In this episode:
Venessa: Life after trauma can feel very different for people living with it. There's often a moment where the world stops feeling familiar. Everyone's story with trauma is different. Mari, when you're ready, can you tell us a bit about yours?
Mari: Yes, I can. Eight years ago, my friend and I were mugged in a park, and he got stabbed quite severely. He got stabbed in the head and in the torso, and yeah, I was literally right there, and it was a beautiful sunny day.
I'm always mindful how much I talk about the story because I feel his injuries, his side, that's not my story to tell. But for me, everything sort of changed on that day. I was definitely not the same person after that, and what followed was many days spent in the hospital because he was in a coma, and I didn't actually know him very well.
So it was a very strange journey of getting to know his family and battling with my own guilt that nothing physically had happened to me. They caught the guy, luckily, who did it, and it went to trial, so I was the key witness, which was also an interesting experience that I never thought I would have, when you have to tell what happened again in great detail in front of a jury, and you're questioned about it.
What reinforced the trauma a little bit was that they played my 999 call in court, and they didn't tell me about it. And those, I think it was over eight minutes of hearing myself in the most stressful moments of my life, and then it was like, "Oh, it's one o'clock now. Let's break for lunch."
And that whole experience, when I hadn't had therapy for it, or any kind of conversation really about the trauma side for me, it wasn't great. Yeah, and that's basically what happened.
Venessa: Wow. So a lot of people say that there's a moment where you realise something has shifted inside. When did you first notice that you didn't quite feel like yourself anymore?
Mari: I think the first few months or even the first year, I felt like I was absolutely fine. I was just like, "Yeah, it's not a big deal. I live in London. People get stabbed," unfortunately, to say it plainly.
So I felt completely normal. Retrospectively, I can say that I made some questionable choices during that first year, but that felt, again, completely normal to me. I can relate now a lot to people's choices right in the aftermath of trauma because we think we know how people react.
We think they must be crying or certain things we just feel like we know, and with trauma, you just don't know.
So I can look back at that year and say, "Okay, well, I really wasn't okay, but I felt okay." And then the first panic attacks, which didn't happen the first year, that was about a year in, and that was when I felt obviously, oh, I don't control this now anymore.
So it wasn't so much that I had conscious emotions about it, but it was more that the body was suddenly kind of doing things to me in a way that I couldn't control, and that was very frightening.
Venessa: Thank you for sharing that. Phil, any thoughts on that?
Phil: You're absolutely right. This understanding that these responses are to an abnormal event. So we try and normalise it. "Well, I'm in London, so that's going to happen." That's not what we expect to see in our lives.
So when we do see these things, even though we know they happen, being witness to something that significant will store somewhere, and it will hold on somewhere, and we try and go back to our lives, and we try to logic our way through it and go, "Ah, that's fine. It wasn't me."
We don't think about vicarious trauma. We don't think about having to be in that dark and also that your brain wants to work it out. It's just trying to make sense of a really nonsensical world.
Venessa: Thank you. So Mari, for many people, a realisation comes with that first trigger or flashback. Can you take us back to that moment, and what was it like for you?
Mari: It was the evening. I was in my flat with my partner, and there were just some drunk people outside, and they were shouting certain words.
Venessa: Mm.
Mari: ...that were the exact same words that the man who attacked us was shouting, and I went straight into a panic attack.
And it was so overwhelming. I felt like I did not control any of this at all. It just feels like your body is suddenly hijacked.
Phil: Yeah.
Mari: And there's not much that you can do from the inside. The best case is that there's somebody outside who knows what's going on, and they can pull you back into reality and back into your body in a way because it's almost like you shrink in there, and all these things go on physically, but you're not steering the ship.
Venessa: No, thank you for explaining and describing that as well. Thank you. So Phil, after trauma, people often say that their identity feels disrupted. From a clinical perspective, how does trauma affect behaviour, sense of self, and identity?
Phil: So I think one of the bits we often miss is the biology, and understanding that it's there, we see it first.
And the situation you described was an extreme situation that creates a sense of threat, and our biological response is to threat.
Need to fight, flight, or freeze. And they're natural biological responses. We don't get to choose those. They are what they are, and they're what we do.
So we're going to go with one of those when we feel threatened enough, and we need to learn not to judge that, but to understand, okay, this is just my old biology, my old brain learning how to survive this situation, and therefore, we're going to do one of those three, and that's okay.
