Tiny traumas with Dr Meg Arroll

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Not all of us have experienced huge childhood trauma. We've not been neglected or physically or emotionally or sexually abused in our formative years, and even today, there may not be anything inherently wrong with your life. You have a roof over your head, you've got an income, a functioning relationship, and we know we should be grateful for those things. Yet there's still a sense of not being entirely happy, maybe feeling empty and anxious in some ways. And if this is you, or even if it's not you, you are going to love Today's guest doctor Meg Arrol. Meg is a chartered psychologist here in the UK. She's a scientist and the author of Tiny Traumas and I am so excited to share this conversation with you. On the Crappy to Happy Podcast.

1:22 Doctor Meg, thank you so much for joining me on the Crappy to Happy Podcast. Oh, thank you so much, Cas. I'm so excited to be here. And I just love the title of your podcast. It's amazing, it's pretty catchy. It's pretty catchy, covers it all. Everybody knows straight away we're all about So Meg, I was really interested to see that you have written a book called Tiny Trauma. So we've talked about trauma quite a bit on this show. It's something that I'm really interested in. It's something that touches us all, and I've been really focused on where I can trying to expand kind of people's definition, widen the scope of what we think trauma really is. And so I was really curious to see that you've written a book called Tiny Traumas.

2:05 So can you please share with the audience how do you define tiny traumas? Yeah, so, I think we were just so much on the same page about that, about having maybe a more nuanced conversation about trauma and mental health overall. So I'll give you a little bit of a backstory and origin story as it were for the book. So years and years ago more years than I to remember, I was teaching a module called the Psychology of Physical Illness, and in each week we chose a specific condition and it was a third year elective, so the students had chosen to do this module. We had very, very, very engaged, engaged students and they were always really interested in these particular topics. So I spent a great deal of time researching for my lectures, and I came across a study on the topic of ibsitualvale syndrome and it really changed my perspective around the whole topic of trauma. So within this study, the researchers they looked at groups of people who had experienced big T trauma, so capital T trauma, those really significant events in some people's lives that we now have a major impact both psychologically and physically. And they're things like living through a war and natural disaster, perhaps losing your primary caregiver early in life, a violent attack, these things that most of us understand these days, that

3:38 we know that these are traumatic events, and I think that that's wonderful because actually, you know, the general public and we didn't really understand that before and we do now. We do know how significant that can be from individual and groups. But the researchers looked at these big T traumas but also a group of people that had experienced little T trauma or lower case team we're thinking about the word trauma, and they compared them in terms of health outcomes. So they were specifically looking at tummy symptoms for this IBS population, but also psychological symptoms and quality of life, these sorts of things, and what blew my mind. So as a psychologist and researcher, you have kind of that sort of informal hypothesis in your mind, and my prediction was probably going to be like, both types of trauma will have an impact. But what really made me pause was that for this study, those people that experienced this little tea lowercase T trauma actually had worse outcomes than those people who had big TA acute traumas. And that really surprised me. It really surprised me, and so that was always in the back of my mind and I thought, that's notable, that's interesting, and actually no one's really talking about that. So later on in my career in my work, I began to see people my own practice who would come to me and they would actually say, look,

5:09 I haven't been through anything that bad. I haven't been through a major trauma. I don't know why I'm feeling just not okay. And I started to recognize some patterns in terms of things that would come up within our work. They would often be this low grade, consistent, cumulative type trauma that would build up over time and really lead people to a range of presentations that I would see. So things like high function anxiety, low grade depression, or even just feeling numb all the time, emotional eating, imposta syndrome, problems with sleep, just a huge range of themes, but of which if you were to go to say your GP or primary care physician, you probably wouldn't meet the criteria for a psychological condition. You probably wouldn't meet the criteria for major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder. But you're still really not thriving or flourishing in life at all.

