When life feels stressful, dark, or challenging, we often tell ourselves–or are told by others–that we should just toughen and carry on. Yet, from my professional and personal experience, I’ve learned that compartmentalizing or burying our struggles only makes things worse in the long run. When we ignore our needs for mental, emotional, and physical safety, we can worsen underlying issues such as anxiety or unresolved trauma. On the positive side, I’ve discovered a mental health toolkit that helps foster genuine healing. Join me, Dr. Carla Marie Manly, and trauma medical expert Dr. Christy Gibson, for a heartfelt journey into the realm of trauma, anxiety, and the healing process. As physician Dr. Christy notes, “It took me so many years to recognize trauma underlies so much of physical and mental ill health that I saw. It took more years to learn why this happens in individuals and families and communities, especially those placed at risk in their social positions. It’s now time to share what can be done at all these levels – to provide some hope and a solution focus. Without hope, trauma intensifies.”

Please note that this episode contains sensitive trauma-related material; listener discretion is advised.

Note:

If you or someone you know needs immediate support, please call your emergency services. In the US, 24/7 help is available by calling “911,” “988” (Suicide and Crisis Hotline), or SAMSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). Additional links are in the show notes.

 

Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Date Smart: Transform Your Relationships and Love Fearlessly

Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend

Aging Joyfully: A Woman’s Guide to Optimal Health, Relationships, and Fulfillment for Her 50s and Beyond

The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships

 

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcarlamanly

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drcarlamanly

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcarlamanly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.carlamariemanly8543

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr_carla_manly

 

Book by Dr. Christy Gibson:

The Modern Trauma Toolkit: Nurture Your Post-Traumatic Growth with Personalized Solutions

 

Connect with Dr. Christy Gibson:

Websites: https://www.christinegibson.net

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moderntraumatoolkit

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-gibson-md

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gibtrotterMD

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.christinegibson

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Trauma Toolkit: Research-Back Tips for Healing with Trauma Expert and Physician, Dr. Christy Gibson

When life feels stressful, dark, or challenging, we often tell ourselves or are told by others that we should toughen up and carry on. Yet, from my personal and professional experience, I’ve learned that compartmentalizing or burying our struggles only makes things worse in the long run. Our needs for mental, emotional, and physical safety can worsen underlying issues such as anxiety or unresolved trauma.

On the positive side, I’ve discovered a mental health toolkit that works. We’ll focus on this reader’s real-life question. “I feel constantly anxious and on edge. I’m haunted by ghosts from my abusive father and I swear I have PTSD from a series of failed relationships that I guess were pretty toxic. I put on a smile, but I’m struggling and have started having panic attacks. My doctor recommends medication, but that feels like a Band-Aid. Can you help?” With that, the question is the focus of this episode.

Please note, that as this episode contains sensitive information, reader discretion is advised. I’m joined by a very special guest, Dr. Christy Gibson, who will be sharing her expertise on psychological first aid and trauma healing. Dr. Christy is the author of the 2023 book The Modern Trauma Toolkit, and she’s also known as the TikTok Trauma Doc. Dr. Christy, thank you very much for joining us. It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

It’s an equal pleasure to be here, Carla. Thanks for having me.

It’s such a joy to have you. You have so much experience and such vast expertise. Could you tell us a little bit before we dive into the topic of the day, a little bit about what makes you, you?

 

 

It’s a question of which identity we want to talk about. I’m a Canadian. I think that a lot of that colors the way that I view the world. I am a traveler. I’ve been to 70 different countries. I’m a curious explorer. One of the reasons why I started as a family doctor and now work primarily as a Trauma Therapist is curiosity. I’m a very innate learner. What I’ve learned about psychology, trauma, and how it affects the mind and body is a real adventure for me to explore because it leads to a lot of exciting possibilities for people.

The Psychological First Aid

I appreciate that background about you. Seventy countries, you’re a medical doctor, and you’re a Psychotherapist. Readers, look at her bio. We have a very incredible guest. As you’re saying, it is curiosity that fuels that desire to ever grow, ever expand, whether we’re doing it personally or professionally. Looking at the reader’s question, curiosity is one of the most important parts of healing, which is first getting curious, non-judgmentally curious about what’s going on inside. Let’s start with psychological first aid. I love that piece. Could you explain that to our readers?

As a medical doctor, we are taught the importance of intervening in an emergency to prevent injury and try to stop someone from being traumatized. Not physicians or psychologists, but the general public is unaware that as important is preventing psychological trauma, this is also possible. We have been facing many collective traumas from climate and resulting natural disasters from a global pandemic that is currently being ignored.

Many wars are on social media and we are very visceral. Our body reacts to these perceived threats and sometimes these perceived threats can create patterns that make our brain feel we’re in constant danger and psychological first aid is preventing that from happening. I think it’s important and it’s something we don’t speak about often enough, especially in the context of developmental or childhood trauma.

 

 

This is such a good line that we’re following. I appreciate it because it sounds as if what you’re saying is, yes, you work in the medical field on working with physical trauma and we’re all used to that and we talk about it. We have no shame generally talking about the broken leg or the broken arm or the scuffs we got from a mountain bike accident, all of those things.

