Trauma Learning Systems

This is part of my full-length conversation with Tony Fitzgerald, Innovation Scientist, on the new science of the brain as a predicting organ, which supports how and why my therapy and coaching methods work. Here we mainly discuss how to get the word out about this, and Tony’s “Trauma Zero” approach as the starting point for dissemination. Transcript below.

Lilian:

It's meant to be that we should learn from these things, and never go there again. If there was a lion in a cage and you went in there and nearly got eaten, you have learned never to go there. That's why it's installed in us. It's the fastest way to stay out of trouble because you build on top of old situations. So it comes with some knowledge, of what's going on here.

Tony:

Yeah, we need to learn. Yeah, there's an important learning system. When that learning system 20 years on is still trying to stop you getting abused or whatever else happened in your past, but that's less likely to happen now, then it's not effective. That's when it's trauma, right? If it stops you going into a lion's cage, it's not trauma, right?

When it's still happening 20 years on and affecting your life and affecting your mental health and affecting your bodily state and your health, your wellbeing, you know, your sleep and your nervous system regulation, when it's affecting those 20 years on, that's trauma, right?

We need to treat that now or when it happens. So that's why to me, it's so important. We share this science, right? Collectively. Because the more of us that are working in this way, like you, the more of us are doing that, the more trauma is going to be healed. And the more we move towards this trauma zero as a population, not just individuals, but populations.

So that's where I see the two parts, the science and the art. We bring those two together. Work together collectively. Now we can start to bring this to trauma. It's just increased and increased over generations. We can start to turn that back and bring that down. That's why we want to bring this out and share this.

It's the science of effective treatments.

Lilian:

If you talked about the fastest way to do it is to find some influencers that have a hook in a lot of people because scientists are not very good at sharing things and social media. So we need some influencers with thousands and thousands of followers to spread this knowledge. Science cannot, they are not good at that, so that's number one and when it's out it's to start to reformat the school system and have health, both mental and physical health, in the school. So every week children have two hours of health. So that's how to implement it the fastest. So they start to understand it in whatever fits the age group.

It is coming out. I see a lot of posts about that, but it's coming from... can you say the roots? But a huge part of the population, maybe 80% still have doctors and science as gods. So they won't trust anything before it comes from doctors. But there's a lot of things happening.

Tony:

That's one of the reasons why I'm actually really excited what's happening with people like Howard Schubiner, for example, and Mick Thackeray, who are transforming how we think about pain, and that's where the doctors will start to hear about this. They'll start to get a new picture and for us working with trauma zero, I've partnered with a psychologist Philip Low, and together we're doing this, and what we'd like to do is try this obviously for trauma workers mental health workers people working in trauma.

Primarily psychologists, right? Because people trust their psychologists. Psychologists are well-trained to use this type of approach, especially psychology working with trauma and psychology working with complex trauma/ This can make that difference to making sure that the interventions are more consistently effective, right?

So we see it as important to bring out to those doctors, to those psychologists, to those areas. So yeah, there's the grassroots, finding out about it and driving sort of a demand for it. But we also see taking it directly to those people, those authorities that can make the difference where this science actually supports them in their work, helps them to achieve the results they want to achieve and get the outcomes they want for their clients.

And that's where we're targeting this. We'll be looking at academic courses for psychologists. When they're coming through in the early stages, and for those who haven't, are already trained, providing training to them as well.

As well as providing, we want to put this science as an open source for people like yourself to share and for the concepts underlying this science, and why people get stuck in trauma and why people get stuck in these symptoms, provide that as open source so it's freely available and freely accessible to be shared.

That's the activities we want to do, to share with the world because I don't think we can wait five to 10 years, right, for this to become knowledge and used, in the world. Like when I read some of those trauma studies on people who've had that trauma for 20 years and at the end of the treatment still had the trauma. In a so-called successful treatment. They still were traumatized and depressed and still hospitalized with all sorts of conditions.

For us, it's critically important that we do this collectively and share this. That's why we want to open source the knowledge and the science, so that it can be shared and try and bring this fundamental foundational science, and the psychologists and those professionals and medics that need to know about and bring those together, those communities together.