 Welcome to my talk. It's such an honour and a privilege to be here, listening to some of the talks and stuff yesterday. I am amongst some of the greats of the industry so it's a real privilege. My name is Viviane McKinnon. I am a cognitive behavioural therapist. I'm a clinical hypnotherapist. I have a master practitioner in neurolinguistic programming. I have a master practitioner in timeline therapy, a master practitioner in hypnosis. I am a havening practitioner. I'm a spectrum performance and emotional coach. I am an author. I've written a couple of books. I am a multi-award when an international public speaker. I am a mental health first aid trainer here in Northern Ireland for the healthcare trust. I'm a laughter yoga instructor and a regular acupuncturist and I'm the regional coordinator for Northern Ireland for smart recovery. While that sounds like I've been studying for the last 20 years, which I have, it's not who I've always been. You see, this is me back in 1972 and this is a picture of me and my mum and my mum struggled with alcohol dependency and mental health. Because of that, I had lots of different adverse childhood experiences ranging from all sorts of abuse. I remember being about four years old and running from something, what I can't even remember, but I remember lying in the long grass and feeling myself coming out of myself, looking down on myself and disappearing. That, for me, was a really profound experience at such a young age and it always came back to me all throughout my life. As I grew up and got old at any time my mum raised her voice around me, I would wet myself and I was covered in stress sores on my face and on my arms and on my elbows. In 1978 I contacted Rubella, German measles, and I was placed in the room in darkness and no one was allowed in to see me, which I internalised as it was me that had done something wrong. By that point I had experienced so many different things that I believed I was bad, I believed I was stupid, I believed I was unlovable and there was lots of different things that were going on in my life at that time. By age 13 I was introduced to cannabis, by age 10 I was introduced to alcohol so my teenage years were a bit of a blur really where I kind of just always wanted to fit in. By my 20s I was living with my own substance abuse issues, I was fleeing a domestic violence relationship, I was living on the street with a one year old and the relationships in all areas of my life were really a bit of a disaster. I always felt like I needed to fit in somewhere where really I never felt like I belonged anywhere, I felt like my life belonged to other people, I grew up with so much shame, I always had to have a secret because that was how my childhood had been due to my mum's alcohol abuse. So you see I had a huge disconnection from myself, I never really had any idea of who I was, I gave myself away to anyone really who would want me. I avoided pain by any means and I woke up in so many compromising situations yet fought tirelessly to maintain my dignity and my integrity and the identity I suppose of who I was. My involuntary vulnerability left me in a constant state of hyperarousal, left me constantly looking to avoid the things of the past. And then in 1999 I woke up in a bed in the hospital in the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh where I'd been for the last couple of days and just within the space of six hours my body and mind had Kenny say, we're out here, we're not with us anymore. And I'd been there for two days, I was on a life support machine and when I regained consciousness within again five, six hours I was saying I can't be here, I need to go and I've got children to look after. The internal critic inside my mind was going into overdrive, was telling me about all the terrible things that I'd done, how terrible I was, how unlovable I was, how no wonder my life had turned out like this. And for the first time in life I was genuinely scared at the capabilities of myself. I'd had near death experiences before but never at my own hands and never because of just what felt like nothing. So in that bed I had a real awakening, I had a real sense of the self-sabotager who lived within me was going into overdrive but for the first time ever there was a gentler softer voice who was saying please don't do this, like you have two choices here, you live or you die. So I began a pathway of recovery and I started to look for things to occupy my time, things to kind of challenge who I was and more importantly who I was not. In 2001 I got an opportunity to go to China and raise some money for a charity that I had been supporting. And when I went out I managed to, I was to say I was to fundraise £2,500 and at that time I had a friend who supported me to get some to go for some funding through various different funding streams and I raised £42,500 and went out to China and walked over 100 miles of the Great Wall and really started to find a sense of self and from there I started to go really quite quickly. I became almost like suffocated and squashed in the mould that I had settled within for the last 30 years. In 2004 I decided to volunteer for a charity and that charity was supporting children who as life had been impacted by the care system. In that charity I was quickly promoted. They seen something in me that up until then I suppose I really had in the scene in myself and when I was there I met this guy who was originally from Sweden who was one of the project coordinators and he said, If you need to float you would love it, you would absolutely love it. So I went to the local float centre and I stood looking at this coffin-like structure. By taking into account I had already told myself that I wanted to keep living. So I looked at this coffin-like structure and I thought there is no way, there is absolutely no way I am getting