BSB Ep. 85
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I want to ask you a question. Do you think you might be accidentally traumatizing yourself by your attempts to feel better? Sounds weird, right? But I actually think a lot of people are. Now, if you've listened to my podcast or you've read any of my recent blogs or social media posts.
It is a hot new trend to tie every problem back to your nervous system, and there is a big rise in somatic therapies, meaning body therapies or bottom up therapies versus mind focused therapies which are top down like cognitive behavioral, therapy or IFS therapy, but specifically when it comes to the somatic therapies.
They in particular, their messaging is about trauma. We're going to help you release [00:01:00] the trauma in your body that you've stored in your body and look, that is a real thing. Mind body practitioners have known for ages that yes, the body does keep the score. You can absolutely store mental, emotional trauma in your body and it does manifest as physical pain.
And even neuroscience is now catching on to this fact that,, a research article I read not too long ago is they're finding that the brain makes backup copies for memory. It can store memories in cellular tissue outside of the brain. So yeah, neuroscience is backing up the fact that the body absolutely keeps the score.
So that's not where I have the issue. But where I have the issue is the word trauma. And this may be an unpopular opinion for a couple of reasons, but words are powerful, [00:02:00] especially when it comes to that top down process. The story that you tell yourself matters. The words that you use to describe your life experience as a human matter.
And if you keep using the word trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, guess what you're prepping the brain for? To expect more trauma, but that's going directly against what you're trying to do, which is to release trauma. So I beg of you, please, if you can, if this resonates with you, change the word to something else and here's why.
When it comes to your brain, when it comes to neuroplasticity, your brain is concerned about two things. Safety and energy efficiency. The safety piece we all get, like if you are listening about any nervous system technique, including mine, yes, safety is a big deal [00:03:00] because that's your brain's prime directive is to keep you safe.
But what matters is your brain doesn't necessarily know what safe is. So when a lot of practitioners are going, "You don't have X, Y, _Z because your nervous system doesn't feel safe"_. Yes, that's true. But if they are just expressing, "Okay, release these things_ from your body. We're trying to retrain your brain to recognize safety"._
They are kind of missing a little bit of what it takes to actually re-pattern the brain. And you need to do that from a top down perspective to re-pattern a little bit. And your brain, because it's energy efficient, will create very strong pathways. We have the saying in science _neurons that fire together wire together._
If you wire together, you fire together, meaning what wires together [00:04:00] forms very strong pathways. The stories you tell yourself reinforce those very strong pathways. If you continue to replay traumatic or upsetting emotional memories, you are reinforcing the pathway that you do not want to reinforce. And this is where some people do have an issue with top-down therapies is they're like, "_I don't wanna go relive that"._
And that's fair because the reliving of it is reinforcing a pattern that you want to extinguish. So the way around that is you want to be very cognizant of the words and the stories that you're telling. And this is awareness because the tricky thing about the brain is the brain's definition of safety is not the one that you would give it.
The brain's definition of safety is what is familiar to [00:05:00] me, not what you want. I'm gonna say that again because it's super important. The survival brain does not care what you want. The nervous system does not care what you want. Your survival brain and your nervous system views safety as what is familiar.
So if you grew up i n a chaotic home that there was a lot of fear and a lot of unpredictability. Guess what became familiar to you? Fear and unpredictability, and you can express that as an adult by unstable money situation, unstable relationship situation, unstable job situation. Now, your higher self, your logical self would say all of those things are unsafe.
Yes, by your logical definition, they absolutely are. But by the survival brain's definition, [00:06:00] safety equals familiar. What that really means is chaos is familiar to you. So chaos equates safety. Trauma equates safety, so that is a well-worn pathway. And to get out of that pathway, you have to embrace stability.
That's gonna make you feel uncomfortable, and this is why you see sometimes where women, especially who grew up in a household with domestic violence, often end up with partners who are violent against them. They swore to themselves. "_I wouldn't be like my mom or I'm not gonna put myself in that situation",_ but they accidentally end up that way.
