How to Navigate Mental Health and Childhood Trauma Recovery | with Dr. Roseann Capanna Hodge

Michael: Hey, what's up, Unbroken Nation? Thank you so much for joining me today, my friends. I'm here with Dr. Roseann Capanna Hodge. My friend, how are you today?

Dr. Roseann: I am awesome, as always.

Michael: Good. I love awesome and always questionable, but I'm going to believe you today.

Dr. Roseann: Typically, typically awesome.

Michael: Yeah, there you go.

Dr. Roseann: That's all your mindset.

Michael: That's correct. I agree with that a hundred percent. Listen to any episode that I talk about, I'm going to bury mindset in you until you can not get away from it. First I just want to say thank you so much. I'm super stoked to have you on the podcast and to. Sit and spend some time with me and my audience today, who I know are going to be enthralled and thrilled with you. I want to start something right off the bat. I heard you say something that I thought was excessively profound, and you said, I'm going to change the way we view and treat children's mental health, that to me, I was like, respect. Let's do it because that is baseline, that's the catalyst, that's where everything comes from. I am in this position where I'm like, how do I get myself out of my career? How do I make me obsolete? And that is how, and that is the first time I've ever heard anybody say that. And I just want you to, how do you even get to that place? What's your journey to that statement?

Dr. Roseann: Wow. Thank you for saying that's a profound statement because, it is things are bad for kids, things are bad for mental health, and our Children are canaries and they are helping us to see how difficult things are in the world of mental health, and it doesn't have to be, and so mental health issues amongst Children, are just so on the rise, and so I've been working with all ages, but really a very strong focus with integrative and pediatric mental health for over almost 30 years next year. And, I thought 20 years ago, things would be better, because I thought we would have innovations, we would be using evidence based treatments and instead we're gravitating towards things with little evidence behind them a lot of talk therapy, a lot of psychiatric medications and yet we are an all time high with stress, anxiety, depression, suicide rates have doubled amongst 10 to 24 year olds in the last decade. This is not, okay. And I really took it upon myself. I'm really well known regionally and people have always flew in for me, and I just said, I'm going outside my comfort zone and I'm going to push myself out on a national level. I've done a ton of media and my media has reached, I think we're at about a billion and a half people. Right now, and I want to send a message to parents that they can do things to reduce and reverse mental health symptoms and show them that there's a lot of evidence behind different types of psychotherapy, right? Including somatic experiencing, EFT tapping, EMDR. These are things that are very effective and specific to issues as well as nutrition neurofeedback, biofeedback, these are things parents just are not hearing about. They're only given typically one option, which is a psychiatric medication, which these things are often used off label. So my journey is to teach parents and empower them because they just don't know other ways, so that we can stop this mental health crisis.

Michael: You're speaking my language and I completely relate and understand all of that. I go back and I rewind 30 years ago, being a child and talk therapy, and then going through this journey of my own healing process and looking at everything from mindset to food, to action, to movement, to I did EMDR tapping, CBT, NLP, all the acronyms. Plus I was got, I was this close to doing electroshock therapy. I was like, there's gotta be a freaking breaking point in here where something about my life changes, but I want to reverse real fast because I think those are really important and special modalities and I have found so much from those so much from plant medicine so much from just the journey of stepping into the unknown. But you said something really important that I want to touch on you said 20 years ago you thought it'd be different. How did we get to this place where we're 20 years removed and it's the same damn game, right? Nothing has changed.

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, and I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist here, but let's be honest. There isn't a medical program that isn't at least funded in some way by pharma, so there's a real conflict of interest. And in the medical, in the mental health world, it's the psychiatrist medical first, then It trickles down. So that's one part of it, right? So we're, how things are structured, our diagnostic and statistical manual, our DSM, which is the bible of diagnosing people, is heavily influenced by pharma, right? That's one part of it. And the other part of this is, we're not getting the same kind of care 20, 30 years ago, even when somebody did meds, they were put in a hospital or given a much higher level of care until they're titrated, that's 1 part of it, but we also are believing that.

Everything is biochemical and we know that it's not trauma happens, stress activation happens, inflammation happens, infectious disease happens. These are way more likely causes of mental health problems and genetics don't define you, and people walk in and they think, oh, it's genetic. So that's part of it. The other part of it is we can't blame the system completely. The other part of this is that people don't want to be uncomfortable anymore, uncomfortableness is our body's alert system to let us know we need to take care of ourselves and instead people push it down.

Michael: They totally do, and I relate to that entirely. And I remember being young and making up my mind as a teenager, as I watched my mother, really battle bipolar and my grandmother and looking at it being hereditary. And maybe it's a gene thing, maybe it's not. I also look at, generational trauma and the impact of that going again and again. And so I'm biracial, both black and white, half Nigerian, half Irish, all of my background is trauma, all of it is slave trade. All of it is abuse, right? And you look at the impound impounding effect of that over years and years, and I have got to this place where, because even as a youth, my mindset was around, I can't let mental health impact my life because I recognize that if it does, IE my mother and grandmother, then I'm not going to go where I want. And so I made this idea that the nomenclature of mental health existed in that you made it up, it's bullshit, it's not real, fast forward 15 years, I'm having panic attacks five times a day, I'm completely overwhelmed, I can't think straight, I have anxiety, I have depression, I'm losing my mind, I had a suicide attempt. Everything that you can imagine is happening to me because I did not acknowledge the truth that. You can be impacted by mental health issues, whether or not you want to. And that comes from the societal standpoint where I grew up in the eighties and everyone always said it's in your fucking head.

