Transcription
"Foreign" comes on a Greek word for wound. So trauma is a constriction, it's a narrowing, it's a diminishment of your emotional functioning, your psychic, psychological functioning. So what I'm saying about trauma is that trauma is not what happens to you, promise, what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.
How many of you had the experience that you have a strong gut feeling about something and you ignored it and you're sorry afterwards? Sorry that you ignored it. Just raise your hand. You've had that experience. Okay, most people here. Now, that's what I mean. That's the first sign of trauma, or the first impact of trauma, is a separation from yourself. Because you've got feelings are the strongest guide or what you need in the world. They're essential. How long would you survive out there in nature if you ignore your gut feelings? You wouldn't. You'd be dead. That's how important gut feelings are.
What makes us disconnect from our gut feeling so that they're actually even telling you and you ignore it? Well, you've been disconnected from yourself. That's the first impact of trauma. It's a disconnection from the self.
The second impact of trauma is you disconnect from other people. No, you just don't trust others. You just don't trust others, and you feel very much isolated and on your own. So addiction is a very lonely kind of thing. Even if you use addiction to connect with other people, you're using it because you feel isolated. So there's a disconnection from other people, a mistrust, and isolation. That's the second impact of trauma.
The third impact of trauma is your view of the world. So how do you see the world? What kind of world do you live in? So whatever I, how I see the world, that's the world I live in. So if I see the world as hostile and dangerous and untrustworthy, I'm in a very different life. And if I see the world as basically a good place with suffering and there's joy, it's complex, but fundamentally I belong here. I live in a very different world if I believe that and if I'm convinced that it's a hostile, dangerous world. So trauma distorts your view of the world in a negative way.
Number four, trauma gives you pain. It gives you a wound that you might, there might be some scar tissue over it, but the wound is never healed, actually. So there's pain there, and then that's pain that you need to escape from. So it imposes a lifelong pain. And I say lifelong, I mean until you deal with it. That's the fourth impact of trauma.
The fifth impact of trauma is actually on brain development. A trauma actually affects our brains develop. Children have no self-regulation. So if you're stressed as an adult, if you're mature enough, you can regulate yourself. You can take a few breaths, you can calm yourself down, you can say, "Okay, slow down. Let me think about this. Let me deal with this." An infant can't do that. An infant's got no self-regulation whatsoever. So the infant's brain requires the mature function of the adult's brain to regulate itself. But what if the adult's brain is not functioning maturely because that adult themselves never got the right conditions for the healthy development? Now you have an immature adult's brain regulating, or trying to regulate, an immature infant's brain. The self-regulation never develops.
Number six is that trauma gives you a shame-based view of yourself. So you become actually ashamed of who you are, not just of what you do, but of who and what you are as a person. So trauma gives you a shame-derived sense of yourself. That's number six.
And the seventh impact of trauma is it makes it difficult for you to be in the present moment. It keeps you stuck in the past. So you react to the present, or you're thinking you're reacting to the present, but actually you're reacting to the past. And that's an important one because it affects everybody. You may think you're here because somebody in the family's got a problem and you're here to help them, but I'll be telling you throughout the day is that actually each one of us is here for ourselves.
[Music]
There's tremendous healing possible.
[Music]
Does anybody ever really old? Yes, they can be.
[Music]
[Music]
Foreign.
[Music]