Latest / Trauma Meets Recovery Podcast / Trauma Tried to Steal My Life | Hal Hughes

Transcript

Trauma Tried to Steal My Life | Hal Hughes · Trauma Meets Recovery Podcast

• 0:03
  Welcome to the Trauma Meets Recovery Podcast, where we share stories of resilience, recovery, and hope.
• 0:09
  Join us as we sit down with survivors, authors, and leading experts to discuss their experiences and insights, exploring the path towards healing and the power of the human spirit.
• 0:18
  Now here's your host, Dr.
• 0:20
  Mark McNear.
• 0:21
  Hi, and welcome to Trauma Meets Recovery Podcast.
• 0:24
  My name is Dr.
• 0:25
  Mark McNear, and I am pleased to be with you today.
• 0:29
  I am honored to have with me today psychotherapist Hal Hughes.
• 0:34
  Hal, welcome to the program.
• 0:36
  Oh, thanks so much for having me on, Mark.
• 0:38
  You know, I have heard your story, and we were talking just a little bit before this about your story, but I want to I don't want to waste any time.
• 0:45
  I want to invite you right into your story.
• 0:47
  I I mentioned that you were a psychotherapist, but that wasn't always the case with you.
• 0:52
  No, you're right.
• 0:53
  Um I mean, in certain terms of my professional career, I, well, I was a bartender for many years before I sort of figured out what I really wanted to do.
• 1:01
  And while I was doing that through my 20s, I kind of chipped away at an undergrad.
• 1:05
  It was one of those took me 12 years to get a degree.
• 1:08
  I was in and out of school, and I finally got a degree in psychology, but then decided I wanted to get into uh a career in policing.
• 1:16
  And so I ended up getting a job uh in federal corrections as a correctional officer first, kind of as a prelude to lead up to get into policing.
• 1:25
  I did that for a short amount of time, uh, and then I got into policing uh in a small town in uh uh Perth, Ontario.
• 1:33
  So that's how my policing career started, and it was kind of um ideal like for me.
• 1:37
  I mean, I liked the excitement of the job, uh, the physicality of the job, and really uh the first few years of my policing career went relatively smooth, as smooth as they can, and the job is kind of littered with trauma.
• 1:50
  So, you know, in terms of my story itself, basically there's kind of a delineation in, I would say, January 1st, 2008, to the next day, so to speak.
• 2:00
  Because in the in the first number of years of my career up until January 1st of that year, everything was going fairly good.
• 2:05
  I mean, I had my share of bad calls, but I was managing things fairly well.
• 2:10
  At the time, I was also pretty heavy into jujitsu.
• 2:13
  I'd had my black belt and my coach had talked to me uh in around Christmas time of the previous year about maybe setting up my first pro fight that year in 2008.
• 2:22
  So I was in great shape.
• 2:23
  I had three young kids, another one on the way.
• 2:26
  Uh, I was also running marathons, so staying in great shape that way.
• 2:30
  Amazing wife.
• 2:31
  I'm very blessed, still with her.
• 2:33
  We've been together 32 years.
• 2:34
  So I was kind of um in a bit of an illusion in the sense that I thought I was kind of bulletproof.
• 2:39
  I felt like I could kind of withstand anything.
• 2:41
  And then the next day, sort of January 2nd, 2008, I was in my police cruiser and I was following a car that I was going to be pulling over for a traffic violation.
• 2:51
  And so I stopped on the highway waiting for the through traffic to pass, and I was gonna turn left.
• 2:56
  And the sun was just setting that day, kind of straight in front of us on the roadway, and uh the truck behind me or the car behind me uh didn't see me and so hit me the rear end of my cruiser going about 50 miles an hour.
• 3:08
  Uh rode off the cruiser, my head took most of the impact.
• 3:11
  Um, I was diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury.
• 3:16
  Uh, I'm not sure where they come up with those names, but that's like a mild divorce or a mild bankruptcy.
• 3:20
  Um and uh also PTSD.
• 3:24
  So um kind of a cascade of symptoms over the coming days.
• 3:27
  I got kind of scared of everything.
• 3:29
  We determined later on through testing, I had some pretty bad memory and attentional deficits from the head injury.
• 3:35
  I went from being that athlete I described to I gained about 40 pounds.
• 3:39
  I was sleeping 20 hours a day as a function of the brain injury, migraines, kind of five, six days a week, debilitating levels of migraines.
• 3:47
  So I went from this kind of what I described as kind of a high flyer, sort of high-functioning person, to very close to death.
