Rewiring Trauma: How to Break Free from Limiting Beliefs

Andrea McTague: Welcome to this episode of The Shift Show, where we're going to delve into the big, broad topic of trauma. And today we're going to flip the script a little from our usual format, and I'm handing over the interviewer reins to Matteo Cicito. Matteo heads up our operations department here at ShiftGrit, and we work out of the same office, so we're constantly getting into some really interesting conversations. And we thought we would share this one with you guys.

Matteo Sestito: Hi, everyone. I'm Matteo. As Andrea says, yeah, we get into so many of these conversations in the office, and we thought that, hey, why don't we chat about what it is, where we see it, where we see it with our clientele, where we might feel it ourselves. So, yeah, thank you for having me on the podcast today. I'm very excited about it. I'm pumped. Why don't we get into it? So do you want to maybe just tell me some kind of broad definitions of, you know, like, what is trauma? And this, again, is coming from a layman like myself. So if you could, you know, I don't want to say dumb it down, but simplify it, maybe it's probably for the best. Yeah, if you could just give some some quick definitions, maybe so we know what we're working with here.

Andrea McTague: Because when I was thinking about it, we've been talking a little bit about trauma and like what trauma is in our modality and stuff like that. And one of the things I realized in our modality and the way we practice, we rarely actually refer to trauma as trauma. And there's a couple of reasons for this. The first one is that when we use that word trauma, a lot of people have preconceived notions of what trauma is and what trauma is not. And basically we just classify it as anything that disturbs you. So anything that is binned as a threat by your threat brain or the walnut brain, as we call it. And it can have those like that has those maladaptive, bothersome effects. And this takes out that whole thing of people comparing like the size or the impact or the validity or the significance of their like trauma to other people's or just like, you know, oh, it wasn't this big, huge thing. Or it doesn't fall into like that big T trauma kind of definition definition. So it's not really a thing I should be able to cope with it. We just remove all of that and kind of look at it as like disturbances or things that register as a threat to the walnut brain. And I think this is important in like validating the experience of the individual, because what's super impactful to me might not be impactful at all to you. Right. Or and it doesn't mean that that should have no like it should have some outcome or I should deal with it or see it in a certain way. So the effects of trauma have more to do with the lens through which we see like the context that we see the traumatic experience versus like the actual like classification of the trauma. So it's like one reason. And so we use a lot of different words for it. We use like disturbance or like threat or trigger or activation or whatever. And kind of also like whatever the client like bins it as. The other reason, and this is kind of a big one, is that in our approach, we make a big distinction between trauma experienced by the adult and trauma experienced by our young child self. And the reason for that is there's this like critical sensitive period of development. And it's about like zero to seven years old. And that's when we're forming our identity. So we're creating that lens through which we see ourselves and the rest of the world. And we're kind of writing these like little patterns and scripts for what we're going to use, like how we're going to interpret like everything, whether it's good or bad later on in life. And so we call those non-nurturing elements. And that's because they're kind of like things that are less than ideal for the developing human, not necessarily, again, things that are binned as like traumatic or not traumatic, etc. Like some of them obviously traumatic. We're talking like physical abuse or whatever. That's pretty obvious one. But there's things like favoritism of one sibling over another, which can register as a trauma for like and negatively impact our identity and stuff. But it's not necessarily going to be binned by people as like this is a trauma, right? Like it doesn't necessarily go together with that word. So we just call them non-nurturing elements. And it's got like a whole bunch of them in that set. And then that kind of sets up our lens thing a little bit.

Matteo Sestito: OK, that was super cool. There's so much to unpack, I think, in there. And in terms of like one thing I just want to mention is that that idea of like disturbances and like recognizing the validity of like one person's disturbance versus another and how they're not really necessarily comparable. I think that that's that's really cool.

Andrea McTague: Well, it's kind of an interesting one in that regard, because I think an example that I use with clients often is it's like if we look at what was the meaning, right, what was the context? So let's pretend I take you to the amusement park and we go on like that drop of doom one where you like just drop nine stories or whatever. So if we go on that, you know, it's fun. We're like and we drop nine stories. But if I take you to the roof of a nine story building and I'm like, I'm going to push you off. That is not the same thing. So it might still be a nine story drop, but the context matters a lot. Like one, you're actually under threat. And then the other one, the intention or the context is you're safe and it's just for fun. It's still going to activate the fight, flight, freeze response, but the interpretation is different. So I think when we look at trauma, we have to look at the interpretation of the trauma as well or the difficult event or whatever it is as well. OK, kind of a little bit about it.

Matteo Sestito: I kind of have a follow up question to that. I hope I'm not skipping steps here. Yeah, go for it. But it's just on my mind. So as an adult, then, you know, you're talking about from zero to seven years old. We are in that formative stage of our lives as an adult. Are we always aware of like maybe something that happened in that stage? Like, are we always going to remember it? Is it always something that is lingering? Is it somewhere in our brains and it keeps cropping up or is it generally like something you can remember like this disturbance?

Andrea McTague: Yeah, well, a bit of both. Right. So basically, we have these things that occur. Right. So it could be the favoritism one. It could be physical abuse one. It could be like whatever. And then what those do is they encode limiting beliefs about ourselves or about the world. So it might be something like I'm at risk or something like I'm not good enough or I'm less than in the favoritism case. So these belief structures and the patterns that go with them, they exist. And you were kind of nailing it on that. Like, do they exist somewhere in our brain? Yeah, they exist somewhere in our brain. And the somewhere is different than where our cognitive like thinking mind, our conscious mind would store them. So trauma actually stores differently in the brain. It stores in isolation and it stores in like a different area. And that's the area that's going to cause a lot of that like activation of the nervous system. So we have it. Whether we're consciously going to tie that to something that's creating a maladaptive response now, that is usually fairly buried. For people, it's definitely like sometimes people are aware of it, but sometimes not. And when we're running those unconscious scripts, they are running unconsciously. Right. So they're just like having an effect on how we deal with things. And it's kind of like, you know, if somebody makes a comment to you and maybe it's a little bit critical and you have like one of those like big reactions to it. And then later you go back into your thinking mind and you're like, that was unnecessary. It's often because it's activated something that was encoded by an early trauma or an early disturbance.

Matteo Sestito: I think we've like we've all been there. So I appreciate it. I appreciate that sort of example. It sounds like from that explanation that trauma goes somewhere different in our brains or stores differently somewhere somewhere up there. It's in somewhere different. Is there a reason for that? Is that is that because it's looking to protect us in some way so we can just go about our daily lives, show up to work, you know, crush our operations as it might be for myself or whoever. But what's what's going on there?

