Many people think that if they’re doing well in life, depression will never get to them. However, every person may be ignoring suppressed trauma that, if not addressed at once, will come and bite you when you least expect. That’s why some millionaires are still depressed despite earning a lot of money. Some couples deal with cheating even if they seem happily married. It’s not enough for people to do well -people also have to be well. This is one important question you should be asking yourself: are you truly happy with your life?
Join Dr. Patty Ann Tublin as she talks with Britt Frank (@brittfrank), a psychotherapist, speaker, and author of The Science of Stuck: Breaking Through Inertia to Find Your Path Forward. Learn how trauma works, why it must never be buried deep within you, and the essential role of the brain in dealing with such negative thoughts. Moreover, listen as Britt explains why not all traumas are bad. Tune in to this enlightening episode to gain a more positive perspective in your everyday life.
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Dealing With Suppressed Trauma With Britt Frank
I have a powerhouse woman that I cannot wait to introduce you to. Since you are going to love every episode of this show, make sure you like, comment, share, and subscribe to the show. Without further ado, I am going to introduce you to an incredible woman who hails originally from my home state, New York, and she now is living in Kansas City. I want her to tell you her story. I’m not even going to tease my introduction to Britt Frank. Britt, thank you so much for coming to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. I can’t wait to have this conversation.
You are a therapist. You’ve written a book. You have about 100 gazillion followers on Instagram. You are someone that people listen to. Before we get into your story, tell us about where you are now, what you’re passionate about, and what you are hoping for going forward.
I’m a trauma therapist, and I love to speak about this mental health. I forget when I’m talking to non-wellness people. That sounds weird, but in our sphere, of course, we love talking about trauma. I don’t love that people get traumatized. I love knowing what we know so we can help move forward. I did not know the things that I knew many years ago. Nobody talked about trauma several years ago.
Which in itself was traumatizing for people with trauma.
It is so traumatizing to not have accurate, good information. It’s traumatizing to not have access to information that makes sense. I’m passionate about taking all the gobbledygook in the academic world and making it, “Let’s talk about this in plain language. Let’s talk about neuroscience in ways that we can relate to,” versus, “This thing is interfering with the mechanism of that thing,” and snooze, snore, boring. I love knowing this stuff, talking, and writing about it. This is what I do. It’s what I love. I live this, breathe it, eat it, sleep it, and much to the detriment of my friends. I’m sure I annoy them at parties.
It’s so funny you say that because I love my work, too, and my husband will say to me if we’re going out to meet new people or going to a party, “When people ask you what you do, they don’t want to hear everything.” I’m like, “This and that, I love this.” They’re standing there like, “She likes what she does, doesn’t she?”
Maybe a bit of social awareness goes out the window. There are a couple of things that you said that I love. In the work that I do, my corporate work, my coaching and consulting years ago, if you would say soft skills, which we know I encompass under emotional intelligence, their eyes would glaze over and I’m surprised my nose hasn’t been broken from it being slammed by CEOs that, “If this doesn’t impact the bottom line, go away.” I’m like, “It does.”
Criminal attorneys and prosecutors will tell you the best thing that ever happened to them is social media because criminals text and they leave a social media trail. What has helped me is neuroscience because I can now show how human behavior, how being able to create a connection and empathy, have all those soft skills impact a relationship that impacts the bottom line.
ost of my readers are pretty sophisticated now, and there are very few absolutes in life. All decisions are based on emotion. When we can tie that into neuroscience and I can show the chart, then you have people’s attention. You mentioned that. I call it psychobabble. You call it gobbledygook. How have you taken the gobbledygook to go and transformed people’s lives with it? That is such a gift that you bring to the world.
Thank you for that. I love corporate speaking too. I remember I did a talk for a room full of female C-Suite executives.
Did they all have on black or navy blue? I’m curious.
That crew dresses sharp and the topic was The Science of Social Intelligence, Why We Need Friends. I can see them all staring at me down. Who is this person? Arms crossed, beautiful, high-heeled shoes clacking. That was the scariest room I’ve ever stood in front of. Once you go to neuroscience, everyone goes, “Oh,” especially when you get to facts. They have done meta-studies across a variety of disciplines that show that not having friends is as dangerous to your physical health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. That got their attention.
Loneliness kills you.
