A Dialogue on New Treatment Tools for Relational Trauma & Emotional Numbness

[Music] hi everyone welcome and good afternoon here in the midwest uh my name is kate sample i'm with publishing and i am absolutely thrilled to be here this afternoon for a free event we've got over 6 600 people signed up today which is just unreal um and it definitely indicates how popular our speakers are today and how impactful their work has been um they are two long time pesky family members uh internationally renowned trauma experts and authors of two of our newest books transcending trauma by dr frank anderson and transforming the living legacy of trauma i'm more than thrilled to introduce dr frank anderson and dr genina fisher please come on hello everyone hello hello welcome welcome welcome it looks like we have upwards of 800 2 000 people on so far so let's give people another minute um we're so happy to have you here talking about such an important topic of relational trauma a term we're hearing more and more it's been around for a long time but we're hearing it more and more and i was thinking about this just such a such a hallmark of trauma is this emotional numbing right and and learning more about that we talk about trauma as a whole a lot here at pesce and in our various continuing education avenues but just to talk specifically about numbing i just i'm super excited about and i can't wait to hear um all of your thoughts so i'm gonna jump off you guys start when you're ready okay yes and i would imagine that we have a lot of people because numbing is so hard for the therapist often harder for the therapist than for the client i totally agree and i i it's one of those things it's like um one of my clients said this janine like the silent killer you know it's that it's the absence of that is really profound and really powerful right so um i'm thrilled to uh first of all i'm thrilled to be here with janina uh dear dear friend i don't even know janina how many years we go back um 1995. 1995 is that what it is okay so you're really aging both of us in a big way here we go back a long way it's beautiful it's such a wonderful lovely friendship you know personal friendship as well as work work and colleague friendship for many many years we both i think we did immediately the first time at the trauma center with vessel vandercook in 1995. um but yeah no i'm excited i'm excited for everybody out there uh so welcome to all of you that are out there joining us today and as you already referenced janina super excited about kind of helping and talking with clinicians and also with clients around this issue of emotional numbing because it's not talked about so much and it is kind of one of these silent below the radar yet incredibly packed impactful and powerful i once did a workshop where i took a poll of the audience and asked how many people find it harder to work with suicidality with client anger and demands or numbing and numbing one yes right the therapist would rather have a client who is suicidal who is difficult challenging attacking than to have someone who can't feel totally totally i wanna if it's okay i mean so just to let people know so janina there you guys all have packets of our slides so all the content is there and janine and i are going to be sharing and talking together uh periodically we're going to be stopping for some questions so kate's going to help us with ques with questions so if you want to type in the q a section if you have any questions feel free to do that kate will help regulate those monitor those and we probably won't get to all of them but we'll do the best we can but if it's okay janina i want to share a personal story about numbing interestingly enough well like it just reminded me when you said you know take a poll of of the people in the workshop now meg used to be so hard for me it was one of these on the you know clock watch oh my god like five five minutes has gone by this is a 50 minute hour i don't know what i'm going to do with myself for the next 45 minutes you know it was really really difficult and challenging for me and you know as you and i both do this work all the time around what ifs calls and janina talks partly parts language forever it's therapist parts or the parts of us that get activated right in the numbing scenario i was shocked to to explore find out what was happening for me janine and i want to share it with you yeah and if it's okay and i want to share it with everybody because it was really surprising i'm much more an activated person i could be with hyper arousal so much easier it's kind of old home week for me in my italian family right and the numbing and disconnection was so difficult and one of the things that was so surprising for me as i kind of went inside for my own exploration of why frank why is numbing so challenging for you it went right to my young attachment issues it brought up my attachment issues like this because the numbing that my clients were experiencing for protection for their own system really triggered the parts of me that felt lost and abandoned by their numbing and it was really surprising for me i i was just so shocked and over the years of being able to work on those young attachment wounds of my own i can sit with numbing in a very different way now like it's a whole different experience which i'm just so grateful for but i was really surprised to see that that was at the root of my issues with numbing so i just wanted to share that as you brought that up and isn't that so interesting because i come from this very intellectual disconnected family so i've always been more comfortable with nothing yes yes yes you know it's like it's it's i mean maybe because i had to get through my parents numbing that it's kind of it just feels like just another another day no more difficult than than clients who feel too much yeah yeah that's so interesting oh my god i love i love the the polarity right the the commonality and the polarity so that's old home week for you you know it's kind of uh here we go again another day in that way right and for me it was very activating even though the absence of as we're talking about oh that's really interesting so one of the things i hope everybody out there um can start thinking about and exploring for yourself like what in this realm of numbing what is challenging for me if i'm a client or if i'm a therapist as janine and i have shared like what makes it challenging for you i want to really kind of throw that out there for you to start getting curious because as you see there's a range of different reasons why it can be challenging absolutely absolutely you know does it feel like a rejection does it you know when clients are stuck in the numbing i think we feel stuck oh so that it isn't just okay this person who's suffering is stuck it's like i'm stuck i'm being i'm being prevented from helping that's the biggest challenge for me is i'm being prevented from helping yeah yeah no i totally agree and and it really is i don't think it's something that we talk about much and i don't think it's something that we teach a lot of you know um and interestingly enough like oftentimes my assumption is numbing is associated with neglect but it's certainly not only associated with neglect right we're gonna we'll talk today a little bit about all the all the origins if you will or the root causes of numbing in this way but it's one of the things that often makes the numbing even more challenging for me is when it's connected to neglect because it's the absence of response connected to the absence of connection all right all right absolutely so i'm going to start out and talk a little bit about numbing from a more somatic perspective and then frank will talk about it more from a parts perspective but we'll touch on both so let's see here so let me start by reminding us all that that as soon as our clients get in touch with their fear of remembering it instantly brings up the fear of feeling as remark wrote after the first world war it's too dangerous for me to put these things into words i'm afraid they might become gigantic and i'd be no longer able to master them or applefield the moment any holocaust memory or shred of a memory was about to float upwards we would fight against it as though against evil spirits so as soon as we invite remembering our our clients defensive systems their fear systems are going to engage right and what happens is we we we have a choice of five uh defensive systems we can cry for help which human beings are better at than animals because we have words we can fight um animals are actually better at fighting which is i think why humans developed weapons we're not as fast on our feet but we have many subtle ways of fleeing we can freeze in fear um or we can submit in shame and humiliation yeah that's it that's our repertoire we we don't have any other choices so all all five of those survival responses block emotion because when we go into a fight respond our bodies prepare for action not for feeling imagine you're ready to fight and you burst into tears it's not going to be very effective same with flight right we immediately feel the impulse to move in freeze we feel terror and the body tenses it freezes so we it it actually supports invisibility right if you freeze you can't speak or move even if you want to in submit in the fame death or submission response we collapse we we flop right often people talk about freeze or flop as the two options and then in a submission response we go no which facilitates submission so much easier to submit if your muscles are floppy if you can't move not because you're frozen but because you have no