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0:00 my name is Bobby cane I'm very excited to be here today with a man I respect very highly and have been fortunate 0:06 enough to work alongside with for about two years now doctor Dan Hoffman a somatic psychologist currently practing 0:13 as a psychological assistant at iris healing retreat under the supervision of dr. Helene o Mahoney his particular 0:20 areas of interest include sexual abuse and trauma healing developmental trauma healing in working with anxiety 0:26 depression and substance abuse dr. Dan has written dissertations dealing with sexual trauma from a somatic perspective 0:34 experiences of people who had received somatic trauma treatment after sexual abuse and assault his master's thesis 0:40 was published in the US ABP Journal dealing with understanding connection 0:45 between attachment based in somatic perspectives on the development of characteristic emotional regulatory 0:51 patterns his educational history he's got a BA psych from University of 0:56 Michigan MA and clinical somatic psychology from Santa Barbara Graduate Institute and a PhD in clinical somatic 1:03 psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and Los Angeles he regularly attends ongoing 1:09 psychological training such as relational somatic psychology threefold Way and brain spotting so without 1:16 further ado dr. Dan welcome to the show good to be here Bobby I'm so glad to be 1:21 here with you yeah so as I mentioned earlier I've been fortunate enough to work alongside with you for a little 1:26 over two years now and I'm curious was there anything in particular that drew you specifically to 1:33 the field of substance abuse treatment yeah it was a little bit of a stroke of luck that I made my way into substance 1:39 abuse treatment because one of my very good friends at my master's program was 1:45 working at a facility with addiction and recovery but as I've gotten deeper into 1:51 the field it is a field that's really tremendously impacted by trauma you know 1:56 in any kind of addiction and recovery process generally at some level there's 2:01 a trauma that's happened either it's early in someone's life or it's come along a little bit later and not only 2:07 what we usually think of as traumas like the big what they call big t traumas like a car accident or 2:13 sexual assault but also what is referred 2:18 to as little tea traumas or developmental or complex traumas which are sort of the accumulated difficulties 2:25 in attachment relationships childhood neglect abuse of a less than extreme you 2:34 know magnitude things like that and in a lot of recovery processes dealing with 2:41 that trauma really helps people to get a little bit of a leg up because trauma 2:47 has a pretty tremendous impact on how people engage with their lives can make people more sensitive to things that 2:55 those of us who haven't been through as much trauma are the same kinds so in just about every client that we see at 3:02 our facility there's some form of a distortion in the way that they regulate emotion you know instead of using either 3:09 relational emotional regulatory skills or internal emotional regulatory skills 3:15 they're using an outside substance to help manage their internal experience 3:20 and those distortions in emotional regulation are often caused by those various kinds of trauma both extreme 3:26 post-accident or you know mugging or something of that nature or natural 3:32 disasters you can also have especially now living in California we're seeing a lot of the impact of that on people but 3:39 also again those developmental or complex traumas are changing the way people process emotion a lot of times 3:47 what makes something traumatic in a lingering way is that whatever happened 3:53 at the time wasn't given this space to you know to kind of be a little bit 4:02 vague whatever the impact the the energy that the person took in around the trauma and they don't mean in sort of a 4:09 out there kind of immersion of energy but you know whatever their their nervous system took in around what 4:15 happened if it hasn't been untangled dealt with or healed then it can be very 4:20 hard for a person to return to like a baseline homeostasis state and so that's 4:25 where the substances come in that they can be that external something to help you know change the emotional 4:32 state so that's that's what's kind of what brought me to addiction was luck but what's kept me here is that I can do 4:40 the work with people to heal from those both early life and you know later traumas that have impacted their 4:46 addiction and recovery process well that's a great answer and I'm so glad that luck had brought you into this 4:52 field there's certainly a need for more people like you that have such Drive and passion and education around what you 4:58 specialize in so i heard you mention that the majority of the clientele that you serve do have some history of trauma 5:06 some may come in and be completely unaware that they have had these traumas because when mentioned in you know the 5:13 general public i suppose you'd think of the more significant issue some type of abuse or accident or tragedy really loss 5:21 whatever it may be can you maybe get into why it is so important to address 5:27 the underlying traumatic issues that people may have throughout the course of substance abuse treatment absolutely 5:33 what tends to happen is that people with the best intentions and a really good 5:40 understanding of sort of the practical steps that recovery takes often run into 5:46 [Music] you know triggers is the word that most people use around it but something gets 5:53 underneath that really great plan about how recovery is gonna go and generally whatever that something is that gets 5:59 underneath the really good plan about how it's gonna work out has something to do with the person's past you know 6:04 something that they went through growing up or some way that they're still not 6:12 able to really regulate their experience of those things without defaulting to 6:19 their old habits or patterns so i know a lot of people think that dealing with trauma is kind of like a magic bullet 6:25 that if you just do that recovery is gonna follow you know just one step 6:31 after the other but I'm much more believe that it's not necessarily the solution mm-hmm but that 6:37 without it without dealing with the trauma without dealing with those impacts of the past that a 6:44 person still living with it can be a much more difficult path and for some people it's really essential because it 6:51 is that that past impact that past trauma that that they keep stumbling 6:57 over again and again and it can lead to a lot of frustration and hopelessness if I know all the steps to take I know what 7:03 I need to do but why why can't I do it and a lot of times that's because there's something else that's there that 7:08 they haven't really taken a look at yeah yeah it makes complete sense to me I've seen it over and over again and I think 7:15 the probability of somebody relapsing if the traumatic issues haven't been dealt 7:20 with are much much greater and you know because there's that constant emotional 7:26 pain until it is dealt with and healed and addressed there's always going to be that desire to escape so I'm a huge 7:34 proponent of including that in in treatment so I guess to back up a little bit what developed your interest in studying 