Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
I talked in a previous video about how trauma affects
how you store memories.
Traumatic experiences can also affect
how you perceive things
and cause you to have what we call cognitive distortions.
These distortions are especially present
in people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder
from an event,
but you don't need to have that diagnosis
for your thinking to be skewed
from a traumatic experience or experiences.
Here are four ways trauma can distort your thinking.
Number one is you can't feel close to people.
If your trauma involved losing someone or something,
or even being rejected by someone you love
like an absent parent,
you can believe that you'll always lose people or things
that are important to you.
If that's the case,
then why bother getting close to someone
or why bother investing that much into this thing
because you'll just lose it anyway
and then you'll have to suffer again.
Breaking out of this pattern takes time,
but change starts with recognizing the connection
between your past losses
and how you're reacting to new situations in the present.
In the wake of a traumatic experience,
you tend to overlay the same emotions
from the past experience onto the present
and react to it as if it's the same experience,
but it's not.
You can still be disappointed
and still experience a loss in the present,
but you have agency to make different decisions
in the present that could result in a different outcome.
So getting past this pattern of reacting with old emotions
takes constant reminding that that was then
and this is now, and the two are not the same.
You won't be able to work all of this out in your head.
If you don't have a therapist to help you
see what you're doing,
journaling your experiences can help you
be more introspective.
One approach to the journaling is to write down
a negative experience that you had
interacting with someone.
This could be a conflict you had with someone
or did someone say something that made you
feel uncomfortable, insecure, angry, shamed, or guilty,
just to name a few negative emotions.
Once you identify the emotion,
write down the situation.
What did the person say or do that resulted
in you feeling that way?
Notice, I don't say what did they do
to make you feel that way?
We're assuming here that your reaction
was out of proportion to the trigger.
It doesn't fit the situation.
So whatever the person said or did,
isn't to blame for how you feel.
The next thing to explore is,
has there been another situation
that evoked a similar reaction or emotion?
What about that situation is similar to the present.
Then you want to look at how that situation is different
and how you could have responded differently.
Now, this is a very generic template
and you'd have to modify it to make it fit situations
where you were.
Overtly harmed versus covertly harmed.
For example, let's say you tend to withdraw
from people when they start to get close to you.
You may recognize that the situations
that trigger you to do this
may be when someone becomes too controlling
or smothering like a key figure from your past,
or you may pull away when you notice
that you're relying too much on the person
and you want to keep an emotional distance
because you anticipate eventually being rejected
by this person or situation
like it always seems to happen for you.
These are two very different originating
traumatic experiences that result in similar behavior
of keeping people at a distance
or not being able to feel close to people.
So this is how exploring these situations
through journaling can help you figure this out
and see your patterns.
I put these questions in a worksheet for you
that you can get as a free download on my website.
If you're on my email list,
you already got it in your inbox when this video published.
The second distortion is around feeling safe.
If you've experienced something that threatened your safety
like being in a car accident,
you may have this foreboding sense
that you will eventually die in a car accident
or some other accident.
It's just inevitable.
This unsafe feeling can run in the background of your mind
and make you feel anxious.
And you may not connect the tension that you feel
with feeling unsafe.
That fear may not register consciously for you.
Instead, you just have this sick feeling in your stomach
or sense of dread and not know why you feel that way.
Grounding exercises are a great way
to get out of future thinking
and bring you back to the present moment
where you are currently safe.
And there's lots of ways that you can ground yourself.
But one easy way to do it
is to use color awareness exercise.
You pick any color that comes to your mind
and then name all of the objects in your view
that have that color.
So you look around the room and say the object aloud.
You can look at this exercise and other grounding exercises
as a way to diffuse your fear and settle your mind.
A third way trauma can distort your thinking
is by generating self-blame and mistrust.
It's fairly common to blame yourself for the experience.
Person to person trauma are things like abuse,
bullying or assault at the hands of another person
as opposed to a natural disaster or an accident.
We process intentional person to person harm differently
than unintentional accidents
even if the physical outcome is the same.
The thing about distortions is they aren't logical.
So when something wrong happens,
you look to blame yourself for the circumstance.
If I'd only gotten an earlier start to my day,
I wouldn't have run into this person who attacked me.
This self-blame, guilt, and shame
can cause you to doubt yourself
and not trust your judgment on decisions.
You may even have trouble believing
that people can really have your best interests at heart.
You can address this distortion with journaling the same way
as you would with not feeling close to people.
A fourth cognitive distortion that can result from trauma
is feeling powerless.
You can feel like you can't control any aspect of your life.
And this feeling can drive you to make extreme decisions
or eliminate things from your life in order to gain control.
For example, let's say you're held up at a gas station
when you step out of your car to pump gas.
This is something that can happen to anyone.
Your reaction is to stop driving
because you don't feel safe even when you're in your car.
You fear that someone can walk up to your car
at a red light.
Now you've never seen someone walking up to cars
at busy intersections with guns in their hands,
but now you see this as fairly probable,
an incident just waiting to happen, it's a matter of time.
Fear followed by avoidance of things related to the fear
makes the fear grow bigger
and sometimes morph into other fears.
Like in this example,
it starts with fear of someone surprising you
when you step out of your car
and then evolves into general fears that you're a target
anytime you're in your car.
Avoiding driving all together is what made the fear grow
and develop branches.
If you recognize this kind of distortion
around being unable to control anything,
the thing to do is to dial back
and look at the things you can control.
If you gain control over something, even if it's small,
you weaken the distortion about being powerless
over everything.
And these can be small wins
like maybe you can control the time of day that you drive,
or control only getting out of the car in well lit
and well-populated areas.
If you've really gotten into a pattern of avoidance,
you may need help from a therapist
to help you recognize ways to feel more in control.
Another approach to reducing
and eliminating avoidance behaviors
is to gradually expose yourself
to the things that you find threatening.
This is called graded exposure
or systematic desensitization.
Desensitization helps you get past the restrictive behavior
that's holding you back,
but you'll still need to work on your mindset
around feeling powerless.
It's a combined approach to managing how you think
and your actions.
If you don't have your own therapist,
you can learn about addressing cognitive distortions
in my new book called, "Why Am I So Anxious?"
I teach you about how to identify cognitive distortions
and how to create fear ladders
for graded exposure exercises.
The book will be available August 16th,
but if you pre-order before that date,
you'll get this bonus illustrated guide
that has a handy reference
for the common cognitive distortions
and 11 sample fear ladders.
You can get your pre-ordered book from getyourpreorder.com.
If you want more details on what's in the book,
watch this video for a chapter by chapter breakdown,
and watch this video,
for more on how trauma affects how you process memories.
Thanks for watching.
See you next time.