I’m here joined by Kate Lauth. She is a sensorimotor psychotherapist at Insight Counseling & Wellness. We’re excited to bring some sensorimotor information to our listeners.
For those who don’t know, sensorimotor psychotherapy is a body oriented talking therapy. It was developed by Dr. Pat Ogden and is a blend of thought-based approaches with physical interventions.
I was a personal trainer and in grad school and noticed that as much as I was healing my psyche, there were aspects of my whole self that weren’t being addressed. I thought that exercise and personal training would address those concerns and in some ways they did. Weightlifting and cardiovascular work has changed my system’s ability to respond to stress, tolerate distress, and become stronger, but it was sensorimotor that completed the picture.
I worked with a lot of people who weren’t feeling safe in their bodies. Sensorimotor gives that foundation to help someone first know that they have a body and then learn from their body. We use movement and nervous system regulation and nutrition and things like that to really treat the whole person.
After grad school, I did level one training because it was just such a powerful modality of healing. It felt like magic as a client, especially when sensorimotor was combined with inner child work.
Sensorimotor therapy started in the seventies by Dr. Pat Ogden who noticed that many patients were reliving the past and that the past was alive in their bodies. Treatment methods only seemed to trigger those reminders. She began forming the principles of sensorimotor psychotherapy by joining somatic therapy, which means body, and psychotherapy, into this method for healing the disconnection between mind and body.
After working with the Hakomi Institute with Dr. Ron Kurtz, she founded the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute where therapists are trained on reintegrating the mind and body. We were once whole, it’s through life events that there’s a disconnection.
A little bit about the foundational principles of sensorimotor.
There are four guiding values of sensorimotor psychotherapy; organicity, unity, nonviolence, and mind body spirit holism.
Organicity is honoring the intelligence and the wisdom of the body. Creating a condition for clients to trust and heal from within.
Unity Acknowledges that we’re all interconnected and we’re all interdependent. There’s no hierarchy there where we’re humans that are relating.
Nonviolence. Broadly means the therapist has an attitude of non-judgment. There’s no criticizing or pathologizing or giving advice.
Holism means acknowledging that mind, body and spirit are constantly interacting, and they all make up our experience as humans. All significant mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences are registered in the body
Does sensorimotor psychotherapy treat trauma, or does it treat attachment issues?
First, a few key words.
Attachment begins with a child using their primary caregiver as a secure base to explore the world. With a strong attachment, the child has a safe haven. When they feel ready, they go out into the world.
Next, hyper arousal and hypo arousal. Hyper arousal means our bodies are in high alert, even if the danger is not present. Hyper arousal can look more like anxiety, worry, flee, fight. Hypo arousal is an under response, our system starts to immobilize, freeze, or shut down. Depression, feeling numb, and dissociated are hypo aroused states.
Finally, trauma. Trauma is an event or a series of perceived threats that are overwhelming to your system, your body, your mind. Janina Fisher says, traumas imprint is both psychological and somatic. Long after the events are over the body continues to respond as if danger were present. This can look like changes in your heart rate, breathing, digestion, chronic pain, tension, or numbness. These responses are because our body and our nervous system perceive threats before we can cognitively process them.
Next, let’s touch on the triune brain, a model based on the division of the brain into three distinct regions.
The frontal cortex: the part of our brain that’s in charge of logic, reasoning, and language.
The midbrain, where the limbic system, our threat response system, is located. Emotions and attachment also lie here. We refer to this as the mammalian brain, because all mammals have this area of the brain.
Lastly, the oldest and most ancient area of our brain, called the reptilian brain. This is where automatic instinctive responses, freeze, shut down, or dissociate, come from.
When we experience a threat, our midbrain sends a signal to our thalamus, which oversees sensory information. Our thalamus then sends a signal to our amygdala, which is the fire alarm for danger. The Amygdala then tells our nervous system to respond. This all happens in milliseconds.
When we’re in the front of our brain, we make explicit memories, ones we remember. When we’re living in the middle or back of our brains, the prefrontal cortex shuts down, holding memories implicitly in the body. Oftentimes, people who experience trauma might not have an explicit memory of the event.
When we’re in utero, our nervous system and body are forming and organizing around the energy of our mothers and their nervous systems, shaping the adult we’re going to be because the body remembers implicitly. If you experienced a trauma when you were five and it feels like you’re reliving something in the present moment, you are. You’re body doesn’t know you’re not five anymore. It is activated now.
How do we ground ourselves back to the present, to bring the prefrontal cortex back online, to assess if I’m safe right now?
Mindfulness.
Awareness of my racing heart or tension in my body. Listen to your body. That’s a moment where you can follow through on that survival response. Often trauma gets truncated in the system when those survival responses are not allowed to be followed through on. It can get stuck.
Let’s go into hijacking a bit.
Being hijacked means the reptilian brain took over really fast and flooded someone either with an emotion or thoughts or a body sensation.
We have what’s called top-down processing. Top-down processing means you’re working first with the front of your frontal cortex, then some midbrain emotion and then processing the body’s response. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a very popular and well-respected, top-down processing technique where if a thought is not helpful, you look at what triggers the thought, and you look to challenge the thought and reframe it hoping that this helps the psyche feel safe.
The thought ‘I’m all alone in the world.’ Top-down processing would start with looking at that thought. Is that logical? Are you really alone in the world? What triggered that thought? Can we reframe? Can we practice saying I’m not alone in the world? I know my partner loves me, but they just don’t have time to take on that task.
That’s helpful to work on, but what it doesn’t do is acknowledge the body’s response. A lot of traditional talk therapy uses top-down processing only. The way we bring the body into the room is through bottom-up processing.
Bottom-up processing is reptilian brain up through the limbic system and the emotional processing system to the front of our brain. This approach acknowledges that the body responds first to everything, way faster than our thoughts. Using this approach, we can start to see how our physical behaviors and actions create the foundation of our mental actions. Our body’s experiences are shaping our emotions and thoughts.
If a client comes in and they feel overwhelmed and alone, how would you approach that from a bottom-up perspective?
As the client, I would close my eyes to see what my body would feel like in that moment. Perhaps my heart is racing and there’s tension in my body, but I’m feeling stuck. I would just create awareness.
Was I mindful in that moment or was I already overwhelmed? If I’m not mindful, that means I’m not in the front of my brain and I’m not going to remember the event as well. So maybe when my partner says, I’m really busy too. I wasn’t able to read the sincerity in their voice. I couldn’t look them in the eye and see that they care about me. I would explore how my system reads their responses. Maybe they crinkled the brow the same way a parent did or maybe they looked away and my system shifted based on their response. Be curious what was being informed? How did I feel? What sensations were present?
We would look at it through the five minutes leading up to an event and as much as we can remember during. Then, how I felt afterwards. How did my body organize that experience afterwards? How did my body influence my emotions? How did my emotions influence my narrative and my story? Did I feel more shut down? Where did I have a fight response and say you never helped me. Maybe my system responded with, I really am all alone in the world, there’s proof. Then it shuts down further and disconnects
I really work to observe rather than interpret what is happening, just be curious. Yes, a good sensorimotor therapist would say, how does your body feel right now? We work with what’s happening right now. Even if the event is in the past, because it lives in the body right now. Maybe, I don’t recall what happened but I’m living with these symptoms of hyper arousal or hypo arousal of anxiety or depression, and they come out of nowhere or it’s chronic.
You don’t have to know why, let’s just work with what is here. We don’t have to rehash the past. We don’t need to be scared or avoidant of what’s going on. We can allow it to happen and give ourselves the space to be present with that experience. Often then, it moves through us. When you allow that emotion to be processed and you feel those feelings, then you move on.
When we’re truly hijacked or triggered the front of our brain gets shut down to preserve energy for survival. That’s why people say, I know I’m supposed to breathe deep, but I don’t remember to do it when I’m overwhelmed. You don’t have access to your front of your brain at that moment. So how can we connect to the body?
Just observe with curiosity. A lot of the work I do in sensorimotor psychotherapy with my clients is building resources so that we can get to the front of our brain where cognitive interventions work. The goal is to help the body, heart, and soul figure out a new way of being.
Kate and I are going to pause here. We’re thankful to be sharing this information with our listeners and we’re excited to have you join us again next week, where we continue our conversation about bringing the body into therapy.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast. We’re your hosts, Jessica Warpula Schultz and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you’ve tried everything to feel better and something is still missing, or you’ve already discovered the wisdom of the body, this podcast will encourage and support you in healing old wounds, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential all by accessing the mind body connection.
Please know, while we’re excited to share and grow together. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for mental health treatment. It doesn’t replace the one-on-one relationship you have with a qualified healthcare professional and is not considered psychotherapy. Thanks Jess. And thank you for listening. Now, let’s begin a conversation about what happens when we take an integrative approach to improving our wellbeing.
Jess: Welcome. Today’s episode is about adults living with ADHD, an ADHD MythBusters, if you will. I’ve been really looking forward to this episode because I’m fascinated by the brain, and I’m really interested in hearing what our guest has to say about how the brain influences a person’s lived experience. We’ll explain what ADHD is, what it is not, and destigmatize this mental health disorder. Our guest today is clinical psychologist and ADHD expert, Lynn Hyland, someone we are very proud of at Insight Counseling & Wellness to call our own. Welcome Lynn. I’m so glad you’re here.
Lynn: Thank you, Jess. I’m very excited to be here too. A little bit nervous, but mostly excited about it.
Jess: Well, you know, I get nervous too and yet that’s what makes it so amazing, the process of showing ourselves as therapist, so, thank you. Thank you for being vulnerable and bringing your excited and nervous self to the table. Yeah, before we dig in, I’d love it if you can share with our listeners a little bit more about who you are and how you chose this area of expertise.
Lynn: Okay. As you said, Lynn Highland, I am a clinical psychologist. I work at Insight, which I love, and have been doing clinical work, i.e. therapy, psychotherapy, for 20 years. ADHD is very close to my heart because I have ADHD. I was diagnosed when I was five which was a really long time ago because at that point, they called it hyperactivity. I was diagnosed with that, but not really treated for it. Through, into my adulthood, I wasn’t totally aware of it. I knew about it on the side, but when I was in grad school, we went over, discussing ADHD and it just made a lot of sense to me since I had it and I could see it in myself. So, I was very interested in treating ADHD as well as evaluating for ADHD.
I used to see children as well as adults; had lots and lots of children that I evaluated for ADHD and also, some adults. Now I just see adults and over the years, it ended up becoming one of my very big specialty areas especially because I can completely relate. I think that my clients really appreciate that I do understand what’s going on and it’s good for them, I think.
Jess: Yeah. I think that’s so important that we can bring lived experience to the work we do.
And I, I would assume it would be very validating for a client when they’re building a relationship with a therapist, which is a relationship that, being seen, being heard, feeling understood, is essential to the work you do. To have your therapist understand what your lived experience has been. I believe that would positively impact the relationship and the work that the clients get to do.
Lynn: Yeah, absolutely. That is the one thing I always make sure. If I’m seeing somebody for ADHD or doing an ADHD evaluation or just think they might have it, I will share with them that I have it, because I think that’s really important for them to know that I’m not just going from the books.
Jess: Yeah. That little bit of self-disclosure we call it in the therapy world. When we share about ourselves in a way that serves and benefits the client. It’s called self-disclosure. I think that your choice to share that piece of who you are is really brave.
Well, let’s get into it. We really want to talk about what is ADHD, which in the diagnostic manual, the proper name is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yes. There’s three classifications inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity, and then combined type. Am I correct?
Lynn: Correct. Yeah. So, it’s ADHD predominantly inattention. ADHD predominantly impulsive hyperactive. And ADHD combined type. Okay.
Jess: How would you explain what those three mean?
Lynn: Oh, it’s funny. One of the things that is a pretty big myth for ADHD, is that people with ADHD will all look alike, all look hyper, right? They’re the ones that jump around. ADHD was first diagnosed for children. In fact, it wasn’t an adult diagnosis at all and it continues to not be turned quite as an adult diagnosis. The descriptors that we use for it, the criteria that we use to diagnose it, is based on children, not on adults.
And so, when people think about ADHD, they think about a child who just can’t sit still and that is, is quite the myth. ADHD, predominantly in attention, what the people call ADD, is one where the person is having trouble paying attention and staying focused. They’re easily distracted. You’ll see, these people will be the kids, or adults, that kind of zone out. Also, you get distracted by things and it may look like you’re not paying attention, even if you’re trying to pay attention, you’re distracted by something. We see, especially, a lot of girls with ADD, attention deficit predominately in-attention, don’t get diagnosed because they’re quiet and they don’t attract a lot of attention, but they zone out a lot. So, they miss things in class. I actually, generally I’d say I diagnose, I evaluate more women than men because I think more boys get the diagnosis as children. I’ll have somebody come in to me who’s female and they have it, but they never got diagnosed because they were quiet.
Jess: Part of, in a way, that gender conditioning; people pleasers, wait until spoken to, conditioned not to push the boundaries. I can see how that diagnosis might fly under the radar.
Lynn: Absolutely. Absolutely. These girls, then, they zone out, like in classes, and they miss a lot of stuff. It’s very frustrating. They get told, you have so much potential, you’re not living up to your potential, without getting that diagnosis, which is explaining why they’re not living up to that potential.
Then there’s ADHD predominantly hyperactivity, impulsivity. Hyperactivity is lots of energy and we see that in kids with ADHD, we see it as they’re constantly on the move. We talk about it like they’re driven by a motor. We also see that they are also verbally hyperactive.
They tend to be the real talkative ones. The impulsivity combines with us where you do something without thinking about it first. So, you say something impulsively. These are the kids that are playing catch and the ball rolls out in the street and they run out to catch it, not even paying attention to other cars. Lovely.
In adults with hyperactivity, often you’re not going to see it as much. Usually, adults have learned enough self-control but also learned enough ways of working around it. For example, you can have ADHD with hyperactivity as an adult and if you’re in a meeting, you get up to get a drink of water or you have to go to the bathroom, or you wander, leave to go look at something. You do things that are socially appropriate so that you can get out of your seat.
Oftentimes adults have verbal hyperactivity, they’re just really talkative, as well as mental hyperactivity, which is something one of those myths that people don’t realize is part of. Part of ADHD, hyperactivity is mental hyperactivity. Your brain’s constantly going and it’s going fast all the time.
Jess: I want to get back to that. I know we’re going to talk about the brain in a second. What do both look like? When it’s combined?
Lynn: That’s the big part where there’s not a specific, it doesn’t all look the same, right?
So, if you’ve got somebody who has more inattention than hyperactivity impulsivity, but they still have the hyperactive impulsive, they are more likely to maybe be a little quieter, maybe not as running, but their brain’s going and they get distracted by their own thoughts. So that’s part of distractibility, it’s not just external, it’s also internal.
