Latest / Pete Vs Anxiety!!!!! / Somatic Therapy & Trauma Healing

Transcript

Somatic Therapy & Trauma Healing · Pete Vs Anxiety!!!!!

• Pete: Welcome to the exciting episode of Pete for Exciting. Before we get started today, don't forget to go check out my partners over at PsychPAL guys. There's a link in the description of this episode right now. And if you like what you see, hey man, you know what? I got you guys, it's a good deal. Enter Pete at checkout for 20 % off. I'm such a nice guy, I got you 20 % off. So go check it out guys, you know? And with that being said, my guest today is a psychologist educator author who specializes in somatic therapy and trauma healing. She's the founder of the Brooke Institute where she teaches therapists, parents, and individuals Ever wish you had someone to talk to anytime, anywhere, matter what you're going through? Meet PsychPAL, your 24-7 AI companion, designed to help you process your thoughts, calm your mind, and keep you moving forward. Chat anytime during a panic attack on a restless night or just when you need to vent. Prefer talking instead of typing? Try voice journaling. PsychPAL listens, transcribes, and truly understands. You can even upload screenshots of tough conversations, and it'll help you unpack how they made you feel. PsychPAL keeps life organized, too. peter: Show ⁓ Pete: how early development experience shapes behavior, emotional patterns, emotional patterns. Sorry, Blake. ⁓ Her work focuses on helping people across access and resolve the root cause of anxiety, stress through the body. Please welcome in the one, the only, Annie Brook. Annie, how are you doing today? It can add appointments to your calendar, track your mood, and even summarize your sessions for your therapist so you'll never lose progress. Plus, built-in crisis resources are always just one click away. It's a privacy-first, constantly evolving, made to complement your professional care, not replace it. Ready to try it out? Head over to the link in this episode and use my code, Pete, at checkout to get 20 % off your first month subscription to PsychPAL. PsychPAL, because your mind deserves a companion too. Annie Brook: Hey Pete, it's great to be here. I love chatting and having, you know, conversations that are interesting and give people new ideas on how to help themselves. Pete: So Annie, before we get into the whole conversation just exactly, why don't you tell people a little more about yourself? I mean, you've been doing this for a long time. Annie Brook: Yeah, you know, I never thought I would become a psychologist. I started my life out as a stoneware potter living in Maine in the backwoods. We built a, you know, no electricity. No, we built a log cabin. We were like all this back to the land. I loved it. And then my partner started drinking and I didn't know anything about that. And then I started to feel pretty isolated. Pete: ⁓ Annie Brook: So I started drinking Kalu and milk and that wasn't really that helpful. And at one point I had to realize, oops, you just gotta stop this or you're gonna go in the big black hole of alcohol. And somehow through all that trauma where my partner burned our house down by mistake and my animals were killed and I was just like, I didn't know what to do with Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: And everything that was the foundation at that point, my young foundation just crumbled away. And I couldn't hold a conversation, Pete. My brain was so worried. It was so worried about what to do. And so I found myself kind of ruminating with worry all the time. I ended up getting a job on a fishing boat to get some money because we didn't have any money. And, ⁓ When I was on the fishing boat, I had what's called a wake-up call. You know, might have heard of those. Sometimes people get it from a car accident or they get it from a big shock. And for me, I was ⁓ working on this fishing boat and selling my lobsters. We, you know, we bought, we caught fish, caught fish, but the lobsters was extra money for the crew. So I would have to climb this metal ladder at the end of the fishing days and get up on the wharf and go sell the lobsters. And I got all the way up to the top of the ladder and I was so exhausted with worry and just, you know, it's a lot of work to fish. And I got to the top of the ladder and I just let go. Now that's a crazy thing to do, but I wasn't in my right mind at the time. I was so full of the worry anxiety that I just gave up. And luckily for whatever reason, I had one of those Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: useful experiences of a near death. And I saw my, was as if the second I let go, because I didn't scramble, but I just let go, my body sort of started as it started to fall, it moved just enough sideways in the air so that I, and I was kind of watching, I was being held in this love. So the felt sense of it was, wow, this is happening. There's this love that I'm being held in and it's so vast that... If my body survives, I'll go back. If it doesn't, doesn't matter. And that was such a profound awareness. Luckily, my body went sideways and fell and it didn't land directly under the ladder because I would have been impaled on a tank with rebar on it for tying off lines. But there was an old tire against the tank. My body fell and hit the tire and bounce. And when I bounced up, I was back in there. And I was like, what just happened to me? And so I went to, know, I went back up the ladder and sold my lobsters, of course. But within a month, I was out in California studying meditation. Because I made it that to myself. I wanted to feel that much love inside my body. And I wanted to know what's the connection to spirit. Pete: Yeah, that's that's so it's so interesting, though, because you like you feel that weightlessness as you're coming down and the fact that tire was there. Are you religious at all? mean, to me, it's like an act of God almost like they're like, no, no, Annie, we're not done. We need we need you to do there's something you're here for, you know, and a lot of people, you know, kind of falls in that, you know, that God has a plan for everybody kind of thing, you know, the same thing or a higher power, whatever, know, whatever