Caffeine, Cortisol, and Coping: Are We All Stuck in Survival Mode?

About this episode

Caffeine, chronic stress, and even your sleep tracker can keep you stuck in survival mode. Dr. Montana Holmes and Auriel Campbell explore how trauma can show up in everyday habits, body cues, and the pressure to keep pushing through.

They discuss why rest can feel difficult, how trauma may affect the body and memory, and the difference between big T and little T trauma. You'll also hear how EMDR helps process difficult experiences and why tracking tools can sometimes add to anxiety instead of easing it.

Join the conversation and hear about recognizing what your body may be telling you and making space to slow down and listen.

Transcript

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability — it may contain transcription errors.

Welcome to Bilateral Banter, a Loma Therapy podcast where we explore the psychology of everyday life and make EMDR easier to understand — with your hosts Dr. Montana Holmes, licensed psychologist and EMDR-trained therapist, and Auriel Campbell, licensed professional counselor, supervisor, and EMDR trainer and consultant. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for mental health care. Listening does not create a therapeutic relationship. If you're in crisis, call or text 988 or contact your local emergency services. Let's get into today's conversation.

Welcome, listeners. I know Montana has her coffee. What do you drink in your coffee? Is it just black?

No. Oh gosh, no. I'm not a black coffee person.

Yeah.

I do the Chobani creamer. And now that they have their fall creamers out, I do the pumpkin spice.

That sounds just so perfect.

I don't know what the weather's like over there in Texas, but right now it's kind of getting cool, and it's a little dreary, gray, and I love this type of weather in the fall, because you just want to cozy up. And I've got my tea. Now, today I'm not drinking my typical chai tea. I'm drinking Throat Coat, because I might be coming down with something. But I love just anything with the fall smells and the tastes and the weather outside, you know.

I know. I know. I am praying for cooler weather. And we got a little taste of it the other day, when we were supposed to get a storm, and just the tiniest little front blew in and it got down to 69. And I walked outside and I was like, "Wow, this feels amazing."

I love it. I love it. That's awesome.

I know.

That is awesome.

Very cool.

So, I have been off coffee for almost — what is it — two and a half years now.

Yeah.

So, I was with my mom. We walked into this coffee shop that we'd never been to, somewhere in California, and there was this mint mojito coffee drink, and it sounded delicious. And I was like, "You know, I'm going to try it." But it never crossed my mind that there was caffeine in there, for some reason. I thought it was like a tea — and I can do black tea, caffeine, yes, but I can't do coffee. It's different. And I drank that whole thing. It was just tiny — it's like this big. I thought I was on drugs. I was shaking. My heart was beating so fast. I was sweating. I was walking around this outdoor area with my mom, telling her, "I think I'm having a heart attack. I don't know what is happening." And it turns out they put an espresso shot in that little mint mojito. And forget it — I was not prepared for that.

Yeah.

It was awful.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

But I have something to share about that — with coffee.

Well, speaking of coffee — I know we're talking about EMDR, but I'm going to nerd out about chronic illness and our nervous system.

Yes. Yes. Please do all of this stuff. Favorite nerd-out.

Yes. Right. So our body actually has this hierarchy. For example, our heart. Our heart has a ton of ATP. ATP is just the currency for our body — our cells, right? Kind of like how we use American money as our currency, ATP is our body's currency. And the heart has so much ATP that after someone passes, that's why you might see the heartbeat a couple times.

Yeah.

And it's the only organ that does not get cancer. Isn't that interesting?

That is fascinating.

I know. It's because there's so much ATP. Well, the lowest thing on our hierarchy is our hormones.

And if you think about it, think about women. You have a really hard month, you're going to have a crappy period, or it might be delayed, or it might be really heavy. Or struggling with fertility — or even some of the biggest things right now across America are thyroid struggles and adrenal fatigue. All of this is hormones. So, there's a reason I'm connecting this with coffee. There is a thing in our brain, and I never can say it right. Let's see if I can pause and remember for a minute. Adenosine. Adenosine — that's it. So adenosine will build up in your body as the day goes on, to let your body know, "I need a rest."