• 3:53
  I mean, the the depressive symptoms, I was suicidal, and I was kind of uh right on the edge there of wanting to live, but not being able to sort of sustain that level of pain physically and emotionally.
• 4:06
  And then um something life-changing, well, someone uh happened.
• 4:11
  Um what happened was my my wife was kind of explaining to my youngest son at the time, he was three and a half, four, uh, why daddy wasn't kind of the same daddy anymore, why he wasn't tucking him in bed at night, why he wasn't playing with him, why he wasn't sort of the same daddy.
• 4:28
  And my little son at the time, he was kind of processing this, and then he locked eyes with me and he said, Well, I want my real daddy to come home.
• 4:36
  And so, you know, you want to talk motivation, motive, reason why.
• 4:40
  Uh, well, I found the reason to put the work into recovery.
• 4:43
  I realized that I was um, you know, hurting my family with my inability to recover.
• 4:48
  So I put the work in, I got back to work uh full duties in about 18 months from the time that happened.
• 4:54
  So I'm back to work, full duties, um, still some remnants from that initial brain injury, but relatively minor stuff I could kind of overcome.
• 5:03
  And then in 2013, um, I was at work, we had arrested a violent suspect, um, but we had to take him to the hospital because he had a laceration kind of over his eye from the fight he'd been in.
• 5:15
  He'd been sort of out of control.
• 5:17
  So we got him to the hospital, he was still kind of fighting us, and then he eventually kind of sort of calmed down so that the hospital staff could attend to him.
• 5:25
  And so I let my guard down.
• 5:27
  And he, as soon as he felt me let my guard down, he kind of jumped up, headbutted me, knocked me out cold on my feet, you know, hit the hospital tile floor.
• 5:38
  Um, and that was ended up being a more serious traumatic brain injury.
• 5:42
  I think classified as a moderate traumatic brain injury with uh bilateral frontal lobe, uh, you know, permanent damage uh sustained there.
• 5:50
  Um that injury in itself, I think given the nature of where it was located most of the damage, ended up with some really um uh emotional dysregulation.
• 6:00
  So, what happened is months after that, I ended up being diagnosed with bipolar secondary to the brain injury.
• 6:06
  So, in other words, the brain injury caused the bipolar.
• 6:09
  Um so I was put on eight different psychiatric meds and put through a course of a type of shock therapy.
• 6:15
  I mean, um, I was on, uh I mean, this list will sound uh hard to believe for someone, but I was on, at the same time, I was on Buspirone, ceracol, slow acting, and fast acting, uh, larzepam, acetalipram, modafinel, mertazepine, Botox.
• 6:34
  Uh, and so they were they were trying to use medical interventions for what was primarily a psychological problem, which uh, as you probably know, rarely works well.
• 6:44
  Um, I mean, there's a team of people, there's a physiatrist, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, an occupational therapist, a neurosurgeon, my family, my friends, like everyone was helping me.
• 6:55
  And the only one who wasn't putting the work into the recovery was me.
• 7:00
  Um, but they did prescribe one drug on top of that that actually kind of helped with my uh situation, and that was codeine, believe it or not.
• 7:10
  So uh opiates uh tend to, you know, for me, they they gave me energy, they helped with the migraines, they improved my mood.
• 7:18
  And the only problem with opiates is sometimes they work too good.
• 7:22
  And so I went from being prescribed a very small dose, that was all my my doctor would give me uh wisely, uh, to finding drugs outside of uh what I was prescribed, and that went to oxygotton, percocets, hydromorph, morphine, whatever I could sort of access, doing fairly large uh doses of that, pretty bad addiction that I went through for a few years, overdosed a couple times, um, again, suicidality.
• 7:50
  Um, and so I was at this place where I was sort of barely alive, being over-medicated and and over-medicating myself.
• 7:59
  I don't know if you want to jump in at any point, or just want me to keep going.
• 8:01
  I can't.
• 8:02
  But I uh one one, yeah.
• 8:03
  One of the questions I had for you with bipolar, was it bipolar one or bipolar two or mixed, or what what did what did that look like?
• 8:09
  You you had talked, Al, and the reason I that came to my mind was that idea of you talked about dysregulation of mood.
• 8:17
  Yeah, yeah, good question.
• 8:18
  So it's it was considered type two, which I believe the main differentiation there was hypomanic.
