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From wherever you are around the world, around the world,
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welcome to the Circle of Insight, a show that explores
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the many facets of human behavior and the wonders of
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the human mind. And now, here's your host, Dr. Carlos.
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So Dr. Grant, thank you very much for doing this.
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I really appreciate you spending the time with us. I
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guess my first question is really curious. By the way, folks, Dr.
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Grant wrote two great books called Brain Spotting, The Revolutionary
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New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and Emotional Healing
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at Warp Speed. He's also the co-author of This is
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Your Brain on Sports. Before we get to those books, Dr.
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Grant and Brain Spotting, I got to ask you, what
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led you into the discovery of brain spotting?
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Well, it wasn't so much that something led me into it.
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It's that it came to me and I received it.
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I noticed it. I was already a therapist for over
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20 years, trained in a variety of different techniques. And
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I was working with an ice skater who was blocked
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on a particular jump called the triple loop, which she
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could do every other jump, triple jump, but not the
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triple loop. And she would go once, twice, and then
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would pop out of the jump instead of completing it.
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And it was a compulsory jump for either the short
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or the long program. And so it really blocked her,
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even though she was a championship caliber skater. And we
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had done a lot of work with this and other things.
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And I was doing a combination of a body therapy
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with an eye movement therapy. I was going very slowly
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across her field of vision. And I had her visualize
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and feel herself just at that moment of popping out
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of the triple loop. And just when I got over here,
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her eye went into this incredible wobble like I had
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never seen before. And then it just locked on. So
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it felt like a hand grabbed my wrist and kept
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it in place. And she went into the deepest processing
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for the next 10 minutes and one trauma would come up,
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whether it was personal or had to do with skating
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or injuries or failure, and process through. And then another one.
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And she was literally looking at my finger like she
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was watching the videos.
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And I.
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Was just mesmerized by this. I didn't really know what
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was happening. And about halfway through, traumas that we had
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worked through already, at least I thought we had worked
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through already, came up again and processed through to a
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deeper level. That got my attention as much as the
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first part because it showed that what looked like it
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had been processed through to the bottom really hadn't gotten
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close to reaching the bottom. After 10 minutes, this intense
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processing stopped. We just kind of finished up. And the
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next day she called me from the practice rink and
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she said, David, I just did a triple loop with
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no problem. And I did it again and again and again.
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And she never had a problem with it before. So
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that's how it came to me.
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Wow, that's interesting. That's great for her, too. Oh, absolutely.
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Was she as surprised as you?
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Yeah, in her own way, yes. In her own way, yes.
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Because she had been so stuck on it for so long.
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Now, it's interesting because when you put your finger up,
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I know last week the class and I were kind
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of looking at it going, was this some kind of
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version of EMDR? Because this is what people might be thinking.
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Is it?
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Absolutely not. In fact... EMDR is based on eye movement, okay?
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Brain spotting is based on finding relevant eye positions in
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the visual field and having the person gaze at those.
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So it is the absence of movement that creates the
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stillness that allows the processing to go deeper and deeper
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and deeper into the brain. Additionally, and this is a
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little bit more technical, brain spotting is based on what
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I call the dual attunement frame. It's all about attunement.
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The The basis of it, the basic part of the
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frame is the relational frame, relational attunement. Built upon that
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is what I call the neurobiological frame, which has to
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do with body awareness and relevant eye positions. So it's
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the two levels of attunement together. But if you look
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through the literature on EMDR, you will find nothing about
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the relationship. If you look through the literature on brain spotting,
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you'll find everything on the relationship. So those are just
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two reasons why brain spotting is not only a separate modality,
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it's in many ways an opposite modality.
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Interesting. Now I'm getting a litany of questions popping up
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in my head. Class, if you have any questions, you
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can also throw them in the chat. By the way, folks,
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we're talking to Dr. Gran, G-R-A-N-D. You can find him
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at brainspotting.com. Dr. Gran, you said relevant spots. So this
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to me now makes me think, Are we looking at
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different places of their eyes? If you're looking up, are
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you looking to the side? I'm kind of getting a
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little bit of NLP-ish kind of thing right now going
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in my head, but is that what you're referring to
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or not?
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NLP has a prescribed map that you look up here
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for this, you look up here for that, and this
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over here. There is no map in BrainSpotting. Not only
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is each person different and there's no map, each person
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is different from session to session. So if you were
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working on a spot over here with a client, And
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they come in the next session and they're still working
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on the same issue. And you find where it feels
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the most active or accessible to them might be a
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completely different spot. So the attunement is based on not
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only being with the client in the moment, but being
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with their neurobiological and their visual orienting experience at that time.
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I'll give you an example. If you talk to somebody
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about something that's important to them, Whether you're a therapist
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or whether it's just talking to a friend or a relative,
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you'll find that when they lock onto the essence of it,
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their eyes will jump to a position and they'll just
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be gazing at that position as they're talking to you. Now,
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some people actually think it's avoiding eye contact, which it's
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the opposite of. There's something about that eye position that's
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so compelling that the person needs to look there to
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access in the deepest of ways, whatever it is that
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they're thinking about whatever they're expressing, whatever is so important
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to them. In brain spotting, we look for those, we
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call them gaze spots. They're spontaneous spots where people gaze
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at as they're talking to us about what's important. And
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you pointed out, I say, you see where you're looking
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over there? Just keep looking over there. Notice what you're feeling.
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Notice what you're looking at. And let's see what comes up,
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what comes next, what comes next. And they go into
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a very focused form of mindfulness. which is really how
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the system heals itself and re-regulates itself.
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It's fascinating stuff. By the way, folks, if you want
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to learn more about gaze spotting on chapter five of
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his book, it's there. Dual attunements over in chapter six.
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So if you're getting tantalized now, this is where you
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can go. Dr. Grand, I'm going to ask one more time,
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different types of theories that keep popping in my head
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as I talk to you, because it sounds a little bit,
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I'm seeing I wonder if you incorporate anything from Dr.
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Shore's work in regards to attachment theory, neurobiology, or Dr.
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Ogden's work on sensory motor operation. Is that all anything
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at all from there?
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Not directly, but we're all looking at the same phenomena.
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So when people look at the same phenomena, they won't
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see the exact same thing, but there'll be overlap with that.
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Attachment is... is crucial for all human beings, really crucial
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for all mammals. But for the human mammal, attachment is
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a very tenuous, vulnerable kind of process. And if there
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is chaos or if there is disruption or even worse,
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trauma in the attachment process, it will be with the
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person as they grow into adulthood. And everybody who comes
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in for therapy who has any kind of significant issues,
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It goes all the way back to attachment. So in
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that way, it's definitely part of brain spotting. I want
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to add brain spotting is a very developmental model. We
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look at whatever a person brings in as being a
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roadmap to where they've been, going all the way back
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to the beginnings of their lives. And the attachment period
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and the first few years of life are such vulnerable
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times that traumas that happen during these times come out
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and look like symptoms for someone in their 20s or
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30s or.
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40s.
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Let me just jump in. And you can't access pre-verbal
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trauma with talk therapy or with any therapy that goes
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into the system from the top down, okay? Any language
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or cognition-based therapy, okay? is developmentally comes more when the
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person is further along. So you can only get, this
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is why body therapies, somatic therapies are so effective, but
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what the somatic therapies miss is the relevance of eye positions.
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And I want to add, the eyes are absolutely fascinating.
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The eyes are actually an outgrowth of the brain. In utero,
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the eyes grow out of the brain. And the retinas
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and the optic nerves are actually made up of neurons,
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made up of brain cells. So the eyes and vision
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are inseparable from all neurological processes. That's why eye positions
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are so crucial and so easily missed.
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That's fascinating stuff. We have a question from Kennedy. We'll
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get to that in a little bit. Kennedy has a
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good question. Let me go back to this developmental process.
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I don't know if you've worked with children and tried
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brain spotting with them. Have you seen them behave in
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similar fashions to adults, I guess I'm trying to get at.
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Well, I'm not a child therapist and I'm not an
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expert on child therapy, but there are brain spotting therapists
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who are. We have one in Austria, Monica Baumann, who
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teaches seminars on using brain spotting with children. What's the
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difference between doing brain spotting with children and adults? With children,
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it works faster.
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Really?
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Yeah. You'll find that eye position and have an adult
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look at it for a half an hour, 15 minutes,
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30 minutes, 45 minutes to really process more deeply. With
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a child, sometimes 30 to 60 seconds on the spot
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actually helps them to process through because they're carrying less
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in their system, but their systems are just a lot
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more open.
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That's fascinating. That's interesting. So Desiree's question, I'm going to
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go to that first. No offense, Kennedy. It just seems
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to go nice flow here. And then we'll go back
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to yours. At what age can you confidently start implementing
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brain spotting intervention?
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Well, I cannot explain it to you, okay? But people
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report having effective use of brain spotting as young as
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one year old, okay? Now, remember, the visual systems of
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one year old, they're very active and so on. But
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if you catch their attention, you know, and you catch
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their attention with something where you can just see that
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it either is activating for them or that it's calming
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for them. And you just hold that with them as
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long as they can. They're not they don't have language yet,
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but they're processing just on a very visceral level, whatever
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it is that is distressing to them.
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That's interesting. Yeah. I'm trying to see if we have
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a couple other questions, but I'm trying to see. I'm
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going to get eventually to the neurobiology component. Paige's question is,
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could you elaborate more on how eye positions are linked
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to processing trauma and facilitating change? I'm not sure we're
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going to get ahead of ourselves on that one. That's
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a good question.
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With the ice skater. The answer is it starts with
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the ice skater. That eye position right over here, just
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slightly to the left, you know, at eye level, was
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an access point. spot for her. That somehow accessed deeper
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and more efficiently into her neurobiology, down past the neocortex
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into the subcortex, down into the limbic system and the
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autonomic nervous system. Something about eye positions helps us to
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do that. Now, when vision comes in into the eyes,
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it gets sent down two pathways that come together in
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the occipital cortex, That is getting real neuro kind of stuff.
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And that register in the superior colliculi, which is in
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the midbrain, right at the top of the brainstem, the
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top few layers of the superior colliculi are visual. And
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that's the core of where visual memories are stored. Antonio Damasio,
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who is a great brain scientist, said, that it's the
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seat of the self, the seat of the soul back here.
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So if there's unprocessed trauma that is accessible visually at
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the visual layer in the top of the midbrain, okay,
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that eye position, this is our theory, can access the
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unprocessed trauma, you know, can find the file, the right file.
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And by holding the eye position, you know, fixed there,
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can keep that file open and allow for processing down
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to a mid-brain level. So again, that's one of our
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core neuro theories.
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That's fascinating. And do you think, how am I going
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to frame this question? So when people access some of
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their traumas, we know some of them are very salient.
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They can be stored in the amygdala or other places.
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Does it allow them to access these memories in a
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safer way? Or is that something the therapist is going
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to have to help them with more?
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Well, safer compared to what?
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Safer compared to not having brain spawning, I guess, relative
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to that.
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Well, you know, there are a lot of other effective
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modalities out there. So I don't want to answer that
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question and cast dispersions on other modalities. I would say
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that the attunement of the therapist and the wisdom of
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the therapist, especially to development, especially to trauma and dissociation,
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would have a lot to do with that. If you
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just compare eye fixation to eye movements, if you're working
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with someone about a really profound early trauma and you
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find a spot over here and the person just gazes
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at it and processes over that, you can viscerally feel
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the difference between that and working off the same thing
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going like this in terms of containment and maintaining grounding.
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But any therapy can uncover something at any point, even
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if it's talk therapy or CBT, you're not looking for it.
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A dissociative barrier can be breached and whatever is behind
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it can come out. So there's no fail safe way
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of having that not happen. Okay. But this is why
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the relationship is so important. That's why it's the core
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of brain spotting.
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Okay.
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If you are present with the client and they have
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a connection to you, And they feel a sense of
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trust in you and stability with you. When the tough
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stuff comes out, they're able to feel like they're not
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catapulted into the state of isolation that they experienced at
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the time of the traumas, especially early traumas. That's why
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we put the emphasis on the relationship. Because the healing
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comes through the relationship. It doesn't come through the technique.
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The technique is only as powerful as the relationship.
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I like that a lot. Do you do any particular
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theories that you seem to work better with brain spotting, CBT,
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object relations, anything of that sort, or not really?
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Well, CBT is more of a practice modality. Object relations
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is more of a theory. I studied, I've been in
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this business a long time, so So I studied originally
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back to not only Freudian, but the Neo-Freudians and object
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relations and the psychoanalytic developmental models and so on that
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really underpin so much of what people know now, but
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they don't really know necessarily where it comes from. But
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we draw from neurobiology as much as we draw from psychology. Okay.
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If you have a psychological theory that isn't grounded in
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neurobiology or is actually opposite to what we know in neurobiology,
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we don't give much credence to that. It has to
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make sense neurobiologically. You've got questions, but I'm going to
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say something here because I think it needs to be said.
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The population of the world right now is 8 billion.
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The population... of Europe and North America is 1 billion.
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So North America and Europe is 1 billion. The rest
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of the world is 7 billion. Psychological concepts and the
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research that goes along with it is very Western. And
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it goes back just a hundred years, a few hundred years.
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And it's been exported all over the world. just like
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the West has exported things all over the world in
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not such good ways with colonialism, et cetera, so on.
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But healing wisdom, and there's different viewpoints around the world
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about what we call the nervous system, other places call
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it chakras, meridians, and so on, energy. Who's to say
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that the 1 billion people are right and the 7
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billion people are wrong? And that the ideas of the
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$ 1 billion should be superimposed on the $ 7 billion. We
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have this term, evidence-based practice. Well, who determines what the
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evidence is? Well, it's a Western concept, okay and it
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is applied by westerners okay but what in in essence
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what it's saying is that the wisdom of the rest
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of the world you know going back thousands of years
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is not evidence that's a pretty um telling sort of
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thing brain spotting and we use what we call the
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the the neuro-experiential model expands beyond the West and it
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takes in the wisdom from the rest of the world.
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And we're always looking for wisdom from the East, from Africa,
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from South America, from indigenous peoples, because people were doing healing.
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In fact, they probably were using eye positions going back
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centuries and millennia and having some good effect on it,
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but it just didn't fit the Western idea of evidence.
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So I just needed to say that.
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It's interesting that sometimes I've mentioned to the class, I
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don't know if I mentioned it to this class or not,
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but it's funny how a lot of times people act
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like CBT or certain types of theories or practices are
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new when we look at the Greeks from 2,000 years
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ago with Stoicism and they applied a lot of the
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same belief systems that we do 2,000 years later.
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I might argue they did it better than we do it.
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I might agree with you.
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If you look at their literature, it is very... Deep
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and high level.
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Isn't it? It's incredible. I'm going to go now to
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Kennedy's question. So I kept her waiting long enough, but
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I think it's right around the area here. It says,
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I saw on TikTok about how lateral eye movement exercises
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increase serotonin levels. Does this have any relationship to brain spotting?
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Well, I'm not sure that TikTok is the best source
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of scientific information. And I just want to use this
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to expand things a little bit. Nothing in the brain
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is literal and linear. Everything is nonlinear, okay? In fact,
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everything in the brain operates on a quantum basis. You know,
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the idea that something is located in the amygdala as
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opposed to something is located through the entire brain and
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somehow it may be organized through the amygdala, there's nothing
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that happens in a part of the brain that doesn't
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happen in all of the brain or all of the
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nervous system. So going back to the questions, Um, is
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it possible that for some people at sometimes, uh, lateral
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eye movements can have an effect on serotonin level? Probably, probably. But, um,
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there's another saying, this is Western, you know, uh, uh,
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correlation is not causation. So, uh, if that happens, you know, um, uh,
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it's so, it's so complex, you know, and there's so
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many different, uh, brain chemicals that are operational at one
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time so that if it affects the serotonin level, it
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probably affects a lot of different levels. And how that
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all comes together, I don't know. But to put it
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this way, does brain spotting affect the serotonin level of
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people at different times? It probably does. But in science,
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most things are put forward as facts in the field
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of psychology and mental health are actually theories that have
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been around a long time that just have become accepted
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as facts. So the fact that this gets this result,
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we're working with an infinite number of variables in the
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human system. The human nervous system has one to four
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quadrillion synaptic connections. That's more than the stars we know
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about in the universe. So how can you know about that?
