Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 802: Where's The Blizzard with Tracy Morgan
Transcript
- 0:00Trauma Therapist Podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right
- 0:04now. Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma
- 0:09Therapist Podcast and signing up today right Welcome back to the Trauma Thepist podcast.
- 0:25My name is Gamiferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible
- 0:30selves, to be human, to be real, not just a clinician.
- 0:34I'm a big believer in who we are is more important than what we know,
- 0:38and this requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires
- 0:43intention. Can learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma
- 0:48Therapist project dot com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get
- 0:53started, all right, So here we go. Also fine or three,
- 0:57two and one, our folks, Welcome back to the Trauma Theaprist Pod.
- 1:00I'm very excited to have a back Tracy Morgan. Tracy welcome, Hi,
- 1:04Hi, nice to be back. So you are back. I invited you
- 1:11back. I wanted you back because I thoroughly enjoyed having you on the first
- 1:15time we chatted. Let me read your bio and then we will dive in
- 1:21here Tracy has been qualified as a therapist since two thousand and five and practicing
- 1:26continuously in the nh NHS in the UK ever since. She's spent twelve years
- 1:33in community treatment of early psychosis and is now a clinical lead mental health liaison
- 1:38practitioner working out of acute hospital year departments. She had a trauma coach and
- 1:42also a solution focused in the therapist and committed to the foundations of Milton Erickson
- 1:48and that therapy is about the relationship, not necessarily the dogma of any specific
- 1:53modality. She says in her own words, I continue to work in the
- 1:57NHS but also have a thriving private pract this where I support people to literally
- 2:00use their own inner resources to hear with a combination of neurology, solutions focused
- 2:06therapy and occupational therapy. Tracy welcome back, lovely to be here, so
- 2:15just quickly, briefly, rather remind our listeners those who didn't hadn't tuned into
- 2:22the first time we chatted. Where you're from originally and where you are currently.
- 2:27I am originally from Scotland. I was brought up near local Omens,
- 2:35but I have lived in the West Midlands in England for oh, good grief.
- 2:40Thirty years. So I've been here my whole adult life, qualified in
- 2:46England and things so awesome. So you said before we were recording that it
- 2:50was kiss' it is a word to use that I had reached out to you.
- 2:53What I did explain actually spammed a lot of people sort of different podcasts,
- 3:05producers and things like that. I didn't actually send you one, which
- 3:07was really strange. I'd done it all the night before. I thought,
- 3:10right, feel the fear, do it anyway, get back out there because
- 3:14I've obviously had a lot of development in my career and in my therapy practice
- 3:20since then, and I thought, right, I need to start working on
- 3:23getting myself out there because obviously I'm building on the business I already have.
- 3:29And the following morning after I sent all these emails, I got you in
- 3:32my own box and I was like, really, I didn't email him?
- 3:42So it was like I almost feel it was like almost like a bit of
- 3:45a divine there's the person that Okay, so I've got to ask why didn't
- 3:50you email me? I think because I'd already been on the podcast once and
- 3:54it was and it was literally I've done it. You know when when we're
- 4:00sort of feeling the fear and doing it anyway. We tend to sort of
- 4:02do it in a little bit of a temper, but not a temper,
- 4:05if you know what I mean. It's that kind of right, just do
- 4:09it. And I think, how only emailed three others to be honest,
- 4:13and I was, and of course yours came in and I was like,
- 4:15it was literally I went to bed, I did the emails at eight pm.
- 4:18I went to bed at nine pm. I got up the following morning
- 4:23at five pm, and there you were in my inbox, and I went,
- 4:26wow, well, let's let's get into it here, so you know,
- 4:33give our listeners kind of a foundation of what you do, and then
- 4:38we'll talk more about how things have unfolded for you. Okay, the last
- 4:43time I was on the show, I had very very recently almost died.
