DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
Resolving Childhood Trauma
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This weeks guest is Barb Smith Varclova, a beacon of resilience and a leading expert in childhood trauma. From her challenging upbringing as a dissident in Prague, facing persecution and fear, to her own survival of a life-threatening car accident. Barb's journey is marked by profound experiences that have fuelled her passion for childhood trauma expertise. In this episode we delve into her story and the transformative impact of her resilience on the field of trauma understanding.
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Welcome to Storytelling. This week's guest is a beacon of resilience and leading expert in childhood trauma. From her challenging upbringing as a dissident in Prague, facing persecution and fear, to her own survival of a life-threatening car accident, her remarkable journey is marked by profound experiences that have fueled her passion for childhood trauma expertise. Join us as we delve into her story and the transformative impact of her resilience on the field of trauma understanding. Please welcome Barb Smith Bar Slova. Hello, Barb, and welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Hello Debbie, thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01Bob, can you explain to us the impact of childhood trauma on mental health and well-being?
SPEAKER_00When we have the children facing different ways of adversities, which are causing the fear in us, because as a child, as every other mammal understands depending on adults around. So when we get scared, when we have different adversities as the children, then we're not developing the fully as we should. So we are not connected with our inner strengths, with our self-love, and we're developing things as anxiety, depression, or being overly focused on something, struggle with focus, and can develop symptoms as ADHD. We can have generalized anxiety or be even diagnosed as bipolar or borderline personality disorder. So childhood trauma is manifesting as the mental health issues in adulthood in various forms, and from things as resistance, trauma response, which is leading to the burnouts in alcoholism, to drug abuse and eating disorders, through panic attacks and nightmares, and ability, not ability to speak up for ourselves, ending in the toxic relationship, to developing to the physical manifestation as the asthma, as uh in autoimmune disorders. So childhood trauma is very significant in developing the mental health issues in adults.
SPEAKER_01So you mentioned some of the symptoms just now, or some of the obvious signs that can indicate that there's been a childhood trauma. Is there anything specific that you may point out and think, oh, maybe there's been some childhood trauma there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there is several questions we can ask ourselves. Like the one was most obvious is like, did I feel afraid as the child in any time? And it doesn't have to be just because, for example, witness or be part of domestic violence, or uh living in poverty and don't not be sure that it will be enough food, or living in an environment when it's the coldness, or where it's the emotional and mental abuse, it can be also bereavement and loss of people in childhood, uh, if it's the parents or siblings or close relatives. So when we have that question, yes, I was afraid, I was terrified, I didn't know how to cope, then it's one of the signs which will most likely lead to some way of trauma. When it was ongoing, when it was, for example, for several years, then it's creating different trauma responses, but almost sure that there are if there wasn't some really positive influence and feeling of safeness with some person.
SPEAKER_01Are there specific therapeutic techniques or approaches that are effective for childhood trauma?
SPEAKER_00As I tried recovered from my own childhood trauma, I went through many different uh modalities and different techniques, and I tried what was available from Silva Method Control Mind, one brain, neurolanguage programming, regression therapy. You know, if you find it, you name it, I probably try it. But so what I found out over the years that it needs includes to the work with the subconscious mind. So very effective is hypnotherapy and specifically rapid transformational therapy, which is combining the hypnotherapy with the regression therapy, neurolanguage programming and uh CBT uh techniques. I added also what I call somatic hypnotherapy, which is working with the releasing emotions from the body, so on that subconscious level, which are actually the real cause of the trauma responses from childhood, and the part therapy, which is working about reconnecting our parts together to become whole again, because our minds have a tendency to split in the traumas and staying in small ages in different ages, and also disconnecting from our parts as inner strengths and knowledge and intuition, and we need to kind of put it all together back on subconscious level to get the full recovery from trauma.
SPEAKER_01So you mentioned that some of these techniques helped you to overcome some of your childhood trauma. What was your experience and when did you realize that you had unresolved trauma that needed to be resolved?
