EP 113: 5 practices for resilience in crisis | Dr. Laurie Leitch

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. In this episode of the Radical Responsibility Podcast, I'm happy to share with you an interview I did for one of our Global Resilience summits with Laurie Leach, PhD, another leading trauma expert and founder of the Model Social. The Social Resilience Model. And we explore in great depth how we can recognize all the different dimension of trauma and how it impacts our lives and lives of others and how we can heal our own trauma and be supportive to others in healing their trauma and approach life and whatever kind of work we're doing in a more trauma informed manner. How you doing, Laurie?

I'm doing fine today, thanks.

Are you at home?

I am, yeah.

We're all home these days.

All of us are sheltering inside, I guess, right now.

Yeah, sheltering in places. Home confinement.

Yeah.

So good to see you. And I want to introduce you a little bit to our audience and some of them may know of your work, but I want to make sure everybody's familiar with it. So Laurie has been a psychotherapist for 25 plus years.

And developed a model called the Social Resilience Model. And she offers her work through an organization, her organization called Threshold Global Works. Threshold Global Works, and you can find that online easy enough.

And Lori's really done this kind of work where the rubber meets the road. You brought, you know, you got involved in disaster relief and, and bringing in resilience tools in post Katrina, with the tsunami in southeast, the South Pacific or Southeast Asia. I think you were in Nepal after the earthquake, if I'm not mistaken.

And we did some work. We've both been involved in Rwanda and we actually worked together at kind of a think tank conference in Italy supporting corrections officials from Rwanda. But we're dealing with the fact that.

The accused genocide heirs, as they're called, genocide people who committed genocide, who had not been willing to sort of go through the Gachasa court process, had been in for more than 20 years and they're starting to get out, and they were completely unprepared on how to deal with this. So we had a meeting with them. And we've also been involved in bringing consul practice and other resilience tools into Rwanda. So. So this is all really grounded in kind of rubber meets the road reality. So just wanted to give that context. And of course, we're all in a Rubber meets the road reality right now with the COVID 19 or novel coronavirus pandemic, which is really, you know, ramping up as we record this here on April 1st. It's, you know, we've been told we have some really rough times ahead here in the US and of course there are already rough times and Italy and Spain and, you know, China has been what they're through. There's supposed to be a resurgence in Hong Kong. I read about, yeah.

This is a tough situation we're in. And of course, in the background of that, we're already in this looming or already present climate emergency that could create all kinds of disruptions in the coming years. And this pandemic may be climate related for all we know. So anyway, we need some resilience tools and I'm happy to be here talking to you today about your social resilience model. So maybe you could just give us a little background on how you developed that and then, and then just start taking us through it.

How I developed it is I was fortunate enough to go to southern Thailand as part of a team through Peter Levine's Somatic. Back then it was called the Somatic Experiencing Institute, I think. And we worked in southern Thailand, but we didn't have a model that we could leave behind. We did a lot of sessions with people and we did a lot of presentations to sort of administrative types all over southern Thailand.

But it was really clear to some of us that when we left, we just left nothing behind really. And so three of us decided to form an organization to try to develop something that could be taught to other people and where they could use it. And over the years we developed various versions of it. And in 2010, I began developing the social, what's now called the Social resilience model. And it really has, like so many other things, it stands on the shoulders of lots of other people's work, including Jane Ayres, who does work with children. There's a wonderful book by some of her students called How Does My Engine Run? And Eugene Gendlin's Felt Sense, Dan Siegel's work, Peter Levine I mentioned. And.

What my goal has been is being able to develop a model that anybody can use, any ordinary person, it can be used clinically to work through traumatic events. And I can talk a little bit about how we did that in China. But frankly, my most.

Determined orientation, as I'll put it, is to make it available in places like you were referencing in Rwanda, for example, where our project has now collected and analyzed all the baseline data in Rwanda and found that 75% of the 300 prisoners in our sample have diagnosable PTSD even after 20 years in prison, more than 20 for some of them. And we're going to train a group of those prisoners as SRM trainers so that they can.

Give it to other people in the prison where the mental health services are so meager, even in the country as a whole, but particularly inside of prison. So, and that's a big motivation for me is making these skills that are very practical, neuroscience based skills accessible to anybody who wants to be able to use them.

And so I'm gonna also to Here. Here in the US you brought them to Rikers island as well. You're working with prisoners here in the U.S. that's right.

And also to a bunch of prisons.

Yeah. And it's very exciting for people when they realize that there are practical skills that they can use that will actually change their brain. And I'll talk a little bit about how that can happen for any of us, how we can deepen our own resilience. There are a few sort of generic points I think are important to ground my model in. So before I actually go into the details of the model and particularly related to the pandemic and the climate threats too. And one is that we have to recognize that people all have different ways of coping. And so we're. And often if it's a couple, one part of that couple may have one way of coping and another a different way. And so we end up seeing a lot of tension arise, not just of being cooped up in a house together, but as we face our differences together. And I think back to when I was living in Washington, D.C. with my psychotherapy therapy practice, working with a lot of couples. And it wasn't unusual that one part of the couple wanted to stay in Washington and they were determined we're not going to get driven away by these terrorists. You know, we're going to, this is where we live and we're going to stay here and live our lives. But the other couple, member of the couple wanted to move away from what they felt like was a version of ground zero, Washington and New York, and then a little piece in Pennsylvania too. So it's important for any of us who work as service providers to recognize that, but also any of your listeners who are living with difference in their own relationships that gets heightened during times of threat and fear. Another one that I think is important is to recognize that we are wired, our brains are wired for going toward threat and fear. We have in our brain a real negativity bias. It's through the amygdala, two of them we have.

