Speaker A
hey guys heidi preeb here welcome back to my channel today i wanted to make a video on something that was kind of a huge aha moment for me in my understanding of trauma and before we get started i want to be
Heidi Priebe explains unresolved trauma as incomplete learning, per the Dynamic Maturation Model of attachment: events lacking context overwhelm us, leading to preoccupied or dismissing responses.
Key Takeaways
- Trauma is best understood as incomplete learning: an overwhelming event not yet contextualized and integrated.
- Resolution comes from understanding why an event happened and feeling reasonably able to prevent it recurring, not from total control.
- Preoccupied and dismissing responses are both forms of unresolved trauma, reflecting different ways of handling missing context.
- The same event can be traumatic or not depending on context, so trauma is not purely a function of the event itself.
- Repeated interpersonal trauma commonly leads to complex PTSD, linking attachment theory to trauma symptoms.
What the video covers
- The speaker, a master's student in attachment theory (not a trauma therapist), frames the video through the Dynamic Maturation Model (DMM) of attachment.
- The DMM describes 22 attachment strategies, organized sets of tools people use to keep others close, rather than a single fixed attachment style.
- In the DMM community, unresolved trauma is considered incomplete learning rather than a 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' idea.
- Trauma is defined as a physiologically overwhelming event that a person has not been able to contextualize and integrate into their understanding.
- The same event can be traumatic for one person and not another depending on whether they had context, understood why it happened, and felt able to prevent recurrence.
- Trauma resolves when a person understands the sequence of events and feels reasonably certain they can protect themselves in the future, reducing preoccupation and extreme responses.
- Unresolved trauma tends to remain active in the body when events were not understood, so the body and brain learn unconsciously that something is unknown and dangerous.
- Two main unresolved patterns are preoccupied trauma (hypervigilance, over-reading threats) and dismissing trauma (minimizing the event and risking repetition).
- A hypothetical example of being held up at gunpoint illustrates how context changes whether an event is traumatizing.
- Interpersonal trauma, especially repeated, can lead to complex PTSD, and insecure attachment is often associated with these symptoms.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and disclaimer about expertise
- 01:32Overview of the Dynamic Maturation Model of attachment
- 03:04Defining trauma as incomplete learning
- 04:35Why the same event affects people differently
- 06:35Preoccupied versus dismissing unresolved trauma
- 08:35Gunpoint example and the role of context
- 10:40Interpersonal trauma, cPTSD, and the infidelity example
- 13:20Conclusion: what resolution looks like
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
clear that i am not a trauma therapist i am a master's student in the field of attachment theory so most of what i am educated on formally when it comes to trauma is trauma through the lens of attachment theory
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so today that's mostly what i'm going to be talking about but i want to just start out by making it clear that what i'm talking about today is not the one universal definition of trauma there are many different definitions of trauma
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many different ways we look at trauma many different types of trauma right there is ptsd there's cptsd there's chronic trauma there is many different forms that trauma can take but today i'm going to be talking about a definition
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that i found really helpful in my own understanding and it came to me through studying attachment theory so i'm studying something in my master's program called the dynamic maturation model of attachment and what you basically need to know about the dynamic maturation
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model for now is that it is similar but not identical to the original model of attachment so in the original model you have anxious avoidant secure and fearful avoidant attachment styles in the dmm you have 22 different attachment
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strategies so instead of looking at the person as having an attachment style which kind of in theory permeates through a lot more of their being the dmm looks at which strategies you use so which organized sets of tools you
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use to keep people close to you and they call these attachment strategies there's 22 of them in a long series of other videos i will tell you guys way more about the dmm but what i think is particularly interesting is how the dmm
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defines trauma so i am learning to code adult attachment interviews using the dmm model and when you're coding adult attachment interviews to figure out which strategy someone is using they teach you to look for unresolved trauma and i found the
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definition of resolved versus unresolved trauma super interesting and wanted to share it so basically in the dmm community unresolved trauma is considered incomplete learning and i want to be very clear that this video is not a your trauma made you stronger video
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that's not the kind of learning i'm talking about what i mean is that basically trauma is looked at through the lens of this theory as a really physiologically overwhelming event that you haven't been able to properly contextualize and
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integrate into the rest of your understanding and that's what defines it as traumatic so a really big question that comes up a lot for people is why can the same event happen to two people and for one person it's traumatic and
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for another it isn't and the answer to that is usually that the person who was not traumatized by the event was able to properly understand contextualize it and feel as though they are going to be able to protect
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themselves from that same situation happening in the future so when you feel like you have enough information about why a certain negative overwhelming event happened and you feel reasonably certain that you'll be able to prevent a similar thing from happening in the
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future that's likely to be when you resolve that event so you no longer have to be kind of continuously preoccupied with it and you no longer have to have these extreme responses to it in situations where it doesn't make sense because you've been
