Hi, I'm your host, Dr Caroline, and if you're welcome to my podcast, cleaning up the mental mess. Today, we are going to talk about trauma and the impact of trauma. And just before we begin, I just want to say, I love it if you would rate and share the show with your friends and family. It helps me to get this word out and to help people with their mental health and to get our thought life under control. Whether thought life's crazy or life becomes crazy. Can it dive into trauma?
Kidchild and trauma is a major topic of discussion, we know. It's for a long time now, and it's really, and for good reason. What you experience when you're young really does impact you throughout your life, especially when it's unmanaged, and you're starting to find your place in the world, and the world can have a major impact on our mental and physical health. Well, today I'm going to talk about this concept from a new book that I am bringing out on the 6th of August.
called Help in a Hurry. And this is chapter 13 of their book, and it's called Help. My past is haunting me. I am so excited about this new book. I've got 18 chapters of Gold. We are really help you in the moment sort out issues and deal with stuff like help my past is haunting me. And there's one of Haraki Help in the moment
when maybe you get stuck in black and white thinking or stuck in ruminating thoughts, all kinds of topics. I'll tell you more at the end. But let's dive into chapter 13. So I'm going to be glancing down because I'm working directly from my book. And so if you want more, you can go. It's on pre-order.
It's on pre-order so you can go and look at the link in the show notes and find out more about the amazing bonuses that we're offering as well. So this one helped my process haunting me is about childhood trauma. As I said, it's a major topic of discussion. The research on this topic shows just how important adverse childhood experiences are. You've heard of ACEs, ACE, adverse childhood experiences. It was a master study done in the late 90s, early 90s, sorry, a landmark study done with actually studied 17,000 individuals
asking them experiences about their childhood and then they looked at their physical and mental health. And what they found was that when children are exposed to toxic stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, this can have a dramatic impact on their minds, brains and bodies, which makes sense. You hear me talking on this podcast about the link between the mind, brain and body.
So this study later became known as the Adverse Childhood Experience or ACE Study and you can go, you can go, Google this, I'm sure you will heard of this and you can actually fill in, you can go work out your ACE score. So basically these are Traumatic Childhood Experiences.
that you're exposed to or growing up. That includes things like abuse, neglect, domestic violence, substance misuse or mental illness. Long-term exposure to childhood trauma has been linked to everything from heart disease, diabetes, alcoholism, depression, suicide. Unfortunately, this is not just a localized problem. It is a global problem. Research shows that around 61.5% of adults and 48% of children have been exposed to adverse childhood experiences. So it's common.
Okay, and it makes sense if you think about it, no, none of us know how to do everything. So as a parent of for myself, and I was in a family of, grew up in a family of four, you make mistakes, we all know that. So you can be the best, have the best intentions as a parent, but you're still going to your issues or still going to impact your parenting and impact your children. It's at least fortunate in the cycle. So there's a normal amount of impact that was happened
from parenting, from growing up, from just being a parent, from being a child in a home because of your parents for what they've gone through. But it doesn't have to be something that cripples us for the rest of our life, but an awareness is very important for many years.
It was kind of not paid attention to you. Now there's a huge spotlight on this which is good, but there also needs to be a balance. So I'm going to talk today about the importance of dealing with this, but also to bring a balance into the approach. So we don't just look at all the negative and get absolutely obsessed and stuck in the negative, but that we also balance this with the positive. And I'm going to explain it very clearly now with some great research. And as I said,
This is from a chapter in my new book coming out on The Third of All is called Help in a Hurry and this particular chapter is chapter 13, Help My Past is Haunting Me. Okay, so, while there's no denying the reality and impact of adverse childhood experiences on our mental and physical health, if we just focus on the negative or the bad things that happen to us and focus on how this can
affect our relationships, affect our physical and mental health, which we need to do, but if we just focus on that, it shows that this overly negative focus creates an additional network, an online brain body network that will actually keep us trapped. So what I'm saying is that we need to be aware of these things. Wonderful that we're so much more aware. Wonderful that we have the ACE study and the ACE scale and that there's so much more term work being done.
But the research also shows that if you just look at the negative and have an overly focused negative approach, you create a network that keeps you trapped and stuck.