And so because of that, in situations like these, it's very easy for your attention to be constantly on the news, listening to the latest thing that's frightening and heartbreaking and all of that, and how important it is to learn how to shift your attention in ways that help enhance your resilience and deepen your. What we call your resilience zone and boost your immune functioning. So that's another piece that I'll touch on. And then the final sort of generic part that I really hope your listeners find useful is that we have to recognize during times like this, during any time, really. But it's heightened by times like this, the issues of health inequity that really are their own plague. And so people don't all come into this pandemic with the same kinds of resources available to them. You know, in New York City, there was a great debate about closing the schools and how many children in the schools get both breakfast and lunch when they come to school and what would happen. And they talked about how they'd make delivery possible to the kids in their homes. But I kept thinking, well, what about the parents? How do you deliver food enough for a child's breakfast and lunch? And the rest of the family is hungry also. So the sort of structural inequalities that we have in our country are really important for us to acknowledge as we think about strategies and ways of helping find our way through this. What's going to be, obviously, a protracted catastrophe, really? I guess I would call it a catastrophe, wouldn't you?

Absolutely. I think that's one of the beautiful things about your model, is you've simplified it such. And I know you'll probably be showing us some of your cards later, but you've been able to do them kind of culturally neutral as well as culturally specific and really simplify it. So it's a. It's. They're very simple human tools that anybody can learn to use because with a lot of, you know, there's wonderful things going on with the mindfulness movement, the mainstream mindfulness, but there are real issues of accessibility, both economically and culturally and so forth. And so, yes, we're all meeting this current pandemic catastrophe, as you said, with different baselines of resources and cultural differences and different levels of access, all kinds of things. There is a way in which, you know, the virus is respecting no boundaries. So we're seeing that or privilege or anything else. But of course we know the most vulnerable among us are the ones most immediately impacted.

Yeah, I think that's right. And it sort of leads in fleet to two concepts that have really provided a foundation for my work in terms of how I design my programs, my training programs, who I train as trainers. And one of them, the first one is the term health literacy, which I was really largely unfamiliar with until I read a paper that was really fascinating about it. And the World Health Organization has a definition of health literacy that includes its people's that they have both the knowledge base and skills so that they can take responsibility for their own health. And even though that's a useful, it's not a word for word definition, but that's the gist of it. Even though it's a useful one.

It'S limited, I think. And the way that they're meaning it is that if you get your cholesterol count back, you know enough about cholesterol and how the test goes to know what HDL and LDL are and what your ratio is so that you can be motivated to get your LDL lower and all of that. But I like to think that my model, the social resilience model, it has a set of concepts, core concepts I call neuro education. And a set of practical skills, is also a version of health literacy that puts a bunch of information that is very practical, as you say, into people's hands that motivates them to use the skills, but that also.

Helps them take care of their own health. It doesn't mean they don't need to go to the doctor obviously, but it means that they have a capacity to directly impact their own immune system by practicing skills that keep them in a balance in their nervous system, which we'll talk a little bit about. The other concept that I really, really love is called appropriate technology. And people say that originally that term was developed by Gandhi. I don't know if that's true.

He meant he gave his examples of appropriate technology, the sewing machine and the bicycle. And I know there's been some criticism. Paul Farmer criticizes the concept of appropriate technology because he said it's been misused to give the minimum to people, poor people, to take care of their health. But the way I look at appropriate technology and the definition that we use is it's a technology that ordinary people can use.

For their own well being that decreases their dependence on systems that they have no control over. And so many of the people I work with have very little control over the kind of major institutions of our society. Including the health. The health institutions. And so I think that our SRM skills are an example of appropriate technology. You mentioned our skills card, which I'm so proud of. It's a card that I developed initially in Haiti. Looks like this. It's for. Initially. I developed it because in Haiti there's a 70% illiteracy rate. We were training a lot of local people as trainers.

But they didn't have a high level of reading, and a training manual wasn't going to be as useful. So one night I sort of sketched out these really rudimentary figures for each of the skills. And we used very few words to describe the skill. And now there are all kinds of versions of it, as you pointed out, when I was in Nepal, we had a version, a really lovely one, that was designed by a group of students at the School of Visual Arts here in New York that showed the symbols of Nepalese culture on the clothing of the people in each of the pictures. It was just. And then in Nepalese, the small descriptions of each skill were described. It's an example of appropriate technology. So we would see groups of parents, they would be lined up around the block to come into a school to learn how to help their kids with nightmares. They would walk away with a skills card and be able to actually help their kids when they encountered problems. So lots of the countries that I've worked in really have no mental health system other than one that's very stigmatized. People are afraid if they have a mental health problem, they'll be considered crazy.

Well, I love both these ideas of health literacy and the way you've described it, and appropriate technologies. With my own meditation practice and teaching work. You know, there are some folks in the meditation world, a little bit or pure kind of purists who are a little bit allergic to the science. Right. I actually find having some basic.

Except for the Dalai Lama.

Yeah, except for the Dalai Lama, exactly. The Mind and Life Institute has been at the forerunner of this and so that he co founded with Francisco Varela. So, you know, for me, having having some basic knowledge about what current neuroscience says about my physiology and my neurobiology, I feel actually augments my practice and leverages my ability to go deeper with my practice and be a little more sophisticated in terms of the various meditation techniques that I use in my own practice and that I teach.

