The Taproot Podcast - 🧠How to Eliminate the Roots of Trauma in the Deep Brain - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

Trauma is stored in a part of the brain that lies beneath language, cognition, and the ego. To effectively heal the effects of trauma, it is necessary to explore the roots of trauma in the subcortical brain. Therapists must begin with the visible symptoms in the cognitive process and delve beneath the surface into the subcortical brain. The roots of trauma impact our emotional system, and the deepest aspects of trauma lie in the way our physical body reacts to stimuli and emotions. By letting go of the ego and tapping into the creative and intuitive aspects of the deep brain, we can heal trauma. It's important to note that the resources, videos, and podcasts provided on the website and social media are not a substitute for mental health treatment. If you require assistance, please seek a qualified mental health provider, and in case of emergencies, contact the appropriate emergency services in your area. The contact information provided is for scheduling purposes at Taproot Therapy Collective and is not monitored consistently for emergency services. For further information, please refer to: Address: 2025 Shady Crest Dr Suite 203 Hoover, AL 35216 Email: [e-mail] Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/cnverPNUPuxiPkbc8 Podcast: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] #Brainspotting #EMDR #Trauma #PTSD #DID #CPTSD #Psychology #Neuroscience #Brain #Therapy #Psychotherapy #sensorimotorpsychotherapy #somaticexperiencing #carljung #emotion

Hey guys, it's Joel, and today I'm going to walk you through a phenomenological understanding of what the different parts of the brain feel like. Now, what this is not is a neurobiological neuroscience explanation of all the different pieces of the brain. There's some really good books on trauma and the limbic system that explain exactly what's happening in the brain if you're a brain scientist and what part of the brain is doing what that the amygdala is the alarm bell and it's telling the hypothalamus to release adrenaline and things like that that's interesting it's not what we're doing today this is a phenomenological experiential explanation of how the different parts of the brain feel to you not when you you're looking at a textbook, but when you're experiencing an emotion, when

you're experiencing a cognitive process, when you are experiencing being a human with a brain. So it's a little bit different of a way to look at it. So the parts of the brain that I'm going to get into today are the prefrontal cortex, which is right here. You know, if you're going to have an old school ice pick lobotomy, this is what they cut off. It's what takes a chunk out of your personality so that I can still eat and breathe and sleep and walk. But I don't have really the spark that makes me me. This is our cognitive process. A lot of what we would call the ego is here. Our conscious cognitive processes

are thoughts and specifically thoughts within language. You know, when I'm sitting there watching a movie, I'm like, oh, that's very clever, because the director is hearkening back to an older tradition where the movie structure is supposed to go this way, and he's sort of showing that, but he's subverting it. That's a conscious thinky process, okay? That's something that I'm thinking. Most positive thoughts are cognitive. You know, happiness is like, well, I did a good job. I wanted to do a good something that I'm thinking. Most positive thoughts are cognitive.

You know, happiness is like, well, I did a good job. I wanted to do a good job. I'm so proud. Now I can be happy. That's a thought-based process. We have a whole lot of cognition that is beneath the surface of language. And if you are in cognitive therapy, or if you're a cognitive-only therapist, you may not spend a lot of time talking about that part of the brain, the subcortical part of the brain that is beneath cognition, that is beneath language, that does not think in words. I'm going to call that the subcortical brain. It contains a whole lot of the med brain, the basal ganglia. It is the oldest part of the brain around the brain stem.

