The Taproot Podcast - ⚛️😡The Atom is not Happy! Introducing Alice Hawley as a new Taproot Therapist and Cohost

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

We welcome Alice Hawley LPC NCC LMFT to our practice and talk about evidence based practice in soft and hard sciences. Please check out Alice's bio here.  https://gettherapybirmingham.com/alice-hawley-lpc/ More to come! Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast 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] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services. #Jung #Therapy #psychology #EMD #DepthPsychology #anthropology #sociology #philosophy #mythology #psychology #psychotherapy #SpiritualHealing #TherapyJourney #EvidenceBasedCare #JungianPsychology #SpiritualAwakening #TherapeuticApproach #EvidenceBasedResearch #JungianTherapy #SpiritualGrowth #TherapyWorks #EvidenceInPractice #JungianAnalysis #MindfulnessPractice #TherapySession #EvidenceBasedResults #JungianArchetypes #SpiritualWellness #TherapyTools #EvidenceBasedApproach #JungianTheory #HolisticHealing #TherapyGoals #EvidenceSupports #JungianTechniques #SpiritualBalance #TherapySuccess #EvidenceBasedTherapy #JungianConcepts #SoulfulHealing #TherapyJourneys #EvidenceBasedResults #JungianPerspective #SpiritualTransformation #TherapyMatters #ResearchBasedPractice #JungianApproach #InnerPeace #TherapyBenefits #ScientificEvidence #JungianIntegration #SpiritualEnlightenment #TherapySupport #ProvenEvidence #JungianSelf #SpiritualGuidance #TherapyForAll #PracticalEvidence #JungianStudies #SpiritualEmpowerment #TherapySolutions

there's a gateway in our minds and lead somewhere out there far beyond this hey so this is the taproot therapy collective podcast um on video uh and also on the audio so if we say something and you want to see the visual you can check out the youtube but have some exciting announcements um we have some good interviews coming up a lot of them got kicked back either due to writer's strike or people being sick so the podcast episodes have been a little bit slow um i hope to to get a lot of stuff coming out around christmas and we're always welcome um we always welcome like suggestions if you guys know of a guest that would be good or are a guest that you think would be good to

me an email um but what's really exciting is we now have a new therapist and a new co-host to the podcast because there are you know five other therapists at taproot plus the qeg and neurostimulation and then everyone in our referral network but most of them um you know are just kind of busy and don't want to do a podcast it's's not up their alley. They'll like it. But Alice wanted to do that, which is awesome because we need another perspective and you guys don't have to listen to me as much. And I will have to write less think piece essays

to read in my monotone voice. So I'll turn it over. Alice will be working at Taproot, hopefully in less than 90 days, but it will take at least that long to get a network with insurance so it'll be coming up you know probably after christmas but we're so happy to have you this it was kind of um synchronistic how we met i was uh you kind of came out of the blue as being a perfect thing for uh practice a little bit out there so um you want

to say a little bit about like your, your like practice as a therapist and, and you know, perspective. And we, I think today we're just going to have kind of a general conversation about the state of the industry and the way that the way that it works and the way that we do therapy. Yeah.

I've had a kind of a roundabout experience. I felt like I've been, you know, I'm a person who wanted to be a therapist since I was like in young years, you know, I had trauma around me that I didn't identify as trauma until way later, like had to hit grad school before I was like, okay, fine. My childhood was really traumatic. Trauma and intuition coming from the same part of the brain is like a thing that we've made a lot of hay with. You can't really tell the difference between a trauma response and intuition. But usually if you have childhood trauma, you know,

your intuition is very heightened just kind of as a protective mechanism to try and see the future or understand people or keep yourself safe. But then that comes from trauma. So you usually are pretty effective if you deal with trauma. But that's the trick, right? We all think we have, and then the shadow is still there a little bit. So I try and wear mine on my sleeve so I know where it is in the room. Yeah, totally. It's very easy to, when you've been a victim of abuse and trauma, you suppress everything that you,

all your opinions and all your, all your thoughts, because nobody's going to honor them. And yeah, you just kind of, like you said, you kind of start and you ignore your intuition or you follow your intuition,

but you use it for the wrong reasons. It's like, you are so attuned to to people um well i think that intuitive personality type like the magician like it's like it's not it's not immoral it's amoral i mean you can you can use it unconsciously and it's the same energy with the stand-up comedian or the con man or the grifter who's able to figure out who you are what are you running from how do i sell that to you to make it feel right they're using what you need and not what you want to control you whereas a therapist is giving you what you need what you want to help you but you know

nurses social workers teachers they're all those high intuitive feeler types when they do the mbti or um you know the intuition is like really high it's just if it's unconscious it's trying to figure out how to sell you a rolex you know right um but the the person who's able to stand up as a stand-up comedian and be like all blankety blanks are like blankety blank you ever noticed that and you're like oh wow you should but that's true i mean they're seeing this systemic pattern that's not allowed and you know right right but i don't know yeah it's yeah it's like intuition gives you this it's a I don't know it connects the dots in your neural pathways advanced level that you are very high vibrational level that is hard to it's hard to intentionally try you can't intentionally train it very well it's just about like differentiating like you said a trauma response versus intuition like that's the only way to really train it i feel i had an

analyst tell me one time went way back when i was in therapy uh and she said something about it being really hard to see this stuff i just didn't want to i just kind of wanted to be normal um and she was like you can't you can't turn it off. You have to learn how to hold it, but you, you're, you can't, you can't turn that thing off, you know? Right. Um, which was hard to hear. Um, because it is hard to hold. Yeah. Yeah. But then it, I mean, it, I don't know, you hit, sometimes you just hit a complete rock bottom and then you realize it's your superpower. And that's kind of my, my story. I don't know. It felt like there was a lot of rock bottom in my life. And then, but the field always lit me up totally. Like, especially like in grad

school was very healing. And it's not a coincidence that I was also way away from far away from my family and my systems that I'm a part of. Um, and you know, the state where we're from, um, I went to school out in Colorado and it was, um,

I went to university of Colorado. I did. Uh, I was at Boulder for my undergrad and, um, the counseling psychology program is in Denver. I wonder if you were in school with my cousins,

they were out there at the same time. They weren't counseling. They were like welding and art. I'm an art professor out there now or a welding professor. And then another one works professionally as a like metal, metal artist. They fly around and do the chair cases and things, but yeah,

they were all at the same time. Their last name is Blackstock so yeah yeah i always feel like i never know anybody that well it's a big place i mean i went to swanee so it's like technically 2 000 students but like you knew everybody even like even if you didn't meet them you you knew what kind of food they liked because you'd seen them in the cafeteria yeah at least like it funny was so tiny in such a weird weird place yeah well it was strange i mean at cu there's like maybe five when i was there there were maybe five people from alabama and it's like you just sort of knew you caught on to who the other people were from alex city which i thought was so random like

how in the world did you end up at CU? And he would drive back for the Florida George for that Auburn Georgia game. Like every like two weeks into school drive all the way to Alabama to see that game and then drive all the way back. And it's like, the football is Mecca thing is, is pretty unique to Alabama. I mean, they like sports enough to like have a riot and burn down the city and other college towns. But there's not people in their 60s, like making a pilgrimage just to touch the grass

on the quad, you know, I don't know. There is, it has more of a religious like element in Alabama for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The religion is more about skiing and snowboarding. I don't think they're in the- It is, it. It really like when we I remember knowing people who were like, you know, oh, your dad's from Colorado. When are you going to take your daughter skiing? And I was like, she's like one and a half.

I don't know. Like if I go skiing, she wants to go maybe. But and you would go on the ramp and there would be people who like that was from Colorado. Yeah, he was. Well,, my dad's family was military. So they moved everywhere. And then the last stop when I guess my grandmother and my granddad got divorced was Colorado. So she stayed there. So that was kind of the last home he had, I guess, but he was in Huntsville and he was everywhere.

Oh, okay. Um, so you never, as soon as he met, made friends and have to leave. And I think, you know, it was kind of a hard way to grow up. Um, but then his brother stayed out there and his brother recently passed away he's really nice guy he had a construction company and so they he has three boys and wow those are my cousins yeah sorry to interrupt i did not know that yeah well the what is it the um she said something i wanted to jump back to we were talking about skiing and snowboarding being like yeah we when i even as a kid i'd go up there and there's people that like literally had like a one and a half year old baby

in a suspender thing so you had to hold it because it can't do anything you know in skis like in between their legs like getting them ready for that it was like they they really they really like it they like live to do it so yeah the little ones are better like they and they don't use um the you know the pole when you're really little so they're just like buzzing around on their skin yeah grown-ups yeah my dad always wanted to take ski trips and you know we were all from alabama didn't know how to do it so oh yeah i mean i passingly know how to but but I'm not going to win any contests. Yeah, I can talk about it, but I really didn't go that much. And yeah, you have to get up really early and it's so cold.

