Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Veronique Mead

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Guest: Veronique Mead · 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 longtime 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 we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
• 1:02
  Our guest today is Veronik Mead, who majored in cross cultural studies and premed for a BA at Antioch College Yellow Springs, Ohio, where the focus was on experiential learning. She then found a medical school with a similar emphasis on learning by doing, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, whose mission is to create lifelong learners. This style of learning has served her greatly in the exploration of her health and looking into factors that may have contributed to and continue to perpetuate her own chronic fatigue. She attended the University of New Mexico for her family practice residency, having spent her early years in Santa Fe. After completing her medical training, she traveled the country doing different stints as a temp doc.
• 1:50
  She tested out different environments, such as private independent outpatient practices in Michigan and Rhode Island, hospital based clinics in Maine, the Indian Health Service in North Dakota, and an isolated clinic in the outer banks of North Carolina. She then settled down as a full time faculty in a small community based residency training program that was just getting started in Concord, New Hampshire, where she delivered babies, taught residents and medical students, bought her first house, and made good friends. In 1998, she took a year off and realized that she could become more like one of her role models, Rachel Naomi Remin, who works with the relationship between mind and body. Veronique went back to school to become a somatic psychotherapist. What she learned helped her made sense of even her own symptoms.
• 2:41
  She got a master's degree and specialty training in working with trauma, bonding, and attachment. Her research has taken the form of scouring the medical databases for over twenty years. She has put together new ways of making sense of chronic illness and finding commonalities between chronic illnesses. She has also been using herself as a case study, examining and working with her symptoms and their relationships to past and present life events. And she shares these throughout her blog to validate just how much is changing in our understanding of disease and tools for healing.
• 3:15
  Her full biography and referenced works can be found on our blog, including links to her blog and website. We welcome Veronique Mead.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: So my name is Veronique, and one of the things that's not in my bio is that I've had a chronic illness myself for twenty years. And what I've had is chronic fatigue syndrome, which has often been thought to be psychological because there aren't many reliable tests and no real biomarkers, even though there have really been a lot of studies that have found abnormalities. And so my chronic illness has been part of how I've learned a great deal about the effects of really subtle trauma in addition to the ones that are more overt. So that's part of what really informs what I've learned about trauma and chronic illnesses as well. That was so well done.
• 4:19
  Good. All right.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: I was just appreciating that. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background in trauma and dissociation?
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Sure. So trauma and dissociation, my training is as a somatic psychotherapist. I retrained after I left medicine where I was a family practice physician. And my own area of personal interest has been in chronic illness. And my sense, what I've really begun to learn from understanding trauma is that all of the effects of trauma start with some level of disconnection, whether it's disconnection in our emotional lives from other people, relationships, work life.
• 5:06
  But what got me really curious in my training was whether a certain quality of dissociation could also happen in the physical body to affect risk for chronic physical illnesses. And that's what I've ended up following. But the whole concept of dissociation and disconnection from a trauma perspective and how I look at it is something that links to the state of freeze. We're pretty commonly familiar with fight and flight and how that can lead to symptoms. But our understanding of freeze has been less common.
• 5:45
  And so that's where I get curious about what kind of symptoms can happen from a state of freeze. And that can lead to all the different variations in the spectrum, whether it's brain fuzz, difficulty with cognition, whether it's fatigue, low energy, numbness, and whether it's disconnection from different parts of ourselves in all kinds of different ways.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: So it fascinates me, and that's exactly why I contacted you because we have on the podcast talked about some of these pieces a little bit, and it's led into this conversation. It started when I was sharing actually about our My children are all adopted from foster care, and so they all have different trauma histories. And there were things that, even though their stories were very different, that we were noticing some patterns in their bodies. And I was talking about it on the podcast about, some of our own issues. Like we have Sjogren's and different things that we know are physical symptoms.
• 6:59
  We also had cancer that was originated in scar tissue. And so we had to have surgery and chemo for that, and it's become this big thing. And all these different things that were just hard in our lives, but because there's so many people in our family, it was a lot of hard, right? Then when I started sharing about this on the podcast, kind of as a side note, what happened was that I started getting all of these emails of, I also have this trauma and this is what's happened to my body, and I have trauma and this is what's happened to my body. And so people started talking about it and we started this conversation online.
• 7:41
  And so we've talked on the podcast a little bit about polyvagal theory and a little bit about ACEs. Can you expand on any of that or or introduce ACEs a little bit, or where do you even want to start in teaching us today?
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: There are so many threads, aren't there, into how we begin to understand trauma and its effects. And I think maybe one place to name right off at the beginning is that what you just said patterns. And that different kinds of trauma can lead to the same chronic illness. And people with different chronic illnesses or the same chronic illnesses may have had all kinds of different types of trauma. And what we tend to understand from our society and in medicine and in traditional medical care is sort of the concept of major trauma that what they talk about is big T trauma, such as war or rape or abuse.
