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Feb. 8, 2023 - Straight White American Jesus
33:55
It's In the Code Ep. 38: Understanding Trauma with Dr. Laura Anderson Part I

Many of the themes and topics we explore in “It’s In the Code” figure prominently in the experience of those who have been traumatized by participation in high-control religious environments. But what is “trauma”? How is it possible that something as widespread and seemingly mundane as participation in very mainstream American religious communities can be “traumatizing”? Dan finds the answers to these and other questions in this interview with Dr. Laura Anderson, founder and head of the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, which specializing in working with those processing religious trauma. Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163 To Donate: Venmo: @straightwhitejc https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series with Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And this is a little bit different from the normal format today.
I am joined by Dr. Laura Anderson, who is the founder and director of the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I've shared before the experience and the privilege of being a practitioner with the center, working with coaching some people who are working through religious trauma.
And I was sort of corresponding with Laura and I do this series it's in the code and it's it's actually strangely similar to a small group that I ran with the center exploring some of these themes because a lot of the themes we talk about in this series can be Traumatic for people or reflect that.
And I hear that from all of you when you email me.
And as always, I welcome the emails, danielmillerswage at gmail.com.
But I can feel the energy from that.
So many of the topics I talk about are also topics I work through with clients.
And so I've invited Laura to join us for a couple interviews here.
To sort of talk about that dimension, because I think it's part of this notion of things being in the religious code, of just sort of being part of it or of decoding it and helping us to understand why it is that so often these things are trauma.
So I begin by saying, Dr. Laura Anderson, welcome to It's in the Code and Straight White American Jesus.
Thank you.
It's so wonderful to be here.
Yeah.
I'm really glad that we can have this conversation.
Yeah, and so you are literally an expert in topics of religious trauma, and one of the things that first comes up, and I'll just throw this at you, is what is, quote unquote, if people could see the scare quotes, you know, the air quotes, I'm doing them, Trauma.
What is it?
And the reason I ask, this is something that will occupy us here, I think, in the next interview, is I think people often think of trauma as sort of foreign or really, really big.
We have a sense that, yeah, if I was carjacked or something, that would be traumatic.
Or if I was, you know, maybe abused in some way, that would be traumatic.
Or if I'm a veteran returning from a war zone, of course that's traumatic.
But trauma is more than that.
Tell us just if you would, what is trauma?
What do we mean by that?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's obviously the best place to start.
And even as I say that, you know, there's not a succinct answer of like, here's the universal definition of trauma.
But as we've continued with research, as more interventions have come out and understanding trauma and how that operates in our body, we do know that trauma is not the thing that happens to you.
So You had mentioned some things like the car accident, the war, these really big catastrophic events, even when we're talking about religion, sometimes like experiencing cults or altar calls or whatnot.
Those things can result in trauma, but the thing, the event, the experience that happens in and of itself is not necessarily trauma.
But trauma is the result of anything that could be too much, too fast, too soon, That kind of overwhelms our body or our nervous system's capacity to cope and return back to a sense of normal, normalcy or safety.
And so essentially that means trauma is not the thing that happens to us.
It's the way that our body, our nervous system responds to the thing that happens to us, which means that trauma is highly subjective.
What results in trauma for you may or may not be for me and vice versa, and it's embodied.
It's not something that you go, oh, this thing happened, it's in the past, and I can walk away from it, and now I'm in the present moment.
It's one of those things that overwhelms us to the point where that energy gets stuck in our bodies and then is looking for a way out.
There's maybe more conversations to have around that, but that's kind of the short definition of what is trauma.
Yeah, so I want to we'll come back to that embodied piece that I was thinking of that and talk about people to where does trauma live like what like a sort of where does it live and how does it live in us?
But more than that even did you just touch on this thing that trauma is different for everybody or or or maybe the the the responses or not, but what could cause it?
Proximate cause the trigger whatever word we want to use for that can vary.
I think that that's hard for people to understand too because people will have the same experience and like one person.
sort of processes it okay and it doesn't have lasting effects and another person feels really encumbered by it like long after it goes away what can some of those causes be and again i think everybody has some sense that what provokes it cause may not be the right word what provokes it can be really big but how or is it the case that more mundane things can also be the causes of Yeah.
Yeah.
Another great question.
And I think the answer is ultimately yes.
Single incidents can cause this as well as what you call more mundane things.
That's where I like to talk about, this is in like a non-comparative way, but what I call single incident trauma versus a more complex trauma.
