Kate's Nuggets

The Differences Between Stress, Strain, and Trauma
Episode 26

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about the differences between stress, strain, and trauma.

By getting a little bit of understanding of the nuances that distinguish these words, it gives us the ability to think about how we need to move forward in challenging circumstances. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, this is important because there are lots of valid concerns that there will be trauma to be dealt with after we come through this period. And these concerns are valid and there certainly will be some people who have trauma that needs to be healed after this.

The scope of that is unclear, and if we can understand the difference between stress and strain and think about how to work with stress and strain, we may be able to avoid some trauma, so that is really important to know.

The other is in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests that are happening right now. It's really important to understand what trauma is and to know that even people who aren't suffering from PTSD are having often trauma responses to things, and we have to understand what's going on from a trauma informed perspective if we want to have any hope of moving forward in a way that is better and kinder and more inclusive.

Stress and trauma are used in quite casual ways by a lot of people, and PTSD is not as well understood as it could be. And the difference between PTSD and trauma that doesn't rise to the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. It's worth talking about so that people can have a better sense of why it is really important for trauma-informed practices to be part of absolutely everything that people do from parenting, to education, to corporate life, to volunteer situations, to dance classes and art.

I'm going to start with some definitions. Stress is simply pressure or tension from challenging circumstances. And the feeling that we have when we talk about, "Oh, I'm so stressed," that so stressed feeling is a statement that we are in the variation of stress that is distress, which is too much stress, stress that is getting in our way of our ability to function.

There is also Eustress, E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S, for those of you who are not familiar with Eustress. Eustress is moderate or normal levels of tension and pressure that are perceived as positive to the person who is experiencing them.

One of the things about tension and pressure is that if we don't have any tension and pressure from the circumstances around us, it's really easy for us to veg out and not do anything. And so often a little tension makes us feel alive and motivates us to do something.

Without some kind of stress or pressure, boredom often occurs. And so a certain level of tension, pressure, or challenge actually activates us into feeling alive, and eustress starts with the amount of stress that gets us into action and ends when we get to the point of being concerned that we can't manage it.

Once we get to the distress level, we start entering the realm of strain. Strain is a severe or excessive demand on the strength, resources, or capabilities of something that tends to stress us to an extreme or damaging degree. So, strain is that place where we feel like we're about to break, where we feel like we're on the verge, we're just keeping up. We're treading water, and we're afraid that if we stop, we're going to drown and if we continue, we're going to exhaust ourselves. Strain is that white-knuckle pushing through something. If I can just get to the end of this, I can relax. I'm almost at my breaking point, but I haven't broken.

Trauma is an injury that results from distress. The injury of trauma is what happens when the strain is so much that we actually get damaged as a result of the stress.

Trauma has a residue in our bodies and our minds that has an impact on our behavior. It came from a stressing event. It came from an event that actually was greater than our strength, resources, or capabilities to healthily survive that amount of stress.

PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, comes from a level of injury, because trauma's the injury that interferes with day-to-day functioning. Trauma lives in our bodies and our minds as physical tension, mental patterns and behavioral habits, behavioral impact from the physical tension and the mental patterning. It often shows up in the form of intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, unhealthy habits, quickness to anger, hypervigilance, avoiding situations that might trigger memories of the event.

Trauma that is so big is to interfere with our day-to-day functions is thankfully rare. PTSD is not nearly as common as it might be given how stressful life is.

Most of us are able to walk around in our day-to-day lives with these traumatic injuries that maybe get in our way sometimes, but don't get in our way so much that we can't feed ourselves and have reasonable relationships.

Most of us have some degree of trauma.

Most of us have habitual patterns in the way that we think that are defense mechanisms trying to get us to avoid being in situations where things hurt the way that they did at some point in the past, where we try to avoid the amount of stress that we had, or that we have weirdly inappropriate reactions to things when we get triggered. If you've ever had the feeling of somebody saying something and you getting angry and you realize that it's because you misinterpreted what they said, because what they said reminded you of how your second-grade teacher used to shame you in classroom, that's trauma.

Most of us have some of those reactions that we put up with in ourselves.

So, what does this set of definitions help us with?

The first is distinguishing between eustress and de-stress helps us to think of stress being something that we want to manage. In fact, we want to make sure that to the best of our ability, we put ourselves in situations where we have the strength, resources and capabilities to handle what is put in front of us, and that what is put in front of us is challenging enough to make us feel alive. In fact, the state of flow that most of us crave, the state of flow being the mental state where we are so engaged in something that we lose sense of our self-consciousness, and we lose sense of time and we are just in the moment working on the project, doing the thing, and it feels easy in terms of we're not straining, and also it's demanding us to be at our best and we feel like we're being well-used, applying ourselves to this task, but we just become one with the doing of the task.

People who have studied the flow state have identified that what it takes to get into that flow state is to be right at the edge of what we are capable of with a feeling that we are able to rise to the occasion, a sense that we are capable of doing this, and a sense also that it will take all of our attention to do it, and the activity that we're doing is one that we enjoy or feels meaningful to us.

So, there's a reason for us to actually apply all of ourselves to this task that is just at the edge of what we're capable of.

