--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I want to start the conversation today by just thanking you for being here. Today's show is going to be a little bit different. And the reason why is it's going to be a tough one. So I wanted to give you a little context before we get started.
--:-- Mel Robbins: When I launched the Mel Robbins podcast less than a year ago, my promise to you was we would share life together. And I would use this show as a way for us to support one another through the good and unfortunately sometimes the bad. And that brings me to what I want to talk to you about today. And that is how do you support yourself when something bad happens?
--:-- Mel Robbins: See, a few weeks ago, I was a witness to a horrible tragedy. And while it did not directly impact me or my family or anyone that I knew personally, it still affected me profoundly. It affected my family and it affected the community that we're in. And I recorded my feelings in real time as I was processing the events that were unfolding because that's how I process my emotions by talking about them.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And when I shared what had happened with my teammates and with my extended family, what was really interesting is that almost every single person had their own story about having been a witness to another person or family's tragedy. And the truth is, when you find yourself in that kind of situation, none of us had the tools to really process how it affects you or how to deal with your complicated feelings of guilt and fear and sadness and grief.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And these conversations with my friends and family, it just reinforced the fact that this is a really important topic to discuss. How do you support yourself when you witness something horrible? And it's so important that that's what we're going to talk about today. Even if it's hard or it feels very uncomfortable to listen to parts of what we're going to talk about, this is important.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, when all of this was happening, I had the benefit of speaking with Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, who is a renowned researcher and expert in trauma. And what I learned from Dr. McDonald a couple weeks ago, it helped me process the traumatic experience and events that were unfolding here. And I hope and I know it's going to help you or someone that you love do the same.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So before we get started, I really want you to decide if this may or may not be the right episode for you to listen to today. If it's not, I completely understand. This will be here for a resource for you when you're ready. And I do hope you will join me again when our next episode releases in a few days. And if this is the right episode for you, let's get started.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm going to take you back a few weeks ago to a moment as these events were unfolding, where I was sitting in a chair in a bedroom, and I decided to hit record and just start talking to you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: A couple nights ago, we were cooking dinner. It was about 6:30 at night. And all of a sudden, I heard all of these horns honking. And not like honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, but like, you know, and like somebody lays on a horn. And I'm thinking, what the hell is that? And it had been a really windy, stormy day. The waves that day on the ocean here where we rent this awesome little house, they were enormous. I mean, enormous.
--:-- Mel Robbins: We had been out at the beach and it's a very shallow beach and there are lifeguards there, but the flags were yellow and I was only in up to like my knees. These waves were crashing way over my head and I'm like five, eight. And so they were big, monstrous waves. There was a riptide warning. And when it comes to the ocean, I don't screw around. The second that red flag is up, we're out. The second they say those words, riptide, we're not screwing around.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So we had fun in the waves. We then came home, we're cooking dinner. And now all of a sudden these horns are honking. It's like, and so I put the spoon down, I'm stirring the pasta and I go out to the front porch and I look down to the right and there are four cars. There was a tan suburban that is going to be seared into my memory. There's a tan suburban. And I think that's the car where the horn was like, and then all these other cars and more cars coming up.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And there were people on the road because the road is right on the ocean. It goes road and then all of this kind of brush and then tons of rocks and then the waves were crashing. And everybody had their hands up in the air and they were trying to wave and flag down this police boat that was out in the ocean in these huge waves. And I'm thinking, is there a boat in distress? Because that happened two summers ago, there was a boat that ran out of gas and kind of crashed up on these rocks. Everybody was okay.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I'm looking around for a distress boat and they keep flagging these boats and flagging these boats and flagging these boats. And I'm like, what the heck is going on? And we had guests staying with us and the dad of the couple staying with us quickly checked Twitter and was like, it looks like there's a missing swimmer. And I'm like, oh my God, I wonder if they have eyes on them. And the boats start turning around and heading away from the people that are honking the horns and trying to get their attention.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I don't know what hit me, but I have this like first responder instinct. I immediately picked up the phone. I called 911 and the first attempt I didn't get through. And that's a scary thing when you don't get through on 911. I hang up, I call again, and it sort of clicks through, but no human being picks up. So I hang up again. And now I'm starting to get panicked that there is a swimmer out there, that these people have eyes on them, that the waves are so big, the wind is so loud, the rocks are so big between them and the police boats. The police boats are now way off in the distance. They've gone in a completely different direction.