Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Underdog, to Unstoppable. I'm Nicole Anderson, and today we're proving that no matter the odds, resilience rewrites the story. You're watching now Media Television.
Welcome to Underdog to Unstoppable. I'm Nicole Anderson, and this show is for the fighters, the builders, and the people who had to become strong before they ever felt safe. Today, we're going deeper than motivation, because resilience isn't just mindset.
Sometimes it's survival wiring.
I'm joined by Ricky Greenwald, psy D Founder and executive director of the Trauma Institute and Child Trauma Institute. He's a fellow of the American Psychological Association, a longtime clinical psychologist and the developer of progressive counting, with work translated into over a dozen languages. Dr. Greenwald. Work. Welcome.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Before I get into tools and techniques, I want to ground this in your story and the why behind your work. Because people don't trust advice until they feel the person understands the cost.
So welcome. Dr. Greenwood. I'm so happy to have you here. I'm happy to have this convert to talk about trauma and the world that you've been building for the last 30 years or so.
So, first and foremost, tell us about yourself. Tell us about you and what you do.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Sure. Well, you probably figured out by now. I'm a psychologist and I live in western Massachusetts and I have. I'm married, I have children.
I. I founded and direct the Trauma Institute and Child Trauma Institute.
We started soon after 9, 11 as a training institute and at this point do a lot of training and also a lot of intensive trauma focused psychotherapy. We do research.
And in my spare time, which I don't have much of, I try to keep up with my kids. And I do some other things, too. I go contra dancing. I used to actually be a musician, but I still go dance and climb a mountain now and then.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: You climb mountains now and then. That's interesting.
So tell us what brought you into trauma?
What made you, when you were going through school and once you got out, decide trauma was where you wanted to be?
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Yeah, this. This starts early.
So my mother was a therapist, and as a teenager, I'd be like, reading her books. And she'd say, don't do that because you'll see yourself in every diagnosis. Which, of course I did, but I read them anyway.
And so I thought I.
I thought I wanted to, you know, into the mental health business. I wanted to be a therapist myself.
I also, from a very early age, wanted to be part of a movement.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Like the development of Psychoanalysis or the development of feminism or, you know, the, the big things that were happening. And I wanted to be part of that.
It's, it's interesting timing right now. We just learned that Cesar Chavez was not necessarily who we hoped he was. When I was 10, 11 years old, I was standing in front of the A and P every Saturday morning telling people not to go in because they were carrying non union grapes.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: So I, I always wanted to make the world a better place, be part of something.
And then I had a very sort of non traditional career trajectory.
My poor parents, they wanted me to go to college, but it didn't really happen that way. I was a cook, I was a musician, I worked on farms. I did all kinds of things.
I just did what I wanted to do. I didn't have any children, I didn't need much money for anything.
And I just did what was interesting to me.
And then finally, at some point, what was interesting to me is, all right, I'm ready to be a therapist now. So I applied to graduate school, but they wouldn't take me. Go figure. You had to graduate college first. So that's pretty wild. I, I did that. And so as I was finishing college and working different jobs with, I worked as a paraprofessional in an elementary school with emotionally disturbed children.
And college and into graduate school, I really started to develop an understanding of how, what hurt and healing is about.
And my initial understanding was unprocessed loss is where people get stuck.
And then I learned more about trauma. And it was the same idea, but sort of a bigger conceptualization that if something bad happens and you handle it in the ideal way, you take bites out of it, you chew it up, and little by little, you digest the bad thing. The part that hurts gets smaller and smaller.
And you know what happens with those bites? You chew them up, they don't all taste good. You chew them up, you digest them, they become part of your nutrition, something you grow from, right?
But what happens with trauma and loss if it's not processed that way? I mean, sometimes it's like, oh, wow, this is way too much. I don't even know where to start taking a bite. And anyway, I can't stand this. You know, I, I can't stand this. I got to get rid of it.
I'm going to push it out of the way. I'll put up a wall. It's there. I'm here now. I'm good now.
People do that because it works, right? People, My clients will tell me that it doesn't bother me. I keep it out of my mind. I try to forget about it, but it's not really gone. It's just out of your face, but it's not really gone. And that stuff behind the wall, it hurts.
