The Sabrina Zohar Show - 50: Attachment styles and using self hypnosis to heal through childhood traumas and core beliefs with Dr. David Spiegel!

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

On this weeks episode of The Sabrina Zohar Show, Sabrina is joined by Dr. David Spiegel, psychiatrist and founder of the app Reveri  to chat about healing attachment styles and using self hypnosis to add to your tool box as a new healing modality. Want to work with Sabrina? HERE! Stuck After the Podcast? Master Implementation in 8 Weeks with Sabrina's Foundation Course Join the Make It Make Sense: Getting Through a Breakup course HERE! Get Ad-free episodes and 2 Bonus episodes a month HERE! Dont forget to follow Sabrina and The Sabrina Zohar Show on instagram and Sabrina on Tik tok! Video now available on YOUTUBE!  Disclaimer: The Sabrina Zohar Show, formally known as Do The Work, is not affiliated with A.Z & associates LLC in any capacity. Try the Reveri App FREE for 2 weeks HERE! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Do the Work Podcast. My name is Sabrina Zohar and I am your host. Y'all, I can't believe we're almost... This is the second to last episode of 2023. Can we just for a fucking second look back on how far we've come, but also get excited about how far we have to go? I don't know, you might be thinking we're going, Zohar, what the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean?

Get excited about how far we have to go. But now hear me out. Give me a second. The reality is, we are always a work in progress in learning because like let me tell you if any of these clickbait bullshit or any of these gurus tell you that you can get healed they are fucking lying to you because there is no such thing as being fully healed baby i am an anxious ball more often than my day but that's because i have an anxious attachment style so my anxiety is going to manifest in other ways

if i were healed and i were where i wanted to be at 33 how shitty would that be right like i want to be a forever student. And so to me, that's why I get excited about all the places I'm going to go. Because my nervous system is being challenged right now that there's a new year and all these new goals and all these new things that I've implemented. I'm fucking terrified. But I'm also equally excited to see what I hit, what I don't and what I learn along the way. So I'm excited. Next week, we have our end of year wrap up show. That'll be a solo with mama. So I'm stoked. But this week, we have Dr. David Spiegel. He is the founder of the app reverie. And he is one of the high ups at Stanford.

He is fantastic. He has been studying hypnosis for almost half a century. Like this man knows his shit when it comes to how to handle, process, and really work through all the shit you're going through. And I'm stoked because Reverie is giving people two free weeks. So all of you guys get to try the app. So everything will be in the show like the link in show notes. So I'm just amped. And guys, don't forget, as always, if you need anything, don't forget to follow along on the socials.

Those are in the show notes. Do the work podcast on Instagram. I'm Sabrina. Zohar on TikTok and on Instagram. Don't forget to rate the show. Please, please, please, please. We are at 5,000 ratings on TikTok. On TikTok, what fuck day is it? On Spotify, and I want to double that.

So please, all you do is there's three dots at the top. You just click it says rate show and you leave the rating. And on Apple, you scroll to the bottom and leave it. That's it. But it means the world because that's how I can get more guests. That's how I can grow. That's the only way. So I need your help for that.

And guys, please don't forget. I know we have ads. It's a little different. Is it ideal? Well, here we are, right? So I get it. But if you guys could please support our sponsors, they're helping us make this show happen. And without them, I would have to go get a job, right?

I would have to go do something else. So please show your love, your support. Software, my clothing company is the show link. You get 20% off at wearsoftware.com. I started that company after I almost lost my mom. And I created something that feels like a fucking cloud. Did I reinvent the wheel? Nah, I made a jogger, but I sure as fuck made something different.

So guys, don't forget everything you need will be in the show notes. And also don't forget, I'm starting my new. membership. So I've got four spots left. Starting the new year, it's going to be two one-on-one sessions with me every month and unlimited messaging in between because I've learned, yeah, the one-on-ones are amazing and those will always be an option, but at a little bit higher of a price point so that to kind of deter people from just doing a one and done. Because the reality is healing doesn't just happen in one 45-minute talk. It's progressive. It's implementing new behavior. That's why the messaging is so amazing. You could talk to me any time you need during the days. Like,

hey, I'm feeling anxious. What do I do? Hey, this guy did this. Remember we talked about this? That way you can be held accountable as well. So if you want to info on that, it'll be live soon, but you can just DM me or email me if you want to get on on that for the new year. And yeah, guys, I'm just so excited. There's so much coming up next year. It's like kind of wild. And I just want to thank you guys all for being along for the ride. So if you've listened to this long of me, love you. Thank you for sticking around. But all right, babes. Without further ado, let's get right the fuck on into it. Hi, Dr. David Spiegel. Thank you so, so much for being on the podcast. Good morning, Sabrina. I'm happy to be here with you.

Awesome. I'm beyond excited. We have such an incredible episode to get through and to talk about, but before we really dive on into any of that, I would love if you could just give an introduction. You have such an incredible history of what you've been doing. Please share that with our audience. Well, Sabrina, I'm a professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, where I've been a professor for almost half the century quite a while. I run the center on stress in health where we do research on mind-body interactions, how stress affects people, and how it can be handled better. And I'm medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford. So we have a program where we teach people hypnosis, mindfulness,

use acupuncture, do functional medicine. So we try to offer non-pharmacologic treatments for common problems like anxiety and help people who are living with cancer to cope with it better, things like that. That's incredible. So I've been doing research and clinical work for a long time, trying to help people, help themselves. Amazing. And I know, obviously, you have the Reverie app, which is incredible, you've hypnosis.

