Transcript: A Trauma

Welcome to the US and Kids Podcast. I am your host Jan Talen. I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, but I'm also a wife, a mom, and a grandma. And, with my own marriage and with my clients, I have worked to help us avoid the pain of divorce and achieve that grand balance of being married forever, while parenting together. I know, you know, we know, this is not an easy task or easy work, but it is very rewarding. And, that's why I do this podcast is to help build marriages forever, while you parent together. 

Today, we're going to talk about trauma. Not many of us like to think about it. Yet, probably all of us have it.  And, trauma impacts families. It impacts marriages, and it impacts us as individuals. And yet, I feel like it's not talked about very often even though it often impacts how a family and a couple reacts and interacts with things.

So first of all, today, I'm going to talk mostly from the general perspective about trauma with a little bit of application more towards the end. You will hear some of the D.N.A. process: knowing our desires and our dreams; using the necessary skills to work through the trauma; and applying those skills well. Regardless of the trauma, it is important to apply those skills well depending on the age and the situation of those involved. This helps us use the best of the necessary skills to achieve our dreams and our desires. iThat way it's received well, and people grow and bond together. 

So, first of all, we should do something, and that is we should define trauma. Trauma is an experience that is way outside of our coping skills either bodily, or mentally, or emotionally. It’s where we don't have the skills to know how to adequately make our way through (the traumatic experience/event) and come out on the other end okay.
So, I've had a few traumas in my life that I think I processed okay. One of them we're going to talk about today. Other ones that we're not going to process is the time that I dove off a sailboat, and I pulled my arm, at least everything underneath the skin in my arm, off from my shoulder. And, we had to figure out how to put it back together again. We had to figure out how to stay on the boat when I was far away from good medical care. I had to work my way through that trauma, because I had never been that injured before. That's some of what I mean... arm trauma.
But, trauma can also happen mentally when people say things that we have no idea what to do with that sentence or with their opinion.
Trauma can come from somebody else's interaction with us where they have treated us cruelly or strangely. And, we don't know how to think about it. How to interpret it. What story to tell ourselves about their reaction or their interaction with us.
So you can hear traumas go from really big things: death; accidents; scary, scary things; to strange things that we don't quite know what to do with.
And in these ways, I think all of us have experienced trauma, and that even our kiddos experience trauma. They are perpetually having to figure out what to do with strange situations they've never known what to do with before. And, as you will hear here, one of the ways to make it through trauma is to give people room to ask questions. And, in giving the room to ask questions, is giving them room to search for answers. And in searching for the answers and finding them, often you'll also see that there's been an action to take. 

So, the trauma that I was going to share with you today in terms of helping you see how this applies, is a trauma that happened between me and my husband quite some time ago. And yet, it still sort of rattles my brain, because he should be either in a vegetative state or dead. I don't want either one for him or for me. What did happen?
My husband and I were out skiing, and he got taken out (firmly ran into) by another skier. I wasn't there when it happened. I caught up on him a few seconds later, around the corner, and there he is laying head down, face down on the hill.
I was stunned and not sure if this was serious or not.  So I started asking questions. 
"How are you honey?
How come you're still laying there?"
And, he's not moving.
And, I haven't done that before. (Seen my husband be unresponsive).
I've come upon fallen skiers before, but usually they'll go, "Yeah I'm fine." And, you move on.
But, I never come upon my husband not able to move, hardly able to respond to me. I'm on a steep part of the mountain. I have to figure out how to get my snowboard off, so it doesn't go flying down the hill. And, I'm trying to get close to him on the ground.
Ski patrol does come. My husband isn't very cognitively well. He doesn't have anything broken, but he could hardly stand. And, he really can't think or talk. 

Chip's experience of this is one thing.
My experience and memory of it is another. Much of what I experienced in trying to get him to answer ski patrols' questions and trying to determine what kind of cognitive ability he had... he doesn't remember much of that.
But, I do.
It's the same experience... us having to deal with him fallen on the hill.
And, we had to figure out what to do with this shared experience. Chip's experience was he had never had to ride in an ambulance before. I had never seen Chip out of control that he wasn't able to think, or sign papers, or answer questions.
That was my experience. 

