Ep. 1 What Happens When… Trauma is Kicking Your Arse
Join Gem for this episode, "What Happens When... Trauma is Kicking Your Arse".
When they experienced an intense cPTSD flare-up earlier this year, Gem realised their usual supports were no longer enough.
In this episode, they reflect on what helped them navigate being stuck in a trauma response, their experience of moral scrupulosity, the importance of co-regulation and loving community, and the magic of nature for recovery and perspective - all recorded in a cosy bed and then whilst walking by the River Tweed!
Thank you so much for listening! I'd love it if you'd consider sharing and reviewing this podcast!
Find out more about me and my work at www.gemkennedy.com and @thegemkennedy in all the usual places.
Helpful links:
PTSD and Autism: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/misdiagnosis-monday/ptsd-and-autism
Moral scrupulosity: https://iocdf.org/faith-ocd/living-with-ocd-religious-traditions/moral-scrupulosity/
Monotropism: https://monotropism.org/
Window of tolerance: https://autismunderstood.co.uk/health-and-wellbeing/window-of-tolerance/
Transcript
00:25
Okay, I'm awake. I slept really well, and it's really nice to be waking up in a house that has other people in it. So often, when I go away, I feel like I want to be shut away and have privacy and just be alone, away from everything. But I think because of how I've been feeling recently, it's actually so helpful to be in a house where there is noise and activity - just so that I don't feel completely alone. And one of my worries about coming away was that being alone would not be very good for where my anxiety levels have been at recently. But I'm really grateful to be in this particular place.
01:15
Maybe I should say a little bit about the place I'm staying. It's in an annex in a really beautiful architect-designed house in Scotland, in the Scottish Borders, and it looks like there's a river about five minutes walk away, which I'm going to go and explore at some point hopefully today. And, yeah, it's really, really pretty.
01:43
The annex itself is just like one studio room with a bed and a kitchen, like a little kitchen counter, a little sort of half size sofa. It's a chair, yeah, half a sofa is a chair. And also a really nice bathroom with concrete walls, which is cool. And one of the things I really struggle with in the morning, or have been struggling with recently, is waking up and feeling intense anxiety as soon as I wake up. But it was really nice this morning to be away and realise that, because it's been improving back at home, and also to realise that, yeah, it's still low here. So I'm hoping that that will continue as well.
02:27
I feel like I've got two episodes in my head that I really need to get out, and once I've got those out, then more will turn up. So the first episode, it feels important to kind of set the scene of like, what has been going on and where I'm at currently, as a way to explain the rest. So the first episode I think is going to be called, "What happens when trauma is kicking your arse."
03:03
So trauma... some things happened in quick succession in April of this year. So April 2024 and when the first thing happened, I felt quite, I guess, activated, like my nervous system felt dysregulated by it. And then the second thing happened, and I felt even more dysregulated. And then that kind of built over time and persisted. And when I mean, when I say dysregulated, I mean that I felt basically terrified or terrorized by the things that had happened. And just to be clear, the things themselves that had happened were stressful, but like, not in proportion to how I was experiencing them. And not to say that when people are, you know, not to kind of minimize the experience, but I guess, had I been in a good place and one of those things had happened, it probably wouldn't have knocked me off course so much. But the combination and the ways in which they were connected, I'll explain a bit more about them at some point. But both of those things happening at the same time meant that my nervous system essentially didn't have any time to kind of calm down and recover from the first thing before the second thing happened, and then I was basically, like stuck in a highly reactive state.
04:37
And I don't really want to make this podcast about explaining like concepts or theories. I feel like it's really important to actually be able to speak freely without feeling the need to kind of fact-check my experience all the time. So I'm just going to say things, and then I will share resources related to those things. So the first episode is called, "What happens when trauma is kicking your arse or ass?" and I have definitely had that experience over the last four months, and I think it's really important to explain a bit about that to understand, and also for me to then be able to go on to talk about the other things in that other episodes, because it feels really closely linked.
05:24
So what happened was I had these two experiences in quite quick succession that essentially on reflection and after, you know, taking some time to process and also talking to a few support people, i.e. a coach and also a hypnotherapist about this experience, what I now realise happened was that I essentially was in a PTSD flare, or PTSD episode, where those two events in themselves would not have been that significant or, you know, had I been just bobbing along doing quite well, one of those things might have happened, and I might have found it stressful, but it wouldn't have totally floored me in the way that it did. So it's been a time of trying to figure out how, first of all, like how to deal with the immediate situations, like the distress that came from those experiences, and then how to try and gently bring myself back down, because I essentially got stuck at like in a mode that was very, just very distressed, on high alert, hypervigilant about everything and other things came up around that. When I was in this experience, it felt so real and so threatening, and it took quite a long time for me to be able to see that it wasn't really about the events themselves. It was that those events had triggered essentially like capsules of old trauma to resurface. And my coach said, "Oh that's good in a way, because it means that you've got to a place where you feel safe enough that those things can come up. But at the same time, it literally felt like death. It felt awful. I really cannot remember for a long time feeling that bad.