So a single incident trauma is going to be exactly that.
There was this thing that happened that was really big and overwhelming, and it resulted in trauma.
That could be your car accident.
That could be a natural disaster.
What's important to note is there was a before, and then this thing happened, and now we're in the after part of it.
Whereas when we look at complex trauma, there's often not a before and after.
It's more of an ongoing, persistent, consistent, inescapable threat that's happening.
It could be large or small, but our body is in this place of activation, feeling either real or perceived danger, threat and overwhelm, an inability to come back to safety.
This is where we start to see things like domestic violence, cults, You know, like living in countries that are constantly in war with one another, systems of oppression, and I would put religious trauma in here as well, especially when we're talking about high control religions and just kind of this lifestyle.
Like you said, there's maybe not one thing that has happened, but it's over time these things that are very overwhelming that then So let me, I think all of that makes sense.
They come out as hypervigilance, all sorts of different physiological and psychological issues that then usually can wreak havoc in our lives. - So let me, I think all of that makes sense.
I wanna try to paint a scenario maybe for listeners.
And you can tell me if this is a good scenario or not, because what stands out to me that is the notion of repetition, because most of the folks I talked to through the center, and I know that some have had, as you say, like the single incident trauma, but most are that complex trauma.
It's years and years and years of something, whatever that is.
And so I think of, for example, a topic that comes up a lot is so-called purity culture or something like that, or the idea of living as God wants one to live.
And you referenced this notion of hypervigilance.
A part of a lot of religious backgrounds that clients come from is one that says we have to constantly be sort of policing our actions and make sure that we are, in Christian language, right, bringing every thought into captivity and Thinking and doing only things that glorify God and so forth.
And so we're sort of conditioned over time, repeated over and over and over and over that this is how one has to live, that being a good Christian is to constantly be aware and watch yourself and make sure that you're thinking the right things and doing the right things and so forth.
And over a long period of time, what I encounter for folks is that it creates this kind of thing where it's like a switch is turned on that they can't turn off.
And so in all realms of their life, they're constantly sort of looking over their shoulder or being aware of how they're being perceived and so forth.
And that's the kind of trauma response where they just can't turn it off.
They'll find themselves up in the middle of the night, you know, cataloging things they did during the day that might not have met their boss's expectations or their parents' expectations or their partner's expectations because the way that they sort of were conditioned to think about and experience God, It impacts everything they do.
Is that the kind of scenario that we're thinking of?
Just to put it in perspective for people, because I hear people all the time who are like, well, you talk about trauma and I kind of wonder if like, maybe I experienced trauma.
Is that a, is that like a fair description of the kind of thing that we might be talking about?
Yeah, and I think purity culture is a great example of that, where we look and we go, well, gosh, like no one thing happened to me, but these messages over time by parents, pastors, leadership figures, these people who are really important and influential in my life and have a lot of sway, including over consequences that I might face for stepping out of line.
And so what happens, the way our brains and bodies work is that as messages come in, especially as they're repeated messages, Or messages that have fear connected to them or messages from a caregiver.
They get into our bodies.
They create what we call neuropathways.
And those neuropathways create chemical pathways down to our body so that when a message or something comes into our brains, it sends a signal down to our body and we have a physiological response.
So, you know, when we hear a message over and over and over again, sex is dirty and disgusting, except for this one context that's ingrained so much so that we may have adverse responses if we see something on TV or we see, you know, friends or family who are engaging in public displays of affection.
And we might be like, oh, like that's gross because I'm told that I'm not supposed to do that before marriage.
Well, what happens then is Even if we go, you know, we kind of grow out of that and we say, gosh, that's not something that I believe anymore.
I'm walking away from that.
I'm, you know, kind of engaging in my own relationships.
I might notice I still have a physiological response to seeing and or participating in that, which can be very confusing because we go, well, I don't cognitively believe that, but my body is having this response.
And I think that's Kind of a tie-in to, you know, what you're talking about and why we, you know, with the, in the code, there's all these messages that are coming in that don't just stop at our heads.
They go down into our bodies and they, they live there so much so that even when we cognitively walk away, we still can have the after effects unless we're actually addressing them.
And that's where we start to see Trauma and what we're calling religious trauma.
Religious is just the adjective that helps us better understand the context that all of this took place.
But that's where we start to see these messages over time, these practices over time, these ways of relating over time now live in us in a way that causes significant distress.