Others, they’ll be more hyperactive, impulsive, but still have that inattention component. They’re the ones that actually hurt a lot of people’s feelings pretty easily, because they just say whatever comes to mind, they think really quick. You’ll find them a lot, like you miss their transitions. There’ll be in a conversation that suddenly start talking about something you weren’t talking about and it’s, whoa, what, where this isn’t what we were talking about. And they’ve already gone through this process of a transition and they don’t realize nobody else was following
Jess: So, we have these three types. What do you see as most common?
Lynn: In adulthood, I tend to see more of the combined type, that’s for sure. If somebody has reached adulthood without an ADHD diagnosis, they’re probably mild, have mild or moderate ADHD. A lot of people have a picture in their head, somebody with extreme, with more significant ADHD, and so that the person with mild ADHD who has made it through into adulthood relatively successfully, but is struggling with some things and wonders, ‘Why am I always sticking my foot in my mouth? Why do I always miss out on the conversation? Why can’t I just sit still and relax on a vacation?’ Those sorts of things are more mild. If you’ve gone through, into adulthood being relatively successful, or at least functional, and you’re like, what’s the ADHD diagnosis going to do for me? It actually just explains a lot. It takes that guilt that you have for not meeting your potential away. It also says, oh, look here’s a bunch of things, coping strategies you can try, to help you with your ADHD. You can start applying those things and you wouldn’t have gotten those, probably, if you hadn’t gotten that diagnosis.
Jess: I’m excited to share with our listeners some of those strategies that you use with your clients and with the groups that you work with. Going back to de-pathologizing, which means helping someone feel like they’re not the problem. I think giving a diagnosis can do that. I agree completely that there are these symptoms or experiences we’re having, and often we internalize and look for fault, right, just normally trying to figure out what’s going on. Often, like you said, Why am I always sticking my foot in my mouth? Why am I struggling to maintain this relationship? Why is it so easy for the people around me to get their homework turned in during a pandemic when we’re all online, but it’s really hard for me to do that or, why am I trying harder than everybody else and yet I’m farther behind everybody else? The diagnosis can help take the “I” out of it and give reasoning.
Lynn: Yes, and it is a, it’s not something, first of all, it’s invisible, which is hard, but it’s not something made up. There’s actually brain function involved and it’s how your brain is wired. It’s not your fault you have ADHD. You have, you have a condition. Your brain is wired differently from birth and that’s just how it is. You need to adapt to it, but it’s not your fault that you have it. A lot of it’s, oh, you just need to be more disciplined about it. You just need to put in more effort and willpower, but the whole point of ADHD is, it doesn’t respond to effort and willpower. When people try and try and try, and then they come into me with depression or anxiety, because they’ve spent their whole lives, not quite being their potential and they’ve been, they don’t know why, they become kind of, there’s an unexplained incompetence sometimes.
Jess: That’s absolutely true. I’ve seen that as well, where there are outlying influencers or factors that have nothing to do with how hard they’re trying or that they’re not good enough.
No wonder you have anxiety. No wonder you’re feeling low and depressed about your future. Maybe, let’s look at it this way and see if we can treat the symptoms or, assess, first of all, for ADHD, and consider whether you want medication in your life or not. Since about 80% of people respond pretty well to medication for ADHD. Then, looking at how can I work with the diagnosis in a way that makes me feel better. Let’s talk a little bit more, you mentioned the brain. I’m always excited to talk about the brain. I don’t know that much about the neurology of ADHD. What can you share with us?
Lynn: So, what’s going on in the brain, the wiring quote-unquote issue. The wiring difference in that is that the, it takes place in the prefrontal cortex, which is near the front of the brain.
There’s an area in there that manages what we call executive function. Executive functioning is the master controller of your life. It controls things like paying attention, starting and stopping attention. Inhibitions, right? Whether you are inhibited or impulsive. Managing your level of energy. Managing your level of emotional energy. Motivation is in there as well. Time management. Not just planning things, but also being able to tell how long something is taking or even what time it is. There’s all these different, in that one area, controls so many different things. What happens with people with ADHD as compared to people who are, what we call neuro-typical, because their brain was in a typical fashion, is that, that area is under stimulated. So, the executive functioning area is under stimulated in the brain, which means that it’s not working as well. When the brain is under-stimulated in that area, it means that you just don’t, you’re not, that’s a weakness. You’re not able to do those things well, and those executive functioning things really make you functional. That’s why the medication that’s often prescribed are things like Ritalin and Adderall in all their various formats and psychostimulants, is to stimulate that area in the brain, to get it working. Because if it’s more stimulated and it’s working more, that means you’re going to have more control over those things and you’re going to function better with those executive functions.
Jess: That makes a lot of sense. Do you know anything about the root cause? Is it genetic?
Lynn: Yeah, it’s very genetic. In fact, it is so heritable. It’s more heritable than eye color. Wow.
Jess: Wow. That’s fascinating.
Lynn: Yeah. So, if you have ADHD and you have a child, your child has a 50 to 80% chance of getting ADHD. For example, I have ADHD and I have two children. Each of my children had a 50 to 80% chance of getting ADHD. Both of them got it. But their ADHD looks different for each of them. Even though it comes from me the same antecedents….
Jess: I hear what you’re saying, even though it’s coming from the same source. Yes. The presentation, epigenetics, within them is very different.
Lynn: It is. Yes. Yeah.
Jess: Let’s talk about Jessica McNabe, she did a Ted Talk. It’s called, ‘How to ADHD’ and she shares her story. Very moving story, by the way, if people want to check it out. She does a great job of summarizing her personal experience of having ADHD and feeling as though she wasn’t living into her full potential. She talked about how, for her, when she was a child, it was like, if she wasn’t interested in something, it was like trying to nail jello to the wall to get her… That’s like clear visualization.
Lynn: It really is, yeah.
Jess: Speaking of that, especially in the body work I do, sometimes it’s moving the body more, changing the diet, meditating, trying to create lifestyle changes or change habits, or even change how we think about ourselves. I hear stories of shame of like, why can’t I find that motivation? I must be lazy. I’m just
Lynn: I don’t care enough.
Jess: So, I’d love if you could explain to our listeners the idea of motivation.
Lynn: Motivation is controlled in the executive functioning part of the brain, like we were talking about earlier. People with ADHD have little to no internal motivation. Internal motivation is where you say, I’m going to do this thing and you do it. You don’t say I’m going to do this because, you just say, I’m going to do this thing.
Jess: Which I didn’t know, by the way. I did not know someone with ADHD does not have an internal source motivation. I didn’t know that. If you think about how much self-help propaganda is about just do it, it’s all within, if you can’t be with yourself and find motivation, there’s something wrong with you that you have to work on. Yeah, I call it propaganda because it’s very stigmatized. So, they think, if I can’t pull that from within what’s wrong with me?
Lynn: Yeah, and the answer may be, you have ADHD and you have little to no internal motivation. You have to get external motivations and external motivators are not just things like grades and money. It’s also how you feel about things, which you’d say is internal. But what it is, is that because of the stuff around you, it makes you feel good or bad. I work with people with ADHD. They come to me because they’re having trouble with something like focusing on the job, getting their work done for work or for school, or what have you. And it’s okay, you probably have little to no internal motivation, so we need to figure out what external motivators can motivate you. What external things can motivate you. Do you want to get straight A’s? If you do, that might be enough motivation. Do you want to get a promotion at work? If so, that might motivate you. Deadlines are huge motivators for people. I cannot tell you how many people, over the years, I’ve spoken with who had ADHD, who are like, it’s the two days before the project is due, be at school or work, and they pull an all-nighter and, but they couldn’t get to it and they kept wanting to get to it, but they never got to it before then.
It was that deadline. It was that pressure. And so, some people with ADHD can really thrive in high pressure environments because they’ve got that constant, external motivator pushing them. If you don’t have an external motivator, then it’s like creating one. Sometimes one of the best ones is accountability, right? It’s, if you say, okay, I’m going to get this done by Monday and it’s not due till Friday, eh, you’re never going to work on it. I have to get this done by Monday because I promised my coworker that I’d get it to them so they could do their part, right? Having somebody that you have to get something done for, or they’re going to be upset or they’re going to fail, those sorts of accountability, can really help. One big external motivator is actually, it seems an internal but it’s not, the motivation isn’t internal, but the feelings are, anxiety is a huge motivator. For example, when somebody is really worried about getting good grades, they can actually be very motivated and get everything done and look like an ideal student because they are so motivated by their anxiety just keeps them on edge. It’s like pressure, this pressure of the anxiety. Then what happens is they reach adulthood. Where they’ve succeeded really well school, college, if they go work, and then they get to a point where they’re not worried about it anymore, or they get treated for their anxiety and when their anxiety goes down, all of a sudden, they’re not functioning very well anymore. They’re struggling to get the motivation to get things done, because they’ve always had that anxiety pushing them. They don’t know why they’re suddenly not able to get things done and they’re finally relaxed for the first time in their lives. It’s so hard because when we get to this point in a therapy setting, the person oftentimes has to decide between, managing their ADHD, functioning and being anxious.
Jess: Wow.
Lynn: And that’s why it’s really good to identify ADHD as well. If it was anxiety, keeping you going, you don’t want to spend your life anxious. You need some coping strategies and different ways you can do things like create motivation so you can live, be functional, not anxious.
Jess: Yeah, because that anxiety, it wears on us, it wears on our body. I’ve seen that as well. That’s absolutely true.
Lynn: One of the main things we see for people with ADHD is a lot of procrastination, right?
Just attending to things when you have trouble attending, is really tiring. You want it to be easier to attend to things. It’s easier to tend to things when you have motivation. And so, if your motivation is low and you’re sruggling to find something then then you generally procrastinate a lot. We have a technique, called the procrastination technique, it’s used to help you when you’re struggling to get something done that you think you should get done, but you just can’t seem to get the energy and the motivation to do that, to start. We don’t use this just for ADHD,
I actually use it for people who have procrastination through other things, they’re depressed or they’re anxious, or just darn busy. What happens with the procrastination technique is, if there’s this wall to getting started, it’s you’ve got this big project and you’re like, okay, I have to do this project, but actually, starting on the project, it’s the hardest part.
Jess: Oh, so true. Yes.
Lynn: Right? There’s this wall, this barrier, between you and getting the project done. The procrastination technique is, so when you have a big project, to get over that wall, is to
make the wall smaller. If you’ve make the wall smaller, then you can get over the wall with the amount of motivation you already have. And, the way to get that smaller is to have the project be smaller. How we do this is, I tell people and I do it myself, is okay, you’ve got this big project, break it down into small pieces. So, you have small goals. So, for example, if you have, say, a research paper, you have to do for school, okay break this down. This research paper it’s like a 10-page research paper, oh my gosh, it’s going to take so long. Break it down. What’s the first thing I have to do? Come up with a topic. So go ahead and get a topic. Next, do something that’s only going to take you a few minutes to do. Then you’re going to say, I’m going to go Google search it and write down five articles to read. Then, okay, I’m going to read one article today or what have you. You can break it down into small bites. You can also break it down into time pieces. I’m going to work on that for 10 minutes today. Now, if you think about these, most people are like 10 minutes, I can do that for 10 minutes. That’s fine. And then the timer goes off. I recommend people use timers, if they want to. Timer goes off and you’re like, okay, I’m done. I can do a few more things. And so, what we find is that you make a goal, say you make a goal 10 minutes each day, you’re going to work, okay? And people are like that’s not very much. By the end of the week, you’ve done 70 minutes.
Jess: The motivation, I believe sometimes kicks in once we’re doing something like the inspiration and the interest kicks in once we’ve already started going. During our production meeting, you brought up a concept that you’ve witnessed in your work, something you called the zone of comfort. Right now, this procrastination technique, it’s reminding me about breaking things down and getting into it. Can you explain for our listeners the zone of comfort?
Lynn: Absolutely. It’s about the amount of stimulation that you have. So, everybody has this place where there’s too much stimulation and they get overwhelmed, or there’s too little stimulation and you get bored. For most people they prefer not to spend time bored or overwhelmed. Those are really uncomfortable. And so, everybody’s got this band that is their zone of comfort between too much stimulation and too little stimulation; between overwhelm and boredom. The thing for people with ADHD is they also have this band, but I believe it’s much narrower. So, in other words, they are easily thrown out of that zone of comfort by a little more stimulation or a little less stimulation and that people who are neuro-typical and don’t have ADHD, there is this kind of wider so, they can tolerate more stimulation before they get overwhelmed and they can tolerate less stimulation before they’re bored. Now, the thing with ADHD is that doesn’t mean it’s strictly right in the middle, because there’s some people with ADHD who get bored very easily. Their zone of comfort is near the top, where there could be a lot of stimulation and they’re still bored. These would be the people with ADHD, you think are thrill seekers, the ones that like to bungie jump, sky dive, or drive really fast. Whereas other people with ADHD can get overwhelmed by too much stimulation. I actually, I think I’m one of these people, because what happens is I can’t stand to work at a desk that isn’t neat and tidy.
If there’s papers scattered around, it’s too much stimulation. It feels like chaos to me. I have found one of my coping strategies for my ADHD, and this zone of comfort, is that I make sure my desk is tidy when I’m going to work on it. Then I feel it’s less stimulating and I’m more comfortable and I’m also able to focus better.
Jess: That reminds me of sensorimotor psychotherapy. We have what’s called the modulation module. Our thoughts, our feelings, our physical sensations, movement, the senses, at all times, that information is coming together in our present moment and within this window of tolerance. And so, if something happens that makes us feel overwhelmed, we may leave our window of tolerance and go above it. We also go down into hypo arousal so we freeze or we feel numb or shut down or collapse and the way you describe that comfort zone is the way we described the window of tolerance. Everyone’s is different. It can be smaller. It can be bigger. It can change based on the day or even, let’s say now, if you’re a person with ADHD, your window of tolerance may be smaller than the neuro-typical brain. And why that’s interesting, knowing this can really help a person in predicting triggers or observing what’s happening within their system so that they can make individualized choices for coping. Like you said, you’re closer to the edge that needs less stimulation, less input coming into your brain, helps regulate your system. Yeah, absolutely. That’s so cool. We’re not done yet. We want to share practical strategies for anyone listening.
Lynn: Yeah.
Jess: Someone with ADHD has a poor working memory, right?
Lynn: So, what happens is, in the brain with memory is, you have to keep something in short term memory, long enough for it to go into intermediate and long-term memory. So, the short-term memory is a few seconds to a couple of minutes, mostly seconds, but you have to stay focused on it. So, it takes your attention. A good example of this. Say you meet somebody at a party, and you meet them and you’re like, hi, and you each give your name. Let’s say, Bob, you meet Bob. You’re like, oh, this is Bob. Okay. Hi, it’s nice to meet you, Bob. So, what do you do for a living? And Bob starts talking about what he does for a living. By that point, I’m now focused on one, asking the question, what do you do for a living? Two, listening to him, say what do you do for a living? And I have forgotten Bob’s name. I can’t keep it in my head long enough. Because you have to focus on it long enough to get into intermediate and then long-term memory. And so, the same thing happens if you decide, you’re in the middle of say your living room, and you realize, oh, I need to go grab that piece of mail and get it out to the mailbox. It’s in my office. And you walk from the living room to your office and by the time you’ve gotten to your office, you’ve been distracted by something, and you forgot what you came to the office for. You just can’t remember. Again, most people have these moments and everything, but people with ADHD have them a lot.