SPEAKER_00My experience started when I was really little. I grew up in Czech Republic in the time called Czechoslovakia in the time of communism era, and my parents were dissidents, so we lived in permanence supervising or by state police and were limited to what we can do, travel. My parents wasn't allowed to do the work they should do. My father was an inventor, but was for many years limited in doing any science work. And when I look back, I realized that it started when I was just a few months old, actually, when the communism regime forced the mothers to put children to the full daycare. So I was from six o'clock in the morning to the five o'clock in the afternoon in daycare since I was six months old. And then my mom had an accident when I was four years old, which was a severe accident with followed a huge amount of snow on her from the roof of the apartment building. So they kind of put it to the equivalent of one and a half tonne of pressure. And everybody calls it the miracle that she survived. But we as children were there. I stepped back and my siblings and forward. So we it didn't hit us, but we witnessed it. We were there, and and that was the one looking back, the also one source of PTSD I have developed from there. But what was the worst part and how developing the trauma was that nobody came to help us. We wasn't in contact with our family because they didn't want to uh be persecuted, also for my parents who didn't agree with the regime, and also because we were Christian and it wasn't allowed to be in that time. And so mom was in hospital, father tried to take care of both three children in age four to seven, and uh nobody came to help us. So I kind of got on the role of the carer, try to help with things, uh, and learn to totally suppress my emotions, not to express them and just keep going. But that starts showing on my health. I was quite often have some infections, inflammations, sinusitis. And in the end, when I was 17, I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. It was really probably the worst part of my life. Even later I had the car accident, I would say that that chronic fatigue syndrome was the worst because my daily achievement was get get tutorial. I live in enormous pain, enormous headaches, fatigue. And doctors told me that they don't know what to do with that, that they in that time was actually one of the new uh diagnoses itself, and they definitely didn't know how to deal with that. They just was able to kind of diagnose that it is, but it's still kind of counted as the unknown or psychosomatic source of pain. And that time I started really looking for solution because I said, like, no, that's not possible. I'm 17, that's gone on my life on. And one of the first things I found was silver method of control mind. In that time, it wasn't so popular as it is now, so there was actually just few people who were trained in that and was training the others. But that's opened the world for me, completely new world, because I find out that connection between mind and body, it's so amazing. And I actually start seeing how all these little thousand little drops of everyday pressure and fear and tension from not knowing when secret police took my father off if he will come back, if my mom was in hospital, if she will come back, if she will manage to climb the stairs because they didn't let us move from the different flat, and we were living in the third floor without elevator, without lift, and and I would watch my mom crawling the stairs up, and some days she would not be able to get off the bed because her body will just uh respond to the nerve system. So that all that everyday pressure, pressure, pressure from different points of views in school and home, not knowing what will be tomorrow, not uh living in uh poverty will look back now because in that time I thought it's normal, but looking back now, it was a really, really desperate poverty we was living in, then that my body just gave up because the mind was just so overwhelmed. And I learned that I can be successful in the work, but self-sabotage myself, have panic attacks when I should stood up for myself, uh struggling with having trusting relationships, always keep myself for myself, not sharing my problems because it wasn't believed that I would be ever accepted and nobody would ever understand what I went through or why I'm reacting like that or why. And I saw that leading to the some unpleasant really experiences in relationships.
SPEAKER_01All this difficult family experience, and nobody would help you. How did that make you feel? How did you hold back the bitterness towards that?
SPEAKER_00It's created an enormous amount of sadness, feeling not valued, feeling not worthy, and feeling so that has to be something wrong with me that I wasn't wanted, or I was or all of us, you know, like that people just not help that spite. It's a part of that we have, and we know often not speak about, and it's not speak about it a lot. There is a big amount of grieving in trauma, yeah. And uh it's not about forgiveness, as often people think, it's it's about the processing that enormous amount of sadness we get from childhood trauma, because sadness it's not about what's about past, sadness is actually about future, about all these lost possibilities, how my life could be different if somebody would come and help, or if somebody what if you know, and all that what we didn't have, what we couldn't have, or was taking from us, and that amount of sadness it's it's a big part of trauma, and it's what we're not speaking about, and why we cannot just let to manage, we cannot learn to manage the responses because that sadness is present until we are managing to look back and realizing the situation was like that, it did happen, it wasn't my fault, I cannot do anything else, I'm still valued, I am enough, I am worthy, and I can be just myself as an adult. I just have to accept that. So, same as in the grieving process, it's about accepting this new reality, accepting that I wanted that, I would like to have it differently, but it just wasn't. So I can move forward, I can be myself, I can be in the present moment and not keep looking back. But that's hard until we we need really first to understand what's really happened, be willing and brave to go back and look on that child which was scared and help the child to grow. We see speak about a lot about working with the inner child, but it's not about connected with the inner child, it's about let the child become adult. We need to be all adult, not have one child inside which is three years old, five years old, as ten years old, as they our mind will start making these parts. We need to look back and go and tell the child you are safe now, you are not in that situation anymore, because that one part of our mind still living in that situation. If it was domestic violence, if it was lack of having things, if my case was not be accepted by some family members, which is really manipulative and really create even more troubles for us, even in situations we were already. And a children doesn't understand that they just reacting in that high alert, switch to the survival mode and just surviving. But when we surviving, we are not choosing, we just grabbing. We just what is available, we will take, but we are not choosing. So we need to first switch off that high alert, switch off the survival mode, and become present, and then we can go through that process of grieving, of trauma, and realizing that's past, and this is the new day, this is the new reality, this is where I am choosing what I want to be, who I want to be, where I want to be, with whom I want to be. This is me, who I am, who I want to be as an adult.