energy and you don't feel anything in the cry for help response we feel a desperate sense of needing connection but when we're crying for help we don't cry it's when help doesn't come that we might feel sadness so when we're trying to survive janina could i could i interrupt and go back because you said something super important that i want to make sure people get it's a super important point and this was this issue of these trauma responses fight against emotion and the and i just want to highlight that for everyone out there because i for many years were confused that trauma reactions were feelings right okay and what janine is talking about here everyone i just want to highlight this is all these big reactions or the numbing or the dissociating or the fighting and screaming and reacting our reactions to trauma not feelings these reactions actually protect from emotion and i think people confuse those two things all the time janina so i'm really glad you brought that up and i just wanted to highlight that before you move on to differentiate trauma reaction from feeling so please please period no thank you for underlining because i'm thinking the fight response often gets mistaken for the emotion of anger right exactly technically and uh and so it's a very important point yeah and and it really is important in therapy if we have a client who's having trauma responses that's a whole different piece of work than a client who's having emotion exactly yeah so you you know as as uh bessel vanderkult says the body keeps the score but the client's survival responses i.e body tell us more about how the client survived then they then it does about what happened so whenever we have a client who is numb who dissociates who disconnects the moment an emotion is felt um that tells us how the client survived if the client disconnects from emotion and fights we know this is a client who had to fight even at the time some tiny age if the client submits and goes numb we know that's the story of how the client survived yeah because numbing is so essential for submission imagine if you had to submit without numbing it would be even more horrific and and so it's very important we can't feel vulnerable in the face of danger right that's it doesn't work it doesn't facilitate survival we can feel vulnerable as a result of what happened and that's what we want when we ask clients to get in touch with their emotions but if they're in the midst of a trauma response they can't do that so this is the problem with a traumatized nervous system right trauma results in too much emotion or hyperarousal too much action also typical of hyperarousal or it results in in too little and parasympathetic unable to take action unable to speak unable to feel unable to be fully there and uh and a very very narrow window of tolerance meaning very very little ability to tolerate either extreme and so often i i mean i'm sure this is true for you too frank i have clients who come to me saying i want to feel yeah but wanting to feel doesn't mean your body's going to let you yeah right or your parts are going to let you right wanting to feel is is one part but it takes work with many other parts to actually connect to emotion and this stop sign is a reminder when we're threatened and we're in high sympathetic arousal or we're in low parasympathetic arousal the prefrontal cortex shuts down so we lose access to the observing mind we lose access to dbt skills to perspective to all the things we agreed with our therapist to do um and we lose access to good judgment and that with that comes a host of other clinical problems we have to remember that emotions are dangerous in the context of relational trauma i immediately think of our shared client frank [Music] grew up in exactly that in a family where emotions were dangerous yeah for children to have um i'll give you something to cry about i mean she always says her mother's favorite words were somebody is going to cry tonight um meaning somebody is going to get hurt tonight and so whether it's physical abuse whether it's humiliation um you know in abusive families positive emotions are also dangerous um feeling happy feeling proud god forbid feeling excited all emotions are dangerous in the context of relation and trauma and when we're little i always say to my clients children wear their emotions on their sleeves which you and i know as parents right very wrong and so the only way you could protect yourself i tell them was by disconnecting from the emotion because if a child feels it it's going to show and so the mind and body organize to to close access to any feeling which was dangerous which is why our clients often say i don't cry people in my family don't cry as the tears are starting to fall i'll say something personal again it was it's and this is kind of a little family joke of mine with my um my kids my husband kind of knows what i'm talking about but i've become a real crier okay and we watch tv we'll watch a um commercial and all of a sudden i start you know tearing up papa stop crying oh my god there goes papa again crying oh wow papa's crying again you know and what here's my response to nina i was like it took me a long time to be able to be emotional i've spent a lot of money in therapy to be able to cry at the drop of a hat because i was totally one of those people who who needed to think and learn in order to protect and survive and survive right so my intellect was my salvation and i was so even though i'm an expressive outgoing person i had very little access to feelings so the the responses that janine is talking about and very well versed within my system took a long time to be able to relax to allow that emotion to come through absolutely absolutely um it's i always say i didn't learn to cry till i was 40. that's right yeah it was just too dangerous in a lot of ways and a lot of families for all kinds of reasons right and in my case i didn't have any well i had a belief my mother will not like it if i cry but most of it i think was really my body had learned to avoid crying yeah and so then we have another problem which is we and the client have different agendas they come to us because they want to feel better we don't say to them you know therapy involves deepening into your emotions so you will come to feel better but it may not feel always feel good and and so then we go along the client still thinks i'm here to feel better we still think we're here to access those deep emotions and and we forget that we haven't gotten the client's consent to all this vulnerability that's right and as the client picks up that that's where we want to go often clients begin to feel a sense of threat right because we want them to remember we want them to feel and it's a very subtle struggle we don't verbalize the struggle but week after week there's this this push pull where we try to help the client deepen the client resists we try harder the client resists and and we forget that this is a two-way struggle because we have an agenda but the client has an agenda too and they don't always match i i love the idea janine of actually you know i don't do this as much and i'm really grateful for you to be able to be naming this is to make that agenda more explicit like people come in and they don't come in saying i'd like to heal my unconscious childhood wounds they're unconscious hello you know and that's oftentimes the agenda when that we know of all their symptoms drinking binging depression anxiety is those protective responses in root of underlying trauma i love the way you're saying wow what we have very different agendas that what if we can kind of be more mutual or get on the same page people want to feel better not connect to their relational wounding so i love that she's i love that you bring that up it's really important at least at least we could have a collaborative mutual agreement that's right and also we have to remember that the deepening into emotion doesn't feel like healing to the client the client starts to cry and we say good for you but the client will feel that's a sense of good for me absolutely that's where parts language help i always say i always say to clients isn't this wonderful there's a part of you that still knows how to cry so just just let that part have her tears because often that feels less threatening in the model the parts model that i use which is the structural dissociation model we understand the parts as driven by these survival instincts so that so that the the parts don't so much hold what had did happen they hold the anticipation that it will happen again um the world still feels like a dangerous place it doesn't feel as if that was then and this is now and and as frank is going to talk to you more about self energy but in this model what i do is i try to bring together um what i think of as some of the best pieces of ifs along with the best pieces of structural dissociation and i help the left brain part of the client that has kept on keeping on to become um more filled with self energy more calm more compassionate more connected so that the healing which i i agree i am in total agreement and i i think dick for this idea that healing is is the self-healing it isn't the therapist healing that gives us too much power as well as too much responsibility so let me just let me just quickly say what the self is as janina mentioned it and then maybe janine it may make sense for us to take a a bit of a pause and answer some questions if that's okay yeah yeah wonderful so just for those of you who don't know what janine is referring to around this idea of self-energy it's a concept that certainly dick didn't create but