Even if we've been able to cognitively untangle them and walk away from them, we're still living.
Yeah, and you're touching on, like, right where I want to go, which is the way that these live in our body.
I'm not a brain expert.
You're more of a brain expert than I am.
But part of the issue, right, is we can all remember things, and we know that they're memories.
We experience them as memories.
But we can probably all also like I don't know maybe it's that song that comes on the radio and you hear it and you you're right back where you were when you heard it and that could be a really positive experience or maybe it's a smell like I don't know you smell an apple pie or something and you're back in grandma's kitchen when you were five and she was showing you how to do that weird thing you do on the edge of the crust or whatever whatever it is it can be really positive.
But it's those smells and things that sometimes they don't live in our brains as, like, we don't experience them as memories.
They sort of short-circuit that, and so instead of remembering sitting in Grandma's kitchen, or remembering where I was when I heard this song, or having a good feeling of nostalgia, or even remembering, I don't know, how scared you were the first time you went to a haunted house, or, you know, whatever, but it's a memory, and your body knows that it's sort of in the rearview mirror.
It activates now.
And that's what people feel.
And I guess what I want to ask is, because what I have to work with people with a lot, and I know you do, is That as you say, cognitively, like, I don't believe that.
I know that that's in the past.
I know all these things.
And we live in this society that often thinks that it's about belief and it's about knowledge, but they're like, they still feel it.
So I guess what I'm asking is, is what does it feel like?
How does, cause I also have people, as I know you do say, how do I know if this is true or how do I begin to uncover what's going on and untangle it?
And so I guess what I would ask is what does it feel like?
How do we listen to our bodies?
To begin understanding these memories that are, they're embodied.
They're not coded as memories.
They're there living in us and sort of dragging us into the past every time they happen.
What does it feel like?
What should we be like attending to in the body?
What is trauma?
Where does it live?
How does it feel?
Yeah.
Well, like you said, trauma does live in the body.
There's a really wonderful therapist named Pete Walker who coins the term emotional flashback.
And essentially what that means, colloquially when we hear the term flashback, we think of like a very vivid image that kind of flashes into our mind of maybe a memory or a scene from some time in the past.
And that often does happen for people who have experienced overwhelming events.
But more often than not, when we're talking about a more complex trauma, we are experiencing what we're calling emotional flashbacks.
And it's more of that feeling of like, I'm not here in the present moment.
This feels familiar to something in the past.
I may not even be able to put a lot of context around it.
It was grandma's house.
I was five.
Here's what happened.
But it's just going like, ooh, this feels familiar.
I feel like I've been here before.
I feel like I'm a kid again.
I feel like I don't have a voice again.
And so a lot of times if we start to tune in, we might notice, well, it doesn't feel like it's the year 2023.
I don't feel like I'm this adult.
I don't feel like I have a sense of empowerment.
I feel weak.
I feel vulnerable.
I feel scared.
And so if we start to notice that maybe our presence in the moment is not necessarily matching what's happening around us, that can sometimes be an indicator that there's something else going on.
Now, whether or not we have trauma, our bodies operate under the kind of umbrella of familiarity, of felt sense, right?
So even if they're not negative or overwhelming or bad memories, we go, oh gosh, like that deja vu moment.
I feel like I've been here before.
And so it's important to recognize that we might have some of these emotional flashbacks that are not connected at all to traumatic events or experiences or overwhelm.
That's just part of the human experience, but that is very common.
In traumatized individuals.
And so we're looking at things like, because we know trauma lives in the body, there's often a physiological response when a real perceived or remembered threat comes our way.
That's very subjective.
Again, what is threatening for you may or may not be for me, but we would probably start to notice physiological cues.
It could be my heart starts to feel like it's racing.
Maybe my chest tightens.
Perhaps my cheeks get really red.
Or I feel like there's maybe this energy coursing through me.
Perhaps I feel like I need to run away.
Or I'm getting ready to kind of puff up and fight.
Or maybe I feel like I need to like get as small as I possibly can and hide.
Everybody's going to be different in terms of like kind of their go-to responses, but we look at the physiology that helps us determine if perhaps there's something going on internally that is kind of different than our external situation.
I think that's really important to note.
We can't always determine what we're going to be triggered by or how a trigger is going to impact us.
I live in the South.
They play Christian contemporary Christian music everywhere.
I cannot I cannot tell you which stores I will go in and they'll be, you know, playing something.
So I can't avoid that.
