The Taproot Podcast - 🎙️Navigating the Landscape of the Past and Future of Trauma Therapy: A Conversation with Samuel Blanchette

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Samuel reached out to me as a therapist in the same world as Taproot to have a conversation about therapy and we had it on the air. We talk about Brainspotting, trauma, Emotional Transformation Therapy, Meditation, Mysticism, Jung and the past and future of therapy.  🔊 Join us in this enlightening episode as we sit down with Samuel Blanchette, a therapist in the field of trauma therapy. Samuel brings a trauma-informed and humanistic approach to his practice, emphasizing the uniqueness of each individual's journey. With his rich experience working in diverse environments and with hundreds of people, Samuel has developed a deep understanding that one method doesn't fit all. In our conversation, we delve into the evolution of trauma therapy, exploring various modalities and how they can be tailored to individual needs. 🌱 Samuel passionately believes in validating every person's experience and pain, and he shares his insights on how he walks alongside his clients on their path to healing. Whether you're a professional in the field, someone dealing with personal trauma, or just interested in the human psyche, this episode offers valuable perspectives on the history and future of trauma therapy. #TraumaTherapy #MentalHealthAwareness #HealingJourney #HumanisticApproach #IndividualizedCare #TherapyInsights #MentalWellness #TraumaInformed #PsychologyPodcast #HolisticHealing #SelfDiscovery #EmotionalHealth #MentalHealthMatters #TherapeuticInnovation #EmpathyAndHealing Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]     Transcript: Transcript This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created. Joel Blackstock: All right, this is the Taproot therapy podcast. I'm Joel Blackstock, and I'm here with a man that truly needs. No one introduction. Joel Blackstock: Philosopher king, rock star of published author World traveler collector of rare artifacts as a tearing magic specialist now, so it's Samuel Blanchette I'm saying that there's another social worker who reached out to me and we know we were both kind of in a similar world and a ton of the stuff that I've done. I think it's just because our website is a little bit more visible his people see ideas and they're kind of looking for people in their world, we've talked a little bit about how academic psychology is going in a different direction and clinical practice because the market is wanting things that are not having in the hospitals by and large which is not a great place for the profession to be in and anyway, I have a lot of these conversations on the phone with people that want to connect and they're fun and they're interesting and I learned a bunch of stuff and so decided I'm just gonna start doing that on the podcast one because I'm out of time. All I do is Joel Blackstock: therapy podcast and play with my kids and sleep. And so yeah Samuel's a really interesting nice guy who reached out and wanted to connect and I'm sure we'll have a fascinating conversation. thank you so much for being here. Can you introduce your actual biography? Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, so aside from my arcanium of esoteric skills and my treasure seeking and… Joel Blackstock: know I should come up with as a terror more like Antiquated titles like alienist,… Samuel Blanchette: so forth. Joel Blackstock: nothing. It's like Haberdasher. Samuel Blanchette: sure, right the Joel Blackstock: Yeah farrier Samuel Blanchette: All of those things in the progression of learning how to be a human, Yeah. So yes, I'm a random human being that reached down to you because I saw that you had found a really kind of lovely way of integrating some of the modern neurological approaches with some of the cool more philosophical approaches what I don't think there's really a distinction there, but just to make discrimination between as… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: if we could do that to ourselves, which we try Yes,… Joel Blackstock: romantic distinction only really Samuel Blanchette: and so, I am a master's level clinician with licensed Associates clinician. So I'm working towards my ultimate end goal of whatever that is. Joel Blackstock: just here because here the sea is the terminal license. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, so I'm in Arizona and it is different across all the states and my degree is actually in counseling, so I'm not coming from the social working Realm. Joel Blackstock: Okay, when you said LCS because here it's ALC LPC and then search is counselor and then social worker is lgsw which they just changed to lmsw and then it turns into Li csw which used to be LCSW that in our board and it's infinite wisdom. there's some others around Samuel Blanchette: Absolutely. I'm really appreciate some of the states that are working on doing kind of interstate compacts as far as that goes. I think that's kind of a really cool. right Joel Blackstock: the counselors are so much better at it than the social workers and I think there's pros and Constable both ones, but overall it seems like the social workers have a little bit less self-esteem or something. I don't know what it is and the boards seem like we're during the pandemic at the counseling boards are getting together in the clinical boards are making everything APA. It's like making everything so much easier for the license to practice across state lines and meet this need in a mental health crisis and our board is making it harder and being like actually there's these hoops because we have to make extra sure which I mean there's maybe ways to do it but it's just like they keep raising the number of Ethics hours because they're like, people keep sleeping with their patients. So maybe that they're doing that because they haven't heard it for eight hours instead of four and it's that. don't think no one told him not to do it as the problem. Samuel Blanchette: That's right very much like introduction to you want to be a mental health professional number one,… Joel Blackstock: They're gonna be so bored that we're gonna build a little Beetle of the entire profession. Samuel Blanchette: please don't. Joel Blackstock: No, I mean it's like you need to kind of catch that and the education level and… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: the support level and the licensure level which for some reason it's only we'll just tack on the cease and that'll fix these problems retroactively which supposed to be the system's professional social workers are supposed to understand the system and that actually works not as we wish it did, the stereotype is the lpc's kind of in a vacuum being like symptomology, which is always true and the social worker is more like person in an environment food racism culture, But for some reason those are not the ones that they make the loss about social work. Samuel Blanchette: And that's an interesting point that you make about coming into this field. Right and I think to some degree. it seems that human beings have an interest in how their minds psychees Souls work right how this thing functions because we all experience suffering and so we try to create method Of managing whatever that is, right, and I think that that's such an interesting point about this creating education of so many hours to try and inform you of information and there's such a huge difference between the experience of sitting with somebody in an intensely emotional space and the theoretical constructs around sitting with somebody in emotional space. 00:05:00 Joel Blackstock: And everybody who doesn't do that seems to want to tell you how to the theatrist that has never been in therapy and doesn't practice therapy and… Samuel Blanchette: All right, and Joel Blackstock: the insurance board and the state legislature have all these opinions about things. They don't teach children or do counseling. Samuel Blanchette: Yes, all of those pieces and I think I mean you used to really I mean explicit example, right this idea of they keep on engaging in relationships with these, people that's outside of the framework and the boundaries of the holding container, right? And at the same time… Joel Blackstock: mmm Samuel Blanchette: if you don't know how to work with the energy of human connection, right like intensity of that on the levels that are necessary to some degree to healing Joel Blackstock: for multiple types of people you kind of got to be a chameleon. You need to be what they need. what you want? Samuel Blanchette: Absolutely and to stay with that is interesting. I think that's a huge part of what our field does we create mental constructs in order to feel safe when we're journey into the unknown and I brain spotting. I think that the author makes a really interesting point about this quadrillion Connections in the human brain,… Joel Blackstock: mmm Samuel Blanchette: and I think that that's lovely to be aware of because I think one thing I've noticed as a struggle is They boards and other Trends try to dictate. What is the right way of doing therapy and boy, I've had so many internal conflicts or Joel Blackstock: you can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, it's there's some people who use exercises and avoidance, so if they're processing trauma with brain spotting stop exercising, it's not that that's a bad thing to do, but it's like so a lot of times I think when you Put more control at the top level. You're just making providers. Sort of have a different aesthetic about doing what they're doing. Anyway, it doesn't actually practice that much if anything it makes it worse. Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, I think. this idea of having to change the language that you express the thing that you're going to be doing naturally anyway. Joel Blackstock: And the whole profession, I mean, I think that's like why mental health is such a weird spot is it's like because that you see it if you're a social worker and you're working with grants and things so there's all these assumptions baked in to the way the rules are written that there's services that exist and… Samuel Blanchette: Yes. Samuel Blanchette: Mm-hmm Joel Blackstock: connections and things that have not been around for 30 years. So half of it is ticking boxes that are fake just because it used to work this certain way and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: and it's not quite a catch 22, but we need to word for that. and one of the things is it's like psychiatrists know how to do therapy. It's just this assumption because I know… Samuel Blanchette:  Joel Blackstock: how to read research about CBT and it's like no we used to think that because it used to be true because they used to do therapy and they used to be in there therapy. And now the vast majority of them are not but for some reason they're the one that calls me, from an insurance panel that I'm no longer in it says you should be able to treat the associative identity disorder in Greece sessions with CBT or drugs are mandated and a more therapy will be paid for and also brain spotting is in Joel Blackstock: Based and neither is EMDR and neither is some other long list of stuff. She wanted me to it's like hey,… Samuel Blanchette: reason Joel Blackstock: have you done this? Like I asked would be I left the panel and… Samuel Blanchette: Why? Joel Blackstock: then they were fine, and now they call me every year and ask me to go back in I never will but they're like I don't know does it was your dream to be the member of a 15 person, fake referral insurance thing. That's local to this ZIP code. what are you doing? Why are you telling me how to do therapy? You've never done it Joel Blackstock: I don't know. Samuel Blanchette: yeah, that divide is a curious one because on something in some cases it actually Bears really Pleasant fruit, right some of the really cool neurological studies and some of the neurocy stuff what I really love about it in all honesty is it gives Credence to a lot of historical and traditional methods of working with people and now we can just label it with scientific terms and say it's good an example that I really like so memory reconsolidation I think is so lovely. That's really been encouraging to me this idea that there is a way that the brain changes things damentally permanently emotional, Love that. It's very encouraging to me. And in my process of doing therapy, I deeply fell in love with Gestalt therapy at the very beginning of things. I've done the book Eagle hunger and aggression and I'm like, my goodness. I really love the depth of this thing. 00:10:00 Joel Blackstock: Rich pearls he was an interesting guy. Samuel Blanchette: He was I think a lot of and we have videos and we use that to interpret a certain total system of philosophical approach, which it is what it is and that's what people do but his wife Laura pearls contributed so much good men all these different thinkers into this really really lovely existential approach to their and yeah. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: One I think it's downfall was kind of two things too. It's like one he was kind of a little bit more of a showman. He was probably kind of like me he was like you're not I want to show you how well this thing works by demonstrating it. And so people thought it was too productive. Samuel Blanchette: Sure. Joel Blackstock: No not reductive. They thought it was too much of Joel Blackstock: I don't know just some kind of a trade technique or something and said he was showing them part of the system and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: then also east and west coast Charlotte and I got in a fight. I mean it's like the middle of California people were like this should be therapy and… Samuel Blanchette: all Joel Blackstock: the other people it should be religion, I guess you're therapy modalities successful. If it accidentally forms like a religion / cult, I don't know. Samuel Blanchette: A philosophical life approach and yeah, I think that you're absolutely right though about that thing and I think the challenge that happens the unfortunate thing is when certain people take things to their extreme, especially when part of the whole thing is trying to keep ideas alive to some degree letting Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: let me show you something cool. Right and I think what that winds up doing though is especially in the case of stole therapy. here's this beautiful in a theoretical field Theory dialogical approach. I inval phenomenology relationship in between bracketing all these brilliant really lovely existential Concepts kind of like flowing into this approach and then we wind up with I do empty chair work therefore I'm using it. Joel Blackstock: yeah. Samuel Blanchette: and it's like Samuel Blanchette: that's saying all young and therapy is active imagination. Right? it's like let's take a technique. Joel Blackstock: We don't even give actual unions that are trained. It's like a ton of time. especially I think it's more of an American Union thing where they just sanitize it so much and it's just therapy plus Jesus or it's like therapy. You can bring to church or it's like a sand trade but there's not I mean it happens with all modalities same thing you're talking about. It's like people mistake the technique Or the lens of the modality… Samuel Blanchette: foot Joel Blackstock: which is how you're understanding a person which is how the conceptualization is so much more important than what you're doing in the room, Samuel Blanchette: I agree so fully I think and the hard part is how do you describe being a human right like this? It's so the potentially new ones. Joel Blackstock: The problem is psychology there, Samuel Blanchette: again, and how do we turn this into something that creates transformative change and I think again out of all the things that sort of young jungian slash Youngs love of alchemical ideas and that framework of thought I think it's so beautiful because it's at least language that's not dependent on time. Right? So it's the taoists or ayurvedic Traditions or these different things. They're all drawing from this concept of transformation. And now my experience especially when we're looking at things like Parts work and stuff. Everybody's labeled these things in their own way with their own conceptual lens. Yeah. Joel Blackstock: Especially ifs is him just putting which I don't dislike. I guess if I had a giant treatment center and I needed to Train everybody to be able to do the best work with it … Samuel Blanchette: absolutely. Joel Blackstock: but he put Yugi and archetypes together with dished out therapies experience will component. and maybe some DBT skills, but That's what it is, and the language of it is kind of dogmanic. You… Samuel Blanchette: It yeah. Joel Blackstock: I think it's so much easier to just say protective part. You kind of feel how this one's a physical protective part. That one's kind of unconscious one or whatever then getting in a fight with a client about is something like a firefighter or… Samuel Blanchette: Sure. Joel Blackstock: protector what I personally like, I mean, it's people who do it do great work. But you… Samuel Blanchette: Yes. Joel Blackstock: I'm not as wild about the language of All that also they think it's family therapy every time you say ifs people think your family there. Samuel Blanchette: Sure, what do I have to bring my mother in? the mother lives in you,… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. He's already here. Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: whether that's an object or at least he's in the space part of your phenomenological field like how we're doing this. 00:15:00 Joel Blackstock: what did you work with Gestalt, but what are the kind of broad Strokes of your practice now or the stuff that you Samuel Blanchette: So, I'm not an official anything right? Because unfortunately there's a pace wall that inhibits people from becoming certified in anything and I understand that to some degree because people want purity of systems possibly or they don't want to be misrepresented or whatever that means and that's okay and I understand that, I think unfortunately that again diminishes the free exchange of information and ideas and then you wind up with like you said this dogma's that have to approach existence in a very fixed pattern and that's neurotic traditionally anyway,… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: so I would say the collection of things right so I do really like primarily because it makes me feel confident and science is important to people and myself So this sort of neuro biological piece, especially poly Bagel Theory. I really like that and again all of those are still constructs built on our current understanding of medicine and biology, but I really like holy legal Theory. I like like I said memory reconsolidation, I like the idea that there are fundamental processes that mammals use to make adaptation. And that just makes sense to me and then sort of more of that the Gestalt oriented humanistic type of thing. So kind of like nazloe kind of existential stuff. And then I did a real deep dive into Parts work and things because Samuel Blanchette: if you've ever sat with anyone whether you're a therapist or otherwise there is a transition of Consciousness between aspects of themselves. However, you want to Define that right. And people have been exploring that from the beginning of time. In fact, I movement and all of these things have been deeply announced analyzed by taoists and in ancient Arabia Arabia and all these different kinds of things people have been playing with human observation and how we do what we do but one thing that constantly shows up and I met it first in Gestalt work right doing empty chair. It's like, my What is this? We have two fundamentally different states of Consciousness and he's Consciousness to define the whole being right? It's not a thought process, but it's a total representation of Self in the world right with environment. and it's just so fascinating there and I really Samuel Blanchette: fell in love with that and started strongly believing in it in a sense. However Samuel Blanchette: that's an interesting space to go because it's very unknown right and so I was looking for framework to understand this and I first got some deep framework in Psycho synthesis, right assagioli really going into all these details about sub personalities and the alchemical process of transmutation of self and then I started kind of playing around from there and it's interesting to see now what my work kind of shows up as after I've been exposed to all these different methods voice dialogue, internal family systems. All these different ones. There's a gentleman John run. Joel Blackstock: there is voice dialogue have purchase out there. I mean, it seems like there's not a ton of places still doing it much. Samuel Blanchette: So I had to look to find all of these things right ego States is super fun enjoyable for folks… Joel Blackstock: mmm Samuel Blanchette: because it's derives from a currently utilized processes that are popular. Joel Blackstock: That's like The Last Remnant of transactional analysis. It's still out there. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah this which all have roots in this Gestalt thing which I'll have roots in, psychoanalytic processes,… Joel Blackstock: Mm-hmm Samuel Blanchette: right ego and superego are parts, I mean to find them how you will There's something right. yeah, and… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: I think finding out how to work with parts and Also, my own process has looked like working with parts and also realizing more of this kind of again this field oriented idea or kind of this Buddhist idea of this local non-duality. So it's like parts and no parts can both mutually exist. And what's meaningful is how it applies in the field of Exchange in that moment with the person at least that's where I'm sitting at. I'm kind of wondering for you for yourself. How have you integrated that do you stick kind of sharply to a process of the way of working with parts or how have you integrated this because you have a lot of really cool neurobiological techniques, And then you have this other stuff too and kind of like, I'm very curious about that. Joel Blackstock: But I mean, I think probably what you're responding to is when I'm looking at the way that a lot of these models are younger pearls or whatever. I… 00:20:00 Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Yes. Joel Blackstock: they're written in phenomenological language. It's like this is just how this feels and so they're kind of intuitive which is the reason why a lot of people they won't die. A lot of people are called back to them and a lot of reasons why they're never going to be institutionally. there is that it's not an objective thing. Samuel Blanchette: Monday Joel Blackstock: It's kind of an intuitive concept about don't you understand this part of your own experience, if you're chasing the academic thing and you don't understand that part of your experience, that's not going to speak to you, because it's not real. Samuel Blanchette: yes. Joel Blackstock: You can't see it take you to touch it. This is about subjective kind of felt State and in the parts of self that you can feel and work with and I mean frankly I think to do certain kinds of trauma therapy, you have to bury a certain amount of trauma that you've worked through or… Samuel Blanchette: yeah you Joel Blackstock: you don't really understand it. Joel Blackstock: Yeah, but then now there's neurology and neurobiology that is able to explain or we can make guesses. I'll still get a nasty email from a clinical psychology student. But we can make guesses about what these parts of the brain do and… Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: that's always been my interest and so it's like because I was always frustrated with just how bad Academia is it admitting that it's wrong? it's the same people publishing these papers that are like you doesn't know unconscious isn't real and this is whatever and… Samuel Blanchette: Behaviorism it's hard. Joel Blackstock: trauma is trendy. So the same guys like riding a paper. That's like there's tertiary secondary and primary levels of consciousness, but the tertiary levels are only, symbolic function and show up in the body and you're like what it dude like you're wrong. just right. I'm sorry, that's the paper that you should be published. What? Joel Blackstock: So my thing is going back and saying look. Yeah these philosophies are Perennial meaning they pop up independently because there's people sort of feeling themself and discovering the same thing about how we work and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: but then a lot of times, I don't really have a friend anywhere because I'm saying no, I'm not just in this club. I'm trying to say that all these clubs share functions and that neither one of them is they all have pros and cons. They all have drawbacks people don't like that. Samuel Blanchette: Yes. Joel Blackstock: They like me for the extent of me saying what you're doing is interesting and here's a cool way to articulate it and here's some techniques there. They like that and then I say, okay, but here's where the limitations are and where you can pivot if no don't do that, and that's the, people kind of like the stuff online until I won't even get a chance to respond to the email. Sometimes it's just like this is great. and this is great. I used it. wait, you said this thing that's threatening the way that I practice so I don't think you understand like I haven't said yeah I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if that answers. Joel Blackstock: that video that I have where I'm talking about I think the breakdown of these models is how experiential they are and how cognitive they are. And so the person who comes in and says that they want existential therapy and they're like, I didn't know my PhD in Sartre and I use that existential therapy and I'm called to whatever I'm like in a bag my hand. I'm like, that's the last thing that you need, it's not that other people are hell,… Samuel Blanchette: it's right because this Joel Blackstock: it's that you are in hell because you feel that in here. Don't need to the same thing with the person who comes in that's just totally in their feeling State and their feelings all that's real and they want to dump all this emotion. I mean really what you need is to kind of get out outside of that and see a bigger picture and have some kind of, spiritual or philosophical ones to analyze your life, which young says that in his book that the kind of therapy you come and… Samuel Blanchette: I love Joel Blackstock: wanting is usually the last one that you need. Samuel Blanchette: And it's that young and function of opposites, right or… Joel Blackstock: To tension of opposites. Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: this enabled from Yeah, there's Yeah, we want to come in this way. So it's likely that the other side of that is probably where we're gonna get the most yields. However, how do we… Joel Blackstock: mmm Samuel Blanchette: how do we get you to feel comfortable walking into that space because we have to build structure and some different scaffolding to step into the Known, right. So if I am loaded with a certain perspective it's easy for me to walk in that world until I dip my toe in the reality that I don't perceive then it's like my goodness and then we get all of the functions of adaptation that threatens my self-concept and do all this lovelyness. Joel Blackstock: I mean that's if you just listen to conflict or politics or whatever. It's half of the fights that people get into or where they become the most reactive. It's just where somebody saying. Hey, my behavior doesn't line up with myself image and you're pointing that out to me, … Samuel Blanchette: what? Joel Blackstock: which is one of the reasons why I can do therapy, but probably not anything else very well is that I don't quit doing that ever. if you say something I'm gonna take it at face value and… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: because of that, people come into therapy. There's kind of a buy into that process of but it makes you Miserable, person to be around at Thanksgiving. maybe we'll drop this episode then. Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: What was in a hospital? I couldn't turn it off. I mean they would have this thing where they're like, hey, we really want to continuously improve and we want to know what the problem is and we want your all input and we want you to be honest and then I'd be like, then here's the thing that you could do easily. It would save you money and it would make reduce burnout and it would reduce errors and the downside is it might threaten somebody Ego or we would just have to admit that there's a problem which is what you're asking. no, don't say that. That's not what you're supposed to. Okay fine, then you don't want what you said. don't do this meeting give me three hours of my life every six months or Say I want you to give me your honest feedback. Where it's what I mean as long as you're saying it I'm gonna continue to take it at face value, even though I know you don't mean what you're saying and… 00:25:00 Samuel Blanchette: And that's the phenomenological approach right? Joel Blackstock: I'm not gonna stop doing that. I mean that's all that I'm gonna die. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: You literally cannot know anything other than what is happening in the immediate now, It's like everything else is extrapolation or some sort of projection or something. So it's like This is what you mean, right and they're like no. Okay. So this is not… Joel Blackstock: mmm Samuel Blanchette: what you mean, but this is what you're saying. Is that correct? And I love that this memory reconsolidation like the fundamental initial tenant is just creating this explicit awareness and then a juxtaposition of so this and this yes, and that's Joel Blackstock: Can you talk a little bit about memory reconsolidation for people who may not be familiar the technique there and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, absolutely. Joel Blackstock: the assumption? Samuel Blanchette: Let's see. If Bruce Ecker was a physicist before he started getting into the whole therapy situation. And I love that people have passions because passions create they take people down. Holes that lead to information I would never find because my passion doesn't lean in that direction. And so Samuel Blanchette: they really did a lot of work looking at this idea of how we fundamentally change our memories right? There was this idea up until the early 2000s or so that once it's in long term memory storage. You're stuck with it. And even we have in a vendor coax book like that body keeps the score. It's like no once It's in there you're stuck and then that leads right that necessitates creating processes where we're doing a counter development of a strategy, So we're looking for extinction, which is let me build up this neurological pathway that's contrary to this one so they can battle it down and hopefully my pretty fun little cortex wins down against my limbic system and my sub cortical areas when I'm threatened and we can do that through some desensitization and building up strategies, right which is fine and that also building strategies is how we learn grow and develop, however, Samuel Blanchette: The fundamental sense of emotional pain when I access a historical piece of my existence. That's not very fun. And that's what drives most of us to seek change. right and… Joel Blackstock:  Samuel Blanchette: and this idea is really lovely because They were going off this model. you can't erase long-term memory once it's in it's in but whoa. All sorts of cool experiments they're using mice and then they're putting in certain chemicals that inhibit the consolidation of certain kinds of neurological processes and bad Bang. Now we're not having the long-term memory affect them on an emotional level, but they still theoretically hold on to that information in a chronological fashion, right? So Joel Blackstock: Yeah, and anything like with brain science because there are billions of connections. It's gonna be reduced to some kind of metaphor. I mean, there's no way to talk about it without being reductive unless you're super computer, … Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: but I mean that's another thing a lot of the research is showing is the pair sympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system are out of sync. They're not acting in the same way which I mean to me with brain spotting and a lot of the pupil dilation stuff that we do you can't fake those reactions,… Samuel Blanchette: yeah. No. Joel Blackstock: when your people's like doing this you're having a brain bleed or you're maybe brain spotting works and it's doing something that's neurologically reproducible with a reducible effect. Even if it's not past a zillion randomize controlled trials and isn't 30 years old yet, something I can recreate in the room. Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: I hear the same thing from the patient. It cures the same thing. that's Health Science works, even it starts here, you research it later and there are a lot of studies on it now being more effective and embr and some other things but the parent sympathetic and sympathe. Joel Blackstock: Nervous system fighting each other one dilates the eye. It has kind of a sphincter like muscle that tightens and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, right. Joel Blackstock: the other one has a pulling muscle that opens the eye so I hit my mic and that when you usually don't drive with your foot on the gas and the brake, you… Samuel Blanchette: Right. Yeah. Joel Blackstock: but what I can do is hit those to be intention, with color light frequency eye position, all the different techniques that we have now eye movement sometimes until they Sink in my body is assuming the same thing that the front of my brain is assuming about… Samuel Blanchette: I love that and… Joel Blackstock: how the world works not something that is 15 years old, traumatic. Samuel Blanchette: and this even speaks to Peter Levine the oscillation between felt senses right even going back to earlier stuff of self-observation. 00:30:00 Joel Blackstock: Yeah, yeah. Samuel Blanchette: We're looking at ben Eugene gendlin in this focusing. here's a felt sense. I experience it. I look I put words on it and then there's this curious thing. I'm speaking back to this memory reconsolidation piece, which I love because it's non-theoretical right? it is theoretical in the scientific sense, but it's trans theoretical in the sense that it doesn't belong to anybody nobody can I think they say this is my method pay me my Right. Joel Blackstock: You can't really consolidate memory only I can do that. Samuel Blanchette: I have it all it's mine. Let baby thousands of dollars to learn my strategy which is fine and… Joel Blackstock: Yeah, that is kind of even the models that I like. Samuel Blanchette: I understand. Joel Blackstock: It's kind of off-putting or they're like look you use this word. Then you're whatever. It's like man. Come on. why are you doing this Samuel Blanchette: we have to and some because it's marking territory and it's validating philosophical processes and trying to differentiate that from something else and all the things. So what I love though, and I'm very curious especially with brain spotting and various other eye movement type things whether it's NLP and the different ways of accessing or looking in the visual field or any of these things or even just staying with the micro Tremors and neurogenic tremoring that happens during certain kinds of activation all the good stuff, The lovely thing about So the concept here for the memory reconsolidation is that It is theoretically not and sometimes that feels kind of powerful but it is the way of creating. Samuel Blanchette: Forever emotional change and the way that it works is memory is Consolidated during event of high emotion, right? So boom. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: I have stored that in my system. However, we do that. We have no clue, we have always ideas on how memory works but it's way too integrative to just be reduced to neurons. It's memories stored with emotion, In order to change that the process is really really simple, but it's also challenging because the process is this I need to activate that as a felt experience that memory with the emotional component. Samuel Blanchette: Once I activate that memory and it felt experience. I need to create an explicit juxtaposition as the word that they use something that fundamentally on a felt sense disconfirms. The fact that that is that be whether I'm using an eye thing and I'm in a safe space or whatever that is and what that does is it unlocks all of the patterns of how that's held because now just like an animal right? I have an explicit fact that contradicts the emotional content. And once that opens then we have a process of five hour window where if we continually repeat the Discerning event one consolidates, the evidence says that what should happen is that should no longer elicit anything you can call it back up and it will be a historical. Piece of information but it will not be emotional charge to it. Joel Blackstock: It sounds like a lifespan integration is doing that too. I'm not training that one. I've read the book and one of my supervision candidates is really into it but it sounds similar and… Samuel Blanchette: with you Joel Blackstock: that you're kind of taking these things that are felt experiential pretty strong activating memories, but they are contradictory and then ramming them all through so quickly that you can't continue to have all of that stored semantic memory be on challenged and then the brain let's go. Samuel Blanchette: And the timeline and lifespan stuff is really interesting because we look at NLP they've been using timelines and things for a long long time. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: And this is one of the other things that I struggle with as people will take ideas that are explicitly described in older therapeutic modalities. They will not give credit to the line of thinking and… Joel Blackstock: yeah. Samuel Blanchette: they will need it to their own process. That is one of the things that Joel Blackstock: Then sometimes they don't even know when they're doing it. I mean you can kind of tell when people know that they're doing it when people don't like Joseph Campbell bringing young to America. Samuel Blanchette: but that's Joel Blackstock: I mean, I feel like he knew what he was stealing and he was a union he didn't give credit to it. You… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: he said that but yeah, there's other people where I think they've just heard something and then they start doing something and then they decide they can I mean like that. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair what I really loved though about this process. So this idea memory recall it somatically in a felt way. Juxtaposition of experience something that completely explicitly confronts that create the unlock which then allows new information to be encoded in the memory to go away and what's really kind of need is though. This is very dependent on each situation. So you can remove the emotional charge of a certain thing. But if it has other connections or other parts are attached to it each of those would also need to go through this process of reconciliate memory reconsolidation in order to get the full effect of when I think of that in this context it no longer elicits that strong necessary emotional survival response. 00:35:00 Samuel Blanchette: and what I like about it is because it's kind of like It just a concept neurologically. It means that every therapeutic modality could theoretically work and if they worked it means they follow this natural biological process. and if… Joel Blackstock: yeah. Samuel Blanchette: what I really love about Concepts like that is that it gives a lot of freedom back to the clinician to trust their artfulness their own and… Joel Blackstock: their intuition Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: They're intuition. Yeah, so it says This is generally how it works. Even if you was probably Bagel Theory I think was also beautiful for that. This is generally how it works. Now knowing that within the confines of the biology let's use our creative playful curiosity to generate new outcomes. Joel Blackstock: Yeah and that's the thing that you can't teach, it's like I love it if there's an interview candidate that fights with me because they understand something and they believe it and they know something they're not just trying to figure out what somebody wants from them. Those are the clinicians that take years to get better the ones that have coming from the hospital or something and it's almost like they were trained not to think for themself and… Samuel Blanchette: We Joel Blackstock: justify everything they do in this thing and the question that you can't fake and interview. if you're early in your therapy education remember this one, I mean just absorb a ton of podcasts and a ton of current material on that and then go in with a fresh perspective like this, I think it's headed this is where it's not because you can't fake that question. I mean when we do Executive coaching and people are talking about hiring always just ask them the last thing that they learned and… Samuel Blanchette:  Joel Blackstock: independently that they apply to their job if somebody's telling you about what they learned in college 20 years ago. Don't hire them if they're like, I kind of think this and I think this way even if it's Joel Blackstock: And don't have to be therapy you can't teach curiosity but it's pretty good indicator of one,… Samuel Blanchette: No. Joel Blackstock: self-awareness a conscious relationship with intuition and a drive to be better. You… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: Which is what you want in the room, Samuel Blanchette: I like that with that phrase. He said curiosity can't be taught and that other thing because it can't be taught. It means that it's a biological function. ventral vagal thing. It's like and everyone uses different languaging higher self. Maybe the self or these things but the neat thing is Joel Blackstock: I think it can be healed. I'm not saying that some people are born with it. Some people it's genetic. I'm saying that your relationship to your trauma and your life and your sense of self that is a really good indicator of whether or not those things are in a good place, because it's like a ton of people. That's why EI infj types are so dangerous. you get Jesus you get Jesus and… Samuel Blanchette: yes. Joel Blackstock: you also get healer because you're intuition is so strong in order to see what people want to hear and then get them they're doing their own language you go somewhere which can make you really capable is a therapist but also as a leader and a some are grifters but a lot of the people who are doing bad work like it's not that they're Meaning to it's that they're mistaking trauma for intuition because they come from the same part of the brain and they're actually having this trauma response, but it feels like the spirits in me and I'm giving the sermon, Joel Blackstock: I don't know and the early days of charismatic Christianity in the old west. I mean, it really was wild that it was just up in the mountains everybody with the dopamine disorder needs. They've got the calling now, let's we people would scream and… Samuel Blanchette: and it's our says yeah. Joel Blackstock: cry and see things and lay on the ground and buttoned up Victorian society was like this slaps man. this is the coolest thing like and they were feeling something like that. Samuel Blanchette: Just profound. Joel Blackstock: Yeah, that's But you want your intention to be conscious is the point, Samuel Blanchette: I like that and I think that being able to and even speaking to that piece. Right? The neat thing is that humans when given a safe container and given permission to be appropriately expressive and to feel especially with others because we do all this really cool neurological connection, this mirror neurons in the distribution of emotional tension, whether that's electromagnetic through whatever that is is we're doing all that fun stuff or whatever but The neat thing is when we have a community of people that are coming together and ideally with full intention and understanding of what they're doing and then they create a space for exchange and support Those are the most beautiful healing environments the Tim notes right this container and Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Yeah, that was a title will summon's book about the spirituality of urban planning a guy. He was on our podcast earlier. He's a really nice guy. He may know. 00:40:00 Samuel Blanchette:  Joel Blackstock: Know the tenemos is the name. Samuel Blanchette: Mm- guys and the thing I think. the disempowering part of information right and some respects I think Theoretically it's neutered right? It's just information and we have the freedom to exit connect with that. But another battle that I thought one of my own internal oppressors or tell it what you will right. It's like Trying to do things the right way, and… Joel Blackstock: in It reduces anxiety… Samuel Blanchette: I've been in enough in. Joel Blackstock: if there's a right way, and… Samuel Blanchette: Absolutely. Joel Blackstock: and therapy gets to a point where somebody's being like. No, I know that you don't know. I know it's up to me, but I'm worried that I'm doing me wrong, and it is this thing that it's such a silly idea or a silly statement, but it's a real thing and that we have this insecurity about if we're doing us right, I mean I had somebody one time that told me okay. Yeah, you're saying that if I get rid of this then I'll sit down I'll know exactly who I am and I'll be able to connect with people in a way that's good. but what if I do that and I don't like you that guy is I started laughing. It's just like what am I supposed to say and what if I like myself and the self that I am right now is Rebels right itself that it could be in the future of all my potential. Samuel Blanchette: What? Joel Blackstock: It's like but it's so human. It makes a Sense, it's not like that person. I'm not making fun of them just saying we all do that right? Samuel Blanchette: Yes. I don't like that guy,… Joel Blackstock: I just never heard it said Samuel Blanchette: but I don't like the authentic me. Joel Blackstock: yeah. Samuel Blanchette: and I think the challenge with all of these structured ways of trying to get it right and somebody saying I have the way and all of the stuff the things that I think get hamstrung by those things in particular are the power of our own and impressive creativity the beauty of our intuition and then the other thing is this and I think this is something that earlier young and some of the shelters and folks the aesthetic value of beauty and felt sense like congruence with beauty. I don't think there's any objective way of measuring what feels congruent right good and beautiful. So let me Joel Blackstock: That's We read a lot about architecture and I've talked to a couple I'm supposed to be on the Australian Institute of architectures podcast a little bit later on but that's one of the things is it's an archetypal thing and not a lot of people apply Young's theories visually, I mean some artists sort of did that in the 70s and he generally did not like that art because he thought there was supposed to be a descent and then a return you were just supposed to be enamored with the unconscious and become a psycho not you're supposed to solve your ego and… Samuel Blanchette: That's it. Yeah. Joel Blackstock: then come back and have learned something from it and have been transformed but also go back to being how were you. a better version of that Samuel Blanchette: Right here was Journey piece. Joel Blackstock: But yeah architecture is getting in touch or filmmaking, so many of those things. I mean, that's what you're saying is it's finding the beautiful isn't just I came up with it. It's almost like intuition is like a radio wave that you tune into and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: channel this thing or you don't I mean and you can say that you could use spiritual language about that or you could use second language of just this kind of deep genetic programming that we're getting in touch with but only you can run your experiment to the end. your choice is you do that or Are you ignore it? Samuel Blanchette: And it's again that called The Adventure. I like that kind of languaging around this thing. and there's a beautiful book by Piero. Ferrucci I guess is his name and he's a psychosynthesis, right and… Joel Blackstock: What is that? Samuel Blanchette: he has I'm psychosynthesis. Joel Blackstock: I'm not familiar with them. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, so psychosynthesis was near the end time of Freud's process. I said you only was a psycho analyst and he worked closely with young as well. I'm down in Italy and he created a beautiful beautiful model. He was informed by theosophy, which is a really cool amalgam of a lot of different spiritual conceptsky in these types of folks brought all that in and Joel Blackstock: a lot of those flying around Vienna around that point. Samuel Blanchette: yeah. Yeah during that time period right there's a lot of this really. Joel Blackstock: If Freud is kind of more of an inevitability than we give him credit for me. There's other people or they're not giving credit more than we think we give him too much credit, it's kind of like Columbus you have enough ships going around there. Somebody's gonna bump into it and realize you can't sell the India if his strip sink somebody else does it and you look at what's going on in Vienna with clamps everybody, people were going to apply this idea that maybe we are not only… Samuel Blanchette:  Joel Blackstock: what we think maybe there's forces beneath the surface. to medicine to psychology and They probably would have done it a little bit better than Freud, the random guy, or gentler. Samuel Blanchette: right and unfortunately, he had to create a modality that he could sell to a community which believed in the world in a certain kind of way, some of the earlier ideas and… Joel Blackstock: mmm Samuel Blanchette: even the archetypical imagery that comes in this Thanos and Eros and all these Joel Blackstock: Which he abandons? He puts the Thanatos back, 00:45:00 Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, this existential requirement of this death thing, right and then even libidinal energy. I love that whether it goes into Wilhelm Reich and talking about the embodied memory system how the unconscious is the body or otherwise, I think that there's a lot of really neat stuff there and then of course, you can see a lot of this cultural overlay and then we had all this beautiful stuff pre that time even like mentalism and these different kinds of Hypnotic type Concepts that use a lot of alchemical concept and ways of defining the world, right? The world is MIND in using the Emerald Tablet and these different theorems of alchemical transformation, right? So Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, I think really set a really cool space and gave words and language to it to start playing around with it. And I love that people dissented explicitly. I think if anything right that is what mental health is about is you've created a construct and I love that you've done that. Thank you so much for putting words out there. I disagree on some of these levels and that's important. Because if we all collude we definitely uphold the delusion. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Yeah,… Samuel Blanchette:  Joel Blackstock: and I think one of my things is always been like I don't want to just get trained in any kind of therapy and then be the expert I want to be in that kind of therapies of patient before I do it with another patient because there's of learning and then there's the AHA of feeling and… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: So I'm a huge advocate. I mean, sometimes people are kind of sheepish and they've love come here for a while and it's like you don't need therapy anymore. You're fine. if you're unsettled something come back but you should go try something else, … Samuel Blanchette: Yes. Joel Blackstock: you've probably heard my perspective you've heard the way that I think Joel Blackstock: And you've internalized what you need to internalize you've filtered out what you don't and somebody else is gonna tell you something different, and… Samuel Blanchette: Yes. Joel Blackstock: that there's gonna be useful too. So I mean Union analysis was a totally different experience for me than CBT was totally different experience been kind of a more psychodynamic… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: but you learned that language and it's why I can wear that hat now, if you just try and learn all of it intellectually and… Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: then you're like, I read all the books. That's why you don't know how to apply it and you end up just picking the one you like the most, and only doing that because you haven't really been in it as a patient enough to know how to do it as a provider. I think. Samuel Blanchette: I agree with that. I think I've struggled with that too. Because again, there's this price wall That's constructed in order to access certain types of approaches. Right unfortunately… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: if I label it with something I can charge you another $50, right? It's like Joel Blackstock: Yeah, and that's when you're saying that people are coming up with these new models and then changing the name and not giving credit half the time. it's the institute's fault that is charging you $200 to have this on your website… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: because we copy right at a phrase, Samuel Blanchette: right that makes sense. Yeah having to create language in order to not be copyright that Joel Blackstock: I mean there's to my movement therapies that are combinations of ett. And LP and bsp that we worked on and we're kind of doing with other therapists and… Samuel Blanchette: yes. Yes. Joel Blackstock: we've tried our spouses and it's interesting but it's like, where do you go with that? If I call that ett? I got to talk to Dr. Vazquez. If I call it brain spawning I got to talk to if I call it Fusion I got talked about what do I want to do? I don't really want to be the guy going to conferences being like here's a new thing, for 10 years. I just don't want to or do you just make up a new thing and then have everybody be like, so you just hold this out of nowhere and it's not evidence-based at all. I don't… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: and Samuel Blanchette: I hear that. Yeah, for instance we have sensory motorcycle therapy. We have hack Homie. We have all these really kind of nifty things right where people are labeling their personal approach to and oftentimes rooted in a lot of these traditional things. So we have Vegeta therapy oriented will help Reiki and stuff like whether people want to buy into it or not or the outcome of Wilhelm writes life or any of those things like you you're probably deriving some of your breath methodology your observational awareness and phenomenology from Old School body armoring right through by energetics like Joel Blackstock: yeah, yeah. right didn't do himself any favors either. I mean he was trying to shoot down UFOs with orgasm energy by the end of his life and that Samuel Blanchette: right This person like it rain clouds and things and that's yeah. Joel Blackstock: And… Samuel Blanchette: Look, who knows. Joel Blackstock: the FBI just took all the equipment too, which even for the time was kind of an overreaction. I mean, he really made some people mad or… Samuel Blanchette: me Joel Blackstock: maybe they just wanted all the orgasm energy for themselves. I don't know I mean, but I think it's funny too is like any Psychotherapy lens like what you're talking about that kind of perspective when you go so far into it and then you extrapolate it becomes a cosmology, again analysis is… Samuel Blanchette: It has to be. Joel Blackstock: wow, there's archetypes. So what does that mean and Freud's but I'm right, going nuts kind of was somebody making a free and mesophysics like a classical Freudian metaphysics and then being it's sexuality is the energy ever under everything maybe sexuality is also the energy of the cosmos and atoms are respond to orgasms or what 00:50:00 Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, So this Oregon energy which is taking from the idea of the original liberal energy libidinal energy is just life energy, which is sexual or otherwise, it's projection whatever that is, but it lives right? Joel Blackstock: You Freud usually applied it in the public sex more than other places. Samuel Blanchette: Yes. Yes he did. Joel Blackstock: Okay. Samuel Blanchette: However, the neat thing though is let's say if we change our lens and we look at Contract Traditions from Tibet or India right now. We have this idea of the interplay of this duality of relationship between energies of masculine and feminine when they use sexual language to describe the fundamental workings between polarities, right and so in the alchemical marriage,… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: So this idea of creating a total self using this sort of languaging so Joel Blackstock: I was gonna say the resolution chemical marriage but I mean even just it's access kind of, a big forest and part of our Humanity but it also is just a pretty obvious metaphor when you make metaphors, even like I mean, there's Psalms in the Bible that you're talking about the love of God you loving God is the same of the love of the man or… Samuel Blanchette: Right. Yeah. Joel Blackstock: woman, it's like… Samuel Blanchette: absolute Joel Blackstock: what does that mean? That's out now or they're like, somebody invents like a clock and then they're like, God is a watchmaker and then somebody in advance architecture and they're like God is an architect and then somebody invents an AI and they're like, we're in a simulation, it's just the easiest way, Yeah, yeah. Samuel Blanchette: That's true. It's not too far removed to create metaphor that incorporates that I think though the nice thing that when we're starting the neat thing about that is when we connected these qualities like psychic qualities or libidinal qualities or whatever to the body. what we can do at that point though is now we have some language to explore the phenomenology of my felt experience. thats ment. How does excitement work? I experience it in this fashion in this way. And then now we're like, how does my body produce energy, which Need to engage with this world and… Joel Blackstock: yeah. Samuel Blanchette: then we have all the kind of ways that we create creative adaptation to all the things and that's another thing that I really love from sort of this memory reconsolidation. I stuff coherence therapy. Is this Bruce Ecker and Lauren Holly's Joel Blackstock: I am familiar. It's like somebody trying to make a solution focused brief treatment of psychoanalysis. Just kind of interesting. Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: it's interesting because it's following the memory reconsolidation thing. So theoretically right and I have always loved this and it always baffled me that a moment of explicit trauma can indelibly burn in a learned experience for life. If that's true using kind of this Duality process. It must Joel Blackstock: it lets the brain is thinking about it in a different way and almost religious or spiritual way. why other moments are not being experienced all the time, but traumatic moments are so that's telling you that that's a different kind of memory. Samuel Blanchette: So this idea that it does this but my wondering is this right and I've always wondered this from the very beginning of every time the first somatic oriented therapy, I think it was sensory. Yeah. Anyway, Peter Levine. I was looking at Peter he's working. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: I was like, this is curious. Is that if a memory? Joel Blackstock: Did this kind of experiencing is over here? Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, not experience. So if a memory can be created so powerfully in a moment. it should be able to be uncreated in a moment, right it just Joel Blackstock: Which you making contact with the somatic memory in a way that is not reach traumatizing, Samuel Blanchette: in and it always kind of tickled my mind to think that because if it can be created it should be unable to be uncreated in that kind of way. Now we've talked about not wanting to be traumatized people and kind of titrating those experiences which I understand. however Joel Blackstock: which was certain things you can't do, it's why you have to be able to take appropriate risks at a certain point but there's not always a way to eat some of those memories in this bite sides way that some of the models are designed to do, Samuel Blanchette: And I think you're right in my experience working with people and in my own kind of self-processes I go through that there are some memories that must be experienced as a Gestalt the whole fixed experience must be digested in the moment it not Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: Brain spawning does that if you have somebody who's pushing enough to take you all the way in I mean, I've said, I'm kind of pressed everyone that I've ever talked to that has had a bad experience with brain spotting the provided in look at the people at all. They didn't really map the trauma at all. They were just like What do you feel here in the person was nothing but it pulled everything up at once which is kind of spiritually profound and interesting to have this two three gay process where you're expering all these things mastering them and at the end, memory comes back. Are you kind of realize what it was your processing either yourself or working with therapist, ET which is newer thing that Is trained it. Samuel Blanchette: yeah, using the light. Joel Blackstock: Yeah, it can bring up incredibly specific parts. 00:55:00 Joel Blackstock: Surgically, and I loved brain spotting. I still love it. So but it's not appropriate for everything. I don't think any one thing is and it's wild with EtG. There was one of the eye movements we had the color frequency and the person said can you do something with acid reflux and as I mean it's not really how it works. But I got what was supposed to be for kind of throat lungs breathing like top neck that area which is kind of a blue green color a certain flicker rate whatever and he was looking at it and then immediately started remembering when she was eating as a kid and she was shame. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: And then her whole stomach kind of shutting down and then this whole thing just came up, but it wasn't this whole memory about your whole relationship with this child like everything it was this incredible around that one somatic emotional thing in this specific way. Samuel Blanchette: very specific Yeah, and I think that's speaking to this kind of memory reconsolidation thing. that's what that also looks like. It's like every single moment that is created a pattern. It has that creative adoption started because of a reason right so it's like and if we attend to that whether again we're focusing on a Feeling whether we're looking at a space in a visual field, whether we're moving our eyes to inhibit our amygdalas whether we're stomping our feet whether we're psycho, whether we're dancing whether we're doing any of the modalities that exist that our human modalities of expression, right whatever we track and whatever we stay with if we were to stay with it. Enough and give language to it. Even if we were doing some just fill in the blank sort of word association stuff. It is likely that all those roads would lead to a story right? Samuel Blanchette: And once the nice thing about knowing what the story is. Joel Blackstock: And sometimes our body remembers it in a way that are the front of our brain can't which is where a bunch of those modalities get stuck. I mean if you're drugged or pass out during an experience, it can be traumatizing that the memory is not written right? It's like a corrupted file on the hard drive where maybe all you're gonna get is the bodies response to it. and that's what you have to go. Through and process it but you're never going to be able to do this stuff because you didn't see it. You didn't perceive it. Samuel Blanchette: right and I Joel Blackstock: Maybe if you're very young the damage is written in a different way kids. Don't make narrative memory until kind of three or four. Yeah and… Samuel Blanchette: right yeah,… Joel Blackstock: a cognite way. Samuel Blanchette: and I think and what I like to is the narrative that we experience doesn't have to be The Experience itself, right so Consciousness accessing something in a way that my total brain can experience… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: which involves language components often, right? When I can conceptualize it, even if it's a theme for instance, I have to not eat because I will be hurt now that doesn't have to have as explicit memory but that's a felt sense that I'm giving words to and once I can hold that with the experience in my conscious awareness now and then I create these moments that contradict Those are the things that unlock those old patterns and you're right we can do that without eliciting that cognitive piece. However, It seems in my experience. At least that that part is very useful for having. I guess a total Gestalt a whole story, right? Joel Blackstock: Yeah, yeah. Samuel Blanchette: The Narrative piece is a really lovely part of me understanding myself in the world. Whereas if I do a purely somatic exercise, let's say I do a holy traffic breathing or I go through something like thing that can be really awesome. Joel Blackstock: . Samuel Blanchette: However, without the right framing I think those things can also be the disempowering. we're attributing it to some other something instead of acknowledging that it's a us thing. Joel Blackstock: Mm-hmm Joel Blackstock: Yeah, even I think that it's not that the narrative is unimportant when you don't remember the Evander it's not able to be perceived. It's that you don't have an intellectual cognitive memory there. It becomes part of a bigger narrative, Samuel Blanchette: Yes. Joel Blackstock: a bigger story and you're still linking it to that but figuring out what happened or who or whatever I mean, even if you do knowing is Colonel Mustard in the green room with the Rope doesn't heal,… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: right now Joel Blackstock: it's experiencing physically and then going through the crisis having the crisis resolve and then letting my heart and my body feel safety, that the thing Samuel Blanchette: I love that and I love that pattern and I think that animals are such a brilliant exposition of that. we have these systems because they're designed to deal with the world and when we get to a place of completion, I activate my sympathetic responses. they discharge appropriately to create the safety that I need and then I take in the environment of safety, which is a completely different thing and then it allows my body to dissipate or discharge or complete that cycle And the huge part and I think in most of the somatic type work is it never gets finished, It's the unfinished business story, right? It's like I never got to feel like it worked and I never got to know that it's over and I never get to feel safe. So my body's Gonna Keep On generating that. 01:00:00 Joel Blackstock: What I don't want to admit that and accept that framing because I know that so I shouldn't have to feel that. Is the fight that you get into with the more kind of St. In a sensory thinking type patient? Samuel Blanchette: and I think that's an interesting space And again, you have to move that into that feeling frame, right? It's like Yes, you're right. It is absolutely over and yet here you are in your body is still exhibiting behaviors necessary for that condition to be met. so how do we create an experience now where that can be done right And yeah,… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: and I think that's the art of therapy right? it's a very curious thing. Joel Blackstock: it sounds like you're doing amazing work when you're practicing and where you are. I mean you have kind of longer term career plans or what. Do you see yourself? Samuel Blanchette: So I just love doing therapy and I love reading all these things and trying to make sense of because I'm a human in the world trying to make sense of that. The thing that I would love to do at one point, which is something I deeply appreciate what you're doing and there's a lot of people doing this is putting information out for people to have access to it without any paywalls or any kind of things like that. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: I think giving people free access to information so that they can experiment with what works for them. So if I were to create a Fantastical future adventure for myself, right, it would be to continue to learn and use mediums how long hopefully as I feel a little bit more grounded and confident in my own process and just share those things always with the condition of this could or could not be true and please experiment with it within the appropriate context using the appropriate supports that you need in order to achieve those outcomes,… Joel Blackstock: Mmm Yeah Samuel Blanchette: . Joel Blackstock: Mmm, I think it would be something that would be down the road if I was doing it, but I'd love for Tapper to be able to host almost like a Dev psychology Library that's free because there's so much stuff that's out there in the common domain or… Samuel Blanchette: mmm Joel Blackstock: that people professors are retiring or whatever and they're just likely to be like, hey, you can have all of my papers and make them available and it's stuff that you can't even get through there. that journal was gone 12 years ago or… Samuel Blanchette: Right. yeah. Joel Blackstock: whatever and even if you pay 600 dollars a month, you still can't read it. But yeah, I'd love to put together something like that. our website or Collective is just kind of we're all trying to we think we can build something that is better together than we can individually and you could cost sharing and everything that goes with that. But yeah, if you're ever interested in working on something that if we could help if I can give you the access to the website to build something on the back end like I don't know some kind of electronic. Joel Blackstock: Anything if that's ever anything they're interested in doing. Samuel Blanchette: Something. Thank you so much for taking some time to kind of explore some Concepts around the therapy. It's lovely to explore and have these conversations and I think It helps kind of flesh out and… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: build some deeper understanding for myself. thank you very much for taking some time with me. Joel Blackstock: Yeah, I mean and I got to pick my daughter up in just a minute. But I've got 15 20 minutes or so. I mean what is there anything else because I don't want to you had reached out and I think initially with some Questions or things you wanted to discuss and I would like to get all that stuff. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: I don't know how much of that was included when we already done Samuel Blanchette: I think a fair bit was if you're yeah, so we have another about 15 minutes. Is that right? so Joel Blackstock: you call I can try and get in touch with you later. This week. November's The last three months have been just the most wild ever. I mean, but it's coming relatively bounce. Samuel Blanchette: So some things that I wonder that I would like to bring up or explore with the time that we have left. because I'm not officially trained in any of these things. Joel Blackstock: Sure. Samuel Blanchette: And also there's these paywalls to get exposure and therapy through these things. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: Hopefully wind up being the subject of my own experimentation, right? So I apply these things the methods and Concepts to myself as all as possible Right whether it's using brain spotting,… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: right and I kind of like feeling that felt sense and associating with that or it's short work or otherwise, So I definitely understand the value of having another person. I think that fundamentally changes Joel Blackstock: You can't always do it. You can always afford it or… Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: there's not somebody local or what. I mean, sometimes the self work is the only option for certain things. Samuel Blanchette: And absolutely. I agree with that. So one thing that I was wondering about and I did some more research and things when I first saw brain spotting said, my goodness. This looks really interesting. I like this idea. And this is also the floor I ran into memory reconsolate. 01:05:00 Joel Blackstock: It's uses with any kind of therapy too, even cognitive behavioral people like it. I mean, there's somebody in the training usually it's kind of less cognitive providers and somebody he was one of the trainers and one of the things was like, my cognitive therapy. Person those friends fighting and was like, wow and I was listening and she was like, brain spawning does the thing we're cognitive therapy can actually work because the body calms down and then they can learn all this stuff. it's like, wow, that's a neat way to think about Behavior, but that's what my problem with behaviorism is that they think you can change Behavior by talking about it, most times people know what they're supposed to do. They just Do that. Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: right Right, and that's that experimental needing to experience that's experiential therapies that we're in the 1970s when they were doing really good stuff. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: Then we get into these ethical quantities that have created what we have today to some degree,… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: but is what it is that but I've really deeply appreciate living now in that there's so much beautiful. There's a thousand waterfalls pouring into the Zeitgeist right this current space and… Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: if I want to and I'm open to it and I can check my prejudices against certain conceptualizations and methods like a lot of really beautiful stuff. Joel Blackstock: mmm Samuel Blanchette: That's very transformative. so one thing as I was doing these kind of experiments right kind of like playing with that up down using the zxy accesses different kind of like checking different points and… Joel Blackstock: I can do brain sweating on myself at… Samuel Blanchette: moving between different points what I noticed, Joel Blackstock: There's inside and outside window and you get training and outside windows where they're providers. Just looking at people and… Samuel Blanchette: yeah, it's Joel Blackstock: inside windows when you're trying to see what the person feels and… Samuel Blanchette: yeah. Joel Blackstock: for me so outside window is a lot more effective in my experience because a ton of my patients are such Associated they don't know what they feel anyway, so I don't notice anything there and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: I'm like, no just hang out a minute you're gonna feel it. But when I do brain spotting with my therapist, I'm just like, I don't know. I think I felt something here and she's like and then I'm gone, so sometimes I'm particularly bad at it. Samuel Blanchette: So I'm wondering in your processing so when I did this thing and I'm kind of playing around with this and as I'm holding this space, I'm kind of noticing my natural responses right? Maybe some swallowing maybe some rapid blinking maybe the eyes start to agitate,… Joel Blackstock: work Samuel Blanchette: maybe I start feeling kind of those little neurogenic Tremors that we're getting from this body discharge stuff. And I love that. It makes total sense from a biological standpoint, everything starts with orienting right here everything started with an orienting reflex. That's Front that's just how it is right and so I find this place. I hold that in space right holding that and what I've noticed in my own process as I've been playing with that in certain cases. Samuel Blanchette: I'll start there with a feeling right there's a felt sense. I'm experiencing that I'm with it and then my mind will automatically start populating that with parts. So what I've seen happens is here's My finger is there I'm attending to this and then my finger becomes a part right? So now I'm noticing that there's me a self apart there and then it has dialogue and concept that starts playing out in my mind and then my active other parts are starting to play out there. And if I hold that space my processing right my primary modalities, and otherwise, that's what they like to do. They create a dialogue oriented story because I'm very auditory. And then they'll play that through to a sense of completion. Joel Blackstock:  Samuel Blanchette: However, that story wants to kind of close itself up. I'm kind of curious though. and that's what really drew me to this is like because also the other pieces like if you have your eyes closed and you do this as well, right your eyes still move if your eyes closed because that's just what we do to access information and then no linguistic program folks talk about this deck. It's in Dickens and decades ago, right, but I'm kind of curious. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: Is that a normal? Joel Blackstock: They didn't have the neurology though. I'd like the problem is they don't distinguish for training prefrontal Med and sub brand and so that's why it doesn't work. It's like that. I'm moving NLP stuff is neurologically very interesting but your eyes gonna drift there when you're really feeling like you could just look here and lie. So saying constructed audio memories there that's not the best metaphor about… Samuel Blanchette: he Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: how the brain works because it can do different things. you Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, this location I think is interesting but they using And discussing the visual field and how track side from different areas of visual. Joel Blackstock: Yeah, yeah. Samuel Blanchette: Super fascinating. I think I'm sort of wondering what's been your experience. You don't have to give any explicit information, but when you've worked with folks and you're doing this brain spotting type methodology. Even fixed points or you kind of like jumping between points or tracking between things or whatever. Samuel Blanchette: Does it often have a narrative component? do people often express to you that they're experiencing an internal story with parts? Do you and there's a whole branch of brainstorms? 01:10:00 Joel Blackstock: Hard space therapy is fuses. So with brain spawning it's almost becoming part of the training most the trainers will train you and I'm not certified and I've done phase wanted to consult with a lot of people that have done a lot of the different new ones… Samuel Blanchette: and phase 3 Joel Blackstock: because there's a lot of Splinter ones now, but it sounds like… Samuel Blanchette: Yep. Joel Blackstock: what you're asking is there a pattern with eye movement from an LP IQs that is relevant with brain spawning or are you saying do people see a story when they hit the eye position? Samuel Blanchette: I think if I were to distill that it would be when people are holding an eye position. Are they accessing a awareness or is it part? inevitably is that if Joel Blackstock: Sometimes Parts base therapy can get you there. But when you're there with brain spotting, you're so deep in a lot of the time you're losing time I dissociated for 20 minutes when I did the training and I was expecting nothing is EMDR didn't do anything for me. I was like … Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: but I saw it worked for some patients. I was like take some of the things from this training and it was during covid. We're on a screen. It wasn't even a person. I was like, I know how far the thing is away. And I mean, I felt like I just needed to move my head. I was in water kind of and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: I was just silent and if it takes me and not everybody goes in that deeply with processing, but if you do Joel Blackstock: You usually lose time so the person thinks the session was 10 minutes and it's at the end of the hour because it took me 10 minutes to get them to go down. So when you're really deep in it's more about the difference with Etc and brain spawning and EMDR is brain spotting. Most of the processing is not in the room. You're like opening this box and throwing all this stuff from the subbrain up into the midbrain but the front of the brain,… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: hypothetically, I mean don't see many email and say I can't prove that I can't but like you don't even know… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: what you're thinking about for two days. you don't know… Samuel Blanchette: interest. Joel Blackstock: what it is. And you also don't really get to pick what you hit as much I like it… Samuel Blanchette: right Joel Blackstock: because the processing so much more predictable with the MDR. Joel Blackstock: Very few people do this, but it's still terrible when it happens and it's possible with complex trauma, sometimes somebody would come into process like a car wreck and you do it and they feel great and then they're thanking you and whatever two days later totally decompensate. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: I just remembered this thing from when I was a kid, I'm totally shutting down. I'm totally whatever okay learning process that and… Samuel Blanchette: Yeah. Joel Blackstock: Dad did this thing? Okay, and then you compensate again. but Mom was watching I thought she was my protector now and they can't work and that decompensation just doesn't happen with brains funny in that way. Samuel Blanchette: interesting Joel Blackstock: It's not that do you compensation? I said, it's so predictable. if you'd either doesn't work it's like you can knock the ball over the hill and it's gonna roll down or you can keep knocking the ball up the hill if you didn't get it to pop if you didn't go all the way through it just nothing happens they feel kind of weird but you didn't open it. If you open it then they go all the way through this thing for usually two three days, if you're obsessive if you're compulsively trying to figure out what it is if you're smoking a lot of marijuana if you're drinking a lot alcohol if you're doing anything obsessively you're gonna slow processing down. Joel Blackstock: but it will still work. It's just don't do that because it will make the bad part last longer but your dreams are very weird. Usually they're kind of like letting you know what you're chewing on they're kind of archetypal. They're just weird. They're not normal Dreams A lot of times. There's very photo real sleep moments in it, It's happened for one my patients with and brain spawning or with ET. The processing is five six hours. And it's very specific. You don't have that huge. Thing is that kind of answer your question. So saying is it activating a part or not? Joel Blackstock: You can use Parts work to be okay, I'll use it to be map that defensive part of you. what is your spine want to do and the period person's like you no, really listen, you're feeling this they're big you want to curl up into a ball. I kind of a Bend. Okay you wanting to crop into a ball like you're protecting yourself. Are you covering something up? you don't want to be seen you want to be invisible. Do you want to just train spotting look back into the carpet and disappear in that way. Samuel Blanchette: he Joel Blackstock: You tense you're bracing for impact you're a foot you're gonna be tackle like that's all and interesting information getting them to go into the experience. That would be Parts based and mapping this part and what it somatically is and ideologically what is the world around you feel like if you feel small that means everything around you must be bigger. Do I look intimidating? do you feel smaller than the room? Wait you feel lighter than the room heavier than the room you feel it could be green. Samuel Blanchette: grab it Joel Blackstock: You can feel great that doesn't have to make sense. you could feel VCR static, what is that and then that lets the eye open and you go in, Joel Blackstock: But when you're going in you're never I'm fighting the inner critic. This is what I have to like. It's a pretty deep brain thing. generally there's not much talking. Samuel Blanchette: Yeah, I think that that's useful to kind of hear. I think so in different forms of Parts work, right it covers a lot of different ones. It's just a strategy you're working with somebody in their accessing these things If this were to be in the room here, where would it be now in inherently? They do gay spotting, right? So they will know they will naturally do so the question. 01:15:00 Joel Blackstock: yeah. Samuel Blanchette: I wonder and this is a philosophical question as it isn't there's no neurobiology to Define it, I wonder whenever we do that we are looking at something that's inside of us that we've projected. So if on a creative construct level we are always looking at something. Right because you can another thing. Joel Blackstock: It's So you're saying is that how the brain works or is that where you're looking to a specific experience Samuel Blanchette: Where I'm wondering if that's just a normal function of how the brain does this right? So if I find a space right and we have the other examples working with kids, you put a little fluffy top of it or on I mean traditional sand trade therapy right there. I gazing down in their fixating on certain areas. Joel Blackstock: Yeah. Samuel Blanchette: These are just naturally occurring processes that are pre-existent because they're human rights you're working with somebody and then naturally Fixate on a specific location and then they'll just start. However Joel Blackstock: Yeah, what is the thousand yard stare in PTSD at somebody looking at something that isn't there because their eyes going to this memory from past,… Samuel Blanchette: They're looking. Joel Blackstock: Yeah, I mean if I'm understanding your question, I think it's a little bit of both. I mean what David Gran would say the brain spawning guy is that you can't know anything about other brain works. So that's making an assumption and you can't do that. So just get out of the way and let the patient's experience. Thank you somewhere,… Samuel Blanchette: Right, right. Yes.