Mental health is essential for the bottom line. When I get corporate people that are like, “I don’t want to have to deal with feelings and all this,” it’s more efficient for your productivity and for your bottom line to have a company full of regulated people versus dysregulated people that are getting triggered, flipping out, and not knowing why.
I’m with you. It’s nice that things that people have been talking about for thousands of years well beyond modern society, neuroscience is finally showing, “We need connection. We need empathy. When you take a deep breath or you chant, sing, gargle, or hum, whatever, that brings you down out of the clouds into a state where your decision-making capacity becomes usable and viable versus walking around with our brains on fire. It’s beautiful to know that neuroscience backs up what people have known forever.
Apply, simplify, and operationalize that to trauma.
Trauma is brain indigestion.
Trauma is brain indigestion.
Brain indigestion, I love that. I wanted to feel that for a moment. We know that all behavior serves some type of purpose for us, both positive and negative. I would imagine this ties into that. You get indigestion because you eat something that’s not good for you.
You get indigestion for whatever reason. I love the metaphor of digestion because it’s so much less loaded than the word trauma. A lot of business people balk at that, “I don’t have trauma.”
It implies feelings and they don’t have feelings.
Of course not or that something terrible happened. If you eat poisoned food, you’re going to get sick. I could get indigestion from eating the same turkey sandwich that I’ve eaten every day. Why? Digestion is automatic and our bodies are out of whack and we don’t know why. It doesn’t matter why. Anything that overwhelms our digestive process that is going to create symptoms. Trauma’s the same way. Anytime our brain doesn’t like something or is overwhelmed by something, or for whatever reason, is not able to process something, then we will have indigestion of the brain, which we call anxiety, burnout, fear, panic, or what have you.
Can you give an example? I love the fact that you’re talking about digestion. This is interesting. The mind and the body are connected. It’s only the last 100 years that we talked about mind and body. The base of the brain is attached to the tip of the spinal cord, and it’s going back and forth. Which comes first, the thought or the emotion? We could have had a great conversation on that for a long time, but we do know that within the stomach, they have found brain neurons. We are not sure why, I would imagine it’s some type of information being provided to us, a mechanism of information.
I would imagine that trauma plays out. You know when you don’t feel well, you’re nervous, anxious, or get a stomachache, I have to go to the bathroom. That’s a digestion issue, whether I ate or not. I was out to dinner one night with friends and we were talking about the mental health crisis in the country and probably in the world. Talk about how this information. When somebody comes to you or somebody’s reading and they’re struggling with anxiety and depression, and they appear to be functioning, but inside, they’re falling apart. How would you help them?
If they’re coming through my door, that’s half the battle there. A lot of people operate under the assumption that doing well is the end game. Doing well is a panacea. Once you’re motivated, everything is fine. Once you achieve your goals, everything is fine. It’s not enough to do well. We also want to be well. If someone’s coming through my door, they’ve already reckoned with it, “I’m doing great, but I feel terrible.”
I’m not big on trying to sell people on why they should do the work that we do. If you’re sick and tired of feeling like everyone is patting you on the back for your accomplishments, but you can’t sleep, your relationships are a mess, and you constantly feel you’re about to get in trouble or that the walls are caving in when you’re ready to not feel like that, there’s my door. Come on in and let’s talk.
I never set out to convince corporate people. I love corporate people. They are wonderful. When they’re like, “Why should I listen to you?” I’m like, “You shouldn’t. You don’t have to. If you’re fine with what’s going on, then great. I support you. My hunch is you’re not fine. You’re doing great, but you’re feeling not fine.” There are ways to work with it, and It’s not a binary of, “If I feel good, I do poorly or if I do well, I feel terrible.” There is a way in which you can be high functioning, high productivity, and also not feel terrible all the time. I help people primarily by taking out these stories that do us no good and they’re inaccurate. The story of, “If I’m happy and calm, I won’t be as motivated,” is an interesting one.
Tell us more about that. What’s interesting about that?
How or where did that story come from? That belief is so firmly ingrained that, “If I’m happy, I will be lazy.” I’ve seen and heard that one often enough that that’s a belief that people have.
If you’re happy, you will be lazy, as opposed to content?
No. If I’m happy, I’ll be lazy as opposed to productive and motivated. I have all of these goals and all of these things I want to do. If I’m just happy, I’m just going to be sitting around feeling happy and I won’t get anything done.
