[Music] welcome to the being known podcast with my friend dr kirk thompson my friend pepper sweeney we are here to discover and explore what it means to be truly known and today we are going to be looking at trauma and the body and uh i am happy to be here with you kurt um you know these these uh recordings that we do mostly on fridays are one of the highlights of my week me too man yeah really really great yeah so tell us where we going today you know i'm looking at you know uh you've shared some notes with me for where you know some things you want to talk about today and um there are words on this paper in front of me that i really do not think are english i don't know i mean the these accented a's and it looks i feel like i feel like we're going to be going into some nordic you know i want to hear you say these words because i don't even want to try [Laughter] so if that doesn't entice people to stick around and listen to the podcast i don't know what will oh my gosh uh we have we're just getting started holy cow well um you know i am uh excited in particular about this episode because you know i grew up uh in the field of medicine and particularly in the field of psychiatry and we're you know we're trying to study the mind and we're taking care of patients who have all kinds of psychiatric impairments and for you know it it was really how interesting it would be that you know except when we were talking about you know pharmacology you know what might an antipsychotic or an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety medication do or maybe you know some kind of other intervention uh you know electro convulsive therapy or something of that nature there just really wasn't a lot of conversation in my training about the role that the body itself is playing in how we experience our life now we kind of all know that and of course if you you know if you have a heart attack we know if you break your wrist you know it but to consider the role of the body in the mind in in the development of the mind in the first place uh we begin to discover that uh it's it plays a huge role and you know the subtitle of today's episode uh then the lord god formed the man this this uh you know our christian anthropology highlights that when god formed us he starts he doesn't start with our thinking self he doesn't start with our breath he doesn't start with our awareness or consciousness he starts with mud lord god formed the man out of the dust of the earth he formed man's body and he begins this formation in a very intimate way he's not forming it from a distance he's down in the mud the hebrew text would indicate in genesis 2 7 that god's down in the mud forming it with his hands and that he breathes the breath of life kind of like cpr into the man's nostrils the man becomes living being and the man can't become a living being unless he has a body and therefore in many respects we learn that our body as it turns out um encounters things uh knows things as it were long before our thinking mind knows things anytime we're doing anything when we walk across the floor when we drive our car when we have sex well our bodies are doing and knowing things in ways that our minds themselves don't always know them and this follows along in our just our general development we start out with this you know two cells come together in conception they develop into a zygote and it forms this thing called a neural tube and at the end of the tube there's this brain stem and the brain stem moves to our limbic circuitry the brain stem we have in common with reptiles the limbic circuitry we have in common with lower mammals all of which we would say like have bodies but we don't imagine them to be thinking in the way that we're thinking eventually it comes to our neocortex the part of us that makes us most uniquely human and it's easy when we talk about trauma for us to think that we're really limiting our conversation to you know like what we feel and what we think and how i function in that sense but today we really want to emphasize and look at the role that the body itself plays and what happens when the body experiences trauma as part of the mind when the body is part of the mind experiences trauma and one of the first things that we would say about bodies is that our body is formed in an intimate setting conception takes place as a matter of intercourse or you know in vitro fertilization but it comes because people are being intimately connected with one another so bodies are formed in intimate settings that that formation is a slow and intentional process it doesn't just happen instantaneously for god to form the man like you form something out of if you're gonna mold clay that takes time and it's also conducted that formational process in genesis is conducted with the long-term intention for well-being of the one who's being formed the well-being of the one being formed is kept in mind and that's important when we'll see later what happens because when when we're thinking about our children we're thinking about our friends we're being mindful of others we're not just being mindful of them in the moment hopefully we're being mindful of them the long-term well-being of them i want to act toward them and toward their bodies with the intention of encouraging their encounter with flourishing i want to think about that trauma as we'll see does just the opposite it in an instant does whatever it's going to do and it's not thinking about them or their well-being at all and then we get to later in the second chapter of genesis and we see that when god creates the woman you know again god could have just said hey we're just going to take some more some additional mud we're going to do the same thing but no there is a certain kind of wounding that takes place now he causes adam to enter into a deep sleep but he still takes his rib he opens up a space he takes his rib he closes up the space we sense then we see that in the text that god has the woman with him in some way shape or form for how long we don't know and then he brings the one to the man and the man responds with poetry and song he's just had some kind of general anesthesia applied and when he awakens beauty and goodness is what he responds with and this is something else that we would say that trauma does the opposite of when it comes to our bodies trauma leaves us in a heap of carnage it doesn't bring us to places of poetry and song in this way trauma is in many respects the opposite in every way with the exception of the context the context is often an intimate context in which we experience traumatic events but it's often sudden not this deliberate careful mindful formation or surgical operation it's sudden it doesn't keep the well it doesn't have the well-being of the victim in mind and it doesn't have the long-term vision of beauty and goodness for all who are concerned in mind the body then very soon as we develop is shaping the brain and the mind with all of its ascending messages