The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – 20 Ways to Break Free From Trauma: From Brain Hijacking to Post-Traumatic Growth by Philippa Smethurst

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

20 Ways to Break Free From Trauma: From Brain Hijacking to Post-Traumatic Growth by Philippa Smethurst https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Break-Free-Trauma-Post-traumatic/dp/1805013106 Philippasmethurst.com 'An important and insightful contribution to the mental health literary landscape.' - Alastair Campbell Trauma is a wound - one that we often hide from ourselves and others. Philippa Smethurst - a psychotherapist with decades of experience - has written this compassionate and practical guide to help you to understand, process and move beyond trauma. The book explains twenty common ways that trauma can show itself - from dissociation and anger to brain hijacking and trust issues - but also how you can move on from them. Drawing on the latest brain- and body-based research, this book uses stories, poetry and reflective exercises, to give you the guidance and tools you need.About the author Philippa Smethurst is a psychotherapist specialising in trauma. She has worked in the NHS and as an external supervisor for charities. She has written for many publications, including the BACP journal Therapy Today and The Psychologist, the journal of the British Psychological Society. She trained at the Metanoia Institute, and is an advocate for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Her aim is to make psychological information accessible and creative, particularly the more hidden and subtle aspects of trauma. "20 Ways to Break Free from Trauma", which she describes as a Trauma Kit for a general audience, was published by Jessica Kingsley in November 2024. The book has been endorsed by human rights advocate and trauma survivor Sir Terry Waite who has also written the foreword. Philippa has worked in the field of homelessness and has an interest in promoting the ideas on trauma gleaned from her study and long psychotherapy practice for trauma mitigation. She travels widely to talk about her book in webinars and in person at various institutions in UK including Oxford University, Edgehill University, Banbury Therapy Group and St Martin-in-the Fields, London.

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You can hear our guests is just clined to get on the show. She's the author of the latest book called 20 Ways to Break Free from Trauma, from Brain Hijacking to Post Traumatic Growth. November 21st, 2024, Philippa Smithhurst, or yes, Smithhurst joins us on the show with us today. We're going to get into it with her,

and we're going to learn about trauma. I got on Twitter today and got some trauma. Anyway, she is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma. She has worked in the NHS and as an external supervisor for charities. She's written for many publications, including the BCACP journal, Therapy Today and the Psychologists and the Journal of the British,

Psychological Society. Welcome the show, Philippa. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you very much, Chris. I'm really delighted to be on your show. We're delighted to have you, and then hopefully we're getting some sort of dragger hitting on the mic, if we could somehow just keep that contained there. I just figured you're so excited to be here. Well, I've been waiting a long time because I started at midday. That's true. You're coming to us from across the pond, as they say, over there. the pond in time zone difference went the wrong way and so it's been a 12-hour green room. Now keep in mind, we don't allow the King's English here because we are the Yankees. You know, we're the don't get fooled again, people.

Sorry about that. So no, no color with C-O-U-R. Okay, okay. I'll try very hard not to do that. God save the green. So, but give us your dot-coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Okay, so it's Philippa Smethurst, on L and 2Ps, smethurst.com.

That's my website. YouTube, Philippa Smathersst, Instagram, 20 ways to break free from trauma, 20 as in 20, X and Facebook, Philippa Therapy. LinkedIn, Philippa Smothers. Give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your book? So what's inside my book is complex thing. Trauma is wide, broad and part of the warp and weft of life. But what can we do about it? So the book distills and divides trauma into 20 different responses and is full of ways to tackle it, to think about it, to mitigate it. Yeah. That's really, it's really, it's really, Resources.

Is there anybody who, it's a toolkit. It's a toolkit so people can read your book and deal with 20 ways to break free from trauma. Is there anybody who, here's a good question for you, is there anybody who goes through childhood without trauma? Probably not. Probably not. So trauma is basically, my definition, is that it's something that's too much for us to deal with. So it overwhelms us. And so if I have here, I don't know how many people are going to.

to be watching. But if you think about this Coke bottle, so life shakes us up, right? So you get the, yeah, so you get the Fizz, and the FIS is what's left over. Oh. Right? So the FIS is the trauma. If we have things that are upset us, disturbers, we can recover, no lasting trauma. But sometimes things do last. Where does the Fizz go? That's the point of my book Is to look at that Where does the FISGO?

