Mind-full-mess: The Trauma of Getting My SIFT Together

By Kylie Brown

A 14-year career as a paramedic left my mind a full mess. Diagnosed with PTSD and with a long list of symptoms that left my mind having exploded all over the neighbourhood, I was forced to clean up the mess. Working in an industry prone to breakages, I decided to bring all the knowledge I've collected into a book, creating an understanding of how the mind works. You never know when others might need to clean up their own mess and need some guidance. Through the inspiring work of psychologist Daren Wilson, and many others in the field of psychology and neuroscience, I have formulated my own understanding and applied the knowledge to restructure my brain, healing the damage incurred through trauma exposure. Understanding how the large-scale regions of the brain come together as a team of operators to perform roles and tasks to achieve an organised system is paramount in understanding how the whole system becomes dysregulated. With a constant flow of information coming and going through the sieve of our mind, it can quickly become clogged and block up the system. With advances in neuroscience, we now understand how best to get the most out of our mental team members as individuals and as a team working together as a regulated system. Torn between short and long-term survival, motivated by pleasure and pain, we all struggle to maintain balance in a world dominated by hijackers. This knowledge integrates into the mind-brain-body-environment connection and provides the tools required to do our mental housework. I can't do the housework for you, but I can show you where I found my dirt and guide you in the right direction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jan 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781779416612

Kylie Brown

A paramedic of 14 years, Kylie has a background in counselling/psychology and a passion for neuroscience. A workplace injury of PTSD left her needing to understand what happened and gave her a requirement to change. Kylie has used the writing process to consolidate her learning and apply the neuroscience she writes about to create an adaptive experience for both herself and her readers. Also an artist, Kylie has illustrated the book covers to further add to the creative exploration of the concepts she discusses and engages her readers in a multi-sensory experience exploring fact and fiction.

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Mind-full-mess

Copyright © 2024 by Kylie Brown

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-1-77941-660-5 (Paperback)

978-1-77941-661-2 (eBook)

I dedicate this to all those I wore out, irritated, frustrated, infuriated, and confused. Thank you for helping me to find ways to adapt.

Table of Contents

Welcome to My Mind

My Princess Story

The Objective

Part One – The System

Chapter One – Operational Elements

Chapter Two – The Team

Chapter Three – The Functions of the Team

Chapter Four – Equipment and Resources

Part Two – Dysregulation

Chapter Five – Team Vulnerabilities

Part Three – Regulation

Chapter Six – Ourselves and Others

Part Four – The Flip Side

Chapter Seven – The Outcome

In the Aftermath

Acknowledgements

Reference and Bibliography

About the Author

Reader ALERT: What you are about to read may cause adaption. You will know if you are adapting by feelings of discomfort, confusion, irritation, frustration, and general feelings of fatigue. If any of these symptoms occur, please take a deep breath and refer to the self-maintenance and recovery section of the book. Please try to remember: you’ve got this!

Welcome to My Mind

Hello! Welcome! Come in, and don’t mind the mess!

My name is Kylie, and I am a paramedic of 14 years. I have literally heard those first few words hundreds of thousands of times as I have spent my life going into other people’s lives. Mostly, I’ve been welcomed and invited in, looked at with relief and gratitude, ushered in with eagerness and concern, but not always. Sometimes, my job has come with agitation and aggression, pain and heartache, fear and threat, anger, hate and complete delusion. Life is messy and complicated. People are messy and complicated. I used to believe I was less messy and complicated than most, which led me to believe it was my job in life to help the messier and more complicated. Eventually, this delusion led me to be bopped on my metaphorically big egoic head by everyone who disagreed with me. It turns out I was just as messy and complicated, or I became that way with time and exposure. It’s hard to say which came first!

