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You may have experienced trauma and didn’t even realize it. Jolyn Armstrong, a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, talks about how trauma can affect anyone. For the Prison: The Hidden Sentence podcast, she focuses on trauma for those who have or had a loved one in the prison system. No matter when you experience trauma, you can still heal from it. Jolyn brings to light things you may not have thought of that can help you and your loved ones. In this podcast and in her book, Trauma Recovery: A 90-Day Guidebook to Building a Great Life After Trauma, Jolyn provides tools you and your loved ones can use to identify trauma triggers and ways to deal with them.
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Listen to the podcast here
Trauma Recovery For Prison Families With Jolyn Armstrong
I’m excited to be speaking with Jolyn Armstrong again. Jolyn is a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, and has worked with hundreds of people who are healing from the trauma in their life. There are many different types of trauma, and we are going to focus on having a loved one in the prison system. As we know, families and friends on the outsiders serving this sentence with their loved ones and that’s where the term hidden sentence came from.
Having a loved one taken into the prison system can be a traumatic experience. Most people don’t even realize that even when they are in the midst of it. You are going to learn not only what’s considered trauma, things that you never even thought of, and ways that you can heal and minimize its effects. Jolyn, thank you so much for being here.
It’s such a pleasure. I’m glad to be here, Julia. Thank you.
I’m so excited to get started. This isn’t the happiest and best topic to be talking about, but it’s so important because there are things that we can do about trauma. Can you begin with what trauma is and how it affects us?
This isn’t a happy topic at all, but it’s something that we, as prison families, deal with more than we care to admit sometimes or even realize. It’s something that took me a while to realize that I had been traumatized because I led a decent life. I had a comfortable life. People who have comfortable lives don’t get traumatized. It took a little bit of research and learning initially for me to figure out what trauma was and why that fit with what I was feeling and experiencing. I like to share that with as many people as I can so they know what it is they are going through if they have been traumatized as well.
There are three elements that are present with emotional trauma. There’s not a hard and fast definition, but these elements are there when people have been traumatized. One element is that there’s an outside circumstance or event that occurs. It’s either intensely frightening or considered a moral injury.
Also, that outside event, this is a second part, the individual has no control over that event. It starts and finishes, or anything in between, so they are completely powerless to control that event. The third part is that the individual’s beliefs and interactions with themselves or the world are changed by the event. Their system is completely overwhelmed and their outlook has changed.
I didn’t realize it when my brother was incarcerated that I was traumatized, but hearing that definition was everything I went through. I’m excited to learn more.
Until you realize what you are dealing with, it’s very difficult to get past and heal from it. It’s important to know what you are dealing with because trauma is so powerful. It’s insidious in our lives. It causes emotional and physical problems in our lives that we wouldn’t even consider thinking about. We can go over some of the symptoms of trauma if you’d like.
Until you realize what you're dealing with, it's very difficult to get past or heal from it. Share on XIt’s too late now. Being that I have been through it and somehow I got through it and probably have used some of the methods that you are going to be talking to us about. I want to hear more about it because I wish I had this information back then.
I’m going to push back on what you said a little bit because it’s never too late. I think that there are things that we can do in our lives. Even if the trauma happened years ago, there are ways that we can adjust. To make simple adjustments in our lives to help alleviate some of the symptoms that are lasting. Symptoms do last long after an event or situation is over for us. There’s still hope.
That’s good information because people that are reading might think like I did that it happened so long ago, but there are always things you can do.
Let’s talk about some of the symptoms that people sometimes don’t attribute to trauma that they may think of other things in their lives. Some of the more obvious ones are hypervigilance, “I’m going to study everything. I’m going to build a bubble around myself. I can’t trust anyone.” Those are some examples of hypervigilance. Difficulty sleeping and reduced ability to deal with stress like, “I can’t deal with this. I’m triggered all the time.” Shame and lack of self-worth, especially those of us who have a loved one who’s incarcerated. Shame is a huge part of that.
That was me.
Me too. Here’s another one. Mental blankness or spaced-out feelings. People lose periods of time where they are off in La La Land.
When I’d go visit my brother, I had that. When I was planning it and then I travel and I get there, that was totally me.
Here’s one that is a little bit less obvious until you dive in, and that is an attraction to dangerous situations, driving too fast, participating in dangerous sports, and things like that. That happens to those of us who shut down our feelings. We have got the freeze effect especially. Over time, it becomes difficult for us to feel anything, so there’s this attraction to dangerous situations that allow us to feel anything.
