Jan Winhall: Unraveling the Complexities of Trauma and Addiction

When the wisdom of the body meets the complexity of trauma and addiction, profound healing can begin. This is the message that Jan Winhall, an experienced trauma and addiction psychotherapist, brings to our latest conversation. With her Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, Jan offers a paradigm shift, viewing addictive behaviors as adaptive strategies for managing dysregulated states. Throughout our discussion, she dismantles the traditional brain disease narrative, instead celebrating the body's innate intelligence and advocating for a treatment approach that respects its capacity for self-regulation.

Triggers, those emotional tripwires, are typically seen as obstacles, but what if we viewed them as signals pointing us toward deep-seated healing? Jan guides us through this reframe, leveraging the polyvagal theory to decode the language of our nervous system. The journey through ventral, dorsal, and sympathetic states illuminates the intricate dance of our reactions to stress and trauma, with Jan's insights offering a map to navigate these complex territories. By embracing and understanding our body's responses, we open the door to a life more authentically lived and aligned with our true self.

But what does the path to recovery from addiction and trauma really look like? Jan paints a picture of resilience and hope, emphasizing the importance of neuroplasticity and the human capacity to rebuild and recover. She stresses that setbacks are not failures but part of a continuing story of growth, and how communities can become safe nests that foster healing and connection. By the end of our profound exploration, it's clear that understanding our neurophysiology can free us from the grip of fear, offering a beacon of hope to anyone entangled in the complexities of addiction and trauma.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome everybody to this interview today with Jan Winhall. Let me read you her bio. Jan, she's a master's of social work. What does FOT stand for?

Speaker 2: 0:11

again, Focusing Oriented Therapist.

Speaker 1: 0:14

Thank you. I should have guessed that she's an author, a teacher, a seasoned trauma and addiction psychotherapist. She's an education partner and course developer with the Polyvagal Institute, where she teaches a certification course based on her book Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model. I have my book upstairs, but let me tell you it is A Must Read, which was published by Rutledge in 2021. She's an adjunct lecturer at the University of Toronto and is a certifying co-coordinator with the International Focusing Institute. She is also co-director of the boarding street clinic, where she supervises graduate students, and she loves traveling and teaching and sharing her wisdom on the topic of trauma and addiction all around the world. Welcome, jan. Thanks so much. It's me here, so I was just showing off what a good student I was of her book, so I have pages and pages and pages and pages of notes.

Speaker 1: 1:13

It was a very unique book about addiction and trauma. It was really written from a therapist to therapist, but I think it would be relevant to anybody who's on the journey of trying to recover from both trauma and addiction, which are obviously they very much coexist, and what made the book unique is that for some, a large part of the book is actually sort of like a history of our understanding of what is addiction and how. These different sort of points of view she describes at one point in her book like the blind men who have all got a piece of the elephant and when they put it together we have a big picture. And that's what Jan has done, is she's brought all these different points of view, the brain disease model but maybe it's just trauma. You deal with the trauma and the addiction goes away. Not so quick, right? No, they're distinct and they require overlapping but sometimes unique interventions. And so she's pulled all these different sort of theories and ways of understanding it and working with it into this model. That sort of pulls it all together in this creative way that she calls the felt sense polyvagal model. So we're going to explore that and unpack that today.

Speaker 1: 2:25

So, jan, how did you get involved in this work? Let's start there. What brought, what drew you to the topic of trauma and addiction?

Speaker 2: 2:34

Well, probably how I grew up. I think it's true for so many of us but what kind of crystallized it was when I finished grad school and I ended up getting a job in a hospital outside of Toronto in a pretty high needs area and they had this program at the hospital for women who were incest survivors. And that's really how I got into all of this, because in running this group I realized that a lot of these women were engaged in self-harming behaviors which became addictive because they served a purpose. They helped them in sometimes ways they understood, like drinking which would numb them or some drugs but in other ways that they didn't understand, like cutting the body, for example. They didn't understand why they were doing these things. Or, really interesting, I couldn't understand things like sucking on bars of soap what's that? So it was a journey really to try to figure that all out in a way that felt very respectful of the human body.

Speaker 1: 4:00

And that is one of the paradoxes that you really explore deeply in the book, that the brain disease model comes up short in understanding that this isn't just a pathological brain problem, that this is a behavior that also is our best effort, or the individual's best effort, to try and regulate a dysregulated nervous system. It brings in a felt sense of safety, even if it is not ultimately in the end actually regulating. It's more dysregulating. It actually dysregulates the body, as time goes on even worse, but in the moment it's helping. It is an act of self-care. It is their best effort to be kind and loving and good to themselves, even though it seems bizarre.

Speaker 2: 4:46

Well, and I think from the model, really, when you distill it, it's really about two embodied processes. One of them is introception, the awareness of what's happening inside us, in our body, and also how we feel, and that's the felt sense piece of it that we can talk about. And then neuroception, steve Korge's word for how our body unconsciously keeps us safe through the autonomic nervous system. And so what I put together over many years of trying to figure this out and other people have too, but I hadn't found them. When I did this, I found Judith Perman, actually, who she began to understand these behaviors through the autonomic nervous system.

Speaker 2: 5:39

And so really, what became clear was that, for example, when you cut the body, if you're in this kind of flight fight state, that's one branch of the nervous system, the sympathetic response of flight fight that most of us know that feeling in the body.