I'd love to know how did you get into this specific modality? I've tried so many different things. Hypnosis is actually the one thing I haven't tried, which is why I'm so excited, but I'd love to hear how you even got into this. Well, I heard that. I wanted to help you catch up, Sabrina, and hypnosis. Hypnosis is a bit of a genetic illness in my family.

Both of my parents were psychiatrists and psychoanalyst, and they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be, so here I am. My father was trained in hypnosis when he was going, going off to World War II as a battalion surgeon in North Africa, a Viennese refugee who wanted to serve in the military, who'd escaped from the Nazis in Europe, was a forensic psychiatrist who had a smallpox scar right in the middle of his forehead.

And he noticed that as he was talking to some of these prisoners, they would sort of nod their heads and drift off. And he realized that they were going into some kind of hypnotic state. and so he studied it, and he offered to teach that to young army doctors. So my father learned it to help with combat stress reactions with pain. When he came back, he was going back to his typical analytic training, but with one of his supervisor, he was going to give it up, because Freud gave it up and who was he to keep doing it?

His supervisor said, you're going to teach a course on hypnosis in the analytic institute because I'm going to take it. And so she kept him in it, and he liked to follow up on his patient, and see how they were doing. Not everybody does that. And he found that he was often getting better results

with using hypnosis with people for a few sessions than he was three times, four times a week on the couch. So he kept doing it. And the dinner table conversations were pretty interesting. I got to watch him make movies. I got to watch him make movies about, you know, patients who were undergoing some kind of, of conversion symptom or in hypnotic states.

And when I got to medical school, I took a course in hypnosis. And my first patient ever was a, I was on a pediatric rotation in Children's Hospital in Boston. And the nurse says, Spiegel, your next patient is in room 347. She's in status asthmaticus. So she was having tremendous difficulty breathing. she had been unresponsive to subcutaneous epinephrine times two. They were about to consider general anesthesia and starting around steroids. I didn't know what to do.

And I walk in the room and there's this 15-year-old pretty red-headed girl, bolt up right in bed, knuckles white, struggling for breath. Her mother's standing there crying, nurse in the room. So I said to her, would you like to learn a breathing exercise? And she nods. So I got her hypnotized. And then I broke into a sweat because I realized that we hadn't actually gotten to hypnosis in the, to asthma in the hypnosis course.

And so I came up with a very clever statement. I said, each breath you take will be a little deep burn a little easier. And within five minutes, she's lying back in bed. She isn't wheezing anymore. Her mother stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room. My intern comes looking for me. And I figure he's going to pat me on the back and say,

what did you do? And instead, he said, the nurse filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent. Now, you know, and this, I got to tell you, this has been the story of hypnosis that it's either considered ridiculous and a stage show trick or really dangerous, neither of which is true. So he said, you're going to have to stop doing this. And I said, oh, really?

Why? He said, well, it's dangerous. And I said, you're going to give her general anesthesia and put her on steroids and you think my talking to her is dangerous? You know, I don't think so. So taking you off the case if you want, but as long as she's my patient, I'm not telling her anything that I know is not true. So he stops off. He and the chief resident and the attending had an argument about it over the weekend, and they came back on Monday with a radical idea. They said, let's ask the patient. I don't think that had ever been done before. No, no, God forbid. And so this, you know, I thought, well, what are we going to do here? And so I kept teaching herself hypnosis. She had been hospitalized every month for three months. She said, you know, I like this. I want to keep doing this.

I feel better. She did have one subsequent hospitalization, but she went on to study to be arrested. respiratory therapist. And I thought that anything that could help a patient that much violate a non-existent Massachusetts law and frustrate the head nurse had to be worth looking into. And the main thing, Sabrina, is, you know, I could see it happen in front of my eyes. You know, it wasn't some, oh, gee, I wonder what the course was, you know, weeks later. You could watch her get better. And that's been the story is that hypnosis is a way of helping people very rapidly make very big changes. And by intensifying their focus of attention, by dissociating

things they'd rather keep out of awareness, and by being open, cognitively flexible, by experiencing things differently. And so I've used it now with about 7,000 patients and research subjects in my career. And it works. And that's why I build reveries to get it, make it available to people because, you know, unlike big pharma that has, you know, ex-chirleaders going on telling doctors to use their new drugs, there's no big money in hypnosis, and we don't have big organizations to push it. Yeah.

