The Recovered Life Show | Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Podcast

[Lisa Robinson]
And then also we might just not know that we're in the middle of a trauma reaction. If nobody's told us, nobody's educated us on what trauma triggers are and why this all happens and what is your nervous system and why do I feel up and down all day long and what do I do when I'm too high or what do I do when I'm too low, like if nobody ever taught you about that, how are you supposed to know?

[Announcer]
You're listening to the Recovered Life Show, the show that helps people in recovery live their best recovered lives.

[Damon Frank]
Have you ever been told just move on from something painful that happened in your past? Maybe you've tried. Maybe you know intellectually that you're safe, that the experience is over and it's time to move forward.

But for some reason, your body and emotions don't seem to agree with you. Why does that happen? And why can something that happened years ago still affect how you feel and react today?

Today on the Recovered Life Show, we're exploring why healing from trauma isn't as simple as deciding to move on. Joining me is Dr. Lisa Robinson, a clinical psychologist with more than 20 years of experience helping people work through trauma, anxiety, and stress. She specializes in EMDR therapy, which helps people process traumatic experiences.

We're going to dive into this and talk with her about trauma, memories, and emotional triggers, and why our bodies sometimes continue responding to danger that's no longer there. Welcome to the show, Lisa.

[Lisa Robinson]
Thanks for having me.

[Damon Frank]
So glad that you're here with us today. So magic question here, trauma, it's a very big subject now. Everybody feels they have a little trauma.

If you were raised in the 60s, 70s, or even early 80s, you probably have some sort of trauma as we would look at it today. Why, let me just ask you the big question up front here. Why can't people just get over this?

Because you hear this a lot, just get over it. It happened 30 years ago, get over it.

[Lisa Robinson]
Yeah, well, so it's definitely not that simple, right? There are reasons that the body and the brain get stuck in trauma. When we move through our life, our brain takes in all that sensory data, and it has to work through it.

We have to think about it, talk about it, feel about it, dream about it, maybe do artistic expression around it. There's lots of ways that we work through it. And most of the time, at least for most people, that's easy, but sometimes the brain doesn't get to do that job.

It doesn't finish that job. And when that happens, the experience doesn't get fully digested, metabolized, integrated by the brain. And that experience has been stored in the brain in a different location, in a different format.

It gets stuck in a part of the brain where it's not supposed to stay stuck. And so it becomes this traumatic memory that is stored what we call maladaptively. And so because of the way it's stored in the memory, it becomes easily triggered.

We get stuck in what we call trauma time, where there are parts of the brain don't realize that the trauma is over and that we are safer today, and that the rules of kind of survival are different today than they were back in the trauma. So it's really a brain thing. The brain didn't finish its job.

And so now it's easily triggered, and the brain is operating on principles as if the trauma was still ongoing.

[Damon Frank]
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I said in the opening, intellectually, you kind of know you're in a safe place, right? And this is the thing that I see a lot when we do TikTok Lives or in our Recovered Life community. People will still be trying to process it.

And when you have a conversation with them, they'll say, you know, I intellectually know I'm not in danger right now. But it's very strange. It's almost like the twilight zone.

There seems to be like there's intellectually what you know.

[Lisa Robinson]
Correct.

[Damon Frank]
And then there is the body feeling it. And you know, that big famous book, we always talk about the body keeps a score. It's like it's almost so is it like almost a muscle memory that we're talking about here?

[Lisa Robinson]
It's there's a disconnect, right? Insight and understanding doesn't always change the way how trauma is stored in the body, right? So I can know intellectually that I'm safe enough, that I have value, etc.

But it doesn't always sync up with the body because of the way the experiences are stored. Old learning is dominant and it is shaping the way I am responding in my environment today.

[Damon Frank]
What is a trigger? Because we hear a lot about this, like trauma triggers. So intellectually, you know, you're safe.

You're sitting there. Maybe, you know, I know there's a lot of people that have trauma from abuse and you're intellectually safe. But all of a sudden, something triggers you.

