40: Overcoming PTSD: There is Always Hope (Book Review: Body Keeps the Score)

Hey guys!!
I hope this gives anyone even a teeny tiny bit of hope that there is always hope, and if you need help you're not a failure. I hope you guys enjoy this. Love you

Transcript

Hi everyone :) Welcome back! it's Reese and this is Reese Grey Analyzes and I'm so excited that you guys decided to Adventure with me today~ on Reese Grey Analyzes we look at creations and experiences in art media music and even video games to explore exactly why we think the way we think question what we believe and learn something new~ and we're finally getting into something a little bit more substantial today we're gonna delve into two books here that deal with PTSD responses and we're going to talk about the concept of learned helplessness today yaaaaay so I know that's really like mood Whiplash from like my last videos on like Sriracha the nail industry and like Martha Stewart but you know what let's get into it because "Boo we hate not being unserious boo" so let's be serious so body keeps the score is by besser Vander Kolk and then talking to strangers is by Malcolm Gladwell and let's get this out of the way right right away all right people don't like Malcolm Gladwell because they think that he takes like abstracts and then takes like incorrect conclusions of them and doesn't really honor Academia and like he's a fake academic and stuff so the only thing that we're going to be talking about today the program SERE on that program today which you can look up for yourself if you're concerned with the validity of the study or anything which I think is super fair and we should always like be open to like critique and wary of the things that you know we we study and stuff and like look for a bunch of different options so I just wanted to bring that up right away so you guys don't think I'm some kind of shill but I do think the the study is really really interesting and I think reading up on like PTSD responses and learned helplessness can help us understand ourselves and why we react in way that might like be weird or incorrect under like a traumatic response and sometimes people feel like guilty for the way that they deal with trauma and stress and so this is kind of a way to like explore the way the brain work to try and like find like validity in like those weird feelings that you have so the links to the books and the studies of course are in the description if you would like to read it and of course like make up your own mind about it as well and let me know if you have different conclusions in the comments too and if you want a vent about Malcolm Gladwell do so in the comments sick it to him so in talking to strangers in this book here I actually found this at a Korean Bookshop in Korea like there's some like book shops that have like best-selling books that are in English and so I picked this up and then I looked at Malcolm Gladwell and learned that everybody hates him but--- so in this study here so the SERE program is the Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape program so this program is a program that like Navy Seals go through okay and they had this map experiment which I'll show you in the book and so the program in itself studies like how people react in high stress situations so these Navy Seals of course like they're trained to be like the best of the best and so when they drop them off at a park and then ask them to draw the layout of the park and they do excellent so so if you can see there on this side is the actual layout of the park and on this side is a recreation of a Navy SEAL excellent right I could never freaking do that I don't even understand how they do that so that is what these people are capable of doing and then part of the study what they did is that these seals knew that after they drew this map there was going to be like a mock kidnapping and they're going to be trained how to get through torture basically high stress situations where they like didn't have control of the situation but they knew it would end and for a large part of it understood that they were being trained right so they weren't going to like without a doubt like be in danger or anything after that situation where people were under high stress but they knew the stress was going to end and they knew that in a large way that they were safe and they knew that this was a part of training so you would think think that maybe the stress response would would be lessened however they were asked to draw the map again of the layout and under the stress that is what they were able to draw after so as you can see a lot of their memory has been affected very negatively by trauma and so even though they were like under physical endurance able to endure this their psychological resilience was still affected very greatly by the trauma and I know like maybe this might come across as like a duh thing but and if it does that's fair but to me this was really surprising because I had no idea that people even who were like trained to undergo so much stress how their stress responses would even affect like the task at hand so heavily so that's a huge thing that like I learned like I didn't know that and not only did they have trouble like recalling the map after all of that psychological stress but they also were tasked with like pointing out the person who performed like the test on them like who performed the torture on these Navy Seals and they all picked the wrong person which was really really interesting because their minds were trying to legitimize the fact that they were supposed to be in a safe situation so they all picked like the doctor on the team but the doctor wasn't even a part of that day's experiment which I found really really interesting like trauma affects your memory in such a substantial way that you will accuse someone else who