Professional Coaching with Tara Treiberg (Part 1)

many of my patients presented sometimes with physical symptoms and we couldn't find even in the hospital, even thorough workups what it was. And once we looked at the mental health and we identified a trauma, severe, we would find the answer. And I was shocked about the results of how we transformed patient's life just by treating the mental health.

And for example, of the first patient that really opened my eyes to this was a patient that was having headaches and temporary blindness. And she had been hospitalized for this, workups, you know, how they can be like Lyme disease, like all of the parasites of the brain CT scan MRI and they couldn't find it. Just talking to her, talking to her in the clinic, she opened up to me, not by words.

She had to write it down. She said, "I've never said this to anyone, but this will happen to me." And this is how I'm feeling.

And after we uncovered all that, it took a while, you know, because she didn't want to see the mental health piece and it was a heart go. I welcome to another episode of the Healing Bot Gas. This is the place where you learn and get inspired to heal in, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction in every area of your life.

I am carrying a million-year host and I believe that what we resist, or cis, and that we cannot change what we don't face. And it was finally when I accepted this reality and invested time, energies and money into myself, in professional support, that my life was completely transformed. And now I'm on a mission to demystify this process for you to inspire you to do this work yourself.

Today we are going to continue with our series on how our mental and emotional health affect our physical health. And to have this conversation, I have with me today an amazing coaching client of mine who is also an excellent pediatrician, who incorporates a mental health approach into the treatment of her patients. Dr.

Maria Aramburo is an assistant professor of pediatrics and a board certified pediatrician. She received her training in general pediatrics and a fellowship in community pediatrics at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D. C.

Dr. Aramburo holds a master degree in public health and has specialized training in motivational interviewing, pediatric and adolescent mental health management, trauma informed care and integrative mental health practices. Her focus of practice is a adolescent mental health, which is also the focus of her social media account at Pediatrics Mom.

Through her work as social media, Dr. Aramburo aims to empower families to identify, prevent and manage pediatric mental health conditions early and in a trauma informed way, while also advocating for mental health. Dr.

Aramburo currently practices as an adolescent focus pediatrician with expertise in mental health at the Department of Adolescent Medicine at Lehigh Valley Health Reli, Children's Hospital in Pennsylvania, USA. In our conversation, we talked about her journey into incorporating the effects of trauma and mental health into her practice, how so many times this headaches and tummies and tummy aches are caused by emotional and mental health issues like anxiety and how she treats them. We discussed the biggest factors affecting children and teens' days and what to do about it and why it was important for her as a physician to also prioritize her wellness in many ways including working with a professional coach and why it has been so valuable to her.

To learn more about Dr. Aramburo, follow her at Pediatrics Mom's on Instagram for tips and advice. I love this episode for many reasons including that it was full of useful information for us parents and if you're a pediatrician, you're gonna love it as well.

If you like it, please share it with us many colleagues and friends as possible and please give me a five-star rating to help me with algorithms to make sure that we can continue to inspire as many people as possible to do this work themselves and excel in every area of their lives. Welcome to the Healing Podcast Dr. Maria.

It's an honor to have you. Thank you, Karen. It's an honor to be here.

I really appreciate the invitation to share my journey. So I met Dr. Maria as she was referred to me.

I was looking at our notes and he's actually two years ago, September of 2021. So it's our two-year anniversary of working together. Yay!

And she came into my life in one of the things that she wanted to work on was her kind of finding professional clarity, focus. I think doctors work so hard when she came. She wanted to talk about maybe pursuing something with the FDA, maybe a pediatrics practice, maybe her own thing.

And for sure finding more balance, for sure having a sort of part-time arrangement where she can excel at the things that she was passionate about and have that voice and that strong focus and purpose into her new negotiations with a new job. And we had that journey and that led us into sort of life coaching where we look at parenting, life relationships, parents, work issues to be better and feel better and excel in every area of our life. So thank you for being here today.

It's been a complete honor working with you. I really look forward to our sessions. When we don't have sessions every week, we always touch base.

How are you doing? How are you feeling? So it's growing into a beautiful relationship and friendship.

I agree with that. Thank you for being here today. I think the world of you, I think you're very brave to do the work you do to really honor your needs.

