Kristen

Welcome to the close the chapter podcast. I am Kristen Boice a licenced Marriage and Family Therapist with a private practice pathways to healing counselling. Through conversations, education, strategies and shared stories. We will be closing the chapter on all the thoughts, feelings, people and circumstances that don't serve you anymore. And open the door to possibilities and the real you. You won't want to miss an episode, so be sure to subscribe. Welcome to this week's close the chapter podcast I realise you have so many options with your time. And I am so grateful you're choosing to spend the next 40 minutes with us talking about trauma and how to move through it to get to the other side. And I'm very excited about my guest. She was just at a very important trauma conference. And we're talking about her book sales and I'm so excited to have her on the podcast and share more about her work that she's putting out in the world. So without further ado, let me introduce you to our guest. Dr. Christy Gibson is a family doctor and trauma therapist, tick tock trauma doc on the socials and the author of the new book, The modern trauma toolkit. Welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Gibson

Oh, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Kristen

I'm so glad you're here. So let's just dive in. Tell me about the new book you wrote the modern trauma toolkit. And what inspired you to write it in tell me how the journey has been for you,

Dr. Gibson

a whirlwind for sure. So I'm a family physician, I have been for over 20 years. And I've been really deeply interested in communities placed at risk. So equity deserving spaces, and I created our residency in health equity. So when I became a community based family doctor into my career, what I was recognising was that in these communities, which I now know had high ACE scores, or very high levels of adverse childhood experiences, or significant event trauma, because I also work with refugees, I just kept feeling like I was putting out the same fire over and over again. And it wasn't until I started doing a deep dive into trauma that I recognised. This was the underlying factor in most of the physical and mental ill health I was seeing. And as a family physician, I just didn't have the tools to do anything about it. And even though we have universal health care in Canada, that doesn't include mental health, and certainly even our mental health structures doesn't include trauma. So I decided that the best thing for me to do with somebody who's covered by our public system was to do it myself and I studied all the different trauma modalities, I a huge segment of the alphabet soup in what kinds of therapies are efficacious. And I became a trauma therapist. So for at least six years now, I've been doing primarily trauma therapy with a smattering of family medicine, in these kinds of communities. And the book came about because I just recognised that as a one physician, city in western Canada, I can only affect so much change. And I'm really interested in changing systems. And that happens through getting knowledge into people's hands and skills. So the reason I joined tick tock, and the book is just trying to get the information further and further out there. So I created a book that was very accessible to read, it's written at a grade eight level, there's not going to be any medical jargon that will trip people up in recognising what's happening in their own body related to toxic stress. And then I'm very solution focused is giving this valuable tools in their hands so that people can learn what works and doesn't work for their nervous systems and for their communities. So I'm very eager to get this information out there in a way that will benefit as many people as possible.

Kristen

I love this because a lot of physicians are not trained in trauma, as we know, they're just not there's a deficit there. And I find a lot of clients I work with have chronic pain. How do you help clients or patients with or just people in general with chronic pain? And how does it relate to modern trauma?

Dr. Gibson

It's really interesting, you asked that specific question because I'm about to propose my next two books to the publisher. And the second one is actually that intersection between chronic pain responses and the body signals and the traumatic reflexes that take place in the brain. So I'm trying to just put together my proposal on that. I have a number of thoughts related to pain. Certainly, folks who've had significant trauma or toxic stress and that can happen in our families and our work environment be carried over from painful past experiences that will amplify the pain signal. So the pain signal is a perception in the brain and it interprets the messages that are coming up from the body. And when we've been through trauma, anything that's dangerous or threatening our brains, our predisposition to pay more attention to it because it's waiting for threat. And so anything that seems painful or distressing will be amplified by the brain that's been through trauma. And that's not to say that the pain is in your head. But the pain that reaches your head has a louder signal. For the most part. I mean, some people dissociate from their body as part of the adaptation and they have almost no pain response. And that's a different phenomenon. But when we're talking about chronic pain, I'm in the school with John Sarno, Howard Chu Bunner, around this idea that a lot of times these signals get locked on, because our brain is trying to protect us from something threatening. And so it takes that message and keeps it firing and saying, Well, this is an area of the body, that's dangerous, you need to keep this in mind. And even though there is no ongoing stimulus coming from that area of the body, the brain locks the message in. And I think that that's actually a really hopeful way to think about chronic pain because it helps you understand that there's so many different ways that can be modulated

