Childhood Trauma, Psychedelics & EMDR | Dr Bessel van der Kolk

[Music] well i sometimes think that our biggest problem that we face the biggest legacy issue is that for over 100 years we've called these things mental health problems and i slightly wonder as i've explored your work and your colleagues work if this is a kind of misnomer this is something we say because we don't have anything better to say because we didn't yet understand the problem because the more and more we talk about this the more it becomes apparent that the things that we categorize as mental health problems like anxiety or depression i mean take for example the guy running from the lion are rooted in the physiology they're rooted in the neurobiology the anatomy and if we had framed these things from the beginning as a an imbalance in if you like the communication between different parts of the brain i wonder if we would be so confused at this point and i wonder if it would have been so difficult for pioneers such as yourself bring this word forward yeah you know i'm not critical about it because you know humans are incredibly complex and we can only talk about it as a neurological problem once we know a little bit about neurology what people don't realize is that 30 years ago trauma was not on the map when we created the diagnosis of ptsd 1980 we said this is an extraordinary event outside the ordinary realm of human experience that was our definition in 1980 and then we start looking at it and we go like there's trauma everywhere and what is astounding is we have been blind to domestic violence we had been blind to incest we had blind to child abuse we just didn't see it now here are people who are working with people who are upset and nobody asked about did anybody beat you up did anybody rape you it did not exist the textbooks of psychology and psychiatry had no talk about rape incest domestic violence like we were so blind you know and then uh so this field is 40 years old okay and then somebody finds out that doing cognitive behavioral treatment makes people 10 percent better and they say oh we have found the treatment of choice and everybody should do cbt no that's the first little thing that appears to make a little bit of difference we are very young and we don't know anything and maybe a little bit of cbt might be helpful but it doesn't solve the problem and then we learned about neurobiology and people say oh it's an olympic system yeah but then we learn 10 years later we learn something else and we learn about the how the vagus nerve works and then people say oh the vegas nerve everything now we have the answer no because just above the vagus nerve there's all kind of other brain structures that still make it more complicated so we use the language that we have access to by the technology that happens to be available at that particular point and usually about about 10 years behind so we're already using the technology for uh have to use language that already is outdated by the time you formulate it well i mean you have thankfully for many of us including myself um the pioneering work that you've done and your colleagues has led to there being pockets of professionals who do understand this this formulation and it has increased and are attempting to provide treatments based on um this this deeper more causal formulation of the problem and you mentioned treatments that might work what uh what are you advocating at the moment what what would you recommend to people who are listening today who are resonating with your description the problem how how should we be addressing this for me the big window into the new world was emdr emdr is a crazy treatment you ask people to remember stuff you don't have to talk about it and you ask them to move their fingers eyes from side to side and follow your fingers bizarre and like everybody else i said don't do that that's crazy stuff and then you know i get to see that it works and we do the first study funded by nih on how well emdr works and it works spectacularly well to deal with trauma and i go like wow that's interesting you do this weird thing eye movements that doesn't fit with any of the paradigms we have and you bring about dramatic changes in people so for me this was like oh so bizarre things may work and then people say oh i benefit from yoga doing for my trauma and i go like really bring your butt up in the air and twisting your your body into a pretzel is helpful for dealing with old stuff and you know being a little weird guy i i like to explore these these weird things go to an image always six times because you always get rejected the first five times so it's very labor intensive and the last time we get a grant and it shows us that yoga has a more profound effect on trauma than any drug that people have ever studied and so when you ask me what do you think is the best treatment i got no we're on a journey we're in a journey of discovery and let's see what works for you and let's explore what works and let's not say i have found the answer and then a very important thing that i also learned is that we talk usually talk about people as a unitary self and then dick schwartz amplifies something that earlier people like janae and jung has obviously but becomes very popular now because these things have always been said before and he said we have multiple parts and in order to protect ourselves from feeling so horrible and helpless we develop defense mechanisms so we become very controlling and uptight and that becomes our character structure in order to keep that terrified frightened part of me under control and then when i can come control it any longer i can feel completely out of control and this person who's