And it's really commendable really because to you know, I think that when we are career focused and we enter this structure of, you know, law, medical school, 9 to 5, 60 hours a week and to have the clarity to say, you know what, this might not be working for me. I need to think outside of the box. I want to come up with something that gives me the balance that I need.

It's really commendable. So would you mind sharing with my audience a bit about your background into becoming a pediatrician? What led you to pediatrics?

I'm more importantly, what led you to mental health? Like when did you realize, wow, there's a link between how my younger patients are feeling to the symptoms that they're coming to me for? Absolutely.

I think it's interesting because I'm not one of those people that always wanted to go into medicine that maybe people grow up knowing they want to be doctors. And I actually never thought about that, but growing up, I always knew that I wanted to work with children because my mom was a teacher. She had a preschool, and I knew that I had a good rapport with kids, and I just love working with children.

When I was in Panama waiting for, going to college, maybe study psychology. So I always was interested a little bit about mental health and education. I started volunteering at the Children's Hospital in Panama and found my passion for medicine.

I felt a calling, but I still had the plans of going to college. And while at my first year at Georgetown University, I continued to volunteer in a hospital, Georgetown Hospital actually, pediatrics. And I really was like, there's nowhere else for me than in a hospital.

Like I felt like I was the right place for me. And I kind of had to rearrange everything and go to medical school, transfer to medical school from my freshman year from college. And that's many years and lots of work and nights.

And you don't get too much time to think. You're just doing it. And then I did take a little gap between finishing medical school and doing my social service in Panama.

And I was having hesitations about pediatrics because I always said, I'm going to medicine to do pediatrics to do kids. So I never had doubts about that. But after working with kids in a hospital, very sick children and just like critical illness, I had my doubts because I said, you know, I want to treat the whole person.

Like I want to be able to help just with a preventive, with the mental health, with the body. Like I want to do the whole person. And working with sick kids, it's hard.

You're there in the critical. So I went to a retreat in California, I kind of just to figure out what I wanted. And my message was kind of like you can do pediatrics.

It's just going to have a different focus and you'll find what that is. So that was like the message that I got in that retreat. And I from that retreat, I came out deciding, yes, I'm going to do pediatrics.

And the, you know, the way we'll show it's way. The way that I will do it will be different. It will show it will show it's after.

And did my residency, a lot of interest, you know, work in the community, work in psychiatry, work in lots of things. And the path shows itself because I was selected for a fellowship in community pediatrics and child advocacy, which included a masters in public health. So I got to do like a lot of research there.

When I finished that fellowship, they offered me the position for medical director of a school based health center, which was a grant that I have participated in writing and we got funding from DC Health. And being the medical director of a teen clinic, I accepted the position. And so the last five years, I was a pediatrician in DC for 10 years.

And the last five years was medical director of this clinic. And I was seen the need for mental health. So I was seeing how many of my patients presented sometimes with physical symptoms and we couldn't find even in the hospital, even thorough workups what it was.

And once we looked at the mental health and we identified a trauma severe, we would find the answer. And I was shocked about the results of how we transformed patient's life just by treating the mental health. And for example, of the first patient that really opened my eyes to this was a patient that was having headaches and temporary blindness.

And she had been hospitalized for this workups, you know, how they can be like Lyme disease, like all of the parasites of the brain CT scan MRI and they couldn't find it. And just talking to her, talking to her in the clinic, she opened up to me, not by words. She had to write it down to say, I've never said this to anyone, but this is what happened to me.

And this is how I'm feeling. And after we uncovered all that, it took a while, you know, because she didn't want to see the mental health piece and it was a hard go. But she was cured from the physical symptoms after her mental health was treated.

So that's when, you know, I started training and doing more about mental health and how to diagnosis and treated and really find other complimentary, you know, treatments towards, you know, the the wellness of our patients preventive and trauma. Trauma focused. So during my practice, there was Marital's right right, right, right, myself, I trained my staff and I really grew in the mental health in DC.

We had a problem, DC Virginia and Maryland that there's not a lot of psychiatrists for the need that we have. So there was a program called DC map where pediatricians could call psychiatrists and work with them in the management of their patients. But I would manage the patients and they would just guide me.