Kristen

people think like I've gone to my doctor, and they say there's nothing wrong, we've run all the tests, and they have a hard time understanding how trauma can be linked to the pain. And I do EMDR eye movement, desensitisation reprocessing and brain spotting. And it doesn't always work. And so I don't want to put a full bullet proof option out there. But when we work on processing what got frozen in time, because they didn't get the opportunity to process it. Literally, it's hard to explain what you see and what you witnessed that it doesn't always free up the body. But a lot of times it will slowly but surely the client will start feeling better. How do you explain that to somebody that trauma does really live in the body.

Dr. Gibson

And honestly, not just people, but physicians, nurses health care, like this is a paradigm shift that's absolutely needed. And I had a lot of unlearning to do before I could start this journey into this new paradigm myself. So yeah, brilliant question. I also am a brain spotter. And I do a modified version of EMDR called accelerated resolution therapy. And I also believe both of these are efficacious in chronic pain, other physical conditions where the brain is magnifying the amplitude of the signal. So things like migraine, IBS, there's all kinds of things that physicians call functional, it's all about your body signals. So that's what I'm really excited to write about next. So much of what the human body experiences is what the brain is perceiving. And those perceptions are really shifted by the things that we've gone through in our past, and the anticipations that we have about the future. And so when we have these signals coming up from the body, what we experience as a human is our perception of those signals. And a lot of times when we experience toxic stress or trauma, our nervous system responds in a way that continues to respond. So like our sympathetic nervous system, or that fight and flight system can get locked into responses where we're constantly holding tension in our shoulders, or neck or jaw, or our body always wants to run away. And we're just feeling restless and our legs jittery, and our toe is tapping, and our body is stuck in flight without the power to kind of do an act of completion. That's kind of the language of Peter Levine and Pat Ogden, which is do the thing your body wanted to do at the time of the trauma, which is fight the problem or run away from the problem. And that's why I called my book, The modern trauma toolkit is because we can't usually fight or run away from our problems in these times. And then these physiologic responses get stuck in the body. I'm also a proponent of polyvagal theory, which talks about a second freeze response, where we just shut down we're so overwhelmed. And the stress response of sympathetic has been acting for so long, that the body has no energy left and it shuts down. And I see a lot of that people who can't get out of bed people who can't get to work people who are putting a dent in their couch, and it creates a lot of unhealthy behaviours, which physicians will say, Oh, gosh, these patients are non compliant. And to me, I'm like, No, their stress response is locked in their body, and we need to help them get it out.

Kristen

It's so true. Somebody on the podcast a while ago say the word trauma is getting overused. How do you feel about that? What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Gibson

It's about downtime. I think we've under recognised how much trauma is playing a role in our day to day interactions in our workplace environment, in the way that we respond to each other. And even though there's misinformation I certainly see someone tick tock as well. As the brilliant mental health, there's some people who say, Oh, I had such a traumatic event happened today, and they'll talk about something, you know, kind of minor and that they don't have any stuck physiology on. So there is an overuse of it in that context. But in a caregiving mental health context, we haven't talked about it enough. I mean, PTSD was only recognised in the DSM, The Big Book of Psychiatry in the 1970s. And that definition hasn't changed a lot. There's been tweaks, but there's never been an introduction of complex trauma, which to me, is actually a better understanding of most things that we call personality disorders. It's also a great understanding of many folks who've been labelled with attention, depression, anxiety, if there's a significant history of complex trauma, in my view, now that I understand it better, it's a better explanation. And so our medical textbooks haven't evolved in terms of our understanding of how trauma affects the mind body system. It's another reason why I wrote the book is to get this information out to healthcare workers. And some of my early endorsers were prominent physicians. And I said, don't you think every physician and medical student needs to know this? And I got a resounding yes.