• 8:47
  And that tends to be all we think about. And what the ACE studies, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Studies are doing is they have narrowed it down to 10 specific kinds of trauma, which I'll name in a second. But there have been dozens of very specific ACE type studies and hundreds looking at different types of ACEs to see what the effects are. And the ACE studies are just the tip of the iceberg. So even though there are 10 specific types of trauma that we're beginning to see have all kinds of effects, whether it's mental health conditions or chronic physical illnesses or addictions, the ACEs as I see them, are introducing us to the enormity of the effects of trauma.
• 9:47
  And one of the big limitations people will talk about is, well, I had this type of trauma and it's not in the 10 ACEs. Doesn't it count? And the answer is yes. That all kinds of different traumas have the same types of effects. And so if we look at the ACEs, the 10 ACEs are five different kinds of physical or emotional abuse.
• 10:14
  So it can be physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or physical or emotional neglect. Those are five ACEs right there. And they can be really hard to identify, you know, someone who's grown up in a family that looks pretty normal on the outside, where there's really no overt physical abuse, may still have experienced the sense of fear that they might get hurt, or maybe they have a parent who's an alcoholic and has rage attacks. And maybe they've never hurt their child when they were drunk, but that threat is still perceived by the nervous system as a potentially life threatening thing. And so when we look at the ACEs, the 10 ACEs to see whether we might have experienced them, we can really easily miss and think, Oh, I wasn't physically abused, therefore I didn't really experience trauma.
• 11:22
  So the first five ACEs can be on a range from very subtle to totally overt. And then the other five ACEs are having had a parent who had a mental illness. And I know even in my own mind as a physician, I would think, well, maybe that was a very serious illness that was disabling or required someone to be inpatient in a hospital. Maybe it was schizophrenia. But a child who has a parent who had postpartum depression, for example, a mother who, for the first two years of their life, was really overwhelmed because of her own traumas or difficulties in labor and birth, that would count as an ACE.
• 12:09
  So a parent with a mental illness, a parent who has substance abuse issues, these are reflections of actually their own trauma, multigenerational trauma for parents who have those kind of symptoms. Having a household member who's been in jail, because that's also a reflection of trauma in that person's life. But it tends to mean that there's other stuff going on in the family system as well. And then let me see if I can remember the other violence between parents is another ACE. And the original 10 ACEs talk specifically about it being the mother who was abused by the father.
• 12:57
  But what the understanding of ACEs is helping us really understand is that it's not it doesn't have to be that specific. It could be the father that's being abused by the mother. But if you have a sibling or some other member of the household who's been abused in any way, as a witness, that is also traumatizing for the child. So we can really begin to see just how many nuances there are into the different exposures that can constitute trauma. I think one of the big lessons to get from ACES is that it is forging a trail and blazing the trail here in North America and in developed countries around the world especially.
• 13:47
  But it's becoming a global movement to begin to recognize the enormous of impact of trauma, and that it's actually really a public health crisis. And so ACEs are also, just to be really specific, these are events that happened before your eighteenth birthday. And that just helps quantify that these are events that happen when our nervous systems and our other organ systems are are developing at really high rates. And that's when we're the most sensitive to what's happening in our environments and to developing perceptions of threat that can get stuck in our systems to cause symptoms.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: The thing that I love most about this, which is a funny thing to say because we're talking about trauma and that there are terrible things that have happened. But the thing that I love about it is that it puts on paper an explanation of what has happened, not just to our body, but in our body, which helps us feel less crazy. Like, there's actually things happening, not just all in your head, but actually in your mind, in your brain, and physiologically, and neurologically, and all these ways, there's stuff going on. And it makes sense then why we experience some of the things that we do, but it also gives hope because if it Yes. It means if there's something going on at that level, that ultimately there's stuff we can do about it.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: That's exactly how I think about all this. Because just as you say, it's sort of who wants to talk about trauma and who wants to have to think about it or look at it. And and there are a lot of people who find the concept of ACEs really distressing and disturbing because it feel it seems like we're focusing just on the negative. But if you don't understand the roots and the potential impacts and what can initiate these symptoms, then you don't know where to look and you don't you don't really have a sense of what's causing problems, and it makes it much more difficult to have a sense of what you can do. So that is exactly my sense as well.
• 16:04
  If we can understand what trauma does, then it gives us these tools to have an impact. And what you're describing, we're actually learning that even people who have symptoms from emotional or physical symptoms. It doesn't actually matter what the symptom is. The causes are not psychological. They're not in your head.
• 16:31
  They're epigenetic. The role of trauma in affecting our bodies and our physiology and our biology and our emotions happens because the environment interacts with our genes by attaching molecules to these genes and affecting how they function. So whether they turn on or off or something in between. And that's actually what drives all these symptoms, emotional or physical. And I also came up with the tenth ACE.