all the neural networks all those neurons that run from your heart rate and your gut and your legs and your face and your hands up to the brain shaping the brain letting the brain know what we are sensing and it's taking place long before the brain is actually able to make sense of all that that experience is taking place you know there was a series of experiments that were done with dogs uh seligman and mayor are the ones who did this experiment and basically it created with these dogs the you know the what they call the encounter of the inescapable shock and that they would uh you know they would shock these dogs but in a situation which the dogs couldn't escape from the provocation there was no way out of this cage in which the cage was electrified the dogs were shocked and so forth and so on and then they took those same dogs with yet another set of dogs they compared these two sets of dogs and they took the new set of dogs and they put them in the same kind of situation with the exception that if they wanted to they could escape and as soon as the shock started the new set of dogs ran out ran away from this but the dogs that had learned that they couldn't escape didn't leave the cage even though there was a wide open door and in this way we see that in our own lives when we experience trauma as we've defined it we often discover that this is not a matter of mind over matter it's the other way around matter over mind that my body just like the dog's bodies despite the fact that their mind could see an open door their bodies did not move and so one of the things that we see that our trauma experiences do is that they shatter our perceptual capacity like the dogs were unable to perceive that there was an open door out of which they could leave they had there were other dogs we knew that they they could see it and they left they could no longer perceive things and so this is one of the most this is one of the most potent issues around trauma and our bodies that our body senses a reality in which it perceives its powerlessness it perceives its inability to do anything and so we find ourselves feeling like we're just stuck we're going to be stuck with this particular sensation or feeling or image or or story that i'm telling i'm stuck with that and there's no way for me to change my perception of that one of the ways i then cope with these kinds of things with my body is that i dissociate now when we talk about this process of dissociation we talk about this notion of how i leave the room now uh you know dissociation is a thing that everybody does actually right when you and i are driving the car we're uh when when we are driving the car down the road but our you know where you're you're talking with nell who's in the passenger seat you're having a conversation in some respects you've actually dissociated to a certain degree from the active attunement to driving the car and this is a good thing because this way like your body can drive the car while you have a conversation with now and this is a way that you can function and do what we might call some degree of multitasking although you're not able to fully pay a hundred percent attention to either one of them which of course is why our wives it's not a great idea to have really important conversations while we're driving the car but we we you know we have we dissociate all the time we daydream you know we're we're in a conversation and we somehow get distracted we're thinking about other things they say hey are you paying attention to me i'm sorry something i'm i don't know do we we introduce the podcast right we're we're we're in the middle of oh yeah i'm sorry we're associating we're in the middle we're we're in the middle of the scandinavian alphabet yes we're just going over some scandinavian words okay so so if i so so what we find ourselves doing like we dissociate and so in some respects like the dogs are kind of are are doing this in a way they're dissociating they're they're not paying attention to what is real but they have an open door and in the same way we misperceive things i dissociate i cut off and and and frankly when we we can you know as many of our listeners may have had this experience of having been in the middle of traumatic events that were so bad uh you know your you know your combat experience or your experience of sexual harassment or mistreatment or sexual abuse your physical abuse you find yourselves in your mind going someplace else and you're not even aware what's happening anymore we often have a hard time remembering these events because the part of my brain that needs to be online in order to explicitly recall events as they're happening in real time in space that part of my brain is not engaged and so i don't recall things that have happened to me often or it's often very fuzzy but my body my body continues to hang on to this so we find ourselves often in these what we call inescapable prisons just like the dogs do but not because my mind isn't able to think my way out it's because my body has been so overwhelmed and overpowered by the events themselves there is a researcher by the name of steven porgis uh for those of you who have not heard of his name p-o-r-g-e-s that is not scandinavian i don't believe um but uh he is a researcher and neuroscientist who back in 1994 so it's been a while uh that he's been at this work uh he developed what eventually became known as the polyvagal theory and we're going to talk about that is that one of those words no polyvagal was actually my fifth grade math teacher i learned a lot from miss vegel she had a brother named joe joe vagel yeah that's right yeah yeah okay it's going very well okay well his work uh has really demonstrated the role of the body in the experience of trauma and he begins by drawing our attention to what we commonly call the autonomic nervous system now many of our listeners will have have heard of this maybe like in you know high school biology classes this notion that there is the part of us we the autonomic nervous system we like to call it the automatic nervous system we it's it's a part of our nervous system that helps keep our heart beating helps our breathing rate continue it moves our gi tract helps it do everything it's supposed to do there are lots of things in our body that we don't have to command in order for it to happen like i have to command my hand to move and we're all grateful that we've got this automatic this autonomic nervous system right and there are a couple of features of it the fundamental way that it's involved in the development of our well-being has to do with two or three things first of all is our fight or flight system now we've all heard of this this is part of our it is housed in our brain stem we like to call it our sympathetic drive system and anytime we sense danger we are going to do one of two things we are first of all these animals the first thing we would typically do the first thing that all animals do if they're able is they will