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Holy smokes, holy smokes. I call a third time I get the dispatcher. What's the reason you're calling, ma'am? I'm calling about the swimmer. There's somebody in the water. Do you have eyes on them? No. However, there's a huge group of people on the shore. They're a hundred feet from me. And I say, you have to get through to the police boat. You have to tell them to turn around. They are driving away from the accident. Turn around, turn around.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I hear her say, hold on. And then she clicks through. It must've been the police boat. She said, this is the third caller we've had about a swimmer. You're going in the wrong direction. Turn the boats around. Turn the boats around.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I climb up on the railing on the porch. I don't know how I balanced. I'm standing on this railing. I've got this huge red and white towel and I am waving it back and forth and it's whipping all over the place because of the wind. And I'm saying to the dispatcher, look for the red and white towel, look for the red and white towel, and then look before it to the left. The people on the shore, go there, go there. Keep the surfers on your left. Turn around, turn around.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I hear her saying, you're going in the wrong direction. Turn around, turn around, look for the red tail. So she's talking directly to the police boat. The police boat turns around and starts heading back in our direction. And then I start telling her after the surfers, look for the people on the road, look for the people on the road. They've got eyes on something. The boats pull up in front of where the people are. I'm like, oh my God, I give the phone to my daughter. And I'm like, Ken, run down to those people, keep the 911 operator on the phone.
--:-- Mel Robbins: She's like, but we're going to lose her. I said, just try, get down, get down there, get them on the phone with her so she can communicate with the people on the shore to the boat. So she goes running down. Now the helicopters show up, search helicopters flying all over the place and more information is coming in. And now my heart is sinking. And my daughter races down. There's more people down there. The police boats have gathered kind of offshore because there's so many rocks you can't come in. But here's the problem. It's so windy and the waves are so huge. Nobody can communicate with one another. And the call drops. The reception's terrible down here.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And for three and a half hours, this search and rescue mission played out in front of the beach house we rent. I don't know if you can hear that, but there's a helicopter going by. And I hear my heart just racing, and I feel myself, like, getting emotional. And the helicopters were going back and forth, and the search spotlights, and the dive teams, and the sheriff's boats, and people on the road, and it was just horrible. And the weather got so bad that the dive teams couldn't do their job. And at 9:30 at night, they called off the search and declared it a recovery mission, not a search and rescue.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And the next morning when we woke up, there were people pacing on the beach and there were helicopters and dive teams. And Chris and I were leaving to go out of town for a wedding. And I felt terrible that we were leaving. And I climbed into bed with our son and just held him really tight. And I felt so much heartache for this family.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, and all weekend long while we were gone, the search and recovery was happening. And they were trying to find him. And I just think, what could I have done? What could I have done? I should have run down there sooner. I should have done something. And I keep thinking about it over and over and over again. And part of me feels like, why do you feel so bad? You don't have a right to feel bad, Mel. I mean, it's not like this is your son. This is not somebody in your family or somebody that you even knew. And yet I do.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so one of the things that I did is I've reached out to my therapist, I've reached out to a trauma specialist. And one of the things that trauma researchers say is that it is incredibly important to process what happened, not by just thinking about it, but by talking about it. And that by talking about it, and making sense of the story and putting it in context, you also allow yourself the ability to start to process all the feelings because it's not just the watching or witnessing or experiencing something that can be traumatizing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What I think has been really challenging for me is processing all of the conflicting feelings that have come up over and over and over again. And also stopping my brain from just thinking about the family or reliving it over in my mind or thinking about how I might have been more effective or more helpful, feeling terrible and honestly torturing myself over it. And then feeling bad that I am because I don't even know this person personally.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I wanted to talk about it because there is so much research about how your brain and nervous system process traumatic experiences. And there's a lot of misconceptions about this. And so in case you're somebody that is trying to process something traumatic that you've either been a part of or that you've recently witnessed, I knew that this would be helpful to you. And if you experienced any kind of trauma in your life and you find that it comes up and you get re-triggered by the sound of a car pulling in the driveway or a beer can cracking open or a certain song... For me, I hear a helicopter and I'm right back there. Like, boom. I hear the words riptide. I'm right back there. I will always think about this. When I step out on my deck and I look down to the right, I still envision that tan suburban there.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And there's a reason neurologically why this keeps happening, and there are things that you can do to take all of this experience and the feelings that have come up, whether it's happening right now or it's something from your past that you wish wouldn't keep coming up. There are things that you can proactively do to help process it in a healthy way backed by research so that it finds its home in your brain and in the story of your life. And so that's what we're going to do today.