• 17:06
  It's actually the most common and the most subtle, which is losing a parent such as to divorce or separation. That's actually an ACE. And what has also come from expanding the ACEs is that in the original one, it didn't really quite count as an ACE if you if one of your parents had died. But that's clearly the ultimate loss of a parent. And so that fits into being one of the ACEs, even though it's really common and, you know, fifty percent of our population here in The US has divorced after getting married, it doesn't mean it has no effects.
• 17:48
  So coming back to your question, see if there's anything else you wanna ask about this. Because it's it's really very hopeful and there really are tools that we can use to make a difference in our health and in our symptoms.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: I think on the loss of a parent, I would even push that further because I am seeing more and more, at least in private practice, where people have serious trauma that is simply from misattunement, which we also talked about on the podcast, but that disconnect or even the cultural issue of people being on their phones instead of having eye contact so that their parent is physically there, not beating on them or hurting them, but also not really emotionally connected at all, or in other cases, actually aggressive to the kids. And so I've seen I feel like that boundary is getting pushed more and more in society as well on that ACE.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: I totally agree. And I actually kind of think about that as its own category because it's so enormous and so subtle. I actually think of this as invisible ACEs. So when the parents physically present, but emotionally absent or unable to attune. And I've been kind of building on the concept of ACEs with the terms.
• 19:08
  So I think of this, this is known as developmental trauma. It's also called complex PTSD. And I think of it as adverse childhood relationship experiences or ACRES, just to build on the ACEs term, because all of these things do tend to be inter combined, intertwined. So parents who are abusive are clearly not being attuning. And that very subtle end of the spectrum is something that we tend to really miss in our culture.
• 19:42
  We tend to not see it. But so parents who travel a lot or who are really pulled into their work or social media or who can't attune or who can't be who don't have the their own ability to regulate emotionally, and therefore can't really cope when their child has big emotions or fears or a difficult time. So I think this is actually a whole separate category. It's so big.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah. My mind is going so many places at the same time. I'm sorry. It's so good.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Well, one thought I have is I think the more we understand trauma, the more we can look at it from a place of non judgment and even compassion, whether it's compassion for ourselves or compassion for those who are causing more trauma. Because when parents are unable to connect or attune, or when they are causing distress for their child, it actually is telling us that this is the parents' trauma. These are the effects of parental trauma. And so it links then into multigenerational trauma, and how the impact on one generation as a child will very high risk to perpetuate in the next generation. So not everyone who's been physically or emotionally abused as a child is going to physically or emotionally abuse their own child.
• 21:17
  But they could easily get pulled into misattuning or having difficulty regulating their own emotions and their own system, and therefore have trouble really caring for their child in a way that can help prevent that from some kinds of effects, whether it's from attachment trauma or more subtle things like emotional neglect from impacting their own child. So in a way, the threads, you know, that are all coming into your head, once we start to understand trauma, the enormity of it and how it's really in so many different aspects of our lives potentially, it's kind of mind boggling.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: That was a good example that you gave. I know that in our personal life, we have a desire to be a good parent. I have a desire to be of some help and that their lives now are better than they were before, perhaps, you know, most days. But it's also true that because we have so many special needs kids that our medical bills are just astronomical. And so I do have to take work that requires a lot of traveling.
• 22:36
  And there is a lot of times where one parent is with a child at the hospital for weeks or months and another parent is home and then we have to trade. And so we manage it as best we can. Like there's one parent at home with the children all the time, and we take turns as much as we can. And we use technology in positive ways, you know, for FaceTiming when we're out of town or, when I leave town, we write a letter for each day we're going to be gone, the kids open that in the morning. We do the things that we can, trying, but at the same time it's still their experience.
• 23:14
  Even though it's our best, just acknowledging, not in being mean to ourselves way, but just acknowledging that it's still their experience and that's still difficult. And I feel like being honest about that is as much a part of the healing as anything else, because we don't want to participate in the denial of it either, because that's not healthy as well.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: I think what you're saying is all so real, because ultimately being human, there's just, it's inevitable that we will all experience some version of trauma, whether it's in early life, like during prenatal events, if you have to move across country, that's a stressful thing. If you have a difficult birth or complications, those are things that are not in our control. And so the fact that we can begin to understand what trauma looks like can really help us make a difference in all these kinds of ways, just as you're describing. So there are certain things, and in a culture, say, where there is no parental leave, or where there isn't universal health insurance. There are all these things that we have to do as individuals to put food on the table and to keep a roof over our heads as best we can.
• 24:33
  And so the more we understand about trauma, the more we can do all these kinds of things you've just described. Because then we know the difference that it can make. And then we know just kinds of the little things that we can acknowledge or name it. It's really ultimately, it's not about being perfect. It's like as parenting, that's not about being perfect either.