Some other physical things too that we might not think of like chronic pain, asthma, skin disorders, and digestive problems. All of these things can result from trauma that either happens over an extended period of time or that we don’t actively heal. Even if it’s a one-off event like a serious car accident or something like that that traumatizes us, we can have extended symptoms from that too.
Prison families are unique in the way that trauma happens to us over a long period of time. Repeatedly over that long time, and the symptoms from that is they quadruple. This extended period of time where our system is activated is so difficult for our bodies to overcome. I could go on and on with symptoms. I have probably got a list of 45 or 50 of them that I’m like, “That’s how.”
Every time you go to visit, it could be traumatized. Maybe every phone call, it’s different for every person every time you are at an event, and you can’t talk to people. Some of that stuff.
People ask you questions, “Where is your loved one? Why haven’t we seen him or her? What do you say?” That shame builds up and all of that. Another thing is the huge amount of fear that we feel for our loved ones. This is a common trigger too when I talk to people. I heard someone talking about prisoners as if they are not worth anything or they are subhuman and that triggered me again. That hurt me. Talking about the danger in prison and what could happen. Let the prison system take care of that one. These little comments that we don’t realize until we are in the situation. It’s retraumatizing prison families over and over again.
Every time somebody comes on TV that’s been arrested, and you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but you see somebody’s picture up there and that you see what they are accused of. I know that would trigger me or even jury duty.
All those things. Getting that envelope in the mail is another thing for sure. Trauma around this subject is something that winds up invading so many parts of your life that you would not realize. This is why we talk about this even though it’s not a fun subject. It’s important to share that. This happens and the effects of it are serious and sometimes lifelong effects. Things that don’t even show up right away, that show up years down the road too in your system. It’s an important topic for sure.
Trauma is around something that winds up invading so many parts of your life that you would not realize. Share on XWe talked about what trauma is, the elements of trauma, what it can do to you physically and emotionally, and the long-term effects. How do you safeguard yourself? How do you protect yourself? Can you heal?
That’s super valid. Those are two separate questions. I’m going to answer your second one first. Can you heal from this? Yes, you can. That is the good news. Trauma is an actual injury that happens in your brain when the three elements that we mentioned earlier exist, but yes, you can heal from it. There are some real solid strategies around healing that maybe we can talk about.
There are three things that I rely on pretty heavily. One I will say is cold, one is discomfort, and one is DBT. I will talk about the first two, cold and discomfort. One thing that happens when we are traumatized goes hand-in-hand. It’s a common symptom of emotional trauma, and that’s panic attacks. It’s your body getting overloaded and you wind up. Panic attacks have been described as people thinking they are having a heart attack. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s a physical sensation and they are very difficult to control. One thing that mimics a panic attack is what’s referred to as a cold plunge. A real big proponent of cold therapy is Wim Hof. You can look him up. He’s pretty interesting.
What I tell especially prison families to do is if you are suffering from panic attacks, turn on your shower, turn it completely cold, step under that shower, and let it give you that deep breath feeling. That mimics the onset of a panic attack, and then warm yourself back up on purpose. Bring yourself back under that control. I’d say do it a few times a week when you get into the shower, either when you first get in or before you get out, whichever is most comfortable for you.
Mimicking that, being in control, and pulling your body back out of that helps your body to see, “She’s got control. He’s got control. I can control this. I can do this.” It also desensitizes you to that feeling so that you can, “I know what this is. I can control this. Let me take a few deep breaths. Let me calm myself.” Cold is good.
That’s completely physical. We are not having to think about anything. It’s our body communicating with our body because trauma sits in our body. It lives in our body and a lot of times, we can’t think our way out of a traumatic event or trauma at all. This is a real somatic thing you can do. Train your body. The other thing discomfort is another somatic tool that I use, and that is simple yoga exercises. Put yourself into uncomfortable positions in yoga and hold it there, and then pull yourself back out of those positions.
Yoga, a decade or so ago, got super trendy. Everyone is like, “I do yoga.” The reality is, for trauma survivors, putting yourself into those positions, holding them there, and pulling them back out, it teaches your body that you have control of this. You can do this. I always recommend beginner yoga. You can find free YouTube videos of people doing beginner’s yoga if you are not already somebody who practices that. Those are two body practices that you can do.
