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Description

We’re often taught that trauma is something that happens to us, but psychiatrist Dr. Alauna Curry explains that trauma is something that happens within us. Using different parts of the brain, she explains how our experiences and beliefs can lead us to experience something as traumatic, and how we can use those same systems to heal from that trauma.

 

Find Dr. Alauna on social media @dralauna.

 

Here is her Instagram story about Rush Limbaugh: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17867747017918762/?hl=en

 

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Please note, In Recovery contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

 

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Dr. Nzinga Harrison, Claire Jones, Dr. Alauna Curry

Claire Jones  00:00

Hey everyone, its Claire here, just popping in really fast to say two things. One, we are coming down to our final episodes of the season. So if you have any questions that you have been wanting to ask but haven’t asked yet, you should ask them. So give us a call at 833-453-6662. Or you can leave us a question on our Google forum at bit.ly/inrecoveryquestions, we would love to hear from any and all of you that still have questions you want to ask. The second thing is that we are really excited to do an episode on languishing. If you are unfamiliar with this term, we’re gonna link a New York Times article in the show notes of this episode. So if you want to read more about it, and it resonates with you, and you want to ask a question, then give us a call.

Claire Jones 

But I’m going to just read a little bit from that article now, languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health, it’s the void between depression and flourishing, the absence of well-being, you don’t have symptoms of mental illness. But you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity, languishing, dulls your motivation disrupts your ability to focus and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. So if this sounds like you, we want to hear from you. Call us at 833-453-6662. We want to hear your questions about languishing. We’ll have an expert on to answer them alongside Nzinga. And with all of that, on to the episode.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison

Hey, everyone you’re listening to IN RECOVERY. And I’m Dr. Nzinga Harrison. So this week, we’re talking about trauma with Dr. Alauna curry, she’s a Board-Certified psychiatrist to study trauma for 12 years, she’s developed a quote unquote, skills over pills approach, in no way is this meant to stigmatize using medications for any kind of mental illness. But it is meant to help develop skills and recognizing and controlling our thought patterns around trauma. Because often, trauma stories are told well as stories like I was walking down the street, and then this happened. And then that happened, when actually, trauma is a chemical response that happens in our brains after these events. So we’re going to go through some science of the brain, but stick with us, because it will help us understand why we perceive certain events as traumatic. And then Dr. Alauna is going to give us some skills to help reshape our thinking and go in depth with empathy. So let’s get into it.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  02:46

Tell us about you. And Skills Over Pills. And then I just want to jump straight into some questions that I know our listeners have.

Dr. Alauna Curry

Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to do this as well. You’re like we fan girl on each other. I know, I know. But I focus on Skills Over Pills. Because I think that it’s really important for us to learn internal cognitive skills that help us to wrestle that every day emotions, that everyday life, the traumas that are occurring just left and right in our society. So we can’t take pills every time we’re feeling something.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

But don’t we learn that, don’t we learn that from two years old fall down and hurt your knee? Take a Tylenol?

Dr. Alauna Curry 

Absolutely, I think that a lot of the ways that we function right now are based on a profound lack of understanding of how our brain and body works, period.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison

So let’s get real concrete because we want to give in this next 30 minutes or so our listeners a dose of this Skill Pill, okay? You were like we’re constantly being traumatized every day. So like, how does a person know what is trauma? And how do they know if they have been quote, traumatized? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do you recognize it in yourself?

Dr. Alauna Curry  04:23

The definition that I use of psychological trauma is anything that you experience internally negative and is creating a shift or a change in the way you think about yourself, other people, and the world.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison

Oh, okay. Give it to me again, Dr. Alauna. Because I know people are going to try to draw the space between that concept of trauma which is changing your you know, changing the way you perceive yourself, others or the world and what people typically think of trauma, which is like the building that just collapsed in Miami, or a car accident where people get killed or severe violence in a relationship. So help us understand the connection, like this whole spectrum, right?

Dr. Alauna Curry

All of those things are traumatic. And that’s kind of the point, an example can be a car accident, one person can go through a car accident, and they’ll have maybe a couple days, where they’re, you know, maybe shook up and having anxiety when they drive again. And of course, maybe don’t want to go back into that other space, but their body eventually acclimates. And they’re able to still go about their day, where as another person could be in that exact same scenario. But, their experience of that thing can make it to the point where their biology now has it to where they can’t drive, or when they’re driving. They think that they’re seeing an encroaching vehicle, and they yanked the wheel so hard, they cause themselves another accident. Now they’ve concluded, driving is dangerous. I don’t want to do it. Matter of fact, I don’t want to leave the house. And their life is changing.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  06:09

Claire popped on camera. Like she had something to say about that.