And not to judge that or shame that, but to accept this is my programming. My new brain might come later in life and tell me, "Oh, well, you should've done this," or, "You should've done that," or, "Why didn't you do this?"
In the moment, our only job is survival, and sometimes we just need to accept that. We try and think our way through trauma, and trying to think your way out of a sensation is really tricky. It's so, so hard because you're feeling that sensation.
Part of this is about not trying to logic your way out of these sensations, but to have the courage to sit with that feeling, which is horrible, to sit with that sensation and not think it's going to overwhelm us.
So it almost works like a bottom-up response rather than a top-down. We try and feel our way out of the thought, not think our way out of the feeling, if that makes sense.
And then it just moves us in that direction because if we try and think our way out of the feeling, we just end up feeling more.
If we try and feel our way out of the thought, then it creates space for us to think differently. So we start to regulate and bring our way through them.
Venessa: Thank you. So Phil, many post-trauma changes can often look confusing or even self-sabotaging from the outside. So why are these changes often actually protective responses?
Phil: I always like to think of them as survival strategies.
Venessa: Mm-hmm.
Phil: We've got through a significant event, and our brains and our bodies want to make sense of what do we do? What do we do now? Something awful's happened.
I don't understand the world. I don't understand what's happening in me or around me.
So we may go to situations where we put ourselves back in there really quickly because I want to make sense of the world. I want to know this is a safe place.
Because we're good at overthinking and not always good at looking after ourselves, we push ourselves quickly into trying to resolve situations or trying to avoid situations or trying to flood ourselves with the same situation.
And it's not about any particular end of that scale. It's about doing enough, but not too much, but not avoiding it completely.
So it can seem, I think, from the outside that people are saying, "Oh, why aren't you doing therapy?" Or, "Why aren't you there?" Or, "Why aren't you..."
Right time, right place, right way if we start recognising what we do.
Venessa: Mm-hmm.
Phil: And I think that's just quite important to make sure we spend time doing what we need.
Mari: It's really hard, I think, to get that balance right with the timing as well because, for me, it was go straight back to the park the next day with my dog because I felt like I'm not going to let this person who did that to us take my beautiful park away from me.
Phil: Yeah.
Mari: And I was like, "I'm going to outsmart trauma." Because I'm not stupid. I've seen the veteran films. I know what's going to happen. So I'm going to go straight back in.
And I think with that bulldozer approach, I really didn't do myself any favours. So it is what you say.
Phil: You could see logically why you would though.
Mari: Yes.
Phil: If you... Yeah.
Mari: Yeah.
Phil: Makes loads of sense.
Mari: I claim it back.
Phil: Yeah.
Mari: But I wasn't very kind to myself in those moments.
Venessa: And I think that's the key word, isn't it? Kind to yourself.
Mari: Yeah.
Venessa: So there is often a pressure to actually get back to who you were, which is what you just spoke about there a bit. So what actually helped for you, and how did you start to feel yourself again? Or what helped you to build that sense of self again, and you started to feel safe?
Mari: First of all, therapy, and lots of it. So working through your trauma with somebody by your side who knows what they are doing is very different than just going to the park on your own again.
And the whole timing thing, I think, is really important to be guided and for someone external to say from the outside, "Do you know what? You don't have to master trauma, because you won't, but we're going to get through this together."
I think that has helped. So in that same vein, talking about it, talking to other people about it, has really helped.
And then there is also learning how your body works and learning to read the signs that your body is sending you because they are actually quite clear if you know what to look for.
I used to have, when it was worse for me, I used to always have a piece of dark chocolate with me, and I would put that in my mouth and have it melt, and have that sensation of this bitterness but sweetness, and that sensation would give me a few seconds of breathing room, and that could cut the circuit.
So it's little tricks like that. I used to call this my PTSD toolkit. I think it's really underrated that you can have these little tricks...
Venessa: Mm-hmm.
Mari: ...to regulate yourself when it feels like you can't.
Phil: Yeah. It's weird why we won't give ourselves permission to have a toolkit, isn't it? It's like, hold on, why am I not going to... Oh no, I need to do something more complicated. No, we need quick wins. There's some really quick wins. Let's take them.
So those sensory bits that you talk about, that taste that can cut across into old brain thinking to go, "I'm here. I can taste this unpleasant taste. Wasn't happening in that moment. I'm not in that panic attack because I've got a different smell that disregulates that pattern of anxiety or fear," and goes, "Okay, we can cut across this really quickly."
Any of those bits that just help you know where you are, not where you were, I think, yeah, it's a no-brainer.
