Trauma Resilience
Trauma. Postal Traumatic Stress Disorder. Those words might spark a reaction in you. Imagine being able to change the culture around trauma and PTSD. Imagine when people seek treatment, it feels the same way as recovering from any other injury.
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Special Guest
Dr. Tim Black is an Associate Professor of Counselling Psychology at the University of Victoria. He has been working with the Canadian military and Veteran community for over 20 years and has delivered programs to help people with trauma.
Highlights
- What causes trauma in a military setting
- 5:28 The effects of a traumatic injury
- How do you know if you need help?
- Stigma
- 19:06 Could receiving treatment for trauma be as accepted as getting physiotherapy on a knee injury
- With trauma, it is a social responsibility for us to foster resilience
- 26:12 The role that families can play
Quotes
“If you’re suffering you’re suffering, you don’t have to have anybody’s permission to seek help when you’re suffering. If you’re upset and you’re suffering, go talk to someone. I wouldn’t wait.” – Dr. Tim Black
“Part of the reason I agreed to do this is really trying to help people understand when someone’s traumatized, they’re just not finished a process, and their brain is trying to finish it. And that’s why and it’s exhausting. When your brain continually tries to finish off this process, it’s exhausting, because it never stops, it never takes a break. So if we can help people finish what they need to finish and support them to do that, then they can come out the other side.” – Dr. Tim Black
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Thank you
- Thank you to Organized Sound Productions for their help bringing this podcast to life.
Transcript
Tim
I’d like to see people move it to a more sort of a higher professional standard that knowing that when you’re exposed to trauma and knowing when your limbic system engages, there’s a sort of processing phase, that you take that as your next step that kind of aspiring to like if you’re a professional and you’re exposed to trauma, this is just part of maintaining your system, just like maintaining your physical fitness or just like maintaining your weapon or your vehicle or whatever. Your body is a system that needs maintenance and true professionals will actually maintain it all the time.
Intro
The military lifestyle is all encompassing. It’s difficult, but rewarding. Dynamic, very, very dynamic. Unpredictable. You are in the Canadian Armed Forces, or a family member connected to the military. You know, the lifestyle can be a challenge. The military lifestyle is always changing. In this podcast, we explore the world of deployments, postings and transitions. This is The Military Lifestyle. Here’s your host, Jon Chabun.
Jon
Trauma, post traumatic stress disorder. Those words might spark a reaction in you. Imagine being able to change the culture around trauma and PTSD. Imagine when people see treatment that is treated the same way as recovering from any other injury. Dr. Tim Black is an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Victoria. He’s been working with the Canadian military and veteran community for over 20 years, and has delivered programs to help people deal with trauma. So I’m welcoming Dr. Tim Black from the University of Victoria. We’re going to be talking about trauma and resilience. Thank you for coming.
Tim
Yeah, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me. It’s It’s nice to see a real person.
Jon
Yes, absolutely. So tell me what causes what things cause trauma in a military setting?
Tim
Yeah, I think they cause trauma whether you’re in a military setting or a civilian setting the what causes it, it’s I’m glad you asked that to start off, because a lot of what I do in my work is trying to help people understand how people get traumatized, and what is trauma. So maybe a bit of just sort of background like around. A lot of people think that when you’re exposed to a traumatic event, that you get traumatized. And it’s not necessarily true. And of course, in a military setting, people hear these stories all the time that well, I was there, I’m not traumatized. So then oftentimes, they feel like it must be some character flaw or something about the person or something because you know, if you have eight people who are all in the area, and all saw the bad thing, say something happened in a particular environment, and only one person ends up with PTSD and that’s sort of based on some of the myths of what I see a lot of myths around trauma and versus like what is a traumatic event and traumatic events are not just things that are kind of mildly upsetting, mildly upsetting or even highly disturbing. Doesn’t necessary mean they’re a traumatic event. Really what it boils down to you can’t be traumatized if you haven’t been exposed to a traumatic event. But you can certainly have a lot of negative outcomes from being exposed to things that aren’t trauma, that there isn’t a clear dividing line between something that’s super upsetting and trauma, except in terms of when we treat trauma, we’re looking for certain things. So for example, a car crash where somebody you know, is badly injured would constitute a traumatic event. Not getting into the program that you wanted to at university never will be. So you can’t be traumatized by not getting into the program you wanted to get into. That’s just simply not at least in terms of how I define the most of the trauma practitioners I work with, we follow for the most part, the DSM five definition for your listeners, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I have a lot of stuff to say about that manual in general, but I like the definition of trauma for certain reasons and some that I think is problematic. So basically you become traumatized if certain things happen, but it has to follow exposure to a traumatic event. And of course, in the military setting, there’s a lot of exposure to traumatic events.
