👨‍🏫 Exploring Your Psychograph and the Bio-Emotive Framework w/ Dr. Doug Tataryn

Right.

I'll start recording. Here we go.

So my voice and everything is fine.

You sound great. Perfect. Here we go.

This meeting is being recorded.

Oh, it still played that? Oh, I thought I got rid of that bit.

Well, it came up for me. Maybe because I was in the room already.

Yeah. Hello. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Lovely to see your faces. Hey, Pablo.

Everyone.

Hey, Catherine. I'll just let these people in. Hey, Caroline. Hey, Matt. Hey, Denny. Lovely to see you. It's been a while. Hey, Christian. Hey, Michael. Hey, Caroline. Oh, hey, Yanis. Welcome back. Okay, we'll be starting in about a minute's time. If you guys could mute yourselves as well.

There we go.

Unmute you, Doug. And if you'd all like to share how you're feeling in this exact moment in three words and share in the chat. Share how you're feeling in three words. Doug, you can jump in as well if you like. Last couple of folks joining. Hired. Floppy and ready. I can resonate with floppy. Calm. Inspired. Embodied. Beautiful. Chocolatey. Yeah, me too. I've just been having. Hey, Julia. Relieved. Calm. Engaged. Fire. Curious. Smiley. Beautiful. Okay, well, let's. Let us begin. I think some more people might keep joining, but I'll just try and keep an eye on the waiting room. Doug, I'm gonna pin you. Pin myself as well, just for now. Okay. Well, welcome. Welcome, Doug. It's really an honor to have you back. Are you muted?

No. There we go. Oh, I nodded. Yeah, I'm here. I was just gonna listen to you. Yeah. Sorry.

Great. No, no, no. All good. Well, you are. Or you were one of the most requested guest speakers that we've had, so we. We had to kind of bring you back by. By popular demand. I. I'm not sure what the best way to introduce you to this group is, because you have, I mean, like, 20 kind of two or three decades worth of experience in this realm, which is really astonishingly rare, I think, kind of in this space. And. And there's not. There's certainly not many people that I've met that have the. The depth of understanding, but also the. The intellectual rigor and the. And the research to kind of back up what you teach. So I. I know that I always learn something every time we speak, and I'm. I'm really grateful to have you here.

Awesome. I'm thinking. Yeah, like, I started meditating when I was 15, right? So that was, like, 1975, and. And I got into it really intensely, as one of my clients put it. I had, like, 50 years of experience under my belt by the time I was 20, you know, and, and that really set, I think, a set of direction for my consciousness and, and you know, what I was interested in in life? I don't know. Do you want me to talk about my background or like, do people know like what, what's, what kind of intro do people know before they, they're going to listen to me with some attention? Yeah.

Well, I imagine people have read your bio that was on the page, but why don't you give us like a kind of two to three minute kind of brief. Like what, what was your background? How did you get into this and what are some of the things that you've created over the last like two decades?

Yeah, so I mentioned my meditation background. I went into psychology really excited to study the mind and all the stuff that I was interested in. And then I found out that even though people in psychology were studying it, there were certain areas that you couldn't really talk about. And because of my meditation background, I was initially interested in the, in the parapsychology. You know, clearly learned that wasn't the best thing to do. But even as I got interested in studying the body and emotions and things, I found that there was pushback. So my wife, I met her when I was 19, so in 1970, 79 and she was doing expressive and sacred movement work. She ended up getting a PhD in expressive therapy. And so I've always been connected to what would be considered the fringe areas of, of psychology. But in reality they're just like 10 or 20 years ahead of what psychology will get to. And now they're, they're there. And so I started looking at the thing that really got me into this area was I'd be at my wife's classes and we're doing what's called sacred movements. And inevitably somebody in these silent slow moving sequences would start crying. And it really confused the hell out of me because I was an extremely rational person back there and it didn't make sense to me why this was doing that. And so I started doing research and found out in the 30s and 40s there was a lot of interest in the relationship between muscular tension or posture and mood states. And if you could affect moods by changing postures, and there's some evidence for that. But the critical part was that they found an organ in the brain called the hypothalamus, which when seemed to be mediating the relationship between the posture and the tension. And, and basically what they found is if you squeezed a hand dynamometer, you could decrease performance on any cognitive task, memory, perception, anything. And it was a function of how much tension was in the arm. The more tension, the more decrease in. In the memory and perception and math skills and everything. And I put that together with the emotional stuff that it was basically the tension was interfering with your experience or ability to be in the moment and. And do things. And so this led me to develop what I call the muscular interference theory of repression. And so this is, I think, an interesting thing for everybody because it says, because you guys are studying a lot about the body, but the hypothalamus takes afferents from, you know, your hand. So I can know that I've got two fingers up, even though I can't see it, right? And then there's like four fingers, and you can't see them. But I can tell what my hand's doing without looking at it. That's the afference being processed in the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is also involved in the limbic system, the emotional processing. And if you are trying to do emotional processing and you tense up your muscles, you actually start interfering with your ability to do emotional processing. And so how many people here have ever been in a situation where you got upset and wanted to cry, particularly as a kid, but you didn't want to cry in front of people? How many. How many people you know, put up your hands that I can see? So most people. So what do you do when you're starting to cry? The. The impulse is happening. You're upset, but you don't want to actually cry. How do you stop yourself from crying? What do you do? Volunteer from somebody? If you can unmute yourself, you clench up. Exactly. And so the first time you clench up, it's a voluntary activity. And you clench up different muscles depending on which emotions are activated. But you clench up. You also unconsciously reinforce the clenching because the clenching interfered with your emotional experience. It's not as salient in consciousness when you clench up. So you just reinforced muscle tension. And then when you relax, if you relax the clenching and you're still in the presence of the upsetting situation, you'll start getting upset again. And you don't want that, so you just punished relaxation. And after three or four cycles of this, your muscles learn to tense up, to override and interfere with your emotional experience. And then they stay tight. Because even when you get home now, when you start to relax, the relaxation, the actual act of relaxing the muscle, can cue the memory because it's just been associated with it. And you don't want to feel that. And if you don't want to feel it, you tense up again. And the next thing you know that automatic tension starts happening earlier and earlier in the recollection sequence and you've effectively repressed the muscle or repress the memory. And you can certainly get rid of the charge. And if it goes far enough, I think you can actually get rid of the actual memory. And that's sort of a basis for repressed memory syndrome. So that whole phenomena that I, I studied and wrote a paper about that in 1984 really set me up for looking at the mind body relationship. And then I worked with some people who were doing biofeedback and really got into that. And I ended up with a research lab where I could watch people as they were in therapy. I had them on a polygraph, right? This is in the 90s. And so as I'm doing therapy I'm watching them say one thing and their body and heart rate and GSR and EEG just flipping out completely opposite direction to what their words are saying. And that was just such a salient impact on me that there was at least two different systems going on with that one person I was talking about. And you know, my conclusion was it was the emotional system. And so a lot of what we talk about is the unconscious in a person I've come to conclude is actually the emotional system. Whenever you hear the word unconscious, just substitute the word emotional in there and you'll probably have a much better idea of what's actually going on. So this brings me to this notion of a triune brain. So how many people have heard of the triune brain? I, I find this is interesting, okay, and the people who have heard of it, how many of you poo poo it and how many of you go

