Change Your Brain Every Day - Stop Suffering: How To Overcome PTSD

Episode Date: January 2, 2018

Trauma can occur in many forms and degrees of intensity, but whether we remember it consciously or not, the past is always living in the present. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen dive into an examination of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Learn about the many different faces of PTSD, along with ways you can stop suffering today.

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're back and we're going to talk about PTSD in the brain today. Really quickly, I want to read this because I love this. Wellness coaches, new fave. So it says, I love, love Wellness Coaches, new fave. So it says, I love, love, love sharing these podcasts with my clients as they are short to the point and touch on such a variety of issues.

Parenting, CBT, marriage, fitness, et cetera. Thank you. I can't wait to read and then probably share your new children's book. Your children's book is awesome, by the way. Captain Snout and the Superpower Questions. Really cute. Yeah, I love the stories of parents and grandparents saying that the kids know all the words, and when they try to skip a page to get the kids to know, they're like, no. Who wasn't? Somebody just said recently, please don't bring any more of Dr. Amen's books into

the house because they can't get, because they're not short enough and they can't get away with, like, not reading every single page. It was hilarious. So it was very, very funny. So I love that. So let's talk about PTSD. So first of all, we should talk about – a lot of people think PTSD is just, like, for soldiers or it's just for people who have been through a war. But it's really for a lot of different types of wars. So let's tell people what that's about. PTSD in the brain from people who had traumatic brain injury.

So emotional trauma from physical trauma with high levels of accuracy with SPECT. So the problem there is because they would treat them the same, right? Because the symptoms were often the same. The symptoms overlap significantly. And if you treat people with PTSD like they had traumatic brain injury, you'll actually ruin them and vice versa. So that happened with Denny recently. Oh, which we should talk about.

We're going to have Denny on the show. Yeah, we're going to have him on the show. So it was many years ago after I started doing his scans that my assistant, who had actually been traumatized, she noticed the diamond pattern in the brain. And she said, when people have this pattern, that's the cingulate is lit up, the top point of the diamond, their basal ganglia, the side points, the thalamus, the bottom point. When that's lit up, just ask them if they have trauma. And I remember my first case, he had the diamond pattern. And I said, well, have you ever had trauma? And he said, emotional trauma. And he said, no. And I learned from people with brain injuries, you couldn't ask

once. You had to ask them like 10 times, you ever fall out of a tree off a fence, dive into a shallow pool in a car accident, sports concussion, whatever. And just like I did with you. Right. And so I started asking him, well, have you ever been robbed, raped, in a fire? No, no, no. Do you ever have a time when you thought you were going to lose your life? And he said, no.

And then he said, yes. And I said, what happened? He said, I was 10 years old. It was in the San Fernando Valley where we're going to put a new clinic. I'm so excited about that in Encino, which is where I grew up. And in Encino, there are a lot of movie stars live there. And one of his friends was the child of a movie star who collected exotic animals. And he said, I went over his house. They had a lion.

The lion got loose while I was there and actually had me pinned. Oh, my gosh. And they shot the lion when the lion was on top of me. Oh, my gosh. And they shot the lion when the lion was on top of me. Oh, my God. I looked at him and I went, how did you forget that? That's crazy. Because that actually seems pretty intense. Traumatic, yeah.

And he had nightmares for a long time about that. So in defense of this guy, so I think it's a defense mechanism that we use to stay sane. It's called repression. Right. When you come from an environment that's a little wacky, I call it garden variety dysfunctional. Call it what you want.

But I think that we do that to normalize and be able to survive and function. Because I remember when I first met you, you were talking to me about some of my physical issues. I was really sick as a kid. I was, not kidding, kind of sick all the time as a kid. And had not normal stuff. I had upper and lower GIs when I was four years old. And so the first thing you did is start asking me, well, what happened when you were four?

And I'm like, oh my gosh, don't start shrinking me. And so I'm like, nothing happened when I was four years old. I was fine, I wasn't raped, I wasn't molested, I wasn't like, and so you're like, okay. And so anyways, we were just talking for a little while and all of a sudden it comes out. And I didn't even like connect the two, but we were talking a little while later

and I started telling you about when my uncle was murdered in a drug deal and the police came to the door and I remember the whole thing, my mom screaming and my grandmother screaming and they both fell to the floor and I just, I was completely freaked out. And my other uncle was a heroin addict and his friends were there and he was just a mess. And I mean, the whole thing was just,

it was horrifying, right? And I didn't, I was just sort of disappeared into, like no one was there to sort of take care of me. And so, and then two weeks later, I ended up with these upper and lower GIs. And you just kind of looked at me and you're like, and you don't think there's any connection? And that's just like one of like many stories. But the way I often described it growing up was that there was like, it's always like there was a tiger around the corner. You kind of never

knew when something was going to happen. I remember one of my early stories, one of my early memories was my mom and I coming home from the movies, which we didn't get to do very often. But we went to the movies and we came home and there was someone in our house, like robbing our house. We had a burglar in our house. My mom grabs a shotgun and chases the guy through the house and she shoots the shotgun out the back.

