The Safe Enough Podcast Episode 9: Beyond trauma informed
Welcome to the Safe Enough Podcast! This podcast is an exploration of what it means to feel safe enough in order to live the kind of life, or make the kind of changes that transform our lives, into those with all the love, connection, belonging and purpose that we seek and strive for. My name is MacPherson Worobec, founder of the It Begins To Move studio. I am a safety and self-worth recovery partner, and I’m so happy that you’re here.
This is the second of 4 episodes on the basics of feeling safe enough to heal and make changes towards a life that is full of love, connection, belonging and purpose. In the previous episode I defined safety, and in this episode I’ll talk about why I think it’s time to go beyond trauma-informed approaches. To be trauma-informed means to understand that previous experiences influence how folks feel and behave in the present. And this is important, because a trauma informed approach explains that tough behavior always comes from somewhere. It’s a result of something. Folks aren’t just nasty or highly fearful out of the blue, or due to some random personality defect. And on the subject of personality, our understanding about personality is evolving, and we’re starting to understand that its not as set and inborn as was once thought. Trauma and addiction specialist Dr Gabor Mate boldly says in “When the body says no: The cost of hidden stress,”his incredible book linking stress to disease, “Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.” And personality as a set of coping mechanisms acquired in childhood makes a whole lot of sense from the perspectives of neuroscience and attachment. Attachment theory says that how you relate to others - so how you expect other folks to behave, and also how you yourself behave - is in large part due to how your primary caregivers behaved with you when you were very young, and I mean very, very young, between the ages of newborn to 2, although some folks say that you’re still foundationally influenced up to 5 years of age. So, from an attachment theory perspective, personality is a set of behaviors and expectations that you developed before you even had reasoning skills, when you were so, so young, to help you interact with caregivers who were just right in their amount of attention and responsiveness, or to cope with caregivers who ignored you, who were frightened much of the time and therefore couldn’t give you care and made you feel scared, who were abusive or mean, or worse, who were a mixture of all those things. And I say worse, because the worst part about having a mixture of all those things, is not knowing what care you were going to get when you needed it. Those caregivers create the most instability in the children they care for, and therefore require the most complex coping strategies and lead to the most complex personalities in adults who learned that relating with others (since primary caregivers become templates for all folks), is very unpredictable and unreliable. It's terribly scary to have a basic need as a mammalian child, and not be able to provide that need for yourself (like eating), and to not know if your need will be met or not (will I be fed or not). And worse, on top of not knowing if your basic need will be met, to not know if you’ll also have to deal with someone being really mean and hurtful to you, or ignore you and refusing to comfort you, or being really frightened and leaving YOU feeling really frightened without being able to understand why. So let’s say that as an mammalian infant, you have this basic need of food. When you’re hungry as an infant, you can’t feed yourself. You rely on others feeding you at either regular intervals, or when you notify those caring for you by crying. Let’s say that you’re hungry, you cry, but you’re crying isn’t acknowledged by your caregivers AND you’re not fed. Not only does your body, hunger feedback loops and nervous system have to deal with being hungry - and infants need a steady supply of nutrition because they’re brain and body are developing at exponential rates - but it ALSO has to deal with being hungry AND its need for food being ignored. Here, I just want to point out that there’s a difference between poverty and neglect. So, in a severe poverty situation there might be any food, but there can be comforting, connection and acknowledgement of a baby’s hunger even in the presence of no food. So you can have secure attachments in conditions of poverty and systemic oppression, although there is an enormously strong correlation between poverty and attachment trauma. So attachment theory says that in these instances of not getting your basic needs met - and engagement, comfort, both physical and emotional safety, and love are basic needs - you developed coping strategies and mechanisms for bearing what to an infant actually feels like unbearable ways of being treated. It’s nearly unbearable for any adult to be hungry, cold, homeless and uncomfortable, to be ignored, denied, abused, ostracized or physically hurt by another person, and it’s a million times worse for a small human who doesn’t yet have any additional perspective on the world, and doesn’t yet have any agency to get their needs met. Another way to say this is that as an infant or a young child, you don’t know any better. You just have to take it. And because you just have to take it, you figure out a way to tolerate the intolerable, to bear the unbearable. And this coping skill set gets so ingrained and automatic, because you’re so young. From an attachment perspective, which is essentially a behavioral perspective, these