One of the things I really recommend is technology. We have such amazing technology now for helping with various skills, but this one for memory, really good ones. So, Alexa, Siri, Google, nest, whatever it is, those devices that are set up to listen and answer you can say Alexa, add something to my to-do list and Alexa will ask you, what do you want to add and you say what it is, or add hamburger to my grocery list. You don’t have to stop and find a piece of paper. You don’t have to take care of the issue immediately, right? Now, I just use my phone, whether I stop and type something in or I have Siri add it. My coping strategy for this, for many years, I would think of something I meant to tell my husband and then I’d go into his office to say, oh, I remember we’re supposed to talk about this. And he would look at me and go could you not interrupt my work? Oh gosh. Because one I’m impulsive, but two, I know if I don’t do something about it immediately, I absolutely will forget it. In fact, many of the times I would go into bug him is because I’d remembered and then forgotten and remembered, then forgotten, and remembered, then forgotten. And by the way, for anybody who lives with somebody with ADHD, close your office door. I will tell you, just close your office door. I kept telling him, please close your office door. If you close your door, and he just didn’t want to close the door, I’m like, it will stop me from interrupting you, I promise because I’ll have that barrier there.
Jess: We have such access to technology, and I just wonder how many marriages are flowing better. That does bring up, having reasonable expectations for ourselves and for our loved ones with ADHD and, you know, having that conversation about how to support each other. The more we can educate loved ones or family members on what it’s like to have ADHD, the more we can increase our empathy and understanding of how to support them, so that in those moments, if you walk in, it doesn’t feel like you did something wrong. Both people in the equation know, ope, there’s some ADHD, and we can support each other and move through it.
Lynn: So, there’s a really good book called, Driven to Distraction, that explains ADHD. It was written by a, I believe, psychiatrist and I’m not certain, but I think he has ADHD. You have to understand, I read this 17 years ago, but it gives you all these case examples. You can see all the different ways that ADHD can present, it gives people kind of an idea. In fact, when my husband and I were dating, I gave him this book to read, and he read it and he really understood my ADHD more.
Jess: Understanding, there’s a shift to compassion and supporting each other. I can imagine how, if it’s either diagnosed, or the partner or family member or employer doesn’t have an understanding of ADHD, that it can cause some pretty big conflicts or issues. I’m glad you mentioned that book. That’s wonderful, Driven to Distraction. Do you have any tips or tricks for bringing the body into the equation and helping the whole system regulate and function better?
Lynn: Absolutely. One of the things is that, especially for people with the hyperactivity component, you can have a lot of energy. And so just, straight out, if you have the hyperactivity thing, get regular exercise. Take it, use it, it can help you feel more in control of your energy levels. Mindfulness, meditation, yoga, things like that, all help to slow down thinking in the brain, but also to bring things into focus as well. They’ve studied mindfulness with ADHD, especially with kids with ADHD, and found that kids getting trained in mindfulness really helps kids with ADHD quite a bit. I think it’s great for adults as well. One of the things, just to mention, is that I know for myself, and I’ve spoken with a few people with ADHD who have had the same kind of experience, is that I really struggle to meditate on my own. To sit still for 10 minutes and frankly, just to sit still for 10 minutes, is really hard for me in the first place, but to stay in the moment and everything, I struggle with that. When I do guided meditation, it works really well for me. If that works for you to have some sort of external guide, then, use that it. You don’t need to be sitting there frustrated.
Jess: That’s helpful. That’s helpful. With my clients, when I’m leading guided meditations,
that is something we’ve talked about. Whether or not a person has ADHD, but especially if, I’ve learned in my practice that the more I can guide and help someone stay in the present moment, either through body scan visualizations or positive affirmations, the more they feel as though, or they report back to me they can turn their brain off, or it gives their brain something to focus on. Like you said before, for some, the hyper activities inside the mind.
Lynn: Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. A lot of this is doing what works, right? When you look around, somebody with ADHD looks around at their coworkers, say, and they see everybody’s getting their stuff in and they’re not having problems with it and they’re not working so hard and you’re trying to work the same way they work. It’s not working because you have a different wiring in your brain and it’s like finding what works for you. And sure, if the people around you don’t quote, unquote, need to do these things that you need to do, but what does it matter? You need to do what you need to do. Of course, safely and not harming others and all that stuff. But if you need to ask your boss to give you hard deadlines and give you plenty of time to get the project done before it’s due, ask your boss to give you hard deadlines, right?
Jess: Good point. The more you know yourself and you can communicate about that to those around you, the more opportunity you have to get your needs met.
Lynn: Yep, absolutely. Yeah, I find, right now with COVID and people working from home, I’ve gotten this like rush of, deluge of, ADHD evaluations to do, because so many people who have not been diagnosed with ADHD and who were functioning and doing okay, have now been trying to work from home and it’s pulling all these really problematic ADHD symptoms from them. They no longer have that accountability of somebody working next to them. They don’t have the people around them that makes them focus more. They have more distractions in their house than they did in their, at their desk, or their office or what have you. Yeah. I’ve never had such a rush of adult ADHD evaluations. It’s all these people who’ve been very functional, they’ve got mild ADHD. They’ve been very functional. It’s worked for them, and boom, things change, and they are struggling a lot.
Some people with ADHD would say, what I need is I need one room that’s completely empty, in my house or my office or whatever. Like, all the distractors are gone so, you could just go in there with your work and there’s no distractors. Your house tends to be more distracting than your workspace.
Jess: Oh, I can only imagine. I think that’s a really valuable point. Even though the world is opening up a little bit more now, things are going to shift. Offices are closing. It is changing to more remote work in a lot of different industries. Share one last tip. How do you support someone in those moments?
Lynn: The distractibility thing is a quote, unquote, simple fix of creating a space, even if you don’t have a room for it, but creating a space that’s not as distracting. That may be, you have to wear headphones while you work. The tidy desk. If you have to create a corner in your room that has nothing on the walls. It’s a desk with a laptop on it or computer on it and you sit there so you’re not distracted by, you have to face the corner or the wall. Don’t face a window, because I’ll tell you what you will be watching every car that goes,
Jess: Again, Lynn, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate your time and your skill and sharing with all of us. I want to let our listeners know too, if you identify with any of this information, there are ways that you can seek a formal assessment from a specialist like Lynn.
There’s several in our community, and we hope this information also helps the loved ones of those with ADHD increase their understanding and their compassion for the atypical neurological experience. So, to close out, Lynn, let’s end with talking about the wonderful qualities that ADHD can create within a person. What do you see in your clients and even within yourself?
Lynn: Oh, I have to tell you, one of the reasons I specialize in ADHD is my clients who have ADHD are my favorite clients, because they are so dynamic. Having conversations with them is so much fun. They’ll hit all these different things because they’ll meander in their thoughts as they get distracted by things and that’s really cool. It’s fun. You find a lot of energy. People with ADHD tend to be pretty sensitive. Of course, there’s lots of people that will say, oh, you’re too sensitive, negative quality. I think it’s a fabulous quality. You find passion. You find more creativity. A lot of people with ADHD have a lot of positivity as well, which is very cool. And one of the best parts is the hyper-focus. If you get somebody with ADHD that is interested in a certain area, they can do amazing things because they’re able to just completely hyper-focus, block other things out and really work on it. They can be incredibly productive, incredibly good, incredibly detailed at things. Thinking outside the box. There are just really some absolutely fabulous parts to ADHD and people with ADHD. I have to tell you, I don’t know what it’s like to be neuro typical, I don’t know but, I don’t think I’d ever want to not have ADHD. Some days it’s a little hard to pay attention, but I’ve been able to manipulate my life in a way to make it fit and work and so, it doesn’t cause me a lot of issues and I think it gives me a lot of positives.
Jess: I agree. I agree. I’m glad you’re you. I always appreciate your energy, enthusiasm, your drive and commitment to serve and you just have so much to share. So, thank you again for being here.
Lynn: It was fun. Thanks Jess.
Jess: Oh, good. Good. Okay. Join us next week, where we talk about the wisdom of the body, a sensorimotor approach to healing. We’ll talk about treating trauma using the body as the entry point. It’s one of my areas of expertise. It’s an episode not meant to train you in using the model. I promise no one’s walking out a sensorimotor therapist, but instead deepen your understanding about sensorimotor psychotherapy, its guiding principles, and its key concepts. I’m grateful to have Kate Lauth, a fellow sensory motor psychotherapist, as my guest. I hope you’ll join us.
Jeanne: Thank you again for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-centered mental health podcast. We hope today’s episode was empowering and supported you in strengthening your mind-body connection. Please join us again next week as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing. Until then, take care.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast. We’re your hosts, Jessica Warpula Schultz and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you’ve tried everything to feel better and something is still missing or you’ve already discovered the wisdom of the body. This podcast will encourage and support you in healing old wounds, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential, all by accessing the mind body connection.
Please know, while we’re excited to share and grow together. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for mental health treatment. It doesn’t replace the one-on-one relationship you have with a qualified healthcare professional and is not considered psychotherapy. Thanks Jess. And thank you for listening. Now, let’s begin a conversation about what happens when we take an integrative approach to improving our wellbeing.
Hi there. Thanks for joining us today. We have a very special guest. I’m very excited to talk about resources for student athletes and supporting our high school students in their athletic endeavors. Today with us is Kelly Kendricks. He is a therapist and service facilitator at Insight Counseling and Wellness. Not only that, Kelly, you have 20 years of teaching experience, 30 years of coaching experience, and you have coached basketball, both boys and girls, and I hear you’ve helped bring your teams to state three times and finals two times as well. Indeed. Fill us in. Tell us how you got interested in working with student athletes and how this became a passion of yours.
It actually all started with my mom who, Roberta Corrine Baron Kendricks Smith, and that is her full name, she was one of the first female coaches in Wisconsin history to coach high school basketball. I believe she was the first black female coach to coach fast pitch softball in high school. So, I got started really taking stats on the bench and then offering advice and then essentially just becoming an assistant coach. That was when I was 17. In fact, I got a letter in being a scorekeeper because they couldn’t, obviously, pay me as a student. But my mom was one of the first people inducted into the Wisconsin softball hall of fame. So, I grew up with her playing sports and going to tournaments all over the place. It’s funny because all I ever wanted to do was play sports. I wanted to play baseball. I wanted to play basketball. I wanted to play football.
Growing up, I knew my mom as Rabbit. That was her nickname. This is embarrassing, but I’ll share. Yeah. Until I was a freshman in high school, hand to God, I thought my mom’s name was Rabbit because that was her nickname and that’s what everyone called her. I never heard anyone call my mom anything other than Rabbit. And, of course, I called her mom because, yeah. So my freshman year in high school, there was a baseball coach and he asked me, oh, so you’re the Roberta Kendricks’ son? And I’m like, no, I’m Rabbit’s son. He just looked at me like, no, you’re Roberta Kendricks’. I know, because she was big in softball and in the state, and most of the country, on this side of the world, knows your mom. So, of course I went home, and I asked my mom, what’s your name? She said, Roberta.
That’s so sweet. I think that is so sweet. What a great nickname. I love that. Rabbit. She got the nickname because when she played softball, she played shortstop, and, of course, you get into the hall of fame, you probably were pretty good. She had a habit of, whenever she picked up ground ball, she would hop before throwing it to first, so they started calling her Rabbit. Wow. What a legacy. What a way to come into this world of movement and mind-body. That’s amazing.
It runs in my family. My dad was an athlete. He played high school basketball as well, and baseball. I have a cousin who is playing professional basketball right now in Europe. Oh, wow. If you’ve heard my name Kendricks, you’re probably wondering, hey, is there any chance that he’s related to Lance Kendricks who used to play tight end for the Rams and the Packers and briefly for the Chargers and the Patriots. Yeah. He’s my first cousin. Alright, it’s in the DNA. It’s official. So, I’ve always been working with student athletes and so it’s just been something that I started and I’m like, I love doing this.
Oh, wow. I’m so glad you’re here. I was preparing for this episode, and I didn’t realize there are over 8 million student athletes in the United States. I was really blown away by the amount of people who spend their time, have passion, the discipline it takes, the courage, the leadership, and the community that’s created for these student athletes. Let’s get into it. What we’re going to talk about today is how to help students find the sport they’re interested in, some parent education on how parents, guardians, or families can better support their student athletes. We’re also going to talk about mental health and mind-body connection that’s so important.
Let’s begin, starting with, in your opinion, how we can help families support a student to find a sport that they’re interested in.
There are so many options, so how do we begin thinking about that? I think for the most part, a lot of families will not necessarily push their child into a sport, but they’ll make suggestions. I would like you to try baseball or I’d like you to try soccer. There are a lot of other things that your child might be interested in, that in your mind might not be a sport, but probably should be considered a sport, it takes as much athleticism. It’s important to, it’s okay to push if that’s what your child wants. Sure. If they’re clearly not interested in a certain sport, then pushing it is never going to work.
Yeah. Oh, I agree. When we, when you and I talked before we talked about the tri path versus the do path. Can you explain that for our listeners? What that means? Yeah, absolutely. There’s a, and it’s to quote Yoda from Star Wars, is that there’s do or do not. There is no try. The try path is. Yeah, it’s okay for them to try a sport or to try a dance or to try some motional activity. If they don’t like it or they do like it, but this isn’t something that I want to do as a world-class event, so to speak or a state event, that doesn’t mean that they can’t enjoy it. To do it, that’s where you’re committing, is this is something that I want to do. You’ll know. Your child will let you know. It won’t be a secret. It won’t be a, if they’re hemming and hawing, then it’s something they may want to try. If they don’t like it, that’s fine. Yeah. Yeah, so what you’re saying is it’s really important to support them in the experimenting and trust that they know what’s best for them and that when they find it, you’ll have to pull them by their arms and legs to get them to stop doing it, to get them to come in the house, or to slow down.
Because now at that point, now you’re at the do point, you have to realize, okay, they want to push forward. How far and how much do they want to push forward? There are certain sports that take an immense amount of time and practice and training and there are individual sports where they’re out there on an Island all by themselves. If you’re a golfer or if you play tennis, you’re on your own. If you’re a swimmer you’re on your own. These are things that you have to take into account, and it’s a different mentality if you’re doing a solo sport than it is if you’re doing a team sport. How is it different, would you say mentality?