Andrea McTague: Well, if we look at it kind of from an evolution of the brain standpoint, our brain, I think commonly we think that our brain just like evolved in like one kind of big blob, but it actually kind of grew in different parts. So we have this like animal brain or threat brain, the survival brain. And then we had a mid brain and then we had our like fancy evolved brains. We tell about that as like the cognitive mind or the thinking mind or whatever. And sometimes the two of them don't particularly communicate well. So it's the trauma stuff or things that disturb us go into like what we call the walnut brain. So that early pre-evolutionary brain. And one of the reasons is to mitigate threat, right? Because its whole job is just to keep us safe. So I like this one. I kind of like back if we go back, back, back in time until like caveman days or whatever, we didn't have that evolved brain. So that evolved brain is going to understand like context and nuance and like be able to like memorize things and whatever, whatever. So instead we have this like little animal. So instead we have this like little animal. So if you and I are like little cave people and we're going about our day and we go by a set of caves and out of the caves jumps like a big bear, we're like, oh shit, we like mobilize, our threat brain activates and it's kind of our only brain at that point and we run away from the bear. So we don't have enough at that point like development or evolution in the way we think to know like, oh yeah, bears live in caves and they hibernate and if we go too close to them they can eat us and blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't have any of that. So instead the next time we walk by a cave we're just going to get this like really feeling like almost this instinctive like get away from that thing. So we go by the cave and we're just like and we move away from the cave. So kind of that instinctual piece and that's how trauma kind of stores in our brain. It stores with this like physical sensation because that's the language of that brain, right? Versus the cognitive if we're like, okay, well, you know, probably we shouldn't go up there because there's caves and bears and it's whatever, hibernation, whatever you call it, season when they come out of the caves and all that. So that's why it's doing that and it's also stored then in isolation, right? So it doesn't get intermingled sometimes with our other memories and the example I like for this one is let's pretend you're going out, you're going to go down the street to get a coffee and you're in a rush because we're often in a rush. Maybe it's a Monday. Monday is a crazy day for operations. So you blast out the front door and you just go straight into the street and there's a big bus coming and you like literally almost get hit by this bus and you're like, holy shit. And your heart starts racing and all of those nervous system activation things come up, palms are sweaty. And you're like, if we pause and you go, if that stores as a trauma, as a disturbance memory, so maybe it's hitting on and activating a limiting belief if I'm at risk or I'm incapable or whatever. The next time you go to cross the street, you're going to get that little feeling just like we did with the bears and the cape. And it's going to be like, okay, well, I'm just not going to cross the street. I'm just going to stay on this side. I'm not going to go to Duchess. I'm going to go to the coffee shop on this side of the street. And it's going to start to impact like your behavior and the things that you see from the world because it's kind of locked in there. Instead, if it doesn't store as a disturbance of trauma memory, you're just going to go to the crosswalk and you're going to be like, oh, yeah, last time I almost got hit by a bus. So this time I'm just going to check a little bit better, et cetera, et cetera. And then a few times of crossing the street, you'll probably totally forget that that happened because that memory then has been diluted by all of the other times where you were able to cross the street. Totally fine. Nothing bad happened. It was just like run of the mill stuff. So that's kind of the difference between in like light version of a trauma memory and how it stores and a non-trauma memory.

Matteo Sestito: So, okay. Yeah. I really appreciate that example because it's pulling out something for me where it seems like in one sense, you're able to use your logic. You're able to say like, okay, I better check both ways, right? Before I cross the street. Okay. I've checked. There's no traffic. You know, you cross the street, right? No problem. In the other sense, it's like almost something inside. It's something uncontrollable, something that you can't logic your way around. Is that sort of like what you're saying?

Andrea McTague: Because that evolved brain, that's where the logic lives, right? That's where our logical thought lives. The subconscious brain, that like early pre-evolutionary brain, it doesn't have logic. It just has kind of like those like kind of instinctual feelings. And it's sometimes it's referred to as the emotional brain because emotions have a function where they're supposed to do things for us. And it's not just keep us safe in terms of like, don't get hit by a bus. Don't get eaten by a bear. But it also can be related to things like maintain status. Don't upset the other members of your tribe or group. So you don't get kicked out of that because like belonging is important for survival. And it goes into all of those types of survival stuff, like things that would be important to the human animal for survival. So anything that threatens that is going to be disturbing to the human.

Matteo Sestito: It's like protecting yourself both physically and like your idea of yourself and what other people have to see you. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: Your sense of self-worth, your like, and you know, your ability to contribute to a group or accomplish things or whatever. That's why like some of the really common limiting beliefs that we do are things like, I'm not good enough. I'm worthless, like aka to the group or to the people important to us. I'm less than that's the status one because it's important to like not be the lowest man on the totem pole in a little chimpanzee type group, right? Because we get less stuff. It can be things also like, I'm going to be abandoned or I'm unwanted because for our early evolutionary self, pre-evolutionary self, that would have been like, you're dead now because we're not so good at surviving. We're a group species. So things like that. So it can encode all kinds of different meanings depending on like the individual and what the event was.

Matteo Sestito: Okay. And so when it, I guess, I mean, we have like these, you sort of touched on these different examples of like something disturbance that, you know, is a real threat versus a disturbance that is perhaps more to your sense of self, right? Or yeah, like something that quite, that might not be a physical threat to your life. So if we're looking at that, is there, I guess, does everyone deal with this sort of like with a traumatic experience and what makes, I guess, I'm trying to get to the crux of the question, of course, what makes one time crossing the street and almost getting hit by the bus, what makes that traumatic or a disturbance for somebody and not for somebody else? Is it to do with that sort of zero to seven pre, you know, functioning, coming up with who you are as yourself? 100%.

