Episode 16
· 20:56
People aren't broken, and there's always a way forward. I know that because I've lived it. I left school at 14, one of nine kids, and joined the RAF at 16. Thirty years following that, I worked in sales and hospitality, all the while believing there was a version of my life that I couldn't quite reach. In my mid forties, I found hypotherapy, and discovered that belief was wrong.
Gary Johannes:I retrained, built Inspired to Change, and at 60, came out of King's College London with an MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health. The same year, I found out I had dyslexia and ADHD. I'm Gary Johannis, solution focused hypnotherapist, founder of Inspired To Change, and senior lecturer at CPHT. This podcast is everything that's come from all of that. One condition per episode.
Gary Johannes:What's going on? What's keeping it going? And what actually helps? If you find it useful, hit subscribe. Let's get into it.
Gary Johannes:So Trauma and PTSD. If you've lived with either, you'll know they don't stay politely in the past where they belong. They say what you'll do, where you'll go, and how safe you feel in your own body. I want to start with something important. Trauma is not rare.
Gary Johannes:In England, around one in three adults report having experienced at least one traumatic event. About one in three children in The UK will have one before they turn 18. If you're carrying something like this, you're not the exception. You're one of a very large number of people quietly getting on with life while carrying something heavy. This episode is about the difference between trauma and PTSD.
Gary Johannes:What each one actually is, what's happening in the brain, what's keeping it going, and what actually helps. And I'll leave you with one thing you can take away today. Now let's get into it. So what is trauma? Trauma is what happens when something overwhelms your ability to cope in the moment.
Gary Johannes:Something frightening. Something where you feel out of control. Something where you, or someone you love, is at risk of serious harm. And here's the part people miss. It doesn't only count if it happened directly to you.
Gary Johannes:The two big diagnostic manuals, the DSM-five out of America, and the ICD-eleven, the World Health Organizations, which is the one the NHS uses, both recognize more than one way in. You can live through it yourself. You can witness it happen to someone else right in front of you. You can learn it happened to someone you loved. A sudden violent loss you weren't even there for can land just as hard.
Gary Johannes:And you can be worn down by repeated exposure to the aftermath, which is the daily reality of paramedics, police, and nurses. Anyone whose job puts them in the room with people's worst days, over and over. And you don't have to have reacted in a particular way for it to count. The old thinking said you had to have felt intense fear or helplessness in the moment. That's been dropped for good reason.
Gary Johannes:Plenty of people go numb. They function, they handle the practicalities, and it only catches up with them later. If you've been wondering whether it counts because you didn't fall apart at the time, It counts. Going numb is one of the ways the brain copes. Now, trauma is a real problem in its own right.
Gary Johannes:There's a version of this conversation that treats trauma as the small thing, and PTSD as the serious thing, and that isn't right. When something traumatic happens, the brain treats it as an emergency. The threat system fires. The body floods. Everything narrows to get through it.
Gary Johannes:That's real. It's serious. And it can knock you sideways for weeks. For most people, over time, that response settles. The brain processes what happened, files it away as over, and the alarm gradually switches off.
Gary Johannes:That's not trauma being trivial. That's recovery. The system finishing its job. PTSD is what we call it when the second half doesn't happen, when the alarm won't switch off, when months later, sometimes years later, the flashbacks, the nightmares, the constant scanning for danger, the sense of still being in it carry on long after the danger has passed. So here's the cleanest way to put it.
Gary Johannes:Trauma is what happened to you. PTSD is your brain still treating it as what's happening to you. One is the wound. The other is the wound that won't close. Both are real.
Gary Johannes:The difference is only whether the system managed to stand itself back down. And PTSD is common. Over a lifetime, it affects somewhere between six to nine people in every hundred. In the jobs that meet trauma head on, again and again military, emergency services that climbs to as many as thirty in one hundred. One in five UK police officers and staff show symptoms of it.
Gary Johannes:Healthcare workers are twice as likely to experience it as the rest of us. And it isn't only adults. One in thirteen young people in The UK will have PTSD. This is not a fringe condition. It's the quiet reality for a huge number of people who spend their lives helping the rest of us.