Speaker 2: 5:58

And if you drink a bottle of wine, then you shift down into a numbing place. But how did that work with cutting? Well, how it works with cutting is that if you cut the body, the body releases these endogenous opioids and so it numbs you. How amazing is that it also works the other way, if you cut the body and you're in a numb state, it can trigger adrenaline and cortisol, which wakes you up and shifts you back into a flight fight state in the nervous system. So we have these ways that help us to manage really dysregulated states in the body. When we don't feel safe, when there's no opportunity to calm ourselves down in a way that feels safe inside, then the body has these other systems to do that. Isn't that amazing? That's body wisdom. That is not pathology. In my view, it's actually very adaptive if you understand the context in which the behaviors are happening.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Right. Yeah, you mentioned in your book that addictive behaviors are adaptive strategies and there's zero, zero, when we really understand that for ourselves and for each other, that there's no room anymore for pathologizing, for shaming, for judging and punishing. These are people that are doing their best, with what they had to work with, to try and work with that pain.

Speaker 2: 7:39

Yeah, and I think, actually addictions. They function as what we call state regulation strategies. They shift you from one state in the nervous system to another when there isn't the possibility of escape. And for lots of you know, certainly for the women that I was working with there was no escape because these people that were hurting you were your parents.

Speaker 2: 8:03

So how do bodies survive? Well, they have this amazing function of being able to help us to shut down and it's kind of like hibernating, it's like you're living in the basement of your house. You're just surviving. You know it's not thriving at all, but you're surviving right, because how else could you survive something like that if you weren't able to dissociate and to numb? The horror of it all, I mean, really it's quite something, the way bodies are designed. And we miss all of that when we just apply this kind of top-down pathologizing model that doesn't understand the true wisdom of the body and what we're gifted in that capacity to thank goodness, to be able to numb and to dissociate and not even remember when it's really bad.

Speaker 2: 9:00

Right Now, there's a problem with that for sure. There's lots of problems with it because bodies also get stuck in those neural pathways, those trauma we call them trauma feedback loops. And then you're in trouble because you're still using when you don't have to anymore, when you've managed to get yourself to a place where it's safe enough that you could be more present. But because of the way brains work and neuroplasticity in the brain, the brain is carrying on walking down the same pathway it has for many, many, many years, and so we get stuck in these old bad habits that are sometimes terrible. You know, this model is not about minimizing the harm of addiction. It's about understanding the true nature of addiction.

Speaker 1: 9:54

And the biggest.

Speaker 2: 9:56

That's our job, then, as therapists and coaches, body workers and mental health workers is to help people shift out of that state of the trauma feedback loop, by helping them to understand if they can bring enough presence and safety into the body, and we know that's not easy these days.

Speaker 1: 10:20

In fact I remember writing down that you had a quote here somewhere. It was something like basically you know about neurons that fire together in the whole. You know all the different research, the brain studies. It really helped us understand that the brain is neuroplastic until the day we die, that it can be rewired, but that with brains like ours, who started our editions especially, you know the younger, the more decades of use of wiring. You know the hard wiring of pathways but that it's always possible.

Speaker 2: 10:54

You're talking about the plastic paradox. This is so interesting. This is Mark Lewis's work and Norman Doge and, yeah, this learning model of addiction. So when I made the model, I was building and I'm thinking, well, if it's not a brain disease, what is it Like? How do we understand what this thing is that takes over in people? And so, yeah, brains are constantly changing, so that's not a way of sort of justifying that it's a disease. Your brains are always changing and learning new things. Right.

Speaker 2: 11:30

But what happens is if you travel it's like if you think of a path in a forest, if you travel down that same path over and over and over again, eventually you know you can see it very clearly. And if you think of it as a kind of a bit develops, a muddy road, then you're in a rut and you can't get out of it. So we have to do come in with our interventions to help people to shift out of that rut. It's like getting your car unstuck and moving down a new, fresh pathway that connects you with the ventral branch of the vagus nerve, which is the part of us that you know when we feel safe enough.

Speaker 2: 12:15

This part of the vagus nerve is online and this is the place of healing and growth and restoration in the body. It's above the diaphragm. The vagus nerve is this long cranial nerve right, it runs from the base of your brain, the brain stem right down through into your gut and it's an amazing thing really when you think it's. This is the nerve that watches to see how safe we are, and if we're not in a safe enough state, it will shift us into mobilizing and fight flight and if we can't escape, like these young women in my group, it shifts us into what Steve Porge is named the dorsal branch of the vagus, which is where we shut down and dissociate and give up and hibernate just to survive.

Speaker 1: 13:09

And how you describe that addiction basically is the bouncing between those two states, and that's primarily it. So we're jacked up, we're wired, we're stressed, we're in fight or flight, we're overworking, we're, we're in conflict, we're defensive, we're, we're in a solitary defense state because there's this constant internal sense of threat, threat, threat. And when we've lost hope that we can outrun this threat or outwork this threat or solve this threat, boom, we crash into the freeze response or the trauma response or the dorsal, the dorsal nervous system state, and then we're we're heavy and lethargic and depressed and hopeless and helpless. It's, it's a very dark place, it's a dark pit. And then and then our addiction can. Either we're there for a while until we will either use our addiction or cortisol and adrenaline to jack ourselves back up into a stress state of mobilization again, till we can't do it anymore and we crash back into the trauma response. And that's what addiction is is we go from those two states.

Speaker 2: 14:11

Exactly how we understand it through the polyvagal lens. I call them propellers that shake you. I have a I'm I'm very visual person, so I had to kind of put it down on paper and I made this graphic model and you can see in the model where we shift back and forth between this flight fight and then shutting down, and then shutting down and back up to flight fight because there's no safety there or no perceived safety Right.

Speaker 1: 14:41

That's important, yes, cause you talk about in your book how trauma creates triggers and triggers distort the present moment and in we can be led to perceive threats that aren't there. Can you talk to us a bit more about that?