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able to understand the sequence of events that led to that happening as well as which protective measures you can make to prevent it from happening in the future with a reasonable degree of certainty right none of us are a hundred
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percent in control of our lives but where we have unresolved trauma and where trauma tends to live in the body very actively for a long period of time is when we have events that happen to us that we didn't understand that we lacked
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the full context for and so our bodies and our brains unconsciously learned okay i don't really understand what happened here so then one of two things happens as a result we either become preoccupied with the trauma or we
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dismiss the trauma and both of these are considered unresolved forms of trauma so i'm going to use a simple example to explain the difference between a preoccupied and a dismiss trauma and these are not the only types of trauma
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these are just the two main types that we look out for as kind of big common types of trauma that you might have at least in the attachment world and that doesn't mean that these events had to be
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attachment related right if you're suddenly held up at gunpoint one day that has very little to do with attachment but your response is likely to be some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder response unless let's say you live in a dangerous area where you
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frequently get held up at gunpoint and you know which streets you can walk down that are safer and less safe and one night you walk down a less safe street and you predict it you might get held up
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at gunpoint and then you did and it was by someone who had held you up at gunpoint before and you knew that you probably weren't gonna die because this is just larry the guy who robs people at the end of this street right because you
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have all the context around that situation it's possible something even as traumatic as getting held up at gunpoint might not be a trauma for you because you had all of the information and you were able to predict why that
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happened and how to not get held up in the future and you were also probably in that completely fake situation that i made up reasonably sure that you weren't going to get killed because this guy had held you up three times before at
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gunpoint right so the only reason i give that example is to show that an event in context can be not traumatizing whereas the same event lacking context can be extremely traumatizing and i also wanted to talk about the fact that we're not
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just talking about attachment stuff here but interpersonal trauma is absolutely a thing that happens to many of us if you have an insecure attachment style a lot of people with insecure attachment of any type identify with having a lot of complex
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ptsd symptoms which is what happens when you have repetitive interpersonal trauma in a relationship so a series of threatening or psychologically damaging events that are not properly contextualized for you that happen over and over and over again in
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your life tends to result in cptsd so again there's different types of trauma and what i'm going to talk about today kind of touches on a lot of different types so if you have a preoccupied trauma generally what that means is that you
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haven't learned enough information about how to prevent that event in the future because you aren't really sure what led to it in the past so this can lead you to feeling like you have to be perpetually alert to anything
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that might indicate that this thing is going to happen again and often you are letting in way too much data to be considered as possible threats so i'm going to use a simple example i'm going to say that someone has been traumatized
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interpersonally through let's say they learned that their partner had had an affair and again being cheated on traumatic for some people not traumatic for others it's all about context but let's say someone had a house and three children with their spouse and then they
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one day learned that their spouse had been sleeping with someone else for a year behind their back and now they are suddenly leaving them for this other person is that potentially traumatic to the attachment system absolutely absolutely so if this person let's call
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them jill jill was cheated on by their partner if jill never understands the context of what led to her partner cheating on her she might become hyper vigilant to the idea that it could happen again in future relationships and
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so the next time she starts dating the next time she gets into a serious relationship she might be on chronic high alert for any little sign that her partner might be disloyal to her and she might be looking everywhere so she might
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be thinking okay if they don't text me back it's probably because they're cheating on me if they look a little bit nicer one day it might be because they're cheating on me if they have a lot of friends who are women it probably
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means they're cheating and the problem with this type of reasoning is that when you have a preoccupied trauma it's often because you are lacking the proper context for what led to the sequence of events happening that led to the
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traumatic event so in jill's case she probably doesn't have the real information about why her partner cheated so there are a variety of reasons why her partner may have cheated right maybe it had to do with their relationship maybe her partner was very
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unhappy in their relationship maybe they no longer had a fulfilling sex life or had the emotional intimacy that they once had and maybe that drove her partner into the arms of someone else or maybe her partner was a psychopath and
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was just chronically cheating on everyone their entire lives right but if you don't have the information about the sequence of events that led up to a traumatic event you become hyper vigilant to anything that your mind could possibly think of that might cause
