What is Trauma and How to Heal with Paul Krauss MA LPC | Ep. 80 (Audio Only)

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Hi Everybody. This is Dr. Nicole and my co host and best soul sister Hadley of the Holistic Inner Balance podcast. We have a treat for you today. We're going to be interviewing one of my favorite humans alive, one of the best clinicians that I know. His name is Paul Kraus. Full disclosure, he is my spouse. We love to talk about all things psychology and we love talking about trauma informed solutions. And we laughing one day and we're like, we haven't done an interview on the podcast with Hadley, so let's make that happen. And so today you're going to hear some of the fun, some of the banter and some really great information pertaining especially to trauma, adverse events and the neuroscience behind it. So strap yourself in everyone and get ready to enjoy a really fun podcast. So Paul, thank you for being here.

Why thank you for having me, Dr. Kane and Hadley, this is great. So happy to be on this podcast.

We're so excited to have you.

So Paul, one of your zones of genius is trauma. And your passion has extended beyond your direct clinical practice and you opened the Trauma Informed Counseling center in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And I was just sort of curious if you could tell us a little bit about why trauma has kind of taken a cornerstone of your clinical practice.

Well, I think that the term trauma, we probably should define it first because I do think that what we are talking about now when we talk about trauma is far beyond the actual concept of trauma. But it's what trauma has introduced into the field of counseling and psychology and hopefully will be introducing into the field of functional and holistic medicine and naturopathic medicine as well is that there is something that goes on when people experience trauma and it's almost like neuroscience, informed therapy, essentially. Let's get into that. So let's first define what is trauma so people can understand what they're talking, what we're talking about. You've heard people say traumatic events or I experienced something traumatic. So if you're on planet Earth, you probably are going to experience some sort of traumatic event in your life just based on statistics. And for some people, there are adverse events that are not traumatic. For instance, like your grandparent dies, that is an adverse event. That may be difficult for you, but if Your grandparent was 95 years old, lived a good life, told you goodbye, it's just part of life, it's not necessarily a trauma. But let's say you are 10 years old and your parents are in jail and your grandparent is raising you and they suddenly die and you find them on the couch. And that may be completely a traumatic event that stays with you the rest of your life and may even haunt you, depending on if you are able to process it or not. And so the issue is that trauma is extremely subjective to the person. And I think that in our society we get judgmental about what exactly trauma is. And to each person that we say, well, that's not traumatic, that happened to me, that wasn't as bad for me, or whatever. Well, that's just judgmental cultural crap. So essentially trauma is an extremely disturbing, stressful situation or event where you are overwhelmed in your nervous system. And oftentimes people feel emotionally out of control or helpless, or they actually are physically out of control and being assaulted, or something bad is happening to them or it's happening to somebody close to them essentially. Oftentimes we have psychological trauma that can bring back extraordinarily stressful events into your mind through intrusive thoughts, unbalanced emotions, flashbacks, anxiety, depression, numbness, I'll get into all of that. But essentially it can shatter a person's ability to feel safe in the world, to be able to make choices, to feel like they are either responsible for other people's problems or other things, problems and not their own, or they can't, they don't know how to, to not take on responsibility for others, or they feel like they're responsible for everything. So it's, it's an earth shattering event, but it is really subjective to the observer and how their nervous system in that moment handles the event and how it handles it post event. And so that is what a traumatic event is. Easy examples are. The first term for post traumatic stress disorder was shell shocked. That was what we called war veterans when they came back from the war, a war, any war, and had these bizarre behaviors where they heard noises and they would overreact or underreact. So they would overreact by, you know, hearing a loud noise and you know, grabbing a weapon and hiding under the bed. Or they would underreact and they would feel dissociated and fall asleep and kind of lock themselves in a room. So that was how we started studying it in the, in the more modern sciences. But it's been happening all over planet Earth. For as long as planet Earth has existed and humans have existed, we've had traumas and they've been. And in some ways, a trauma can inform you for the better, but it can also really plague your life. So when we say trauma, we're talking about an event that happens that somehow sticks with you. It sticks with you because of neuroscience. We know the neuroscience is it makes an impact on your brain, it makes an impact on your nervous system. And so signs or signals or thoughts then can bring that traumatic event back almost as if it's happening right now. Certain people are very aware of this. Certain people are not aware of it. They go about their daily life reacting to things, having underreactions, overreactions, planning their whole lifestyle around, you know, things that make them afraid, but all leading back to some traumatic event or two or a pattern of traumatic things. So that's what I want to talk about when we say trauma. So hopefully that is defining it. It is not necessarily post traumatic stress disorder that we're talking about when we talk about trauma. We're talking about the way the mind and the body deal with events that leave traumatic marks on the nervous system. And those markers are seen in neuroscience and behavioral science and they cannot be ignored. But they're often misunderstood, diagnosed as other things almost for. I mean, depending on the training of the clinician there, they can be eighty to a hundred percent misdiagnosed. We see that all the time. If a clinician doesn't know about the latest neuroscience that's been happening over the last 22 years, since about 2000, started in the early 90s, but really took off in the early 2000s, they will most likely label the client as some sort of dysfunctional person, which they could be. But it's very nasty and naughty to not explain to the client why this may be occurring and how they can deal with it.