Jon
With people that you’ve worked with, where they’re like a few things that kind of stood out like experiences that I’m sure if people want to put them in like little categories, right? Yeah, like this happens, then potentially, it could lead to a traumatic experience. And the war in Afghanistan was obviously huge.
Tim
Yeah, well, the reason why I like the definition, it’s not perfect is it really outlines and I, I don’t have it in front of me, and I won’t try to go off my memory of it. But basically, it’s something that is sort of a threat to life or limb or even threatened physical violence or sexual violence or sexual assault, that kind of stuff. Even threatening violence can constitute a potentially traumatic event. And again, what makes the event traumatic has to do with the event itself, but that doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be traumatized. So you can be exposed to a traumatic event, like a violent assault and not end up traumatized. And I think that’s the thing that I really tried to help people understand is that there’s a process to quote becoming traumatized of which being exposed to a traumatic event is the first domino that has to fall. But that’s not the only one that has to fall because there’s things that happen after that, that will lead to someone actually being traumatized, say, by an event.
Jon
What are the effects of a traumatic injury?
Tim
That’s where we start to get into talking about like, what does it mean when you start thinking about someone being traumatized? Most of this about teaching people in sort of what I would call trauma literacy, and, you know, using all the background that we have in our teachings, you know, there’s experts all over the world that are doing this incredible work, is to understand when you have that traumatic event, if you have what’s called the limbic response to that, so say that car crash or whatever the exposure is, and your limbic brain, what we call the those of us in the trauma field. I didn’t come up with it the lizard brain, this part of our brain that responds to threat. Basically, we all have a part of our brain that responds to threat is the thing that makes us nervous when we, anytime we feel threatened, that activates our bodies. And in extreme cases, it can activate us to do that fight, flight, freeze or flop response are those kinds of things. If you have a limbic response, you can do all sorts of things, but the four main ones that we teach our fight, flight, freeze, or flop as a flick of full what we call limbic or lizard brain response, so of course the fight one is pretty clear, you fight. The flight is pretty clear. You take off try to run away. The freeze one people don’t understand as much but it exists when you ever seen somebody gets really scared and they just go stiff, like someone’s just frozen them. And then the flop response, which is one that’s we just sort of learned about in in the last while was it like like someone’s knees will just buckle and they’ll just, they’ll just lose their ability to stand and that those are sort of adaptive responses. If those things happen and you end up traumatized can talk about in terms of how does that all happen without making it too complicated. Really what I see the quintessence of trauma is the past being re experienced in the moment. And which is very different from remembering upsetting things. We all remember upsetting times, we remember sad times remember good times, that quality of trauma is that your body in particular really experiences those symptoms, as though the traumas happening again, and that’s the thing that’s really hard on people who are dealing with trauma is that it isn’t a remembering of the past. It’s that as the you start to remember the past, your body starts to go into those very real responses as though the traumas happening right now again, even though it’s not so it’s the past in the present.
Jon
How do you know if you should seek help? Is it obvious?