7:42 somatic psychologies when I was younger I actually was a little bit torn between 7:47 studying engineering and psychology and I had a talent for math and science so 7:53 it was kind of assumed that that was what I was going to do you know going into school and and everything like that 8:00 going into college that's that's what I went for was engineering but you know I 8:06 at that time I wasn't I wasn't really happy with it I felt like I was doing it for somebody else and it was around that 8:13 same time that I got involved with a group of martial arts practitioners in 8:18 Michigan that studies a martial art called wood Shifa and the schools called 8:24 the school of cultivation and practice mm-hmm so I I got involved with this martial arts group and it's not a 8:32 martial art where there's a lot of complicated forms or exercises that are 8:38 really you know elaborate it's really fairly simple and predominantly is based 8:44 on building your awareness of how your body is doing really simple things like standing or walking and doing those 8:51 things in a way that's connected and integrated so that the power of the whole body can work together and expressing your intent 8:58 whether it be Marshall or otherwise and in that school the senior school bar the 9:04 guy that was helping us all learn and develop was not only a martial arts enthusiast but also a really big 9:11 proponent and student of one of the sort of preeminent figures in somatic psychology a person named Wilhelm Reich 9:19 and in addition to doing the martial arts exercises you know he gave me some of these books to work with there are 9:25 certain exercises that come out of that a lot of different breathing awareness things both from that more reichian kind 9:33 of somatic psychology as well as the forms that came after that you know physical exercises and things now get in touch with the emotion sure and it was 9:40 fascinating because as I did these really simple martial arts and other exercises a lot of feelings came up that 9:46 I had not really been in touch with before that I was very very you know a more creative intellectual type and not 9:52 very embodied sure you know and as I did these exercises I started realizing the 9:58 ways that I felt about all these things that I was doing in my life including following this expected pattern which 10:04 was to become an engineer or what I thought was the expected pattern and as 10:09 I was feeling all of these things coming up as I was doing these standing practices for example 10:14 I got really curious about you know that's amazing all I wasn't doing 10:20 anything I was just standing and breathing and all of these different emotions were coming up and they 10:27 actually changed the way that I would interact with my life because I was realizing some of the things that I was doing that actually weren't okay with me 10:33 realizing some of the ways I held myself back from interacting with other people just because I couldn't hide from myself 10:39 when I was standing there and I would see those things and went from being fairly unhappy person not really 10:47 enjoying the whole being around and being a live thing to being somebody 10:52 that I really enjoyed going through my day and being a part of the world and I 10:57 started to think you know this is something that's worth doing if I can help other people get this connection 11:04 with themselves whether it's through the martial arts or through psychology then maybe I can help ease 11:12 other people's pain and help them live lives that are more free and satisfying and I went through this whole period of 11:20 okay well is this what I what do I want to do and psychology was the thing that I thought in my mind well if I could do 11:26 anything this seems like it's really worthwhile to help ease you know people 11:32 suffering help the world be a little bit of a better place help people to hurt less and then hopefully from there they hurt other people less and it you know 11:38 it just becomes an element exactly so that's how I got into into psychology 11:44 that's really beautiful and I think that probably contributes to the high degree 11:49 of passion you have for continued exploration of the potentials of these 11:55 types of therapies and it's really cool it seems throughout your explanation that there's a lot of parallels between 12:01 the martial art that you were practicing and the somatic psychologies and of the 12:06 mindfulness component the mind-body connection yeah they were really good parallel to each other and each one that 12:12 I did supported the other one the more that I stood with myself and felt what was there more understood how body my 12:19 body and then you know by extension other people's potentially could carry different experiences and then the more 12:24 I learned about it from the psychology side the the more in-depth I could go with my personal standing practice 12:29 that's amazing yeah so what is somatic psychology exactly so somatic psychology 12:35 is a psychology that integrates both the mind and the body into how things like 12:42 therapy and understanding human experience are approached so somatic really just means the the lived 12:47 experience of the body so that can include everything from how our bodies 12:55 hold emotions as I was talking about before to how you know our nervous system regulates the experience of us 13:02 moving through the day there's a lot of different branches of somatic psychology 13:08 initially it kind of came out of some of the students of Freud I mentioned 13:13 Wilhelm Reich before and other people that worked with him that saw how 13:19 patterns of tension that occurred in people's bodies correspondant to their ways of being in 13:25 the world you know talked about how restrictions in the musculature develop out of early life experiences and then 13:31 impact our later ability to be expressive and authentically ourselves I can say a little bit more about that 13:36 later but I'll talk about some of the other branches of somatic psychology other things that somatic psychology 13:42 does are like dance and movement therapies that allow a nonverbal 13:47 expression of whatever's going on internally to things like EMDR and brain 13:52 spotting which approach the way that our brains subcortical 'i hold information 13:57 and can process that facilitated by eye position and eye movement so all of 14:05 those different forms and and others that I that I haven't really mentioned are really just looking at how we can 14:11 approach healing from you know that organism ik that whole person 14:17 perspective and looking at the impact of things like trauma not only on the way we think but on the way we're actually 14:24 showing up in our bodies in the world moment-to-moment that's one thing that I think is really crucial about somatic 14:30 psychology is it goes beyond to the stories we have about what happened to us because everybody's got their narrative their story about what they've 14:36 been through and that can be more or less helpful to take a look at but everybody also has the way that their 14:43 story is showing up in the world today in this moment through how how we're showing up how we're showing up with 14:49 each other or how the client shows up in the room how the past is impacted them 14:54 that's changing what they're perceiving in the world around them so I get 15:00 tripped up over this because there's so many