Healing through divorce with Life Coach Sy Neary (Part 2)

The reason why I encourage people to do this work is I think that first off, I believe human beings have an inherent innate drive to excel in happiness, connectedness, productivity, philanthropy. I think that's built into it. But lack of healing curtail is all of those.

Right? So it helps keep us stuck in patterns that are not useful for us and they don't allow us to be our best self. So I think similar to like mouse loads higher up you've needs if you're familiar with that, right?

Very familiar. I think that we can't be self-actualized, tell the different parts of ourselves have been healed. So I think that's one reason I encourage people.

The other reason is actually very dear to me. And it's why I am committed to systemic family therapy. And that drives my passion every day.

I welcome to another episode of the Healing Podcast. 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 caring, milling your host and I believe that what we resist, persist 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 have an episode that gives us great news, great news because we are going to talk about two modalities that according to my amazing guest can make the healing process drastically faster and can heal without spending years in talk therapy without seeing significant results, which I know it was my experience until I tried deeper healing modalities.

And it is a deterrent to some of you who may want to tackle some of your issues, but may not want to spend years relieving the past or in talk therapy or counseling. Here with me, I have Paul Langfield, who has over 30 years of experience in mental health, including a license in three states as a marriage and family therapist, a national board certification in clinical hypnotherapy, and a certification in neuro linguistic programming. His clinical background includes impatient experience with addicted adolescents and providing individual and family treatment in a traumatic brain injury clinic.

Paul has been on the faculty of Colorado State University and has been a presenter at the National Council of Family Relations, authored many publications and is a graduate instructor and clinical supervisor in the marriage and family therapy graduate program at the Colorado State University, which keeps him current on new innovations in mental health space. Today he loves to work with couples and young adults and anyone looking to alleviate symptoms of anxiety. On our episode, we had an in-depth conversation about his background, the difference between traditional problems focused hypnotherapy that we discussed in detail on a few episodes on this podcast and the solution focused clinical hypnotherapy he practices today.

And how and why it works to reprogram your subconscious mind without having to go through what happened to you. We discussed how Paul's hypnosomatic ketamine assisted psychotherapy is the fastest and safest way to move past a trauma if that's the only way. And we had an in-depth discussion about what anxiety is and how he heals it.

To learn more about Paul and to work with him, you can find him on his website at cohesivesolutions. com. Solution is spelled creatively so be sure to enter S-O-U-L-U-T-I-O-N-S to get the right side.

If you find this episode as fascinating and helpful as I did, please do me a favor and subscribe to the podcast, give me a five-star rating and share it with friends or co-workers who may want to heal or reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety in a fast and secure way to help us on our mission to inspire as many people as possible to heal in, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction with your health and in every area of your life. Welcome to the Healing Podcast, Paul. I am so glad that you're finally here.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have an in-depth therapy or ketamine therapy or trauma or any direction you want to go. Awesome.

I heard about Paul. I heard about you through a very good friend of mine here in New York City, Tiffany. Who, by the way, I got permission to speak about if it came up.

Who had some unexplained health-related anxieties and one of the things I love about her is that we talk about our anxieties and our issues and our goal to reduce them or ideally eliminate them because they're not serving us and they're a pain in the butt to deal with things that we don't understand why they're happening. I had talked to her about hypnotherapy about three to four years ago and when she told me she started working with you, we both started to see in the progress and she was feeling better and making the decisions she wanted to make. When I started asking her, "So what is it about based on this podcast?"

I'm really curious about her things work. I'm like, "Oh, that's a different approach that what I heard." I'm like, "I got to have all on the podcast."

People, this guy is good. This guy is busy. We scheduled this interview in July of last summer and I had to cancel, I think, for health reasons and took me six more months to get him here and we're recording at night.

I have a bit of a cough, so I excused myself, but if I canceled, it would take me another six months to book you. I am so grateful that you're finally here. We always start this episode by sharing with our audience a little bit about your journey into the work you do today.

I know that you did some family marriage therapy and what got you into hypnosis and what got you to the work you do today. This is a potentially long question. I'm going to try and give you the reader's digest version because it has not been a straight path for me and I've been on some other podcasts where I actually went and kind of ended up with about my own story wasn't it?

But so I could say that the reader's digest version is that when I was younger in my 20s, I was a bright kid. By the time I was 24, I had three college degrees and I had opened my first private practice. I was on the faculty at Colorado State University.

I was working at a drug and alcohol treatment center for adolescent felons and I was working on my PhD at another university. So I had this ridiculous kind of capacity back then. And then a few years into my practice, it all came crashing down.

I was on my whole day home one night and I was stopped at a red light and a guy hit me from behind going about 45 miles an hour. No skid marks. He didn't even use skid marks.

So he didn't even see me. And my foot was firmly on the brakes and my carbs were all of that. And my head snapped back over the top of the headrest to the back of his seat.

And as my neurologist graphically put it, my fine tried to pull my brain out. It was all in the back of my skull. I ended up with a broken neck and got thoracic vertebrae and herniated disc.

But mostly impactful was traumatic brain. I was completely non-volatile. So sorry.

So I lost all these. That's my trauma, right? But it was a long time ago.