It's really expensive. Ski lifts are very anxiety provoking. Yeah. The ski lifts were like the most fun part to me, but the waiting four hours to be on the ski lift was not um you know if four in the morning yeah so i guess you know you're coming into our practice and and we kind of discovered that we were kind of in the same world our practice is a little bit niche for the area maybe for everywhere but um can you say a little bit about like your style and kind of what brought you into it and and the things that you've used because it sounds like

and especially going back to your bio like some of the older stuff from when you were in private practice you know uh before is like still there and it looks like kind of what happened to you happened to or kind of what happened to me happened to you where you go into there you come out of grad school and you're like i'm gonna be this kind of therapist and then you know two months in you're like wait a minute this doesn't work i don't like that and then you end up doing you know something that you never really would have thought just because you want to help people and it's working you end up going in this new direction yeah um it's like the clients in your community are different you know like the community of people that i would have been working with in colorado are very different than the community here. So it's, it's, I don't know, it's interesting,

like the groups of people who gravitate towards therapy, for example, kind of, and like, I was doing very purist family and couples work. And I even were using Gottman at that point, the Gottman method method gotman and emotionally focused therapy like susan susan johnson um sue johnson i like eft i i don't i've never seen the tests um i've known people that did it but gotman i was always kind of curious i'd always wondered what you thought of that because i mean it for people unfamiliar it's a and correct me where i'm wrong because i don't do it, but it's like a test basically,

which is pretty good for the Gobbin Institute. I imagine it's lucrative, but the couple actually does a test that you did. They have to pay the Institute for, and then they send the results to the patients and the therapists. And it's like, this is where you're good in the relationship. This is where you need work.

Yeah. I didn't experience that way. Um, the Gobbin stuff is great. I, they they'll give they give you a huge book it's it's extremely evidence-based which is like very hard evidence-based where he's been in a lot like has a lab where couples come and stay there yeah for like a couple weeks or and they and he's been doing this for like 40 years where and they code every single interaction of the couples in the in like a set up apartment and like they have a breakfast room and everything and they record everything and um and so they

have all these statistics about reality tv science reality tv they have all these um this amazing statistics and relational work about different behaviors and what predicts divorce um in married couples you can predict like within a 96 uh accuracy which couples are going to still be together in five years versus which are not without intervention and if you intervene and use so there are a lot of assessments that you can use for government do it you can i never did it where you had to send something in so everyone that i've ever known in this area that did it that's what they did is the patient came in and then they made the patient like log on to the website. I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying and like pay the institute.

I don't know what 50 bucks or something. And then they did the test in the first session. And then when the results came back, they were like, okay, this is what we're working on. But that's the only way I'd ever encountered it. Schema therapy is kind of like that too. In the schema institute,, you do a test, but they're in control of the test. You can't just buy the test and apply it yourself.

You have to kind of pay the Institute. Well, with the God of, if I have like a stack of assessments like this thick and I put, I myself put, then you're supposed to be able to use them for anybody. So, and it's not like a big,

it's not like one big test. There's like a page that evaluates this page that evaluates that and um and it's more like checklists that you then there's not like they're not coded like there's not a um you don't get a score on it you just it's all intuitively interpreted at least when i did it but i tried i trained like 15 years ago so maybe they're i mean that's a they have a very good brand um and their stuff is really solid like i love their stuff not it doesn't have a it doesn't have like a work perspective on couples it's generalizable to any any population the same sex couples like it is um yeah i like it a lot and i found that this is one thing that people say and i found also to be true is that um kind of the the um the stereotypical like man who gets dragged to

couples therapy by his partner um that sort of person loves the Gottman stuff because it's very concrete and like is able to put into context these concepts that a lot of people who are way more like concrete think black and white thinkers don't it's much easier to grasp it's like oh okay here's some actual tools and here's you know what I'm actually doing that's causing this this thing i mean it gives you some action oriented work on but yeah it's kind of just informs my perspective i was working for a while where i was doing where i did the assessments and then it just kind of got it gets clunky to me like that's that's part of generally therapists start with tons of assessments like everyone i knew right out of school including me

it was like oh suicide screener this this this this and then you've done it enough times it's kind of in your head and you you do it for court or for liability or for you know the patient's request but you kind of learn the assessment enough that you're not just covering up patients with paper right in my experience i mean not yeah that not the right way to do it and I this is another like I really found that like in school we learned that we were really taught everything over us like once we got into practice everything was over a solution focused kind of framework where we're all like we could be doing something like narrative therapy which is very very deep and um wordy and takes a long time narrative therapy um a lot of art and stickers and billboards and books and yarn and narrative therapy no i don't

use yarn but just like like really focusing on people's language and helping them restory their memories and things like that. But with the assessment, I just always felt like, you know, it's really the we have learned that it's people get the effect of therapy within 10 to 12 sessions. And then after that, it's not it's no like the results show it's no longer really effective. I don't think that now I'm like, okay, that's. Cognitive therapy, the patient probably absorbs everything that you can say on the script. Yeah. 20 sessions, I would think. But it's like you work with somebody who's dissociating and it can take like 15 sessions for you to see for, you know, their parts to to be comfortable even like kind of creeping out you

know when you're a standard yeah because the more vulnerable and kind of repressed parts don't even feel safe for a long time yeah it's really about you know the relationship but then other clients i like i really tried not to practice in a way where I was expecting people to just keep coming indefinitely. Like I was trying to help people get better and, and move on. And so sometimes it just really would feel like, okay, I feel like they've gotten the benefit of this work right now where they are within like three sessions or within. Yeah. It is wild that you say this one thing sometimes and it's like you're done you know yeah and then other times it doesn't work like that but i mean i think we both agree on like push the

patient into the bad place teach them to be independent to not run from it you know that like and and then go forward and be careful you know you're not pushing people into things they're not ready for but the goal of therapy is really to internalize your own wisdom and you you know sometimes as a parent sometimes as a shaman sometimes as a friend or just a kind of voice of other language you internalize the therapist's voice in your head and you decide which parts are you and which parts are not because you know i'm different from my patients they're not supposed to just believe everything i believe or think everything i think and then it's there and you're independent and you're, you're good.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, that's, yeah, I, that's,

that's where it's like the assessments, like when using your first few sessions to throw assessments at people, you, you lose, it's like the critical period of, you lose patience. Yeah the critical period of yeah you lose patience yeah you lose the you lose the possibility of connecting with them in the way that um yeah so i don't know the school in the 90s probably has a trauma response to scan

i would imagine yeah i sure do i sure do. I sure do. journals all the time and read this stuff. But I also understand the role that research has. And I, you know, I think both of our criticism is that sometimes people use to turn off their brain. Like you're saying that they told you in school, 12 sessions of therapy, anything beyond that, you're not getting anything out of. Well, I believe that, but that's based on when I'm doing psychoeducation and ego management strategies and cognitive therapy, you absorbed all that by 12 to 15 sessions. Right. Right. So when you're, so the research can measure that because that's objective, you know, that can be turned into a number right so when you're so the research can measure that because that's objective you know that can be turned into a number but when you start saying like well there's a vulnerable part of the client where i saw another side of them where they you

can't turn that into a number but that's still part of therapy you know so i i want to make room for that in therapy too that isn't something that that research can do a case study can do that you know right um and that's kind of why my criticism of the way that we do academics now is that we don't even really read research journals to be read by people we read them to make careers we write them to be cited by because your impact factor my my pay as a professor and my salary is based on my impact factor like but the impact factors for the journal what's the i forget the i forget what the metric is but basically the more somebody cites your papers right yeah the number is

which you know kind of makes sense but what happens is no one writes a case study because not everyone's going to cite that what they're going to do is be like we extrapolated 10 different sets of data and then controlled them for different variables and you cite everything and you have this giant uh what do they call them like you know analytical uh review of multiple studies so then more studies have to cite that but you read them and it's like this is not helping anyone do therapy better this is written for someone to cite it it's when you it's like when you land on those pages on the internet that you're like oh this was written for google to read it's not written for a human to read it It's being like, you, therapist area, are you hungry?

But, you know, just looks like an AI road. Yeah, and it's kind of interesting, like, in the broader public sphere that there is this, you know, people who don't know what the words mean are declaring that they want evidence on, you know, where's your evidence? Where's your peer reviewed papers to back up this claim like people who don't actually know it's a concept you can't peer review but it's still kind of intuitive and useful but nobody has access to like okay there's you can look up research on google but it is not the same as being in a university library and

having all the databases like there's the real research is access through people who are in academia. It's like, you can't even be a person walking around. Yeah. Those subscriptions are $800 a month. If you want to get a host or something. I mean, we, we paid to access some of them for a while. Exactly. And you can't just like, I've tried, like,

you can't just join a university library. Like you can't, there's not an option to do that can't just like, I've tried, like, you can't just join a university library. Like you can't, there's not an option to do that as far as like, even my, even see, see you like my, I was like, well, as an alum, shouldn't they let me be able to be a library member? No. A lot of people will teach a class if they want to keep a foot in the door with research. They'll just teach one college class like as an adjunct or something. Yeah. Just to get access to the library. Because once you have that email, you can log on to the university. But if you don't, you can't.

