Welcome back to the trauma informed herbalist podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Guthrie, and today we’re discussing how trauma affects us. We’re going to dig into the definition of trauma, the types of trauma that can occur the different layers of trauma. And then we’re gonna talk a little bit about how the body responds to traumatic situations.

Not everybody is going to come out of a traumatic situation with unresolved trauma or PTSD (also known as post traumatic stress disorder). There are really obvious events that occur that could create unresolved trauma for people. When I say obvious events, I mean, things that the majority of people would look at that and say, “yes, I see where someone experiences this and comes out of it with an unresolved trauma issue.”

But, there are more insidious situations that we don’t necessarily recognize as traumatic things – that maybe we would say, “oh yeah, I could see how that’s stressful”, but the majority of people might not realize that it can create an underlying trauma for someone, so to better understand how trauma can occur, we need to understand what we are defining as trauma.

A lot of people think of trauma as the event that occurred. The thing that happened to you that created these responses, but trauma informed experts began to realize that the event being the definition of trauma, doesn’t quite make sense. I can go through an event and it might affect me completely differently than you going through that same event.

You may have an event that has happened to you, that wouldn’t even phase me, but for you, it was very, very difficult and vice versa. I could go through something that was horrendous to me, and for you, it was a walk in the park.

So people like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and Dr. Peter Levine began to realize that this is not a matter of the event itself or how “terrible” an outsider might see that event. And instead it’s the reaction that your body has to the event.

So let’s unpack that just a little bit. The reaction your body has to the event. This means that it’s not your fault. This means that your brain recognized a danger and it did exactly what it’s programmed to do to keep you safe. You didn’t choose to freeze in that moment. You didn’t choose to have a fight or flight response in that moment. Your body made that determination based off of what it thought would be the best thing for you to come back into a place of safety.

So that’s the first takeaway from the idea that trauma is the reaction of the body – that it’s not your fault. You did not cause this, you didn’t make a decision for this to happen. Your body was just working to keep you safe in those moments. And that was a big realization for me that not only was it not my fault, but I could find ways to be grateful for my body and my brain.

Initially, I thought, well, I’ve done something wrong. I’ve had a response. I shouldn’t have. But instead my body and my brain did everything it was supposed to do in that situation.

The other helpful piece to this is that when we recognize that trauma is the reaction of the body to an event, we can begin to understand how other people have different reactions from us.

So if a friend comes to you and says, you know, I just experienced this and it was terrible and I feel sick afterwards. You no longer have to go, well, gosh, why did that bother you? It wouldn’t have bothered me if I was in that situation. Now, you know, each person responds differently to these situations.

And for those of us who have some form of privilege, whether you are male, or white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, able bodied… whatever privileges you may hold, it makes it easier to see how somebody who doesn’t hold those same privileges may have a stronger response to certain experiences.

And for those of you who are practitioners, I encourage you to look into some of my trauma informed certifications to help dig deeper into this.

We’re also going to talk a little bit about self-evaluation later on in this series and that can come into play with this as well, noticing where you’re having a reaction to somebody’s trauma, noticing where you’re, you’re thinking to yourself. Well, I wouldn’t have done it that way, or I wouldn’t have been in that situation or whatever it might.

Sometimes privilege can play a role in those judgements. And if we can recognize those judgements are occurring and stop ourselves, and in essence, check our privilege, then we can begin to show more compassion for each other and hopefully eventually start to heal our communities, our families, our friend circles, whatever that looks like for you.

So we’ve agreed. Trauma is the reaction the body has after a stressful event. But there are different types of trauma. There’s different ways we can group trauma to help us understand a bit more about how it affects us, how it affects people around us and our communities in general. So I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about types of trauma and then layers of trauma.

People have tried to define different types of trauma, different layers of trauma. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Like I mentioned, last episode, there’s so many other things we could talk about here, but to begin with, there are three types of trauma that we could discuss: acute trauma, chronic trauma, and complex.

Now you’ll sometimes hear people talk about big “T” and little “t” trauma, and I’m not gonna get into that theory this time. I don’t like the big and the little, I understand why people use that. But to me, that, that suggests that big “T” trauma is a bigger deal than the little “t” trauma. So what I’ve found that I prefer to kind of group the traumas is acute trauma, chronic trauma, and complex trauma.

