Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Raja Selvem, PhD

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Guest: Raja Selvem, PhD · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over:
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to long time listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you. Doctor. Raja Selvam, a licensed clinical psychologist from The US, is our guest today. He is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology, ISP, which is a complementary therapeutic approach based on affective neuroscience and the emerging paradigm of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to improve cognitive, emotional, behavioral, physical, energetic, relational, and spiritual outcomes in all therapy modalities.
• 1:38
  Doctor. Selvam is also a senior trainer in Doctor. Peter Levine's Somatic Experience Professional Trauma Training Program. He has taught for twenty five years in nearly as many countries in North And South Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, The Middle East, and the Far East. His work is informed by older body psychotherapy systems, newer body psychotherapy systems.
• 2:03
  His book, The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Method for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes was published in March 2022. Doctor. Selvam's work also draws upon his clinical psychology dissertation based on which he has published an article titled Jung and Consciousness in the International Analytic Psychology Journal Spring in 2013. He did trauma outreach work in India in 2005 to 2006 with survivors of the February based on which he has published an outcome study titled Somatic Therapy Treatment Effects with Tsunami Survivors in the Journal of Traumatology in 2008. Doctor.
• 2:50
  Selvam's work is also inspired by the work he did in Sri Lanka in 2011 and 2013 with survivors of war, violence, loss, displacement and with mental health professionals engaged in treating them after Sri Lanka's thirty year civil war ended in 2009. Welcome Doctor. Selvam.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: My name is Roger Selvam and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in California.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: How did you first learn about trauma and dissociation?
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: I trained in a modality called somatic experiencing or SE developed by doctor Peter Levine. I trained in it. I I through that, I came to know a lot about trauma and dissociation. But prior to that, I I was in another training called body dynamic analysis. And in the course of the training, I went into a shock state.
• 3:53
  And somebody, a therapist at the time identified this, identified it as post traumatic stress and got me interested in going to a workshop with doctor Peter Levine who was, you know, coincidentally coming to San Diego around the same time. That's how I got to got to an understanding of trauma in myself and then from there to train professionally in in trauma and and and its treatment including dissociation.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: So you have some lived experience just as far as your own experience even in your training realized it it impacted you because that happened to me as well.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course, we we like most people, learn things that we need to heal ourselves and then heal other people.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: I think that that's a such a common experience where we experience something and Yeah. Then realize something else has impacted us in ways that we didn't realize at first.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. You know, I nearly died in my birth along with with my mother. Probably the most profound traumatic experience of my life. And I also experienced separation from my mother when I was young.
• 5:17
  And repeatedly, she fell ill and my grandmother took care of me. And because my mother and I were so bonded, these separations, though I went to a loving parent's home did not set well with me and it could create a huge abandonment trauma. And and and both these promise had built into it the the dissociation as a means to cope with those unbearable experiences. I think that if I had not gone down the professional path I did, it's not my first profession. My first profession is in business.
• 6:02
  It's my second profession. My second PhD is is in clinical psychology and and more than the p more than the PhD, I've learned more about trauma dissociation through working with myself, not just by myself, but different modalities of therapy. The different traumas I've had, especially the birth trauma, the abandonment traumas, and so on.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: This is one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the podcast and wanted to catch your story because there is such a stigma or stereotype about this kind of abuse or that kind of abuse when really research right now is really especially like Simone Reinder's neuropsych research, all of this is really showing that there are lots of kinds of trauma that impact us and really matter. I think there are so many people walking around with trauma they don't realize counts as trauma because they think, oh, it wasn't so bad as what you see on the news or it wasn't so bad as what is in a movie or something. And so it doesn't count. Whereas, like in this example, a good relationship, but because of circumstances that being disrupted, it really is a trauma that that can be tended to and healed and worked through.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That is what I think the whole field of complex trauma, it's realizing, know, things that happened in relationship over time. You know, at times they're repetitive, at times they're one traumas like abandonment. They have a profound impact on our system, on on on on a body and a brain and leave a lasting imprint with which we react to current events as though we were we were still stuck in the past. And that's what trauma treatment can help us with.