Over the last five years, I’ve spent considerable time in a psychologist’s office. I came to therapy because, simply put, it was a real mess in here, and I could no longer pretend otherwise or keep it hidden behind closed doors. My mind was bursting at the seams with chaos and clutter that I had shoved in and pulled the door closed on. For years, I had more or less gotten away with keeping the front yard tidy and quickly clearing away any random items that burst out from under the doors and through the cracks in the façade. The day I arrived in therapy, I felt like the whole house had exploded. My crap was scattered all over the neighbourhood, and I was sitting amongst a pile of it, sobbing like a small child where nothing had gone her way. In some neighbourhoods, this probably would not have seemed so bad; in my community, this was not okay. I was not okay. The story wasn’t supposed to turn out like this! The brochure didn’t look like that, and I would never have willingly brought into this picture! I was angry, sad, frustrated, scared, and above all else, exhausted from all the effort of trying to keep it all together. It all felt like a colossal waste of time and effort. What went wrong?!

I came to therapy as a qualified, registered, and well-experienced paramedic. I also have a double Bachelor’s degree in therapeutic counselling and psychology and years of experience working with young carers in their support roles in the industry; before all that, I was trained in the advertising and graphic arts world, designing websites, commercial advertising, and brochures. If anyone should have known how the story turns out and how brochures intentionally aim to mislead, selling us crap we do not need, it was me, right?! I had ten years of tertiary education in the subjects; what could go wrong?!

What could go wrong? I turned up in therapy with a very long list to that question. It rolled out before me like a toilet paper ticker-tape parade on Halloween, only there was no fake blood, and the zombies, dead bodies, and all the severed limbs were real. How did it all go so wrong? And why? Ultimately, answers were what I needed, and luckily for me, I was referred to psychologist extraordinaire Daren Wilson. Daren is somewhat of royalty, a superstar, a psychological trauma specialist in his field, an ex-military psychologist and well-known amongst defence and Emergency Services. Daren obviously saw me coming because he was ready, poised, and calmly waiting to help me learn and understand exactly how it all went wrong. Of course, I first learned that it didn’t go wrong; it all worked exactly how it was supposed to. What was wrong was my understanding and expectations of how it was supposed to work, how I was using it and an ego that thought it would not happen to me, that I was somehow special.

With the help of Daren and his Structured Image Framework Theory SIFT; I have learnt there is an importance to understanding the processes involved in adaption, from everyday emotional processing to highly distressing incidents that are complex, overwhelming, and disorganised in nature (Wilson, 2018). When we can put the information into a structured image, it’s useable to explain the theory and combine the pieces into a coherent story. Truth be told, I did not truly understand the concept of adaption, how or why I might be required to do it, or what would happen if I chose to ignore it. Through my exposure to SIFT, I have been able to form an understanding of how my mind filters, evaluates and organises information during processing, what happens when it does not (technically, I learnt that when my world exploded), and why and how I avoided the process for so long. I have combined what I have learnt from Daren’s work with a combination of others in the field of psychology and neuroscience; as a member of the International Association of Applied Neuroscience, I have a particular interest in the work of Dr John Arden. Technically speaking, that is what this book is: a written version of all the information I have accumulated from all those in the field that I gathered back together after the explosion. Following the explosion, I have sorted and processed everything into a coherent organisational structure that makes logical sense to me. Full disclosure: I hold no accountability to how much sense it makes to anyone else; that is your business!

While this is the first book I have written, this process is familiar to me. I am an artist and have long used a canvas to sort and process a coherent organisation of images and colours to create a picture story. The process of writing is not dissimilar. Rather than painting, this is a word story typed into physical existence. Concepts become words, strung into sentences to form paragraphs of topics that combine to create the bigger picture. Once I had grasped the bigger picture, I turned it back into a story and then into images to create the covers. Of course, Daren has his own images of the SIFT process, but I imagined it differently as an artist. Taking concepts from the micro to the macro and back again reinforces the brain’s neural structures, and mine certainly needed the reinforcement. This process is SIFT in action or applied neuroscience if you would prefer. As the warning above alerted, don’t be alarmed if you find yourself adapting with me. I have also done my best to establish, build, and reinforce your neural structures as you read. Just remember, I did warn you!