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How can you know about a system like that from
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the outside? You know, that's my question.
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That's a good question. I have no answer here, but
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in case you were waiting. Dr. Graham, folks, again, you
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can find the book called Brain Spotting, The Revolutionary New
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Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and Emotional Healing at
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Warp Speed. Also co-authored, This is Your Brain on Sports.
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You can find more about him at brainspotting.com. Jonathan, I'm
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going to hold your question off for a little bit
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because it's going to tie into another question. for dr
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grant but kennedy comes back with another interesting question that
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kind of takes me to where i wanted to take
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you to she mentions as someone who has never witnessed
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brain spotting in action can you describe what it looks
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like so i was kind of wondering the same thing
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if you could take us through i know you took
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us kind of through the ice skater but if somebody
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comes in with trauma for instance and they come to
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see you what do you do what's the process like
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is it just natural is there a system going on
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how would that work.
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Well um uh, first of all, uh, almost everybody I
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see has, has trauma that is contributing to what brings
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them to see me. This is part, I said, brain
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spotting is a developmental model and we look at things
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from a developmental trauma and dissociation point of view. Dissociation
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is when a system puts up a protective barrier in
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order to, to survive, but what's behind the protective barrier
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ends up being hidden and lost. So coming back to
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the question, um, person comes in to see me, I ask,
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you know, first of all, I wait to see what
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they have to say, talking about a first session. And
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I'm looking for them to tell me in their words
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and their concepts and their own time, what it is that, that,
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that goes on for them that has led them to
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have the courage to come to see me in the
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first place. And from there, you know, I ask kind
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of follow-up questions. Almost everything I do is following, not leading.
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Because one to four quadrillion synaptic connections, you have to
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take what comes to you. If you think you know
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there or you can lead it, you can't. And this
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is a failure in different therapeutic processes. But assuming that
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I'm going to do brain spotting with a person in
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a first session, I will ask them, what would you
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like to work on today? And it doesn't have to be,
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you know, some therapies, you have to give a memory,
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you have to give something that you can put into words,
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you have to give a cognition, all these kinds of things.
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In brain spotting, it's self-defined by the client, for the client.
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And then they'll say whatever it is, you know, and
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then we may go into a more extensive discussion about it,
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or we may just quickly go into brain spotting with this.
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It's all a matter of the individuality and following the
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client wherever they go. Let's say the client had something
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more discreet. They had a bad car accident six months
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ago and they have driving phobia now. That's actually an
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easier thing to work with, surprisingly enough, as opposed to
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more complex trauma, which usually everybody has in their own way.
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But I'd say, okay, just.
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Are you activated around the car accident now? The person says, yes.
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We will ask them zero to 10, how activated are you?
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Zero is neutral, nothing. 10 is the most it can be.
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Person says a six.
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Okay.
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Now from there, we have three different ways of finding
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the eye position. The first way is if this person,
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as soon as he started to activate himself around the accident,
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he went like this, his head went back and he
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looked up, or he went like this, I might say,
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just keep looking where you're looking and notice where you're
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feeling in your body and let's see where it goes.
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But the other two ways of finding the relevant eye positions,
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let's say the person, it's a six and they're feeling
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compression in their chest. I will go slowly across their
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eye position, looking for reflexes in their eyes, in their face,
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or even in their body. You get across here and
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the person starts blinking very fast. You get over here
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and the person's head goes back. You get over here
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and the person clears their throat. Those are all reflexive
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responses that are indicating that something about that eye position
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is touching on something in this state of activation that
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they're in. And then from there, I'll choose or we'll
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choose together a reflex spot. We call that in brain
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spotting outside window because the therapist is looking from the
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outside into the client's eyes. Or I might say to
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the client, Okay, we're going to see the eye position
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where you feel it the most. Do you feel it
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more looking to your right? Do you feel it more
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looking in the middle? Or do you feel it more
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looking to your left? Okay, the client says to your left.
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Then we'll say, is it more above eye level, at
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eye level, or below? They say higher, higher, higher, right there. Okay,
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that's the third way of finding a relevant eye position.
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We call it inside window. because the client is directing
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us from the inside. So once they're on any of
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the spots, the gaze spot, the reflex spot, or the
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inside window spot, the client just starts by being aware
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of what they're feeling in their body, and they are
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guided to go into a mindfulness process, okay? You don't
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direct yourself. You don't judge yourself. You don't hold yourself back.
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You notice what comes up, what comes next, what comes next,
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what comes next. And what happens is that the system
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goes into a deep form of processing that somehow takes
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them out of the dysregulation and out of the trauma
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and moves them towards the here and now and moves
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them towards more of a sense of homeostasis or regulation.
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And periodically you check in on the activation number. A
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person started at a six, they process for about 15 minutes,
478
00:29:47.059 --> 00:29:49.160
you say zero to 10, how much are you feeling
479
00:29:49.200 --> 00:29:54.769
it now? It's a four, you keep going. And sometimes
480
00:29:54.809 --> 00:29:56.630
in a session, you'll get down to a zero and
481
00:29:56.670 --> 00:29:58.369
sometimes it won't get down to a zero, it'll go
482
00:29:58.390 --> 00:30:00.690
from a six to a three. But a lot of
483
00:30:00.750 --> 00:30:05.960
processing has happened with that. At the end, we say, okay,
484
00:30:05.980 --> 00:30:08.480
I want you to go back to the accident now.
485
00:30:08.880 --> 00:30:10.559
Let it come up now and see what it looks
486
00:30:10.640 --> 00:30:16.299
like and feels like. And the client will say, it's
487
00:30:16.359 --> 00:30:19.420
kind of like vague, it's hazy, or it's further away.
488
00:30:20.220 --> 00:30:23.109
Or I kind of see it, but I'm not reacting
489
00:30:23.150 --> 00:30:29.210
to it. Those are reflections of changes in the neurobiology.
490
00:30:29.910 --> 00:30:32.789
in response to this processing. And you can get to
491
00:30:32.829 --> 00:30:34.910
a point where it's at a zero, we call it
492
00:30:34.930 --> 00:30:37.299
even a squeeze lemon zero, where we have the person
493
00:30:37.390 --> 00:30:40.700
try to activate themselves as much as they can until
494
00:30:40.720 --> 00:30:45.299
they can't even activate it at all. And something has
495
00:30:45.359 --> 00:30:49.839
shifted in the person's nervous system by doing this. So
496
00:30:50.220 --> 00:30:53.359
that's an example of how we do it. It's a
497
00:30:53.400 --> 00:30:54.579
relatively simple example.
498
00:30:54.599 --> 00:30:58.119
It's a great example. It's really interesting to see how
499
00:30:58.140 --> 00:31:02.970
that would work. I've got a lot of questions now,
500
00:31:02.990 --> 00:31:05.339
but I'm trying to think how I'm going to handle this.
501
00:31:07.500 --> 00:31:07.859
One.
502
00:31:07.900 --> 00:31:11.339
Lost my train of thought. Okay. So in your book,
503
00:31:11.359 --> 00:31:13.240
you mentioned it's interesting in Chapter 8, it was kind
504
00:31:13.279 --> 00:31:18.660
of a fascinating title of Chapter 8, Z-axis convergence. Is
505
00:31:18.700 --> 00:31:20.920
that mentioned in this example you just gave us, or
506
00:31:20.960 --> 00:31:22.359
is this something separate? No, no, no.
507
00:31:23.099 --> 00:31:27.180
This is actually going back to high school geometry. going
508
00:31:27.240 --> 00:31:29.799
across horizontally is the X axis, going up or down
509
00:31:29.839 --> 00:31:34.259
is the Y axis, and the Z axis is depth. Now,
510
00:31:34.299 --> 00:31:39.069
because the visual field is three-dimensional, and the perception of
511
00:31:39.130 --> 00:31:44.529
trauma is three-dimensional as well, for some clients, when you
512
00:31:44.549 --> 00:31:47.910
move the pointer further away, it gets less activating. When
513
00:31:47.930 --> 00:31:50.250
you move the pointer towards them, it gets more activating.
514
00:31:50.769 --> 00:31:54.769
So that's exploring the Z axis. But there's another fascinating
515
00:31:54.809 --> 00:31:59.089
phenomenon here. If this is the eye position where they
516
00:31:59.119 --> 00:32:02.089
feel it the most and the client looks through the
517
00:32:02.130 --> 00:32:05.950
pointer to the most distant spot on the wall and
518
00:32:06.549 --> 00:32:10.450
aligning with the pointer and goes back and forth between
519
00:32:10.470 --> 00:32:15.099
the two every three to five or eight seconds, it
520
00:32:15.200 --> 00:32:22.640
activates an oculocardiac reflex. The eye muscles, I told you
521
00:32:22.680 --> 00:32:25.789
about the eyes are partly made up of brain cells.
522
00:32:26.359 --> 00:32:29.109
The eye muscles, there's six eye muscles for each eye,
523
00:32:29.630 --> 00:32:33.490
are loaded with reflexes. And one of those reflexes is
524
00:32:33.529 --> 00:32:36.369
a vagal reflex. You may have heard of polyvagal theory.
525
00:32:37.049 --> 00:32:37.670
Well, you can.
526
00:32:37.829 --> 00:32:44.559
Actually activate the vagal system by looking, by converging and
527
00:32:44.619 --> 00:32:49.940
diverging and converging and diverging. The whole nervous system calms
528
00:32:49.980 --> 00:32:54.220
down and quiets down, okay, because you're getting that vagal access. Now,
529
00:32:54.279 --> 00:32:56.079
if you're doing it on the spot where the person
530
00:32:56.119 --> 00:33:00.730
feels the trauma activation and you're getting this, again, this
531
00:33:00.789 --> 00:33:06.529
old technical stuff, but I'm only answering your questions. You
532
00:33:06.549 --> 00:33:13.809
can literally downregulate using a vagal reflex that goes all
533
00:33:13.829 --> 00:33:17.089
the way down into the heart, into the digestive system.
534
00:33:18.509 --> 00:33:22.420
So when I was cutting my teeth as a therapist,
535
00:33:22.720 --> 00:33:25.569
we didn't know this stuff. We couldn't do this stuff.
536
00:33:26.329 --> 00:33:28.890
And only as the years and the decades went on
537
00:33:28.910 --> 00:33:31.390
did we learn more and more about these things. And
538
00:33:31.430 --> 00:33:35.710
here's the good news. Whatever we know now, tomorrow and
539
00:33:36.289 --> 00:33:39.190
next month and next year and next decade, we're going
540
00:33:39.210 --> 00:33:40.960
to know a lot more than we know right now
541
00:33:41.339 --> 00:33:43.279
in terms of promoting emotional healing.
542
00:33:44.859 --> 00:33:48.980
Absolutely. It's an exciting look at the future. Absolutely. Yeah,
543
00:33:49.119 --> 00:33:51.859
because chapter nine, you talk about the neurobiology of brain spotting.
544
00:33:52.829 --> 00:33:54.910
So this is what you're covering right now, some of
545
00:33:54.930 --> 00:33:57.170
these aspects here. You probably go deeper in the book
546
00:33:57.210 --> 00:33:57.509
as well.
547
00:33:58.170 --> 00:34:02.380
Well, actually, the book came out 10 years ago. So
548
00:34:02.390 --> 00:34:05.759
we have some ideas and information that have come on
549
00:34:05.819 --> 00:34:13.820
since then. I'll give you an example of it. The neocortex,
550
00:34:14.320 --> 00:34:16.969
the thinking brain, the human brain, the conscious brain, the
551
00:34:17.030 --> 00:34:22.090
language brain, okay, is brilliant at what it does. but
552
00:34:22.130 --> 00:34:27.320
it has very little capacity for regulation. Okay. For the
553
00:34:27.389 --> 00:34:32.760
regulating systems where you like balance or emotional balance or
554
00:34:32.800 --> 00:34:36.260
being able to regulate emotions. There's no capacity for that
555
00:34:36.440 --> 00:34:42.420
up here. So any therapy that is language-based and thought-based
556
00:34:43.389 --> 00:34:46.570
is going to go here and it's going to spend
557
00:34:46.610 --> 00:34:47.409
a lot of time here.
558
00:34:48.150 --> 00:34:48.489
Okay.
559
00:34:49.170 --> 00:34:54.469
But if you go down, The lower part of, underneath
560
00:34:54.510 --> 00:34:59.650
the neocortex, you have different areas that are highly involved
561
00:34:59.789 --> 00:35:05.000
in regulation. So this is another part of the brain
562
00:35:05.039 --> 00:35:11.219
theory of brain spotting. You want to bypass the neocortex,
563
00:35:11.239 --> 00:35:15.309
which has little to no capacity for systemic regulation, to
564
00:35:15.329 --> 00:35:19.090
get access to the subcortex, to the parts of the
565
00:35:19.150 --> 00:35:24.130
subcortex that are highly involved in regulation. If a person
566
00:35:24.170 --> 00:35:32.489
has panic attacks, that's dysregulation. A person has OCD, that's dysregulation.
567
00:35:32.510 --> 00:35:36.840
A person has flashbacks, that's dysregulation. A person has depression,
568
00:35:36.880 --> 00:35:40.559
that's another form of dysregulation. So you have to be
569
00:35:40.780 --> 00:35:44.300
able to help the system to come from dysregulation towards
570
00:35:44.360 --> 00:35:47.039
regulation You have to be able to access the parts
571
00:35:47.079 --> 00:35:49.880
of the brain that are directly involved in that. Well,
572
00:35:50.679 --> 00:35:53.820
the more talking you get into, the less access you
573
00:35:53.860 --> 00:35:57.010
get to the regulating parts of the brain. This is
574
00:35:57.070 --> 00:35:59.190
why we keep it to a minimum. Where do you
575
00:35:59.210 --> 00:36:04.030
feel it the most? Here, here, here, up, down, below,
576
00:36:04.409 --> 00:36:08.929
right over here? Okay. See what happens from there. We
577
00:36:09.050 --> 00:36:14.659
minimize the language. We minimize the thinking-based kind of processes.
578
00:36:15.469 --> 00:36:21.409
which helps us to access the areas of dysregulation or regulation.
579
00:36:22.059 --> 00:36:24.179
That's why we're looking for where the person feels it
580
00:36:24.199 --> 00:36:27.579
the most. That's why we're looking for those reflexes, okay?
581
00:36:27.980 --> 00:36:30.920
That tells you where the regulation system is, down to
582
00:36:30.940 --> 00:36:33.440
the brainstem, down even to the spine, where a lot
583
00:36:33.460 --> 00:36:36.800
of the reflexes are spinal. This is why we look
584
00:36:36.840 --> 00:36:41.440
for that spontaneous gaze, because that spontaneous gaze tells us
585
00:36:42.380 --> 00:36:45.989
that this is where the person is accessing it into
586
00:36:46.010 --> 00:36:49.190
the system that's trying to regulate itself, that's been having
587
00:36:49.250 --> 00:36:50.650
trouble regulating itself.
588
00:36:52.630 --> 00:36:54.889
That makes me think about the prefrontal cortex and its
589
00:36:55.130 --> 00:36:58.610
responsibility for emotional regulation. So is that what you're referring to?
