The Peter Attia Drive
#339 - Unpacking trauma: How early wounds shape behavior and the path toward healing | Jeff English
Mon, 10 Mar 2025
View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Jeff English is a trauma-focused clinical counselor with extensive experience working with adults, teens, families, and groups across various settings, including career counseling, life coaching, addiction recovery, professional workshops, and private practice. In this episode, Jeff shares insights from his work as a trauma therapist, exploring how moments of perceived helplessness shape behaviors and how adaptive strategies can become maladaptive over time. He discusses the concept of the “trauma tree,” examining its roots (causes) and branches (consequences), and highlights a powerful framework used at the Bridge to Recovery, a residential workshop where Jeff serves as an outreach specialist. Jeff reflects on the transformative power of group therapy, the role of vulnerability in fostering connection, and the challenges of letting go of control. He also offers practical advice on finding a great trauma therapist, balancing personal growth within relationships, and recognizing when it’s time to seek help. We discuss: Defining trauma—a loaded word [3:00]; The therapeutic process at The Bridge to Recovery: confronting discomfort, embracing vulnerability, and reframing one’s story [5:45]; The roots of the trauma tree: the foundational wounding experiences that shape adaptive survival behaviors [11:30]; The branches of the trauma tree: how trauma manifests through co-dependency, addictive patterns, insecure attachments, and more [17:30]; The connection between trauma manifestations and underlying wounding experiences, trauma triggers, and the importance of surrender in the healing process [24:00]; How surrendering control, eliminating distractions, and practicing vulnerability are essential components of the healing process [32:45]; How adaptive behaviors developed during childhood in response to trauma can become maladaptive in adulthood [43:30]; The difference between shame and guilt, and recognizing and addressing toxic shame and shame-driven behaviors [49:15]; The unique rules at The Bridge to Recovery that support the healing process [53:15]; Internal resistance to healing due to the fear of losing positive traits associated with trauma [58:15]; The structured storytelling process at The Bridge, and the role of peer feedback in healing [1:05:00]; The differences between immersive residential therapy and individual therapy, and how to determine the right approach for different individuals [1:09:30]; Jeff’s personal journey as a client and therapist at The Bridge [1:22:00]; The generational transmission of trauma, and breaking the cycle [1:25:45]; The challenge of addressing socially acceptable maladaptive behaviors like workaholism, perfectionism, and overachievement [1:28:45]; How to determine whether struggles stem from deep-seated trauma or just bad habits, and how rewiring maladaptive behaviors requires addressing the underlying emotional wounds [1:32:30]; Breakthroughs that shatter beliefs and allows change to occur, and the process that creates this opportunity [1:39:15]; Jeff’s advice on finding a therapist for trauma work [1:46:45]; The importance of connection and vulnerability [1:52:45]; How to encourage a resistant partner to seek healing [1:57:30]; Jeff’s advice for those facing emotional struggles [1:59:15]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube
Chapter 1: What is trauma and how is it defined?
It's good to see you. Likewise. I thought long and hard about how I wanted to structure our discussion today, knowing that this was a conversation I wanted to have for a very long time. Maybe the easiest way to start is just to talk a little bit about this loaded word of trauma. When I first was introduced to this idea of trauma, I didn't know what it meant.
And I think today it's become such a catchy buzzword that everybody is traumatized by something. And I don't know if that represents a pendulum swing or a normalization or what, but Why don't we just start with how you describe trauma as a trauma therapist and as someone who's been doing trauma therapy for many years, not just in the recent trendy years, for whatever that means.
But how do you describe this to people? Well, I would have described it the same way that you described it initially back in the day.
Trauma. I have to have been at Vietnam, wartime, 9-11. These are those big T traumas you hear some folks use, that type of terminology. But within the spirit of the work... the knee-to-knee work, really embracing a definition, moments of perceived helplessness. That's what's gonna activate the limbic system. So who is to say what one limbic system evaluates as helplessness versus another?
That's when we get into this, I think, discovery of most of the people that I meet have been meeting over the last several years are the ones, wow, I think I did experience trauma. You mentioned it's a much more popular thing and now are we trending in a different direction?
