Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 765: Integrative Psychotherapy with Dr. Brian Tierney

Transcript

Episode 765: Integrative Psychotherapy with Dr. Brian Tierney · The Trauma Therapist

0:10
Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gamiferson. My
0:14
mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to be human,
0:19
to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in who
0:23
we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating authenticity,
0:28
genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more about
0:33
my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com. That's
0:38
the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. Okay, here we
0:42
go. So five four, three, two and one, our folks,
0:47
welcome back to the podcast. Very excited a with Mike today Doctor Brian Tierney
0:51
Brian, welcome, thank you, Thank you guy. Good to be here.
0:56
Awesome. So Doctor Tuney is a somatic psychologist in private this in San
1:00
Jose, California. He's an adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integal Studies
1:04
where he teaches neuroscience to sematics students. Brian has taught the neuroscience of trauma
1:11
resolution for a decade now and he's working on publishing his first book after his
1:15
dissertation, which includes his own unique approach to trauma resolution, hands on therapy
1:21
and social artistry that he's calling visionary somatics. Brian, Welcome to the podcast.
1:27
Before we go in here, share with our listeners where you're from originally
1:32
and where you are currently, and then we'll dive in. I'm from Saint
1:36
Paul, Minnesota originally and currently hail from San Jose, California. Okay,
1:44
all right, so you have very interesting background, eclectic to a certain degree,
1:49
intricative, of course. How did you get into this field? Well,
1:55
really it was through my own suffering. You know, I was doing
1:59
a bachelor's in mar marketing and I decided and I started feeling miserable and just
2:05
you know, socially anxious, and I didn't realize that I was traumatized by
2:13
my upbringing, you know, traumatized by secrecy. I guess you could say
2:17
that kind of yeah. Yeah, So there's really just my waking up process
2:25
to my you know, through my own suffering. And what did that suffering
2:30
look like, if I can ask you that question, Well, it was
2:35
this sensation that I had in my throat and that kind of got amplified by
2:43
social anxiety. So right from the beginning, I was already starting to have
2:46
this instinct and this intuition about the connection between psyche and soma, between mind
2:53
and body, because I knew when I went to the medical doctors that there
2:58
was something psychogenic of it, that there was something psychological about it. So
3:01
that then when there were saying, oh, you got something wrong with your
3:06
gud, you have the gastrosophagal reflux or something, part of my like my
3:12
philosophical self or my deep self knew that that wasn't that wasn't all of it
3:16
because I knew, I could feel that there was a social component, that
3:21
there was an anxiety component, and I just knew that it was psychogenetic.
3:25
I knew it had psychological elements. So that really got me going towards you
3:30
know, the healing arts and massage therapy, cranio sacra therapy and men's work
3:36
and all this eclectic stuff that I've been up to for for quite someone some
3:40
time. So when you when you realize or began to realize that there was
3:46
this connection between psyche and soma and that your upbringing had played a role in
3:53
this. How old were you at this at that point? Yeah, I
3:55
was twenty, Okay, I was twenty. What did the suffering look like
4:01
up until that point, how was it manifesting for you? Well, I
4:09
think that it was I had unexpressed. Well, I think it was kind
4:16
of like a trauma regarding the Christian church. You know. I was just
4:23
talking to a colleague the other day about being publicly shamed by a pastor for
4:30
kissing my girlfriend when I was sixteen and so, and I didn't realize how
4:38
deeply that had shaped me until many years later, actually, when I had
4:46
already moved to California and started to do bodywork and to do massage. I
4:49
hadn't realized that my body was so ashamed of itself, so ashamed of pleasure,
4:59
so a shame of of the desires that are circulating through this body.
5:05
I didn't even know that was there. And then so through backward engineering,
5:11
I was able to kind of and through some therapy, I was able to
5:14
kind of go, oh, you know, like gosh, I'm so repressed.
