How to Remove the Effects of Trauma Repurpose Old Patterns and Experience Peak Performance With Dr. Don Wood - Genius Network Episode #185

There's nothing wrong with you or there's nothing wrong with your mind. We just need to get to the root of where the problem is. What is creating this? Right. Let's not think of it as a problem. It's an opportunity to resolve something that your mind has been trying to get you to resolve. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius Network, go to geniusnetwork.com when you eliminate the effects of disturbing traumatic events, which he refers to as atmospheric conditions in a person's life, then their performance improves, both personally and professionally. So we're focusing with our expert, Dr. Donwood, on improved performance, as Gina said, is one of the things that I talk about all the time. What are your atmospheric conditions? And Joe has mentioned this a few times. People have probably heard him talk about that. And I was really honored that Joe in his book what's In It For Them? Mentioned this. And it's something that, you know, we've talked about. And the idea behind it is if you understood the atmospheric conditions of everyone's life, it would make sense as to why they do what they do and why they behave the way they behave. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about what I meant by atmospheric conditions. It'll make a little bit more sense.

So what I like to do when I meet with somebody is I sort of explain it this way, is to think of the brain as the hardware. It's a computer, so the hardware, the actual physical brain, is a hardware. And I talk about think of the mind as the software. So it's what's sort of running the programs. The hardware is the brain, the software is the mind. And so whenever I sit down and talk to somebody, they'll come in and they'll say things like, you know, I have anxiety, I have depression. They'll give me all these different labels that they've been identified with. And I usually say to them, I said, well, that's not what you have. That's a symptom of something. Why is your mind anxious? Why is your mind depressed? So I have a very different approach. The way I look at is I say the mind does everything for a reason. It's not trying to hurt you, it's not trying to make you depressed. It's actually calling for something, it's looking for something, it's trying to protect you. So I'm going to explain a little bit more about how that works. But one of the things that I say to Somebody, the first time I sit down with them is I say, there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with your mind. And this is what Gina was just talking about, the stigma. Because when people come in and they'll say, well, I have anxiety, I have depression, I have post traumatic stress, there's all these, you know, images that come into people's minds. What does that mean? Oh, there's something wrong with them. And what I say is, no, there's nothing wrong with you, or there's nothing wrong with your mind. We just need to get to the root of where the problem is. What is creating this? Right. Let's not think of it as a problem. It's an opportunity to resolve something that your mind has been trying to get you to resolve. A lot of people will talk to me about the emotions and the cycle of emotions that they go through. And in this chart here, I'm sort of saying people will go from optimism, euphoria, depression, back to optimism, and they float through this cycle. And what I explained to them is that an emotion is a call for an action. What's the purpose of an emotion? The emotion of fear is to escape a threat. The emotion of anger is to attack a threat. So these glitches and error messages will start showing up in their life because of some of the things that they've experienced in their life, their personal set of atmospheric conditions. And so the mind will go through these series of emotions. But when I explain that to somebody and I say, why is your mind feeling fear? When you think about something that happened to you 10 years ago, there's a glitch happening. It's an error message. I'm going to explain a little bit more about that. The purpose of an emotion is a call for an action. So our minds and bodies are always seeking homeostasis. We're always trying to be in balance. So what's interfering with our ability to stay in balance? What's interfering with our ability to stay present and in the moment? And so what I'm going to share with you is basically it's really coming down to an activation of the nervous system. And the activation of the nervous system interferes with our ability to stay present and be in the moment. And so one of the things that I always talk about is I never talk about triggers. I never like the word trigger. When somebody says, oh, this triggers me, I always use activation. What activated your nervous system. Because your mind is not being negative and violent. It's actually calling for some sort of an activation and it's going to be either a fight flight response or a freeze response. So if that nervous system is constantly getting activated, why is it getting activated? What is actually happening? So we can actually heal ourselves. If we can quiet our mind, we can effectively heal our minds and bodies when we get into that ability to stay present and focused on what's happening now.