the belief, the higher power thing would be for that person. You insert it there. Annie Brook: Yeah. Pete: kind of thing. It's almost like they're like, yeah, listen, you're having this moment of just like, realizing that there's more that you need to do, because the tire was there to save you to bring you back up for you to continue going. You know, and, and you've been doing this for a while now. So you've seen the evolution of mental health from where it's gone to where it's now. I mean, there's so many things have changed, like from where it used to be to where it is now, and you have all the years of experience. you know, that you've gained over this time. like you said, you didn't even think you were, you didn't even consider being in that area at all, which is interesting because a lot of people that get into there, usually like a lot of us have had online, let them start in therapy and then go into something else like, you know, the other branch out to something else, which is always interesting to hear because they like, they all start in one place. They all seem to start there. And they're like, yeah, you know, I discovered this or I discovered that, you know, and they kind of branch off, which is kind of interesting because, you know, Annie Brook: Mm-hmm. Pete: the way it was in the 90s was that pill, pill, pill was everything. Now it's like, you have what you do, you have hypnotherapists, you have all these like people coming together for the same thing to try and help people in some way. Annie Brook: That's exactly right. And, know, I think hopefully there's something inside each person that starts the motivation to heal. You know, and that impulse where we know either we're suffering so much, we're just done with suffering. What can we do? And then those resources, like you said, an act of God or spirit, something starts to show up and Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: It takes a little courage, you know, it takes wandering through the abyss of the unknown. But what I learned in my own healing is there are things you can do that will help reset your brain, help you reset your body filters that are always guarded or collapsed or hopeless. And this is what I love sharing. Pete: Yep. Annie Brook: You know, so I became, volunteered at Children's Hospital with the trauma kids and I studied my own, you know, I went and worked, I attended this meditation school, was Sufi. So it's a lot of Sufi heart love and you know, how do you rest in the center of your head, not in your worry brain up front, to ground your energy down through your feet. And then how do you release what I've come to learn as a Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: you know, somatic psychologist is your brain, you release the filters in there that are like images. Some people have obsessive thoughts, obsessive pictures in their brain, but the Sufis had a method, they were just smart about it, where you just make a little space for yourself, like a hula hoop, and then you put a picture movie out there, a screen, and then you dump all that stuff on the screen, and then you dynamite it. Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah. See, that's funny because that's what I do with my anxiety now. It's like I talk about it out loud. I basically do the same thing, essentially. I put the thoughts out there. So I'm thinking and just start saying I'm allowed to myself. So sometimes other people watching me, I look like I'm talking to myself, having a conversation, but really I'm sorting through the thoughts that are going through my head. And I'm just telling myself and I'm looking at it and I'm getting a better visualization as I'm saying it. Like how silly they sound, what you're saying is like, know, like your brain is inventing these things. And I'm just like, Yeah, that's just doesn't seem right. Because it doesn't make sense when you really say it out loud. And you think about what you're saying, you know, essentially what they were doing, you know, I'm projecting it outward. And I'm putting it in front of me. And I'm like, okay, well, these kind of sound silly. And then just kind of goes on, you know, and it's, it helps a lot, though, because my brain tends to catch it and just takes off like a spin cycle just and they play Annie Brook: Well, that's it. Don't keep on spinning, you're done. Pete: Yeah, yeah, you know, and it's almost like playing telephone with yourself, like the story will change. It'll start as one thing and it just starts, you know, but I've learned over the over the year and a half of doing the show, like different techniques, like meditation is a big one for me, too. I do meditate a lot. I do breath work. I do the grounding. I love energy healing. I'm really I like energy healing a lot because I found I'm energy sensitive. You know, things like that discovered, you know, different things as as I've gone and met different guests, you know, in a lot of stuff makes sense because when they were explaining the situations to me, Annie Brook: Yeah. Pete: I was like, wait a minute, that applies to me right now. I said, that makes a lot more sense, you know, and then I'm also an empath. So, you know, a lot of times I have to be careful too, because I, I feel everything people are telling me. So there's some, some episodes we've done where I'm just like, I got to tap out after a while. And they're just like, you know, the person that doesn't, doesn't understand that you can tell they don't, they don't understand it completely, but there's a lot of stuff that goes on, you know, but I've learned a lot of really cool techniques though. Annie Brook: Yeah, I know. And I'm so glad that you not only have learned them, but you're helping other people feel capable. Like, ⁓ if you look at them, you know, that's what it was for me. If I learned them, other people can learn. Even if we didn't know we could. And, you know, I wrote a book called ⁓ Help for Sensory Challenges, because I work with a lot of hypersensitive people and wrote this book because people think Pete: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: You just have to adjust your environment around you, but the world's not going to do that. You know, you can't go down