BONUS EP 4: The Science of Storytelling for Trauma Recovery

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

Speaker 4 Where did that story come from?

Speaker 5 Book?

Speaker 6 Dream? Nope, it came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time.

Speaker 10 What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch?

Speaker 6 Unlock your child's imagination.

Speaker 9 imagination.

Speaker 11 Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI exclusively at Costco.

Speaker 12 It starts like any other night.

Speaker 13 The glass of red, the cozy blanket, then the drop.

Speaker 15 The stains so dark, so stubborn, it might as well have been a crime scene.

Speaker 18 But this isn't your average couch.

Speaker 19 This is Anna Bay.

Speaker 21 Fully washable, unspeakably comfortable, and ready for whatever your life, your kids, or your ex throws at it.

Speaker 14 And here's the kicker.

Speaker 17 Starting at just $6.99, you can make sure your sofa isn't part of the problem. Fully washable, stain-resistant, and built to hide even the darkest offenses.

Speaker 14 Right now, get up to 60% off in Black Friday savings because no one should have to live with a stain that won't quit.

Speaker 24 Annabe, the only mystery you won't be losing sleep over.

Speaker 22 Shop washable sofas.com today.

Speaker 23 That's washable sofas.com.

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Speaker 1 I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is a special bonus episode of Betrayal. Our team loves to dive into the science and psychology behind betrayal and the trauma it can cause.

Speaker 1 We often talk about the power of storytelling as a tool for healing. So we got curious about how the science of storytelling really functions in trauma recovery.

Speaker 1 That's how we found applied neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, Dr. Kate Truitt.

Speaker 29 An applied neuroscientist straddles the line between what's going on in the labs, what I call the ivory tower of the educational space, and the clinical realm.

Speaker 29 I view myself as a translator of the brain to best help people connect with what's happening in their mind-body system.

Speaker 29 I specifically focus on the brain areas tied into both trauma and empowerment.

Speaker 1 Dr. Truitt also has her own clinical practice in Los Angeles, where she sees clients who've experienced trauma.

Speaker 29 The through line though and what really, really lights me up is helping people disseminate the impact of trauma and better understand the weird painful experiences that happen in our mind-body system when we've been deeply harmed.

Speaker 1 She's very open about her own lived experiences. and how they impact her work.

Speaker 29 I'm also a survivor. I am a survivor of traumatic grief.

Speaker 29 I was widowed a week before my wedding, and I'm harnessing my own vulnerability and knowledge of neuroscience to shine the light on how change and healing is possible.

Speaker 1 I wanted to start by asking Dr. Truitt what trauma really is in a clinical sense.
For instance, what makes something a traumatic experience to our brains?

Speaker 29 When I look at trauma through the lens of neurobiology, I like to distill it down to the concept of threat, safety, or a lack of safety.

Speaker 29 Because we can experience something that feels threatening, such as getting on a roller coaster and plummeting at the earth at a very, very high rate of speed, but also knowing that supposedly if the engineers did their job, we're okay, so therefore we're safe.

Speaker 29 If that's the case, and we like roller coasters, then it's not traumatic.

Speaker 29 On the other hand, somebody who gets into the same roller coaster, maybe totally safe, hates roller coasters, but is forced to get on that roller coaster and ride the roller coaster, that could be very traumatic because there's no choice.

Speaker 29 So, threat in and of itself is a critical through line of what makes something traumatic. It could be threat to life or perceived threat to belonging, lovability,

Speaker 29 threat to one's ability to make choice in their life, to have agency, or threat to the baseline, safety.

Speaker 1 There's one part of our brain responsible for processing safety. It's the amygdala.
Dr. Truitt actually personifies the amygdala.
She affectionately calls her Amy.

Speaker 1 By making the amygdala into a character, that can help us see its reaction as separate from who we fundamentally are.

Speaker 29 Our little friend, Amy the Amygdala, who, that's what I do call her Amy the amygdala. The amygdala is a part of our brain whose primary job is to keep us alive.

