Thanks for listening to Take Out Therapy, a podcast for people who are trying to be their best selves, but maybe need a little more information about it all. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a therapist and anxiety specialist, doling out the information, latest research, and of course, a little advice here and there. If you've got less than 20 minutes and a good sense of humor, you will find this discussion helpful.
This isn't therapy, it's self-help at its finest. Let's get to work. Hello, my friends.
Thank you so much for listening today. You know, if there's one thing that I see a ton of just lately with people in the therapy office and also kind of online, is that we just don't really understand each other. It causes so many problems.
It causes us problems in our relationship. It causes a bunch of drama all the time because we take things personally, I think sometimes, and we make a lot of assumptions. So today's podcast episode is designed to help you with all of this.
And basically what I'm going to talk to you today is teaching you about what it means to be trauma-informed in relationships, at work, with your friends, with your kids, whatever, so that you can understand other people a little bit better and have closer relationships and maybe less drama. And definitely you can stop taking things quite so personally because trauma-informed is basically the idea that we kind of understand that we've all been through really hard things and we can understand each other better because people behave in certain ways based on what they've been through. And so when we get to the root of it, basically being trauma-informed means that there's room for other people's experiences and their perspectives and their past in our lives, basically.
You know, it used to be that we didn't talk about what happened. You guys know anybody like that? Maybe you're one of these people still. But you know, our history in many countries has gone through a period of absolute devastation.
I would argue to say that what we've just been through is devastation. But what we used to do as the human race is like just not talk about it, right? Like, yeah, that happened and our family never talked about it. And what happens when we do this is that we forget that something happened that's so awful.
And we don't forget the thing, but we forget the impact of going through hard things. So let's talk about this today because I think it's important to understand that sometimes there's room to consider trauma in every room, in every situation, okay? And so I think what I really want you to understand is when I'm saying the word trauma, which is kind of triggering to some people, and if it is to you, stick with me for just a minute because what I'm talking about is any situations, it's like lowercase trauma or capitalized trauma are two different things. But really what they encompass is a situation in which the person who's going through the situation perceives danger, life-threatening or otherwise, okay? So perceives themselves to be in a lot of danger, okay? And so I know that definition of trauma is quite broad, but we know a lot about what's hard in life and, okay, well, I'll use this as an example.
Like lots of us have been through divorce in our families. Did you know that divorce is trauma? Yeah. And no lives were threatened in most cases, right? But it's so hard as a child to go through divorce.
So what I'm pointing at today is like we have to allow within our perspective other people's experiences and our own of trauma, whether it's lowercase trauma or capitalized trauma, it doesn't matter. Can we make room for understanding that people have a past? My friends, hard things happen and those things have impact. They have a lot of impact.
They have impact on people's ability to be in relationships, their ability to parent very well, their ability to listen, their ability to rise to conflict. We all have things that have happened to us in life that have caused us to behave in one way or another, right? And so can we make room for that? And what I mean is like, can we just start to use our critical minds to really think about and be curious about the people in our lives and why they act the way we act? Because I think that people take other people's behavior really personally. And I did a whole episode on that.
And, and I think I mentioned the same thing and that's basically like most of the time it's not about you, right? And it doesn't matter like, well, somebody is treating me really unkindly. Yes. And most of the time it's not about you.
It's about their ability to be in relationships based on things that they might've been through. It's about maybe something that got said that was triggering because of something that they've been through. See what I'm doing there? I'm kind of like using this lens of understanding that everybody goes through hard things and those hard things have an impact on us and to make room in that, for that within our interactions with each other.
We have to just stop and recognize the impact of trauma. Okay. And I just, I want to talk about this just for a second.
And what I'll say is that they've, they've done a lot of studying of things we call adverse childhood experiences. And basically what we figured out is that the more hard things that happen to us as kids, the more likely we are to develop certain diseases and certain mental health diagnoses, the more likely we are to struggle in school and like tons of other factors. Hang on a second.
If you've already come to the conclusion that trauma might be causing your anxiety, that could absolutely be the case as it could be with many other mental health struggles as well. Here's the deal. We all have a past, like it or not.
If you're one of the many people who can pretty well function in life, but underneath is an anxious mess, I might be able to help you. I'd like to invite you to a self-help solution. Will you join me in Back to Calm? This is my three week online course on how to get back to a peaceful place in life without the anxiety.
Find out how this program could be a game changer for you too at RebeccaHunterMSW.com. So the things that we go through matter and there's an impact to them. And sometimes those impacts are very nuanced, right? They just wiggle their way into your life where you're like, no, I, everybody in my house has to keep a very, very clean kitchen to the point where sometimes like maybe I'm driving everybody bananas without really seeing like, oh right. This is from something that I've been through.
Maybe cleaning the kitchen to an extreme isn't a great example, but some of you will be able to relate, right? All part of one thing or another is the point. So realizing the impact of trauma on ourselves, like what you went through matters and I could do a whole episode on trauma comparison, but I won't my friend. What I will say is don't compare what was hard in your life to what was hard in somebody else's.
Could you not do that? Because what it does is it diminishes your experience and elevates somebody else's experience of trauma, which is like, no, don't try not to do that. I'm, yeah, and it's so, it's such an interesting thing that we do because it's part of comparison culture. So, hey, I do it.