in there, pulling that lid on top of myself and being left on my own with me, with me in this inner critic. Eventually I got over myself and I went into that float tank and what happened next I still cannot explain but I was the most profound experience. That four-year-old that I had lost back in the long grass back in 1975 came back and it was almost like I was reintegrated and the voice was now in my head, I was like we've got work to do lady, we have got work to do and this strange but really wonderful therapy is going to be a massive part of that. I came out, I had this visualisation of owning a centre, I had a visualisation of helping people to heal, working with addictions, doing all these different things and when I came out the girl who owned a float centre couldn't tell me what had just happened. But I knew what happened, I had this massive insight that the magic is within me, everything I need to heal from the experiences I have had are within me and avoiding the pain of the past and focusing on the things I don't want inevitably are going to bring me more of these things. So perhaps I was already good enough, perhaps I'm not stupid, perhaps I am unlovable, these were all the things that would go on in my head at that moment in time. So then what happened was my mum passed away and when my mum passed away there was the guilt at what I could have done, what I should have done and my mental health then took a knock again. But really quickly I made a decision and the decision was I was going to support other people to heal the wounds of the past that I was going to start to get myself into a place where I understood things more and I was going to let my mum's pain die with her. I was going to walk alongside people while they healed and help to give them the tools and the strategies to help them to heal and had all these things going on in my head and then the voice was like but you have to scale at 15, you have no qualifications. Who's going to understand you, who's going to listen to you? So I went to college, I went to university, I studied, I got into neurolinguistic programming so studied with Richard Bandler who invented it. I got into hypnosis and studied with Paul McKenna who's quite a famous hypnotist in the UK, got into havening and studied with the Rudin Brothers and now facilitate their training. So there were lots of different things that happened to me almost like an epiphany in a box of water filled with salt. So again the softer voice was starting to kick in. I then had a breakthrough in 2010 when I re-engaged with an old boyfriend from 2002 who had split up with and he had moved to Northern Ireland and by that point I had changed so much in my life by 2010. I had done so much training, I had done so much introspective work looking at who I was as a person and really through all the different theories and models studies and all the things that I'd looked at, everything was really leading back to this is what the float done, this is what the float done, this is what it was made, this is what it cleared away and enabled you to see. So I, we got married in 2011 and I began to really truly believe in me because I began to see myself through his eyes and I looked back over all the different things that had happened and realised that you know I could be who I wanted to become, I could, if I wanted to work for myself, if I wanted to have a float centre I could have it, if I wanted to be a therapist I could do that, I had these qualifications, I had all these things now. And I continued to grow and learn through various different private studies and various different other things that I liked my time to. And all the things I spoke about in the start to create the version of me that I wanted to become that I had always called my battle scars were almost now like my badges of honour, the things that when I was speaking to people people were really connecting with me on that level because they were saying I felt disconnected, I felt, I've always wanted to fit in but never actually felt like I belonged anywhere. I have so many skeletons that I hide from the past. And I just started thinking what if we celebrated these skeletons, what if we took them out and polished them and we really became and we looked at these versions of ourselves as prototypes of who we were going to become. So then my transformation, I now give back on intention, everything for me is about purpose and intention. My purpose is what would I like to do and my intention is how am I going to do it. So for a lot of time my life was about am I doing things because there's something in me that needs to heal or do I genuinely feel I have something to give back. So I feel now after all the training, all the experiences, all the insights that I do genuinely have something to give back. So when I spoke to my husband about floating and he knew that I've floated he would say why don't you open a centre and I was kind of going oh no I don't think I could do that. And he was saying of course you could of course and he kept pushing me and pushing me. So he applied for a programme for me which meant that I would get some business advice. So I managed to get through that 35 hours of business advice and wrote this fantastic plan about opening the centre and having people coming in from the NHS and having private clients and helping people whose lives have been impacted by the troubles in Northern Ireland because we have 40% of the people who live here are impacted by the 30 years of what is known as the troubles. And that's before we even look at COVID that's before we even look at anything that's been happening over the last year. So he believed in me so much and I said well if that's the case you know to get this started I wanted to have one room and one float tank. I thought I would need about £25,000 I knew he had 27 in savings