Healing From Trauma & Limbic Loops With Don Wood, PhD

It's all coming in because only humans have the ability to store explicit memory. We store billions and billions of bits of information and this is stored in this explicit memory system. Animals don't do that. So what happens is, is that when our minds recall data memory from five years ago or 10 years ago, the subconscious mind is seeing it in real time. Because your subconscious mind is survival based and it only deals what's happening now.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Reshape your Health podcast. I am your host, Dr. Morgan Nolte and I am really excited about our conversation today. I was connected to our guest by Esther Blum, who has been on this podcast multiple times. We were talking offline about trauma and she highly recommended Dr. Donwood. And so I reached out and he graciously agreed to come on the podcast to talk about trauma and healing from trauma and ways that trauma can manifest in depression and anxiety, PTSD and physical health ailments. So I think this is going to be a really interesting and enlightening and educating conversation today. Dr. Dawn Wood is a PhD author, speaker, founder and CEO of the Inspired Performance Institute and creator of the Inspired Performance Program or TIP Method. He's also the author of two top selling books, Emotional Concussions and you'd Must Be out of youf Mind. His TIP method uses the newest developments in neuroscience to clear away the effects of disturbing or traumatic events, repurpose old patterns and prime your mind for peak performance. The TIP method resets or reboots the brain that has been stuck in this fight or flight mode because of the trauma and helps people move on from trauma, depression, anxiety, anxiety and PTSD. I'm so excited for this conversation. Dr. Dawn, thank you for joining us today. Can you just get started with a bit of your story and how you got into this field?

Yeah, it's very interesting, Morgan. I started off because if I talk about my childhood and compare it to my wife and daughters, I had this idyllic childhood. I had amazing. I was adopted. I had incredible parents that never argued, never raised their voice. I was living in this utopia. I didn't know it at the time. I thought everybody did. And it really wasn't until because a lot of my friends never talked about the traumas they were dealing with, the physical, emotional, sexual abuse that was always quiet. Nobody ever talked about it. And so when I met my wife, I was 18 and we got close very quickly because I had a chance to go and play professional hockey in Sweden. So we got engaged at 19 and we were going to go over now I'm around her house all the time, and I see the dysfunction going on in the house. I could sense there was a tension, but I didn't see it enough. And then eventually, they couldn't hide it. Her father was a very angry man, very violent. So all the children and the mom and the grandmother in that house were living in fear of him. And that was ongoing and constantly, you know, her. Her nervous system. I always talk about activations. I never talk about triggers. I say, our nervous system gets activated. I just never liked the word trigger. I thought it sounded violent and negative. And your system's not violent or negative. It's trying to protect you. So she was living, you know, in that world. I thought, when we get married, all that fear will go away because she'll be living in the type of world I grew up in. But it wasn't. It just continued to activate her nervous system with something as simple as me saying, no, I don't like that. She could tear up and start to cry and say, why are you upset with me?

Absolutely.

And I didn't understand it at the time. I was thinking, well, how did I say that? And I started to think, okay, I've got to choose my words more carefully. I got to be careful of the tone in my voice. But it would take very little to activate it. And then when my daughter turned 14, she was diagnosed with Crohn's. And they told us, there's no cure for Crohn's. We don't know what causes Crohn's. She needs to take. Be off of dairy and gluten and change her diet. And. And she ended up having four resections done where they literally went in and took out 24 inches of her intestines over four operations. So she really struggled and suffered. And then they said, you know, there's no answer for it. She'll eventually end up with a colostomy bag. And then later, she ended up developing another autoimmune disorder called idiopathic pulmonary hemosy, which is where the iron and the blood gets released. And so we got a call that she was rushed to the hospital. She was coughing up blood. And they just said, again, this is what they diagnosed as hemosiderosis. Said, there's no cure for it. There's no cause. We don't know what causes it. Same kind of thing. And that's when my wife said, you need to figure this out. You are adopted. This must be coming from some genetic side, from your side, or it's my fault, right? And if you don't figure out an answer to this, we're going to lose our daughter. So that's what started me on the research to figure out why are these things happening. And that's really how I developed the whole program.

What was your. So you went to play professional hockey, but then you went and got, did you get your PhD later in life?

Later in life? Yeah, not until in my 50s.

What was your first profession?

I was always an entrepreneur. So I was in the financial services, mortgages, real estate, insurance. And I've always just been a lifelong entrepreneur, which I think was actually an advantage when I went to research it because I wasn't coming in to learn what they wanted to teach me. I came in with an agenda of trying to figure out why are they not fixing this.