Where does the FISGO? Well, sometimes you open it, sprays all over you. That's probably... Exactly, exactly. And then you're just all sticky and tastes like Coke. That's an only fan channel out there somewhere, I'm sure. So basically, you help people with trauma. No, what was your experience in your life that...

And what, did you experience trauma and have to overcome it? Some people who go into psychotherapy do it because it's cheaper to, you know, learn to be a psychotherapist and deal with their trauma than to pay somebody else for it. What was your journey like? So, yes, I have my own trauma. It was framed, though, 40 years ago when I was living and working in China because I was working along with a lot of folk from America, from the U.S. That'll be a trauma, too, yeah. Yeah, in 1988 and 89 and teaching university students. And at that time, we were caught up in a momentous event in world history,

the horror of Chianaman when the government troops came into the square and opened fire on the protesters. You were there at that time? I was. I was teaching university students. It didn't happen to my students or me, but it was their siblings. Oh, yeah. It was their friends. And so what I noticed then, I was a young woman, I was, you know, 28 or something.

But I felt the raw despair and pain of those students as I sat with them because their hopes had been crushed. And I noticed one of your guests this week was talking about Mao's China. Yeah. So I was interested in that. So the raw emotions from this experience bearing witness to, to them and bearing witness to the unbearable was what led me to train as a psychotherapist. And actually also, four months felt like four years. So that's what drama does to us, too.

It scrambles time. And we'll get more into perhaps what I think the 20 ways are as we go through the conversation. But that was my start, really, to bear witness to somebody's pain and that makes all the difference. Yeah. That must have been soul crushing. I mean, that was such a typical moment in China and probably, you know, so many hopes were pinned on maybe there would finally be a revolutionary freedom or some sort of, you know, getting some more rights and to see it just crushed one of the wheels of a tank. I still think no one knows what, whatever happened to the guy who stood up to the tank, whatever happened to him, which is unfortunate. know but yeah and to see i think every year that china puts tanks in that square and make sure that

never recut re uh re happens again um yeah it's just it's just uh heartbreaking to think about so with trauma i mean we want people to buy the book so we don't need to give them all 20 steps they've got to have a tease out uh do you want to give us maybe some of your top ones or favorite ones uh yeah on on on trauma that people might be feeling out there you know Most people listen to the show and they get traumatized just from the hard intro with all the music and stuff. Well, I think that what I wanted to say is, well, that this should be trauma light. Because, of course, when we talk about things that are difficult and deep, sometimes our memories, you know, come back. So you need to be light touch about it.

And that's the point of the book that it's, you know, light touch, bite-sized chunks, little exercises and things like that. Yeah. So what are the things that I want to say are some of the top ones? Trauma takes us over, like a white water raft not being able to be in control of the currents, a sense of urgency and speed, looking at life through a window, but never really tasting it. Trauma scrambles time like me and Tiananmen, so then becomes now we can't easily flow into the future. Trauma makes us want to fight or flee away from pain or cover it, so we freeze it or we might freeze in fear like a deer in the headlight, hardly being able to breathe,

hoping that the bad thing will go away. We collapse under the radar into a hopelessness and submission. We can't get off the sofa. This happens in the animal kingdom as well. Our brains get hijacked so we can't think or process experiences properly or get fixed onto things obsessively. So we can't think with nuance or subtlety. Or we don't remember because, you know,

official word is dissociation. We don't associate with an experience. So we feel disconnected from the world, like seeing the world through a plate glass, or we get so lost in our own world of impulses that we cancel our own impulses and responses. And we silence our own cry, so they go deep inside. We might feel in pieces. We say, are you all in one piece, but you might feel absolutely fragmented and then rather like this jack-in-a-box, you know, parts that might be highlighted, might come out at times when we're not expecting them or where they're not in control of them. We might feel, of course, humans traumatise each other. So we might feel, of course, that other people have wounded us. We might need them, but still push them away or

be like a cat and mouse situation digging up the foundations of our relationship or we might feel to blame or worthless in a kind of default position with our hearts broken deep down we might get caught up in destructive cycles without being fully aware of it

or you know rather like me at Tiananmen Square we can become the overflow of other people's traumas Because trauma, this is an important thing, it's catchy. That's why I say we've got to be light touch about it, Chris, because it's catchy. One trauma touches another like dominoes, you know, that you stack up. So one early wound, like you said, the childhood wound gets touched. And then, you know, childhood adversity, other life ball, life curve ball comes towards us. And then we've got multiple traumas.

