Self-Havening Freebie with Dr. Truitt

manager here at Pepsi publishing welcome everyone to this special three hour event with Dr Kate Truitt on self-havening this is going to be a wonderful training all about training trauma with self-havening and I can't wait for us to get started so with that here's Dr Kate Truitt thank you Carson for the introduction hello everybody it is such a joy and an honor to be here with everyone today just want to cover a couple logistical elements to provide support before we dive into the slide deck let me fix my quick view here so as we know this is a training and so we have a couple disclosures that we're going to quickly go through so just being mindful that we are here to learn some amazing healing in your hands tools and learn all about the neurobiology of selfhavening these wonderful new uh modalities that have been growing and expanding over the past couple decades and so please be mindful of your scope of practice as we're integrating these tools and practicing them and our vision is that you'll be learning things that you can take into your personal life and your clinical space and of course we always want to be mindful of staying within our realm and our scope of practice and then additionally conflict of interest disclosures are on the pesi website so you're welcome to check those out and in terms of chat box and Q a I am joined here today by one of my fellow trainers at my training institute Rebecca Turner lmft bcn and so she will be providing support in the Q a if you have questions please about the content uh clarification please put those in the Q a box and she will be responding or else she'll also be collecting a couple questions that when we do go to q a you'll be able to or she'll send over to me and I will respond to uh there is an upvote and a down vote option so if there's a particular question that somebody asks and you really want to make sure that we address that question do you use that up vote thumbs up on the Q a because that will ensure that she highlights it and puts it into puts it into my brain so to speak so that I do speak to it if there are technical questions please make sure to use the chat box for those we are joined by Tabby here for from pessie who will be providing support with technology in the chat and we have received word unfortunately that Zoom is having a massive difficulty with closed captioning right now and of course pessi being pessie has already identified a workaround and so if you do want closed captioning please see the chat box you'll notice that there's a link there and that has a caption viewer and Tabby just put it back in the chat box again so please open up that link and you'll be able to get the closed captionings and I think that is all of our fun Logistics so let me share a little bit about where we're going today and first introduce myself and Carson again thank you for the lovely intro my name is Dr K Truitt I'm a havening technique certified trainer also also one of the developers of the havening techniques which is a high honor to be recognized as such and Global director of research and curriculum development and we're hosting this free event today in honor of book launch week of the new book healing in your hands and the purpose of this book is exactly that it's all about teaching tools and exercises for self-healing because one of the things we've been learning in the field of Neuroscience over the past several decades and that Dr Stephen and Ron Rudin the founders of the havening techniques really identified is that we do hold the capacity for self-healing within our mind and body system much as we can recover from a paper cut our brain has innate mechanisms for recovering from stress anxiety as well as trauma and so our journey today is to really dig into these experiences because fear is so fast it's much faster than many of us actually give it credit for I'd like to introduce you to one of my patients Wesley in a session we had that really highlighted for me the power of the amygdala and we'll talk a lot about Amy the amygdala today to start as I sit across from my patient Wesley a heavy silence fills my office his shoulders are slumped and his face is flat finally he blurts out my boss had been going on for 20 minutes about my performance all I could hear was how much of a failure I was I know it was stupid but at some point it was like I couldn't even hear him anymore I just snapped at him something rude I don't even remember and I stormed out slamming the door his side tirely and rubbed his eyes I'm getting called into HR tomorrow he continued I think I might get fired what is wrong with me why am I such an idiot as I shared that story you might have noticed that there have been moments like that in your own life there certainly have been in mind these moments that spiral us into these harmful thoughts like calling ourselves names like an idiot that bring up shame and have consequences that are Way Beyond what we were hoping to have happen in that moment these moments where our emotions start guiding our behaviors and our goals designing our life in the present moment even if our thinking brain our self brain is sitting there Whispering quietly in the background why are you doing this what's happening these very human moments are at the heart of some really exciting opportunities for healing now that might sound a little interesting these triggers that take over and hijack our brain become Windows of healing opportunity and that is what this course is all about today identifying those moments understanding where they come from and utilizing these new tools for healing called self-havening and specifically these specific exercises that we'll be learning and practicing together so our journey today is to dig into the neurobiology of self-havening what are these new tools because they are new the first training was in 2013. although the scientific exploration into these experiences began more than two decades ago by the doctor's readings from there we'll start moving into a deeper understanding of this mechanism of action called the havening patch it's an ancient opportunity for healing that Neuroscience has really highlighted in powerful ways over the past two decades with Incredible outcomes that indicate that the opportunity of Gentle Touch is not just soothing it actually fundamentally changes our neurobiology and an electrochemical level decreasing some of those chemicals that are less than preferable like cortisol never fun to have a cortisol back while enhancing the presence of a lot of those chemicals that we like to have in our brain and our body love like serotonin and Gaba and oxytocin and then of course you're going to practice because it's one thing to hear it and it's a whole other opportunity to experience it and then we'll be moving into a deeper exploration of the amygdala now this might be a term that some of you are familiar with the amygdala gets a lot of press these days and a little bit of a bad rep for being involved in fear and that's true she is involved she is very involved in those moments like we just talked about with Wesley and what a lot of science is now highlighting is that she is also highly involved in cultivating the type of experiences we want more of the positive links and as we move into our experiential processes at the end of today you'll start to witness how we cannot just heal the past but build the future through directly working with our amygdala calming her down letting her know her safe and also building new Frameworks and templates for how we want to be existing in our world to the power of self-havening is all about this healing opportunity iron is saying our systems innate capacity for healing to create sustainable health and resilience and mental Fitness now havening is new as I mentioned newer especially in the field of psychotherapy where we know cognitive behavioral therapy psychodynamic you know Jung and Freud they've been running around for a long time Aaron Beck started doing his thing many many many moons ago and back in 1988 Francine Shapiro took her fateful walk that gave birth to EMDR and so when we say new as we know in the world of psychology and Science and it was about two decades and that's around how long havening has been in the world the opportunity of havening is both in a really critical clinical space of helping the brain release trauma and also where we'll be focusing our efforts today on something called self-havening for personal empowerment truly the healing in your hands opportunity for how we can help our clients and our own mind and body systems heal and utilizing that havening touch and these protocols that we'll be learning I first learned about havening back in 2014 the very very beginning of 2014. my career in studying neuroscience and fear and Trauma started all the way back in my early early 20s my personal experience of complicated feelings and experiences started way back as long as I can remember and we have our clients who share those types of experiences with us and we'll talk about why in just a moment when we talk about brain development I was very lucky to be told about havening early on and it was very lucky for me personally because I'd been living with PTSD for over five years see in 2009 a week before my wedding to a partner of 10 years John I came home and found that he had passed away and I was unable to save his life and even though at that point I had already studied trauma and Neuroscience extensively I was already a psychologist I was working and living in this field that I love I trained in the ACT what we call the alphabet soup and Trauma treatment right the EMDR CVT CPT tfcbt all of these different treatments trm crn they're so amazing but I ran right into the very real fact that our brain it's our brain and no matter how much we know if our brain is experiencing a large enough trauma or has been exposed to extreme stress for long enough it will rewire itself and that self part of us just as Wesley shared with us can start to feel like a whisper the knowingness of what we know becomes less and less accessible because our survival brain becomes more and more powerful and the opportunity is in learning how to speak the Primal language of that electrochemical experience to let you highlight this image here for just a moment this is McLean's work it's old we know it's not exactly the most up-to-date model but what I love about it is this idea of the Triune brain which is a helpful way to think about the evolution of our mind body system so we think about lizards people wouldn't sit down and expect to have a philosophical conversation with the lizard I mean unless it's the Geico lizard sure possibly but otherwise probably not and this thing would largely go for our cat or a dog although my dogs and cats are very very good listeners let me tell you but they're not very great at communicating their thoughts on the deeper considerations of you know brain functioning and when we look at the evolution of our species this is a critical part of understanding our own neurobiology and information processing because we started out as ancient Primal creatures that have evolved across the course of time and when we think about lizards they respond to the world in a sensory way and they respond to the world through an experience of touch and even if we go all the way back to our single cell organisms if you remember biology 101 in high school and if you were to tap a single cell organism it would retract I know you I remember watching that in my projector in high school and I just stated myself not touch is one of the most Primal and important mechanisms for helping our system understand the world and one of the things that's great about evolution is it holds on to what works and it lets go of what doesn't work and we have this little tiny brain part in our system called the amygdala there's actually two of them and they've been around for over 300 million years playing a guiding force and how we understand the world in fact there's some pretty exciting scientific literature that highlights that when vertebrae started to develop amygdala started to develop and so over 300 million years ago as soon as somebody turned around and had a thinking process of some sort back in you know 300 million years ago landed that said hey I've got a spine the brain also said hey I've got a thing that keeps Us Alive let's prioritize that here's the thing we spend so much time navigating this world from our thinking brain and exploring and making sense of it through our thinking brain processes and in Psychotherapy there's certainly so much prefrontal cortex Focus but these more Primal parts of our system these more these older pieces are more powerful and survival will always Trump thriving because quality of life isn't our brain's number one priority it's actually how do we stay alive doesn't matter if we have a nice car if we're not walking around and functioning our thinking brain came to the experience of life 70 to 300 000 years ago depending on which literature you look at I like to think of it as the Pokey puppy to the game it's slow well touch has been around forever some version of this responsiveness to the world and our amygdala 300 million years which is way longer than any of our feet have been walking along this and around on this beautiful world of ours and surprisingly or not so surprisingly developmentally we see the same progression touch is one of the first sensory systems to develop in the utera within the first trimester our organism is starting to experience a sense of touch the amygdala they begin to develop in the third trimester before we even read our amygdali are interacting with the world and our cerebral cortex is slow to the game develops in our late 20s early 30s a slow slow and very important journey of development and starting to make sense of the world but these old tarte parts of our system they're Old Guard they've been around for so long because they work and that means they get priority in processing the world around us and when our brain experiences something as going wrong those parts are going to Define what's happening in that moment if the threat is big enough whether it be a threat tied to this present moment or a threat tied to something we've learned from the past so something happens Wesley was sitting in that room and his boss was giving a performance review now he could have had some anticipatory anxiety going into that experience perhaps there are some hiccups in the past he has a whole host of experiences navigating him into that moment and prior to walking into that space his brain was prepping and identifying how to make sense of the information that would be coming towards him and while that experience continued very very rapidly his most basic one of his most basic brain Parts started interpreting that data at 50 milliseconds this part of his brain called the thalamus is chiming in and helping him to sense what is happening now the thalamus historically has been thought of as a post office what we now know and thanks in part to Dr Andrew huberman for his research in this space is that the thalamus is one of our Originators of the threat experience but also how our brain starts making sense of schemas and Frameworks and helping us interpret what's happening before our thinking brain comes online and if arthalamus notices that there's some emotional experiences going on then she's going to tie in our amygdala and go hey Amy what do we know about this The Good the Bad the Ugly the neutral just inviting in another rapid firing brain part to help us make sense of the world and our little friend Amy the amygdala works at 75 milliseconds now remember with Wesley we talked about how fast is the air I'd like to invite everybody to Blink now fear or 75 milliseconds is four times faster from the experience of your brain hearing the request to Blink so before your cognitive awareness your conscious awareness said oh she said blink blink your amygdala was making sense of that and before then your Thalamus was saying where's this data going to go and the reason you knew what an eye blink was was because you're a hippocampus and your working memory system all started participating in the information processing sequence and said we know what that word is but when you're six months old you certainly didn't know what that word is somewhere along the line you learned that word or if English was your second language even later you would learn what a blanket our brain has Google search capacities built into it in many respects and the Google search is tied to the experiences of our life and the experiences that get priority processing and notice again 75 milliseconds four times faster and that is before our cognitive brain is online our brain is Google searching information before we're still consciously aware of it to know how to execute the next step now if you chose to Blink when I asked the request your anterior singular gyrus said oh I'm going to do the thing and prioritize that request to the link but if you were looking at an email or if you were in the chat box or asking a question your brain would have been prioritizing and spotlighting that and whatever that Focus was was then when your prefrontal cortex shows up so there's a delay there's a lag time and this is important when we think about Wesley and that moment where all of a sudden he's out the door of his off of his supervisor's office the door slammed and he stops and he goes what did I do and when he remembers what just