And there are some days where I walk into a store and I'm like, you know, jamming out to old worship music, not because it necessarily is something I would normally sing or believe anymore, but it's just it happens.
And then other days I walk in and it's a creepy crawly feeling and I'm like, I have to get out of here.
This does not feel safe to me.
So I think it's important to notice that our bodies just experience things differently, and that's where we start to notice whether or not it's trauma, like we're dealing with a response, a trauma-like response to something in the present moment, even though we may cognitively know that we're safe.
Yeah.
It's one of the things I'm anybody who listens knows I'm a nerd and I'm, you know, so I'm a, I'm a pretty cognitive intellectual type.
And so, yeah, one of the things I've, I've had to learn as I work through any kind of emotional things, they may rise at the level of trauma or not.
It's just learning to listen to the body.
And that, that's what I hear you describing a lot is being able to, in some context, be like, God, I'm like, I'm just in the grocery store and my heart is racing.
Like I just ran a mile, like, What is going on and beginning to untangle that?
Tied in with that, I wonder if you could talk for a minute, is there a reluctance to name things trauma, right?
To trivialize or minimize The reality of that, because I encounter that with people that are like, well, a lot of people in the world are worse off than me, or they've been through worse things.
And of course, and almost like, uh, as if, I don't know, they're trivializing the experience of others.
If they, if they name what they have trauma or just our general cultural uneasiness about.
Acknowledging mental health issues, right.
That I think are much more common than we like to think.
So trauma is what other people go through.
It can't be what I'm going through.
What role do you think that plays, that reluctance to call something trauma?
Yeah, you know, I think about social media immediately.
There's some beautiful things that happen on social media in terms of getting information out and more people have access to things like research on things like trauma.
And so we've gone from like, Everything being taboo and silent, you don't talk about these things, to now we're kind of at this other end of the spectrum where everybody is a narcissist.
Everybody, you know, if you crossed your eyes at me, that traumatized me.
And there's Neither one is maybe necessarily a healthy end of the spectrum to be at.
We're looking for a balance because the fact of the matter is being able to name things for what they are actually can be healing unto itself.
So to understand this is trauma, this is living inside of me, I can understand what these experiences are, does open the door for like support and medicine and connection and being able to like engage in things that would feel very helpful in the healing process.
And so that even unto itself can be an acceptance thing of like, I have to, I have to be accurate and honest about what's happening in me.
I think for so many people who grew up in high control religions or were introduced to it at some point, there is always this idea that was promoted of like, somebody always has it worse than you.
You just need to be thankful or grateful to what God has given you.
You need to, um, You know, be thankful for suffering.
That's always a big thing, right?
And so there's a lot of silencing language in there.
But at the same time then we're learning like if I have an issue, any issue, like I, it is not valid because somebody always does have it worse.
And I really feel like anytime we try to Compare who has it worse, like shame enters the picture and just takes over.
Because the fact of the matter, there's probably always going to be somebody who had a worse experience or a better experience, but that doesn't mean that the experience was invalid or that it wasn't painful or that there wasn't significant ramifications.
And so I prefer to say like, we just go through what we go through and our bodies have responses.
And then we, we deal with that.
We resolve that how we need to.
And because of the way trauma is subjective and we are all unique in our chemical makeup and our histories and environments, like how one thing hits one person is going to be different than another person, even if it's the same event.
I think I have about my siblings, I have other siblings and myself, and we all had the same experience in terms of like who our parents were, the churches we went to, the messages we heard.
And yet how that landed on me was different or similar to different siblings.
And that does not make the experience better or worse or more or less intense.
It's just we have to deal with it in our own unique ways.
So it's important to not compare, but it's also important to be really accurate and honest because we need that.
That's that part of denial.
Like when we can let go of that, it actually opens us up to more healing and really being able to let go of all of that past stuff that we're wanting to.
help.
Yeah, I think of a couple analogies here, right?
Because that notion of being able to name something and the way that that can open us up to, you know, not being labeled or pigeonholed.
I know sometimes people worry about that, right?
Of like, oh, I'm going to be slotted into this.
But we do this with other physical things all the time, right?
We'll go to doctors and specialists until they can finally figure out what it is.
And then we start, okay, now I can chart a path of like, How to manage this or treat this or whatever it is.
I think in terms of identity things right all the LGBTQ people of different different kinds of identities who will talk about like what a revelation it was the first time they encountered the notion of say transgender identity and they're like, oh my God, that's me like and not because a pigeonhole them are defined who they are, but it helps open up those pathways.
