Introduction

I always knew about trauma, but only as a concept. You know, images of some homeless guy dodging imaginary gunfire.

Recently I realised just how much of my life – in fact how much of everybody’s lives – have been shaped or touched in some way by wounds of trauma.

The gunfire isn’t imaginary, it’s just invisible to outsiders.

It wasn’t until my first real relationship that I came face to face with trauma myself.

Though we were together for six and a half years, I never recognised what we were constantly fighting. It was scary and frightening. I lived in low grade fear, always waiting for a landmine to go off.

I see now, it wasn’t each other we battled – it was trauma.

Countless questions and accusations, countless unanswered calls and messages, countless arguments leading even to getting the police involved.

Learning about trauma as a crisis supporter was an incredible eye opener. The more I learned, the more I understood.

Odd behaviours that didn’t make sense began to shift in my mind, I learned to read between the words. I developed a sense of listening to the subtext. I learned to hone my intuition to help build powerful You Maps of people who struggled to label their own trauma (to learn more about mapping yourself and others, read my article on how they impact connection).

I’ve taken the skills and applied them with my friends, helping multiple people heal and process their wounds.

In the pursuit of becoming a better crisis supporter, I became a better person.

In this article I’ll outline a way you can think of trauma to offer you a powerful tool for developing empathy, growing imagination and deepening understanding.

Let’s begin.

Speaking and Feeling Mind

Inside each of us we have two Minds.

One for language, one for emotion.

The two minds are kind of at odds.

Speaking Mind can communicate with the outside world, it can process facts and put information into categories and impose structure over chaos.

Feeling Mind can intuit and allows us to experience sensation and emotion.

The gap between each becomes clear when we see how they remember stuff.

Listen to the Speaking Mind while it recalls a memory, it will tell you a somewhat analytical story. It might say ‘I went to the park, it was a good day with lots of people out. I fed the ducks and thought about the pet I had as a kid.’ Speaking Mind will tell us this thinking based story, making it’s judgements and rationally analysing.

Listen to the Feeling Mind while it recalls the same memory, it will tell you about the sensations. It might say ‘At the park the sun was warm on my skin, seeing young families together was so heartwarming. I fed the cute ducks and got reminded of how much I miss Smokey, my cat growing up.’ It makes judgements too but its focus will be on emotions and sensations.

Take a moment and think through the implications of the following; your Feeling Mind doesn’t speak in language of words.

In order for it to be understood, your Feeling Mind requires your Speaking Mind to translate direct sensation into words.

This slippery fact plays out literally in the hardware of your brain, for an example lets zoom into recall in more detail.

Speaking, Feeling And Memory

If you actively recall a memory, your language system lights up.

You can talk about the memory and tell a story. This memory is explicit. Overt. You’re like the conductor of the Speaking Mind Orchestra, telling which sections to rise and which ones to fall.

Essentially, we can bring up memories on purpose.

Your Speaking Mind uses the same language as you.

And yet, notice how people don’t get triggered on purpose? It always seems to be out of their control, right?

Same with you I’d bet.

Use that active recall to remember a time you ‘flipped the lid’ and lost your cool. Maybe you got cut off in traffic, maybe you had an assignment or deadline you didn’t think you were going to make, or your partner was acting sus after coming home late..

Well, remember about how your Feeling Mind doesn’t have access to words?

What option do you think that leaves it for when it wants to recall a memory?

Your Feeling Mind only speaks the language of emotion.

In other words, it only recalls slippery memories that come up in the form of feelings, sensations and experiences.

Feeling Mind only has implied memories, associations between situations and sensations. That’s how feelings happen without us knowing why.

Stay with me, I promise we’ll gain an excellent frame of reference for navigating when trauma is at play (in others and yourself!).

Let’s take a deep dive and illustrate the Feeling Mind with precision… by looking at babies.

Why Are Babies Such… Babies?

When you’re tiny, like, fresh out of the oven kinda tiny, your brain doesn’t work like other peoples.

It hasn’t made connections yet.

All that grey matter, it’s like a brand new phone that doesn’t even have the operating system installed.

So what comes pre-installed in the human bio-computer?

Feeling Mind.

Babies don’t have any access to Speaking Mind! It requires experience, training, conditioning, socialising, lots of things have to be installed in order for Speaking Mind to come online!

But Feeling Mind, also known as Lizard Brain, comes pre-installed at birth…

So not only do babies have full ten thousand watt access to their emotions, but they soon get to have the delightful realisation that they are missing something vital!

Ever seen a baby struggle to communicate? Watching them know exactly what they want but unable to communicate it can be hilarious and heartbreaking.

You can see the Feeling Mind light up like fireworks; frustration, anger, sadness, all of them fly by in a flash.

Babies are slaves to their Feeling Mind. And so are you.

Feeling Mind, Your Inner Puppet Master

To recap, when implicit memories get triggered, they happen beneath your conscious awareness.

They’re the reason you flip the bird at bad drivers, or yell at your kids, or pick fights with your partner, or… you get the idea.