Speaker 2: 14:54

Yeah, because you know the way memory works, right, is that when we're really traumatized and we dissociate, memory isn't processed through the brain in the same way, and so these memories stay like little pools inside us and memory in the body is very different, right? If you go down into the body, into working with the felt sense and we should talk some more about this then the way that your body remembers things is very different. It's not linear. So when a trigger happens, the memory feels like it's happening right now. It's right now this is happening. And then up we go into these dysregulated states to try to manage those triggers that are really like little they're. They're unresolved trauma experiences that are kind of waiting and patiently for us to pay attention to them, to help people to heal. Yeah, oh, I lost, you Get here.

Speaker 1: 16:02

Sorry about that, right, because in our nervous system and in our cognitive mind there's still a sense that that threat is still possible. It hasn't been resolved and cleared and let go of right. Yeah, there's still a perceived sense.

Speaker 2: 16:21

I'm just back to a wounded place. It's like a window into a wounded place in your life, and I try to help people to reframe triggers like that, because we can just hate them. It feels scary and horrible and whatever, and they do. But really it's our body's way of saying listen, there's this thing that happened and it's getting in the way of us being fully who we can be, because it's a wound that needs attention, just like a physical wound needs attention. They have physical pain in the body as a warning right. It's like, oh, something's wrong here. It's not that it's our enemy, it's telling us something's wrong here. And triggers are like that too. They're emotionally painful, terrifying, chronic, often because they need to be paid attention to. So let's talk more about the felt sense.

Speaker 1: 17:21

That sounds great. You know what I thought. I would just share a quick slide in case we've kind of deep dived into the polyvagal and it might be new to somebody. And then I know what I'll do after. I pull this one up when we move into the felt sense and some of Jen Lynn's work. I'm going to try to find on the internet your I'm sure there's a slide there somewhere. I'll try and pull that up, but I'll share this quickly just in case it's helpful.

Speaker 1: 17:43

This is quite a classic sort of it's one I created, but it's a very classic polyvagal sort of slide. So this is the traumatized nervous system. So in this window of tolerance here, this is where we have a flow like we have. We have energy that's activated. We've got a bit of a stress. I got to go let the dog out, or I got to make lunch or pick up the kids or whatever. Right, there's a bit of a lift, I need to take an action. And then I come back down into oh, that's over and I'm relaxed and present again. And all of this happens in the context of a sense of flow. I'm not overly stressed. I can handle everything that's coming at me, everything that's on my plate all of the demands on my body and in my life and I'm just flowing with my day. This is when you're in your window, but what happens is when something is too much, too fast or it's a trigger, we move into this hyperarousal state.

Speaker 1: 18:35

The sympathetic nervous system, I think of the sympathetic S stands for stress, the stress state, and we can stay there for quite a long time. We can get stuck there, stuck there, stuck there, and then eventually it's just too much or too long and we crash into the dorsal, so otherwise known as the freeze state or the trauma state. Same, all the same. And then we get stuck there for who knows how long and then something sort of kicks us back into gear. Sometime it's our addiction. We'll eat like chocolate or like in my case it's. We use food a lot to sort of create these state shifts and then boom, we're back into this stress state again and we just keep kind of back and forth. We're not spending much time in this ventral flow where we're connected and present in the moment to ourselves and to other people. So that's the polyvagal theories. Basically there's three states the ventral, the dorsal and the sympathetic. And these are, yeah, I did very high level, but hopefully that'll be helpful. Is there anything you want to add about that before we move to?

Speaker 2: 19:41

into a couple of things. So the freeze state is actually it's a little bit different. I know Steve called it that originally, but he likes us to be really specific about this. The freeze state is really a blended state of sympathetic and dorsal. So if you think about that in your body, freezing has constriction in it.

Speaker 1: 20:06

Right.

Speaker 2: 20:07

But it's also immobilized right. So the freeze state is what in my model I call fixate, because it is the place where addictions occur, in shifting you back and forth between sympathetic and dorsal. The actual dorsal state is a collapse of muscles and so it's a heaviness, there's no constriction, it's limp, it's the state of giving up and surrendering Right. So we in the Polyvagal Institute we want to really try to educate people around that, because it's kind of a shift in his way of talking about it, but it's important, because it's important from the body's point of view. Constriction is not part of the dorsal vagus.

Speaker 1: 20:51

You get that. So constriction is sympathetic, and then when we drop into the freeze response, it's a heavy letting go. There's no tension.

Speaker 2: 21:03

The freeze response is a blending of both. If you find my model, I'll show you. I will. Yeah, because another piece I wanted to stress is that we have many blended states in the nervous system, right? Yes, maybe I'll just go on my website, or?

Speaker 1: 21:22

So let's see if I can find it Images. Here we go. Oh yeah, here it is, cape. I don't know how great this is to be able to see, but let's, hopefully people can see it.

Speaker 2: 21:59

That's the clinician version. Do you want the simpler one? Well, it's up to you. Is your audience mostly clinicians?

Speaker 1: 22:09

or not. No, I think there are mostly people. I can pull up this one. Well, with the six Fs.

Speaker 2: 22:13

Yeah, sure, cape, there we go, you got it. Can you make it a bit smaller so people can see the whole thing? Let's see if I can.

Speaker 1: 22:25

What is this? Is there anything doing here? Just one second.

Speaker 2: 22:28

Or just slide it down a bit. Yeah, just slide this down.

Speaker 1: 22:32

There we go.

