 Welcome to Much More On Medicine. I'm your host, Katharine Norr. You may notice that I'm not in the think-tech studio. I'm at my office due to the governor stay-at-home order because of the COVID-19 pandemic. My law practice is an exempt business, and so I'm still able to go to my office and conduct the business of helping people during this crisis. Wherever you are in the world, there's a good chance that you're quarantined at home with loved ones or alone. Today, I'll be talking with family therapist, Walter David Disney about caring for self and relationships during this crisis. Mr. Disney is a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist in private practice at Disney Family Therapy in Kansas City, Missouri. He is married with four children. He is a native of Kansas City, and after serving 13 years in the US Navy SEALs as SEAL Team 3 in Coronado, California, he returned to Kansas City. He attended Friends University to earn a Master's of Science in Marriage and Family Therapy. Mr. Disney has a private practice and has been a provider for approximately 500 veterans and first responders to recover from PTSD. Welcome, Waltz. How are you today? I'm well, Catherine. How are you? Fantastic. So let me ask you first, are you related to the Walt Disney? Well, that's unique. Nobody's ever asked me that before. It's distant. The branches merge somewhere down the trunk, but not sure exactly where. I'm far enough out that I don't get tickets or money and that's okay. I get a lot of smiles. Okay, fantastic. And you have the perfect name for your family therapy practice. Anyone wants to go to Disney Family Therapy? Now, so what's a burning question in my mind is you were a Navy SEAL medic. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah, for 13 years. All right. So what makes that interesting to me is I wonder the training that you had as a Navy SEAL medic. How does this seem to correlate with our current crisis? There's a lot of correlations, quite honestly. And in my practice, I get to see how I was kind of prepared for this through the many years of medical training that I had, not only with medicine, the human body, the brain. I was trained to deal with PTSD and what they would call like shell shock or combat fatigue, even 25 years ago, which ages me. That's okay. But additionally, there's a lot of science and medicine and mental health, quite honestly. We rely on it greatly to understand the human brain and what's going on to the human being. It's not just the brain, but it's a whole central nervous system. We were talking before the show about some of the sciences and the students of the social sciences and how good they are because of that. One of the other aspects is this is warfare. COVID-19 is warfare. It is what we could call a biological warfare. There is this virus that is seeking to kill, steal, and destroy our lives, our loved ones, and our way of life as human beings. So it's very well correlated with nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare. Okay. So let me ask you, during this time, are you also quarantined with your family? Indeed, I am. You are in one of our, well, our two older sons are graduated in college, one's graduating from the University of Missouri Medical School and is on his way to Kaiser Permanente out in Oahu. So he's out there and this was their bedroom and I've turned it into my office. So I'm quarantined here at home with my family. I see clients through telemental health and it's actually pretty effective. It's not the same as being with somebody. We'll talk a little bit about that. But I am an essential business because I'm healthcare. However, I choose to remain at home most of the time and do most of it this way. It's just best for everybody. So it's a little bit of sacrifice for me and my clients, but it's to benefit everybody, absolutely. Okay, fantastic. And what kind of problems are your clients having these days? So I have picked up a few new clients since we've gotten our stay at home order and this crisis has come upon us. Most of my clients, probably 85% of them are existing clients. Now, everybody is experiencing a number of mental health effects in this pandemic. There is fear. It's not easy to really understand that. I mean, we're all afraid of something. We've lost the normal rhythms. We've lost normalcy. We've lost toilet paper. That's a big one over here. We've lost, some people have lost their jobs already and they're afraid of what's happening next. What this has done is this has instigated our nervous system to a level that's supposed to be brief. It's the sympathetic nervous system that elevates us so that we fight, fight, or freeze. But we're not supposed to sustain that for a long time. So it really requires some self-care to step away, step away from the fright-inducing aspects of possibly media or dialogue and be able to take care of ourselves in that. The other part is, and it's kind of vague and blanketed, but it's grief. We have lost so much of our natural rhythms and so we have these losses and grief is natural and there's a process of it, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And when we process through all that, we actually come to a new purpose, which is really the new birth, if you will, out of this challenge. Okay, and so what advice would you give to those families that are, they wanna see each other and they love each other, but they're just in two close of quarters and they are starting to get on each other's nerves? Yeah, too much of a good thing isn't a good thing, right? We all like sweets, but too much of it can really give a tummy ache, right? So what we have to do there is get some normal rhythms. Daniel Siegel MD is really on the tip of the spear when it comes to interpersonal neurobiology, which he has drawn on tons of science, brain scans, PET scans, FMRIs, these kinds of things to understand human beings and what happens when we interact together. He does a great job. Anything that he has is really regarded as out front in the field, but he has something called the healthy mind platter. The healthy mind platter exists of sleep, right? Seven to nine hours, whatever's good for you, not too much, not too little, right? And sleep or fear can disturb our sleep, so we have to deal with that. Then there needs to be physical time, which gets our body going and moving, right? We have to have that to be healthy. Then we have this focus time, which most of us do almost too much in our jobs because most of our jobs are very brain centered, they're thought centered work, right? And then inward time, just