So I shut down my practice. I resigned from the treatment center. I dropped out of school and I went into about a year and a half of rehab learning how to speak again, cognitive rehab, neuropsych, occupational therapy.

I was seeing sometimes 30 doctors a week. And I did that for, you know, a year and a half. Anyway, so it's that probably on a totally different trajectory.

And they told me was anything I, my brain is like a muscle. And anything I was going to get back, I was going to get back in a year and a half. And if I worked my muscle out, I would, I would heal.

And if I didn't, I wouldn't. And so I said, what does that look like? And so well, you need completely different stimuli, unique stimuli than what you're used to.

So I went to the library and I got a book on computers. And I started building computers. And that was my rehab and that eventually years later led to a, to another degree in computer operations and a career in IT, kind of in the middle of all this.

But in meantime, when I was killed enough to back into therapy, I actually was invited to work at a traumatic brain injury treatment center. Just working with traumatic brain injuries with people's and their family. So obviously, I had some unique insight into that.

Oh, I did that. And then I don't, you know, you probably remember when I don't know if you were managed to care came again to the scene, but it really managed to care really kind of destroyed. I was completely reliant on insurance company because the people I was seeing were car accidents and workers comp and managed care came in and just said, we don't have to pay for a brain injury treatment anymore because it doesn't show up on a CAT scan or an MRI.

And overnight, I was in a multidisciplinary practice with probably all other practitioners. And overnight, everyone, my own businesses are me, the neuropsychosis like that. And so I never burned out on being a therapist, but I burned out on the whole insurance gig.

And so I left, I went shut down that practice, I went in IT and I climbed the corporate ladder, became a VP of IT for a multi-billion dollar corporation. That wasn't my passion. And so with the help of my wife and her encouragement, she said, you got to get back a passion.

A number of years later, I gave up this ridiculous salary benefits. And I, by then, my license had laps. So I got my license back on my certifications in hypnotherapy and L.

P. All of that had laps. I got all those back.

And then I dumped, I unleashed and I jumped back in. So and I've been, remember thinking, I made half as much money, you know, as a therapist as I made the corporate world happy. I am busy, as you said.

And I've replaced that salary and I'm helping the world in a different way. So that's kind of how I got to where I am. Wow.

Yeah. Very heroic. So did you started with hypnotherapy from the beginning of your career and you got back to it or was it something that came after?

No, I started in the very beginning. In fact, I got my hypnotherapy certification when I was 22 and I didn't get my graduate degree till I was 24. I was actually a hypnotherapist a couple of years while I was in graduate school.

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

So we have a few episodes on hypnotherapy. Actually, I went back to them and they were in February of 2021. So, you know, wow, three years ago.

And we talked a lot about how it's useful to accessing the subconscious. And both episodes were mooring to let's go back to the subconscious and let's get information, let's retrieve information. It's funny because one of them was talking about information technology and accessing files and, you know, working with whatever memory you choose to work with and processing it and healing it and letting it go.

But what I understand is that what you practice is a bit different. Would you like to share with us perhaps a little history into the different types of hypnotherapy and why you chose what you practice? Yeah.

Yeah. So I watched that episode with Janet Filman and she made an excellent point that different hypnotherapists probably approach a very different ways. And I would guess the way I approach hypnotherapy is drastic different than you heard in the other in the other ones.

So I don't see hypnotherapy as a career in and of itself. As you can tell, I was always a learner. I was kind of a bit of a school and I still am always wanting to learn more, right?

So I see hypnotherapy as one tool in my toolbox. But I have a lot of tools. I use a lot of CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy.

Yes. I use a lot of IFS internal family systems. In fact, I was just talking to big shorts a couple months ago about ketamine and again IFS.

How he's going. Anyway, I started out my initial training was in heart centered hypnotherapy. This is back in 1992.

The idea was exactly what Janet kind of shared. You take a, what's called a feeling bridge back. I never regress people based on specific event or specific time.

Because if you do that, you run the risk of creating false memories. Because our client comes in and they say, "Hey, I think something happened to me when I was 10 years old. Can you hypnotize me and take me back to find out my answer is no.

I can't do that." Because they already came in with a preconceived notion and they're likely to find what they expect to find and therefore it invalidates. What I could do is I would take a behavior.

It's because I keep doing this behavior over and over again. Oh, I do it and keep doing it in blah, blah, blah. I say, "What's the feeling you have right before you do that behavior?"

And they give me a feeling. Then you take what's called the feeling bridge back. So you do a regression based on that feeling.

One of the first times in the most intense time due experience that feeling. You have no idea where you're going to land. But when you land there, you can be pretty confident that it's real because you're not directing them.

And then the idea was we all experience, when you talk to professionals, experts on trauma, they refer a lot to childhood. And of course, we all have the opportunity to experience traumas in adult too, just as I did with the car accident. But the reason we talk so much about piled traumas, because the fundamental element of trauma is lack of control, lack of power.

If you think about any situation, I didn't have any control of power when that guy hammered into me a formula. Someone who's a salt that doesn't have any power of control in that situation. With children, the trauma is more intense for two reasons.

One is children don't have power control in their life. And so most of us respond to threat with fight, flight, or freeze. As an adult, we may be able to fight, we may be able to run away, or we could freeze.