I also really like how you brought up the fact that it is subjective and we do have so much judgment in our culture, in our society of, well, I went through this thing and I wasn't traumatized from it or whatever. And so these people, these other people need to buck up, right, and, and, you know, just, just handle it. And it is, that's just not really how it works. So.

Yeah, no, it doesn't, it doesn't work that way because it's not a choice, right? It's not a choice to have your nervous system react. It reacts unconsciously without your, without your will. The only issue is that humans survive by making up stories. That's how homeo sapiens, we think, beat out Neanderthals, is that they could group around A story and fight a war. And so what happens is people have these reactions and they make up a story after the reaction. Your brain is behind, behind your, your thought, your part of your brain that makes up stories. The narrative part is it we know is behind the reaction. I don't have time to talk to you in the middle of like a, like a comedy movie where somebody's like, a bear is chasing me. No, if the bear is chasing me, I'm either running, I'm falling down, or I'm break having a mental breakdown or I'm trying to fight the bear. You then say what you did later. People, often after a near miss in a car accident or after a car accident, we'll talk about like, oh my gosh, at this moment, I thought this was happening then I thought this was happening. They're making up the story afterwards. Their body and their mind already reacted to it. And so when people say they need to buck up, I mean, that's just really easy for you to say, sitting in your armchair talking about how other people should act because something happened to you and you made a story out of it. And maybe that story puts you in a good position because if you ever read a memoir, most people's memoirs put them in a positive light. So it's really easy to look at other people's problems and label them. But in real time, and you can see this in laboratory results, when people are triggered by a trauma, they will lose sort of different functionings in different parts of the brain. And we go down to the base of the brainstem where we must react immediately. Then we make up a story. Why do you start crying in the middle of that work meeting? Oh, well, it was because my grandma died and I'm still upset about it. Like, we make up bullshit to kind of COVID up what might be really happening because, you know, we might not want to tell people about what. Why I'm really crying in a work meeting because somebody reminded me of. Of something that happened to me when I was a kid or something, or reminded me of a past job. Once you see this stuff, you can't unsee it. But the problem is most folks haven't had the luxury of finding clinicians and therapists and doctors that are trauma informed and even having the luxury of reflecting on their own trauma and understanding how that's influencing them. So, sorry, sorry to cut you off, but.

Well, I like the narrative change is, you know, we can call it trauma therapy, trauma informed therapy. But I. What I really like that you said at the beginning Is neuroscience informed therapy? Because trauma isn't necessarily an event or events, but rather an adaptive response by the nervous system to an event or a series of events. And so if we start looking at the totality of the nervous system, we look at how the body is trying to adapt to or respond to events that are happening in your life, then it gives us tools to actually unwind that and heal that. And I think there's a major obstacle which I think you both brought up, is that our existing language for trauma is really limited to what the dsm, which is the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual. It stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual we use for diagnosing mental health and emotional diseases. And they have PTSD in their post traumatic stress disorder. Like Paul, you were referring to as war veterans and people who went through or witnessed or thought that their life was in danger. But that doesn't really, truly accompany the totality of how our nervous system is responding to day to day events, which would be maybe micro traumas, those smaller T traumas, or bigger events like a tragedy or a major loss or a one time event we call a big T trauma. And so I love kind of circling back. I love that you're calling it neuroscience informed therapy. And so I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about that. Speak more about the neuroscience?