And so, you know, if you've had a really busy day, if you've had some stress, all of that — adenosine is necessary for it to communicate to your body, "We need to take a break." Even if it's taking a little 20-minute power nap, or maybe you don't do as much as you've been doing. Well, caffeine blocks adenosine. So if you think about it, a huge epidemic I think happening in America right now is we don't listen to our limitations. We don't know our body's cues that say, "Hey, I've had enough. I need to slow down." And one way we feed into that is caffeine. And caffeine is a drug, and it does block adenosine. Isn't that so interesting?

That's fascinating, because it's so much a part of our everyday life that we don't even think of it as something out of the ordinary, but the effects — the impact that the caffeine, the coffee, is actually having on us — is pretty high.

Huge.

Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just like cocaine used to be in Coca-Cola. That was the norm, you know.

Right?

Yeah.

And we find ourselves craving this, because I know the 3 p.m. slump is usually when someone will go for their coffee, or get that Diet Coke that they really want. And that's our body, I'm sure, telling us, "Hey, it's time for a rest. It's time to give yourself a break." But instead of actually going and disconnecting — and maybe taking a walk, or sitting outside, or putting your feet in the grass — you go for this thing that's going to block that communication from your brain, and then push yourself and make yourself even more tired.

Yes.

I mean, think about our circadian rhythm. It's universal that a lot of people will have that slump around the afternoon, right? This fits the normal circadian rhythm. Our body produces the most cortisol right before you wake up, to help with energy and waking up. It's also going to slow down towards the end of the day. But we treat ourselves as machines, as opposed to precious souls and bodies, you know, with limitations.

Yeah. And you know, Auriel, I feel like so much of this, too, is because of the demands on us. It's hard to have the conversation of, "Take care of yourself, do self-care, try to give yourself these moments," when sometimes that is not in the cards for people.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny you're saying this. When I finished grad school and I moved back home, I worked in — I call it the bougie Catholic counseling center, because they charged about 200, 250 an hour, and I was like, "What?" You know, it just blew my mind, because I did my grad program in New Orleans, where there's just a massive amount of poverty, right?

And so while I was working at the bougie Catholic counseling center, I decided to also do some pro bono work in an area where there's a lot of poverty. And this is totally not to negate that each socioeconomic class has unique struggles, but I found that sometimes even people that have high levels of wealth, or are in the middle class, can have the mindset that, "I'm not making enough. I'm not okay, and I need to just strive, strive, strive, strive, strive, strive, strive." Whereas when I saw my people that were on Medicaid, they legitimately had some hardship, but they seemed to not have the same mentality as those that were in a higher socioeconomic class. And it was really, really interesting.

And I'll share this with you — because this is neat, we're going into trauma, because I think a part of this is 100% trauma brain.

For sure.

My husband and I — when we married, he had a six-figure engineering job. I was doing very well. We had two rent houses. We had 4 acres of land that we were going to build on. We lived in a 2,400-square-foot house with all the acreage, and we lived pretty lavishly, right? And it's interesting. We've been recently convicted of how much we were just chasing, and didn't realize we were chasing. And it was never enough.

It was never enough.

And we've recently — well, we sold our two rent houses. We're selling our property. We're downsizing. There's a lot of research that shows that even the house sizes that we live in now are significantly larger than a hundred years ago, you know. And it's so easy to see how our culture has fed into the consumeristic mindset: "I need more things. So then, in order to have more things, I need to work more to make enough." And then all of a sudden, you're just kind of spinning your wheels.

And so since he and I have intentionally said, "We literally don't need all this. Literally, we do not need this" — he is not working. He's helping our group practice. I've slowed down. We actually have — not that that's the goal — but we have more money now, and we have significantly less on our plate. But just to kind of show this correlation: this same transition is when we stopped drinking coffee. And I'm not saying that coffee is the reason we were doing this, right? But it totally was feeding it, you know.