wasn't even there on the day but it's not because they were trying to wrongly accuse someone it was because it was their mind mind's way of protecting themselves since these people they're not supposed to hurt me in a controlled environment this experiment would be conducted by a medical professional and that's just an amazing way that the brain tries to protect you and is just very very surprising to me so of course like gladwell's findings were to highlight how trauma affects perception of that same trauma and your memory and even like Elite people like Elite seals nobody is immune to like trauma responses and anyone under extreme stress is going to have these type of responses like it's not something that can be trained out of you which obviously they were trying to do here in this experiment well at least if you can be trained out of normal trauma responses they didn't figure it out with this experiment so in general duh like every everybody has a difficulty dealing with these complex traumatic events which I think is like a big Comfort to know that even these highly trained best of the best supposedly like physically and mentally people in the end like they're they're like there's still like biological human responses that cannot be helped under trauma and it like can't be trained out of you so I found like a lot of like comfort in that so I hope like sharing that with you guys who like might not have read the book or I might not have known about that like I hope like that in itself gives comfort and Solace because that to me was really profound so let me know I don't know I'm afraid that it comes across as like stupid right but sometimes like when these experiments and stuff like back up these normal brain functions it's I there's something comforting that I find about it and there's also like this disorientation that you see in these map drawing things where it's just like they're kind of on the right track right but not quite but it kind of works as a metaphor as like how people often fail at correctly remembering facts about the traumas that they went through and it's your brain's way of protecting yourself so in a way it's kind of like a testament to be forgiving to yourself and not blame yourself for your mind and body trying to protect it Itself by like misremembering things or remembering things wrong and it's also a testament on how we can treat others as well because I think like with True Crime a lot too like people are very very judgmental when it comes to like how people are acting under interrogation and stuff that like oh that person's not crying oh that person's not acting the right way but you can't predict the way that someone's feeling or act acting under extreme stress and Trauma it's a way to look at people like with more compassion and not to like look at someone and believe that you know the truth about a situation just because someone's supposed to act in one way or another like that's what investigations are for to like get the actual facts of what happened not to like make these Stark judgments on people's motivations based on if they're freaked out enough or something and basically just trauma makes people act in mysterious ways and let me know what you guys think about that in the comments too and this kind of like brought me to my next like point of bringing this book up too is there some type of reason why this happens and again I'm not a medical professional or anything I'm just like a curious person who reads books so don't take any of this as a diagnosis or anything but this is what I learned from this book so my question of like why people stay in contact with their toxic families why people return to abusive relationships why do people like return to things that hurt them despite these like proven trauma responses does that have to do something with like the memory in your brain protecting itself you know like do those two things have connections so in this book body keeps a score by besser Vander Kolk he talks about like in the beginning of the book talks about this experiment of learned helplessness where In a experiment that would be very very very illegal today they took a dog and put it in a cage and administered shock to it and there was two different dogs in one cage the cage was open so the dog was able to escape um every time that the cage was shocking it right the other dog was not allowed to escape you know the the cage was closed and it kept shocking it and then later they did open the cage so he was able to escape even though the dog prior was experiencing like inescapable pain and shock when it was given the option to leave it didn't so they basically used this experiment to say that when you're in an situation where it's inescapable but then you're given away out you don't necessarily take it because you learn learn that there wasn't a way out and you kind of get stuck in the circular motion of why would I leave this is the pain that I've always experienced type of thing and then a lot of people had an issue like rightly so like when they interpreted this experiment they're all like oh well are you saying that people are addicted to trauma are you saying that people who go through trauma and it's inescapable when they're given away out like there's no hope and people like are too dumb to escape blah blah blah and so it was like critiqued a lot right so at the same University with the the same professors they Revisited this assignment the original experiment was in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania and then they Revisited this in 2017 so 50 years later and they basically say that like these dogs trapped in these locked cages people learn how to cope Within their traumatic situations it's not that they get addicted to this trauma they learn to adapt to what they're trapped in and it's what they know and it's what they understand