Change Your Brain Every Day - Can Childhood Trauma Lead to Chronic Illnesses? PT.3 - Dr. Wayne Jonas

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

In the third and final episode of a series with Dr. Wayne Jonas, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen discuss how childhood trauma factors in to chronic conditions. As Dr. Jonas outlines in his new book, “How Healing Works,” taking an integrative approach and a patient in the driver’s seat mentality, you can find ways to heal yourself to enjoy the things that matter most.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. So we are back with Dr. Jonas, and I'm so excited because in the last episode, we touched on doing things that make you happy and how that might be able to help your healing so when you're happy obviously happiness is going to help your healing when you're doing things that make you sad that's not gonna help healing we talked

a little bit about that good for you right right because cupcakes make me happy yeah but they're not good for me right that's feel better now later that's not quite what we were talking about we're talking about sort of the physical component of doing things that are empowering to you and making you happy. I brought up the example of doing karate even though I was told not to do karate. And I agree, maybe I needed to modify karate because of my back, my chronic back pain. But for me, doing karate, the worst day in karate is better than the best day in yoga because for my brain and how I function, that makes me happy. When I don't do it, I start to feel lethargic and old and I don't feel good and then my

back pain is worse. So I brought that up to Dr. Jonas and he said something so interesting I want him to touch on it in this episode. All right. Because it's interesting for healing. So welcome back, Dr. Wayne Jonas, the author of How Healing Works, pick it up. It's a very important book if you're struggling with a chronic health condition or you don't want to get a chronic health condition

this book can help you it also makes a great gift for anybody you know that is struggling with a health care issue yeah it also makes also makes a great, great gift for your doctor, by the way, because doctors want to try to do this. And I actually have a section in the appendix where I teach doctors how to actually do these kinds of integrative health visits and ask the right questions to really get at the components of health and healing that we know determine health. And on my website, drwaynjonas.com, we're populating it with all kinds of tools that can help patients and doctors actually do this together right now. They don't have to be specialists in, you know, anything. They need to learn about it. They need to get educated about it.

But we're trying to give them tools that they can already start to get at these areas. Now the question of happiness came up, and I actually wrote an entire chapter in the book on that. It's chapter eight. And I call it a little something different. I call it the mental and the spiritual components. And I talk about what matters to a patient and what I call the meaning response, the response that occurs from your body when you do something that truly is meaningful for yourself. The study that we were talking about at the break was a National Academy of Medicine Institute of Medicine study that came out in 2001.

It was a landmark study, had a huge impact, called Crossing the Quality Chasm. And it is what put the movement of patient-centered care on the map. You've heard of patient-centered care. You've heard of things like the patient-centered medical home and this type of thing as a framework for managing chronic disease.

And one of their primary recommendations was the patient should be in the driver's seat, which means the patient actually is telling you what they need and what matters to them. And then you bring in the evidence, you bring in the support to help them achieve that type of thing. Okay. And their health, because that's what brings the motivation back. You know, when they look at compliance, even with regular medications, only about 50% of people will comply with the medications as their doctors prescribe it. They're not even taking it the way it is. If you look at behavioral changes, it's worse. It's only about 5% of people actually engage in the behavioral

changes. So the only way to solve that problem is to connect it to what's meaningful for them. They have to say, yes, I like this, and in your words, this makes me happy, this brings me joy, perhaps is another way to do it. And then bring the evidence and the behavior support into that so that they can be successful at accomplishing it. Right. Once they're successful at accomplishing it,

then it's a partnership. And it is patient-centered. The patient's in the driver's seat. And the physician in the healthcare system is an assistant. They're facilitators. They're educators of that process. No longer are they throwing agents at them,

but the patient has found their own agency with whatever they do. Well, and we know that when people do things that make them happy, right, or it's meaningful to them, it releases chemicals in your body that reduce the cortisol, that reduce those bad chemicals that are increasing inflammation and pain and things like that. When you're doing things that are stressful, it does the opposite. It increases it increases your pain so i like that but i remember stopping the thing that makes me happy because several doctors told me i had to and within a short time i started to feel old and lethargic and like i didn't feel good and like i was getting older or something um i did have one doctor who told me

do what you love just modify it just do it so that you don't get hurt. And that gave me this green light. And I'm like, oh, that makes sense. Just modify it. Okay. So I started to do that. And immediately I started to feel better. So just be smart about how you do it. Right? Yes. So I only have about nine minutes and we want to talk about the impact of childhood trauma and chronic pain. And one of the things we've talked about on this show before is that when you experience childhood trauma, it actually changes the microbiome and increases the risk of inflammation in your body. Also increases the risk of anxiety and depression. So talk to us, Dr. Jonas, on your experience between chronic pain and childhood trauma.