all right um this is the taproot therapy podcast um i'm joel blackstock and i'm here with a man truly needs no introduction. Philosopher King, you know, rock star, published author, world traveler, collector of rare artifacts, esoteric magic specialist. Samuel Blanchett,

am I saying that right, is another social worker who reached out to me. And, you know, we're both kind of in a similar world and a ton of the stuff that I've done, I think it's just because our website is a little bit more visible. As people see ideas and they're kind of looking for people in their world. how academic psychology is going in a different direction than clinical practice um because the market is wanting things that um are not happening in the hospitals by and large which is not a great place for the profession to be in and um anyway i have a lot of these conversations like on the phone with people that want to connect and like they're fun and they're interesting and i i learn a bunch of stuff and so decided i'm just going to start doing that on the podcast one because i'm

out of time all i do is therapy podcast and play with my kids and sleep and so yeah Sam was a really interesting nice guy who reached out and wanted to connect and I'm sure we'll have a fascinating conversation so thank you so much for being here can you introduce your your actual biography yeah so aside from my Arcanium of, you know, esoteric skills and my treasure-seeking and so forth. I should have come up with more like antiquated titles like alienist, you know, things like that. Haberdasher, yeah, farrier. All of those things in the progression of learning how to be a human, right? Yeah. So yes, I'm a random human being that reached out to you because I saw that you had found a really kind of lovely way of integrating some of the modern neurological approaches with

some of the cool, more philosophical approaches. I don't think there's really a distinction there, but just to make discrimination between as if we could do that to ourselves we're not romantic distinction only really yes and so I am a master's level clinician with license associate clinician so I'm working towards my ultimate end goal and whatever that is. What are your stages here? Because here the C is the terminal license. Interesting. Yeah. So I'm in Arizona.