Gary Johannes:So what's happening in the brain? When something traumatic happens, the amygdala, the brain's threat detection system tags the experience as dangerous in vivid, high priority detail, so that if anything similar happens again, you'll spot the danger instantly. That's survival. And most of the time, it serves us well. The problem is how the memory gets stored.
Gary Johannes:Normally, the hippocampus processes it, gives it a time stamp, files it as past. With traumatic memory, that can get interrupted. The memory stays raw, present tense, not filed as over. So when a trigger comes, a sound, a smell, a place, an anniversary, sometimes nothing you can actually put your finger on. The brain doesn't retrieve it as a memory.
Gary Johannes:It re experiences it as though it's happening right now. That's a flashback. That's not remembering, that's reliving. Which is exactly what the W. Manual means when it describes re experiencing in the present.
Gary Johannes:Underneath, the amygdala stays on high alert, because as far as it's concerned, the danger was never filed as finished. That's hypervigilance. The racing heart, the scan in the room, the jumping at a sudden noise exhausting, because the body is running a threat response for a threat that isn't there anymore. None of this is a character flaw, or a sign of weakness, or evidence that you didn't cope well enough. It's a filing system that's got interrupted at the worst possible moment.
Gary Johannes:And a system that got interrupted can, with the right approach, finish what it didn't. So what causes PTSD to develop? There's no single answer, but a few things matter. How intense and how prolonged the event was, which is part of why repeated trauma, like the kind of emergency workers face, carries a higher risk. Childhood adversity, because the nervous system's baseline threat sensitivity was already shaped by what came before.
Gary Johannes:Women, and particularly women aged 16 to 24, are statistically more likely to develop it. And how much support was around the aftermath? Feeling believed, feeling safe, feeling less alone, all help the brain finish that filing, rather than getting stuck. The point about prolonged inescapable trauma leads somewhere a lot of people have never heard of. The WO manual now splits this into two diagnoses: PTSD, and complex PTSD.
Gary Johannes:PTSD tends to follow a single event, or a handful of them. Complex PTSD follows the kind of trauma you couldn't get out of prolonged, repeated, inescapable childhood abuse, years of a violent home trauma that isn't one moment, but a climate you had to live inside. Complex PTSD carries everything PTSD does, and three things on top. Trouble regulating emotions. So feelings arrive too big and take too long to settle.
Gary Johannes:A corroded sense of self, that deep belief you're worthless or somehow to blame, and difficulty feeling close to people. Because when the danger comes from people, closeness itself starts to feel unsafe. If that's ringing a bell, hear this. It has a name. It's recognized, and it's understood.
Gary Johannes:You weren't being dramatic. So what keeps it going once it's there? Avoidance is the biggest. Steering clear of anything that reminds you, a place, a situation, a conversation, brings short term relief. And the brain files that relief as the right strategy.
Gary Johannes:But it means the brain never gets the chance to discover safety. That the trigger itself isn't dangerous anymore. And the world just keeps getting smaller. Self blame keeps going too. I should have done something differently.
Gary Johannes:I should have seen it come in. That's often the mind trying to manufacture a sense of control after an experience where there was none. But it keeps the nervous system on threat, because if it was somehow your fault, the danger hasn't really passed. And sleep disruption feeds all of it. Nightmares and restlessness means poor sleep.
Gary Johannes:And poor sleep leaves the amygdala more reactive, and the rational brain less capacity to keep it in check. And round it goes. So what actually helps? You've probably already heard of the two approaches you're most often offered: Trauma focused CB and EMDR, which uses eye movement to help the brain reprocess traumatic memory. They have the most research behind them, and they have helped lots of people.
Gary Johannes:If one of them has worked for you, or does, that's a real result, And I'd never talk you out of it. But here's what I see, again and again. Both of those work by going towards the memory, deliberately turning it over until it loses its charge. And for a lot of people, that's the exact thing they can't do. Some can't bring themselves to even start.
Gary Johannes:The thought of walking back into the worst moment of their lives keeps them away for years. Others do start and find it too much and stop. If that's you, hear this clearly. This isn't failure, and it isn't weakness, and it isn't you not trying hard enough. It's a frightened nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do, keeping your way from what still feels like danger.
