The Science of Storytelling for Trauma Recovery | Betrayal Weekly — BONUS

00:00:18
Speaker 1: I'm Andrea Gunning and this is a special bonus episode of Betrayal. Our team loves to dive into the science and psychology behind betrayal and the trauma it can cause. We often talk about the power of storytelling as a tool for healing, so we got curious about how the science of storytelling really functions in trauma recovery. That's how we found applied neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Doctor Kate Truett.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: An applied neuroscientist straddles the line between what's going on in the labs, what I call the ivory tower of the educational space, and the clinical realm. I view myself as a translator of the brain to best help people connect with what's happening in their mind body system, I specifically focus on the brain areas tied into both trauma and empowerment.

00:01:15
Speaker 1: Doctor Truett also has her own clinical practice in Los Angeles where she sees clients who've experienced trauma.

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Speaker 2: The true line, though, and what really really lights me up, is helping people disseminate the impact of trauma and better understand the weird, painful experiences that happen in our mind body system when we've been deeply harmed.

00:01:41
Speaker 1: She's very open about her own lived experiences and how they impact her work.

00:01:47
Speaker 2: I'm also a survivor. I am a survivor of traumatic grief. I was widowed a week before my wedding, and I'm harnessing my own vulnerability and knowledge of neuroscience to shine the light on how change and healing is possible.

00:02:04
Speaker 1: I wanted to start by asking doctor Truett what trauma really is in a clinical sense, For instance, what makes something a traumatic experience to our brains.

00:02:16
Speaker 2: When I look at trauma through the lens of neurobiology, I like to distill it down to the concept of threat, safety or a lack of safety. As we can experience something that feels threatening, such as getting on a roller coaster and plumbinating out the earth at a very very high rate of speed, but also knowing that supposedly, if the engineers did their job, we're okay, so therefore we're safe. If that's the case, and we like roller coasters, then it's not traumatic. On the other hand, somebody who gets into the same roller coaster, maybe totally safe, hates roller coasters, but is forced to get on that roller coaster and ride the roller coaster. That could be very traumatic because there's no choice. So threat in of itself is a critical three line of what makes something traumatic could be threat to life or perceived threat to belonging, loveability, threat to one's ability to make choice in their life, to have agency, or threat to the baseline safety.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: There's one part of our brain responsible for processing safety. It's the amygdalah. Doctor Truett actually personifies the amygdalah. She affectionately calls her Amy by making the amygdala into a character that can help us see its reaction as separate from who we fundamentally are.

00:03:40
Speaker 2: Our little friend Amy, the amygdala who that's what I do call her Amy. The amygdala. The amygdala is a part of our brain whose primary job is to keep us alive, and when we feel threatened, she's assessing in our brain these core values of am my safe in my lovable or do I belong? And can I create changer I call be successful in my life? And if there's a direct threat to any of those values, then there's the possibility of something being encoded in our brain as traumatic.

00:04:11
Speaker 1: Sometimes the amygdala struggles to determine the size of a risk and it can be activated in all kinds of situations.

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Speaker 2: Now there's this concept in society on social media in the clinical realm of big T versus small T trauma. Big T trauma being something that we just lived through here in Los Angeles, these fires, or any natural disaster, or a direct assault, or something that is very clear that if you told another human this happened societally, that other person would say, yeah, that's definitely traumatic. Small T trauma are often just as impactful, but they're missed in the trauma dialogue and they create ongoing traumatic stress as well in the system. But there's things that directly threat in those our values in more subtle ways, such as course of control, feeling assaulted or humiliated or intimidated all of the time, in ways that don't leave an actual mark, perhaps on the body, those small TI traumas can be just as impactful on how the mind body system is experiencing and processing data, whether it be a big tea or small T trauma. When those experiences happen, it fundamentally changes the way our brain and our body are making sense of the world around us.

00:05:31
Speaker 1: What the amygdala considers to be a threat changes all the time. Based on the things we experience.