So that, and it is different across all the states. And my degree is actually in counseling. So I'm not coming from the social working realm. When you said LCS, because here it's ALC, LPC, and then social is counselor. And then social worker is LG SW which they just changed to LMS W and then it turns into L I CSW which used to be LC SW in our board and it's infinite wisdom there's some others around absolutely I really appreciate some of the states though that are working on doing kind of

interstate compacts as far as that goes I think that's kind of a really cool counselors are so much better at it than the social workers um and it's like and i think there's there's pros and cons to both ones but overall it seems like the social workers have like a little bit less self-esteem or something like i don't know what it is um and the boards seem like we're like during the pandemic of the counseling boards are like getting together and the clinical psychology boards are making everything apas like making everything like so much easier for the licensed to practice across straight lines and meet this need in a mental health crisis and like our board is making it harder and being like actually there's these

hoops because we have to make extra sure um which i mean there's maybe ways to do it but it's just like they keep raising the number of ethics hours because they're like well people keep sleeping with their patients so maybe that they're doing that because they haven't heard it for eight hours instead of four and it's like no like that i i don't think no one i don't think no one told them not to do it is the problem pretty much like introduction to you want to be a mental health professional they're gonna be so bored that we are gonna kill the libido of the entire profession i mean it's like you you you need to kind of catch that and the uh education level and the support level and um the licensure level which for some

reason it's only we'll just tack on these CEs and, and that'll fix these problems retroactively, which is supposed to be the system's profession. Social workers are supposed to understand the system as it actually works, not as we wish it did. You know, the stereotype is the LPC is kind of in a vacuum being like symptomology, which is always true. And the social worker is more like person and environment, food, racism, culture, you know, but for some reason,

those are not the ones that uh that make the loss about someone yeah and i think that's you know that's an interesting point that you make about coming into this field right and i think to some degree well it seems that human beings have an interest in how their minds psyches souls work right how this thing functions because we all experience suffering and so we try to create methods of managing whatever that is, right? And I think that that's such an interesting point about this, like creating an education of so many hours to try and inform you of information. And there's such a huge difference between the experience of sitting with somebody in an intensely emotional space and the theoretical constructs around sitting with somebody

in emotional space mm-hmm and everybody who doesn't do that seems to want to tell you how to you know the the psychiatrist that has never been in therapy and doesn't practice therapy and the right and the head of the insurance board and the state legislature have all these opinions about things they don't do like teach children or do counseling yes all of those pieces and i and i think i mean you used to really i mean explicit example right this idea of like oh they keep on like engaging in relationships with these uh you know people that it's outside of the framework and the boundaries of the like the holding container right and at the same time if you don't know how to work with the energy of human connection, right? Like the intensity of that on the levels that are necessary to some degree to like...

And for multiple types of people, you kind of got to be a chameleon. You need to be what they need, not what you want. Absolutely. And to stay with that is is interesting i think that's a huge part of what our field does we we create mental constructs in order to feel safe when we're journeying into the unknown and i think um you know brain spotting i think that they he the author makes a really interesting point about like this quadrillion connections in the human brain and i think that that's lovely to be aware of

because I think one thing I've noticed as a struggle is they boards and other you know trends try to dictate what is the right way of doing therapy and oh boy I've had so many internal conflicts or like you can do the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons. You know, it's like, like there's some people who use exercises and avoidance, you know? So if they're processing trauma with brain spotting, stop exercising. It's not that that's a bad thing to do, you know, but it's like, so a lot of times I think when you put more control at the top level, you're just making providers sort of have a different

aesthetic about doing what they're doing anyway you know it doesn't actually change practice that much if anything it makes it worse yeah yeah this idea of having to change the language that you express the thing that you're going to be doing naturally anyway well and like the whole profession i mean i think that's like why mental health is such an a weird spot is it's like, because you see it if you're a social worker, and you're working with like grants and things. Yes. But there's all these assumptions baked in to the way the rules are written, that there's services that exist and connections and things that

have not been around for 30 years. So like half of it is ticking boxes that are fake just because it used to work this certain way and and like it's not quite a catch-22 but we need a word for that i mean and one of the things is it's like psychiatrists know how to do therapy it's just this assumption because i know how to read research about cbt and it's like no we we used to think that because it used to be true because they used to do therapy and they used to be in therapy and now the vast majority of them are not but for some reason they're the one that calls me you know from an insurance panel that i'm no longer in that says well you should be able to treat dissociative

identity disorder in three sessions with cbt or drugs are mandated and no more therapy will be paid for and also brain spotting isn't evidence-based and neither is emdr and neither is like you know some other long list of stuff she wanted me to it was like hey uh have you ever done this like i mean i asked it'd be that they like they i i left the panel and then they were like well fine and now they call me every year and ask me to go back in i never will but they're like um you know like i don't know was it your dream to be the member of a 15 person, you know, fake referral insurance thing that's local to this zip code? Like, what are you doing? Why are you telling me how to do therapy? You've never done it. And I don't know. cases it actually like bears really pleasant fruit right like some of the really cool um neurological studies and some of the like neuropsych stuff um what i really love about it in all honesty is it gives credence to a lot of historical and traditional methods of working with people and

now we can just label it with scientific terms and say it's good an example that i really like so memory reconsolidation, I think is so lovely. And that's really been encouraging to me, this idea that there is a way that the brain changes things fundamentally, permanently. Love that. It's very encouraging to me. And in my process of doing therapy,

I deeply fell in love with Gestalt therapy at the very beginning of things. I have the book, Ego, Hunger and Aggression. And and i'm like oh my goodness i really love the the depth of this thing rich pearls it was a it was he was an interesting guy yeah he was i think a lot of you know we have videos and we use that to interpret a certain total system and philosophical approach which is it is what it is and that's what people do but um his wife laura pearls contributed so much um goodman all these different thinkers contributed to this really really lovely existential approach to therapy uh and yeah i think its downfall was kind of two things too it's like one he was kind of a little bit more of a showman he was probably kind of like

me like you want it was like you're not i want to show you how well this thing works by demonstrating it and so people thought it was too reductive no not reductive they thought it was like too much of like a um i don't know just some kind of a tri technique or something instead of he was showing them part of a system and then also like east and west coast gestalt kind of got in a fight i mean it's like the middle of california people were like this should be therapy and the other people are like it should be religion which i i guess your therapy modality is successful if it accidentally forms like a religion slash cult you know i don't know like a philosophical life uh approach yeah i think uh that's i you're absolutely right though about that thing and i think the the challenge that

happens the unfortunate thing is like when certain people take things to their extreme especially when part of the whole thing is trying to keep ideas alive to some degree like let me like you like you said let me show you something cool right and I think what that winds up doing though is like especially in the case of like gestalt therapy like here's this like beautiful um theoretical idea right field theory dialogical approach i am thou phenomenology relationship the in-between bracketing all these brilliant really lovely existential concepts kind of like flowing into this approach um and then we wind up with like

oh yeah i do empty chair work therefore i'm using it and it's like ah it's like like saying like all jungian therapy is active imagination right like uh it's like let's take a technique we don't even give jungian therapy i mean actual jungians that are trained it's like it's not a time they just especially I think it's more of an American Union thing where they just sanitize it so much and they're like oh it's just therapy plus Jesus or it's like therapy you can bring to church or it's like a sand tray or like but there's not I mean the same it happens with all modalities same thing you're talking about it's like people mistake the technique for the the lens of the modality which is how you're understanding a person which is how you're the conceptualization is so much more important than what you're doing

in the room you know i agree so fully i think and the hard part is like how do you describe being a human right like it's so potentially nuanced. The problem is psychology there, you know. Yeah, and then how do we turn this into something that creates transformative change? And I think, again, like, out of all the things that sort of Jungian slash Jung's love of alchemical ideas and that framework of thought, I think it's so beautiful because it's at least language that's not dependent on time, right? So whether it's the Taoists or Ayurvedic traditions or these different things, they're all drawing from this concept of transformation. And now my experience, especially when we're looking at things like parts work and stuff, everybody's labeled these things in their own way with their own conceptual. So much of the part, especially like IFS is like him just putting, which I don't dislike IFS.

Like if I had a giant treatment center and I needed to train everybody to be able to do the best work, like like but like you put union archetypes together with with um gestalt therapies experiential component you know and some maybe some dbt skills but like that's what it is you know and i the language of it is kind of dogmatic you know i think it's like much easier to just say protective part you kind of feel how this one's a physical protective part that one's kind of an unconscious one or whatever then getting in a fight with a client about if something's like a firefighter or protector what like i personally like i mean it's people who do it do great work but yes you know i just i'm not as wild about the language of all that also they think it's family therapy every time you say ifs people think you're a family therapist sure they're like what

do i have to bring my mother in? Well, the mother that lives in you, whether that's... She's already here. She's in the space, part of your phenomenological field. Look how we're doing this. So what did you work with Gestalt, but what are the kind of broad strokes of your practice now or the stuff that you... So, you know, I'm not an official anything, right?

Because unfortunately, there's a pace wall that inhibits people from becoming certified in anything and and i understand that to some degree because people want purity of systems possibly or they don't want to be misrepresented or whatever that means and that's okay and i understand that you know i think unfortunately that again diminishes the free exchange of information and ideas and then you wind up with like you said this dogmas that that have to approach existence in a very fixed pattern and that that's neurotic traditionally anyway so I would say my current I I would say the collection of things right so I do really like primarily because it makes me feel confident and science is important to people and myself, right? So the sort of neurobiological I really like polyvagal theory. I like, like I said, memory

reconsolidation. I like the idea that there are fundamental processes that mammals use to make adaptation. And that just makes sense to me. And then sort of more of that, the gestalt-oriented humanistic type of thing. So kind of like Mas's low II kind of existential stuff and then I did a real deep dive into like parts work and things because if you've ever sat with anyone whether you're a therapist or otherwise you there is a there is a transition of consciousness between aspects of themselves however you want to define that right and people have been exploring that from the beginning of time. In fact, like eye movement and all of these things have been deeply analyzed by like Taoists and in ancient Arabia and like all these different kinds of things,

people have been playing with human observation and how we do what we do. But one thing that constantly shows up, and I met it first in Gestalt work, right, doing empty chair, it's like, oh my gosh, what is this? We have two fundamentally different states of consciousness, and I use consciousness to define the whole being, right? It's not a thought process, but it's a total representation of self in the world, right? With environment. And it's just so fascinating there and I really, really fell in love with that and started like strongly believing in it in a sense. However, that's an interesting space to go because it's very unknown, right? Like and so I was looking for framework to understand this. And I first like got some deep framework

in psychosynthesis, right? Asagioli really going into all these details about sub personalities and the alchemical process of transmutation of self. And then I started kind of playing around from there. And it's interesting to see now what what my work kind of shows up as uh after I've been exposed to all these different methods voice dialogue you know internal family systems all these different ones there's a gentleman um voice dialogue have

like purchase out there I mean it seems like there's not a ton of places still doing it much. So I had to look to find all of these things, right? Ego states is super fun, enjoyable for folks because it derives from our currently utilized processes that are popular. That's like the last remnant of transactional analysis that's still out there. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, like this, which all have roots in this gestalt thing which all have roots in you know

psychoanalytic processes right in ego and super ego are parts right I mean to find them how you will there there's something right yeah yeah and so I think finding out how to work with parts and also my own processes looked like working with parts and also realizing more process has looked like working with parts and also realizing more of this kind of, again, this field oriented idea or kind of this Buddhist idea of this non-local, non-duality. So it's like parts and no parts can both mutually exist. And what's meaningful is how it applies in the field of exchange in that moment with the person. At least that's kind of where I'm sitting at. I'm kind of wondering for yourself, how have you integrated

that? Do you stick kind of like sharply to a process of the way of working with parts or how have you integrated this? Because you have a lot of really cool neurobiological techniques, right? And then you have this other stuff too. I'm kind of like, I'm very curious about that. Well, I i mean i think probably what you're responding to is when i'm looking at the way that a lot of these models are written you know younger pearls or whatever i mean they're written in phenomenological language it's like this is just how this feels yes um and and so they're kind of intuitive which is the reason why a lot of people, they won't die. A lot of people are called back to them and a lot of reasons why they're never going to be institutionally there is that they're not,

it's not an objective thing. It's kind of an intuitive concept about, don't you understand this part of your own experience? You know, if you're chasing the academic thing and you don't understand that part of your experience, that's not going to speak to you, you know, because it's not, it's not real. You can't see it, taste it, touch it. This is a subjective kind of felt state in the parts of self that you can feel and work with um and i mean frankly i think to do certain kinds of trauma therapy you have to bury a certain kind

of trauma that you've worked through um you don't really understand it yeah and but then now you know there's neurology and neurobiology that is able to explain, we can make guesses, you know, I'll still get like a nasty email from a clinical psychology student, but like we can make guesses about what these parts of the brain do. And that's always been my interest. And so it's like, cause I was always frustrated with just how much,

how, how bad academia is admitting that it's wrong. Like it's the same people publishing these papers that are like you know jung doesn't no unconscious isn't real and this is whatever yeah now trauma is trendy so the same guy is like writing a paper that's like well there's tertiary secondary and primary levels of consciousness but the tertiary levels are only you know symbolic function and show up in the body and you're like what dude like you're you're wrong just just right i'm sorry you know that's the paper that you should be publishing um but you know you're you're just so my thing is going

back and saying look yeah these these philosophies are perennial meaning they pop up independently because there's people sort of feeling themselves and discovering the same thing about how we work. But then a lot of times, I don't really have a friend anywhere because I'm saying, I'm not just in this club. I'm trying to say that all these clubs share functions and that neither one of them is, they all have pros and cons. They all have drawbacks. People don't like that. They like me for the extent of me saying, well, this is what you're doing is interesting and here's a cool way to articulate it and here's some techniques there they like that and then i say okay but here's where the limitations are and where you can pivot if oh no don't don't do that you know and that's that's the you know

people kind of like the stuff online until they don't you know i won't even get a chance to respond to the email sometimes it's just like oh this is great and i used it and this is great i used it oh wait you said this thing that's threatening to the way that i practice so i don't think you understand like i haven't said anything yet like i don't know you know um i don't know if that answers it but you know that video that i have where i'm talking about like how i think the breakdown of these models is like how experiential they are and how cognitive they are and so the person who comes in and says that they want existential therapy and they're like i didn't know my phd in sartre and you said existential therapy and i'm called to whatever i'm like in the back of my head i'm like that's the

last thing that you need you know right it's not that other people are are hell it's that you are in hell because you feel bad like and you you don't need to you know and the same thing with the person who comes in that's just totally in their feeling state and their feelings, all it's real. And they want to dump all this emotion. I mean, really what you need is to kind of get outside of that and see a bigger picture and have some kind of, you know, spiritual or philosophical ones to analyze your life. Um, which Yalom says that in his book, that the kind of therapy you come in wanting is usually the last one that you need. And it's that Jungian function of opposites, right? Or this tension of opposites, yeah.

Yeah, it's like, okay, yeah, we want to come in this way. So it's likely that the other side of that is probably where we're going to get the most yield. However, how do we get you to feel comfortable walking into that space? Because we have to build structure and some different scaffolding to step into the unknown, right?

So if I am like loaded with a certain perspective, it's easy for me to walk in that world until i dip my toe in the reality that i don't perceive then it's like oh my goodness and then we get all of the functions of like adaptation like oh that threatens my self concept and all this yeah well i mean that's if you just listen to conflict or politics or you know whatever it's like half of the half of the the fights that people get into or where they become the most reactive is just where somebody's saying hey my behavior doesn't line up with my self-image and you're pointing that out to me

you know which is like one of the reasons why i can do therapy but probably not anything else very well is that i don't quit doing that ever um if you say something i'm going to take it at face value and because of that know, people come into therapy, there's kind of a buy-in to that process of like, but you know, it makes you a miserable person to be around at Thanksgiving. Maybe we'll drop this episode then. When I was in a hospital, like I couldn't turn it off. I mean, they would have this thing where they're like, Hey,

we really want to continuously improve and we want to know what the problem is and we want your all input and we want you to be honest and then i'd be like okay well then here's a thing that you could do easily that would save you money and it would make reduce burnout and it would reduce errors and the downside is it might threaten somebody's ego or we would just have to admit that there's a problem which is what you're asking oh Oh, no, no, don't say that. That's not what you're supposed to. Okay, fine. Then you don't want what you said. So don't do this meeting. Like give me three hours of my life every six months or say, I want you to give me your honest feedback where it's, you know what I mean? Like, as long as you're saying it, I'm going to continue to take it at face value, even though I

know you don't mean what you're saying. And I'm not going to stop doing that. I mean, that's all that I'm going to do. And that's the phenomenological approach, right? Like you literally cannot know anything other than what is happening in the immediate now, right? It's like everything else is extrapolation or some sort of like projection or something. So it's like, okay, this is what you mean, right? And they're like, no. Okay, so this is not what you mean. But this is what you're saying. Is that correct? And I love that. I love that this memory reconsolidation, like the fundamental initial tenant is just creating this explicit awareness and then a juxtaposition of like, so this and this, yes.

