 Thank you for coming, you may have more people come in in the next couple of minutes, but I'm Leah Jones, I have a parent in Monterey, I have three kids in this school, and I'm part of the union school parents group, which is the main street parents group, which is sponsoring this event. We're really excited about it, we've had a lot of people express interest, so clearly there's a need for this, and I want to hand it over to Ben right away so he can get going. And so you don't have to be talking. Yes, I'm in the down. Thanks Leah. So yeah, thank you all for coming out. I have not done this with a handheld mic before, so I'll try to do this, but if I do this for too long you can just call out and remind me. And also I welcome questions as we go. We have an hour and a half, which is not a whole lot of time, but I also don't want to just kind of run through something if you're not feeling clear about it. So if you have a question please raise your hand and I'll call you. And I guess I'm not going to hand the mic out so you'll just have to speak up. So as you can see on the slide what it says is we sat side by side in the morning light and looked at the future together, which I'm presuming most of your parents here, which is why you came. And what this whole thing is going to be about is essentially trying to get back to the essence of that. And while I've been thinking for like how I was going to start this to talk about what I was going to be doing. And then I got a marvelous quote from the mom of one of the kids I do therapy with, if I can find it here. So she asked him, so like what, going to bed is that helpful? Like what actually happens? Like what do you do? And he said, I don't know, I don't know what about going to bed and it's teaches me other than it just calms me down. He explained why I have big freak abs and how to tell when it's going to happen and what to do about it when it does happen. If I'm mad, I think, what did Ben teach me to do? And then I go and do things that reduce my stress so that I can reach out instead of the back down. So I don't think I could have said it better. Well parenting is not very easy as some of you may have found. From time to time it can get difficult. And I wanted to start with this quote from Ron Doss. And I think it would be really easy to just put parenting in there, which is the services and endless series of questions in which we encounter our own limitations. Is that very true to anybody? So we're going to talk about that like our own limitations and also what, where our kids' limitations are and what, why? Like why do we reach these places where there are limitations and we don't know what to do? Since we all read the manual on parenting. And it didn't cover these one or two things. So no pressure on me, but tonight in an hour and a half we're going to learn, I hope, what the science of child development, physiology and the brain. Physiology and the brain kind of being the same thing, but I'm going to differentiate a little bit between brain and body tonight. It tells us about why kids and all of us act the way we do. So that's the first thing you should be expecting you're going to learn for the money that you pay. Number two is what we can do, meaning us, about challenging behavior, both to make it stop in the moment and then also how to prevent it in the future. Which are two different things, obviously, because we like to put out the fires. That's really fun, but it's sometimes nice when we don't have to think that the fire is going to be going on in five minutes after we put it out. And then lastly, one of the cool things about the model that I use is that inherent in working with behaviors about building relationships with your kids. And so we're going to talk specifically about some things that we know about attachment and science and ways to be with kids. And in fact, the secret is ways to be with lots of other people too that can help you build a relationship with them. So we've got an hour and a half and I'm going to take a little break real quick. Because this is body-based work, I want to love everybody who feels like it to stand up for a moment. And the cool thing about this is if you don't stand up and you just witness it, you're probably going to get some positive effects from it. How many folks out here have heard of power posing? Anybody? Okay, good. So some of you are already experts, so we're going to do power posing. And I'm going to count. You've got to stay at rest for this. So if there are any volunteers, did anybody notice anything? Anybody else? So opening space, does anybody else have an experience with that? Okay, yes. Especially common. Okay. Well, thanks for saying I don't know why because I can tell you why. So what power posing does is a woman named Amy Cuddy at CU-DDY found out about it and she's got a really great TED talk. What power posing does is it makes your body feel powerful. So when we close ourselves off or what we start to feel is defended, and then our body starts to take notice of we start to feel defended. So what kind of things happen when our body starts to feel stressed inside? Heart rate goes up. Heart rate goes up. Tense. Tense. Anybody know what cortisol is? What's cortisol? Stress hormone. Stress hormone, right? So power posing, this is one of the brilliant things about it. Guess what the percentage of the drop in cortisol is if you power pose? Close. It's 14% 85. But it's a 14% drop in cortisol without having to think your way out of the problem or anything. Your body all of a sudden just feels powerful. So you're kind of tricking the mind to be like, I'm confident. Like if you're like this, you're un-defendant. And your body's just going to feel better. So that's one of the little tools that we'll talk about. We have a whole bunch of other ones at the end. But again, this work is really about the body and what happens. So that's one piece of it. What you can do in the present in terms of the body. So another basic thing about this model is strategic self-regulation is the name of the model. And one thing that we think about in terms of this model is it's a stage or state model. So I do a lot of work with folks moving across developmental spectrums, working with kids, turning into tweens, turning into teens. And as we know, as kids grow, they hit different developmental markers where all of a sudden your kid is able to do something he wasn't able to do the day before. And then the next day he forgets what it was that he just did, like helping you with the dishes and things like that. So kids move through developmental markers. But they also, and this goes for the rest of us as well, the body goes through different states, meaning that states change depending on what's going on around us, what our level of stress is, things like that. So as you can see, stage one or state one, what do you think these folks need over there? Those might be good, right? To calm down. Thanks, that's my son, by the way. He hears about this stuff all the time. So what happens in this picture of the mom, what do you think the mom would possibly say to the kid here? Something that's going to be helpful? Probably not. Right, this actually happens as well. So she's probably not going to say anything helpful to him. Like what needs to happen in this situation? Do they need to figure out the problem? They need to regulate, how did you know that? So yeah, they're not going to do much problem solving at this point, right? So this would be a good time, like folks said, power posing would be good, or some other thing to help the body calm down. The next step is when you actually feel calm, that's when our system opens up in terms of being able to relate to people. If you're really angry, it's not the time to give somebody a hug, it's also not the time to tell them what to do, or to listen to what to do either. And stage three, which we may talk about some, is about reason, which means that it's more sort of the thoughtful reasoning for why you're doing things. Self-reflective afterwards, does that make sense? So this is sort of like before there's a problem, while there's a problem that you're calm enough to talk about, and then reflecting back on like, oh, that's what happened, I don't want that to happen again, what are we going to do differently afterwards? Make sense? So we're going to refer to things in terms of state as we talk for the next hour or so. That it's about looking at what kind of state you're in in terms of what you do in terms of an intervention. So sometimes stuff like this with our kids, right? And then sometimes I know as a parent, no disrespect to you, Lake. Sometimes I feel like this. So, what's that? We'll