Trauma is anything that that is too much, too soon, too fast, or not enough.
– Britt Frank
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Vanessa is joined by Licensed Psychotherapist and Trauma Specialist Britt Frank for a discussion on “The Truth About Trauma.” In this episode, Britt Frank, MSW, LSCSW, SEP demystifies the word “trauma” and explains why it is important to understand the basics of how our brains and bodies work together to create our moods.
Together, they address how you are NOT crazy if you have struggled to talk or think your way out of problems. While everyone has trauma (even if you don’t think you have it), the good news is that trauma is not an illness; rather, it is an injury, and it can and does heal.
SHOW NOTES
Britt Frank Website | Britt Frank Instagram | Preorder The Science of Stuck
Episode Transcription
Vanessa Cornell:
Welcome to The NUSHU Podcast. I’m your host, Vanessa Cornell. I invite you with love into this space to learn and grow with me. And for a brief moment of the day, come home to yourself.
I had the great pleasure of interviewing my friend and brilliant mind, Britt Frank. No one has opened my eyes more to understanding trauma than Britt. So I am just thrilled to be able to offer you this window into what I believe is a pretty misunderstood concept. What struck me when I started learning was how much of it was counter intuitive, and also counter to what I had learned and what was generally accepted. Britt’s way of framing trauma really turned things on their head for me, but in the best possible way. It’s truly empowering to get out from under the misconceptions, stereotypes, and assumptions that people have about trauma and how it manifests. Britt’s perspective is valuable for everyone, whether or not you consider yourself someone who has experienced trauma. You’ll see that early on in the episode.
I do want to mention that the topics we discuss are intense. So I remind you to take good care of yourself as always, and make sure you have the resources and support you need. If you choose to listen, this episode could certainly bring up things for you. We touch on so many different topics like trauma and self esteem, childhood trauma, inherited generational trauma, sexual trauma, trauma and eating disorders, trauma informed therapists, the internal family systems model of therapy and how it addresses trauma, and how to help a partner who’s dealing with trauma. It’s such a rich episode, I will put in a quick plug for Britt’s Instagram, which is to me the most surprising and informative account on Instagram. I’ve learned so much and highly recommend it. You can find her @brittfrank. Without further ado, thanks for joining. And I hope you get as much out of this conversation as I do.
Vanessa Cornell:
I’m so excited to talk today. Let’s just start at the very beginning. What is trauma?
Britt Frank:
Trauma is misunderstood. The word’s tossed around, they don’t teach it in grad school, you have to do a special separate training thing to even learn about it. We’re getting better. So it’s no wonder It’s so confusing. And I didn’t think I had it. I’m like no, I don’t have trauma. trauma is that big stuff. trauma is natural disaster, or it’s being in a war. And those things are obviously traumatic. But the definition of trauma that I love, I didn’t come up with it. But it’s so brilliant. Anything that is too much too fast, too soon, or not enough to say that, again. trauma is anything that that is too much too soon, too fast or not enough. It’s essentially brain indigestion. So we think of trauma as these external circumstances. And trauma isn’t a situation. It’s a brain interpretation. So trauma is not in the event. It’s in the body. Yes, there are traumatic events that we can all agree on. But you and I can both experience the same exact thing. Like let’s say we both slam on our brakes, and for you, you go about your day and you move on. But for me, my brain is now going to store this as a trauma. And I’m going to have flashbacks and nightmares and I’m going to feel crazy, and I’m not gonna know why. And most people walk around really struggling with feelings of shame and self doubt. They think that they lack motivation. They think that they’re lazy. It’s like most people don’t have a motivation problem. They have a trauma problem and they don’t know it.
Vanessa Cornell:
So I remember the first time someone suggested I had trauma. I was super triggered by it. That person also told me I had low self worth. And I was a people pleaser. It’s like a whole trigger package. Now that I’ve unpacked that package, I realize Yes, I have trauma. Yes, I was a people pleaser. Yes, I had low self worth. But at the time, I remember that trauma sort of in my mind saying like, no, like I had a happy childhood. I don’t have trauma, and the stigma associated with quote unquote, having trauma.
Britt Frank:
I love that you name that because the stigma if you really dive into what trauma is, it’s a physiological thing. It’s so important to know that trauma is not a mental illness. trauma is an injury. It’s an injury and it can heal And so we really want to dial down the bigness of what it is I’m not minimizing people’s pain or the things that they go through. But trauma is absolutely something that we can heal from, like any injury.