Can you talk a little bit about memory reconsolidation for people that may not be familiar that that the technique there? Yeah, absolutely. Let's see. So Ecker, Bruce Ecker, Lauren Holy. So Bruce Ecker was a physicist before he started getting into the whole therapy situation. And, you know, I love that people have passions because passions create like they take people down wormholes that lead to information I would never find because my passion doesn't lean in that direction.

And so they really did a lot of work looking at this idea of how we fundamentally change our memories, right? There was this idea up until like the early 2000s or so that once it's in long-term memory storage, you're stuck with it, right? There was this idea up until like the early 2000s or so that once it's in long-term memory storage, you're stuck with it, right? And even we have in Van der Kolk's book, like the body keeps the score. It's like, no, once it's in there, it's in there, you're stuck. And then that leads, right? That necessitates creating processes where we're doing a counter development of a strategy, right? So we're looking for extinction, which is like, let me build up this neurological pathway that's

contrary to this one so they can battle it out. And hopefully my prefrontal cortex wins down against my limbic system and my subcortical areas when I'm threatened. And we can do that through some desensitization and building up strategies, right? Which is fine. And that also building strategies is how we learn, grow and develop. However, the fundamental sense of emotional pain when I access a historical piece of my existence, that's not very fun. And that's what drives most of us to seek change. And this idea is really lovely because they were going off this model like you can't erase long-term memory once it's in it's in and then whoa all sorts of cool experiments they're using mice and then

they're putting in certain chemicals that inhibit the consolidation of certain kinds of neurological processes and bada-boom bada bang. Now we, we're not having the long-term memory affect them on an emotional level, but they still theoretically hold on to that information in a chronological fashion. Right. So, and anything like with brain science, cause there are, you know, billions of connections is going to be reduced to some kind of metaphor. I mean, there's no way to talk about it without being reductive unless you're a supercomputer, you know, but I mean, that's another another thing a lot of the research is showing is the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system are out of sync they're not acting in the same way which i mean to me with brain spotting and ett and a lot of the pupil dilation stuff that we do

you can't fake those reactions you know when people's like doing this you're you know you're having a brain bleed where you're maybe brain spotting works and it's doing something that's neurologically reproducible with a reproducible effect. Even if it's not plastazillion randomized controlled trials and isn't 30 years old yet, you know, something I can recreate in the room. I hear the same thing from the patient that cures the same thing. You know, that's how science works. Even it starts it starts here you know um you research it later and um and there are a lot of studies on it now being more effective than emdr and some other things but the parasympathetic and sympathetic

nervous system fighting each other one dilates the eye it has kind of a sphincter like muscle that tightens and the other one has a pulling muscle that opens the eye sorry i hit my mic um and that when you usually don't drive with your foot on the gas and the brake. Right. But what I can do is hit those to be in tension, you know, with color, light, frequency, eye position. You know, all the different techniques that we have now, eye movement sometimes until they re-sync. And my body is assuming the same thing that the front of my brain is assuming about how the world works not something that is 15 years old you know traumatic i love that and and this even speaks to like um peter levine the oscillation felt senses right even going back to um earlier

stuff of self-observation we're looking at like gendlin eugene gendlin in this focusing right like here is a felt sense i experience it i look i put words on it and then there's this curious thing I'm speaking back to this memory reconsolidation piece which I love because it's non-theoretical right it's it it is theoretical in the scientific sense but it's trans theoretical in the sense that it doesn't belong to anybody nobody can yeah you know this is my method you can't reconsolidate memory only I can do that right I have it all it's mine let pay me thousands of dollars to learn my strategy which is fine it is kind of even the models that I like it's kind of

off-putting or they're like look you use this word then you're you know whatever it's like man come on like why are you doing this like well they we have to and some because it's marking territory and it's validating philosophical processes and trying to differentiate that from something else and all the things. So what I love though, and I'm very curious, especially with brain spotting and various other eye movement type things, whether it's NLP and the different ways of accessing or looking in the visual field or any of these things, or

even just staying with the micro tremors and Neurogenic tremoring that happens during certain kinds of activation all the good stuff, right? Mm-hmm the lovely thing about this This idea. So the concept here for the memory reconsolidation is that it is theoretically the way So not and and sometimes that feels kind of powerful, but it is the way of creating And sometimes that feels kind of powerful, but it is the way of creating forever emotional change. And the way that it works is memory is consolidated during event of high emotion, right? So boom, I have stored that in my system. However we do that, we have no clue, right? We have all these ideas on how memory works, but it's way too integrative to just be reduced to like neurons.

It's yeah. So memory is stored with emotion. Right. In order to change that, the process is really, really simple, but it's also challenging because the process is this. I need to activate that as a felt experience, that memory with the emotional component. Once I activate that memory in a felt experience, I need to create an explicit juxtaposition is the word that they use. Something that fundamentally on a felt sense disconfirms the fact that that is. Whatever that might be, whether that's I'm using an eye thing and I'm in a safe space or whatever that is. And what that does is it unlocks all of the patterns of how that's held. Because now, just like an animal, right, I have an explicit fact that contradicts the emotional content.

And once that opens, then we have a process of five hour window where if we continually repeat the disconfirming event, when it consolidates, the evidence says that what should happen is that should no longer elicit anything you can call it back up and it will be a historical piece of information but it will not be emotional uh charged to it it sounds like a lifespan integration is doing that too i'm not trained in that one you. I've read the book and one of my supervision candidates is really into it. But it sounds similar in that you're kind of taking these things that are felt experiential, pretty strong activating memories, but they are contradictory. And then ramming them all through so quickly that you can't continue to have all of that stored somatic memory be unchallenged and then the brain guy lets it go. And that life the timeline and lifespan stuff is really

interesting because we look at NLP they've been using timelines and things for a long long long time right and this is one of the other things that I struggle with is people will take ideas that are explicitly described in older therapeutic modalities they will not give credit to the line of thinking, and they will attribute it to their own process. That is one of the things. Well, and then sometimes they don't even know when they're doing it. I mean, you can kind of tell when people know that they're doing it

and when people don't. You know, like Joseph Campbell bringing Jung to America. I mean, I feel like he knew what he was stealing, and he was a Jungian, and he didn't give credit to him. He said that you know but um yeah there's other people where i think they've just heard something and then they start doing something and then they decide they can you know what i mean like the yeah yeah that's fair uh what i really what i really love though about this process so this idea memory recall it somatically in a felt way, juxtaposition of experience, something that completely explicitly confronts that, create the unlock, which then allows new information to be encoded and the memory to go away. this is very dependent on each situation. So you can remove the emotional charge of a certain

thing, but if it has other connections or other parts are attached to it, each of those would also need to go through this process of reconciliation, in order to get the full effect of, when I think of that in this, this, this, this, this context, it no longer elicits that strong, necessary emotional survival response. And what I like about it is because it's kind of like just a concept neurologically, it means that every therapeutic modality could theoretically work. And if they worked, it means they followed this natural biological process and if what i really love about concepts like that is that it's it gives a lot of

freedom back to the clinician to trust their their artfulness their own intuition their intuition yeah so it says okay this is generally how it works even if you was polyvagal theory i think was also beautiful for that this is generally how it works now knowing that within the confines of the biology let's let's use our creative playful curiosity to generate new outcomes yeah well and that's the thing that you can't teach you know it's like i love it if there's an interview candidate that fights with me because they understand something and they believe it and they know something they're not just trying to figure out what somebody wants from them those are the clinicians that take years to get better the ones that are coming from the hospital or something and like it's almost like they were trained not to think for themselves and justify everything they do in this thing and you know

like the question that you can't fake in an interview you know if you're uh if you're early in your therapy education remember this one i mean just absorb a ton of podcasts and a ton of like current material on that and then go in with like a fresh perspective and be like this is where i think it's headed this is where it's not because you can't fake that question i mean when the when we do like executive coaching and people are talking about hiring like i always mentioned like just ask them the last thing that they learned independently that they applied to their job if somebody's telling you about what they learned in college 20 years ago don't hire them if they're like well i kind of think this and i think this way even if it's coding it doesn't have to be therapy because you can't teach curiosity, pretty good indicator of one, you know, self-awareness,

um, uh, a conscious relationship with intuition and, uh, a drive to be better, which is what you want, which is what you want in the room. You know?

I, and I love, I like that, that phrase. He said, curiosity can't be taught. And that other thing, because it can't be taught,

it means that it's a biological function. This is that like ventral vagal thing it's like and and everyone uses different languaging higher self maybe the self or these things but the neat thing is i think it can be healed you know i'm not saying that some people are born with it and some people aren't it's genetic i'm saying that like your relationship to your trauma and your life and your sense of self that is a really good indicator of whether or not those things are in a good place, you know, because a ton of people, you know, it's like a ton of people who that's why E I N F J types are so dangerous. You know, you get, you get Jesus and you also get Hiller like, you know,

because your, your intuition is so strong in order to like see what people want to hear and then get them in their own language to go somewhere which can make you really capable as a therapist but also as a co-leader and a lot of those people who are doing i mean some are grifters but a lot of the people who are doing bad work like it's not that they're um meaning to it's that they're mistaking trauma for intuition because they come from the same part of the brain and they're they're actually having this trauma response but it feels like i'm the spirit's in me and i'm giving the sermon

i don't know and like the early days of charismatic christianity in the old west i mean it really was wild that it was just like up in the mountains everybody with a dopamine disorder needs they've got the calling now let's people would scream and cry and see things and lay on the ground and and and buttoned up victorian society was like this slaps man like this is the coolest thing like i'm you know and they were feeling something like yes yeah that's but you know you want your intuition to be conscious is the point you know yeah i like that and i i think that um like being, and even speaking to that piece, right? The neat thing is that humans, when given a safe container and given permission to be appropriately expressive and to feel,

especially with others, because we do all this really cool neurological connection, you know, this mirror neurons and the distribution of like emotional tension, whether that's electromagnetic through whatever that is, as we're doing all that fun stuff or whatever but the neat thing is when we have a community of people that are coming together with a and ideally with full intention and understanding of what they're doing and then they create a space for exchange and support man those are the the most beautiful healing environments the temnos right this container yeah that was the title of will salmon's book about the spirituality of urban planning a guy he was on our podcast earlier he's a really nice guy you know the tenemos is the

that's the name guys and the thing i think the disempowering part of information right in some respects I think like it is theoretically it's neutered right it's just information and we have the freedom to connect with that but though another battle that I fought one of my own like internal oppressors or call it what you will right it's like trying to do things the right way you know and I've I've been in enough reduces anxiety if there the right way, you know, and I've I've been in enough. It reduces anxiety if there's a right way, you know, and and therapy gets to a point where somebody is being like, no, I know that you don't know. I know it's up to me, but I'm worried that I'm doing me wrong.

You know, and it is this thing that it's such a silly idea or a silly statement, but it's a real thing. And that we have this insecurity about if we're doing us right. You know, I mean, I had somebody one time that told me, okay, yeah, you're saying that if I get rid of this, then I'll sit down. I'll know exactly who I am and I'll be able to connect with people in a way that's good. And, and, but what if I do that? And I don't like you. That guy is, I just started laughing. It's just like, what am I, what am I supposed to say?

And what if I like myself and the self that I am right now is rebuttals by the self that it could be in the future if I hold my potential? It's like, but it's so human. It makes a ton of sense. It's not like that person. I'm not making fun of them. I'm just saying like we all do that. You're right. Yes.

I just never heard it said. I don't like that guy. I don't like the authentic me and I think the the challenge with all of these like structured ways of having to be or trying to get it right and somebody saying I have the way and all of this stuff you know it the things that I think get hamstrung by those things in particular are the power of our own in impressive creativity, the beauty of our intuition. And then the other thing is this, and I think this is something that earlier, Young and some of the Schultes and folks, the aesthetic value of beauty and felt sense,

like congruence with beauty. Like, I don't think there's any objective way of measuring what feels congruent right good and beautiful so that's the architecture we read a lot about architecture and I've talked to a couple I'm supposed to be on the Australian Institute of Architecture's podcast a little bit later on but that's one of the things is it's like is it's an archetypal thing and not a lot of people apply Jung's theories visually I mean some artists sort of did that in the 70s and he didn't he generally did not like that art

because he thought there was supposed to be a descent and then a return. You weren't just supposed to be enamored with the unconscious and become a psychonaut. You were supposed to dissolve your ego and then come back and learn something from it and have been transformed, but also go back to being how you were.

You know, a bit of a version of that. A hero's journey piece. But yeah, architecture is getting in touch, or filmmaking, you know, so many of those things. I mean, that's what you're saying is it's finding the beautiful isn't just, I came up with it. It's almost like, you know, intuition is like a radio wave that you tune into and channel this thing or you don't. I mean, and you can say that you could use spiritual language about that, or you could use secular language of just this kind of deep genetic programming that we're getting in touch with, but only you can run your experiment to the end

you know your choice is do you do that or do you fail to or do you ignore it yeah and that's again that call to adventure i like that kind of languaging around this thing and i and i think um there's a beautiful book um by um piero ferrucci i guess uh is his name and he's a psychosynthesis right and he has that i'm not and he's a psychosynthesis, right? What is that? I'm not familiar with that. Psychosynthesis? Yeah, so psychosynthesis was near the end time of Freud's process. Asagioli was a psychoanalyst, and he worked closely with Jung as well down in Italy, and he created a beautiful, beautiful model.

He was informed by theosophy which is a really cool amalgam of a lot of different spiritual concepts Latsky and these types of folks brought all that in and and a lot of those flying around Vienna around that oh yeah yeah during that time period right there's a lot of this Freud is kind of more of an inevitability than we give him credit for me there's other people or they're not giving credit more than we think we give him too much credit you know it's kind of more of an inevitability than we give him credit for i mean there's other people or they're not giving credit for than we i think we give him too much credit you know it's kind of like columbus like you have enough ships going around there somebody's gonna bump into it and realize you can't sell to india if his ship sinks somebody else does it when you look at what's

going on in vienna with like clamps everybody you know like people were going to apply this idea that maybe we are not only what we think maybe there's forces beneath the surface to medicine to psychology and they probably would have done it a little bit better than freud you know the random guy you know right and unfortunately like he had to create a modality that he could sell to a community which believed in the world in a certain kind of way, you know? Some of the earlier ideas and even the archetypical imagery that comes in, this Thanatos and Eros and... He puts the Thanatos back, you know? Yeah, like this existential requirement of this death thing, right? And then like even libidinal energy, I love that.

Whether it goes into wilhelm reich and talking about the embodied memory system how the unconscious is the body um or or otherwise i think that there's a lot of really neat stuff there and then of course you can see a lot of this cultural overlay and you know and then then we had all this beautiful stuff pre that time even like mentalism and these different kinds of like hypnotic type concepts that used a lot of like alchemical concept and um ways of defining the world right the world is mind uh in using like the emerald tablet and these different theorems of like alchemical transformation right so um yeah i think it really set a really cool space and gave words and language to it to start playing around with

it and i love that people dissented explicitly i think that that i think if anything that is what mental health is about it's like you've created a construct and i love that you've done that thank you so much for putting words out there i disagree on some of these levels and that's important because if we all collude, we, we definitely uphold the delusion. Yeah. Like, and I mean, I think one of my things has always been like,

I don't want to just get trained in any kind of therapy and then be the expert. I want to be in that kind of therapy as a patient before I do it with another patient. Cause there's the awe of learning and then there's the aha of feeling. And I'm, so I'm a huge advocate. I mean,

sometimes people are kind of sheepish and they're like well i've come here for a while and you know it's like yeah you don't need therapy anymore you're fine like if you're unsettled something come back but like you should go try something else you know you've probably heard my perspective you've heard the way that i think and like you've gotten you've internalized what you need to internalize you've filtered out what you don't and like somebody else is going to tell you something different you know and that is going to be useful too so i mean union analysis was a totally different experience for me than cbt um was totally different experience um and kind of

more psychodynamic but you you you learn that language and it's why i can wear the hat now you know if you just try and learn all of it intellectually and then you're like oh i read all the books that's why you're you like don't know how to apply it and you end up just picking the one you like the most you know and only doing that it's because you haven't really been in it as a patient enough to know how to do it as a provider i think i agree with that i think i've struggled with that too because again there's this price wall that's constructed in order to access certain types of approaches right like unfortunately if I label it with something, I can charge you another $50, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's when you're saying that people are like coming up with these new models and then changing the name and not giving credit half the time. It's the person that they're, it's the Institute's fault that is charging you $200 to have this on your website. Cause we copyrighted a phrase. Right. Well, anded a phrase. Right. Well, and that makes sense.