Children, mostly the first two are off the table, right? They can't fight. They're not going to run away, or they're going to be back in a week, right?

So they only freeze. And that is the least powerful way to respond to a traumatic event. So I think that's why we talk about childhood trauma.

I just wanted to kind of talk to you. So the idea, again, of the way I was trained is you would go back to that time and that child needed something, right? They needed protection.

They needed someone to tell them this isn't your fault. They needed someone to accept them. They need someone to say you're precious and loved, right?

So the process of that kind of hypnotherapies, you go back and you actually kind of bring the child onto your lap as an adult, right? So your adult becomes the parent for your child and you put them on your lap and you say, and you call them all of those things, right? And it threw that a healing process at once.

And when you come back to the present, that behavior tends to go away because it was driven by that emotion and not that emotion. Let me ask you something. So when you I was training cognitive behavioral therapy and my coaching and my coach is solely CVT, except I am so trauma informed and I take a lot of courses that I do when we were exploring the thought, right?

And the thought about a situation and they talk about the feelings that that thought gave them. I do go back and say, when was the last time you felt this way? When was the first time you said this way?

So when it comes to hypnotherapy, do you stop the client then and then sort of go through a meditative state to go back to do a hypnotherapy and then go back to that time or how does that work? So I'm going to take us on a different path, your real quick, because what I was heading toward is that's how I was trained in hypnotherapy. That is not how I practice hypnotherapy today.

Right, that's yeah. And that is because, so I was trained, so I have a degree in psychology, my practice is a marriage and family pharaohs. And that decision was because it's a very different philosophical aspect, the different orientation completely.

So psychology is rooted in the medical model, which tends to be linear, tends to be hierarchical, right? The patient is sick, doctor, diagnosis, doctor treats, patient gets better. I was trained in systemic solution focused family therapy.

And when I'm working at CSU now, that's what I'm teaching. So the idea, I don't know how familiar your listeners are to kind of solution focused on systemic therapy, but the idea is that we tend to deemphasize because the idea of systemic therapy is that we're all involved in systems, right? We have family systems, we have school systems, we have work systems, and even within ourselves, if you're familiar with IFS, right?

We have systems within with the with the. So the idea is as a therapist, I become part of a client's system automatically, right? That's part of the process.

And as a therapist, I need to play a role that allows that person to move forward and change. So systemic family therapy is based on change in the present time, right? I have a client who comes in with a trauma and they've been focused on that trauma for the last 10 years.

If I as a therapist jump back in time with them to that time, number one, I'm kind of giving them a stamp of approval as a professional, it says it's okay to live in the past and it's stay victimized. And I'm also potentially being stuck there with them, right? So I gather history and I'm definitely trauma-informed, which I get to because I do most of that work with ketamine, but solution-focused therapist, I'm focused more on what do you need today and where do you want to get tomorrow and how do you get there?

And so I practice a type of hypnotherapy, it's Ericsonian, right? Which is so it's not the directive you will close your eyes and you will go into trans, right? It gets metaphoric, it's very much an art form.

And so I determine like for instance if someone has anxiety or depression, I'll schedule a hypnotherapy session with them and I'll have a strategy going in and it's largely metaphorical. So I'll do a I'll do an induction and I'll do a deepener and then I will talk metaphorically, I might tell them a story, but that story, every word that I say is very precise, right? And I might go through that story and I'm talking to their unconscious mind about how they can move past the situation.

So a story related to their anxiety? Yeah, so for example, I might do an induction and then say and you can imagine yourself, you know, in a forest. So for the sorry, the audience that don't know what an induction is, what is an induction?

So an induction is the way you get someone into an altered state of okay. And when we talk more about the specific way that I do hypnotherapy that's unique, talk more about, but you know, when we're awake, we're in a certain state of consciousness before a awake and you know, kind of excited, before a late awake and quiet, if we're in hypnosis, that those are all measurable, electrically measurable brain patterns, right? We know what the frequency of hypnosis is.

We know what the frequency of unconscious mind induction is how you take a person from right awake, down into that hypnotic state for there in the state of mind where they're prefrontal cortex, is the part of our brain that is prefrontal cortex is it's all about judgment and it's all about, it's like the naysayer in a brain storming situation, right? So you've got a group of people who are trying to be creative, right? And you've got the one person who's like, you don't have time for that, where are we going to get the money, you know, and you just want that person to be quiet down so that the creative process can happen, right?

That's what hypnotherapy is largely about, it's quieting down that prefrontal cortex because it shoots down any ideas of how the person can see themselves differently before the ideas even come out of the unconscious. So you do the induction and then a metaphor might be as simple as let's say someone has low self esteem, right? I might talk to them about Ray Povin and how he got increasingly deaf as he got older and one time he was facing New York at your when he finished the symphony and the audience erupted in a pause, he didn't, he couldn't hear that until someone came out and turned him around so that he could see what he could not hear and what we all need to know about ourselves is, you know, beauty is in the by-I of the holder, right?

And the truth about one's beauty is often in that realm and I might tell a story about someone who thinks they're ugly and awful and horrible and they're at lunch with an artist and the artist says, you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. That's not to lie. And because that person was an artist, that woman couldn't ignore that and I had just a statement of fact and how she fought change and how she perceived herself change, right?