thumbs

up poo poo, yeah, thumbs up poo poo, yeah. Don't know, I use it. You know, I'm not particularly interested in what's neurologically or even existentially ontologically real. I'm interested in kind of what works. And heuristically, the triune brain is a really good tool for understanding some of the dynamics that are going on. And I think there's actually really good neurological evidence for it. And I even asked triune chat GPT about this, you know, that, that authority. And I said if you could clap, I said if you could classify people in high school into three types, what would they be? Right? So just open ended question and they came up, he came up with three groups, two of them fit really well. And the third was like, ah, that doesn't really fit. But then I looked at it more closely and I asked some more questions. We ended up with three groups. So the three groups. And so I'll tell you what they are, but before I do, it's like if there's not something to the idea of the triune brain, then why is it our culture keeps creating these subgroups of people over the last few hundred years? So the groups are, you'll probably recognize them. The nerds are the intellects, the jocks, you know, the athletic people who are into sports or physical stuff. We see them in school, they get called different names at different eras. And then the third group actually turned out to divide into two groups and that was the musicians and artists. This is from Chat dpt and the socially kind of cool and progressive ones. The, the in group, the, the socially astute ones that everyone, we used to call them the beautiful people. So it turns out the artists and musician types are introverted emotional brain types. And the social cool people are the extroverted emotional brain types. They're really in tune with your emotional brain and cues and social cues and they're extroverts. So they use that skill to create clubs and you know, connection with the people. So we've got the intellectual brain as the nerds, we've got the physical brain as the jocks and we've got the emotional brain showing up as intro, introverted and extroverted types. But it's a group that came up from Chat GPT without me kind of priming them about the triune brain. So I use that because a lot of the problems that we have living a harmonious life and you guys are all here because you want your life to get better. I find it really useful to say that maybe my three brains have different agendas or are perceiving this situation differently. They're not always working together. My intellectual brain can think one thing while I'm feeling another thing. And you can also have your physical brain wanting to do one thing like eat another potato chip or buy another thing of french fries or have sex with somebody while your intellectual brain is going, no, don't do that. It's not good for you. What are you doing? You've done that before, right? There's, there's a contrast between, you know, those three brains. And you know, Freud has talked about this. There's, there's, there's different people reinventing versions. It even shows up in Buddhism. So one of the things that I say is our culture is really bad at understanding the emotional brain. It just, you know, we spent probably 100 years repressing it. And that used to upset me. I didn't understand why, but now I understand developmentally, if you understand spiral dynamics or other adult development theories, emotions get in the way of performance and sort of visioning for the lower levels of development. And it's not really until you get into postmodern levels of development that emotions and feelings have a place before that they kind of get in the way. So we've as a culture have spent most of our time repressing, dismissing, dissociating or pushing away our emotions. How many people agree with that? Just, you know, that, that we're not good with emotions in our culture? Okay, most people agree with it. So I'm not going to push the point too far. I'm going to give you some examples, however, that might surprise you. How many people have suffered or have know someone who suffers from an anxiety disorder. Okay. To me, this is one of the biggest. Indicators or reflections of our alexithymia. At one level, I would say that anxiety doesn't actually exist, that it's an epiphenomena, it's a conceptual distraction from what's actually happening. So if you look at the signs of anxiety, sweating palms, heart rate stuff, activated bowels, cold feet, cold hands, all of those things are actually symptoms of emotional activation. But we don't talk about, hey, you're emotionally activated, what do you need to process? We say, hey, you're anxious, why don't you do some breath work? Why don't you calm down with your vagus nerve, right? And what I've really appreciated, I've been spending time with polyvagal theory, is it's basically a third person perspective on the emotional system and it's cut reality up in the exact same ways that I cut it up through first person phenomenological, you know, assessment of what's going on. So everything I talk about in bio emotive has a correspondence perfectly in the vagal nervous system thing, including that I made a distinction between freezing and the fear response, that it's coming from a different system. Like it's amazing. But, but so I do I. What I teach is a first person perspective or experience of the emotional system. And most of our culture is interested in coping with and regulating and bringing under control the emotional system. And that's really wonderful that we're acknowledging and working with it, but I think there's so much more mileage that you get from owning that all of this nervous system activation is your emotional experience and that what you're being asked to do, there's basically two things, which is to clean up your emotional history. Because most people who have anxiety disorders or depression or drug addictions or alcohol abuse, or, you know, excessive anger and violence, they have history, emotional history that they haven't resolved. So we clean that up, and as we clean it up, our emotional system starts maturing and catching up to the rest of us. You know, because you can think of the emotional system as a little child that was pushed down and kept in the dark for most of your growing years. The intellect was out growing up and gaining experiences, but the emotional system fell behind, which is why most people, when they go into their emotional system, find a lot of painful childhood memories. Once you clear those out, your emotional system can assimilate all of those years of experience and learn and mature and, and update its understanding of the world. And you can show up in the way very differently. Now, what do I recommend to clean up the emotional system? Funny you should ask. I, I think I've developed probably one of the most powerful ways of working with the emotional system. I cut it up very differently than most people. And you're going to get a taste of that today. So before I go there, is there any questions from anybody? We'll take maybe three or four questions or five minutes just to clarify that. And then I'll give you the rest of the framework and an exercise where I'll teach you a little bit about how to access this emotional system from a non intellectual way. Okay, so any questions? And I don't know if there's someone moderating the questions or how we're going to do that. Johnny?

Yeah, I'll moderate the questions. I actually want to start with one of my own. You mentioned the word Alexis Alexithymia. Can you define that for people and what that means?

Right, I. I usually do. You can break it down into three parts. A. Lexi Thymia. A means no or not like agnostic, not believing. Lexi is short for lexicon or words. Thymia refers to the chest where our thymus gland is, which is where most people experience their emotional system or it's considered the seat of the soul. So no words for moods and emotions. Our culture is alexithymic. We say anxiety instead of I'm emotionally activated. We say I'm stressed out, as if stress is out there as opposed to my emotional reaction to it. And there's just tons and tons of examples. I used to give an entire Lecture on this, but I do it short now of the Alexa Thymusness of our culture. So I'm here to help you become less alexithymic, wake up your emotional system and integrate it into your way of being in the world so that you can have a heart centered, open, vibrant, energetic way of being in the world and still access your intellect, not, not have them be fighting each other all the time. Makes sense.

Yeah. Beautiful. And then one more, one more question for me again, as you were speaking about the, the muscle tension and the lack of capacity to feel emotions, I'm wondering if there's a correlation there between, in a lot of different emotional regulation frameworks, there's a practice of like expanding your awareness to different areas of the body or even kind of behind you. And my guess is that that expansion of awareness creates a natural relaxation and relaxing of tension across all of the body, which then allows the emotions to flow more fluidly. Would you agree with that or would you put that in a different way,

that the expansion of awareness is responsible

for relaxation, that there's a connection between the mechanism for expanding the awareness, allowing the emotions to be felt and integrated more fluidly is due to its natural kind of relaxation effect?

Yes, it's actually common in places where relaxation of the body happens explicitly, like through massage therapy or relaxation protocols that people will break down crying or sobbing

or have fear responses.