and then the last chapter which you'll be glad to know we've got to now chapter 20 which is twice as long as any other chapter is about something really special called post-traumatic growth its trauma can also build resilience and I've noticed this so many times in my work with folk it's the best job in the world when we talked about PTSD but post-traumatic growth is when a new purpose is come to where life feels because of what we've gone through we know what our confidence is in life we know what life means somehow and we're kind of more appreciative of it we've still got the trauma

but we've got something else going on like purpose and direction that's post-traumatic growth so I'm you know I'm pretty keen to spread this word about trauma as you've probably got the idea yeah most definitely spread the news

spread the awareness it's interesting how you know for a long time when I was younger and we didn't study trauma and of course we didn't have a lot of people on the show talking about it back then in 2020 we changed the format of the show from technology Silicon Valley and CEO interviews for business to all the authors in every sort of walk of life

and so then we started talking about trauma and before that you know I was like a lot of people I'm confused I'm like well, if something happened to you as a child, you know, a sexual assault or something or a experience, how come it, how come you forgot about it? And suddenly now you remember after 20 years. But now after doing all the interviews and studying it and different things like that, I understand that the mind, it's an overwhelm for the mind to handle it because you're so young at that age. And so it puts it away to give you safe keeping. And then somewhere down the line when it feels like maybe you have grown,

to where you can maybe handle the data, it serves it back up to you. And I imagine that, I mean, that's confusing for sometimes for victims and confusing for people who are like, wait, you know, how can we didn't bring this up before? Right, because what the brain does, it starts from the bottom of the spine upwards, and we know much more than we did 20 years ago, that it's the body and mine together. So from the bottom of the spine, there's a whoosh of arousal and activation, and then the limbic part of the brain is overwhelmed

yeah and the frontal lobe which you just referred to the part that can process can link can think can remember stuff is overwhelmed yeah and that can be forever it'll come back in little little little

pieces later on in the fragments yeah and it's really important trauma is because you know in the legal system we tend to think that people will be able to remember in a linear way. Oh, what happened to you? You know, ABC, they don't remember like that.

Especially under the stress of being in a legal situation, they remember in a fragmented way and then people think they're not telling the truth. So we have a long way to go, I believe, before we are trauma-informed and understand the weights. I think trauma, we have a need to know it and share it as humans because it's us. It's how we are. And most of us at some stage or other have experienced some kind of a more overwhelming situation, whether it's big T trauma, you know, the incident trauma that comes from nowhere.

Like a terrorist attack or a train crash that changes everything from before to after. That's one kind of, we call that big T trauma. But then there's little T trauma, which is the slow accumulated situational trauma, where somebody is dispossessed or treated badly or just fighting life on too many corners at once and that's cumulative trauma, small T trauma. And the effects of that are just as severe as the big T trauma,

but they can be overlooked because, of course, that's your experience, that's your normal. You might not even know you have trauma. There's so many people in my experience, in my understanding, going around in the world today, they don't know that they have trauma. They're locked into fight, flight, and freeze and all of the things that I'm talking about, but they don't know why. And this is my passion, I suppose, is to try to say, well, information helps.

Yeah. Information really helps. Yeah. The more you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes talking about your trauma helps, too, just like the bottle.

Coke, it probably helps to release the pressure, maybe? It can, but you've got to be ever so careful. You don't want to be necessarily retelling the story. We used to think, you know, in my profession, we tell the story, we will recover. It doesn't necessarily work that, because if we tell the story, we might reactivate that arousal. So what we need to do is to treat it very, I think releasing the Coke very, very, very slow. with awareness and support and the discharge yes can be released but the trauma will still be there

have I show have you heard of the the three the three jam jars so here's my first okay here's my first jam jar so it's a small jam jar with a tennis ball the tennis ball is the trauma you can imagine that the people who aren't seeing me live the trend This ball is nearly completely filling the jam jar. So this is trauma activation. Trauma, trauma, trauma, not much discharge, not much good stuff coming in, just the repetition of the trauma, the triggering. The second jam jar is a bigger jam jar, same size tennis ball.