It’s interesting. I haven’t heard that before, although I did read that n my notes here. You can be happy in one area of your life, but you can still be ambitious and want to learn in another area of your life. Where did that story come from?
I have no idea, but I do know it is often the stories that we tell ourselves that create. Life can be hard and it’s not like, “It’s just your story.” It’s like the global pandemic, geopolitical unrest, aging parents, and sick children. There are a lot of legitimate life stressors. However, often, it’s the stories that we attach to our situations that create unnecessary anxiety.
There’s a certain amount of stress that we’re all going to have as humans. We can dismantle these stories of not good enough-ness or these myths about mental health, that if I admit I need help, that means there’s something wrong with me, or whatever the story may be. Sassing out the story is usually task number one of feeling better. What’s the story that you’re telling yourself?
Do you see patterns in the stories over your practice over time?
Impostor syndrome is a fun one. I hear that one from every single level. In every single socioeconomic place, everyone has impostor syndrome. You have it. I have it. Whoever’s reading this has it to a degree, but not always. It’s nice to know that is a universal experience because we all have it, then we don’t have to worry about overcoming it. It’s knowing that’s just a thing that we all have.
If this is a fair statement, will you normalize the unproductive thought?
Yes. People will normalize something and now they have to live with it. That’s not true for everything. You can normalize that life is hard, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing that can be done. With impostor syndrome, normalizing it makes it not just your thing. If you are in a room full of intelligent people, knowing that they all feel it does help to take some of the stings out of it. It’s a lot easier to walk into a room if you know everyone has it.
It’s a lot easier to walk into a room if you know everyone has imposter syndrome.
It goes back to how we started our conversation knowing you’re not alone even in the story. It is amazing because working with many high-functioning people, they’re like, “Everybody else sees that I’m talented, but how come I don’t feel it?” It’s that type of story. What do you offer? I read something where you said to remember what happened without re-experiencing what happened.
Talk about how you put that into play in helping somebody. All trauma is on a spectrum. I would imagine that your work, your technique, it’s the platform and baseline, and then it’s also within the spectrum. It’s not all that different for someone with severe trauma versus someone that has the trauma of something so simple as, “I was late for an important meeting.” There’s a lot of anxiety attached to that. What do you do? How do you help them help themselves?
There’s the split of people who want to dive into the past and spend hours in analysis and figuring out the how, the who, and the why. For that crew, we want to bring them out of the past and focus on what’s happening here and now. You also have the crew that’s like, “Whatever happened in the past is in the past. There’s no point in going back there.” For that crew, the past doesn’t stay in the past. The past stays in your nervous system.
If you’re constantly bumping up against the same stuff, then we may want to look in the rearview mirror. There’s a reason the rearview mirror is small and your windshield is large. We don’t want to stay in the past. Another story I hear is, “I don’t want to do this whole talking about childhood, blaming the parents thing.” That’s not necessary but it does help if you have a pattern in the present to know that the past is in the present in the form of patterns and symptoms.
The past informs your present. What I tell people Anything in life, whether it’s therapy, work, coaching, or anything, you only look backward in the service of moving forward. Otherwise, you get stuck in the past, and that doesn’t help.”
We want to take the fear or the fascination of the past and regulate it. The past is there to inform our work now so we can move forward. For people who are way too past-focused or way past-avoidant, we want to be able to give the past a smaller size of the pie in terms of therapy. I don’t spend a lot of time digging around in the past. It’s just what happened and where, if that’s available. Sometimes that information is not available and that’s okay. That’s another beautiful thing about what we know now about neuroscience. You don’t need to remember your past to heal from past patterns. How marvelous is that?
Talk about getting techy and nerdy on us. When you said that our brain forgets nothing, people might not remember the trauma consciously, but the nervous system remembers the trauma. How do you work through that with somebody? What is that science that people can hang their hats on? You say understanding sometimes is a start. To me, many times in that cognitive understanding, I’ll use the baseball analogy. Now you’re on second base.
If we want to geek out, we’re talking about implicit versus explicit memory. Explicit memory is narrative memory. “What did you have for breakfast this morning?” “I remember that I woke up, had my coffee, and had my eggs. That is explicit memory. I recall the story of what happened. That’s not the only type of memory. We also have what’s called implicit memory, somatic memory, or body-based memories. That might be why when you smell an apple pie, instantly, you’re transplanted back into your grandmother’s kitchen at Christmas time or holiday of choice.
