If Its Anxiety .... It MUST Be Trauma! (Episode 111)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Disordered we're discussing the all too common narrative in wellness circles that demands that we ascribe all anxiety or suffering of any kind to unhealed or unprocessed trauma. And while its certainly a good thing that we are more concerned with life experiences than structural defects now, this narrative can be unhelpful or even harmful in the context of anxiety disorders.
All humans experiences crises. Some of those crises remain unresolved and create trauma. In some of those cases that trauma appears as functional impairment long after the traumatizing experiences are over. Some anxious people struggle with this. BUT NOT ALL. It's not automatic. The word "some" is the most important word in this discussion.
When there is trauma in the mix - and not all difficult things in life need to be called trauma - that makes anxiety recovery more layered and even more tricky in some cases, but it doesn't make things impossible. And when there is no lasting functional impact due to "trauma", insisting that anxiety disorders are an unhealed / unprocessed pain problem is a really bad strategy.
Whatever your experiences in life with crisis, trauma, or anxiety may be, this episode is worth a listen.
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Struggling with worry and rumination that you feel you can't stop or control? Check out Worry and Rumination Explained, a two hour pre-recorded workshop produced by Josh and Drew. The workshop takes a deep dive into the mechanics of worrying and ruminating, offering some helpful ways to approach the seemingly unsolvable problem of trying to solve seemingly unsolvable problems.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You can pick out the anxiety specialist because we stick out like a sore thumb. |
| 0:06.0 | We're the only one's not defaulting to inner child trauma, unhealed pain. |
| 0:11.0 | This purposely vague thing, like you've got to deal with the trauma. |
| 0:14.0 | What do you mean by that? |
| 0:16.0 | That just adds confusion, particularly to the compulsive ruminators |
| 0:19.0 | and the people that are obsessed with |
| 0:21.1 | anxiety recovery. |
| 0:22.1 | We have to stop saying that everything is trauma. |
| 0:24.3 | Not everything that's difficult or creates a bad memory for you is called trauma. |
| 0:28.4 | You fear how you feel. |
| 0:29.8 | And so therefore it can become one big hunt, one big simplification of finding a technique |
| 0:36.3 | to make it all go away. Oh, wait. This helps me understand |
| 0:40.4 | why it's so difficult for me to do the facing, accepting, floating, willfully tolerating |
| 0:45.8 | exposure thing. So there's an empowerment in that sort of stuff. Welcome to Disordered. This is episode 11 of the podcast entitled Anxiety Recovery. It Must Be trauma, right? |
| 1:00.6 | I am Drew Linzalata. I am a therapist practicing in the area of anxiety and anxiety disorders in New York, |
| 1:06.4 | former sufferer of anxiety disorders and OCD and depression for many years in my life, but better now, three-time author on the topic, social media dude, psychoeducator, |
| 1:15.0 | advocate, guy with an expensive mic and co-hosts of Disordered. |
| 1:19.5 | I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxiety Josh, and I'm a psychotherapist and author based |
| 1:24.4 | in Manchester in the UK, prance about on social media, love doing this podcast, |
| 1:29.4 | and providing valuable insights and psychoeducation to the world of anxiety disorders. |
| 1:35.3 | So what are we going to talk about today? We're talking about it must be trauma, right? It's got to be |
| 1:39.7 | trauma. Must be some trauma in there somewhere. Have you looked in your cells? Have you looked |
... |
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