So I'm going to share the story of how the whole program developed. And I start off with really my story, which was I grew up in this beautiful, idyllic childhood. I was adopted. I always knew I was adopted right from birth. I got adopted by some amazing individuals who were the most loving, nurturing people. They never yelled, never raised their voice. My brother and sister and I can't ever remember them arguing. Now, that's a very unique home to grow up in. And so my nervous system stayed pretty regulated most of the time. I got bumped along the way with a friend or a coach or a teacher. But as soon as I came back home into this environment, my system would come back into regulation. I believe that that was very important for my health. Not only physical, but emotional as well. So I've been healthy all my life. I've lived in Florida 30 years. I never have to go to the doctor. I've stayed healthy. I didn't take the vaccine. I figured my immune system is pretty much as good as anything they could ever give me. So I'm just going to stick with mine. And I believe that was coming from the regulation of my nervous system. And so I thought everybody lived in this world. I thought my friends were living in this world. I didn't see the dysfunction going on in their homes. I didn't hear about the abuse, physical, emotional, sexual abuse. Nobody talked about it. Right? So again, that stigma of abuse or dysfunction in a home. So I'm just growing up believing that this is the world everybody's living in. And it wasn't until I met my wife, Bridget. And so when I met my wife Bridget, I realized very quickly that she was not living in the world I grew up in. She had a very dysfunctional father, a very angry, violent guy. So she was living in fear. So she was always afraid. And if I said something like, no, I don't like that, she could tear up and start to cry and say, why are you upset with me? And I'd go, honey, I'm not upset at all. What makes you think I'm upset? She'd go, well, the way you said that you were getting upset with me. And I said, well, no, I Didn't say it like that. What I didn't realize at that time is that she wasn't wrong and I wasn't wrong. We were both right. I didn't say it that way. But if I had this little tiny tension, change in my voice, she could hear that, like I was yelling. So people, especially as children who have had trauma, are highly sensitive to sound. So she could hear things that I could never hear. And to her, that would activate her nervous system. And I'll explain a little bit more, even more depth of how that happened. So great mom, great wife, high functioning, never got into drugs or alcohol, but just constantly living in fear. And there was nothing I could do to fix it. I tried to change the words. I tried to pace it properly. I was very careful the way I spoke to her. And yet I could activate her nervous system just so easily. So then my daughter Ashley, she develops she beautiful, loving kid, never saw anything that was wrong with her. She was 14, gets diagnosed with Crohn's. And they told us there's no cure for Crohn's. We don't know what causes Crohn's. She just needs to stay off of, you know, dairy, gluten, things like that. And you're just going to have to manage this for the rest of her life. She ended up having four resections done where they literally went in and cut out about 24 inches of her intestines because she just kept on getting sicker and sicker. And then she developed another second autoimmune because Crohn's is autoimmune, a second autoimmune called idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis. And that's basically where the iron and the blood gets released. So she was rushed to the hospital. They had her in ICU for three and a half weeks and said this is what she came up with is hemosiderosis. Again, no cure. We don't know what causes it. She should just live near a hospital because her lungs could fill up in 15 minutes. So that's when my wife said to me, she goes, okay, this must be your fault, because we don't know your genetic history and we don't have this on my side of the family. So this must be caused by something going on from your genetic history. So that set me off to start trying to do some research, because what she said is, if you don't figure this out, we may lose our daughter. Because she literally. It could be a death sentence for people who have that kind of disorder and only 1 in 1.2 million people get it. So it's very rare. There was no research being done on it, so we didn't really have many answers. So what I did, when I started doing my research, I said I first got to understand the problem. What is the problem? And so one of the things I did in the research is I started looking at why are people dealing with this? What is a common connection between people dealing with these kinds of autoimmune disorders? And so I started studying the animal mind and the human mind and say, what's going on in our minds that is creating this? And so animals are 100% present all the time. Everything for an animal is happening now. So if an animal could have a clock on the wall, that's what the clock would look like. It's what time is it? It's now. It's always now. They don't deal with anything in the past or the future. They only deal with what's happening now. Now, the human mind, 95% of our mind is our subconscious mind, and it operates exactly the same way. So 95% of everything that's happening for you is happening on a subconscious basis. Right? And it's dealing with everything in the present has no connection to time at all. It's only the conscious mind, which is about 5%, that deals with time. So everything else is all subconscious and, and it's taking care of everything subconsciously. Heart rate, digestion, all programs running the same way for an animal.

So again, when we look at time, time is sort of an illusion to us. As far as the subconscious mind's concerned, there's no such thing as time. Everything is in the moment, fully present. And so I started looking more behind the science of how that is working. How is that affecting, affecting us? How is that affecting our lives, day to day lives? And so what I started to realize is how does the subconscious communicate? It communicates through emotions, feelings and sensations. All of those are calling for some sort of an action. An emotion is a call for an action, a feeling, a sensation. Your mind wants something done, and that's how it communicates.

So what is activating these emotions, feelings and sensations? What I really found was that traumatic memory is having a big effect on the sensations, emotions, and feelings. And so when we have an activation, for my daughter, for example, with her Crohn's that was going into a cell danger response. So the cells in a cell danger response is actually a protection. It's inflammation, it's a protection of the system. It's protecting you against any foreign invaders getting into the cell. So for my daughter, she was her Crohn's was a cell danger response because of the traumatic memory, the traumatic event. What we didn't know until my daughter was much older is that she had had some trauma when she was six years of age. And so that trauma was creating this inflammation.

So one of the things that I did look at and started looking at is that when there's a traumatic event, the traumatic event creates inflammation. And the inflammation, like I said, is a temporary pause to protect the system against any foreign invaders, any threats. It's not meant to stay constant and inactivation all the time. It's meant to activate and then come back into regulation.