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Speaker 2: One of my favorite examples of this is if we go back to February of twenty twenty, if somebody sneezed, then it may have been a simple kazoothe bless you, not an entire fearful mind body reaction to, oh, my gosh, is that person sick with a virus that could kill us? Forward to August twenty twenty, A sneeze for many people had a very different connotation. That's a type of neuroplasticity known as stress and do structural plasticity now sitting here in twenty twenty five, a sneeze for many people, Once again, it's just a sneeze. That's how our brain is supposed to respond to threats and then also unlearn threats when it's no longer actually threatening to us.

00:06:27
Speaker 1: Whether we're aware of it or not, our amygdala is always reacting to experiences. Doctor Truett says that traumas that occur in early childhood, even ones we're too young to remember, can still have a strong impact on the amygdala sense of safety.

00:06:44
Speaker 2: When we're living in a state where there is constant internalization of fear of trauma, where our brain has learned and started to design itself around traumatic experiences, even if the trauma is no longer happening. The traumatic event might have been for two years during one's childhood, but if those two years were impactful enough, the brain is still going to be harnessing and utilizing the neural pathways set down during those childhood years.

00:07:13
Speaker 1: Regardless of the degrees of trauma we experience, it always takes a toll. Trauma exists on a spectrum, and so do the effects.

00:07:23
Speaker 2: It's a rewiring of our mind body system into feeling chronically unsafe, oftentimes too though it becomes an internalization. It changes how we experience ourselves in the world. We start having negative viewpoints on our capacity, our lovability. We start feeling as though there's something wrong with us, we're shameful, or that we're a chronic failure. We can't make change in our world. Our body may be rewired into a state of chronic stress or vigilance, meaning that all of a sudden, our gastrointestinal system simply stops functioning the way used to, which is a part of a trauma response. Or we can't sleep very well or feel rested when we're sleeping. So the impact of whether it be big TI or SMALLTI, trauma happens in many, many layers across the course of our mind body functioning.

00:08:15
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to hear her unpack how one event in our lives can impact our brain wiring and how it can also put our body in trauma mode. So without proper intervention, we could stay in that state for the rest of our lives. It can keep us from achieving our goals or experiencing joy.

00:08:36
Speaker 2: The really good news about our brain is it's changeable. It's plastic. That's where the buzzy word neuroplasticity comes from. Because of neoplasticity, we can help the brain carve new nural pathways and strengthen the ones that we want, while either desensitizing the ones that we don't want, or even helping the brain shift through and release the ones that are anchored in by trauma and creating space for new learnings going forward, a new way of being in the world. And we can play a very active role on that when we know how.

00:09:10
Speaker 1: And a lot of doctor Truett's work is teaching people how after we have a traumatic experience, our brain starts to develop a story, a narrative to explain what happened and how it happened. We can become very attached to that story. For example, if your partner has an affair, your brain's initial story might be I'm not good enough, but here's the thing. Oftentimes, our brain writes this story while we're in trauma mode, and the first draft is full of self blame.

00:09:45
Speaker 2: What that looks like at a neurobiological level is when our little friend amy the amygdala, when she starts looking at the world through a lens of threat, she disrupts the story making parts of our brain, such as our hippocamp This what she focuses on memory consolidation, our thinking brain, which is our prefrontal cortex, which helps us pay attention to things and make decisions. The amygdala changes the capacity of those other parts of our brain to function in a balanced, resilient manner, and instead starts pulling all of our other brain parts into a direction of survival mode, threat based looking at the world through those trauma glasses.

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Speaker 1: And when the brain is stuck in that survival mode, seeing through trauma glasses, this is what it can feel like.

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Speaker 2: The world is scary or it could be I'm a bad person, I make bad things happen. It could be I am not deserving of love. Whatever the brain has learned is the thing tied into what is painful, scarier heard, and the amygdala reinforces those types of stories over and over and over again. The more those stories get to exist within our neurobiology, the stronger they become, which means they can start to feel like truth. So the impact is pretty profound, and the stories are still going to be happening. It's just that the stories are being written by a very unkind narrator.