talk later. So we're going to talk about this moment right here. What happens when you feel like you're all alone, you don't know what to do, and next thing you know you're going to be falling somewhere? Does that feel familiar to anybody? At least two people, good. So I'm going to talk a little bit about this gentleman over there on the right. His name is Al Vecchione. He is a psychologist, although he's not licensed, so he's gotten in trouble a couple times for being called that. He runs a place, runs a couple of agencies actually out in Middlesex. And he's been working ever since he was around 20 with folks with really, really challenging behaviors, very explosive behaviors. A lot of folks with developmental disabilities. He started an agency in Middlesex called the Francis Foundation. And when he started the Francis Foundation, what he was trying to do was keep kids from getting sent out of state institutions. And so he called up DCF, he called up the agency of mental health, and the agency of developmental services and said, just send me your toughest kids. And he got all the toughest kids in the state to move to Middlesex. And he's been using the model that we're going to talk about now tonight. And the change has been extraordinary. And one of the things that Al has done is he's taken pieces from all the different realms of child development and brain studies and behaviorism and all this different stuff and brought it together to create what's called strategic self-regulation. And one of the things Leah's going to have a hand sign out. And one of the things that you guys will be able to get if you're interested is I can email you a bibliography, which is the stuff that Al has based a lot of his work on. So this is one of the things that he's worked on, which is the guy just strategic self-regulation therapy. And I asked him for a quote this morning while I was sitting in red head and freaking out about doing this presentation. And he was helping me regulate because he's really good at that. And this is what he said. The body, again, in here, is where all experience is stored. Meaning what? Everything has happened to us. We can think about it in terms of memory, but the body is the place where all this stuff is really held. On a cellular level, the body remembers pretty much everything. The brain, not so much. So what you see today, where the experience is stored and it's also the springboard for all behavior meeting, we respond to what's going on based on what our experiences are and what's stored in our body. So what you see today in terms of behavior with folks is based on the experience that people have had and how they have wanted to react when they're in distress. So I'm going to give an example of, obviously, a lot of what we do as parents rubs off on kids. Our kids are often like us for better, for worse. And so here's a little clip that I thought would be helpful in terms of thinking about modeling for children. So when this little girl is learning about communication, it may work really well at the dinner table with her grandmother, but my guess is like the first day in Mrs. Wayland's class in kindergarten and maybe a little more tricky, you know, in terms of her communication style. So strategic self-regulation therapy, which I have behavior all in quotes because I go to a lot of meetings as a consultant where people talk, they talk about an issue in terms of whether it's behavioral or whether it's psychological. And what I think is that these two things are really hard to pull apart. So behavior from this perspective is driven by body states and experience, essentially. So we're going to talk about what strategic self-regulation therapy is basically, and then we're going to get into a little bit of the science, and then I promise you there are going to be some tools you get to leave with, too. So the first one is that when we see behavior as people responding to behavior, what we're really responding to is stress. Somebody's acting in a certain way, acting out, and we'll talk about that, because they're feeling stress and we're responding to that based on our level of stress, the level of stress that we feel in that moment. And the stress is inevitably caused by these. I think, if you think about it, it's very simple in some way. Things that cause stress aren't a problem. So you have something and you can't really figure it out. Like we talked about, cortisol level goes up, heart rate starts to go up, all these things start to happen as soon as you're uncertain about what to do. A problem, a threat, whether real or imagined, actual danger, obviously, is going to trigger a stress response, and then discomfort. So just feeling uncomfortable. Something in your body doesn't feel good. That's going to increase your level of stress, which is going to change the state of your body. And all of these things can be real, meaning actually happening right now, or imagined, which I mean, it's not fantasy necessarily, but it can certainly just even be in your head. So it may not be a problem right now, but it could be the fact that taxes are due next week and you haven't paid them for three years. Not that I know anything about that. The next thing is the response to the stress is the thing that leads to, if not dealt with well, it leads to two different kinds of behavior, which is either explosive or avoidant. So I'll explain that a little bit more as we go. But if you're distressed and you can't soothe yourself, your behavior is going to be either avoid or explosive. I'm not going to explode, I promise. Or I'm not going to go avoid either, although I was thinking about it around 5.30. The next thing to think about is that we have two targets of treatment, meaning there are two things that we can do that are going to help with the distress. Or not two things we can do, but there are two targets of the distress. One is the brain, and the other is the body. And as we talked about earlier, in terms of the stages with one and two and three, you don't want to target the brain if what's going on in terms of distress is really being driven by the body. So if you start talking to somebody about something when they're distressed and their body physiologically is not calming down what's going to happen. Probably not going to solve the problem. So when we think of if folks know what ABC is in terms of behavior, antecedent behavior consequence, that's sort of the basic way of thinking about it, which makes a lot of sense, right? Something happens and antecedent, there's a trigger. We behave because this thing has happened. And because of what we're doing, because of the behavior, there's a consequence, which makes a lot of sense, right? It's very simple. But what this model does is think about once there's an antecedent, something that triggers, it's not the behavior that starts what changes first is the body. The body state changes. The body state is what leads to the change in behavior. Does that make sense? The distinction of those two things? So you could focus on the behavior or you could think, huh, what's going on in the body that's driving the behavior? So you know if your kid comes home from school on the right or your kid comes home from school on the left, you're probably going to have a different couple of hours. Right? And you can tell that right away. You don't even know what's going on, but you can see it. So we'll talk about what you do to respond to this right here. So I'm going to start. We'll talk about the brain and the body. I'm going to talk about the brain first. Everybody okay at the pace? Good? I'm not going too fast. Everything's groovy? Okay. So, this is one of the things that Al Becquian told me is just really changed the way I think about everything in terms of my day-to-day existence, which is the brain is essentially, it's an anticipation machine. Meaning that what your brain does is it anticipates what's going to happen. Right? It's like a predictive machine. It's always thinking about, well, what's about to happen? You know, all you guys walked into the auditorium and I'm thinking, okay, is it going to fill up? Is it not going to fill up? We're always anticipating what's going to happen and then at a basic level, that's really all the brain. That's the brain's job, is to anticipate. So what is it basically anticipation? How does it know what's going to happen? That's the only thing it has, is past experience to anticipate what's going to happen next. Right? If you think about it, there's no way to know what's going to happen until you've experienced it before, which unfortunately is really limited because the only experience you've had is your own. Right? And that's your