Vanessa Cornell:
Let’s talk about this illness versus injury. Talk about that specifically in the context of mental illness and how people might have been told that there’s something wrong with them wrong.
Britt Frank:
So my disclaimer with this is, if you are taking meds, don’t stop taking them after you hear this talk medications, great. If it works for you take it if you don’t like it, talk to your doctor. But please do not take anything that we say here is licensed to just change your medication. If you look at what people display, depression, anxiety, when people think of mental illness, they think of bipolar, or borderline personality disorder, right. But trauma in the body, if it’s not dealt with, looks exactly the same as mental illness, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and panic disorder, and OCD and ADHD as a hot mess. And borderline personality disorder. Because I had all these crazy symptoms, I had eating disorders, I was depressed, all of the things like all of the things. But what I didn’t know was these were not anything that was making me sick, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with me, my nervous system was traumatized. And the symptoms looked like mental illness. But once you heal the underlying trauma, and you address that, the symptoms stop. It’s amazing. It’s really amazing. And if not totally stuck, because I don’t really believe in all keyword all better. But they get so much more manageable. Like I do not meet criteria for any mental illnesses anymore. And it’s really, really a disservice that a lot of mental health professionals do by slapping a diagnosis without once ever asking, do you know what trauma is? And let’s examine this first, I saw a therapist for years, and no one ever asked me that. And so one day someone did.
Vanessa Cornell:
So let’s talk about what you mentioned the nervous system, the body help us understand the role of the body and the nervous system.
Britt Frank:
So I always tell people who push back and they go, Well, I don’t I don’t have trauma. I had a great childhood. I’ll say that’s awesome. How is your life working? Are you living your best life? Is your relationship with sex good? Is your relationship with food good? Do you have good, if life’s working for you and you’re happy, then don’t go see a therapist then do you think have added, but for people who are confused and they don’t understand why certain things are difficult, even though they don’t think that they had a bad childhood, even though they don’t think they have trauma, we want to start with if your life is less than ideal, you qualify for dealing with this thing. trauma is for everybody. So there’s that. Now, our brains and our minds live inside of a body. And again, with mental health, we treat it as if it’s this separate thing. We talk about mental health as something separate from physical health. But our minds are housed inside of our brains, which live inside of our bodies. So understanding that our thoughts actually impact our physiology, our physiology impacts our thoughts, and our nervous system is responsible for keeping us alive. So our brains have been around a lot longer than conscious, logical, rational thoughts. Our brains are habituated to keep us from being eaten by lions. So our brains generally the survival part only knows two things, danger or safety. So if your brain thinks it’s about to get eaten by a lion, all of those wonderful rational Think positive set goals do afirma none of that works, right? Our brain has the thinking part, which is the front, they call it the cortex.
Britt Frank:
There’s the thinking part, the emotional part and the survival part. I mean, there’s more to it than that, but we’ll just start there, right? So if you’re trying to think your way out of a problem, but your brain is stuck in survival mode, this is not available. That’s why you can logically No, this shouldn’t bother me but it really bothers me or I know that I should do this, but I can’t seem to get myself out of whatever hole I’m stuck in. So it’s so important to know that we have so the nervous system is essentially like a car, we have the gas, we have the brakes. Again, it’s simplified, but when our gas pedals down, that’s up energy, it’s go energy, but too much gas is gonna feel like anxiety, it’s gonna feel like panic and it’s gonna feel like overwhelm the brake is good for slowing us down. But too much brake is going to look like the Teague depression, lack of motivation. And these are these mechanisms the gas and the brake and knowing Okay, if my gas pedal is stuck to the ground, which is how I usually function I’m Go go go go, they’ll collapse. How do I get my gas pedal unstuck? Or if my brake pedal is stuck to the floor and I cannot get myself motivated to do anything. I need to know how that works physiologically because there’s brain hacks that really work quickly to help The body get out of wherever it’s stuck.
Vanessa Cornell:
How do you sort of generally work with your clients to create a reregulation of something that’s been off?