And it's not because they were foolish, it's because their brain wired that kind of chaos as familiar because they were a kid and they couldn't get out of that situation. It didn't [00:07:00] view it as safe., But if you have an opportunity for Prince Charming, guess what's gonna happen? Your brain doesn't know how to keep you alive with Prince Charming because t hat is not familiar to you. So your survival brain will view it as a threat and view a fabulous situation as unsafe. When you are rewiring your nervous system, it's not about chasing the symptoms. It's not about learning how to breathe. It's not necessarily about letting it go from your body or even necessarily letting it go from your mind.
All these things are important, but you really need to understand that you will not have a consistent definition of safety in these different pieces of your brain, and that one piece of your brain will fight you when you try to reach a state of happiness and stability. If you grew up in an unsafe, chaotic, fear-based situation, it's not your fault.[00:08:00]
But it's going to take focused awareness to really understand you have mis wired safety, and because you have mis wired safety, you may be misreading the cues of safety. And I'm gonna give you an example. I wanna ask you this question. How well do you deal with silence? No tv, no alerts on your phone, no music, no noise, sitting in silence.
If that starts to make you itchy or squirmy or uncomfortable, then you may have said yes. That's a sign your nervous system is dysregulated. That is true because silence is supposed to feel good to one part of your body. But to the survival brain, and if you've watched any horror movie or you've been out in the woods, you know that when the animals go silent, it's a threat.
It means there's a predator in the area. So from an evolutionary perspective, [00:09:00] we have learned that sometimes silence is a threat, and so you will have to override that cue. Or sometimes you override that cue when you really do need silence, but you fill it with noise. Why? Because noise is more familiar to you.
Go for the music, go for the tv, go for the distractions. And it's a sabotage when what you really need for recovery and to feel safe is to be silent, to sit in silence, but the brain doesn't care what you want. It cares what's familiar, and this is another example, how you could be accidentally traumatizing yourself by even using the word trauma.
It's keeping that brain pathway alive w hen you want to extinguish it, and there are some people who really hold on to the concept of trauma to the point where they're like, _"I don't know who I would _[00:10:00] _be without this experience"_. Because they've told the story so long they've tread that well worn brain pathway so long that leaving that story behind b ecomes unfamiliar. So that is the thing that is unsafe. What's familiar? Holding onto the trauma story, but that's not what you want to do. The brain is crazy, my friends. It'll pop up with all of these different sabotages. And when we talk about the brain being energy efficient, it requires more energy to carve yourself a new pathway.
A new identity, a new habit, a new way of being than it does to default back to the well worn pathway. And it requires these pieces of you to be on the same page. And this is why mind-body, and spirit, they're all connected. Sometimes you need to split them apart and look at the parts and everything works.
Like I love all of these therapies, so please don't think I am bagging on any [00:11:00] particular therapy. They are amazing and they all work. But the questions you need to ask yourself, _"Is this the right therapy for me f or what I need done?"_ and _"Am I ready to change my story?_" Because learning how to breathe won't do that.
Stretching your body won't do that. It will absolutely help you regulate and it will help you rebalance and bring yourself the rest and peace that you do need as part of your healing. But if you're not addressing the way your brain works from a cognitive neuroscience space, you may be missing a pretty big piece.
And the opposite is also true. If you have only done top down therapies and you have never respected or paid attention to your body, then that might be your next piece. And what I teach my clients is how to examine [00:12:00] these different pieces through my Bespoke Brain System to look and try to spot what do I actually need?
What is the real trigger? What is the real story? Even what is the origin event? And we extinguish that instead of, let me revisit your trauma over and over to keep it fresh. The point of the therapy that I do with my clients is to find it, extinguish it, install the new story and move on. If you would like some help doing that, I do free consultations at aprildarley.com.
I'll drop the link in the show notes and you can learn more about how to change your story and how it actually changes your life so that you don't go through life accidentally traumatizing yourself by therapies that aren't quite the right fit for what you need in the moment. All right my friends, until next week, I'll see you then.
Goodbye.
