What Greek Myths Reveal About Complex Trauma with Dr. Gillian O’Shea Brown

I love that.

I mean, you already mentioned some of the, some of the myths, some of the stories that I'd love to kind of get into.

Um, would it feel okay to, to start with Sisyphus?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes.

Well, um, before I go into Sisyphus, I used the chapter The Achilles Heel because, um, a lot of complex trauma survivors will know that, you know, we all have these emotional maps of the world in terms of who we are and how we'll survive, and everybody has core negative beliefs.

And you don't come out of the womb with these beliefs.

You learn them through painful and invalidating life experiences.

It could be, "I'm not good enough." It could be, "I'm too much." And in this Psychological Achilles Heel chapter, I used, um, Matthew Perry's memoir as, um, as a case study, and anyone that has read that memoir, and he has a documentary coming out later this month, he repeatedly said in his memoir, "I'm broken." And it was something he started telling himself early on when he felt very unseen in a stressed out family system.

And it's emblematic of what happens in complex trauma, where you have an early formative memory where, you know, when a parent looks through you with despondent eyes, you don't stop loving them.

You stop loving yourself, and you start telling yourself a story about yourself, that core negative belief.

And then what happens is that anything that serves as the bite that fits the wound, that aggravates that pain, it's the cumulative pain of all of the times that you felt that way.

So in, um, I guess, the Achilles chapter, what I do is I have people map out their core negative belief, and there's a technique to do this.

And then what we do, and I always do this in complex trauma treatment, is they write it on the top of a page.

They do a timeline, and they write down three to five times in their life when they felt this way.

And, uh, almost like the headline of a newspaper, just enough to take the memory from your internal cabinet, and then you start to see, oh, I started to feel not good enough at 5 and 7 and 12 and at 19.

And it, the corrective experience I needed the most would've been to be seen, to be held, to be believed.

You know, you start to see yourself through compassionate eyes.

But after identifying your psychological Achilles heel, the next chapter is Sisyphus, which is the bite that fits the wound.

It's the old pain that we keep reliving over and over again.

And, um, this is tied to an old Freudian theory.

It's over 100 years old.

It's called repetition compulsion.

And we tend to unconsciously reenact the past, um, because the unexamined history is doomed to repetition.

And there's a quote from Carl Jung that I love, and he says, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it continues to rule your life, and you call it fate." But the simplest way that I can explain repetition compulsion is that if we were all in a circle, and we all threw our problems in the circle, and you could pick anyone's problems, you would probably choose your own again.