Dr. Roseann: Oh, a hundred percent, and absolutely. At a cellular level, trauma lives there, they say that I believe it's every seven, 7 years, you go through a complete change of every cell in your body, but you don't lose your memory cells and trauma is really deeply housed, and you can pretend you can say, oh, that didn't affect me. I had a traumatic event a couple of years ago where it's a long story, but ultimately it was a betrayal, and somebody put me in physical harm, a woman who was very close to and two people in her family. And I was in physical jeopardy and, I was like, I'm Dr. Rowe and I handled it like a boss. I was like, basically almost like a hostage situation. I talked my way out of it and what happened, what already happened to me, Michael, I walked out of there and they screamed at me for 15 to 20 minutes, all kinds of crazy things and it got in me, right? And all of a sudden I was activating. So trauma is going to grab me, what does that mean, activating? Like I was startling, all of a sudden I started startling, people would raise their voice or come up on me quick, and I started activating, I knew enough and I went and did somatic experiencing because the EFT tapping wasn't doing it for me. But I knew enough to take stop and take care of myself because my body was giving me the signal, right? But even I was like, wow, I took care of myself right away, I went to the therapist, I did this, I did that, and it didn't matter. My body was like, you were traumatized. So what happens when you have people, like you said, you, your family survived famine slave trade and all of that. Now it's in there at a cellular level, but it doesn't mean it can't be addressed. And that's what you've learned, right? That a pill isn't going to fix that. You have to do that deeper work. And it's really possible to do that. And it is what it makes, which has been so fascinating to me, Michael, over all these years. My dad's a trauma survivor, multiple times. Why does 1 person become resilient? And another person not, and what happens because I know so many people that have suffered horrific trauma, including my dad beaten in his sleep by his mother survived World War 2 and the Germans throwing bombs and him having to run in the tunnels, and he's pretty resilient, darn guy. And he doesn't look at it is he's not. He lives a normal life. Like he's Oh, I glass half full, this is wonderful, lots of opportunities, it made me stronger, it's hard to say, but ultimately it's people that sometimes it's within you and you recognize it in your body. But even if you are activated, there's always a way to unwind that with you're willing to do the work.

Michael: And that's the scary part too, because I think about that and how long I took these ideas and notions of being impacted by it and just stuffing it down and saying this doesn't impact me ever literally refusing it. And of course, if you've read the body, keep the score, that it's going to come. Guess what, motherfucker, you're going to get it. It's going to show itself because it needs to escape, and what I came to recognize and like having these panic attacks and not being able to control it was that my body so desperately just needed to have a release of the pent up stress and cortisol that I'd been bathed in for the last 26 years of my life. And here's the thing that I have that happened for me though, that I think, think flip the switch, cause the question is where does resiliency come from? You can look at some resiliency studies and point to one or two people impacting your life, and I was able to go at all these really interesting turning points of my life. There was always some person, at least one who had my back in some capacity. The thing that was missing was my ability to accept that for myself and show up and take agency and have acknowledgement around the fact that I have this intrinsic power to be able to step into what's next, it wasn't until…

Dr. Roseann: do you think you were so activated that you couldn't accept the help?

Michael: A hundred percent like here, I'm going to share something really funny with you. So in my early twenties started going to therapy because I lived in a community where it was like, that's what you do, I escaped the hood. I'd gotten out of drugs and stealing cars and run with guns and shit. And I was like, okay, maybe I need to do something about how crazy I'm acting, just putting myself in dangerous scenarios, unprotected casual sex, like drugs, the whole nine, right? All of those normal standard symptoms, and I remember going and paying a therapist, 150, he was the best guy in the town, right? Number one, dude, and lying to him and telling him what I thought he wanted to hear, because in my mind I was like, okay, at least this satiates that thing where I'm trying, it wasn't, and I would love your opinion on this, but I have this. Strange feeling and belief, not only through my own experience, but understanding humanity and the human complex that we are, that until we reach rock bottom, we don't make change because there's something instinctual within us that just loves to suffer. And so I have been trying to get to this place where do you mitigate risk against this, to put yourself in a position where you can step into your healing journey, prior to that moment where you go, okay, I guess I'm going to die if I don't change.

Dr. Roseann: Oh, it's why I love working with kids. Kids are so open to change, right? Their life is used to change. The older you get, the more resistant you are, right? And it's because of habits, people 70 percent of all decisions are made out of fear to avoid something. So we don't like change, we recently we have a lot of exciting things going on here. And it's very interesting how things shake out, even with people that I love and care about work for me, where some people are like, this is the best thing other than Ever. And other people are like, wow, because fear doesn't have to just be associated with painful things, it could be really positive things and people make those decisions and avoidance on that. But you're right, we hunker down out of fear of change and people come here all the time, people fly into me and, and they say, I want this. I want this for my kid, I want this for myself, and sometimes when you put that mirror in front of them, they're afraid. They're afraid that once they make those changes, they can't just do what they did. They have to do something else, they have to be different, and there's a comfort level in dysfunction.