Kristen

For sure. I think it's important as we move through how trauma impacts the body to define from your perspective, what is trauma, and then versus what is complex trauma,

Dr. Gibson

we're still evolving those definitions. So I'm happy to share my understanding of it. But I'm sure there are at least some people with different ideas. So trauma to me, is not the event. It's what happens in your body related to that event. So it's something that's happening to you, because of the thing that's happened in your environment. And that can be either an external thing. So for example, I survived the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015. And that was a very significant traumatic event. And those of us that I know who survived have different levels of PTSD symptoms, which I'll describe next. But trauma can also be something that happens internally, it can be the way that you feel because you suffered neglect, and you never really felt loved and cared for and looked after as a child, or you have an adoption, like a pre verbal trauma, that you just can't verbalise it, but you just feel like people are gonna give up on you and nobody is really going to stick around. And that's not something you could put into words, but it's something that was laid down at a very foundational age. And I learned about adoption trauma significance on tick tock, I did not understand that as a physician. So trauma is what happens in your mind body system related to the things that are happening to you. And I think a lot of people think of as trauma as the event. But if you have different siblings who grew up in the same environment, or different people who survive a natural disaster, how their physiology responds to that will depend on their past painful experiences, their ongoing resiliency and support systems, their foundational beliefs about the world, and the meaning of that event. To them. There's so many different ways that will affect how trauma will show up in each individual body. And then the difference between trauma as we've historically talked about it in complex trauma, which is starting to gain a little bit more traction, initially, it was linked exactly to developmental trauma or things that happen during early childhood. But I think a broader definition that I think is easier to share is complex trauma is multiple different events over a prolonged period of time. So a person who suffered an abusive situation one time in their life compared to multiple times over the course of their childhood or life, that's going to land in very different ways in the mind body system.

Kristen

That's very helpful to explain, and you mentioned PTSD symptoms, what would you say are the most significant symptoms to pay attention to?

Dr. Gibson

Well, there's the classic DSM definition. So it talks about hyper vigilance. And that basically means that you're just waiting for the shoe to drop, you're always looking into your external environment, waiting for something bad to happen. So you're looking over your shoulder, you're jumpy if someone touches you, but also your internal environment. And as a physician, this is one I really pay attention to is because if somebody has the signal that most people would interpret as benign or normal, a person who has been through trauma is going to interpret that signal in a very different way. And we don't talk enough about those internal signals. So hyper vigilance is a key category in PTSD, intrusive symptoms would be another and that's often manifesting as flashbacks or nightmares and basically re experiencing something that was traumatic And as a medical doctor, one of the things I failed to recognise was people who'd experienced medical trauma, which is incredibly common, they would come in not trusting me having a kind of a chip on their shoulder attitude about being in interaction with the medical system. And before I studied this, I would think, well, gosh, like, what's wrong with this person, they're not interacting with me with respect, and they're not compliant or adherent to the treatment plan. And I failed to recognise how that medical trauma was showing up the instant they walked in the door. And that power privilege relationship was set up in a way that had harmed them in the past. So intrusive symptoms could be like you sit down in a chair, and you just get flashbacks of another time that something similar had happened. I see this a lot with my refugee population, they have very significant intrusive symptoms of the events that they survived, especially if it was related to close family members. These just replay like a movie in your head, which is why I love a lot of the techniques that I use to process them as you can change that movie negative feelings and beliefs. So negative feelings of low self worth low self esteem thinking, Well, I'm not good enough, because bad things happen to me. And I probably deserve it. Because one of my favourite developmental trauma modalities is something called the norm or the neuro affective relational model. And it speaks a lot about how we change the way that we believe about the way we belong and show up in the world based on the interactions that happen in our childhood. So we might feel that we're not good enough. Because if we start to believe that our parents weren't capable of giving us the care that we deserve, that's much scarier than believing that there's something wrong with us that we just didn't deserve it. So a child really struggles to think my parents can't look after me. And it's actually safer for them to believe I didn't deserve to be looked after. So changing those kinds of foundational beliefs can be really impactful. And then that desire for connection. And that fear of connection kind of shows up in these negative thought patterns. Well, good things don't happen to me. And then you kind of manifest ongoing, very significant losses, trying to subconsciously repair the process that had already happened. And then the last major category in the DSM is avoidance symptoms. And that's more obvious, you're just avoiding any situation that could recreate things that have been painful in the past. And it can get so significant that you can avoid just being out in public. And we're seeing a lot of that, after the pandemic that people who were I want to say after because it's ongoing, but I really balance it, because I'm trying to remain COVID cautious, but I don't want to be isolating anymore. So how do I balance my fear, which is a genuine fear of being out in public spaces, with the irrational fears that are in Me, because of what we've already been through collectively. So how do we balance those fears and try to recognise Well, what's real and what's just a locked in signal? So those would be the more classic PTSD symptoms, those categories.

