Hello, and welcome to this interview.
I'm Megan Gibson, co-host of the Trauma Super Conference.
I'm delighted to be speaking with Britt Frank today.
She's a trauma specialist who is a somatic experiencing practitioner and is trained at Internal Family Systems Level 3.
She was an award-winning instructor at the University of Kansas and has taught classes on ethics, addiction, and social work practice.
Her first book, The Science of Stuck, is out now.
Thank you so much for joining me, Britt.
SPEAKER 2
Hi, it's so good to be back here again.
SPEAKER 3
So I always love the way that you outline what trauma is.
So I'd love if you could start by outlining the difference between trauma and a trauma response.
SPEAKER 2
Mm hmm.
And that word is so trendy now, which is great, because I'd rather we all talk too much about it than not at all.
But the word has tended to get overused, misused, watered down.
So the definition of trauma that I use comes from Dr. Peter Levine, who founded Somatic Experiencing.
And trauma is anything that's too much, too fast, too soon.
And my little addition to that is or not enough.
Trauma is anything you got that you didn't need or anything that you didn't get that you did need.
A trauma response is when our bodies
Trauma is an internal process.
It's a brain indigestion process.
A trauma response is when our brain either throws up or goes into freeze.
So you can eat bad food and not necessarily get sick.
Same thing with trauma.
You can experience a traumatic event and not necessarily have a trauma response.
But the things that we call panic, anxiety, things like that are often trauma responses, which is the symptom or the behavior or the manifestation of the trauma that we experienced or witnessed.
SPEAKER 3
And furthermore, to your point, not something we decide we have.
This is a physiological and cognitive process that happens outside of our cognitive awareness.
We're not deciding to have trauma if we have trauma, right?
SPEAKER 2
Yes, and it's so important to know that you don't get a say.
And I've seen people say, Well, that that wasn't a traumatic event.
I'm like, Okay, that might not have been a traumatic, being bullied, for example, normal part of childhood.
That doesn't mean that for some people, given their family and their genetics and their attachment, that being bullied is not going to have long term traumatic consequences.
So our unconscious automatic nervous systems get to decide what counts
as trauma and we don't.
And the thing about trauma is you can be traumatized by a traumatic events, but you can also be traumatized by seemingly normal events.
You know, having a baby, getting married, moving to a new city, starting a new job.
These aren't inherently bad things, but anything like food, like any food can cause indigestion.
Any event can create a trauma response.
SPEAKER 3
Absolutely.
I love that context.
And so going just a step further for people, because I have a lot of things I want to dig into you with, but I like to establish like the baseline.
Can you help us understand the different types of trauma?
And specifically, I'm talking about, like acute, chronic, and complex and the differences between those three.
SPEAKER 2
Sure.
And again, the fact that trauma is part of life doesn't mean that we all have it in equal doses.
It does not mean that everybody needs therapy or that everyone needs medication.
So we don't want to, you know, people push back on me like, well, if you're saying everyone has trauma, then that doesn't mean anything.
It's like, it absolutely means something.
You know, we all get injured.
We all have immune systems that get sick.
We need to normalize and understand what it is.
So to your question, acute trauma would be a one-time thing.
So let's say that you were in an earthquake.
That was an acute traumatic event.
It happened, it ended, and now you are experiencing perhaps nightmares or sleep disturbances or whatever.
Okay, chronic ongoing trauma might be something like a chronic illness that you're living with, or living without your basic needs met, living without access to healthcare or mental health support.
Complex trauma is when everything is burning down from every which way and there's no one identifiable.
This is the bad thing that happened.
It's sort of just a giant soup of things that are either suboptimal or inherently bad or maybe not that bad, but in the context of all the other things are bad.
So, and again, it's not that one is better than the other, but it's helpful to know, are you working through an acute traumatic event or are you working through complex ongoing chronic trauma?
SPEAKER 3
And I'll just speak from personal experience.
My trauma history was, I was enlightened about my trauma history because of an acute event that kind of unleashed all of the symptoms of chronic and complex trauma, right?
But it was that acute event and that stressor
that brought all of that stuff to light.
