I think one of the biggest misconceptions about trauma is that if you understand it, you should be able to move past it.
When I say trauma, I don’t mean one difficult event. I mean childhood grooming, childhood sexual abuse, parental abuse that is very hard to discuss, years of severe bullying and physical assaults after school, and rejection of peers because I was from another country. So much so, that as soon as I turned 18 I made plans to leave. And I did. It wasn’t one experience. It was years of my nervous system learning that the world wasn’t safe. My body was stuck there and I could not unstick myself!
Cognitively, I knew what had happened. I didn’t deny it. I understood it. I took psychology classes. I read the books. I learned everything I could about trauma. I tried therapy multiple times over the years. I tried nearly every SSRI and other psychiatric medications my doctors recommended.
But none of those things answered the question I was really asking:
How do I stop feeling like I’m still in danger when I’m not?
I didn’t want to be a victim. I didn’t want to keep talking about the past forever. The truth is, I often couldn’t. Every time I tried to go back there, my body would become so activated that I would either shut down or become overwhelmed. I didn’t have the skills to regulate my nervous system well enough to process those memories safely.
What I’ve come to understand is that insight and healing are not the same thing.
Trauma doesn’t only live in our memories. It changes how our nervous system responds to the world. My brain knew I was safe, but my body hadn’t gotten the message.
That has been the biggest shift for me. Instead of trying to force myself to revisit every painful memory, I’m finally learning how to help my nervous system feel safe in the present. I finally have a therapy that understands that I don’t need to talk about every single incident. Learning regulation first has made healing feel possible in a way that years of simply understanding trauma never did.
The part about fragility resonated with me. I've noticed this phenomenon in which people think it's malevolent to ask a question. I'm not talking about questions that truly are inappropriate or abusive. I'm talking about sincere questions that help one person to understand where the other person is coming from. This trend worries me.
Therapy is 100% relational. A guide working alongside someone to help them find their own agency. Helping a client develop genuine agency is the work of good therapy, not the exception to it.
Consider a client who has been in an abusive relationship. She has lost her sense of self, her knowing, her intuition. Her attachment to her abuser has become more important than her attachment to herself. That work takes time, patience, and trust. Forcing agency before she is ready would likely send her running. Guiding her to hear and trust her own voice again is deep relational work. It cannot be rushed, and it cannot be replaced by a shortcut.
Many of your followers will hear this conversation and conclude that therapy is the problem, when what may have been missing was the right therapist or the right modality.
Diagnosis is also worth clarifying here. It is not a label clinicians use to reduce people. It is a shared language that helps us understand common patterns of behavior and experience, and points toward the most helpful approach. People are not their diagnosis. That flattening has largely been driven by the internet, not by clinicians. In my experience most clients never even know their diagnostic code. That information exists for insurance purposes, not to define them.
You advertise BetterHelp, which is primarily a talk therapy service. What if instead of positioning therapy as the problem, you helped your audience learn how to bring your framework into their therapeutic work? Your journaling techniques can be a valuable part of that process. Teaching people to arrive more prepared and self aware, better able to advocate for what they need, could be genuinely powerful.
Trauma work has evolved significantly. Skilled clinicians today work across Jungian frameworks, somatic approaches, EMDR, journaling techniques, and more. There are too many talented therapists to flatten an entire field as doing it wrong.
I'm sorry Anna, I can't watch anymore of this interview as it has triggered me.
While I agree that wholesale pathologising of, in particular, women's mental ill-health (not to mention coloured people, lgbtq, neurodivergent, and/or other vulnerable minorities )& the overarching systemic control (👀looking at you AMA!) of healing & recovery + the global use of medication pushed by Big Pharma is absolutely endemic,
PLEASE, please don't say that prescribed SSRI's (and some other medications) are "unproven" and not helpful in healing & recovery from complex-ptsd. I think that is a dangerous generalisation and should be accompanied by a ⚠️ warning to people currently taking medication to NOT stop taking the medication abruptly and only de-prescribe under close supervision by their treating doctor. (If you have provided this warning further in the video, I apologise)
Sometimes when the complex-ptsd is so severe that it renders someone incapable of executive function (eg: major depression with perhaps psychosis; suicidal ideation and/or actual attempts), medication can literally be lifesaving. And certain SSRI's are particularly efficacious for allowing some mind/brain recovery to a point where we can then begin to heal the whole mind, body & spirit.