• 8:24
  Um so it wasn't um a lot of my behaviors were so for people that don't know bipolar, a lot of people think bipolar is this like oscillation you know, of mood, and and there's an oscillation, but it's very long periods of depression with very rare periods of uh sort of hyperactivity, which is what mine was.
• 8:44
  So I would go months of deep depression and then have a couple of days type thing where I had this elevated level of activity, of uh creativity, uh, of things like that.
• 8:54
  And it would be, you know, a lot of strange behaviors, which I think sort of helped determine what was going on there in terms of the diagnosis, where I'd be up till three in the morning drawing things and researching things and working on math problems and doing this weird art and stuff like that.
• 9:09
  And even behaviorally, I mean, there was one day where uh, you know, I started to get up and kind of left and ended up going and uh skydiving, doing five jumps in one day at a skydive place near her house.
• 9:21
  And I kind of got back and I was talking to my wife about it, and she said, Do you think this is a good idea for a guy with a head injury?
• 9:26
  And I said, Well, you know, I mean, you either live or die with with, you know, so it's like, you know, I'll probably be okay.
• 9:32
  And and she's like, Well, don't some people just have rough landings and get head injuries from it?
• 9:36
  I'm like, Yeah, maybe it's not a good idea.
• 9:38
  So there was just like so there, there was not great judgment there either.
• 9:42
  No, no, very poor judgment.
• 9:44
  And so I was kind of stuck, and you know, I mean, and who who knows what was driving that behavior?
• 9:48
  Was it the organic head injury?
• 9:50
  Was it the being over medicated?
• 9:52
  Was it the opiate usage?
• 9:53
  I mean, it's it's hard to, but but the problem is I got the diagnosis, and with diagnosis comes medication.
• 10:00
  You know, and so they're they're clearly over-medicating.
• 10:03
  Uh, and not once was I asked during any of those visits with the psychiatrist, like, what's your diet like?
• 10:10
  What's your physical activity and level of fitness?
• 10:12
  What's your social structure?
• 10:13
  What's your, you know, what's your how you how are you finding meaning in life?
• 10:16
  Like, none of that was, it was just literally like tell me your symptoms and then adding on more sort of medication.
• 10:23
  And it was really, I was, I was kind of stuck on this path until my uh friends and family, my closest friends and my and my wife did kind of an intervention of sorts uh around the drug use and basically sort of put me in a corner and said, You gotta, you know, you gotta go to rehab.
• 10:39
  So I did a bit of bargaining, and what I said was, I'll go to rehab if NA doesn't work, I'll try NA.
• 10:46
  And so I went to NA and it was not what I thought it was.
• 10:49
  I thought it was, I'm not sure what I thought it was, but it but what it was was uh people from all different socioeconomic sort of positions in life.
• 10:58
  Like I met a I met a doctor, uh, you know, high high-level real estate agents, you know, construction workers, teachers, like all different, you know.
• 11:07
  And uh I I would say in in some way, it it kind of saved my life.
• 11:12
  I mean, I'm I'll be coming up on 10 years sober this July.
• 11:15
  Um congratulations.
• 11:17
  Yeah, thanks.
• 11:18
  And I and I think it's uh that was sort of the starting point for my recovery.
• 11:23
  Um, and it helped me come to a lot of realizations about um what was happening to me, what was going on, and what I needed to do to get better.
• 11:32
  You know, I I think that um it's interesting because you alluded to the fact that you had preconceived notions you know about NA or about addiction or about you know people who you know participate in addiction.
• 11:47
  And and I think it's so wonderful when we can step out of that and step into reality and look at what is actually going on and saying like you know, there's people all over that are struggling with trauma, struggling with addiction, struggling with dysregulation, struggling with some of the things that that you that you talked about.
• 12:08
  And I I think it's like really important for people to hear you know, the journey.
• 12:14
  There's so many people out there that struggle with dysregulation, including myself, dysregulation of mood, that it needs to be tended to.
• 12:21
  Could you could you say more about that?
• 12:24
  Yeah, and I'm I I think the uh the addictions piece, just to share something I think that's important.
• 12:29
  Have you ever heard of uh the term rat park in terms of uh yeah, yeah, explain to people what that is, though.
• 12:36
  That's so fascinating.
• 12:37
  Yeah, uh, you know, many of my clients have some underlying substance use issues, and and um so I often explain this.
• 12:44
  Um so basically, um, if you take a rat, as most people know, if they're used in experiments, you can very quickly sort of condition a rat to different types of behaviors.
• 12:54
  For example, like you can get them to where they can push a lever and get a food pellet.