You know, this is a major area and I ask all of my patients, not just with chronic pain, but with any chronic major disease about how their childhood was. In chronic pain, it is huge. In PTSD, it is huge. But we now know, and the data is very strong on this, that having had adverse childhood experiences, that's the term that's used, ACEs, in childhood, and it can be physical abuse, it can be emotional abuse, it can be neglect, it can be a variety of forms, increases the risk for not only chronic pain, but even physical conditions such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, PTSD, et cetera. And so it is a major factor. And the earlier you have the trauma, the more it formulates pathways in the brain and in the body that make it difficult actually to heal.

Now, you can heal afterwards, and there are ways to do it, but it actually becomes more difficult in those areas because it hampers the ability to actually engage in this. I actually write about this in chapter seven of my book on the social and emotional components of health and healing. You know, there's some wonderful, I'll give you an example. I had a woman in chronic pain who had been through all kinds of treatments, alternative and conventional treatments.

And I asked her how her childhood was. Nobody had asked her that before, believe it or not. And she had had a very traumatic, difficult childhood that she had walled off on one side and completely ignored and separated from the rest of herself. So she was no longer whole. Now, when you're undergoing trauma, that's an important survival method, right? You better learn how to do that. But later on, if you continue to do that, you're not a whole person because that's part of you. That's part of your life. And you need to be able to reconcile that.

And I write about the research in my book that shows when you do reconcile that, when you open up to those areas, a huge impact on your biology, your immune system, your function, your healthcare utilization and chronic pain. So this woman, I asked her about that and she said, you know, I had a very difficult childhood. She wasn't ready to go there on her first visit. So I said, that's fine. We know it's there. Let's put it in the parking lot and then let's look at techniques to do that. Now, to get at this issue, there's some great work on this. And Daniel, you have been one of the pioneers

in mapping out what happens in the brain when these kinds of traumas occur, psychological, physical traumas in the brain and how that then formulates pathways in the brain that then modify what people can do and can't do later on. And I think your work with the PET scanning, the brain imaging, maps so nicely with a man by the name of Bruce Perry from the Childhood Trauma Institute in Texas, who's actually

now mapped out pathways that you can capture that complement brain imaging in those areas, specifically to deal with childhood trauma. And there are growing centers like the Center for Health and Equity and Trauma run by Audrey Stillerman. I just talked to there yesterday, actually, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. They have an entire center for healing trauma and they bring in modalities

of whole person care to do that. And what they find is that people can reconstruct those pathways, as you know, and you've seen it on your images. They can actually, the neuroplasticity can actually grow different parts of the brain that were damaged in those early times. And they can do it through the same things we've been talking about for other chronic illnesses, through movement, through nutrition, through appropriate supplements, and also by opening up and reintegrating it into your life. One of the things I recommend on my website, for example, and I recommended for this woman who had had the childhood trauma because she was still very hesitant to go there, was journaling. And there's now work showing that simply writing about or talking about old traumatic issues in a safe environment has huge therapeutic effect.

