The Trauma Response is Never Wrong
We have been tricked to believe that the trauma response is a sign of weakness and disorder. What science shows us is that the trauma response is in fact a sign of strength and proof of an inherent human drive to survive. We need society to catch up with science, and fast. We are no longer living in an era where we can assume that trauma impacts a minority of the population. Trauma impacts us all. This has always been true, but we can no longer pretend otherwise.
Unbroken is a book about the miracle of the trauma response, the importance of acceptance and self-compassion, and the transformative healing potential that lies within us all. Drawing on my experience as a trauma researcher, coach, as well as my own personal journey of healing, this book offers a new perspective on trauma that emphasizes the wisdom of the body and the resilience of the human spirit.
If you’re struggling with the after-effects of trauma, Unbroken can help you understand your experience in a new light. You’ll learn how trauma impacts the brain, the body, and the spirit, and how you can use this knowledge to start your journey of healing. You’ll discover practical tools and strategies for managing trauma triggers, regulating your emotions, and cultivating self-compassion. Most importantly, you’ll learn that the trauma response is never wrong – it’s a natural and adaptive response to a difficult situation.
One of the most important lessons of Unbroken is that the trauma response is never wrong. This means that even if you’re struggling with symptoms like anxiety, depression, or dissociation, your body is doing exactly what it needs to do to protect you. By embracing this truth, you can start to shift from a place of shame and self-blame to a place of self-compassion and empowerment. The book is chock full of tools that will help you understand and appreciate your trauma response and how to intervene when that response is tripped off unnecessarily. I can’t wait for you to dig in and I can’t wait to hear how this book changes you. It certainly changed me.
MaryCatherine McDonald, PhD, is a research professor and life coach who specializes in the psychology and philosophy of trauma. She has been researching, lecturing, and publishing on the neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience of trauma since the beginning of her PhD in 2009. She’s published two academic books and many research papers, and she is the creator of a trauma-based curriculum designed to serve previously incarcerated folks and veterans
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How to Meditate – with Pema Chödrön
When it comes to meditation, Pema Chödrön is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost teachers. Yet she’s never offered an introductory course on audio—until now.
On How to Meditate with Pema Chödrön, the American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun and bestselling author presents her first complete spoken-word course for those new to meditation.
Through traditional insights and her personal guidance, offered in 12 sitting sessions, Pema Chödrön will help you honestly meet and compassionately relate with your mind as you explore:
- The basics of mindfulness awareness practice, from proper posture to learning to settle to breathing and relaxation
- Gentleness, patience, and humor—three ingredients for a well-balanced practice
- Shamatha (or calm abiding), the art of stabilizing the mind to remain present with whatever arises
- Thoughts and emotions as “sheer delight”—instead of obstacles—in meditation
“From my own experience and from listening to many people over the years, I’ve tried to offer here what I feel are the essential points of meditation,” explains Pema Chödrön. Now this beloved voice shares with you her accessible approach—simple and down-to-earth while informed by the highest traditions of Tibetan Buddhism—on How to Meditate with Pema Chödrön.
Be What You Want to Receive: Three Ways to Experiment with Microdosing Bravery
At a time when we’re marinating in trauma and dealing with the test of a lifetime, we all wish things were different. When what we want from life is a million mile march from what it actually is, it can seem like we need a massive intervention to keep facing what’s at hand.
But research shows that small things can make a big difference. Just like stress is cumulative, so are the daily steps we take to grow and give.
Microdoses of bravery add up. To start, consider moving from asking what will the world offer me, to what will I offer the world? Tiny bits of strategic courage are sources of nourishment that can help you become what you want to receive.
Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable is a tall order, but worth doing. Microdosing bravery can help us build the strength and stamina that helps us heal, create, and liberate from fear, despair, and isolation.
Here are three ways you can experiment with microdosing bravery including journal prompts for reflection.
BE LOVE.