prediction of what life's going to be like is based on only what you've anticipated. You know, if you've lived the life of Axl Rose, as Daniel will know, your anticipation must be happening tomorrow is probably a lot different than mine. And then the brain decides, based on what it's anticipating, it decides and prepares for what it believes is coming next. So instead of being just open in the moment, we're always thinking about what's happening next. Most of this is very unconscious. Does that make sense? Yeah. What do you mean by projecting? I don't know, a lot of people might not know what you mean by projection though. That's a really good point though. Because when you meet somebody, they're preparing for their experience of what you're going to do. Because of that projection, which is related to my trauma and my past experience, then that's how I'm anticipated. Sure, so if we meet somebody, we usually have some opinion based on how threatening they are, which is going to be unconscious. You know, all of you, I can look at you and I have an opinion. Right? Guess what it's based on? My previous experience has nothing to do with who you actually are. And unfortunately, especially in our culture, we don't come up to somebody and say like, I'm an open slate. I just want to know everything about you. Like, can you just be with me present for a little while? Let's breathe. Let's talk about our fears. Let's talk, you know. No, we like meet and we're like, hey, what's up? And you know, like next thing you know, like, I don't know. I've known this gentleman for 25 years, Pat. We just drove down to New York. I found out so much more about him. And that's part of that is like I'm not just projecting onto him. I'm like curious about what he's like. So thanks for allowing me to do that. Thanks for allowing me to project on you two for a long time. Yeah? So yeah, does that answer your question? Yeah. I mean, it's how we survive. We anticipate. So it doesn't happen. It's not a bad thing, right? We can't start each day new. But we also, if you've had bad experiences, if you've had a really hard time in first grade, your body's anticipation of what second grade is going to be like is probably not like I can't wait for the first day of school. Right? Right? Think about it a little bit. So the brain is also, I'm going to be really like super, super basic science because the brain is obviously more complicated than this. But we think about the brain in terms of this model simply, which is that there are two parts of the brain. There's the frontal lobes and there's the limbic system. And they work in perfect harmony just like this picture. So our system, the body is controlled by these parts of the brain in terms of the anticipation of what it's going to do. So the limbic system back here, that big light bulb, that is all about our survival. The limbic system is what drives our survival, meaning the brain's job, it's an anticipation machine, but I've also thought of the brain. The only job the brain really has is to make sure this thing stays alive and maybe lives as good life as it can. But more importantly that it survives. That's the most basic thing. So what this thing is doing all the time is assessing threat and it drives the behaviors when the high stress happens of explosion avoidance and shutdown, which we'll talk a little bit more about. The frontal lobe, which is also awesome, only limited by its previous experience, controls up here, this part of the brain, controls stopping. So even just impulse control is controlled by the frontal lobe. It also is where you think and where you process, how you solve problems is through the frontal lobe. And it's also the place where memory starts to work. So memory is based, there are mechanisms in the frontal lobe that take in information and hold it so you'll be able to use it at another time. Which one of these works faster? The limbic system works about twice the speed of the frontal lobe, meaning it's processing information much more quickly and it's not paying that much attention to this. In fact, what's the more important part of your brain in terms of survival? The lightning one, the lightning brain. The limbic system. So when we start to feel a high enough level of distress, the limbic system starts to get activated and what happens to the frontal lobes? They start to shut down and if they start to shut down, what happens to the job they're doing? They don't do it very well, right? So what happens when we go limbic, and this could be subtle, it doesn't have to be dramatic, it doesn't have to be like there's a line in the room, but our limbic system starts to turn off, okay? And so then what happens to our thinking? Do we stop thinking? No, but what happens often when our limbic system is going on our frontal lobe shutdown is this. Because the brain's still figuring it out by being one of those things like, there's not a whole lot of activity going on out there. So one of the things that can happen then is a word that I love called confabulation, because the brain's thinking, the brain's continuing to think and it's thinking and knows what's going on, but really everything's being driven by fight or flight, so everything's being evaluated for threat, and so you start to have crazy ideas of why you're doing things, because this part isn't like working, yelling out. I bet you can. Can you think of an example of this? You wouldn't know anything about this. Of a 10 or 11-year-old boy? I don't know anything about 10 or 11-year-old boys. Well, confabulation is... Wait, can you think of an example? Right, so you have, yeah. It's like, you know, if there's some sort of criticism of this behavior, or like, if something goes wrong, you know, it will immediately jump to, oh, well, more of a person is ever going to get to me. That's a great example. Right, right. That's a great example of confabulation. The reason this is happening is because I'm horrible. No, the reason that you're happening is because you were doing something and didn't put that away. That's a great example. Does your kid ever do that? No. All right, so that's the brain. That's the whole entire semester on the brain. Any questions? Is that helpful? Okay, good. So we went from the brain and now we're going to go, this is my favorite part, because the brain is kind of boring, it's not very smart. This is what it's already experienced, and then it thinks it has everything figured out, you know, especially if you're like 19 or 20. So we're going to get back to this guy, the body. So one of the most beautiful things about strategic self-regulation therapy is it talks about these two systems that are inborn. Everybody know who that is? Yeah, okay. So what's he doing over there? He's boxing, he's defending himself, right? And what's he doing over there? He's in his trap. Yeah, so he's not defending anything. I guarantee if somebody walked in the room and tried to mess with his kid, he'd be defending, he'd go back to defense mode. But these are the two modes. One of them is like this, and one of them is not just not defending, but is actually socially open, is engaged, social engagement when we're not feeling distressed. Does that make sense? Okay, ready to be convinced of that? Okay. So we think of this as the defense response, right? Muhammad Ali like this. In this model, there's three responses when we get distressed. So remember we talked about distress and what triggers distress, the four things? Anyone? What are the things that make us feel distressed? Threat, problem, danger, and discomfort, right? So the moment you start to feel these things, your defensive system will trigger. Quarters all the way up a little bit, your heart rate may go up a little bit, the breathing may go up a little bit. That stuff just happens in your body. Your body's like, I'm ready to fight Tiger or I'm ready to get the heck out, okay? So what we know about the distress response system is that there's two main things. Acting out, which is hyperarousal, which is that's when your limbic system is going to, it's going to, by any means necessary, avoid the problem or defeat the problem. And then if it doesn't do fight flight, what it does is it checks out, meaning it goes avoid it. So it can't defeat the thing, it can't actually escape, so it's just going to start to shut down, okay? Does that make sense? So the third defensive response is this one over here, which is reaching out. So if you think of a little baby, what does it do when it's distressed? Which is what? It's reaching out. It's communicating its behavior, it needs something, and if you're a good parent and have actually gotten some sleep and you're like feeling all right, you're