5:18
And that's what that's kind of where it came from, is through some
5:21
of these some of these ideas that are that feel so against the body and
5:30
its desires and so on. And that was starting to kind of emerge in
5:34
my twenties and erupt in my twenties. But I didn't have a language for
5:39
it. And I think that's one of the reasons why it constellated in the
5:43
throat right, because I didn't have a language for it. I didn't know
5:46
how to express why I was suffering. It was just like showed up right
5:49
here, right, and I just it was like a cork was stuck in
5:53
there, and I didn't know how to pop it out. Still, you
6:00
did you undergrad and did you focus on psychology or what? Now the undergrad
6:06
was marketing. My first job out of school was marketing director for a healing
6:11
art school, a residential healing art school in northern California. That was my
6:15
way out of the Midwest. And that's when I got introduced to all these
6:18
really eclectic and interesting healers coming from more scientific neurological approaches to you know,
6:27
creating a sacral therapy, you know, like the kind of more WU stuff
6:32
like polarity therapy, more classical anatomical massage. So all these different approaches,
6:41
all these different approaches. So, uh, you decided to pursue a graduate
6:46
degree and what was the impetus for that? Was? What were you thinking
6:51
when you went in I'm going to study this. I want to study this
6:54
or focus on it this. Yeah, So it was it was a long
7:00
time later that I went to graduate school. I was a massage therapist and
7:04
creating a sacral therapist for many years. So at this at Hertwood Institute,
7:11
which is where I lived, you know, up on the hill as a
7:13
marketing director, and all these different traveling teachers and all that people were doing
7:19
trauma resolution work. Just they didn't really have that frame for it, you
7:24
know, like but that work was being done right through the body work approaches
7:32
and it was sematic psychological, so it had a sematic psychology to it,
7:38
and it was kind of framed in that way. So modalities were taught,
7:44
techniques were taught, but it wasn't necessarily it didn't in the beginning. It
7:51
didn't make me go, oh, I want to get a psychology degree.
7:56
I didn't make that connection. I want to be a body specializing in trauma
8:01
resolution and I want to develop a skill set for that. But it wasn't
8:07
until many years later that I was like, ah, I want to get
8:09
my doctorate. After a long journey of being a body worker and teaching body
8:16
work and teaching cranios acra therapy, which has a trauma resolution branch. In
8:22
fact, it's kind of the core of some of the craniosacral teachings. It's
8:26
like a sematic experiencing training. It's kind of like one branch of craniosacral work,
8:33
or a couple branches of it are like their own brand of somatic experiencing,
8:41
you know what I mean. So I kind of taught that brand,
8:45
or a couple different brands of trauma resolution through the craniosacral community for years,
8:52
and then you know, like somewhere in there, I was like, you
8:54
know what, I just really love psychology and I'm going to just I want
9:01
to get licensed. And that's when I went to graduate school. Okay,
9:07
Now, I mean, as we talked about in the bio, I mean,
9:11
you do a lot of different things. So when when you talk to
9:13
people, what's your thumbnail sketch of what you do? And I guess behind
9:20
that, what is your passion in this or your mission in the work you
9:24
do. Yeah. Well, one of of course the unique things about me
9:35
is that I'm a hands on therapist. So like I've taught neuro anatomy and
9:41
the anatomy of the nervous system for many years in the context of being a
9:46
body worker. So I touch people when I do trauma resolution work. Not
9:50
all the time, you know, I'm trained in the MDR and all that
9:54
stuff, but I'm often touching the body. Okay, so my hands aren't
9:58
in the direct interface with the body as we're talking about things. I can
10:07
tell you more about the model and visionary semantics and some of the neuroscience if
10:11
we have time to get there. But the fundamental thing, right and my
10:16
niche is that I touch people. So I, you know, do an
10:20
intake interview, We talk, I gather, I get a history and so
10:26
on. But then pretty soon we're on the table and my hands are in
10:31
a direct interface with the nervous system while we continue to explore. Sometimes I'll
10:37
have those tappers on the feet, you know, so that we're doing some
10:41
of the E m d R work, but on the table with me touching
10:46
them. Yeah. Now, so walk us through. For example, someone
10:54
comes to you, give us kind of an idea of how you would work
10:58
with them. Yeah, heavily contextual. But let's say let's work. Let's
11:09
pluck an example where you know, somebody with complex trauma so it isn't just
11:16
a one off as the literature says, and consistent with what shows up in
11:20
my practice, the one off sorts of traumas are easier to work with clinically,
11:28
there's less complexity from a body worker's perspective and from a psychologist perspective,
11:37
like a one time physical accident like a car accident, is fairly easily cleared
11:43
through some re sequencing work and things like that, and so it's the complex
11:50
trauma cases that are complex and take quite some time. So I'll pick a
11:54
complex trauma case to orient too, And this person had a car accident,
12:01
but this is at the end of a very large set of already existing traumas,
12:11
sexual abuse, physical abuse, all sorts of marginalization happening because they're they're
12:26
an ethnicity that's non white and so on, so racialized trauma. So all
12:33
of those factors are are at play with this person. And then at the
12:41
end of this sequence of horrible traumas, you have a really bad car accident
12:46
where they were brought to a hospital and basically racially abused at the hospital and
12:58
put in a psychiatric ward, not because they there was an objective reality behind
13:07
the clinicians that put them there, but because of some racialized distortions, and
13:15
so basically just a horrible situation, right, just you know, physical trauma
13:20
plus all this other like the worst case scenario, pretty much worst case scenario.
