Trauma, shame, and being enough | Patti Ashley | TEDxCU

[Applause] a few years ago i was having lunch with some colleagues and i mentioned the research i'd been doing on shame i said it all seems to come down to one thing being enough one of the therapists said you're enough i didn't know you were from nuff that inspired this cute little character i keep on my desk i give out to my clients a reminder that we are all enough i'm enough you're enough there enough if that's true what keeps us from believing it i wish i could give you a bullet point answer to that question but i can't what i can do is walk you through some things i've discovered in my 40-plus years of being a mother an educator a therapist and an author in the 1990s i was a mom of four small children and a parent educator for a large pediatric practice in virginia beach virginia i was well equipped with the best parenting information i had learned in my early childhood graduate program however behind closed doors i often heard people myself included saying things such as i can't get it right what's wrong with me everybody else seems to have it all together the more parenting books people read the worse they felt i decided to pursue a phd in psychology so i could fix this non-enough-ness once and for all my thesis question was what's the lived experience of mothers who feel good enough attachment theorist donald winnicott had coined the term good enough mother in 1953 to relinquish mommy guilt my research revealed winnicott didn't help [Applause] good enough just became another unobtainable standard not enoughness can't be calculated reasoned with or fixed it lives in the shadow of perfectionism or what researcher brene brown calls shame that painful feeling of being tragically flawed and unworthy of love and belonging psychologist carl jung define the shadow as the parts of ourselves we hide because we fear that they are bad when we don't recognize our shadow we tend to act in ways we don't consciously understand what then is lurking in this shadow of chronic non-enoughness let's start with two years ago a time we all remember all too well but i know we'd really like to forget so one month after the coveted 19 pandemic hit there was an 891 percent increase in calls to the national mental health hotline the pause on our busy routines was a wake-up call for our mental health no longer any place to run and hide from our shadow we had to go in not out raven a 20 year old college student contacted me with anxiety and depression and shared this journal entry i'm worried about debt college success dad's health mom's emotions if i will ever be loved or if i am loved 52 year old ella reached out for her first time therapy appointment 17 years after suffering a debilitating stroke she told me it seems as if all my life i put my emotions in boxes on a shelf and the shelf has gotten too heavy and now the boxes have fallen on the floor and i can't ignore them anymore it's as if we've created a culture that thrives on not being good enough media images portray unrealistic expectations success is measured by graduating from the best colleges hefty bank accounts children are encouraged to compete regardless of how much anxiety ensues employers demand perfection over well-being implicit bias dismisses and disregards race gender and diversity and even our mental health system feeds not enoughness with stigma diagnoses and how to solutions that often lead to more failure what the hell has happened to us let's go back way back to infancy and childhood in the first three years of life your nonverbal feeling right brain develops before your verbal analytical left brain you aren't born asking for a starbucks instead you cry out for the feeling of being comforted loved seen nurtured caregivers who attuned to our early needs help us develop neural connections that support the feelings of love and belonging misattunements however prune off these neural connections much like trimming branches off a tree leaving us with a broken compass for feeling good enough from the start now let's go back even further back to our ancestors swiss psychoanalyst alice miller studied 18th century child rearing practices she called them poisonous pedagogies because they encouraged parents to withhold love and affection to name call ridicule humiliate and literally beat the devil out of a two-year-old having a temper tantrum the ultimate parenting goal was to break the will of the child before old enough to remember now let's pivot into the lens of neuroscience and trauma tests that measure electrical activity in your brain show that prior to age seven your brain operates in mainly lower level theta brain waves so everything in the first six years of life is absorbed into your subconscious mind much like a hypnotic trance so you grow up under a spell of sorts a shame inducing spell perhaps physician gabber mate defined trauma as an emotional wound that induces fear and interferes with the ability to grow and develop we've all experienced trauma in varying degrees including secondary trauma just watching tv news and social media regardless of the degree trauma impairs the brain and nervous systems ability to feel safe seeking emotional safety children begin to start to develop adaptive responses that continue on into adulthood people pleasing rage avoidance disordered eating perfectionism over controlling and even addiction just to name a few when we don't look our shame shadows straight in the eye and take it down we end up taking ourselves and others down with us covid made us look the past two years of uncertainty and fear have activated so much trauma nervous systems are raw my clients