- 4:50I had a condition called necrotizing fasciitis and sepsis. I had to have life
- 4:58saving surgery. Blessed be the NHS for you at the point of need here
- 5:02that we still have. And essentially I was just coming through, actually lived
- 5:13through more adult trauma when I actually spoke to you guys. Anyway, now
- 5:17the really interesting thing is that today I got a time hot on my journal,
- 5:26so I'm actually going to read out. This wasn't public knowledge. This
- 5:29was something I wrote to myself, and it will lead on quite nicely into
- 5:33how I've then developed as a trauma therapist, as a trauma coach. I
- 5:40actually wrote this exactly, So we're on the eighth today, so the eighth
- 5:45of February twenty twenty, just before COVID I actually wrote this. Today I
- 5:49realized how mortal and fragile I actually am. Today. I realized I may
- 5:57not have much more of a future. I thought I should really write letters
- 6:02just in case. Today felt gray and scary. Today I didn't share my
- 6:10fear with anyone, even though I could have. Today I realized everyone around
- 6:16me is as scared as I am. And today I realized that what I
- 6:23have done to myself and the result of that, may chase away some of
- 6:27my sunshine, and that scares me. Today I realize the fragility of my
- 6:33humanness, and it terrifies me because I fought and endured the abuse of others.
- 6:41But if my body stops healing and gives up, that's it. There
- 6:46is not a thing I can do to stop. That also a little bit
- 6:51of kismet that that was actually thrown up as my time hop Currently, I
- 6:57used to work in an early intervention in psychosis. I think the episode number
- 7:01that we had was three hundred and fourteen guy, because I looked it up.
- 7:08And I used to work in early intervention in psychosis, and I now
- 7:11work as a liaison team manager practitioner within the NHS. Now that is basically
- 7:16I'm a mental health professional. I have a team of them who go into
- 7:21er department to people who are in very severe distress, are acutely mentally unwell
- 7:29and have turned up an ambulances or with their family saying please help us.
- 7:34I also deal with the extremely suicidal, and all of my practice up until
- 7:44now has basically prepared me to support and train the staff that go in there.
- 7:47I still go into and actually still practice a specialist clinician, but I
- 7:53don't do it as much as my staff do. And it brings me to
- 7:58the fact that our body when they've been traumatized, and that can be from
- 8:03childhood, it can be repeated trauma, and then it can be a car
- 8:07accident, and essentially this negatively impacts on our ability to heal, and I
- 8:15mean physically heal, not just mentally heal. I mean physically immune systems,
- 8:20our, ability to digest our food, and all of these things. And
- 8:26I think what I've just read to you was basically I was sitting there and
- 8:30I was still getting temperatures. They were pumping me full of antibiotics, and
- 8:35they were working, but they were working very very slowly, and I was
- 8:37still spiking a temperature. I still felt really ill. I could barely move,
- 8:46and I thought, I don't know how to fight this, because as
- 8:52a trauma survivor, and I'm sure that we all know that that some of
- 8:56the coping mechanisms for that are keep fighting. That means clean the house,
- 9:01work harder, work out harder, eat less, punish yourself, punish your
- 9:07body, keep going. And the thing was, at that point in time,
- 9:11I realized that number one, I was physically unable to do any of
- 9:15those things, and I had to find another way. And what I had
- 9:18to do was I had to allow my brain to heal so that my body
- 9:22got a chance to heal so and then that brought me to solution focus hittinotherapy,
- 9:33which I've been I'm training in and by the time this goes to air,
- 9:37will probably be fully qualified in. And it's whereby we work with people
- 9:43to keep them in the part of their brain that allows them to access the
- 9:46solutions as opposed to being in the limpic system or the primitive brain. I'll
- 9:52give a little tiny bit of an example of that. When I walk over
- 9:58to our our department in the city of Coventry. It's quite a long walk,
- 10:05really, and when it's very cold, and when it's very hot,
- 10:07you can get kind of a bit of breath, a bit sweaty, you
- 10:11can feel a bit harassed. We're we're also working to a time table,
- 10:16so we have a key performance indicator saying that we have to be there with
- 10:20that person within sixty minutes of referral. Now, the amount of times I
- 10:24have said this to doctors that have accompanied me are students or other practitioners or
- 10:31new practitioners. They'll start to walk really fast and I'll say slow down,
- 10:37and they'll be like, but we're on a time we're on a time limit.
- 10:39And I'm like, I need you to slow down, and I'm going
- 10:41to tell you why. And as I'm walking I'm telling them, I'll say,
- 10:46we're on our way to see someone who is possibly the most distressed they
- 10:52have ever been as far as they are concerned. The world is incredibly dangerous.
- 11:00World is full of frightening polar bears, and everything is a risk.