happened and it happens quickly for that to go oh no then the brain can start to take over but if that had been a wonderful performance review he would have stayed in a green brain Zone and walked out of there going yeah it's going to be another great quarter we've got this that we know that wasn't Wesley's experience instead somewhere in that moment with his supervisor his brain started to say something's wrong and by his brain we mean these very early information processing parts and once those parts started to come online his thinking would start to become cloudy and just think about a moment where you've had a knee-jerk response of agitation or frustration or anxiety and it felt like your thinking brain just stepped back and another part of you stepped forward and started guiding your behavior these very human moments and these very real moments that bring our clients into our offices and sometimes what our brain is tuning into is real frequently it's tied to something from the past and is being triggered his boss may have never even had said to Wesley that you are a failure there may have been something else in his life that got activated turning off his prefrontal cortex and giving his amygdala even more power as you see our amygdala has the most important job in many respects she plays a critical role in helping us stay alive and therefore she has a lot of influence on the way her brain is making sense of the world and in a moment of possible threat she can lift us into a yellow brain Zone a go no-go is there really something here to be scared of and even up into a red brain Zone and here in the 21st century she's pretty good at doing that even though she's originally designed to be on the lookout for tigers and poisonous berries when we go all the way back to our grassland days 70 to 300 000 years ago she hasn't changed much there is no amygdala 2.0 she's still her classic Old Guard self behaving in the same ways but our prefrontal cortex is very good at spinning up all sorts of scary stories that then become a felt sense truth and if we are living in a red brain zone for long enough our brain can actually be rewired into that state thank you and how does that happen our brain is very cool I'm obviously a big fan I've been studying this stuff for a very very long time and we know now that the brain is made up of 86 billion neurons now one of the reasons I started studying Neuroscience was a I had my own Journey with mental health and wellness and I want to understand what on Earth is going on up here because life felt really hard and it didn't seem so hard for some people I was like this is bizarre and back in the day when I was growing up when I took psychology AP psychology in high school we were still back in the 90s when it was like well I think it's a black box or maybe the brain's capable of Shifting and changing and that there is a possibility that you know up until a certain time or age we can start to be different but after you know the age of 29 well we're our brain's concrete to me I was like I'm not a big fan of that so let's let's dive in and dig deeper and what we know now is the brain is made up of about 86 billion neurons and they have thousands of connections to each other so it's like a bunch of freeways and Roads and Pathways going through our brain all of the time and what becomes priority is a part of that developmental process and I did see the note about she is the amygdala gendered and we will go into why we call Amy the amygdala in just a little bit we do call her Amy the ambigdala very lovingly because she is our fiercest most maternal Warrior protector is the way we like to conceptualize her and if you're an ifs object relations or Gestalt person you'll notice a little bit of that Parts work coming in where it's the brain showing up to take care of us and sometimes causing these less than preferable moments the organization of how we show up in our day-to-day life is based on neuroplasticity and how these streets paths and Roads and super freeways are defined how we respond how we react what we believe poor Wesley in that moment having that gut reaction and leaving and showing up in my office many days later in a panic was that appropriate to that moment no is that a pretty good indicator that something had happened previously whether it had been weeks months or even decades prior that would leave him vulnerable to being triggered in that moment absolutely that's all a gift of neuroplasticity and thankfully the brain is capable of forming and reorganizing these synoptic connections there's thousands and thousands of links can shift and change and that's what this healing in your hands is all about because when we link into one of the oldest sensory elements of our life touch and use it to interact with the most powerful piece of technology on the planet our brain we can harness neuroplasticity to create empowered sustained change specifically if there has been something developed called stress induced structural plasticity yes we have a very specific form of neuroplasticity that is driven by norepinephrine and cortisol and that is this is where sometimes Neuroscience is kind to us and names things exactly what it is this is one of those moments yay stress into structural plasticity these are super freeways through the brain that brain has said this was scary enough important enough big enough threatening enough tied to my survival enough that this is now henceforth getting priority processing these are reasons why we don't touch a hot stove we don't play in traffic these are also reasons why we may become agoraphobic why we might have a trigger to a smell why for Wesley a specific tone of voice could have triggered his brain into that red brain zone so much so that he stormed out of his performance review so here's the thing 90 of every moment is defined by the experiences of the past this is a wonderful awareness that Dr Lewis cozolino identified you're not familiar with his work he's the founder and creator of the term neurofluency and as many powerful books about how to integrate Neuroscience into the therapy space which is all about what we're doing today the truth is our brain talks to itself 86 billion neurons talking to itself and 10 of this moment is novel so that 350 I blink self-experience as we just explored is heavily informed by what we have learned about ourselves and the world around us and so if we have learned hard things if we have learned to beat ourselves up to have those painful cognitions or the sticky beliefs feeling stupid or like an idiot or that broken or not good enough those will show up and take over it's not just about PTSD as we know these super free ways become guiding forces for how we see the world not just with our thoughts but also with how our body is functioning how we're making sense of the moment so we've talked a lot about the brain and the Old Guard amygdala and let's shift now to the Old Guard touch when you're stressed what do you do and when you see somebody else having a hard time is there something that you are pulled to do now sometimes when we're stressed ourselves we might go for an easy button I know that I like my cat memes they're cute kittens are adorable Netflix guilty Easy Button zone out state but I would never go to a friend who's having a hard time and put an Instagram in front of their face and scroll cat memes for them instead I might put my hand on their shoulder and go hey are you okay Gentle Touch I might walk up to somebody and give them a hug if I haven't seen them in a long time I have a tension headache I might gently run my fingers across my forehead or if you've ever wiped away a tear there's a very specific set of Little Fibers embedded in our skin that are just as ancient as our species and mammals and of themselves and these receptors calm our mind and body down just as breath work does for our body soothing touch actually does for our brain and there's a reason why humans are called towards touch and if we remember the wire monkey studies going all the way back to high school or undergraduate graduate school where the monkeys had all the sustenance they needed but they didn't have soothing touch they were impacted developmentally same with the children in the Romanian orphanages all of the basic needs met but no touch their brains are actually smaller touch is a foundational Human Experience that plays a critical role and helping our mind and body develop a sense of secure safety in the world but don't take it from me take it from the scientists soothing touch promotes positive affect there's a reason why we reach out and hold somebody's hand there's a reason why when we dance we might move around and also use our hands and even snap those fibers are in our palms touch has been shown to reduce heart rate and blood pressure the havening touch has been shown to to reduce these experiences in longitudinal studies it lowers norepinephrine which is a excitatory neurotransmitter and increases oxytocin we like oxytocin that's a yummy one decreases cortisol I can even activate the smile muscle and it slows the system down especially when we're in a heightened state of awareness or in that red brain Zone and in doing that enhances the presence of Gaba as well as serotonin Gaba is the opposite of glutamate if you yourself or any of your clients have ever taken Gabapentin it's because it's helping the system calm and Gaba is something that we do create naturally but when we have a lot of cortisol we have less Gaba and of course we're all familiar with serotonin the antidepressant commercials the sad droopy Rock going on a topping Journey with the rain serotonin is very helpful and plays a critical role in safety havening developed out of this awareness that the application of soothing touch creates the electrochemical representation of safety in the mind and body that's actually where the name havening came from the original scientific name for the clinical interventions of havening was the amygdala de-potentiation technique and as the opportunities to not only use this in a clinical realm but also to take this into individual self-healing practices developed became apparent that the word Haven to put the Mind Body into a safe space was a really powerful and apt description for what we're doing so as we transitioned here Rebecca I just want to check in and I know you all can't see Rebecca but she's here with me and I'm going to open up my chat are there any questions coming in that would be supported no she actually just texted me what she was going to put in the chat box all right think we're good so I'm going to continue on here so the havening touch has been shown in the literature to be most effective when you engaged in four specific areas on the mind and body now these Little Fibers and we do have an entire video on our YouTube channel that can go deep into the science if you're interested in learning more about the havening touch and if I know Rebecca she'll put that in the chat box for y'all that are actually all over our body wherever there's hair because you know humans are you know hairy creatures ultimately interestingly the fibers are also on our palms which kind of highlights the power of touch and of itself the first touch and I'll invite you to model or to follow along with me as we practice these touches this is though you're washing your hands under warm water do you remember at the very beginning of the pandemic when the guidelines came out to wash their hands for 20 seconds and hopefully we were all doing that anyway and you also sing a song so you were sure to wash your hands for the 20 seconds as you'll learn here quickly we're all very excited in the havening community because that is one of the havening touches and that was done regulating the mind body system the second touch is as though it's a soft soothing hug like to call it a havening hug or a moving hug arms crossed across your shoulders fingers on your shoulders and then moving down to your elbows if you're familiar with EMDR and Butterfly tops this will be a very very very similar touch the only shift being that we're engaging those fibers through the gentle soft touch let me go right across the brow as I mentioned earlier with that tension headache following the eyebrows and finally wiping away tears just wrapping right around the eyes following your cheekbones these touches can be used in a combination they can be used in isolation you can choose to only use one touch we just did a wonderful Workshop or a series of workshops with the sexual abuse prevention and response program for the Air Force and we talked a lot about how perhaps focusing only on Palm pavementing with individuals who have had touch weaponized against them may be preferred when you're introducing these touches to people because that is a more common or accepted type of touch and so as you're introducing this stuff to your clients slow study invitation and discussing how this works and inviting an exploration of curiosity of what feels okay now as somebody who does work with sexual trauma and complex PTSD a lot we have of course created a whole host of alternative ways to engage these same receptors and get that same wonderful electrochemical shift that we were just talking about with the power of soothing touch in a way that feels safe for individuals who struggle with the experience of touch and honestly one of the greatest gifts that I've seen in my clinical practice is utilizing this process to recreate a felt sense of safe connection to touch and thus self because touch is again one of our most fundamental senses and if feeling the experience of touch has been weaponized against us we have lost an internal sense of safety at a deep biological level and we do have a YouTube video that Rebecca will put into the chat box that goes through all of the alternative opportunities for how to integrate these touches safely but for now we're going to transition into okay all of this good powerful touch stuff and what's going on in the brain how is this happening just a quick check in just notice do you like roller coasters I've found that that's one of those polarizing things for many people you either love them or you hate them if you love them and you're about to get on a roller coaster your brain will go into a gamma state if you hate it and you're about to get on a roller coaster your brain will also go into a gamma or a hyper gamma State it's a very very fast rapid processing brainwave state and it's a critical criteria for a moment of trauma to be encoded into the brain and remembered forever it's also a critical part of what leads to the development of stress-induced structural plasticity behavening touch on the other hand down regulates the brain and creates a increased power as we say in the field of biofeedback and neurofeedback are increased presence of these slower brain wave States and Delta specifically is a critical part of memory reconsolidation while we sleep well a big part of trauma reprocessing is what reconsolidating Memories and so the havening touch in of itself creates a permissive State for the brain to down regulate out of that stress out of the trauma encoding out of that moment of trigger alertness and move in an alternative Direction which then of course we have protocols and structures built around which creates a whole new opportunity for how we can use these tools in our own daily lives for our own human moments and teach these tools to our clients to regulate their mind body systems in between sessions and even to support the system and letting go and we'll talk about this more in just a moment of those triggers so that they show up less often or even stop showing up at all in some cases but first let's do a practice so that you can experience yourself the power of neuroplasticity and the havening patch so if you're starting to engage with self-havening for the first time it can be helpful to have a framework and my friend Bill Soules created this framework and I'd like to just invite you to follow along if you want to use this or practice it can be supported you'll start with your fingertips in the center of your forehead and then wrap around your eyes Circle up to your nose and back out to your cheeks down your arms and then to your palms then you can repeat that motion if it's helpful and I know sometimes for Brains it's easier to have a structure to start and then start to notice what feels most comfortable what we've found is most people have one or two sweet spots that their system prefers I know I definitely do a lot of palm havening and then I also am a big fan of the havening hug especially when my brain's starting to go oof it's a pretty good tell for my teams here in Los Angeles when I'm having a particularly unique day if I find myself doing this in the middle of a conversation and that's the cool thing about these touches is they become muscle memory if you've ever yourself bit your nails or picked out your nails or had a client who struggled with that that's not too different from what is trying to be accomplished here and it becomes an easy redirect a go-to self-soothing mechanism our brains are designed to find difficult things and we always have glimmers of positivity surrounding us and so I'd like to invite everybody to sit back find a space welcome in a gentle breath breathing in and out let's begin to apply that soothing self-havening touch either in that order I just introduced to you or in any order that feels comfortable for you I invite you to find either a soft case or to invite your eyes