are saying i'm shattered i'm a mess i'm undone i'm falling apart what i say to them is sometimes things have to come apart in order to come together in a different way as the poet rumi says you have to keep breaking your heart until it opens i may have painted a bleak picture here but the good news is you can rewire neural connections and change your dna but you can't do it from the neck up i started tonight with this slide not to make fun of the fact that many of us don't feel good enough rather to give you and myself one split second of feeling good without analyzing or judging whether or not you believe it how many of you sighed or exhaled when you saw this how many of you chuckled or laughed that one split second may have contributed to positive changes in your brain known as neuroplasticity so now let's move down into your heart your heart is a regulatory organ that detects and responds to safety threats not your brain you have 40 000 sensory neurites in your heart valves also known as the heart brain when trauma stresses the nervous system it disconnects the head from the heart that's why you can't find safety in your logical mind let me repeat that you can't find safety in your logical mind experiences that feel good are what you need to generate coherent heart rhythms and rewire emotional safety and i'm not talking about the bottle of wine the ben and jerry's or the booty call your compass to present moment regulates the heart worries about the future and regrets and regrets about the past take you out a present moment and reactivate trauma john kabat-zinn pioneer of relaxation meditation defines mindfulness as moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness the poet mary oliver wrote if we pause for a moment even for something as inconsequential as a few birds singing we might find unexpected joy it doesn't help to go back and blame or criticize anyone about what happened to you instead acknowledge your ability to change your neural connections now and make a commitment to be better to yourself remember my client ella let me tell you what was in her boxes one box held the trauma she had not being able to communicate with caregivers after her stroke another held her guilt she has because her husband blames her for his arthritis having to lift and transport her another has her mother-in-law's criticism and another had her feelings of failure as a mother because she couldn't do the things that other mothers could do and in another box was rufus a children's book she started before her stroke and never got back to until february of this year knowing that creativity helps build neuroplasticity i encourage della to start writing took her many months but she's now begun to let rufus speak ella found freedom in emptying her boxes and releasing her pain rufus is helping her to continue to express herself and maybe one day her children's book will help others do the same demystifying chronic not enoughness requires telling the truth if you look closely at the word familiar you might see two words family and liar much of what we learned growing up is a lie now let me shamelessly share a few of mine i was a mistake i was fatty patty in sixth grade i was told to be happy when my father died because he was in heaven my high school guidance counselor told me i wasn't smart enough to be a psychologist my ex-husband would tell me not to sing to our children because i might make them tone deaf luckily gratefully through the years many years of brutal inner space work i've discovered or i am discovering the truer things i am a blessing i have beautiful curves [Music] it's essential to wail when losing a loved one especially my father i got that phd in psychology [Applause] and i just sang in my first solo vocal freedom performance with rebecca folsom on january 14. demystifying chronic non-enoughness also requires the willingness and tenacity to stay on the ride even if you don't know where it's going or how long it's going to take metaphysician deepak chopra said that some people think that the shadow is the opposite of love and actually it is the way to love the average number of uncomfortable feelings my clients can identify as three frustrated mad and sad growing up we often learn feeling words from adults who simultaneously shame us for them don't be angry you're okay stop crying before i give you something to cry about get over it it's only an ice cream cone so we begin to believe that our feelings are bad so we shut them down fearing we are bad so where do you think they go the shadow i offer my clients a 50 word feeling list to help them identify the shadow they begin to excavate deeper emotions such as abandoned unloved betrayed invisible these deeper feelings help them identify that original shame story so they can write a new narrative for example if you feel abandoned ask how you can stick around for yourself a little more and finally a very significant way to break the spell of shame is by using the magic of imagination all wonder and curiosity tame shame give yourself permission to play and be like a child sing dance laugh create use your senses to identify things that feel taste smell look sound good like your favorite song petting your cat sun shining flowers blooming lavender hot tea imagine gratitude even amid devastation and of course imagine what it might feel like if you were enough [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 87,741

Keywords: Creativity, Curiosity, Emotions, English, Family, Mental health, Neuroscience, Social Sciences, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:47613]

Id: qV1BonL8wOg

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2022