Do you want to raise a child that can bounce back from all the hard stuff life throws at them? Join us to talk about this with Dr. Caroline Leaf, a communication pathologist and clinical and cognitive neuroscientist. She is the author of several books, including Switch on Your Brain, Think Learn Succeed, and How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess.
In this episode, we cover:
This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
Do you want to raise a child that can bounce back from all the hard stuff life throws at them? Join us to talk about this with Dr. Caroline Leaf, a communication pathologist and clinical and cognitive neuroscientist. She is the author of several books, including Switch on Your Brain, Think Learn Succeed, and How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess.
In this episode, we cover:
This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport 00:00
Welcome everyone to creating a family talk about foster adoptive and kinship care. I'm Dawn Davenport and I am both the host of this show as well as the director of the nonprofit, creating a family.org. Today we're going to be talking about building resilience and our kids. We'll be talking with Dr. Caroline Leaf. She is a communications pathologist, audiologists clinical and cognitive neuroscientist, and she has a Master's and PhD in communication pathology. She is the author of several books, including switched on your brain, think learn succeed, and how to help your child clean up their mental mess. Welcome Dr. Leaf, to Creating a Family.
Unknown Speaker 00:42
Thank you, lovely to be with you doing.
Dawn Davenport 00:44
So on this show. We talk a lot about trauma, adverse childhood experiences, prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs and other things that can alter our kids brains and make it harder, quite frankly, for them to live healthy and happy lives. However, I so often think it is equally important to focus on our kids abilities to overcome these challenges, to focus on their resilience and their strength. So I'm looking forward to talking with you specifically about your new book, how to help your child clean up their mental mess. And in the book, you talk about the mind brain body connection. And it seems like that is really foundational to our understanding everything else. So let's start there. What do you mean by the mind brain body connection?
Unknown Speaker 01:32
Well, first of all, great podcast and focus that you have. And it's so important that we do focus on being proactive about helping our children develop the mental skills to be able to cope with life, and what they're exposed to. So the mind brain body connection, scientifically we call psycho neuro biology, psycho with mine in your brain biology body, a lot of the time we hear people talking about the mind and brain. So it's the same thing. And that's been very common over the last 40 years where there's been much more focus on the brain brain brain in a very neuro reductionistic way, as you've learned more about the brain. I've been in the field for nearly 40 years now. And I've watched this progression. So the mind brain connection is talking about the fact that the mind and the brain are not the same thing. They actually separate, which interestingly enough, don't has been the case for 1000s of years for 1000s of years. If you look at the philosophical writings and the spiritual writings and research for 150 years, that's been the focus set the mind brain body connection are separate but intimately connected. So the mind we can talk about as being embodied in the brain and the body, but the mind is a driving force, we are making
Dawn Davenport 02:41
a distinction between the mind and the brain. Yes. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. The mind is
Unknown Speaker 02:45
not the brain. That's very important. And people can be excused for thinking it is because as I mentioned, for the past 40 years, that's been very much what the speak has been. The which has been mind as well, my mind or my brain are synonymous in many people's Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that has been the focus in a lot of the literature, a lot of the media, a lot of the psychological speak in the last 40 years. But it's not accurate. Scientifically, there's a huge body of research, 150 years of good scientific modern research plus 1000s of years, as I mentioned, philosophically, of understanding the separation. And the reason I'm emphasizing that, is because if we just see ourselves as a mechanical brain, then everything is about the brain and the body. And therefore we as humans don't kind of have any control. If your brain is broken, well, then what's the point? So this manifests in, over diagnosing over labeling and that kind of thing. Interesting. So my work has been around understanding, the separation and the integration, they separate, but they're intimately connected, because the mind can work without the brain in the body. I mean, it can, but it's, it works efficiently with the brain and the body. So the mind uses the brain, the brain responds to the mind, the mind uses the body, the body responds to the mind. So the mind is like a driving force. And the easiest way to understand mind is your aliveness, the fact that we can have this conversation, people are listening to us the ability to process what you're hearing that your mind, and in your mind will take this conversation and literally put that into the brain and grow it into the brain and the body in two different types of networks. So that's the mind brain body connection, and everything about life. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, you are building life into the brain and the body and the mind, via the mind, the mind is doing the work. The brain and the body are responding. And whatever goes into this tripartite network will Sacher neurobiological network, those become the thoughts that drive how we function. So you talk a lot about adverse child experiences on this podcast and you mentioned in the beginning, so every experience that a child has and an adult obviously, but if a child has an adverse experience there is building into the mind, brain and body if it's not processed, and if it's reinforced by repeated negative experiences that's getting bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger as a network mind, brain and body and that is the driving how a person is functioning. And it follows into adolescence, adulthood, and so on. And that's why we see that pattern of adverse childhood experiences resulting in physical and mental challenges as they get older.
Dawn Davenport 05:12
Right. And we're going to talk later about the impact of trauma. And we'll bring that back up again. So thoughts take place in our mind, not in our brain, would that be correct?
Unknown Speaker 05:22
When a thought lands up in the brain, but it's created by the mind. So the mind is taking the thought like our words now, our electromagnetic lightweights, for example, and auditory sound waves. And it's the mind that neuro physiologically captures those and puts them into the brain. And the brain responds chemically and electromagnetically. The key thing here, and genetically, the key thing is that the brain is responding. It's not generating. So the thought and the experience of this conversation, let's use this as the example, this conversation is an experience. And an experience is building a thought, there's a big thought of mental health children, however, people have labeled this conversation in their mind, and that our words are this energetic force that are becoming a physical structure inside the brain that looks like a tree. As soon as it builds in the mind and the brain, it also builds into the body, this conversation. So every experience becomes a thought in the mind and is built into the brain and the body, neck forms this network.