Speaker 2: 22:33

There we go, so we made it into six Fs, because my client's like simplicity, right? Yes, yes, the bottom yellow one we called Flock, and this is the ventral branch of the vagus. This is the part of the body above the diaphragm, up into the face, and this is the place where we feel safe enough and where we really thrive and feel healthy. The immune system is working well. No, it's a great place to be. The immune system is working well, and the other states are important too, though, because they're all good in the sense that they all help us, right. So then, you see, fight, flight up there, that's the place of sympathetic that we all, you know. We know that sense of either you want to fight to be able to respond to a threat, or you want to flight to get away from there, in order to get out and to protect yourself.

Speaker 2: 23:34

Then, over on the other side, we called Fold and collapse. This is the dorsal branch of the vagus nerve that Steve Porges named as part of the the vagus. That's really one of the major contributions that he's made to this new way of understanding the autonomic nervous system. Then there are three blended states. As people, we're working with different blends. There are more blends.

Speaker 2: 24:02

This is just the next kind of come up with right now, but there are, there are more and more and more. We're discovering I think we really a lot of the time in blended states so but the one that we're talking about here, freeze and fixate. You see where freeze is. Yeah, so freeze is in between dorsal and sympathetic, because it has that, that constriction of sympathetic right, but it also has the stuckness, the immobilizing force of the dorsal. So you're literally stuck, you're going nowhere fast and that really is addiction. It's a stuck state, right, really stuck in this awful place, this rat, it's even a rat in your neural pathways. So I think it's a very, it's a very helpful way of understanding. You know both the experience of what it feels like and literally what happens in the nervous system Right.

Speaker 2: 25:07

And the flow state is a blending of the grounded ventral branch and the part of the dorsal vagus which is activated when we feel safe enough that we can be still. So we're not moving, which is the dorsal part of the vagus, but we're not moving and we feel safe. So in flow we have meditation, we have a focusing practice where we go into the body and pay attention to what's happening inside and then, and you know whatever, maybe with prayer or people are quietly reflecting. And then the other side is this blended state that I we call fun or fired up. So fun is like when you're playing, so you've got some sympathetic energy in flight fight, but you also feel safe.

Speaker 2: 26:00

Kids you can hear them in the schoolyard. They're laughing and having fun, and then, as soon as something happens, you hear either they they start crying and running home, they flight back to mom or dad, or they fight. Right, somebody hits somebody else because they feel threatened. And then fired up is a state of really feeling maybe adamant or passionate about something, or you're, you're like, right now I'm probably in, I'm in fired up, or I'm like I'm sharing this with you and it's my work and I love it and it's exciting to share. And we know we're like, we're online, so people are watching and all of that, but I still feel, you know, safe in my body and pretty grounded. So that's how we work with the nervous system in the felt sense polyvagal model, and my clients started like downloading this on their phone and and sticking it on the fridge. All of the the handouts are available on my website for people to to download and to use.

Speaker 1: 27:03

Yeah, so right here at the center. Right here at the center is the felt sense. So we'll go there, because this is this was actually the the.

Speaker 2: 27:15

After I started working with these young women, I could see that there were lots of things going on in their bodies and I was really curious. I started reading a lot of feminist research and literature, because feminist understood embodiment in a way that wasn't understood in a more traditional top down pathologizing DSM model, which is what I was working in, you know, and in the hospital. It was pretty terrible. I mean the contempt that these women were treated with. They were diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder and they were seen as being really manipulative, that a lot of these self harming behaviors were about getting attention. Now, when you realize that these self harming behaviors actually are incredibly adaptive when you're not safe, I mean, come on, and this, 40 years later, this is still like, bless her heart. Janina Fisher gets it, you know, she's wonderful and and Judith Herman, but it's still. We still got this DSM thing with. You know all the ways that people are sick and screwed up and wanting attention and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I went hunting to try to figure out how can I help these wonderful young women to be more skillful with them, to help them understand what was going on in their bodies, because I didn't get all that yet. I just knew something was going on there that that we hadn't really tapped into, and so I discovered Gene Jendlin's work at the University of Chicago, back in the. He was a student of Carl Rogers, who was a very famous beautiful humanistic psychologist in the 50s and the 60s, 1950s and 60s. This is going back. I mean, jendlin died several years ago and he was 90. So but they were really curious about what produces change for people, and what they discovered was amazing and it's really my model. So they discovered that people who were doing well in therapy, both reported by therapists and by their clients. They started recording the sessions, which is a lot of what happened in experiential therapy years ago. They would do these process recordings and they found that during the sessions there were these large gaps where nobody was talking Can you imagine. And so they asked them what were you doing there? And what they found basically was that these were clients who were they were pausing a nice mindfulness strategy, right they were pausing and connecting into how their body was reading what was happening in the session, this introspective process.

Speaker 2: 30:18

And so Jendlin said, well, okay, that makes sense, right? People that are doing well and able to make change in their life are integrated people. Their bodies and their minds are integrated. It's like a biofeed, a loop that goes around instead of being cut off. And so he said, okay, if people are doing this, naturally connecting with this full experience of what's happening in their lives, which he called the felt sense, this kind of intuitive, deeper signaling from the body, something that the body knew, that you didn't already know in your hand and we experience this all the time in life if we're connected to our bodies right, something will happen and we'll feel kind of. We'll feel kind of a tightness in our throat or a kind of upset stomach and we're not sick, something else is going on. And so that's the beginning of a felt sense. It's like your body's saying to you wait a minute, something's not right here. And then so Jendlin created these six steps to help people find the felt sense, to find the integration with body and mind.

