Exploring Trauma: Understanding Small and Big Moments, Therapeutic Approaches, and Healing through Art and Meditation

Ever wondered about the small and big moments that shape our lives, and how they contribute to our trauma, whether it be capital T or lowercase t? Buckle up for an enlightening journey as we navigate the intricate landscape of trauma, with an emphasis on the seemingly insignificant moments that can have monumental impacts on our perception of control and safety. Together, we'll challenge the notion that only life-altering events carry the weight of trauma, and dig into how the minutiae of everyday life can just as powerfully sculpt our mental state.

In this episode, we cover:

- How can we dislodge our brains when they become stuck in a trauma-induced state, you ask? 

- The transformative power of therapeutic approaches such as Internal Family Systems and EMDR therapy. 

-  How our understanding of trauma can inspire us to overhaul our thoughts and actions, sparking deep-seated change.

- The healing power of art and meditation, and reflective practices that serve as lifelines to our past selves and assist in processing those traumatic experiences. 
 
Throughout this episode, we will draw on the theory that all events, past and present, are unfolding all at once, and learn to anchor ourselves in the now. So, tune in and let’s start the journey of understanding the lesser-known aspects of trauma and the incredible power of healing.

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TRANSCRIPT:

(Host) Jenn Hulley:

Mind, body, spirit. This is Soul Therapy and I'm your host, Jenn Hulley. This week I hope to talk about a lot of things but to be honest, I don't have a plan. I want to touch on trauma capital T and little T trauma, the idea of whether we should or shouldn't sweat the small stuff and how the little moments of our lives have these massive ripple effects and what we can do to harness that power. All right, so let's dive in, and yes, I have no plan. I have no plan. Previously, my podcast, I would always have a plan. I'd have a script, I'd have research notes, resources, blah, blah, blah. I don't do that with this podcast and I feel like it flows a little bit better and actually sounds like my voice, which is A amazing and B easier. But I usually have on my mirrors. I've got these mirrored closets in my office to my left of my computer. I'm looking at them right now and I have a web of different podcast topics and little subtopics with each topic, and I was going to talk today about intuitive development and I just don't feel it. That's not where my intuition is taking me. My intuition is taking me a different place and I don't really know where we're going. But I really want to talk about this idea of don't sweat the small stuff or more like yes, actually we should sweat the small stuff, and why we do sweat the small stuff. Because I don't know if you remember that saying I think it was like from the 90s or early 2000s. Was it a book, I don't know. I can just see it like don't sweat the small stuff, it's only the big things that matter, and that's true, but also not true. And I think when we just sort of blindly accept that kind of statement as truth, we fuck with our heads. We fuck with our heads and we do ourselves a disservice and like, if we're looking at, let's look at trauma, let's start there.

There's capital T trauma the big stuff and then lowercase T trauma the smaller stuff, and these are things that happen in our life that impact our sense of control and our sense of stability and they basically work and impact the wiring of our brain and what we believe to be safe and true. And this whole like don't sweat the small stuff saying basically means like only worry about the big shit that happens in your life, like when somebody dies or you lose your job or a flood happens and it's like, don't worry about the fact that you maybe had like a shitty person who was rude to you at the grocery store or don't worry about like the kid who stole your ball when you were in kindergarten and told you were stupid, right? But I think that's not true at all and in fact, I know it's not true at all. Trauma is trauma. Trauma is a really like a buzzword right now. It's like super trendy, everyone's talking about trauma and I think it's good. I think we need to talk about trauma. Like I was born in 1982, full disclosure and like to me, when I first heard the word trauma, I thought of like people coming back from war. You always see that on TV, right, the flashbacks of war, and they're in battle and they disassociate so badly they don't know where they are and they think they're reliving it and their body is stuck in this moment. That's in the past. And it caused us, like me and others, to downplay this idea of like the small things that actually are super traumatic and have the same impact on your brain. And so, like, what is trauma?

