I'm 75 years old, was married and divorced 3 times, and am currently enjoying my first "secure" attachment. Looking back on previous relationships, and working on fully accepting the trauma of childhood with a narcissistic mother and an immature and distant father, 2 older brothers and a younger sister, I reorganize my inner story daily, and appreciate the contributions of helpers like Heidi Priebe. I feel like understanding trauma is the basis of any progress I have made. As Bessel Van Der Kolk says, The Body Keeps the Score. Beginning at about age 17, I have looked to therapists for help. Sometimes, just the process of talking with someone has helped. But I must admit I have seldom found much counseling I could build on. Most therapists didn't even know the vocabulary of trauma, much less the steps necessary to deal with it. Your podcasts are the first I have happened on that deal with attachment - which in my case, is the next step after accepting trauma. Thanks for sharing - keep up the good work!
Working on your pain from 17 to 75…You must be so resilient to be able to persevere and work to improve your life and wellbeing for so long. I’m happy for you that you can enjoy your healing and connection now.
I think it is never over. Life keeps offering triggers of the past. You need resilience - and the courage to deal with each new discovery as if it were happening today. Gradually you build up an understanding of the real you. Only then can you choose whether or not it's time to face and fight, or turn away and forget. @@ellotheregovna401
…” you haven’t learned enough information about how to prevent that event in the future because you aren’t really sure what led to it in the past.” Yes. I felt a huge release hearing that sentence. Thank you.
What is also hard about betrayal is that you are suddenly alone. No one can really understand the pain and why you are grieving. People who haven't experienced the utter work that it takes to get back to normal judge you way too harshly. So there is a sense of total isolation and rejection from so many fronts. On top of that you need to behave as if life is normal. Make lunch boxes for kids so that you do not mess them up too. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone. Thank you for highlighting this Heidi.
"If you don't have enough information about what lead up to a traumatic event [and feel safe from it recurring], you will become hypervigilant to anything that your mind could possibly think of that might cause it again in the future." Wow. That's the FA strategy in a nutshell. Also pretty much the theme song of family scapegoats everywhere.
Very interesting. For my entire 31 years, I've never been able to grasp terms such as "Moved on" "Letting go" "Healed from" "Worked through"... I've always just gone through life collecting more and more trauma and then crumbling, dissociating, going through depression and hating myself, then finding a new partner who's similar to the previous one, to go through the same shit again. This video helped me get a much better understanding of what working through things really means. Thank you, Heidi.
This comment hit me like a ton of bricks because I could have written it verbatim a few years ago. The terms ‘healing,’ ‘moving on’ etc. always felt vague and inaccessible to me too. I am so truly happy to hear this video helped you gain more context for what that process might look like for you.
Aww that’s so sad!! There is so much freedom through Jesus! Please reach out to me, I would be so happy to pray for you!! I will be praying for you. I know so many people who have gotten healing from past trauma, you are not alone and this is not impossible. You are amazing and so loved
@@heidipriebe1 could you please tell me the titles of the books you've read on the particular emotional+physical depravation thing? i rewatched to no avail on that regard. awesome video tho
I laughed SO HARD when you said "that's just Larry the guy that robs people at the end of this street". I immediately imagined Larry as a green furry sesame street character. Lol. Seriously though. This video is awesome. Thank you so much for your incredible insight!
Peter A. Levine rethinks trauma by looking to the body's memory of the event, not the mind's interpretation of the story. His work (Somatic Experiencing) has helped me a lot. I couldn't overcome cognitive dissonance before, which kept me stuck in trauma bonding and in retraumatizing patterns.
Very interesting. I worked on focusing on my thoughts and beliefs for the past 3 years. It took me very far, but I have not gotten a complete resolution from it. I'm now becoming more interested in the mind/body connection and body practices I can do to see if I can get more relief.
I usually don't leave comments, but today I had to. This video literally changed my whole mindset, and finally gave me some insight in this soul-crushing anguish that is ruining my life every single day. I was feeling like there was no solution or hope of surviving this trauma that has been plaguing me for years and years. I think now I can maybe find my way out. Thank you.
This sounds like what many of us have called looking for "closure" and how hard it is to not get it. Learning to go on after loss without understanding what happened is so hard. Even more so when it's the 4th or 5th time. It's happened to me in dating and it's happened at what should have been the peak of my career when I was passed over for promotion after 10 years of outstanding reviews and never told why. I found a wonderful job and am happy now but have once again had to learn to live with never knowing why. This, to me, is what turns loss into trauma.
Great point! I and many people I know get into detective mode hyperfocusing on 'figuring it out'. However, without an honest conversation with the perp (which is unusual) many stay in theorizing mode. What helps me is building massive boundaries and speaking up...we'll just say our culture labels that a "mean b*tch". 🤷♀️ Many benefit from weak women who don't speak up.
And how does speaking up look like for you? Naming an example perhaps a few can relate to: getting dumped by an ex, or honestly any other type of relational dynamic without any explanation why. How would standing up for one self/creating boundaries look like in these sorts of cases? Because the speaking up and communicating with the perp, to find closure (I believe is what you meant) is still a bit abstract for me.
Hello, I recently experienced 8 months of someone presenting a picture of a man who wanted to marry me and believed in my faith, then a total cut-off. No real explanation. What helped me to work through it for my own closure was. Telling my story to a mother and father figure who I really trusted. They helped me see that the facts I already had pointed to an irrational person who in the end of the day was not good partner material. So in the end the facts I did have were enough to satisfy my brain that something bad had happened. Then I worked on validating my intuitions that had been present in the relationship so I am reasonably confident that I will see this pattern if it happens in the future. I learned so much about where I did not trust myself and protect myself along the way. And Thanks to Heodi's videos, how to take better care of myself emotionally in the future. I am almost excited to try again. This was a big turn around from being on the floor with confusion and grief. I wish you clarity too. Maybe the facts you have are enough. I hope so!
@@MaineEmOcean I just found this. Thank you. I'm learning. Being a mean b*tch is SO counter to my upbringing (I'm 60). Also, when I DO speak up I often then have MY behavior called out, even though I'm calm and rational about it. Gaslighting. 😔 Boundaries are better for me even if my world gets smaller.
@@zayabrinkopart3212 Hi! I just found this. Speaking up, to me, means approaching the person with curiosity and a willingness to listen to their "side." Perhaps I have a lesson to learn. Unfortunately my experience is that no explanation is given. I think the reason is that to give one would reveal something that the person knows was wrong to do. It's been so hard to experience such dishonesty and cruelty.
I am much too old to be a beginner but here I am, lol, I total beginner. only learning recently how much cptsd has affected me. And you explaining attachment issues, wow, I am so anxious avoidant, but feeling so alone all my life, almost dying from addiction but I am sober and staying that way till the day I die. But my beloved husband did not survive. Watching my narcissistic parents aging and knowing they are at the end of life. it's just crazy how much your videos are helping me! I have felt crazy all my life, and do not have a therapist or funds for professional help. that is a luxury in this country. So I appreciate so much you breaking things down and helping me understand that I am not "crazy" but I have a lot of trauma, a lot of unmet needs in my childhood and wounds I need to find a way to heal now.
I cried so much the first time I failed a test, it was math. I was 12 years old. Today I understand that they advanced me a year and did not update me with all that information. They had told me that the change was because I was ahead of schedule. The truth is that I was in the class of the director's daughter who had raised me since I was 4 years old and someone reported that there was violence towards me, my mother took me to live with her. I feel like that set me up for failure. I went from being the best student to being lost in many subjects and I have always felt that something was not allowing me to finish projects
Your explanations [I listened to 2 today] are seriously the best psychological explanations I have ever heard. There just isn't anyone else who explains things this way. It is absolutely beautiful, and so incredibly what I need to hear. Thankyou from the bottom of my heart..
You're a brilliant lady. Your disclaimers about your level of expertise surrounding trauma are unnecessary considering I think you know more than 90% of the therapists who claim a specialty in it. This video helped me understand two separate incidents in my life: one of which I responded to in a dismissed way (explained a whole lot about my numbed reaction); and the other I'm currently experiencing in a preoccupied form. I've said many times that I can't heal until I can know the extent of the damage done from the last traumatic event, and from what you explained that's because I have incomplete learning around it.
Thank you SO much for clarifying the difference (a bit) between Asexuality ans a change in a person's libido. Trauma might inform a brain that is Asexual and be part of your self and identity but Asexual people don't need to be criticized. Love your vids I find them very helpful!