It creates a sore spot. Even if you're not thinking about it from one minute to the next, it creates a sore spot. In any little thing that comes along, if it happens to hit that sore spot, it can feel like a big thing.
And so when you think about how people overreact, whether it's with anger or discouragement or shame or anything, that's one way of understanding it. Something hit the sore spot and it feels like this. And of course, that leads to a lot of symptoms. People giving up too quickly, people losing their temper, people getting desperate and, you know, so much pain and covering it with substances, all kinds of stuff.
And, you know, which is why they come to therapy, because it's not working for them in some way.
So I had really developed an understanding of, you know, in the field we call it psychopathology, but it's really how people get messed up. And it was really about unprocessed trauma or loss.
And then what do you do about that? You process it. You take the bites, you chew them up.
So early on, I was working with abused children, and I take them through this play therapy approach where they act out. They'd play out their trauma memories over and over, their abuse memories and five, 10, 15 sessions. And they got better. They did. I thought I was pretty good at it. And they did their work and they got better.
Right. And then.
All right, so I was in graduate school one day, and my neuropsych professor was just happened to be mentioning this weird new therapy he'd heard about from California called emdr.
That's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It's become pretty big. But this was in like 1991.
So I was one of the people that followed him after class to get a photocopy of the article. You're too young to know about photocopies, but people used to have things on pieces of paper.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: No, no, I promise. I know a lot about that. We used to do our hands. We used to put our hands on the copy machine, you know, make our handprints, our face prints, whatever. And they said, just don't open your eyes.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Okay?
So anyway, I was married at the time. I took this article home. I told my wife about it, and she said, oh, you should do me.
I said, I can't do you, my wife, you're not a client. She said, oh, yeah, but I'm afraid of doctors because when my first son was born, I was in this army hospital in Germany. I almost bled to death.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah. I said, yeah, but you know that. Anyway, couple weeks go by and something comes around. She actually needs to talk to a doctor. She needs to see a doctor. And she can't make the phone call. She just can't do it. So I said, all right, let's try this thing.
So we're there on the living room. She's bawling her eyes out. I'm reading step by step. Now. Take a deep breath. Now this, right?
An hour and 10 minutes later, she's good.
The memory doesn't bother her anymore. And the next morning, she just calls the doctor. It's no big deal, right?
So she's been carrying this. You know, her son by now is like 20. She's been carrying this around, afraid of doctors. Suddenly, we spend an hour on this EMDR thing, and she can do it.
Next day, I go to school in one of my classes. Somebody was supposed to do a presentation.
She was sick. She wasn't there. I said, I got a presentation.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: You're like, me, me, me, me, me, right?
[00:10:20] Speaker B: And I told everybody what happened in that session with my wife the night before.
So then when EMDR training came to Honolulu, that's where my school was. We all went.
All three of my. Three of my professors went. A couple of my colleagues went. We all went.
And.
And we loved it. EMDR was really good.
And we all did practice memories in the training and experienced. I mean, I'd already been doing trauma therapy. And what I realized is what I can do with a child, an abused child, in 10 or 15 play therapy sessions.
I can do in two or three EMDR sessions and get more done. It's going to be more thorough.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: This was a game changer. And it was. It's now. The thing is, my colleagues also had great experiences. My professors, that all had great experiences. And yet by a month later, I was the only one using emdr, because I was the only one that was already a trauma therapist, and nobody else knew where to fit it into their treatment.
And so as the years went by and I started providing supervision and consultation to other people, I realized people hadn't been trained as trauma therapists. And I kind of developed, not on purpose, but I really developed my own treatment model to teach people how to do it.
And so.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: I want to get into specifics in our next segment, especially about how trauma relates to relationships and how these things that you have helped people learn how to cope with. And for me, I am a recipient of emdr.
And so I have personal.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: You definitely know what it is.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Yes, I have personal attestation to the success of emdr.
And I want to talk to you about people preventing.
Right. Like they prevent themselves from going to therapy because of the stigma and what that can do. So in the next segment, we're going to discuss that and what helps and how it affects decision making because that does play into leadership and work history and entrepreneurship and stuff. Sure. So we'll be right back. So please don't leave. We have so much more for Dr. Greenwald.
This is Nicole Anderson, Underdog to Unstoppable. Stay tuned. We'll be right back with more unstoppable stories and strategies for turning obstacles into opportunities.
