Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Heal Yourself From Past Trauma, with Dr. James Gordon

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

People who have experienced trauma in their past are often affected in their present. Many of them think that their only options for treatment is to spend long hours on a psychiatrist’s couch. But what if you could conduct your own treatment, on your own time, in order to process your trauma? In the third episode with “The Transformation” author Dr. James Gordon, Dr. Daniel Amen, Tana Amen, and Gordon give you some practical tips to take control of your care and your life.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your 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 nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are still talking to our friend, Dr. Gordon, and we're talking about his book, Transformation, and it's just so interesting. I'm just so enjoying this. Dr. Gordon specializes in trauma, and we left off the last podcast talking about something

you called expressive meditation. You're making a distinction for me about the difference between martial arts, which I love, because it just clears my brain of whatever else I was thinking. But you were distinctly talking about the difference with why you have patients do expressive meditation in an intentional disorganized, but it's not an organized pattern like martial arts. So can you finish explaining why that's important, what it does for you? Sure.

Martial arts is more of an exercise in mindfulness as well as the physical exercise. And it's beautiful and helpful. And expressive meditations understand that when we've been in the freeze response that we were talking about before, when our body is shut down or we've gone limp and our mind is stuck, we're ruminating all the time, we're removed from our physicality, we feel distant from our body, somehow we need to break up those fixed patterns. And one of the easiest ways to break them up is by shaking them up. And the easiest way to shake them up is quite literally by shaking. And what happens if you stand up and shake for five or six or ten minutes is the body starts to loosen up and emotions that have been buried start to come up. So I'll tell you a little

story of working in Haiti after the earthquake there. You may remember there were 90 nursing students killed during the earthquake in Haiti. One of the buildings collapsed. And I was doing a workshop with about 100 nursing students. This is about a year after the earthquake. And talking about trauma, teaching them soft-bellied breathing, talking about fight or flight, talking some about the freeze response. Then I got everybody up shaking, these 90, 17, 18, 19-year-old girls, and me and a couple of members of my team. And within two minutes, at least half the girls are weeping, crying, crying. And we continue the shaking for about five or six minutes. And then we pause for a couple minutes,

which is a kind of mindful pause to become aware of the breath and the body. The girls are still crying. Then I put on Bob Marley's Three Little Birds. And so all the girls are dancing. Now girls are crying. They're laughing. They're dancing. Afterwards, I say, as I always say, what was that like for you? And the girls say, this is the first time we've been able to cry since the earthquake. We've had to be strong for the little children, for our parents,

for our grandparents. We're nurses. We have to be strong for everybody else. It felt so good to cry, to let go. And it's also the first time that we've been able to laugh and the first time that we've danced in a year and we're girls. And then one of them stands up and she says, and Jim, we love Bob, Bob Marley, but we are Haitian girls. We have wonderful Haitian music. So I said, great, next time we'll use Haitian music. But what's happening is that these emotions that they buried because of their trauma, that they've kept it under wraps because they had to move ahead. They felt they had to help other people. They're able to release the emotions. And by the end of it, they're feeling like teenage girls again. They've recovered themselves. So they're able to cry. They're

able to laugh. They're able to dance, they're able to laugh, they're able to dance, they're able to joke around with me, which they have not been for a year. The trauma has completely overwhelmed them. And I've seen this while I'm here in the VA in Orlando. We're working with veterans and people who are training people to work with veterans. And we see this all the time with vets, that they are suppressing all these terrible things that have happened to them. They start shaking and dancing and it starts coming up and they start feeling back in their bodies again for the first time maybe in years. So these expressive techniques are really important

and the combination of the soft belly breathing as the antidote to the fight or flight, the shaking and dancing antidote to freezing sets the stage in which people are balanced enough to be able to learn and effectively use all the other self-care techniques that I teach in the transformation. So, you know, one of the things that brings up for me is the spec scans we do show activity in the cerebellum really well. And I think of the cerebellum as the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain. It gets no respect. It's 10% of the brain's volume, but it has 50% of the brain's neurons. And there's a whole literature, actually much of it developed from Harvard, on its role in emotion, mood, cognition. And what we often see is low activity in the cerebellum. And so I'm thinking by you getting people up, dancing, moving, it's actually activating their central processing unit. Because when the cerebellum's

