17 year old Amber was found unconscious on the floor of her school washroom.
Her breathing was shallow and her heart beat was half the normal rate.
Just imagine this is a clip of a teenager in a washroom. It’s the
best I could find with the unlimited stock footage subscription I got.
In the hospital her heart stopped and she had to be resuscitated.
Just imagine a hospital.
They found nothing wrong with her brain.
They found nothing wrong with her heart. And there was nothing wrong with her lungs.
It sort of looked like an opioid overdose, but they found no drugs in her system.
Just imagine the doctor is using chemistry to find the drugs rather than a visual inspection.
Nobody knew what was going on, and it looked like there was nothing they could do.
But a psychologist at the hospital was asked to help support the mother.
And during that conversation he discovered that Amber had been
raped by her mother’s boyfriend for several years ending when she was 9.
So this ended 8 years before she was found unconscious. But the night before she was
found unconscious, her abuser called the house and unfortunately Amber picked up the phone.
One of the things the body does in preparation for physical or psychological pain
is release endorphin and enkephalins. They bind to opioid receptors and
inhibit the communication of pain signals. They’re the body’s natural pain killers.
They’re released during exertion, when you eat spicy food,
as a response to psychological stress and when you’re physically hurt.
Opioids like opium, heroin, and morphine act on the same
receptors and have a similar pain killing effect. It’s why we use morphine for pain.
Amber automatically learned that contact with this guy led to pain that she couldn’t avoid.
So in his presence, to prevent further harm,
Her brain got a new function or instinct. If he’s around panic and release pain killers.
When he called that function played out.
In her case the reaction was strong enough and lasted long enough for her body to shut down.
Like an opioid overdose. Just with her bodies own opioids.
At least that was the psychologist hypothesis. It was unheard of but they decided to give her
a relatively safe drug that is usually used to counteract an opioid overdose.
Within 90 seconds of receiving he drug she regained consciousness and asked where she was.
Amber’s response was strong, but what happened to her isn’t unique.
She experienced post tramatic stress disorder or PTSD. PTSD can be caused by military experiences,
civil unrest, abuse, and experiences of death.
Any where you see overwhelming stress you might start to see PTSD.
Pretty much everyone will experience at least 1 traumatic event in their lifetime.
And about about 8% of all people will have symptoms severe enough
to meet a PTSD diagnosis in their lifetime.
Trauma is so common, and can have such a big impact on learning,
behaviour and health, that it seems to have a significant economic impact.
It’s often described as an epidemic.
This video will look a little bit at what’s going on and what can be done.
I’m hoping it will be slightly helpful to somebody somewhere.
Slightly helpful to somebody somewhere is going to be the new motto of this channel.
Slightly helpful to somebody somewhere
A man went to therapy because he was getting flashbacks.
He said I’m gettomg flashbacks and nightmares from living in a concentration camp.
I’m reliving the smells, tastes, the feelings of it. I’ve always been afraid of telling anyone
because I’ve gotten them since I was a kid. I’ve never been to a concentration camp. Am I crazy?
Am I the reincarnation of someone? But that’s also a crazy thing to think… God doc you gotta help me!
Throughout the course of therapy he was able to remember that these were not his memories.
They were his uncles memories.
When he was young his uncle came to stay with their family. His uncle recalled his time in
a concentration camp, giving detailed stories of daily struggles and fear of sudden death.
The stories were enough to traumatize him to the point of getting vivid flashbacks years later.
This is called vicarious trauma. It’s basically taking on someone’s
trauma through story. It can be especially common
among trauma therapists listening to traumatizing stories all day.
It sounds strange but it’s essentially the system operating as it should.
Trauma can just be your brain adopting a fear response
whether you experienced it yourself or learned about it in a story.
Fear is a useful emotion. It’s a sense for danger. It can help you prepare you to fight a danger
if you can defeat it, it can prepare you to run away if you can get away,
it can make fawn over someone to pretend like nothing is wrong, attempt to calm someone down,
or appear to be the ally to an aggressive person in an attempt to prevent damage from them,
and fear can make you hide and freeze. What they call the fight flight
fawn freeze response. I would add pissing yourself
to that. If you’re fighting someone, pissing yourself can sometimes deescalate things.
Because it appears to be a submissive act and nobody wants to get piss on them.
So these responses can be useful… the problems come when we’re stressed,
angry and afraid even in safe circumstances. A fear response trigger can be anything. A specific
person or kind of relationship, a smell or object that was present during the stressful event,
some word that was said, or your own thoughts and memories like a flashback.
Those stress responses can be playing out nearly all the time without you
knowing what’s causing them.
And while protective, a fear response may not be wise or desirable.
For example within the context of abusive relationships,
you may be trained to fawn or freeze when really you should be getting the fuck out.
