#1235 Resilience in Four Parts - 2

June 25, 2024Scott Benner

Scott and Erika break down and discuss resilience. Part 2 of 4

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Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends welcome to episode 1235 of the Juicebox Podcast.

I'm back with part two of the resilience series with Erica Forsythe. Erica of course, is available at Erica forsythe.com. Don't miss her. If you didn't check out part one, that's going to be episode 1229. It's called resilience in four parts. Number one, this is number two, check them out in order. Nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan. When you place your first order for ag one with my link, you'll get five free travel packs and a free year supply of vitamin D. Drink ag one.com/juice box. If you're looking to save 30% at cozy earth.com Just use the offer code juice box at checkout and you'll save 30% off of the entire cart, whatever you put in it 30% off. If you have type one diabetes and are an American citizen that's a US citizen with type one or a US citizen who is the caregiver of someone with type one, I need you to go to T one d exchange.org/juicebox and complete their survey. It helps type one diabetes research it'll take you about 10 minutes. It helps the podcast it helps you t one day exchange.org/juicebox This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by the ever sent CGM and implantable six month sensor is what you get with ever since. But you get so much more exceptional and consistent accuracy over six months, and distinct on body vibe alerts when you're high or low. On body vibe alerts. You don't even know what that means to you. Ever since cgm.com/juicebox. Go find out. This show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries. G voc hypo Penn Find out more at G voc glucagon.com. Forward slash juicebox. This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by us med U S med.com/juice box or call 888721151 for us med is where my daughter gets her diabetes supplies from and you could to use the link or number to get your free benefit check and get started today with us met. Well, I'm gonna start recording just in case you say something insane. Go ahead.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 2:38
Okay. Okay. So I'm excited. We're going to talk about trauma today. That sounds funny saying those two words together. But mainly I'm excited just because there's there's so much to share. I'm not quite sure which direction will go. Okay, how much we'll cover. But what I'm relearning and relearning and remembering, is there's just there's so many different ways to talk about trauma and adversity and understand it, but hopefully we'll do a good job.

Scott Benner 3:08
I'm sure I'm gonna open up my door. I have a document for Yes, I'm here. So I'm gonna open that up. Do you have that? So to what is trauma? I have it right here. I you know, I'll say this real very, very quickly. Before we start, I interviewed a lady yesterday. This has nothing to do with this, but it does. She's the 31 mother of three. Her oldest has type one. And then her two youngest have like a severe and rare genetic issue. It's going to plague them their entire lives, right. And I don't know that I've laughed more with a guest in an hour than I have doing this. And at the end, we talked about it. And she just said, you know, like, what am I going to do? Like, I can't let myself feel the weight of this constantly. And so like, I get the like, Hey, we're gonna talk about trauma today. I'm so excited. Because it's information you don't get to give people and then they can hopefully take something from it. So let's jump right in. But you know, laughing along the way sometimes helps. That's

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 4:09
right. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so hey, go sell to it. Okay, wonderful. So I know we covered a little bit, we might be a little bit repetitive from our introductory episode on resilience. That's kind of our overarching theme here. But we talked on our first episode, in this series about before we talk about resilience, it's important to really understand what trauma means and what definition we're operating from as we talk about resilience. And so I love and appreciate this definition. Again, I'm using a lot of information from Dr. Bruce Perry, from his book with Oprah called what's happening to you and I also pull a lot of information from Brene Brown. If the three of you ever catch wind of this and want to come on with us. That would be so great. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, so Dr. Bruce. trade talks about trauma from the three E's. So first we want to think about the event itself. This could be a one time event such as like a hurricane, a death in the family a diagnosis, one of the examples they give in the book, I think is really helpful. Imagine there's a fire at an elementary school. And it's in the near the first grade classroom. And he talks about how the trauma is perceived through three different people. So the fire biter arrives, and they are not traumatized, right, it's it's more of a resilience experience for them, they know it, they know how to deal with it, they're trained. And then from the the first grader because the fire is right near their classroom, the first grader responds in fear, their stress response system is highly activated, that's going to be a trauma for this child, the fifth grader, who is a couple of classrooms on the other side of the school sees the fire, it's might be kind of kind of scary, but also kind of exciting, but he knows he's further away from the fire and he feels safer. So that's the example of how an event even though we might hear, wow, there was there was a fire at the elementary school, how traumatizing for everybody there, it's important to remember that everyone who experienced that event, came at it from a different lens based on their experience, their training, their age, their relationship to the actual event and in terms of space. And so that's important. And I think also we kind of can look talk about that, that the pandemic, right, we can say that the pandemic was a trauma for everyone. And actually, it was it it was trauma traumatic for some people, and that's a whole you know, it's a whole other series,

Scott Benner 6:44
you'll hear people say, that's the best thing that ever happened to me. You know, like, I didn't have to leave my house, I saved a bunch of money, blah, blah, blah, you know, the next person would be like, couldn't get out of my house. I couldn't make any money. You know? Yeah, exactly. So your perspective, both intellectually and physically, like literally, like where you're standing during the event? Yes.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 7:05
Yeah. Yes. interest. So that is that the second II the experience, right, so what I just described was the event which is the fire or we could, you could, again, talk about it through the lens of the diagnosis, and we'll go into I want to stay in the diabetes theme a little bit more today. So the experience of the event and we'll also go into why that is harder for some people are more challenging based on genetics, and based on family history, generational trauma, we we talked a little bit about that in the first episode, and then the effect did this event lead to any lingering long term effects that were challenging.

