Unraveling the Impact of Trauma: Big Tea Little Tea's Healing Journey and Self-Discovery

This first episode of Big Tea Little Tea Podcast is here to help you understand the complex world of trauma and its impact on our lives. Join me, Kaysha Thomas, a registered nutritional therapist and Pilates instructor, as we explore the stress response cycle, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and delve into the lesser-known Little Tea traumas like being parentified as a child or experiencing emotional neglect.

Together, we'll uncover the importance of not comparing our traumatic experiences to others and the significance of seeking help for unresolved trauma. Our conversation will leave you with a better understanding of trauma's effects on your life and inspire you to take the necessary steps towards healing. So, why wait? Tune in now and get ready to discover the reason behind the name Big Tea Little Tea Podcast, and how it relates to your own journey of self-discovery and healing.

Big Tea Little Tea is a podcast hosted by Kaysha Thomas, MSc a registered Nutritional Therapist and Pilates Instructor. The podcast covers themes related to trauma recovery and mental health. This podcast is not a substitute for individual professional advice.

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Transcript

Kaysha Thomas: 0:09

Hello and welcome to this first episode of Big Tea Little Tea Podcast. My name is Kaysha Thomas and I'm a registered nutritional therapist and pilates instructor, and I really wanted to, in this first episode, speak a little bit why I called the podcast what I call the podcast, which by the end of this episode it will be very, very clear. And also I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about trauma. So, for those of you who I haven't met before, i work very much through a trauma informed lens. In all of the work that I do, i specialise mostly in eating disorder recovery, disorderly recovery, chronic diet and recovery and body image, body dissatisfaction issues. So that's all the work that I do. That's my world. That comes a lot from my own personal journey, which I will talk about in a future episode, but today, today, i really want to talk about what is trauma and give you a bit more of a broader idea, or a good idea, as to why I named the podcast, what I named the podcast. So trauma and this is the best explanation I've heard, and I do apologize, i don't know where it comes from originally and if I do find out I'll put in a show notes, but trauma is anything that can be described as something that was too fast, too much, too soon or too little for too long for a nervous system to respond to and handle. So it's quite a broad term, but it kind of gives you an idea that I think a lot of the time. Well, let me just be clear. This is what I first thought when, before I knew what trauma was, my first idea was that it was just something, it was only things that were massive, big things that would happen, and I was always thinking of big, big traumatic events, and I want to say big, with inverted commas traumatic events, and I'm already alluding to where I'm going to with the podcast name. So whenever trauma occurs, so anything traumatic remember that term it's anything that is and I'm having to read it out as I say it anything that was too fast, too much, too soon or too little for too long for nervous systems to respond to and resolve. So when we encounter a threat or something that, let's say, feels unsafe, normally what would happen is our bodies will initiate the stress response and there will be a resolution and then we'll move on feeling safe. When trauma occurs, that stress response cycle, let's say, isn't completed And that leaves a person feeling very unsafe and as though there's a threat imminent. So a person who is struggling with PTSD, so post traumatic stress disorder, or CPTSD chronic sorry, complex post traumatic stress disorder will be left with this feeling of unsafeness and imminent danger is around the corner, and this was something that I experienced myself.

Kaysha Thomas: 3:07

What got me into the work that I do today in terms of how I learned about trauma was really, first and foremost, through my own body and an experience that I didn't know I was experiencing until it really got shaken up, and that was racial trauma. I don't want to go into it too much in this episode, i don't want to overwhelm you with lots and lots of information, but what I can tell you was that the way. So basically what re triggered the racial trauma that I was experiencing was witnessing the murder of George Floyd, and I was left with really uncomfortable visceral feelings, memory flashbacks that were just coming back, coming from nowhere. Things that I didn't even know that I had in my memory were coming back to me now And I just generally would go from feeling okay one moment to suddenly feeling overwhelmingly unsafe or just overwhelmed and just feeling like everything that was once safe, no longer feels safe anymore. It was really really confusing time for me And it was through that and I had to then go on and do more therapy And it was through that that I really really learned about trauma and really understood. Okay, this gives me a really good understanding of what my clients may be experiencing when their past traumas have been triggered.