particulars I could go into that I'm not sure what to say all at first 15:06 but that that's basically kind of a brush overview of somatic psychology and 15:11 how it works Wow well for a condensed version it was a very very great description and just 15:19 to speak a little bit from my own personal experience I've met with therapists since I was an early teen and 15:25 I had never well first of all I had never understood until I began working 15:31 in treatment that there were various different clinical modalities that 15:36 you know each kind of is useful in its own regard and for different types of 15:42 diagnosis or treatment or whatever it may be is there a certain type of person 15:48 or a certain diagnosis that somatic psychology kind of serves best or a diagnosis that it's most effective in 15:55 treating in your opinion I know you've mentioned trauma a lot that's kind of where I was gonna start was with trauma 16:00 because a lot of the current approaches to dealing with you know different kinds 16:08 of somatic therapy really focus on trauma and and healing trauma and that's 16:14 because more so than I I personally think a lot of different kinds of issues 16:19 but I'll focus on trauma for right now is impacting a person on a level that is 16:25 deeper than the story that we have about what happened right trauma isn't showing 16:31 up because we're necessarily thinking a certain way about a situation something happens and our bodies are our whole 16:38 nervous system is back in it so you can talk about that all you want you can deal with the story somebody has about 16:44 what happened to them and talked about it for years but until you change how the activation of their 16:51 system is responding to those old cues you've just founded 100 different ways 16:57 to talk about this horrible thing that happens sometimes I can even be worse in some ways I think it could be detrimental yeah it's kind of picking 17:04 that scab reopening the memories and making them you know kind of putting them back in the forefront of the mind 17:10 right without changing the way that they're living in the person in that moment mm-hmm and so somatic psychology 17:16 in its different forms not only helps to you know it doesn't just activate that 17:22 past impact in the body mmm you know and and nervous system in mind and brain it 17:30 activates it so that it can help that activation find whatever you know 17:36 whatever movement whatever awareness whatever it needs to be able to shift 17:41 and change so you know you can't you can't talk someone out of being scared 17:50 right an example that I give a lot with people working with their trauma from 17:55 like a somatic perspective is that it's kind of like if you have a kid who's 18:01 afraid of ghosts in the closet mm-hmm you can sit there with them and tell them for hours that there's no ghosts in 18:07 the closet right but without having the experience of something different they're not really going to believe it 18:14 you know you actually have to take them to the closet open it up shine a flashlight around and you know they're 18:20 feeling scared they think there's a ghost there and then you're showing them in that experience a fits okay that they 18:29 can trust it so it's kind of like that with trauma in our bodies is that when 18:34 you utilize the somatic methods of dealing with trauma mm-hm 18:40 it is helping bring that past that's in the moment to an awareness of what's 18:47 actually there and it's interesting that somatic psychology in some ways is very 18:53 slow and spacious and in some ways is is 18:59 very fast I say slow and spacious because getting a new awareness takes 19:06 takes the right kind of time and space so a lot of times when you're working so medically with somebody whereas a normal 19:12 talk therapy hour might be very full of dialog working so medically there's 19:18 often big pauses where you're encouraging someone to feel what's going on inside of themselves mm-hm and to 19:26 bring that awareness up in the present moment to help to connect it to what might actually be present in that moment 19:31 I think we might talk in a little bit about implicit memory and how that can 19:38 be reconsolidated and changed under the right conditions and somatic therapy is 19:44 really good at doing that kind of thing whereas you know traditional talk therapies may fall a little bit short in 19:53 some ways in that regard so you have trauma to answer your question that that's one of the big ones that somatic 19:58 therapy works with and shifting those you know traumatically encoded implicit memories 20:04 but also things like anxiety things like depression you can look at how the person's system 20:11 is carrying those things and helped to shift it through various methods what is 20:16 a typical session look like is it begin with some discussion you're throughout 20:21 the discussion you're kind of monitoring their physiology and then getting them 20:26 to check in with certain parts of their body where you might notice them holding tensions or anxieties or emotions or is 20:34 it more kind of you're guiding them in a sense to check in and notify you where 20:41 they feel those energies are being held like I said there's a lot of different ways of working so medically with people 20:46 so I'll just talk about the one that I most commonly do in the populations that I normally work with some forms of 20:53 somatic therapy even involve physical movement or even contact between the 20:59 therapist and the client which you know is all within very structured boundaries to be healthy and helpful but the kind 21:05 of somatic therapy I usually do with the clients that I work with normally is a 21:12 lot in helping them to notice things within themselves that they're not 21:17 necessarily noticing so I might notice a change in someone's posture or I might notice how someone's body's responding 21:23 to whatever the material is that they're talking about so usually we'll begin by talking a little bit about a topic it 21:29 might be something that a person wants to talk about a trauma that happened years ago or it might be that they have something going on current that's having 21:36 a bigger impact on them then they are kind of thinking that makes you know conscious sensor like why is this thing 21:42 getting so much under my skin and to facilitate awareness in either of those 21:47 cases usually I'll help to help them identify where in their body they're 21:53 aware of something happening around that experience and depending on the person's level of literacy with their felt sense 22:00 and body states that might be more or less of a structure to intervention sometimes it's as much as saying you 22:07 know I can tell that as you're talking about that I see it's almost like you close in a little bit where are you feeling that in your body right now as 22:14 you're talking about what's going on with this face remember and they might say well you know I really feel it a lot of times 22:20 it's kind of through the through the core Bunny's body that they feel most of the emotional stuff it can be anywhere but they'll say yeah 22:28 I just feel like you know my heart kind of closes in when I talk about that or you know there's something going on 22:34 in my stomach we're all sort of I mean many people are familiar with some of the somatic markers of emotional 22:41 experience like butterflies in the stomach or a pit in the stomach