The Taproot Podcast - The Body Holds The Trauma: Adam O'Brien on Dissociation, Addiction & Why Ketamine Treatment is Backwards

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Is your therapist accidentally making your dissociation worse? Why does ketamine - a dissociative drug - keep getting prescribed for dissociative disorders? And what if everything we think we know about treating trauma is backwards? https://gettherapybirmingham.com/understanding-dissociation-trauma-and-addiction-insights-from-adam-obrien-and-the-wounded-healer-institute/ https://youtu.be/6SxxhB10G8U  In this eye-opening episode, trauma specialist Adam O'Brien (founder of the Wounded Healer Institute) reveals why the body IS the psychological unconscious and how dissociation connects directly to our natural opioid and cannabinoid systems. You'll discover: ✓ Why it takes YEARS to diagnose dissociative disorders (and why that's insane) ✓ The hidden link between dissociation and addiction that most therapists miss ✓ How "skilled dissociation" can actually be protective (and when it becomes problematic) ✓ Why Brainspotting accesses preverbal trauma that talk therapy can't touch ✓ The 3 "missing addictions" society rewards: perfectionism, altruism, and ambition ✓ How to work with non-verbal parts of yourself that hold trauma ✓ Why "checking out" actually means you're "checking in" somewhere else ✓ The real reason some therapies (CBT, ABA) might induce dissociation Adam drops truth bombs about: The medical system's resistance to qualitative research Why calling alternative therapies "pseudoscience" is often gaslighting How insurance companies dictate mental health treatment The historical use of psychedelics in healing (and what we lost) Plus: Learn about the Wounded Healer Institute's revolutionary peer-support model that values lived experience alongside professional training. Perfect for: therapists, anyone with complex PTSD/DID, trauma survivors, addiction counselors, and people failed by traditional therapy. ⚠️ Content note: Frank discussion of trauma, dissociation, and mental health system failures. TIMESTAMPS: [00:00] Cold open - "The body is the psychological unconscious" [01:05] The dissociation-addiction connection no one talks about [02:38] What is the Wounded Healer Institute? [06:08] "Your lived experience matters more than their data" [15:27] Preverbal trauma: Why talk therapy isn't enough [19:14] Your body IS your unconscious mind [29:39] Brainspotting: The therapy that changes everything [41:25] Plot twist: Dissociation is checking IN, not out [42:24] The ketamine scandal no one's discussing [44:16] How to talk to parts that don't use words [53:49] Time doesn't exist in trauma (literally) [1:03:24] The addictions we celebrate (that are killing us) [1:06:37] Building the healing community we actually need Guest Bio: Adam O'Brien is a researcher, Brainspotting expert, and founder of the Wounded Healer Institute. Specializing in the transdiagnostic nature of dissociation and addiction, Adam challenges the biomedical model with integrated approaches combining neurofeedback, somatic therapy, and lived experience. Their groundbreaking work reframes dissociation as a navigable healing journey rather than a life sentence. Resources Mentioned: Wounded Healer Institute Brainspotting International QEEG Brain Mapping Progressive Counting Technique Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT)

youngest parts are the oldest, meaning they held the wisdom. So like I'm 46, so my six year old self is 40 years old. If that math doesn't make sense to you because it's emotional math, it's inverse math in the sense that your six year old has been in the car for the last 40 years.

Yeah. So when I start talking to the six year old, as if they are, you know, equals and, and, or like, you know, I want to learn from you. I, I understand that you've been here longer. If they're behaving like they are six or like have those six-year-old needs and stuff like that, then we want to structure the system and somewhat like where's the today you, where's the future you, how can we kind of create that? And so when we're talking temporal space and time, we have to help people be able to create past, present, and future of them because a lot of themselves don't know what's going on and

who's what and where. It's what waits underneath the mouse, beneath the bruises you stop looking at. All right. Welcome to the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. I'm here with Adam O'Brien of the Wounded Healer Institute. And I am so, so glad to finally connect. I've sat down to write this email starting two years ago when I started hearing about your work from people and genuinely meant to.

And every time I would start to touch the keyboard, my life would blow up and the building would be up for sale and you would be trying to buy it or you know meteors would fall out of the skies so luckily I'm not a behaviorist and I didn't have laviantly conditioned me to stop trying to connect with Adam and I'm really glad that we finally are connecting so thank you so much for being here and I'm wondering if you we finally are connecting. So thank you so much for being here and I'm wondering if you can kind of introduce some of the the work that you're doing and the tensions that you're diagnosing in the industry that are a lot of the same tensions

that we talk about on here. Yeah great yeah thank you for for having me and extending the invite and the the backdrop there is is pretty heartwarming in a lot of ways. So I'm definitely interested to branch out into what you're doing as far as what I'm doing. So the Wounded Healers Institute came as an idea of, if people are, if not everybody is diagnosable, then what are people doing for their mental health? Like what are they doing for their physical health? And a lot of my kind of dynamic of like, so one of my private practices is called mutual arising. And it's a Taoist concept, but has a familiar kind of context within Buddhism of dependent origination. And when I look at dependent

origination and that dependence word and that addiction and like kind of both sides of the coin type of thing, I was trying to understand the world as it's like mirror opposite. So what would be the mirror opposite of like a mental health gym? So like, can we have like a middle ground of mental health where we can have these conversations

and where does the line of pathology? So my dissertation and my academic research really led me to try and understand that like, there's a dynamic between trauma dissociation and addiction that really seems to be missing. And when I look at the system as a whole, like we kind of put drug addiction over there. And you know, the DSMs are, you know, finding evidence that there's like process addictions and there's like, you know, eating disorder and, you know, there's different

ways of framing all of this stuff, but I've never been satisfied with the definition. And then around 2012, they started coming out with definitions that, you know, addiction is a treatable disease. And I'm not against the disease model. I do as like kind of empirically kind of want to know what we mean by those words as a qualitative thinker. I kind of want to know the meaning and you know, how and why's and my, you know, it's kind of led me to a point where