• 24:54
  It's about repair and attuning wherever and however we can and acknowledging what we are doing that might be causing problems and then working on it ourselves so that we're not burdening our kids with thinking they have to fix it. So all of those things come into the side that you talked about earlier that gives us hope.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: I think that it's so important though and makes such a difference. I have two two of my sons have autism and they both just like to scream a lot. And even though those are their like, we get why it's happening, and we do the best we can to prevent it. There's just a great deal of our day, every single day has them screaming. And for all the rest of us, that's really triggering, for me and my other children.
• 25:43
  So part of me wants to isolate from them, or part of me wants to push that away because it feels like danger, right? But it's not actually healing for them and trying to find proactive ways to connect with them and not just to prevent the screaming from happening, which also just logistically needs to happen, but to actually connect with them in that place and find ways to do that. And one of the best things that have happened is that we actually got a hammock and moved it into our office, and now they just come and swing. And so they're not screaming, but they're getting that vestibular movement, But also, I can do what I need to do, but they feel that closeness, but I'm not too intrusive to them sensory wise, and it's working really well.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: That's great. I love it. It's exactly the example of how the solutions, the tools, the supportive things, they're gonna be different for everybody, for every family, for every individual. And when you have a sense, a context to use for understanding symptoms or reactions or triggers, whether it's for yourself or a family member, for example, then it helps you keep looking and understanding what might work and why, or what might not be working and why, and to keep honing it till you find something. I love that example.
• 27:08
  That's great.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: How would you talk about the way that those epigenetic traumas or the impact of it kind of starts this process where so many of us end up with these illnesses that are really resultant from that?
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: I think that's a really great question. I have some theories, some thoughts on it. One is, there's a body of research called critical period programming. And what that refers to is that, as we're developing in the womb or in childhood, that's when our neurons and cells are growing at the fastest rates while our organ systems are developing. So maybe your pancreas cells are developing, they'll be developing at a certain time when you're in the womb, and they'll be also beginning to connect to the nervous system, and that'll help regulate blood sugar levels and insulin levels.
• 28:10
  And so the timing of exposure to an environmental event, let's say a toxin, like we know we've heard a lot of us may have heard about thalidomide, this drug from, I believe it was the 1950s that women took to decrease nausea in pregnancy. And what they've discovered only afterwards was that the medication was causing congenital malformations in babies of these women who had taken the medication. And so the babies might be missing limbs or organs, or some of them died. It was a very startling and humbling thing to realize back then that actually medications do cross the placenta and the barrier there, which we hadn't realized before. What that showed us was that it's the timing of exposure impacts what's developing at the highest rate, and different toxins can influence different organ systems.
• 29:18
  And so depending on the day of pregnancy, day twenty one, day twenty two, day twenty three, it affected different parts of the baby's body that were developing a growing. What that very stark reality showed us, taught us, what we begin to see is that exposures to much more subtle things that aren't specifically poisons or toxins or medications also have an impact. And then that begins to come back to things like prenatal stress and experiences that a mother has when she's pregnant, or in labor, that those things have an impact as well. And so what it's saying is that there is a programming that happens in our bodies early in life to help prepare us for the environment that we're expecting to have. So if we have a very stressful experience in the womb, we as a baby, our nervous systems and our immune systems and our bodies expect that's what it might be like when we get out.
• 30:33
  And so everything begins to orient and becomes programmed towards an environment with danger or a threat. And what we've been finding, what the research has been finding, there's a whole body of research called the fetal origins of adult disease, or the developmental origins of adult disease. And they find that prenatal stress can actually increase the chance of a baby being small at birth, and that small birth weight, the general number is about a baby that's five and a half pounds or less, has a much higher risk of developing chronic illnesses like type two diabetes, obesity, and other diseases of insulin resistance, but they may also be at risk for mental health conditions. And this is happening in part because of epigenetics that are being influencing how genes very early in life are gonna be orienting how they function later in life. So it's it's kind of shocking and hard to hear because it feels as though there's nothing we can do about what happened in the past when we were in the womb or when we were little children.
• 31:44
  But they do see that epigenetics can reverse. And we do see there's a study that's been done with trauma therapy that veterans who have epigenetic changes because they, that are associated with PTSD, with post traumatic stress disorder, when they do trauma therapy and their PTSD resolves, the epigenetic changes that are associated with PTSD also resolve or reverse. And so that's come again, it comes back to the hope. The more we start to get this and use these tools, the more we're gonna learn about just how much might be reversible way, way, way more than we've ever thought. And that chronic illnesses, half fifty to sixty percent of the cause is actually environmental.