the street with a big shield around you, right? Unless you make it yourself in a good way. But so there are things you can do that help the body recover the ability to not be so hyper. And you don't lose the good resources. It's nice to be empathic, to be sensitive, but if you're Pete: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Annie Brook: Oversensitive, you're jumping into other people's space in a way. And so one of the things I teach people to do is how do you imagine you got a hula hoop around you? That that's your breathing area. That's your space. And if you check in with yourself, if you're on the other side of it, you know, you don't have a place to come back to to rest. And our nervous system really is a master at balancing activity and rest, healthy movement, play, the right amount of stress, and the recovery. That's what we're designed for. And when we can feel how to find the middle so we don't go into depression, which was the extreme of the rest and digest, and we collapse and get depressed. Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: And we don't go to the extreme of hyperanxious or hyperactivity, but we keep balancing this little flow. So anybody who's listening, you could actually take your hands and imagine, you know, you've got this middle area and your hands can breathe like holding a breathing ball and there's movement. Cause sometimes what people do is they get hyper and then they get on the spin cycle you talked about. Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: and they feel it that they're not actually breathing at a pace where their body can stay connected. The mind is going so fast and that's a normal stress response when someone feels overwhelmed. That's why I go all the way back in somatics, meaning body centered. I go all the way back to the first impressions, which are what happened when you were born? Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: after birth or even in utero. And it's amazing, know, adults can actually find that territory with the right guidance. I was just supporting a woman who ⁓ she had a little pressure in her head and by working and she felt a little claustrophobic at times. So we just started working with her sensations that she was aware of. We ended up all the way back to You know, was she a welcome baby? Was the soul coming in or didn't want to fly back because it was a violent beginning? All these things have impressions without context. And so once we have the impressions, we're going to make up our own meaning. Some people make up a meaning like, ⁓ I must be a bad person. You know, I find this with people who are Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: were adopted that often there's a very deep fear or fear like there's something wrong with them. They don't even know what it is. It's so confusing. So we try to just help the adult with the cognitive brain be able to imagine and experience by paying attention to sensation and slowing down. If we could give one real tool, it's the ability to Pause for a minute. To pause when you feel that spin cycle coming on, push the off button. And just slow down and breathe. And then the body will start to, you you can look around, realize you're safe. ⁓ I'm okay. I didn't do anything wrong. Or if I did, I can apologize. It's not the end of the world, right? I don't have to be perfect. Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: But when we get spun up like that, that's when we hurt other people or we hurt ourselves. Pete: Very true. Very true. think a lot of people, the other people need to be very understanding of that situation too. don't like to, like, you you talk to certain people that don't understand mental health as well as we do, and then you just kind of see like the incentive they have towards it. It's like, maybe if you just took five minutes to realize what some of these people go through, you know, you know what mean? That's all it takes. Five minutes to understand something, you know, and I think that's where we as humans are pretending to forget things. just, you know. Annie Brook: Yes. Uh-huh. Yep. Pete: the understanding that everybody goes through things. It's not like, you know, and that's the scary part about the internet now is like, you have people that go out there and share their stories and the things that come back. And it's just, yeah, it's, it's a scary place because like I grew up before the, ⁓ when AOL was the first internet access you had. And was like, before you had to see people directly to say things to them. Now it's like, have endless amounts to say things to people. And it's just, mean, especially with mental health, gets scary the things people are saying to these people. Oh, you should go to the hospital. You should go get... And it's like you're not helping the situation. Annie Brook: Yeah! No, you're saying something really, really important, And I don't personally, I don't know what we're going to do about it because it is a tragic overwhelm of thinking they have the answer, wanting to be helpful, but they don't know. They're not, you you want to help other people and some people beat other people up on that. Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah, God, yes, it's brutal. Annie Brook: So I guess that would be another real strong thing to say, don't let yourself get all that addictive adrenaline from screen time. know, put your toes in the grass somewhere. away from Pete: Mm-hmm. Yep. Or my friend, or my friend Catherine tells me she goes, I'll hug a tree all the time. Pete Godside and hug a tree is what she'll text me sometimes. Because I'll text her every so often and check in there and she lives in Australia. So we're on two different time zones. So it's fun when I text her sometimes. She's like, Pete, what are you doing right now? I said, well, I'm some Godside and hug a tree. That's what she'll always tell me all the time because she's very big into grounding techniques and things like that. So. Annie Brook: Yes! And do you think it makes, for you, it make a difference? Pete: Yeah, it does. I go outside barefooted a lot of times and reground and things like that all the time. She's been my pretty much my spiritual advisor, kind of like