Speaker 29 And when we feel threatened, she's assessing in our brain these core values of, am I safe? Am I lovable or do I belong? And can I create change or what I call be successful in my life?

Speaker 29 And if there's a direct threat to any of those values, then there's the possibility of something being encoded in our brain as traumatic.

Speaker 1 Sometimes the amygdala struggles to determine the size of a risk. And it can be activated in all kinds of situations.

Speaker 29 Now, there's this concept in society on social media in the clinical realm of big T versus small T trauma.

Speaker 29 Big T trauma being something that we just lived through here in Los Angeles, these fires, or any natural disaster, or a direct assault, or something that is very clear that if you told another human this happened, societally that other person would say, yeah, that's definitely traumatic.

Speaker 29 Small T trauma are often just as impactful, but they're missed in the trauma dialogue, and they create ongoing traumatic stress as well in the system.

Speaker 29 But there's things that directly threaten those core values in more subtle ways, such as course of control, feeling assaulted or humiliated or intimidated all of the time in ways that don't leave an actual mark, perhaps on the body.

Speaker 29 Those small T traumas can be just as impactful on how the mind-body system is experiencing and processing data.

Speaker 29 Whether it be a big T or a a small T trauma, when those experiences happen, it fundamentally changes the way our brain and our body are making sense of the world around us.

Speaker 1 What the amygdala considers to be a threat changes all the time based on the things we experience.

Speaker 29 One of my favorite examples of this is if we go back to February of 2020. If somebody sneezed,

Speaker 29 then it may have been a simple, kazunte, bless you.

Speaker 29 Not an entire fearful mind-body reaction to, oh my gosh, is that person sick with a virus that could kill us? Fast forward to August 2020, a sneeze for many people had a very different connotation.

Speaker 29 That's a type of neuroplasticity known as stress-induced structural plasticity. Now, sitting here in 2025, a sneeze for many people, once again, is just a sneeze.

Speaker 29 That's how our brain is supposed to respond to threats and then also

Speaker 29 unlearn threats when it's no longer actually threatening to us.

Speaker 1 Whether we're aware of it or not, our amygdala is always reacting to experiences. Dr.

Speaker 1 Truitt says that traumas that occur in early childhood, even ones we're too young to remember, can still have a strong impact on the amygdala's sense of safety.

Speaker 29 When we're living in a state where there is constant internalization of fear, of trauma, where our brain has learned and started to design itself around traumatic experiences.

Speaker 29 Even if the trauma is no longer happening, the traumatic event might have been, you know, for two years during one's childhood, but if those two years were impactful enough, the brain is still going to be harnessing and utilizing the neural pathways set down during those childhood years.

Speaker 1 Regardless of the degrees of trauma we experience, it always takes a toll. Trauma exists on a spectrum, and so do the effects.

Speaker 29 It's a rewiring of our mind-body system into feeling chronically unsafe. Oftentimes too, though, it becomes an internalization.
It changes how we experience ourselves in the world.

Speaker 29 We start having negative viewpoints on our capacity, our lovability.

Speaker 29 We start feeling as though there's something wrong with us, we're shameful, or that we're a chronic failure, we can't make change in our world.

Speaker 29 Our body may be rewired into a state of chronic stress or vigilance, meaning that all of a sudden our gastrointestinal system simply stops functioning the way it used to, which is a part of a trauma response, or we can't sleep very well or feel rested when we're sleeping.

Speaker 29 So the impact of whether it be big T or small T trauma happens in many, many layers across the course of our mind-body functioning.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating to hear her unpack how one event in our lives can impact our brain wiring and how it can also put our body in trauma mode.

Speaker 1 So without proper intervention, we could stay in that state for the rest of our lives. It can keep us from achieving our goals or experiencing joy.

Speaker 29 The really good news about our brain is it's changeable. It's plastic.
That's where the buzzy word neuroplasticity comes from.