always uptight and careful suddenly starts drinking or taking cocaine and we call it a firefighter when the whole system breaks apart there's something else jumps in to keep you under control and you start understanding that people do what they can in order to survive feeling completely disintegrated and then you get to see that oh some people cut themselves in order to stay under control and i go that's interesting for some people cutting seems to be a helpful way of coping the long range is probably not so great other people find that starving myself gives me more sense of control and people say to these people who starve themselves you you better eat if you don't want to die you have to eat but they don't understand that this learning to not eat started off as a self-preservative way of surviving whatever they try to survive and so that you get to see that a lot of weird things that people do are in essence self-protective ways of desperately trying to not succumb to complete helplessness and so you get to see how complex people's adaptations are and to help people to respect people for whatever complex adaptations you have i say i wish you wouldn't kill people in order to survive and let's try to do something about it but this rage that you have where does it come from where does it did this weight start and then when you and then the critical element and that is something i feel quite strongly about it and i'd be surprised that i would change my mind about it before i croak and that the critical issue is the development of self-compassion for that creature that you inhabit and to really get to understand like i developed these habits and these coping mechanisms in an attempt to to desperately stay in control for myself yeah i think that it's one of the one of the most helpful ideas that people i see in treatment take on is when we move from this delusion that we are just one entity as i was saying before i have this kind of dialogue with benjamin but really the model that i sometimes think of is the hung parliament which we had in great britain for a while over this brexit fiasco and it's really just you know it's a lot of people shouting agree with each other the british they need to come to a decision because as you said the brain's job is to move the body really like now speaking is moving my body i've got to come to a decision and a lot of the stress that i think people who've been fragmented by traumatic experiences uh even dramatic with a small t just you know the difficulties of life a a lack of nourishment in childhood don't call these things small t's okay i actually francine superior was the person who invented it i loved francine uh she died two years ago but you know being neglected by your mom and being ignored as a kid it's not a minor little thing you know every child has the birthright to be adored and when they see my grandchildren when they walk into a room everybody goes like oh my god isn't she cute and i think that is what kids need and that's normal and we are wired for it to be adored as kids but if as the number of people i've tweeted if they say oh i tried to abort you as a kid because i knew what a terrible kid you were that is a drama and that becomes your identity that's not a minor little thing man that's huge yeah i agree and i you know i think that one of the difficulties with this field is the word trauma has begun to be banded about left right and center it almost becomes a marketing tool for a lot of yeah in this industry and people don't really understand what it means uh you know to me i don't particularly like those distinctions but i try and help people who want to say well i've never been in a car crash i've never been to war so i don't have any trauma really i think anyone who's had an unfinished reaction to something anyone who's got an invisible lion round the corner um has experienced what we could define as trauma and peter levine's catch phrase i think was trauma is in the body not in the event which i think that's right um so you know we can end up with these fragmented parts this kind of rowdy uh hung parliament and i i think it's one of the most important ideas to take on i sometimes say to people well you're familiar with this because you'll say you'll go to work and you'll sit down with a colleague and you'll say oh you know part of me really wanted to stay in bed this morning and so we know this it's part of our language but we we kind of think we don't know we think it only applies to people who are massively i don't know schizophrenic or borderline personality disorder or or i did dissociative identity disorder or something but it's not i think it's a part of all of us and i think you're right schwartz's work and janina fisher with with the similar workers has shown us in our field how important it is to layer these integrations from working with the brain into the cognitive into the executive and and so on and i suspect that's why your answer to the question well you know what you do about this is it's quite manifold it's quite complicated yeah you know it comes up all the time you know i was recently talking with uh eventzler who the author of the vagina monologues and other things her name is now v and i love her and i love the work that she does and she has gone through a long trajectory and at the end says i've done that treatment i've done that we've had that tweeted and then she says at the end what was most helpful for me was iwaska ayahuasca and i go see that was your path and the next person who i meet i have another friend maybe i won't mention the name of the pretty public the person who taught me neurofeedback also had a horrendous uh traumatic background and for her