• 8:03
  Yeah.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: And when we talk about complex trauma, one of the things that finally clicked that understanding, or helped me understand that finally, was reading about it and realizing these other things that really were traumatic. So I could list on my fingers or make a list of this was traumatic and this was traumatic and this was traumatic or this was abuse or that was difficult or this was really awful we had to go through. But then also there are actually these traumas that were relational or were attachment ish or were abandonment, these kinds of things or those kinds of experiences where there were disruptions or ruptures in relationships aside for any abuse specifics, and that those are the pieces that really have these emotional layers that can be so much more difficult to pinpoint than a bruise or a black eye or a broken bone or something. And I only learned maybe two years ago about that flashbacks could be emotional even. So your conference, you presented at the ISSTD conference, and what got me at got my attention for that was because you were talking about embodying emotions.
• 9:33
  And one thing that happens with dissociation, so often we think about the amnesia like I'm losing time or somebody else remembers what I can't remember or those kinds of separations, but the emotions are such a big piece of it. How does that work?
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, the what is an emotion? An emotion is the impact that a situation has on us. Yeah. And when it's adverse, the impact is adverse. We experience unpleasant emotions or unpleasant impact on a survival physiology.
• 10:14
  The more intense the event, the more intense the emotions are. And and and for example, the fear of dying during birth or see the fear of dying during a subsequent abandonment. These emotions are states of high stress and dysregulation. Not only do they cause a lot of stress and dysregulation as a consequence, but by the very nature, an unpleasant emotions, emotion like the fear of dying or the fear of abandonment is defined as a state of stress at highest high level of stress and desolate duration. So when the brain sees a senses that the survival physiology is in such a state of disrepair, then it protects it through dissociative mechanisms.
• 11:09
  So the the the the the in the in in the presentation I did at the conference in Seattle, what I was focused on is the following. An intense emotion in a complex trauma like abandonment is a high level of stress and dysregulation of the physiology and the emotion itself is unbearable, you know, because because of not only its meaning, because it just feels so bad in the body. So the the practice of embodied emotions is a practice to, you know, create more capacity to process this emotion so that it, you know, and true. So that it does not continue to get triggered in current relationships and current situations, you know, as though the past is repeating itself without really repeating itself. And and there are two things that the practice of embodied emotions does well.
• 12:11
  By the way, the, you know, the embodied emotion by which I mean, the expansion of the emotional experience to as much of the brain and body physiology as possible or simply to as much of the body as possible. That's what I call call embodied emotion or the practice of embodied emotion. What it does is it spreads the impact, you know, let's say from the heart to the belly or other places. It makes it more bearable. So the emotion becomes more bearable.
• 12:46
  When the emotion becomes more bearable, you can stay with it longer. Our brain can process it much better so that there is a resolution to it, not only in terms of, you know, it it the emotion becoming, you know, over time, not so important, but also in terms of significant insights and and and and and about the meaning of what happened to us, but also what we can do about the situation in the future. So when we do that, when something becomes more to other world, the brain does not have to engage the dissociative mechanisms of numbing or, you know, there's so many ways in which we can dissociate. You know, we can even dissociate from an emotion without dissociating in the classical sense of the word. We go out of a body or we split into multiple parts.
• 13:36
  We can actually consider body and go away from emotion. That would that can also be called dissociation dissociating from the emotion even though technically that's not what dissociation is. Dissociation is where the body experience becomes so intolerable that we do something in order to, you know, go away from it through different means like splitting or numbing, etcetera.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: This is a complete reframing of my understanding of emotions. Now granted, I don't understand emotions a lot in my personal life. Like, clinically, I can sit in a chair and help someone guide through that or with my children, I can sit with them and and hold presence and co regulate with them. But when I'm looking at my own stuff and I think about emotions, I just think about big feelings and I don't know how to control them so by default they're overwhelming. But what you're saying is that emotions what it was profound what you said.
• 14:39
  Emotions are the impact of what we have experienced.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Right. The impact what what that the event on us, really. The impact of the event situation on us. And a situation can affect us in different ways. Right?
• 14:56
  Different aspects of the situation can affect us in different ways. And and and, for example, if I lose my computer on vacation, I go, oh my god. I lost my computer. You know, I can be very afraid. You know?
• 15:10
  On the other hand, a part of us part of us might say, well, you know, we can have a real vacation. You see, a different aspect of the situation can affect us in different ways. So we're talking about those aspects of the situation that are so intolerable to experience that we push the emotional experience away into the unconscious. Those are the things that we're talking about. And, you know, complex trauma has these such intense emotions that have high level of stress and dysregulation built into them.