to gently drift clothes as we go on this neuroplasticity Journey let's take a moment and slide back across the course of this day yesterday evening yesterday even see if you can find a smile and you'll notice I put some cute images up here for you as well just invite your mind to explore and find a smile now this could be a smile that you exchanged with a loved one perhaps a smile and a beloved pet I know my orange tabby cats certainly smells maybe a smile that was hidden in an object such as the curve of a coffee cup with a curve of a flower petal be one of those so precious rare exchanges where you exchange a glance and a smile with a perfect stranger having a moment of human connection once you've found your smile invite it to become the center of your awareness spotlighting it with intention welcoming It Here and Now to be with you and notice if your smile has a color or a shape does it have a scent maybe a vibrant citrus perhaps a soothing lavender welcome in a gentle breath deepening your connection to that smile even imagine that you're inviting that smile in breathing in two three four and out bye four three two one and as you notice your smile notice if it has a home inside you do you notice a shift or a change as you connect more fully to it do you even perhaps feel pulled to smile back greeting that smile with one of your own and noticing now if there is some place that you would like to invite that smile to Anchor within your own mind and body system the space that you can return and connect back to at any time when we choose to Spotlight something with intention we're letting our mind and body and particularly our amygdala know that this matters they're saying pay attention to more of these we want more of this and teaching our brain to Fire and wire in that direction and as we bring this exercise to a gentle close take a moment to extend gratitude to the smile to your mind and your body to yourself for being here today and for taking a moment to connect with this experience with intention our mind and our body love to feel whole and strong and empowered but that doesn't mean that is how our brain is wired in fact you ever find that you catch yourself in a ruminating loop guess what me too our brain is desired to Google search the hard stuff to find it in that 10 of the present moment prioritize it and link into it so much so that sometimes it even takes that hard data and turns it into fact that we then act upon just as we saw with Wesley as the extremely wise Dr Rick Hansen reminds us our nervous system evolved and as it evolves survival has always trumped thriving so our brain is designed to Keep Us Alive it's number one directive and that means looking out for the Tigers in the grass but like we talked about we don't have a lot of tigers running around in the 21st century unless there was a zoo break what we do have is a lot of data coming at us in a whole new way that our brain has not been designed to process and specifically those old Primal brain Parts again remember there's no brain 2.0 for these more ancient brain parts and so the more that we're exposed to stress the more our brain looks for stress because those freeways start to say this is what we do this is how we stay alive and that begins to guide what we Spotlight within pension and that becomes the automatic way that we navigate the world unless we take a quiet moment and pause and find something like a smile if the amygdalas in a red brain State those difficult moments can start to overwhelm here's the thing Amy the amygdala like we talked about she is our fiercest protector she is 300 million years old she's been doing something right for a very long time because she's still hanging out with us and making sure that again we're not running in traffic we're not falling off cliffs and by the way if you don't like roller coasters that's your amygdala keeping you safe as humans we are not designed to strap ourselves in metal boxes and plummet at the Earth at 120 to 180 miles per hour that's a poor idea for our species yeah some of us do it some of us do it even without the roller coaster and just with a jet pack on our backs or a pack on our backs so hey whatever works our amygdala is going to keep us safe and she's going to assess for threat rapidly four times faster than the blink of an eye she's also critical in developing her sense of self in the world and helping us build relationships and so when we start speaking the electrochemical language of the amygdala and working with narrow plasticity then we can start to create a whole new opportunity in the therapeutic space by helping the amygdala step back and harnessing the neuroplastic role of her and also outside of session in our own daily lives deepening our relationship to self Sierra amygdala has a fantastic memory and remember she's on board in the third trimester she's one of the first nuclei in the system to start encoding information and recalling it and it's all sensory she speaks the language of the five senses and then we'll throw the sixth in there into reception she is tuning into that experience she is not speaking English or ASL or Mandarin or French it's electrochemical and if she thinks that there's a tiger in the room just like she did for Wesley she's going to make sure that we have a way out but she is fast and she's got her go-to's that she loves fight praise Bond are those two D's defensive rage and dissociation she even has a specific nuclei for dissociation she is powerful in her work to keep us safe and when we're living in a high stress cortisol-driven environment she gets more air time than her self-brain so we need to help her feel safe and the more air time she gets the more she's pulling on that ninety percent of the past and prioritizing anything tied to the past to help us stay safe in the present moment see our amygdala plays a critical role in ultimately defining who we are in the world how we experience ourselves she plays a role in our cognitions our autonomic nervous system so gastrointestinal considerations rapid heartbeat am I feeling anxious or excited either way our heart rate might go up and how we're experiencing body memories the somatic sensory world pain she's chiming in on all of these things she even has a specific nuclei called the central nucleus that is tied to physiology and of course our emotional world she loves emotions the big beautiful vibrant ones and she prioritizes the hard scaring ones those threat cues are critical and these experiences don't stay in the past in fact the earliest experiences become The Guiding Light for how we navigate the world in our present moment they become the priority this is so much of the work that we do for our clients and for ourselves is unwinding these old thoughts that hijack us into not just perhaps a behavior we'd rather not do but also the consequential shame the why did I how could I I know better and that spiral that comes when we behave in a way that we were going why am I doing this but we couldn't quite get ourselves brain to connect now many many many years ago I had an opportunity to work with a young man who's an aspiring artist it was a wonderful musician difficulty was that he grew up in a high performing military family that did not allow space for it's more creative offbeat ways and he had a brother who was the best at all the things and that brother had a lot of light shown on him and poor Jeff did not and Jeff's amygdala learned a lot about how he needed to stay safe and these oftentimes contradictory ways of being small of numbing out with substances of disconnecting from the world perhaps this sounds like some of your clients because if we are told don't be who we are our brain and our body will find a different way he came to therapy to start doing the work to find himself and start cultivating his new experience of the world and giving himself permission to lean into what he left music and so after one particularly rough session in the recording studio he showed up in my office just fraught with anxiety his amygdala was clearly running the show and had been for quite some time describe the session as being a disaster the recording session was going great I could see them in the recording booth they're nodding along to the beats but then Jeff's leg started saying his hand started balling up and tight Fists a strong somatosensory and autonomic towel that Amy was jumping on board in this moment even though he was now here safe with me and then what happened Jeff what got Amy so freaked out I nod my head in encouragement and start gently applying the Palm havening touch to my own hands modeling a new opportunity to release that energy of his bald fists and start caring for his system luckily he had tuned in his palms did start gently creating that Gentle Touch and then the producer shook his head he shook his head and he left he moved his arms into that self-soothing havening hug position that autopilot now is weeks of work coming into play as soon as Amy went into that red brain Zone when I saw that I just choked everything fell apart I couldn't play anymore I was paralyzed I knew I had screwed up I knew I couldn't do it anymore and of course from there he went to his local bar and he missed his gig that night how many times have our clients had these moments and I forgot to switch my slide how many times have we ourselves had these moments a reading of a situation that then our brain spirals out of control our amygdala reminds us of something from the past and starts telling this worst case story of Doom narrating that present moment through the sphere lens based on what we have learned the case for self how do we stay so you like to think about the amygdala as having three core values and when we're born she's trying to figure these values out how do we stay safe how are we lovable and how are we successful now success is not the car we drive or money in the bank although as we grow older that's certainly helpful success is Maslow's fundamental hierarchy of needs are our basic needs being met do we have food and water is there some sort of shelter and these values tie deeply to one another guiding our sense of self about the world and we start to learn that we stay safe by Jeff learned to stay safe by shutting down his creative instinct and eventually silencing that flame inside of him until one day somebody said hey buddy you're really good at this if you actually try and a mentor started to work with him sometimes it just takes one voice but that didn't mean that his amygdala calmed down because he had learned and he had been taught that his way for success lovability and safety was to stay small and staying small and calling himself names and beating himself up meant silencing himself in difficult moments not allowing himself to bloom she learned that if he uses his voice if he's expressive and interacts in the world he will be unsafe and there were many times where his family actually kicked him out when he would go after hours and play at a gang in high school and then they just said you're not staying here anymore and he lived on Friends sofas for months the very highest form of threat is being kicked out of our village we need our village and our caregivers are that foundational Village healthy or unhealthy as we grow and we develop this guides development of the case for self and our amygdala is much like Walt Whitman highlights here does she contradict herself very well then especially when these core values start playing a role in our adult life because the amygdala impact is large and it contains multitudes the amygdala doesn't know that the past is no longer present the amygdala is still accessing and utilizing the information from all the way back there and so if we are taught that we are stupid if we are told repeatedly that this is our truth eventually our brain Buys in because that's how we stay safe that's how we have a sense of lovability connection and that's how we get our core needs met the child will buy and that is neuroplasticity in the developing system now if it's good stuff it's neuroplasticity and remember if it's painful difficult stuff it's that stress-induced structural plasticity and it gets the priority processing and our brain doesn't leave it in the past the brain learns it and encodes it and heal holds onto it defining our Frameworks for how we make sense of every moment of our life so these two lists have some pretty high value words on them some of them might jump out at you a little bit more in terms of the way you experience your own life here's the thing about these two lists of words we didn't come into the world with any of these words accessible to us we learn we were taught what they meant and how they apply to us and the world around us through the developmental process and through neuroplasticity so when we start to directly interact with neuroplasticity in the clinical space and in our own self-healing work well we can start to heal through the neural networks over here we can even turn these moments into opportunities a yellow flag moment where amygdala goes whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa I'm now calling myself stupid that's something from the past this is an opportunity to lean in and get curious about wild beating myself up right now because that's old stuff 99.99 of the time it doesn't belong in the present and instead start to build what we want this other site harnessing neuroplasticity through speaking the electrochemical language of the amygdala because that's where the case Begins the thalamus and the amygdala sending all of this up for a Google search of what do we know about this moment right here right now and depending on the super freeway that the brain jumps on well that's going to win our information processing moment for Jeff that head shake was a trigger concession we started looking at what happened in that moment all he remembered was the head shake and then paralysis and as we started zooming out that head shake became connected to his Google search reminded him of a very similar moment when he came home and had received the news that he had gotten a scholarship to a Music Academy and his dad just looked at him and his mom just looked at him crossed their arms and sighed an abject tangible disappointment to them why can't you be more like your brother Tom you're so stupid and his brain remembered that and when the producer shook his head and turned and walked out that trigger 75 milliseconds went up to his Google search of Doom and his brain goes oh yeah we know this one we know how this story goes we better just quit get out freeze shutdown because what comes next is going to hurt red brain red brain red brain now what actually happened in that moment the producer got a text message from his wife about something related to his own child interestingly and he had to step out to take the phone call and he got signed that day by that music producer and that was the launch of his career but his brain didn't have access to that data and instead he almost torpedoed himself through going on a bender missing his gig ghosting his bandmates and thank goodness there was a part of him that was present enough to say I'm at least going to go to Dr Kate's office and show up there was something inside him that had that level of commitment because he had chosen this term and he was also doing his CPR for the amygdala when he woke up very hungover realizing everything he had done and started shame spiral and we will learn CPR for the amygdala here in just a moment as we can help Amy calm down and step back and we know that that shame spiral can be just as triggering and even more negatively impactful than whatever happened in that moment because oh shame is like cotton candy for amygdala she just loves it and it will keep us paralyzed and when we're in those trigger moments we can get pushed out of what's called our window of Tolerance and it could be a big Trigger or even a small Trigger or a series of small triggers if you've ever had that happen you wake up a little late you spill your coffee you can't find your car keys and the next thing you know you're just vibrating at a slightly different space well you could be out of your window of Tolerance but if we stay out of our window of tolerance for a prolonged period of time it can start to rewire our system the window of Tolerance is where we are flexibly adapting to the world it doesn't mean that everything's gravy by any means resilience isn't about gravy and great resilience is about flexible adaptation so if you've ever studied studied heart math or heart rate variability we want our heart rate to be flexible so that we are responsive to the data of the world we also want our brain to be flexible so we're responsive to the data of the world but when we are outside our Zone we get stuck there the cycle of anxiety and depression the cycle of rage and dissociation the cycle of agitation and worry or we may not even cycle we just may be up here or we may be down here the longer we live in this space the smaller our window can become That's The Power of stress and do structural plasticity it actually will weaken and make smaller our Zone making it less accessible when we need it and when we speak the language of those Primal survival brain parts we can create proactive change so we're going to start shifting into how do we do this and learning these tools and before we do that though I want to check and see if there's any questions coming in that would be supportive for me to address uh how do dreams connect with Amy