It helps if you've got an expanded awareness to not identify with the objects that are arising. So that's something that parts theory, internal family systems does. It really helps you identify with the self that isn't identified with all the parts, which means it's going to hold in a space of awareness and not get overwhelmed by all the material that's coming up. So I wouldn't say it's necessarily helping with the relaxation, but it's helping you not be so caught up with the material that's there. And one of the reasons I say that is that when people sit to meditate, it can take weeks or months to get to stage three or four. And at stage three or four, this is according to Chula Das's the Mind Illuminated, which I think is like the bible for meditation if you're new to it. At stages three and four, you start getting lots of pt, it's called, and emotional upset will arise. And so PT is all sorts of vibrations and twitchings and spasms of the body. And to me, that's the point in meditation where you've done enough relaxation that your body's trying to relax, but then as you begin relaxing, the emotional material is coming up and there's still an unconscious response to push it down. And so you get this oscillation and tension of the body trying to relax, but you're not really doing it. You're not really allowing it, and it takes a little while. That's the point at which a lot of repressed memory starts showing up in people. And this is the point at which meditation can, quote, become dangerous because you're now accessing traumatized stuff, some of which is too much for you to deal with on your own. Right. And it can cause an imbalance. But if you've got a good guide and mentor, they'll help you into integrate that. So I would say if you do a lot of meditation, your body will eventually start relaxing and you'll have the option of doing emotional clearing work in that context. And that's something Chula Dasa said he wished he would have spent more time explicitly writing into. So it's the Mind Illuminated by Chula Dasa. John Yates is a really wonderful podcast if you're into meditation, that he did with Michael Taft on Deconstructing Yourself, where he talks about the profound impact that doing emotional clearing work had on his life, even though he'd been a very highly attained meditator for 40 plus years.

Yeah, beautiful. Let's. Let's have one question from Pablo and then I want to dive into the experiential stuff.

Thanks, Johnny. Hey, Doug. How you been?

Good.

Doug. You just put in words and experience that I've hadn't had the language for this describe to myself or even make sense, but that intuitively I understand that it's, it's a sign that my body doing something that it needs, which is I have these spontaneous movements. Like, I'll sit down in my chair at home and my neck will start, like, swiveling, and sometimes very strongly to the point that a part of me is like, hey, is my neck about the break? And. And sometimes my hips will start moving on their own and my arms will start doing, like this helicopter. And I, to this day, I still don't know precisely intellectually what's going on. I simply allow it as much as I can and I make space for it. Since I sense something is, that's it. I don't have words for it. So my question is, where could I go find the literature or language that will help me navigate these experiences?

Yeah, so there's. They talk about it in, say, the Mind Illuminated. And it's, it's the.

I just I think create.

No, not creates. Anyway, it's, it's the body shaking stuff. The expressive therapists have a lot of access and ability to work with that because you're, it's pt, right? You're so. So in improv or spontaneous dance, this is where the other two brains, the physical and emotional brain, gets to have permission to come out and express itself. And that's what seems to be coming on with you. Except you don't really have a forum to really let it loose.

Right.

I've done those kind of. And, and some, some of the, some of the yoga practices explicitly get you shaking your body and doing things to try and release those long chronic tensions. So the yoga literature, the meditation literature and the expressive therapy literatures all talk about this kind of thing. And improv, if you love improv or contact improv, it's a wonderful way to access this stuff because you get triggered in all sorts of way interacting with other beings. Right. All your issues coming up.

Okay, so expressive therapy and the mind illuminate. Illumina. That resonated with me. Good place to look. And Doug, in the meantime, what's like a tip that you could share with me on how I can approach those spontaneous movements

first is to just to keep allowing them like you're doing and then try and tune into what's the emotional feeling tone in behind this because it's coming up as physical behaviors like you, you might want to do this. And then you find out that you're fighting against feeling trapped and helpless because you have memories of someone holding you down and it's your body acting it out. Right. So it's easier if you can actually own that. I feel trapped and helpless. Process, cry it out. Okay, So I could talk like this literally all day and all weekend. So we'll stay focused on. I'm going to give you the real fundamental breakdown of the biomotor framework. And it's really simple at one level and it's a little complicated at another. But first of all, there's a difference between emotions and feelings. Okay? So I'm going to tell you this. I'm not going to try and convince you of this. Just buy into it for now. If you don't like it, you know, debate it another time. Emotions are pre programmed physiological responses. Okay. That we get in order to survive or socially bond in some way. Okay? They're pre programmed responses. So fear, anger, happiness and sadness. That's it. Four emotions. The other ones, they talk about disgust, shame and everything. It's a misunderstanding of what's going on, they're coming from other systems. No, feelings cause emotions. Okay, so someone says someone did something and then they got angry. Trigger anger. No, step, step, step, step, anger. There's three, four, five steps between the trigger and those are feelings. So interpersonal feelings are different than core feelings. And feelings are your emotional system's best guess as to your interpersonal status or dynamics in that moment. And it's a guess. Okay? But our emotional brain is constantly assessing our interpersonal status when we're with other people. And it shows up in real subtle ways. And if we had more time, I'd ask you about how you're feeling, interacting with me, like, say, specifically Pablo. Now, he might not be able to say it, but hopefully he doesn't feel dismissed. He doesn't feel I'm being arrogant, he doesn't feel I'm being pretentious. Like all of those words can come up easily. Hopefully he feels understood, you know, to feel seen, accepted, supported. Those are feelings, interpersonal feelings. We often use behavioral metaphors like supported or seen because they capture an essence of something and it's simple enough for emotional brain to get it. So I feel seen and accepted is a wonderful feeling to have when you're around someone. And you'll probably find that you're on the happier side because feeling seen and accepted will tend to make you happy. If you felt dismissed and, and neglected, you'd probably end up feeling sad,

right?

So feelings cause emotions, but it's one more step in there. Core feelings. Now, core feelings are interesting and I know we've got exercise time, but I'm. I. You trust me, Johnny, we have time.

Okay, I'll.

I know we're ending at 1:30. When I left my job in academia, so I was a research professor for 10 years when, when I realized that I couldn't just study the mind the way I wanted to, that people were going to, like, fight me, I decided to learn the tools of the trade that they fought in. And so I became an expert in research methodology and statistics and computers. And literally I could say what I wanted because I knew the research and people were smart enough not to debate me. Because now, because of my meditation, I also became the statistician that statisticians came to when they got stuck because I've got this creative bent and way of seeing things that most statisticians can't because they're a little bit too linear. So I learned those tools and then I had to leave academia for various reasons, mostly because it had been. It wasn't A good place for creative people that were supposed to just be focusing on productivity. And so I became a clinician because I had gone into the clinical program, not because I was interested, but because everyone else was doing that. And I didn't think I'd ever use it, but it saved my ass. I went into clinical after I left psychology, a professor, and I did a standardized intervention with all of my clients. I love Gendlin's Focusing. How many people have heard of Gendelin's Focusing? Okay, you should check it out, because if you learn Gendelin's Focusing, it'll save. It'll really teach you the embodiment part of the Nadura process. I'm going to teach you, but it's a good. It's a good structured program. I did Gendelin's focusing for three years with all of my clients with a slight modification. You're supposed to find words that resonate, But I didn't want just a word that resonated. I wanted a word that resonated so deeply that it caused people to cry. And so whenever someone came in with a problem, and we did gentleman's focusing, and we tracked it through the body, it almost invariably ended up in the torso or the chest. The muscle tension or the headaches ended up down here. And I'm saying, what's the essence of your pain? What one word describes all of the pain you're feeling? And they'd come up with all these different words. We'd say them out loud, do the resonance stuff with Gendlin. And then finally there'd be a word that start crying with. And I say, is that the essence of it? And if they went, no, we'd keep going. We found a word. They say, yes, this is the essence of my pain. And I wrote it down. So after three years of doing that, how many words did I have? Someone who doesn't know this, Take a guess. How many words do you think are the essence of everybody's pain? That's come into me for three years. How many words do you think are there? Ritz. Take a guess. 5, 6, 7, 8. Okay. How many words for other people? Another guess.