I use DBT, which is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Big word for a simple thing, and this is where we start to change our mindset and our thought process around the situation that we are in and other situations that trigger us. DBT is a subset of the more popular CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that has been used in therapy for a long time. DBT takes a lot of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy practices and adds a healthy dose of mindfulness to it.
There are four elements of DBT, mindfulness being the first one that I dive into with clients. Distress tolerance is the next one. This one is so important when you are in a super stressful situation, especially one that prison families are in that goes on and on. We need to learn to tolerate some of those high-stress situations like prison visits and attorney visits, sitting in a courtroom, and those kinds of things.
Distress tolerance exercises help with that. We have got handfuls of them that can be done in public that nobody knows what you are doing that you are doing. It doesn’t make it obvious, so those are a great go-to. The third part of DBT is emotion regulation. That helps us reduce the number of those high-stress instances. Regulating our emotions to be a little bit more level all the time.
Interpersonal effectiveness is the last bit of DBT, the fourth module of that. Where this helps with prison families too is simply interacting with people in this new world that you are in. How do I answer questions that I don’t want to be asked? How do I get myself out of those situations in a graceful way? Shame obliterates our ability to stand up for ourselves in a lot of situations to feel like we are worthy of standing up for ourselves.
With DBT, the interpersonal effectiveness portion of this helps rebuild that. It’s a beautiful way for people to stand back up after they have been knocked down. I love that portion of DBT. That’s in a nutshell where how we walk through healing. All of these different elements of healing from trauma is possible.
I didn’t want to interrupt you because you were on a flow, and it was so important to go through what they all were, but could we review them? The first one is mindfulness. That’s being present, right?
It is, and that’s another buzzwordy thing in our society probably. Truly, when you think about when you are super stressed and your mind is spinning, you can’t fall asleep at night because all the thoughts come to you. You lose track at work. Mindfulness helps you gain that muscle to bring your mind back to focus on what you need to get done. It’s super helpful when you find yourself spinning.
Mindfulness helps you gain that muscle to bring your mind back to focus on what you need to get done. Share on XYou told us in a previous episode to focus on something like in your office or room to bring you back. If it’s not too present to stop all the whirling thoughts and everything, focus on something.
It’s important too when we are in this situation where we do find ourselves spinning. It’s not a reprimand to bring yourself back into focus. It’s like, “I have been spinning again. I noticed that. Now I’m going to focus on this.” Be kind and refocus. That’s it.
It’s like in yoga when you do treeing, and you have to focus on a spot ahead of you so you don’t fall over that you focus on that. The second one was?
Distress tolerance. I remind myself of when I was sitting in the courtroom listening to all of the horrible things that get said in courtrooms and wanting to run from there. I’m glad I have got the tools to calm myself in those instances. I wish everyone had them. My goal is to teach them to as many people as possible because it’s so important. We all wind up in these situations where it’s like, “This is horrible. I’m losing it because this is so uncomfortable. How do we survive through those moments?” There are lots of ways.
One of the things that we are bringing into the show is workshops, and there is a trauma workshop that is available that Jolyn is providing. A lot of these tools you can get more information on and we’ll talk more about that. The third one?
The third one is emotion regulation. I like this one. It saves us from being retraumatized in a lot of instances. This is a good time to talk about it. A lot of us live our lives at capacity as far as our stress level like, “As long as nothing happens, I’m okay.” When does that ever happen that nothing else happens? It’s when we are living our lives at the brink of what we can handle already, and something does happen and we get that overwhelmed. That’s where trauma happens. Emotion regulation helps us keep our stress level lower. It lowers our baseline and helps us when we do get those bumps and stress level to regulate that to help prevent trauma.
Then the fourth one was interpersonal effectiveness. We were talking about being around safe people and other people. One of the things that we were talking about earlier was the Prison Families Alliance support meetings because that’s a safe place. I always talk about PFA in the workshops too, because everybody should know about it.
Along with the workshops that the show is offering, there are a lot of resources and other groups out there. I always talk about if your loved one is at a certain facility, a lot of times, somebody will start a Facebook group for that facility so you can get information, but the support group meetings will help better with trauma.
Yes, I think so too. There is almost no replacement for a support group where you can talk with other people, either face-to-face or on Zoom. We have some amazing connections that happen in support groups over this. It’s a great place to practice talking about the situation that you are in a group where you know that it’s safe, people aren’t going to judge you, and you are not going to be rejected. That’s a big part of trauma like, “I have been through this thing, and I can’t talk to anyone in my current life about this at all.”