that little bit. She kind of helps me with things and a lot of the techniques that she's taught me I've learned from her and other people I've ran into on the show. You know, breathing. I do breath work a lot of times too, you know, and things like that. And I teach other people things too, like all these things I'm learning. I take them with me and show them other people and tell them, hey, listen, have you tried these things before? Annie Brook: Good. ⁓ huh. Pete: If you tried this, you know, and I just suggest I'm just like, Hey, listen, if you tried it, I mean, it's nothing like I'm not telling them any professional advice. I'm just like, Hey, listen, these are some techniques I learned. Maybe you want to try them and see if this is why I use them for myself. Maybe try them and see if they work for you. You know, if, it comes to they need something like that, I've got a whole roll of decks of guests I've had on the show. I've reached out to some, I've reached out to Mac fact, one of them before and asked them for some help about something. Hey, listen, I've got something that may fall in your area. Do you know somebody that Annie Brook: That's good. Pete: If this is not your spot, do know somebody, know, things like that. So it's been great having the access to all these tools that guests like yourself, like give us and, you know, things that we can use later on. can, I can give it to other people and share with them and they can listen to these episodes and hear these things and come into, come meet people like yourself and see what you're doing and find, okay, well maybe Annie is doing something I like. Let me go check out what she's up to. Annie Brook: That's really... Yeah. Well, you know, that's it. When we can keep spreading the tools and people practice them and try them out. have something called clear your head toolkit. And it's just a free thing people can download, but it gives you practices that really stop the obsessive thinking. You know, they stop the self attack. And I, you know, was one of the things I learned so long ago in my Sufi practice. Pete: Mm-hmm. Nice. Yeah. Annie Brook: And I just made it into a one-minute video on my Instagram and it went viral. It's like 160 people were doing blink blink to clear their brain. And why not? If we can share those tools so anybody wants it, it's called Clear Your Head Toolkit. It's called blink blink and they can find it on my Instagram. Pete: Yeah. Yeah, I'll definitely grab it from your Instagram and post and get it online as well for them and I'll link up with Annie for sure and make sure we get that video posted everyone. I'll probably seal it and put it on my TikTok and give you credit obviously for it because I'd like to take videos from Instagram and then I'll take them out, put them out on other platforms so that people are on because you know everybody has their platform they want to be on. So I try to be everywhere. So I have that. Yeah, I have the ability to do that stuff. So like to share those videos everywhere. People like I'll screen record them sometimes and Annie Brook: ⁓ that's Yeah. Pete: you know, tell them where they can go find the full videos or if hey, listen, if you like this, go check out, know, whoever the person the author of the video was, you know, I mean, I give credit to whoever who ever made the video originally and Annie Brook: ⁓ That's a real resource. You're sharing stuff for people. Because bonding people now is a big part of it. I've been doing this work. I had my own healing journey in my 20s, but I've been learning and growing and dealing with life. I've been a therapist now for over 45 years, and I've seen a lot of stuff. Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen, I was going to say you've seen a lot in 45 years. You've seen a lot of things. You've seen the evolution of how things gone from where it was to where it's now, you know, and it's ever changing, which is great to see that there's more options out there for people so they don't feel like they don't have an option anymore, you know, and things like 98 exists and all these other places that are really great and, you know, stuff like that that really help out, you know. Annie Brook: Yeah. Pete: help you guys, know, and the love that you guys have, because you can't be available 24 seven to help people. But with 988, it's Annie Brook: Bye. ⁓ that's why we gotta share our tools. I wanna share another one right now, which has to do with what I call self-touch. So I'm gonna share two tools, and I have to say one thing, Pete, I got some message about the screen or the recording, is it all working okay? Good, then I'll ignore the message I got. So this tool for self-healing, really, it's to balance your... Pete: Exactly. Okay. Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: sensory input because sometimes we don't even know that our body is really reacting to things because we're busy in our brain figuring it out. But there's ⁓ sometimes when I do this with kids all the time they call it they have a tactile defensive which means the skin doesn't really welcome touch sometimes you know or if it does the person gets all nervous because maybe they've had a bad experience with touch that wasn't, they didn't have permission. So this you do to yourself or you, and you just use your arm. So if you have a good friend, you can, you know, do it to their arm and they do it to your arm. But what it is, is you start with your hand and you just brush your skin. And the first thing you want to do is just put your hand on your skin and feel Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: that your skin can touch your hand. So it's not just your hand touching your arm, but your arm can touch your hand. And that gives someone a little more control with touch. But they're part of the conversation. And then once you've got, you can just brush your skin a little and see, does my skin like heavier touch, firm touch? Does it like light kind of tickly touch? ⁓ okay. And you can help your skin realize, you know, I can survive different kinds of touch. I can stay in my body and I can feel and communicate to myself. Then you can give little like squeezings. You can like rotate your hand around your arm a