flee a situation and if they're not able to flee the situation they will marshal whatever they can to fight their way out of the situation and that's one of the first elements of the autonomic nervous system but the other thing that the autonomic nervous system provides for us in the sympathetic drive system is this process of providing us an accelerator and a break so it also like you know we get hungry for things and like i go for who like i don't have to think about being hungry i i that moves me towards seeking out food or my you know or water like i i go for things i see things that i'm interested in my interest in curiosity is peaked i don't have to just simply make plans to be curious i don't have to make plans to be sexually aroused like those these things happen and my sis this sympathetic drive system this accelerator moves me toward i'm in go mode i'm cure it is part of the system that helps me create things we want to make things i'm interested curious i'm in movement perspective but if i'm two years old and i'm running into the street somebody has to put the brake on because i'm not going to do that by myself and so we also have this braking system it's the parasympathetic system we have the sympathetic drive system we have the parasympathetic system and that will come into play in porges's polyvagal theory now all who are listening might be like why why are we talking about all this stuff it's important for us to know that um you know we often think as as we imagine and reflect on our own stories and our own traumas uh it's easy for us to wonder why can't i just think my way out of this why can't i just come up with a solution for this why can't i just have a better understanding and somehow i will cognitively figure this out and then make a different set of choices and then i'll feel better the reason we talk about these things is because the more we pay attention to our bodies and how our bodies work the more we can then live and work synchronously with our body because one of the things that we know that trauma does is that trauma mucks around with this autonomic nervous system because if i'm afraid or if i'm worried i want to be able to leave the situation just like the dogs wanted to be able to leave the cage but they couldn't what becomes of them what becomes of us when we can't leave the cage right this is where the polyvagal theory becomes really helpful and the first thing that so when we keep in mind this autonomic nervous system right so we've got fight-or-flight and we've got the accelerator and the brake and this notion that it really is driving us to be able to create things to make things that we really want to do it and it is in those moments when we are most interested in creating that we can become most vulnerable and we don't see trauma coming if i'm in my foxhole with my you know with my automatic rifle looking for the enemy like i'm far less likely to get hoodwinked it's when i'm with the babysitter that i trust it's when i'm on the date with the guy that i thought was going to be kind to me it's when i'm in the church that i have been attending as a way for to be spiritually nourished it's when i'm i've taken a job that i really love only to find that you know it's like its practices are really hard i mean all the the you know the the innumerable you know it's the sports that i love only to find that i have a coach that only you know uses you know certain ways of traumatizing their players in order to get results all these things i'm doing i'm moving into this moment of creativity and that's when these things happen that i'm not looking for so one of the first things that the polyvagal theory teaches us is that we all as human beings we all have what we call when we develop a little you know grow into what we call a a the capacity of our bodies to regulate our emotion a lot of life a lot of life and a lot of what the autonomic nervous system does it helps us regulate the things that we feel and we have all kinds of emotions pleasant emotions unpleasant emotions across the spectrum and we develop a certain capacity to tolerate a range of intensity of those emotions we call that the window of tolerance if i can maintain my emotional tone within that window of tolerance it enables me to tell my story over time more faithfully as we'll see when we get outside that window of tolerance when my emotion is either too chaotic or too caught up rigidly i don't have access to all the elements of my story that i need to be able to tell because the things that are important about my story always have emotional connection and tone related to them so what is important about the window of tolerance is that it enables me to live in a particular range of emotion while remain connected interpersonally to other people newborns come into the world and they don't tolerate things very easily they get tired hungry angry and they are just wailing they don't tolerate it very well and over time we would hope that when that you know newborn is 18 years of age that 18 year old is not going to be wailing in the same way when it has to go to the bathroom or when it has to you know get a snack because it has learned to regulate move its emotional states within that window of tolerance and we need this moving ourselves to states of integration and it is absolutely contingent upon relationship interactions i need the help of other people to help me learn how to bring my emotional states within that window of tolerance and that's what secure attachment does in parenting along the way as we learn to be in this window of tolerance and then as we like to say we like to widen it as children age we want those children to be able to tolerate more and more emotional experience without falling apart this is why we would hope that the 18 year old can be able to tolerate certain emotional states they're not getting rid of them they're not denying them they're not dissociating from them they're tolerating them they've learned to tolerate them even while they are in a certain emotional space but they're able to do it because they have a sense of connection to people that's what these interpersonal relationships are intended to do and the system that is responsible for enabling us to widen our window of tolerance is what porges has called and what other research is called the social engagement system every baby comes into the world with a primitive social engagement system this system is a collection of neurons that is spread throughout the brain throughout the body and it is what it says it is it is a system that enables us to engage with each other socially and we come to learn that the most effective way that i regulate my emotional tone is by my connection to you if i'm upset and you come to me as my dad and i sense and see you're sensing me i'm actually able to borrow your level of calmness so just uh this week um my my daughter was was uh very emotional she came to me she was very upset about you know something and um she