And we're back. I'm Nicole Anderson, and you're watching Underdog Twins Unstoppable on NOW Media Television. Let's keep pushing past limits together.
Welcome back to Underdog to unstoppable. Watch Now Media TV live or On Demand. Download the Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS. Prefer audio? Listen to the podcast anytime at NowMedia TV.
Welcome back. I'm here with Ricky Greenwald, Psy D.
Now I want to talk about the trauma, how trauma quietly hijacks successfully, especially for underdogs who have built their lives out working pain.
Trauma doesn't always look like breakdowns. Sometimes it looks like control, perfectionism, hyper independence and burnout dressed up as drive. Welcome back. Dr. Greenwald.
We were just talking in the previous section about how you chose trauma, how you chose how you got into the field that you're currently working in and the field that you have dynamically rose awareness, too.
So as we come into our our second session or our second segment, I want to talk about what you some of the things that you've seen in individuals that, you know, could possibly, that maybe identify like, hey, you need therapy, you need, you need, you need some help there, there's some triggers and things. So let's talk about, let's have a continuation of the conversation priority and talk about, you know, what brings people to come to you.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Sure. Well, I mean, most people want to be feeling better in some way, are doing better in some way.
And so when does that rise to the level of going to therapy?
I don't really know the answer, but it's sometimes it's very clear when it's really interfering with their ability to live the life the way they're trying to live it.
So, you know, if you're, if you're feeling like you're not doing as well at your job as you could be, that you're not achieving your potential, if you feel like you're not satisfied in your relationships because you're holding back or you're losing your temper or your, you know, whatever it is, or you're overly anxious and that sabotaging things, right? So it's really when people feel that they're getting in their own way somehow that they're holding themselves back and they've tried things and it's not happening. And so they come to a therapist and ideally, if the therapist is good and using good tools. We were mentioning EMDR before. That's not the only really good trauma healing method. There are several. It is the one with the most research support. But you know, in our shop we use progressive counting, we use the flash technique, other quick, well tolerated, thorough trauma healing methods.
And yeah, so if people feel like they're getting in their, in their own way somehow, when they can't overcome that, they, they might come for help. Another reason people come for help is if they're feeling bad, if they're worried all the time, if they're depressed, if they're anxious, if they're angry.
And yeah, you can gut it out and keep going. But why, why not just work out the problems and, and have a little more peace and a little more success with your life?
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Well, I can definitely talk to the whole, I'm going to be fine, I'm going to like, it's going to get better, everything's going to work itself out type of person. I don't need therapy.
A bad experience with it, with my, with family therapy as a teen. And I was just like, no way am I ever going to do therapy.
And then, you know, I had a close friend that said, nicole, I think you need help.
Like, you know, perfectionism, trying to control everything in my circle, you know, trying to make sure things are certain way.
And I remember like in my career I knew where I wanted to go, right? I wanted to be a, an entrepreneur. I wanted to be a leader. I wanted to, to work in the sexual exploitation and sex abuse as an advocate. Like I wanted to do so many of those things, but I noticed like patterns where I would set myself back, right? Like I would, and I would set myself back or I would. The negative thinking, the anxiety, you know, all the things that, that come with. I'm never going to be good enough to be able to be successful.
So I can really speak to being that person that has trauma, that went to therapy and therapy has been over the last 10 or 13 years, has been so successful for me. And I always ask any entrepreneur, I'm like, they, they tell me, oh, what would you. What, what would be your advice to me? And I'm like, you need a therapist is the first thing. Like, that's, that's number one for me. And then I'm like, you need an accountant and a legal person. Like, those are my. Those are my three things.
So what you've worked with children, teens, adults, and families.
What do most people misunderstand about trauma?
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Oh, they think it's not about them.
They think trauma is the war veteran, the rape victim.
And of course, many people are war veterans and rape victims, but many people aren't. And they think, oh, my stuff that doesn't count.
That's not as bad as real trauma.
And it counts if it's behind your wall, if it's making your sore spot, that counts. And even people that can identify trauma.
Well, what's going on? Well, maybe they had a learning disability as a child and had a lot of frustration experiences. Well, even a lot of little things that piles up and makes a sore spot too. Maybe they were bullied. Maybe they had a parent who was aggressive with them or dismissive with them.