it's the way he organized it within the model okay and the model of ifs says that everybody has this thing we call self-energy it's kind of our essence it's our core it's internal wisdom everybody has it we believe that you're born with it we believe that everybody has it and we believe that traumas can help block access to it so some of the work that we do is to help people clear their blockages so they can access their internal wisdom their internal healing capacity the way they their intuition that knows what's right and what needs to happen so i just wanted to give a a frame of that and those words that janina puts up there are the are the kind of descriptors of self energy you know the eight c's of self-energy so to speak so why don't we take why don't we bring kate back kate are you here with us why don't we bring kate back and maybe you can go through a couple questions and then we'll continue i would love to this has just been a fantastic start there's been a lot of great questions and comments and people are loving the dialogue between the two of you um i've asked everyone to vote for questions using the little thumbs up feature so i can kind of prioritize what the audience is wanting to hear from you so far and away the most popular question at this point is um is about chronic pain and whether or not chronic pain is related to unresolved trauma and whether or not that's an unresolved trauma response what are your thoughts on that you want to go first you want me to go i think i think we both i think we would both agree on the answer we could maybe we'll just nod yeah yeah i i actually use the model of robert scare who who's the author of the body bears the burden who talks about a number of chronic pain and chronic medical conditions as unresolved traumatic memory and and i think we both work with those unresolved traumatic memories and the assumption they're held by parts sure totally yeah and i'll just i'll just add a piece from the ifs perspective interestingly enough some people know that some people don't the way ifs became an evidence-based treatment was actually a study done on rheumatoid arthritis yeah it was a study done on rheumatoid arthritis and we we did a piece of work with people who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis there was a drug comparison to ifs and time and time again when they started working with the parts of them that locked up their jaws and locked up their joints made them unable to move it was an attempt by apart to have the person not caretake others but caretake themself so it was an attempt to take care of oneself in an attempt to help and heal so you know gabor mate is another person who speaks about almost like all he makes the bold statement of all medical problems medical issues are related to trauma so it's certainly something that janine and i feel very strongly to and and really work with in a compassionate way the parts that show up in the body through chronic pain yeah absolutely and think about the atheist study which i'm sure many in our audience are familiar with and just you know just this the statistical association right between so many diseases um yeah yeah and adverse childhood events yeah yeah i mean you you really can't ignore that at this point you know that connection between the two yeah okay um well let's do one more and then we'll go back sure yes this one relates back to something that you um spoke about a little bit frank was the um the difference between the differentiate differentiation excuse me you made between a trauma response and an emotion um so the question really is so do they not do they not feel the emotion during that response whatever that action or behavior is can you just elaborate a little bit more on that yeah i'll elaborate personally in that and i kind of reference that a little bit because um a trauma response is very overwhelming but it's in it it's very overwhelming in the ways that janine is talking about physiologically okay especially if it's hyperarousal so the body is activated the heartbeat is racing you know there's there's there's an activation physiologically which is different than a feeling or an emotion okay so that somebody can feel sad somebody can feel happy someone can feel loving like that's a that's an emotion that is also can be felt in the body but it's a very different physiological you know the window of tolerance that janine talked about and as we're talking about today too the same with numbing okay which is a physiological reaction cuts off all emotion okay cuts off the body sensation like there's a shutdown that occurs so those reactions are very different physiologically and they're experienced very differently depending on where somebody is on that scale that janina showed hyper arousal window of tolerance versus hypo rails and that window of tolerance might be that sweet spot where people are able to actually feel emotion but a lot of trauma survivors don't spend much time in that window that's for sure right and their relational trauma you know the theory is that it's good attachment that builds a window of tolerance right and i see this in my granddaughters who have amazing windows of tolerance for teenagers our our clients didn't have the opposite of good attachment so of course there's this very narrow window and i really think we can think about in our own lives you know the when we have a trauma response versus when we have a just an emotion so i'm thinking i was thinking as you were talking frank i was thinking about a particular angry client um who was very i don't want to say that she was intentionally intimidating but when she got angry it was intimidating for me and i remember one day as i was listening to her angrily tell me what i had done wrong this week i felt my body tense like i was i stopped paying attention to her and i paid attention to what was happening in my body and i could feel heat i could feel tension and i got if i speak while my body is tensing and defended it's going to simply trigger her more right well and so because in that fight response even if we don't say i'm angry or this is unacceptable our body tension is going to show up in our voice and body language and just as you know i'm sure we all have had experiences of feeling defeated and deflated yeah that's right and you just could feel your whole body kind of given up you know what's the point and and so we all have those defensive reactions all the time we just have them in a milder form because hopefully we're not being traumatized all the time right right well it speaks to what you the both of you brought up early on which was doing your own work as a therapist doing your own parts work and understanding your reactions to things um and that's a wonderful example of that of knowing that you felt intimidated and you felt that if i were to speak it wouldn't go well right and so you had that knowledge um what i was noticing was i was having a defensive reaction defensive yes and so that's and if i was just having an emotion it would have been easier to work with um if i were that makes sense that's this piece that i you know if anybody if if there's a one takeaway for me around emotional numbing it's the protective quality of it because most people don't really appreciate or be or have that awareness that this disconnect this numbness this absence of is actually trying to help me here that's what janine was describing there's the protective nature of emotional numbing because most people don't like it they want to get rid of it and they're going to do everything they can to stop it instead of really appreciate it for the protective quality the protective intention um that it really is trying to do i think that's so important to pay attention to yeah okay well i'm gonna hop off and you guys carry on all right and i'm just gonna just finish up a few remarks because i want to hear what frank has to say beautiful so i like to think about deepening without deepening right because the more i help the client be comfortable with even a little bit of emotion the more the protective instinct is or the protective part is going to relax around the emotion so i keep the focus on the feeling memory and on the parts rather than on the events i acknowledge the traumatic events without asking the client to talk about them because i know that talking about them triggers the protector parts but if i acknowledge what happened if i acknowledge the protector parts if i acknowledge i know i know the protector parts don't want you to talk about this but is it okay with them if we just acknowledge how hard it was can we acknowledge that you have a little part whose heart was broken is that okay um and i find that the protectors as frank does too you know if you ask permission of protector parts they're usually amazingly willing at least to meet you know to meet you halfway i try to help clients develop what i call their emotional muscles i don't talk so much about the window of tolerance i talk a lot about strengthening those emotional muscles right and inviting the protector parts would it be okay with the numbing part to let mary feel just 10 of the little parts sadness could the spacey part open up that gate just a little tiny bit and again that being willing to say you only have to feel five percent ten percent protect your part you only have to let in one person i mean i'm happy with one percent you know work backwards start in the present moment start after all the worst has happened because that's less threatening um i use the body rather than pulling if people are emotionally numb and phobic i go for gesture and movement and and the more it's