Michael: And I think there's a level to that also, which, and this was a recent realization that I had when working with one of my clients that sometimes like realistically. It is the fear of you might actually get that thing that you desire that keeps us from it. So sabotage, because I recognize so often that like you might put in the work and be right there at the finish line, and then you purposely go off the track because fuck, how scary is it to get to have that thing when you come from this place where your wants, needs, and interests aren't addressed and acknowledged.

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, absolutely. We're always like singing that Beastie Boys, sabotage song around here because, it's true. And, I love NLP and who is rougher on you than you, and so there's that conscious awareness where we're so rough on ourselves, but that subconscious part of us, which you can access, which is why I do all these therapies because your subconscious is running the show, but you have to be willing to say, okay, I'm going to take those steps. And I think that's the other part about change is like people look at everything like a mountain, right? And okay, it might be but it might be a hill and you have to do those little micro pieces and people are afraid to of the work that it takes to get in those little steps. They're not always celebrating those successes. They feel like a failure if it's not instant, right? Because we're part of this instant society of everyone thinks that medication is going to work really well. It's clearly not, as we've shifted towards medication only and mental health, but, you have to look at, okay, I got in the way of my own success. What could I do differently? And it's okay to have failures and that people don't want to have failures at all.

Michael: And you think, you speak about children and I think about the negative reinforcement of moving towards the things that you're interested in. When you follow your intuition as a child, because there's often, very often, especially when you come from a traumatic background, like as soon as you move into that thing that you want to discover, there's ramifications. How dare you be you? How dare you dress how you want? How dare you eat the thing that you want? There is punishment and torture and abuse and all of those things which lead down that path to as an adult. How do you step into your intuition when you're terrified of the potential result of the negative? It's not even necessary, here's what's so fascinating to me about this. It's a two way street, and I don't think one foot leads the other here. It's like a collision course where suddenly you recognize Oh, I don't listen to myself. Is it a, because I'm scared of what could happen or B as it, because I'm scared of what I could have. And that negative reinforcement is so powerful because and I would love to know your opinion on this, because I think about being a child. Every action that I had was informed by fear. I would put myself in this small minority of people where I don't have a pleasant childhood memory prior to five years old, right? There's always something behind it, and I'm also like burdened, but also blessed with this incredible memory where I actually remember pretty much everything at all times, which I also recognize as a sign that it's a trauma response because it is my brain's mechanism for survival. So why is it that as we progress into adulthood and as a child, like people who come from the same homes and backgrounds, they don't have the same traumatic experiences, right? Or results or as they head into adulthood, there are two different people, who grew up in the same house, same abuse, same thing. How is it that one copes one way and the other doesn't?

Dr. Roseann: And this is, I do a lot of resiliency work too. And I talk a lot about resiliency mindset and I talk about a resiliency mindset as being three parts, ok, so it's how you view it, how you manage, how you recover. And how are there's so many facets in this. But ultimately, if we can find a way to get our nervous system to regulate and not be in this hyperactive straight state, we have access to our frontal lobes and our cognitive thought. And so some people, for whatever reason, there's a temperament component in it, right? So just like you said, I have families that I did a lot of work at Sandy Hook, the Sandy Hook tragedy, my center is we had another office right near there and we were one of the providers for Sandy Hook, and you know what happened, right? So why did one kid do okay? And actually the kids really generally all did very well in the tragedy. It was the parents and what we knew about the parents is if they had a previous tragedy, if they had a previous mental health issue of any kind, they didn't recover as well. So what you bring to the table helps you recover. So that's one part of it, but when we talk about kids, what are their life experiences? So having worked for almost 30 years and, either with clients or even in my own personal life, I've had many friends and employees with trauma backgrounds, it tends to be that there was something that provided an anchor for a person that helps them to get through it, whether it was a grandparent or a teacher or being skilled in something. But then there's this group of people that, for whatever reason, have this internal Thing that changes the way they look at things so they don't they're they're in this they didn't have food, okay, so you've two kids without food and one child is grateful that when he did get it, and another is angry because he didn't get it the other time, and it really was how they viewed it. And that is something that is hard to understand why that actually happens. But we do know that if people can find ways to regulate their nervous systems, they can respond better to trauma. Lots of work, through, to the 9-11 tragedy, that's why Bessel wrote his book. By the way, I'm speaking with Bessel at a conference, Northeast Region Biofeedback Society Conference in January. If anybody's interested in neurofeedback, it's a nonprofit. And but, he went in working for pharma at 9-11 and did a survey, did research as to how people recovered and what were the top things. And lo and behold, farmer was like 27 on the list. It was acupuncture, I think was number one. He was like, what's this thing called somatic experiencing, and he opened his mind right to these other ways for people to recover. And, we know that those people did very well because they were given a lot of help. How you view things, how you manage it, and how you recover are all factors in how trauma affects you, and there's so many variables in that.