Well, yeah, totally. And it's, it's, oh, I just lost my, oh, and I mean in you know so there's the effect of people need to write research in order to get tenure and those types of you're talking about and then it's like you realize that it's like the only things that get funding are the things that schools want to fund which is pretty trendy too i mean trendy is as science is as trendy as like english or something you know where it's like braided narrative is now in oh now somatic now now somatics are the thing that you do in the english department you know like that it changes and science does the same thing like it's it's it just is kind of bad chasing yeah um in a way

it's funded not in in the you know, you know, the discipline itself, if it was followed, you know, scientifically. Yeah. It's like the powers that be decide what the perspective of the school is going to be. And then you identify somebody who will do research to back up that opinion and then you fund or, you know, and I mean, and it's really also based on who are the people who are paying, who are giving money to the school, the big corporations. And that dictates what studies are funded and not. And we tend to only research things that we already think we know the answer to in order to prove that. And then when it proves us wrong, we don't change. Like, I mean, evidence, Exhibit A is the DARE program, right?

Like you have Nancy Reagan being like, we're on drugs, whatever, instead of, you know, education or something that was, you know, kind of useful or funding or kind of meeting the needs of these communities. Let's just go, you know, scare kids straight with DARE. And then they kind of tried to make DARE different later on.

But whatever change they made, we researched DARE for a decade. It made kids do more drugs. If you took a school that didn't have a DARE program and then you did a DARE program, have a dare program and then you did a dare program drug use went up and then you could compare that to and there was no way around it i mean the research said that and they kept being like oh maybe we need to control for that no

like the dare program didn't work it made kids do drugs did we quit doing the dare program no like because we we kept throwing more money at research to try and get the study to say that actually it worked and it just didn't work. Yeah. You get really disillusioned because it's like, then you, you learn that we know best practice for all these things, like in education, for example,

and then you figure out, well, it's nobody who is a teacher or in education really gets to make the calls about what they study in schools. You know, education is the worst for the way that researchers use that like that like they'll they'll come into education and they'll like every bit of data that we have going back to the beginning of research says even if the

teacher is not good even if the teacher's incompetent if the classroom is smaller the kids will do better just hire more teachers pay teachers and and that's never what they've done all the research has said that it works a hundred times what they do is they go in and they're like oh well pearson hall has this information technology uh communications education platform and it's two points better than the the one by epson that's you know play-d. So we need to switch to the Blackboard program. Okay, you're talking about these incremental tiny gains for millions and millions and millions of dollars where you know that it's going to be 65% more effective if you just hire teachers

and you don't have 35 kids in a classroom, you know? But they're not doing research to figure out what works. They're doing research to figure out how to justify the payments to these giant corporations. And I mean, this isn't to knock on research. I mean, studying cause and effect is inherently helpful. We're talking about what the ethics outside of the study. And like in graduate school, you learn, oh, the ethics of the study, all this, whatever.

They're talking about inside the study, but the ethics of who funded it, how's it used, where is it coming from? We just turn our brains off and act like anything that comes out of these journals is magic and I just it's strange I don't mean I like research for what it is but it is what it is you know right right yeah and I was I went through the whole application process for PhDs and PsyDs, which went fine. But it was just like the experience of that where it's just like you're looking, you have to look at, look through the professors, research, like the professors who work in each individual program, look at what their research

background is, and find someone who sounds like they might match up with what you want to study so it's like you have to find somebody in the country who wants to study the same thing as you're interested in which by the way there's nobody as far for whatever it was that i was like so then it ends up that you tailor all of your applications to okay well that guy has interest in his bio but i have to write a completely different essay saying i want to do this kind of research for this program. And well, and just the amount of abuse and corruption in those systems where people, you know, you won. I mean, just the idea that you have to work for free, I don't think is right. And then to or, you know, not even work for free, you're paying to work, you're doing work for these guys. But then the amount of professors that you know financially sexually

i mean there's just you see all this that system the power is so lopsided that even if it's not that everybody is bad but you're it's just enabling the worst behavior right and and and and just the competitiveness of it you know that you're never safe because all these people you know more than anyone else in the world about this teeny tiny little area safe because all these people you know more than anyone else in the world about this teeny tiny little area and all the other people who know as much as you do about that teeny tiny little area are fighting for your job right i mean that's that just seems lonely and sad i don't know um i mean and it's not a huge it's not like everywhere in academia is like that but it is a trend that i think you look at the 70s go ahead i said i don't know it's kind of like everywhere is like that but

well and what what gets me though when you're saying like using research for what it is sometimes you know intuitive concepts and soft sciences are inevitable and even in hard sciences like intuitive concepts and metaphors are used right but it's like you get so much flack because like i'll write something and then somebody will send me an email and be like well you shouldn't have a license because you said the unconscious and the unconscious is not evidence-based it's like what does that mean like you know you guys said that the unconscious doesn't exist we're just the ego that's all we are and now you're going back and being like well car, Carl Jung was still wrong.

And I'm never going to admit that. It's the same professors, too. I mean, these guys have been publishing since the 80s, but now it's trendy to talk about trauma. So they're like, well, there's primary, secondary and tertiary memory or there's implicit memory that is nonverbal and shows up as a symbol from the body brain as a trauma response and you're like oh you mean like an unconscious like what what this you're it's a semantic distinction but they're not ever gonna say i'm wrong or i was wrong yeah well and i i mean it's it's just so the emperor's new clothes because guess what we can't prove anything like there is no you know you can't prove anything everything in hard physics is a theory like it's not the same thing

that will happen when that's just what it is yeah yeah like the same people who say well the unconscious doesn't have a space or whatever you i'll be like okay let's look at what you're writing and i'll look on the arlington article and they're like self-esteem is this new concept you're like self-esteem is still a metaphor like you can't just listen to a tube self-esteem is not evidence but like what right but it's a useful metaphor that helps people understand the phenomenology of how we think and helps them under break the self into parts to feel it and then get better so if it works what does it matter if I can't you know empirically validate every single part of the process, we can study the process and see if it works. Like exhibit A, antipsychotics, you know, we spend all this money trying to figure out why antipsychotics work. We know they work. You know, you're never going to

tell somebody with schizophrenia who apparently schizophrenia go off your medication because we don't really know exactly why this works yet. Right. But we spend all this money about the dopamine theory of schizophrenia. 10 years later, it turns out we know less about why those work um now it's sensory gating is like the primary theory on on it but we spent all that money to figure out that we don't really know what our guess about why we thought it worked is wrong but we still prescribe antipsychotics because we know that as as a method they are effective not as a method they're effective even if we don't understand exactly what's happening so when you study ifs or eft or any of these things yes you can't validate every little vocabulary word that i have to use and most of it's going to be semantic anyway you know but

like you know that those things are effective because a patient with ptsd went into it and then 65 of them got better on the other side versus this other model but they don't want to do that kind of research yeah and even the people who do research don't it's like they don't get that i don't i don't understand um i know well i think they're so defensive because you have to be so defensive about yourself to even get to be successful in that area that it's like those people don't want to admit that the whole field is like basically a sham i'm sorry to say it's not even like soft like the thing is like you're gonna run into intuitive concepts and metaphors in soft science inevitably but even in very hard sciences they're still there i mean you sit in fifth grade and they tell you okay well here's the atom it's

a circle and it has to have the same amount of protons as electrons. And so the atom's happy when the hydrogen gets one electron and it's, then it isn't happy when it doesn't, whatever. That's all completely made up. Like there's subshells where a particle is popping in and out of existence and you're calculating a fraction of a possibility of where it might be. The atom's not happy. It's not happy. Like there's not a circle where there's two protons and then we're gonna dot two electrons that's what you teach people to start to understand the balance of forces in the natural world when they're in fifth grade like but you no one's going into you know the the fifth grade classroom and being like that's not evidence-based why don't you you know show them certain data like right right oh my gosh because you're you're building a bridge where they're starting to help them understand how these things interact and that's the ma and that's a metaphor

it's not true it's not true that adam's not happy there's not two electrons in a hoop around two protons and then they cancel out the electric force that isn't how atoms work yeah but we still use that to start to understand how these vastly complicated systems work in order to to use them and it's just sitting with that uncertainty causes a certain kind of clinician so much anxiety that they really want to run back to a model and say well i did this right but not wrong and i think that's where you start to get unethical because i never feel like i did it right or perfect i'm always running cases and being like what did what what do i not know what could i have done different what could i have seen coming you know yeah and i'm not you know the best clinician out there but i'm trying to be better all the time and you lose that ability when it's just well i'm going to read this book or do the ceo i'm going to do what they said