that's one of my favorite topics all right so our amygdala doesn't sleep it would be so lovely if it did oh but she doesn't so that idea of waking up on the wrong side of the bed very very real or amygdala plays an important role in nightmares how many times have you yourself or have you heard the client describe that they're having a delightful dream walking down the beach someplace and then the next thing they know there's a tsunami and they get crashed on and the entire scene turns dark well that's our little amygdala when an event is big enough or vibrant enough our brain will super glue it there's a specific type of receptor called an anti receptor it's a glutamate receptor onto the amygdala and when that little receptor gets lit up it's too powerful for our sleep processes to do a general reconsolidation as it would with a regular memory because our brain has now tagged it and said okay this is scary stuff we're going to remember it again great news when it comes to a hot stove not so great news when it comes to a experience of a certain facial expression and our childhood representing harm because our brain remembers that facial expression just as vibrantly as it would a hot stone and those glued on receptors play a role in how we sleep and our information processing while we sleep and there's another question can you clarify trimester like the other things touching amygdala so in the first trimester the first three months in utero is where the sense of touch develops and then the amygdala is formed in the third trimester which means that before we're even breathing air we have a part of our system that's back there making sense of the world around us I'm going to go a little bit further and then don't worry we'll take a quick break here because I know three hours is quite a long time for a way to sit and let's talk about the first of the protocols that we'll be learning today and this protocol has a couple different tools woven into it from the healing in your hands book and I'll be kind of touching on how those work because what we want to be doing is participating or is intentionally getting our prefrontal cortex to participate in the moment as much as possible whether that be in the moment of the actual trigger or in a moment where our brain has hijacked us and we're now after the fact going oh there's some consequences such as Jeff coming into my office in that shame spiral and Wesley after that experience with his supervisor CPR for the amygdala is one of the foundational self-havening protocols and it stands for creating personal resilience the idea is that we're empowering the amygdala to come back online after a red brain moment so CPR most of us are familiar with and several I'm sure a lot of us are probably certified we what do we do and when do we do that when we cannot breathe when our body is not capable of functioning we do CPR for the amygdala on our brain is feeling like it cannot function the way we want it to when we're that in that red brain survival threat focused space which is how come it's called this CPR for the amygdala give the amygdala some love let her know that we actually have everything we need that there isn't a threat right now because when she's in vibrant run she thinks that something is going to hurt us or even possibly kill us CPR for the amygdala creates agency it's a tool in your pocket in your client's pocket because life happens we're taking in sensory data all the time and in a moment where life happens and our amygdala goes low I don't like that well we have a tool in your pocket to bring yourself down so you don't stay outside your Zone and because we're speaking the language of the amygdala it also is proactively working as a glue be gone for whatever got triggered in that moment which is extremely exciting in the clinical space we can use a different version of this to actually heal those super glue moments of trauma here we're empowering our clients in their day-to-day life to notice sensory moments of triggers opportunities what used to be called a yellow flag that their brain's going I don't know that could chip them into a red brain Zone they can now wait oh I've got a tool for this and let me lean in and get curious as Dan Siegel reminds us we want to feel it to heal it and here we're saying here's a tool so that when you feel it you can heal your brain which is one of the most empowering things that we can give to our clients and for ourselves because it feels pretty cool to notice when our brain goes oh okay I got this that's pretty cool so the protocol is quite simple because remember our ancient brain is pretty simple it's been roaming around this Fair planet of ours for 300 million years before humans even were so we have this acronym that we've come up with called Snap we're going to snap the amygdala out of the red brain so that she can move into the yellow or green brain because the yellow brain zone is a good Zone there's some space for consideration so SNAP stands for first sensing into it and we'll go in a little more in depth in all of these steps then we're going to notice that something's happening many of us might be familiar with the subjective units of distress scale we use a slight modification on that well I'll introduce that in just a moment and we apply that soothing Haven in touch wrapping a warm fuzzy blanket of oxytocin and Gaba and serotonin around our system so that we can go whoo we don't need to stay in that gamma hyper firing cortisol State anymore and then we're going to give our brain a different job because left to its own devices are amygdala and our working memory system which is our Google system in our brain will guide our information processing and so we want to stop that feedback loop so they cannot keep gossiping and sourcing up all of the related difficult moments of our lives and yes this might you might have just noticed this is what rumination is it's that Google search that is driven by the amygdala so in that moment for Jeff had he had the opportunity to push pause with the guitar down and check in with the sound the recording studio and so hey I noticed the producer left and sentencing to the fact that something just got highly triggered he could have shifted his experience in that moment so we're sensing into the fact that yeah I am definitely in a red brain zone right now feeling it to heal it then we're noticing the notice is important because it's bringing that prefrontal cortex online with intention just as when I asked you to Blink and you spotlighted that information and perhaps even blinked that anterior cingulate gyrus is going notice this right now sensing noticing that's prefrontal cortex activity that's good stuff we like that then we're applying that soothing havening touch that warm fuzzy blanket of calm and giving our working memory a different job now for those of you who are CBT people or mindfulness practitioners this is going to sound very familiar we are distracting the system and that can be through brain games it can be through different types of mindful exercises finding different colors in the space counting steps doing number sequences with breath work we're simply saying hey brain you need to do something different now and I'll unpack how to create a safe inventory here in just a moment this then starts to soften and pull back that red brain Zone because Amy and the working memory are no longer gossiping they're no longer chatting with one another and instead the brain is going electrochemical safety because of that havening patch that redirect to a distraction and then the system can come back to self because it's sensory driven we know that it could be in the moment of a trigger or in any of those lingering case elements those cognitions if we're ruminating emotions somatous sensory rapid heartbeats sweaty Palms anything tied to a trigger and the encoding of a trigger and the more we utilize this protocol the more we're delinking the likelihood that that particular trigger could show up again and could be a scent an eyebrow whatever it is that the amygdala goes oh I don't like that that then gets priority processing they're snapping sensing something's awry and when the amygdala is guiding the show the anterior Cingular gyrus and the prefrontal cortex that are going off of the amygdala's feedback loop prioritizing that for those of you who are EMDR trained you know your negative cognitions and your positive cognitions this is that concept the negative is that spotlighting and when we look at the fmris of EMDR that's a large part of where we see functional changes is in that anterior cingulogyrus which is where the opportunity to integrate havening as a powerful amygdala engaging tool is awesome as we're working with so many different brain Parts the more we integrate these components together same with our prefrontal cortex work the more we can support the neurobiology and being engaged and present in the integration the greater the healing opportunity across the board so first we're just sensing something's wrong the good news about sensing and noticing is that the more we start to expand our language around emotions as well as the energetic activation of our system in any moment the more we're teaching our brain that it's not all one thing or another so often our patients have maybe five primary emotions they're sad they're angry they're numb and well sometimes that's all it is and then that ever elusive search for happiness we really need to have all of the emotions available to us because they're critical data points even the difficult ones and so in using what we call the emotions thermometer you can start to shift your awareness and help your clients become more intentionally attuned to the fact that wait a minute we can be at a five and have our brain percolating around something but that doesn't mean we're going to be hijacked and we'll talk about this in a little bit and we go deeper into this in the book we can be out of five and give that energy a different job what used to be anxious can become excited because physiologically they're not too different but the label the case plays a critical role so sensing into it noticing it is really really important and then we're going to apply that havening touch give our mind and our body the opportunity to down regulate and start to shift into our Zone that green brain space or even just the yellow brain as you'll notice yellow brain here okay I'm feeling uncomfortable but I'm not out of control I can be in distress and be okay I can be upset and reconnect to my smile I'll invite you all to take a moment and reconnect to your smile and notice if it's there the power of the spotlight with intention neoplasticity is so cool our brain is so malleable when we know how to speak the language of it we've calm the system down and then finally preoccupy now distractions are a really exciting opportunity to bring into your own clinical practice as well as to get to know yourself better we we always create a distraction inventory in our very first session and one of the reasons I love to do it and my teams and I do it in our first session is because our clients frequently show up with this framework of we're here to talk about the hard stuff but when we start building a distraction inventory we're also learning about the things that they enjoy what do they like what are their Hobbies what are areas of expertise that we might not otherwise hear about in a therapeutic space because the distractions are all about their and your own unique brain and giving the brain a different data point to attune to it can be as simple as breath work and we'll practice and exercise in just a moment or it could be as lovingly in depth as I work with a lot of horseback Riders and equine certified equine psychotherapist and working with horses and having them describe the process of putting the halter on the horse and grooming the horse and Counting The Strokes as they're brushing we're cleaning the hose and noticing what that feels like you see our working memory system is also very sensory based it speaks the language of the senses as well and to give you an example of this take a moment and imagine that you're holding a basketball and if you've never held a basketball find a ball that you've held in your life and then imagine bouncing or dribbling that basketball five times notice your sensory experience and then perhaps even imagine shooting a basket and go free throw granny shot whatever you like to kind of feel like that's happening and for an even more vibrant representation find a hobby or something that you thoroughly enjoy anything from cross stitch to yoga to hiking if you're a cook making your favorite recipe all of those experiences will start to help the working memory link to the sensory elements distracting it from the red brain moment but while distractions have been scientifically proven to down regulate the brain while we're using them it is not a sustained down regulation it's the addition of the havening touch that creates the sustained change and those outcomes that we witness of the sustained decrease in blood pressure cortisol so on and so forth so it's the combo platter of the two so let's do a quick practice and then we are going to go and take a small break before we come back and transition into the opportunities of building and healing a building with neuroplasticity so breath breath is a very very powerful thing as we know in fact we need it to live it's critical for our survival we can incorporate breath as a great tool for healing and you may have had clients in your life who have struggled with breath work when we live in states of tension and stress our breathing patterns foundationally change especially prolonged tension and stress and I don't know if you're like me but remember when the Apple watch used to tell you to breathe all the time now I believe it's called having them take a mindful moment I loved when it said breathe because my little orienting reflects my Spotlight would go oh yeah breathe because I tend to hold my breath and breathing is very very very important for regulating the brain and the body but if breathwork in of itself causes anxiety for your clients or for yourself that's because your amygdala is working very very hard to keep you safe she's diligently ensuring that your nervous system stays in a yellow or red brain probably more of a yellow or perhaps a green yellow state just in case a threat happens to show up as again the amygdala loves us she wants to keep us safe so we can start to recreate a safe connection to breath work through the incorporation of that CPR for the amygdala and if we're using breath work with CPR for the amygdala I want to provide a tiny piece of data to keep in mind for individuals who've been living in a Vigilant or hyper Vigilant State feeling calm can be very triggering there's even a name for this it's called relaxation induced anxiety relaxation induced anxiety is that rebound effect of our brain going oh I feel quiet and the amygdala going oh no it's not okay to be quiet because my case for the world around me is that I need to be on guard sound familiar to anybody anybody else struggle with meditation I struggle with meditation Forever Until I can start bringing in until I learned about behavening touch When we struggle to connect to our mind and body system when our bodies and our minds have learned even that our physiology is dangerous to us we will disconnect and becoming calm a tuning inward can create a lot of anxiety and stress so in that situation moving into breath work in a specific way can be very very supportive and that's why I love this specific side breath exercise because for any of you breath holders out there do you sigh a lot I do uh it's kind of it's kind of a joke here in the hallways of our Clinic uh you can tell what kind of day I'm having by a if I do this at some point during the day and be how heavy are My Size because I hold my breath doesn't mean I'm stressed all the time but I am you might be able to tell pretty energetic and a little type A taipe way in a good way still it shines through so the side breath exercise was created by Andrew huberman and Dr Feldman Andrew huberman's up at Stanford if you're not familiar with this work he's a phenomenal neuroscientist has an incredible podcast Dr Feldman is one of the world's foremost experts on breath he's here at UCLA and together they in conversation discussed and realized that wait a minute the sighing is an important part of our physiological reset for a breath we sigh because it fills our lungs with the really delightful oxygen and that heavy release of his side gets rid of what's technically poison the carbon dioxide so the Sigh breath and of itself and I'll guide you through a quick practice and then we'll do a larger exercise with the havening touch when we come back from break empowers us to incorporate these two things the Sigh breath exercise in of itself is a double breath in and then a slow release now what does that look like I'm going to use my hand as a gauge so I'll invite you to breathe in then you're breathing in on top of that first breath and then a slow gentle release and everybody's on mute so if there's nobody around you and if you even want to you can make that sound it will actually up the impact so we're breathing in breathing in again all that delicious oxygen oh Fur Elise our amygdala loves to know we can breathe remember that's prime one of our primary directives making sure we stay alive and obviously oxygen is critical to that so as soon as we