6:18 So there's this big gray area. Cass. It was like, this is a great area, and as professionals, we need to start to take note of what's going on in people's lives. I am so on the same page. I was having a conversation just a side note so I have been doing some corporate kind of well being work with a company over in Amsterdam. I've been doing some executive coaching. I have a background as a coaching psychologist as well as then being a clinical psychologist, and there's always this distinction between what coaching is and what therapy is. And coaching is taking these people who are well and functioning and thriving and kind of you know, helping them to achieve goals and to move into being the most flourishing kind of selves. And somebody said to me just this week, what we're looking for here is like coaching, not therapy, And I said, well, I have to be honest in my experience, especially as a private practicing psychologist, you know, not in a public mental health system where you're dealing with really serious mental health conditions. I oftentimes struggle to draw the distinction. Like a lot of people who are showing like what you're saying, you're struggling. People come to therapy they know something's wrong, but they're not meeting the criteria for significant mental health issues. And equally, the people that come for coaching are often in that same sort of spot, like it's that languishing isn't it. It's like that kind of just that just a little south of kind of moderate no mental health definitely.

7:51 And I'm a chart of coaching psychologists as well, and there is trauma informs coaching too, So again we are broading in our scope many of these different subdisciplines in psychology, and there are so many overlaps, aren't there. It's it's important to make distinctions, but to realize that, you know, we really people are human beings in a complex, aren't they exactly? But in terms of thinking about mental health on a spectrum is so incredibly important. So if you think, okay, so if somebody may be languishing, that is a different end of the spectrum to florishing, but it's not quite bad enough, as they say, to to meet the diagnosis of depressive disorder. But then even there's something between florishing and languishing where people can just be coasting and so still able to meet all the requirements in their lives.

8:43 They're you know, probably doing quite well at work, taking care of their families and loved ones, and maybe even engaging in some hobbies, but actually they feel like they're coasting, that they're not really living their own lives. And this is where tiny tea tiny traumas come in because in my work, if we can identify some of these things that happen in all of our lives that actually cause us just to be knocked off course a little bit and start connecting the dots, being able to have that awareness first of all, that these low grade traumas exist, they do affect us, and that we can find out really what our constellation of tiny tea traumas and often the life events mixed up in that and they interact together and they can really compound each other too. To have so many of us walking around on autopilot really or experiencing I see this high function anxiety so much on a day to day basis. People are feeling anxious all the time. But because you'll know, to meet the criteria of these sort of mental health conditions, one of the main criteria is that you're not able to achieve your activity of daily living. All of my clients do.

10:03 They all do so, but it is effort. For it is like walking through molasses and not the nice sweet carrying the really sludgy, sticky kind. And that's just no way to live. No, So Meg what are the kinds of experiences you're referring to when you talk about these constellations, like all of these little tiny tea traumas, these kind of emotional injuries, Like can you share kind of examples of what those things are that we're talking about. Yes, absolutely, And again the difficulty sometimes that we have is that all these things are individual to us. So a point I really want to make in general about trauma.

10:46 It is not the event per se, it's how it impacts us, how it impacts the individual. So something that has happened in your life may impact you very keenly, but actually it may not particularly affect another person at all. And that's the same for the spectrum of trauma as well. So to bear in mind that some things that really do not people of course in their life. It won't be the same for everybody, but these tiny tea traumas, there are some really interesting categories. So things like microaggressions, things like toxic positivity, things that really make us feel undermined. Often things that make us feel a little bit humiliated, because in an evolutionary sense, we want to be part of our groups, and if we have the fear that we're going to be ejected from our group. That is actually that triggers that stress response. So moral injury was one thing that came a lot in the pandemic, and not just for nurses and doctors, but for many of us who are sitting on the sidelines so basically couldn't help other people. That was incredibly hard for people. And again, it probably isn't just one of these experiences. It is when they build up over time and often when they're constant.

12:04 So if someone is perhaps working in a workplace where there is quite a lot of microaggressions, where people have been undermined quite a lot, then we do know from some really amazing research that it does have a profound impact in terms of health outcomes. So I'll give you an example actually of something that really really stuck with me. So I had a client. She was very, very high functioning, she's very sort of inverted commas, successful in her work, and also amazingly kind and compassionate person, and she was on the verge of burnout. She was burning herself out. Again.

12:51 She said, look, nothing really that bad happened to me. You know, I haven't been through an abusive experience. You know, I have a really good relationship. All my life is really good. It on paper. And so we kind of explored some things and one thing she said that came up when I asked my tiny tea question. So I posed this question to my clients. Can you tell me an event or experience that has occurred in your life that has affected you in some way affected your behavior or the way you view the world, of how you think about yourself. But you thought wasn't quite important enough to mention, and that's the important thing. And she came back and she said, well, you know, when I was a kid, if if I had a bad report card, my mom she would pin it up on the wall and they stayed there from my whole childhood for years.