Sometimes there are even scars that are the scars of the warrior and how wonderful that is, but when it comes to trauma that happens to us psychologically, often from very birth forward, we tend to think that there’s something wrong with us, that we’re broken, that we’re too weak, that we should hide our trauma, hide our pain, or hide our anxiety, which as I was saying earlier is part of the problem because the hiding it, in my opinion, like yours on this, only makes it worse. What do you think?

There are different ways that trauma is hidden and it can even be hidden from us. When you said the words from birth onward, my instinct was to say, “Not even.” Of course, it can happen. We don’t have a good language around the trauma of being born, which is very traumatic for lots of people, especially with interventions.

There are different ways that trauma is hidden. It can be even hidden from ourselves. Share on X

Even imagining this little being in this warm and cozy fluid environment, and now they’re in cold air and being told to breathe when they’ve been getting all their nutrients in through this lovely little connected cord. Yes, there is incredible birthroom trauma that we don’t have language for. Instead of saying that we’re compartmentalizing it, it sits in the subconscious because it’s pre-verbal. We can also have pre-birth trauma and ancestral trauma that’s also pre-verbal and subconscious.

I think a lot of people do have a language for the trauma they’ve been through and they could tell the story, but many don’t. These traumatic experiences and they’re almost sensations in terms of how we carry them. We carry them in the body, and we don’t have a language for that. Sometimes, I think we consciously and deliberately will compartmentalize and suppress. Sometimes, our body is doing the best it can.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I think one of the most common ways I see that is with people who have unresolved trauma often going through the world saying things like, “I walk on eggshells.” or “I’m always anxious.” They may even have a very kind partner or kind friends, yet they say, “These people are criticizing me.” or “I’m always anxious around everyone.”

Inherited And Childhood Trauma

Yet they don’t realize that it may not be the current situation. It might not be the present circumstance or the present relationship that is provoking the anxiety, that the anxiety goes back to early childhood. As you say, I also believe in the intergenerational transmission of patterns. How can we not? As you call it, ancestral patterns. Ancestral, we can call it dysfunctional. Some ancestral functional ways and habits are passed forward. For our readers, could you please describe what you mean when you’re talking about ancestral patterns?

When I studied my very first degree a long time ago and many degrees ago, I did science and a lot of what I was interested in was neuroscience and genetics. I was intent on going to medical school. I thought I would learn relevant content and it’s fascinating that everything I learned about genetics, I graduated with this degree in 1995.

It’s been a little while, but much of it has been replaced by new scientific evidence, specifically around epigenetics. Epigenetics is the science that is a more recent understanding of how genetics code is passed from parent to child. Initially, we thought that the DNA or the code in the nucleus determined the way that the child was formed but what we’re starting to understand is the cellular environment actually will turn on or off some of those DNA codes.

For example, some people can be exposed to a viral trauma or even a car accident. Those kinds of things can turn DNA on and off. What we’ve started to understand more about toxic stress responses is in a parent, if that happens to them, it will methylate or permanently change their DNA. That will be inherited by at least some of the children. What we’re starting to see, at least in animal studies, is three or even seven generations of children.

There have been human studies, for example, Holocaust survivors, women who were studied after 9-11, who’d been pregnant during that event and exposed to quite toxic stress, their babies had higher levels of cortisol or stress hormone in their saliva. We have scientific proof that stress and trauma are inherited. That’s not something that I studied 30 years ago.

There is scientific proof that stress and trauma are inherited. Share on X

It’s almost chilling, isn’t it, that when we look at not that most parents intend to traumatize their children, but whether it’s an environmental trauma going on, a hurricane, constant fires, or political stressors. Whatever’s happening, a domestic violence relationship. All of those stressors that parent is then passing, if that parent’s pregnant, is then passing it on to those little ones.

Not even necessarily pregnant. Sorry, I might have miscommunicated that piece. Anytime that it happens, the DNA changes. That was one particular study protocol, but toxic stress at any time can be passed on.

Let’s talk for a minute about the physical transmission, which happens through mom, dad, somebody having sex, creating a baby and eggs harvested. Whatever method we’re doing, that DNA is changed and that child will be born likely or possibly with higher levels of cortisol from the get-go. The stress hormones are higher.

Now let’s take it to a relationship where we have a family, two parents in the home, one parent in the home who’s very stressed for whatever reason. That type of stress takes us to the reader’s question where she or he, they are saying, “I grew up with this abusive father. Now I’ve had a series of abusive relationships that I realize were toxic.” What you are saying very clearly is that, of course, that father transmitted because of the environment. Am I getting this right? That the father transmitted whatever was going on with him into the child’s way of being.

Both are strong factors. You can have a child who inherits toxic stress and then it’s compounded by being in an abusive or neglect caregiving situation. For children, it’s additive or synergistic. What we know from research is that with every single adverse childhood experience or negative events that happen to kids, there’s an exponential increase in physical health, mental health, and social health outcomes. If you consider the DNA that we’re inheriting, it’s not a sure thing.

