the body keeps the score this was a a pretty radical approach to thinking through trauma and it became a meme which is an interesting thing to see actually well I I I use it in my like everyday language with my partner yeah and I've heard other people say the body keeps the score the body keeps the score when we're talking about how our body is holding on to those y traumatic memories traumatic things that have happened to us for someone who has never read your book and doesn't even understand the like base premise here what
is the like base premise of your of the title there it's really that trauma is a visceral experience of what does a visceral mean in your body heartbreak and gut bench you stiffen up you surrender you lose your power you tighten up that's really where trauma is lived I kind of see it as two approaches you can either go let's try and change the mind which will then change the body Downstream or you can say let's change the body which will then change the mind right you could but I do a lot of CBT with
my wife let's say yeah I point out her irrational behavior and that she should really see things from a different angle and I should really see things correctly and I really have much success with that and I'm a bit surprised that psychology does things that most spouses have failed in using very well this sematic approach I've only recently heard this ter from my partner and she says It's amazing And she's told me she told me to speak to you on this podcast because she says you know you'll really help to change her opinion on this
what is the sematic approach to Healing so approach is to really experience what your body feels and also uh allowing your body to do things that it has been afraid to do and to explore how your body moves to the world in some ways why women just to seem to be so much better than at this stuff than men because they're doing like P sure Pates yoga these are all things dancing these are things typically women do more than men yeah yeah yeah yeah and it seems women are just more in touch with it yeah
I think it's a intriguing question because it's not exclusively women of course men have always done it in armies and basic training and the military and uh what's intriguing to me is that uh you know when people join the military they often times they're not very well put together people and they go through basic training and they really March together they sing with people and they climb barricades and they go through uh composite physical experience with other people at the end of 12 weeks they feel competent and they feel connected and they have found a
Band of Brothers how do they do it not by yaking but by having very deep shared physical experiences one of the interesting things that you write about which I found particularly interesting because I saw little flashes of myself in the words is you said I found that the more traumas your patients have in their background the more creative and successful they often become often often and we don't know how often that is but I get to meet quite a few of them yeah yeah it's the people who have had to struggle who often see new
possibilities and have no choice but to discover new options that's true that's true yeah but you know but those are the people who managed to get into my practice and the people who don't find those Solutions don't have the wherewithal and the capacity to make it into therapy with me they might be outside with a drug addiction getting drugs lying on the streets etc etc and to a large degree I see that as as an issue of accident you know this past year I visited a program in Los Angeles called um Homeboy Industries is a
it's a program for formerly incarcerated largely Latin men who had no fathers who have been criminals and it's a spectacular program where they honor they say what do you need how we can we together you how can we make sa safe place for you and I saw a real treatment there say Quinton Hospital uh s Quinton prison famous prison in California is now trauma based I use my book as a for tector and they're transforming people's lives by acknowledging the reality of what they dealt with helping people to be part of the healing system working
in groups working with movement um like it's in Quinton they have hoola dancing classes I go like yeah moving together with other people if you sense connection s of pleasure uh they they're really begin to understand you can do it at a Harvard Hospital you wouldn't do the whole L with people you would dance with people I think there's a bit of a joke in the investment Community um that says you'll get better returns if you invest in someone an entrepreneur or founder that is a little bit traumatized and I actually think I if I
I don't want to misquote her but Barbara Cochran who's a shark on Shark Tank in the USA here on the show and one of the things she said to me was with all of her Investments the ones that tend to do the best are those that have a little bit of a trauma in their past and she says because when they call me with a problem they call me with the solution attached versus people who have never had trauma they call me and just tell me the problem so they'll call me and say listen Barbara
this has happened and this is what we're going to do about it and that was her you know she said it in a slightly humorous way but I wondered if you thought there was any truth in this idea yeah I think that's again a selection bias of people she works with I know certainly plenty of people have had plenty of people working for me uh who who really get paralyzed in the face of of challenges and who don't have a solution and become very dependent on giving getting the action so I think she has an
bit of an unusual sample actually cuz I wondered if if you've had an an anomalous early upbringing does that make you an an adult is does it increase the probability that you become an anomalous slightly different adult absolutely and that can go everywhere you develop a mind and brain to fit with that particular situation and if that particular situation doesn't help you need to find new Solutions and so trauma and abuse really forces you to find try to find other Solutions but many of them are not successful is trauma a story in your brain no
trauma is a perception of your brain a percept what's the difference so the issue is something happens and your brain and mind takes it in and then makes an adaptation to that particular event that depends on how old you are in the circumstances it's very different for different people give mean example of a perception if you would beat me up right now I'd go this guy is crazy and I can call people and ruin your reputation Etc if you fre if I'm three years old and you start hitting me as a kid I don't know