I kind of want to have a general conversation with more people. I think there's some universals there. My research highlights that addiction is transdiagnostic. We just identified that, you know, in 2022, I cited an article that the dissociation was just identified as transdiagnostic. And so I'm making the argument that we do have some things that we're missing as far as diagnoses within the addiction framework and how it relates to this trans diagnostic world and what's underneath all of this

and not just the surface level answers of how are you feeling, but like what's really kind of going on with you and that transition from trauma informed care to now I think dissociation, it really is trauma. Meaning that everything that we look at to me as far as the symptoms of PTSD are basically describing dissociation. So there's a whole lot there. I'll give you a couple jumping off points and see what's interesting to you here. I mean, one of the things I think is that the overlap between dissociation and addiction is something that

I think some of the best people treating addiction now are starting to notice independently. So when a lot of people that are highly effective at doing something start noticing it at the same time, that's something that I think the industry should pay attention to and maybe treat as a sort of pre-research the industry should pay attention to and maybe treat as a sort of pre-research indicator objective type metric of what worked? Pre-research, we're going to say qualitative versus quantitative. Yeah. You know, and that to me highlighted in my work between right brain, left brain processes, and who would label what what? If you're a doctor, you're labeling what you're seeing and you're naming the symptoms same thing with like PTSD, you're just basically reiterating what the client has said and you're finding that there's like themes here. But if we're going to say that like

pre research, because I think it's dangerous, especially with you know, I'm a person long term recovery, I think it's dangerous for us to say that quantitative versus qualitative research that there is a hierarchy here, I really see that we are separate and equal, not separate, but equal. And qualitatively, like if somebody had done a qualitative test as far as psychologically, like, and I know that like sociology and marketing and PR type of stuff, but if we were to be an honest

in hindsight, I'm imagining that every, in hindsight, every person was working in the addiction field is like, yeah, non addictive opiate, how can you even do that? Like, that's an oxymoron? Who was who was guard? Who was, you know, who was safeguarding that kind of ad? Or that type of qualitative, like, you know, and then they maybe they had the quantitative or whatever that means to them, but like, there's something about the qualitative narrative that we should just kind of have our like, you know, our BS button to be like, because those who have qualitative lived experience,

you know, isn't pre-research, right? We have to give that more value to me than it being like this kind of like exploring things and then kind of getting down to a nitty gritty, like they're both valuable. What is just more supported and or, you know, validity and being what that is, it's more kind of supported and or believed.

And I think we're now entering in a very interesting age, particularly with like the James Webb telescope and the whole stuff with, you know, the origins and the Big Bang and like, you know, what came before chicken or the egg type of thing, we're still in that conversation. And like some of the realities that are coming through seems that the spiritual solutions and or answers and a lot of the great thinkers that we've had are coming, you know, to the same conclusion that like, you know, this is, And a lot of the great thinkers that we've had are coming to the same conclusion that like, you know, this is, you know, the proverbial, you know, God experience. And there is no separation between the observer and the observed.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, a lot there. I mean, one of the things that I totally agree with you on is that the qualitative and quantitative research, one, are both kind of equal and should be more supported. But then two, I don't know that there's a huge distinction between those like we try and make. A ton of people will talk about qualitative research and it's like if a researcher notice,

if a clinician notices in the room that they try 15 things and one of those things gets 80 people well and the other one is not as effective and then they write a qualitative study is that Completely qualitative because it starts off I mean, yeah You do it right you do a randomized controlled trial to check for biases not to not to create empiricism, you know Well true but I think you know when we kind of get into the To me the dynamics and the philosophicals of my work particularly like this implicit removing implicit bias sounds a lot to me like removing disease

Yep, and I'm very cautious of that because of our work as a trauma, you know And you know knowing what you do as well like the implicit system is where we're really talking about because any complicated, any complicated issues that are presenting later in life usually have happened before the age of three. And these are our, it's our implicit system. Our implicit system is our right brain. It is our feelings. We have been, we've been listening to somebody else label us for too long in that sense. So I do this little thought experiment of like, is what is irrational? What if that is a rational brain's way of labeling emotional? Well, I think that's why some of the Jungian in-depth guys talk

about the truth of metaphor is you've got a part of the brain that doesn't think in language but it still thinks in meaning and one of the ways that that greater meaning has to be filtered into language where it can't quite fit is through symbol. It's through metaphor, it's through emotional cosmology you know. Right and the symbols of language and who's using it though so that's where we start to get into the dissociative effect of like us as clinicians being able to kind of know who is talking dependent upon the language in which they are framing it or the age, developmental age that it is being presented. This is how we're able to see. And, you know, once you see dissociation as a phenomena of happening, you can't unsee it. Yeah.

And you start to see it in everything. And that is a, you know, whatever that effect is called or whatever. But like, it is one of those powerful things that really tell us that we're onto something here. And I am willing to legally say that, like, I can know if people are all, all there or not, in that sense. You know what I mean? If they're acting as if they are all there and you know The nuance of doubting and or needing empirical evidence Like the evidence is that like we are here or that emotions are real But like if you can't feel them that doesn't mean they don't exist Exactly and a lot of the therapy that I'm very skeptical of

like that I'm very skeptical of, like misappropriations of CBT, definitely ABA therapy where you're not really taking into account the child's experience, you're just taking into account other people's experience. I feel like what they're doing is turning off emotion by making someone dissociate so that that is easier for the system or easier for the family. And just because you've made this kind of objective metric

that you're trying to treat or the symptom as you create it come down, that doesn't mean that the person's not screaming inside, which is still a problem for me as a clinician. Well, skilled dissociation, right. Are we just teaching that? But we do have to play around a little bit with the dissociative effects.

So what my research kind of highlighted is that there is like a normative range has been not necessarily my work has highlighted this, but like people who have dissociative, you know, experiences and or phenomena as like, you know, parts of self, they experience, they can still experience the normal range of dissociation, like, you know, driving a car and kind of getting lost in that. But I mean, they're fully capable. So when we, and I'll kind of do a little bit of my spiel with you because and you know, respectful of the answers that you give that like, they're not necessarily supposed to

be tricks, but they are kind of fun. So you know, and how I've come to understand and I think like the main state that I would want somebody to walk away with and like think about for a while I mean, you know, anything that I kind of say I hope that but like this one is the one that's profound to me is that the physical body is the psychological unconscious. Separated others other than through idea and or you know separation So there is an ultimate reality that we are we are all like here. We're all together. We're all like one in some type of you know Microcosm of like the space between things is not absence. Yeah right the rational brain as like one plus one equals two when we start to get into the CBT like one plus one equals two, when we start to get into the CBT, like one plus one equals two, like only shit, it's a matter of like, okay, well, how about if I prove to you that one plus one equals three beyond a reasonable doubt?