You can't go round and round and round and round and you don't move forward. Can natural action make you worse? So research on the mind-brain body network shows that an ugly negative focus without balancing with the positive can distort our perceptions and potentially hamstrings our ability to work through what we've gone through. So you can literally
You can identify, but just focusing on the negative can hamstring your ability to work through and move forward because we have to work through and move forward. We're not excusing, we're not getting just ignoring, you've got to face, you can't ignore and suppress, that will explode in your life as well. We have to deal with our staff, but in order to move forward, we can't just focus on the negative. So we have to balance it, we have to identify the negative
acknowledge that it's there and they work forward and that is why I have developed the neuro cycle really nearly 40 years ago and the neuro cycle is a system for how we can actually identify the patterns tracked back to the source deconstruct and reconstruct you can find out more in the link below you can go to my neuro cycle and you can see more about that and in my books as well which you can find below as well the details okay so
Focusing on the negative will add to an already overloaded amount of stress. So it's one thing to acknowledge, but if you stay stuck, it makes it worse to go around and around. It's like if you keep journaling about the same thing over and over, it just makes it worse, because whatever you think about the most will grow. So you have to have a sort of time limit, you have to have a sequence, you have to have a process, you have to acknowledge, you have to
start to acknowledge all the emotions and the sensations and perceptions, how it's affected you, your behaviours, and then you need to reflect on why. You need to bring that all together, you need to then get to the point where you've got all this data. But now, what are you going to do to afford? Your story can never go away.
but that what happened can never go away, but what you can do is change what it looks like in the network and reconstruct it to move forward in a more constructive way, otherwise it keeps you tracked. And we do this by balancing the positive with a negative and I'm going to tell you exactly how.
So, in fact, this existing research that shows that positive childhood experiences, called PCEs, can actually help buffer against the negative effects of the ACEs. So, these ACEs are adverse childhood experiences, PCE, positive childhood experiences. So, what the research shows is that you can buffer the negative with the positive.
And so PCE's positive childhood experiences also promote healing and recovery to activating our natural internal resilience. So we are resilient as humans. Our resilience can get masked by trauma and by adverse child experiences. But by...
One is by focusing and using ways like the neuropsychotherapine sign and counseling to start focusing on more of the positive. You can then activate the resilience that can then slow up in your mind when everybody needs to help you process through the difficult things that you have to get through.
And one of the very important things is in moving forward is when we find the source in the origin. It's very important that you don't stay stuck there, that you don't like dive into the cesspool of the trauma and stay swimmingly. It's important to stay on the outside looking in and not to try and relive any of that
But on the outside looking in and into use techniques within the neuro-cycle concept to move forward, to reconstruct that. So you become aware, but you don't stay at the origin and the root. You move forward. And that involves not questioning, speaking too long on why would this happen? Why would someone do this? How did this happen? Because that will keep you stuck there. And you'll stop falling into that cesspool as opposed to observing and moving forward. It's happened. And you have to take the power out of it.
So constantly focusing on the negative can saturate our mindsets to the point where we feel we don't have a choice because everything feels so hopeless. And I saw this so often with my patients that if you just look at the negative and you just talk about it and write about it and talk more and more and just the negative and just kind of
But either in assuming and saturating yourself in there, you will get worse. There's research showing that the more you ruminate on something negative, the more you think about it, the worse the depression of someone will get. So we have to acknowledge and go through the depression and anxiety, but then we have to move forward.
Okay, so some research even shows that people with some exposure to adverse child experiences, if they reported three to five positive childhood experiences, had 50% lower odds of adult depression or poor mental health. And those who reported six to seven positive childhood experiences had 72% lower chance of adult mental health challenges. It also means that as you look, there's this one negative thing and then look for something positive,
And if you can find, what this is saying is if you can find three to five positive things for every one thing, you're going to have a 50% chance of improving quicker, basically. And reduced, you know, you're going to, your healing improves basically by 50%. And if you can find six to seven to every one or two, you know, cluster, then you've got a 72% chance of, you know, of lowering a chance of long to
me, cloud challenges and physical ailments, et cetera. So you're putting yourself into the healing zone by looking at the PCEs to balance the ACEs. So that's really important to understand. Constantly be saturated in the negative, makes us feel fragile, broken, hopeless, worthless. What's the point of trying? It's so bleak. And every constantly surrounded by messages, and we are constantly having 95% of our mind daily is taking in messages from our environment.
and are non-conscious, minus 14 through those, but a lot of the messages around trauma, especially currently all over social media in articles is adverse child experiences will make you a mental health case, okay, and affect your physical health. Now we're not denying that, but by hearing that, the fear of that is almost worse.