--:-- Mel Robbins: As you put your arm around me, we're going to walk and talk and we're going to bring in Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald to help us understand what's happening when something traumatic happens. And more importantly, what do we do about it? And we're going to welcome her to the walk and to this conversation when we come back. Don't go anywhere.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins. And today I am so grateful that you're here. I just appreciate you being here with me. I can feel energetically you got your arm around me as we talk about this very traumatic experience that I had just a few days ago. So Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, thank you so much for being here with us. I was just telling everybody listening about this experience of watching a search and rescue mission for a missing swimmer turn into a recovery mission that took place in front of the house we're renting for literally the last four to five days.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: I've had actually more than one client have that exact same situation, witnessing a rescue at sea that didn't ultimately result in a rescue. And so that is indeed very traumatic. And I think we don't talk often enough about the fact that witnessing a trauma is traumatic. It's not just going through it firsthand, but vicarious traumatization is a thing. It's real. And being a witness to something or hearing details, graphic details over and over, even if you weren't a witness to that can be traumatic, for sure.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can you explain what happens in your brain when you witness something like that?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Okay, so really quickly, for those who may not be well versed in what's going on in the brain, let's talk about what happens in a regular event, a normal event, how that gets filed away. And then we can talk about what happens when you've got something sufficiently overwhelming.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That sounds great.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So if your brain was a video game, its goal would be homeostasis. And what that means is just equal blood flow, equal electrical activity across the whole cortex. Now that rarely happens because your brain is constantly taking in information and filing it away, both from inside the system, inside your body and also from outside in the world.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So when you've got a normal event, let's say you go to the grocery store and something mildly funny happens, between anywhere between four and 24 hours after that event, your memories get filed away into a file room. This is primarily in an area of the brain called the hippocampus. This is what I would love to film a Pixar movie about where if you have this file room with all these multicolored file cabinets, and then there's these little file room workers who are running around trying to put your memories away in an order that enables your brain to pull them out when it needs it and make sense of it. Because your whole system is wired for safety. And the better we remember things, the more likely it is that we are to survive.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So when you have a normal event going on, you've got relative homeostasis in your brain, meaning you have access to all of the parts of your brain that are needed in order to complete that filing system.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What happens when you are in a situation where the memory gets properly filed away?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So between four and 24 hours after an event, it gets filed away. And then when it gets filed away properly and in an organized fashion, that means that you can reach for that file later when you need it, pull it out, talk about it, and then put it away and continue on with your day. So let's say I'm like, oh, I want to tell you about this funny thing that happened at the grocery store, I can really easily reach for that file, tell you the narrative content, feel some of the feelings. Maybe I laugh again as if it's happening again. And then I can put it away and we can continue on doing whatever we were doing. So that's a normal event. That's what your brain wants and needs to happen.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That makes a lot of sense. Can you now explain what happens in a traumatic situation or even just a situation where the alarm or anxiety in your body just starts to go off?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: When you've got something sufficiently overwhelming going on, the homeostasis in your brain goes totally out of whack on purpose. This is an evolutionary adaptation that happens so that you can handle the threat or the danger that is in front of you. And so your brain, when the alarm system goes off, this is in your limbic system, your amygdala, it reprioritizes 47 different functions in your brain and body to prepare you for what it is sensing is a danger.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: One of the things that kind of goes offline, however, is the file room. So if you can imagine all those file workers, they run out of the hippocampus because they are needed elsewhere to handle the threat. So instead of this neatly organized file folder that you get between four and 24 hours after the event, you get instead a fragmented file folder. And each file folder needs that narrative content. So I can tell you the story, the emotional content. So I can feel a little bit of how it feels. And then a tag that tells me in my brain, what it means, how do I find it? How do the file room people go and find it?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So when you have an overwhelming event, this adaptation happens in the brain and in the system. And what that then means is that the file room workers aren't there. So you get this fragmented file. The file room workers come back into the room and they're like, oh no, we have a fragmented file. We don't like a fragmented file. We like everything to be in order. We don't know where to put this. We don't know where it goes. So they kind of keep it sort of in a queue so that it can go to the front of your mind whenever you experience anything that is similar to something in that fragmented file, which will give you the opportunity to organize it all over again.