Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black.

Everyone experiences trauma and whether it's a specific harrowing event or a series of stressful moments over time,

trauma can etch itself into

our brains and echo as we remember it over and over throughout our lives. On this episode,

we'll find out about the long-term effects of trauma and what we can do to reduce them.

Joining us as neuroscientist Dr. Tracy Shores, who was the author of a fantastic new book called

Everyday Traumapping the brain's response

to stress, anxiety, and painful memories for a better life. Dr. Shores, thank you so much for

joining us. Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. Tell us more about the kinds of

experiences that cause trauma. Well,

they're almost too long to list, right? There's so many things that can be traumatic. They're not

necessarily always traumatic. But, you know, everything from, you know, the death of a loved one to a violent attack, to a natural disaster,

I would certainly include the pandemic as a traumatic event.

The term everyday trauma kind of spans beyond our typical idea of trauma.

Usually we think of a traumatic event of something kind of discrete, definable, maybe even

kind of short in terms of how long it lasts.

But I kind of came up with a turn of everyday trauma to describe other types of trauma that do go on,

you know, day after day, week after week, to some extent the pandemic is like that.

Maybe if you're suffering from an illness, a chronic illness or taking care of somebody who is discrimination, et cetera.

So there's like a lot of traumas that actually are quite protracted go on like day after day, week after week.

And then even for those that are short-lasting, like the exact, the experience is very short,

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