little. So you're getting some movement and you get this quality of presence. If you do this game with another person, and I have parents do it with their kids, the person who's going to be doing the touch has to say what they're doing and not trick the other person. So an example, an example is I'm going to brush your arm from your shoulder to your hand and back up. And I'm just going to brush. And so you and I'm to do that one time. Pete: Okay. Annie Brook: So you say what you're going to do and you do it in a slow enough so the person hears it. Then they, if they're watching, they see it, but they also can feel it. So then you brush all the way down to the fingers and you brush all the way back up to the shoulder. And then you take your hand away. So the person can digest what they just felt. They can experience it. Then you say, okay. Now I'm going to do patting. I'm going to pat your arm. And this time I'm going to start at your elbow, go up to your shoulder, and then all the way down to your fingers. So we pat, pat, pat, and all the way down to the finger, and then we stop. And so every time you give the information and the person is ready for it, and they listen and feel it, their body is remembering, ⁓ I'm okay. I can tolerate this. So that's one game. I actually have lots of them. I'm going to do another one. This is more of a overall feeling of remembering that we have healthy insulation. If we're a hypersensitive person, we have natural in our body. healthy fat. And this fat is called myelin, it coats our nerves, and it's called the omentum, which protects our organs and makes them warm. And it's called glial cells in the brain. And even the cell membrane has lipid molecules. Our eyeballs are mostly made of healthy fat. Pete: And so we should protect our organs from it to warm. And it's called the real cells in the brain. And even the cell network has misses. Annie Brook: So what we can do is when things start to speed up, we can just rest into our fat. It's like, ⁓ you know, there's no problem. There's no famine. I've got resources. If someone comes to me, you know, I'd be exhausted as a therapist and probably changed my profession a long time ago if I didn't know how to do this. I just kind of rest into my fat. And that actually helps the person calm down. because they're seeing that they're telling me something that's so intense and I'm like, okay, tell me about it. And then I'll guide them to slow down and breathe. And I'm like in my healthy fat. I'm not dissociated. I'm actually more present. And that's a really good thing. comes from the work of body-mind centering, which allows you to kind of hook up your Pete: Mm-hmm Annie Brook: natural intelligence. Like, ⁓ what do my muscles know? What does my blood know? What does my fat help me with? So we have this whole organic self that can actually handle things. So that's a practice. You could do the touch practice for the skin. You could do the healthy fat practice just to... slow things down a little and remember your brain doesn't have to race around. And then the last one I'll share right now is the self-touch called the organ clock. And this comes out of Chinese medicine and our organs are so deep inside it actually helps us be more present. And if our organs are feeling tense or not nourished then we're going to get more intense and uptight. It's a signal to the brain that things are not good. So I'm gonna have everyone hold their liver on the right side. Just take a little self-touch. Yeah, I like your breathing there Pete. Got your breath going. There's that self-touch. And then think about The healthy liver is all about power and growth. And so it's got energy that has to go in a circle all the way through the organs back to itself. So it's gonna send the food, the chi, the blood up to the heart. It's like the liver is the mother of the heart. So the heart has to both receive energy taken in and then the heart has to send it over to the spleen, which is on your left, under your ribs. So the liver feeds the heart. We can rub our heart a little. And then the heart is going to feed the spleen, which is under your ribs on the left side. You're going to rub there and make sure your spleen Spleen is for blood storage and it helps the immune system. So then we got our spleen nice and happy. Cause if the spleen is unhappy, you're going to worry. Every organ, if it's stressed out, has an emotional, you know, not so useful. If it's happy, the spleen is all about being balanced. You know, the heart when it's stressed out is anxiety. Pete: Mm hmm. ⁓ yeah. Annie Brook: Yeah, but when the heart is happy, it's like generous. You know, what's got, yeah. And so then we come down to our spleen, and our spleen is gonna feed our lungs. So now you can touch your lungs, and the thigh, and the back, and the front. Just all your whole big lung. Yeah. And your lungs are really about that core. that lightness, and if their lungs are not happy, they're going to be stuck in grief. So it's really important that we keep filling them up. And if you've had a big loss, I know my husband died suddenly, my god died when I was little, I've had some big losses. So want to deal with that grief and get those lungs happy. And then the lungs make me the kidney. Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: And the kidneys, according to the Chinese medicine, they hold our life force, what they call kidney gene. And we want them nice and happy. And they are surrounded by healthy fat, which actually helps them a lot. But the adrenals sit right on top of it. So some people under stress will jump into their adrenals and forget to stay a little deeper with the support of the kidneys. kidneys, when they're happy, they have the awe and wonder experience. That's like when you hug a tree, like, ⁓ I feel, you know, the miracle right now of connection and relationship. And when the kidneys are not happy, they're not fed by the lungs, then we are afraid. So you can think of it, if I hold my breath, my body's gonna get afraid. I need to feed that energy from the lungs to the kidneys. And then the kidneys, they're happy, so they send the energy back to the liver. And now it's come all the way around. that liver, you know, if the liver's