Michael: Yeah, there are, and it's incredible because I look at my own experience and like at these points of ebb and flow where my own brothers and sister would be on what I felt was such a better trajectory than me. And I would just be stuck, just in this loop and the loop. And as I've grown and as I've changed, it is those tools, that I have been able to leverage that have implemented the most long term effective benefits for me, and I think about, as we head further into the future, we are at this, and some people like hate the idea that we always have access to information, IE our phones. And to me, I always think this is incredible because today I have the opportunity to learn something different because when I actually started this journey and I got serious about it. About eight and a half, almost nine years ago at this point. It was, I was trying everything right from acupuncture to yoga, you name it, I tried it, the one thing I refused to try, however, was pharmaceuticals because I had looked at the way that they had negatively impact my community. Not only in my own home, but in my neighborhood, and to me, I have a really big issue with pharmaceuticals, not that they don't have a time and a place because they absolutely do. And I will never be a person to say that integration isn't necessary, but I think that we are such an overmedicated population, especially in this country, and how do you process toxic stress when you are constantly turned off?

Dr. Roseann: It's dumbing things down, but plus, we are now become a society where meds are the first thing, right? Why isn't therapy the first thing? So we're moving away from evidence based treatments. And there's a particularly for children, these pharma drugs, there's very little research to substantiate them, and a lot of the medications like Prozac and Zoloft, those studies that they're doing they bring in copywriters to come in and parts of the research, a lot of the prozac studies only showed the first 4 weeks when at 8 weeks, they showed a worsening of symptoms. And then we built a whole mental health system 20 years later on these. So medication is useful for certain conditions, very small percentage of conditions, and they're certainly overused and, we're talking about in my world, children and teens, we've developing brains. We shouldn't be throwing toxins in 1st when there's really nothing to substantiate it. When people come to me and say, oh, we're going to try medication, I'm like, did you ask your psychiatrist for the research to show that it was efficacious for this particular thing? And they're like, no, and I'm like, go back and ask them and then come back to me, there's a lot people just need to know there's another way and they also need to know that the meds even if they choose it is not an overnight thing and that's the other part of that driving that you know that they think they don't want to do the work. You got to do the work, the basis of my work is to calm the nervous system with neurofeedback, biofeedback, PMS, meditation, EFT, somatic, whatever works, right? There's lots of things like you tried a lot of things and I hope many of them move the dial because they all work.

Michael: Yeah. I agree. Let me ask you this question because I think it's really important. You've said a couple of times, you have to find a way to calm that nervous system. And in that process, where do you begin? Because most people, and this was my experience, I didn't realize that I was constantly being triggered. A word at one point I hated because I thought it was bullshit. I didn't know I was being triggered. I didn't recognize the symptoms of dissociation, which was so incredibly potent that literally my brain felt like it was a mile away from my body, and finally just the toxic stress, no sleep, ate like crap, couldn't take care of myself, what does that mean? What is this concept of slow down?

Dr. Roseann: Let's talk about activation and really what does it physically look like, right? So activation could be anything from being low on the energy, withdrawn behaviors, oversleeping, disassociating, focus problems. And then on lack of communication, then on the other end is those hyper behaviors, everything from hyperactive behaviors, mood dysregulation, anger, agitation, and those are the often behaviors that you see, I shared an example of me literally having a physical startle response, okay. But that's not always common. It can be anything else. There's so many ways that it shows, but there's often a physical component to you. And then there's a cognitive component, so that's a part of it. But what happens is once you're activated physiologically, there's only 3 possible responses, if you're in a super high activation, which our nervous system has a calm state, parasympathetic and then a relaxed state sympathetic dominant. Once you're in this over activated, jacked up state, I like to call it your frontal lobes go offline. You are not capable of rational thought. So people are walking into their jobs or relationships therapy sessions over activated, they're not thinking right. So this is where talk therapy doesn't have a place. Once you're regulated, talk therapy has a lot of value, but we can't start off with that because all we do is activate people and, therapists say, oh, yeah, I do trauma work, and I'm like, what do you do? And they're like, I do CBT. And I'm like, that's talk therapy, we got to regulate the nervous system. They get they, when you're a trailblazer, you have to get used to getting. People uncomfortable and angry with you, and that's okay because I'm designed for that, and the research, let's go to the research. And that's what I love about Bessel. He, besides him dropping the F bomb every 2 seconds, I adore him for that. He's really pushing the limits and saying, I was doing this and it didn't work, and now this is what really works. So fight flight or freeze are the 3 physiological responses that happen when you're hyper activated. Now, you can have a trauma background, you can have a high stress, you can have anxiety, you can have panic attacks. It doesn't always start with trauma, but we also need to broaden our definition of trauma, right? So we think of, physical abuse and sexual abuse, you can have medical trauma, you can have a mother who's depressed and not, engaging with you, and that could be trauma, there's just a lot now we can always recover from trauma. It's not an easy thing and it takes time, but you can always recover the body. What the work that I do with neurofeedback and biofeedback in particular. It gets worse at a subconscious level. The body, the brain is easy to train and get the nervous system to calm, the harder part is the pairing with new learning, and the new learning is therapy, right? You had to learn new ways, that were healthy Michael?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think you're spot on. And I take into consideration this process of that journey and recognizing a couple key elements that probably were the most beneficial and that was getting regulated, that was being able to control my parasympathetic response and understanding that like that was paramount because you don't, cause you don't know what you don't know, and it wasn't until I started to acknowledge, I have anger spurts and I have uncontrollable behaviors and there's no gray area. I used to say this all the time, they're all in or all off and I would just be in this constant flow of chaos, and I want to say something that's very pointed here, cause I think it's important, if you go and look at the ACE score, adverse childhood experience survey, I'm a 10, I am in the minority of minorities where that comes. And I always tell, if you're listening right now, please go research this and take this quiz, cause it's super important. It became profound in a way that it changed the way that I approached mental health. And in that, you said I was, your words just now, you said I was able to change, right? I want to be very clear about this because I agree with you and this pisses people off, but I don't care, I believe that everyone is capable of this, but it's going to take not only a shit load of time, but the same amount of effort, and this is theoretical and hypothetical at best, but I believe that it takes as long for you to get healthy as it does for the trauma to take over you. And I'm 10 years into this journey, I expect that I got another, at least 20 to five before I ever feel somewhat normal, right? That'd because I'm able to regulate, I'm able to tap into these systems, I'm able to have my routine and my boundaries and all of the things that are involved in this, I was able to implement change, I live by this very important principle, and I think that you'll understand this and that though trauma may be our foundation, it is not our future.

