MaryCatherine McDonald on How Trauma Response Is Never Wrong

MaryCatherine McDonald is a PhD researcher, coach, consultant, and author specializing in trauma, stress, and resilience. She talks to Doro about her new book, Unbroken: The Trauma Response is Never Wrong, and explains the science behind trauma in our lives.  She discusses how shame relates to trauma, how people are adaptive, what a “relational home” is, and how it is never too late to heal from traumas – no matter when they happened.

More on MaryCatherine McDonald:
Website: alchemycoaching.life
Book Order: Soundstrue.com/products/unbroken-the-trauma-response-is-never-wrong
Instagram: instagram.com/mc.phd

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Quotes:
Let's ditch this idea that we are broken if we have trauma because that's based on shame and bad science from the late 1800s. We know better. MaryCatherine McDonald

People pick up this language of “Big T” and “Little T” trauma  and they use it to judge each other and themselves. It's both scientifically wrong and really harmful, and I think it creates more shame, which is the number one barrier to healing.
MaryCatherine McDonald


The trauma response is actually a sign of strength. It's not a sign of weakness or disorder.
MaryCatherine McDonald

Show Notes:
MaryCatherine McDonald: I'm from the East Coast. I'm living on the West Coast now.

MaryCatherine McDonald: I have a big family and had a couple of traumatic losses in my twenties. Namely, both my parents passed away.

MaryCatherine McDonald: Personal experience showed that when you have a traumatic experience, your narrative shatters the story you were telling about yourself, about the world, about your future just absolutely explodes.

MaryCatherine McDonald: The trauma response is actually a sign of strength. It's not a sign of weakness or disorder.

MaryCatherine McDonald: even though we've been looking at trauma in the field of psychology since the 1800s, we haven't had a sustained study of trauma.

MaryCatherine McDonald: The trauma response is a set of adaptive responses that is rooted in your biology or your primitive biology, and it's there to keep you safe.

MaryCatherine McDonald: I don't really think we make it to adulthood without exposure to trauma.

MaryCatherine McDonald: I've been working on a theory. I think that shame is a type of trauma.

MaryCatherine McDonald: In the field of neuroscience, we're kind of moving away from this language about neuroplasticity because plasticity suggests you mold something and then you can remold it.

MaryCatherine McDonald: Over time, if you change the way that you're thinking and seeing the world, you can rewire your brain and then stop having those symptoms.

MaryCatherine McDonald: Here's where I see a lot of shame, because people will legitimize one trauma in their lives and delegitimize another.

MaryCatherine McDonald: This whole conversation that we have around triggers is wrong in so many ways. And one of them is that we're always conscious and can connect the dots between the stimulus and the thing that's being triggered, and that's not true. Sometimes these things are really buried.

MaryCatherine McDonald: There are certain modalities that work really well. Like EMDR is a great example. 

MaryCatherine McDonald: The hippocampus doesn't like a disorganized file because it doesn't know where to put it.

MaryCatherine McDonald: Your body is responding as if the event is happening again and there's no often no or very little cognitive realization of this, at least in the beginning.

MaryCatherine McDonald: You don't even recognize that there has been a trigger and you are literally living in two times at once.

MaryCatherine McDonald: Your brain is going through memory reconsolidation all the time.

MaryCatherine McDonald: The thing with trauma memories is that they're often more crystal clear than regular memories, because, again, your brain has this vested interest in remembering something that was dangerous and painful.

MaryCatherine McDonald: The first stone in the path to healing is the recognition that there are other people out there that you can connect with about this exact thing that is trying to trick you into believing that you can't connect.

MaryCatherine McDonald: Anything that makes a continuous beat on your prefrontal cortex is going to re prioritize that blood flow and energy in your brain.

MaryCatherine McDonald: Walking, doing something rhythmic can do the same thing, yoga. And that's because of the vagus nerve.

MaryCatherine McDonald: If you've had an unbearable experience, which I'm sure any listener who's listening probably can think of at least one, your first impulse is to reach out and find someone who can guide you, relate to you, attuned to you.

MaryCatherine McDonald: If you can't get that either because you have too much shame to reach out or because you can't find that, then what was potentially traumatic has a much more likelihood of becoming lasting trauma.

MaryCatherine McDonald: A relational home is a space where someone can help you bear the unbearable.

MaryCatherine McDonald: A lot of losses are not grieved appropriately. And part of the reason for that is I think we live in a grief-phobic society.

MaryCatherine McDonald: The nature of trauma is that it leaves imprints that change the way you see the world.

MaryCatherine McDonald: If you can find tiny little joys every day, no matter how huge and awful, the thing that you're trying to integrate or cope with, you have a reason for living.



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