I totally agree with you. And I. A big reason why I developed this notion of the neuro education, these core concepts that come from neuroscience about how the nervous system can operate in an optimal way is exactly for that reason that it motivates people to use the skills. I mean, lots of people have said to me, why don't. It seems like a lot of jargon, you know, your model people. Do people really, do they really need to know what the amygdala is and do they need to really know what the parasympathetic part of the nervous system does? And when I first heard that they thing, I heard it from a person in the Department of Corrections in New York City and I was very taken aback because it just the they where you're, whoever they is, it's not us, you know, it's not us educated people, it's not the ones of us who know these things or should know them. It's the sort of little people. And so I was, I turned out to be very grateful to her for challenging me that way because I realized how much kind of COVID elitism there is in the healthcare field and how we have this paternalistic attitude that we have the knowledge and then the little people just come to us for care. And so with this concept of appropriate technology and also health literacy, it totally takes that notion away. And so what I heard myself saying to her, kind of off the top of my head was these are correct labels for parts of the brain and body. And when people understand the power they have over their well being, it motivates them to take good care of themselves. But also from my point of view, it also motivates them to learn the skills and actually use them.

Absolutely. I find it very self empowering for myself and for others. And also it provides motivation because prior to that, you know, I think for a lot of us when we first started practicing, it was kind of mysterious. You sit on the cushion, you hope something happens, it's hard, you have trouble and but you hope it's doing you some good. You're not sure. And some days you have a good session, some days a not good session, you know, and maybe it goes once you start doing retreats, but nonetheless, having a little, especially for beginners, I think having just a little simple knowledge about what's actually going on when you sit down to practice some kind of mindfulness meditation. Right. Understanding something about the breath and the autonomic nervous system, very empowering and motivating. And with appropriate technologies, you know, we may all find ourselves needing to use more appropriate technologies in the coming future because none of us have any control over all these, you know, technological platforms like the one we're recording this on right now. And who knows what we're going to be faced with, with the various disruptions that may be coming our way in the future, but certainly it's probably good for us all to relearn some appropriate technologies.

I think that's true. And what I find is that people get very excited because they see results too. And you know, years ago, I have taught at UPIA Zen center off and on for many years, and I got very curious about.

What happens to people with a trauma history when they sit on a cushion. And so I started asking people, and in my own practice I had people, my psychotherapy practice, who would try to meditate and would dissociate. And so I asked a few people like Jack Kornfield and Joan Halifax, did they, as I thought, did they think that there were a fair number of people who, when they sit to meditate, actually dissociate or even worse for some people, have a flashback? And they both agreed that there were probably a good number of people in that kind of situation. And in my very beginning work with a neuroscience based model, it was a lot with combat veterans who had a heck of a time meditating because of all the triggers that would come up for them during meditation. And I realized that having a self directed attention model, which SRM is, that is not a meditation model, could really be either a precursor for people who just can't meditate without dissociating, or having a flashback, or just can be more acceptable to people for whom meditation is too woo woo. You know, there are lots of people who develop a point of view about meditation and they just won't do it. And then in many countries that I work in, the mental health part of anything isn't really of interest. It's can I function in my community, Can I carry the water, Can I find the food, Can I build the table? They don't care about what was my relationship like with my mother when I was a little kid or anything. They just want to get back to their level of functioning. And so skills like these that I'll tell you about next really help people just do that and having done that, deepen their zone of resilience and just can function better. And it embeds things in a much more stable nervous system.

Well, I think it would be great if you could kind of walk us through the model now. And I think it's an important distinction you made between certainly I think your model, I would say it's mindfulness related. Mine is certainly attention related, but a distinction between that and, you know, classic mindfulness meditation or meditation. We kind of sit down and we're just, we're just with our experience as it is, the ups and downs, the hard, the easy, the difficult and so forth. Whereas, and you know, there is a long term process, there's a real value in being able to sit through our experience and welcome as it is without trying to change it. But your model is actually more of a resourcing model which people can use in an immediate fashion to when unresourced and challenged, get back to a more resource, to back to that zone of resilience which would actually help somebody maybe practice classical mindfulness. But really it has an immediate benefit for their life. And you know, we've worked with a lot of people coming out of, we both do prison work and a lot of people coming out of prison, when they get out, they're not that interested in, you know, something contextualized as a spiritual path or a yogic path or, or meditation path because they're at survival, they're trying to get a job, they're trying to find a place to live, they're just trying to function. And if you can give them simple tools that help them do that, they're going to get a lot more uptake. I think it's just a lot more practically useful to them.