or tightness in the heart area Oh an end to 22:50 any other various ones like that but usually we just brush those off me say 22:55 oh yeah I got butterflies in my stomach going into this thing we just deal with it or you know what it'll be easier if I 23:01 don't feel that so let me just go ahead and have a xanax and then I won't have to deal with those butterflies in my 23:07 stomach sure but in somatic psychology we slow things down and really pay attention and say okay part of your body is holding 23:13 this experience of something and we come in with that trust that that's informed by some past experience that that 23:20 person's had our series of past experiences so instead of just brushing it off or trying to get away from it or 23:27 just saying I I don't want to feel that at all you say no like let's bring some 23:32 attention there let's feel what it is that you're feeling and see as you pay attention to that what kind of things 23:39 come up around it and what happens is with enough space and attention and 23:44 attune mint because a lot of it is you know being really present with that person in the room as another human 23:49 being they start to feel safe to sit with that body experience and they start 23:58 to become aware of the expectations that go along with it or memories that might 24:03 be connected you know things come up that tell more of the story than just oh I just have butterflies in my stomach 24:10 and what happens is that you know I used this term before but the implicit memory 24:15 mm-hmm starts to kind of bubble up into awareness so you can actually see what 24:23 it is that's coming up in impacting their experience at the present moment you know and when you see what it is 24:28 that's coming up it's usually those way that somebody learned how to survive and stay safe in the past but when you can 24:35 bring that up and we can see it in the present you can help either guide that experience to understand what it needs 24:41 in this moment to be able to be negotiated differently or a lot of the 24:47 time just by being with it long enough and becoming aware enough of where it 24:53 comes from you can then kind of match it more with 24:58 their actual present moment experience which causes or can cause in the right 25:04 environment the shift and that reorganization and change in that do you notice certain people or certain 25:10 demographics that may have difficulty kind of checking in with their bodies there's absolutely differences in 25:16 people's personal comfort with being able to identify you know what's going 25:22 on so matically what's going on in their bodies and it's interesting because I 25:29 think that it is ultimately a fairly natural thing to have an awareness of 25:34 what's going on in our bodies psychologists refer to it as the capacity for interoception ability to 25:39 feel and see you inside and every human being before we ever have the words to 25:46 talk about what's going on experiences things in our body we laugh we cry we need things it's all nonverbal but as we 25:55 go on you know sometimes people don't have the support around attending to 26:01 their internal experience some people are taught you know an extremely example when somebody's crying either they're 26:08 completely ignored or they receive some sort of like abuse around that or for 26:13 whatever reason their family culture doesn't really pay attention too much to internal experiences it's more about what you do 26:19 etc there's a number of different ways that that cut off between different 26:24 parts of ourselves and especially the internal experience can develop so there's some people who just yeah for 26:31 whatever reason their early life circumstances didn't have space for communicating or even really feeling you 26:38 know those those aspects of their experience and so you know people get very much into 26:44 thought in their heads into even sort of 26:49 like an idealized version of what being a human looks like that's a way from 26:55 like the experience mm-hmm so actually oddly enough a lot of people who are very like intellectual like engineering 27:01 type folks and like I started out it's it's about the thought process it's about logic and rationality and anything 27:08 that's irrational which you know that the body has its own logic it's not necessarily that a plus B equals C 27:15 that's that's neat and clean and that very intellectually oriented people not 27:23 because I don't I don't really want to say that it's not intellectually oriented people it is people who split 27:29 that very logical rational way of looking at the world from more of that like messy unknown urgent yeah and it's 27:35 it's we're talking about it too because sometimes those people who are very logical and rational also have very 27:41 wildly uncontrolled emotional expressions it's because there's not 27:46 that regulatory piece of it it's like emotions or something that gets packed away until they yet explode mm-hmm it's 27:54 like that throughout the entirety of my teenage years more than a few holes punched in the walls is it as a kid just 28:01 because I didn't have that outlet for a healthy expression or the knowledge of express those feelings in a healthy way 28:08 you know that's really making me think that a lot of that is developed through relationship mm-hmm you know emotional 28:14 regulation primarily for younger people is done relationally first caregivers 28:20 help develop the capacity for it and then it becomes internalized but without 28:26 the right relational environment it's really difficult to develop the ability ability to regulate ourselves so you 28:33 know to me therapy and especially somatic therapy is sort of filling in some of those gaps 28:40 and helping people learn to contact bring into the room and regulate those 28:45 those messier parts of non-rational non-logical experience say you somebody 28:52 that you're working with somebody that you know has developed some of these skill sets to be able to 28:57 with her body notice the energies and things of that nature would you be quicker to dive into the more heavier 29:05 traumas or the big tease with them versus somebody that's not yet really 29:10 developed the skill set to be able to check in with their physiology with their body where the energies are being 29:15 held would you would that be more like a gradual dive into treating their 29:24 traumatic experiences or is just somebody that does have more of a developed mind-body connection working 29:31 somatically of course the therapist is there to help guide the process and orient it and make this space for 29:37 whatever needs to happen for that person to heal but each body each person has 29:43 their own sort of timing and one of the things that's interesting about somatic psychology is that just about every form 29:49 of somatic psychology trusts the body's ability to regulate itself and return to homeostasis given the right environment 29:56 and so somatic psychology is tends to follow the process as much or more as 30:03 they do lead it so we are creating a certain kind of a space for a person to 30:08 go into these deeper parts of themselves and to bring them out and to let them express and let the awareness develop 30:16 around them let whatever needs to happen happen for that activation to be able to 30:21 complete or move through or go toward healing and just give enough guidance to 30:29 help keep the person