Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Join trauma therapist and host, Lindsay Faas as we explore the limitations of talk therapy in supporting trauma processing for First Responders and Front Line Workers. We open the conversation about alternative treatment interventions and therapy models that we'll dive deeper into in coming episodes.
Created for First Responders and Front Line Workers to tackle the challenges of working on the front lines. Dig into topics on burnout, workplace dynamics, managing mental health, balancing family life...and so much more. Created and hosted by Lindsay Faas, clinical counsellor and trauma therapist. View the show notes, and access bonus resources at https://my.thrive-life.ca/behind-the-line.
Hey there and welcome back to Behind the Line.
I’m your host Lindsay Faas. If you are new to Behind the Line, what you should know about me is that I am a clinical counsellor specializing in trauma therapy, and after over a decade working with First Responders and Front Line Workers around issues like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and related OSI’s, I have become a passionate wellness advocate and educator for those who sacrifice so much for our communities out on the front lines. Behind the Line is a place for us to talk about the real life behind the scenes challenges facing you on the front lines. I created this podcast with the hope of bringing easy access to skills for wellness – allowing you to find greater sustainability, both on the job and off.
Guys, it’s September. I don’t know about you, but September has always felt like my fresh start. I know a lot of people feel attached to January and the whole New Year thing as their reset point, but for me it has always been September. This time of year makes me think of fresh pencils and crisp notebooks and clean new clothes. It is a time of beginnings. And despite not having been in school for more years than I care to admit, it still comes with that feeling deep in my soul. This September comes with some added pieces as my youngest starts kindergarten and steps into life as a school-aged child – meaning activities galore. It feels like a time of transition in the stage of life we’re in as a family, and while aspects of that feel daunting, it also feels really exciting and like there is opportunity and potential waiting to be discovered all around. I have a lot of curiosity for what this coming year will look like, and an openness to the not knowing and figuring out as we roll through.
I’ve been trying to lean in to the openness to the not knowing more generally in life these last many months. It’s not my knee-jerk – I’m pretty hardwired toward planning, perseverating, anxiety and hyper-controlling. Settling in to the unknown and trusting that I’ll have what I need whenever I end up needing it – trusting that I have done what I can and allowing the rest to fall where it may – is not usually in my comfort zone. Yet, I’m finding it to be my saving grace lately. Curiosity and trust. Those are the muscles I am exercising a lot more regularly, and it’s been really cool to see how this allows me to relax into uncertain situations without sacrificing any of my capacity to be meaningfully involved or capable. I don’t think I’m alone in trying to micro-manage and control things in an effort to make everything be ok – my hunch is you might be in the same boat. Given that, you may also understand how uncomfortable it can be to try to shift from that mode to something less vigilant and “on top of things”. But it’s been simpler. Calmer. Nicer in a lot of ways. And it has allowed me to consider and explore ideas I wouldn’t normally have even allowed space to exist. Now, that has been true in my world and life generally but also as it relates to my work and the topic we’re kicking off with for Season 3 of Behind the Line.
A few months ago we had a guest on the show, you might remember, Kelsi Sheren from Brass & Unity. As a quick recap, Kelsi is a retired artillery gunner with the Canadian Armed Forces. She shared her story of experiencing PTSD and struggling with treatment resistance to traditional or conventional therapeutic interventions. I so valued this conversation and her calling out of the limitations of many conventional therapy models – because the truth is that they don’t work for everyone. And I really appreciated that she brought up a topic that in my profession is still pretty controversial, but I believe is really important, and that is the topic of psychedelics for PTSD treatment. When she brought it up I honestly had a moment of shock – not because of what she was sharing but because I realized that we had not yet spoken of this in a year and a half of this show existing. We did a whole series on therapy in the fall of 2021, and somehow I missed talking about some key pieces. As soon as I got off the interview with Kelsi, I reached out to 2 colleagues and asked them to schedule interviews for a new series I wanted to do to kick off season 3, and so here we are and we are jumping in talking about alternative treatment modalities for those who are struggling to find the right fit in conventional therapy.
