SPEAKER 1
Hello and welcome to this interview.
I'm Megan Gibson, co-host of the Trauma Superconference.
Today I'm speaking with Dr. Ronald Siegel, an assistant professor of psychology part-time at Harvard Medical School.
He's the author of several books, including The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary, Finding Happiness Right Where You Are, and The Mindfulness Solution, Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems.
He's a longtime student of mindfulness meditation, teaches internationally about the application of mindfulness practice in psychotherapy and other fields, and maintains a private clinical practice in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Dr. Ronald Siegel, thank you so much for being with us today.
SPEAKER 2
Thanks so much for inviting me.
SPEAKER 1
So one of my favorite things about talking with you is how well you explain the process of evolution and how our brains have evolved to predispose us to things like trauma.
So I'd love if you would start there.
SPEAKER 2
Yeah, you know, there are so many aspects of our brains that were adapted for survival and adapted for reproducing and passing our genes on to our kids and even for taking care of our kids, which predispose us toward a lot of psychological suffering, including toward trauma.
And if it's not too complicated of a map, there are actually four, I think, predispositions of our brain that get us into trouble vis-a-vis trauma.
The first one is very, very basic.
It's something that we share with all other animals.
We even share with bacteria.
It's the tendency to recoil from that which might be dangerous or painful.
Right.
And and to move toward that, which is pleasurable.
And we see this, obviously, throughout the animal kingdom, where we're all organisms.
You know, if something is sharp or hot or in some way painful, they will withdraw from it.
And the way this shows up for us is while this makes perfect sense evolutionarily in order to keep our bodies intact and
and be healthy in the world.
Recall from it and withdraw from it.
And we do that to such a degree.
And we have this interesting capacity to be able to actually block it out of awareness.
And you could see also how this would be very adaptive in terms of our, our evolutionary history, let's say, you know, you had, um,
experience something really horrible with a lion, you know, in the past out there on the African savannah, and you're in a new situation that requires you to think quickly, you don't want to be thinking about the lion, you want to be thinking about what you have to do now, the same way, for example, a first responder now, you know, the are pushed out of awareness.
And it's particularly the painful ones.
So that's the first mechanism.
And we'll talk about the way in which by splitting off experiences that are painful, we actually predispose us toward all sorts of post-traumatic difficulties, because these memories, they don't just disappear, as one of my patients put it so eloquently, when we bury feelings, we bury them alive.
and they come back and they want to re-express themselves.
And then we're always stressed out trying to maintain this, trying to keep them out of awareness.
So that's one mechanism.
Another thing that we evolved for is to be able to think, right?
Now, you know, again, going back to the African savanna, we weren't very fast, we weren't very tall, we weren't very strong compared to the other animals.
If we came face to face with a lion, our recourses were kind of limited.
What, we're gonna like rid our teeth and show our claws?
But that wouldn't work very well, right?
So what could we do?
Well, we had a few resources.
One of them was we were social preachers so we could cooperate with others and that's super helpful.
with a prehensile thumb so that we could grab things and make and use tools, that was super helpful.
We had this fight or flight system, right, that allowed us to activate ourselves quickly, but the real ace in the hole that we had, I mean, our real strength that set us aside from the other animals was this ability to think.
But our thinking process is not just some neutral computer, it's subject to what cognitive scientists call the negativity bias.
or what my friend Rick Hansen uses the metaphor, he says, our brains are like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones.
Bad experiences happen and they stick.
Good ones happen, they slide right off the pan.
And there's a good reason for this because when we're out there on the savanna,
we could have made one of two types of errors.
And they actually correspond to type one and type two errors in modern scientific research.
A type one error is a false positive, type two is a false negative.
To illustrate this, a type one error would be to be looking at like a beige or yellow shape behind some bushes and think, oh my God, it's a lion, when it's really just a beige rock.
And a type two error would be to look at the same thing and say, ah, it's probably just a beige rock when it's really a lion.
And you could imagine we could make countless of these type one errors and still live to tell and survive and pass on our DNA to our kids.
But one type two error, that's the end of our DNA line.
So maybe
In ancient times, there were these happy hominids holding hands and telling stories about luscious pieces of fruit and wonderful sexual encounters and gorgeous sunny days, but they weren't our ancestors.