Scott Benner 7:47
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Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 9:00
so that's what we're when we're thinking about trauma, we're always kind of thinking through the the event, the experience and the effect. Also important to note that we're taught this is like the big T trauma the one time event. But Dr. Bruce, Dr. Perry talks about how we can have these little T traumas these micro moments and he defines trauma as any pattern of activating your stress response system that leads to an alteration and how that system is functioning which leads to an overactivity or over reactivity. So for example, and again in the book they talk about how a person a child in a minority in a classroom, for example, have a different skin color has these micro aggression, micro moments, right but any it could be any moment or feeling that you don't belong, or you feel stupid or you feel invisible or you feel are shamed, that pattern of non event trauma can lead to a big T trauma. Because your stress response system is perpetually being activated when you feel like you're and I'm thinking about now from the diabetes lens, as a child sitting in a classroom, not to compare racism to living with diabetes, but the experience, I think can can feel similar for the child, if they're sitting in the classroom and our alarm goes off. And they're feeling different, or they're feeling embarrassed or that they don't belong, that can over time, for all the reasons we're going to get into that non event trauma can be a pattern, which can lead to big T trauma for the person, right individual. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. Another way to define trauma from Brene. Brown is a situation or environment over which you have no control. So, I mean, gosh, isn't that what we feel like a lot of the time, particularly the beginning of living with diabetes, feeling like you've been, I think we can think about the diagnosis of diabetes as a big T trauma event, right? You we a lot of us have described and share it on the on the podcast, or in my office about that big T trauma, diagnosis story. And we talked about, it's really important to to process and grieve that story, that diagnosis story. And then there's like the phase two, right of this non event, trauma was just pattern of maybe feeling like you are constantly out of control. And that can be experienced for some of us as trauma that's being repeated over and over and over again. Because as they say it Dr. Prairie in the book says activating your stress response in ways that are controllable, predictable and moderate, that leads to resilience. And this is where we're I want to make sure I might kind of fumble around here a little bit with my words. But when we are experiencing living with diabetes as a repeated trauma over and over and over again, one of the reasons could be that in your development, in your time as a child, that you were exposed to your your stress response system was activated because you're exposed to uncontrollable, unpredictable or prolonged and extreme it was prolonged or extreme. And that leads to dramatic changes in your brain and functioning. So if you're already sensitized to this experience, because of your past trauma that could be possibly why this repeated kind of what every time you have to change your pump, or you have or you hear the alarms that can be more challenging for you to manage your diabetes or experience. You're experiencing that trauma over and over again. This is just one of the

Scott Benner 12:58
potential Yeah, I'll share an experience with you from my family. Okay, so obviously, Arden's had a couple of seizures over the last, however many years she's had diabetes, right. So that's a traumatic event. I can't say that for certain for her for us, for everybody involved. Now, even still, to this day, if she experiences like a compression loan, or CGM, which all of a sudden shows a very low blood sugar and happens the middle of the night, for example, my wife wakes me up, she says art is low, and I look and I go, Hey, you know what, this is a compression low, it's not real, it's gonna bounce back in a minute. If it doesn't, I'll call her Tell her roll over or whatever, right? And then that's it. Five minutes later, we've got the whole thing sauced out, it was a compression, low artist, blood sugar is actually 92 It's not a problem, my wife cannot go back to sleep. It might as well have been that someone ran into the room banging a gun onto a trash can lid yelling, I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you, I'm gonna kill you. My wife is lit up at that point, no matter how many times it happens. She can't get under control. Okay,

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 14:01
yes. So that is her stress response system is being activated. And if if I'm going to try to explain the brain, and again, if you guys are interested, they have great charts and explain how the brain works in the in the book would happen to you. But he shares this example of it will stick to what you just shared. So if you think about our brain as an upside down triangle, at the base is the brainstem. Okay, and at the top is the cortex, which does like all of our thinking, you know, planning that's kind of like the highest level of our brain and then at the bottom is the brain stem. And so the systems at the top, he says are responsible for speech and language thinking planning, our values and beliefs are stored there. And at the top, this is the part of the brain that can't tell time, right? So when the cortex is online and active, we can think about the past and look forward to the future which She hears the alarms through the brainstem, her stress response system is activated as if it's back in the past that she's having the seizure and all the feelings that she experienced because at the bottom of the brain, this is the part that controls less complex, mostly regulatory functions like body temperature, breathing, heart rate, and so forth. But there are no networks in the bottom part, that think or tell time sometimes refer to this part of the brain is the reptilian brain. So think of what a lizard can do, they don't plan much or think they mostly live in the moment and react. But we humans, thanks to the top part of our brain, the cortex, we can invent, create, plan, and tell time. So input from all of our senses, vision, hearing, touch, and smell, first comes into the brain and the lower areas, none of our sensory input goes directly to the cortex, everything must first come to lower parts of the brain. So as soon as the signal comes in, so you we hear the alarm. When did this example, the signal comes into the brainstem? It is processed, and basically, the incoming signal is matched against previously stored experiences. This is what we're describing this is what we've now just discovered as post traumatic stress disorder, right? The sound is coming in, and it's now being matched against previously stored experiences, which is, oh my gosh, Arden's having a seizure. And you go immediately back into all of the fear, stress response that you experienced at that time. Yeah. Does that make sense? Out of the book, just to make sure I get a totally accurate,