Dawn Davenport 06:18
And we certainly know the body is intimately connected in all of this as well. And not only the book, The Body Keeps the Score, but also we know that so many of our physical ailments are connected to things that have happened to us, not actually physical things, but emotional things.
Unknown Speaker 06:36
Well, absolutely. So every experience that you have is got all those components, it's got the emotional or physical or behavioral perspective, all those every experience has got all of those attached. And that gets built into the brain as a network of protein structures. And also every cell of our body. That visit conversation now has been built into the brain in a tree like structure. At the same time, it's been built into the mind as an energetic wave. And the same time it's been built into the cells of the body, and we have 37 to 100 trillion cells making up every organ and system of our body. And in the cells it does, it looks like a little beaded rolled up carpet. So when we have a negative experience, it's going to be a very erratic wave in the mind, it's going to be an ugly looking tree in the brain all inflamed and only think of an ugly looking tree. And in the body, it's going to be a carpet that's unraveling. And that's a very simple analogy to understand the impact. So let's say that there is a genetic weakness, which we all have coming through the bloodline in maybe your heart. And so you go through a lot of tragic experiences or trauma or whatever, and you don't manage them, you suppress them, and you don't process them and deal with them. That in the brain is the street, in the body as these unraveled carpets and wherever these the weakest part of your body. That's where we're going to find the most unraveled carpet. So potentially, in this case, the example I gave, it would be more unraveled carpets in the heart cells, which then increases the vulnerability of the heart to cardiovascular disease, which over time, it's not automatic, it's cumulative over time, the weaknesses, they will just manifest until processed. The good news, which I just have to throw in very quickly, is that once we start processing our trauma, those carpets can wind up again so we can be strengthened the souls of the heart and fix those ugly looking thought trees in the brain and the waves of the mind.
Dawn Davenport 08:23
Hey, guys, did you know that creating a family has a free monthly e newsletter, you can sign up for it by going to Bitly slash C A F guy that's bi T dot L y slash C A F guide. And when you do, you will receive a free guide. Right now the guide is parenting a child exposed to trauma, the guide is our way of saying thank you for subscribing, our newsletter is terrific, we curate some of the best resources out there to help you and your parenting journey. So go to Bitly slash C A F guide and sign up. So what is the neuro cycle?
Unknown Speaker 09:04
So the neuro cycle is a system and a framework that I've developed over 38 years ago, based on theory and clinical research and clinical application, very strong foundation to help a person to influence how they build information into the mind Brain Body network. And also once it's in for examples from a trauma, or an abuse or whatever kind of trauma when experienced or even positive once it's in the network. And it's impacting how you functioning like an adverse child experiences in the network. And it's impacting how you're functioning as an adolescent or adult. The neuro cycle helps you to identify the signs of that, and then track back to the thoughts which is the experience and deconstruct it in the brain and the body and the mind and then reconstruct it and to therefore change how it plays out into a future. So it takes advantage of how information gets from the mind into the brain and into the body. And also how that shows up in How you can then reverse engineer that process. So it's very powerful, based on very heavy science, but very simplified and works to empower the person to be able to manage the mind. So I'm not anti, I mean, totally pro therapy and all those kinds of things. But you've got to know how to live with yourself, we've got to teach us children from as young as possible and ourselves, to be empowered to manage your mind. And the new recycle pretty much provides that basic skill of how we manage our mind and direct the neuroplasticity of the brain. Okay,
Dawn Davenport 10:29
so as we said at the beginning, we want to be talking about resilience and in how to help your child clean up their mental mess, you talk about a five step process to build resilience in our kids. So I would like to spend some time understanding those five steps because I think that's where a lot of parents are wanting to focus. Let's start focusing on repairing the damage. Let's start focusing on helping our kids bounce back if possible.