As we talked about it a few days later. Yes, he was okay. We both agreed we never wanted to ski on that mountain again. (Sorry, Colorado.) That mountain... we're not going back to.
We also noticed that with both of us having this different experience around the same event, we were having different trauma reactions.
I had never had to have my six-foot-plus husband lean on me. I'm about five (foot) three (inches). As I tried to hold him up while he tried to walk around the snow hill. It's slippery!
We have to get into the warming hut. He can't really even tell where we're supposed to go.
I had never ridden in an ambulance before, but I was in a different spot than him. I was in the front seat, and that is weird. Like I said, the same event with very different experiences and very different takeaways.
So, he was sort of surprised that I was so rattled by it. I was surprised that he was surprised that I was rattled by it. He was really loopy until he got the oxygen that he needed. So much of it, he doesn't remember, because he was trying to just keep his brain working, and his body put together. 

As we put the event, in the middle between us, we explored it.  We had both calmed down a little bit. We could see that we were going to be okay. We could also see his experience was valid, and his takeaway from that experience was valid. So was mine. Even though our takeaways were a little bit different.
As Chip and I have talked about this trauma over the past years, we can hear the different layers of confusion. We can hear the fear that I realized more in the beginning, and that he realized more later when he was a little more cognizant of what was going on.
We both agreed that the fear was real. It was just different for both of us. He sort of wondered if his brain would work well and consistently again. It does.
I wondered if his brain would work well enough for him to walk again without help.
We asked questions, and we stayed curious about what the other person remembered. We accepted what their takeaway was. It was their takeaway. We came to accept that both of our experiences were true. Same event, different experiences. And, even though we had different answers to some of the questions, none of our answers or our questions were wrong. 

As we asked questions and got answers, we figured out there was an action to take. You see, the part of the story I didn't tell you is what we were doing at the time. We were delivering a helmet to my son-in-law. We were under the impression, at that time, that skiers like my husband don't need to wear helmets. Only snowboarders needed to wear helmets. So, I was wearing a helmet, and we were delivering a helmet to my son-in-law who didn't have one on his head.
What we did the next day, when we had our wits a bit more about us, was to realize we had an action to take, and that was to go get a helmet for my husband, the skier. We came to understand that what we needed to do, the action we needed to take, was not just to get a helmet for my husband. We also knew that anyone who was out playing on the snow in steep terrain would benefit from wearing one.  You see, the helmet that Chip was delivering was now no longer usable. It had a crack about an inch and a half up the back of the helmet. This should have been my husband's head. Instead, this was simply a helmet, an $89 purchase, not zillions of dollars of medical bills and physical, personal pain. And so, we didn't ski the next day, but we did take action and go and buy and wear a helmet. We have used those helmets every year since.

You see, I had to ask questions that we never thought about asking like, "What would one of us do if the other had to go in the ambulance and someone couldn't go along?"
We had to deal with other sorts of life trauma, scary questions that forced us to sort of discern what did we want to do if we were in such trauma places again. We had never asked those questions, but it was time to ask the questions, and get answers, and take care of actions that helped us know what to do.
We wrote down our questions. We wrote down our answers. Where it was important, we added it to our health care policies. 

I'm sort of hoping that traumas for you are not this big. And yet, we are so thankful that our trauma is really just a story and a short ambulance ride but not much more.
I know it's very possible that you have much bigger trauma than this either from your childhood, or from your everyday life. Work to talk gently and carefully with each other asking questions that are honest and are gentle. You can hear, I just slowed down my pace of my voice. (At) This pace ask questions; be still; wait for answers; look for answers that have room for actionable steps. And, even if the action is just hugs, and care, and empathy - those are still actions, and they rate actually very high in helping the situation and the trauma heal in the long haul. 

Your kiddos might have trauma from something that happens at daycare, or out on the school playgrounds, or with cousins, or just a loss of somebody or a pet that they know and love. As you sit with them and listen to them, probably while you're coloring or playing with some playdough, you'll be able to ask some questions. Because, you're their parent, you're going to help them ask and look for good answers. Answers that help them take actions, and then help them maybe find a new approach.
I'm hoping that as you help them find answers, your kiddo feels more safe and secure. Where there's safety, they then will also have courage to not continue to repeat and relive the trauma, but to learn from the trauma and move on. 