Scott Benner 16:39
I appreciate that. It makes total sense. It's what I assume is happening, I just does not seem to be a way to like, consciously talk yourself out of it. You know what I mean? I have heard recently, I don't know if this is gonna take you down a rabbit hole you're not interested in or not. But I keep hearing about people doing like, stuff like ketamine treatments with therapists and stuff like that, where they're basically like, I guess, kind of the way I've heard it described as there's a disconnect of your memories, like, almost disconnects your mind from your body, and then you do the therapy during that disconnect. And then when you come back together, again, the connection is gone. Is that something you've paid any attention to?

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 17:18
Like the DIS the association, while you're because you're trying to rewire retrain some of those neural pathways? There's so many different types of therapy, you know, we've talked about EMDR. There's CBT. You know, hypnosis, there's the ketamine treatment?

Scott Benner 17:37
Is doing mushrooms, right? Yes, a lot. There's

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 17:40
a lot of people experimenting with that, right. And the goal is all the same. It's just kind of a different pathway to get there, of re framing restructuring and recreating the narrative around when you are hearing, or touching or feeling, you know, we get all this input from our senses. Yeah. And then we also have, from our memory, right, this so we're, as soon as those things are being matched what we're then wanting to go through a therapeutic process to say, Okay, no, not actually, it's really important to understand the why. Like, why am I why do I react this way, every time I hear this alarm? And then to go through the process of saying, No, I'm actually, this is what's happening, and I'm safe. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I'm really, you know, paring it down. But that's what all of these different types of therapies are doing.

Scott Benner 18:32
I believe they're pretty expensive still. And I'm certainly not telling you just to go like down a K hole and talk yourself out of like feeling, you know, bad but I've heard at this point, they're famous people who have talked about it publicly. But to that stick in my mind, Trevor Noah, formerly from The Daily Show, who grew up in South Africa with parents of two different colors. So literally, the mother had to pretend that he wasn't hers when they were in public. And then she later remarries a man who was like very abusive. So he described his life like he, you know, it's his to describe but he had a lot of problems. He did this ketamine therapy, and he seems like a different person. The next person I've heard talk about this kind of treatment, who's a famous person is a comedian named Neal Brennan, who, if you listen to him prior to his treatment, he was in trouble. Like, I mean, he was he was out of his mind and not doing well by his own admission and then went in to burn these therapies. And now you listen to him. And I mean, my goodness, he sounds like a completely different person. He feels like someone reached in and removed those memories from having a connection from his body to his brain is the best way I can describe how it says and I don't know the first thing about it, but I will tell you every time I hear someone talk about it, I think there are people in my life that would really benefit from this. Anyway, hopefully, it gets studied more and more.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 19:59
You know, I mean, that trauma, even the concept of trauma and how it impacts mental health wasn't even really studied intensely until 25 years ago, really fighting according to Dr. Perry, and so it's an in PTSD. The diagnosis wasn't in the DSM, which is a book that psychologists therapists doctors used to diagnose. There's a whole controversy around even, you know, diagnosing, but the PTSD wasn't even a diagnosis until around the early 1980s. That's interesting. So it's all this concept of trauma, and developmental trauma and how it impacts our ability to function and be resilient is really new. And it's it I think that's what's exciting about it, particularly as we think about it through the lens of our we're living with the chronic illness.

Scott Benner 20:53
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Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 25:32
instantly say, what's what's wrong with you? Yeah, versus like, what's happened to you. And I think it's really important to understand that even if you have if you've had predictable, traumatic experiences as a child, in so doing, you develop more resilience is that the pattern of it is, you know, like, actually, we can go, I want to touch on the stress system. But the pattern we talked about in the parenting series, where every as a newborn, you were exposed to stressors, right? And I want to find they talked about this in a bucktail. So you found it, yes. Okay. Okay. Do you go ahead? Do you say something, just that

Scott Benner 26:18
I feel like what you almost started to say a minute ago was almost like, you know, when you have an allergy to something, and they'll tell you, like, have a little bit of it, then a little more than a little more. So if you get to grow up in a reasonable way, with reasonable people around you, you will have experiences of things not going well, or almost even possible, but if they build slowly, then you'll build up a tolerance for them. And that looks like resilience all the sudden, the reason this pops into my head is that an acquaintance of ours passed away recently. And she leaves behind some children, right, she was young. And it is not a month later. And this poor family's dog needs to be put down. And it's just the saddest thing, you know, but it occurred to me, if that dog just would have died a year ago, they would have been a little more prepared for their mom passing away unexpectedly, if they would have got the, what you think of is the the right version of these events happening in their lives. Like how many of us don't realize when we buy our kids a pet, that that pet is going to help you somewhere down the road, be prepared for loss, you know, and I don't think anybody thinks about it that way, really, but it's true. And I was lucky people in my life did not pass away until I was older. I got to see less impactful things in my life, come go live die, before my father passed away. And I think that made me more prepared for it. But if your mom dies in her 40s, and then a month later, your dog and it's not your dog doesn't die, you have to take it somewhere to end its life. That is an unfair situation that you can't avoid that will undoubtedly impact those people for the rest of their lives. I think, you know, anyway, I felt like you started to say that, and then you got onto this, and I just didn't want to lose that thought. So please, go. So