i think yeah yeah you get out of touch that's when you lose lose track of your intuition which is the thing that you can't study or manufacture you know that's when you know you just get so consumed and having to do things exactly like this person is saying but you can't you can't ever do that though because as you're saying i mean it kind of gets to the point of like, all language is metaphor, language is, and language is just how we, is how we structure all of our thought. But like language isn't evidence-based,

it's just our very like categorization of different concepts in our lives. And we've like created sound to signal to other people that we're thinking about this thing but you know yeah i mean yeah and i mean i think like there was some guy that was going off on twitter that was like no one you just you say that you you attack somebody's semantics or the way that they're using symbolic language when you don't like their point right but like so you know he was like you know you can never do this and like you should only just be terribly literally

metaphors or for weak losers that are are you know illogical and are ruled by emotion or whatever occam's razor blah blah blah and it's like occam didn't have a razor that is a metaphor the philosopher made like you did the thing like at the end of your post yeah yeah and like you said i mean in in what i would say before i mean electron electron like that's an it's it's like a way that we like kind of describe this type of energy but there's not like a little thing there like it's not i mean and how do you even define what a thing is because there's you know all energy is diffuse and there's really not a difference between you and everything that's around you. I'd be curious to see what you thought of this, because this is something that I've played around with for a little bit.

Because I really like the history of the profession and reading by the fire with like the models that i really don't like that all came out in like the 90s when in health care and insurance is getting really corporatized and so everything had like solution focused or brief or time limited or like crisis centered in front of it you know like because they were trying to make it shorter but i think the models kind of the way they fit together they all seem to break down to me on like two axes like one is you know ego versus like unconscious subcortical brain so you know something like cbt is is very ego management strategies it's very ego based on that access whereas something like you know a union analysis or whatever is dealing you know only with the unconscious you know it's

a depth psychology and then the other axis is that is it analytical where the provider has all the power and they're telling you oh you smoke cigarettes because your mom made you orally fixated or is it experiential are you being like i don't know what you're feeling or why you're doing it but i'm going to push you into that feeling and so something like gestalt therapy is going to be incredibly experiential or brain spotting is experiential you're pulling this person into a feeling i don't even know what they're feeling you know i'm just pulling them into that so that the brain can heal itself and i have faith that on the other side of facing this thing whereas analytical is well maybe your jaw's locking up because they wouldn't let you talk in school and so you learned you know yeah and but they to me

that's that that's the access that you can put all the models on and see kind of how somebody's thinking that makes sense and what do you think about that or i don't know is that is that wrong no i mean i yeah i think i think so i mean i yeah they're all just kind of different ways of looking at the same thing that's always kind of what we what we get back to and like when you're saying like solution focused it's it's it's a way that they it it was like it's a reaction to insurance companies and so then we have research that backs it up and who's really funding that research and what schools is it from and where do they get their funding do they and where does big pharma giving their fund you know it's it's all linked.

Well, I mean, the reason I think those axes are useful though, is that, I mean, they are all, all the models are trying to do the same thing and that you give people to feel better and change behavior. But there's different parts of,

I think phenomenology of consciousness that the inventors of the models are the people who gravitate to them. Don't want to sit with, you know? Yeah. Like even, you know, urban yalom's the

existential therapy guy a ton of people come to therapy because of yalom but he still is so analytical like he's he really um like he's very kind of ego-based thinking about this i mean he has that quote in one of his books about how he went to see like the somatic medicine person and he didn't get any change at all and he did he doesn't think that that works but the most helpful thing the guy said was at the very end of it he was like well if the meditation like doesn't help you sleep um just remember that you can always get a gun and shoot yourself and then y'all was like oh wow and that really put things in perspective for me and whatever and it's like you're kind of telling in yourself you went into not an analytical ego language place you went into a

felt experience of like maybe i really don't matter too much on this. And, and Yalom's brilliant. You know, I'm not, I'm not like critiquing him, but he is very suspicious of anything that is not able to be understood in language.

You know, he's, he, he's a, he's an existential guy. He likes, he likes us existential philosophy and is very kind of mind over mind over matter.

Right. Right. Yeah. Um, He likes us existential philosophy and is very kind of mind over mind over matter, right? Right. Yeah Yeah Trying to think Where you know, where do you fall in your practice after having done this for I mean you've been a therapist for what ten years Yeah Yeah, something around there I I having done this for, I mean, you've been a therapist for what, 10 years? Yeah. Uh, yeah, something around there. Um, I, yeah, I kind of, I, I started out really trying to be like extremely evidence-based, but I was also, I think evidence-based can mean stuff like

narrative therapy and, um, emotionally focused therapy. There are so many different practices that are evidence-based. Emotion focused therapy is pretty research therapy. There are so many different practices that are evidence based. Emotion focused therapy is pretty researchable. I mean, it's incredibly evidence based. That's all the people that are like, well, you have to do CBT because it's the gold standard for this. It's like, well, not in these areas. EFT is actually outranking it. So why aren't you doing that one? If you're really following the research as much as you're saying. I mean, Sue Johnson proved if you just take the partner's loved one or you put, put the patient's loved one in the room, their outcomes are like 50% better. The person doesn't

have to say anything. Just somebody who they love going to therapy with and makes it better. But we don't do that as a profession. You know, we don't, most people are like, I'm an individual therapist. I'm not going to see your partner, you know? Yeah. I mean, and her work really, really really really um that was a big learning about attachment and the way that she taught it was a huge turning point for me and when i uh went to training with her in grad school it was just like everything fell into place when i saw sue johnson talk that she is so moving um and it just felt like i I was so into couples and it felt, oh my gosh, this is it. And this is it for every, I mean, talking about attachment and attachment injuries.

And I think, and so that work just, I mean, that was like the backbone of most of how I practiced because that was the way I studied that was in couples work, but I brought it to families. And I love working with systems of relationships, i.e. couples and families. It's so powerful, but it is it's just very hard to actually get people to do it in the way that's effective. Like you can't like family therapy. You're supposed to have every single person in the family in the room, no matter what the issue is. And an empty chair if they are not there, if they have the flu that week or something. Right, right.

People react to their presence, even though they're not there. And when I worked in Colorado in community setting and in diversion, I would get juvenile diversion where it was like teenagers who would get in trouble for stuff. And we had an amazing program and they put all this funding into the diversion counseling. And so we got like as therapists, we got to basically do any type of therapy we wanted. And they got free indefinite therapy that no, none of the courts monitored or saw it. I got to do like really cool family work and it wasn't requiring, you know, it wasn't mandating that people have to be there. It was just the one kid. But then I ended up doing like couples work with their parents and things like that and just was seeing um like amazing results so quickly for these kids but then i come back here and to alabama and like nobody wants to take their whole family to there like and and it's sort of hard and it's hard to and i'm from here so i so i get that it's like that that is very outside of what anyone i don't

you know it's just not something people think to do or it's just not in the canon of how people are here you can groups too i like we i mean there are a couple practices that were good and they tried to do these these iop groups and different things and it just people don't get it i mean we have this conception in alabama that group therapy is AA and that's it yeah and AA is not that yeah yeah it's not group therapy you know but it's like people just think if you're sitting in a circle you have to you have to be in recovery and I mean group therapy I don't know insurance doesn't pay for it here which is probably part of what started to kill it. Now they're wanting to pay for it again.

Oh, they are? Yeah, they're trying to get people to do groups. Save money. Yeah. Well, there was just that whole period where it was like, we'll just tell people, we'll give people Band-Aids and I'll get them out faster. And then it ends up not treating trauma actually is a lot more expensive. So now it's kind of moving back the other way. Yeah. Yeah. Groups are a great example. I never even tried to practice. I mean, I, you know, with groups and as part of my private practice, just because it was like knowing how you actually make a good group, you're supposed to have this set number of people between these numbers,

you know, between eight to 12, eight to 10 people is ideal. And it's supposed to be the same people show up for a certain amount of time. But all the groups here are run where it's just like, anyone can show up to this about postpartum depression, it happens every day, blah, blah, blah, and you don't get the same group of people there. And the whole point of how group therapy works is that it's you know you're creating a family you're creating a family and everybody serves as like an archetype for what's going on in your subconscious and and same with like family work and couples work but groups don't work like that here in general like you're saying and um and it seems like it's like, even I found,