No harm, no foul. Just notice that we do that your, what you went through matters. So take the time to realize the impact of that, recognize and learn about the signs and symptoms of what you've got going on and how they might possibly relate to trauma, right? That's being trauma informed.
Recognize that your coworker acting like an absolute lunatic this week probably has something to do with something going on in her life and that something's hard for her. Not necessarily, right? Taking it personally or allowing it to affect the culture at work or allowing it to diminish that relationship. So our response needs to be appropriate.
And that's kind of what I want to really drill down into a little bit. It's like how we respond to other people's trauma and, and really my friends to our own, it matters because one thing is like when other people are behaving badly based on their own stuff, right? And we can just call it stuff. I mean, it makes it so much easier because we all have stuff, right? We don't have to take that personally.
Everybody's got their own life, right? But understanding things from a trauma lens of like, not everybody has everything all worked out. Okay. Like myself included, just to let you know.
So like we all have stuff, you know what I'm saying? And if that can help us kind of understand each other and you guys, we can even be curious, right? We can be curious with people like, Hey, like what's going on for you? Because if they know, they'll tell you, and if they don't know, then they'll tell you it's about you. And that's okay too, right? Because we can make room for other people to have their own experience without having to kind of get drawn into it in that way. And when we have a trauma informed lens, there's way less drama.
I'm just going to tell you there's, there's way less drama. There's way less of a need for us to like disconnect from somebody because their behavior is bad and way more of a need for us to get a little bit more curious or also like illuminate if we're in an accountability partnership with people, which, you know, if you've been listening to me for any length of time, you know, I do think marriage is an accountability partnership, but you know, maybe we can say to somebody, Hey, like what you have going on is, is something that you need to deal with and I'm not the solution to it, right? It's an opportunity for us to go like, okay, this, you know, maybe I'm not being treated like I'd like to be treated here. And then to be able to say, and that's not about me.
That's about someone else's trauma, right? And I can look to myself, maybe, right? We can always look to ourselves and I encourage you to look to your own life experience. Start your sentences when you're talking to yourself with I, my friend, remember what you've been through and how it impacts your ability every single day to be in good relationships, be a good parent, keep all the balls in the air, right? Manager, manager, mental health, by the way, and know all the things. No, that's not a thing.
So if you can be more trauma informed, then you'll start asking yourself like, what's, what's going on for me right now? And be able to, to start to discern what is going on based on the impact of what you've been through. And that's valid just so you know, but it's also a nice place of insight and a place like where you can do some work from, right? But if you're not kind of looking into things in a way that's kind of trauma informed, then it would be easy to say like, you know, I always pick men like this or nobody cares about me or right. Just to say like, I'm not good at conflict rather than say conflict wasn't safe in my house when I was growing up, but I can learn right.
And those two statements are so different, my friend. And I want the second one for you. And I want you to understand trauma a little bit more and how to be a little trauma informed so that you can work with what's happened in your own life, in your friends' lives, right? If you understand kind of what your friends have been through, if you have deeper relationships with people where you talk about the past and what matters and who a person really is, you start to learn things about people and that will help you understand them better is the point, right? So when we ignore what's happened, we can't really understand it because we don't talk about it, right? So if you're trauma informed with everyone, like in your workplace and, you know, with yourself mostly and with your partner and your relationship, like one of the things that I see is really hard for people is understanding their partner and why they don't have the same perspective about things, which is, you know, part of the relationship puzzle.
I'm laughing because it's so true. But yeah, and like being more trauma informed can help us ask more questions about how somebody is doing in life or how they want to have situations handled that feel really triggering for them because of their past. Or, you know, we can start to get really creative and open within our relationships, both at home and at work or wherever you are with friends.
When we stop ignoring trauma and start working with it, right? There's nothing like if we're still carrying around shame from the things that we went through as kids and we do, we all do my friend, but like maybe we could let some of that go and just get to know ourselves and, and give ourselves some grace for what we've been through. Work with it, understanding ourselves and others. It's connection.
You know how I care about connection. That's why I'm doing this podcast. So thank you so much for spending some time with me today.
I hope this podcast helps you understand the phrase trauma informed and I'm just like blowing it out and just saying, you know, trauma informed is a phrase that we use in the therapy field, in the medical and mental health fields where we need, like we're encouraged to be trauma informed. I'm kind of like, uh, yeah, duh. And I'm kind of going, why aren't we all encouraged to be trauma informed? So that's what I'm trying to help you with today.
Um, let me know what you thought of the episode and thanks for hanging out with me. Have a good day. Okay.
I hope you found today's episode helpful. Here's the deal. I'd like to get rid of some of the stigma around mental health and this is how I'm doing it.
You can join me by leaving a review, sending an episode along to a struggling friend, or even subscribing. Any of those choices would be so exciting, my friend, because then you and I, we would be helping more people. Let's do that.
If you want to work with me, visit me at RebeccaHunterMSW.com and you can see all the fun things I'm up to. Don't forget, I'm an anxiety specialist, so if that's your jam, it's my jam too. Way to show up today.