590
00:36:58.670 --> 00:37:00.269
Does it have any play at all here?
591
00:37:01.690 --> 00:37:02.590
Only secondarily.
592
00:37:03.030 --> 00:37:03.710
Secondarily.
593
00:37:04.909 --> 00:37:10.539
For primary emotional regulation? No. Because emotional regulation is all
594
00:37:10.579 --> 00:37:15.500
based on somatic processes. And it's all based on survival
595
00:37:15.599 --> 00:37:20.889
issues of flight and fight and freeze. By the way,
596
00:37:20.929 --> 00:37:24.929
it's not fight or flight. Mammals are not looking for
597
00:37:24.949 --> 00:37:27.929
a fight. They're looking to survive. A mammal will run
598
00:37:27.989 --> 00:37:30.769
away before it fights. It'll only fight when it's cornered.
599
00:37:31.269 --> 00:37:37.000
So it's really, excuse me, it's really flight or fight.
600
00:37:37.199 --> 00:37:41.079
And then if that doesn't work, freeze. When a person has,
601
00:37:42.460 --> 00:37:46.320
in the state of flight, the animal gets the anxiety signal,
602
00:37:46.380 --> 00:37:51.199
which tells us danger is here, run. So the flight
603
00:37:51.239 --> 00:37:55.059
response is very much related to anxiety. The fight response
604
00:37:55.179 --> 00:37:59.969
is very much related to anger. And the freeze response
605
00:38:00.030 --> 00:38:05.630
is very much related to helplessness. All core survival mechanisms
606
00:38:05.650 --> 00:38:10.489
that are mammalian, that are the substrates of our emotional processes.
607
00:38:11.630 --> 00:38:16.880
So how can the Prefrontal cortex mediate things that are
608
00:38:16.929 --> 00:38:22.719
so primal. Okay? You can tell yourself, that's like when
609
00:38:22.739 --> 00:38:25.179
you tell somebody who's really upset, oh, don't worry, don't
610
00:38:25.199 --> 00:38:28.320
be upset. And it doesn't, of course, it doesn't help.
611
00:38:28.340 --> 00:38:29.699
Okay?
612
00:38:30.480 --> 00:38:32.139
What you can say is, okay, I'm here with you.
613
00:38:32.159 --> 00:38:32.739
Okay?
614
00:38:34.179 --> 00:38:36.179
You say things in the kind of voice and the
615
00:38:36.219 --> 00:38:39.489
kind of gestures that are more calming in a more
616
00:38:39.789 --> 00:38:42.650
primal sort of way. And you have to take your
617
00:38:42.690 --> 00:38:47.070
time with it. Because the system doesn't shut off as
618
00:38:47.130 --> 00:38:51.329
quickly as it may shut and turn on. Interesting.
619
00:38:51.349 --> 00:38:55.050
I like that. I know we're going towards already 45
620
00:38:55.050 --> 00:38:57.860
minutes in. I can't believe it. Pretty fast, isn't it, folks?
621
00:38:59.400 --> 00:39:01.500
Let me ask you this. I'm going to jump on
622
00:39:01.519 --> 00:39:05.119
to Jonathan's question here. This will lead to other questions
623
00:39:05.219 --> 00:39:07.039
for me. Actually, you know what? Before we get to
624
00:39:07.079 --> 00:39:09.039
Jonathan's question, there's a couple other ones that are attached
625
00:39:09.079 --> 00:39:12.130
to it. In Chapter 10, you talk about the body
626
00:39:12.210 --> 00:39:15.079
is memory. Tell us a little bit about that. What
627
00:39:15.119 --> 00:39:19.489
is this all about? You kind of referenced it earlier.
628
00:39:19.510 --> 00:39:20.820
It seemed like you alluded to it earlier.
629
00:39:22.949 --> 00:39:25.750
What would happen if you think back to a significant
630
00:39:25.829 --> 00:39:29.610
memory in your life and the memory comes up, but
631
00:39:29.630 --> 00:39:32.320
there's no emotion and you're not feeling anything in your
632
00:39:32.340 --> 00:39:37.739
body okay you think about the first date that you
633
00:39:37.780 --> 00:39:42.539
had okay and you bring it up the only way
634
00:39:42.579 --> 00:39:45.360
that it has resonance is what you feel what you
635
00:39:45.389 --> 00:39:48.329
feel in your body you know You may feel kind
636
00:39:48.349 --> 00:39:49.889
of a warm feeling in your body, or if you're
637
00:39:49.909 --> 00:39:53.250
thinking about a cringeworthy memory, you'll feel that cringing in
638
00:39:53.289 --> 00:39:56.110
your body. But if you go to a cringeworthy memory
639
00:39:56.269 --> 00:40:02.659
and there's nothing, no body, no emotion, nothing, it has
640
00:40:02.719 --> 00:40:10.179
no value as a memory. And what happens is, let's
641
00:40:10.199 --> 00:40:15.260
say you take a traumatic experience where you got very
642
00:40:15.460 --> 00:40:22.230
frightened by something. okay, the fear that you felt in
643
00:40:22.269 --> 00:40:25.590
your body is as much a memory as the image
644
00:40:25.630 --> 00:40:28.750
of what frightened you. In fact, I would argue that
645
00:40:28.789 --> 00:40:31.690
the feeling, that fear feeling in your body is more
646
00:40:31.730 --> 00:40:34.769
of a memory than the image. So if you bring
647
00:40:34.809 --> 00:40:36.750
up the image, but the body memory doesn't come up,
648
00:40:37.250 --> 00:40:40.250
it's not much of a memory. It's a disembodied memory.
649
00:40:40.909 --> 00:40:42.510
But you know what? You can have that fear in
650
00:40:42.530 --> 00:40:46.489
your body and be remembering that frightening experience without having
651
00:40:46.510 --> 00:40:49.139
the visual or the auditory memory that goes along with it.
652
00:40:49.849 --> 00:40:53.699
A lot of what we feel emotionally is actually memory
653
00:40:54.480 --> 00:40:58.019
that we're not recognizing as memory because it doesn't come
654
00:40:58.099 --> 00:41:00.630
up with a declarative memory that goes along with it.
655
00:41:03.739 --> 00:41:05.840
I like that. I know it's always interesting to see
656
00:41:05.880 --> 00:41:09.360
how the nervous system responds when you access memories. You'll
657
00:41:09.389 --> 00:41:12.469
start breathing heavier, depending on the memory, of course.
658
00:41:13.349 --> 00:41:15.789
Well, if you have somebody come into your office and
659
00:41:15.809 --> 00:41:18.250
they want to work on something that is very traumatizing
660
00:41:18.289 --> 00:41:20.809
to them and they're walking in, they're in a safe
661
00:41:20.849 --> 00:41:23.230
environment with a safe person. They've been seeing you for
662
00:41:23.250 --> 00:41:25.889
three months, you know, and they're familiar with the place
663
00:41:26.730 --> 00:41:28.329
and they bring up the memory and you say, how
664
00:41:28.429 --> 00:41:29.150
activating is it?
665
00:41:29.170 --> 00:41:29.690
Zero to 10.
666
00:41:29.670 --> 00:41:33.230
And they say nine. Their body is reacting like they're
667
00:41:33.250 --> 00:41:37.409
in danger. When they, even though they know this is
668
00:41:37.489 --> 00:41:41.590
the prefrontal cortex knows there's no danger. Okay. The body
669
00:41:41.650 --> 00:41:44.980
is still reacting as if there's danger. They're actually having
670
00:41:45.019 --> 00:41:50.139
a body flashback, which is what creates that activation in
671
00:41:50.199 --> 00:41:53.679
a session, whether it's in brain spotting or any other therapy.
672
00:41:55.019 --> 00:41:56.480
Let me ask you your opinion on this. I have
673
00:41:56.500 --> 00:41:58.480
a lot of friends in special forces, and this is
674
00:41:58.519 --> 00:42:00.869
something similar a lot of times that I hear from them.
675
00:42:01.550 --> 00:42:05.070
Do you like the phrase... They usually use it with amygdala,
676
00:42:05.090 --> 00:42:07.289
but in this case, maybe we'll use it with the body,
677
00:42:07.309 --> 00:42:10.070
that it overrides the prefrontal cortex? Or is it just
678
00:42:10.150 --> 00:42:15.469
different pathways that are not communicating properly? What do you think?
679
00:42:15.750 --> 00:42:24.269
I think both things you say make sense. By the way,
680
00:42:24.309 --> 00:42:27.949
when it comes to people who have been involved in combat,
681
00:42:28.909 --> 00:42:31.050
and they talk about– and this we see now, again,
682
00:42:31.090 --> 00:42:34.530
with natural disasters– They talk about the thousand mile stare
683
00:42:34.909 --> 00:42:35.710
person is like this.
684
00:42:35.730 --> 00:42:36.869
Okay.
685
00:42:37.789 --> 00:42:40.670
And they're just gazing off into space and they're like,
686
00:42:40.710 --> 00:42:41.389
not really there.
687
00:42:41.429 --> 00:42:41.849
And so on.
688
00:42:43.510 --> 00:42:48.570
Not true at all. That's a gay spot. Okay. There's
689
00:42:48.610 --> 00:42:51.260
a part of them that they left behind on the
690
00:42:51.320 --> 00:42:55.340
battlefield that never came home. And they're gazing off into
691
00:42:55.380 --> 00:42:58.820
space in some relation to that part of them that
692
00:42:58.860 --> 00:43:04.320
hasn't come home. Okay. If any other therapist who's not
693
00:43:04.340 --> 00:43:08.400
a brain spotting therapist is going to misread it and
694
00:43:08.440 --> 00:43:11.449
isn't going to make use of it. By the way,
695
00:43:11.510 --> 00:43:16.409
any therapists who are listening here, you don't have to
696
00:43:16.449 --> 00:43:19.750
come to a brain spotting training to learn about this,
697
00:43:20.010 --> 00:43:22.570
especially gaze spotting. It's the most natural thing of all.
698
00:43:23.889 --> 00:43:31.400
Coming back again to combat. It's usually not just one person.
699
00:43:31.960 --> 00:43:38.480
event for, for combat trauma. It's usually multiple events over
700
00:43:38.519 --> 00:43:41.179
an extreme period of time. And some of it is
701
00:43:41.239 --> 00:43:43.619
what happens to you or almost what happens to you.
702
00:43:44.099 --> 00:43:46.420
But a lot of it is what happens to somebody else,
703
00:43:46.539 --> 00:43:51.809
the vicarious traumatization. Okay. But what happens is when, you know,
704
00:43:51.829 --> 00:43:59.130
the unprocessed trauma inside of, of the returning, uh, soldier, um,
705
00:44:01.000 --> 00:44:04.219
their nervous system is still reacting as if they're in
706
00:44:04.239 --> 00:44:08.969
the field of combat. That's where, and brain spawning is
707
00:44:09.010 --> 00:44:12.349
not the only modality that's successful in working with this,
708
00:44:12.429 --> 00:44:16.309
although it's highly successful. But what you're doing is you're
709
00:44:16.349 --> 00:44:20.469
helping the parts of that soldier that were left behind
710
00:44:20.489 --> 00:44:24.400
on the battlefield to be identified and to come back
711
00:44:24.820 --> 00:44:26.960
from the then and there to the here and now.
712
00:44:29.090 --> 00:44:30.849
And it's not like it didn't happen, and it's not
713
00:44:30.889 --> 00:44:33.769
like it wasn't profound, but it's that the person is
714
00:44:33.849 --> 00:44:36.409
not endangered now as they were then.
715
00:44:39.159 --> 00:44:41.380
Definitely going to share that idea with them when we
716
00:44:41.400 --> 00:44:44.219
put that on the podcast over there. By the way, again, folks,
717
00:44:44.260 --> 00:44:47.159
it's Dr. Grand, G-R-A-N-D, the author of Brain Spotting, the
718
00:44:47.179 --> 00:44:50.099
Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and Emotional
719
00:44:50.139 --> 00:44:52.579
Healing at Warp Speed. We're going to talk about warp
720
00:44:52.599 --> 00:44:54.500
speed in a second. He also co-authored the book, This
721
00:44:54.559 --> 00:44:56.800
is Your Brain on Sports. You can find more about
722
00:44:56.820 --> 00:45:01.010
him at brainspotting.com. Dr. Granz, we head towards the tail
723
00:45:01.110 --> 00:45:03.050
end of the interview. Thank you very much again for
724
00:45:03.090 --> 00:45:07.239
doing this. What do you mean warp speed? How fast
725
00:45:07.280 --> 00:45:12.199
can people get over some of these traumas?
726
00:45:12.980 --> 00:45:16.800
Well, for some people, it can be two sessions instead
727
00:45:16.840 --> 00:45:19.570
of 20 sessions. For some people, it can be 20
728
00:45:19.570 --> 00:45:23.650
sessions instead of 200 sessions. For some people, it can
729
00:45:23.670 --> 00:45:26.769
be three years instead of 15 years, and they still
730
00:45:29.230 --> 00:45:32.699
haven't really come to any kind of resolution with it.
731
00:45:33.170 --> 00:45:37.230
So I want to mention complex trauma, which I also
732
00:45:37.289 --> 00:45:43.989
call developmental trauma, takes longer to heal. And it's usually
733
00:45:44.429 --> 00:45:48.179
developmental trauma or complex trauma is many traumas at different
734
00:45:48.219 --> 00:45:51.380
parts of a life, but always going back to the
735
00:45:51.480 --> 00:45:55.860
early years of a person's life. So you can get,
736
00:45:56.199 --> 00:45:59.239
for some people, in two years of brain spotting, a
737
00:45:59.300 --> 00:46:05.309
much deeper, more comprehensive healing in relation to complex trauma
738
00:46:05.329 --> 00:46:09.590
or developmental trauma than you might with certain other modalities. Again,
739
00:46:09.630 --> 00:46:13.190
I'm not naming names. That in 10 years, you might
740
00:46:13.230 --> 00:46:14.929
not get close to as much as you got in
741
00:46:14.989 --> 00:46:19.360
two years. So warp speed for somebody is two sessions.
742
00:46:19.380 --> 00:46:22.059
For another person, it's 20. For another person, it's two years.
743
00:46:24.039 --> 00:46:27.360
You're a Star Trek fan out of curiosity?
744
00:46:27.559 --> 00:46:31.110
I used to... The original series, the first few movies
745
00:46:31.199 --> 00:46:33.340
and so on. But beyond that, I didn't, I don't,
746
00:46:33.380 --> 00:46:38.260
you know, I didn't, I, you know, uh, captain, uh, uh,
747
00:46:38.280 --> 00:46:41.309
that was, that was, I wasn't into it.
748
00:46:42.960 --> 00:46:44.820
You're a Shatner, Lemoy, Nemoy fan.
749
00:46:45.420 --> 00:46:45.940
Absolutely.
750
00:46:45.960 --> 00:46:49.570
Our last round of questions, I guess, Jonathan kind of
751
00:46:49.590 --> 00:46:51.829
starts it off with which type of client is brain
752
00:46:51.869 --> 00:46:54.130
spotting network for.