So you've still got space to go, some discharge, someone new good stuff coming in not just trauma but trauma's pretty big yeah you're still going to be triggered you're still going to be going to be going to be going to be having those survivalist beliefs that tell you to do certain things to survive that's what trauma does but more space than the first one then my third jar is more of a kilnajar right I was broken too I know it's broken, but that just happened. Oh, they got hit by a lot of trauma. They haven't been able to replace the kill.

We need that glass to go to therapy now. But you get the idea, right? So there's so much other stuff, good stuff. We may still be triggered, but we know what to do when we are. We recover quickly, quicker. So that's post-dramatic growth. Yeah, that thing's been through a lot of trauma. It's kind of a good example of people who are broken, you know, from trauma.

Right, right, right. I often joke, and it's kind of a tongue-and-cheek joke, but I'm like, you know, the thing about if you have trauma and you trauma and you trauma, it's like two people, one person's got a box of broken glass, the other one's got a box of razor blades, and you're like, let's make a relationship and see if this works. Let's play with what we got. Oh, you got a razor blades? I got, I think you want to find, you know, if you got a box of razor blades, you probably want to find the person who has Band-Aids, maybe. Right, yeah. So, you know, the one thing you mentioned, too, that I thought was interesting.

I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about is how trauma stops or slows down times or makes our perception of time off. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, yeah. So it can work in some of a different way. So we can be arrested. by a trauma because that whoosh that I talked about

you know so we're stuck in the present think of a river that's got a kind of lock that stops the water flowing the path goes round and round on a loop that's what triggering is you know if somebody's had a terrible experience all they can think of you know they were with their husband one moment he went out and suddenly you know didn't come back

they remember the moment that he went they remember the moment that he was with them. That's the repetition. That's them stuck in the present. Not only that, they're thinking about the future. They're thinking, my goodness me, I can't face the future. The future's terrifying. I can't go out of my house.

So stuck in the past, stuck in the future, the future repetition. But the present is full of mind and body triggering. it's a misery because if you were shelled in Afghanistan you might feel that every time the doorbell goes you're in that arousal so it goes round

it's fight or flight it's like a kind of nightmare scenario to be so charged up but the subtle thing is and I've seen this a lot with people is that with this scrambling of time you can't necessarily feel confident about

the future going forward. Normally speaking, life goes on. We know this is in my zone, midnight, tomorrow will be tomorrow. I have a fairly confident idea about what that will be. Yeah, the sun that comes up. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what? With trauma, we don't have that confidence anymore. Oh, really? No, I don't think we do. We can often feel life itself we've lost confidence in it flowing forward us being a part of it

we're stuck we're really stuck in time so there is you know think about that with the pandemic you asked me about why I you know the book was yes framed by Tiananaman but it was actually started

in this pandemic why well because like everybody else 2020 happened and we had this scary, unknown thing that was coming towards us, like a slowly turning vice. Didn't know what it was. We had no vaccine on the cards at that time. And what did we do? Well, this is when I started to study trauma more deeply.

I mean, you have been studying trauma for years, but this is when I wanted to really study it because people were responding, Chris, in such weird and contrasting ways, weren't they? So either they were locked in time, like I was just saying, they couldn't go out of their house. They were thinking of the pandemic under every paving slab, terrified, or, and washing lemons. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I remember washing the groceries. Yeah. Or at the other end of the spectrum, people who had no sense of there being any danger whatsoever, going out. cavalier. This isn't applied to me. It doesn't matter. And in between those two polarities, so many different gradations. So that's when I started to write the book. First of all, I wrote a

small paper about trauma responses and saying what to expect and what trauma does to us. People found that helpful. And then the whole thing started growing into this book, which, you know, they say that the muse takes you when you are writing or you're an artist. And I used to think that was quite a pretentious thing, you know, the muse takes you. But you know what? It does. It took me over. I have to be careful because I talk about trauma and write about trauma so much. You've got to be careful of this live wire, right? Because it takes you over. But it had a life of its own. Yeah. And it's doing pretty well the book. We've sold quite a lot in the UK. It's been translated into Spanish for a US and South American audience.

out next year with a different this is the this is the look of the one the UK one we've got we've got a forward by Terry Waite who was a former hostage in the in the Middle East he was chained to a radiator for five years didn't know whether the next person who came into the room was going to you know end his life he took a lot of recovering from that since then he's an example of post-traumatic growth he's a guy who's starting three charities and he says that you know before he went to Beirut he was you know worried about his mortgage and things like that after coming back yes of course he had a lot of trauma like the you know the tennis ball in the in the

jar but he also had this fire to start have a purpose for his life so yeah that's awesome yeah yeah it's it's interesting how we can recover from that. So, if one has got trauma, how long on average, and this is an average, would you say it takes to fix this?