• 12:58
  And they do that through sort of proximal, you know, as the rat gets closer, they give it a pellet, and then eventually it has to touch the lever and gets the food pellet.
• 13:06
  So then what you do is they'll they'll set the rat up where it's cannulated, so it has a basically an essentially a needle right into the pleasure center of its brain, and they'll have a second lever.
• 13:15
  So now the rat has a choice.
• 13:16
  Okay, I can hit the food lever, get a food pellet, my favorite burger tasting thing, whatever it is, or I can hit the second lever for whatever drug they're gonna test.
• 13:25
  So it might be cocaine or booze or whatever it is, or opiate.
• 13:29
  And so the rat takes the food, yeah, that's good.
• 13:32
  Then he tries, let's say, the opiate.
• 13:34
  Well, the rat will almost starve to death.
• 13:36
  It'll sit there just on the opiate lever, like just hitting it.
• 13:40
  So that's in a rat cage.
• 13:42
  Now, if you take that rat and put it in in laboratories, what they call it is a rat park, you get something different.
• 13:48
  So a rat park would be something like a much bigger enclosure.
• 13:51
  There's gonna be, if it's a male rat, there'll be other male rats it can play with.
• 13:55
  There might be some female rats, so there's a chance for rat action.
• 13:59
  There's little play structures that rats like to play on.
• 14:02
  There'll be hay and different things that rats like to work on, push around and make nests.
• 14:06
  There'll be artificial sunlight, there'll be, you know, trees and bushes and stuff, so it's a very sort of uh nature, natural setting for them.
• 14:14
  And so there's like the chance for social interaction, the chance for intimate interaction, there's work and play for it to do, and there's natural elements uh in this.
• 14:24
  So in that kind of a rat park, you set the rat up with the same two options again: food, opiate, and it'll try both and it won't go back to the opiate.
• 14:34
  So, I mean, the metaphors here are fairly obvious, right?
• 14:37
  And it I think it kind of nicely explains how us humans can fall into addiction if those domains of our life are void, and then add in if someone is harming us in terms of traumatically, um, you can see how we we will choose the the drug or the substance when we are missing out on our needs getting met in other areas.
• 14:59
  Absolutely.
• 15:00
  Thank thanks for sharing that.
• 15:01
  I appreciate that.
• 15:02
  So so one of the things that I found so fascinating with your story is your IQ.
• 15:07
  Could could you could you tell uh us about that?
• 15:11
  Sure, yeah.
• 15:12
  So um, I mean, when when I was a kid, uh my cousin and I were getting to a bit of trouble in the classroom, um, and so they ended up testing us, doing some neuropsych testing, and determined we were gifted.
• 15:22
  And um, so I knew I had a high IQ.
• 15:25
  I didn't know what really what the hell that meant.
• 15:27
  And it doesn't actually mean an awful lot in terms of uh correlating with success or anything in life or happiness.
• 15:33
  But um after my first uh car accident uh that I got in at work when I was on duty, uh shortly after that, they put me through some neuropsych testing and a full Weschler adult intelligence scale just to see what my deficits were so they could have a comparative during my recovery down the road.
• 15:50
  And so my initial IQ was 129, which is which was one point shy of being able to join Mensa or Genius or Gifted, whatever you want to call it.
• 15:58
  Uh, and then when I retested uh a couple of years after that, before I was gonna go back to work, I think it was uh 142 or something like that.
• 16:07
  Uh, I mean, the the um it was probably 129 because I had a memory and attentional deficit, so I wouldn't have tested that well.
• 16:15
  So, anyways, uh so that was in 2009, I think it was, that I got that result.
• 16:21
  And then it just went on about my life.
• 16:23
  And then after my um more serious brain injury in 2013, uh, it took me about four years to recover to the point where I was gonna go back to school and end up doing what I'm doing now.
• 16:36
  And so they put me through the same neurose testing again just to make sure I didn't have deficits that get in the way of me going back to school.
• 16:43
  They didn't want to, you know, put money into me uh if uh if I wasn't gonna be successful.
• 16:48
  So they put me through the same uh Wesler adult intelligence scale then, and my overall IQ score was 152 on the Wesler.
• 16:56
  So I gained a few points.
• 16:58
  And and what was interesting was the and my processing speed was in the 99.9th percentile or something like that too.
• 17:05
  So I mean, there's a few different explanations of how that could happen.
• 17:09
  Um, I mean, the plasticity of the brain is certainly as part of it.