• 32:35
  It's not all genetic. And so again, there too, there's this sense that, you know, there may be a lot more reversibility and improvement of symptoms possible than we've realized.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: That's fascinating to me because I saw this happen literally with one of my children. Oh. We had we had one of our foster children was not able to go home, so we went ahead and adopted her, and then a sibling came along. Right? And so we were in court one day and, the drug test she had gone to take the drug test and she had failed it, but it also came back positive for pregnancy.
• 33:12
  And so I was checking the math of when I knew she had been out of jail and how long, like, how long how possible like, how far along her pregnancy could be. And I was just guessing, totally guessing, but I looked up the stages of development for that, and it was all this midline stuff. Right? And so she and she was just positive for everything across the board with drugs and alcohol and all kinds of drugs, just polysubstance. And so then her pregnancy, she was just arrested over and over and over again, but she kept getting bailed out, and it was all this drama legally.
• 33:51
  But then she had been they finally revoked her probation and her bail, and she had to stay in jail. And so she had been so med seeking in the jail that when she was finally going into labor, they didn't believe her. Oh, yeah. And so they just left her in her cell. She wasn't even in the medic's office.
• 34:12
  And there were twins actually, and she had not had enough prenatal care for us to even know there were twins. And so she had both of the twins in the jail cell, and one of them passed away right away. But the other one that we ultimately adopted had all of the structural midline stuff is all kinds of a mess. Her airway and her heart. And she had, they almost treated her like a Pierre Robin baby, but it was just the order of repair.
• 34:42
  Like, she didn't have the cleft palate. She didn't have a jaw. She didn't have a tongue. Like, all of these pieces that and so she has spent her whole life in the hospital almost and just surgery after surgery after surgery and palliative care of, like, how do we where do we draw those lines of how much we intervene or we don't intervene and those kinds of conversations. But what's been fascinating to me is watching this play out, not not in a fun way.
• 35:09
  Again, I know it's trauma, but recognizing that that's her own trauma because if you were only taking the social connotation, you would think she's the only child we've had from birth. So she's actually scot free and she's fine and it's going to be great. But it's not. Her body was so impacted both physically and then also her mind and the stressors from the medical trauma that she's gone through that she goes through the same kinds of experiences as the others.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And are you talking about the baby of, I think it was your foster child?
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: The baby? It's a sibling. Yeah. It's a sibling. Yeah.
• 35:50
  So now we have both of them. So so I know that's a literal and a medical piece of it, but I just saw that play out of how everything impacts everything and that developmental stage, like from now on is harder to work with. Her airway is kind of important, and so keeping her alive is work.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: Well, I'll give you another story, another body of research. There's a psychologist named Tony Madrid in California, who I met twenty years ago. And the research he's done, he stumbled across a cure for asthma. When you mentioned airway, it made me think of this. And it sounds like we're dealing with two different ends of the spectrum here with what may be going on in your family.
• 36:38
  But similar causation. What Tony found was he and his colleagues were working with a family. Their nine year old girl had asthma that was quite severe. She was on a lot of medications, steroids multiple times a year, emergency room visits. And they tried all these standard things for what we think of as a psychosomatic illness.
• 37:00
  And whether it was family therapy, hypnotherapy, visualizations, relaxations, and and some things would help for a couple hours, but Chrissy, as he calls her, her asthma would always come back. And one day the mom, they decided they were done with therapy, it wasn't working, but the mom continued therapy. And one day she said, You know, I don't feel love for my daughter. I feel terrible about this. And she cried.
• 37:26
  It wasn't something she really wanted to say, but I think maybe because of the relationship she might have developed in therapy with Tony, it somehow came out. And Tony had just been reading a book by two pediatricians about bonding. And what they learned in the seventies when we started doing hospital births and separating moms and babies at birth routinely to help moms recover. And, you know, since they were tired, we put babies in the nursery. And they they started noticing that it didn't seem to be working as well as they thought, and so they did studies, and they have a book on this from the seventies and another in the eighties.
• 38:07
  When moms are separated from their babies, for whatever reason, whether it's that the baby is sick, or they have jaundice and need phototherapy, or they're in the intensive care unit, it makes it hard for them to feel that bond. It actually interferes with that bond a lot of times. And that's what Tony recognized that Chrissy's mom was saying. She had had a bonding disruption. And he had got her whole history, and it found it turned out that her husband had left when she was pregnant, so she'd been all alone and totally devastated.
• 38:42
  And when Chrissy was born, she'd had jaundice and had been treated in an incubator, and she hadn't seen her baby for the first eight hours. And so what Tony did is he used EMDR or hypnotherapy. He's been doing this for thirty years now. EMDR is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It's one way to work with trauma.
• 39:03
  And he treated the mother, Chrissy's mother, to help heal all of these events, these traumatic events we wouldn't think of as traumatic. And when it healed for Chrissy's mom, he did this in one session, when she went home that day, her child's asthma was gone. That's amazing. It's totally amazing. It's totally crazy.
