BRAIN SURGEON On How To HEAL From TRAUMA | Dr. Rahul Jandial

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0:48The brain has the ability to heal from trauma, physical and emotional trauma, because I feel like the emotional hidden trauma can be more painful and harder to recover for some. the psychological, emotional trauma, than the physical trauma. You can see it and you can treat the physical trauma in a sense, but the emotional, psychological, hidden traumas, I feel like, are invisible and people don't think they need to treat it because they don't see a broken arm and say, I need to go to the doctor because my bone is sticking out. Let me put a splint on it and heal it up. We're not trained that way.

1:23There is no easy answer. There's therapeutic trauma, resetting a bone after it's broken, the pain of a cancer surgery, but then you know that your cancer has been cut out. Like, that's good pain. Right. And we're just talking about physical trauma. Yes. Then there's emotional trauma if people are attacked that's also intimately connected to emotional trauma, right? So people who don't have memory after certain injuries or operations, they never have PTSD because they don't remember it. So the emotional context and memories related to trauma, be it emotional physical or a combination requires memory that's cool right i like to think about like just as a concept i don't have a solution for i don't hey don't do these three things you'll be better sort of not my approach because when people did that with me i was like how do you know what i'm going through man you look at me you think everything's good are you sure are you sure i wasn't attacked last night are you sure i didn't find out that my patient didn't do well last night are you sure i didn't find out a loved one was diagnosed with something you know like i just don't want to put people in boxes.

2:28In fact, I want people to know that they are new every day. I'm not even the same version of myself I was before the last few years. How can I be understood as a group of people, a man or a surgeon? You know, I just want people to think of each other as individuals and dynamic. That said, I never judge people's trauma to be better or worse. Everybody's going to have a traumatic event in their life. It's unavoidable. It's partly because we put ourselves out there. It's partly because the way we approach the world is to be completely adaptive, right? If we're rigid, then there's less chances for trauma, but that's a life less well-lived.

3:05So when you put yourself out there, traumatic experiences are unavoidable. That said. But what I hear you say is that if we don't have the memory of the traumatic event, we don't have PTSD. We don't have trauma. We don't have a trauma tail. That's the concept that I want people to walk away and say, memory is important. Memory is the thing that determines whether the event remains traumatic in your heart. Or whether it's painful still. So let's get into that. So we just need to heal the memory of the trauma. That's exactly where I'm taking it. Memories are not files in a cabinet. There are some regions, if we remove them, you would lose memory.

3:43But memory is not only there. It relies on pulling from memories of smell to new. Like, for example, smell is very interesting. It's one of the five senses that we can't tamp down with our thinking. So the perfume or cologne, smell and memory are intimately intertwined. And so you're pulling from all different parts of the brain. Again, memory is a certain electrical flow in the brain. It's malleable. It's moldable. just because you have a certain memory today doesn't mean that that experience good or bad will remain good or bad our positive vibe right now can be made negative our negative vibe right now can be made positive as we look back at our day today really so when you see memory that way then you say okay wait a second i was attacked or i was hurt or something really traumatized me and i think of it when i smell that smell when i see that color i'm traumatized again I clench up, I have stress, fear, anxiety.

4:41The emotional context to a memory is what you can change. You don't want dementia. You don't want to delete the memory because that's a different problem. You don't want to block it. But what you want to do is change the emotional context attached to that memory. What happens if we, you hear this from people a lot who might have been traumatized as kids, where they kind of block the memory and then they remember it. When it resurfaces, it's still raw. It's very raw. But they've stuffed it, they've blocked it, They've numbed it. Driven it to addiction. Yeah, exactly. So emotional context and memory for adults in the right setting with the right person, you can actually work through the trauma of the memory and the experience by going to certain therapists who help you get better with that.

5:26To process the memory. Yeah, just to take the emotional pain, right? The emotional trauma and dampen that. so you can say, and just bring examples from my world, I was diagnosed with cancer. That's a traumatic event. My patients, you see them over time through different ways. When they say, you know, I was diagnosed with cancer and I did this, their face is different describing it later than it was immediately after receiving the diagnosis. That's a real-life example, right? It doesn't have to be all the stuff, you know, related to violence and all that. Sure. The traumatic experience of a cancer diagnosis and how patients cope with that immediately.

6:06And then you see them months later, years later, because I'd be a mess, right? I'd be like, okay, this is, I wouldn't be able to cope. But they, surprisingly, not some of them, most of them cope. They get dressed, they come in for their three-month scans, which to me would be a traumatic experience every time. Is this guy going to tell me it's back or it's bigger? I mean, think about like nothing in your mail or email. I got to go in for this news again. But somehow they cope. And that's where in Life on a Knife's Edge, I learned so much from them that it's possible to cope with traumatic experiences.

6:39I'm not saying you as an individual can. I'm not saying I can. When you look at a group of cancer patients and most of them cope, live, move on from very traumatic emotional experiences as well as physical experience of cancer pain and cancer surgery. right? That's the lesson I want everybody to go through in their mind when they're dealing with their own challenge. Wow.

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8:06Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

8:21Thank you.