If your spouse or a loved one has experienced trauma in the past how to you talk to them about it?
In this episode Chris lays out the do’s and don’ts of having these discussions. He takes the listener through his “trauma rules of therapy”.
Tune in to see ‘talking to traumatized loved ones’ Through a Therapist’s Eyes!
Show Link:
Helping Someone with PTSD
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Episode #109 Transcription
Chris Gazdik: [00:00:00] Imagine if you will, on any given night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, come home from work, stressed out, getting ready to go on a date night and your partner just gets irritable. You don’t know why you don’t know what’s going on. You ask them if they’re okay. They say I’m fine, but you know, they’re not fine.
Something’s happening. And you don’t know what and little do you even know that they may have experienced a traumatic experience in their life of some sort. And they’re into that experience and they’re distant from you and you’re struggling. This is what is experienced by many men and women who have loved ones in their lives that have experience with trauma.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Mr. Graves. Hello, I’m Chris Gazdik and he is Mr. Craig Graves. I’m a mental health and substance abuse therapist. I have a book available soon reunderstanding emotions and becoming your best self. Craig is an Unbeatable Mind coach. He has his website. Wininyourmind.com check it out and he might be willing to coach through life with you.
Welcome to Through a Therapist’s Eyes, the podcast, see the world through the lens of a therapist and a coach being where’s not to deliver therapy services in any way. Checking out our website throughatherapistseyes.com where you get full show transcriptions.
Any book that we have that we’ve talked about on the show is available there. Click through the site, we get a little bit of a stipend help with that. We also are sponsored by Better Help. Where you can get online therapy counseling. You’ll find us on Spotify, iTunes and all kinds of places that you find your podcasts, Mr. Graves, this is the human emotional experience. Let’s figure this thing out together. Spouses and loved ones with trauma. What says you, Mr. Graves? How do we deal with that?
Craig Graves: [00:02:08] Man I’m here just like everybody else, trying to figure it out, trying to see what you tell us.
Chris Gazdik: [00:02:13] All right. Let’s start out with what I do in a therapy office.
Anytime that I kind of get a trauma experience. And I think that you can replicate that in ways where you’re dealing with a loved one, or even just a buddy or a friend or somebody that you know, has had trauma. There’s, there’s some certain things that any time I come across trauma, I like to lay out right from the get go, boom.
Like you gotta know these things in order to work with me so that we’re on the same page on how this works. Right. So the first thing above all. Safety above all other concerns. Okay. I learned this from a conference that I was at really green, young clinician, and I remember guy standing up in front of the room in therapy experience, he said, you know what?
One of the things I’ve learned throughout my experience doing therapy, he was well-seasoned therapist. He did trainings around state pretty well known. Guy. And, he said safety above all else. And I’ll tell you what I have gone back to that over and over again, and found so many different applications to that.
We’re not just talking about homicidality or suicidality. We’re talking about emotional safety, physical safety, and certainly safety from, you know, suicidal thoughts and such. So that’s got a comfort safety above all else. Secondly, we got to deal with current emotions and be able to be in a manageable state.
Right. So we don’t even begin talking about. You know, the quote unquote, new material trauma. When someone reveals that to me, until we can’t talk about self care, take a good assessment, get some skills and stuff in place to kind of know that you can manage the stress that you currently got. It’s all sort of happening now in the real here and now, right?
Those are two very important steps. We don’t even go any further with any kind of trauma stuff. Those almost a requirement. Okay. Third, you know, you need to be in control. I make sure you understand. You control what we talk about, or that you control the depth of what you reveal. Fourth, you control the pace like it, that person needs to know that they are not going to be forced, pushed, pressured in any way to do anything or talk about anything that they’re not comfortable with.
They’re totally in control. Fifth. It’s a no judgment zone. Right? I like to set up the idea that, you know, they need to know that they can say, and it’s a hard standard debate to get to. But that they can say anything that they may need to say in this environment comes a safe environment for somebody to be able to do so.
That’s the goal and that’s hard to get to, but we try to do some deescalations and disarming, you know, stuff. I like to use humor. You’re in therapy with me, Craig, you probably going to laugh at some point, right? So you need to know that there’s no judgment special note here for private conversations though.
Instilling the very difficult notion that you could say anything that might need to be said. This is very, very hard, right? Say that again, in order to get to a place where you convey to your spouse, you convey to your buddy that, you know what you could say, anything that you might need to say, anything that’s needed, anything at all.
That is a very, very, very hard thing to establish because this is going to be used against me. You’re going to remember this. You’re going to bring it up later on and it’s going to be weaponized, you know, And so it’s easy in a therapy environment. I have an extra easy advantage because in a therapy environment, that’s totally easy to believe that that’s the case. It’s why therapy works. Right. When you’re doing that with your spouse, you got a tough one on this. What is this number? Number five. No, no judgment zone. Right? Number six. I make sure that the person understands and knows that I can handle the details. Okay. there’s a natural inclination to believe if you hear what I did in theater in the military engagement, right?
You’ve you really know what happened on my job today. The you’re not really going to be able to, I handle it. I got to make sure that they understand that I can handle the details. They need to know that whatever they tell you, you know, it’s not going to do harm to you. Like people feel protective, you know, towards their loved one or their buddy.
They don’t, they don’t want to do extra harm. Okay. And again, I can say that they can tell me, you know, it, they can’t tell me anything really much new. I can reassure them. You know, I’ve been doing this long enough. I can tell them to say, you know, you’re not going to surprise me with much. So that’s hard to do in a private conversation or a personal relationship, lastly, that our relationship won’t change.
You know? And I learned this actually from Jeff Shook our guy. He’s a good colleague of mine. Yeah. I know. You know him, you’ve mentioned it before, right? There’s a natural, particularly with sexual abuse cases in situations and whatnot, right? Like you need to know and understand that my role in this is nothing more than a therapist.
That’s all I am. It’s all I ever will be in. Our relationship will never change. In a private conversation. You really want to kind of reinforce the idea that no matter what you tell me, we’re going to be together. I’m committed here and I can reassure you. And we’re not going to suffer any dramatic changes in our relationship.
Is the way that you amend that. So that’s what I do with my therapy rules. And I threw in there a couple of little perks for spouses. You’d kind of adopt this and go with this, and it’s a good way to kind of start laying out some things, when you find out your spouse or your loved one, you know, has some sort of trauma.
Craig Graves: [00:07:20] So these are rules that you have adopted for your office, your sessions? Correct. Okay. What was the source of these? What’d you get these?
Chris Gazdik: [00:07:28] I think just kind of me and my travels just
Craig Graves: [00:07:30] overtime. Okay. Interesting.
Chris Gazdik: [00:07:33] Yeah, it sounds like a blog post doesn’t it?
Craig Graves: [00:07:35] It could be. Yeah, it does. It could be. So you’re saying that, here’s the one he’s out just for other therapists or
Chris Gazdik: [00:07:41] for, throwing these, these therapy rules out as what I do in my office, when I’m dealing with trauma.
Okay. And what I’m saying is you might be able to adopt this, you know, with your loved one, given a special, a couple of circumstances I just mentioned, but these are good things to have in place in dealing with trauma.
Craig Graves: [00:07:59] Okay. So you’re saying if you’re going to have a conversation with your spouse or about this issue, these might be some rules you would
Chris Gazdik: [00:08:06] yeah, absolutely.
Safety above all else. Current emotion needs to be able to be manageable. First, the loved one is in complete control. They control the depth. They control the pace. God bless you, man. He just sneezed. If you didn’t hear that off mic.
Craig Graves: [00:08:19] Sorry about that guy.
Chris Gazdik: [00:08:22] He’s got the COVID. No, I’m just kidding. No judgment.