Gary Johannes:You were never the problem, and the door you were shown isn't the only door. Solution focused hypnotherapy is a real option in its own right. And it works differently. It starts from a different place. Not tell me what happened, but a different set of questions.
Gary Johannes:What would you be doing differently if this had less of a hold on you? What does a good day look like? What's already working, even a little? And how do we get more of it? Bit by bit, you build a clear picture of the life you actually want to be living, because the brain needs something to move towards, not just something to move away from.
Gary Johannes:From there, we work with your individual triggers, not avoiding everything that might set you off, but to know yourself well enough to catch it early, and entranced, in a calm, focused, deeply relaxed state, the rational part of the brain stays engaged, while the threat system drops out of high alert. It's close to the state your brain enters in REM sleep, when it does its own overnight filing. From that calm place, we help the brain finish filing the memory it left raw. Bring the baseline down so the amygdala isn't on high alert hair trigger, and rehearse the steadier, freer version of you. And our brain doesn't fully distinguish between vivid rehearsal and real experience.
Gary Johannes:All of it without you ever having to climb back inside the original moment. And this is exactly how we work with complex PTSD too. Same approach, same direction of travel, lowering the threat, building safety, rehearsing the life you want. There are just more layers to it. The self blame runs deeper, the weariness of other people runs deeper, so it tends to be steadier.
Gary Johannes:Longer work, rather than a handful of sessions. But the direction is the same. And the same brain, that learned all of that, can learn something different. The solution focused approach has a solid, growing body of evidence across anxiety, depression, and stress. But the thing I want you to take away from this is simpler than any statistic, because this way of working doesn't ask you to relive anything.
Gary Johannes:It's a door far more people can actually walk through, and stay behind. And in the end, a therapy only helps if you can bear to keep turning up. The three pillars matter here as much as anywhere. Positive interaction, a real connection with people who make you feel safe and believed, directly calms an overactive threat system. And isolation is one of the things that keeps PTSD entrenched.
Gary Johannes:Positive action movement, structure, small, steady routines help the body discharge some of the loads of a hypervigilant nervous system. And positive thinking. Not forcing yourself to feel fine, but gradually building a sense that you're safe now, and that the danger has passed, helps the brain finish updating what it never got to update at the time. Sleep underpins it all, as it does everywhere in this series. A more rested nervous system is a less reactive one, and the less reactive nervous system finds it easier to sleep.
Gary Johannes:It really is that connected. Before I close, one thing you can take away today. If you feel yourself being pulled into a flashback, or a sense of being back there, ground yourself in the room you're actually in. Name five things you can see right now, in as much detail as you can. The color of the walls, the shape of the light, what's on the table.
Gary Johannes:This isn't a distraction technique. It's giving your prefrontal cortex something concrete and in present tense to work with, which helps it come back online and remind the rest of your brain that 'Was then, this is now. You are here, and you are safe.' Try it if you need it. Notice what happens. If you've carried something like this for a long time, and you've avoided getting help because you've assumed it meant reliving the worst moment of your life in detail, hear this clearly: that's not how this approach works.
Gary Johannes:You don't have to go back there to move forward from here. What happened to you was not your fault. Whatever story you've been telling yourself about that, you're not broken. And you are not permanently stuck reliving it. Your brain got interrupted in the middle of a job it was always capable of finishing.
Gary Johannes:And the same brain that filed that memory the wrong way can learn to file it properly. That's not me being kind, That's neuroscience. Understanding what's going on is where it starts. You've just done that. And quietly, that's a step forward.
Gary Johannes:If this podcast has helped, please do hit subscribe, or leave a review if you can. It really helps more people find the podcast. Every episode, one condition, the same honest lens. What's going on? What's keeping it going?
Gary Johannes:And what actually helps. There's a lot more to come. And if you'd like to find out whether Inspire to Change can help you with trauma or PTSD, we have a nationwide network of solution focused hypnotherapists across The UK. You can find your nearest hypnotherapist, read more about how we work, and book a free initial consultation at inspiredtachange.biz. The link is in the description below.
Gary Johannes:See you on the next one.
Listen to Moving Minds Forward using one of many popular podcasting apps or directories.