Well, yes, basically when I, when I say neuroscience, there's so much in neuroscience. There's people that study parts of the brain, there's people that study the, the connectors, the axons and you know, just different physiology of the brain. Right. And what goes on when different parts of the brain lose function or gain function back or whatever. But what we're kind of talking about is interpersonal neurobiology or neurobiology, which is Dr. Dan Siegel, a bunch of colleagues back in, I think it was the early 2000s, developed the field of interpersonal neurobiology, which is an interdisciplinary view of life experiences that draw on over a dozen branches of science to create a framework for understanding of our subjective and interpersonal lives. So essentially what's going on with that is they were like, I feel like what's going on here is we're all studying like separate parts of the brain and we're studying separate parts of the body and we're not understanding how these things interact and actually deal with our day to day lives and how they influence our day to day lives. And so I said neuroscience informed therapy. I don't know if anyone's actually said that. I have no idea. I didn't get that I've kind of been saying that, but I think that sounds so like pretentious that I have not put that on any website. But essentially it's like, because, I mean, how do you, how do you say that you're neuroscience informed, right? I mean, you have to be reading the latest neuro science stuff. And then I've also heard of people doing like neuros, neuro counseling or neuroscience counseling. And that might just be some fancy device they're hooking you up to and doing like neurofeedback. And that's totally different. That's not even what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is what do the scientific studies say about trauma? How does it influence the nervous system? And then what can we extrapolate from there through practice and through more studies of how people behave and how people interact from things that hit the nervous system? Because what I'm trying to say is like that stuff happens first, the stories happen second. And what I think therapy and psychology was trying to do for so long is what humans are good at. Focus on the story first and then figure out what your behavior is like. What we have to figure out is how do we help people understand that, yes, stories are so important. The stories you tell yourself, your core beliefs, cognitive behavioral therapy, all these things are important. But if we don't know why they're installed, if we don't know why they are reacting the way they're reacting, we don't know why they're automatic beliefs. That's another cognitive behavioral therapy term. Why those automatic beliefs and automatic thoughts are coming, then we are then starting to possibly label ourselves as a dysfunctional mentally ill human. When we' just on the spectrum of mental health. The spectrum of mental health goes from very healthy to not so healthy. Right? And we've learned that. And so when you have traumatic events, and the more traumatic events you have, the more likely you are to have major terrible health outcomes. You can look this up. I'm not going to go off on this, but the Adverse Child Experiences study, which has been going on for years, it started in the early 90s. The more of these adverse child experiences you have, such as parents going to jail, unstable household, somebody being hurt in your home, financial instability, et cetera, violence, you will have more terrible outcomes. Here are some of the outcomes. More likely to use drugs and alcohol into adulthood in a bad way, in a way that makes you less functional, more likely to be addicted to cigarettes, more likely to have sexually transmitted diseases, more likely to have Cardiovascular issues, more likely to have strokes, more likely to be overweight or underweight. I mean, you see this in the medical literature too. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is like, the problem is not even my grad school prepared me for the field. We had all of our theories and all of our good intentions and. Yes. Does therapy work? Does counseling work on its own? Sure it does. But why? Are there shortcuts? Are there ways of helping people learn to do things on their own? Is there a need for this information to get not only into counseling, but into medicine and into the workplace? You know, how our nervous systems and how our minds interact with our story is pivotal to how humans are dealing with things. So there you go.