Loneliness is being called “the new smoking,” a modern health risk. For some, the global pandemic has strengthened relationships, allowing for bonding and teamwork like never before. For others, it’s wreaked havoc: leading to feeling smothered and stuck. For those living alone, distancing has been brutal, making love feel far from reach. Loss, whether through death, divorce, breakups, or other factors, singes our hearts. We can become avoidant and skeptical of our future potential to love and be loved.
When we strive to embody love, it’s essential to keep an open mind and heart. Loving connections are protective factors to our well-being. Consider these microdoses of bravery to strengthen your relationships, your sense of belonging, and the co-creation of new love paradigms in your life:
- Get real. Go through your friends on social media and make a list of all the real people in your life with whom you can be yourself. Make a conscious effort to spend time outside of social media. Thank them for being so real to you and vow you’ll do the same.
- Spark connection. Initiate a conversation with a partner or friend to see if you can build greater intimacy or camaraderie. To improve your connection, ask them what would mean a lot to them, and offer your own thoughts too.
- Seek affinity relationships. Write a short poem or essay about yourself to clarify your various identities and then seek an affinity connection. Invite that person for coffee. Don’t shy away from sharing yourself and nudging them to do the same.
- Be innovative. Create your own bravery microdose to help you be love.
Take note:
Write down what you chose to do and reflect on how it cultivated love in your life. Consider sharing this with someone you trust to help you maximize your efforts.
BE HEALING.
The level of trauma at hand has ravaged our lives, making healing feel elusive on a good day, impossible on a bad. Given the magnitude of suffering at hand, healing should not be trivialized as a three-step process. Healing requires enormous courage. Microdosing bravery can help us reach out and tap in to the many forms of restoration available to us.
Understanding how resilience works is a helpful way to begin healing. Gone are the days when it was viewed as a character trait—something you’re born with or not. There’s a lot of hype about being gritty and never letting anyone see you sweat that gets in the way of us finding the right support. Here are some ways to microdose bravery to foster healing and build resilience:
- Recognize you’re not alone. The biggest lie our difficulties tell us is that we’re the only ones dealing with such intense suffering. All of us are living in a global mental health crisis, with exorbitant pressures and crushing circumstances. Suffering is part of our shared humanity. Finding solidarity and safe community can serve as a catalyst to healing. As we get traction in our own healing process, our acts of courage can be nourishing and healing to those around us.
- Self-advocate. Healing requires intentional change in our communication. Many of us are comfortable and willing to give help, but few are asking for it. Identify one trusted person in your life that you know has the emotional maturity and skills to listen and support you. Tell them what you’re going through and work with them to identify potential roads toward healing, such as therapy, strategic behavioral change, and targeted self-care.
- Set boundaries. Untreated trauma and unresolved issues can haunt us and impair the quality of our lives. By paying attention to what we say yes and no to, we can ensure we are leaving space for growth after we’ve gone through significant stressors. Find language to courageously share what you can commit to, and what you cannot. Enlist support to help you firmly protect your time so that you can devote attention to healing and restoration.
- Identify resources. Take some time to scan your direct environment for things that nurture and sustain you. Select one or two things that can be microdosed to build your bravery.
Take note:
Write down things that help you experience healing. How can you continue to build off this?
BE A LIBERATOR.
Society can project a lot onto us, caging us into patterns of conformity that can become harmful. Freedom to live as our truest selves isn’t something that comes with safety or ease. The work of unhooking from social prescriptions and ills can be fraught and exhausting. Still, when we find the courage to call out injustice and fight for a more humane world, we can experience exuberance and help change paradigms.
When we strive to liberate, we realize that we must dismantle oppression. That we must advocate for inclusivity and human reverence, particularly for social identities that are marginalized and harmed. Constrained living hinders human progress, individually and collectively. Consider these microdoses of bravery to liberate from social constructs that are harmful:
- Let go. Take inventory of so-called social “norms” and become less apt to cower in the face of social impositions that are dismissive and destructive toward “difference.” Embrace your own multidimensionality, and that of humanity.