It's what evolves first when we are a reptilian lizard ancestry. When we look at something we have to figure out, am I going to mate with it? Am I going to jump away so that I don't get eaten? Am I going to freeze so that it thinks that I'm part of a rock and I'm going to try and eat that? It's this immediate response that does not need our intellect. It does not need our intelligence. The lizard doesn't have to sit back and be like, oh, this moth, I think I am a bit hungry. And perhaps the moth and me have a, it doesn't need that. It just needs to see it and it needs to eat it. Or it needs to say, that's not a moth, that's an owl. It's going to eat me. I'm going to get out of here. And so it's a part of

the brain that is not using intellect, which is a concept that a lot of people who are very intellectual or have a very rigid ego structure, where they sort of cling to what they can understand and what they, a materialist, you know, objective understanding of the world, they have a hard time grasping the concept that there are things that are part of them that are outside of what we can, you know, objectively experience. And so things like a knee-jerk reaction, things like the doctor taps your leg and then it kicks, reflexes, things like that are going to be part of the subcortical process that are kind of outside of your control. I mean, I talk a lot on here about brain spotting. And one of the reasons that brain spotting works is the connection in the brain between the eye, which is what you're using in

brain spotting, and that basal ganglia, you know, deep brain on the brainstem is really direct. I mean, if you look at a brain, the optic nerve goes straight through the middle all the way back to my brainstem. And it affects that before it goes anywhere else. Because that's the way the brain is built. If you're building a computer, you need the pieces that are going to talk to each other really fast to be right next to each other. You want there to be some RAM cache next to your CPU. If you don't know what this means, that's fine.

But the parts of the computer that have to talk really quickly, they have to be right next to each other so the latency is low. And it doesn't take very much time for that spark of information to shoot back and forth. If you're going to be storing information on a hard drive, maybe it can be all the way over here on a longer wire, and you don't need that immediate latency, but our brain is built in the same way. So how does this apply to therapy? How does this apply to how you feel?

How does this apply to how you feel? How does this apply to bigger concepts? Well, one of the big things that is most therapy modalities that are good, most therapy modalities that work are doing, is teaching you to let go of what you know and start to actually feel your emotional experience, which is sometimes scary because our emotional experience is programmed across the lifespan. I may have a traumatic event when I'm eight or nine years old and I learn, alright, when I feel vulnerability that is bad. When I feel vulnerable somebody is going to take that, they are going to exploit it, they are going to hurt me, so if I'm vulnerable I have to get rigid. I have to look tough.

That has to be a secret. If I'm hurt, I cannot show that to anyone. I have to get angry. Now, that's not an intellectual thing, right? It's not happening in my prefrontal cortex. That's happening in the body brain, the part of the brain that is connected to my deep emotional system and to my body. And what that deep brain is learning how to do is essentially map energy

and distribute energy. When I see this stimuli, when I have this stimuli, an emotional need of a specific color, maybe it's red curtains as a trigger for PTSD. But a lot of times it's an emotional state. This is how I distribute energy. My heart gets cold. My back gets tight. My adrenaline goes up. I'm ready to fight. And therapy, especially for trauma and PTSD, a lot of the time is teaching you to go ahead and let go of that controlling prefrontal cortex brain and drop down into the subcortical brain so we can rewire this stuff. Because I know intellectually I shouldn't have panic attacks. I know that I shouldn't overeat. I know that I shouldn't drink too much. I know that this thought is illogical and this thought is logical.

But that's not how my brain is working on the most important and fundamental and oldest level, the subcortical part. So the point of this video is not to say the prefrontal cortex brain is good and the subcortical brain is bad and the subcortical brain is good. That's not it. It's that this is how we're built. This is how we feel. And if you're going to do therapy effectively, if you're going to go through therapy effectively, you have to understand that these pieces have to work together. So if I just continue to tell patients, all right, every time that you want to eat a cheeseburger, just clap your hands and say, stop, just clap your hands and say no, you know, or snap a rubber band.

I'm trying to control a system that is beneath cognition, that is happening before I'm even thinking in language, with cognition, which doesn't really work. I'm just sitting there white knuckling trying not to eat this food or something, but it's like trying to steer a little ship that I have control over on this roiling ocean that I'm not going back and regulating that's going to sink the ship eventually. I have to be able to go back and say, okay, when I'm feeling panicked, when I'm feeling afraid, I handle that by projecting it onto food.

