45: An American Academy of Pediatrics Trainer Talks About Her Passion and General Underpinnings of Every Successful Strategy with Addiction in the Family
“But I would say a lot of intuitive knowing; a lot of deep knowing has sort of been lost. And so it’s helpful to remember and to plug back into how we came into being and what is really embedded in our sequence. Because from there are the tools for healing.”
Karen Strange is a Certified Professional Midwife and an instructor at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Basically, her job is to educate midwifes about the latest techniques in birthing children. She also founded a workshop on neonatal resuscitation. But, why would there be an instructor for neonatal resuscitation in a podcast for families with addiction? Well, let our guest tell you the secret around your birth.
To know how to proceed, one must know where he came from. Karen’s words above give a glimpse of why this topic is essential. An individual’s personality is shaped as soon as we breathe life. Learn how one’s conception and birth has a bearing on one’s predisposition to addiction. And even if many unplanned events happened around this time where we didn’t have control, find out how ‘repair’ can still be done in order to attain this elusive healing. Today’s episode will bring you back to your memory that only your infant self can remember.
Highlights:
04:59 An instructor for Neonatal Resuscitation in a Family with Addiction Podcast
10:53 How the Mother’s Emotional World Shapes Personality
17:33 Two Layers of Support- Essential for Healthy Neonatal Development
22:59 Our Implicit Memory
27:30 Repair of the Unplannned
30:33 The Birth Sequence
37:29 The Pacing Where Healing Occurs
46:20 Aware of How We Are In the Inside
Get ready for a real different conversation in today’s episode with @TFRSolution and ! Let’s go back to infancy and root out what shaped who we are. #motherandchild #repair #pacing #sequence #healing Share on X
Connect With Karen
Website: https://karenstrange.com/
Email: karen@karenstrange.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NeonatalResuscitation/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4EDUUPFvE2MStt-FMaalKg
Instagram: http://instagram.com/neonatalresuscitation
Quotes:
“The baby is the mother’s body; there’s no separation. Whatever the mother feels, the baby feels and not only feels, but is building a body to support that environment once the baby comes out.” –Karen Strange
“Birth is one of those environments where you need extra support and the support… It’s feeling held and whole and many of us did not get to feel held, and safe and whole when we were babies.” –Karen Strange
“As we’re under more and more stress, that aspect of the human being becomes more and more expressing from that place, or are more important or something.” –Jeff Jones
“But I would say a lot of intuitive knowing; a lot of deep knowing has sort of been lost. And so it’s helpful to remember and to plug back into how we came into being and what is really embedded in our sequence. Because from there, are the tools for healing.” –Karen Strange
“The point I’m trying to make is that you need to have activation and settling and to become aware of it. And then most importantly, you need to have a practice that allows you to become aware.” –Karen Strange
“It is seems so in some ways, so basic, ultra basic, but so basic that it is easily missed. And especially as our culture gets faster and faster, it’s easily missed.” –Jeff Jones
“I’s not like you have to know much. It’s simple, simple little things that that can really create healing.” –Karen Strange
Got ideas? Perhaps a future podcast? Schedule time with Jeff here: https://meetme.so/jeffjones
Transcriptions
This episode of Families Navigating Addiction and Recovery is sponsored by The Family Recovery Solution where we recognize that families are the biggest stakeholder in this addiction crisis. And we see that families can be a stronger part of the solution in their own family, in their communities, and in our world. We know that addiction in the family is not the fault of the family. We know that family engagement increases the potential of change happening sooner and positive outcomes lasting longer, as well as navigating healing connections in the family now and well into the future. So we’ve created an online platform for families to safely navigate this journey at their pace. Check out www.thefamilyrecoverysolution.com
JEFF: Well hi everyone, this is Jeff Jones and I am really excited for this episode today, this conversation. This is going to be probably a real different conversation today. So I am speaking with Karen Strange. And Karen Strange is, she teaches neonatal resuscitation. She’s for a part of, and she’ll correct me but the American Academy of Pediatrics, she was my neighbor in 2006 and she initially educated me in a lot of the things that we’re going to be talking about today. And so you may wonder like why am I having, you know, someone who travels around the world teaching midwives neonatal resuscitation on a podcast for families who are, you know, in some stage of addiction or recovery with their loved one. And so, there is a significant connection here and, you know, part of the connection is how I approach working with families with an addictive loved one.