Britt Frank:
And they call it in the trauma world, the window of tolerance. So again, this is like the brake and the gas, but a different metaphor. If you think of a thermostat, you know, 72 is the high and 60 is below and it never really goes above that, it never really goes below that. And within this window, we can manage our lives, right? If we’re getting too anxious, we know how to settle if we’re getting too low, we know how to come up. So the very first thing that I do with my clients is let them know they are not crazy, and there is nothing wrong with them. And they don’t have a lazy problem or a motivation problem. They’re not stupid. This is a physiological thing, just knowing that it can make symptoms round out a little bit. Our bodies are already in distress and dysregulated. And then we attach a story to and Bernie Brown is so good about talking about attaching stories to the things that we experience. If we attach a story of shame to a symptom, we’re going to inflame it, and then everything is sort of blown. So we have to take the shame story off the symptom before we can even begin to get it back down into a place where then we can use all of our good positive thinking logical thought skills, right? I think it’s a big deal. so important. I mean, I got raised in a family that looks normal, everything looks fine. And it’s what’s wrong with me that I am having these really amplified things going on. I couldn’t explain it. And so the only explanation that people will come to in the absence of trauma information is it must be me. The other thing I say to my clients is, please ask yourself, Is it possible that there’s information I don’t know that could be explaining this before you come to a decision that it’s just you? What if there’s information I don’t have, and if I had, it would explain this, because I’ve experienced a lot of traumatic events. But there’s very few things to me that are worse than feeling absolute insanity, and like, I can’t trust myself, and that at any moment, my brain can explode, and I’m going to be wandering around just, it’s an awful feeling. It’s terrible. So knowing there’s an explanation, every single symptom makes sense, in context.
Vanessa Cornell:
Okay, a couple more just nuggets that I pulled out that I would love you to talk about. We cannot change anything about the past, we can all agree on that. We can change everything about the way our brains relate to the past and the present. Talk about that, and how you coach people and help people to achieve that.
Britt Frank:
So a lot of people hesitate to do therapy, because well, what’s the point in dealing with any of this because you can’t change it, what’s happened has happened. And that’s it. And that is true, we can’t physically go back and change the past. But the past is stored in our brains. If you think of a closet, like a storage closet, you know, our memories are stored in the closet. And if our closet is disorganized, when we open the door, everything’s gonna come falling down on our head. So we can’t change what’s in the closet, but we can change how it’s stored. And a lot of what trauma work does is it creates containers for these difficult memories. It takes the emotional charge off the memories, it takes the toxic poison off of them. So when you go back and you think about oh my god, that thing that happened when I was 12, you can remember it without the negative feelings or the fear feelings, or whatever the feelings are that are associated with it. And that’s incredibly good news, because life is tricky. And we all have things that have happened to us that they’re really just cringy we all survived adolescence, puberty is traumatic in itself. Right. So being able to recall our own story without shame, fear, guilt, and pain is really a gift. And it’s incredible that that is actually possible with trauma work.
Vanessa Cornell:
I’ve seen so much where people attach the story of blame and shame or self blame and shame to something that was done to them. Even though we can say you didn’t do that that was done to you so often. That’s the way the story unfolds in somebody’s mind.
Britt Frank:
And if you think of little kids, right, little kids will always blame themselves. In the absence of information. You can tell a five year old, Oh, sweetie, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong, but they’re not going to stop crying. They’re going to keep going the same mechanism and adults until we have an experience of being held in safety and having a new way to relate to what’s happening to us. We’re going to blame ourselves. And it’s not accurate, and it’s not helpful. And our lives don’t work when we live in shame and self blame.
Vanessa Cornell:
I do want to turn to some questions. The first one is about trauma and self esteem. How did those interact and if there’s been a traumatic event And it’s negatively impacted self esteem. How do you work with somebody on that?
Britt Frank:
So the first thing we have to do is define self esteem. It’s the word that gets tossed around. And we all think we know what it means. It’s how I feel about myself. Well, okay, well, what is the self mean? And so there’s a model of therapy that I love called internal family systems. If you’ve seen the movie inside out the Pixar movie, it’s sort of that idea that within our bodies are these parts of us. And part of me knows I should go to the gym, part of me wants to lay on the couch and watch Netflix, part of me knows logically, this isn’t my fault, but part of me can’t help feeling guilty. And so self esteem is actually a problem with one of these parts. Some people call it inner child work, or subpersonalities, you don’t have multiple personality disorder, but we all function in a system of multiples. We’re like trees, there’s bark, and roots, and leaves and branches. And the way to work with one part is gonna differ from another part. So let’s say something traumatic happens to me. And it reminds me of that thing in fifth grade that happens to be so I now have a 10 year old part of me that needs tending to, and the intervention for a 10 year old is not the same as a 25 year old. So it’s so important not to ask, why do I have bad self esteem, but which parts of my story are getting aggravated by what’s happening to me now, because most people will agree, I know I should have better self esteem, but I don’t know how to fix it. It’s because it’s not about yourself that needs a steam, it’s understanding on your timeline of you. You’re every age that you’ve ever been. So do you have a three year old part of yourself that has trouble with what’s happening? Do the 16 year old party yourself, my rejection stories, usually an adolescent teenager anything, right? But my fear and abandonment stuff is usually a smaller child. So I would argue no one actually has a problem with self esteem. But we all have a problem with part esteem, which parts of us need help.