It helps you become more whole and it changes your entire physiology and your brain in those areas. Especially if you do it from the adult perspective, sort of supervising the child or, you know, how would a good mother help this child? So I love the whole, we just did a podcast on it, post-traumatic growth. So if you look at a bell-shaped curve, about 10% of people exposed to a serious trauma will develop PTSD, but 80% won't. So what's the difference between them? And as you mentioned, it's sort of the brain you bring into trauma or the life you bring into the trauma will determine the life that comes out of it. But about 10% of people on the other end of the trauma will determine the life that comes out of it. But about 10% of people on the other end of the spectrum will get this thing Dr. Martin Slegman calls post-traumatic growth, where they have really developed better relationships,

spiritual purpose, they feel more confident about themselves. If I can survive that, I can survive anything. And so I love what you said. Journaling is really important. I would just add, put your adult self in there and how can you make sense out of it? My early research, the earliest research I engaged in was on adult children of alcoholics. It was an issue near and dear to my heart because someone I really cared about grew up in a very violent alcoholic home. And that has generational impact, just I think as you were saying. But it was so important to go back through some of the traumas, but from an adult perspective. I think you're absolutely right.

And I see this all the time with service members who have had a past history of trauma. Now they get deployed and they're in war, so they get exposed to trauma again. And many of them, especially those who have had a past history of trauma, will have post-traumatic stress problems in those areas. A proportion of, will have post-traumatic stress problems in those areas. A proportion of them will have post-traumatic growth, as you've described.

You can enhance that process by putting them into a safe, nurturing, loving environment, and then working with them to reintegrate those traumatic experiences, including the past experiences, into their life. There's a wonderful book about how to do this. It's written by a good friend of mine, Joe Bobrow. It's called Waking Up From War. And it is about, he's a psychologist and actually a minister, and he sets up retreats, four and five day retreats for veterans that have

psychological depression, PTSD, a variety of traumatic struggles. And he shows that in this loving environment, when they reintegrate in a safe environment under supervision in these areas, they can launch into this post-traumatic growth area and flourish afterwards. And it is literally Waking Up for More. That's the title of his book. I love it. I write about it in my book and describe how it happens.

And the evidence is there that you can address these things even in adult life. So if you have chronic pain, one of the questions to ask yourself is did I have a difficult childhood are there issues that I haven't dealt with or I need to deal with in order to settle down very important areas of my brain that were over firing since childhood we published a study goodness two years ago now on 21,000 people looking at the difference between PTSD and TBI, traumatic brain injury. And with PTSD, we saw the emotional brain working too hard, where with traumatic brain injury, we saw deficits, so decreases in activity. And of course, a number of people have both.

But calming down those circuits, because when they work too hard, if you hurt, you can't stop thinking about the hurt, which will just devastate you. So as somebody who experienced childhood trauma and has had chronic pain, I know people ask me on my page all the time, what's the one thing I can do to get started? And, you know, we've both often said, you know,

do it all. And, and here's the thing. I don't want to sound flippant when I say that. I must not be very, uh, special, or maybe I'm extra special because I can't do one thing. I am one of those people who has to do it all. I do the supplements. I work really hard on my sleep. I work hard on my nutrition. I meditate. I've done therapy. I'm like, I'm not kidding about trying to get better and get out of that pain. Um, and it works when you do it all. Okay. It really helps. But how do I answer that question for people who are trying to get started and they feel overwhelmed? What would you recommend? What would you recommend for just getting started? It doesn't mean you don't need to do it all and incorporate it as

a lifestyle. How do you get started? What's the one thing? We only have a minute left. So in a nutshell, Wayne, what would you say? So you're an example of an empowered patient and many people aren't quite ready for that. And so you find one thing. What I do is I find one thing and then I support them. Often I bring in a health coach that will help them accomplish that one thing. The one thing that matters to them brings them joy. Okay. I like that. If they then experience that change and they can do that, it almost doesn't matter what it is they're doing. Right. Okay. Because if you do one thing, you're likely to do two. They move to that. They have to pick it. So once they master that, then you. Now they experience the empowerment.

She did one thing and then she did another thing. So people don't have to feel like they have to do it all because there are not very many people like you. And when we first met, one of the first gifts I gave you was 10 sessions of EMDR. EMDR. I'm like, you think I'm screwed up. Dr. And it just made a huge difference. Well, we have to stop.

How healing works. Dr. Wayne Jonas,, we have to stop. How healing works. Dr. Wayne Jonas, we'll have you back. What a joy. That was awesome. To spend time with you. And I know our community. And you gave me permission to do karate. I like it.

All right, my friend. Take care. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month. Thank you.