So in a lot of my work with clients individually or groups, I say I hate to oversimplify things, but I think sometimes we just make things too damn complex. A lot of what I do is try to depolarize.
for folks and we're getting into these situations to where we live in this world of get over it it doesn't matter versus like you mentioned perhaps stay stuck in it but yeah moments of perceived helplessness activating that limbic system these things can happen sometimes at
the bridge you remember we talked about wounding events and one of those would be a tragic event life seems to be going one way before this thing happens and then this thing happens and life changes and everything is different on the other side of that a big t event versus someone again who maybe you could describe it as a thousand paper cuts
Someone growing up, going through childhood daily, being limbically activated. But moments of perceived helplessness, that stuck for me and it stuck for a lot of clients.
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Chapter 2: What is the trauma tree framework and its significance?
I'm going to share a story, share deep information about myself. And that's really the objective is to start within the technical thing that's happening therapeutically is there's a window of tolerance that we all don't have. And so don't want to drop into week two work when we start doing these experiential therapies.
But within the spirit of a window of tolerance and experiential therapy, telling your life story is experiential therapy. The content's important, Peter, but so many times the way the story is told is more important, or as important at least, as the content of the life story.
You talked about the trauma tree. Maybe we can describe the roots and branches of that tree in some detail because that is kind of the meta structure that I think that story gets told. It's the cause and effect piece of it. At least that's how I sort of came to understand it. I've seen many different ways that trauma is described. Obviously, since I... left the bridge.
It's a topic I'm personally very interested in for myself, for patients, et cetera. Jeff, I always come back to that structure and I think it is the single best one I've seen. Now that doesn't mean that it is the best one. It's just the one that resonates the most with me because causality means so much in my world. And I like the idea that even though it's not a one-to-one mapping,
Everyone who experiences this trauma will have this manifestation. Clearly not. But if you accept a little bit of the randomness in the system, it's pretty powerful. So maybe walk people through the five roots and the four branches of the trauma tree.
The five roots of the trauma tree, that's the what happened to me. This can be seen through the lens of trauma. And for folks where trauma is just too big of a word, can you believe I'm saying that on this podcast? But okay, then lose it. Highly stressful events.
So abuse tends to be the one that we talk really the least about at The Bridge because that's the one that folks tend to know the most about. That's not to mean that we minimize it. There's just so many different forms of abuse. Physical, emotional, abject, emotional.
social you move over from abuse and you look at something like neglect which can be very tricky so many folks that have experienced neglect it's an eye-opening experience because while something like abuse is something that happened to me neglect is something that failed to happen for me And so to see that through the lens of high stress or pain, so many different ways one can be neglected.
An example that's used there is the little boy that is going to school and he's being bullied. And he's got these parents who are professionals and they're successful and they're busy and they've got the best of intentions. but they're missing it. They're missing the look on this kid's face when he comes in every day and before he gets on that bus every morning.
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Chapter 3: How does group therapy foster healing?
So that's where my old friend can get in my driver's seat, you could say, and make life hard for me. But a very adaptive skill. I would call it a skill. Some folks would use the language of a character defect. I'm not against that language. I just prefer a skill.
I really think that's a powerful bucket because it has enough breadth to include things that don't easily pathologize. Maybe for the sake of completeness, we could just go back and talk about the codependencies, addictions, and attachment issues. I think everybody's familiar with the terminology, but just as within abuse, there are things that people don't quite think.
Everybody thinks of sexual and physical abuse. Very few people think of emotional abuse or religious abuse, those kinds of things. So similarly, maybe talk through the breadth of what we think of as addiction, codependency, and attachment disorders.
Codependency, the spirit of it, and it's not my definition, it's an old one, but it's the one I prefer. It's an outer reach for inner security. I can't draw that thing from inside of me. I have to get that from something or someone else. You let Jeff know he's okay, I can be okay. But if you're not okay with Jeff, it's hard for me to be okay with Jeff.