Unknown Speaker 10:56
Absolutely. So the neuro cycle is made up of five basic steps. So to get information from the outside in to this network, there are five major processes major cycle neurobiological processes, and within each of those five days, a million different steps that are happening. So what I've done is I've over the years, I've researched that and simplified that process into something that is doable, good. We need doable stuff. It's undergirded by very hectic science, but very simple in its application. Essentially, I mean, I worked with just to give you a little bit of background, I worked a lot with people who had obviously experienced extreme trauma, but also neurological issues like Parkinson's and dementia. In addition, other things like learning disabilities, and autism and that sort of thing. So across the board spec, traumatic brain injury, those kinds of things. This was developed based on a need for a therapeutic intervention, to help, for example, some traumatic brain injury, learn how to recover, and someone with extreme sexual trauma or something like that, learn how to basically recover because everything that you go through, never goes away. Once you experience something, it's in that network forever. But what we can do is change what that network looks like. So the neuro cycle, the five steps of the neuro cycle, are basically doing that empowering a person to change what networks look like, inside of the brain. And in addition, the new recycling enables you to also grow your brain, our brains are very, very hungry for knowledge. So the mind brain body connection is looking to grow constantly and learn. So just as a quick side note, the other huge part of the neuro cycle is building the brain. Because things like our current social media and technology and everything, all very fantastic. But if they're not managed, they don't grow the brain properly. And that in itself can create mental health problems. And that, you know, that's worth you know, chatting about maybe in a little bit more depth later on. So the neuro cycle, therefore, is a very non conscious process, which is non conscious is our biggest part of how we function as humans. And it's not as if we're not conscious of it, it's driving us 24/7 It's our most intelligent part of us. And then our conscious, which works with an unconscious is what we're aware of now. So we're aware of our conscious, but behind the scenes of conscious is the tip of the iceberg, we've got this massive unconscious, the neuro cycle is how the unconscious is working. So what we are doing is we bring what's an unconscious into the conscious mind. Okay, so your five basic steps are, gather awareness, reflect, write, visualize, or draw, recheck, and active reach. The easiest way to understand the neuro cycle is just think of flying a plane, I know this may sound very strange, but you have an analogy to hook this onto is really important. When a plane is about to take off first, before takes off, there's a lot of preparation that's fueled, and these check things that are checked in these flight plans. So there's a lot of preparation, one of the things we need to do as humans is prepare our brain and body and mind. So when we go through an experience like bullying, or any kind of from a minor thing, lack of little minor fight with the sibling to a major thing like a bullying, incident or abuse, or we've just got habits or bad habits that we've developed. So on a scale of one to 10, the day to day stuff would be one, two, and three, your bad habits that we will have will be around four through seven. And then the traumas, which are things that happen to us are the eight nines and 10s. So those are the buildings and the abuses and that kind of thing. We all have a range of these in our life that we're dealing with all the time. And so what the neuro psycho helps us to do is to manage all three levels, the day to day stuff, their bad habits, plus the traumas, what we're doing is that every experience is built into us, as I've said, and what we have to do is learn to recognize how strong these networks are. And we recognize the strength by seeing how they show up. When we start becoming aware of how they show up. They can make us feel very anxious, it can make a child feel an adult, whatever age you are, feel that this is kind of scary. And that can create neurochemical chaos in the brain and the body and you can you know have your heart beating fast and like shockwaves through your body will accept children you say to me, I feel jiggly in my tummy. It's very important that one calms down the neurophysiology first before you try and do the actual work of the neuro cycle, because the neuro cycle is finding the problem thought, going to the root and reconstructing. So to come back to the plane analogy, when to calm down the brain and the body to calm down the jiggly stomach, or the heart that's palpitating, or wherever the blood red cheeks or something like that, we have to prepare the mind brain body connection. So that's the equivalent of preparing the plane. And examples of that would be good old fashioned breathing, all the different types of breathing, meditation, various different techniques like that, that help to calm down the neurophysiology. You can do them for a minute, three minutes, they don't have to be long, but it's really important to prepare, otherwise, you fighting against like, you know, a log in the road, it's difficult to drive to the log, you want to log out of the road instead. Now, if you just do that, if you just do breathing, which calms down people, it's great, or meditation, that will calm you down to a point where you can actually function. But if you stop there, if you just prepare, plan, and you do nothing else, the pain doesn't go anywhere, you don't go anywhere, if you just do preparation, it's a bandaid on the wound, you're not actually solving the problem, you're not fixing what's the source of the anxiety or depression or the behavioral issue, whatever it is, so you then have to go into flying the plane and flying the plane means you've got to take off fly and land pilot has to know how to do all of those. If you take off and don't know how to land, you're going to crash, there will be a problem. Yes, if you take off from flying, you don't get your crash, you've got to be able to do all three. So the neuro cycle takes you through all five steps of that process, most traditional therapeutic techniques or interventions like CBT, and psychodynamic theory. And those kinds of things tend to focus on one or the other, they don't focus on the unit of five. So what I have found from our research and publishing scientific papers and do clinical trials, and are currently still do that is that if you don't take your mind, brain body connection through all five steps, you won't have sustainable change. And in addition to that, you can't do the neuro cycle once and think you're going to fix something, it has to be done daily, over at least 63 days. So what I've done in my research is try to work out how long does it take to fix it to rewire a network, in other words, rewire a habit, rewire a pattern, a driving force that you've set up, and it doesn't happen with one or two years cycles, it's going to take at least five to 15 minutes a day of being in your cycle to these five steps for at least 63 days. And
Dawn Davenport 17:17
I can only guess with our kids who have had many of them. Not all but many of them have had multiple traumas that we're not talking 63 days, we're talking consultative cycles. Yeah, we're talking consistent parent shifting our approach when we're working with them for long periods of time, I would guess. Absolutely.