What is the big picture? That is a question I have heard many ask along the way, along the way to writing this book, along the way in my career, along the way in life in general or often just as a matter of interest when I get talking and go off on a tangent. We all want to know what it’s all about, where it’s all heading and to what end. I do not presume to know the systemic most giant picture of life or even many of the smaller ones. What I have attempted to get my head around is the bigger picture of the human mind and how it regulates and dysregulates itself in its attempts to respond to the messages of the internal and external world. It’s just a mildly huge concept! We are all adapting individually and as a species, whether we like it or not or are aware of it. When we attempt to grasp the concept of adaption and try to see the big picture for what it is, we gain conscious awareness while gaining a sense of governance over the process, real or imagined. We all want a felt understanding of personal governance and to think that the governance is within our power, or at least I do and know I am not so special.

I do not know what you expect to find here; holocaust survivor Victor Frankl said, It doesn’t matter what we expect from life, but what life expects from us. Presumably, that means it does not matter what you expect, for it’s written already, and you get what you get, upset or otherwise. Like a bitter little pill, we swallow or attempt to spit out as we progress from beginning to end. Ultimately, the short version of my long story is this: we are all human, and as humans, we have physical and nonphysical parts. The physical parts get a lot of air time, and the nonphysical parts get called many names, disregarded, and swept under a lot of rugs. As it turns out, the nonphysical parts operate the physical ones, and there is functionality. The functionality requires the use of tools, and the tools are either working for us or against us and unless we bring awareness to the process, they are most likely working against us at some level. The purpose becomes a process of becoming acquainted with what we are working with, how it operates, and to what end. Spoiler alert: This isn’t a fairy tale; we all die! However, don’t stress yet because there is an opportunity to live your best life first, although, unapologetically, I must warn you that I may change your concept of what that means. Alternatively, I won’t, and you’ll carry on until your own life erupts, at which point, as the dust settles and the smoke subsides, you may find something I’ve said useful. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter how you want to play this game of life; it’s your call!

As I’ve already said, this is no fairy tale; however, it does begin with a tale. This tale isn’t about a fairy; it is about a princess.

My Princess Story

Once upon a time, a princess lived in a faraway land in a castle on a hill. The hill was very high, and the stone castle had very high walls, a heavy wooden door, pin pad protection, and a remote-control draw bridge on the road leading in. The princess had lived in the castle for many years, and while everyone in the local town had the pin code to her door and remote control for the bridge, she felt safe and protected by the sun’s warm glow, which radiated around the castle. The sun was middle-aged, wise, and terribly menacing to all those who didn’t know or understand him, and that’s precisely how he liked it. Well respected and notoriously feared enough that his very presence reflected most threats away. The princess didn’t have a lot to do and spent most of her days thinking about what life had been like in the past when she had been allowed to leave the castle, back in the time when she had a van, many friends and was allowed to roam wherever dispatch sent her. Alone in her castle, she remembered the past and dreamt of a future outside her confinement’s walls, full of sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops. She wasn’t entirely sure why she dreamt of such things but recalled a brochure that arrived in the mail years ago, and there saw the life she’d dreamt of ever since. Life seemed pretty sweet for the princess; she was safe, protected and warm in the sun’s glow despite her confinement.

While life seemed pretty sweet during the light of day, something strange happened during the night. As the sun’s rays slipped out and the shadows crept in, the castle on the hill became a whole other world. During the night, the castle took on a cold, dark presence full of lost souls and trapped and tortured spirits. The shadows became dark, endless spaces full of warm, waling bodies and the clutter of their sharp, jagged junk was impossible to navigate. Hands reached out of the darkness at every doorway, screams rang out in the echoing halls, and children cried endlessly into the early hours. Voices and sounds everywhere pleading and begging the princess to help them. Initially, the princess wanted to help, tried to help, and did everything she could to help, but over time, she realised she couldn’t help or save them from themselves. She felt incredible guilt, and the guilt eventually turned into fear and then into paranoia as she felt those souls held her accountable and responsible for their pain. Tormenting her from the shadows, calling her names and condemning her to a life of trying to rationalise, justify and prove herself. They banded together, never relenting and ever-increasing like sirens in the night and beacons bouncing off the fog; they drove her crazy, dancing all around.

