John R. Miles

And I was one of these high functioning trauma survivors that you describe in the book.

I look calm on the surface, but underneath I felt myself paddling furiously.

And I think what I was doing is I was equating having control and competence in my professional life with safety, but what was happening underneath, it was quietly destroying me and numbing me.

Why do you think so many of us equate control and competence with safety?

I'm so sorry that happened to you.

I had a similar situation.

It wasn't my parent.

I was in my late twenties at the time and I had recently gone through CPR training and in the office building we were working in, we got a call that there was a person on CPR

not even in our company, but who had a heart attack and a coworker and I went up there and unfortunately too much time had passed.

I can still see him.

I can still feel those moments because it seemed like eternity while we were trying to save him.

But for a long time, I really felt down on myself because I felt like I should have been able to save him.

But we got there too late to do anything.

Exactly.

Well, Robin, in the book, you introduce pretty early on three blunt questions to help people determine whether they're carrying trauma or not.

And I'm just going to go through them real quick.

One of them is, did something happen that changed how safe in the world?

Well, did something happen that changed how safe the world feels to you?

The second one is, do you still live as if that event could happen again at any moment?

And then do your relationships, especially with your children, trigger that sense of danger?