Then it's worse because it blocks you from healing. So we've got to acknowledge that. We've got to be objective and say, yes, I'm aware, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to throw in on that. I'm going to find the issue. I'm going to find the source. I'm not going to get into that cesspool. I'm going to then find something positive to give me into a better frame of mind, to activate my resilience. So then I can then work through deconstructing and reconstructing and finding a way forward. If we submit to all these constant messages,
about childhood experiences equating to mental and physical and relationship problems in adulthood, we don't get much hope in the opposite direction. And this may inadvertently send the message of what's the point of trying but I'm so damaged anyway. No one is so damaged that you can't heal. No one.
There was a story, and it's a story of a boy who had an interview with this person, who had a terrible childhood. There was just a constant abuse drug addict parenting, the worst of the worst abuse from every side. And there was one person in his life, which was a lady in a shop that he happened to walk into in a little bookshop in the village where he grew up. And that lady just took some time to talk to him about
him listen and talk to him and give him an understanding of how to meditate and think about things differently and experience a bit of love and transform this young man into a phenomenal professor of science who made great changes in the world. So these always hope.
And what we don't want to do is immerse yourself in so much negativity that we get so stuck. The immersing yourself in that is going to block your ability, then to actually work through and transform and reconstruct what that trauma has done. So as journalist Gary Welsh notes, rewind one second day, we also have to be careful of conflating
adversity with trauma. Two different things, adversity or the things that happen to us in life, the challenge is okay. And not all hardship is bad because we can also learn through hardship and birth through hardship. So this perspective that is very dominant now of seeing all things bad as trauma, which is concept creep.
can quickly suck the joy out of every moment, as journalist Gary Welsh notes. While abuse and neglect should always be considered fundamentally wrong, traumatic and preventable, the same cannot always be said for the broad adversity. Everyone will experience adversity at some point, and there is often strength and hope to be found in it. Our response to adversity can nurture resilience and loving relationships while also defining our identities.
So relying on your feelings alone can be very confusing because feelings are one signal and we don't always balance those feelings in a creative way. So our feelings always need to be balanced with our behaviors, where the feelings or behaviors linked to those feelings, where those feelings
your body and the perspective. So when you objectively gather the awareness of those and reflect on those in this very objective way, and the neuropsych will take you through that process, you then can find balance and clarity in seeing those emotions. But if we just roll with our emotions,
when we are processing the toxic emotion, it can be very confusing. Just think about it. When you have a very, when someone upsets you terribly, when you go to having a very, a very under the weather motion, you can feel under the weather. You can feel, I know when I get very worked up or very toxic, I get tremendous neck pain and my whole, my neck just gets so sore and I just feel that fluid.
I'm sure you can relate. In that moment, it's not going to be a good time for me to stay. If I stay in that signal for me to stop and stick back and give myself some space, otherwise I'm going to get sucked into something very, very negative.
So if not managed, these feelings can spread like a virus, shaping all our thoughts and snowballing into a big negative mindset that can influence how we feel and approach the rest of the day, the week, the month, the year, of patients who have just got so sucked into this, that it's been there consuming for months, weeks and even years.
And then until we actually face processing, we conceptualize and notice face process, we conceptualize, embrace process, we conceptualize, we're going to get stuck. So thoughts can quickly become distorted if we just focus on the negative. That's really important to know.
It's important to address the post tours. I keep stressing it and work through them. But the more we ruminate on them, the more power they have in our life. Whatever you think about the most is growing and less hope you will have for the future. It's all about balance. And this is why the research on PCE's positive childhood experiences is so exciting. Understanding how they interact with adverse experiences to help mitigate the effects of ACE's is extremely hopeful and highlights the plasticity that I talk about all the time on this podcast.
of the mind brain body network. We always need to remind ourselves that the brain can and body can change and heal. The mind brain body network can change and heal.
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And this is what is concerned by the PCE research, the positive childhood experience research. Finding something good, even the smallest thing, can help mitigate the enormous impact and resolve childhood experiences may have had on us or what we may be passing down to our own children. So if you are in a situation where your parents have, you have experienced something very negative in your childhood.