The way you explained contextualizing struck me like an Epiphany. Don’t second guess your ability to impart understanding in a meaningful way just because you aren’t a clinician. I found this video incredibly useful as I’m sure many others have and will.
EMDR therapy and time on my own, learning me, how to love myself and take care of myself, a support system, has helped me report with gratitude that I resolved my CPTSD
I find this really interesting. I've recently been in therapy for childhood neglect. I realized that I minimized the way I was treated and then I attributed my behavior as a child to weirdness in my personality. So it's not like I didn't have context it is that I assigned the wrong context. Because it's so much easier to pretend your childhood wasn't as bad as it was (and because your family is gaslighting you and you have to agree in order to survive emotionally). It's easier to take responsibility for things that aren't your fault as a child. So I'm not downplaying the possibility that it's going to happen again because I'm never going to be a child again so I can't be neglected without the agency to escape but I still can't stop the effects of trauma on my life. But now that I'm starting to put my behavior in context - I was a small child trying to survive a narc mother - I'm finally getting some freedom from the trauma.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I am currently healing from a similar situation and actually accepted the diagnosis of ASD after I completed a questionnaire at a therapist visit and she commented that she thinks I have ASD because of the way I answered how I behaved during childhood (even though the vast majority of the behaviors no longer impacted me in adulthood, or at least so I thought). The whole time I was suspicious because I was like, “I know my parents had extremely unrealistic and rigid expectations of my emotions as a child”, but I accepted the diagnosis for a few months, only to reject it now, upon realizing that I was actually suffering from developmental trauma arising from attachment wounding, and that I was DESPERATE to exonerate my parents for their behavior with the belief that “I was just born like that.” Sadly not true. I’m going back to therapy to get help with the root cause of my issues and am already seeing results from commiting to facing and processing the real pain of the past on a daily basis. It was so much easier for me to think it was just my personality too, and I’m glad I didn’t stop there.
I was involved in an accident a little over two years ago, an accident that has turned my life around. Around the same time I parted with my ex, maybe even earlier. Few months later, he married someone else, someone i learnt he started seeing around the time my accident happened. Even after recovering, I haven't dated and find it very difficult to. I have dealt with the post accident trauma and even further my childhood trauma. I feel like I just got the last piece of the puzzle today. Thank you Heidi.
Exactly! Communication and understanding is so important. My lack of sexual desire was indeed linked to not feeling safe, and I never knew how true that was most of my life. Not facing the trauma only leads to prolonged suffering and/or numb emotions. Be brave. Be kind. Be conscious.
You're super smart Heidi. Your ability to be technical without being alienating is an amazing strength. Becky Kennedy says that one of the healthiest things you can say to a kid is "you didn't want/expect that to happen". Interesting how that ties in with what you said.
Another reason why I think certain experiences caused trauma is because not only do we not know why it happened but I think a big thing is we know that it should not have happened and it was traumatic for us because the traumatic experience came from people that should have kept us safe, that didn’t. So that’s why it’s hard for people to wrap their head around the fact that traumatic experiences happened from people we least expect it from. Now some are without ill intention but whether there with ill intention or not, if the person that caused the traumatic event never shows remorse and/or apologizes, it’s hard for the victim to ever get over it especially when that was the person they were relying on to keep them from experiencing trauma in the first place. Eventually people do predict it’s going to happen because they know the person‘s behavior by then but it’s still hard for them to not be traumatized by the next round of abuse or the experience because deep down they know it shouldn’t be coming from the person that it’s coming from. So sometimes I think all the information is there for us to see, but sometimes we twist it into our own understanding because we can’t come to terms with the fact that maybe these people that caused the trauma just did not care and that is hard for somebody to come to terms with especially when they know that they are people that were suppose to, and should have, cared. That is why God states in the Bible something along the lines of, “the truth will set you free.” So once we face the truth that some people just don’t care, it will be a lot easier to heal and move on.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🤔 *Heidi Preeb introduces the topic of trauma from an attachment theory perspective, emphasizing her role as a master's student and not a trauma therapist.* 01:08 🧠 *Discusses the Dynamic Maturation Model of attachment, which differs from the original attachment model by focusing on 22 different attachment strategies.* 02:14 🔍 *Explains that unresolved trauma in the Dynamic Maturation Model is considered incomplete learning, highlighting the importance of context and integration in traumatic events.* 03:11 🌐 *Addresses why the same event can be traumatic for one person and not for another, based on their ability to contextualize and feel prepared for similar future events.* 04:20 🚨 *Describes how unresolved trauma lives actively in the body when events are not fully understood, leading to either preoccupation or dismissal of the trauma.* 06:13 🤝 *Highlights that interpersonal trauma, especially in insecure attachment styles, can lead to complex PTSD symptoms.* 07:07 ⚠️ *Discusses preoccupied trauma, where lack of context leads to hyper-vigilance and overgeneralization of potential threats.* 09:53 🚫 *Talks about dismiss trauma, where individuals emotionally downplay traumatic events, leading to a numbed emotional state.* 13:08 💡 *Emphasizes the need to face, understand, and integrate both the events and emotional impact of trauma to resolve it.* 16:27 🧐 *Explains the biological basis for intense emotions in attachment relationships and how betrayal in these relationships can be highly traumatic.* 19:12 📚 *Mentions upcoming content focusing on healing from attachment trauma and wounds.* 20:06 🌱 *Defines trauma resolution as the complete understanding and integration of traumatic events, enabling more accurate future predictions and responses.* Made with HARPA AI
Heidi strikes again! How is it that no one else has been able to explain this to me??? No therapist (and I’ve seen a bunch) or doctor or other much older and supposedly more experienced experts… And it’s exactly the information I need to actually do something about the very preoccupying recurring fears of repeat trauma. thank you, Heidi! Brava 👏
Sometimes I hate the algorithm, but this time it definitely did me a solid. Trauma has often been framed as something unresolved, but it has never made sense to me how you “resolve” trauma. ‘A bad thing happened and you can’t change it and that sucks’ has long been my understanding, but framing it as essentially a memory that has t had its lesson learned yet. that we need to relive the trauma fully and allow ourselves to feel everything we couldn’t at the time because we didn’t feel safe. Makes me think of the pensive from Harry Potter lol What I would be curious to hear about now are methods by which one can identify, recount, and reprocess trauma. Is it just a matter of writing a memoir about that bad stuff that has happened? Great stuff.
I feel exactly the same, until tonight the phrases "resolve trauma" and "re-framing" made me upset/frustrated bc I didn't understand those things, or how to do them, and I felt like I was the only idiot that didn't get it, sitting alone unable to live a real life, no more
From some other sources I've been looking into, when you bring up the traumatic experience again, you need to be sure to be in a safe place and with a person or people you feel safe with (physically and emotionally). You need someone or something there that can help you get through the experience in a way that it won't re-traumatize you. I've heard that things like EMDR can help with this. There are some other ideas in the last chapters of The Body Keeps the Score. I'm no expert, and I need to seek out someone who knows what they're doing with these methods. From what I understand, it's not just about reliving the trauma. It's about changing the story so that now, there's is protection from it... Whether it's someone else stepping in to protect you or you finding a way to protect yourself and others, or all of the above. Kind of related to what she said.
One of my random hobbies lately has been researching behavioral neuroscience and it's s so neat to see it all align. It lines up exactly with what the amygdala does. It is constantly scanning for patterns, but when somebody comes from a dysregulated and dysfunctional childhood the scope of inconsistency within those patterns is so broad that almost any little thing can trigger our sympathetic nervous system which is the system in charge of activating the famous fight-or-flight response. I'm in the process of trying to help my emotional and logical brain were together which is something I don't think they've ever done before haha. But getting a grasp on the logical side of the situation, the actual function that makes my body react, has been a really valuable precursor to me doing inner work. I highly suggest it.
This explains a lot. I have done both types of trauma coping - dismissed and preoccupied, or ruminating, so I relate to both. Guess I have to disentangle it all. Appreciate you sharing as you're learning, so we can sorta learn along with you
Thank you so much for this. Right on the money for me. I was wondering why lately I have been seemingly depressed and just kinda hopeless, and only while watching your video, I realized I had dissociated so much that I can barely recognize myself. I had a dog bite me yesterday and I got angry for half a second and forgot and buried it in the next half (for context, I had a huge fear of dogs in childhood, so something like this should have me shaking in the corner). You are a life saver, it's good to have you back!