Yeah, well, and these kinds of skills have the benefit of nobody knows you're using them. You know, I could be sitting here with you right now and grounding myself, bringing up a resource in my mind, you would have no idea I was doing it, but I was stabilizing myself. And so a lot of people appreciate the opportunity to have something that in the heat of any moment they can draw on. And I think it's why I do work in police departments and places where there's a high level or correctional staff like you do too fleet, where there's a high level of hyper vigilance. And it's really helpful for people to have an antidote to all the stress chemicals that flood the system when you're hypervigilant. And so I can tell you a little bit about these skills and then we'll do a little practice too. So the skills are named, they take their name from Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing model. Although this model is taught differently and it's, we have a clinical version that we use and train clinicians with. But really I would say nowadays 90% of the work I do is with non clinicians, with community based people, with ordinary people. You know, that's really where my passion is, where my Politics are, is being able to make a difference to ordinary people. And so the model's core concepts rely on things that we know from neuroscience. And I'll just mention a couple of them. And one is that we are wired to respond to threat and fear. Our orientation is toward novelty that especially has a negativity bias. And so we're always, if you're meditating on a cushion or whatever you're doing where you get quiet, the ordinary way that your body is wired to respond will be to what isn't going right, oh, I have that little pain in my knee, or, oh, it's too cold in here, you know, that's your amygdala scouting around for what might pose a threat to you. And so what we want to teach people how to do is decide, is this where I want my attention to go or do I want it to be somewhere else that lets me have a more expanded perspective. And so attention is a very big part of this model, self directed attention. And part of that is because of this amazing thing that we all have called neuroplasticity. And when I go into prisons with people who feel pretty powerless, and I asked them, how many of you? So here's a men's prison in Upper New York State, 30 men. And I say to them, how many of you are here because you reacted in a way to a situation that got you in a lot of trouble? And they all laugh and they raise their hands and I say, well, what if you knew that you have the power to change your level of reactivity, to change your brain? And they're all like, blown away, like, I have that kind of power to change my brain. They can't believe it. And yet we all have it. And I don't think we make very good use of it, most of us. And so the idea that the process of building those neuroplastic changes in the brain is something so simple, it's just, what do we pay attention to? And so a sports physiologist describes it as where your attention goes, energy flows, and that's what grows. So what we put our attention on regularly is what grows in our brain. All the little dendrites expand and you get this nice bushy neuron. And what we don't pay attention to gets pruned away. And so if you have a tendency to be a pessimist, you come into a room or you're listening to this and you're looking at all the things you don't like, like, you know, why are they sitting like that? And what's on the bookshelf. I don't like that. Why do they have the books on the bookshelf like that, you know, and all those kinds of things. You can, if you catch yourself and notice that that's where your attention goes, and you shift your attention away from it to something that you like. I really like that scarf she has on. You know, what about whatever. Whatever it is, you just shift your attention regularly. You'll prune away your pessimism, and you can build yourself into a much different kind of person. It requires practice, because where your attention has to go regularly is what grows. And where your attention doesn't go much is what gets pruned away. So it's wonderful news for people who have gotten in trouble, for people who don't feel like they have very much power. And so understanding the neuroscience of it becomes really important and valuable. And even children. We do lots of work in orphanages when we go to other countries. And what I got into the habit of saying because I was coming in to teach some science, was, how many of you who are sitting here know that you have a crown next to you on the floor, next to you? And most of them are on the floor. So they look like, where, Where? And so I put my hands up and I say, yeah, you have a science crown. Put it on. So they help. You know, kids are great at this. Put it on. That's their science crown. And then they're ready to learn some science about how their brain functions and how they can grow neurons inside their brain and all those kinds of things. And once the UN workers stood and watched it, they had their science crowns on, too. They wanted to. I have great pictures of all these adults with their science crowns on. So people have a hunger to understand. There's yours. People have a hunger to understand how can I help myself be a better person? And this set of skills is not a panacea. And it's just a tool. It's a tool in the tool bag. But it's a very. So attention is a core piece because it's the process that creates neuroplasticity, one kind or another. And so let me just show you, and we can go through these skills.

Here. I always have. I have a terrible dyslexia anyway. Spatial dyslexia. So we have five skills. Two of them are combined over here because.

We only could get four boxes on the back of the card. And I have taught two days of a workshop using only this card, which shows. On the front, it shows the body and the part what happens to the organs when you have sympathetic activation or parasympathetic calming and then the nervous system rhythm when it's in the resilient zone. And then what happens when something like that lightning bolt bumps you out? And so we've drawn that.

Regulated nervous system and the dirt in places on chalkboards, in the air. But the card once I came up with that.

As I say, you don't need electricity, you don't need a training manual. You can do an entire training. We take it into Rikers Jail, you mentioned that, leave it behind if we get permission so that people can practice the skills on their own. If they forget. And so the first skill, and as I say, these are named, these are skills named by Peter Levine, even though we teach them differently, not so much tracking. Tracking. And they all rely on attention. So tracking is merely putting your attention to whatever is going on inside your body at the sensation level. And so most people don't even have a fluency of sensation based language because we just don't use it in our country. We know if somebody says what are you thinking? You can usually come right out with it or what are you feeling? People are feeling, maybe not quite so facile with that, but most of us know how to describe a feeling. But when you say what are you noticing in your body at the sensory level, people don't know how to name those sensations. Kids make up the names, they're great, but adults don't. And so what you could ask, why do they need to know the sensation level? And it's because the sensation, what good.

Is that going to do me?

Right? Why do I need that? But it is because the sensation level of experience is how you know what's going on in your nervous system. And nothing, nothing comes into the body as a thought, nothing comes into the body as a feeling. Everything comes into the body as a sensation. A smell, a sound, taste, a touch, an image, even more, you know, we have all kinds of neurotransmitters in our skin. So if we can train people how to monitor their sensation level experience and interrupt what isn't serving them well and intensify what is, they have a tremendous capacity to both cut off the toxic stress chemicals that flood them when they get activated and to stay longer in the kinds of sensations of calming and well being when they are more relaxed. And so that's mainly what our skills are doing. But the overarching skill is tracking, which just means paying attention at the sensory level to what's going on Inside. That's the first step. And so then the next one is a really common skill. And I'm going to take your listeners, viewers through these at the end. But the second skill, an old one, nobody, I don't know who way, way, way, way, way long ago invented it. But this skill of grounding, which simply means paying attention, and notice the word attention again, paying attention to the support of some kind of a solid surface against your body. And so if you're sitting like you are in a chair, it would mean your attention to the bottoms of your feet being supported by the floor or the ground. Or if you're in a chair, the support of the chair against your body. People can do it against a wall. We work with lots of people who are lying on the floor or in a bed, especially after natural disasters. And so you can do grounding, you can pull up against a table. If you're in a meeting and something's happening that's getting you activated because you're tracking your nervous system, your heart starts beating, you start to feel a clenching in your gut.

You can push up against the table, nobody at the meeting knows you're doing it. And you can bring yourself back into what we call the resilient zone or the R zone. So that's grounding, then resourcing and resource strengthening. So we have two parts of the nervous system that we're paying attention to in these neuroscience based models like srm. One is the sympathetic, which is our excited part, our activated part. And one is the parasympathetic, which is the part that calms us. When they're working together the way we hope they will. The nervous system rhythm is inside those two red lines inside the resilient zone where the up arrow is the sympathetic activation. The down arrow is the parasympathetic calming. And that rhythm goes on all the time. And the sympathetic activation when it's inside the R zone is our vitality. So we don't want it to be a flat line in there because then what would you be.