Yeah, I was just kind of pausing there for a moment because I was thinking about. So Paul and I met in graduate school and it was really CBT focused cognitive behavioral therapy. That's what I did. My master's thesis on my practicum was all cognitive behavioral therapy and a rehab. And it was very much focused on story. It's talking about, well, why do you do this? What are the motivations? Let's like get into your childhood and what precipitated you behaving and responding and thinking and feeling this way. And so, you know Freud, very famous for the psychoanalytic psychotherapy where you lay on the couch like Woody Allen your entire life. And then we have the cognitive behavioral therapy, people who are talking all about, well, this is logical and this isn't logical, so get your logic on straight. But then we start to see in the neuroscience that you actually have a Mohawk kind of distribution across your brain of the part of the brain that starts to shut down when the nervous system is in a trauma activation or a trauma trigger or a fight flight, freeze, flop, bomb response. And so this central part of the brain that's kind of where a mohawk would be, is important for that rational, logical computing of data and information. And that part of the brain tends to shut down. And so while it can be great to figure out the why behind our behaviors and our thoughts and our feelings, but it can be really difficult for people that are. They're like, I don't want to feel this way. I know it doesn't make sense to feel this way. But it's like when that. When I go to this place or I see this person or I hear this song, it's just like my emotions or my body takes over. And so I think that really shows us the limitation of just one modality and bringing in the neuroscience, I think it's like what you were saying, Paul, is that we, we realize we're just studying parts of the brain. You know, we're the cognitive behavioral theorists are just looking at the analytical parts. And you know, then we have all these people that are all about the feelings and they're looking at the, the limbic system. But I think that it. Neuro neuroscience informed, maybe kind of a pretentious term and I like it. But I think it kind of demands that we look at the totality of the human experience in a way that honors like the way that you feel is an adaptive response to something or many things that you have gone through that are really difficult. And so instead of giving you a label which, which you came down against, Paul, you know, it's really so limited in our, our humanity is just to put a label on someone and say you're dysfunctional. But rather we can say this is your body, this is your parts, this is your nervous system doing the very best that it can do. And let's start to work on the process of healing by going into those parts. And so I'm kind of voling you up, Paul, to tell us a little bit about the therapies that, that fall more into trauma informed neuroscience. Trauma informed therapies like EMDR parts work. I still run into a lot of people that aren't familiar with it yet.

Well, yeah, so one of the things we have to understand when we talk about adaptive responses, you kind of said that really quickly, but that's a very important term. So whatever our nervous system is doing, it wants to keep us alive. That is its job on a base level. Why do we know that? Because look at all the other animals in the animal kingdom. Look at the arachnids. Look at the insects. Whenever there's a threat, they fight, flight, freeze, flop, or fawn, if possible. I don't know if they can fawn like humans, but, you know, they all react. And we have that same basis, nervous system. So we will react in whatever way we think based on our complex upbringing, cultural programming or opportunities in the area. Right. So if somebody's coming after me in a dark alley and I see a giant object, I might actually turn to fight and throw that, try to throw that object onto them to stop them from coming after me. But I'm certainly not going to probably negotiate verbally and argue with them if they're chasing me with a knife. Right.

Which should come from the Mohawk part, that verbal negotiation.

It's coming from. We're coming from the brainstem and the amygdala, because we're trying to. Our nervous system wants to preserve. So, so then people say, well, what is. What does adaptive mean? Well, listen, for a child who is totally neglected by their parents and totally upset and getting bullied at school, drinking alcohol after school may be adaptive to their nervous system because it's calming them down and stopping them feel better or eating a bunch of cake might be adaptive because that calms the nervous system, helps them feel better. And so the feelings, people want to rip on feelings sometimes. It's like feelings often precede behavior, right? And yes, behavior can also. Then we can ignore our feelings and try to. Try to change our feelings by behaving certain ways. But if you don't have that ability as a child, you form habits, and these habits then go into adulthood, where.

An adapter and feelings are trying to kind of like let us know that there's something going on that we need to change.

Right. The feelings are. Are adaptive in of themselves. Because what's adapting is we're trying to deal with our environment, we're trying to deal with what's going on to our body. We're trying to deal with what's going on our neighborhood. We're trying to go, what's going on in our story? I'm trying to change. I'm trying to live, first of all. And so we. We look at the adaptive information processing network that is our nervous system, and it's always adapting, and it's always changing based on what's going on. That's beneath the story. Okay? And so people get themselves into ridiculous situations just trying to adapt, and they feel ashamed of this. But it might have been the best that they knew how to do at the time. They might not have had the coping skills. So EMDR therapy you asked about and other therapies. So EMDR therapy, I have whole podcasts on that, and we could go into that, but it's essentially a therapy that was. Has been studied for over 30 years now, and it's been shown to be extremely effective. It is definitely not just talking. It is involving bilateral stimulation, which sounds weird, and I thought it was weird, but it is involving the nervous system, whether through eye movement or other means, while engaging in what we find to be the roots of people's traumas or just events that seem to link things together. Right. Because if you've had, you know, hundreds of traumas your entire life, we can't just pick one. Right. So we're. We're going thematically, what are These, what are these different things informing us? And then we go backwards too. So like what bad behavior? What. What behavior you do not like that you're doing? Okay, let's, let's follow that backwards now. Let's do this EMDR therapy. Let's work on that thing. Then you're, what happens is your mind naturally, without the therapist telling you. That's the difference between cognitive behavioral therapy. The therapist tells you you're thinking wrong, figure out how you're supposed to think. You figure out how you're supposed to feel. You, you do it with the therapist guidance. And there's other therapies like trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness based cognitive therapy and you know, somatic experiencing therapy and different things like that which take into account the nervous system's response to thoughts, ideas and actions and triggers. So that's kind of what I would call a huge shortcut. Otherwise, I think a lot of people feel disappointed with therapy. I've been in therapy for two or three years, four years, five years. Nothing's changing. Right. Well, if you just keep talking about the same story and you don't change up what you're doing and you don't know how to change it up, and then what if you can't change it up? What if it's just such a deep reaction that you need a therapy to kind of pull that out of you? So, yeah, that's, that's one tool I would recommend to people that have, you know, want deeper results or have had trauma in their life or just haven't had a successful run at therapy. Go ahead.