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 28:08
good. Yes. So our, as an infant, Dr. Price's, you know, we're our brains are malleable. We don't we're not born with resilience. We're born with malleability. And so when we go back and talk about, you know, the stresses and the traumas and how it impacts our brain, it does change the way our brain functions, but it can also be changed for for growth and healing, right. So in the parenting series we talked about, as it as a newborn, you know, the child's born hungry there, they need to be fed, if they're hot, they're cold, and those needs are met by an attuned caregiver. And then as they are in if they're in a safe space, and they feel comfortable, the baby will crawl away, and they'll experience a stressor, and that'll activate their stress response system. And then when it's too much, they'll come back to the caregiver, to their safe base, right. And then they'll continue this process 1000s of times as the newborn grows into a toddler and young child, and then through these little challenges, they then build the capacity to develop and demonstrate resilience in the face of the unexpected stress. So here, you know, the emphasis is on, it's okay. Like this is what a newborn in a safe, predictable environment, where their needs are met initially, then they kind of feel more comfortable to go out and experience a little bit of stress. Oh, that was scary. I'm gonna come back for children who were in that environment, they are able to develop and build their resilience through the predictable stressors, right?

Scott Benner 29:48
You can see them finding their their new boundaries. And that's the only way we really think about it right like oh, look, they feel safer going a little farther or I you know, I finally went to the park and She wandered away from me when I said go ahead, you can go play and like that you don't think about it the way you're talking about it. Now you just think about it like that. It's so interesting because, yes, not

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 30:09
even every year, they go to a new site, they have a new classroom, they have a new teacher, these are all new stressors, where the child is there because their brain is developing. And they might experience challenges, too, if they're coming back to the household where the stressors are predictable, controllable, they're building resilience. Now, we can, as we talked about, again, in the parenting series for children, who grew up in an environment where the parent is hovering, and wanting to prevent them from experiencing any hardship or any stress, it's challenging for that child's brain to develop that sense of resilience. Conversely, for the infant and newborn and child, who is growing up in an environment where the stress is it there's chaos. Theo's there's uncontrollable, unpredictable, prolonged, extreme stress, that leads to the traumatic changes in the child's brain, right, because now they're there. They're sensitized to any trauma. So they are going to be on high alert, they act and react before thinking because that's how that behavior as a newborn and young child is, is an adaptive behavior, right? I gotta, I gotta be alert, I gotta be to try and find safety. And that's, that's what they've learned. And we talked about this in the first episode, that war veterans, people who go to war, who grew up in that type of environment are so sensitized to trauma, that they had higher rates of developing PTSD, versus the person who grew up in an environment where there was, the stress was controlled and predictable. Then they went to war, and they did not develop PTSD. Yeah. And the state, we can apply the same thing to the diabetes diagnosis. If you are listening, and you have found cost, you're thinking, wow, I grew up in a childhood, my environment was really unpredictable. There was chaos, there was abuse, there was neglect. And then and then later, you get diagnosed or you're caregiving for your child, and you're experiencing these traumatic episodes or symptoms or behaviors. This that could be white. Again, this is not, it's not black and white. This is not either this or that. But we just want to kind of give some potential kind of background as to why you might be experiencing this. Can

Scott Benner 32:35
I jump in for a second, please, I'm hearing stability breeds resilience. I'm hearing lording over people impairs resilience. And that once these alerts are set off, then that's the reaction moving forward. So if your kid or you, or whoever's just recently diagnosed, and something gets low or high, and you freak out, and you keep freaking out, when those things happen, then when they happen, you're gonna freak out before you even have a chance to freak out, like your brains gonna go, oh, here it is, the thing beeped, the lady is gonna come in here and yell at me now, blah, and then you know, then you come in and talk to your kid and go, I don't understand, all they have to do is this and blah, blah, and then you tumbled down that rabbit hole of just, this is a mess. And I was talking to a lady yesterday or 11 year old was talking about not wanting to be alive because of type one diabetes. And I tried to help her a little bit talking online. And I said, What do you think it is she goes, so it's obviously a divorced household. So there's four parents, she goes, I just think she's tired of having four people after all the time. And I said, Have you considered not being after her all the time, just set up some basic touchpoints. Like, we're going to definitely Pre-Bolus Our meals. And we're going to test for sure two hours later and correct if we get if if it's necessary. And just set that up as an expectation. And then let that go for a little bit and see if that autonomy doesn't help her to feel more in control. And like everybody's not yelling and talking to her all the time. Like maybe go backwards. And the person was really grateful and said they were going to try it. But your other point about if I grew up in a crazy household, then I move forward, and I have my own household and something happens. It just makes me want to say this, and I'm so sorry if they hear this and they feel badly but you're helping a lot of people. So my wife's family, whether they know it or not, needs a bad guy. They need a foil and they make one of them the foil constantly until it burns out, then they move it to somebody else. They are always as a group mad at one of them. And when they are they're calmer. I don't know how to explain that by then. But I've watched it enough and I know it's happening. One of them has to be on the outs at all times or none of them can function. It's really interesting.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 34:58
Oh, there's there's F Phenomenon unnamed. I can't recall what that's called.