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So this is the origin of the trauma trigger. Again, this is your brain trying to help you by telling you, okay, so let's say you have this fragmented file. It has like post-it notes in it. Your brain doesn't know what it means. It's just sitting there in the file room on top of one of the drawers. And let's say the color red is in that file. And then you come across that same exact shade of red in the universe, right? Someone walks across your periphery and they're wearing that same color. The file room dudes say, oh my God, here's the chance you need to organize the file. And so they throw that to the front of your mind to give your brain the opportunity to organize it. Hey, we have a fragmented file. We don't like that. Let's throw it to the front of mind, give you this opportunity.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: And then the problem is your amygdala, that limbic system also recognizes that color red and it has coded that red as mortal danger. So it goes and sets off the alarm system all over again. And then you're off and running, even though you're sitting at your desk at your office. So that's essentially what happens between when you have a regular event and then when you have a traumatic event.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That makes total sense. And I love the explanation of a fragmented file because that's how I feel. I feel like I've got these little snippets of the whole experience, like the red and white towel that I was waving, the super windy breeze blowing the towel and how heavy it was, the sound of the helicopters, the sound and the spotlights of them once it got darker, the police boats, the horns. There are all these snippets. And then 24 hours later, when I heard that they had not found him yet, all of these little fragments feel like they're floating around in my brain.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You said that this is how we're designed and that it's adaptive. How is that adaptive? I mean, that sounds like maladaptive. I just kind of want this traumatic thing to go back in my brain in the filing cabinet. And I don't want to think about it again.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: That's a great question. I think there's like a fine line between adaptation and maladaptation. And I think it's really important that we understand. So what I've just described is essentially the origin of the trauma response. And I think it's critical that we understand that the trauma response is adaptive and it's designed to help keep you alive. It is sort of born of a will to survive.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: And the reason that's important is because when we try to heal from trauma, we often go immediately to a shame place. If I have trauma and I'm dealing with these symptoms, this means there's something wrong with me. I am broken. And so when we start by understanding that it is an adaptive move, then I think it can help us heal because we can peel away that layer of shame. But you're right. It is something that started out as adaptation that becomes over time maladaptive.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: And what you're describing is kind of like the trick when it comes to treating trauma, which is integration. How do we take that file folder and figure out how to organize it and put it away so that it looks more or less like the rest of your files without continuing to get triggered over and over and over again?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Exactly. I mean, for me, that's the $100 million question. How do you integrate, as you say, these experiences so that you're not re-traumatized? Because that's exactly what I've been doing to myself. I mean, this is also just a few days old in terms of my experience, but I continue to go over and over and over in my mind. Like, how are these poor parents feeling and the family members? And oh my God, the anguish of them going back and forth on the beach. And I saw that there was a GoFundMe page and I donated to it. And I just keep feeling this heartbreak over and over and over again.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then, of course, I feel bad because I go, why am I torturing myself? And why do I feel so gripped and devastated by this? I'm not even a member of their family. I didn't know who died. And so, I would love to talk about both why you feel conflicted when you have these sort of traumatic experiences. Why are your emotions kind of unsettling? And I also think for the sake of everybody listening, this is so fresh for me. But every one of us has had a traumatic experience in our life. Whether it is a death when you were in high school of a classmate or maybe somebody in your family or something that happened in your community, every single one of us has either had an experience like this or will have one.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I would love to learn the specific steps, Dr. Mary Catherine, that we all can take so that even after the fact, we can properly file these memory files of what we saw, how we feel, the emotions inside of us into the right file cabinet so that we can move on with our lives. We can stop being re-traumatized by it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And that's exactly where I want to go with you when we return. So stay with us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and I'm here with Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, a trauma specialist who has been researching trauma and working with people for decades. And we're talking about a very traumatic incident where a swimmer went missing and the search and recovery mission took place right in front of the house that we rent for days. So Dr. Mary Catherine, let's talk about integration. How exactly do we integrate a traumatic incident into our life moving forward?