- Speak up. We all have opportunities to be active contributors rather than passive bystanders in the world. Practicing accountability means that we call out injustice and work to eradicate forms of human suffering and imprisonment—whether based on race, gender, orientation, age, place of origin, or other social identity categories.
- Practice human reverence. Move from me to we. See the glory and wonder across the human spectrum. Honor varied identities and perspectives. Work to find and engage in diverse relationships, rather than staying insular or spending time with those that look like, love like, and think like you. Become a liberator by standing fervently with those who’ve been marginalized, oppressed, or discriminated against. Seek ways to forge change, bit by bit.
- Break Free. Create your own bravery microdose to help you liberate.
Take note:
What do you need to be liberated from? Do you know someone who is struggling in a similar way? How might you join forces and work together to become freer?
Kristen Lee, EdD, LICSW, is an award-winning Behavioral Science and Leadership professor, clinician, researcher, activist, comedian, author of Worth the Risk: How to Microdose Bravery to Grow Resilience, Connect More, and Offer Yourself to the World, and host of Crackin’ Up. She has over two decades of clinical experience in mental health, and twelve years of teaching and leadership roles in higher education, focusing on underserved populations. She leads the Behavior Science program at Northeastern University. For more, visit kristenlee.com.
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The Trauma-Trigger Cycle
When you are stuck with old unprocessed experiences living inside you, they can create what I call a trauma-trigger cycle because they are still very much alive in our systems.
Here’s my analogy to help you understand how this works and why it causes so much trouble. Imagine that you have a very difficult experience, for example, having to say goodbye to a sick pet. All of the details in the form of individual feelings, smells, images, sounds, and more get bundled up and deposited into a metaphorical glass trauma capsule—which gets stored in the body. It sits there with all of the old feelings we experienced at the time the event happened. While you might not be aware of it constantly, you are likely feeling those emotions at a low level all the time. When any current situation reminds you of any of those details hanging out in the capsule—either consciously or subconsciously—the old trauma gets “poked,” or reactivated. This is how we get triggered. Being triggered can bring up flashes of those memories, including images, feelings, and any sensory stimuli.
For the most part, except in certain cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from major life events, where sometimes the trigger is known, this trauma-trigger reaction actually happens at a subconscious level, outside of your awareness. Even in obvious situations, you may think you know what the trigger is, and try to avoid it, but it may be something totally different that got stuck in the metaphorical glass trauma capsule. Often, people come to me and say, “Nothing set this off,” “I’m depressed for no reason,” or “I suddenly started feeling terrible but nothing happened.” While this may seem true, I can bet on the fact that while the bad feelings might seem random, they are being triggered in some way that you simply haven’t yet identified. Triggers can be foods, colors, smells,sounds, weather, or anything, really! Finding and resolving triggers can become almost an entertaining game if you let it.
As you can imagine, this entire trauma-trigger dynamic is very unsettling and unpredictable—which can feel like danger to your system and keep you stuck in that freakout response. Not only that, but in this state, you can actually be excessively tuned in to your trauma, seeing reminders of it everywhere, which further traumatizes you.
