LE Botanica Presents: FREE Knowledge

Hey Soul Family,

We’re going to get in deep today when it comes to trauma responses and what they are. According to the APA (American Psychological Association), trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships, and even physical symptoms such as nausea or headaches. These feelings are completely normal. Today we’re going to go over and discuss the 4 different types of trauma responses that could have been developed during your childhood or adolescence. There is a very good chance that you fall within at least one of these categories, although it is common to fall within at least two categories. The four categories that we will discuss are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. There are two other categories that you may also find- friend or flop but I find that these are extensions or branches of fawn and freeze respectively. Understanding our trauma responses and learning more effective ways to cope with and deal with stress will also be beneficial to healing your inner child.

Hey Soul Fam!

I want to take a moment to touch upon codependency and breaking down what that means from a psychological level because this has been such a huge theme in the last year. Codependency is not to be confused with BEING codependent. Being codependent is something completely different and the definition of codependent is what most people think of when they hear the term codependency used, yet these terms should not be used of thought of in conjunction of one another. 

Hey Soul Fam!

This week during Thankful Thursday we discussed the origins of prejudice, the documentary A Class Divided, and microaggressions. First we will be talking about the psychological origins of prejudice. What are the theories that surround this topic? What do they say about how prejudice is formed? Then we will quickly go over our documentary of the week. Last but not least, we will be exploring in depth the concept of microaggressions. This is a topic that I believe many people have never really discussed, but it definitely needs some light shone on it. So, that being said, we will be exploring quite a few concepts this week, so buckle up kids!

Hey Soul Fam!

This week during Thankful Thursday we discussed Attachment Styles. Why is this so important to know? Well because our attachment style is how we develop our sense of self. This sense of self when translated into our adult lives is responsible for how we will attach and love others in both platonic and romantic relationships. Attachment styles are solidified usually during the first year of our lives, but for some not up until the third year in cases of neglect or abandonment. Either way, within the first five years of our lives we form our sense of self and this is determined solely by the connection that we have with our parents- primarily our mother. While original studies focused primarily on the role of the mother within this dynamic, newer studies have brought the role of the father to the forefront as well.

Hey Soul Fam!

This week during Thankful Thursday we Narcissist. We’ve all dealt with narcissist to some degree and we all carry narcissistic traits within us because in all actuality narcissism is a spectrum. In psychology there’s a scale used to evaluate this called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which was developed by Robert Raskin and Calvin Gall in 1979. The one thing about narcissist though is that they tend to share common character traits, but someone with actual narcissistic personality disorder is rare. Most of the people we encounter on a day to day basis exhibit narcissist traits to some degree but often don’t score high enough in the spectrum to make them fall within the parameters of the disorder.