If I can prove to you that beyond a reasonable doubt in the real world, one plus one equals three, would you take a leap of faith that maybe there are other answers out there? So the one plus one, and even one times one, would equal three. Yeah. We have to start to define the words that we mean by that and the lived experience of them. So could you give an example that is a little bit more concrete of that for the clinical psychology students that have just taken their first research one-on-one class that are

going to email me and say that I shouldn't have a license right after this episode airs. Just go ahead and speak directly to them because they're there. They're listening. OK. So you mean you think I have to give them the answer? No just get maybe make that concept a little bit more concrete. Well this is this is more just because I think it would be funny than you know. So the as far as the answer I mean as far as the dissociative kind

of spectrum is kind of what I was looking at. So when we look at the spectrum of it, we find pathology and we find, you know, a normative range. So if the norms are kind of labeling the pathology, then what would the pathology label the norm kind of a thing? And I think I think a lot of artists and a lot of people have done that enough that like we can kind of see kind of what their opinion of the normative is. And if we are gonna be normal as like, okay, so one plus one equals two, that's the reality that we live in. That's when things add up. And usually when people say things aren't adding up, they say that it's irrational or there's something wrong with that answer, right?

They start to be pretty pretty like, you know, rigid in their like thinking like this is what I was taught. And this is the difference between, you know, trained versus educated and or lived experience versus, you know, I know the answer to the question and like, and not, you know, with clients, some clients are like, you know, pretty, you know, like one plus one equals two, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no other answer, dude. Like in the real world, like, yes, I'm putting these qualifiers in there to kind of boost, boost it up. Um, but you know, the answer will rather annoy those who are stuck. And I want to be sensitive to like the conversation that we're opening.

And I feel like this is the reason why I'm doing is because we're gonna talk about psychedelics and if we're gonna talk about Dissociation if people think that dissociation is the absence of mind it is the presence of body Jim Another part of the brain another part of the network that we normally are not consciously engaging with. And the unconscious is the body. And as the body takes over because the mind is off, we're talking about the default mode network. Yeah. We're talking about a shifting of a gear into another state that a person who has or has not experienced it,

you know, a person who has and doesn't know what it is and feel like there's something going wrong. The part that would label that one plus one only equals two would hear this answer and be like, Uh-oh. And it's pretty simple of an answer. And it's mother, father, baby. It's about what process are you involved, are these numbers involved in past, present and future? One plus one equals three. There's a, there's a, you know, and I'm sure the philosophical kind of underpinnings of, of, of qualitative versus quantitative. If you, if you are in, if you're able to hear that you're in, like it was rigid, you're probably in your left brain and that one plus one can only equal two. Well, that's what you were taught and trained, but like also the real world is this. So people who live in the real world with dissociation are highly

adaptable. And this is where dissociation is not the absence of. And so when we define the unconscious as having a consciousness and it is your lived experience, then your lived experience starts to be much more valuable than the words that other people use. And I also have started to look at like, um, dissociation and learning disorder because they have, you know, piped in, um, Maya Salalovitz has a book called the unbroken brain about, and her kind of presentation on, you know, addiction

being in learning disorder, because you keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. It's just like, no, I'm there's a reenactment here of relief that I am reenacting that I need because the dissociative system is overloaded by either past trauma that hasn't been able to resolve naturally or through means or, you know, through, you know, just living with it and toughing it out and that gets heavy. So when I was looking at the systems, I think this will be valuable in this conversation

that when we start looking at the biology of it, the body is really innocent in the sense that it is going to believe what it is that you are telling it until it has some other like, uh-uh. And it's going to give like, uh-uh, you know, and it's going to give, and that, that, that, like, uh-uh, that, that, uh-oh, checked out, that, that, don't believe it. And now whether or not that's, you know, related to like kind of, you know, certain themes, but like, if, if we are able to be in a neutral state, we can receive the positives and negatives, and this is a meditative type of thing, too. We can just kind of witness the thoughts and the feelings and the positive and the negative

and just let them be for a little bit. That neutral is so important to be able to have. And dissociation as a process isn't neutral. It is the first responder on the scene. Yeah. It is numbing you. So the cannabinoid system can come and start helping you heal. So when I say

that people are addicted to trauma, which Vander Kolk was the first to relatively say that in the literature, 1985, he was talking about the dependence of people being the opioid system in the body. The opioid system in the body, the naltrexone, as a lot of clinicians are learning, is that naltrexone is like a transdiagnostic feature because it's being used for eating disorder, bariatric surgeries, it's being used for dissociative disorders,

alcohol cravings, obviously for the opioid means to it. I mean, anything, we have a clear understanding of the addictive processes with spending and buying and stuff like that, but like, when the start of the healing process is the opiate and somebody else labels that as the problem, well, the dissociative effect starts taking you into a land where time doesn't matter.

You're in the amygdala. People who have complex PTSD usually have that kind of, and I would say the other side of the coin is that some people are so rigid in their numbers and some people are so fluid in their numbers, there isn't that like, you know, hybrid kind of experience back and forth. Now, a little bit about me, in my journey, and you know, the my lived experience was I had an accident, you know, a pretty simple accident when I was about three. And this has always been my my reality. And I had a good enough life, a bunch of developmental, I have skin issues and like pain problems from pre-verb, you know, from my birth and stuff like that. But the, the out of body experience that I remember

and its connection to the dissociative system of which dissociation in the opiate version versus dissociation into like the psychedelic version where we have the pineal gland versus the opioid and cannabinoid system, Right, we're talking about like biological, I'm not calling anybody an addict, but like they would behave like an addict if like their drug opiates weren't like getting their hit. So like we go to like the TV or the drama and like people get caught in these new cycles.