This helped deepen my understanding of trauma. And now I think I have a better paradigm to tackle the most recent situation I've been avoiding. Seems like so many things lead back to confidence. I've never lacked confidence but I feel its been building a lot more for me lately and the way I handle things now is so different, but it feels fluid. Trauma sure can seemingly stunt you. Thank you for another great video!
This was so helpful in a many ways. I’m a healthcare provider and I see a lot of patients with health anxiety, even in conditions that I think of as common and easily treatable. This makes sense with how the lack of context around illness might cause health anxiety.
This makes it understandable how C-PTSD can set from relatively mild events in childhood such as emotionally unavailable or unresponsive adults. Thank you for your amazing explanations.
@@happymixtapes Yes, completely right! Perhaps better wording would be overt abuse and passive abuse - it's difficult to see and acknowledge passive abuse, but it is just as life altering, and sometimes more so because it's not obvious.
I looove this title because it explains how I've been trying to resolve my own trauma which I often consider to be emotional underdevelopment while growing up therefore it's treatment is equipping yourself with a set of skills to manage your emotions and thoughts at its core, ofcourse its more complex than this, but at its barebones when we're becoming more self aware we're merely making the unconscious conscious
When it comes to some of the things my Dad said to me in childhood, or more precisely, the way he said them, I have concluded that he couldn't really love me, and I think he agrees, which is why he said that he never made the death threat he made at 11:30 pm while he was driving me to finish math problems in the third grade.
Heidi, you are such a blessing to your audience! I just wanted to express my gratitude for your intelligence, gifts and style of educating. It's helped me so much! Truly! God Bless you!
The thing I got tripped up on is this part about learning to reasonably predict and avoid the traumatic thing - what if this is truly not possible. My ancestral trauma is one of genocide that has gone on for millennia. I don’t know how to make sense of this step to heal.
I was fascinated by your explanation, how trauma is differentiated as one being fully absorbed in the traumatizing event and another being fully denying the very event. Could a trauma be like, somewhere in the middle for the person due to literacy problem? Not demeaning anything or anyone, but my grandma wasn't given the education she deserved, and has an emotional pool where people drown and I have just recently learned to swim in it without choking myself to die. At times when I talk to her, it feels like she poops a large one on our door. Her trauma whatever it was, is causing my parents harm and my emotional well-being as well. I can't specify what happened or something, but it's just the regular conversations that we have, she is very fond of me yet very destructive with emotional lashes like, fake sympathy and over-emotional moments. You mentioned understanding the context of what happened and to me it sounded like having the "ability" to reallly understand, and not build my own understanding around my own auto-correct, could also be an important factor. Because she never lets me finish sentences, and to a topic she's not familiar with, she fakes to listen then refuses to continue. Worst part of this relationship is, I always thought she was the problem, and after I went through depression and received psychotherapy, and did a lot of internal reflection, I'm beginning to see I have problems myself as well and some of my problems reflect my grandma to my horror. I think i'm losing the track of what I want to say, but I wanted to say that your videos sure are enlightening and sometimes almost like my brain being read out loud, and it's really helpful because I never saw the need for contextualizing and feeling it fully, but now I do thanks to your vids. :) Thanks for being back!
Wow. I am thinking I had both of these responses to the same childhood trauma. I both obsessed over looking for betrayal and completely ignoring it at the same time. I am healing and FA attachment injury so this makes more sense to me since it was installed by a survival figure.
Brilliant video! You explain complex issues in such an accessible way. I was 11 when my father died suddenly and we moved to another part of the country and started a new school within a week. There was no explanation or emotional help at all. In fact when she saw me making new friends my insensitive mother said blithely in my hearing "children recover very quickly". I have had difficulty in relating to men ever since (in case they leave suddenly without explanation). I am working with a trauma therapist and we have now reached the stage of tackling this. I will work hard to heal as it's really overshadowed my life.
Strategy vs style Unresolved Trauma: an event that is overwhelming for you & you haven't contextualized & intergraded for your understanding. We either dismiss or become preoccupied.
OMG.... you just hit it right on the nail for my avoidant ex. I have always felt that the reason why he left me in he way that he did was to change what happened in the past with his baby mama!!! i have always felt that he felt "well, if i leave my girlfriend the way i should have left my ex, then it is like i did leave my ex and that makes it all better. And it wasnt me that was the problem it was her, because see, I DO KNOW how to leave a bad relationship"... but in reality, he left a very good relationship in a bad way in order to change what he did in the past. hurting me, does not go back in time and change what happened in the past. and internally (because i have not evidence of this) him hurting me is in a way of making it up to his baby mama for how much better he treated me than her. (even though he treated me better because i treated him better) thank you. i needed to hear it this way from someone else.
I have so many thoughts. It's hard to pin everything down, including context. There are so many layers. I may or may not be dealing with CPTSD. If so, it's hard to admit without feeling like I'm exaggerating or not taking responsibility or something. But I know that I've struggled. And as I've come to understand things from my past and the pasts of others in my life, having that context has helped me start to recognize my symptoms for what they are: me still trying to protect myself emotionally. Just knowing this has already started to have a healing effect because now I know that I can talk to myself in a more caring and gentle way. I have to thank you for bringing so much of this to my attention through your videos. I've started to change my thinking patterns for the better. There are still layers to go through. Sometimes I wonder if part of it is from secondhand trauma. It's unclear what all the context is there and why I'm responding to certain things the way I do. Hopefully I can find ways to resolve that and live a more fulfilling life.
Cheating happens because the cheater makes a conscious decision to violate the bounds of a relationship, not because the other partner wasn't doing something that they wanted
And even if there was a "fault" in the relationship (aren't there always faults), the real one would have been the lack of communication. Why wasn't it possible to talk about it? Or, if it was/is beyond repair and it's time to leave, cheating is obviously not a solution, just a shitty thing to do while you lack the courage and morale.
Thank you so much Heidi! Your videos are helping me immensely. I appreciate your clarity and thoroughness. You’re helping me re-parent, uplevel, and become a healthy (as can be) adult . Much sense is being made. A feeling of security ever growing. 🙏
12:41 that is so accurate to something I've kinda experienced. I got bullied for years and sometimes I've experienced like wanting that to happen again because I want to relieve that shit, but this time deal with it better, this time come out on top
I just want to thank you for your well researched, knowledgeable and insightful videos. I have just come to realise that some big youtube channels that concentrate on trauma issues are not actually reliable and I highly suspect the presenters to be more or less narcissistic. In a way it's kind of obvious, what narcissist wouldn't want to be youtube star... so you have to be very careful in what you trust in youtube. Source criticism is so important, I learned that in uni but kind forgot it for a while. But you are a real one! What makes me trust you besides your content, is that you are actually studying this field in a real master's program and you state at the beginning of this video, that your content is not the whole truth or the only truth. So thank you, keep up the great work! 🙏
Very interesting and informative video. Makes perfect sense. Some of it seems to me to sound like what others have described as that if a traumatic experience does not fit into one's model of the world, it will be even more difficult to heal from such an experience - and that therefore some of the healing lies in integration . Apart from that, isn't there a risk in misunderstanding the concept of "understanding", because in many cases it can be almost impossible to come to a complete understanding of why something can happen? There will always be an extra: But why?
I just wanna to say how graetfull i am, that i found you !! (really I wasn't looking , i was too stubborn to help myself ). Funny fact : few months ago i had a really bad day , and then after i said it out loud ... my mobile prompt one of your videas : " how to stop being sad" .It happened 4 mn after you post it .You'r my Hero of the day.(5 or 11 videos of yours it helped me a lot). Schöne Grüße aus Nürnberg
Ohemgee, you explain things sooooo well! I'm learning so much from you and it's really helping me on my self-healing journey. So I definitely have unresolved trauma and how do I understand, contextualize & integrate it SAFELY & GENTLY so I can heal? I also am an anxious attachment type & currently don't have a partner or close family to give me the love and support I need to feel safe. I'm learning to self regulate and self soothe and reparent my inner child, but it's a not so easy path. I'm filled with fear and anxiety and dealing with inner parts that are afraid to let go, change, heal. I want to lovingly remove these blockages with me. How do I heal unresolved trauma without support other than my therapist? Lately I've been dealing with anxiety & bad insomnia. It's time for me to heal. But how? I'm not even totally sure what the trauma is although I know I had some childhood emotional neglect, a narcissist father, parents who fought a lot, so I understand why I'm anxious, fearful, & don't always feel safe. But I want to change that.