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: This has been the thing that the field of neuroscience and psychology and psychiatry have been trying to figure out since the 1800s. How do we circumvent the alarm system and organize the memory file? There are a lot of different modalities that can accomplish this, but basically at a base level, what you're looking for when you're aiming at integration is a narrative of the event that doesn't have any holes. So it has a coherence, a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some amount of emotional content.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So if I tell you a funny story, I'm going to maybe laugh. I feel some of those emotions. If I tell you a sad story, I'm going to maybe tear up and feel a little bit sad. That's okay. Our memory files are supposed to have emotion. And then a set of meaning tags. What does this event mean in the larger story arc of your life?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So typically, I think I'm a huge advocate for multiple modalities when it comes to integration, because we're always in it for a quick fix. And we want to say, okay, I want to do five sessions of something and then get this integrated. But typically, we need more things because your entire system is along for the ride. It's not just a file problem. Your body is involved as well.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So just to give you a quick rundown, EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is a modality that's designed to sort of short circuit the fear center from setting the alarm off. So what happens is the clinician will occupy your vision. Usually, the first ways that they used to do this was just to wave a finger back and forth in front of your face. So think like old school hypnosis was like a little pocket watch. And when your visual cortex is occupied, when you're talking about the memory, what you're essentially doing is manually creating homeostasis in your brain. You're manually pushing blood flow and electrical activity to the parts of your brain that are trying to get disconnected by the alarm system.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So EMDR is one modality. Narrative therapy is a great modality. Sometimes people use alternative medicines like psilocybin or MDMA, both of which are thought to turn off the fear center and enable you to talk through the memory and integrate it without having that overactive alarm.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One thing that I keep thinking about is the fact that other people in my family and some friends of ours all witnessed this exact same thing. And our two friends were just as shaken up as I was, but some of our family members were not, at least on the surface, as triggered as I have been by this. Can you talk a little bit about why that is? Why you can witness the exact same event or have the exact same traumatic experience, but two people side by side have a very different trauma response to it?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So one of the things that's really interesting about these file folders, and this is something that has been interesting to track through the history of the study of trauma, is that since a file folder can be fragmented in one of a billion different ways, this means that the symptoms that come after the event can also look very different, even for two people who went through the exact same event.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: And the reason that's important historically is because we used to use that fact to shame people and say, okay, let's use a combat veteran, for example. You have two soldiers that fought in the same war in the same battalion, having the same job, they witnessed the same thing. One of them comes out and they have all of these overactive emotions. The other person is totally shut down. So the person who's having the overactive emotions, there must be something wrong with them aside from combat, because this person next to him seems to be doing quite fine.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: And in reality, what's happening is that the fragmented files can be creating different emotions. For some people that creates a whole lot of upset, distress, crying, outward kind of feelings of anxiety. For other people that causes total shutdown. And so they seem to be talking about an event and not having any emotional response to it, or they just don't feel anything at all.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: And in the media we use, when we talk about somebody who has PTSD or someone who's dealing with trauma, we usually use an example of someone who's having an overly charged response. They're crying too much. They're having the sort of quote unquote hysterical response. But from a clinician standpoint, if someone comes in and they're telling you this story that is the most horrible thing they've ever seen, and there's no emotional content, then we can see really clearly that that part of the file folder isn't there. So they have the story, they don't have the emotional content. That still requires integration.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So are you saying that everyone who sees a traumatic event has some kind of trauma or fragmented file?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Good question. So it really depends on what goes on immediately after the event. It depends on whether or not the file gets consolidated between four and 24 hours after the event. For some people, they have the opportunity to consolidate that memory, even if it was really overwhelming in the moment. Let's say they get home and they're able to talk to their partner or their family about it, assign some meaning to it and put it away. Then that file is going to start looking really quickly like the other files in their file cabinet.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So there was a study, I think it was in Israel. They took folks who had just been through a terrorist attack in the emergency room. One group went through a narrative therapy exercise where they had to talk through the event over and over, assign it meaning, feel through some of the content with someone who was able to attune to them. The other people just got the standard of care in the emergency room. The people who went through that event and were able to narrate and integrate the memory right away were something like 80% less likely to have PTSD than somebody who just went through the standard of care. So it really depends on what goes on immediately after the event.