Andrea McTague: Yeah. So like in our modality, we look at it as like in that critical sensitive period, if you had encoded something like I'm incapable or I am at risk, it is going to be much more likely that that crossing the street thing turns into a trauma memory versus just like, oh, yeah, I feel like I'm capable. It was just like one time I was in a rush, blah, blah, blah, whatever, not a problem, right? So our encoding set or that critical sensitive period of development is going to set us up for kind of the lens through which we see our experiences. And then are we binning them? So in our theory, and this is kind of comes from a bunch of different psychological theories and whatnot and theoretical orientations, but basically the limiting beliefs will bin things as threat or non-threat. So if the bus thing binned and activated that I'm incapable, well, you're going to have that stored as like, see, now this is really disturbing, et cetera, versus if that wasn't there and that wasn't the lens used to interpret the context of it, and you'd be like, ah, stupid, busy Monday, whatever, right? And it just kind of gets diluted in all of our memories. So that's one of the reasons. So the things that happened to us really early on kind of set up these early predispositions. And we see this in, there's different theories on it. And most psychological theories touch on this in one way or another. So we draw a lot from like evolutionary psychology and some of the neuro stuff and attachment. But there's this other thing called the adverse childhood event scale. And it's kind of like a little questionnaire and it goes through 10 different things. They can be like divorce or separation. They can be like whatever, whatever. And if some of those things happen in early childhood, you're creating these predispositions to binning things as traumas and storing them as traumas versus the, you know, adaptive kind of interpretation of it, I would say. So yeah, that's, it's kind of an interesting thing. It sets up a filter, basically.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah, that's super interesting. And you kind of hit like both my questions on the head there in terms of like the reason why people deal with these disturbances in a different, in different ways. And then I guess like my, my follow up to that would be like, so what, if, if you've had say something going on in your life, or you had something happen to you as a child that categorizes a disturbance, you do have this limiting belief about yourself that I'm incapable say, what can you do in, in sort of like your day to day life to get better at that, I guess, or, or to maybe not get better is the wrong wording. I'm sure you have the right. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: Well, this can basically like, yeah, like cope with it better or not have a mess with you. And like, this is one thing about working with me in like therapy land is I don't use a lot of therapy speak. So it's very likely that if I was talking to my client and be like, well, to make it not fuck with you or whatever. Right. Because that's really what we will want. Like, how do I prevent these things from becoming blocks that create these maladaptive behavior sets or emotional reactions or thoughts or whatever later. And basically we will go in. And so we want to identify then like our first step is always we identify the non nurturing elements. Right. So we make this like nice big list. We do this like clinical interview and we ask a lot about like what's going on for the client now, but also like historically, like what did it look like? Because we have some information about what constitutes a non nurturing element, which isn't necessarily the public's view of what a trauma would be. Right. Like as we were kind of talking about, so we go, okay, this is a non nurturing element. This is a non nurturing element. From there, we can map likely limiting beliefs. Right. So that's one way. So we can get to the limiting belief identification through the identification of the non nurturing elements. But sometimes people know they're limiting beliefs too. Like they know that they're going around and being triggered by any situation that they perceive themselves as less than, or they know that they're just thinking like I'm in danger all the time. Like that's a limiting belief. Right. And then the other piece of it is sometimes there are big mass traumas that we experience as adults as well. And they're so large because they have a threat to our safety or like life, death threat, like witnessing somebody else. So in the diagnostic statistic manual of mental disorders, which is like our big psychology, psychiatry diagnosing book, they're going to constitute trauma as something experiencing a life or death kind of situation. So, you know, maybe that's an attack or maybe it's war or whatever, whatever. So it can be that and it's The impact of that then is going to intermingle with the limiting beliefs that come out of the critical sensitive period of development. And then we get the different responses, basically, to trauma and the different triggers for it later on as well. So it can show up in a lot of different ways, I guess, is the very long winded answer to that.

Matteo Sestito: No, no, that makes sense. Because I was going to ask about that, that whole like, you know, when somebody comes in for an intake and they're sitting down and you're sussing out, say, like their day to day life. But you're also looking at, you know, like, tell me about your childhood. Tell me about your family history. Tell me about all of these different things. I guess that's the reason why. Right. So you can kind of like get a baseline or at least the idea of perhaps what is contributing to these limiting beliefs.

Andrea McTague: Percent. Because we can basically take the non nurturing elements that somebody has experienced and the limiting beliefs that they encoded. And then we can kind of map it with what's happening for them in there, like in there now. So you go like, OK, strength stuff, this stuff's working for you. This stuff is where these blocks are showing up or these emotional reactions that you don't like are showing up. And we just basically like look at them in conjunction and go, OK, well, we've got something with abandonment. We've got something with failure. We've got something with whatever. And then we're going to make basically a list of the limiting beliefs. Then we rank order them and we just start killing them.

Matteo Sestito: OK, that's super cool.

Andrea McTague: Very aggressive approach.

Matteo Sestito: No, no. I yeah. Like I like the term we start killing them. Right. Because it's like, OK, like that's I think what a lot of the time if you're coming down, you're sitting down for therapy. That's what you're hoping to do is to get rid of or at least cope with better as you as you were saying, whatever it is that you're sort of going on.

Andrea McTague: Well, and I think that's kind of an interesting thing with it, too, is like there was a discussion always about, you know, do we have to cope with trauma or do we have to manage it or do can we get rid of it? Can we get rid of it and rewrite that? So our approach, we're going to attack the cognitive and we want to set up like the individual to have the best strength to cope with things because you're going to have stuff happen in life and so on and so on. But the official word for it in psychology land is to create extinction of a response. So what we want to do is create extinction of the limiting beliefs. So it's not like a cope with. It's like remove.

Matteo Sestito: Removed.

Andrea McTague: Yeah, 100 percent. I like kill, but, you know, that's my personality.

Matteo Sestito: And I appreciate you using both the psych lingo, but also just like the everyday lingo. It helps me sort of organize it in my in my mind. Well, I'm going to I hope you don't mind if I bring us to sort of a slightly related topic. And I don't know, I guess this is sort of answered. But I was wondering if you could go more in depth about why some people are able to handle a traumatic event or experience or disturbance. I guess not better. They're able to cope with it better. Why are some people able to do that? And does it have to do with that idea of like it's being encoded to a limiting belief? Is it the same sort of thing that you were getting at at the beginning?

Andrea McTague: Yeah, but there's other factors as well. Right. So if we look at somebody's like overall functioning. So say you've got a person who's got a lot of balance, they've got some social connectivity, they've got a lot of their own like mindfulness practices or coping mechanisms, and they've got some really positive views of themselves, so on and so on. So they've got these different things that are kind of like balancers or insulators for humans. And then something traumatic happens, that person generally is going to fare better versus if we have somebody who the limiting belief structures in their life have created a life where there are going to be deficits in that insulation or it's going to create other stress points. Right. Because if you think about it, if we've all got kind of this like pressure cooker, this capacity. So if we look at it as capacity, so we've got things in our capacity structure where it's like if we are tired, it shrinks our capacity. If we are hungry, it shrinks our capacity. If we don't have friends and social supports, it's going to shrink our capacity. If we've got the activation from a bunch of limiting beliefs really frequently, it's going to shrink our capacity. So then you've got this like smaller capacity to deal with, to use, to cope with it. Right. Because we're all going to experience some stressors, but the size of the stressors and the size of the capacity and a mismatch there is what's going to create more maladaptive reactions. Yeah.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah. That's yeah. OK, that's super cool. And I guess that tells me, you know, you got to keep doing those things that are like, you know, filling up that that sort of whatever we want to call it.

Andrea McTague: Because then I mean, I think I use like this example of like the toddler at Disneyland. Right. So if because your your niece is like almost two. Yeah.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah. Closing it on to. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: I'm excited for this one. If we were going to take her to Disneyland, there's a lot of fun and a lot of stuff, but there's also some stressors that come with that. What are a few things that we're going to take care of to make sure she doesn't have like the classic dreaded Disneyland meltdown?

Matteo Sestito: Yeah, we're going to dress her in comfy clothes. We're going to make sure that she's like not too warm, not too cold. We're going to make sure that she's got her favorite maybe snack or whatever it is that she's kind of eating. We're going to try and like, you know, cater to those things. Yeah. But, you know, please her or I guess like make her happy. So that way, you know, when four o'clock rolls around and we've been there for 12 hours or whatever.

Andrea McTague: Exactly. Exactly.

Matteo Sestito: She's able to deal with it just like we are.