12:30 I think that's part of our younger self wanting to know what it could have done back then - it's not resolving the prior trauma, it's looking for what could have been way of dealing with things. If you have a way then this way of dealing with things then flows forward into the now.
So interesting! I see both of these strategies in my patterns. The first: I am hypervigilant when dating someone. It's as if my foot is hovering over the brake pedal or my finger is hovering over the eject button of the airplane, whichever metaphor you prefer. Then when I bolt, I'm dismissive. I don't spend any time grieving and just hop into another relationship very like the last. Well, I should say USED TO because a 12-step program is helping a lot. I'll stay tuned to learn more!
This video was really helpful and I'll be re-watching it I'm sure more than once. I frequently think about events regarding my ex-husband and the many many hurtful things that happened. I guess by doing that and imagining myself reacting differently, perhaps I'm trying to rewrite history. I appreciated your comments regarding sexual trauma. My husband wanted little to do with me outside the bedroom, but he did want to have sex daily. He didn't take no for an answer & just kept going. I would have to be extremely firm for him to stop, but then I had to pay the price of his anger & emotional withdrawal for days after. I am trying to work on things with myself and I find it helpful the way you outlined the process of moving forward in a healthy way.
This is fantastic, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge so lucidly. If resolution of trauma is partially dependent on understanding what led to it taking place, where does it leave us with early childhood trauma including sexual abuse within the family? A person might be able to (in time) understand and accept that an abusive mother for example was abused by her own mother, but they can't hold their 2 year old self responsible for her behaviour?
We don't always have access to the complete context of any given situation. For example, my trauma happened to me as a child, my dad was schizophrenic, and he died a while back. How exactly do you get the context for that rat's nest? What we do have access to is the beliefs and stories our brains tell us about what happened. If a sentence that you tell yourself is crushing you, then it's holding a lie. The goal is to tell yourself a story that energizes you and propels you forward with hope. Without context, you can still feel around blind like that until you find what you need to heal. Yep, it takes longer and sucks, but it's not hopeless; there is a backup.
I think there's also a gender component to trauma that probably needs to be explored. I mean, as a man that has been attacked on the street before, I never called the cops because I didn't want to be a victim. I don't think many men want to be seen or perceived as a victim which is why I suspect most men don't seek therapy and deal with their struggles alone. I'm probably not the only man that never bothered to call the cops when they've been attacked. I used approaches like REBT to remind myself that if I live in a poor neighbourhood, where this sort of random violence happens due to wider social problems around poverty and drug addiction, then it's not that surprising I'd be attacked. I'm pleased to say that I overcame the emotional difficulties it caused me by reminding myself of some of those old stoic saying that underpin therapeutic approaches like REBT. I also used my experience to write a pivotal scene in my first novel, so I probably did a fair bit of work on my trauma through doing that too.
Thank you so much for your videos. I've grown up harbouring a lot of toxic shame I think, and have been unpacking my emotional baggage yet trying to bloom for years, and I've just recently had the most intense depressive episode of my life at 27, and even though it's only happened in the last couple weeks, I think I can call it pretty traumatic. But I wanted to ask you about processing pain, subconscious and somantic - do you have any recommendations for how to go about that? I feel the reason this most recent depression has felt so intense is because it felt like I went to the core of myself, which it felt like I've never even done before in my life, and the fears and inner negativity and pain that came up, really felt too much to bear. So much so that I've been dissociated since coming into contact with these inner feelings and self beliefs. I've booked hypnotherapy in the next couple months and hope it can help me face these subconscious things. But was wondering if you had any advice on really feeling those feelings, in the body and mind, because at the moment, it feels like if I do that, I won't make it out alive. I've heard you talk about that in an avoidant attachment video I think, and it sounds wild but really feels true. Thank you again, for making and sharing these videos :) xx
Ouch! So on point as usual. My ex was anxious and always jealous, because of that I broke up with her once, but got back together. I was avoidant, but we had a lot of fun sex and fun times. I kept not wanting to commit to a relationship, however I had started opening up to it as realised that sex could also lead to kids. I started feeling her more from my heart during sex. Then one day a dude was coming on to her and she told me. I dismissed it and played games telling her she could give me her girlfriend, however she saw that I became sad by the thought of her leaving and told me we couldn't be without each other. Still she went ahead and slept with him. Over the next month she veered closer to the new guy, I suddenly felt jealousy, but had a hard time confronting it, and also had a lot of emotional turmoil with my son suddenly being kept away from me by his mother (another woman). Boom one day she decided to leave with the new guy and travel. I didn't stop her, but afterwards all my feelings came crashing down. I had an emotional breakdown. These last 2years have been about processing all the hurt I've had stored aside, my son gone, my dad and best friend dying the year before, with her leaving it's been too much and can't stop thinking of her feeling I need to resolve aomething between us. She came back after a month, but seeing me in an emotional state she left for another relationship, and has kept at bay texting from time to time. The thing about becoming sexually anorexic really hit home, as I've spent a lot of time reading listening and trying to understand women, and attachment PTSD, but am very very weary of getting together with women as I'm afraid of sex feeling superficial, and too engaging. I'm not sure how to proceed.
I love all of your videos, that's why I ask you to be careful with the risk of biologizing monogamy, you didnt quite cross that line but this is the second red flag I noticed. I might have gotten it wrong though, I'm not very good with subtext
Hey! You did not mention this point specifically, but it sounded to me as if you were talking mainly about trauma experienced as an adult. It would be very interesting to know how this model relates to attachment (or other) trauma experienced in the early years of life or trauma related to parents? From what I've heard, you were talking about traumatic events that come from outside a worldview that has already been formed and as such are unexpected/incomprehensible, but what about the very first years of life when any traumatic events are basically the very foundation a person has for creating their view of the world and their place in it?
All emotions are equal and that means that flashbacks are equal. We place a higher value on "good" flashbacks and it is equal to those flashbacks labels negative or "bad" Spells. Nostalgia is a flashback, period. Not living in the present. 🎁 of presents
Great video. I was interested in learning more about the sexual anorexia that you were talking about. I don't see the references in the description. Thank you.
Like most orientations at the end we were asked if we had questions so I asked if fire drills were as frequent or serious as other places she snapped just follow the exit signs like other places to which I commented that the towers were not like any other place I've ever worked
In my journey I have heard this thing many times, get the pain back and relive it to process it. Bring back the feelings. I understand this and why it would work but I am absolutely clueless to how to actually do it? Like how do you get access to that stuff again?
Wow, fascinating. I hadn't heard of this new model. It sounds more interesting. I think my strategy is to stay single 😛 but I'm not numbed out. Waded through a lot of feelings.
Love your content, commercials midsentence are really distracting though. Isn’t there a way as the contact provider to designate where your commercials go? Mid sentence, mid paragraph there’s just no decency to the commercials on UA-cam😢
I'm 75 years old, was married and divorced 3 times, and am currently enjoying my first "secure" attachment. Looking back on previous relationships, and working on fully accepting the trauma of childhood with a narcissistic mother and an immature and distant father, 2 older brothers and a younger sister, I reorganize my inner story daily, and appreciate the contributions of helpers like Heidi Priebe. I feel like understanding trauma is the basis of any progress I have made. As Bessel Van Der Kolk says, The Body Keeps the Score. Beginning at about age 17, I have looked to therapists for help. Sometimes, just the process of talking with someone has helped. But I must admit I have seldom found much counseling I could build on. Most therapists didn't even know the vocabulary of trauma, much less the steps necessary to deal with it. Your podcasts are the first I have happened on that deal with attachment - which in my case, is the next step after accepting trauma. Thanks for sharing - keep up the good work!
You give me hope! I'm still as yet unmarried and I know I have avoidant attachment. I'm working on it!
Working on your pain from 17 to 75…You must be so resilient to be able to persevere and work to improve your life and wellbeing for so long. I’m happy for you that you can enjoy your healing and connection now.
I think it is never over. Life keeps offering triggers of the past. You need resilience - and the courage to deal with each new discovery as if it were happening today. Gradually you build up an understanding of the real you. Only then can you choose whether or not it's time to face and fight, or turn away and forget. @@ellotheregovna401
Wow. Your first sentence had me going "wow". Thank you for sharing. I am anxious and in a relationship with an avoidant. Its torture at thr moment.
Wow. The phrase "How do I make this unhappen" hit me like a ton of bricks. That's exactly what I've been trying to do subconsciously all this time.
…” you haven’t learned enough information about how to prevent that event in the future because you aren’t really sure what led to it in the past.” Yes. I felt a huge release hearing that sentence. Thank you.