low, we don't process information as quickly or as well. And doing coordination exercises is activating. Because there's this dance between the cerebellum and the frontal lobes that you're probably calming their emotional brain, activating their thoughtful brain. It's just so interesting for me to think about it from an imaging perspective, but I love that. That is interesting, yes. What are some other techniques? We've talked about breathing. We've talked about dancing. We've talked about hand warming that people can do if they grew up in trauma or they had a single incidence. And I know in the book you talk about that's really very different. Well, but the techniques, the approach is the same. I think this is an important point,

that whatever the source of trauma, that the approach for helping people to move through that trauma, to learn and grow through it and beyond it, and to become who they're meant to be is the same approach. Whether I'm working with veterans here or traumatized kids, kids who've grown up in abusive families, the same approach works and seems to be able to mobilize the same emotional and brain functions. Now, the other techniques, one of the ones that I really like personally is guided imagery. I don't know how much you've used that.

Oh, I do meditation with guided imagery all the time. So I don't know if you knew Hal Wayne when he was at Walter Reed. Sure. I knew Hal. But Hal was my teacher. And I spent a month elective learning hypnosis. And so guided imagery was... Imaging just sort of fell into my lap later. My natural bent as a psychiatrist, hypnosis, guided imagery, biofeedback, teaching people

skills, not just giving them pills. And so I love guided imagery. It's so helpful. So powerful. Guided imagery, as you know, is enormously powerful. And we use it in a couple of ways. One is to help control physiological functions. And anybody can do that simply by sitting quietly, breathing deep. The idea is if you imagine you're in that state and you imagine yourself biting into a lemon, and people can do this either maybe they've done it right now or they can do it at home, what you notice is you start salivating and puckering up. That's the power of an image to create a physiological response that's out of our conscious control. So that's number one.

And then we use imagery to create a safe place. This is very important when you're traumatized, is to imagine you're in a safe or comfortable place. And I've done this with people in the middle of wars, as well as with people who are in abusive relationships who feel there is no safety where they are. They can imagine a safe place. It gives them some relief from the situation and then uh once people get a little bit comfortable with imagery

you can teach them to use a guided imagery to make contact with what we call what i call in the transformation a wise guide which it, you can think of it as intuition, imagination, or unconscious, or greater knowing, deeper wisdom, whatever you want to call it. But that's the part of ourself that can help inform us about things that we need to know that are not easily available to our conscious mind. And this is a very powerful part of healing. In the transformation, I describe people whose wise guides, the guides they imagine, help them save their lives, give them ways, reasons, and perspectives on their life that make it seem no longer reasonable to kill themselves. A wise guide can show them how

to get out of situations that have felt impossible to solve. Because in many ways, that imagination, that intuition knows more than our conscious mind knows. And all of us can use those techniques. So that's just one of many techniques. That's so powerful. Because at first because at first I thought I can't meditate, I don't know how to do it. But when I finally figured it out and started doing it and started doing guided imagery, it's so powerful that within a week, like I noticed a massive change in my physiology, in my mindset, and just how I feel. And it's like exercise now. When I do it, I feel good. When I don't do it, I don't feel right. It's just, it's like exercise now. When I do it, I feel good. When I don't do it, I don't feel right. It's just, it's that powerful.

How can people- Right. What I find is when I'm not doing something, I ask my wise guide, what should I do? Right. Exactly. Exactly. How can people learn more about your work? They can pick up your book, The Transformation, Discovering Wholeness and Healing healing after trauma. How else, Jim? They can look at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine website, cmbm.org, charlimarybettymary.org.

They can learn about the work. There are videos of some of these techniques are available. They can take part, find somebody near them who is leading mind-body skills groups where they can work with somebody in person to learn the techniques I teach in the transformation. If they're interested in learning this material to work with other people, they can come to our training programs. We have training programs in the U.S. as well as around the world. And they can see the work that we're doing. They can read about the research we've done on it. They can read articles from the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post about what we do and look at

the videos. I think the videos are very, very interesting to see people using these techniques and making major changes in their lives. Great. When we come back, I have a very important question for you about my wife. Stay with us on the Brain Warriors Way podcast, and I promise it's not going to start a war. Uh-oh. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. Uh-oh. supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.