• 17:13
  Uh, I think some of the environmental factors uh that would have promoted that neuroplasticity in terms of the habits and rituals that I uh started to do during my recovery after that second accident, were I was pretty rigid around and still am today, pretty intense about.
• 17:28
  So I I suspect I set my brain up for the opportunity to, you know, make a full recovery, but yeah.
• 17:35
  So so how what does recovery look like for you now?
• 17:40
  You know, you had said that you're pretty diligent with it, but you know, what what does it look like for you day to day?
• 17:47
  Yeah.
• 17:48
  Uh so a big part of a big part of my sort of approach to recovery, um, you know, from trauma, brain injury, and addiction, it's all kind of related, is um basically you've heard the expression that which does not kill us makes us stronger.
• 18:07
  So I'm a big believer in hormesis, or uh, which is a class of stressors that in the short term or acutely are really hard and difficult, and really hard on our system, really uh acutely, but promote you know, moderate to long-term health, turn on longevity genes, reduce inflammation, have all kinds of benefits.
• 18:27
  So there's four main ones.
• 18:30
  Um, the most sort of well-known one is exercise.
• 18:32
  So exercise is a stressor that acutely is really uncomfortable and is really stressful in our system short term, but obviously it is the number one thing we can do for disease prevention.
• 18:43
  Turns out it's the number one thing we can do for depression, anxiety, and stress disorders based on the research.
• 18:48
  Um, so there's exercise, there's intermittent fasting, which I do every day, there's cold exposure with ice baths, which I do every day, and there's uh heat exposure, uh, sauna.
• 18:58
  And then I would add in there a fifth one of yoga and stretching, which is also short-term taxing on the system.
• 19:04
  So those are the kind of the four or five things I do every day, plus a certain type of diet that I'm very vigilant around, plus uh red light therapy, uh, plus very um very protective of what I put in my mind.
• 19:19
  I stand guard at the door of my own mind and I intentionally put really good stuff in every day.
• 19:26
  Um, plus I'm very vigilant around the my social relationships, my intimate relationship with my partner.
• 19:32
  So, like this all started essentially, may I back up a step?
• 19:35
  Is um in 20 uh 16, once I got clean, um, I basically sat down and said, okay, um, like I'm I've been doing this to myself.
• 19:46
  Now things have happened to me, um, but now I'm doing it to myself.
• 19:50
  Basically, um, you know, when you wake up every day, you know, have six waffles with syrup and turn CNN on for a couple hours, and you hang out with other drug addicts, you know, you're you're kind of have you ever heard the um okay, quick side story.
• 20:08
  Okay, two guys, two guys are at a can uh at a construction site, lunch bell goes, they go sit down, one guy flips up his lunchbox and he goes, Ah, tuna.
• 20:19
  I hate tuna.
• 20:20
  About eats the sandwich, there's nothing else in his lunchbox.
• 20:23
  Next day, same two guys, lunch bell, tuna again.
• 20:27
  So this goes on all week until finally his friend's sick of listening to him moan about it.
• 20:32
  He says, You know, why don't you get your partner to make something different for lunch?
• 20:35
  And the guy goes, Oh, I make my own sandwiches.
• 20:38
  So most people in life are making their own shit sandwiches and eating them and complaining about it, but they think it's someone or something else that's causing their suffering when when we take full responsibility for what's going on, only then do we have a chance for recovery.
• 20:51
  And so that's kind of what I did.
• 20:53
  I literally sat at my kitchen table and said, What habits and rituals do I need to do every day to set myself up for at least a chance of recovery?
• 21:02
  And then I also wrote down four principles I thought that if I lived my life by, my life would improve.
• 21:08
  And I literally put those lists up on my fridge.
• 21:10
  And I said, I'm gonna give it 90 days.
• 21:13
  I got nothing to lose.
• 21:14
  You know, I was suicidal and very unhealthy.
• 21:17
  I'm gonna I'm gonna do it for 90 days no matter what.
• 21:19
  And you know, three months later, I was off all of those medications.
• 21:22
  I titrated down off all of them.
• 21:24
  Six months later, I started speaking publicly in front of fairly large crowds, teaching sort of resiliency.
• 21:29
  And a year and a half after that, I was in the starting my master's degree and it started ultramarathon running.
• 21:35
  Yeah, I I think that that it's so important in this process to take steps forward, even even if they're little steps to begin with.
• 21:44
  I know people are listening and going, whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 21:47
  Like that's just too much.
• 21:49
  You know, but but even you know, to be able to take a walk.
• 21:55
  A short walk.