I mean, I think most people are now, are kind of getting away from, and seeking their own kind of like teacher rather than like new source. They want a framing of something that makes sense to them. And when I start looking at how dissociation and how people could be addicted to trauma or addicted to anything other than a drug or gambling, because those are the only two real legal ones we have. And I don't, I'm not buying that. And I'm, I, my bachelorors is in history And I look at like how long have we known the absolute power corrupts absolutely

So is that not addiction? Well, I mean one of the things that I've written about a little bit that it seems like you're hitting on is that things like dissociation things like synesthesia things like addiction are Way more normal than we pretend They are we just don't say that they're a symptom until they're all the way up here They become problematic when they're problematic for those in charge. They start to label it. Yeah, and The person who is experiencing I mean a lot of times that you know I'm sure you have like those experiences where people start to you know

They label that like something else is happening to them that they can't explain and Then they go to a medical and like whether or not they can you know translate it? I mean, I would really like to help the medical model, you know get What if I I would want the medical model to be able to get unconscious informed consent Well, that's the problem with dissociation is like you familiar with brain- brain spotting that David Grand does or emotional transformation therapy that Dr. Steven Vasquez does? More familiar with David Grand. I'm an approved consultant in brain spotting. Okay.

So one of the things that I use ETT and brain spotting together, brain spotting, if no one's familiar, which I don't, you probably haven't listened to many of this episodes of the show if you're not familiar but it's a I position therapy that I find to be a lot more effective for more people than EMDR is and then also and also a lot more controlled and how you process and then emotional transformation therapy uses the Several devices but it's basically light color flicker rates very specific use of color, and then direction of light against the pupil. And you can process a little slower,

but a little bit more surgically than brain spotting. And I use both of them together with dissociation, especially. But one of the things that I try and tell people for, one of my issues with like the classic cognitive behavioral treatment plan is like, I'm telling people when your dissociation comes down your goals are about to change. Like you're telling me that you're fine with your reality, that your partner is abusive to you or emotionally abusive to you or that your environment isn't safe

but you're cool with that and that you've been in recovery but you had a problem with alcohol whatever. When I bring dissociation down you're going to start to feel your emotional experience in a way where those things will become a much more present problem and They it's like trying to explain to a fish what's outside of water like they're like they can't conceive of that yet And I'm trying to say I want you to feel this I want you to kind of say that I've done this with multiple people and like Just take my word for it. Once your ability to dissociate comes down You're going to be working on regulating the amount of motion that you're going to start to feel.

Do you see that in brain spawning or does that make sense? Oh, it makes sense. I so a little kind of background, I think it's helpful because we can compare and contrast not necessarily against each other's, you know, us but like our different things that we do. So I also do progressive counting, which is was developed by Dr. Ricky Greenwald who was my EMDR trainer originally and then deep brain reorienting with who validated or kind of confirmed you know brain spotting Frank Corrigan and psychedelics. So the question that I have played with is that when you are

decreasing somebody's dissociation, you're basically saying that you are putting them into their body. Because their body is rejecting them because there is pain. Absolutely. On some level, right? But you can't, when you said unconscious consent, that's why I started talking about that because you can't make a treatment plan

for a pain that you are not feeling. Even if I know that it's there, you know? Right. That's the, if the opioid system is at play as the primary dissociative feature. And if you have somebody who's like sick, like, you know, whether it's dope sick or like, that's a good example of somebody who's kind of, they're in their, whether it's dope sick or like, that's a good example of somebody who's kind of, get that right up there in there kind of like opiate kind of like uncomfortable grumpy stage. But if people are in there like kind of dissociated, like imaginative world and it kind of comes down to me for like, you know, theta alpha and you know,

theta beta and and alpha ratios, because I also do neurofeedback. And putting people in their- Can you do some QDG brain mapping there too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was huge to be able to see when I did therapy what changed in the brain before neuromodulation started. That was really wild.

Theta is incredibly important. So like the dissociative effect, you know, if the body is kicking out the mind, it's a matter of what percentage is the mind and what percentage is the body. Because the body may be turning off the systems and that's why the body being the unconscious is so important to me, because it does help us be able to define who is giving what permission, right? And who is like, who has an opinion, who has a lived experience? And I did a panel with Bander Kolk and his, his wife, Lucia Skye, and we were talking about like the body being a differential system, meaning that it's like ones and zeros, and like it can give you answers if you know how to talk to it. ones and zeros and like it can give you answers if you know how to talk to it.

Unconscious informed consent is having your body be agreeable to something, but people's wirings can be crossed. So my near death experience really crossed my wires because I thought that numb was calm and I, my labeling system would have been all backwards comparative to like everybody else's. And I had to learn that kind of in my own way. I also had my skin condition I basically will itch until I bleed and that actually felt good. So like then there might my wires get crossed again in that sense. So I'm crossing our wires healing and all that process. You know what system

is activating and I think you know some of what we have to be kind of cautious of, like, yes, sometimes people have imaginative stuff. And the biggest thing that I like, I love to kind of think about is this reenactment, like, why does history repeat and like, how can we talk to it? How can we get it to stop? What is it that we need to do, whether that's individual or personally or like society, you know, in that when we or personally or like society, you know, um, and that individual, when we can talk to the unconscious, uh, I think it's kind of like on, if the unconscious

is accept accessible and communicative, then people are going to get a lot out of their work. And I see that with my more dissociative clients, they have much more access to be honest with themselves and much more capacity than those who have it shut off. And the things that- It's fascinating because what they do is a lot of times like they tend to have like lower self-esteem or second guess themselves, or they've plugged into life. And a lot of them are very successful and smart, but they don't really trust, you know,

their own sense of self in the community or in the environment. But when it comes down to like the core parts of identity that you want to reconnect most people to, it's like they'll go to the map for those and they never forgot those things because they are spending so much time in the brainstem, they're spending so much time in Theta wave that those more emotional truths that you have to teach other patients that are less dissociative to recognize, they are not ever good.

They don't have the luxury of pretending those things aren't real. But I don't know, that's what I don't know. Who is dissociated? Cause I had to live, I was trapped in my body, in my brain stem. Like at three, there was a part of me that was stuck there in a sense.

And there was a part that went on. And so like, I can tap into that three-year-old and have those biological processes understood. I can have a kind of like communicative yes or no type of conversation. Like, I mean, like how much of our language is nonverbal? Yeah. You know, so like really teaching people,

you know, what that is, and you know, not necessarily kind of going down the parts rabbit hole, but like those facets of self. So my other math equation is like the youngest part of you is the oldest one. And that's the wisdom that therapy has been seeking that people could like find within themselves is that like you've been through this before.