• 15:40
  And that's why they're so hard to process, but yet, you know, as you know, we heal by, you know, processing what has happened to us, not by avoiding what has happened to us. And it does not always work that, you know, we just, you know, express it cathartically in a charged manner. So that sometimes helps, but eventually we have to, for example, if you have a broken heart and we we the the you know, every time we go toward the brokenness of the heart, we dissociate from it one way or the other. We defend against it one way or the other. Then we have to process that hurt.
• 16:18
  It's just at the level of the body, right, at the level of the brain. It's just an experience. It's not necessarily happening to us now. If you can process that, then, you know, expand that brokenness, that that pain from it to the rest of the body so that other parts of the body can also hold it for us. We can tolerate it and be with it and even come to the point where we go, well, you know, if it were to happen to me again, I'm I can live through this.
• 16:45
  I can process it this way. It doesn't mean that I have to shut myself down and not get into a relationship at all.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: I am I am a very visual person. My I I I am deaf. I have cochlear implants, and so I can't hear at all without those on my head. And and because I am my native language is sign language, I'm very visual person and when you're sharing this I have that image of realizing when I'm just running from my emotions no wonder they keep coming because it is it is the the impact of what's happened to me, so I can't really avoid it. And so avoiding facing it is also giving the parts who need to help process that, like even talking about my heart and my belly and spreading out the impact so it's not as severe of a hit, as severe of an, like stuck in one place as blunt force, you know, and spreading that out so that I can take it, that I can tolerate it, so that I can process it.
• 17:52
  It gives me a whole new visual of even what integration means, even if we're just talking about the integration of knowing what I'm feeling and how I feel about it and what to do about it.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it can be done in a systematic way. And again, the practice of embodying emotion is not a therapy in itself.
• 18:15
  It's a complementary method, right, practice that therapists and lay people alike can use to regulate the emotions, whether they're from very traumatic situations or even ordinary life situations. You know, emotions are overwhelming by their very nature, you know, and life goes up and down and we have these very difficult emotional experiences. You know? If you can find a time and a place and support to embody them, you know, to great or lesser extent, then what happens is that our thinking and behavior improve. And I'll share a little bit about how that happened.
• 18:57
  It used to be thought that cognition depended only on the brain. Now we no longer believe that because there's a lot of research that says even abstract thinking depends on the body. So when the behavior depends on the body, expression and movement, etcetera, depends on the body is quite apparent. So when the behavior and cognition depend on the body, not only on the body, but also on the connection of the body to the environment, this is what is called embodied and embedded cognition. When emotion forces us to shut our body down and dissociate, what happens is that the body at the same time, becomes not so available for cognition of behavior.
• 19:43
  This is the triple whammy, I would call it, not even a double whammy. You know? We have a difficult emotion. We shut ourselves down. We shut the body down.
• 19:52
  We shut the brain down through association or other means, then what happens? Our cognition and the behavior also worsen. That's the problem. But if a cognition behavior were at least intact, we could at least find a way to use them to tolerate the emotional process, the emotional handled impact. They all go down with the emotion that's unbearable and the shutdown that a brain, you know, automatically is programmed to to help us through these difficult times.
• 20:24
  You know? Everyone, no one actually welcomes an unpleasant emotion because it's by an unpleasant an unpleasant emotion by very definition is a state of stress and regulation of the brain and body physiology. Therefore, the brain is geared toward avoiding anything that is opposed to regulation. So when you're processing these emotions, those impulses will come up. We have hold those impulses and then at the same time understand with cognition, thinking that we have to move toward that and find a way to open the body up, you know, and and expand the emotional experience support it so that we it becomes more tolerable.
• 21:06
  So we don't shut it down and then cognition and and behavior improve automatically. I'll I'll give you an example. Yeah? I'll give you an example. I think the you'll tell listeners like, will appreciate an example.
• 21:23
  I I was you know, I I have a big deal of difficulty right now emotionally because grand nephew, my my sister's grandchild, is being abused by his parents. And he's developed obsessive compulsive disorder. And I find myself so distressed about it. Even though it's not my child, I have a relationship with them, but I I'm so distressed by it that that when I'm interacting with the parents, I'm impatient and angry, etcetera. None of it is really useful because they get more defended.