Like years? Are you supposed it depends on whether it's big, too, little? Depends on what, sorry? Maybe whether it's big, T, or little? Exactly, or the severity of the trauma, yeah. So if it's something relative, you think of ourselves

as layers, you know, we're layered. And trauma is, the Greek word for it is wound. So right at the bottom of us is the wound, right? But it may not be such a huge wound, right? So we might have had a small thing, relatively small thing that happens to it. We might go for a few sessions of EMDR, which is the eye movement desensitization. We may find that we recover no lasting trauma from a relatively short series of sessions. Many of the people I work with have. have multiple traumas. So we're talking about lifelong traumas from childhood, as things that you've mentioned earlier, you know, child's sexual abuse, neglect. And so, and then of course

life does its thing, curveballs, etc. So those kinds of traumas, I think we're looking at often this, living with this. There are lots of people who are broken in the world, you know, But with the information, with the kindness, with the reaching out to others, I think we can go for not necessarily recover or fixing it, but more living with it and almost being enhanced as a result of it. We were changed by it. You know, my book was going to be called trauma and inside job or trauma and inside story. That was the first title that the publishers have other ideas, right? But it is what's inside of us. But we can grow round. If you think about the wound of trauma being like a hole, what can grow around are beautiful plants around that hole. You know, the Japanese have this beautiful art form called Kinsugi.

Have you heard of that, Chris? No, I haven't. Okay. So if you take a jar, actually it happened with my big kilner jar, didn't it? So that's a perfect example. So imagine this is a jar rather than a glass vase. Okay. You break it.

You think it's for the dustbin, right? But no, what the Japanese do, and it's an old art from thousands of years, is they took up gradually, scooping into their hands, these broken pieces and reconnect them, yes, with glue. And, of course, then there's the... Then there's the, that you can see where the joins are. But this is the amazing bit. After they've glued them together, and I've gone on a workshop to do Kinsugi,

because I'm so keen on it, after you glue it together, you flick it with real gold. And so you have then a kind of mosaic piece. You'd imagine what that looks like. So it's a piece of porcelain, which is formed together, and all of the jagged pieces are gold. and it's more valuable, much more valuable. It's an art form than it would have been just as a pot. And that's Kin Suji. And I use this in my last chapter of 20 ways to say,

you know, our attitudes to ourselves of what we've gone through in our lives, our weaknesses, our fears, we can often be very, very self-critical. There are so many people I work with, people I know in my life who suffer with shame. him. That's another of the 20 ways. You know, we think that what's happened to us is our fault and we're culpable. So, for example, a man who's very sadly his brother committed suicide as a teenager. So this brother who was very close to the brother thought, do you know what? It is my fault.

I should have saved him. It wasn't a logical thing. Drummer is not logical, but it was a response and it was a belief. It was his fault. He was culpable. So he went through life, believing, do you know what? I need to make up for that. I need to compensate for that.

He had that charge going through him to do this. He was a medic. He was running down the wards. You know, every time the buzzer went, he was trying to fix people. It was having the turbo charge of trauma. And, of course, that took over and over, became addictive. He couldn't stop help. helping people. He was neglecting his own family. This is what happens with trauma. He gets us all

out of sync. It wasn't until he realized, do you know what? The trauma belief was, I have to fix people. It was because I was culpable. It wasn't until at the right moment, somebody said, it wasn't your fault. And he realized that with self-compassion, he could body and mind, treat himself with self-compassion and that charge of trauma then was was mitigated the tennis ball went down if you like it shrunk a bit and that's the kinsugi that's saying i am vulnerable i am you know have weakness i have i have fears i have pain i really really have pain losing my brother in that way i'll never ever get over it but i live with kindness towards myself I don't need to act from it.

I don't need to behave from that trauma. I can behave with knowledge about my trauma and really claiming my best life, living my best life, my Kinsugi post-traumatic growth. Does that make sense? Oh, it sure does, yeah. It's, you know, so did we establish a timeline for, do we establish a timeline for, do we establish a timeline? for what an average an else is to be to fix your trauma? No, we didn't.