So it tells a real stories like this so that when they come out I'm actually talking directly to the unconscious wild and their conscious mind is off doing something else. So it's like you are reprocessing their thoughts and their beliefs and so for example in the case of our friend or your my friend, your client, she's, every time she has an age she feels like he's cancer and she's going to die. So you are speaking to her subconscious mind, you are healthy, you are, what would you say?

So this would be again, this would be a multi-passive approach, right? Because I'm going to talk to her at CBT, right? And for people who aren't, if your listeners aren't familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, we know from functional MRIs that we have thoughts first, then we have behaviors, right?

I'm assuming we have thoughts first, then we have feelings, then we have behavior. It doesn't happen any other way. So I'm going to be doing work with someone like her on a CBT level and talk to her.

Okay. But then I'm going to do therapy, I'm going to reinforce that, right? Because her conscious mind may get it.

It doesn't mean her unconscious mind isn't going to sabotage that. It did not sabotage it in that way or on purpose, but that's what our unconscious mind does. Paul, so do you?

Obviously this is very effective. You know, I have a business degree, you don't continue to do anything that is not effective in the market, right? It would not, people would not come back, people would not do it.

But with your other experience with IFS and I know KIDA mind that we're going to talk about in trauma, as a coach, I do CBT and he's statistically evidence to work 70% of the time. And I'm sure your experience, my experience, you're working with someone, you look at the thoughts, you challenge them, they're like, oh my god, yes, what else would you rather think that he's struggling versus he's a terrible person? And usually sometimes it works, and this is like done.

In sometimes, obviously when there's trauma and trigger, they come back with the same issue and the same thought and that CBT did not work. And that's when the podcast becomes very handy because he's like, well, listen to EMDR, listen to hypnotherapy, listen to IFS, listen to attachment-based therapy, and they find what works for them or what, you know, sometimes I can guide them. But with your original approach and with a trauma approach, where you go back and access those memories and where that original trauma started, right?

The memories that made someone have an alert in their body, I'm not safe, run, right? We get triggered and you with EMDR or even the traditional sort of heart center hypnotherapy, you go back and you relive that a bit and you reprocess it and you hold that child in your lab and he's like, okay, Karen, okay, Tiffany, you're not ate anymore, you're safe now. I found that also healing.

When do you choose to do this reprogramming, more like meditation, approach versus a trauma, go deep, go relive that experience, you know, if it's safe enough, because that could be extremely retraumatizing, to heal that way. That's a great question. And it comes down to kind of exactly what you just said.

I'm likely to take an aeraxonian solution focused approach right off the bed. Sometimes because of trauma or other things, it really is rooted. And I sometimes there's a belief that the only way passed is through.

I don't think that's true all the time. Okay. I think that's true, a certain percentage of the time.

And when people are not responding to something else, that's when I go in, right? So if I do the cognitive behavioral therapy and stuff on it, and that's not changing, then I'll go into hypnotherapy. And if I'm going to do a regression, so let me back up a little bit.

I know a lot of people do talk therapy around trauma. I'm not judgmental about that because I think it can work. It takes an extremely skilled therapist.

I think the risk is you retraumatize. To me, a hypnosis gives me a level of control that I don't have in that environment. So if I'm going to do trauma work with someone, I can do what's called the triple dissociation.

I can take them into a movie theater and have them sit in the seat in the middle looking up at the screen. And then I can have them come out of their own body and come behind the projector looking through the projector grass at themselves and up the screen. And then I can have the screen be black and white photo, or I can have it be in a movie.

There are all kinds of, this is all neuro linguistic programming. I can protect them in a way I can't talk therapy. I love that.

And I got it right away after you said it. In essence, why go through, why go through the terrible memories if you don't have to, if this way can be effective. And I also thought about men and children who, and I'm being stereotypical, but most men don't want to go to therapy.

They don't want to talk about it. They want to bury it. It never happened.

It's more difficult than most women are like, let's talk about it. We know we're socialized to talk. We're socialized to feel it's okay for us to cry.

So okay for us to break down. This approach, it's a lot more safer and and I feel like it's more human and it's much more efficient. Yes.

And I know that I spoke to you about a few, one of my daughters who was testing inside and I know where it comes from, but she's too young to want to even go back there and do EMDR or remember that. And I do share that you heard the episode with Janet and I did do hypnosis. And it was very retraumatizing.

It was very hard for me. I had to go back to her two days after and I'm like, I just can't shake this anger I have because I remembered how I was bullied and what happened. And I'm like, I didn't want to do it again.

I didn't go back because it is hard. Like who wants to go back there if you don't need to. So I totally get it Paul.

At first, I'm like, you know, I knew it worked. I know I've seen the results, but I'm like, I don't get it, get it. Like why not go through it and reprocess it and repair it yourself and I don't think there's enough research to show that talking over and over again about our problem tells us anything about and that's why I'm solution focused therapist and I'm solutioned.

Again, I think there are times when the only way it passes through, but I actually in my experience over 30 years, that's the minority. And when I get there these days, I might do a little, I'll do some hypnotherapy probably not with the regression. If I'm going to help someone dig through that trauma and then he is ketamine therapy and I'll tell you why.