• 39:30
  And they don't usually or always work that fast. Sometimes he works with the mom for weeks or months. But as the mom's symptoms improve, the child's symptoms improve. And I've spent the past twenty years wondering, okay, what kind of research could help explain this? I mean, even today, Tony still has trouble getting people to participate in his research because people don't believe it and hospitals aren't interested and physicians don't think it's real.
• 39:59
  But there are studies starting to show up now that explain that this may be happening because of epigenetics. So how do we stop blaming the kids? How do we stop blaming the parents for the impacts of trauma? And for example, there's an intergenerational study being done by Michelle Wright out of Yale, finding that when mothers are stressed, it changes their epigenetics. And that babies' epigenetics mirror what's happening in the mother.
• 40:36
  Wow. Yeah. So it's painful to hear that our stress might infect our kids. However, the more we understand that, the more we can start to see that all these things we talk about for trauma that seems so simple and just plain mild, like self care and relaxation or mind body practices or yoga or doing things so that we aren't more stressed than we have to be, that they actually have deep positive potential repercussions for our child as well as for ourselves. And so that was one study I found.
• 41:13
  Another one was this one that I mentioned about epigenetics reversing if you treat PTSD. And so all of this begins to give you a trail of breadcrumbs showing that these things are not in our heads. They're not something we're doing on purpose or out of weakness or laziness or because we're broken or weak, you know. And so Tony's published a few small research studies and he does this in his private practice. And what I'm really curious about is can this be helpful in other realms with other chronic diseases or very early before symptoms have even started.
• 41:53
  And so I've developed another category of early trauma called adverse babyhood experiences or AIDS. And instead of like ACEs going up to 18, these go up to age three. And they cover the science that Tony talks about and that Claussen Kennel, the two pediatricians he'd read about have looked at from pre and perinatal events. And all of it's really oriented, how do we increase our awareness of trauma as healthcare professionals, as individuals with symptoms, as parents, as children, so that we can really start to work on it for ourselves as individuals, and also begin to start prevention and addressing things more actively in our society and in medical care and in mental health care.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: But even even in that example with with our daughter, what kind of trauma has that mother gone through Yeah. To be 20 years old giving birth to twins in jail Exactly. That are that much impacted by polysubstance abuse?
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all of it. And so it's all these multiple threads that are additive, all these effects add up. So it makes it, I think it's part of what I'm starting to see in the ACES news that I'm following, and there's a wonderful news information site. I don't know if you're familiar with it called ACES connection or ACES too high. It's online based in The US, and they have articles.
• 43:26
  If you sign up to their newsletter, you get articles every day that people are publishing, and that's happening in the news, and they share that as well. And what people are doing in all walks of life, whether it's in education, schools, or in jails, or in public health. And there's there's really a groundswell and a movement that's happening.
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: What do you think or how do people work on reversing this? When you're saying the the effect can be reversed, how did people do that?
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: I think it depends to some extent on, not fully on the type of trauma, but what age, like you alluded to this, the older we are, the more work it takes, because there's been that much more sort of strengthening of the trauma pathways, the survival But there are all kinds. So for example, I've just recorded a talk for an online e course with an organization called Gold Online. They're worldwide, and they work with maternal infant health. And so I talked about adverse babyhood experiences in this one hour talk that'll be published sometime in the next few months once the credit there will be continuing education credits available. And so, as the earliest place where we can actually use it for prevention or very early treatment, like with Chrissy who has asthma, there are a ton of things we can do in pregnancy, or before and after.
• 44:56
  So for example, there's a midwife, Jenny Joseph in Florida, who has a clinic for pregnant women, and she uses an approach that they refer to as trauma informed care. So every staff person in her clinic has an understanding of trauma, and it goes beyond that. They actually work with each other as staff to be really clear in communication and work through things so that they are really deeply a team. And they have access to everyone. They turn no pregnant woman away.
• 45:34
  That's another huge part. With their awareness, they also provide that access and sort of a safe home. And this alone, a midwifery practice during a person's pregnancy, regardless of all of the trauma she may have experienced, they have birth weight babies, the low birth weights are much decreased compared to in the county and in the state of Florida. And there are fewer preterm births in her practice compared to the county and state of Florida. And these are two risk factors for chronic health conditions and mental health conditions later in life.
• 46:13
  So trauma informed care, a safe place, access to prenatal care in an environment that also helps educate you makes a huge difference. But that's just one thing. They're also finding, for example, that doulas in pregnancy, having an assistant, a person who's just there to support the mom, can reduce all of the complications that can happen with pregnancy. So that's only two examples, and that's very early in life. But what do you do for example, if you're me and you, where we're adults and we're working with our chronic health conditions or symptoms, or you're working with older kids?