This will soothe me. This will fix this. And, and, but what? I'm not going to reach for the food. I'm going to face this pain. How old is this? What am I trying to turn off here? What emotion have I not not going to reach for the food. I'm going to face this pain. How old is this? What am I trying to turn off here? What emotion have I not learned how to regulate? And this isn't always fit neatly into language. That's why sometimes therapy modalities like internal family systems,

gestalt therapy, Jungian psychotherapy, somatic therapies, trauma-informed yoga, things like that that are dealing with the subcortical brain, they have kind of a mystical component about the deep and aware self or, you know, the dropping down into body-mind. And they have a language about that sounds almost religious and dissociative. And that's why, is they're activating a part of the brain that is not part of language. It's not part of intellect. It's a way of experiencing things. Now, if you're sitting there and you're like, well, that sounds great conceptually, but how the hell do you know this? And like, what are you talking about? How do I feel this? Brain spotting is a modality that will make you feel this stuff immediately. If you go work with a brain spotting therapist,

one of the things that happens when you're processing pretty deeply is that you kind of lose language a little bit and you just feel your body almost move without your permission. I feel a huge cold brick of ice around my heart and then I feel like it gets stronger and stronger and then it pops and then oh the energy floods out. And the person is sitting there going like why is this happening? I'm not thinking anything. I'm not thinking, I'm not remembering anything. I don't have a picture in my head.

I don't have a word in my head and yet my body and my emotional system I have this intense awareness of. And it's because it's activating that deep part of the brain. And so if you're sitting there going, I don't know what on the world this guy's talking about, if you want to see what this feels like, find a brain spotting therapist. That's probably the fastest way to do it. There are some other ways. You can also call me or reach out, and I'm happy to point you in a direction. So when we're learning throughout childhood, not with our intellect, with our emotional brain, right? How do we handle these emotional states? How much energy do we direct into muscle tension?

How much energy do we direct into an adrenaline response? I mean, some people, when they have an emotional need, you know, if they see something on television that makes them feel a little bit insecure, if they have a bad day at work, if they have a belief about how the world is supposed to work, and I see something on the news that is contradicting the way that I think the world is supposed to work, I start to feel a little bit vulnerable or a little bit like on earth, a little bit untethered. Immediately, their response is to get mad. They don't know that. It's not an intellectual thing. They're just watching this. They're feeling a little bit of an insecurity, and then all of a sudden there's a anger, and then they're, you know, yelling at this or that,

and that is projected. We have to turn off this intellect in order to figure out what the real problem is, because the real problem is not the the news or the real problem is not this thing that I don't like. The real problem is not that like you talked over me and that makes me mad or you moved my shoes and I want to know where my shoes are. That's never what the real problem is. The real problem is always that there's a younger part of self that has a different age.

You know, a lot of times we feel very strong age when we go back and we feel this stuff. And it learned how to handle emotion, in this case, the emotion of being wrong or vulnerable or not in control by getting aggressive, getting angry, fighting. And we have to go back and comfort this eight, nine, six, two-year-old part of ourself that is a subcortical memory, a subcortical programming in the deep brain beneath intellect. And it feels scary because a lot of times when you do this kind of therapy, what you're making contact with are pieces of yourself that feel like a child. And pieces of yourself that feel like a child that is throwing a temper tantrum. And when you do that, you have an opportunity to go back and soothe the child.

This is very IFS-like language. And heal it and calm it down so that you can make a choice in those moments about what the best use of your emotion is, about the best use of your energy. And I'm a big believer that a lot of these things are programmed in utero, you know, the way that your mother is feeling, whether or not she's able to handle emotion herself or not. A lot of those things get implanted, you know, the switches in DNA start getting turned on or off to go ahead and get the child programmed for the world that it's going to come into.