And actually just this morning a course came out that I attend video course came out on my website called First Step Skill Building for Success and in some of those videos are actually descriptions and points that I’m going to be asking Karen about to explore more. So I am really excited to have Karen here because she is an expert with teaching midwives about the latest techniques for birthing children and why that is important for people with addiction and their family members who are under a great deal of stress is because like when we’re born, we can either, the birth that we have, the upbringing we have, can build resources and strengths internally within us, through all kinds of different things that Karen will be talking about.
Or if we don’t have those experiences in our birth or as a child, then we will be more challenged to regulate our own nervous system to navigate stressors in our life. So that’s the connection. So Karen, thank you very much for agreeing to have this conversation with me. I really appreciate it. And welcome Karen.
KAREN: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
JEFF: Yeah. And so if we could just start with you, kind of you introducing yourself a little bit. I did kind of an overview from my perspective of being your neighbor for many years and having many of these kinds of conversations. But please give me your intro.
KAREN: Right. So, yeah, just as you’re introducing, I was thinking probably the best way would just to just give you guys all a little history on myself. I became a midwife in 1988. A midwife that worked at a very high volume birth center on the border. I became an instructor for neonatal, the American Academy of Pediatrics, neonatal resuscitation. Let me see, in 1991, and I began teaching neonatal resuscitation, which is, I’ll just state now, a pretty stimulating topic for most people, including birth professionals. And then sort of what happened is my own personal journey began as I began to see how much fear there was talking about resuscitation and what’s started coming up. And also the place that I trained, I trained in a place where I got to see a lot of complications at birth. It was right on the border, probably more than your average low risk birth population.
And so what eventually happened is I began to notice that I had some fear in my body and I began to try to figure out how to heal that and how to resolve that. And so began my journey in learning a little bit more about the nervous system and a little bit more about what they actually embedded in birth besides just giving birth. I guess the, before I go and talk about my journey, I guess I’d like to just say that I’ve now had an opportunity to have taught 9,500 people. I’ve traveled all over the United States, six different countries. And I feel like I have a pretty good sense of understanding, pretty good sense of what people, midwives, birth professionals, health professionals, really understand about the body and the nervous system.
So what happened is I heard a Webinar, it was a show called New Dimensions, this is many years ago. And they were talking about the effects of maternal stress on the developing fetus. And it was [inaudible] who used to be president of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Bruce Lipton, who’s a cellular biologist. And if your audience has never heard of Bruce Lipton, I highly recommend you check them out because he’s so much fun to listen to. He’s so dynamic and engaging and he really talks about how the cell lives in a community and is impacted by its environment.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: That was sort of the foundation of this lecture. And they were just talking about the effects of maternal stuff on the developing fetus. And they were saying how the time in utero is building the baby’s brain nervous system and temperament. And they called Doctor Thom Verny, who I’m sure most of your audience have not heard of, but he wrote the cutting edge book called The Secret Life of the Unborn Child.
JEFF: Yes.
KAREN: And in that book he talked about how our personalities are actually formed more in utero than at any other time in our life.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: And as a midwife, I was kind of shocked to hear this. I mean, it was more than, well, our bodies are being formed, you know, we’re baking the bread, but the brain doesn’t really come online until after birth, until later. And this was incredibly eye opening and i
JEFF: Yeah – yeah.
KAREN: – impactful. Just in how I saw birth as a midwife. Somebody that was intimately familiar and connected to prenatal and birth.
JEFF: Right. So Karen, let me interrupt you for a minute. And so there were a number of points. There’s a number of points there that I wanted to interrupt and didn’t, but one was you have taught 9,500 people about this and so you have a good sense of what health professionals, midwives, but doctors as well and therapists what they understand and what they don’t understand. That’s one of the things that I’m hearing. And one of the reasons why I was so excited to have you on this podcast is I think there’s a lot of doctors and there’s a lot of therapists in the addiction world that don’t really have an understanding of what you’re talking about and how the dots are connected here. And how like our, not only our childhood but our birth and our relationship with our mother and the holding environment that our mother creates. How important that is to later on in life being able to calm ourselves. Self-soothe is the word or to regulate our nervous system or like once we get scared or activated, how we can calm ourselves because when we calm ourself, we have the most blood flow to our cortex, we can make the best decisions and we’re not as like emotionally reactive. All of this stuff happens in families with addictions, so I’m going to keep trying to kind of like connect the dots here.
