- Hey, everyone.
I am here with Katie Morton,
she is a YouTuber who talks loads about mental health
and is also a licenced therapist.
- Correct.
- I thought we would chat about trauma and PTSD.
If you've seen a couple of my videos recently,
with my surgery and having been really ill
and in the hospital recently,
I basically talked about how I want to get therapy
because I don't want to develop PTSD.
So I went up to my GP, had a phone assessment,
and then I had an in person assessment.
But because I'm moving house soon,
and I'm moving to a different borough,
so it's a different council, it's a whole different system.
- Oh okay, good to know.
- That hasn't happened yet,
but I thought this might be useful for you guys to hear.
And also useful for me to learn all about this stuff.
Basically I'm terrified of getting PTSD
but I was like what is that?
(laughing)
- Yeah what does that mean.
- Yeah, because you kind of hear it in terms of soldiers.
- It's funny because that's probably,
even though that's what we hear about the most,
it's probably the least common cause of PTSD.
The most common causes are like any kind of abuse
or a life threatening disease, surgery,
illness, things like that, car crash.
- So the person I spoke to says it can happen
if you think you are going to die.
- Exactly.
In order for us to be traumatised,
all that really has to happen is we either
have to fear for our own life, okay,
or the life of someone we care about.
Let's say we were like best, best friends.
Like hooked at the hip, hang out together every day,
and then you call me, you're like oh my god,
this was terrible.
Then I could be traumatised also because my best friend.
- So I should probably check in with my parents.
- Well exactly, just encourage them to get help too.
Or if we witness an event,
even if we don't know those people.
- Uh-huh.
- People might have died in a car crash
or witness something really scary,
that can cause it as well.
And so just recognising that if we ever fear for our life
or the life of someone else.
That is really what can cause a trauma.
- So does PTSD involve flashbacks
or is that just Hollywood making me think that.
- No it definitely does.
PTSD involves a lot of different things.
One of them is flashbacks, and not everyone has flashbacks,
just so you know what flashbacks are,
is when you feel like you're back in the moment
and it's happening again.
But people can have memories that pop into their mind
like a little blip of it and, uh.
And it's just for a second. - I think I'm getting that.
- Or we can have certain scents that trigger it,
like any of those things.
- 'Cause smell's like your strongest memory as well.
- Yes, totally, tastes.
All of your senses can trigger any kind of thing like that.
So any of that is all kind of part of PTSD
as well as avoiding situations that might,
some people especially with surgery related things
may be like, I'm not going back to the hospital.
Those are all components of the PTSD diagnosis.
- Is there a difference between PTSD and trauma
or are they two different things?
- So PTSD itself is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
and that's a diagnosis.
People can be traumatised and never have PTSD.
- Right.
- But then some people develop it.
And PTSD usually develops within three months
of the incident.
- I'm comin' up to four months.
- Okay, cool.
But it can take up to years even,
I always tell people that too.
People can go through something rough
and our brain is so resilient, it can stuff things down
and we're like, I'm just gonna get through this.
And all of a sudden when you feel good,
it's like rarrr.
All the shit comes up.
- A friend of mine has had multiple surgeries
and she was telling me how she didn't take any rest time
after one that she had and was just like,
I'm gonna go back to uni, I'm gonna do all the work,
da-da-da-da and then that actually caused her
to then develop the PTSD.
- Cause you don't get any down time to give your body
and your brain time to process all that happened.
- So for me, one of the reasons why I wanted
to get therapy and also talk to you, is because
I'm interested in trying to prevent it.
Is that a thing that you can do?
- Yes and no, it's a little tricky
because you can get treatment and process through
the trauma you sustained,
before it actually turns into PTSD.
But you can't prevent the trauma from happening,
because it's already happened, I guess is what I'm saying.
So the experience will never change,
but the way that you respond and react to it, can.
- For me, I know that I have a lot of trauma associated
with the two and a half weeks that I was in the hospital
before surgery, because post surgery,
even though that was still awful
because I was barely mobile.
The fact that the diseased colon was out of me,
my brain just felt so much better.
I was like, I'm not ill anymore,
but the time before was just horrendous.
I was a complete shell of a person.
- Yeah, you were afraid for your life.
This is as sick as I've ever been.
- Yeah. - You were traumatised.
- Exactly, and I'm not having any PTSD symptoms right now,
but I want to be in a place where I know what tools
are available to me in order to process that healthily.
- 'Cause we talk about process a lot in therapy,
like you're gonna process through that.
