#533: Paul Conti, MD How Trauma Works and How to Heal From It

A person should be able to talk about what’s going on inside of them because it’s burying those unhealthy seeds, so to speak, that then compounds original trauma into something that can end up being far, far worse with a whole cascade of problems. It could be depression. It could be substances. It could be self-harm. It could be an eating disorder. There's so much that gets compounded when the original trauma gets pushed outside of consciousness and outside of communication.

Our lives and the world around us can seem to us to be very helpless and hopeless at times. We can feel helpless and the world can seem hopeless. And that’s not the case.

I do believe, if we work hard enough toward them, there can be silver linings to anything, no matter how bad it is.

More lithium, including more lithium in the groundwater, so small amounts of lithium that are higher in all of us, seem to sort of make everything better. It seems like there's less depression. There's less violence. There may be less dementia.

Where it all has to start is a search for truth. Because trauma changes... our feelings and emotions about things, it then changes how we think and what our memories mean. So, we need to look at what is the person's narrative about trauma, if they're identifying that there's trauma, and if not, what is the narrative about self? Because unless we understand that, then it's like trying to solve... a math problem, but you don't know what the equation is.

I would describe trauma as anything that causes us emotional or physical pain, that surpasses our coping mechanisms, that makes us feel, then, overwhelmed. It often overwhelms our nervous system, both body and mind, and then really leaves a mark on us as we move forward.

We've evolved a system that purveys mental healthcare largely without attention to the actual human being—and this is a huge problem.

If trauma arouses shame, then the trauma itself immediately alters our perception mechanisms that we can use to understand the trauma and navigate our way through it.

Dopamine is like a currency. People say, ‘What does dopamine do?’ It’s like saying, ‘What does a dollar do?’ It depends on where we’re spending it.

Vicarious trauma comes from, really, this wonderful fact that we can be empathic and empathically attuned to other people, and we can feel what they’re feeling. That’s a wonderful thing that we can do that for one another, but it also makes us so susceptible to other people’s suffering and pain.

Your willingness to talk about your own trauma is so powerful. It's so powerfully helpful because you're pushing against reflexive stigma—because trauma makes reflexive shame and reflexive stigma, and that's what makes people go underground, so to speak, with their trauma, and that's where confusion comes in.

Selective abstraction is when we take one detail from a big picture and we construct the story of that whole big picture around the detail.