Kristen

Here's one thing that we're missing. And I'm curious to get your thoughts because you're spot on with the next book, I think there's a huge population of people that have bodily sensations that connect to PTSD. What would you put in those categories of the bodily sensations? To your point, we have extremes of dissociation to the body. And then we have people like pain is taking over the body. So what would you put in that category?

Dr. Gibson

I feel like it differs for each person. There's also some cultural components to it, because I've always worked in very multi ethnic environments. And so one of the things I noticed in medicine, we call it somatization, where you would show up with a physical representation of a mental health illness. But I'm starting to recognise that that's a culturally appropriate way to express yourself for lots of different people. So I work in Nepal quite a lot. So folks who are South Asian, in my experience, they'll often show up with abdominal pain or abdominal symptoms. And when I really dive deep, it often relates to anxiety or sadness. And that's where it shows up panic disorder, and that certainly can be linked to trauma that can show up with a myriad of symptoms like shortness of breath, chest pain, nausea, there's all kinds of manifestation where severe anxiety can show up and I've had some patients who are always getting chest pain when they're feeling afraid. But the sad thing is, sometimes the somatic symptoms will lead to gaslighting, where you'll show up with chest pain, and the physicians will just be like, Oh, no, dear, you're just anxious and you've actually got an underlying medical condition. So I'm a little concerned to say like, this is the list of things that are off When somatically expressed because the flip side of it is when, especially women, we end up getting gaslit by the medical profession who just wants to say everything is Oh, it's just your anxiety. Sometimes it is. And that's really important. And sometimes it isn't distinct medical problem, I've had really good results working with folks with trauma, who have neurological pain. So neurological pain is kind of like pins and needles or my body feels like it's on fire, or something that is like a positive symptom. So rather than like your skin feels numb, your skin feels burning, your skin feels tingling, those kinds of things are often stuck manifestations of trauma. And it's just a signal pathway that's just been lit up, almost like electricity. And it creates this sense of like urgency, like, I want to crawl out of my skin. And you would imagine that metaphor makes a lot of sense when someone's been through trauma and their skin has gone through pain, many, many different manifestations of trauma as somatic responses. And I just want to relate that it goes in both directions, the medical system, also traumatises people by not paying attention to the signals that they're hearing. I appreciate you

Kristen

saying that distinction, because sometimes there is truly a medical issue going on underneath. And I think that very important point. That's not what we're saying, definitely look for the underlining symptoms that could be leading to something more severe. And it is important to talk about gaslighting in the medical community because I do think unintentionally or intentionally, sometimes there is gaslighting to move along there on certain time crunch to work with somebody,

Dr. Gibson

I feel like the intentionality is often our own trauma responses. So when we're physicians were told, we should be able to diagnose and manage most things. That's the message we get. There's a drug for everything. And there's really not. So when we have many medically unexplained symptoms, or when we have treatment resistant problems, it builds up our own internal shame. And then we projected onto other people. So when we're feeling like, well, what's wrong with me that I can't figure this out, there's something wrong with you that I can't figure this out, and it gets flipped. So I do believe that for most of us that go into medicine, we just want to help. And when we find that we can't help the guilt and the shame and the internal turmoil often expresses itself in very dangerous ways. And then that vicious cycle just gets more and more heightened. So I like to give everybody in that room the benefit of the doubt. And yeah, there's some jerks out there. But I really do think they're few and far between the same as any other person in the world, the better question than what's wrong with you is what happened to you what got you that way. And medical training itself is incredibly traumatic, we'll learn to ignore all of our body's signals, staying awake, 36 hours, there's so many things that we have done as a medical discipline to create traumatic responses in our practitioners. And that shows up in the therapeutic relationship. And it's really hard on both sides.