753
00:46:55.969 --> 00:46:59.360
A client who won't walk into your office. The client
754
00:46:59.380 --> 00:47:01.179
who walks out of your office in the middle of
755
00:47:01.199 --> 00:47:06.619
the session doesn't come back. Okay. Here's the, I'm being
756
00:47:06.639 --> 00:47:10.599
a bit facetious, but this is, this is one of
757
00:47:10.639 --> 00:47:14.610
the strengths of brain spotting. It is based on attunement,
758
00:47:15.690 --> 00:47:19.989
which means it's individual in the moment. You can never
759
00:47:20.070 --> 00:47:24.030
work with this, with two people the same way. You're
760
00:47:24.050 --> 00:47:29.170
going to work with each person differently. And, and, If
761
00:47:29.230 --> 00:47:31.590
it's in your expertise, let's say a person has a,
762
00:47:32.389 --> 00:47:35.199
I don't call it dissociative disorder because I don't believe
763
00:47:35.219 --> 00:47:38.000
that it's a disorder. I think it's an adaptation or
764
00:47:38.019 --> 00:47:40.900
a reaction pattern. But let's say a person has high
765
00:47:40.940 --> 00:47:45.300
levels of dissociation. You have to have expertise in working
766
00:47:45.340 --> 00:47:48.280
with that. Being a great brain spawning therapist isn't enough.
767
00:47:48.860 --> 00:47:51.670
If you're working with addictions, you have to have expertise
768
00:47:51.710 --> 00:47:53.750
in addictions. If you're working with children, you have to
769
00:47:53.769 --> 00:47:56.809
have expertise with that. If you're working, you know, with
770
00:47:57.190 --> 00:48:00.250
different cultures, you have to have expertise with that. So
771
00:48:01.829 --> 00:48:06.489
with that as a caveat, if we're working with the
772
00:48:06.739 --> 00:48:10.960
one to four quadrillion synaptic connections that each person has
773
00:48:11.059 --> 00:48:14.320
that they bring in with them, and we sit with
774
00:48:14.360 --> 00:48:17.420
the person in such a way that we don't assume
775
00:48:17.639 --> 00:48:22.050
anything about them, and that we receive whatever they say,
776
00:48:22.369 --> 00:48:25.800
and we believe whatever they say, And we see them
777
00:48:26.559 --> 00:48:30.119
as the source of information. We see them as the
778
00:48:30.219 --> 00:48:35.010
smart ones about themselves, not us therapists as the smart ones.
779
00:48:35.489 --> 00:48:37.670
What makes us smart is to realize what we don't
780
00:48:37.710 --> 00:48:40.409
know and what we can't know. And we follow the
781
00:48:40.429 --> 00:48:43.730
client wherever they go. In that way, you can, you know,
782
00:48:43.750 --> 00:48:52.590
brain spawning is made to be adapted to any individual
783
00:48:52.690 --> 00:48:53.530
or situation.
784
00:48:54.849 --> 00:48:57.820
So. I mean, I'm going to see if I can,
785
00:48:57.949 --> 00:48:59.679
if I summarize this right, of course, correct me if
786
00:48:59.739 --> 00:49:02.019
I'm wrong. So it seems like this is going to
787
00:49:02.059 --> 00:49:04.239
jump onto this question for a second, but it seems
788
00:49:04.300 --> 00:49:09.000
like brain spotting, there's an innate response for this gaze spotting.
789
00:49:10.679 --> 00:49:13.909
Would anything else interfere with that innate response, such as
790
00:49:13.989 --> 00:49:18.710
if drug use, like you mentioned a minute ago, schizophrenia,
791
00:49:18.809 --> 00:49:20.849
anything at all, or would it? you think the innate
792
00:49:20.889 --> 00:49:24.090
system would still be functioning properly enough?
793
00:49:24.730 --> 00:49:28.030
Well, brain spotting won't take a schizophrenic person and have
794
00:49:28.050 --> 00:49:35.039
them become not schizophrenic. Okay. But every person who has
795
00:49:35.139 --> 00:49:38.699
diagnosable schizophrenia, because a lot of times dissociative disorders or
796
00:49:38.760 --> 00:49:43.400
conditions are misdiagnosed as schizophrenia. But anybody who has schizophrenia
797
00:49:43.960 --> 00:49:46.360
is a human being that has their own developmental history
798
00:49:46.860 --> 00:49:51.230
and their own developmental traumas. Because there's so much genetic loading,
799
00:49:51.789 --> 00:49:54.869
there can be other family members with schizophrenia, a parent
800
00:49:54.989 --> 00:49:58.789
or so on. So there's a lot of trauma that
801
00:49:58.849 --> 00:50:05.780
people who have schizophrenia or bipolar condition have that that
802
00:50:05.820 --> 00:50:07.860
you can work with that person, but you have to
803
00:50:07.900 --> 00:50:11.480
be an expert in working with those particular populations as well.
804
00:50:12.099 --> 00:50:13.920
But brain spotting can be used with them, not to
805
00:50:13.980 --> 00:50:16.400
cure it, but to help the person to heal in
806
00:50:16.420 --> 00:50:19.530
the context of what their potential healing is.
807
00:50:23.309 --> 00:50:24.809
I guess I'm just going to throw this out there.
808
00:50:24.829 --> 00:50:26.449
I haven't thought about it enough. Maybe I should have,
809
00:50:26.489 --> 00:50:31.269
but either way, anything with dementia, Parkinson's, anything there, it
810
00:50:31.289 --> 00:50:34.559
gets altered, interferes with that innate response again for gazing.
811
00:50:34.179 --> 00:50:39.090
Or Um, you know, as long as the nervous system
812
00:50:39.210 --> 00:50:43.670
is working enough, okay, you can work with a person
813
00:50:43.769 --> 00:50:48.429
and whatever happens happens, you know, um, can you work
814
00:50:48.469 --> 00:50:52.329
with someone who's, who's a, who's had a stroke to,
815
00:50:52.429 --> 00:50:56.639
to the, you know, to the degree that they can. And, uh, um,
816
00:50:57.199 --> 00:51:03.329
but again, uh, uh, we've seen a lot of surprising
817
00:51:03.389 --> 00:51:07.739
responses to brain spotting with different situations or conditions, but
818
00:51:07.780 --> 00:51:10.760
it's not predictive that you can do this with anybody
819
00:51:10.800 --> 00:51:13.659
who has that kind of condition. So, so we're very
820
00:51:13.760 --> 00:51:16.980
cautious about, you know, over claiming what we can do
821
00:51:17.019 --> 00:51:17.780
with brain spotting.
822
00:51:20.019 --> 00:51:22.820
I guess my last question, what's in the horizon for
823
00:51:22.860 --> 00:51:24.920
brain spotting? Is there anything that you see that you're
824
00:51:24.960 --> 00:51:27.139
excited about in the future of brain spotting?
825
00:51:28.079 --> 00:51:32.300
Well, I discovered brain spotting 20 years ago. We're in
826
00:51:32.380 --> 00:51:37.300
our 20th year anniversary. Every year since then, on my
827
00:51:37.420 --> 00:51:40.619
own and then with the other people who've become expert
828
00:51:40.659 --> 00:51:45.110
in brain spotting, brain spotting evolves and changes all the time.
829
00:51:47.110 --> 00:51:51.510
I introduced the neuroexperiential model of brain spotting two years ago,
830
00:51:51.530 --> 00:51:54.949
and it's changed brain spotting dramatically from what it was
831
00:51:55.010 --> 00:51:59.670
before that. brain spotting is going to continue to evolve.
832
00:52:00.409 --> 00:52:02.230
But I'll tell you something that you'll never hear from
833
00:52:02.250 --> 00:52:05.780
the head of any other modality. The ultimate goal of
834
00:52:05.820 --> 00:52:10.820
brain spotting is to usher in the next modalities that
835
00:52:10.860 --> 00:52:14.599
are more powerful than even brain spotting. It's to have
836
00:52:14.639 --> 00:52:16.880
there be a beginning, a middle, and an end to
837
00:52:16.920 --> 00:52:21.510
brain spotting because we will have served our purpose and
838
00:52:21.550 --> 00:52:25.210
followed our course and that other approaches that we don't
839
00:52:25.230 --> 00:52:29.349
have now will be able to do even better than
840
00:52:29.409 --> 00:52:32.159
what brain spotting is doing right now and into the future.
841
00:52:33.880 --> 00:52:37.119
I'm excited for that. Any final questions, folks, before we
842
00:52:37.139 --> 00:52:41.940
let Dr. Grand go here? Again, folks, Dr. Grand, you
843
00:52:41.960 --> 00:52:45.079
can find him at brainspotting.com. The books are called Brain Spotting,
844
00:52:45.099 --> 00:52:47.780
the Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and
845
00:52:47.800 --> 00:52:53.329
Emotional Healing at Warp Speed. This is your brain on sports. Actually, Dr. Grand,
846
00:52:53.530 --> 00:52:55.869
you mentioned the book was about 10 years old. Would
847
00:52:55.889 --> 00:52:57.889
you refer them anywhere else aside to the book? I
848
00:52:57.909 --> 00:52:59.550
know it's going to get a history of it and everything,
849
00:52:59.570 --> 00:53:00.750
but anywhere else you wouldn't send them?
850
00:53:03.510 --> 00:53:07.090
The book is still comprehensive. It's not outdated per se,
851
00:53:07.199 --> 00:53:09.940
even though it can be updated and it will be updated.
852
00:53:11.320 --> 00:53:14.380
My website is a very good source of information, brainspotting.com.
853
00:53:16.090 --> 00:53:19.219
I also have a video that I did many years
854
00:53:19.280 --> 00:53:22.699
ago called What is Brain Spotting, a YouTube video. It's
855
00:53:22.760 --> 00:53:25.699
out there. There's other content like that. So there's a
856
00:53:25.739 --> 00:53:28.239
lot of material that's out there.
857
00:53:29.389 --> 00:53:32.190
Excellent. All right. Any other questions?
858
00:53:32.269 --> 00:53:32.449
No.
859
00:53:32.530 --> 00:53:34.829
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Grant. I really appreciate
860
00:53:34.849 --> 00:53:36.469
you taking the time. You're in the East Coast, aren't you?
861
00:53:37.389 --> 00:53:39.510
I'm in Long Island, New York. That's correct.
862
00:53:39.969 --> 00:53:42.760
Well, thank you very much for staying up. I appreciate
863
00:53:42.780 --> 00:53:43.300
it very much.
864
00:53:44.219 --> 00:53:46.739
Well, thank you so much, Carlos, for having me on this.
865
00:53:47.139 --> 00:53:50.159
And thank everybody who's been here with us together.
866
00:53:51.019 --> 00:53:53.409
Absolutely. I'll send you the link once it goes up,
867
00:53:53.530 --> 00:53:54.389
probably next week.
868
00:53:55.630 --> 00:53:56.480
I look forward to it.
869
00:53:57.289 --> 00:53:58.610
Have a great one, sir. Nice meeting you.
870
00:53:59.050 --> 00:54:00.639
Nice meeting you. Bye.
871
00:54:00.659 --> 00:54:01.739
Bye-bye now.
1
00:00:02.919 --> 00:00:06.759
From wherever you are around the world, around the world,
2
00:00:06.860 --> 00:00:11.679
welcome to the Circle of Insight, a show that explores
3
00:00:11.759 --> 00:00:15.169
the many facets of human behavior and the wonders of
4
00:00:15.189 --> 00:00:20.250
the human mind. And now, here's your host, Dr. Carlos.
5
00:00:42.859 --> 00:00:44.880
So Dr. Grant, thank you very much for doing this.
6
00:00:44.939 --> 00:00:47.920
I really appreciate you spending the time with us. I
7
00:00:47.969 --> 00:00:50.729
guess my first question is really curious. By the way, folks, Dr.
8
00:00:50.740 --> 00:00:54.590
Grant wrote two great books called Brain Spotting, The Revolutionary
9
00:00:54.649 --> 00:00:57.649
New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and Emotional Healing
10
00:00:57.750 --> 00:01:00.590
at Warp Speed. He's also the co-author of This is
11
00:01:00.609 --> 00:01:04.510
Your Brain on Sports. Before we get to those books, Dr.
12
00:01:04.530 --> 00:01:06.930
Grant and Brain Spotting, I got to ask you, what
13
00:01:06.989 --> 00:01:09.109
led you into the discovery of brain spotting?
14
00:01:10.370 --> 00:01:12.930
Well, it wasn't so much that something led me into it.
15
00:01:12.950 --> 00:01:16.200
It's that it came to me and I received it.
16
00:01:16.370 --> 00:01:21.510
I noticed it. I was already a therapist for over
17
00:01:21.510 --> 00:01:25.969
20 years, trained in a variety of different techniques. And
18
00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:30.260
I was working with an ice skater who was blocked
19
00:01:30.319 --> 00:01:35.040
on a particular jump called the triple loop, which she
20
00:01:35.060 --> 00:01:37.760
could do every other jump, triple jump, but not the
21
00:01:37.780 --> 00:01:41.349
triple loop. And she would go once, twice, and then
22
00:01:41.510 --> 00:01:43.719
would pop out of the jump instead of completing it.
23
00:01:44.549 --> 00:01:47.510
And it was a compulsory jump for either the short
24
00:01:47.530 --> 00:01:50.500
or the long program. And so it really blocked her,
25
00:01:50.560 --> 00:01:54.780
even though she was a championship caliber skater. And we
26
00:01:54.819 --> 00:01:57.739
had done a lot of work with this and other things.
27
00:01:59.359 --> 00:02:04.719
And I was doing a combination of a body therapy
28
00:02:04.799 --> 00:02:07.700
with an eye movement therapy. I was going very slowly
29
00:02:07.760 --> 00:02:11.580
across her field of vision. And I had her visualize
30
00:02:11.639 --> 00:02:14.280
and feel herself just at that moment of popping out
31
00:02:14.300 --> 00:02:18.159
of the triple loop. And just when I got over here,
32
00:02:18.280 --> 00:02:21.719
her eye went into this incredible wobble like I had
33
00:02:21.759 --> 00:02:24.580
never seen before. And then it just locked on. So
34
00:02:25.340 --> 00:02:27.469
it felt like a hand grabbed my wrist and kept
35
00:02:27.500 --> 00:02:30.889
it in place. And she went into the deepest processing
36
00:02:30.930 --> 00:02:35.830
for the next 10 minutes and one trauma would come up,
37
00:02:35.870 --> 00:02:38.250
whether it was personal or had to do with skating
38
00:02:38.330 --> 00:02:41.900
or injuries or failure, and process through. And then another one.
39
00:02:41.939 --> 00:02:45.139
And she was literally looking at my finger like she
40
00:02:45.180 --> 00:02:46.120
was watching the videos.
41
00:02:47.199 --> 00:02:47.460
And I.
42
00:02:49.020 --> 00:02:51.139
Was just mesmerized by this. I didn't really know what
43
00:02:51.180 --> 00:02:55.319
was happening. And about halfway through, traumas that we had
44
00:02:55.400 --> 00:02:57.900
worked through already, at least I thought we had worked
45
00:02:57.919 --> 00:03:01.300
through already, came up again and processed through to a
46
00:03:01.340 --> 00:03:04.469
deeper level. That got my attention as much as the
47
00:03:04.509 --> 00:03:07.569
first part because it showed that what looked like it
48
00:03:07.629 --> 00:03:11.360
had been processed through to the bottom really hadn't gotten
49
00:03:11.400 --> 00:03:15.419
close to reaching the bottom. After 10 minutes, this intense
50
00:03:15.460 --> 00:03:19.659
processing stopped. We just kind of finished up. And the
51
00:03:19.719 --> 00:03:21.560
next day she called me from the practice rink and
52
00:03:21.590 --> 00:03:23.889
she said, David, I just did a triple loop with
53
00:03:23.909 --> 00:03:26.770
no problem. And I did it again and again and again.
54
00:03:26.930 --> 00:03:29.289
And she never had a problem with it before. So
55
00:03:29.949 --> 00:03:31.219
that's how it came to me.
56
00:03:32.330 --> 00:03:37.110
Wow, that's interesting. That's great for her, too. Oh, absolutely.
57
00:03:37.770 --> 00:03:38.909
Was she as surprised as you?
58
00:03:38.930 --> 00:03:44.000
Yeah, in her own way, yes. In her own way, yes.