taking some time for inward introspection or what he calls interoception, which is kind of understanding what's going on. We talked about the gut ache of having too much sugar and looking at things like that and going, why am I feeling like this? And we'll get into feelings and emotions, they're important, they're not scary or worthless, they're very valuable for us. And then it is downtime, just that kind of lanai time where you're sitting out on the back and feeling the breeze and enjoying maybe a pig and some pineapple, if you will, right? But that brings community and connection time, very, very important. And that's something most people are fasting from involuntarily, right? Like many of us who are at home alone. So we need that connection time. And then we need play time, time that we're just playful. Quite honestly, most of the time, if you look at kids, kids are really good about all of this. They do it naturally, okay? And so we need to do these focus times. One of the things that's really hard and we're gonna touch on a little later is some inward time. Some of that, what's going on inside me? So that's basic self-care. You need to eat well too. There's tons of fun memes going on right now. Memes that say, you know, at the end of this shelter in some, most of us or half of us will be pregnant and the rest of us will look like we are, right? So we can't, we have to be really disciplined. I found myself kind of, you know, emotional eating, you know, snacking on stuff every time I pass by the pantry. And we have to be careful with that, you know? So that's self-care to be able to do that. Sure. And is there a value to going outside? That the stuff all fed me absolutely. As a matter of fact, we were made to be outside, quite honestly. We as human beings have structured ourselves into these 68 degree cubicles. And it's not necessarily healthy. There is a lot to it, but go outside and put your feet in the sand or in the earth and walk around, lay around outside, just the fresh air, the vitamin D from the sunlight, very much needed, very much needed. The other thing is in nature, you don't see any like straight lines, you know? You see that with human beings. We always try to create verticals and horizontals. You don't see that in nature. Nature naturally creates what are known as fractals. Fractals are natural patterns in nature. And they have this effect on us. They actually can create a psychological piece or ease. And so we need to get out there and get that. Additionally, I don't know, you guys have pretty much a planting season all year long, but we have more seasonal things here. But when people go out to plant, there's actually bacteria in the earth that affect the serotonin in our minds, in our brains, that affect our attitude. One is mycobacterium vacae, which we pick up by getting our hands in the dirt. And just getting out in nature. So it's absolutely therapeutic, very healthy, yeah. Wow, so it sounds like gardening would be a good thing during this time. So we're gonna take a short break. I'm Catherine Norr. This is much more on medicine on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. We're talking with family therapist, Walt Disney, about caring for self and relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of Crossroads in Learning on Think Tech, Hawaii. On Crossroads in Learning, our guests and I discuss all aspects of education here in Hawaii and throughout the country. You can join us for stimulating conversations to enrich and liven and educate. We are streamed live on Think Tech bi-weekly at 4 p.m. on Mondays. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Aloha. We're back, we're live. I'm Catherine Norr and this is much more on medicine on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. And we're talking with family therapist, Walt Disney, about caring for self and relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. And one question I have for you, Walt, is you mentioned inward time. What does inward time mean to you? There's a lot of incredible science, Catherine, on mindfulness or what some might call meditation. And that shouldn't scare any of us. I come from a very conservative midwest kind of culture. And so to think of meditation, it conjures up hodges and things like that. And it really is slowing down our breath and paying attention to what is present right now. When I work with my clients, I have them do, I say, breathe like a wave. A wave will come in strong and big and fill up your lungs and then hold at the crest and then slowly reseed back out to the ocean. It's about a count of four and then two and then six, okay? So it's a very slow breathing, feeling the cool air come in and the tension melt away as you let it out. And when you do that, you can pay attention to your body. I have them kind of scan down their body, see if there's any tense places we hold a lot of emotion in our body. And again, emotions are not, sorry, they're actually like the software for our hardware, which is our brain. So emotions tell us to do things that preserve our lives or help us to appreciate life, right? We all would like to live with love, joy, peace and excitement, but unfortunately fear infiltrates our existence. So we can either live out of love or fear. And when we take that inward time, that breathing, we understand what's going on. I say this because the me will affect the we, that is whatever relationship I'm in. So I have to take care of the me. And I've read somewhere that inward time, not only you might use mindfulness or meditation, but also journaling could be a helpful way to have inward time. Is that correct? Absolutely, there's a number of different ways. And quite honestly, through technology, I say my wife has a GHD that is a doctorate of Google, right? And she can look up things wonderfully fast. But we can research this stuff, mindfulness, meditation. You go on YouTube and there's tons and tons of resources that are exceptional that guide you into that practice. Science tells us that if we do that 20 minutes a day, after 21 to 30 days, we actually change our brain physiology, not just the chemistry, physiology. With people with PTSD, they have the amygdala as a part of the brain that fight, flight or fear. And that actually can shrink from doing mindfulness. And the part that is used for empathy, it's responsible for empathy, which is up in the front of our brain, it actually can increase. So like the Buddhist monks in Dalai Lama have this structure, the anterior cingulate is two to three times bigger than normal because of their mindful