• 21:59
  But when I did a process around it, you know, I I took this discomfort. You know, emotion does not have to be just, you know, sadness or anger or fear. It can be just discomfort. If if you define emotion as the impact a situation has on you, they're just feeling very uncomfortable with the person is good enough, you know, emotion to work with. But sometimes sometimes people don't have, you know, well defined emotional experiences, but they feel bad about it.
• 22:28
  They feel uncomfortable about it. So what I did was I took the discomfort that I'm experiencing in this situation and about with my concern about a child that I care about and found it in the chest. And and I don't remember exactly how it went this session, but I I even started to express to sound like, oh, oh, it's unbearable. Then it started to expand into my body, you know, and then to my kidneys, etcetera. And to cut the long story short, before long, I could be with the discomfort because now it is spread throughout my body.
• 23:06
  And and at the same time, I realized that I could recognize in it the inner child, my child, you know, that I've run into therapy before, that that is so distressed about being abused by a father and not being supported by the mother. You know? And once I got to that insight, you know, the insight about the past in conjunction with feeling relatively okay tolerating the discomfort, then everything just calmed down. I no longer had the compulsion to reach out and, you know, strike out in an angry way at the parents who were ignorant. So I could come from a more neutral place of stating what is happening as I see it and the consequences for the child and etcetera.
• 23:53
  I could educate them rather than, you know, yell at them, you know, and and that turned out to be much better. It's still an ongoing situation. I'm not still happy with the situation, but I'm I'm not as distressed about it as it used to be. You know?
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: I'm just fascinated by this. The example helps. Your explanation just has redefined this for me, broadened this for me. So I have said before in using very Western Americanized examples that I know that we have to deal with emotions. Like, even when I'm talking with clients, like, we we have to deal with emotions because if we don't, they're gonna come out sideways, like Ghostbuster slime or something.
• 24:39
  Like, they're going to show up somewhere. But I feel like now you've explained to me why that is and how that happens. And and I have said that emotions are like, I tell my children that emotions are like the delivery person who's bringing us a package but they leave the package on the porch and then go back to their truck. We don't have the person come in and move in with us and live downstairs. They just drop off the package and come and then our emotions are bringing us this information but we don't have to stay in them.
• 25:18
  This idea of inviting emotions to to to face emotions, inviting myself to face my feelings or to sit with that and to see where it spreads and what information it's actually giving me. This is really powerful.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: And and, Emma, not just sitting with them and see where where it would spread because what happens is that we are programmed to survive, to engage multiple defenses in the physiology, you know, going back to the womb. And therefore, the practice of embodying emotions is an active practice of making sure that the emotions go into places that they don't easily go into. For example, from the birth trauma, yeah, that that took me nearly to the point of having cerebral palsy. Yeah. This I know from processing about trauma, I will have symptoms like cerebral palsy, like, you know, hyper, you know, constriction as well as uncontrolled and spontaneous movement in like seizure.
• 26:40
  So my legs are not available because they're spastic. That's the word I was looking for when I was saying constrictor, hyperconstricted. The energy doesn't go into them and easily. And when the energy doesn't go into a place in the body biologically, then there is no experience to be had there. Yeah.
• 26:59
  And I remember trying to go jogging when I was in college, I would invariably end up with shin splints that was so painful I stopped jogging. So it's through yoga, for example, over a period of time, I opened a body work. I opened my legs. And the more I opened my legs, the more I could also feel the fear of dying or grief, etcetera, into my legs. And the more I could feel them there, the more the upper part of the body became, you know, open enough and spacious enough to process the grief or the fear.
• 27:35
  So it's an active process of, you know, working with the physiological and energetic differences in the body to expand the emotional experience. Otherwise, the emotional experience might just stay in in in in where a where where it's, you know, used to. You know? The poet Rumi said, emotions are like, yes. Just to you know, you're talk about you know, you're talking about the delivery person on the package, you know, made me associate to the poem by Rumi.
• 28:09
  He said, emotions like guests. You know you know, what you need to do is to open all the doors and open all the windows and light the candle, lamp, and they will come in and stay as long as they can. And they will stay longer if the, you know, if the doors are closed, if the windows are closed, there's not enough light in the room, some place. But if they open and well lit, the emotions that come, you know, complete themselves much faster. This has been my experience.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: This is fascinating to me, all of the pieces, and just trying to process this. Even your cerebral palsy example, like the the serendipity of that. I have a son with cerebral palsy, just yes just just this morning he was asking for help because he noticed he had a rash and I said, well, just go put this on it, it's fine. Because that's what he was asking for, but when he came back I said, well, can I can I look at it? Can I what do you where is it?