• 21:56
  And I'm sure I'm sure you you work with that with your clients.
• 21:59
  Could you say?
• 22:00
  Kind of what what your work with your clients is like now?
• 22:03
  Yeah, so and I think that's a really good point.
• 22:05
  So um, you know, it anyone that hears what I just said would be like, wow, like they're assuming that, you know, I wrote down the 10 or 12 habits and the principles, and then I just flipped a switch and did everything automatically.
• 22:18
  And it was like it was like anything else.
• 22:20
  Anytime you see, you know, I think we make a mistake in logic when you look at anyone who's had some success in overcoming something or success in business or anything, we tend to look at and think, oh, like they just made a decision and had an easy route there.
• 22:33
  And it and that's I that's never the case.
• 22:36
  Like we see their success in public, but we don't see what they struggle with in private.
• 22:40
  So for me, it was this journey of like starting to do the things and then sort of falling off on some areas and then getting back online, and then you know, it was slowly and incrementally adding these things in and maintaining them across months and then years, and then adding other things in slowly across time.
• 22:56
  But when I started running, for example, you know, it was it was like half a kilometer, and I was winded and sore, and then the next day I said, screw it, I'm not gonna run anymore.
• 23:07
  And then a couple of days later I started and then slowly, you know, to the point where I was competing in, you know, 50K's and 100-mile races and things like this.
• 23:16
  So, and with my clients, it's the same thing.
• 23:18
  I would never say, okay, like, here's the list of stuff you need to do, let's go.
• 23:22
  It's like slow incremental progress is this is the path of success.
• 23:28
  At the same time, what I always tell my clients is like it is sort of within your control whether you treat recovery like a part-time thing you dabble in, or whether you commit to it like it's a full-time job.
• 23:42
  You know, some of my clients are injured to the point where they have to be off work.
• 23:46
  Sure.
• 23:47
  And so they do get to decide, and each of us does, like, you know, how much time do I want to commit to my recovery?
• 23:53
  Because what what we have to sacrifice in order to put time into recovery is mostly bullshit, anyways.
• 23:59
  It's what is it, TV and social media, what people are spending most of their time on, anyways.
• 24:03
  So it's so it's like slow and incremental is the greatest approach to recovery.
• 24:07
  And yet, if you want to treat it like a full-time job, the results are kind of linear.
• 24:12
  The more time you put into something, generally speaking, the more improvements you can make in your life.
• 24:17
  So I like to kind of do both things at the same time, yeah.
• 24:22
  Absolutely.
• 24:24
  So so I'm wondering, uh, as you have worked with yourself and worked with with clients, what what has trauma taught you?
• 24:32
  What has trauma taught me?
• 24:33
  Wow, good question.
• 24:34
  It's not what happens to us, the meaning that we give what happens to us.
• 24:38
  Say more about that.
• 24:39
  Some of these sort of little bits of wisdom I I honestly came to through my own experiences.
• 24:45
  And so I thought, oh man, I've got this, I've got this new thing that I've figured out.
• 24:50
  And then I've literally Googled some of my ideas and realized the Stoics came up with it 2,000 years ago, or or some great person came up with it.
• 24:57
  So none of my ideas are original.
• 24:59
  Um, so so that idea is essentially that the meaning we so Victor Frankel, Man's Search for Meaning, wonderful book.
• 25:06
  I suggest it, I think everybody should read that book.
• 25:09
  And essentially what he said was between the stimulus, in other words, the event, the tragedy or what somebody said to us, and the response, the emotional response internally, there is a space.
• 25:22
  And it's the meaning that we put in that space, it's the meaning we give the events of our life that determine our response and then our actions and outcome afterwards.
• 25:31
  It's not the thing itself.
• 25:33
  Now, don't get me wrong, of course, things happen to us, but at the end of the day, it's ultimately when we're doing recovery work with people or with ourselves, it's in uh changing, reflecting on, and adapting the meaning that will ultimately change our response to what happened in the past or what's happening in the moment.
• 25:49
  And I think of all the things I've learned through my own going through my own traumatic experiences, that's one of the most important things that I pass on to my clients.
• 25:59
  It's that it feels like the external world is causing the anger, the frustration, the hurt.
• 26:05
  But there's something between the external world and our reaction, and it's the meaning we're giving things.
• 26:10
  And once you realize that, you can start asking yourself the question of what else could this mean other than the shitty meaning we may be given it, that's given ourselves a crappy response.
• 26:20
  So so I guess you're saying there's that space.
• 26:23
  There's a space.