KAREN: Jeff, I guess what I’d like to say is, as somebody that new birth well and work with pregnant clients, this was like, as I said, eye opening. I really did not think much mattered prenatally in terms of our emotions, our feelings, what we were going through that really were – we were making up a loaf of bread and that we just had to eat the right nutrients and everything would fall into place. And so that began to change my understanding of what was happening.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: And in hearing them discuss this and talk about how the mother’s emotional world was building the baby’s brain, nervous system, temperament, actually hard wiring and laying down the capacity to regulate one’s emotional self, whether they’re aware of it or not. That’s all just happening because between mother and baby, there’s no separation. There’s no differentiation. They’re undifferentiated, whatever the mother is feeling, the baby is experiencing, she is – the baby is the mother’s body. There’s no separation. Whatever the mother feels, the baby feels.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: And now [inaudible] feels, but is building a body to support that environment once the baby comes out because the time in utero is always about preparing for life on the outside. So just a quick little analogy. The animal in the Kalahari desert, the mother that is pregnant and stressed by possibly, let’s say the giraffe is stressed by the tiger that’s going by. She is flooding her body with stress hormone and she’s –
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: – [inaudible] the baby so that when the baby comes out it can handle an animal coming at her. So, and she needs to have that.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: And to remember when stress is all available, oxygen, nutrients and energy go to the brain, go to the muscles, the joints, and the hindbrain for immediate response. So that baby, when it’s born, if you’ve ever seen the video, the baby drops, you know, quite a long way because it’s a giraffe. It’s wet. It’s spindly. The mother takes off and then you can see the baby. She’s like trying to get up on a little spindly legs and you’re thinking, why did the mother leave? Oh my god.
JEFF: Ah, yeah.
KAREN: But then you see the baby kind of finally gets up and takes off to follow her mother. She has to do that for survival. She had to –
JEFF: Follow.
KAREN: – prepared for that the entire time in utero. That the time in utero is building a brain, a body, a nervous system for life on the outside. So a stress mother, anxious mother, a worried mother, a joyful mother, a happy mother is all preparing the body for life on the outside whether she’s aware of that or not.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah – yeah. And I mean, thank you for talking about that. My understanding of this comes from Gabor Mate who – one of the things I remember him saying is for big animals, their brain is more developed when they’re born. However, for infants, for human infants, their brain can’t be fully developed or their head would be too big to get out of the mother’s body. And so babies are born where their brain isn’t fully developed. And so when I heard that, I really got the connection, like the environment around that just born baby really influences how the development of that brain takes place and it’s optimal when that environment is, you know, stress free and is protected and the mother, like anything that comes in the mother regulates it for the child.
KAREN: Unconsciously, it’s not that she’s regulating consciously, but whatever she does in her body is being passed on to the baby’s body. They are undifferentiated. This is important to get that mother and baby are one. They are not separate beings. The placenta doesn’t mean that they’re growing in totally different environment. They are their mother’s nervous system and that –
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: – [inaudible] after birth.
JEFF: They are their mother’s nervous system. You know, Karen, one of the things I remember many years ago, I think it was like 2006 or 2007, you gave me this picture and it’s still in my office. And it’s a picture of a mom with her infant and she’s cradling the infant and she’s looking deep into the babies eyes and you know, about six or eight inches apart. And my understanding of this was that eye contact, there’s millions of neural networks being connected in that child’s brain every second. And those neural networks, I mean some of them will be pruned for sure, but a lot of them is kind of the beginning of the development of the endorphin system, which is about connection. But it’s also about pain relief and reward. And so children who get that, they have a lot of internal strengths to regulate, you know, emotional pain or physical pain. But for children who didn’t get a lot of that, they don’t. And then they depend on external ways to regulate pain, which you know, we live in a culture where there’s thousands of external ways to regulate, you know, outside stimuli and addiction drugs and alcohol is one for the addicted individual. And I think for family members it’s, you know, continually trying to get to the addicted individual to calm down where if they calm down then I’ll feel better.