You can manage the details and reinforcing the things will not change, right? Those are some rules and good things to adopt in your young therapists out there listening. Absolutely. Or if you’re a coach, honestly, you know, those are really good things to kind of really put in place.
So that you can create this environment. You can create an opportunity for this person on the last show we talked about, you know, what do we say, tell your story, right? Don’t be alone. And then you ain’t actually re understand. You said, recapitulate, you can, you can redefine your story. Well, you can’t even begin that if you don’t have some things kind of put in place to where you’re going to have some, you know, some emotional peace and confidence in that process.
So, that’s a good way to start, man.
Craig Graves: [00:09:11] Interesting. I’m going to give you a show note suggestions. So you’re saying one, two, three. I’m like where the heck is he? Because on the notes, it’s ABC
Chris Gazdik: [00:09:19] Do math man. Five one,
Craig Graves: [00:09:20] two, three. I’m like really confused.
Chris Gazdik: [00:09:22] E is five. I’m sorry. Yeah, show note change. All right.
I’m sure the listening audience cares about that. My brainstorm of factors. Okay. Let’s, kick down through some of what we want to try to do. You know, in some of the factors, because as I laid out there in the beginning of the show, I mean, you can imagine this is really an important and unique perspective in the life of a family, especially because one of the things that’s so torturous, you know, military homes, military families, we talked a lot about military last time, I guess the title I said, especially sexual trauma.
I was thinking that maybe I’ll kinda. Spin around with different kinds of traumas, this episode to broaden it out. But you know, the family impact is severe, right? The family and the relationships that first responders people with trauma, domestic violence, you know, whatever it might be.
Military family struggle with relationships and communication. You know, now we think of it as, the kids got to move from town to town, to town. And that’s what military family means. Well, you know, military family also means, you know, communication is rough. You know, the divorce rates are high.
Suicide rates are high. The depression and mood disorders are high. Trauma is high. That’s why, you know, I’m recovered now, Mr. Graves, but you got me last show where you said, you know, look, this has been 20 years since Iraq started, you know, And it’s been a long time since we really got geeked into this with Vietnam war and we could do better because the effects are dramatic.
And so this show is a little bit of a different angle on, you know, loved ones and whatnot, right?
Craig Graves: [00:11:15] Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: [00:11:18] So first and foremost, as a therapist, I’ll tell you what I gotta do. I gotta decompress. I gotta manage myself. You know, when you’re dealing with trauma, you hear some things. Sometimes it’s hard to hear you experienced some things.
It’s hard to experience when you’re walking with people. And if you don’t have the ability to handle your own emotions, well, that’s going to be a hard day. It really is. And so not that I’m an expert on handling my own emotions. I’ve admitted that on a show before, at times I really suck at it. But, you know, doing the work that I do, you do pick up a lot of different angles that you might not think otherwise.
And so if you have a spouse, you have a loved one, that’s dealing with trauma and whatnot, man, you you’ve really got to be mindful about managing your own emotion. How good do you think people generally are at that? We’ve established
Craig Graves: [00:12:14] not very good.
Chris Gazdik: [00:12:15] We suck at it. We suck at it. So, you know, What you didn’t know will affect you.
It’s important to manage yourself so that you can be facilitated, manage your own emotion. This has likely been going on for a while for this person, and you’ve not known it. This is likely been going on for the entire time that you may even have known them. You know, how many people get married and they never revealed through their spouse that they’ve had sexual trauma.
Craig Graves: [00:12:41] I don’t have any idea
Chris Gazdik: [00:12:42] A lot. I ain’t gonna tell anybody. Mom I’ll tell you what are you different? Yeah. We’re getting married, but you don’t need to know that. I can’t tell anybody that
Craig Graves: [00:12:49] that’s a big deal though.
Chris Gazdik: [00:12:51] Yeah. It’s a huge
Craig Graves: [00:12:52] deal.
Chris Gazdik: [00:12:52] Yeah. And if you have shared that with your spouse, good for you. That’s a great first step.
If that’s the only person you’ve shared that with. Okay. Let’s try to broaden that a little bit, but that’s a great first step, but a lot of times people don’t even share it with your spouse. I mean, a lot of things, you know, the expression, right? What kind of skeletons you got in your closet Mr. Graves? You’re going to let anybody know that.
Craig Graves: [00:13:16] No, I ain’t got no skeletons, man.
Chris Gazdik: [00:13:20] He didn’t even say that with a straight face audience. We need to start doing this on YouTube.
Craig Graves: [00:13:26] Yeah. That brings up a question for me though, is like, we’re talking about, pretty big issues here. I mean, definitely trauma.
That’s easy to say. Yeah, that was traumatized. But what if you have small little traumas throughout your life, how do you go back and identify those things? You know, my father slapped me or,
Chris Gazdik: [00:13:50] stood up, do what I was stood up on a date.
Craig Graves: [00:13:53] Yeah. Stood up on a date. what, I mean, just stuff like that. I mean, how did those kinds of things show up later in life?
Chris Gazdik: [00:14:00] They do. And it’s an excellent question. And to a lesser degree, you’re not going to have post-traumatic stress disorder. You might not even have acute stress disorder, PTSD light. If you will. You’ve got these different experiences that you haven’t really explored or thought about. And you, maybe you’ve been embarrassed and you haven’t really wanted to dang gum them, tell anybody. You know, it starts by being able to take the courage, which takes an incredible amount of courage to break the seal and let somebody know what you’ve, what you’ve dealt with.
You know?
Craig Graves: [00:14:30] How do you, I hear stories about people who’ve blocked stuff out completely, and then they discover it later on
Chris Gazdik: [00:14:37] Repression.
Craig Graves: [00:14:37] Yeah. So how do you, how does that happen? And once you’ve discovered it, how do you really know that it really happened?
Chris Gazdik: [00:14:43] That is an awesome question and thought, and almost psychologically fascinating to me. You know, the way that I’ve made sense out of that, Craig is the fact of the matter is mother nature kind of kicks in when something is too hard or difficult or weird for you to handle boom mother nature kicks in and you don’t even remember it happened like, wow right.
And, and it’s a good question because sometimes what will happen with those situations is you kind of get body memories start happening. Like your body remembers what happened. Stephanie Fast in her dramatic story early on in history of our show, shared some things with her that she talked about. What was her expression?
What the mind forgets the body remembers. Something like that.
Craig Graves: [00:15:28] I don’t remember her saying that, but I’ll take your word for it,
Chris Gazdik: [00:15:30] Right? Because you remember that feeling of hunger. You know, and I remember telling her, I wanted to follow her around with a hamburger because she said, when she’s busy talking and running around and she forgets to eat, suddenly she’ll feel that hunger pain.
And she didn’t associate it with trauma at first, if I remember correctly, but then she began to realize and associate that cause the body remember, and she would be that little girl in Korea, again, roaming the countryside starving, but she didn’t really connect to that. So you know, it can affect you. In ways that you’re really not aware of.
And if you pay attention, you get mindful and you start paying attention. I’ll tell you what I think is really important as well. You pay attention in combination with managing your emotions. Well, as you grow, then mother nature kind of realizes, Oh, okay. I think you can handle it. And you can remember now and people will begin recovering the memories.
You know, I don’t do hypnosis therapy. I don’t really engage in that and that’s a great way to go. It’s great service, but I kind of have the belief that you don’t need to go into a hypnotic state to recover memories and whatnot. Mother nature will kick in when you’re managing emotion well, to allow that.
Craig Graves: [00:16:44] So have you had that experience in your, in your office, people remembering things that they had suppressed or repressed suppressed, right.