Scott Benner 35:04
I saw a real thing, right? Yeah. Oh, I know. Yeah, sure.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 35:08
Well, I'm gonna look that up. I'll share back next time. Also,

Scott Benner 35:12
I've shared this on the podcast, my wife and I get along better when we have an adversary that has in common. Yes, yeah. We talked about that very, very, very true. If we can have somebody to both be pissed that we like each other better. Like when we're on the same team about something, it doesn't even have to be anything important. Yes, it's fascinating. It's called it's called ash, is what it's called Erica.

Unknown Speaker 35:38
Recall, it's like way back here. Okay.

Scott Benner 35:40
But anyway, like, my point is, is that with all this is like you might not understand Arcus point to, that the way you grew up, is now impacting the way you're reacting to your diabetes, which is then impacting your kids experience with diabetes, which is going to have a direct impact on their health and happiness for their life, forgetting that it's also going to impact how they one day talk to their children, etc, and so on. Talking about diabetes specifically. So you got to fix your own thing. Or you're just going to make another problem. Somewhere is I mean, it's overly simplified. But yeah, it's just that easy. Yeah, just go just go fix everything.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 36:19
But I also wanted to the point of this diabetes, that divorce and diabetes, and, you know, we've talked about this, you talked about this all the time, but how stress, you know, can impact even the blood sugar. And we often forget and maybe compartmentalised diabetes without we'd forget that okay, well, what is it like for that child to be going back and forth, and listening to be, you know, the different perspectives on how to manage the diabetes or what happened at school that day. And maybe that's why the numbers are higher, not just because they forgot to Pre-Bolus. And not just because they hate you, or they hate diabetes, but like how significant the trauma big T little T, the stress is impacting the blood sugar. Yeah, it's a really significant

Scott Benner 37:08
list. This might sound Hocus Pocus, either some people, but most of the things you're seeing are not happening for the reasons that you think they're happening, that I just know, for certain, you know, like, whether it's something your mom's had to get 25 years ago, or if it's something more specifically the way you just react, because if something like we've discussed here today that you're not even aware of, or a thing that's happened to you when you were six, and you don't even know that this new thing makes your body feel that way. I honestly think that I think that most of what is happening, most of people's reactions have so much less to do with their conscious decisions, and much more to do with how all the wiring and chemicals fire off in your body.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 37:53
Yeah, yes. And I appreciate what you were talking about. I wanted to go back to the the tree of regulation, the you know, the neural networks in our in our body and brain that help us process and respond to stress. And I think it's important to note that we think about stress, we often think about it in this negative, like, Oh, I'm so stressed, right? That's the negative concept. He talks about how it's it's a demand, stress is a demand on one or more of our bodies, many physiological symptoms such as hunger, thirst, being cold, or hot, getting promoted at work losing a job getting diagnosed. So in stress is an essential and positive part of normal development. And we just talked about six key element in learning like just that, you know, having just enough stress is important to master new skills to build resilience we already talked about. And what we want to determine is, is it positive or destructive, in the pattern, right. And he talks about with the core regulatory networks, or neural systems originating in the lower parts of the brain, right in the brain stem spreading throughout the whole brain, they work together to keep us regulated, your brain is constantly trying to keep you imbalanced. But when you are exposed to that unpredictable, uncontrollable stressor, your core response system is RIA is activated. And that can still I guess, I want to highlight two that can still be happening. Let's say you grew up in a very common predictable household, but you're still feeling like cash. Why? Every like I'm still grieving and processing and I cry every time I think about having type of diabetes, or I cry every time I think about my child having diabetes, it still could be that you're having this little T trauma, right? Every time you have to change the pump, or think about the carb ratio. And you're having this these moments it also can be because it is really hard, right? So it'd be having a big T trauma. So it's not just validated if you had a unpredictable childhood. Does that make sense?

Scott Benner 39:59
You Yeah, it does. Is this a good place to remind people that if your parents were heavy drinkers or alcoholics growing up that you probably have a lot of issues that you're unaware of? And is that because of the unpredictability? Yes.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 40:13
So, and we haven't gotten into the aces, and maybe we'll save that for next time too. But that's one of the you know, adverse childhood experiences is being in a household with one of the parents has substance abuse. And in any type of abuse that you're exposed to, whether directly or indirectly, there's that unpredictability that is, creates your your stress response system is triggered constantly. And then you become sensitized to that.