Because nature is smart and these things exist because of evolution. And if your mom is panicked and running and frantic, that means the world you're coming into might be a very scary place and needs to go ahead and start getting you ready for that. So sometimes trauma, you know, trauma with a lowercase t is not even like a traumatic event in your life. I mean, it's just sometimes this programming that we get from our deep genetic experience or from, you know, the epigenetics of the adaptations going on when we're born. We can't always figure out where it comes from, and we don't always have to. You know, something like psychoanalysis is very much fixated on figuring out what is it that happened, and we can't always know what happened. We just have to know how to regulate and how to make contact with the deep body. So in summary, when we're going through these things, there's two

parts of the brain, right? There's the prefrontal cortex, which is kind of our ego, and it is our intellectual system that thinks in language. And then there's the subcortical brain, which is a deep body awareness that happens without us thinking of how should our body react to things, and also a deep emotional experience of what do I do with anger? Do I have to shrink down because no one will listen to me? Do I get cocky and go ahead because everyone will listen to me? What do I do with sadness? Is it something that I have learned is okay because I can heal and I can feel it and I can think about it? Or is it something that I have to shut down and run away from and eat a bag of cookies or play solitaire or watch Netflix for three hours so that I'm not in touch with it?

And the problems in psychotherapy, the problems in psychology where you get neurosis and things happening are where these parts of the brain are not working together. I remember when I was in school, I would never smoke cigarettes together. I remember when I was in school, I never smoked cigarettes, but I remember when I was in school like they did a DARE class and they told us, you know, cigarettes, people say that they relax them and that they feel relaxed, but really it revs you up, it makes you anxious. And I was like, what do you mean? If the person smokes a cigarette and they feel relaxed, then they're relaxed. And what they meant there was that the cigarette has a stimulating effect,

and it makes that front prefrontal cortex brain be very focused, be very charged on one thing. So that feels good, it lets the person focus, but at the same time, they're dysregulating, upregulating that deep emotional central nervous system that is getting jittery, getting wired, and so the person is getting more disconnected from their feeling. Despite the fact that they're not regulated, they can still focus on getting this report done or focus on getting through the day,

and that creates more problems as I'm not emotionally aware of this anxiety that I'm having. And the way that you treat trauma, the way that you do therapy effectively is not to teach people to be afraid of the emotional system. I mean, maybe you have to avoid triggers for a certain amount of therapy or something. But when you just say, never look at red curtains because you'll have a panic attack, never be around cheeseburgers because you'll eat them. You're cognitively trying to control this whole system. What you need are therapy modalities, which many of the therapy modalities out there are doing this in so many words, that start with the symptom.

What is it that I'm projecting this on? What is it that's a problem? Am I biting my nails? Am I drinking beer? What is the protective part that's protecting me from the greater anxiety? Start with the symptom in cognition. When does it happen? Why does it happen?

And then go from the front brain like a route all the way back down into the body. Trace where the symptom actually comes from. What is it that I'm feeling when I start to bite my nails? What is it that I'm feeling when I'm being a workaholic, when I'm drinking too much alcohol, when I'm eating too much food, when I'm picking fights? What is it that I'm avoiding feeling that those things are protecting me from? They're not the real problem.

They're the way that I turn the problem off. We're going deeper into the root. So what is it that they are serving? Maybe I'm afraid of being out of control. If I don't feel like all my conditions for safety are met, that people respect me, that I'm being listened to, if I don't feel like that's going on, then I start to fight. So I have to find out what is it that I'm avoiding. And then I have to learn how to experience that, which is scary because I don't want to experience that. We're going deeper into the root. This piece of me feels two, three, four years old. I mean, I don't know how much it feels. It just feels terrible. I don't know how old it feels. It just

feels terrifying and overwhelming. And it wants, what does it want? What does it want to do? I'm going deeper into the root. It wants to fight. It wants to break things. It wants to throw stuff. That is scary to me because my prefrontal cortex doesn't understand why. Why would this be in my body? Why would this be in my deep emotional system? Because I know that I don't want to do that, but yet this part of me does. Where does it, what does it activate? Is it tension in my neck? And this is where good therapists are noticing the body and helping you point these things out. Is it, and good modalities of therapy are teaching them to, is it in my wrist? Does my posture want to stand up and fight?