Kristen

That makes so much sense. And that's a good perspective to zoom the lens out. To look at it a deeper way. I want to circle back to the chronic pain piece. Because I do feel like it is a huge pain point. When you're in pain, life, everything is impacted by that everything is impacted. What are some of the things that you share on ways to work through it? Because people feel hopeless, despair, weary, exhausted, powerless? How do you help people begin to feel hopeful and work through it? Well, I

Dr. Gibson

would say an essential ingredient, and one that does show up in this first book is self compassion. So a lot of people feel like I should be able to do more can't show up for my kids or that working eight hours straight in this position is really hard. And I think self compassion is the first early ingredient to management. So I do a lot of work with focus on self compassion around not blaming anything or anyone and trying to just be where they're at. So one of the concepts I introduce in the book is The Spoon Theory. So that's Christina Miranda Reno, she was a lupus or is a Lupus patient who was trying to explain pacing. So it's kind of like how much energy is left in your battery. How much gas is left in your tank and spoon theory is that same thing, but it's specifically in the disability community. And I think pain is really helpful by understanding well, how many spoons do you have left? Like if it took two spoons for you to make breakfast and clean up? You might only have three spoons left for the day and you just have to pace yourself so a lot of physicians and physiotherapist will tell a person to push past their pain. And sometimes that helps but you also have to be self compassionate, recognising There's only so much that I can do safely. One of the most significant techniques in the Sarno method that I learned through Dr. Xu butter was recognising when your pain changes. So if you're a person whose pain changes based on the whether pain changes based on whether you're enjoying something you're doing, so if you're somebody who's in significant amounts of pain, unless you're outside, or unless you're dancing, or unless you're travelling, and you're not in your home situation, then that's a really clear indicator that your pain is based on perceptions. And those perceptions can be shifted by having stronger signals of joy and on beauty. And that means that there's a lot of other ways that you can change those pain pathways. And to me, the opposite of a traumatic response is mental flexibility. So trauma is when the brain is kind of locked into a specific pathway. And when it comes to pain, it's locked into that pain signal. My body feels pain in this location, and it feels like this. And that signal gets locked in. So creating other signals, and there's lots of different ways that we do that, but also creating mental flexibility. So that in the Sarno method, we'll talk about things like well, what if I do go for a walk tomorrow, and I feel great. And then you actually visualise what that would be like visualise the walk, visualise feeling good. And you created some mental flexibility around that anticipatory pain response. And the really cool thing about the human brain is, if you imagine something taking place versus actually doing the thing, it lights up the exact same signals in the brain. So when you're locked into that pain response, versus you're imagining something to be different, your brain will experience that difference. And then you'll give yourself more flexible pathways. So these are just a small handful of the tools that I recommend. And if I get that second book deal, I'll certainly get into it a lot more detail. But on tick tock, I talk about chronic pain as being something that is like a trauma response from a psychological perspective. But it's more connected to the body of the Mind Body syndrome. And there's just so many things that can be done that are outside of traditional medical practice.

Kristen

How much does childhood development because we kind of talked about developmental trauma, impact pain, would you say? So if you've had a traumatic event, let's say you had a parent die, you had a fire, you had a parent divorce something, you've had ongoing sexual abuse, whatever. How much does that developmental trauma impact pain as an adult,