going to be able to respond to that baby in a really appropriate way. There's this guy, anybody heard of Daniel Stern? He's a psychologist, not the actor. He studied infants. He did psychotherapy on infants. And what he studied was that a baby needs a response, a baby's behavior looks for a response. What's your guess? How often? What's that? Any guesses as to how often a baby is looking for a response? Every 75 seconds. So in order to be a really good parent, all you have to do is respond to your kid every 75 seconds from the moment it's born. And then you're not going to have any attachment issues, no behavior issues, anything like that. So what starts to happen when the mom or the dad or the cousin or whoever is not responding in the 75 seconds is the baby's starting to evaluate whether it's okay and successful to reach out, which most of the time it is for folks unless they've had pretty horrific childhoods. And if not, they're going to start going to some kind of hyperarousal response or a response of checking out. So we talked about this. This gets triggered by the problem of threat danger and discomfort. And then typically what happens is fight, flight, or checking out is going to lead to what we call bad behavior. So when I talk about strategic self-regulation, we think of all behavior is really just one of these two things. Either we're responding to the stress by an action of confrontation or we're disengaging. So this is too much, I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to show up, something like that. And so what we're really wanting to think about is how do we enable people to do what when they're distressed? What do we want our kids to do? If they can. We want to help them with reaching out. Now unfortunately there's all sorts of problems that can arise when reaching out. Otherwise we would do it all the time. And we may get to that by yet clock. So if we're in this situation right now, the body's feeling what probably? Uncomfortable at some level of scared, right? But what do we know that's going on with the frontal lobes? Shutting down. So really this is what we're thinking. Like for the most part unless I mean there are situations where obviously there's something to be really scared of. But I would guess most of us live lives at a 99% of the time where we're triggered by distress. It's not a dramatic thing that our body really needs to respond to in terms of complete acting out or checking out. Make sense? Reaching out for the most part is good behavior. So if a kid is stressed at school you hope that they can talk to the teacher about what's going on and resolve the problem. And otherwise they're probably going to act out or not. Or check out. So that's the defensive system. Is that clear? Any questions about that? So we talked about the defensive system and what was the other one? Advancement. So there's defense and then there's advancement. So advancement is all about safety. If you feel okay and safe enough your body is, we're designed as creatures to move out in the world unless there's a tiger over there. We're designed to actually move out and do things and explore. And so the advancement system is all about opportunity and what's next. And the really cool thing in terms of bad behavior quote unquote is that the advancement system actually turns down the defensive system. So I think of it as like two, like on old stereos. We don't have these very much. But basically there are two dials that are kind of moving and fluctuating all the time. One is defensive and the other is advancement. And so the way they work is... This is funny. I'm not sure I was supposed to do this with one hand. As the defensive system turns up the advancement system will turn down. Right? So that's not great. So one way of turning down the defensive system is to do what? Turn on the advancement system. And there are specific aspects of the advancement system. And if you can get to these you're going to turn down the defensive system without even calling attention to behavior. So those are... One of them is just basic regulation. If you turn down the distress level of the what? The body, you're shutting down the defensive response. Makes sense? So the other ones are all really cool because what you're doing you're going to engage the advancement system and play is a big part of that. Exploration were naturally designed as creatures to go out and explore otherwise we would have never left our huts. But the only reason we left our huts is because we needed something that was out there. Caretaking is a big one. If you're taking care of something else your defensive response is going to turn down. Why is that critical for human beings? For those of you that have babies who are up at three or four o'clock in the morning the only thing that helped you all survive was the fact that your caretaking system would turn down your defensive response. I also want to say all the slides I can send out too. I didn't want to print them up beforehand but we're going to have a sign up list and if you give me your email I'll send out the slides along with the bibliography. What's up? Okay, so if you haven't seen that that's going to go out too because I know this is kind of a lot of information. Any questions? Do I still have your advancement attention? So this is it in terms of defensive response. Something happens in the world or internally we start worrying about something we weren't worrying about two minutes before and the first thing that happens antecedent leads to state change. Our physiological arousal will change. That's the next thing that's going to happen. Based on that defensive system goes on we start thinking about stuff to whatever level of accurately or not and we have these three things that are going to happen which is either acting out which is fight flight freeze the limbic system in terms of its full on rush to get out of there reaching out which is all about safety seeking out others and when you seek people out your limbic system settles enough and you can start to problem solve and think about things and then the last one is a mobilization which is avoidance the body is designed to if it can't reach out and it can't get out it's going to check out it's going to avoid So, what's up? No, that's a really good question freeze is like a deer in the headlights like the body actually locks up it's like a possum it plays dead that's a little bit different this is actually hypo arousal it's also called dorsal vagal the body is a different mechanism of shutting down which is more social disengagement so freeze is like the deer in the headlights checking out is like I open the door and the room is filled with people who I don't know and I'm not so sure I don't want to go in so that's a really good question thanks for asking that Okay, any questions? Yes, Rebecca I can show you some of the tools that we use are about exploring what your body feels like and when I mean I can show you a couple of them because I think it's a good question one of the things that we talk about is like self-regulation so you want to be able to know what's going on internally and so I'm not sure if this is I think this is probably similar but it's essentially what it feels like in here where people see and then also what I can do and also what other people can do to help me So, any questions? Does that answer? Yep Huh? Let's do it So from here anybody have any idea what the treatment zone part of this is? Yeah, it's places where things are starting to get funky but you can actually do something about it when someone's about to hit you in the face they're already in full flight mode but there may be ways to do something before that when you start to get stressed or before you do something really awful if you've gone and done something really awful that you're going to regret later you're not in the treatment zone you've stepped out of the treatment zone the treatment zone is the place where you can feel awful or distressed and do something about it Right, Lake? So another way this is sort of the big picture of strategic self-regulation So on the top we have an acting out which is hyper-arousal the feelings that are associated with that are what? So fear angry leads you to fight flight, right? Checking out is a little bit more I don't know if nefarious is the right word we tend to look at acting out behavior like kids acting out as being bad but one of the things that's a real struggle is hyper-arousal are feelings that can be a lot more dense in terms of checking out when you start to feel sort of like what you said with your son like I'm so awful like there's a way that that's acting out but it's also checking out and