And I avoided that. Okay. All right. I want to make sure. No, no. I think we could have just a few sessions of EMDR to fix and more light-touch trauma than there may not be much lessing legacy.

But with complex trauma and with cumulative trauma and some of the things that I talk about, which go back for years and years and years, we're living more about living with, more about living with and claiming the post-traumatic growth. So you don't recover, but you find post-traumatic life of a different quality. Yeah. With help from somebody who's a skilled helper like me, yes, or not.

And that's my passion. Everybody can afford psychotherapy. I don't know what it's like in the US, but, you know, it's a very much a mixed economy, whether you can get it, whether you can afford it, what's available, whether there are people who are good. So the idea of the book is to offer some ideas, keep our imaginations going about what helps for whom. It's a whole range of stuff, self-help and other kinds of help. So, yeah, that's it. Yeah.

So I think it's more living with the brokenness and then trying to make sure you believe in yourself, you know, to pay attention to what's good in life and to find others to support you on the journey. And that's why I think it's not just us that we need to fix, if you like. It's, it's an interweb. Do you call the interweb? Yeah, the interwebs, I call it. Yeah, the innerweb. Yeah, well, we're like. The tubes in the sky. Yeah, we're all connected.

Well, really, yeah. We're all connected, aren't we? Yeah, I think there was an Alaskin Senator several years ago. who said that he suggested that the internet's run through pneumatic tubes in the sky. And he actually believed that. So we're all that. It's kind of funny. So the reason I bring that up is because one thing I see in the marketplace and being

single, you see this a lot. There's a lot of people that instead of going to psychotherapy for trauma, you know, I see people, you know, you see a lot of women posting, I'm in my healing phase. And, you know, you talk to anybody. anybody who's saying they're in the healing phase is full of shit up to the airballs it's just projection and gaslighting i mean i suppose it makes them feel good like i i am in healing but one of the problems i see is these people that are doing healing with crystals and sound bass and breathing and well i'm not dispense disposing of those things that they don't make you feel good you know and maybe they're good for meditation

and, you know, stuff like that, it really isn't dealing with your trauma. Am I wrong there? Okay, nice, really nice question. Really nice question. So I think that sound baths, things that's soothing like that, there are many things, aren't that of that ill? Oh, yeah. I get vodka is pretty soothing too, but it's not going to fix my trauma.

That's a bit different. I make it worse. What those things do, those good things, like sound bass, like saunas, like saunas, like, hot warmth, you know, all those things, they take the activation down. If you go back to the Coca-Cola and the Fizz, they take the activation down the glass. They regulate the nervous system. Trauma is a mind-body thing. So they will help soothe us, but you're right that there's still going to be the tennis ball.

Of course, we can do stuff about that. The discharge of trauma might be helped by things like, cold water swimming. Have you heard of that as a trauma treatment? No, but it's not, oh, when they go in the bath? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cold bath, yeah, yeah. That's quite an interesting one because you've got the tennis ball,

you've got the charge, you've got that charge from the bottom of the spine upwards, and what it tells us to do is to move, to act to do something, right? but then we get cut on quartered now destructive cycles on our hamster wheels etc etc but what something like

wild water swimming does is it recognises that we need to move we need to express our fizz we takes us to the edge of that and then it allows us to

just do a little bit of that and then come back down. So we let up it out, we come back down. Of course, exercise can help with that as hugely. You know, after my Tiananmen experience, I used to go running. I've always been a runner, a runner. You know, it supports my practice because what I do is I'm sitting with a lot of people

who are traumatized. Of course, I take it in. What do I do with that? I need to do something. I need to move, move, need to discharge. I don't want to keep that fizz inside me. Otherwise, I can't do my work. I can't look after myself.

So basically you're just putting, I don't know, you're just putting a band-aid on a compound fracture if you're, you know, doing some of these other things with, you know, I think they can all help. Yeah, if you want to, if you want to do some crystals, great. But, you know, what I want to see is, you know, there's lots of people that go to the gym to for their trauma. And, I mean, that's great for a man. but uh and it's supposed it's healthy for everybody technically but it is kind of a masculine thing

uh you know i see people you know they're holding up pictures of their of their you know their astrology or they're holding up pictures of their crystals or i'm doing a sound bath and i'm in healing phase and it's and it's like no you're not you're not dealing with the problem and you're not fooling anybody i i'm glad it makes you feel good so cool beings, but you're still going to be the shit show in the next relationship you're in where everyone's going to be like, whatever, and then I'm going to have to hear how I was the narcissist the whole time and stuff like that. And that's kind of the other problem I think trauma has right now. It's got a lot of people hijacking it. Kind of like the term narcissist.