what the hell to do about it and I will likely think as probably I did something wrong that I caused the guy to beat me up and I'm a terrible person and no wonder that he beat me up because I'm a horrible creature and that's what almost everybody who I know who was beaten as a child uh that's the internal understanding of it not when you're eight years old or 15 years old but when you're very young that becomes your experience because you're still forming your perception of the world yeah yeah and your brain creates
a map of the world very in very deep ways and so you experiences form an internal was of the world that that makes you expect certain things at certain times so if I walk into a room and I see a person who looks like my old Uncle who he has to play with I start sing up to you because you on deep level might be of the very nice uncle that I once had I know that but my brain is set to interpret the world in a particular way so one of the things most uh
profound uh research experience I had was purely accidental we started to do warshock tests some people what's that ink blood test so you SE some formless ink picture and we showed it to people and we saw that people had completely different interpretations of what they projected on that ink BL test and that really brought home to me that we all are Liv living in different worlds and that our like a lot of the Vietnam veterans I saw saw bloody corpses or mutilated bodies in those cards people had never been in combat didn't see that uh
Vape victims saw torn vaginas and torn bodies other people didn't see this so once that becomes lodged into your perceptual system you continue to interpret the world in that particular way having to do with what you have gone through in the past and an ink block test for anyone that doesn't know is basically just a piece of paper with random in all it is yeah but it's been analyzed on about 100,000 people over the years so there are certain patterns you can detect in it yeah yeah I've never done an ink blot test I feel
like I should do one and I learned as much from my ink blot test as I learned from my brain Imaging uh but the brain Imaging is respectable and in uh the mind sort disappeared but for example in our psychedelic research I still very much hope to do ink blood test because as Michael pollen says how to change your minds but we not measuring how people change their minds how many people do you think I mean this is maybe a ridiculous question but how many people what percentage of people do you think have trauma in
some form how you define it uh you know the figures are a quarter of people get physically abused one of five people got sexually abused uh one of eight kids Witnesses vness being their parents uh etc etc so you know if I sit in a room you know it's it's not a binary issue it's not I do you traumatized you didn't get traumatized but when I talk to a room of professionals which I do a lot I assume that at least half of the group Vis knows what trauma means and what is trauma doing to
my brain you said you've done a lot of neuroimaging yeah scans um if you if if I was traumatized and you scanned my brain is there something you could see not necessarily I can see how uh your brain may be different from other people's brains I may take a particular population you can average it out and you can say oh there's a little more activation of the B Rea to gray a little bit less of the right insulin so you see see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain but to some degree you know I
think we we learn a lot about the brain but we don't know much about the brain and I think people tend to overstate how much the brain pictures can teach us uh you know it's I love the Hubble telescope or the web telescope you know it's our brain is like a universe and our technology is very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably con complex Connection in the brainers but we have learned learned a few things in the last 20 years so how how does trauma affect the brain it affects the brain that you
tend to there's there's one part of your brain that I call the Cockroach Center of your brain the perac gray that lights up it s underneath the amigdala everybody knows the word Amiga these days there a part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger when you traumatized you're likely that that little part of your brain way back in the your brain is firing all the time all the time you go like I'm in danger I'm in danger I'm danger and so that's where it starts in a very Elementary sensory level you don't
know what the danger is but you just feel that you should be scared and then there's certain um Parts other parts of your brain for example your insula which makes the connection between your physical Sensations and your body awareness that for many people get shut down because trauma basically the experience of trauma is a visual experience of heartbreak and gut venge and if you have a allot of that you can learn to shut that part of your brain down so you don't feel your body so much anymore I you don't feel your body so much
you don't feel very alive either but you don't feel so scared all the time but it's likely that you will want to take some drugs to make yourself feel alive some sometimes times um stuff like that yeah so the part of my brain you said just under the am around the amydala below below the amigdala people that are traumatized they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically well the dysfunction is that it keeps firing keeps firing and how does that feel and then the mea so so there's a constant sense of of subliminal dread
is that anxiety anxiety is already to higher mental functioning okay it's more element tree it's like your dog shaking like yeah my daughter has adopted a dog was time and two years later the dog still walks to my house you've adopted a dog and it shakes in your house still yeah yeah but still never quite comfortable um and that's how many time that you meet are never quite comfortable so when someone says they're triggered now trigger is in the higher level thing okay so then the next level is need the trigger the is in part
mediated by the amigdala if your Amiga if your smoke detector that tends to become hypers sensitive so that minor things get blown up and a minor thing that you may say to me I take as the most insulting thing in the world and so you're constantly triggered by things and that makes makes you feel like you are doing terrible things to me and it's not like I'm hypers sensitive uh and when you have an off day uh that is your issue and not my issue no when you have an off day I feel your off
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