KAREN: And there could also be a connection. I don’t really know. But there could be just a connection in ways that the environment, the mother. The mother is the baby’s environment.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: Wasn’t able to deal with her situation and she did the best that she could. I mean, this is not about guilt –
JEFF: Absolutely.
KAREN: – but she did the best she could. And she had to find ways to manage what was going on in her nervous system because there’s a good chance her mother, when she was being carried, wasn’t able to fully settle and be held by her environment, her community, right? The environment, the community, just like Bruce Lipton cells, a cell lives within a community that is impacted by its environment. And one of the things we have, you and I have talked about is just having these layers of support in our life that we need at least two layers of support to go through things and pregnancy and birth is one of those environments where you need extra support and it’s not the support –
JEFF: Right. Right.
KAREN: – your having, you know, the bedding and the special room painted that it’s not that kind of support. It’s feeling, held and whole and many of us did not get to feel held and feel safe and whole when we were babies because maybe our mother wasn’t able to, maybe she –
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah.
KAREN: – or you know, there’s just so many layers the ancestral piece it goes back.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah. There’s so many, so many like the generational thing. I totally understand what you’re saying. I want to go back to you, you mentioned the Bruce Lipton experiments couple times. And my understanding of that, and I just want to try to frame that as best I can for people who are listening. But that is my understanding of that was Bruce Lipton kind of took a cell, divided it and put it in two different environments. And when he did that, the same cell in different environments would grow differently, you know? And so in like when I read that, that was such a powerful thing in the power of the environment. Exactly like what you’re talking about. It’s like the environment of the mother. And the mother is doing the best she can because we live in a stressful world. And Karen, I remember one of the comments you made years ago and I was talking with you about addiction and you said something like: “Jeff, you know the way to fix addiction on this planet for good?” And I was like: “What?” And I was like, my ears were, okay. Okay, I’m listening Karen. What is it? And you said something like that is if every mother, you know, had like a period of time to be totally supported and protected and our culture really valued protecting and kind of setting up safe spaces for mothers that that would go a huge distance to changing the addiction problem. Changing a whole lot more than that.
KAREN: But so that Joseph Chilton Pearce.
JEFF: Oh!
KAREN: Joseph Chilton Pearce, an amazing human, said if the way to change addiction and change our society would be to have complete support of the mother and the child bearing family for the first three years of life.
JEFF: Whoa…
KAREN: That would – like just think about it. If your mother didn’t – like my grandmother had to immigrate to this country and it was very difficult and challenging and then they had to learn how to make a living. And then, you know, my mother, when she was born, one of four children that was somewhat slow, I guess would be called developmentally delayed. And, you know, that she didn’t really get the support around raising a special child then, you know, what would that have been like for my mother to have had the, or for my grandmother to have had support. Yeah. So it’s pretty, pretty amazing. And I guess I’d like to go back to the – so I’m listening to this radio show and I’m just like, all the light bulbs are going off in my brain about this connection.
So I called up Barbara, Barbara Van Dusen. And I said: “You know, I’m a midwife and I trained at a birth center and I think I have some fear around birth.” And I was taking a lot of anti anxiety drugs myself and sleep medication by the time I heard this interview. And we talked and she said: “You know Karen, I don’t think it’s the fact that you’ve seen so many complicated birth.” She said: “I think what’s happening to you is that every time you go to a birth, especially a complicated birth, what’s happening is you’re stimulating your own memory, your own cellular memory, your own implicit memory of what happened at your birth.” And Jeff, I like to just take a second and explain implicit memory because most people don’t understand this.
JEFF: Sure.
KAREN: Implicit memory is the memory that we have before we have words. It’s in our body, it’s in our fluid, it’s in our tissue, it’s in our bones. We all have implicit body memory and we don’t remember this. It’s just in our body, that’s before we have words. At 18 months of age, explicit memory comes online. That’s the memory where you go: “Oh, I don’t remember that.” Then you have both implicit and explicit memory. You have the body experience of something happening and you have the conscious memory of what happened. She was talking about this implicit memory, just memories. Nobody sort of remembers but is in our bodies and that sort of began my journey and I – because of this, she said, I suggest you do some birth workable. What the heck is birth work? But I went to a birth workshop and I began to learn not only what was happening in my body, but I got to see other people having this experience. And it was weird in the beginning being a midwife, but I’ve really got to see that the baby has an experience of what is happening in utero during the birth process, the time after birth and early infancy. And that they make a decision about life depending on what happens to them and they live from that decision from that point on.