It's also related that this is all related to the breath. So when we breathe in, it upregulates a little bit, we breathe out down regulates. So you get heart rate variability.

That's right. And even if you didn't try to do that, you do it all the time anyway. Yeah, there's so many autonomic functions that happen that we don't even have to direct. They just happen because homeostasis to keep.

Us in a good resource zone.

Right.

Just like the thermostat on your. In your heating system or your air conditioning system kind of has the same.

That's what we hope.

Yes. When it's working well.

When it's working well. That's right. And so we're are inside of our bodies. Our human nervous system is another one of many cycles of nature that has a rhythm. And when it's in balance, everything goes well. And when it isn't imbalance, there's some big problems that can happen. So that in the wild, if there are too many coyotes and not enough rabbits, pretty soon the coyotes start having fewer babies, even though it's not anything they think about. Like, man, I better have only two this time, because there's not enough food for the family. It's a natural rhythmic homeostasis that happens in nature. And we have that in our bodies too, when things are going well. But lots of us work with people, maybe even ourselves, where that nice rhythm gets bumped out sometimes. And then it looks like that where some kind of an incident, a trauma happens or a trigger, and we get bumped outside either above the zone, hyperarousal with, you know, things like.

A lot of emotionality, pain, things like that, and anger, bump below the line, out of the resilient zone. It's disengagement, dissociation, depression, and those kinds of things. And we know, any of us who work in the mental health field know that when that system is trying to. It's been bumped on high. That the way to get balance isn't to go back into the middle, it's to go back down low. And so then we see people and what are they diagnosed with? Bipolar disorder, which is a legitimate diagnosis, but not if it's because of a trauma. Then it's just a process of trying to get your nervous system back into balance. So we misdiagnose some people who are trauma survivors with bipolar disorder who aren't. Who don't deserve that disorder. And same with our children, where when they bump up and down, what do we call them?

Yeah, adhd. And then we medicate. Maybe in some not so helpful ways.

Exactly.

There would be better ways to allow them to their own system to come back into homeostasis with some supportive tools like the SRM model, as opposed to trying to force it with medication.

Absolutely. When it's not. I mean, ADHD is also a legitimate diagnosis that can be treated with medication for kids. But if that's. It's. It's the wrong diagnosis. If it's somebody who has a history of abuse and neglect or something like that that child may not have adhd, they may just have the dysregulated nervous system. And so we use these skills with kids, and we use them with adults as well, and they can teach it to each other. And of that. And so that's the. So when we get to the next one. So grounding, the third and fourth skill, resourcing and resource strengthening, are intended to be skills that access the parasympathetic part of your nervous system, which is the part that calms us. So is grounding. So we always teach people those three skills first to bring stability to the nervous system. And it also helps us assess people's nervous system. Can they stay for a little while in that state of parasympathetic calming, or is their nervous system so volatile that they get bumped out very easily? And so with resourcing is merely.

Bringing to mind something that brings you a sense of gratitude, joy, security.

Calming, that sort of thing. I try not to use the word safety with people because so many people I work with have the perception that they really haven't ever felt safe, but somehow the word security doesn't have that same connotation to them. So I'll say. So I'm gonna. Is it okay to practice with you just as a little demo?

Sure.

Okay. So, Fleet, most of us in our life.

Have things that bring us a sense of joy or calmness or gratitude. It can be a place in nature. It can be somebody from your past. It can be a pet. It can be something as small as the smell of your morning coffee. So it can be big things or little things, just so that when you bring it to mind, it has that quality of bringing a sense of joy or calmness or gratitude. So if you just let one float to your mind, what would one be?

Well, fortunately, I've had a lot of them. I used to be a sailor. Unfortunately, I lost my yellow lab a few years ago. So my son. Lots of wonderful sources. But right now, and thank goodness, since we're all in home confinement, my real source of joy is my fiance, Sophie.

Okay. Especially since you're on home confinement. So that's your resource. And then the second part of resourcing is called resource strengthening. And we have to do that because. Because the amygdala is so wired with that negativity bias that we need more parasympathetic sensations to override the brain's focus, the amygdala's focus on the sort of negative bias. And so it's kind of nice because then you get to Ask some curiosity questions. So I want to. So when we're doing resource strengthening, it's in order to keep the person in the resource long enough that all those nice parasympathetic sensations get stronger and stronger. And so when you think of Sophie, what makes her a resource for you?

Well, she's so committed to the quality of our relationship, and she just has a very sweet, nurturing nature to begin with. Unless she's mad at me. I give a reason to be. But no, overall, she's just really sweet, nurturing, and really dedicated to our. Our. Our partnership and our home life being really quality. And so we just have rhythms and routines of practicing together and doing meals together and. And going out for walks. And it just. She just brings a sweetness and a joy and a. Just to really nerve. I just feel held. I feel held in my life. Feel held and really supported well, and.

I see this relaxing kind of face happening and a sweet little smile. So as you're doing it, as you're telling me about the resource and you're strengthening it, I'm tracking you for all the kinds of ways I know that that parasympathetic response is getting stronger. And I don't know, what do you notice inside? What do you notice at the sensory level in your body as you tell me just this much about Sophie?

Well, I noticed just relaxation, and I notice a. I kind of felt resonance or coherence from head to toe inside my body, just a kind of flow state and my shoulders relaxing and just, you know, the breath becoming more subtle. But every now and then, just another kind of long into just another kind of.