But people, you know, you like to get people to rethink their situation, you know, approach it from a different point of view. And we need to rethink what constitutes effective treatment for people. And sometimes it isn't as I'm a doctor, I prescribe meds, all the time. But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's teaching people how to manage themselves, their mind and their body better. And that's a real intervention. It helps people change. This episode is brought to you by Open. That's what I'm devoted to do and that's what Gregory is all about. That's why I was so excited to have you on is because like my personal

journey was I have anxious attachment like to a T. I've suffered. I use the word suffer because it's been literally crippling to my adult life, to my careers. So like the point where I couldn't connect with people because my anxiety would be so overwhelming. I can't even sometimes sit still. And I had maybe, what is this? Six, seven years ago now at this point, I was misdiagnosed and a doctor said, oh, you have borderline personality disorder and you have this, this and this. So we're going to give you a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, anti-anx, and they kept changing my medication. And I literally thought I was insane. I was going through moments of of, okay, I knew something didn't feel right in my body,

but I just kind of became numb, and I was just going through my days and clearly lost in who I am. Like, I even have a photo of I took before, and you could just see in my eyes, I'm just not there. And when I made the decision and I said, okay, to some people, medication's incredible. If your body knows how to take it and to do it, good for you. Congratulations.

I'm happy that you found something. But there are people like me and people that you've worked with 7,000 patients, plus that feel, wait, medication can't be the only one. way. Like there has to be something else. But I'm curious now because I know my aunt, she went through like intense trauma, like to the point where this is like true big tease in childhood and growing up in different countries and things. And she tried hypnosis and the person said that her trauma was so deep. He couldn't get her there. She just couldn't. I wanted to understand a little bit more of your process. Have you ever experienced somebody that just has so much shit or so much stuff that

you can't get there? Like, how does this work? Well, no, there are several components to this, Sabrina. And one of them is just how hypnotizable people are. Not everybody is equally hypnotizable. Some are extremely hypnotizable. They're in hypnotic-like states all the time. They sit down in a movie and they enter the imagined world. They forget they're sitting in a theater.

They become part of the movie, part of the story. and they usually very quickly and deeply go into hypnotic states, even if it can be upsetting. On the other extreme, there are some people who are just not at all hypnotizable, who, you know, they privileged reason over experience every time. So they're very judgmental and organized and linear and they just do one thing at a time

and they don't let themselves, they can't allow themselves to shift into the state of highly focused attention. And the majority of people, about half of people are somewhere in between. We call them the diplomats, the highs are the poets, the lows are the researchers and the mid-range people. And we have this test on the Rivary Act.

You can find out in six minutes, whether you're how hypnotizable you are. They have the experience, and then they step back and they wonder about it, and they try it again, and then they wonder about it. It can be the depth of the trauma, but it's also the way you approach it. And there are some people that just don't want to go there, and I respect that.

But frankly, I have dealt with some people who deal with some very serious trauma, and I can give you an example if you'd like, Sabrina, that may help illustrate that. This was a lovely woman who had been raised in a country that is not famous for being kind to women. And she said that she realized as an adolescent girl that her body wasn't her own and men felt free to say anything they wanted to about her body. and she found it very disturbing. It turned out that when she was 12 years old, she was raped by their landlord. The family knew it. They knew the guy.

They were afraid to do anything about it because they were afraid they'd be thrown out of the apartment. So finally, you know, it contributed to the family wanted to get the hell out of this country, which they did. She came here. She became a health care professional, but she was chronically depressed. And her marriage didn't work out.

She had a very nice son who stayed with her and tried to help her, but she got more and more depressed, and she retired about 15 years early. I was just pretty miserable. So she came to see me initially because of pain, and she was rather hypnotizable, and we were able, in one session, her pain went from 6 to 0. She said, I can't believe it. It's just gone. And that sort of gave her the expectation that maybe it could be helped. And then we started talking about this rape that happened when she was 12. And I asked her if she would go back and look at it with me.

And I said, in hypnosis, she was very hypnotizable. And I said, I want you to please think about yourself as a little girl. Be your own mother. Look at yourself as a 12-year-old girl. And look at yourself right after you had been raped. And I said, I want you to answer one question for me. Is this her fault? And she cried even harder, and she said, I'm stroking her hair.

I'm stroking her hair. And she hugged her in her imagination. And it was a way of intensely seeing how much pain she had been subjected to, but also have a different perspective on it for the first time to stop blaming herself for something she didn't control. And as you know, when people are subjected to these miserable circumstances, they rarely, you know, have this sort of objective view of it that you and I might have thinking about it. That is, that bastard did something awful. It's, what did I do to deserve this?

You know, if life is fair and this bad thing happens, there must be something wrong with me that I deserve it. And for the first time, she just saw herself as not guilty, not responsible for what happened. And she called me a week later and said, Dr. Spiebel, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore. And she'd been on meds for years and, you know, and she said, my friends do not recognize me. And I feel different. You know, I just don't, I've stopped blaming myself for that. And I feel entirely different. And so this is somebody who had a horrible thing to deal with, but one of the things about hypnosis that can be very helpful is you can intensely focus on it.