JEFF: Wow.
KAREN: I know you want to jump off from here, but my goal became – I have to figure out how do we make repair when things don’t go as planned. And for me of course it was resuscitation because, you know, sometimes babies need help and they need to be resuscitated, but how do we – there has to be embedded in the embryological blueprint of birth, the repair or we would not have evolved as a species. And this is the really important piece that really it’s in there, how to make repair? Even when horrible things happen, there is a way to make repair and that really began my journey of learning. How do I heal myself.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: How do I teach this material? How do I share this material? Because it’s hard to hear. We either feel bad as mothers and fathers, right? Or we just begin to get caught in the tangle of shame –
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: – and guilt. So that sort of was the beginning and I’m, yeah, I know I said a lot there.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah, that’s huge. So thank you very much for the personal story that’s really helpful. And I think, well, I know every human being has their own personal story like that, you know? And so often times it’s like we don’t remember it. We don’t value it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t even think about it, you know? But as we’re under more and more stress, it’s like that aspect of the human being becomes more and more expressing from that place or more important or something. And I love that you, you know, asked the question to yourself about how do we repair? How do we do this? What does repair look like? And you know, you named exactly the – like people can feel bad. People can feel shame. Oh my god, I didn’t do enough. I should have done X, Y, Z or all those should’ve, would’ve, could’ve and that can freeze us up. That can like put us in a place where we do nothing, which isn’t helpful. So, I love that you mentioned repair and that seems like the next place that we can go in this conversation is, you know, so can you start talking about what repair looks like in general, in any places you can connect dots and create and know that I’ll probably be trying to do that as well.
KAREN: So, I think it’s really important to understand, first you have to understand the sequence. And I would love to be able to come back and do my little, we could do a live video and I could do my sequence of birth and what is embedded in the sequence. Because embedded in the sequence is understanding how to make repair. Because birth and our survival works. It is set up to work to the optimal survival of our species, which is why we have survived and lived for millennia. But I would say a lot of intuitive knowing, a lot of a deep knowing has sort of been lost. And so it’s helpful to remember and to plug back into how we came into being and what is really embedded in our sequence. Because from there –
JEFF: Right
KAREN: – we’ll learn the tools for healing.
JEFF: Yeah. Well, and so one of the things I was thinking about, you know, because we haven’t like, and I say we haven’t, but there isn’t anything like we learn in school how to do repair, you know, because that has never been emphasized. Every human has a strategy, a way to feel the way they need to feel. And so there’s patterns, there’s a sequence that they go through that I oftentimes referred to the psychobabble kind of terminology, defensive coping mechanisms. There’s habitual patterns of behavior that everyone goes through to try to deal with stressors. And of course, like my little – so in the videos I made in this thing called the Spotlight Diagram, the different roles in the family. Those are all like strategies to try to deal with the problem. And they’re also, my guess here is that their implicit memory strategies that those people in the family developed at a very young age.
KAREN: They’re hardwired into the nervous system.
JEFF: Hardwired into the nervous system. Wow. So how do we repair? How do we make change?
KAREN: So I feel like the most important piece is you have to understand the sequence because you always have to go back to the sequence that there was, you know, before a beginning an end and an after.
JEFF: So can you kind of like, and I really want to take you up on the offer, the Webinar to do the sequence live and, you know, but also can you just kind of, is it possible to kind of go through it in a –
KAREN: Short manner?
JEFF: Right now so people can get a sense?
