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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we're going to be talking about resilience and today I want to go over something that I see getting mixed up left right and Center
Heidi Priebe explains the difference between trauma and hardship: hardship can be integrated into a coherent narrative, while trauma disrupts how inner and outer worlds connect, requiring different co
Key Takeaways
- Trauma and hardship are distinct experiences that call for different coping strategies.
- The key distinction is whether a person can coherently integrate the experience into their inner and outer world.
- Being able to reframe and choose next steps intentionally suggests hardship rather than trauma.
- Trauma involves memory disruption shaped by emotional and stress responses, and trauma therapy can help resolve it.
- Recovery from trauma is possible, and the distinction is meant to empower rather than discourage.
What the video covers
- Hardship is a challenging set of circumstances that requires resilience but can be made sense of and reframed by the person experiencing it.
- Trauma disrupts the ability to coherently connect the subjective inner world (feelings, sensations, thoughts) with the external world of people, places, and events.
- Whether an event becomes trauma or hardship can differ between people, so the same event may be stored differently in each person's system.
- A rule of thumb: if you can reorganize your thinking about something and regulate around it to choose next steps intentionally, it is likely a hardship.
- Her personal example: after a difficult 2024, she mourned her expected future, regulated her grief, and chose a new direction, which is a hardship-processing pattern.
- Trauma is harder to resolve because conscious beliefs about safety conflict with how the body processes the environment.
- Hardship and trauma require different coping skills; what resolves one often does not resolve the other, so identifying which one you face matters.
- Analogy: hardship is like reading a challenging but coherent chapter; trauma is like a chapter with missing pages and scrambled sentences.
- Memory formation is tied to emotion: strong emotional responses make events memorable, and under extreme stress or surprise the body may log irrelevant details as if they were significant.
- Trauma can arise from stress chemicals becoming abnormally elevated or from a shutdown/dissociation response that prevents forming proper memories; trauma therapy can help, and the video stresses that this is not a hopeless outcome.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Resilience and Trauma vs. Hardship
- 01:50Defining Hardship and the Rule of Thumb
- 03:29Hardship Explained: Personal Example from 2024
- 03:34Why Trauma Is Harder to Resolve
- 05:23The Book Chapter Analogy
- 06:47How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body
- 08:47Stress Responses, Memory, and the Attack Example
- 13:29Shutdown Response and Dissociation
- 18:09Choosing the Right Coping Strategies and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Online which is the difference between trauma and hardship hardship being a set of circumstances that are really challenging and that require a lot of resilience for us to move through but that ultimately we are able to make sense of
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whereas trauma refers to things that happen to us that disrupt our ability to make coherent connections between our subjective inner world so our world of feelings Sensations in the body emotions thoughts and perceptions and the outer world of people and places and things
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and events and situations that are external to us so when we are dealing with trauma there is generally a very confused relation ship between inner and outer world because something has happened that has disrupted our ability to form memories in a way that is
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adaptive for US versus when we are dealing with hardship we're generally to a reasonable degree at choice about how we are going to connect our inner and outer world so for example you can have someone saying something like oh that
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thing that happened to you that you're claiming is traumatic also happened to me and I'm fine I found a way to get through through it to reframe my thinking about it and to move on with my life air go if you're traumatized by it
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you're just being dramatic when in reality what might be going on here is that the same event caused trauma for one person so to cause incoherence in their system whereas for the other person for a variety of possible reasons
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that we're going to go into as this video goes on that same event might have gotten stored in their system as a hardship so as a quick rule of thumb if you are able to change your thinking about something and reorganize the way
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that you're holding something in your mind in a way that allows you to regulate around it and choose the next steps that you take intentionally it's likely that what you're dealing with is a hardship so an example of this I had a
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really challenging year this past year of my life 2024 was just not it for me I had a lot of things go wrong and after a period of being very down and very sad I was able to sit down with myself and go
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you you know what I think it's time for me to start looking at how to create a new future for myself now that I've mourned the future I thought I was going to have and I was able to find ways to
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regulate around the grief and the pain and the loss that I was moving through and choose a new way forward and when I started employing those plans and moving in that new Direction I was able to coherently follow my own plans and
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effectively change the way that I was feeling because what what I was doing was regulating around a hardship and this does not mean that the challenging circumstances of our lives are not genuinely really really difficult to overcome sometimes but when we are
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dealing with trauma trauma is a lot harder to resolve and the reason for that is because our conscious minds and what we think is safe and accurate and true about the world is not agreeing with some part of how our body is