You can turn it on, but you can turn it off. You know, a lot of other situations, you feel like you're opening Pandora's box and all the misery is going to fly out and you'll never get it back in again. And with hypnosis, you go into the state, you focus on it, you think about it, you can see it from a different point of view. And then you can put it aside and say, okay, enough for now, but I'll do it again when I'm ready to. to deal with it again. So it's more contained, and you can restructure your understanding of what happened. You can see it,

not just what I did to get myself into this kind of trouble, and this was a guy who basically kidnapped her with a gun and, you know, raped her. And, but you can see it for what it was from a very different point of view, not just what he did you, but what you did protect yourself, what you did to avoid getting,

into this situation. And so you experience it from a different cognitive perspective, and that helps you to change how you deal with it. So it can be a very powerful way of facing something. It can be intense. It can be upsetting. But at the same time, you see things from a new and different point of view. And that's what I've found with hypnosis. So going back to your question, I often think sometimes some people are just not capable of experiencing a hypnotic state. Most people are at least to some extent. But even if the trauma is very bad, and I've dealt with a lot of people who've been through a lot of terrible things, they live with that anyway.

It's a matter of being able to face it, but come away from the memory of it with a different point of view about who you are and what you did. So I find it, you know, if people don't want to, if they say, doc, this is too much for me, I don't do it. But very often they welcome the opportunity to deal with something that has affected their lives deeply in a way that makes them feel better. So it can be very helpful. What I love about it is so it kind of the experience, which I got goosebumps when you were sharing that story, because it's similar in the sense where like, thank God I didn't have that experience. but in the sense where I had so much trauma growing up, like just in my household, like having immigrant parents and just like this dynamic that I grew up in.

And it was really, really, really tough. And as an adult, I didn't understand, I didn't have any modalities to be able to tap into the subconscious or to understand where I was holding on to things, like that reparenting and being able to be there for that little me and holding compassion and space for her. Because obviously as a child, my perception in that egocentric age is like, I fucked up.

I'm too much. What's wrong with me? I'm the reason all of this is happening. As an adult, like you said, we can consciously look and be like, how is a four-year-old? Was this your problem? But I lived with those core beliefs.

Now, for me, because I didn't know about, I mean, obviously I knew about hypnosis, but not to the accessibility that you've created with one, the app and two with what you're doing. So for me, I did ketamine treatments. And that was how I was able to get in. Now, you know, obviously, I don't, I don't recommend that for everybody. Not everybody needs to take a psychedelic.

For me, though, that's what worked. But now I'm able, I guess, I'm kind of doing it. Self hypnosis. I'm able to close my eyes and I can bring myself back there as a spectator, not as living her experiences, but being able to be there for her support her, see her experiences and be able to reframe and reparent her. Now, my question is like what I was lucky, like when I did my ketamine treatments, the first one, I was, I'm painfully self-aware. Like for me, self-help and growth is my doing the work. That's my number one goal in my life is to become for myself the best version so I can live with myself through the days of not be,

in my older years depressed on medication because I haven't addressed my issues. How many times, like I was lucky. First time I did ketamine, I was able to tap right into my memories. I had a couple of sessions after, obviously, that were not as intense or not as great. But kind of what you said, I was able to close that chapter, come out of it, feel a little wonky, but nonetheless, like get on with my days and process through. For people, I know that you were saying, like, whether they can or can't, how many times of hypnosis do you really give to kind of see, can this person do it?

Can they not? And I'll ask that question and then I'll go on to the next one because I'm curious on that. With this patient, I did hypnosis a total of three times and the first time didn't involve the trauma. I just spoke to her on the phone yesterday. It's now about eight months afterwards and she says she had one rough period, but she's feeling better. She's feeling like herself again and feels wonderful. And so it doesn't always take like a long train of, you know,

repeated sessions going after it, it's more you sort of train yourself to experience what it is that cause you all this pain from a different point of view. So when you do think about it again, you think about it differently and you think about yourself differently. And I teach people to do self-hypnosis if they want if you need to relive this and just get another fresh look at what happened and what you did to protect yourself, how you didn't deserve what happened to you, how you didn't ask for it, it just happened to you. You know, trauma is really the experience of being made into an object, a thing.

It's losing agency. You don't control what's hand. People hate that. And so most people would rather feel guilty than helpless. You know, you'd rather blame yourself for a maladaptive attachment to some parent-parental figure. They just say, boy, I lost my. the lottery on that one, you know, I chose the wrong parent, you know, that's, you know,

what can I do? So it, and I teach people to use it in a milder way also, Sabrina, that a lot of the problem when people get mired in anxiety, it sort of starts with your body, feel fidgety, and uncomfortable. And then the more upset and anxious you get, the more your body reacts to that and your muscles tense, you start to sweat. And then you notice that and you say, oh my God, must be really bad because I feel so terrible. And it's like a snowball rolling downhill. So another thing that hypnosis is very helpful with, and as I mentioned, I started helping her with her pain with a body problem,

is that it can help you from the body up rather than the head down. It can help you start with the one thing about a stressor you can actually do something about, which is help your body react differently to it. So I have people in hypnosis, imagine you're floating in a bath, the lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. Go somewhere where you know your body will feel comfortable. And just let your body relax, let your body not react with immediate attention to what you're thinking about. And then you can picture the problem and think about looking at it. So I would get her floating in a warm bath, feeling comfortable.

comfortable, and then picture yourself and stroke her hair, you know, and just allow yourself to do it from the body up. And another thing about hypnosis that is unusual but helpful is that we found on neuroimaging that to the extent that you're engaged in the hypnosis, you're turning down activity in what we call the default mode network. It's a part of the brain and the back of the brain, the posterior singular cortex, where you reflect on who you are when you're not you judge yourself you evaluate yourself you think about what other people think about you and when you're not doing anything else that's what people often do

so you can turn down activity in that region you can stop judging yourself you can try out being a different person and you know that's got a kind of bad image from you know stage show hypnotists having the football coach stands like a ballerina and it's stupid and it's humiliating to be i don't like it But it illustrates the idea that you can very quickly try out being somebody different, see what it feels like. So, you know, in the case of the stories that you tell Sabrina, you know, to see yourself not as, you know, as you mentioned, little children don't understand independent causation. You know, they just feel like it's their fault that you didn't set off that argument between your parents. They were doing it themselves and doing it to you. and you reacted to it, but you didn't cause it.