You could have multiple family members and some might inherit the stress and others might not. In a person who does inherit some of those stressed codes, and then you compound those with childhood experiences, it adds up. Instead of asking what’s wrong with this anxious person? I always ask, “Why does it make sense that this person is feeling anxious all the time?” It’s such a more compassionate question to be asking and it’s solution-focused, which The Modern Trauma Toolkit intends to help people understand their brains and how to fix them.

You’ve given us a lovely background and I want to dial it back even a little bit more. When you were talking essentially about the fight or flight response where you were saying that we have this state of stress and the fight or flight response, something feels like a threat. Even if it’s not a threat, it feels like a threat. We are meant as animals to see a threat, a mountain lion, run from it, and then get regulated again and carry on with our day.

Modern Stressors And Their Impact

In the current world, it’s threat after threat. There are perceived threats. Some of them come to fruition, some don’t but it doesn’t change the fact that the body is in this constant state of fight, flight, freeze, or appease. We unconsciously choose one of those coping strategies. First, what do you say in your words? How do you view the world that we live in now and how that fight-flight response is being consistently and chronically triggered in many of us?

There is so much brilliance in all that you said, Carla. I’d pick up on a few threads there. I love how you asked specifically what’s different now. That’s something I think about all the time. It’s why I put the word modern in the title of the book because there are new things that are related to modern times that we didn’t deal with before.

For example, social media feeds us images and very graphic depictions of violence. It’s not something that I dealt with when I was growing up and kids are having to. This sense of fear, there’s always been something. When I grew up, there was the fear of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation, but the climate emergency is making kids scared right now.

I gave a TEDx talk a couple of weeks ago, and one of the statements that I quoted was a survey of 10,000 young people. When they were asked about their future and their opportunities, 75% of them said their future felt frightening. When you ask about people being stuck in a fight or flight or that sympathetic high-activation nervous system, that makes sense to me because they are frightened whether they’re frightened because of inherited trauma, childhood trauma, or this perception and oftentimes amplified perception.

What happens in the brain once you’ve been in danger is it scans both your insides and your outsides, looking for more threats. Once you’ve been in a dangerous situation, your brain will amplify and intensify the signals that it’s perceived as threatening again. We’re getting more of those signals. It does make sense to me that more and more people are caught in those reflexive responses. I don’t think it’s usually a choice for two reasons. One, who would choose it? It’s uncomfortable, even though it’s familiar.

Our brain does like familiar. Secondly, once our amygdala, the part of our midbrain that decides if we’re in danger or not, starts to think that we might be in danger, it disconnects some of the neural networks in our thinking brain. We don’t have that rational mind engaged in that response. Our amygdalas are, “Get away.” They decide on how we’re going to do that. A lot of these processes don’t happen in consciousness, as you said.

That emotional center of the brain, sometimes called the fear center of the brain, the amygdala that you’re talking about, when that’s disconnected, it’s disconnecting because it’s saying, “We’re paying attention to one thing and one thing only and that’s how to stay safe. That’s survival.” I agree with you. I think that’s why many people, when we get into that stage, unconsciously think we’re thinking clearly.

We think that the point we’re making in that argument or in that aggressive bullying place we’re in if we’re in fight mode, we think it makes perfect sense but it often doesn’t because it’s coming from sheer survival. The other piece of it, which you were talking about, is that constant scanning of the environment, which is common with people who have PTSD. It’s one of the symptoms.

Complex PTSD, domestic violence survivors, emotional abuse, all of those things where the radar is up 24/7 and it exhausts the system. It is that stress. Could you talk a little bit about how those constant elevations in stress, neurochemicals, adrenaline, and cortisol, do to the system short-term and then long-term? When we aren’t meant to be in the stressful days but once in that blue moon when we’re being chased by the tiger.

Before I ask you to answer that, in case readers are wondering, they might be thinking in the past, our ancestors were also faced with lions, tigers and bears. Yes, but they had communities around them in many cases and they had this connection and the threats were not on many levels. They were often even seasonal threats with drought and crops and intruders, but it wasn’t 24/7.

They didn’t have smartphones reminding them 24/7. Another piece I have to say I’ve noticed in my own life is that the climate is on my radar and we live in a fire area. I never used to check the weather every day. It was going to be cool, it was going to be hot, I’d look at the sky, okay, it’s going to rain. Now I check my phone in the morning.

Not obsessively, but every morning, I check and say, “It’s going to be 95. That’s going to be a hot one.” It didn’t used to be. I can see in that way that there is that vigilance, we might say hypervigilance and we can see where, for youngsters, for people of all ages, the temperature in our environments is now a stressor. Something that simple is a big stressor. Sorry for digressing. Let’s go.

No, again, it’s a lot of brilliance. I’ll try to pull on a few of the threads that you got into. One was that you were differentiating between the activated stress response, which is fight and flight, and the low activation stress response, which is our parasympathetic nervous system on overdrive. We think of parasympathetic as rest and digestion, but it can also be overwhelming.

That’s what we end up in freeze, collapse, or shutdown. It is happening to more and more people. The way that looks in the short term is a person who can’t get out of bed, they can’t get off the couch, they can’t get anything done on their to-do list. Over the long term, that can help cause suffering with relationships and employment, actual survival, even though it is our brain trying to protect us.