Mentality, with a team sport is you have that family and that connection, and you can depend on other people. If you’re playing tennis, it’s, you’re out there, you’re on your own and you have to have that mental toughness that if you fall down, it’s you who has to pick you up. In fact, it is actually against the rules. You’ll get, you can be forfeited if you get outside help. Your coach can’t coach it from the outside and it’s completely different than in baseball and basketball. You can get help from your teammates. You can get help from your coach. In tennis and golf that’s it, you’re out there on your own. That takes a lot of mental toughness. Yeah.
That’s such a good point because when families are trying to help their child choose which direction they want to go, I would assume then that personality temperament really plays a part in whether they should choose an individual sport or a team sport. If you have someone that, you know, would grow more in a populated environment where they can turn to other people and build that sort of mental game, I would think that they should do a team sport. Versus, if you have someone maybe where they already enjoy solitude, or they’re pretty internally driven towards something, they don’t need much prompting, maybe they would thrive with an individual sport. And there’s some people who may struggle with anxiety, or they may struggle with social situations, but they get into an individual sport and they’re fine. They like being able to rely on them. They don’t have the pressure from anyone else and they do absolutely find playing tennis or they played golf or they do swimming or track and field events. You’re part of a team, but you’re not necessarily working together with anyone.
That’s such a good point. I never even thought of that. That’s a really good point. What about depending on age. Any tips on developmental stage, age of the child. One thing, a lot of course you probably know that, there’s T-ball leagues and Mighty Mite leagues for just about every sport. That’s a really good time to judge just how much your child wants to play in a particular sport. When they’re, I would say between the ages of three and seven, because the way those sports are played, if you’ve ever seen a soccer match, you know that with the adults and young adults it’s spread out and everybody has their assignment, their area. With three-year-olds all the way through seven year olds, it’s a cluster of about five or six kids all trying to kick one ball and you’ve got a goalkeeper who’s chasing butterflies. I have seen this before. My friend Molly coached a kindergarten team once and it was so adorable. All it was was trying to get them to kick in the same direction, because they were confused about why they couldn’t just kick the ball to the closest goal versus their goal. Exactly. At one of the younger teams that I coached once, we scored two goals that entire season, but we scored them against our goalkeeper because when we practice that’s who they were used to practicing against. During the game, I would try to convince them no, we want a score against the other goal. No? Okay. Good job. Yeah. So, in that age group it’s introducing them to even the structure of, we go somewhere, we practice, we share, we wear jerseys, and then we show up on Saturday and we have community and things of that nature. What about more late elementary, middle school? What starts happening then?
So that’s when you really start to figure out what they’re developing into and what they’re really interested in. I think the best example is little league. You have the little league, whether it’s literally baseball, softball, or hockey, you have a tendency to figure out right away, this kid wants to do it. He’s practicing all the time. He shows up at every game. There are some players that, oh I’m just doing it for fun and there’s nothing wrong with that. It may just be a casual experience for them. There the others, and you think of people like LeBron James, who is one of the few athletes to make it as a teenager into the NBA. He was playing from an early age with a mentality of, this is where I want to go. I’ve got goals. When you’re setting goals, you are basically announcing, I have a plan of what I want to do in this sport. I have chosen sport. Again, that’s a mentality of dedication.
It’s also really good to offer support to those who just want to do it for fun. Yeah, I agree. There’s a lot of play in play is important. It’s really important to our nervous system. It’s important to our mental health that we play. As adults, I think sometimes we forget. So, yeah, offering children that opportunity to just get out and play and enjoy movement, I think it can be really helpful to their mental health and their physical health. This comes back to the do and try. If you’re trying a sport and you’re doing it for fun, then it’s also important to get them into the right area. What I mean by that is, you have, like in high school, you’ll have players that, I’m playing basketball because I want to work towards getting a state championship. There’s a huge difference because, at the varsity level, that’s what most teams are trying to do. There are some athletes that just want to play. I just want to have fun. So, that might not be the locale for you to play. If you’re not taking it as seriously as everyone else, it might not be as enjoyable. You might not get as much playing time. There are absolutely other avenues that you can take on. It’s really important for parents to realize, and not pressure, even if they have a big interest in it, to not pressure them into having to play in high school. No, that’s a really good point because they can find joy in movement outside of the high school arena and still stay connected. Still, enjoy and play and yet maybe it doesn’t come with the expectations and the pressure. Yes.
Speaking of which, let’s talk a little bit about that. Let’s talk about the experience of a high school athlete and, in your opinion, the mentality of the mind body connection when you’re playing high school athletics. This is another area where it separates between team and individual. Obviously, at the high school ages and where, for me, I started high school at 13, so I’ll limit it from 13 to say 18, maybe late teens. Just the difference between the mentality of the 13 year old, and an 18 year old, it’s huge. It may not sound like it’s huge, but the difference of five years in that, that’s where it becomes a thing for the coaches to be careful about. You have a huge effect on a player’s mentality. You can push certain players in a certain way. They need that push. They need someone to tell them you can do better. I expect better. There are other players that will get that reaction and they’ll crumble because it’s not the way to approach them. So, it becomes a very mental health aspect for coaches relating to their players, to find a way to bring out the best in them. That’s where you have to have that mentality, have to focus on your mental health. You have to focus on the match itself and that can be very challenging for youths.
I heard Aaron Rogers recently speaking, you know, of athletes, I heard him talking about how people often may try to push away their emotions when they’re nervous, feeling overwhelmed, stressed. What he tries to do is tries to do is to be present with those emotions, and accept those emotions, support himself through them and perform through them. Because the thing is, is that they’re not going to go away. We talk a lot about that on the podcast, about accepting our authentic reality, what’s happening in the present moment. Nurturing and supporting is actually how we work through things and build resilience and tolerance to those distressing emotions.
I thought it was really cool that he’s now spreading the word about really how to regulate and how to be with your emotions and still perform and play through them.
A couple of years back the Packers had some struggles and it looked like they were, six and five and they were going to have to win out the rest of the season and all these sports channels were talking about this and that and Aaron Rogers stepped up and said, R E L A X, relax. Then they win six straight games and end up in the NFC championship and people were like, what just happened here? It’s like, he took the time to tell his teammates, and I honestly think that’s who he was talking to. He got all the sports people to calm down and he’s telling his team, yeah, relax. We got this. We can play together as a team. I’ll lead. You follow me. We’re going to get this done and they got it done. That’s leadership. That’s taking the account of your emotions of your teammates and helping them with that. Letting them know, I got you. I’m your support person. Let’s get this.
And it’s also teaching them emotional regulation and, even some polyvagal theory in there, right? Our nervous system, when we feel under pressure, when we feel threatened is activated and so what he knows, I think, and at least what we know, is that, when you’re in ventral vagal, when you’re feeling safe and calm and relaxed, you’re in the front of your brain. We have higher health outcomes, and our bodies are more in flow and more in tune when we’re in that state. We’re starting to do a lot more neurological work with athletes, and I love hearing about it. That makes me think of the other example that I wanted to bring up, which is way back in I think April 1989 and the 49ers were playing the Cincinnati Bengals in the Super Bowl and the Bengals had just taken the lead and there was very little time left and Joe Montana, who was another great leader, this is a situation where, yeah, it’s very emotional. People are tense. They’re on the verge of having anxiety attacks, because this is it, this is the biggest game. Joe Montana, he looks off into the crowd and he tells us, he may say, there’s John Candy. This is John Candy, look at that. And they’re all, yeah, it is John Candy and it’s just wow, that’s cool. All right, so let’s go win this. You take that moment where people are just like, this is how he got the nickname, Joe Cool. Because most people in that situation, not to call out poor Donovan McNabb, but in his game in the Super Bowl, in the same situation, he threw up in the huddle. Oh yeah. That’s it that’s like the opposite of reaction of what can happen.
It’s so smart to point up into the crowd to someone that we all know and love, and to see John Candy, like immediately the nervous system probably settled, I would imagine, and regulated in a way that then, yep, let’s go back to it. Yeah, that’s very wise. So, I think they’re taking on leadership traits and they’re being the sort of, honestly, like a therapy guide for their teammates. I’ve had players where, again assisting my mom coaching of softball, fast pitch softball, in high school, and I was basically the pitching coach and we had a pitcher who was in a tough situation, had the bases loaded and my mom said go out there and talk to her. Like, sure, okay. And sometimes, I call it the, sort of the, distraction technique. And so, I go out there and I say, hey, did you know there’s penguins in South Africa? And she just looked at me like what, w what, what does that have to do with anything, seriously? So, this colony of penguins that got lost off of Antarctica ended up in South Africa and so now they migrate there all the time. Then I left. So now she’s out there standing on the mound, trying to figure out, I don’t understand what that was about, but now she was not thinking about the situation on the field. She just went out and did what she was supposed to do all the while thinking, I don’t understand what penguins have to do with this. Absolutely nothing to do with it, but you are so focused on just doing your job so that you can come to the bench and ask me what I was talking about. You got out of the situation. You didn’t give up any runs any hits and you struck out the last two batters. Agreed. So put her in the front of her brain, activated that prefrontal cortex, slowed down the amygdala, oh yeah.
We’re talking a lot about, the, the icons out there. We’ve mentioned Aaron Rogers, we haven’t yet mentioned people like me, Hamm or Michael Jordan, those top athletes. How can we help support students with higher aspirations, right? What would you recommend if someone is seeing a student who could take it to the next level and who wants to take it to the next level?
There are a lot of athletes that are on that track, where they think I’m going to be this, I’m going to be this success story. So, supporting them in that is always a wonderful thing. You should also recognize realistic aspirations. The biggest thing is to offer them support if they change their mind. We have a lot of athletes, basketball is probably the best one, you have a lot of athletes that have this desire to make it to the NBA or the WNBA. You want to help them say, okay, first steps first. If these are the steps that you’re going to need to do, you’re going to need to really dedicate yourself. You’re going have to go to some camps, like high school basketball. There’s the rare situation where you’re as good as Kobe Bryant or LeBron James or Darryl Dawkins or Kevin Garnett, who came out of high school and went to the NBA. Yeah, that’s pretty rare. It is very rare. You want to give them that realistic goal that you’re playing to try to get into college and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a lot of high school athletes that make it through college because they got a scholarship, which is wonderful. There’s a realistic part that you have to present to anyone like that.
One of the things, one of the risks that you may take is, you don’t want to douse their dreams. You want them to keep those dreams, but you want them to know what their realistic goal is and what it will take to get there. Each year there are 60 players drafted into the NBA. There are about 20 million basketball players.
You’re right. College is a wonderful avenue for movement, for the NCAA really creating opportunity for a lot of people and allowing them to live in to parts of themselves that they wouldn’t necessarily get to. Really helping people thrive, grow, and develop leadership skills, hard work, as well as develop the resiliency needed to take a defeat in life. I was reading about Dr. Benjamin Bloom. He suggests really helping frame for these students, one, hard work is important, no matter what the end goal is, two, there’s always more to learn. Yes. Always more to learn, and three, can the learning and the curiosity be fun and he said, that’s the most important step. It’s that the learning, the growing, and the curiosity are fun. And that’s why we’re doing this, not just to have that outcome of making a specific team or making it to being a professional athlete, but can we cultivate these other aspects of who we are and grow through it and enjoy?
I think that’s absolutely possible. I think it’s a lot easier, maybe at the high school level and maybe, and to an extent at the college level as well. I think those are really good places to not necessarily reach your peak, but a lot of college athletes aren’t going to get to the NBA. They can get to the G league, which is like the minor leagues of basketball. They can go and play in Europe. Again, you have just a ton of athletes in college, but there’s only a small amount of spaces available in whatever professional sport, whether it’s hockey or baseball. Sure. And it’s even smaller for the WNBA because they have not quite as many teams as the NBA. So, getting that enjoyable experience in college and having fun is absolutely integral and it’s one of the things that I think coaches who have a lot more success are the ones who have their players enjoying the game.
We’re talking a lot about mental health. In your opinion, being a student athlete is so much more than just playing a game. It’s not just a game. How do we support them on their journey? Student athletes are, at times, representative of the community’s hopes and dreams, the school, possibly viewed as a little bit of a local celebrity. They’re thinking about college and how this could be a path which is very important to them and comes with a lot of pressure. Some of them are leaders on their teams, and that’s even a different degree of expectation. How would you support a student athlete carrying the weight of this world?
I think the biggest thing most people need to do, speaking to two different levels, starting with the high school level, is remember that they’re kids. Remember all the things that a human goes through from the ages of 13 to 18. There’s a lot of changes physically and emotionally, mentally that they’re going through. As a fan, you want to obviously support your team, your players, your high school, but at the same time, you need to remember their kids. They make tons of mistakes, and it can be just overwhelming for them.
This is an incredibly important for those gung-ho parents that are really into the whole athletic scene and the support. Remember, they’re still kids and they need the, hey, it’s okay, we’ll get them next time speech. Don’t tear them down. It takes so much to build them up. It’s incredibly easy to tear them down. I agree. I agree. Just honoring their reality, how important it is to them and cheering them on. You know, I’ve heard a lot about how difficult it is to manage relationships, training, nutrition, sleep, homework, family, life, thinking about college. A lot of the high school athletes are taking the ACT, preparing, doing all these different things, and they’re still just trying to be themselves. Really honoring that. And you didn’t even mention any of the physiological changes that they’re going through and how that affects them mentally. Such a good point. Such a good point. You’re right. Listening to their bodies.
We were talking earlier about if student athletes get injured and how to support them in listening to their bodies, taking care of themselves. I mentioned I was watching Tik Tok, doing my research on, student athletes in high school and I saw this theme. A lot of them feel guilty for taking rest days or they feel like they’re supposed to push through a possible injury. Get back sooner. Can you speak to that at all? Did you see that as a coach? I absolutely did and it was actually one of my, as an assistant coach, it was one of my duties to make sure the athletes did not put themselves at risk. When you are very dedicated and especially at the varsity level for just about every single sport, when you’re that dedicated and again, you have that close knit connection. You’re formed a family and you don’t want to let them down. If you’re one of the best players on the team and they generally need you to win most of their games, but your ankle is twisted, but you feel like, I can put a little pressure on it. It became my job to go, you know what, I’m going to wrap this ankle and then I’m going to tell you whether or not you can play. I’ll be able to tell just as I’m wrapping it, if you grimace, you’re done, you don’t go back out there. I was able to, I had some athletic training, so I was able to judge if a player had a concussion, just by doing a mild concussion test. I’m doing the finger thing and your head rocked back, just trying to track my finger. You’re done. And you might be done for a couple of days.
That’s not something that was always done when I was younger and started coaching because I’ve been coaching for 30 years. My last 10 years, that was a high priority. You think about a lot of the things that happen in the NFL with head injuries. Anytime a basketball player in our games fell and hit their head on the floor, they immediately had to come out and we had to do concussion protocols. That’s not what they were called, but that’s what we did. The players want to go back. They want to play. Even if it’s just, it may not even be like an important championship game or conference championship game, they want to play. They want to support their teammates and they don’t want to let them down. Sometimes you have to be the bad guy and say, I can’t put your health at risk. I’m not going to do that.