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processing the environment because trauma inherently disrupts our ability to make sense of our experiences and in a lot of cases to move forward in a linear way with the plans that we make both trauma and hardship require a lot
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of coping skills but they are not the same coping skills so what might work to resolve trauma is not going to work to resolve a hardship and what works to resolve a hardship is often not what works to resolve trauma so it's
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important to figure out what we're dealing with so that we can get to where we want to go next with the best chance of success going through a hardship is kind of like reading a really challenging chapter in a book where the
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characters might be disillusioned or distressed or going through something really difficult but there is a coherent narrative online as the reader you can understand what is happening and you understand why the characters are feeling the way that they're feeling or
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acting in the way that they're acting so if somebody handed you that chapter of the book and said can you write the next next chapter you would have enough information to be able to write a next chapter that made sense and followed the
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rules of logic versus having trauma is like being handed a chapter of the book that is missing pages or where certain sentences are glued upside down and other ones are just smudged out entirely it's really challenging to make sense of
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what's Happening inside the chapter so it's really hard to write the next one because you don't have the coherent information you need ordered in the way that you need it in order to make sense of what is going on and this is very
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much what it's like to have trauma stored inside the body when we go through traumatic events what generally happens is either our stress levels become abnormally elevated which causes us to store too much memory in our body related to the trauma and we'll talk
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about what that means in a minute or we go into a shutdown response in which we might not be able to form proper memories that include all of the relevant details we need to stay safe in similar situations in the future the way
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that we form memories as human beings is highly related to our emotions so our emotions alert us to what feels important so if I wake up and look at my watch and realize I slept through my alarm and I have a really important
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business meeting to get to 15 minutes from now my body is probably going to have a stress response and I'm going to get pummeled with things like adrenaline and cortisol that are meant to get me out of bed and to meet the demands of my
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environment now when I get to that meeting that stress response knows it's time to calm down because I have clean subject object relationships online I can recognize I needed that stress to get to this meeting and now that I'm
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here it's time for my body to be safe and relaxed at least to whatever level is normal for me inside of a business meeting but one of the things that can happen that leads to trauma is when our
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system becomes flooded with those stress chemicals in a situation where we were not expecting that to happen and so we do not have the understanding online to make sense of it so if for example I'm walking down the street one day and I
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get attacked out of absolutely nowhere what's going to happen is the stress chemicals in my body shoot through the roof because all of a sudden I have to respond to a demand that I did not see coming that is very threatening and so
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what my body is desperately going to be trying to do is understand what it is that led to that attack and it's not going to be doing this consciously this is what my body is going to be trying to
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log so my body might be tracking what's happening as I'm getting pummeled to the ground and it might notice it sees someone walking by wearing pink shoes and it sees an oak tree in the distance and it smells the scent of Sandalwood
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cologne that my attacker is wearing and all of these things are getting logged in my system as memories that the body holds on to because what gets stored in the body as memory is highly related to the strength of our emotional
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responses this is why you tend not to forget things like the first time your child smiled at you but you do tend to forget things like where you put your keys when you came home from work yesterday one of those things had huge
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body emotional responses come online when it happened and the other one probably did not and so we remember things that are tied to the strong emotional reactions we've had when we are surprised and in danger at the same
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time generally our body goes into a super intense stress response we have adrenaline and cortisol coursing through our system trying to get us to rise to the occasion of fighting off whatever threat is in our environment this is not
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the only possible way our bodies can respond but it's one that has a high likelihood of leading to trauma and so if I was not expec that attack but all of a sudden my stress response is through the roof my brain and my body
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are frantically going to be trying to encode any information possible about what may have led to this attack and so now in the future let's say I go to the hospital I recover from this attack and it's weeks later and I'm trying to make
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sense of what happened and maybe I don't have a good coherent explanation for why I got attacked on a street that I thought was safe in the middle of the day maybe it was just astronomically unlikely that this would ever have