you know somewhat connected relationally as that process 30:34 has happened someone connected to themselves so they're not going too far off into a dissociative process and like 30:40 I say not too far off sometimes there's a little bit of back and forth but yeah it's really hard to know what the timing is some people who haven't had too much 30:50 of a vocabulary around what they're feeling in their body as soon as they get that it's like super fast it just 30:55 kind of happens and some people who have a good awareness of their body they have 31:00 a very particular awareness of their body and so things go actually slower you know somebody tends to focus more on 31:07 the pain and they have certain areas that their attention kind of clings to there / focused on certain experiences their 31:12 body and they don't let the attention go to other places that you know for whatever reason our outside of the focus 31:19 and sometimes it's actually easier to work with somebody who starts without very much body awareness then somebody 31:25 who might have over focused in particular in very rigid ways wow that's interesting you know there there's this 31:31 theory psychologically that health is the ability to respond flexibly and 31:37 appropriately to whatever the demands of the environment are not to just go with the environment but to respond 31:43 appropriately and one of the things that gets in the way of that is any kind of 31:48 rigidity so usually in working therapeutically especially somatically what we're addressing are patterns that 31:57 are held rigidly that get in the way of 32:02 interacting with whatever the real moment that a person is in in a satisfying way so you metaphor of being 32:10 stuck or languaging around like I feel stuck I can't do I need to do here some people get stuck in certain ways of 32:15 relating to their bodies and then it takes a lot to shift that if there's a lot of energy that goes into it whereas 32:21 somebody who comes in as a blank slate I don't have really much of a connection in my body but I'm curious about it 32:26 sometimes those people it goes really quick yeah so it more as a function of 32:32 you know a person's ability to remain in the unknown and remain curious and and 32:41 that more than it is about you know necessarily their their comfort level or their body awareness to begin with so 32:48 yeah kind of interesting that way it is it is thank you for that explanation and kind of on a tangent but well also on 32:54 the topic of the feelings in the body and the the somatic responses that people will listen I can't say any 33:02 references but I've heard some stories about the neuroscience behind somatic 33:07 psychologies for instance I heard a story about somebody that had a heart transplant and then they would then have 33:13 these really vivid dreams that they had never had before and it had turned out that these dreams mirrored an exact 33:23 experience that he organ donor had gone through in real life no again I don't know if that's 33:29 just a story I don't have any anything to cite in regards to that but could you 33:35 speak a little bit on that whether you believe there's some truth to that yeah so that's actually a really interesting 33:41 story about the heart transplant and I I haven't heard that but I'll have to look it up and see what I can find out about 33:47 that but somatic psychology you know is really fairly neuro neuroscience it's 33:57 fairly well integrated with with some neuroscience I mentioned that 34:02 interoception word earlier and I've mentioned implicit memories and things 34:07 like that so the explanation that I'm about to give is going to incorporate some of those different things so and 34:14 today since we've talked about trauma so much I'm really gonna focus on how trauma impacts the system of our bodies 34:21 and our nervous systems so we have this area in our brain that is in the 34:30 midbrain that amygdala it's called that's in charge of letting our systems 34:35 know whether or not we're in danger basically it does a bunch of other things but one of the things that does 34:41 is it is sort of a monitoring system that activates survival skills when when 34:49 needed and that part of our brain is 34:56 actually one of the first places that sensory information goes to one of the 35:02 first places that hearing is going to visual information is going to sensory 35:08 information and also that interoceptive that sense of what's going on in our bodies so a sense of tension in 35:13 different muscles position of our bodies but especially for this explanation you know keep in mind that it's monitoring 35:20 the activation of different muscle groups in our body too so when something 35:30 that's either you know a big t trauma when some big event happens that is 35:36 really I'll call it survival relevant yeah 35:41 occurs our organism does its best to respond to that you know and that's 35:46 things like activating fight-or-flight social engagement maybe first before 35:51 fight-or-flight and then freeze if fight-or-flight doesn't work and then everything that's involved with that but 35:58 what happens in our bodies is that that's not just the idea of fight or flight or the idea of freeze there's 36:04 actually a real embodied equivalent that happens you know when we get ready to 36:09 run those neural chemicals the you know hormones and everything floods into our 36:16 systems and gets ready to muscles tense if we're about to fight or our legs get ready for about to run and then if we 36:23 get past that point and we go past fight or flight into the freeze place say we 36:28 can't get away we can't fight whether it's through physical restraint or because the situation doesn't allow it 36:35 basically that activation stays in the body but it's like the brake and the gas 36:42 are on at the same time at that point you have the gas from that readiness to fight but they have the break of hold it 36:48 back this is going to be worse if I try to do that so you end up with this real tension inside the body and a lot of 36:54 nervous system activation that just kind of gets stuck there and one of the 36:59 theories around trauma is that whatever our protective patterns were that got activated and trying to deal with those 37:04 situations were never allowed to like complete so to speak the energy the 37:10 activation of our nervous systems that happened never got to discharge and so 37:16 our bodies maintain a state of either hyper which is too much hypertonicity or 37:23 hypo tenacity hyper being too much you know overly tense in the muscles or hypo certain muscle groups basically like are 37:30 in a given up a frozen really deep frozen kind of position and when that 37:37 happens and when we maintain those you know traumatic patterns in our body 37:43 remember I said that there's that part in your mid brain the amygdala that's monitoring your situation and it's 37:49 looking at what you're seeing it's looking at what you're hearing but it's also look how your body is in that moment so it's 37:56 constantly getting that message of this muscle is tight we're ready to fight or it's constantly getting this message of 38:02 I'm given up from these muscles that are in that hypotonic place and because it's 38:08 constantly getting those messages it's assuming those are appropriate to the situation so the way that implicit 38:16 memory works is that that system in our brains in the midbrain as it