Andrea McTague: 100%. And we're going to take care of things like sleep. We're going to see like boredom, any of that, like all of those sorts of basic things to just to just handle it. So we don't go past her capacity because if we go past her capacity, we're going to have a bit of a time. Right. If we stay within it and we keep her regulated. So what we're looking to do is essentially create regulation in our walnut brain so that the walnut or the threat brain only wakes up when there's a legitimate actual threat. So we're not having it like come and make decisions about our career or how we speak to, you know, that irritating individual that we all have one of in our lives or whatnot. Right. If we can stay in the cognitive, we can be a little bit more calm and strategic about it. But if the threat brain takes over, it's going to be a very emotional response generally or it's going to feel kind of that gross stuff from, you know, walking by the caves. When we are removing the limiting beliefs, we're essentially removing a thing that is going to add to our pressure cooker. And then we're also going to do all this stuff to set up our clients for like the mindfulness and the balanced lifestyle and the good food and all of that kind of stuff that also increases our capacity or like reduces the pressure cooker kind of thing.

Matteo Sestito: So it's an interesting.

Andrea McTague: So it's a little bit of like management stuff because you want to be doing those things to create more space in your capacity. But it's also the extinction of those things. So we see like massive change when we remove the limiting beliefs because you're just not having as many stressors then.

Matteo Sestito: And so it's changing interpretation. It sounds to me, too, that like there is that sort of sense that like you can have a super balanced life. You can be doing all of these like awesome things. But if you do have that, say, limiting belief and something does happen that triggers that, then all of a sudden it's very hard for you to use your logic, use that balanced life that you've been building to deal with like something like that. So as you said at first, killing that off is like kind of like probably your best bet, right? Oh, 100 percent.

Andrea McTague: I think sometimes we'll see things like, you know, somebody will have it like very managed in most areas. But then in one area, maybe it's like romantic relationships or something that limiting belief trigger really messes with them. Right. And they're like they just can't seem to remove the blocks to achieving whatever it is that they want to achieve there. Right. So it sometimes shows up in these very specific areas. Sometimes it shows up as a blanket thing, which might look like anxiety or even like to the extreme of PTSD and things like that, depending on like what the individuals experienced or just like those thoughts that pop in that you can't get out of your mind or negative thinking and all of that kind of stuff. And those things end up creating more of the same. Right. So an example is for this one is like if you've got a little kid, we've got two little kids. OK, so we've got two little kids and one of them has these good beliefs in themselves. Right. They believe that they can trust the world, that they are competent, that people will like them, all of that. So that little kid gets onto the playground and they're going to like run up to Matteo and be like, hi, do you want to be my friend? And so you're going to be like, yeah, OK, let's go on the entire swing or whatever. Right. Right. So their their belief structure and their identity, the way they see the world is going to create more positive events for them. Right. Versus if we have the little kid who, you know, maybe there's some chaos in their environment. Maybe they're a bit more afraid. They have like, I'm at risk. People aren't going to like me. I'm unwanted. I'm not good enough, whatever. And so they hang back a little bit because they're not sure whether you're going to play with them or not. And so then they're getting this like negative loop that comes back to them. And that's kind of one of the examples that I use for like how our limiting beliefs or how our early trauma experiences can shape how we behave in the world. And then consequently, how the world behaves towards us. Right. Which then becomes a compounding factor.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah. It sounds like it's like informing our experience of the world. Right. Where it's like, oh, if you've been turned down, no one ever wants to play with you and no one ever wants to ride the slide with you or whatever the case. It's it's going to inform your next time that you ask somebody to do that or the next time that you want to do that.

Andrea McTague: So and it creates our avoidance patterns, too. Right. Like so there's a section in our intake where we do romantic relationship history. And I'm always like, what's the first one ever? And everyone rolls their eyes because they're like, oh, my God, we've got to go back to the beginning. But what I'm looking for is that contextual piece, because if I'm talking about relationship issues with somebody, say I'm a client who, you know, has difficulty trusting men. And at least that they're all toxic and out to hurt her and no one's ever going to be faithful or whatever, whatever. And we look back into the history is like, well, in her relationship history, she's been cheated on seven times and she's been treated badly and so on and so on. That's going to start flavoring that lens. And then it's going to double down if we look. back even further and we go dad cheated on mom, abandoned her, etc. So now we've got all of these little data points that she's collected where it's like, hey, guys are bad and relationships are bad. And if I get in one, I'm going to be at risk. I'm going to be under threat. And so that's going to shape how she interacts with all men in the future, how she screens them, which might be poorly because you're not. If you assume that no good ones exist, you're like, well, I guess I'll take this guy. Then he's maybe a kind of a POS or whatever. And then that starts to move the needle where you can get pretty off course from where you want to be right in that protection thing, because it's activations for the trauma mind versus like, who's a good fit for me to fulfill my romantic relationship goals? Right. So that's how we see those things kind of coming up as blocks long term and like the accumulation pattern of trauma. Yeah.

Matteo Sestito: And informing you're informing like large parts and important parts of everyone's lives. Right. Like if you're saying like relationships, it's like they're hard enough to find. Right. So you get a good one. But, you know, it's especially hard. I think that if you've had those those experiences that are negative and then you're kind of effectively it sounds like building these like kind of walls that are just going to make it harder and harder to do whatever it is you're trying to do, whether it's find a, you know, a partner, yeah, promotion or whatever.

Andrea McTague: You can show up in kind of all areas. Right. Right. And and it has a lot of impact when it shows up in things that impact our worth, like our perception of worth, because then we're almost expecting the world to treat us badly or we're kind of like living up to that version of ourselves that we have in our head where we're like, I'm not I don't deserve I'm this and that whatever, whatever, versus being like I deserve it and I'm going to do my best and so on and so on. So it like starts to really mess with people in an accumulated sense, which can feel really, really overwhelming because you're like nothing's going right. Everything's messed up. I can't do this and whatever. And if we just thread it back, it's actually pretty clear to unravel a pattern. And I think that's one of the most fun things about like working with our therapeutic modality is that you're like, oh, yeah, this thing early equals this belief, which then equals like this stuff happening for you now. And that's messing with you, including maybe an opt out coping behavior. That's not so fun. And if we just like create extinction in this belief, then this whole pattern goes away. Right. And some of those patterns can include evidence piles that have fairly severe traumas in them or minor traumas. And it kind of doesn't matter which are present for the removal of it. Like it's going to work either way, which is very comforting when you're like, I don't know. It just because somebody's had a big trauma doesn't mean they're like permanently damaged or anything.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah, yeah. Enjoy. So and then I guess like in terms of if you are able to when you remove these limiting beliefs, because I know you're talking about killing them. So when you remove this limiting belief, do you ever have it where clients like see unexpected results out of that? So like maybe the whole goal, the whole reason they came in, right, was to, you know, improve their love life, get rid of some of those walls. But do you ever have it where there's these limiting beliefs and they're attached to behaviors that they're currently doing that they don't even realize? Oh, it sounds like that. That's got to be the case. I must be super excited.

