Do you have trauma brain?

#selfhealers, it's so important to understand that while we experience trauma it is not who we are. It does shift both the mind and body, but we can always heal. If this video resonates, check out the video I created on reparenting to begin your healing journey here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLVrwb7w37s Also, we are so close to 100,000 followers! If my videos have been helpful for you, I'd so appreciate if you took a minute to subscribe. I can't thank this community enough. -Nicole (@the.holistic.psychologist)

I felt called out when you said "Need for constant distraction" as I'm distracting myself with this video😂

My autobiography: 1. Early memories of confidence, curiosity, ease, extroversion. 2. Fuzziness; a sense that something happened. 3. Fear, anxiety, apprehension, shame, withdrawal, unending stress.

This is me 1000%!!! I have never seen one list that listed every single issue I have until this. I know what the trauma was. I hope so much I can heal and change one day.

Yep that’s me. I was a bullied kid into high school and by my freshman year I gave up. Quit athletics and and hated school to the point of failing classes. I started fighting back my sophomore year and had no parental support at home- I was actually blamed for my issues at school. In my 30s I blew up my life with addiction and almost killed myself with alcohol. I’m recovered now and sober and it took 3 4th steps in AA to come to the conclusion that you talk about in this video. I’m better but I think the damage is permanent. I mistrust people still and I’m very wary of people who are nice to me. I struggle with success and feel I don’t deserve it and I’m not trying hard enough and I don’t even know how to explain my shame cycle. Parents- love your kids. Hug them every day. You have no idea what they’re going through.

All of the above apply to me. Abused by parents since I can remember. I've been aware of this cycle (and the fact that I let others abuse me when I grew up, too, which I called "bad luck" with people) for 20 years but never knew how to change things. At 44 I'm slowly starting to heal.

I've been struggling with all over these, I didn't realize some of them could be from trauma. Thank you

"Do they like me? Will they want me?" is the perfect prerequisite for joining a cult. "They like me! They are interested in me! They accept me!" and feeling part of something, feeling included .. Until you find yourself used and abused. Even then it's hard to leave .. the need for approval is so great. "They'll hate me if I leave .. I know how they're disgusted by those who are not-spiritual-enough to stay"...etc. I've spent the rest of my life self-recriminating over having joined - while at the same time wishing I could have managed to earn their love and approval! Oh dear .. 😣 ..

I have never felt so simultaneously supported and called out by a video 😂 Lots of love to you wonderful healing work you are doing! 💖

I was diagnosed last year with GAD and SAD. This concept of Trauma Brain is me 100% of the time and it makes social and work life situations so painfully difficult because I keep wanting validation and approval from people I honestly don't particularly care about but my ego seems obsessed with their perception of me. It makes it so hard to be in collaborative situations at work because all my ego cares about is having the best ideas and wanting people to think the best of me. Looking at it as Trauma Brain and knowing that I can Reparent is so much more helpful than calling it GAD and SAD because all I have then is a label. Dr. Nicole, and consequently my work, give me so much hope for my future self.

#3 really hits home. Ever since the traumatic event in my life I’ve been feeling like I can’t be alone with my thoughts. This is the most difficult at night when I’m trying to go to sleep so I play YouTube videos so that I can fall asleep with “noise” in the background. You finally worded it for me because I struggled with identifying this feeling for a long time. I don’t feel safe in the present moment and haven’t felt safe since my trauma. Thank you for empowering me to understand my own thoughts and actions 🙏

In another video she talks about Trauma (big T, intense acute threatening event) vs trauma (little t, low grade chronic/cumulative threats). We often ignore the latter because each individual event doesn't "add up to much" but this distinction helps us understand why the symptoms of trauma seem much more prevalent than exposure to Traumatic (big T) events. And also probably the line between what constitutes Big T vs little t trauma differs from person to person and over time as either triggers build on and intersect with each other or as we do the necessary healing/growth work