come into the world and we let out our first hauler as an infant she goes oxygen I like this and she learns that just like you don't touch a hot stove and hey maybe you love cotton candy or roller coasters she learns that she likes oxygen but our physiology can reset itself so that we don't have the oxygen we need sometimes so this is a very simple opportunity to find a rhythm to start to expand your diaphragm and retrain it and when we get back from break we'll talk about how we can bring in the havening touch to start to create and cultivate a sense of safety back into the body especially if that's been taken from us so before we go to break I'm going to once again turn over to our questions Rebecca anything for me to answer I can see you're very busy over there how does one deal with an imagined worried feeling or a serious gut feel of a problem issue that's beautiful I'm actually where are we in time you know what I'm going to read through these questions while everybody goes to break and then we'll we'll Circle back and I'll answer these questions when we get back because I just realized we're at 90 minutes and uh you know Zoom brain's a thing and also biology is a thing so we'll take a break let's come back at 20 till the hour so it's a short break about eight minutes stretch fill your water take care of your mind and body and we'll get started again uh right at 20 till so I'll see everybody back here shortly and we will go through these questions and then move into our guided practice [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Laughter] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] back into our screen here excuse me full disclosure I I've had the flu so um bear with me if my my throat's a little rough okay so let's look at some of these questions um remember can everybody see me okay Tavi are you here with us yeah yep you're all good okay perfect all right so um okay so dealing with an imagined worry feeling or a serious gut fill that goes back to the the 90 of this moment being defined by things that have happened in the past as well as our own what we call intraception around something that that sixth sense that something's off our system is designed to Intuit when things feel awry and it's supportive it's there to Keep Us Alive have you ever felt kind of the hair show up on the back of your neck a little bit that's exactly what that is uh same reason why if you've ever spelled something rotten you've been like and we're born with certain things that we're inherently afraid of uh called unconditioned threat stimuli basically things that have killed enough of our species across the course of Our Lives that our brains like I'm going to tie that into our next evolutionary stop so if it's one of those types of experiences then still creating a space to calm the brain down but also recognizing that that's a yellow flag moment and in the book we do have a entire exercise designed around how to work with yellow flags that's outside the space of our contacts today but the idea being that if we go back to that emotions thermometer our brain is saying pay attention to this and then we want to make sure that our nervous system and our clients nervous systems have the space to not go into that reactionary mode the getting up and leaving and slamming the door after saying something less than preferable to his boss that Wesley did or the complete freeze shutdown that poor Jeff experienced followed by the compensatory binge drinking you want to help the system have that space because intuition is one of the superpowers of Being Human it's a gift and it could be tied to an experience we've had in the past or it could be tied to one of those unconditioned threats stimuli and the next question is so if Amy is active continuously even in sleep dreams and waking hours is she responsible for waking thoughts fears and confirmations of our imagination or is it all about our past fears Amy's playing a role in how our mind and body are making sense of the world around us those case elements our cognitions are autonomic or somatosensory our emotional world based on the experiences of our past as unconditioned threats stimuli so she responsible for them if they are those threat or survival focused experiences and in some of our other trainings we go more deeply into this idea when the brain has a case for survival or a case for trauma but yes she plays a role in deciding which freeways of information processing is our brain getting on again check back in with your smile she's playing a role in that too that's why we call her a fierce maternal protector she's a warrior on our behalf and we want to support her plus our Thalamus him going in specific directions that are more in alignment with how we want our mind body functioning in a given moment rather than those fears and worries and it could be factual or it could be also imaginal so what if story is a doom right and we'll learn a protocol that I came up with way back you originally started using it with EMDR long before havening was even on my radar called the creating possibilities protocol where we're going to give what ifs a different job because our brain will what if itself it's like a doom doomy gloomy narrator if you remember those choose your own adventure stories if left to its own devices and it's tied to difficult nights we can use that and give and use it to harness neuroplasticity to build the brain we want to live within which is great ah havening and grief okay this is uh obviously very we're actually going to have a case study here in a moment about grief obviously something very near and dear to my heart that's one of my areas of specialization as well that it's it's beautiful complicated powerful and incredible work grief is uh really nuanced on the YouTube channel we have a number of educational videos as well as guided exercises for how to integrate havening into grief work and so I do I'm going to recommend that you go check those out because the it's a very very finely nuanced there's also a great book that just came out called the Greek The Grieving brain or the grief brain I should know this because I cited it extensively in my second book that's coming out next year um The Grieving brain Rebecca yeah Mary Mary uh shoot I've got Zoom brain myself sorry y'all um phenomenal book on the neurobiology group so check that out if you haven't read it and she's incredible incredible author um working with veterans and complex PTSD how would you frame these techniques such as the destruction so that you're not reinforcing avoidance is it simply coming back to triggering events after you have calmed yourself down with Paving that's such a great question and we've been very lucky to run trainings and teach this at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as well as as I mentioned partner with the Air Force sexual abuse prevention and response program when we're teaching this especially in some of those more institutionalized settings where there's a little more of a concrete focus on specific types of interventions we really like to lead with the neuroscience and that's true across the board for any trauma survivors because the more we understand that the brains being a brain that in of itself softens the trauma and when we can talk about this narrating gossiping Loop and how normal that is for all of our brains and also talk about the fact that we can intentionally redirect our brain and help it calm down by playing brain games and applying the havening touch that is very very powerful for people to learn about that doesn't mean that we're not going to circle back to what the trigger was or what was happening in that moment but we're allowing the system to safely move into whatever happened rather than have a prefrontal cortex engagement again going back to that emotions thermometer ideally a five or below something's happening I may not like it but my thinking brain is here and we can keep utilizing the CPR to down regulate the system in those types of experiences because we know with complex PTSD there's a specific neurobiology happening and the amygdala is going to keep pushing us up and not just a complex bdsd with so many different types and considerations that we work with so that emotions thermometer for us is a Mainstay of our clinical toolkit it's helping the patients recognize when they're out of five that they can bring themselves down if they're at a five or above we're not going to continue the content conversation because we're telling the brain to Spotlight this data in a threat based state the more we interact with the world in a red brain Zone the more amygdala is building deeper neural freeways we talk about a trauma net and a trauma filter this is exactly that so we want to calm down first and then revisit whatever the process is and then if the nervous system goes back up commit because Amy's like good okay calm back down that's one of the really powerful opportunities of these tools and modeling that in your clinical practice will help your clients start to take this organically into their day-to-day lives yes Mary Frances O'Connor thank you very much that was she's amazing uh I'm a little bit of a fan girl about her so she's great um I'm loving all these questions coming in so I'm gonna I will answer a couple more does havening touch work with autoimmune diseases um absolutely we use the Haven in touch with chronic pain and chronic illness that's another area of specialization and for us here on our team in fact the amygdala is deeply tied into chronic pain as well as chronic illness and there's a something called The Fear avoidance model of pain that plays out in all in chronic pain and illness and on the YouTube channel there's uh several there's a playlist tied to those experiences called thriving through pain so check that out you'll get a whole bunch of yummy narrow biology stuff as well as of course Haven and guided exercises [Music] um bring it in let's see I have patients who bring resistance to working this way they don't want a new kind of therapy they want to talk and not get educated they don't think distraction is therapy enough ah yes yes we have witnessed this ourselves and that is where the neurobiology again is helpful and then when we can anchor it back to their own story those red brain zones so it's like with Wesley or with Jeff and this is one of the reasons I wrote the book too is this exact type of acknowledgment of yeah we've been trained to do talk therapy I can tell you as a psychologist I was largely trained to do talk therapy I was lucky enough to have a mentor in my undergrad or my graduate school who would sponsored me to do EMDR and learn EMDR but the rest of my cohort learning MDR this was back in the early 2000s so I'm dating myself all over the place that's okay I love her field because being older is actually a good thing um and so it's going to take some re-education for them and for us to be honest it's going to also request that we don't go into the content that the client is sharing or The Narrative of the trauma or the trigger at the time and instead step back and redirect to the distractions in the CPR for the amygdala in order to not re-traumatize or strengthen the trigger so it's it's re-education for the clients and for us as well and that's the power of the what's happening in the field of Neuroscience and I always feel like I'm probably you know still three years behind the field of Neuroscience because they're every day there's more and more data coming out but for so many of us when we went to graduate school we didn't have a lot of Neuroscience backing I did because I specialized in it most of us didn't and so this is a lot of new information and that's where incorporating this information into the discussion or sharing our YouTube videos uh opens up a new opportunity spoken to in your breathing voice quality they feel seduced or being treated that's a good point I also am recovering from the flu but I do have a um an alto voice for sure I'm not usually breathing as my team would say or if you follow me on social media you might notice that um but that you're you're noticing their amygdala's core values the case for self each of our clients are coming in to the moment with their experiences of the past remember that cartoon with the little boy these things are carried forward with them all the way down to you bring up such an important point in this question or this highlighting the tone of voice that somebody interacts with us with tone of voice is important all of those safe lovability success elements for some people are soothing for others are triggering and it is completely a dance and that's why all of this work is an experience about being client-centered first and foremost first and foremost I just noticed something in the chat is there poem Dr Truett's age that's sweet I appreciate you picking that up and it could be an LA issue I think you're also noticing a little bit of my own case for self-elements around what was prioritized in my own family system see we give ourselves away all the time consciously and unconsciously and so yeah and I did correct myself I also appreciate you connecting that isn't it amazing there's little nuances we share so much unintentionally and the more we deepen ourselves into a state of awareness and connection and also realize that even in those moments that it's our amygdala and what's been learned and taught it's not self doing something wrong it's going oh wow that's a good data point thank you for teaching me something about myself that I wasn't aware of that's awesome because now we can create space for change so I'm going to take us oh there was a couple of things I wanted to quickly highlight there's been a lot of questions about um using the resources all of these materials are in the healing in your hands book and if you purchase the book you'll actually have access to the handouts and you'll get a specific link inside the book that will take you to those materials and so if you'd like to use them please do cite them and attribute them we love that I mean of course it's copyright so do that anyway um and also you're welcome to reach out to us and our the emails info at drtruitt.com if there are specific handouts that you would like to use now my poor office manager it might just kind of fall over with what I just did to her there so it might take some time for her to respond but just know all of these things are in the book if it is in the book she is just going to reply and say buy the book because then you can use it so if that's going to be your question don't reach out to her get the book and you can use it because pessie's done an amazing job putting all of these handouts into these materials together um and then you also have a lot of these this information on the YouTube channel and then also on the the tech talk Channel and on the Instagram you know social media these days it's what we do um also we know there's a lot of you and a lot of great questions coming in remember to upvote Rebecca's doing her best but I can also see she's working very very very very hard and so if your question gets missed it's not personal it's not intentional there's just a lot coming at her so please remember to upvote if there's certain questions that you would really like uh to be brought forward so that we can answer it here in the Q a all right without further ado I am going to bring us back to our share screen so let's now practice acpr for the amygdala exercise that utilizes that Breathe In Breathe In Breathe Out experience that we just practiced plus the havening patch again the idea being that this creates a new sense of psychological safety for our mind and body system that allows us to start to intentionally shift and deepen our awareness with ourselves without accidentally creating that connection to a felt sense of oh no I don't feel safe being calm or if we have learned to breathe in a more shallow manner accidentally engaging and causing some increased anxiety so the exercise itself is exactly this we're going to practice breathing in breathing in and then breathing out and I have some images that I'll walk us through and then as we're doing that we will be applying the havening touch the entire time now I'd like to invite everybody to start with a simple check-in to your mind body system and notice how you feel right here right now we're sensing in that first part of the CPR protocol sense in and now on the emotions thermometer just take a note of where you rank on this scale we're working with what we call our state or Ambient Energy in the moment there might be a little bit of brain fog you might notice you've been sitting for a little while just checking in and noticing how you're feeling right here right now I'll invite you to begin to apply that soothing havening cut Palms arms and face in any order welcoming the system to start exploring the possibility of a new electrochemical ship now I'm going to practice that side breath it's as though we're breathing we're going to smell a flower smell a flower and then blow some bubbles and if you work with kiddos or teens or adolescents that might be a familiar analogy for you we're smelling flowers smelling flowers and blowing bubbles as the whole time we're continuing that havening patch let's breathe in breathe in and release breathing in breathing in and release breathing in breathing in and release breathing in breathing in and release and one more oh not one more okay coming back to this present moment apologies for that let's invite yourself