What is also hard about betrayal is that you are suddenly alone. No one can really understand the pain and why you are grieving. People who haven't experienced the utter work that it takes to get back to normal judge you way too harshly. So there is a sense of total isolation and rejection from so many fronts. On top of that you need to behave as if life is normal. Make lunch boxes for kids so that you do not mess them up too. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone.
Thank you for highlighting this Heidi.
"If you don't have enough information about what lead up to a traumatic event [and feel safe from it recurring], you will become hypervigilant to anything that your mind could possibly think of that might cause it again in the future." Wow. That's the FA strategy in a nutshell. Also pretty much the theme song of family scapegoats everywhere.
Very interesting. For my entire 31 years, I've never been able to grasp terms such as "Moved on" "Letting go" "Healed from" "Worked through"... I've always just gone through life collecting more and more trauma and then crumbling, dissociating, going through depression and hating myself, then finding a new partner who's similar to the previous one, to go through the same shit again. This video helped me get a much better understanding of what working through things really means. Thank you, Heidi.
This comment hit me like a ton of bricks because I could have written it verbatim a few years ago. The terms ‘healing,’ ‘moving on’ etc. always felt vague and inaccessible to me too. I am so truly happy to hear this video helped you gain more context for what that process might look like for you.
Aww that’s so sad!! There is so much freedom through Jesus! Please reach out to me, I would be so happy to pray for you!! I will be praying for you. I know so many people who have gotten healing from past trauma, you are not alone and this is not impossible. You are amazing and so loved
omg. You and I share the EXACT same experiences. I can't take it anymore. We can climb out of this 💪 Message me anytime would love to chat :)
Please pray for me !!!! Thanks you and bless you too.@@laurenannmusic792
@@heidipriebe1 could you please tell me the titles of the books you've read on the particular emotional+physical depravation thing? i rewatched to no avail on that regard. awesome video tho
I laughed SO HARD when you said "that's just Larry the guy that robs people at the end of this street". I immediately imagined Larry as a green furry sesame street character. Lol. Seriously though. This video is awesome. Thank you so much for your incredible insight!
Peter A. Levine rethinks trauma by looking to the body's memory of the event, not the mind's interpretation of the story. His work (Somatic Experiencing) has helped me a lot. I couldn't overcome cognitive dissonance before, which kept me stuck in trauma bonding and in retraumatizing patterns.
Very interesting. I worked on focusing on my thoughts and beliefs for the past 3 years. It took me very far, but I have not gotten a complete resolution from it. I'm now becoming more interested in the mind/body connection and body practices I can do to see if I can get more relief.
I usually don't leave comments, but today I had to. This video literally changed my whole mindset, and finally gave me some insight in this soul-crushing anguish that is ruining my life every single day. I was feeling like there was no solution or hope of surviving this trauma that has been plaguing me for years and years. I think now I can maybe find my way out. Thank you.
This sounds like what many of us have called looking for "closure" and how hard it is to not get it. Learning to go on after loss without understanding what happened is so hard. Even more so when it's the 4th or 5th time. It's happened to me in dating and it's happened at what should have been the peak of my career when I was passed over for promotion after 10 years of outstanding reviews and never told why. I found a wonderful job and am happy now but have once again had to learn to live with never knowing why. This, to me, is what turns loss into trauma.
Great point! I and many people I know get into detective mode hyperfocusing on 'figuring it out'. However, without an honest conversation with the perp (which is unusual) many stay in theorizing mode. What helps me is building massive boundaries and speaking up...we'll just say our culture labels that a "mean b*tch". 🤷♀️ Many benefit from weak women who don't speak up.
And how does speaking up look like for you?
Naming an example perhaps a few can relate to: getting dumped by an ex, or honestly any other type of relational dynamic without any explanation why. How would standing up for one self/creating boundaries look like in these sorts of cases? Because the speaking up and communicating with the perp, to find closure (I believe is what you meant) is still a bit abstract for me.
Hello, I recently experienced 8 months of someone presenting a picture of a man who wanted to marry me and believed in my faith, then a total cut-off. No real explanation. What helped me to work through it for my own closure was. Telling my story to a mother and father figure who I really trusted. They helped me see that the facts I already had pointed to an irrational person who in the end of the day was not good partner material. So in the end the facts I did have were enough to satisfy my brain that something bad had happened. Then I worked on validating my intuitions that had been present in the relationship so I am reasonably confident that I will see this pattern if it happens in the future. I learned so much about where I did not trust myself and protect myself along the way. And Thanks to Heodi's videos, how to take better care of myself emotionally in the future. I am almost excited to try again. This was a big turn around from being on the floor with confusion and grief. I wish you clarity too. Maybe the facts you have are enough. I hope so!
@@MaineEmOcean I just found this. Thank you. I'm learning. Being a mean b*tch is SO counter to my upbringing (I'm 60). Also, when I DO speak up I often then have MY behavior called out, even though I'm calm and rational about it. Gaslighting. 😔 Boundaries are better for me even if my world gets smaller.
@@zayabrinkopart3212 Hi! I just found this. Speaking up, to me, means approaching the person with curiosity and a willingness to listen to their "side." Perhaps I have a lesson to learn. Unfortunately my experience is that no explanation is given. I think the reason is that to give one would reveal something that the person knows was wrong to do. It's been so hard to experience such dishonesty and cruelty.
I am much too old to be a beginner but here I am, lol, I total beginner. only learning recently how much cptsd has affected me. And you explaining attachment issues, wow, I am so anxious avoidant, but feeling so alone all my life, almost dying from addiction but I am sober and staying that way till the day I die. But my beloved husband did not survive. Watching my narcissistic parents aging and knowing they are at the end of life. it's just crazy how much your videos are helping me! I have felt crazy all my life, and do not have a therapist or funds for professional help. that is a luxury in this country. So I appreciate so much you breaking things down and helping me understand that I am not "crazy" but I have a lot of trauma, a lot of unmet needs in my childhood and wounds I need to find a way to heal now.
“Too old to be a beginner,” not at all! You can always work to live more happily. It’s not a task with a deadline. :)
I cried so much the first time I failed a test, it was math. I was 12 years old. Today I understand that they advanced me a year and did not update me with all that information. They had told me that the change was because I was ahead of schedule. The truth is that I was in the class of the director's daughter who had raised me since I was 4 years old and someone reported that there was violence towards me, my mother took me to live with her. I feel like that set me up for failure. I went from being the best student to being lost in many subjects and I have always felt that something was not allowing me to finish projects
Your explanations [I listened to 2 today] are seriously the best psychological explanations I have ever heard. There just isn't anyone else who explains things this way. It is absolutely beautiful, and so incredibly what I need to hear. Thankyou from the bottom of my heart..
You're a brilliant lady. Your disclaimers about your level of expertise surrounding trauma are unnecessary considering I think you know more than 90% of the therapists who claim a specialty in it. This video helped me understand two separate incidents in my life: one of which I responded to in a dismissed way (explained a whole lot about my numbed reaction); and the other I'm currently experiencing in a preoccupied form. I've said many times that I can't heal until I can know the extent of the damage done from the last traumatic event, and from what you explained that's because I have incomplete learning around it.
Thank you SO much for clarifying the difference (a bit) between Asexuality ans a change in a person's libido. Trauma might inform a brain that is Asexual and be part of your self and identity but Asexual people don't need to be criticized.
Love your vids I find them very helpful!
The way you explained contextualizing struck me like an Epiphany. Don’t second guess your ability to impart understanding in a meaningful way just because you aren’t a clinician. I found this video incredibly useful as I’m sure many others have and will.
EMDR therapy and time on my own, learning me, how to love myself and take care of myself, a support system, has helped me report with gratitude that I resolved my CPTSD
I find this really interesting. I've recently been in therapy for childhood neglect. I realized that I minimized the way I was treated and then I attributed my behavior as a child to weirdness in my personality. So it's not like I didn't have context it is that I assigned the wrong context. Because it's so much easier to pretend your childhood wasn't as bad as it was (and because your family is gaslighting you and you have to agree in order to survive emotionally). It's easier to take responsibility for things that aren't your fault as a child.