And so see it as something that you had to grow up with, but not something you had to take responsibility for. And so you can try out, what would I be like, as you have done, you know, if I saw things from a different point of view, and why do I carry that burden of guilt and responsibility for something that I had nothing to do with causing? So hypnosis can be a state, that is really a prime state for change, for trying out being different.

Now, ketamine that you took is a dissociogenic drug. What it does is triggered association, which actually involves that posterior part of the brain, an area near the posterior singular cortex where you have this rhythmic activity that ketamine can stimulate. And I don't know exactly you could tell me what your experience on ketamine was, but it's unusual and that it's not just another, you know, serotonin reuptake inhibitor kind of drug. It triggers dissociation. So you're shifting states back and forth when you're taking it. And you're getting an experience of being different and seeing what it feels like.

Now it's drug-induced. As many of the psychedelics, you know, do that. But the interesting thing about psychedelics, too, is that you don't have to keep occupying the receptor the way you do with an anti-anxiety drug or an antidepressant, a couple of experiences well-guided and well-run, and people feel changed. I've worked for years with women dealing with the anxiety of dying with metastatic breast cancer,

and there have been studies of, you know, group therapy can be very helpful. I've done that for many years. But so can psychedelics, psilocybin. People say, you know, I look into it, to the deaths, you know, and I realized that if I died, you know, it would all be over, but I feel better about myself. One woman said, it's like looking into the Grand Canyon when you're afraid of heights, you know, you know, if you felt it would be a disaster, but you feel better about

yourself because I'm able to look. And many people with, you know, I'm not serene, but I can look at it. Many people on these psychedelics also say, you know, I could see that death really it would be the end for me. But I can also appreciate what a miracle it is that I exist at all. And I can think about the wonderful experiences I've had in life and with my loved ones and all that. And I'm grateful for that.

And they are less anxious after that about dying. Now, that's a big deal, you know. It's not an easy thing to reduce anxiety about. So the capacity to experience the change mental state, and I don't know how you felt that while you were taking the kettle, if you felt any differences like that. But treatment, psychedelic treatments, and ketamine is a little different from some of the other drugs

that are used as psychedelic treatments. But just sort of shaking yourself up and saying, I can try out being different, see what it feels like, and maybe I'll like it, you know, is something that has tremendous therapeutic potential. There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most. out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family.

Whatever you want, wherever you're going. Start your search at ototrater.ca. Canada's car marketplace. For me, the ketamine at my journey, like the first, because I was approached by a company saying like, hey, you know, we've seen that you've been posting about like anxiety. this is years ago. Like, do you want to try it? And I was like, listen, I'm at Wixend. You know, of course, I'm working with a traditional therapist. We were doing tapping, which I actually really liked, it was nice and challenging to certain thoughts. But with the amount of stuff and the many of years I had of shit that I honestly, one, I normalized. Of course, it's like, okay, so what my dad hit us as kids. You know, whatever, he took the belt

out. Okay, so my dad used to leave in the middle of the night. Okay, so my dad had a girlfriend. I didn't see that as like, hey, wow, that could be really traumatizing to me. This is why I date people like him. I saw it as no, I'm fucked up. There's something wrong with me. So when I was doing the ketamine, my intention was where my stuff. You can see me one second here. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. There is. But I was saying when I was doing kind of my journey, for me, it was where am I stuck? That was what I kept kind of go. Where am I stuck? Where am I not able to move on? So when I did my ketamine, I just, I remember the practitioner telling me, just hold on to an intention.

Don't let it go. Don't let it go. And I was like, okay, I'm in it. I'm in my space chair. I'm doing the whole experience. And my nephew, who's, now nine, but at the time was like four, he came and he was like, Sasa, are you ready? And I was like, for one, he was like, come with me. And I guess he was just that bridge of the gap and whatever. That's where my brain took it. And I went into my old home where all of the bad shit happened where like this was, I called the House of Horrors.

It was like I was almost kidnapped from this house out front of my house. Like it was just the time of seeing people leaving and hurt and screaming and screaming and just all the bad. And I couldn't find myself. I saw my parents running around screaming. I saw my sister walking out. I saw my brother. It was on loop.

And I kept saying, where am I? And when I saw myself in the attic and I went up and I was like, what are you doing here? And I just turned around myself and I said, you fucking left me. And this whole experience and I was like, I've self-abandoned. I've completely left you here. I let her just rot in this attic and always blamed her for every issue without taking an accountability. You didn't ask for this.