- 11:07We're going to walk into a N. E. R. Department that is
- 11:11making loud noises, beeping. There's going to be people panicking, There's going
- 11:16to be really ill people. There's going to be crash trolleys flying all over
- 11:20the place, I says, But see when we get there, we're going
- 11:24to walk into that person, and if we're out of breath or sweaty,
- 11:28or even a little bit stressed facially, it's not going to be what we
- 11:33say. It's going to be what they say and what they pick up at
- 11:37a very instinctual level that will reinforce the fact that the world is terrifying and
- 11:43full of polar bears. And we have just walked in and reinforced that the
- 11:48world is dangerous. And if we do that, they are going to be
- 11:52in their primitive brain and their limbic system. They are going to stay there
- 11:56and we are not Anything we say, anything suggest anything at all is going
- 12:03to be completely ignored because all they're going to be thinking is fight flight freeze.
- 12:11It's the end of the world. And when I tell them this,
- 12:16they go, I never thought of it like that, And I'll watch what
- 12:20happens. So they watch what happens. And one of the first things to
- 12:22do is a walk in in a smile and I go, you're having a
- 12:26really bad day, aren't you. This says, however, it's really nice
- 12:30weather out there, or it's a fresh day. I will say something that
- 12:33is an inconsequential comment, and I'll sit down and I will attempt to bring
- 12:43them from being in their right prefrontal cortex that has got a direct link into
- 12:48their olympic system, which is worry, fear, all the negative stories they've
- 12:54ever known and ever experienced. I will want to lift them out of that,
- 13:00move them into their left prefrontal cortex, which has got all the direct
- 13:05links into the cerebral cortex where they can start to solve problems. And it's
- 13:11got every memory and every way that they have ever got through a similar distress
- 13:16before, and it works. It works every time. And I've been using
- 13:22it in my entire career and I had no idea that that's what I was
- 13:26doing. Wow, let me just study there Tracy and say, whoa,
- 13:33I'm so glad I emailed you to come back on here. First of all,
- 13:37thank you so much for sharing that journal entry. I mean, I
- 13:41got goosebumps when you were reading reading that, it's very intense. Can you
- 13:52talk more about I mean, and I just loved your description of your walk
- 13:58to the er and how how you utilize that to gather yourself and the tools
- 14:07in a sense you use. Can you talk more about your entree into solution
- 14:13focused therapy. Wow, here's the story of I really do sound quite wo
- 14:20at this point, and I do apologize. I'm very very scientific. When
- 14:24I qualified as a therapist in two thousand and five, I was really lucky.
- 14:31I worked in Birmingham and I was on rotation, which meant I moved
- 14:33to different departments to learn my craft. And because of that, I got
- 14:39sent on all the good training. Because we weren't counted really as staff numbers.
- 14:45We were super mumery. So I got sent on a course. It
- 14:48was all quite new at the time, and it was called solution focused brief
- 14:52therapy. It was born out of brief family therapy, which is the base
- 15:00that as in America, I can't ah do you know when you go to
- 15:07it, it doesn't really matter. But it was born from all of this
- 15:09research of let's stop working with the psychoanalytic model because all we're doing is re
- 15:15traumatizing everyone. I stopped digging at it. There's got to be a better
- 15:18way, and they started doing that work. So this theory of practice came
- 15:24in and it was solution focused brief therapy, and I was trained for five
- 15:26days intensive on how to deliver this. Now, being a very young,
- 15:31enthusiastic shiny everything's unicorns, I just took it for granted. But I've learnt
- 15:37this, so therefore I use it and I continued to use it my entire
- 15:43career. So that's the first part of that. I've always been very much
- 15:50into stories that heal, narrative metaphor, that kind of thing. I used
- 15:56to think it was cheating. I never quite knew why it was working,
- 16:00but it does. Then in two thousand and six, I self funded and
- 16:07off I went to the Human Givens Institute, and I learnt about let's stop
- 16:12talking psycho babble at people, Let's stop even speaking in psycho babble with each
- 16:18other. Let's just actually be real with people and tell them what's going on
- 16:21with their own minds. Let's teach them how to do it. So that
- 16:25was a human Givens model. Now fast forward all the way to last Just
- 16:32as I was recording with you, I think I was supposed to have an
- 16:34interview with the Solution Focused Hypnotherapy Training School in Bristol in the UK, because
- 16:42I was seriously thinking about engaging in that process. However I didn't because obviously
- 16:48I've been so desperately ill. And in September last year, no August last
- 16:56year, I got an email randomly out of the blue asking me if I
- 16:59was still interested. I went for the interview and I got it. Now,
- 17:03as I've been, as I've been training, I've realized that every single
- 17:06training course I have ever done throughout my entire occupational therapy career, has basically
- 17:14provided me with the entire development of solution focused hypnotherapy, which is quite amazing.