was like i don't know she said to me i don't know what's wrong like i'm feeling you know i have this and so um i said well let's talk about it so we sat and um you know i was able to talk to her about what you know what are the circumstances right now that you're going through where are the stresses coming from um i was able to say i get it i i understand what you're what you're why you would be upset i understand why you know and i just want you know that i'm i'm here for you if you need me in any way and kurt you could see you could palpably see the change happening in her you know man just the the the really and and you know for me i i went to her later and i just said thank you for you know coming to me and sharing you know what you were that you were feeling something that you didn't understand whatever i said i just i just really appreciate you having those kind of conversations with me and being open to doing that and right even just this week it's just it just caused this whole different level of communication that we're having with each other and um yeah it's been it's been really really a great thing i mean you know and i don't like that she's struggling in any way but you know you never liked to see that with your kids right right it was thrilling that she came to me and we had conversations about it right and so that's an exam man uh can you be my dad oh please listen i mean there's a lot to the fact that love you know heals a multitude of sins because i am i would never claim to i would never give parenting lessons but i'm you know i do i mean that's that's a perfect example of how in in your attuning to her you don't just uh diffuse or get rid of her feelings you provide an opportunity for her to better hold them tolerate them that she can now have the intensity of those feelings and they can be there and she might perceive them as she might perceive herself as feeling better not just because she no longer feels any of those things at all but because she's no longer carrying them by herself right and and this conversation that you're having with me and you're teaching these things today it's encouraging me to want just want to do that more yeah to want to continue those conversations because you know um we need each other people need each other to be able to uh get their emotions into their window of tolerance and um and it just is like yeah i can just my presence and my sitting and being there can be of help is of help right right and you know um we might say uh that you could have that conversation in person is significant because it literally means that her physicality gets to interact with your physicality she is in the presence of you and your you know your six foot one six foot two body like and in it it it in and of itself without even the words it in itself is communicating to her that you are there to hold and to help provide a container for the stuff that she's feeling at the moment that seems to be spilling out all over the place yeah that she can't tolerate and you're going to help her learn to do that and so not only have you helped widen her window of tolerance you've also literally strengthened the neural firing connection pattern of her social engagement system and it's that kind of human interaction that is necessary for us to grow those widen our window of tolerance enhance our social engagement system and the other thing that's really crucially important about this is that you know we said earlier that our autonomic nervous system that autopilot it is constantly its radar is constantly up looking for danger and these kinds of moments that you're talking about with your daughter it quiets that autonomic nervous system it quiets it because if we are looking for danger we cannot create we cannot do stand-up comic routines we don't experience joy we are unable to offer reflections we need those connections in order for creativity to emerge i in order to create i need to not be wondering if you know the sabretooth tiger is going to come and devour me right and so to strengthen that means i strengthen my capacity for creativity i strengthen my capacity for joy for humor for all of those kinds of things for rest all those things are necessary that we need this enlarged window of tolerance and the social engagement system in order for those things to come forward and this is where we start to get down kind of into some of the more details of what poor just likes to say is this polyvagal theory like why why do we why do we talk about this we talk about this polyvagal theory well what's that word mean so first of all we talked about the fact that there are what we call 12 pairs of cranial nerves and this might be feel like it's we're just getting a you know graduate level course in neuroscience but it's helpful to know there are 12 pairs of cranial nerves all of which are important for vital function by their vital function mediators so our optic nerves for our eyes are like our the the third the third cranial nerve for hearing and so forth and so on my gag reflex all the things that help us survive the tenth pair is what we call the vagus nerve and if you imagine we there there are pairs there's a one on the right side one on the left side of the brain they come out and all the vagus nerve is is such a big important nerve because it innervates the entire series of hollow organs that we have all of our visceral we like to call our visceral hollow organs so my lungs and my entire gi tract and my cardiac system right my my heart is all innervated by this system because the heart the lungs the gi tract are also sending messages up to my brain it is giving messages to the internal state of my body to my mind at all times so it innervates this these hollow organs which tells me a lot about what i'm feeling a lot about what i'm sensing coming from my gut and my breathing and my heart rate and the front part of this if you imagine that this like two branches that come out from a big tree trunk on the opposite side of the tree trunk the front half of each of these branches the front part the anterior vegas is what we call it's myelinated and what's that mean it's this protein sheath that wraps itself around it and the reason that's important is because the more myelin the more flexible this part of the nerve is more flexible and i can turn it on and i can turn it off quickly and this anterior portion of the vagus nerve is part of what innervates what we call the social engagement system this system that is actively engaging with others so that for instance if my son comes to me and he's mad about something with me if we're connected because of this social engagement system he can express his anger i can receive it we can talk about it and then his anger can be resolved because it's using a part of the nervous system that is flexibly able to adapt because of all the myelin that's wrapped around it and then it has a back side or what we call a dorsal vagus nerve and it's not myelinated and that's