Mom, can you pick me up? Overturning Outdated Psychology with Emile Ennis Jr & Bex Taylor-Klaus

5:52PM Jul 26, 2022

Speakers:

Keywords:

people

trauma

study

realise

traumatic event

grew

stronger

traumatic experience

bex

experienced

life

absolutely

interracial couples

earthquake

queer

feel

world

happen

listen

emotions

Hello everyone, I'm Emile.

and I am Bex. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Right? Or maybe not so right. Sometimes as things get hard, we just want to grab our friend's parents landline call our parents and cry. Mom, can you pick me up? I mean, we've all been there. Right. I'm in love with you. To you.

Good to see you. I'm in love with you. Listen, we're guest hosting lovestruck daily. Today, we're giving you something a little bit different from what we're used to. You know, instead of talking about love for a person, we're going to talk about love and a broader sense love for our planet love for this world and all the people in it, because that's what matters most to us. But Bex, they might be asking, Who are these people? On this podcast, so why don't you kick it off and tell us a little bit about you?

Absolutely. I am Bex Taylor Klaus. I am a non binary actor and producer. I'm based in LA. And mostly I'm chasing queer joy in my life. So I'm excited to be here to try to bring a little bit of joy to this unending chaos.

I love it. I'm also based in LA My name is Emile Ennis Jr. I'm a TV host and personality. And yeah, I kind of in the same like i My main goal is to just make people smile and bring them joy with it with as little judgement as possible. I feel like there's way too many people in this world who have their own opinions, and they try to force them on other people and all these different things. And I feel like we just all love each other the world be a better place. And we'll kind of get into more of that as we go along. We're both millennials. And you know, we're going to keep this positive, but the world sucks.

It's terrifying. It's like every day is like you have the urge to call your mom and be like, Mom pick me up, I'm scared, but she's never gonna come. It's up to us.

Now. She's not coming. It's really up to us. And the thing is, you know, I know we all open our phones, some of us are addicted to these apps. And rightfully so just because you need that distraction from what's going on outside. But here's the thing, I feel like we were all raised to believe certain things. Everybody obviously grew up different. But our generation like we really, we really were taught to kind of avoid it, and it will go away and it's not going away. So that's what we're here for.

We were handed this mess by a bunch of adults who are like, well, we'll just leave it for the next generation. We were told to do that as well. But I don't think that any of us listened.

Nobody listened. And we're here to not only bring you something to smile about but also kind of talk about those deeper topics with a little bit of levity and a little bit of depth. So let's get into it by starting with the game that we're calling five good sign so we have a minute to Name five things just five good things. So do you want to start or do you want me to start? Oh, man,

this is this is a challenge. Let's do this. I five good things. That's yeah. All right. Ready?

Start the timer now.

Okay, first good thing is the executive order signs to advance LGBTQ eye equality. The other good thing is the transgender Bill of Rights that's being pushed right now, and hopefully will be signed that one gives me hope. Oh, there was this. Something I saw on Tik Tok about a queer meetup for travellers, queer travellers on the road queer and interracial couples who are travelling on the road. And I was like, I didn't know that existed. That's so cool. That gives me hope. Something else that gives me hope is this next generation of absolute lunatics who are out here trying to fix everything that was broken, like and making us look like old people while they're at it? Even though we're millennials, we're still young. It's fine. I think about a time we have time. Oh, seconds. Last good thing dogs dogs are always good dogs give me hope.

Yeah. Bags. I loved all of those. I also didn't know about that. What would you say is a travel meetup for gay interracial couples?

Yeah, I didn't know that existed. But there are all these like since pandemic all these couples have started like hitting the road and bringing their lives on the road. And they're safe meetups for queer people and interracial couples who may not have you know, safe spots to go to on the road.