Acute trauma is when there is a sudden event, usually lasting less than a couple of weeks. It’s very severe in nature. And usually people will recognize acute traumatic events as traumatic events. Think things like natural disasters, a death of a loved one, uh, maybe a sudden car accident or other medical event.

Something that happens relatively quickly, resolves relatively quickly, but felt overwhelming in the moment. And if there’s not a way to resolve those stress cycles, you may find yourself dealing with trauma in the aftermath.

Chronic trauma is an ongoing situation. So some of the chronic traumas are a little more obvious, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, that kind of thing.

Most people can point to that and say, yes, I see where somebody ends up with trauma, but there are also less obvious forms of chronic trauma things such as a chronic illness that keeps us separated from friends and family, maybe causes us to feel that we’ve lost a sense of safety… or systematic discrimination: that’s a big one that a lot of people don’t realize can create a sense of trauma over time.

Acute and chronic traumas can begin to pile up and create a situation where someone has complex trauma and complex trauma is becoming much more common. You’ll hear people say that they have C-PTSD or they’ve been diagnosed with C-PTSD, which is complex PTSD.

And that indicates that they have multiple sources of their trauma. Complex trauma sounds daunting, but it just means that there’s a few more wires crossed and it may just take a little longer for things to resolve. So those are the three types of trauma, acute usually pretty quick, very fast experience, chronic, which means it’s gone on over a long period of time, and complex when there are multiple sources of trauma. They could be all chronic. They could be all acute… or it could be a combination.

And then we have the idea of layers of trauma. Now traumatic situations could actually fit into multiple layers. They don’t necessarily have to be one layer or the other.

So as I describe these layers, think of situations in which maybe there was a trauma that you experienced personally, but you also see it in your community or with your family, and just recognize and honor that nuance that there’s just so many different aspects to the way that trauma affects us.

So the first layer is personal trauma.

These are the things that you have happen to you personally, you experienced them, or there are forms that maybe are secondary/tertiary trauma, where you’re hearing about it from other people or you’re observing it occurring, that still can create a trauma response in your body.

And then we have family trauma.

Family trauma is what’s happened to your relatives, your parents, your grandparents, and to some extent, even your aunts, uncles, cousins, extended family members, these traumas, and how they affect you could be very obvious. For instance, if a family member experienced abuse, then if they’re not working to resolve that they could turn around and abuse you.

Sometimes it’s a little more subtle. If your parents lost a child before they had you, it could cause them to be overprotective or could cause them to react to certain situations differently. And that might not necessarily traumatize you, but it could change the way that you view things in the world. So family trauma is happening to the relatives that are around you and changing the way that they directly interact with you.

The next layer, ancestral trauma is more of an inherited genetics, epigenetics and energetics discussion. I say energetics because in a lot of different traditional healing systems, such as Ayurveda, there is an idea of an energetic pattern that is passed down from the birth giver to the child.

From a more tangible aspect, we see different ways that people’s genetics change when they’ve been under a lot of stress and those changes can be passed down to future generations as well. So again, these ancestral changes may not be creating personal trauma. You may not have direct trauma, but it can change the way that your body reacts when faced with a stressful situation.

It can change the way that your body processes different events, or even from a more physical standpoint, the way it processes food, the way that you carry your weight, all of those different things can be affected by ancestral trauma.

And then we have to address the next layer, which is racial trauma.

This is a significant type of trauma that tends to be overlooked or just flat out dismissed here in the United States, the BIPOC community (which is the black indigenous and people of color community) suffers from discrimination on both personal levels and systemic levels. There are all kinds of scenarios where somebody who is in the BIPOC community may struggle to just get basic support because of systems that have been built with a focus on making it convenient for white people.

I saw this a lot as I was getting my master’s of public health degree: research is heavily weighted towards white individuals. It’s also weighted towards rich people, but for our discussion here, white individuals have more information about how different medicines work for them, how different products will work for them.

And even recently, I saw an article about how the infrared thermometers don’t work as well for certain skin tones, because of the way that it reads the temperature on the surface of the skin. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be an overt act of assault. It can be these little subtle things that are just not being changed because people aren’t aware it’s even a problem – and that can create trauma for people.

So racial trauma is a layer of trauma that we have to consider that we have to recognize and acknowledge as a concern.

And then the last layer I wanna talk about is community.