not happy, it's all angry and cranky. But if the kidneys are feeding the liver, there's our healthy power and growth. We're in our body. We're powerful. We don't have to use our ego to pretend to be powerful. We're just there. This is the beauty of the ability to find the right tools that work for you. Pete: Exactly. Annie Brook: Yeah, and so I love sharing what I've found and being able to bring those together. And I want to say I also have a real, an offering for therapists, which is called the Therapist Masterclass and it's totally free. So I'll send you that link too, if people are trying get others. Yeah. Pete: Definitely. Annie Brook: So, shall I tell you a few stories about what I've discovered working with children? Pete: I think you should. I think it's very interesting what you find out working with children, Annie Brook: Okay, what I found is that children actually remember what happened to them when they were being born. And it's an interesting thing. Adults remember too. They just don't know they remember. But kids will show me in play therapy. So an example, there was a four year old. I'll tell you two stories about four year olds. One was a little boy who was just one of these brilliant gifted kids and he almost died at birth. At birth they measure. Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: on a scale of one to eight, how healthy the baby is. And eight is a good sign. And this little guy just had one, he was only a one. And his dad, you know, his dad and his mom, always have the parents in the room when I'm working with kids, they would need to heal that birth experience too. And so the dad said, yeah, we thought he was gone. And I just said to him, where's my baby boy? And this little almost dead baby reached up and grabbed his dad's finger. So the baby knew, you know, well, here, dad, I need help. And what happened with this kid is he had the umbilical cord around his neck. And so every time he had that, mom had a big contraction to help him come out. He was being pulled backwards and he didn't know it. and mom didn't know it. And so what happened for this kid, once he went to public school at four, he went to, you know, little kindergarten, kids were always too close to him. He had this hypersensitivity, he couldn't rest in the lunch line. You know, he had to wear a weighted vest to calm himself down. And so, With kids, I like to use stuffed animals to show what happens so they don't take it so deep personally right away. And so I'll take a stuffed animal, I'll put it under my shirt and I'll say, ⁓ there's a baby in here, come help. And I'll see if the little guy will come help get the stuffed animal out. So I'll pull the stuffed animal out and I'll give it a big hug. And I'll say, ⁓ there you are little baby, you made it. And then I'll say to the mother, the dad, how was this little boy born? And so now the kid is like thinking about, ⁓ babies come out, go to their mom, I hope so. And then he hears the story of when he was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. And so now we're giving context. Something when it happened, his brain had no ability for context. All it had was a life-threatening situation, being trapped, can't get out. And so this little kid, then I showed him, because I have a baby doll which has the umbilical cord, and I showed him the baby doll with the cord around the neck, and I said, ⁓ you need help. And then I took it off. And then I held the baby. Pete: Mm-hmm Annie Brook: And he just loved that. So then he wanted to play a game. He went over to my big toy basket and rummaged through the stuffed animals and he got out the clawed snake and he wanted to wrap it around my neck and pull me around the office. And I let him do it and then I go, help, help, I need help. And then he'd turn around and you take it off. And then we celebrate. And he... wanted to play this game over and over. And then after a while, maybe several sessions of that game, he came back and he wanted to build a cage to put the snake in. So now he walks in the door, find that snake, we're putting it in a cage and he's gonna sit on the cage. So what he's doing is he's getting more powerful than this life-threatening event. Somehow he's giving it a context. where he realizes he's safe, he made it, and we're doing this through play and including the mother and the father so they get to heal from a very scary birth experience because they thought they were going to lose their child. Isn't that amazing? Pete: Yeah, that's very interesting actually. Annie Brook: Yeah. So that's why I love, you know, have online classes where adults can attend and they can go back and remember, ⁓ what happened at my birth. I help them through guided sort of sensing and imagining and listening to uncover these stories. And then we bring relief to the nervous system. So have a course we'll start up again in September. I do it every spring and fall. And I'm going to tell you one more story about a little girl, another four-year-old. She walks into my office and her mom brought her. mom had two older kids and they were a good family. There wasn't any beating up of kids or violence going on. But she didn't know why her little girl, when she entered preschool, He would grab another kid, create a barrier in the classroom, and she wouldn't let the other kid get out. So then the teachers have to come rescue the other girl. And then this little child would have a huge emotional meltdown. And so I'm listening, like, wow, that's interesting, huh? And their mom's like, yeah, what the hell's going on, right? And so then as soon as this girl walked into my office, and I had a big 12 by 12 office, and a corner with pillows, and lots of movement things kids can do. But in one corner I have a Japanese folding screen that stands upright and it hides the room, the door that goes to the next room, which I have covered with soundproofing. So this little girl, first thing she does is she walks behind the screen and then I hear this sound rip, rip. And I go, oh, hello, what are you doing back there? And she is ripping off the soundproof tape. And she is taping it up on the cracks in between the panels of this Japanese folding screen. And she says, very important work and