And I think about that. I think what often can lead us to that mindset, whatever socioeconomic class you're in, is this mindset — it's a scarcity mindset. "And I need to self-preserve." But in doing so, you don't listen to your limitations. You don't know how to truly rest. So your resting is just doom scrolling.

Right?

It's not regenerative or restorative in any way.

Yes. And you just keep feeding the cycle, you know.

And we see the other side of this. I think of companies like Oura, who are producing the Oura Ring, and Apple. I just saw a commercial the other day where it said something along the lines of, this new Apple Watch checks your heart rate significantly more, so that you can be more attuned with your body and recognize your limitations. And there's this video of this person playing the drums, and they're getting frustrated, and the watch tells them, you know, "Maybe it's time to take a break." It's almost like we are depending more and more and more on things to tell us when to pause, when to breathe, when to step away, instead of attuning ourselves to our body. Because those signals are there. We're just not listening to them.

Yes. And I will tell you — Oura Ring's going to come bang on my door going, "How dare you?" They're not accurate.

You think so? I'd love to hear why.

Okay. Well, I can say this in one minute, but let's just think about this from a general standpoint. How much is a machine on you going to really tell you what's going on in your body, right? And it's not to say that there couldn't be some — it may recognize some patterns. But I'll tell you, I had an Oura Ring in 2020, and it said I got two minutes of deep sleep every night. So what do you think I was doing? I was freaking out. Every morning that I woke up, I cried with anxiety, because I was doing all the right things to help with my sleep hygiene, and I was increasing my stress level.

I went to Mayo Clinic, and I brought my huge packet. Yes, I printed all the data from Oura Ring, and I'm like, "I'm getting two minutes of deep sleep. Help me." And that sleep medicine man from Mayo looked me in the face and said, "That is not accurate. Stop it," right? He's like, "Oura Ring is not legitimate science." So I printed all this out for him to go, "I'm not even going to look at that."

You killed so many trees, Auriel.

I know. I know. Sorry. So then he had me do a sleep study. And guess what? The very next day, he said, "This is what I'm saying. I'm showing you your sleep." He said, "You have textbook perfect sleep." I had no idea. I did a sleep study at Mayo Clinic, and I thought that night I had shitty sleep, by the way. And he's like, "You have textbook perfect sleep."

And so I say this thinking of levels of stress. There's been research that shows all these things tracking us are increasing stress. There's a new machine out — I'm going to butcher this — but it's watching your kids' breathing, and it's telling the parents, "Well, they're doing this type of brain development." And it's like, gosh, that is keeping you in such a vigilant state, and not being human anymore — of just attuning and connecting. And not that data is bad. I'm not saying that at all, but it has gone to such an extreme — kind of like what you're saying. You're not even learning your own body's cues.

No, I agree with you, Auriel — just for the sake of conversation, following up on things. During my intakes, I've made it a part of my intake with people to ask them: Do you have an Oura Ring? Do you have a Fitbit? Do you have an Apple Watch? Because I work a lot with folks who have OCD. And it's so much a part of the health anxiety subtype of OCD, where the first thing they do in the morning is go to the app to see what kind of sleep they got. And God forbid the app says that they got 2 minutes of deep sleep, or 4 hours of whatever type of sleep. It sends them into a total stress-induced spiral. I say, "Well, how did you sleep? Do you feel rested?" And they pause, and they're like, "Oh, I actually feel kind of — you know — fine today."

Okay.

So, when you ask yourself how you feel, you feel fine. But when you look at this information, you feel terrible. So, what is this doing? This is more of a ritual compulsion that's satisfying this anxiety that comes up, but it's not actually serving you in any way.

So, I see it. I see it all the time, too, and I think it for sure can become pathological.

Yes. I worked with a lot of chronic illness and pain clients — so mast cell activation, Lyme disease, all these things. And if anybody's ever interested in learning more, you could learn about the spoon theory. They talk about it with people with chronic illness. Let's say everybody has 12 spoons in a day. Someone with chronic illness, it's going to take them three spoons to just take a shower, as opposed to someone like my husband, who's just bebopping along — it takes him no spoons to take a shower, you know.