And those of you watching Fleet, you can see that his body starts to tell the story, too. His hands. In srm, we work with those body gestures, and we slow them down so people can really sense into them. But because I'm tracking him, then I know what I may do next based on not just what he's telling me, but what I'm tracking as he tells me. And so that's how we help people with that skill of resourcing. And so in this one, you see a woman bringing up various resources for herself. Music, sunset, hugging her child. And then she would intensify that resource. And it's a wonderful way to balance having had something happen that's really jarring for you or when you're watching the news, any of you, like most of us who are tuned in now to all the pandemic news.

It'S really, really useful to shift your attention to something that's happened during this day that brings you a sense of calmness or joy or gratitude, even the smallest kinds of things.

Yeah, sometimes I see the latest figures on the pandemic and. Or just hear something set on news, I can literally catch myself that I've stopped breathing, you know. Yeah, I've just. I've just gone into, you know, some kind of freeze or. And then I. Unfortunately, I'm able to recognize that pretty quickly and then relax and try to work with the information I've just received. But, boy, we're all on this ride right now where the information that we're being inundated with is really just wanting to trigger us out of the resilient zone, either up into hyperarousal fear, anxiety, and even acting out, or just to shut down, disassociate either one.

And I noticed that when you were talking about listening to all of that news, you put your hand up against your chest and so if you do that again, just for a minute, put your hand up against your chest and just sense into the contact of your hand against your chest, see what you notice inside with that.

I know it's a relaxing and a nurturing quality. You know, this area seems to both be metaphorically and physically are our heart center. And you know, we just naturally, you know, when we feeling. And so something that's connected to our vulnerability. So feeling my hand there, it just feels nurturing. It feels like a holding myself. I can do it more like that.

Yeah. And so just sense into that, putting the other hand there and see what you notice that. That way. So when we're working with someone, we're paying attention to those beautiful ways that the body starts to tell the story and we're intensifying it by bringing attention to it or we're titrating it, which is a wonderful term that, you know, it comes from chemistry. But Peter Levine, I think one of a great contribution he made was to really put a focus on the titration of activating sensation so that we don't overload the nervous system when we do work with people, that we can help people tell a little bit of a story, then we shift to something else and then we come back and hear a little bit more of a story. I think it was a wonderful gift. It completely transformed my way of listening to people. And I'll tell you one of a really beautiful story that happened for me in China, where we were going to work with a group of what they call prosecutors there, but what police officers here, that's what we call them. In our country. And we were going to do a little training for them about, you know, how they could use skills and that sort of thing. But when we got there, they were in such distress because first responders are often survivors of an incident themselves. And this Sichuan province earthquake was in eight cities. It was gigantic. And these officers had been pulling people out of the rubble that they knew, people who had died. And this one particular. So we, you know, didn't take a rocket scientist to know that there was no point in trying to teach anybody anything, but that we would just do some sessions with them. And so the man that came over to me, police officer, crying, he told me that his heart was black with grief because his. Two of his kids had died and his wife. And so tears are streaming down in his face. And in that moment, I was so grateful to know about titration and to know what to do that would not be disrespectful to him. And so I said to him. I listened to him tell me that, and I said, would it be okay, just for a minute, to tell me who else lived? Who else lived? And he sat back in his chair. I think he was stunned. And he. His face. His tears stopped, his face relaxed. He pulled out, of course, his cell phone, and he showed me a picture of his surviving son. And so that became his resource. And so then I strengthened that resource by asking him questions about his son, you know, what did they like to do together, all that kind of stuff. And I watched his body relax. And all of a sudden, he got this kind of curious look on his face. And all of this was through a translator and said, you know, he said, when I sat down, my heart was black with grief. And now half of my heart is pink. And he was this kind of burly guy, and to hear that half of his heart was pink itself was so sweet. But to know. And so then we went back, you know, and talked some more about the loss, but to titrate activation so that people can learn to tell a story and have the experience of telling that story embedded in the resilience zone with what's also true. Because what's also true is that people lived. And then he spontaneously started talking about all the other people who'd lived, relatives and people he cared about, and some of the officers that were in the room with us that day.

At the end of the session, that lasted about 30 minutes, I think, or 35 minutes, not long, right, to bring people into a sense of balance in their nervous system. He said he had most of his heart was pink. Just a little part of it was gray. And I was thinking, my gosh, I mean, why would you ever expect or shoot for, let's wait until we get the whole heart pink. You know, it just would be completely disrespectful. And we talked about how he could shift his attention went to how much of the painful sadness was important to acknowledge and sit with. And then at what point would he shift his attention away by focusing on his little boy or his relatives who'd lived? So he went off with a kind of little roadmap of how to manage his grief in a way that allowed him to still be a good dad to his son, who was also grieving. And it's a. It's a great example then of how. So it brings us to the last skill in the model, which is called let me get this right, shift and stay. So here we have a guy who is having an intrusive thought of being on the wrong end of a gun. And he is. It's an intrusive thought. So he's shifting his attention away from that to a resource. And when.

I had a student at Arizona State University design the drawings for this particular card. And so many of the men I work with, young men, gang involved youth, have been raised by their grandmothers. And so I asked her to draw, to put in as the resource, this guy's. I can't get my direction there. His grandmother and then strengthen the resource with her love the heart. And then the table full of delicious food. And as you had pointed, you mentioned to your listeners earlier that the first card I did well was very primitive little drawings of stuff, figures essentially. And then I got kind of tired about coming up with a new card every time. After Nepal, you know, we did a big one of Nepali's culture crescents and their national flower on the clothes. And so I had a group of students draw a really sort of stylized human being that wasn't a male or female. It wasn't a race or ethnic group. It was just a figure. And I was really proud of it. And I used it in a lot of places. And then working in New York City with a group of gang involved youth, I asked.