that's going into places of guilt and shame hopelessness and helplessness so that behavior is fight or flight this is about avoidant, disengagement, numbness in fact I would suggest maybe argue, I don't know if I want to argue about it but I would suggest based on the years that I've been doing therapy that really mental illness, mental health is all about, mostly about hyper-arousal you have some issues where hyper-arousal is an issue with violence certainly I don't want to diminish that but things like depression, all of that goes under the hyper-arousal your body is just disengaging and it's misperceiving what's going on in terms of reality so what we're looking for is reaching out in safety and when I have here feelings, the authentic ones what do you think I mean by that? right, they're not responses too right, so we talk about safety we want it to be all about feeling good but actually the authentic self is that feeling place that's not necessarily reacting to something else but is feeling something coming up from inside which can be joy, sadness, pain fear that you're just feeling that's not based on that and so the hope is that you if you can feel those things you're not going to react as much you probably will to some degree but most of fight-flight and hyper-arousal I think is actually avoidance of those more authentic feelings seem reasonable so it's not just about feeling good it's about feeling what's actually happening without having to react to it so we call that the authentic self which I know is sort of like a catch phrase or something that we're talking about sounds like a little, for me a little new agey but when I think of the authentic self I think of this is the place when we're regulated we're reaching out, we're socially engaged and we feel good that's, most people do pretty well when their distress level is high and I think the reason is we're not going into hyper-arousal or hyper-arousal sound good? so you know how I talked about the stage model I mean the state like we can, we move through these different states throughout the day this is also a stage model in terms of emotional growth and health which is that as you move from left to right as you can see hyper-arousal and hyper-arousal will decrease so if you think of a child developmentally that's part of what happens as you go from left to right and the bigger the green gets and the bigger the treatment zone gets which means the ability to tolerate distress the more you're able to be in the world in a way where you're not just reacting there is the day-to-day which is, this is what it's really about which is that we're all from moment to moment moving through this our body is constantly in a state of regulating or dysregulating so you see somebody coming down this retort to who you adore and you can't wait to see that green may get really strong you see like somebody who you just talked to yesterday and had a big fight with your arousal is going to change you enter situations where you haven't been successful what happens to your arousal it goes up or down, exactly you go into situations that you've been really successful and what happens to your arousal what? well it stays there your regulation is going to stay more steady right, nothing builds hope like success if you've experienced to be foreign been able to do really well with it you're going to be more hopeful about it so you show up to my office for therapy the first time and you're like I don't know if I'm going to talk to this guy check out, check out, check out after a while you hope you start to feel better with your life you're going to be more eager to go you're going to be more regulated you're going to be less defended does that make sense? so perfect, so how do we do this how do we help with regulation so the good news is we talked about these things are really good at turning down the level of distress okay and we're going to talk specifically about the physiological regulation I'm actually going to give you all a website that has a bunch of these different things that you can do to help your body regulate and maybe your kids will want to do it too because it's really fun but these other ones also if you can bring these to consciousness more it can be really helpful any questions about these, the advancement system thing these turn off our distress yes playing exactly if you see kids at play, they're not distressed right? it only becomes distressing if there is a problem or a conflict or someone starts to lose and they don't have the ego strength to tolerate loser even so they start to get distressed and all those things playing is great when we play we're regulated programming is like intimate relationships so I'm not sure the real definition of pair bonding is but what I've discovered pair bonding to be in terms of therapy is people who you can be really vulnerable with like so boyfriend girlfriend, child, father mother child and really really close friends there's a pair bonding, there's an intimacy in terms of the relationship so people who you inherently feel like you know well enough to feel really really safe with I would say is pair bonding as opposed to socialization you're kind of checking each other out you know socialization is like the first aid and if you're regulated enough like that's helpful, it feels good pair bonding is like knowing people really well that's how I went to find it does that answer your question? okay good yeah it's not the negative caretaking caretaking is taking care out so when you're you know like I do really well in therapy because I have this cute little white dog named Buttons that when he's there people are much more regulated and part of that is because they feel like they're taking care of him he just looks at me while he's being picked up by these little kids and is like why are you letting these kids do this to me and I'm like because I'm turning on their caretaking system so they're going to be more willing to talk to me so advancement system is good and which is the good of the three of the defensive system that leads to good behavior reach out so I'm going to give you a huge like life hack cool secret for like how to do well with people okay because this is all about how you encourage reaching out I'm going to back up a little bit here well I'm missing a slide sorry about that so with reaching out the way you build reach out is the same way as you build attachment so if you want somebody to reach out to you and you want to find people to reach out to to help you regulate your arousal problem solving all that this we call the big six of attachment and I'm sorry I don't have a slide that breaks it down a little slow I know this is like a lot but in order to reach out and be reached out to you're going to be able to feel like a safe person to you so if you're a calm and patient with somebody they're going to be more likely to reach out to you the next one is generate positive effects duty to delight is a wonderful expression which is that if you're with somebody and you just enjoy their presence and you're smiling that is going to help you be a person to reach out to and it's going to help them manage their arousal proximity seeking is welcoming if you approach somebody and you're not seen as a threat they're going to be more likely to welcome you in and the same goes if you approach somebody they don't say whoa dude like hey you know you're going to be more likely to reach out to them so that's three on the left and then we have safety in general but this one's really cool which is that if you're actually stressed out and having a hard time if that person helps you feel sooth it's also going to increase the capacity to reach out or sense of attachment makes sense the next one is about communicating problem solving negotiation just being curious with somebody also helps build that sense of attachment and the last one is just affiliation like if you have shared interest and you want to talk about stuff with people that's going to make you more likely to reach out to them and them to reach out to you so how does this relate to parenting is it easy to do these things all the time no but when is it easy to do these things when you feel what when you feel calm when you feel regulated these things probably come pretty naturally right when you start to feel distressed it's a little bit hard to have compassion at 9.30 at night when somebody hasn't played the flute and is saying they need to play the flute for rehearsal and practice and hasn't done their homework and that is complaining about brushing their teeth it's a little more tricky to be like it's okay sweetie like everything's fine so I know this is like a lot of