Right.

So it's sort of a different kind of approach, which is what a entrepreneur would do. Find out where the problem is and solve the problem.

Absolutely. So let's talk about first off, why do you feel like it took you Till you were 50 to go get your PhD to figure this out? What was the impetus? Like, why such a long lag time? Because if you were married young and you knew that some of this was going on for years and years in your marriage, I'm just kind of curious why the lag time?

Well, my wife was high functioning, so it wasn't like she was like struggling every. I could see the struggle, but if you had met her, you would never have known. But I just saw that she was constantly living in fear and I had no idea what was causing it. And I, and I couldn't come up with an answer. And it wasn't like she was, you know, having a drinking problem, drug problem. She was just struggling with this. And one of the things that I look back on now and I realize is that even though we had a really good life, three beautiful children, a beautiful home, good business, she wasn't enjoying it. She. And it wasn't that she was ungrateful. She just couldn't get into that feeling of happiness. And it really came back again to her childhood because she was afraid it was going to stop because there were times where dad would be okay and then all of a sudden the violence would start again. So she was protecting herself from getting too excited about things going well so that she didn't get hurt when they stopped. And again, it wasn't until my daughter really ended up with that second disorder that it was like, if we don't do something, she's probably going to die from this Right. Started me going looking.

Okay, so we talked offline that a big issue when it comes to dealing with trauma is just not even seeing the trauma, not even recognizing the trauma, and then having so much resistance to talk about it or masking. I feel like people are really good. Maybe your wife is a good example of masking the trauma, even subconsciously. So can you just bring to our awareness what counts as trauma? What are some signs that we might be masking unresolved trauma? And then lastly, I want to talk about. Why is there so much resistance to healing from trauma?

Well, the big thing is a lot of people who have. Some people know exactly what their traumas are. You know, they can tell you what. What happened. But there's a lot of times that people don't realize it. Like, I worked with one person who had from the Boston Marathon, an obvious trauma, and that's what she thought was her trauma. But once we got into the program, she realized my trauma was my childhood. This was just one more piece of it. And she didn't realize how much she had to resolve from her childhood to even address what was the current one, which we thought was the most obvious one. And so a lot of times, the best way that I can explain it is if you want to know if you have unresolved trauma is if you think about an event that happened to you, say, 10 years ago, and you feel an emotion, fear or anger, then it means it's active. Because anytime you have an emotion, fear or anger, your mind is calling for an action. The purpose of fear is to escape a threat. The purpose of anger is to attack a threat. So if you think about something from 10 years ago and your heart's pounding in your chest, your mind is actually calling you into an action that isn't possible. It wants you to fix it, but you can't fix it. But your mind keeps looping through the data and keeps seeing. It's actually a glitch. That's why I always say, Morgan to people, there's nothing wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with your mind. Your mind is looping through some old data, continually calling you into actions that are impossible. So does that make sense?

It makes total sense. And I think I personally have had those looping thoughts. And I.

Would say it was like I was watching a movie on repeat that I couldn't shut off, and I didn't know how to shut it off. And it probably. I mean, it took a couple years, you know, really to shut it off. And I think that it's off now. I don't know how I did it. I'm hoping you can bring some insight into a more systematic approach of healing to expediate the process.

So I think some resistance, too, that we have to talk about is the guilt, the shame. Maybe it was sexual trauma, or maybe they went through something where they were the person at fault, you know, for the trauma.

Or maybe it's just embarrassing. Like, I know that you mentioned that your wife didn't really want her story to be public for a long time, so she had that resistance to sharing the trauma. I could imagine that sometimes people might be afraid of facing the trauma again and experiencing those feelings of anger, or, you know, they want to fight them or they want to run, and they're just like, I can't. I don't have the emotional capacity to go through this right now. So what are some of those big things that you see as resistance to going through and healing from this trauma?

Well, I think that's the big thing. When my wife, before we got married, she said to me, okay, I want to sit down and talk to you about the trauma I've had in my life, because that may change your mind about wanting to marry me, right? And so I was like. At first, I was like, wow, is there something I really don't know? And as she shared what she'd experienced as a child, right. She thought that that would change the way I thought about her. And I said, no, that doesn't change it at all.

Right?

You are a child. But in her mind, there was a lot of shame about that. She didn't want people to judge her, judge her family about what they had gone through. So that's generally why people don't want to talk about it. Plus, if you.