- 17:26So that's how I came to be there. I don't know if you
- 17:30you probably heard about it. You know that you've probably been trained, and
- 17:33that quite a lot of people have the miracle question. So if you woke
- 17:37up tomorrow morning and I somebody turned up and a miracle has happened and you
- 17:42are exactly where you want to be. What the miracle question that solution focus
- 17:48hypotherapy, well, solution focused brief therapy. And then obviously we had the
- 17:53hypnosis the trans state, which creates the focus between the subconscious and the conscious
- 17:59minds so that they actually commend focus and you know, there's nothing woo about
- 18:03it at all. But yeah, so that that's generally what it's about.
- 18:10What So this theme of or is more than a theme with you, but
- 18:15this the knowledge, the reality that uh that the relationship is important being real.
- 18:25Talk about why that is important to you, why that resonates with you.
- 18:32Right, I'm gonna I'm probably going to speak about a case actually,
- 18:37and it was. It's a wonderful case. Obviously I won't mention names,
- 18:41but it was. It was a young woman in her early to mid thirties
- 18:47who had gone through our crisis team system and she basically was diagnosed she was
- 18:52very psychotic when I picked her up. She had three children, one of
- 18:56them was only two at the time, and she had a husband, a
- 19:00beautiful house, a very nice you know, a nice life, and I
- 19:04went she was probably one of the most unwell people at the point of actually
- 19:08me taking the case on and gently by The strange thing was she visited me
- 19:15yesterday. I means that it's been years since I discharged her, but she
- 19:18visited me because she's actually a peer support worker within the NHS trust that I
- 19:25work in. So she's actually gone on to be a therapist and a support
- 19:27worker herself, which is phenomenal. However, and that would have been a
- 19:32diagnosis of schizophrenia in the bad old days. She's not got that at all.
- 19:40And the first time I met her, she was still quite psychotic.
- 19:41We were still early days of just medicating that imbalance. And I remember sitting
- 19:48down with her husband and her and I said to him, I said,
- 19:52you are not going to understand a single thing I am about to say,
- 19:56but I promise that I will keep reminding you so that one day you will
- 20:00understand what I'm about to say. And what I said to her husband was,
- 20:03at the moment, we have pressed control all delete on your wife's brain,
- 20:11I said, and she may appear very switched off, very distant,
- 20:17I says, And we're going to restart her in safe mode, just like
- 20:19a Windows computer. And it will take some time to get all of the
- 20:25hard drive back online and everything all working and safe again. However, she
- 20:30welcome back, but we need to be gentle and don't push this because this
- 20:33is actual neurological damage that's happened that woman. It's phenomena. And we were
- 20:44talking about it yesterday, she went, She said, I don't know what
- 20:47it was about you. You were always just able to tell the right story
- 20:49about something at the right time. She says. It was almost like she
- 20:55said, you just can do it. Because she contacted me about a career
- 20:57idea that she had and I was speaking to her and I was putting things
- 21:02together as she was messaging me, and she went, why do you always
- 21:06seem to know the right thing to say? And so because I'm listening to
- 21:08you, I'm listening to you, not symptoms, not risk, And I'm
- 21:18definitely definitely not wanting to hear or listen to your story of trauma. I
- 21:25don't want to dig into somebody's trauma. If they tell me, that's fine.
- 21:30The idea is, once somebody has expressed something from the right prefrontal cortex,
- 21:36it is our job, but it is our responsibility, it's our moral
- 21:38responsibility to ensure we do not leave them there. And whether we use humor
- 21:45or we use a story, we have to lift them out of it because
- 21:48if we leave it there, we're not resolving anything. And so it's it's
- 21:55the stories that he'll Milton ericson. As we said, you said in my
- 21:57bio, reddible guy, and nobody could ever actually work out or standardize what
- 22:03he did either, just like I can't standardize what I do. I can
- 22:08give you an idea of the tools that I use within what I do,
- 22:11but I can't standardize it because every single person, every single person is different.