Claire Jones 

Well, I was Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say like, how, if you are a person who is like walking down the street, and you’re trying to figure out, have I just experienced something that was hard? Or am I traumatized? And I don’t know, because I have been told all of my life, that trauma has to be this really extreme thing. How do you? How do you answer that question?

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  06:36

What do you feel? What do you think?

Dr. Alauna Curry 

Yeah, if you are experiencing something painful, and it seems like it’s coming back into your mind over and over again, that you might feel psychologically stuck in any place in any process. That is trauma. No one else really can tell you. If something was traumatizing to you, if it feels traumatizing, if it feels like I don’t trust people, because of these things. I don’t want to go places because I’m […]. I don’t want to be around this space, or I’m having this, you know, negative response to a thing than it is a trauma, we don’t have to look any further.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

Is it kind of that experience of being stuck? Because I think Claire’s question is like, and you describe some of the Dr. Alauna, two people have the same experience. And one person has a short period of time where they’re reacting to that experience. And then it’s like they quote moved on. And another person has a period of time they’re reacting to the next experience. And it’s like, they can’t, quote, move on, is that when we’re falling into trauma?

Dr. Alauna Curry 

That is when we’re falling into trauma. And what I’ll tell you is that it is very subtle. Some traumas are not people think of like violence has to be overt. It has to be someone hitting you, slap you, something happening to your body. But let me list some other things that are psychologically traumatic. So the things that are hit the most people at once are natural disasters are really these days. It’s unnatural disasters, right? We’re having these weather events and climate events that are extreme. So think about living through that. And by the way, you don’t have to be a soldier in war to be traumatized by war, the people who live in war zones, every time you have alarms going off, they say go get in your bomb shelter, that is inherently traumatizing. So let’s think about all of the wars and things that are going on the famines that are going on. Imagine having insects come in and eat up all your crops in an area where you are depending on these for food. That’s traumatizing.

Dr. Alauna Curry 

But also things like sometimes the words that someone can say or the way that they talk to you can be traumatizing. Right. Invalidation, I think is one of the biggest psychological traumas. That is like death by thousand cuts, but nobody sees those invisible wounds. You telling me that my version of reality of what I’m experiencing is wrong is it that I should feel a different way. You’re not acknowledging my reality. I’m saying I’m LGBTQ. I’m saying I’m experiencing racism at work. I’m saying that I’m experiencing pain in this marriage. And you tell me no, you should never. That wasn’t what you heard. That wasn’t what you thought I’m not yelling at you. Right? And that happens so often. And it makes you think, sometimes that you’re crazy. It makes you think that the other people crazy me think that the world are crazy. I believe that we need a hard reset. Our minds are so powerful to create things, but we need to know, seven parts of our brain. That’s it, just seven.

Dr. Alauna Curry

Okay, before we get into the seven parts of our brain, let’s take a quick break.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  10:31

Now that we’re back, Dr. Alauna, you were just about to tell us about the seven parts of our brain that relate to trauma.

Dr. Alauna Curry 

So the first brain system, you need to know about that amygdala, okay? And I love the amygdala because it catches a bad rap, but it’s like a gremlin. It does the little cute stuff, like happiness and joy. And then it does the cracking, which is fear and hate and jealousy, and disgust, embarrassment and all those other things that we don’t like to feel. But the amygdala does not create your emotions based on any like firm or objective reality. It creates it based on what you have been interpreting or what you believe is happening in the situation. So you seeing that, in that particular state, your amygdala goes to worst possible case scenario, oh my god, he’s gonna die. This is what you always had been afraid of. Here he is, in this compromised position. What will you do without him, and then off to the races, right?

Dr. Alauna Curry

Your internal experience creates this anxiety that you speak of, okay, so that amygdala, those invisible undercurrents are present all the time, even when we’re asleep, which is why like you can wake up from a nightmare dream and feel so many things. Number two, reticular activating system, it’s your brains filter. It’s always filtering information. An example of it is if you decide that you like a car, all of a sudden, that car starts popping up all over the row, you’re like I supposed to have that car. And it’s your reticular activating system. And it hones in on traumas as well. So when you have painful experiences, now your brain is looking more for that thing to happen again, and emphasizing things that may indicate trauma is going to occur. The problem with that is that all of us are now walking around with an increased filter for negative traumatic and painful things, which is helping us to be addicted to recreating it over and over again.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  12:41

Feeding the amygdala the information to bolster that belief.