Michael?

Three, four. Okay. Most people will guess 15, 20, 30. I found nine. I had basically five words in the first year. Another three words in the next year. I found one more word on the third year, and that was it. No more. And then I stopped looking. And so those nine core feelings, I believe I discovered the essence of how our emotional brain determines its relational status to the group that it's a part of that we use. We are biologically programmed to see the world through these nine core feelings. And that's what we're going to be doing our psychograph on. Because what are the nine words? Yeah, we'll get there. If you've got issues from childhood, if you're aware that you're being highly sensitized or triggered or reactive or fearful, I can almost guarantee you that one or more of these nine words are at the core of your challenges and that if you process them, you will find yourself in a very different space than if you keep just living with them. So I'm going to give you what I would call a pith teaching. So anyone who's been into meditation and Buddhism, they. They know what pith teachings are. There are phrases that, as you repeat them out loud in different circumstances, as you mature over time, you get more and more insight about what they actually mean. So here's a pith teaching. Any intense. And you can write it down. Any intense interpersonal experience. That's the first phrase. There's four parts to it that is not fully experienced and expressed will become part of your sense of self or world view instead of something that happened to you. In other words, it becomes you instead of an event that happened to you. In psychodynamic literature, they call this an introject, but this is, in a sense, this defines an emotional impression. Any intense interpersonal encounter that you don't fully experience and express at the time becomes part of your sense of self or worldview instead of something that happened to you.

Johnny, would you make any distinguish or do you distinguish between that and trauma or are you speaking about the same. The same thing.

I would say that trauma is on the continuum.

Yeah.

So when it gets to this point, we call it trauma. When it gets down here, we just call it, you know, weird behaviors or associations, you know, but it's influencing us. And when it gets big enough, we call it trauma. So I would say, in essence, this is the definition of trauma. But it means that we're traumatized at much lower levels. And that's why complex PTSD or childhood PTSD is becoming so common that we're realizing that the emotional conditions we were raised in has huge impacts on who we are as adults. And that they don't necessarily have to fit the definition of trauma, as in life threatening. Right. Because it's just left an emotional impression. And so what I'm going to teach you is how to clear those emotional impressions from your system. I talk about accidental conditioned history and Cultural DNA and stuff, but we don't have time. This is how you end up reproducing your childhood environment in all your other relationships and go, why the hell do I keep meeting or dating people who are X and Y? Well, it's because of your accidental conditioned history and these impressions. You either pick people or train people to treat you certain ways. So now we're going to move towards the exercise. Any questions before we go there?

Besides the nine core feelings, one question from Ryan. He says, are you speaking only of negative experiences or positive ones as well?

Both though, and, and this is something my daughter and wife and I talked about 15 years ago when I was first doing this is why am I always talking about negative emotions and feelings? It's because very few people come in with unresolved feelings of happiness. Happiness is one of the few things that we get to usually just fully experience and express at the time, though some people even have trouble with that and some cultures have trouble with that. So then, yes, you can have trauma, positive trauma impressions, you know, but they're usually not that dysfunctional until people start saying why the hell does he think so much of himself? Like why? What the. What the heck? You know, because maybe you got impressed on that you were really valuable or potent and powerful as a kid and you've just lived in that little bubble even when it's not true. And yeah, okay, that, that's clear enough. So we're going to do an experiential exercise. I'm going to put in the chat a link that I want you all to open

and interesting everyone.

HTTP tinyurl.com BEF for Biomotor Framework Core. Hopefully I typed that in. So if you click on that, it will open up a Chrome browser and you don't have to read that first part. It just sort of gives you some background. And I put this together to help people learn this framework and unfortunately it doesn't work that well on its own because it really invokes the intellectual brain. But it gives you the structure. If you do this enough and get it in your system, it can be very powerful. But it was disappointing because it, it kind of keeps you intellectual. So I'm going to try and do a version of this that'll make it more experiential, emotional and less intellectual. So put your email in there. It's going to end up by default, it signs people up to my newsletter so you can always unsubscribe. But to in order to get the summary PDF afterwards, you need to put your email in, you can put your first name in there or alias. Now in this case, you're not going to be talking about a situation, so leave this out. Just put other. And then when it says briefly describe the situation causing your distress, I want you to put emotional childhood psychograph. Okay? Now when you think about going into your childhood, How upsetting is that for you? And you can actually answer that on the next question, right? When you reflect on this situation, how emotionally upset or body activation, how much body activation or emotional upset do you experience? Zero is none at all. Ten is really upset.

Okay?

So if the idea of going into your childhood stuff is scary, just acknowledge that. If it's an 8, 9 or 10 or 7 even, maybe you shouldn't be doing this exercise because this isn't necessarily, you know, a place where I can react to you. But at the same time, I trust that if things get overwhelming, you can just stop the exercise or you can repress things. You've got all sorts of coping mechanisms. Okay, so I'm gonna assume that you guys are mature enough to modulate your own emotional state. And you know, this is an emotionally evocative process. If you feel safe enough when we get on to the next questions and crying starts to happen, I would encourage you to cry. You can keep your video on or you can keep it off. You can share in the chat if you want what's happening. But if you get triggered and activated, remember that statement. Any intense interpersonal experience that you don't fully experience and express. Well, it's the lack of experiencing and expressing that kept it traumatized. And the way to untraumatize it is to fully experience and express it. Now the trick is express means you need to put the feelings out. So this is where we're going to go into the feelings and just feel around to see what kind of associations happen. Because I'm going to have you say phrases out loud with the core feelings and you're going to see how your body responds to it. And by saying it out loud, we're bypassing the intellect in a certain way, going directly through the ears into the, into, into the physical brain and then into the emotional brain. And it may be feeling seen or heard in a way that it hasn't than when you're just thinking about it. Because we don't often have a lot of direct neurons connecting the intellect and emotional brains. Okay, any questions? Does this seem clear enough? Johnny, we can go forward?

Yeah, it seems. Seems clear to me.

Okay, so everyone's ready to do this and you've completed those things and click onto the next page with the next button. Now, at this point, don't go ahead. Okay? Stay with me. And we're gonna spend a few minutes on each one. Okay? So close your eyes. Now take a few breath. Breathe out through your mouth. Just imagine that you're in a safe place. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. And I'm going to have you say a phrase out loud. And it's important that you say the words out loud and say it and express it. React to it with curiosity. I feel alone.

I feel alone.

And just see how your body responds to that statement. If this is an actual issue for you, even if you're not aware of it, your body may start activating. So say it out loud two or three times.

I feel alone. I feel alone.

And then open your eyes and rate how much activation where 10 is so much that you're crying or you want to cry.