Scott Benner 40:41
And if you're looking for something to prove it to yourself, if you find yourself being the kind of person who always wants to make things, okay, in groups, and your parents were alcoholics or substance abusers just think, oh, that's why i That's why I do that. Because you grew up around chaos, and you were trying to calm it. And now you maybe still do that in your adult life. Now, when you see chaos, your brain goes, Oh, no, I know what's going to happen. He's gonna get drunk and yell at her, and she's going to hit me and like, like, you know, like, that whole thing's gonna like tumble down for if I could just keep it calm right now. Like, I can stop that. I used to have that terribly. My parents weren't drinkers. But my father had a lot of anger, like, and he would kind of like spark up out of nowhere. And when I first got married, and we had kids, I had such a compulsion for no one to fight. Yes. I just never wanted anybody to be upset. And there's part of me that thinks it's because I thought that people being upset led to divorce in the end of your family. Like, that's what I but I think it was until I realized you cannot control people's reactions to things, and that you could actually talk your way through them, and come out the other side of them better off, I would literally, if it got too bad, I would try to yell down people being upset, because I was so scared of what was going to happen if it if it boiled over. But not consciously. None of it was conscious. So I didn't have those thoughts while I was doing as what I'm saying. But for sure, that's what was happening.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 42:14
Yes, yeah, you want PC adult children of if either of alcoholics or they unpredictability in their mood, know how to read a room, they know how to is a safe or not, they know how to be peacekeepers, they are going to try and control what they can either internally or externally. Because that's how they learned how to that was a an adaptive skill. As a child, it's

Scott Benner 42:41
funny because it can lead to having some good resilience to because you get skills from them, like one of them is, I would be a great human resources director. You because people are like, I've never met somebody who only has to talk to you for 10 minutes and then knows everything about you. It's got like you meet somebody, and he's like you, generally speaking, have them down pretty quickly. And I think that's a little bit about the read the room thing. You know what I mean? Like, is this new person? Is this new idea problematic? Is it going to cause a upheaval? I've got things calm now. Like, you know what I mean? Like, how do I even when you talk to my brothers, my brothers will tell you like, Oh, my God, Scott fixed everything for us. Because I was like, I didn't know what was going to go wrong. Next, if you know, especially after my dad left, like, what if something else happens? Yeah. Anyway, like, it's, that's the kind of stuff that the interesting question there around resilience is, do those experiences make you resilient? Or are you going to be a resilient person anyway? Did they hold you back? Did they benefit you? Yes, or No, who knows? I don't think that I was molded into this person, only by those experiences. But I can see where I got lucky going back to the beginning, because the first 10 or so years of my life, were really stable, that my dad got angry as I think his tolerance for being married, got to the end. And then we got I got through that it wasn't terrible. And then I got through that, but then he left. Now that time was bad. for like five years. That took a lot to get over. All the reason you think like, I thought it was my fault that my parents got divorced. You know, all the stuff that happens people got through that became an adult, and then started paying closer attention to what was happening to me what I was doing, and then kind of came out of it. But still, it was still a reasonably regulated pathway. Good, little worse, terrible. I'm alive. Things are getting better. New problems come up. I can apply what I learned before, but if you move that stuff out of order, I just got lucky. Maybe you know what I mean? If you move that stuff out of order, my dad leaves when I'm five. My mom gets pissy and starts hitting me when I'm 10. I'm probably a disaster by the time I'm 15 You know what I mean? Like, that's random. Yes,

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 45:00
yeah. Yeah. I mean, timing is really important. This specific effects that you talked about on your health, in addition to what you were exposed to as a child, that I think it's also important to note that genetic vulnerability, the developmental stage at which the traumatic event occurred, the history of your previous trauma, your family's history of trauma, and this is I'm quoting from the book and the buffering capacity of healthy relationships, family and community. So all of those things, you know, we talked about, you've often wondered before of like, Did you just get lucky? Is it just like the hardiness of your brain and adaptivity, to stressful situations, I think all of these things are really important to note and understand. And we'll, we'll talk more about the significance of being in community. But I think that the history that genetic vulnerability he goes into, I'm not gonna go into it in detail, because it's really complicated. But he talks about the epigenetic factor. Epigenetics is another one of those widely used and poorly understood terms in our fields, and the psychological field and neuro logical field. He says, that can be part of why someone might have a certain hardiness resilience versus someone being more maybe sensitive, just just by strictly your your genes. Yeah. And if you want to learn more about that, you can certainly read more about the epigenetic factors.

Scott Benner 46:32
I know nothing about nothing. But it would be hard to make me believe that there's not some imprinting that happens generationally as well. You know, what I mean, and I always use the same example of like, like the Irish Potato Famine, like and how that may have impacted like generations of people from Ireland, or internment camps, or, you know, Nazi Germany, or like any of these big ideas that impacted people on a whole and how it, it could get translated a little bit, maybe through genetics, and maybe an a lot, obviously, through that your parents lived through this experience. And now they're parenting you through the vision that, you know, through the lens of that experience. So those things mixed together. There are things we know to be afraid of. And I don't know why I'm like, spiders, like, why are we afraid of spiders? You know what I mean? Like, is it because spiders used to be 19 feet tall? And like it stuck in? Like, I don't know, you? Don't? I mean, like, is it? Is it? Is that kind of a thing? Like, how real is that, but I, if I had to guess, I think there's a lot of reality of that idea that the you know, if your parents grew up very poorly, and were treated terribly, that maybe you're already predisposed to being in that, like having some of those feelings that they had. And over generations, maybe I have no idea. Like, I don't know how you would prove any of that. But it certainly makes a reasonable amount of sense to me. Are we going to cover privilege before we get on today?