Implicit memories are our bodies recording what things felt like and seemed like, and there’s no story attached to them. A good example would be when we’re infants, we don’t have any cognitive structure to support narrative memory. That’s why you don’t remember things when you’re two months old. Let’s say at two months old, every single day, gunshots were going off around you. When you were two, your parents moved you to a different neighborhood. You blocked that out completely, but somehow, every time you hear drums or fireworks, all of a sudden, you’re panicking and you don’t know why.
In one second, let me ask for clarification. At two months, you don’t have a memory because you don’t have the structure. The brain isn’t developed enough. How do you have that still stored, if you never had it to begin with?
You don’t have explicit memory. You have the implicit memory, the body memory, which is the feelings. The implicit memory is a somatic piece. Let’s say you come into my office at 30 going, “Every time I hear fireworks, I don’t know what happens to me. I’m panicking and I’m sweating, and there’s no logical reason. What’s wrong with me? Do I have a disorder?” Now, you and I are never going to get to that story because you won’t remember it, but it’s helpful to know that implicitly, for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter why. Your body decided that that noise equals danger.
We don’t need to know at 2 months, it was of gunshots, or at 3 months, your brother yelled in your face and scared you. It doesn’t matter. It could be anything. It’s not always, “I was abused and therefore, it’s trauma.” Implicit memory tells us that we can have body reactions for “no logical or narrative-based reason.”
For our readers, you normalized trauma. You made it feel not bad, not negative. That is such a gift to everybody. Thank you for what you said. Trauma doesn’t have to be bad. You had the implicit memory. A gunshot versus fireworks. Fireworks could be a celebration. A gunshot is not so good.
The shorthand is you can have brain indigestion. You can experience trauma from things that aren’t always bad. Sometimes, good things can unintentionally create fear responses in the body. That takes some of the pressure off that just because you have anxiety doesn’t mean you are abused. It may be, but it doesn’t always mean that. Just because you have depression, it doesn’t mean you had bad parents. I hear this, “My parents were good. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
There are a lot of ways your nervous system could encode an experience and code it as, “This is bad, scary, and dangerous.” Our work isn’t to figure out where that happened. Our work is to take the response and the stimulus and create some space so that we teach your brain, “Loud noises don’t immediately equal danger,” and there are ways of working to do that.
I was thinking, “You have great parents, but you were in a car accident at three. It’s an experience.”
That’s why I tend to veer away from the word trauma, and I call it either indigestion of the brain or your body getting stuck somewhere. We can work with that because it takes the weight off the trauma. People think trauma equals abuse. Trauma equals assault. Trauma equals natural disaster. Trauma is anything that overwhelms our brain for whatever reason and good things can cause trauma. On the flip side, sometimes you can have a bad experience and not have any lasting consequences.
Is that true?
It is true.
Why is that the case?
Why do some people not get traumatized by bad things? They’ve done a lot of studies on this. Genetics, environment, community support, your ability to have in real-time, and somebody there to help you. Let’s say as a child something scary happens, but a caregiver immediately said to you, “I’m here. You’re safe. I’ve got you.” You may not be traumatized long-term by that. Similarly, something neutral or good can create lots of trauma. There are a lot of reasons from the environment to genetics to what are the stressors in your life to what sort of resources and support you have. We don’t get to choose what will and what will not traumatize us, unfortunately.
Many people say that they have had what most people consider traumatic, negative, and not good. The thinking I believe used to be the way people came out of that trauma. Let’s say war. In many ways, it does not directly cause and effect but influences their mental health prior to that experience. Is that true? Is that a myth?
There’s truth in almost everything that people share and teach. Nothing is the be-all, end-all. There is no absolute with that. You could have all the resources and on paper look like, “This shouldn’t have traumatized you because you had X, Y, and Z.” Nevertheless, it does, and that’s why I advocate taking, “Why is this a thing?” out of the equation.
If we’re just talking about being efficient with our wellness, I don’t know why this is a thing but it is. Let’s deal with it because we can figure out the how and the why, but why something happened doesn’t necessarily mean that you feel better. I like insight and understanding-wise, but not at step one. Let’s get you feeling better. Let’s get you moving. Later on, we can maybe get some insight into the how and the why.
How do you do that in terms of getting them to feel better right out of the gate?