Yeah. You've been here before. Well, how many people do, I read all of these biographies of people that I think are in touch with that. A lot of them are dead and very old, some of them are still around. Then you also talk to therapists a lot about, or I talked to therapists a lot about reconnecting people to something.

Everybody seems to describe the breakthrough that is healing and midlife or the thing that lets them kind of put things back together as this remembering of something that was forgotten in so many different languages. You know, but that's what all of them are saying is that I was born knowing this or I knew this before I was born and I forgot that and now I'm reconnected to it. But you know, you can't. We hear the same thing as psychedelics. That makes the empiricists so mad. The objective researchers so mad because they're like, what is this woo woo thing? How can I randomize control trial that?

It's like you can in that everyone tends to say this when they get better and you can listen to that language, but you can't necessarily put it in a randomized control style trial study that is completely quantifiable you know right and that's the limitations of it i don't mind that that exists but i don't feel that like because you don't have the answers that doesn't mean that mine is you know not valid i would say that it exists whether or not you're mine you know well it's a mind Well, it's a matter of who has that preference I want to know who has that preference within your psyche and if we start talking about and this is where you know, like some of the bigger

ramifications, I think even legally though, but like I mean Psychology if it takes psychology whatever eight to twelve times to diagnose dissociative dissociative disorders and like whatever, eight to twelve times to diagnose dissociative disorders. It doesn't take that long. And we have to kind of question where we rank our educational system. I think we have to question who is in charge to be able to, you know, feed us lines, like follow the science, but then don't allow us to. But the science is pretty clear with psychedelics. I don't know why I have to ask permission. But Adam, I did my PhD on just a mere 65 questions that you can ask a patient to find out

if they empirically have anxiety or not. So I just distrust if you could just talk to me for a minute and tell that I'm incredibly anxious. I don't think that that, I don't think that that. I could understand why people wouldn't trust that. And that's why the lived experience. I'm making a joke. I don't have a PhD. And I would never give you 65 questions. I'm, I'm making fun of a perspective in the industry that emails me for some reason.

I have other podcasts you can listen to. If you, if you told me that there was 211 questions, I would have been like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. told me that there was 211 questions, I would have been like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. Well, I mean, we want to have these empirical metrics so that we can study things. We need them. We need them because the law needs them.

Yeah. The law wants them. The law wants us to tell people, hey, here, sign this thing first before we talk. I mean, if you need eight to 12 sessions to tell if somebody has dissociation, I think there's a serious problem. I mean, I'll admit there's times where I'm like, maybe this person slightly on the autism spectrum and there's dissociation or maybe I'm just seeing this, you know, I see the kind of deep awareness of the body while also like a disconnection from it.

Like I see that it's kind of in charge, but somebody doesn't know that. Or I see like an absence and And it takes a while to figure out exactly what the flavor of that is or what's going on sometimes But to miss it entirely, I think well, it's not just a matter of eight sessions I what that statistic is is it takes eight different like it took me five times to get an accurate diagnosis That means that could have been with that therapist for years, not just eight sessions, they could have been with somebody and I have plenty of clients in their history. They were with somebody and that this I was the first one. I mean, finding out that somebody's dissociative and now granted that the other clinicians may

have known this and I don't have their reports and I don't have like empirical evidence. I mean, this is where like, give me the facts, give me the facts. And that's where again, I go back to this James Webb telescope of like, the facts are proving that like, this is the same phenomena, no matter the chicken or the egg, you're gonna have to start to believe that like evolution would have had an in between stage. Now, now I mean, this is just kind of the philosophical of it too, is I guess, uh, uh, Rudolph Steiner, um, had some credit, you know, had credibility in the philosophical world for like saying that there is a transition, there's a fourth or there's a fifth form where there is a transitional state. And I think, you know, when we start to look at dissociation as a transitional state, like if somebody's dissociated, I say welcome.

Yeah. Because if somebody is checking out, that means somebody is checking in. You can't have one without the other And you can talk to the absent-minded, you know, and you know It may look like talking to a catatonic person on you know, not suggesting that we do this But I'm just saying when somebody kind of goes blank They're kind of look like they're brain-spotting and I kind of just say is there somebody else here and like that that part gets permission at that if if if

Whether they be CBT dominant in their belief structure or cognitive that one plus one can only equal two, then like, yes, I do have a lot of concerns for people who are missing that dissociation as a transdiagnostic. And the bigger picture to me is that like addiction as transdiagnostic Should have been obvious for a long time Well, but a lot of times like when I talked to Andrews 20 is an urban planner

he was like, you know, the biggest problem and the biggest problem in like that community is when somebody doesn't want it or he's talking about architecture and You know contractors who he's like when somebody doesn't want to, or he's talking about architecture and, you know, contractors, he's like, when somebody doesn't want to know something about a design, they start to pretend that it needs more research. And you just have to say, I'm not researching something that's self-evident. I can sit here and I can watch this happening. And so I'll have things happen where somebody will say, well, you know, what do I do? What about ketamine for this? You know, the provider. And I'm like, well, I like ketamine for some things, but I don't really like it for dissociative disorders because it's a dissociative drug. And they're like, well, what's the research on that? Who said that? And I'm like, I don't think there is any, I don't really need.

It's categorically, I mean, So the drug you're using to try and treat a dissociative disorder, you're going to put that person further into dissociation. Like if somebody has got an acute flashbulb re-experiencing of trauma and they're not scoring high for dissociation, maybe if somebody's got an acute flashbulb re-experiencing of trauma and they're not scoring high for dissociation maybe if somebody's got a hopeless helpless depression with no dissociative element. Well I mean I mean as far as you know like I'm not one to kind of go on scales as to like whether or not like how dissociated somebody is because it's hard to measure it's a matter of who is dissociated, who is not there.

So in my model, what I look at is like really creating, you know, a meeting area. I created a meeting area screening and assessment that I have like a, you know, a script that like a guideline that people can use. Yeah, so in like, you know, things like EMDR, so I'm also an EMDR trainer. And so when, when we ask a part of self, this is why I just be cautioned, cautious about like, you know, you know, this part is saying like, you know, like, I'm psychotic. And, or I'm, everything's fine. And I'm not scoring high in dissociation. I really feel like I'm here. I don't, going off of like, neurofeedback, I don't know how here you think you are. Yeah. Because you're thinking about it.