--:-- Mel Robbins: We focus so often on the type of event and whether it's traumatic and not the person who went through it, and then what happens in the aftermath. If someone is there to help you in the right way to integrate the memory, it's a lot less likely to become traumatic.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: In my work, I've adapted the definition of trauma because this is the thing we've been arguing about in the field of psychology since the 1800s—which events are traumatic, which are not. And it's like, guys, this is not the point. The definition I use is that anytime you have something that gives you an unbearable emotional experience that lacks a relational home, you have a potential for a chronic trauma. So unbearable emotional experience, plus a lack of a relational home, means you potentially are going to have these symptoms.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: I love this term "relational home." I got it from a clinician, Robert Stolorow, because it can be a lot of different things. What it means—to listen to someone and provide them with a space to help them feel through and organize what was too overwhelming to organize in the moment—can look like so many different things. Different people are going to require different amounts of a relational home based on the event. If you're going through a divorce or a breakup, you might need a relational home every day for six months. And what that relational home looks like might be really different depending on the day.
--:-- Mel Robbins: When I was researching this, I bumped into his work and this concept of a relational home. I'm glad you're talking about it because the way I thought about a relational home is this notion of "where can I put this?" I just witnessed something, but I've got all these complicated feelings about what I witnessed and about what just happened. It's the feelings that I'm trying to make sense of. I know that wishing it hadn't happened doesn't make it go away. But how do we find a relational home for feelings that keep coming up?
--:-- Mel Robbins: For example, is it normal to feel guilty or conflicted that I'm so affected by this? When I wasn't even someone that was part of the family or part of the search team, I was just watching this.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Yes, 100%. I think the reason we feel guilt is because we've been defining trauma incorrectly for 150 years. One of the ways we've been defining it incorrectly is that we create a false hierarchy where we say the trauma I'm going through, the experience I'm having, is not legitimate for X, Y, or Z reason. The truth is your nervous system is telling you everything you need to know—you're having a trauma response that requires intervention. If you had appendicitis, you wouldn't feel shame at having appendicitis. You wouldn't go into the emergency room and say, "So-and-so is having this experience and that's a lot worse than mine. They have a broken collarbone and they're sitting right in front of me, so they require care and I don't." We don't do that with physical injury. Why would we do that with psychological injury?
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's true. That's a good point. How do you stop getting that incident to play out in your mind over and over and over again? That's what's really been haunting me.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: That's a great question. One of the primary symptoms of trauma is intrusion. This can be intrusive thoughts during the day—you're trying to go about your day and the thing just keeps popping up. It can be a flashback memory where you sort of lose track of the moment and you're thrown back into the past fully. It can happen in memories, and it can also be that people end up repeating behaviors that kind of put them back into traumatic situations. This probably wouldn't be the case in this situation, but this happens a lot when it comes to relationship trauma.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: So how do you stop the intrusion? The short answer, which is also the long answer, is that you integrate the memory. What that looks like depends on the event.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Let me just share what's happened for me. A big part of the process for me is peeling away this shame that I'm having a response that's outsized in some inappropriate way, that I don't deserve to be having this response because I don't even know this person.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Right.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Let's put that down. Now let's look at what's coming up, because I think shame is the biggest barrier for integration. And we never really think about that. The trauma response is happening for a reason. It's something that's going on in your biology that you cannot stop. So let's stop shaming ourselves for it and then turn to it and see what it means.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Then I think if you sit down with someone, you can kind of figure out what fragments are sticking out and what do those fragments mean? How am I going to fit them into this narrative of what happened? And then how am I going to fit this into a larger narrative of my story? You can see really directly where shame gets in the way, because when you're talking about something that happened that you witnessed and you didn't even know the person, it's hard. It feels like, "How am I going to fit this into my story?" But the truth is that something really intense and meaningful happened to you as well. So how are you going to fit that into your larger story? What kind of meaning can you assign to that?