Oh, tell me why. Tell me why because you're saying that that, you know, you're trying to not go through it, which is like every episode I find in the podcast is like, get through it. It sucks.

It's hard, but he's worth it. And it's almost always worth it. I mean, I obviously don't have a therapy and as much as terrible as it is, it is worth it.

But so get a mind. Tell me about why. It's a hypnotherapy.

It's all about preciseness of language and the influence you might have on someone else. So I want to tell you just kind of a story, right? Like you just said, you know, it sucks and it takes a long time.

I was doing clinical supervision at CSU. And, you know, so these are younger therapists. They're not younger, necessarily, but the newer, you know, they're just kind of getting their feet wet.

So I'm behind the one way mirror. I've got a telephone to call in and not kind of thing. And, you know, newer therapists, someone might come in and tell them about it specifically, right?

And in order for the therapists to feel like they're joining and connecting and their clients being heard, the therapist starts saying, oh, you know, that's really horrible. You know, we can get through this. It's going to be really hard and it's going to take a long time.

I'm on the phone going, stop talking and come behind the one way mirror. And they come behind the one way mirror and I say, look, I understand your passion, and I understand your empathy and that's wonderful. But you're giving your client who is susceptible right now because they just told you about a trauma, which means in their brain, they're having something called a PGO spike.

And a PGO spike makes people more susceptible to suggestion, right? So they just told you their trauma. They're in a PGO spike and you're sitting there pulling them how long it's going to take, how painful it's going to be.

How is that benefiting your client? Right? So I, you know, it can be hard.

It can be painful. And in my experience, it can also not be hard. And it can be fairly quick, right?

And so those kinds of belief systems are what, as they have no therapists, I'm actually kind of trying to pull people out of them. Does that make sense? So I know this is probably a little bit kind of out of, I mean, we're going in different direction, which is, I don't know, it's the ADD thing from my traumatic brain injury, right?

But let's talk Academy in a little bit because it is, it is a remarkable medicine for several reasons, for main reasons. One is it, it, it, it, why it's down your prefrontal cortex. The same way that hypnosis does, it provides some safety.

And when you've done that prefrontal cortex, that's the nasaire, but you actually have it more opportunity to have insights into yourself. So there are two kinds of ketamine therapy. One kind that kind of came from anesthesiologists, because it's initially an anesthesiology, right?

Once they realized that this could massively impact depression, they started doing high dose ketamine to deal with depression. It used to be back in the day. If you had a client who was so actively suicidal, that if you left them alone for an hour, they were going to be dead.

The only way to keep that person alive was electric convulsive shock therapy, right? Which has a really bad reputation, right? But in that situation, it literally was life-saving.

The only way you're going to keep this person alive. Anesthesiologists figured out that you could give someone a high dose of ketamine intravenously and have the same reason. So someone's got this massive suicidality, you give them a high dose ketamine thing.

They've last stopped the moon and God and the stars. They come back and magically their suicidality is gone. So that's where it started.

Tell my audience, is that we would go to your office and get an intravenous, get an injection and how is it administered, how does it work? We'll go into that. So that's where it started.

But that is not at all what I do. Because that started in the mental health realm, what we realized is that most of the antidepressants, which are only symptom relievers, not healing. Not healers.

Most of the antidepressants are dealing with serotonin, more of naffrine, both parts of the brain and that chemical system. It operates in the GABA energy system. It is a completely different system.

So we've started to realize people who have treatment resistant depression, they've tried five SSRIs, they've been in therapy, they've, you know, maybe don't remember having joy in their life for decades or ever. All of a sudden they might respond to ketamine because it works in a different system. So what I do is is low dose, a bling-glow ketamine and I do ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

It's not the same as ketamine therapy. So when people come in my office, right, they have the ketamine, they dissolve it under their tongue and it is low dose, which means that they can still interact with me, they know who they are, the goal is not to go see God in the plants, right? The goal is to do therapy.

And the ketamine itself has a lot of benefits and those are the ones I'm going to go into in a minute. So they do low dose ketamine and the reason I got into ketamine-assisted therapy is because of hypnosis. 30 years I've been working with the unapologized mind, right?

But when I'm doing hypnosis, it's not very interactive. It's mostly me popping and the client listening because if I'm asking them questions, critical questions, they're going to go to their conscious mind for the answer, which is going to pull them out of them. But I started thinking, what if they had a medicine that could keep them in the trance, they can manage the trance so that my client and I can now have a dynamic, interactive therapy scene.

The same benefits as hypnosis will be more and I don't have to maintain the trance. That's how I got into ketamine-assisted therapy because a low dose ketamine will put you in a trance state that is very similar to him. So sorry, to get this right, the add-on to hypnosis is that they would still be on the trance, they still numb out the critical part of their brain, but they can have a conversation with you.

Correct. And it gets better. This kind of gets better.

But ketamine clients don't perform perfect so they can see themselves in a different way and maybe have different insights. Also something called the default mode network. And that is three areas of the brain that wire together when we're growing up and they become our default way of operating in the world.