Dr. Roseann: 100 percent. And we have to stop telling people that they're going to be sick, that there's something wrong with that, and you, we all have horrible experiences, you have had horrible experience, it sucks. It should have never happened to you, but we have the power. I don't know how long people's healing trajectory is, and I think it's very unique, but what I can say is. That in 30 years, you know why I started using these treatments and I've always been holistic is that these treatments are so fast in regulating the nervous system so that activation and over activation can be easily mitigated. It really learning, that's hard, it's the behavioral change that's hard. That is different, and in fairness, when you're living with people that are traumatized around you and you're in a place where it's much harder to heal and your boundaries are harder for you, that's going to be a lot longer than if you're pulled into a, in a system where you're healthier people around you, because you're going to be supported and loved for change, and when you're with people who are traumatized, they don't want you to change, because they don't set the balance.

Michael: Yeah, a hundred percent. Don't interrupt the status quo, I literally just wrote a blog about that today. I want to pretend for a moment that I have no idea what we're talking about break down these modalities for me, I don't know what they are.

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, okay. So anytime somebody is in a distressed state, regardless of the source, okay. It can be even covid anxiety. I'm working with people who are experiencing stress, and feeling incredibly agitated often for the 1st time in their lives, just because of social isolation all the pressures that are going on in this world. It feels like a pressure cooker right now in the world of covid in 2020. So your nervous system as we experience stress, what happens is you cannot live in a high stress state, we are telling ourselves this is Americans and even in other countries to but we're living in this high street stress state and your nervous system gets activated. Once your nervous system is activated, you're not capable of rational thought, so when people go and they try to get help, it doesn't work, you could go to a great therapist. You could have an autoimmune disease and you're going to a great physician, but you're not healing. Because once you're activated, every resource, including your immune system, your hormone system goes to this unknown stressor and it's going to stay there until you regulate. So once and you can physically as a therapist, you can see when people are activated, you can see when they're processing information, you can look at their eyes when you're trained and you can see where they're pulling information from which side of the brain, after a while, you really can just see where people right are in front of you. Obviously I'm using tools called particular called the QEG brain map, and I can, see where people's brains are working healthily and not healthily. You can see the rhythm of a brain by a technology where you put a brain cap on and you measure brain waves and you can see what's happening over instruction structure and how a brain, is talking to itself. So these tools are diagnostic like a QEG, but then there are treatment tools, so biofeedback neurofeedback PMF. Let's talk about these because these are tools that people may or may not be familiar with, they have a lot of evidence around them, particularly biofeedback and neurofeedback. Tens of thousands of research studies and over 3000 peer reviewed studies, just for neurofeedback. So biofeedback is learning to conscientiously regulate your nervous system, really simple breath work, you can control your body temperature, your skin conductance, your heart rate, your muscle tension, and why would you do that? When we focus on these what are called autonomic functions, it brings our stress levels down. It gets our nervous system to go into this nice Chilled out parasympathetic state, and the more we do it, the more our muscle builds essentially, and instead of being agitated, you're building this calm muscle so that you're really not just managing stress, you're stress inoculating, you're learning to get yourself regulated, you're giving yourself space for everyday stressors when your nervous system goes activates. Now, neurofeedback is different, it's subconscious, I'm training the subconscious to actually change brain waves in very specific areas of the brain, there's different kinds of neurofeedback. I do different kinds, but EEG is the most common, nothing comes through the wire. It's based on operant conditioning, and you're basically telling the brain. Hey, great job, keep pushing down this unhealthy brain wave, push up this brain wave and the brain so desperately wants this reinforcement, which is typically a computer, that a movie won't play, you won't get dinging, there's points, there's all these things in 2 to 3 seconds from the 1st time somebody gets hooked up. If you're looking at the screen, your brain is literally going to produce the right combination of brainwaves, and then it takes time. Most people are doing 20 or more sessions, and it's used from everything from trauma to ADHD. To autism, I do a lot of head injury, I do a lot of Lyme disease and pants and pandas. And these tools again, are designed to not just regulate the nervous system, but keep them regulated, and they then become that base where you then add in the therapy, which I call learning, and you learn to make new behavioral changes in a safe space with the person who's trained to help you, and the great news is there's therapists all over the world who are phenomenal.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And those modalities are so important and so powerful. I think one of the things that's really hard is that unfortunately we do live in America and that means that we, many of us don't have healthcare to take care of this, like when I go and I look at this journey for me, like it took everything I own, right? Every single penny, a lifetime of work, and I look at that and I go, okay, is that a good thing or a bad thing on the plus side is I'm in this place where, wow, I've had this transformation, to go from complete poverty, to be able to afford that, to like having a life that I love. And I'm proud of that was a lot of effort and energy. But there were so many moments where. I was like, shit, all right. I guess I'm putting acupuncture on my credit card. I guess my therapy is going on my credit card. I guess this thing that I'm going to try is going on my credit card and ultimately found myself well beyond five figures in debt, but it was like, what do I do? It's hill or die, and I faced this thing where I made the choice that no matter what it took, I was going to do whatever it, did take to have the life that I wanted to have, if you're in this position, which I know there are people who are listening right now, who are, how do you, like, where do you start? If it's finances and medical care, that's going to be in your way.