So through that doing that for five years, I really, really learned with the trainings and practice. And now I'm doing it on my own. I moved to Pennsylvania and I was hired at that was the, you know, your step position where you found me, but I'm working now mostly 80% is mental health of what I do.

And it's patients that are referred to me by pediatricians. They find that there's something with mental health. They can't manage because they haven't done everything that, you know, I did and they sent it to me and we have an adolescent clinic.

I don't have a clinic. Congratulations. Sounds really, really exciting.

So I guess that's a long journey. Some of the other symptoms that kids come to you that are hard to diagnose physically. So I know one of them is tummy aches.

Like in the trauma work that I've done, a lot of kids have tummy aches and you do all kind of gastroenter, you know, MRIs and ultrasound and the kids are perfect but they're still doing, you know, having a lot of tummy aches. What are kind of some of the other symptoms that you get? Absolutely.

I love that part because I have a lot of patients. Sometimes they have even been diagnosed with something in their mental health. Like, oh, they've been through the year many times and they're like, yeah, maybe you should see a psychologist, but they don't really tell them exactly like, this is due to this and you need to treat this but very seriously.

So they say like comments like, it could be related to your mental health, but Karen, the range of things that I have diagnosed physical that are due to mental health, I'll tell you. Tommy X is the easy one, but I have, I have a patient that I cured from psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. So she literally had seizures due to her severe anxiety and depression.

And she, the parents were tired of going to the ERs and everybody rolling their eyes at them because it was like, oh, it's psychological, but it's not that true in itself, like it's psychological. It sounds like she's making it up, but she was actually having a seizure because her body went into full-blown kind of like dissociation, you know, it just was the cycle of a trauma and she couldn't get out of it. So it was the, you would see a seizure, but when they did the EEG, there was not epileptic activity.

So then they were like, so it's made up, but did they not actually exist? It's non-epileptic seizure disorder. So we cured it just with everything mental health that we did for her.

And I have other patients that have like, they faint, they are dizzy, there's the stomach aches, there's patients that suffer from headaches. And I've had patients that suffer even from blindness, patients that had like the temporary blindness with the headache. It's kind of like a conversion disorder.

So when the trauma is, or the mental health symptoms are being suppressed and it's manifesting through the body, but it's not a conscious thing. So, you know, I, I, I, like, for example, these, these parents, I mean, the child had to get the school had said you can't come back here because you're having three to five seizures a day and we really don't feel comfortable. We can manage.

So they basically kicked her out of school. And the parents were like, we live in the ER. Like now we know that, you know, she, like it would last half an hour, she'll get better, but like, we don't have a life.

The mom had to quit her job. They were all day with a child. And now she's, she's been seizure free for three months.

So this is it, you know, so we had so sad that we, we minimized it in that, oh, it's just that she's upset or she's having a hard time in school or she's having a hard time at home. You're fine. And they get sent away without, no, you're not fine.

You're really upset. It's manifesting in severe stomach aches or headaches. How can we help these children?

So what are some of the treatments that you recommend or what's your, what do you look at? Is it a combination of meds and therapy or is it what, what, what's the process to figure out what the root problem yeah usually the two initial like most important steps is the time, getting the time to really be look, hey, we're going to talk about everything and we're going to pinpoint out like what could be affecting this. And then sometimes there's like current stressors like they're dealing with something that they don't want to talk about and this causing shame or causing vulnerability.

It's not accepted in their family and they're just bottling this in and it's manifesting as different things. And sometimes it's something from the past that they have never opened up about or that they haven't healed or processed. So it's interesting because you know big iterations don't have time.

They have 15 minute visits. So I'm always grateful for me. I have for my patients at one hour.

So I really I'm like they're like let's just talk about everything and I'm going to be offered the confidentiality. I mean that's number one. And then they know in the have a safe space that they can really open up about everything.

It won't be used against them. They won't be judged. It's that for their health that we need to know.

So then after that depending on the severity of the symptoms, some of the practices that I did in in DC in the school based cell center was identifying symptoms of trauma before it becomes a diagnosis of depression or anxiety or full-blown PTSD. So that is my goal. So we had screened like the whole school or a lot of the children that had immigrated from Latin America to see if they had symptoms and some of them did.

So that's the idea. Like you can have symptoms of of trauma but you don't you're not going to be identified having a problem. So then you know what I do?