0 is none all.

And then close your eyes. And then I'm going to read the next statement. I feel inadequate.

I feel inadequate.

Inadequate means you believe you have the skills and abilities to do something, but

you're not doing it for whatever reason.

You're not showing up.

You're getting a C instead of an A in life. I feel inadequate.

And this is not a rational process. This, you know. Please don't let your intellect decide if you can rate this or not or

react to this, because we're here trying

to give your emotional brain more direct access and expression, even if it doesn't make sense, even if you can combat, you know this rationally. Just go with how your body is feeling. I feel inadequate. And now open your eyes and rank

that 0 to 10.

And when you've done that, close your

eyes

and you may notice yourself feeling more open and more vulnerable as we do this.

That's wonderful. It takes a little bit for the intellectual momentum to die off. Sometimes.

I feel insignificant.

Insignificant. I feel insignificant.

That means I don't even register

in someone else's awareness. People don't see me often, will feel invisible. I feel insignificant.

The other thing you can do as

we're doing these exercises is switch between I feel and I am. Say I am insignificant. And sometimes that will feel even more true if you've got that kind of deep impression. So oscillate between I feel and I am. Open your eyes and rank the amount of activation. Close your eyes. Say out loud, I feel lost. I feel lost. You know, feeling lost is not an easy way to be in the world to not have a Vision not have a direction, not have a purpose. To not be able to understand or make sense of the world is to feel lost. I feel lost. I am lost.

When you're saying these words, often associative

memories will come up. And if that's the case, just allow it. Just allow it. Just be curious about those memories or those associations. I feel lost. Now open your eyes and rate the level of activation.

And then close your eyes

and say out loud, I feel helpless. I am helpless. I feel helpless. Nothing I do makes a difference. No matter how hard I try, nothing changes. I feel trapped and helpless. This is beyond me. And sometimes it's very powerful to just interpret it as in, there is nobody here helping me. I need help and there's nobody here helping me. I. I am helpless. I can't do this alone.

Just notice your body, particularly your belly

and chest, and then rates 1 to 10 how much activation you have. Then close your eyes. I feel worthless. I am worthless.

And again,

we're just exploring how your emotional brain feels. Don't try and counter it rationally. If it does start feeling resonant, just allow it. You know the rational part, we spend lots of time dealing with. This is time for just the emotional brain to experience and express itself, even if it doesn't make any sense. I am worthless. I feel worthless.

You know, it's different than insignificant in

that an insignificant you weren't seen with. Worthless you were seen and not wanted, rejected or abandoned because you have no value. I am worthless. I feel worthless. Then open your eyes and rank 0

to 10

how much activation there is emotionally or physiologically.

Close your eyes.

I feel a loss. A feeling of loss that doesn't resolve over time will become a feeling of emptiness, a hole in your heart where the positive feeling once lived. Loss means you had something positive and now it's gone and you have to live without it. It can be the loss of a loved one, a loss of a skill. You know, for some of us getting older, it can be the loss of memory or cognitive functioning. I've got a friend who's going through dementia and he's aware enough to know that there's a loss there and it's very sad. I feel a loss. And if you've been living with this for a long time, the word emptiness may resonate more. And that's okay. Just say, I feel empty. I have an emptiness inside. There's a hole in my heart. I feel empty. Open your eyes and rank this from 0 to 10, how much activation there is. Close your eyes. I feel like a bad person. I am a bad person. It doesn't have to make sense. It can just come from one memory, even if you can't remember it. One instance where basically you violated the rules of the group, you broke a kind of implicit pact and you did something wrong. So you're a bad person. I am a bad person. I feel like a bad person. And sometimes you, you'll have insight as to in what role you're bad. Like I am a bad husband, I'm a bad daughter. I'm a bad child. Just go to wherever the most activation is.

Open your eyes and choose between 0

and 10 and then close your eyes. Now this last one is hopeless. I feel hopeless. I am hopeless. Hopeless is different than helpless in that

helpless is in the immediate moment.

And hopeless is something that happens over time.

And in terms of the activation, if you are, another way the activation shows up is you become numb or dissociate. So if that's happening, put a 10,

because that's a very extreme level of activation. You, I think done the dorsal vagus nerve shut down, freeze response, dissociation. So that's a lot of activation. I feel hopeless. I am hopeless.

It means that whatever negative state I'm

in is never going to change. It's like this forever. And that's just a deep feeling belief. So open your eyes and rank that between 0 and 10.

And then just glance up and down at your psychograph and take the top

three words that have the highest levels

and just write them down.

It says, list the three words from

above that rank the highest. So I want you to take the

time to write down those words.

And then it'll take a few minutes to do. And once you've done that, I want you to make a sentence up. Either all in one sentence or maybe two in one sentence. But make a sentence of using each

word

that just seems to capture some

aspect of your experience or some belief

you have about those.

So I've got examples there, like, I feel alone in the world and if I'm going to survive, I have to look after myself. I'm inadequate and I'll never be good at the things I love. You know, I am helpless and unable to create the life I crave.

Just try and unpack.

Express a little bit more of what that word means to you and the other beliefs or associations that are there

and then press next. And for those of you who were afraid to do this, you know, when you put some number, just how do you feel now about this? Now that you've done it. The other thing to do is you can fill this out if you want, but if you did cry, I have five different levels of crying and you can just choose which type of crying kind of happened. If you didn't cry, what did you do? Including getting number dissociating. And then, you know, if there's any action you need to take to honor this processing, you know, or what you've

been exposed to or opening up to,

maybe just take a little note on

it now so that you have an idea of, you know, something to remind you of what seemed really relevant or salient.

So just give you a few more minutes to finish those up and

please,

you know, you can do this now

if you, if you're going fast, leave

any comments or feedback, your age group

and stuff and then submit it and

you will get a form sent to you summarizing this. You'll actually get a little graph PDF showing these numbers and you can use that now to refer back to when you get upset. Can look at the words and say, oh gee, interesting. This feeling that I had really high activated when I did this psychograph. Showing up at work or showing up

at my relationship a lot, you know,

or maybe it's a different one, but just keep it, reflect on it.

I should probably, if I'm.

No, these things are relatively anonymous other than they get sent to me. I don't look at the contents or I mean, I look at the contents. I don't really look at the email thing but you know, I, I don't have a way of automatically stripping the email from the content so there's a little bit of exposure there. But it's, it's stored in a way where the emails are not linked. Okay, so for people who have finished this and sent it away, do you wanna, we'll make some conversation, answer questions and maybe share some experiences. Johnny, do you want to start.

Do you want to just reflect on

what this was like for you?

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for, for sharing that. It was the, the second time that I've, I've been through this and for me there was the most resonance around the word helpless. Like that was the one that I felt this kind of somatic reaction to. And it's one that I've been exploring in kind of my own somatic journeys and a guided Hakomi session a few weeks back. And that was something that I actually remembered being or I had the visceral experience of being left in a cot and like left alone and kind of crying and like abandoned In a way. And there was this, this deep feeling of helplessness in that which was, was very powerful to, to move through and, and also bizarre being in like a 35 year old body, experiencing myself as a, as like a, I don't know, one year old, perhaps less.

Yeah, that's a good point that you make. Like these memories, when you go back into them, you will feel the age that you were when these impressions came in.