I just, I got very disillusioned with feeling like it's like the therapists don't even, most therapists that I talked to, or all therapists that I talked to don't know that even they don't even know, like they weren't even educated about like how a group should be run, for example. And people didn't get any, well, I guess we did have a group should be run for example and people didn't get any you know well i guess we did have a group therapy thing in my master's program and it's if you get any of it it's all based on y'all i mean this book is still the book yeah right right yeah but it's like people don't and to say and like couples work and family work i got i got pretty frustrated feeling like people were doing couple and family work who don't actually know what

they're doing with couples and families because I really do that in couple and family work you know you treat we kind of talked about this a little bit but you treat the relationship instead of the individuals and so and it's extreme especially with families it's so powerful to work like that but it's just i don't know it's it's it's tough to get people to keep showing up and yeah and men men don't want to go to therapy you know it's just this whole um well and i think therapy in general has just gotten a lot harder it's gotten more expensive you know a lot of those trauma modalities like um i mean i'm coming off the second wave of ett and it's just like i'm i'm out i don't know how long it'll take to make that money back

and i had a wait list before i did the training i did it because i wanted to be a better therapist but it's not like it was making me more marketable i already was full right um so it's like you you carry these thousands of dollars of these new trauma modalities you know the brains four phases of brain spotting or whatever um that works and it's like a second master's degree so i mean therapy overall has gotten a lot more expensive insurance is less blue cross still does a pretty good job but most insurance is more reticent to pay for different things people are just working two and three jobs um because the economy

is different when do i go to therapy i mean i i have that issue where i i want to see my therapist really more than i'm able to yeah yeah um and so when you have an entire family schedule i mean how do you it's like we can't even eat dinner together when are we going to go to therapy yeah yeah i know um yeah because they have to be at a certain time you know it has to be like after work and oh what i was thinking i mean this is you're talking about something that's it's just like i've sort of gotten to where i feel like it like the whole does it feel like the whole field is sort of this pyramid scheme like it sort of turned into this pyramid scheme where it's like okay in order to be successful you need to keep adding on these trainings and these trainings and

paint and paying these you know pay the gotmans this much money to use this practice which whereas like the boards are going to tell us like it's not evidence-based if you're not doing this therapy that you're going to have to pay this much money to even say you're doing it's's just, yeah, that is something that I, I am really turned off by some of those models is you can read the book and understand the system and see what he's doing. But I mean, some of those trainings, they're like, okay, you can pay $2,000 and you can do level one through three, but you can't even say that you do this model without getting sued by me until you've gotten this whatever. And she's like man no like you know

i don't i don't know and like mental health practitioners do not have money for you know it's like yeah we already don't you know you know we don't make any money like which is fine but like but it's it just feels very victimizing of yeah of people who already i mean not to mention the clients like well just the microtransactions of on everything that modernity is kind of moving the economy towards where it's like you can't own the movie you can't own the whatever you just have to pay 20 to every screaming streaming service ever all the time and right you know what is even i mean it's not just therapy i mean a lot of these realities just are across industry but um yeah and it's like well what did we pay for to have our degree and our license because it's like that doesn't

it's well and at least for the masters i went to i mean you really didn't learn how to do therapy in school i mean i was trying to take classes and read books and which is expensive you know academic books to know how to do therapy for four years so that I could do it because I didn't feel like, you know, the couple of classes on CBT and DBT that I got in school were going to prepare me to do it. Yeah. Well, I, I, okay. I did feel like my program was really, really great for actually learning therapy um and i don't know if that was a function of it be of it being a cpce counselor counseling psychology and counselor education program which i didn't even really know the distinction before i went into my program and then figured out that it was

like oh i really like that it's like preparing you to either be a therapist or teach therapists how to do it. And I, you know, if you like the history of psychology and stuff, it's like so much fun to study how therapy, the way that you could like help other therapists. It's so fascinating. And it was, yeah, I felt very, very prepared. And we worked in the, we were counselors in the, um, in the university counseling center where we had like glass and, and people and our peers like watched us through the glass and on. Yeah. I mean, the LBC programs, you definitely get way, way more therapy stuff, you know, only cause it's like, it's what they do, you know, where social work's huge. I mean, y'all could manage a nonprofit. I could work with with geriatrics i could be on a psych ward so

there's yeah there's all you know it's the difference in whatever um but i think that you know the upside is you come out of school not gonna do therapy as an lpc which is nice and one of the downsides is you can't really do anything else so there's some people who sort of get tired of doing therapy or don't really like people but then they are an lpc so they can't go do this short job so they're kind of that's that's one that you want to be really sure that you want to do therapy forever before you agree because you know i can reinvent myself and hop around you know as a social worker into different different uh a ton of different areas so true you know really not a ton of social workers are

working in therapy exclusively yeah it is mostly social workers at taffy though christy marie are all i feel like in alabama i just feel and in colorado there were like um it's it's i mean it's so different state to state you know that's another part of kind of what we're talking about is it's which licenses are the good ones to have or is different state to state. Like, I feel like my LMFT is not that big of a, it's not that super valuable in Alabama. Insurance doesn't pay for it. Like the LMFTs that want to bill for insurance, what you have to do is say, well, this is the identified patient and that's the collateral patient who's there to come to help this patient's goals. But if you divorce or something, only the patient has the right to the medical record and then you bill it as individual therapy.

You know, I don't do marriage counseling, but that's that's what most of the marriage counselors do if it's covered by insurance. Right. Which I don't know. You know, I that's going to make it a lot harder for LMFTs to have a big marriage and family therapy practice. But then if you're in somewhere like Colorado, LMFTs are paid more than everybody else. I was going to say California. California.

But I do feel like workers are way more, in Alabama, way more. I don't know. It's bigger, but I don't know. I feel like they're more respected in Alabama. Yeah, you do definitely want to know the state you're moving to and the state you're in when you're going to school. Because school is so expensive now. You just don't want to get the wrong degree. Right.

I was wondering, could you say anything about brain spotting? When Alice starts with us, she'll have the brain spotting training like everybody else that does the individual adult therapy at Taproot. So you had tried a little bit of it and then decided to get the training. Do you want to say anything about the experience or you want to kind of wait until you're out of training? I don't know. I was just wondering if you could give people who are listening who may want to come see you that are local or anything, some information about training. Yeah. I mean, okay, so, yeah, I have not done the training yet. So I'm not – my blurb is not going to be –

but I am excited about – so, okay, I love, my practice kind of led me into more trauma-based, are you still there? Mm-hmm. Okay, trauma-based therapy. Like, I just, I ended up having a lot of women who were coming to me with history of sexual abuse, whether it's people presenting for eating disorders, people presenting for depression, people presenting for all these different things. And then it's like, actually, okay, everyone has sexual trauma apparently. So it's, I, I think it's like, there's so much trauma that people just don't even know how to begin to get into like get to acknowledge that it's there or really even um like identify it as trauma like yeah like my uh

like my mom i was like my mom was gonna watch this or not like my mom had an abuser when she was little and when i finally found out about it it's like she's just mom was going to watch this or not. Like my mom had an abuser when she was little. And when I finally found out about it, it's like, she's just sort of like, she didn't identify it as abuse. Like she didn't say it like that. It's like, it's like, this was a creepy tennis, tennis teacher who blah, blah, blah, like touched her. And I don't know, but she, it's like something she thinks sort of is funny. And it's like, no, you were like, and like, that like that's not right but people kind of and so it would never that's what's interesting those

those defensive parts when you're doing brain spotting they flare up uh-huh and one of the things that the most one of the reactions that the most they because it's the patient feels embarrassed and i'm always like no this is you know qualified and you help make room for it one of the most common reactions with the most traumatized people is you know they their body feels all sweaty and hot and like they don't want to re-experience the thing and then they start laughing and then they can't stop laughing but going back into that place that's this pretty strong defensive reaction is my mother for sure the brain spotting will pull you through it i'm like no just laugh as much as you need to we're still going to go through the version's like i'm sorry i'm taking it seriously i'm not laughing

at you i'm like i understand i've done it myself like let's go through yeah yeah i mean it's and i i really have come around to being this is part of what i was disillusioned with was just so many of our approach or all of the approaches besides maybe EMDR are so based in like you need to be able to put into words what happened to you and you need to like with EMDR though you're starting the analysis of it well well even with EMDR you're still like what is the happy belief let's replace what's the bad belief let's replace it you know as soon as they start to feel anything you're talking you know whereas with brain spotting you talk as long as you need to to get them to go down there but once they're there be quiet and get out of the way let them go yeah you know the deep brain knows what it's more but

it was like EMDR I always felt like because I mean it works EMDR works and it was the best tool that I had when I was first coming out of school but for very very traumatized people or dissociation it's like you're fighting past those defenses for so long with these eye movements i mean i was doing two-hour sessions sometimes um and it's effective but it just brain spotting was more effective for more people more of the time more profoundly and i'm always looking for what is the kind of biggest biggest net yeah um i dogs are barking yeah i it's i i think it's just i i think being through uh having a, so I had a lot of trauma, trauma growing up. That's like complex trauma where it's like, I can't, it's very hard to pinpoint individual times.

And so with EMDR, you know, you're supposed to come up with these, like a list of all your trauma. And like, as a person who has had trauma, it's just like, I, it's like therapists. Do you even understand what it is to have had like trauma your whole childhood? Because I'm not going to be able to come up with a list of like five things.