But I found that my chronic illness clients — including myself, when I was in this — we start to hoard spoons. We start to be like, "Don't take my spoons." And we even become fearful and anxious about: What am I breathing? What's in this deodorant? What's in this food? Because they're so scared of getting sick that that actually ends up spending more of their energy, because you're in a sympathetic, anxious state, as opposed to being relaxed.

Yeah.

And so I'll tell you, during that time with my own chronic illness, my doctors were like, "Oh, you need to do Myers cocktail IVs, get a hyperbaric machine, get the PEMF mat." And guess what I did? I did all of it. But I also became obsessive with it, and it was draining my resources.

Yeah. Well, there's a desperation to feel relief when you've been in that state for so long.

Yes. So, this is such a great segue into trauma, because when we think about — I talk about a callus on the wound. The wound can be anything. It could be, "I got in a car accident," "I got fired from my job." Or honestly, I think about trauma. Trauma can be big T's and little T's. Big T's are more what we often think of as a big T: "Oh, I was sexually abused," or, "I got in this horrific car accident," or, "My spouse died of cancer." It's really big, right?

Little T traumas are often things that we don't realize are traumatic and are taking a blow on us. So these are the little attachment ruptures. So think of the little kid who brings her little painting that she did in kindergarten to Mom, and says, "Mom, look at my beautiful painting." And Mom goes, "Oh, that's nice." Or throws it in the trash — as opposed to, "Look at this beautiful painting. I'm so proud of you. Let's find a special place for it on the fridge," right? That little moment is going to build upon probably a ton of other little moments. And so I think of the example of big T traumas as one big marble, and little T traumas as tons of little marbles. And I ask the question: What do you think would weigh more — one big marble or a million little marbles? And if you think about it, a million little marbles are going to weigh more than one big marble. But often we have both.

And what ends up happening with the wound is, if it continually gets hit, you can't heal. So your body develops this callus to kind of help block the pain. And that's all our maladaptive coping mechanisms — so doom scrolling, emotional eating, compulsions, isolating, anger, any of it, right? And it often fits in the fight, flight, freeze, fawn state, which we can talk about later. But why I want to share this is that callus is ultimately trying to be a surrogate attachment figure. We are so geared for attachment and connection and co-regulation that when we cannot receive it from someone, we start to create it in other things.

So that emotional eating is like — so, the five areas of secure attachment. Attunement: I can see you and I let you see me. Predictability: I know what to expect. Emotional regulation: we can co-regulate one another. Unconditional value: you are precious no matter what. And freedom to explore: figuring out who you are, your likes and dislikes. If you don't receive that, especially from your primary caregivers, your body's going to find ways to meet those needs. And so when we think about just what we're talking about, asking clients to give up compulsions, or whatever it is, is almost like asking a little kid to give up their pacifier.

Yeah. Maybe even bigger than that, too.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Especially because that was learned when your amygdala was firing, when your brain was in danger. There's this thing called procedural memories and trauma procedural memories. Procedural memories are any type of muscle memory. And I use the joke that I will forever know how to play Titanic, even when I have Alzheimer's. I don't even like the Titanic song, but I can play it. But a trauma procedural memory is something that you learned to do when you were triggered, when you felt unsafe. So Flamin' Hot Cheetos, right? That's a lot harder. Even when I was playing piano — and I didn't learn piano in a dysregulated state — if they said, "Hey, your form's off. I need you to start doing it this way," or, "Oh, you're left-handed. I need you to start writing with your right hand," that's going to be difficult. So, how much harder will it be when it's something that was such a huge safety anchor for you?

Yeah. Your brain doesn't want to let go of something that it believes was ensuring your survival.

That's it.

It wants to survive. Totally programmed to survive.

And when people are going to therapy — maybe starting therapy — and their therapist is exploring these things with them, and asking them to maybe start to challenge some of these things that have been so — what's the word? — foundational to their life, to make them feel secure, it can feel really, really scary to do that, to even think about doing it.

