Tracey Shors, EVERYDAY TRAUMA: Remapping the Brain's Response to Stress, Anxiety, and Painful Memories for a Better Life
[0:01]Hi, I'm Sivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,
[0:05]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:07]If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids.
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[0:28]And of course, my new publishing company called Sivi Books.
[0:32]And now back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from some of my kids.
[0:37]Hi, hello.
[0:38]Enjoy the show.
[0:39]Tracy Shores is the author of Everyday Trauma,
[0:44]remapping the brain's response to stress, anxiety, and painful memories for a better life.
[0:49]Tracy, a PhD, is a distinguished professor in behavioral and systems neuroscience
[0:54]and a member of the Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University.
[0:58]She is also vice chair and director of graduate studies in the Department of Psychology.
[1:02]Dr. Shores received her doctorate in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Southern California,
[1:07]along with postdoctoral training in neurophysiology, also at USC.
[1:11]She worked at Princeton University and briefly at Genetech,
[1:14]before joining the faculty at Rutgers University in 1998.
[1:19]She has been at Rutgers for more than 20 years.
[1:21]I have to admit, when I interviewed Dr. Shores, I was having a really bad day,
[1:26]and was having trouble coming up with all of the information that I had prepped before our interview.
[1:33]And I don't usually do this, but I just wanted to read a few quotes that I had meant to talk to her about on the show,
[1:38]but got distracted and didn't read.
[1:41]So here are a few of these amazing lines from her book.
[1:44]And when you listen to our conversation, you can hear some of the amazing things that she discussed.
[1:50]But here's some, think of, anyway, listen to this.
[1:53]Think of your brain as a hard drive on a computer.
[1:56]If you save a document under a new name, every time you make a change,
[1:59]eventually you will have so many copies of the document that your hard drive will fill up.
[2:03]In the case of your computer, you can do something about it.
[2:06]You can delete some of those old files, or get a new computer entirely,
[2:09]or store your data in a cloud somewhere.
[2:12]Sadly, we cannot simply delete old traumatic memories from the brain,
[2:15]much less get an altogether new brain.
[2:18]Our memories stay with us, most of them for the rest of our lives.
[2:21]And this is part of why she discusses why traumatic memories and reliving them can be really detrimental,
[2:27]but we do talk about this.
[2:28]Another part, numerous studies, including some of my own, indicate that women ruminate more than men.
[2:34]And many of those ruminations are about far more serious events than typos than an email.
[2:38]Exactly why women ruminate more is more difficult to answer.
[2:41]There are several theories.
[2:43]One, suggest that women ruminate more because they tend to focus on their internal feelings more.
[2:47]Why am I feeling sad? Why am I so nervous?
[2:50]As a result, they are more familiar with their own thoughts, which makes those thoughts easier to rehearse over and over again.
[2:56]Another theory poses that because women are more likely to suffer sexual and physical violence,
[3:00]it can exacerbate the production of these kinds of thought processes.
[3:04]But all theories, the most accepted, is about depression.
[3:07]Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience depression in their lifetimes,
[3:11]and ruminations are tightly linked to depression.
[3:14]In one of our studies, women who were depressed were likely to ruminate, reflecting on the past.
[3:19]Perhaps they were trying to understand what has happened to them along the way to make them feel the way they do.
[3:23]But to be clear, men do ruminate, and they ruminate more when they are depressed.
[3:27]By the way, ruminate a lot, so I don't know what that says about me.
[3:30]Another thing I found interesting was that her dad was an accomplished engineer at standard oil for nearly 40 years.
[3:35]He loved his job, this is a quote.
[3:37]He loved his job and never missed a day of work and hardly ever took a vacation.
[3:40]The year he retired, I came home from college for the holidays to find him sitting in his big chair with his head in his hands all day.
[3:48]And this is about how losing your sense of purpose can be destructive.
[3:52]So if you know anybody going through this, this is also helpful.
[3:55]Another quote about her family history.
[3:58]One day after working in the store all day, my dad and his brother arrived home to find the garage door shut, which it never was.
[4:05]When they opened it up, they found their father dead.
[4:08]So this is also about inherited trauma.
[4:11]Some of the things that she recommends are one of the things is exercise and also therapy.
[4:16]She says the exercise needs to be effortful and by effortful, she means aerobic.
[4:20]She thinks mindfulness-based stress reduction known as MBSR is super important, especially mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and dialectical behavior therapy, MBCT and DBT.
[4:31]And she's developed this map train, my brain, trademark fitness program, which we talk about.
