PTSD is like a Big Mac

Imagine you stop at McDonald's for lunch. You're hungry, so you order a Big Mac, fries, and a drink. You eat every bite, then head back to work. Your body immediately begins doing exactly what it was designed to do. It takes those calories, burns what it needs for energy, and quietly stores whatever is left over. Your body is brilliant. For thousands of years, storing extra calories helped human beings survive seasons when food was scarce.

The problem isn't eating a Big Mac. The problem comes when we keep taking in more calories than we ever burn. Day after day, month after month, the body keeps storing the excess until what was once a survival system begins to work against us. Weight increases. Disease becomes more likely. The very system designed to protect us eventually starts harming us.

It is this brilliant storage system that creates trauma. Trauma works in much the same way. Every difficult experience comes with what I like to call emotional calories. Some experiences carry only a few emotional calories that we esily .burn off. Disagreeing .about what movie you should watch on the date. A stressful day at work. Other experiences carry thousands of emotional calories. The death of someone you love. Childhood abuse. Domestic violence. Combat. Sexual assault. A serious accident. Religious abuse. Betrayal. When we store too many emotional calories, we end of with trauma: PTSD and Complex-PTSD (CPTSD) over long perdiods of storing emotional calories.

Our nervous system is remarkably well designed to process those emotional calories. We cry, talk about our feelings or shake after a frightening experience. We pray, exercise, create art and breathe deeply. We laugh, grieve and spend time with people who make us feel safe. In all of these ways, we can successfully burn off excess emotional calories.

But many of us were never taught how to name our emotions. We never learned we could connect with other people and be vulnerable. Instead, we learned to push our feelings down, distracted ourselves with work, stayed busy, reached for our phones, or convinced ourselves we were "fine." We turn to substances and risky behavior as a means of outlet. We became experts at storing emotional calories instead of processing them.

One of the most important skills we can learn is simply knowing what we're feeling.

You can't process an emotion you don't have words for. Learning to say, "I'm scared," "I'm grieving," "I feel ashamed," "I'm lonely," or "I'm disappointed," gives your brain something incredibly important. It transforms a vague feeling into something understandable.

Research consistently shows that putting feelings into words helps reduce emotional distress and improves emotional regulation. Naming emotions is often the first step toward healing them.

PTSD or CPTSD aren't signs of weakness. They're signs that the brain and body are still carrying more emotional calories than they were meant to carry alone. The good news is that emotional calories can still be burned years after our body stores them. Trauma informed therapies, like EMDR, Motivational Interviewing, mindfulness coaching and Forward Facing Trauma Therapy offer a safe place to process experiences that may have been stored for years.

Trauma-focused therapies help the brain and nervous system finish work they couldn't complete during the original event. Practices like mindfulness, meditation, regular exercise, journaling, supportive relationships, and even the natural shaking that sometimes follows intense stress all help our bodies do what they were designed to do.

Our bodies are extraordinary storage systems, but they were never meant to become warehouses. If you need help burning off emotional calories, contact one of our skilled counselors today.