Keynote Session: Teal Swan (Healing Root Trauma - The Surprising Effect of Going Into Pain)

please join me in welcoming the oh so amazing miss teal swan owner and founder of tli llc and headway foundation give it up [Applause] hi everyone okay so to begin this talk today i want to ask you to keep a really open mind because i'm going to take some of you out on a limb many of you will be familiar with some of the concepts which i'm going to be conveying to you today some of you will not so to start this i want i want you to imagine a scenario in this scenario i want you to imagine that somebody has broken their leg and they go into a hospital and the doctor comes and looks at this person and starts to inject novocaine all over the site that's the end of what they do maybe this gets worse maybe they even hand the person novocaine and they say take this home with you and anytime this starts to hurt just inject it by raise of hands how many of you are horrified by that idea here's the thing in the mental health field and in the emotional health field we do this all the time to people i mean all the time in fact this is the industry standard the industry standard is what i call novocaine relief it's not actually addressing the root trauma it's not actually creating healing and it's very important from my perspective that we differentiate between relief and actual healing now i'm all for people not being in pain i think most of you who are standing here today agree with me none of us want people to be in pain otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here right but the thing is is if we mistake pain relief for healing people won't actually get better in fact they're going to come back with more symptoms and more symptoms and more symptoms and many of you if you're familiar with a alternative health field understand that a symptom is really an indicator of something that is deeper pain i consider to be a symptom so pain is really pointing to something that is deeper most of this is trauma of course so before i start the rest of this conversation with you today i want you to become a little bit familiar with the idea that in alternative mental health we understand that the body is never against you so i know that this may be an uncomfortable concept for some of you but i want you to step out on a limb with me if the body is never against you then it means that anything that takes place in your body is in fact for you and i have a demonstration i have a demonstration as to how i can even prove this relative to symptoms that you could consider the most against you something like an autoimmune disease before i do this i probably need to to explain that in alternative mental health fields we like to understand that the body really is informed by the mind by the emotions so we're not just looking at mental health from the perspective of what's happening in the brain or what's happening in the body we understand that the emotions and the mind informs the body so with that in mind i want you to understand what creates autoimmune disorder all right so let's say that here we have an abusive relationship this is the abuser and in this abusive relationship there's either emotional or physical attacks that is that are happening so when this happens i want you to pay really close attention to what the other one does this is the one that's on the receiving end of the attack why didn't you clean your room what are you doing why are you just laying on bed all day you do nothing okay what okay did you notice this reaction so the minute he started attacking himself what happened here did you notice that there was a pullback one of the best ways to get somebody to stop attacking you is to attack yourself now when you're doing this on a mental and emotional level what are you telling your body to do to itself and this is not me standing here today and saying that there's no other physical element to autoimmune disorder but i want you to start to look at the emotional mental roots below it okay so let's talk let's talk about flashbacks now you've seen in this demonstration how the body is really never against you right no process that takes place inside of the body inside of the mind inside the emotion is actually against you this means there is no such thing as self-sabotage so let's talk triggers because that's the meat of what we're here to talk about today is trauma a trigger is essentially an emotional flashback now if we look at this through this lens if we look through this lens of the body and the mind is never doing anything against you then what might a flashback be for you guys can guess no interaction there we go okay yeah so a flashback is trying to call your attention to something that is unresolved that means it's for you right and a trigger is nothing more than an emotional flashback now i'm going to stand before you today and tell you that i'm shocked personally because in the mental health field we have the audacity to go in the exact opposite direction of it so when the body is calling us to be as present as we can be on an emotional and on a mental level to these triggers to the memories or the traumas that are unresolved underneath instead of actually follow and go with that calling from the body we go against it most of the techniques most of the methodology that you see in the mental and emotional health field it's basically like that it's let's figure out how we can take this trigger and make it so that we can take our attention off it let's see if we can take this trigger and diminish it so my suggestion today this is this revolutionary concept here is that you do the exact opposite that when the body is calling your attention to something that is unresolved instead of going away from the pain you go towards it when people are in this process of healing so often what we're teaching them is coping skills and in the mental health field the word to cope is seen as a positive thing but i'm going to put before you today the coping is a little bit more of a swear word when it comes to those of us who are chasing healing to cope by definition is to not change the stressor it's to put up with whatever the stressor is so for the rest of this conversation and maybe considering taking this opinion out the door with you today i want you to start to see coping as heading in the opposite direction of healing that's not to say that coping doesn't have a place right it's just we tend to put it in the wrong place right are so many people who need this deep root healing