important because of what happens with shame what happens with trauma which we're going to talk about in a minute so we have the front part of the vegas we have the back part of the vegas and in between we have this sympathetic drive system my fighter flight system so if we imagine for a moment that there is an algorithm there is a default system in which the brain operates with this autonomic nervous system in which we are designed optimally to be living in and working through the social engagement system i'm living my day living my life connected to others it doesn't mean that i'm perfectly happy i mean i could be sad upset just like your daughter but if i'm living within the context of the social engagement system and a widening of the window of tolerance it means that i can still i can be upset and still be connected and that connection helps me regulate that sense of being upset and so i if that's okay but then i encounter something that is too overwhelming an emotional event that is too overwhelming just like the dogs in the cage i default to my flight or fight system i'm gonna do one of two things i'm gonna either flee if i can like the second group of dogs we're able to do or i'm going to fight if i can and so i moved from the anterior portion of the vagus nerve and the social engagement system to my sympathetic drive system in my brain stem that's default place you know that's the first place i default but if i can't do that if i can't move out of this situation i then tend to move toward collapsing and collapsing is the very same thing that happens with mice and with possum when they are overwhelmed we think that when a possum plays dead they're like consciously sitting there laying there on the side of the road like with one eye open looking for when the fox is going to leave they're not they're unconscious because they're dorsal yes this i see the yeah come on come on talk to me well okay i love this we're in the mid we're in the middle of a serious trauma conversation and my daughter brought a cat home with her she moved home for a while for a cat home with her and this morning the cat caught its first mouse right we have released it we lived here well right now i'm realizing that i put this mouse in a little ziploc bag and it's sitting in my garage right now thinking them out but i don't think that mouse is dead well it probably is now it might not have been when you put it in the zip lock but like gosh all right okay and now said to me maybe it's playing possum i'm like mice don't play possum mice most certainly do play possum from now i know yeah i'm not a possum but i play one on tv right this is what will happen with animals that are overwhelmed and are unable to fight their dorsal vagus nerve system activates the sympathetic drive system that shuts everything down it shuts your heart rate down it shuts your breathing rate down and when it shuts your heart rate down blood leaves the central nervous system and you lose consciousness and this is what a mouse will do this is what a possum will do and it's not like it's now this waiting consciously no it will wait for the danger to pass and it usually takes a long time and this is something else that's usually that is important to know because it's not myelinated when those nerve endings fire they don't have the flexible capacity to fire in a different way quickly when you and i are talking to each other you're talking your daughter i'm talking to my wife my son or our friends or whatever and we get irritated upset sad or whatever we respond flexibly because we're using the anterior portion of that vagus nerve we're using the the this myelinated part that can actually adapt and it because it's it's using other people's brains to do this when i'm by myself and that dorsal vagus nerve acts it does so in such a way that once it fires it's going to be difficult to reverse that and the reason that's important is because this these are the rails that shame run on as well which we'll talk about in our next episode shame run on these rails which is why it's like you can start to feel shame and like the the situation can resolve itself and like you feel shame for days right you can't get rid of it and why is this important then when it comes to trauma because trauma overwhelms the setting and it sends us into this place where we are even having a cope where like i'm i'm constantly either in fight-or-flight mode because maybe that's all i'm i can do that but that's all i can do like so i'm living in a house where my dad's an alcoholic and you know i it doesn't create collapse but like i'm constantly on high alert and you know our brains are meant to be able to be on high alert for short periods of time yeah but not constantly right and once they collapse i don't have a way of predicting how i'm going to be able to come back from that and so we talk about how then trauma brings us into this place of what we would call terror disintegration dissociation which we've already talked about our perceptual shattering we have what we call these repetition flashbacks that i find myself i'm reactivating and why is that because when my brain is overwhelmed in this way and i'm now outside the window of tolerance we call either hyper or hypo activity hyper meaning fight or flight hypo meaning collapse right i'm not able to be creative humor doesn't help me i can't be curious i have a friend is named roger and he was a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon i write about him in anatomy the soul and this was a guy who when he was about 10 lost his two-year-old brother to a car accident right in front of him and from that day forward being the smart guy that he was he just really kind of cut off his emotional states because his parents they were unable themselves to kind of comfort them they couldn't get them their own comfort let alone comfort him by the time that he came into my office in his late 30s i mean he'd already risen in the ranks i mean all this this amazing academic uh and surgical pedigree um but he couldn't parent his own two-year-old he would lose his cool with his two-year-old he wanted to have other kids and his wife's like no dice like not until you're like you're like you are a world-renowned pediatric surgeon but like i can't afford we can't afford to have another kid because the trauma of his unfinished business this meant he he had he had taken a part of him that wanted to be able to flee but couldn't and all he could do would be to have that part of him was essentially collapsed and then we think about gail this you know i.t entrepreneur who you know grew up in a house where again just really things were out of control in her house and a father who was physically abusive and i'll never forget not long ago in one of our confessional communities that she's part of she started to name things that were taking place in her life as a young girl and the things were coming to her lickety-split that she hadn't thought about in years and as she named