Certain natural disasters that occur in a community can create a collective trauma that here in Alabama, if you say April 27th, everybody knows what you’re talking about… the tornadoes that took place 11 years ago. If you say Katrina down in the Gulf and especially in New Orleans with the aftermath, the flooding, it evokes a certain response. In communities where things don’t feel safe where people don’t feel comfortable, it can create personal trauma, but it can also create collective trauma.

It can cause people to not necessarily have as many resources, it can create an effect that resonates down through the generations, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be a geographic community. People who face systemic discrimination in communities, such as the LGBTQ community or who are disabled, and in those communities can be facing discriminations that create a collective trauma for people who are in that group.

So community trauma is that last layer. So you have personal, family, ancestral, racial, and community traumas that are different layers that we’ve discussed.

So how does this all fit into natural medicine? If you find yourself identifying with certain layers of the trauma or certain types of trauma that can sometimes change the different ways that you implement the modalities, we’re gonna talk.

So just kind of keep them in mind. And as we’re talking through, if I say, if you have chronic trauma, then you might try this a little bit differently, just try it out and see, see what feels right for you. See what is working for you in that moment. In some modalities, the differences of where the trauma has come from may not matter at all.

And that’s okay. The more that we understand how people can be affected by these events, the easier it makes us to be compassionate on our. On our friends, our loved ones. And even just people we meet out in public, we can be more gentle with each other and we can become more proactive in offering a helping hand in situations that before we might have been aggravated by the way that somebody was responding to a situation.

The last little piece that I want to discuss today, that sets us up for next time when we’re talking about the nervous system and how it responds to a perceived threat is this idea of wired for fear versus wired for connection.

So we’ve established that the body naturally reacts to overwhelming situations with certain responses that are designed to help us to stay safe. When a person is wired for connection, once those events are over, they will start looking for people to connect with and what we’re going to discuss later is called co-regulation: those moments where you feel safe, where you feel like, yes, I belong here and yes, this is where I need to be.

When someone is wired for fear, they stay in that state of fearfulness and reaction to the event that has already passed. Now, if you have a relatively good childhood, if you grow up in a nurturing environment, then you’re probably going to naturally be wired for connection.

However, even if you were wired for connection from a good childhood and from feeling stable and secure, trauma can still cause you to become wired for fear later in life. So some people are wired for fear early on. They’ve had events happen that cause them to be naturally looking for the danger and, uh, leaving somebody in almost a hypervigilant state on a regular basis.

Other people experience this later in life. It can happen to anybody. The beauty of this is it reinforces the idea that the trauma response is not a choice. It’s not something that somebody has chosen. It’s not somebody’s fault. However, there’s also a visual that comes to mind of being able to rewire for connection.

So just because somebody is having an overactive fear response, they’re naturally inclined towards being wired for fear. Doesn’t mean that they’re stuck there. You can work to rewire your system for connection. It can be a slow, complex process. I know we’ve all seen at some point (or most of us, I think at this point) have seen some form of a server room where all the wires are haphazardly crossed and crisscrossed, and they’re all in different directions.

And everything’s kind of a tangle think of that as a wired for fear response. It may take a tech a long time – It may take them a couple of days – to figure out where each of those plugs runs and re-plug them in, in a much more efficient manner…. in a much more organized fashion, but it can be done.

Humans are the same way.

Many wires can be crisscrossed. There’s not an immediate fix, but we can work to become rewired for connection. So when you’re dealing with something like this, there is hope, and natural remedies can help in the process.

In the next episode, we’re going to continue our discussion about how trauma affects us.

And we’re going to see more about the different ways that the nervous system changes. And we’re gonna talk a bit about the polyvagal response, and this is gonna set us up for the discussions around herbs and aromatherapy and all the other modalities that when used effectively. Can help us on this journey to rewire for connection.

They can help us feel safe and secure so that then we can go to our therapists and say, “Hey, I’m dealing with this. I want to understand more about it. I want to rewire!” Instead of having to go to our therapist and say, “I still don’t feel safe. I’m not ready to rewire.”

That’s the beauty of this. If you can find some natural things that can help you feel empowered and safe, then it becomes easier to start doing that heavier work. We’ll talk more on that next time.

Thank you so much for listening. I welcome any comments or questions you can send them to me, Elizabeth@EmpathicCoaches.com.
You can check out my trauma informed work at www.traumainformedherbalist.com. And you can follow me on Instagram @EmpathicHerbalist.

Thanks again. I’ll see you next time.