ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-06-09
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo_mgcxGYYE
it's June fifteenth two thousand sixteen a warm summer day I'd just graduated high school and I'm reading the euphoria of all the comes along with going away to college now most are a start off with today was not a normal day but not mine today was anything from normal from sun up to sundown I cancel plans of my friends I decide to not go to my
favorite museum with my family and I washed my car by hand all of these actions are really out of the norm for me for whatever reason I was home all day and just after drying off my car I was in my room not really doing much middle sister Alison comes and she asks Krieger pick up Maddy from Jason's house I say yes without really giving a
second thought in within a couple minutes were driving a little backstory on Madeon Jason Jason is a junior goes to my high school and he's dating Maddie a freshman whose friends of my sister now my sister likes to throw parties like any other teenager does so I've got to know Jason a little bit and what I've learned from watching him is that he's the center of
a social group he's the one that everyone looks to to see what they should be doing and if they like it or not now I also notice that he can get angry sometimes and has a hot temper my sister first ask if we go pick up Maddy I said yes pretty quickly and this is for a couple reasons the first was that it's kinda weird for
me to pick up a friend from a boyfriend's house usually I just so far for my sister from house to house the second was that I've heard in school about marrying Jason having some relationship problems and that kinda set an alarm bell off the third was that my sister wears her arm on her sleeve so it's really easy to tell that she was anxious about the
situation also so we arrive at Jason's house and I park my black sedan on the right side of the street opposite from his house I open the car door and stepped out into the warm cloudy afternoon Virginia air analysts that Maddy sitting on the porch which is out of place normally my sister's friends just wait inside for attacks or knock at the door but many walks
across the yard open a car door behind mine and she gets and I shut it behind her now at this point I have to admit that I'm really relieved that Jason is nowhere to be seen and that there'd been no incident or altercation so I have back in the car but my seatbelt close the door and start a three point turn to head home the first
turn with the left into Jason's driveway I put the car in reverse to back out and I look up at the house and knows the figure in the doorway that wasn't there before I recognize and instantly from its red white and blue American flag tank top it's Jason and he's holding a broom in his hand it looks like but as I take a closer look my
heart begins to thump inside my chest as they recognize the metal and what as a shock I begin to think about what's about to happen my first thought is that Jesus is trying to show that he's more manly than I am I can't hurt him and the second but more scary is that he's gonna come out show is anger through the firearm and that's what I
act on I put the car in reverse and I back out of the driveway I stopped and I'm about to head home and I put the gear shifter and drive and then park Dr forgetting away safely park for getting out and trying to talk some sense into Jason I choose Dr so we left my foot off the brake I feel the car start to push into
my back I think one must look at the house to make sure everything still okay and I don't see Jason anymore but I see you red white and blue at about waist level and notice that Jason's bent over like this as I scanned my eyes down pop I see what looks like a pink mist covering the door that Jason was standing behind I'm trying to wrap
my brain about what just happened and I force myself to come to the conclusion that what I was seeing was Jason's brain matter spider on the door and the skylight above I hear a faint Joey something just happened from the backseat and I realize that I know something the girls don't Jason just shot himself my first thought is to get the girls away I put the
car in drive and begin to speed away across one intersection and maybe even to I here rustling from the backseat and next to me the girls are starting to panic there's rustling in seats slamming on windows so I locked the car to keep them and I grabbed the phone and dialed nine one one the operator picks up and have to utter the words I've just witnessed
a suicide chaos immediately erupts inside that city at as I'm trying to relay the information the operator like the address my name and for some reason my birthday I get a faint look for my sister with tears in her eyes and asks if Jason is going to be okay in order to keep myself together I have to look away I pull the car over and get
out because I cannot keep myself together inside with those two girls I know that I have to stay at least calm and collected I keep them there and away from that door I finished relaying information the operator and they say hang on the police will be there soon and then click the phone line goes dead and the operator hung up and I'm all alone I stand
outside in the furnace familiar neighborhood of Vista what's knowing that I am the only one that knows what just happened the whole world is oblivious a car drives behind me someone's mowing their lawn off to my right and I hear little kids playing to my left everything it's normal as far as rest the world is concerned but I am stuck in a different universe than the
rest of the world in a movie or something like this happens the screen goes dark and ominous music comes from underneath but it's not like that I was scared and I couldn't do anything about it now I tell you that story because today I want to tell you what it means to experience trauma sorry so there's no real book on parenting as all parents now there's
no textbook you can turn to to know what to do next and even if there was a textbook on parenting I seriously doubt that any of the chapter titles would have been what to do when your child misses a shock and suicide so my parents did the best thing they could think of and took my sister need to talk therapist in town the very next day
and we set up more sessions for that summer and throughout that summer we told her what happened and our feelings and stuff like that and it definitely helped but it didn't help where I needed it which was in my psyche if that makes any sense I'm really into knowing where people are coming from and their thoughts actions and words I subject myself to the same analysis
and over the summer I was doing these intrusive thoughts and what I was coming up with was I was milking it I was flying into need any extra attention and I think a lot of people go through that I thought to myself this events in the past Joey just move on and get over it so I start school here parent in the fall and on the
surface everything's great but there were these little things that were happening that showed me that everything was not great for instance I would be in my dorm room or in a classroom and your kids down the hall laughing and instantly I would think that they were crying it's really amazing how much hysterical laughter and hysterical crying so I would blank out into the thousand yard stare