You hiding in there was your coping mechanism because you couldn't handle at seven years old what was happening in this household. It was way too traumatizing. My experience with it when I was done with the ketamine, and the reason I liked it was I felt like I was in a museum. I was walking around seeing things, but I wasn't feeling what she was feeling. So I wasn't reliving that pain, but I was able to see her and say, oh, wow, okay, this is where I worked through this.

It took me, it took me about four years, and not only doing ketamine, but just in general of like working through these issues to understand for me that they morphed. It wasn't just, oh, dad did this. So this is happening. It was, wait, this is an anxiety. and wait this is causing this, and I started to just piece together for me, how I created my narrative, how did I create my core beliefs? Where did that come from? And then when I was finally able to identify where I was stuck and like, I just had this one memory of my dad, like, telling me

to open the door that he wasn't going to hit me and he punched me in the face and he left for two weeks and just thinking like, just feeling so guilty, feeling like everything was my fault. My dad leaving me was because of me, nobody who's going to take care of the household? It was all of these, these thoughts until I went back into the memory. And this was actually through meditation, so probably hypnosis, to be honest, at this point. And I went back and I saw myself there and I said, you know what, we're going to go.

And I broke open the door and I told my dad to fuck off. And I said, I'm done. I'm taking her from this. She doesn't deserve to be here anymore. And I created a safe space for her. And I would, anytime I felt her going back, I would literally close my eyes and drop into that space. I'm thinking I'm hypnotic.

I think I'm doing it. And I would go there and I would tell her, it's okay, you don't need to be here anymore. Come with me. Like, let's go to your safe space. this isn't because of you. I love you and I'm here for you and I'm never going to leave you. So when she trusted me more, and that was really just my journey. But with me, because I think I had probably some help psychedelically, I was able to go there. My question for you is for the people

that I'm sure you get every day that I get every day, I don't remember anything. My childhood was amazing. I have no idea where any of this is coming from. I had very specific memories I was able to tap into. But for people like that, how can they utilize, especially self-hypnosis? If they're doing it alone, they're not working with somebody, how can somebody kind of start to tap into those places that they've probably just blocked off or don't even acknowledge as an issue? Well, it's a good question, and some people really do need psychotherapeutic help with it.

It's not always something you can just do know by yourself. But there are elements of what you did that I think can be helpful guidance for people. And one of them is you took what you had sort of criticized yourself for, was just kind of hiding out and turned it into something that you did to protect yourself, that as you saw yourself hiding in the attic as an attempt to get off the battlefield, you know, to hide and protect yourself. And that was a good thing. And that was your childlike recognition that this is a dangerous place and I got to stay

the hell away from it. And it wasn't a bad thing that you did that. It was a good thing. It was self-protective. And so you could see that and start to feel better about yourself and not you were responsible for all the chaos around you. And so that's the kind of thing that people can begin to think about in dealing with trauma, is that you focus on seeing it from a different point of view. That is, I was not, you know, the person responsible for all the chaos that was going on around me.

I wasn't responsible for that bastro hitting me in the face. And then going away for two weeks, I was subjected to it, and I did the best I could to hide out and protect myself as a kid. And so you can see it but change your perspective about what you're seeing. And it's also beginning to, that carries with it the germ of an idea, which is this is the world I was introduced to. but I didn't deserve it. There was something going on outside that was causing me to be terribly fearful and to suffer.

And I was doing the best I could to protect myself, to hide from it. And that isn't a bad thing. That's a good thing. So you can see and face the same situation, but from a different point of view. And that's a valuable thing. That's very important. It was game-changing for me. It allowed me to have compassion for myself, to have compassion for also my family

members because I still talk to my dad. I still talk to my mom. I still talk to my siblings. Like I didn't, for years, I couldn't because that block was there. But once I was able to have compassion for myself of, okay, you are self-protecting. This is not because you're doing this because you're a drama queen. You're doing it because if you didn't do that, who knows what would have happened? Who knows if you had gone out into the room? If you had been involved in a lot of these things, if I would have been in the middle, who knows? So I was always been grateful for that, but I still think, like I would love to know how the app works, I think, because there's so many people that are listening to this wondering, like, because I get a lot too, like, I can't afford therapy or like,

I don't know where to start. I don't know what to do. How can somebody utilize Reverey? Like, is there a beginner thing? Or if you're, if you're somebody that's coming in saying, I've no idea what's wrong with me, how can they utilize what you've created to actually start to see change? Well, it's a very important question. It's not a substitute for good psychotherapy, but it is a way of getting more in touch with yourself and how you can handle just the anxiety and the insomnia, the trouble sleeping, that often goes with this. One of the things we learned from our neuroimaging studies is that people who are highly hypnotizable have, there's a region called the interior cingulate cortex.

It's the part of the salience network in the brain. It's the alarm system. So you hear a lot of noise and you suddenly turn away. that's the salience network saying, oh, this could be a gunshot, who knows what it is. And so the salience network is turned down in hypnosis. When people go into hypnosis, it allows you to focus attention, you know, sort of eye in the middle of the storm, you know, the eye of the hurricane. You can be there.