So you can have one, you can have a combination of all three.
All of them.
SPEAKER 2
Exactly.
SPEAKER 3
It could be just a general buffet of drama.
Okay, so great.
Now that we've kind of got that baseline understanding, I want to talk about what I've seen in myself and friends and family members that have tried to get help
and get some support and they come to the realization that they've experienced trauma.
And now there's a diagnosis.
Sometimes there's a label attached to their experiences or their behaviors.
And I find that people, including myself at one point, kind of get stuck there for a while.
And as the author of The Science of Stuck, I'm wondering if you can help us understand why that might happen for people and what the future might hold if you're in that position or you're the caregiver or a friend or family member of someone who is in that position that's kind of that
that place of a new diagnosis or a new label and feeling kind of stuck there or you're experiencing your friend or loved one as feeling like they're stuck there.
SPEAKER 2
All right, you ready to unlock this Pandora's box?
Okay, like activation warning everyone, we are going to talk about the danger of diagnosis.
So with a giant disclaimer, diagnoses are sometimes life-giving, life-saving pieces of information.
when you have no idea what's wrong with you.
I'll speak for myself.
When I didn't understand what complex PTSD was and I found out, this is a diagnosis.
It's a thing.
You have it and here's a path forward.
I could breathe again.
For some people, getting a diagnosis of autism gives them the same type of relief or ADHD or bipolar or, oh my gosh, this is a thing.
Here's the medication I can try.
Yay, diagnosis.
So I am couching this whole discussion and I am not anti-diagnosis.
Okay?
I'll say that again, not anti-diagnosis.
Okay, cool.
That should give enough air cover for what I'm going to say.
SPEAKER 3
Exactly.
And there's no understanding the amount of validation that comes with that, right?
That we're not belittling anybody.
It's like the huge validation that comes from finally feeling like you've been seen and heard, right?
SPEAKER 2
Yes, and access to mental health care.
in, you know, I don't work with the insurance system, but in order for people with whom I work to get coverage, I have to give them a diagnosis on a form with numbers and letters or else they're not going to get reimbursed.
So diagnoses are important, but they are problematic.
And so off to the races we go.
Sometimes diagnoses give us a, you know, while they should give us a framework to hang our experiences.
So we have an understanding of what's going on in the path forward.
For some people, and I'll speak for myself, because I was captain of this team, my diagnosis was not a starting place.
My diagnosis was a resting place.
Oh, I have a thing.
Therefore, this is my community.
This is my merch.
These are my rallies.
This is what I do.
This is what I know.
And I want to identify not as this is a thing that my brain is doing that I'm working with.
This is who I am.
And for me, that diagnosis that I attached to was borderline personality disorder.
And that one is such a hot topic one, and I'm sure I will get plenty of angry DMs.
So, and again, I'm not saying that you can be cured or healed.
I am saying that I attached to that diagnosis because it gave me access to a community of like-minded people.
It gave me, and again, I'm speaking just for myself.
If this isn't you, then continue listening.
This does not apply to you.
It gave me an excuse.
Not everyone uses diagnosis as an excuse, but I sure did.
Because if I have this, then this is who I am.
This is the way I am.
Things can't possibly get any better.
And so I guess I'm just out of luck.
Oh, well.
And again, there's the problem of privilege and access to resources.
If you don't have any access, then yes, it's not that your diagnosis is who you are.
It's that environmentally, you don't have access to the help you need in order to feel better.
For me, I had plenty of choices, but I really liked cuddling up under my diagnosis, like a little blankie, and not having to acknowledge that sometimes when you get better or feel better, you lose community.
And sometimes you lose access to like-minded people.
And when I was in the 12-step recovery rooms, that was another diagnosis I attached hard to.
It was as an addict.
I am an addict.
And when I stopped identifying as an addict, I was no longer welcome.
in my 12 step community.
And that was a bummer.
Because there's a certain expectation that you identify as addict.
And if you don't identify as an addict, or if you choose to go outside the bounds of what's understood within that framework, within that diagnosis, and that program, you're no longer welcome.
Well, crap.
Now what?
SPEAKER 1
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