07:20
I guess maybe to explain how I was feeling physically, my body just felt, yeah, the word that comes to mind is like, drenched in anxiety, just totally beyond anxious all the time, and I felt like I couldn't really sleep. I couldn't eat. So eating was really hard. I was having to kind of have a schedule and, like, make myself eat food that I knew would help me. But yeah, that was really, really challenging. I found it very difficult to be present at times, and also really was having a lot of intrusive thoughts and finding it very, very difficult to sort of ground myself and what was actually happening around me, because my current environment was safe. Everything was safe, but my body obviously felt terrified, and it resulted in things like reading the news making it a lot worse, which I know it does make things a lot worse for lots of people, but reading the news, I found myself developing this experience that I've not had before, and I'll share more info about it, because it's a concept I hadn't come across before, but my coach said to me that there's this thing called moral scrupulosity, which is where there's this kind of constant search for whether we're good or bad, and it can mean that we're, you know, evaluating all of our actions and really thinking very intensely about what we're doing and whether we're a good or a bad person. And I really felt before, I know that people, are not just good or bad. People can do bad things. People can do good things. It's grey. It's not as simple as you're either good or bad, obviously in most cases. I'm not including like extremes in that, you know.
09:29
But just to be clear, I could understand that there could be balance and that there could be variation, and that, you know, I was not perfect, and there were things certainly that I had done and will do that are not ideal, but my measure was really different, so it was like off the charts. So experiencing moral scrupulosity meant that everything was triggering to me, because I was constantly trying to measure whether I was a good or a bad person, and that became like... there were a lot of intrusive thoughts around that. And really it was the worst. And I feel like now things are calmer, and I'm really hopeful that I'm not gonna go back there, but for quite some time, there was this sort of rebounding happening, where I would feel very, very traumatized, and then things would start to dissipate. Maybe after like, three or four days, gently they'd start to dissipate, and I'd be like, "Oh, I feel a bit better". And then, like something would happen, something tiny, like I'd see something on the news that related to what my worries have been, or I would hear a word in a conversation, and I would be massively like, triggered again and sent back into that same thing again for another three or four days. And so I kept yo-yoing in and out of these. Well, I don't think I fully came out of a very, very distressed state. But I kept yo yoing between them. And over time, I guess the the times that the very activated state lasted for became less and I was more able to move back into feeling more regulated more quickly.
09:30
But there were times where I thought, "Oh, I think I've, you know, I think I've, like been doing quite well for a little while now. I think I might be feeling better", and then something else would happen. And not to say that, I think I'm totally out of it now. I don't know that it's all resolved. I mean, who knows, but I definitely think that I'm feeling generally a lot calmer and a lot more regulated, because even the idea of this trip at some points felt impossible, like I didn't think I could actually be away from people. So I had really considered cancelling and just staying at home. I've stayed at my mum's a lot. I've stayed at my ex husband's a lot with my children, because again it's just been so helpful to be around people that love me and that I feel supported by.
12:13
So yeah, it's been intense. But all of that to say, I'm really glad that I'm here now in Scotland, and hopefully able to process and kind of bring some of this to a close in a way. Yeah, it's been really hard, and I think we really don't... I don't think that I hear enough conversation about the challenges of anxiety as an Autistic ADHD person, like just how hard that can be, and not to say that anxiety in general isn't hard, because it is. Well, I imagine, but I'm not, you know, I'm not a non-Autistic person so I can't imagine what it's like to experience anxiety and not be Autistic, but I guess the just the relentlessness of the brain. Fuck me! It was bad. The catastrophizing and for me, the only thing that helped was being around people, just seeing that those people were safe, that those people were going about their day, and trying to remind myself that there wasn't an immediate danger, that my brain was just not doing well, and was in a place of being stuck in anxious thought loops, intrusive thoughts. It's almost like when you're in it, you can't feel what it feels to be out of it. It feels like that's the way you've always been and the way that everything will always be. And I really was terrified that that was what the rest of my life was going to be like.