Speaker 2: 31:39

And then he invited people to come into partnerships. So we always focus in partnerships and in my courses on the Polyvagal Institute, everybody has a focusing partner and you learn the process of paying attention to this intraceptive process of felt sensing and also the neuroceptive process of where am I in my nervous system right now? And through that process people really begin to understand themselves more deeply, to understand triggers more accurately, to process triggers, to live a more present, authentic life. And that's what we then teach clients in the model. So then I just got, I fell in love with Jendlin. Really, I mean, he was a funny guy, he was a real character, but boy, did he know how to listen to people very deeply.

Speaker 2: 32:46

Do you remember in my book the Dream with Lata? I do very clearly. Oh, my goodness, when I saw that, I mean I was lucky enough. It was over 30 years ago. I went to a conference that he was at in Niagara Falls in Canada, with 30 people. There were only 30 people there, and he did this dream work with Lata, and I had never seen anybody be able to be with another person so deeply. The place where there's not words, really the right hemisphere, the place of poetry. The place of poetry of imagery, of metaphor. This is the body, this is the body's language. It's not linear, right, and we've lost this. It's a tragedy, it really is, and it's what gets me fired up. It's like if we don't get back to our bodies, we're gonna destroy this world. It's easy to have do damage to the climate and to each other when you're not connected to your body Right and the irony is and oh man, I wish I had.

Speaker 1: 33:58

I wish I had some of these in my favorite quotes from your book, just right at my fingertips, but there's never spread out among 60 pages of notes.

Speaker 2: 34:05

But let me I have some on Instagram. I'm putting quotes on Instagram.

Speaker 1: 34:10

I will share some of my favorites, in case you're not following it.

Speaker 2: 34:12

Share some of your quotes from there yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:16

So when we work with addiction and trauma page 158, we must remember that the autonomic nervous system is engaged in disconnecting from embodied experience. Addiction is a guard dog keeping us or sorry, keeping deep feelings at bay. So we must work slowly and awaken ventral presence slowly. We help clients learn to titrate the experience of becoming embodied again, connecting, reconnecting to their body. The greatest source of healing lies in my client's capacity to engage with their felt sense, to access the healing power of the body. One last quote here Clients learn how expanding their window of tolerance, their capacity to stay with challenging feelings, sensations, emotions, allows for deepening of the felt sense experience, and for them it is both reassuring and terrifying to know that the deepening of their capacity to feel into their life is the path forward.

Speaker 1: 35:18

So the crazy thing is that we're using our addiction to shut down the overwhelming sensations in our body, the pain that's stored there, the overwhelm, the memories that were literally just the pain that the addiction itself has caused. Because, right for my addiction the food addiction, sugar addiction, space we wind up with metabolic syndrome left, right and center and ever escalating amounts. We have fibromyalgia, we have migraines, we have cancer, we have diabetes, we're overweight, like there's so much pain and trauma that our addiction itself is creating, and so we want to be less in our bodies the longer we're on the path of addiction. And so then, when someone comes to the table to say, okay, the path forward, the path to healing, is to feel I mean what? No, is there a plan B, please? Right?

Speaker 2: 36:15

Yeah, yeah. But you know you do that within the context of what I call the safe nest. So you do that within the context of co-regulation, we would say in Pauli Bigel, of being with you in a way that inspires you to be closer to me, because it feels good, it awakens a part of us that's yearning for connection, because that's how we're designed. We're mammals. We're designed to connect with each other and to thrive when we're held and we feel safe and we feel warm and cozy, right. And so it's really about coaxing. It's hard work, you know, coaxing and encouraging and sometimes downright pulling people out from hiding in that cage at the back of a cage and saying, come on, come on out here a little bit, because you were out here all on your own before, but now you're coming out here with me and with community. So I always work in groups pretty well.

Speaker 2: 37:28

The only time I think individual work is good is when people are just not ready to go to group, and that's fine. There's a real place for it and you can start there. But groups are magical, because in groups the sense of connecting and intimacy is just magnified and you learn from each other. You can see, oh, joe, blow down there. He's a little further along than me and look at him, he's having a good time. I want some of that right. And so it just starts to grow and grow and grow.

Speaker 2: 38:06

And in order for that to really happen, it's like you kind of have to help people kind of ignite into that energy right Of that ventral energy. It takes time, and sometimes it takes a long time in individual therapy to have that happen, and that's all fine. But my goal is to get them into group where you can really socially engage with other people. And this is the place where I think 12 step has been really great In terms of offering this kind of group process and accessibility Everybody, almost all over the world really and all of that is great. It's just I don't think you need to buy the whole 12 step thing to have that. That's a thing we make on our own. We can build community and we are different ways, right, right.

Speaker 1: 39:00

So if the thought of connecting to your body and the distress in the physical pain and the emotional distress that's there, and the discomfort and the triggers, it just feels like, oh my gosh, thank you very much. I have an addiction because they don't want to feel that. I think what you're saying is that you don't have to do it alone anymore.

Speaker 2: 39:22

Right, you don't have to do it alone anymore and also that we do it slowly, right? So I think you were talking about the three D's that I write about in my book. Deepening the Process. Yeah, we do it slowly over time and in terms of coming into the body, we do it very slowly. So there's a number of ways.

Speaker 2: 39:44

Gendland, the first step in focusing is called clearing space, and in that step there's many different ways of being able to kind of.

Speaker 2: 39:52

It's like a meditation step, really, and then it's not meditation anymore, because you're going into a problem and but it's a way of beginning to help people pause and slow things down and clear all of the noise that's in there.