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Doing a podcast episode, for example, using it to talk to your listeners about trauma and normalize the response—that's a great way to assign meaning to this event that feels really out of control and meaningless. Once you do that, and you may need to do it a couple of times, typically what happens is that the intrusion starts to recede. You stop having those intense intrusive memories. It may come up every now and then when you have a reminder, but when it does, it's a lot less intense.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know what? I know exactly what you're talking about because I have had an experience in my past that was extraordinarily traumatic. For those of you who listen to the Mel Robbins Podcast or have read any of my books, you are very familiar with this past experience. Fifteen years ago, my husband and I were about to lose everything. We were going bankrupt. I was drinking myself into the ground. We were fighting nonstop. I could barely get out of bed. When it was happening, it was traumatizing. The anxiety was crushing. The depression was crushing. The bills and the financial stress were crushing. The amount of stress in my marriage was crushing. And I couldn't talk about it. It was like I was frozen.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Even as we started to climb out of it, Dr. Mary Catherine, I couldn't talk about it without getting choked up or feeling stressed out. But here's what I realized in hindsight. I have now told the story of that rock bottom moment, nearly losing everything, so many times. And I've allowed myself to feel the emotions of that moment so many times that I have integrated the story into my life. I do talk about it all the time. And I don't feel that traumatic trigger at all. I can access authentically what I felt like, but I don't feel the intensity of the emotions. So you're right. Telling the story over and over and over again does help us process.
--:-- Mel Robbins: There are a lot of you that have experiences that you have survived, that you have lived beyond, that you have moved through, but that emotional file—and the ability to talk about it and tell the story—there's a huge opportunity for you here. I want you to really seriously consider what Dr. Mary Catherine is telling you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One of the things that I loved is that you talked about this relational home and how telling the story and feeling the emotion allow you to file those fractional files in the proper place. What are some things that people could do right now if this is resonant, if they want to lean into the advice that you're offering and the expertise that you're offering? Can you name some things that you would recommend that anyone listening could do right now?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Number one, take your shame and put it—close your eyes, visualize putting it in a box, and put it on the highest shelf you can in your house. You can pick it up later. I'm not going to try to take it away from you, but just try to put it down for a couple of days because it is getting in the way. It will continue to get in the way in a way that will prevent healing. So number one, take your shame, put it in a box far away.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Number two, I think one of the best things you can do here is try to really make sure that the narrative part of the file folder has all of the pieces. This is tricky, especially when you go through an event with other people. You often don't narrate it because it happened and you all know what happened. But could you sit down and write out the events as if you were telling someone who wasn't there and had no idea what happened? Have you done that yet? Continue to do that if you've done that already. Maybe once a day, if you can stand it, just to get the narrative straight. Because you're already having these intrusive thoughts, you might as well tell the story.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: The second thing is to try to connect the narrative with the feelings. What feelings come up? What feelings came up in the moment? What fragments seem to be sticking out? There will naturally be moments in the story where you feel something really intense. So what is that feeling? What is it tied to in the rest of your life story? What kind of meaning does it carry? And try to do that with someone else. If you can feel through those things with someone who can be attuned to you and say things like, "Oh, I can imagine," or "You must have felt so helpless, and I've felt helpless before, and that's terrible," then those things can help put the emotional fragments in the right place.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: And then again, that last thing is just to figure out what meaning are you going to assign this thing? What importance does this have in your life? Did it give you some kind of message? What can you do with it as you go on? How are you going to carry that forward?