Speaker 29 Because of neuroplasticity, we can help the brain carve new neural pathways and strengthen the ones that we want while either desensitizing the ones that we don't want or even helping the brain shift through and release the ones that are anchored in by trauma and creating space for new learnings going forward, a new way of being in the world.

Speaker 29 And we can play a very active role in that when we know how.

Speaker 1 And a lot of Dr. Truitt's work is teaching people how.

Speaker 1 After we have a traumatic experience, our brain starts to develop a story, a narrative to explain explain what happened and how it happened. We can become very attached to that story.

Speaker 1 For example, if your partner has an affair, your brain's initial story might be, I'm not good enough. But here's the thing.
Oftentimes, our brain writes this story while we're in trauma mode.

Speaker 1 And the first draft is full of self-blame.

Speaker 29 What that looks like at a neurobiological level is when our little friend Amy the Amygdala, when she starts looking at the world through a lens of threat,

Speaker 29 she disrupts the story-making parts of our brain, such as our hippocampus, where she focuses on memory reconsolidation, our thinking brain, which is our prefrontal cortex, which helps us pay attention to things and make decisions.

Speaker 29 The amygdala changes the capacity of those other parts of our brain to function in a balanced, resilient manner.

Speaker 29 And instead starts pulling all of our other brain brain parts into a direction of survival mode, threat-based looking at the world through those trauma glasses.

Speaker 1 And when the brain is stuck in that survival mode, seeing through trauma glasses, this is what it can feel like.

Speaker 29 The world is scary,

Speaker 29 or it could be, I'm a bad person.

Speaker 29 I make bad things happen.

Speaker 29 It could be, I am not deserving of love. Whatever the brain has learned is the thing tied into what is painful, scary, or hard.

Speaker 29 And the amygdala reinforces those types of stories over and over and over again.

Speaker 29 The more those stories get to exist within our neurobiology, the stronger they become, which means they can start to feel like truth.

Speaker 29 So the impact is pretty profound, and the stories are still going to be happening. It's just that the stories are being written by a very unkind narrator.

Speaker 1 Part of Dr. Truitt's approach is understanding the amygdala's response and even empathizing with it because its biological intention is to keep us safe.

Speaker 29 That's the irony about Amy the Amygdala. She can be very disruptive in how she guides our brain in order to keep us alive.
But fundamentally, she does really have our back.

Speaker 29 And that's the opportunity in the neurobiological healing work and integrating that with meaning making and simply storytelling.

Speaker 1 We are wired to make stories, but we're also allowed to revise the story our brain writes.

Speaker 29 There's a lot of very effective different types of intervention for trauma because as humans, we're narrative creatures.

Speaker 29 And until we can support the system in changing the narrative, the meaning making of what has happened, the system can continue to be paralyzed or run by the pain of the past.

Speaker 29 And we're always going to be leaning into the meaning making, which is is fundamentally the story that our brain has around what happened and identifying new opportunities for finding escape from what feels inescapable.

Speaker 1 After the break, Dr. Truitt delves into specifics about storytelling as a tool for trauma recovery.

Speaker 2 Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

Speaker 4 Where did that story come from?

Speaker 5 Book?

Speaker 6 Dream? Nope, it came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time.

Speaker 10 What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch?

Speaker 6 Unlock your child's imagination.

Speaker 11 Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI exclusively at Costco.

Speaker 12 It starts like any other night.

Speaker 13 The glass of red, the cozy blanket, then the drop.

Speaker 15 The stains so dark, so stubborn, it might as well have been a crime scene.

Speaker 18 But this isn't your average couch.

Speaker 19 This is Anna Bay.

Speaker 21 Fully washable, unspeakably comfortable, and ready for whatever your life, your kids, or your ex throws ahead.

Speaker 14 And here's the kicker.

Speaker 17 Starting at just $6.99, you can make sure your sofa isn't part of the problem. Fully washable, stain-resistant, and built to hide even the darkest offenses.

Speaker 14 Right now, get up to 60% off in Black Friday savings because no one should have to live with a stain that won't quit.