Speaker 2: 40:13

Right, and the first, I mean the first way that I do. In the beginning I don't talk about that at all with people, I just get to know them. But then, when we start to with through some kind of psychoeducation around what's important and what's going to bring you a good life, we can start by just saying you know, can you pause and notice what's in the room, notice something in the room that you're drawn to, like I have lots of things in my room that I like, that I'm drawn to. We can teach people that too, so you could buy something that you really like, or find a rock or something that has meaning for you and put it beside you in your room and then practice just noticing that for even 30 seconds to slow down and stop, and so we have many ways of beginning that process of slowing down. We don't yank people, we go there. It's titrating very gently, very, very gently yeah, yes.

Speaker 1: 41:19

And you do have a quote where you say healing occurs in a series of daily practices that one intentionally commits to. Exactly, yeah, yeah, the daily practice is very important.

Speaker 2: 41:34

You can't really rewire, I don't believe, without daily practice. Right the consistency, the slow, and that's hard.

Speaker 1: 41:41

You know when we're used to a life of addiction.

Speaker 2: 41:46

it's often pretty chaotic, but there can also be some very clear kind of structure there when it comes to meeting the needs of the addiction. So we kind of you know piggyback on that. It's like okay, so if every day you have this habit of doing whatever that numbs you, let's see if we can use that every day thing but change the habit Right?

Speaker 1: 42:12

instead of, like that mid-afternoon chocolate bar and chips, go for a walk around the block, take 10 minutes somewhere to just breathe or put your hand up.

Speaker 2: 42:25

Or even one minute to think through what you're intentionally committing to in your own life, how you want to really change your behavior, or take one minute to bring up an experience that is really motivating you to change. I'm actually writing a workbook for my book.

Speaker 1: 42:49

Oh.

Speaker 2: 42:50

Glad about because it's much simpler. It's a Norton book and it's coming out next year. I'm just writing it now. Okay, boy, writing about establishing safety. Wow, I mean, it's always been tricky, but now, with what's going on in the world, wow, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 43:14

There's a lot of sense of threat environmental, political, economic. Like Jan, I'm pretty immune to the price of food. I have been prioritizing it since I was in my 20s. I go into health food stores and whatever they charge me, I pay and I don't really blink an eye. It's sometimes I wince and I move on because it's a priority. I don't have the option of the cheap stuff. It just doesn't work for me and so. But when I'm at the tail going what, that tiny bag of Brussels sprouts is $13. I mean, wow, talk about. And then the interest rates and inflation, like post COVID is just like if COVID wasn't difficult enough, like it's a lot on our nervous systems right now, from so many angles.

Speaker 2: 44:08

Yes.

Speaker 1: 44:09

Yes. So one thing that was interesting in your book is that you talk about. Let me just share this quote because I think it summarizes what you said and then I'll move on to the part about harm reduction. You say letting go of addictive behaviors that have helped us. They always help us. We wouldn't. They're not sabotaging self-hatred, intentional self-harm, it's not. They're always intended to try and help us. Letting go of addictive behaviors that have helped bring a feeling of safety triggers defensive systems in the body. So we must go slowly, honoring the role addictions playing, creating stability and a sense of safety for the individual. So talk about an opportunity for self-compassion. That relapse is exactly. It is exactly those moments when you go. I just have to go back to my safety. That's all it is. It's just a matter of. I know that's really gonna be comfortable and cozy and safe and even if I know rationally that's not a good decision to go back and eat the three rows of Oreos, honestly, in that moment that's all you're doing.

Speaker 2: 45:18

And just, and it's actually an I believe it's an unconscious choice. It's just the body, the nervous system just goes to the place, it shifts states and it comes from the brainstem. It's not a conscious thing and the brainstem is not a sophisticated part of the brain. It's just, it's a part of the brain that just goes yes or no kind of yes. And so what? How?

Speaker 2: 45:43

The way that we work with relapse is we work with really harnessing the wisdom of the nervous system and so being able to say okay, so you came in. You, you know, you're here today and you're really freaking out because you had two sips of wine. I've had clients like that. They get a sip of wine and they're terrified, which I understand. But then all this stuff starts going in.

Speaker 2: 46:11

And then there's this whole thing about the 12 steps, where you have to start again at day one and nothing of what you've done is mattered, and this I have a very hard time. I do not agree with that. I think it's very damaging actually, because it's not the way bodies work. You don't lose everything. You know. The 12 step program really has to update itself in terms of neuroplasticity and some people are, some people are, but you know, we know that you don't lose all you've gained you don't the brain, that you've still got that pathway in there, that you've gained but you lost yourself because you got triggered in some way or another. And sometimes you can find what it is and sometimes you can't. But we know too that when clients can, when people can get back on track because they're not shaming themselves and they're not having to start all over again, they recognize oh, my body went there because it wasn't, didn't feel okay. Those pathways of the ventral vagus are established and they can regain quite quickly.

Speaker 1: 47:21

Often, not always, not always- If they have enough of a number of days like they have had enough of a lived experience. I don't know what it feels like to let it go, and I know I felt safer. That can feel safe too.

Speaker 2: 47:35

Yes, and also just neurophysiologically. Your body has that pathway in there. It hasn't lost it, right right. But when people understand that, it's very hopeful.

Speaker 1: 47:48

Yes, yes, and not that I want to overly defend the day. One thing, because it has traumatized me many times it took me almost two years to get 90 days of back-to-back abstinence in my food addiction recovery program. I would break it day 13. I would have to strawberry or I didn't finish my lunch. Then I'd break it day 27. And I got all the way up to day 56 and I can't remember what I did. Whatever it was, I accidentally ate chicken instead of beef and I committed beef. And I had to go back to day one. Like it was so strict and so intense, like I felt like I just was never gonna get it. And then I broke it day 87. And in my program you weren't allowed to talk in meetings till you had 90 days of back-to-back. You couldn't go up to history and there was limitations to your capacity to be a full participant in, and so it was a big deal to get your 90 days and I just it was so demoralizing.