Nothing until you have like a severe problem. So so the kids that come to me already are having problems right now. But for my vision of the future would be like all kids would get screen right.

So basically what I do is first kind of commit to a diagnosis and really come strong and like this is what's going on and we're going to treat this. But I've had patients for example that have been for years Skyron to neurologist, gastroenterologist and organizers are trying to figure out like if it's hormones, if it's this if it's that and then they start throwing medications at them but for pain, for gastritis, for everything. And I see them and there are five different medications and I'm like this is all due to the anxiety that was caused by the you know the fact that they were raped at you know 10 years of age or by the fact that they've been bullied for the last three years.

Like the traumas range from fast recent or just like they they're confused about their gender and they don't know they don't they can't talk about it so they're expressing it this way. And I try to like when you voice that out that it's this and it's because of that that's number one because then you can focus on that. And then we talk about the options.

So the options would be range from therapy, different types of therapy depending on what we're dealing with. I offer the range from DBT which is the electrical behavioral therapy CBT cognitive behavioral therapy for younger kids. I range between play therapy, occupational therapy depending on if there's sensory processing, there's other things, there's anger, there's OCD that's coming out.

So depending on what symptoms are particular presenting, I choose a therapy. Some kids have come to me carrying with mutism. So for those kids I cannot recommend therapy.

So then I would go with something like EMDR like equine therapy. We're referring a lot of our kids to equine therapy because we have two farms nearby that we partner with and that helps with the impulsivity, self-esteem, anger, self-acceptance because they're not talking but it's a therapeutic approach. And then we talk about medicines.

So sometimes medicine is needed depending over where the child is in their journey. We decide if it's something that can tie me over until the therapy starts working or do I need something for a period of time and especially if kids are going to do therapy sometimes they're so depressed or so anxious that they are not going to talk. So they need the medication to support them through.

But what I say is a joint treatment. The therapy is going to help you but like sometimes they're withdrawn to the max to a level that they won't be able to open up in therapy or they don't accept going to therapy. Let's start the medication.

You feel a little bit better. You still like talking and then you go. So especially for example the patient that had mutism this was a case of a patient that had been abused in elementary school by the teachers and he would get punished all the time.

He had called dumb and also had had like a fire in his house and issues at home with the parents having physical violence, psychological violence between them. So I only knew about the trauma in the school and that was never able to be resolved or report. So he had mutism in school and school they didn't know what was going on with him but he was failing all the classes and he couldn't even communicate.

So I started with equine therapy with him and medication. And six months later he was like he couldn't stop talking. He was like we need to address what we lived in 1989 in this family when you two were fighting and you two were divorcing and then the house burned down and I want to talk about how I felt.

The parents were like we can't shut him up. It's like that's great. Amazing what beautiful work you do.

Oh my god. Yeah. Now we know oh my god it's amazing.

It's amazing. Actually I told you the other day that I was going to share with you a project that I'm working on and it sort of had you integrate the importance of mental health that is being documented through the A study that affects your physical outcomes, affects your disease. It predicts that you are going to have a higher propensity for cardiac mental you know all kinds of diseases based on your trauma score.

And you're doing this right now. This is so amazing. Like understanding that yes there's some physical component that we need medicine but that there are other factors that affect your physical health.

What about have you started incorporating the need for nutrition into their mental health and that if you're eating donuts and fries and that's the basis of your diet it's not going to be helping your mental depression and anxiety symptoms. I was going to mention that the other therapy that we use a lot within the ones that I refer out to which is CBT, DVT, equanimity therapy, a trauma focus CBT and EMDR. I do motivational interview myself and I recommend behavioral activation and nutrition.

So behavioral activation is kind of finding activities that motivate you to feel no more energized like you're depressed and you feel severe motivation to like even move. So start walking and it's like pushing yourself before you feel the motivation. It's a methodology that it's called behavioral activation and sometimes the equanimity therapy is part of that behavioral activation because they're not doing anything they're just in the room all day.

They win trough completely and they're not going to feel that motivation. So we do that and the nutrition plays a huge role because I wasn't going to tell you some of the other symptoms that I see of trauma or mental health is eating disorders. So we deal with a lot of eating disorders and I sometimes they come because they've been heard thinking that they have something and I change I diagnose them with something else.