The princess spent most of her nights trying to stay out of the dark, huddled in patches where the rays of the moon fell through the windows; she pushed away hands and tried to block out the sounds. For years, she tried one method after another, stuffing fingers into her ears and clenching her eyes tight shut as she waited out the night’s terrors for the sun to rise eventually. In the early days, the sun’s rising brought such relief and resolve that the princess danced around in the early morning light with fair abandonment, happiness, and glee. She never did tell the sun of her nighttime experiences as she thought it must be as clear as night and day that his presence was welcomed, for she was always so happy to see him. As the years passed and the terrors of the night worsened, the princess learnt to take things from her day into the night, things she thought might help pass the hours away and distract her. The princess took many things, including bottles of wine, cigarettes, food, a television, and a mobile phone. She used these items in various ways, trying to block out the sounds, distract herself, drink herself into oblivion and even make herself appear scarier than the ghouls, hoping she could scare them all away. These things didn’t work though, the lost souls used her distraction to creep in closer and provoke her further, unperturbed by the stench of her smoking, the unsightly state of her hairstyles or her erratic drunken rants. One day, the princess decided enough was enough; nothing was working, and it was time to seek outside help. One morning, after a tough night, seedy with alcohol and the stale smell of smoke, she turned to the sun. She told the sun all about the night; she explained how she’d been trying to manage the situation and how a terrible mess was only worsening. She cried, shook, and told him all about the lost souls and how they reached out, grabbing at her and pleading for her help from their darkness, night after night. The sun listened to her and let her speak, and when she finished, he told her that he couldn’t see how such things could be possible, for he had never seen such things, and she always appeared so happy. It did not make any logical sense to the sun. The princess tried to explain that his presence was such a relief that she was always happy, but when he left, there was such darkness and fear. Although difficult to believe, the sun, as wise as he is, suggested that the princess needed to find ways to bring light into the night. He told her that the castle, fitted with electric lights, only required her to flick the switch by the door. The princess was both amazed and flabbergasted that she had never known there was lighting in her castle all these years. While feeling a little silly but always able to laugh at herself, the princess felt relief and couldn’t wait for the next night to come; for now, she knew what to do. As the day drew on and the afternoon arose, the princess grew impatient; never before had the day felt so long, for she had never been this excited to meet the night. As the time passed and the shadows grew, the princess waited, and she watched, unsure of when to flip the switch. With the passage of time and the lengthening of the shadows, she became increasingly frightened; all the regular sounds overwhelmed her, and she crouched small in the moonlight of the window. The princess stayed terrified and alone in the dark until the light of day, where, as usual, the sun met her. The sun asked how her night had been, and the princess explained that it had been exactly the same as she had been too scared to turn on the light. She feared what might be seen if she could see into the darkness, so she didn’t use the switch. The sun looked at the princess in disbelief and tried to explain that when the lights were on, there was no darkness to fear; the darkness goes away. The princess appeared to understand, but then three more nights passed, and the same thing kept happening, for the princess still believed the darkness was full of fear. Nothing the sun could say seemed to help or change the princess’s nighttime experience. The sun grew weary and tired of the princess, for there seemed nothing he could do to help her.