The information is the first piece. You have a brain. Here’s how your brain works. You have a gas pedal and a brake pedal, and either one can get stuck. If your gas pedal is stuck, you’re going to feel racing thoughts, insomnia, lack of appetite, anxiety, and panic. If your brake pedal is stuck, you’re going to feel fatigued, blah, depressed, “unmotivated,” and all of those things. Let’s start with, your brain is like a car.
It has a gas pedal and a brake pedal. Now that we know that a brain stuck in the on direction needs a different intervention than a brain stuck in the off direction. We can then strategize, “What are your resources that help you feel up when you’re too down and that help you come down when you’re too up?” It’s not always punching a pillow, taking a walk, eating your vegetables, and getting sunshine. There are lots of ways of bringing you out of the rafters when you’re too far up and bringing you up when you’re too far down.
Give an example of somebody who is feeling stuck and we’ll talk about the signs of being stuck in a little bit. They can’t get out of bed. They’ll say they can’t get motivated. They know they’d feel better if they take a walk. What’s an intervention for that?
That’ll be environment dependent. The first question is, “What’s going on here?” When you get out of bed, what are you walking into? If you’re in an abusive marriage where you don’t have enough money, you don’t know how you’re going to pay the rent, and you have a child that’s screaming, that’s going to be a lot different than, “I wake up and I have all my needs met. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I can’t get out of bed.”
What’s going on is you’re dissatisfied. Even though your marriage seems fine, you want out, and you feel guilty because it’s too good to leave, but it’s too bad to stay. We need to know what’s going on here. That’s where we need to become very ruthless in our willingness to get honest about, “What are the factors here?”
What if their life didn’t take the direction they thought it would? They live alone. They wanted it to look different and it’s not horrible, but it’s not what they thought it would be.
I guarantee you, that person’s story is, “What’s wrong with me? I should be grateful for the life that I have.” That story prohibits the grieving process which is a prerequisite to feeling better. That story of, “I should be happy. This is stupid. I’m ungrateful. My life is good enough. It’s not the way I wanted it to be, but it’s fine.” Yeah, but you’re not fine. We need to create space for you. You get to be sad about things not working. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to spin you out into this victim place. Having perspective on things like privilege and access to resources is good. If you’re sad, let’s create space for sad.
Did you give it a time limit? You can have a pity party for 15 minutes and then move on.
That works for some people, but what’s the task here? The task is grieving, it’s not so much, “Have a pity party and then move on.” Where in your day are you going to create space for sadness? Do you have twenty minutes or throughout the day? We don’t want these big, huge catharsis. Neuroscience has shown catharsis is not that good for us because even if it’s a big wave of emotion that feels good, like a big cry often feels good but then we get that emotional hangover and we’re exhausted. They call this, in trauma work, titrating. We want to give little tiny doses.
Neuroscience has shown that catharsis is not good for people. It feels good, but it will lead to an emotional hangover.
When I was going through my version of, “Everything is crap. How am I going to do this?” it was like five minutes in the car before I would have to go into a place of, “I’m just going to be mad. Before I have to put on a happy face and I’m going to give myself five minutes in the car to be mad and not shame myself for my feelings.” Anyone’s body can handle 300 seconds of any emotion. We’re talking for 3 to 5 minutes. It’s a space where it’s you don’t limit your pity. It’s where are you going to expand your capacity and your willingness to feel what’s real. When we lie to ourselves about ourselves, we’re going to get stuck. That’s a guarantee.
Here’s the thing about what you said. We can lie cognitively to ourselves all we want, but the body doesn’t lie. Your body knows, and that’s where people get crazy because a mother can tell the kid, “You’re not sad. You’re happy.” The kid’s like, “I’m feeling sad.” If you hear that long enough, then you get confused and you don’t even trust your emotions anymore. The whole concept of emotions that are repressed gets amplified. You deny the emotion. It’s going to crop up somewhere else.
When I do work with emotional intelligence, we used to talk about that innate feeling of our emotions and being able to manage emotions. We don’t want to deny it and the more you allow yourself to feel it, you can work it through, although it gets dark at some point. Counterintuitively, you come out. It’s like when you have a muscle, you have to work the muscle. It’s hard and then, it loosens up. That’s what happens with the trauma that you’re describing.
It’s in small titrated doses. That way it doesn’t become overwhelming because it’s counterintuitive, but when you’re anxious, sometimes taking a deep breath is going to make things worse. Even though you’ll hear this out in culture, “If you’re anxious, do some deep breathing, belly breathing, box breathing, and 4-7-9 breathing,” and for some people, that works. For other people, telling your body to calm down is going to piss it off, and then it’s going to become even more amplified.