13:45 So every morning I would get up and I would see these f's or even d's. And but Meg, that's not trauma, Like that wasn't that bad. I wasn't in an you know, I wasn't in a really difficult sort of environment like living through a ward. It's not that bad. And we took a pause. We took a pause, and we reflected on that, and again, imagine, imagine how that would impact your sense of self worth if growing up what you saw every day was something that was telling you weren't good enough. So many people have these sorts of experiences. And it doesn't have to be based on childhood either. These things can happen later in life. They can happen all the way through life. And one point in my book that I want to make really clear is that because many people have said.

14:38 Well, how do we avoid this? How do we avoid tiny traumas? And it's not so much about avoiding it, because you can't cast you can't avoid difficulties in life. It is about having the awareness these things happen, that they are important, and what we can use these experiences to build up our psychological news system. I call it build up that psychological resilience of flexibility, so that later in life, when difficult things happen again, because they inevitably will, we will have the tools. We will have the coping mechanisms, we will have our psychological toolkit to be able to overcome those difficulties.

15:19 Yeah, so you hit on a couple of points there. One was the idea of whether these things kind of occur in our early life when we're most susceptible to some of those You know that when we're forming our sense of self versus things that happen later. I guess I'm guessing that what you're kind of saying is that when we talk about how much of an impact these things have on us, than one of the factors that might make you more vulnerable is if you have had more of those experiences in childhood. Would you say, as opposed to somebody who had a really happy, healthy, emotionally supportive parents, would they potentially have more resilience I guess like when they dealing with some of these issues later.

16:03 Possibly. But I think the difficulty with going down that pattern of thought is when, and I see this so much in my practice, is often people say I had a really loving childhood, my parents were amazing. It wasn't that. And again, the perspective of the individual is so important, But you can have difficult things happen later in life that really do cause a level of psychological unease. And so sometimes in psychology I feel like we focus a little bit too much on childhood. And if we're thinking about the spectrum of mental health and mental sort of disease as it were, unease, then what happens is people dismiss what can occur later in life and really impact us now of course for individuals, and in terms of tiny tea trauma, even if we did have very loving parents, there are studies that show if there's a misattunement, if we're not attuned with our parents, that can have an impact.

17:10 And again because as you say, early life is so important in terms of feeling that sense of safety and security and being able to go out in the world and having that sense that everything is going to be okay. So there are some studies that look at parents' personalities as opposed to children's personalities, and when they're not really aligned, that can be difficult. So perhaps you have parents that are really really extroverted and they want to always like take you out about and they want you to be quite extraateted too, but you might be a quieter child. And so trying to live up to those expectations, even though they come from such a good place, can often again leave people feeling like no one understands them and actually what they do in life may never be good enough.

18:01 And that is such a theme at the moment I feel I see in my practices people just don't feel no matter what they do it's ever, it's ever good enough, and a lot of these tiny traumas play into it. So what I would say is early in life, what can happen is we can sort of create associations between some events, and then if similar things happen later in life, that can really trigger as we say these days, but they can bring to mind association in such a way, in such a way that it feels very powerful, and also that can then nudge us to engage in behaviors that are comforting but may not be that good for us as it were.

18:45 Yeah, no, that makes sense. And as you were talking, I was thinking of people that I know, parents that I know who will have a great relationship with one child and they just can't connect with another. Like you said, they're just a completely different kind of person, and so there's that constant kind of misalignment. So that's really interesting. So you talked about these different ways or different presenting problems. I guess that you see that are often a result of these tiny tea traumas. And I know that one of them that you talked about, and you mentioned it earlier, is imposter syndrome, which is a huge topic that I've been really diving into recently myself, because I see it all the time. I would love to hear your perspective about how the impact of these tiny teas on cultivating those imposter thoughts and feelings that feeling like I don't belong here, I'm a fraud. You know, it's very much a manifestation of the not good enough thing, isn't it?