Who does that? Nobody shoots a shotgun out the back window. You know, and she's like, well, I wasn't actually aiming it at him. I was shooting it into this flower bed just to scare him. And I'm like, now, as I'm older, I'm like, you can't do that. You're actually still reacting to it. Okay, well, anyways.

So life was always just sort of like, what's going to happen next? There's this tiger around the corner, and what's going to happen next? So it was always just- And that can happen with one event, one big event, like hearing about your uncle being murdered and witnessing what happened with your mom and grandmother. Or it can happen with hundreds of small events. So when I was little, because my bladder wasn't developing properly, I wet my bed probably until I was like nine years old. And what that meant is I woke up every morning panicked.

And that's hard, especially when you have siblings. Because, you know, you just never knew. And nobody was terrible to me. And my mom was great. But it's to be embarrassed every day of your life, just not knowing. So what it does is it changes your nervous system to heighten it, to always watch for what is that next bad thing that is going to happen. So it can be a big thing or something that many people would think of not that big. I mean, I would think of it as big, which is why I'm really great at treating kids who

have enuresis. But I still notice every, like, I still am looking for the bad thing. Like, I'm still like, we're walking and I notice walking and I notice if someone's drunk, if they're following someone. I mean, I notice someone who looks like wrong to me. I notice everything wrong. One of the things that happened to us last year is we were walking Aslan, our white German shepherd on Corona Del Mar beach. So Corona Del Mar is one of the ritziest places in the world. But on the beach, sometimes there's a little bit of a seedy element. And, you know, my favorite place to walk is right on the jetty, right next to the water.

So you started talking about it, my heart started beating faster. And, you know, as we go back, it's a little dark and you go, let's turn around. And I'm like, no, let's go to the end. I'm like, I don't want to go to the end. And you were right, I was wrong. And two pit bulls. Awfully, they were fighting dogs. Came and attacked our dog.

And one of them bit you. I got bit in the process. And I almost went to jail because I went psycho. When I get scared, this psycho person comes out of me that's not human. So that's like the whole mama bear on steroids thing. I went completely insane. With his gangbangers all tatted up. And I didn't care.

And I could tell, I was like, I had an out of body experience. And I'm trying to calm her down. No, there was no calming me down. And I'm having this out of body experience going, I know I should probably not be saying what I'm saying to this guy. And it didn't matter.

I couldn't shut myself up. But what happened was I got triggered. And then recently, some lady wasn't controlling her dog, another pit bull, and she wasn't controlling him. And he almost bit my dog. But it wasn't nearly as extreme as that situation where we actually got attacked. And I lost my mind. And I was not nice to her. Not even a little bit.

Okay. So the past is always living in the present. And if that's you, because 30 million people grew up in alcoholic homes in the United States. PTSD affects about 7% of the population. And the next podcast, we're going to talk about post. But I want to add. Wait, wait. We're going to talk about post-traumatic growth. This one, we're going to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder.

And people who have PTSD, the symptoms are often flashbacks of the event, nightmares. They can have panic attacks. Sometimes they can you get triggered really easily. Like future is shortened. Okay. They may feel numb. Yes, they can be easily triggered. If anything, like what happened in the past and, and the brain is a sneaky organ.

The brain works through association. So if you were attacked in a park, sometimes just being in another park, you'll start feeling panicky. If it was storming out, sometimes just a storm will trigger the panic. If you were at a place and you smelled gardenias, and all of a sudden the smell of gardenias

is now associated with the trauma. So it can be anything that's related to the trauma. So let me connect this, because I've heard other people say this. I'm thinking if someone's had PTSD, they're experiencing the same thing. So I was attacked when I was 15 by a person who tried to rape me and I got away. I never connected that to the dog attack. However, I actually did some NLP on this because I was so triggered. I was so triggered. I couldn't talk about it without shaking.

Neurolinguistic program. Yes, neurolinguistic. But I couldn't talk about it without shaking. Neuro-linguistic programming. Yes, neuro-linguistic. But I couldn't talk about it without shaking and, like, getting so wound up. So I did some NLP with it to help sort of dilute that feeling and, like, take that trigger away. And it helped a lot. And it was during that time that I put together that my reaction was exactly this. The only time I've ever felt that same way was when I got attacked when I was 15. And then again, when the dog almost bit Aslan on the beach, that next time, how long did it take me?

It took me 10 minutes to calm down. And I went off on that lady, because when I get scared, that's my reaction, my reaction is to go crazy. So I went off on her and I'm shaking. So that reaction, I noticed a pattern. I have that reaction, I noticed a pattern. I have that reaction every time. Yeah.