Kaysha Thomas: 4:28

When you're experiencing or, let's say, when there's an imprint in your nervous system that's left you feeling unsafe and that threat is imminent, you find it really really difficult to settle And what you end up doing is you end up engaging in very maladaptive but protective copermechanism. So they're maladaptive because they're usually copermechanisms that in the long term don't serve us, but they're protective because in the short term, they usually serve a person. That purpose might be to help you disconnect, to help you numb out, to help you distract from those feelings, to help you actually just survive and actually be quite high function and get on with your day. So maladaptive copermechanisms might look like things like alcohol use disorders. This is where eating disorder behaviors can come in as well disordered eating, chronic dieting, excessive people pleasing, so saying yes to everything because that feels safer than saying no and potentially being met with a conflict, because you don't have the resources within you to deal with conflicts, you end up just saying yes to everything. That was definitely my experience, which just meant that. For me, anyway, it meant that I was doing things in my life that I didn't want to be doing and I felt really, really afraid to do the things that I did want to be doing, which is what I'm doing today. So another story for you, another time. Loads of segues. That's the way my brain works.

Kaysha Thomas: 5:52

Yes, as I say, these coping mechanisms, these maladaptive coping mechanisms are there to protect a person from what feels like very, very uncomfortable feelings, or sometimes it's because they are feeling nothing and they're feeling very numb, and sometimes these maladaptive coping mechanisms help them feel something. So, like I said, they serve their purpose, but they keep a person trapped in the cycle. So they have this cycle where they experience a trigger and, just to be really clear, anything can trigger a post traumatic stress memory, so anything can trigger that memory. That's just in your nervous system. It's not something that we're always consciously aware of, so sometimes that can be just a person might remind you of someone who was the source of your trauma. It could also be just a situation, sometimes walking down maybe a road or being in an area where something traumatic had happened to you. Things like that can bring back flashbacks and cause triggers. So what happens is the cycle is formed.

Kaysha Thomas: 6:57

Person experiences a trigger, they turn to their coping mechanism. So all those things that I spoke about might be using alcohols, might be using drugs, could even be self-harm. There's so many different ways that a person maladaptively tries to cope. They're just trying their best with the resources that they believe. One of the things is that they feel that they don't have many resources so they grab onto the most familiar resource, which is often maladaptive.

Kaysha Thomas: 7:21

So trigger happens, maladaptive coping mechanism. Someone feels better for a little while because, like I said, it does work in the short term. But in the long term what happens is you just go back around the cycle again until the next trigger and the next maladaptive coping mechanism happens and that cycle just keeps on going And so excuse my squeaky chair. So oftentimes a person feels just completely out of control because, like I said, these coping mechanisms they are just automatic. They just reach for them because it's what they know and it's what quote unquote works, because it does work in the short term. Long term keeps them stuck. I don't think I have to keep on saying that. And then what starts to happen? the reason why I mentioned this sort of cycle and that short termness of it? because what starts to happen is a person start their behaviour as those coping mechanism those behaviours and the guilt and the shame that comes around. Sometimes, using those coping mechanisms can start to look like a person's personality. It isn't, but it takes up so much of their time or their brain space or the way that they're just, you know, in the world, in their survival state, and sometimes I mean, wow, being in the world in your survival state and actually realizing that's what it is.

Kaysha Thomas: 8:36

For me was the most confusing thing When I actually went through my healing journey and many ways it's still ongoing. I don't think healing journeys just start and then stop. But when I was definitely in the thick of my healing journey, i suddenly understood why I never felt like I could be authentic. I always felt like I was putting on an act. I always felt like, oh, and someone's gonna catch me out in a minute, and that's what I kept on thinking. And the reason for that was because I wasn't actually able to truly be myself. I could sometimes and I'd experienced that moment of authenticity and I'd say why can't I be like what? Where's that girl? Why can't I be like her more? And the point was that a lot of the time, i was really worried about what people thought about me. I was worried about so many things around my race And I said I want to give this topic proper space racial trauma.