In order to maximize the number of minutes that we spend in that flow state, we have to be constantly riding the edge of strain because we are wanting to be right at the edge of our capabilities, and this requires consciousness, paying attention, noticing what our strengths are, what our resources are, what we're capable of, and what the nature of the challenge is.

And so, in order to maximize the amount of time we spend in that flow state, we are managing the level of stress that we expose ourselves to in a very self-conscious, self-aware way. As we develop skills and resources, we are able to take on bigger challenges, and in fact, we need bigger challenges in order to be working at the top of our capabilities.

On the flip side, if we lose strength or resources through an injury or the world around us takes away some of our resources, or we age and suffer from mental degradation or physical changes that take away some of our resources, then we need to reduce the scope of the challenge in order to maintain that flow state.

When we feel ourselves at the verge of breaking point, we have an opportunity. If we notice that we are straining, if we notice that we're under that pressure, we have an opportunity to look around us and say, "What can I do to increase my strength? What resources do I have available to me that I'm not taking advantage of? What capabilities do I need in order to be able to handle this situation? What can I say no to?"

So, on a really practical level, when we're feeling that strain, we need to invest in training, say no to things, ask for help. Look around for what other resources we have, strengths and skills we might not have used in this circumstance before that we might be able to bring to bear. We might need allies and companions, and we might need to partner up with people to undertake the work that we are doing.

Once we have trauma in our bodies and in our mental patterning, we actually need to do a healing process. There are so many ways of healing trauma that finding the one that is right for you or finding a one that is right for you and your level of trauma isn't always the easiest thing, but by understanding how trauma manifests in our bodies and our minds, we can start looking at healing.

The therapeutic model of trauma in the traditional talk therapy mode is to actually process the trauma in ways that involve telling the story and getting some distance from the story and integrating the memories and telling a story that goes from victim to survivor and making it less cognitively weighty.

This is a very effective method for some people and for others it is retriggering. And the problem with retriggering is if you don't have the resources to deal with the retriggering, then it becomes more harmful and not a healing opportunity.

If you have the resources to process when you're re-triggered, it can actually be incredibly healing to encounter that level of distress and discover that you have the resources to heal from it. Therapists who work with people with trauma are watching that line. They're part of the resources that a patient has for healing when they encounter these distressing events even as memories and as storytelling.

There are ways of processing trauma that go directly at the fact that trauma is often maintained in our bodies as physical tension and muscle habits and other physiological things that can be released through various forms of somatic processing.

Now, once again, somatic processing will release emotions and will release the emotional content of trauma, and so if you're not resourced well enough to manage it in that point, it can be a retriggering cycle. But our bodies are wise and very frequently will just not let us do the things that would release the trauma unless we are already resourced.

So, there's physical practices, somatic practices, there are practitioners who've been training and doing this work that are available as resources, mental patterning, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, mindfulness and distancing yourself, creating the inner observer, the part within you that says, "Oh, look, I'm having an experience of having these intrusive thoughts, but I'm not my thoughts."

That training can be useful with little T trauma. The trauma that doesn't rise to the level of post-traumatic stress disorder coaches and therapists, cognitive behavior therapy can be a real part of that. Dialectical behavior therapy can be a real part of that, and also the kind of compassionate self-awareness of various mindfulness techniques and self-inquiry techniques that coaches and spiritual directors are trained to help people with. And there are behavioral impacts of trauma that we can work with directly.

If you have a tendency to avoid places where you might be rejected because you have habits of being overwhelmed by rejection, and so you need to find new courage to face rejection because you are entering a part of your life where you need to be a more active salesperson, or you are looking for a romantic partner and so you need to ask people out on first dates.

This is a place where you can either go and look at the how did I get here and try and unpack the story and tell a new story and hope that that changes your behavior, or you can commit to a practice of training in rejection. "Okay, I'm going to do something that scares me once a day.

I am going to try and see if I can get 75 people to say no to me in the next month so that I can get used to it, so that I can become comfortable with it, so that it stops being so scary because I know I can handle it."

In my work, I often talk about anti-fragility and resilience and post-traumatic growth, and they're related to stress and strain and trauma in the following way. Resilience is when something stressful occurs, I just bounce back. I absorb whatever the challenge is and I bounce back.

Anti-fragility or what I sometimes call extreme resilience is I incorporate the challenge from the stress and I become stronger as a result of it. This is like going to the gym and lifting weights and the weights that I lift tear my muscles because I strain them to the point of breaking, but then they heal stronger, but I don't really damage them in the grand scheme of things. Those little tears are well within my strength and resources and capabilities to heal from and become stronger from.

Post-traumatic growth is when there's been an injury from stress, there's been an injury from a distressing event, and it's unpacked and healed from and integrated into a way that makes you or me or someone else, a more mature, more capable, more resourceful individual.

My hope is that by having a sense of the distinction between stress and strain and trauma, you will have a tool to be able to evaluate when you're having stress in your life.

Ask yourself, is this present stress from a present circumstance? And if so, is it within my capabilities to manage? Or do I need to increase my strengths, increase my resources, or ask for help or say no or get myself out of here to reduce the strain? Or has this somehow activated a residue in my body, physical, mental, or behavioral that is actually a result of a past stressful event that has just been activated by the present circumstance?

Answering that question will help you know whether you need to manage stress, reduce strain, or heal trauma.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.