If somebody tells me, yeah, I think I'm here. It's just like, let me know when you know. Yeah. Well, what about how do you deal with kind of parts of self or parts of the network that are maybe not completely verbal or maybe are more relational, usually very young because I mean those tend to not have the same access to language a lot of the time. I mean how do I access them or how do I communicate with them? Just what do you feel like their role is clinically you know when it's not a part that can say I'm

not quite here but you kind of feel the presence of somebody who has I look at posture a ton if somebody is like You know has more of a when I see very strong posture changes and tone changes Sometimes those parts just need to be kind of like Encouraged and made room for but they're not they don't really have a lot to say in language or they don't have access to language Right, and I mean or they don't have access to language. Right. And I mean, developmentally, there are reasons for that. And that's where we have to be able to switch

into age-appropriate type of things to help them move through things and or get access to memories. So how do I do that? I kind of orient people towards, to me, the reality that I see. And I think it may be more of a spiritual bent or to me, the reality that I see, and I think it's maybe more of a spiritual bent or like somebody could label it as that. But I think it's actually psychologically, you know, sound and that I have to assume that you are if you walk in the door, you're bringing everybody with you. Whether you are aware of it or not. And

that's kind of my point is like when we ask somebody today, zero to 10, how bad is that memory now? And they give me like a five and I say, okay, can you ask the person the age that it happened to? And they could tell me at 10. Then I know that they're not on the same page to be able to answer the question. And if you have a filter,

and this is where the learning disorder type of stuff is getting interesting because like auditory processing, either it is like a facet of an ear part that can only hear certain like pitches or hear certain language and it has to go through and it can't go through or if you hear it on this side and you hear things differently than you would on this side. it's all about how the brain receives the messages in those nonverbal type of cues and stuff like that. So like, yes, a lot of posture, a lot of bodily stuff. I don't really talk, I mean, as far as brain spotting, that's where I would go to a lot of my preverbal stuff. To your point earlier about EMDR brain spotting, and I would use EMDR later on for some more of the cognitions, the behavioral cognitions, but a lot of my preverbal stuff is very brain-spotting based to help the body find its regulation points

But also like test the system to see how it's going to respond to what I would call like adaptive dissociation or mindful dissociation Yeah And that is that's not an ox. It's only an oxymoron if you believe that nothing is nothing. Like that there's, I mean, the absence. I mean, the only thing we, I mean, the black holes are really like the absence that we don't know, but like I'm more than sure that they're connected

to something somewhere. If something's eating something, it's going out some other door. So I don't, it just has to, you know, if it's an organism. So, so the other part too, is that like the, what I said to you earlier is that like the youngest parts are the oldest, meaning they held the wisdom. So like I'm 46, so my six year old self is 40 years old. If that math doesn't make sense to you, because it's emotional math, it's inversed math in

the sense that your six yearyear-old has been in the car for the last 40 years. Yeah. So when I start talking to the six-year-old as if they are, you know, equals and, and, or like, you know, I want to learn from you, I understand you've been here longer. If they're behaving like they are six or like have those six-year-old needs and stuff like that, then we want to structure the system is somewhat like where's the today you where's the future you how can we kind of create that and so when we're talking temporal space and time, we have to help people be able to create past, present and future them because a lot of themselves

don't know what's going on and who's what and where is black again, it's really a circle. Yeah. It's really round. So what you're saying has so much resonance for ETT. When you ever get the emotional transformation therapy and look at what those colors do. It's it's wild because the far red end where you lose visibility of the red, it's almost like going into the body without you. So it's like experiencing the body without self whereas violet,

the when you start to get violet loses visibility, you're going into higher order thinking without you So you get very secular or existential or spiritual higher concepts of like thought without yourself Where's the other one and and if someone's on an fMRI or a QEG and they look at? Far-red you get the same networks that activate with phantom limb syndrome with body dysmorphia with Dissociation due to sexual assault or some kind of invasive surgery and that stuff does have it more of a neurological basis than you know even Watts is aware of oh yeah yeah no doubt the color thing I saw something recently about that too I forget what it was called though but um yeah no that's i mean that's that's fascinating because like you know the

you know how how you know how we're going to kind of do this is like you know and i i don't know we just have to be able to not question that there is a science psychology has a science here like qualitative is not nothing and we know more than what we're doing and more than what the medical and I would say the law kind of agrees is possible. Like we I see healing in miraculous ways and kind of my point of kind of bringing some of this up is that like you taking a I'm not necessarily against you know taking a ketamine as a dissociative to get through because I think sometimes you have to punch through that but like I like the how you were you know describing the and like I just trust the you know brain spotting I'll just trust the process and like it works itself out You have to know there's a buying is gonna land and like the what I see when I'm trying to

People ask for I'm not a trainer and brain spotting or anything But when people at the clinic or local providers are like can we can we work through some of these is? What you can teach people is that you know I can teach you some kind of tricks that I know or prompts of you you talk enough to get them into the experience and then you stop because you've got the metaphor right and they're experiencing and the people's doing what it's supposed to do. But they need to be let go there. Don't pull them back up in the prefrontal cortex by talking. I can tell a clinician that. But what I see is that if somebody has not done their own work, they don't have faith that that plane will land and the patient starts to go through it, they start to have distress and then the clinician puts the stick down because they don't know. I mean you see things come up especially with DID, especially with dissociation where you just have to say, I know that there's healing on the other side

of this process but what you're starting to get is real wild. But if somebody hasn't done that themselves, if they haven't been through it, they don't have faith in holding somebody else going through that process You know is that related to what you're saying? Is that is that too much of a side? No, no, I think it's fair and I think that's why we do dual attunement You know within brain spotting and it's not necessarily you know, I mean we highlight it But it's not like almost like required in like EMDR type of things. But no it is required in like EMDR type of things but no it is. Though the dissociative so when we look at to me the cannabinoid system as a way of helping people kind of regulate their alpha compared to like the

pain system with the opioid and the that system. I don't know what dissociation means if somebody checks in, if somebody checks out, like they're kind of always has to be a driver unless they're asleep. But even then you have a driver that is, you know, trying to, if they smell the smell of smoke, they're going to wake up. Yeah. You know, and they probably can tell the difference between like, you know, smoking, you know, cigarettes versus like fire smoke. Like it is that tuned. And so these youngest, these youngest parts are often, you know, manifested in, in honestly, evolutionarily, they're, they're manifesting in like a lot of reptilian type of brain type of stuff,

whether that's metaphorical or whether that's actual. I talked to them as if like rings on a tree, all of these, all the rings of there are here. Like the past is still here. Right. Each year there's a new ring to you. And my line that I say to clients in my, you know, kind of one of my initial things is like, I know I'm not just talking to you today.