Andrea McTague: It's super exciting because I think sometimes we just accept like that we're powerless for certain things. We're like, oh, well, I'm just going to be like this or whatever. So I had somebody come in and they were wanting to just parent a bit better and be a little less reactive, get frustrated less often and so on and so on. And what ended up happening was like a giant fallout of also being able to like assert their needs and, you know, have more clarity at work and communicate better. And then that equated to a promotion and then feeling less anxious. And I think sometimes, especially if we've had kind of a baseline of anxiety our entire lives, we don't even notice it's there. We're just like, yeah, I just run out of like a five out of ten. But that reduction in anxiety created like such a contentment structure across all things that it was a note actually from her husband. And I'm allowed to talk about this one is he sent me an email. He's like, it's just so much more pleasant. She seems so much more happy and she's able to like share in the joy in our home now, which is very, very, very cool because it was just like that one goal. And that's the nature of it, right? Like because we're only one individual, what's happening inside of us is going to affect all areas of our lives, which is kind of a fun when you pull that one thread out. You're like, oh, and let's see what we get. And you do get impact. Like it definitely takes time.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like I mean, like when you're talking about taking time, right? Like it's like, OK, well, I think like any any sort of improvements you want to make, whether it's like for your life or whatever, where you work, they take time, right? Like it's not something that's just going to happen overnight. But that's pretty cool to hear that. Like, you know, yeah. Pulling the thread on something is going to also like help unravel a whole bunch of things that maybe people are anxious about or whatever.

Andrea McTague: And I think that there's like some interesting things, because like we don't have a talk therapy approach, right? Like we're going in and we're doing essentially counter conditioning, which is the inversion of classical conditioning. So psych work, psych word. But I don't know if you remember those like Pavlov and the dog studies. Oh, yeah.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah.

Andrea McTague: He conditioned. I don't know why everybody knows this, but everybody knows. And for those of you that don't, it's basically he rang a bell and then he created this conditioned response where the dogs would salivate every time the bell rang. So trauma can kind of be like that, right, where it's like every time you get around the cave, you're like, I'm going to get eaten by the bear or step out into the street or whatever, because there's things that are tied together. So that was classical conditioning to purposely tie things together. Counter conditioning is to purposely break those ties. So we're just separating things from each other so that it doesn't attach to a limiting belief. Now, when we do that, though, it's it's there's a couple other like misconception things with trauma. I think when you work in that talk therapy thing, because I often have people who've been like, I've done therapy and this doesn't bother me anymore. And I've talked about it or I've talked it through. And you're like, OK, see thing with that is that the talking part of us, it lives in the cognitive mind. So we can still have the effects of trauma in the body or in the nervous system that's controlled a little bit more by the threat brain. There's also this thing where a lot of people who have dealt with like specific types of trauma or very scary, scary, scary types of trauma. So maybe we're talking about molestation or a rape or, you know, a physical attack, like really scary, scary things. Even the exposure to the thinking about that event will cause like massive, massive, massive emotional reaction and shutdown and all kinds of things. And so they begin to avoid thinking about it. They avoid things that are related to the trauma. They avoid maybe it's going places, just like you would avoid going to the coffee shop on the other side of the street, that sort of thing. And avoidance, we know with humans, creates these phobic behaviors, right, where we start not doing things. And one thing we know about phobias is they get bigger and they tend to generalize to other things, right? So it becomes bigger and bigger impact on the individual. But we also know that exposure is the thing that creates extinction. So which is problematic because we don't want to go near things, including the thoughts about anything traumatic, right? Like we don't want to go near the cave. We're like, stay away from those.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah, you're like, I don't want to talk about that. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: But then we never really learned how to negotiate them or deal with them. So when we introduce kind of a controlled burn of exposure to it, which is what we're doing in order to create that counter conditioning. If we expose ourselves incrementally and a little bit slowly, then we can tolerate it, right? Because you can't just go back to the big thing and you're like, ugh, too scary. So incremental exposure then will create that controlled burn that then extinguishes the trauma response or the disturbance response, which is very, very cool. But you know, like a little bit scary for people.

Matteo Sestito: For sure. Yeah, I can definitely see that. Yeah. I feel like, well, let's do some exposure.

Andrea McTague: So I like this one. Okay. So every time I'm in Calgary and I'm like driving around, you know, the Olympic park there.

Matteo Sestito: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: So they built the big like ski jumping thing. So there's a huge tower. I have no idea like how tall it is, but it's like ridiculous. Right.

Matteo Sestito: I always look at that.

Andrea McTague: And I think like, who just got up to the top of that and was like, you know what I want to do? I want to just ski down this fucker.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: Bizarre. Right. But if you go back to like how that was done, because I think that that would activate a fear structure in like most people. Right. Put these slippery things on your feet and then like, just go down that thing. So how did they get to do that? Well, it was probably they started young on the bunny hill and then like, you know, greens and then yellows and the black diamonds and then so on and so on. Right. So it's that incremental exposure will allow us to do things even if we're afraid of them. And that's kind of the same. So we take to create a desensitization to some of the things that are involved in our trauma, including the thoughts to anchor it.

Matteo Sestito: And I guess. OK, so my follow up question then to that is in terms of like how you do that in the office here with somebody when it's say like something super traumatic, like you were saying, but or even something that, you know, is just what we would call maybe like a breakup or something. Yeah. Something a disturbance. How do you how do you do that sitting here like in the office, like in terms of like exposure to that? Is it?

Andrea McTague: Well, because it's really hard to bring go find somebody's shitty ex boyfriend and bring them into the office and stuff.

Matteo Sestito: All right. You're getting it. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: Yeah. Yeah. 100 percent. So what we do is we kind of trick the walnut brain a little bit because he doesn't understand entirely the difference between imagining something and experiencing something. OK. And that's why when we think about something that's like frustrating or annoying and disturbing. So if you think about like maybe a criticism somebody said about you or whatever, if you bring that up, you'll actually feel that like physical feeling again and it like kind of takes over. That's your sign that the thing is in the walnut. that's where it's living. And so what we can do is we can get people to start off with thinking about that thing that makes them feel like the ick. And then we can kind of, we have this like little activity where they kind of go through it until the whole kind of ski jump thing from the bunny hill to the scary thing happens in the mind. And at the end of it, they're able to do this thing or feel this thing or experience this thing, aka not avoid it, that they wouldn't have been able to do before. But we do it through the imaginal exposure. That's like the component of change.

Matteo Sestito: It's super interesting to hear though that like, of course, you know, these, this disturbance, this traumatic memory, whatever it is, doesn't abide by logic. Of course, it can happen while you're laying in your bed at two o'clock in the morning, and that weird feeling in your chest or whatever. So yeah, no, that that definitely explains that. I appreciate that response in it. I think it's like, I think it's something humanizing about it too, right? Because I think like most, I don't know, it seems like everybody has those feelings, those thoughts or whatever, or when they're like, maybe laying and lying down, had their cup of tea, and then they're like, why did I do that three years ago? A hundred percent.