How do you differentiate that? How do you know? You’re right. That is common wisdom.
Try it and if it doesn’t work, then do something else. Deep breathing isn’t bad. It’s never wrong. Imagine you were in a fight with your spouse and they told you to calm down.
That makes you more furious.
Our bodies are very much the same way. Rather than telling an anxious system, “Calm down and breathe,” how about validating and talking to your body? If this sounds woo-woo, neuroscience shows that this works. Talking to your body and saying, “It makes sense that you’re feeling anxious. I don’t know why you’re feeling anxious, but I know that you’re not crazy because that is not a thing. There’s no such thing as a crazy person. I don’t understand these symptoms, but I’m sure it will make sense. What are my choices for people, places, or things that can help me feel less bad?”
You said something and this is an important point. Many times people don’t feel like they have choices. If you said to someone, “What are your choices?” they’re like, “What choices? Do you think I’m choosing to feel this way?” What do you do with that?
I love that, “I have no choices.” How true is that story? You may not like your choices, but unless you’re actively being oppressed or you’re actively in a traumatic environment. There’s always something. You may not be able to get out of bed, but you could choose to flip to the other side of your bed. If you’re going to stay in bed shake up the snow globe of your brain, and lay foot to head. Anytime we change a pattern, we can help our brain snap out of whatever thing it’s stuck in. You may say to me, “That’s a stupid choice. I don’t like that choice.”
You may not like it if you can’t get out of bed and summon the will to do that meditation thing on your Calm app and you don’t feel like making a phone call, what are three choices that you have available to you right now? Not after you buy the day planner and the stickers, not after you get all the clothing and the gear. What are three viable choices, no matter how tiny, that are available to you? It’s almost never the case that there are no choices. It’s just, “I don’t like the choices.”
That’s okay. I don’t care if you like them, but anywhere you can make a choice, you’re teaching your brain that it’s safe to move. It’s safe to come out of stuck. Nobody wants to do the little micro things because they’re not very fun and you’re not going to Facebook Live, “I rolled over in bed or I put on different socks.” No one wants to talk about that, because it’s not exciting.
I’m thinking about what you’re saying though, and I can feel it. If you’re cocooned up in bed and even though you want to get out, there’s something very safe. As we said before, all behavior serves us. Whatever the day is that I don’t want to face, even if it’s a story I created, let me double down into my little cocoon. We know that movement, the neuroscience behind the movement, and the fact of moving shakes you out and then, you’re not feeling safe lying-in bed. You might as well get up anyway. If you’re not going to feel safe, you cannot feel safe getting up.
I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve had with people who are like, “That’s stupid. How am I going to get anywhere if all I’m doing is shifting where I’m lying in bed?”
You don’t understand neuroscience.
It’s getting out the whiteboard and explaining, “Here’s what happens to your brain when you move from foot to head or from head to foot. It disorients your brain.” If you try this, it feels uncomfortable, which is the point. If you’re in your bed and your brain is used to, “I lay on my pillow on my left side with the headboard behind me and the blanket on me,” that’s a pattern. We know our brains are organized for pattern-seeking. Our brains love autopilot, things that conserve energy to not have to think. I’m in my usual position. Now, I’m shifting, and I’m laying with my head where my feet are and my foot on the headboard.
That’s going to be pattern-breaking because we’ve not done that. Now my brain is going to be like, “We don’t know what this is. This is not our pattern. This doesn’t feel good. It’s going to feel weird.” Great, weird breaks the autopilot. I always say that autopilot is the handmaiden of being stuck. We want to break this autopilot thing. You’ve now broken your pattern because you’re lying in a weird position. Now that creates space for you to move because your brain’s disoriented. If we can break the autopilot, it’s like in Physics. An object in motion will stay in motion. Do you know the principle of inertia? If you can break the pattern, you can get moving.
Autopilot is the handmaiden of being stuck.
If you look at your brain as a highway, you’re taking a new highway. You’re creating a new pathway. I talked about neural pathways. If you change your position, “I’ve never been on this road before. Maybe I should pay attention.”