- 22:18But the one thing I don't do is number one, we do not
- 22:21wallow. Number two, I do not, under any circumstances start digging into
- 22:26trauma and asking them details. All we're doing is ensuring that their primitive mind
- 22:30is saying, see, it's happening again. Primitive mind is deeply stupid.
- 22:36Doesn't know if something if the thing you're thinking about or consuming either off the
- 22:41television or off the news or a friend, it doesn't know it's not happening
- 22:47to us. So it's what it's doing is with every single negative thought the
- 22:52brain has accumulating it straight into the hippocampus and all that stress has to go
- 22:59somewhere. M hm. When when did you realize the the significance, the
- 23:07importance of you know, like you said, i'm listening to you, I'm
- 23:14not listening, not digging for your trauma. When did you realize that that
- 23:22there was magic in that, there was there was healing in that. Oh
- 23:26yeah, well, the really really odd thing is not strange. The same
- 23:30same person I was conversing with yesterday. It was a little bit of that.
- 23:33That's how I word that brilliant was. Trauma is a strange thing.
- 23:41Trauma is a strange thing because what one person would see as a trauma,
- 23:45another person would go, really, that's not hard the way to hear my
- 23:51story, Ah, I have. I have dealt with people who have been
- 23:56sexually assaulted, gang rapes, been in worse situations, being in horrific a
- 24:03sort of relationship abuse, intimate relationship abuse. Also worked with a lot of
- 24:07people who have been systematically childhood sexually abuse within families. And but the thing
- 24:14is what they see is trauma. Somebody who hasn't had that background may see
- 24:22a boy when they're a teenager being slightly too handsy, say or maybe saying
- 24:29something negative about their body as being deeply, deeply wounding. That doesn't make
- 24:33that trauma any less significant. We still need to treat that with with respect
- 24:40and not get them to dig into it and play around with it. What
- 24:42we need to do is we need to acknowledge, acknowledge that that person is
- 24:48distressed by it validated. We don't need to ask questions about it. We
- 24:53just need to say that sounds really tough, and then lift them from the
- 24:59right prefrontal cortex where that memory is and say, how do you want things
- 25:04to look? What do you want doing? Instead? What do you what
- 25:10are you missing from before the trauma or before the realization that there was a
- 25:15trauma? What do you want to do? How do you want instead of
- 25:18concentrating on the problem or the trauma, let's focus on how you want things
- 25:25to be, not how you don't want them to be. There's no there's
- 25:27no value in that. Telling stories is valuable, but we have to be
- 25:33so mindful of how those memories come up and are shared because when someone does
- 25:41share that and quite often, especially in statutory services, and I'm sure it's
- 25:45the same in the States. If somebody's in distress, how many professionals will
- 25:49they have to tell that trauma too. The brain thinks it's happening every single
- 25:55time. We're not helping. We're not helping making it with. We all
- 26:02have to ask the questions. We all have to ask them. I have
- 26:04to ask them. It's like and I always I always prefix this with this
- 26:08statement, and it's not on the paperwork, but I always prefix that.
- 26:11I says, I'm going to ask you a question. I want you to
- 26:15answer yes or no. You have no need to share that with me because
- 26:19you may never see me again, and I don't want to keep putting you
- 26:23through that. I just need a yes or no. Have you ever suffered
- 26:27from any form of abuse, physical, sexual, neglect, psychological and emotional.
- 26:33It's a yes or no. That's it, because let's acknowledge it and
- 26:41then let's hand it to the people who may do it, especially in emergency.
- 26:45Obviously that's where I work. But we need to be so mindful.
- 26:51We're not constantly asking people. And the problem is it just seems to me.
- 26:56I don't know if it's just here in the UK or if its world
- 27:00wider. It's a Western world, but all people seem to want to do
- 27:03is talk about the trauma, Oh and what happened? Em DR does it.
- 27:08EMDR does this, but especially in complex traumas, like please stop asking
- 27:14people. When did you realize that that's not necessarily the most beneficial way to
- 27:22do things. The neurology told me that basic, basic understanding of how the
- 27:30olympic system works, how we get the limpic system and the cerebral cortex and
- 27:37the prefrontal cortex is to actually work together. That's when it really crystallized.