And whose emotional response or physical response is completely non logical or they can't put words to. Why? Because we know that trauma gets stored in different parts of the brain. And so some people will have endured something really difficult when they're young and they experience it somatically. They don't have any memories or thoughts associated with it. It's just that their body is holding onto it. And that's of course, hence the title of the Body Keeps the score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, because he talks about how these adverse events can result in changes in our liver function or our blood pressure management or our thyroid health or our stomach now having irritable bowel syndromes. And so I think that EMDR is a really wonderful way to access that part of the human experience when we don't have the linguistic bridge to, to get there ourselves. And so that kind of brings to mind parts work. And so Paul, could you tell us a Little bit about what parts work is.

Well, parts work is just another way of understanding that our minds are very complicated and multifaceted. And so parts work isn't necessarily a school of psychology. But some of the things it should be. Right. Some of the things that are under parts work would be internal family systems, which is a modality. Often EMDR clinicians will combine EMDR therapy with internal family systems. Another one is ego state therapy, which is also very similar to internal family systems. And then I would just say advanced EMDR is also does a lot of parts work. And what parts work is, is it's acknowledging that at various times in your life, whether you were 5 years old, 8 years old, 10 years old, 12 years old, 13 years old, it doesn't even have to be a trauma that triggered these things. They're just major events or major modes of thinking that got stuck. Like, I've got one for you. Here's an easy one. I was 16, I locked my keys out of my car. I was so angry. My adrenaline was going, going, going, going. And I said, damn it, I'm never going to lock my keys in my car again as long as I live. And so how did I do that? I adapted by touching my keys in my pocket three or four times an hour to make sure they were there. I always put my keys in my.

He's not kidding.

I'm not kidding. The truth, I don't do it as much anymore, but I'm aware of my keys in my pocket. I put them in the same exact place when I came home. I always double check the car before shutting the car door to make sure that my keys are not in the car. Now, eventually something was invented called remote lock, so you could lock your car when you were away from your car, walking away from it, which helped me out immensely. But essentially I have never to this day actually locked my keys in the car and been having to be locked out and get a locksmith. And so anyway, to that, to that point, I've never actually personally locked my keys in the car. And the same way that I, I did when I was 16 and, and that way I've adapted. But it also caused an annoying behavior such as touching my keys and making them jangle or becoming obsessed about where my keys were, maybe thinking about them too much right now. Is that going to mess up my life? No, no, it doesn't. It's a minor adaptive behavior that I worked on. But for other people, let's say something happens when they're 16 and they say, I'm not going to let this happen again. I'm going to overcome this or I can't overcome this. I am screwed my whole life. I'm just going, you know, I'm never going to be good at anything. I'm not going to go to college. I'm just a loser. I'm going to just do whatever job I can see. I'm just looking forward to my next Friday night to get drunk. You know, there's these messages that come in after. Adverse events are so key. And so with parts work and all of these things, we have these events and they are ways of thinking about the world. And what we have to understand is by the time you reach a certain age, especially adulthood, we have so many different and differing life opinions. And what parts work does is. It's just ways of bringing up your awareness that you have what's called ambivalence, which is you feel differently, possibly three or four different ways about the same idea. Here's an easy one. What is true love and who have you had true love with? Okay. People are going to feel all sorts of different things. They're going to feel like, oh my gosh, I feel true love for my parents or I don't feel true love for my parents. I don't have, I don't have love. I have true love for a pet. What is true love? I don't even know what true means. I don't think there is truth. I think everyone's just. I think they're in for themselves. Or, you know, I, I think I have love, but maybe it's just dependent. Maybe it's a state of codependence or, or maybe, you know, I have. I can't talk about love because love is, it's just a contract. Or maybe I'm. I put somebody on a pedestal, I'm in love with them and they're the only person I can ever love. And all of these things influence our behavior because they're all based on different experiences you had. And so it's a way to work with people where you don't have to do all the trauma therapy stuff from the earlier things, but you do work on trying to help them become more present. Not necessarily through mindfulness, but become more present in what their age is, where they are, what their abilities are, what their functioning is, while acknowledging that they have these other feelings and thoughts that may influence them.

