do you ever have an intense emotional reaction that just seems disproportionate to the situation
or do some little things set you off or you can't figure out why you're upset maybe you feel anxious
or like this flash of anger or an unexplainable feeling of fear or maybe you experience this like
feeling of shut down like where you just feel exhausted or like withdrawing curling up into
a ball right when we can't figure out where these feelings are coming from sometimes these feelings
are related to Childhood trauma or unresolved painful experiences from our past trauma changes
our nervous system to make us super sensitive to situations that in any way remind us of the
pain or danger of our past trauma and this is supposed to help us right like we're supposed
to be able to identify dangerous situations very quickly and respond to them very quickly
but when we can't identify what's underneath those emotions we often feel out of control
in our own body so in this video you'll learn seven journaling prompts to help you explore
how big emotions might be related to past trauma and you'll hear about a man whose fear
of flying mostly went away when he did this work so let's get better at feeling [Music]
foreign [Music] let me tell you the story of a man who walked through these questions with a
therapist and it changed his life Mike was terrified of flying and because he refused
to fly his family couldn't do the vacations he that they wanted to do and he couldn't take a
promotion that he wanted that required travel so his wife eventually asked him to see a therapist
so he did his therapist asked him to describe what it felt like when he had to fly in an
airplane and he said it made him feel anxious and panicky and just out of control he he told
the story about how once he'd even demanded to be let off the plane like right as they
were closing the doors when the therapist asked him where he felt this in his body he said that
he felt like anxious like his arms and hands were jittery and tense he said that he felt sweaty and
he felt like he just needed to do something like this this urge to act he couldn't just sit there
so then they explored when he remembered feeling these Sensations and he saw this image of himself
as a 12 year old boy he described feeling like helpless panicked and he couldn't remember why
his therapist didn't say much and she just let him sit with that feeling for a minute so the
man just sat there and he thought about how he felt as a 12 year old and suddenly he remembered
that that was the year when his dad left the family and when he left he handed Mike as a
12 year old boy a checkbook and he said you know your mom is incompetent at handling money I have
written down all the bills that need to be paid and it's your job to make sure that they get paid
and Mike realized when he was 12 had been put in this position where all the adults who were
supposed to be in control couldn't be trusted and the therapist asked you know can you see any
connection to what that has to do with flying and Mike said yeah actually I am terrified of trusting
adults to keep me safe I feel like I have to keep myself safe and when I'm on a plane I actually
have to you know trust the pilots and the flight attendants so I've seen his therapists continue to
discuss and explore these fears he was able to identify them and see what these feelings were
really about he was able to also see himself as an adult now and realize that the pilots were not the
same as his parents they were actually competent and trustworthy he also saw himself differently
he wasn't that child anymore he was a capable adult so as he did this work his his fears of
flying decreased immensely and he was able to start traveling again for for work and for fun
okay so sometimes big emotions seem to come out of the blue right you're walking down the street and
suddenly you feel scared or jumpy or your child is rude to you and you snap at him or your boss says
something and it just like fills you with this overwhelming heaviness and usually you don't even
know why and that's because a lot of times these big feelings we have in the present moment they're
connected to deep emotional memories sometimes of trauma and these memories are stored beneath
our Consciousness right they're stored in our limbic system in the emotional centers of our
brain and they're also in our nervous system and they're meant to help us react quickly to escape a
physical danger like a snake or a physical attack but sometimes they get triggered even when we're
actually safe now Larry Chelsea tells a story of when he was at a restaurant with an old friend and
the waiter brought a dish to the table and all of a sudden his friend was jumping up and screaming
at the waiter and screaming about how terrible the restaurant was and you know his friend stormed out
now Larry his family the waiter everyone in that restaurant were all just like stunned they sat
there confused couldn't figure out what had caused this well Larry and his friend were both Veterans
of the Vietnam War and they had spent years being tortured at a prison camp Larry realized
that before bringing them their meal the waiter had just brought them a dish of white rice and
rice was the only food they had eaten for years in the prison camp so that Rice brought up all