Speaker 24 Anna Bay, the only mystery you won't be losing sleep over.

Speaker 22 Shop washable sofas.com today.

Speaker 23 That's washable sofas.com.

Speaker 30 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.
The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 30 So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer.

Speaker 30 The investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 31 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 7 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 28 I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know.

Speaker 7 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 32 Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 7 My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 33 I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 34 They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

Speaker 7 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

Speaker 5 America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happen

Speaker 5 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 7 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 7 And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 We're talking with Dr. Kay Truitt, who's an applied neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and educator.
Dr.

Speaker 1 Truitt says that when it comes to identifying the stories your brain has written about trauma, you can take the first step on your own.

Speaker 29 Journaling is proven scientifically to be an incredible way to help integrate our story. Putting something on paper is a way of honoring your own story and your own truth.

Speaker 29 Sharing our journaling, sharing our story in a healthy way also can be incredibly healing. It can also be very vulnerable to journal.

Speaker 29 We can be tapping into sensory data that's tied into our traumatic experiences.

Speaker 29 Sharing our story can be incredibly vulnerable, and our amygdala may have fears around being rejected or feeling even more isolated after sharing.

Speaker 1 But working through that fear and vulnerability is part of the process. Dr.
Truitt helps her clients develop tools for navigating the difficult feelings that come up when they're telling their story.

Speaker 29 The main focus that I always recommend to my clients, friends, colleagues, anybody when we're doing this type of work independently is to also have a toolkit of self-regulation tools next to us in case we tap into something that carries a lot of emotional weight as we're journaling.

Speaker 29 And so if we have our self-regulation tools on hand as we're journaling or writing or sharing our story, we can actually proactively heal any of those reactive responses that are coming up.

Speaker 29 And one of my favorite tools for this is an exercise I created a long time ago called Creating Personal Resilience for the Amygdala, CPR for the amygdala.

Speaker 29 As we're doing our narrative work, as we're journaling, if we're noticing our amygdala starting to get reactive, it's just time to push pause and take a breath and utilize something known as mindful touch in order to downregulate the brain.

Speaker 1 Mindful touch is a meditation practice of clearing your mind, bringing your awareness to your body, and gently running your hands together or running your hands over your arms like a hug.

Speaker 1 It's a way to ground yourself and help calm down your amygdala. It seems simple, but this practice can build a sense of safety around traumatic memories.

Speaker 29 It's a way of saying this happened rather than holding it inside, of acknowledging the pains of the past and starting to create a new way forward, imagining different outcomes, creating a way that you would like to respond or react to something.

Speaker 29 We can help this system find ways to re-narrate and free our brain of being stuck, locked into what happened, and know that, hey, we're not there anymore.

Speaker 1 Another important step in this process is detaching from labels.

Speaker 29 A tooler exercise I do with my clients quite a bit is to have them notice the difference between the statement, I am an anxious person versus I am experiencing anxiety.

Speaker 29 As humans, we tend to label ourselves. And when we give ourselves big emotional labels, it's hard for our mind and our body system to dig ourselves out of that label.
I am bad. I am depressed.

Speaker 29 I am unlovable. I am unworthy.
I am powerless.

Speaker 29 Our brain buys into that as a self-identifying component of self, as opposed to saying, I'm feeling powerless in this moment, which then creates space for the brain and the body to go, oh, I can do something to feel more powerful right now.

Speaker 29 What might that be? Oh, I can control my breath. Oh, I have control over that.

Speaker 29 Or I am experiencing anxiety, which creates the opportunity to zoom out a little bit and say, why am I feeling anxious? Which immediately starts.

Speaker 29 A positive neuroplastic experience of being curious, which gives us dopamine and opens up our visual sphere, both internally and externally, to seeing a larger picture around us.

Speaker 29 And the value in that is

Speaker 29 there's space for curiosity and even possibly beginning to move into a state of self-compassion and deeper self-awareness and self-acceptance, which fundamentally is a critical part of healing through trauma.