You know,

that's. And the other thing that happens is that all of the times that you felt helpless seem to be stored in the same place. So you'll be hanging out with helpless in one context and suddenly helpless in another context, you know, in another. Or feelings of inadequacy when you're. It's like, it's literally what a more refined version of mood dependent learning, which

was big about 10 or 20 years

ago, where when you get a memory from one mood state or feeling state, all the times that you felt inadequate or alone are very accessible and there for you. And when you cry and resolve one of them, you're actually crying and resolving all of them. And one of the nice things about this work is that there's only nine core feelings. Unfortunately, like, I grew up through this transition from traditional repress it all into this sort of postmodern embrace of feelings that we're now at. I lived most of my life in the modern one where they didn't even want to pay attention to feelings. And a lot of people, including I remember feeling very sad and disillusioned that my heroes, Ken Wilbur and Carolyn Mice, Mice from the parapsychology side and Ken Wilbur from the intellectual side, were talking to each other about their personal journeys. And they said, yeah, at a certain point you just give up on all this personal growth, healing stuff and you just get on with it. You just do what you're supposed to do with your life in spite of your wounds. And it hurt because like, no, you can actually clean your history up. I've done it 99.9. I would say it's asymptotic, you know, and a lot of my clients have done it. And, and why it's because there's only nine core feelings. And once you've gone through all nine core feelings, either incidentally or explicitly, and you've worked out all the issues that come up, there's nothing left. Right. And this is. You can. I've met people who were cried for decades, but they don't heal. And I've met people who have been to therapy and talk all about their feelings, but they don't heal. They have insight. The magic part of healing is that you both cry. In other words, your emotional system is open and you express the feeling experiences that you had. That completes the fully experience and express part of that impression slash trauma. You can do it now, you can do it 10 years from now. You could have done it 10 years ago, right? It'll stay there until you do it. So fully experiencing and expressing means find the feeling words worthless, insignificant, inadequate. They're going to heal your core wounds. If you've got issues with a person, okay, you have to be careful about sharing core feelings with people you don't really trust because they're very intimate and vulnerable. You don't want to share them with people at work, for instance. You want to share them with significant others, people that you trust enough to be that open and vulnerable. With interpersonal feelings like betrayed, neglected, abandoned, they're less vulnerable making in a sense, and they're appropriate to actually describe the dynamics between you and any person. So you can at work, say, hey boss, I felt dismissed by you, or to a colleague, I felt abandoned by you. We had agreed to work on this together. And those words are very potent, they capture a lot of energy. So make sure you've got the right ones when you say it. I actually put another form together, which is the interpersonal feelings, the most common ones. So, Christian, I'm anticipating your question. Apparently if you go to the tiny URL/bef stress the all of the interpersonal ones, you have the exact same form, but with a bunch of interpersonal ones. So if you're confused about what you're feeling in an encounter with someone, go through that. You'll find the right interpersonal feelings, and then you can talk more intelligently and more accurately about what happened between you and that person. You also will likely, when you find those words, get emotionally upset and activated. And then it's up to you to find the core feelings. Where do you go when you get dismissed or neglected and everyone goes to different places? Some people feel worthless, some people feel insignificant, some people feel inadequate, right? So you do that further processing. And if you can get rid of most of the charge by doing this work yourself, when you go to talk to the person, not only will you have a clean, crisp, precise language to communicate your exact difficulty with them, but you won't be crazy when you're doing it. You won't be overwhelmed by emotions because you've already resolved a lot of the material and they'll have to respect you because you can stand your ground without being overwhelmed. I'm not saying you shouldn't get emotional, but I'm saying you'll have the option. Right. You won't be overwhelmed more than you want to be if you do this work. And it'll make it much easier to have that difficult conversation with somebody. So we've got people, I imagine, in order.

Yeah, there's just a couple of small points of clarification. And then let's go to the questions. One piece was around the dorsal. Could you clarify for people how they can distinguish between, oh, this isn't causing a reaction versus I'm in dorsal.

Ah.

If you go into a dissociated state, there is a general numbness and distance from the material. So if you're dissociated from your body, you'll feel like you're floating in midair. If you're dissociated from your emotions, you'll be able to talk about it, but you'll know that you're not really feeling the stuff.

Okay.

Whereas when it's resolved, you have full access to your body and your emotions, but it's no longer triggering you or activating it. And so there's often a sense of relief that happens after you've cried. And, and I'll actually ask that. How many people have the experience of having had a good cry and feeling better afterwards? Okay, so that feeling better afterwards means you, you've resolved something. Now, if you expressed words and dealt with the interpersonal and core feelings, that whole amount of pain that you've been carrying, maybe it's this much pain will go down every time you cry and release and express till eventually it goes away. If you only cried because you're overwhelmed and you didn't express the words, then the relief that you're getting is physiological. It's burning off the chemicals, it's discharging and, you know, activating the right sympathetic and then parasympathetic responses to calm you down. But you haven't touched the emotional part. And so you'll keep getting triggered over

and over and over.

So one of the ways that you know that you've done emotional clearing is the charge goes away. You don't get triggered in the same way. If you've done a dissociative dorsal vagal type thing, if that's, I don't know the language well enough to speak confidently, I'm trusting that that's what it is.

Yep.

You're going to find that you dissociate and don't feel and you can't think as clearly that you've lost contact with yourself. And I have a explanation where I talk about dissociation in terms of the sense of self, which is a separate module in the brain making contact with the different other modules. And when you dissociate, your sense of self stops taking input from that brain system. And usually there's a qualitative difference in how you feel. Most people can tell when they're dissociated.

Yeah, that's great. And then just to speak to Inga wrote in the comments, for anyone else who kind of felt overwhelmed during off that exercise, what would you recommend? What would you. What would you suggest?

Well, when we say overwhelmed, it usually means my emotional system was getting activated and overwhelming my intellectual sense of self. And I would say find a safe place where you can get overwhelmed and cry and express yourself and, you know, smack the bed or hug the pillow or, you know, wish that someone was there to hold you or ideally have someone hold you, but let yourself be overwhelmed. The worst thing that happens is that you cry. That's it. You cry and then it's over.

It.

Crying does stop. I've had clients who believe if they start crying, they'll never stop, but you stop. Is that helpful? Is that enough?

Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Okay, well, let's. Let's go to. There's a lot of raised hands. Let's start with Yanis, then Ritz, then Louise.

Hello.

Yeah, I'm really grateful.

That was really powerful. And I got really activated. I found three words that were really spot on. And I'm curious, what do we do with this, These beliefs that we. The sentences that we produced, how can we use them? I mean, for me, it was. I was mostly activated. I tried, but it was the overwhelm releasing.

Overwhelm.

I didn't get through the charts. So I'm wondering how to go about with it.

Yeah, the. The simplest answer is just go back to it and let yourself cry and experience it and explore. May be a single incident, it may be many incidences, but just let your body like, you know, you had 10 minutes here. You're not going to heal a lifelong pain in 10 minutes. You may have to go back to it for one long session or multiple short sessions. I, I literally say that, you know, every wound maybe has this much or this much or this much tears in it. And if you sob, if you sob, it goes down quickly. If you just trickle tears, it goes down slowly, but it's still going down.

Right?