I love that so much whenever I travel, you know, we always have to think about you know, those things. We can't just go anywhere because we want to make sure that we're safe. So I absolutely love that. I'm gonna look more into that. All right, um, okay, I guess we're gonna start the timer for me. Yeah, three, two. I'll kick it off with dogs because I love my dog Kingston. He's just a good sign anytime. You know when I opened this door and we're done taping this podcast, he will be there smile idling and that's a good sign there is still good in this world. Second thing I saw there was a little boy who learned to do the Heimlich manoeuvre from the show the good doctor and save somebody's life. And that blew my mind. Because people always talk about entertainment and TV and social media and all these things, saying that it can't bring any good, but you can actually learn from these things, you can educate yourself in different ways. So I absolutely love that. Before I really, you know, got successful hosting I was a server and I saw that somebody left a bartender like a $4,000 tip on $141 Bill, and that made me happy. The most I ever got was like $30 on a $10 bill during Christmas time. And that was amazing. Something else is good. Oh, I'm married, got married a few weeks ago gratulations that's a big deal. Man it now kid called

time on.

Know I appreciate it as a son of a pastor and who grew up in the South marrying the man of my dreams was a big deal. And I'm just very, very I feel blessed that you know, we were able to make it happen. But that was five good signs, you actually got to five I got to four

years should count double because any gay wedding should count as a double win.

Okay, I will take that I will take that. So we did our five good signs. So hopefully that made you smile and gave you a little bit of hope. But our main goal for this show is to find current events, news, anything really that we think is essential for us to share with you. And today the lovestruck team brought us a recent study about the nature of trauma and post traumatic stress that we can't wait to share with you, it may just may change the way you think about some of the heart experiences in your life. And you may be asking, Are we qualified psychologists? Absolutely not? Are we just two people trying to figure out how to exactly manoeuvre this bizarre world of ours looking for any sort of help along the way? Absolutely. So let's go ahead and get into it. And yeah, let's get into it. Let's get into kind of what this study says. So it turns out that we have significant flaws in the studies of post traumatic growth shocker. For centuries, we've assumed that most people who experienced traumatic experiences go on to develop this greater appreciation for life or strong relationships and emotional strength. And this has always been called post traumatic growth. So often this thought can be comforting. A lot of terrible things can happen. Sometimes this makes it feel worth it and pause right there. How many times has something happened to you? And then people try to encourage you to say, but you should be grateful that happened. Because look at you now. And it's like, okay, it's the worst. Didn't have to happen. Like, yeah, like,

how does this help me? Like, I get that it got me to where this is. But how does that help me right now?

It is almost as if they're saying that if this thing didn't happen to you, you would never have gotten to like the place you are at today. But we'll never know. And yeah, you wouldn't ever know, did you? I mean, I don't want to get too personal. But did you like grew up with a traumatic childhood or any like, major traumatic experiences? And were told like, oh, you know, it's gonna make you stronger in the long run?

Oh, absolutely. I grew up with with some medical trauma, I have some chronic health issues and illnesses. And growing up, I was told that this is this is how you become a fighter. And I even was told, like, look at your grandfather, for an example. He's had a pacemaker for 30 years, and he was given five to live. So as long as you just hunker down and be better than the odds you've been given, you can survive. And on the one hand, it's like, yeah, that that did teach me how to fight for myself and fight for my health. And I'm still dealing with the health care trauma of it. And the reality is that when I get sick, I get scared. And I don't think that that particular thing makes me any stronger in the long run, if that makes sense.

No, it totally makes sense. I feel like for so many of us, we were told that these things make you stronger without actually addressing, like, the feelings within and we're gonna get into that when we get into this study. But even when I tried to think about, you know, traumatic experiences growing up, I think, you know, for me, being in the closet was obviously a traumatic experience just in general navigating that but like, there were other things that maybe I've blocked or that I didn't realise until I started going to therapy, literally last year, because I was against therapy for so long, because I was like, I don't, I don't need that. I don't need to, you know, what's the purpose of like, breaking down these walls and going into these deeper emotions and feelings? Because that's how many of us were taught to navigate is just to, you know, swallow it, let it go and move on and it will make you stronger,

but just bottle it up until it explodes. Right?