them she's she was sitting there like in the room and was just becoming like becoming you know short of breath and she turns and she needed assistance in the room at the time and so in that moment she her her emotion was her body alright so this is a person who is now moving hyper arousal but what do i do with this this trauma is like working its way out of her even after 25 30 years the trauma's working its way out of her while we're sitting there in the group and another group leader was able to [Music] stay with her long enough and we ran some exercises with her in which and all we did was we just had her pay attention to what we were doing with our bodies how we were looking at her the tone of our voices we all each one put our hand on our chests and we were just able to help her regulate not because we were telling her anything we just wanted her to pay attention to what she was sensing and what she was sensing us sensing but to do that we had to do what we could to widen her window of tolerance just enough to bring her back in in order for her then to do what she needed to do to regulate those emotional tones and tenors that had exploded within her body and she did that in the context of this group and then i think of jeremy my friend who was special operations and he's now i mean for many of our audience i mean this was the first gulf war so a long a long time ago and this is a guy who you know has seen seen things that you just can't make this stuff up and um and for the most part has very even even has very little sensation in his lower body completely fit completely capable but no sensation emotionally in his lower body because he's so cut off because of the trauma and so these are just three examples of what happens with folks and how healing as we like to say often begins at the beginning healing begins by first paying attention to our bodies in their over or under reactive states for gail in the room it was just being or she was finding herself really upset but being able to just say yes i'm i'm upset i'm i can't do this and we come to her aid and say take a breath look at me listen to my voice take your right hand and put it on your chest she could do that and now i want you to just feel press press on your chest just ever so gently she could do that so she could feel her hand on her chest and so she could feel her chest with her hand and she could feel her hand with her chest which are two different neural circuits but for her to do that meant that she was bringing her attention back into the window of tolerance and using her social engagement system with me and with others to do it and then i said tell me what you see in my face tell me what you see and she started to say what she didn't see well you're not upset with me i said i i know tell me what you see i see kindness i see your smile i pay attention to that so we're we're inviting her body to work with my body and the bodies of others in the room and so in this way we are helping her move back into in other other episodes we've talked about this river of integration moving out of out of for her the bank off the bank of chaos into this river of integration there are some other things that we can do there's a exercise called the body scan that you all can you can you can find this online in a number of different places you if you just google body scan there are multiple different places where you can get that there is a breathing exercise that you can find on my website kurt thompson thompsonmd.com is a breathing exercise that will take you through for about five minutes that helps you connect with your body more effectively we're going to talk in just a minute about another form of comfort in which we tap ourselves on both sides of the body we can just cross our arms put our hands on our upper arms and just tap back and forth back and forth back and forth and at first glance you think like kurt like i don't know what the heck you're doing but think about this when you are comforting a newborn or an infant i remember when i would hold my kids and they were upset i would ever so gently i would hold them and i would pat their bottom i would just pat their bottom there's a certain rhythmic sense right we are rhythmic people and when we are either and we are outside the window of tolerance we are no longer rhythmic we are stuck in one place or another our body is in a prison of some kind of either it's on fire or it's collapsed but to tap back and forth lets our brain know that we're coming for it but it's not going to be left alone and tapping can be a comforting grounding exercise walking with intention not just pacing but walking saying i'm going to go around my block two times and as i do i'm gonna pay attention to what i feel my feet hit the ground another exercise that we have for grounding purposes is we have people literally stand up sometimes and we have them gently or even firmly stamp on the ground to feel the weight of their body hitting the earth and feeling the earth coming back up through their bodies so they feel this sense because one of the things that we're doing with all of this is that we are completing the trauma cycles physical escape route i'm just going to walk through this real quickly because we're getting close to our time um it's important to know that uh when you you'll watch this in animals in the wild if ever an animal has been cornered if it's ever been threatened by a predator but the predator leaves it alone and the animal collapses when the animal wakes up you will find that the animal does not simply wake up and then just suddenly behave normally it will wake up and it will start to shudder because what it's doing is it is enacting what it wanted to be able to enact but couldn't because of the predator and it has to finish it has to complete its cycle of trauma escape if you were suddenly cornered by if you were if you're in a house fire and you're terrified and you get out of the house you're relieved because your autonomic nervous system your fight or flight system did exactly what it's supposed to do it moves you out of that and you're afraid for the moment but you move in response just like the dogs in the cage that are shocked and they do move out of the cage it's completing the cycle and then you feel better trauma remember our sense that we are overwhelmed and there's nothing we can do about that so we talk about this completion of a trauma physical escape route through a number of different things we talk about first you can you can rate how high your stress is that's a helpful thing to do for as you think about different traumatic events for you rake and then we once you've done that you can start to go through some of these some grounding steps we talk about this butterfly hugging and tapping that we uh talk about we can do what i would mention you can ground yourself by putting your feet on the ground stomping lightly or heavily to give yourself some sense of your lower body being firmly rooted to the ground