Tim
Not always, not always. Sometimes people don’t really realize what’s going on for them because they you know, they’re just dealing with with their stuff. And if you know there’s a certain amount and if you have a tough experience, anytime everyone knows there’s a period of time where you kind of come down from that like, you know, a bad breakup and make a big argument with your with your spouse or something like nobody expects everything to be fine 30 seconds after the arguments over sometimes it could be a day or two. So I think everybody kind of understands that when things are really hard, sometimes it takes a bit of time. What we usually say is that if you’ve had an exposure to a traumatic event, it can take up to 30 days under normal circumstances before you stop what we call sort of re experiencing those things. So if after 30 days and 30 days is sort of the line in the DSM that they draw between post traumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder, which are two separate things, but you know, the body takes a long time to get through these things. So if after 30 days, you’re still experiencing really serious effects and really feeling the effects of that exposure. Like you’re you’re remembering it, you know, you you saw the car crash and you can’t get the images on it. And you’re not sleeping well and you’re starting to get agitated and your moods starting to change, if that’s still going on or getting worse over the period of 30 days. And those are the things I start to get a little bit concerned this, this might not go away on its own. But if it’s a really bad trauma, it’s not going to go away in a day. It might not even go away in a couple of weeks. But it should start to taper off, it should start to sort of come down, where you’re not as upset by it, you’re not remembering it as much, you know, you’re not having as many dreams about it or thinking about it during the day when you don’t want to. So obviously, if you’re ever concerned about your own mental health, just go talk to someone. I mean, if you’re suffering you’re suffering, you don’t have to have anybody’s permission to seek help when you’re suffering. If you’re upset and you’re suffering, go talk to someone. I wouldn’t wait. But if you’re not the kind of person because it’s hard to go talk to a therapist, it’s not always easy to go say, Hey, I’m feeling kind of messed up and can I have some, some help? But part of why I wanted to do this podcast is to kind of get rid of some of the myths around this stuff that. It’s normal, when you get exposed to something really intense, and you have one of those sort of lizard brain responses, it’s normal to have some effects coming out of that. And as long as they are allowed to kind of finish and kind of come out the other end, oftentimes, there’s not a lot of negative effects to it. But what happens is that people get frightened by what their body naturally has to do to kind of come down from that. To give an example, as we use this when you teach a lot is if you’ve ever been in a near car crash, oftentimes people will say, yeah, I almost got hit by a car. Well, it was it, well, nothing happened. But then their hands will start to shake, or though they’ll start to feel like they’re feeling a little bit like emotionally, they might start to cry. And they think, well, what’s wrong with me like, there was no crash. That’s what happens when your limbic brain kicks in is that it makes your body kind of do things so your hands shaking the adrenaline, that kind of stuff that’s completely natural. When you your brain assesses that something like you might have almost died happens. It doesn’t matter that the accident didn’t happen as long as your limbic brain assesses that threat was there, it will give you some sort of physiological things to have to kind of deal with afterwards because it mobilizes those systems, if that makes sense.
Jon
Can seeking help re traumatize people? Or is there that fear with people that seeking help might kind of trigger something?
Tim
For sure, when you’re dealing with people who aren’t well trained, and what we’re dealing with, like, every profession has people who aren’t the best at their profession, and then every profession has people who are not, are not helpful. So is it possible to be injured by getting surgery? Sure, if you don’t have a qualified surgeon, and if they don’t do their job, and if they’re not paying attention, and if they’re, you know, drinking that day, whatever, of course, there’s always a risk when you go, but I think the bigger fear is, is that it’s going to mess me up if I go, so I’m not going to go and I’ll just kind of knuckle down. Most of the people I work with have been trying that for years. And they’ve reached this point where everything they’ve tried isn’t working and it’s only getting worse. So one of the big things that we say is like trauma is a relatively new field. At the university, we try to teach trauma as a foundational theory, but we don’t. There’s not a lot of programs that teach trauma practice as the foundational theory, it’s often like an elective or those kinds of things. So I think we as a profession have a little bit more work to do. So you want to try and find somebody who has had some proper trauma training and actually knows and is comfortable talking with trauma. The simple truth is if you’ve been coping with trauma, often times when you get into working on it, you go to see someone, you’re gonna probably start to feel worse before you start to feel better. But it’s almost like if you injure your like say you injure your knee and you have to have your ACL replaced, you know, going for physiotherapy is going to hurt. And sure if you go to an unqualified physiotherapist, they might mess it up after surgery but you’re going to go to a really qualified physiotherapist, it is going to hurt like the blazes to do the proper therapy on that knee to get back in shape. I think trauma in some way very similar, it’s going to hurt. However, if you know it’s hurting in the right direction, I talk about like productive suffering. I don’t like to suffer, but I really don’t like to suffer unproductively. And what I mean by that is suffering in a direction that’s not helping. So most of trauma therapy is going to feel worse before it gets better. But it will be actually in a direction of getting you to where you want to go. So it’s hard work. There’s no therapists that can do therapy to you. They can work with you, but most of the work is going to be yours to do and it’s going to be hard work. But if you get the right person and they’re on your team to do it, when you do it together with them as a team, you can actually make a lot of progress, even if it’s hurting.