to turn inward once again and let's check back in on that emotions thermometer and notice if anything has shifted or changed and how you're feeling now it's a very simple version of the creating personal resilience for the amygdala Journey but it's creating space for two critical elements oxygen as well as soothing the brain I'm going to actually I just had a thought come to mind and Tabby if you could answer this in the chat box if I send these handouts can we post them with the slides because I'm happy to give an actual printable version of the handouts from this Workshop if that's a pessy approved just you can let us know in the chat box then I will send those over once the workshop's done very happy to do that we're extremely share aware again as long as the citations are on and the book citations on there already okay I see that was a good okay that that got some hits all right so David I will send those over to you um and then they will go wherever the slides are all right so we've been talking a lot about how first like Tabby said Yes Y'all yay Pepsi I love hessy this is one of my favorite organizations to work with they are so great and so generous in everything that we do together so we've been talking a lot about how do we help Amy calm down and the opportunity of working with self-havening the havening techniques and neuroplasticity is not just that we're helping to heal the past we're creating space in the present moment as hopefully you just experienced a little bit with that sigh breath exercise and we're also empowering ourselves and our clients to build the future we want to have to create and often cases the what should have been but wasn't because of the pain that was experienced in their childhood and the way those core values came into being to curate the present moment there was a question about grief not too long ago and this is an area of specialization of mine and really exciting space to do powerful work especially in holding space for the suite of what was and healing through and navigating and releasing the bitterness of loss I personally don't believe that grieving ever comes to an end and as a widow I'm living in my 13th year of grief and I also know it softens and when we can lean in with strength and wisdom and harness the power and the opportunity of what was it can fundamentally shift so many other elements of our life and that can be very hard to access in a moment of grief or when we're living in the despair of grief Sandra came to me after having been a widow for over 30 years she had just moved to LA with her daughter and she had spent the previous 30 years highly highly dedicated to ensuring the safety of her daughter and her adult daughter's now family and grandchild when her daughter moved to LA you can bet she packed up sold her house and followed that family here because that was how she had started to Define her life but it wasn't in a space of only loving maternal guidance it was also grounded in the very heartbreaking experience of losing her husband when her daughter was about five years old and her fear that something like that could happen again and by her yes I mean The Grieving Sandra I also mean deeply deeply the traumatized Amy that was living within her striving to keep her safe and grounded in the world she gotten to a point because stress impacts not just the brain it also impacts the body that her world had started to become defined by it she had severe IBS tension headaches TMJ so shut grinding of the teeth that night she wasn't sleeping well she was going to physical therapy twice a week now just because of the severity of the muscle tension her traumatic experience almost 30 years prior had not just rewired her brain over the course of time it had rewired her body and when we work with the amygdala remember autonomic and somatosensory all of that's part of the case so we're able to start to shift and create a different relationship with the self but it wasn't just about healing the past because her brain and our body didn't have the opportunity or know where to go from here and so after we've been working together for a while there was a really amazing session where Sandra came into my office and she shared with me that she wanted to consider the possibility of dating again I could tell she had chosen her words carefully consider the possibility Amy's thinking about it but not quite on board with this new experience It's Time Dr Kate she shared with me I caught a shy smile flicker across her face even though she tried to hide it with her water bottle I could imagine Amy spinning Sandra's worst case stories of Doom she had already been devastated once in her life and spent over 30 years trying to climb out of the desperately painful whole of despair Sandra I leaned in what changed she glanced down at her hands and began to pick out a nail and then caught herself and quickly reversed that old nervous habit by self-havening on her Palms she brought her eyes back to mine as she said I met the most handsome man in a coffee shop I even flirted a little bit but then she stopped and her eyes started away from mine I felt really guilty but also oddly for the first time a little hopeful per Sandra the possibility of dating again and building a loving relationship with another human was filled with excitement for Sanders amygdala on the other hand it triggered the expectation of being thrown off a cliff into Devastation and loss Sandra's arms had classed tightly across her chest as soon as she started sharing with me about feeling guilty I knew her brain could use a little extra support and especially her amygdala modeling her posture I encouraged her to gently soften that touch Sandra even now Amy is trying to keep you safe I slowly released my class to arms and began self-havening a gentle moving hug up and down my arms now if we were to focus on one feeling that would help Amy be willing to lean into the possibility of possibly dating what feeling would that be Sandra shared with me that she would like to feel Brave but she didn't know how I'm starting to be brave again in so many areas of my life but when I think about opening up my heart again true son there's a hollowness inside of me and I can feel Amy she's threatening to take over this is definitely yellow brain stuff let's start with exploring into this new possibility with some curiosity you shared you've been doing Brave things we can use that let's anchor into it now on a scale of zero to a hundred or zero is not brave at all and a hundred is completely Brave like writing on the back of a bear through the forest Brave where would you rate yourself right now Sandra laughed at the reference to her granddaughter's favorite movie Brave with her arms still clasped but more lightly now and even beginning a little bit of the havening patch she replied 65 percent is that enough yes that is enough because 65 percent of you is open to the possibility 65 percent of Amy believes that there could be a new opportunity here and that is plenty let's talk now about how we can start to cultivate and curate these experiences to help the system link into and connect to what we really want for ourselves and for our clients to help the brain realize that we don't need to be stuck in this red brain space because even if we're able to regulate into our window of Tolerance that doesn't mean that all of these emotional states are available to us we might still have a really small vocabulary around language or the possibilities of certain emotions might feel like Ugh Whispers difficult to ask access but possibly there we call the possibility of possibilities that's where this next protocol came from is acknowledging that we can start to cultivate and teach the connections and teaching the brain the connections to all of these emotional states through the incorporation of that havening touch the electrochemical experience of safety because feeling brave can feel like a stretch for some of us for others feeling brave can feel downright impossible especially when our amygdala is running the show in a threat state you might be familiar with that idea of toxic positivity we just kind of latch onto an affirmation and run with it if you've ever tried to talk yourself into an affirmation you know what I'm talking about if our amygdala is not on board it's not going to feel real even worse if our amygdala is not on board she'll send us into a red brain zone or sometimes kindly just into a yellow brain Zone we want to help her connect and safely and in a way Buy in to this new possibility creating a new neurological framework now Merida from Brave and I know I don't have a Scottish accent so I did not say that correctly if you're familiar with the movie she is this fiery fiery little girl who has a vision of her life how she wants it to be and these loving parents who are doing everything in their power to keep her safe and it was one of Sandra's favorite movies and her granddaughter's favorite movies and they watched it all the time and so we were able to link into that energy and utilize the havening touch to create a new what if possibility that becomes the building blocks to the new way of being connecting the systems internal and authentic resources the sensory elements that are amygdala and our working memory love so much and giving all of that a positively focused job Wraith what if I were Brave well our brain loves to answer questions like we talked about a moment ago and it will answer those questions in a very heavily focused doom and gleam way because the negativity bias that's just part of how our system functions For Better or For Worse but when we shine the spotlight on the possibility of what we want we get acetylcholine going we get dopamine going we get curiosity going our brain also loves to be right now that's kind of the last and proper preferable experience when we get a negativity bias tied with a confirmation bias but when we Spotlight positive or desirable or even feelings of calm which is another great experience we can start to navigate and Link into our brain will also want to be right around the possibilities of that this is the beauty again of these old brain pipes they flow data and processing if I were Brave gets that Google search going in the brain asking that question what if what if and the more expansive we can be with that question what if what if I were what if I were Brave changing the intonation oh it's cartoonish the brain is going to start Google searching other opportunities Sandra had been doing a lot of very brave things that she highlighted and that gave us the opportunity to help her brain remember that and further link into it through that new electrochemical space and created by the Haven and touch because when we have extra serotonin on board Gaba on board oxytocin on board our system will link into where it's going that's a part of the Haven and touch Journey and with the decreased cortisol decreased norepinephrine we can more we can we can gently and more soothingly that is not proper English help the system guide in the direction that we want that feels safe and secure ultimately helping our clients build this internal sense that they want that they have identified either in the clinical room or in their own day-to-day lives which also means in your day-to-day lives this is all to be brought back to your world too so the creating possibilities protocol is all about harnessing the opportunities of neuroplasticity to build new freeways we start with pathways and then we use the havening touch plus specific sequences of these inquiries and mental rehearsal to say hey brain prioritize this prioritize it prioritize it and tell the brain and it learned and the thalamus and the amygdala go yes I've got this this is real now the amygdala may be running around the world feeling like this poor guy all freaked out it's getting yelled at a lot the opportunity is to start to shift and say hey nice to meet you alternative feeling State how are you today it's been a while or maybe never would like to see what this feels like let's dip our toes into these Waters and from there transitioning to a new way of being linking this in at a neurological level so that it stops being just a path and becomes a new freeway neurons that fire together wire together and we can do that with intention so the goal is harnessing neuroplasticity again I originally created this protocol all the way back in the early 2010s when I was doing a lot of EMDR work I was working with an 11 year old girl who had very very severe anorexia and the possibility of anything different for her wasn't available to her brain if you know anything about anorexia there's a lot of specific nuances that come in term with the impact on information processing and at 11 years old she'd already been struggling since she was eight she was in the hospital of being refed when I started my work with her I got to go on an incredible journey with her in her healing space and this protocol was a game changer because no matter what the doctors told her no matter what work we would try to link into therapeutically her brain was concrete and that this is her forever world it's from the age of eight this had been her forever world but we could start leaning into the possibility of possibilities and exploring hypothetical what-ifs and utilizing butterfly tops back then for her system to start to go ah okay and now deepening that the havening touch and bringing the system even more fully into the electrochemical states to make this more accessible so it's this gradual stepwise process and we want to be mindful to use it when Amy is feeling somewhat safe and secure so if Amy's in a red brain Zone and we go hey Amy how do you feel about bravery if I'd said to Sandra right when we started working together hey we thought about getting on a dating app what do you think her response would have been nah she would have felt horribly missed to begin with by her psychologist horribly horribly best and her little amygdala would have absolutely had no space for that at all and it probably could have triggered her pretty severely so we want the brain calm or reasonably present calm so sometimes we it's preferable to start CPR for the amygdala prior or other regulating techniques so we know there's so many out there prior to moving into this space we want to be mindful to have an anchor to support the system in utilizing something accessible but you'll notice with Sandra it wasn't necessarily a personal experience of Bravery I knew that she had watched that movie so many times and she had talked about how much she admire this spunky little girl and how much her granddaughter reminded her of Merida and her brain had built a sensory awareness and a narrative around this cartoon character but that was actually a great and safe anchor for her we can also even utilize colors or we can of course use personal experiences songs even scents somebody wants to feel energized think about you know what it's a really fresh orange when you smell a fresh orange how does that smell or peppermint your brain might go oh yeah what if I was energized and you just reflect on that sense or if you use sensory elements in your own practice or in your life oils you'll notice oh your system can shift and change with sensory pieces those are all great anchors most important part always is client-centered the client needs to have that connection so if you bring up an element where you go well you were so brave in this moment and the client goes no I wasn't okay Amy wins we're not going to use that as an anchor we want to really support their mind body system and linking into what feels real for them what feels authentic so that that becomes their felt sense truth so I'd like to invite everybody to take a moment and notice an energetic State you would like more of right here right now now float back across the course of your life and notice if there's been a time that you have felt this way in the past notice if perhaps you have experienced somebody else embodying the state such as Merida and the movie break if this has a scent or color to it link into and tune into what is coming up for you I'm going to invite in a gentle inquiry exploring and a scale of zero two hundred where does that statement i n whatever that feeling state is fall on that scale I am Brave I am energetic I am whatever it is now some of you might have come back and thought Oh it's like a five percent if even or even a two percent our response to that is that's great two percent of you is saying that's possible we can start there two percent is enough one percent is enough point five percent is enough because it's possible others might say wow I'm already at a 95 what then you can go into that embodiment I am Amy's on board cool we love that I want to be in very intentional relationship with the amygdala inviting her voice to this conversation it's one of the things that happens so often because we are taught to shut down and close out our feelings and specifically the hard ones I know I grew up in the midwest where everything was fine that was a big part of the kind of daily dialogue how's the weather and how are you oh it's cold today and I'm fine especially in the 80s and 90s there wasn't a lot of conversation around emotional intelligence and the purpose and the feelings of and the purpose and the intention of feelings and so being very mindfully aware that we want to invite the amygdala into feeling these experiences and deepening that relationship uh we'll go to questions here in just a moment and also I want