Vanessa Cornell:
Interesting. Talk about childhood. And what we did or didn’t get in childhood. I’ve been really interested in again, the same person who gave me that big trigger ball years ago, which actually helped me tremendously. But it felt terrible at the time, asked me the question, What did your mother not give you? I was like, I had a good mother. I was really defensive. At that point. I was like, how can you be like criticizing my mother who did her best, and she’s a good person, and she loved me. And then I came to understand there are things she didn’t give me because one person can’t give you everything in your childhood, and you can’t possibly have all of your needs met. Correct me if you disagree. But let’s talk about needs that are not met in childhood, and what we do with them now.
Britt Frank:
So the mommy problem with the shame, usually people fall in one or two camps. One, I had a good mom, don’t you talk about my mom, she did the best she could, like you said, or Oh, crap. I’m a mom, and what am I doing to mess up my kids? So it’s so important that if you are a parent, this is not about shaming you, if you’re concerned enough to ask, How can I do better by my kids, and you’re good. And it’s not about shaming your mom, she may very well have been a great mom who did the best she could. But every mom is a human. No human is perfect. And so mom may not have meant to harm you or not meet your needs. But her intention does not change the impact. The example I give people is I may not have intended to run you over with my car. That was really not my intention. I’m a good person, you’re a good friend of mine, I didn’t mean to hit you. But that does not make your leg any less broken. And so it’s so important to validate that your pain doesn’t take away from the goodness of your parents and giving yourself permission to explore. Okay, where were my needs possibly not met? And knowing every mom is a human and no human is perfect. And so no shame. So circling back to what you were saying as far as mom not meeting your needs. You know, a lot of people go well, I don’t know. I have no idea. Well, look at what’s happening in the present. Are you terrified of rejection? Okay, that usually goes back to at some point in your life that need for security. Wasn’t that? Okay? Are you terrified of abandonment? Are you a people pleaser? Are you a chronic, I must make sure that everyone is okay. Before I can be okay. That goes back to a need that didn’t get met. Again. It’s not about shame. It’s about understanding and naming the problem so we can solve it.
Vanessa Cornell:
Yeah, I’ve actually come full circle with my relationship with my mom, where I can both acknowledge where my needs weren’t met. And there’s just no blame. And there’s great gratitude for what she was able to do. And her own limitations. It’s taken me a while. But I’ve gotten there.
Britt Frank:
You do good work. That’s integration. Right? And with trauma, what happens is trauma fragments ourselves. So we don’t feel whole and we don’t know what’s going on being able to hold the duality of my mom was imperfect, and I love her. And I recognize where she caused pain, and I can still see her. That’s wholeness. There’s like a toxic positivity thing where it’s I just jump right to forgiveness, I just forgive her. An everything is light, love and peace and happy and positive. And that’s not integration, because we’re ignoring the pain, when you can hold the pain and the truth that she was doing the best she could that’s healing.
Vanessa Cornell:
There’s another layer to it, which is, she had a lot of capital T trauma in her life. And so sometimes she’ll do things that seem irrationally logical, and I want for the longest time I wanted to heal her of it, heal her of all of the, you know, capital T trauma that she had experienced. And then I realized, she actually, in one generation, managed to protect me from it. And so she’s sort of had to hold her sword up against it her whole life to protect me. And who am I to tell her put down that sword right now, like, turn on a dime, put down that sword. And so part of me is okay with her holding on to her coping mechanisms that she created, frankly, to insulate me. I don’t know if that has any basis in any of your work. But that’s the way I’ve really reconciled it. In my mind.