Jon
Stigma, and we always hear people say, there’s no stigma and you also maybe hear the phrase, the walk of shame. When it comes to stigma, the word stigma for me I know people say that, yeah, there’s no steak but there’s no stigma I kind of feel like, you know, maybe that even stigma is not the right word, but it makes people feel uncomfortable and people are not comfortable talking about mental health just as like an everyday conversation. What do you think about something like that?
Tim
I think we’ve come a long way. And I’ve been doing this for about 20 some odd years now, we’ve gotten to the point I not totally jokingly say, it used to be that if you had, you know, if you’re traumatized, you were just a coward. You were no good. You were whatever, you know, add whatever pejorative term you want. I think we’ve come in the last two decades of like, I won’t judge you for being weak is kind of the main message I hear. If you can’t handle it, it’s okay, I won’t judge you, which I think is better than I will judge you. I don’t think we’re far enough along the continuum. I think it’s because so so much of it is that notion of not understanding how people get traumatized. People who are dealing with trauma have basically processes physiological process that are not finished most of what I do as a trauma therapist and my colleagues that across the country do. We’re trying to help people finish a natural process when you’re exposed and your limbic system engages. If that finishes properly, usually there’s not a lot of negative effect to what’s going on. Sometimes there is. Most of what we’re doing in trauma therapy is trying to finish something that got started years ago, that hasn’t finished but the the body in the brain still tries to finish it. That’s it’s job. So we try to say like, I won’t use the term we say, but we say not messed up, just not finished. That’s what trauma work is, you’re just not finished that. So what I’d like to see us move to is an understanding of how people get traumatized that the work of getting better out of trauma is finishing a natural process. Just like with physio, again, with physiotherapy, like if someone tears their ACL and you put them back on operational duty before they’ve done their physio and before they’ve got their quad strong and it’s before they’ve done all there, IT band. If you do that you can expect that they’re not going to perform well. It’s the same thing with trauma. If you bring people back before they’ve had a chance to finish, and do that, that therapeutic part of getting thing, getting their system back to where it needs to be, you can expect that they’re not going to perform as well. The truth of the matter is that if you get traumatized, and you live with that for a long time, because of all this stuff that’s going through your body, it does affect you. And so it’s a sort of a steeper hill to climb, the longer you go. So I’ve had trauma in my own life, but if I if I get traumatized, I’m just gonna go to a therapist as quickly as possible because I don’t want to have to climb out of a darker hole later. I’m just going to go so I kind of encourage people, it’s gonna hurt. It’s going to be hard work. But if you’re not shy about doing the hard work, do it sooner rather than later, you’ll get out of it. So I do think there’s been some good change. I think there’s a lot more understanding of PTSD, especially about traumatization. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. which is again, part of the reason I agreed to do this is really trying to help people understand when someone’s traumatized, they’re just not finished a process, and their brain is trying to finish it. And that’s why and it’s exhausting. When your brain continually tries to finish off this process, it’s exhausting, because it never stops, it never takes a break. So if we can help people finish what they need to finish and support them to do that, then they can come out the other side. I’m trying to help people say like, if you’re in a trauma exposed profession, like the military, I work with other trauma exposed professions as well. I’d like to see people move it to a more sort of a higher professional standard that knowing that when you’re exposed to trauma, and knowing when your limbic system engages, there’s a sort of processing phase, that you take that as your next step that if you’re going to be a professional, if you’re an emergency room physician, or your fire or police or a paramedic, you learn this about your body and that you are expected to do sort of a finishing process if your limbic system gets engaged and that if you don’t do it, that might be not the right mark of a professional. So kind of aspiring to like if you’re a professional and you’re exposed to trauma, this is just part of maintaining your system, just like maintaining your physical fitness or just like maintaining your weapon or your vehicle or whatever your body is a system that needs maintenance. And true professionals will actually maintain it all the time and not let it sort of fall or deal with stuff like it’s like a car, right? I’m not very good with my car. Like you need to change oil. Everyone knows if you want your engine to run really well, you need to change oil every six months or whatever. Our systems in some ways are very similar to that if you don’t maintain it, you can expect it to break down. And so if you maintain it, it’ll work for you much better, even when you’re being exposed to those things.