information again you'll get the slides this is something that I could spend bye Jim this is something that is like a full day's worth of training breaking down each one of these things but this stuff is wonderful in terms of not being reactive with people in terms of managing your own distress so I feel like I'm giving you a secret I don't know if you feel the same way so okay so we have we have this we have the reaching out so kids distressed my son's having a really hard time he's going to avoid fight flight running away he doesn't really want to check out so he goes to reach out to somebody because there are only three possibilities so what happens though this is the question I've gotten a lot because you want to teach people to reach out but what happens if you try to reach out and it didn't work what the heck do you do what's up well you can try somebody else yeah you can continue to try to reach out for sure there must be somebody in the universe who understands me none of the people in the room do but there's got to be somebody but what if you're feeling really really stressed out really angry all of those things and you went up to the woman the woman who was supposed to help you like you're on the playground right you have a problem with another kid and so you go up to the person who's supposed to be helping manage all the kids and they're like yeah I don't even believe that happened I'll talk to her about it later so that happens what are you going to do well you can act out or check out but I certainly hope there's another option self-regulate self-regulate you can try to fight on the teacher but self-regulate is it right so this is the beautiful thing you're going to be acting out and checking out a lot less if you believe me that it's all based on the body if you are able to regulate right so what do we know about ways to regulate okay anybody else do anything to regulate them meditation breathing power pose exercise that's another one music okay so luckily there's plenty of things and in strategic self-regulation we have all of these tools and I'm going to give you a link to a website where Albeco actually in person over the internet um walks through these and what's really cool about that too is he talks about all of these are science based these are all research based regulatory tools so he talks about that like why these things do this so one of the great things at the beginning is if you allow and provide an escape for somebody when they're distressed that's really regulated so I know a lot of folks are like I've seen situations with parents where they're like no we're going to talk about this right now I recommend really strongly you don't do that if you don't take an escape allows you to regulate allows the frontal lobes to come back on and allows people to come back I've had a lot of experience working with really really explosive kids like kids who are restrained fairly regularly because their behavior is so aggressive these kids will not reach out because of what do you think in terms of their previous experience what's happened to them in the past really severe trauma they've been abused really badly in their homes they've had really horrible experiences they learned really quickly that reaching out was not the same thing to do so they're stuck with what acting out or checking out I was working with the kids who would never check out these weren't hacked out kids total aggression fight flight behavior a lot of programs will not allow that to happen no they don't check out these kids will not check out their survival is based on never doing that they get sent away to wear them and they're still going to fight flight and they're never allowed to escape so what happens they end up getting restrained they end up getting restrained so Stephen Porges is a great name he's developed this thing called the polyvagal theory which is all about the vagus nerve which is connected to all of these defense systems that we have in the body he did a study around restraint and what happens to the body when it feels like when it's in restraint is if you think about fight flight and you're not allowed to fight and you're not allowed to get out the body literally starts to feel like it's going to die that's the experience of being restrained so one of the things that we worked on and Al has worked with really explosive kids is you allow them to learn how to escape the situation and get out in order to come back and that's been a life saver for a lot of folks but it's also a really good thing to do for our kids like I'm going to take a break I'm going to take an escape and I'm going to come back when I feel comfortable to talk to you looks like wait they're making you escape right now nice timing good night love good night fuck what's that what do you do then what's more important is how you talk about it afterwards so processing it afterwards one of the things you can talk about is you can make an escape plan what's the question which is when everybody's calm not everybody has a question the question was like okay I'm realizing I'm getting distressed my kid is really upset and angry so I'm going to take a break and the kid follows you anybody looks like other people know that so you're doing everything you can to regulate because you don't want to act out on the kid and you're trying to just take an escape and they follow you and so she asks me well what do you do there what I would say is that you want to be able to talk about it when everybody's calm and actually come up with a family escape plan and then practice it when you're calm you could be like remember honey the other night when you were really upset I'm going to take a break let's practice it because another thing that you're working against there is attachment style which my guess is with your kid if you leave what happens to the distressed level it goes up so when you want to teach in that moment is I'm going to leave and you're going to be okay and the only way to teach that is to have it it's not something the frontal lobe is going to get but it is something that the body can get and so if you can work the body with it not in a moment of distress but in a moment of like remember what happened last night we wanted to avoid that you were really upset I was upset sometimes I just need to take a break let's practice it I'm going to go over here some way to make an agreement about what's going to happen and then practice it when you're not distressed so in the moment when you're distressed remember we talked about this I'm just going to go here for a moment because then again the brain is an anticipation machine right so you're fighting against the anticipation that your kid may not have any idea what you're doing like if you leave life is over because the anticipation is I need you when I'm distressed and so you have to break that form of attachment by talking about it and working it through and practicing too it might take a while you could be like okay now I'm going to do that when your kid gets really distressed I'm going to do that thing I'm going to leave and they may be like nooo you're like alright well it's not going to work this time but I guarantee you if you work it through and talk it through that it'll get easier and easier so but yeah yep so then if you try to do it you're leaving the right so then their distress is going to go up because they feel like you're getting them when they're upset so how are you supposed to like how do you deal with that in that moment it's really hard the way you deal with it is working on some of these things while you're not distressed when you're not distressed you go back home and you're like honey it's really hard I went to this great training and I learned these really cool things that we're going to try so you're not so distressed and these things can be really helpful um but in the moment I mean you're dealing with total limbic system fight flight response if you try to disengage or do something that's unplanned that hasn't been rehearsed and practiced in the body it's not a whole lot you can do you can go through and keep trying to change it so again I was the clinical director of the new school Montpelier, I don't know if anybody's heard of that but it's a small private school on top of the hill for kids with really severe trauma and behavioral challenges that kind of thing happened all the time and it sometimes takes a long time to break that so what I would say is you want to do planning around it, practice this stuff the more you can make this sort of part of your family culture stuff that feels good and comfortable and not hokey don't do power posing if it feels really hokey but