Unknown Speaker 17:35
So it's in units of 63, to have your change as you would trauma. So if you think of that scale of one to 10, something that's in the 123, which is maybe a little fight with a sibling, that will take one year a cycle, a habit, it's a pattern, it will take probably two or three neuro cycles, a trauma could take you 56789 10. So I've I've had some patients who had extreme sexual trauma, and we broke for almost two years, over multiple neural cycles. So it's just that that unit of time, it's around about 59 to 63 days is the time it takes to change all the proteins and the trees and those carpets, things that I spoke about earlier on and the waves that make it work. And if you don't change it network, you won't have sustainable change, you will have change. And then you recognize, I can see the hope and I can see where I'm healing. But the change is not sustainable. So you slip back and that makes people feel stuck and tremendous frustration. So that's kind of the background. So what is the five steps, gather awareness, reflect right, recheck active reach. So the preparation is that breathing stuff together. wareness is taking off the plane taking off. Now notice how to use the word gather awareness. When you meditate or breathe or do mindfulness sort of exercises, which are preparation, you'll become generally aware of your thoughts and your emotions and your body. That's great. But if you just stay away and you do nothing else, you'll get worse. That's why I said you can't just prepare. So then you need to go into gathered awareness. So step one is a very focused specific, let's narrow down the awareness to four elements of how you are showing up or your child is showing up. And that is, what are your emotions, things like I'm anxious, depressed, whatever. Where do you feel this in your body? My stomach is Giglio, whatever. What is this doing in terms of behavior, withdrawing, not sleeping, whatever pauses altering perspective, and but that is how you're viewing life. Life sucks, hate school, don't want to go and play with friends, whatever. So these four categories of signals that we gather awareness of and literally making like four little sentences, so you narrowing down, I feel anxious into let's get more specific. And when you do that, you bringing all of that stuff, all those networks and carpet things and whatever into the conscious mind on a neuroscience level. We bring that tree like structure into the conscious mind and we weaken the branches which prepares it for change. And that's what we want to do. We want to change what it looks like the way we explain it to children and you'll see in the book I have a lot of cartoons I created a character called brainy and brainy walks the mental health journey with you and his superpower is the neuro psycho. So there's a lot of analogies in the book for explaining these complex concepts,
Dawn Davenport 20:09
right? Because I do want to bring it down to how do parents work with children? In this first step, which is gathering awareness. Let's use an example. Let's say, let's say we do know the trauma. Some often we don't know who that child we don't know. But let's say that we know that the child experienced neglect, parents were struggling with substance abuse disorder so that they saw parents being very uncapable of parenting, perhaps they saw domestic violence. So this is what we think that the child but what we're seeing is a child whose behavior is difficult, and we're suspecting that it's coming from the trauma. So how would we help our child gather awareness?
Unknown Speaker 20:51
You would work with them, obviously, with using prompt questions. So in the book, I've got tables with prompt questions, so that you're dealing with a three to five year old, the type of questions you'd ask a six to eight year old and, and then obviously, an 18 year old. So obviously, different categories. And there's a whole table of these four warning signals, and it's neatly laid out. So for example, if you're dealing with let's say, a three year old, and it's the first time you sitting down with them, the easiest way to teach a child how to start processing, because that's essentially what we're doing is for you to demonstrate yourself. So as an adult, and that's I get asked this question, often, what would you do for the mental health crisis, the first thing I would do would be to help the adults and children will do what the adults do. So the easiest way to teach to kids is to first of all, learn it yourself, number one, and we'll come to all the five steps. I know, we just didn't get awareness, we'll work through the example. But first thing is you learn it as an adult, you use it because it's good for you anyway, and you're gonna find your own stuff, because all of us have got stuff. So there is a book for adolescents and adults. And I also have an app I don't know if you're aware of or don't I have an app called the new recycle app, neuro cycle app in the iTunes Google Play. There's a web version and these, like me giving therapy, I'll walk you through the process. There's also a section there for parents to help children. Okay, so the first thing is allocating area in your house that is your mind area, or your neurosurgical area, or your brain area, whatever works best for the age group of the child. Don't underestimate children, they love big words. They're my youngest patients were two, three years of age, I worked in schools, I worked in family therapy, we would teach kids as young as two and three, the brain and the microcycle. Words big what they love those words, and may not even say it that well, but they love it. And they know it's something that's going to help me feel better. So find an area in your house that is allocated like a little bench or like for example, some of my patients have taken an area, like the hill area in the kitchen and maybe painted a wall with chalk, that chalk paint and I'll tell you why in a moment, put a little nice beanbag down and put some a little toy box there with brainy and whatever. So you create an area in your home. That is when I'm feeling bad, I go sit there. And that's my message to whoever's my caregiver, that I need some help to process, I'm not feeling great. And I'm sitting here because I'm going to process myself or I'm going to, so that's very important to allocate that area. And then you start with you as an adult, you learn the system, and you demonstrate, so you come home from work, maybe we come out of a meeting, and you're feeling kind of worked up and you maybe snap at your child or children, whatever, and catch yourself and say okay, and you go sit on the little beanbag with a chair, and you demonstrate and say, oh my gosh, I feel so mad emotion, certain sentence, I feel mad, what I feel angry, my tummy. So so I've got a headache. This days sucks perspective, you could even pick up a little pair of sunglasses, you can have a little box where you can have three pairs of sunglasses ones or crept one beautiful and one's just a little bit scratched. And you can maybe pick up the Scratch one, and put that on and say things I can't see. So clearly. Now, if it was really bad, you pick up the correct one or whatever. So there's lots of those kinds of tips in the book of having those sort of practical things. So you could pick up your sunglasses to put on your perspective, whichever pay shows the appropriate perspective at that moment. And then also behaviors are yelled at you. So you're acknowledging you're focusing you gathered awareness, the planes taken off that's changed neurophysiology, incredibly, and