And Then when you have these random days where you just start crying like I don't know what's wrong, well, maybe we talk about things more, we could figure out what was wrong, we just assume that one, we either shouldn't have those feelings or two, it's a burden for people. And really, if we stop looking at it as a burden, and realise that if we opened up about our trauma opened up about our experiences in the motions, that we can find commonalities within each other's experiences that maybe we can all grow from, I think that'd be an amazing thing. Did I get to where I am today? Because of things that happen in my past? Absolutely. Could I have gotten here without some of those things happening? Possible? Probably? Well, no,

we have no way of knowing, right?

We literally have no way of knowing. So I love that this. This study came out, based on a series of talks presented in Chicago at the Association for Psychological Science say that 10 times fast. No, some researchers call this perspective, largely illusory.

Some researchers on this perspective, largely illusory, they say that because the surveys have always required people to assess their personal growth over time, the results were skewed. Now, back when they did these studies, they would have people do these surveys. And it goes into this talk of with these surveys, it's hard to let somebody do a survey talking about this growth, because most people feel like if they don't have this growth, or they still have negative feelings, or emotions or trauma, then I don't want to say punishes the word. But like they're doing something wrong. I didn't even realise until I read that, that we are, especially in Western culture, like ingrained to think that everything has to have a happy ending, and that hinder how we process it. And some of these emotions and feelings

100% I've been watching Love Island, and something that's been happening, of course, I have garbage. I've been watching Love Island, UK. And one thing that's happening in the most recent two episodes is this guy is like we've been through so much we have to work out we just have to, because we've been through all this. And I keep hearing that and going no, it doesn't have to be for any reason. You don't have to have gone through all this trauma. In order for it to work in the long run. Maybe you've gone through all this trauma, because it's not working. And it's never going to don't keep pushing on something that hurts because you hope that it'll stop hurting eventually, because it might not that is

so true. And I think so many of us are, I think it leads to so many of us just being afraid of the unknown, which, unfortunately causes us to lean more into the trauma because it's something that we're familiar with. But starkly psychologists thought, you know, if a person couldn't rebound from a traumatic event, that that was a person failing, and research after the Vietnam War changed that narrative, and collectively our understanding of PTSD. And as it turns out, only 1/5 of people who experienced trauma, develop PTSD. And then in 2009, a study in Psychological Science said that 1500 undergraduate students participated. 122 reported experiencing a traumatic event during that week period. And then they filled out a survey comparing their current state of mind to the past. They say people are terrible at remembering how they felt in the past. And this led psychologist to wonder if people are able to accurately report how they have grown. And then another problem with the old way of studying this is participants feel pressure, like I was saying earlier to show that they've grown and not growing as shown as a regression of

a personal failing, even when it's not right. It really

makes me happy, though, when these type of studies and articles come out, and they're like, Okay, let's look at something that has been established for so long. And let's kind of like just really break this down and see if that's accurate. And is it actually, you know, working for people in this world. And another way to improve has been developed by Adrian Bowles, who's asking people whether they have changed because of a traumatic event, or the spite of it. And that's an important distinction.

I really liked that question. Right?

I wasn't even aware of it. I don't know if you've experienced this Beck's but I would be in a therapy session. And she would ask one question, like midway through that would unlock something. I don't know if you guys have seen on those meetings where it's like core memory unlock new it unlocks something that completely blocked or forgot about. And I'm like, Whoa, and then the tears start flowing. And you realise that you have blocked this trauma or blocked this event or blocked whatever this is. And all those times where you're saying, Oh, I don't know where it's coming from? It's like, oh, no, I didn't know I just I had it. No, whatever. And I don't know when we got to this point where we were told like not to talk about those things. Because you talked earlier about, you know, this newer generation or these new word generations. And I I think that's one of the things I love is that there's so it's almost like this brutal honesty and openness that feels uncomfortable to To not just millennials, but definitely people who are older than us. But it's something that is also refreshing because we were, I mean, growing up, like you just didn't talk about certain things. You didn't open up about a lot of things. And hell, I had a queer guidance