59
00:03:44.400 --> 00:03:46.280
Because she had been so stuck on it for so long.
60
00:03:47.460 --> 00:03:49.460
Now, it's interesting because when you put your finger up,
61
00:03:49.500 --> 00:03:51.419
I know last week the class and I were kind
62
00:03:51.439 --> 00:03:53.240
of looking at it going, was this some kind of
63
00:03:53.319 --> 00:03:56.039
version of EMDR? Because this is what people might be thinking.
64
00:03:56.990 --> 00:03:57.210
Is it?
65
00:03:58.129 --> 00:04:03.939
Absolutely not. In fact... EMDR is based on eye movement, okay?
66
00:04:05.120 --> 00:04:09.039
Brain spotting is based on finding relevant eye positions in
67
00:04:09.060 --> 00:04:11.840
the visual field and having the person gaze at those.
68
00:04:12.530 --> 00:04:15.490
So it is the absence of movement that creates the
69
00:04:15.550 --> 00:04:19.110
stillness that allows the processing to go deeper and deeper
70
00:04:19.129 --> 00:04:22.069
and deeper into the brain. Additionally, and this is a
71
00:04:22.069 --> 00:04:25.860
little bit more technical, brain spotting is based on what
72
00:04:26.040 --> 00:04:29.920
I call the dual attunement frame. It's all about attunement.
73
00:04:30.680 --> 00:04:35.699
The The basis of it, the basic part of the
74
00:04:35.759 --> 00:04:40.379
frame is the relational frame, relational attunement. Built upon that
75
00:04:40.620 --> 00:04:43.040
is what I call the neurobiological frame, which has to
76
00:04:43.100 --> 00:04:47.470
do with body awareness and relevant eye positions. So it's
77
00:04:47.509 --> 00:04:50.269
the two levels of attunement together. But if you look
78
00:04:50.290 --> 00:04:53.189
through the literature on EMDR, you will find nothing about
79
00:04:53.209 --> 00:04:56.750
the relationship. If you look through the literature on brain spotting,
80
00:04:56.769 --> 00:05:00.870
you'll find everything on the relationship. So those are just
81
00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:07.089
two reasons why brain spotting is not only a separate modality,
82
00:05:07.689 --> 00:05:10.290
it's in many ways an opposite modality.
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Interesting. Now I'm getting a litany of questions popping up
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in my head. Class, if you have any questions, you
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can also throw them in the chat. By the way, folks,
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we're talking to Dr. Gran, G-R-A-N-D. You can find him
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at brainspotting.com. Dr. Gran, you said relevant spots. So this
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to me now makes me think, Are we looking at
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different places of their eyes? If you're looking up, are
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you looking to the side? I'm kind of getting a
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little bit of NLP-ish kind of thing right now going
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in my head, but is that what you're referring to
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or not?
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NLP has a prescribed map that you look up here
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for this, you look up here for that, and this
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over here. There is no map in BrainSpotting. Not only
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is each person different and there's no map, each person
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is different from session to session. So if you were
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working on a spot over here with a client, And
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they come in the next session and they're still working
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on the same issue. And you find where it feels
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the most active or accessible to them might be a
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completely different spot. So the attunement is based on not
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only being with the client in the moment, but being
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with their neurobiological and their visual orienting experience at that time.
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I'll give you an example. If you talk to somebody
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about something that's important to them, Whether you're a therapist
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or whether it's just talking to a friend or a relative,
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you'll find that when they lock onto the essence of it,
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their eyes will jump to a position and they'll just
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be gazing at that position as they're talking to you. Now,
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some people actually think it's avoiding eye contact, which it's
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the opposite of. There's something about that eye position that's
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so compelling that the person needs to look there to
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access in the deepest of ways, whatever it is that
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they're thinking about whatever they're expressing, whatever is so important
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to them. In brain spotting, we look for those, we
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call them gaze spots. They're spontaneous spots where people gaze
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at as they're talking to us about what's important. And
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you pointed out, I say, you see where you're looking
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over there? Just keep looking over there. Notice what you're feeling.
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Notice what you're looking at. And let's see what comes up,
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what comes next, what comes next. And they go into
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a very focused form of mindfulness. which is really how
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the system heals itself and re-regulates itself.
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It's fascinating stuff. By the way, folks, if you want
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to learn more about gaze spotting on chapter five of
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his book, it's there. Dual attunements over in chapter six.
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So if you're getting tantalized now, this is where you
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can go. Dr. Grand, I'm going to ask one more time,
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different types of theories that keep popping in my head
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as I talk to you, because it sounds a little bit,
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I'm seeing I wonder if you incorporate anything from Dr.
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Shore's work in regards to attachment theory, neurobiology, or Dr.
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Ogden's work on sensory motor operation. Is that all anything
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at all from there?
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Not directly, but we're all looking at the same phenomena.
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So when people look at the same phenomena, they won't
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see the exact same thing, but there'll be overlap with that.
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Attachment is... is crucial for all human beings, really crucial
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for all mammals. But for the human mammal, attachment is
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a very tenuous, vulnerable kind of process. And if there
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is chaos or if there is disruption or even worse,
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trauma in the attachment process, it will be with the
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person as they grow into adulthood. And everybody who comes
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in for therapy who has any kind of significant issues,
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It goes all the way back to attachment. So in
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that way, it's definitely part of brain spotting. I want
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to add brain spotting is a very developmental model. We
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look at whatever a person brings in as being a
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roadmap to where they've been, going all the way back
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to the beginnings of their lives. And the attachment period
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and the first few years of life are such vulnerable
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times that traumas that happen during these times come out
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and look like symptoms for someone in their 20s or
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30s or.
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40s.
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Let me just jump in. And you can't access pre-verbal
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trauma with talk therapy or with any therapy that goes
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into the system from the top down, okay? Any language
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or cognition-based therapy, okay? is developmentally comes more when the
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person is further along. So you can only get, this
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is why body therapies, somatic therapies are so effective, but
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what the somatic therapies miss is the relevance of eye positions.
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And I want to add, the eyes are absolutely fascinating.
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The eyes are actually an outgrowth of the brain. In utero,
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the eyes grow out of the brain. And the retinas
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and the optic nerves are actually made up of neurons,
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made up of brain cells. So the eyes and vision
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are inseparable from all neurological processes. That's why eye positions
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are so crucial and so easily missed.
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That's fascinating stuff. We have a question from Kennedy. We'll
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get to that in a little bit. Kennedy has a
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good question. Let me go back to this developmental process.
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I don't know if you've worked with children and tried
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brain spotting with them. Have you seen them behave in
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similar fashions to adults, I guess I'm trying to get at.
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Well, I'm not a child therapist and I'm not an
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expert on child therapy, but there are brain spotting therapists
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who are. We have one in Austria, Monica Baumann, who
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teaches seminars on using brain spotting with children. What's the
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difference between doing brain spotting with children and adults? With children,
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it works faster.
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Really?
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Yeah. You'll find that eye position and have an adult
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look at it for a half an hour, 15 minutes,
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30 minutes, 45 minutes to really process more deeply. With
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a child, sometimes 30 to 60 seconds on the spot
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actually helps them to process through because they're carrying less
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in their system, but their systems are just a lot
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more open.
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That's fascinating. That's interesting. So Desiree's question, I'm going to
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go to that first. No offense, Kennedy. It just seems
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to go nice flow here. And then we'll go back
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to yours. At what age can you confidently start implementing
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brain spotting intervention?
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Well, I cannot explain it to you, okay? But people
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report having effective use of brain spotting as young as
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one year old, okay? Now, remember, the visual systems of
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one year old, they're very active and so on. But
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if you catch their attention, you know, and you catch
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their attention with something where you can just see that
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it either is activating for them or that it's calming
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for them. And you just hold that with them as
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long as they can. They're not they don't have language yet,
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but they're processing just on a very visceral level, whatever
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it is that is distressing to them.
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That's interesting. Yeah. I'm trying to see if we have
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a couple other questions, but I'm trying to see. I'm
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going to get eventually to the neurobiology component. Paige's question is,
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could you elaborate more on how eye positions are linked
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to processing trauma and facilitating change? I'm not sure we're
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going to get ahead of ourselves on that one. That's
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a good question.
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With the ice skater. The answer is it starts with
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the ice skater. That eye position right over here, just
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slightly to the left, you know, at eye level, was
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an access point. spot for her. That somehow accessed deeper
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and more efficiently into her neurobiology, down past the neocortex
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into the subcortex, down into the limbic system and the
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autonomic nervous system. Something about eye positions helps us to
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do that. Now, when vision comes in into the eyes,
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it gets sent down two pathways that come together in
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the occipital cortex, That is getting real neuro kind of stuff.
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And that register in the superior colliculi, which is in
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the midbrain, right at the top of the brainstem, the
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top few layers of the superior colliculi are visual. And
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that's the core of where visual memories are stored. Antonio Damasio,
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who is a great brain scientist, said, that it's the
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seat of the self, the seat of the soul back here.
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So if there's unprocessed trauma that is accessible visually at
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the visual layer in the top of the midbrain, okay,
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that eye position, this is our theory, can access the
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unprocessed trauma, you know, can find the file, the right file.
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And by holding the eye position, you know, fixed there,
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can keep that file open and allow for processing down
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to a mid-brain level. So again, that's one of our
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core neuro theories.
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That's fascinating. And do you think, how am I going
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to frame this question? So when people access some of
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their traumas, we know some of them are very salient.
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They can be stored in the amygdala or other places.
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Does it allow them to access these memories in a
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safer way? Or is that something the therapist is going
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to have to help them with more?
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Well, safer compared to what?
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Safer compared to not having brain spawning, I guess, relative
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to that.
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Well, you know, there are a lot of other effective
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modalities out there. So I don't want to answer that
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question and cast dispersions on other modalities. I would say
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that the attunement of the therapist and the wisdom of
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the therapist, especially to development, especially to trauma and dissociation,
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would have a lot to do with that. If you
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just compare eye fixation to eye movements, if you're working
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with someone about a really profound early trauma and you
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find a spot over here and the person just gazes
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at it and processes over that, you can viscerally feel
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the difference between that and working off the same thing
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going like this in terms of containment and maintaining grounding.
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But any therapy can uncover something at any point, even
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if it's talk therapy or CBT, you're not looking for it.
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A dissociative barrier can be breached and whatever is behind
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it can come out. So there's no fail safe way
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of having that not happen. Okay. But this is why
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the relationship is so important. That's why it's the core
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of brain spotting.
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Okay.
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If you are present with the client and they have
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a connection to you, And they feel a sense of
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trust in you and stability with you. When the tough
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stuff comes out, they're able to feel like they're not
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catapulted into the state of isolation that they experienced at
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the time of the traumas, especially early traumas. That's why
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we put the emphasis on the relationship. Because the healing
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comes through the relationship. It doesn't come through the technique.
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The technique is only as powerful as the relationship.
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I like that a lot. Do you do any particular
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theories that you seem to work better with brain spotting, CBT,
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object relations, anything of that sort, or not really?
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Well, CBT is more of a practice modality. Object relations
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is more of a theory. I studied, I've been in
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this business a long time, so So I studied originally
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back to not only Freudian, but the Neo-Freudians and object
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relations and the psychoanalytic developmental models and so on that
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really underpin so much of what people know now, but
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they don't really know necessarily where it comes from. But
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we draw from neurobiology as much as we draw from psychology. Okay.
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If you have a psychological theory that isn't grounded in
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neurobiology or is actually opposite to what we know in neurobiology,
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we don't give much credence to that. It has to
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make sense neurobiologically. You've got questions, but I'm going to
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say something here because I think it needs to be said.
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The population of the world right now is 8 billion.
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The population... of Europe and North America is 1 billion.
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So North America and Europe is 1 billion. The rest
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of the world is 7 billion. Psychological concepts and the
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research that goes along with it is very Western. And
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it goes back just a hundred years, a few hundred years.
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And it's been exported all over the world. just like
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the West has exported things all over the world in
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not such good ways with colonialism, et cetera, so on.
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But healing wisdom, and there's different viewpoints around the world
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about what we call the nervous system, other places call
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it chakras, meridians, and so on, energy. Who's to say
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that the 1 billion people are right and the 7
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billion people are wrong? And that the ideas of the
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$ 1 billion should be superimposed on the $ 7 billion. We
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have this term, evidence-based practice. Well, who determines what the
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evidence is? Well, it's a Western concept, okay and it
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is applied by westerners okay but what in in essence
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what it's saying is that the wisdom of the rest
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of the world you know going back thousands of years
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is not evidence that's a pretty um telling sort of
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thing brain spotting and we use what we call the
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the the neuro-experiential model expands beyond the West and it
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takes in the wisdom from the rest of the world.
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And we're always looking for wisdom from the East, from Africa,
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from South America, from indigenous peoples, because people were doing healing.
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In fact, they probably were using eye positions going back
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centuries and millennia and having some good effect on it,
322
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but it just didn't fit the Western idea of evidence.
323
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So I just needed to say that.
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It's interesting that sometimes I've mentioned to the class, I
325
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don't know if I mentioned it to this class or not,
326
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but it's funny how a lot of times people act
327
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like CBT or certain types of theories or practices are
328
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new when we look at the Greeks from 2,000 years
329
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ago with Stoicism and they applied a lot of the
330
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same belief systems that we do 2,000 years later.
331
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I might argue they did it better than we do it.
332
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I might agree with you.
333
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If you look at their literature, it is very... Deep
334
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and high level.
335
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Isn't it? It's incredible. I'm going to go now to
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Kennedy's question. So I kept her waiting long enough, but
337
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I think it's right around the area here. It says,
338
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I saw on TikTok about how lateral eye movement exercises
339
00:21:20.099 --> 00:21:25.069
increase serotonin levels. Does this have any relationship to brain spotting?
340
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Well, I'm not sure that TikTok is the best source
341
00:21:31.329 --> 00:21:36.029
of scientific information. And I just want to use this
342
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to expand things a little bit. Nothing in the brain
343
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is literal and linear. Everything is nonlinear, okay? In fact,
344
00:21:45.700 --> 00:21:49.799
everything in the brain operates on a quantum basis. You know,
345
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the idea that something is located in the amygdala as
346
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opposed to something is located through the entire brain and
347
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somehow it may be organized through the amygdala, there's nothing
348
00:22:00.849 --> 00:22:02.450
that happens in a part of the brain that doesn't
349
00:22:02.470 --> 00:22:04.089
happen in all of the brain or all of the
350
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nervous system. So going back to the questions, Um, is
351
00:22:08.619 --> 00:22:12.509
it possible that for some people at sometimes, uh, lateral
352
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eye movements can have an effect on serotonin level? Probably, probably. But, um,
353
00:22:19.890 --> 00:22:22.210
there's another saying, this is Western, you know, uh, uh,
354
00:22:23.410 --> 00:22:31.160
correlation is not causation. So, uh, if that happens, you know, um, uh,
355
00:22:31.359 --> 00:22:34.339
it's so, it's so complex, you know, and there's so
356
00:22:34.380 --> 00:22:40.670
many different, uh, brain chemicals that are operational at one
357
00:22:40.710 --> 00:22:43.390
time so that if it affects the serotonin level, it
358
00:22:43.410 --> 00:22:46.869
probably affects a lot of different levels. And how that
359
00:22:46.910 --> 00:22:50.720
all comes together, I don't know. But to put it
360
00:22:50.779 --> 00:22:56.380
this way, does brain spotting affect the serotonin level of
361
00:22:56.440 --> 00:23:02.259
people at different times? It probably does. But in science,
362
00:23:02.319 --> 00:23:08.460
most things are put forward as facts in the field
363
00:23:08.500 --> 00:23:11.140
of psychology and mental health are actually theories that have
364
00:23:11.160 --> 00:23:14.119
been around a long time that just have become accepted
365
00:23:14.180 --> 00:23:18.240
as facts. So the fact that this gets this result,
366
00:23:19.309 --> 00:23:24.670
we're working with an infinite number of variables in the
367
00:23:24.730 --> 00:23:29.250
human system. The human nervous system has one to four
368
00:23:29.670 --> 00:23:33.950
quadrillion synaptic connections. That's more than the stars we know
369
00:23:34.009 --> 00:23:37.279
about in the universe. So how can you know about that?