don't you come in. So immediately I got up with the C-section. because she is already wanting her space and she's not wanting any cut or opening to happen. And then she got her mom back there with her. And so we played out several versions of her with mom, on the outside, until she could relax and come out herself. Because with the C-section, the baby is... air lifted out so fast. If you think of sensitivity, that is so fast for the skin. The body doesn't get that healthy pressure to, you know, remember itself when it goes through the birth canal. And then there's bright lights and cold temperature. And often the mother can't sometimes can't even hold the baby. Sometimes because she's numbed out from the chemicals to numb her body. So there's a lot of little sensory inputs that have no explanation to the baby. Like, why did my mom stop moving her legs? When every time, other before that, could, every movement she made, could feel it. Now all I feel is this sort of dead thing. Why? Pete: There's Annie Brook: And that gets, that's the first alarm bell. And the mother gets numb. Then there's the incision and it's so rapid. And so I think babies actually try to hold on to their mother, but they can't use their hands, but you know, they're bracing in their body in order to not be pulled away. And then they get pulled away anyway, because we do want a live baby. And so. That's the paradox of a C-section is often it's needed for a live baby. And my wish is we would just help parents and children recover. And that's what happened for this little girl. Eventually she was finished with the whole story in a really healthy, integrated way. And she didn't have any more troubles like that. And to be able to get that help when you're four years old, That's what I love training therapists. I have a whole play therapy training for therapists. If you've never worked with kids, this is the best way to work with them. Cause you really can give some useful cognitive practical things for the parents to go through with the child. Yeah. That's pretty. Yeah. Pete: I think that's really cool. I really think that's really cool. You're working with kids that young though, because the things that they already know ahead of time that a lot of people don't realize that they do, they just don't have any context of wording for what it is, know, and what you're doing is you're putting into frame for them so they understand, you know, because a lot of times, you know, a lot of people say, oh, they don't understand. Oh, they understand. They just don't know how to put it into what it is exactly. They have a good idea of what it is, you know, in all those kind of things. They're constantly watching you too. know, like I know one person I talked to said four years old, they start watching a lot of things that everything going on around them. They're very observant of things, but they may not be able to tell you what they're watching, but they know what they're watching. You know, and things like that. And I think it's very fascinating, you know, that a lot of people I've met, because I met an author recently, she wrote a book that's that's teaching kids how to mostly regulate, but it teaches the parents as well. So it's Annie Brook: Yeah. Pete: it's doing both, know, because a lot of times, you know, we as parents read the books to the children. So the way she was doing it was kind of had a kind of working dual purpose. It's helping the kids understand what these feelings they're having are in ⁓ for those parents that are in her normal. She regulated it's helping them understand their own way to and at the same time, it's you know, it's really cool how she's doing it. Annie Brook: I love that because really the relationship that gets established during our birth, post-birth, is often what shows up in couples when they struggle. You you could have a very wonderful time and then all of a sudden you've moved in together and you don't know how to relate to each other. Everything gets stressful and that's normal. Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: But usually what's happening is just like those kids want to tell that story of their birth, our adult self wants to tell the story of how we connected and is the world safe? So I actually teach a course for couples, or individuals who want to be more sane in a relationship. And I call it Relationship Ready, that you might have to do a little personal homework to be ready to be a Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: And there we look at, you know, think about if a mom got postpartum depression, it's not her fault. It's often a chemical thing. And the baby reaches out to say hello and the mother's always looking down or heavy. The babies might stop reaching. Or the baby might get really anxious and think it did something wrong. So we have something we call anxious attachment where In an adult relationship, someone can always be tracking their partner. You know, that partner never gets to rest because they're always under the surveillance of their partner who's wanting to please them. Or it can be someone who, as soon as they come home, they want to avoid their partner because maybe they had an intense... Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: parent and mom or dad who was always playing with them when they needed to rest sometimes. So they try to get away. And then we have a kind of thing where the baby is ambivalent because they're with the mother, then they get taken to the nursery, they give up, then they're brought when, you know, they don't know when, but they're going to be brought back to the mother, they have connection, then back to the nursery. The baby doesn't have that consistency of care. So they get a little ambivalent, like, do I need a hug? I don't really know. My partner wants one, but I don't feel it. Because we don't have our felt sense awake, we've numbed out a little. And so it's really great that this person you were talking about works with reading stories for the parent and the child, because it's a relational interaction. Pete: Mm-hmm Annie Brook: And with couples, if someone can become relationship ready, they're able to look at their life and kind of not use bad things from their