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it again in the future this is what we call preoccupied trauma where basically you are looking at too many things as potential indications of future danger because you don't have the proper context for what led to that danger
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happening in the past now you can also have something called dismiss trauma so dismiss trauma is when you essentially omit the entire traumatic event from emotional processing and drastically downplay the conscious thought that it's going to happen again
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in the future at all so this would look like if jill's partner had cheated on her and then she decided okay i'm just gonna do what needs to be done i'm gonna move out i'm gonna take the kids i'm gonna go forward
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with my life and you know what i'm good i'm okay i'll get through it there's no need for me to dwell on this i'm just going to move on which is for many a very common response to traumatic events
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as is preoccupation but the problem with this is that this will leave the individual with a numbed out set of emotions surrounding the traumatic event so jill might suddenly find that she is not attracted to anybody she has no
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interest in dating no interest in forming a close intimate connection with someone no interest in moving through the pain of what happened to her and learning from it and going forward in a different way she wants to forget the
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whole thing happen and subsequently she buries the entire range of emotions she had around her old partnership both the negative ones and the positive ones and moves forward in a more numbed out way so i was reading this book the other day
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on sexual anorexia which is essentially people who refrain from sexual intimacy and who don't necessarily feel the desire to be close to other people in a sexual way like kind of like your sexual system just turning off i can recommend some books
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on this if you relate to that because i read some really good stuff on it and this is not the same as being asexual so often people who go through periods of sexual anorexia it happens after they experience a betrayal in a sexual
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relationship and i thought yeah that tracks really neatly with this concept of dismissed trauma so if you had a sexual relationship with someone who you felt really close to who you had a high degree of trust and intimacy with and
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then that trust and intimacy was betrayed assuming obviously in this example that you were monogamous then dismissing that trauma is likely to result in you feeling kind of numbed out to any future situations where sexual or emotional intimacy are on the table
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because you have to bury the entire set of feelings that you had around that thing and as such you're now going to be out of touch with yourself and your own needs and your own wants in this particular area of your life until you
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deal with the pain of that original trauma so neither of these are great outcomes obviously with preoccupied trauma you are on high alert kind of chronically trying to figure out how you can prevent this from happening again because you don't know why it happened
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in the first place and with preoccupied trauma there's kind of this idea not consciously but like your unconscious thinks that you can still change the past like there is this part of you that's still kind of going okay if i can
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prevent this from happening again in the future somehow the past is going to reverse itself and this trauma will unhappen and again that won't be a conscious thought that you have but it's going to be what your body is kind of trying to
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chronically work out is like how do i make this unhappen and with dismissed trauma what your body is trying to do is protect you from ever feeling the pain of what happened and in order to heal from both of these types of trauma what
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has to happen is we have to face the full entire spectrum of what happened understand both the sequence of events that led to it as well as the emotional impact that it had on us and we have to be able to integrate both
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sides of that in order to move forward in a way that allows us to protect ourselves in a realistic way from having a similar thing happen again in the future now of course we can't predict the future right no one can do that with
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100 accuracy but someone who let's say had been cheated on in the past and it turned out the reason they were cheated on was because in their marriage they both ended up feeling very lonely and unfulfilled now has real information that might help
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them form a healthier more connected marriage the next time around so that it's much less likely they're going to get to that place where one person starts looking elsewhere so a big part of resolving trauma is understanding the sequence of
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events that led to the traumatic event happening and on the flip side with dismissed trauma a person who tells themselves the story what happened had absolutely no effect on me emotionally is at high risk of walking right back into the exact
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same situation or a very similar situation not seeing any of the warning signs and having it happen all over again because they aren't even conscious of the fact that it hurt them so until that pain gets brought into the body and processed
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and acknowledged they're at high risk of putting themselves right back in another similar dangerous situation because they're telling themselves this is not dangerous because they literally don't feel the pain that is usually there to alert us to the fact that we're in
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danger physically or emotionally so this idea that trauma is incomplete learning is the idea that every time we have a traumatic event happen what makes it traumatic is the fact that we really did not expect it to happen and we felt
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highly threatened by it either emotionally or physically and a lot of the time people like to talk about trauma as only something that threatens your physical life right so there's kind of a dispute over like what do we