370
00:23:37.619 --> 00:23:39.920
How can you know about a system like that from
371
00:23:39.960 --> 00:23:43.160
the outside? You know, that's my question.
372
00:23:43.180 --> 00:23:47.319
That's a good question. I have no answer here, but
373
00:23:47.460 --> 00:23:49.849
in case you were waiting. Dr. Graham, folks, again, you
374
00:23:49.890 --> 00:23:52.269
can find the book called Brain Spotting, The Revolutionary New
375
00:23:52.289 --> 00:23:55.029
Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and Emotional Healing at
376
00:23:55.069 --> 00:23:58.089
Warp Speed. Also co-authored, This is Your Brain on Sports.
377
00:23:58.109 --> 00:24:01.519
You can find more about him at brainspotting.com. Jonathan, I'm
378
00:24:01.539 --> 00:24:03.259
going to hold your question off for a little bit
379
00:24:03.279 --> 00:24:06.710
because it's going to tie into another question. for dr
380
00:24:06.759 --> 00:24:10.039
grant but kennedy comes back with another interesting question that
381
00:24:10.079 --> 00:24:11.920
kind of takes me to where i wanted to take
382
00:24:11.940 --> 00:24:14.720
you to she mentions as someone who has never witnessed
383
00:24:14.759 --> 00:24:16.779
brain spotting in action can you describe what it looks
384
00:24:16.819 --> 00:24:18.559
like so i was kind of wondering the same thing
385
00:24:18.579 --> 00:24:20.400
if you could take us through i know you took
386
00:24:20.440 --> 00:24:22.720
us kind of through the ice skater but if somebody
387
00:24:22.799 --> 00:24:25.049
comes in with trauma for instance and they come to
388
00:24:25.140 --> 00:24:28.849
see you what do you do what's the process like
389
00:24:28.910 --> 00:24:32.670
is it just natural is there a system going on
390
00:24:33.170 --> 00:24:34.029
how would that work.
391
00:24:34.630 --> 00:24:40.789
Well um uh, first of all, uh, almost everybody I
392
00:24:40.869 --> 00:24:45.029
see has, has trauma that is contributing to what brings
393
00:24:45.069 --> 00:24:47.250
them to see me. This is part, I said, brain
394
00:24:47.269 --> 00:24:49.970
spotting is a developmental model and we look at things
395
00:24:50.029 --> 00:24:54.470
from a developmental trauma and dissociation point of view. Dissociation
396
00:24:54.509 --> 00:24:57.690
is when a system puts up a protective barrier in
397
00:24:57.750 --> 00:25:00.670
order to, to survive, but what's behind the protective barrier
398
00:25:00.750 --> 00:25:04.150
ends up being hidden and lost. So coming back to
399
00:25:04.170 --> 00:25:10.710
the question, um, person comes in to see me, I ask,
400
00:25:11.049 --> 00:25:12.859
you know, first of all, I wait to see what
401
00:25:12.890 --> 00:25:15.599
they have to say, talking about a first session. And
402
00:25:15.619 --> 00:25:18.400
I'm looking for them to tell me in their words
403
00:25:18.460 --> 00:25:22.039
and their concepts and their own time, what it is that, that,
404
00:25:22.539 --> 00:25:24.759
that goes on for them that has led them to
405
00:25:24.779 --> 00:25:26.500
have the courage to come to see me in the
406
00:25:26.539 --> 00:25:33.029
first place. And from there, you know, I ask kind
407
00:25:33.069 --> 00:25:36.970
of follow-up questions. Almost everything I do is following, not leading.
408
00:25:37.390 --> 00:25:41.640
Because one to four quadrillion synaptic connections, you have to
409
00:25:41.700 --> 00:25:43.700
take what comes to you. If you think you know
410
00:25:43.740 --> 00:25:46.220
there or you can lead it, you can't. And this
411
00:25:46.680 --> 00:25:53.240
is a failure in different therapeutic processes. But assuming that
412
00:25:53.269 --> 00:25:54.930
I'm going to do brain spotting with a person in
413
00:25:54.950 --> 00:25:59.190
a first session, I will ask them, what would you
414
00:25:59.250 --> 00:26:03.000
like to work on today? And it doesn't have to be,
415
00:26:03.099 --> 00:26:05.859
you know, some therapies, you have to give a memory,
416
00:26:06.299 --> 00:26:09.279
you have to give something that you can put into words,
417
00:26:09.819 --> 00:26:12.059
you have to give a cognition, all these kinds of things.
418
00:26:12.700 --> 00:26:16.920
In brain spotting, it's self-defined by the client, for the client.
419
00:26:17.799 --> 00:26:20.549
And then they'll say whatever it is, you know, and
420
00:26:20.569 --> 00:26:24.339
then we may go into a more extensive discussion about it,
421
00:26:24.549 --> 00:26:26.910
or we may just quickly go into brain spotting with this.
422
00:26:27.329 --> 00:26:30.849
It's all a matter of the individuality and following the
423
00:26:30.890 --> 00:26:35.259
client wherever they go. Let's say the client had something
424
00:26:35.299 --> 00:26:38.680
more discreet. They had a bad car accident six months
425
00:26:38.720 --> 00:26:45.259
ago and they have driving phobia now. That's actually an
426
00:26:45.359 --> 00:26:50.880
easier thing to work with, surprisingly enough, as opposed to
427
00:26:50.940 --> 00:26:54.359
more complex trauma, which usually everybody has in their own way.
428
00:26:55.180 --> 00:26:56.920
But I'd say, okay, just.
429
00:26:58.640 --> 00:27:02.579
Are you activated around the car accident now? The person says, yes.
430
00:27:03.240 --> 00:27:06.359
We will ask them zero to 10, how activated are you?
431
00:27:06.440 --> 00:27:09.940
Zero is neutral, nothing. 10 is the most it can be.
432
00:27:10.720 --> 00:27:11.880
Person says a six.
433
00:27:12.539 --> 00:27:12.839
Okay.
434
00:27:13.319 --> 00:27:15.289
Now from there, we have three different ways of finding
435
00:27:15.309 --> 00:27:19.089
the eye position. The first way is if this person,
436
00:27:19.140 --> 00:27:23.269
as soon as he started to activate himself around the accident,
437
00:27:23.910 --> 00:27:25.630
he went like this, his head went back and he
438
00:27:25.650 --> 00:27:29.390
looked up, or he went like this, I might say,
439
00:27:29.430 --> 00:27:33.140
just keep looking where you're looking and notice where you're
440
00:27:33.160 --> 00:27:34.779
feeling in your body and let's see where it goes.
441
00:27:35.799 --> 00:27:39.299
But the other two ways of finding the relevant eye positions,
442
00:27:40.359 --> 00:27:42.700
let's say the person, it's a six and they're feeling
443
00:27:42.940 --> 00:27:47.460
compression in their chest. I will go slowly across their
444
00:27:47.549 --> 00:27:51.289
eye position, looking for reflexes in their eyes, in their face,
445
00:27:51.349 --> 00:27:54.630
or even in their body. You get across here and
446
00:27:54.650 --> 00:27:57.349
the person starts blinking very fast. You get over here
447
00:27:57.369 --> 00:27:59.730
and the person's head goes back. You get over here
448
00:27:59.769 --> 00:28:03.190
and the person clears their throat. Those are all reflexive
449
00:28:03.230 --> 00:28:06.880
responses that are indicating that something about that eye position
450
00:28:07.900 --> 00:28:11.279
is touching on something in this state of activation that
451
00:28:11.319 --> 00:28:14.500
they're in. And then from there, I'll choose or we'll
452
00:28:14.539 --> 00:28:17.910
choose together a reflex spot. We call that in brain
453
00:28:17.930 --> 00:28:21.410
spotting outside window because the therapist is looking from the
454
00:28:21.710 --> 00:28:25.789
outside into the client's eyes. Or I might say to
455
00:28:25.829 --> 00:28:28.650
the client, Okay, we're going to see the eye position
456
00:28:28.670 --> 00:28:31.130
where you feel it the most. Do you feel it
457
00:28:31.170 --> 00:28:34.849
more looking to your right? Do you feel it more
458
00:28:35.269 --> 00:28:37.869
looking in the middle? Or do you feel it more
459
00:28:37.910 --> 00:28:40.950
looking to your left? Okay, the client says to your left.
460
00:28:41.569 --> 00:28:45.109
Then we'll say, is it more above eye level, at
461
00:28:45.150 --> 00:28:49.849
eye level, or below? They say higher, higher, higher, right there. Okay,
462
00:28:50.250 --> 00:28:52.859
that's the third way of finding a relevant eye position.
463
00:28:52.880 --> 00:28:56.059
We call it inside window. because the client is directing
464
00:28:56.119 --> 00:29:00.569
us from the inside. So once they're on any of
465
00:29:00.609 --> 00:29:04.509
the spots, the gaze spot, the reflex spot, or the
466
00:29:04.809 --> 00:29:08.630
inside window spot, the client just starts by being aware
467
00:29:08.650 --> 00:29:10.930
of what they're feeling in their body, and they are
468
00:29:11.009 --> 00:29:15.170
guided to go into a mindfulness process, okay? You don't
469
00:29:15.670 --> 00:29:19.130
direct yourself. You don't judge yourself. You don't hold yourself back.
470
00:29:19.549 --> 00:29:22.259
You notice what comes up, what comes next, what comes next,
471
00:29:22.319 --> 00:29:25.309
what comes next. And what happens is that the system
472
00:29:25.369 --> 00:29:29.269
goes into a deep form of processing that somehow takes
473
00:29:29.309 --> 00:29:31.769
them out of the dysregulation and out of the trauma
474
00:29:32.369 --> 00:29:35.599
and moves them towards the here and now and moves
475
00:29:35.630 --> 00:29:38.420
them towards more of a sense of homeostasis or regulation.
476
00:29:40.160 --> 00:29:43.279
And periodically you check in on the activation number. A
477
00:29:43.599 --> 00:29:47.019
person started at a six, they process for about 15 minutes,
478
00:29:47.059 --> 00:29:49.160
you say zero to 10, how much are you feeling
479
00:29:49.200 --> 00:29:54.769
it now? It's a four, you keep going. And sometimes
480
00:29:54.809 --> 00:29:56.630
in a session, you'll get down to a zero and
481
00:29:56.670 --> 00:29:58.369
sometimes it won't get down to a zero, it'll go
482
00:29:58.390 --> 00:30:00.690
from a six to a three. But a lot of
483
00:30:00.750 --> 00:30:05.960
processing has happened with that. At the end, we say, okay,
484
00:30:05.980 --> 00:30:08.480
I want you to go back to the accident now.
485
00:30:08.880 --> 00:30:10.559
Let it come up now and see what it looks
486
00:30:10.640 --> 00:30:16.299
like and feels like. And the client will say, it's
487
00:30:16.359 --> 00:30:19.420
kind of like vague, it's hazy, or it's further away.
488
00:30:20.220 --> 00:30:23.109
Or I kind of see it, but I'm not reacting
489
00:30:23.150 --> 00:30:29.210
to it. Those are reflections of changes in the neurobiology.
490
00:30:29.910 --> 00:30:32.789
in response to this processing. And you can get to
491
00:30:32.829 --> 00:30:34.910
a point where it's at a zero, we call it
492
00:30:34.930 --> 00:30:37.299
even a squeeze lemon zero, where we have the person
493
00:30:37.390 --> 00:30:40.700
try to activate themselves as much as they can until
494
00:30:40.720 --> 00:30:45.299
they can't even activate it at all. And something has
495
00:30:45.359 --> 00:30:49.839
shifted in the person's nervous system by doing this. So
496
00:30:50.220 --> 00:30:53.359
that's an example of how we do it. It's a
497
00:30:53.400 --> 00:30:54.579
relatively simple example.
498
00:30:54.599 --> 00:30:58.119
It's a great example. It's really interesting to see how
499
00:30:58.140 --> 00:31:02.970
that would work. I've got a lot of questions now,
500
00:31:02.990 --> 00:31:05.339
but I'm trying to think how I'm going to handle this.
501
00:31:07.500 --> 00:31:07.859
One.
502
00:31:07.900 --> 00:31:11.339
Lost my train of thought. Okay. So in your book,
503
00:31:11.359 --> 00:31:13.240
you mentioned it's interesting in Chapter 8, it was kind
504
00:31:13.279 --> 00:31:18.660
of a fascinating title of Chapter 8, Z-axis convergence. Is
505
00:31:18.700 --> 00:31:20.920
that mentioned in this example you just gave us, or
506
00:31:20.960 --> 00:31:22.359
is this something separate? No, no, no.
507
00:31:23.099 --> 00:31:27.180
This is actually going back to high school geometry. going
508
00:31:27.240 --> 00:31:29.799
across horizontally is the X axis, going up or down
509
00:31:29.839 --> 00:31:34.259
is the Y axis, and the Z axis is depth. Now,
510
00:31:34.299 --> 00:31:39.069
because the visual field is three-dimensional, and the perception of
511
00:31:39.130 --> 00:31:44.529
trauma is three-dimensional as well, for some clients, when you
512
00:31:44.549 --> 00:31:47.910
move the pointer further away, it gets less activating. When
513
00:31:47.930 --> 00:31:50.250
you move the pointer towards them, it gets more activating.
514
00:31:50.769 --> 00:31:54.769
So that's exploring the Z axis. But there's another fascinating
515
00:31:54.809 --> 00:31:59.089
phenomenon here. If this is the eye position where they
516
00:31:59.119 --> 00:32:02.089
feel it the most and the client looks through the
517
00:32:02.130 --> 00:32:05.950
pointer to the most distant spot on the wall and
518
00:32:06.549 --> 00:32:10.450
aligning with the pointer and goes back and forth between
519
00:32:10.470 --> 00:32:15.099
the two every three to five or eight seconds, it
520
00:32:15.200 --> 00:32:22.640
activates an oculocardiac reflex. The eye muscles, I told you
521
00:32:22.680 --> 00:32:25.789
about the eyes are partly made up of brain cells.
522
00:32:26.359 --> 00:32:29.109
The eye muscles, there's six eye muscles for each eye,
523
00:32:29.630 --> 00:32:33.490
are loaded with reflexes. And one of those reflexes is
524
00:32:33.529 --> 00:32:36.369
a vagal reflex. You may have heard of polyvagal theory.
525
00:32:37.049 --> 00:32:37.670
Well, you can.
526
00:32:37.829 --> 00:32:44.559
Actually activate the vagal system by looking, by converging and
527
00:32:44.619 --> 00:32:49.940
diverging and converging and diverging. The whole nervous system calms
528
00:32:49.980 --> 00:32:54.220
down and quiets down, okay, because you're getting that vagal access. Now,
529
00:32:54.279 --> 00:32:56.079
if you're doing it on the spot where the person
530
00:32:56.119 --> 00:33:00.730
feels the trauma activation and you're getting this, again, this
531
00:33:00.789 --> 00:33:06.529
old technical stuff, but I'm only answering your questions. You
532
00:33:06.549 --> 00:33:13.809
can literally downregulate using a vagal reflex that goes all
533
00:33:13.829 --> 00:33:17.089
the way down into the heart, into the digestive system.