That feels so much better,
but nobody really talks about what that means.
And overall, the term process is like
to get to the point where you can talk out
whatever happened without any emotional charge.
So you can just be like, and I did this thing
and it was really shitty, but like, I'm okay.
And you legitimately, there's no
physiological response to that.
- Is that also not bad?
Because what if it's a bit shut down or?
- You would've had to talk it out.
- 'Cause then you're a bit like a robot, I don't know.
- You can't have processed through something
without actually doing the work.
So someone could stuff it down,
just be like pretend it never happened,
and I'm totally fine.
But if you've been in treatment at all,
or been talking it out with people and been in group
or anything like that, that would be that process
for you to then not have an emotional response.
And so trauma memories, do you wanna get into it
with the memories a little bit?
- Yes. - I love the movie Inside Out.
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. - I talk about this
all the time on my channel.
- I wanna watch that again. - I know.
It's so good, 'cause they do such a good job
of representing our brain and how it stores memory.
They're marbles, right? - Yeah.
- They're like rolling them around and filing them
and all those beautiful cabinets and stuff like that.
- This is a happy memory, this is a sad memory.
- All those memories are essentially,
you're essentially telling a story,
and the way that we create memories in narrative form.
And so when you're able to talk through a story
or even tell yourself the story, clearly,
it's rolled up nicely in a marble and it's filed away.
Trauma memories are too much for us to put
into narrative form, our brain can't process it.
We might not even have the memories at first,
because it's so traumatising that our brain
pulls the ripcord, I call it, dissociates.
It's like, waaa, this is too much.
I don't wanna remember, it's like you don't have the memory.
So when we're putting that marble together,
it's like it slips, and it falls,
and it splinters everywhere.
And so when we're walking around,
trying to create new memories, we step on those splinters
and that's when we have the flashbacks.
Or we have that sensation in our body like the scent.
- Yeah, it's not like you have a trauma marble
stored somewhere. - And it can get into your
other memories that are marbles, 'cause it flew
into every part of your memory.
- This is a great analogy.
- And so then working with someone in the process
is essentially putting on thick gloves
and picking up all those splinters.
And putting them back together into a marble
as best you can until you roll it away.
- So then you still have to, because you experienced it,
but you've stored it.
- we won't accidentally stumble into something
that's going to cause us to react in a way
that we don't want.
- And what's the difference between doing that
and storing the marble, than pushing it down.
And hiding it away somewhere.
Is that just ignoring the splinters, basically?
- Mm-hmm, yes. - Okay.
- You're still experiencing it.
- It's even a funnier analogy just because
the association with mental health and losing your marbles.
Oh no, my trauma marbles, like eugh.
So what are the treatments for PTSD then?
- There are a bunch of them, but the first thing
that you will probably start with is talk therapy.
And that's really just talking it out with someone
and essentially you're talking through all the little bits
of story to put it into that marble.
And that is what we try first,
and usually that's because most therapists
are trained to do it and it's the easiest
to consider trying.
That's what I do I do in my practise
and that's all I'm trained to do.
I'm not a trauma specialist, but I am able
to do talk therapy and see if it's working
and if we should refer you off to other options
or more intensive programmes.
And so after that there's EMDR, and EMDR stands for
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing.
And there's a lot of people who say it doesn't work,
a lot of people say it works.
I just feel like do what's right for you,
try it out, don't knock it til you try it.
And essentially what it means is you know when you sleep
and you have REM sleep and your eyes are like (trilling).
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - They believe that
that's your brain processing through your day.
And so the person who created this found that
if she would watch something, go back and forth,
back and forth, the stress or anxiety that she was feeling
went down and the thing she was worried about felt better.
They think it's like giving your brain another chance
to process through it. - Oh.
- And so EMDR, they can put tappers in your hands,
they can tap you on your knees or shoulders
or whatever's appropriate for you.
Putting headphones on with buzz, (buzzing)
in essence they're trying to recreate that eye movement
while you talk about a traumatising event
and therefore your brain is processing it again.
And I mean there still needs to be more research on it,
and some people are like this is ridiculous,
but other people find it to be really helpful,
so do what's right for you.
But there's also a tonne of different types of therapy.
And I'm just gonna name them and I have videos about them
but there's a lot to get into.
- Yeah there's a lot of videos on Katie's channel.
- And I even have a trauma specialist,
my friend Alexa comes on and gets into more nitty gritty,
but there's Somatic Experiencing,
which is like managing the bodily symptoms of it,
and then there's Schema Therapy,
there's all sorts of things you can do
with regard to trauma.