We can't have a "spiritual awakening" if we've temporarily lost our minds 😢
Also spare a thought for neurodivergent, especially autistic, adhd & combination AuDHD folks who are born with a neurology that is "wired" quite differently to most of the general population. The concept of "God", the "divine spirit", a "higher power", etc is something their specific neurology will likely never register. Ie: it won't make any sense to them. However neurodivergent people are disproportionately represented in our society as struggling with complex-ptsd (and the inherent misdiagnosis, pathologisation, inappropriate medicating etc)
I love & admire you so much. Please keep doing you 🙏🏼♥️
Hmmm. How about performers? They are not very rational and do not often seek to elicit a rational response. Some of them make a lot of money (pay the bills).
AI creates well-received music and images through pure rationality, with no emotion. Music often gets attributed as a product of emotion, but I think the best music comes from rationality, not emotion. AI's success at music-composition is giving substance to my opinion there. My second major was in music, and I have spent years analyzing Bach, Beethoven, and others. I think they approached music primarily scientifically.
I have a bachelor's in cognitive science, which is AI, as I was taught it.
We design AI to be as rational as possible. That requires no emotions, and we add no emotions in, because they would only get in the way of rationality. Those are our AI-priorities, because that is the functionality demanded by the market.
If AI got emotional, we would treat it as dysfunction and try to eliminate the emotions.
(Meanwhile, I avoid emotional people in real life and block them on social media.)
AI models human rationality. It does not model human emotionality, because human emotions do not pay the bills. Why should psychology conceive of human functionality as anything besides what pays the bills?
In psychology it does, seriously, the whole point of it is to understand what makes people act and behave the way they do, so yes, human emotions drive the industry.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about trauma is that if you understand it, you should be able to move past it.
When I say trauma, I don’t mean one difficult event. I mean childhood grooming, childhood sexual abuse, parental abuse that is very hard to discuss, years of severe bullying and physical assaults after school, and rejection of peers because I was from another country. So much so, that as soon as I turned 18 I made plans to leave. And I did. It wasn’t one experience. It was years of my nervous system learning that the world wasn’t safe. My body was stuck there and I could not unstick myself!
Cognitively, I knew what had happened. I didn’t deny it. I understood it. I took psychology classes. I read the books. I learned everything I could about trauma. I tried therapy multiple times over the years. I tried nearly every SSRI and other psychiatric medications my doctors recommended.
But none of those things answered the question I was really asking:
How do I stop feeling like I’m still in danger when I’m not?
I didn’t want to be a victim. I didn’t want to keep talking about the past forever. The truth is, I often couldn’t. Every time I tried to go back there, my body would become so activated that I would either shut down or become overwhelmed. I didn’t have the skills to regulate my nervous system well enough to process those memories safely.
What I’ve come to understand is that insight and healing are not the same thing.
Trauma doesn’t only live in our memories. It changes how our nervous system responds to the world. My brain knew I was safe, but my body hadn’t gotten the message.
That has been the biggest shift for me. Instead of trying to force myself to revisit every painful memory, I’m finally learning how to help my nervous system feel safe in the present. I finally have a therapy that understands that I don’t need to talk about every single incident. Learning regulation first has made healing feel possible in a way that years of simply understanding trauma never did.
The part about fragility resonated with me. I've noticed this phenomenon in which people think it's malevolent to ask a question. I'm not talking about questions that truly are inappropriate or abusive. I'm talking about sincere questions that help one person to understand where the other person is coming from. This trend worries me.
Therapy is 100% relational. A guide working alongside someone to help them find their own agency. Helping a client develop genuine agency is the work of good therapy, not the exception to it.
Consider a client who has been in an abusive relationship. She has lost her sense of self, her knowing, her intuition. Her attachment to her abuser has become more important than her attachment to herself. That work takes time, patience, and trust. Forcing agency before she is ready would likely send her running. Guiding her to hear and trust her own voice again is deep relational work. It cannot be rushed, and it cannot be replaced by a shortcut.