Kaysha Thomas: 9:23

So that's gonna be another conversation, but what I will say is that I was so stuck in my survival mode that I just didn't even realize that I wasn't being authentic, and so, like I said, these behaviors and these coping mechanisms start to look like your personality. I was just thought I was a super friendly, helpful person that just said yes to everything, because in many ways, that's what I was taught to do from a young age to be helpful. And so that was really my strategy to be super helpful, to take on all of these things that I did not have the time capacity, the space to do, and for a lot of the time there weren't things I wanted to do. Oh and so, and the reason why I bring that up is because I think one of the well, one of the things that I'm very, very passionate about, particularly as a practitioner, and I think I would really allow people to find their own way to come to terms of what it is they're struggling with and how they want to. I don't wanna say label, but how they want to describe their experience. But from a practitioner standpoint, one of the things I'm really, really passionate about is making sure that we're not labelling people by their illness, and what I mean by that is I don't refer to people with eating disorders as being Bulimic it's a big quotation mark here, by the way So "Bulimic, anorexic, a binge eater", because that's not who they are.

Kaysha Thomas: 10:52

That's their illness. I don't use the word alcoholic or addict because this isn't who the person is. This is their illness, so it's alcohol use disorder. It's a person is suffering with addictions, so they are not their illness. So they might feel like sometimes they're illness, and I could speak particularly to eating disorders.

Kaysha Thomas: 11:12

And a lot of the time people who experience the eating disorder have had it so long or are just so entrenched in their eating disorder they're not always able to separate themselves from the illness. Sometimes that voice feels like it's one in the same. That's a process that they'll go through in their recovery to make that separation. But, yeah, a lot of the time, sometimes a person's illness feels like it's their personality, feels like a big part of their identity, and so a lot of the recovery journey is the rediscovering who you are. Sometimes it's rediscovering if somebody's been poorly for a long time, then it's maybe actually just starting to build who you are.

Kaysha Thomas: 11:52

So, yeah, so I stay away from stigmatizing language and I invite you out there. If that's something that you notice, that you do, i invite you to find different ways to maybe describe your experience that doesn't make you feel like you are your illness and that the illness is something that you have but it's not who you are. That's just an invitation. Like I said, you're gonna find your own way to describe and explain your own experience. But that's, i think, something particularly as a practitioner, from a professional standpoint. I think it's important that we are looking at people as individuals, because I've never met two people with the same illness who have had the exact, who even have the same behaviors as such or the same rules. There's always similarities, but I'm always looking at the individual in front of me And for myself.

Kaysha Thomas: 12:45

One of the things I had to rephrase or start calling myself a people pleaser, because it wasn't. I was a people pleaser, it was that. That was my trauma response, that was my coping mechanism and that's how I coped for so long. To my it got me to where I am today. So that's fine. It served its purpose. Short term maybe feel okay, long term was not going to work. But yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad I made I made that discovery and that and came to all these understandings.

Kaysha Thomas: 13:18

So, coming back to the title of this podcast, it's called Big Tea, little Tea. It's a bit of a play on words because I've used the word tea And I don't know. If you're in the UK, tea can mean different things to different people. If you're from up north, it means something different to those of us who are down south. For some of us just know it's just a drink, but for some people it's a meal that comes up I'm not going to go into because I'm a southerner, so I don't know when tea time is. I know by afternoon tea I don't know when tea time is, but anyways, it's a bit of a play on words. But what Big T, little T actually is referring to is the different types of trauma experiences that somebody might have. So you've got your trauma with a capital T, so big T, and you've got trauma with a little tea yeah, lowercase T.

Kaysha Thomas: 14:10

And before I came to do the work that I do, i even had this understanding about myself. I was only really aware of the big T trauma. So that would be things like racial abuse, natural disasters, physical harm, witnessing death, war, chronic illness and parental bereavement. So that's just some examples of big T trauma. Those are the only ones that I would actually connect to when it came to the word trauma, and in fact, that list isn't even the list I would have come up with, but I just want to give a few other examples there, and so when I understood that there was something called little T trauma, it helped me understand my world a little bit more, and it really helps me speak to my clients about the less obvious forms of trauma, and so this can include things like being parentified as a child, frequent or sudden moves to new homes as a kid, like you know. So constantly changing schools, constantly having to move house country this can be a source of Little Tea trauma.