Britt Frank:
It’s huge. Because what you’re talking about is trying to get her to see and change and do. And with trauma work, you realize that you can’t change people, but you can change how you react to them, you can change how their behaviors impact you, you can change how your nervous system either goes into hyperdrive. And you can look at like Thanksgiving and Christmas for people whose nervous systems go into hyperdrive, or into shutdown. But absolutely, that’s totally relevant. You can own your story and see her standing in hers.
Vanessa Cornell:
It’s created a lot of peace for me in the relationship. So talking about inherited trauma, can it be passed down so that somebody child is experiencing something that they may not be able to name or see or consciously understand?
Britt Frank:
I’ll just start by saying there’s an awesome book called, “It Didn’t Start with You” by Mark is like the book on dealing with inherited family trauma. That book was just like, “Oh, my God, welcome to another level of crap to deal with. And yay, now we can deal with it. And we know what to do about it.” So inherited family drama is really interesting. Because yes, we can actually be impacted by events that we did not experience. So if you think about your inside your mother’s womb, and feeling everything she’s feeling and experience while she was in her mother, and who was in her mother, who was in her mother. And so from generations ago, you can have symptoms of panic and terror and night terrors and anxiety from things that you actually never went through now. Okay. So the bad news about that is you might never actually know why you’re having your symptoms. But more good news, you don’t actually need to remember the trauma in order to heal from it. So memories is tricky. You don’t actually need to cognitively know, four generations ago, my grandmother experienced this, okay, now I can heal. The story can be helpful, but it’s not necessary. And so what I tell people is, if you think you have inherited family trauma, don’t go crazy trying to figure out the story. Start with where you’re at, what do I need right now to feel safe?
Vanessa Cornell:
That actually addresses one of our questions, which was, is it important to know why it happened?
Britt Frank:
If I walked out into the middle of the street, and I see somebody lying on the floor, because they just got hit by a car, I’m not going to ask them why they’re in the street. I’m going to get them to the side and 10 to the wounds. And if we figure out what happens and why later on cool, me knowing why can be useful, but it does not change anything. Why did he do that? To me, there’s no answer that’s going to make that okay. I think that we search for the why as a way of making it okay. There’s nothing that can be answered that can make trauma. Okay, you have a right to your pain, that you have a right to your feelings and why someone did something and no way changes its impact on you. Even if you did get the answer. Easier said than done.
Vanessa Cornell:
Yeah. I have a question about sexual abuse and body image. I’d love to know whether you see those linked often and what underlies that?
Britt Frank:
I have so much compassion on that issue. As I am a sexual abuse survivor and an eating disorder serve I get it. And so I don’t like to use always because the world is just too big for always and never but I will say I have not seen sexual abuse that does not come with food issues or body issues. Like I have never seen it. I’ve never heard of it. Were some One with sexual trauma doesn’t also have to some degree, a food issue or a body image issue, which makes sense. I don’t even use the word body when I’m dealing with sexual abuse, because that word itself is so triggering, right? There’s no escape. If the abuse happens to the thing I walk around, then I can never leave it, it makes sense why we turn to other things to check out of our bodies. So the answer to the you know, what do we do about it is too broad for today. But yes, if there are sexual trauma issues, it’s almost guarantee that there are going to be food issues, sex issues, and body image issues. And I’ll skip to the end of the story that can get a lot better, that it’s a long process. It’s a painful, slow, awful process, it’s worth doing, because making peace with the thing you walk around them and making peace with the fact that we have to eat to survive, is really worth the effort of doing it.
Vanessa Cornell:
Can you tell us a little bit about your process?
Britt Frank:
And I do share about my own personal story just so people know, I’m not Pollyanna about “Yeah, you can get better at it can heal!” It’s like I was I use drugs, and I had an eating disorder. And I was in bad relationship, all the things. And so I avoided the work I did, I did everything but deal with my sexual trauma. And I was hell bent on not and it wasn’t until doing the work as bad as it was, was still a better option than not doing the work. And so you don’t have to deal with your sexual trauma. Now, there’s a lot of things that go on when there’s trauma and issues. So if now is not the right time to deal with your sexual trauma that needs to be okay. I would tell people don’t go there until you feel safe until you feel supported. And until you are pretty sure that the health that you’re getting can handle what you’re bringing, because you cannot heal sexual trauma in the absence of a safe container. And so I did it for a really long time, I just didn’t. And then eventually it got to the point where if I don’t figure this out, I’m not going to be able to continue to live. So that was when I’m like, Okay, fine. I will surrender and do the frickin work because I at this point, have no alternative. You don’t have to wait till it gets that bad. And then my process was what have I been not wanting to deal with? What are the truths of my life that I have gone to great lengths to avoid, and trusting the person in front of me to lead me through tolerating the experience of living in this body. And that’s really what trauma healing is, it’s learning to tolerate, what our experiences bringing us whether it’s grief, or shame, or whatever it is. And there are ways of working with the body, with the brain with the heart with the Spirit. And there’s a lot of ways of working to develop a tolerance to what we’re feeling without feeling the need to check out.