Nothing headliney that you can say, oh, yeah, this is a trauma. But you know what? All those little things, they pile up, they make a sore spot reaction too.
And so I think the sort of error that many people make is saying, oh, that's not about me. And now this is a sort of a controversial, very broad definition of trauma. And I'm not going to argue it with other psychologists because there's different definitions for different reasons.
But in terms of, like, how do you know that you could benefit from therapy that focuses on trauma with methods like emdr, Everybody can. Because we all have stuff behind the wall. That's life. That's just life. Right. No matter how good our life is, even if we don't have any major stuff. And many people do have major stuff too. Right? Loss counts, too.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Yeah, grief. Grief is a huge.
Grief is a huge. And we.
I didn't realize how much it played into to life until my mom passed. And then when my mom passed, you know, I didn't, I didn't want to talk about it in therapy. I didn't want to go through it. And then eventually when I found my trauma therapist, I was like, no, we're dealing with this, like, you. You don't. You don't have a choice. Like, we've got to deal with it. And we found out that it was. It was the cause for a lot of other things that were happening.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: Right. And you know what happens with these experiences? We learn things about ourselves that really mess us up. Right? We learn, I'm helpless, I'm powerless. I'm not good enough.
I can't do it.
We learn from these experiences. When they're stuck behind the wall, we can't negotiate with them.
And so, you know, perfectionism, I'm not good enough, or I have to be in control or bad things happen. I'm not going to psychoanalyze you. But that's like classic perfectionism stuff, right?
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: So.
So what happens when we do the trauma work is we take that stuff out from behind the wall, just a bite at a time, not. Not too much at once, and kind of chew it up and.
And, you know, grow from it.
It's still the same life. We still have the same history. We can still say, yeah, that affected me, that meant something, but we don't have to be driven by it in the same way. And we can make more choices and it doesn't, like, without that sore spot reaction. When something's this challenging, it's like, okay, it's this challenging. I'm going to deal with it. And you do.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: Well, I think one of the things that I noticed.
Well, the biggest thing that I noticed during EMDR or after, when we were going through months of it, because there was just so much packed in, is that my mind got quiet.
Like, my mind kept getting quieter and quieter and quieter. And I didn't know that I was. Again, I was like, is there something wrong with me? And my therapist is like, no. Like, that's a normal brain.
Like a normal brain, you know, doesn't constantly, like, go a thousand miles an hour.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: You weren't hyper alert anymore the way you were before, Right.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: And I found that the core quietness was a great place to be in.
And that's what I tell a lot of people when I talk about emdr, is if you go through and you go through it properly, you know, all those voices you hear in your head, all those replaying of everything and analyzing and overthinking, it gets quieter, you get some peace, you can sleep at night.
And I think that that's before we shoot to the next segment.
What is one grounded, immediately usable practice you recommend when someone is spiraling before doing something big because of the unresolved Trauma.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: So you're looking for a self management strategy.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: Yeah, just one self management strategy.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: There's not just one, but. But what it comes down to is do something different.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: And people are going to have to find out what works for them. Is it playing some music?
Is it doing some deep breathing? Is it watching a mindless TikTok? Is it right? Do something different?
Is it patting your dog?
And people are going to have to experiment with things, what works for them to kind of take them out of the bad place and just to where they can calm down a little. Yeah.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: So if someone watching wants support or wants to learn more about your institute, what's the best step for them?
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Website ticti.org awesome.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: Please go, go read resources and reach out to the trauma institute.
Next, I want to get into methods. What makes your approach different and why?
What works for people who don't want to relive the worst moments of their lives?
[00:24:51] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: So stay tuned. We'll be right back with more unstoppable stories and strategies for turning obstacles into opportunities.
And we're back. I'm Nicole Anderson and you're watching Underdog to Unstoppable on NOW Media Television. Let's keep pushing past limits together.
Welcome back. Dr. Greenwald. Your name comes up a lot when clinicians and trauma survivors talk about approaches that are effective in tolerance.
You developed progressive counting and you were recognized for your work in emdr, flash and intensive trauma focused therapy. I want to translate that, what that means for our audience, especially people who say, I tried therapy and it was too much.
It's kind of when we were on commercial break and we were talking a little bit about I had a stigma towards therapy and, and that's most of society. Right. And it's also cultural. There's a lot of culture, cultures that just absolutely refuse therapy. Would you agree?