Huge.

So oftentimes — I'm sure you've noticed this — when people are coming in for trauma therapy, there's this tug. There's this: "I feel a lot of shame with this behavior, and I want relief from these emotions and this behavior, but it feels like a threat. What am I going to do without it?" You know?

Yeah.

And this is where that trauma work comes in. It can be really helpful in rewiring your brain and finding other ways to self-soothe. And, you know, I use the example — it's also got to hit the same way. For example, when I ate my Flamin' Hot Cheetos, someone said, "Well, what is it about the Flamin' Hot Cheetos? Is it the crunch? Is it the spice? Is it the salt? Or is it the chemicals?" I was like, "This is such a great question, because if it was just the crunch, carrots would be fine."

Carrots are not fine. They're not fine. Carrots do not hit the spot — they don't do it. And so I found out it was a combination. It was the crunch, the spice, and the salt. So maybe if I put some cayenne pepper and salt on the carrots, maybe then the carrots would be fine, right? But it's getting curious about what it is about this thing that is meeting my need or communicating safety to me, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think about the powerful taste of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, too, and how that can really maybe orient somebody when that hits their taste buds.

Yes. But Auriel, before we even get into all of this, I'm wondering if maybe for a moment we do step back into small T, big T, and what is happening for our listeners who are joining us who might be curious: is what I am experiencing a symptom of trauma? Or is this behavior that I have been engaging in for five years potentially reflecting something that happened, or something that is happening? I wonder if we kind of gave some examples or shared some stories, maybe that would be helpful to the person who hasn't learned to validate these symptoms as symptoms.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, I want to start off by saying I think big T and little T trauma is subjective. There's some level that if somebody were to say, "Oh, it's a little T trauma, Auriel," I'm like, "Oh, no. You don't realize that was a big T trauma." And usually what can help a client or a person realize whether it's big T or little T is how big of an impact it had on you. Is it something you have flashbacks about, that you think about? Did it really encode a certain belief about yourself, such as "something's wrong with me," "I'm in danger," "I can't trust others," "I'm not good enough," "I need to be perfect"? Right?

And then here's the other thing: a big T trauma may not even be easily able to come up in memory. So an explicit memory is what we think of as a memory — "Oh, I remember that time." If someone has high levels of dissociation, that doesn't mean that they don't have big T trauma. If anything, it probably points to they do, right?

So maybe I can give some examples of a big T and some little T's that really feed into one another. A big T trauma could be maybe a kid got bit by their grandma's dog when they were five years old. It's the first time they ever interacted with a dog, and the mom shamed them. Mom said, "What are you doing? Why did you pull the dog's tail?" — as opposed to, "Oh, let me see that. That had to be really painful." Right? So that's a memory that sticks in their brain, because there's a lot of things that just happened: a dog bit me, I was bleeding, and I was shamed. And mom didn't come. Right?

Yeah. She didn't meet me where I needed her to.

That's it. And then maybe some other little T traumas would be thinking about the time you're on the playground with friends, and you wear an outfit that you're so proud of, and they go, "Ew, what are you wearing?" Or maybe you accidentally fall in front of someone and they laugh at you. Or maybe the teacher puts your green card on yellow because you were whispering to your friend, but your friend didn't get that, you know?

Yeah.

Any types of these little things can start to build upon that neural network of "something's wrong with me" or "I'm not good enough" that may have started with this big moment of the dog biting you and mom shaming you.

Right. Right. And we see this, too, in adulthood with people at work. You know, they feel like their boss is never happy with them, or they feel like their co-workers are talking about them behind their back, or they feel like the projects that they're on are never good enough. Sometimes the stories that we catch ourselves telling ourselves come back to this root. But I don't think that connection is ever really explicit when people are thinking about how they're experiencing these little moments in their everyday lives.