Trauma is really just anything that happens in your life that creates a sense of like not being in control, right, you're not in control of what is happening to you, you're not in control of what is happening around you and you feel like unsteady because of that. So that's like the lowercase T trauma. You can have trauma from your childhood, literally about something like a kid taking your toy over and over again, right. Or you can have trauma from your childhood of like the smallest things that seem not important or significant, but because you were little and dependent on your parents and you didn't have a lot of control, your brain might have like encoded it into your brain as a traumatic experience and so sweat the small stuff, right. Like sweat the small stuff. I don't think most of us go through capital T trauma experiences in our life. I think, well, maybe we do. We all go through death, right, we all experience death. But like we'll go capital T underscore bold trauma like war. We don't all experience war, like you know, some people do, some people don't, but like it's not a widespread experience right now, thankfully. Or you know, we don't all experience having someone die in our life in a traumatic way or an unexpected or violent way. I should say right. But there are these micro traumas and little traumas and just day to day traumas that we all do experience. I think it's part of being human is to experience trauma. Right, that's just part of life.

We go through things because if we were in control and felt totally in control of our life forever, everything would be a fucking breeze, everything would be easy. And it's not right, it's not. We're here on earth to learn and love and grow and shape and shift and change, and a lot of that comes from, basically like getting on a roller coaster and being like all right, I'm not in the driver's seat, right, so it's just by default design of being a human that you're gonna experience trauma. And what happens? We say that like trauma lowercase t trauma is when your brain feels like it's not in control of a situation. There's a theory that says that like part of your brain gets stuck there or part of your memory gets stuck in the space and the state that you were when that happened. So if you were, maybe you moved when you were seven, right, and you didn't know you were moving, and your parents sort of sprung it on you after they bought the house and they're like, okay, we're going here and your whole life was up and and you're like roots were ripped out and you're moved to a new house and now you're like 37 years old, but there's part of your brain that is stuck in this seven year old state and thinks that you're still seven, like they think that you're still there. So when you're 37 and doing things that might require drastic change or like dismantling, or like leveling something, uprooting something and completely changing your life, there's this part of your brain that's like holy fuck, what are you doing? Cause it thinks that you're seven. It doesn't realize that in those 30 years you've grown up, you've gone to school, you have authority and agency over your life, you can weigh the pros and cons of what's happening, you have strategies to support you if you become overwhelmed emotionally, and the work that needs to be done here is to catch yourself up, to move that part of your brain into the current space.

There's a psychological approach called IFS, which is internal family systems, and it looks at like how your brain is different parts, there's different parts of you, there's like, and there's different names for them and things, but they represent different aspects of your personality or different timelines in your life and when you combine that with trauma work, a lot of the work is like meeting that younger version of yourself to catch them up and to like be sitting in a space with them to say like, okay, we're here, now I'm gonna put my hand out and I'm gonna guide you and I'm gonna move you along. I have experience going through this in my own life doing EMDR therapy. There's different ways that EMDR therapy is put in place and I reached out for EMDR therapy in the last year because of some like capital T trauma stuff that had happened earlier in my life and recently. And a lot of the work was through like visualization, meditation, bilateral stimulation to put your brain and body into these states, basically to hack your brain waves, to get yourself to be able to connect with that part of yourself and to feel what wasn't felt, to say what wasn't said and to move on. And I think like EMDR therapy has been so beneficial and I always recommend it to anybody who's dealing with something.

But I feel like there are elements of it that we can bring into our day to day to sort of see how maybe we're stuck or we're standing in the way of moving forward, how maybe we're like sweating the small things and we're not like we're self sabotaging because of this, and there's lots of different ways to do it, like some people recommend and I've done journaling, like writing letters to your formal self, like looking at a photo of yourself and writing a letter and just sort of saying like, hey, it's me 30, 40 years down the line, 20 years, even two years down the line. Here's what's happened and here's where we are All right. But I think the starting point for all of this is to be aware of when it's happening, and I wish I could remember this saying, because it's so catchy and it rhymes and I'm gonna completely fuck it up because I can't remember but it basically says like when your reaction to something is like over dramatic or like just really like disproportionate to what's going on, it means that it's a wounding, a trauma, something from your past that's actually reacting.