One of my trainers if he would bring find some who would volunteer to come and look at the card and tell me what they thought of it, because we are about to send it into Rikers, as you pointed out. So they came in and I proudly hold out my little card. I wish I had a copy of that one. And they were so disdainful fleet. I can't even tell you. One of them sort of went. Flicked it away. And I said, why? What's wrong? And they didn't like the fact that all these figures, while not designed to be African American, were black. All of the figures were blacked in. No hair, no nothing. And then in the one on grounding, the artist had drawn a guy lying on the ground because we often ground people who are on a mat. They don't have beds in a lot of the places I've worked. And they said, oh, well, he's been shot. And, you know, grounding is a skill for parasympathetic relaxation. It's not about getting all activated because somebody's been shot. So I went back to the drawing board, and this student, I think, just did a brilliant job of coming up with.

You know, black and brown people. There's a white person. There's all different kinds of body types. I think she just did a brilliant job. And so this is the card that we're using now in the prisons and in the jail and in the communities that I work in, which are really. That's where my heart is, you know, and leaving behind a card that looks like the people I'm working with.

This is so wonderful, so simple, brilliant, and practical. And, you know, also, your model is clearly trauma informed and trauma sensitive, obviously. And what often happens as a result of traumatic experiences, our zone of resilience gets smaller. And so you're very skillfully helping people, you know, move this way, this way a little bit, lean into the edges so they gradually expand that. But doing it in a resourced way. We can't just throw somebody outside their resilience zone and say, okay, learn to tolerate that. It doesn't work that way. So in a safe way.

That's the way a lot of trauma work goes, is that we. And it's the way that it used to be with critical incident debriefings, where they went around in a circle and everybody told everything bad they were thinking about, all their intrusive thoughts, all the horrible, grim things they saw. And I worked with a guy in the fire department in New Mexico who had been in the fire department for 20 years, and they came on a terrible accident. Lots of kids were, you know, dead and suffering some of the ones who'd lived. And he retired after the critical incidents group because he was. It so overloaded him. And so if we truly want to be healing presences in people's lives, to know that you can help people completely digest a traumatic event by Shifting their attention between states of activation and calming and to remind them of their resources, which is also true. And I'll tell you as a sort of kind of final punctuation on the SRM model and also a little. It also points to the difference, I think, between.

Certain kinds of trauma models. So it's a Buddhist teaching story. It's one of my favorites. And it goes like this. A Buddhist monk is standing at the edge of a beautiful mountain lake, and he's with his student, and he takes a glass and he dips it into the lake, and he takes it over. He hands it to his student, and then he takes a bag of salt, and he takes many, many tablespoons of salt and puts it into the glass of water. And he says, now drink this. And, you know, this student is dutiful, does what he's told, drinks the water, grimacing and choking. You know, as all of us who ever had to gargle as little kids when we had a sore throat. And the teacher said, so what did you notice? How was that? And he said, it was just terrible. I hated it. I still have a bitter taste in my mouth. It was just awful. It makes my stomach feel bad. So the teacher nods, and he goes over to the edge of the lake, and he takes the bag of salt again, and he dumps the rest of the bag in the water. And he says to the student, now go and drink that. And the student kneels down at the edge of the lake, and he takes the water into his mouth. And the teacher says, so what do you notice? And the student said, I don't even taste the salt. It tasted refreshing. It felt so good on my throat after that glass of salty water. And the teacher nods, and he says, live your life like a lake and not like a glass of water. And I think that so many of our ways of treating people with trauma are exposing them to the glass of water over and over and over again. And there are many things that are also true about people's lives. Not just the bitterness that's happened, that's also true, but there's also other things that are true. And, you know, maybe a last story about Rikers. I was asked to work. I received a phone call one day and told that they had a group of 15 men who were called cutters, and they were shackled 24 hours a day because they cut. There were 15 of them. They cut whoever they could get near, or they cut themselves. So they were cutters. That's their name. And I said, well, what would you want me to do with these guys? And she said, well, we want you to.

Teach them the SRM skills. And I said, well, I'm willing to do it, but first I want to be able to meet individually with each one of the men. And there was this pause on the phone and she said, well, why? And I said, because I want to know who they are. Besides being cutters, who else are they? Not one single One of those 15 men is only a cutter. He's had a dream of something. He has an interest in something, or used to. You know, he may have a wonderful skill that we never knew about. That's what we also have to collect. That's what helps us work with the mountain lake and the bitterness of the salt rather than work as if people are all a glass of water. And I think that's what appropriate technology does. That's what the concept of health literacy does, where people learn to shift between states of activation and states of calming. And they have such a sense of competency and mastery. And in my model, I rarely do. I used to do a lot of two and three day trainings in srm. I haven't done one of those for three years because what I do is train the trainer. I want to teach people how to do that. I want to train them as trainers and then they don't need me anymore. They can go out and deliver it in their communities in their own way. And it's been a very important shift for me to recognize that no matter who they are, I can train them as trainers. And we have wonderful trainers that come out of very harsh circumstances and many who've been in prison themselves and now are out and wanting to help. So it's been a very exciting shift for me and my work.

That's wonderful. So I'd like you, to invite you, if you would, Laurie, just to leave us in a brief two or three minute kind of resourcing or resilience building exercise of your choosing, just so we can all have a felt experience with it.

Great. All right, so those of you listening and seeing the first step, I'm going to take you through grounding and resourcing and shift and stay. So you'll have the. But we can do this in a very efficient way. But the first step of grounding is to just let your eyes glance gently around the room that you're in. Not attaching to anything in particular, but just as a way of reminding yourself that you're right here, right now.