amazing i'm thinking of our mutual client the word self is triggering for her but if i say if i use this this is my symbol for for really for for clarity but it's for you know the observing mind that's okay right and let go of your own need for the client to deepen i try to let go of my need for the emotion for the deepening in every cell of my body because when i let go of my need for people to feel it's usually easier for them to feel and we have to admire the ability of their parts their bodies to achieve knowing you know that numbing is tough right right you and i might have have been taught not to cry as children but but numbing not being able to feel anything is is actually an extraordinary accomplishment of the mind and body and remind yourself that a client has a right to tin humming i find that easier if i say you know this client has a right to be stuck this client has a right to be numb it relaxes me and i'm sure that uh frank would agree with these wonderful words from mark epstein when those aspects of ourselves have been unconsciously refused are returned when they're made conscious accepted tolerated or integrated the self can be at one the need to maintain the self-conscious edifice disappears and the force of compassion is automatically unleashed and i and i think that really speaks to how both of us work is is through unleashing unleashing the force of compassion in ourselves and in our clients either or both is good well that's a that's actually a beautiful segue with for my first slide so thank you for that janina and i want to go back to something that janina said that is super important uh to highlight this because it's actually it's ifs has this component but i learned this from you janina years and years ago this sliver of memory concept you know if you you you've coined that term for me sliver of memory and this point that i want to make for everybody out there is the the way our systems client systems have the capacity to share a little at a time okay super important most clients don't even know they have that capacity so we have to help them with that ifs calls it dealing with the overwhelm and that disability in most parts storm the gate because they want help they get flooded and overwhelmed because there's a traumatic reaction and they're just wanting help and so this way janina is talking about breaking it down into one percent or two percent is really important it's the way to have people be able to be with the unspeakable be able to be with the intolerable in a way that is not reliving in a way that's therapeutic and healing dropping the content dropping the words you know holding it in the body in position all those things that janine is talking about here are really tried-and-true ways of being able to be with overwhelming things in a way that's safe and more manageable such that the numbing and the disconnect doesn't have to step in and shut it all down so i just wanted to highlight that piece that's super important around how do we do this like how do you stop the numbing for example you know we appreciate the numbing as janine is saying we value the numbing and we offer these alternatives to being able to be with the unspeakable the horrific the traumatic all right is is it okay for me to put up a couple sides is that right great wonderful um and then we will i'll put up a couple sides and then we'll take some questions too again um well we're that's not going to want to put up the last slide i'll put up the first slide but i'll have to go back how that happened let's go back like this okay so um this is the slide that i wanted to put up first because this is kind of dovetails the last slide that janina puts up this is my favorite quote quote from my book transcending trauma and it was it three partly the reason it's my favorite quote honestly is it's not my quote it's a quote that came to me it kept when i was writing this book just over and over again i kept getting this download of information and i would go for runs after writing all day trauma blocks love trauma blocks love would just repeat over and over again in my head and i really experienced that personally too is the way that trauma blocks love our essence who we are that thing we called self-energy and interestingly enough the other side of the story kept coming up in my head too love is what heals trauma love is what heals trauma so for me it became this cyclical mantra the cyclical mantra of trauma blocks love blocks access to who we are we're born with the core we are that core that core is full of love everybody has it even if they don't believe it or feel it and it is that very love essence self that janina was talking about self healing that is what heals trauma so i just want to send that message out to the world that is really something that's super important to me and i feel the more we do this work the more we do this work collectively not only janina and i but everybody else out there the more we're going to be able to help people be able to release the trauma that they carry and to be able to feel more of their self and their love which will only be contagious so for me this is a this is a global mission at this point for as many people as possible to be able to get this message learn about this learn how to do it so that this trickle effect will happen we can create this web of healing in the world um let me back up here this was i think we've mentioned a lot of these things but these are some of the difficulties um that happen that make this numbing so hard that make this numbing challenging okay there's a lot of boundary issues that come up there's a lot of comorb comorbid conditions that come up we've already talked about the extreme symptoms which numbing and disconnection and dissociation is one of those extreme symptoms that extreme absence of in the service of protection and of course we talked about therapists parts as a huge piece janina talked a bit about the neuroscience of numbing and dissociation i'm going to add a couple components this is comes from some of the studies of ruthlanius she did some neuroimaging studies and the side you know for years honestly i've done workshops for vessel for years and years and years at his trauma center around the neurobiology of ptsd as it relates to hyperarousal for years we knew about the neurobiology of sympathetic activation that's all of what we were looking at now thankfully thanks to people like steven porges and ruthlanius we can um and joe ladue which i'll talk about in a minute we can look at the other side now from a neurophysiological perspective and one of the things that the some of the neuro imaging studies really looking at people who were blunted numbed out and disconnected is that the neuroimaging studies show they had high cognitive suppression so very high capacity to suppress and it was a top-down suppression meaning we shut things down from the top down shut down thoughts shut down emotion shut down physical sensations so there's this top-down suppression that creates the state of numbing that creates the state of dissociation and disconnection joe ladue's work shows us there's a part of the brain called the amygdala it's kind of our emotional center in a way when things are emotionally significant they go unconsciously and quickly to the amygdala and of course more slowly to the prefrontal cortex but in those extreme examples that janina was talking about the amygdala activates a certain part of the brain called the ventral striatum and you don't have to memorize any of these terms people that's not the point here the point is under that extreme condition beyond fight and flight in the numbing submit the ventral striatum gets activated and activates the escape avoidance pathway within our bodies so there's a brain thing that happens there's a body thing that happens that says holy crap this is life-threatening this is super dangerous stephen poor just talks about that dorsal branch activation that numbs and shuts everything out so i wanted people to just know a little bit that there's science behind this that this is not just theory anymore we really know the science behind numbing and dissociation which is very helpful this little chart is a chart that you would find in in this book transcending trauma and i just want to point out kind of the steps that i go through when somebody's numb okay what i do as an ifs therapist and what i do now since i no longer get pissed off and frustrated when somebody gets numb like i talked about in the beginning right oh my god i used to get so frustrated now i could really be with hypo hypoarousal with emotional numbing in a very different way janina says wow how wonderful they can do this wow i know there's a really good reason for this so i have a lot of compassion for this now what i do is i'm noticing the energy of my client is that energy high is that energy low what energy is coming at me not the words the energy right really important distinction and then i'm going to assess how shut down are they can they move their body their fingers can they breathe can they look at me how shut down are they are they able to hear me can they feel anything so i do a little assessment can you wiggle your fingers are you able to feel anything can you hear me speaking when people are so shut down they are disconnected totally so i'll do a little assessment to see how shut down no pressure just an assessment then i check in with my parts am i clean am i clear am i okay am i relaxed and open because the more i push shut down the more shutdown the client will get pushing makes it worse the other thing i'll say with this shutdown is empathy tends to be