• 46:51
  And there, the trauma therapies, there are somatically based trauma therapies where that training is specifically oriented to understanding trauma, understanding and recognizing how it shows up in symptoms. So whether our symptoms are in the fight flight end of the spectrum, such as anxiety, having trouble slowing down, always being on the go, kind of being a bit hypomanic. You know, our society loves people who are workaholics. That's the fight flight end of the system. And then they're also trying recognizing more of the freeze states.
• 47:28
  So I've had chronic fatigue for twenty years. That's more at the freeze end of the spectrum where I feel relatively immobilized, or my own physical symptoms were being exhausted, and where I actually felt death like, or as if I would die just from moving. And I didn't believe that, I knew enough from all these trauma perspectives, but my physiology felt that way. And that's actually a survival strategy when no other options are available. So if you can't fight flight your way out of a traumatized home, a child really can't escape.
• 48:09
  They can't survive on their own. And so freezing, numbing out, dissociating, watching things from the ceiling, having not a whole lot of emotions or being on the depression end of the spectrum, that's all in the freeze end. And so for an adult, what I've done is really these somatic trauma therapies, EMDR can be that way if the therapist has training in trauma, somatic experiencing, which is also called SE, tapping emotional freedom technique is referred to as the tapping solution, internal family systems, cranial sacral therapy. I have a list therapies on my blog. My blog's called Chronic Illness Trauma Studies, and I have two blog posts.
• 48:56
  One has books about all of this in relation to chronic illness, but it also applies to all the other effects of trauma. And then I have another post on therapies, and it talks about different therapies for different kinds of trauma, multigenerational trauma, babyhood events, childhood events. So that's that's how we start to look at this picture. And it's it's I've begun to see it. It's it tends to be a lifelong process.
• 49:22
  If we have long standing emotional or physical symptoms, it may be a lengthy process, but I've come a long way with my own health as an example. Like, I was mostly bedridden for almost a year at the very worst of my chronic fatigue, and my symptoms now are way, way reduced, and I can do a ton of things. I can run errands and do walks and give talks and things I couldn't do. I had trouble talking on the phone in the past. And it's been a process.
• 49:55
  It's been a number. I've been working on this for over ten years. And it's also made such a difference in my life in ways I never predicted. I got married at the height of my chronic fatigue, I met someone. So you just never know where it's gonna take you in good ways, in good places.
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: But all of the therapies that you're referencing that help with this or that really make a difference all include the body in some way.
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: Yes, and part of this is from an understanding of trauma, which is that trauma makes us disconnect. And it also happens in the parts of our brain that are not accessible to our conscious awareness. These survival parts of our brain, the parts that perceive threat and make us anxious, and we don't even know why or what, these are all happening under the consciousness radar. And so these therapies work with the body's intelligence and the awareness of the body to access this information. The perspective that's being gained in trauma therapies is that symptoms happen because our body never got the message that the trauma was over and that we survived.
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Can you say that one more time?
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So trauma is different from stress. Stress, when the stressor goes away, our symptoms go away. But with trauma, it's something severe enough to tell our nervous systems that we have to be in a survival mode. And it becomes trauma when we don't realize, when our nervous system does not get the message that it's over and that we've survived.
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: So that's why being present in our bodies in now time and being safe is so important, why safe touch is so important, why being connected in our own skin is so important, caring for our bodies is so important because all of those send signals physically that the trauma is over and that we are safe now.
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: Exactly. And they're sending signals through the nerves, through the nerve pathways. This is where polyvagal theory comes in. It's sort of information comes from the brain to our body, but we can also send information from the body to our brain and also from our experiences. So that sense that you described of, if you notice something that makes you feel, let's say pleasure or joy or ease, if you then take a moment and say, so where do I notice that in my body or in my experience, just for a moment, oh, okay, my heart just softened a little bit and I feel this sense of softening in my chest, or I just sank down a little further into my chair, or, oh, I can feel my foot on the floor.
• 53:12
  Any one of those things is actually anchoring that information and conveying different information back to the nervous system about present moment safety and that things are not what our nervous system thinks they are.
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: That's fascinating.
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: It is, and that's just one small way that it works. The somatically based trauma therapies are all working to help unhook these perceptions of threat that aren't real anymore, these triggers. So for example, if someone's been in an accident, and we feel that sense of like, I don't even wanna go near where that happened, because it makes my heart start to beat really fast. If you're doing somatically based trauma therapies, you might notice that the heart rate happens when you think about that event. And in a very gentle way, you can work with that to help the fight response that got stuck because it couldn't solve the problem or you didn't have time to avoid the accident, it can actually help your body access, maybe there was a movement, maybe it was a steering wheel you wanted to move, and there's some unconscious movement your body wants to make that could have helped you escape if you'd had enough time, or if there had actually been enough room.
• 54:35
  And if your body can complete that movement, or feel that feeling in a place where it can also knows that it's safe in the present moment, that's one other way that we begin to unhook those perceptions, and convey to the nervous system that it is over, and that you did survive.