Vanessa Cornell:
What advice would you give somebody who is not in that safe container, and feels like maybe now is the time to do the work and they’re just looking for the right support system, the right safe container to do the work?
Britt Frank:
Well the first thing is going back to you’re not crazy. So remind yourself adding I should be dealing with my trauma. Why? Why there’s no should, it’s not a good time, it’s not a good time. So giving yourself a lot of permission and a lot of grace, that this is not the right time to be dealing with my sexual trauma, let that be okay, that just needs to be okay. Like that really just needs to be okay. And then as far as looking for safe helping people, not everyone has access to trauma informed helping professionals. It’s a specialty, it can be difficult, but at the very least, if you don’t have access to a trauma informed professional, do not accept a mental illness diagnosis as gospel facts. There’s nothing wrong with taking meds or taking meds is your jam, it can be useful. But taking on the this is who I am now I have this mental illness. This is my disease without someone who knows trauma, working through it with you. So there’s a lot of good therapy that can be done. That’s not trauma work, but do not take on the burden of an identity of an illness from a non trauma informed professional.
Vanessa Cornell:
Yeah. And there are a lot of therapists you know, I’m sure good therapists and informed therapists who are not trauma informed, which is different, right?
Britt Frank:
And a healthy therapist will tell you that I mean, I don’t work with everything. So I know my limitations. If someone comes to me with here’s my issue, and I know that’s out of my scope, but I’ll tell them that’s not my thing, but here are some people you can call. So a non trauma informed professional who is safe will tell you their limits will always tell you their limits. And another way to find a safe helping professional is if you never feel guilted by them. If you’re not afraid to ask questions. If you know that you can leave at any time like there’s no I’m afraid to leave my therapist none of you are free to leave Anytime you want, if you don’t have that you’re not in a safe place.
Vanessa Cornell:
Right. I always tell people, if you have a teacher, a therapist of, you know, spiritual guru who would be offended if you said to them, I don’t need you anymore.
Britt Frank:
Yeah, and I tell every person I work with, “We’ll work together until it doesn’t make sense. And that’ll either be because everything’s good to go, or because you found somebody who can meet your needs in a better way. Awesome!”
Vanessa Cornell:
There’s a question about the significant other, helping the person that you’re with to understand the trauma brain. So helping that person understand that your perception of experiences may be different than their perception of experiences.
Britt Frank:
My first piece of advice is don’t try to therapize your partner, even if you can, like I could. I don’t, it’s not a good idea for anybody. But what you can do is ask them, are they willing to read and learn? And are they curious, even if you’re partners and into therapy, or wellness or mental health? If your partner is willing to read a few articles on, here’s how the three parts of the brain work, it can be really useful to appeal to their sense of intellectual curiosity. Are you okay? No, you don’t need therapy. But here’s a few things that I’m learning about, would you be willing to read them and sort of work it in that way?
Vanessa Cornell:
Yeah, I’ve worked with a lot of women who are very interested in teaching their husbands what they’ve learned. And my advice to them is, stop, don’t don’t do your thing. Let them see their changes in you. And then they’ll be curious, then they’ll be interested. But if you try and ram it down their throats, you know, it doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work in my in my marriage. So I don’t know maybe it works in other people’s but doesn’t work in mind.
Britt Frank:
I’m going with a big No. And if you are shifting how you show up in your marriage, or your relationship or whatever they’re going to shift to and I love what you just said, do your thing. live your best life, I promise you they’re gonna go What the hell are they up to? I want to know what’s going on. Like how happy they are? Oh, my gosh, they boundaries? Oh, my god, they’re doing their thing. spark curiosity rather than ramming information.
Vanessa Cornell:
Yeah, yeah. I think the best way to trigger change and other people is to just like focus on you make yourself happy and motivated and engaged, and people are gonna start looking at you and being like, “I want what she has.”