Chris Gazdik: [00:16:50] Absolutely both. Okay. Both repression is a term where you just don’t have memory. You don’t. You have no recall suppression is kind of, you know, you compartmentalize it, you push it down, you push it away, you resist it from coming to the surface.
Craig Graves: [00:17:03] So you’ve had people say, Oh wow, God, I just remembered this.
Chris Gazdik: [00:17:06] Absolutely, absolutely. Wow. Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s oftentimes the, you know, I might’ve started therapy for a totally different presenting problem. Interesting. And they began to get Weller. That’s a word.
Craig Graves: [00:17:20] Weller
Chris Gazdik: [00:17:22] They begin to get Weller. They begin to, you know, to grow a little bit.
And like I said, they begin to remember, and then you can deal with, it was so bad is when you don’t. Oh, and I’ll tell you this just occurs to me. It isn’t on the show notes or planned, but. It is so dangerous within the head of a person to minimize it. I’ll hear all the time. Oh, well, that, that happened so long ago that doesn’t bother me anymore.
And they’re, they’re kind of really numbed out and detached from the emotion with it and they minimize it themselves. Boy, one of the things you don’t want to do as a spouse or a loved one is in any way, either intentionally or unintentionally minimize what the experience is when somebody begins talking about this stuff.
It’s easy to do, particularly when you’re just hanging out with them and you know them well. And you’re like, Oh, you’re just stupid about that. Just, just eat that hamburger, stop it. Meanwhile that hamburger’s reminding them. And when they were in town in Korea starving, you know, so you really want to be careful about that, you know, that kind of thing, but, but be careful about that in your own head too.
Right. Does that make sense?
Craig Graves: [00:18:24] Yeah, I think so.
Chris Gazdik: [00:18:25] Yeah. Yup. A little bonus there. So here’s another big area when you’re a loved one and you’re dealing with things, man. It is very natural to see the behavior that your loved one has. They’re seeing that glimmer of light in downtown Charlotte and they’re edgy and they start getting irritable long, unbeknownst to you.
They’re triggering out on a sniper zone and they’re reliving, you know, a desert town that they stumbled upon. And. Re seeing the scene and then you’re sitting there and they’re like, Oh yeah, they’re tripping out. They just shut down. What the hell? I mean, they’re pissed off. Then they’re mad at me.
They don’t want to talk to me. Something’s going on and where are they? You know, maybe they’re, you know,
Craig Graves: [00:19:12] It’s not about you, not about you. Yeah. About them, about them.
Chris Gazdik: [00:19:16] So, you know, in general, it’s good to avoid personalizing things until you know, it is about you. And sometimes it is, by the way, but a lot of times it isn’t, and it’s very easy to take things personally and to get into that when you’re observing things and you ain’t, and a lot of times you don’t even know what you’re really looking at, you know?
Cause they’re not telling you, But you you’ll likely begin to understand better. A lot of the things that you have been personalizing for quite a while, actually not having anything to do with you when you begin to talk about the trauma experiences. It’s hard, you know, for instance, with the sexual trauma that people go through, you’ll have a lot of times, you know, anybody who does marriage counseling or sex counseling or whatever.
Your sexual appetites and sexual behavior will be there for sexual shutdown or avoidance. I mean, there are people that have sexual traumas that are having sex with her spouse. And then Holy cow start weeping like in the middle of, you know, what do they call it? Playing the piano. I’ve never heard that.
Never heard playing the piano.
Craig Graves: [00:20:19] No. So are you a sex therapist as well?
Chris Gazdik: [00:20:22] I don’t know, advertised as that, but I mean, sex comes up a lot in therapy. Yeah.
Craig Graves: [00:20:26] Yeah. The sex therapist I’m trying to. Get on the show too, as a guest. So that works out.
Chris Gazdik: [00:20:32] Yeah. That would be great. Cause there’s a specified kind of thing.
It’s a lot of relationship. Yeah. You know? but this is hard because you’re engaged in, you know what I mean, in a relationship a spouse and, you know, they suddenly start weeping and stuff. It’s like, you know, they might get angry or, you know, over the years and even have like startle reactions, you know, I mean, I’ve had sexual trauma victims. And I mean, they’re just, they’re in the middle of a panic attack in the middle of sex. And the partner’s like, dude, what’s wrong with me? I did something wrong. And again, No, you can’t, you can’t take that personally, but you got to know what’s going on. You want to check out like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, what happened there?
You don’t seem like you feel safe, like what’s, what’s happening. And you get in there in a validating way and you begin trying to figure out, Holy Cow. Are we dealing with PTSD? And no. I can’t tell you how many people were dealing with full blown PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder had no idea that that’s why they’re freaking out right now.
They don’t, they’ve not put it together because that’s just their experience. And so, you know, being able to put it together, you know, and deal with things and then I’ll go back to the trauma rules and you’re well, on your way to recovery. Okay. So you want to facilitate your own emotions and you want to be careful about personalizing the behavior.
I’ll tell you what, when you come across something that’s new to you and you don’t know much about, and you need to, because your spouse is dealing with this, what do you think you might want to learn about
Craig Graves: [00:22:04] What’s going on with them.
Chris Gazdik: [00:22:07] Dr. Google? get a book. Read, learn. Become a little mini expert in what’s going on in understanding trauma and in any way, possibly, you know, get on, read blogs, listen to the show, you know, get, get some, understanding of what you’re dealing with because man, this is something this person has been dealing with with intently.
you know, for a while here’s another one D. Or should I say, number four, Mr. Graves,
Craig Graves: [00:22:34] whatever it is,
Chris Gazdik: [00:22:38] Respect what? Letter D, their respect
Craig Graves: [00:22:43] and their privacy.
Chris Gazdik: [00:22:44] Yeah. Right. Well, wait a minute, I’m your spouse. You’re supposed to tell me everything right. Well, well, if you can’t tell me that, who, you know, what do you tell when you’re somebody else tell some other girl you’re dating.
You tell some other guy at work, you know, There’s a very weird reality that when you’re living with somebody, you kind of want to know what they’re dealing with and what they’re doing and what they done today and what they did yesterday and what all their experiences are. Well, be careful there.
Hold on. Trauma rule number, what was it here? Number, five or six, right? Who’s in control.
Craig Graves: [00:23:21] Yeah, they are.
Chris Gazdik: [00:23:22] They need to be in control and you need to be able to respect their privacy when they’re not wanting to talk. When they’re not wanting to, you know, to deal with it. Now there’s a balance there because we can’t like never deal with it.
You know, you don’t want to fall into that trap, but you gotta respect the distance and the privacy in the walls a little bit, you know, and let them, you know, manage that on their timeframe, on their depth level, on their pace, in their way. And that’s hard to do when you care so much. Particularly for those of us on the tribe of abandonment, right?
Yeah. Can you imagine how that would work?
Craig Graves: [00:23:59] Yeah. That could be an issue for that crowd,
Chris Gazdik: [00:24:06] Our crowd. All right. So, it goes along with that, but you know, you’re trying to be the safe confidant, but you know, allowing them the space to take care of themselves, listen, some of the thing you have to realize.
And maybe you don’t realize that if you’re the victim of trauma yourself, you know, if you experienced this, when you were a 20 year old kid, you know, in the desert of Afghanistan or as a teenager with your uncle and sexual trauma or, you know, whatever, and you’re 42 years old now, and you’re struggling with some things and trying to cope.
Do you realize that you have been able to cope with this trauma for over 40 years? 30 35 years that they’ve been dealing with it. It’s been in them. They’ve been aware of it if it’s not fully repressed, so respect and understand that they need to have the space to take care of themselves. You know, they’re very adept at managing their emotions, not maybe in the most productive ways, because we talked about last time trauma doesn’t get better until you, you know, begin to address it and heal from it.