- 27:41I always knew it. I always knew it. I mean in that text
- 27:47that I read out earlier, that I sent to myself as like a personal
- 27:51journal, I didn't tell anyone how I was feeling that point I was three
- 27:55days post almost dead. I didn't tell anybody about that. I told no
- 28:00one because number one, they were au traumatized as well, because they almost
- 28:07lost their mom and their partner and all the rest of it. But the
- 28:10thing was that sometimes you don't want to talk about it. The cure to
- 28:15distress is not necessarily telling the story over and over and over again. There
- 28:22is a catharsis in writing your story. Clearly there is. There's plenty of
- 28:26it out there. How many stories do we say that our people that are
- 28:30written out of biographies and they're phenomenally fascinating and all the rest of it.
- 28:36However, to think that that's how you recover is actually incorrect. How you
- 28:40recover as you heal first and then you tell the story as a story.
- 28:45Because it's in this it has been transferred from being an emotional memory in the
- 28:48limbic system and it has been moved into the cerebral cortex where we have emotional
- 28:53control over it, where we can realize that it tells time. This rebook
- 29:00cortex knows the difference between past, present, future. The Olympic system has
- 29:06no clue it's happening, it is happening now, and panic button on fight,
- 29:11flight, freeze, depression, depression is the safety behavior that comes from
- 29:15the Olympic system. Not a lot of people know that. Not a lot
- 29:18of therapists know that to safety behavior, it comes from our primitive ancestors.
- 29:25And it's once we realize this and actually get people to start living back in
- 29:30their prefront left prefrontal cortex, in their in their cerebral cortex, actually problem
- 29:36solving functioning, living their lives, positive actions, positive interactions, sort of
- 29:42positive thought. That's how mindfulness works, bringing you into the present moment.
- 29:48It's why gratitude practice works. It's positive thought. It's why running works.
- 29:53Positive action. It's it's not scrolling through Facebook, making sure that our interactions
- 30:02remain positive. Stay away from those toxic friends that whine and bitch all the
- 30:07time. You know that once we do that and they're doing that, then
- 30:11actually we can start to process because the brain will start to do it naturally.
- 30:15Right and solution focused therapy, of course one is engaging the prefrontal cortex,
- 30:26right, Yes, then what excites you about that so much? Oh?
- 30:33Sure? The most exciting thing about it is how many therapists do we
- 30:37see burnout and trauma? And why is that? How many nervous breakdowns and
- 30:44illness do we say? And the reason for that is our primitive mind has
- 30:48no clue whether what we are hearing or consuming is happening to us, or
- 30:52it's from the past or the future. It's a worry. That means that
- 30:56if we are listening to constant tales of just and drama, what actually happens
- 31:02is our brains are taking that on and putting it into our hypocampus and overloading
- 31:07it. Therefore, the beauty of the solution focused is that you are not
- 31:15in any way traumatizing yourself either. You are avoiding the consumption of a lot
- 31:22of negative worry. So one of the things that when I was working on
- 31:26the community in early intervention, people said, we don't understand why you don't
- 31:30burn out. I would see lots all of my patients at least once a
- 31:33week. I was really engaged. My clients didn't relapse. I had no
- 31:37hospital admissions, definitely, no use of the Mental Health Act, no suicide.
- 31:41And that was in twelve years and it was like, well, what
- 31:45am I doing different? My manager at the time was like, are we
- 31:49cherry picking your clients? What is going on? And what it is is
- 31:53that I go to people and I say, right, you want things to
- 32:00be, I will cheerlead you. I will help you access the cerebral cortex
- 32:06and all of the stuff that how you want your life to be, and
- 32:08we will problem solve those together. And we do it with humor, we
- 32:15do it with metaphor, we do it with going out on a bike.
- 32:17I've done it with a bike Occupational therapy in the UK and it's really a
- 32:23difficult thing for us to understand in America and actually worked out why the equivalent
- 32:29job in America is licensed clinical social worker and mental health. That's what I
- 32:37am here, That's what I do there. So but we use activity,
- 32:43we use positive action all the time, So in occupational therapy we do that.