Andrea McTague: And I think that that's one of the things that's so normalizing about it is it's like, everybody's experienced some non-naturing elements, everybody's experienced some dysregulation in the walnut brain where it's bending something as a threat that maybe doesn't need to be a threat, etc, etc. Or, you know, like, how do I deal with that when that pops in? Or like, why am I thinking about that weird mistake that I made at work like two years ago that doesn't matter today, that's making me feel super gross? Why is it making me feel why do I care about this? Why is that thought in my head, all of that stuff, we've all experienced that to some degree, right? And it tends to be even more and more frequently, like the closer to the disturbing thing that we are, right? So I think if we think about like having a breakup or getting dumped or whatever, and in that moment, it's like feels terrible. And then the next week, it feels terrible. And then then a week after feels maybe still terrible, less terrible, hard to say, right? So it creates these intrusion thought things that just like pop into your head. And then with like this flavoring of this meaning where it's like, no, I'm never going to find anyone else. And that's the one that got away or whatever it is. But these thoughts that are generated kind of by the walnut, they're emotion based, and they sometimes just don't make any sense at all, right? Like, it's not a logical thought to think if you get broken up with like you 3.5 billion people on the planet, like you're never going to find anyone. But it's a really common thought because the walnut's interpreting something there, right? So it's adding some context and some flavor to the experience that's not helpful. And that's what we want to rejig. And the fun thing about trauma is because of that piece with context, right? Like you remember the amusement park ride versus like taking you to the top of the building, because of that piece that involves our perception of it, it means that we can get in there and we can change the response to it. Because we can change the things in our minds, that's possible. Like we can't change what has happened, and maybe some of the physical effects of what's happened, or what's going to happen. But if we alter somebody's perspective, we can make them way more resilient for stuff that's going to come up. And we can make this stuff in the past bother them a lot less, and like impact their now a lot less as well.

Matteo Sestito: And at the same time, it's yeah, like you're sort of like breaking down some of maybe those barriers or those things that they've set up to help avoid that feeling or avoid that situation in the future. Oh, that's super cool.

Andrea McTague: Super cool. And I think when we talk about avoidance, I think we all avoid certain things. But when we avoid things that would be good or would be helpful for us, or we avoid challenge altogether, that's when it gets kind of interesting, right? So if we're seeing a ton of clients right now with I don't know what's like for colloquially referred to as like the failure to launch, right? Like difficulty going out into the world and getting a job and getting there moving out of mom and dad's house and so on and so on. So we've got underlying that these avoidance structures. And why is somebody compulsively avoiding things, even though they might say like, I want to find a career, I want to find a girlfriend, I want to move out, but then their behaviors are in total opposition to that. Well, if we're having a lot of our things, our behaviors and our emotional responses driven by that threat brain, it doesn't necessarily agree with what our cognitive mind wants, right? So if we go one step further, we go, okay, well, what is the walnut brain avoiding? So it's avoiding doing all of these things. And then we go one step below that and we go like, why is it avoiding that? Because it makes them feel what about themselves, like I'm going to fail, I'm incapable, whatever, whatever. That's where you can pinpoint that origin. And once we get to that, which doesn't take us long at all, then we can go and extract it, which is very fun. And then what people see is they're going to see that absence of the reaction, right? So it's not going to be like them walking around necessarily being like, I'm great. It's just that you won't have the block to not doing the thing, right? So you won't get the weird feeling that stops you from going on Indeed and looking for jobs or stops you from like going out and living on your own and dealing with the stressors of the first department and all of that. So it's removing the blocks that and the blocks are like those avoidance structures.

Matteo Sestito: And that's sort of opening up opportunities for yourself at that point, right? Because it's like, okay, instead of just not doing the thing, you're like, oh, I'm going to do the thing and see if, you know, it turns out, see if like it works out, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities. And you don't have that thing in the back of your mind saying like, I'm going to fail or I'm not going to be able to do this or I'm not incapable. A hundred percent. Like limiting belief is attached to it.

Andrea McTague: Well, and then when you experience something that isn't fun, isn't negative, because we all like make mistakes or screw stuff up or make a bad choice or whatever, but then it doesn't go onto an evidence pile for the limiting belief. Be like, see, you sent that dumb email and then they interpreted it and now I'm an asshole or I can't do anything right or whatever. It doesn't do that anymore. You're like, I sent a dumb email. Next time I will not send an email at 2am when I'm kind of annoyed at somebody, right? I'm going to write it. I'm going to think about it. So you can employ some strategy because I think our perception is that the cognitive mind of people, the thinking brain is competent. It's good. It's like it can figure problems out. It's like very capable versus the walnut, which is going to come up with solutions that are very like short term. And they're good at removing pain or the threat in the moment, but not so much for the long term, right?

Matteo Sestito: So they're like pushing it down the line a little bit.

Andrea McTague: Yeah, exactly. Oh, it's like, oh, you're stressed about that big report you have to write. Why don't we just YouTube rabbit hole and eat some candy, right? Like, okay, it'll make you feel better in the moment, but then it stops compounding as well. And I think that that creation of the absence of negative reactions is really fun for our clients. And that's something that we would see like often in the check-in part of like, what's good. Be like, oh yeah, I would have gotten really bothered when this like annoying coworker walked into my office, but I was just kind of like, eh, you know, kind of her stuff. And she's just really neurotic and then carried on with the day. Yeah.

Matteo Sestito: You're able to like move forward without bending that and then like revisiting it. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: And just being like the rest of the day, like, oh, Sandra is such a pain in the ass. And I don't know why she never gets her stuff done on time, blah, blah, blah. And like that, like personalizing and that like activation, it just doesn't happen. So a really cool thing that occurs when we start to create a lot of absence of reaction that was formerly there is people get more space freed up in their mind. So their mental real estate opens and that's where we then have room for the creation of joy and strategy and fulfillment and more deep connection. So we get like, it unlocks like a different video game level of life, which is very, very fun.

Matteo Sestito: And it's like, yeah, you're sort of like at that point, like helping optimize, right? Instead of like, perhaps maybe working on getting rid of the limiting belief. It's like, okay, well, now how can we optimize your life to make sure that, you know?

Andrea McTague: Well, and speaking of optimizing, one of the things that we'd been talking about was, can trauma be beneficial?

Matteo Sestito: Yeah. Oh yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. I'm glad. Yeah. Okay.