Kaysha Thomas: 15:19

Unpredictable care, so maybe having a primary caregiver or a parent who is sometimes really loving and is sometimes really cold and distant and you didn't actually ever know which side you were going to be on any given day. So these are things like then emotional neglect and stuff like that. So these are what we call quote unquote little T traumas, and they're not little because their impact is small. Their impact is devastating on the nervous system, but it's called little T because they're less obvious. It's less obvious, not really the ones that people think about. What I'll do is in the show notes is I'll link to an infographic that I made infographic because it's an Instagram post that I made. That's got all the different types of big T and little T trauma.

Kaysha Thomas: 16:10

Whenever I've delivered this information in training and workshops, it really resonates with people because it helps them. Well, a lot of times people have turned around and said I hadn't actually thought about that as trauma and actually makes that resonates. So much of my own experience. So, as you can tell, it's something I'm quite passionate about because, like I said, i don't think well, i for sure hadn't made those connections before I learned what I learned.

Kaysha Thomas: 16:37

So one thing I want to make so clear is that we can never, ever, ever, compare our trauma to anybody else's, your trauma experience or your experiences in life that might be really tricky and really difficult, is valid right. So we don't need to compare ourselves to others to validate our pains and the things that we're struggling with. I do believe that you are probably going to find someone who has quote unquote got it worse than you, but making that comparison doesn't help your situation. So I was advised people to sort of just to. Whilst we can definitely hold compassion for others, we can't fall into that trap. We have to be mindful not to fall into that trap of invalidating our own traumatic experience or invalidating our own pains or the things that we're struggling with because others may have it worse.

Kaysha Thomas: 17:33

It's saying how can I, how can I If I'm not able to meet my needs, if I'm not able to look after myself, care for myself, shop in this world in a way that I want to, you know, maybe live out my purpose or at least do the things that I'm passionate about or experience joy, feel more in control of my life, like I can honestly just go on and on about it. If I can't do those things, that comparison is unnecessary because that doesn't help me. It doesn't help me move through what it is I'm struggling with. So, regardless of what's going on for you, you know your trauma and your any traumatic experiences that you have. If they're having a lasting impact on your life, then it is well worth, in my opinion, seeking help for that, not letting it go unresolved. And I'm particularly passionate about it because if you, if I understood oh, like, if I knew what I know now, if I knew this back in 2015 and earlier, like, i think my life would have been very different. But in many ways, what happened to me once I resolved a lot of my trauma or at least had a better understanding around it, because I can't say that I don't still get triggered sometimes. It definitely does happen. It just takes a lot more to trigger me.

Kaysha Thomas: 18:54

Now, if I didn't move past all that, i would not be sitting here right now talking into this laptop camera I've used my laptop today I wouldn't be talking, i wouldn't be recording the podcast, i wouldn't be showing up, i wouldn't be doing the work that I do full time. And I'm not saying it's easy doing what I do, but it's definitely a lot easier than standing in my kitchen listening to Lisa Nichols and crying my eyes out because I didn't understand why I couldn't do the thing that I really wanted to do. So that's episode one for you. I've got lots of wonderful episodes that I've pre-recorded.

Kaysha Thomas: 19:29

I want to put this one ahead of those just to explain the name of the podcast, but actually so they're going to be. I want it to be mostly solo episodes, but just to get this ball rolling, i've done quite a few interviews, and so the next five episodes are actually just interviews of other people and talking about different things. It's not always going to be talking about traumas, but it's going to be talking about things that will relate to people who have any experiences or trauma or want to just understand more about their bodies from that you know, somatic and embodied sense and really healing. That way. You're not going to find weight loss advice on this channel. You're not going to find Pilates videos about how to sculpt and tone your body. It's not what I'm about. I'm about people really embracing who they are, learning about themselves, being comfortable with who they are. Oh gosh, i mean I can already map out in my mind the next 20 episodes because there's so much on that that I can share. But that is going to be it for today.

Kaysha Thomas: 20:36

I will link any resources or anything that I've mentioned here, any articles that I think might be helpful. I'll link those all into the description below. If there's anything that I've talked about today that you want me to go into more detail, please do just either send me an email Again my email address will be in the description or drop a comment below. That's probably the best way to do it, and I will get on to that as soon as I can, because what I want is for this podcast to be helpful. What I will share my experience is this podcast is not about me. It is. I've done this for you. It's what I've always wanted to put out there, and so here we are. Until next time, take care.