I'm talking to every you you've ever been. And if you want to kind of get all spiritual or psychological in a sense, or, uh, uh, you know, future oriented, like, and I'm talking to every you, you'll ever be. Yeah. And so we're in a different space. We're in the, you know, it's a timeless part of the brain. Time stops when you're down there.

If I got somebody into really deep processing back when I was just kind of doing pure brain spotting, if I got somebody into really, especially with one eye closed, the session, they may be processing if they needed a ton, they may be processing really hard for 40 minutes. And when they stopped, they would think that the session had taken however long it was before that moment.

If it was 20 minutes to get them down there, they thought that the session was 20 minutes long and they didn't believe me and they were looking at the clock and I was telling them, man, like that part of the brain does not have a clock. And so you were in this timeless part of experience that it has a different clock. It still has a clock.

It has, it has, it's our circadian rhythms. So Vanderkult gives an example. And the reason why I'll add that to this is because Vanderkult gives an example of a Vietnam vet who goes into a year after, you know, gets discharged and every year, the same day, the same time, down to the same minute, he goes into a convenience store, lights up a cigarette,

puts his fingers like in his jacket and tries to hold it up. And then the cops get called and he says, you know, he starts to try to draw fire. This happens, you know, however many times, but every year the same time down to the same minute. Yeah. So that's the clock. That's why people get all thrown off because of the circadian rhythms being messed up with the daylight savings times this statistically you are 10 times more likely or whatever the statistic is. I think it's

a lot more than that to have some type of medical because your body gets thrown off whether or not this car Rex if you want an empirical stat look at the amount of car wrecks that happen the day after daylight savings time You know people are deeply and they're not ready to drive yet You know well the thing that gets to me about it I kind of have a mock campaign on my my YouTube move as to like This is just another example of like you can't follow the science, but they'll make us follow the science Yeah, well and the biomedical model. I, especially when you do QEG brain mapping,

it's like, even if you accept it based on its own rules, which I think it's always going to be kind of reductive, and we have to have, you know, some kind of framework, you know, you can't completely get rid of something like that. I think it has too much control over clinical work. But even if you accept it on its own terms, and you're like, okay, fine, we have to have an empirical whatever, well, we know with QEG, that if you accept it on its own terms and you're like, okay, fine, we have to have an empirical whatever. Well, we know with QEG that if you have ADHD and you respond to the same symptoms and you take the same medication and respond to, or you have the same symptoms that I can screen for and you take the same medication and you respond to that, when you get under a QEG, ADHD is actually six different things that could be happening in the brain.

And if you're doing that screener, You don't know which one it is. So even if you want to say, okay fine biomedical model Let's find these markers and find what's actually going on. Oh, no. No, that's too much work. Okay Well, you don't believe in your own thing at that point. You know what I mean? Like you're saying that you have to Turn these things into an empirically objective Objective thing that you can see and now that we can't the technology is caught up where the clinical wisdom can be Validated empirically they're like no no never mind Exactly exactly Believe what they're saying it's they don't so I said when I did that talk with Van der Kolk and his wife and there's another

Person there, too And I said unconscious informed consent and Vanderkulk just laughed and like because I had said it to him before we had met twice and like he was just like he gave me a look of like good luck with that. But like I'm saying I'm like I have a QEG I have a QEG I'm not like I'm not like what more empirical do you want? They're never going to believe it because they don't have necessarily access. And that's how dissociated they may be.

And I do take a kind of a stab at like trying to explain this. And one of the brain spotting, there was a brain spotting article that came out in 2022, I believe, December that was calling it a pseudo science. And some of those papers are really wild, though, like there's a guy that published one a year and a half, two years ago, and he wrote basically like he was just like when I was in med school, not even somebody in psych, he just was like, I heard about this brain spotting thing.

I mean, it's written in academic language, but he's like I heard about this brain-spotting thing That's crazy because when I was in med school in the 80s we know that memory is in the front of the brain and Eye position wouldn't affect that so this thing that I have no experience with or training in is not right And this just goes to show that we should have more better medical training. And it's like where memory is in the brain is one of the most complicated questions in all of modern neuroscience. I mean, somebody could sit down with a medical license and write that and, and that a journal and I don't want to like, I don't want to be too specific here, but like a giant mainstream journal would publish it. I mean, that's why I don't want anything to do

with research personally. I mean, it's like that. Well, it's getting even kind of uglier, I think, with psychedelics, because the state is actually asking, requiring that people have a license to do research. That is, I'm not talking about like, they're approving the study

Yeah You know and right some of the like, you know opening yourself up to like, you know What is available within the research community for people to be like and this is kind of where I'm going from and I We're not quoting the same article But like at least I don't think we are. But the thing that they're using is APA kind of like systematic, like jargon in my in my book as to be able to weed out what is pseudoscience and what isn't and they're they're they use this word, a phrenia, basically somebody who will pop up for any or something like that, that basically, you'll

believe whatever I'll tell you like they're like they were, they were calling, you know, brain spotters that. Yeah. And my only question to that is, isn't our do we agree that meditation is evidence based? Like, can we have a common like just or attachment theory, or attachment theory? Sure. And in that developmental trauma exists you know in the grander scheme of things or to my point would be okay so are there other addictions besides you know even though eating disorder isn't really labeled as one but like are there other addictions besides alcohol and drugs and you know gambling are we saying that there's no other addictions out there that are diagnosable?