Jon
Is the analogy of tearing your ACL. I’ve torn my ACL before.
Tim
So you’re sitting there going oh god.
Jon
Yeah. Do you think that trauma and people healing from trauma that it can be as like an easy a process? As you know, tearing your ACL going for surgery or going to a physiotherapist? Could it be that comfortable of like having people being able to step into that conversation and not kind of shy away from it.
Tim
That’s my hope. I mean, I, I think absolutely you can you can get to that point. Again, like for me, I know how people get traumatized, at least, you know, in terms of what we see in terms of the work we’re doing. It’s a pretty clear response. So we teach this thing called the trauma formula, which is again, just based on looking at sort of the cascade of events, you have a traumatic event which you talked about, you have a limbic response, and then that limbic response doesn’t finish. So whatever you need, that your hands are shaking, if you thwart that response that tends to look like it leads towards trauma, and then if you add on to that a negative social response from around you, if you put all those things together, you’re really increasing the chances that someone’s going to end up traumatized. You’ve got people exposed to war zones. They have to because they’re on six months tours go from one fight to another fight to another fight. They’re never they’re taking on and having lots of traumatic sort of responses, but not be able to finish them and then they come home and nobody understands why Canada was in Afghanistan anyways, and people ask questions and they don’t even care. They don’t even know what you’re doing. No one’s at the airport to greet you, whatever in a military context. That seems to be within the terms of the people I’ve worked with in the last 20 years. All the people I’ve worked with tend to have those experiences, they have the event, they haven’t finished their limbic response. They’ve also had multiple negative social responses. If we can change the negative social response, we’ll go oh, so you haven’t finished? Okay. Well, so you’re going for trauma therapy is like, oh, you’re on crutches. So clearly, you haven’t. Have you started physio, right? Oh, no, not yet. I gotta wait for the other thing to heal. Okay. Well, you go where you going? Oh, I’m going to a physio appointment. To me, it’s, it’s no different in terms of the work that has to be done. And that social response is part of what if people really understood how someone got traumatized, and they’re just like, okay, great. So Well, let me know when you’re finished, you know, like, it’s gonna be hard. I know. It’s hard. Was it a rough day, like, the difference being when you tear your ACL, you might sweat and you might have some sort of localalized pain. And, you know, obviously you can start to get feeling down because your leg doesn’t do the same things that you used to do and you have to be a little bit more careful or change things. In some ways trauma therapy is the same way that once you’ve experienced trauma that way, there may be things that you have to shift in terms of how you go about your day, if you want to continue on that process of healing. I firmly believe that if people know how people get traumatized, the stigma just disappears, because it’s just a matter of finishing a natural process that started could be 5,10, 15 years ago, and this thing that people don’t like, I think the ACL is a good one, you can tear your ACL and ignore it. It doesn’t heal the ACL. The ACL is not going to heal on its own. And when it comes to trauma, if you’ve if you’ve experienced trauma and your limbic systems in that and you’ve ignored it or you haven’t done anything to it, your brain will keep trying to heal, even if it’s and it doesn’t necessarily heal itself all the time. That’s when you want to go talk to somebody to help you with that process. But once you get the surgery The surgeon doesn’t heal you. All the surgeon does is put the parts back together. Now your body has to start healing, now that the things put back in place. And I see that’s kind of what trauma therapists do. No trauma therapists can heal you, and that you don’t need them to because your brain, truthfully, most of what people experience in PTSD is the brain trying to do it’s job. And it just can’t get finished. It just can’t finish the process. If we can get you into a position where you can start to finish the process, sure, it’s going to hurt. But as you finish it, you’ll start to get that relief, you start to see and things will start to get put, again, if if trauma is the past and the present, what we’re trying to do is put trauma where it belongs, which is in the past. That’s the mostly what therapy is, is you take this thing that feels like it’s there every day all day, when you sleep, when you wake up and put it where it belongs, which is in the file of you know, a terrible thing that happened to me one time. That’s kind of the goal.