So our default way of looking at us, our default way of responding to threat, our default way of communicating with our spouse. So if you think about anxiety, for example, I also want to get into what causes anxiety and why hypnosis. But people who have anxiety have a default way of responding to threats that is unhelpful.

But you can have two people doing this exact same thing. They say they're getting on an airplane. One person is thinking, I don't have three hours where nobody needs me and all I can do is read my books.

This is awesome. You have another person who's terrified with anxiety. Same plane, same destination, same experience, but they process it differently.

That's a subway with me. I get anxiety to get in the subway. My heart is racing.

I'm looking at everyone and then I meet someone, they're reading a book, taking an app. But I'm like, oh my god. Yeah.

So you and I could have talk therapy session about that for a long time. And hopefully you get some benefit. But it is slow.

When I'm supervising therapists who don't have hypnotherapy background and they're working with anxiety, these are good therapists, they're doing good interventions, they know their stuff, but it takes forever. And in the back of my head, I'm thinking myself, of course, I never say this. Back my head, I'm thinking myself, just give you this client for pre-sessions, it's due to hypnosis.

It has to be right so we can move on. So I'm getting back to the academy. The default mode now, you and I do talk therapy about anxiety.

You might have the experience of understanding it, you get it, you know where it came from, you know it's irrational, but you get back out into the world and guess what you have the same experience? Why? Because your default mode network is in place.

And as we grow older, the older we get the more rigid the default mode network gets. So it does not change. And so that's where you're having a situation where you're talking to someone you're saying, I don't understand.

I know exactly why I meant just I know what caused it. And you know that I'm safe and I'm still terrified. Default mode network.

But what ketamine does is it softens the default mode now for about 72 hours after you take it. So if you start putting these things together now, someone comes in their freefrontal cortex is now mellowed out so they can see themselves in more creative ways. Default mode network is soft and more reliable so they can actually take that moment in sight.

And over the course of 72 hours, they can actually rewrite their default mode network so that their default way of existing in the world is different. Amazing. So do you have a longer session with them to capitalize on that opportunity?

And we program them and relax them or I'm sure they can't go to work after they're like all in on a healing mode. They're all in on a healing mode and for that 72 hours afterwards, they really need to be protected. Because again, if your default mode network is softened, if your model protects is softened, you don't want to be having conflict, you don't want to be right having angry words.

You want to be journaling, you want to be listening to music, you want to be walking in nature, you want to be with a loved one. Yeah. Right.

You want supportiveness and then you can rewrite that default mode network in a way that's more useful. Fascinating. So it's extremely powerful.

And it's better. And is it approved in the United States? I've had sessions on SiloFsivein and I just had you know Ayahuasca and SiloFsivein, right?

Yeah. That is illegal still and there's a lot of research. How is it different from psychedelics?

It's the word. Yeah. Yeah.

So first off, ketamine is not technically a psychomore. Okay. Although it can't feel like which we can look a little bit more.

Let me finish with the last couple things about ketamine and then I'll tell you why it's a house. So you got the softening that default mode network. The other thing that's different about ketamine is that for some reason, probably because of the two things I've just talked about, people have a different kind of courage approaching hard things.

But when I was being trained as a ketamine-assisted therapist, I went through my own ketamine therapy, right? I can remember at one point I saw this big black hole in the middle of my stomach, big black mass. And the therapist said, do you want to go back to a resource state?

Do you want to go back to the ocean in the beach and relax? Or do you want to go into that middle of that black hole? And I heard my voice say, let's go into it.

I have that experience with every client on ketamine I see. Something comes up and it's scary. It's held.

They would never even consider approaching it normally. And you give them the choice and they go, because they always have the choice, they go, let's go into it. So they dive into this.

So this is where in those situations where the only thing we can ask really is through, this is why I prefer ketamine. They will dive into that. And it's not that it's numbing them out.

You still get a motion that had a client this morning who was wailing and weeping. The motion is still there. But it is not scary.

And when they come out, they're out. So that's another benefit. And then the fourth one, I want to say, I know I'm losing a lot of time.

A lot to say. But the fourth one is ketamine is neurogenetic. So I can do a scan of someone's brain who has chronic anxiety, chronic stress or chronic depression.

I can see parts of that brain that are actually atroping and dying off. After ketamine treatment, I can do a scan again. And I'll see those neurons getting healthier.

And only that else, the brand new neurons, growing and reaching out to different parts of the brain. So unlike SSRIs and other antidepressants, it is actually healing the brain. That's amazing.

I heard through Dr. Amin's similar scans with EMDR that you see the trauma, you see it on a MRI. And after sessions, you see a decrease.

But it seems so interesting. No, this is fascinating. And I love that it's more that is legal, that is more controllable.

I had some episodes and it's interesting that they were talking about MDMA, which is ecstasy, ecstasy and an illegal drug. And how it induces dopamine and oxytocin. So allows you to go back to your trauma a little less scared and a little more surrounded with love and all this hormones.

But it's still very scary because you could also go to see the universe and all this super traumatic things. And you know, it's so ketamine is a little more controllable, more studying. It's been studied and it's been legal for decades.

It's different from things like psilocybin in ways because I've sat with people through psilocybin, you know, as a it's funny because not funny. It's interesting. Now in Colorado, psilocybin is legal.