So the range is from psychogenic loss of appetite. So I have patients also because of trauma because of how anxious they feel because of how depressed they feel or how stressed they feel they lose their appetite and they're really not trying to to be like I want to be skinny or body image they don't have that they just literally lost their appetite and when you fix they underlying they get better. So I incorporate nutrition there almost like what I'm saying about behavioral activation like we need to nourish your body.

Your body has shut down because you stop feeding them. So once you stop feeding them because you lost your appetite because something else now your body is in starvation mode it's not going to tell you it's hungry and we have huge celebration when my patients start feeling hunger again. It's like your body is talking to you again like you know when you're mad at someone you're not talking you're giving them the like the law of ice you don't talk to them.

That's why I explained to them their bodies doing to them like you're not hungry because your body stop talking to you. The day you feel the hunger again is when your body is like okay we're good like we can feed friends again I'm going to talk to you again and the way we do it is like just small portions of nutritious foods throughout the day. Sometimes I have my patients put alarms and they eat every three hours but sometimes they have the opposite they have binge eating they're so anxious they're binge eating I was like if your body is nourished if your body has what they need in terms of protein, nutrients, minerals and also like calories and the carbs and fats and all that we try to talk about like proportions of what needs to go in the body and what the body needs things for.

Then it's not you're not going to feel that urge to binge eat like sometimes when the binge eating is because they start to keep in breakfast and then they're eating anything at lunch it's roasted for food at school and then on the afternoon it's like oh my god I'm starving and the binge eat. So I see binge eating disorder I see anorexia I see bulimia I see psychogenic loss of appetite and then I see arphid which is avoid and restricted food intake disorder so it can be due to different things the arphid it can be I have patients that create have like fear of choking or fear of vomiting and that's just anxiety because of something that happened and then it's kind of like calming your body and then eating and knowing that nothing's going to happen but mostly it works to nourish your body and then when when I diagnose anxiety that's number one your body needs to be fed and hydrated because if not you're going to feel anxious so we work with also like probiotics and you know the GI making sure that everything's moving right because medications are not absorbed these things are not moving right a lot of our patients come in they're constipated so fiber needs to go up so it's it's it's very global and holistic and well rounded but nutrition is really the base. Sometimes we're dealing with so much at the beginning that we just start like with like let's eat frequent meals try to make it nutritious with you know you know how as a mom to feed your kids like you know the fruits and vegetables are good and that you know you need some balance in terms of protein fats and carbs and then we go more into the detail but really when we incorporate nutrition is when we see the best benefits.