now you ready to go deeper, then very quickly, you move on and you go to the reflexive. The reflect is why the who the what the when the where the why it's going deeper, this is a step that is very, very important. And it's hard. It's easy to gather witness quite easy, does amazing stuff. Always get this feedback for years. Now, when people start this changes the focus completely, but don't stop there. Otherwise, you're just going to take off and crash. You may also find as you're gathering awareness, I would recommend maybe a little bit of deep breathing first to prepare yourself. So I would sit down on the beanbag do some deep breathing, there's all kinds of I love breathing for three hours for seven, or breathe in for six hold for six hours for six days, so many different ways. But those two kids learn very fast. And they work very quickly and they've had a lot of science behind them. So that's input three, output seven, and you do it three or four times called the 10 second pause or infer six, hold for six out for six. Just do a few of those and then do four little sentences and you're demonstrating you know, they watch New. As they get more familiar, they'll start joining, you'll see they'll naturally come and collaborate, then you say, Wow, this is why I'm feeling like this, I had such a horrible call a few moments ago, whatever it is, obviously, age appropriate. If it's a three year old Mommy had a really bad call, if it's a five year old, that was a horrible business know that those people were so mean, they made me very upset. They said ugly things, an 1819 year old, I had a really bad business call. Those people were just awful. And they made me feel very bad about myself. So it's a little age appropriate. And I've got all these kinds of examples in the book. So you're giving them the why behind why you feel those, it's taken it even deeper to loosen the branch has done more neuroscience, then you go to step three, and I'm doing this very quickly. Obviously, there's more depth than everything in the book. And in the meanwhile, I mentioned about maybe having a chalk wall, if you can't do that, just have in the little toy box next to this beanbag or whatever the scenario is that you create, just have a notepad, nice big one, have some coloring pencils, or some sharpies or something like that, and just take it out and just draw your face and a few words of you know, maybe a smiley face, that's a sad face, I should say. And if the child's not literate, it's to put the word next to it because you're teaching that word picture association. So it's a chance to develop vocabulary reading. It's collaborative does a lot of amazing stuff. At that point, just writing down at this point, I can tell you now the child's looking and very interested and they started to collaborate you inviting them into the scenario, then you go into the recheck just quickly to come back to see if it's for you writing down what you've gathered awareness of and what you've reflected on. So you could draw a sad face. So Tammy, in the most simple way, it could just be hands on around thing doesn't have to be a work of art, it could be a few words, it could be a few scribbles, it's just to represent those four different signals. And maybe just something bad deed work, something like that a little statement, or something that just represents that the older they are, the more words you put down. And each day, remember, you're not solving the problem in one day, you are solving it over time, I'm just giving you on the spot example. Then you would recheck the forced if you'd look at what you've written, and you'd say, Wow, this is what's happened. Now, what am I going to do about this? That's so key question for that step where you re conceptualizing. And that's just a very broad overview. But there could be something like where you invite the child in, and they may say, Oh, shame on me, I'm sorry, you had such a horrible meeting, maybe you should send an email. Or maybe you should, whatever the kids come up with pearls of wisdom that may or may not give you insight by chocolate, mood, hot chocolate mom, something like they'd Absolutely, let's make her chocolate, but recheck is more for solving the problem, then our chocolate would be active reach, okay, that's fantastic idea, I'm going to send an email and tell them that I didn't like what they said in whatever language age appropriate, you'd give as much detail as is necessary per age, and then you'd go to an action, you've helped me so much, let's go and make hot chocolate together will it'll walk the dog or something like that. So then you've demonstrated those five steps in a very, very simple way. And they see that you now are being authentic children love authenticity, you've respected the Insight kids a lot more insightful, then we given them grace, what but a lot of studies in the book about explaining that to their respond to authenticity, they respond to you modeling and so on. So that's how I would teach to children, then when they come home from school, let's say they come home, or you pick them up from school, and they're throwing a tantrum in the back of the car that's three year old or they're withdrawing. If they're an eight year old, whatever, they just different, you pick them up from school, and you notice that something's off, they get home, they steal off. So you can say, Do you want to do a neuroscience? Do you want to go sit in the beanbag and do the neuro cycle there may spontaneously go there, we've actually made a plush toy of brainy. There's even a coloring book with different scenarios, you have all of the kits together. And even that the actual books filled with cartoons that children can respond to, and children are great at picking up. We've tested this, I mean, I've done this for years, we've analyzed this and done studies on it, where you have this kit together, children will pick up the book and points to the different characters and things like that. The point is you're giving them tools, a toolkit to develop the mental skills to deal with experience, and that in itself unmasks resilience, because resilience is naturally in us, but we have to unmask it. And by suppressing, we mask resilience, and by processing we unmask resilience.
Dawn Davenport 29:03
One question I have so in the example that you gave, you had a bad meeting, you came home and yelled at your kids. And you sat down and you went through this at one point is or is there a point where you would say, you know, I was mad, and I yelled at you? I took it out on you. And I'm sorry. Oh,
Unknown Speaker 29:24
you know, you would sorry, I didn't say that. You you automatically would I did this, and I'm sorry. So in the reflect pod, you'd come very quickly I did this this this this you label the four signals and as you reflect, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. This is why I did it. So you preface obviously, the apology comes along with the reason I did this. You're not justifying why you did that. But you explaining why you did that. And you will.
Dawn Davenport 29:44
Yeah, exactly. And I think it's important to make reparations if I broke sister's toy because whatever I broke her toy. I was mad. Because dad played with my older brother outside and he wouldn't let me Come outside to play and I was mad, I broke sister's toy. And then both of them do apologize. But is there a part where after we bring awareness in the way that we solve the problem is being aware that that we were angry that dad didn't play with us? But you know, how am I going to make it up to sister who I broke her toy?