monitors 38:21 our situation is looking for convergence between the present moment situation and these models the schema we have that 38:28 were formed in the past either through big traumas like I just talked about or the same kind of process can happen 38:34 through repeated relational trauma and if enough pieces match it it puts us 38:41 back there so if enough information from what we're seeing hearing feeling and noticing in 38:48 our bodies mm-hmm matches with what the old situation is we respond as if we're back in that old situation that's 38:54 basically that's what trauma is is people responding to a present moment situation as if it was just a reflection 39:00 of the past it's like I was back there again kind of a thing and because of that it you know that's the problem with 39:06 traumas because then it's your response to the present moment is inappropriate it doesn't match with what's actually going on makes perfect sense 39:12 so if a lot of that is that unprocessed body energy those muscular patterns of 39:19 you know hypertonicity or hypo tenacity those are like check marks so that it becomes you only maybe need to see one 39:25 thing in the outside world it might not even need to be very well matched but since you have all that information inside you're very you're always in that 39:32 state of being very close to like a match with that old situation and so 39:38 when we deal with that with in somatic forms of therapy it is you know bringing 39:46 awareness to and helping to overtime shift those internal patterns even the 39:51 muscular patterns that are informing our perception of what's going on in the world one other thing that I want to say 39:58 about that is that those implicit memories and I've mentioned that a bunch of times 40:03 would you mind defining that yes in place memory contrasts with explicit memory 40:08 okay so there are basically two different ways of remembering things that we have in our brain explicit memory deals 40:16 mostly with facts and things that when you remember them you have the sensation of remembering something so everything 40:23 from autobiographical information this morning for breakfast I had oatmeal and a cup of tea two two plus two equals 40:30 four okay those are explicit memories mm-hmm if I asked you what the capital of Nebraska was the memory of what that 40:37 is I think it's Lincoln I'm not sure thank you probably I'm a psychologist not a 40:43 geography yeah those kind of things are explicit 40:48 memory okay implicit memory is the system in our minds that represents things that are really important to be 40:54 able to do quickly so things that we've repeated enough times that we can just 40:59 do them without thinking as well as things that are really like I said important to do quickly more quickly 41:05 than we would have to think something through so for example riding a bike is a muscular implicit memory you just know 41:11 how to do it without having to think through every step tying your shoelaces writing your name you know doing your 41:17 signature that's implicit memory how I'm interacting with you in this moment also 41:23 is implicit memory this is being informed well not completely but my 41:28 experience of being here with you doing this podcast sitting in front of these microphones mm-hmm is informed by 41:34 everything that I've done in the past that my brain sees as related to this 41:41 moment you know all of my interactions with you all of my interactions of presenting things to people those are 41:46 all informing how I'm showing up here and they're doing that in a way that I don't have to think about it I'm just 41:52 just here having this interaction you know when you are also dealing with a 41:59 situation that you know you've been through some trauma and then you see 42:05 something that reminds you of that trauma and then all of those responses come up you know that fast heartbeat 42:12 that part of you that wants to run even the memories and things that is all more implicitly coded 42:18 the the really great thing about that part of our brain is that or I'll just 42:25 say that part of our mind it has correspondence in the brain is that without it we would not be able to 42:32 function you know if you had to think about when say a lion was charging at 42:39 you if you had to consider okay well Alliance charging at me well I know that that's dangerous let me talk myself 42:45 through how I'm gonna run away from it I'm gonna move my right foot and I'm gonna move my left foot and oh no he's 42:51 insane you're already being so the things that are most important for our 42:56 survival are that our brains think are more most important for the survival and integrity of our organism including 43:02 because we human beings are social relationally mmm-hmm that's all implicit that's all just happening without us 43:08 having to think about it so yeah the implicit memory system is just the system in our minds and brains that 43:17 organizes basically our current experience of the world based on all of 43:23 our past experiences in a way that's very quick and generally seamless so the somatic psychologies are it kind of 43:29 creates a bridge to bring conscious awareness to these unconscious behaviors 43:37 or responses to certain situations yeah yeah in in a lot of ways it either 43:43 creates that bridge or up or else it helps expose so the implicit memory is 43:50 coded based on experiences so old experiences code you know our current 43:56 implicit memories including those that are sort of maladaptive or that don't really work very well but it's really 44:02 great that implicit memories are also subject to change and the change process for implicit memories is something 44:08 that's referred to as reconsolidation so it's basically what helps reorganize a 44:14 past memory that's not a you know linear verbal story about memory but actually 44:20 that memory as it just emerges in the moment and one of the things that helps with reconsolidation is new experiences 44:28 now it's tricky because implicit memory not only organizes our sponsz but it's actually becomes a 44:34 filter through which we see the world so there's a challenge of you know once you see once I see a man is dangerous I'm 44:42 always gonna have a sense of danger when I'm sitting across from a man so you 44:49 really have to slow things down and bring a lot of awareness how reconsolidation works is if you can 44:55 activate an implicit memory in the right kind of relational environment where somebody's feeling safe where they have 45:03 a good attunement from their therapist you can activate that old implicit memory and then help them match it with 45:09 a new experience you know which can happen in the therapy room which can happen between that person and himself 45:15 that contradicts and is completely kind 45:25 of trustworthy if you can let them have an authentically new experience in that moment you know whether it's through an 45:31 embodied expression or through a different kind of awareness of what's going on then that implicit memory can 45:38 start to shift and they actually can start to let go of the activation in the body and help to actually experience 45:43 things differently so in a lot of ways one of the goals of somatic therapy is to help shift a person's orientation to 45:51 what's going on in a way that's underneath just shifting the story about it that's fascinating and I've heard of 45:57 other