Likewise, when our sympathetic or overactive response has been locked in for too long, initially, it feels like a lot of stuck energy. Muscle tension, restlessness, pounding heart, mind racing, you can’t go to sleep, busyness. You might see people in a new relationship every few months, changing their jobs all the time, or can’t quite settle in a place.

That restlessness from flight can show up in very overt behaviors. Chronically, what ends up happening is if you’re stuck in that overactive response for too long, it’s your sympathetic nervous system and your sympathetic system is in charge of movement. We all need it. We use it to make dinner or go for a walk. It’s only when it’s overactive that it causes us harm. What happens in that scenario is it keeps the parasympathetic system off for so long that the parts of our body that it’s in charge of, our digestion, reproduction, and immunity. All of that doesn’t work as well.

It affects our health in many obvious ways when you think about it because we’re not letting much of our body do its natural work and much of that is self-healing. One of the things that I’ve noticed in doing trauma work with my patients, I started this when I was in family practice, is that much of their physical health improved by working on their nervous system responses.

That’s why I focus on body-based or somatic practices in The Modern Trauma Toolkit, because the more that we can shift our nervous system back into that, what Dan Siegel calls The Window of Tolerance, where we’re not too over or too under-activated, then our body does what it’s supposed to do, which is heal itself.

The more that we can shift our nervous system back into what is called the window of tolerance, where we're not too over or too under-activated, then our body does what it's supposed to do, which is heal itself. Share on X

The Impact Of Chronic Anxiety And Stress On Our Immune System

You brought up many wonderful points and I love the piece where you’re talking about the immune system because many people are feeling exhausted and they are thinking maybe it’s depression and it certainly may be. However, sometimes it seems from my evaluation that it’s this pernicious anxiety and stress that is eating away at the immune system, eating away at our ability to bounce back physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Is that what you are finding?

I would say that it’s probably multifactorial and with every person, it’s different, but you’re definitely onto some of those root causes. I’m also seeing a lot of people who are exhausted because their sympathetic nervous system isn’t meant to be active for much of the day, and that is tiring. It takes a lot more energy to be stuck in being sympathetic.

For a person who’s experiencing that restless, agitated, can’t even be comfortable in my own skin, energy, that is exhausting. I think that’s a component of it. You mentioned this at the beginning, and I want to pull on that thread, but there’s a difference between a culture where you’re taught you are the only person who can help you survive versus a collectivist culture like Indigenous worldviews or most of the global majority when they are literally in it together.

If somebody is struggling, the community helps them. We have such an individualistic society in North America that’s doing us tremendous harm because if a person is falling behind because of inflation, and they feel like there’s no safety net at all, that is causing a great deal of stress and that sympathetic activation. I’m a person who has seen a lot of folks suffering from the chronic effects of COVID. We’re not fully understanding the science of multiple COVID infections and how much that takes out of us physically. I would add that as another factor.

I agree. One woman said, “I’ve decided to see COVID as a flu.” It’s ongoing. I keep getting it. It’s unfortunate because it’s a serious ongoing pandemic, as you said earlier. I’d love to pop back to the piece where you were talking about the exhaustion on the body. I think that when we look at the long-term effects of anxiety, taking us back to the reader’s question for a minute. The person is experiencing a lot of anxiety and it sounds as if, come to terms, worked with the abuse from childhood or the relationships.

We look at this individual in light, looking at it through the lens of chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system. What would you offer to that particular reader and all of our readers who are likely coming from your Modern Trauma Toolkit of what can be done to start to create some healthy somatic-based habits, body-based habits that increase awareness, help move through the trauma, help work with it so that it’s not a lifelong companion and not a happy companion at that?

Trauma recovery, I like to think of it through the research lens of Dr. Judith Herman. She wrote a book called Trauma and Recovery and her most recent edition has a fourth stage around justice, which I think is pretty cool but her first three stages are what has helped me design the processes that I use as a therapist. The first one is Establishing Safety. I call this Noticing.

It’s about getting to know and as Deb Dana says, “Befriend our nervous system and learn.” What does my body feel when it’s in over-activated parasympathetic or when there is too much freeze or collapse energy? What does my body feel when it’s going towards too much of that overactive energy and starting to learn when we’re on the window sills of the window of tolerance rather than having blown right out the window?

Part of this preventative ability is getting to know ourselves and then developing a toolkit to bring us back into that window. That’s why I love somatic practices. I’ll teach my patients things like havening, tapping, tremoring, or ways to release too much sympathetic tone because when we’re stuck in fight and flight, it’s our body wanting to move. We have to release that extra energy and using the body to do that makes sense.

One of my clinical environments is refugee health. Many of them won’t even have words to describe the emotion. They might not say they have anxiety. They might say, my chest hurts or my legs want to move. The body-based practices make much more innate sense to them, but truly, if you use the right language, it makes sense to everybody, as long as even talking about your own body feels safe enough. That’s not true for everybody.