What actually is a trigger? Because we hear that all the time. I was triggered.

What is that?

[Lisa Robinson]
So a trauma trigger, a trigger is just something that is reminding your brain of old danger. And so because of the way parts of your brain are stuck in what we call trauma time, the brain is going to be looking for any kind of signs of potential danger, right? When something happens, and it's traumatic, the brain links different kind of red flags for danger with your fight or flight system.

And so when our nervous system, right, our brain, our spinal cord, all the peripheral nerves, that is constantly scanning for danger, right? And so when it notices one of those red flags for danger, which can be an internal feeling of like helplessness, it can be something that we sense, the smell of a perpetrator's cologne. It can be a moment when somebody, there's a large male being very dominant that reminds your brain of old danger.

That is the trigger, right? Our brain is being reminded of old danger and it's acting like it's happening in the present.

[Damon Frank]
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and the thing is, is that it seems very real.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I know you work with people with EMDR therapy every day on this. I do, right?

[Lisa Robinson]
It does.

[Damon Frank]
It's real. It seems real. And you know, and I think to people around the person who is suffering, they look at this and it's like, this just looks crazy.

Why is the person acting out like this? Why is the person doing this? But to the person that's going through it, it feels real.

[Lisa Robinson]
Because it is real, right? Traumatic memories are stored in the brain differently and they're stored in a way that where you reliving it. When we're reminded of that old danger of that old situation, right?

The body acts as if it's happening now. And so it feels very real. If we had gone through a difficult situation, but the brain finished its job, right?

It worked through it, it processed it, it digested it, and then it stored it in the brain in kind of a healthy way, in an adaptive way, we wouldn't have that. It would just feel like an old thing that happened to us that was bad, but it would feel older, farther away, more distant. Like the brain filed it away as something that happened in the past.

But with traumatic memories that didn't get fully processed by the brain, the brain, parts of the brain involved in your fight or flight or freeze system think it's happening now or think it's about to happen again.

[Damon Frank]
How does addiction fit into this? Because I know a lot of people with trauma end up in addictive patterns, whether it's alcohol, drugs, other addictions. What is the link there?

Do you see that a lot, people that have trauma, then will either go into some sort of addictive pattern to block it out? Is there a link there?

[Lisa Robinson]
Certainly there is, right? There's believed to be lots of trauma in the history of individuals who have kind of addictive patterns. And addiction, whether it's substances or sex or overworking, they help us try to kind of contain or get away from hard feelings or even symptoms.

Like if I'm overworking or I'm using substances or whatever pattern, it can help me reduce or at least ignore symptoms that are present. Or it can help me not feel big, bad feelings as much if I'm in the middle of something else, if I'm distracted by that thing.

[Damon Frank]
So let me ask you this, because what are some less obvious signs that people are being triggered by trauma? Because I know a lot of people in my life through just my journey of addiction recovery over 33 years and just doing the Recovered Life Show and doing lives and dealing with a lot of people that are in recovery. I've met a lot of people that I could even pick it out and I'm not even a trained professional.

It's like, oh, that's trauma. That's a trauma response that somebody's having, either being very confrontational or setting boundaries that are way too inappropriate. And you see it, you start to pick it up.

And at first you just think it's just kind of like, maybe the person's not so nice. Or why is a person always agitated? Or why are they always so defensive?

What are some of these subtle things that somebody that's listening to this might not know that they're actually having a trauma response?

[Lisa Robinson]
Got it. So you're describing kind of leading with a fight response. Remember, our nervous system has survival defenses, fight, flee, freeze, fawn.

So you're describing the fight response. If you lead with the fight response, the brain is trying to protect itself and the body by having outbursts, by pushing people away, by being overly aggressive. But there are other options.

It could just be the flight response. The person might leave really quickly, or they may avoid certain situations that they know will be triggering. You might see somebody freeze.