So here's what I discovered from the research that I was doing. Why is our system constantly being activated?

So I mentioned that 95% of our mind is operating fully present in the moment. 5% of our mind is our logical, reasonable, intellectual part of our mind. It's running everything in, you know, in terms of we've created automobiles, airplanes, cars. Whatever we have created is created by that 5% intellectual part of our mind. It can imagine things, create things where our subconscious mind is really just responding to the environment.

So animals and humans have some commonality. We have two memory systems. Animals have one memory system. The memory system that we share with animals is the procedural associative memory. So if you want to teach an animal how to do something, you repeat it over and over. They're going to build up an association through that repetition. So anybody who has a dog, this will make some sense. You can feed your dog the same thing every day because they don't store the information about that from yesterday. They have just built up an association that you're safe, that you're going to feed them, that they're going to be taken care of, but they haven't stored the details of it. Now we have that memory system as well. And that memory system is terrific. So it can help us to continue to grow and learn. But we have a second memory system. The second memory system is explicit memory. We store tremendous amounts, billions of bits of information about experiences in our life. So everything you ever seen, heard, touched, or smelt in your lifetime has been recorded and stored in this memory system. So this is where I say the glitch is going to come in. And this is what I sort of realized through the research and everything that I was doing is that our mind is glitching. If we have 95% of our mind operating in the present and it activates a memory from something that happened five or 10 years ago. When does it think the memory is happening? Now? In the present. So doesn't it make sense that if you think about something that happened 10 years ago and your mind is starting to review that data in real time, that it's going to activate your nervous system because it thinks something's happening? That's what's happening. For a lot of people post traumatic stress, all the things that are happening are coming from this explicit memory system, activating our nervous system. We've stored all that information, good experiences, bad experiences, all of that is stored in that long term memory. If something reminds us and we activate and go back into looking at that memory, a sound, a smell, a name or whatever is having us look at the long term memory that's going to activate our nervous system if it was a traumatic event. So I say that when we have a traumatic event, all our senses are heightened. Sight, smell, hearing. So how's it recording it? High definition, very bright, very intense. That intensity is what makes it look so real. And if our system thinks we're under attack, it makes perfect sense and it's going to activate our nervous system.

So fear and anger are calls for actions. But if your mind is looking at data from 10 years ago and activating a fear response or an anger response, but the action isn't possible, that constant running of that system is going to create all kinds of issues. And for my daughter, it was creating constant inflammation. Her mind constantly looped through the trauma when she was six years of age. And it kept activating the cell danger response, which was the inflammation. And that kept it in a constant state of fight or flight. That's going to wear down the physical, emotional health that we're dealing with. And that's why we see so many people who have trauma as children having health issues when they become older. I never had that. So my system stayed fairly regulated. I didn't have that long term memory of trauma. So one of the things that I found was something called the time slice theory. And this really helped me understand why this is happening. So I'm going to just share this with you.

What is consciousness? Is it streaming? Not according to a professor and neuroscientists at the University of Zurich. They developed the time slice theory and we use it at the Inspired Performance Institute to help people stay present and focused. According to the time slice theory, your subconscious mind is viewing all incoming data and presenting a fraction of this data in time slices to the conscious mind. With only a 400 millisecond gap between the slices. The slices look like clips from a movie reel. So your subconscious mind is viewing, then slicing only specific data into pieces and sending it in time slices. Now here's how our TIP program explains a theory. As it is processing the time slices, it is also doing a Google search from memory. Does this data look familiar? Does it look like any threats we've experienced? If it does, then it starts to pull in old high res traumatic images stored in memory from previous experiences. Since the subconscious operates in the present, it believes the images pulled from memory are happening now. Then the subconscious begins to prepare the body for fight or flight. However, nothing is happening. The subconscious is viewing old data images and the intensity and brightness makes it look real and sees it like it's happening now. Now you know why you've been experiencing these emotions when nothing is actually happening. And there it is.

So the time slice theory really helped me understand that. If you remember what I was saying earlier when I would say to my wife, no, I don't like that, and she could tear up and start to cry, I thought it was what I just said and it wasn't what I just said when I said, no, I don't like that. And she heard that little tension change in my voice, her mind did a Google search. What do we know about men when they start to get angry? And a flood of data about her father would come in subconsciously that she wasn't aware of. She thought it was me saying it, I thought it was me saying it, but it was her mind activating a response because she felt like she was in danger and she wasn't in danger. She had never been in danger with me. And it didn't matter what I did, I couldn't fix it. And so what I discovered and what we've put together with the TIP program is we can actually fix it. So, and this is just sort of a quick little exercise for you to think about for a second if I asked you and just think about it, what you ate for dinner last night. If you can think about what you ate for dinner last night.