I had an experience after going through a loved one’s difficult health crisis where every single place I looked, I saw reminders of the experience. And for someone who wonders if everything is some greater “sign from the Universe” (fact: not every single thing is) or my intuition is trying to get my attention because another loved one might be in danger (second fact: trauma and fear clouds intuition), it felt like torture to me. I kept meeting people who had the same illness that my loved one had had, saw posters and billboards advertising medications for the condition, and more. As a distraction while on vacation, I had deliberately picked out several seemingly lighthearted books to take—and it turned out a character in every single book had that same medical condition! I was constantly on edge and further traumatized by all of these things. This is a perfect example of what happens to us in a traumatized state: we become highly attuned to the world around us, perhaps subconsciously scanning for danger, but in the process, we see and get triggered by everyday things we’ve probably passed by a million times before. I realized that had I been tuned in to any other single thing out in the world, like peaches, I likely would have seen that everywhere. This recognition actually led to a funny mantra I used during that time to keep things light while I did the deeper healing work: Look for the peaches! But in all seriousness, what happened as I worked to release the trauma, just like you’ll be doing in this chapter, was that I stopped seeing reminders of it. I have to be honest in that this took months of using energy therapy in different ways to overcome the trauma I had experienced, like you’ll be learning soon—but it worked. Did all the people with this condition go away? Did all the billboards get taken down? No. The less traumatized I became, the less heightened my sensitivity to it was. This is a perfect example of why it’s essential to work with unprocessed experiences.
Emotional memory is stored throughout the entire body. Thanks to the work of Candace Pert, we know that “unexpressed emotions from experiences can get stuck in the body at the level of cellular memory.” This is such a simple explanation for why we feel bad when we haven’t resolved our past experiences. We are still quite literally feeling them. And even if it’s at a subtle level, it may only take a “trigger” from that metaphorical glass capsule to awaken it.
While your own unprocessed experiences may not disrupt your life in the way that clinically diagnosed PTSD does, you may relate to what it feels like to have PTSD, when one or a few memories from life takes over all of it. This is, again, why we must deal effectively and consistently with our emotions instead of suppressing them. Otherwise, we are at risk of our emotions becoming part of future unresolved experiences.
Even knowing all of this, there’s no need to panic. Again, not all experiences traumatize you. And, not all traumas will need to be dealt with in order to get you feeling better. But the ones that do need careful attention. I want you to understand that by working with trauma, we are not trying to force a positive perspective on it or make you be okay with something bad that happened to you. Not at all. What we want to do is release the stress it’s causing you, even if that stress is undetected consciously. We don’t want these traumas taking up space and energy in your body anymore or triggering you without your knowledge.
Working with unprocessed experiences will help empty the metaphorical glass trauma capsule so we stop becoming triggered by the world around us. In other words, you’ll be seeing peaches more easily instead of trauma triggers.
This is an excerpt from How to Heal Yourself From Depression When No One Else Can: A Self-Guided Program to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t by Amy B. Scher.
Amy B. Scher is an energy therapist, expert in mind-body healing, and the bestselling author of How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can and How to Heal Yourself from Anxiety When No One Else Can. She has been featured in the Times of India, CNN, HuffPost, CBS, the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Curve magazine, and San Francisco Book Review. Scher was also named one of the Advocate’s “40 Under 40.” She lives in New York City. For more, visit amybscher.com.
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The Self-Acceptance Project… a free online video series
Access the Self-Acceptance Project free of charge
Self-aggression, self-acceptance, self-love, and issues of self-worth can be challenging for contemporary spiritual practitioners, even for those who have meditated or engaged in psychotherapy for years. There are many ways we can be unkind to ourselves, often subtle and unconscious, which can affect the way we perceive and engage in our lives, especially in interpersonal and intimate relationship.
In this free, 12-week video event series, I invited 23 psychologists, psychotherapists, neuroscientists, and spiritual teachers to speak with my friend and longtime colleague, Tami Simon, to explore these areas and how we might move toward the creation of a certain kind of holding environment in which we can grow, heal, and transform together.
All episodes of the Self-Acceptance Project are now posted and can be accessed as video or audio downloads, or can be streamed at no cost from the comfort of your own home. We invite you to join us for this pioneering series and look forward to sharing our discoveries with you – and hearing what you have learned. It is our intention that you benefit deeply from this work and that it guide you along your own journey of love and awakening.