Many nights and days passed, and each held the good intentions of the princess; she knew what to do during the day and, by nightfall, was too terrified to act. Long after the sun grew weary, the princess grew so tired that she was exhausted. As the sun went to bed and the next night arrived along with all its terrors, the princess sat back against the wall and listened. Too tired to be scared, realising all these sounds had haunted her night after night, yet she was still alive, and nothing had happened to her. With this realisation, she reached up and switched on the light. The room she was in became fully illuminated, and all the ghouls and spirits shrank away from her and into the darkness of the adjacent room; the sounds followed and suddenly seemed just a little less intense. Suddenly, the princess had a whole room around her, empty of darkness and terrors. The princess realised that the sun had been right all along; the light switched all the dark terrors back into the reality of the day. With this realisation, the princess ran through, hitting all the lights and running deeper into the castle’s bowels. As the princess got deeper and deeper into the castle, she began to slow down, and she noticed that it was getting harder and harder to go beyond her beliefs. The rooms in the basement seemed scarier somehow, and she struggled to get beyond the fear and turn the light on. With most of the house illuminated, the princess returned upstairs to wait for sunrise. When the sun arose, the princess excitedly explained what had happened and, speaking at the rate of knots, told him all about how much room she had now that the lights were on. She had decided it mattered little that a few lights were unilluminated and the ghoulish sounds were still ringing out from the basement; she thought she could live with that. The sun was very happy he had been right.

Months passed, and the princess lived happily enough in her illuminated castle until she noticed the fear was starting to creep back up the stairs. Every time she noticed a shadow out of the corner of her eye, she could swear she saw arms reaching out to her. The noises in the basement were getting louder, and the cries in the night were longer. The princess waited for the sun to rise and again asked him how to fix the problem. The sun told the princess that all she needed to do was to turn on the light. The princess nodded, but she didn’t believe in her heart of hearts that she could be so brave; added to that, the princess realised that with one last room left in darkness, if she turned the light on in that room, there was nowhere else for the darkness to go. She would surely see all the terrors brought to life if she turned that light on. The princess decided it was too much to bear.

On a day when the princess felt braver than usual, she decided to go down to the basement and peek through the door. Using the torch from her phone, the princess shone a light into the last dark room in the castle. Standing clear of the door, poised to run up the stairs, the princess projected the light into the dark. Realising her eyes were closed, the princess peeked out into the room. At first, she saw what looked like a dead baby, a stiff blonde lady reaching out from the corner, and then a grizzly bear. There were a lot of strange noises, moaning, groaning and suddenly a massive explosion. BANG!!! The princess didn’t know what happened, suddenly knocked off her feet and landed on the floor outside the room. There was dust and clutter of stuff all around her. Slowly coming to her senses, she notices an old ice skate and a worn-out old sneaker on top of her old football jersey from high school. Suddenly, the princess realised she was looking at a pile of her old junk left over from her childhood, bursting under pressure from the basement as she bounced down the stairs. The blonde was Barbie, and the dead baby was her doll named Polly, whom she used to drag around everywhere, and good old Ted Stuffins, the teddy bear her grandmother handed down. Looking around in disbelief, the princess saw that nothing appeared as she thought it might. She got up and turned on the light, and the room shone bright, full of all her old memories. As if the sun had crept in around her and flowed all over her stuff, the princess suddenly felt a warm fuzzy sensation for all she saw. Overwhelmed with nostalgia, the princess wondered how on earth she could have come to fear all this stuff. Then, she recalled her mother’s warning; Don’t go down into the basement; it’s full of old junk and covered in all sorts of nasties that can hurt you. You could scream down there; not even the dead would hear you!

Now imagine if the princess shared her castle with other people; the basement would be full of everyone’s crap in a crazy, mixed-up mishmash of things she only partly recognised. What a complicated, scary mess that would be under pressure!