which means they actually have to change the stressor or the source of whatever pain is arising within them and coping takes them in the exact opposite direction speaking of coping out of interest how many of you by raise of hand have heard of dissociation well good all right for those of you that have never heard of this word i'm going to do like a very here's a surface the surface is in a dissociative state the consciousness or awareness of somebody is disconnecting in some way from the experience that they're having dissociation therefore is a coping skill it's a coping mechanism that the being itself has in the moment of trauma you feel like you can't actually resolve something and so you disconnect from it i'm going to share a really interesting perspective with you today it is my opinion that dissociation is not actually a byproduct of post-traumatic stress disorder but dissociation in fact causes post-traumatic stress disorder so let's look at the moment of trauma in the moment of trauma somebody gets into a position where they feel distressed without the capacity to resolve it they disconnect from the experience but what most people don't know is that a portion of them gets stuck there when a portion of you gets stuck in trauma this sets off a whole host of negative experiences for a person to make it really practical for you it sets a person on a path to try to recreate that trauma and this is not a conscious process this is a subconscious process so what you're looking at with somebody who has dissociated is that they're going to repeat that trauma in order to reverse this process you have to reverse the process of dissociation which is the premise of my work it is that in the moment of trauma when you're popping out and associating from the event you actually have to return to the event to re-experience the event but with your free will and this is not re-traumatizing because a person uses their free will in order specifically to go back into this event with the intention of creating some type of positive resolve you ready to talk about fragmentation [Music] you guys can come back i got to make use of this space okay stand behind me to begin with okay so dissociative states right we're talking about this thing that happens where you're essentially disconnecting your own consciousness from your physicality or from whatever experiencing that you're having this goes very far i want you to become comfortable with the concept that fragmentation is the primary coping mechanism for a physical human what do i mean by fragmentation first i want you to consider that consciousness does not actually originate in the brain that the brain is more like a computer where your consciousness goes through to in order to communicate with this physical time-space reality so it's like intermediary but consciousness itself is not limited the brain is not created by the brain i want you to think of consciousness more like a stream of water you know if you watch these rivers you can notice that they branch off right and when a river branches off one direction and then the other direction it's not like anything happens like harmful to the river it's not like if i was to come up to one of you with a knife and cut your body in half you can't really keep functioning but consciousness doesn't work that way it works more like water so it can fragment not only can it fragment it's going to fragment if you experience trauma which is distress without resolve it's going to split into parts and the splitting of consciousness i should say your awareness of the splitting of consciousness is where so much healing can take place and so much understanding of what processes are actually taking place on an emotional and mental level for a person i want to show you how fragmentation happens i'm going to use a like a simple example for you today all right so these people who are standing back here i want you to imagine that right now for the sake of this conversation they don't exist we're all one at this moment so we represent a united consciousness now i'm the one that you can see on the surface right when i walk up to you let's say i meet you later in this conference and i shake your hand i'm going to say hello my name is teal swan what's your name i'm not going to call myself by 17 different names i'm just going to use one name but the problem with this is that you're going to start to see me as a single thing which is not actually the truth of my consciousness it's not the truth of anyone's consciousness so i'm really hoping that in the future there's a push towards changing the understanding that we have of multiple personalities because i'm going to tell you that we all have multiple personality disorder i mean every single person walking the planet as an adult today has it the only point in which we call it a disorder in the mental health field is the point of which it starts to interfere with our day-to-day life and you see people you know flipping from one altar to the next or introducing themselves by multiple different names but many of you are already aware of these personalities you call them sides right you've got a friend who acts completely different when he's on the football field than when he's at home these different sides of people actually represent these different fragments within the psyche within consciousness itself so i'm going to show you how one of these splits happens and why fragmentation is the primary coping mechanism for a physical human i want you to imagine that i'm four years old and at four years old i encounter a trauma maybe we should experience what trauma is okay i have a different definition of trauma my definition of trauma for you is distress without resolution that means i get into a distressing event and i can't create any positive change so as to make it so that whatever i'm experiencing adds to my life experience instead of takes away from it now what happens when we start to look at trauma through this lens is that we understand that there's a lot more trauma in the world than what we would usually define as trauma here's what i mean by that trauma is actually being a seven-year-old child you're going to a birthday party where you get to see another kid get all the presents and for whatever reason it causes you to stress you don't understand why that kid is getting all the attention are some of you parents okay so if you don't understand why this other kid is getting all this attention and it creates distress within the system then that's actually