Yeah, you mentioned not necessarily through mindfulness. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Well, okay, yeah, I love mindfulness. I've been, I'VE been meditating since 2001, on and off. When I meditate, I have great days. I do well. I have less stress. I mean, the neuroscience shows if you meditate like 55 or 60 days in a row, but 25 minutes a day, you have more gray matter, like a literal hard outcome, which helps you deal with stress. More gray matter helps you be resilient from stress, where, you know, obviously if you're on your cell phone every five minutes looking at the news, your gray matter is going to deplete, you're going to be more stressed out, you're going to need more substances to function or whatever. So I love mindfulness. However, mindfulness has been co opted by certain people and certain industries to sell things and to be trendy and to, I would say, even dissociate from like pain and suffering, which isn't helping. So, I mean, I should say this. First of all, mindfulness based stress reduction was co opted from Buddhist meditation and other yogi and Hindu meditations. So actually we already co opted in the west, but we're just talking about the west right now. So we co opted it. We took out the spirituality part, but some of the spirituality parts remained, which are trying to have peace and equanimity and trying to acknowledge that there is suffering in life and not denying it. What's happened recently is that mindfulness is just some sort of state of mind you get in where you're fully present and you only think about that state of mind, right? And you only are here now. And that's cool because that can help you relieve stress. But what can happen is if you're always being too mindful, quote unquote, then you're spiritual bypassing. It's the same thing when somebody says, you know, you know, do you want to hang out on Friday night? And you say, I want to. I mean, I got to pray about that, right? Or I got to like throw some dice and figure out if that's right. Or I got to call my psychic and find out if I should hang out with you on Friday night or, you know, I don't know what is Friday. We. All we have is Tuesday. It's just Tuesday. And I don't know. And we'll see. We'll see what happens. And I'm not sure if I. I don't plan. I'm not into planning, right? And so it. Mindfulness can be also some. So you have to be able to understand. Like if you say you do mindfulness, read some mindfulness books, what are, what is Mindfulness based stress reduction. What is mindfulness? Go to some mindfulness classes, do some workshops. Don't just like go to YouTube and type in mindfulness, because that's not mindfulness. And mindfulness can be dissociative from trauma because it doesn't, it tries to bypass the pain, which is, you know, normal. If you have trauma or ptsd, you will try to bypass the pain, which is normal. But you have. But we found from therapy that going through the pain helps you heal.

So you're talking about like, don't use mindfulness as a form of bypass. Don't use it in a form of avoidance, but rather like, what would be an example of a non bullshit mindful practice?

Well, a non bullshit mindfulness practice. It depends. I mean it's, there's, there's many examples, but I would just say you have to use the full totality of mindfulness. There's not just one mindfulness activity of like meditation, like listening to some like drum beats or something. It's, it's, it's not that. It's, it's going through the whole book where they acknowledge stress and I acknowledge thoughts that I have that are difficult, but I, I realize I'm not my thoughts. Right. It's actually putting it into a practice where we aren't denying the reality of what's happening in our life. It's not a shortcut to happiness. It is a tool that helps your brain deal with stress and it's a tool that can help you be more loving and kind towards other people. And it's a tool that can help you center yourself and be able to do better at work or sports. I mean, people remember the Seattle Seahawks made the news about 12 years ago for all doing this mindfulness meditation. And then they went all the way to the super bowl and I think they forgot to meditate. But the point was that they, they had like made headlines. And what were they doing? They were practicing a tenet, one of the tenets of mindfulness. And there's many different tenets. So what it is is that if you're actually going to learn it and you're actually going to do it, like read about it, practice it, figure it out, and it changes, but it's aware. It's a way of being present in the here and now, which is very difficult considering the way our culture in the west functions, which is very much not in the present. Yeah.