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 47:56
No, I wanted to talk about one more thing, though, or do we have time I have time

Scott Benner 48:00
if you have time? Okay, okay, I make up like, I have nothing but time you're a professional person.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 48:06
I just wanted to end with like a tip or a tool instead of waiting till like the end of the whole series. And listening to a lot of fan favorite of Brene. Brown, as we all know, on the very beginning of the pandemic, she launched her podcast called unlocking us, one of them. And she talked about FFTs, which is expletive first times or you could do TFTs for your children, terrible first times, experiences. And I was thinking listening to that. And thinking about that in context with you know, the trauma, as we define it as it could be any moment that you feel like you don't belong, or you don't know what you're doing. Or you're invisible, or you're embarrassed or shamed for anything, the diabetes related how those little micro moments add up to this experience of living in a traumatic situation over and over and over again. And I think, well, for all the reasons that we just talked about today, you could be experiencing that. I was thinking, what if it also is an as we think about the diagnosis, and like, let's say the first year of living with diabetes, everything I know we talked about this a ton. And it's talked about in the community that every time you experience something new, it's a for the first time. The first time you go out for pizza the first time you switch from injection to wearing a pump all

Scott Benner 49:32
by flying freaks people out. Yeah, the first time they fly with diabetes, right? Oh, now I'm saying because you're combining two concerns. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 49:43
Okay, so we're thinking about the FFTs or TFTs. And when you're experiencing something new, you feel scared, you feel dysregulated you might feel stupid, you might feel embarrassed. stir ashamed, that's something that we all experience, you can even think about like going like starting a new job or learning a new skill, right. And it's she talks about how it's important to continue to be exposed to first times. That's more in like the skill set, but I was thinking about it through, like, every time you're experiencing something that you feel like you're out of control, she kind of gives these these three tips on what to do in this time. So this is kind of like, we're understanding it as like, it could be trauma, and or it could be this experience that feels like trauma. But it might also be because you're going through a new experience within the context of the chronic illness. And so the first thing you want to do is name it, say, Ah, I'm experiencing, I'm irritable, I'm upset, I'm crying, I'm angry. Because I'm this is the first time this is an FFT, you can even tell your kid like, oh, gosh, we're, we're having a hard time here. This is a, this is a terrible first time at TFT. Because we're not robots, right? We don't, we can try and eat the same thing at the same time. But we are going to experience our blood sugar variability differently every single day. And particularly, we feel that in the first I'm saying year, but you know, it could be shorter or longer. Somebody say, Oh, we're feeling this emotion. This is because we're having a TFT. Sometimes people get scared to call it or name it like that, because we feel like we're gonna give it more power. Like over we're gonna talk we're saying going flying is a TFT. Because we're gonna give it so much power. But it's really important to say no, we're actually taking that power on. We're not giving it power, but we are in feeling empowered, because then we can affect change, we can do something about it. Okay, so we're gonna name it. We're going to note you're going to normalize it. Oh, yeah. This is? Yes. We're only in month two, and we're trying to play all of the sports and go out to eat. This is this is normal to be feeling this way. We are feeling really scared and out of control. This is totally normal.

Scott Benner 52:00
Yeah. Like your Pre-Bolus in confidence. Yeah, right. Oh, yeah. Like you're giving yourself you're giving yourself some confidence ahead of time, so that when the impact actually hits, you're a little above where you need to be. And when you lose a little bit of it. It's still level. That's how it's how it's striking me, God, give me the third

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 52:19
thing. I like that. I like that. Okay, so the third one is giving yourself perspective. You could say, well, gosh, because oftentimes, I'll hear people say, on on the podcast or on the office, like we've been nailing it the past week, and then on Sunday, man, we just, we failed. We messed up. And I'm like, what was going on? What happened? Like, well, we went, you know, went up for Mother's Day brunch, you know, or whatever. And we didn't get the timing. And so like, oh, well, just because you didn't nail at that time doesn't mean, you have failed in all the other areas, right, like, so you're just you're giving it context to say, this is an FFT, this is a TFT is terrible first time. And you might be feeling this over and over and over again. But in yourself of giving perspective to say, You know what it's not, it's not always going to be this hard. That's hard to do in the time when you're grieving when you're experiencing the trauma over and over again, if it is feeling like a true big T trauma.

Scott Benner 53:20
I think this is why I tell people all the time when they're newly diagnosed that as crazy as this feels right now, a year from now, you'll look back on this time and not recognize yourself in any means, like because those little experiences build up into real experience that you can then put into practice and stop them from happening in the future. And then you'll look back and you'll think, Oh, God, I was like, I was out of my mind back then like, how do I? How do I get to here? Like, I'm so much further off it, but you need it. And I want to just be clear, FFT means being first time, right? Yes. Yes. You don't want to say because you're applying for.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 53:57
Yes, yeah. So