- And CBT, is that more like talk therapy?
- Yes, but they have trauma based CBT.
- Which is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
- And that means essentially that we work
on figuring out what your faulty belief is.
Let's say that that belief is every time I get in a car,
I'm gonna have an accident.
Figuring out why, what thoughts you're telling yourself,
and then what behaviours, are you avoiding cars
because of that, slowly getting you out of that.
- I remember trying to get CBT at one point
for my fear of flying, but
I couldn't get it for free on the NHS
because it wasn't so severe that
it was stopping me from getting on planes.
- So exposure therapy's great for that, too.
- Oh, 'cause they sit people by airports
and make them watch planes go
up and down and everything.
- Yeah, and you go to the airport
like you're getting on a plane, then you don't.
And you visualise yourself slowly exposing yourself
to the scary thing, which you were kinda doing by flying.
I think my one question for you is
I would have assumed it was
the surgery that was traumatising?
- Uh huh. - You said it was more
the time leading up to it, why do you think that was?
- I think it was because of how much being ill
effected my brain.
For two and a half weeks, I was in a side room,
so it wasn't on a ward.
I spent all day lying down in pain.
I didn't wanna pick up my phone, I could barely
talk to people, and (whispering) my voice was like this.
Most of the time, I'd just be lying there
with my eyes shut, like not even sleeping.
And it's just not fun.
And when I think of that room, that's where my trauma is.
Just physically that room, and then I was wheeled
out of there, had surgery.
Obviously that was terrifying, but at that point it was like
I'm so ill, I just want this to end.
And so I had the surgery and I woke up in a lot of pain.
- Yeah, 'cause you had surgery.
- 'Cause I'd just had surgery, but other than that
I was just like chatting away.
And like hey, mom, dad, boyfriend.
It's amazing to see you finally.
I've not seen you for a few weeks,
'cause I haven't been here.
But yeah, all of the trauma is like the room.
It's very much there.
- Which makes sense, I guess, because it was out of control.
I think a lot of people, the trauma comes from
when you have no control, where the surgery is almost like
you're taking control back. - Yeah, uh-huh.
- Where you're like I'm sick of this,
I can't feel this way anymore, I don't even know who I am.
- It was the unknown, whilst I was ill,
it was like I have no idea it's going to be
until I get better, I didn't know if anything
was going to work.
I have no idea if I'm going to be healthy again.
It was just like, don't know, don't know,
don't know, constantly. - Yeah.
- Post surgery, it was like there is a clear trajectory
of what happens and there is an end in sight
of when I will be okay again.
That was so much easier to live with than before.
- I could see that the worry of being ill forever,
like when is this gonna get better, what am I gonna do,
it's still fear for your life.
You feel like, is this what life is right now?
'Cause this is terrible.
- And I know I was the one who was ill,
but seeing how it effected my parents,
and my partner as well,
having to like see me go through that,
like that also hurt, and I also wanted to look after them.
I was too ill to be able to do that.
So it was like a circle of everyone is traumatised
and wanting to look after each other.
- I mean, it is normal not to be like,
it doesn't matter, 'cause it matters.
But it is normal for those close to us to feel it, too.
But that's part of their process.
It actually really has nothing to do with you,
it's their own ability to process what's going on.
They even talk about, similar to family dynamics and stuff,
that there can be generational trauma.
And they call it trans-generational trauma,
'cause it moves from generation to generation.
So let's say your parents grew up in a war-torn country,
but they got out and they don't live there anymore,
but because of the way they
behaviorally interact with people, emotionally.
- Their kids could have that, too?
- You could have the same symptoms.
- Whoa. - And it could go
from generation to generation until
someone stops it and talks to therapists,
processes it through so they feel better.
So they don't keep passing it on.
- Will it always get passed on, or is it just kind of like
it may or may not? - It may or may not.
It kind of depends, I think,
how intense your PTSD is,
how much of the symptoms you express to others.
- Well, thanks, Katie, for coming on my channel
and talking about this stuff.
It's super interesting, and definitely,
once I've moved house I'm like, to the GP.
- Yeah, yay.
- Yeah, I hope you guys liked this video, found it useful.
Please give a thumbs up if you did.
And maybe if you're willing to share
any of your processes or things in the comments
that might help other people, that would be amazing.
And I'll leave links in the description
to Katie's channel and socials and we did a video
on her channel, too, so you should definitely check that out
and we'll see you soon, bye. - Bye.
(light downtempo techno)