So bringing us into the present is awesome. And when pre, the present becomes like our escape, like basically escaping from our lives, that's when it becomes maladaptive.

That was a much better summary of what I was saying. Yes, exactly. And when it brings us into the present, that's useful, that's good. But if it becomes an escape, then it's not.

Well, because then you're not full of the awareness. You're not full of the mind. You're dissociating away from the mind. And so it's maybe a good gauge for. For you. Listening is like, okay, is this practice bringing me fully into the presence of what it is to be alive in this very moment, or is it taking me away from my awareness of this present moment and causing dissociation or avoidance or bypassing?

Yes, and I think that fits in perfectly because I think in the Western culture, we're always looking for something to free us from the reality of life.

Yes, the pill for an ill model, but with meditation.

Right, exactly. The pill for an ill model. Whether you. You both talk about quite often, right? Like, something's wrong with me, and I immediately, I cannot accept that something could feel bad like a symptom, a physical symptom, or a mental symptom. I. And if I immediately don't accept that because that means something in my culture, then I'm going to try to bypass or fix or speed up the remedy to that. When in fact, by speeding up or bypassing or trying to not deal with it and. Or deal with it in an unhealthy way, a less natural way, if you will, I'm actually causing more harm. You see that with, you know, it's just like, apparently it's just normal for Americans to be like, I'm going to eat hot dogs and burgers. Burgers, like, every day. And then like, somehow I have to buy antacids and keep them in my car and keep them in my desk. Like, okay, there are other ways to eat. Right. There are other ways to function, and they don't involve being dependent on some sort of drug, because so it's like, follow the. Follow the roots. So mindfulness, I think anyone who's gone through the process will. Will it can change your life. But you have to understand there's so many different ways to do it, and it's important to try to be disciplined about it. So even if you can't do it every day, two or three days a week helps develop the skills. Let's just say mindfulness meditation. And then if you practice throughout your day, you can say, Tuesdays, I'm practicing. And on Tuesday, every time you find yourself thinking about future and the fear. You bring yourself back to two, back to Tuesday, right? But if you've got a book, book a flight for, you know, holidays, and it's Tuesday and that's the day the flight goes on sale, you do have to plan ahead. You do have to use future thinking. So you have to, you have to be able to come in and out of it. And that's the flexibility that we want to do or help people get to, which is neuroplasticity. And trauma stops. Neuroplasticity, you know, it, it's, it shrinks, it shrinks your ability to be flexible. And life is about adaptation. And so what tools do we have to adapt to life circumstances? What tools do we have to deal with difficult things that happen to us? Therapy is one of them. But again, not every therapy is the same. So finding out if your therapist is trauma informed, finding out if your therapist takes advanced trainings, find out if your therapist has gone to anything new for the last 10 years or are they just kind of sticking with their stuff that they learned in grad school? Because if I stuck with what I learned in grad school, I would not be where I'm at today. I had to keep learning. And it's the same thing with medicine. And that's kind of where you both come into place with Hadley's, you know, lifestyles and working on all of the habits and everything that you do. And are you Vedic and Dr. Kane, working with all of your different programs and educating people to become their own mental health expert. It's about like, knowledge is so, so powerful, but it takes time, right? And it takes a little bit of devotion. But I think both of you have learned the art of breaking up massive topics into smaller things to help people one, I guess, one module at a time, so to speak. And that's, that's different. And both of you do one on one care too. But one on one care is different because one on one care is completely customized. So going to see a therapist in person, preferably online, is also good as well with coaching and learning. What you do online is actually a lot easier, I think. But with therapy with emdr, it can be a little easier in person, but that's a whole other modality. But people need to understand that if you've got trauma, you can't just do one modality to adapt and overcome what's gone on in your life. You need to work on mind, body, everything, spirituality, physiology. You can't just do one, right? So because the whole body adapts, the whole body adapts. Right, Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I see this. You see it often. You know, you go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and everybody on the break is smoking all these cigarettes. They don't drink anymore. Right. And it's like, okay, I get, I'm glad you're not drinking anymore and like losing your teeth, you know, are getting DUIs, but now you're smoking. And then, you know, and I get that that may be their best adapt. Adaptation at the time. But I'm thinking, okay, how do we expand just past not drinking? How do we get people preventing and getting into the process of cultivating a life where they at least have some sense of what is healthy and how can I help myself versus just stopping things or just substituting things? So, so that's some thoughts there.