No, there's actually a technique in hypnosis, which I'm a huge fan of, called hypnoanalysis, where you go back to the trauma. You remember what you were thinking and feeling. And then you go back. You actually regress them to the first time in their life where they were thinking or feeling that. I treated a 16-year-old boy, maybe I haven't told you the story. He had panic attacks and so I put him in a trance and last panic attack, what were you thinking or feeling? I can't breathe.

I'm like, okay, think of yourself getting younger and smaller, smaller and younger to the first time in your life when you couldn't breathe. And he went back to when he was four years old and he had a piece of steak stuck in his throat. And someone had to do the Heimlich maneuver. But whenever you go back to the first event, you want to make sure it's actually the first event. Right. And so after we cleared that out, you can breathe, you're healthy, you're grateful because someone was there to help you, you don't need to be anxious and nervous about that anymore,

so you clean that out, and then you go, now I want you to get smaller and younger. And is there any other time in your life when you couldn't breathe? His mother's in the room. And he starts choking. and he says it's dark and it's wet and I'm going to die

because I can't breathe he was born with the cord wrapped around his neck and his mother starts crying because that's exactly what happened and even though he didn't have language then His mother starts crying because that's exactly what happened. And even though he didn't have language then, there was part of his soul that remembered it.

So the trauma state. When he was four and he couldn't breathe again, that reinforced the trauma. Triggered again when he was 16 and he started having panic attacks and after that hypnosis session he never had a panic attack that's very similar to what they did in NLP with me it's not the same but a similar type of technique where you go back and you sort of clean up what happened in the past that interest really interesting so I like that he was such a special kid and you I saw him three times and he was better. I like it. So lots to do. If you've had trauma in your life, we're both huge fans of NLP.

We're huge fans of EMDR, eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing, tapping, havening. You can learn all about those if you Google them. Hypnosis. But there's so much help. And you want to talk about Denny just a little bit. Yeah, so Denny, he was a Marine, and I actually met him when I went on a survival training weekend with my daughter. Because you've been assaulted.

Yes, I'm telling you. I have 11 cameras around my house. So this is how PTSD comes around. But my way of dealing with it is to be a fighter. My way of dealing with it. We're going to talk about that next under post-traumatic mode. So anyways, I take my daughter on this survival weekend where you have to basically survive with nothing.

It was not easy. Anyways, you have to learn how to do everything with nothing. So this not easy. Anyways, you have to learn how to do it with everything with nothing. So this kid, to me he's a kid, he's not a kid kid, but he's like a kid to me. He was one of the lead instructors, and he's an ex-Marine, and he tells his story, and it breaks my heart.

So he's this Marine who tried to commit suicide, actually. It was just a horrible story. When he was in, was he in Iraq or Afghanistan? Iraq. Iraq. Okay. Anyways, he was in a vehicle that was blown up and his, two of his friends with him died in front of his eyes. You know, he's trying to help save one of them and he died in front of his eyes. He had a massive head injury. And one of his friends survived and lost a limb or something like this. But he had this huge injury. So he's in the hospital.

He goes through hell with the whole VA treatment. He ends up almost dying. Then when he finally comes to, he ends up trying to kill himself because he's on the wrong treatment, right? So it's exactly what you talked about, not knowing the difference between head injury and PTSD. He had both severe, and he's had 12 concussions throughout his life. And it's just a really sad story. So I hear a story and I'm like, okay,

you've got to come see us. And he's just the nicest kid. So he comes and sees you. He had severe brain trauma and he was on the wrong medication, the wrong treatment. And when we helped to balance his brain, what did he say? Well, it was pretty crazy because I'm following this kid so I want to make sure he doesn't fall through the cracks again. So I keep sort of hounding him. I can be that way. I can be sort of a nag.

And so I'm following up with him. I'm following up with him because I didn't hounding him. I can be that way. I can be sort of a nag. And so I'm following up with him. I'm following up with him because I didn't hear from him. Yeah. And so I'm not hearing from him. I'm not afraid of a Marine. Just kidding. You're afraid of a psychiatrist. Yeah, but Marines are a little different. So anyway, so I'm following up with this kid. See, you can see through us. I don't like that. So I'm following up with this kid. See, you can see through us, and I don't like that. So I'm following up with this kid, and he's like, well, I haven't written back. He's like, basically, he was like, it's only been less than two weeks, and my diet's better. I'm sleeping better.

My thoughts are better. My memory's better. I'm like, wow, this is pretty crazy. He just that quickly started to feel so much better. And he's got hope again. That's how people feel better fast. It's not take this drug and hope you feel better fast. It's you get brain healthy habits into your life so your brain can help heal. You have to put the brain in a healing environment. Well, when we open the next one, I want to start with his, I'll read what he actually said.

And then we can talk about growth. Great. All right. Stay with us. Post-traumatic growth coming up. 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 Warrior's Way and the Brain Warrior's Way cookbook we give away every month.