But because of the way it was written and they haven't made regulations in place, as long as you're not licensed, you can do anything you want with psilocybin. You can sit with people like that stuff. But if you're actually licensed and could actually help someone, it's illegal.

You're going to sit with someone who's psilocybin. That is so interesting. It won't be that way.

I don't think it a year, but it is. But again, so in Colorado, a lot of people are talking psilocybin, this is so, which, and I think at the good medicine, it is neurodynamic, all those things. But it's unpredictable.

You don't know what strain you're getting. You don't know where this is more buttons or stems. Is it how strong is it?

Well, well, you don't know who made it. You don't know any reliability on that. Yeah, I am.

Last a long time, ketamine is very predictable. You take it and pretty much an hour later, you're done. That's awesome.

psilocybin might be five hours, eight hours. And so if you're paying a therapist to say a lot of freaking money, yeah, and the unpredictable aspect of it, as we wrap up, Paul, let's talk about anxiety. Insighting something that plagues a lot of humankind.

And I've heard it defined as a alarm system in our body. It's a bit of the fight or flight or right, it's more of that, you know, something is telling us we are in danger. And how do you define anxiety and how, what do you treat it best in your opinion?

So I define anxiety as a mostly non-adaptive, habitual response that results in a primitive sympathetic nervous system body reaction. Like increased heart rate cortisol adrenaline, right? So that's the fight or flight that you're talking.

It's a pression of non-emergency systems like digestion, sex drive all right to me, that's anxiety. And so listeners might be going, we'll wait a minute. It sounds like this guy is saying that anxiety is a physical problem more so than a mental problem.

In some ways, that's exactly what I'm saying. Anxiety is a physical thing, right? When you talk to people at anxiety, it's the physical feeling they don't like.

Right. Generated by emotional and thought processes that I want to talk more about. But it is a physical problem.

This is why one of the reasons why hypnosis is so effective, right? You can use hypnosis therapy to manage all kinds of physical things. I mean, I had, when I was in my 20s, two impacted wisdom teeth, they had to chisel out of my jaw.

So as oral surgery and they want to do full anesthesia, I used zero anesthesia. I used hypnosis to out my wisdom teeth chiseled out, right? Because the brain is very, very powerful.

So if I can help people with that physiological response, right? And the symptoms go away. And in order to understand anxiety, I think you have to understand the difference between fear and anxiety.

Because they're very different things. The fear is an adaptive evolutionary response that's useful. And it is a two-step process.

If I'm walking down the street, I'm going for a walk. A big dog comes running out from behind this blue house and it's growling, teeth growing. It's going to take my leg off, right?

I see the dog, step one. And my amygdala, another part of my brain, fire out, fight or fight, step two. So two-step process.

Because I know that dog's dangerous inherently. And I also know it has maybe it beat my neighbor, right? Anxiety is, and it's not, anyway, it's adaptive, right?

Because I'm getting my adrenaline going and I'm looking for a stick. And then I fight off that dog or I run away. And in the process of doing that, I burn off the adrenaline.

I burn off the cortisol. I burn off all that energy. I get back to a state.

Anxiety is a three-step process. I'm now walking down the same block of a weak layer. I see the blue house.

No dog. I start thinking that's where that dog came from. I start imagining that dog coming out and that dog has its teeth growing, rolling.

I start looking for a stick, right? But there's no dog. He that dog will get a hold of my leg.

It rips off my calf and there's flesh growing over there and I'm in the ambulance, right? Part of our brain that kicks off fight or flight, largely is the amygdala. The amygdala is pretty rudimentary.

It does not discern the difference between what is real and what is imagined. So as I'm imagining all of this stuff that is not happening, when amygdala is taking off fight or flight, that is anxiety. It's not adapted.

It's not helpful. The important part is it's being correlated by my prefrontal cortex. That's the part of me that's saying, "Oh, I can imagine this dog ripping my leg."

So someone has anxiety. You need to stop that thought process. With CBT, you might point all this out and say, "Look, you need to stop thinking this way."

But quite frankly, if you got your conscious mind and you're unconscious mind and you're battling it out, you're unconscious mind wins every time. So if CBT doesn't work, that's when I go, actually, I don't even think it can bind me. If CBT and hypnosis, they're on opposite of those spectrums, they work great.

So I would do hypnotherapy to get the body to stop flying that because that is a habitual response. You stop the habit. Habits by definition are unconscious.

I hear you. Yeah. It totally makes sense.

It's extremely useless and painful experience to have anxiety. It's exactly that. I feel that in the subway.

Nothing's happening. But I'm thinking September 11. I'm thinking terrorists.

I'm thinking I'm going to have a gas bomb. I'm thinking we're going to get raped by just immediately. Nothing's happening.

But I am feeling all this things, which is very maladaptive and useless. Yeah, you're positive. But if we could get your prefrontal cortex to stop doing guess what?

Symptoms go away. You know how triggers work, right? So my boss has the same tone of voices.

My dad had when I was six years old and I lied to him and I'm in trouble. Now I'm a six year old talking to my boss. There is a correlate to that, which is anchors.

Anchors, you can anchor positive states. You can anchor them visually, auditorily and kinesthetic. Right?

