Watching Your Own Trauma Response

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]I remember the very first time that I was able to watch myself go into a trauma response as if it I were watching someone else. And I would never been able to detach myself enough from my internal experience to be able to watch and be like a curious scientist and be like, "This is interesting. Look at what Amy does now." But I remember it and I'll tell you that it was a moment that I learned so much about myself and my internal experience of what it feels like to have that dorsal vagal response come over and the immediate shift to a low-energy state that happened. I went from a really high-energy state and I'll tell you what happened. I was in general surgery residency and residency, especially in general surgery residency, you are expected to do a lot of work and you have the attending physicians who are overseeing you and they are mentoring you, training you, reprimanding you, all of that good stuff. So, >> Yeah.

[00:00:59]I don't even remember what I did, but it was clearly not what my attending physician had wanted me to do. And so, I'm rushing around and I come into the OR and here he is and he immediately turns around and he's standing right in front of me and he's tall, >> [laughter] >> he's big, and Emma, he had these blue eyes. My father had blue eyes and I immediately just felt like I was that little girl standing in front of my father. This was no longer the adult Amy standing in front of her attending surgeon. This was little Amy standing in front of her father who once again, she messed something up, she hadn't done it right, and he was reprimanding her and all of the feelings that were part of my family dynamic growing up of >> I'm I'm not worth anything. I'm a failure. And noticing how fast my energy went from busy busy busy busy, we got to get all this stuff done. Shoot, he's already in the OR, I'm late, and then I'm rushing in and then just this absolute I could feel it wash down my body and it turned into this collapse where now all of a sudden it felt hard to even stay standing up. I >> You felt like you felt so heavy, right?

[00:02:10]Is that what you mean?

[00:02:13]>> just, you know, sat down, curled up, fetal position. Yeah, fetal position under the covers, blanket over your head. Yeah, I know that.

[00:02:22]>> And so, what he sees is I'm just standing there and I'm very stoic. I don't even know what he saw, right?

[00:02:29]Because I'm I'm just perceiving this from my angle, but I definitely didn't freeze on the surface. There is no way that anyone else in that room would have been able to be like, "Whoa, Amy just went into a trauma response right now."

[00:02:41]But on the inside, I could definitely feel the complete shift of my inner state.