- 32:47So it was like embedded in what I did, and it really hugely
- 32:53different. I mean, yeah, client's walking up to me in the street
- 32:57and hugging me that I've had years and years ago. They didn't forget me
- 32:59for some reason. We contrast that with, say, a what a typical
- 33:07approach to someone who's been traumatized. Granted not everyone, uh, you know,
- 33:13just goes in there and jumps in and digs into the trauma. But
- 33:16contrast what you just said and the way you work with how maybe other people
- 33:23might approach that. Okay, I'll probably tell another story because that's how I
- 33:30explained things. I had a young lady. I was out working doing my
- 33:37day to day stuff, and I was in my car. I had another
- 33:39client with me. We've been out, we'd had coffee, we'd been at
- 33:43a bookshop, We've been talking about literature or something. And I got a
- 33:45text message from another client who said I can't do this anymore. I'm done.
- 33:52I am done. Yeah, I read it. I said, where
- 33:55are you? They told me. I says, I'll be with you in
- 34:00twenty minutes. I'm in a different time at the moment. I'll be with
- 34:04you in twenty minutes. You hold that thought, I said to other client.
- 34:07I went, I'm going to just rush off. I said, I
- 34:08can't sit and chat in the car like we usually do, because I've just
- 34:12got to go and see someone else. They took that with the understanding of
- 34:15that they had experienced a bit of a crisis in their life as well,
- 34:19so they knew that I would kind of drop things and go and deal with
- 34:23a distress. I went up to the young women's home because I worked on
- 34:28the community, so we worked in people's homes. And I sat down and
- 34:31I says, Okay, we're in a bit of a pickle. And what
- 34:38came out was I've had enough of this. I never said the word suicide
- 34:42once it was implied in the text message, but she I never said it.
- 34:45When I got there, I went, what seems to be getting on
- 34:47top of you. Let's have a look. He said, I'm trying to
- 34:51get the kids ready, for the holiday, and and we've not got the
- 34:52transports or two and oh it's all these things, and oh my parents are
- 34:57a nightmare and oh my god, never be thinks I'm a nut cads and
- 35:00all this, and I went and brief, that's a lot. You've got
- 35:07a lot going on, a lot going on, So let's have a look
- 35:12at what are the things you really need to do to make this wonderful,
- 35:16amazing holiday that you've been so looking forward to actually happen. Because it's always
- 35:22a bit stressful going on holiday. I get that. I'm the same myself.
- 35:24We're all the same, you know, everybody gets a little bit there.
- 35:29But when you've got a long term mental illness and other challenges going on,
- 35:35those kind of things, it's huge. And she went, well,
- 35:38well I need to find transport. And I was like, well, what
- 35:43was the idea before? And she says, well, we're going to go
- 35:45by train. And I says, well, why isn't that an option?
- 35:47We haven't got enough money? Okay, is there any way you can,
- 35:53you know, conjure up that money. I left that lady's house. Forty
- 35:59five minutes later. She'd organized her tickets for the kids, she'd organized her
- 36:04dad to actually drive the other bits across that we're going to get missed because
- 36:08of the train, and essentially that crisis and that distress was actually reduced.
- 36:19Now, another practitioner perhaps who's very very stressed themselves because they're listening to a
- 36:25lot of deeply distressing things about self harm and suicide. If they get a
- 36:31text saying I've had enough, I don't want to be here anymore, they
- 36:36press their own panic button and they start to go into write I need to
- 36:40call a Mental Health Act assessment and it's commitment papers. Essentially, I need
- 36:45to get a doctor. We need to medicate this. No, we don't.
- 36:50First of all, we need to listen. First of all, we
- 36:52need to actually get the context of the distress, because the primitive brain doesn't
- 36:59know whether it's a big problem or a little problem, or in the past,
- 37:02or they're worrying about something in the future, or if it's actually a
- 37:07big, scary polar bear or roaring in their face. It's all the same.
- 37:10It is it is a problem now, and the whole of the olympic
- 37:15system will react with anxiety, anger, or depression. And it's as simple
- 37:21as that. And the thing is that practitioners don't realize that. First of
- 37:24all, we need to listen. And the reason the reason for that is
- 37:28because their own limbic system, their own primitive brain kicks in. First.