Individually, even, the psychological response to injury, if it’s an injury that has a predictable path of rehab versus not. A twisted ankles may be very different than if there’s a concussion and how long until they can return to their activity? What does that look like? I just imagine that perhaps it feels like a sign of weakness, or even if it’s the first time experiencing that sort of difficulty, or they’re really used to working through the pain, that it can be hard to slow down and rest. Oh, absolutely.
And parents as well. They can also be instigators of, hey, I know you’re injured, but you need to play because this is important, there will be scouts there at the game. What good does it do them if they end up injuring themselves more? I just think to avoid burnout, we need to rest. We need to work hard on the days we’re supposed to work hard and then we’re allowed to rest and take care of ourselves. That includes if there’s an injury. Just keep them involved with the team. Let’s say it’s a longer injury, demystifying what can happen psychologically when you’re injured. Helping them notice any emotions that are coming up. Helping them notice any difficulties. Really encouraging them to get any support that they need from someone like you, if they’re injured, if they’re struggling.
Yes, absolutely. I think one year, one of those years I was talking about when we were in the state championship, all year long we had been coming from behind and just mentally how this team went from doubting themselves to a 13 game winning streak that led them to the championship game of state. Wow. The mentality change. Constant belief that we can do this. No matter what it is, we can do this. We can do it together. It was easily the most close knit, family-style team we have ever had. It was our motto and each cheer. Family. Team. Everything was together. This is a real private moment that we had in our locker room. We just talked about how much we loved each other. How much we love this season and no matter what, yeah, we didn’t get the gold ball, but we’re all still champions in here and we always will be. That is so important. Yeah.
All right, Kelly, let’s close out this episode with talking about fear and how not just students, but really how all of us can honor the presence of fear without necessarily letting it influence our choices.
I think of a particular game where we had a very successful team and I was coaching the junior varsity, helping out. All season long, we had done very well. We had a very good record, but we struggled against good teams. We would play all the teams that we were absolutely supposed to win against. We won those games. Games that could go either way, we lost all those games. There was, again, a whole different mentality when we took on those teams. It took me all season to figure out that not only did they have a fear of playing these teams, they had a fear of winning. That’s a difficult thing to work on, especially when you only have one game left in the season and you recognize it too late. For those of you that want to recognize these symptoms, it’s where they have so much success that they don’t know what to do when they don’t have that success. They don’t know where to go from there.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter what the coach says, and this is a mentality strength level where you can either, it’s almost fight or flight. Sure. Okay. Yeah. Absolutely fleeing. They were just fleeing from the chance to win. They just wanted to get out of there. We were playing our archrivals in our last conference game and the winner was going to win the conference title. I saw them in warmups where it just looked like they were nervous. They were edgy. So I brought them back in early and I just had this speech for them where I said, I recognize what’s going on and I’m sorry, I didn’t see it sooner. I don’t know why, but we struggle against good teams. I think it’s because you’re afraid. Whether it’s the fear of winning, or there’s a fear of losing, there’s this fear that you have, that’s keeping you from doing your best. So today what we’re going to do is, we’re not going to have any fear. We’re going to unite as a team. All of us together, we’re going to do our best part because this is what I promise you. If you do your best, I don’t care if we lose by 20 or win by one. If you give me your best, there’s absolutely nothing to fear. I have belief in you. I have confidence in you and I’m going to be okay, no matter what we do, as long as you give me your best, there’s nothing for you to fear. Don’t be afraid of them. Don’t be afraid of you. And so, after a timeout, after each break, the only thing we cheered and said was no fear. After every single thing, no fear.
Directly after that game, I got a text from one of the players on the team and she was still pumped up. This is two hours, this is after the varsity game, and she’s on her way home and she’s still, I’m still pumped up from that speech. It was years later where she was playing in college and she said, I wanted to give that speech to my team. And I’m, I can’t believe you remember that speech. I was like, just never forget that speech. It just made a huge difference in how I thought about myself. It was funny because she actually ended up in that state, that last state game I told the head coach, put her in she’s not scared. She’s too, she’s never been here before. She’s only a sophomore, so she doesn’t even know what’s going on, so just put her in and tell her to shoot. She was lighten it up. Like, you realize that this is the state semifinal and there’s 9,000 people here in the Kohl Center watching you. And she’s like oh, okay. In the first round, she tied a state record for three pointers because she didn’t have any fear. I think that was just a huge moment. We won the game. Awesome.
I appreciate what you’re saying in that, the idea of when we act from what brings us joy and when we act from a place of trying our best, being present. Regardless of the outcome, it can be very freeing. If you follow what’s in your heart, how can you ever regret it? That’s at least what it reminds me of is that when you say, when you go out there and you play from your heart, and you give it your all, what is there really to fear at the end of the day, because you were true to yourself. At the end of the day, you’ll look back in 20 years, 30 years and you’ll remember how you felt about who you were, not what the score was.
And I relate that to some adults who struggle with anxiety or fears of what other people think of them. I will always tell them that, especially depending on their age, it’s like, you haven’t reached that point in life yet where you just look in the mirror and go, why am I worried about what they think? I’m okay with me. I’m going to do this. When you hit that point, it’s just as you said, it’s incredibly freeing because then you can, sure, I heard what you said. It doesn’t matter to me but thank you for your advice and I’m going to do it my way. I’ve got my support. I’ve got the support of people who care about me.
You’re right. That’s a really important skill to develop. If you can learn that skill as a high schooler, as a college aged person and incorporate that into your life at 16, 19. Think of what that can do for you as you navigate all the different challenges. Yeah. Yeah.
Kelly, it has been great. Thank you so much for being here and for opening your experience to us and sharing what you’ve learned. I’m sure this will benefit families, high school athletes, college athletes and really all of us, right? The philosophies we talked about, the psychology behind all of it can be transferred into jobs, relationships, life in any capacity.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you.
As Kelly and I wrap up today’s episode, I just want to let you know about the week ahead. We’re going to be talking about adults living with ADHD with clinical psychologist, Lynn Hyland. We’ll explore the common mind-body experiences. We’ll talk skills. We’ll talk tools to help manage ADHD symptoms. It’s a relevant episode for any person living with ADHD, as well as their loved ones, or really someone interested in learning more about how the brain influences mental health. I hope to see you then.
Thank you again for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk, we hope today’s episode was empowering and supported you in strengthening your mind-body connection please join us again next week as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing until then, take care.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast. We’re your hosts, Jessica Warpula Schultz and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you’ve tried everything to feel better and something is still missing, or you’ve already discovered the wisdom of the body. This podcast will encourage and support you in healing old wounds, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential, all by accessing the mind-body connection.
Please know, while we’re excited to share and grow together, this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for mental health treatment. It doesn’t replace the one-on-one relationship you have with a qualified healthcare professional and is not considered psychotherapy.
Thanks Jess. And thank you for listening. Now, let’s begin a conversation about what happens when we take an integrative approach to improving our wellbeing.
Today, we’re exploring the topic of mindfulness; the concept itself, how mindfulness influences the mind, brain, and the body and how you can use mindful awareness to develop resources for coping with stress. Jeanne and I will also get into the impact of mindfulness on mental health and how she and I use mindfulness in trauma-informed yoga and fitness training.
So, Jeanne let’s begin with a quick explanation of what we mean by mindfulness.
Oh, wonderful. This is a huge topic, Jess. We could have an entire series, podcast series, about mindfulness because it’s such a simple thing, but there’s just so much rich history to it. When we’re talking about mindfulness today, we see it everywhere. We see it all over the place. There are so many books about it, there’s just a whole industry around this thing that is, it’s just very simple. I tend to go to Jon Kabat-Zinn, who wrote a book called Full Catastrophe Living. He really started to have this conversation about mindfulness in the therapy realm, but it was also, it’s also, really accessible to, just everybody. It’s just paying attention to our experience in the present moment without judgment. So just being aware of what’s happening and in this place of what I like to think of as equanimity. We’re just here without judgment. Think about how simple that is. So simple and yet so complex. I know. I know.
So yeah, we can talk about the roots. We can talk about where this comes from, of course, we’re going to do that, but it really is just the simple act of being aware of your own experience as it’s happening. Without judgment. With acceptance even, which is really complicated a lot there. You’re asking a lot. Yeah, you’re right.
When I describe mindfulness, I think about just being present in the moment.
Internal awareness of what’s happening. Observing, rather than interpreting, and doing so with a sense of curiosity and non-judgment, and perhaps some friendliness and just studying the self in a way. Oh my gosh. There’s so much to that. There’s so much. It’s one of the key tools used in sensorimotor psychotherapy, right?
It’s the idea of cultivating an awareness of what’s happening internally, what’s happening with our internal sensations, our five senses, micro-movements, thoughts, feelings. With mindfulness, you can really study and learn more about how you organize your own experience. Yeah. It seems so simple, but it’s really complex.
This concept has been handed down for centuries. What we’re talking about does originate in Eastern cultures. Of course, as a yoga therapist, I have to think about this in terms of the yoga tradition. In yoga, we have something called the Sutra as these threads. It’s one of the texts that we borrow from. One of the sutras, we might’ve mentioned this in a previous episode, the tu ta vérite. Yoga’s tu ta vérité. Yeah. So that means, yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness. That’s mindfulness right there. The fluctuations of consciousness.
We’ve been talking about this for forever. Yoga is 5,000 some years old, and it’s very applicable to our daily life now because our brains are, we’re wired for survival. Yes. We’re wired to have fluctuations of our consciousness because we have to survive threat. Our brain’s job is to keep us alive. Definitely. It’s an act. It’s very active to be present with what’s happening in the brain in the mind, and that is mindfulness. Exactly.
When you say active, I totally agree, it’s this quality of, to be curious and to be compassionate is a very active process. It’s it doesn’t come by passively and it’s really the choice or the process of engaging with what we’re experiencing. Sometimes, at least in regards to psychotherapy, we’re observing and engaging in order to perhaps change how our system has previously adapted because of threat or because of our lived experiences.
I’ve read earlier this great quote by Ron Kurtz. “You can’t take the engine apart while it’s running”, so true. Really slow things down and start cultivating an awareness of, what am I experiencing internally? What is happening? How am I relating to this? That’s a really big question I ask a lot, is given this, how were you relating to it? What are the stories or the beliefs underneath what’s happening? That takes a level of mindfulness. Yeah. We have to bring awareness to our own experience that, that single pointed awareness. And that’s not something that we can just command ourselves or other people to do. We have to practice. So mindfulness is like a constant beginning again. Just beginning again. Being aware of our experience.
You do that in sensorimotor psychotherapy. Yes, by tapping into the body. Yes, every person experiences an event differently, depending on how their system organizes the information. And when I talk about organizing an experience, I’m referring to our five core organizers. We’re not just thinking thoughts and having feelings. We’re also making sense of our present moment through internal sensations; our heart rate, our digestive system, muscle tension, things of that nature. Our perception of our five senses. Not as much our five senses, but how we perceive our five senses. Then also movement. We make movements. Other people make movements. Micro movements, big movements. We’re organizing with these five core organizers at all times. In sensorimotor, we look at how things can change. We grow, we change, but sometimes the system doesn’t change, the way it responds, the way those five core organizers make sense of things. So, we use mindfulness to bring awareness to how someone’s creating their experience and then if needed, we use mindfulness to help transform the system.
What does that mean, transform the system? What’s our goal here?
If we only depend on insight to change our experience. If we only depend on our thoughts and our feelings, we’re limited by habitual filters by thinking patterns, by what we already know. So, if we’re just talking about the past, the goal is to look at what’s happening in our body in the present moment. Mindfulness is that key to healing because we have coping strategies but those are located in the front of our brains, our prefrontal cortex, and threat and trauma can shift us, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, more into the midbrain or even the back of the brain. So, when we’re flushed with these body memories or when we’re feeling overwhelmed, relying just on insight isn’t going to work. We want to resolve those body memories and to resolve that overwhelm that’s happening in the system, rather than think our way through it. Mindfulness is one of the key tools we use because at the end of the day we want to create new meaning and new understanding of our past. That facilitates new understandings of ourselves. That brings upon hope and empowerment. Along the way we actually learn how to tolerate distress as well.
Yeah, we want to tap into our true nature. We want to be able to experience joy, to really let our light shine as a cliche, as cliche as that sounds. We want to reach of course a transcendent state, which we don’t talk about a lot in psychotherapy. We talk about just like maybe being a little less miserable. Yeah. Like, I love Dan Harris. I don’t know if you’ve ever read his stuff or listened to his stuff. He’s the, he’s the news anchor who’s written books about mindfulness and he, yeah, he’s really approachable. He wrote a book called 10% Happier about meditation. I have that book. Yeah. I know, and I like his approach so much, like he had a panic attack on the air when he was delivering the news. Granted, he was, really in the throes of substance abuse and mental illness at the time and he found meditation. 10% Happier just means if you meditate daily, if you pay attention to the present moment, if you practice mindfulness, you might be like 10% happier. Okay, what’s wrong with that? That’s good enough, right? That’s something. We’re also talking about really reaching our true potential and living with more ease, but we have to practice this, moment by moment awareness, in order to even understand what that means.
So, it seems like sensorimotor psychotherapy has a really similar structure too. And I’m thinking about yoga that, it’s moving through the senses to transcend, to overcome our patterns, to reach a state of what we would call healing or even just balance. Yeah. That’s just it. Yeah. And that’s where yoga, again we’re borrowing this tradition from Eastern culture, always considering that humility that we want to honor this tradition as the psychology of mind that we are using very humbly in our practices today. The eight limbs of yoga, which is what I practice, which is what we do here, mostly in the Western world. The actual physical movement of yoga is only one part of that. What we think of as yoga, we think of people contorting themselves and doing all these glamour poses. That’s just one little part of it. The reason that yogis did those movements was so that they could keep their bodies healthy, get their bodies out of the way so they could meditate.
So, it’s truly all about this mindfulness, this meditation. That’s the path of yoga. It’s also part of the Buddhist teachings too, if we’re thinking about the psychology of mind that is Buddhism. It’s the, one of the parts of that path is, right, mindfulness, that the Buddha has passed to us. We use the body, again, as that door, as that sensory experience, to really tap into our awareness so that we can start to peel away the layers. Yeah. And reach that, that bliss. Yes. Agreed. It doesn’t have to be bliss. It can just be like, 10% better too. 10% better. Or, I can go into that meeting now or I can get out of my car and walk into work or walk into the house after a hard day. It helps us relate to our experience.