--:-- Mel Robbins: I could talk to you forever. I feel like there's so much more to cover. Is there anything that's top of mind for you right now that you want to make sure everyone listening is taking away from this conversation with you?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Yes. If you're having a trauma response, just know that you are not broken. The trauma response is an evolutionary adaptation and it is there to keep us alive. Of course, it causes distress and can become maladaptive over time, but its source is survival. I think that's really critical.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: The second thing is that the trauma response is something we can work with. We have a lot more say over our nervous system than we think. We assume because we don't have control over that initial trauma response that we don't have control at all, but that's not true. We can walk back some of these responses when they're getting in the way.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: The other things are about triggers. One, I think we make the mistake that we are always conscious of our triggers. We are not. Sometimes triggers are really subterranean, in the back of the brain, and are not consciously connected. So it's really critical that we start—especially if you're doing trauma healing—treating your body as a barometer. It's giving you data all the time. If you're feeling upset around a certain person, that's something you should listen to, because it's possible that there's a buried trigger there. As we talked about, triggers are a painful way, but a way that your brain is trying to get you to organize a memory that is not organized. So we need to look at them as opportunities, rather than reasons to avoid something forever.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: The last thing is that "not feeling" is not a realistic goal. Our memory folders have emotional content in them for a reason. If I want to tell you about the most joyful day of my life, I would like to feel some of the joy. We don't question that when it comes to happy memories. If I tell you about the morning that my father died, I'm going to feel some sadness because I pulled out a folder that has sad in it. Our memory files are supposed to have emotion. When we set as the goal "not feeling"—when we say, "Oh, I know that this is integrated when I don't feel anything"—we've got that totally wrong. We are asking our brain to do something that it is not equipped to do, nor would we want it to.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One thing that I want to make sure that everybody heard, because I think this is so important and it would be easy to miss this nuance. You have said over and over that when you have one of these traumatic experiences, these emotionally charged experiences, your memory files get fractured. When the files get fractured, they literally go into a queue in your brain ready to be called forth at any moment. One of the files isn't just your memory about what happened—it's your feelings and your emotions that you were feeling.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What I'm gathering, Dr. Mary Catherine, is that most people do not want to integrate the emotions around what happened because that requires you to go back to the painful experience and allow all of those painful or scary emotions to come back up. If I'm hearing you correctly, and I want you to confirm this because I don't want anyone listening to miss this part: part of integration requires you to not only integrate the story of what happened, but to integrate and process all the feelings that came up for you. If you don't process all the feelings that came up for you, you cannot successfully integrate the traumatic experience and you will continue to have this re-triggering and the re-traumatization. I don't even know if that's a word, but you're going to continue to have this be an issue in your life. Is that correct?
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Did you hear that, everybody? Dr. Mary Catherine said that's correct. Which means you're never going to be able to fully integrate traumatic experiences from your life unless you're willing to go there. Going there is going to require you to drop into your body and your feelings and your emotions and to allow them to come up because right now they're in queue because they can't be filed. If you do not do the work to drop into your emotions, you are going to continue to have this fragmented file and this past memory come up over and over and over again when you least expect it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One of the things that I really love, not only about this conversation, but about this podcast in general, is that by sharing our stories with one another, I feel like you and I are walking each other home. We're helping each other heal. So first of all, I just want to thank you. I so appreciate you being here with me today. Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, thank you so much, not only for your willingness to just jump on and help me process this and integrate what happened into the story of my life in a healthier way, but also for pulling away the shame and the conflict that I felt—that I had this intense of an experience just watching something unfold.
--:-- Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald: I think I've said it a couple of times already: the trauma response is a proof of our survival. It is not a sign of brokenness. We are not broken because we've been through trauma and have these symptoms. We are actually the unbroken. That's the message of the trauma response. I think if we start there, then healing becomes possible.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So true. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for being on this metaphorical walk with me today. I can feel your arm around my shoulder. I can feel how much you're getting out of this. I cannot wait to hear how you put these very specific tools, research, and science to use in your own life. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here and for listening to me and to Dr. Mary Catherine as I process this. I hope that this not only helped you, but that this episode will be one that you share widely so that it helps people that you love too.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In case nobody else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and your ability to create a better life. Okay. I'll talk to you in a few days.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I can't do bloopers on an episode like this. I would be a first class asshole if I were to do bloopers. So here's what we're going to do instead of bloopers. First of all, thank you. I know you love the bloopers. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. But in light of the topic, I want to just point you to another resource. It's an episode, Episode 34, entitled "Take Control of Your Life: A Toolkit for Healing." The episode goes even deeper and more in depth on the issue of trauma.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think that's it. I love you. I'll see you in a few days.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, and one more thing. No, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