Over the coming weeks I am going to introduce you to two amazing clinicians and the ways that they work outside of the conventions of traditional talk therapy to support healing and change. You’ll hear from my friend and colleague, Claire Weiss who specializes in Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy, as well as my colleague, Michael Mariano who specializes in neurotherapy. You’ll also hear from me about non-verbal trauma processing approaches like EMDR which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing; and OEI which stands for Observed Experiential Integration.
For today, I want to start by talking about why talking doesn’t always work.
Let’s start with this. As a therapist, I may be biased, but I genuinely believe therapy works. I have witnessed time and time again the incredible power of the therapeutic process, including the influence of talk therapy in shaping or reshaping how we think, feel and engage in the world. I have had so many opportunities to watch people make substantial shifts and live lives more aligned with their core values. I have seen people re-write their internal narratives and discover freedom from the stories they were handed. I have myself been shaped by therapy, growing from the opportunity to look more closely and intentionally at myself, my choices, my ways of perceiving, and considering alternative ways to going about it to be more the person I want to be. I want to be clear that I am not saying that talk therapy isn’t helpful – on the contrary, it can be incredibly helpful and consequential in changing someone’s life. That said, it has it’s place and it has it’s limitations, and chief among it’s limitations is in the processing and healing from trauma.
We have talked on this show a number of times about how traumatic experiences get encoded into our brains. We’ve talked about how the regions of the brain associated with trauma memory as unique and struggle with things like time and context. One of the other things these regions struggle with is language. That’s right, when we store traumatic memories, we store them in a part of the brain that doesn’t have particularly keen access to our language center. Our brain has to work hard to connect the memory to words to describe it, and often when people share about their traumatic experiences they find that they stumble trying to find the right words, or randomly blank on words. The part of our brain that is awesome at language is our frontal lobe, which is also where we do our really good thinking, decision making, learning, and so on. As we’ve identified in many other episodes, the frontal lobe part of your brain essentially gets turned off when trauma happens, and this also occurs when we go into memory recall of traumatic events. Whenever we are putting demand on the part of our brain that manages stress and stores trauma, our brain recalibrates itself to give more resources to the stress center and less resources to other parts of the brain including our frontal lobe.
So think about that for a minute – if you are going for therapy to work on traumatic experiences or the impact of trauma over time, and you are being asked to recall or share about the impact trauma has had for you – the act of doing what needs to be done means that language is automatically reduced. Which means that talk therapy is going to have a MUCH harder time accessing what it needs to, and supporting you in navigating what you need to move through, in an effort to rewire how your brain has stored that traumatic information. Talk therapy for trauma can feel very slow and very difficult, as it leaves people sitting in their traumatic experiences with minimal equipping to move through and out of it. It rests heavily on talking being the tool that gets us through, but the part of the brain that connects with that isn’t likely to be online. Unfortunately when people have tried talk therapy and found it ineffective in helping them with their trauma and symptoms, they tend to scrap therapy altogether. But what if there are other ways at getting to your brain that don’t rely so heavily on a skill that isn’t online? What if we can find some workarounds that get us there through some sneaky back doors?
For decades now trauma therapists around the world have been searching for the back doors. We have been working to be creative and emerging brain science has helped move us forward in better understanding how we can access and reprogram trauma. I won’t say that we have all the answers, because man alive, the brain is a complex thing and I’m not sure we’ve even scratched the surface of all that there is to know about how it works. But I will say that we have learned a lot and that we’re taking what we’re learning and working really hard to find better ways to provide support to people who don’t find conventional therapy to be doing the trick.