So I'm not downplaying the possibility that it's going to happen again because I'm never going to be a child again so I can't be neglected without the agency to escape but I still can't stop the effects of trauma on my life. But now that I'm starting to put my behavior in context - I was a small child trying to survive a narc mother - I'm finally getting some freedom from the trauma.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I am currently healing from a similar situation and actually accepted the diagnosis of ASD after I completed a questionnaire at a therapist visit and she commented that she thinks I have ASD because of the way I answered how I behaved during childhood (even though the vast majority of the behaviors no longer impacted me in adulthood, or at least so I thought). The whole time I was suspicious because I was like, “I know my parents had extremely unrealistic and rigid expectations of my emotions as a child”, but I accepted the diagnosis for a few months, only to reject it now, upon realizing that I was actually suffering from developmental trauma arising from attachment wounding, and that I was DESPERATE to exonerate my parents for their behavior with the belief that “I was just born like that.” Sadly not true. I’m going back to therapy to get help with the root cause of my issues and am already seeing results from commiting to facing and processing the real pain of the past on a daily basis. It was so much easier for me to think it was just my personality too, and I’m glad I didn’t stop there.
I was involved in an accident a little over two years ago, an accident that has turned my life around. Around the same time I parted with my ex, maybe even earlier. Few months later, he married someone else, someone i learnt he started seeing around the time my accident happened. Even after recovering, I haven't dated and find it very difficult to. I have dealt with the post accident trauma and even further my childhood trauma.
I feel like I just got the last piece of the puzzle today. Thank you Heidi.
Exactly! Communication and understanding is so important.
My lack of sexual desire was indeed linked to not feeling safe, and I never knew how true that was most of my life.
Not facing the trauma only leads to prolonged suffering and/or numb emotions. Be brave. Be kind. Be conscious.
You're super smart Heidi. Your ability to be technical without being alienating is an amazing strength. Becky Kennedy says that one of the healthiest things you can say to a kid is "you didn't want/expect that to happen". Interesting how that ties in with what you said.
Another reason why I think certain experiences caused trauma is because not only do we not know why it happened but I think a big thing is we know that it should not have happened and it was traumatic for us because the traumatic experience came from people that should have kept us safe, that didn’t. So that’s why it’s hard for people to wrap their head around the fact that traumatic experiences happened from people we least expect it from. Now some are without ill intention but whether there with ill intention or not, if the person that caused the traumatic event never shows remorse and/or apologizes, it’s hard for the victim to ever get over it especially when that was the person they were relying on to keep them from experiencing trauma in the first place. Eventually people do predict it’s going to happen because they know the person‘s behavior by then but it’s still hard for them to not be traumatized by the next round of abuse or the experience because deep down they know it shouldn’t be coming from the person that it’s coming from. So sometimes I think all the information is there for us to see, but sometimes we twist it into our own understanding because we can’t come to terms with the fact that maybe these people that caused the trauma just did not care and that is hard for somebody to come to terms with especially when they know that they are people that were suppose to, and should have, cared. That is why God states in the Bible something along the lines of, “the truth will set you free.” So once we face the truth that some people just don’t care, it will be a lot easier to heal and move on.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:00 🤔 *Heidi Preeb introduces the topic of trauma from an attachment theory perspective, emphasizing her role as a master's student and not a trauma therapist.*
01:08 🧠 *Discusses the Dynamic Maturation Model of attachment, which differs from the original attachment model by focusing on 22 different attachment strategies.*
02:14 🔍 *Explains that unresolved trauma in the Dynamic Maturation Model is considered incomplete learning, highlighting the importance of context and integration in traumatic events.*
03:11 🌐 *Addresses why the same event can be traumatic for one person and not for another, based on their ability to contextualize and feel prepared for similar future events.*
04:20 🚨 *Describes how unresolved trauma lives actively in the body when events are not fully understood, leading to either preoccupation or dismissal of the trauma.*
06:13 🤝 *Highlights that interpersonal trauma, especially in insecure attachment styles, can lead to complex PTSD symptoms.*
07:07 ⚠️ *Discusses preoccupied trauma, where lack of context leads to hyper-vigilance and overgeneralization of potential threats.*
09:53 🚫 *Talks about dismiss trauma, where individuals emotionally downplay traumatic events, leading to a numbed emotional state.*
13:08 💡 *Emphasizes the need to face, understand, and integrate both the events and emotional impact of trauma to resolve it.*
16:27 🧐 *Explains the biological basis for intense emotions in attachment relationships and how betrayal in these relationships can be highly traumatic.*
19:12 📚 *Mentions upcoming content focusing on healing from attachment trauma and wounds.*
20:06 🌱 *Defines trauma resolution as the complete understanding and integration of traumatic events, enabling more accurate future predictions and responses.*
Made with HARPA AI
Exactly--Trauma is incomplete learning: an event that has not been contextualized and integrated into your understanding.
Thank you for putting this together. I feel like it is unraveling decades of confusion and missed opportunities.
Heidi strikes again! How is it that no one else has been able to explain this to me??? No therapist (and I’ve seen a bunch) or doctor or other much older and supposedly more experienced experts… And it’s exactly the information I need to actually do something about the very preoccupying recurring fears of repeat trauma. thank you, Heidi! Brava 👏
Sometimes I hate the algorithm, but this time it definitely did me a solid.
Trauma has often been framed as something unresolved, but it has never made sense to me how you “resolve” trauma. ‘A bad thing happened and you can’t change it and that sucks’ has long been my understanding, but framing it as essentially a memory that has t had its lesson learned yet. that we need to relive the trauma fully and allow ourselves to feel everything we couldn’t at the time because we didn’t feel safe. Makes me think of the pensive from Harry Potter lol
What I would be curious to hear about now are methods by which one can identify, recount, and reprocess trauma. Is it just a matter of writing a memoir about that bad stuff that has happened?
Great stuff.
I feel exactly the same, until tonight the phrases "resolve trauma" and "re-framing" made me upset/frustrated bc I didn't understand those things, or how to do them, and I felt like I was the only idiot that didn't get it, sitting alone unable to live a real life, no more
From some other sources I've been looking into, when you bring up the traumatic experience again, you need to be sure to be in a safe place and with a person or people you feel safe with (physically and emotionally). You need someone or something there that can help you get through the experience in a way that it won't re-traumatize you. I've heard that things like EMDR can help with this. There are some other ideas in the last chapters of The Body Keeps the Score. I'm no expert, and I need to seek out someone who knows what they're doing with these methods. From what I understand, it's not just about reliving the trauma. It's about changing the story so that now, there's is protection from it... Whether it's someone else stepping in to protect you or you finding a way to protect yourself and others, or all of the above. Kind of related to what she said.
One of my random hobbies lately has been researching behavioral neuroscience and it's s so neat to see it all align. It lines up exactly with what the amygdala does. It is constantly scanning for patterns, but when somebody comes from a dysregulated and dysfunctional childhood the scope of inconsistency within those patterns is so broad that almost any little thing can trigger our sympathetic nervous system which is the system in charge of activating the famous fight-or-flight response. I'm in the process of trying to help my emotional and logical brain were together which is something I don't think they've ever done before haha. But getting a grasp on the logical side of the situation, the actual function that makes my body react, has been a really valuable precursor to me doing inner work. I highly suggest it.
This explains a lot. I have done both types of trauma coping - dismissed and preoccupied, or ruminating, so I relate to both. Guess I have to disentangle it all.
Appreciate you sharing as you're learning, so we can sorta learn along with you
Thank you so much for this. Right on the money for me. I was wondering why lately I have been seemingly depressed and just kinda hopeless, and only while watching your video, I realized I had dissociated so much that I can barely recognize myself. I had a dog bite me yesterday and I got angry for half a second and forgot and buried it in the next half (for context, I had a huge fear of dogs in childhood, so something like this should have me shaking in the corner). You are a life saver, it's good to have you back!
I read your ENFP book, and would like to say thank you for putting the time and effort into creating it. It has been a real game changer in my life :)
This helped deepen my understanding of trauma. And now I think I have a better paradigm to tackle the most recent situation I've been avoiding. Seems like so many things lead back to confidence. I've never lacked confidence but I feel its been building a lot more for me lately and the way I handle things now is so different, but it feels fluid. Trauma sure can seemingly stunt you. Thank you for another great video!
This was so helpful in a many ways. I’m a healthcare provider and I see a lot of patients with health anxiety, even in conditions that I think of as common and easily treatable. This makes sense with how the lack of context around illness might cause health anxiety.
This makes it understandable how C-PTSD can set from relatively mild events in childhood such as emotionally unavailable or unresponsive adults. Thank you for your amazing explanations.
That's not mild at all. Infants can die from emotional neglect
@@happymixtapes Yes, completely right! Perhaps better wording would be overt abuse and passive abuse - it's difficult to see and acknowledge passive abuse, but it is just as life altering, and sometimes more so because it's not obvious.