Let’s zoom in.

Getting ‘triggered’ is another way of describing your Feeling Mind going haywire.

What exactly happens when you get triggered?

Fight, flight, freeze and fawn all take lots of energy so your spine shuts down some functions and boosts others. When the survival part of your brain lights up with activity to help you, rational and conscious parts get shut down.

Your Feeling Mind is the string puller. It brings up feelings and sensations that were encoded in the past. Implicit memories.

Do you ever wonder why people get the same results over and over? The same shitty relationship for example, despite their constant whining about wanting better. Or the same crappy dynamic with their boss no matter how many jobs they change.

It’s almost as though they try to change everything around them and never want to change themselves.. Well that makes sense because change is incredibly difficult.

These patters repeat because when Feeling Mind recognises familiar settings, it brings up familiar feelings. Sensations that are hard to understand, for example suspicion, anger or even attraction toward someone (maybe who doesn’t deserve it, or deserves much less than your body’s response).

When you get triggered it doesn’t make sense to you, because it actually doesn’t make sense.

Your body isn’t responding logically to the stuff around you. It’s responding with emotion, to the stuff inside you.

In other words, your heart is racing because your Feeling Mind recognised a cue from real life. Maybe it noticed a familiar dynamic. Something it had seen when it was very impressionable, like, say… as a baby.

Ever wonder what the big deal is with ‘attachment styles’?

Attachment styles are basically the first apps your parents installed in your brain when you were a kid.

If you got lucky, your parents only gave you the good stuff. If you didn’t, like my ex and I, you got the nuclear combo of Suspicion in one and Dishonesty in the other.

So let’s look at how our parents install garbage into our bio-computers as children.

Speaking Mind, Your Inner Parent

The way your parents related to you while young influenced how you relate.

Not just to others, but yourself too.

The voice you use in your head to speak to yourself is modelled from the voice others used to talk to you and to each other.

If your inner voice is emotionally intelligent it probably learned compassion, empathy and understanding. If your inner voice hasn’t developed skills of Mindsight it probably talks to you like an asshole in one way or another.

It’s your choice how you decide to live with your Speaking Mind.

Do you actively, intentionally listen to it?

Do you tell it what to say to you? For example when you feel disappointed or let down?

Or does it run like an endless monologue just yammering in the background?

The more you can actively train your hearing to tune into it, the more you’ll be able to catch the weird crap your parents and other people installed before you had any say.

That sense of tuning in is the first step in unwinding trauma. It’s a long journey but with some good books and good people around you, it’s amazing how much you can transform in even just a few years.

How Do You Use Speaking Mind to Influence Feeling Mind?

This is where most people will turn away. Will you?

Change sucks. You gotta balance acceptance of where you are, with desire for where to want to be. Not an easy road to walk.

Yet integrating the implicit memories of the Feeling Mind is actually nowhere near as hard as it seems.

Integration boils down to making a mess and cleaning a mess.

As we unpack our Feeling Mind… sensations and implicit memories will continue to spill all over the place.

Meaning, as we begin to clean our mind, we actually have to make more of a mess.

By labelling these feelings accurately with Speaking Mind we paint in the dark spots on our Me Map.

In other words, we have to develop the emotional intelligence to first perceive, then acknowledge and finally unpack our implicit memories… By giving voice to Feeling Mind!

The best way to do so is by getting yourself someone who helps you update your Me Map. For example a friend, family member, therapist or mentor. If you’re genuinely dealing with trauma or struggle please make sure your map helper is familiar with trauma informed care.

If you want to develop your insight and fill the dark spots on your Me Map, join my mailing list and I’ll send the best tools to help you take courageous action today.

Next after that is to externalise your internal stuff so that you can see it, hear it, read it. This gives you room to stand back and observe yourself.

How you talk to yourself is your choice.

Summary / TL;DR

So in conclusion; between your Speaking Mind and Feeling Mind is a conflict. You have control over the explicit memories of your Speaking Mind. Implicit memories of Feeling Mind meanwhile, have control over you. Until you can integrate the sensory and experiential memories of feeling triggered, they will keep running automatically when your lizard brain perceives danger.

It’s difficult work to make a change, but you can do so today by finding and engaging good support, or spending time in reflection.

I hope this has helped offer you some perspective about trauma and triggers.

It’s exactly the information that would have changed how I saw my ex during all those massive fights, the confusion I had, the resentment and fear and so many other things.

If I’d understood we were fighting the invisible ghosts in the machines of our memory, I believe I would have held a lot more compassion and grace for her and also for myself.

It’s my hope you can use this understanding the way I do now, extending non-judgement to my friends, family, colleagues and especially myself when someone gets triggered.

Knowing it’s never as personal as my Feeling Mind wants me to believe – changes how I view the struggle, allows me more room to respond rather than react and focus on building reciprocity while navigating boundaries.

Understanding is not about excusing poor behaviour. It’s about making sense of it to see with better clarity.

The better you can do that, the better you can support those you care for with true non-judgement.