counsellor who told me not to come out. It was just different. One thing I'm really excited about this next generation is that, well, there was another study that came out recently, that was essentially proving the existence of generational trauma. And what I'm excited about this next generation is, you know, I like to think that the millennials are the ones in the labs, figuring out the answers in these studies. And the generations after us are the ones going, Okay, thanks for showing us now. We're going to fix it. Yeah. Now we're gonna get rid of this generational trauma that has been passed down to us for decades, centuries. Yeah. And I have so much respect for this new generation, because that is their mindset, while we're stuck here going in the like, Oh, God, I'm an adult, I'm supposed to be doing things. Oh, no. The younger generation is like, I don't want to be an adult. But I'm going to fix it. So the adults don't have to.

Absolutely. And I think it gives me so much hope. Like, it really does give me hope. I wake up every day, obviously, you have to keep up with the news. Like, I want to just avoid it. But you have a sad reality. And even if you do try to avoid it, you'll get an alert or a headline, or you'll just be scrolling on social media and it will be happy, happy, happy to. I wish I remember what I saw the other day. And I was just like, like, are you? Are you actually kidding me? Like what is going on? Like, I think one two days ago, I saw something in Texas where it was like a field of mosquitoes and it was the most like it was millions of mosquitoes just I've never seen anything like that. And then anyway, I'm always just scrolling. And we'll go from happy to what is going on to back to happy and I think that's kind of the limbo that we're all in just to cope and maintain. But what I love about, you know, this, this study and what people are doing, because there was another study that was led by scientists at Brown University, in the US and the University of Concepcion, in Chile, it just blew my mind.

There was another study that was led by scientists at Brown University in the US and the University of Concepcion, in Chile, it just blew my mind. They actually did a examination of Levin 1260 Julian's in 2003 and 2011. Before and after the 2010 earthquake, the study found that individuals had experienced a certain number of stressors before the earthquake and other parts of their lives. They were actually more likely to develop PTSD after the earthquake, which made them question this trauma actually make you stronger.

Well, yeah. And that also goes back into like the whole the 1/5 of people who experienced trauma developing PTSD, will one of those one in five have all experienced excess of trauma leading up to that final traumatic event? Whoa,

I think about when it comes to COVID, right, because some people don't want to talk about it. But life support and COVID has been dramatic for many of us people lost their lives. Some people got, like, dangerously ill or

lost their livelihood, their way of life, their career, all sorts of things, so

many things. And you know, you've had these traumatic events over the years. I know for us millennials, there are certain defining moments, you know, there was 911, there was like, there were certain things where we like, definitely remember, and it changed our lives. And I even think about like before COVID, I was stressed with the job, I was working. And after COVID hit and we moved to home, and we were doing all these things, it became this buildup, which one led me to get into therapy, and then to lead me to actually leaving that job realising that it was toxic, and I feel like not to compare my job to an earthquake. But I say all that to say, when that traumatic experience happened, it really enhanced the stressors that I was having before with that job. And I was like, oh, and it made me more aware of oh gosh, I have to get out of this because I can't even handle it anymore. So I really do love that these studies are coming out in that we are actually saying out loud that hey, the whole what doesn't kill you makes you stronger maybe isn't the best thing

and in fact it made there may be basis to say the exact opposite that what doesn't kill you actually leaves you more sensitive to the next thing that tries to kill you. Yes, absolutely. It's the same thing with heat exhaustion like I after having heat exhaustion. Once they tell you straight up, you are more likely to get it a second, third, fourth time because your body now knows what it's like and is now more apt Risk for it. Why wouldn't trauma be the same thing? Here's a quick set of fun facts about what doesn't kill you makes you stronger because a lot of people are going to attribute that to Kelly Clarkson. That is not who said at first, I was actually Nietzsche who said it first like, like classic philosopher. Yeah. If you want to know more about the original, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Definitely go check out some new chips. Okay. I would love to have a conversation with him based on this these new findings, though,