That breaks the cycle of being stuck. If you’re on the same highway that you’ve taken 100,000 times, you could zone out, listen to the radio, drink your coffee, and do whatever. If you’re on a path you’ve never been, as you said, now I have to orient. I have to see. I have to notice. A brain that can orient, can move, and orienting is one of the first tasks if you’re anxious or depressed.
I know people are always asking you about your past, your failures, all your addictions, and stuff. What I would like you to talk about if you’re open to it is if you’re comfortable sharing with the readers perhaps your most profound failure because we know that gave you your most profound growth and how that enriches you.
Having to fail at a job that I was very good at because my personal life was falling apart. My self-care was falling apart. I was anxious, I was depressed, I was addicted, and it eventually got to the point where I couldn’t work anymore. I had a public meltdown, and everyone at the company knew it. It was not quite that Britt was losing her marbles, and she couldn’t hack it. That was a profoundly unpleasant moment. That was my moment of surrender.
Up until that point, I could always justify feeling terrible by saying, “At least I’m functional. I can get up and go to work. I’m doing X, Y, and Z, but I’m still producing, I’m still getting it done, so I’m fine.” That broke the spell of, “I’m fine,” and nothing can change until you’re willing to name that it’s not working. That was one of the things that broke through my denial of, “No, I’m super not fine. I can no longer pretend I’m fine.” That was when it was like, “I could use some help here.”
The Science of Stuck wasn’t written yet. It wasn’t even born. How did you get help? What helped you?
I wrote the book now that I could have used then. What helped me then was that I just tried everything. I read a bunch of books. I tried stuff that worked. I tried stuff that was super not helpful. I went to useful therapists. I went to therapists that were profoundly damaging and I beat my head on different walls and different doors to see, “What was going to work there? That worked. That didn’t work.”
Eventually, I cobbled together my path, and that’s so unnecessary. Now that I know a few things, my way isn’t the only way, but I’m happy to share, “Here are some things that you’re told to do but here’s why they might not work.” I spent so much time beating myself up because breathwork didn’t work for me, and I didn’t understand why breathwork didn’t work for me. I have assault trauma with strangulation. Anytime I’m depriving myself of natural rhythms breathing, my body’s going to start to freak out.
For me, breathwork doesn’t work. Instead of spending three months going to class and feeling like crap, it would’ve been helpful to know, “Breathwork is not for everybody.” I’m happy to share now the things that we’re told are the good things aren’t always the good things for everybody in every circumstance. I just found out by trial and error.
The things we’re told are not always the good things for everybody in every circumstance.
The great message there is what works for one doesn’t work for someone else. Isn’t that true for all of human nature? I tell people all the time, “If there was one right way to raise a kid, there wouldn’t be so many child psychology theories.”
It’s so true. We very quickly forget because we’re told and sold on the idea that this is the way to do it. “Here’s how you do the work. Here’s how you get yourself mentally strong. Here’s how you build resilience.” That’s one path. There are many, and the only wrong path is a path that harms somebody else and yourself.
There are 1 million ways to be injured and there are 1 million ways to heal. You get to get creative, do weird things, try things that you may not have thought of, and say no to things that are thought of as good. Again, it’s taking the story of, “This shouldn’t be hard for me.” It is. Let’s pivot and do something else.
I also like reframing where the complexity of life is. You can look at it as mind-boggling in a negative way. The complexity of life is awesome. It can be hard. If you think about everybody having a different life experience, a collective life experience as to where they’re from and what’s important to them, everybody reacts differently people there will not be one size fits.
I grew up in a family of 1 of 5. Every single one of us appears that live our lives very differently. Having said that, there is a common denominator to all of us. What would work for one of us, the other one would say, “Are you out of your mind? I’m not doing that. That’s crazy,” and the other person’s like, “I love this.”
Exactly, and again, without beating ourselves up. It’s the same thing with a therapist. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean that I’m a bad therapist and it doesn’t mean that they’re doing something wrong. If it’s not a fit, fortunately, there are 5,000 people in the wellness world. I’m a big fan of, “Don’t necessarily quit right away when it’s hard.” You can say to yourself, “If this isn’t a fit, I don’t need to force it. I can try other things.” Try five different people and see what works for you. Try five different techniques and see what resonates with you. Don’t assume that the problem is you if something isn’t working that you think should be working.
Tell us about your book, The Science of Stuck. What would you like people to know? Later on, we’ll share with them how they can get it so they can purchase it and consume your wisdom in its entirety.