But you can stand back and put that into perspective and say, this bad thing, and it tended to affect and it was really bad. But in perspective, what are the other good things? Like we said, between five and what the research says between five to seven things can mitigate between 50 to 75 percent of the impact.
So if you can find for this one big thing, can you look in context and find five to seven things that are going to be positive? And so that can then help to balance this out and put you into a place to work through the difficult stuff that is impacted your life. And whatever that looks like, and that's where the neuroscience can help.
And by the way, if you want to know more about how the neurocycle works, I refer you to my neurocycle app, which is now scientifically developed neurosystem for how you basically rewire the mind and body network and find these adverse circumstances and deconstruct and reconstruct them. And I have the neurocycle app, which is available on
It's available on iOS Android and where there's a web version. You can find the link in the show notes. And inside the neurocycle app, when you go in, I have a webinar section, which is a whole library of amazing teachings to help you work through all the things and challenges of life, not just trauma. And I'll show you in depth how to use the neurocycle.
And there is a specific, one of these, we call it a neural live webinars, that deals with exact examples of how to, of the different types of torma, big T-torma, small T-torma, and how to use the neuro cycle to work your way through those.
Okay, so we need to try with looking at our childhoods as binary, as either or or simply good or bad. A healthy approach is to see the path as the past as both and instead of either or as both and both good and bad for the end inside of it.
There are both good and bad things that happened and we need to focus on the full complex picture if you want to find healing. Even if you can only find one good thing and it's 99% was bad, that one good thing can help give you the resilience to take that first step to start the process of healing and find the people in your life that you need to help you with healing.
Bearing the obvious and unacceptable traumatic experiences, most children grow up with some negative impact parenting, as I mentioned before. And because parents are only human, and as humans, we do make mistakes, okay? So we know that. We all hear that all the time, we always say that, it's like almost key shape, but it's the truth. So we need to give ourselves grace. You are absolutely entitled, and I encourage you to work on the impact of your childhood experiences, of what your parents and whatever you went through.
But at the same time, you need to give grace to your parents who are doing the best that they could with what they had at the time. It's obviously boring for the news of parents that while doing totally 100% of what they shouldn't be doing. So essentially, you need to give them the grace because in giving them the grace, you disconnect and you are able to then work on your own stuff. If you always stay angry and resentful,
and you're entitled to all those emotions and you can acknowledge them but you need to move on from them and doesn't tangle otherwise you stay entangled and it's very hard to not keep falling back in that cesspool and getting so terribly frustrated almost like there's a string pulling you back every time you want to move forward pulls you back and keep landing in that thing they're pulling you climb out and you go back again anger resentment bitterness those are signs that you are being pulled back in so when you do the work of acknowledging that this is the bad
These are the six to seven good five to seven good things. And I'm going to, if you can find that, even if you can only find one and you focus on that one, get your residence app and start doing that work. Okay, so, for example, in my own life, I mean, my father was very emotionally absent. And, you know, she was an amazing father who has met her needs and
And it was no Christian of his love for us at all. But he was just emotionally absent. And that made sense because as a child growing up, he was placed into a boarding school at four years of age. And in the first night that he was placed in boarding school, he cried. And the nuns actually put him into a dark closet and left him there all night long. And it traumatized him for the rest of his life. And he got stuck in that trauma. And he had so much love to give but didn't know how to because he had never really worked through that trauma.
And it was as an adult when I was studying all of this and had all this knowledge and my dad died quite young at 69, but I was really qualified when working and we took through these things and he was actually able to start seeing the reason why towards the end of his life was much more able to reach out and be more physically involved and emotionally involved in my lives and the lives of our boys.
where I've got three siblings and our children and so on. So I don't excuse his own lack of emotional support on my own needs as a child. But I do recognise that he did what he knew, what he could, I'm reading what I said to you. He did what he knew and told me to him a good enough father. And I only his name in the best way I know how, but acknowledging that he was human, imperfect and still made me smile and gave me some of my most treasured memories. And that's what I look at, my most treasured memories. I mean, I can remember every
He was in the baking industry. He was a very famous bakery technologist. He had one of the freedom of London. And he would consult to bakeries around the world. And every night he would come back and he would have some delicious goodie that he would bring to us. So he would all run to the coin, get so excited about all these little goodies. And we would have this dessert off to dinner. And just give the smile on his face when he could give us those things. Those are treasured memories that I will focus on more. And those are when I remember more about my dad.
then about the hard times and the times when I really wish he was more in touch and he was a bit of an alcoholic. So I can work through those because I focus on the ones that have given me resilience. So this is why I emphasise balancing the good, the bad and the idea about paths.