Thank you. Makes total sense to me and when I look back "incomplete learning" sums up so much of my history. Many thanks again ❣
I looove this title because it explains how I've been trying to resolve my own trauma which I often consider to be emotional underdevelopment while growing up therefore it's treatment is equipping yourself with a set of skills to manage your emotions and thoughts at its core, ofcourse its more complex than this, but at its barebones when we're becoming more self aware we're merely making the unconscious conscious
When it comes to some of the things my Dad said to me in childhood, or more precisely, the way he said them, I have concluded that he couldn't really love me, and I think he agrees, which is why he said that he never made the death threat he made at 11:30 pm while he was driving me to finish math problems in the third grade.
Heidi, you are such a blessing to your audience! I just wanted to express my gratitude for your intelligence, gifts and style of educating. It's helped me so much! Truly! God Bless you!
The thing I got tripped up on is this part about learning to reasonably predict and avoid the traumatic thing - what if this is truly not possible. My ancestral trauma is one of genocide that has gone on for millennia. I don’t know how to make sense of this step to heal.
I was fascinated by your explanation, how trauma is differentiated as one being fully absorbed in the traumatizing event and another being fully denying the very event. Could a trauma be like, somewhere in the middle for the person due to literacy problem? Not demeaning anything or anyone, but my grandma wasn't given the education she deserved, and has an emotional pool where people drown and I have just recently learned to swim in it without choking myself to die. At times when I talk to her, it feels like she poops a large one on our door. Her trauma whatever it was, is causing my parents harm and my emotional well-being as well.
I can't specify what happened or something, but it's just the regular conversations that we have, she is very fond of me yet very destructive with emotional lashes like, fake sympathy and over-emotional moments.
You mentioned understanding the context of what happened and to me it sounded like having the "ability" to reallly understand, and not build my own understanding around my own auto-correct, could also be an important factor. Because she never lets me finish sentences, and to a topic she's not familiar with, she fakes to listen then refuses to continue. Worst part of this relationship is, I always thought she was the problem, and after I went through depression and received psychotherapy, and did a lot of internal reflection, I'm beginning to see I have problems myself as well and some of my problems reflect my grandma to my horror.
I think i'm losing the track of what I want to say, but I wanted to say that your videos sure are enlightening and sometimes almost like my brain being read out loud, and it's really helpful because I never saw the need for contextualizing and feeling it fully, but now I do thanks to your vids. :) Thanks for being back!
Wow. I am thinking I had both of these responses to the same childhood trauma. I both obsessed over looking for betrayal and completely ignoring it at the same time.
I am healing and FA attachment injury so this makes more sense to me since it was installed by a survival figure.
Thanks, Heidi. I am grateful for the definition of healing.
Brilliant video! You explain complex issues in such an accessible way.
I was 11 when my father died suddenly and we moved to another part of the country and started a new school within a week. There was no explanation or emotional help at all. In fact when she saw me making new friends my insensitive mother said blithely in my hearing "children recover very quickly".
I have had difficulty in relating to men ever since (in case they leave suddenly without explanation).
I am working with a trauma therapist and we have now reached the stage of tackling this. I will work hard to heal as it's really overshadowed my life.
Strategy vs style
Unresolved Trauma: an event that is overwhelming for you & you haven't contextualized & intergraded for your understanding. We either dismiss or become preoccupied.
OMG.... you just hit it right on the nail for my avoidant ex. I have always felt that the reason why he left me in he way that he did was to change what happened in the past with his baby mama!!! i have always felt that he felt "well, if i leave my girlfriend the way i should have left my ex, then it is like i did leave my ex and that makes it all better. And it wasnt me that was the problem it was her, because see, I DO KNOW how to leave a bad relationship"...
but in reality, he left a very good relationship in a bad way in order to change what he did in the past. hurting me, does not go back in time and change what happened in the past. and internally (because i have not evidence of this) him hurting me is in a way of making it up to his baby mama for how much better he treated me than her. (even though he treated me better because i treated him better) thank you. i needed to hear it this way from someone else.
HOLY MOLY this is why I've been binging psych information!! I knew it!
I have so many thoughts. It's hard to pin everything down, including context. There are so many layers. I may or may not be dealing with CPTSD. If so, it's hard to admit without feeling like I'm exaggerating or not taking responsibility or something. But I know that I've struggled. And as I've come to understand things from my past and the pasts of others in my life, having that context has helped me start to recognize my symptoms for what they are: me still trying to protect myself emotionally. Just knowing this has already started to have a healing effect because now I know that I can talk to myself in a more caring and gentle way. I have to thank you for bringing so much of this to my attention through your videos. I've started to change my thinking patterns for the better. There are still layers to go through. Sometimes I wonder if part of it is from secondhand trauma. It's unclear what all the context is there and why I'm responding to certain things the way I do. Hopefully I can find ways to resolve that and live a more fulfilling life.
Cheating happens because the cheater makes a conscious decision to violate the bounds of a relationship, not because the other partner wasn't doing something that they wanted
And even if there was a "fault" in the relationship (aren't there always faults), the real one would have been the lack of communication. Why wasn't it possible to talk about it? Or, if it was/is beyond repair and it's time to leave, cheating is obviously not a solution, just a shitty thing to do while you lack the courage and morale.
Thank you so much Heidi! Your videos are helping me immensely. I appreciate your clarity and thoroughness. You’re helping me re-parent, uplevel, and become a healthy (as can be) adult . Much sense is being made. A feeling of security ever growing. 🙏
12:41 that is so accurate to something I've kinda experienced. I got bullied for years and sometimes I've experienced like wanting that to happen again because I want to relieve that shit, but this time deal with it better, this time come out on top
Thank you for sharing this Heidi! That was a biggie the last 10 minutes, 😭. Appreciate your work and deep insight so much.
I just want to thank you for your well researched, knowledgeable and insightful videos. I have just come to realise that some big youtube channels that concentrate on trauma issues are not actually reliable and I highly suspect the presenters to be more or less narcissistic. In a way it's kind of obvious, what narcissist wouldn't want to be youtube star... so you have to be very careful in what you trust in youtube. Source criticism is so important, I learned that in uni but kind forgot it for a while.
But you are a real one! What makes me trust you besides your content, is that you are actually studying this field in a real master's program and you state at the beginning of this video, that your content is not the whole truth or the only truth. So thank you, keep up the great work! 🙏
Very interesting and informative video. Makes perfect sense. Some of it seems to me to sound like what others have described as that if a traumatic experience does not fit into one's model of the world, it will be even more difficult to heal from such an experience - and that therefore some of the healing lies in integration .
Apart from that, isn't there a risk in misunderstanding the concept of "understanding", because in many cases it can be almost impossible to come to a complete understanding of why something can happen? There will always be an extra: But why?
Talk about Parentification. What impact it had on the child in a reversed role. Thanks! Chuck
This has helped me in SO many ways. You have truly been a blessing to me. Thank you, Heidi!
Two videos in one week! Absolutely love it! I could listen to you talk about the topics you cover all day long :)
Great video. Your wholesome structure with: intro, dissecting the concept into parts and then concluding, is easy to follow and learn from.
Extremely helpful!! Thank you for this video Heidi! I appreciate you! ♥️🌸♥️🌸♥️
I just wanna to say how graetfull i am, that i found you !! (really I wasn't looking , i was too stubborn to help myself ). Funny fact : few months ago i had a really bad day , and then after i said it out loud ... my mobile prompt one of your videas : " how to stop being sad" .It happened 4 mn after you post it .You'r my Hero of the day.(5 or 11 videos of yours it helped me a lot). Schöne Grüße aus Nürnberg
Ohemgee, you explain things sooooo well! I'm learning so much from you and it's really helping me on my self-healing journey. So I definitely have unresolved trauma and how do I understand, contextualize & integrate it SAFELY & GENTLY so I can heal? I also am an anxious attachment type & currently don't have a partner or close family to give me the love and support I need to feel safe. I'm learning to self regulate and self soothe and reparent my inner child, but it's a not so easy path. I'm filled with fear and anxiety and dealing with inner parts that are afraid to let go, change, heal. I want to lovingly remove these blockages with me. How do I heal unresolved trauma without support other than my therapist? Lately I've been dealing with anxiety & bad insomnia. It's time for me to heal. But how? I'm not even totally sure what the trauma is although I know I had some childhood emotional neglect, a narcissist father, parents who fought a lot, so I understand why I'm anxious, fearful, & don't always feel safe. But I want to change that.