That's a blanket summary and I think an accurate summary of codependence. And your addictive patterns, addictions, addictive patterns, I mean, again, these can be substances, these can be process. When I talk about the ego states, the parts, my guard states,
Those parts of me that jump in my driver's seat, I look at those through the lens of addictive patterns because it's that concept of powerlessness. You'll hear folks that are in the programs, such as 12-step programs, they talk about being powerless to something. to get into the surrender of being powerless.
Well, you can just take the word alcohol, remove it and replace it with whatever that behavior is. It's the thing that I do. It's not a bad thing that I can do it sometimes. The problem is I can't not do it. So again, this could be work. This could be ambition. This could be anger. This could be many things. And usually these things, they're there for a reason.
And again, we're back to vulnerability is the enemy. So the goal of all of these maladaptive coping skills, patterns, whatever we want to call them is we've got to keep Jeff from being vulnerable. We've got to keep that little boy that had that situation with his mother in that refrigerator. We've had a bad experience with vulnerability.
So all these parts of me that step in to my driver's seat, they've got a goal. They do their job in different ways, but the goal is to keep me from being vulnerable. Attachment styles. You get four books, you're probably going to get four different numbers of attachment styles. I like simplicity. You'll probably hear me say that more than once, but simplicity, the three most popular.
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Chapter 4: How do adaptive behaviors from childhood become maladaptive in adulthood?
When you bring this up, this question up for me, it brings up a stumbling block that I've witnessed a lot with clients within the spirit of, or before they even become clients. And what I'm getting at is, is nothing happened to me. I don't think about that. Why do I need to talk about that? And I honor that as someone's truth.
And of course, the answer therapeutically within the setting of somewhere like the bridge is, okay, God believe you. So you won't have any trouble telling your story. It'll be a breeze for you. You got to roll with that resistance. But the example that comes up for me, and that's where we get into implicit and explicit memory. A good example, I think, is flashbacks.
Go back to the example of something where somebody has an image. I think what comes to mind for most folks is an image. Like, I see this thing. So then back to this other person who says, I don't think about this stuff anymore. Like, I don't go into the room and think about my dad cheating on my mother. I don't even remember that stuff. And oftentimes the answer is, sure you do. What do you mean?
Well, you remember it through your anxiety, perhaps. Maybe it's not an image. Maybe it's not a sound. Maybe it's not a smell. But that thing, that discomfort that you're experiencing, maybe that's the way you remember it.
Something that's coming up for me, and again, there's so many case studies, if you will, but within the spirit of making the implicit explicit, the example that I just gave, you know how that process works at the bridge. After the group's over in the evenings, we usually have meetings where the folks can experience some type of maybe a 12-step meeting, some kind of meeting.
And it's part of the curriculum, if you will, and it's mandatory. We've had clients have panic attacks. I would qualify some of those as that in these situations. The next day, when you're in group trying to unravel something that happened on the previous night, and we're talking about a client that I've been describing and they're like,
Obviously, I need to see a medical doctor because I said, possibly you do. Well, let's try to work it at both ends. Let's unravel this. This process, you give up a certain amount of control. Let's say this client had control issues. And so it's one of the things we ask you to do is give up control at the bridge.
and client x says yes yes yes that's right so okay so you're sitting here and you know there's exits you know the people are in the room you know all the players are here but for some reason you're anxious that your anxiety is building to the point to where you experience or you describe this thing as a panic attack right exactly and i don't need to talk about any of this stuff that you guys are talking about i said okay great but just play along with me who's the most controlling person that you've ever met in your life oh you should have met my grandmother
Okay, tell me one of the most controlling things your grandmother may have done. Well, I lived with her for three or four years in my childhood. There was that deal with the basement when I was in trouble. The deal with the basement. Can you say more about that? I'd get locked down there. How long? I don't know. It was dark. I learned how to not think about it. Back to the implicit with explicit.
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Chapter 5: What role do control and vulnerability play in trauma healing?
We kind of just say something to start the day and then everything gets quiet until somebody gets nervous enough that can't stand the silence and starts checking in. Somebody always does it.
Can you describe what a check-in is? Because it is actually a pretty interesting experience and I needed a piece of paper to help me do it because I didn't know what the words were.