And that's that's what I think some of this is.
Maybe we'll move into the specific religious dimensions in our follow-up interview here, but maybe with this, another direction to go or a next thing to think about is, maybe there's somebody listening to this who's like, wow, I've never thought about the kinds of experiences I had as trauma or It's never occurred to me that maybe the reason when anytime I remember sermons by so-and-so, I just find myself angry, right?
Or whatever, right?
Or I'm scanning through the radio stations, and if it ever stops on a Christian station, I've just got to pull over because I'm losing my mind or whatever.
And for some, this could be that instance where they're like, oh my God, maybe that's what that is.
What do people do?
What are some of the kind of first steps people could take if they're coming to a realization and saying, you know what, I think maybe something, it doesn't have to be their religious background, but that's what you and I are sort of focused on.
I think I have experienced this.
What's a kind of next step?
You know, if it's something else physical, we're like, I better go see my doctor and have him, you know, tell me, where does somebody go?
What are some first steps?
Yeah, that's such a great question because I will say for those coming out of high control religions, we are bent towards wanting to have a nice, neat, concise, step-by-step process, right?
Because that's what we came out of.
Like, you do these things and you get this result, right?
And so I hate to burst people's bubbles, but there is no one right way to heal from trauma.
There is no one perfect modality of therapy or coaching or whatever.
Um, it tends to be very, there's things that tend to be pretty helpful in general, but like it doesn't always work for everybody.
Um, but I, I think there is something, um, when we, when we go, gosh, I'm starting to realize like in what you're saying, like I'm having this inflated reaction that in a calm moment, I'm like, wow, that felt much bigger, like a much bigger reaction than what actually happened.
And I think part of, like, twofold is, like, becoming aware of it.
I think that's really important and noticing, like, where is this showing up?
When I work with clients, like brand new clients that are coming in doing an inquiry, inevitably what they'll say is, like, I'm noticing that, like, I'm talking to my partner or my kids or whatever, and they do X, Y, or Z, and my response is so much bigger than what it is.
And I'm starting to become aware of that.
I need to know what to do with it.
So I think the awareness piece is huge.
I think also in that is giving yourself a lot of compassion.
Self-compassion is huge in trauma work because it is very easy to be like, well, it wasn't that bad, or this other person did have it worse, or I've been out of this for 10 years.
I should be over this.
Or, I didn't have this one really big thing happen, so why am I having such an inflated response?
And so to be compassionate to yourself and go, like, hey, I might not understand all of what's happening, but I can't deny that it is happening.
And at the very least, I'm not going to judge and shame myself.
Because when we do that, that tends to isolate us.
It pulls us away from people because we believe there is something wrong with us.
When we lean into that self-compassion, we are able to say like, I don't know what's wrong, but I think I might be open to getting some support and getting some help.
And that might look like connecting to an online community, searching hashtags or, you know, finding social media accounts.
It could be connecting to a podcast.
Like I know you guys have your Patreon and there's many podcasts that do things like that, that develop a sense of community or other social media.
It could look like finding groups in your community, therapists, coaches, people who may be professionally trained to be able to help you navigate through, um, through trauma and really learn how to resolve it in your body, as well as like recover from the other harms that religion may have caused you.
Um, the one thing I'll say is it's usually a very slow process.
Um, when we're talking about coming out of environments that have encompassed our entire identity, and for many of us having been in them since before we could, you know, even walk, you know, or think for ourselves, there is a lot of things that are needing to be untangled.
And so the more we can give ourselves compassion and patience to kind of move through this process, In a slower way, the better it usually is.
So I regret that I can't be like, okay, do this and this and this, and then you're going to be good.
But what works for one person may or may not for the next person.
That said, I usually do hang my hat on a concept called internal safety.
And short or quick thing is like in religion, we are taught that our safety and identity is found external to us.
And that could be whether you're Jehovah's Witness, or Muslim, or LDS, or Evangelical Christianity, CULPS.
We go, here's this way of living that's outside of me.
Here's the rules for thinking and relating.
Here's how I find my identity.
Here's how I know if I'm good or bad.
Here's how I know if I'm doing okay, if I'm safe, if I check these boxes, right?
And it's a divorce from ourselves.
And when overwhelming things happen, we're trying to like kind of Isolate ourselves even more.
So part of trauma healing is coming back home to ourselves and being able to feel safe in our bodies, being able to tolerate sensations and emotions that we have otherwise been cut off from because everything has been external to us.