more useful than compassion interestingly enough and janina has heard me talk about these distinctions between empathy and compassion when we're empathic we're warm and fuzzy and we're resonating with emotion and that's more useful for clients who are shut down if we stay too cognitive or too distant it can feel distancing for them so i tend to be warm and fuzzy not pushy when my clients are hypoaroused or shut down i want to join them in feeling i want to help from the bottom up then be able to help bring their systems back online so empathy not pushing us important distinction is super important when somebody is numb i'm here with you i care i'm going to be here for as long as it takes no pressure and i want them to feel my warmth i want them to feel my heart okay the last thing i'll say is if they're really in that shutdown space it's really disconnected there's no access to any prefrontal cortex as janina talked about no access access to self energy we do this thing in ifs called direct access my parts will talk to their shutdown part wow something really big is going on here you're really struggling i'm sure there's a really good reason for it tell me more i'm really curious to hear so i'll engage in a discussion directly with that numbed out part knowing it's there for a reason there's a really important reason why it's doing it and i'm curious to get to know it a little bit better so i just want to share with you some of the steps to give you some practical steps around how we may manage or how i may manage this whole shutdown disconnection hypoarousal space and frank can i add one other little practical please said because sometimes when when the client is shut down completely and can't respond in any way right so we're trying direct access you know with the shutdown part but nobody's nobody's home um that's right what i do is i say can you nod your head for yes and shake your head for no yeah um because if they're able to and remember babies can do that right okay babies can go no yeah um so it's such a primitive um movement that often those shutdown parts can nod and shake their heads and then i just ask a series of yes no questions and that seems to somehow unlock the the shutdown yeah yeah that's that but so thank you janina for mentioning that piece that's really print basic yes no bottom up it's a bottom up you know it's that we're trying to bring the system back online from the bottom up and some peop some clients aren't even capable of doing that right if they're really disconnected then we're there to hold that space and i often will see janina is when there's total shutdown in that way eventually there's just a little something happens in the body like it shifts and then they're bought they be big beginning of them coming back online i had this very cool example once of a client who got in a total shame freeze frozen disconnect response we were talking i asked the part not to overwhelm and boom it took over she was totally immobile she couldn't hear she couldn't see eventually she moved to pinkie which is really fascinating and then she was able to move this whole hand and i was just really empathically present with her we're not pushing at all knowing that hypoarousal is more physiologically dangerous to the organism than hyperarousal is eventually she was able to fully move her body open her eyes talk to me she came back interestingly enough janina her part the little girl was still frozen in the bedroom back in her history it was fascinating i had never seen that before and so then i had my client go into that room where that little girl was frozen in her bedroom and do that same loving unblending unfreezing unthawing ish um sequencing with her client she's like she can move her finger now she's moving her hands she's moving all around she's smiling she can feel so it's really a fascinating my client system got totally numbed out how i helped her with my self-energy helped her come back online and then beautifully she was able to help her part inside who was also frozen come back online it was it was very impactful and really a powerful moment for me to be able to see how serious and important and dangerous it can feel yeah and how we're capable of helping them kind of get out of those states yeah well i wonder let's why don't we take a couple more questions and then we'll go back does that make sense yeah all right great okay wonderful um again people continue to comment about how wonderful this is and and really appreciating the camaraderie and friendship between the two of you um and the simplicity of some of the things that you're talking about frank with your with trauma and love a lot of people resonated with that that was wonderful um again one of the overwhelming questions here is uh you know from through the lens of trauma how how would you explain um clients who kind of who kind of go back and forth and shift between hyper arousal and then being dissociative and shutting down i know we're only talking about kind of one end of that spectrum but can you speak a little bit to when people are shifting between the two beautiful questions yeah janina you want to start there and then i'll pick up i mean i think there are two ways to understand it one is that again it tells us how the client survived right because often that sympathetic arousal is dangerous for the child who isn't supposed to move who isn't supposed to speak who isn't supposed to register any emotion and so the body very quickly early in life even in infancy can learn as soon as their sympathetic activation the parasympathetic system um is automatically activated to shut it down we can also understand that as parts as as a you know angry or sympathetically activated part um who responds and then the num part responds to the activated part yes so say more about that frank yeah that's exactly right so and and i will say that the the switches between these parts can be very quickly can be very subtle and therapists can miss it all the time okay it can happen in a nanosecond so you know i have a i have a video of our mutual client that i show where i'm doing hyper arousal strategies when she's shifting between hyper and hypo different parts and i keep me doing the wrong strategy with the wrong energy you know and i'm like i love showing people how to mess up and what not to do because it really was it really and and actually she got more and more dysregulated and more and more dysphoric and more and more um stressed stressed for her because i was doing the wrong intervention but only in retrospect that i realized parts were shifting so quickly so she had a numbing part that wanted to numb out all the feelings related to a a traumatic loss in her life and she also had an anxious part that kept trying to get away by being anxious and getting away from the emotions and those parts were kind of at odds with each other they were kind of fighting each other and ifs we call that a polarity or a polarization so these parts were shifting back and forth very rapidly even too rapid for me to be able to track so in ifs and eventually i got i said i i said to her when i was able to oh wait a minute here which part wants to talk to me first so in ifs that's what we would do we'd say okay there's two parts here sometimes there's three or four two parts here right now which one wants to talk first i want to talk to both of them because i know they're both vying for position right here but which one can i talk to first knowing that each are going to get equal time and it really changed the trajectory of the whole session because these parts that were kind of jumping in interestingly enough for the same reason and they didn't know that the numbing part was protecting the same wound that the anxious part was protecting they were just doing it in physiologically opposite ways and when they when i talked to both sides and they saw that they're like oh wow they joined forces like we have a common goal you know so it can be really tricky when these parts are you know wendy d'andrea calls it mixed states different parts hyper and hypoarousal can almost coexist at the same time i'll say one other thing and then she need to go ahead this is very very common with clients who have did okay we're not talking about two parts we're talking about 25 parts or 30 parts so it becomes a whole different level same principle increased number of parts that are shifting and switching all over the place right go ahead janine you were going to say something and i think i think you're absolutely right that that ex those extreme shifts from hyper to hypo sympathetic to parasympathetic are more much much much more common in did clients and and the other thing is what i do is because you know my way of working is more about having the client access the part is i help the client notice that these parts are in conflict wow there's a real struggle going on inside you can you notice because you know the noticing brain to me holds a lot of self energy that observer self that we all have um so i want i want the client to notice the struggle not just the parts notice the struggle yeah yeah exactly that's exactly right and you know um what'd they say about that yeah i think that's a i think that's totally true if they can it's great and if they can i'll try and help them out i guess that's the piece that i was going to say because sometimes they can we'd much rather have them do it than us that's for sure that makes sense that makes sense another question i'm sorry that's okay i'll just do a quick one here a couple people from the last segment were asking um the first one was what is the name of the study that you referenced