That's it. In EMDR, how we conceptualize everything is through the three-prong protocol. If someone comes in and their presenting problem is, "I feel so inadequate at work. I have high anxiety. I dread going to work," we say, "Okay. Well, when are some times that you also felt that shame? What's the youngest time you felt that shame?" We're going to start what we call the floatback technique to past things, right?

"Well, I remember feeling shame when I did a presentation in college, and I completely went blank and didn't speak — nothing came up." So you make a note of that. "Wonder if you can go even younger." "Oh, I remember in high school" — I'm thinking this actually really did happen to me — "I was on a date, and I didn't know I was going to start my period, and I started my period and bled through my pants," right? Just these things. Luckily, the date did not recognize it. "Okay. Can we go even younger?" "Well, I remember in middle school, I was really excited about this haircut, and I got it done, and everybody laughed at me." "Yeah. Okay. Can we go even younger?" Right? So what we're doing is we're viewing this presenting problem from things that have a root.

Then we'll come back to the present and say, "Well, what are the present circumstances and stimuli that are hitting that root?" And you might go, "I have a hard-ass boss. You know, my boss doesn't smile. My boss doesn't ever compliment me. It's just 'keep doing better, keep doing better, keep doing better.'" And so this is helping the client even make sense of their story: "Oh, okay. This isn't coming out of nowhere," right?

Yeah.

Yeah. It's helpful, too. I've noticed being able to do a timeline like that, or even just name some of these moments that are in a person's memory, because sometimes I find that they won't even realize that it was that long ago that it happened, because it still feels — it either feels very fresh or it feels very old, but almost like there's no perception of time when it comes to trauma.

Absolutely.

Have you noticed this, Auriel?

Yes. Well, and you know, part of how our brain will deal with trauma is, sometimes if you are in the situation and it's been going on a while, your body's going to have to find some way to distance it. And by distancing it, your brain might kind of dissociate it, where you don't remember it. Or maybe it distances it through titration of "oh, that wasn't that big of a deal" — where you almost start dismissing your experience.

Like minimizing it.

Absolutely. And when that happens, and you start to just kind of let your brain not even go to those things, it would make sense that whenever you have someone bring it up in that moment, you kind of go, "When did that happen? Did that actually happen?"

Right. Because you've distanced it so much. You didn't allow it to be part of your story.

Yeah.

Or if it is more like in a flashback state, it's going to feel like it just happened yesterday.

I hope this is validating, too, for the people who have these vague memories, or these daydreams that they get taken to every once in a while, or these thoughts that linger sometimes with these questions or these reflections — because it is there. If your brain is offering it to you and you're noticing it come up, it's there. It's just that your brain and your body have done a really good job of keeping you alive, and they've done so with all of these different ways. And I like to get into the biology of it, too, because I think that's another way that it can be super validating.

And I think there's a website that actually has a video where they talk about how if someone broke their arm and went to go get treatment, no one would ever shame somebody for going to the hospital to get a cast put on and get it reset and get medication for it, because it's a broken arm. Of course you need to get that fixed. But with trauma, when we get it so fragmented, in all of these bits and pieces, and it's only offered every once in a while, and sometimes it's in symptoms that feel out of the ordinary and like you can push through it — so why, you know, pay so much attention to it? — it's dismissed. And people don't often go — or it takes them a while, I should say. Maybe it takes them a while to sit in front of a therapist and start piecing all this together. But it's just like the broken arm. It's exactly like the broken arm.

You know, memories can come up in four ways. There can be the image — and the image may not even be the actual thing; it could be a representation —

Right.

— a belief, an emotion, and a sensation. And oftentimes with trauma survivors, and as humans, when you've been dismissed and you've learned to not trust yourself, it's really easy to especially think, "That didn't happen to me," right? And we often are wanting our brains to give us the explicit memory — and explicit is going to be this image, and I can play out the narrative. Most trauma is not going to be there.