Dr. Gibson

there has been research on this phenomenon and it is quite linked. So the most famous of the research was the ACES trial or ACEs study. So this was done through Kaiser Permanente, through their health centres in California, they enlisted more than 10,000 people. And what they looked at was 10 specific events that did or didn't happen in childhood, and how they were related to later adult health. And chronic pain was one of the many instances that was an exponential relationship. So for every event that you went through, from neglect to abuse to parent with mental illness, or parents who had suffered sexual abuse in particular was what they asked about. But I mean, we're talking about ancestral and generational trauma, and that really gets stuck in the body in a way that we can't verbalise because it didn't even happen to us. So all of those conditions add up synergistically. So it's kind of this exponential effect towards later ill health and chronic pain is certainly a strong linkage. I mean, I've obviously been a physician for over 20 years. And I've certainly seen that play out in my practice, when I've spoken to somebody about their past experiences when I'm seeing them for pain and related disorders. The people who experience significant pain often will have something in their background that makes the meaning of the pain different for them.

Kristen

Yes, I think that's something that talked about much the linkage between health and childhood developmental trauma, and how the research is so strong in that area.

Dr. Gibson

I remember reading about the ACEs study, years later, because it wasn't something that hit the medical community, and I mean, still has failed to penetrate as much as it should. And I just remember thinking because I have a master's in medical education, and I thought, this should change everything. It should change everything we teach in medical school, it should change the approach that we teach it. Every single specialist should be trained in this so that they can understand and we can build the resources and so much more of our dollars should be going into mental health and the treatment of developmental trauma.

Kristen

I agree and how I see it as a marriage and family therapist, because I love looking at systems and how they impact us individually. And then relationally, how does it show up? And in couples, we don't talk about childhood, a lot of people don't, that has that's in the past that's over. And I'm at, oh, that's one of the most essential components to understanding self and self awareness, and how that can transcend relationally. And I love this conversation, because spans so many facets of your life, what happened in your childhood, or didn't happen in your childhood, affects us people say, Well, I had a good childhood, my parents were working, and I didn't have a bad childhood. And so they kind of skip over. And I'm like, it's not bad or good. It's just an understanding of who you are, and deconstructing, who's the authentic self underneath all those layers of conditioned responses, culture messages, there's so much to look at, what are some of the key resources or tools? Because I love you have a toolkit in your book? I mean, that's the whole book. And I love how you're putting it in simple language, what are the most important tools that you would want a listener to know about to help them through adverse childhood experiences, trauma, chronic pain?