See, it doesn't sound pretty because I can't remember the words, but if I find it I'll share it. I swear I saved it on Instagram. Anyways, not important. We talked about self-awareness last week, right, and we talked about fuck, I just looked at my mirror to be like what did we talk about? I wiped it off, I can't remember. We talked about cultivating awareness of our thoughts and our emotions and I think, as we build on, that if you put those practices into place and you practice getting in touch with yourself and being aware of your internal experience and your fears and how things are playing out in your life, you can start to better identify what instances in your life or what things in your childhood or even like your recent experience, remind you of this. So when something's going on and it doesn't even have to be that you're triggered you could just look at something that's upsetting you or something where you're dissatisfied with I don't know. Maybe you wanna start painting and sharing your paintings and you're not doing it. And there's this process of needing to go back and be like well, what am I actually feeling around this? When I think about painting and sharing my painting? What's stopping me? Is it excuses like I don't have any money, you're wasting money buying supplies or is it like everyone thinks your art's gonna be stupid? What sort of emotions and narratives are surrounding that? And you can get to that point through meditation. You can get to that point through journaling. You can get to it through having conversations with yourself and engaging in those reflective practices that we talked about last week. But when you start to get an idea of what's going on. What are the thoughts and feelings and memories that are kind of attached to what's happening.

Now you can look back on your life and be like, okay, when do I remember feeling like this? And, even if it doesn't seem related, if you realize you're coming up against fear of somebody laughing at you, just think what are all the times that somebody actually did laugh at me? What's the earliest time that I remember somebody laughing at me? When did somebody laugh at me when I was engaged in something similar to it? You gotta do a lot of detective work, right, to sort of figure out what's going on and then work with yourself to decide how can I extend that olive branch, how can I reach a hand back to that version of me that's right there that needs me to gently guide her along and pull her into the present. And, like I said, you can journal, you can write, you can meditate. One of the things that I do is I sit with that version of me If I'm activated by something or I realize I'm like afraid to do something because it's reminding me of a certain person. Let's talk about transference, okay, in psychology, like when somebody reminds you of somebody in your past and you transfer the emotions and the energy and the traumas around that experience to this new person. Like that can come up and you just you have to sort of sit with it. So when I realize I'm sitting in this space of like, transference and transferring trauma, memories or emotions or feelings to this new scenario or person, I go in to sit with that version of myself and I get into a meditative state. Right, which people are like. What's a meditative state Doesn't mean you do like I'm not like astral traveling or like in the void and like seeing shit. I mean I calm the fuck down and I slow my breathing down and I slow my thoughts down and I empty my head and my. You know the easiest way to do that is to just be tapping.

You know I do butterfly taps I showed a TikTok this week about that where you link your thumbs and you place your hands on your chest and you just alternate your tapping on your chest and I do that while breathing in for four, holding for seven and out for eight until I feel myself sort of settle where I'm like okay, and then I bring up that version of me. So if there's transference or something happening where I'm like I'm reacting to this person like they're my boss from six years ago, because there's something about them that reminds me of them. And maybe it's just because there's somebody who's got a bit of authority over you, or someone that you perceive has authority, and it may have nothing to do with it, but you know that you're bringing some baggage along. I sit with myself, eyes closed, breathing, tapping, and I'm like what do you want to tell me? And you just listen. You ask, like why are you here? What do you want me to know? How are you feeling? And you see what comes up. And you might sit in silence and maybe nothing comes, and that's okay. You know, we get into these things and we think like an answer must come. I must be like why are you here? I'm here because I need help. I want you to make me feel powerful. It's not gonna play out like that. Sometimes it might just sit there, but the more you can visualize sitting with yourself. Where are you? What are they wearing? What are you wearing? How do they look? Do you hear anything? Do you see anything? Are there any smells around you? What's coming up? And maybe you'll get one word. Maybe you won't get anything from them and you just imagine yourself being like, hey, you know what, like, let's just talk about where we are, and like if you were writing a letter to an old friend back in the day with pen pals. Be like you know what. In the last two you know six years or so, you left that job, you went back to school. Now you're doing this and you're working with these people and this is how you're feeling and you see what they say, you see how they shift, you see how they feel, and it might not be that you're seeing anything of them actually changing, but you might feel a subtle change in your body and you just go with it. And it's one of these meditation strategies where you have to let go of expectation and just sort of see what happens.