19:43 So how do tiny tea traumas relate to imposter syndrome? Yeah? And so those messages they come from somewhere, don't they? And I felt very strongly that a lot of the information on imposter syndrome there is just a missing piece. Okay, So a lot of the research that was just cross sectional that looked at sort of prevalence in terms of imposter syndrome, it always said women experience imposter syndrome more than men. I was like, but why why? I don't really believe innately there is a sort of biological reason that that should be. So why?

20:23 And I couldn't find much information about this. It was really hard to find the mechanism of action around it. And then so digging deeper, digging deeper, and actually there is some evidence here and in terms of imposter syndrome. People that have experienced these tiny tea traumas, particularly microaggressions, so those everyday's slights and indignities that do happen on a frequent basis. Well, women and people from other minority groups are more likely to experience these things. So if you are perhaps in a workplace where you're you know, receiving many of these microaggressions on a daily basis, it's going to make you feel like you're an impostor. It's going to make you feel like you shouldn't be there.

21:10 It's going to make you feel like you can't do this job. And I'm like, yeah, that makes sense, that makes total sense. Now, it's not just because that person happens to be a woman. It's because of these indignities, these emotional, just little cuts, psychological like little scrapes, So you know, people are subject to on such a regular basis, and it grinds you down and it makes you feel like because they're subtle, because microaggressions are subtle, and sometimes the intention to do harm isn't there. And again, it's not about the intention, it's about the impact it has on the individual. Because we can't put a finger on it.

21:52 A lot of the time, what do we do as human beings. As human beings, we are meaning making machines, and so we will make meaning out of something that feels confusing, and often that is to blame ourself. So it must be me. It must be me, because you know, it doesn't seem to be having with other people. So there's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough, I shouldn't be here. Maybe I'm faking it. I just don't know. And because we don't talk about tiny te traumas in the way that we talk about bigger T trauma, we maintain that sense of shame actually and secrecy around it. But what's been amazing cast I would say, in the past, only about five years, I would say, is that we are starting to talk about these things, and once we can see there is a mechanism of action, we can start to do something about it so that all the responsibility isn't just placed on the individual and mental health.

22:48 I feel sometimes we do that a bit too much. We really place all of the work on the individual to do. But actually we are part of our environments and so perhaps we need to be doing some work work on an organizational level. On a macro level, I would say, to be able to help people to have the best mental health possible. Yeah, no, I totally agree. In fact, I just ran a session just this week on imposter syndrome and that came up. You know, well, surely there are these other factors that contribute, and of course there are, like but I think you would agree there's those big systemic changes that we need to make. And I think we're becoming more aware of inequities and the gender bias and the racial discrimination even and all of that unconscious bias. But we still at an individual level, we can't necessarily change the world. But how can we change how we respond to it? How can we feel less alone and ashamed?

23:50 And you know work within the world that we do. Because because often because this is something that is a bit insiduous in it, it develops over time. What can happen is some of the effects of this simplicit bias and the microaggressions can start to affect how we view ourselves. So we will start to engage in some cognitive distortions and we can minimize the good and maximize things that perhaps were a bit hurtful for us. So say For example, someone in a workplace may have received some feedback, and if you've experienced long term sort of tiny, teased microaggressions and they've built up, you will jump on the negative bits of that feedback and be like, yeah, that's evidence, that's evidence that I know I'm rubbish at this, and they can see it and actually ignore quite a lot of the really positive feedback. So we need a reality check and again absolutely hav an awareness that these bigger, micro level things impact us organizational aspects, impact as but having the awareness and then taking accountability of ourselves too, we can change how we respond and not react to respond to a situation. And we can absolutely change our thought patterns because what I always say, which is a little bit contentious, many things might not be your fault,

25:24 but you're the only one that can do anything about it. Yeah, I agree, And using that is a superpower though. You have the power. So to shift shift some of those thought patterns, but also to be proactive and say, actually I want some feedback. Seek out feedback about your performance if it is something that is work based along the theme of imposter syndrome, gain that information objectively, collect it like you're a detective and do that and figure out pick out what are some of the coolnesses distortions that you may be engaging them, and what is the actual evidence there. And that can be very, very very helpful because we do get inside our own heads too.