But. They can, they can carry it. They’ve carried it for a long time. No, they’ve likely been doing this for their entire adult life. So you want to avoid jumping in and saying, okay, I got this. I’m going to take care of this. Now I know now and now I’m going to, I got the answers. No, you don’t. And we gotta be careful with that, that whole co-dependence thing, you know, here.
So I know that you got this trauma. Oh, well you’re an injured person. And I need to fix you, No you don’t, you know, these are traps that people can fall into. These are, these are stuck points, that people can, you know, can be into letter F Mr. Graves. What is that? A, B, C, D, E, F, G six. Sorry, I can’t let go of the whole show note, amendment thing.
Be supportive lots here and can be simple to think about, but on a deeper level examine, you know, what is it mean to be supportive? How can you do that? Okay. knowing the love language, some cool material out there in the love language book, Gary Chapman wrote on it. You know, if you want to be supportive, you’ve got to do it in the way that they can manage it, the way that they can receive that care the way that they can receive support.
Again, it isn’t about you. It’s about them. And if you’re not really a gift giving kind of love language person, you’ve got to figure out how to do that. It’s just, it’s a caring thing to do. It’s a difficult thing to do, but particularly when you’re dealing with trauma, somebody is going to need a little bit of love, care and support.
If they need space and they need to be alone. And then you got to shut it down on your part and let them be alone. How do they operate? You get into there sphere. Figure out what their needs are. Even if they’re not telling you, how can you, how can you manage it from that perspective? or if you’re from the engulfment camp and, you know, you’re kind of stuck into the idea that, you know, I’m sure they don’t want to talk about this.
They, they, they want to be alone. No, no, no, no, no. If they’re in the abandonment camp and the man that person’s been traumatized and you need to be close to them and stay close and be close. A lot more than is comfortable for you. How hard do you think that is?
Craig Graves: [00:27:28] It can be tough. You know, be tough.
Chris Gazdik: [00:27:33] Of course.
Reinforce, reinforce. We are okay here. You know, be calm. I’m okay. We’re okay. Particularly you don’t want to, one of the worst things to do when somebody is in a trauma situation and they’re reexperiencing an event and they’re flashing back. But tell me, tell me, tell me what’s going on. Talk about it now.
Talk about it now. Now come at me. Go push. Dude, that that is a worst thing to do is that can, that can escalate somebody to a dangerous level. Right? It’s instead, what do you need now? Just tell me what you need to tell, you know, what can I do? What can be helpful now? Right. You got to ask and prepared by the way.
They might not even have any blazing idea. You know, they might not have a clue. My blowing your head off. Am I going too fast?
Craig Graves: [00:28:24] No, I’m following you man.
Chris Gazdik: [00:28:26] Site current safety. Okay. There’s a lot to this. I think I probably could spend a lot more time on this instead. I’m going to refer actually to, a panic attack reaction.
I got so much feedback on our show, Craig, about when you did that short with the panic attack. Remember when we did a show on that. And
Craig Graves: [00:28:46] I remember, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: [00:28:47] Yeah. And you made a short out of it.
Craig Graves: [00:28:49] Yeah, I remember
Chris Gazdik: [00:28:50] that is an awesome reaction when somebody is feeling panicky and in the middle of, you know, reliving this stuff and whatnot.
A lot of what goes on with that is safety statements, you know, deep breathing, use your senses, five things to see, five things you hear, five things feel, you know, and then safety statements. I am okay. You are okay. You’re here with me. Come back in the room. You know, that’s kind of gets dicey because you’re freaking out your adrenaline kicks up.
Can you imagine if somebody starts weeping and having a panic attack in the middle of playing the piano, are you going to be calm? No, you’re going to be like what happened? So get calm. Come back in the room. Reinforce you’re safe. We’re okay. We’re going to be okay. What is letter H Mr. Graves, I think that you might be able to speak to that one, right?
Craig Graves: [00:29:40] Support professional help. Reinforce the idea that it’s okay to reach out. They may be highly. I don’t know that word is, but to do so,
Chris Gazdik: [00:29:53] Are people gonna want to talk about this or people want to deal with this?
Craig Graves: [00:29:56] They probably are not. I don’t want to. And I think a lot of the tips you’re given here are how to communicate with your partner, your spouse, whatever, but shouldn’t that be a step that a.
Higher up, maybe. I mean, if you’ve had a traumatic experience, I probably need to have a, have some help. Right.
Chris Gazdik: [00:30:15] Probably so. Good feedback. And these aren’t in any order, this is a brainstorm that I did, you know, but yeah, I think that, you know, that might be a bit, I don’t know, you know, one second thought I was gonna say that might be a bit of a starting spot, but you know, I mean, things happen much more natural than that and be honest with you.
I don’t know that that needs to be a first step or a second, or even a third. Right. Like it’s going to come out as it comes out. And I think if you, you know, if you just jump to that real quick, the other person’s be like, Oh, okay. You don’t even wanna talk to me about fine. I’ll shut it down.
Nevermind. Yeah, I’ll go see a professional. Hell no I ain’t going to see a professional. I don’t need a professional help. I’ve been dealing with this for 30 years. So, you know, I think that you gotta be kind of careful about that. You might make it a light suggestion
Craig Graves: [00:31:03] I’m following what you’re saying. Yeah. But I think eventually needs to happen.
Right? I mean,
Chris Gazdik: [00:31:08] Can, yeah. I mean, here’s a therapist saying people can get well, other ways. I mean, you know,
Craig Graves: [00:31:12] what can people get well through something like if it’s a traumatic sexual experience or a traumatic drama just by talking to their spouse.
Chris Gazdik: [00:31:20] Boy, that’s a trick question. I mean, obviously I’m going to say, yeah, I’m, I’m totally agreeing.
And he was playing a little devil’s advocate. Cause, you know, people can cope, you know, people can deal with things, a lot to ask of your spouse to know what to do and how to handle all of this. So, yeah, for sure, like professionals are there to do that. And to guide that process. Would be great to get into marriage counseling, you know, at some point during your treatment from truama and it’s almost a, shoot, it could be a foregone conclusion to a certain extent.
So I’m not putting, I’m not down playing that. I just, I just don’t want people to jump to that and say, all right, Hey, you’re sick. You’re a problem. You’re the problem with our marriage goes, go, go get help.
Craig Graves: [00:32:00] You’ve given a lot of stuff to lead up to that point that would be supportive.
Chris Gazdik: [00:32:05] Yeah, keep on clicking my microphone with the glass.
Sorry about that.
Craig Graves: [00:32:10] Given a lot of stuff that leads up to that step that is very supportive. Right? Right. So you talked about love languages and respect and privacy and setting up a safe environment and all those steps. I think all that’s great. You know, I’m just thinking that maybe eventually you need to reach out and get somebody that really knows how to handle these kinds of trauma issues.
Chris Gazdik: [00:32:29] Absolutely.
Craig Graves: [00:32:30] Dig deep down in there and figure out how to get out of that.
Chris Gazdik: [00:32:35] It’s kind of, again, you know, with the trauma rules, I mean, it’s, it’s their own pace. I think if you force them or you push them or pressure them, I’m just thinking of a spouse. That’s going to be pushing them
Craig Graves: [00:32:45] out of their own panic.
Chris Gazdik: [00:32:46] I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to handle this. Go to the professor, go a talk to your counselor.
Craig Graves: [00:32:50] Yeah. That’s not what I’m saying at all.
Chris Gazdik: [00:32:51] It’s gotta be careful,
Craig Graves: [00:32:52] you know me better than that. I’m not saying that at all.
