Latest / Lucid Interval Podcast / Complex Trauma, Attachment Styles, & Spiritual Healing - Dr. Patti van Eys

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Complex Trauma, Attachment Styles, & Spiritual Healing - Dr. Patti van Eys · Lucid Interval Podcast

• Andrew Heacock: And we're live. Dr. Patty, thanks for joining me. Patti Van Eys: I'm so glad to be here today. Thanks for inviting me. Andrew Heacock: Thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me. We've already talked a couple of times now. We were just talking before and conversations with the two of us seem to be easy and fun, which is always a good time. ⁓ So how did you become the illustrious Dr. Patty? Patti Van Eys: It's even funny that you call me that because that's what the kids that I serve call me and I didn't even tell you that. You just started calling me that. So ⁓ it's like you intuited it. ⁓ I am a clinical psychologist by training and I was trained mostly in child and adolescent work. Although I've worked also with some adults, but ⁓ my aspirations in the beginning were were to be a developmental neuropsychologist, which sounds fancy. But mostly what that means for children is that I'm really looking at the problems children may be having with attention, with learning. So I would be getting referrals from the school setting a lot to say what's going on with this child's particular learning profile or ⁓ their attentional system, that kind of thing. But what happened is, and how I really became Dr. Patty, is that ⁓ at the very beginning of my career, after my internship, which was with Boston Children's Hospital ⁓ up in Massachusetts, we moved to Nashville, Tennessee, which is where I am now. And that move was because of my husband's work, not because of my work. But we moved down here, and then he got moved again down toward Huntsville, Alabama. So I started practicing down there, my very first job in community mental health, and I'm like, I'm a developmental neuropsychologist. You know, I'm what, 28 years old or around there. And I hung out that shingle in community mental health. And I began getting referrals from a very important entity, which actually changed my whole life trajectory. It's a facility called the National Children's Advocacy Center. And for those persons who aren't familiar with that, We now have in the state of Tennessee, which is where I am now, we have more than 40 of these. But at the time in Alabama, there was one of these advocacy centers and there are thousands now across the world, even internationally. But it was the first one. And I just happened to be put into the town with that. And this was in like 1989. And so this advocacy center was set up for children. who have had allegations of sexual abuse. At the time, that was the only kind of referral that was brought to the advocacy center. And the people there would do forensic interviews with the children. They also gave services like therapy and parent groups for the non-offending parents and all kinds of services like that. Adult survivor groups, survivors of sexual abuse also came there. Anyway, I'm over here hanging out my developmental neuropsychology. shingle, which is a lot about assessment, and suddenly I'm getting referrals from this other place. And I began to see these children in my office for assessment. And the referral was always, we can't figure these kids out. They're so different. You know, they're doing their interviews with the Department of Children's Services and with law enforcement. It's like they must be psychotic or something. So we need you, psychologist who does assessment, to figure it out. And I began taking these referrals. And as I began to get to know these children in a safe, calm, play therapy looking office environment, they began to tell me their stories. And their stories were of very complex, chronic, early abuse and neglect. that had happened in their life. Now they didn't tell it to me like that. what they, how they told me was maybe I'm showing them a picture and saying tell me a story about this picture. And they began to tell me this story of this child in the picture having terrible things done to them. And the story begins to come out. And the reason they looked different to the interviewers back at the advocacy center is because when they were being asked these questions in an environment that didn't feel safe, they were triggered to trauma memory and their behaviors that would come out looked frankly psychotic. And so I started having more of these referrals from the advocacy center until one day they would call and they said, you know, you've been coming to our meetings weekly to tell us about these assessments. And it sounds like these children feel safe enough to talk to you, so why don't you just keep them as clients? And when about half of my caseload were those children, they called again and they said, you know what, why don't you just come work with us? And so I remember the day that I had gotten that call. And I was driving home down Highway 52, I think it is, and the sky was really blue. and the sun was really shining. It was a fall day. I think it was September. And I was thinking, you know, do I really want to go work with child sexual abuse exclusively? Because that's what I would be signing on for. Is this the work I really want to do? And Andrew, I got the clearest answer. And there's only been two times in my entire life where I feel like I have heard with auditory hearing. message from spirit, let's just say. And what I was told was, this is your destiny. This is for you. Yes. Go. This is what you're supposed to do with your life. And I remember just tearing up and just the rest of the way home just crying. I'm like, can't argue with that. So I told them yes. And everything changed for me after that. We were in that area for five years and I became part of the workings of the National Children's Advocacy Center, which at the time also involved us going to other parts of the country to kind of plant advocacy centers in other places. And by the time we came back to Nashville in 95, we had an advocacy center here in Nashville. that I also worked with part-time doing parent groups. ⁓ But that's when I also became a professor at Vanderbilt University here in Nashville. ⁓ over time there, became the director of the Center of Excellence for Children in State Custody. So here I am, right where I'm supposed to be. And it was through those experiences that I became Dr. Patty. I was serving children who were extremely vulnerable. In the Vanderbilt Clinic, was four children in foster care, state custody. Some of them were in residential treatment, but in state custody. And I began to... see a pattern over and over again in these children, they would be sent to our clinic when nobody could figure out what to do, which rings that bell back when I was being sent kids from the advocacy center. Like, these kids don't seem, we can't figure them out. And they're disrupting foster homes and they're having problems in school and we need help to understand them. Well, I needed help to understand them too. because I'm like something's going on here that's beyond just trauma, it's beyond just PTSD. it's, ⁓ I think it's in the realm of disorganized attachment systems, which we can talk about later, which gives birth to dissociative symptoms. I began to look into dissociative phenomena and there was very little written about that for children, very little. and I grabbed onto what was out there, but I began to say, this is what I'm seeing. I know this to be true. And this was before social media. This was before internet searching. We didn't have Google. This was, you know, this was late 90s, early 2000s. And I found a woman up in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Her name is Fran Waters. And I saw some things she had written on this phenomenon in kids. And so I reached out and I go, I need help. I need a mentor here. I am seeing child after child after child with symptomatology that is perplexing their caregivers, perplexing their teachers. They're bouncing from residential treatment to inpatient to foster care back, you know, and back around. And Fran said, I gotcha. And she began to teach me and I just was mentored beautifully. I brought her down to Nashville. had her train about 50 therapists down here. ⁓ She and I began to have a very close relationship and I not only learned from her but then I began training with her as well and ⁓ really kind of getting myself seated firmly in my calling which as you know was this is the group for you to work with. So that's a long-winded response to kind of how I became Dr. Patty. Andrew Heacock: That was wonderful. That was a wonderful as an origin story. And it was actually kind of moving on a number of levels. mean, one of the first things that struck me was the way that the kind of winds will blow your career, especially at the beginning where it's like something will open up and all of sudden you start becoming an expert in it and then there's this demand. And the thing that was among the more impactful things, I have all kind of intellectually interesting questions about the things you said about disorganized attachment and dissociative identity. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: But you hear this voice, you have this moment on the road with these one of these two moments in your life. And I felt this sense of irony because you're talking, this voice is talking to you about children who hear things, know, or who are perceived to be psychotic and that, you know, hearing a voice could be seen as evidence of psychosis. I was to an undiscerning mind or an untrained mind. And I was wondering if you have felt that irony in that moment and if it's still something that you, Patti Van Eys: Mm-hmm. I'm sorry. Andrew Heacock: you experience in your life of having a spiritual life and then also being a person that is a woman of science. Patti Van Eys: Yes, that's such a great observation that you made about the voice because I will tell you earlier in my life I would not have told that story. Right? So there's a bit of a stigma around hearing voices as you're pointing out. I would not have told that story earlier on except to my intimate circle of people who know me well. So... ⁓ Yes, at this point in my life, I'm very clear that my spiritual life is a very important driver in my work. Very important driver in my work, and I've come long way to get there. And I have to say that these children who call me Dr. Patty, and their parents who do, they've been my great teachers ⁓ around their ability to have become fragmented themselves in their sense of core, because that's what dissociation is. It's a fragmentation of the parts of us. ⁓ But they also have, they have such strength and resiliency. And I've come to learn that there has to be something greater than those children to have held them together as best that they could. And that there's a spiritual core to each of us that is our true core. in my work, I didn't mention this, but as my work has progressed, because I know a lot about the developing brain in the context of trauma, in the context of family violence and chaos and poor attachment and all the things, because I know about that, I've taught about that a lot. I've been picked up by legal teams to also help them with their clients who are incarcerated, who have had these kind of childhoods. And also from those persons I've learned this incredibly important ⁓ lesson or reality, truth, about spiritual strength and how we can be utilizing the part of us that is connected to the other, the part of us that is connected to the greater than. So that's, we're all interconnected. That's the spiritual lesson we know that I believe in anyway. ⁓ Through that spiritual connection, I have learned that people can talk with me because the channel is open. And so what I heard then that said this is your destiny, this is what you are to do, that same spiritual channel can be open between you and me, between myself and someone on death row, between that child who has learned not to trust anyone under any circumstance, but when that spiritual channel can be opened and I can receive Andrew Heacock: Hmm. Patti Van Eys: messages in the moment even around how to be with this person sometimes that means to just shut up you know sometimes that means to not give eye contact because that's overwhelming or that opens up their channel of shame or whatever it might be. But yes, I have ⁓ learned to become much more keenly aware of the messaging. I've never heard it again auditorily. ⁓ That was the second time I'd heard it auditorily, but I've never again heard it that way. the messaging still comes to me now. in kind of intuitive knowing and sometimes in words, sometimes in images when I'm with someone, I can see something and then I can just check it out with them. You know, I said, I just got this image and this is what I'm seeing as you're telling me something and they'll go, yeah. And you know, you very often it hits right where it needs to hit. So there's more to the story about my spiritual development, which is much more personal. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: ⁓ And we can go into that. Yeah, and it's also how I take care of myself in the face of really hard work. Andrew Heacock: to that, Yeah, I, I have been fortunate to know some really amazing therapists and work with them. ⁓ and they, they really, you know, more than anybody else are responsible for me having the life that I have now. ⁓ this what I guess in 2018 or so I started hearing about trauma informed approaches. The body keeps the score has come out and it was making some impact. ⁓ I just, I think on the cultural conversation around, around trauma and then around how the past can become, you know, somewhat almost destiny if it becomes unexplored. And ⁓ I've witnessed in having relationship, you know, with these, because you form these, I guess these attachments, know, there's, call it the therapeutic alliance, but like, mean, you can't help but work with someone on this personal level and not come to care about them. And you can see that I've been able to see the toll. Patti Van Eys: in Andrew Heacock: ⁓ that it takes and, and I've come to know a lot of people that do lots of, see themselves as healers that are not necessarily therapists, but they all kind of feel connected with what they're doing. And it's become a common question that I ask is like, what do you do? What do you do to, to, to offload or to vent or to, to just to cope with the energy that you take on? ⁓ and there is this interesting question I've had that almost as And my art too, ⁓ which that I make with film and photography and writing is who heals the healer? Like, what do you do? You know, who do you go to when you're the person that people go to? ⁓ And inevitably the answers that I get will have some sort of spiritual dimension that probably has to do with who I'm interested in and who I'm talking to. You know, I mean, there's probably some selection bias to that, but. Patti Van Eys: Thank you. Andrew Heacock: ⁓ Usually it does come back to something like that. And I find that very fascinating because you mentioned that at another part in your life you might not have even mentioned of hearing these things or maybe even having a spiritual life because there is kind of this stigma to it. it seems like it's like we don't want to study it. We don't want to know because I guess it's not reducible in a traditionally materialistic way. Patti Van Eys: Mm-hmm. you Right. It's a hard thing to study in a materialistic way. Although we've been, there's some interesting research out there recently that I'm sure you're aware of where we are beginning to actually get a evidentiary handle even in the world, in the earthly world we live in on some of these ⁓ spiritual phenomena, these metaphysical phenomena around the way we can relate to one another. We can put that aside for a moment. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Mm. Patti Van Eys: So I can answer your other question. ⁓ Yes, for much of my earlier career, I was ⁓ influenced by what we call evidence-based practice. Because for one, insurance pays for evidence-based practice. I was even a trainer statewide of one of these practices that I really thought was a good trauma specific practice at the same time and for children but at the same time the population of children we were working with with this complex trauma or what I call developmental trauma that actually changes that early brain in the context of a chaotic family. I was beginning to say this isn't enough. This particular kind of trauma specific therapy isn't getting at the attachment, you know. right? And it's kind what you were talking about. So my journey began to deviate a bit from the evidence-based to more of what am I seeing that works. And I started kind of putting other pieces into the other model and kind of expanding it a bit for foster parents, adoptive parents for this population. And I found that it was more effective. So I began to think about, know, what are the elements that we're really looking at that are ⁓ helping people heal? And as I took on more and more, I like your word, the energy of clients and their family members, their parents, caregivers are really dysregulated with these children because they're taking it on all the time. I began to realize that we've got to pay attention to the way our nervous systems are responding, right? It's not, know, cognitive behavioral therapy is all here, pretty much, for example. And it's like our nervous systems and our relational neurobiology. So there's this whole interpersonal neurobiology theory that Dan Siegel has and others are talking about. There's the polyvagal theory that Porges talks about. And these became much more important. important to thinking about how do we take care of our clients but also how do we take care of ourselves. And there came a point for me ⁓ when I had a personal situation going on. as a professional you can kind of put your boundaries up and you can kind of bolster and you can say, okay, that's their life. I can let them have that. I'm doing my piece in their life. But when it becomes your life and you've got your own thing going on that is a loss or a trauma that's really devastating you, I came to a point where I was taking care of foster kids and at this point I was in clinical leadership of a big foster care company. This was after Vanderbilt. It was a multi-state foster care company and I was in charge of all the therapeutic aspects and all the therapists and all the things. So big job. But then when this other ⁓ incident happened in my life, I realized I'm not well. I'm not well. What would I tell a client if they were feeling what I'm feeling where they're, it's like burnout on steroids kind of a feeling is how I was feeling. And I felt vulnerable and all the things that nobody knowing me would ever know because I was great at putting up the mask. and I was a professional and I'm supposed to have that mask, Supposed to. And like, whose message is that? No, actually, you're gonna be more helpful if you yield to your own vulnerability, get the help you need and model that for everybody else in your world. So at that point, which was in 2019, I went to the Art of Living Institute in Boone, North Carolina. I started looking like where can I go just to get some healing? Where can I go just to get away and get retreat? And I don't know if you're familiar with the Art of Living. you familiar? Okay. Well, it's a non-profit, ⁓ an Aravatic ashram up at the top, up on the mountain, down from Boone, or up from Boone Center. And it is a center for healing and it teaches meditation. Andrew Heacock: I don't know that one, no. Patti Van Eys: It's everyday yoga. There's a spa that does the Ayurvedic treatments like Shridhara where they put the hot oil on your third eye and it goes down and ⁓ they have massage and they have lots of things in the spa. But it's a place for detoxifying the body through the food that they serve. It's beautiful food, clean, Ayurvedic food. And of course there's no caffeine, no alcohol, no nicotine, none of that on campus. ⁓ And then the detoxifying that happens from nature, we're up in the mountains, in the air. The detoxifying that happens from the yogic practice of the yoga, of the meditation, of the Kirtan chant at night. ⁓ And I went by myself and I spent eight days. And when I finished that eight days, I was a totally different human. I didn't know. I didn't know I could feel like that. It was, I was a long distance runner in high school and then after and I, the closest I could get to how it felt was runners high. So it was clearly my own natural opiates that were just, woo, this is so awesome. And ⁓ so I came back from that knowing something I had not known before. Knowing something about the spiritual practices that are necessary for me to feel whole, feel thriving, to have the well-being kind of sense and to know that if I ever, when I feel other big feelings, which we all will and I still do, but when I'm feeling those other big feelings, to lean into those, to invite those, to teach me. Right? Okay, big sad that just came to visit me. What do you need to let me know? You know, but knowing I can always get back to what I call being on the mountain. Andrew Heacock: Yes, I mean, literally in that case, but metaphorically, you can the beauty of spiritual practices, once you learn the practice, you can bring them out with you. Right. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. And if you I think that's why many people who become committed meditators will talk about it in terms of freedom. Because you do like that's usually, you know, the way it's like, man, I've become liberated because I can kind of Patti Van Eys: You got it. You can bring the mountain with you. Yes. Yes. Andrew Heacock: you know, bring whatever mind state with me where I need it, when I need it. And it's like this resource that you have, you know, and like a bunch of resources, just kind of like, we have these trauma resources that we can do, like yoga is also like meditation. Like these are spiritual practices, you know, really singing, you know, in harmony, which is a Kirtan. Yeah, they're, all, I'm, I'm endlessly fascinated by spirituality. I was, I had a deconversion experience basically. I mean, I was raised Catholic. Patti Van Eys: Yes! Right. Yes, yes. Andrew Heacock: And I had ⁓ traumatic events in most of my life, my young life. then in early adulthood, when I was in law school, I had a medical misdiagnosis. And I talked about this actually last week and I just became very like, there was a sense of an existential despair without really having a word for it. But it's like, you know, even as a kid, I liked existential cinema. That's still what I love now. I mean, I just, I've always had that kind of like that kind of personality, I suppose, that's interested in these big questions. Patti Van Eys: Okay. Yes. Andrew Heacock: You know, the question of like, why do, like, why does random bad stuff happen to good people? Like for no reason. And, being raised in a Catholic face, which is very theistic, ⁓ and very, ⁓ you know, there essentially is that there's this, there's an ego up there that's an agent and it's calling the shots and this is supposed to happen because you deserve it basically. And that was utterly unsatisfactory to me. And the idea that no one is calling the shots, not only was a, to me, a better explanation of the data, but also kind of weirdly reassuring. Um, that like, it's like, uh, th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Right. Andrew Heacock: You know, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, who's a meditation teacher, he's also this famous atheist, will say like, atheism has no content. Like it's really an absence of one particular set of belief systems, but you can't really build off of that. now you've got to start doing the work of finding out, like what does resonate with me? And I've kind of found this hodgepodge of things. And this is kind of like what you were describing up at ⁓ the Art of Living Institute. You know, it's kind of like ⁓ there's a symphony of things. Patti Van Eys: Yep. Yeah. Yes. Andrew Heacock: that you can do and it's different times in your life, different instruments or components of that symphony will take a more of prominent role. ⁓ for me, I still have an hard time explaining to people that are Christian, which is mostly the people that I talk to about religion that don't get it, is that it's not a belief-based thing, because belief is a very Christian thing to be concerned about. ⁓ And I'm like, you know, All I know is when I do these things, I feel so much better. And it's kind of empirical in that way. And it is an interesting thing, but it's beautiful that we can find that now and that there is, we're in a more open society. You know, now that there's more, it wouldn't be professional, kind of a career ending thing for you to have this conversation with me, which, know, 50 years ago, if clinical psychologists were talking about this, that could have been career ending. mean, that's Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, you know. Patti Van Eys: Right? right you're absolutely right and and I believe now that this whole spiritual component needs to be integrated into psychology and there is spiritual psychology now that's being that's that's beginning to it's been it's been here for a while but it's beginning to be more accepted and I we've just left out that whole piece in terms of wellness, terms of healing. And it's like, wait a minute, what are all these people from the other, from ancient cultures, what have they always done for healing? You know, how did we all of a sudden leave out the spiritual aspect that all cultures have had around healing? You know, so it's, I think we're, I agree with you, we're starting to bring back just, gradually bring back those threads of indigenous healing and ⁓ intuitive knowing and ⁓ all of those kinds of things. And I wanted to ⁓ mention, again, back to the mountain, one of the practices that I learned was a very intentional breathing kind of practice, which is, you know, the word for that is pranayama. the general word pranayama, just a controlled breathing practice. There's a lot of different pranayamas out there. But I learned one that the Art of Living ⁓ teaches and it's ⁓ the founder of Art of Living. In Art of Living, the main campus is in India and it's Sri Sri Ravi Shekhar is the person that started it. And then there's just a few other ashrams around the world, not too many actually. ⁓ But He created this kind of pranayama called sky breathing. And sky breathing is ⁓ short for Sudarshan Kriya Yoga. So you can see why we call it sky breathing. And the Sudarshan Kriya translates to proper vision through purifying action. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, got it. Yeah, sky breathing. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: proper vision through purifying action. And sky breathing is a combination of controlled breath pranayama and some meditative process, mostly breathing though. And I learned how to do this particular type of breath work. And at the time in 2019, there hadn't been a lot of ⁓ evidence-based research on it. But since then, I've learned, there's been quite a bit of research and particularly with Vietnam combat veterans who have PTSD. And the research has shown unequivocally that sky breathing changes the brain ⁓ into a calmer brain and they can actually even see the connections, you know, and through ⁓ functional MRIs, they can see how the brain's lighting up. So the connection between the fear-based part of the brain, the amygdala, the limbic system, and then the prefrontal cortex, which can say to us, hey, limbic system, this isn't really a threat, know, cool your jets, this happened a long time ago, this is 2026 now, this isn't happening now. That part of the brain that knows how to do that gets cut off from this fear part of the brain when we're activated into our fear system. And it can be... cut off, can be partially, it can be for a moment, it can be for a longer time, and this particular sky breathing helps to build more of the connection between those two parts of the brain so that this part can help us calm down and discern ⁓ that, you know, we're calm, we're peaceful, everything's okay, and it's the same thing that if you look at the brains of gurus that have really learned meditation at the highest, what we believe is the highest point. Their brains are different in this way. Their brains are so different from those of us who still have all of this anxiety wiring that hasn't been well established around any kind of re-wiring to where we can get to that calm easily. But meditation and also the sky breathing and other things can bring us there. And I like what you said about every person needs to find their own way, their own practice. What works for you may not work for me. And there is a large menu, there's a buffet. Andrew Heacock: Yes, buffet is a great way of doing it. It's funny, I up in Louisiana, it's a heavily Catholic state and there's a term cafeteria Catholic. It's like, you don't go to confession every week or whatever, but you don't eat meat on Friday at Lent. And so it's just kind of like you picking, people picking shoes, it's called being a cafeteria Catholic and Catholics would, many Catholics would refer to themselves as that. But I like buffet better a little bit. yeah, what you said about like, you can pick what works for you. Patti Van Eys: I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I've been interested in psychology for many, many years now and ⁓ started with like what's in the DSM. And that's kind of a negative thing. Cause I think a lot of it is unfortunately not that not likely to be valid. ⁓ But ⁓ obviously there's so much more to what makes us tick than that. And the psychology of spiritual experience is just a deeply fascinating one for me. Cause I've just been, it's been personal and ⁓ there's different, there's different ways to look at Patti Van Eys: Yes. Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: to study it. There's like, well, why do we believe in gods and have spirituality? That's just kind of an evolutionary question. And then there's like, well, what's happening when we do have these experiences, which is kind of a cognitive question or like, you know, these meditators, we can see that they, their inhibitors are probably much stronger. Like they're, you know, they're, much more in tune with their prefrontal cortex to, to inhibit the thoughts, which is probably why meditation is so great for ADD. Cause it's, you know, you know, cause you're that, that part of your brain is the inhibition is a little weaker. Patti Van Eys: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: And then there's also like, well, why does it affect people the way it does? Like, why does it heal? Which is a whole different, I guess more in your realm of clinical psychology. It's like, and then there's kind of an ultimate philosophical question, which is if it works, do we really need to know why it works? Like, that really matter or is it, it's interesting. I'm deeply fascinated to know why, but like if it's helping people, and I think there is one thing for me that does seem to matter the most is that it, Patti Van Eys: Yeah, that's a great. Andrew Heacock: It is personal. like if there's something, if there's a religious practice that works for lots of people, but there's a person who just doesn't buy it, you know, they're just skeptical. They're not open to it or it's not, it just doesn't resonate with them. I think it's unlikely to be very helpful. Like there is the mind is seems to be a necessary component in, the practice working. Do you think that's true in your experience or do you think that there are some things that could just work regardless of, of buy it? Patti Van Eys: Hmm. I think for people to heal, do need to buy into something. ⁓ What they might buy into is the relationship with the healer. And they may not have to be totally convinced in an evidentiary way that meditation... We can go look at all those brain studies and I can set it all out there and they may still... But they may say, Patty, you have demonstrated through your modeling that you can really ride a storm. I want to be able to ride a storm like you, right? And if you say this has worked for you, I'll give it a try. So they have to have some buy-in at some level, I think, around... ⁓ They have to some motivation to try something, in other words. ⁓ I think that's what you're asking. I'm not sure. Andrew Heacock: Motivation. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, buy in on that, but also like on a particular practice. But what you said was actually very impactful for me because I've had that experience where it's like, you know, there was just a person who was, ⁓ you know, a therapist that I knew and a healer. And I just reached out and she was into shamanic practices and meditation. And it was very contrary to my worldview. But I just, I had faith in her. Like I had to have faith in her before I could have faith in myself. Patti Van Eys: right. Andrew Heacock: It's so strange as you were talking about that a red-tailed hawk just landed on a tree right out in front of me. And yeah, yeah, it's a race. Just, she's just sitting right there. They live here. There's two of them and, ⁓ they've been singing and dancing for a couple of weeks now. I guess they're, it's a courtship ritual that they're doing. ⁓ but red-tailed hawks are a sign of Kundalini rising. The red tail is a sign of, is a symbol of the Kundalini rising. and I just thought it was. Patti Van Eys: Yes. I wondered what it was, I saw you noticing something. Andrew Heacock: interesting that, and that, you know, the woman that I was describing, who I put my faith in would have absolutely loved that. mean, just like, because so much of shamanism is about the symbols that we find in nature. And ⁓ if you're open minded to the possibility that this symbol could have an impact and mean something for you, I think that's all that matters. Like, you know, I doesn't, I don't know if there is something, there's a third force between me and this, this Falcon here or this, this Hawk. Patti Van Eys: Right, Andrew Heacock: but that kind of does matter. all that really seems to matter is if I'm open to receiving meaning from that symbol, then I get the meaning. It's just a cool, this is an amazing thing about human psychology that like we really do seem to be the necessary component in the spiritual experience and the healing in particular. Patti Van Eys: then you get the meaning. Yeah, and the messaging. know, I think like you're talking about being open to taking a message from this sign that feels synchronous to you right now. And so your mind can say, is really cool. I wonder what the message is for me right now. Or the mind can say, ⁓ that's just woo woo stuff or whatever. then, and notice how Each of those ways of framing it, one way is going to give you the neurohormones of positivity and wonder and this sort of embracing there's something bigger than me out there, this sort of awe, the whole psychology of awe versus awe, that's just woo, Andrew, you're just making stuff up. Then that brings negative neurohormones to the brain, right? And it closes down the creativity and the awe and the wonder. And you think about how little children are so open and creative and spiritual, spiritual. And ⁓ because they haven't started giving themselves those other messages that close them down. But before we leave the hawk, and this will be me being very vulnerable, ⁓ the hawk is one of my signs. around the very situation I was talking about in 2019. The hawk is my sign from a loved one that died. And when the hawk shows up, which is not that often, because hawks aren't just everywhere, I pay attention. So right here between us, when the hawk came and I watched you see something, I could tell you were attending to something out somewhere. And I was like, wonder what that is? And then you told me, so you know, who knows? So we can decide, okay, that was just a coincidence, or... we can decide that was a synchrony that is a symbol to our, what we're doing here, the energy we have together here. And for me, because I know how when Hawk, Hawk doesn't come very often, but when Hawk comes, it's very meaningful and it's usually very ⁓ unusual. So these signs that shamans talk about and that ⁓ Laura Lynn, ⁓ the medium, the evidentiary medium, Larlene Jackson. She wrote the book Signs and it's all about loved ones and those who have gone across the veil and how there can be communication and energy exchange and spiritual meaning still and spiritual connection with those across the veil. ⁓ So her whole book would, she would say, ⁓ Yes, that just happened to you and Andrew. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a few things I'd like to follow up with. The just the continuation of what we've been talking about is like you do have a choice. Like I could just say, he just flew away. No, he just flew down. ⁓ I hear them all the time. They're never that close to me. There's a tree right outside of my balcony here and it was close. ⁓ Patti Van Eys: and Yeah. Andrew Heacock: And it was, as if it knew we were having this conversation. And there's a part of my mind that say, of course not. You know, it's just, it's a coincidence. Absolutely. Of course there must be coincidences. And it's just, I had a, I had a realization at one point, like, um, not that long ago, probably around the time my life started getting better was I have all these good reasons to feel bitter. Like I really do. I mean, I would be totally justified in feeling like I'd been victimized my life and by the system and whatever else, but. Patti Van Eys: Right. Mm-hmm. Thank Andrew Heacock: I would rather feel better than bitter. Like you just, have a choice at a certain point where like we've all got things where life has happened to us. And some things in particular, when people truly have been victimized, you know, and ⁓ it's very hard, I think for people in that position to not constantly play that role and go and play the, you know, play the role of the victim and have this victim mindset about everything that. only ends up perpetuating the problem in a lot of cases, which of course confirms it in their mind that the people really are out to get me. But you just kind of at a point, you just got to make a choice. Like, do I want to feel better? Do I want to feel bitter? And it's an easy choice when you put it that way. And that is the same thing as like with seeing meaning. When it presents itself, you could choose to be skeptical or you could choose to be open and say, and be curious and say, hmm. Patti Van Eys: now. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I wonder what, because sometimes I see things and I'm like, that means something, but I have no idea what this means. Like there's something is happening, but what is that? And ⁓ man, the way you describe it of opening or closing different channels that you can go down, it's like there's a choice. There's hallways in your mind, neural pathways that you can choose. And this one has been better for me, like the spiritual pathway of just this moment that we just had, which was very, very powerful for me. Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yeah, yeah, I agree about if we're open and I also want to say that if we are doing a spiritual practice such as meditation, we become more open. So my experience of my own practice for my spiritual growth is ⁓ if I were to leave my practice, like neglect it for several days, I notice that I'm not my channels aren't as open to even see the wonder, see the signs, hear the messages that are intuitive knowing, right? ⁓ We open ourselves up to seeing that that hawk came closer than normal and has a message for me today. Sometimes we might see one way out there. It may not be a message for us because it's kind of, cardinals are that way too. The carnal that comes right up and comes by my feet when I'm sitting on a bench and looks up at me and stays there, that's a sign. Whereas maybe when I'm just walking in the woods and I see a few flying around in the trees, I might not think of that. But I feel like the more we practice our spiritual daily routines, meditation, yoga, whatever else we're doing, mindful walking, nature walking, ⁓ there's lots of different things, the pranayama, ⁓ the more we practice it, I think the more we become aware of the spiritual channel because we're opening hours. It's, you know, in my mind there's got to be something bigger than us. You know, the sun comes up every day, it goes down, or we go around it, or whatever it is that we're doing. That happens way beyond our control. There's a mystery to that. We don't know. But if we're opening our channels to that mystery through practice that is ⁓ mindful and routine and dedicated practice, we're going to see the hawk that comes closer. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: It would, and it would have arguably come regardless, but we might've missed it. Like that's the thing for me with meditation and moments and photography is a manifestation of my mindfulness practice. Cause I like to shoot on film and you have to let go of any result. That's what I love about film. There's no guaranteeing any result. know, I don't even have a, there's no battery in it. I don't have a viewfinder. I don't know what I'm getting. I'm hoping and I've learned and it's made me a way better photographer now. ⁓ I've only been doing about six or eight months and I'm very interested in spiritual practices, but Patti Van Eys: We might have missed it. Okay. Andrew Heacock: When I capture a photograph, it can be maybe 1 1,000th of one second. And that's that moment. And it will never happen again. And you've got to be waiting because I only get 36 shots in a roll of film. And I've chosen the roll of film. There's no fixing it in post or whatever. So you can't just change film, change lens. You just got to be waiting. This is the camera that I started using right there. And ⁓ it's, for me, a mindfulness activity. I want to ask about something that we've Patti Van Eys: Okay. Andrew Heacock: We kind of started by talking about your professional work and it kind of drifted. But one of the things you said that was really fascinating to me that keeps rolling in my mind is that ⁓ your spiritual practices have made you more open and that's made it easier for children to talk to you. And you know, it's so, so funny. As soon as we logged in, I immediately started talking. I immediately started feeling calmer and I noticed it. It was like weird because I was just like, man, I just, and what I thought was there are just some people that walk the earth. They're like, Patti Van Eys: Huh? Andrew Heacock: that are born to do this work and it's not surprising that maybe you would be one of them and end up in a profession where you're able to use that gift. you mentioned children also as being spiritual, little spiritual creatures. And I assume that in some sense it's probably like developmentally normal for that to decrease a little bit in adolescence and then maybe change in adulthood. But for young children, you know, I was thinking that Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Andrew Heacock: Would you agree that like ⁓ child abuse is also a form of spiritual abuse? I mean, if there are these intensely spiritual meaning-making creatures, almost like promiscuously teleological, that abuse has got to have that kind of spiritual dimension, what can you tell us about that? Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yes. Well, you know, it damages the spirituality of a child, it also might bring on... bring on the spiritual aspects to protect. I'm trying to think of this book is, I just read a biography of a monk who turned into a spiritual psychotherapist. So he went from Catholic boy to monk. to spiritual psychotherapist no longer a monk and is married and all that on the other side. I'm so embarrassed. James Hillman, that's the name of that. And in his biography, he's describing as a little boy the abuse at the hands of his father and the domestic violence that was going on in his home. And he ⁓ realized there was a spiritual protector kind of part or self or something entity is a better word that that came to help him and he can describe this beautifully in in his biography always stayed with him it's what drove him to want to be come a monk what took him out of the monkhood is is you know also part of his story ⁓ but it it he he realized that he was being protected spiritually. And there are a number of children with abuse histories who can talk about that. And in my particular specialty, which is around when children are so... terrified, terrorized, they go into survival terror really young when their brain is still developing and they actually fragment into different parts of self. That's that whole dissociative barriers between these parts of self. There's always a part that is a protector part that's within their system. And then a bit of the fragment is, yep. And oftentimes, Andrew Heacock: one of the fragments like a part of the, okay, okay. Patti Van Eys: that protector part has a spiritual ⁓ element. It's an angel, for example. ⁓ Or it's otherworldly in some way. I believe that the abuse of a child that is physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual, because we're all of those things, if we're being abused in any way, ⁓ then the spiritual part of us will be part of that. ⁓ you know, it's our core. We are spiritual beings in physical vessels. You know, when we die, spiritual beings in physical vessels, these bodies that carry us are not us. You know, and one of the things that is just something I think about all the time is this is just me being wishful and idealistic. But sometimes I wish that we didn't see the bodies of each other. Andrew Heacock: That's a beautiful way of putting it, yeah. Right, right. Patti Van Eys: that we could only see the spirits. Because if we could only see the spirits, which is who we are, then we wouldn't have problems with each other anymore, is my belief. So little children are spirits in little bodies, and it's before they have gotten all the messaging of how things should be, the right and the wrong. Andrew Heacock: Right. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: When children are very little, they don't have the cognitive, their brain hasn't developed enough to have the cognitive capacity to really make those judgments. You know, when they're really little. So they're just kind of pure, naive, unashamed little spirits. They don't know to be shamed until we shame them. Yeah. And so, ⁓ so you asked me something about spiritual children. The other thing that I've come to learn about children is that in their imagination and in their creativity and in their play and in their, just in their discovery of the world, if you watch them and listen to children, they don't have any trouble believing in the big, whatever the world is, the mystery. They know magic. Andrew Heacock: Right. The magic, the magic of it. Yeah, magic, basically magic. It's the feeling inside of us, of them that is the magic and everything. Yeah. I call that feeling the magic of Christmas. Yeah. Like Christmas morning and you've woken up at five and you're not allowed to get out of the room until eight and just the endless possibility of everything. Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: them. That's it. Yes, yes. Yeah, endless possibility. That's how children are made until we as a culture put limits around the possibilities or the magic. But yeah, yeah, and right in the wrong way, really, to paint something or to stay in the lines or, know, we begin to, yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, of play and creation. Yeah. Yeah. One of the, ⁓ so I read that book, Body Keeps Its Core. You know, the first time I read it and I don't remember anything about reading it except for reading about dissociation and thinking, that's so weird. I wonder what that's like, those poor people. And then I dissociated for the rest of the book. Patti Van Eys: You Andrew Heacock: And I just didn't remember it. I read it the second time, it hit much harder. I've tried, basically, I think probably every practice that he mentions in that book, it's because those are the standard things that you do now. I mean, if you're seriously committed to changing your life and you take seriously the idea that like, you your problems are not some kind of neuropathology, that they're just manifestations of trauma in the body. The things that have been the most... I would say like, you know, there are various spiritual practices and if you group those together, that's probably been the most impactful, but I don't think that makes sense because that includes meditation and traveling to holy sites like Jerusalem or Mexico City that I've done and plant medicine. And there's just a big, that's a big thing there. But I would say outside of that, the most impactful thing for me has been acting. ⁓ Patti Van Eys: I'm in. Andrew Heacock: and just taking acting classes, ⁓ which I've done from beginning into film and also photography. I I'm very interested in spirituality and spiritual practice as an art form, but there's something about acting, which I know is called psychodrama in psychological literature. That's how Van der Kolk refers to it in his book, but ⁓ theater. And ⁓ it's amazing. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: because the psychology of acting is deeply fascinating to me. Are you familiar with the term method acting? You've never heard of method acting, going method? Okay, in common, colloquially, when people say that someone's gone method or they're going method, it means not breaking character. Patti Van Eys: No. Andrew Heacock: Like while you're in your preparation and you were for, know, Daniel Day Lewis makes people refer to him as Mr. Lincoln when he was on the set and he'll spend two years making shoes or whatever to become, know, and so, um, and it's, it's, there's some criticisms of it because that's not really what method acting was supposed to be, but it goes back to this, uh, playwright named Stanislavski. He was a contemporary of Freud and then, or he was a contemporary of Young actually. And he would diagram this, this, um, his system is what he called it. He, he was a Russian playwright. worked with Chekhov's plays and ⁓ He was a theater director, pardon me. And with this system, and when you look at it, it's like, this looks like Carl Jung's map of the psyche. I it's just basically the same thing. There's an inner self and an outer self. ⁓ But it really, and then there are these various methods. Some of them involve like bottom-up practices, like Stella Adler, who taught ⁓ Marlon Brando. She was his acting teacher. It would be mostly like movement therapy, just being in the body. Forget about yourself. And that's mostly what acting is about. Psychologically is... de-centering the self from experience, getting into the body, but becoming anti-self-conscious. That's the skill of acting is because you have to neutralize shame and it's very, very hard, if not impossible to do that when you're thinking about how you look or what people think of you or are they going to shame me or whatever, being silly and it's just, it's death. And it's so amazing how the nervous system will just seize once you start to, you feel that shame and you, the body, you know, and so it's... Patti Van Eys: Yes. Andrew Heacock: Of course, it's amazing that you can do body things that will work the other way. But for me, there's something about acting, it's about being seen, truly seen and vulnerable and play ⁓ as an adult. And you still pretend to be an animal, like you'll be a zebra for a minute or a monkey or a bird or whatever. And you embody that and it's profoundly healing. And the thing is, it does not involve anything about your real life or your past or talking about it. That's the thing for me is... Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: talking about the things in your past that are painful, or even accessing those memories in a conscious way is a big challenge and has been a challenge for me. But the emotion is kind of the same. The emotion is fundamental. And so you're able to access that emotion without having to disturb your conscious mind. And it's an amazing technology. I really think that we should be doing more to have Shakespeare troops in. Patti Van Eys: Thank Andrew Heacock: like an at risk for at risk youth and things like that, because it's just, it's just play and you don't have, it doesn't have to be as personal, but it's still vulnerable. Patti Van Eys: Yeah, so you're talking to somebody who loves play therapy ⁓ and believes there is healing through play for these reasons. It's metaphorical, right? A child comes in or even an adult, you might have a sand tray and you ask them to create ⁓ a world in the sand tray with the various figures, often Jungian archetypical figures in the sand tray. And then you can have them begin to play, if you will. with themes around these animals and figures that you've put in here and they aren't in their conscious own story. It's metaphor. It's play. And ⁓ it's healing at a level underneath the conscious level, which is what you're talking about, because the conscious level gets back to all this messaging that narrows us. the message that the old messages it's just too hard to bypass this you're bypassing your own ⁓ messaging that has caused you to stay stuck when you're doing any kind of play in my mind ⁓ acting is awesome i i also have a history of acting which is interesting yeah we're learning some some things that we have in common i was in acting in high school and college and love acting ⁓ i'd do feel the play in it. You know, it is, it is, it is leaving the self. Yeah, and, but play does that too for children. And an adult, mean, and adults even in play play in the playroom. ⁓ Yeah, you leave, you leave the conscious self, you leave the self, the vulnerable self, and you put on the play. ⁓ Andrew Heacock: Yes. Patti Van Eys: and it is healing and so what's going on there you know ⁓ if you think about meditation the idea of meditation is emptying self and i want to make a distinction between mindfulness and meditation because sometimes yes sometimes people think they're the same but actually mindfulness is very much being aware Andrew Heacock: Okay, let's do it. Patti Van Eys: of what's coming in through the senses. So if I'm going to do mindful walking, I'm out on my green way and I'm noticing through my eyes that the leaves as they flutter or the sounds of the birds song or the smell of the decaying leaves or the sound of the crunch, I'm mindful through my senses of everything under my feet, in the air, I'm very aware. ⁓ healing practice in and of itself just by being present through the senses. But meditation is the opposite. It is emptying. It is becoming kind of unaware and separate from all of that stuff. Right? So they're actually very different things and yet can both be useful in their own way. But I'm thinking and I've never thought this before so thank you. I'm thinking that acting is like meditation. because you're emptying self. It's over here. So there's a similar something that might be happening. As I empty self, I'm freeing space for what? Andrew Heacock: Yeah, basically, yeah. Patti Van Eys: Maybe clean and maybe clean experience, maybe experience without shame. You said that. think you hit something there, ⁓ Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, shame, so it's an interesting way that you put it about meditation being emptiness. That makes a lot of sense to me. I've studied lots of different kinds of meditation now and would like to really deepen my knowledge base. Emptiness is the essence of Zen meditation. That's really what Zen is about and it very much informs my photography. Most of what, I mean, I'm in... Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yes. Andrew Heacock: I'm not toying with the idea now, I'm not toying with it, I'm going to do it, I just haven't done it, is creating a course in mindful photography. Because to me they're the same, it's duplicative to say both, mean photography is a mindful activity if you make it that. And ⁓ Zen is very much about emptiness and emptying the mind, and so that experience can come in, and then mindfulness is the expected result of that because the thing you're emptying is... Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yes. Andrew Heacock: bunch of distraction, distracting thoughts, self referential thought, ⁓ like, man, you know, you look like an idiot. That girl would never go out with me. You're a failure. Your parents, you know, like these thoughts are really distracting from what's happening right now. I'd be too busy thinking that the, notice the hawk or to be paying attention truly to what you're saying instead of what's going to make me not look stupid to ask next. Like that's a really distracting thought. And, Zen is great for that Buddhism. It's, it's a very martial form of Buddhism, but Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: And with acting, ⁓ it actually can be a good practice to empty the mind, but there's another ⁓ kind of discipline of yoga or meditation I've been studying, is in yoga, Raja yoga. And I think it's not about emptiness. It's about concentration. ⁓ I think it's a different path and I'm interested. There's there's a contemplative neuroscientist here in Nashville that I want to, I want to interview. I haven't emailed him yet, but I'm fascinated to know if there's a neural. Patti Van Eys: Okay. Andrew Heacock: basis for this because I think there two different approaches to kind of achieving the same result, like which could be Samadhi or, you know, is this, this, you know, ultimate state of enlightenment, but also like by concentrating the mind very intensely on an object of mindfulness could be the breath or could be, which is also kind of what you're doing in Zen, but ⁓ in yoga, there's a massive array of different approaches to it. Patti Van Eys: True. True. Andrew Heacock: You could look at a candle with your eyes open and it's like an open eye meditation, which is great for folk. But there's like a laser like focus that I think what's happening is that at the level of the brain, we have the central governor theory of the brain. just has finite resources. So if you're going to dedicate a bunch of resources to focusing on one thing, you're necessarily going to have to pull them away from other things. And inevitably you'll take the lower order things. And then eventually the ego is going to start to They're going to have to start to pull resources away from the default mode network and self referential thought. And you can kind of achieve eagleness that way. ⁓ And what I think that there's elements of both in that because Zen very much is about letting go, surrender. You just have to let go of all that shame, let go of the self-consciousness, empty that out. But especially with film acting, Dr. Patty, I am so in awe and in... Patti Van Eys: Right? Andrew Heacock: by what film actors are able to do because it requires extraordinary focus. I could not do it. I've done a little bit of it, not professionally, but I could not do it, but for my meditation practice, being able, giving me the ability to focus because it's not, did you do theater? And yeah, so theater, I would love to do theater because it's one continuous thing, you know, and there's an audience there and you're in the flow of it and. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. I did. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Andrew Heacock: Film acting is not like that. Like you're going to sometimes say one line at a time completely out of context and there's a crew here and they're doing a whatever and you're standing around mindlessly, just mind numbingly bored for like four hours and all of sudden they go, okay, we're ready, let's go. And you have to just do it. And it's a different skill set, but they both, both of these approaches, ⁓ just found that so fascinating what you were saying about that connection between mindfulness and acting. And I really think there's a there there. Like there's some real truth to be mined with. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Why does this help so much? Patti Van Eys: Right, I think it'd be interesting thing to study. Andrew Heacock: Me too. I think of those things all the time now. Yeah. Interesting things to study. Someone should do that. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: I do that. And I was in one film acting. I was thinking just theater. But when I was 13, I was in an ABC movie of the week. ⁓ And so I did have a little taste of that, the discontinuity of the different scenes and things. And one day it took us all day long to film this five minute, I don't even know if it five minute dinner scene with this whole I was in a family, I was a kid in this family. But yeah, anyway, I just all of sudden couldn't. Andrew Heacock: I bet actually being a child would probably make it almost easier because then you're just like, this is fun. You're not going to get as bored or like frustrated because you're just like, I'm on a movie set. know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't have, don't really have a bunch of better stuff to do. you know, yeah. Patti Van Eys: Yeah, here I am. What are we doing here? Yeah, and that particular one, one of my brothers in this family that I was in was Robbie Benson. And I don't know if you know Robbie Benson because you're ⁓ millennial age probably and I'm not. But Robbie was this big, I mean, really hot teenage star back in my day. and he he was like ⁓ he played in that one-on-one it was called one-on-one the basketball movie called one-on-one and Billy owed to Billy Joe and I don't know several other things but so yeah anyway I digress but ⁓ I do Andrew Heacock: was a beautiful digression and very fascinating that you're among other things, polymath, Dr. Patty is a child actor, actor extraordinaire. ⁓ So there's something also that I've been mulling over since you mentioned it an hour ago ⁓ is ⁓ you mentioned the word attachment a few times. And I think there was something that you said about that these social workers and these service providers were coming to say, we can't figure these kids out. And I think these, if I remember correctly, you said something about that they, what they were missing was attachment. Patti Van Eys: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: All right, some of the trauma therapy that you brought in as well, the evidence-based therapy was missing that. Can you just explain as a psychologist, what are you thinking when someone says attachment? What does that mean? then how does that relate to trauma disorders and things like dissociation? Patti Van Eys: Yeah, that's a great thing to talk about. One of my favorite things. So when babies are born, they have, we all had, you know, just like think about the stars in the galaxy, just trillions of just brain cells, neurons, nerve cells, just floating around. And those have got to begin once you're born and even some before you're born, but those have got to start wiring together in what we call neural pathways. So these nerves find each other. and they attach. So as soon as the baby is exposed to light and the eyes open, right, they're exposed to light, the light from the environment comes in and the nerve cells, the brain nerve cells that are dedicated to vision, the, you know, optic area, those all find each other. And what fires together, wires together, we call it. That's an, it's called Hebsack. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Right, heavy in theory, yeah, yeah, yeah. Patti Van Eys: And so they find each other and they all wire together and they create back here this whole area of the visual center of the brain. ⁓ so that happens. If that baby were never to be allowed to open their eyes for whatever reason, ⁓ and this experiment has been done with cats, which is very sad, but it has been a long time ago before, know, PETA or whatever, you know, animal rights. Andrew Heacock: Peter here. Patti Van Eys: ⁓ if the eyes are closed, if a child is born blind, ⁓ so the light doesn't do anything, it can't excite those nerves, they won't develop that ⁓ optical cortex, that visual cortex won't be developed. And it'll just be pruned away. Okay, so I'm using this because when we talk about attachment, what we're talking about here, is about the first 18 months of the baby's life is the most critical time to form the neural pathways for what we call attachment, which is ⁓ important in a number of ways to being human. One way is it is the relational pathways. So how we develop our understanding of our relationship to the other. So trust. pathways, if you will, or just relational pathways. They find each other. And when the parent says like, hey Andrew, hey Andrew, and you see these eyes going, hey buddy, and yeah, your eyes are gonna come back and go, hi mama, hi mama, you know, and it's like, ⁓ you're my buddy, you're my little guy. And all that we do with babies, this is the mirror to the child's mirror, it's mirroring, and the neurons get excited. that are dedicated to relationship and they find each other and they begin to wire these neural pathways. And with the attachment wiring, we're also getting a core sense of self because you're letting me know as my primary caregiver that I'm here, that I'm an other, that I matter. When I cry and you come, every time I cry as a baby and you come as a caregiver, it is creating for me neural pathways around my needs getting met consistently by the caregiver. And so we're developing a core sense of self. We're developing a core pathways for relationship, for trust. We're developing our even cognitive capacity because we're learning always through the caregiver. It's the only way a baby learns is through the caregiver. really, I mean that's how they learn. learn language, they proprioception because they're being picked up and moved around and anyway. So pretty much the whole foundation of the baby's brain is dependent on this caregiver child back and forth relationship. And if that gets impacted because the caregiver is neglectful, ⁓ or the caregiver is inconsistent, like sometimes I'm there, sometimes I'm not there. The caregiver may be depressed or impacted by substance ⁓ misuse or maybe even just an illness. But anything that can impact attachment can create ⁓ an insecurity in those neural pathways. And so you can have insecure attachment rather than secure attachment. And we can talk about that. But the worst kind of thing that can happen is called disorganized attachment. And that's when the situation is so bad for