Dr. Roseann: Yeah. So that's part of my mission too. So let's talk about where to start, because a lot of these things can be done on your own. The deeper work with a therapist is going to be need to be done with a clinical therapist, but you can get there and there's lots of things that you can do.

So number one, the foundation, I always talk about the eight pillars in mental health and there's the number one piece is nutrition. So what you put in your mouth affects your brain and your nervous system. And people don't want to hear that, so if you're eating junk, your brain and your body is going to work like crap.

Michael: But it's affordable.

Dr. Roseann: It's affordable, it's affordable. So what does that mean? So the number one best diet for mental health is an anti-inflammatory diet, you can Google that and you can figure that out, but it is no or reduced gluten, dairy, and sugar. Okay, so start pushing those down sugar has no nutrients. And what we want to do is we want to put nutrient dense food in our mouth. Why? Because our nervous system is so activated, it's burning through so many nutrients, it's not going to be able to keep up. And I think the to most critical things, besides putting in a lot of vegetables in particular, if you can is healthy fats and consistent protein. In mental health, we know that low blood sugars are very much tied to mood dysregulation and the activation of the nervous system, consistent proteins with some nice fat in there, avocados and almonds and things like that, this is what you can do, you can choose to get lucky charms or you can get some sweet potatoes with apples, that's what I had for breakfast this morning. So they're going to be very similar price point. So try to add in as much as you can for yourself and you're going to give your body those nutrients so that it can work. In such a stress state, then what can you do that's cost effective to regulate your nervous system? These are easy tools meditation. So we know through research that after 40 days of 10, excuse me, 10 or more minutes of meditation, your brain is changed. So people think I can't meditate. Here's what I want to break a common misconception of meditation that you have to be quiet. The thoughts don't have can't, can't come into your system in your brain. No, you have to practice at it, right? Monks say they work their whole lives to be great at meditation. And so you, it's going to be harder for you with a trauma back background or any activation to quiet your brain, but there's guided meditations, those are free, they're on YouTube. You can get, insight timer is a free app, there's lots and lots of things. You can look up on YouTube EFT tapping. You can do EFT tapping yourself. You can look up somatic experiencing and try to get into your body because 1 of the biggest problems with anybody who stress activated, regardless of the source, and you already touched upon it is you have you want to disconnect from your body and so until you get into your body, okay. You're not going to be able to heal you, you're going to keep moving away and disassociate, and you're not going to be able to do the thinking work. If you're not into your body, you have to recognize those sensations because your sensations are red flags to take care of yourself.

Michael: Yeah. And also, I think with that too, is when those sensations arise that you want to put yourself in this position of continuing negative behavior, you have to pause and go. What is it really that I need right now? Because I found this when I was 150 pounds overweight, chain smoking two packs a day, drinking from sunup till sundown and living this really intensive life, I only continued to fuel that fire. I never asked myself the question of what is it that I really want to do? What is it that I want to be? How do I want to show up for myself? And so much of my change came, and I guess, it's funny because the universe is always going to give you what you want, and I recall this moment where I was standing in front of the mirror, I'm 360 pounds wearing a size four XL shirt, size 47 pants, like jaundice, yellow, gross, 27 years old, and just feeling disgusting and being like. I need to change and then getting sick and my body going, yeah, you do, we're going to help you with that, and then putting me in this position where I was faced with not only getting SIBO, but eventually getting C diff and really putting myself in, it was rough. I even had an FMT because ultimately that's what saved my life, but it was. In that, in which I had to adopt and adapt a healthful lifestyle because every bite of food that I put in my mouth mattered, right? And now it's a little bit better, I've done so much in healing my gut and leaky gut and getting rid of SIBO and getting rid of C diff. But now, there's still some times I want to have a slice of pizza. Man, I got to pay the piper the next day, you know what I mean? And so I think about the impact that food has in your daily life and how important that is, but nutrition is such it is the number one thing when it comes to regulation, but it's so difficult because what tastes better than feeling good, fucking chocolate cake.