[00:25:55] Speaker B: Yeah, but you saying on air, hey, I did. It worked for me. You and Julia Roberts and Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga and a few more people. I can't break their confidentiality, but a lot of famous people are doing this. Yeah. And I think that's helping. Yeah, that's helping.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: And so, and we also talked a little bit about the reason why we had a stigma or like that I had a stigma and it was due to a bad therapy session as a teenager.
How, how can you help or give advice to somebody who's struggling with that right now to come to get over that and kind of move into something?
[00:26:32] Speaker B: Well, yeah, and you know, we've, we've had a lot of People who have. Who have said what you said, yeah, I tried this and it messed me up, or I tried this and it didn't do anything for me.
So if you think about going to a doctor, you're not going to go to a doctor just because they happen to have prescription privileges, right? You're going to go to a doctor that you think is any good.
Now, trauma therapy is the same thing.
And I kind of have a beef with a lot of trauma therapy because I.
We teach it our way and we think our way is really good. But I will say that the people that come to us, that failed somewhere else, literally almost always succeed with us.
And it could be because we have the best therapists in the world, but I don't really think so. I think we're just using a very good system. And I want to highlight a couple of things about it, because people should be looking for that in their own trauma therapy.
One is we use a personal trainer approach.
We don't ask people to go from £20 to £100. That's too risky. That's too much, too soon. You might get lucky, but you might get hurt, right?
And so we go a small step at a time.
So even when it's time to start treating trauma memories, we don't start with the biggest one in the pile. We start with a little practice run of, you know, getting cut off in traffic yesterday and. Or something like that, just for practice, see how it goes for you. If it doesn't work, we solve the problem on that before we get right and then we go.
We work through the memories in a certain order to give it the best chance of being successful.
We also use methods that people can handle.
One of the methods, the flash technique, it's newer, but it's already got a dozen studies supporting it, three of which my name's on.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: Congratulations.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: You don't even have to think about the memory. It's kind of weird and I'm not going to explain it too much now, but we have ways of helping you get through.
Even if it's hard, we have ways of helping you get through. And people can do it. Another thing that I've been kind of a leading innovator of is intensives, where instead of going hour per week for the rest of your life, you go to the therapist for a few days, maybe a week, work with that therapist all day, every day. It's like a little marathon and you get like a year's worth of work done in a few days.
And there's a few reasons for that one is if you're doing hour per week therapy, well, you do your check in. If there's a crisis of the week, you talk about it, right. And then you do whatever and then at the end you got to kind of get your client comfortable again so that they're not walking away all activated, Right?
[00:29:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: So a quarter to a third of every session is spent on hello and goodbye. And that's not wrong, you have to do it. But in an intensive you don't have to do all that, you don't have to chop it up, you just go through. It's like binge watching a season of a TV show. No recaps, no ads, just all progress.
So, um, and the other thing is even people who are working with therapists trained in methods like emdr, some of them say, yeah, we're just getting started and the session's over.
Right. With intensive you dig in and you go and you go and you go. And people are getting a lot done really quickly.
And this is, we got research on it, so do some other people too. We're not the only ones. It's become pretty big where we've got a couple of grant funded projects. People also come and unfortunately pay out of pocket. But we are working with a couple of projects that are going to be publicly funded.
One through county funds for court involved people and one through Medicaid.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: That's phenomenal.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: So it's becoming more closer to becoming a standard of care. It's not there yet, but it is. I mean, look, if you take your car to the shop and your mechanic says, hey, you're driving on bald tires, that's not good.
Tell you what, you come in once a month, every month, I'll change a tire in a few months. You'll be good. It's nuts, right?
So what do you want? You want them to change your tires so you can drive and you're safe. So that's why we do intensives. Right. If people have something worth going to therapy for, let's treat it and take care of it.
So my mission, well, more generically heal the world, but more specifically to develop and research and disseminate therapy that's as effective as possible, as efficient and quick as possible, and as well tolerated as possible and work towards. And obviously I'm not the only one. I'm part of a movement, right? What I always wanted to be. I'm part of a movement to get this to the world. And the quicker and the cheaper and the less difficult we can make it, the more People can get this. And so that's what we're about.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I think it's really dynamic to think about how hard it is for individuals to get mental health support.