Unknown Speaker 30:20
Yes, well, that's comes into the Reflect, you need to bring in the apology immediately. So you've identified your fog signals with gather awareness, and then you're going to reflect and part of your reflection is the impact that it's had. So it's the empathy, it's the awareness, it's the taking responsibility, it is, you know, we don't break toys, I understand that you broke the toy for a reason. But first, we need to apologize to a sister that will come as an act of rage. But you need to recognize that that's not an acceptable wave of debt, unkind, it's hurtful, they're going to be upset, you wouldn't like it. So that comes in your reflect section, which is very close upfront, but at the same time, you're going to say to them, that's unacceptable. But I recognize you did that for a reason. So our action of when we get to the active reach when we do our little plan, at the end, we're going to go and see how we're going to make reparations to use your wording the well as let's also see what it is that you upset about you wanted to play with there, too, let's work out a better way. By the time you've written it all down, you get to the recheck what's a better way that we could have handled this? What is a good way that we could say sorry, so you do all the planning, and then the first step is, then let's go do those actions, that's the act of reach yet to reach is the first step. The second step is the reflection on the why and the impact, and the apologies and so on. The writing gathers more information brings it to the forefront and unconscious. Because there may be other situations and other scenarios and things that will come up, maybe it will, things will come up that are related that you don't even see that are related, and then you will reach out because we you do a lot of the work, where there's a lot of return operator grocery kicking, recognize this worry, we're all there. And that things is okay, how can we wrap this up now? And land the plane? And what are the action steps? What are we going to do, we're going to go to your sister and say, I'm so sorry. And he has one of my toys or whatever they decide, we're going to sit with dad and talk with them and say next time can you explain why played was worried about but even those actions are that your work out in the recheck. So you collaborating and facilitating and empowering the child to solve problems as opposed to solving problems for them, which leads to, you know, the whole concept of safety net parenting versus helicopter parenting, and I've got a whole section on that in the book to where your helicopter parenting is really not allowing a child to solve problems with these more discipline, and no learning that taking place, you're not allowing them to make the mistakes to form to fail. That kind of thing. That's really important. A helicopter parent is doing everything, where's the safety net parenting, when you think of an acrobat, there's a safety net, they climb up a ladder at different heights, and they jump and swing and do whatever and then they go higher. And sometimes they fall, we can't go up the with the child and put the safety net directly and and swing with him, we've got to let them climb up and fall and do the same. You know, and that sort of thing, which is, which is hard news or Jennifer Garner was interviewed the other day in the comment, the highlight of the heading was something along the lines of it's good to let your children fail or something like that it wasn't those words, it was even more catchy. And she basically talked about that about how she allows her kids to make mistakes. And we don't do enough of that. So it's that sort of concept. I
Dawn Davenport 33:17
think that is at the heart of resiliency as well, is to know that you can fall you make mistakes, but you can repair the mistakes. Absolutely. And you have it within you, you don't have to turn to an adult to do that.
Unknown Speaker 33:30
Now you've got it within you. And that's the problem solving skills. You know, it's interesting that a few years ago, and it's not that long ago, kids would have up to four hours a day of unstructured play, it's in that region. Now it's down to just a few minutes a day of unstructured play. Yeah. And that's changed their problem solving skills, you know, where they've become so focused on the external locus of control, they're not developing an internal locus of control. So this neuro cycle is all about empowering to develop an internal locus of control in a co regulated way, the younger they are becoming more and more self regulated. That's the principal operating. And
Dawn Davenport 34:02
this is also a way of use the word co regulating, co regulating with your child. Absolutely. Which is another amazing tool to build resiliency because self regulation is crucial. It's key. Yeah, it is key.
Unknown Speaker 34:16
In my research, that's really key that we've shown that over that 63 day cycle, when you go through a full cycle, if you stop it too soon, the self regulation doesn't develop enough to be a point where it's sustainable, so they don't get in Parliament. So if you if you just half do things if you skip some of those steps, the five steps or if you just do to a certain time point, the child still becomes dependent on external locus of control and an adult they'll become over therapy tires, you know, we talk about over therapy, tires, nation and that kind of thing. Become over dependent on others. There's nothing wrong with having collaborative let we need collaborative, deep, meaningful relationships. We all know that. But we shouldn't be relying on someone else to make our decisions. And that's really that whole timeframe is so important. self regulation is vital.
Dawn Davenport 35:01
Let me take a moment to tell you about a new podcast from creating a family. We are calling it weekend wisdom. And it's different from this podcast. This podcast is, as you know, an hour long interview with an expert in we can wisdom, we're answering your questions in a very short form 510 minutes no more. So check it out, it drops on the weekend. And don't forget, you can submit your own questions. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed getting questions from our audience. It's really been enlightening for me to see what questions are coming in. So make sure you send in your questions to info at creating a family.org put weekend wisdom, if you remember in the Rayline. But either way, it will work its way to me. And we'll add it to our list of questions to answer on weekend wisdom. The examples that you gave in an I gave you gave a scale of 10 There was a b One, two and three, a bad meeting or a child breaking a toy and having a squabble with a sibling. So let's move it up. Because a lot of our kids have much bigger issues that they have faced that are influencing unconsciously they are not aware that having witnessed domestic violence makes them more likely to have tantrums or, or whatever. They're unaware of this. So how would we use your approach to build resiliency in kids who've had a series of traumatic events in their life before they arrived with you?