Chris Gazdik: [00:32:56] You know, here’s a thought that happened in my brainstorm. You know, people are afraid to do Craig.
They’re really literally afraid because they don’t want to do any more harm, you know, they don’t want to put the, actually, they don’t want to push somebody to talk. They don’t want to, you know, trigger more problems than what already are. And so they will not ask directly questions. It’s okay to ask questions in a soft way, in a validating and supportive way, you know, have you ever felt like, yeah.
And in your life, you know, you’re telling me these things, have you ever felt that way? Direct question. And you’d be surprised when I do that in therapy people like, okay, I know I’ve never been asked. I don’t know what to do with that. I can, I’ll answer the question directly. Yeah. Actually, you know, I kind of have, if you’re just short, simple and ask to direct questions, you know, then, then they’re going to be willing more times than you would bet that.
You know, I’m just going to be honest, I’m going to answer it directly and be blunt and be honest and be, yeah. You know, be direct back because you were courageous enough to ask me that question directly right. Now, this also being said, if you’re dealing with the suicide thoughts and you don’t know what to do, and there’s a death wish that somebody might have, or reoccurring intrusive thoughts about self harm, that’s not something to mess with.
You can go to the emergency room right now. Right. And don’t be afraid of that. You know, because we definitely, you know, I just start talking and you can relive and it can be hard and you can be in a moment that can happen. So again, say, you know, trauma rule, number one, you remember what it was safety.
Yeah. Right?
Craig Graves: [00:34:43] How’s he, you ready to cheat but I remember now that you said it
Chris Gazdik: [00:34:46] Safety above all else. You know, if you come across suicidality, that’s when you definitely did not collect 200, do not pass, go, just go directly to the emergency room or hospital. Get out. Here’s an interesting one for all of us, abandonment people far as respect, space and privacy.
How about tolerate silence?
Craig Graves: [00:35:09] That’s a good one,
Chris Gazdik: [00:35:10] right? That’s hard. Sometimes. I want to talk, tell me, let me ask him more questions. You know, sometimes you really just need to tone it back, tone it down, pull it in and just sit like it’s okay to just sit. Sit in silence.
Craig Graves: [00:35:29] Yeah, I agree. Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction.
No, the uncomfortable silence. Yeah. Where she says to him, you know, you found somebody special when you can just shut the f up and enjoy silence.
Chris Gazdik: [00:35:42] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, some people struggle with it. Check in, after the timeframe begins to feel too long or awkward. Right. So, you know, hold in there, stay in there and be silent, but to begin is to be awkward.
You know, the person might get stuck, you know, sometimes that’s five seconds, sometimes that’s 10 seconds sometimes that’s, you know, a couple minutes, but then, you know, you kind of know each other. You check in and it breaks. It’s okay to break silence and just kind of go for a little while until it gets awkward, you know?
And then you kind of you to make some comments. Rest after a conversation. Remember the three cares, self care, physical care and relationship care. Yeah. Right after you have conversation and take a big bite out of the elephant, go on a date, go do something relaxing, go watch a game together, go watch a movie together.
Decompress. It’s really important to go have fun. This person been crying and they’ve been upset and you’ve talked and you’ve kind of validated support. Might look at it and say, Hey man, are you, you know, and we’ll go play Scrabble, you know, person be like, yeah, you know, go get, grab a game and start getting into it.
And boom, like, you know, now you just chill it.
Craig Graves: [00:36:57] I’m just picturing that in my head, talking to your wife. Hey man. Want to go play some Scrabble?
Chris Gazdik: [00:37:04] It’s a fun game, man. Beat your tail. Doing something special. Something physical rather. There’s another thing. That’s I had a long brainstorm here didn’t I.
Craig Graves: [00:37:16] Yeah, it looks
Chris Gazdik: [00:37:16] like it really kind of did it. Had a lot to think about, well, it didn’t take me that long to, I was just realizing he’s like go down through there’s like, am I overwhelming people?
Is this too much? Like, do we have to take notes? This is a lecture
Craig Graves: [00:37:28] Like drinking from a fire hose.
Chris Gazdik: [00:37:30] Seriously, man.
Craig Graves: [00:37:32] Hey man. So if people, you know, if people are having trouble, we we’ve talked about trauma in different fashions. I think this is the first time we’ve talked about sexual trauma. if people are, the people have experienced that.
And they’re having trouble in their relationship now, can you get past it? I mean, can you get to a point where you have a healthy, enjoyable sex life with your spouse or your partner, even if you’ve experienced that kind of trauma in the past,
Chris Gazdik: [00:38:03] You know what somebody told me recently and they’ve gotten very well and they made a very important statement, Respect it and honor it. And I think it is really cool that you begin to develop a little bit of a realization that you know what, this trauma, this person, this event has had power over me for a long time in my life.
And by God, you know what, it’s not happening now. Get a little pissed off with it. That’s fine because you know what, that doesn’t get to have power over me anymore. So the answer to that is an absolute resounding you know what? Yes, absolutely. This does not have to control your life in any way than it already has up until now.
And you begin to recover, you begin to be to reconstitute and understanding of yourself feeling comfortable in your own skin and not allowing that to own out your sex life. Yes, absolutely. You know, but remember that statement, I kind of said last time. If you don’t address it, it doesn’t get better.
That’s the thing that sucks about this. It doesn’t go
Craig Graves: [00:39:11] away if you don’t address it, if you address it and the way you’re talking about here, you can get over it,
Chris Gazdik: [00:39:17] absolutely
Craig Graves: [00:39:18] get past it.
Chris Gazdik: [00:39:19] Absolutely. There’s a lot of hope with this.
Craig Graves: [00:39:22] That’s a good news, right?
Chris Gazdik: [00:39:23] It really is. And I’m glad that you did that.
Because, I mean, this can feel pretty desperate. I mean, trauma sucks, and you feel so out of control. I mean, imagine that you’re literally just absolutely going to your kids’ backyard and playing in the sandbox, and this feeling of sand, on your, on your body. When you fall into the sandbox, triggers you into rolling around in the Saudi desert, you know, I mean, that’s terrible.
I mean, I’m just sitting here in my freaking kids’ sandbox and I re-experience this. Yes. It can be, feel, it can feel so overwhelming and so frustrating, but when you get well and you get through that and you deal with those triggers, they don’t trigger you anymore, or at least at minimum, very mildly, you know, cause sometimes you can’t unsee what you see.
but yeah, you can absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Get into a better space with that. Let’s finish this up on the other side. Take a quick break,
Take a quick break for our, sponsoring agency. Who are they? Mr. Graves,
Craig Graves: [00:40:35] Better Help. Betterhelp.com.
Chris Gazdik: [00:40:39] And what do they do?
Craig Graves: [00:40:40] Oh man, you’re putting me on the spot. It’s an online therapy site. That’s right. That’s right. You can go to that site and you can find a therapist. That you can communicate with, via telephone.
Is that right Chris? Correct? Yeah. So it’s a service that you can, you know, in these days of COVID and staying at home and social distancing, you can get therapy from the comfort of your own home.
Chris Gazdik: [00:41:04] And how do they find it
Craig Graves: [00:41:06] betterhelp.com?
Chris Gazdik: [00:41:08] No, throughatherapistseyes.com. They’re a sponsor of ours and,
Craig Graves: [00:41:11] Oh, I’m sorry.
That’s right. And you click through to the counselors, a counseling link on our web that’s right.
Chris Gazdik: [00:41:16] Yeah. And that definitely is a way to help us support the show in our partnership with better help and, keeps the show free for all. Check it out on throughatherapistseyes.com. Let’s get back to the show.