- 37:32There's certain key words that as a clinician working with this severely distressed will will
- 37:38will will spark that, Oh my god, I'm going to end up in
- 37:42coroner's court. You know, I want to commit suicide, I've hurt someone,
- 37:47I feel like hurting someone, or I'm hearing voices. Okay, let's
- 37:55talk about that then. And because i'm cam, the client cams down mirror
- 38:02neurons, polyvagel theory, and it just all sorts itself out. How many
- 38:09times? I mean, there was actually this happened at the end of last
- 38:14year. I'll never forget it. I was I just had I have that,
- 38:17I've gone all echo in my house, and I have a solar array
- 38:20on my house, and I have air source heating. It's fabulous. However,
- 38:24this was all happening at the end of the year in winter, and
- 38:28I was studying for my hypnotherapy qualification. I had sort of all my insurances,
- 38:34I had to check that website, I had to do coursework, and
- 38:37I was also working three fifteen hour days a week and managing a team,
- 38:44which is still quite new to me. I wasn't a team manager before,
- 38:46so I'm still having to navigate the management system. I got up one morning
- 38:52and I thought, all I want to do, all I want to do.
- 38:54I just want to stay in my pajamas, make a big cup of
- 38:59hot tea, and get my blanket on and watch Netflix. I had so
- 39:06much to do. I remember I stood up and I walked over and I
- 39:10was looking at my wall light, and I went, why do I want
- 39:14to go into hibernation mode? Because hibernation mode is the primitive brain's way of
- 39:21keeping as safe. When our ancestors would look out of their cave, they
- 39:25would see snow and ice everywhere or danger all around, so they would get
- 39:29back in the cave. They'd snuggle down, get their bear skins, suppress
- 39:34all their bodily functions, and wait for the danger to pass. I was
- 39:37like, what's my blizzard? What's the blizzard? I knew to do it
- 39:40because both my unconscious and my conscious brains now actually communicate. I went,
- 39:45right, what's the blizzard, where's the blizzard? What's the blizzard? I'm
- 39:49feeling overwhelmed. So I've got this, this, this, and this going
- 39:52on. I have a reason to feel overwhelmed, and all of them are
- 39:58temporary and I Am not going to die from any of them. And that
- 40:04acknowledgment and then validating it's okay to feel a bit rubbish today, Make a
- 40:08list, do one thing at a time. And I did that. I
- 40:13didn't end up depressed. I'm not on prozac. It's fine, that's and
- 40:19that's just life. And if we just realize that no matter how mentally ill
- 40:22or how traumatized someone is, they've got the same neurological basis that we have,
- 40:30you are so friggin inspiring. I love talking to email. I'm speaking
- 40:36with Tracy Morgan. What's the best way for people to get in contact with
- 40:38you? Tracy? Right, I have a website if you even if you
- 40:44google, I mean I know you probably have it in the show notes.
- 40:46Anyway, if you google Ultra Violet Holistic Therapies dot co dot UK, you
- 40:54will find me and you can contact me through that on the contact The website
- 41:00is still being built, so there's things being added to that all the time.
- 41:04And clearly will I will take on clients to work with, because I
- 41:08don't think anybody doesn't benefit from the type of work that I'm doing. There's
- 41:15also a Facebook group which is very positively inspiring Facebook group, which unfortunately I've
- 41:22not been working on as much as I used to, but I'm planning to
- 41:25put in that self actualizing Trauma Thrivers on Facebook. You will see my photograph
- 41:32on there you join the group. It's a closed group. There is definitely
- 41:37nobody complaining, moaning, or talking about what horrible things have happened to them.
- 41:43It's actually about the triumphs of every little wind that they have, and
- 41:47everybody sort of celebrating that and encouraging each other. There are videos of me
- 41:53talking about all kinds of crazy things and singing on my roof. I was
- 41:59singing on my IF at one point. It was quite a get go.
- 42:02So there's that. There's also you can email me at Tracy Underscore Morgan at
- 42:07emmy dot com as well, and I think there's gonna be a WhatsApp link
- 42:12from a business WhatsApp so as well. So there's also ways to get hold
- 42:15of me. Yeah awesome. We'll have the link up here at the show
- 42:19notes page at the Trauma therispodcast dot com. You you know, there's a
- 42:27there's an energy that I love hopefully bringing to this podcast, and uh,
- 42:34you embody that and that I knew I when I first talked, You're gonna
- 42:39have this woman back, and I'm so glad I did. You're so freaking
- 42:44inspiring and I just love talking to you and listening to you, and I
- 42:50can feel your energy. It's amazing, love it. Love you so much.
- 42:55Thank you so much for being here. Sincerely, I really appreciate it.
- 43:00Thank you very much. You're welcome. Moving in touch, okay,