Hi, doc. I don't know if you'll see this comment given how long ago the video was posted, but here goes. A little over a year ago, I lived through a relatively minor event that had a disproportionately big effect on me emotionally and threw me into a kind of depression. We were all on lockdown, I was unemployed, and my life was totally up in the air, so getting therapy was not an option, but I knew something had to change so I looked around online for books and gravitated towards yours. I read it and, for the first time, started reflecting on my childhood experiences and realizing how much trauma there really was in them, in the more expansive definition you give trauma here. Since then, I've had a lot more awareness when it comes to the root causes of certain kinds of emotional responses that I have in my relationships with others (and with myself, to be fair). I do have a lot of healthy practices, which I've had since before I even realized I had trauma brain: I eat well, I do my best to sleep well, I exercise, I sometimes meditate (or at least have a habit of bringing awareness into my actions, interactions, and reactions), I'm fairly well in touch with my body and breathing, etc. I have a long way to go on some issues, though, and this video nailed everything on the head about how my own experience of trauma seeps into my everyday life. It really helps to put a name to these phenomena, because a vague background awareness of them can only go so far when it comes to trying to tackle them. It was difficult for me to watch this and go "yup, yup, yup" as you went down the list, but also very eye-opening. And it's helping push me in the direction of acknowledging what's really wrong and stepping up to work on that rather than resisting like I have for such a long time, thinking that therapy is brainwashing and social conditioning, etc. I'm 42 years old and I don't want to stay stuck in this place anymore, or come circling back around to it cyclically. Thank you kindly from the bottom of my heart.

I never subscribe to anything on You Tube, but I felt subscribing to this channel was the least I could do to say thank you to Nicole. Even after years of therapy, never has a therapist helped me like The Holistic Psychologist has. Thank you will never be enough for helping me have a better life.

Once again, BRILLIANTLY explained. Sincere gratitude for your wisdom 🙏♥️

I saw your video with Mel Robbins and when you were talking about having very few memories of childhood because of being in state of anxiety and not present it hit me so hard, out of all the things that have resonated with me in reading and watching people like Brené Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert and so on, I don’t think anything had such an impact on me as that. It was likely finally finding someone who can really connect the dots. I’d been reading a reparenting book and I got stuck in parts where you were meant to think of your childhood and what it was like and I couldn’t really recollect. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I’d fail at reparenting because I couldn’t remember. And now this, all 5 of these make such sense to me. I even distracted myself from the present right now by going on YT and watching this video. I recently concluded that I always need some background distraction in order to focus, for example when I’m drawing I found it much easier to keep going if I was watching a livestream from an artist drawing or painting and talking, instead of just drawing ‘by myself’ or with only music, I get uncomfortable. Now I think that’s because my inner critic starts ramping up whenever it gets a chance and by having some form of distraction I don’t feel that so I can keep going. But I guess the point is that I need to figure out how to deal with that discomfort, that inner voice, so I can do this on my own. Because that’s another thing I do - always feel like I can’t do things by myself, like I always needs someone to give me advice, because I don’t trust my own opinion..... the outside confirmation thing really. I’m getting better at it, I’ve been reparenting through daily journaling, but there’s still a lot to uncover.

Oh wow. #1 ! Why I was obsessing over people I don't even like very much. It made 0 sense, but I was still doing it. Thank you for this.

I relate to all of these. Some of them to a hugely uncomfortable degree. There was a lot of fidgeting and sweating palms, holding of the forehead, full breath sighs, and unnecessary wiping of my eyes. I felt an inner seething for that last one.

Tears in my eyes because I operate in my trauma brain. 💔 I Often wonder there are people ever in the world who are wildly confident in themselves and work about feeling secure naturally 😩

This describes me very well. I thought I was one of the only ones with this much of a traumatic brain or whatever, and just thought there was something very wrong with me. Very good video. Thank you. You make me feel less alone and less different.