I remember about 6 years ago I went to a training by one of my psychology idols, Bessel van der Kolk. Dr. van der Kolk is known as a trauma expert. He has been at the forefront of the most significant and consequential research related to trauma, he has acted in roles of leadership within the most significant bodies related to trauma work, and if you do what I do, you have read everything he has ever written and admire his dedication to serving people better. He shared during this training about his work before learning about EMDR. He talked about the limitations he kept running into and the “treatment resistance” he observed in so many trauma clients. He shared about the lack of outcomes in treatment research, or outcomes being really limited and hardly passing a level of significance. He shared about how he started hearing about this thing called EMDR and that he thought it sounded like nonsense. There’s no way anything could give the results EMDR had been found to offer. Then he shared about his experience with a specific client who he could not figure out what to do with. Nothing was working. All of his best work wasn’t touching this persons trauma. So he sent her to a colleague who did EMDR, and the gains this client made were so substantial that he couldn’t deny the efficacy of this intervention. He got trained in EMDR soon after and has since been one of the most considerable contributors to research related to EMDR and PTSD.
Now, we’ll get into the specifics of EMDR later in this series, and I’ll be clear that I don’t think EMDR is a universal answer to trauma either – but the point I’m trying to make is that we need to be open to the possibility that the problem isn’t that our trauma can’t be helped, but rather we need to get curious about whether the intervention that’s being used is the best way to work at helping our trauma. What if, instead of calling it quits after a few unsatisfying talk therapy sessions, and feeling like we aren’t fixable, we instead asked questions about other options, and sought out alternatives that could bring different relief?
Let me say really quick that this requires you as the consumer of a service to know that there are more options available. …And that kind of sucks. It shouldn’t have to be your responsibility to know and seek out alternatives – I think this should be made more easily available and accessible, but we live in a managed care system that does ask more of you than it should. Advocating for yourself and not giving up will fall to you. I hate that that’s true, because often when we’re struggling with something like PTSD we don’t have the sense of capacity to do more for ourselves, we just need help. Yet, this is where we’re at, and I hope that at minimum, episodes like this help you feel more aware and discerning as you seek support and equip you with questions to ask, things to watch for, and the ability to pull the plug on something that isn’t working to find something that will if you aren’t getting your needs met.
Over the coming weeks we will talk about three specific treatment interventions offered by specialized clinicians and practitioners. My hope is that you might hear something you gravitate towards and that you’ll be inspired to continue seeking support and ensuring your wellbeing. Your wellness is critical. We are living in a time where we need every person, every person who is able to contribute to making the world a better, safer place. We need you, and we need you well. We need you to keep helping, in whatever role or capacity that might be, because goodness knows the world has been in an increasingly tough spot. Investing in you can’t be optional, we need you too much for that. So I hope you’ll continue listening over the coming weeks and that you’ll take something away that will shape how you invest in you.
As we wrap up today I want to remind you to about our listener feedback survey. We are askingyou’re your feedback to help shape the future of Behind the Line to ensure that it is meeting your needs and covering topics that matter most to you. You can find the survey link in the show notes as well as on my social media pages. If you complete the survey before September 30th you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card! Also, please reach out and connect if you have any questions or feedback. You know I love hearing from you and shaping this podcast to echo your needs and interests. I love hearing about what you’re working on and how you are using what we talk about on the show. You can find me on facebook and Instagram, @lindsayafaas, where you can follow me or tag me, or you can email me at support@thrive-life.ca.
I am grateful that many of you are keen to share about Behind the Line and spread the word to others on the front lines. Thank you so much for sharing with those you know. Know that we can be found online on our website, on most major podcast platforms as well as on youtube. Click subscribe to get alerts about our latest episodes, or subscribe to our email list to hear from me about all the exciting things we have going on and coming up – you’ll find all the details you need in the show notes, along with links to our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help facilitate self-assessing burnout and related concerns. We make all of this available to you because the work you do matters, but more than that, YOU matter and we want to make sure you have what you need to keep up the good work at work, as well as in your real life outside of work. So use it, and share it.
Until next time, stay safe.