Five. And you're stopped. I never felt like, you know, what do you mean? Tell me the event, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't have an event like, okay, I can identify. Okay. My sister had a big boating accident. Okay, that's, that's an event. But like, all the rest of the stuff was some kind of coping mechanism dissociation or whatever but because you can't feel it it's stored you know and then you have to go back and process it later but some of that is acute that there's a boating accident or car wreck or somebody hits me when i'm a kid or something but a ton of it may be so nebulous that it's hard to even find or identify like you know i had like a lot of patients that i've had

they've had a patient the parents that were real moralistic or religious. And the, the parent never said anything that even if you had a transcript would constitute emotional abuse, they were just always being like, you don't understand how the world is. Everyone out there is going to try and get you and you, everyone in the world. And there's all these evil forces and, you know, look everywhere all the time and, and, and the child is panicking and afraid of everything but they don't even know what they're afraid you know what i mean like and that their whole experience with life is that it's scary and bad and gonna hurt them and that is the trauma you know and it never it's not one thing it's this nebulous whatever how do you target something like that you know yeah um and i guess emdr cbct would say turn it into a belief um but i mean something like that is just

so complex and huge it's somebody never felt safe anywhere in their life and that's one of the things with complex trauma patients a ton the first session is i'll ask them do they kind of go through their history and i'm like is there anywhere in your life ever that you felt safe and they'll think and they're like no that is so sad and it's like the first time that they've realized like oh I went from this childhood to this relationship to this relationship to this marriage to now where I'm out and trying and they never had any place where they felt okay right right and that's something so nebulous that it, I think it's very, when I was in the middle of some punctuated acute trauma that where I was going to therapy for this, like a few years ago, it was, it's so, it's so minimizing to be asked to like put into words stuff that you've never been able and it makes you feel like your trauma is not legitimate if you're not able to describe it to somebody but i really think that there's also like we shouldn't have to describe it because i really believe that putting language to things where we are our brains haven't put stored them in a language place like i think that that's like a lower level of consciousness and our traumas are stored in this place where it's like your brain is trying to radiate them out of you and to put them into words.

Like artificial words is like a way of crystallizing the trauma. And I think locking it in more than it needs to be because the words are never going to even. I mean, and the words are not going to represent what I mean, like with EMDR, where we have this. Like I love the list of like fears and like beliefs, faulty beliefs about yourself that you get when you do the training, like the list of, okay, is my belief I am worthless? I can't trust myself. I am going to be abandoned. Like it's a very lovely little list to have, but it's still like people go down the list and then they're trying to narrow down which one so there's just like this artificiality about it no

matter how you cut it somebody else's words and you can't like beliefs don't have are not necessarily stored as words it's stored as instinct and intuition you know when it's that trauma or somebody could have been unconscious during a trauma their body remembers something that intellectually i don't have access to they could have been drugged you know children make memories at different ages in ways that are pretty kind of semantic um you know like you don't start to have like narrative dreams until you're three or four you know two-year-old will just dream like a color or an object and then they'll say it like um and and so like a ton of times it's never gonna be and even if it even if you do have that

sort intellectually and you do come across a repressed memory or something which is not terribly common um you know but possible it's never gonna the the point is never well is colonel mustard in the green room with the rope this This is what happened. You go through the emotion first. You go through the body first and you regulate and you get all this out. And if the memory needs to come back, it will. It doesn't always need to come back. And that's never the point. That's where you get therapists that are kind of implanting memories

and suggesting things because you're trying to do all this analytical stuff. I mean, there's so many people who had this just profound change and you know we had a pretty good idea probably what happened to them as a kid in some environment but it the point was to get better it wasn't to ever completely remember that experience and in some cases they couldn't ever completely remember that experience because they were semi-conscious or um you know they they were using drugs or something and it's like the memory wasn't written into the brain perfectly like a video we think of ptsd like we still think of ptsd as a culture like it's shot in movies you know that's the firework goes off at the cookout and then somebody's like bob bob you okay and and the

footage of vietnam plays on the tape. It's not that. It's that my body is starting to feel like I'm angry. I need to fight. And then you say something that's a little bit off. And then I have an out-of-size reaction to that. And my emotions are kind of running the show. That's it. More so than the little videotape of the bad experience that just plays and plays.

The re-experiencing is real. But it's very, you know, maybe 10 of it is is visual or you know prefrontal cortex memory right because your prefrontal cortex shuts down when you're in fight or flight which is why it's like we don't naturally it's a lack of sync i mean that's my body's feeling something that i know isn't true up here and And then I keep feeling that thing. And, you know, a lot of the newer research on why brain spawning or psilocybin or a lot of the brain based medicine works is that it's rethinking the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. So they're on the same page. Yeah.

Yeah. But we don't. Yeah. It's need to do that from a higher level rather than from our intellectual level, I really think. I mean, and some of my most profound work was with clients who had, you know, sexual abuse or neglect or things like that, where we never actually like had a session where somebody is like intimately describing being touched or, you know, things like that. Like it's like you kind of like with some people, it was just like, you know, like talk around it like you flow with the person and let's kind of brush up against it but like

you would say being the tail of the comet you're going to hear that at brain spotting training a whole lot that the patient's experience is going and that you can kind of observe it but you don't want to get in the way or direct it you're just following it and letting it let it go with the energy yeah yeah i think and i i would see clients who um i was okay so i was seeing following it and letting it go with the energy. Yeah. Yeah. I think, and I, I would see clients who I was, okay. So I was seeing a lot of people who are presenting more with like sexual abuse and trauma and was really loving that work dissociative disorders.

But the people who I was seeing with dissociative identity disorder had been to therapists who it felt like to me or it sounded like to me had basically like like even more crystallized the parts that were there like instead of writing the parts that it's like the therapist it's like it's like this self-indulgent therapy thing where it's like they're trying to get the overall part to come out. I know exactly the models of psychotherapy that you're talking about. Yeah, and it's where it's like I'm just going to take a borderline person and regress them down to a two-year-old and then reenact this fight about maternal whatever with them. Yeah, I know what you mean.

I've seen those. But there's not an integrative part. It's this re-experiencing of the individual part. The parts aren't naturally coming out there like as, but you know, parts come out to cope with something in the moment. And so if you're unnaturally dragging a part out, you're connecting,

it's, I don't know, you know, you're connecting it to different parts of the experience that that part doesn't necessarily need to be involved in. Yeah. Yeah, it can be very re-traumatizing. My experience with EMDR was exactly what you were describing.

It was like I saw it do magic for 30% of people and do nothing for 70% and was like, what is the part for people who this works for? And what is it really doing? And I love the little belief list at first, and then slowly started to find that limiting. And then I, and then my practice has evolved a lot, you know, but I was saying like, okay, I'm going to do a somatic trauma map. So we're not even going to worry about talking about the belief and the good thing and replacing whatever. We're just going to do like this whole thing of like emotionally, what this would feel like where is it physically in your body how does your posture want to move you know all in the person trying to get that subcortical activity and then i would

start doing the eye movements and that's when i would notice that when the eye movement would go past a certain spot the pupil would wibble and so i was like well what if i stop here and then people started going into crashing into processing. And I didn't know what I was doing. And then multiple people, EMDR was just so protocol-driven. I kept paying for more trainings. And they were like, no, don't do that. Just do the 15.

And I was like, but they're asking me to do it. The patient's been in EMDR forever. I haven't been a therapist for two months. I don't know what's happening. And then somebody was like, well, that sounds like brain spotting. So I paid to talk to david grant Um, and david was like, yeah, that's exactly you discovered exactly what I discovered I was a brain spotting practice. I was an emdr practitioner working with shapiro shapiro said if you change my model You're not doing emdr

and I noticed that Brain emdr was opening up every single brain spot a little bit So you were starting to get the person to feel every single issue that they had a small amount, but not going all the way to the bottom of any of them. And then I could surgically go in on these different spots that the eye associates with kind of stored trauma. And it sounds cranky. I mean, if I heard this, if I heard myself say this 10 years ago, it'd be like, I would have turned the podcast off. It took me being in the room with people who patients who I really loved and cared

about and was desperate to help trying everything that I had finding this and it just worked, you know, and, and then it worked for me, I went to the training, I didn't get anything out of EMDR at my EMDR training, I went to the brain swatting training, dissociated for 20 minutes, you know, and had this huge profound experience that, you know, and had this huge profound experience that, you know, it was very helpful and also very humbling because it's not fun to realize how messed up we are, or it wasn't fun for me to realize that we need to. No, yeah, it's not.