Jon
Resilience is a common word in the military community. Why is resilience important? Are the resilient approach important?
Tim
Yeah, I have a particular way of thinking about resilience because a lot of times people think about resilience being a person. Is that person resilient? And I think with trauma, it’s very much a it’s more of a social responsibility for us to help foster resilience. So I think about organizations as resilient or not rather than people. Because no person can be resilient in the face of an organization that’s, that’s big, like, organizations are resilient, and they’re resilient in my mind when the people know they have good information about what trauma is, and what trauma isn’t. They understand what the brain does in response to being exposed to trauma. So like understanding that’s just your limbic brain response, like just like when the car goes by and you almost get hit in the crash, your hands start shaking. Well, that’s just a thing. Your hands start shaking because the adrenaline starts coursing through your blood. It’s just a thing if people understand that and then as people and organizations know how to respond when someone’s in that space. Then you’re talking about resilience at an organizational level. Individuals can be resilient if they understand like, oh, I just went through that they like after this conversation if your listeners if they hopefully they never get an accident if they get if there’s a near accident, they will sit in their car potentially on the side of the road shaking going, huh? There it is. That’s what they were talking about on the podcast like there’s my hands are shaking. It’s like, that’s fascinating. So, to me, that’s how you start to develop resilience is that you understand what your body’s doing. You’re not freaked out by it, but you go, you notice well, there it is. Does it feel great? No, it feels awful. But you understand that’s how your body responds. And so you don’t judge it. Just a thing. I don’t know if that answers your question sort of in as a clear a way as maybe you might hope to but resiliency put inside of a person I find problematic because trauma doesn’t sit just in a person trauma is a social phenomenon. To the extent that society understands people around you understand your family understands. That goes a long way. And if so if if everybody understands what’s happening, and everybody knows how to respond to that, to me, that’s true resilience, not just making somebody stronger to be able to take more terror. Often times the question is, well, how can we get it so that people can be exposed to more trauma and have no negative impacts like? Well, the more trauma you get exposed to the higher risk you are of having negative impacts. So why don’t we talk about if that person is responding, how do we respond to them after that, that’s why for me, it’s an organizational thing, a family thing, a community thing. When we get there, to me, that’s how you build resiliency. You don’t you don’t build it in a person. But the person can certainly learn things hopefully from you know, listening and reading and those kinds of things, but it can’t be sitting with the person only.
Jon
I think that’s actually a really an interesting response. Because it’s something I probably wouldn’t have guessed. It really gets me thinking just based on my own job and my own experience when it comes to resilience. So it does work for me. What are some things that families can do in this process? So you got you got someone who’s obviously been experienced the trauma but a family member, what can they do?