Obviously, it's a lot easier than it used to be.
But, like, where I live in the state of Florida, a lot of the public centers are. They struggle, right? They struggle with.
They struggle with funding, they struggle with their, you know, therapists because they have so much to do. There's so many people. They're just completely underfunded.
And then private therapies, there are some insurances that just don't pay for certain parts of therapy.
And. And I think that as a movement and what you've done and trying to bring light to what we can do, because healed people help people. Right? Like. Like, that's.
Most people who walk around with trauma.
It's a difficult life. It's a. It's a struggle. It's.
You have. I remember them giving the statistics for me when I was 14, giving statistics of what my life was going to be like because I was a victim of survivor of abuse, and the statistics were not good. And I'm like, so why don't we change the statistics? Right?
And so that's what I've sought to do. Right. Is change those statistics, especially for women who have been underdogs and they want to do more stuff.
They want to do more, but they're stuck in this cycle of abuse, their trauma.
So for me to hear you come on here and talk about your movement and what you want to do to further get this education out to the masses can only make our world that much better. Right. There's no downside to healing people and healing them the right way.
What's. What's a.
What's a red flag? So if somebody from our. From our talk today decides that they want to jump into a therapy or trauma therapy and what is a red flag for them, that they're moving too fast, that maybe that isn't the right trauma therapist for them.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Wow.
I do want to say that the way I work is not the only good way to work.
And I know therapists that work differently than I do that still get good work done.
But what I would say is you want to feel that you're part of the conversation, that it's not being done to you, but it's being done with you, that the therapist is explaining things and that it makes sense to you what they're asking you to do.
Typically, I would say also that you don't feel that you're being pushed or coerced, that this is something you actually want to be doing. I mean, nobody wants to face their trauma memories. We want to leave them behind the wall right away.
So I'm not saying that it's going to make you happy, but that it should feel like your decision and not some, not something that somebody's pushing you into.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: And then, you know, again, this is how we do it. We start with a test run even. I mean, first of all, we want to make sure the client understands what's going on with them, that they have a goal they're working towards. Because if you don't have a goal, you're not going to do the work. You know, you talked about your goals and how you were sabotaging yourself. Right.
So that has to be part of the conversation is what do we plan for here? Because it's very important that therapy clients feel like they're working towards something they care about.
You want to have some self management skills, so if things do get dicey, you can kind of catch yourself and calm yourself down.
I would say those are some of the basics. You know, they're.
There's a book I need like one day to finish writing that lays it all out.
It's not ready yet.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Yeah, we're waiting. We're going to hold you to that. We're going to be waiting for your book because I for one, will definitely buy it.
In our final segment, I want the comeback blueprint. Right? What healing looks like in real life, how to pick the right support, and how underdogs stop repeating survival patterns.
So when we come back, we're going to dive more into this. And I have a very important question for you as we move into the next segment.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Okay,
[00:36:44] Speaker A: stay tuned. We'll be right back with more unstoppable stories and strategies for turning obstacles into opportunities.
And we're back. I'm Nicole Anderson and you're watching Underdog to Unstoppable on Now Me Media Television. Let's keep pushing past limits together.
Welcome back to Underdog to Unstoppable. Stream Now Media TV live or on demand with the free Roku or iOS app. And listen to the podcast anytime at NowMedia TV.
Welcome back to our final segment. Dr. Greenwald, I want to land this with clarity and power.
What do underdogs need to stop surviving and start living
[00:37:28] Speaker B: well?
A goal and a means.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: A goal and a means. Can you elaborate a little bit on those?
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Sure.
People often think about.
And this is, this is a. I tell regular people the same thing. I train therapists.
So you're getting the same thing that I do in the professional trainings that everybody knows that they want to be able to sleep through the night or they don't want to be so anxious. Right. Everybody wants to get rid of their symptom. Yes, that's good, but it's not enough.
It's really about what kind of life you want to be living, who you want to be, how you want your life to be.
For example, I, I talked with somebody the other day who's kind of in a dead end job and they were saying they think they want to go to college and that's fine, that's smart. Actually, you know, they want to.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Great goal.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Right? But, but that's, that's my point. Going to college is not a goal.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: It's a strategy.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: It's a ticket towards your actual goal. Right.