Speaker 1 Certain labels have more power than others. like the label a victim.
It's a word that comes up a lot in our interviews. It's a polarizing and emotionally charged label.

Speaker 1 Some people adopt it, others reject it.

Speaker 29 A common label that I hear is the idea of, I am a victim, or the polarizing opposite, I'm not a victim. And I can see a lot of damage potentially being done on either side of the aisle.

Speaker 29 If we are a victim and that is the label that we're putting on our mind-body system, it can feel what we call in psychological terms very much of having an external locus of control.

Speaker 29 Things happen to me, I am powerless, and I cannot create change in my world. And for the amygdala's core values, you can possibly tune in there that Amy's going to hate that.

Speaker 29 And when she really feels powerless or weak, she's going to create a way of interacting with that statement for the good, the bad, or the ugly, but however it shows up for her to keep us safe.

Speaker 29 Oftentimes that can mean isolating or creating ways of being in interpersonal relationships that are not preferable or are unhealthy for us. The flip side of I am not a victim, again, great.

Speaker 29 If you're not a victim, that's fine. But if that's a trauma reaction, it can bypass the reality of things happen out of control.
Scary, difficult, painful things did happen.

Speaker 29 And the mind-body system wasn't in control in those moments.

Speaker 29 And so the label of victim in and of itself becomes self-identifying and either side of the aisle, I don't believe it's supportive or helpful for my clients or anybody in the world to have an I am statement in one direction or the other.

Speaker 29 When we look at the term of victim, it means something has happened that was really bad. And it's a concept.
It's not a label. It's not a self-identification.

Speaker 1 Still, having a word for that experience and the changes it caused can be a way to acknowledge that it happened.

Speaker 29 In the field of survivalship, when working with trauma survivors, we've taken victim off the table. Because when we're a survivor, it's giving an acknowledgement to that something did happen.
So, yes,

Speaker 29 there was a moment where I was a victim of something really bad happening. And I'm standing here right now.
I made it through. I have survived.

Speaker 29 And therefore, there's space to look at what happened and to build through survivalship into resilience and empowerment.

Speaker 1 A major barrier to building resilience and empowerment is shame. Dr.
Truitt explains where shame comes from and why we hold on to it so tightly.

Speaker 29 Ah, shame, shame, shame, shame.

Speaker 29 Our brain can be a shame junkie. And shame is fundamentally a feeling of being flooded with a lack of self-worth, feeling completely and utterly like somebody is bad.

Speaker 29 They are broken at their core and they are bad. And the interesting thing about shame is our little friend Amy the Amygdala loves it.

Speaker 29 When she's feeling shame, she's like, there is something clearly not okay here. And she gets to make up even more stories about

Speaker 29 how we are bad. Believing that she's keeping us safe, she really does have her best interests at heart.
But feeling shame or feeling bad or broken for Amy the Amygdala actually gives her power.

Speaker 29 It helps her feel like she has agency and choice.

Speaker 29 I know it's weird, and it's real.

Speaker 1 Shame is baked into our brain's normal functioning, and it's something we have to learn to work with.

Speaker 29 The problem is hindsight's 2020.

Speaker 29 And so we can look back and see every flag that was missed and hold ourselves accountable for it. And when I say hold ourselves accountable for it, of course it's not us.

Speaker 29 It's our little friend Amy the Amygdala spinning up a narrative of saying, see, you missed that. That's your fault.
That's your fault. That's your fault.
That's your fault. You missed that too.

Speaker 29 Aren't you so bad? How'd you fail on that account? What's wrong with you? So on and so forth.

Speaker 29 Again, all as a way to create internally a sense of safety.

Speaker 29 Because when we're self-flagellating, when we're beating ourselves up and holding ourselves responsible for things that we could not control, did not know about, did not see, our amygdala is saying, remember it.

Speaker 29 Remember it because you don't want this to happen again.

Speaker 29 And so this is her way of being a looky loo when there's a car accident on the freeway.