Dr. Roseann: I know it's true, and then it's a behavioral break, right? And you now know this, once you change your diet, your taste buds actually totally change, and it's just become so much easier to eat healthy, but it's harder to change your diet than your religion. They say, but it isn't easy in terms of the nervous system and what the body reacts to. It's easy to help heal the body when you change, your food, changing your food and the behaviors around your food or another story. But even if you start small, just start small, add a smoothie to your breakfast or somewhere in your day, throw in spinach or kale and, put almond milk or coconut milk, get some fat in there, maybe even throw an avocado and start noticing the change and then how do I feel? How does my body feel? Do I notice I'm more regulated afterwards? You have to drop into your body, and that healthy food makes you feel more connected. In a good, safe way.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely, and from all of us, I think yes food's the easy one. Meditation's the easy one, YouTubing is the easy one, if you were to leave someone who's listening right now with the one absolute thing that they must do. No questions asked, if they want to start healing and go down this process, what would it be?

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, obviously, if we had a magic wand and there was no expense and they could afford anything, I'm going to tell you that neurofeedback is a very highly effective tool for anybody with trauma and mental health issues, because it works at a subconscious level. So even if you don't like it or believe in it, it's going to start regulating your nervous system and quickly and way quicker than a medication will, because medications is like Russian roulette, they don't really use any science to pick it. They just go, Hey, it looks like you have this and you may not have this. You have that, right? How many people with trauma are diagnosed with, I just got a call today for a four year old diagnosed with disruptive mood disorder. I'm like, he's four years old. Let's really take a look at this, right? How likely is that? Not very, let's find out what else is going on, I know nothing about him, I would say neurofeedback. Now, if you could add something and you cost was a factor, then I would go to biofeedback and you could use something called heart math, which is an inexpensive, relatively inexpensive device, it's 159. It will go on sale on black Friday. You'll get it for 25 percent off, you can get it for they'll have, they'll have one for 100 on Black Friday, and that's going to get you to sink your breath and your heart rate. The reason why that's my second choice, even though I love biofeedback, and I think it's amazing, and I do it pretty much almost every day, is that it's conscious control, and it's much harder when you're activated to get in that conscious awareness state and practice it. But it is so effective that research around this sucker is unbelievable and it's easy. You can do it on the way, to work on the train, you can do it at night. There's, it's a tiny little device to help hooks to an Android or an iPhone or an iPad, it's very easy to use. But these are tools that have the evidence to support the reduction of the activation of the nervous system. And this is a leading problem with healing from trauma and physical problems. Like this, these are, people get stuck all the time, right? I have a program called the get unstuck program. It's because people are stuck, and so we have to help them get unstuck and it's reducing the activation and the nervous system is absolutely the key, it's the key.

Michael: I think that's brilliant. And I resonate with that in a really intense way because I recognize these moments in which I really felt like I had turned these corners in this journey. And it was always when I felt the most at peace and in touch with who I was and that journey for me, so much of that was yoga, right? Yoga is free, Yoga is on YouTube, Yoga is there for you. It's and I realize it's very like this new agey thing still, people still have not quite gotten into it. But there is, and I think, I remember being the only guy in a yoga studio in Indiana over a decade ago and being like, all right, I gotta try this thing. For, I think about that as well, because what is that doing? We're regulating, that's all this is.

Dr. Roseann: Regulating and getting into our body. And if we're doing, I do yoga morning and night, we can also support our thyroid, which gets so taxed out from stress, there's so many things we can do in yoga, but it does teach you to get comfortable in your body, which, again, anybody with trauma is going to have a disassociative quality to them, they may not realize it. So you talked about remembering everything in trauma. It's actually more common for people to not remember things, they want to cut off their memories. And, but I love yoga and I think it's amazing, we have multiple people on staff that are yoga certified, instructors and incorporate in the work too. And we spend so much time teaching kids to try to get back in their body because, anxiety and stress is the greatest thing that I have seen increase in these 30 years. If I thought I'd be dealing with stressed out 3 year olds I didn't think that was possible in a non trauma environment. They're just activated just because everybody else is activated around them and the world is so intense.

Michael: Talk about that real quick because I distinctly have these moments of memories as a child of feeling stress, like walking in and you could just cut it with a knife and the impact of that and the way that carries over, and then as an adult, you accept that as norm, right?

Dr. Roseann: In your case, Michael, I'm guessing you were walking on eggshells, right? Were horrible to you, and so you had to be hypervigilant and think, Oh my God, if I don't do this, then I'm going to get my ass kicked or whatever it is. That's just unacceptable that occurred to you. And I always say to every, I'm sorry that. That occurred to you because that's not right. Every child deserves like the best environment in the most love possible. They just do. And unfortunately, that is the, not the case for everybody. But I deal with kids of all walks of life who are living in loving homes and being well cared for and are activated because, the world is so stressed. So our body knows no difference between good and bad stress. It's the intensity that is bringing a lot of the stress. So now, in these 30 years, kids are expected to now write. In kindergarten, a paragraph in 1st grade 10 years ago was 3rd grade. So we're now pushing these kids to do these things that don't have any evidence and showing their long term success in life. We're, we look at the happiest countries in the world, they all start school really academic school 787 and up. They're not pushing academics are pushing play. So we're reducing free play. We're pushing way more academics, we're reducing physical activity and boys are held to pay and these kids are very stressed because there's no chance to be anything but fit in and be on this hamster wheel to the intensity of, you must go to college, you must do this, you must do that. And even well meaning parents fall into that, and even when they don't, everyone else around them does, and your kid gets challenged and pushed because the other kids, they're lacking skills, kids are mean to each other, kids have always been mean to each other, but it's different now, there's we know more, but they accept less.