We try to let folks experience or start practicing letting their outside match their inside. And that sounds like a simple goal, and it is, but it's a complex scenario. Because again, some of us have paid a price for letting our outside match our inside. And so that's really the spirit of the check-in, is to get some practice doing that, just rigorously with others. As much honesty as possible.
How am I starting this day? Where am I at right now? What's on my heart? Bringing the heart and head together. Kind of how I describe that. Some folks, it's very personal and sometimes it's group dynamics. We want to introduce that. But again, it's let's just get honest. Let's get honest because I think that's the beautiful thing about the group.
And again, this scenario where if you can't do it with some yahoo at the bridge, I hope everybody's Facebook friends for the rest of their life. But the fact of the matter is you don't ever have to see these people again. So if you can't get honest with so-and-so or in front of so-and-so, how can you do it on the couch with the people that are closest to your heart?
Because those are the people who end up being, if we want to fall back on the trauma word, our biggest trauma triggers are the people that are closest to our heart. Maybe I can build some muscle memory in being vulnerable in a scenario like we've been describing. So that's the spirit of the check-in.
The example that I'm given where this client is in this rocking back and forth, I believe I can take this client's pulse from where I'm sitting at. So I'm going to suggest that that client checks in first. It's kind of my job to notice something like that. They haven't said a crossword in my experience in the first three or four days of their journey. I haven't heard them say the word hell.
Flat out. That was a bunch of bullshit last night. Bunch of bullshit. Nobody told us that we were going to that place. I had to sit out there. I wasn't going. Nobody told us anything about that. And let's say this client, one of their calling cards when they approached the bridge was that they were really thrilled about mentioned about nobody on a winning streak.
But one of the wins, they're not void of wins. One of this client's wins, let's say, is that like their medication management finally was dialed in. They finally got their anxiety medication dialed in. And so this thing happened.
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Chapter 6: How does shame differ from guilt in the context of trauma?
And this whole integration game is about starting to live a life where I tell stories that go like this. I noticed that I was starting to be really judgmental. I noticed I was getting triggered. I had this little short, subtle thought, conversation, whatever that looked like. Maybe there was something somatic that happened with my body that I did.
But I had this thing that I cultivated, this new muscle that gave me enough space to to choose my next step when so many of us, especially out of our shame, out of our trauma, have lived a life telling so many stories that go like this. I got triggered and then I did this. And that's the reaction versus the response. Simple goal, complex process.
Yeah, absolutely. Simple and complex, never to be distinguished. There were a bunch of interesting rules at the bridge. No minimizing. You got to stand up to get your own Kleenex. Tell me again some of the rules and the reasons behind them.
First thing is trying to create an emotionally safe place. If we can create a space where folks feel like they can let their outside match their inside, then we got a chance for the magic to happen. Learning a new language, one of those things is I statements.
Where so many of us want to make statements for the world, the we, it's a lot easier to address someone's behavior when we're tired of this or we're tired of you doing that. How many times a client may come up to me and say something to the effect of, when is somebody going to say something to Peter about being 10 minutes late to group? You were never, but hear me out here.
And the answer is, I think the appropriate answer is, we're wondering the same thing. Because if I say it, it weighs about 10 pounds. But again, within that group process, if another peer going through this process rigorous journey with me, says it, it tends to weigh a little bit more. That Kleenex rule, you mentioned that.
There's so much that comes out of, I don't even know what a box of Kleenex costs nowadays. Used to say 99 cents, right? Like so much can come out of that. How hard it is for some clients not to give somebody a Kleenex. You can have the best of intentions in the world, but out of our woundedness, our trauma, our shame, so many of us, the commonality is professional,
feeling stuffers, a lot of muscle memory and stuffing emotions, especially sadness. And so the very act of handing someone a Kleenex can cut off something that maybe had been 25 years in the making. And there's so much more that can come out of that because for the person who's having the emotion, I think about my healing journey that I'm still on.