The second stage is what Judith calls Remembrance and Mourning and I call, Shifting, but it’s that trauma processing stage. Once you have more of a sense of ability to stay in your window of tolerance, you’re not flooding in over-activation or freezing and under-activation. That’s when you can start to move into the process of work.

I use a lot of skills like Accelerated Resolution Therapy, which is a cousin of EMDR. What you’re doing is you’re rewiring the brain from those original traumas. For a reader or anybody who’s dealt with developmental or childhood trauma, what you’re doing is changing your relationship with those memories, essentially leaving the pain of the past in the past. We can’t change what’s happened, but we can change its effect on your present.

When you rewire the brain from those original traumas, you change your relationship with those memories, essentially leaving the pain of the past in the past. We can't change what's happened but we can change its effect on your present. Share on X

Many different modalities can be effective at that stage. Of course, I gravitate to the body-based ones. The third stage, which she calls Reconnection, but it’s around integrating this new reality that’s not driven by those trauma responses and trying to figure out who you want to be now that you have more conscious control over it because you’re not being driven by the amygdala the whole time.

Key Therapeutic Strategies And Their Applications In Trauma Treatment

Those are all lovely steps and they make sense. I’m a fan of Judith Herman’s work. Let’s go back to the first one and give readers an example for someone who might not know what all of those strategies are. Maybe focus on one that readers can embrace.

Sure. I mentioned both Havening and Tapping, but most people have never heard of them. It’s one of the reasons why I joined TikTok. I’m now on YouTube and other social media as well because I worry that we’re going to lose TikTok, which is a shame, but I love to spread the word about all of these body-based tools that are easy to practice. For many people, incredibly effective. Havening is a gentle brushing across the skin of the palms, the shoulders, and the face.

What science shows us is it creates delta and theta waves, which are calming brain waves. It’s one of the ways that we can shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic. There are lots of different techniques with that. Tapping is an evidence-based treatment for PTSD. I didn’t have a good understanding of it as a physician, but now that I’m a trauma clinician, I love this tool because not only is it something I can use in treatment and sessions, but it’s something that patients can take away with them and use at home.

It’s self-acupressure, where they tap on specific areas of the body and the sequence isn’t hard to learn once you’ve seen it. You can check out my TikTok or the chapter in my book, and there’s a video in The Modern Trauma Toolkit. Self-acupressure and tapping these points lowers the intensity of those perceived emotional responses.

If you’re trapped in anxiety and you’re experiencing it at an eight out of ten, and it’s intense all day, something tapping can lower the intensity of how much you’re experiencing. Many different strategies are incredibly effective, and people have to personalize them and figure out what works for them. It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution, but there have been very rare people where we haven’t found a path towards a solution.

I appreciate that you talk about personalizing it because, in many realms, people think, “I tried this medication and it didn’t work.” or “I tried this therapist and it didn’t work. It must be me, I must be broken.” No. We are all alike in many ways, but we are also very different in many ways. The way we’re wired, our personal history, and even how words hit us. We are such precious beings who deserve a personalized approach, which modern medicine doesn’t always give us.

Let’s go to the next piece. As an EMDR Certified clinician, I love EMDR and I don’t use it with all clients. It’s not appropriate for all clients, but people might not know what that means or the modality that you use. EMDR is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a form of therapy. It was originally used for PTSD. It’s now used for lots of other things but let’s talk to Dr. Christy about the modality you were talking about and describe that.

Accelerated Resolution Therapy came to Elaine Rosen’s fights in very similar ways to how Francine Shapiro downloaded EMDR. Francine was apparently in Central Park and looking back and forth at the trees on either side of the pathway and noticed experientially in her own body that her nervous system had calmed down.

Elaine also started to work with the EMDR protocol and noticed certain things that were particularly effective for her clients and created this specific protocol. What I love about it is it’s fast. For many folks, especially if they have event trauma, you had mentioned earlier about being caught in a natural disaster.

For me, I was caught in the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015. I had quite a lot of event trauma processes stuck in my body. It can also work for relational trauma, but for event trauma, almost always a single session is effective, which I find magical, and patients appreciate it very much because they can walk out of a session an hour and a half later and feel differently related to that memory. I did it with one of our refugees this week and they had said that they didn’t think that they could ever feel safe again.

In treating that particular memory of something awful that had happened to them, they were able to say, “I know that happened to me, but it’s not happening to me now and I can feel safe now.” They didn’t believe that they could feel that way again. I love it. It was the first modality that I studied. I did it with a lot of my family practice patients at the time and got such incredible results, not from their mental health, but every single realm. Their relationships changed, and their sense of caring about their bodies changed.

I had lots of people who were disassociated or disconnected from having a human body because that body had been in much pain or suffering and they wanted to distance themselves from it. Once we process the trauma, they can acknowledge and care for their body again. It’s such a beautiful, what I would say, upstream solution to do this trauma processing. What I love in particular about accelerated resolution therapy is it’s creative and we use lots of metaphors.