Why?
Because statistically, they died before they got to reproduce.
Our ancestors were the ones walking around saying, oh my God, that could be a lion, not another poisonous snake.
Oh, one of those plants with the thorns?
That was horrible last time, right?
Our ancestors, because it was good for survival, are the ones who have these brains in which bad things stick.
So when we've had a traumatic experience, even though there's this tendency to push it out of awareness, it also sticks around because this negativity bias was so helpful for survival.
So, third thing that we evolved for.
We evolved to believe that the world is stable and that things are relatively permanent.
Now, why was that useful?
Well, you know, if you were wandering around the savannah, you discovered, hey, there's this fruit tree over there at the base of that mountain.
Well, remembering that and thinking of that as stable and expecting the fruit tree to be there in the future was going to be helpful because you'd be able to find the fruit tree or even just getting the idea that, oh, you know, that person over there is, you know, cooperative and okay, that person over there, watch out for them, right?
To start, we look for patterns and pattern recognition involves imagining things will be stable.
Well, That's very useful in a lot of situations but it becomes very problematic when dealing with emotions because when we start to get really sad or really scared or even really angry, we imagine that this is the state forever, right?
We imagine we become afraid of our fear, afraid of our sadness, afraid of our anger because we think it's going to stick.
We don't
we don't realize the reality, which is, gosh, consciousness is mercurial.
It's always changing, right?
Different things are happening each moment.
And, you know, one of my fun exercises, what was your worry three worries ago?
And, you know, it's hard to remember it, but in the moment, it felt like this is going to be it forever, right?
And gosh, when I get sad, I get afraid of sadness because like, oh, no, I'm going to always be upset.
I'm not always going to be upset, but so that dovetails with this tendency to push the painful things out of awareness.
We push them out of awareness because we fear that they're going to be permanent.
And the fourth thing, the fourth propensity, and it's sort of arbitrary picking four, but these are, I think these are the greatest hits.
The fourth one is our preoccupation with ourselves and with what other people think about us.
You know, out there on the African savannah, there was a lot of concern with being dominant, right?
And you know, you see this pattern where there's often a dominant male surrounded by literally a harem of reproductively promising females.
And then over in the next field, there would be a group of often a little bit younger males doing the species specific equivalent of playing basketball.
you know, trying to develop the skills to become dominant.
Now, why does dominance matter so much?
Well, the dominant ones and the dominant males and the females that had kids with dominant males, they had better luck at passing on their DNA because they had access to more resources and were able to protect the kids and like that.
So there's a lot of concern for this.
And that all sounds very primitive.
And yes, we see it play out in human affairs in which
world leaders historically, male world leaders have had literal harems and that kind of thing.
And we see people with their trophy wives there.
I mean, there are current examples.
But the way this plays out much more broadly for all of us, and isn't just a guy thing, is fluctuating self-esteem.
We are very concerned with how we're doing.
How do I feel about myself?
Right now, am I doing a good job presenting these ideas?
Is Megan smiling and thinking, no pressure.
Always, I'm always smiling and thinking great thoughts about you.
which is actually lovely and very encouraging.
But the sort of looking for feedback, am I doing okay?
Or just going through the world, should I have said that?
Or do I look okay?
Am I being a nice person?
Am I a good enough friend?
I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ways in which we're always evaluating ourselves and judging ourselves and thinking we're either good or bad.
and so this kind of self-esteem preoccupation and preoccupation with self-judgment plays a huge role in our suffering and the way it relates to trauma is almost everybody who's been through trauma feel some shame around it either they feel shame around
Post-traumatic symptoms like, I don't know, I freeze in these situations, I go blank, I don't feel like I'm able to connect to people, I feel dead inside, just naming some of the possibilities, right?
So people feel ashamed about having post-traumatic symptoms or often people are ashamed of having been
through the trauma that, you know, certainly people who have been, you know, sexually mistreated and the traumas in that area almost always feel like something's wrong with them because this happened.
People who are suffering from what we now call moral injury, like the, you know, the people in combat who
under the circumstances do something and and in retrospect is like oh my god you know an innocent person was was killed or injured and they feel terrible about themselves so that this self-judgment including harsh self-judgment gets much much worse when people have been
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