[4:36]And finally, this one last quote is all I'm going to read and then I'll go into the interview.
[4:40]The year 2020 was going to be promising.
[4:43]Then, before I could put away my holiday decorations, I was waiting with a crowd of people in an emergency room, all of us struggling to breathe.
[4:50]After a checks extra, I was sent home with some prednisone, a type of cortisol for the inflammation in my lungs.
[4:56]Once I got home, I turned on the news to hear story after story of people getting sick and dying for the coronavirus.
[5:00]I was convinced I had it, but could not get tested.
[5:03]The more I thought about the virus, the more I couldn't breathe.
[5:06]So anyway, these were just things I wanted to talk to her about, but I didn't.
[5:10]So I'm sorry, but I hope this picture interest in her book.
[5:13]And now, listen to our conversation, which admittedly was not my strongest interview based on the stuff I was going through in my life that I tried to put aside and couldn't.
[5:23]So enjoy.
[5:24]Welcome, Tracy.
[5:25]Thanks so much for coming on Moms.
[5:26]Don't have time to read books to discuss everyday traumas.
[5:29]Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here.
[5:32]Well, as I was just saying quickly, I learned a lot from this book.
[5:36]And you know, I've thought a lot as many people in today's world have about have about trauma and the effects of it and everything.
[5:43]So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about what your book is about.
[5:47]And some of the things you share about trauma that people will find unexpected perhaps or that really useful.
[5:53]Yeah, so I'm a neuroscientist.
[5:56]And then I've been studying the brain and how it responds to stress and trauma for, you know, I chose thinking less than I think it's like 40 years.
[6:04]I keep saying 30, but it's actually 40.
[6:06]And so I know a lot about it.
[6:09]You know, I know a lot about it, you know, from a cellular level all the way up to kind of more of a psychological level.
[6:17]And so I just kind of reached a stage in my, in my life where I felt like I wanted to share some of this information with people.
[6:25]Maybe who don't necessarily know that much about how the brain responds to trauma or if they do.
[6:31]Maybe they hear like kind of these somewhat, you know, simplified ideas like fight or flight, you know, a lot of people have heard of that.
[6:40]That's only one, you know, one part of how we respond to to trauma.
[6:47]And so the part of my goal is to kind of help people understand how memories are made in the brain to begin with and why the ones that are that we tend to think about the most and and ruminate and go over and over again.
[7:03]You know, why, why those, you know, and how does the brain pick those over, you know, other kind of more mundane memories.
[7:12]And so that was, you know, kind of my goal.
[7:14]And then the other goal is like, I didn't really want it to be completely depressing or sad.
[7:20]You know, I feel like sometimes when you read about trauma and or stress.
[7:26]It can almost make you more sad or more depressed because you're like, wow, yeah, life is really traumatic and there are all these things that happen.
[7:35]So I kind of wanted to also show the positive side of our life and how we can learn to reflect on positive things or put even the negative things in context better so that we don't kind of go down those holes all the time.
[7:54]Like people tend to do. So yeah, that was my, that was my goal. I started writing it actually before the pandemic and I had it have done quite a bit of work on women and and how stress and trauma affects their brain differently than men.
[8:12]In particular, I was working on how such a violence and physical violence, you know, affects women.
[8:20]And that happened, you know, some of it during the me too movement. And so when I started writing the book that was, you know, kind of my idea, but obviously things have changed.
[8:32]Another trauma, not that the other ones have gone away, but yeah, so.
[8:36]So in the book you shared a little about past trauma in your own life. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[8:41]I mean, the experience I had and, you know, that was a long time ago, but when I was young, well, it was in my 20s. I was working on my PhD in California and I was staying in this house up in the Hollywood Hills.
[8:56]And I was there by myself one night alone and I wasn't paying attention. You know, I think I was talking on the phone to my boyfriend and I, and I heard something outside and I was like, oh, I think there's something outside.
[9:09]I thought it was maybe like an animal. It's like, you know, it was up in Griffith Park. There's coyotes and whatever out there and deer.
[9:17]I don't know if there's deer, but anyway.
[9:20]And so I didn't think much about it and then I went to go to sleep and pretty much as soon as I lay down. I heard this huge bang like up on was on a staircase on the outside of the house.
[9:35]And yeah, it was just like it's one of those things that if I think about it again, even now after all these years are kind of my heart kind of stops.
[9:45]Because I was like in my head thinking about my dissertation and my personal love life and all these other kind of things and all of a sudden I was just like, you know, like someone's in the house and they probably don't have good ideas.
[9:59]Like this part.