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happened and so even if I can make sense internally of the fact that this was a random attack that I could not possibly have predicted my body is still going to be trying to keep me safe with whatever
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means it can come up with so what happens is I may have internalized a bunch of triggers which means the next time I'm walking down the street and I see someone with pink shoes even if I have no conscious memory of the fact that one
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of the last things I saw before passing out when I was getting attacked was a pair of pink shoes I might instantly go into a massive fight or flight state in my body the second I see those pink
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shoes because some part of my body has loged that this stimuli was present during a time when I was having an abnormally high stress response and so this kind of thing tends to be what we're talking about when we're talking
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about trauma it's not just that we went through something difficult it's that our body stored something as relevant data that may not have been relevant data so a different example of this of something like this happening that might lead to hardship
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rather than trauma is let's say you know that you are walking through a really dangerous neighborhood at night and so your body is already kind of primed for something to happen and then you notice out of the corner of your eye a little
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flicker of movement and then you get jumped on and it's not that this couldn't cause trauma but it is possible that if you were already a little bit prepped for the danger and your conscious mind already knew it's
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possible that something dangerous is going to happen here you might have an incredibly hard time emotionally regulating around the fact that that happened once it's over you might have to do a lot of processing of it with your friends and loved ones but your
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body might not be storing triggers the same way because your system may already have been a little bit prepped for that attack so the spike in your stress response was not as great it was not as unexpected and it was not as confusing
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to your system airgo your body is not necessarily going to be left desperately searching for reasons why you are attacked it's going to have situationally appropriate danger cues online maybe you're going to feel fearful the next time you walk through
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that neighborhood as you should because your body is logging real danger cues as opposed to your body responding to something like a pink pair of shoes or an oak tree in the distance because once your stress response spiked so fast in a
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scenario that your conscious mind could not make sense of that your body just started logging everything it could possibly think of as potentially related to that attack now when we're dealing with something like this this is where trauma therapy is incredibly helpful and
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framing something as a hard situation is not because even though it was a hard situation and the goal of trauma therapy might eventually be to integrate what happened and to get through enough of those trigger responses that you're able
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to make sense of it hence transforming it into a hardship in your mind it's not going to work if you're trying to get over this thing that is a trauma that you now have triggers around by just thinking more positively about it your
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body is still going to be responding to those triggers every time they come online no matter what you tell yourself in your conscious mind so trauma is not just about what happens to us it's about how our minds and bodies can or cannot
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make sense of what happened to us and which inaccurate subject object connections might get left over in our nervous system because our bodies were storing inaccurate information about what led to the extreme shift in our body State now this is not the only way
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we can experience trauma another thing that can happen in traumatic experiences that overwhelm us is our bodies and Minds can go into a shutdown response and when our systems are shutting down in the most extreme forms of dissociation we are actually not able to
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form memories properly so dissociation is another word that gets used to mean a wide variety of things these days and on one end of the spectrum we have it being used to describe kind of zoning out and being somewhere else mentally than where
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you are physic physically but there's another end of the spectrum where essentially we are unable to form memories properly because our bodies are in a state of emotional shutdown so sometimes when you have a really traumatic event if the body is in a
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shutdown dissociated response while it's happening you might have people either lose memories related to the event or not be able to remember very much or very much detail or not be able to make a lot of conscious Recollections about
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what their environment was like while this thing was happening or what it felt like to be them while this thing was happening when we are dissociated in this way essentially our inner world is not making proper connections between
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what's going on for us internally and what's going on for us externally so this might lead to a situation where for example someone is being brutally attacked or abused but they're unable to log and integrate into memory the pain
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response of what was happening to them in their body and so when we have this type of trauma often what happens is that where we should in the future perceive danger we do not perceive it and so we might walk over and over again