They might pause and literally have difficulty moving or speaking temporarily. They might dissociate where suddenly there's a disconnection. They're not really in their body anymore.

They're not really in control of the body. Or they might fawn, which is kind of people-pleasing, submitting, trying to make sure that we are avoiding conflict. Those all come from difficult life experiences where old learning was, the way I say stay safe is to run or to freeze or to submit and appease.

[Damon Frank]
Yeah. A lot of the failure to thrive is trauma too, right? So people that are just stuck, because I see a lot of people that say, well, it's ADHD, it's this, it's that.

And I'm like, really? Because I don't see that in other things. But just this idea of being stuck in this repetitive pattern, it's almost like, I mean, I was going to say, if we were going to compare trauma to a movie, which I know is not a scientific thing, but I'm like, that's how I think, you know, Lisa, that's how I think.

If we're going to compare it to a movie, it's kind of Groundhog's Day, isn't it? Your every day is a new day, but you're living the same thing over and over, correct, right?

[Lisa Robinson]
Yes, I would agree with that, right? We have the same patterns, all those patterns that we're trying to keep us alive and safe. It's old learning, right?

When we're in trauma, or we're growing up in difficult worlds, right? We learn how to stay safe, we adapt, we have survival adaptations, whether that's not expressing anger or having outbursts, because that's the way we stay safe, or not expressing emotions or not feeling emotions or not trying new things, because the world taught us that life is dangerous. Trauma taught us that.

[Damon Frank]
Yes, yes. What are some of the things that can happen in early childhood or through childhood that creates this kind of trauma that you're talking about?

[Lisa Robinson]
There's just so many things. So the obvious ones, right? Physical abuse, emotional abuse, right?

Telling a child that they are essentially a piece of crap and unlovable and are the problem creates lots of problems growing up, right? But it can also just be emotional neglect. Neglect tends to be, at least in my experience, even harder, right?

So the absence of things can create these problems. The absence of love, caring, safety, of even meeting basic needs can create these patterns that are problematic. Abandonment, right?

A father or a mother leaves suddenly. The child tends to self-blame. It's essentially a survival adaptation, right?

If I'm the problem, then I can just be better and I can fix it. And I can stay attached to caregivers that maybe aren't the best, right? So self-blame, shame, that can be a way to survive for a young child who can't survive on their own.

[Damon Frank]
I love that you're talking about neglect here. We just did an episode and somebody had brought that up. And I had never thought about neglect actually being one of the main causes of trauma, but it really is, right?

I mean- It really is.

[Lisa Robinson]
And it's hard to undo.

[Damon Frank]
People not doing the best they can in situations.

[Lisa Robinson]
And it's really hard to undo. Generally, when I'm working with somebody with EMDR, it is often easier to undo physical abuse, even sexual abuse versus neglect. Because the child takes that in as, I am no good, I'm bad, I'm worthless, I'm unlovable, which can be hard to begin to shift.

I mean, it's doable. You can do it. But in my experience, it can be even harder than abuse.

[Damon Frank]
Yeah, I can see that now. I never really thought about that. But neglect is so...

And I think when you see, especially just day-to-day life, when you see people that are recovering from addictions, they have anxiety, depression, all these things that could be linked to trauma. I know there was a fad for a period of time where every addiction had to do with trauma. I don't know if I'd necessarily buy that, to be honest with you, because I know a lot of people that never had trauma that have addiction.

But I can see it. It's the same feeling. It's the same loop of being on this treadmill that you can't get off.

Codependency, seeking out people that aren't really good for you to try to fix that abandonment. Do you see this a lot? What is the number one thing that you see regarding trauma that is the most impactful for people's life?

Or is it numerous things?

[Lisa Robinson]
It's numerous things, I would say. I think most of us experience some trauma over the course of our life. I don't think that the DSM-5's definition of trauma is always helpful.

And I don't think it captures the depth and the breadth of what can be traumatic for a person. And so it can be lots of different things. Yeah.