26:12 Yeah, yeah, we do. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you EPs drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. So imposter syndrome. Like I said, it's something that I'm really interested in, and it's one of kind of several different manifestations or presentations that you see that are often a result or associated with these cumulative traumas that people pick up through the course of their lives. Another one that you talk about is food and people's relationship with food.

27:02 This is a huge topic for my audience. This is again, this is another one that we're talking about all of the time. How do you see the relationship or the association between these little tea traumas and food kind of unhealthy relationship with food. So absolutely, So a big part of my work is to do with emotional eating, so eating for the reasons but besides hunger physical hunger. And sometimes we think about emotional eating in a very sort of caricatured way in terms of perhaps having a breakup and going and just dive in for an ice cream or a big old ball of pasta or something that is very comforting. But that's only a little part of it. Actually, food can be used in many, many ways, and if we think about it, food is very delicately and intricately linked with our sense of love. So when we are grown up and you know, as we said before, life is really important.

28:02 So in terms of just receiving a sense of comfort, absolutely absolutely, But it's not just that physiological effect. We can have those associations between For instance, say when I was a kid, absolutely, if I went to the doctor, my mum would always take me out for a tree afterwards, so a sweet tree to kind of you know, make it all okay. And that association is very strong. So if something feels uncomfortable, it makes total sense that people who've had those sort of experiences would reach for food almost without without any conscious awareness of why they are doing that. Now we live in a world of ultra processed food. This food has been manufactured so that it triggers a bliss point and it makes us feel really good for a moment. It really is addictive like in that way, And there are industries that spend huge amounts of money to do this. But lay it onto that.

29:10 There is so much advertising for food, So if we think about priming effects, they're constant and continual, so you may not even notice, and we don't when we think about prime effects, don't we. But all these messages that are really you know, going into our brains in some capacity saying, oh you can get this and this food and this food, coupled with that association between comfort, then with the physiological effect this food has on us. It surprises me that not every single person has an issue with food because it is so prevalent. It is so so prevalent. So the first step in being able to disentangle this all is part of a process I developed so to help people deal with all of these presentations.

29:59 There is so much many common themes that I've won process, and it's called the Triple A Approach. Love It so the first day is aware this, yeah, having this sense of let's unpick, let's unpick our relationship with food. And one of the best and simplest and completely free ways to do this is to do a food and mood diary. So I would say, you don't need an app, you don't need any any sort of equipment to do this at all, pen and paper and then just write down every day what you're eating, the time you're eating it. So that's a basic food diary, but really importantly how you were feeling beforehand, emotionally, how you feel afterwards, who you're with, and what you were doing, and also to rate your level of physical hunger. And often with my clients, just doing that is so enlightening to see those patterns we have between perhaps feeling a bit low, but sometimes feeling very positive emotions, so feeling really really excited can lead people to over consume. And then we have that information then going through a process of acceptance and then finally action. So acceptance is the second A and action is the third A. Because having awareness and accepting that

31:29 these things may have happened in your life, the tiny teas you may have this relationship with food that we want to change, we need to move into action, and sometimes we can get a bit stuck in awareness that we're really spending a huge amount of time and exploring all these things. But we need to be able to be dynamic about it and move to action, so to break some of those patterns and replace them. And what we know in psychology is that we don't really extinguish these these associations because they serve us for a reason for some point, but we can replace the food with something else that brings us what we need in that moment. Yeah, I see. I love a process, I love a framework, so I appreciate your triple A model, Meg. So can I just go back to the acceptance part though? So you said obviously awareness, and totally agree. You start documenting what's going on and suddenly all the light bulbs come on and you see these patterns because which most of us can't remember what we ate yesterday, let alone how we were feeling last Thursday. So having it mapped can be such an important helpful thing to do. When you say acceptance, though, can we talk more about that, big?