13:59
And I do not say this lightly, but particularly in the beginning, there were times where I really have... I really thought that I could understand fully... I've always, I think, understood theoretically, why people decide to take their own lives or not even decide why people end up taking their own lives. I really had thought that I had a lot of understanding and kind of compassion for that, but I think this experience was like absolutely next level for me. And I really thought at times I do not know how much longer, even as I'm saying, I feel like I could cry. I really felt like I did not know how much longer I could experience that for. It was so distressing. Maybe, I guess, on reflection, maybe I was just having basically a constant internal meltdown for what felt like months. It was just so awful. And I feel like I'm really pushing the point but yeah, I just I wish, in a way, that I had been able to hear someone else's experience of this in order to kind of assure me, or reassure me that it was somewhat to be expected, or that other people experience it too.
15:27
I think that's the thing with mental health stuff as well. I remember this with when I realized that I had an eating disorder that also other people experienced, I genuinely felt like I was the only person going through it, that it was just me and all of the thoughts, all of the weird behaviours, I really thought that they were just things that I did and that no one else did, and I was like broken and super weird. And actually hearing other people's stories and realising that I wasn't the only one with those thoughts was just so affirming and really made me realise that I was not the only person going through those things.
16:06
So yeah, hopefully if you are someone who also experiences this stuff from time to time or regularly, then it's really shit, and I would really encourage you to just keep going and just know that it won't always be this way, because that combination of an Autistic brain that's monotropic so you know, is very able to kind of go around in loops and cycles of things. That combination with being a traumatised person, which I think Autistic people growing up in a non-Autistic world are inherently traumatised. Children growing up in a world if they've been to school and if they've experienced being treated or oppressed, because they're children also are traumatised. So like pretty much all of us living in this world are traumatised in some way. And if you add to that, like quite complex or quite intense childhood trauma, then it's very it's like a volcano.
17:19
Yeah, a lot comes up, and there's a lot to process and work through, and it was, at times, weirdly annoying to be told that, you know, it's because you have got to this place in your life where you feel safe and where you have the capacity like your window of tolerance is expanded, so you have more capacity to be able to deal with this trauma, and that's why it's coming up now. And that felt kind of annoying to hear in some ways, but also quite reassuring, because I was like, "Thanks brain!". But also, yeah okay I get it, because I have never been in a place in my life where I have felt so much myself, so much able to understand myself and live in a way that is aligned with my neurotype and with how I want to be in the world and all of that stuff. Like I love my work, I love my children. I've got a really great community of chosen family and biological family around me. Yeah, it makes sense, I guess. But also oh my God, it was shit.
18:29
I also wanted to say a bit about the things that actually helped me, because I think what I realised was just drawing on my usual self care things was not enough. And also I lost the ability to really lose myself in my passions. So in the past, if I was feeling a bit anxious, doing things like singing, playing the ukulele, doing some cards and, you know, doing things that I was passionate about, like, I can't even remember as I'm talking, I can't even remember what my passions were, in a way, before this started. And I think that's, that's part of the problem. So calling on the usual things that I would have gone to really just didn't help because of the severity of my experience and how distressed I was. And so there was something about needing to find other ways to cope that were much more basic and didn't require a lot of effort, or a lot of energy.
19:43
So for me, that looked like, you know, I am a single parent, so my children are with me say, like 65ish percent of the time, and the times when they went with me, when they were with their dad, I would really find it not good to be on my own. That would be a really difficult time for me so just realising, and this took me... it was a couple of months in that I realized that I actually need to not be on my own. So doing things like staying at my mum's and staying at the children's dad's house for a few nights, seeing my friends, particularly Sophie, spending time with her, just being around more regulated people so that I could essentially co-regulate with them, my nervous system was like around another nervous system that was much more regulated, and that meant that I could relax a bit, and also, you know, talk to them and say out loud what my worries were. Because at times their thoughts were so... well they always seemed so real, but then to be able to say them out loud to someone else and see their reaction, and, you know, sometimes they would laugh, and not like laughing at me, but just they couldn't believe the the places that my brain was going to with, you know the distress and so actually being able to say those things out loud to them, and for them to be able to tell me, "Gem, that's ridiculous," or "You don't need to worry about that", was so reassuring. So, yeah, definitely that was a massive one for me, not being on my own at times when I knew that that was not good for me.