KAREN: Yeah. So, I’ll say first of all embedded in the birth sequence, which is occurs right at conception. There’s a whole sequence that evolves. And it is part of what happens embryologically, the beginning of birth, the middle of birth, the end of birth. And then when there has been an interruption in the sequence, the place that repair occurs is after, is plugging into those embryological forces, the embryological blueprints. So, basically we come into being according to an embryological blueprint. It’s in all of us. We all have this blueprint and it just unfolds. You don’t have to think about it. This is the untainted blueprint within us. And what do I mean by that? So, here you are, you’re a sperm and an egg and you come together, right? This just occurs. You don’t have to think about, it doesn’t matter if you think about it because it doesn’t happen with your conscious mind. The conception occurs, right? It just unfolds. It is in our DNA. It unfolds. So there’s the connection and then there is 24 hours of stillness that occurs. Once the sperm and egg come together, this is all the embryological blueprint. There’s 24 hours of stillness. Like things stop.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: Just think about that. There is this gigantic pause. This place of rest. Then what starts happening is there’s the dividing, right? There’s the cell division, there’s cell expansion, there’s all this growth that occurs. Now that just occurs. It occurs according to a sequence, like you have to have cell division before cell expansion. You can’t have cell expansion before cell division.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: It won’t happen. Right? It’s according to a sequence and all of development is like that. The other thing about the cell division and cell expansion is that it occurs at a slower pacing. Like we think it occurs like you’re watching it on TV where you see cell conceptions, cell divisions, cell expansion, the baby starts to grow….. It all happens really quickly but that’s all on time lapse photography, if you were to watch it, it is so incredibly boring. It’s like 24-48 hours each stage.
JEFF: Yeah. Oh my gosh!
KAREN: Slow pacing and that’s what’s critical to understand that we were formed at this slower pacing. And babies in utero are in this slower pacing and this embryological blueprint, the sequential blueprint that has pauses embedded and it is also part of what happens just stationally. It is also part of what happens in the pre labor, labor, birth and the immediate postpartum, that all those are embedded in there. The pacing, the sequencing, the integrating, the building potency to do the next step. And then I like to use the example of the contraction pattern because in a contraction pattern, right? You have to have the contraction, that’s the stressor.
JEFF: Aha.
KAREN: Which is okay. You need stress in life. Stress is good. It’s healthy for the nervous system. For babies ,it turns on the circulatory system, the lymphatic system, but you don’t want to stay in the contraction because too much stress. It’s too difficult to stay in there. It’s too hard. It would actually kill the mother and the baby if you stayed and there a particular type of contraction like that. So that’s not healthy. But what usually happens is you have a contraction and then she comes out of the contraction. She’s coming out and this is the really important piece. She drops into the space in between the contraction, which is the resting phase, the integrating phase. Then what will happen is she’ll begin to feel the potency of the next contraction and you need to have both the contraction and the relaxation. And this is very much like day and night, activity and rest, work and play and what we call the nervous system is activation and settling which sort of leads into your bell curve.
JEFF: [inaudible] nervous system diagram.
KAREN: Yes.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: Exactly. You need to have both –
JEFF: Charge, discharge, expand, contract, speed up, slow down.
KAREN: And you don’t want to be at either end. Other end would kill mother and baby and the other is you wouldn’t have a baby. You need both.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: Now, in Porges, he’s really trying to get you to titrate in the middle, but the point I’m trying to make is that you need to have activation and settling and to become aware of it. And then most importantly you need to have a practice that allows you to become aware. Well yeah, to become aware, to choose, to notice what’s going on so then you can have the practice and bring it back into the middle.
JEFF: The mindfulness stuff.
KAREN: Yes. I don’t know. You know, I know it’s mindfulness but for me, I have to actually stake out places in my day when I just take a moment to feel myself. And feel myself on like, how I begin all my lectures and how I teach neonatal resuscitation. I mean we do this all day in my lecture. We do grounding. We do settling and orienting. I am constantly tracking my own tempo, my own pacing, speaking up.
JEFF: Yeah – yeah. So from the standpoint then tying this to, you know, the stress in families with addiction, tying it to the stress of that, it’s like, because, you know, if the family is living with a family member with addiction, it’s like they don’t have a whole lot of time to relax because it’s always around them and they live in an activated state. And so – and I think just with addiction our “system of care” in this country definitely doesn’t recognize any of this and leads the burden of it on families to deal with these stressors until they just can’t deal with them anymore.
KAREN: So I agree with you Jeff, but I want to go back to what I was talking about before, because I think the missing piece that I see, my attendance in my –
JEFF: Sure.