12:30 I think that's part of our younger self wanting to know what it could have done back then - it's not resolving the prior trauma, it's looking for what could have been way of dealing with things. If you have a way then this way of dealing with things then flows forward into the now.
Hello Heidi! Nice to have you back FINALLY!!! Book recommendations on sexual anorexia that you mentioned plz?!? 🙃
Here's the one!
Sexual Anorexia: Overcoming Sexual Self-Hatred by Patrick J. Carnes
www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/480743
These videos are incredibly fascinating and helpful :) thank you!!
That's literally the best phrase to describe what trauma is! 😊👍
This is such good information conveyed in a wonderfully understandable way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
you just changed my life. thank you.
So interesting! I see both of these strategies in my patterns. The first: I am hypervigilant when dating someone. It's as if my foot is hovering over the brake pedal or my finger is hovering over the eject button of the airplane, whichever metaphor you prefer. Then when I bolt, I'm dismissive. I don't spend any time grieving and just hop into another relationship very like the last. Well, I should say USED TO because a 12-step program is helping a lot. I'll stay tuned to learn more!
Great comprehension! This helps me see things even clearer. Great work! Thanks. ❤
This video was really helpful and I'll be re-watching it I'm sure more than once. I frequently think about events regarding my ex-husband and the many many hurtful things that happened. I guess by doing that and imagining myself reacting differently, perhaps I'm trying to rewrite history. I appreciated your comments regarding sexual trauma. My husband wanted little to do with me outside the bedroom, but he did want to have sex daily. He didn't take no for an answer & just kept going. I would have to be extremely firm for him to stop, but then I had to pay the price of his anger & emotional withdrawal for days after. I am trying to work on things with myself and I find it helpful the way you outlined the process of moving forward in a healthy way.
Absolutely helpful as I worked at the world trade center at the orientation for the job
This is fantastic, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge so lucidly. If resolution of trauma is partially dependent on understanding what led to it taking place, where does it leave us with early childhood trauma including sexual abuse within the family? A person might be able to (in time) understand and accept that an abusive mother for example was abused by her own mother, but they can't hold their 2 year old self responsible for her behaviour?
Heidi you just keep dropping them truth bombs
Such a great video again. Thanks for sharing!
We don't always have access to the complete context of any given situation. For example, my trauma happened to me as a child, my dad was schizophrenic, and he died a while back. How exactly do you get the context for that rat's nest? What we do have access to is the beliefs and stories our brains tell us about what happened. If a sentence that you tell yourself is crushing you, then it's holding a lie. The goal is to tell yourself a story that energizes you and propels you forward with hope. Without context, you can still feel around blind like that until you find what you need to heal. Yep, it takes longer and sucks, but it's not hopeless; there is a backup.
Thank you Heidi. This confirmed some things that I was thinking about a few days ago.
I think there's also a gender component to trauma that probably needs to be explored. I mean, as a man that has been attacked on the street before, I never called the cops because I didn't want to be a victim. I don't think many men want to be seen or perceived as a victim which is why I suspect most men don't seek therapy and deal with their struggles alone. I'm probably not the only man that never bothered to call the cops when they've been attacked. I used approaches like REBT to remind myself that if I live in a poor neighbourhood, where this sort of random violence happens due to wider social problems around poverty and drug addiction, then it's not that surprising I'd be attacked. I'm pleased to say that I overcame the emotional difficulties it caused me by reminding myself of some of those old stoic saying that underpin therapeutic approaches like REBT. I also used my experience to write a pivotal scene in my first novel, so I probably did a fair bit of work on my trauma through doing that too.
I love this. It really states clearly on how to heal...and it makes so much sense. Thanks for sharing Heidi :)
Great teaching tool!
Thank you so much for your videos. I've grown up harbouring a lot of toxic shame I think, and have been unpacking my emotional baggage yet trying to bloom for years, and I've just recently had the most intense depressive episode of my life at 27, and even though it's only happened in the last couple weeks, I think I can call it pretty traumatic. But I wanted to ask you about processing pain, subconscious and somantic - do you have any recommendations for how to go about that? I feel the reason this most recent depression has felt so intense is because it felt like I went to the core of myself, which it felt like I've never even done before in my life, and the fears and inner negativity and pain that came up, really felt too much to bear. So much so that I've been dissociated since coming into contact with these inner feelings and self beliefs. I've booked hypnotherapy in the next couple months and hope it can help me face these subconscious things. But was wondering if you had any advice on really feeling those feelings, in the body and mind, because at the moment, it feels like if I do that, I won't make it out alive. I've heard you talk about that in an avoidant attachment video I think, and it sounds wild but really feels true. Thank you again, for making and sharing these videos :) xx
Ouch! So on point as usual.
My ex was anxious and always jealous, because of that I broke up with her once, but got back together. I was avoidant, but we had a lot of fun sex and fun times. I kept not wanting to commit to a relationship, however I had started opening up to it as realised that sex could also lead to kids. I started feeling her more from my heart during sex. Then one day a dude was coming on to her and she told me. I dismissed it and played games telling her she could give me her girlfriend, however she saw that I became sad by the thought of her leaving and told me we couldn't be without each other. Still she went ahead and slept with him. Over the next month she veered closer to the new guy, I suddenly felt jealousy, but had a hard time confronting it, and also had a lot of emotional turmoil with my son suddenly being kept away from me by his mother (another woman). Boom one day she decided to leave with the new guy and travel. I didn't stop her, but afterwards all my feelings came crashing down. I had an emotional breakdown. These last 2years have been about processing all the hurt I've had stored aside, my son gone, my dad and best friend dying the year before, with her leaving it's been too much and can't stop thinking of her feeling I need to resolve aomething between us.
She came back after a month, but seeing me in an emotional state she left for another relationship, and has kept at bay texting from time to time.
The thing about becoming sexually anorexic really hit home, as I've spent a lot of time reading listening and trying to understand women, and attachment PTSD, but am very very weary of getting together with women as I'm afraid of sex feeling superficial, and too engaging.
I'm not sure how to proceed.
very enlightening and well structured video. kudos to you
So so helpful. Thank you. Your videos are great, they have already helped me so much ❤❤❤
Your videos have been super helpful for me. Thank you
This has been super useful, I understand many things so much better now. Thank you!
What a good lecture there, Professor.
Thank you for the work that you do! ❤
This is encouraging to hear
This fits in with the Bhuddist dependant arising idea.
I love all of your videos, that's why I ask you to be careful with the risk of biologizing monogamy, you didnt quite cross that line but this is the second red flag I noticed. I might have gotten it wrong though, I'm not very good with subtext
This is so helpful. Thank you so much.
Could you do some videos about Developmental Trauma Disorder ?
(PLEASE!)
Hey! You did not mention this point specifically, but it sounded to me as if you were talking mainly about trauma experienced as an adult. It would be very interesting to know how this model relates to attachment (or other) trauma experienced in the early years of life or trauma related to parents? From what I've heard, you were talking about traumatic events that come from outside a worldview that has already been formed and as such are unexpected/incomprehensible, but what about the very first years of life when any traumatic events are basically the very foundation a person has for creating their view of the world and their place in it?
So what you’re saying iiiiissss… I can rely entirely on cognition to heal and still never have to deal with my actual emotions. PHEW!
All emotions are equal and that means that flashbacks are equal. We place a higher value on "good" flashbacks and it is equal to those flashbacks labels negative or "bad"
Spells. Nostalgia is a flashback, period. Not living in the present. 🎁 of presents
Growing pains
Friggin Larry…I hate that guy…😂
Great video. I was interested in learning more about the sexual anorexia that you were talking about. I don't see the references in the description. Thank you.
Like most orientations at the end we were asked if we had questions so I asked if fire drills were as frequent or serious as other places she snapped just follow the exit signs like other places to which I commented that the towers were not like any other place I've ever worked
In my journey I have heard this thing many times, get the pain back and relive it to process it. Bring back the feelings. I understand this and why it would work but I am absolutely clueless to how to actually do it? Like how do you get access to that stuff again?
EMDR therapy can do this.
Wow, fascinating. I hadn't heard of this new model. It sounds more interesting. I think my strategy is to stay single 😛 but I'm not numbed out. Waded through a lot of feelings.
Love your content, commercials midsentence are really distracting though. Isn’t there a way as the contact provider to designate where your commercials go? Mid sentence, mid paragraph there’s just no decency to the commercials on UA-cam😢