modalities like neuro linguistic programming that use similar I guess 46:02 techniques or based on the description that you just gave the you know certain 46:08 experiences are tied to what they call an anchor an anchor you know I guess a 46:13 synonym for it would be a trigger so that trigger creates this response in the body and they're able to kind of 46:19 create a new experience for the person anchor that and then by activating both 46:24 at the same time they're able to kind of collapse that implicit emotional our 46:32 physical response to specific events it sounds really powerful yeah it sounds 46:37 like a very very similar process it's it's really the trick of getting through 46:42 an old filter that's helping a person perceive a situation in a particular and maladaptive way to 46:49 opening up the awareness to more accurately perceive what's going on to match them and then the old one that 46:55 they can done see experientially in that moment doesn't fit starts to break down and are you able to isolate substance 47:02 abuse in particular in a somatic psychology session meaning you know 47:08 substance abuse in itself it creates a lot of negative emotion there's a lot of shame there's a lot of guilt there's a 47:13 lot of behaviors that people wouldn't typically engage in that they have as a result of very substance abuse maybe 47:20 it's stealing or like whatever it might be so are you able to kind of address or 47:27 shift a client's emotions about a particular job like if somebody were to mention you know cocaine and like all of 47:33 a sudden they're getting kind of excited and they're kind of triggered for it are you able to to change that association 47:39 so when they think of cocaine they they're thinking of gross or my nose or 47:45 it's really you know to where there's a negative connotation there are some interesting kinds of you know modalities 47:51 of somatic therapy that do that there's there's one brain spotting that does 47:56 that kind of process that helps shift a person's like directly shift a person's 48:02 orientation to their substance of choice mm-hmm that there that's specifically this method that's called the model 48:08 that's called the crocodile mob model that Robbie Abel's I think was the the woman that kind of developed that but 48:14 basically helps to connect the part of the brain that has the cravings and 48:21 everything like that in it with the part that has the negative consequences because her theory is that you know the 48:28 brain tends to flip between one or the other you know they're not connected it's like a seesaw one one's up the others down got it so with that method 48:34 you can actually help to you know help the brain to create a linkage between you know the cravings and the 48:42 consequences so that it kind of ruins the ruins the cravings part of it in 48:48 some ways what people have said in the past that I and other folks who have done some brain spotting with people that's amazing uh could you give a brief 48:55 description of brain spotting and everybody everybody that I have asked for it description of rain spotting even some 49:00 of the cofounders of the modality have difficulty describing it but yeah so 49:06 brain spotting like a lot of somatic therapies has a really high level of trust that if awareness is brought to 49:12 how our bodies are holding things those things can shift so the way that brain 49:18 spotting works with that is that they have found through that modality that 49:23 different eye positions correspond to heightened activation of whatever the 49:31 emotional issue or trauma or whatever it is the person's working on that there will be some eye positions where they 49:37 don't really feel very much of it which is interesting that you could just look in a certain place and then not feel as much of the distress and other ones that 49:45 bring up more of that bring up more of that connection so generally in brain spotting what you're doing is you're 49:51 helping a person to access where in their body they're holding that you know 49:57 emotion or that trauma or that issue through those I position access points 50:03 and basically what happens is that you help a person bring their eyes to that 50:09 spot that brings up the maximum activation for that topic I'm there's a lot more nuance to it but I'll give that 50:15 very simple version and then you as a therapist are very much in tune with them noticing how their bodies are 50:21 responding what's going on emotionally your your present their relationally and because that issue is being held within 50:28 that relational presence both externally and internally that person is focusing 50:34 there without really very much intention mm-hmm brain spotting trusts what they refer to as the subcortical regions of 50:40 the brain I talked about the midbrain that mcdowell all of those to organize and process whatever that activation is 50:48 through its own resources to bring it to resolution and so it's really interesting they have this huge level of 50:54 trust that says okay all we have to do is put a person in touch with how their body's holding this issue mm-hm and hold 51:01 it with them through this eye position and their system will know what to do as long as we stay present with it - 51:09 basically neutralize that to help bring it to resolution and what happens is that as you're sitting with a person as 51:15 their eyes are in that spot as the emotion is up it'll it'll raise a little bit because as they're tuning into it it 51:21 brings up more of it memories will come up thoughts will come up images other feelings emotions they'll cry their body 51:27 might move even and stuff will happen and the more you can give permission for whatever wants to happen just let it happen basically they get over that hump 51:33 and the activation starts to come down and it'll get to a certain point and they'll have a rest you know they'll get 51:40 to a rest point with it and it'll be lower usually than when they were before then it'll come up again and then it'll 51:45 come back down maybe even a little bit lower and over time as you sit with that person and just maintain that really 51:51 special kind of container and just basically follow where that process wants to go brain spotting calls it 51:57 staying in the tail of the comet so that person is the comet and you just stay behind them in support whatever wants to 52:04 happen and keep the container to a good extent that they're not getting dysregulated 52:10 you know too far past what their system can deal with any sense that if you kind of help keep a little bit of those 52:15 bounds and keep the relational connection they will get to the point where their own system resolves through 52:21 that you know through its own processes and returns to homeostasis whatever that charge is before so you know it was 52:29 amazing I think that I had one client that every time he would see a red truck 52:35 he would basically get flush of anger and it was because of a past 52:40 circumstance with a person in a red truck he was associated with somehow they had done something to him well I 52:45 don't imagine that being really disruptive in everyday life right there's a lot of red trucks out there most definitely and I did one brain 52:52 spotting session with him around that instant incident that had originally happened and he came back the next week 52:59 and said I have seen so many of those trucks and it hasn't