And some people aren't capable of sobbing. They're too constructed. By the time you finish this work. Usually sobbing is accessible, but just do it. Cry and express and explore. Say the words out loud. It's important to say them out loud because then your emotional brain really feels like it's being heard. And if you can do it with somebody, it's even better. You can still do a lot of healing all by yourself though. That's helpful.

And you go about like sentence by sentence or you session by session with the words that you found out together.

Every. It sort of depends on, on how you want to do it. I have a process of creating what I call feeling beliefs, which is what I've given examples of. And that's usually feeling beliefs are extremely triggering and bring up all the core feelings. And then once you've done enough work with the feeling beliefs, they go. But feeling beliefs emerge naturally. So now that you've got this tool, every time you get upset. Okay, use the tool. Ask yourself, am I feeling, how do I feel treated by that person? Dismissed. Okay. How do I feel when I, when I'm dismissed? Insignificant and worthless, right? How do I feel when someone cuts me off at the. When I'm driving a car? Insignificant and worthless. Oh, there's a pattern there, you know, like that's a projection. Other people feel helpless, other people feel violated. So you're going to keep bumping into your unresolved issues in different contexts. And once you've done enough individual situations, you'll notice a pattern and that will allow for the articulation of a feeling belief. I am insignificant and worthless and no one will ever pay attention to me. I'm insignificant and worthless and no one will ever love me. I'm insignificant and worthless and no matter how much I try, I can't be a positive influence in the world. Everybody has different contexts and containers for their feelings. Once you find the feeling beliefs, it really magnifies the process, but they happen naturally. You can't really jump there. Just hang out with the feelings and they'll start emerging as you do this.

Enough. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So I just stick with the feeling. The licks and yes. Led to the yes.

This, this is what I would call a, an experiential based problem solving. It's not a rational problem solving process. It's an experiential associative problem solving. The problem is you're in pain. Hang out with the pain and let the associations come up. Cry and express them. Try and make sense of them later. Don't, don't worry about that, that the. The making sense comes naturally. But don't impose the intellect on the process until you're good enough that you can do it without actually interfering with the process.

Thank you so much.

Okay. Ritz.

Yeah.

So, thanks. This. This stuff makes even more sense the second and the third time you. You hear it. So. So I'm a little bit curious about how these things move over time. Right. So this is the third or fourth time that I've done this process. And the feelings aren't particularly static. The same ones don't keep showing up. So how situational are these? And what does it mean if different things start showing up at different stages? Does it mean that you're getting better? Does it mean that you've processed stuff? Or am I just doing it wrong?

Well, so first of all, this is bringing up a good point. When you do the psychograph, and you're not taking it in any context, you're just saying the words. We're looking to see what you're carrying with you and projecting onto the world so that when you're talking to someone and they glance at their watch for a second or their phone for a second and look back for them, they just like, oh, I've got an important meeting. I got to make sure you know, I'm not late. And they come back. But for you, that glance is just huge evidence that they're bored and you're insignificant and they're not getting anything from you. Okay? That's your history. Now, on the other hand, if someone's actually being dismissive and bored and not interested in you, if you feel insignificant or worthless or, you know, at least dismiss, that's appropriate. Right? What we're trying to do is get rid of the historical charge, but it doesn't mean that when people treat you in certain ways, you won't feel things. You should feel things. Right? And so my experience is, as you clear your charge and the big stuff kind of goes away when you do this, it's very likely that situations will come up. So if you've recently had an experience where you're insignificant, then that situation pops up and you're back basically doing the form for that situation, even if you didn't intend to, okay? So that means you just didn't process, you know, that, you know, any intense interpersonal encounter that you don't fully experience and express becomes part of your sense of self or worldview. Well, it's part of your sense of self or worldview, and it's asking you to please clear it from your sense of self and worldview. It's that simple. And you notice the word intense doesn't have to be that intense. It just has to be emotionally intense enough that it got through your barriers. Right.

Thank you. That's very helpful.

All right. I'm glad you're doing the process, and I hope it's benefiting you. Hello.

Hello.

I'm looking to different parts of the screen. As you see my head turning,

I can go there. I just have a question. You may have mentioned it at the start, and this is probably kind of similar to Janice. It's just what you're doing when this comes up. So obviously you speak all these sentences and then you feel however you feel in your body. So this is obviously come up and then you're adding words to it, I guess, to get rid of the historical charge. Is that what we're doing? Is that how you clear it? Or otherwise you're just left with this energy as such, it's like how we. Clearing that properly is that the process of adding the words or the clearing

is not so much to add the words, but to express the words.

Right.

So you want to find the words that resonate. So if you're upset and. And you go, I feel insignificant, I feel inadequate, I feel alone. And alone brings the tears. Hang out with I feel alone. And just allow yourself to feel alone and say it out loud and let yourself cry. And that will be the healing process. Saying out loud, I feel alone and crying. Now, in that context, you'll probably have memories of having been abandoned or left alone by people, and so spend time processing it in that context. So if your mother comes up or your friends from high school come up or grade school, process in that. And basically the dis. The energy gets discharged. And because you're giving it words, you begin integrating it into your narrative mind and it stops haunting you. You're literally embracing a part of your past that you've been running from. And as an adult, it's usually much less scary. So there's an integration that happens. It loses. You lose your fear of those memories and feelings. Because when you were small and you had an emotional reaction like this, and your sense of self is like this, you're overwhelmed by quite a bit when you're an adult and your sense of self is like this. You know, this emotional energy feels like it's this big, but it's only this big. Right. And so you don't get as overwhelmed when you come back as an adult, and the adults part of you will Start showing up more obviously when you go back to those memories.

Okay.

But the. This all happens with your emotional system updating itself. So crying and expressing the words. And ideally you're doing this where you're being held either physically or emotionally by someone else who cares about you. But not necessarily. Okay, I don't. I get a sense that I haven't answered your question.

Kind of. I'll probably go see for a second there the.

Yeah.

And say somebody is feeling alone. If they're feeling alone in that moment versus this historical aloneness, do they just process them both in that moment, or how are you differentiating the two?

Okay. And alone is. Alone is a hard one because if you're traumatized with feeling alone and you're crying all alone, it's really hard to heal from that because you're just re experiencing that you're alone in the world and no one cares or whatever it is. So in that case, you really do need to find somebody who will. Who you feel connected and cared enough with that you can share your feelings of being alone and update. And so this brings up a good point. Once you find a feeling belief, we have in any given day, 5, 10, 20 opportunities to heal our core wounds. But most of us, it doesn't happen because we've closed our emotional system down. We. We go about intellectually, and so those experiences bounce off our. Our intellect and don't get into the emotional. When you have a feeling belief and you say it out loud, you begin opening up your emotional system. So if you stop saying I'm alone in the world and no one cares and you're crying and then there's somebody there holding you or talking to you or caring about you, that part of you can get an updated impression and you cannot feel alone in the world. Now for other experiences like inadequacy or valued. We have enough memories of being valued, you know, or embraced or appreciated that when you open this up, those will sort of fall in there and you'll remember them near the end of the healing process. And sometimes you can explicitly bring up positive memories, but I don't recommend you do that until you kind of really opened up the negative stuff and have been sitting in it for a while. And usually the positive ones will find their way in there, but if they don't, try and remember positive ones. So one of the things is that crying by yourself will really get you from negative 10 on something to zero. But you can't feel connected and cared for it if there's nobody there or you don't have actual memories of people connecting and caring for you. Right. So then if you're just neutral, that's wonderful. Now you're in a position where you can go out and maybe find caring relationships that you wouldn't have been able to do before because you felt too insignificant or too inadequate or too worthless to actually pursue those relationships. Okay.