Amazing amazing amazing and I love how you in your explanation touch into the important steps in the healing journey one is being witness is being heard so that one hour that you spend with patients probably is the first time someone spend time with them right because parents especially if they're single parents or they're both three jobs at a time and they don't have time to be seen witness heard and to have you to sit with them is like that witnessing that can be very healing right just being heard and I'm like oh my god the second you talk about is awareness when you say you diagnose it this is where it comes from is having that awareness that holy cow this affected me that fire affected me my parents screaming every day and yelling at each other affected me being bullied and that's like the core and then giving them a coping mechanism with all these different therapies that are really evidence-based to to work at least 70% of the time with CBT and DBT and all that that's amazing yeah absolutely you must feel very fulfilled with your work yeah well it's it's it's great to see there's many hard moments I see the light I feel better I feel myself I'm doing the things I love and my brain is nourished they tell me like now my brain like the fog is gone like I can think because they they heard themselves a lot in the process of not finding what they have so so the the earlier we can we can help patients the better the better and yeah it's very fulfilling yeah so you have an Instagram account in your posting videos what in your opinion is affecting teens and children's mental health the most this days well um I'm actually um just writing an article on this so I might be biased but you know the one thing that we are all kind of agreeing that has been the thing that has increased in the last five years um 10 years that also is increasing mental health and this has increased is the use of social media and the internet you know that is something that bring time all of us and they are exposed to things that sometimes we can't control like even you know I know from personal experience with my kids I'm always like I let you watch YouTube because you were watching like this educational thing and then now you're watching this random influencer so they go and when they start having social media it can go down a rabbit hole it's amazing so it's a lot of protect preparing them but sometimes it goes so fast we haven't had time to prepare them and they're getting exposed to a lot of things so that's affecting and then pandemic affected a lot of kids that's just kind of like why because the normal development stages of everything that these kids would acquire during many years of pandemic they were isolated they came back and many kids the anxiety that I see are struggling a lot with social but then other kids that are struggling with like anger or impulse control or they're depressed they're the ones that are doing the bullying like I always say if someone's bullying something's broken inside something they're hurting but they're trying to put their pain in you and the other kid that you know didn't get exposed to friends for five years they have to come on socialize and they're thinking that one's thinking that about me that one's thinking that about me so there's these convergence of factors and then that creates a cycle of they're seeking more online interactions which are less less risky but they they can go through rabbit holes like for eating disorders is definitely affecting because girls are looking for fitness healthy eating and they end up finding information that leads them to eating disorders comparing themselves bodies is satisfaction and information that's not evidence-based racquet like carbs are bad proteins bad don't eat fast like if you're hungry just drink water you might be just thirsty and they start starving themselves so following the truth that they feel like what they're seeing online is true they just believe it you know straight up so it's a lot of checking in talking to them preparing them of not everything that's online is true and your brain is growing so it's gonna catch on to these things and believe them so I think those two things are affecting kids right now you know and so what do you recommend to most parents and anyone listening to this podcast they do with the safe screen time like what are the thought leaders saying what is the okay amount of time that they should be allowed on social media one of them you were clear is prepare them explain to them not to take things as face value that not because someone says it is true what what do you recommend we all do actually we're having a battle in my home with my teens as to what is the right amount of time to spend scrolling on TikTok and snapshot is now become the the medium of texting and he's like well that's how you know all of our friends communicate and he's like and at least two other things yeah it's like the I've had patients that have been bullied in Snapchat and then they find out you know or they get rejected from a group and then they know that everybody's at this party and they're not there so how do they feel because it has the location so one of the things that I talk about with social media is one teach them about mindful use so you know let's let's let's do it together what are you looking at what it like or checking in after like how did you feel was there anything that made you feel bad about yourself or that you know a new information that you encountered and them being able to have like this self-checking that this mindfulness mindful mindful scrolling versus mindless scrolling so okay I'm you decide giving them some autonomy listening to them because if you prohibit and you're like no it's only going to be an hour and that's it it's gonna turn off that can also cause a lot of anxiety and they'll hide and they'll do against your will I had an patient that he's young he was like 11 and he got like two slip phones fake phones and he was accessing through that open fake accounts I'm like how do they even so it's like also the strong strong strong barriers sometimes don't have so it's more like keeping that connection that line of communication with your shall say I want to trust you I'm just trying to protect you and trying to be here for you so you can this kind of affect you in positive ways it's great positive things about social media and there's not like it so one the latest much as possible to social media contract there's some available online so what are the expectations what are the the things that are not allowed like you're not gonna post a picture of you have naked because that you know explaining the consequences of that or doing some high risk activity because once something's in the internet is there forever people use it to to blackmail you or you know or bully you so being careful with the content they post and the content they consume so in terms of consuming like you know what are the things that are affecting us you know like things that make us more emotionally depressed or sad it's the cyber bullying or the you know comparing ourselves and then the things that can be false information like if you if you find something that goes against like everything I've told you like checking with me because maybe we need to talk about maybe there's a halfway point in that instead of like just