[Damon Frank]
I'm going to ask you the magic question here, which everybody listening to this wants to know. Can you really heal from trauma? Because I hear people say no sometimes.

That once you have it, you have it. It's always going to be there. It's always going to trigger you.

But you're saying you can heal from trauma.

[Lisa Robinson]
You can heal from it. Now, are you going to be the same person that you would have been had trauma not entered your life? No.

But we can actually grow. There's something called post-traumatic growth, where we can actually recover from trauma, meaning reduce trauma-related symptoms. And we can even grow spiritually.

We can be more grateful for people or things in our world. We can have new missions or new values based upon that. So yes, we can reduce symptoms of PTSD or other trauma-related conditions remarkably well.

Now, the treatments aren't easy because it involves going back and getting your brain to work through these things, and involves kind of new learning, exposure to situations that we prefer to avoid, because the brain has to update its software essentially about what is safe versus not safe. So it's not easy, but it's certainly possible to reduce symptoms with the right support.

[Damon Frank]
It is really. I mean, and is that what EMDR really is? Is it a reprogramming?

It is a reprogramming of how you think.

[Lisa Robinson]
It's a reprocessing, I would say, right? So remember when I said we take in all that event data, and then the brain works through it, right? We think about it, talk about it, feel about it.

It essentially reboots that information processing system, and it gives your brain another opportunity to work it through. So in EMDR, for example, or really any trauma, most trauma-focused treatments, right, your brain is working this thing through, your brain and your body. You're sorting through the pieces.

You're understanding what happened. You're integrating new information into the memory network. So then that traumatic memory gets stored in the brain in a healthy way with new understandings, with new insights, with new essentially adaptive information that helps the brain notice that this is over, that this happened.

And today I am safer. I have more choices. I have more control than I did in the middle of that.

And in that, new learning does occur, right? I then learn what safety is today. I don't have to be perfect.

I can be safe and be imperfect. I can be safe and set a boundary. I can be safe even if I go to a bar where there are men or whatever the trauma kind of triggers were.

[Damon Frank]
You know, it's interesting because that you say this, because for years, just doing peer support and meeting a lot of people and helping people along the way, they'll ask me like, well, how did you get over, you know, how did you get over, break the cycle of this? And I said, you know, I brainwashed myself. I said, honestly, I really did.

I literally, because I, this was before EMDR therapy was a thing. This was before I had the resources for any of that later on. You know, I did go to therapy, but I had great anxiety in my mid twenties, really suffering from addiction.

And you know, my path was 12 step because that was the only thing that was really there. But you know, I literally brainwashed myself. I literally learned how to rewrite those channels.

I look at them like of, of, of like, you know, yes, I see, I'm feeling this, but it does not mean that this is, is this truly, am I truly safe? Yes, I am. Okay.

Let's feel that new experience, you know, and using energy work and things that were a lot less sophisticated, but work very, very well. Meditation, things like that, just staying in the presence of being all right in the here and now, you know, because I think that that's the big one, like that I see that people that have trauma or really any type of trauma, they're not okay in the here and now the here and now is a dangerous place. That's why I think addiction is so big.

Cause you just don't want to be here. Lisa, you're like right here, right now is not a good place to be. I need to be somewhere else.

And you know, and I found that most of it was the reverse in healing was a reverse is to be able to say, there is no other place that I need to be than right here, right now, that even though I might be feeling and thinking certain things doesn't necessarily mean that that is the case. And I can make a choice. Now I can make a choice to feel something else.

And I'm choosing to feel something else. Not easy. I'm not going to say it's easy, not at all, but it does work.

I mean, at the end of the day, cause you're building those new neural pathways, right?

[Lisa Robinson]
Yes, you are. Right. You were about new learning.

You're talking about exposure so that the brain will update its software about what's safe versus not safe today. Right? And so that's dealing with trauma triggers.