00:11:17
Speaker 1: Part of doctor Truett's approach is understanding the amygdala's response and even empathizing with it, because its biological intention is to keep us safe.

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Speaker 2: That's the irony about amy the amygdala. She can be very disruptive and how she guides our brain in order to keep us alive, but fundamentally she does really have our back, and that's the opportunity in the neurobiological healing work and integrating that with meaning making and simply storytelling.

00:11:50
Speaker 1: We are wired to make stories, but we're also allowed to revise the story our brain rights.

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Speaker 2: There's a lot of very effective different types of intervention for trauma because as humans were narrative creatures, and until we can support the system changing the narrative the meaning making of what has happened, the system can continue to be paralyzed or run by the pain of the past. And we're always going to be leaning into the meaning making, which is fundamentally the story that our brain has around what happened and identifying new opportunities for finding escape from what feels inescapable after the break.

00:12:33
Speaker 1: Doctor Truett delves into specifics about storytelling as a tool for trauma recovery. We're talking with doctor k. Truett, who's an applied neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and educator. So it says that when it comes to identifying the stories your brain has written about trauma, you can take the first step on your own.

00:13:08
Speaker 2: Journaling is proven scientifically to be an incredible way to help integrate our story. Putting something on paper is a way of honoring your own story and your own truth. Sharing our journaling. Sharing our story in a healthy way also can be incredibly healing. It can also be very vulnerable to journal We can be tapping into sensory data that's tied into our traumatic experiences. Sharing our story can be incredibly vulnerable, and our migdalah may have fears around being rejected or feeling even more isolated after sharing.

00:13:43
Speaker 1: But working through that fear and vulnerability is part of the process. Doctor Truett helps her clients develop tools for navigating the difficult feelings that come up when they're telling their story.

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Speaker 2: The main focus that I always recommend to my clients, friends, colleagues, and when we're doing this type of work independently is to also have a toolkit of self regulation tools next to us in case we tap into something that carries a lot of emotional weight as we're journaling. And so if we have our self regulation tools on hand as we're journaling or writing or sharing our story, we can actually proactively heal any of those reactive responses that are coming up. And one of my favorite tools for this is an exercise I created a long time ago called creating Personal Resilience for the Amygdala CPR for the amygdala. As we're doing our narrative work, as we're journaling, if we're noticing our amygdalah starting to get reactive, it's just time to push pause and take a breath. And utilize something known as mindful touch in order to downregulate the brain.

00:14:55
Speaker 1: Mindful touch is a meditation practice of clearing your mind, bringing your awareness to body, and gently running your hands together or running your hands over your arms like a hug. It's a way to ground yourself and help calm down your amygdala. It seems simple, but this practice can build a sense of safety around traumatic memories.

00:15:16
Speaker 2: It's a way of saying this happened, rather than holding it inside, of acknowledging the pains of the past and starting to create a new way forward, imagining different outcomes, creating a way that you would like to respond or react to something. We can help the system find ways to renarrate and free our brain of being stuck locked into what happened and know that, hey, we're not there anymore.

00:15:48
Speaker 1: Another important step in this process is detaching from labels.

00:15:53
Speaker 2: A tool er exercise I do with my clients quite a bit is to have them notice the difference between the statement anxious person versus I am experiencing anxiety. As humans, we tend to label ourselves, and when we give ourselves big emotional labels, it's hard for our mind and our body system to dig ourselves out of that label. I am bad, I am depressed, I am unlovable, I am unworthy, I am powerless. Our brain buys into that as a self identifying component of self, as opposed to saying I'm feeling powerless in this moment, which then creates space for the brain and the body to go, Oh, I can do something to feel more powerful right now. What might that be? Oh? I can control my breath, Oh, I have control over that. Or I am experiencing anxiety, which creates the opportunity to zoom out a little bit and say why am I feeling anxious, which immediately starts the positive neuroplastic experience of being curious, which gives us dope mean and opens at our visual sphere both internally and externally to seeing a larger picture around us. And the value in that is there's space for curiosity and even possibly beginning to move into a state of self compassion and deeper self awareness and self acceptance, which fundamentally is a critical part of healing through trauma.