So. Where did I leave off. Resting after a conversation, self care relates to relationship care, doing something physical let’s park here for a minute, you know, seek back. You remember Craig, think back to last show and shows before when we really talked about trauma and what’s happening with the body, right?
You know, a little bit about this now, what’s your body going through? How do you, how do you know you’re freaking out with this?
Craig Graves: [00:42:02] I don’t remember if we talked about it specifically, but I would think that your breathing gets shallow. You probably tense up and feel constricted and just really in a bad spot, kind of a panicy and feeling panic attack feeling probably is what you would experience.
If you’re going through this,
Chris Gazdik: [00:42:20] you’ve been doing the show for two years, you know, more than you think, you know, absolutely dead on man. You know, it’s your body. Let’s think about it as a natural reaction that your body is like, you know, working to survive, your body has said, alright. You’re either going, be killed or kill.
You’re going to run, or you’re going to fight. You’re going to fight or flight your amygdala, right? Your body is doing something that you need to allow it to do. And so doing something physical, Yeah. Particularly after a panic flash or something like that, you know, go for a walk. Or when you’re wanting to talk to your spouse and you set something up, you know, do it on a hike, you know, do something physical because your body, you know, is, I’ll tell you what, I remember something, I’ll use as an example for personal experience.
You know, I had a lot of trouble growing up as a, as a kid in a divorced family and some different things. And so I was really struggling. with, a particular, actually I might’ve had a fight with my wife to be honest with you. And you know, we were in college and I remember my roommate, at the time it was, Dorothy and Dorothy, I don’t know, she just intuitively figured it out and she looked at me and I was having a hard time.
I was struggling and she said, come here, Chris, let’s go. Now. Say what she said, get shoes on. Let’s go. Oh, okay. Whatever, you know, got my shoes on. And we started walking and I mean, I was walking fast, man. I was paced and hard walking and walking and she was just listening and I was just talking and she was listening and I was talking and she just knew like, get him up and move.
Let’s go move somewhere. And I really thought back on that, just flashed in my mind and memory, you know what I’m talking about, do something physical. That was really helpful, Craig. I really appreciate if you listen to that there. I really appreciate that day. That was really, a helpful thing for me at the time.
So that’s something that’s important because my body wanted to do, do something, you know, what an awesome treatment for PTSD would be
Craig Graves: [00:44:29] probably a physical activity
Chris Gazdik: [00:44:30] go punching bag.
Craig Graves: [00:44:31] Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: [00:44:33] You like to work out and do weights and stuff. Yeah. Right? Yeah. How much iron do you pump when you’re fired up about something?
Craig Graves: [00:44:41] I’m not sure if it’s any more than I pump otherwise
Chris Gazdik: [00:44:45] really, I might put a couple extra pounds on there and just work a little.
Craig Graves: [00:44:49] I Do you believe that though? I mean the physical activity does help. The brain movement helps the brain. I just posted an article the other day about a study done at Stanford that says that if, you had, you know, you have some kind of writer’s block or creativity block, then you can take a walk.
Yeah, and it will actually get the creative juices flowing there’s research behind it.
Chris Gazdik: [00:45:09] Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah.
Craig Graves: [00:45:10] Okay. Yeah. Look it up on LinkedIn. I posted it the other day
Chris Gazdik: [00:45:13] is when I’m writing my next chapter, I need to go for a walk,
Craig Graves: [00:45:19] go for a walk.
Chris Gazdik: [00:45:19] I need to get up for a walk before I start sometimes when it seems like, you know, all right, this is the last one of my brain story. You get a laugh, Craig, don’t take this wrong listening audience, man. Be a support animal. What do you think? I mean, by that
Craig Graves: [00:45:36] Be a dog man dogs, a man’s best friend,
Chris Gazdik: [00:45:40] you know, seriously, if you think about it, you know, a dog being, you know, we’ve done support animals before and, I’m actually thinking about taking my dog into my office, man.
I’ve really wanted to do that. Really? Yeah. I mean, she would be great with, you can take Lily clients.
Craig Graves: [00:46:01] My dog hates Chris.
Chris Gazdik: [00:46:04] I don’t know why that wouldn’t be known me. Lily’s friend man
Craig Graves: [00:46:08] raises the roof. When Chris comes in
Chris Gazdik: [00:46:10] every single time, incessantly doesn’t stop. No seriously, a dog emulates this. You know, all of these things in a great way, you know, cats are great. Animals are great as well. Trish wouldn’t think cats are great therapy animals, which she
Craig Graves: [00:46:25] No she would get that book.
I think that’s a winner.
Chris Gazdik: [00:46:29] I think so too. Yeah, you can
Craig Graves: [00:46:31] Just have crap content. Just that title. It sell a a million copies
Chris Gazdik: [00:46:34] I really would really would. They’re patient. They’re accepting. They’re unconditional. You can say anything around them. You can, you can be silent with them. they’re excited when you’re, when you come home and you’re around.
I mean, you know, they really like serious. If we model the way that our pet animals treat us, you’re probably going to be in a good zone. Right?
Craig Graves: [00:46:59] Yeah. I agree with that. A hundred percent
Chris Gazdik: [00:47:01] Except for Lily.
Craig Graves: [00:47:05] If people treated other human beings, the way they treat their animals, it would be a better world.
Chris Gazdik: [00:47:10] I agree.
Craig Graves: [00:47:11] You know what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: [00:47:14] Absolutely. It’s a good point too, in reverse. So I backed myself up a little bit with an article. I don’t know what I need to do with this. did I. I want to add stuff, I guess, you know, looking at some stuff further, this is a good article is going to be on our show notes.
Neil, we’ll get that up for you. And it came from helpguide.org and I, and I thought it was cause there were several blogs and stuff, but you know, what was funny, man? I don’t know if this is a correct statement or not, but I don’t think there was a whole lot, really at a glance. That’s all I do is a glance with that, but on a glance there weren’t a lot of really good.
You know, like psychology today and, you know, these get well, professional sites kind of things that really dealt with from a spouse’s perspective. Like maybe it’s a good plug here to kind of say,
Craig Graves: [00:48:03] if they’re not out there, dude, that’s the whole, you should feel.
Chris Gazdik: [00:48:05] I think so. You know,
That’s
Craig Graves: [00:48:07] a great an opportunity for you to write some information and put it out there.
Chris Gazdik: [00:48:10] Probably so. In the plug that I would say is if you’re, if you happen to come across, you follow our show and you know, somebody that. You know, that has someone they know about that, you know, is dealing with something in a friends talk and, you know, share basics, you know, pop them up, pop them a copy of the show because I don’t think there’s a lot.
I don’t really think there’s a lot out there for them from this angle, you know, from a loved one in a family perspective, you know, but there was this article. I’m sorry, go ahead. No, that was it. you know, helpguide.org, they kind of talked about provide social support. Actually, I talked about this in some of my ramblings, I guess don’t pressure into talking, do normal things, quote, unquote, be patient acceptance, expect mixed feelings.
I think what that, yeah, that’s what I did with this. Some stuff that I kind of missed in my brainstorm that they kinda, you know, added, I put this out here for myself to remember, to go at, to, you know, to be mindful being patient. We talked about doing, don’t pressure into talking. We talked about.
But accepting and expecting mixed feelings, you know, somebody who’s going to be like, alright, yeah. I’ll let you know what, nevermind. I’m fine. No, you’re not fine. I’m fine. No, you were just going to tell him no, I’m not right. You know, this is going to be herky jerky, man. This is messy. This is not very simplistic for somebody to be talking about and dealing with is in fact, that’s the last thing that’s ever been on their mind for the last 35 years.
And now you expect me to deal with it. No, you ever hear the expression? I’ll take this to my grave.
