when I discovered this it was transformative for me and transformative for my patients there are two kinds of people in life there are people who like have plans and goals and work towards those goals they're like I'm going to get up today and I'm going to like Advance towards my goals I want to accomplish this in life I'm going to get better at this and then there are the rest of us who are like I don't know how these people do it like I get up today and I struggle I use a lot of willpower
I try to create habits you know I'm trying to be like these people who are productive but my default state if you let me do what I want to do I'm going to do nothing now we we look at this and we're like how does this work are these people fundamentally different so trauma is the big difference here if we grow up in a traumatic environment there's actually something called the loss of the future Dimension so let's say I go to my parents and I say hey I'd like to have a birthday party can I
invite my friends over parents say sure next day parents are drunk they get mad at me they're like no birthday party so what will happen if you look at traumatic upbringing is that children can't plan for the future any kind of future that any kind of kind of autonomy that they express an abusive parent will shut it down like you know this is highly controlling parents too we see this so much in like Asian and South Asian cultures where parents are like you got to do this and you got to do this no dating you're
going to study you're going to learn piano so we're actually doing this is like we see so many gifted kids that stall later in life because in these upbringings we remove the the ability for autonomy when a child tries to express themselves we shut it down the second thing that happens is trauma is about surviving today so I was working with a patient who would be able to tell within the first 60 seconds to 5 minutes when their dad got home whether they were going to get beaten today and so what people when people grow
up in traumatic environments and it doesn't have to be physical abuse it can be highly controlling it can be even like children who are parentified is kind of traumatic where you have a a a parent who's very chronically ill and is depending on the kid to take care of everything that's traumatic too because then what happens is your brain looks at your day and there's no point in planning for tomorrow all of your brain's resources are about surviving today how do I not get abused how do I make sure that my parents don't notice me
children who grow up in traumatic environments learn to be invisible and so then something very important happens in the brain where it stops planning for the future because any plan for the future can change depending on whether your parent is drunk or not and then if I was going to have a birthday party I told all my friends and I got cancelled now that hurts so much so what what happens when we get traumatized is we go into survival mode we go into protective mode and this is even mirrored like physiologically where we have two
states of the body we have our catabolic state where we're breaking things down we're trying to survive the moment and we have our anabolic State when when we are building for the future so when I encounter a tiger and I get a burst of cortisol cortisol breaks down my muscle tissue to provide me with enough energy to survive we are sacrificing iing the future to survive the present and that happens on a physiologic level it happens on a mental level so when you grow up in a traumatic environment where you are punished for thinking about
the future you can't plan for anything because your home environment is so chaotic there's no rules no organization and you're focused on Survival that becomes baked in and what happens when these people grow up is that they are bound by external stimuli if there is some kind of pressure from the external environment then I can act but I cannot derive internal sense of motivation at all because now that there's an external deadline I have to survive that deadline so they go into this survival mode instead of this like being able to look into the future
mode and it's it's really crippling because it's fundamentally like the part of their brain that plans for the future has been disabled [Music]
