WATCH THIS EVERYDAY AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE! – Morning Motivation
foreign to the science you quote a study and a survey that said that almost 50 percent of children in the United States have had at least one significant traumatic experience but a lot of people will still deny however having experienced trauma a lot of people will feel uncomfortable admitting and accepting that they have experienced some trauma what are some of our misconceptions around what trauma is and how it affects us and would you mind explaining what sort of experiences are defined as traumatic to help us expand our definition so most of us first heard the concept of sort of trauma as we're talking about it now in context of post-traumatic stress disorder and combat veterans and so even within our field in Psychiatry the majority of people who studied uh trauma and looked at trauma were looking at the effects of these horrific events exposure to combat death of a soldier next to you as you know the thing to understand around trauma but over time people like me who were studying the stress response systems in animal models were very uh well aware that it's not necessarily these big traumatic events that are easily identified by everybody as a trauma that will lead to the changes in the brain that cause the problems and so certainly if you do have these events that can be a problem so natural disaster house fire car accident you know abuse of All Sorts that's certainly traumatic but probably the most important thing and and I think the thing that's impacting more children and adults than anything else are experiences that are patterns of stress activation where you have no control over the experience it's not predictable and it's prolonged it's ongoing and I think to some degree the experiences of the last year are an example for many people of a prolonged set of uncontrollable and unpredictable stressors and we've all felt sort of our Baseline level of Tolerance is going down we're a little bit more tired we can handle situations a little bit less and so what we've been studying is the combination of these experiences where you are not in control of your life and it may be a child who's living in a domestic violence environment where he or she is not the direct Target of all of this stuff but there's so much unpredictability about when the fighting is going to happen and there's so much unpredictability about whether Mom is going to be in a good mood today or a bad mood or Dad's going to be angry or not angry and that can lead to these physiological changes that increase your risk for physical health problems mental health problems and learning problems and so that's kind of where we're moving in the field is this recognition that you don't just have to have some sort of capital T trauma in your life to be impacted by trauma and in fact if you are a minority in a majority culture you're going to get all kinds of experiences where you're getting these relational interactions that are not are sending the signal that you don't belong which will activate your stress response which can over time accumulate and influence your physical and mental health we can believe things that are core but are we acting at them on our call right are we acting on them are we actually taking action are we actually becoming activated and making change or trying to make change when we are believing making things happen actually attracts resources so focusing on resources at the get-go isn't necessarily what you need what we need to do is focus on the authenticity of what we're trying to achieve Ronnie we always have doubt whether our opinion matters or not and sometimes we think that our social status might hinder us from making change how do we overcome this funny great Point let's take a look at the case for Malala social change is different from business in business our social status matters in business our achievements matter in in business our grades matter right but social change is about authenticity and genuineness and the true belief in a cause if you look at anyone having massive change today in those spaces they may be coming from business and making change that's awesome right they've already established themselves in another industry and now they're bringing that to something that they care about but if you look at Grassroots level change in any area it's coming from people who don't have degrees in the area who don't have a background in that area they haven't made money in their area but they care about it and that's why an authentic program of change not just speaking about stuff not just writing about stuff but actually creating small groups of change small pockets of change activating individuals to start making a difference that's something that everyone can connect with that's something that attracts attention so when you're doubting your opinion or whether your opinion matters recognize you're probably right most of our opinions don't matter everyone has an opinion if I share something about Standing Rock today so many people around us will have an opinion but the key is how many people are turning that opinion into action so it's true our opinion may not matter but as soon as we start turning that opinion into genuine and authentic action that will attract interest from the right people when you were talking about the stories we tell ourselves I think that's so important because there's a there's a great study there talk about the book by Amy grazniewski from the Yale uh University and what they found is that they tried to find a career that they felt people may find not sharing a positive story around and they found that hospital cleaners or Hospital workers potentially are one of the toughest jobs in wrong and you're a doctor and you know I'm sure you've seen people having to do that work and it's a tough job and so they asked Hospital workers how they Define their jobs and the majority of them defined it as low skilled defined it as you know insignificant Define it as just a way to pay the bills and that their job wasn't useful or their job wasn't important and their role was basically describe like the Personnel manual but then they asked another set of Hospital workers the same people who did the same jobs different people who did the same jobs and they said how do you feel about your job and these people aren't they felt they were Healers they felt they were caretakers they felt that they were able to transform the energy of the actual hospital they felt that they were carers for the people there and what they found is that these same people sorry different people who did the same job were telling themselves a different story and therefore they saw their role as integral to the healing of the patient and because they saw their role as integral to the healing of the patient they found the work that they did to be extremely meaningful and that's crazy to think about it that different people doing the same job could say different things about the same work 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