Many people dissociate or disconnect from their body because that body had been in so much pain or suffering that they want to distance themselves from it. But once the trauma is processed, they are able to acknowledge and care for their body again. Share on X

I believe that metaphor and imagery are the language of our subconscious brain to bring it back full circle from the beginning when we don’t always have a language for the trauma that we’ve been through. These kinds of images that we can create or notice our physical sensations give us a window to still approach the trauma and work on the pathways within our brain without necessarily having the language or having to tell the story.

I love your descriptions and appreciate them and we will be sure to put links for the readers in the show notes and the beautiful part about that modality and EMDR is going back to the amygdala. It helps the body work synergistically with the brain, with the emotional world to not forget what happened but to take it, I always call it, take it from being technicolor, activated, and scary and make it more black and white.

That’s what good trauma works. Readers, it doesn’t erase part of your being. It doesn’t make you forget things. It doesn’t give you amnesia. It makes it a memory that no longer rules your life and keeps you in a hypervigilant stage all the time. The other piece, Dr. Christy, is for readers who are reading and say, “I’ve tried that and it didn’t work.” or “I’m skeptical.” You, as a client and as a human being, have the right to experiment with different therapies and even different therapists.

One modality can be used differently by another practitioner until you find something. If you don’t want to use medication or work on the underlying issues while you’re using medication, whatever route you choose, remember it’s okay to experiment. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means you’re experimenting with what works in the garden of your being. Moving from that one, Dr. Christy, to the last Dr. Herman piece before we get to justice.

The last one is where I started to use a lot more talk therapy because their thinking rational brain is more available in the third stage. In the first two stages, there isn’t as much neural connection to those outer layers or the thinking brain, and it starts to engage once the trauma has been processed. Memory and concentration improve and people feel like they’re in a calmer nervous system state.

Once that’s happened, therapists, you’ll know this, Dr. Carla, we have the Alphabet soup of trauma therapies. As a physician, I was taught that cognitive behavior therapy is the gold standard and we should use it for everything. I’ve found some other ones that I enjoy even more. My favorite is NARM or the NeuroAffective Relational Model.

What I love most about it is it’s meant to be for developmental trauma. You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’re not broken. It makes sense what your brain is doing. The questions are, why does it make sense? Where is your adult consciousness? Instead of those child parts that are using internal family systems language, but instead of these parts that are stuck in those memories.

What does the adult you want? What does it value? What are the goals here? We’re trying to find examples of when the adult consciousness was actually in charge and making things happen in a way that was preferred. I’m a huge fan of NARM because it’s creating that sense of agency and pulling on those threads of hope.

I find that for folks who’ve been through significant trauma, hope is a missing chapter. Finding more of, “Look, you did do that.” “You can do that.” Those examples are such beautiful ways of showing them that they are already solving their problems. The other one that I like, which is a branch of CBT called ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It’s focusing on values.

For people who have been through significant trauma, hope is a missing chapter. Share on X

I work in adult addictions and refugee health and with folks who have had a lot of childhood trauma, even when we think back to that question that your reader was asking. How is this impacting? How are the trauma responses and what is your amygdala creating in terms of your behaviors and your thoughts? How does that impact your relationships, your ability to work, your hopes and dreams, and the things that you love? We try to work in that third phase toward what you want.

I appreciate how you bring it all together so that it creates. We can see it’s a beautiful toolkit that has these steps. Before we move to the justice piece, I’m a big believer in justice and how that works with the whole equation, the hope. You brought up hope and it’s an often overused word, lightly thrown out.

Yet, I agree with you and I love connecting hope with the agency because I’ve seen with clients that the minute they start healing, baby steps toward healing. It is because that’s how healing works in the psyche. It’s not overnight, even though there are some effective modalities out there. Healing takes time, it takes effort, and it takes commitment.

I believe that our hope, that light of hope, gets bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter with every step of agency that comes, every step forward. Sometimes, when I’m working with people, I don’t know if you’ve experienced the same thing. They’ll make strides and they’re so busy moving forward that they don’t even think they’re moving forward.

 

 

They forget the importance of saying, “Well done.” “I was able to go to the supermarket. I got in an elevator. I didn’t have a panic attack. I experienced anxiety at an 8 instead of a 10 all day.” That’s giving yourself accolades and kudos because that’s how we work with anxiety. That’s how we work with trauma.

Noticing that we can make changes. They’re not always palpable every day but if we give ourselves, take the time to pause and say, “Well done.” “I had a conversation without erupting.” or “I had a conversation with someone that I used to be afraid of, but I had the conversation and I wasn’t too anxious.” All of these things build hope because we’re building or baby-stepping toward more and more agency. Do you find that same thing in your practice?

I do. Carla, it’s such an important piece. The way that I would label this awareness is self-compassion. I’ve found that many folks who’ve been through developmental trauma struggle to have innate self-compassion because, for children, one of the main core wounds that we find is shame.

When kids aren’t getting their needs met, it’s safer for kids to believe that there’s something wrong with them than to believe that their caregivers can’t or won’t do what they should be doing. It’s safer for the kid to internalize that shame and feel like there’s something wrong with them, that they didn’t deserve care or that there’s something that will never work for them.