I don't know how you're familiar are with the singles dating market, but it seems like someone has decided there's a script out there and they're going to all adopt it where everyone's got trauma from dating chads and which they shouldn't be dating in the first place outside of their market tier on the dating market and then they you know they're dating the worst guys and they can't you know and somehow it's never their fault and you see this in dating I mean I've I've sat across from the dating table with women and there's like every guy the last 10 guys I dated were narcissists I'm like were you hanging out outside the narcissist clinic or what was going on like There's one consistent person in this whole equation.

And the trauma is the same way. They're like, yeah, my ex-boyfriend gave me trauma. What did he do? He told me I couldn't go out with a girlfriend's on girlfriend night because usually there's some hobaggery that goes on there. Oh, well, gee, what an asshole that guy was. Isn't it a shame in life if we get caught up in blame? It's externalizing something, like you say, isn't it?

But also that's a very trauma response. type of thing to do, to deny, to push away, to say, it's that, it's that, you know. So we can, I think we look at those things with compassion rather than blaming, right? They may not have faced their trauma. Yeah. Well, I'll be compassionate as I blame them. But, you know, perhaps it takes quite a lot of rounds of going through difficult relationships. until you become unstuck and then it takes however many times around that merry-go-round

to say the common denomination is me what is it what is my responsibility here let's look inside and pay attention you know john dunn the famous english theorist who the metaphysical poet apparently the thing that made people come to hear him when he spoke at sir paul's cathedral there are thousands of people before microphones and they all listen to him with bated breath and his big thing was pay attention pay attention to yourself i love that i love that because you know what you're talking about is people caught up on a roller coaster ride of behavior of of destruction sometimes but i think yeah it takes so many revolutions of that to say what do i do you know Is it me?

I mean, my chapter four is flight, which, of course, is running for the hills, pushing down pain and trauma through substance abuse, through, you know, changing my job scenario, country, every five minutes, anything rather than looking at myself. Isn't that human that we do that? Yeah. Yeah, we get locked into these survival. But isn't it also a bit ironic, like you say, Chris, that then people say, I'm fixing my trauma.

But then, yeah, so trauma, if you like, becomes a ubiquitous word, but she's too easy. It's not an easy fix. It's not an easy word. It's a complex thing. So even though I'm making a big thing, if you like, broken down and more straightforward, I'm still not saying it's a simple thing. I'll never say that. Yeah, definitely is awesome.

I mean, but I also think people need to understand that it can take a long time to fix. I talked to a psychiatrist one time about someone in my life that was narcissistic and, you know, clearly had narcissistic problems and tendencies. And I'm just not talking about, you know, there's a small percentage of the population that's narcissistic. Yeah. So it's like five. That comes from a wound as well, right? Yeah, about five percent. And, you know, his quote to me was, Chris,

It's going to take probably about five years to fix that person. And I had to make a decision to move on because I'm like, I don't have five years. You know, I'm expected to show up with my shit fixed. So everyone else is too. That's the standard by which we roll. And, you know, I used to try and fix women back in the day. Yeah, we don't do that anymore. We send you on your way and go, good luck, and wish you the best.

I don't, my life isn't a kamikaze trip or a, or I don't have born to lose. tattoos. So, you know, everyone's got to do their warm work and whatever. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's another really interesting trauma point that you've just raised right there, Chris, that actually, if we've had trauma, very often our boundaries have been violated. So, you know, I was talking about to somebody earlier today who's part of the movement for adoption apology. There's about 500,000 women in this country who had their babies taken from them in the 40s, 50s, 60s. And the government was part of it. And of course, there are very many broken people, the women and the adoptees, right? But they often feel this sense of not being able to keep separate themselves and another person. That's because their needs haven't been treated seriously. So they're kind of all of a mishmash with somebody else. There's not really a separation. And also they describe it as almost having like a membrane rather than a skin psychologically.

So if you think about your example there of narcissists getting involved and trying to fix other people, we can't fix another person, but we can easily get tangled into that attempt when we don't have a sense of our own boundaries. This is me, this is you. You do you, you do me. That's a really healthy place to get to. That's on my tender, too, by the way. Oh, is it?