Craig Graves: [00:49:46] Yeah. I’ve heard that expression,
Chris Gazdik: [00:49:48] right? Yeah. Trauma. I’d love to find a research study somewhere and find out how many times that relates to trauma. And I think that’s probably going to be pretty stout numbers on that.
Unfortunately, hopefully we’re blowing that up. To be a good listener, they made the point that I missed in my brainstorm. You know, what this person might be telling you for the 75th time, what happened when they went through something that they went through when they went through it. And Craig, that is, O K.
They’re going to retell and retell and retell, and you know, what’s happening every time they retail they’re re-experiencing and redefining and reunderstanding their story. The more that you tell a story, the more that you tell your thing, you know, particularly if you have an abandonment person who’s dealing with a trauma, they’re going to talk, they’re going to talk and they’re going to talk, they’re going to talk longer and longer than you ever thought they would ever talk about it before, because maybe it just needs to come out and that’s okay.
So it’s funny. Don’t pressure them to talk. But let them talk as much as they want. It’s okay. Over and over again. So I thought that was interesting that they pointed out. Here’s another thing I did mention this as well. This stuff might make you squirmy, you might want to defend them. You mean, tell me your uncle did that.
When you were out of those, I’m going to go over there at his house. I’m going to beat him, tell him a piece of it.
Craig Graves: [00:51:16] Do more than that.
Chris Gazdik: [00:51:18] Kick his ass.
Craig Graves: [00:51:19] That’s right, right. Yes.
Chris Gazdik: [00:51:22] And, you know, be careful with that because you know, they need who’s in control.
Craig Graves: [00:51:29] You are. They are.
Chris Gazdik: [00:51:30] They are, they are,
Craig Graves: [00:51:33] You better be in control of yourself though.
Chris Gazdik: [00:51:34] That’s right, right. You need to control yourself because sometimes this is hard to listen to. I mean, I’ll be honest with you in therapy. Sometimes I’m hearing some drama and stuff and I’m sitting here thinking, do I like take that guy out?
Craig Graves: [00:51:45] Yeah, that those kinds of thoughts bring up another scene in pulp fiction.
Chris Gazdik: [00:51:53] Which one is that? Mr. Graves,
Craig Graves: [00:51:54] When Oh, Marcella says he’s going to go get some, what does he say? Do you remember the
Chris Gazdik: [00:52:01] exact quote? It’s an idea. Go
Craig Graves: [00:52:04] get some hard pipe pit and to go to work on the homes with the. Something in a blowtorch
Chris Gazdik: [00:52:11] that night got to remember that I wouldn’t be able to recall it, but yeah, pretty serious.
Yeah. You know, it’s going to be hard to listen to sometimes and make you feel squirmy
Craig Graves: [00:52:19] his short ass life in agonizing pain.
Chris Gazdik: [00:52:24] Whoa, baby, you control yourself. They talked about, you know, avoiding getting into a lot of pitfalls. I like this because it models after my book. Right. A do’s and don’ts try to make things simple. Don’t give easy answers, right? Don’t stop them from talking about their feelings or fears. Don’t offer unsolicited advice.
Don’t tell them what they should do. Don’t blame them for their relationship or family problems on their PTSD. Again, weaponized right. Don’t minimize or deny the experience don’t give ultimatums or makes threats or demands or make them feel weak. You know, pointing out their faults. Don’t tell them that they were lucky that it wasn’t worse.
You know, don’t overshare your own personal experiences or feelings that trauma again is not about you. You know, those kinds of sound a little bit silly if you heard me read through those. Right. Kind of like, yeah. Well, I wouldn’t do that. Oh, I wouldn’t do that. Why I’m gonna blame them. I wouldn’t do that.
You know what, when you’re in real life and you’re just kind of having pizza and on a Wednesday night, because you didn’t feel like cooking and something comes up and you start talking and something starts coming out. It is really easy to minimize what the hell they’re trying to talk about because I’m just wanting to watch big brother.
I don’t know what you’re talking about right now. It’s easy to fall into these things, you know? Well, I got, I know what you should do. I got an idea. Hey, have you ever thought that, you know, I don’t want to hear that if I’m telling you what I’ve been dealing with for 35 years inside my personal experience, don’t tell me what to do.
You have no idea. You can get some real bits of anger being shot at you and you try some of these things, or when you fall into the trap of doing some of these things in probably by the way, if you’re a loved one, dealing with this, I’m sure that you’ve done these things. It’s okay. You know, you want to be aware as possible.
Boy, it’s really difficult to do this, but they point out rebuilding trust and safety. This is why I almost said earlier, Craig, right? Like, I, it is almost probably smart to mandatorily think at some point in your professional help with trauma that you do marital counseling, can I make that statement?
Craig Graves: [00:54:49] Say it again,
Chris Gazdik: [00:54:50] it is probably almost a foregone conclusion, a bit of a requirement expect the tendancy that if you’re engaging in trauma recovery, trauma, professional trauma work that you probably ought to incorporate at some point marriage counseling in that.
Craig Graves: [00:55:05] So that goes back to what we talked about earlier, when I asked you about getting professional.
Chris Gazdik: [00:55:10] Yeah. Professional help. It does. I think so. Okay. You know, cause because the relationship stuff, I mean, you know, to rebuild trust and to rebuild, you know, safety and again, remember my trauma rules, you know, it’s a lot easier for me to sell somebody, Hey, listen, you can say whatever you want to say here, you know, and that’s what makes it artificial environment such as therapy work.
And it is an artificial environment because the real environment is you tell me this and I’m going to use it against you. Wait a minute. I didn’t mean to, of course, I’m not going to use this against you. Well, you know what argument months later you did, you brought it up. Why are you throwing at me now?
Right. It’s easy trap to fall into. and you know, the person doesn’t mean to, but boy, I mean, it, it’s just your own emotions are involved and when your own emotions with them, I’m making the best decisions sometimes on how to handle something. Oh boy, you want to go to D how do you deal with this
Craig Graves: [00:56:16] Anticipate and manage triggers?
You got to realize they’re happening. You got to redirect those emotions, man.
Chris Gazdik: [00:56:25] You know, it is a really difficult thing because actually, I meant for you to read E you know, when you got the triggers that are happening,
Craig Graves: [00:56:36] it’s both the same way.
Chris Gazdik: [00:56:37] If you got to,
Craig Graves: [00:56:38] you gotta go back to your breath and you gotta realize what’s getting ready to happen.
You gotta realize you’re getting triggered or getting angry or getting volatile, whatever. Right. And then you redirect those emotions to somewhere else
Chris Gazdik: [00:56:50] I just heard the Unbeatable Mind in that brother
Craig Graves: [00:56:52] That’s exactly right. What it is. I was just talking with some folks today about this very topic.
Yeah, yeah. Transmuting emotions and the recapitulation. but yeah, you transmute those emotions. You take anger and transmute it into the equivalent or the exact opposite, which might be compassion. You know, so yeah, you can deal with that. It’s hard. It takes work. You know, you don’t learn how to do that overnight, but it is doable.
Chris Gazdik: [00:57:19] I think it’s funny when the coaching stuff just pops out of you.
Craig Graves: [00:57:21] Yeah. Well, that’s what that is, man.
Chris Gazdik: [00:57:24] What I was thinking, I would ask you to look at D is actually E, you know, yeah. People do not like dealing with anger. They’re afraid. I don’t want to piss my partner off. I really don’t want to piss my partner off.
I don’t want the volatility. I don’t want the irritability. I’m just, we’re just going to leave this lying dog lie.
Craig Graves: [00:57:44] Yeah. Yeah. So you have to, you do have to have those difficult conversations and that’s one of the things that is the hardest to do, you know, like, there’d be never a good time to talk about something like that.