You can be surrounded by very stressful things, but you can maintain your calm and your focus. And people who are hypnotizable have more of an inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA, which is the transmitter that is stimulated by anti-anxiety drugs by benzodiazepine. So you've got your own little pharmacy in there. And to the extent that you go into the state, you can secrete more agaba and calm your salience network. You can turn it down because, you know, it sort of builds on itself. You start to think about these upsetting things. Your body gets tense.

You get tense. And, you know, it's like the snowball rolling downhill. So part of what you can learn to do is I don't know quite what is making me this upset and uncomfortable, but I can learn to calm my body when it happens. And that's giving you a bit of a sense of control and opportunity to try and understand things better. And that's a valuable thing. And it can help you get yourself to a point where you can begin to face whatever these issues are and then maybe get into good psychotherapy with someone that will help you think it through

and talk it through, but you can also think it through for yourself. And I had a patient who was an educator, a very responsible guy, nice guy, big tall guy who had a lot of lower back problems. And I initially was helping him just with his pain. Hypnosis is very helpful in reducing, helping people to reduce pain. And one day, it was around this time of year, and he was telling me about Christmas, and he said, we used to hate and fear Christmas because my father, who was violent, Anyway, we'd just get worse on Christmas Day.

He'd throw the decorations around the room and he hit me in the face and do all kinds of terrible things. And then after that, he was telling me about this, and I was talking about what he did to protect himself and just stay out of trouble like, you know, you were talking about. He said, well, I have to go up to the cemetery to clean up his grave. And I said, what in the hell are you doing that for? And he said, well, that's what I should do, you know?

the irresponsible son and all that. And I said, you don't know that bastard of thing. You know, he was responsible for coming, bringing you into life, but he made you miserable throughout it. And why on earth would you go and do that? And he was sort of shocked that I would talk that way about his father, and you've got to think carefully about it. But he came back a couple weeks later, and he said to me, you know, Doc, I was looking at some family photos. And for the first time in my life, I could look at a photo of myself and like what I saw. And so, you know, people kind of misplace their feelings onto themselves from other people who deserve the criticism more than they do.

Just being able to see an old, time-worn situation from a new point of view, which hypnosis can help people do, can be very, very valuable. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. why I'm so excited about this is because I'm all about tools. For me, like, I've had years of, hence my therapist throwing me on medication who for four years of talking to somebody never said,

like, hey, so you sound dysregulated. Well, what are you doing when you're dysregulated? Your nervous system doesn't feel safe. Are you doing any kind of self-soothing? And instead, it would just, cool, take medicine, take medicine, just keep masking it. No, like, also hearing me say, yeah, but I feel more suicidal now. Like, this doesn't help me. I don't feel like this is benefiting me. Oh, well, then we just need to up the dose them. And it's like, No, what I appreciate about this is now these are after, this is actually an app, this is actually in a tool because I think for a lot of people, and now I wanted to actually ask you about this, so like you're just regulated, you know, like for what I deal with, for a lot of the people

that are listening, data's super anxious or just, you know, whatever. And all of a sudden, it could be something like they don't get a text. And because they don't get the text back, I love like you said, it happens in the body first. And I've been really trying to get people instead of focusing intellectually on why aren't they texting me, wait, what's coming up for me? what's happening in my body? What's the narrative that I'm starting to create? Where am I feeling it? Because that is such a good indicator.

But I would love to know, like, if you're in these moments, because I know that when you're super dysregulated, obviously you feel like you're in danger, even though it's just a text, doesn't need to make any sense to us, but here's where we're feeling that anxiety. Typically meditating, just trying to sit and focus on your breathing, could feel like it's impossible.

Because if there were a tiger next to me and I were trying to meditate, I'm probably not going to be able to do it as successfully because I know that there's a threat. How can somebody use reverie and hypnosis when they're feeling like, let's say somebody's disregulated and all of a sudden they feel like, oh my God, they start catastrophes. He didn't text me, which means he doesn't like me, which means he did-da-da-da-da. You start to go in.

You and I know hearing that saying, hey, there's an underbelly of a story here. This is coming from somewhere. This isn't because of this guy that you had one date with. You don't know who he is. But how can they utilize this app and have it as a resource? When they're feeling this, would it be able to help people to be able to at the very least, kind of like you said, like create a resistance against this feeling in their body? Or like, how would you recommend utilizing self-hypnosis if you're dysregulated or

feeling super anxious or in that moment? Can this be a tool to tap into? Well, I would say, you know, there are sort of two things going on. One is just the arousal and sense of danger and fear in your body. So that Thalian's network is saying there's something terrible looming. And you can start by just saying, let me calm my body first, the way I would calm an anxious child. Yeah. You know, and always have people calm their kids. You know, you just, you stroke them, you hug them, you try and soothe them.