to highlight that as you're finding an anchor we can use physiological experiences as an anchor for an emotional one so anybody ever felt strong physically like you've lifted a big box you go to the gym you do some a great workout yeah I am strong right now that feeling State can be used as an anchor to start to create an internal sense of emotional strength so it doesn't have to necessarily be based fully emotional at the outset same way we can use an external figure to bring in an internal sense let me go ahead and open us up for questions here I'm sorry Rebecca I'm so used to you popping in and muting and asking questions I was just waiting patiently for you sorry everybody all right I've got a couple good ones here and Rebecca if there's a couple more let's go ahead we can answer those too okay the thinking brain cognitive brain the PFC cortex when does it begin to develop before or after birth are fetus is thinking or just feeling that's a million dollar question right there I know cognitive memories typically do not start until well after birth for me somewhere in age three yeah so most of us are born with something called infantile amnesia and that's why we don't have a lot of memories from when we're infants and toddlers now some people have magical amazing powerful brains where they do actually have these very early early childhood memories and most of us do not usually when the hippocampus starts coming on board which is between the ages it's kind of two and a half to four four and a half depending on each unique brain that's where we start having concrete narrative memories those declarative I can remember this happen there's facts involved sensory elements visual components to it prior to that though as we've been talking about the amygdalas on board all the way back in the third trimester and our more sensory body memories are starting to develop much sooner the basal ganglia and other memory systems are coming online before the hippocampus does the prefrontal cortex is pretty slow to the development process in terms of when it is fully formed but we are learning and exploring across the course of our infancy or toddlerhood our childhood our adolescence and onwards and we're learning how do we respond to the world around us there's some really interesting research about um very young children I believe they're about a year and a half old and they had they were with their caregiver and then they had the person who was running this study do something and it was benign obviously but the caregiver holding the Toddler goes oh no and the infant looked at the caregiver's face and then looked back and then at the person running the study and then look back at the caregiver's face and then went change their expression to match the caregiver along those same lines when this person running the study that the infant or the toddler did not have a relationship with when oh no but the caregiver stayed calm and grounded the infant would look at the person running the study and then take the cue off of the caregiver and stay calm so our our caregivers are the surrogates for our nervous systems and so while it may not necessarily be full-blown thinking beliefs that is developing once we're born now is our pre are we thinking and feeling believing in the womb we do not have evidence of that the system is developing now there might be some other literature out there but as far as I am aware that it's when we're born that we're starting to start to Intuit now with a one and a half year old or an eight-month-old have a sense of eye not necessarily but what they what we do have are a lot of learned behaviors and experiences and we are tuning closely to the world around us and our facial expressions going back to the comment on foot vocals going back to the facial expression of the supervisor for Jeff or the producer for Jeff and the supervisor for Wesley we start attuning and identifying facial expressions very very very very early the fusiform gyrus is our facial part of the brain and that is a early developer in the process once we are out in the world especially our caregivers facial expressions because they help us stay alive if our caregiver's face is frozen in fear it's very helpful for an infant to go I need to be quiet now because there's something happening so the developmental phases when we're looking at helping our clients and ourselves understand the impact of these case elements are really it's really good data to share because these triggers like we were talking about go all the way back for very very very long time and the amygdala is running alongside all of that there must be a direct link between havening and the HBA access yes there is absolutely amygdala manages a lot of the body stuff Downstream as well as our Upstream processes it's tied into our physiology quite closely hence the autonomic as well as the somatosensory elements and especially that is evidenced by those decreases that we see in blood pressure as well as decreased heart rate and enhanced heart rate variability so if we're able to calm all of the stress hormones down and bring our system into a more stabilized way of a balanced way of functioning on a regular basis the better able we are to navigate the world the outcome being not just that we're less stressed and have decreased inflammation but the outcome also being that we have a stronger immune system we are more physiologically resistant to viruses hey people have been dealing with that one right to all sorts of different experiences in the world so a calm brain I like to say is a happy brain and it doesn't mean that it's not a brain that's functioning and able to upregulate into threat when it needs to or you know hit the brakes if we're going to rear-end somebody because they just cut us off that's still a calm brain but it's a responsive brain rather than a reactive one um how work with sleep issues stemming from Amber oh the ampi receptor effect is that it I'm assuming that's what we meant um so I'm assuming with sleep issues tied to the ampa receptor that would be going into conversations around nightmares and things like that difficulty sleeping stress insomnia we do have quite a few videos that tackle this on The Tick Tock Channel as well as the YouTube channel um that we can utilize these tools to help the amygdala calm down prior to going into sleep CPR for the amygdala is one of my absolute favorite tools for my insomnia patients and I'm also a cranky sleeper as I like to say because our amygdala carries data with us into the night and if we've had any activation points during the day when the rest of our world isn't being distracted by emails or you know Instagram or you know our family and our friends or whatever it might be and those Quiet Moments before sleep our amygdala does love to perk up and make known all of her worries and concerned does anybody else experience that I do all of a sudden my entire listed everything that I was supposed to get done during the day just crashes into my brain and a sleepy sleepy brain is no longer available to me so we can use that CPR for the amygdala plus the creating possibilities protocol that we'll finish learning here in just a minute to create a really beautiful navigation into sleep first for calming the brain down and by slowing the brain with the havening touch bringing on those slow brainwave states of theta and Delta you're helping the the amygdala step back and also let go of good space from whatever is percolating and the caveat I always give my clients is if it crashes back in grab a piece of paper and write it down because then your thinking brain and your amygdala know that it's concretely there and you're not going to forget it that's a big reason why our brain ruminates on things it's going remember remember remember pay attention pay attention pay attention so if we write it down we go hey Brian look I wrote it down that can help once we've calmed the system down and that old thing about counting sheep that's a great distraction if that's a good one for you then you can use that creating possibilities that what a question to inquire what if I was sleepy what if what if I was sleepy and that Neuroscience data for the clients and for yourselves at this touch is bringing in some of those sleep wave States is very helpful because your brain is getting sleepy weight it's a little bit of a sleep hat calming the system down very very very helpful so we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a moment I see a lot of other great questions um here so I'm going to flip us back to the creating possibilities protocol we'll finish that out and then we'll come back and I'll answer these other questions and I realized I stopped my I did stop my share but I also stopped the actual presentation so let me open that back up there we go all right so by seeing the right stuff cool so the client has shared with us that there's an emotional or feeling or it can even be a cognition something that they would like more of to support them going into a new experience like Sandra Brave something that would help them in this moment or help you in this moment being grounded or energetic and then you've worked with them or you've supported yourself in finding this new anchor and connecting more fully to that and when we find the anchor it's very helpful to link into the sensory elements remember amygdala speaks the language of the senses as does our working memory so what are you seeing or hearing when you think about that anchor when you think about for Sandra when she was thinking about marredonda bear running holding on to her she's like she's going she's following her dream she's courageous she's Brave she was able to remember the joy of watching and experiencing that and then she could also hear her granddaughter's giggles and how much they love that scene and then the protocol once we have that anchor utilizes what's called mental rehearsal to get the brain flowing and the direction that we want here's a little important piece of data because of that negativity bias stress-induced structural plasticity becomes the freeway and it becomes a felt sense truth very quickly because of the rapid-firing nature of that it can actually heal and step back somewhat quickly too building resilience and positivity and building with neuroplasticity takes in tension and time so you might notice that things calm pretty quickly with the CPR for the amygdala but things take a little longer with the creating possibilities protocol that's normal just like if you were learning a new skill you'd have to practice it think about the creating possibilities protocol as muscle memory the more you practice the stronger it gets and also side note the more you apply the havening touch the more muscle memory you develop for it and eventually you can imagine applying the touch you don't even have to do it and your system will start to go into that soothing brainwave State now is that a great life tip you betcha because you can do distractions in your mind and imagine you're applying the havening touch in a situation where you feel a little on edge holiday tips y'all if you go see your family and there's any nuances there and nobody will know the difference so we start with that what if and curiosity empowers the possibility so we're going to ask that inquiry five times ideally changing the Nuance of the inquiry each time what if I were what if I were Shifting the emphasis on those words what if what if I were Brave all the while applying that havening touch and remember you've linked into that anchor and brought it to life of the senses already and you've rated it on that scale of zero to 100 so you can get a sense of what is Amy on this from that what if if it feels comfortable after that five repetitions that mental rehearsal of exploring and Google searching the possibility you can check in and explore does it feel like you can be or for yourself does it feel like I can be gradually building a sense of capability this could also be posited as a question can I be so what if I was can I be or what if two I can be since they were slowly walking into some water waiting in the water's beautiful and calm and warm it's been a while since you've swum and so you're just trying all of this on same thing five times I can expanding the options and each repetition is encouraging the brain with because of that havening touch to Google search opportunities to find more like-minded data it's reverse engineering that CPR for the amygdala now when are activated Amy and the hippocampus and the working memory systems gossip gossip gossip all the hard stuff here we're going anchor on the positive thing let's Google search that with intention go get it Amy find that good yummy stuff then we're checking in because I feel like I will be we'll be in five seconds from now not we'll be in a month we we can't tell the future and five seconds does it feel like I could possibly go a little more deeply into this and also look towards some guided intentional future engagement creating a new possibility about future possibilities so we're staying in the present I remember we create the present and build the future with this protocol um with all of the havening work that we do so present and now going I will be and then we will check back in on a scale of zero to a hundred and if the brain is at 95 or more and by brain of course Amy's buy-in is going yeah I am actually feels quite possible right now in this moment 95 of that energetic state is accessible to me then and only then do we advance to an affirmation we don't want to give Amy any sense that we are not listening to her we're not and or that we're not hearing her her felt sense of safety is foremost because she plays that critical role in cultivating the case for self and what we're doing now is building in new experiences of self and linking that in so Sandra's case for self now began to develop a link to being brave for her it took several sessions of doing this protocol as well as doing our narrative work our psychodynamic work our cognitive behavioral organ I integrate a lot of these things together with the basis being the neurobiology what do we need right here right now and also her practicing this in her day-to-day life just as we're walking through it right now the more we practice and harness this opportunity with a safe relationship with the amygdala the more we create that spaciousness for this to happen and Rebecca I'm sure will put in a wonderful guided exercise but we'll do a small practice here and then I'll turn us over for answering additional questions so take a moment and return back to your identified feelings state that you would like more of right here right now and that anchor that you found a moment ago I'll invite you start applying that soothing Haven and touch and leaning into an opportunity to deepen your relationship with that anchor spotlighting it in the Here and Now a time when you felt this before or an experience that reminds you of this feeling State somebody who embodies it much like Merida and brave or even a color that represents this face this energy and on a scale of zero to a hundred where would you rank yourself right now and that I am statement the idea of you are embodying this right now foreign once you have that information if you're below a 95 extend some gratitude to your mind and body system for feeling safe to share with you it's truth right here right now for letting you know that this is something that is wanted doesn't feel fully accessible it's a gift when our systems share with us their truth I'd like to invite you either either aloud or in your mind to start to begin to explore the sensory elements in this question tied to this identified State what repeating that question and five unique ways changing the emphasis on the words exploring the possibilities of it what if I was yeah what if I were inviting your mind to get really curious about what it would feel like to embody this space this energy there's no pressure to strengthen it it's just an exploration what a once you've asked that question five times notice how it would feel for your mind and your body to try on the can me completing that sentence with your chosen energy I can be calm I can be brave whatever it might be now if any part of you goes I don't feel like I can be thank yourself your mind and your body for that information and go back to the what if you've been given a gift begin exploring with those what ifs again and if you are the icans and that feels safe and comfortable for you let's explore into the possibility of a little feature shift well ivy I will be again inviting your mind to Tumble through that possibility to explore it Google search the possibilities of it I will be five times and if anybody found their mind or their body going but she got to the eye cans go back to my king or go back to the what if we're planting the seeds we're inviting the mind to connect and open up to new possibilities or creating the space for what should have been but wasn't to explore into these beautiful spaces these energetic presentations and connecting and from there if it feels comfortable let's Circle back and check in on that idea of zero to a hundred once again noticing where would you rank yourself as you reflect on this energetics has it shifted or changed and if you find that you happen to be at a 95 or above go ahead and move into that I am space I am five times inviting your mind to really notice and be present with that I am and if you're not there that's beautiful is your mind and your