Yeah, yeah. Oh, is it? You do me, I'll do you, something like that. I don't know what that means, but it's on my turn. Yeah. Post-traumatic growth, Chris, that is. Yeah. You know, I've never been to a sound bath, but I do quite like the idea of it.

Yeah, why? hosting all this stuff about how I'm healing and, you know, I'm using crystals and shoving them on my eardrums so that I can hear better on the sound bath. And you're like, I don't know, I don't know if you know how this works. But, you know, and I'm ready for, ready for my relationship. And you're like, yeah, I don't really think so, no. You know, and then I've seen some real bad shittery off the rails with unaddressed trauma and unaddressed emotional damage. Yeah.

Yeah. And to the point you're just like, you're going to, I mean, you should just probably marry a therapist at this point. That doesn't work too well. Yeah. My husband doesn't want to be fixed by me. No. And a lot of women fall into that category where they try and fix a guy.

They're like, I can fix him. I can, you know, and it's kind of the. Beauty and the Beast fantasy that women love so much, the stories that they're fed to them by through novels and Disney. But, you know, there's certain people you just, you know, I've learned in life, there's certain people you just got to go, yeah, I know, doing this with you. You can, I'm not here to save the world anymore. I'm here, I'm just barely saving myself at this.

Really, all it on, the little old me. I don't need, I don't need a weight put around my neck as I'm trying to swim. So there's that. What else haven't we talked about? We've been blathering on here for quite a while. What about some of stuff on your website, maybe workshops or events or things that you do for counseling and maybe coaching? So, yeah, I have a practice in London and Banbury. I'm doing quite a lot of podcasts, most of them UK, but it's nice to do one across the pond today.

I'm also doing quite a bit of writing articles for things. If you go to my website, you'll find a lot of stuff about that. I also have a newsletter, which I popped into your inbox once a month, which is me trying to apply my psychotherapy thinking, my trauma thinking, to things of the day to matters of the world. And that's going quite well. Yeah, so we're just spreading the word and getting it out. there. And if it helps a bit, I'm happy.

How can people work with you or get help from you and reach out to you? Yeah. So I'm fairly full in my practice. But if you want to be in touch with me, philippa smethers.com, that's my website, all about the book, but all about me and everything to do with my, my, my, uh, psychotherapy practice. Yeah. And the, and also the newsletters there as well. And I've seen your, uh, you know, people can buy the book. Of the YouTube channel as well, YouTube channel. Yeah. So if you want to have little tiny bite-sized chunks of what these 20 ways are, go to my YouTube channel.

Philippa Smothers, what did I call it? No, it's not that one. It's, yeah, Philippa Smothers' YouTube channel. And break free from trauma. And you'll find loads of material there just describing each of the facets of the trauma and what helps. one size does not fit all it's a pick and mix did you have Woolworths there in America

we've got it with them here but Woolworths used to have this thing where you did pick and mix with sweets you know yeah so it's a pick and mix variations of that at some of the stores that are out there yeah yeah yeah so it's a pick and mix situation one size doesn't fit all

sounds like my dating sounds like my dating thing at that pace so as we go out give people a final pitch out to order up your book. And, of course, taken any dot-coms you want them to look for. Okay. Trauma is part of the warp and weft of life. But what can we do about it? We look inside. We recognize the 20 ways. And there are lots of things we can do. Use our imaginations to pay attention and get some help. Don't say what's happened. Don't blame people.

what's happened to them. Yeah. A bit of compassion. Compassion. I used to be a musician, so sometimes repetition, rhythm helps as well to regulate ourselves and to bear the unbearable. Bear the imbearable.

That's why I listen to Metallica a lot. It helps with that depression and er, you know, getting stuff done and stuff. Anyway, thank you very much. for coming the show. We really appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. It's been delightful I'd be able to go to bed now because it's 1 o'clock in the morning. Oh, that's right.

All right. Well, folks, order up her book where refined books are sold. 20 ways to break... Let me recut that. 20 ways to break free from trauma, from brain, hijacking to post-traumatic growth

out November 21st, 2024. Thanks for much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com. Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss, One, the TikTokany, and all those crazy places to the internet, be good to each other, stay safe. We'll see you next time.

And that should have us out.