frank about the rheumatoid arthritis and ifs um you can either if you know it now go ahead and say otherwise you can email it and we'll share it and then the book that you referenced janina uh was it scare was the last name if you could repeat that some some attendees were really looking to find those okay uh so do you want to reference this sure so the the nancy sowell and nancy shattuck are are the first first and nancy shattuck and nancy sowell are the first and second authors on this paper it was in the journal of rheumatoid arthritis and it's about ifs for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis it can be found on the ifs foundation website so instead of people searching for the journals on google you can certainly do it that way um ifsfoundation.org is a not-for-profit organization and in the research section they'll there's a tab that posts the um that study for um rheumatoid arthritis um and the robert scares last name is spelled s-c-a-e-r and his book is called the body bears the burden thank you appreciate that a lot of people will as well um did you want me to do one more did you want to carry on sure you could do you could do one more and then we'll jump back in okay that sounds great um we talked a little bit about comorbidity um and one of the questions that's coming up is how do you kind of clinically differentiate between numbness um as related to trauma and numbness as related to something like depression um where some of that numbness or the anedonia or however you want to describe the clinical presentation how do you kind of differentiate between those two that's a great great question too these are great questions by the way they are i i have to say just i just want to say i'm having so much fun here this is really great i love spending time with janina so it's super fun and i'm really i'm really grateful to all these questions because they're really people are being very thoughtful and i just love these questions so i'll just say a little bit about the way i go around differentiating them from the ifs perspective and from i'm going to say from an md perspective if you will so i bring a little bit of my emptiness in here which i rarely do anymore these days but um so from my from the from the ifs perspective both are parts whether it's a part that holds depression or a part that holds trauma so we're still looking at them as parts okay um is it the depressed part is it a portion of the part that holds depression is it a trauma response of numbing and disconnection is it a portion of a part so i'm always looking at what percentage of what's showing up is part related or emotionally rooted and then i'm always trying to differentiate how much of it is biological how much of it has to do with low serotonin how much it has to do with genetic passing down from family members so for me this differentiation is real mind-body medicine not just in theory and interestingly enough parts are great at sharing information parts will say 80 of it's us and we're just really numb because we need to get away from this pain but that 20 it's not us we're not doing it we want help with that 20 so for me when i start having those discussions there's a they can help differentiate what percentage is biological and what percentage is emotional sometimes it's all emotional and all biological rarely though in my experience it's usually a percentage of both and the last thing i'll say about this when i'm sussing out biology is the biological effects usually affects all parts not just the anxious part of the biological or that you know the press part so all parts say yeah we don't like that numbness it affects the whole system so that's another way i differentiate it so i'll just share that and certainly hear what janina has to say about that too i mean when i you know when i think about i mean again there are so many different kinds of depression right made major depression quote unquote has many different causes from situational to biological to to what i would cons to trauma related right because the symptoms of major depression are among the most common symptoms of of trauma so like frank i assume that it's best to treat depression as a part regardless of its cause i actually find it helps people even to relate to their biological depression to understand it as a part um depressed parts are more often in my experience hopeless than numb right they've got feeling they've got low feelings right they feel hopeless despairing depressed um right they have terrible problems with self-doubt and not self-hatred i think of that as a different apart that hates the other parts um but that low self-esteem that goes with depression in in my mind depression is not the same as numbing i just had a little bit of a light bulb moment there that i want to share is listening to you it's really interesting because so i like what you're saying when you're talking about depression as a feeling and for me that is when it's related to parts yeah okay because i also think of depression as this neural vegetative symptoms of depression which are the biological component you know i mean so that's a distinction for me i was like oh wow like when there's a an emotion attached it may be parts related and when there's symptoms attached i can't drink i can't sleep i have trouble concentrating i'm not eating well i'm hopeful you know all those neural vegetative signs are more biologically rooted or biologically based so that's another nice for me distinction um between that biology and in part a lot of sense yeah that makes a lot of sense and i really one thing that i love about ifs i've been learning in the last couple years is how um non-pathologizing it is um just in approach and so excuse me janino when you mentioned you know the depression however you frame it is is always a part you know even if it's biological even if it's you know it kind of i love that the essence of ifs which allows you to step away from it and just see it as part of the picture you know so to speak um rather than because i think with depressed clients it's very difficult to get them to unhook from their depression um and you know people who are just horrendously and chronically depressed just it becomes their identity it becomes you know all their it consumes them you know and i love that idea of being able to kind of unhook a little bit um not a clinical term by any means of course but just just interesting so all right i'll hop off all right let's go and and i'll just i'm just gonna it is an ifs issue for sure this whole idea of um the positive non-pathological approach and just saying i've been knowing this woman for many many years and one of the reasons that she's become one of these parts trauma dissociative icons in the field is because for years right in the front of the beginning she had a loving positive approach to all parts like i just you that's just been inherent in your work janina from the beginning is loving up all those symptoms because that's why you were doing the work when nobody else was doing it because everybody was getting pissed calling people borderlines and being really mad at them and janina in her loving beautiful voice mothering ways like i think it's lovely let's learn more you know what i mean well you and i we heard that for sure it's true it's true and it's a game changer it's really a game changer all right so i want to talk a little bit more here and i realized well and then we'll see if we can end up in a couple more questions for the end because the questions are really really great i just want to talk about the complexity of systems for a little bit so this is a little bit more as we move into this numbing avoidance space into the did dissociation realm a little bit more because that's the that is something that janine and i really both have spent so much time in our careers in working with this popular this this um this side of that population i feel like janina like you and i have been working with the most traumatized for a really really long time so we're very comfortable and familiar with these very severely traumatized complex systems um so and yeah i just want to just name that and i one of the things i just like to do is group these complicated systems to make it a little bit more easy to understand that that's there's often a series of extreme parts and there could be five six seven the suicidal the cutting the numbing and not to get so overwhelmed by them but to just i think about this is like parts mapping how many extreme parts are in a certain system and how many parts are there to kind of run day-to-day life a lot of functional parts within every system there's extreme parts and there's functional parts within every system and then which parts are underneath that are holding the pain that are holding the trauma either singularly or multiple traumas in there and to just normalize those extreme parts there's parts that run life and they're all there to protect these wounds which we're here to which we're here to help our clients with so i just want to name don't get freaked out don't get overwhelmed just kind of get a mapping mapping of these systems because they're in there and you get that curiosity towards them the other piece i want to mention which janina referenced earlier and i made a bit reference is sell this thing we call self-energy and ifx and the thing this diagram depicts what kind of access really is i call this my container theory okay and the more trauma that somebody experiences the more parts they have to protect they have tons and tons and tons of parts that need to show up for survival sake to protect and in the container of