And a big reason why is explicit memories are on the left side of the brain. Implicit memories are just sensation, emotions. So how you may know you're experiencing that is you're in a situation and you have no clue why, but all of a sudden you feel like, "I do not want to be alone with this person," and "I don't feel safe being alone with men." And you're like, "Where does that come from?" Or all of a sudden you just have this gut pain that is not explained medically, or intense anxiety or shame, or this belief of "I'm not good enough." These are implicit memories. And oftentimes memories are going to be in that form because when the trauma took place, it happened in a preverbal state. And what that means — it doesn't mean, "Oh, well, it happened when I was six; I knew how to speak." But you didn't have the language for what was happening.

Yeah.

So if you were sexually abused at six, you're not going to have the language to be able to say, "Oh, I was sexually abused, and this person disrespected my boundaries." And so oftentimes, if it's not acknowledged and it's not processed, it's going to continue to stay in that state.

Yes. And even in adulthood, Auriel — because I know you mentioned the preverbal, but help me along with this, because I'm going to do my best —

Yeah.

When we get into the neuroscience of it and we start talking about the parts of the brain — the amygdala, and what else? The prefrontal cortex. If we are in fight or flight, if we're in any sort of survival state, the brain has gotten some sort of sensory input saying, "Hey, we need to be on alert." So the amygdala fires up. That's our alarm system in the brain. Then our prefrontal cortex, which is supposed to do all of the smart decision-making, goes offline. But it has to make some sort of decision, so it's making that decision in a very altered state. When all of this happens, the hippocampus also goes offline, I believe?

That's a good question.

I think this is why I'm bringing it into conversation, because where we would expect to have some sort of narrative of the event, where we would say, "Oh, I can recount this trauma; it happened A, B, C, D" —

Yes. Yes.

— the reason why we can't do that is because the part of our brain that would encode a narrative memory —

Yes.

— is offline.

Yes. That is in the hippocampus. Yes.

Right. Okay. So I love this explanation because it's another really validating explanation for those folks who know something really awful occurred. Or maybe they don't remember the awful thing that occurred, but their body remembers it. And the reason why it can feel so hard to recount, or so hard to piece together — or they gaslight themselves because they don't remember the details of it — is because that brain of yours that was trying to keep you safe in the moment was doing everything it's supposed to do.

That's exactly it.

It doesn't fail us, but it makes things hard to access, because certain things went offline.

I think what can be encouraging for people to know is that you can do EMDR even if you don't have a lot of memory. And that's why I like to talk about the four parts of memory, because even though you may not have explicit memory, your body still holds 100% implicit memory from the day you were conceived, which is crazy to think about.

Wild.

And so when you are in those situations where you're like, "I have no clue why I feel so activated there," your body is experiencing a memory, and it may just be experiencing it more sensation-wise or more emotionally.

Or dreams. Dreams are a big one.

Yes. Dreams are going to also show what is needing to come up. And this is not woo-woo — this is legit. Our brain in REM is breaking down all the things that have happened in the day, and it's trying to encode it and make sense of it. And especially if you have stuff that's been stuck in the past, it would make sense. It's going to kind of go back and try and loop at it, to be like —

Yeah.

"So wait, what was this? How do we go with this?" You know?

Yeah. My favorite explanation for dreams — I forget what theory it is — is that when we're dreaming, our brain is basically opening up. It's walking into the file cabinet, and it's taking everything that happened during our day and saying, "Okay, now that we actually have some peace and quiet, let's look at everything that happened. Let's start filing it away. The things that we couldn't attend to during the day, now we're going to attend to them." And it starts opening up all the files and saying, "Okay, this goes there, and this one goes there." And as we're dreaming, we're trying to make sense of all of the files that it's opening, which is why we get these really wild stories.

I just think that is the most fun explanation for why we dream. And I also think it's the one that makes the most sense. Out of all of the theories of why we dream and how we dream, to me, our brain taking that information, filing it away, and bringing up old memories because they're in that file — and then we're trying to make sense of all of it — makes so much sense, especially after having worked with trauma survivors.

That's it. And I think if we go back to the adaptive information processing model, which is what EMDR is based off of — saying there's this adaptive information system in us. It wants to work things out. It wants to digest it. It wants to order it. It wants to work it — just kind of like how your body wants to heal the cut.

