Sasza Lohrey

Hello, hello, thanks for tuning in to this new series of the BBXX podcast. We wanted to bring you more content, specifically more BBXX original content. And we’re using this as a chance to experiment with different topics, different formats, short format, longer format, casual interviews, more formal interviews, and a bit more fun stuff. So this new series will bring you mainly content from what I am referring to as the food for thought series, which explores different terms and terminology, or questions that might be particularly relevant to now, it might elaborate on something specific from one of our main interviews. Or it might just dive deeper into question that people have been asking me or that I’ve been wondering about myself. But we’ll also include things from fun ratings and reviews for books, movies, other podcasts, etc. To live interviews, and informal interviews with more people, perhaps such as yourself, talking more about personal narrative, and personal experiences that have shaped ourselves, our lives and our relationships. Because as much as there is to be learned from us from BBXX or any expert, we have just as much that can be learned from all of you, and from each other.

Okay, so this isn’t just food for thought, this is a bit of Thanksgiving dinner for a thought. But in a recent interview with Owen Marcus, who is one of the co founders of Everyman, and also in our interview with one of the other co founders of Everyman, Dan Dodi, we talked about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but in a very much more expansive way. And so part of what we talk about with Dan was how our past experiences and the reactions to them shape our present reactions, and how not dealing with emotions or not processing past experiences and kind of just shoving them under the rug, or gritting our way through them, can later lead to health issues, chronic pain, mental health issues, all kinds of stuff. And so we talked about this also with Owen, about how the mind and the body are connected. And certain things from the mind, if not properly dealt with, can manifest themselves physically, or if dealt with can help release physical anger, or other physiological states. And so he talks about trauma, when talks about trauma. And he really emphasizes how we often only assume that to be very extreme circumstances, for example, things like war, or rape, those being extremely traumatic experiences. But he talks about this concept of micro trauma, and how all of us go through things that are traumatic.

But because we don’t label them as such, a lot of times the problem ends up being not the circumstance, we experience itself, but the unhealthy coping mechanism that we have developed in order to deal with it. And so, if we don’t process these things and deal with that trauma and work through it, acknowledge it. Then what happens is we create this sort of deflection, we create this self fulfilling cycle, where our fascia this part of our body, that connects, everything else begins to change the way it works. And we begin to form kind of metaphorical but also literal scar tissue surrounding these themes and these unhealthy thought processes and not processing things correctly. And so he uses this example where we’re physiologically revved up, even though there’s no stimulus, because there’s so much lying under the surface, that we’re sitting in this giant, noisy tractor. And we’re at a stop sign, and we’re not going anywhere, but there’s all this energy happening, because of that unhealthy cycle. So, essentially, if these experiences these emotions are not dealt with properly, they accumulate these micro traumas or these stressors, whatever these stressors might be, that we’ve accumulated throughout life. And I don’t think anybody would say they don’t have accumulated stress, or stressful experiences, or micro traumatic, if not more experiences. And so they accumulate, and they eventually, because they have nowhere left to go, they start to house themselves physically in our bodies. 

And so in the fascia, these connective tissues, they can begin to show themselves as physical stress, tightness, tension. But in a way, they’re sort of forming these these scars, they can form scar tissue, in a way. And that is because emotional trauma and physical trauma, I think, are obviously very different, but in a way, where it would help people to think about them as being more similar because I think people value and give credit to and deal with physical pain in a way that we do not with emotional pain. So as a baby stepping stone, we can think of them in the same way. And eventually, we need to, if we put emotional trauma and pain here and physical here, we need to think of them on the same so we can then eventually switch them and recognize that emotional pain science and research shows that emotional pain can be as painful if not much more painful, and longer lasting than physical pain. And we don’t think about it in that way. We don’t talk about it in that way. And we certainly don’t deal with it in that way. And so if we think of these scars, for both of them, we have scars, maybe there are some physical scars from trauma we have experienced, some of them are emotional, or metaphorical or literally ingrained within us. And so these cycles can form and this memory tissue forms. And so we have these unhealthy response cycles that are like that attractor who is revved up at a stop sign. Because we have this built in stimulus and stress that’s already there, even though there are no external factors or influences in that moment. And so there’s a lot of research that talks about how to unlock these cycles, and how to unlock these memories and unlock the or release that trauma that’s being stored there.