I know, trauma is not a fun thing to talk about or think about. I know we really just want to pretend that if no one is talking about it, it's all okay. However, we know that traumas have anniversaries. Dates where that trauma happened, and those, like anniversaries, show up every year. Around those anniversaries, even in between those anniversaries, if you see a shadow or a trauma that mimics elements of your kiddos trauma or your trauma, it's wise to just ask, "How you doing?" The knowledge for them is that you care, and that it's okay to talk about it. It's okay to feel it, and to relive it, and to wonder about it. During anniversary times, sometimes for people, we ask them, "How are you doing?" That's a vague question. Ask it more specifically. "Is there something I can do to help you through this anniversary?" And, sometimes the answer is, "I just want to go help somebody else." Sometimes, the answer is, "I want to plant flowers." "Or, I want to make something pretty." Or, "I want to be alone. I want the day to myself just to think and contemplate. I'm gonna be fine, but I just want the day to myself." Sometimes, people want to visit a grave or look at pictures. Sometimes, you want to go shopping. 

The healing from a trauma can take a long time, and it looks differently for everybody. It looks differently for a four-year-old who had trauma from mom or dad dying, or even losing their puppy dog than it is for the two-year-old than it is for the eight-year-old than it is for the 18-year-old.
Things change, and sometimes, what at first it seems really scary, now might be less intimidating. However, the opposite can also be true. What was not so scary in the beginning, because we were calm in the moment so that we could to figure it out. But now we got to safety, and feel such relief around that that we never paid any attention to the fright growing inside of us. But, as time goes by (and sometimes this is years down the road), all of a sudden, we start to dream. We start to have anxieties and worries; become over protective; or more withdrawn; or more crabby; really reactive to a situation that has the same fear in it that you had way back when. Both traumas are true - the ones we realize right away and the ones that awaken when life is calm. They just have different timing for when we react to them. They are still healable by: asking good questions; looking for answers; and finding good ways to take action that move us out of the trauma and into a healthy perspective. 

So, if you're remembering some things that happened to you, as a kid, or as an adult, take some time to write about it. Putting it on paper frees our brain up, so that we can do more exploring. It's like it gets out some of the gunk...like when you start to declutter your junk drawer you find treasures. And, that's what happens when we write about our traumas is that as we do we begin to find some of the treasure in it. 

With your trauma, don't be afraid to tell someone else about it. A wise person, of course! Don't be afraid to pray about it and look for comfort, and care, and perspective from Jesus' angle.

Look for those A's: Ask questions;
Seek Answers that will help you know what
Action to take; and remember, sometimes, no action is action.

If you were with someone who is dealing with trauma, a kiddo, a spouse, a friend listen to their questions. Let them find the answers. 

Of course, give appropriate input as they ask and help them discern wise actions. If they say, "I'm going to go get even." You might want to help them discern a wiser action. They say, "I'm going to drive my car off the cliff." Yeah, I think that I would help them in that trauma, because what they're saying is they're in such great pain, they have to find a way out of it. Your care and compassion will help them have courage to keep working their way through it. Where it's appropriate, help them find a counselor or a therapist. If you're stuck on that, for goodness sakes, email me (at) [email protected]. The email comes to me, and I'll help you find a therapist. I have connections. We can do it. 

Trauma sadly, yet truthfully, is a part of everyday life for every family. Each person because of their age, and their place, or their role in the trauma will have a different story to tell. We're gonna honor each story and perspective. Where there is information that makes the story more accurate just share it gently and appropriately.
You can hear, as I talk about these traumas, that a tender, kind heart: that gives room for benefit of the doubt; that gives room for lots of empathy; for really listening carefully; for being gracious in the middle of person's pain is really important to helping the person you're with, yourself, and your family feel.
This is hard work. It is good work, and it is worth the work.
I'm here to support you and to cheer you on.
Do the work.
If you have questions, email me.
Take this printable, because you will find it usable: when you hear a friend that has lost someone precious; when your kids come home, and they have to deal with the fact that their kitty or their puppy dog got hit.. you'll have some ideas about how to manage it. And, that moves trauma away from being so traumatic, and it can be incorporated into our skill set for everyday life.
Once again, cheering for you.
Thank you for joining me.
We'll talk to you next week. Bye, bye.