Change Your Brain Every Day - When the Hurt Won’t Go Away (PTSD)

Episode Date: November 21, 2016

7.5 million people in the U.S. suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and tens of millions more from past emotional trauma.  In this episode we discuss how to decrease the power of past hurts and ways to help heal PTSD.

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Welcome back. This week, we're going to talk about what to do when the hurt won't go away. When you have had emotional trauma in your life and it keeps haunting you. Now, I know you have no experience with this. I have no experience with emotional trauma. So your first gift to me was like 10 sessions of EMDR and I thought you were insane. I'm like, why would you ever give me something like that?

And I remember we had this talk and we were dating about how emotional trauma can affect things like your physical health. And I was telling you how I had gone in for upper and lower GIs when I was four years old. And you said, well, what was going on in your life at that time? I'm like, nothing. I was like, I was fine. And then you started talking to me a little bit more about my family dynamics.

And I explained to you that right about two weeks before that, my uncle had been murdered. And I remember that day very clearly still when the police showed up and my mother and my grandmother were screaming on the floor and my other uncle who was a heroin addict, it was, there was a lot of drama around it without getting into detail. And you just sort of, you gave me that look that psychiatrists give you that can be really annoying. And it, you ended up giving me 10 sessions of EMDR. It was my first Valentine's Day present from you. I will never forget that. And I'm like, he thinks I'm really messed up. See, I thought you were really awesome, but everybody's got baggage. And I thought, well, let's clean it up so that our relationship can be better.

Yeah, I actually thought the EMDR was amazing. I went in completely reluctant, thinking, great, I'm going to go in and bang my head up against some wall with some therapist and talk about problems. What good is that going to do? And then just continue to feel bad. Right, I thought it was ridiculous. And what I found, so EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It's a really great form of psychotherapy where they get your eyes to move back and forth or they tap. It's an alternate hemisphere therapy where they stimulate one side of your brain than the other side of

your brain. And for whatever reason, we don't know why it works, but it helps not only bring up the trauma, but then get rid of it. Right. And believe me, my very logical oriented, like logic oriented mind and brain would not ever like go for something that didn't work. And it worked, like seriously worked. I loved it. So post-traumatic stress disorder affects 7 million Americans. So it's not just soldiers. Right.

In fact, didn't you tell me that there was a study that showed that children who grow up in chaotic homes, you know, lots of chaos and drama and trauma, that they have the same effect in their brain as soldiers coming home from war? Right. In fact, we posted that online and it got like 13 million views. Crazy. Incredible.

And what we have- So I really am a warrior. That's what you're saying. You are a warrior. I know you want to be. Oh no, I'm a Navy SEAL in my head, just as my brain forgot to tell my body. So here at Amen Clinics,

we have been treating people with PTSD for a very long time. And we published a study last year, two studies, one in veterans and one in over 20,000 patients, showing we could distinguish between emotional trauma in the brain and physical trauma about 90% of the time. And Discover Magazine listed our research as one of the top 100 stories in all of science for last year. In fact, it was the number one neuroscience story. It's really exciting. What we discovered is people who've had emotional trauma, that their limbic brain, their emotional brain,

becomes overactive and then stays that way. So even years later, anything that reminded you of that early trauma all of a sudden can flip you into a scared state, into an anxious state. Or into a fighting state. Fighting state. Right, that fight or fight. We all react differently. State. And it just doesn't go away unless you actively do something to calm it down.

And one of our best friends was in an abusive marriage. And when I first scanned her, we call it the diamond pattern, where her emotional brain looks like a diamond on scans, just completely fired up. Right. And then five years later, after she got out of the abusive marriage, had some of her own therapy, took the supplements we'll talk talk about her brain look unbelievably awesome. I actually thought this person, I sort of thought that's how she was because she was in this relationship for so long. I thought, well, she's just stuck. Like she's just that way. And then

when she got out of that relationship and got treated, she's such a loving, warm person. And now she's in a very stable, loving relationship. So really interesting to see that happen. Right. So when you've had trauma in the past, it tends to go with now you're worried. You tend to loop on the trauma. Get stuck on it. It can go over and over again. You can have problems with your mood and anxiety. And it's like the memories haunt you.

Right. And you're kind of stuck in that flight or fight, right? Right. Right. Because those emotional circuits are overactive. And the way to help, so EMDR is a specific psychological treatment for trauma. And you found it to be very helpful i found it to be extremely helpful when i was going through a really stressful time but we want to do things that calm the brain now unfortunately what a lot of people do is self-medication they use alcohol marijuana painkillers you have a close friend who got addicted to pain killers yeah like 200

a month a lot of trauma in her past right and interestingly she had the same reaction i did i don't even know what you're talking about i've never had trauma it's like wow okay and then when you asked her like three or four things oh she had been raped her parents were doing drugs with her when she was 12 you know she ended up ended up giving her, she got raped, got pregnant, gave her baby up for adoption. She didn't ever equate that to trauma because she's never been educated as to what trauma really means. She thinks of trauma as like a soldier, you know what I mean? Trauma. So she doesn't know what that means. And so education is really important here. So we want to do things that are healthy for you that help calm down your brain as opposed to self-medication.