Yeah. Thank you. Can I get a tiny other one in just on that tears part? Say if somebody's not experiencing fear, it's safe for a number of them. I feel more of a. The collapse or just that, just a not bad feeling. Say like, do you just sit with us for half an hour or how do you know when you've made. You were like, okay, I've done my bit. First day on that.

Yeah. The collapse. The collapse in a sense is you're. You're getting overwhelmed and collapsing. Like you, you need to. It's a shutdown response. I've literally had people fall asleep on me while I'm doing therapy because they get triggered and they, as soon as they're getting emotionally activated, they fall asleep. It's a, it's any stress induced narcolepsy or emotionally induced narcolepsy. And that collapse is, is a deeply programmed response. And the only way to undo it is to try and sit in that liminal space of activation and collapse. You know, so here's the activation, here's the collapse. Try and just sit in that activation without the collapse and eventually you'll lose the fear and the collapse will go away and you'll be able to move into the actual material. Okay, I think we have time for one more question and that I've got. Well, I'll share now. My daughter, who's been doing this since she's 13 and she's like in her mid-30s now with a child, is an expert at the Nadura process and all of this stuff. She's going to be offering a, I think a six or eight week training in a few weeks in October and it's I think for two hours on a Thursday. There's a link that I think Johnny has that he'll share with you and he. The Nandura process is explicitly. It breaks down the stuff that we've been doing very intuitively into six steps. And it teaches you how to be with each of those six steps and really learn how to integrate this healing process into your system. So it's a just a little bit more structured way of approaching this. And then once you've got the structure, it goes back into Automated mode. But sometimes people shut down like the experiential part. If you can't do the experiential part, you're dissociating. There's different things that you can do. So nadura is notice, experience, differentiate, express, hang out with the resonance until it resolves and then at the end you take action. So that's just a bigger container that we teach this in. I didn't have time to go through all of that because you got the taste of what it means to have resonance and that's the important part. So that's a teaching that's coming up. There'll be a link that Johnny has. We also have a self paced course on the website where you can do

this just on your own.

It's constantly being upgraded. We just added some experiential exercises to it. I'm about to do another round. Adding some more guidance and camaraderie on your journey right now. It starts off a little academic, but it's still got really good content and teaches you everything you need to know. So I think we've got time for another question or two. I, I don't mind going over a little bit if, if it sort of brings closure to everything.

Okay, well thank you so much. I'll include the. I've just posted the link in the chat and I'll also post all of the links to both the self based course and your cohort which I believe starts on October 19th.

Yes, I think so on the website

and that'll be in the, the replay as well. So for any of you that have to go at 12:30 on the dot, feel free to head off. Thank you for being here. And then it looks like we've got two final questions. So thank you Doug for going over time. All right, James, floor is yours.

Thanks Charlie. If you can't hear me, let me know. But I think it should be okay just to follow off the last question. I put it into the chat as well. I can feel like a lot of times like an activation of an emotion coming up, be it sadness or something like that. And I can't quite get it to shift and it's very rarely that I will get like when I mean shift, I mean like if I feel tears, I don't cry completely. Like I don't get to a place of like having shifted the full thing and I find that my body starts to like dissociate, shut down and I'll experience it as like muscle tension. And I've noticed it like today especially probably the most I ever have. It's weird, like my whole head and my jaw is like really sore. Like I'm sitting here and just like I feel like I've been like clenching like this all day and I don't know how to kind of. Is it to get my body safe enough? Is it with other people to like really feel out fully? Because even with like certain somatic things, like even somatic therapies I'll do, I'll get like a bit of tears sometimes maybe, and it won't. It would just be like I can, I can just feel that it's just not quite full. And maybe I haven't got to the full belief or something.

But yeah, I. I wish there was an easy process to solve your dilemma. It's the result of years and decades of conditioning so that as the emotional brain starts to activate, muscle tension kicks in. And we know from studies of learned helplessness, if you take a dog and put them in a kennel with a gate like a little fence, that they can easily jump over and you shock them. They'll jump around and then jump over the. To the other side where there's no shock. And then they'll rest. And then 10 minutes later you turn on, you know, a sound, a bell, a tone, and the floor gets shocking again and they jump around, you know, they jump over the little fence and they get to the safe side and they learn that when the tone gets turned on, they just jump and they avoid the shock. So your body has basically got that conditioning sequence where you feel the emotional activation and the shutdown happens. And so part of what you're going through is you're more afraid of the feelings than you're feeling the feelings. And so you need to hang out with that. I'm afraid to feel my feelings and just explore where that takes you. What does it mean if I feel my feelings? You know, it means I'm vulnerable and somebody's going to hurt me. Like just. You have to unpack why you have such a strong conditioned response to feeling your feelings. And that will be the trauma that will then release your ability to get to all the other stuff. That's the nutshell thing. We could spend hours on nuances, but if you follow that, it should take

you to the right place.

I'm afraid to feel my feelings, and that's the dissociative response and the muscle tension response. Unpack that and you'll find some freedom to then go into the stuff.

Yeah, that's really. That really resonates. And I, I feel for me, I don't know if this is true as well, but I think fatigue is a big one where I don't want to feel something or there's a fear coming up, and I will get really tired, and I'm just like, I'm not. I've had enough sleep. I'm not tired now. It's. It's a. It's a protective response. And it's just.

Like I said, I've watched people fall asleep in on my chair, and I think that's the essence of depression. But, you know, it's that shutdown response. But we have to get out of bed. So we walk around with no energy. So we got time for one more.

Thank you, by the way.

Just. Just wanted to add a very brief curiosity to that, Doug. I. I found that for me, expressing anger can actually be the thing that kind of allows me to get through to the underlying tears. And is that something that you've seen in your process too? There's times when I can be almost stuck in the. In the tears and that the. The anger needs to shift.

You know what? Anything that allows emotional expression. So anger, if you get into, like, cathartic release work, you almost always anger turns to tears. There's something called laughing yoga, where if you just start 10 minutes a day laughing and letting your emotional system out. Almost everybody reports crying and sobbing at some point of. During laughing yoga. So anything that activates and allows the emotional system out, whether it's anger or laughter, happiness, once it's open, it'll do what it needs to do to heal.

Yeah. Beautiful. Okay, last question from Mud Floor is yours. Assuming you're still here. If you're not here.

Oh, there's mud. You're gonna have to speak, though. Mud

gonna have to unmute you.

Sorry.

Yeah. My question was actually along the same

lines as what you've been talking about,

which is what happens when you get stuck in shutdown.

And so you've been talking about that. So go ahead, jump to someone else.

Okay.

Okay, great. Well, that. That is a wrap then, I believe. I feel like everyone just take one collective. Collective sigh. Ah. And thank you so much again to Doug. As I mentioned, all of the. The links to learning more, also the book I believe that you have available on your website as well. I'll link that too.

I've got a Nadura book. Yeah, It's a nice little guide for guiding you through this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you so much. Let's close with everyone unmuting and saying. Thank you so much, Doug.

Thanks so much, Doug.

Thank you so much.