Transcription
[Music] welcome back or if you're just joining us i do recommend going and watching the first videos i'll give you a little more context but let's go a little bit deeper in our understanding of how the amygdala impacts our day-to-day life our fierce warrior back here amy she is a powerhouse and you might have noticed from the video that i talked about how she remembers things in fact amy has little it's almost like she has her own little memory centers and those memories are the earliest encoded memories that we have she starts remembering things all the way back to when we're in the womb second third trimester even so wow she's fierce she wants to make sure that we survive at all costs so much so that she's percolating in the womb going i'm going to encode things and remember them now that might sound daunting especially if you know that your mother had a particularly difficult or complex pregnancy the good news is it's not anymore now we used to think the brain was concrete if we go all the way back to 1913 1915 1916 we did believe that the brain was a concrete non-changing thing and later as we started to advance through the 19 1900s we started to learn that wait a minute the brain is plastic but even as recently as the 80s and the 90s start people still believe that once you hit the age of 25 26 27 your brain was done well i can say for myself i mean i was widowed at 29 that was when my ptsd started to set in it was a very complex deeply painful experience and at 29 years old if my brain was concrete i wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today the way i am because my little amygdala would be going you don't get to talk about amy because really for her it's kind of like fight club we don't talk about survival when we're in survival but guess what i'm sitting here talking to you today because through the work with amazing practitioners and a lot of my own self-healing journey and resiliency work my brain has recovered and i'm a different person than i was even before 2009. so i'm a testimony to this work and so is my team and so are those that we serve it's the reason why we're so deeply passionate about all of this
take a look at what happens to the amygdala when she says i'm going to remember something see that little starburst that's representative of what's called an ampa receptor now you don't need to remember that but it's basically a little receptor on your lateral nucleus of your amygdala that is super glued onto your amygdala and until recently we didn't know how to unglue those little receptors we didn't know how to turn them off if you go all the way back to your high school bio courses you might remember the terms potentiate and de-potentiate potentiate means to turn on in our brain and when these little receptors are turned on on our amygdala she remembers them forever luckily two doctors back on the east coast in new york city did a deep dive many many years ago into what happens when our brain encodes traumatic experiences and literally it was just an investigation in curiosity they weren't planning on building what they ended up building and what they built for all of us has become an incredible gift to humanity what they came to over the course of their investigations was this recognition that these are anti-receptors that can be changed they're no longer super glued on they identify the glue be gone for these super glued receptors and that's called evening and so one of the core tenants in our group is to teach all of our patients how to have at minimum a self-having practice for resiliency and narrow plasticity now evening is a bolt-on technique that we utilize to enhance all of our traditional psychotherapy it is not a core practice unless somebody is reaching out to us because they have an acutely dramatically encoded event then we do lead with havening specifically we bring in brain spotting and emdr and other trauma reprocessing experiences as helpful but haven't just de-glues unglues glubigons these experiences and that's what happened to me with my trauma so when amy remembers something she goes oh i'm going to remember that forever she perks up and it's like super glue and how many traumatically encoded experiences we have are a good indication of how many of these little amphi receptors amy is holding on to because those are the experiences that when you reflect back across the course of your life your brain or your body goes ugh i wish that hadn't happened the fact that you're still holding on to those experiences is representative of the fact that either that was an encoding moment or a moment that reminded your amygdala of another stressfully or dramatically encoded moment and the more of those experiences we have across the course of our life the more opportunities amy has to start chiming in and defining what's happening here in the present moment
so in 2020 we may be casually walking along and the next thing you know something from one of our five senses gets activated and amy goes i perceive a threat what's so confusing and so important to know so it's no longer confusing is that she doesn't have a sense of time so she can perceive a threat that happened in this moment but it's a perceived threat that actually is being activated by an experience all the way back in your past 1986 1992 2004 and that feels like it's happening in real time right now you ever had that happen goodness knows i have it doesn't feel very good it can be really confusing to both me and to whoever i'm interacting with when i all of a sudden and for me it shows up as a crackling in my chest i start to go oof i'm really activated right now that's the amygdala that's amy saying hey kate pay attention to this and if we don't pay attention to it or if we're unable to soothe her in the moment because we don't have the tools then what will happen is you see this red cloud around the amygdala it'll expand and she'll start to generalize so if you've ever noticed a moment of reactivity where you've been been more reactive or more vulnerable or felt more raw across the course of your day it's because of this experience and in those moments we're technically outside of our resiliency zone and our amygdala is running the show and you know what happens when we're outside of a resiliency zone it's almost like a stress hangover it takes 8 12 up to 36 hours for us to rebalance and for our amygdala to calm down unless we take proactive steps to balance her but for some of us we're living in a state of fear glasses all the time and you know in 2020 there's a lot going on globally there's a lot of stress and a lot of distress and so it might feel like our world looks like this and that's because our amygdala is looking around going hey i'm scared and i want to make sure that we're ready to go i want to make sure that we know how to protect ourselves and we have the resources the thing about our amygdala is is like they said she's always keeping us safe and she loves us so much her only job is to keep us keep us safe but within that love sometimes the behaviors that manifest can feel really counter-intuitive she's spiraling out of control and cortisol and so i go you know what i'm just going to reach for that whiskey because i will feel better if i do that or the ice cream you know everybody's joking about the pandemic 15. well that to me is amy going i need to numb out or disconnect or have sugar which carbohydrates sugar all those things are drugs we live in they impact our system you know or she might be saying hey i'm just not going to get out of bed today it's scary out there but the bed i can hide in here or maybe she's causing you to have panic attacks or anxiety all those things are her way of saying hey i love you stay safe and she's sending up all sorts of warning signals that she doesn't know what to do and that's why i'm creating these videos so that we can start putting these healing tools in your hands right away often we're not taught how to heal ourselves or how to be in balance in our day-to-day lives and sometimes our childhoods are complicated sometimes a lot of the time and our system is just going to pick up whatever tools it can along the way and say maybe this will help me feel better the goal of our work here is to teach you how to find the things that really functionally help you feel better while intentionally actionably sustainably healing your brain so that your brain is operating in a sustainable resilient way in the next video we will dive a little bit more deeply into some steps you can start taking right now to help her feel better she loves you but she might be a little freaked out so let's give her some love back i'll see you soon