Yeah. Having to create language in order to not be like copyright. Here's to my movement therapies that are combinations of ETT and LP and BSP that we worked on and we're kind of doing with other therapists and we've tried on our spouses and like, it's interesting, but it's like, where do you go with that?

If I call that ETT, I got to talk to Dr. Vasquez. If I call it brain spotting, I got to talk to, if I call it fusion, I got to talk to dr vasquez if i call it brain spotting i got to talk to if i call it fusion i got to talk to but like what do i want to do you know i don't really want to be the guy going to conferences and being like here's a new thing you know pretend i just don't want to but like or do you just make up a new thing and then have everybody be like oh so you just pulled this out of nowhere and it's not evidence-based at all like yeah i don't i don't know. You know, I hear that.

Yeah. Like, for instance, like we have sensory motorcycle therapy, we have hack homie, we have all these really kind of nifty things, right, where people are labeling their personal approach to and oftentimes rooted in a lot of these traditional things. Right. So we have like vegetotherapy oriented, like Reikian stuff, like whether people want to buy into it or not, or like the outcome of Wilhelm Reich's life or any of those things,

like you're probably deriving some of your breath methodology, your observational awareness and phenomenology from old school body armoring. Yeah. Through bioenergetics. Well, Reich didn't do himself any favors either i mean he kind of he was trying to shoot down ufos with uh orgasm energy by the end of his life and

rain clouds and things and that's yeah well no the fbi took all the equipment too which even for the time was kind of an overreaction i mean he really made some people mad or maybe they just wanted all the orgasm energy for themselves i don't know i mean what i think is funny too is like any psychotherapy lens like what you're talking about that kind of perspective when you you go so far into it and then you extrapolate it it like becomes a cosmology you know like jungian analysis is like oh wow there's archetypes so what does that mean and And Freud's, but Wilhelm Reich, you know, going nuts, kind of was somebody making a Freudian metaphysics, like a classical Freudian metaphysics and then being like, okay, well, if sexuality is the energy ever under everything, maybe sexuality is also the energy of the cosmos and atoms or respond to orgasms or you know what like yeah right so this orgone energy which is taken from the idea of the original libidinal energy libidinal energy is just life energy which is sexual or otherwise it's projection whatever that is but it lives right usually applied to

the realm of sex more than other places yes he did um however the neat thing though is let's say like if we change our lens and we look at tantric traditions from Tibet or India, right? Now we have this idea of the interplay of this duality of relationship between energies of masculine and feminine when they use sexual language to describe the fundamental workings between polarities, right? And so in the alchemical marriage, right? So this idea of creating a total self using this sort of language, I was going to say the chemical, the Rosicrucian chemical marriage,

but I mean, even like just sex is kind of, you know, a big force and part of our humanity, but it also is just a pretty obvious metaphor when you're being metaphors, you know, even like, I mean, there's Psalms in the Bible that are talking about the love of God is the love that you're, you loving God is the same of the love of man or woman, you know, it's like, what does that mean? That's out now? Or they're like, you know, somebody invents like a clock and then they're like, Oh God is a watchmaker.

And then somebody invents architecture and they're like, God is an architect. And then somebody invents an AI and they're like, Oh, we're in a simulation. You know, it's just like the easiest way, you know, that's true. It's not too far removed. The metaphor that incorporates that i think though the nice thing though when we're starting the neat thing about that is when we connected these qualities like psychic qualities or libidinal qualities or whatever to the body what we what we can do at that point though is now we have some languaging to explore the

phenomenology of my felt experience oh Ooh, that's excitement. How does excitement work? Well, I experienced it in this fashion in this way. And then now we're like, oh, how does my body produce energy, which is felt? Yeah, we need to engage with this world. And then we have all the kind of ways that we create creative adaptation to all the things. And that's another thing that I really love from sort of this memory reconsolidation type stuff. Coherence therapy is this Bruce Ecker and Lauren. It's like somebody trying to make a solution focused brief treatment of psychoanalysis. Interesting, because it's, it's, it's following the memory reconsolidation thing. So theoretically, right, and I've always loved this. And I don't, it always baffled me

that a moment of explicit trauma can indelibly burn in a learned experience for life. If that's true, using kind of this polarities, duality process, it must... Well, it lets you know the brain is thinking about it in a different way, and like an almost religious or spiritual way. You know, other moments are not being re-experienced all the time but traumatic moments are so that's telling you that that's a different kind of memory right so this idea that it does this but my wondering is this right and I've always wondered this from the very beginning of every time I the first somatic oriented

therapy I think it was sensory yeah uh yeah anyway peter levine i was looking at peter he's working i was like oh this is curious is that like if a memory experiencing yeah not experiencing so if a memory can be created so powerfully in a moment it should be able to be uncreated in a moment right just making contact with the somatic memory in a way that is not retraumatizing you know in and it always like it always kind of like tickled my mind to to think that because if it can be created it should be and be able to be uncreated in such in that kind of way now we've talked about not wanting to retraumatize people and kind of titrating those experiences which which I understand however things you can't do.

It's why you have to be able to take appropriate risks at a certain point. But there's not always a way to eat some of those memories in this bite-sized way that some of the models are designed to do. And I think you're right. In my experience working with people, and in my own kind of self-process as I go through that, there are some memories that must be experienced as a gestalt like the whole experience must be digested in the moment well brain spotting does that you know like if you if you have somebody

who's pushing enough to take you all the way and I mean I've said you know I'm kind of frustrated everyone that I've ever talked to that has had a bad experience with brain spotting the provider didn't look at the people at all they didn't really map the trauma at all they were just like what do you feel here what do you feel like what do you feel here what do you feel here what do you feel here what do you feel here and the person was like nothing nothing um but like it pulled everything up at once which is kind of spiritually profound and interesting to have this two three day process where you're re-experiencing all these things mastering them and at the end you know memory comes back or you kind of realize what it was you were processing

either yourself or working with therapists you know ett um which is you know a newer thing that yeah using the lighting yeah like it can bring up incredibly specific parts surgically you know and i loved brain spotting i still love it so it's not like you know but you know it's it's not appropriate for everything i don't think any one thing is. And it's wild. Like with ETT, there was like one of the eye movements, we had the color frequency and the person said, can you do something with like acid reflux? And I was like, well, I mean, that's not really how it works.

But I got, you know, what was supposed to be for kind of throat, lungs, breathing, like top neck, that area, which is kind of a blue-green color, a certain flicker flicker rate whatever and she was looking at it and then immediately started remembering when she was eating as a kid and she was shamed and then she her whole stomach kind of shutting down and then this whole thing just came up but it wasn't this whole memory about your whole relationship with this child like everything it was this incredible around that one somatic emotional thing in this specific way yep yeah and I think that's speaking to this kind of memory reconsolidation thing that's that's what that also looks like right it's like every single moment that has created a pattern it has that

creative adaption started because of a reason, right? So it's like, and if we attend to that, whether again, we're focusing on a feeling, whether we're looking at a space in a visual field, whether we're moving our eyes to inhibit our amygdalas, whether we're stomping our feet, whether we're psycho, whether we're dancing, whether we're doing like, you know, any of the modalities that exist that are human modalities of expression, right? Whatever we track and whatever we stay with, if we were to stay with it enough and give language to it,

even if we were doing some like just fill in the blank sort of word association stuff, it is likely that all those roads would lead to a story, right? And the nice thing about knowing what the story is... Sometimes our body remembers it in a way that are the front of our brain can't, which is where a bunch of those modalities get stuck. I mean, if you're drugged or pass out during an experience, it can be traumatizing, but the memory is not written, right. It's like a corrupted file on the hard drive where, you know, you,

maybe you're all you're going to get is the body's response to it. And, and that, and that's what you have to go through and process it. But you're never going to be able to do this stuff because you didn't see it. You didn't perceive it. You know, maybe if you're very young, the damage is written in a different way. Kids don't make narrative memory until kind of three or four in a cognitive

way. Yeah. And I think, and what I like too is like the narrative that we experienced doesn't have to be the, the experience itself, right? So consciousness accessing something in a way that my total brain can experience, which involves language components often, right? When I can conceptualize it, even if it's a theme, for

instance, I have to not eat because I will be hurt. Now that doesn't have to have as explicit memory, but that's a felt sense that I'm giving words to. And once I can hold that with the experience in my conscious awareness now, and then I create these moments that contradict those, those are the things that unlock those old patterns. And you're right, we can do that without eliciting that cognitive piece. However, it seems, in my experience at least, that that part is very useful for having, I guess, a total gestalt, a whole story, right? Yeah, yeah. The narrative piece is a really lovely part of me understanding myself in the world

whereas if i do a purely um somatic exercise let's say i do a holy traffic breathing or i go through like some psychedelic thing that can be really awesome however without the right framing i think those things can also be disempowering we're attributing it to some other something instead of acknowledging that it's a us thing. Yeah. Well, I think that like, it's not that the narrative is unimportant when you don't remember the event or it's not, you know, able to be perceived. It's that you don't have like an intellectual cognitive memory there. It becomes part of a bigger narrative, you know, a bigger story and you're still linking it to that, but figuring out what happened or who or whatever. I mean, even if you do knowing it was Colonel Mustard in the green room with the rope doesn't heal, you know, re-experiencing physically and then going through

the crisis, having the crisis resolve and then letting my heart and my body feel safety. I love that. And I love that that pattern and i think that animals are such a brilliant um exposition of that right like we have these systems because they're designed to deal with the world and when we get to a place of completion like i'm activated i activate my parasympathetic or my sympathetic responses they engage they discharge appropriately to create the safety that i need and then i take in the environment of safety, which is a completely different thing. And then it allows my body to dissipate or discharge or complete that cycle. And the huge part, and I think in most of the somatic type work is like the, it never gets finished, right? It's

the unfinished business story, right? It's like, I never got to feel like it worked and I never got to feel that it's over and I never get to feel safe. So my body's going to keep on generating. But I don't want to admit that and accept that framing because I know that it's over. I know that I shouldn't have to feel that is the, is the, the fight that you get into with the more kind of ST, you know, sensory thinking type patient. And I think that's an interesting space because, and again, you have to move that into that feeling frame, right? It's like, okay, yes, you're right.

It is absolutely over. And yet here you are and your body is still exhibiting behaviors necessary for that condition to be met. So how do we create an experience now where that can be done? Right. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And I think that's the art of therapy, right? And it's not the, yeah, it's a, it's a very curious thing. Well, it sounds like you're doing amazing work, um, when you're practicing and where you are, I mean, you have kind of longer term career plans or what, what do plans or what do you see yourself? So I just love doing therapy

and I love reading all these things and trying to make sense of it because I'm a human in the world trying to make sense of that. The thing that I would love to do at one point, which is something I deeply appreciate about what you're doing and there's a lot of people doing this,

is putting information out for people to have access to it without any paywalls or any kind of things like that, i think i think giving people free access to information so that they can experiment with what works for them so if i were to create a fantastical future adventure for myself right um it would be to continue to learn and use mediums along the way hopefully as i feel a little bit more like grounded and confident in my own process and just share those things with always with the condition of like this could or could not be true and please experiment with it within the appropriate

context using the appropriate supports that you need in order to achieve those outcomes you know well i i think um i'd really love you know it wouldn't it would be something that would be down the road if i was doing it but i'd love for um like taproot to be able to host like almost like a dev psychology library that's free because there's so much stuff that's out there in the in the common domain um or that people professors are retiring or whatever and they're just likely to be like yeah you can have all of my papers and make them available. And it's stuff that you can't even get to then.

Like, you know, that journal was gone 12 years ago or whatever. And even if you pay $600 a month, you still can't read it. But yeah, I'd love to put together something like that. You know, our website, our collective is just kind of, we're all trying to, we think we can build something that is better together than we can individually. And you get a cost sharing and everything that goes with that. But yeah, if you're ever interested in working on something

that we, if we could help, like if, you know, I can give you the access to the website to, you know, kind of host or build something on the backend, like, I don't know, some kind of electronic thing, if that's ever anything you're interested in and doing Awesome. Thank you so much for taking some time to kind of explore some concepts around the therapy It's lovely to explore and have these conversations and I think It helps kind of flesh out and build some

Deeper understanding for myself. So thank you very much for taking some time with me Yeah, I mean and I've got you know, I got to pick my daughter up in just a minute deeper understanding for myself. So thank you very much for taking some time with me. Yeah. I mean, and I've got, you know, I got to pick my daughter up in just a minute, but I've got 15, 20 minutes or so. I mean, what, like, is there anything else? Cause I don't want to, you had reached out and I think initially with some questions or things you wanted to discuss, and I would like to, you know, get to all of that stuff. I don't know how much of that was included in what we already did. Yeah, I think a fair bit was. Yeah, so we have another about 15 minutes. Is that right?

Yeah. I can try and get in touch with you later this week. November is a lot. The past three months have been just like the most wild ever. But it's calming, relatively. So some things that I wonder that I would like to bring up or explore with the time that we have left.

Because I'm not officially trained in any of these things and also there's these paywalls to get exposure and therapy through these things, I usually wind up being the subject of my own experimentation. So I apply these things, the methods and concepts to myself as often as possible. it's using um brain spotting right and i kind of like feeling that felt sense and associating with that or it's short work or otherwise right so i definitely

understand the value of having another person i think that that fundamentally changes you can't always do it you can't always afford it or there's right to be local or what i mean sometimes the self-work is the only option for certain things right and yeah absolutely i agree with that so one thing that i was wondering about and and i did some more research and things when i first saw brain spotting said oh my goodness this looks really interesting i like this idea right and this is also before i ran into memory reasons with any kind of therapy too you know even like cognitive behavioral people like it i mean there's somebody in the training usually it's more kind of less cognitive providers and somebody who was one of the trainers and one of the things was like i'm a cognitive therapy person that does brain spotting

and i was like oh wow and i was listening and she was like you know brain spotting does the thing where cognitive therapy can actually work because the body calms down and then they can learn all this stuff you know it's like oh wow that's a neat way to think about behavior you know but that's what my problem with behaviorism is that they think you can change behavior by talking about it you know most times people know what they're supposed to do they just right do that yeah right and that's that experimental needing to experience that's the experiential therapies that were in the 1960s 1970s when they were doing all this really good stuff and then we get into these ethical quandaries that have created what we have today to some degree but this is what it is that i but i really

deeply appreciate living now in that there's so much beautiful there's like a thousand waterfalls pouring into this um current you know zeitgeist right this current like space and yeah if if i want to and i'm open to it and i i can i can check my prejudices against certain conceptualizations and methods i can make a lot of really beautiful stuff that's very transformative um so one thing as i i was doing these kind of experiments right kind of like playing with that up down using the zxy accesses different kind of like checking different points and like moving between different points what i know is i can't do brain spotting on myself at all like there's different kind of like checking different points and like moving between different points. What I know is I can't do brain spotting on myself at all. Like there's inside and outside window when you get trained and outside window is where the provider is just like,

and inside window is when you're trying to see what the person feels. Yeah. And for me, like, so outside window is a lot more effective in my experience. Cause a ton of my patients are so dissociated. They don't know what they feel anyway. So they're like, I don't notice anything there. And I'm like, no, just hang out a minute. You're gonna feel it. But when I do brain spotting with my therapist, I'm just like, I don't know, I think I felt something here.

And she's like, nah, and then I'm gone. So sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. I'm particularly bad at it. So I'm wondering in your processing, so when I did this thing and I'm kind of playing around with this, and as I'm holding this space, I'm kind of like noticing my natural responses, right?