Many of your followers will hear this conversation and conclude that therapy is the problem, when what may have been missing was the right therapist or the right modality.
Diagnosis is also worth clarifying here. It is not a label clinicians use to reduce people. It is a shared language that helps us understand common patterns of behavior and experience, and points toward the most helpful approach. People are not their diagnosis. That flattening has largely been driven by the internet, not by clinicians. In my experience most clients never even know their diagnostic code. That information exists for insurance purposes, not to define them.
You advertise BetterHelp, which is primarily a talk therapy service. What if instead of positioning therapy as the problem, you helped your audience learn how to bring your framework into their therapeutic work? Your journaling techniques can be a valuable part of that process. Teaching people to arrive more prepared and self aware, better able to advocate for what they need, could be genuinely powerful.
Trauma work has evolved significantly. Skilled clinicians today work across Jungian frameworks, somatic approaches, EMDR, journaling techniques, and more. There are too many talented therapists to flatten an entire field as doing it wrong.
Roger McFillin’s stuff is great.
YAAAAY! Seeing you without the gag on again has been so wonderful. We need you! I can't wait to watch this.
I'm sorry Anna, I can't watch anymore of this interview as it has triggered me.
While I agree that wholesale pathologising of, in particular, women's mental ill-health (not to mention coloured people, lgbtq, neurodivergent, and/or other vulnerable minorities )& the overarching systemic control (👀looking at you AMA!) of healing & recovery + the global use of medication pushed by Big Pharma is absolutely endemic,
PLEASE, please don't say that prescribed SSRI's (and some other medications) are "unproven" and not helpful in healing & recovery from complex-ptsd. I think that is a dangerous generalisation and should be accompanied by a ⚠️ warning to people currently taking medication to NOT stop taking the medication abruptly and only de-prescribe under close supervision by their treating doctor. (If you have provided this warning further in the video, I apologise)
Sometimes when the complex-ptsd is so severe that it renders someone incapable of executive function (eg: major depression with perhaps psychosis; suicidal ideation and/or actual attempts), medication can literally be lifesaving. And certain SSRI's are particularly efficacious for allowing some mind/brain recovery to a point where we can then begin to heal the whole mind, body & spirit.
We can't have a "spiritual awakening" if we've temporarily lost our minds 😢
Also spare a thought for neurodivergent, especially autistic, adhd & combination AuDHD folks who are born with a neurology that is "wired" quite differently to most of the general population. The concept of "God", the "divine spirit", a "higher power", etc is something their specific neurology will likely never register. Ie: it won't make any sense to them. However neurodivergent people are disproportionately represented in our society as struggling with complex-ptsd (and the inherent misdiagnosis, pathologisation, inappropriate medicating etc)
I love & admire you so much. Please keep doing you 🙏🏼♥️
Wow! So glad you are both here! So glad you have both answered the call and the challenge to tell the truth and help all who need help.
Contact Dr Joanna Moncrief as well Anna - her study on depression is very controversial and may help your case.
Hmmm. How about performers? They are not very rational and do not often seek to elicit a rational response. Some of them make a lot of money (pay the bills).
AI creates well-received music and images through pure rationality, with no emotion. Music often gets attributed as a product of emotion, but I think the best music comes from rationality, not emotion. AI's success at music-composition is giving substance to my opinion there. My second major was in music, and I have spent years analyzing Bach, Beethoven, and others. I think they approached music primarily scientifically.
I have a bachelor's in cognitive science, which is AI, as I was taught it.
We design AI to be as rational as possible. That requires no emotions, and we add no emotions in, because they would only get in the way of rationality. Those are our AI-priorities, because that is the functionality demanded by the market.
If AI got emotional, we would treat it as dysfunction and try to eliminate the emotions.
(Meanwhile, I avoid emotional people in real life and block them on social media.)
So, I see a case for pathologizing emotions,
Human beings are not machines.
AI models human rationality. It does not model human emotionality, because human emotions do not pay the bills. Why should psychology conceive of human functionality as anything besides what pays the bills?
In psychology it does, seriously, the whole point of it is to understand what makes people act and behave the way they do, so yes, human emotions drive the industry.