and I said you give me your savings and he said okay. And I was like oh okay. So but then I got so excited I spoke to Ginny and Colin from float away I spoke to Justin Feinstein about you know about various different tanks and then everything just kind of grew arms and legs and the next thing I was talking about having a centre with a one to one room and having an open plan group work area and having two tanks and having them as double tanks. So is that people who were living with anxiety could float with someone if they if they were really you know and really hyper aroused we could have music we could have lights we could have we could have all these things all the things that potentially stopped me from floating back in 2004. I wanted to get rid of all the barriers but that wasn't just going to cost £27,000. So so packed in my full time job so I had no wages coming in. I spent my husband's money and I put myself £66,000 in debt and you know I just failure was not an option failure was I believe that I could make a difference I believe that you know that it just takes a dedicated bunch of people to change the world and I believe that I could become part of these dedicated people I could become that one person that could create the change here. So my vision of supporting people to heal by removing the emotional drivers and the triggers of the past and connecting with the true authentic self to use kindness to use forgiveness and gratitude. Working with the internal critic working with the parts of themselves that they had turned their back on because they were embarrassed or they were shamed by them by embracing them that we were able to release in our entrepreneurial spirit and that was what I believed I could do and I would then go and do. And I finally now feel like I have a sense of belonging and I'm no longer fitting in and I have a sense of belonging and I belong to me and as long as I'm true to me then everything's going to be okay because the only person who's with me from the first breath I have overtaken until the last breath I ever take is me. So if I stick by me and do right by me then surely I can't go too wrong. But ultimately I suppose you know life being human is hard. Life is hard and in life people will share to you their gifts they'll share their fear, their pain, their sadness, their anger and we accept that as ours. They offer gifts of emotional comfort, connection, belonging and they're all wrapped in beautiful silk at the beginning but when we open them we realise that these are the gifts of the fear and the pain that they have given us. But by that time it's too late because we've already let these people in and we've already accepted these gifts of ours and we carry them along with us long past the event. But what happens if we choose to let them go? So throughout my time and my studies and my trainings and stuff the things that made sense for me was one of the theories and models that made sense for me was Morris Massey's theory and this was proposed in the 1980s. And what he says is what you are is what you wear when because we encode so much information at certain points of time. Mostly through these three sessions of time so zero to seven is our imprint stage and this is where we don't have the cognitive capacity so we don't have the ability to be able to decide if something's right or wrong or good or bad or safe or dangerous. So we believe, we have blind belief of the caregivers and people around us. Seven to fourteen is our modelling stage and this is where we model again based on the people around about us and how they respond and react to the world and we compare and contrast these to create our version of the world. And then fourteen to twenty one is our socialisation and this is where we really take a sense of self. We create our egos, we usually leave school, we usually get into relationships or maybe leave home for the first time or set up our own home or have a real sense of self. We create what's called a Gestalt where we have the very first time we experience a happiness and we have other events and then we have big significant events like the time you were at the beach with your grandad and you watched someone slipping on a banana skin and he's both laughed and twenty years later you talk about it and you say oh grandad do you remember I had that dress on and it was a beautiful day and remember we seen Uncle Bob and you're right back in that event because it has significant meaning for you. Now this happens with anger, with sadness, with fear, with guilt, with hurt and this set so many light bulbs on for me and I was like oh my goodness so that's and it just gave me so much meaning to what happened. One of the other theories that made sense to me was the neurolinguistic mathematical theory of communication and it states that we have external events that meet that present us with anything up to billions of pieces of information that come in through our five senses. We delete information that's not important to us, we distort information to fit our view of the world and we generalise information. We can only pay attention to 134 bits which creates an internal representation, which creates a state, which creates a physiology, which creates a behaviour, which is the output. This is what we do and this happens like this and this is such an unconscious process until you understand it and then you can see where your drivers, where your triggers, how you are creating your version of reality. Hence why we all respond differently to different things. So when I looked at my trauma and I thought how have I stored or encoded this and then looked at a model proposed by Dr Ron Rudin and he says that we have events and these events we give them meaning depending on the landscape of the brain so depending on if in that moment you feel vulnerable or you feel resilient. If