So this is something I want for everyone. Okay, so just a couple of little exercises to wrap up. And then as I said, if you want to take this further, I really encourage you to get my app. Do the neurocycle. Don't have a look in depth at the ago watching depth in your life that I did where I actually walk you through a neurocycle doing trauma, big T, small T, climate zone.
But what you can do is you can try and balance your ACEs and PCEs and you can do a little exercise. You can go online, pull up an ACE, taste the available, fill it in, see what your ACE score is, but you can do a little self-evaluation exercise. So you can just make note of these questions. So the first tip is like a kind of little self-evaluation exercise. It's in my book, there's a chart that I'm working from here,
So when you get my book, you can pre-order it. The URL link is in the show notes. You can do this, but it's a few questions. You can ask, was my childhood all bad? And then describe. Can you recall and describe any positive experiences? Have I been influenced by the vast amount of exposure to adversity told my childhood experiences? How? Have I balanced the good with the bad, or have I got sucked into the wrong direction, focusing only on the negative?
Can I find the balance between understanding and roasting my childhood and how this has impacted me and the challenges my own parents dealt with? And then another exercise you can do. This little bit could take a little time. You may need to do this with a therapist or for indoor counselor. The thing which you can do is you can practice a three to one port ratio or
3 to 1, which is for every negative thing, you can basically find at least three positive. It's like the minimum, or you can go to what the current PCE research is showing, which is for every one, if you can find between five to seven, that's even better. But if you can only find one, it's also going to help. So each time you have a negative thought, don't suppress it, but use it as a prompt to think of three positive childhood experiences.
Even if it's not related directly to your parents, what happened during childhood? So maybe this negative thing about a period, maybe it was a school teacher or friend or aunt or a granny or someone who did something beautiful and you balanced that art like that. You're building your resilience so that you can work through the hard stuff.
So, as you went to this exercise, it's important to remember that a negative sort of emotion isn't necessarily toxic. It's giving you information, emotional warnings, emotions or warning signals that give you information. They're giving you the because of.
These salience can be overwhelming, which I mentioned earlier, which is why you want to just take some space when you get very activated and triggered. There's lots of examples in my app of how you can decompress if you're triggered. And also on my social media page, there are things that you can do when you're triggered and need to decompress.
And as you work through this exercise, just remember, they sometimes thinking about the worst case scenario for a limited period of time can help us prepare for the unknown to make me feel more in control. So in limited amounts of time. So here's one example of a three to one ratio, okay? So here's the one. My dad was physically and emotionally distant. Here's three positives. My father was always there when I needed him. He really was. Even if he was emotionally distant at times. If I was really upset, my dad would say, even if he didn't know what to say.
Okay, now the one, he would often smile at me when you drop me off at school. Beautiful, beautiful smile. I remember my dad's incredible smile. So I think he showed how proud he was at me when I did something well by wiping small tears from his eyes with a smile. Whenever he was proud of me, he would drop little tiny tears, think we didn't see them and wipe them away. So those are three beautiful things I can hang onto and I think about my dad being physically and emotionally distant. Okay, hope that helps you. And if you want to dive in deeper, you know where to go. I look forward to seeing you next time.
I hope you found today's podcast interesting and helpful. If you want more tips and help with managing anxiety, depression and mental health, be sure to visit my website at DrLeaf.com. And to sign up for my weekly newsletter, we also include a schedule of my speaking events and so much more. And follow me on social media. I'm on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Just look for Dr. Caroline Leaf.
Also, I love seeing all your posts on social media about this podcast. I love seeing what resonates with you and what you've learned. So, be sure to continue posting and tagging me and letting me know what you think and how these tips worked out for you. And don't forget, leave a review and keep spreading the word about this podcast.
Thank you for joining me today. I really hope you learned something new and helpful. Till then, I'm Dr. Caroline.
This podcast represents the opinions of myself and my guests. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for educational and informational purposes only. Please consult your healthcare professional for any individual medical questions you may have. While we make every effort to ensure that the information we are sharing is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions or corrections of errors.