past and dump it onto their partner. And especially if you go all the way back to the birth, which a lot of therapists don't know how, and that's why I'm training therapists as fast as I can to really be able to hold awareness of Pete: Yeah. Annie Brook: precognitive experience and how it shapes our neurology, it shapes our emotional map of relationship, and we will act it out until we pick it up and figure it out. Pete: Yeah, yeah, I think that's really great. I think it's really cool that you're that's what you're teaching them though, because I think it adds another layer to what they can get to and the things that they can learn. Obviously, you know, especially that at that point, you know, that you're learning now from the children now. Annie Brook: Yeah Pete: and things like that too. So I think it's really great. So Annie, we're at the part of this interview where I'm going to ask you those two questions I already told you about a little bit ahead of you. So the first one's a bit of a fun one. I borrowed this from a friend of mine. I thought it was great because I'm a big music person. So this question to you is that if your mental health had a song, what would you say that song would be? Annie Brook: Okay, well I have been listening to Zulu ⁓ sort of Zulu chant music and it's so soothing but I don't know what it's saying. So I can't give you the answer on the saying but it's something about you can get it on YouTube and it's ⁓ you know it's got it's about healing the trauma of crying. Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: Some of the music is too fast, but this is so rich. But if I had words for a song, it would be, are not broken. It would be, you can do it, you are not broken, you can get it if you really want, right? Yeah, that, could be. Pete: I love it. Mm-hmm. I love it. I love it. think it's an interesting answer though. Like I said, I think there's no wrong answer to the question. It's great because you get different responses from different people. So it's fun to see what people's responses are to it and things like that. Because music in some form is really great for everybody. Like you said, you're listening to chanting music. I listen to just regular music. I listen to whatever music itself. It's just something I like because it's just something I'm related to and things like that too. So it's a fun question to see. So now we're down to the nitty gritty question. The main reason this podcast was started was that if you could break the stigma about mental health. Now what I'm asking you is that if there's something out there that you just want people to stop believing in your 45 years, is there something that you just keep hearing people saying that you're like, Hey, can you please just stop listening to this? Annie Brook: I would say for anyone helping in the mental health profession, listen for the hidden story. There is a reason someone behaves the way they do. Volunteered at Children's Hospital, one little boy kept falling down all the time and going numb, blanking out. Nobody knew why. Turns out he had witnessed his baby sister getting killed. And when we could, you know, that's a tragic story, but when we could... Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: play about death and loss. All of a sudden he told me the whole thing story and he remembered from being an infant. So I would say with mental health, listen for the hidden story and don't get too close to people who are hypersensitive to try to fix them. Give them some breathing room. I used to work with gang youth and we had do-gooder therapists coming in. I was supervising and they would get too close and then Pete: That's really. Annie Brook: 16 year old would have a blow up and then the 16 year old would get in trouble. I didn't like that. So I would say, for mental health, slow it down, breathe and be curious what's the hidden story. Because you've got to be honest for the trust to happen. Pete: I love it. I love it absolutely so much. Thank you so much, Annie, for coming and hanging out with me. I appreciate it. I think what you gave us was great tips. I really loved your insight to what you're doing these days. And I really think what you're doing is really great. Before we start signing off, did you want to let everybody know where they can find you? Any websites? I know you mentioned Instagram, YouTube as well. Do you want to plug those? We'll definitely include the links in the bio for sure of the show, the description for everybody to get to them. But go ahead plug them for everybody listening. Annie Brook: Yes. Thank you. I will say for Instagram go to Annie Brook therapy all one word lowercase Instagram calm Annie Brook therapy for Facebook go to Facebook calm the Brook Institute and then I've got YouTube with adoption and healing and then for me direct go to Annie Brook and Brook is spelled B R. ⁓ okay. There's not an S. There's not an E Pete: Mm-hmm. Annie Brook: ANNIEbrooke.com and you'll find a free PDF library. have lots of freebies and I have classes. I have training programs. I have one-off videos like Heal Self-Attack Thinking. I have a one-off video you can watch to interrupt that brain attack. All kinds of resources. Yeah, thanks for the treat. Pete: Nice. I love it. I love it. I love it so much. Annie, thank you so much again. Guys, I'll also be including her other book she has, Burt's Hidden Legacy in the description as well for you guys to, you know, I told Annie before we started that, you know, we got to highlight everything she does. It may not always be mental health related, you know, when she took the time to write the book, we might as well post it in there too for you guys to check out. Maybe it applies to somebody else, you know. And with that being said, guys, we're going to wrap up this episode of Pete Frick's anxiety. You know where to find me on Pete Frick's anxiety and X all the way down to TikTok. I'm on Spotify all the way down to Pandora radio and as always say it costs nothing, absolutely not to be kind to somebody. One kind act you could do could save someone's life or hell, you can't make their day. I'm Pete for this anxiety center. saying don't ask how your day is today. Say hey, how's your mental health?