00:17:25
Speaker 1: Certain labels have more power than others, like the label a victim. It's a word that comes up a lot in our interviews. It's a polarizing and emotionally charged label. Some people adopt it, others reject it.

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Speaker 2: A common label that I hear is the idea of I am a victim or the polarizing opposite, I'm not a victim, And I can see a lot of damage potentially being done on either side of the aisle. If we are a victim and that is the label that we're putting on our mind body system, it can feel what we call in psychological terms, very much of having an external lucus of control. Things happen to me. I am powerless and I cannot create change in my world. And for the Imigdella's core values, you can possibly tune in there that Amy's going to hate that, and when she really feels powerless or weak, she's going to create a way of interacting with that statement for the good, the bad, or the ugly. But however it shows up for her to keep us safe, oftentimes I can mean isolating or creating ways of being in interpersonal relationships that are not preferable or are unhealthy for us. The flip side of I am not a victim again, great, if you're not a victim, that's fine, But if that's a trauma reaction. It can bypass the reality of things happen out of control, scary, difficult, painful things did happen and the mind body system wasn't in control in those moments, and so the label of victim and of itself becomes self identifying and either side of the aisle, I don't believe it's supportive or helpful for my clients or anybody in the world to have an I AM statement in one direction or the other. When we look at the term of victim, it means something has happened that was really bad, and it's a concept, it's not a label, it's not a self identification.

00:19:26
Speaker 1: Still, having a word for that experience and the changes it caused can be a way to acknowledge that it happened.

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Speaker 2: In the field of survivalship, when working with trauma survivors, we've taken victim off the table because when we're a survivor, it's giving an acknowledgment to that something did happen. So, yes, there was a moment where I was a victim of something really bad happening, and I'm standing here right now. I made it through. I have survived, and therefore there's space to look at what happened and to build through survivalship into resilience and empowerment.

00:20:07
Speaker 1: A major barrier to building resilience and empowerment is shame. Doctor Truett explains where shame comes from and why we hold onto it so tightly.

00:20:18
Speaker 2: Ah shame, shame, shame, shame. Our brain can be a shame junkie, and shame is fundamentally a feeling of being flooded with a lack of self worth, feeling completely and utterly like somebody is bad, they are broken at their core and they are bad. And the interesting thing about shame is our little friend Amy theam Magdalah loves it is when she's feeling shamed, She's like, there is something clearly not okay here, and she gets to make up even more stories about how we are bad, believing that she's keeping us safe. She really does have her best interests at hearts, but feeling shame or feeling bad or broken, and for Amy the Amigdalah, actually gives her power. It helps her feel like she has agency and choice. I know it's weird, and it's real.

00:21:10
Speaker 1: Shame is baked into our brain's normal functioning, and it's something we have to learn to work.

00:21:16
Speaker 2: With the problem is hindsight's twenty twenty, and so we can look back and see every flag that was messed and hold ourselves accountable for it. And when I say hold ourselves accountable for it, of course it's not us. It's our little friend Amy the Andmigdala spinning up a narrative of saying, see you miss that. That's your fault. That's your fault. That's your fault. That's your fault. You miss that too, aren't you so bad? How do you fail on that account? What's wrong with you? So on and so forth again, all as a way to create internally a sense of safety, because when we're so flagellating, when we're beating ourselves up and holding ourselves responsible for things that we could not control, did not know about, did not see. Are a megdala saying remember it, remember it, because you don't want this to happen again. And so this is her way of being a LUCKI loo. When there's a car accident on the freeway, people slow down, Yes, perhaps for the safety of the passengers in the car accident, but also people look because the brain's going I need to learn something over there, our megdala's version of doing that with shame and trauma is to do a hindsight review and have twenty twenty vision about every single thing we missed and hold us accountable for it so we don't get into danger in the future.

00:22:50
Speaker 1: As we often hear on our show, healing from trauma isn't linear, and healing doesn't always bring back the person you were before. That's one of the hardest parts. So we asked doctor Truett what healing looks like when she's working with clients.