trauma because they can't resolve it those feelings of jealousy get buried and they become something that's repeated in your adult life everyone has trauma i mean literally everyone if you were born in mainstream hospitals you have trauma so i want you to kind of adjust your mentality around what trauma is because we tend to only define trauma as the most extreme stuff you can experience stuff like i went through as a child you know you've got your abuse you've got human trafficking you've got a high-speed car accident you've got serious deaths within the family right now even if you don't have some of those what we would consider serious high-level traumas everyone has trauma everyone and that's why i'm saying everyone has fragmentation within their being so back to our example let's say that i am four years old and my dad leaves me at four years old i'm watching him drive down the street i have no idea why he left there's nobody who's sitting there with me and emotionally coaching me through the experience in fact mom is so messed up that there's no way that she can help me she's basically on the floor too and because dad left she has to get a full-time job so not only did i actually lose dad i lost mom now at this particular point in time the only way to actually cope with this experience is to split myself into two parts i'm going to split myself into the part of me that really needs dad and really needs mom and needs relationships the part of me that's really vulnerable and the opposite part i'm gonna split into the aspect of me that doesn't need people that probably has the attitude of go screw yourself why the hell would i get connected to anything else i mean i've already seen how that goes right this is what it looks like on the inside world okay this is the part of me that is vulnerable that needs mom and dad this is the part that doesn't which one's going to keep me safe you can point at it point exactly this is the one that's going to keep me safe so you see how i'm going to hold on to this this is what i'm doing on the level of my psyche i'm gonna hold on to this one this is the one that kept me safe in my childhood experience and therefore this is the one that's going to shine through as my personality so another little side note is i wish i could stand up here today and i could tell you that your personality is a genuine reflection of who you authentically are but it isn't your personality is an amalgamation of the aspects of you that kept you safe now because i'm identified over here this one is the one that's going to shine through my behaviors and my actions every day and my words and when you describe me to people you're going to describe me as a super independent person who doesn't really need anyone who's not real emotionally available right is it the truth of me you guys would have a conversation yeah it's not the full truth of me it's only partially the truth because there's also this part which i of course have see how i've turned my back on this one this is what we call the subconscious right this one has become an inhabitant of my subconscious awareness this one is actually impacting me every day but i don't have conscious awareness of it because it's not the one that keeps me safe right it's those moments where maybe i have a friend who's really close to me and for some reason this friend just doesn't show up on time and it revives all of this emotion you can grab me it revives all this emotion in me that's what this part is doing on the inside of you but see when i get into that mode i'm going to come pull towards this even further now these are two fragments right there you can think of them like containers i asked you to think of them like strings but now you can think of them like containers these containers both possess very real perspectives very real needs very real desires they both have a personal truth now this is going to start to be a living hell for me do you want to know why i hope some of you recognize yourself in this next example okay so what does the relationship inside look like i want to be close with you why because i feel alone and i just want someone to spend time with me yeah but i have so many things to do i'm so busy and i really just need some space right now but why can't you make time for me because i feel like i need some alone time so that i can make sure i can be okay to go to work tomorrow i know but you're not even making time for me and saying when we can hang out and when we can spend time together i don't really feel like i need that how about we discuss how the both of you feel about relationships externally instead of each other they skipped a step well i don't really feel like i need that at all i feel like i can meet my own needs i don't want to rely on anybody i feel like no one wants to be with me when i want and i want them more than me then they want me i think you can have that it's just not something that i can do do you want a relationship yeah tell us why i want a relationship because i feel alone all the time and i feel like i just want someone to spend time with me that makes me feel smothered like i feel like i'm gonna have no time for myself i'm not gonna be able to do the things that i wanna do but that makes me feel like no one cares that you don't care what is it there's nothing like you don't care about me either you guys recognizing some of this in your internal world or maybe other people's okay so we could go back and forth all day long there's an internal war that starts to happen between these polarized parts and anytime we're dealing with a genuine split within the consciousness of a person we're dealing with these polarized aspects one that has a need one that coped by not getting that need met in some way right and these internal wars they start to build and build and build and build i've shown you only one split from one trauma now this gets more complicated obviously if this is a compound trauma or what we call a complex trauma where you have multiple times where you have the same type of wounding but i mean how many of us have experienced only one wounding you know we get to the point where we have so many splits inside that it's just like this constant chaotic back and forth and when this happens pain starts to rise within the internal system and we of course look at that pain rising within the internal system instead of turning our attention towards it so as to resolve this split within our psyche so as to resolve the underlying trauma we tend to take whatever pill we can