Dr. Gibson

Well, I think one that doesn't get enough attention. And we talked about it when you ask the body holding on to trauma, but I really think that for many people that doorway into management isn't the brain, it's the body. So we call this the difference between cognitive or top down therapies and somatic or bottom up therapies. And I introduced a lot of somatic therapy in my book, because I really think that for many people for whom it feels safe and reasonably accessible to them, the body is a very effective doorway into helping us understand our own nervous systems. Deb Dana calls it, befriending the nervous system, which I love, and then learning how to shift those responses on our own. So it gives us a feeling of agency when we have that self efficacy to create those changes. So I really think somatic practices that can be done on your own in the moment, when you're feeling anxious when you're feeling there's a situation that doesn't feel safe when you're experiencing an intrusive thought these kinds of practices can really change our physiology. So I've got three different chapters with three different somatic practices that people can learn. I love the havening techniques. So that's a way to decrease the gamma waves or the agitated brainwaves and increase your delta and theta waves or the calming brainwaves. So havening techniques is one of the simplest practices I've ever learned in something that the human body innately knows how to do. And I think we've just been socially conditioned to not do it as often as we might benefit from. So I was surprised at how simple this is and how effective it can be. For some people. It's basically just really, really gentle brushing, brushing or petting the way any mammal prefers. And it really calms the whole system down. So huge fan of havening have got a whole chapter and video in the book, tapping. It's basically self acupressure, also called EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques. And it doesn't mean we're free of emotion, but we're free of the distress associated with the emotion. So if we're feeling sad at a nine out of 10, using a few rounds of EFT can bring the volume dialled down to like a two or three where it feels manageable. And what I love about EFT is that intersecting idea that all emotions are felt by all humans, we're not alone in our suffering. And the reason why EFT and these related ideas. This came from traditional Chinese medicine from 10,000 years ago, and there's just this modern day adaptation of it. But humans have always had suffering humans have always had strong emotions. I mean, many of us lose our parent, many of us go through some kind of natural event one way or the other. And with the climate emergency looming, that will be all of us. So we've always needed tools to help our physiology regain some balance. And a lot of these tools can come from ancient practices, which I really love. So EFT is a specific sequence that helps lower the volume dial, some people use it to process trauma as well. There's different techniques that can work for that. It's amazing. And what I do with both havening and tapping is I'll demonstrate this to my patients and I'll say well, this is your skill. Now you use it any time you need to. Some of them will use it every day. Some of it will use it when they're stressed. Likewise with tremoring or TR e that's tension releasing exercises, it was developed by a social worker who was working in war torn areas. He recognised that when people had a tremor when their body was shaking viciously, during the trauma, they were less likely to lay down the PTSD responses. So he designed a pathway where you can actually release that trauma. So kind of like how a dog or a horse would shake their whole body, and then move on with their day, like nothing happened. Humans have that capacity, and we've been socially conditioned not to do it. So when I first saw people tremoring, because it's not something that you can create, you can't just move your body in a tremor, that tre response comes from your inside core muscles, your so as muscle, so you can allow it to emerge. And then it's actually not under your conscious control at all. Your body just starts tremoring when I first saw people doing it, I thought, There's no way my body does this. I've never done this. And then the first time that it happened naturally, I thought, oh, yeah, I did do this. I remember this happening after a car accident, my whole body just did this spontaneously, and released the sympathetic tone that made me want to run away from the car accident. So I love tremoring. Because it's a way that you can release the sympathetic tone that you build all day. And I often use it for insomnia, if I feel like I can't turn my brain off, or if my body's really tense, I'll just do trembling for 10 minutes and fall asleep like a baby. So I would rather prescribe these kinds of methodologies that humans have known about our body for centuries or millennia, then give someone a pill and say, hey, just put a bandaid on that thing. Well, yeah. So these are the kinds of techniques that I think can really benefit lots of folks. I mean, there's lots of different ways to do trauma processing. We've already talked about a lot of that. But there's three phases and trauma management. I'm sure you're familiar, but Judith Herman talks about establishing safety, which I call noticing, like noticing what your own physiology is doing. The second phase, she calls remembrance, and mourning, which is when we go through the processing and change the associations to those memories. I call that shifting. And so with something like havening, and tapping, you can actually practice shifting, so that when you're working on actually shifting the traumatic memory, your brains like, oh, yeah, I know how to do that. I know what neuroplasticity is, I can change, and it will rewire itself. So I use a lot of really small amounts of neural rewiring before we get to the bigger process work so that the body builds confidence that this is possible. And then the last stage is reconnecting and it's basically just Well, who am I without all of these reflexes showing up on a daily basis. And in the folks that I work with their identities are often really deeply tied to those foundational beliefs and the trauma responses. And it can take a long time to really figure out what brings me meaning, what's my purpose? How can I enjoy relationships in a way that feels safe for me now that I've shifted some of those foundational beliefs. So different tools work at different stages of the journey. And I think it's different for all people, but it's one of the reasons why I designed such a huge toolkit as a trauma therapist is that if something wasn't working for a person, I could try something different. Something like brain spotting, I honestly believe can work in all three phases. So there's different powerful therapies that are out there. And not all of them work for trauma. So I know, I was told that CBT works to process trauma. It was the treatment for PTSD. And I no longer believe that. And I know that there's all kinds of evidence out there. But if I talk to clinicians on the ground, the vast majority don't use CBT. So can it work for depression or anxiety? Yeah, doesn't work for trauma. I haven't seen that. Not in my clinical experience. So I also think things like prolonged exposure need to go out the back door because they can be effective, but they can also be very confronting and feel very dangerous in the moment, especially like anticipating getting exposed to something every session. I mean, they start to associate trauma with danger. They're sorry, therapy with danger. Why would we as therapists want to feel dangerous to people? So I like to do the kinds of therapies that people leave a session feeling giddy feeling connected to me feeling like something magical happened. And there's so many tools we can use out there, like the word magic with brain spotting, or Accelerated resolution therapy. I get that all the time. And then I feel really good in my physiology at the end of the day.

