What You Never Knew About Trauma

summary
In this episode of the Catapult Effect podcast, host Katie Wrigley delves into the complexities of trauma, particularly how it is perceived by the nervous system. She distinguishes between 'Big T' and 'Little t' traumas, explaining how both can impact individuals in profound ways. 

Katie emphasizes the role of the subconscious mind in recording experiences and how these can lead to patterns of feeling 'not good enough.' She discusses the importance of recognizing these patterns, especially in the context of toxic relationships, and encourages listeners to explore their own experiences to foster personal growth and healing.

takeaways

• Trauma can be defined as something you cannot escape from.
• The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of a global trauma.
• Your nervous system can register negative events as trauma.
• Patterns of not feeling good enough often stem from childhood experiences.
• The subconscious mind influences 95% of our daily actions.

Fun Gen X Resource

Kelly Manna on Instagram

Resources

• Website
• Book your mini session
• Learn more about Cognomovement
• Try Cognomovement for yourself!
• Book a call with Katie

Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:00.622)
Welcome back to the Catapult Effect podcast. I am your host, Katie Wrigley. I am so overjoyed to have you here with me today. Thank you so much for spending time with me. Today, we're gonna talk about things that you may have never known about trauma and what your nervous system may actually mark as a traumatic event. Here's a hint, it may really surprise you. That is coming right up, so stay tuned.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I know you have a lot of choices of what to listen to out there on the internet and I trust that you are coming to the show for a reason and you want to make positive changes in your life. So as you probably know, if you've listened to any episodes of mine so far, I practice a modality called Cognomovement and it focuses directly on the nervous system and creating new neural pathways and really rewiring the nervous system in a very easy, gentle, simple way.

through the years of practicing this, come November of this year, only four months into the future, it will be five years since I was introduced to Cognomovement. And the leaps and bounds of changes that I've been able to make in my life as a result, directly come from consistently doing this work. Even with taking breaks from daily sessions sometimes when my system's asking for it, having this in my life as a consistent tool has been a huge game changer for me. Now I wanted to talk to you today.

about what is trauma. So I want to first define what trauma is and then also help you understand that it may not be a traumatic event as the definition gives us for your nervous system to track it as such. So first, trauma, the definition of trauma is something that you cannot escape from and you have no control over.

It usually results in large amounts of discomfort or fear, but it's a situation that's completely out of your control. A very good example of a traumatic event was the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Now, I know the virus is still out there, but we've learned how to live with it at this point. But that is the sheer definition of trauma. There was literally no place in the world that we could escape to.

Katie Wrigley (02:29.528)
to avoid the risk of this virus. And it was out of all of our control. A lot of the guidelines that we were giving had mixed results as to how well they worked. There were lot of differing opinions around vaccines, not vaccines. This was the definition of trauma. So if you were alive during the COVID pandemic, you have experienced trauma.

Now it doesn't always have to be a global event or we would have much less trauma since that's the first global event that we've had for a very long time. It doesn't actually have to be a little bt or big t trauma. So let me explain what those are as well. So a big t trauma this is something like being physically violated especially if it is of a sexual nature. That's a big t trauma. It can be held up

gunpoint. It can be assaulted in some way. It can also be witnessing an assault or witnessing someone taking their life or witnessing a horrific accident. These are all what we would refer to as big T traumas and we tend to know that there's a certain impact that comes from those and I'll get to that in a minute. Little T traumas can be things that are less dramatic.

less impactful on the nervous system in the moment. And this is where the line gets a little blurrier. And I hear over and over again from clients, some clients know that they have experienced traumas. Others are like, I don't understand why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling because I haven't had any trauma. And this is where it's really important to talk about the distinction is that your nervous system can register

an event that had a negative impact on you as a trauma. And one of the most likely and common patterns that I see coming from these type of events is this pattern of not being good enough. This not feeling seen or heard is actually a huge underlying pattern that drives most overachievers, myself included. This not good enough pattern can come out in ways where people are constantly trying to prove themselves.

Katie Wrigley (04:49.07)
If you've read Will Smith's memoir or if you've read Matthew Perry's memoir, both of them had been trying to prove that they were good enough through the course of their career. And as you read those memoirs, you'll see that neither of them actually felt good enough until they started to do inner work. And I'm not sure. I think Matthew Perry's, if I remember correctly, did end on a positive note that he was starting to do that work before he passed away. And Will Smith continues to do that deeper work for himself.

and for the rest of his family, which mad props to him.