• 26:24
  And in that space, you know, there's a trigger and then there's the response.
• 26:28
  In that space is the power, I would say.
• 26:30
  Well, well, totally.
• 26:31
  And it and it's um, I remember uh as a very sort of relatively benign example.
• 26:37
  Um my son and I were driving and uh a while back, and there was a truck tailgating us.
• 26:44
  And you know, when someone's tailgating you, they're so close you can't even see their headlights, like it was right up on us.
• 26:49
  And my my youngest son at the time was like, Oh, like he started like swearing about the guy, and he's like, break check him, dad, and all this stuff, right?
• 26:56
  And I just slowly pulled over safely on the side of the road and let the guy go whizzing by.
• 27:00
  And my son was like, Why'd you do that?
• 27:03
  And I said, uh, because son, he's that guy's on his way to Kingston.
• 27:06
  His daughter has uh chemo treatment today for cancer.
• 27:10
  And my son was like, Oh, geez, sorry, Dad, I didn't know you knew them.
• 27:13
  And I said, I don't, son.
• 27:15
  That's just the meaning I choose to give what was going on there.
• 27:19
  So by giving it that meaning, my emotional response is empathy, and my action is one of patience and tolerance and letting them buy.
• 27:28
  I mean, I could have given it the meaning that, you know, what a prick.
• 27:31
  He's breaking the rules of the road, he's putting me in danger.
• 27:33
  I would have created a very different emotional response.
• 27:36
  But we're constantly giving meaning to everything in our life.
• 27:39
  And we never slow down long enough to challenge ourselves in, okay, I took it to mean this, which was causing me frustration.
• 27:47
  What else could it mean?
• 27:48
  So so one more question for you.
• 27:51
  The idea of the body, you know, we talk a lot about the body in trauma work.
• 27:57
  Yeah.
• 27:58
  Can can you say some things about that?
• 28:00
  Yeah, and so I I find that um we tend to have sort of habits of emotion related to trauma.
• 28:07
  It could be could be fear, could be anger.
• 28:10
  And it's it's almost like we get so habitual with those kind of emotions and feelings that and a lot of my clients, uh, and I was in this space too, where I would wake up and I was already feeling in my body the fear, the anxiety, the tension before I was even thinking anything.
• 28:29
  So it's almost like my body was doing it without me.
• 28:32
  It's like I became so good at doing anxiety, for example, that I didn't even need to think worrisome thoughts.
• 28:39
  Just the body was already there with the adrenaline, the tension, you know, the respiration changes.
• 28:45
  And then, you know, we tend to think the way we feel in our physiological system.
• 28:50
  So it's like I wake up with the anxious feeling in my body, it's very familiar, and now the brain matches up with your physiology and you start thinking more worrisome type thoughts.
• 29:01
  And so that's why a lot of work with clients is sort of somatic work in that you're you're helping to regulate their physiological system uh first, so then your mind can kind of get in alignment with it.
• 29:13
  It it's you know, you'd probably be surprised as a psychotherapist that I work and talk with my clients a lot about their physical fitness and wellness.
• 29:26
  Because it's really hard to have a healthy brain and a healthy mind, which is part of that brain, on top of a poor physiology.
• 29:36
  So it's like, you know, I've often said, and this is a controversial statement, I suppose, but 50% of mental illness could be resolved if you get in good shape.
• 29:47
  It's not gonna fix all your problems, it's not gonna change all your perspectives, but at least then you've got a healthy vehicle that you're navigating this stuff in.
• 29:55
  It's like I can give my clients amazing psychological tools, but um it's like giving a, so let's put it this way.
• 30:04
  Let's say somebody comes to me for uh car driving skills.
• 30:08
  Let's say I'm a race car driver, and so I give them all these strategies, how to you know avoid skids, how to go fast around corners, and then they leave and they jump in a 92 Toyota cell with bald tires that hasn't had an oil change in 10 years.
• 30:22
  They've got all the skills in the world, but the vehicle can't help them traverse it.
• 30:26
  So it's kind of the same with trauma work.
• 30:29
  It's like when you're working with them around you know psychological interventions for themselves, but physiologically, if their blood sugar is out of whack, their hormones are out of whack, they've got no energy in their system, they're just at poor health, it's really hard to apply those skill sets when their brain isn't healthy.
• 30:47
  So that's kind of like step one is well, it's it's a concurrent journey, is help them realize the importance of their physical health while you're giving them sort of adaptive skill sets psychologically.