Kristen

These are so helpful. I am so grateful for you sharing them. One thing that I remember Peter Levine saying because he was I believe he had a story about him walking across the street, and he got hit by a car. And he was tremoring. He was trying to release all that was happening to trauma in his physiology in his body. And they were trying to medicate it to get it to stop. They were trying to give him an injection to make the tremoring stop. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I need to do this. Like he was self aware enough to know that no, don't give me the medication. This is my body's way of releasing it. And I thought I had Never thought about that before, how we're trying to get rid of the tremoring versus allow it because it can feel disorienting to people when it happens. It can feel scary sometimes. And if we know that that's the body's natural way to metabolise to release, it's less scary, we can go, Oh, okay. And so when I'm doing any kind of reprocessing, and they start having AB reactions, or tremoring, I'm like, it's just your body's way of releasing your safe to try to create that understanding. Because I didn't know that until I heard, Oh, that makes a lot of sense. We're taught to like, get rid of it, versus embrace it, and know that it's trying to help you.

Dr. Gibson

And it's funny, even like when I learned the term AB reaction when I was learning brainspotting, because I also remembered when I was learning, I just think of it as adaptive reactions, like our body knows what to do. And sometimes we just need these gentle nudges are these gentle reminders. And I'm not saying everybody can learn tapping havening tremoring, just by watching my video reading that chapter. Because some people might have very significant emotional flooding, and it would be really hard for them to be alone during that some people are going to need it to be guided. But the vast majority of humans are fully capable of these things and capable of learning these skills, because our body already knows what to do. We just have to recreate those patterns.

Kristen

Yes, that's so true. Oh, I loved our conversation. It's caused so fast. Where can people find you? If they want to buy the book? They want more information about how to work with you? Where can they find how to get in touch with you or find out the videos? I mean, you have so many resources.

Dr. Gibson

Well, most of them are tied to the book. So in the book, there's a special website that's going to be linked inside the book that goes to the videos, coloured illustrations, the audio practice is a book club guide. So lots of different tools, I just wanted the book to be very high value. Because I cannot work with people. I'm in the Canadian public system. So I work at the refugee clinic, I work in adult addictions. And I work with some of my old family practice patients. So I just work with a really small handful of people. And that's why I want my work to be more systems level. So I got on tick tock is tick tock trauma doc. And this book can be found through the webpage, modern trauma.com. It gives all the buying options for the US, Canada and the UK. I'm on my last leg of the book tour right now in the eastern states. But I'm happy to pop into somebody's book club and talk to them about what they're noticing. If they've got a reasonable sized group. I do lots of keynote speaking, I really want to affect change at a systems level, helping with health care workers be more trauma informed. So I even created a company called safer spaces, training programmes where we're launching HR platforms, we're creating onboarding for people to have trauma informed organisations to understand psychological first aid. How do you manage somebody in distress? How do we develop safer trauma informed communication strategies, I really want to do more systems level work, because when I work one on one with folks, it can be really powerful. But there's just such a handful of people I can work with. That's why I love folks are doing podcasting because you're affecting so many people by getting this information out there. And that's really my goal, too. I love

Kristen

that everybody needs to get the modern trauma toolkit. There's so many resources in it. And I think if we could get this into schools, too, I'm thinking all the systems need your work, to help equip people to understand what is trauma, how do we handle it and practical tools in your everyday life. So thank you so much, Dr. Christy Gibson for being here today. I'm grateful for you and what you're putting out in the world.

Dr. Gibson

Well, and thanks for your insightful questions. It was a really, yeah, it was a great conversation you asked really pointed specific questions. So it was excellent to talk to a fellow expert.

Kristen

Thank you so much, and I can't wait for book number two. Me too. Good luck with the rest of the tour. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you so much for listening to the close the chapter podcast. My hope is that you took home some actionable steps, along with motivation, inspiration and hope for making sustainable change in your life. If you enjoy this episode, click the subscribe button to be sure to get the updated episodes every week, and share with a friend or family member. For more information about how to get connected visit kristendboice.com Thanks and have a great day.

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