Episodes include
- Developing Shame Resilience with Dr. Brené Brown
- Waking Up from the Trance of Unworthiness with Dr. Tara Brach
- Turning Towards Our Pain with Dr. Robert Augustus Masters
- Begin Exactly Where You Are with Jeff Foster
- Taking in the Good with Dr. Rick Hanson
- The Human Capacity to Take Perspectives with Dr. Steven Hayes
- What if There is Nothing Wrong with Raphael Cushnir
- No Strangers in the Heart with Mark Nepo
- Transforming Self-Criticism into Self-Compassion with Dr. Kelly McGonigal
- Faith in Our Fundamental Worthiness with Sharon Salzberg
- Developing a Wise Mind with Dr. Erin Olivo
- Embodied Vulnerability and Non-Division with Bruce Tift
- Perfect in Our Imperfection with Colin Tipping
- Staying Loyal to One’s Self with Dr. Judith Blackstone
- Compassion for the Self-Critic with Dr. Kristin Neff
- Curiosity is the Key with Dr. Harville Hendrix
- Kindness is the Means and End with Geneen Roth
- Healing at the Level of the Subconscious Mind with Dr. Friedemann Schaub
- Embracing all of Our Parts with Dr. Jay Earley
- Understanding Empathy and Shame with Karla McLaren
- Integrating the Shadow with Dr. Parker PalmerLetting Life Be in Charge with Cheri Huber
Relieve Anxiety and Depression – a free audio download
Millions around the world suffer from anxiety and depression, and seek relief from the many challenges associated with these difficult conditions. Over the last few decades, both scientific research and clinical reports have pointed to the power of meditation to lessen the challenging symptoms of anxiety and depression, and to aid living a more healthy, productive, and stress-free life.
With this collection of seven guided meditations, Sounds True brings together seven respected psychiatrists, psychologists, and bestselling authors who offer exercises designed to help bring immediate—and potentially lasting—relief from the troubling symptoms of anxiety and depression. Each of these guided exercises can be undertaken in the comfort of your own home, and require no prerequisite knowledge or training.
Receive free access to Relieve Anxiety and Depression: Seven Guided Meditations; simply select the format (“Audio Download”) and click “Add to Cart”. From there, click on your shopping cart in the top right corner, enter your details (no credit card information needed), and this product will be delivered to your Digital Library!
Tracks include:
1. “Soft Belly Meditation” with James Gordon, MD
The author of Freedom from Depression speaks about the role of meditation in the treatment of depression and leads a guided practice for balancing the emotions, body, and spirit.
2. “Body Scan” with Erin Olivo, PhD, MPH
Dr. Erin Olivo, psychotherapist and author of Free Yourself from Anxiety presents a guided body-scan exercise to reduce anxiety and open us to the wisdom of the body.
3. “Guided Relaxation Visualization” with Mark Hyman, MD
The bestselling author and co-medical director at Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires Health Resort in Lenox, Massachusetts, shares a guided relaxation visualization designed to reduce anxiety, lower stress, and cultivate deep relaxation in both body and mind. Excerpted from the audio learning program UltraCalm.
4. “Guided Mindfulness Meditation” with Daniel J. Siegel, MD
Psychiatrist Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, author of The Mindful Brain, offers a guided mindfulness meditation to help bring us into the present moment, thereby allowing us to access a natural and creative healing response to whatever distressing symptoms arise in our lives.
5. “Coming Home to Happiness” with Rick Hanson, PhD
The next guided meditation is from Dr. Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist, bestselling author, and creator of the audio program Meditations for Happiness. Here, Dr. Hanson teaches a guided meditation to help us access our “true home,” finding rest and acceptance in whatever comes our way.
6. “A Pause for Presence” with Tara Brach, PhD
Clinical psychologist and bestselling author of the audio learning series Radical Self-Acceptance Tara Brach teaches us a way to pause in our daily lives, ground ourselves, and start fresh in the midst of any difficult situation.
7. “Healing Lake Meditation” with Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD
The founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and bestselling author of Mindfulness for Beginners guides us through what he calls the “healing lake meditation” to relieve anxiety and stress, helping us contact a place of deep relaxation within that is available at any time.