13:26
Okay. So really, as is the case with a lot of complex
13:33
traumas, the whole first long, first phase is just about helping that person
13:39
to stabilize because as soon as we would even approach anything that was the content
13:46
of her trauma, her nervous system would be off to the races. So
13:52
and because she has that sexual trauma history, there's no way that we're going
13:58
to do touch because and because I could tell right from the beginning that approaching,
14:05
even if it was slow and respectful, that her nervous system would just
14:11
ramp up and then she would go into very quick speaking, you know,
14:16
and just basically dissociate and go into her headache pattern, which is one of
14:22
the salient features of her symptoms is horrible headaches. So really it was just
14:28
you know, in the beginning phases, just teaching her tools to self regulate,
14:35
you know, which I think is a classic part of our modern day
14:39
skill set, right, just you know, some visualization techniques, some breathing
14:43
techniques to slow things down. And then what I found interestingly is this is
14:52
where the talk therapy portion was really necessary in the beginning, where this is
15:00
where I'm like, I'm so glad I'm a talk therapist too, and not
15:03
just a body work or whatever, because some meaning making frames were super essential
15:09
at this point that if it was just AMDR, if it was just bodywork
15:15
or something, these sorts of healing contexts that were in the framing of the
15:22
therapy itself wouldn't have happened. And I find that they were essential. So
15:28
framing about how you know, she needs to move from caregiving others and having
15:35
others be the center of her universe to actually moving to take care of herself.
15:39
She has a special needs brother that she is constantly taking care of and
15:46
displacing her needs onto. So right, so like providing a context for her
15:52
was essential, like this is about you. Therapy is about you, and
15:58
it's time for you to start moving away from putting all of your attention and
16:03
care elsewhere, and it's time for you to to move it towards yourself here.
16:10
And actually the whole family was involved in framing it that way, so
16:17
and this was a pivotal moment in the framing of the therapy and and in
16:22
the the kind of creation of the of the therapeutic alliance that then set the
16:29
tone for doing processing work with the MDR. But we're still at this stage,
16:36
even after a year in, we're still not at a place where I
16:40
would this is a client I wouldn't touch yet. Okay, we're still We're
16:45
still not there. Yeah, yeah, okay, let me let me just
16:48
pause here for a moment. I want to thank our sponsors again. We're
16:52
talking with doctor Brian Tierney. Will be back in two seconds. Okay.
16:59
So I want to get to the point, Brian, where you are working
17:03
with your touch and talk specifically about what modality, what type of body work
17:08
are you using when you're working with someone who's experienced trauma. What does that
17:12
look like? Yeah, I have a whole range. So I go from
17:18
the really really neutral, non movement touch forms like craniosacral therapy, where it's
17:26
pure work with the nervous system and so it's stillness touch, there's no movement,
17:33
and it's providing a place of coherence through the stillness, providing stillness,
17:41
and it's really stabilizing. Craniou sacral touch is super stabilizing. You ever had
17:47
cranial cranio sacrona no super stabilizing, It's like a it's like a shared meditation
17:53
in a way. So like the hand just becomes this kind of a place
18:02
of orientation for the body and for the nervous system, it's just stillness.
18:07
So that's one like a neutral, non stimulating, and it's not adding anything
18:12
to the nervous system. And that's quite good for traumatized bodies, right,
18:17
because if you start, it's already added to so much that you don't need
18:22
to add anymore. But there's some cases where I'm doing more deep tissue stuff
18:26
where it's really it really feels like the trauma is in the musculo skeletal system.