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directly back into the same situations that caused danger to us in the past because our body is shut down in the moments where the appropriate response would be to feel distress so an example of this might be someone who grew up in
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a rough neighborhood and who is repeatedly subjected to attacks but who as an adult does not avoid dangerous scenarios and frequently puts themselves In Harm's Way because the only way that their body knew how to deal with that
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prevalence of danger was to dissociate from it on some level and so now in places where that normal healthy stress response the same one that gets us to the meetings that we need to get to in time and that gives us that gut feeling
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that something is off when we're walking down a dark desert at Alleyway at night and hear footsteps approaching behind us that stress response that should be coming online might not be coming online for people who have trauma that caused
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them to dissociate during the original traumatic event and therefore not develop enough memory about which details led to that event and if this is something you want to learn more about I cannot recommend enough the book trauma and memory by Peter LaVine who is world
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renowned for his work in the field of sematic therapy so really understanding how our body is recovering from and processing traumatic events and then working with the trauma that lives in our body until we are able once again to
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make those connections between our subjective inner world and the objective outer World properly but the main reason I wanted to go over that and exactly what it means to have trauma that lives in the body is because life is
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challenging in many ways and not all of our challenges are trauma but if we are are looking at something that has been traumatic for us and we are expecting ourselves to just get over it the way we would get over a hardship we're going to
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be setting ourselves up for failure and on the flip side of things once again if we are treating something as trauma when what it is is in fact a hardship that we need to find ways to reframe and
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regulate around trauma therapy is probably not going to be that helpful to us so 2024 for me personally was a terrible year I had just a series of very unfortunate events happen in very quick succession to me and it just
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totally knocked the life out of me for a while and for about 6 months I felt really down really sad really unwilling and uninterested in engaging with my life because I was in a state of mourning and there was a point in the
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process where I started looking back at everything that had happened that year and asking myself are any of those things that happened to me likely to cause lingering effects traumatic and the question I had to ask myself to get that question answered was
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do I think that these events cause disruptions in my ability to understand the relationship between my subjective inner world of feelings and Sensations and the outer world of people places and things outside of my body and I kind of
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went you know what yeah there was at least one thing that I notice I now have a freeze response around in a scenario that it doesn't necessarily makes sense to be frozen about and so in that one area I went and did a little bit of
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exposure therapy and after I was able to do that about three or four times my body calmed down in relation to the stimulus and then everything I was left with was hardship it was up to me and my
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conscious mind and my own body and self-regulation skills to look back on the year that it happened and to go how am I going to make something good come out of this even though it was so bad how am I going to give myself the
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space that I need to grieve and to let go of my old ideals so that I can move forward in a new way and I was able to eventually get there because I had the skills that I needed for coping with
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hardship which are often skills like consciously recognizing how much time and space we need to do things like grieve and process our losses I was able to get clear on the amount of social support that I was going to need to get
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through that period and then I was also able to recognize when I was at the point where grieving was no longer going to be the thing that was giving me the most returns and where in fact my body
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was now asking me to kind of get back at it put myself back out there again set new goals Chase New Opportunities and start writing the next chapter of my life this is what we are resourced enough to do when we are dealing with
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hardship it doesn't mean it's easy to move through any of that but what it means is that because we have a clear understanding of how our inner world is connected to our outer world we are able to come up with solutions that actually
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work for writing the next chapter of Our Lives now if what I had been dealing with as at other points in my life I had was in fact a series of triggers in which the way that my body was
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responding to my environment was quite different than the way that I was thinking about or making sense of my environment if that's what I'd been dealing with trauma therapy would likely have been a lot more helpful for me in
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moving forward because I would have first needed to find a way to make sense of my world by clarifying the relationship between my subjective inner world and the object of outer world of people places and things before I would
