The Universe is Your Therapist 5.2

Amy Hoyt26min

Amy Hoyt

00:00

We believe in functional mental wellness, a holistic approach to mental health. We know that there's hope for those of us who have experienced trauma, even profound trauma and that's why we created the universe is your therapist podcast, we believe whether you call it God, the universe, source, unity or love that there is something much greater than us that conspires for our good, we envision a world of healing and connection. And we teach you simple, but powerful practices that integrate your mind, body and spirit so that you can come home to your highest self and your truest identity. You are not broken, you are loved, and you can heal. My name is Amy Hoyt, and together with my sister, Lena, we will take you on a journey of healing and self discovery. Hello, and welcome back. This week, we're going to address a question that we get quite frequently. And that is, do I have to go back into the past and look and talk about trauma in order to heal. And we have been researching this and talking about this for quite a while. Between Lena and I and the other founders of mending trauma. And what the research shows is quite different than what's out there in pop culture. And so we wanted to kind of demystify what it takes to heal from trauma. So Lena, why don't you start us out by talking about kind of the typical model of Healing Trauma right now that a lot of people have as a conception.

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

01:41

Sure, culturally, there is a belief that in order to heal from a traumatic experience, you have to go back into it and experience it. Again, in order to resolve it, this can look like you have to talk about it in detail in a therapists office. It also can look like the idea behind exposure therapy, which is if you have enough exposure to the the event itself that somehow that will help you not have such a strong nervous system reaction to the trauma. And the work that we've been doing, particularly focusing in the last year indicates that those are not accurate, and they actually can be much more harmful than beneficial. And so what you and I and our co founders have been talking about is, how do we help people in the public understand that you don't need to recount the details of your traumatic experience in order to process those. And in order to reduce symptomology that you don't have to stay focused on the past in order to affect your present, and to leave the trauma behind in the past.

Amy Hoyt

02:58

I think that's such an important point and one that I get messages, saying things like, Are you depressed because you're always talking about trauma. And what it did for me is it brought an awareness that I haven't been conveying accurately, that trauma can be trauma, healing can be future focused. But that doesn't mean we don't just glance back to kind of orient ourselves. But if we turn all the way back and put ourselves in that trauma, it's very difficult to do the work, it's almost impossible. In fact, because of the research that Bessel Vander Kolk, has identified in the Body Keeps the Score, that when we are in a traumatic event, our language center actually shuts down the center of the brain, Broca's region. And so typically, people can't talk about the terrible event

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

03:56

even if they wanted to. That's correct. They can't process it linguistically. And the other thing that happens in the traumatic event is that memory isn't captured the same way in a traumatic event. And so there's not necessarily a flowing narrative, or there may be gaps in the memory. Or you may have somebody who remember certain things at different times. And one of the things I love about some of the newer trauma treatments is that they stay focused on how we want to help you resolve symptomology. And we want to help you take that traumatic experience that you've endured, and keep it keep, keep you focused on how to let it not affect your present and future. We don't want to be mired in the past and we don't need to revisit the horrific imagery or events of the past. There's lots of ways to heal trauma and to move forward Word em to process that don't involve a deep, focused recounting of the experience.

Amy Hoyt

05:08

I know that when I was first in rehab when I was 18. And then of course, that was my first exposure to therapy and group therapy and AAA meetings, and then I lived in a halfway house. And so I spent some pretty intense time in a therapeutic environment, both individually and group environments. And one of the things that I picked up on although it was never explicit, no one ever said, you have to drag the past in, but I implicitly picked up on that I had to tell everything that had happened to me in order to move through it. And I'm aware that it did serve a particular purpose one, I had never told anyone about my abuse. And so in that sense, it provided a way for professionals to intervene and make sure other children were safe from the abuser. So that that provided a very specific and important intervention. It also helped take some of the shame away from me, when I talked about what happened, and no one fell apart. And no one said, I don't believe you. And no one said, You're horrible. You're awful, you're unlovable. Right? So the the function of articulating what happened was important, in a sense, however, I didn't stay in that position. Right, and stay there. So I told what happened to me. And then we start moving towards, I guess, problem solving. Right? So it's who still is exposed to this person? What can we do to help? What's our legal obligation is what the therapists were, of course, concerned with. I know now, I didn't realize you know, all of this when I was going through it. But at that point, then what we started doing is looking at the behaviors that came out of those situations for me, right, the symptoms. Exactly. And so for me, drinking was a symptom. And for me, lying was a symptom, right? Because I had to lie in order to drink because I was underage. And I had to, you know, there was a lot of shenanigans in order to get my self medication.

Leina Hoyt, MFT, MA

07:46

Right. Great word shenanigans, and there were some ah,

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