Unknown Speaker 36:26
Absolutely. So there's a whole chapter by the way on trauma in the book as well. So essentially, this is going to take time. So coming back to that scale, this would be an eight, nine and 10. So trauma is something that's happened to us, whereas the one through seven are things that, you know, we do the things that just happen and things that we do like, Right, exactly, this is things that have happened to us. So the next thing is going to be observation initially where you notice patterns in your children, or the teacher notices patterns, or the caregiver, the grandparent who is very involved in the child's life is to identify the patterns. And these patterns are very often the labels that are currently given to children like that add ADHD and bipolar depression and terrible to labor. There's a whole chapter on labels as well. That concept of diagnosing a child based on how they're showing up mentally in terms of behaviors, and emotions and so on is not actually scientific at all. It's been disproved. But it's very much the model that's used. And when you label a child has been through trauma, and is showing up with quite strong behavioral patterns, like they could be, you know, hitting others or does very difficult in the classroom or having really bad nightmares, or, you know, even sexually abused children show a lot of sort of sexual behaviors that are inappropriate. And they often battle at school. And there's actually a story in the book of a child who was very, very sexually abused from three months of age terrible, terrible story, it ends up happy, but it's a sad story and those behaviors for years that what the parents observed were one negative pattern after another, which was the sleep to the sexual behaviors to the not focusing at school to being difficult to lots of tantrums to not being able to sleep through the night. And you know, that creates a desperate situation for parents as well, obviously, and going to doctors and getting labels, which has kind of made things worse and medication. So what they did with that particular child was eight when they heard about my stuff. So just to give you this as an example, and some of my patients were even what a parent can do, the important thing is to observe the patterns and to see, like, for example, what is the consistent pattern in terms of the four signals? And how long is it happening? So for example, if you take sleep, what is the sleep pattern, repeated nightmares every night, or three times a night, or once three times a week? What happens with the nightmares? What are the types of nightmares? How often are the nightmares, so you could have like, literally do a neuro cycle for you, as a parent to observe the patterns and to kind of be almost the observer of your child for a period of time. And then they could be the emotion, you know, looking, if there's a specific pattern of behavior, that they just can't seem to form relationships with friends, they can't make lasting friendships, there always seems to be some kind of drama, or there's always a problem at school, you're always getting called in, get those big categories. Let's say it's not always it's always getting called in at school, because the child pulled someone's heel done something to hurt another child. Maybe it's also schoolwork is not great. So let's say that those maybe are the three parents. Now that you've heard this, what I would do as a parent is then observe those patterns over a period of about three weeks, and get as much information as possible using the five steps as your guidelines. So you could just sit down yourself and do an initial overview of that particular thing and not miss what is the general pattern. So gather awareness, reflect a little bit, write it down, recheck a bit and get some active reaches. So it could be a thing like, okay, they are waking up three times a night, that's the behavior. They are screaming when they wake up, it's always screaming and the face is very contorted, and they're grabbing their stomach, and they are terrified to go back to sleep. You know who, what, when, where, why it's happening. It seems to be triggered more often when this in the situation or something happens or it seems to be better at this time. So a bit of a reflection write that down as you're writing that down just like literally a mind dump knowledge And I'll just put down whatever thoughts come up, that will dig deeper into the non conscious, not the unconscious unconscious is when we asleep, the non conscious as we are stuff is stored, and you want to connect the conscious to the non conscious. So the first two steps and the third steps are digging down. As you write, you're pulling stuff up,
Dawn Davenport 40:16
this is a parent doing this. Now we're going
Unknown Speaker 40:19
to start with a parent first always start with a parent. First, it's an observation. I'm giving example of the parent, what they would do not observe a gene will sit down and do a general first couple of neuro cycles to get the pattern, write it down, do a bit of a recheck again, seeing this, I think it could be there, I'm thinking this is the pattern, my action is okay, I'm going to now specifically look for this. Because during that neuro cycle, on your own maybe or with your partner, whatever, you're going to get more insight, it's more organized, not just this nightmare behavior, big chaotic thing and being more specific, then that will guide you to look more deeply into the nightmare behavior, and start observing more and creating another neuro psych with more details. And then when you feel confident enough that you've got a pattern, then you could sit down with a child and you know, the beanbag area than your recycle area, the brain area, whatever you call it, and start saying you know what, I've noticed that you have nightmares, and then you start walking through and guiding them through the five steps in a very simple way over 63 days. So day one, you don't ever push them beyond what they can cope with. If they don't want to talk about it the first day, you simply run through as simple as possible. Is it okay if I tell you what I've seen? And then you talk through in those five steps, literally, I've seen you do this, I've seen you do that, you know, make like a script almost for yourself. And then as you're talking, invite him to collaborate, am I right? You think I'm right does this so you start walking him through that process. And then the next day, you can take it a little bit further and don't force him if there's a day in between, don't go longer than five minutes. You know, if you don't have to do for hours, honestly, this and if you only managed to get the first step done, and the child pulls away, don't force it either. You don't want us to become a negative thing. So ideally, you want to do all five steps every day. But that's nothing's ever ideal. So I've got a whole chapter on timing of keeping you you know, just do what you can, if it takes you a whole week to get you on your cycle, that's fine, it doesn't matter. You've started the process, eventually the child will get into the flow, but you slowly build up over time. And you will start seeing within a few days even you know may take a couple of weeks, you'll start seeing a lot of clarity on the pattern, and you may start getting solutions. For example, in the book, the little child's example that we gave this child observed the mom doing it because the mom was betting so much with this child's behavior that she did the neuropsychologist to get herself to cope and her behavior changed. And this child observed her and said, I want to do what you're doing. It's making you happy, Mommy. And that's how he literally got into an eight year old doing the neuro cycle with his mom. Within four days he was sleeping, it never sleeps through the night. He was eight years at this age. He very quickly got into the nightmares was one of the first things I started with. He drew picture. And if he's active reaches ends in the book, a picture of