32:47 I'm all about mindfulness and acceptance and self compassion. How crucial is that acceptance part, because I think when you talk about people can get really stuck in awareness. Often that awareness is tainted with self critics, isn't it? And self judgment? Oh oh, with hers out? We are so much harsher on ourselves than we would ever ever be on other people. And acceptance is probably the hardest bit, and is the bit that people tend to skip over and move straight into action. And some of the actions will work for a short amount of time, but then because the acceptance piece hasn't really happened, they'll sort of bounce back and be like, well, actually I tried all these tips that I saw online or a magazine and you know, but still don't really feel that Okay, So kas would you Wand if we do a little exercise to to sort of because should be scared maybe a little bit. So a lot of my work comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, which I have a huge amount of time for. So we're going to do other like sides. So cass imagine that you are on the edge, on the edge of a deep, dark black hole. You're on the precipice of this black hole and if you if you fell down it, you would be utterly consumed. Can you see that? Mm hmm. Okay,

34:21 now bring to minds either a monster or a nemesis, something that is very powerful that does want to harm you. For me, it's Penny Wise from Stephen King's it by that absolutely terrifying. That clown just awful. But what is it for you? What is your your monster in your mind? I have trouble coming up with a monster. Okay, I can probably think of something that used to scare me as a child. Do I just have to think it or don't have to say it. It would be great if you could share it, if you're comfortable with sharing. Oh. The only thing that makes me feel like at all, because now I'm grown up, is I used to this just gonna sound so strange. I used to have nightmares when I was a child about these like almost like smurf creatures that were just but they were really scary and they would chase me and they would always be under my bed. So I can I can recall, I can bring to mind the sensation of those those like scary smurfs.

35:21 Brilliant scary smurfs. I can see this. I can see these evil smurfs in my mind as well, okay, so the Evil Smurfs they are on the other side of the black hole. On the other side between you and the Evil Smurfs is a rope. Okay, okay, So the Evil Smurfs they are tugging, they are trying to pull you. You're grabbing onto rope and they are trying to pull you into the black hole, and you are trying to pull back. You're trying to keep your feet on on the edge, on the edge, on the ground. How does it feel to be pulling so hard? Exhausting and scary? Yeah, yeah, it's a yeah, tiring.

36:10 Okay, So the Evil Smurfs they're still there. They're still there, They're still pulling. It might even be laughing at you, giggling a bit and really tugging. Now, let go of the rope. Oh yeah, ah, how does that feel? I love that exercise. And that is the power of acceptance. Yeah, it's like, oh, letting go. That's a perfect analogy. I love that we often conflate acceptance with resignation, and acceptance is letting go, but it's not giving in. It's not giving in or giving up. Acceptance is having psychological flexibility rather than psychological rigidity. Acceptance is empowering because you can take that energy that you were using trying to pull, trying to battle with those evil smurves, you can use the energy for something else exactly right.

37:09 So the struggle that we get into with I shouldn't be doing this and what's wrong with me that? And why do I keep doing this? That's the that's the metaphor, right, just come to peace with it, just let it go, let it be. Often one of the things that are driving the kind of maladaptive behavior and thought patterns I see that then end up in these presentations. It's that battle we have internally with ourselves. And no, we can't change the past. We can reframe a lot of our experiences, but what we can do is we can use our energy to create a future that serves us in a much better way. M Yeah, that's powerful. I'm a big fan of acceptance and commitment therapy as well, but I have never heard that exercise, So that's great. I know listeners are going to love that. They're going to be using that now.

38:00 I love it. It's a good one, And that's the that's the power of metaphor, isn't it too? Like that's a whole other conversation, but embedded into act, into acceptance of comitment therapy. There's a lot of use of metaphors because they just are so powerful to enforce and instill a message that you otherwise don't get when you're trying to think about it with your without analytical brains. No, that's really that's really useful. And Meg, are you able to just quickly because there's a lot that you cover in your book. We've only talked about the tiniest, tiniest bit of tiny trauma, but there's a lot that you talk about in your book that and these are issues and problems that, as you say, are widespread. They affect a lot of people. People who are otherwise you know, doing okay in life. People struggle to know what's going Why am I happy? Why should be happy?

