Unpacking trauma: How early wounds shape behavior and the path toward healing | Jeff English

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. My guest this week is Jeff English. Jeff is a trauma-focused clinical counselor with extensive experience working with adults, teens, families and groups. He's worked in multiple settings, including career counseling, life coaching, addiction, recovery, professional workshops and private practice. He's a licensed professional clinical counselor, a nationally certified counselor and a certified clinical trauma professional. He's an outreach specialist at The Bridge to Recovery, a residential workshop for individuals suffering from the effects of trauma. I met Jeff in 2017 when I attended The Bridge to Recovery as a client, and we've stayed in close touch ever since. In this episode with Jeff, we discussed the profound impact of trauma and the impact that it has on certain individuals. Jeff shares insights from his experience as a trauma therapist, diving into how moments of perceived helplessness shape our behaviors and how those adaptive strategies can become maladaptive behaviors over time. We explore the concept of the trauma tree, examining its roots and its branches. This is a great framework that they use at the Bridge to Recovery that I still find to be probably the most helpful in explaining what trauma is and how it manifests. Jeff reflects on the transformative power of group therapy, in particular at the Bridge to Recovery. We discuss briefly some of the challenges and breakthroughs that can occur in that setting. We speak about the role of vulnerability in fostering connection, and the challenges in letting go of control, the path from understanding to action in trauma integration. Jeff offers advice on how to find a great trauma therapist, balancing personal growth within relationships and recognizing when it's time to seek help. This is kind of a heartfelt and deeply insightful conversation for anyone grappling with disconnection or seeking to better understand the complexities of their own experience and their own journey of healing. Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Jeff English.
Jeff.

**Jeff English** (2:58)
Peter.

**Peter Attia** (2:59)
Kind of hard to believe we're sitting here, huh?

**Jeff English** (3:01)
Yeah. It is hard to believe. It's amazing. It's good to see you.

**Peter Attia** (3:05)
Likewise. I thought long and hard about how I wanted to structure our discussion today knowing that this was a conversation I wanted to have for a very long time. Maybe the easiest way to start is just to talk a little bit about this loaded word of trauma. When I first was introduced to this idea of trauma, I didn't know what it meant. I think today it's become such a catchy buzzword that everybody is traumatized by something. I don't know if that represents a pendulum swing or a normalization or what, but why don't we just start with how you describe trauma as a trauma therapist and as someone who's been doing trauma therapy for many years, not just in the recent trendy years for whatever that means. But how do you describe this to people?

**Jeff English** (3:48)
Well, I would have described it the same way that you described it initially back in the day. Trauma. I have to have been at Vietnam, wartime, 9-11. These are those big T traumas you hear some folks use that type of terminology. But within the spirit of the work, the knee-to-knee work, really embracing a definition, moments of perceived helplessness, that's what's going to activate the limbic system.
So, who is to say what one limbic system evaluates as helplessness versus another? That's when we get into this, I think, discovery of most of the people that I meet, have been meeting over the last several years, are the ones, wow, I think I did experience trauma. You mentioned it's a much more popular thing, and now are we trending in a different direction. So in a lot of my work with clients individually or groups, I say, I hate to oversimplify things, but I think sometimes we just make things too damn complex. A lot of what I do is try to depolarize for folks, and we're getting into these situations to where we live in this world of get over it, it doesn't matter, versus like you mentioned, perhaps, stay stuck in it. But yeah, moments of perceived helplessness, activating that limbic system. These things can happen sometimes at The Bridge, you remember we talked about wounding events, and one of those would be a tragic event. Life seems to be going one way before this thing happens, and then this thing happens, and life changes, and everything is different on the other side of that. A big T event versus someone again who, maybe you could describe it as a thousand paper cuts. Someone growing up, going through childhood daily, being limbically activated, but moments of perceived helplessness. That stuck for me, and it stuck for a lot of clients.