so like being traumatized means reorganizing your learning to organize your life around that trauma and saying that people don't leave traumatic and harmful situations when given the chance just to say that they're like used to it addicted to it or like coped well enough with it is a oversimplification so in their 2017 revisit to this experiment they kind of hone in that the reason like why these dogs were staying was because of like these this passiveness in order to survive in escapable situations you have to be passive about them and you have to focus on basic survival and you kind of have to stay in that space because of the heightened anxiety so staying was a default reaction to prolonged events in a totally like normal one and so since these dogs were trained to stay they can also be a way to train them to let them know that it's safe to leave and then this is kind of where they assert that cognitive behavioral therapy like remapping the way that your brain thinks after trauma can be really really helpful like you get stuck in these like mind Loops where you're trapped in these horrible situations but to understand like and it sounds really simple like oh well there's a way out it's really really simple just take your way out but like the reason I'm making this video is to tell anyone that comfort that it's I know it's not easy and like the science behind it knows it's not easy and this like cognitive behavioral therapy and like re wiring your brain to like understand that you can have hope and Escape horrible situations isn't something that's like really easy and going through that journey to try and like better yourself and like understand that you can do better for yourself is really hard and if you're like going through that journey I really like commend you and that's really wonderful and beautiful and it's hard and that's backed up by like these experiments so basically you can heal from trauma by training your brain that you are no longer in danger and this can be done not only by cognitive behavioral therapy or different therapies but also by medication too because your literal brain acts differently under extreme stress so like this book to like I learned what your amygdala does and that's like the part that like gives you warning that there's like stress or something bad's going to happen and people who have been through a lot of bad things that's like always on and so like people are like always on edge and if you need medication to like calm that down that is warranted and like totally fine like something's not wrong with you because you need help because your amygdala is over active like it's a physical response to real life situations and just like in a way like we can be like in a way we can like be mad at our bodies for doing that right but but in a way like it's a reminder to like be thankful to our bodies too because of these responses that help us survive and it helped us survive through whatever horrible experience and now it's time to let your body know that there are different options and like to calm it down you know so like you don't have to be like mad and like punish yourself because you need help or like help rewiring the way you think so people return to these abusive relationships to these toxic families think there's no way out when we say it's easy to like just leave these situations but in their mind it's really difficult to understand that there is hope for something different and there's Hope for Change but if you see a way out it's like not easy to leave a bad situation but it's possible and I think Acknowledgement to you don't deserve something bad and it's possible to leave something bad is something that's really difficult to understand and think of so if you're struggling with that I mean this book is excellent so pick up this one maybe not this one but this one's really really interesting too just maybe like do your own reading and stuff on um on it and just know all the um critiques of our of our boy Malcolm here Mr Gladwell and just because someone's critiqued like it doesn't mean that they're like a pariah right but just so you guys know I don't want to like try and misinform anybody here so one really profound thing that I found in this 50y year later experiment from Meyer and Seigelman um their revisit to their project on learned helplessness that I'm going to read straight um from their article that's also linked in the description and it's just a beautiful way to end um their article so they Meyer and Siegelmen explain that hope consists largely in the habit of expecting that future bad events will not be permanent Global and uncontrollable rather they will be temporary local and controllable so people stay or return to trauma because they believe it's the best option until they learn otherwise or believe in Hope otherwise so all in all you know there's just a lot to think about with like trauma responses and learned helplessness it's really difficult to get into that mindset of having hope and it's really difficult to get into that mindset of feeling like you deserve better and that it's possible but if anything um you know a little reminder that like you don't deserve to be hurt um if anyone needs to hear that cuz I know like people who are in horrible situations like they don't always hear that they think like they deserve it and there's no Escape but you don't deserve it and if you do see a way out you deserve that way out um so I know this was kind of a heavy one so I think if you guys decide to check out either of the books um that would just be really awesome even if you don't have like any trauma in your life like maybe it'll help you look at other people's lives in a more compassionate way and that's like what Rees gray analyzes is about just a little bit Adventure through um stuff and so you guys with that I love you very much okay love you bye