You're right here in this moment with us, right now and then the rest of grounding you can do with your eyes open or closed, whichever feels most comfortable to you. And so in this step of it, I'm going to invite you to just take your fullest attention, almost as if you had a funnel and you could funnel your attention all the way down to the stability, the support of the floor or the ground or wherever you are underneath your feet. Some people like to put a little extra pressure when they do this and other people don't like to. So you do it whichever way you want to. Just put your attention down to the support of the floor under your feet.

And if for some reason that gets a little activating, because some people who've had bracing experiences, grounding doesn't really feel calming when you do it through your feet. Just put your attention. We're going to do this anyway. See what you notice when you do your feet, the support of the ground under your feet.

And then just shift all of that attention that you funneled down to your feet to the support of any solid surface. So if you're sitting in a chair, pay attention to the support of the back of the chair against your back or underneath the rest of your body and just sense into the support there.

See what you notice inside. See what you notice. For example, with your breathing, is it faster? Is it slower, Is it about the same? Notice your muscle tension. Faster.

Or more? Is it less? Sorry, my dog is crying at the door. Is it more? Is it less? Is it about the same?

And see about your heart rate. It's a little hard sometimes to tell that. More, less, about the same. As you sit with your back against the support of the chair, just see what you notice inside.

And it's not unusual when we stay quiet and tuned into the body for this long, not very long, but for the amygdala, scouting around for any novelty to notice a distracting thought, a little pain, something on your to do list. And if that's happened for you, just shift your attention away back to a place in your body that feels neutral or even calm.

And stay there. So that's the skill of shift and stay. Shift your attention away from the distraction.

To a place in the body that feels calm and stay there.

And then when you're ready, if your eyes have been closed, open your eyes and just reorient to the room. All of us.

And so that really takes you through all the skills because you're tracking yourself as you do it. You're with the grounding, you're paying attention to the support of a solid Surface. That's what grounding is. And if you're resourcing, you bring up the resource and you oh, we didn't do the resource, so let me do that one. Do we have a time to just do that, too? Or do you want to stop here?

Maybe a minute? Maybe just.

Okay, so let's. Now that you've done the grounding again, you can do resourcing with your eyes open or closed, but just most of us have in our life things that bring us a sense of joy, gratitude, calmness, pleasure. And so just in this moment, bring one to mind. Just let it float up. It can be a place in nature. It can be a person in your life from your past or in your present. It can be a place in nature. It can be something as small as the smell of your morning coffee or tea. But just see what comes to mind in this moment.

And then when you have it, can you see Fleet's face? I don't know if he's on the screen, but you see how relaxed and peaceful he looks. And so when you have that resource, then you want to strengthen it for yourself, and you strengthen it by bringing all the multisensory details into your attention. So are there good smells associated with your resource?

Is there a special image of yourself in a place where you particularly enjoy that resource?

Just see what all those are there sounds, if it's in nature, maybe there are particular sounds that bring that resource into even a greater level of potency for you.

And when you've strengthened the resource in all those multisensory ways, just track what goes on inside your body. That's your nervous system. See what you notice about your breathing.

Shallower, deeper, about the same muscle tension. More, less, about the same.

See where you notice any places of calmness as a result of that resource.

Sometimes people notice it in their chest, and sometimes not. Just see what you notice.

And then when you feel like you've really given yourself that experience of parasympathetic calming, just if your eyes have been closed, open them and bring your attention back to this room. And.

Hopefully it gives you that sense of, you know, refreshment. And when we use these kinds of skills, especially after something kind of destabilizing has happened, it really brings you back into your resilience zone, that zone where the rhythm is in balance and you're capable of being your best self. And in the resilience zone, you can be sad or mad or glad. It's just that you're all of those things in a degree that allows you to think strategically in your own behalf. It allows you to be to engage in all kinds of positive pro social behaviors. You know, your memory stays more intact. All kinds of good things happen. And one of the best things that happens is you essentially cut off the flow of stress. Chemicals that really toxify our bodies and are the source of every major so they create inflammation and inflammatory processes, are the source of every major chronic illness. So these skills, as simple as they are, they can really enhance your immune system strength and functioning and bathe you in, you know, those parasympathetic sensations. And if you have a good laugh, even better. All kinds of wonderful chemicals burble up in your body. When you can tune into Saturday Night Live and some of the funny things on that or any of the funny things that people are putting online.

Wonderful.

Kind of never know is my go to comic right now.

Oh my gosh, some of them are so great. I mean Kate McKinnon on Saturday Night Live when she does Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I mean, and she can do Rudy Giuliani. I mean talk about somebody with versatility. It just, you just have a really good laugh. It's very health enhancing.

Absolutely. Well, Lori, this has been absolutely fabulous. It is so practical, so immediately beneficial. This is something any of us can do anywhere, something we can share with our children. It's something we can share with our family members, our friends, team members. It's just so eminently practical and powerful and just thank you so much. This is incredible and something that we all really need to work with in our own way as we're going through this global pandemic together. One just, you know, to be able to kind of survive it in any kind of good state. But so we don't come out the other side of this individually and collectively traumatized such that it'll be debilitating because we're going to need to put our lives back together.

Well, that's right. And if we shift our attention from the debilitating fear based things that are true to the possibilities that will our economic system get restructured as a result of this or will a business that was doing one thing decide, you know, now that it's all gone, I really would have rather been doing this thing. And maybe some things will come out of our economy that may be positive. People may develop skills and resourcing that they never knew they had. We can shift our attention to the possibilities in the face of uncertainty and not only focus on the things that are also true, which is, this is a terribly heartbreaking and scary time of uncertainty.

Well, thank you so much. This is a thing.

You're welcome.

I wish you well. Stay healthy, stay safe. Thank you, Lord.

All right. You too.

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