Transcript for this latest instalment of my long form conversation with Benny Ferguson, aka the Movement Monk.
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Transcript of the video
Benny: It's interesting, when you move into the world of where someone chooses to move on a path of personal growth, and they start to actually look at what has happened and trauma, they often can then try and really intellectualize all of these events that have happened. Then they can be still have self-protective mechanisms of these core experiences that are there. I suppose I'm interested in what you've noticed in your work…
I use this analogy of the body is like an onion and the mind is sort of the same in that regard - there's many layers to it. So let's say you're working with someone and they have a chronic condition, whether that be Parkinson's or the range of other conditions that you work with. How do you go about even starting to re-experience things, which can be very scary and bring up all of those self-protective mechanisms. I'm interested in where you might start in that situation.
Lilian: The interesting thing is everybody is different, even if you have got a group of people with Parkinson's, they are so different that when I meet them, I say, how can anyone put them in the same group? Because it's not all that has tremor. They have stiffness and a lot of other symptoms.
So I do it differently. First, I talk a lot, and mostly people who have onboarded this idea come to me. They already know that something is going on regarding stress, and that helps a lot. So it's different where I start. But that's one thing that's typical with people with chronic diseases, especially Parkinson's. It is that when they have symptoms, they are stuck in what we call fight, flight, and freeze.
So not only do I glue together mind and body, but I also connect us as mammals so that these instincts mean a lot more. They have so much bigger impact than we think. So we have all seen the animal videos with meerkats in the desert.
They tend to hundred times a day get alert and find out what's going on around here, and most of the time it is just OK, it was a false alarm. But sometimes there is an eagle, there's a fox and they run down to their caves. And we do the same, but we are not aware of it. So when we meet a stressor and now it can be a shadow or sound, but often it's a person, and this person might remind us about a bully we had in school. Same dark hair, the same look. We are triggered back into that memory, and this trauma, this body memory is making a replay.
So we act as if this person wants to do the same as happened to us 50 years ago. They probably don't, but our whole nervous system is thinking it. We are going into fight, flight, and freeze. Can we call it normal persons without a disease, they can go back again. But if you have a lot of these experiences, you stay up in this fight, flight and freeze for too long. So the biggest problem is that to help them, we need them out of this fight, fight, and freeze, and that's not easy because what happened, we call it down in your body. You are connecting with the body. In this body, there might be a lot of fear, blame, guilt, jealousy, and a bunch of feelings. That's the hard part. So people escape back into the freeze state often where they are numb and cannot feel anything.
It's one of the things to help them down. Tapping is very good to do that, but some people don't like it because you get access to everything that's going on in your body, and they flee back immediately. So it takes some repetitions to learn to trust the process that even if you feel this blame, it will never be as bad as 50 years ago when it was installed.
You can reduce that trauma, but it takes some time.
Benny: It's sort of a micro exposure to the things that are then being held and the progressively meeting that over time. So then it can be felt, experienced. Then it doesn't trigger that fight, flight, freeze.
Lilian: Some people have been in a terrible accident in a violent relationship or have had parents that have been not very nice to them.
Then it's an enormous trauma and you have to onboard it very slowly by maybe talking about it tapping on years of experience and calming it a little down. But most people with Parkinson's have a ton of smaller experiences. So it's OK to dig down into one. A soldier who come back with PTSD, have intense terror experience where they have seen death in the eyes for a few months.
Most people have not been in war, BUT have a whole long life with small things where it's often OK to dig into one situation, but I also have a woman who has been into the war in Guatemala and been shot. Then it's different tools because it's too much for the nervous system to dig into one situation there. Then you must do it very, very slowly.
Benny: I hear you.
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Overcoming Numbing Due to Fight, Flight, or Freeze as a Defence Against Feeling the Body in Therapy