to drown that pain out it's really important to understand something about this fragmentation now i'm going to make a case here for the fact that you need to go into these root traumas that are at the basic root of this splitting in this case that i just gave you this scenario that we're looking at up here it's dad leaving me at four years old and what that made me decide about myself and about the world what's important to understand about the splitting is that there are certain memories which are only stored in certain parts within your system in fact ritual cult leaders what we call programmers they actually deliberately program for this and the rule of thumb within ritual cults is you never program against human biology always and only with it so what these cult trainers are doing is they're on top of the idea that your body actually does this naturally your body when it can't deal with a specific trauma stores it in a specific fragment what's the problem if the fragment is in this one can i see it no so many people are walking around with traumas that they don't even know they have traumas that happened at delivery traumas that happened in their toddler years toddlers were traumas that happened around weaning you know traumas that happened right just all kinds of traumas and what does not help is that we live in a society that doesn't have this perspective on trauma doesn't understand the long-term implications of it and so we live in a society that actually normalizes a lot of the trauma that we're experiencing so we're not really connecting the dots yet between this event that a person goes through and what the subsequent effect is so it's important to understand once you see this fragmentation right that what's the most important thing to do is to come try to resolve this fragmentation within it's try to get these different polarized aspects of self on the same page the ideal situation is to get them to a position of agreement but what's really interesting when you can actually gain awareness of one specific fragment or the other specific fragment is if you go deep let's say i go deep into this one if you go deep deep deep deep into the consciousness or awareness of this one there are definitely processes for this i'm doing an overview today if you go as deep as you can to the conscious awareness of this part of you only or this part of your client only then it's like its own universe its own world with its own truths and inside of those truths you see a great many needs needs that you can actually genuinely meet and easily meet as an adult and it's within those that the seeds of resolution actually lie so i created this process it's called the completion process what this process essentially is is that when we go back within one of these aspects of self we're actually using a person's trigger that is the emotional reactivity that you see in real time as a doorway that opens to the subconscious mind we're using that open doorway instead of telling a trigger to calm down or telling it to de-escalate or doing breathing techniques or emdr or any of these types of things that cause that symptomology to disappear we're using that symptomology right that big huge alarm bell that's saying hey there's something here that's unresolved we're going directly down into that back into the trauma itself the first portion of this process is to re-experience it and through re-experiencing we come to a place of acceptance now by acceptance i don't mean that you approve of something i mean that you accept that this is the truth of what happened and when that happens even the tissues the body no longer fight the traumatic experience anymore they open to it once you have re-experienced this it turns into an active resolution process where those unmet needs or those pains are actually flipped around and resolved so for example i may be able to as a four-year-old who lost dad experience what it is to have a dad who's so committed that he won't leave me no matter what based off of figuring out whatever those needs are and actually creating this resolution within this process itself we can then apply that to our adult life this is where this process gets really fun it causes us to look at the world in a different way it causes us to meet our needs in different ways so quite often you see people who are popping out of this process realizing wait a minute i've surrounded myself with people who just reflect my early traumatic experiences maybe i'm going to choose to put myself in a different place maybe i'm going to choose different thoughts different ways of behaving but this time that different choice it's not just surface level it hits us at the deepest core of resolution and everything after that i mean everything after that everything causally linked starts to shift thank you so it's at this point that i'm going to tell you i have some high hopes here i have high hopes for where the mental health field is headed because where it's headed in the future is to the understanding that mental illness is actually not about what's wrong with you it's about what happened to you that's going to be the wave of the future when somebody enters into a psychiatrist's office a person is going to be looked at in terms of what happened to them not what is wrong with them and so at this point i need to say i want you to start to think of mental illness those things you're looking at the surface and calling mental illness i want you to think of them as adaptations what you're seeing in terms of this surface symptomology of mental illness was something that actually benefited a person in the past it may not actually be something that benefits them anymore but it did at some point save their life and until we have the capacity to recognize that the part of themselves that actually is maintaining this behavior is never going to be able to shift itself it's never going to be recognized it's never itself going to start to recognize that that adaptation no longer benefits it my timer went off all right so thank you for listening to me today what i'm going to end this with is this i want you to consider that this behavior that many of us have in the mental and emotional health field of running away from pain is us running in the exact opposite direction of where we actually need to be headed so i want you to consider that the only way out is in thank you

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Id: mvzKcj97Y9s

Length: 31min 5sec (1865 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021