The Objective

According to holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how’. The ‘why’ is our sense of purpose or our objective outcome. The ‘how’ is open to creative ideas; some are more bearable than others. Research has found that having a sense of purpose is a crucial component to overcoming life’s adversity, is an essential ingredient to have in the attainment of life goals, is personal, anxiety provoking and changes as we experience life diversity (Fuller, 2022; Kim et al., 2014). So clearly, it works best if we have a purpose, and potentially, it will change with the passage of time and experience. What is the purpose of my story? The princess had an overwhelming problem that she was trying to fix. Her solutions were not only ineffective but made the matter worse. To overcome the problem, she needed someone else’s input, someone who could help her shed light on the situation, bring awareness to the challenges and change her beliefs. To achieve this, she had to find a way around her fear. While the princess’s story is loosely my own (I never owned a footy jersey!), this story applies to any life problem we face. We have all had one issue or another that overwhelmed us or got in the way of living our best lives. These issues can range in severity; maybe someone has asked something of you that caused discomfort, challenging your integrity. Potentially, you have been asked to choose between two unfavourable choices, both options making you uncomfortable. Maybe you have been asked to do a job that makes you uncomfortable. You fear speaking up due to the stigma involved in being ‘that person’ who cannot cope or makes a fuss, or maybe you hide your true self away for fear no one will like you if they knew the real you, forever feeling a deep sense of loneliness and shame of who you are.

Sometimes, the problems are bigger; sometimes, the issues sneak up on us, and many of us have felt like the problem hit us with such gross intensity that we were knocked off our footing and left discombobulated by the experience. Perhaps it is the sudden loss of a loved one, a natural disaster, a terminal illness diagnosis or some other way life has suddenly turned upside down. When our worldview is shattered or broken somehow, it can often leave us struggling to make meaning of life and unable to move forward. That happened to me, and as much as I love the word discombobulated, the sensation of the experience is not something I desire to reexperience. Following my life explosion, I was left with the daunting task of sifting through the rubble and putting the pieces of myself back together; as I sifted, I realised I was asking many questions. I questioned everything: how it worked, why it didn’t work particularly well initially and how I could put it all back together in a new way to achieve better outcomes. If the tale of the princess were to continue, what would follow would be an account of her cleaning up and sorting out all the ‘crap’ in her basement. Did she shove it all back in and jam the door closed? Put it all out on the footpath for hard rubbish collection? Or did she spend time with it all and create some order to the chaos?

In my princess story, I’ve spent time in the light looking at each item, figuring out what I was keeping, what was for goodwill, and what was rubbish. Top tip: I wouldn’t recommend giving anything back to anyone who originally gifted it to you. That does not go down well! I have processed what was left, formed connections between it, and structured it into a sturdy foundation of knowledge. I have brought it all together through repetition and cross-referencing to ensure the foundations are as strong as possible for you and me. What follows is a heap of the questions I’ve asked and the answers I found. It’s everything I thought worth keeping about what I’ve learned so far about being human. Knowing all this helped me with my cleanup and organisation, so I put it into a book. Working in an industry prone to breakages, I figured it might be helpful if I wrote it all down; you never know when someone else might need to sift through all their crap and need some guidance. That’s what this is: guidance around how to navigate your inner world. I don’t presume to know what is in your inner world, only what the science says about how it’s structured, how the information got in, continues to get in, the effect it can have and what to do about it after the fact.

Ultimately, I believe there is an objective to life, and it has become clear to me as I have traversed the space that we did not all get the same briefing before we set out. Some people seem to be headed somewhere with purpose and hast, some appear to be being chased, others meandering, while many wander around in circles aimlessly, appearing to have no purpose. I believe we use our life experience to gain knowledge and collect wisdom for the collective human bucket. We attend to this task through exploration and traversing the environments. Many environments are less travelled, and knowledge and wisdom are rich with more for the taking and sharing. Many spend their lives travelling the external world environment; others have found a whole universe of adventure and challenges to climb over, through, around and into within the inner workings of the human mind. The explorers of this terrain use the physical experience to provoke, guide and lead the way in an environment with poor visibility that is difficult and often painful to navigate. The experience is lost to many, too scared to step beyond their boundaries and comfort zones or out of the safety of the external world where the space offers the company of others. One day, on the flip side of life, we might all be held to account for what we used our life experiences to collect and bring home. Unable