Michael: I heard you say that children's schools are developmentally inappropriate and I thought to myself, holy shit, that is so true because I grew up at the beginning of no child left behind like when that started getting into high school. And I remember sitting, taking these standardized tests being like. Why am I taking this test? Because I'm pretty sure I'm going to go home and not have any food tonight, and yet here I am doing this thing. What, like, where do you go from there?

Dr. Roseann: First of all, I always feel like the world of education is a bunch of shit. So we know like early intervention is so important and all this other stuff, but they deny kids services, like what are we doing early intervention? Why is like what, we know kids are traumatized, we know kids. What can we do more? So we need to give kids these resilience tools that no matter what they face in life, some challenges are real, some are perceived, but kids are challenged regardless of what the source is. So we need to do more for that. But we are all on this ride that academics are king, and I'm not saying that we know college education brings you more income. We know all that. But when I grew up, you didn't have to be a straight A student, and Dr. Rowe was not a straight A student when she went to college.

Michael: Neither was this guy.

Dr. Roseann: I remember like the, I went to college and I was like, I'm a genius, like I love school college. I hated school and never went more than four days a week to high school, I planned every day off. My parents let me have days off and I got my stuff done, I was probably C student or whatever. And then I went to college and I did amazing, but that's not the point. You're not even allowed to have any individuality, you must achieve. And kids are taking on it's just a lot of pressure and not everybody should go to college. Some people should learn an awesome trade, there's nothing wrong with trades, they're always employed. And, can bring some beautiful things to their world if they're doing their more hands on learners. But, our education system, yeah, no child left behind. Now we have common core, which was thrown in there with little evidence behind it. It's all about learning a process instead of actual learning content. All my smarty pants who don't want to talk about the process, they just want to talk about content, they're struggling. Things are right now, the world of education is the, it's like the wild west because of COVID and they're just doing the best they can, so no challenge in that. And I'm really hoping. That we're going to have a silver lining and that people are recalibrating what they decide is important in their family life, and I'm hoping that educationally, they're, these kids are struggling emotionally socially. Focus wise, we're really starting to see people buckle and I'm hoping that we're going to really say this is the time. This is a time to do better and do more, and I think we need to think about not to sound hokey and corny, but we need to think about the whole child and all the pieces I know schools are charged with a lot, but education isn't just academics, and we really need to work on the mental health of our kids and providing a more well rounded, person because stress levels are unprecedented.

Michael: I agree with that. I had so much stress in the school that now I reflect on it and I think to myself. Man, if I would have had meditation at one of the worst public schools in America, I might not have done so many drugs at 12 years old. That is very much a possibility, and I think about the impact that has, as I head into my adult years and I could talk to you forever about this. It's so fascinating to me, but Dr. Roseann, as we start to wrap up, and I have one more question for you, but first, where can everybody find you?

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, I just wrote a book for therapists called teletherapy toolkit. You can find me at teletherapytoolkit.com and if you allow me to talk about my bonus, I have this amazing bonus of coping statements and it's for therapists, it's for parents, it's for individuals and it's teletherapytoolkitbonus.com, you download it, it's these. Coping statements I've been collecting for a dozen years, and there's over 100 of them, and there's things that we can say to ourselves and there's things that we can say to our children, because it's so important to give them positive reinforcement so that they can learn how to cope and you can always find me on drroseann.com too, but that's my giveaway is coping because we all need to learn how to cope.

Michael: Yeah, that's beautiful, I love it. I have what I call power statements in my life and my motto and the way that I show up for myself every day. And there's not been a day in probably 8 years that I haven't had to use it at least once, that's powerful, those are good tools. My last question for you is... What does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Dr. Roseann: To be unbroken means that you are somebody who has built in this inner strength and a core and you have a resiliency that you have a level of teflon in you, and you've developed to the point where you, I don't want to say you don't give a shit, but you learn to care about and love yourself because until you find that within yourself, you will never, ever find Happiness and love, and so it's really finding that. So you have that strength to be resilient to whatever comes through or has happened to you. It's healing the past and also being ready for what is ahead.

Michael: It's beautiful, I love it, could not agree more. Everyone, thank you so much, Dr. Rosann, thank you so much. This was enthralling as I knew it would be.

Dr. Roseann: Thank you, this is a great conversation. I could talk to you all day. So thank you, you should be proud of yourself.

Michael: I am, every single day, I wake up always. Thank you all for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, like follow rate.

And Until Next Time,

My Friends, Be Unbroken.

I'll See Ya.