KAREN: – in my understanding is so our environment, our mother, her ability, she didn’t have the capacity or the awareness to even choose to drop into that slower pacing. Remember, the slower pacing that I was talking about is how we were formed. We were formed in slower pacing and that the brainwaves of a baby is about 10 times slower than our brain work. So then we’re born, we come out into this very fast paced world, maybe we’re whisked away and taken into the nursery and things are done at really fast pacing that’s incredibly overwhelming to the nervous system. So right from the start we didn’t get a chance to come into the outer room into the slower pacing, and this slower pacing is where all healing occurs. That’s – as you know, the slower pacing is where trauma work is done in the slower pacing.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: So that layer of support that can create the place for the parents. And I know that sounds sort of utopian, but the place where the parents can just be present with their baby and attend simply to the needs of their baby. This new being that operates completely different than we do.
JEFF: Right. Yeah.
KAREN: So then we go back into our busy world and we – back to our baby to come along with us and we start to having feeding problems and we starts having difficulty settling problems. And then as the baby grows up, we start wondering what’s wrong with him, is he this kind of babies. He’s spirited, maybe he needs drugs, maybe he needs this. We have to go back to work. We have to get all this done. So when you come to do repair, you have to plug into those embryological, the embryological forces. The embryological forces are current, much slower pacing and however you do that, whether you find a way to do that. But we have to find that within ourselves first because we each co-regulate with each other. Just like the dynamic between mother and baby, that setting up that co-regulation. So when you’re working with your clients, you have to be settled –
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: – in order to help your client begin to even settle and sit and talk with you. It’s this co-regulation that is critical and the slower pacing is how it begins.
JEFF: Right. So that’s number one in healing and repair is just having the ability to calm oneself down.
KAREN: And I would say originally, first you have to become aware of that’s something you have to notice.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: Me, like I just didn’t think that’s something I had to do. I have to choose to figure out how do I remember to check in so that I can notice that I’m talking really fast and thinking and like what do I need to do to settle myself so that I can be present with you.
JEFF: Right. Yeah. Yeah – yeah. Wow. Well this is, I mean this seems so in some ways, so basic, ultra basic, but so basic that it is easily missed and especially as our culture gets faster and faster. It’s easily missed. And I mean, my own experience is just in the world of addiction and addiction in families, it’s like this isn’t even talked about or known or there isn’t a stage like this, you know. It’s like the family deals with it ’til they can’t deal with it anymore and then they call someone an interventionist to come in and help them through it to where their loved one will willingly reach out for help. You know, and I can’t help think what would it be like if families had this information and not all families could do this.
KAREN: Right.
JEFF: But some could.
KAREN: But some could. Right. And it seems like just as you’re talking, I’m sort of imagining this interventionists process. It’s like you offer the family, somebody that is actually grounded, present, name some of what they’re going through.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: Like you change your pace in this chaos that they were involved in with their loved one to this oasis. This somebody that is in this safe place. You do this – the tools of tempo setting, pacing.
JEFF: Yeah. Right.
KAREN: You are a resource for the family because you are in those embryological forces for them. You are in the healing forces. So that is the first thing. You become a beacon of light, a safety place that they can actually go there, not on to unless you have to get them all.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: Subtle, otherwise we’re all just grabbing at straws. Oh, you’ve got to go and fix him. No, it doesn’t work that way.
JEFF: Yeah. Wow. Karen, I’m so glad that you’re talking about this because tomorrow morning that’s exactly what I’m doing with a family. I’m showing up at their house and you know, dah, dah, dah, dah. But this really helps me to kind of, you know, get underlined and put in bold the importance of, you know, this aspect of my role to kind of create a container of safety and calmness and, you know, that it’s me regulating my nervous system, which is most important regardless of what happens here.