38:49 All the shirts there's should have wits? Yeah, right, So that's why I think this is so important. So can you just give us a little snapshot of like what some of the other issues are. I guess what some of the other problems that you see that you've presented in the book that you've laid out for people that I know that people will resonate with and relate to. Obviously relationships and love. We as human beings, we are group creatures. We do need others in life to thrive, and so that is always that's always a complex and really fascinating topic too when we're thinking about love and our sort of template of love, and that does come from early life, and there's a huge amount of research that says it's based on your attachment style. So you're either securely attached, so you feel that what you've received sensitive parenting for you, that was appropriate for you, and you do feel secure in the world so that you can go out and explore it in a way that it does feel safe. Whereas if you have an insecure attachment, and there are various subtypes of that, you may develop some relationships that are maladaptive and perhaps you feel insecure, perhaps you feel anxious, perhaps you're a bit avoidant about relationships and love. The point I want to make here is that for a long time research said when we

40:21 were told, and a lot that has to do with the way the research was carried out, that these attachment styles are fixed, like once you have developed one, you have that for the rest of your life, and that is not the case, Cass, It is not the case. So through certainly through therapeutic interventions in psychology, but also through other experiences in life, you could have an insecure attachment style, but actually you can develop a secure attachment style. We have neuroplasticity, We can actually change the connections in our brains again, as they say, to serve us in a better way. And with regards to relationships, we have focused so much on romantic relationships too, and there are other relationships that are profoundly important to us. And I focus in the book on friendships and the breakdown of friendships and how difficult that can be. I've seen so many clients and again when we're talking about tiny tees, they'll be like, well, you know, it's not my primary relationship.

41:24 You know, I haven't broken up with my partner. But actually I have a friends who we were friends for a long time and I don't hear from them anymore, and I feel I feel profoundly hurt and rejected and it's really affecting me. And again to have this more nuanced discussion about these topics. So it's not just about that primary romantic relationship. It is about other relationships that we have that can impact us. And there is such a sort of relationship perfectionism sort of theme, definitely with regards to friendships and female friendships, and for particularly like these should be you know, perfect, like your best friends will see you through life and they'll see you through all the ups and downs. Actually friends can be for a reason, for a season or for a lifetime. And when we can let go of those expectations that we can have of a relationship, we can actually go with the flow a bit more, but have a much better relationship with our view of relationships.

42:32 I'm so glad that you mentioned that, because that is that's huge, and I think there's also this there's a lot of kind of comparison when you see other people with their best friend and you aspire to, like, I don't have a friend like that, and the pain and the emotional experience of disruptions and breakdowns in communication with those friendships can be just as painful. More so in terms of even my own experience, I've found the breakdown of friendships to often be more painful than perhaps a romantic relationship. And again, if you think of all the messages we receive. All the movies we've watched in our lives about friendships and about how perfect again they should be if they're your true friends.

43:22 Come on, life's just not like that. We get busy casts in life, we have kids, we change jobs, we move country. You know, all these things happened, or we just change as people and we're no longer on the same page, and that's okay, That is okay. We can value the friendship for what it was at a time and our life when it served us. But actually we can move on, or we can just have a bit of a pause in terms of if a friend is for a season and come back to that friend. That often happens when perhaps some people have kids at a different time than other people, we go into a different sort sort of phase of stage life. So the key here again is to unpick what are these sorecisal expectations that are maybe playing into some of these maladaptive thought patterns that then impact how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about relationships. But they often do then impact our behavior and in a way that can be harmful.

44:26 Yeah, yeah, that's really great advice. Meg. Thank you so much for your time today. I'm going to put the link to the book Tiny Traumas in the show notes. You know, there's a lot more in the book, so perhaps we can even come, you know, get you back on the show again down the track to talk some more. But I will certainly let everybody know where to find you. Thank you so much, Thank you, kas, thank you. Doctor Meg's book is called Tiny Traumas When you don't know what's wrong but nothing feels quite right, and it is available right now in all bookstores. You can catch up with doctor Meg at her website, doctor megaryl dot com.

45:07 I'll put that link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this conversation, I would recommend you go back and listen to my conversation with doctor Sarah Woodhouse. She wrote a book called You're Not Broken, which was also a really great book and a great conversation about the impact of trauma in our lives, whether that be small TA or other T or big T trauma. Obviously, if you enjoy the episode, if you enjoy the podcast, please share it with others. Help us get into the ears of more listeners. Give us a rating and a review, or click the plus button on Apple or Spotify to subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you would like me to tell you when there is a new episode, come to my website cast doone dot com, forward slash subscribe, and I will send you an email telling you who the guest is so that you can choose whether you want to tune in or not. In the meantime, come and follow me on Instagram. Cast done underscore XO, and I can't wait to catch you on the next episode of Crapy to Happy