Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

You know, I start making a negative, hostile judgment about, well, this is my trauma and I want to protect it.

The purpose of trauma is to say to you, you're a biological creature.

You're in the present moment.

You're a real human being.

You have a life.

My life, part of my life is my trauma.

And I will bounce from trauma to trauma to trauma to trauma.

And if I look at the trauma and say, this is a horrible thing, well, maybe it was a horrible thing.

And maybe that was 30 years ago, and that was a horrible thing.

And the more you think about it and you root into it, and the more often we run a circuit, the more that circuit stronger that gets and begins to run on automatic.

And so now I'm always worrying about, oh, my God, am I going to have more trauma?

And I put all my energy into that trauma.

Well, what am I doing?

It's just the same as if I'm just a workaholic and doing nothing but character one.

And so the power of whole brain living is to know that I have four parts of me and that trauma is important information.

And let's say I was attacked or I was raped or I had a horrible experience with a person.

And now in the future, whenever I see a person that looks remotely like that, I knee jerk away from that because I perceive myself from my trauma that that's not safe.

So I push it away.

That is an appropriate response.

But then I say, oh, but this is actually a different person.