It's actually a fascinating study in women who have PTSD. When they go to drug addiction centers, if people don't treat their PTSD and they withdraw from drugs or alcohol, they get worse. Oh, interesting. Because their brains are on fire. They're taking their medicine away from them. And the brain is on fire. Interesting. The brain is overactive. So EMDR can work. Hypnosis is so powerful.

Oh my gosh, so powerful. And there's a specific technique called hypnoanalysis, where I put someone into a trance and then take them back to the first time they had those thoughts or feelings. So just an interesting example, I saw one man because he had sexual problems. He couldn't get an erection. And he was very upset and anxious about it because he was afraid he was going to lose his sweetheart. And so I put him in a trance.

And I said, when you have one of those failures, what are you thinking and feeling? And he said, well, that's exactly what I'm thinking and feeling. I'm a failure. And so in a trance, I said, I want you to go back to the first time in your life you had that thought or that feeling. I'm a failure. And he went back to when he was five years old and he couldn't read. So he had dyslexia and he remembered his father beating him and calling him stupid and that he was a failure. And so cleaning that up about having him view it from an adult perspective, it's you're five years old, you're having a learning issue, and that a good parent would be much more understanding and loving and get you the help you need.

And it was so interesting how when we cleaned up his failure, the automatic negative thought given to him by somebody he cared about, his sexual problems went away. Isn't that fascinating? It was really interesting how the past is always in the present unless we clean it up. Well, and along with that, I think meditation has become like my best friend. So I noticed when I get too busy to meditate, I just get more anxious. And so I have a special grounding meditation where I sort of, you know, I'm able to, I pray first and then I do this grounding. And, you know, sometimes people are like, oh, meditation's like this bad thing. I think of praying like me talking to God and meditating is me listening to God. So I'm able

to calm myself. And then I do a grounding technique where it's like, so many of us, it's sort of painful to feel sometimes when you've been through that. So we think, I remember when I was going through the EMDR process and she said, tell me what you're feeling. And I'm like, well, I think, and she's like, no, tell me what you're feeling. And I'm like, okay, I remember when I was going through the EMDR process and she said tell me what you're feeling and I'm like well I think and she's like no tell me what you're feeling and I'm like okay I think that I could not get to the point of feeling at the time I had so disconnected that so I do a grounding I do this meditation where I sort of connect you know that feeling and thinking and ground yourself and the feeling and thinking are connected and you're congruent if that makes sense and it just changes everything.

And when I get too busy, I notice that that goes away and I feel more anxious. Meditation is so powerful. And what we found when we studied it, I published three studies on it, it calms your emotional brain, but increases blood flow to your thought. Oh, absolutely.

There's some supplements that can help, especially calming ones. Supplements that boost serotonin like 5-HTP, L-tryptophan, and saffron. Also GABA. GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. It helps to settle things down and you can actually take GABA. L-theanine from green tea has been shown to have a calming effect on the brain, as can magnesium and zinc. So if someone has ADD and they have trauma. Not uncommon.

They go together. Right. Because if you have ADD, you're often not making the best decisions. Or your family has ADD. You come from an ADD family and there's more trauma. Well, and something people don't talk about, ADD families have a higher incidence of sexual abuse and physical abuse because of the lower impulse control. Right. So if that happens and you've got ADD, do things like 5-HTP and GABA, are they going to affect frontal lobe function? Well, if you have low activity in the prefrontal

cortex, common in ADD, and you take things that calm down your brain, you can actually make somebody more ADD. So, you know, I talk about this in my book, Healing ADD. So knowing what's your type or what's your subtype. And if people go to amonclinics.com, they can take the brain health assessment, know, well, what's my type? And then we'll give you supplement recommendations, not to treat a medical disorder, but to help support what your brain type might be. Right. Excellent. So PTSD and emotional trauma are common. They stay with you.

You actually really like neuro-linguistic programming. Love NLP. Let me tell you why. It's like a shortcut. It's like so fast. So I love EMDR because I think it really is, you know, like this long-term solution. But NLP is sort of this quick route

to getting to a reprogramming of the way you see things and creating new strategies. So the strategies you learn when you are two to survive or four to survive a situation, you stick with those strategies. They may not be the strategies that work for you that are effective as an adult. So what you do is you sort of go back and reprogram and learn, use strategies that are now effective for you. So there's so many different ways that you can deal with emotional trauma so that your past doesn't always have to be with your present. Love that. Stay with us. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com

where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.