But the whole process and purpose of this is to connect with that younger version of yourself, even if it's like a week ago, seven years ago, 20 years ago. To connect with that version of yourself that still exists in your brain and in the grand scheme of the universe. It still exists because everything is happening all the same time. There's like time is not a thing. That's another episode, but we have to really understand that everything that has happened to us is still happening. At the same time, whether you believe in that from an existential perspective of the universe or whether you believe in that from psychological implications, it's still there and you just have to support yourself to bring yourself back into where we are now. Okay, you know what this is impacting me. Here we are now. How can I help you? How can I support you? I've lost my train of thought, so we're just gonna keep going. I don't remember what I was talking about. This is what happens. Is I just sort of like dump stuff out of my mouth and I don't have a plan, but we're going with it. Journaling some people like to write letters to themselves, some people like to burn them. It's very ceremonial being like, especially if you're like, let's release this, you don't need that person anymore, that person's out of your life, they can't hurt you and then you tear it up and you burn the shit out of it and you put it in the earth. It can be very ceremonial and therapeutic to do something like that. If you don't wanna write and you don't wanna sit in meditation, you can journal it out through art. You can just sit and paint or use markers and just put yourself back in that state Again. Put on some meditative music I love stuff by Hemisync or by Noral Beats. You listen to that and just see what comes up. A lot of our past memories get rooted so deep into our subconscious brain because it's from the past and our brain is like this is important, let's file this away so this never fucking happens again. And it goes so far down into our subconscious that we're not consciously aware of how it's impacting us. And this is where, like, if journaling is hard because you're like I don't even know where to start, and like meditating is hard because you don't know where to start, working with art and color is so, so helpful because it's abstract and it's symbolic and you don't need to know what you're doing.

You literally can go get a sketchbook I have like 15 of them from the dollar store Get shitty cheap watercolors, paint, collage materials, buy a ton of crap and sit down and get yourself into that state, put on some music, zone out and just think about that original experience. Think about the kid on the playground who was playing with their friends and then someone jumped on there, skip it and broke it and they all laughed from ran away. That's a personal story. It was like a toy that I was like so proud of and we had like saved up and I got it and I was so proud to take it to school because I was like, look, I've got this cool thing that everybody wanted, and this older girl took it from me, ran away with it, used it with her friends and broke it and then gave it to me and left it there and I was like standing by myself with like a broken toy. So like that's something that is still like I can remember it. But If your memory of the event is like looser and not as detailed, that's fine. But sit with that and be like what colors? What colors are coming to mind? What do I feel like? Is it red, is it? You might just even start moving your pen, drawing circles or lines Like what do the lines look like? Are they scratchy? Are they loopy? Are they rectangles? And it's hard to give a directive of how to do this because it will unfold as you do it. So I don't want to say like get your markers and draw a square and then do colors and fill it out what I want you to do is have a range of art materials in front of you paint, marker, stickers, charcoal, pencil, crayon, like all different things, magazines and think about that experience and then ask your body what comes up and just start putting stuff down and you'll be like I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Why am I drawing a hat? It doesn't matter, right? We don't need to know. We're just connecting with and having a conversation with a part of our brain that doesn't use language to speak.

So it's really, really important. And so you know, when I say don't sweat the small stuff, I think that's bullshit. Like, sweat the small stuff, but sweat it out. Sweat it out and get it out of your system. Right, make room for other stuff and don't be rate yourself if you're like why can't I move on from this? Why is this happening? Blah, blah, blah. Right, it's because probably something so small happened to you that programmed your brain and taught you to be a certain way or not be a certain way, so that you're safe and loved and protected. And our brain, our egoic mind, it is there to keep us alive and it does a really good job of being like never do that again and it controls what we do and think and how we act and how we be. So absolutely sweat the small stuff, because we are made up of infinite amounts of small stuff. Don't gaslight yourself into saying like, oh, my parents never got divorced, I didn't go through war, my house didn't burn down, like I didn't really have a traumatic experience. Hold space for yourself with kindness and love and understand that there are an infant amount of times in your life where you felt out of control and scared and your brain and your body reacted in a way to keep you safe and to protect you and that maybe, maybe, just maybe, there's part of you that's stuck in that spot that needs to be nurtured and supported and have a hand, reach out, to be like let's go, let's come along.