And that in that tissue memory. And so one of the ways is to equip ourselves with the resources that we might not have had previously to cope with that trauma or micro trauma. Another one is having the space in which to release it, if we already have a certain amount of stress, emotionally, physically built up, there’s no room for anything to be released into. It just kind of built on it and accumulates and reconnecting the body and the brain and being able to tap into what the trauma is that is perpetuating that cycle. And to be able to acknowledge, understand it and to work on releasing it emotionally and physically with that brain body connection that we talked about in our interview with Owen Marcus. And so this is just such a huge, incredibly, incredibly important topic. And one of the interesting ways that we can better

Understand this is with a concept called cytokine storms. And this is a concept that is happening now with Coronavirus, where researchers are saying that they were sitting why, in some people, there aren’t many symptoms. And this is not in any way a fatal illness. And in others, you know, the body collapses. And it’s an extremely fatal illness for others. And obviously, there are factors such as age, there are factors such as pre existing conditions, susceptibility vulnerability. But without those factors, there are still extreme discrepancies in some cases. And so they’re talking about whether part of this could be because of this concept of cytokine storms. And this happened in research with swine flu. 80% of people showed certain symptoms that could have been caused by the cytokine storms. And so what it is, is when the body T cells, all these other kinds of things, attack, this illness, this foreign thing, this bad influences danger to us. And so our body begins to attack those things. But in doing that, sometimes that response becomes so extreme, to China really, really fight off is very dangerous thing, that the body begins to attack its own cells, attack its own body itself and begin to do damage. And so it passes this point where it becomes self perpetuating. And it’s this cycle where in trying to deal with it, we take ourselves down with it. 

And this is common in certain autoimmune disorders, where probably some of you have heard about this, where the body is really trying to fight something off, but ends up breaking down itself, or in some types of cancer, this happens. And so if we use that lens to look at the way we deal with or don’t deal with, or the unhealthy coping mechanisms we have for trauma,

what we can kind of understand is, on one hand, some of the damage might be done because of these unhealthy mechanisms itself and not dealing with things in the first place, or dealing with it poorly. Or with building up that accumulation, that begins to manifest it within us ingrain itself within us and begin to do damage to us to our body our mind and create this kind of parallel sort of thing that we can better understand a bit from these cytokine storms. And so on a very personal level, when I did that interview with Dan dodi, I really, really helped me relate and better understand some of my own experiences. And it’s something that I had already acknowledged. And luckily, now medicine is making a lot of progress, still a very, very far ways to go by, I had already had a lot of doctors for the body, and also for the mind, tell me that a lot of my health issues if not, they might not have been created by stress and trauma, but very well could have been perpetuated by made worse by or if you think of it as somebody who’s predisposed to mental illness. Maybe they go under stress, or in the case of doing drugs or LSD, people talk about that person who that switch was flipped. And that’s often because of a predisposition.

And so putting them under that extreme additional external stress is what flips that switch and leads to a mental break, or to not coming back from a trip. In any case, these circumstances can enhance things and so in my case, I had preexisting physical health conditions. And I lost my mom in a fatal accident a couple years ago, and I did not deal with it. I had a lot, a lot of suppression, a lot of depression, a lot of suppression of my emotions of reality of my circumstances, a lot of deflection. I just developed this insane, obsessive cycle of deflection of memories of her have reminders of what my new reality was that I didn’t want. And I just began to live in this extremely, extremely unhealthy reflex and cycle of denial and perpetuation of very, very healthy reactions to that traumatic experience. And there were also a lot of dramatic things built up from my childhood that probably had already accumulated a lot of tension, not to mention certain predispositions to medical conditions. And so I, from there, my health spiraled out of control, it started with mental health problems following my mom’s accident.

And then it became physical, physiological health problems. And I had to have a very traumatic operation for a large mass that I had, that again, I already had endometriosis, I didn’t know about it, I had lots of symptoms in an unhealthy relationship with pain, having been the granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor and the way I was raised, and from being in Division, one athlete very unhealthy relationship with pain, both physical and emotional. And off the back of that, that operation event spiraled completely out of control problems with my back, that again, I had a predisposition to I’ve degenerative disc disease, I also have scoliosis and arthritis in my joints. But that operation, on a physical level, they cut through my entire abdominal wall, it was a C section, operation. And so just completely D stabilized everything, and was a very long, long recovery. And I was told I was going for an outpatient surgery and thought I was gonna be able to resume daily life that same day anyways, it’s a very long story. But it basically just, again, accumulated all these stressors from the emotional to the physical, that built on each other, manifested on top of each other. And just, you know, my body essentially was attacking itself.

And there were very unfortunate external circumstances, that probably could have led to this outcome in a way. But that, most likely, if not 100%, guaranteed, we’re greatly made much worse, by the way in which they were dealt with or not dealt with, or the fact that I already had so much accumulated stress, and the additional trauma that I was going through. And so it really, this whole concept for me has really reinforced the reality of my own situation, my own health and the way that me not properly dealing with what I’m going through from the past or in the present, can not only have a huge psychological effect, but a huge, huge physical effect and extremely profound and dangerous, not to mention, traumatizing consequences, which again, just reinforces all of that and builds on top of it. And so, I would encourage you all along with encouraging myself to try and change these unhealthy coping mechanisms to try and rewire our brain and our body to process things to acknowledge things and to try and help prevent these very vicious and extremely painful consequences that only create more trauma and build off of that other trauma.