Britt Frank:
Yes, that’s the principle of The 12 Step Program. For people with addictions. They say it attraction, not promotion, we don’t promote what we do, we do our thing. And people see what we have, and they want it and they come, that’s the best way to do it.
Vanessa Cornell:
Interesting. I have a question here about DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy. I don’t even know what it is. So I’m curious too, what do you think of it? And do you use it?
Britt Frank:
So I went through DBT as a client, I’m like, I’ll do anything. So dialectical behavioral therapy is sort of the first go to for borderline personality disorder, or severe emotional dysregulation. So the gist is it skills building and the areas of skills, building our mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and being able to tolerate distress. Now, DBT is great for getting some skills on board, but it does not heal trauma. So DBT, hardcore DBT, people will say you can’t do both at the same time, you have to do DBT first, and then you do trauma. I don’t subscribe to that. Because sometimes DBT won’t work until you do trauma. So I think they go hand in hand. It’s can be great for learning tools, hacks, skills, it’s a lot of, you know, worksheets and homeworks. And it’s a lot of group activities. So it can be useful for managing.
Vanessa Cornell:
I imagine that there’s a whole set of different approaches, modalities, tools that you use, but if you could walk us through just a couple of them to help us understand what’s involved.
Britt Frank:
I have a bajillion tools in my toolbox. So the main ones that I draw from, so Somatic Experiencing is a trauma model that focuses pretty much on the body. And so there’s not feelings processing, we don’t really go through story, we don’t go through memory, it’s what’s happening in your physiology, what is your body need to do a session with Somatic Experiencing might look like we spend the entire hour rearranging the couches in a way that you feel safe. So this is really good for the men I work with, because they don’t want to come in and talk about their feelings. And they think I’m nuts because I’ll stand against the wall, they’ll move the couches, so you feel safe. And then they’ll put themselves in one corner and they’ll put me in another with like three Ottomans in between us. And just having that sense of choice and moving around and mobility is it trips them out, but it’s actually really effective. So my hack is if you have trauma face the door, if you’re anywhere where your back is to a door, you’re going to feel anxious and your brains not going to feel okay. Hey, unless it knows where the exit is. And so that’s the type of thing that I do when I’m doing purely bodywork. That’s just one example. And then there’s skills building where it’s really directive, like, here’s how you do this. Here’s how you do that. And then there’s another model I work with called internal family systems. And that’s working with these parts. And that’s inner child work. And that’s understanding that developmental needs that weren’t met, it’s how we talk to ourselves, like, do you talk to yourself, as a loving parent would talk to a child? Or are you beating the crap out of yourself, you should do this, you should do this, you look like crap. And it’s working on facilitating the relationship between ourselves and these parts of ourselves. I do play therapy, I do sandtray. And I’ve got adults in my sandbox with little miniatures, which is like a young Ian, way of working, there’s, there’s a lot of ways to get to stuff, if one way doesn’t work for you.
Vanessa Cornell:
The amount of compassion and the space for love that you can hold in this work is really, really tremendous. And the underlying basis of compassion, where you say again, and again, you are not crazy, there is nothing wrong with you. It feels like that’s really the core of everything you do.
Britt Frank:
Yes. And, so the compassion takes the shame and the gunk off of it so we can get our work done with other people. Compassion has to coexist with boundaries. So having compassion on a narcissistic parent does not mean I am a doormat, because I recognize you have trauma, and I feel bad for you. That is not compassion. That’s codependence compassion is wow, I recognize that you have stuff that you haven’t dealt with. I’m not going to interface with you, I’m not going to actually have much contact with you at all, because you’re not safe and you’re not healthy. But I’m doing it from a place of love. So compassion needs to have boundaries in order for the relationship to work. Compassion is not permission to act like a fool. Compassion is recognizing there’s nothing fundamentally bad about you.
Vanessa Cornell:
Interesting. So let’s talk a little bit about narcissism, gaslighting, we got a question where, you know, sometimes people experience trauma, and then the perpetrators make them feel crazy. So help us understand just the fundamental dynamic, how to recognize it, if it’s happening to you, and how to understand what it is.