Andrea McTague: So there's tons of research on this topic. And it's interesting because the answer is yes. Yes. So yes, but. So yeah, it's gotta be kind of like midline. And I would say there's a couple qualifiers with it. So it can optimize certain behaviors, right? So it is often really, really features in people that have like really, really high ambition and success drives, for instance. So in a lot of my really, really successful entrepreneurs, because that's the population that I work with the most. I will see high grade trauma in their critical sensitive period of development. But the limiting belief structures that it encodes are things like I'm powerless. Well, the dysfunctional need for I'm powerless is I need to be powerful. Things like I'm irresponsible or it's my fault. The dysfunctional need for that is I need to be responsible for everything and everyone. So in certain contexts, those dysfunctional needs that relate to the limiting beliefs can actually create success. But what happens is they will often create success in one area or one pathway. So maybe my entrepreneur guy is like, you know, he's super hardworking. He gets at it. He's not afraid of anything. He's a bit low on the empathy thing. So he'll do what some other people won't do. And so he'll get that success in that area. But if you apply that same sort of activation pattern to his marriage, it's not going to work out well, right? Because it's low vulnerability structure, can't connect, really wants to hold the power cards, which of course, wives love, right? Not going to go well in that regard. What we want to do is we want to take that ambition and we want to move it out of a trauma based structure into a choice based thing. But there is. And so there's that. And then there's also this other piece where it can build some level of resilience. So if someone has an early life that has no disturbances, no challenges, maybe they were really coddled, really helicopter parented, they didn't have to fail participation trophy, like central, that kind of thing. What you're going to create is another distortion, right? So where they're not going to have the resilience or the distress tolerance to handle the challenges of being successful in life, right? So that's a problem. And then it often will also put this thread of entitlement, like I shouldn't have to deal with anything bad. I shouldn't have to deal with any challenge. And of course, if we go back and like draw on what the Buddhists say, you know, suffering is an inherent part of life, like you're going to have stuff that you don't super love. And if we embrace it as a challenge, we're going to kind of up our skills and be able to move forward. But if we quit every time there is some pain involved, we're not going to get anywhere in anything, right? Like if we, I don't know, in yoga land, I'm always doing like some asana that I hate. And I'm like, this hurts. I don't want to. My leg is shaking now, whatever. And if I just stop because it's like, I shouldn't have to, or I don't want to, or I can't handle this. Like if it's any of that kind of stuff, I'm never going to achieve the next thing, right? So the answer to the question of like, can trauma be beneficial in one frame, it's like, yeah, but it's kind of got to be a bit midline because if it goes past that, and if it is beyond what our capacity can handle, then we're going to get into more dysfunctional reactions than functional, right? So too much trauma hurts us a lot, too little, also problematic. And then certain types of trauma, because they put into that like capacity too much. The other thing with experiencing trauma, and I think this is a little bit less research, there is stuff in existence in it, but it creates like certain types of traumas create certain types of superpowers as well. So my clients who grew up in a really chaotic environment, maybe there's a bit of domestic violence, for example, something like that, they tend to have a superpower of being able to read people very quickly and very accurately. And that's because that would have been a survival skill early on, right?

Matteo Sestito: It's been owned, right?

Andrea McTague: Yeah, because you got to walk in and you got to know his dad in a good mood, whereas he had a couple beers and is this going to get bad? And you got to know that like really quick, right? Same sort of thing with parents that grow or kids that grow up and when parents have got mental disorder issues and things like that, they're often needing to like determine like, how safe am I today in this moment in the world? So they get really good at reading the room, they get really good at reading people. And depending on the application value, that can be a really, really useful skill to people, right? And that's just one example. There's like different things with it. One of the things that we clock is non-nurturing element, which is like fairly common, but almost never identified by the client as a non-nurturing thing or a disturbing thing is something we call parentification. So it's when there's something in the home where in the early home, where the little kid kind of takes on a more adult role than they kind of should at their cognitive or at their developmental level. So maybe, you know, mom and dad fight a lot, mom gets really sad. So little kids like takes on the role of comforting mom and making sure the other siblings are fed and like things like that. So this parentification one, it will encode a belief like I need to be responsible, like I need to be responsible for everyone and everything. So that tends to play really, really well. They do well at work, right? Because they're that responsible person. They tend to be really valued by friends and things like that. But what it can do is it can distort their efforts so that they'll go beyond their capacity, beyond their own pressure cooker. So it can be harmful to them as an individual, but really adaptive in a ton of different contexts as well. So we get things like that. So there's like good parts and bad parts. And the natural question for that one is I get clients, particularly my biz guys. They'll be like perfectionists because they have I'm not good enough or something. Or maybe dad was a major hard ass or whatnot. So they get really good at doing things really, really well. And then I will tell them like, OK, here's the pattern. This is how it's messing with you. I'm like, let's let's kill it. And they're like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Because if you want thing, yeah, if you take this thing away, well, am I just going to start sucking at everything? Or am I going to not care? And I'm not going to be motivated or ambitious anymore or whatever. But what we're doing is we're going back to that bus example is we're not making it compulsive. Then when you put it back into like our cognitive mind, if it's something that they really value, if they still want to do it really well, or if they still want to achieve and it goes into like a want structure, they'll be able to do that. But with with some sort of awareness and kind of responsiveness to what their personal capacity is. They're not harming themselves.

Matteo Sestito: They're able to level out and see where they're at beforehand instead of it just being like something that's just instinctually. They're just doing all the time.

Andrea McTague: Exactly. And then it stops it from being global, too, because I definitely dealt with a lot of the perfectionism one where before, like everything had to be perfect all the time and everywhere. That gets very exhausting and it makes people look really rigid and it's not good. It's not a good vibe. Now, as you know, I'm still very perfectionistic about certain things, about things which I really care about that I think have really high value that connect to my life purpose or are for people that I like take care of. Like I'm very perfectionistic about some of the research around my daughter or whatnot. Right. But it's not all over the place all the time to the point where it exceeds my capacity.

Matteo Sestito: And then it's manageable. Right. And it's repeatable. It's like something that you can you're choosing to do for those things that you really, really care about instead of it just being across the board. And then like you say, it's like maybe not at some point it becomes unmanageable because you're just trying to do it in so many different capacities that it's no longer you can't upkeep that. Right. Yeah. What happens like if somebody is doing that and not to use any personal examples or anything, but if somebody is like they're pushing that limit so hard in so many different ways, like what does that manifest like?

Andrea McTague: I know this is trauma related, but yeah, no, but kind of kind of it is because I would say like to qualify that what we see is generally like trauma in or disturbances, activation in the threat brain, whatever you want to call it, underlies almost every single thing, almost not all, but almost every single thing that we see in our practice, in the land of psychology, in the land of dysfunction for humans. So it's not trauma, but it is. Right. And so what we see then is in the patterns is that compulsive need to fulfill the dysfunctional need or avoid the limiting beliefs, all the stuff that we do. So if we take the perfectionist guy, you know, he's going to show up his like suit is going to be on point. He's got the kerchief. It matches the socks. He's got the polished BMW sitting out there and it's got no water spots and he loses his mind a little bit if there is one and whatnot. And he's going to go crush it at work and be the workaholic that goes like beyond his capacity. And what we see it doing is it basically fills up that pressure cooker and then begins to overflow. And when people's pressure cooker gets too full, they need a kind of release valve for it. And that's where we see the introduction of opt out behaviors. So maybe he gets into the scotch every night or maybe he gets really snippy and like kind of yells at the secretary and the wife or avoids, you know, that interaction with the kids or so on. And then those things are detrimental. So they're like negative coping mechanisms that we use to manage our pressure cooker. But long term, they create more work for the pressure cooker. So then there's that compounding nature of the patterns. The other thing with it is when we are running so much in these compulsive trauma based patterns, we lose that stuff that I was talking about, that like mental real estate that can then be used for like joy and connection and goal setting and, you know, focusing on what we really want, including morality and things like that. Right. Because those are all like higher order thinking. And that belongs to the cognitive mind.

Matteo Sestito: Okay, so yeah, it's like, it makes sense, though, right? Where it's like, okay, like, you can't necessarily, I mean, you have to fill in the whole circle, right? You can't just draw like one straight line all the way out. And that is going to be super developed and super useful for you in work or whatever it is. And then ignore everything else, because it's all gonna kind of cycle back and like, it all interplays with each other.