believing what the influencer said and like oh my mom was around this whole time I shouldn't be eating this and that and the other I'm just gonna go start myself so I can be like her um and then coming up with a compromise with them like hey I don't want you to have to go behind my back to look at it like I want us to compromise what do you think is fair for for social media use and you know kind of like when you say it's two hours um then she says it's two hours you're like what are we compromising and I ever have like I want you to eat a little bit and come to a midterm because they're always gonna want like more I feel but they need to be on board with it because that's the thing about teens they're finding their autonomy so you can't put like the strict limits like just you'd like because I said so kind of thing so then um then it's like talking to them like you know sometimes when I look at social media I feel sad because I start comparing myself with all the other moms they're doing such a great job they're doing this but then you know talking to my friends not all that is true people are only posting the positive people are posting their picture filtered things like that so you know I have to check in with myself how that make me feel and what beliefs is that making me believe about myself like I'm about mom I'm this and that and then let's let's talk about that because sometimes we can't check in good about in ourselves so I can be like sounding board for that um and the other thing I tell them is like when you decide that you're gonna do a hour like literally put a timer of an hour because then you go you don't measure the time and I know have a little plan of what you're doing like okay I'm gonna do 20 minutes of snapshot and 20 minutes of TikTok because you get absorbed and you go with the scrolling and the fast and then you can never stop and they need to learn how to stop themselves and then protecting the sleep time is the one other thing I tell them like all of that like maybe 30 minutes before sleep trying to turn it off putting in a separate place where you can like just grab it at night and then trying to turn the brain off I know that's hard for all of us that is so hard to believe in trying to do that in our family for five years and it's just not happening oh my god but yeah it's I'm glad you talked about this um it's hard but it's it's a new thing and it's like I heard on a video the day that I love Megan Markle she was like when the cars were invented she said you know it was like oh this great technology this new thing is gonna you know shortcut distances shortcut times it's the new advances to technology that are wonderful but then people started like having car crashes and people were you know driving and smoking and driving and drinking and whatever and then accidents happen that's happened you know and then they started putting the loss the restrictions so it's also on the governments and the policymakers and the teachers and the institutions to put their rules but it's going so fast that we're behind right when car crashes that are happening they started checking what what's going on oh people are drinking maybe they shouldn't drink and dry so then like it's a law like don't drink and dry like oh maybe how can we protect them or seat belts so I think the time is for all those protections are coming but as parents we're in the middle of that transition and it's so hard and I do have my kids they're young and they're telling me like mommy commercials are good we can learn about a lot of things and I was like I have to explain you know what commercials are they're marketing they're trying to convince you of something it's not for you learning I'm like oh we have to watch a lot of YouTube like we make it makes us smarter and they have found false information in there and I'm like look you see this like it's not true and try to back shape with them so but it's really I know that's a great analogy the one with the cars I know that I just told my teens that just just like social media and too much of that is negative let's focus if I'm gonna be a little more flexible in your social media I want you to use it for positive things like audio wall I want you to listen to a self-growth book every two weeks so that when you're online it's not just for it's not chatting and and TikTok very very helpful be distributed between those four things so what are the three things that you want to do and then let's do one positive thing for you so then time is two hours but then 30 minutes is gonna be the audible so that's a good well that's not what they want the extra time is for what I wanted to do yeah no two hours trust me took me years to get them down to two hours yeah before we move to a bit of your personal journey in working with me what other advice do you give to parents when their kids are complaining of physical pain and they have done the blood test they have done the exams and they're fine yeah so one of the things is kind of like to stop looking for more like to believe you know that the fact that we have gone through like we review all the tests that have been negative and be like you know see we haven't found anything and we're finding this and this is the way that I think this is affecting and just kind of like not something you don't have to point it out all the time but it help with the root cause so if it's anxiety or if it's depression kind of like understanding that that's not something that the child can't control it's not like it's more of a I try to explain to them that to imagine it in the unconscious mind and your nervous system being like hyperactive like asthma I try to explain it more as I disease because people have a lot of misconceptions and a mental health and especially not to be biased but like I am Latina and the Latina culture is like but yeah I told her not to be talking about that because then we're going to be like you know people are going to think we're crazy and or you know that's stigma so when I try to point it like more of a you know it's the condition that she can control it's more in her body because of what happened or because of their experience or whether they lived or sometimes it's unknown they they they kind of create more of an acceptance to it and then you know to practice of compassion of care to maybe share things that they've gone through because sometimes parents for kids they see them like oh but they've never been through something like this they're perfect or you know so being a little bit more vulnerable you know having time to listen but without like that typical questionnaire that you had other lessons you know it's like tell me about this like a lot of questions and they more want to be listened in their own terms so being there to listen and I'm not going to judge you and if you need help and if not me I'm going to get help so kind kind of being like a presence but not trying to solve it all the time and letting them go through their process and with the physical pain it's more like you know learning to if we know that this mental health condition is causing this so trying to address that first so like the mindfulness or we have like something that they can take to calm themselves down when when they're feeling the things that come before the actual physical pain so those are some of the things that we talk about.