body are sharing with you and you're cultivating security and safety within the system by leaning in and allowing all of these states to be present you're creating trust with your own brain which is critical it's a vital part of that case and return back to wherever you feel most comfortable what if I will or I can and as we conclude this exercise I'll invite you to welcome in a gentle breath and notice if that anchor has an energetic space in your mind or your body or perhaps if there's something in your environment that you can link it to that when you see that color or that object in the future you can be prompted to once again revisit this energetic State and that inquiry what the building of muscle memory and intentional anchors in our world allowing ourselves to have spotlights around us for those moments when we forget to Spotlight the gun and our brain gets a little too busy the less than preferable beautiful so I'll come back to our questions and I just want to take a moment and say thank you to all of you for being here has been such a joy it is an incredible honor to be in the space with you this is a book launch week and it's just amazing to see how all of this has been coming to fruition for years and years and years and if you have questions we have we are a very shareware space and as we already highlighted I'll send out the specific handouts that are printer ready the ones that we use in our own clinic so you can print them laminate them we do all those things I'll also include the brain diagram so that you can use that it's very handy and there's a lot of data on our YouTube channel and also know that on my Tick Tock Channel basically all I do there is respond to one question every day two to three minutes of Neuroscience on trauma mental health whatever it might be it's literally just you get bite-sized tidbits of me so if you have questions use that put them into the tick tock Channel and I've seen a lot of uh my Tick Tock people here which is so cool to see your names popping up so hi I saw you I know you're here yay and I don't know I do respond it's such a gift to share this information with the world and the more that we have happy brains we have a happy healthy humanity and that's really the goal for all of us so the recording will be available for two weeks the handouts will be available if you want to go deeper we do have a one-day course with pessie that's all about take the beginnings of some of this clinical work for working with acute traumatic encodings and in that Workshop we do talk about integrating this with the ndr and CBT and internal family systems and all the good good yummy stuff because remember we're back in the Primal brain all of our thinking brain stuff is just as important it's the integration opportunity to really support our clients and ourselves so I'll swing back over to our Q and A here and pull us out of this share screen and the reference references are also on the slide deck and there's a lot of great research articles there if people are looking for the references okay um so I will answer a couple oh we've got good yes I I did I did well saving space for time for Q a so there are additional questions that have been upvoted Rebecca please put those in the chat box all right so what are ways to stop the I can't do this mindset with relaxed anxiety ah such a wonderful question and a very personal experience of mine as well uh relaxation on me have had a very complicated relationship for years I do like to go um so that's where the electrochemical shift that we do see with the havening touch is so supportive uh yesterday I was very very blessed to have an opportunity to sit down with Dr Ariel shorts who does incredible amount of somatic work if you're not familiar with her work she's got a number of amazing books a great YouTube channel and she talked about how she integrates the havening touch with her somatic practices and EMDR that is a really great resource to go and listen to that interview it's on the Pepsi Facebook page so do check that out but when we start to apply the havening touch because this is part of our innate biology it can down regulate the system it will down regulate the system again recognizing that for some people touch might be complicated and then we can use those touch modifications one of my favorites is using um Silly Putty if you've ever made balls or snakes with Sally putty well guess what your palms are still getting the engagement but the system isn't thinking about it as touch it's thinking about it as silly buddy I don't recommend Play-Doh it later dries out very very quickly just a side note but in that way we can start to distract by the creating space or the distractions through even the interaction with the Silly Putty well down regulating the brain into that Theta gamma space the I can't do this is an amygdala and formed these are core values we Link in what we call them cognitive flashbacks even that cartoon of stupid is a cognitive flashback it's something being said enough times that the self takes it on as a core cognition maladaptive cognitions right and so this is a really powerful way to start to create space from any of those types of thoughts me I can't do this I'm not good enough I'm broken I'm a failure all of those have been encoded into the neurobiology and that can become a pretty big roadblock to utilizing these types of tools and often that's more deeply tied to a sense of not being deserving of One's Own healing which to me is highly highly highly indicative of Developmental trauma and complex trauma since it being a burden not you know the self being identified through fawning or through the role that the child has had to learn to play for the caregivers that didn't allow for a sense of self to really come into beingness and self-care is a part of that so there's a lot of the nuances of the amygdala core values there and that's a great space to again start with the possibilities much like I did with that little girl I was sharing about possibility of something possibly being different dipping the toes into something playing with silly putty and even talking about the possibilities of possibilities and start to create that space baby baby baby steps when we're working with these really sticky brains can sometimes shift into the next question here can havening results be remembered by people living with dementia they may not remember the process but maybe remember how it feels I wonder if an anger can be made for that you work with folks of dementia yes the havening we have actually seen and we have a number of individuals who work in hospice we have a lot of phenomenal nurses who've integrated this into their work as well and I know I've had times when family members have been very unwell and their brains haven't been quite available and I've taught the nursing staff especially during the pandemic that's why they haven't touched it's very very very supportive and down regulating the system and helping the brain get some space and specifically with dementia if it's the more traditional dementia and they have access to childhood memories that can be a beautiful anchor I know and I have an aunt who has one of the most joyous laughs in the entire world when I reflect on that laugh throughout the course of my childhood I can go all the way back to you know 1988 1989 and hearing that laugh and just start going oh yeah I've got the sensory memory of that so we can definitely use those anchors and the application of that havening touch will soothe and calm the system as well I believe there's another book that was written by Harry Pickens or it's a he did a kind of a uh what's the word Anthem not an anthology um combinations are just little sidebar I had Encephalitis many many many years ago and I have a little bit of brain damage and I lose words sometimes from that like I did pretty well today though um but a combination of interviews and stories of people who've been utilizing havening and in that book a couple of the individuals do talk about their work with individuals who have dementia so definitely worth checking out um request to read demonstration of the self-havening patch maybe I'll do that in just one second and kind of how I introduce it that's a great way for us to wrap up here um let me get to so before we do that this is great clinically and I will use it I am concerned about people who are not licensed practicing this modality is there a difference between the clinical and the non-clinical work this is a great question and yes absolutely there is so first going back to the very beginning disclosures about scope of practice it is so important and also required that everybody be mindful of their own space in terms of scope of practice what is it appropriate for you to be sitting with and utilizing these healing tools with integrating it into your care and so keep in mind that just as if you haven't been trained to work with trauma if you're not a licensed mental health practitioner who has been trained to do trauma work you would refer that person out right that's our scope of practice that's our ethics that's the Hippocratic Oath Do no harm so just as if we don't have that training that same scope of practice construct applies here as well and we also know that there are many highly functioning humans walking around with cases for self that do percolate and get in the way and so that's where somebody might go do some addition some type of work around performance and where these tools can be very supportive for an athlete in a performance space where they're working with a coach and they've got an amygdala that's going man I kept missing that shot over and over and over again and I go well let's do a little CPR for the amygdala around that and then let's do some classic coaching visualization and bring in the creating possibilities so the self-havening work that you've been learning today that is CPR for the amygdala the creating possibilities protocols everything that's in the book there's a reason why this is a clinical and a public-facing book those are tools that have been designed very mindfully to be safely brought into the world and there's very specific structures around how to use these hence the emotions thermometer and that idea of we're sensing things we're not going to go find traumas and Spotlight them that's trauma reprocessing that belongs in the clinical space so when it comes to our more traditional autonomic nervous system regulation this is where these tools are very very helpful and it UPS the ante and the power because we're working with the brain and we all we've all got one if we're sitting here we've got one and we've all got stuff that's happened that our brains remembered and sometimes it gets in our way part of Being Human in the clinical space we do have very specific havening techniques protocols that are designed for clinical care and integration into treatment those are much deeper deeper deeper tools and we have trainings and workshops on how to use those tools safe in I just mentioned one that I did with Pepsi not too long ago where you can start to learn how to work with actual trauma and Coatings and go much deeper in the work and again scope of practice safety wins always so yes there's two separate spaces I really appreciate whoever brought this question up because it's a very very important piece and so even for the Air Force we've done treatment trainings and then we've done the trainings that are self-havening advocacy first responder trainings different set of tools some of the self-havening ones of course go to the treatment space but the treatment ones do not go to the self-havening space ever we keep those separate for safety uh doing ccpp triggered feelings of grief about a long past relationship I've worked on Grief about this a lot yes this is it goes back to what we were talking about about how grief stays lost days and so if while we're doing the creating possibilities protocol whether it be for a reason like this and that's come up for me too when I'm working on certain considerations or my own loss but sometimes our amygdala will kick up some dust and get activated if we go from the what if to I can and the next thing we know are amygdala is going who do you think you are going back to deservingness those core values is it safe to even think about possibly feeling this way well if that's there then guess what you have a tool for that that's when you transition back to the CPR for the amygdala because that's an opportunity to let your brain start to move through and heal that so that whatever that activation is can become a reprocess a part of traditional information processing and not continue to guide this activation and there are sometimes especially around grief where we want to keep a little bit of the bitter that's okay too and normal we want to hold on to that and part of that frequently is because our brain is going if I don't feel this pain around this anymore doesn't mean I've let go doesn't mean I've forgotten them does it mean I'm not honoring them I know oh there's so many what-ifs around all of that information and the main thing as somebody who's lived with a lot of despairing grief and somebody does a lot of work with grief is remembering that the memories live on there within you the people live on the animals live on the pets live on they're with us we carry them within us so now as we're coming to the end here let's do that request for one more introduction to the havening touch so that we have that walk through experience for everybody so when we teach the havening touch to our clients we focus on four identified areas Palm havening arm havening face and then around the cheeks these four areas have evidence so thinking about empirical validity evidence-based all that good stuff that highlights efficacy and the electrochemical shift that we're looking for now we do know that as I mentioned these fibers that we're interacting with called c-tactile fibers are all over the body but we're not teaching our clients that going back to scope of practice going back to clinical safety what are we teaching we're teaching what is proven we're always staying with the science that's what we do it's important and so these four areas have been proven and you have the citations for all of the that good data in your references and there's a whole bunch more I could have given you probably I think in the book there's around 30 around 80 or 90 different citations excuse me so the first one is as though you're washing your hands under warm water it's a wonderful way to describe it Palm on Palm slow and gentle sometimes our clients will do this you'll probably notice or you have noticed that I switch back and forth between the two both get the same level of Engagement second is that havening hug fingertips on shoulders and down the arms inviting the system is that you're just giving yourself a nice hug or if you are an EMDR practitioner you're used to your butterfly tops we're basically taking that and then upping the ante the power on the presence of those delta waves because guess what butterfly Taps by about bilateral stimulation also enhance or strengthen the presence of delta waves and theta waves in the system and across the brow so it's a good way to share about this with your clients is if you've ever had a tension headache just as we describe it and a lot of parents do this organically with infants and run their fingers across their brow I see this on airplanes within infants and parents a lot they just start doing this naturally and then again right under the cheeks I know my my husband's from India and yes I am remarried now very happily so and she shared with me that his gram growing up in uh Mumbai would sing hems and run finger uh infinity symbols across his face at night when it would be hard to sleep when there would be uh things going difficult things going on in the streets outside that they could hear so it's these specific touches that are again pretty hardwired into our innate biology we do these things organically for one another and for each other and on the YouTube channel there's a video the introduction to the havening touch as well as that modifications video that we mentioned earlier so again thank you everybody this has been absolute Joy I have Rebecca I'll check in and see are there any final questions I see her moving for specific referrals for clinicians that are trained in encoded trauma work are the so EMDR has a referral list um Parnell Institute which is a attachment focused EMDR they also have theirs of course we have a havening.org has a referral list um you're also again welcome to reach out to us uh we have we do a lot of trainings like these we are blessed to sit with so many amazing humans and clinicians and practitioners and healers and so we're also very happy to provide referrals because we have the list of the individuals who've trained under us as well so this would be my primary go-to's and then of course if you're doing trauma work really this will help you that trauma inform peace and educating our clients about this information is so normalizing because it's not us it's our brain and that's really kind of cool because our brains just learned how to keep a safe one way and we can now unwind that and move in a different direction and teach our brain another way of staying safe thank you everyone

Channel: PESI Inc

Views: 21,979

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Id: 8zgMEE1nSHU

Length: 184min 37sec (11077 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022