Britt Frank:
So gaslighting is a term from a Hitchcock film, and the gist of it is when a person is intentionally causing you to question your sanity. So if I see that someone is chatting with a girl, and I go, Hey, who you’re talking to, and they go, nobody, I don’t know you’re talking about this is just the pop of bad, that’s gaslighting. It’s, I saw what I saw, but you don’t want me to see what I saw. So you’re gonna make something up that causes me to go, Oh, well, maybe, maybe it was that? I don’t know, maybe, oh, what’s real? I don’t know what’s real. Maybe he’s right. And then I’m apologizing to him for something that he did. gaslighting is an awful form of abuse and manipulation. So if you’re in a relationship, and you’re not sure, if you’re being subject to gaslighting, it’s really important to have friends who can be reality checks for you, friends outside of your, your partnership, friends who are outside of the system, to whom you can say, Hey, this is what’s going on. Am I crazy? You need connection in order to be able to make sense of reality as especially if narcissistic abuse is involved. And they want to isolate you. So that can be tricky.
Vanessa Cornell:
Yeah. And I know you do a lot of work around narcissism and you have a course. Tell us about that.
Britt Frank:
So narcissism is a whole other thing, like with trauma where narcissism is not taught. And it’s not something that you can really go to school for. It’s it’s been around forever. But it’s only recently that it’s getting a lot of traction, and there’s a lot of buzz or a lot of people are using the word now everyone’s a narcissist. But that particular form of abuse, if you haven’t experienced that, it’s really hard to work with it or to recognize it. And so I had a lifetime of narcissistic relationships. And so I spent a year with a partner of mine, and we’ve put together a five hour course with every single bit of information available on what it is, why it happens, why you do what you do, why they do, what they do, how to help them, how to have boundaries, what’s this grief thing, how to work with it, all of the things and there is some good information out now about it, but it’s so tricky because if you don’t know how to spot it, it’s gonna get missed. Yeah.
Vanessa Cornell:
So I have a question here about small t trauma. Us there a difference between small t trauma and big t trauma? And do we all have it?
Britt Frank:
So small t trauma would be the trauma Those that you don’t necessarily think, are traumas. So big t traumas are the ones we can pretty much universally agree. Assault, abuse, oppression, poverty, natural disasters being in combat, all of those things. They call them big t traumas, not because the little ones are invalid, but just because these are the ones we can all get behind. And they are not singular incidents, but they’re these big things, little t traumas might be a parent who’s an alcoholic who doesn’t beat you, but who disappears for weeks at a time. And over the course of your life. That happens, little t doesn’t mean that that’s not devastating. It just means it’s not the singular big event. It’s sort of this ongoing in escapable environments of threats where you don’t you may not even know that you’re experiencing trauma.
Vanessa Cornell:
Would you put childhood illness in big t trauma?
Britt Frank:
Absolutely.
Vanessa Cornell:
Would you put a household where feelings are never expressed in little t trauma.
Britt Frank:
Putting them in the categories is so tricky, because it’s like if you got screamed at for having feelings and expressing them that would be a big t trauma, but the environment of the family not wanting you to express your feelings would be the little t so I tell people don’t get too hung up on if it’s big or little. But your other question not everyone has experienced big t trauma. Everyone. There is not an I get a lot of angry messages. But it’s true. There is not a soul who has not experienced trauma to a degree, we’re not equal. But everyone has experienced a little t trauma to one degree or another and you have a right to your pain and to heal from it.
Vanessa Cornell:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I wasn’t even trying to really categorize it. But I think there are a lot of things that go into this sort of small t trauma area that people don’t recognize as something that might need to be healed from.
Britt Frank:
I’m so glad you said that I have clients that obsess is this big T or is this little T and if this is little, you know, my kind of perfectionist like where does it fall in which category? So I’m glad you said that because it doesn’t really matter. Trauma is for everyone. Yeah.
Vanessa Cornell:
So Britt, are you writing a book?
Britt Frank:
Yes. It’s my little idea baby. That’s still just happening but I’m working on it. So yes.
Vanessa Cornell:
That’s great. I cannot wait to read it. I think it’s gonna be so fascinating. I love your perspective. I love your piercing insight and the way that you frame things with such generosity and compassion and a lot of caveats. A lot of you know this is not gospel. Everyone has their own experience. So if you are not familiar with Britt’s work, please get familiar with Britt’s work. It’s been such a pleasure having you on today.
Britt Frank:
Thank you for having me on.
Vanessa Cornell:
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, we welcome you to stay close and discover more of our offerings. Check us out on Instagram @nushu or visit nushu.com for more.