Does my posture want to shrink away? What is the physicality of this place in the subcortical brain? What is the way that my body experiences energy? Does my throat lock up like I'm afraid to talk or I'm trying not to say something? Do I feel just a cold, icy pressure on my chest? Do I feel like my chest is going to burst chest do I feel like my chest is going to burst do I feel like the pressure is going down do I feel just a black hole void sucking in my chest is there pressure behind my eyes is my stomach a pit what is it doing in the deepest part of the root here

and then teaching myself not to be afraid of it but to own it and understand it and be curious about it and reclaim it as a part of myself and feel it in my body and feel it in my toes and in my posture and at the deepest layers of physicality. And so now we've taken that symptom and we've traced it all the way down to the root of the deep brain. And one of the reasons why it's so important to find this root and then trace it all the way down into the layers of the deep brain is that a lot of those deep brain processes that are in your body and your deep emotional system are our creativity. They are our artistic sensibility. They are our intuition.

They are our ability to feel something that is beyond this, that it has a spiritual aspect or a transcendental aspect or something that's bigger than us. I mean, it is part of our deep system, but that again is why you get this kind of mystical language I think sometimes in therapy modalities that embrace this, is because I can never really understand my intuition with my prefrontal cortex. I mean, I may make a beautiful work of art that just feels like it's coming from something else and then I see it and I'm like, oh my gosh, I understand what I did there. I can't believe that I was in conversation with this creative idea or this metaphor because it didn't come from this part of my brain.

It came from my deep intuitive experience. And remember, intuition is a gut reaction. It's a lizard knowing that this color brown means I can eat it, and this color brown means I have to jump away or else I get eaten. It isn't something where I sit back and say, oh, well, let me make a decision about how I'm feeling about it. I'm not thinking. I'm not using intellect, I'm just reacting. And so when we have a very strong intuitive sense about something, it's not that the intuition is good or bad or right or wrong.

I'm not saying that you should always just follow your intuition around. Some people do that too much. But you don't know where it comes from until you go back into this deep brain and heal that. Maybe my gut reaction, my intuitive sense is telling me that men are bad because a man hurt me and I haven't healed that trauma. Maybe it's telling me that I just don't like this person. I don't like this kind of politician. I don't like this kind of thing. They're just bad. And that's because of some association that I never went back and healed. Or maybe I'm intuitively feeling, even though this is right for my friends and right for my family, this isn't right for me. I can't do this and be authentic. It's not who I am. And until I go back in and reclaim that intuition and that sense of creativity and that ability to think with more than reason, more than ego,

and let go of my need to control and understand and hold everything in my prefrontal cortex and my intellectual brain, I haven't become whole. I don't know all of who I am. And there's a lot of parts of me that I'm leaving out of my life. And even if I can function without overeating or something, even if I don't have any major issues, that's still a very sad thing because I haven't finished this project of becoming the person that I am supposed to be. I haven't become all of me. I'm not even aware of what that is. And a lot of times we want a quick fix, we want to skip this. You know, medication may turn off the anxiety so we don't have to do this process.

Medication is needed sometimes, but it isn't a solution to everything. Nothing is a silver bullet. We're taking these symptoms and then going all the way through the deep brain. And there's a lot of therapy modalities that do this. So I hope that's interesting. If you have taking these symptoms and then going all the way through the deep brain. And there's a lot of therapy modalities that do this. So I hope that's interesting. If you have any questions about following the route down into the body, I think that's what the best therapy modalities have been doing for a long time. If you have a question or you have a comment, let me know.

Thank you for listening. This is Joel with Taproot Therapy. I hope you all have a question or you have a comment, let me know. Thank you for listening. This is Joel with Taproot Therapy. I hope you all have a good day.