• 31:00
  So I said one more question, I'm gonna ask two more.
• 31:03
  Uh one question is what gets you up in the morning?
• 31:09
  Service to others.
• 31:11
  I love that.
• 31:13
  I I had heard you speaking um and just talking about the fact that the the person interviewing you was saying that you know you went from this victim.
• 31:23
  You know, you you had these things happen to you and that you turned it around and now you're serving others.
• 31:29
  And I think that that's a huge part in trauma work, you know, to move out of that realm of being the victim.
• 31:36
  And and many of us have been victims or victimized, but to be able to move out of that and to serve others is it has so much power attached to it.
• 31:45
  Uh yeah, you said that so beautifully.
• 31:47
  Uh, I mean I I I agree 100%.
• 31:49
  I I think you know, and I was second victim mode for a period there too, and and uh like um being a being a victim or or blaming is a horrible strategy for life because it takes the onus off of you and your recovery and puts it on something or someone that's well well in your past for the most part, and so you know, at some point we get to decide like like nobody ever died of a snake bite.
• 32:20
  It's the venom that we pump through our veins for hours, months, years, or decades that does the damage.
• 32:27
  And so at some point we have to shift out of victimhood and realize that if we're still talking and blaming how we are today, based on something that happened 20 years ago, you know, that's that's us pumping the venom from the snake bite that happened, and it's in the past.
• 32:44
  And so at some point you want to become the hero of your own story, you know, and so what you do is you ideally get wisdom from everything you've been through, and then your journey's not done then.
• 32:55
  The hero in the hero's journey, when you come back to your community with the wisdom from what you overcame, the most important part of the journey starts then, and it's in the paying forward and the passing forward of your wisdom through the service of others.
• 33:07
  And it's it's an interesting thing.
• 33:09
  Uh obviously, you know, most people have figured out, or a lot of people have figured out that the truest meaning, the deepest meanings in life are found in serving others and in contribution.
• 33:17
  Um, but it's also a very good um from a pragmatic strategy on dealing with stress.
• 33:23
  So uh I'll give you a small example, but um we uh uh I I lost my mom three months ago and it was kind of sudden and tragic in the nature of it.
• 33:34
  And um so you know, a couple of days afterwards, um, you know, we're you know, obviously supporting each other as a family.
• 33:42
  And uh I remember one of my friends saying, like, you're gonna take a couple weeks off work.
• 33:47
  And so in terms of serving others, it's like um like when we turn inwards, this is a lot of mental illness, as you're I'm sure you're aware, it's like there's this deep turning inwards when we're not doing well, and it's it's very much we become very much like me-oriented in terms of, and it's understandable sometimes, but it's like I'm feeling this way and I'm tired and I'm agitated, and I'm in a it's very inward turning.
• 34:13
  Whereas when you see people start to recover, it starts to it, it becomes more like them or we focused.
• 34:20
  And so even after my mom's passing, I went back to work quite quickly because it's like from a pragmatic level, I can sit at home and turn inwards with my grief.
• 34:30
  And I'm not saying I avoided my grief, I I don't avoid grief, but but it's like I'm gonna go to work and serve some other people and help them, which pragmatically it can be really good for you too.
• 34:41
  It's like sitting and stewing your own juices doesn't do anything.
• 34:45
  So service of others, yeah.
• 34:46
  I I love that how because I think that you know, with with anything in life, and especially with recovery, there needs to be that balance.
• 34:54
  Yeah, there needs to be that weighing up, there needs to be that grieving, but also movement.
• 34:58
  There needs to be, you know, contemplation, but there also needs to be action to do things, and and I'd love that perspective.
• 35:06
  Let me ask you, if people want to get in touch with you or get familiar with your work, where would you direct them?
• 35:11
  Yeah, I I think I think just like sort of a search of Hal Hughes, like my website's HalHughes.com, so they can they can find me through the website and social media.
• 35:20
  I think if you search my name up, you can find me on Instagram and things like that.
• 35:24
  Yeah.
• 35:25
  I just want to thank you for this time.
• 35:26
  This has been wonderful.
• 35:28
  Yeah, it's been great chatting with you.
• 35:29
  I appreciate you having me on.
• 35:30
  Thank you for joining us on the Trauma Meets Recovery podcast.
• 35:33
  If today's conversation spoke to you, we would love for you to like, subscribe, or share the episode with someone to learn more or connect with us.
• 35:40
  Visit our website at trauma meets recovery.com.
• 35:43
  Until next time, be gentle and kind to yourself.