coping skill sets become nearly solidified because they are set at the very beginning of life. They become the foundation upon which everyone else about the world and understanding folks in the world, gets built upon. And for a behaviorist, THIS is the process by which personality develops. And why it FEELS like personality is so set and unchangeable. Have you ever said or thought, or heard someone else say, “well, that’s just WHO they are.” That’s what we think about personality. And attachment theory is such a good behavioral theory. It’s been backed up by decades of high quality behavioral research. It’s still incredibly influential and relevant today. AND! modern neuroscience has more recently demonstrated why attachment theorists consistently see such a strong correlation between what happened to folks when they were very young, or what happens to folks during atrocious relationships that occur even after age 5, and why they’re still affected later in life, as adults. Why what happened to you before, impacts how you feel and how you behave now. Modern neuroscience has identified that the brain and nervous system actually change, they actually change their structure and the way they go through a whole cascade of biological processes, as a result of trauma. Ok, so I have 5 things to say about this nervous system change process, as a result of trauma. One, let me call you back to the definition of trauma that I used in the previous episode, episode 8 “What is safety?” It’s Bessel van der Kolk’s definition, which is that trauma is: when your experience is not allowed to be seen, heard or valued. It’s an experience of invalidation, being ignored, violated or hurt. It’s essentially an experience of becoming unsafe. Ok, the second thing I’d like to highlight is that the first step of healing from trauma according to Judith Herman, is re-establishing safety. The third thing is that the definition of safety I use is Gabor Mate’s which says that safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection, and that Brene Brown defines connection as “being seen, heard or valued.” So not all experiences of trauma or unsafety carry forward and have a lasting negative impact on your experience of life and relationships. Or, from a neuroscience perspective, we could say, not every experience of traumatic stress creates structural changes in the brain and nervous system. This brings me to my fourth point, which is that the difference between whether it does or doesn’t, then becomes a question of whether someone receives real connection afterwards. This is universal and important to every human, but it is particularly important for a young person whose brain and nervous system structures and processes are developing for the first time. Young folks are particularly susceptible to traumatic stress, to attachment wounds, invalidation, neglect, abuse and violation because, without overt and comprehensive unwinding, those experiences SHAPE their brain and nervous systems, they influence those critical structures and processes during the molding stages. It’s like a plastic toy that get mispoured during the casting process, and it sets up kind of kinked or malformed in comparison with what the rest of the toys like it, look like. And in this example, say the toy has some musical feature. Well, if it has a mishap during the molding process, and the structure of the toy gets a bit malformed, perhaps the toy isn’t able to play the music like it’s regularly shaped and molded counterparts can. NOW, here’s my fifth and most important point of this episode. Your brain and nervous system are not hard molded to the point that they are unchangeable. Your structures may have developed in a malformed way BECAUSE of early trauma, or may have become misshapen due to an experience of long term relational and complex traumatic stress later on, BUT everything can still change. And that is blue sky, good news. Because it means that things really can change. It means that your suffering is not a death sentence. BUT! Real change, change at that kind of level requires going beyond just being trauma-informed, and working directly with your nervous system. Trauma informed is really necessary. It’s the first step. Being trauma informed means that you understand that how folks feel and behave right now in this moment, is a result of what happened to them in the past. Great!! That’s the starting point. Changing the way that things are now, if you’d like them to be different, requires working at the level of your brain and nervous system. But true change can only happen when you really understand how the brain and nervous system work. Because changing automatic, adaptive, brilliant self-protective coping strategies can’t just be fixed with a breathwork sequence. Real and effective change at this level requires an understanding of not just how to establish, but how to maintain a felt sense of safety and an authentic and legitimate connection, during a process that will inherently resist change when done without skill. The future is nervous system informed, friends! And the next episode will talk all about how to make that happen. If you find this interesting, please leave a review and subscribe so that you know exactly when the episode drops. And if there are any topics that you’d like me to cover, please make those suggestions in the review or comments section! Also, feel free to check out current and future offerings at my website itbeginstomove.com. This is MacPherson with the Safe Enough Podcast and It Begins To Move studio. I’m so glad that we’re here together. I’ll see you in the next episode and take care, kind soul.