replaying the event in my head and would be scared over something moving or someone touching my shoulder and finally I would cry myself to sleep at night not a sad or angry cry just there staring at the wall with tears rolling down my face so I'm a bit of a nerd and I started researching what was happening to me and I learned that your brain talks
through the exchanging of charged particles through neural pathways in many pathways get use more it's easier for your brain to follow now most people heard a fighter flight and what this says is it's an instinct that happens when your body feels in danger your amygdala which is the oldest part of your brain takes control and tells the rest your brain what to do and your body
now if there's a tiger in front of you you're really not going to benefit that much from thinking over what I can do next all with tiger going to do next it's a lot more beneficial for your longevity if you fight the tiger or really really fast now that the amygdala triggers now my brain thought that the right way to act in a sad or scary
situation was to do it my amygdala set on June fifteenth which makes sense I was just trying to protect me but what it was actually resulting in was a torrent of emotions that I'd never felt before now despite all this I was telling myself jelly you're just a freshman you're just anxious about the semester trying to ramp up and your home sick now you know that
part of movie where things start to really get bad this is that part and the part where they really starts knocking okay where my dreams I was struggling to sleep without nightmares and eventually started sleepwalking and one night I started sleepwalking left my dorm room left my building and ended up eight miles away from campus in rainbow flip flops yeah I was eventually found by the
police disoriented and confused and their first thought was dang this college freshmen deftly cannot handle his booze so I took me to hospital and called my parents and eventually everyone realize that it wasn't drunk or on drugs but I was having a PTSD breakdown now this sleepwalking incident was a wake up call for me and my parents that I needed help and that I wasn't okay
and since my dad is a retired marine where well connected with the military community and were pointed in the direction of EMDR which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing it's a way to help our brains deal with drama such a three week leave of absence from school to go home to Virginia and star EMDR therapy the first session was about an hour and a half
in the therapist's went over all the science very thing which again I was into she told me that EMDR is based on the research of ram sleep which is rapid eye movement sleep and what happens during rem sleep or what's theorized at least is your eyes are moving back and forth rapidly and randomly and your filing all way you're filing away all the information from the
day so if you're a stressful day at work your dreams might have some relation to that now rem sleep is almost like the visualization of what's happening in those come out as strings what was happening when I was dreaming was I was seeing June fifteenth in a different light now your brain during rem sleep it's moving everything from your short term to your long term in
a kinda reads what it is label set and sent away for filing in doesn't always come across exactly in your dream what was happening in my dreams was I was replaying the events over and over and over again because my brain couldn't file it he just kept trying to refile and refile but it just wasn't able to now the way typical EMDR session would go is
a therapist would hold their fingers about six to twelve inches away from I face and swiped from my left peripheral to my right peripheral back and forth and they call this bilateral stimulation because it stimulates both hemispheres of your brain she would tell me to put myself back into June fifteenth back into the sedan and let her know what I was feeling and what was happening
and I came to a part where I was upset or didn't really understand what was happening or angry she wouldn't cut a sentence or two and then we would swipe on that and now kind of cement that thinking into my head now there were two really big problems I was having with June fifteenth the first was that I felt responsible for what the girls had seen
now if your member I turned left but there's a way to get home straight and I thought that because I turned left that that was the reason the girl saw what happened that I was the reason they saw I if I would have gone straight they would be fine the second was that I feel like I could have helped Jason I don't know what I could
have done but I just wish I would have done something better for him what EMDR helped me do was realize I could have done nothing better and that situation went the way it was going to happen now with traditional talk therapy you can say well I'm fine it wasn't my fault I'm okay but you can lie you can why the therapist and you can lie to
yourself with EMDR does is it really forces you to believe what you're saying and thinking now one way to show this is when I've been researching EMDR I found that people would start crying out of nowhere during the swiping and I thought that is a halfpenny it happens to me but the we'll be sitting there swiping back and forth and I would just start crying uncontrollably
it was like someone taking a champagne bottle pop the Cork and all that was coming out was everything that I had bottle away on June fifteenth and now it was finally escaping luckily I was only need luckily I only needed to EMDR sessions part of this is due to the fact of the neural pathways I mentioned earlier and how when one gets used more it gets
easier to follow now in my brain the trauma only had time to set up a walking path through the woods that my brain could follow but in other trauma victims like someone who spent the war or someone who is in an abusive relationship they might have a highway that's been formed for me all we had to do was take a rake and brushed the leaves back
over my brain would forget it was there but for someone else you may need to get Jack hammer to it and plant trees and we from the net wait for them to grow and that takes time now little statistics on EMDR to show that I'm not just like a poster child after an average of six fifteen minute sessions one hundred percent a single trauma victims and
seventy seven percent of multi counterfeit dems had zero signs of PTSD after now EMDR just one of the ways that we're learning about trauma in the way our brains process it and who knows what science is gonna bring us in five ten or twenty years what I do know is that before this event happen to me I thought the trouble was just something you need to
get over just accept it and move on but what I realize now is that we have to help ourselves if we truly want to get past something for months I was wanting to know why this happened why did Jason take his life why those two girls and what I've learned is that some of ensign life just feel like a crappy movie one where the last scene