So if I have someone who is going in for a job interview and they need to really nail it, I put them in a light trance. I would have them go back to some times in their life. This is when I will do it.

Back to times in their life when they're grateful. Powerful. Maybe they won an award.

They're walking across the stage, getting their degree, whatever it is. And I'll watch their physiology, right? The confidence and the power and the strength and the focus when it gets to its peak.

I'll say just let your unconscious mind give you a color. Any color that represents what you're feeling right now. And then let your up to that's visual.

Then the layer unconscious mind give you a word. Any word that represents how you're feeling. And then I want you to touch your thumb and finger on one hand together like it gets really feel that power.

If that anchor, I can test that anchor after the session. I'll bring them out of the trance. I'm sitting on the couch.

We're talking about something else. They do me a favor. Just close your eyes.

See purple. Hear that word power and do this. And I'll watch their physiology.

If their physiology changes, I know that anchor took. Right? And then I'll tell them when you go into your interview, they say you're going to sit in its chair.

I want you to throw a purple circle around my chair on the ground. And as you step into that circle, I want you to say that word power and I want you to sit down and do this under the table. They will nail that interview because I have just anchored.

I just thought up an anchor for that state. So if you think of that in terms of things like anxiety, you get the person very calm and relaxed. You teach them how to put themselves in a trance and then you anchor that state.

The next time you're getting on the subway, you take a deep breath. You see purple or whatever it is. You do this.

Boom. That anchor comes in and it calmer acts the physiological thing going on your body. You do that a couple times.

And your default way of responding to perceived threat changes. And your anxiety goes away because if you do that two or three times because of neuroplasticity, you start developing a new way of responding to that threat. Yeah.

Be an amazing thing. So this has been amazing. It's been really, really, really helpful.

I've loved all the definitions, all the reminders, things make a ton of sense to me and I'm sure my audience can be very helpful. Well, I ask, oh my guess, what does healing mean to you? How do you define healing?

That was a great question. I think to me, healing refers to a process leading to physical, emotional and spiritual change that happens at a core level that results in complete alleviation of symptoms without maintenance by a drug or some extra. So for example, right?

Because of my traumatic brain injury, right? I have healed, I think largely emotionally from that. That's why when I spoke to me when I first telling you, oh, you know, and you had that empathy, which I appreciate.

But I'm like, it's not a deal right? Emotionally, I'm through that. But I will, I still take brain injury medication 26 years later because physically, I am not healed.

I'm emotionally healed. I'm not physically, right? So I still need medication physically, but emotionally, I think I'm pretty good.

Because if I stop taking my medication for my brain and start locking the keys in my car, forgetting my wallet, missing appointments, right? So to me, that's the difference between healing and just kind of simple. I hear you.

And what can you, how can you encourage people to do this work, especially men who have such a hard time getting support doing this. Another excellent question. And I'm going to answer it in two ways.

The reason why I encourage people to do this work is I think that first off, I believe human beings have an inherent innate drive to excel in happiness, connectedness, productivity, philanthropy. I think that's built in, but lack of healing curtail is all of those. Right?

So it helps keep us stuck in patterns that are not useful for us, and they don't allow us to be our best self. But I think similar to like, you now it's low, higher our feet of needs if you're familiar with that, right? Very familiar.

I think that we can't be self-actualized, tell the different parts of ourselves have been healed. So I think that's one reason I encourage people. The other reason is actually very dear to me.

And it's why I am admitted to systemic family therapy. And that is, and this drives my passion every day. You're why?

Yeah, it's my why. It is, it is, it's intergenerational legacy. Right?

So if I have a client, I mean, if I have, I love working with young people, you know, 20, you know, 1920, 20, even young couples, because if I can help someone at age, they have their whole life right where they're not continuing to roll that snowball down, whether it's depression or something, whatever, right? But I also know I'm helping a family, I'm helping a couple keep their marriage healthy. They're going to be better parents.

If they're better parents, their children, right, are growing up in a different and much better, more functional world. And I say to myself all the time, actually, you say this to the client sometime, I know that based on what I do, some great grandchild way down the road when I'm already in the grave is going to have a better life, a better marriage, a better family, more happiness, more self-fulfillment, because the work I'm doing and the client gets the credit, right? I say to the client, the work that you're doing right now, it's helping you a lot, which is awesome.

But it is way bigger than that. You're helping great grandkids who haven't even been born yet because you are dedicated to your own healing. Beautifully said, it affects them and everyone around them, right?

Their spouse, their children, their society, their neighbors. It's amazing. Paul very, very well said.

I do believe that good thing, take time, and it took a while to get you here, but it was totally worth it. Worth doing this at night, I am so grateful for your valuable time. This has been amazing.

I know it's going to have killer downloads. And thank you so much for your time. Oh, I appreciate you inviting me and I appreciate your flexibility with the timing because I love doing this.

I'm a, like I said, at CSU, I'm a graduate instructor. I like teaching, I like doing those, it's awesome to me. And in all honesty, there's probably 10 other things.

I could fill a whole other conversation about why hypnosis works, how it works, how the unconscious mind and the conscious mind work together or on with the other. So maybe we need to get beyond the schedule. I love that.

I love that. Well, thank you so much. You are so welcome.

Thank you.