you have an event and you give it meaning and you feel vulnerable in that moment and there's an element of inescapability or a perceived sense of being trapped, you are at a higher predisposition to encode this as a traumatic memory. So what mean by that is when we look at how we create our events, how we take in all this information. So the surroundings are called the context so this could be, although this is in a bank, the surroundings could be in the park. It could be rather than having someone with a balaclava on which is content related but not fear producing someone in a balaclava doesn't automatically produce a fear response. This is complex content so this could be the man in the park is in the bushes with his hood up. Then the fear producing content in this case is the gun and the park it could be the man in his hand has a knife. It could also be that the man in the park has a dog lead so it's very different but they all enter the amygdala so the fight or flight very differently and again this is a slide from Ron Rudin. The research on this, this is the havening technique, the research on this, I've put some papers and bills on pathable that you can access if you go into files. What we have input, that sensory input creates an electrochemical transduction and what that means is an internal information transfer. That goes into the thalamus and it's compromised, the thalamus is compromised of different nuclei so if you can imagine it's like the seeds inside a fruit and each serve a very unique role ranging from relaying sensory or motor signals to the regulation of consciousness or alertness. The thalamus is almost like if you can imagine like a post office sorting office where the complex content and the context go take a different pathway. They all, they go up through the cortex directly and then via the hippocampus but this is where we really start to give meaning to the input and we create our own version of reality. The fear producing content goes straight to the amygdala, goes straight into the fight or flight and switches on the survival brain, the fight or flight response and it stores and binds the sensory information when the brain is filtering information really quickly and this is where the mind goes up into gamma wave. The emotional, the feeling, so the emotional which is the feelings internal and external, the somatosensory which is the biology which is things like sense and heat and pressure and the autonomic which is the heart rate and digestion and the cognitive and the thoughts. They all encoded within the mind to mark as a marker for a future to detect a threat so if any of these things are there we know that we could potentially be in an environment that's unsafe for us based on how we're processing the information. What happens then is the components are stored in bound by a protein called PKZ and when the amygdala is open like this it creates an amper receptor. All of the information is stored in that so that it can be activated quickly so that we can go fight, fright, freeze which which Flux spoke about yesterday or flop which is where we just pass out. Any time a component that's encoded within that amper receptor we see in the future. This was massive for me. This absolutely explained so many things to me and then I thought well if this happens how can we, how can I work with this? So I explained almost the first 30 years of my life. Absolutely was a switching on. So when I opened Hygoes and when I started using flotation as part of the offerings that I was offering at that time, I then developed a programme called Reconnection and Flotation Therapy which puts these two is the power of all the skills and tools and understandings together with the journey from gamma, which is where we're processing the information really quickly. When we use the havening technique with CBT, NLP, hypnosis, whatever it is for that person in that room at that time and we put these things together. You could supercharge people's ability to heal and recover really quickly improving data selection systems from both the mind and the body through the interplay between our central nervous system and our peripheral nervous system. So the power of all these skills and tools together, if you place yourself into a float tank free from all the experiences and almost all sensory input, what happens is that amper receptors are stuck in place with a protein enzyme. At this point the brains forced to process information quickly, as I've stated in gamma wave. During the reconnection part of the sessions of the of the raft, we work on distracting the thoughts and dropping the mind into delta wave. We would open up the calcium channels within the brain and that is a much slower brain wave. So delta and calcium after the mind has been up in gamma creates a chemical called calcium neuron. Calcium neuron dephosphorylate so unsticks the protein that's holding the amper receptor in place to allow the amper receptor to go back into the amygdala permanently alter in the neurological encoding of the event. So then what do we do? Well we put them in a float environment because when you put people into a float environment what you've just worked on for that last hour. Allows them to make sense of for themselves when they're in theta brain wave state. So they go from being hyper aroused and in that where they're processing information really quickly down into delta where they're allowed, which is that deep rest state where they can allow for them to start to make sense to remove the emotional components from the memories where they're harvested to allow the memories to go back to where they should be. So when you think about that memory it doesn't feel like it's happening all over again. If you'd like to know more about RAFT programme I am sending out a free ebook and I've set up a landing page on my website.