When Joy, known online as Compassion & Consoles, joined MommaFoxFire on Even Tacos Fall Apart, the conversation went deep fast. Joy is a licensed professional counselor, a doctoral candidate focusing on anxiety and trauma, and someone who uses her own lived experience with mental health to inform the work she does. This episode covers trauma reactions, gaming as a coping tool, how schools fail kids with unrecognized trauma, and why the DSM does not have all the answers.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/joy-compassion-consoles

Joy pushes back on the narrow definition in the DSM, which limits trauma to things like threats to life or sexual assault. Her take is more practical: if an experience overwhelms your ability to cope, not just in the moment but over time, that counts. Chronic, ongoing situations where you have no escape and no control can be just as damaging as a single acute event, even if a textbook does not say so. Invalidating someone's trauma because it does not fit a checklist is its own kind of harm.

Social support is the single biggest protective factor after trauma. Studies consistently show that having even one safe, supportive adult can make an enormous difference, especially for kids. Other risk factors include pre-existing anxiety, avoidant coping patterns, genetics and family history. The less control someone feels they have in the aftermath, the harder recovery tends to be.

This is where Joy gets fired up, and rightfully so. Children who have experienced trauma often cannot put what they are feeling into words, so it comes out as behavior instead: running out of classrooms, ripping up work, shutting down completely. That behavior gets labeled as defiance, ADHD or ODD, and the actual cause never gets addressed. Joy is direct about it: she has never worked with a kid diagnosed with conduct disorder whose behavior was not better explained by trauma or anxiety. Slapping a behavioral diagnosis on top of a trauma reaction does not help the child, it just gives adults someone to blame.

Joy is a single-player, narrative-driven gamer. She talks about how games like Detroit: Become Human and the Uncharted series offer something genuinely valuable: story, agency and a chance to emotionally invest in characters in a low-stakes environment. She also gets honest about anxiety spiking during combat sequences and having to walk away from games entirely, which opens up a real conversation about how gaming intersects with stress responses.

Drawing from both research and personal experience with an eating disorder in her late teens, Joy explains why thought suppression backfires. The more you try to block a thought, the louder it gets. Mindfulness-based approaches, which focus on noticing and accepting thoughts rather than fighting them, are a better fit for trauma recovery.

The episode closes with a look at mental health needs in the workplace. Reasonable accommodations are legally required, but many people do not feel safe enough to ask for them, and many employers do not know how to respond when they do. A pool table in the break room is not employee support.

Find Joy on Twitter at Compassion & Consoles and follow Even Tacos Fall Apart for more conversations about mental health, gaming and the messy, real stuff in between.