00:23:06
Speaker 2: One of the interesting things that happens with my clients when we not everybody, but a lot of them when we begin the work is ask them what is their goal, and they say, I just want to be happy. The problem is our brain is not designed to be happy all the time. In fact, our brain would burn out neurochemically if we were. Our brain and our body are designed to flow an EBB and navigate through all types of feelings and emotions on a daily basis, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the calm and the neutral, and all of those feelings become flags for helping us better understand what's happening in the world around us. The beautiful part of being in the work and doing the work is that those red flag moments no longer spiral us into shame. If shame comes up and go oh, that's also an interesting data point, is a part of me now feeling bad again? What's happening? And we can get curious or in the aftermath of a red flag moment, if we've really leaned into narrow plasticity and helped our system come home to self with loving care, we can give ourselves an internal hug or even an external hug, and wrap our arms around ourselves and go, they're there, girl, It's okay, what's going on and have that compassionate, loving response that for so many of us we may never have ever had to begin with.

00:24:31
Speaker 1: Instead of making happiness a marker appealing, a more realistic approach is to build self compassion.

00:24:38
Speaker 2: Self compassion is a skill. We're not born to be compassionate towards ourselves. We are born to be compassionate towards other beings, animals, living things, even inanimate objects, because we need other entities for survival. But frankly, to survive, we don't have to be nice to ourselves. So that's a skill that we get to learn, and that's a really critical part of the trauma healing journey is learning how to hold the space for ourselves that we neurobiologically freely give to everybody else.

00:25:13
Speaker 1: This is the work she's actively doing with her clients. But doctor Truett acknowledges that therapy isn't always accessible. That's why she's committed to online education and sharing free resources.

00:25:26
Speaker 2: So therapy is a privilege, and I'm very aware that not everybody has access to it. I also know that mental health and wellness is a human right, so dedicated an extensive amount of time to providing resources and tools that are neurobiologically based to help people heal the experiences of their past, finding ways to show up in the present moment and do proactive healing in the here and now while building the neuropathways they want for their future as we honestly can partner with our own brains to create incredible change. And on our YouTube channel, it's doctor k Truet, which is a Google Health channel. It's approved by ANIH and IMH as well as World Health Organization. As an educational resource, we provide therapeutic tools guides, information so as guided meditations, and all sorts of ways to support people in safely moving into their own healing journey along those same lines. I have two books that I've written. The first one is called Healing in Your Hands, which the title leans into exactly everything we're talking about. It's a full healing experience for going on a guided relationship with oneself and navigating how our life experiences have shifted and changed the way we experience the world around us, while providing actionable tools and resources for curating and creating change.

00:26:57
Speaker 1: Her most recent book is a memoir where she uses her own story as a lesson in trauma recovery.

00:27:04
Speaker 2: My memoir, which is called Keep Breathing, really goes into a deep dive, and I use myself as a case study, which was quite terrifying, to be honest, to unpack the complexities of having PTSD.

00:27:17
Speaker 1: In writing her memoir, she experienced firsthand how healing it can be to tell your story, and it's a story she hopes other people can learn from.

00:27:27
Speaker 2: It was really one of the hardest choices I've made in my life to put that book into the world, partially because as psychologists, there's an old idea that we're supposed to be blank slates, But fundamentally, what I realize is there's a lot of people who are just like me, who are struggling, who could possibly benefit from the information. And it was so healing to even write my own story. It took five years and to have the space to share my story and to have my story be held by others and reflected. So it's an incredible, incredible, powerful testimony to the power of narrative work and how in our story is held by others, that and of itself is really really healing.

00:28:13
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and a special thanks to doctor Kate Truett for sharing her expertise with us. In the spirit of storytelling for trauma healing, We're going to spend the next two weeks sharing listener essay submissions. The theme was Resilience in Recovery after a devastating betrayal. We received so many incredible submissions and we're excited to share them with you, So stay tuned and we'll be back next week. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support. One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Melcuriy and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio, Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by my Music and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.