you start to notice your breathing slowly gradually noticing your breathing often putting your hand on your chest again as i said you can feel your hand with your chest you can feel your chest with your hand and then we begin to move toward discharging things once we've grounded once we've supported this system we want to discharge this we want to breathe in a particular way that is strong deep sometimes we breathe heavily intentionally you want to feel your breath in your stomach you want to notice what any any distress that you feel in your stomach and again we don't want you to judge whether or not you should or shouldn't be feeling certain things but we're going to breathe hard next time the next thing we would want to do is you're just going to pay attention to what you feel your emotional states and then you want to pay attention to what you're thinking what your thoughts are that are related to all these things one thought at a time and the next thing that we want to do as we um you know as we get to the end of this discharge is we want to really have you reflect on what your resources are who are the people that you would want to have be in the room with you if you were going to do this and that's a these these things are other resources in a number of the books that we've talked about there are explanations for this in more detail but we want at the end of the day remember so much of my sense of being traumatized has to do with my senses i'm overwhelmed i'm alone i'm just imagining your daughter pepper and imagining if she were to talk to her friend later in that same day or the next day and describe what was it like for me to have my dad as a resource how did having my dad speak to me in the way that he did and be with me in the way that how did that help me have a completely different outcome for my day than i would have had had he not been there and this then brings us right back i think uh you know to one of our grounding texts that we've pointed to john 16 33 these things jesus says these things i have spoken to you so that in me you may have peace in the world you had tribulation but take courage i've overcome the world to be in jesus as he says so that in me you will have peace to be in jesus first and foremost is an embodied activity not a disembodied spiritual one who are the people that are enabling you to imagine that jesus body is present and with you in the same way pep that you were with your daughter second to be in jesus is to be then in his body of believers who are the people that are going to be with me then and to be connected via our physicality engages our social engagement system bringing us back into our window of tolerance so this week our exercise for the week real quickly um one thing you can do is just locate uh on the on my website kurt thompson md uh there is a we said we mentioned there's a breath exercise in the reflections page and i would say practice this exercise once every day and just start to pay attention to what you sense in your body as your breathing not only during the exercise but also at other times during the day begin to notice not just what you sense but how you respond physically when you're in various settings and as you do be curious about how long you recall sensing or feeling what you're doing again is drawing our attention to our body and in this way we are increasing our degree of integration not only do you pay attention to what you sense and feel but also what are your thoughts what's the story that you're telling about these and how are they related perhaps to other stories where you felt these things before we mentioned the body scan exercises that you can locate on the internet that can help you be more connected to your body's response and this is intended to increase your awareness as well and always as always should you start to feel more uncomfortable at any time we really want to encourage you to seek help from a close friend a pastor or a counselor as we've said before this is our our podcast is not a substitute for that kind of work and we know that many of you who are listening to this um are in places where that kind of work can be really helpful and necessary and so uh pepper i i just i just realized that um i think i'm tired after this conversation yeah i think i'm tired and i think about the stories that have been moving through my mind i think about the amount of work that we burn not just telling these stories talking about this but also just imagining um how our talking about these things can evoke things in other in our listeners that can have them be tired too and so we also say that when you do this kind of work sometimes your body says i'd like to take a nap and when you hear it say that uh it's those are good words to pay attention to yeah go grab that weighted blanket yep right on yeah right now thank you kurt thanks for today thanks for everything you shared today it's uh helpful just helpful thank you yeah and hopefully um go ahead i've got to go because i've got a mouse to go tend to okay and we will be and we'll be offering the uh the post test in swedish yes those of you watching on uh youtube uh stand by because amy's gonna join us we're going to have a little post show conversation very good love you man holy cow whoo i need an app yeah it's a lot i mean mean it's just a lot of information it's a lot of information and i you know and it's intelligence yeah and i'm aware that you know i well in my own mind i i you know i i want i i i think we're working to try to find a way for these things to be helpful and useful for folks and not be over burdensome in just like downloading information and so i think i i think i was probably i think i was probably a little worried about that well i think this time the information is such i mean it's a component we need that information right we can talk about things but the information is super helpful and then like i think oh okay i'm gonna go back and listen to that because there's so much information what pip i was gonna say if can you hear me yeah if you um if you hadn't given information today i i wouldn't have thought about what happened with hannah and i um the other night yeah huh i mean huh cool and it taught me and is encouraging me to do more hmm that's awesome that's awesome um and to that point kurt i mean pep when you talked about that conversation um like one of my mentors she will often say i'm holding this with you like there's no real solution to be had there's no it's just the weight of something yeah and if somebody says i'm holding this with you like i can hold a lot of things of other people's like yeah i can do that and so but to hear somebody say that then it's like okay whoa like yeah the burden the weight of it gets eliminated almost immediately yeah yeah it's an imperfect um metaphor but i think about like you know you pick up a five gallon bucket of water and i mean you can do that but then you know it doesn't take very long before it really starts to get