When we can develop that in our bodies, it actually then allows us to move into more of that trauma resolution work where we can go back and feel the things and continue processing through All that stuck energy from the overwhelming things that have happened to us.
That's really, it's powerful to hear you talking about it.
And I, you've had the experience as well, that notion of awareness and the slowness and the patience.
I've had clients who, you know, after a few months will be like, I feel like I'm not making any progress.
We're done with the same thing.
And often I'll tell them, I'll be like, actually, we're not.
Like if I go back and I look at my notes, Three months ago, you couldn't talk about these things.
What you would talk about is feeling anxious all the time, or angry, or whatever.
Now you're saying, I feel a lot of anger toward this, or that, or this.
And like, that's progress.
Like, you're able to see it, and it can be really illuminating for them.
And I've been through some of these experiences myself, where it really changes things.
Yeah, it is very slow work.
I always like to tell my clients, when you give yourself permission to go slower at the beginning, then you get to go faster.
We start slow because, like I said, trauma can be anything that's too much, too fast, too soon, kind of overwhelms our ability to cope.
Well, notice I didn't say a bad or negative thing.
That's too much, too fast, too soon.
It could be anything, right?
When we cannonball into a pool that we don't know how to swim in, even if we're like, yeah, I want to be here, like we still don't know how to swim.
And so when we enter into that, Slowly, it gives our body time to acclimate and, in this analogy, learn how to swim so that we're out in the deep ends.
We go, hey, I've got resources.
This isn't so scary.
Like, oh yeah, it's a little uncomfortable because I'm learning a new stroke.
I'm learning a new skill or whatever.
But I don't feel like it's going to overwhelm me.
And I think that's the important piece to realize is that even a good, quote unquote, good thing, whatever that is, can be too much, too fast, too soon.
We don't want to overwhelm you.
So we go with the opposite.
If trauma was too much, too soon, too fast, we go, let's slow it down.
And then we start healing from that slower pace so that we actually can go faster.
Yeah, one of the things I also tell people, and I have to remind myself, right, is most of us have spent a lifetime having our bodies shaped in these ways, having these neural networks shaped this way.
It's like a kind of chemical and emotional muscle memory that our whole body has.
It's like, yeah, you spent 20, 30, 40 years becoming the person that you are, and so it's going to take some time and work to To get it back.
Just like in my analogy, if I maybe sit around a little too much, don't work out as much as I should, it's going to take some time to get back to where I might need to be, right?
It's the same kind of analogy with that, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I use that analogy a lot with clients.
I'm like, if you haven't been in the gym in 25 years, you don't go get a hundred pound dumbbells and start, you know, like pumping and then run 10 miles.
Like you're going to do severe damage to your body.
But you could walk at a slow pace and grab those five-pound dumbbells, and you're going to feel it the next day, but you're not going to be in pain.
Like, you're still going to be able to walk.
You're still going to be able to navigate.
So it is that same thing.
We're building up tolerance.
We're building up new habits.
It's the same thing with trauma.
And so I think that it's just really important for people to know that.
Sometimes trauma healing can happen in big cathartic moments.
I've had that happen.
Mostly, it is in tiny moments of little shifts and changes where something different is able to happen than what had happened previously.
And then my life kind of is altered in a good way where I'm like, oh, wow, that doesn't have as much intensity around it anymore.
So I think it's important to recognize the pace of healing from trauma, religious trauma, because that's where I do find my clients having a lot of shame.
Like you said, I should be going faster.
No, we're just... When you've been in it for 40 years, that's a lot to untangle.
It's a lot.
Yeah.
Excuse me, I get all choked up talking about some of this stuff.
I'll just throw out real quickly for listeners or so one resource, a lot of resources really at the Center for Trauma Resolution Recovery.
So if you just Google Center for Trauma Resolution Recovery or Dr. Laura Anderson trauma specialist or anything like that, it'll come up and I would just invite people to go take a look, see those resources.
If that's something that you are interested in pursuing some resources there just to let folks know.
Laura, I want to thank you so much for your time here.
We're going to pick up this conversation again in another interview and really turn to the specifics of religious trauma, because I know that that'll be of interest to folks.
But thank you so much for your time, lending your expertise and shedding light on something that I think is sort of underdeveloped and something that I know for a lot of regular folks who are not specialists is something new and different.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
It's a joy.
Thank you.
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