KAREN: Absolutely. Because we’re all regulating off of you.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: No [inaudible], but you’re also naming, because I know we’ve, you and I had this discussion years ago and we had a family member that we were thinking about doing some of this work with. And I just remember you naming and that is one of the tools and naming what was going on. Naming. You were slowing, you worked all cranked up over what was going on over, you know, within us about this person that we love, that we wanted to fix. We just wanted them to fix that person. It was just you really – you were. You were that beacon of safety and you were just talking about it and you were really naming what was true that you knew and that was all incredibly helpful and you did a lot of reflecting what you saw in us. All of that was incredibly helpful and that’s also regulating.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah – yeah. Well thank you for connecting those dots there. And so right now I’m, you know, wondering about would it be, like I really want to take you up on your offer to come back together after this podcast comes out and do it in like a Webinar kind of fashion. And have you kind of go through this sequence that you talked about. Because that sequence is crucial in people really getting this on and not just intellectually but getting it in their body, which is really, really important. So at this point in this conversation, I’m kind of wondering like are there other things that you wanted to express or do we kind of close this up and find a good time to do a Webinar?
KAREN: Right. So I guess the thing that I would say is there were two things I wanted to say. So, I was really only beginning about the, I was just starting to lay down why sequencing is so important when I was talking embryologically about development of all of us because we were all born.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: Even if you are in vitro fertilization, you went through with some interruption in your sequence, even with in vitro, because changes the dynamics, understanding the early part of the sequence, but then how that sequence develops where the repair can be made. And of course that’s true. Making the repair earlier is a little bit easier than as we get older. But repair can always occur, always occur. And there are ways like if our parents had known how to make repair early on –
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: – it wouldn’t be so difficult for us. And for me who has probably had, I don’t know, 300,000 therapy sessions, it’s like the layer of the onion, because I’ve had to learn to adapt around what did not get healed early on. And you can only heal each layer that comes to the surface, so it’s a little bit longer of a process as we get older.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: But all that done at birth and it’s not like you have to know much. It’s simple, simple little things that can really create healing. And some of it you and I just talked about, is getting that the baby as a conscious being. Reflecting that you see the baby is having an experience instead of believing that it doesn’t matter. They’re not going to remember.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: It’s [inaudible] that needs to be reflected. That their environment, which is what they regulate off of matters. The environment, not just how it looks and sounds. I have this saying that I say in my class over and over and over. It’s not just what you say that matters, but rather how you on the inside. Because it’s how you on the inside that you and I are actually tracking. This is Stephen Porges, really, it’s what’s going on on the inside that we’re tracking, babies, children, adults like it’s nice. It’s nice that you say those nice words, but we’re really trying to pick up on, are you safe?
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah – yeah.
KAREN: It’s what your saying coherent with what I’m feeling from you. And this is a really easy one, but like when you say, you know, I really love you.
JEFF: [laughing]
KAREN: I got the words, but that’s not how it feels. Or when I’m having a fight with my husband.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: I’m saying all the right things, but I’m just not saying it. I mean I’m not really feeling it, I’m saying it, but I’m not feeling.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: You really pick up on the tone, the pacing, actually how our eyes constrict, you know, our pupils, we don’t even know we’re looking at that. Like that is really what each of us picks up on each other is how you are on the inside. And so how you are in the inside that we need to become aware of so that we can, hmm, maybe have our own simple little practice to take a breath.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: I didn’t begin this with what I normally begin my lectures with, all lectures, whether I’m lecturing to doctors, or parents, or educators, I always begin with feeling myself, feeling my body.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: [inaudible] I do that in, I mean large conferences. I do that online. I always – I start everything with that because I want to refer back to that and especially when you’re talking about birth, when you’re talking about trauma, when you’re talking about resuscitation, when you’re talking about addiction, that is a very stimulating topic. You have to establish resource first. They have to know that this is the place that we’re going to come back to.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: I’m going to come back to because I am tracking what’s going on in my body and when I’m too stimulated just from talking about all…. I might need a pause.
JEFF: Right. Yeah.
KAREN: Before I begin again.
JEFF: Yeah.
KAREN: When it comes to repair, all of that like has to get laid down first so that we have a safe place to go to.
JEFF: Right.
KAREN: Just talking in our conversation before we begin again and that all sort of webbed and wedded in all of it and I saw that you had quite a bit of it in your new videos, so I’m really excited.
JEFF: Well, so this has been really wonderful Karen, and I really look forward to and want to encourage people listening to attend this Webinar. And I have no idea when it’s going to be, but Karen, thank you very much for this and we will find the time. Thank you.