neurofeedback was the best answer and i know other people who did resolve most stuff is emdr um you came to one of my or one of more of my psychodrama um workshops for me my own psychodrama experience was extremely powerful did it change everything no it's a very powerful component of my own journey and so i think it's true in your journey also benjamin is that we take one piece at the time and we grow and it's not like oh my god i found the answer it's not like we're not a religion it's not like the moment you you find that particular religion that you'll go to heaven you take care of pieces of ordin yourself basically yeah i think that's definitely true and one of the things that you know a theme in what you're talking about actually is it's kind of innovation it's one of the things i notice in your book is that there's a lot of references to things like brain scans and emdr often uses equipment neuro feedback is very much a computer-based piece of equipment this whole field would be totally different without the equipment to do brain scanning but there's another side to innovation that's emerging which i think is fascinating which is this this is research that you're doing into using substances as an therapy uh and i wonder if there's anything you can tell us about where you think the field is going i mean we've talked about the last 30 years and particularly last five or ten years what do the next five to ten years look like well you know we are creatures of fashion and we go for one new thing after another we abandon all things like i studied the history of trauma very carefully and the way the early people treated trauma was for hypnosis and i've read numerous case histories of people really getting cured with hypnosis today nobody does hypnosis anymore so things come and go and then when i was a college student i lived in a psychedelic world and like every good college student who went to school in the 60s i took lsd and mushrooms as did every one of my colleagues and friends who have become a major scientist and when they ask my friends what effect do you think does the psychedelics have had on you on your who you are today every one of my friends says you know the psychedelics were profound important for my who i became because as a scientist i needed to see that the universe is much larger than the universe that contains me and lsd helped me to see that there is lots of things we don't know and it's helped me to explore that and so but big dublin and michael midhoffer started to explore psychedelics uh i warned them i said you know people who i know who did this stuff have gone to jail and they're never worked so they said i said to them don't do it and they say thank you very much for your opinion and they did it and they really are showing something that doesn't surprise me a bit if you psychic psychedelic agents very carefully on the very controlled conditions and i can't say that enough because i found a laboratory that does that right now um it needs to be extremely careful then when you take these drugs you you live in a different mind and you see yourself in a different way and you feel oftentimes calm particularly if you have really good therapy around you you can explore yourself in which you have never explored yourself and you know i've i i'm the spokesperson for maps right now so i can't and they told me specifically until the paper gets published i we don't like you to tell the specific results yet so i won't do that but it had extremely good results like extremely good results and it was also very surprising to me how in the 12 sites around the u.s in which the studies were conducted there was not a single serious adverse side effect and that i think is quite remarkable because playing around with these substances is not an innocent little thing i think you know every time you open up your mind to explore the dark recesses of pain and drama you really it's an act of great courage and and it is also potentially dangerous so it needs to be done extremely carefully but much to my delight the results are really outstanding that's amazing and is that the study with mdma that's mdma right how about this parallel studies going on with psilocybin um as far as nobody nobody's formally studying ayahuasca but certainly the anecdotes part of iowa's also very positive but again don't mess around with this uh i want to actually say something about it because ketamine is one of these substances also and ketamine is legal and so the moment it became legal people set up these clinics where you can go and get your ketamine and you can go home and you take academy i think this is a terrible thing in fact i have a friend who but it's very really hard time and he went to academy clinic to deal with his extreme depression and he went home and he killed himself and so this stuff should be done on the very careful protective circumstances you shouldn't do it by yourself you really should do it when people are around you to help you with all the stuff that comes up and that's makes perfect sense in the andes but people do ayubatsuka you don't say hey go take this take the stuff there's a whole ceremony about it and the ceremony is very important you

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 112,707

Keywords: besselvanderkolk, bessel van der kolk, stress, trauma, childhood, childhood trauma, self help, addiction, body keeps the score, creativity, emdr, sensitivity, selfhelp, imprint, psychotherapy, psychotherapist, psychology, neuroscience, traumatic, mind body connection, mindbodyconnection, bodykeepsthescore, beselvanderkolk, besel van der kolk, recovery, recover

Id: XIH5taudtH0

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021