Scott Benner 53:58
like having the idea that we are going to have these first experiences, they are likely not going to go well. Let's expect for them not to go well, so it's not such a crushing defeat when it happens, right? Like, I can just go Oh, yeah, I didn't have I think that was gonna go. It's interesting. It really is like, it's like sending a kid off to bat for the very first time and just telling them look, try to hit the ball. It's not easy. You're probably not going to hit it. But it's okay. You will eventually and just go ahead and try it. It'll be if it's fun. It's fun. If it's not, it's not but it'll be what it is. We'll build on it. That's it. That's what Yes, it is. Right. That idea? Yes.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 54:36
And what you're saying is the actually this is the third one that the the first one was normalized. The second one is give a perspective. The third one is reality check. Okay, expectations, which is what you just did, okay. To say, you know, you might not hit the ball the first time you probably you might strike out, you know what, that's okay, because that's what that's normal. And I think oftentimes we experience So much pain and grief. When we are, we have an expectation of nailing it, whatever that is. And then we don't and then we then that shame cycle can play in and the trauma we can experience again of like, ah, yeah, we didn't get it well, how could I have this disease, this is really hard. And again, this is all really normal. And this can happen 30 years into diagnosis, too. You can have, you know, getting pregnant, going through menopause, going through a tragedy, a loss, we can experience an FFT, and go through these things again, because when we have that expectation, like, Oh, I've nailed it for so long. How can I not? Yeah, contextualize it.

Scott Benner 55:43
I want to say how important it is when you're teaching a child to feel the ground ball. Like they don't do well at first, and they're scared as it comes to them. You can see them being scared the first time they stand their ground. And even if they don't catch it, it's such an important thing to walk up to them and say, hey, hey, you didn't catch it at that time. But I liked the way that you stood your ground. You didn't move, you didn't flinch, you stood there, like you're getting, this is coming, like we're gonna hit you 10 More, you're gonna get one. You know, because everything isn't always like fail succeed. Sometimes there are levels of better before you get too good. And I think that's important to celebrate those along the way. I don't know if this fits here, but it feels like it does to me, like you know what I mean? Like, it's not just all or nothing. As a matter of fact, and this is apropos of nothing at the moment. I have a note here for myself that says after resilience talk to Erica about all or nothing thinking that's gonna be the next thing I make you do on the podcast.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 56:43
He talked about that a lot in the perfectionist. Yeah. mentality. And and even in Yeah, it does. I mean, it fits in here to where? Yeah, you can't just say such a spectrum.

Scott Benner 56:55
Yeah, you don't just fail or succeed. That's not that that's too over simplified. Anyway, good. Well, I'm sorry. Continue on.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 57:02
Yes, no, I think I think that's we can like to stop right here. I think we can stop there. I think what we want, I know we kind of have, we're switching back and forth between like the trauma and then the first year or first experience of living with diabetes. But I think that it's, it's gonna be harder than you think. And holding that, like when you're noticing the irritability, or the frustration or the sadness, going through these steps, naming it, normalize it, give it perspective, reality, check your expectations, offer that compassion to yourself. In that space, you're also building in that resilience, which is I think, just a beautiful thing, offering yourself that compassion again, through this through this process.

Scott Benner 57:46
Can I say something so that people know something behind the scenes? Don't be embarrassed? Okay. Oh, I already Yeah. I always get the feeling that you always feel like we're not doing a good job. Because I think there's an order in your head about the way you think things should go. And that you think when we start conversating about it, you didn't follow the order. But I would like to tell you, I think the conversation is why it's relatable and why people remember it. So I never want you to feel badly about that. I want you to remind you about the guy who's sent the note that says that the 123 that the grounding, grounding got in through the death of a parent. And that tell me if I'm wrong, but it always feels like there's I don't want to call it a type a part of you. But maybe that like wants it to be tell me what it is about you. You know what I'm saying? So what am I what

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 58:34
am I usually you are right. Usually I have things that I would love for us to cover and an order in which we go today. As you might have seen I had notes on the screen. I have scribbles on my paper. I was reading from the book. Yeah, today. Today. It was what we went into it and I was excited and I wasn't quite sure how it was gonna go. And that makes me feel nervous.

Scott Benner 58:54
You get nervous, right?

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 58:57
I get nervous because I'm like, I'm not sure where we're gonna go. But I was also kind of excited and felt like I had enough in here to share. But normally I like to I like to know where we're gonna go.

Scott Benner 59:07
Yeah, and if you can hear like, when I interject at the end, you go oh, that's so good. That means Oh, that fits here.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 59:15
Oh, yes, that's yeah, that's I like that.

Scott Benner 59:16
You're almost like, good job. I can't believe you did that. Because I listen, I've taken us on excursions before. That's how I mean, if you're gonna do this with me, and it's gonna happen sometimes. When we get to the end, it all gets out. And the way I know that, for sure is super interesting, as I'm watching AI digest transcripts of the podcast. And when you go back and ask it questions, you can tell all the informations there. But if you listen through it, and then said, I don't know how to describe this to people and said, is everything here that we meant to be you because I'm not sure, because conversationally, it's hard to know. But once you have something that's smart enough to actually articulate what's in there, the AI you know, it's in there and people's minds. Think check that stuff out. I don't think they could regurgitated as, right consciously. But I think that subconsciously and intellectually they now know the information. So there's something about conversational that works really well. I just when I see you feel nervous, I always feel bad. Like I actually tried. I tried to talk less today to like help you.

Erika Forsyth, MFT, LMFT 1:00:20
Well, I feel like I talked a lot. I think also knowing there are things that are shelved in my brain that I still want to talk about. But I know since we have more episodes in this series,

Scott Benner 1:00:31
I'd like to make this podcast for another 10 years, so don't worry about I got plenty of time. All right, I appreciate you.

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