18:33
So, and the reason why I'm gesturing at my neck is because of
18:38
how deep the trauma gets into the orienting reflex which is in the neck,
18:44
right, and how loaded these neck muscles can get. Wow, And so
18:49
I'll get in there and start to kind of gently but deeply iron out the
18:56
musculo skeletal stuff in there. And then the third component is more of I
19:04
guess I would call it like a distraction technique, therapeutic distraction, which is
19:12
kind of like shaking the body, taking limbs and kind of shaking them and
19:22
moving them like this. And what that does is that gives me a sense
19:26
of some of the neurological holding patterns. So this is the third one is
19:30
more of a movement approach, passive movement approach, where I'm unwinding neurological locating
19:38
and unwinding neurological patterns through movement. It's really fascinating to me to hear you
19:47
talk about this. I havn't spoken with too many people who work directly with
19:55
touch relative to trauma, and it seems really interesting and fascinating. And when
20:06
you're touching someone, and I love the way you described your progression in a
20:11
sense, you know, to stabilizing, you're not even moving in the beginning.
20:15
When you do start to move or when you even place your hands,
20:19
that's in response to what your intuition, the combination of what the person is
20:25
saying or feeling, or what it's into intuition. It's consent. There's a
20:32
there is a very distinct spatial shift often right because we're moving from being both
20:41
vertical, both vertical and talking to being on the table. So that spatial
20:49
shift is part of the part of the whole thing. So and what's informing
20:57
that, Yeah, it's intuition to you. For example, this case,
21:02
my intuition based on feedback but also just my gut is this person isn't going
21:10
to lay on the table for probably another year, so that would be two
21:15
years in, whereas other people that's what they that's what they like about my
21:21
history, and they're coming in for that and fifteen minutes in we're on the
21:26
table, you know what I mean. So, so it's definitely an intuition
21:32
thing. It's a consent thing, it's a negotiation thing. Now with the
21:37
obvious coveiat that everyone's different, right, all situations are different to a certain
21:44
degree. Now, there's the common understanding that you know, trauma resides in
21:48
the body, of course, and you have other modalities SI sci that work
21:56
with the body, not always hands on, though, how would you kind
22:02
of distinguish those modalities from what you do and and the effectedness and so forth.
22:12
Well, let's take let's take somatic experiencing. How about that you're you're
22:19
trained in sematic experiencing, yuh or you studied Century motorcycle Theapy. Yeah,
22:25
Pat Ogden. Yeah, so I was trained as a role for like Pat
22:29
as well, So I have that. And that's one of the things I
22:32
love about Pat too, is she was a role for Yeah, I'm not
22:37
sure I know she she was into dance. She's she's amazing that woman.
22:42
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well so yeah, I think I'll take the
22:49
example of sematic experiencing just because I'm I did a lot of foundational work in
22:56
my neuroscience course kind of transposing some of my ideas with the sematic experience.
23:03
So that's what's most available to me at the moment. So I would say
23:07
that in practice, the it's it's the neuroscience, how the nerve, how
23:17
the knowledge of the neuroscience informs my touch practice. And there's considerable overlap in
23:25
my practice with sematic experiencing, and that in how I operationalize neurological the neurological
23:33
sciences. Okay, So and it and it orbits around the central issue of
23:38
sequencing, how the brain does sequencing, and and that trauma is a sequence,
23:48
right, that is, and that there's a neurology to sequencing, and
23:55
that there is there is a clinical skill set that can that is that's developed
24:00
over time in us in the different camps of drama resolution basically are different camps
24:07
of resequencing, different brands and approaches to reseequencing. But to me, in
24:12
my books, the fund the core of it is neurological resequencing. And then
24:18
we just have our brands and tribes and languages for how that and clinical clinical
24:26
tools that some of them cut across different tribes, some of them don't.
24:32
But to me, the fundamental is is how the brain does sequencing. No
24:37
for define sequencing for our listeners. So sequencing is you know, reality comes
24:45
to us in fragments, so like are for example, the visual information.
24:52
Visual information comes in uh, super fragmented and in like a scatter plot of
25:00
time and space, and that information needs to be sequenced and put in a
25:07
temporal order, in time order and in a spatial order that puts it all
25:14
in a kind of coherent flow in a sequence, right, And the organ
25:18
that does that in the brain is the cerebellum. Okay, the cerebellum is
25:26
the master sequencer in the brain. And so like for example, the latest
25:33
research about the efficacy of VMDR is that it's basically all about this arabellum.