So you're getting practical, which I appreciate is, you know, we've been diving into this really complex topic of what is trauma? What is the neuroscience informed approaches to therapy? You know, the what happens in the brain and body when we endure adverse events. You referred to the adverse of childhood events study with the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, kind of looking at this full body, head to toe approach and assessment. And then you've given some really practical examples of how to find a therapist that's going to help you as a whole person and not just zero in on one system, like just straight up cognitive, behavioral, talking about, what is the emdr, what is parts work, what is mindfulness, what is bypassing, what is dissociation, and how do we know if we're dissociating versus if we're actually getting into that mindful. And so I think you've been really quite practical about it, and I think that gives us a lot of value. And so I'm kind of curious about what kinds of things are you doing to support people so people are liking the information that you have, like what, what are you doing in the community? How can people learn about you?

Well, an easy way to learn about me is to check out my podcast, the Intentional Clinician Podcast. It's called the Intentional Clinician. You can find it on all platforms. If you want to know about my clinic, anyone who's in the state of Michigan can benefit from therapy, whether online or in person. It's called Health for life counseling. So healthforlifegr.com, and it's also the home of the Trauma Informed Counseling center of Grand Rapids, which you discussed, where all of our clinicians have advanced training in how to help people who have experienced trauma and advanced modalities. And so we're very serious about creating a place where you are getting the best counseling that we can find here in the area. And right now, due to state licensure laws, we can only really serve people in the state of Michigan. Hoping to change that event eventually. But if you also want to just go to the website, we have blogs that come out three or four times a month all about different health topics, but also about like personal relationship topics, how trauma impacts us in relationships, how, how to overcome things at a low cost, you know, so sometimes people can't afford therapy. So we have lots of ideas about things people can do on our, on our website. And then the intentional Clinician podcast. So I think that's the best way for people to find out what I'm up to.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for, for being on and chatting with us. This was so fun. I mean, thank you. Talking about trauma, for some reason all three of us think that that's really fun.

Well, I, I, for me, I think it's like the missing link. I think people have just accepted their fate oftentimes because of what culture and relatives and friends and so so called friends have told them. And I think that there's always a deeper answer if you're willing to dig, but you actually have to dig. You can't just like look at Instagram memes and thinks you're, think you're enlightened, like you have to actually, like you actually have to crack a book and, and podcasts are a good way to start. So I'm glad you both have this podcast and I love that you're educating people because that's knowledge is power. So thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for being on. That reminds me of our that Girl podcast where we talk about how we've Instagram has sort of, it's become. Wellness has become memeified.

So yeah, that's a good quote. Wellness has become memified. Yeah. If you like this conversation, then definite, definitely check out the that Girl podcast. And we also have another podcast that you might be interested in. And it's about what is holistic health where we talk more about holistic solutions to the problem of trauma. And so I think you'll be really interested in that. So take a look for that. And Hadley, of course, thank you for your brilliant contributions. And Paul, thank you so much for being here. It's been great.

Thank you so much. Dr. Kanan Hadley and I look forward to hearing more of your podcasts in the future.

The recording you just listened to consists of the personal opinions of Dr. Nicole Caine, a natural doctor with a Master's in Clinical psychology and Happy Healthy Hadley, an Ayurveda expert with a master's in health, behavior and health education. While these opinions are based upon literature, counseling education, medical training and clinical experience, this content should not be viewed as the definitive opinion on these subjects. Listening to this podcast is not a substitute for any sort of medical, psychological or other form of treatment. If you are in a Crisis, please call 911 or call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 1-800-273-8255. If you are in need of counseling, don't hesitate to make an appointment with a counselor in your area. Dr. Nicole and Hadley are passionate about you becoming the expert of your own emotional and physical well being. If this resonates with you and you think this podcast would help someone you love, please share it with them. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Holistic Inner Balance Podcast.