there's a lot of things to try and then I think teaching the escape outside of the context of how awful it is it's like you're ready your body's going to be ready for it and be able to anticipate it I don't have like a magic thing you guys know 1, 2, 3 magic you ever heard of that program basically the idea is you count to like the kids acting up and you count to 3 and by the time you get to 3 the kids going to stop right? it actually works it really does, it's a very powerful program why do you think that works what's that? well think about it from the model that we've been talking about if you buy what I'm talking about about distress does counting to 3 you think if counting to 3 is threat based what's going to happen with the distress it's probably going to go up so something else is happening when you're counting to 3 1, 2, 3 well no that's what it is, I'm going to count to 3 and you're going to stop it's inherently calming you think about the frontal lobes part of it is impulse control you're creating the space for stopping you're creating the space for impulse control and so kids who can self-regulate by the time you've counted to 3 they've sort of created some impulse control or you've created impulse control and I have to say as somebody who's worked with really challenging kids and does a lot of stuff about behavior there's nothing where it's not funny but there's nothing funnier to me than seeing a parent to 1, 2, 3 and having it not work when that's their only tool like that, I just, I have to I get amused but I have my own sort of sense of humor about it but even that you can just be like if you bring that to because I don't think our kids want to act out I don't think any of us really want to act out it's always that there's this feeling of distress or something feels unresolvable so if you bring it to the moment and you talk about it our kids can often have really good ideas of what they actually need when they think about it but then you've got to practice you can't show up at the game and try to shoot free throws all of a sudden you've got to, it has to be part of that cellular muscle memory again, so the brain's anticipation is like oh right, last time I got this upset we resolved the problem as opposed to the last time I got this upset mom walked out and then I don't want her to do that again and then you as a parent are trying to do the right thing but the distress level is just going up yeah, Heidi that's a good question I don't know I think yeah right, so I think one way to frame it for an 11 or 12 year old is that I think 11 or 12 year olds don't want to feel distress right they often do for sure but if you think about there are ways that we can resolve this that are going to feel that are going to help you feel better framing it is that instead of saying I have this wonderful thing power posing I mean I'll show you the website, you can explore different ones you can be like this is why it works here's the science behind it you know, just to just like I had you guys all do, up and do power posing I'm sure if I did that in the middle school none of the kids are going to do it you know, but if you talk with them about the science of it they may be more interested in it and there's a lot of different things to do you know, taking an escape is not hokey and if you understand why you're doing it it's not because you're being punished it's because everyone's stressed out here we want to reduce the level of stress we all feel better that may start to work and it may not work right away but over time you're changing some patterns that are also have been there for a while yeah what's that? do you say that to your kids? drop it anytime right I mean, part of what's challenging about when you're when your distress level is up you're defending yourself not necessarily from the tiger and the threat excuse me, you're defending yourself from feeling vulnerable and what these things do the reason it's hokey is because I think it feels vulnerable it feels vulnerable to power pose in front of all you guys but that's kind of inherent in it is that we want to get back to our authentic self which is actually vulnerable it's not defended but man, human beings have a really hard time with that it's really hard to just feel something we're not, we don't engage in that very often and so hokey to me is just another you know, your defenses on your defenses on about the very thing that that would help you with your defenses which is fine because you can't go right at the defense as we know you have to go around it so if you're asking somebody to do something like here's the thing if you're asking somebody to do something when they're already distressed and you haven't practiced it before and even though you know it's going to work for sure their frontal lobes are not going to take in the information as this is helpful it's going to feel like a threat we don't process information it's the reason why everybody argues about everything all the time is because information only works through the frontal lobe most information is taken in through the limbic system which we're defending ourselves against well I think part of it is starting to understand the physiology behind it you know, so if you understand that you're, what you're doing is a defensive, distressed response and it feels better to not feel that way right? like you have wonderful moments with your 12 year old on shore and you can say this is our authentic self you feel really good or whatever word that isn't going to feel hokey we could have more of this and what's happening for you here is that your defense response is going on and so some sort of psychoeducation around it can be helpful you know you can blame it all on me I saw this guy like I think he was an idiot but we could try this you know like that kind of thing like I think we all want to do well we all want to be in authentic cells we're not aware that we're in a defensive reaction a lot of the time so, yep yeah please oh sorry, she's asking a question from a classroom perspective okay well I think part of that has to do with what the level of distress is right so part of it is being able to read the body it's sort of like the thermometer like where are you actually on the thermometer you know if you're up here I'm not going to be able to get you to do your math work but are you just to avoid is this checking out rather than regulating and that's it is a hard one because inherently you want to turn on the motivation system to get them to do work themselves without you having to be the one who's getting them to do work which is also really hard that's another training that I'll do another time but that's a piece of it and a lot of times folks will say you know, well they're avoided, they're not stressed they're just avoided they don't want to do their homework the framework for me is that that's still a distress response they're not avoiding work they're avoiding distress the distress just happens to be the work and so helping them tolerate the work is part of it so what do you think of stage one versus stage two versus stage three a lot of your kids are stage one just are distressed and so it's not until they go into stage two that you can sort of problem solve and reason with them a little bit and you may be able to have a moment where like I noticed that this work is really hard and you get stressed and want to leave how about doing one more how about doing two more and seeing how that feels in your body because ultimately when we do things well it feels good too and framing that can be part of it as well but we can talk more about that on Monday that's good any other questions yeah I think so I'm not sure is your athlete connected to being able to discommit disengage yeah I think it's a very vulnerable thing to walk away from something you know like so to ask a kid to walk away means that what do they think is going to happen to them your body is ready to be followed like your body to disengage from a threat means you actually have to feel safe and so backing away from a confrontation can feel really unsafe right and if you could do that without triggering them then you're going to start to work but I'm not sure if this is the point you're making if you give them a suggestion and they don't do it there's no vulnerable they're not vulnerable enough to respond to it yeah I mean ultimately us we're going to model the behavior that we want we're going to do what we do and the more we can model doing things that are not authoritarian like the more they're going to become self regulated the more authoritarian they are we are a lot of people check out which doesn't really help it's not a helpful