And like out of my codependence, like I expected a lot of people to read my mind. I don't ask for what I need, but maybe I'm sitting there thinking, why the hell isn't somebody giving me a Kleenex? Can't they see I'm crying? And the answer is because you're a grown man. You need to ask for them and go get them yourself, Jeff.
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Chapter 7: What are the key rules at The Bridge to Recovery and why do they matter?
But you start telling me how you felt and what came up for you, Peter, when I was talking about my dad and what he did. I don't know how that's going to feel for me. And so many times, almost 100% of the time, within the spirit of not giving feedback to feedback is feedback equates to, I'm going to throw some love on you.
Maybe I didn't have anything in the world common with you, but when you talked about that thing at eight years old, I felt myself getting angry. And that's how somebody lets somebody know I was listening to you. I was there with you. 90% of the time, at least. And it's so hard for folks to not give, to just sit there and let somebody share from the heart and to not give feedback to that feedback.
But so many times it's like, well, my brother had it a lot worse. And it's like, I just throw my hands down and I'm like, it happens almost. That's why we do it. It's like somebody throws some love on you and it's almost like out of my shame and my woundedness, I need to remind you that I'm a piece of shit.
Yeah. It happens so often. How do you break that cycle? It's very, very difficult.
A lot of folks, they think that change is about announcing what they know what they're about to do. I know this is going to sound codependent. Well, if you're firing on old pistons as a therapist, the response should be, then don't say it because there's enough muscle memory there. We need to practice the uncomfortable thing of not saying it. The thing you've been saying for years, not doing.
I'm the last person to be black and white about many things. I think much of my work with clients, individually, in groups, what have you, with human beings is finding the gray. But I tell you what, when it comes to compulsive behaviors, complex post-traumatic stress, these things that we've been doing for years and decades, I'm either strengthening an old connection or I'm building a new one.
When those clients say, what should I do when I leave this group room? Do something different and experience what it's like to do something different. And so many times it's not doing something. I mean, we've took the vacuum cleaner away from clients before. It's an ingenious damage control strategy. It's written all over the walls. We're here to talk about some deep stuff.
And I'm finally going to be expected to talk about my stuff. We've encouraged other clients to break rules. Some folks at the bridge might not like that, but it's like, you need to go take some coffee into the morning meeting. You've been a rule follower your whole life. Yeah. We were only allowed one coffee a day or something, right? Yeah. That's not much.
From what I understand, it's not the strongest coffee in the world either.
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Chapter 8: How can one balance personal growth with retaining beneficial traits?
But when you sell crazy back to somebody tenfold, they start to suggest rationality. Here's what I mean by that. One day in that truck, I realized I have got to do something different. Right. So I'm going to go in there. And when I went in there, I went in there with my executive functioning. I went in there from the prefrontal cortex.
Right.
Be sensible. I didn't have access to something that I do all the time with clients, selling crazy back to them. You go home, you'll get your cigarettes back. If you're talking about the bridge, you'll get your cigarettes back. You'll get your phone back. You'll go back home. You'll go back to your perfect girlfriend and life will be okay. And no, I didn't say life's okay. All right.
Well, then we've got something to talk about. You got to stay here. You're going to die if you don't change. They just fight. They just fight, fight for the status quo. But that Jeff that I was talking about, I didn't have access to those skills. I wasn't being driven. Now there's all the baggage. There's the being the son. There's the trauma related to mom.
There's all of that that played into that. But to be able to get access to the what some folks call the bill paying brain.
2016.
Okay. So only a year before me. So you'd been a therapist, obviously, for many years before. How did you find the bridge?
It was an email that I probably wouldn't have read. And it was an opening. And a mentor of mine sent me an email and said, I know your story. I know your background. I think you ought to check this place out. And to grow up somewhere like that, Bowling Green, Kentucky, and to not know this place that's existed now for 50 years, it says something.
I had a certain mindset about what residential therapy would look like and residential treatment and therapy. Yeah. So I was just blown away and privileged to be able to do the work. I mean, it's a gift. I talk about folks not wanting to do it. And sometimes that being the reason that they won't join the team there. That's a very true thing. I wasn't crazy about doing it either.
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