• 29:17
  Because he said it was just on my arm. I just have a little rash. But I looked and it's actually because his brace on his arm, on his on the side that he cannot feel or move, his brace is too small because he's 13 turning 14, and he's grown really fast. And and so the Velcro from the brace was rubbing on his skin, but he couldn't feel it. And so it caused this rash.
• 29:43
  And I said, well, just putting this on it is I mean, that will help the rash, but it won't make it go away because it's being caused by something else. And Right. Recognizing this whole idea of when we can take the information or invite those those feelings in and instead of pushing them away or only compartmentalizing or only dissociating or these it's so much more nuanced than the gentleness and the compassion of opening up to that and Yeah. Making space for it internally and seeing where that goes and what that means. It's a complete change in perception and experience.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And and and one of the things that I write about in my book is to about different techniques for opening up or expanding different parts of the body. There are ways that even readers, who are not therapists, can use to expand into the legs, to expand into the arms, to expand it in the chest, to expand it in the belly, to expand it in the head and so on. And and to expand not only on the outside, but also they help to expand organs and glands and the brain and the spinal cord toward being more accommodative accommodating of the emotional experience in a way that it's more tolerable.
• 31:25
  And on my website too, integralsomaticpsychology.com, integralsomaticpsychology,1word,.com. Under the sec under the section on on the book, I also have resources there that actually show how to do it, you know, how to do the full steps of emotional embodiment. And I'll describe in a moment what they are. And also how to work with different parts of the body to undo the physiological defenses that we might have developed. You know, brain might have brought in way back in time that we don't even have a conscious memory from birth or pre and perinatal trauma.
• 32:08
  So so the the full steps are the situation that's causing the emotional disturbance. So we need to talk about it to remember it, the details of it, especially the details that affect us the most. That's the first step. The second step is the emotion. The the to support ourselves and get support from others to bring up the emotion in that context.
• 32:33
  Yeah. And this is where we can have psychological defenses like denial. My nephew, I was talking to said, my son doesn't have a problem. What he has is not OCD. He just has a, you know, peculiar habit that many people have, You know?
• 32:48
  And so deny it. Not wanting to face the discomfort of what's going on. And so we had to work with those defenses, psychological defenses, and the the innate defense about not wanting to feel something unpleasant. Yeah. Just wanting to wanting it to go away.
• 33:07
  So we bring it to emotion, and if you cannot find any emotion this is what sometimes people say. I can't find an emotion. If you're feeling bad about something, feeling bad is an emotion. If you're feeling awful about something, painful about something, that is an emotion. That is the kind of emotion I call sensitive mode emotion that most, you know, psychotherapy systems don't do not even pay attention to because they don't pay attention to the body.
• 33:33
  And even if they pay attention to the body, they stuck on primary emotions in their combinations, like feeling happy or sad or afraid or or or or angry. All those are important. But very often people don't have them because they can be pushed away by society or family. Whereas everybody can feel bad. You know, they feel bad enough.
• 33:57
  Even when I feel fear, I feel bad. So that's why I run away from it. So if I can develop sense that I'm feeling bad and if we can expand that in the body, you know, that that I'm feeling bad and develop a capacity for feeling bad, then all these other emotions like sadness and fear that make me feel bad drop into it, you know, much more easily in a more tolerable way. So expanding the body and and to do that, we expand the body, you know, in a in a energetic we work with energetic defenses and physical defenses. I work with I talk a lot about how to work with physiological defenses and defenses in different parts of the body, defenses like constriction or lack of energy to correct it so that the emotion can go into these places and then, you know, you have spread the impact and it becomes more tolerable.
• 34:51
  And then noticing the fourth step, You don't have to all the time. That even though you're feeling the fear of dying that you avoid for all your life, you notice that, hey, you not not only is it tolerable, but you're actually breathing much better than before when you're trying to confine the fear of dying into your chest by constricting everything else around it, you know, arms and legs and chest and trying to keep it in the presence of the feet. So these are the four steps. These are easy steps to, you know, learn and practice. And it's not just meant the book is, you know, primarily for therapists, but I've also written in such a way like a user's manual.