the human body there's so much space and when there's a lot of trauma and parts are predominantly taking up the space there's very little space left for self so access to self is little or minimal at best and this is in our more severely traumatized clients what we see parts parts parts parts parts parts parts where is the south where is the cell in contrast to someone who may have experienced the less traumatic whoops we seem to have lost frank momentarily oh what a shame um hopefully he'll be back here soon he'll be back yeah yeah do you want to maybe take a question janina sure sure should be helpful while we receive coming back online [Music] one that came up that i think is just really pertinent right now is trauma related to um covid and the situation that we're in currently symptoms struggling with the pandemic that's ever changing everything's still am i back you are back yes okay oh my god that was so bizarre i was talking i'm like i'm here janina you're not and then i was like kate are you here and i was like oh crap it must be me i must have had a temporary shutdown sorry no worries no i'm i'm just gonna finish this question and then you can beautiful beautiful killing time while you got back on right yes we're talking about covet and the ongoing um trauma that a lot of people are experiencing um and how we're continuing to adapt and change and shift um what are your thoughts on that yeah you wanna you since go ahead janine we could both spend the next the entire ten minutes talking you know covid is a traumatic threat it is a nationwide worldwide traumatic threat and and of course we're all having trauma responses whether it's trauma responses to being isolated and less engaged in life whether it's trauma responses related to feeling threatened or to wearing a mask or to getting a vaccine or to not getting a vaccine okay um so i think i mean and i think it's incredibly triggering don't you agree frank totally totally yeah it's i mean what i would say to janina is and you know that peop the world is now experiencing what we've been working with for most of our careers right you know and that everybody all of us are experiencing a global trauma you know and the thing that's been fascinating for me and i say this not in this cool kind of way and it's just so similar to me for september 11th of the boston bombing any kind of big events like this is not only are the therapists experiencing it and then need to be helping their clients so how do you experience the trauma and then help somebody else experience a travel which is very triggering and activating for a lot of people it brings up so many hidden and unconscious traumas that were buried that's another level people are just layers and layers of trauma are showing up that they weren't aware of isolation for example being locked in the house brings up so many holocaust transgenerational issues for example this is why mental health is at a crisis right now because everybody's traumatized and everybody's re-experiencing past and present traumas so i want to just name that and the last thing i don't know without knowing you're not smelling exactly exactly and then the last thing for me is watching the different phases and waves of trauma there was the initial shock then there was oh this will be over in the summer then there was numbing fatigue people everybody were doing these zoom calls and cocktail parties and then they got so numbed out as we're talking about and overwhelmed they shut down and there were no more zoom parties so we're seeing the faces oh wait hope when uh vaccine will come oh no it's not for another three months like we're watching the phases we're living and experiencing the phases right in real time which i think is going to be profound for all of us for years to come absolutely yeah yeah all right so let me i'm gonna continue carry on and then we'll finish up here um so i wanted to just name this issue of self-energy that we talked about a little earlier and i'm talking about the access to it well depending on the degree of trauma um it's in my view the self is always there we're born with it it may just be an issue of accessing it clients will often say i'm empty i'm broken i have no self i respectfully say we can agree to disagree i know it's in there i know you have it you might not have access to it i can help you access it when we are with those protective parts that are so powerfully protecting you so i want to just name that the last thing i'll name about self energy again which is a state of being an essence within all of us is in my experience the self never endures trauma there's a self is protected from trauma i've never really heard the self endure trauma it's the poor parts that were left behind who endure the trauma so there is a chasm that gets created between self and parts when genina was talking about parts not liking the self often times they hate good feelings or they hate loving feelings because parts parts can say you left me with uncle john you left me behind to endure the trauma now we know self isn't doing this on purpose it's the parts experience but we also know or i my experience is that self is preserved and for me that's kind of a beautiful thing everybody's essence is always preserved in trauma and that's the place we're going to help people gain access to again through the healing i don't know if you want to say anything about that my theory about that is that because the prefrontal cortex shuts down when we're under threat it it it's kind of gives the self some protection right so itself goes offline yeah and the parts and the body endure the trauma yeah exactly yeah feel the same way all right so this slide just quickly we talked about neglect a little bit already i do have a whole course on neglect you know neglect is a whole thing in and of itself the piece i want to talk about is neglect is often rooted in this hypo numbing side of things not only and always and interestingly enough since it is this top-down shutdown i see a lot of my highly intellectualized clients who have issues rooted in wounds of neglect so i just want people to be thinking about that you know the thinking and figuring out and understanding fills the void of emptiness and absence often time and these people these people excuse me i think janina and i were one of them i mean i was one of those highly intellectualized clients who didn't have access to my you know to what to my emotions underneath so a lot of our highly intellectualized clients can have not only have histories of neglect underneath and they also really struggle with loss and letting go if i let go if i lose i will have nothing you know as ellie viselle says the opposite of love is not hate it's indifference it's the absence of that is so powerful and so profound and so why those numbing parts need to shut that down because it's often really quite intolerable and i'll leave this left with this last slide and this is just some things i've collected and noticed over the years of working with clients who struggle with severe trauma and have did numbers of parts many of them extreme they have many self-like parts we call in ifs very high functioning parts that learn how to maneuver in the world while inside they've endured horrific trauma so they have many high functioning parts of themselves that act as if to function and manage many conflicts many polarizations parts form collude with each other live form alliances not against anybody else all in the service of protection they hide they can exaggerate they can be dishonest only to help and protect there's often crises that happen crisis-driven systems oftentimes parts can be represented symbolically in severe trauma they can show up as a a cat or a cave or a black box or a yellow sun that they show up in inanimate forms and the more you get to know them the more they evolve into human form so i wanted to share that there's often this rapid eye movement with a lot of clients with the id we see it over and over again and sometimes i say oh my goodness are they doing the emdr because they're moving you know i think they're just part part part part part part but it's something that's very common i just wanted to share with people and again this issue of hating the self you know because from their perspective self betrayed them or self is dangerous because every time self showed up the perpetrator would attack so from parts perspective self is not such a warm fuzzy thing and again it's not easily accessible so i think i'm going to stop there um maybe can i add one thing beautiful please do yes that there are numerous studies that show that did is widely under diagnosed and a whole series of studies by marilyn corsica in canada showing that clients with borderline personality that one-third of clients with borderline personality disorder have symptoms dissociative symptoms that would merit a diagnosis of d.i.d so if you have borderline clients who have that list of very difficult qualities frank just shared be be suspicious could this be a client with the id yeah absolutely let's answer some questions yeah we'll answer a couple questions but okay what i've heard from linda over at pessi is that we can go over if we want to so we don't have to we can we can answer a couple more questions absolutely yeah absolutely and for those of you who need to jump off for one reason or another you will have a recording of all of this um probably within the next 24 to 48 hours it should be in your account so no worries if you need to jump off but we definitely want to continue because we have some really wonderful questions um one that i just think is so important um a lot of