Right.

REM fits into that. REM is doing that. REM is saying, "Let me take everything from the day and all this, and we're going to make sense of it and encode it so you can continue functioning in the world." Right?

Yeah.

That's also why there's been research that says if you have a big test the next day, sleep.

Sleep.

Let your brain really encode that information you've been studying. Or after doing EMDR, your brain is still consolidating and working through that information for the next three days. And part of that is also what REM is doing.

It's amazing. It's amazing.

Yeah.

I'm glad we're emphasizing the healing power of sleep, because sleep really is so restorative. And for people who are experiencing some sort of mental health struggle, that's one of the first things I see go — their sleep.

Yep. And think about it. Sleep is vulnerable.

Oh, yes.

For you to be not alert — what if something happens again? It makes sense that that's often where it goes, especially if the trauma happened in the evening, you know? Our bodies are so cool. It will know and remember the timing of day, timing of the week, timing of the year the trauma happened. I have somebody who every September goes into a funk, but she's had multiple traumatic things happen in September.

Yeah.

You know, and so I've found that sleep is even worse whenever the trauma has happened near the middle of the night, or nighttime, and their brain is wanting to be vigilant. But even if it didn't happen at nighttime, the brain is wanting to stay in a vigilant state. It knows that it has to stay online to keep itself safe — to keep you safe. So it's a beautiful thing. And I know if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: our brain is designed to keep itself alive, and it will do —

Yeah — everything in its power to do that. Even at the sacrifice of sleep, or eating, or resting, or socializing, and all of these other things that we know are very, very good for us and keep us sane, it will sacrifice those things if it believes that there is a threat there.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that our conversation on what trauma is is probably going to be a multiple-episode one, because I'm thinking of some of the things that we got to touch on today: how trauma is stored, how memories can be, how symptoms may come up, what's big T and little T trauma, even the impact of caffeine and chronic illness in our culture, right?

Yeah. We can just keep building upon this.

But in summary, you know, through the lens of EMDR — or even just the adaptive information processing model — Shapiro, the creator of EMDR, will say anything that has not been able to be processed is, in a sense, traumatic. And so if your body is experiencing heightened levels of anxiety or depression, it's pointing to something that's not been processed. If you're feeling pain in areas that's unexplainable, it's probably pointing to trauma. All these things, like maladaptive ways of coping, are pointing to something that has not been digested, and therefore that situation was traumatic for the brain.

Because if the brain couldn't work through it, it's encoded it maladaptively. It's encoded, and it's stuck, and so the brain is going to continually get stuck on it and see it as traumatic. But I think what you and I are trying to explain here is that if it is stuck in the mind, in the memory, in the body — if it's something that you cannot shake, if it's something that is lingering, if it's something unexplained — that's how we describe something that the mind is holding on to in a maladaptive way.

Yep. And you don't have to go into "I have a diagnosis of PTSD." It's "I have a situation that my brain's just needing additional support with." Go back to: you're running, you fall, you cut your knee. You clean it up, but it's not healing, so it gets infected — and you thought it was just a cut. Well, for whatever reason, your body needs some additional support in that, so you needed to put Neosporin on it. In some situations, our body needs additional support in accessing that adaptive information processing system through EMDR. And sometimes it might even surprise you what your brain encodes as traumatic.

Right. Right. So don't listen to your Oura Ring. Just kidding.

Don't be so reliant on these things, especially if you're realizing how much you're checking it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Stay vigilant of the impact of your Oura Ring, not the information that your Oura Ring is giving you.

That's it.

And consider seeing an EMDR therapist. And if you're in the state of Texas, consider Loma Therapy, because we are live and in network with a bunch of different insurance companies, and we will run those checks for you. And yes, thank you, listeners, for listening to another episode of Bilateral Banter. If you liked this episode, like and subscribe, or follow us on Instagram or TikTok to see clips of Auriel and me talking about trauma.