• 35:31
  That's why it's called the the guide so that people can develop capacity for unpleasant emotions, especially unpleasant emotions, but also pleasant emotions so that they can lie enjoy life more. For example, if I'm out of control with love, infatuate, and I cannot you know, I'm not thinking straight and doing rash things, then, you know, embodying that emotion, love, pleasure of it, etcetera, and making it more tolerable so that I don't have to think in terms of she's my soul mate. I have to get married to her no matter what. You know? And you can you can spend time analyzing the data, the impact, and then so that you could see the other person more clearly before you get married to them and then become miserable and then realize that you're you're you had actually fallen in love and gotten married out of transference about someone else.
• 36:25
  You know? So so that that those are the four steps you can actually easily use. And in these days, the the therapists are not available as much, but there's so much demand for mental health, you know, emotional support on every level of society and the timing of the book. I think it's just right that that people can, you know, people can buy it and use it for themselves. It's probably because of that, the book is doing well within a three weeks of the publication of the book on March 22, you know, three weeks that it sold out.
• 37:04
  So the publisher wrote to me and said that we're going to go ahead and order the second printing. And I think that it's it's meeting the need out there, not just among therapists, but also among lay people for emotional regulation in a way that simple, you you to you by using their own body as a resource to create the capacity. So I'm quite happy about it. I'm happy to share this with your with your readers, with your listeners and you. So
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: When we are using so much energy to keep feelings away or to keep feelings out, that explains so much about the constrictions and and blocking things and why we don't have access to things because we spend all our energy shutting it down. Chronic
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: fatigue and fibromyalgia are very common. So
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: Yes. That's exactly what I was thinking of is there are so many survivors that I know both in my office and in peer groups and colleagues who have been through different kinds of trauma and their body in response to that has a lot of pain and a lot of lack of energy or or shutdown or where they cannot function. And so this again is explaining so many pieces of that of how it works and how what those connections are in a way that I think is so often missed when we're just talking to our doctor at the clinic or something.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, one third of the symptoms that people go to medical doctors for are psychophysiological in nature. According to the estimate by an association called association for psychophysiological disorders in New York, you know, set you know, established by medical doctors. So and so so the AIDS study also correlates childhood trauma and emotional distress to a large number of, you know, physical symptoms.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: It is such a common thing. I'm I'm having I'm having so many things happen in my head. Right? Opening up. Right?
• 39:19
  So now, like, all this stuff is coming in. And I think that I'm just seeing all these faces. I'm thinking of, oh, this person and this person and this person. Like, these struggles that are in the body are so much of this other stuff that's going on and not even that it's other because it's all one like that's the whole point. Right?
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: You know, the every at every moment, the new signs of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior, call it I I named it that. There's thousands of studies and dozens of findings show that at every moment in our lives, what drives our us is emotion. And our thinking and our cognition is driven constantly by our emotion. For example, what we pay attention to in the environment, how we perceive it, how we evaluate it, you know, how we deal with it, depends on this emotional state. And that's what they establish.
• 40:28
  Emotion is a starting point. And of course, we can use cognition and behavior subsequently to modify the emotional state. Right? And and but then then again, we end up in another emotional state that that determines the next cognition, attention, focus, understanding, you know, associations and as well as what the behavioral alternatives we come up with and actually follow. So this is a very important thing, emotion.
• 41:00
  And it's not just that the in terms of sadness or happiness or or fear or grief. It's about whether you're feeling good or bad in a particular moment that is good enough emotion to start to work with. And and I hope that this gets across and more people are able to help themselves without necessarily going to therapists. And they can do that with their friends or, you know, and then only if they get into complex experiences that then I recommended the book that they go to therapists or somebody can help them.
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: How do you address or explain to someone who is learning this and interested in this, but as soon as they start to open up to try to welcome that and and like when I think of the example of the delivery person and we just take the information. The reason I tell the kids that because it's something about containment, like you're making the choice. This is not what's invading you. You're choosing to look at what is there and and trying to to open it up that way. When you're working with people with complex trauma and they have the experience of or perception of or both of being overwhelmed by what's coming at them, How do you work with that to help them tolerate as they learn how to open up and be willing to accept what's coming?