practices, yeah. Okay, well, and how does this affect relationships? Well, all problems are two person problems. That is a maxim in relationship therapy, right? Me, myself and I, we get along pretty well, right? Until I get lonely. And then I find somebody to get along with until we don't get along with very well, right? And depending on what's going on, that could take a very short time period. Might take longer, right? So what happens is whatever I'm bringing into the mix, right? So if we think of blue and red as being the two colors of the two people, they make purple, okay? So if I'm bringing in some of my own stuff, then that will take the color of that purple, right? So if I take care of the me, that purple will be a cleaner purple, right? Too much stuff and it can just be pure brown, right? So it really affects that. And so what happens is we've talked about some negative feedback systems because in this pandemic, we not only have a biological assault, but we have a neurological pandemic and now it's turning into an economic, right? And if we don't do something positive for it, it will continue in that negative trend. So we want to do something. What do we do to reverse that negative trend? Somebody's got to say, okay, let's take a timeout, okay? And in that timeout, we take those big, deep breaths. I say the world would be much better off if everybody took a big, deep breath before they said anything. Sure, right. And from that, then we try to slow the exchange down. And then we try to move toward understanding the other person, okay? And then we try to love and serve them. What I mean by that is not the distorted meaning of the word, but it's really a deep-seated concern for other people, okay? So we try to serve their needs no matter how unrational. What we're doing is trying to soothe them. We've soothed ourselves with breathing slowly to calm ourselves down. We try to turn to them and soothe them. It's like a kid who has fallen and skinned their knee. You can't tell them all the science and physics behind that until after you have soothed them and they're there, it's okay. And we all get that way. We get flooded, right? Fear can overwhelm us. So by taking these deep breaths, going inward self-regulation, we can actually change the world too because we bring love to the world in the purest, goodest sense that there is, even these two-person interactions. And the more we practice that, the more likely we are to take it out into the world, right? Like somebody who, like the cashier who writes a note on your coffee cup, right? They're practicing love and good kindness, right? So, Walt, would you say that helping other people during this pandemic is a good idea? It's exceptional. It's not only, I think that a world's going through a correction right now. And if we pay attention to it, we can move more toward love until instead of fear because fear takes and it hides, okay? A lot of people think of that in terms of greed, right? That's fear stuff. But love goes and it treats. Think of Mother Teresa, right? So the other magnificent thing about this is one of the things I mentioned before, Catherine, in regards to grief is grief is this loss. It is loss of normal, maybe it's funds, maybe it's a job, a lot of things. But if we get our mind off of ourselves in our own pain and serve other people, it is one of the best modalities for grief, which is what we're all experiencing to one degree or another. So absolutely, service to others. And you see great stories of it all over the place. John Krasinski has the show on Facebook called Some Good News. And he talks about how people are putting out toilet paper and hand sanitizer for the people who are delivering their packages, not only in him, but in the world as well. Well, it can be such a little thing, but it can mean so much. So let me ask you, I know that you see many vets and first responders in your work. Do you find that there's challenges when people already have a pre-existing, post-traumatic stress disorder condition and then they experience this pandemic? How are you dealing with that? So you're absolutely right. There is some pre-existing condition of fear if you will, which is what PTSD is all about. It's elevated fear because you've experienced something life-threatening. And there may be some people two weeks or more after this who are stuck in this fear and it can be treated, it can be overcome, you can recover that. That is PTSD. So what do we do with the people who already have this elevated level of fear? We treat them the same way. We try to get close and listen to them, understand them, validate their experience, don't try to solve it, just validate it and empathize it. Cause you know what? It sucks. I mean, there's a lot of stories of healthcare providers who are out there who are just overwhelmed because they've been working 24 seven. New York is one of the sites that I'm thinking of. And how good would it be just to have somebody sit with them and just hear them and care about them? There's a specialty donut place in Kansas City that has sent out care packages. So people can buy a care package and send it to like a police department or fire department or a nursing staff or hospital staff or something like that. And this beautiful stuff has a great effect. Appreciation goes a long, long way. Long way. Sure, sure. And so do you have some messages or some advice for those that are dealing with feeling very closed in, whether it's with other people 24 seven or with just being alone and lonely? Yes. Everybody's life is different. So I'm not going to be able to share one answer that solves it all other than find somebody to love on to give to, right? Maybe it's call somebody up. Maybe it is, you know, reaching out to somebody you know is lonely. Maybe it's caring for people who don't have like the vulnerable people who can't get out and get supplies, right? One of the other things is communication. Connect and communicate with people. The technology that we have even to do this show is fantastic because we can connect over what? 5,000 miles, you know, because of the technology. Absolutely. Okay, well, thank you so much, Walt. We really appreciate your wisdom today. We're out of time and we'll have to wrap it up. I'm Catherine Norr. This is much more on medicine on the ThinkTech live streaming network series. We've been talking with family therapist, Walt Disney about caring for self and relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you for joining us today. Please take care of yourself, wash your hands and be kind to one another.