right. And I guess my follow up question to that is now that we know about this, what can we actually do to improve this beyond just therapist and I think the first thing I'll say is, if somebody comes to you with a traumatic experience, or dealing with these emotion, they're trying to navigate it. I think the biggest thing that I want to work on is just listening. And not going straight into the but everything's gonna be okay. Just really listening and hearing those emotions, hearing those feelings, and not guaranteeing that everything's gonna be okay, just, I'm here for you, whatever you need. That's what I've tried to get better at, like, I love. It's so ingrained in me to say, Everything's gonna be okay. There's going to be a positive outcome. I know that this happened to you. But as opposed to, man, that's really hard. Yeah. How do you feel? Let's talk about it.

That's one thing that I know, I'm just gonna keep referencing strange medias, but I'm going for frozen to this time. So we're gonna keep it like, weird eclectic vibe. But in frozen, too, we see we see Christoph really embodying that he said his line is literally I'm here. How can I help? Yeah, and I want more of us to have that Christoph energy, you know, just that that sensitivity to not just those we love, but anybody stuck on this earth with us. Compassion.

Love that. compassion and hope. I feel like that's what this episode has been all about. Listen, as we draw to a close, we want to recognise that talking about issues like this can feel overwhelming. These are big problems. And it's hard to know where to start. We're right here with you. But the thing is, we do all have to do something because no one else is going to. So instead of trying to go out there and trying to make a massive difference overnight, we challenge you to try and make a tiny change in your life today, a 1% change. can you improve something in your life by 1%? Or do a tiny thing that makes a difference in the world? Do it and do it again, tomorrow? Pretty soon those percentage points will add up for me my 1% challenge, I think, but I'll just do what I just said. Just to listen more, listen more and realise I don't have all the answers. None of us do. Listen, and and be kind. That's that's my challenge. As I go into this week, what about you, BEX?

I love that. I love that. I think what I'm going to do this week is when my friends come to me, I'm going to try to remember to ask, and because I want to listen, but I also want to ask what they need because I you know, sometimes I just barrel through and go straight for like, okay, solution mode, but it's, I want to really ask my friends, compassion or solution when when they when they need support so that I can support them the best that that they need.

Oh my gosh, I am totally going to start using that compassion or solution. Also, I'm going to use that in my marriage. Like when when we're going through it so good. It's a game changer compassion or solution. I can't tell you how many times like I'm like, I don't want that solution right now. I just want you to listen to me for

exactly I had a full meltdown yesterday and my wife is on the floor with me going do you just want me to hold you and

I love it so much. It's so helpful. Let us know what your 1% challenge is for this week. Please please please write in and let us know and also thank you all for listening. We really do appreciate it

so you can follow along with the show on lovestruck daily on Instagram and Twitter again that's at lovestruck daily on Instagram and Twitter or you can email Love Struck daily at frolic dot media I highly recommend this one because I just I love the word fraud like why would you not want to email with frolic in the name?

Yes, please do email less strict daily and probably about media and then where can we find you?

I'm on Instagram at Beck's underscore TK and on Twitter at Ibex with x

o x. And then for me I'm on Instagram and Twitter at a mill inness Jr. and I'm on tick tock at a million is JR 31.

Oh yeah, if you want to find me on tick tock, you got a search for me. I'm not going to tell you what it is because it's more fun that way.

Oh, we have a challenge. We have the challenge and then we have the find on tick tock challenge so Oh that's

a researcher for this is Jesse Epstein and our editor is Jen Jacobs. We're produced by Abigail steckler With little Scorpion Studios. We're executive produced by Frolik media and this is an I Heart Radio Podcast.

We do appreciate you listening and we will see you next time I'm in love with the saying to you I'm in love with you. i I'm in love with you