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: You can you know, there are many ways in which you can modify the practice of embodying emotion to make it bearable for people who have very limited capacity. Yeah. Because when what happens when you're traumatized over and over again is is that a a physiology so stressed and dysregulated that makes it hard to bear even the slightest memory of a slight an emotion. Yeah. So so how do we go about embodying that?
• 43:05
  This is a good question. And what I've often done, I've in the book, I, you know, present a seven step protocol, you know, and and people like protocols, seven steps. So for example, you start with them. Let's say, is causing you, let's say, fear. Yeah?
• 43:30
  And you the take take the situation, you you bring up the fear. That's the first step. You know, you say, oh, this situation, God. You know, there there's a new variant of Omicron. It's called b one twelve point one, and it's even resistant to antibodies if I've had Omicron infection in the past.
• 43:55
  And so this situation scares me. I just read this morning. Right? So how do I manage this? There's nothing I can do about it, right, other than being careful, but I've always been careful.
• 44:06
  I'm worried that despite my careful all the care I take, I might get infected, etcetera. So the fear I want to manage. Right? Let's say I'm I'm for me, let's say if I'm having multiple traumas and highly dissociated, this would be overwhelming. You know, this could cause dissociation.
• 44:28
  Right? And so what I can do is the following. I immediately look for it in one place. That's step two. Now I start with the situation, you know, the variant and and and the fear it causes.
• 44:41
  Then step two, I look for it in the body. So let's say in the chest, it feels uncomfortable. That's where I feel the fear. Okay. So I put my hand there and try to expand it a little bit.
• 44:52
  But then, you know what I do? I don't stay there for too long. I quickly look for another place in step three where the fear is. Right? I might even put a hand on my belly, and when I put my one hand on my chest, one hand on my belly, the energy will connect between the two and take my experience down there.
• 45:12
  And I look for it there. As I look at my fear in my chest, I look to see whether I also can feel the fear in the belly. Right now, I'm doing it as I you know, right now I'm doing it, you know. I noticed that it's actually my kidneys, not in my belly. So so with step three, I'm looking at it in a different place.
• 45:32
  Right? So first, I started with situation that activates me and the fear. Yeah. And then I look for it in the body, in the chest, and then I set the intent to spread it by putting my hand on the belly, but guess what? It's in my kidneys.
• 45:48
  So I'm noticing it there, and I'm putting my hand there, right, in in in the kidney in step three, and trying to expand it there a little bit, but not for too long. The reason is that if you stay in one place and open it up too much, this can become too much for somebody with complex trauma or somebody who's highly dissociative. So you want to spread it fast. You got it. You know, spread it fast.
• 46:14
  And it's like walking on you know, it's like walking with snow you know, snowshoeing. If you stay in one place for too long, you'd kinda drop into the snow. Right? It's harder to get out of there. And then in the third step, I look for the the fear in the the thing.
• 46:33
  And then, you know what I'm noticing? I'm already feeling better. I'm already feeling better. This is what is integration I talked about. With the body, when I spread the impact, the body can breathe better.
• 46:46
  It can feel better. So now what I'm going to do in step four is to look for it in another place. In a way, is it do I am I feeling better? I actually in the belly, I felt some relief or pleasure. Who knows what it is?
• 47:00
  Now Buddha will say relief from, you know, suffering, but whatever it is, it feels a little pleasurable. So I'm going to go there in the fourth step. Right? And I'm gonna put my hand there to expand that I'm feeling better there. Even though in the background, can still feel the fear, but it's not as bad.
• 47:18
  And then I don't want to stay there too long. I do the same thing here, then I look for where else am I feeling better in the body. Is is my energy moving better? So for example, I have more energy in my legs that feels good. So I'm going to notice that that step that is step, you know, six leg.
• 47:36
  So so step one is activating with the situation, the emotion, and step two, looking for it in one place, the unpleasant emotion immediately going to another place, step three. Right? And then four, I cannot look for sorry. I missed this a bit. Looking for where the the two steps into the emotion that's difficult, it has brought about improvement or integration of my body.
• 48:03
  And then fifth step is where I'm looking for it. In some place, the belly felt better. I looked at it, and then I'm looking at the legs. And because the energy is flowing a little more there, I'm noticing that. Now you know what I'm gonna do?