Now, chances are when I asked you that, right, you saw pictures, right, of what you ate and where you were when you ate it. That's how you stored the information about dinner last night. Now last night wasn't threatening or disturbing. So it's stored as a fairly low resolution file. If that had been a traumatic event, all your senses are heightened, sight, smell, hearing. So how's it going to record that? High definition, tremendous amounts of details in that memory. When that gets viewed again, it's going to activate your nervous system and that's what's going on. So what I've developed is a program that we can take some of that high definition memory and get your mind to reprocess it and reset it into the same format as to what you ate for dinner last night. Then it stops calling for the action and that eliminates it. So we can eliminate post traumatic stress with that, panic attacks with that, by the mind not activating your nervous system.

So the key was understanding the solution. Now I know what the problem is. Now I've got to figure out what's the solution to it. And so that's how I developed the program. Tip. So I started to look at what's going on in the brain and we basically have four brainwave activities. We have beta, alpha, theta, delta. Beta is very alert, high oscillations, you're oscillating between 15 and 30 hertz. So your mind's pretty active, taking in a lot of information. If you have a traumatic event, you're going to be in a high beta brainwave state. So storing a lot of data about that event. When you move into alpha, you become relaxed and focused and that's where you perform at your highest and best. So when I work with executives, athletes, I work with world class athletes, I say I want you performing in a dominant alpha brainwave state because then your mind is super relaxed and super focused. They believe Albert Einstein lived in that state a lot and that's why information just flowed. So for the athletes out there, you know, we talk about the flow state, right? That's really what it is. The mind's super relaxed but super focused. When you go into theta, that's basically where you're dreaming. Your mind's processing. And when you go and that's between 4 and 7 hertz. And when you go below 4 hertz, you move into delta. And delta is basically dreamless sleep. But that's where a lot of the maintenance is getting done. So I believe that as a child I was getting more delta maintenance sleep than my teammates. So I played hockey at a professional level. I had six concussions, 60 stitches in my head, and I never missed a hockey game. And they used to just say, well, you just heal really fast. I believe the reason I was healing fast was because I was getting maximum maintenance done. Those are the different brainwave states. When I take you through the program. The idea is to get you into a dominant alpha brainwave state so that the mind can Start the restoration and we can get that mind to reset that data.

We've done some studies, this is a pilot study that we did using brain mapping. These are the different areas of the brain. What we did is we did a pre session brain map and then we did a post session at 30 plus days afterwards. And so one of the things, if you look down here, if you can see the 0102 area, that's the occipital lobe at the back of the brain, when somebody has post traumatic stress and they're dealing with an event from something that happened to them as a threat, as a trauma, that area of the brain is lit up. So when I looked at that, as I said, why would that area be so activated when they're talking about an event? It's because the mind was viewing the data, viewing the memory and act. So that was really a signal to me is that that's what's going on, that's what post traumatic stress is reliving, reviewing the memory in real time. So from the study, what we did is we, I said map them pre and post. And what we found after going through the four hour tip program and the 30 days of audios, we had a 45.3% change in brain plasticity and a 38.6% normalization to the way the brain was operating, which were huge results. And that's again very quick and very efficient.

These are the different areas. This particular area T6 on the brain map is an area dealing with emotions, dealing with fight or flight, future projection, understanding. 70% of the participants had improvements in that area. So that's really what our goal is, is to quiet the mind by getting rid of that loop of trauma that's being run through all the time. That's what developed the friendship with Joe is sort of seeing the results of what we're capable of. This is all about performance. What's interfering with your ability to perform at your highest level. And I believe in most cases it's coming down to trauma.

So.

One of the things that we talk about with the atmospheric conditions, what happened to you couldn't have happened any other way based on the way your atmospheric conditions are being set up. My wife grew up in very dark, stormy atmospheric conditions. I grew up in very sunny atmospheric conditions that made my life the way it was and it couldn't have been any different. And so when people who have very dark, stormy atmospheric conditions, it's going to affect the way they operate on a day to day basis. And so the good news is we can clear up those atmospheric conditions by getting the trauma loop to stop.

So again, it's all built on performance. Again, what I said to Rob Killian, Rob, I didn't make you a faster runner. You were always that fast. We just actually released that energy, the ATP, the mitochondria and the cells, right, that have been held back. And so when that gets released, you're going to perform at a higher level. So we're really optimizing the filters. Our brain, our mind is filtering through our events and experiences and that's how it's responding to the current environment. So if you have a lot of trauma in your life, it's going to filter through those traumas before it responds. Right. That, like I said with the time slice theory, it's going to respond through that by looking at the trauma first. Don't miss another episode of Genius Network. Subscribe today@gieniusnetwork.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show notes or resources, please visit geniusnetwork.com185.