25:40
So it's like cerebellum. Cerebellum governs fine motor skills. So, you know,
25:48
essentially, like what happens in trauma, just to kind of reduce the
25:52
complexity and put it into the framework of sequencing, is that trauma is a
26:02
fragmentation process, okay, and that the normal flow of sequenced reality what we're
26:11
used to. And this gets into default mode network stuff. I don't know
26:15
if we want to get into that, but you know, we have the
26:18
kind of a kind of sequence that predicts and projects, predicts and projects our
26:26
reality over and over again. It's kind of like our daily hallucination, right,
26:30
that's the default mode network, and that's our day to day sequenced reality
26:37
that we keep unprojecting and it's habitual and it just keeps ongoing. But trauma
26:42
fragments that, it breaks it up and it puts a big break in the
26:48
flow of sequencing and so that yep. So then hence exactly hence resequencing getting
26:56
structure back into the flow of perception. Yeah, okay, all right,
27:03
So as we kind of wind down here and we're speaking with doctor Bryan Tierney.
27:08
Your website here is somaticdoctor dot com. Who should who do you work
27:17
with? Who's in your kind of wheelhouse as it were. Yeah, I
27:23
work with all traumatized bodies. I used to even work with infants. I
27:30
work a little bit less with children now and focus mainly on people about ten
27:38
years old and older, people that are interested and embodied and approaches that want
27:47
to get the body moving, and people interested in touch. And I work
27:51
with couples and yeah, and people interested in the expressive arts too. It's
27:57
something I didn't talk about in our talk here, but I also used the
28:02
arts a bit, expressive arts and so on. Yeah, that's what kind
28:06
of intrigued me about you and your your bio. It's very kind of eclectic
28:11
and rich, you know. Speaking with you, Brian reminds me of an
28:17
interview I did a while ago with a gentleman who's since de seased. His
28:23
name is Jerry was Jerry vest And when I interviewed him, he was an
28:30
older guy, but just and he worked with veterans. And he said,
28:37
you know, when I asked him about the challenges of being a male and
28:41
working with touch, he said, how can you not work in this field
28:48
of trauma without touching? Without like communicating and joining in a sense, And
28:56
it was so kind of refreshing and surprising at the same time to hear this
29:02
kind of grizzly guy who works with veterans talk about like touching other veterans healing
29:10
them. These guys have been just jacked up, traumatized. So that that's
29:15
kind of an entryway to ask you, as a male therapist working with touch.
29:23
I'm assuming there have been some challenges even getting into this. How was
29:29
that flowed for you? How have you worked with that and is it an
29:34
issue? You know, I just got the chills you you're sharing this story
29:41
about this guy, just this crazzy old guy. I love that. I
29:45
just wanted to say that first. But no, it actually hasn't been a
29:49
huge issue people. It's I don't know, it just feels like it's intuitive,
29:57
just like you might just like why why not? And yeah, there
30:03
can be situations where it's like there is a sense where touch is too much,
30:10
too fast, But somehow that just seems to always get communicated. You
30:15
know, there's this kind of story that all people are going to dissociate and
30:21
not have access to their no, But to me as a practitioner, that's
30:27
been in this work for so long, I pick that up right away.
30:33
I mean sometimes later on downstream, I might have somebody say, ah,
30:37
that was a bit too fast for me, and then I'll go, oh,
30:41
yeah, that signal that I had when we made first contact was correct,
30:48
and it helps me to fine tune that moment of contact. But usually
30:53
there's really obvious messages coming from the body or from the person that is informing
31:00
Okay, is it a go or is it not a go? Awesome?
31:04
Awesome? Yeah, all right, So how do people contact you, Brian?
31:10
What's the best way? Yeah, through the website. There's a consultation
31:14
button you can click on that's sematicdoctor dot com. I produced some cool content
31:22
on my Instagram which is the Sematic Doctor, and then consistent with all that
31:26
is my Gmail which is sematic doctor at gmail dot com. Feel free to
31:32
I have a trauma paper that I that I like to share and stuff like
31:36
that. That's kind of cool. By the way, that you were asking
31:38
for favorite books, have you heard of this one? Trauma Tragedy Therapy by
31:45
Stephen Levine? Have you heard of this one by Steven Stephen Levine not Peter
31:49
Levine. Stephen Trauma tragic trauma, tragedy therapy, tragedy therapy. No,
31:57
it's brilliant, guy. I would actually be super happy to come back on
32:04
the podcast and chat it up about this one because I think it's a really
32:07
important one. All right, Well we'll do a follow up. I love
32:12
to have you back. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. Well,
32:15
look, it's awesome talking to you, super inspiring. I mean, there's
32:19
so much to talk about, but I really appreciate you coming on here and
32:22
and sharing what you're doing. Thanks a lot, guy, good to meet
32:25
you. Right likewise, take cat Yeah all right, yeah, bye bye,