That’s going to bring out emotions and it could be a difficult conversation, but you got to have those comments. I don’t think you met with, I think E for you was deal with the volatility of volatility and anger that could arise.
Chris Gazdik: [00:58:09] Right?
Craig Graves: [00:58:10] My thought process in the beginning, right there was, it has already risen.
But I do think you owe it to yourself and that person to have that difficult conversation, whether or not there’s volatility or anger that could result or not. Yeah, you gotta have that and be honest,
Chris Gazdik: [00:58:26] you know, I think what the writers of this, you know, helpguide.org deal kind of maybe it meant was, You know, in handling the anger and the volatility and the irritability that somebody’s dealing with trauma is going to have is in part dealing with what I was talking about with, you know, don’t personalize this anger is not really directed at you.
It’s directed at my first husband who punched me in the face. Right. The domestic violence victim might be experiencing.
Craig Graves: [00:58:58] Yeah. Yeah. But I think there’s a there. That may be true, but there’s some awareness too on that person’s part to realize that, Oh yeah, of course.
Chris Gazdik: [00:59:06] That’s part of treatment.
Part of, you know, you’re responsible still, if you’re being mean to me, I didn’t, I wasn’t your first spouse
Craig Graves: [00:59:13] and most people aren’t aware that pissed off angry and they don’t know why or have any idea why
Chris Gazdik: [00:59:19] Exactly. That’s the thing that drives me nuts with the realities that people have such intense.
Emotional experiences going on and just kind of blows my brain sometimes that they just haven’t connected that. I mean, they’re not. People aren’t walking around aware of how they’re even feeling, let alone why they’re feeling that and what’s going on with them. You’re not aware.
Craig Graves: [00:59:46] Yeah. What was the quote that Trish, that
Chris Gazdik: [00:59:48] Trish said, I love it.
And I use it. I use it. What is it? Struggle with it. I’m curious for you.
Craig Graves: [00:59:54] Okay. It’s something about the emotions are signals to her that something’s going on to change something or
Chris Gazdik: [00:59:59] that’s right. Emotions are points of information.
Craig Graves: [01:00:02] Yeah. Right? Yeah. Emotions are points, emotions are points of information.
Chris Gazdik: [01:00:07] Is this information that I need to do something with or is this information and I just need to let float away?
Yeah. And sit with the emotion. Cause it will ride.
Craig Graves: [01:00:15] Yeah. And, and going back to D you know, if you anticipate and manage triggers, right? If something continually triggers you the same event, continually triggers you. There could be something there that needs to be explored too, right? If, Whatever it is.
Chris Gazdik: [01:00:32] Yeah.
That’s when you might not even know the trauma was there might even be a repressed. Yeah, this is, this is one of the reasons why mindfulness is so important just as a mental health, health reality, right? Like pay attention. Why, why am I feeling
Craig Graves: [01:00:45] your kid spills his milk on a table and you lose your mind.
And there could be some maybe when you, maybe when you were a kid that was your milk and your father backhanded you or something, and that’s why you,
Chris Gazdik: [01:00:54] and you began to experience that again, and be, you know, which is an interesting point thatwe stumbled on Craig, unaddressed trauma oftentimes can be reconstituted as traumatizing other people.
Craig Graves: [01:01:09] Oh, absolutely. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: [01:01:11] That sucks. But that’s a bit of a reality. Yeah. You know, as matter of fact, I mean, one of the things that we kind of understand in the psychological realm, if you’ve come across sexual abuse, One of the things that happens in families systems with that kind of trauma is that we don’t talk about it.
It didn’t happen.
Craig Graves: [01:01:34] And those things, if you’re sexually abused as a kid, you’re more likely to sexually abuse somebody else.
Chris Gazdik: [01:01:40] Right. That travel
Craig Graves: [01:01:41] that travels down that path.
Chris Gazdik: [01:01:43] Yeah. I’m looking around for any other sexual traumas.
Craig Graves: [01:01:46] Yeah. How do you have family like that? That went, this was many years ago. But one of the step brothers who was older molested one of the younger, step brothers.
And it turns out that that kid was molested by somebody who had been molested by somebody
Chris Gazdik: [01:02:06] and on it goes,
Craig Graves: [01:02:07] so it just kind of was going down the, going down the line, you know,
Chris Gazdik: [01:02:12] That’s true. And it’s super sad, you know, that’s because a family rule gets kind of created, you know, we talked about that with alcohol, substance abuse, families and no talk rule really gets laid pretty thick.
And you know, you’re not supposed to break that rule. You know, family members will inadvertently and unknowingly. We don’t talk about that, but that’s, you’re fine. You’re gonna move along and it doesn’t get addressed.
Craig Graves: [01:02:38] Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: [01:02:41] So I feel like this was man. I just feel like I laid a lot of information out, man.
I mean, even, you know, my shows were super long this time and everything. I dunno, is that a lot of information or
Craig Graves: [01:02:52] I think if somebody is faced with this situation, they might have to go back and listen to the show more than once, take it in. I do that a lot with stuff. Cause it was, it was definitely a lot of information and I encourage you to write some articles and put them out there on psychology today and places like that because.
If there’s a hole for this kind of information, you could certainly fill it.
Chris Gazdik: [01:03:15] Sounds like a challenge. I just got, I just got a panic attack.
Craig Graves: [01:03:23] Maybe there’s some trauma you need to deal with
Chris Gazdik: [01:03:25] Writing my first book. Oh my gosh. I do. I do agree with that, Craig. I think if you, if you know somebody, if you’re dealing with it yourself, first of all, get help. it Craigs right to highlight that as an important fast.
you know, fast point there, don’t, don’t do this alone, you know, but to reiterate in simple terms that you asked me last show, what do you do with this? You know, the first thing really is kind of telling your story and, not to be alone. And then you get to redefine your story because by golly, when you’re going through something that’s traumatic, it doesn’t, if it’s not happening now, we, don’t want it to own you anymore.
We don’t want it to own your behavior. We don’t want it to own your emotions. You know, let’s, let’s get that addressed because the other side of that is, is absolutely hopeful. I loved when you asked that question, A little while ago, can you have a healthy sex life? Can you have a healthy relationship? Can you feel calm parenting?
You know what? Yes, yes, yes. And yes, it’s absolutely. I see it happen. And it’s awesome to be a part of that with anybody that I’ve worked with. gosh, I guess, closing thoughts, Mr. Graves, anything else that we’ve missed thinking about? Yep.
Craig Graves: [01:04:36] No, I don’t have any closing thoughts, man. I’m still taking it all in.
I’ll just make the point I made on the last show. You know, if you do feel like you need some help, you can get it right out of the comfort of your own home, go to our website and click on that counseling link. You can hook up with a better help and that’s all done over, over a tele teletherapy, right?
Chris Gazdik: [01:04:55] It is. And guys, please, that’s not a plug that’s really true. And it’s a great way to start. You know, it is easier, you know, to be able to do it that way. And I like that you make that point is it’s not a plug it’s. It’s reach out to just reach out if it’s a pastor, you know, if it’s a friend, somewhere where you feel safe, find a safe space and drop it.
They can handle it. It’ll be okay. You’re not gonna, you’re not gonna do harm. It’s your emotion. It’s not. It’s not that other person’s emotion. So reach out as the, as the main point here, Neil talked about, we might have a, what did he say? Do we want to, well, we’re not going to plug that yet.
Nah. Yeah. It’s an extra. Okay guys. We’re glad you’re listening. I hope you enjoyed this. Hope it’s been helpful. We love doing the show, share this one, for sure with anyone you know dealing with trauma in their family systems and whatnot. Make it a great week and we’ll see you soon.