Speaker 2: 48:41

And.

Speaker 1: 48:42

I, oh yeah, yeah, it's one of the more extreme sort of and yet in its defense, I do understand that when my sponsor said, honey, we're gonna send you back to day one because I want you to experience the beauty of the day one's surrender, that right, I was getting, I was drifting, but I was drifting, off course, and I was headed for, I was heading for the ditch and we're gonna catch you and then just get you right back to the basics, right, like, just remember that you kind of you're falling asleep at the wheel a little bit here, right. So it was more in that context, but still, like your point's not lost on me, I lived it.

Speaker 2: 49:27

Yeah, I think it's wanting to revisit that real intentionality. That's it which is hard, and it is true, people lose it. They do. They do what I think helps people to really hold on and sustain it special engagement.

Speaker 2: 49:45

It's precisely the opposite of what you were like. It's talking sharing, being in connection with other human beings, and this is very polyvagal. It's like we need each other to be able to really grow and thrive Right, and the more you have these ventral experiences, the more the body builds this ventral state and the easier it is to come back to it again. And that's really comforting to know that.

Speaker 1: 50:15

Right, right, there's nothing but hope. As hard as it is to walk the path of recovery, as hard as it is to rebuild neuro pathways and extinguish ones that have been with us for decades, and as easy as it is for us to jump on the bandwagon that there's something wrong with us and that it's pathetic that we keep relapsing and we're doing these self-harming behaviors. I think a lot of that is about?

Speaker 2: 50:42

I think it's about the masculinity, because we live in a culture that lays a real trip on us as women and also as men in all genders really in terms of how kind of being independent really means not needing anybody else this kind of fierce, hypermasculine story. And so the state of dependence is really like a parent in this culture. And what is addiction? It's a state of dependence. You need something in order to be okay and survive. You're in this chronic kind of childlike state of dependence, and for those of us living in this kind of really top down Western, hypermasculine culture, that's a shameful place to be in and of itself.

Speaker 1: 51:47

And the irony is that we're dependent on things substances, behaviors, addictions and we're not dependent on what we should be, which is interdependent with other people, that we're very isolated, we're hyper alone. When stuff really is painful and big and overwhelming, we isolate and we find Ben and Jerry.

Speaker 2: 52:11

Yeah, because the world, the relationships have hurt too much. They let you down.

Speaker 1: 52:16

They go unsafe.

Speaker 2: 52:17

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 52:18

Unreliable.

Speaker 2: 52:19

Find the thing that works. Yep, that's survival, and then people shaming for it. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 52:28

Right, right, right, right. And the fear, and the journey through learning to not fear the fear of being, to co-regulate, to connect with somebody who will lend you their nervous system. They can look in the eye, put a hand on your shoulder and say I'm right here and you're not alone, you're gonna be okay. Right when we don't know how, we don't have people in our world, are in a world or we don't know how to lean into them and to take that in, we're gonna use substances, but the path of recovery is to restore our capacity to do that for ourselves and with other people and to let go of the substances In your book. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2: 53:11

People too. We can be addicted to people too.

Speaker 1: 53:15

Oh, good point.

Speaker 2: 53:17

Right that it's a relationship, but it's not a Ventral Vegas socially engaged relationship, right, it's a flowing back and forth with presence, right, yeah, and that's. I think the behavioral addictions are really important to see. In the same way they work, in the same way in the nervous system.

Speaker 1: 53:41

Oh gosh, that's such a good point. Right, I had. That was not one of my addictions, but it did come up in your book and that's a good reminder that, right, people can get really pathologically codependent. I'm not pathologically, sorry, let me tell you that word. They can be really codependent in a way, the borderlines, if not as full, on addiction that there is this dependency on somebody else to feel okay, the real trauma bond.

Speaker 2: 54:08

It's a full on addiction. Be as realistic, as real as the other ones. They work exactly the same way in the nervous system and they can be absolutely terrifying. In fact, I shared in my book that was my addiction early on in my book.

Speaker 1: 54:23

You just briefly mentioned it, you just. It was just like one little sentence.

Speaker 2: 54:28

Well, I mentioned running down the street in Bracebridge and like panicking at the thought of losing this boy I was connected to, but it was absolutely. It gave me a real window into understanding what that is. It's like you feel like you're gonna die without this person. Wow, terrifying, terrifying.

Speaker 1: 54:50

Wow, right In your book you say essential to recovery is knowing that they can recover thanks to neuroplasticity. Do you wanna speak more about that?

Speaker 2: 55:05

Well, it's very hopeful to understand that bodies are designed to help us to survive and that really everything that we do comes from that place of seeking safety and survival. And so it's very hopeful to know that if you stick with your daily practices, brains can change and they can heal and you keep growing these new pathways and you can live a life where you don't have to be afraid all the time because you know that as long as you're following your embodied practices, you'll be okay, and that's very hopeful. Yeah, but this is how the body is designed to help us to survive. It's not our enemy.

Speaker 1: 56:03

Right and our and our titration of connecting to our body and being able to feel our feelings and then maybe distract ourselves or disassociate. It's okay. That's part of the journey. It's in, it's out. It's in, it's out, maybe a little bit longer in a little bit less time out, right, that that's the journey that we all relapse, we all slip, we all run home.