Speaker 29 People slow down, yes, perhaps for the safety of the passengers in the car accident, but also people look because the brain's going, I need to learn something over there.

Speaker 29 Our Amygdala's version of doing that with shame and trauma is to do a hindsight review and have 20-20 vision about every single thing we missed and hold us accountable for it so we don't get into danger in the future.

Speaker 36 You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs.

Speaker 6 Is your child having conversations you never imagined?

Speaker 9 Are they learning without realizing it?

Speaker 11 It's not a tablet. It's not a toy.

Speaker 8 It's Miko Mini Plus, the AI-powered companion that turns curiosity into endless learning.

Speaker 6 Hear the future of playtime.

Speaker 8 Meet the extraordinary Miko Mini Plus, only at Costco.

Speaker 12 It starts like any other night.

Speaker 13 The glass of red, the cozy blanket, then the drop.

Speaker 15 The stains so dark, so stubborn, it might as well have been a crime scene.

Speaker 18 But this isn't your average couch.

Speaker 19 This is Anna Bay.

Speaker 21 Fully washable, unspeakably comfortable, and ready for whatever your life, your kids, or your ex throws at it.

Speaker 14 And here's the kicker.

Speaker 17 Starting at just $6.99, you can make sure your sofa isn't part of the problem. Fully washable, stain resistant, and built to hide even the darkest offenses.

Speaker 14 Right now, get up to 60% off in Black Friday savings because no one should have to live with a stain that won't quit.

Speaker 24 Anna Bay, the only mystery you won't be losing sleep over.

Speaker 22 Shop washable sofas.com today.

Speaker 23 That's washablesofas.com.

Speaker 30 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.
The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 30 So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 30 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 31 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 7 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 28 I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know.

Speaker 7 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 32 Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 7 My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 33 I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 34 They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

Speaker 7 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

Speaker 5 America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happen

Speaker 5 to good people in small towns.

Speaker 7 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 7 And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 As we often hear on our show, healing from trauma isn't linear and healing doesn't always bring back the person you were before. That's one of the hardest parts.
So we asked Dr.

Speaker 1 Truitt what healing looks like when she's working with clients.

Speaker 29 One of the interesting things that happens with my clients when we, not everybody, but a lot of them when we begin the work is ask them, what is their goal? And they say, I just want to be happy.

Speaker 29 The problem is, is our brain is not designed to be happy all the time.

Speaker 29 In fact, our brain would burn out neurochemically if we were.

Speaker 29 Our brain and our body are designed to flow and ebb and navigate through all types of feelings and emotions on a daily basis. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the calm, and the neutral.

Speaker 29 And all of those feelings become flags for helping us better understand what's happening in the world around around us.

Speaker 29 The beautiful part of being in the work and doing the work is that those red flag moments no longer spiral us into shame. If shame comes up and go, oh, that's also an interesting data point.

Speaker 29 Why is a part of me now feeling bad again?

Speaker 29 What's happening? And we can get curious.

Speaker 29 Or in the aftermath of a red flag moment, If we've really leaned into neuroplasticity and helped our system come home to self with loving care, We can give ourselves an internal hug or even an external hug, you know, wrap our arms around ourselves and go, there there, girl, it's okay.

Speaker 29 What's going on?

Speaker 29 And have that compassionate loving response that for so many of us, we may never have ever had to begin with.

Speaker 1 Instead of making happiness a marker of healing, a more realistic approach is to build self-compassion.

Speaker 29 Self-compassion is a skill. We're not born to be compassionate towards ourselves.

Speaker 29 We are born to be compassionate towards other beings, animals, living things, even inanimate objects, because we need other entities for survival.

Speaker 29 But frankly, to survive, we don't have to be nice to ourselves. So that's a skill that we get to learn.

Speaker 29 And that's a really critical part of the trauma healing journey is learning how to hold the space for ourselves that we neurobiologically freely give to everybody else.