It’s so easy right now to just react. Oh my gosh. There’s so much input. There are so many things to be angry about and we should be. Anger is productive and useful in some ways, but we need to be able to relate to that, to recognize what we can do. In order to do that, to be effective change makers, we need to actually be able to be mindful and be present so that we can see clearly how we’re relating to things that upset us.
Exactly. Preparing for this episode, I pulled out one of my mindfulness folders and found an article I’d printed 11 years ago from Tara Brach. It talked exactly about that, about injustices in the world. Mindfulness is not about passively sitting by. It is about how we are internally managing the anger and the pain versus reacting to it. Instead of blaming or having internal or external violence as the product of these injustices, can we sit with and honor how hurt we are and how much pain there actually is? Sit with the pain that other people are experiencing as well. Then act from a place of compassion to create change. To be the change that, you know, as they say, that we want to see in the world. Yeah. We’ve got a big sign that says, be the change you wish to see. We can’t do that when we’re reacting. We can only do that when we take that magic quarter second of slowing down and observing before reaction and that influences, I believe, social change just as much as it influences change within ourselves and relational change as well.
We’re talking about these really esoteric things, about being mindful in the present moment like it’s just this easy thing. It’s not. No. It takes practice, so much practice.
We can see now that this actually changes our brain. Yes, it is measurable. A lot of that research is happening here in Madison. It’s pretty exciting. Richie Davidson at the Center for Healthy Minds, putting monks and long-term meditators in MRI scanners to see what changes happen in the brain and it’s fascinating. We build gray matter when I meditate regularly. You talked earlier about the prefrontal cortex. When we have a regular meditation practice, we can actually see changes there that we build up more gray matter. We build up more wrinkles in the prefrontal cortex, which is good. I want to remind listeners; the prefrontal cortex is the front of our brain. That’s where logic, decision-making, almost, in a way, our identity, who we are, is located, in the front of our brain. It’s an important place to have access to because we need to be in the front of our brain in order to even pursue healing.
You had touched on empathy before, too. We’ve seen, we can see in these brain scans, and I’m talking about Dr. Sara Lazar had a study and she has a Ted talk, and it’s really interesting, on the changes that happen in the brain with regular meditation. Yes, more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. More in the hippocampus, which is in that center of the brain, our memory maker. Yeah. Emotional regulation. Makes sense.
And also, she saw more gray matter in the temporal parietal junction, we don’t need to really dig into what that means, but that is where we could experience empathy and perspective taking. So, we’re actually strengthening our muscle for empathy and our ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes when we meditate, when we practice mindfulness.
Another really important thing, we talked about this last time, remember when we talked about the amygdala? Yes. Yes. That’s our little smoke detector. It’s what gets like, super over-active when we have trauma. It’s highly sensitized at looking for threat. Yup. Long-term meditators have reduced activity in the amygdala. I have that written down. Yes. It’s so important. The medial prefrontal cortex, when you meditate, it decreases activation in our amygdala. It changes how we react to our environment. It’s so important. It helps us to actually pause and respond to threats from a place of balance, rather than just reacting and running wild and letting our survival system just hijack us, which, again, is a natural thing.
We’re talking about, if we think about the brain actually changing, it’s neuroplastic. Neuroplasticity. It’s a pretty new thing that we’ve talked about in the last few decades. The yogis 5,000 years ago, they didn’t have that terminology, but they knew that meditation was so important that they built this entire system around it to keep ourselves healthy, to live in appropriate ways so that we could have this wiring in our brain that now we really understand on that really specific, scientific level. So cool. So cool.
To speak to what you’re saying earlier, it is challenging. I’ve experienced this, as well as I hear, it is so hard for me to sit and be present in the moment. My brain can’t stop. Something I affirm over and over again, one, there’s no such thing as a bad meditation because you’re working on it in that moment. There’s some present moment experiencing, no matter what. If you daydream for four out of the five minutes but you come back one time, we’re building stronger neural pathways for teaching the brain how to focus attention on the present moment. Its job is to wander into the future and try and resolve any possible threats that will probably never happen. And its job, in a way, is to reflect on the past and think about what we could do differently. Those are all survival strategies. Yet, the present moment is where we actually have control and when we meditate, we bring blood flow to those areas of the brain where acceptance lies or happiness or just wellbeing. As long as you come back to that present moment, either in your breath or the sounds you hear, or your body, or whatever anchor you choose. Coming back can really start strengthening those neural pathways to have a different reaction when under stress, right? We don’t have to pour a glass of wine or, numb out or, yell. We can come into the present moment and observe, and then choose something that’s more regulating and that happens by practicing. That’s why it’s called a meditation practice, right?
Yeah. We, it’s not perfection, we don’t just, we don’t just sit on the cushion and just start levitating. It’s, that’s not how it works. So, it’s something that can be a formal practice, like you said, or it can just be sensing the soles of your feet on the ground if you’re standing or sitting. Just really taking a moment to be mindful of your experience.
We can do it while we’re eating. I do a lot of mindful eating exercises with clients where we just pay attention to the sensory experience of nourishing ourselves. It’s very mindful. How often do you sit down and just oops, there goes a bag of Cheetos. I didn’t even notice. Didn’t even savor those delicious Cheetos. That’s where we can really do those informal practices, but what about a formal practice? What about you, Jess? Do you have a formal practice? What does that look like?
I would say for me, formal practice includes, right now I do a lot of formal mindfulness in physical therapy. That’s where I’ve channeled this formal practice. I get a twofer. Really, I’m learning in a lot of ways, the issues in my literal muscles, or the tissues or the tightness of my back. Mindfulness is what is resolving them in so many ways. A lot of my mindfulness practice comes, for example, just a couple of days ago, my physical therapist, Autumn, she’s amazing, she’s going to be on here. So yeah, she’s a Yogi physical therapist. Yeah. I love her. Everyone loves her. So yeah. She taught me to stack two yoga blocks because I’m working on a probable labral hip tear and sitting and sitting cross-legged is not possible for me for the last year and a half. She’s got me sitting on two yoga blocks, stacked on top of a yoga blanket so that my ankles are also supported and just mindfully breathing in and out and watching, from inside out, being with my pelvic floor moving up and down as I breathe. My diaphragm moving up and down as I breathe. That sort of embodiment with meditation has been really transformative for me because things are softening and connecting and that map I have of my body is really expanding through mindfulness.
That’s wonderful. We find it in ways that work for us, and that’s where I think it’s great to have a formal practice where you’re sitting on a cushion every day, but it doesn’t have to be that. In my home we meditate quite often as well, just with guided meditation, things like that. There’s so many resources. What do you do? I’m curious.
Yeah, I tend to need to move my body a little bit. I have to burn off a little bit of the energy before I can really sit. So, I typically practice yoga as regularly as possible. Life gets in the way sometimes, but I do try to get on the mat daily Then either it’s a Shavasana, that relaxation at the end of practice, where we’re really just exploring body sensations and being aware. But I also do like to, you know, I have a fancy little cushion and I like to sit and listen to guided meditations, but I often get really distracted by those. So, I tend to just enjoy, kind of ambient noise. I like to have something. I like to have some chanting in the background or some music, but it is always a group effort. My cats want to participate. Yes. Yeah. It’s I cannot go 10 minutes without having some visitors, but that becomes part of the practice then too. Petting the cat while they’re on the lap and purring is also a very mindful activity. Of course, I get a little, little frustrated, like, why can’t you leave me alone for 10 minutes. then that becomes part of the practice too, relating to that wow, this is, this is an opportunity for me. This is a distraction, which is a wonderful teacher for us.
We were talking earlier about how we lead clients through meditation and how we, how we try to have, we want to have these wonderfully tranquil environments, but that’s not life. My office at Insight is at the corner of a very busy intersection and when I’m leading people through a meditation, the bus stops right outside my window. I hear the air brakes. I hear the people getting on and off. I hear people yelling at each other. Ambulance goes by. It’s life in the city and that is a wonderful teacher, when we can just let those experiences roll off us and come back to our breath. Then that is the practice. It does not have to be this, sitting on a mountain top in this glorious, natural setting with the mind completely clear. No way. That’s not how life happens. I think that’s one of the big myths of meditation. People resist, people resist mindfulness because I can’t clear my thoughts. I can’t clear my head. It’s not going to happen. Yeah, of course not. Why can’t you clear your thoughts, Jess?
Just like we said, the brain’s job is to keep going. There are some default modes that it has and they’ll always click on. Our job, when we meditate, isn’t to reject or to try to change things, right? It’s asking yourself, what am I actually experiencing right now? What is happening in this present moment? Am I being curious? Am I accepting or investigating? Or am I resisting it? Am I frustrated, for example? Let’s say I’m meditating and I’m noticing some pain in my shoulder, and then I’m off on a story about how my shoulder is never going to get better and then I can feel my heart rate start picking up. That’s okay. Perhaps then I notice it and I bring compassion, maybe even, wow, this is really hard. I am scared that I won’t have the degree of functioning I had before. I don’t like not knowing and that’s okay. That’s okay. You’re going to be okay and offering that wise and kind attention to ourselves, I think that’s part of the healing process that mindfulness can bring. Oh, that’s a huge part of it.
Compassion is crucial when we’re talking about mindfulness. Mindful self-compassion is one of the approaches that I really enjoy using for myself and for my clients. Just approaching our experience with some loving kindness, treating ourselves the way that we would treat a loved one, and recognizing, like you said, we all suffer. We all experience pain. There’s a common humanity in that. These are the tenants of mindful self-compassion; kindness, common humanity, mindfulness, and it’s the way that we relate to ourselves with that, that loving attention, that we can only really get to when we’re observing or being mindful.
I really think so, too. Also, where I see mindfulness coming more into play in psychotherapy is when our younger parts, maybe, are showing up in our life. For example, if somebody, let’s say, out of nowhere is feeling really overwhelmed and they’re having the shift and you’re not quite sure where it’s coming from. Yet it’s really distressing, it’s almost panic inducing.
Often, I’ll use mindfulness as one of the paths to exploring it as a younger part. Right. What is this younger part, perhaps, trying to say? When we slow down and we go inward into that internal experience and we check in with what’s underneath that body experience. Is there a younger part that needs compassion or needs us to be that presence that maybe we didn’t have in those moments when we were younger or at any point in our life. Maybe that’s the opportunity where we pursue healing to notice what that inner child needs and then attending to and caring for that part. Mindfulness is a key component because often we’re just going along, we don’t even notice what’s underneath, perhaps that arousal or that overwhelm or that panic. But maybe when we slow down and investigate, and we sit with that inner child and even place a hand on our heart or a hand on our arm and just lovingly be present and investigate that younger part often tells us what it needs. What do most children need? Love. To be told it’s okay. To know they’re safe. Mindfulness can really help us shift and do that inner child work.
It’s that loving kindness toward ourselves, which means all parts of ourselves. That means really holding gently that inner child in healing. I love inner child work. I think when we can really approach all those parts of ourselves with loving kindness, that’s when we can start to integrate and heal. One of my favorite resources for that is Thich Nhat Hanh. He wrote a book called Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child, and there’s, of course, a huge component of mindfulness to this. We have to have this practice of tapping into our experience so that we can tap into those wounded parts of ourselves that maybe we’re not even aware of, that maybe were wounded in childhood. We can’t go back and give people a better childhood, unfortunately, but we can work to repair some of the damage that’s been done in a very loving, mindful way.
Yes, Janina Fisher, still reading her book, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. She talks about how, without mindful awareness, we’re unable to observe these younger parts. We actually can, really, almost, over identify with them, be blended with them where we think it’s something that’s happening in our present moment. What does “blended” mean, by the way? It’s the “I’m upset” instead of “here’s being upset” or even deeper, “I’m unlovable” versus, “my little me felt really unloved when you left the room earlier”. Mindfulness gives us the capability of creating relationships with these younger parts and supporting them in their healing.
We actually have an episode coming up in a couple of months about the inner child specific and you’re going to lead us through some body-based strategies for working with your inner child. That’s the thing, we could, this could be such a long conversation. This could be a series and we’re going to revisit mindfulness in pretty much every topic that we talk about because we have to really do that work of being aware of our experience with fresh eyes. We observe our own experience with fresh eyes, anytime that we’re able to be mindful. It can be formal or informal.
We’re going to give our listeners some formal practices. Right, Jess? We’re going to put some meditations on our way website. I’m super excited about this. So, it’s: www.insightmadison.com/podcast and you’ll find meditations Jeanne and I are both going to individually lead and put online so you yourself can perhaps start practicing mindfulness.
Yeah. I’m excited for that. Yeah, and it’s just a different a different voice, a different approach if you already have a mindful practice, please continue, just do what works for you. If you don’t, this is definitely an avenue to explore. I really encourage, I don’t know if you’re the same Jess, but when I work with a client, meditation is usually the first piece of homework. Let’s start with just, try to do maybe five minutes a day for even two to three days a week, just start to bring some awareness to your experience so that we can do some work.
Yeah, it’s key. It interweaves in the work I do, for example, as a personal trainer, the body or the gym can be really threatening. I work with people who perhaps self-identify as lacking motivation or have narratives like “I’m lazy” or “I’m a quitter”. In a lot of ways, the fitness industry it doesn’t offer mindful awareness approaches that go beyond “build power, build strength”, especially not ones that challenged the cultural norms of “thinner is better” or “more muscle means I’m more disciplined than you are”. The thing is people are not lazy. It’s not just that some people don’t care. It’s trauma. It’s systemic. There are just multiple industries that profit in big ways by getting us to believe that there’s something wrong with us. That creates shame, self-hate, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, things of that nature.
So often what I do in my work is we slow down and we go inward into that internal experience, and we check in with that body experience. Let’s really help make this feel safe. Then once people are starting to feel safe; we start doing things with movement and fitness training that just really support the idea of tolerating distress and being mindful in the moment and learning how strong our bodies are and how we can be present in a new way. I think that’s really empowering. I’ve found it very empowering.
I agree. I agree. And it’s a big leap for people to try to sit and just be still. That’s why we talk a lot about body centered approaches, because we do need to tap into that awareness of the body. But we do need to also practice mindfulness. When we’ve had that trauma, or when we have things happening in the brain that are causing us to have symptoms like depression, anxiety, all those things you mentioned, sometimes it’s just impossible to just sit and stillness. That scares people. That’s one of the big things I hear is, “I can’t do that”. It’s “Nope, I can’t do it”. Yeah. Yeah, and when there’s that trauma wiring in the brain we need the brain to stay active. So, we can give it we can give it that attention and not just clear out the mind.