Thank you for that. The Science of Stuck was the book I got to write because it is the book I could have so used. We all have a stack of self-help books laying around, collecting dust. When you’re in the weeds, when you’re overwhelmed, when life is flying at you 1,000 miles an hour, you don’t have the bandwidth to read them all.
The Science of Stuck is not, “Here’s Britt’s advice on how to live your best life.” It’s, “Here’s Britt’s Show and tell of 25 years of trying stuff. Here are the five bottom-line things that you should know about trauma to get started. Here are just five bottom-line things about boundaries, relationships, and intimacy.
I designed all of the exercises in the book to be done in five minutes or less. I know that when I was reading self-help books early on, I would come to an exercise that’s like, “Set aside some quiet time, clear your space, get a journal, and do this,” I’m like, “No. Next. I don’t have time for this.” Everyone has 300 seconds to try a self-help exercise. There’s nothing in the book that requires a lot of time.
I wrote the book that you can open to any page and grab a nugget. You don’t have to read it sequentially. You can skip irrelevant things. I made it very choose your adventurous, and user-friendly because that’s what I wish that I had. If you want a deep dive, I’ve stuffed a bunch of footnotes in there with little rabbit trails that you can follow. If that brings you joy, it’s there for you. It’s certainly not necessary. It’s a very easy read with the bottom line, “Here’s my show and tell of everything that I thought was useful to know.”
Talk more about how people can get the book because the book is fascinating and It’s practical. Whenever people say, “You can do this,” people say, “I’m not doing that.” I know me. I’m a native New Yorker as we talked about. I have no time for that. Although my husband will tell you, I have time for whatever I want. Share with us the other than your own, the last book you reread, and why.
The last book that I reread, what’s the last book that I reread and why? The last book that I dove into that I loved was The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which was the very first self-help type book I came across. Every time I visited, I find something new, beautiful, and profound. That is the gold standard. Even if you’re not an artist, even if you don’t identify as a creative person, it doesn’t matter. I’m not a visual artist. That book is full of good human stuff and she’s brilliant.
What’s the one song you can’t live without?
John Williams’ movie scores always pump me up. I like the Superman theme song and the Indiana Jones theme song. I love John Williams’ music like that. I just cannot go through a day without having something on my Spotify with John Williams’ music come on.
That sounds like it’s inspirational and motivational.
I’ve listened to it enough before doing hard things that have gone well. Now my brain knows it’s going to get pumped up and excited to hear those types of songs.
You trained your brain. What was the one that you thought it should have been?
What’s a song I can’t live without? An oldie, something cool, or a classic, but I’m not that cool.
A Beethoven’s Fifth.
Something either intelligent, smart, super cool, or trendy. I like Broadway music, and I like movie scores. That’s my thing.
What’s the one question that I didn’t ask that you would like to provide the answer to for the readers?
Procrastination is never because of laziness. We procrastinate because there’s something that we’re benefiting from not doing the thing we say we want to do. Procrastination is a suboptimal way to protect ourselves from either being embarrassed, ashamed or failing. Procrastination is never because you’re lazy. I like dismantling this, “I’m just a lazy person.” No, you’re not. You may be a fear-based person. Your brain might be locked in a shutdown response, but procrastination is a physiological fear response. It is not a moral issue. We can work on it.
I love everything about your approach because it all comes from a place of acceptance and not judgment. Tell the readers how they can get your book, learn more about you, follow you, and continue to grow from your wisdom.
Thank you. My website is ScienceOfStuck.com and you can buy the book, The Science Of Stuck, wherever you buy books. You can get it on Amazon or a bookstore. On Instagram, it’s just my name, @BrittFrank. Come and say hello. I love meeting people from doing things like this. It makes it more real. I’m like, “Hi. You’re a person and I’m a person. Now we’re connecting.”
Thank you so much. This was so informative, fun, educational, and all good things. I appreciate this.
Thank you so much. This was fun.
You’re welcome. That concludes our episode. Make sure you check out Britt Frank’s book on the Science of Stuck. Follow her on Instagram. Since I know that you love this show, make sure you like, comment, share, and subscribe. Until next time, be well.
Important Links
- Britt Frank
- The Science Of Stuck
- The Artist’s Way
- Julia Cameron
- Amazon – The Science of Stuck
- @BrittFrank – Instagram
- https://www.TheGreenHouseKC.com/