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be able to start moving forward in a way that makes sense so when we're looking at healing trauma what we're often looking at is working with therapists or somatic practitioners and doing treatments either like EMDR or exposure therapies or other sematic forms of work
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that help our body recognize when it's in a safe scenario from when it's in danger so that our minds and our bodies end up getting back on the same page and when we can get our minds and our bodies
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back on the same page then we are gifted with the opportunity to begin handling our lives like hardships when difficult things arise I remember when I was doing my ma master's degree and I was learning to assess the probability based on an
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interview that I was reading that the person who was being interviewed had lingering trauma about something what we were trained to look for among other things was when this person was discussing this thing that had happened to them so some form of for example
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adverse Early Child experience when they were describing it did they give details about who was around to help them make sense of the trauma so we were trained to report adverse experiences as more likely to have been traumatic if the person
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reported having no sense of protection from or comfort about the adverse experience from their caregivers or anyone in their environment after it happened and we were trained to code something as less likely to have been registered as traumatic which doesn't
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mean definitely not just that it's less likely if that person talks at length about the support that they received after the fact and the adults who came in and helped them make sense of that experience understand why it had
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happened to them even if it was a terrible thing that should never have happened on a pure cause and effect level what the danger cues were that led to that that they can now look out for in the future as well as comforted them
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around the emotional pain that they were experiencing that Comfort is often the signal to the body that the trauma has ended and that we are now in a safe envir environment around safe people who are going to protect us this is the
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natural completion of the body's stress response cycle where that stress response spikes we deal with the scenario and then afterward the body can downregulate knowing that it's now safe again when trauma gets stored in the body essentially what's happening is
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that that stress cycle does not get the chance to complete and so it's unclear to the person experiencing the trauma whether or not it is over and so a lot of trauma therapy is also about learning in the presence of a
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competent other who is trauma-informed how to complete that stress response cycle when those triggers arise for us rather than just perpetually react to them or in a lot of cases use some form of substance to downregulate from them
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because to be trapped in that stress response cycle is unbelievably taxing on the body and this is a major reason why we find that substance abuse often goes hand in hand with having unresolved trauma what I really want to drive home here is the
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idea that hardship or challenging situations are not the same as being trapped in a trauma trigger hardship is what happens when we have a challenging set of experiences that we are able to learn lessons from which we apply to our
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future growth trauma is what keeps the body stuck in a state where it cannot learn because it's not making proper subject object relations and when we cannot learn it's really hard to plan the next chapter of Our Lives
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effectively because we don't know which information is relevant that we ought to focus on and what is not either because our body is in some scenarios responding with too much emotion relative to the amount of danger that we're in or with
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not enough emotion relative to the amount of danger we're in and then you can have complex forms of trauma where you have triggers going off in different dire directions at different things and it overall leaves you with a very strong
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sense of internal disorientation and this needs to get dealt with very differently than someone who is experiencing adverse conditions that they know how to make sense of even if it's a bit challenging to figure out exactly how to do that and so the goal
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of trauma work at the end of the day is to turn the challenging periods of Our Lives into hardship rather than trauma because through hardship we learn we extract morals because our emotional responses are happening at the right
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level to match the adverse conditions of our environments hardship is what makes us stronger trauma disrupts our ability to form strength and so we need to get that trauma dealt with and worked through before we're able to learn from and
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overcome our experiences in a way that is going to actually help us grow this is not meant to be discouraging and to say that if you have trauma you're completely out of luck quite the opposite it's about giving ourselves the
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grace to recognize when we're having one of those responses so that we can give our bodies what they need to process them properly and then turn that into a hardship that gets learned from all right that's all I'm going to
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say for today on this topic as always let me know any thoughts questions you have popping up as you go through this video I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again
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really soon [Music]
Topics:traumahardshipresiliencetrauma vs hardshipemotional regulationmemory and traumastress responsedissociationtrauma therapyHeidi Priebe