We offer guided meditations. We can do very mindful, like you said, personal training exercise. Of course, yoga is, that’s why we do the poses, so we can be in our bodies, so that we can tap into that mindful state. So, it can be somewhat intimidating, I think, this whole thing of meditation, but we can also demystify it. It can be just as simple as paying attention to five breaths. Just watching your breath, five inhales and exhales. That’s your mindful exercise for today. Good job. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
I think having support during this process, we talk about how Insight provides trauma informed yoga therapy, which Nikki, if you’ve listened, Nikki was on a few weeks ago discussing that and there’s other people besides me, other local friends, Forest Coaching, they’re going to be on the podcast on June 7th. They take an emotional, mindful, neurological approach to fitness training. In October, Trauma Informed Weightlifting, an organization over in Minnesota, is going to be on as well. Yeah, they’re so great, both of those. So, I know Forest Coaching and Trauma Informed Weightlifting, they have great social media presence so if you’re looking for more resources about how to bring mindfulness into movement, check out our Instagram. Check out theirs too. There is so many ways to begin and we’ll always go back to what’s most important is that you feel safe. You feel safe during this process. It’s key.
I love walking meditation. I’ll just give one quick little tip. Thich Nhat Hanh, again, love that guy, he’s just written some wonderful resources on meditation. His walking meditation is just so powerful. He will just have you walk, just being aware of each step. His mantra is breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. It’s impossible not to smile when you’re doing that by the way. And we know that when we change our physiology, when we smile, we actually change what’s happening in our bodies. We can shift our mood state with something as simple as that. A smile. Yeah. Take that and try it out today. If you’re listening, get outside. Say it one more time. Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Yeah, you can’t help but smile.
This has been a great conversation. This has. Folks, were happy to have shared what we’ve learned about mindfulness and how it can be a healing and empowering tool on your journey of health and wellbeing.
Next week, our guest Kelly Kendricks will be here to discuss the psychology of supporting student athletes. Before becoming a therapist, Kelly was a teacher for 20 years and a high school athletic coach for 30. I’m excited to bring his insight into sports, parenting, and helping student athletes choose the best path for their development. Sounds great. I know it’s going to be a cool episode.
All right. Thank you, Jeanne. I always appreciate learning from you during these conversations. I am so curious about your approach too Jess. I think it’s just fascinating. I can’t wait to continue learning. Thank you our listeners for being here today and we look forward to talking to you next week.
Thank you again for joining us on Insight Mind-Body Talk, a body-centered mental health podcast. We hope today’s episode was empowering and supported you in strengthening your mind-body connection. We’re your hosts Jeanne and Jess. Please join us again next week as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing. Until then, take care.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast. We’re your hosts, Jessica Warpula Schultz and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you’ve tried everything to feel better and something is still missing or you’ve already discovered the wisdom of the body. This podcast will encourage and support you in healing old wounds, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential all by accessing the mind body connection.
Please know while we’re excited to share and grow together, this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for mental health treatment. It doesn’t replace the one-on-one relationship you have with a qualified healthcare professional and is not considered psychotherapy.
Thanks Jess and thank you for listening. Now, let’s begin a conversation about what happens when we take an integrative approach to improving our wellbeing.
Welcome. Thanks for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk. Today’s episode is about trauma. What is trauma? Where did it come from? What does it feel like in your mind, in your body? What are some evidence-based body-centered practices you can consider using to address the effects of trauma? As always, we’ll be sharing simple mind-body tools throughout the episode; tools you can use in everyday life to feel better and more connected to yourself.
Jeanne, we’re both trauma therapists. I used to use the phrase “trauma therapist” as a clarifier, as a way to let people know I was trained to work with trauma. What I’ve come to realize is that every therapist, regardless of the situation, is a trauma therapist. I say this because we work with humans and if you’re a human, you’ve more than likely to have experienced some type of trauma. It’s widespread and universal.
Often when I meet someone new, they don’t realize their thoughts or feelings or the physical symptoms they’re experiencing are related to trauma. I believe it can be really healing to learn there are reasons for what we’re experiencing, and we can discover there are paths to feeling calmer, more in control, and more connected to ourselves.
I’d like to take a moment to give a trigger warning. It’s important to know that if you start to feel triggered by this information, please stop the podcast. When you feel ready, if you feel ready, pick up where you left off. Also, if you find you identify with any of this information, remember help is out there. You can use this episode as a starting point for pursuing therapy or simply reaching out to someone you trust for support.
Thanks so much, Jess. Now let’s begin by discussing what is trauma?
I think, when I think about trauma, I think about the different types of trauma that people can experience. There is acute, which usually is a one-time event. For example, a car accident or a bad fall. There’s chronic, more than one traumatic event, or more continuous in nature. For example, right now we’re all experiencing a form of a chronic trauma with the pandemic, right? There’s the pandemic, then let’s say someone loses their job or their job changes, maybe their home or their environment changes in some way and it starts creating this cumulative effect. Correct. It’s a wound. Exactly.
Jeanne, how would you describe complex trauma? Trauma is this overwhelming event. It’s the way that we respond to feeling out of control and in complex trauma, we consider all of those “little t” traumas. I like to describe it as we have these “capital T” traumas, like you said, like a car accident, military trauma, surviving a battle, this is a capital “T” event. Then we have a lot of these little, smaller “t” traumas that we experience, from the moment we’re born. Truly just coming out of the birth canal, that’s traumatic. Complex trauma is that cumulative effect of perhaps being neglected or growing up in poverty, not knowing if our needs are going to be met. It’s a tough thing to peel back all of those layers, but it always goes back to that, like you said, trauma, that it’s Greek for wound. It’s just this wound that never gets a chance to heal. Definitely. I agree.
As therapists, we help support our clients in figuring out what’s happening, what’s going on and how we can help them move towards healing and finding themselves again. One of the ways we do that is using what’s called the DSM, the diagnostic statistics manual. Mental health disorders are all listed in this book and then they’re categorized by symptoms. When I talk about diagnosis with clients. I often say, research shows that this diagnosis, most people have these types of symptoms, they’re categorized in this way and a diagnosis just gives us a path, a little bit more of a structured path to helping figure out how we can treat what you’re experiencing. Trauma, in the DSM there’s two different types of trauma listed right now: Acute Stress Disorder (ASD), so that’s more of an initial response to a stress after an event. It usually lasts around a month. Then there’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and I think a lot of people have heard about PTSD before. A lot of our body-centered work is influenced or comes from PTSD research. So, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms last longer than a month, and it can happen with an acute stress disorder, or even if you don’t have that immediate stress afterwards. I think that it’s important to know you may not feel anything at first. Our bodies are not meant to be put into these little checklists either. Every person manifests these things differently. There are some clusters of symptoms when we’re looking at PTSD, avoidance, flashbacks, numbing, intrusive thoughts, hyper-vigilance. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen the exact same presentation in a person with PTSD. No, it’s so unique. The way that our systems process trauma or don’t process trauma. We lose that connection to ourselves, and it looks very different in every person, but really ultimately it is that disconnection with self. The DSM is a great tool for us to have this guideline, but it’s a blunt instrument. We don’t fit into those categories. It’s really so recent too. We’ve only had language for PTSD for 40 years. It started in 1980. We’ve been experiencing trauma for millions of years and now we have this way of validating the experience that is human, is universal, but again is not a perfect tool to use, but it is what we have. I’ve come to the same conclusion over time.
I think it’s important to note too, as we’re talking about how trauma is different for every person and how, the way our bodies evolve and our minds evolve from trauma and respond to trauma, there’s different things to consider, community, social, cultural, historical traumas that also happen to people. Trauma could be intergenerational. We’re starting to see in research how our genes change generation by generation due to the traumas that other people have experienced. It’s one of the ways, it’s really important right now, to honor the traumas experienced by people of color because this is an intergenerational experience that’s happened.
More than once, people have said to me, “I didn’t even realize that I’ve experienced trauma before? Why is that? Why didn’t I know before?” I think our definitions and understanding is so limited in what we know, what happens with trauma. Also when it’s an everyday experience, let’s say when it’s within our family system or community, we really don’t see it when it’s become part of our conditioning. And I think that’s important to note because when we are experiencing symptoms of trauma, which we’ll get into in a little bit, a lot of our coping strategies around trauma maybe come with narratives of shame or low self-esteem, or we internalize, “Why didn’t I know sooner? Why didn’t I stop something from happening? What could I have done differently?” When we don’t even know what’s happening to us, how can we do anything different? How can we be expected to act in any other way than that? We’re just doing our best to cope.
When you think about just the name post-traumatic, we are not post anything. We are all in this trauma together, especially right now, especially when you’re talking about people of color and the oppressive society that we live in and the pandemic, especially, we’re not post anything. We have to think about we’re all experiencing this trauma right now. How do we then move forward? We have to heal in community so when we have this label of post-traumatic stress disorder, it’s incomplete. Yeah, I think so too. We’re not talking about how we heal in community and that’s where shame comes in because we think it’s our fault. We tend to then wear that as, this is something I didn’t do, something about my behavior and that’s where we then just perpetuate that disconnection with self.
I agree. I agree. You bring up a good point in that often our reactions to trauma aren’t something that we’re choosing to have happen to us. As a sensorimotor psychotherapist, I discuss trauma in the way that the same experience can impact people differently. So, one person maybe walks away from a car accident feeling traumatized and one doesn’t. Why does that happen? There are so many different factors that influence why we become traumatized from something; the context of the situation, who you are, what your previous life experiences have been, how you make meaning of the event. When we specifically talk about sensorimotor psychotherapy, trauma happens when the situation’s perceived as threatening to one’s safety and survival. Then we have these survival responses that are triggered and we’ll get into that in a few moments, but our brain goes into action, our body goes into action and those aren’t things that we choose. That happens, that sense of overwhelm happens regardless of whether we decide it should happen or not.
Oh, exactly. Exactly. It’s a response to an event. It’s the way that we respond. Like you said, two people could experience the same overwhelming event and not have the same symptoms. It’s the way that our systems respond to that. You’re right. It has everything to do with how we were seen and heard and held as a child. If we knew that our needs were going to be met. If we are wired to think that our bodies are safe and that the world around us is a safe place or not. That’s where we get into that more complex trauma, developmental trauma. So, the body really is the key though, to helping us understand this.
Yeah. Yeah. I was listening to Pat Ogden the other day and she said the body is the battleground was like, “Oh yeah, I agree”.
One of the key features of trauma, as you’ve said, as we’ve been talking about is overwhelm. Let’s delve a little deeper into how our brains get overwhelmed, how our brains even get hijacked by trauma. I often start talking about the Triune Brain. When I think about how to explain what trauma is and how it influences our mind. I immediately go to this concept called the Triune Brain where we look at, if you will, our “thinky brain”, the part of our brain that’s in charge of logic, reasoning, language. Then it shifts further back into the brain where it’s our “feely brain”; that’s emotions, attachment our mammalian brain, our limbic system. That’s also where we get the fight, flight, attachment, cry, befriend responses to a threat, to a trauma. Then our brain will even shift further back to the base, the reptilian brain, our brainstem. That’s really where we experienced freeze or shut down. So that’s our “body brain”. That’s our body brain. Oh, exactly. Yeah. Thinky brain, feely brain, body brain. The front part that prefrontal cortex, really makes up our personality and then we have that middle part, that limbic, comes from the word limbus, which is like a ring. It’s like that ring in the center of the brain. Then we have the body brain, which is what babies have. The reactive part of us that kind of keeps us alive. And those three brains essentially process this trauma in a cascade, kind of what you’re talking about.
Yeah. Yeah, I think it, in a way, shows if we go back to the animal kingdom, right, because we’re all animals too here, the thinky brain is what makes us human, the front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. That turns off in threat. That turns off in trauma. Anxiety, or any sense of overwhelm, we wonder, why can’t I use my strategies? I know I’m supposed to breathe deep. I know I’m supposed to walk away. Like, why am I not walking away during this argument? The front of our brain has flipped its lid, it’s turned off. Then it shifts into more of that emotional brain, the feely brain. That’s where attachment is based. That’s our mammalian brain where we either flee or we fight. We also have what’s called attachment cry where people will seek support from someone. Then we even have a response in that area of our brain called befriending, or fawning, where I’m sure a lot of people have experienced this as well. You are almost kind to the threat. Let’s say you’re getting gas at the gas pump, and someone approaches you and you’re feeling very scared about it. You’re going to be friendly to them, most likely, so that the threat passes, right? So, we befriend a threat. Then, if those strategies don’t work, our brain will shift and go into that brainstem, that body brain. That’s where we freeze or shut down really takes over. We wonder, why didn’t I run away? Why did I just stay there? Your body was doing the best thing it could to protect you. It was that dangerous of a trauma or a threat that was happening. Yeah. It was a survival threat. We’re just the brains. Just trying to survive. That’s its job. It’s to survive.
What do you know about the effects on the brain? Do you know anything about how trauma affects the actual brain matter and different things like that? I’m curious.
Sure. We can’t have a conversation about this without talking about the stress response system. The amygdala, the HPA axis. This is where we’re getting more into a little bit of that brain science so bear with us if that’s not your thing. Yeah, so, there are the structures in the brain, the amygdala, these two little almond shaped little structures that are deep in that limbic brain and developmental trauma can highly sensitize those. They can actually really shrink up and they are the smoke detectors. They’re what sense threat. When we’ve experienced trauma or lack of attachment or, all those childhood things, we’re then just more wired to sense threat, to sense danger. So, the amygdala, are always sensing that danger and they send their signal to part of that limbic brain, to the hypothalamus, which then, if we think there’s a real threat here, boy that sucker just kicks in and sends a message to the pituitary glands to release stress. Hormones go down to the adrenals, the adrenal glands, that’s where we are like cortisol, adrenaline, fight, fight. We then are mobilized to have all of this energy to fight or to flee. And it started in the brain. It started in that deep limbic area. When we’re highly sensitized, when we’ve experienced a lot of trauma, that signal doesn’t get up to the prefrontal cortex. It just doesn’t get there because it’s a lot easier to just go into that stress response. So, in that way, our brains are changed by trauma, but they can be changed back. That’s the silver lining here is that our brains are, there’s neuroplasticity. We can change our brains. “Trauma is a life-changing experience, but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.” That’s one of Peter Levine’s quotes. That’s why when we talk about therapies to treat trauma, we can’t just change our amygdala by talking about it. We actually have to feel in order to heal. So that’s where that, that feely brain that you’re talking about really comes in. I really appreciate that. You have to feel in order to heal. That’s really important to note.
Let’s shift a little bit. I was reading. I love Janina Fisher. She’s another body centered therapist, and she said, “We now understand that trauma’s imprint is both psychological and somatic. (Right, so body-based). Long after the events are over the body continues to respond as if the danger were ever present”. I think that’s what you’re talking about too. The amygdala becomes very sensitized. Janina also speaks to that together mind, body start believing our symptoms are current threat, but really they’re just a record of an old experience that’s being relived in the body. Those responses are triggered. We don’t get to choose. It happens in milliseconds. It’s not, would I like to use my prefrontal cortex? I think I’m going to flee, and then if flee doesn’t work maybe I’ll shift into attachment cry and then, if I have to, I will shut down. That’s not how trauma works. Oh no, not at all. It happens in these milliseconds.