Dr. Alauna Curry

Number three, somatosensory cortex, is the part of your brain that registers pain, it does not distinguish between psychological, like non-physical pain, and physical pain. And I also want to point out that things don’t happen to your body that cause physical pain without causing psychological pain. So we can just throw all of this concept away, that having a medical issue is not traumatizing. I’ve been in the hospital before, I’ve had my body deteriorate on me, is traumatic, no matter what is traumatic for everybody involved. So there’s all this psychological pain happening that is completely undervalued that we’re desensitized to, because we live in such a violent and violating society.

Dr. Alauna Curry

Okay, number four, your brand reward system, Dr.Nzinga specialty, that double me is going off all the time. It’s not just caffeine, nicotine, cannabis, opioids, benzos, cocaine, it’s also salt, sex, grief, salaries, cars, smartphones, news, knowing things, trauma, you can be addicted to trauma, and being addicted to being right. Like that sets off dopamine, dopamine going off all the time. Okay, then number five, mirror neurons. We soak up information from the environment constantly. So the words that we use to define things, and the concepts and phrases that we use, we absolutely mirror those from our environment, and the people that we look up to, and the circles that we move in.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  14:31

And that brings us to number six, which I know is the biochemical matrix.

Dr. Alauna Curry 

Right. Like all of the chemicals that flood in our body, adrenaline, cortisol, oxytocin, testosterone, just we’re awash in chemicals that go off when we are experiencing things that are traumatic and we’re triggered and they expand and extend everything that we feel and think so all of us are semi delusional because We think with those primitive brain systems, which leads us to our last things, and this one right here is the one you need to know, behind your forehead, your prefrontal cortex, the most evolved part of your brain, you only use 10 to 15% of it at any given time, because the rest of your thinking is so loud. So I teach ways to be able to turn that mug on, turn it on.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

When we come back, Dr. Alauna is going to tell us how to face some trauma and turn that prefrontal cortex on.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison

Okay, okay, so pretend you’re about to lay me and Claire on your couch. You just taught us about the seven brain systems. And you’re going to teach us how to turn that muck of a prefrontal cortex on.

Dr. Alauna Curry

So I have an online Academy called the Trauma Recovery Academy. And you just learn about what’s going on in there. And I give you tools, for example, be done with trauma thinking, be descriptive, objective, non-judgmental, and effective.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  16:10

Is this an acronym, Dr. Alauna?

Dr. Alauna Curry 

It’s an acronym, you know, I love.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

You know, you needed to say that upfront.

Dr. Alauna Curry  16:20

Be done with trauma thing. Done with trauma thinking. descriptive, objective, non-judgmental, effective.

Dr. Alauna Curry 

Descriptive means use fact base words to talk about whatever it is that you’re talking about. It’s not oh my gosh, driving is completely unsafe. And I don’t ever want to do it again. Because it’s so terrible. It’s, I am having difficulty with doing this. Because I’m having a trauma response. I’m anxious about this experience, because I’ve seen how it can go very badly. It’s okay for me to be nervous about driving. Because I have seen this experience happen. I know that it can be difficult, but I have to learn how to balance myself. The non-judgmental part of it. We all draw conclusions; every brain makes judgments. So being able to say it’s not that I’m stupid, I’m not dumb, I’m not a failure. I’m having an unexpected response to something that was really painful, or something that was very sad to me.

Dr. Alauna Curry 

And then effective thinking, E, using your prefrontal cortex to help select the words you choose, the way that you drive your body drive your feet. And when you’re doing things, being able to recognize that it’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong or feeling right or wrong. It’s about what can I do the skillful like, do I need to meditate? Do I need to stop talking? And just think about what I’m going to say first, you know, like, what is driving, paying attention to the internal stuff, before I allow that to write what I’m going to do next. That’s how you evolve in your experience of anything. So I’ll stop there.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  18:13

You heard it here from Dr. Alauna. You can tell from this time we’re spin over her that she knows what she is talking about. We can use this to be done with trauma, like hard emphasis on that. Okay, go ahead, Claire.

Claire Jones 

No, that’s okay. What all I was gonna say is like, it’s not that bad things happen to you, because, bad things are gonna happen all the time that like, that’s what life is sometimes, but it’s what happens afterwards. And how you react to those things can turn it into trauma. And it sounds like a lot of what your education and work is about is reshaping the way that you can think about bad things to make it less traumatic, is that right?