The isolation is so massive. Support groups and workshops together are a great way to regain that connection because the isolation trauma causes this. I can’t even describe how great it is. By great, I mean overwhelming and how huge it is in your life. Not great like a good thing, but I love the support groups and the workshops for that reason.
Also, to practice how you talk to other people or see how other people are handling things. That’s good.
What did you say in the situation?
There are so many things. It could even be stressful talking to your loved one when they tell you what’s going on and how other people handle it. You care for your loved one. All the things that we know about, and I’m sure people that are reading know about, but if it’s somebody that hasn’t been through it, you are learning about it. There’s a lot.
It’s a big learning curve for sure.
Jolyn, I have learned a lot about trauma. While you were talking, the thing that came into my head, I don’t know if anybody else would think about it, but I was thinking about PTSD because I hear that a lot. I hear about people that are incarcerated, they get it of course, but people on the outside do like family members. It was the first time I heard about it several years ago and I was like, “People on the outside get it.” What is the difference, in your opinion, between the trauma and the PTSD? Are they related?
They are related. They are a continuation of the same thing. PTSD stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s something that needs to be diagnosed by a professional or therapist. A physician probably could too. This is an actual disorder that’s defined medically. I’m a coach. I’m not a therapist. I can’t diagnose, but I can give you some of the things that are involved in a diagnosis that a professional might give a person. What happens with traumatized people is there’s this whole gigantic list of symptoms. In a diagnosis, a specific number of those symptoms or a range of those symptoms need to exist over a certain period of time.
Again, I’m not qualified to diagnose, so I don’t know exactly what that period of time is, but it’s generally months or longer. They need to have severity in order to have this diagnosis. A severity needs to be such that it interrupts your life for that period of time. If you feel like you’ve had any of the symptoms that we have talked about that are disrupting your life and it’s been going on for a while, it would be worth talking to a professional about it. Talking to them and seeing if this is what you’ve got going on.
The good news is even if you do get a diagnosis of PTSD, healing from PTSD and trauma that we have been talking about, you run along the same lines. There are the same exercises that we have been talking about help with all of it. There is healing from it and a diagnosis points you in a direction to go for healing.
That was helpful. If I thought of it, other people might. I know you’ve taken all of this knowledge. All of the coaching and research that you’ve done and put it in this book, Trauma Recovery: A 90-Day Guidebook to Building a Great Life After Trauma, and that’s so important. Do you want to talk a little bit about the book? I know you’ve put your heart into it.
I worked on this book for a long time. I wish that I would have had this book when I was first traumatized. I think that there’s a big component of healing from trauma that involves interacting with other people, but there is a lot of it that can happen on your own and with the book. This is a great starting point honestly for full healing.
In the title, it’s a 90-day guidebook. It’s intended. Part of it is narrative. Me talking about my story and stories that other people have allowed me to share of their traumatic experiences. It’s a guidebook. There are journal pages and calendar pages, and I guide you through 90 days of healing from trauma. I’m super excited. I have gotten some good feedback on it already and I’m hoping that it helps anyone going through trauma.
It’s the unknown thing that we don’t talk about. We talk about people who have shame and depressed, but we don’t talk about the trauma of having somebody in the prison system, and it is. You are traumatized. That’s going to be helpful. If anybody wants to reach out to Jolyn, you can go to TheFotaProject.org/prisonthehiddensentence to learn more.
If anybody has that feeling of trauma, hopefully this conversation has helped and guided you that you are not crazy. There are a lot of us out here that have been through that. There are all kinds of trauma, and we are focusing on having somebody that’s as impacted in the prison system, and how it affects us on the outside living the hidden sentence. Jolyn, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me. Thank you for everything that you do for prison families. It’s amazing to see you go. I love it all.
Someday, we’ll be able to talk about it with a new stigma. That’s so cool.
Important Links
- The Fota Project
- Jolyn Armstrong – Past Episode
- Prison Families Alliance
- Trauma Recovery: A 90-Day Guidebook to Building a Great Life After Trauma
- TheFotaProject.org/prisonthehiddensentence
About Jolyn Armstrong
As a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, Jolyn Armstrong specializes in working with prison families, coaching them through the extremely traumatic experience of supporting a loved one through the criminal justice system. She teaches her clients to use proven techniques to overcome symptoms of trauma including panic, worry, fear, shame and isolation, and find peace and joy in life as they come through the healing process. Jolyn also facilitates support groups that provide a safe space for healing in a group setting and workshops that provide specific education around various challenges prison families face.
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