Dr. Kate Truitt
speaker
65 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Kate Truitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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What that looks like at a neurobiological level is when our little friend Amy the amygdala, when she starts looking at the world through a lens of threat, she disrupts the story-making parts of our brain, such as our hippocampus, where she focuses on memory reconsolidation, our thinking brain.
which is our prefrontal cortex, which helps us pay attention to things and make decisions, the amygdala changes the capacity of those other parts of our brain to function in a balanced, resilient manner, and instead starts pulling all of our other brain parts into a direction of survival mode, threat-based, looking at the world through those trauma glasses.
The world is scary. Or it could be, I'm a bad person. I make bad things happen. It could be, I am not deserving of love. Whatever the brain has learned is the thing tied into what is painful, scary, or hard. And the amygdala reinforces those types of stories over and over and over again.
The more those stories get to exist within our neurobiology, the stronger they become, which means they can start to feel like truth. So the impact is pretty profound, and the stories are still going to be happening. It's just that the stories are being written by a very unkind narrator.
That's the irony about Amy the amygdala. She can be very disruptive in how she guides our brain in order to keep us alive. But fundamentally, she does really have our back. And that's the opportunity in the neurobiological healing work and integrating that with meaning making and simply storytelling.
There's a lot of very effective different types of intervention for trauma because as humans, we're narrative creatures. And until we can support the system in changing the narrative, the meaning-making of what has happened, the system can continue to be paralyzed or run by the pain of the past.
And we're always going to be leaning into the meaning making, which is fundamentally the story that our brain has around what happened and identifying new opportunities for finding escape from what feels inescapable.
Journaling is proven scientifically to be an incredible way to help integrate our story. Putting something on paper is a way of honoring your own story and your own truth. Sharing our journaling, sharing our story in a healthy way also can be incredibly healing. It can also be very vulnerable to journal. We can be tapping into sensory data that's tied into our traumatic experiences.
Sharing our story can be incredibly vulnerable. And our amygdala may have fears around being rejected or feeling even more isolated after sharing.
The main focus that I always recommend to my clients, friends, colleagues, anybody when we're doing this type of work independently is to also have a toolkit of self-regulation tools next to us in case we tap into something that carries a lot of emotional weight as we're journaling.
And so if we have our self-regulation tools on hand as we're journaling or writing or sharing our story, we can actually proactively heal any of those reactive responses that are coming up. And one of my favorite tools for this is an exercise I created a long time ago called Creating Personal Resilience for the Amygdala, CPR for the Amygdala.
As we're doing our narrative work, as we're journaling, if we're noticing our amygdala starting to get reactive, it's just time to push pause and take a breath and utilize something known as mindful touch in order to downregulate the brain.
It's a way of saying this happened rather than holding it inside, of acknowledging the pains of the past and starting to create a new way forward, imagining different outcomes, creating a way that you would like to respond or react to something. We can help the system find ways to re-narrate and free our brain of being stuck, locked into what happened and know that, hey, we're not there anymore.
A tool or exercise I do with my clients quite a bit is to have them notice the difference between the statement, I am an anxious person versus I am experiencing anxiety. As humans, we tend to label ourselves. And when we give ourselves big emotional labels, it's hard for our mind and our body system to dig ourselves out of that label. I am bad. I am depressed. I am unlovable. I am unworthy.
I am powerless. Our brain buys into that as a self-identifying component of self. As opposed to saying, I'm feeling powerless in this moment, which then creates space for the brain and the body to go, oh, I can do something to feel more powerful right now. What might that be? Oh, I can control my breath. Oh, I have control over that.
Or I am experiencing anxiety, which creates the opportunity to zoom out a little bit. And say, why am I feeling anxious, which immediately starts a positive neuroplastic experience of being curious, which gives us dopamine and opens up our visual sphere, both internally and externally, to seeing a larger picture around us.
And the value in that is there's space for curiosity and even possibly beginning to move into a state of self-compassion and deeper self-awareness and self-acceptance, which fundamentally is a critical part of healing through trauma.
A common label that I hear is the idea of, I am a victim, or the polarizing opposite, I'm not a victim. And I can see a lot of damage potentially being done on either side of the aisle. If we are a victim, and that is the label that we're putting on our mind-body system, it can feel, what we call in psychological terms, very much having an external locus of control.
Things happen to me, I am powerless, and I cannot create change in my world. And for the amygdala's core values, you can possibly tune in there that Amy's going to hate that. And when she really feels powerless or weak, she's going to create a way of interacting with that statement for the good, the bad, or the ugly, however it shows up for her to keep us safe.
Oftentimes that can mean isolating or creating ways of being in interpersonal relationships that are not preferable or are unhealthy for us. The flip side of I am not a victim, again, great if you're not a victim, that's fine. But if that's a trauma reaction, it can bypass the reality of things happen out of control. Scary and difficult, painful things did happen. And the
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