those old emotions of being trapped and helpless as a pow and those emotions really had nothing to
do with the restaurant or the rice they were all these kind of emotional ruts of unhealed trauma
so many of our current feelings are actually about old unresolved trauma now trauma could
be defined as an experience that's too overwhelming for us to process
and where did we experience so many emotions and situations that were so big and so overwhelming
childhood right so often those big unexplained feelings are about your
inner child not your current adult and when when we can acknowledge that right we could
acknowledge that inner child with compassion and with gentleness our current adult can heal
now just to be clear we don't fix the past right we don't change the past the reason we do this
work is because the emotional difficulty is right here in the present in our nervous system vessel
Van Der Coke who's the author of the body keeps The Score says trauma treatment is not about
telling stories about the past as long as you can tolerate what's going on right now there's
no need for any further treatment so we explore the past to gain awareness and compassion of our
emotions in the present moment the change we makes happens to our emotional experience it
happens right here in the present okay so let's talk about some journaling prompts you can use
to explore if what you're feeling currently is a trauma trigger now real quick caveat before I tell
you the questions to ask I do want to remind you that doing any kind of trauma work can be
really triggering it can lead to dissociation or really intense and heavy feelings and that's
why it's best done with a licensed professional who can guide you through building resources to
stay in your window of Tolerance and help you stay regulated as you work through your stuff
but I also understand that not everyone can access a therapist and many people have gone
through more trauma than they can process in just one hour a week so not processing trauma can also
lead to triggers and flashbacks and dissociation so that's why I teach this stuff on the internet
but I do want to encourage you like please like work with a therapist whenever possible be really
gentle with yourself and just go really slow if you're starting to feel overwhelmed like take a
little break and then come back to it one of the biggest mistakes people who've experienced trauma
do when they start to do this work is they try to rush through it and do it as fast as possible and
that ends up kind of re-traumatizing them because their nervous system response is so so big so I'm
just gonna encourage you like go really really slow and get as much support as possible use
grounding skills get support from a friend or family member and if it's too overwhelming like
please stop and get help before continuing so okay let's just do a quick grounding exercise
before we talk about these journaling prompts so just take a really slow breath and notice
your surroundings notice that you are here in the present moment and that you are safe at this time
and then before you write I'm going to encourage you you know to consider sitting down with some
comforting objects right some calming music a cup of hot cocoa and the other thing I would encourage
you to do is as you do this journaling I encourage you to write it on paper instead of typing because
again that forces you to slow it down and kind of process as you go it also makes things like
more concrete which makes it more resolvable okay so here are six questions you can ask yourself
and this is adapted from Margaret wernberg's 10 best treatments for anxiety question number one
what do you feel in your body and then describe that number two what is the
earliest age you remember feeling these Sensations number three is can you create
an image of yourself feeling these Sensations even if it's just like a little snapshot what
what else were you doing or might you have been doing when you were feeling this way
and then next who else might have been there and then is the current situation in any way similar
and then clarify are these old feelings accurate for the current situation
so again I want you to go through these slowly as you journal and just remember take a slow breath
notice your surroundings look around you remind yourself that you're safe enough right here and
right now and and again I want to emphasize like not all of the emotions we have right now stem
from some unresolved trauma like a lot of emotions have to do with with what's going on biologically
or how we're thinking how we're interpreting situations but when our emotions are super
disproportionate when they're a lot bigger than a current situation a lot of those interpretations
stem from our experiences in the past where we felt unsafe and when we reprocess those
experiences from a state of safety as an adult with our resources and as we write about them
we can reinterpret them from a place of confidence and safety and create healing and probably in the
long run we can become less emotionally reactive I hope that helps and if you'd like to learn
more grounding skills and how to regulate your nervous system please check out my free course
it's called grounding skills for anxiety and PTSD so thank you for watching and take care
[Music]