Here's what's happening. My brain is telling me I'm in danger right now, but I'm not, it's just old danger that my brain is warning me about because a trigger reminded me of the old danger. And so you were talking it through, thinking it through and staying in the situation.

So your brain could have a new data point that, you know, I'm connected to this thing or I'm near this trigger, but I am still safe. And you probably were working on calming the nervous system to help the nervous system learn that the danger is over, that there's a new rule. Safety is different today than it was back then.

[Damon Frank]
Well, this is the whole thing with talk therapy, right? Like, because I, this is a non-clinical view of it, but I think I've seen people go into talk therapy and get worse because what they're doing is reliving it over and over and over again in a safe way. Now I'm not saying it doesn't help at all.

I'm not, I'm not saying that obviously it does, especially as people talk, but being stuck in being broken is probably the worst hell that you could be in that I see, right? Is that, is that the difference between EMDR and regular talk therapy? What's the difference?

[Lisa Robinson]
So talk therapy is kind of a top-down approach, right? You start with thoughts, narratives, words. EMDR is what we call a bottom-up approach, meaning you're starting with the body, emotions, sensations, action urges, kind of subcortical processes.

And so it's different, right? So the nervous system learns through new experiences. It also can learn when we release kind of fight or flight energy that got trapped in the nervous system.

So top-down or talk therapy can be fantastic in terms of understanding, connecting, and making links and patterns in changing behaviors and ways of thinking that work against us. But the nervous system doesn't always learn that the event is over just through explanation and insight. Sometimes you need something more body-based, which is like EMDR, somatic experiencing, there are other ones that work bottom-up, right?

They work with the bottom directly because trauma is not, is often not just a narrative or a memory in your brain. It's held in the body. So the body has to be involved in a lot of trauma work that I've seen.

Not all of it.

[Damon Frank]
So for layman's serbs, basically, it's not only you're retraining how you think and process, but your body is also releasing that.

[Lisa Robinson]
Your body is releasing stress, trauma, trapped kind of survival energy, that fight or flight that then you had to clamp down on in order to stay safe. Like you weren't able to fight the parent that was being hateful. You weren't able to run because you're a little kid, for example, right?

So that fight or flight injury gets trapped in our nervous system, which really harms our body over time. And so sometimes you have to get that kind of energy that's been trapped, that survival defense, you have to get it released. Top-down therapies, talk therapy doesn't do that.

Now you don't always need to. I've done talk therapies, cognitive processing therapy, and things shifted dramatically because his thinking wasn't right about this particular situation. He was overlooking something.

So in some situations, talk therapy works beautifully to resolve it if there's kind of a missing piece that they're not seeing. But a lot of times it doesn't. A lot of times you got to work with the body and release that energy and kind of complete that fight or flight response that got stalled out.

[Damon Frank]
In your opinion, what other things should people do that have trauma besides EMDR therapy, in addition to, I should say, in addition to EMDR?

[Lisa Robinson]
So the first one would be finding a good trauma therapist, right? Whether that's EMDR or another trauma-focused therapy, there are different ones. Cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure, somatic experiences, there are different ones.

But you can also just work, not just work, you can also work to build safety in your world as best as you can. You can notice what, so essentially we want the nervous system to begin to notice safety, control, stability, agency, right? So if you can begin to recognize moments of safety, moments of control, moments of choice, and highlight those repeatedly every day, or you can build safety into your world.

Like, how do you make your world more physically safe, right? Can you do that at home? How can you make your world more interpersonally safe?

Can you distance from more toxic people or harmful, unsafe people and bring in more safe people? Can you take care of your body to help with stability, food, exercise, hydration, being in nature, whatever it is? Can you begin to practice setting boundaries with people as a way of building safety?

Can you do grounding or mindfulness, mindfulness exercises so you're in the present versus dissociated or disconnected from life, or just kind of looping in your brain over the traumas that have happened? Like, those are some of the things. And then reconnecting to your body, which for some people can be really hard if the body feels unsafe.