thing either so I think I mean it's almost 8 o'clock yeah I'm sorry to say that again meaning that someone passed away and then all of a sudden there's a lot of outbursts and all that you know compassion I mean part of how we tolerate distress is through act down there's nothing more distressing than that or there are few things more distressing than the sudden loss of somebody does that make sense I mean it's very hard right so everything that can be done to help in terms of managing distress like therapy and engagement in advancement system stuff I mean it sounds like it's probably a really tough situation you can email me if you sign up you can ask that's one thing I'll say is I welcome people who have questions and follow up I'm not sure exactly how to do it I was thinking about maybe thinking about if you're interested in ongoing groups or something related to this if it's tickling your fancy thinking about how to have some more further conversations about it but I'm also I'll send out the slides to everybody on the list and I welcome you guys emailing more questions I welcome the conversation so yeah I just want to share that sometimes I think for me to want to resolve or fix or change something is that I forget that sometimes just that vulnerable feeling they're having is just what they're doing in that present moment and so sometimes it's kind of comfortable to just sit with it and just to be present and so if one of my if my boys are upset about something letting them have that space to be upset about it obviously like if they're you know if they're tearful about it if they're feeling really angry or stressed out letting them have that space to do that and I'm not saying like violence or chairs or anything like that but they might be really upset about something and that's totally valid but sometimes it's uncomfortable to just sit there and be present absolutely quiet and give them that space to do that so that they know how to work through something that's upset it and one of the most powerful things we can do for our kids is to allow them to have really difficult feelings and know that it's going to be okay like that these feelings are okay like I know for you guys in that wake sort of like the last thing I want is that kid to be terribly in tears and upset but I also have learned enough to not fix it I don't know if that's what you're saying like to not fix it but to just let him be able to feel the feeling and let it go through it and let it dissolve in a way is really powerful and it's not something that's really hard because it's really hard to be vulnerable in that moment when you want to fix it yeah right but the the hard thing and I think this is like a cultural thing I mean I could talk about this a lot longer is that we're so uncomfortable with feeling that's why I said like the authentic self feels things deeply we're so uncomfortable with feeling that we react to feeling so if we're feeling really sad, we're feeling pain we're feeling these things we react to it and then we're going to do one of those two things which is a hacked out with it because it feels awful or we're going to check out instead of just be with it because every time we're just with a feeling and actually with it it resolves it just does in the moment it feels like it's going to go on forever right and the best thing we can do with people with high levels of distress is to be able to tolerate if we can tolerate the high level of distress and not react to it that person has a lot of space to just be able to feel what they're feeling but then it requires us to be able to regulate ourselves in that moment one of the things I've learned as a therapist that I really really believe is that we as people we experience what other people are experiencing like other people make us feel what their experience is so like I'm working with this girl really awful trauma history she decided she thought I was siding with the parents she didn't like so she does not want to see me anymore for therapy and it's going out to the school where she works so what I decided to do what her reaction is trying to manifest is abandon them which is what she's experienced her whole life so she's put me over here and what I don't want to do is just be another person who has abandoned her so I'm still shutting up and I'm just like well I'm here and she goes to fight flight and she's just like get out of here and I walked into a room where she was with some other clients and she was just so mean to me and walked out and she's like you better not follow me I was like well what do I do here and what I realized I wanted to do was sit with the I felt like crap like I felt like awful and I was like okay I'm just going to sit with this and feel this because I'm pretty sure that this is what she's experienced and I want to just be able to sit with that that to me is also really powerful because I've learned how to regulate myself in that through years and years of experimenting with other people's kids because I've been doing this for 25 years like being able to stay with the feeling I'm glad you brought this up it's kind of a poignant thing to kind of end with because part of it is just being able to be in the feeling of it and part of that is regulatory so if you think of our authentic self isn't happy all the time it's just having feelings if you can safely have those feelings all sorts of growth can happen we're so used to checking out or acting out with our feelings that we don't do it so what's going to happen next is I know this is a lot of information if you want the slides I'll send them out and like I said I welcome any I'd love to hear feedback around this I'm happy to do more of these trainings like the gentleman from Woodbury was saying it would be great to have more of this in other places so if you guys know of other people I'd be happy to follow up so yeah yeah so is he ever not, I mean if there are ever moments where he's not distressed yeah I mean that's tough like part of it is this with the other person talking about sort of the psychoeducation of why he's doing what he's doing like he probably thinks it's all real but it's not it's confabulation maybe, that's what he says that's really true I mean I think again that's confabulation he's probably, I mean one of the things that's really hard about this is a lot of it's going to be unconscious you know we're just reacting we have no idea why I mean that's part of why therapy is going to be a wonderful thing is you start to kind of understand why you're reacting and doing these things that you don't want to be doing you know but as it's tricky for like tweens and teenagers because they're sort of developing their ego and their persona and they're like they don't know this like this stuff isn't what we know we just think that our reactions are real all the time and so then he has to have an excuse for why he's treating you like crap my guess is that underneath that there's something else going on and it may not be something that you as a mom can talk to him about it maybe something that he needs to talk to a counselor or a therapist or something but I guarantee you the reason he's talking about it talking to you that way is because there's some distress that is there that probably has nothing to do with what he's talking about right well so okay that brings me back to this I want to share this and again this will be on the slides these are all the things we didn't talk about so this is a website Alvecchio and again the guys developed this program just put this website it's been up for about a week tamingthetigervermont.com you don't have to put the files in wordpress so it's just tamingthetigervermont.com we'll take you to this site and then each of these all you do is click on them and there's a video and all sorts of resource material for each one of these and my hope is that no matter how distressed your kid is there might be one thing here that they'll do and that can make all the difference hmmm like to do it in the schools I'd love to do that I agree with you completely I mean if you can create a buzz to get I worked in a few schools it's often hard because schools sort of have their behavioral programs that they do but you can advocate I'm happy again if you put your name there you'll get my contact information I'm happy to continue to do this I love this stuff I've seen kids' lives change who are going to end up in jail because of this stuff in terms of the dramaticness of acting out and checking me out but also like I could tell you with my son it works to follow the stuff it really does it's not easy but it's pretty simple in some ways too yeah I agree well thank you all for coming