SPEAKER_01So you've done something really extraordinary with your experience because you are now helping others navigate their childhood trauma. Are there any common misconceptions about childhood trauma that you often encounter in your work?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, common misconceptions are that it has to be something huge happening in in life, that it's those who have this, what is classified as childhood adverse experiences, like witnessing drug abuse or be physically abusive or sexual abuse. This has to be like big things. Uh, childhood trauma coming from thousands of little things often, yeah. So um it can be exactly situation childhood trauma can have children which their sibling is severely ill if they lost the parent. So a lot of children of the military uh personnel have trauma, often moving, or just not be accepted, not be childhood trauma is created when the need of the child are not fulfilled. And it doesn't matter what situation they are, if the if it's not fulfilled, need for safe, for support, for love, that's causing childhood trauma. So that's common misconception. And secondly, is that many trauma responses that are expected that it's we're speaking often just about the fight and fly, but trauma responses for childhood trauma are much more common, are freeze and phone, because children cannot get from that situation, they learn not to fight, and often they cannot run anywhere, they are stuck in that situation, so they learn to freeze or falling, people pleasing, and that freeze response we will see in people who cannot speak in public, in people who cannot ask for raise, people who just do everything for others and they just wear themselves out to try to please others because that's making them feel safe. Yeah, so quite often people don't even recognize that they had childhood trauma until we start really looking into what's happened in their life.
SPEAKER_01What does it look like for an individual who has come to terms with their version of childhood trauma? Because as you've mentioned previously, it looks very different for lots of individuals.
SPEAKER_00Freedom. It's mean freedom because when we realize what happened, was really happened, how we really reacted to it, we just a big part of childhood trauma is numbing, we just oppressing their emotions and we numbing them. And the one part of what we numbing is that our mind is not able to recognize what we want to numb. When we are children, we start numbing that that pain, that emotional pain, that fear, that that anger. But mind will start numbing also joy and happiness and excitement because mind is actually not able to recognize between anxiety and excitement. So when we look at that, we realize what it happened, we release that old emotions, we reprogram these old beliefs, our life becomes totally different. We are joyful, happy, excited, motivated, and free to be we want to be, very often pain-free, very often uh will change the medical situation of that person because the the 75% of medical issues are related to the trauma, um, mental trauma. So when we resolve them, the physical conditions change. So people are finding that they're living different life. I'm living different life. I the quality of the life, it's so different that people cannot even imagine. And it's why I'm so passionate about that because I really would say, hey, when people are told, just learn to manage your responses, just learn to not be angry, just learn to not be depressed, just just do something. You cannot manage trauma responses, you have to uh switch them off, you have to take off the resource.
SPEAKER_01And what would you say to someone listening who is trying to come to terms with uh a childhood trauma or someone who may know someone who has been through child trauma, how can they best support that person as well?
SPEAKER_00I think that best is the realization that give that hope that it's possible to recover. And so every to everybody who do suffer with uh childhood responses to the childhood trauma, I would want to say that it's possible to recover. So seek the therapy, um, seek the help with working with subconscious mind, seek the trauma therapist, which working with um, for example, rapid transformational therapy, seek me if you want to. But it's important to believe that it's possible because it is. And for if you know somebody uh who suffered with childhood trauma, encourage them to seek the help, but also help them maybe speak about that, help them to see the different point of view and help them to validate their feelings because most often, for example, people who are angry because of childhood trauma are not seen as victims of childhood trauma. They are often seen as perpetrators and you should calm down and you should do that, but they cannot help themselves, that anger coming from inside. So it's more about that question, okay, why are you really angry? What is really going on? And help them to understand themselves more because then they can realize that they are actually right to be angry if there was abuse of the children or um was pressurized too much. So it's about that support and understanding that childhood trauma is not one or two big events happening in life. It was for most people at least a decade or more than uh different events day to day, and they need that space to actually start looking at that and process that, release it. But it's possible. There is hope. It's you can get from it. You don't have to stay with that for the rest of your life.
SPEAKER_01Barb, you've given us so much food for thought, and I really do hope that the audience listening, anyone who has unresolved childhood trauma, that they were think the help that they need in order to resolve this. And Barb, I just want to thank you so much for being a guest on his podcast.
SPEAKER_00You're welcome. I was happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01If you would like further details about Barb, then please follow links in the show notes.