Those are some ways. And then, of course, managing trauma triggers, right? We control our understanding, our narrative, or how we're talking to ourselves about it, and then our response.

So there's lots of different ways to begin to respond to triggers in our world, right? How do I calm my nervous system? How do I recognize, oh, hell or heck, I've been triggered, right?

And here's what's happening in my body. And maybe then I can recognize what the trigger is. Maybe I can't.

I can't always recognize what the trigger is, and that's okay. But then I can begin to calm my body through lots of different strategies. And then I can begin to differentiate old danger from new danger, right?

In the minute, am I in danger now, or is this just old danger that my brain is reminding me of? If it's old danger, then I calm my nervous system. If it's new danger, if there's a tiger in the room, then obviously I need to get out of the room or fight the tiger, right?

[Damon Frank]
Because really you're on autopilot, right? I mean, is that what we're saying? Because, and I want to talk with you more about that in the after the show.

Okay. About how to get off autopilot, because I think people with trauma do not always know, in my experience, that they're having a traumatic response to something, a trauma response to something. And you will see abused people seek out people that abuse them.

Like I always say, it's so funny because I will talk to some of those, I'll get calls, Lisa, after I do a TikTok live, or I'll get a message saying, oh, my son or daughter or husband or wife or brother and sister has an addiction problem. And it's all really about them. And I'll ask them and I'll say, well, was your dad an alcoholic or a friend's alcoholic guy?

And they're codependent and they're seeking out alcoholics. And someone's creating them in some cases. And the alcoholics are seeking the codependent, right?

And everybody has trauma and everybody's seeking to relive the same experience. How do you, this whole thing of being on the wheel, can you talk about that a little bit? Because it's like people with trauma don't know that they're having a trauma response.

[Lisa Robinson]
They might not. And they may be doing that repetition. So there's a concept called repetition compulsion, where we create different parts of our trauma, right?

So if I'm a child, a female child, and I'm sexually abused by somebody, I may then become a stripper or a prostitute or whatever, or engage in high risk kind of behaviors. We kind of think about that as we're not exactly sure why it happens, but maybe we're trying to undo or have a different outcome. Or maybe it's a kind of a re-experiencing symptoms when we're stuck in trauma, right?

Our brain brings the trauma back up in an attempt to work it through. So we might engage in those types of activities. And then also we might just not know that we're in the middle of a trauma reaction.

If nobody's told us, nobody's educated us on what trauma triggers are and why this all happens and what is your nervous system and why do I feel up and down all day long? And what do I do when I'm too high? Or what do I do when I'm too low?

Like if nobody ever taught you about that, how are you supposed to know?

[Damon Frank]
Yeah. And you know what a lot of people just think it's their personality.

[Lisa Robinson]
They do. And a lot of people are blamed, right? Borderline personality disorder, for example, is a trauma-related condition.

And so then they're labeled borderline personality, and that comes with a whole bunch of stigma and such, when in they probably had a lot of trauma early in life. And so they had to adapt and try to survive as best as they could in that home environment. And then they grow up and they grow out and those same strategies are stuck and no longer serve them.

[Damon Frank]
Yeah. I see that with BPD, also narcissism. People say everybody's a narcissist now.

Sometimes it's just a protection mechanism. It's like, I am not going to be here. I am not going to let you hurt me.

It has nothing to do with them trying to manipulate you. It's more about them. They don't want to be manipulated.

[Lisa Robinson]
And a defense against actually a lot of self-loathing generally is also.

[Damon Frank]
You know, final question here before we go into the after the show. There's a lot of people that be listening to this and they're like, you know what? Clearly I have some sort of trauma.

People will say this and they'll say, but you know what? I'm not going to be able to fix this. It's always been in my life.

It's always happening for me. It's a generational thing. A lot of the times people with trauma have kids with trauma.

Is there a way out of this? Can you really heal from trauma? Can you really heal from it?

[Lisa Robinson]
Yes, you can absolutely heal with it. Heal from it. If you get the right support.