People ask me a lot. Do you believe that trauma can be in the body? Yes. Trauma is in the body. The way sensorimotor conceptualizes that is when those survival responses, if when we try to flee, or we try to fight, or we try for an attachment cry, and something stops that pattern, if it doesn’t get to come to fruition per se, if you’re not allowed to flee, if you’re not allowed to fight, that pattern of response can be stored in the body.
So one of the ways we help is that we look at what’s happening and maybe being re-lived in the body, this flee response. What if someone consistently fleas? They quit jobs or they leave relationships, or they have difficulty being in the room, for whatever reason. We look at that flee response and then we try to help them complete that action. It’s called an act of triumph and they’re really wonderful moments because it’s, in a way, allowing the body to process out what it never got to finish. That’s one of the ways I know of to really help that trauma be released from the body.
That’s really powerful.
Yeah, it can be. For example, I’ll give an example of myself, a simple one. I was about five years old. One of my strongest, first memories is that I was running with my cousins and my we’re running on this old country road that’s like half gravel, half cement. I don’t know if anyone knows those kinds of roads. You know what I’m talking about? We’re running and we were excited to get somewhere, like to a bridge or something like that to look over. My mom and my aunts were behind me. I had an aunt and she was young, very athletic, and she was literally like, we were little, like five, four, jumping over us, jumping around us, jumping over us like we were playing this game. I stopped and turned around. She later told me, because I don’t know what I did, she smashed into me and I just went into the pavement and I had a scar going all the way up my face. As an adult and as a teen and kid, I never liked to run fast. I didn’t like ice skating. I didn’t like any activity, even in gym class when you’re running lines or something like that. It’s scary for me and I didn’t understand why. Then as I aged, I realized, “Oh, it’s probably from that fall!” Fast forward into sensorimotor training, and I chose that experience as one of the activities to process as we were learning how to do this work. I remember practicing allowing my body to duck and roll, because what happened is I just didn’t get the chance to fully, like complete the reaction. So, I would imagine the fall as much as I could, and then I would practice, with support, rolling my body through that motion enough times that it felt like it left my system. I’m in a place in my life where I, for the first time, learned how to ski this winter. Going very fast. Those are things I couldn’t have done before.
There’s a lot there. When we really start looking into what the body’s holding and maybe release it from the system, that really leads to feeling connected. I feel so proud.
That’s a wonderful discharge of energy. Like, when you were a little kid, you had all of this survival-based energy kind of trapped in your body from that fall. Your system was trying to protect you. So of course, what does it do? It like, floods you with stress hormones and then it depends on how you were treated after that experience too. That’s a big part of it, because we need to discharge that energy in some way. Like, it took you years to complete the action to heal that. Nobody would have considered that back in the eighties.
Oh no. My family rushed me back to the farm, took care of my face and gave me hugs. Like I remember that part as well, but it’s still just lived in there. It did. It created this rush of adrenaline. My heart would start racing. I couldn’t even consider trying to do something like learn how to ski. It just, I would even get to the mountain with friends and I’d be like no, I can’t do it. Yeah, and that was an emotional reaction to that, so there was like fear, maybe even a little bit of panic. Just a visceral experience of avoidance, of not wanting to participate in something that could potentially hurt you. Yeah.
Oh, what a wonderful thing to have healed. I’m so happy with it.
Yeah. It speaks to the work that you’ve done. When we’re not even aware of that, you went through this experience so that you could help other people heal. You went through that but, like, you didn’t like to show up to a therapist and be like, one time when I was four, I fell. Yeah. You explored different patterns of defense in your body, and you did that a certain way. If you’ve experienced, or if a system has experienced things like that over and over, and it’s not released, it’s not treated, then we are living with pain and suffering, but we don’t really understand why. Then we experience anxiety, depression, addiction.
What is an addiction? It’s a turning away from pain. Turning towards something that makes us feel better. It’s what we would term as a mental illness, and that’s often trauma stuck in the body. It’s the body’s way of trying to make sense and discharge whatever happened in order to be connected to self and to go out and be able to take risks like skiing and playing and just being fully engaged in the human experience. So that’s a great story. Thanks so much for sharing that, Jess. Thank you.
Let’s talk a little bit about the polyvagal theory in regards to the mind, the brain, we’re talking a little bit about how the body stores different traumas. I, we can’t leave out, though, the nervous system, right? Even though we, I say this every time, if anyone’s following and listening to more than one episode, you’ll see a pattern of the polyvagal theory shows up a lot and our nervous system shows up a lot on this podcast.
Let’s talk just a little bit about threats and the response, survival. Really the polyvagal theory focuses on the autonomic nervous system. Which is the brain, the vagus nerve, all of our organs and how we survive. As simple as it can be, our nervous system is in charge of always deciding how we are going to survive. It’s going to choose, do we survive through connection or through protection; connection, protection. Yeah. That’s nice. That’s a great way to think about it.
If we pull back and just really think about, we talked about the brain, okay, so, we’ve got the brain and the spinal cord, so that’s our central nervous system. We used to just think that we had the two different stress responses. We would have this kind of activation, this sympathetic activation of our nervous system that comes off that spinal cord, the central nervous system, fight or flight. Then we would think about the parasympathetic, that comes off of that central nervous system as our rest and digest. We used to think that that was it. Are we in fight or flight or are we in rest and digest? And that comes from that, that central nervous system, like you’re saying. I always like to think about it. it’s nervous. It is lots of nerves. It’s where we can really experience that sense of anxiety when it comes to our survival. We used to think about it in pretty simple terms. Sympathetic or parasympathetic.
I saw this YouTube once. This talk, this guy talking about polyvagal, and he said we used to think of it as Bruce Banner or the Hulk. That was it. Oh, I love that. That is so great because I loved the Incredible Hulk in the eighties and it always made me so sad to watch, I think it was David Banner. Oh, is it David Banner? Yeah. Bruce Banner? You’re right. People, correct me there. Bruce is Batman. You’re conflating. Batman and the Incredible Hulk. All of those Marvel fans and DC fans out there. Yeah, so, David Banner. David Banner walking. Do you remember the end of every episode? He was walking sadly, disconnected. His shoulders are almost slumped down and his head, you can almost tell like looking at the ground. His posture is different. Think about the trauma of being the incredible Hulk, but that’s a whole other episode. Yeah. Tune in next time. That can be in our candy bag, like, go to the website and listen. I could do a whole episode on the Karate Kid and Cobra Kai too, so just let me know. Oh my gosh, my Jason would love that episode. We’re big fans of Cobra Kai.
Literally don’t get me started. I will go on and on about how polyvagal theory is crucial in that. Anyway. Okay. So back to the polyvagal theory though, so David Banner, we used to think about it as it was only rest and digest, parasympathetic, and then sympathetic, activation. Flight, fight, and freeze is all we really knew about the nervous system’s response to threat or trauma. Yes, and it’s evolved, as with everything, we’re evolving in understanding of this physiology. It’s truly the final frontier, the brain, the way that we’re just continuing to discover new things. When it comes to polyvagal theory, that’s really not that old. Tt started, Stephen Porges started talking about this kind of new way of looking at our nervous system in the nineties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You talked about the triune brain, well we have this triune nervous system that we’re understanding so much better now, thanks to Stephen Porges.
The polyvagal theory has to do with that 10th cranial nerve. It’s the vagus nerve. It’s Latin for wanderer. It’s the vagabond that wanders through our bodies and we think, so it originates in the brain, the 10th cranial nerve, and it enervates our whole system essentially. We now know that there are three pathways to this nerve and the oldest, the one that’s been with us the longest, it starts in the brainstem, but it goes all the way down through the whole body and really has to do with our digestion or reproduction. It is what we share with jellyfish, essentially. It’s like this passive defense system. It’s part of, that response is part of, our parasympathetic nervous system. It’s where we would think about that kind of rest, digest, but also freeze response. The newer pathway, the newer part of the vagus nerve, runs more along the spine and acts on our respiration, mobilizes our limbs, so that’s where we’re getting more into this fight or flight. It moves us out of danger. We’ll use our legs to run. We’ll use our arms to fight.
For example, that’s a common one that I see in people’s body patterns, right?
When they come in and there’s this tension in their system, it’s often an incomplete flee because their body has prepared, or, incomplete fight response, their body has prepared and continually holds. Like you said, the amygdala, that’s really sensitive, if it’s reading threat when there really isn’t a threat, the body’s continually preparing for something and we wonder, why is there tension? Why am I so tense?
Oh yeah, and that’s where body-based therapy really explores those patterns of defense. We can’t just talk about them. We have to actually feel them and reshape them. The most recent development in this vagus nerve, the newer branch has a myelin sheath around it so it’s more evolved. It’s more protected. It’s more like an electrical wire that wires us for connection. It moves from the base of the skull to the throat, to the heart, and to the face. This new kind of parasympathetic nervous system, that’s more about tending and befriending and connection.
Now we have this understanding of these three different responses. Essentially, nothing is discreet in this. Nothing is black and white. Here’s a hard line I can draw between these systems. They all need to play together, just like the triune brain. We don’t just use our prefrontal cortex and not have our brainstem still having us breathe. They’re all working in concert at once. The same thing with our nervous systems. But we have these responses, and we can get stuck in one of those. We can get stuck in that submit, that freeze, that oldest response. We can get stuck in fight or flight, and really never make it to that tendon befriend, that sense of connection with others and with self.
So that’s a really simplified way to discuss this. Like I said, this is a 400-page book. This is a two-hour lecture. There’s so much we can talk about with this. Yeah, definitely. But when it comes to addressing our traumas, we have to have some sort of felt sense of these systems in order to heal. That’s just it. That’s just it. Exactly.
Now that we have a better understanding of the mind and body’s response to trauma, let’s talk about some of the most common body-centered modalities someone can maybe pursue for trauma healing. I immediately go to thinking about things like mindfulness, Tai-Chi, dance. I’ve mentioned it before in a different podcast, my experience with weightlifting. The mindfulness and carrying the weight on the body. What do you think Jeanne? What are some of the modalities you recommend for people? I’m a yoga therapist, so I really believe in the power of yoga. It literally means union. It’s a union of mind and body.
Lastly, I know we want to leave our listeners with some tangible strategies they can immediately begin at home. I always began with self-compassion. We talked a lot today about how our body responds to things. Our brain responds to things. It’s not a purposeful choice. It’s actually our system working so hard to take care of us and protect us. When we begin to observe those responses in a new way, we can have more compassion for ourselves. It’s not something we did wrong, and it gives us the ability to separate, observe, and then engage with those responses still playing out in our life today, versus them consuming us. When you believe it’s about you, it’s very hard to separate yourself from it and work on it.
That’s where we can see this phenomenon of post-traumatic growth. We grow through our traumas. We can really see the gift that we’ve been given, take it and embody it, and live in a way that’s just much more connected. I think self-compassion is the key as well, Jess. I think you said it.
Another aspect of compassion, I was at a workshop with Mare Chapman, she’s a local meditation teacher and psychotherapist. We love Mare here. She talked about the differences of compassion versus empathy. How, we live in a society that really wants people to practice empathy, putting themselves in someone else’s shoes. I know a lot of empathetic people and a lot of people who actually, at a certain point, start feeling burnt out. I think, if we can, Mare says, if we can switch to compassion. Use empathy so we can understand someone’s point of view and then switch to compassion. Let’s say, for example, you’re on a hike with a friend. They fall. They break their leg. Would you break your leg so that you completely understand what they’re going through? That’s empathy. Then you’re both stuck. Or do you have compassion for that person. You know what it must feel like. You support them. You get them to the car. You drive them to the hospital. I like how compassion in a way offers us again, that mindful separation, where we can care, but stay present within ourselves. Sidenote, it lights up pleasure centers in our brain. Empathy lights up pain centers. Compassion lights up at pleasure centers. Wow. That’s fascinating. We want to care about each other. We are rewarded by our survival system, to care about each other. So, compassion for ourselves. Compassion for others. I just think that’s a helpful place to start when we’re thinking about how to work through that post-traumatic growth. I think the key word there too is work. It’s work. It’s daily. It’s looking at ourselves, looking at our patterns, maybe trusting a therapist to be on this journey to hold the flashlight for us as we pick our way along this healing path. It is work. Self-compassion is something we have to practice daily, hourly, minute-ly, second-ly! No, I totally agree though. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.
Something else, something maybe a little more tangible, maybe the long breath out. We’ve talked about that before. The longer we breathe out the more sensors in our lungs tell, through that vagus nerve, they tell our brain, that survival system, “Hey, we’re safe”. Even if you don’t necessarily feel safe, when we take those long breaths out, we just start helping inform the brain and giving a new message. You can also speak with smiles because who does that under threat? Eye contact, even with strangers, if you feel safe to do that. You talked about, Jeanne, the newest version of our survival system and the polyvagal theory that social engagement system. Even eye contact with people can shift our nervous system state into feeling more safe and regulated. I’m also a big fan of suggesting mid-frequency music. What is that? Google it. For example could be, some people don’t want to hear this, a lot of Disney music is mid-frequency music. That’s why it makes us feel so happy. An interesting thing about human development is that there are parts of our ear that developed along with the social engagement system. As we evolved, our jaw broke off from our skull and a new part of our ear formed. It’s the middle ear and that turns off under threat. When we feel threatened, we really only hear really high pitch sounds or low, because that’s survival. So, when we listened to that mid frequency music, or bineural beats, different things like that, we can actually start to engage that middle ear which is another way of letting the body know, “Hey, listen, we’re safe. We’re good here”.
Any last strategies you would suggest? I think, we have to get in our bodies. We have to be in our bodies. For those who have suffered trauma, it’s definitely an out of body experience, because the body isn’t a safe space. Like you’re saying, eye contact being safe with people. We have to feel safe in our bodies really, in order to be able to do that. Whatever that means, I really enjoy sensory things to help people stay grounded. I love to use an essential oil or a touchstone, like a rock, crystals, anything that we can just have to tell our senses that we’re safe. That we’re grounded. That we can feel our feet on the floor or our seat, supported, however it’s supported, just to get into the body.
All right, Jess. That’s it for today. I know that we could say a lot more about this topic and we will continue this conversation on the Insight Mind Body Talk podcast. We hope this has been helpful in expanding your understanding of trauma, the way it influences not only our thoughts and feelings but our bodies and our present moment experiences. It’s only when our system feels safe that we’re able to tap into the entirety of our ability to heal.
Next on Insight Mind Body Talk, Jess and I are excited to introduce you to the world of mindfulness. It’s a topic we’re passionate about, and we can’t wait to discuss how both informal and formal practices can have a profound effect on your mind and body.
Thank you again for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-centered mental health podcast. We hope today’s episode was empowering and supported you in strengthening your mind-body connection We’re your hosts Jeanne and Jess. Please join us again next week as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing. Until then, take care.