Trying to practice being self-compassionate is something that I think happens through all three phases. I’m a huge fan of the work of Kristin Neff and Chris Gorman. I did a mindful self-compassion retreat with them this year. It’s added to my practice because I didn’t understand how much there was an antidote to shame and exactly what you’re describing.

 

 

Sometimes, I’ll say to my patients because I love metaphors, “If you’re wearing glasses, remember one of the lenses is self-compassion and the other one is curiosity.” Curiosity is a little bit playful, rather than feeling, “What’s wrong with me?” “Why am I this way?” “Why am I broken?” That curiosity is like, “I wonder why that’s happened.” “Why does it make sense that my brain is working in this way?” “Why does it make sense that I’m anxious because I was in an uncertain caregiving situation as a kid?”

When caregiving wasn’t predictable, it makes sense that I don’t have a sense of stability and consistency as an adult because those foundations were laid in my childhood. Rather than feeling like there’s something wrong, we try to figure out why does it make sense. That’s one of the NARM techniques that I’m a huge fan of.

I 100% agree with you. Some people believe it’s not worth going into your childhood and I think that it’s the core of my last book, The Joy of Imperfect Love. We need to go into our childhoods, not to shame or blame our caregivers. There’s no use in that but to go back and put together the pieces of the puzzle, what worked, what didn’t work, embrace what worked, if there’s much of that there, and work to shift that which didn’t work. While we’re doing that, as you say, be curious. Curiosity is amazing.

We need to be curious about why we are the way we are, both for the good and the good. Of course, self-compassion and empathy are critical. That’s why many people I work with have such a strong inner critic when they start because that inner critic, I couldn’t agree with you more, that kiddos are looking at Mom and Dad as their superheroes. Whether the parents are fighting, criticizing them, yelling, or having a drunken bout, the child thinks, “It’s my fault.” Mom and Dad are divorcing, they’re fighting, it’s got to be me because it can’t be my superheroes.

Justice And Healing

That shame persists and is at the root. John Bradshaw shows us that for decades, it has been a shame that is at the root of much dysfunction, including addictive behaviors. I agree with you and it’s such a fabulous topic. Your piece about justice. I’m a firm believer that justice is part of the healing process and that sometimes people forget how important it is that even if you can’t say for somebody who was abused and can’t get justice, we can create justice in other ways. Could you talk a little bit about why justice is important?

When I started my medical career, I was drawn to working in equity-deserving communities. One of the early things that I did was create a residency. We initially called it Global Health, but it’s equity, local and global. This is why I work in addiction medicine and refugee health because these equity-denied communities are the ones that are suffering the most from all of these kinds of collective traumas that are transpiring.

These equity-denied communities are the ones suffering the most from the ongoing collective traumas. Share on X

For example, many refugees are already climate refugees or they’re political refugees because of the politics of the global North. For people who are fighting immigration and refugees very much, I think we also need to take responsibility. There’s this collective justice in my mind around it. What Judith Herman explores is that often the court system doesn’t provide justice to people. There are other ways of establishing justice.

I’ve found that it’s possible through therapeutic modalities. In accelerated resolution therapy, we’re taking a movie of the traumatic events and we’re changing the content of the movie to change the associations. Of course, you will always remember the events as they happened, but you’re overlying these new creative ways that you would prefer it to have gone down.

Many times, I’ll invite a person to say, “Who would have you wanted to rescue you in that moment?” Maybe it’s even adult you. they can swoop in and save the day and we can preferably recreate that scene. Sometimes, the perpetrator gets injured or goes to jail and they are allowed to create that movie. That’s fine. It’s not like you’re doing it to the person, but you’re allowing yourself to have that experience.

Another modality that’s related to tapping is called Matrix Re-imprinting and it is fascinating. I use it for trauma processing as well. The essence of it is you’re going back into the moment that a foundational belief was created and you’re changing the belief in that moment. You’re taking your adult consciousness and you’re going to visit the child, these younger parts, at the moment that the parts are starting to believe something.

You freeze everybody in the scene and you interact with the younger part and help them see what adult consciousness sees so that they can see the truth of the scenario instead of what’s being taught to them in that moment. Amazingly, it changes a person’s foundational belief because many times, a kid will interpret, “I deserve that,” or, “I did something wrong.”

When the adult goes in and says, “You didn’t. You deserved care. You deserved security. You deserved love.” Offer that to them, and then that younger part is healed at that moment. I think of these trauma processing modalities as justice interventions because they’re creating that sense of justice for themselves. That is not something Judith Herman said in her book. That’s a Christy thing, but that’s been my experience with it.

I agree with you because I believe in a world where, for example, rape victims, domestic violence victims, and children who were abused, it’s never been addressed, never talked about. Justice is a very key part of that. That’s one of the parts about accelerated resolution therapy and, to some extent, EMDR, where there’s a storytelling component.

The storytelling component is when the client that you’re working with gets the opportunity, in essence, to create a different story, a different outcome of the way that justice would have been served, their higher self, their best self would have been served, their young self would have been served. It is healing because you said, “We can’t go back in time.”