Maybe some swallowing, maybe some like rapid blinking, maybe the eyes start to, you know, agitate. Maybe I start feeling kind of those little neurogenic tremors that we're getting from this body discharge stuff. And I love that. And it makes total sense from a biological standpoint, right? Everything starts with orienting, right? Every, every, every, everything started with with orienting right period every every every everything started with an orienting reflex that's fun that's just how it is right you and so i find this place i hold that in space right holding that and what i've noticed in my own process as i've been playing with that in certain cases i'll start there with a feeling, right? There's a felt sense. I'm experiencing that. I'm with it. And then my mind will automatically start populating that with parts. So now what I've seen

happens is here's my finger. My finger is there. I'm attending to this. And then my finger becomes a part, right? So now I'm noticing that there's me, a self, a part there. And then it has dialogue and concept that starts playing out in my mind. and then I'm playing out in my active other parts are starting to play out there and if I hold that space my my processing right my primary modalities and otherwise that's what they like to do they create a dialogue oriented story because I'm very auditory mm-hmm and then they'll play that through to a sense of completion however that story wants to kind of close itself up mm-hmm I'm kind of curious though and that's what really drew me to this is like what if we you know because also the other piece is like if you have your

eyes closed and you do this as well right your eyes still move if you close because that's just what we do to access information and the neuro-linguistic program folks talk about this decades and decades and decades ago yeah um but i'm kind of curious is that they didn't have the neurology though i'd like the problem is like they they don't distinguish between prefrontal and subbrain and so like that's why it doesn't work it's like the the eye movement nlp stuff is neurologically very interesting but your eye is going to drift there when you're really feeling like you could just look here and lie so saying constructed memories here audio memories there like that's not the best metaphor about how the brain works because it can do

different things you know right yeah the location i think is interesting but they using and discussing the visual field and how tracking side to side from different areas of vision. Yeah, yeah. Super fascinating, I think. I'm sort of wondering, what's been your experience? You don't have to give any explicit information, but when you've worked with folks and you're doing this brain spotting type methodology, either the fixed point or you're kind of like jumping between points or tracking between things or whatever,

does it often have a narrative component like do people often um express to you that they're experiencing an internal story with parts um do you and there's a whole branch therapy is like fuses so well with brain spotting it's almost becoming part of the training like most of the trainers will train you in it and i'm not certified in it so i mean i've done phase one and two and then you know or consult with a lot of people that have done a lot of the different new ones because there's a lot of splinter ones now um but it sounds like what you're asking is like is there a pattern with eye movement from nlp iqs that is relevant with brain spawning or do you are you saying do people see a story when they hit the eye position i think what i think if i were to distill that it would be when people are holding

an eye position are they accessing a awareness and part or is it a part and a part inevitably sometimes like part space therapy can get you there but when you're there with brain spotting you're so deep in a lot of the time, you're losing time. Like you don't like I dissociated for like 20 minutes when I did the training and I was expecting nothing because EMDR didn't do anything for me. I was like, well, but I saw it work for some patients. I was like, well, I'll take some of the things from this training. And it was during COVID. We were on a screen.

It wasn't even in person. I was like, how could my eye know how far the thing is away? And I mean, I like felt like I just needed to move my head like i was in water kind of and i was just silent and if it takes me and not everybody goes in that deeply with processing but if you do um like you usually lose time like so the person thinks the session was 10 minutes and it really is i'm like it's at the end of the hour because it took me 10 minutes to get them to go down so when you're really deep in it's more about the difference with like ett and brain spotting and emdr is like brain spotting most of the processing is not in the room you're like opening this box and throwing all this stuff from the sub brain up into the mid brain but like

the front of the brain hypothetically i mean don't send me an email and say i can't prove that i can't yeah you don't even know what you're thinking about for like two days like you don't know what it is and you also don't really get to pick what you hit as much right i like it because the processing is so much more predictable like with emdr very few people do this but it's still terrible when it happens and it's possible with complex trauma like sometimes somebody would come into process like a car wreck and you do it and they feel great and then they're thanking you and whatever two days later totally decompensate i just remember this thing from when i was a kid i'm totally shutting down totally whatever okay we're gonna process that and you know dad did this thing okay and then decompensate again oh but mom was watching i thought she was

my protector now and they can't work and you know like that decompensation just doesn't happen with brain spawning that way it's it's not that there's no decompensation. I said, it's so predictable that you can, if it either doesn't work, you didn't, that it's like you can knock the ball over the hill and it's going to roll down or you can keep knocking the ball up the hill. If you didn't get it to pop, like if you didn't go all the way through it, just nothing happens. You may feel kind of weird, but you didn't, you didn't open it.

If you open it, then they go all the way through this thing for usually two three days you know if you're obsessive if you're compulsively trying to figure out what it is if you're smoking a lot of marijuana if you're drinking a lot of alcohol if you're doing anything obsessively you're going to slow processing down you know but it will still work it's just don't do that because like it will make the bad part last longer um but like your dreams are very weird usually they're kind of like letting you know what you're chewing on they're kind of archetypal they're just weird they're not normal dreams a lot of times there's very photo real slick moments in it you know that happened for me it's happened for a lot of my patients with ett and brain spawning or with ett

the processing is like five six hours and it's very specific you don't have that huge thing does that kind of answer your question so saying is it activating a part or not like you can use parts work to be like okay like i'll use it to be like all right now map that defensive part of you like what does your spine want to do and the person's like i don't know you're like no really listen like you're feeling this like they're big you want to curl up into a ball well i kind of want to bend okay are you wanting to curl up into a ball like you're protecting yourself are you covering something up like you're you don't want to be seen you want to be invisible do you want to just train spotting like flip back into the carpet and disappear in that way

do you are you tense like you're bracing for impact like you're a foot you're going to be like that's all interesting information getting them to go into the experience that would be parts based and mapping this part and what it somatically is and what it ideologically, what does the world around you feel like? If you feel small, that means everything around you must be bigger. Do I look bigger? Do I look intimidating? You know, do you feel smaller than the room? Weight, do you feel lighter than the room, heavier than the room? You feel, it could be green. You could feel green. It doesn't have to make sense. It could, you could feel VCR static. You know,

what, what is that? And, and that, then that lets the eye open and you go in, you know, but when you're going in, you're never like,

I'm fighting the inner critic. This is what I have to, like, it's a pretty deep brain thing. Like generally there's not much talking. And yeah, I think that that's useful to kind of hear. I think so in different forms of parts

work right so you and this is kind of it covers a lot of different ones it's just a strategy you're working with somebody and they're accessing these things they okay yeah cool if this were to be in the room here where would it be now in inherently they do gaze spotting right so they know they will naturally so the question I wonder and this is a philosophical question as it isn't there's no neurobiology to define it right i wonder if whenever we do that we are looking at something that's inside of us that we projected so if if on a on a creative construct level we're always looking at something right because you can um

another thing you're saying is that how the brain works or is that where you're looking to a specific experience where you're i'm wondering if that's just a normal function of how the brain does this right so if i if i find a space right and we have the other examples working with kids you put a little fluffy paper on of it or and I mean traditional sand tray therapy right there I gazing down and they're fixating on certain areas these are just naturally occurring processes that pre-existent because they're human right you you're working with somebody then they naturally fixate on a specific location and then they'll just start.

However. Yeah. What is the thousand yard stare in PTSD? It's somebody looking at something that isn't there because their eyes memory from the past, you know? Yeah. I mean, if I'm understanding your question,

like, I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, what David Grand would say, the brain spotting guy is that like, you can't know anything about how the brain works. So that's making an assumption and you can't do that. So just get out of the way and let the patient's experience take you

somewhere, which is probably, you know, right. You know, as a researcher, in my experience, if you don't have some kind of conceptualization,

at least for me, like of helping them understand what's happening, a lot of people aren't going to go anywhere. Like there's no buy-in. And so you can't really even get them to the place where they feel it and kind of understand that it's working um but i think like there are times where somebody specifically looked there during a traumatic event and that's they remember their buddy got blowed up or they remember whatever but when they're looking at that spot that memory the visual tends to like come back in the room and they're like

thinking about it and then there's other things that i think are more about brain function like resource spots tend to be down here you know they tend to be lower and you can and there i've heard people speculate about like well maybe that's where kids look under their desk to self-soothe or something like that but for me like it's like going back i mean some of what we do now is like a fusion of the ett the brain spotting the nlp iqs that we've been looking at how that works because if i put the glasses on you and i cover up you know your left your right eye so that everything's going through the right side of the brain because the left eye is connecting the right side of the brain why do 95 of people have a resource spot right here that immediately if you pull all the anxiety off and you kind of it's not processing anything it's

not an activation spot, but they're processing it, they're, they're feeling calmer. And then you go into processing, it works better. You know, like, I don't think 98% of people saw something right here as a kid. I think that more as a brain function thing. So, I mean, that's of course, incredibly speculative, but does that make sense that I think it's both? But I think that the memories that are related to where you were looking during an event. That was true for me, too. I remember, like, looking at a spot and having memories come back from childhood and then being like, oh, brain spawning works. That's cool. When I was just reading the book and trying to do it to myself. And then that's like the least part of the process. Like, that very deep in at all that's not how the process works um does that answer you i don't i feel like i'm talking a lot and i don't know if i'm answering what you're asking yeah no i think that that works i think part of mine is uh speculative right and so i like how you kind of reiterated like we can't fundamentally know what the brain does it is useful though and then it sounds like in your

own research what you're exploring is how the eyes which are an external part what the brain does. It is useful though. And then it sounds like in your own research, what you're exploring is how the eyes, which are an external part of the brain, how they affect the way that the brain works and processes things. And sometimes it's, it's almost as if there's just a mechanical framework that if it's held generates a certain kind of reflexive response. Well, it's like if you are building a held generates a certain kind of reflexive response well it's like if you are building a computer i'm kind of dating myself everything system on a chip now but like when you build a computer the stuff that has to talk immediately has to be right next to each other like the the cpu has ram on the chip and then the ram has to be right next to it and the hard drive can be farther away because the latency is less and everything else is filtered through

kind of like mid and front brain that's a sense smell goes pretty deep into memory but the visual optic nerve directly through to the brainstem because you have to see something and jump when you're a lizard i mean that's the oldest part of the brain like and you can't think about it you don't need to pontificate and like you just have to move so it's like with brain spotting somebody's moving before they know why i mean for me i felt like i was moving my back of my arm but i wasn't choosing to like i didn't know why that was happening um and it was confusing and um like so i'm kind of losing my train of thought of what we were talking about um but like the yeah anyway i think vision and the pupil is giving you the best fastest indicator of what's happening in a client's experience even if they're not aware like with

ett people dissociate on certain colors when that color goes black and they're like they know it's yellow but they can't see it yeah that's immediately detecting dissociation whereas normally i'm having to look or do you look spacey what's your posture doing are you having trouble trying to think of thought oh every time i bring up mom this happens it would take you know multiple sessions to detect association sometimes immediately there you go like with the pupil you're able to see immediately what the brain is doing right if parasympathetic is you know active or if sympathetic is active you know when your pupil is just super wide under the same lighting for no reason every time you're in one location something's there right yeah and i think that's like one of the most observable

if you attend to it right it's very clear and very descriptive um versus a felt sense of a micro tremor in the iliopsoas of a human, right? Unless they have like a well-developed felt sense and ability to track that, it's very hard to like touch into the body oriented things upfront like that. So I think, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think for myself, it's definitely one that I'm kind of curious in exploring a little bit more, the brain spotting generally. And then by my own self, for my own benefit, there's theorizing about what that looks like, how that works and how to that. Organically, right, I know it sounds like you're asking how you would integrate brain spawning with other things you're doing. Is that kind of like speak to that is like I really love the inherent flow of how the thing how we process and how we move and are as beings so I like when things naturally fall into a method right it's like oh and now we're here and this eye is over here now let's do this and these things i really struggle to some degree applying uh top down like directive approaches to other people

because my ultimate belief is about therapy generally right it's like i don't want to have this i you i would love for you to be able to learn how you work in such a way that you can make this happen on your own if needed. You're wondering how to give people a lens to make this something that you could do individually? Yeah, I think that that's the ultimate thing and whatever languaging that works with or whatever pre preamble or psychoeducation ultimately it's this is naturally you, you've been taught not to, how do I give you, how do I help or provide the service where you can learn to heal yourself in

the way that you're designed to do that without all cultural, you know, inhibitions or requiring a therapist, even though I can definitely speak to and honor the fact that it can process much quicker and much more efficiently when we have that central vagal connection and sense of safety. Well, I think that like, there's a ton of people who have tried to write therapy as a book, you know, write a modality into there's a guy who did that with Adlerian therapy. It's something self. There's a guy that did that with IFS that brought a ton of people to IFS because it's basically how you do IFS to yourself. And, and, and those work for the people who they work for who needs that modality but the real the benefit of having a therapist in the room with you is that i can switch between this like

when i use the language of union analysis you might hear spiritual abuse or something scary to you and i use this language like you know somebody is going to be very like for example like a lot of people who are not typical therapy woo-woo people are going to be very attached to ego-focused language right and they're going to really very attached to ego-focused language, right? And they're going to really want to concretely understand what's happening and they're not going to want to lose their sense of self. And so when you start to explain the hero's journey as this process of like, actually, you know, you're growing, like you're appealing to the way they think anyway to help them. And if you did that ego-focused language to somebody

like me, I would feel like you didn't get me and we're making room for my experience. Right. And a book can't do that. You know what I mean? You could maybe make, you could write 50 books and then do a personality test and then modularly have it, whatever,

you know, but that's not a book, right? That's, or it's an electronic book at that point. I don't know. Am I misunderstanding you or is that what you're asking? No,

I think that kind of hints at sort of what I'm speaking to. I don't know if a book would be the means of it. I think fundamentally, I believe that humans have the capability built in organismic self-regulation, right, to heal themselves. And I think that we have a lot of cultural constructs that we've designed to stop ourselves from using our organic processes. Yeah. I mean, like a ritual or activity, some kind of, some process that would be self-led. Right. And I think there's all sorts of things.

And that's ultimately what these are designed to produce, right? They're designed to produce a means of accessing our natural way of doing that. And we do that in relationship and I can like honor that and understand the like validity of connection on a very like healing level. And I think the other part, and this is like a personal challenge is also like finding the not requiring or not being required to you like required to be educated in a way to use my own body and natural processes to be healing right like like i have i have to go

through a process of relearning how organically my thing was if i well you could never you could one option would be to never forget you know to change the way that we raise children to realize that emotion is not, and we're not shaming the emotion, we're shaming the way that you're handling it, that you need to feel it, but you need to feel it and not let it control you, you know, and we don't do that. So much of the time, what they learn is that the feeling is bad, and then they quit feeling. Right. And I think that catches so much of it because whether I'm staring into a certain location or I'm accessing a part, I think this idea of being able to feel well, not feel healthy, but to feel as a very concrete skill. To feel whole. To feel, yeah, wholeness in all of that. I think that's, I think that, that hopefully that's sort of where the pendulum swings, right? But to feel whole is, is not to be perfect. And even if you say, I know I'm not

perfect, whatever, you know, we don't know that. And, and that that's, you know, all of therapy is kind of trying to come around that. So how do you, you know, in a book or a ritual or self-led process? I don't know. We've been working on it for a long time right i i do think that you could probably train an ai to do fancier things with pupil movement and and we work developer and some other things right now the problem is that a lot of those companies are struggling to figure out how to get their stuff into the mental health space and they don't want to talk to small people like me that you don't have a giant company and whatever well especially they're trying to program them to do cvt basically like the people that are met or self-led meditations and things and which is fine i mean there's maybe a role for

that but i i'm really wanting somebody microsoft says that the pupil sensor that they use to do the hologram is on the hololens is a biometric information. So they won't give it to us. You know, Apple, nobody will talk to you. You know, you've kind of run models and played around with, with different things, but you know, you kind of need a lot of money to, to encourage technology, to help elicit certain responses and human healing. Yeah. But I mean, the pupil stuff, I mean, and there may be patterns that i can't detect that a

computer running a lot of trials could could notice something that's more um helpful than what we're doing or notice subtlety that i can't targeted lights of certain colors to certain locations on the retina and all that kind of cool stuff yeah um a lot of the one of the ett modules with the goggles um uses light direction on the pupil. And like, it doesn't, like, usually there's not that much emotion or the emotion is secondary. It's more physical. It's like it breaks these feedback loops in the way we experience pain. So you can, you can like, it functions sort of like a stellate ganglia on block.

And that like, you're not changing the medical thing, but the way the person feels the pain becomes different. And the emotional assumption about it becomes different and it's instant so if anything in att gets validated soon it'll probably be the goggles because it's like the most objective thing that i mean when i did it my ear was bleeding like my eardrum had ruptured and i was like guys i didn't mom issues my way into this thing it's not psychosomatic and they were like no just look here and like it worked it wasn't a pain i didn't take the steroid or anything and like i it was like i don't know if it really and they would click it back to the other one and i would feel intense pain so it's like something about i don't know and he took you know basically thousands of articles about light direction mostly seasonal affective disorder research

and then put them together to make the model most models come directly out of observation i mean even red flooding did that somebody tried something and tried it and then they thought it was neat and then they kept trying it egt is different and that you could never notice any of those things in the room of the patient he read thousands of research studies about how the brain works and then tried to make a model from that so it's this weird outlier in that way yeah and there's some really kind of cool recent evidence about memory reconsolidation stuff by using directed light. That is a cool thing. Yeah.

Well, it's been really nice having you on. I'm going to, one second. So if anyone, I can point to your website, the Psychology Day page in the show notes. In a lie, they're alive