But I mean, I don't know. That's where the profound growth is though, because underneath our pain, we have such depth like all the pain trauma victims have been through is just the sign of a very expansive soul i think and like you're saying with the world i mean just the speed of the world right now i feel like it makes people feel gaslit and out of control and upset and you know all these things you did yeah yeah i mean we're being traumatized constantly and i i wish that there was better language because trauma is it's it's hard to come up with another word besides trauma but i really believe that we are but it is limiting and what

kind of trauma are you talking about you know yeah but i really believe that we're like traumatized by various experiences in our society we like traumatized by various experiences in our society. We're traumatized by various experiences and then we're never able to come out of that fight or flight mode. So we're always in low key fight or flight mode and then being fed these traumas like people. Well, there's money in it. If the news is saying this group of people is going to come kill you and it has a big

bearing on your life. I mean, probably look at all these dead people, dead children. And you need to. And I, I don't. It's adrenaline. Adrenaline is what's going to sell. You know, it's going to keep me clicking or reading or, you know, whatever gets the metric up that month. We've gotten everybody's brains so shut down. Everyone's in fight or flight. And when your prefrontal cortex is shut down, you cannot make normal decisions. You can't make like basic decisions about your life. You can't

concretely think about things and people don't realize that this is happening. It's like, you know, people are going about their lives, just feeling so frazzled and they don't realize that it's like, no, you're in acute trauma, basically, because of all this, you know, all the, I think we're just so, I think the advent of technology, it just puts in our face so much more trauma than we're ever, so much more, you know, in terms of current events and things like that, than we're actually meant to process as humans they're you know meant to care about everybody within a 10 mile radius of us maybe and then and like but outside of that it's like we don't you know we haven't like built up the capacity to we don't have the capacity to care about every single child in the whole world like you care yeah yeah i mean that is true and grieve every single person like i don't mean that in a hard hard line i don't know that sounds so cold but i don't it's like you can care but when we're told you need to care about

uh here are 20 pictures of dead people a day that you're supposed to grieve like they're people that you know and you shut down emotionally because you can't yeah they're killing the now you know killing the wolves and killing the rainforest and you know all these all these You shut down emotionally because you can't feel it. level. But they've done, you know, I think, yes, you're right. I mean, there's caring about 10 people kind of in a group is what we do. We're trying to make our brains do all this stuff that they're not designed to do. And so we're doing it imperfectly. And that stress and anxiety has to go somewhere. It has to go into alcohol or the body or to what is anger, you know, but like they've done studies and it's like, and the more people that live close to you, the less people, you know i mean somebody

who has an apartment will not know their neighbor somebody who lives in rural scotland will know the person who lives 14 miles away oh old ben did you know yeah we were like we when my dad wanted to go back to ireland to encounter his um heritage or whatever and we're like trying to find the last relative and uh it's kind of dark but like we went to one guy and they're like, oh, old Ben is the one that knows all the people. And then you stop at all these farmhouses. But I mean, you're driving over 200 miles. I don't know how long it was, but it's huge.

It took all day long. The roads are slow and curvy. So it probably wasn't that huge of a distance. But this guy knew everybody and could tell you whatever and you know we finally ended up in the town where the last um you know i don't remember the name it wasn't blackstock or whatever the last one was supposed to be and they were like oh he drank too much whiskey last night and he fell into the fire and burned up you should have come a week ago that was like, oh no. Are you serious? Oh Lord, yes. What?

That was what the guy said. That's a good story. Anyway, drama. What does it mean? I'm sorry. I don't know. No, I know. I'm just, you know.

Yeah, but yeah, the more people that are around you, the less people you know. And we start to build these walls to protect ourselves. And so this inundated news stuff, it's profitable to keep people panicked all the time. But what does that do to society, to kids over a long period of time? Right. Makes everybody... I don't know my i was about to say stupid and my son is in kindergarten i don't know if your daughter your daughter's in kindergarten too but my son's like don't say stupid and they get in trouble for saying stupid in school and i'm trying to not say stupid and this is what that means but don't say that at school is something.

Yeah, he's always screaming at me and my my parents. Beanie, don't say stupid. Yeah, but like brain spotting. Right. OK, so I it's I think what's what i'm excited about is that it's um it's unlike emdr like you're saying you don't have to put everything into words before you can work on it um like i have this i the what i experience is i always go into this it feels like performance anxiety almost like when you're when you know somebody's asking me like when you're, when, you know, somebody's asking me, like when you're asking me like, okay, what are you thinking about or what do you want to work on? And then I just go blank. And I think that, and it's like, I always,

I always like attributed that to just like, okay, that's just me. And I'm like, these are my issues and blah, blah, blah. But I think that that is like a big, I think that that's a common thing with trauma survivors is like you're put on the spot like tell me you're intimate what's on your brain and then you it's like your dissociation just is like triggered immediately and so it's helpful it's helpful for me when you're like okay here i can just find find a brain spot and work with it and let's see what comes of that. Like that, I feel like really, actually very deceptively powerful to be able to be like, I don't know

what I'm thinking. Cause it's like, I don't know what I'm thinking. And then I, then I panic. And then it's like, I could, it's like the trauma, I don't know, you know, trauma, the feelings are there like, okay, I'm going to cry. Cause I so, now I'm embarrassed because I can't think of what to say. And like, I'm never going to be able to think of what my trauma is to be able to advocate for myself. You know, it like triggers all these, all these fears, but none of which I can put into words because I just go like freeze. It's that, you know, fight, flight. Well, and that's the thing is trauma makes you not know what is wrong you feel like everything's wrong and so you don't remember the event a ton of the time they got you there or events or your period but you're sitting there being like i don't like that on

the news oh well the waiter didn't pay attention to me this like you're trying to attach the anxiety all these things that would explain it and then that's exhausting you and it's driving the people around you um you know to to be tired of that behavior a lot of the time yeah and but you're just trying to attach this ambient anxiety that your body's holding to the thing to figure out what the problem is and yeah they're talking about it more with the therapist yeah creating new neural pathways connecting to your trauma so you're just generalizing your trauma even more than it was before that makes sense like you just feel like when we're creating these arbitrary connections to language structures in certain ways when language isn't already coming like language is a tool it's an adaptation

but if it's if stuff is not already in language i think a lot of the time that can chris it crystallizes it this is this where i, I've just gotten so into kind of the spiritual aspect of all that stuff. And it just like keeping it, well, I don't know. I won't get into that really, but. Well, I mean, and we, we probably don't want to keep you too long, but it's wonderful to have another co-host but i mean maybe like one way of saying that is that you know we've got that prefrontal cortex nihilistic ego brain of you are only what you do what you can see taste touch smell accomplish and then um we have this kind of mystical subcortical brain that is you know spiritual maybe myopic if it's overindulged or kind of childlike but maybe at the risk of being childish. And from its perspective,

you know, we're all connected and everything is the Zen-like experience. And we are what we feel very much. Whereas the other one is we are only what we do. And those pieces of self don't really want to be in the same head, you know? So much of the fights between therapy models come back to that. And I think the best models make room to hold both. And you see that in a perennial language, like Adler says, well, it's compensation for everything on big on the inside there on the outside. There's a big thing on the inside.

And Jung says the tension of the opposites. And, you know, I think Freud's psychology was very good at describing Freud's own psychology. Yeah. Sorry. I think good old Freud.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I i i don't know if that is is helpful but and that's kind of what i see is giving people permission to do both because people feel like well i can't feel that's irresponsible i know all this stuff's true so i can't feel that and it's like no maybe you know you've made mistakes too but you're still mad that this person made a mistake it's okay to be mad you're not gonna tell them you know yeah um or you know that the person only wants to feel and you're having to say yeah i mean you you maybe have the purest heart ever but you still have to you know be at work on time or you're probably gonna get fired that's that's real you know if i was king of the world that changed that i'm not you know we can't intuit this away yeah no i don't

want that job um but uh yeah i don't we can't wait to work with you it's so excited uh and we'll have to do another episode after the brain spawning training uh kind of about what your experience with it was and everything because that's one of the biggest questions that we get. I'm like writing that email or having a phone call for providers out of the state all the time where they're like, you said brain spotting. I'm interested. How do I do it? Where do I do it?

What's it like? So probably having a, if I, if I have to have the same meeting with people, you know, 10, 20 times, I usually am like,

I want to shoot a podcast or a video on this topic so that I can just send you that. And then, but yeah, I'm sure it'll be interesting. Who did you sign up with or who are you doing it with? so that I can just send you that and then you can listen to it. But yeah, I'm sure it'll be interesting. Who did you sign up with or who are you doing it with? That is a great question. I can't remember her name. She's in Atlanta.