Speaker 2: 56:26

And that we need to. Sometimes, if we feel threatened, we need to. I mean, what I always go back to is how could a person, how could these young women I was helping, and they were helping me to learn, ever have survived being raped by your dad? You can't, no, I mean. But the way you do is through body wisdom, it's through the Dorsal Vegas, it's through cutting down and numbing and not remembering and dissociating. This is a gift from the body. It is not a disorder. It is a gift from the body and it becomes a problem, absolutely. The very thing that kept you safe becomes the very thing you have to let go of to heal. That's the paradox, right. What helps you harms you, and that is very hard for people to understand. But when you get it, you get it, and there's there's a lot of cognitive stuff in this too, in the model of psychoeducational big time.

Speaker 1: 57:38

Yes.

Speaker 2: 57:39

Understanding how the neurophysiology, of how bodies work, and it's not like like I'm no neuroscientist, but you can learn the basics.

Speaker 1: 57:48

Yes, to make sense out of it.

Speaker 2: 57:51

Right, and that's what I tried to do in the book is to distill some of that information so that we could make sense out of it, because it's oh, I mean it's complicated right.

Speaker 1: 58:06

So, as we wrap up, I'll just do a little bit of a high level summary and then I'd love to invite you to any final words you'd like to share. So what we've heard today is that there's different ways of understanding addiction. What Jan has done so well is she's taken the felt sense work of Dr Jenlin. Was he a doctor?

Speaker 2: 58:26

He was a doctor, yeah, with a philosopher and a psychologist.

Speaker 1: 58:30

Yeah, and he. What he observed in his psychotherapy practice is that the people that were covered, that truly found recovery through the journey of psychotherapy were do was doing. Something that was very interesting to him at first is that they were pausing to sort of process something that they were working on in the therapy sessions and he wondered what was that pause? What were they doing in that pause? And he realized that what they were doing is that they were connecting into the body and the body was was processing. The mind and the body were working together to process what was happening in the therapy and that that led to a felt shift, and the felt shift is what creates change.

Speaker 1: 59:15

I wish I could find this quote. I was trying to, without trying to make a big ruckus with my notes. I might be able to go off the top of my head, but basically it's like this insight does not create behavior change, does not. What does is the felt shift. It's this experience that we probably all have when something shifts in our body and we just know it's. We're in a different place, something.

Speaker 2: 59:40

The place that I put together the felt shift is a place. It's an autonomic state shift in the body.

Speaker 1: 59:47

Yes.

Speaker 2: 59:49

So when, when you feel this, oh, now I get why I said what I said to Joe, blow, now I understand what I was doing. We all know that place, that's a felt shift. It's like you've shifted from this tension. You don't get it to like, okay, now I understand why I did what I did. And that felt shift. And that felt shift is shifting us in the body from, I believe, from, say, a sympathetic state of discomfort into a ventral state of ha. And gentlemen saw that. He saw this physical release in the body and he actually did three studies of the autonomic nervous system.

Speaker 2: 1:00:28

Right, they were simple and he didn't continue because he was a philosopher. He created a philosophy called a process model. That's what. That's what the model is. That's my thesis that I put together, that I ran by Steve Portia's. I said I think these felt shifts we talk about in focusing their state shifts. Right, he's like yeah, yeah, and when you really get, it right, and so the whole journey of recovery.

Speaker 1: 1:00:56

So there's the felt shift sense that Dr Eugene gentlemen observed, that he knew that's what was creating the behavior change. Psycho education, insights, great, great, that's the mind piece. But until it connects to the body and something shifts and you drop out of this activated state or the freeze response or the fixated response and back into the ventral where you are connected, you are integrated, you are present and you're not addicted in that state, right Addiction does not occur. Right.

Speaker 2: 1:01:28

And that's very hopeful, the more time you can spend in a grounded ventral state where the body feels safe enough. Addictions don't happen there, right.

Speaker 1: 1:01:40

Right. So the path home. So we've got the felt sense connecting up with the polyvagal, which understands that there are three states of the nervous system and in two of those states, the hyper arousal and the hypo arousal, anything outside of the ventral, where we're present to our bodies, connected to our emotions and other people, and in the moment, if we're not in there, we're in our state. We are in the addiction realm of addictions, right. But when we come home to our body, to an integrated state, to the present moment, to self regulation and co-regulation, our addictions are no longer needed.

Speaker 1: 1:02:20

So that's the journey of recovery and Jan was saying it's slow and there's, it's gentle. And when we bring compassion and understanding to what, we can see that our addiction is just always, only ever, been there to serve us, to support us, to help us feel safe. And now that we can see what's happening, the path forward can feel less frustrating and less shameful. There's nothing shameful about this. We needed those then and now we don't need them. And now we start the journey of letting them go so that we can find other ways of living in the world and is safe and embodied and in the live kind of way. Anything you would add to that or any final words you'd like to say today.

Speaker 2: 1:03:04

We didn't talk about what we actually do in the four circle practice, so maybe you'll have me back.

Speaker 1: 1:03:14

I'll have you back, because we didn't talk about the three circles at all. I thought about going there and I thought no, because we don't even touched on the three circles. But another to be continued. When Jan has her workbook out, we will have her back and we will all buy her book, because this is amazing.

Speaker 2: 1:03:29

This is just for people to know you can download the four circles on my website. But to know that in that model, that four circle model, it's a map that helps you bring together focusing and polyvagal theory in a very simple, behavioral, pragmatic way to work through the model.

Speaker 1: 1:03:52

Jan, can you give people your website Janwinhallcom Too easy? Thanks everybody for tuning in today. Thank you so much for your time today. Jan, thanks so much, that was really fun.