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classify as trauma and what don't we any event where your life is in danger especially if it's unexpected is likely to be traumatic but also the human drive to reproduce is pretty much the second strongest drive we have after our drive
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to stay alive right we want to stay out of danger we want to protect ourselves and as soon as those conditions are met for most of us this really intense sexual drive comes online and that's just straight biology like our species
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has continued for as long as it has because we have these sexual drives that drive us to go out and connect and reproduce and like whether or not you're actually reproducing through sex your body doesn't know right your body thinks
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every time you're having sex like ooh maybe i'm gonna be reproducing through this um on like a biological level right which is why sexual trauma often has as big an impact on us as traumatic incidents in which our lives were
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threatened whether it's assault or any type of betrayal from someone who is a romantic attachment partner that is really disregulating for the system right because one of our strongest drives is to have attachment partners to help us raise the next generation our
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bodies and our emotional systems are literally wired for us to want to seek that out that's often why we have all these really really intense emotions that come up around attachment relationships because our bodies are trying to secure an attachment partner
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for us to have safe consensual reproductive sex with and then raise children and keep that partner close and again it literally doesn't matter if you've consciously decided not to do any of that with your life your biology doesn't know that so it's very easy to
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be traumatized by interpersonal betrayals is pretty much all i'm saying there so again in either case you're never going to have all of the information that you need to make a hundred percent sure that something is not going to happen again in the future
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but we consider trauma resolved when you have enough information to feel calm in the fact that you're going to be able with reasonable accuracy to predict in the future when such an event is going to happen again which means looking at
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the past event as complete looking at it as something that happened that you process the pain around on a very deep somatic level that you accepted you can't change that you moved through the grief that comes along with not being able to change a
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traumatic past event that you let go of the way you wish things had gone that you accepted what happened instead that you accepted not just the trauma that happened but the impact that it had on your life and
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maybe the ways in which it continued to traumatize you in small ways as your life went on because maybe you developed ptsd and that impacted your ability to function the way you wanted to for the next 10 years and those 10 years and the
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way that you wished you'd been able to function during that time might be an entire time period you need to grieve right but it's only once we have both felt the full weight of what's happened accepted it integrated it grieved it
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which let me tell you is a process and then also felt as though we understood the sequence of events that led to it happening well enough that we now feel reasonably sure we can protect ourselves from that thing happening again in the future or
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that we're at least giving ourselves a pretty good chance at that not happening again in the future that's when trauma is resolved when our nervous system is responding appropriately to things as they're actually happening right the learning is complete when you have
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properly contextualized the sequence of events and also integrated the emotional impact of it that's how we heal from trauma and that is so much easier said than done of course and we will have many more videos on this
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and i am going to get a lot more into i think what it looks like to heal from attachment trauma attachment wounds attachment injuries um that's what i'm qualified to speak to i can't speak to trauma at large from a
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clinician's standpoint because i'm not a general clinician uh but i can speak quite a bit to attachment trauma attachment woundings attachment injury and a lot of that absolutely meets the criteria for trauma so more to come on this but i just wanted
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to kind of share that definition that i find really helpful for understanding what it means to have trauma as well as what it means to resolve trauma is that trauma is incomplete learning it is when we don't have all the information we
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need to make predictions about the likelihood of that same thing happening again in the future and the learning is complete when everything is understood and integrated and we feel more capable of moving into the future in a way that
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is responding to what's actually happening rather than getting triggered back into these old responses at any slight indication that that thing might be happening or completely omitting the information that we should have learned and walking right back into dangerous situations because
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we deny the impact that they've had on us okay that's all i've got for today on this topic um it's so nice to be back with you guys i took a little break from youtube but i am super super happy to be here
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posting again let me know in the comments any questions you have any comments any thoughts any reflections that you're having on anything we talked about today and as always i love you guys i hope you're taking care of
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yourselves and each other and i will see you back here again super soon [Music]
Topics:unresolved traumaattachment theoryDynamic Maturation Modelpreoccupied attachmentdismissing traumacomplex PTSDincomplete learninginterpersonal traumaHeidi Priebeattachment strategies