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: Wow. That's just really good stuff.
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: It's really good stuff. It's really good stuff. It's so encouraging to know that it exists too.
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: Well, it makes such a difference, not just, I mean, for the hope, but really feeling that result of being able to connect to your body and to other people in good and safe ways and bringing healing at that level.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, and it doesn't all happen through therapy. Sometimes just the awareness that you've been triggered can make a difference. I had a exacerbation or a flare of my fatigue some years ago, And I was like day 10 of being flat on my back and hardly able to do anything. And I kind of thought, you know, this is lasting longer than my usual flares. I must have gotten triggered, but I couldn't figure it out.
• 55:51
  And that's partly because it's outside of our conscious awareness. And then one day, I figured out that it had been triggered from a conversation with a friend about a difficult home birth. And I used to do obstetrics when I was a family practice physician, and there's a lot of trauma in that field that we don't realize. And I hadn't realized how much it impacted me. But within two hours of having realized that that had been my trigger, that my fatigues flare had started within hours after that phone call, I was back to my regular baseline that was much better and less exhausted.
• 56:32
  So it doesn't always happen, but sometimes even that can make the difference in a flare up, for example.
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: That's amazing that it's really about connecting to our ourselves physically and understanding what's going on and recognizing the stimulus and response. All of these layers being put together really empowers us too. It not only gives us hope, but it empowers us to be able to do something about it rather than just something that's happening to us.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and it helps us to keep having compassion for ourselves even if our symptoms and as our symptoms continue And to keep working on not judging what happened, not judging where we are, not judging that it may take some time. And so all of these pieces keep adding up. So just as the effects of trauma can add up to make us sick, all of these different tools can add up in their effects to help us come out of it also.
• 57:33
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. Thank you so much. Absolutely.
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: It's it is. It's really good to share with others who are getting this growing sense. And like you say that it is, it's so empowering.
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: Is there anything else that you want to share that we didn't get to touch on?
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: Let's see. Oh, because dissociation is such a big concept in your podcast, There was a reference I thought of, it's not specifically about the most severe end of the spectrum results of, let's say, dissociative identity disorder, which you talk about. But it talks about dissociation from trauma in a really easy to understand non trauma based book. It's by Christine Caldwell, who was one of my teachers at Naropa University, where I trained in somatic psychology. Her book's called Getting Our Bodies Back.
• 58:27
  So that could be a helpful reference. And for those who are who really want the science of, like, say, the freeze state or the cell danger response. There's a researcher at UC San Diego named Robert Naviaux, n a v I a u x. And he's been developing a theory called the cell danger response, the CDR. And he started to do some research, for example, finding that eighty plus percent of people with chronic fatigue have the metabolism of a freeze state.
• 59:03
  And he's done a tiny pilot study with kids with autism, showing that if you interfere with the danger signaling in the mitochondrial cells, you can actually reduce the symptoms of autism, at least for a little while. So, his work is another area. And I have a lot of the science on my blog. So if that's helpful, chronic illness trauma studies, you can get a lot of the references. I focus on the science because we thought so much that this is all psychologically based and in our heads, I really wanted to provide a place to help people see how it's much more than that.
• 59:38
  That was great. You're so clear. And I loved how you kept bringing it to little summary statements or clarity about what that means, what that means about what we can do and what we are doing already and connecting and all of those things and with examples from your life. I thought all of that seemed to make it really digestible, seems to me.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: Good. I hope so. I hope so. There's a really there's a wide range of listeners from survivors to clinicians, and so it's a big gap to bridge.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: Yes. Exactly. Very exciting. I'm so excited that you have a podcast like this.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. That's so gracious of you. Anything else? Do you need anything else before I let you go?
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, you know, you said that you mentioned autoimmune diseases and Sjogren's. There's a study that's been done in ACEs showing that ACEs do increase risk for autoimmune diseases. And the study was done in 02/2009 with fifteen thousand patients from the original ACE studies. And they found that a person with an ACE score of two, so if you'd lost a parent to divorce, and one of your parents was depressed, that could be an ACE score of two, there's a seventy to eighty percent greater chance of ever being hospitalized for an autoimmune disease. And they also found that they looked at 21 autoimmune diseases, and in the five most common autoimmune diseases that are linked to ACEs, type one diabetes was the first one.
• 1:01:24
  There was also rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. And I I would imagine that Sjogren's is on that list. I know it's on Robert Navio's list of diseases. So I just wanted to name that because autoimmune diseases are so common and increasing and seem to be so irreversible. And again, just knowing that trauma is a risk factor might really make a difference for some people.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I very much enjoyed talking with you.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: Same here, Emma. I enjoyed talking with you too. Stay in touch.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemsbeat.com. We'll see you there.