21:45
And yeah, like there was also something about - and this comes up often with my clients - there can often be this feeling of like we need to white-knuckle it somehow, like, if we don't do it "all on our own", and I'm doing like, air quotes, then somehow we've failed, or we have cheated or, you know, not done things properly. And so it was thinking about things like, do I want to take meds? Or are there like, supplements or types of therapy, or whatever that I would consider that are going to help me to get out of this immediate like distress, and really to help me bring things down. So initially, I was dealing with it on my own, and it wasn't until maybe a month in that then I saw a hypnotherapist for a few sessions who was Autistic and queer and brilliant, and that was super helpful to just have that experience of someone kind of helping me to create a safe place in my mind, and, you know, somewhere that I could try to go to or try to access when I was feeling really distressed, and also to kind of unpick some of the links that my brain had made between these different things. So that was really helpful.
23:09
And then seeing a trauma coach who was able to help me think about ways to gently bring my nervous system down, rather than, you know, suddenly just taking a week off, for example, which would, you can't take a week off parenting, um, rather than suddenly, kind of crashing to a halt, how to gently bring myself down so that I didn't become and, you know, obviously, we can't always control this, of course, or we can't control it, But so that I didn't end up making myself ill, or I didn't end up just crashing into burnout. And I still don't know if that is something that will happen. I know that because of those multiple months of having to keep busy, because I could not be alone and I could not be slow, I would not be able to sustain that at other times in my life. I would have felt like I needed to stop because I cannot, or, you know, generally, I cannot function with that many demands, that many activities, that much socialising. That is not a level that I find sustainable, but because of how high the anxiety was I was, like, driven to do all the things. And, you know, sometimes I had to cancel things, of course, because sometimes I realised that I couldn't actually make it through a particular thing, like I was really exhausted, but that general kind of sustained level of activity is not something that I would normally do. And so there was a worry that I would end up burning out. And, you know, I still don't know if that's a possibility, but, or if that's going to happen. There's always a possibility when we're autistic, right?
24:51
Yeah, and I think other things that helped me were the gym - helped me massively. Because when I go... Like, I've been going to the gym off and on for the last year and a bit or so, but since December, I've had a regular practice where I go three times a week and I'm lifting. My aim is, like, I'm doing powerlifting. So my aim is just to lift heavy things. Anyway, you don't need the specifics. But basically, what I'm trying to say is having gone to the gym regularly, so three times a week, and lifting heavy stuff really helps me to regulate my sensory experience. It helps so much so that definitely also helped to keep that practice up.
25:37
But all of these things cost money, right? So it costs money to go to the gym, it costs money to pay to have hypnotherapy or to pay for a coach. It costs money to access supplements, for example, like calming teas or creatine to help your brain function. These things cost money, and these are things that I would not have been able to afford for a very long time, and also that I wasn't sure I could afford this time, but really felt like I had no choice if I wanted to get through it, and luckily, I was able to make it work, but I'm so aware that for a lot of people, their best option is to go on the NHS waiting list for six sessions of talk therapy with someone who is not Autistic-informed and probably won't really understand that much about trauma. So it's like all the things that are not, maybe not all the things, but a lot of the things that are really helpful in these situations are inaccessible to a lot of people, and that's really shit. So I don't want to sit here and say like, if you find yourself in this situation, you just need to do these things, because I know that those things may not be accessible to people, and there may be things that would have helped me that were not accessible to me. Like I for quite a long time, you know, certainly the first month, month and a half, I didn't feel like I could afford to pay to access therapy because of other financial commitments and stuff. But I guess it became like, No, you actually have to prioritise this, because otherwise you're not going to be able to function or get better or maybe even do your job.
27:26
So yeah, I guess it feels important to share the things that helped me in terms of like co-regulating, doing movement that felt good or accessible to me, and accessing support from people who knew what they were talking about. But you know, that's not accessible to everyone. I mean, I tried for a really long time to get through basically just, and I don't mean just I tried for a very long time to get through with accessing my spiritual practice, which is for me, doing cards like tarot or oracle cards and writing and sometimes some meditation or kind of, um, connecting with my dreams. I really thought, you know, I've got a spiritual practice that is going to help me. If I can just, you know, I'm just maybe not doing it good enough, or I'm not like, leaning into it enough, if I do, then I will get better. And yeah, that was super helpful. And again, a massive element of me being able to get better or feel better, but on its own, it was not enough. So I think what I'm trying to say is that in these situations, it's really important to allow yourself to access whatever you can that you think is going to be helpful, and not feel like you need to do it alone.