Andrea McTague: Oh, 100%. And it was kind of funny, because it's like, it's shaped, I think, like, the thing about trauma or traumatic experiences or disturbance experiences, is they shape a little bit of who we are. But we have some control later, of what, like how they shape us, right? And when we bring things from the subconscious up into the conscious, that's when we get into that thing of like, okay, now we can do something with it. But when it's running as this like background script, it's just like life just keeps happening. And this stuff just keeps happening. And we just keep doing these things, but we have no idea why. So the majority of my clients, when they first come in, they feel and this is something I think is like, not just a client thing. It's like a people thing, because my friends will do it as well. And I think people have this perception that they should know why they're doing a thing. They should know why they're reacting. And they're like, I don't know. So what we'll do is we'll make these like sweeping judgments, like, I'm so stupid. I blah, blah, blah, blah, or like, I can't, I'm bad at this or whatever, whatever. And they'll put kind of judgments on themselves for why they're doing something. So it's really nice to kind of unpack it. And you're like, Oh, you're doing that because that's like a mild trauma response to this particular thing that you experienced, which then like impacted your identity. And now it's what you expect from the world.

Matteo Sestito: Just that, right? We're empowering for that person too, though, right? Because it's like, yeah, like, I think it's very most people, I think, analyze themselves, analyze the decisions they make. And there's probably a lot in there where you're like, I don't necessarily know why. And so you just table it as I'm so dumb, or I'm so bad at relationships, or I'm so whatever. And you just keep throwing it in that sort of like that bin, right?

Andrea McTague: Percent. And like, it's interesting, because it's not necessarily like a one to one kind of obvious thing. Like I was working with one of my clients as a thing with binge eating and some weight management stuff was really, really down on herself. Because she's like, I just go, I like want to do well. And she's like super responsible person. And you know, then I'm like binging, and I'm not doing the stuff that I should for myself and so on and so on. When we look back into the non nurturing elements, we see that parentification stuff where all of her resources were going to meet the needs of other people, all of them. So at the end of the day, when she comes home, there are there's nothing there's like nothing. Their capacity is maxed and she doesn't have anything to give to herself. Right. Even if it's just, you know, washing up the dishes in their own house. And so we tied that to also like you're also at this opt out land where your walnut brain is like, I don't have any dopamine. I used it all up. I have no more energy. So get me some dopamine. So you know where you can find dopamine in some nice, sweet treats. Right. And the walnut knows this. So it crams them in, but then it reinforces that cycle. But when she could understand that, like this stuff that she was experiencing now in these maladaptive behaviors, because the problem is the binging, that's what was bugging her. And then now we go back and we like, oh, yeah, it comes from this. And it's actually quite a logical connection. And so when you can put that together for people, which is the first thing that we do in our therapy stuff is like, oh, yeah, these connect to this, which makes sense. This is why this is happening. If we understand the why, we automatically calm down a little bit because we it's normalized. We don't seem we don't feel crazy. We don't feel like we're just like in this like vortex. Well, it's like, I guess this is just going to fucking happen forever. Right. Because if you're like, oh, yeah, this is happening because of that. So then it like sets up nicely for the like and we can fix that. Yeah. And then you get into like a very empowered state. And then when they clear like one thing, then, you know, it's it's a different level of empowerment because you're like, no, like I really can address this.

Matteo Sestito: Yeah. Like that light bulb moment really leads to like some significant change. Right. Because it's like all of a sudden you've realized something about your own actions, about your own self. And then now you're working towards moving past that. And it can maybe have been something where it's like, OK, you thought you would never move past it. You're like, this is just who I am. Whereas, no, this is not who you necessarily are. There's a reason there's some like, yeah, there's some some things you can do. So that's super cool.

Andrea McTague: And I love that like that you're saying it's like people will identify with that. This is who I am. Like I am not good at I am a socially anxious person or I am not able to do this or whatever. And you're like, maybe, but maybe not. Right. Like and often it's the but maybe not part because what we're doing is we're changing your identity. Right. So if you don't feel like you're incapable, if you don't feel like you're less than, if you don't feel like you're these things, well, then the other side is that you start to feel like I am a capable individual or I can do these things. I can achieve these things. So that framework completely goes to an achievement in life orientation and creating those opportunities that you're referring to and just calms the walnut like way down. So there's like that mental real estate to be able to daydream and to be able to like think and enjoy. I was talking to a client and this is one I often use is like when you have a lot of things in your pressure cooker, whether they're like trauma stuff or whatever, what it creates is this like weird feeling of the activation of the limiting release. It's like driving and talking on a cell phone at the same time. So maybe somebody is like trying to, you know, be in the moment recording a podcast to somebody or something like that. But in the background, they have this like running intrusive thought script thing of like, oh, you're going to say something dumb or oh, like, did you prepare for or oh, like maybe whatever or nobody's going to watch. Like you'll have these like narratives that are running. And then that means that we can't like really do either thing, the thinking part or the like thing that we're trying to do really, really well. So it gets into like a lack of focus. So that's a common effect of trauma is impact on focus and ability to be in the moment and be mindful and all that kind of stuff.

Matteo Sestito: Kind of like always knocking on that door and like always there no matter how hard you're trying to focus on your podcast or whatever is the little knock on the door. That makes sense. Yeah. Very distracting for people.

Andrea McTague: So, Matteo, any last questions kind of way before we wrap up our little conversation on the whole like trauma landscape and what it does and how it looks and all that?

Matteo Sestito: No, I suppose I'll just thank you for bringing me on and letting me sort of chat about it for viewers or those who are listening. I've been asked Andrea these questions all the time in between sessions and whatnot. So it's nice to just have a space to discuss them. And hopefully if you're if you're listening, you picked up something from this, whether it's to pull into your daily life or maybe just like a little bit of pulling some logic into, OK, there's a reason there's there's there's reasons why I maybe do this or do that. Yeah. Hopefully, you've learned something from the podcast. I'm sure you probably have if you've been listening. So, yeah. Yeah.

Andrea McTague: And I hope I hope they did part of it. It's like I think such a hopeful landscape of like just because like we've treated some of the most horrific traumas and some of the most like irritating, sticky, get in your way traumas and whatever. And it can be done. And I think that that's like the last thing that about it that I would ever like to say is like just because somebody's experienced some trauma, whether it's like super severe or messing with them in a big way, it absolutely is not a life sentence. Like absolutely not. So it's like a really helpful thing.

Matteo Sestito: And definitely worth emphasizing. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up for sure. I like it.

Andrea McTague: All right. So we kind of and if you want to learn more about it, basically pop on to shiftgrit.com. We've got a ton of resources there. There's other podcast episodes. We're blathering about this stuff all the time. If it's related to a specific concern on the website, there are some little videos about how we fix this. So if you want to know like OCD or how does this all connect together or if you just want to come chat with one of us or if you want more information, check out our socials and all of that. And if you did get a little golden nugget of some value from today's discussion, definitely throw down a like, a share or a subscribe. It means a lot to us. And if you want to hear more discussions from the land of Matteo and I, leave us a little note about that as well. And thank you. We'll check you next time.

Matteo Sestito: Thanks, everyone.