Because your body is just reacting to your brain and what you're thinking about and worried about. So first thing is just get your body feeling safe and comfortable and just go somewhere where you do regulate your body. But the second thing is, as you pointed out, is that, what's happening is you're allowing what may be meaningful or may be random, you know, lack of response or being busy with something else from someone you don't even know that well to determine your mental state and your evaluation of yourself and your self-worth and all that. And if you can get a little distance from it and say, well, you know, I don't know what he's doing or why he's doing it or why he didn't text me back.

but do I really want to let him determine my state of mind? And, you know, is he worth it? Does he, you know, have enough judgment about me and who I am to know or care, whether he makes me feel bad or not? And you can acknowledge that you feel bad and you wish he was, you know, texting you or returning your text. But at the same time, you can sort of, once you get your body calmer, you can look at it and say,

does he deserve that much power over my state of mind, you know, whatever it is, you know, if it's good or it's bad or anything else, I want to be the, you know, the captain of my own ship. I want to be able to regulate how I feel, and I am able now to do that. You know, I wasn't when I was four years old, but I am able now, and I'm going to do it. So you kind of take more charge of your physical and emotional reactions to things. And, you know, there may be a good reason. He's not responding. It may not be a good reason, but you just don't want to be in a situation where you're making yourself that vulnerable to the effects of another person.

And can hypnosis, like in those moments, can they use the app? Can somebody turn to it? Or would you recommend regulate first, process, and then maybe utilize it later in the day? That's the idea of the app. You just take out your smartphone. You, you log into the app and you can choose, and you can choose the stress management app, for example. And you'll hear my molyfluous voice telling you to imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub or floating in space. I'll ask how you're doing. You tell me, you'll get a different instruction from me depending on how you answer it.

So it's an interactive program where if you're starting to be able to change how your body feels, your hand is floating up in the air, feeling light and comfortable, I can go on and help you deal with something else so I can have you picture in an imaginary screen something that is making you upset, keeping your body floating. So separate your physical reaction dissociated from your emotional one.

And then picture on the other side of the screen, one thing you can do about that. Do I text them again? Do I not? Do I take myself out for a coffee? What do I want to do to deal with the problem? And you also can sort of picture the problem from a bit of a distance. You can sort of see it and say, yeah, you know, it's not a crisis.

It's not a disaster. You know, worst thing it can happen is I never hear from it again. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it isn't. But you can kind of experience it, but not let it take you over because you've already created a distance from your physiological response to it. And so, yeah, I'm there when you need me. Your every is there.

and you just, you know, try it. And if you're having trouble getting to sleep because of it, we have an insomnia app where you do the same kind of thing, get your body comfortable, and just project your thoughts like you're watching a whole movie. And just, but not inside your body, leave your body out of it because your body needs to get enough rest and relaxation that you can function properly

so you can do it in a way that you dissociate your mental from your physical stress. I'm just so excited about the audience learning about the app because I think it's, first of all, I've been in trouble with sleeping, so like I can't wait to use it for that too. But I think it's just, it's so nice to have because I think, you know, when you're dating especially, like, I'm grateful now that there are more resources. But when I was doing all this five, six, seven, eight years ago, like there wasn't TikToks and Instagrams about like, hey, try this if you're feeling anxious. It was me feeling like I was fucking insane. It was me feeling like I'm the only one. I thought like a

snowflake. No one else is dealing with this. that there's this community of, wait a minute, no, we're all dealing with this. It's not just, and it's, I'd love to call myself special. I'm not. My thoughts aren't that special. They're not that unique. They're always, usually, every time I talk to people, I'm like, let me guess, you don't feel like you're good enough. You don't feel like they're going to like you. You think they're always going to leave you. I'm like, it's all very reminiscent of these kind of attachment styles. And I think it's so exciting that people can now utilize the app in a way to help them and turn to something, as opposed to feeling like you're upsheds Creek without a paddle saying, well,

now what am I going to do? They have something in their phone because you can't always talk to me, can't always talk to you, can't always call a friend. But I love that you can learn to remove yourself from your body and so that you can at the very least, even if nothing, even if your whole life doesn't find, I'm not expecting that after one session your life is going to change. But at the very least, self-awareness, that's one thing. But growth is actually implementing new changes into your life. So I'm hopeful that this app will allow people to even take that step to say, you know what? I'm not going to text in this time. I'm going to make a change. It might feel uncomfortable. I might feel really strange. Now I'm going to have this app where I can explore what's happening in my body, but it gives people

tools, and I'm just so grateful. So thank you for, thank you for not listening to those doctors, and thank you for pushing through and being a thought leader and creating something that people like us can actually implement into our lives. And for that, I'm so grateful. So. Well, thank you. That's beautifully said, Sabrina. And I would be delighted. That's why we did it, is I want to give people the power to better regulate and manage their bodies and their mood and themselves to understand things differently. And you said it wonderfully well, and I hope it works that way. That's why we did it.

I just want it to be available. And it's a skill. You know, all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. It's not my doing something to you. It's teaching you how to use a capacity that you already have and just use it better. Use it. And, you know, instead of, in essence, hypnotizing yourself to freak out and panic, you're hypnotizing yourself to manage your body

and face what you have to face. And that's a good thing. So the power is there. It's a matter of learning how to use it well to help yourself and help your body. I'm so excited. I'm so thank you again so much for being on the episode. I'm going to link everything in the show notes. I'll put the app so that people know where to find it. And I'm just thank you again so much for bestowing so much wisdom and all of these learnings that you've had because I'm excited that this could help more people. I'm so glad. Well, I'm excited too, and I appreciate you're tuning into it the way you have. And I hope it helps lots of people. That's what it's about. Thanks, doctor. Appreciate it.