• 48:15
  The seventh step, I'm going to look at my whole body and see how even though I might still be nervous or afraid of it, I'm not actually right now. And that my whole body somehow feels better. You know? I feel more at ease with you actually. More at ease during the interview, the whole body.
• 48:35
  And I'm I'm looking at the whole body to say, hey, it's it feels better. It feels better. And you know what? When I think of the omicron variant, I'm not so afraid. In fact, things will happen if they happen.
• 48:48
  I'll just continue to be careful. So I don't have to be lying awake, being tense about it because I go to Munich next week for a training and where the COVID protocols are not so stringent and the cases are quite high in Germany even now, but so I'm not so afraid of it. So that's integration. That's seven steps. So there is a you can do it in a in a quick gentle way by spreading the impact very quickly, but not deeply, but superficially when using the improvement it brings to the body and energy in steps, you know, five and six, you know, three four, five and six to to actually bring more stability.
• 49:37
  So this is something that that works well. In fact, I did a demonstration when I did the presentation on complex trauma at the conference on on in Seattle, TD. I I actually worked with a woman who's highly dissociative. She has a pull, dissociative pull out the, you know, top of the head. And whenever she thought of I think there was there was fear around something.
• 50:06
  I don't forget which it was. So we kept working with the fear this way quickly, you know, doing the seven step protocol. Sorry. The seven step protocol and in a in a way expand the capacity slowly. So this is something that, you know, people who are listeners who are especially struggling with, you know, with complex PTSD and intense emotions and dissociation can actually do quickly and it's in the book.
• 50:32
  And I think that I will actually do another video. I have I'll have a video of working just in the four steps, and and I'll do the four steps and seven steps for working with cases that are difficult to work with. I think each I just got the idea right now to do that. You know? Just think about what else what other videos can I take working on myself?
• 50:53
  Here's an example. I can do this. So thank you.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: I tried to move my hands around and sort of follow your steps as we were going. And Yeah. What I loved about it is that it felt very bilateral and it felt kind of dual awareness, but what I loved about it is that just exactly what you said, it felt very integrative. And I know that can be a sensitive word for people with DID, but I mean rather than something coming at me, like big feelings out there, they're coming at me and I'm trying to avoid them and run away from them, I have this image of, like, I'm standing my ground and I am the one choosing to welcome this and to open up to this and noticing where I feel it in my body in different places so that it was this bigger experience and a more whole experience rather than a disjointed experience.
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: The integration not only takes place in the body, also when I become my body has more capacity, then the body gets more connected to the environment. And it gets connected to the archetypal resources of the universe that people who are very traumatized, tried are afraid of, you know, when they shut the body down. They also get disconnected from the world. So in your description of the experience, I kind of also imagine that you were also talking about that, you know, so.
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: I I really it felt very like, I feel empowered. Like, that I have a tool that I can not just contain myself. Like, I don't wanna be too big or I don't want my feelings to be out of control or what if I am overwhelmed or this or that but that I am I myself am the resource.
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm glad that you had that experience.
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: That's really beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing with us.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much for this wonderful opportunity. What I would say regarding one more thing I want to say is that why do people split, you know, into different parts? They do because of unbearable experience. This is the best, you know, they do that. They compartmentalize the experiences in order to bear the difficult experiences of life.
• 53:38
  And and and and and that so anything that we can provide them to create more capacity for tolerating those awful feelings that lead to the split can actually make them more integrated. Not only bring them together in the body, but also bring the different parts together and and and make it perhaps less necessary to, you know, to to split into different parts. Yeah. So that you know already. I know it's nothing new to you, but I'm just suggesting that you can do it through the body this way.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: It's such a powerful opportunity for a perspective of healing or an experience of healing that is sometimes unfamiliar to those of us who also avoid our bodies, really, because of abuse or complex trauma experiences in the past.
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: Right, right, right, right, yeah.
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: So even even that in itself in itself is integrative because you're feeling your body and your emotions at the same time.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you so much for sharing with us today.
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: Thank thank you for the opportunity, Aman. Good luck with everything, and I hope I hope that this is of benefit to your listeners as well. Thank you.
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: Will you tell us the name of your book one more time?
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: It's called The Practice of Embodying Emotions, a guide for improving cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes. It's available on Amazon, Google Books, and Barnes and Noble, and so on.
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: Thank you, Irma. Thank you very much.
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
• 56:24
  We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too, being human together. So, sometimes we'll see you there.