the baby that they go into what I'll call survival terror. So their little limbic system is constantly on high alert because they're not safe. It may happen due to domestic abuse in the house and there's all this chaos and fighting and fear that mom isn't there because she's getting killed, know, all the things, her screams, the terror in her. ⁓ Disorganized attachment, we think about it that the caregiver is either frightening, they may be abusing the child, or they are frightened. So the mirror now of the caregiver face is not a helpful mirror, it's a scary mirror. And because in the attachment process, the mirror is creating our core. The mirror is telling us who we are. It's creating our sense of worth. But if the mirror is inconsistent or aggressive or negligent, we begin to, as babies, we have to keep the caregiver in close proximity or we will die. Even if the caregiver is abusive, we have to keep them or we will die. So the brain adapts. And the brain makes a part of itself that can figure out maybe how to get the caregiver back to the good caregiver. So you might have a disorganized self-state in a child that is kind of the caregiver part. Or you might have a self-state in the child that is an aggressive part because the baby got so scared it had to learn how to push the caregiver away and not be hurt. And so the brain begins to, ⁓ I forgot to tell you this part. The baby's brain is making more than a million neural connections per second. Just take that in. The baby's brain is making more than a million neural connections per second. Just take that in. more than a million neural connections, little nerves finding each other to connect into their wiring So the baby that's in this other kind of survival terror environment has this paradox. I'm going to die if this caregiver goes away, so I have to keep them here. But I be, ⁓ this part me, ⁓ I can't what's really happening because it's too much. So I'm going to go hide inside. more than a million neural connections, little nerves finding each other to connect into their wiring per second. So the baby that's in this other kind of survival terror environment has this paradox. I'm going to die if this caregiver goes away, so I have to keep them here. But I can't be, this part of me, I can't know what's really happening because it's too much. So I'm going to go hide inside. and wire up a part over here that's just kind of safe over here and doesn't really know what's going on over there. And I'm going to create another part of me that can fight you. and wire up a part over here that's just kind of safe over here and doesn't really know what's going on over there. And I'm going to create another part of me that can fight you. So what we see in people that have a dissociative adaptation, and that's the way I think about it, I don't really think about it as a disorder, because think of the creativity of the human brain that adapted into this way of being in order to survive their world. It's actually amazing, isn't it? Andrew Heacock: Yeah, the mind's capacity to protect is unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. And it's an adaptation because it enhanced their ability to survive. I mean, in a certain time in a childhood, that could be very adaptive. Patti Van Eys: It's amazing. Yeah, unbelievable. You got it. That was very adaptive at the time. So when we get the child later into a situation where they're getting in trouble all the time and their behaviors are perplexing and they're sometimes look like a ⁓ toddler who can barely walk and they're melting down but they're in the body of a 13 year old and these caregivers are like, what is happening here? What am I dealing with here? But they've still got that self-state that had adapted early on into, that had taken the trauma for the team, if you will. It gets back to Bessel van der Kolk's book that the body holds, you know, keeps the score. So this part that's dissociated off this self-state has experienced some kind of trauma that it doesn't let the other part of the system know about. Right? But they are really not aware. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, so they really are not aware of, right, yeah, that's which is fascinating and almost it's like, ⁓ there's a sense in me who 100 % believes this is real still almost feels a sense of disbelief. It's like, how could that be possible? Because I'm a me, I'm the self, I'm in control, right? Like, how could it be that there could be something else going on, right? That's kind of threatening to our sense of control. Patti Van Eys: Right. Right, it's. It's threatening to our sense of control and this phenomenon of dissociation has been understood and then it's been suppressed by scientific community or by the mental health community. Then it's been understood again and then it's been suppressed again and understood and suppressed. And ⁓ this is what we do when it feels like you're talking about, when it feels like how could this possibly be true? Because if this is true, you know gosh I feel so out of control about it all and you know as as mental health providers if this is true how do I treat this you know it makes me feel out of control right so so it's an easy thing to be kind of get into cultural denial around these types of phenomena that seem way out there but I am here to tell you this is true and and and the first the first time I ever saw it first time I ever saw it, hadn't been trained, because I was trained in grad school in the 80s. And we weren't really trained up about this phenomenon, and really even about child abuse. The advocacy center, the first one, was created in 1985. So when I went to work with them, they were just pretty new. Now they're everywhere, and we understand child abuse happens. But back then, we didn't have sexual abuse. child protection on the books until I don't even know when it was but maybe about that time we had physical abuse in 78. We had animal abuse before that but in this country we didn't even get ⁓ physical abuse in terms of legal like criminal yeah anyway so yeah it's so the little yeah yeah it's chilling. Andrew Heacock: Crime. I didn't know that. That's chilling. Okay. Patti Van Eys: So the little baby brain has this beautiful way of protecting itself and staying alive, at least the body stays alive, but the mind and spirit have been very fractured. And ⁓ so you can imagine then if it's a disorganized attachment system, ⁓ meaning, so there's insecure attachment, which is like anxious attachment, so think kind of like. a kid with really bad separation anxiety and can't leave mama or daddy. ⁓ Anxious attachment or even as an adult you might have kind of the clingy spouse syndrome or partner syndrome. ⁓ And then there's avoidant attachment which is kind of like the kind of person that kind of holds you at arm's length. don't really trust real easily but I can have relationship but I kind of do it from here. That's avoidant attachment. That's another form of insecure attachment. About Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Patti Van Eys: ⁓ I'm trying to think. I'm trying to remember my pie chart now. Many of us have insecure attachment, avoidant or anxious attachment. It's not uncommon. But disorganized attachment is less common and it is almost always brought back down to kids who have had early and chronic maltreatment. Andrew Heacock: At what age are we talking about? mean, is there kind of a cutoff at which point it is no longer possible because of neuroplasticity or? You mean you mentioned babies, which is like, oh my gosh. I mean, that's too, I mean. Patti Van Eys: Yeah, so you know the first The first 18 months is when there's those million neural connections happening per second for that whole time period. And that's the most critical development of attachment. But attack of the circuitry. ⁓ there's another part of attachment that happens that's really important, really important. And that is our stress response system is wired up through our attachment experiences. Right. So this stress response system that kind of knows Andrew Heacock: Okay. Patti Van Eys: you know, kid, the baby and the toddler are like, and the mom comes and she goes, I gotcha, it's okay. So the brain learns to wire up to distress into soothe, distress into soothe. And think about that just being a pathway, maybe a roadway that is in the brain, distress into soothe. So that's going to develop a stress response system that is healthy. But if the baby is distressed or the toddler is distressed or the little kid is distressed and the parent does not meet the need, the brain learns to stay on that high alert, that sort of survival mode. And the stress response system is poor. And when you have a poor stress response system, you have a person that will go quickly into high reactivity like fight or flight or down into freeze or dissociation, depending on their survival response at that point. and situation. But the other thing that comes with a good stress response system is a healthy immune system. And for those with a poor stress response system, they have a poor immune system because stress hormones and immunity hormones, like stress hormones that are high, affect the immune system. It suppresses it. And so the ACE study, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, that is pretty big and well known where the more of these adverse childhood experiences you have like sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, domestic violence, parents who are substance abusing, all those things, the more of those ACEs you have, the more risk you have for physical disease as well as mental health challenges. Why the physical disease? Because of the poor stress response system and the immunity that has been. suppressed. So and there's a whole lot more we could talk about there. Yes. Andrew Heacock: This is where psychosomatic illness comes from. ⁓ Last week I interviewed a neurologist who's the head of the Neuroscience of Yoga Conference and we talked somewhat about things like fibromyalgia, for example, or also I have this autoimmune disorder in chronic conditions and allopathic medicine is not really very good at dealing with them or even identifying them. But there is this idea that they come, what's the cause of it? Ultimately, what's the ideology of them? Patti Van Eys: Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Andrew Heacock: it very well could just be like internalized year decades of internalized stress that isn't like released. Patti Van Eys: Yes and so a lot of times with these people that have had trauma early on they do have these bodily things. I was doing a consult just recently with a young therapist in another state who is seeing a teenager and this teenager is just having these horrible ⁓ skin rashes come on and also having a terrible time with their ⁓ body regulation, temperature regulations. They get really, really cold like they're in a freezer or they get really, really hot. so yeah, their body is telling their story. And so I'm like, what happened to this kid? You know, we're trying to kind of image back what might've happened. But you asked me a question I didn't answer, which was about the age and ⁓ attachment. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Patti Van Eys: mostly the first 18 months, attachment keeps wiring up past that. And even as adults, can do something I call, let's say it's somebody with insecure attachment, we can work on having learned attachment because just like we can learn a language later on, we can learn French. I could learn Spanish right now if I put my mind to it. It would take me a while. I would have to work at it, but my brain could still change its wiring with attachment because it's developmental. but back to language. But if I'd been exposed to it in that early brain, I would just have it, right? I could have three languages or four if they were all around me at that time because the baby's brain can actually do that because it's got so much capacity for wiring up and figuring it out. So the neuroplasticity of course goes down. But by adulthood, we can still have some learned attachment and still have some change in our wiring. And that's gonna go better if we've got more of an attachment foundation, more of a healthy. So those with insecure attachment, like maybe the avoidant person, if they put their... motivation in mind to it and have a partner who can help them with that, they can make some significant changes in that attachment style. We'll call that an attachment style. But remember that avoidant attachment and anxious attachment, insecure attachment are still organized. Andrew Heacock: Right. Like explicable. Right. Like they follow some sort of norm, even if they're insecure, they can be described. Yeah. Right. Patti Van Eys: it. they can be described. There was consistency to how they were raised, and it wasn't necessarily any, you know, wasn't terrorizing abuse or anything like that. But the disorganized, they don't have a schema for it because they're just always in survival mode and so they're switching depending on the circumstance and they're thinking that you are always a threat, the other person's always a threat. and yet they're yearning for that connection because they're people like we all are we all yearning for connection so they might think oh my gosh i think andrews the one i think i can be safe with him and vulnerable with him and i'm lean into that and then with that the slightest threat something you say you're you're having a bad day you're a little dismissive whatever it might be they can flip on you right into their Andrew Heacock: as a survival because they adapted to survive that way. That's their tool, right? And then, so if this makes so much sense now, you know, we began this story of people coming to you and saying, we can't figure these kids out. Well, that's because they're all sui generis. Like each of them is their own thing. They have their own pattern. Who knows? You have to basically almost reverse engineer, well, what the hell must have been going on to make this behavior adaptive? That's what you do. That's what you do. Patti Van Eys: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right? Yes, yes. That's what I do. I love that I reverse engineer. Very much detective work and the work that I do in with the incarcerated adults is very much detective work. So I have to figure out what happened to them that brought him up to their crime. And then in their crime, was it related to the disorganized attachment slash dissociative features? What we're learning is that when people develop the Andrew Heacock: Detective work, yeah. Patti Van Eys: the truly structural dissociation, when dissociation is on a continuum. You and I dissociate all the time, you know, at a low level. ⁓ But the structural... Yeah, that's what's happening. But at a structural level where there's the amnesia, where there's the not knowing between the... When the body is doing something, but the rest of me doesn't know it did it. Andrew Heacock: Instagram, TikTok, like that's what that's for. Yeah, that's what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: you know oftentimes that's i'm finding in the persons that i'm called on that are incarcerated i'm getting their selection bias calling me to certain cases because they know there's been the horrible horrific trauma but you know this is the two detectives work to figure out did the court was the crime reenactment in some way of what happened to them or and or just when they were threatened in that part of the brain that then made the one go away, the main self-state go away and the protector self-state come out to do the action to take care of business, know, was that happening? And if so, what was the trauma reminder? What was the trigger that may have set off the switch of the dissociative adaptation? So. Andrew Heacock: Is this work, or like when you're working with people that are incarcerated, is what you're doing the same as forensic psychology, or is there a distinction to be made between that and what you're doing? Patti Van Eys: It's a great question. So when I came through training, because it was some years ago, there wasn't a board yet or a subspecialty of forensic psychology. There wasn't even pediatric psychology at the time, which is the word for psychologists who would work within the hospital setting or within the medical setting. There was child psychology, which of course is what I was raising. So I do a lot of forensic work. I am not a forensic psychologist. What is the difference? The difference is ⁓ once they instituted having forensic psychology programs that actually trained people like myself in that subspecialty and then those persons who have been in those programs can go and get boarded in a special board for forensic psychology. ⁓ Those people are forensic psychologists which basically means they're clinical psychologists like I am. which psychologists do a lot of assessment as well as we can do therapy, can do consulting, all of that, but psychologists have in our toolkit and in our training, we're the ones trained more around formal assessment than anybody else is in the mental health world. That's kind of our distinction, if you will. So forensic psychologists know all of that, but they also know how things map onto legal statutes, they know how... They know a lot about the law. They know a lot about the court. Andrew Heacock: makes lot of sense because a lot of it is about mens rea like the having the mental capacity to commit it like do you have incapacity like are you insane or like just did you have the intention to do this to the requisite mental state for this to be murder versus manslaughter that makes a lot of sense so that's what they're they're assessing Patti Van Eys: Right. right. Right. They're assessing that and so sort of for the insanity side of things. They're also assessing oftentimes competency. Is this person competent to stand trial? Can they work with their attorneys? And I'm allowed to do all of those things even without being boarded, but then what would happen to... And I've done competency evals and things like that, but what would, you what could happen in court if it went all the way to, ⁓ you know, yeah. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Patti Van Eys: It could be, could, you are you boarded in forensic? And I'd have to say no, and they could take me down if you will. But my work forensically has been mostly either in child abuse. So I've been on the stand a lot to talk as an expert witness about children who have been abused. Maybe they have dissociation as well as sort of the damages from the abuse. ⁓ So I get hired a lot as an expert around child abuse kinds of issues. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Patti Van Eys: and then I get hired on the adult side to do what we call the mitigation. So I'm not really doing typically the insanity defense and that kind of thing or the neuropsych batteries or anything. Even though I could, ⁓ I'm getting hired kind of in my wheelhouse of child abuse expertise. And can you be a detective and figure out what happened so that we can Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: present in the sentencing time the mitigation around the childhood and how it impacted the developmental trajectory and then into the crime and can you humanize, can you humanize the person? And by the time I get on the stand or just give my report, both have happened, ⁓ I know that person really, really well. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: and I have also interviewed their family members and their third grade teacher and the social worker who brought them into foster care. know, any people that the legal team can find for me and then I've read stacks of records. So the detective work is really interesting in those cases because it's so much. It's so much. But the thing that's been most interesting aside from putting all those pieces together to try to humanize a person and explain their history, the thing that's been the most interesting gets back to spiritual. ⁓ Because these folks have been, many of them have been on death row for a long time. And ⁓ my job is to try to, ⁓ so they've already been sentenced, but maybe they're coming back for a re-senancing or an appeal around their sentencing. The attorneys want to get them moved from execution just to life in prison, that kind of thing. ⁓ And they've been on the road for a long time and what's happened to them is they have changed considerably because they've actually, all of them have come to some kind of place of meditation, self-reflection. They have a lot of time and they haven't had the work done around their trauma. They haven't had mental health care, ⁓ but they've done so much. They've usually been converted in some way to some kind of spiritual belief system of some sort or another. they've all, many of them have taken something up creatively. So, well, okay, so one guy was able to get paints and canvas and he was just a visual artist painter. Another one, Andrew Heacock: Really? Like what? Patti Van Eys: would get plastic bags from the guards or anybody he could and ⁓ created like twisty, like you can get this stuff at Michael's Craft. ⁓ Can make like little cross necklaces or little bracelets, but they look a lot like what you would, what you can buy at the craft store that kids make things out of. I don't even, but. Andrew Heacock: Okay. Okay, yeah. Patti Van Eys: take strips of garbage bags or dollar general the yellow dollar general bags and Create and and then give them he would give his little creations to ⁓ Different guards that were nice to him or other inmates. He gave me one ⁓ So that's one and then another ⁓ another guy had learned how to crochet and he made little he made little care bears and and he was in a kind of a a non-profit thing that the people from the outside would bring him the materials, he would make these little care bears and they would go to foster kids. ⁓ And another one, very recent one, ⁓ creates little, ⁓ he creates really interesting model cars that are about that big, that actually have wheels that'll go around. He makes them out of tiny pieces of cardboard from granola boxes, granola bar boxes, and then, in his facility he's allowed to have kind of these craft paints that he can then paint it and these things he's made are amazing. They're just, it's art, it's incredible. ⁓ So anyway, those are a couple examples but people, humans find, ⁓ they find their own creativity. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: in the context of being alone. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, well, I think that I have another one of my theories about like the mind is that I creativity is an adaptation to boredom. I think that just under stimulation because my way of doing it, it's very hard to be creative in today's world because of the constant digital media. And I have a practice called doing nothing. Guess what it involves? I mean, and I mean, like I've been influenced by the psychiatrist, Alec Kanojo, he's got a Patti Van Eys: Yeah. There you go. Andrew Heacock: His name is Dr. K is what he's called. He's got a huge streamer on YouTube. And he's a psychiatrist. He was teaching at Harvard Medical School, but he's also trained as a monk in India. so he takes and he's a therapist. So it's a bunch of exceptional. He's a psychiatrist that talks to people. And he uses meditation as interventions. He's got a coaching program. It's a fascinating individual. But he's a big advocate of doing nothing. And he's like, most people who are procrastinating say, just do nothing all day. I'm not doing nothing. They're doing something. It's just playing a video game or the TV. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. out. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: He was also a gaming addict. That was a big part of his thing. His program is called Healthy Gamer. So like playing video games is not doing nothing. You're definitely, you're super active. It's very stimulating. So doing nothing involves like doing nothing. And I have found that if I do nothing, especially first time in the morning with no, ⁓ what might have been stores are topped off in the morning and I don't look at my phone, I don't turn anything on, music and no reading. just sit and look at the light. Basically is how I started getting interested in photography. Eventually I will become bored enough and then ideas start to come. Patti Van Eys: Interesting. Yeah. ⁓ Andrew Heacock: And I think that's probably an adaptation of just the boredom of living on a savanna or wherever we, know. And I could see how in an isolating environment that could be like this, a beautiful way of just finding like meaning and stimulation and enjoyment. Patti Van Eys: Yeah, that was... Yeah, yeah. I was going say what you do sounds like a meditative practice. And again, when you're kind of doing nothing and just watching the light, you're opening, you're emptying so that you're open and the ideas come in. It sounds like that to me, that practice. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah, they're, they're, they're, they're very similar. It's not a mindfulness practice, but it is, I guess, a form of meditation. There's a deliberate intention to do nothing. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: to do nothing. Yeah. And so back to the spiritual of these guys, I'll say one more thing about that. I feel like when I go in, I have this particular job I'm supposed to do and they know I've been sent by the defense team and all of that. But what I learn and what I find by just by being with, by calmly and gently, compassionately being with them. What happens is, and it's happened with every single one that I've ever gone into, they're looking for this. So I happen to be a supplier of what they're seeking, I think. They're looking for someone to see them. And again, I go back to attachment, right, and the mirroring. And they're really, they allow me, and this is the part that is extremely, ⁓ every time it happens, I'm just, I don't know, it's hard for me even talk about it. Andrew Heacock: ⁓ Yeah. Patti Van Eys: ⁓ Mm. they let me see them and I hold their experience in a way that I don't think has ever happened for them and ⁓ their shame can dissipate for them and sometimes I'll get a note back from them or they'll tell me it's okay for me to die now. It doesn't matter anymore. because I've let go. And what's so powerful in this is I always do some psychoeducation and I help them understand how what happened to them wasn't their fault and how it wired their brain differently. It's what you and I have been talking about here today. And to help them understand that because of the way their brain developed in this... survival kind of way that they then responded to every relationship and each opportunity in these ways that then cumulatively narrowed their choices. know, and, ⁓ but, but to, but to have, for them to be able to take the blame off themselves and kind of come to their core and see that they're just a little... I always say I always see the little child. I can see the three-year-old in them. I don't say this to them, but I do. I see the sweet, precious, naive soul that is who they are in this physical body that got spiritually damaged, back to your question. and by bearing witness and helping them understand that the detective connecting the dots. What happens to them is the most amazing and beautiful thing of anything in the work I do. It's the most beautiful thing. It doesn't have words to it for me ⁓ because I don't feel like I'm doing it. It's that channel. It's back to that, you know, it's back to that, let that spirit of compassion come and be with us. ⁓ yeah, so. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, we started off talking about the spiritual and we've kind of come back there full circle and ⁓ I can, you know, I will relate something to you that I related to a couple of those people that I told you that that changed my life. ⁓ And with the, with the trust is that it is extraordinary what you can take on the energy that you take on, but it's not at all. it's, amazing, almost a mystery that people can just handle it. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: And but it's not a mystery to me why you do what you do, because it's obviously that you get to see people have these moments. this there's a theme in my life that's becoming a very, very center present in my life lately. And that's the theme of being seen and helping others to feel seen. That's a lot of what photography is for me. It's I just worked with a model for the first time this week. And I think I was like, this is what I want to do. I want to help people feel I want I want people Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: You said that you wish that people could see our spiritual selves, not our bodies, right? I've always had a wish, hope that the world, that I could make everyone see themselves through other people's eyes, not their own. Because that's most of my problems is just a warped sense of self, which is kind of also what comes out of, think, trauma. just, you don't know who you are. You don't really know how to expect to be treated. ⁓ too much, very low self-esteem or very high self-esteem. Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: you know, are problems that probably would not be as much of a problem in our society and for the individual level if we could just know how people see us. And ⁓ I do have this way of being able to see people. And as a photographer, it's changed that there's a desire. been very wordy my whole life. And so there's something that's very satisfying about not having to explain it to just be able to show people like this is what I see when I see this person. And it is profoundly humanizing, which is a weird thing that humans need to be humanized. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: But that's the reality, I think, of criminal defendants and incarcerated people. yeah, there is just these words. The word, you're right, it's like there's really a good word for it. There's an ineffable quality to this feeling, but I've had kind of experiences with it, directing actors or non-actors and creating safety in the body and helping people feel vulnerable and be seen that there's a healing experience to it that I've been able to be mostly on one side of it. Patti Van Eys: You Yeah. Andrew Heacock: but I've gotten glimpses of the other side and it's easily the most rewarding experience I've ever had. And I can see that as you're talking about it now that you get to do this work. ⁓ So you mentioned a couple of times an event that came up ⁓ some years ago that had changed your spirituality. Do you feel comfortable talking about that today? Yeah, yeah. Patti Van Eys: ⁓ I do. I am honored to do it. Yeah. about my experience and what happened. I do, I feel comfortable. Yeah, it's, yeah, I feel comfortable talking about it. I've talked about this experience publicly when I've done some other presentations around for mental health providers. So it's not something I haven't ever, not that I've talked about. Yeah, I had, I have two sons. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah. Patti Van Eys: And my older son, David, when he was in his later 20s, he had a couple of experiences that really knocked him off center. And he became a person who started to struggle with opioids. And he became addicted to those very mind-claiming chemicals. And I am a clinical psychologist who thinks I know what I'm doing. Right? So, mama to the rescue. ⁓ And we had a journey as a family of ⁓ one treatment program after another that did not work. And David, ⁓ brilliant mind, beautiful person, very, very handsome. Everybody loved him, very social, had done great in school, had a great job. was going to marry a wonderful woman. mean, everything looked good until it didn't. And ⁓ it blindsided all of us. But I'm just putting my whole self into it. We can get through this. We can get through this. And what I learned was, at some point in there, that I was losing myself in the struggle. And it wasn't my fight to fight. And I had to surrender, or I was going to die. and it had to be his fight. I couldn't do it for him. But there was a long time in there when I thought I could. And that's when I went to the Art of Living. And then I went back to the Art of Living with him later, because I thought, well, these other programs aren't working. Maybe this one will work. Maybe he just needs what I found. And we had a wonderful, wonderful week together and climbed Grandfather Mountain. And I have beautiful pictures of all of that day and all of that. but that wasn't his path. And so I had a profound experience in February of 2021 when I just realized I've got to let this go completely and just surrender it and know that David's spiritual path is his spiritual path and he will be healed one way or another. And he died in April of 2021 of an accidental overdose. And he was down in Florida where he lived at the time. In February, I was down visiting him in Florida. And so that was like an incredibly hard loss that I don't mean it's, I, again, no, can't really explain all of that because it's too profound to explain it. But it reinforced when he died. I had these tools already in place because I knew that I needed them for myself and my own healing. And I was really, really strong at the time of his passing. And what I knew then, because of my own work that I'd done, thankfully, for those two years. what i knew then was he and i he and i were okay we we are relationship was going to continue we're gonna have relationship no matter what because for spirit and ⁓ and what did he need to tell me ⁓ what did i need to learn from his experience and one of the things he told me before he died was and we were very very close he and i had very strong attachment ⁓ he he said mom what the programs are missing. did 11 programs, by the way. What the programs are missing is the spiritual aspect. And I remember being really surprised to hear him say that because he wasn't a religious person or a spiritual person that I had, you know, Our family has been raised in traditional Christian, United Methodist tradition, and he was raised that way, but I didn't think of him as... Andrew Heacock: you Patti Van Eys: That just surprised me when he said it. I said, tell me more about that. And he started describing what his experience of addiction was like. And it was like spiritual forces fighting each other on the inside. And he would describe this wolf-like part. And he started talking in a way that sounded like dissociation. And I'm like, this is what I do. And I didn't know that that's what. And so then I started, in my mind, thinking addiction is a form of dissociation. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Of course. ⁓ Numbing out. what they call it. Just handle GZX. They're good for that. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: You know? Yeah, of course it is. Duh, you know, right? yeah. Exactly. So anyway, I deep dived into trying to understand ⁓ how to have relationship across the veil. And ⁓ the hawk, that's David. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I had a sense that it might be something like that. Patti Van Eys: Yeah, yeah, that's how he comes. ⁓ Yeah, that's one of the ways he comes. And it's I could tell you if we could have a whole other podcast about my experience. Yeah, my experience with ⁓ with this aspect of my life. But I learned I've learned about mediumship and I've been a consumer of mediumship. ⁓ I've Andrew Heacock: Probably. Mm-hmm. Patti Van Eys: taken a deep dive into shamanism in terms of learning the basics of that and having a shaman healer work, a shamanic healer that I worked with for a while and still work with, you know, occasionally, but I had a long stint of that. ⁓ I have a ⁓ deep belief that for many people, if we can be in communication through medium with our loved ones, ⁓ we can also begin to build our own ⁓ communication without the medium. And I have pretty good communication with David now. And when the hot came, like, you know, I'm like, thanks, buddy. Andrew Heacock: It was what we were talking about in the moment too. It felt like it knew what we were talking about. ⁓ Yeah, yeah, was very, that moment was very personal for me too, without having any understanding of what it would represent to you. it's some, yeah. I just want to say. Patti Van Eys: Isn't that something? Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I want to say that in moments like this, I've learned that there's a, used to always have no idea what to say. And I realized that there's, there's just no right answer other than to just be authentic. And so I'll say, ⁓ what an, honored I am and humbled that you would trust me to share this, ⁓ in this forum. And, ⁓ I know that it, it, it has to be incredibly difficult to relate it even now years later. And, ⁓ I'm sure. Patti Van Eys: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: telling the story. There's something in my experience about telling a story does kind of facilitate some healing, but there's a lot more to it than that. ⁓ you know, I just, there's a lot of what you talked about is personal to me, I've had struggles with addiction and I have parents and ⁓ I can't imagine what it's like to have been in their position. And ⁓ it must just have been so hard. ⁓ Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and and and it is and you're right and there's so many people who need help other parents help it really might be another good good conversation. ⁓ But I got some good help to through an organization called the Balm family recovery be a it's called be a loving mirror Balm and back to mirroring you know. But my husband. Andrew Heacock: Okay. Mm-hmm. Patti Van Eys: really learned a lot from them too because he's not in my profession. we really got a lot out of that support around other families and parents who are navigating addiction. This is of course before David passed, we were in that group and it was really helpful. There's a lot of things that I've learned. ⁓ There's so much that I've learned and I'll just tell you one other thing about this to kind of put a nice bow on it because there are so many things to talk about here in terms of how much I've grown and learned. I call it the gift of grief because I am a such a different person from who I was before that in such a good way. I'm such a and my work has changed so much after David's passing because what I feel I might my spiritual channels are even more open because I mean communication across the veil all the time but After he died, I got a message from him intuitively and in an image about, ⁓ it was like mom for Christmas, the first Christmas he was gone and he died in April, so this would have been December, so some months later. He said, I want you to give every member of the family a pocket token, round coin looking thing, ⁓ with the serenity prayer on it. And the serenity prayer for, I think, Andrew Heacock: Mm. Patti Van Eys: Most people know the serenity prayer, but it's the prayer that's often used in the 12-step programs around acceptance and surrender, and then the courage to change what one can change, but to accept what one cannot change, and then the wisdom to know the difference. So he's like, want you to give everybody one of those, and I want you to put it with a, like in a little bag, I could see it, like a little drawstring bag with a cardinal, because I Andrew Heacock: Hmm. Patti Van Eys: Again, I have a lot of stories about Cardinals in the beginning of after David died. I have some incredible stories about things that happened with his presence, but ⁓ he wanted me at that point it was the Cardinal. The hawk came later, but ⁓ so I'm like, what are you talking about? I can see what you want me to do, but I don't know anything about this. It was two days before Christmas. So I go online to search these pocket token things. and ⁓ he didn't have one. I mean, this was a whole new idea. And ⁓ I'm looking and I found a couple of places, but I couldn't get them before Christmas. So then I'm like, I'm doing this because this is what I do. I'm doing this. So I start going out into the community. I start making phone calls. I start looking for all the places, go down to St. Mary's Bookstore where I found four of them. I needed 15. And I call these other places. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. and then the people at St. Mary's said, over to the Friendship House, which is a 12-step house, and it happens to be one that David went to a lot. I've taken him there. So go to Friendship House, I open the door, and there's these people sort of sitting around two days before Christmas. I'm like, hi, I'm wondering if you have these pocket token things. I got a few of them from the Catholic store down the street. They look like this. And the woman said, I think we have a few of those. Come over to our little counter where we sell stuff. So we went there, and she's... you know looking all around and all the doors and out comes one and here comes another one and and I told her who I was I said you may know my son and she goes ⁓ yeah we love David we know David and then she finds a few more she gets all the array out it was eleven tokens to go with my four so now I've got my fifteen and she said that's all I've got I can't find anymore I go that's good that's all I need right there So anyway, ⁓ then after that Christmas, I got the message that this was an important, almost ministry or service that I could do, that I was to carry, I was always to keep one on me and then give them to people who need them. And so I'm just reaching into my pocket here so I can show you the one I found. is from, you can see on one side it's a tree, Tree of Life. And then on the other side, it's got the prayer. Andrew Heacock: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: engraved, the Serenity Prayer engraved. So always have one on my person and one of the things I do as a practice is I'll do this when I'm feeling like I need to calm or regulate or something like that. But then I will be directed intuitively and I don't know if it's David, if it's Spirit, if it's I don't know who directs me. I always have thought it was David but I don't really know. But I get directed and it's Andrew Heacock: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Patti Van Eys: strong when it happens. And so like I was sitting on an airplane and it came over me and I'm sitting by the window and there's this woman two up and on the aisle kind of close to the front of the plane and it's like I'm supposed to give her one of these. the idea is that there's a person who needs the encouragement or who needs the healing or who needs the connection. I don't ever know why. but I'm told to give it to this person. it's such a strong feeling that I'm coming out of my skin with it. I've got to get over this man to get to her. so I go to, I couldn't get over him. It wasn't going to happen because we were landing. So I get out and I'm running after this woman and she's this young woman. She's probably 30 and I'm... you know in my sixties and it's like I'm running after her and ⁓ I catch up to her and I'm like Patty you now have to say something. Andrew Heacock: You're the dog that's caught the car at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: I'm the dog that's caught the car. So I say, excuse me, ⁓ but I sometimes get intuition about people and my intuition is that sometimes that they may need this. And I said, just, I put it in her hand, I said, this is just for you. You'll probably know why you need it. I don't need to know, but she looked really, this is just. This is just one out of many I've given. She looked really kind of shocked and I said, I'll tell you what, here's my card. If you ever want to call me just to ask me what this is about, I'd be happy to tell you more. Okay, and about two weeks later I got the call from her and ⁓ I said to her, I'm a psychologist but I'm not looking for clients. I just do consulting now anyway, I told her, but at that time that was true. ⁓ But anyway, she ⁓ called me and she said, I wasn't going to call you, but then something told me to call you. And she said, you gave that to me. She said, I was heading, she said, I was, I was, was going to kill myself. and I was heading out to go and kill myself. And she said, I went into the women's room after you came by with the token, and I went in the women's room and I held it and I looked at it and I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, you don't have to do this. And I've kept up with her through time, just every now and again, just checking in with her on text and we've talked a couple of times. And she's been able to pull things together in beautiful ways and it turns out that she's extremely spiritual and she gets a lot of... so see she had an open channel too ⁓ and she gets a lot of messaging and intuitive knowing and that kind of thing but that particular thing is not Andrew not something I would have ever seen myself doing ten years ago So what happened after David's journey with addiction, the journey with addiction changed me more than his passing changed me. I think the whole thing changed me, but ⁓ sometimes we have to be reduced to our own vulnerability and helplessness to empowerlessness to to learn what we need to learn or Andrew Heacock: Powerlessness. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: when we do get reduced to our powerlessness and our vulnerability, it is our opportunity to learn. Maybe that's a better way to put it. I don't think all people have to be reduced to that to learn the things, but when that does happen, and it happens to most people in some form or fashion, ⁓ I would just say that's our opportunity to capitalize on Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fortunately not, Patti Van Eys: what we can learn from, in a sense, emptying self. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, ⁓ this is a very beautiful, beautiful experience that you've related. And I would love to have another conversation with you. We could just talk about grief because I'm sure that you have a variety of different approaches to understanding that because of your career profession and your education and then your lived experience and then the work with it. I would love that. Patti Van Eys: And yeah, ego goes away. Bye ego. ⁓ my I do. ⁓ Andrew Heacock: That's an again, what a spiritual experience. have some other experiences with that too, as well. ⁓ I, ⁓ I'm wondering, you you mentioned that you, ⁓ you were changed more by the, by living with a son who was living with addiction than you did by losing him. ⁓ And there is this thing of this, this dark night of the soul that we experienced after this traumatic events. I talked with it about, interestingly, my second guest. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yes. Yes. Andrew Heacock: I shared with you as a law professor and he's a scholar and a philosopher. He's a scholar of free will and crime and punishment and free will and responsibility, which is an interesting parallel to what you do. ⁓ It is an interesting approach to the work. Yeah. And free will for me is a spiritual question of like, do we have free will or not? And that's a separate thing from responsibility, but he was fired from his job at LSU because he criticized the governor and the president, Donald Trump. Patti Van Eys: Yes. Andrew Heacock: And he's a tenured professor, but he was fired pending an investigation that will never end and he's been traumatized by it. And we talked about that. This is my second interview and I'm thinking, we're gonna have this really, we're gonna have a spirited discussion about the importance of academic, all above the neck, things about academic freedom and free will and consciousness. And the most impactful parts of it for me personally, and I think for the audience was, just the human moment of like he experienced this deep trauma and it was there's a loss of identity because he was a teacher. know, mean, legal scholars, academia is about scholarship, of course, and you're expected to publish. But I imagine what makes it really rewarding is the teaching and the being in the classroom, which is basically the only thing that they took from him. And I'm having a similar experience now talking with you about Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yes. Right. you Andrew Heacock: I've definitely had my own dark night of the soul moment. Mine lasted like a long time. I was like 10 years. Like it took, I got stuck there and ⁓ I've learned a lot of things of meaning making, cause I am a very different person now. I'm probably closer to what was at the core all along. Like the persona is what gets stripped away, you know, as you, as you integrate with your shadow and things like that. And you become more like the person you were, you were always meant to be maybe. So I like to think of more like that, you know, and, I, and I, Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yes. Exactly. Andrew Heacock: I of failed spectacularly at becoming the person I was not supposed to be. You know, like it was just, you know, like that. And, I'm grateful for that now. And it's a strange thing to be able to say, I'm grateful for the worst thing that ever happened to me. ⁓ You know, it's one of those things that if you know, know, and, it's one of those, you've mentioned this, this sensation of deep knowing. Patti Van Eys: Yep, I get it though. Andrew Heacock: like capital K knowing. And I've had that experience and it does come from meditation. It's like it opens the channel. That's the term you've used many times. And so does grief. So does trauma. I these things, there's not really a whole lot of room anywhere else. Like it takes a wide channel to move those things through. And ⁓ it has kind of given meaning to my life. I've had a, ⁓ it's been a difficult dilemma. You could think of it as a spiritual struggle of Patti Van Eys: Yes. Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: How much of my life and career and frankly, attention should I dedicate to the things that I've learned about what's wrong with the mental health care system, for example, and the health care system? do I really want to spend... And I've thought about studying becoming a clinical psychologist because I would really like to get intimately aware of all of the methodological approaches to understanding why psychiatric diagnosis are not valid. There's a problem of construct validity. I'd like to understand that at a deeper level. Patti Van Eys: What? Andrew Heacock: If you want to study psychiatry, you study clinical psychology, basically. Like if you want to study the problems in, and there's this conflict of like, yeah, I don't think I want to have the rest of my life be defined by the worst things that ever happened to me, but I'm okay with them being defined by what I did about it, by the things that I learned about it. And it's a very hard, there is, it's the kind of thing that I think is spiritual dilemma. There can only be really a spiritual solution of like, you just eventually you know. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yes, yes. Andrew Heacock: And it's not a rational conclusion you've arrived at of how do I thread like, how do I thread that needle? Because, you know, I want to help people. I've learned a lot of things as a result of of what I've been through. But ⁓ I wanted to know if you had any insight on that of like how we how do we how do we answer these questions or how do we how do we discover the answers to the questions? Patti Van Eys: Hmm. That's a lot. And the questions being. I'm not really clear on the, well. Andrew Heacock: I would call them the ultimate questions. What am I supposed to do with my life? What am I supposed to do about all this suffering? Or about the things that I've experienced, like now what? What's the way to act with responsibility here? Patti Van Eys: ⁓ what? So sort of at that personal level, not at the, are we gonna do about the DSM and psychology level? ⁓ You had the more existential personal and yeah. I think about, Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, like the more existential. Yes. Patti Van Eys: I think about the suffering being so important to growth. And that's what you're talking about, the dark night of the soul. And kind of that whole gestalt, kind of the yin-yang of it all, right? So without the suffering, there can't be the joy and the awe and the wonder. ⁓ Love and suffering, grief and love, it's all... it's all one, it's hard to separate it out. And so I guess I kind of reframe the thinking into how can I be ⁓ fully present in this, how can my spiritual self be fully present in this earthly form to follow the guidance and the learning to my highest purpose. And I think If we can do that, if we can wake up every day and kind of be this channel for our highest purpose, help me today to be at my highest purpose, to be on the path to my highest purpose. I don't know that we can ask much else of ourselves. ⁓ What I'm learning a lot at this stage of life is that so much is about compassion. ⁓ compassion to self and others and interconnectedness and knowing you and I are We are each other. Humans and nature and all of us, we're all interconnected by the same spiritual forces that keep us all together. ⁓ So what am I saying? Existentially speaking, It's really a simple concept of being. who you really are, of being the origin, the true self that you talked about, stripping away the masks and being the pure, I think of it as really love, that's just how I think of it, it's above my head too, just being the love. ⁓ If I can be the love every day and be truly authentic and not have to prove stuff and to tell my ego, okay, ego, you're helpful sometimes. You're helping me think about things. I hear you. But you could just kind of step aside right now because I don't need to be anything special. I just need to be here in my love form. ⁓ So the answer to me is simple. Just lead with love. ⁓ But the world is so complicated because not all humans are doing that. And so how do we maneuver? without getting eaten up. you know it i think there's practical issues but that the the existential question to me is easy it's the operating in the world that's Andrew Heacock: Yeah, that, yeah, that and yeah, I was asked the one I was asking about was the easy one for you. I'm glad it's easy for you navigating the world is pretty hard too. ⁓ cause when other people are not on the same wavelength that compassion, you know, is difficult. That was the thing that to me was like, yeah, I mean, you recognize this is a Zen concept interbeing. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: we enter are like, you know, the idea of separateness is an illusion. I think that's what leads to most suffering. That's kind of also my psychology of religion 101 is like when the ego dissolves into a super ego, that's a spiritual experience. That's bliss. And the sense of separateness is where a disconnection and yeah, yeah. And that's what I think a lot of addiction is for me as well as like people also say depression is Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yes. You're just. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, there's this movie called Sometimes I Think About Dying. Wonderful film. First director I ever met. It was at the Belcourt and it was the best representation of depression I've ever seen. Of just chronic, I guess you call it cyclothymic depression or just thymic, it just never ends. And ⁓ the way it just felt, the film was palpable, the felt sense of it. And I complimented the director on it and just shared my experience a little bit in a Q &A. She was like, you know, I don't see the film as about depression, I see it as about disconnection. I'm like, that's... Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: That's what he like that's depression like disconnected. It is an inability to connect to anyone or anything including with what's inside of you. That's the painful thing is not being able to feel that's what that's why a lot of why I love to go to the movies because I can cry, you know for a long time is the only way I could cry and it's been it's been amazing to have had that and now it's now I can cry all the time. ⁓ Sometimes I cry and Walgreens for a reason like it's just it you know, and it's a good thing but ⁓ compassion, think. ⁓ Patti Van Eys: And including oneself, yeah. Now you can try out the Yes. Andrew Heacock: You know, I don't know if it's a solution by itself, although it may be, but damn it, does it make everything better? It just makes whatever you're going through, compassion for self, compassion for others. ⁓ It sure as hell does make everything easier. And it is, has been a nice thing to realize like, ⁓ that I'm worthy of that. And, and I'm worthy of giving it to, which is arguably for me even better, like to love unconditionally is as for me has been better than to be loved unconditionally. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, sometimes that's actually easier because we aren't loving ourselves, so it's hard to let others love us unconditionally. Yeah, and I don't mean to make it sound so easy, the existential, and yet ⁓ part of this for me is think is developmental because I am older and I've realized some things ⁓ at this stage of development that all of that ego persona confronting part is not necessary and now that I can sort of take that off I'm so free that I can then lead out of that love and and and again the existential thing is I am here Connected with everything and I will not leave because I'm spirit And so I don't have to be afraid Because I'm spirit and spirit doesn't die and what we most get afraid about is dying And I know now because also of my experience with David that spirit doesn't die. It's a different form of who we are. We're not in this physical body anymore, but it's a different form. And if spirit doesn't die, but I'm here on earth in this particular place and body and mentality, then I'm here. What a wonderful opportunity to grow my spirit. I'm just here to grow my spirit. Andrew Heacock: That's a beautiful way of thinking about it. like your body's in this life is like a garden for your spirit. Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: And if I can... Yes, yes, yes. So if I'm here to grow my spirit, I can do that. You can do that. Everybody can do that. We don't have to feel helpless. We don't have to feel vulnerable. If we're here to grow our spirit and to evolve, which is what I believe, so that's what I hold onto, okay, that's doable. I don't have to ever feel helpless again. If that's my purpose, if that's the purpose, yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. It's also kind of like, I've also found like in life, this is kind of like, I want to say coaching mentality thing, but like, if you can, there are some ways where I've found where like the bar was always like either failure or just merely not failure. you know, like there was no way to win. You set up these no wins areas in your mind, but there's another way where you can make a no lose scenario where you're like, you know, my goal is just to grow and it's almost impossible not to do that. Patti Van Eys: Yeah! Yes. Andrew Heacock: Like, I mean, it's almost impossible. It's a guaranteed win that, and it may suck. Sometimes growing pains are real. But growth mindset, that's another thing we don't have anywhere near enough time now. We've got to wrap up. just learning the difference in fixed mindset and growth mindset was a massive, ⁓ catalyst for me to change my life of just realizing like, ⁓ Patti Van Eys: That's it. Yes. Yep. Andrew Heacock: I have to be willing to suck at things. I have to not be great at everything immediately without effort, which is kind what I was told when I was a child. When your kids are gifted, you're basically complimenting them on being good at things without having to work hard at it. And unfortunately, creates, even though it's a wonderful thing, but it creates this fixed mindset. And it's very threatening to that ego. I love what you're saying, like the spirit lives on. It's the illusion of separateness that dies. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Bye. That's right. Yes. Andrew Heacock: And that's what it was what I think the ego really is. That's it operates on this assumption that we're separate. And it's really unfortunate that we apparently need that to survive. Or at least we did at some point in the past. Because otherwise we might get taken advantage of for resources and something very primal in that way. But I think that that's, to me, if I were to define spirituality. Patti Van Eys: Yes. Yeah. ⁓ Mm-hmm. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I would say that it's ⁓ either a set of practices or the felt sense those practices are meant to cultivate of the dissolution of the ego or the decentering of self from conscious experience. Patti Van Eys: Yes, and I would add to that the acceptance that there is something bigger than I am, right? And something that is holding us all, that's bigger than I am, sort of the mystery or the silence or the source or whatever we want to call the light. yeah, that awareness of that. Andrew Heacock: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Patti Van Eys: to me is a foundational aspect of the spirituality that I find helpful in my own walk. Andrew Heacock: Mm. Mm. ⁓ Do you think that there's a developmental link to that? Because I've thought of often of people that look at God as a parent, as like an ideal parent. And there is something about something enormously huge that makes you feel small that does kind of create that parent-child dynamic. Patti Van Eys: Yeah, well, I think that our religions in the Christian variations and Jewish as well, I would say. ⁓ And I don't know as much about Muslim, and Hindu and all of and other things. But I know in the Judeo-Christian understanding, we have been messaged from very small children, those of us who have practiced in that and just been around this. Andrew Heacock: Mm. Patti Van Eys: this, United States, guess, and Western thinking, we've been told God the Father. It's how we were messaged. So we grow up with that message and then our image of what a father is is dependent on what happens to us here on this earth. So for some, God the Father is a not good thing. And for some, it is this ideal parent and this benevolent being. And I think that the messaging around that has been, has limited the way we think about the creator, whatever the source is. It's limited that because it's too human. We're trying to put this expansive concept into. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah, or yeah, this, yep. Loaded. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That does make sense. I've thought of that often because with me, in my life now, I'm far more likely to encounter that someone that conceives of God is a mother. That's overwhelmingly more common in my lived experience in the community that I'm in. That is really new world here in the Americas. That's really probably was the dominant worldview, especially in Mesoamerica and South America that there would be a father deity, which would be something like the sky, but people didn't really engage with it. It wasn't accessible. It wasn't incarnate, but the mother, know, Ram Dass has a ⁓ wonderful lecture that he gives about the divine feminine and how it is what makes God flesh. And of course that's the earth, you know, like we call it mother earth and that you can have a relationship with the earth. It's tangible. It gives you things. sustains you in it, births you, it gives. it, ⁓ and the, the Virgin Mary, ⁓ Patti Van Eys: Yeah. ⁓ huh. Yeah. Uh-huh. Earth. Andrew Heacock: Guadalupe, which is the kind of the patron saint of Latin America. My birthday is her feast day in the Catholic calendar. And I walked from the pyramids, Teotihuacan outside of Mexico City to the Basilica. Ten million people walk every year for this festival, for this fiesta to venerate this saint. But she really is. It's obvious when you're there in Mexico City, you can see it. This is clearly a pre-existent. ⁓ Mesoamerican deity that was the mother of God. She was the mother of all creation. And the shrine to the Virgin Mary now is built on the former temple to this goddess whose name was Tonantzin. And ⁓ many, many, of the people that venerate this saint are not even nominally Catholic. They're just part of this what religious scholars would call the cult of Tonantzin Guadalupe. It's not a pejorative term to call it that, but like this is their deity who just kind of got adopted. Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: by the church or got, you it's called syncretism, which is tremendously fascinating. But ⁓ it makes a lot of sense that a creator deity and a human mind would be more like a mother. Like if you think about the power to create. But yeah, I do get what you say. We're like, it depends. Your own relationship to your father or mother has a lot to do with what that idea seems like. And it is a very human way of conceiving of the divine. what else are we gonna? Patti Van Eys: Right. Exactly. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I mean, what else do you do with the unfathomability of it? I think that some people can, that's frightening to some people in the same way that, you know, multiple personality disorder, you know, things like that are threatening to our sense of control. So, I want to say again, how grateful I am and honored that you would come and speak with me. ⁓ This has just been an Patti Van Eys: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I'm not surprised after we'd met, like what an endlessly fascinating conversation this was. And I told you that every time, like I wish I had eight hours, you know, there's so much more that we could say. Is there anything else that you would like to say before we log off? Patti Van Eys: I know, I would have killed. I just want to thank you for being open to pulling together some new ways of thinking and ways of being together in the healing spaces. I also didn't say that I do also have my own mentor in a healer that I meet with every two weeks. So I meant to say that earlier and I want to honor her work with me publicly. And she's a kind of more of an energy healer kind of person. And that's another way that I stay grounded and. not letting these really tough stories that I absorb get too much in me. Anyway, just thank you for your openness to thinking about healing in a broad way. I hope it goes well. We could talk again about grief or other things. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. I would love that. I'm sure that that's definitely going to happen. I'm sure and good time. Patti Van Eys: Thank you, Andrew. Okay, bye. Andrew Heacock: Okay, thanks so much, Dr.