And I want to share a story with you about what I witnessed this week at Old Navy that I feel sort of illustrates this. It was one of those moments. I'll just say like I believe that when we die, we have a life review. I believe we sit down and we see the impacts of our words and actions from other people's perspectives, and I was witnessing this man's behavior with the clerk at the desk. My thought was like I was like that guy's life review is going to be really interesting because I was. It was such an angry, hate filled vile is the only word I can describe of it Vile and violent display of behavior and it was just spewing it out. It was really uncomfortable to like watch. I just wanted to like jump in and be like shut the fuck up, but I couldn't. So it's like this is part of his process and this is part of this woman's process. But I watched her face and it's like you could see her eyes, almost like a barrier, go up. I feel like the eyes are the windows of the soul and the subconscious and you can see how people feel but and what they're experiencing, based on what their eyes look like. And her eyes completely shifted and it was like she was sort of shutting down, disconnecting, maybe disassociating, to not be impacted by what he was saying and doing. But eventually he stormed out of the space and I was just like it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, honestly. And when he left her face just fell like she didn't start crying, but I literally watched the light drop out of her eyes and her face and like it looked like she had energetically collapsed and I was like her whole energy, her whole aura, her whole being had completely shifted because of this, maybe like three-minute interaction with him, this man that had come into the store, and I stood there and I watched her and she worked with other people and I was like your face is completely different and it's those little things that have this impact negative and positive on Like that woman. She's going to take it through her day. You know what I mean. How is it gonna impact? How she shows up, how she treats her dog, how she talks to the person at the gas station, whatever right. It's this ripple effect. And as I was leaving, I was like I don't know, I just felt compelled. I don't normally get my nose in people's business, but I walked up to her and I was like, as I was walking out, and I just said that guy was a dick. I don't know how you did it, but you did a really good job of like meeting him with kindness and grace when he was being completely violent and disrespectful to you, and it was like the light went on in her eyes all of a sudden. It was like and I saw her come back online and she smiled, but it was like a, a pained smile and like like a tired smile, but it was like something had just come back, like a little bit of her spirit had come back, and I Just said you know what, I hope you have a good day.

And I walked out and that small, small moment with the man and then with me, I believe, really demonstrates visibly even how impactful tiny, tiny interactions are, how we feel, how we feel in the moment, how we feel going forward the next day, and I think, yes, sweat the small stuff. Sweat the small stuff that has happened to you. Don't sweat on it. Sweat it and like obsess about it and be like, oh, my life can't ever change, but like get it out. But also be really mindful of how our little, all the little micro things that happen in our day impact other people. Right, it was just. It was one of those things where I watched. I was like there's so many life lessons in the lineup of an old Navy, of course, like right, teachable moments. Teachers and students are Everywhere.

That is all I have for you this week just a little chat about the small stuff and the impact that it has on our lives past, present, future to be mindful, of course, of how we interact with others, but to also be mindful of how we interact with ourself and how we support ourself, and I would like to thank you for tuning into this podcast. If you find it helpful or enjoyable, please share social, send it to people, and if you're enjoying what we're talking about and you would love to reach out To work on these things, I am opening the doors to work with people in terms of doing what I'm calling soul therapy sessions, and it's not a big program, it's not like it's a six week coaching program. It's just me opening the doors to being like, if you're someone where this stuff is resonating with you and you'd love to work together to develop your intuition, to nurture a relationship with yourself, to put in strategies to help and heal your mind, your body and spirit so that you can get online and living in a way that feels really good, I would love for you to reach out. Send me an email and I will send you some details as to what that looks like at this point in my journey. Like I said, it's not a big coaching program, it's not a self-guided thing. So there's no application, there's no, none of that sales shit. It's just I would like to open the door, to have these conversations with people that feel aligned with it and compelled to connect. And yes, you can get my details in the show notes. It's contact at Jennifer Hully. Thank you so much for your support for tuning in. And last thing, don't forget to subscribe Right, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Next week I'm recording a conversation with a very good friend of mine and we're going to talk about embodiment and moving from a masculine type of energy source into a feminine source. It's going to be all sorts of good stuff. So I hope to have that episode ready for you next week. If not, it'll be in two weeks. I'm just rambling now. All right Time to cut it off. I'll see you next week. Bye