even gotten you know a little bit of charge out of me so I was in a single session I was a little 53:06 bit blown away by that one Wow I've had a few of those where people just in one session it totally changes their 53:12 relationship to something not always sometimes it takes a few but yeah it's interesting that I I said initially that 53:18 somatic psychology is very slow in that when you have a session there's a lot of spaciousness and a lot of room that 53:24 made around what a person's experiencing to feel to let whatever needs to emerge emerge and I also said it was very fast 53:31 because sometimes the results the shifts that happen because you're not just talking about the story about the issue 53:37 but dealing with it as it lives in the person it can get some pretty pretty fast results certainly seem so I mean a 53:43 single session to no longer have that impeding on his life you know like I said I was I was pretty blown away by 53:50 that and it's by no means you know what to expect out of brain spotting right it does happen sometimes that you get those 53:56 really quick shifts I also understand that with brain spotting and I don't know if this applies to somatic 54:02 psychologies as well but in dealing with traumas and brain spotting it's not 54:08 necessary or not required to have to discuss these traumas that you may have been through which is that's really 54:17 important I think you know I would imagine I'm not a therapist but I would imagine that sometimes just talking 54:23 about the you know past traumas or abuse or whatever it may be that you had been 54:28 through that in itself could be really dysregulated and kind of draw clients 54:35 attention away from the present moment and you know to where they're kind of 54:41 living in their in their head but with brain spotting it's it's not necessary 54:47 to have to discuss whatever it is that you may have been through is that correct yeah you know what's really 54:53 great about somatic therapy is that again it's not dealing with the story a person has about what happened it's 55:00 dealing with how that is living within that person in the present moment or in relevant situations in their lives so 55:07 vastly more so than other kinds of talk therapies you don't even really need to 55:12 talk about what happened in the trauma some people want to and it's good when they do you just make room for it but 55:19 you know especially in you know you mentioned brain spotting and they make a 55:25 point of saying like you don't need to talk about it you know you some of the sessions can be completely silent 55:31 somebody might come in and say you know I have something I want to work on really don't want to talk about it but 55:36 can we do brain spotting around it and and at that point you say sure mm-hmm yeah because it's really you're just 55:41 there as a therapist holding that emotional and relational container with them and their own system is doing the 55:47 healing so you do the same thing you say okay bring up whatever it is you don't have to tell me and find that spot that 55:53 corresponds to it feel what you're feeling in your body and you just help them to stay with it and move through it and they never need to tell you what it 56:00 is they're doing so for some people who for whatever reason just don't want to don't want to go there it can still work 56:07 for that and in other kinds of somatic therapy similarly because again the story about what happened isn't so 56:13 important as what it is that's that's in the body in that moment you know in 56:20 their system in that moment and if you can work on that and help that to move you know it it's not about rehashing 56:27 what happened 20 years ago it's about okay what's inside you right now and how can we help that come to resolution so 56:33 that that's one of the really great things about you know any kind of somatic therapy and brain spotting 56:38 particularly and I mean just given that memory is so fallible you know you can 56:44 tell yourself or you know kind of recreate a story you know and repeat 56:50 this same story even though it may be inaccurate and isn't necessarily exactly 56:55 what happened in a certain event but by telling this kind of different variation of that same story we can then begin to 57:02 believe that it is true so it just seems really cool that we're kind of able to 57:09 bypass the the conscious mind and the stories with tools like somatic 57:15 psychologies and brain spotting to really address the issues at a core 57:23 level yeah again a lot of parallels with brain spotting and somatic experiencing it seems well I think you know brain 57:30 spotting is definitely I would consider it a somatic therapy because I positions are meant to help a person connect with 57:37 the feeling in their body mm-hmm and you know you're not even calling it an emotion you're just calling it what are 57:42 what are you experiencing in your body mm-hmm so yeah it's absolutely a somatic 57:48 practice and again there's a bunch of different frameworks of looking at it but they all have that sort of trust in the 57:53 body's internal resources that can be brought in for healing so given all this 57:59 information that you've provided tonight which is just amazing it's a lot which discussed quite a bit in a very short 58:05 amount of time here how do you incorporate your education your work 58:10 experience your personal practices with the martial arts how do you incorporate 58:15 that into your everyday life have you found it to be beneficial for you learning these skill sets that you you 58:22 know use in your profession to help other people but has it been something that has been able to really impact your 58:27 personal life as well absolutely yeah I mentioned my Wu Chi fob practice a 58:33 standing meditation process which I still do that practice today I my 58:38 intention is always to about an hour of that at night usually before I before I go to sleep and it's just time to really 58:47 connect deeply and see what all is going on within my within my organism within 58:52 my system and it's amazing I always find things that I hadn't been aware of throughout the day you know there's 58:58 there's so much more to ourselves than we are able to consciously track so it's good to have those practices to get in 59:05 touch with it now most definitely and you do you always seem so centered present happy joyful it's it's really uh 59:13 it's really an honor working with you and I guess just a we're running short 59:19 on time so maybe just one last question for anybody that's watching this that 59:25 might be interested in learning more about somatic psychologies or brain 59:30 spotting or you know somebody that may not have the resources to go see 59:35 somebody in private practice or go to a treatment center are there any resources that you might suggest where they can 59:43 begin exploring some of these psychologies yeah and and actually the 59:49 there's a lot of great books and websites and things like that the best 59:54 thing to do with that is I can put together a good list of links and things and we can put it in the description of 1:00:00 the podcast so people can just go yeah yeah it sounds great well thank you so much 1:00:05 it's been really great learning from you and just hanging out with you thanks for inviting me to do it on you get I'm 1:00:12 honored to work with you too all right have a good night everybody [Music]