[10:00]I'm not a friend because of it.
[10:01]And anyway, I ended up kind of freezing.
[10:05]You know, they often talk about how people
[10:07]when they're afraid, just freeze.
[10:10]And, you know, I had read about that and knew about that,
[10:13]but I never had experienced it.
[10:15]And I literally couldn't move.
[10:18]It wasn't like I thought, oh, I'll just freeze
[10:22]so that he doesn't hear me.
[10:24]Like I literally couldn't move.
[10:26]It was, yeah.
[10:27]I was sounded terrifying.
[10:29]I lived in my 20s in Laurel Canyon,
[10:33]and I know how creepy it can feel being up in the hills
[10:36]in LA.
[10:37]So, anyway.
[10:38]Yeah, it was weird.
[10:40]It was one time I was watching this documentary,
[10:42]not too long ago, actually, about something,
[10:45]I don't know even what it was about, exactly.
[10:47]And there's a woman told a story that was almost
[10:49]identical to mine.
[10:51]She lived in the same kind of area.
[10:53]She actually jumped off the roof and broke her feet
[10:57]and ran away.
[10:58]Wow.
[10:59]So, when you talk about it, well, I liked that
[11:01]because even though she's such feeling
[11:02]and how you, you know, I probably just did what you said
[11:04]not to do, which is when you relive the trauma in your mind,
[11:08]you are imprinting new memories on top of old memories.
[11:12]And then even that is traumatic.
[11:15]So, I didn't realize that the whole like,
[11:19]let's face it, let's talk about it, let's talk through it.
[11:22]And all of that can actually re-aggravate it.
[11:25]Like, it's a wound that you keep picking at, essentially.
[11:28]Yeah, you know, I'm going to be careful
[11:30]because I, you know, as I've discussed in the book,
[11:33]a lot of therapies, in fact, most therapies for trauma
[11:37]are predicated on this idea that you kind of expose yourself
[11:41]to the memory.
[11:42]And it's very useful, but it has to be done
[11:47]like kind of in the right context, right?
[11:49]It has to be done in a safe place.
[11:53]It has to be done carefully.
[11:56]And so I guess what I didn't want,
[11:59]necessarily for people to think like,
[12:00]oh, you can never like ruminate or think about bad things,
[12:04]but rather just be aware of what your brain is doing
[12:07]when you're having these thoughts.
[12:09]And one way to kind of expose yourself
[12:14]to trauma memories is to be more aware
[12:17]of what your brain is doing while you're having that, right?
[12:21]Because that provides you that little distance.
[12:24]Because our memories, as I, you know, mentioned,
[12:28]I hope get across in the book, they're so real.
[12:31]Yeah.
[12:32]I mean, it's amazing, right?
[12:34]I could think about something I did this morning
[12:37]or a few seconds ago or last week,
[12:39]and it's like a movie in my head, you know,
[12:42]how in the world does a brain even do that?
[12:45]That's amazing already, right?
[12:47]And so if you can kind of embrace that fact
[12:51]and then be like, oh, okay, it's my brain is doing this.
[12:54]I'm not reliving it, even though that's how we, right?
[12:57]I hate it, you're not really reliving it.
[13:00]You're brain with proteins and electrophysiology neurons,
[13:07]they're creating that image or that feeling
[13:11]or that, you know, that experience, that feels real,
[13:15]but it doesn't sound.
[13:18]Okay, so for people listening
[13:19]who have been dealing with a trauma in their own lives
[13:23]and maybe it's the pandemic or the isolation or loss,
[13:27]but maybe it has an absolutely nothing to do with that.
[13:28]I mean, there are 8 million kinds of trauma,
[13:30]including the kinds that you describe
[13:33]that happen over time that are more in the abuse category,
[13:36]right?
[13:37]You had a name for it, like the residual trauma,
[13:40]but the repeated trauma that comes over time.
[13:43]So we know there are all these different buckets
[13:46]into which the category, into which the types of trauma fall,
[13:49]that, you know, the end result is still
[13:53]how do you cope with all of this?
[13:55]So if there's somebody out there today
[13:56]who's listening to this and thinking,
[13:58]oh my gosh, like I'm never gonna get over this,
[14:00]or I don't know how I'm gonna get over this,
[14:02]like what do you say?
[14:04]Like how does the brain recover?
[14:07]Yeah.
[14:08]Well, I mean, luckily the brain,
[14:11]a lot of memories and the feelings
[14:13]that come with them do tend to fade, you know, with time.