Dr. Alauna Curry 

Absolutely. Absolutely. There are good things. And there are things that we consider or feel or experience as bad. But many of the things that we have that are traumatic, are stepping stones to better things. They’re learning processes. There are places where you if you integrate it in a healthy way into your story, you can tell it in a way that helps heal other people like sexual traumas. And you know when people are do the work to be able to talk about it. So many people go yes, that happened to me too. How did you heal? I healed by being able to talk about it.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

Yeah, I know. See? You see why I was like Dr. Alauna is coming on. I even put on some lipstick. So Dr. Alauna, empathy is your thing. And I have to tell the story of how I witnessed you walk the walk earlier this year. So you were on the local morning show, talking about confirmation bias. And the host says something like quote, oh, it’s sort of like conservative who give you the same talking points that they heard from wrestling ball that morning. In response to that, you went on to talk about mirror neurons and how our brain creates the world through our own perception. And then that perception is often reinforced by our environment and our community. And so Rush Limbaugh ended up hearing that soundbite and then went full on attack mode against you on his show. He called you all kinds of things. So then you wrote an open letter to him. And this is where walking the empathy walk came in, like so amazingly.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  20:34

You started out with, quote, I listened with empathy to your perspective. And then you went on to validate his reaction to your comments which he took to be an insult towards conservatives. And then you gave some education on mirror neurons using it as a way to draw home the idea that like we are 99.9%, the same, and ended with a message of unity and peace. And I was like, dang, empathy is my bag. But that is next level, like it was so healing her response to him after he attacked her. So I hope we can find it and link it in the show resources because your black girl clapback was in first place. And you had to engage your prefrontal cortex and be like, step back. And approached with empathy, right? Because they don’t have that concept that just like, it comes easily to some people, and they can just do it. And I’m not, I’m just not one of them.

Dr. Alauna Curry

And it’s on my Instagram page. So you can, it’s pretty easy to find. That situation is a great example of where I wrestled myself to use my own skills. I’m not only the president, I’m also the client. Ever these skills practice for traumatize humans curriculum, because it took everything in my soul, okay, everything in my soul. Not to say why that black girl clap back, you know that I have, we just wanted to say my amygdala wanted to talk for me. However, I had to make sure that I chose the evolve path. And that’s the reason that empathy is so important. Empathy can be so much deeper. And as a psychiatrist in trauma, specifically, that was a lot of work that I had to actually build, like deliberately building my empathy muscles.

Dr. Alauna Curry  22:29

And every time I listened to somebody long enough to understand what was going on in their mind, and the way that they were making that decision, and the life that had shaped them to get there with the knowledge about the brain systems. I was like, okay, it totally makes sense why you did it. I don’t agree with you, in terms of what your behavior was, but I 100% understand why you were thinking about it like that, at the time. So everybody’s doing what they calculate to be the right thing to do at any particular time. So empathy is really about when you can look at the world like that, first of all, that’s so much more consistent with seeing a shared reality. And you make different decisions when you see the world through a lens of empathy, it changes you, and it changed me.

Dr. Alauna Curry

And so I said, Okay, we can teach this. So that’s why I created empathy skills practice for traumatized humans, because we can teach ourselves how to activate the prefrontal cortex and look past the trauma bubble, and understand what’s happening in a very different way. But it’s learning to do that it actually has, you have to build the nerves, you have to build the neural pathway to be able to do it. So that’s it. So I said, I’ll do it, Lord.

Claire Jones

Can I ask one follow up question to that? Why is it especially difficult to access empathy if you have experienced trauma?

Dr. Alauna Curry  24:03

Because it’s painful, and there’s nothing that the brain and the body just dislikes more than pain. And so it is very deeply programming to pay attention to this internal experience and not that person over there. Like I said that they didn’t feel it land on you. But I felt yours land on me. So this is the experience that I emphasize. And that’s a I think it’s the nature of primitive species, that we have difficulty appreciating the world outside of our own view. And it takes practice, but it’s doable. So damn it, do it. That’s how I feel about it. We all got to do some psychological push-ups, I’m sick of living in this world like this. Like I’m tired of a traumatizing experience. And I think everybody’s kind of at the point where we’re like, is there anything we can do?