Cynthia Schwartzberg? That sounds familiar. She's in Atlanta. That's who did mine. It was a good trade. Okay, I can't remember i'll tell you i did get my book and my pointer in the mail there yesterday oh yeah they see yeah i wish they would send you his book with ett because the ett training like you really like it opens up so much when you read the book but they don't the brain spotting sending you david's book

before it's nice yeah yeah i have i'm i'm excited to look at it. Is there like anything else you want to like tell people about your practice or just kind of say as an introduction? And I'm really happy that we've got another, you know, voice on here because it's probably nice for people to not just hear me go blind. Yeah, this is fun. um yeah i don't i mean not in particular i mean now it's like okay i don't know how to put it into language joel no i um i i there's a lot that i that is hard to put into language about about the changes in my perspective that have everything to do with um kind of the effects of trauma really blowing up the parts of your brain that are connected to something like a i really think about like the collective unconscious like about things like that and um and people who have spiritual experiences with trauma, like that

is, it's extremely common for people who aren't spiritual at all, or aren't religious like me, to have, to experience spiritual, like a profoundly spiritual experience with, associated with trauma. That seems to be happening more and more to providers. Like I know so many providers that are just kind of clung to this very kind of rational perspective, scientific perspective. And then all of a sudden they are, they encountered some kind of therapy that gives them this transcendental experience and they kind of feel humbled, you know,

in a way to sit with this other part of them, you know, whatever part is repressed, the other part calls to you. Yes. Cause I've never been, I've always been very interested in like philosophy, but I've, I've always identified as an atheist. And so it was just, I think it's, um, but I, it made me realize like it is very humbling. And then I've kind of realized that a lot of the things that we just throw away is that psychosis, that's not real. And we don't really know what that means. It's just like this category of like, okay, we don't understand what that person's talking about. So we're just going to call it psychosis.

But there's so many, our DNA is capable of, I mean, our bodies are capable of so much more than we. Well, the ego wants to be all we are. You know, it's very threatening to the prefrontal cortex language and time sensing brain to say, what if there's this whole other part of me? Yeah. Just by itself, just by its nature, it has to kind of protect itself from that. Yeah. I think I stuff like i realized or i've

learned in our society we do everything that like and calcifies like the pineal gland in our brain our pineal gland is connected to circadian rhythms and in our connection to something that feels spiritual like meaning and things like that and um our society we really suppress the pineal gland's ability to connect to it has crystals in it that um piezoelectric crystals that hook into yeah it transmits your brain waves um this is real not it's not it's like real neuroscience um that we just kind of ignore it's like something that it's like okay well we know that the pineal gland does something in this realm and it makes people feel like they're god and then we just throw it then it's like but there's not a god so there's not there's nothing beyond humans but any but so many people

have these spiritual experiences and are trying to integrate them and reconcile them with things that have happened and i think think it's like honoring people, where people are and what they're- Yeah, wherever they are. That they're mulling over things that are turning around in their heads. To honor people's experiences is like, you're not going crazy that you are feeling like you're,

yeah, you're not going crazy to suddenly feel like you're having spiritual experiences this is normal for trauma populations and we're not quite sure what it means but we can work with it just like just like you know we're not sure what depression means but we can but we work with it you know we can identify markers for depression but we really don't you know like you're saying that it's it's all kind of a metaphor like what is self-esteem it's a lumping symptoms together to say maybe enough of these boxes being checked is this thing that we can label um yeah it's steven dr stephen vasquez that did the ett training for me was saying during one of the things that on the light device and some of the um things that are more likely to give you a transcendental experience to treat

deeper trauma than a ton of the people are like I'm an atheist but I just talked to my dead wife and I don't know what that was but thank you I feel better and I but it doesn't change and he's like okay that's fine I'm not trying to change your mind I was raised in the Episcopal church which in Alabama is kind of mystical and I think I liked about the Episcopal church growing up not every church is like that not every Episcopal church growing up, not every church is like that. Not every Episcopal church is like that, but the ones that I encountered, people kind of agreed that it was more important to get along and to love each other than to agree on everything.

And so there were people who were incredibly literal believers, you know, and then there were people who were very, I mean, essentially they're atheists that believes in community and coming here and that you're, you know, working on this greater project and making the world better.

And then there are people kind of in the middle that liked metaphor of it and think, you know, I don't know, like it just, and people went there. I mean, the point was that this was a good thing. We're doing it because it's good. We don't all have to sit down and figure out exactly what it, what we believe perfectly. I mean, there's some, you know, theology in the Catholic, in the, in the Episccopal church but usually like um when you go through um you call it uh confirmation or whatever the classes are them being like this is what baptists think this is what catholics think you can take whatever you they're like them reviewing the theology was that it was it was pretty loose that's how that's how i grew up in the episcopal church church as well. And that's also.

My line in therapy is always just like, I'm a therapist, not a priest. You know, I can let you go through it and make room for it, but I don't know why. You know, and my why is not your why. That's the fine line where it's like, all of a sudden I am thinking about these spiritual concepts, but I've always been so turned off and very offended by therapists who bring their own religion into therapy and bring their own. Especially without asking. There's some people that say, are you a Christian or are you a Christian in this way? Can we pray? And the patient feels safer. I've had patients that had that experience, but when you're just bringing it in because you think that's right, I feel like that's disrespectful.

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't allow room for people to. I mean, it's kind of the, I don't know, the levels of our psyche that really need to be restructured are these deep, deep seated beliefs, which relate to spirituality and things like that. And when you come in as a therapist and say, well, this is the basic framework of what we're, of the truth of everything. And now let's do therapy. You're really missing, you're missing the really good work that you can do, which is like really going back in and, and helping people to structure and like re-story, like what is my basic experience of life?

What is my basic, what are my basic beliefs or not even beliefs, but just like the way that I am in the world and who I am. Yeah. I mean, identity is a relationship between the self and the body and the world in this way that, you know, what is it? David T self and the body in the world in this way that you know what is it david tacy uh had a talk to the sydney australia young society and he was saying like um self is not a destination it is a process it is a process of you trying to contain the collective unconscious and hold on to an ego you know but this it is moving back and forth between these things yeah yeah it's a process

it's we're in we're in times time space and require everything be a process if you're in the quantum field it doesn't have to be a process but where we are you have to go through the motions and we have to you know we do have a physical brain that needs that you know we can there are ways to restructure it really quickly that we're learning about, but it's still, you have to move some stuff around physically. Like there's going to be process around the changes that need to happen in order for you to be come actualized or transcend this reality. And I really believe that people can. We don't, in Western society, we don't acknowledge enlightenment and transcendence and actualization as being real. When people come to therapy for different reasons, some patients, that's never going to be part of

their thing. They just want to quit biting their nails, you know, and I can do that too. You know, come back if you, come back when you want to do something else. Yeah. It's lovely to see people who just, who just need help biting to quit biting their nails. Although that's very, that's very difficult to do. I, I was as a,

as a nail biter from when I was little, it's very difficult, difficult to break that, break that. It is. Well, I thank you so much for getting on today. And,

um, we have Alice's page. We'll go live on our website soon if it's not up already. Well, I thank you so much for getting on today. And we have Alice's page will go live on our website soon if it's not up already. So if stuff going um but um it could be you know see this next month definitely not longer than than three months so okay we'll see we'll see where we end up but if you want to get on the waitlist for alice um we our waitlist is like i don't even know where it is now i need to ask lily but it went it was out like a year and a half and so hopefully it'll really move now and this would be the time to to call since a lot of times um just when you have a new therapist that's starting full-time and has no patients apparently that's a good time to load me up yeah no i'm really excited that your practice is so cool. I'm totally. It's our practice.

It's not. It's collective. It's everybody's. Yeah. You bring later. Well, that's the spirit of the practice. And that's what you're doing is really. Y'all are doing really cool work.

Yeah. And I can't. I can't wait for you to meet everybody because it is a cool community. And I'm really looking forward to you getting started. And now that Peak is established and just kind of taking time to be a community again and actually sit down and run cases because it's been a hairy six, seven months. Yeah. For me, it's just been just 13-hour days, you know, I do therapy for half of it. And then the other stuff adds up.

But it's a nice community. I mean, I'm proud of our practice i feel like um i mean one you know people make more than they would have individually which is important to me um and then two like we all kind of have a voice in a place and have made something better together than we could have individually definitely better than i could have made by myself with all you guys so i don't know that's neat though that was always what i wanted to do since i was a kid is somehow have community you know and um and always want to be a therapist and it's it's a new thing but it's scary it's when we were moving you in though i was realizing like we're pretty far along in this thing like i tend to think it pretty new but you were asking like how many rooms was tap rude and it's like wow this is actually practice now i know i know like that um and yeah just a

few months ago i was very much like i don't think i'm gonna be a therapist anymore i was like trying to figure out how i relate to the field and everything. And I'm very excited about being able to move in a direction that actually feels authentic. I didn't know. I'm just, I'm really excited about working with y'all. Well, we're excited to work with you.

My new clients. I'm so excited to meet everybody. Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Alice. I appreciate it. And yeah,

get therapy, Birmingham.com again, that's get therapy. Birmingham.com is where you would find more information if you're local um and if you want to subscribe to the podcast or check out the youtube that's where you do it um thank you all so much and you know reach out for for anything awesome thank you Come say you might go crazy Then again it might make you go insane