And we do not think that we are part of the social control. So you quoted some people earlier, like I'm sure you probably know Thomas Sazars, Sazars or something like that. I mean like the medical and how this has in the pharmacological and then like to take away the drug that we actually have a healing system and we discovered the cannabinoid system in 2012. And the whole purpose, its whole purpose is for healing. I think it's our immune system. It's the body that keeps the score. And I'll kind of leave on this point. There's a body that keeps the score, and there's a body that knows the score. And if they are one and the same,

then you know you're kind of like, you know, kind of there. Um, and, you know, past, present and future us, you know, for anybody suffering with dissociation and the, you know, the wounded healers is meant to try and help people kind of find their answers for themselves. And if we can help answer any questions we will, as far as our research, um, I, my, my dissertation is out there for people to read dissociated people are like really interested about going down the rabbit hole of things. I would suggest that because it gives a historical kind of context that you'll start to understand that they sold us that it was a non or

yeah, they sold us those non-addictive opiate, but they also sold us that it was an abnormal response to an abnormal event. And it took them 15 years to overturn that. And I don't know if we, I don't know if we're still, the other models, if we take a look at what laws we're still following it's from like the 50s yeah so like we're still following a lot of that was just overcorrection from like you know RD Lang and Rosenhan and the the anti-psychiatry movement sort of doing some things that made the establishment look bad and they were like okay well we're gonna take away all the subjective ability of psychiatrists to do this. And we're just going to give you something and treat cognition like it is a computer computer science is emerging now.

We're just going to do that. And then, but then they still kept half of the language of, you know, psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy and a lot of the Jungian and Fritz Perls and experiential stuff. And it's like, even when you look at that language, and then what happened after the DSM-3, it's like, it doesn't make sense, because, you know, you have two systems

that are not coming from the same assumptions. It starts to make sense when you need lawyer approval, and it makes sense when you need banking approval, and it makes sense when you need insurance approval. I think that's the only thing, the only places where it makes any sense personally. I mean, I get trying to mitigate, you know, you know, injury and stuff like that,

but my dissertation cautions and or like, you know, highlights that there are three addictions that were missing. And I think that if we were to take an honest, you know, look at the people who took drugs and actually like, you know, found them to be helpful and healing aren't the ones who probably sat in the school and just like did what they were told. Yeah. You know, and that those like, you know, there's no judgment in, you know, people's life choices, but you become aware of things as you get older. If you're keeping the same tradition going that isn't

serving you and is developmentally probably immature, perfectionism, altruism, and ambitious addictions makes sense to me. Because that would level the playing field between type A's and type B's. to me because that would level the playing field between type A's and type B's. Well, we'll definitely link to all of your work and is there anything that you want to kind of say to put ahead on the, you know, somebody is saying, well, either I treat addiction or I treat dissociation or I'd like to start to see more of a relationship between these things. Any place that they should go, any place they should look at, you know, we're pretty heavily in the Jungian world but I do think

the older depth psychologists, even though they don't tend to be as aware of it, are speaking the same language as these new neurologists and, and, and new kind of neuroinformed and neuro-experiential therapists. But they, a lot of times, those worlds don't overlap a ton. People aren't really aware that there was a tradition doing the same thing before, you know, 1980, basically. aware that there was a tradition doing the same thing before, you know, 1980, basically. Well, I would bring back a couple other traditions within that. I mean, I will go back to the mysticism and William James, Carl Jung, obviously, the collective unconscious and the historical context that I feel like I kind of bring to the table. You know, out of the wounded healers, I realized that like we're missing a profession

and that is a healer. And anybody who is like, you know, trained in any trauma resolution, where you've actually got something from your training where you could go back and like take it to the clients, meaning like an intervention, like EMDR, and people could actually like learn or heal in real time type of thing. Like, you quickly realize about how powerful this is, and that like, you're no

longer in a therapist role therapy trained you to become a healer. And a healer is somebody who respects the scalpel in that sense. And I think also knows how to journey that too. So people have gone there and come back. And so the Wounded Healers is now creating the profession of healer based on those lineages and also self-help because Bill Wilson was helped by taking a psychedelic. I think those who live experience with these drugs who know how, how they feel and know not necessarily know like, you know, what complications could be with something else. I mean, the organic kind of psychedelics, cannabis, mushroom LSD would be also there because it's in a derivative of your got mold,

ayahuasca, DMT, these things are all organic organic the processing of them is where we get the problem to me I mean going back to the Salem witch trials the psychedelics have been causing a problem for certain weights of life people eating moldy bread was a Right a problem Yeah, I know that I mean this must have been like huge but you know as far as like, you know The realities of of like, you know some of those things and people tried to start it up pick up on those things but right I mean I think there are people who probably had those you know going for them and knew how to get them and even the mystery traditions illicinian

mysteries and things a lot of those ritual objects they're finding you know orgots spores that are one of the things that tend not to break down over years you can still test for it right and so and so the Wounded Healers Institute is looking to kind of help people create a community around supporting people through their dissociative process and to give some opportunities for people to highlight the parts, skills, and or have a variety of classes

and support systems in place to help people learn and grow within what I've come to understand. And the healing profession as an opportunity is to kind of bridge the gap between no and yes, no, we need to have a little bit of maybe in our life. Maybe but is your room clean? And yes, no, we need to have a little bit of maybe in our life like maybe but like, you know Is your is your room clean? Right. It is your is your house in order before we start going around telling what other people should do like let's let's Scale it down a little bit too. Like we're all equal and doing the best we can. All right

Well, and and I think that you have to learn to not hear it and to recognize it for what it is when you get the I think you're just asking really good questions. And that's good food for thought for me to ignore as I learn to recognize that answer for what it is. If you're hearing that, it's an opportunity. That's the ball. I really appreciate your time. We'll definitely link to your website and your work in the show notes. And good luck to you. I'd like to continue this conversation.

Yeah, same here Joel real pleasure Take care It's what way? underneath the Beneath the bruises you stop The wound is in the story, it's the silence you wrapped around you Healing doesn't mean fixing, it means unfolding Cracking open what was sealed tight just to make it through We spend years avoiding the shadow, but the shadow holds the map. It's not the opposite of your light, it's the root of it. The real change begins not when you become someone new But when you finally stop running from who you've always been I'm going to go ahead and get the This is the work

This is the wild dark miracle Of coming home to yourself