Tim
A, someone who has been traumatized. So say all those things went into it. They’ve been exposed. They’ve had these limbic responses that haven’t finished and they’re really struggling like they’re, you know that people with trauma really struggle with this. It’s genuine. When they’re living with other people that struggle, then comes out in relationships that we know this, we know that it’s hard to live with that. If everybody understands that what you’re really dealing with is just that limbic system. Right and we we run a couples program with with funding from Wounded Warriors called the COPE program couples overcoming PTSD every day, the family plays a huge role, like a huge role, not just in supporting the member, but what would you say as if there’s PTSD in the home? Then the family has it. So again, don’t put it in the person. Most of the members I deal with feel like well, it’s my responsibility, I don’t want my family to have to deal with this, I’ll just deal with it, I’ll suck it up, and I’ll deal with it. And the truth is that there are things that you can do as a person. But if the family what we try to say is, if PTSD is in the home, if everybody’s on board, and everybody understands what’s going on, you have a much better chance of actually tackling it. So even though the person who may have been diagnosed with PTSD feels responsible, once it’s in the home, everybody has a role and can be potentially really helpful in dealing with that. And again, it’s about learning resilient families, they understand. We oftentimes talk about how you talk to kids about this thing, because there’s a lot of shame. People feel I feel ashamed that I have PTSD and say, well, kids are amazing, because they’re just open to learning things say, well, if everyone knows that we all have lizard brains, and if the lizard brain gets affected in a certain way, it makes us do things. It makes us jump. It makes us it makes us irritable. It makes us angry. Sometimes it makes. Kids get that stuff kids or kids will understand that because sometimes they do things just out of sheer anger and they don’t know why. We all have that then putting in place those things for if I am experiencing that in my lizard brains taking over. How do we as a family help to make sure that the lizard brain doesn’t take over and make things worse for all of us. If everybody’s working together, particularly the couples working together, they understand that of each other, and they do it as a team, what we’ve found is that is the person’s going to see a therapist on their own, and their partner at home is is doing it and also understand that it’s not easy for them, so they need care as well. But that if they’re both tackling it together, then they learn from each other what that person needs in the moment. And there’s some responsibilities. If you have it. If you’re in say, you have a spouse, and you have it, learning that together, you’re going to be able to tackle PTSD better than you just doing it on your own. If you get the right skills, if you get the right information. And so that’s what we try to talk about, like families can be absolutely more resilient. As long as everyone understands what’s happening, and that’s usually the thing that most people don’t understand. People feel crazy. They feel like I’m the problem. Or I just have a terrible, you know, husband or mother or whatever. And the spouse like I don’t know, I just want to help I keep trying. But it’s like all we nothing seems to work. We see people like that come through our programs, and just once they realize what’s happening they go oh, and they realize they’re not the only ones. They realize it’s not just them. It’s the it’s the PTSD that’s doing it. And so we try to encourage people to tackle it together, not on your own.
Jon
Is there anything else you’d mentioned about trauma?
Tim
What I said before, so much of what we see is just really understandable responses that just, they just have to finish, the finishing is hard. The finishing can be gut wrenching, but it’s a natural process that’s just been prevented, and that the longer you prevent it, the longer road you have to kind of get through because the more unfinished stuff, the more things you have to finish is just not I would say people tend to beat themselves up about trauma. It’s like if you understand that, it’s just your limbic brain, and these are things that happen to people, anybody can be traumatized. If you know how it happens. If it’s happened to you, and you found, have you been exposed to a traumatic event? Yes. Did you ever finish those limbic responses? Most people kind of look at me like, what do you mean? Like, well, that’s how I know you haven’t done it. Because if you’ve done it, you know it because you felt it. And then have you had these negative social responses. shielding yourself from negative judgment is is very helpful. So you know, it’s being careful about who you share your struggles with, share it with the people who you really trust, try to share it with the people who understand because the negative social responses just make it that much harder to climb out.
Jon
Thank you very much for your time. Yeah, you’re welcome. To learn more about the work of Dr. Tim Black, such as the Trauma Resiliency Program, and the COPE program that’s couples overcoming PTSD every day, visit woundedwarriors.ca.
Extro
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