people are asking and voting on um talking about the epigenetic trauma responses particularly for clients of color um who are perhaps trained for lack of a better word not to show emotions due to societal risks or things like that how do you navigate that when there's when there's these these other factors [Music] wow i mean uh that's such a i'll start well you want to start you want me to start whichever happens okay i'll start like wow that's an awesome question and yeah this that's so so important and you know i just want to say i'm so excited we're getting more air time on this stuff finally finally finally it's becoming an actual thing because it's been around forever and ever and ever you know um um what's her name um i'll think of her name in a minute um has done some really important work on the epigenetic transmission of trauma well rachel hey rachel yehuda rachel yahooda is one of the people who's done a lot of studies on the there is a real epigenetic transmission of trauma so we can certainly pass down trauma genetically i think there's 126 genes known to date in the transmission of ptsd they're shown they're trans they're transmitted by sperm and by eggs this is not just the mothers like mothers are blamed for everything but men and women fathers and mothers can pass down ptsd to offspring without the offspring ever having trauma that comes through family lineage and and and we're talking about cultural trauma here too we're talking about what gets passed down through family you know with the bipoc community with women with any marginalized community with latinx community all of these things are transmitted through family heritage and lineage and through culture whatever culture we live in we are being traumatized chronically in this way and it gets passed down through generations so for me thank goodness this is finally getting notice and recognition because we can the other the real good news here is it's reversible the studies are showing suomi ed sumi who was at bessel's trauma conference several times shows the reversibility of these epigenetic transmissions but if we don't acknowledge them we can't reverse them so the fact that they're being acknowledged is hugely important to me and yes there's something we could do about it it's not that we just have to take it but when it goes down for generations and generations and generations ifs has a way of what we call healing legacy burdens pat and it goes through the generations to get healed okay so i'm think thanks so glad that somebody brought that up and it's a big problem it's getting acknowledgement finally and there's a solution to it so i would say there's hope along the way go ahead janina absolutely and and so i think it's actually helpful to clients to talk about i call it the intergenerational legacy of slavery which has been the legacy for the african-american community um the multi-generational legacy of the diaspora which is the legacy carried by the jewish community and it is so much more helpful if we can acknowledge and we can acknowledge that in the african-american community numbing and dissociation are adaptive responses when it's necessary to submit to keep yourself safe total yeah right beautifully said yeah continue yeah so it's it this isn't an area that is of great interest to me and uh and i hope to be doing a series um with my good friends deborah chapman finley and lisa perez on implicit bias and racial trauma in the next year or so i hope that you will i think the more we can get this on the forefront of the mental health field the better you know um yeah it's so important um i'm trying to think of another good question yeah one let's find one more here one more there you go sure sure let's see um a few people asked about um clinician emotional numbness um our our voting system isn't perfect in here so but i am seeing some questions that are similar so i'm gonna go with this one um clinician emotional numbness um due to vicarious trauma um a couple people acknowledge that doing this work they start to feel very numb and almost um depersonalizing isn't the right word but it just doesn't affect them the way it used to compartmentalize or kind of compartmentalizing things and whereas others are talking about being more numb um can you talk a little bit about that i mean you both have shared your own experiences as a clinician um when when the people who are out here learning from you when they're experiencing their own emotional numbness what do you say or recommend or what are your thoughts on that well you know i actually think that that is a result of the belief and which was part of my training that the therapist has to go there with the client that we have to go to that that place of horror pain overwhelm and i think that that's actually not helpful to the client yeah and it's not helpful to us because it's if the client is having a trauma response and an overwhelming memory that client needs the therapist to be centered right to be to be calm i mean again it doesn't mean that we don't have feelings for the client but the client needs us to stay centered many clients have said it does me no good when the therapist is horrified by what i've been through right right so so i actually think therapists should learn how to use a little bit of depersonalization a little numbing conscious numbing in order to give ourselves the space so that we can be in relationship to the client and the memory but not overwhelmed by it because it's the chronic experience of being overwhelmed that's going to get our bodies to start going them right right can i imagine if you're doing ongoing trauma work you know um you're you're hearing and witnessing and you know just such horrific things throughout the day and people who are really in a lot of pain you know and and i think there's something to your point there of you know you don't have to join it every time it doesn't have to be you know doesn't have to envelop you every time sorry frank i interrupted you yeah no no totally i love what you're saying janine and you know i just used slightly different phraseology but it's the same thing like i when and i agree it's not good to be in it with our clients too much that's empathy we're feeling too much and we will get overwhelmed and burn out so there's studies that show empathic distress causes burnout and leads to burnout and what i would say is when numbing shows up it's a part jumping in that's saying hey you're too involved here so i love janine's conscious numbing right like if you're if you start noticing that you're numbing out a part saying too much here too much here so pay attention and listen and then learn that appropriate space to hold the space without joining too much so i'd rather have someone be with from self than be with because a numbing part jumps in to take care of the therapist so it's going to happen it's inevitable and if you're conscious of it it's information that you need to either see less clients excuse me do less hours of zoom because zoom is physiologically numbing in and of itself right so is this numbing from zoom is this zoom numbing or is this a part saying too much here right so for me i always get curious when that shows up because you can hold the space dick used to say it's like he's like i love doing therapy i can sit here for hours doing it i'm like well what are you on man this is hard for me right but he was talking about doing therapy as much as possible from self energy right because that's sustainable if any parts show up like a numbing part get curious about it and what needs to shift within you to be able to be open instead of numb numbers is a warning signal for sure right and and i will have one other thing which is my my rule for avoiding vicarious traumatization if the therapist is getting overwhelmed the client is ten times more overwhelmed yeah and so that's a sign if i start to feel overwhelmed that's a sign we have to slow down we have to bite size it we have to pace it we have to bring in more self energy to to use the ifs uh language um and it's good for us and it's good for our clients you got it nobody benefits from reliving nobody benefits from reliving trauma yes nobody benefit right reenactment is not therapeutic reliving is not therapeutic so if we're feeling it i love what janine is saying they're feeling 10 times more absolutely absolutely well thank you everyone thank you janina thank you kate absolutely great yes so fun and just thank everyone else everyone out there thank you so much for joining us today thank you for being part of this web of healing and helping uh people overcome trauma so thanks for listening um our books are available i believe that there's a discount or some did you form anything about that kate for people so they know about that if they're interested yes absolutely um both of your books we have a pro promotion going on amazon um the link is in the chat it's also at the end of the handouts um the last slide um and i will ask the pesky team here to put it in the chat one more time and it will give you an additional 10 off of the the lowest amazon price for both of your books so yes which i highly recommend both of them not only because they're pressy books but because they're fantastic books and part of our mission is to get the right information into people who need it to help others so here it is um myth uh yes looks like he's putting something up too so perfect cool thank you both so much thank you so much yeah absolutely you

Channel: PESI Inc

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Id: tCRJ24V2LC8

Length: 103min 12sec (6192 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021