Dr. Nzinga Harrison

Dr. Alauna, thank you so much. Because I will go on record and say when I read that letter from you to Rush Limbaugh, my fantasy of you was that that was your first reaction, that you fired it off easily, with no effort at all that it was just automatic. So I love that, you know, your black girl clapback wasn’t in first place, and you had to engage your prefrontal cortex and be like, step back. Approach this with empathy, right? Because they don’t have that concept that just like, it comes easily to some people, and they can just do it. And I’m not, I’m just not one of them. So I didn’t work on it. I knew this was gonna be amazing. And it was

Claire Jones 

This interview blew my mind in like a lot of ways I feel like it reshaped the way I think about trauma, and also empathy. And so it seems like those seven parts play a role in protecting us. Like they filter things for us. Their role is to sort of like help us. But they also play a role in trauma because they distort things to help protect us. And so one way to like use those systems is to talk about the experiences that we have in fact-based ways like, even with your feelings, like I am feeling this way.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  26:35

Yeah, that’s exactly right. So what you’re teasing out is that part of the brain that she talked about the prefrontal cortex, which is like our factual thinking part of the brain, and then she talked to us about amygdala and the other parts, which are more emotional, what can happen is that amygdala has so much power that, like you said, it can distort our experiences that we’re having in real life today, to fit the belief system that we already have, based on our past experiences. And so you really want to train that prefrontal cortex, because it can be like, I had a woman told me the other day, she won’t get back in her car again, after a serious accident that she had, because that car is a deathtrap. Right? That car is a death trap is not a factual statement.

Claire Jones 

Right. But her saying, I feel like that car is a death trap is the fact.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

That’s right. That’s the fact. And even the next fact is, I’m afraid if I get in that car. I’ll have another accident like the other one.

Claire Jones 

Right. Okay, that makes a ton of sense. And so that’s sort of why she was like, separating those different parts of the brain. Because it’s like, if you work in your prefrontal cortex, you can work to distinguish the facts a little bit from the feelings. And that can help you move from a place of like, this was really traumatic to like, this was an experience I had, and this is how I feel about that experience. Well, then that makes sense for also why empathy comes into it, because then you can have empathy for yourself of like, why your brain is filtering things the way it is, like it makes sense as somebody who had a car accident, like you said, could feel that way.

Claire Jones  28:34

Like you can have empathy for yourself, like, Okay, I understand why I’m feeling this way. But it also makes sense. Like in her letter that she wrote back to Rush Limbaugh, she’s like, I understand why your amygdala would process what I said. And that sound by the way that it did, so I get it. Now, let me give you some facts about why if you use your prefrontal cortex, like you could look at this situation a little bit differently.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison

Yeah. That’s exactly right. And then you can also understand, like, looking at that Rush Limbaugh situation, what’s so beautiful about the empathy that she practiced there was I can understand how your life experiences and your set of beliefs based on those experiences led you to draw this conclusion about the intent of what I said. And then if you drove the conclusion that my intent was to insult you, then you understand why your reaction was to fight back and insult me. And so rather than taking that personally, because the empathy is like, I can’t understand how you got to that point. It’s like, oh, let’s talk in facts and let’s clarify what I actually said and what the true intent of that was, which is that we all have mirror neurons, we are more alike than we are different.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  30:04

Understanding the brain and the body and how trauma, like how there can the brain and the body are contributing to that experience of trauma then gives you the power to start moving forward from it. Because if we don’t actually deal with trauma, and like actually look at it and actually develop skills, like this is not something that you just naturally have. You have to learn about it, you have to develop skills about it. And then that gives you the power kind of to move through it so that it’s not affecting your everyday without you even knowing it. Cuz your brain can do that.

Claire Jones

That makes sense. And then empathy is just like a very essential part to have with yourself and other people.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

I think that’s really important. Like empathy is a skill that must be taught because we tend to think like, oh, that person’s an empathic person, and that person’s not.

Claire Jones 

Well, when she was explaining it, I was like, I know what empathy is. And then as she went through it, I was like, Okay. Very different than what I thought it was.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

Yeah, powerful stuff. Powerful stuff. And with that, I guess we’ll talk to y’all next week.

CREDITS

IN RECOVERY is a Lemonada Media Original. This show is produced by Claire Jones and edited by Ivan Kuraev. Jackie Danziger is our supervising producer. Our theme was composed by Dan Molad with additional music by Kuraev. Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer are our executive producers. Rate us, review us, and say nice things. Follow us at @LemonadaMedia across all social platforms, or find me on Twitter at @naharrisonmd. If you’ve learned from us, share the show with your others. Let’s help to stigmatize addiction together.