534
00:33:18.509 --> 00:33:22.420
So when I was cutting my teeth as a therapist,
535
00:33:22.720 --> 00:33:25.569
we didn't know this stuff. We couldn't do this stuff.
536
00:33:26.329 --> 00:33:28.890
And only as the years and the decades went on
537
00:33:28.910 --> 00:33:31.390
did we learn more and more about these things. And
538
00:33:31.430 --> 00:33:35.710
here's the good news. Whatever we know now, tomorrow and
539
00:33:36.289 --> 00:33:39.190
next month and next year and next decade, we're going
540
00:33:39.210 --> 00:33:40.960
to know a lot more than we know right now
541
00:33:41.339 --> 00:33:43.279
in terms of promoting emotional healing.
542
00:33:44.859 --> 00:33:48.980
Absolutely. It's an exciting look at the future. Absolutely. Yeah,
543
00:33:49.119 --> 00:33:51.859
because chapter nine, you talk about the neurobiology of brain spotting.
544
00:33:52.829 --> 00:33:54.910
So this is what you're covering right now, some of
545
00:33:54.930 --> 00:33:57.170
these aspects here. You probably go deeper in the book
546
00:33:57.210 --> 00:33:57.509
as well.
547
00:33:58.170 --> 00:34:02.380
Well, actually, the book came out 10 years ago. So
548
00:34:02.390 --> 00:34:05.759
we have some ideas and information that have come on
549
00:34:05.819 --> 00:34:13.820
since then. I'll give you an example of it. The neocortex,
550
00:34:14.320 --> 00:34:16.969
the thinking brain, the human brain, the conscious brain, the
551
00:34:17.030 --> 00:34:22.090
language brain, okay, is brilliant at what it does. but
552
00:34:22.130 --> 00:34:27.320
it has very little capacity for regulation. Okay. For the
553
00:34:27.389 --> 00:34:32.760
regulating systems where you like balance or emotional balance or
554
00:34:32.800 --> 00:34:36.260
being able to regulate emotions. There's no capacity for that
555
00:34:36.440 --> 00:34:42.420
up here. So any therapy that is language-based and thought-based
556
00:34:43.389 --> 00:34:46.570
is going to go here and it's going to spend
557
00:34:46.610 --> 00:34:47.409
a lot of time here.
558
00:34:48.150 --> 00:34:48.489
Okay.
559
00:34:49.170 --> 00:34:54.469
But if you go down, The lower part of, underneath
560
00:34:54.510 --> 00:34:59.650
the neocortex, you have different areas that are highly involved
561
00:34:59.789 --> 00:35:05.000
in regulation. So this is another part of the brain
562
00:35:05.039 --> 00:35:11.219
theory of brain spotting. You want to bypass the neocortex,
563
00:35:11.239 --> 00:35:15.309
which has little to no capacity for systemic regulation, to
564
00:35:15.329 --> 00:35:19.090
get access to the subcortex, to the parts of the
565
00:35:19.150 --> 00:35:24.130
subcortex that are highly involved in regulation. If a person
566
00:35:24.170 --> 00:35:32.489
has panic attacks, that's dysregulation. A person has OCD, that's dysregulation.
567
00:35:32.510 --> 00:35:36.840
A person has flashbacks, that's dysregulation. A person has depression,
568
00:35:36.880 --> 00:35:40.559
that's another form of dysregulation. So you have to be
569
00:35:40.780 --> 00:35:44.300
able to help the system to come from dysregulation towards
570
00:35:44.360 --> 00:35:47.039
regulation You have to be able to access the parts
571
00:35:47.079 --> 00:35:49.880
of the brain that are directly involved in that. Well,
572
00:35:50.679 --> 00:35:53.820
the more talking you get into, the less access you
573
00:35:53.860 --> 00:35:57.010
get to the regulating parts of the brain. This is
574
00:35:57.070 --> 00:35:59.190
why we keep it to a minimum. Where do you
575
00:35:59.210 --> 00:36:04.030
feel it the most? Here, here, here, up, down, below,
576
00:36:04.409 --> 00:36:08.929
right over here? Okay. See what happens from there. We
577
00:36:09.050 --> 00:36:14.659
minimize the language. We minimize the thinking-based kind of processes.
578
00:36:15.469 --> 00:36:21.409
which helps us to access the areas of dysregulation or regulation.
579
00:36:22.059 --> 00:36:24.179
That's why we're looking for where the person feels it
580
00:36:24.199 --> 00:36:27.579
the most. That's why we're looking for those reflexes, okay?
581
00:36:27.980 --> 00:36:30.920
That tells you where the regulation system is, down to
582
00:36:30.940 --> 00:36:33.440
the brainstem, down even to the spine, where a lot
583
00:36:33.460 --> 00:36:36.800
of the reflexes are spinal. This is why we look
584
00:36:36.840 --> 00:36:41.440
for that spontaneous gaze, because that spontaneous gaze tells us
585
00:36:42.380 --> 00:36:45.989
that this is where the person is accessing it into
586
00:36:46.010 --> 00:36:49.190
the system that's trying to regulate itself, that's been having
587
00:36:49.250 --> 00:36:50.650
trouble regulating itself.
588
00:36:52.630 --> 00:36:54.889
That makes me think about the prefrontal cortex and its
589
00:36:55.130 --> 00:36:58.610
responsibility for emotional regulation. So is that what you're referring to?
590
00:36:58.670 --> 00:37:00.269
Does it have any play at all here?
591
00:37:01.690 --> 00:37:02.590
Only secondarily.
592
00:37:03.030 --> 00:37:03.710
Secondarily.
593
00:37:04.909 --> 00:37:10.539
For primary emotional regulation? No. Because emotional regulation is all
594
00:37:10.579 --> 00:37:15.500
based on somatic processes. And it's all based on survival
595
00:37:15.599 --> 00:37:20.889
issues of flight and fight and freeze. By the way,
596
00:37:20.929 --> 00:37:24.929
it's not fight or flight. Mammals are not looking for
597
00:37:24.949 --> 00:37:27.929
a fight. They're looking to survive. A mammal will run
598
00:37:27.989 --> 00:37:30.769
away before it fights. It'll only fight when it's cornered.
599
00:37:31.269 --> 00:37:37.000
So it's really, excuse me, it's really flight or fight.
600
00:37:37.199 --> 00:37:41.079
And then if that doesn't work, freeze. When a person has,
601
00:37:42.460 --> 00:37:46.320
in the state of flight, the animal gets the anxiety signal,
602
00:37:46.380 --> 00:37:51.199
which tells us danger is here, run. So the flight
603
00:37:51.239 --> 00:37:55.059
response is very much related to anxiety. The fight response
604
00:37:55.179 --> 00:37:59.969
is very much related to anger. And the freeze response
605
00:38:00.030 --> 00:38:05.630
is very much related to helplessness. All core survival mechanisms
606
00:38:05.650 --> 00:38:10.489
that are mammalian, that are the substrates of our emotional processes.
607
00:38:11.630 --> 00:38:16.880
So how can the Prefrontal cortex mediate things that are
608
00:38:16.929 --> 00:38:22.719
so primal. Okay? You can tell yourself, that's like when
609
00:38:22.739 --> 00:38:25.179
you tell somebody who's really upset, oh, don't worry, don't
610
00:38:25.199 --> 00:38:28.320
be upset. And it doesn't, of course, it doesn't help.
611
00:38:28.340 --> 00:38:29.699
Okay?
612
00:38:30.480 --> 00:38:32.139
What you can say is, okay, I'm here with you.
613
00:38:32.159 --> 00:38:32.739
Okay?
614
00:38:34.179 --> 00:38:36.179
You say things in the kind of voice and the
615
00:38:36.219 --> 00:38:39.489
kind of gestures that are more calming in a more
616
00:38:39.789 --> 00:38:42.650
primal sort of way. And you have to take your
617
00:38:42.690 --> 00:38:47.070
time with it. Because the system doesn't shut off as
618
00:38:47.130 --> 00:38:51.329
quickly as it may shut and turn on. Interesting.
619
00:38:51.349 --> 00:38:55.050
I like that. I know we're going towards already 45
620
00:38:55.050 --> 00:38:57.860
minutes in. I can't believe it. Pretty fast, isn't it, folks?
621
00:38:59.400 --> 00:39:01.500
Let me ask you this. I'm going to jump on
622
00:39:01.519 --> 00:39:05.119
to Jonathan's question here. This will lead to other questions
623
00:39:05.219 --> 00:39:07.039
for me. Actually, you know what? Before we get to
624
00:39:07.079 --> 00:39:09.039
Jonathan's question, there's a couple other ones that are attached
625
00:39:09.079 --> 00:39:12.130
to it. In Chapter 10, you talk about the body
626
00:39:12.210 --> 00:39:15.079
is memory. Tell us a little bit about that. What
627
00:39:15.119 --> 00:39:19.489
is this all about? You kind of referenced it earlier.
628
00:39:19.510 --> 00:39:20.820
It seemed like you alluded to it earlier.
629
00:39:22.949 --> 00:39:25.750
What would happen if you think back to a significant
630
00:39:25.829 --> 00:39:29.610
memory in your life and the memory comes up, but
631
00:39:29.630 --> 00:39:32.320
there's no emotion and you're not feeling anything in your
632
00:39:32.340 --> 00:39:37.739
body okay you think about the first date that you
633
00:39:37.780 --> 00:39:42.539
had okay and you bring it up the only way
634
00:39:42.579 --> 00:39:45.360
that it has resonance is what you feel what you
635
00:39:45.389 --> 00:39:48.329
feel in your body you know You may feel kind
636
00:39:48.349 --> 00:39:49.889
of a warm feeling in your body, or if you're
637
00:39:49.909 --> 00:39:53.250
thinking about a cringeworthy memory, you'll feel that cringing in
638
00:39:53.289 --> 00:39:56.110
your body. But if you go to a cringeworthy memory
639
00:39:56.269 --> 00:40:02.659
and there's nothing, no body, no emotion, nothing, it has
640
00:40:02.719 --> 00:40:10.179
no value as a memory. And what happens is, let's
641
00:40:10.199 --> 00:40:15.260
say you take a traumatic experience where you got very
642
00:40:15.460 --> 00:40:22.230
frightened by something. okay, the fear that you felt in
643
00:40:22.269 --> 00:40:25.590
your body is as much a memory as the image
644
00:40:25.630 --> 00:40:28.750
of what frightened you. In fact, I would argue that
645
00:40:28.789 --> 00:40:31.690
the feeling, that fear feeling in your body is more
646
00:40:31.730 --> 00:40:34.769
of a memory than the image. So if you bring
647
00:40:34.809 --> 00:40:36.750
up the image, but the body memory doesn't come up,
648
00:40:37.250 --> 00:40:40.250
it's not much of a memory. It's a disembodied memory.
649
00:40:40.909 --> 00:40:42.510
But you know what? You can have that fear in
650
00:40:42.530 --> 00:40:46.489
your body and be remembering that frightening experience without having
651
00:40:46.510 --> 00:40:49.139
the visual or the auditory memory that goes along with it.
652
00:40:49.849 --> 00:40:53.699
A lot of what we feel emotionally is actually memory
653
00:40:54.480 --> 00:40:58.019
that we're not recognizing as memory because it doesn't come
654
00:40:58.099 --> 00:41:00.630
up with a declarative memory that goes along with it.
655
00:41:03.739 --> 00:41:05.840
I like that. I know it's always interesting to see
656
00:41:05.880 --> 00:41:09.360
how the nervous system responds when you access memories. You'll
657
00:41:09.389 --> 00:41:12.469
start breathing heavier, depending on the memory, of course.
658
00:41:13.349 --> 00:41:15.789
Well, if you have somebody come into your office and
659
00:41:15.809 --> 00:41:18.250
they want to work on something that is very traumatizing
660
00:41:18.289 --> 00:41:20.809
to them and they're walking in, they're in a safe
661
00:41:20.849 --> 00:41:23.230
environment with a safe person. They've been seeing you for
662
00:41:23.250 --> 00:41:25.889
three months, you know, and they're familiar with the place
663
00:41:26.730 --> 00:41:28.329
and they bring up the memory and you say, how
664
00:41:28.429 --> 00:41:29.150
activating is it?
665
00:41:29.170 --> 00:41:29.690
Zero to 10.
666
00:41:29.670 --> 00:41:33.230
And they say nine. Their body is reacting like they're
667
00:41:33.250 --> 00:41:37.409
in danger. When they, even though they know this is
668
00:41:37.489 --> 00:41:41.590
the prefrontal cortex knows there's no danger. Okay. The body
669
00:41:41.650 --> 00:41:44.980
is still reacting as if there's danger. They're actually having
670
00:41:45.019 --> 00:41:50.139
a body flashback, which is what creates that activation in
671
00:41:50.199 --> 00:41:53.679
a session, whether it's in brain spotting or any other therapy.
672
00:41:55.019 --> 00:41:56.480
Let me ask you your opinion on this. I have
673
00:41:56.500 --> 00:41:58.480
a lot of friends in special forces, and this is
674
00:41:58.519 --> 00:42:00.869
something similar a lot of times that I hear from them.
675
00:42:01.550 --> 00:42:05.070
Do you like the phrase... They usually use it with amygdala,
676
00:42:05.090 --> 00:42:07.289
but in this case, maybe we'll use it with the body,
677
00:42:07.309 --> 00:42:10.070
that it overrides the prefrontal cortex? Or is it just
678
00:42:10.150 --> 00:42:15.469
different pathways that are not communicating properly? What do you think?
679
00:42:15.750 --> 00:42:24.269
I think both things you say make sense. By the way,
680
00:42:24.309 --> 00:42:27.949
when it comes to people who have been involved in combat,
681
00:42:28.909 --> 00:42:31.050
and they talk about– and this we see now, again,
682
00:42:31.090 --> 00:42:34.530
with natural disasters– They talk about the thousand mile stare
683
00:42:34.909 --> 00:42:35.710
person is like this.
684
00:42:35.730 --> 00:42:36.869
Okay.
685
00:42:37.789 --> 00:42:40.670
And they're just gazing off into space and they're like,
686
00:42:40.710 --> 00:42:41.389
not really there.
687
00:42:41.429 --> 00:42:41.849
And so on.
688
00:42:43.510 --> 00:42:48.570
Not true at all. That's a gay spot. Okay. There's
689
00:42:48.610 --> 00:42:51.260
a part of them that they left behind on the
690
00:42:51.320 --> 00:42:55.340
battlefield that never came home. And they're gazing off into
691
00:42:55.380 --> 00:42:58.820
space in some relation to that part of them that
692
00:42:58.860 --> 00:43:04.320
hasn't come home. Okay. If any other therapist who's not
693
00:43:04.340 --> 00:43:08.400
a brain spotting therapist is going to misread it and
694
00:43:08.440 --> 00:43:11.449
isn't going to make use of it. By the way,
695
00:43:11.510 --> 00:43:16.409
any therapists who are listening here, you don't have to
696
00:43:16.449 --> 00:43:19.750
come to a brain spotting training to learn about this,
697
00:43:20.010 --> 00:43:22.570
especially gaze spotting. It's the most natural thing of all.
698
00:43:23.889 --> 00:43:31.400
Coming back again to combat. It's usually not just one person.
699
00:43:31.960 --> 00:43:38.480
event for, for combat trauma. It's usually multiple events over
700
00:43:38.519 --> 00:43:41.179
an extreme period of time. And some of it is
701
00:43:41.239 --> 00:43:43.619
what happens to you or almost what happens to you.