These events, and I want to give you a couple examples of them, these events may barely register on your conscious mind at all. And in fact, they are most likely just going to be registered at a subconscious or unconscious level. The important piece to point out about the conscious and subconscious mind, the subconscious mind is running 95 % of what you do in a day. And day to day, you're repeating the exact same activities about 80 % of the time.

The 5 % of your conscious mind, that's what we think has all the information, but it's not true. There is so much that is buried within the nervous system, within the subconscious mind. Your subconscious has been recording every single event that has happened to you from the time that you were a conscious being in your mother's womb right up until today. And this matters because there is so much beneath the surface that we aren't even aware of.

that are driving these patterns that are working against us, that are keeping us from reaching the goals that we wanna make. It may prevent us from starting the business that we've been dreaming of doing. It may prevent us from speaking out from that hot person that we wanna talk to, but we think, they'll never go for me. I'm not good enough. It keeps you small. It makes you fear to be seen.

Katie Wrigley (06:48.718)
These are all patterns that are working against you, against who you are and who you were meant to be. So let me give you a couple examples of those events. So one that I see a lot is if you had really busy parents. So if you're a Gen X or like me, you're the last generation of latchkey kids and we had a lot of trust given in us. And there is a really funny woman, Kelly Manna on Instagram, who I encourage you to follow. I'll try to put her handle in here actually.

But she has, she reminded me that Ted Koppel used to announce on the nightly news at 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? Like who in the world would forget they had kids and would need to have the news announced? Hey, do know where they are? It's 10 p.m. Like, shit, I lost a kid. But that's kind of the mentality that we grew up with. And I'm not saying that that's traumatic as a result. I'm kind of laughing because there is a lot of trauma that did occur within the Gen X generations.

for sure, but I'm not blaming the parents on that. We all are doing the best we could at the time. And personally, I have wonderful parents who gave us a lot of independence and a lot of trust. More trust than I had earned. Can't speak for my sister, but they definitely gave me more trust than I had earned. But I made it out alive. A good example though, if your parents were starting a business or they worked a lot, you may have been isolated.

You may have started to read a lot of books. That was definitely one of the things I did. I was born independent. I wanted to be in my playpen, left alone for hours at a time when I was an infant. And that continued throughout my entire life. Up until today, I'm still a very independent person. I need a lot of alone time to recharge my batteries. As talkative as I am, I am 100 % an introvert, even though my Myers-Briggs says I'm 50-50 introvert, extrovert.

I definitely relate to the introvert and need that regroup time. But that being left alone, that can make you feel like you aren't seen and heard because parents aren't available to come to school events. They may not be available or aware of little successes that you're doing that you're feeling really good about, but there's no one there to celebrate with you. So it creates this isolation and this hyperdependence on ourselves.

Katie Wrigley (09:13.546)
makes us less likely to be able to create positive conditions with someone else. And it can also create this deep-seated insecurity or feeling that we're not enough. Now, that wouldn't actually be considered a little T-trauma. mean, sheer neglect when you're not being fed, you're not being bathed, that absolutely is an ongoing trauma and will most likely result in complex post-traumatic stress. But I'm talking about the parents who are loving.

who just weren't able to be present because they were so focused on making sure that they were taking care of you, keeping a roof over your head, keeping food in your mouth that they didn't really know how to connect with you on a deeper level to give you that nurturing you needed. There are so many people within my generation that we see that happening too. And now we see parents kind of over rotating on that. And now we seem to be evening out and giving kids a really positive amount of emotion.

emotional availability and also trusting them in their independence to be able to live and grow and do things on their own too. I know some amazing mothers out there and I have so much respect. But that being overlooked and being left alone a lot, that can leave a dent making you feel like you aren't good enough. If you have tons of siblings in your family or even maybe one sibling who was the star in your family and you felt like they were you were in their shadow,

that can lead to a pattern of not good enough. Another story that Liz Larson talks about a lot is a day that a sibling received a popsicle and the client she was working with did not. And her nervous system decided in that moment that she wasn't good enough. Now, she may have been misbehaving that day. She may have had some other factor that allowed her sister to get a popsicle and she didn't. But her nervous system in that moment decided that she wasn't good enough.

And that started that lifelong pattern again.

Katie Wrigley (11:15.918)
Toxic relationships are another thing. We may have put so much into a relationship and been mistreated, been gaslighted, made to feel like we weren't good enough. We may have been manipulated. They may have actually been abusive. That would actually been going to more of the definition of trauma. But for those relationships that don't really hit that traumatic level, but they're not fulfilling and they're actually quite toxic to you, that can have your nervous system marking in that moment.

that you aren't good enough, that it's not safe to be seen, that it's not safe to let yourself go look for love again, because there's something about you that's inherently unlovable, because the people that you've allowed closest to you are the people who have hurt you the most. And this is something that I had experienced firsthand. And now I want to explain when these patterns start at an early age. And I do believe that the bulk of my own patterns of not good enough, which I have now

been able to turn around came from the childhood trauma that I experienced outside of my family. And, you know, my parents also worked a lot, so they weren't as available, but they are available now and they did a great job and I can't really complain about anything in my past. Nor do I want to disrespect them by doing that. But these patterns got set off on me as a really small girl and they continued into adulthood.