Speaker 1 This is the work she's actively doing with her clients. But Dr.
Truitt acknowledges that therapy isn't always accessible. That's why she's committed to online education and sharing free resources.

Speaker 29 So therapy is a privilege. And I'm very aware that not everybody has access to it.
I also know that mental health and wellness is a human right.

Speaker 29 So dedicated an extensive amount of time to providing resources and tools that are neurobiologically based to help people heal the experiences of their past.

Speaker 29 Finding ways to show up in the present moment and do proactive healing in the here and now while building the neural pathways they want for their future.

Speaker 29 As we honestly can partner with our own brains to create incredible change.

Speaker 29 And on our YouTube channel, it's Dr. Kate Truitt, which is a Google Health channel.
It's approved by NIH and IMH as well as the World Health Organization as an educational resource.

Speaker 29 We provide therapeutic tools, guides, information, as well as guided meditations and all sorts of ways to support people in safely moving into their own healing journey.

Speaker 29 Along those same lines, I have two books that I've written. The first one is called Healing in Your Hands, which the title leans into exactly everything we're talking about.

Speaker 29 It's a full healing experience.

Speaker 29 for going on a guided relationship with oneself and navigating how our life experiences have shifted and changed the way we experience the world around us while providing actionable tools and resources for curating and creating change.

Speaker 1 Her most recent book is a memoir where she uses her own story as a lesson in trauma recovery.

Speaker 29 My memoir, which is called Keep Breathing, really goes into a deep dive.

Speaker 29 And I use myself as a case study, which was quite terrifying, to be honest, to unpack the complexities complexities of having PTSD.

Speaker 1 In writing her memoir, she experienced firsthand how healing it can be to tell your story. And it's a story she hopes other people can learn from.

Speaker 29 It was really one of the hardest choices I've made in my life to put that book into the world, partially because as psychologists, there's an old idea that we're supposed to be blank slates.

Speaker 29 But fundamentally, what I realize is there's a lot of people who are just like me who are struggling, who could possibly benefit from the information. And

Speaker 29 it was so healing to even write my own story. It took five years and to have the space to share my story and to have my story be held by others and reflected.

Speaker 29 So it's an incredible, incredible, powerful testimony to the power of narrative work. And how when our story is held by others, that in of itself is really, really healing.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening. And a special thanks to Dr.
Kate Truitt for sharing her expertise with us.

Speaker 1 In the spirit of storytelling for trauma healing, we're going to spend the next two weeks sharing listener essay submissions. The theme was resilience and recovery after a devastating betrayal.

Speaker 1 We received so many incredible submissions and we're excited to share them with you. So stay tuned and we'll be back next week.

Speaker 1 If you would like to reach out to the betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at betrayalpod at gmail.com. That's betrayal, P-O-D at gmail.com.
We're grateful for your support.

Speaker 1 One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review Betrayal.
Five-star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners.

Speaker 1 Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison.

Speaker 1 Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde.
Also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristen Mel Curie and Caitlin Golden.

Speaker 1 Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreincheck. Audio editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio.

Speaker 29 Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins.

Speaker 1 Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by MIBE Music.
And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

Speaker 4 Where did that story come from?

Speaker 5 Book?

Speaker 6 Dream? Nope, it came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time.

Speaker 10 What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch?

Speaker 6 Unlock your child's imagination.

Speaker 11 Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI exclusively at Costco.

Speaker 30 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 30 So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 30 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 33 Season one of Crying Wolf is here. We're thrilled to keep sharing these jaw-dropping stories with you.
And now there's even more to discover.

Speaker 33 With an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, only on Apple Podcasts, you'll unlock 100% ad-free listening on Crying Wolf and other fan favorites like Atlanta Monster, What Happened to Sandy Beale, and Sympathy Paints.

Speaker 5 Don't wait.

Speaker 33 New episodes are ready for you now. Open Apple Podcasts, search iHeartTrue Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

Speaker 37 A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium. Women began to go missing.

Speaker 37 It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved.

Speaker 37 Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.