[14:17]So obviously immediately after an experience,
[14:21]even like the one I described, you know,
[14:22]for those first weeks and months,
[14:25]I was really petrified, you know,
[14:27]and I didn't even wanna go outside hardly,
[14:29]but now, you know, you're later, I can kind of like,
[14:32]I see it more like a story, right?
[14:35]I tell the story, and it doesn't necessarily make me that afraid.
[14:39]So time is a really great healer.
[14:41]But time heals, what is that expression?
[14:43]Time heals, all wounds or something?
[14:46]I don't know, do you buy that?
[14:47]I don't know about all wounds.
[14:49]Yeah, some of those are their real parts
[14:52]and to let go of.
[14:56]And we don't necessarily want to let go of all of them.
[15:00]You know, the other thing is one benefit
[15:04]of learning a little bit more
[15:05]about how the brain encodes these kind of experiences
[15:09]is to think about why, you know,
[15:11]why do we have memories in the first place?
[15:13]I mean, I think sometimes people think,
[15:15]oh, you know, they're nice to reminisce
[15:18]or they're not nice to think about,
[15:22]but there's a function,
[15:23]there are actually there to help us in the future.
[15:27]Yep, you know, so something like the experience that I had,
[15:31]it made me much more vigilant when I'm alone
[15:34]and much more careful.
[15:35]And so there's some like benefits that happen
[15:39]where the problem arises is when the benefit
[15:43]or the downsides outweigh the benefits, you know,
[15:47]so you start maybe hiding all the time
[15:50]or not going out with friends.
[15:51]And, you know, I think the pandemic is just, you know,
[15:55]I wouldn't say great because there's nothing great about it,
[15:58]but it's a prime example of this
[16:02]because everything we do now is kind of like tinged
[16:07]with this little bit of fear or trauma, you know,
[16:10]something as simple as going to the grocery store,
[16:14]which whoever used to think that would be, you know,
[16:16]a traumatic event, but now, you know,
[16:19]you go to the grocery store and even if you feel okay now,
[16:23]you remember how it was a year ago to be afraid.
[16:27]And so in airplanes, I feel like there's all this peace,
[16:30]you know, I don't know, lingering travel fears
[16:33]and maybe it's just me, but no, I think it's like,
[16:37]I was talking to somebody yesterday who's now an airline,
[16:41]she just became a stewardess and airline stewards
[16:43]are like, wow, that's, that's intense, right?
[16:46]To do that right now in this particular atmosphere.
[16:49]Yep. So I guess one of the things that I hope
[16:53]that people would do from reading this book is kind of
[16:58]start to think more about preparing yourself
[17:02]for the future.
[17:04]Okay.
[17:05]And instead of saying, well, this really bad thing happened
[17:08]to me and now I'm going to, you know, seek therapy
[17:13]or maybe try medication or, you know,
[17:16]whatever the kind of traditional ways of dealing
[17:19]with trauma are, but also kind of prepare yourself
[17:22]for the future.
[17:23]Because we know that bad things will happen.
[17:25]Yep. You know, one of the ways that I found,
[17:28]particularly useful for me is just sitting alone
[17:33]with my phone, you know, it's called meditation,
[17:36]but really it's a way of kind of like just really
[17:40]dissecting your own thoughts.
[17:43]And most people, at least I mean,
[17:47]even though I studied thoughts,
[17:49]I didn't take much time to study my own.
[17:53]And I think that also can be really helpful.
[17:56]Okay.
[17:57]And tell me about deciding to write this book.
[18:00]When did this become a book?
[18:01]When did you know you wanted to do it?
[18:04]And how long did it take to write and all that good stuff?
[18:06]Oh, wow.
[18:07]Actually, I was listening to some of your podcasts
[18:09]and I just love like all these people who love books, right?
[18:12]Yeah.
[18:14]So exciting for me because that's how my mother was.
[18:19]That was actually crying.
[18:20]So my mother, she loved books.
[18:23]And she would always take us to the library.
[18:25]Oh, they were free, you know.
[18:27]And yeah, so I always loved books too.
[18:30]And then I kind of always wanted to write a book,
[18:33]but I never really kind of thought I had the,
[18:37]that's really the skill because I do a lot of writing.
[18:40]I have like 150 scientific publications.
[18:43]So it's not like I've never written anything before,
[18:45]but I never wrote something kind of semi-personal
[18:50]somewhat for the public, you know,
[18:52]other than some kind of,
[18:55]some articles like Recympic Americans and what have you,
[18:58]but I never really wrote like a personal story book.
[19:02]And I wasn't even really sure I had enough
[19:04]to tell a story.