So, so I asked this person, why do you want to go to college? Well, because I'm sick of breaking my back and making low wages.
You know, if I go to college, I can, I can study something I'm really interested in and get a job at a higher level where I'm not breaking my back. And then I'll be able to live a more comfortable life, I'll be able to take care of my family better, et cetera.
So going to college is a step towards the goal. Just like getting rid of your symptom is a step towards the goal, the actual goal is the life you want to be living.
And when people can picture the life they want to be living, the importance of a goal is then you're willing to work towards it. Right. And so the idea of college, it's not as inspiring as having that good job and being able to take care of your family and really living the life you want to be living. Being able to sleep through the night. Yeah, what a relief.
[00:39:44] Speaker A: Big deal. Big deal.
[00:39:45] Speaker B: Yes, but that's not. But go farther, go farther to. Well, if you are sleeping through the night, how does that affect your life? Right? Let's talk about the life you want to be living. Right?
[00:39:55] Speaker A: You're not as moody the next day. You're not, you're not grumpy, you're not brain fog. Like there's a whole bunch of things.
[00:40:02] Speaker B: And if you have a lot of weeks and months and years like that, how good could you things get? How does that affect your work, your health, your relationships? Right. And so, so one thing I encourage people to do is to develop their goal beyond getting rid of the symptom beyond the next step strategy towards the life they want to be living. Because the more inspiring your goal is, the harder you're going to be willing to work.
So that's the goal and then the means. And there's a lot of practical things too.
But I'll tell you what we tell our therapy clients. There's three steps.
Avoid high risk situations.
For example, I worked with a woman who was trying to stop drinking before I got to say anything brilliant. She said I should probably quit my job at the bar, right?
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Well, yeah, yeah, most likely, yeah.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: If every time your brother calls, he goes off on you and you get dysregulated, don't answer that phone when it's him, Right. Avoid high risk situations because they destabilize you.
Right? Then the next step is build up your self management skills so that when you're in one of those situations you can't avoid, you get better at catching it and handling it the way you want to.
But that only goes so far.
As long as there's that sore spot stuff behind the wall. Because something hits the sore spot, the reaction can be so strong that the self control skills go out the window.
And so the third thing we talk about with our clients is digest those memories that are behind the wall. The sore spot gets smaller and then you have a much better ability to use your skills to go towards your goals.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I, so we noticed like in my family, we noticed that one of my nieces had, she was anxious, right? She was anxious about storms and things like that. And we noticed. And, and I was similar when I was younger. Like, like I was, I was really anxious as a child.
And one of the skills that was taught to me in early trauma therapy was tapping was when you're in those moments, tap and count, tap and count and stuff.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:42:23] Speaker A: And so we, we taught her that because it was easy. She's like 5 or 6, right? Like there's nothing. And so we taught her like when you feel that way, like do your, do your tapping, do, you know.
And so she started doing that and we noticed that when she would get in moments, you know, it's kind of her boundaries, right. It was her herself, what she could do in those moments and started fixing and managing the anxiety where it wasn't even a.
[00:42:54] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And it was just, it was self, those self regulation tools that they, they teach when you in this spot. Because there's sometimes, like you said, that you can't get out of the high risk situation. Like it kind of happens.
But what do you do during those moments?
[00:43:12] Speaker B: You do something different?
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:43:14] Speaker B: You use a skill and that's a great example of it.
[00:43:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
And nobody understands the tapping method until they use it and they're like, oh, wow, my focus went somewhere else and I was trying to count my fingers.
You immediately know how like that you can't count properly because you're trying so hard. It's kind of like the ABCs. Everybody when they're like, like doing the Alphabet, they have to sing the whole ABCs because just can't do it.
So when somebody is healing and somebody is going through and this is specific to you and your practice and someone is healing, what. And I know progress is different for everyone, but what would be progress for someone in your practice that you would say, okay, we have definitely hit the right, the right place.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: Like, how can you tell that somebody's making progress?
[00:44:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:10] Speaker B: All right. So first of all, it depends what phase of treatment we're in.
If we're. Because we want to get that goal, that's a step in treatment. We want to help the client understand how trauma has impacted them. That's a step in treatment.