702
00:43:44.099 --> 00:43:46.420
But a lot of it is what happens to somebody else,
703
00:43:46.539 --> 00:43:51.809
the vicarious traumatization. Okay. But what happens is when, you know,
704
00:43:51.829 --> 00:43:59.130
the unprocessed trauma inside of, of the returning, uh, soldier, um,
705
00:44:01.000 --> 00:44:04.219
their nervous system is still reacting as if they're in
706
00:44:04.239 --> 00:44:08.969
the field of combat. That's where, and brain spawning is
707
00:44:09.010 --> 00:44:12.349
not the only modality that's successful in working with this,
708
00:44:12.429 --> 00:44:16.309
although it's highly successful. But what you're doing is you're
709
00:44:16.349 --> 00:44:20.469
helping the parts of that soldier that were left behind
710
00:44:20.489 --> 00:44:24.400
on the battlefield to be identified and to come back
711
00:44:24.820 --> 00:44:26.960
from the then and there to the here and now.
712
00:44:29.090 --> 00:44:30.849
And it's not like it didn't happen, and it's not
713
00:44:30.889 --> 00:44:33.769
like it wasn't profound, but it's that the person is
714
00:44:33.849 --> 00:44:36.409
not endangered now as they were then.
715
00:44:39.159 --> 00:44:41.380
Definitely going to share that idea with them when we
716
00:44:41.400 --> 00:44:44.219
put that on the podcast over there. By the way, again, folks,
717
00:44:44.260 --> 00:44:47.159
it's Dr. Grand, G-R-A-N-D, the author of Brain Spotting, the
718
00:44:47.179 --> 00:44:50.099
Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and Emotional
719
00:44:50.139 --> 00:44:52.579
Healing at Warp Speed. We're going to talk about warp
720
00:44:52.599 --> 00:44:54.500
speed in a second. He also co-authored the book, This
721
00:44:54.559 --> 00:44:56.800
is Your Brain on Sports. You can find more about
722
00:44:56.820 --> 00:45:01.010
him at brainspotting.com. Dr. Granz, we head towards the tail
723
00:45:01.110 --> 00:45:03.050
end of the interview. Thank you very much again for
724
00:45:03.090 --> 00:45:07.239
doing this. What do you mean warp speed? How fast
725
00:45:07.280 --> 00:45:12.199
can people get over some of these traumas?
726
00:45:12.980 --> 00:45:16.800
Well, for some people, it can be two sessions instead
727
00:45:16.840 --> 00:45:19.570
of 20 sessions. For some people, it can be 20
728
00:45:19.570 --> 00:45:23.650
sessions instead of 200 sessions. For some people, it can
729
00:45:23.670 --> 00:45:26.769
be three years instead of 15 years, and they still
730
00:45:29.230 --> 00:45:32.699
haven't really come to any kind of resolution with it.
731
00:45:33.170 --> 00:45:37.230
So I want to mention complex trauma, which I also
732
00:45:37.289 --> 00:45:43.989
call developmental trauma, takes longer to heal. And it's usually
733
00:45:44.429 --> 00:45:48.179
developmental trauma or complex trauma is many traumas at different
734
00:45:48.219 --> 00:45:51.380
parts of a life, but always going back to the
735
00:45:51.480 --> 00:45:55.860
early years of a person's life. So you can get,
736
00:45:56.199 --> 00:45:59.239
for some people, in two years of brain spotting, a
737
00:45:59.300 --> 00:46:05.309
much deeper, more comprehensive healing in relation to complex trauma
738
00:46:05.329 --> 00:46:09.590
or developmental trauma than you might with certain other modalities. Again,
739
00:46:09.630 --> 00:46:13.190
I'm not naming names. That in 10 years, you might
740
00:46:13.230 --> 00:46:14.929
not get close to as much as you got in
741
00:46:14.989 --> 00:46:19.360
two years. So warp speed for somebody is two sessions.
742
00:46:19.380 --> 00:46:22.059
For another person, it's 20. For another person, it's two years.
743
00:46:24.039 --> 00:46:27.360
You're a Star Trek fan out of curiosity?
744
00:46:27.559 --> 00:46:31.110
I used to... The original series, the first few movies
745
00:46:31.199 --> 00:46:33.340
and so on. But beyond that, I didn't, I don't,
746
00:46:33.380 --> 00:46:38.260
you know, I didn't, I, you know, uh, captain, uh, uh,
747
00:46:38.280 --> 00:46:41.309
that was, that was, I wasn't into it.
748
00:46:42.960 --> 00:46:44.820
You're a Shatner, Lemoy, Nemoy fan.
749
00:46:45.420 --> 00:46:45.940
Absolutely.
750
00:46:45.960 --> 00:46:49.570
Our last round of questions, I guess, Jonathan kind of
751
00:46:49.590 --> 00:46:51.829
starts it off with which type of client is brain
752
00:46:51.869 --> 00:46:54.130
spotting network for.
753
00:46:55.969 --> 00:46:59.360
A client who won't walk into your office. The client
754
00:46:59.380 --> 00:47:01.179
who walks out of your office in the middle of
755
00:47:01.199 --> 00:47:06.619
the session doesn't come back. Okay. Here's the, I'm being
756
00:47:06.639 --> 00:47:10.599
a bit facetious, but this is, this is one of
757
00:47:10.639 --> 00:47:14.610
the strengths of brain spotting. It is based on attunement,
758
00:47:15.690 --> 00:47:19.989
which means it's individual in the moment. You can never
759
00:47:20.070 --> 00:47:24.030
work with this, with two people the same way. You're
760
00:47:24.050 --> 00:47:29.170
going to work with each person differently. And, and, If
761
00:47:29.230 --> 00:47:31.590
it's in your expertise, let's say a person has a,
762
00:47:32.389 --> 00:47:35.199
I don't call it dissociative disorder because I don't believe
763
00:47:35.219 --> 00:47:38.000
that it's a disorder. I think it's an adaptation or
764
00:47:38.019 --> 00:47:40.900
a reaction pattern. But let's say a person has high
765
00:47:40.940 --> 00:47:45.300
levels of dissociation. You have to have expertise in working
766
00:47:45.340 --> 00:47:48.280
with that. Being a great brain spawning therapist isn't enough.
767
00:47:48.860 --> 00:47:51.670
If you're working with addictions, you have to have expertise
768
00:47:51.710 --> 00:47:53.750
in addictions. If you're working with children, you have to
769
00:47:53.769 --> 00:47:56.809
have expertise with that. If you're working, you know, with
770
00:47:57.190 --> 00:48:00.250
different cultures, you have to have expertise with that. So
771
00:48:01.829 --> 00:48:06.489
with that as a caveat, if we're working with the
772
00:48:06.739 --> 00:48:10.960
one to four quadrillion synaptic connections that each person has
773
00:48:11.059 --> 00:48:14.320
that they bring in with them, and we sit with
774
00:48:14.360 --> 00:48:17.420
the person in such a way that we don't assume
775
00:48:17.639 --> 00:48:22.050
anything about them, and that we receive whatever they say,
776
00:48:22.369 --> 00:48:25.800
and we believe whatever they say, And we see them
777
00:48:26.559 --> 00:48:30.119
as the source of information. We see them as the
778
00:48:30.219 --> 00:48:35.010
smart ones about themselves, not us therapists as the smart ones.
779
00:48:35.489 --> 00:48:37.670
What makes us smart is to realize what we don't
780
00:48:37.710 --> 00:48:40.409
know and what we can't know. And we follow the
781
00:48:40.429 --> 00:48:43.730
client wherever they go. In that way, you can, you know,
782
00:48:43.750 --> 00:48:52.590
brain spawning is made to be adapted to any individual
783
00:48:52.690 --> 00:48:53.530
or situation.
784
00:48:54.849 --> 00:48:57.820
So. I mean, I'm going to see if I can,
785
00:48:57.949 --> 00:48:59.679
if I summarize this right, of course, correct me if
786
00:48:59.739 --> 00:49:02.019
I'm wrong. So it seems like this is going to
787
00:49:02.059 --> 00:49:04.239
jump onto this question for a second, but it seems
788
00:49:04.300 --> 00:49:09.000
like brain spotting, there's an innate response for this gaze spotting.
789
00:49:10.679 --> 00:49:13.909
Would anything else interfere with that innate response, such as
790
00:49:13.989 --> 00:49:18.710
if drug use, like you mentioned a minute ago, schizophrenia,
791
00:49:18.809 --> 00:49:20.849
anything at all, or would it? you think the innate
792
00:49:20.889 --> 00:49:24.090
system would still be functioning properly enough?
793
00:49:24.730 --> 00:49:28.030
Well, brain spotting won't take a schizophrenic person and have
794
00:49:28.050 --> 00:49:35.039
them become not schizophrenic. Okay. But every person who has
795
00:49:35.139 --> 00:49:38.699
diagnosable schizophrenia, because a lot of times dissociative disorders or
796
00:49:38.760 --> 00:49:43.400
conditions are misdiagnosed as schizophrenia. But anybody who has schizophrenia
797
00:49:43.960 --> 00:49:46.360
is a human being that has their own developmental history
798
00:49:46.860 --> 00:49:51.230
and their own developmental traumas. Because there's so much genetic loading,
799
00:49:51.789 --> 00:49:54.869
there can be other family members with schizophrenia, a parent
800
00:49:54.989 --> 00:49:58.789
or so on. So there's a lot of trauma that
801
00:49:58.849 --> 00:50:05.780
people who have schizophrenia or bipolar condition have that that
802
00:50:05.820 --> 00:50:07.860
you can work with that person, but you have to
803
00:50:07.900 --> 00:50:11.480
be an expert in working with those particular populations as well.
804
00:50:12.099 --> 00:50:13.920
But brain spotting can be used with them, not to
805
00:50:13.980 --> 00:50:16.400
cure it, but to help the person to heal in
806
00:50:16.420 --> 00:50:19.530
the context of what their potential healing is.
807
00:50:23.309 --> 00:50:24.809
I guess I'm just going to throw this out there.
808
00:50:24.829 --> 00:50:26.449
I haven't thought about it enough. Maybe I should have,
809
00:50:26.489 --> 00:50:31.269
but either way, anything with dementia, Parkinson's, anything there, it
810
00:50:31.289 --> 00:50:34.559
gets altered, interferes with that innate response again for gazing.
811
00:50:34.179 --> 00:50:39.090
Or Um, you know, as long as the nervous system
812
00:50:39.210 --> 00:50:43.670
is working enough, okay, you can work with a person
813
00:50:43.769 --> 00:50:48.429
and whatever happens happens, you know, um, can you work
814
00:50:48.469 --> 00:50:52.329
with someone who's, who's a, who's had a stroke to,
815
00:50:52.429 --> 00:50:56.639
to the, you know, to the degree that they can. And, uh, um,
816
00:50:57.199 --> 00:51:03.329
but again, uh, uh, we've seen a lot of surprising
817
00:51:03.389 --> 00:51:07.739
responses to brain spotting with different situations or conditions, but
818
00:51:07.780 --> 00:51:10.760
it's not predictive that you can do this with anybody
819
00:51:10.800 --> 00:51:13.659
who has that kind of condition. So, so we're very
820
00:51:13.760 --> 00:51:16.980
cautious about, you know, over claiming what we can do
821
00:51:17.019 --> 00:51:17.780
with brain spotting.
822
00:51:20.019 --> 00:51:22.820
I guess my last question, what's in the horizon for
823
00:51:22.860 --> 00:51:24.920
brain spotting? Is there anything that you see that you're
824
00:51:24.960 --> 00:51:27.139
excited about in the future of brain spotting?
825
00:51:28.079 --> 00:51:32.300
Well, I discovered brain spotting 20 years ago. We're in
826
00:51:32.380 --> 00:51:37.300
our 20th year anniversary. Every year since then, on my
827
00:51:37.420 --> 00:51:40.619
own and then with the other people who've become expert
828
00:51:40.659 --> 00:51:45.110
in brain spotting, brain spotting evolves and changes all the time.
829
00:51:47.110 --> 00:51:51.510
I introduced the neuroexperiential model of brain spotting two years ago,
830
00:51:51.530 --> 00:51:54.949
and it's changed brain spotting dramatically from what it was
831
00:51:55.010 --> 00:51:59.670
before that. brain spotting is going to continue to evolve.
832
00:52:00.409 --> 00:52:02.230
But I'll tell you something that you'll never hear from
833
00:52:02.250 --> 00:52:05.780
the head of any other modality. The ultimate goal of
834
00:52:05.820 --> 00:52:10.820
brain spotting is to usher in the next modalities that
835
00:52:10.860 --> 00:52:14.599
are more powerful than even brain spotting. It's to have
836
00:52:14.639 --> 00:52:16.880
there be a beginning, a middle, and an end to
837
00:52:16.920 --> 00:52:21.510
brain spotting because we will have served our purpose and
838
00:52:21.550 --> 00:52:25.210
followed our course and that other approaches that we don't
839
00:52:25.230 --> 00:52:29.349
have now will be able to do even better than
840
00:52:29.409 --> 00:52:32.159
what brain spotting is doing right now and into the future.
841
00:52:33.880 --> 00:52:37.119
I'm excited for that. Any final questions, folks, before we
842
00:52:37.139 --> 00:52:41.940
let Dr. Grand go here? Again, folks, Dr. Grand, you
843
00:52:41.960 --> 00:52:45.079
can find him at brainspotting.com. The books are called Brain Spotting,
844
00:52:45.099 --> 00:52:47.780
the Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change and
845
00:52:47.800 --> 00:52:53.329
Emotional Healing at Warp Speed. This is your brain on sports. Actually, Dr. Grand,
846
00:52:53.530 --> 00:52:55.869
you mentioned the book was about 10 years old. Would
847
00:52:55.889 --> 00:52:57.889
you refer them anywhere else aside to the book? I
848
00:52:57.909 --> 00:52:59.550
know it's going to get a history of it and everything,
849
00:52:59.570 --> 00:53:00.750
but anywhere else you wouldn't send them?
850
00:53:03.510 --> 00:53:07.090
The book is still comprehensive. It's not outdated per se,
851
00:53:07.199 --> 00:53:09.940
even though it can be updated and it will be updated.
852
00:53:11.320 --> 00:53:14.380
My website is a very good source of information, brainspotting.com.
853
00:53:16.090 --> 00:53:19.219
I also have a video that I did many years
854
00:53:19.280 --> 00:53:22.699
ago called What is Brain Spotting, a YouTube video. It's
855
00:53:22.760 --> 00:53:25.699
out there. There's other content like that. So there's a
856
00:53:25.739 --> 00:53:28.239
lot of material that's out there.
857
00:53:29.389 --> 00:53:32.190
Excellent. All right. Any other questions?
858
00:53:32.269 --> 00:53:32.449
No.
859
00:53:32.530 --> 00:53:34.829
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Grant. I really appreciate
860
00:53:34.849 --> 00:53:36.469
you taking the time. You're in the East Coast, aren't you?
861
00:53:37.389 --> 00:53:39.510
I'm in Long Island, New York. That's correct.
862
00:53:39.969 --> 00:53:42.760
Well, thank you very much for staying up. I appreciate
863
00:53:42.780 --> 00:53:43.300
it very much.
864
00:53:44.219 --> 00:53:46.739
Well, thank you so much, Carlos, for having me on this.
865
00:53:47.139 --> 00:53:50.159
And thank everybody who's been here with us together.
866
00:53:51.019 --> 00:53:53.409
Absolutely. I'll send you the link once it goes up,
867
00:53:53.530 --> 00:53:54.389
probably next week.
868
00:53:55.630 --> 00:53:56.480
I look forward to it.
869
00:53:57.289 --> 00:53:58.610
Have a great one, sir. Nice meeting you.
870
00:53:59.050 --> 00:54:00.639
Nice meeting you. Bye.
871
00:54:00.659 --> 00:54:01.739
Bye-bye now.