[19:06]You know, I know a lot about the brain, obviously,
[19:08]but I didn't know what the art of that story would be.
[19:12]But then like 10 years ago,
[19:14]I started working on this,
[19:15]I call it a brain fitness program.
[19:17]It's called map training.
[19:19]It stands for mental and physical training.
[19:22]And I devised a based on my research on the brain,
[19:26]but even once I had kind of developed it,
[19:28]I hadn't like, does it even work?
[19:30]And you know, it doesn't really help people
[19:32]with their traumas and the way they feel about themselves.
[19:35]And so that took like another five or 10 years
[19:39]to like get enough data to be confident
[19:43]that this was like something that people could do,
[19:47]should do, might want to do.
[19:49]So that was kind of like the final part,
[19:53]you know, of this trajectory where I was like,
[19:55]okay, now I'm gonna make this book.
[19:57]Not too much of the fact that I'm getting older.
[19:59]So I was like,
[20:00]like, okay, I just have to ride it because time is wasting.
[20:03]And it took me about three years, actually.
[20:06]You know, I mentioned I started it
[20:09]somewhat around the Me Too movement.
[20:12]And because I do work on that type of trauma as well,
[20:17]but then the pandemic came.
[20:19]And so it kind of evolved during that time period
[20:23]when I was isolated.
[20:25]Oh.
[20:26]Yeah.
[20:27]How do you feel now?
[20:28]Like, how do you feel that now you have a book that would
[20:31]be in the library that your mom could have found?
[20:34]Oh, my God.
[20:35]I'll start crying again.
[20:37]I mean, I'm a little bit worried as probably most authors
[20:40]are like, you know, will people like it?
[20:42]Or did I say something like crazy?
[20:44]And so I've gone through like that stage.
[20:47]And I'm probably still in that stage.
[20:49]But I was talking to this woman who runs a bookstore
[20:55]at the university.
[20:57]So it's actually, it's really cool.
[20:59]It's a non-profit bookstore.
[21:01]She gives out books for free to all over the country.
[21:04]And anyway, so she was telling me she's that your book.
[21:07]It'll be there, you know, till the end of time,
[21:10]maybe that's not exactly true.
[21:12]But I was like, okay, that makes me feel kind of okay.
[21:17]And even if like, you know, everyone doesn't love it,
[21:20]there's nuggets in there that will be important.
[21:23]I think that will help people in their everyday lives.
[21:26]Hey, Gray, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[21:31]Oh, my gosh, just do it.
[21:34]Like, if it's something you really care about,
[21:37]you just have to like buckle down on and do it.
[21:40]And, you know, you know, too, right?
[21:43]And it's really easy to get discouraged.
[21:47]Like, I was thinking about it when I was listening
[21:48]to some of your podcasts and some,
[21:52]someone, one of the women was talking about reading other books
[21:55]and how they inspired her.
[21:56]And I was like, well, I actually found it kind of hard to read
[22:00]while I was writing the book.
[22:02]Because either I would be like, oh, yeah,
[22:06]my book is way better than that.
[22:07]Or I'd be like, oh, no, so much better at it that I am.
[22:12]So, you know, I just found it kind of hard
[22:15]to actually read and write at the same time.
[22:17]Do you find that?
[22:19]Sometimes, yeah.
[22:20]But as if I weren't really editing part,
[22:24]but like when you're really trying to like come up
[22:26]with something new.
[22:28]Yep, it's true.
[22:29]Yep.
[22:31]So that part, I'm kind of glad,
[22:32]because now I can get back,
[22:34]because I like novels too.
[22:35]So I'm like, you can do a little fiction now and not be so,
[22:40]yeah, a focus on the facts.
[22:42]Yes, that makes sense.
[22:45]Well, Tracy, thank you so much.
[22:47]Thank you for all of your research and time
[22:49]and, you know, expertise.
[22:52]And I know your book is going to help so many people.
[22:54]And that's really exciting.
[22:55]So, congratulations to you.
[22:57]I'm really honored to be associated with your show.
[23:01]And I'm looking forward to listening
[23:02]to some more of your podcast.
[23:03]Oh, thank you.
[23:04]Please do.
[23:05]All right.
[23:06]Thanks a lot.
[23:07]Have a great day.
[23:08]Thank you.
[23:09]Bye.
[23:10]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[23:13]to Read Books.
[23:14]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens
[23:17]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[23:19]Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibi Owens.com
[23:21]and sign up for my virtual book club
[23:23]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[23:26]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[23:28]for the Sound Editing.
[23:29]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[23:31]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.