You know, stabilization, avoiding the high risk, self management skills. So at every step the progress is related to that step. If you're able to do the counting thing with the finger tapping and catch yourself and bring your anxiety down, that's progress. When it comes time to treat the trauma memories, there's two ways we look for progress. One is that the memory you treated isn't as disturbing anymore.
Not only in the moment, but we follow up later on. How is it now? Right, because sometimes you thought you chewed up all the bites, but then you find out there's a little leftover. You got to go back and finish the job. That's fine.
The other thing is, look, if you got a pile of memories behind the wall and you treat one or two of them, you're not usually going to see life changes.
But when you start treating a substantial amount of those memories, things are going to be different if things are working.
So for example, I'll just give you reports I've had from clients a week or two or three after the intensive.
I used to be stressed out at work. It was like a constant 9 on the 0 to 10 tail.
0 to 10 scale.
Now it's like a 3. Super manageable. This is someone who didn't even finish the job. She just came for a couple days. She didn't have more time. I said, oh, that's great. Come back and finish the Job. She said, yeah, that was three years ago. Now that she's not on fire anymore, she's good, right?
She sends us people. But, you know, the stress, the anxiety went down.
Somebody else I'm thinking of, this is a teenager who was very angry and reactive. Every little thing. He just like turned it into World War Three.
And his mother's telling me, yeah, if we have a beef now, we'll talk about it and he'll calm right down. It doesn't explode like it used to.
He hasn't finished either. He's just got started.
But already you're seeing, basically you're seeing the sore spot reaction get smaller so that when the same old stressors come up, instead of being like this and the person going to their symptoms, they're more like this, and the person can cope with those.
So if you've just treated one or two trauma memories, usually the only progress you can see is how does it feel about that memory.
[00:46:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: But once you've treated a substantial number of memories, you're going to see changes in the symptoms. Now, there's one exception.
If there's a symptom that's tied to a particular memory, you'll often see the change right away. For example, I treated somebody on a car crash memory, and she told me the next day, oh, I'm not so nervous driving anymore.
Right?
[00:47:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that's.
[00:47:11] Speaker B: So when a symptom is tied just to one memory, you're often gonna see symptom change immediately after treating that memory.
[00:47:20] Speaker A: And I think that's important for our viewers, especially people who are coming from traumatic situations and are building, is that, you know, progress with some of these methods are immediate, but some of them do take time.
Talk therapy. I know to talk therapy takes a really long time. Like, there's, there's certain.
I think my first three years before I knew about emdr, I was doing just talk therapy. And, you know, we were making small progress, right? Like cognitive behavioral therapy and things like that and making notes about my symptoms and stuff. But like you said about the car crash victim, there were some things that we did emdr and immediately felt relief within the next day.
There are things that if the memory we were working on was gonna be a consistent memory for a while because it wasn't fully processed, then that progress took a little bit longer. But it was still something that was significant and something that I could really, like, communicate to my therapist. Like, oh, I see. Like when my brain stopped braining, and that's what I call it, when my brain went quiet And I could process things normally was probably the biggest progress that we made. That took a few months. We had to work through quite a. Quite a few different memories to get to that.
But like you said, similar.
I don't want to give too much of a specific, but similar to the car crash, there was a few memories that was like, okay, we processed the next day, it was fine. Never thought about it again.
It's just. It's phenomenal.
[00:49:15] Speaker B: Yeah, and we see that in the intensives, too. Like, we don't really expect to see anything until we talk to the client a week or two afterwards. But sometimes my client will come in and, you know, we just spent the whole day working on their mother stuff. Got through it and they'll come in the next day. Oh, yeah. I talked to my mother last night on the phone and for the first time since forever, I didn't have that really strong panic reaction.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: That's fantastic.
That is so great to hear.
So if someone wants to connect with you, we're going to share your public info. It's going to be on the screen.
What's the best way for them to reach you?
[00:49:51] Speaker B: Oh, just through our website.
[00:49:53] Speaker A: Okay. Can you tell them the website?
[00:49:56] Speaker B: Sure. Ticti.org, that's Trauma Institute and Child Trauma Institute. Ticti. Yeah.
[00:50:04] Speaker A: Dr. Greenwald, thank you.
What I'm taking from this is simple. Being unstoppable doesn't mean unbreakable. It means being supported, being resourced, and finally being free.
I'm Nicole Anderson, and this is underdog to unstoppable. And I'll see you next time.