28:53
Yeah, because I'm sure that many of us can do these things alone. We've often got to this point and I think for me, like some of my trauma comes from feeling like I'm doing things alone, and so the idea of doing it alone and getting out of it like yes, probably I could have eventually, but actually we need other people. We need people around us. We need community in order to be able to do these things, not on our own, and just in order to feel supported. And yeah, it shouldn't just be our responsibility to get out of these things alone or to manage things alone. So yeah, community is a massive part of it as well.
29:42
And I think nature has been really important to just being able to see, you know, when I'm feeling like everything is so big in my experience, everything is so overwhelming, and then to be able to look out and see a squirrel or a robin or that it's really green today, or whatever is really, really helpful. And again, like, even then, I'm like, yeah I'm lucky, because I live in the countryside, but not everyone has access to that. So any ways, I guess, that allows you to connect with nature or with a sense of something bigger, especially when the world is just on fire currently and such a mess in so many ways. Sometimes looking externally can be even harder. It can be even more anxiety inducing. So I think for me, nature is beyond all of that, right? Like it doesn't really care, in a way, whether we're... I don't know how I if I'm explaining this in the best way that I could, or whether this will make the most sense, but it doesn't really care. Like we're here or we're not here, and it just carries on regardless. You know, like the robins are still gonna be doing their thing, or the leaves are still going to be growing, hopefully, obviously, with climate change of mind, but nature is just constantly seeking to continue and to thrive, and so being able to look to nature as like I am one person. I'm one experience and one day I won't be here anymore, and I'm part of a massive, long line of people who have been on this earth before, and yeah, life will continue without me. There was something about understanding the smallness as well of my experience to kind of help reduce how big it felt at times.
31:38
Yeah, so there's some some ramblings on things that helped.
32:01
I've just come out for a walk. It took a lot of effort, because when I'm somewhere new, actually, when I'm at home too, I find it quite difficult to get out of the house sometimes. But once I'm out, I'm always really thankful that I went, or glad that I went, and I've just come literally down to the bottom of the path that's right outside the house I'm staying at, and there's this incredible aqueduct? Viaduct? Viaduct. I really need to look into what the difference is. I don't know, but just on the other side of the field, it's so pretty. It's kind of grey and overcast and quite humid, but there's just lots of birds and summer flowers, and it's really beautiful.
32:50
I feel a bit weird walking in the real world talking into my microphone, which is just a tiny little one. So it's not like I'm carrying around a giant piece of recording equipment, but yeah, it's so pretty. There's like a little bridge. I'm just gonna wonder and see what happens.
33:37
I just went through a tiny little gate, and then I'm on a tiny little bridge, and right next to me is a river, which I think is the River Tweed. It is just beautiful.
34:01
Just gonna see if I can actually get down to the river. Woah! Stepping on some mole hills. Oh and there's giant slugs. Okay, I'm through the slugs.
34:18
I wish I was really good at very descriptive language, because it's so beautiful. Oh, I can see a heron! What?! Okay, I'm just going to take some pictures and include them in the shownotes, because then, actually, I don't know if you can include pictures in the show notes, but I'm going to try and take some pictures because it's so beautiful.
34:47
I'm thinking about what I recorded this morning, and whether there's anything else I want to add. I also think it's difficult to know how much to share, because obviously I want for there to be context. And also I'm aware that this feels like a really vulnerable process to go through, but I am recording it, so yeah.
35:17
And also thinking about how structured do I want this to be? Do I want to plan out each episode, or do I want to just see what comes and so I guess for today, I'm just seeing what comes and recording that, and maybe when it gets to other episodes, I might want to change that and do something different. But we'll see.
35:44
I can't believe I'm just literally watching a heron just standing on a branch in the river.
35:54
I'm also just appreciating that for the first time in a long time, on my own, I feel tired.
36:02
I feel like I haven't... I mean, I felt exhausted, but I haven't felt that kind of like calm tiredness, where you just want to have a nap. So that feels nice.
36:16
I'm gonna just walk for a while and see if anything else comes up.
36:35
I was just thinking about how important it is when you're feeling that way, like whether it's just feeling sort of traumatised on an ongoing basis, or having a PTSD flare-up or episode, how important it is to feel believed, and for someone to tell you that what you're feeling is legit, because I think it can feel like so distressing. It's so windy now. It can feel so distressing and just like we're... well, I'll just speak for myself, it felt like I was losing a sense of connection to myself. And yeah, it just felt really, really scary. And so actually, for someone else to be able to say what you're experiencing sounds awful and scary, and this is why, is so helpful.
37:57
I can see people. Oh no! I've got my glasses on, but it's not my favourite thing to encounter people when I'm walking.