For the question of the day, we can’t help our reader who wrote in, go back in time to stop her father from abusing her, to stop the dynamics and the destructive romantic relationships, but we can help this individual find ways to go back and work with the trauma resolution so that she, they, or he can rewire the brain, have the resolution, and ultimately the justice that her body mind spirit are all craving. What do you think?

Impact Of Childhood Trauma On Adult Relationships

I 100% agree, Dr. Carla. I think one of the things we haven’t touched on is the fact that they were also in a series of abusive relationships after having experienced it from their father. This is something I see often, especially in addiction medicine, because this is familiar. When a kid experiences this feeling growing up, they think it’s love.

Even though they can rationally know that that’s not how love is supposed to look like, that’s what’s familiar. Part of interrupting that cycle is to show them what actual love feels like. The most available love is self. Even though it’s a struggle when you’ve got this internalized wound of shame, part of what heals is the therapeutic relationship.

It’s why when they study all of the different modalities, and I know I’ve rattled off a bunch of the alphabet of these therapies, most of them work equally well because so much of it is healing in witnessed and being validated and having somebody who’s co-regulating or regulating their nervous system with you. Healing happens in relationships as much as trauma does, and it’s a relationship to self that is the key.

 

 

We are where love begins and ends, healing the self, changing that story within the self, and the story that sometimes starts with, “I do deserve love.” “I am worthy of love.” ‘I am worthy of healthy, genuine love.” When we grow up not believing that because someone didn’t attune to us, they ignored us, they abused us, they criticized us, whatever the various stories are.

It does take some work, some curiosity, empathy, and compassion on all of those things to heal those wounds so we can show up in relationships and do away with that brain that’s saying that this criticism is normal. As you say, we equate that with love and it’s not love. Dr. Christy, thank you so much for all of your time, energy, and wisdom. Where can our readers find you?

For now, I’m on TikTok. We’ll see how long that lasts, if America decides to get rid of it. There, I’m TikTokTraumaDoc, and on other social media, I’m either Christine Gibson or Gib Trotter because I am a Globetrotter. My website for speaking engagements, which I love to do keynotes and workshops on this, is ChristineGibson.net. I run a company around psychological first aid and trauma-informed spaces. That’s called Safer Spaces Training.

My book is at ModernTrauma.com. There’s a banner at the top that’ll take you to all the buying options. You can learn a lot more about how the book feels on that website. My intention with The Modern Trauma Toolkit was to create a very accessible and soft, gentle tone. The website gives you a sense of what that’s going to feel like.

 

 

Thank you very much. I don’t even know where you find time to sleep, honestly. Are you one of those four-hour-a-night people?

I am not. I am an eight-hour girly. Yes, it is weird. I finished a doctorate, I’m a Doctor, Doctor now. Yes, I did a Master’s in Medical Education. I did a doctorate in Transdisciplinary Study. I thrive off of learning, and I prioritize that for myself. I don’t have biological kids. I do have lots of young people in my life, but I do think that gives me extra free time.

It sounds like it does. Thank you for the wealth of wisdom, kindness, and good that you bring into the world. I appreciate you.

Thank you for such an insightful conversation, Dr. Carla. That was wonderful.

It was wonderful and we’ll have you back again soon.

Let’s do it.

Truly. Take good care and thank you, our readers. This is Imperfect Love.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Christy Gibson
• LinkedIn – Dr. Christy Gibson
• Havening Technique
• TikTokTraumaDoc – Dr. Christy Gibson
• Safer Spaces Training
• ModernTrauma.com
• Gib Trotter – Facebook
• YouTube – Dr. Christy Gibson
• Modern Trauma Toolkit – Instagram
• The Modern Trauma Toolkit
• Trauma and Recovery
• Mental Health Hotline
• SAMSHA
• NAMI
• Website: https://www.DrCarlaManly.com
• Instagram: https://www.Instagram.com/drcarlamanly
• Twitter: https://www.Twitter.com/drcarlamanly
• Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/drcarlamanly
• LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b
• Youtube: https://www.YouTube.com/@dr.carlamariemanly8543
• TikTok: https://www.TikTok.com/@dr_carla_manly
• Authored Book: The Joy of Imperfect Love

 

About Christy Gibson

Christy is a family doctor and trauma therapist in Calgary, Canada. She works in health equity at the adult addiction and refugee clinics. A lifelong learner, she completed a Master of Medical Education degree and is a doctoral candidate at Middlesex University in London, UK. She loves knowledge translation by explaining challenging concepts in acceptable, culturally-humble ways.

She also loves design thinking and social innovation, so that communities can learn to find their own solutions. She is an accomplished international consultant and speaker. Dr. Christy is also the co-founder of a global not-for-profit Global Familymed Foundation and Safer Spaces Training that helps people learn skills for psychological safety.

The author of “The Modern Trauma Toolkit” (2023), her book offers a fresh, compassionate, easily understood description of trauma responses with a strength-based solution focus. Christy takes a systems-lens to trauma, recognizing how it lives in generations, communities, and ecosystems. All levels need to heal, with care and nurturing.

You can find Dr. Gibson on TiKTok with the handle TikTokTraumaDoc with >130k and her two TEDx talks online.