And one of the patterns that came out of the trauma, even the stuff that wasn't just my nervous system registering negative events as traumas, was that I would go looking for abuse in a relationship because what my abusers have taught me is if I just got through the abuse, then the love and the snuggles would come. And so that's what I looked for in my adult life. So I chose people who were not emotionally available or even available for a relationship. They may have been with another partner. I'm not proud to say.

or they were at a high level of avoidance in their attachment style. And I'm an anxious attachment style.

Katie Wrigley (13:22.166)
that's never going to work. I'm constantly looking for love. They're constantly pulling away and it leads to disasters. And it also kept me from wanting someone to really see me. And so I've been doing so much work the past couple of years to really dig through and delete these patterns. Like I've said, I've gotten to that point now, mostly doing cognitive movement to get me there. And some of these patterns came out of little things that friends in school had said to me.

like little pieces like in one of the sessions that I was doing someone from sixth grade who I can't even remember the last time I thought of this kid. They came to mind and looking back they had kind of been a bully to me and fast forward to the end of my senior year of high school I was bullied. I had a group of friends using air quotes there who were egging my house almost every weekend. I had to lie to them and tell them that we were getting moved out of the country and it moved into some apartment.

in order to get them to stop. And when they realized I was lying, they egged my house again. It took me leaving for the summer to finally give my parents peace. And we had a raw redwood house and it was very hot in California. So by the time my dad woke up at six or seven a.m., the egg was already kind of baked into the side of the house. So it was pretty expensive for them to actually fix. It wasn't like egg on siding. It was egg on raw splintery wood.

That was the end of my senior year and it did a lot of damage to me. Now that getting egged wouldn't be considered a trauma. Getting bullied, yes, but someone egging your house, but what was happening there was on a subconscious level what we do is we seek out people who have something energetically in common with the people who have created these patterns.

and we actually then look for proof of these patterns because as humans we want to be right and we're telling stories and so we want our stories to be correct and so we will actually continue to be around people who at some level subconsciously are going to continue to give us these results because this is all we've known and until we start to see that pattern we bring into light we literally can't bring into our life

Katie Wrigley (15:51.01)
the people who are going to treat us better, the people who are going to love us and accept us and see us for who we are and not run away from that person, the people who are going to allow us to make mistakes and they aren't going to shun us for life because we're human and we screwed up and we made mistakes. They're going to know who we really are. But until we see those patterns, we are at risk of continuing to bring those people into our life over and over again who are not going to give us.

what we deserve, who are not going to prioritize us the same way that we prioritize them. And it's so important to be able to take a look at these patterns. And you may have no idea where it came from. Most people don't. And that's some of the beauty of Cognomovement is we go into those sessions directly and whatever is there is going to come up. If the mind is ready to see it and it's relevant, it will come up. If the mind is not ready to see it yet or it's not relevant, it's not going to come up.

but we can still clear it out of the nervous system. And we know this through certain IQs, whether we've had it cleared out or

Katie Wrigley (16:59.778)
This not good enough pattern, a lot of times it also leads to imposter syndrome and who am I? And it keeps us small like I had said in the beginning. So I invite you today, take a look at some of the patterns. Are you living your fullest life? Are you comfortable when you're on your own? Are you able to sit still? Or are you constantly grabbing for some sort of attention, some sort of external validation that you're enough? Or are you able to seek that?

source that for yourself. If you do have a dispute with someone, does it impact you on an emotional level and make you doubt who you are? Are you able to look through it, analyze it pretty clearly, see where your role was, see where their role was, make peace with it, and move on? These are all really good questions to help ask yourself to see whether you have one of these patterns coming out.

from something that your nervous system decided was a traumatic event, even though it did not hit the definition of a traumatic event. I'm trusting that this episode helped you and I thank you again for joining me. And as I've said in previous episodes, the best way to understand Cognomovement is to give it a try. So I am offering mini sessions for the low price of only $50 for a 30 minute session with me.

This is an introductory price so that you can give it a shot. You don't have to have a ball, but it allows you to try it out and we can dive into one of those patterns if you're ready to do it. Thank you again for joining me and until the next episode, please be well.