These stress responses themselves become toxic
like with Amber. And they can lead to all sorts of health and psychological problems.
One way to try to quantify trauma is to count up the number of kinds of adverse childhood
experiences a person had. It’s not a very nuanced exploration into somebody’s trauma
but it’s a quiz that can be answered quickly without prying into someone’s past.
Studies have found that having 4 or more kinds of these adverse
childhood experiences makes a much more likely to develop issues like these.
Compared to having 0 of these kinds of adverse childhood experiences.
And the negative health effects still happen when you factor out things like drugs,
alcohol, and overeating that would also cause some of these problems.
But the problems aren’t just caused by things happening to someone.
They’re also caused by things not happening to someone.
For example if an eye is blocked throughout early life.
The eye will grow but it won’t work. There’s some pathway between the eyeball and the
brain mush that requires using it to develop. The eye will be blind and it may never work.
Block an adult’s eye for the same amount of time, and it’ll be fine.
This seems to be true for for things like emotional development as well.
Two children had the same parents. One child grew up to have typical
well-mannered behaviour. The other grew up to be a violent,
murdering raping psychopath. What was the difference.
The first child had a great support network. He experienced
love and care and rocking and hugs and kisses and touches and play and smiles and frowns.
His inner emotional world was attuned and connected to those around him.
While the second, he was fed and then left alone in his crib all day everyday. His
physical needs were provided but he was severely emotionally neglected.
The hypothesis is that the parts of his brain that developed pleasure
or pain from human connections never formed. He still had the capacity for happiness and
sadness they just weren’t connected to the emotional states of other people.
Like an eye that never connects with the visual centres of the brain.
He was described as having no empathy and no sympathy and he only seened cared about himself.
Severe emotional neglect alone doesn’t create a murderer,
but it’s likely where his emotional problems got started.
We’re born with all these subconscious impulses and desires and reactions. Like anger, pride,
guilt, joy. They can motivate actions that effect other people and other people can affect them.
These subconscious impulses are meant to be adaptive and useful.
But if, for example, your anger is ignored or invalidated especially as a child when
you’re still learning to understand this thing happening to your body, you don’t learn about
what made you angry, why, whether it was justified, you don’t learn about how your
angry actions affect other people, and your anger doesn’t go away. It just becomes more stupider.
The result can be shame, depression,
lack of resilience, uncontrolled emotions and disconnection.
I chose dramatic examples for this video because they kind of suggest the cause
and effect a bit better. But neglect and abuse can be hard to identify.
They tend to seem normal to us. Fear of violence from a spouse or your
parents can just seem normal. Because we don’t have any other frame of reference.
And this is a factor in why abuse tends to get passed down generation to generation.
So what can you do about all this?
Probably the best thing you can do is learn more. This video is pretty shallow.
I would recommend these books as starting points for general knowledge on neglect and abuse.
And I would recommend this book as a starting point for general knowledge on
the opposite of neglect and abuse, development and support.
If you’re interested in trying to reverse trauma in yourself therapy is good starting point.
Therapy can be expensive but so can untreated trauma and other mental health
issues because of health costs and loss of productivity. One study
found that therapy pays for itself 100X over. Just in terms of money
let alone well being and everything else. But I suspect it depends on the therapy.
Some information on where therapy is right for you below.
Communities can help, there’s lots of mental health communities on Reddit.
There people share experiences, talk about therapy,
recommend books and whatnot. Links to those communities below.
For institutional changes: A cheap way for doctors is to
screen for adverse childhood experiences using that same 10 question aces test from before.
It can help a doctor see what might be going on so they can understand what actions might be needed.
There’s some information on how to adopt that below
For schools some countries have been adding mental health and emotional lessons explicitly
into the daily curriculum. As a result of implementing these programs grades go up,
resilience goes up and well being goes up. There’s a video on that below
Many private companies offer mental health support or otherwise design the work day
around reducing stress because they’ve learned it can increase productivity,
decrease employees quitting, as well as increase well being. Couple articles on that below.
With prisons, although it’s hard to help someone, when you feel anything good or positive they
experience goes against the spirit of punishment, prisoner’s who improve their mental health in and
out of prison have reduced recidivism. Link to article below.
And I’m sure there’s something that can be done for doctors, teachers, and prison workers.
Because these issues effect everyone. It all sounds expensive but it does
seem to pay for itself. And just as abuse and
neglect can be passed down generation to generation, so can resilience and support.
Insert a summarizing and hopeful sentiment before final… oh whoops.
Anyway, you can subscribe for more and if you want
to help videos like this get made you can support this channel on Patreon.
And as we say at the end of every episode of this place, I hope this has been helpful to somebody,
one of you helpful and goodbye.