uncomfortably heavy and then if somebody says well here let me let me just hold it with you and as soon as somebody else like grabs half the weight yeah like you feel it and if the you know if it were something bigger than that or whatever where you could do it and a third person walks in and says well let's let's hold this together yeah and so like i'm serious this experience that i had with the with the member of the of the group the confessional community [Music] like the intensity with which she was holding her own distress that was just kind of like really overwhelming her in that moment it was absolutely stunning to me to watch what happened over the next like four to six minutes as she first just paid attention to me and she tried and she's trying to match my breathing and we're just slowly and then i said when you're ready i want to invite you to simply start to look around the room at the other people's at the other people's gazes and one by one one by one and i'm watching her while she's watching the others and you watch it it's it's like watching i don't know it's like watching some body of water go from this chop to just you it it you just watch it plain out yeah and it was striking to me to see what the body of jesus was doing on her behalf because everybody is like leaning in and saying like here i want a hand on the handle i'm going to help hold this we're all going to we're all going to help hold this and so now you know it's like an eighth of the weight i mean that's imperfect but yeah yeah yeah um another thing i thought about okay hearing about the dogs was troublesome and i i don't i think it'll be troublesome to a lot of listeners um but this was done in 1967 is that right or ish it was done a long time ago yeah yeah yeah yeah right and i mean it's troubling that that's that part of it but like but i immediately thought oh my gosh in the context of community we tell our people we tell our friends they're the doors open right doors open right right fathom that idea but i see that it's open we don't have to get up we don't have to do anything right now but and it's very it and and it's it's very difficult for our friends to move yeah like they yeah no it just made it's got me thinking about people that are in abusive relationships that don't like them yeah right yeah right well and if we move to action because i was with some friends one friend said told of a rupture her boyfriend had created and immediately we were all angry and protective and wanted to we resisted the urge to move to action like okay what are you going to do are you going to end this you should in this because this is clearly whatever we all had thoughts but it's like if you move to action you miss what's what's happening it's what's going on because because if i can just say the doors open or what do you see as other options then it's this slow this cadence of i don't even know what processing or right and and the thing is that if if if we move to action too soon we're actually preventing their own cycle from being completed right because we're doing the work for them but they're like their body needs like to get there they actually have to get there on their own in order for them to complete the cycle right right it's like no no no right no it's it's one thing uh and and and it depends upon you know what you know you know it's it's always tricky because it we are always trying to find the line between you know who is and who is not capable of moving right like you're in a fire and you've got three toddlers in the house like you pick them up and go like you don't say hey you know here's you don't tell them to go like because they're not capable of doing certain things you pick them up and you go but you know and and so and and and so there are certain times when we say i mean i i've i've had moments they're very infrequent but they're you know because usually you're asking questions like what do you want to do with that relationship and how what are the things that you can imagine and what all those things right it's uncommon but i have on occasion said here's what i'm going to recommend that you do i'm going to recommend that you i strongly recommend that you consider having no free no more contact with that person for at least the next six months no contact right and i'm not very i'm not often very directive like that yeah but there are times there are times yeah when they need to hear it right and not because they're actually right and not even because necessarily they're going to do it that day right but because they need to hear that somebody else is speaking that strongly on their behalf right yeah and that's where sometimes it is helpful to hear someone's anger yeah because right oh okay it is appropriate it does make sense that i'm angry yeah it's good it's uh in in our in our men's group that we run it just this happened just this past week where there was um you know one person was telling his story and you know two or three others they're like they're like tell me where to find the guy yeah like they're they're like they're just so they're so angry yeah on behalf of this person and this person is like i don't i don't really get it i don't really i don't really get it and then of course like you don't get it how do you not get it and over the course of the evening it was this you know remarkable transition for how they were able to express his in other words the anger that they were expressing didn't just belong to them it was it belonged to him but he couldn't he didn't have access to it but as they started to name it and he could see it outside of his own skin you could see him becoming moved from this place of like being puzzled to this place of being uncomfortable to this place of like feeling it himself right and then of course there's like but now you know i've i've spent the last 20 years working really hard not to pay attention to this and now that it's now now that i've allowed my eyes to open and see that it's in the room now it's now i know why i haven't been paying attention to it for the last 20 years because now i don't know what to do with them right and so we say well we're going to come back about we're going to come back next week and we're going to talk about it again it's not just talking about like you'll figure out what to do with this eventually but but first you need a space you need to widen your window of tolerance you need to be able to hold it order for you to discern what you're going to do with it right right and that progression is important yeah yeah yeah it's good [Music] this podcast is produced by kurt thompson pepper sweeney and myself amy cella audio production and editing is by keaton simons video production and editing is done by mark gould if you'd like to connect with us you can find us on social media at being known pod if you like this podcast tell a friend if you love this podcast tell everyone you know and please like rate and review wherever you listen be well be now you