a house with two chimneys. And the one chimney was scary stuff coming out. And the other one was hot coming out. And he literally trained himself without even knowing he was doing it. Lucid dreaming, where he realized that that nightmare was all those ugly things. And each of those little ugly things was something that he remembered, and you would talk that through with his mom, we needed his neurosurgical. But tonight, he's going to have his little heart coming up. And the heart is if I dream that and I wake up, I'm going to clean this and he had pictures drawn and he had them in front of stack them up on the wall. Can you see what I'm saying that the child he drove the process, he worked out a way not all kids will work out ways. But my experience working as a family therapist and individual therapists and all the things that I do. And just feedback from people around the world over the years is that kids, once they see you do it, once they get into this, you can get boxes, you can get shoe boxes, cut out pictures of emotions, all different emotions, all different age groups or different behaviors, support different signals, get toys, whatever, create a toy box and have that available for a child a child's really good at going and picking up things and saying this is what I feel. And that's when I feel they don't have to worry because they don't the expression is not as high as the reception to understand better than they can embrace all the way through. It takes years for us to develop those skills of expressing how we feel. And even then as adults, it's hard. So it's to have those tools. So there's lots of those kinds of techniques that you can build in. Also just to add to that, if you see that this pattern is occurring, and you start seeing big stuff, and the child actually reveals Yes, Uncle wherever touch me, you know, did this to me. And you mentioned it that you as a parent need to make sure that you do in your cycle to get yourself calm, because your reaction is going to be the stress of the parent will be the stress of the child. And so therefore, it's really important that you practice keeping a empathic, calm face as much as you want to go and kill it and call and start crying and freak out, which is very valid, go do that. But in that moment, you've got to stay as calm as possible. And then do you freak out or do therapy or whatever the neuro psycho can help you whatever. But you now have written down because you've journaling, all of us, keeping a record of all of this. You've now got information that you can go through to a therapist with and say look the Here's what we found. Now we need guidance, we need some, some serious play therapy here. And I need to know how to handle this because this is like overwhelming me to go and to give a therapist, that kind of level of knowledge, advancement with a child and in therapy will be so much more focused and so on.
Dawn Davenport 45:16
Yeah. So you're not suggesting that for really big issues that, that we do not seek therapy? Not at all? Yes, exactly. And
Unknown Speaker 45:23
I mentioned that in the beginning, that therapy shouldn't be an industry that you go on forever and ever that goes round in circles therapy should be there to give us the guidance and facilitation in a clean way that we need when we need it. And so therefore, the more empowered you ought to understand what you're going through, the more you can then empower the therapist, you can then be so equipped to guide you. So it's a really great facilitated relationship.
Dawn Davenport 45:47
I hope you're enjoying this conversation as much as I am. If you appreciate this conversation with Dr. Caroline leaf, you will be happy to hear about some free courses we are offering at Bitly slash j, b f support, that's bi T dot L y slash JBf. Support our partners, the Jacobean Family Foundation, have sponsored a library of courses that will support you on learning more about parenting and being the best parent possible to your child. So check it out today, and telephone. So the last thing I want to touch on is that you had raised it a little earlier, you said you wanted to talk about social media, how does social media impact our kids resilience, which is one of the reasons we encourage not giving kids phones and social media and supervised access to the internet too soon. But nonetheless, how have you seen social media impact kids resilience? Okay, so
Unknown Speaker 46:40
this is a huge question. But first of all, social media is fantastic. It's not the social media, it's the management. So we don't have a mental health crisis, we have a mind management crisis, of which the mental health epidemic or pandemic is symptom of that. And so mind management or crisis, so what we need to be teaching our children in a changing world is how to manage a changing world. So with the isn't enough of is, hey, listen, it's great to go and see your friends on Instagram. But you need to know that if you feeling when you scroll through and you see all those girls that are starving themselves, because I'm only seeing these children getting anorexia and food disorders, from as young as five and six and seven, in this current day and age, it's for you to sit down as a parent and help their child to recognize the symptoms, those four signals. And when I look at that, it's making me feel like this. It's making me do those things. So it's really sitting with a child and showing them yourself, when I look at this post, and you walk through your cycle of how they can make simple Can we try one with what what this makes you feel it's teaching your child how to understand the impact of social media, using yourself as example, and then helping them to process that. So it's really an essence of mind management. The other issue, I mean, there's so many issues, I could talk for hours about this, but I have to deal with two things. The other thing, which is really important is how it's affected our reading and our deep thinking, our mind Brain Body connections designed for deep intellectual thought from very young. And we're not designed to scroll and see so much data without processing it. We're designed to see data or structured to see data and think about it. And you're select, think deeply get some level of understanding, and then look at the next bit of data. So we didn't, there's all this data, let me select that. Let me go deep on that. What's happening when children just scroll adults to scroll this as adults to and just watch TV and jump from one thing to another, it creates no time for the deep processing to happen and for all the networks to stabilize. So you have very unstable networks. And it's constant firing of activity which social media that unmanageable give you and that then creates tremendous feelings of anxiety and depression. And all those scary big words that are not diseases, but are emotional warning signals that something's going on. And a quick way to start fixing that is Don't say stop the social media because whatever you tell them to stop doing, they're going to do or try and do just makes it more attractive. So you can do it. But for every hour of TV, there's an hour of deep reading for every half an hour on social media, these deep reading, the more you read at the top of my prescription list for all my patients in our practice was read, read read. It's the first thing when you read, I've done podcasts on this as well reading opens up the networks of the psycho neurobiological network, the mind brain body connection to a point where you increase the resilience and you create a natural hunger you activate the natural hunger to think more deeply. So once a child experiences that they're not going to be satisfied with the surface level social media. So once you bring in the debriefing, and the fantasy reading, which can be done in so many different ways, together as a group at night when they go to bed, you could be reading chapter books over time and all kinds of things. There's so many ways you can help to counteract it. So that's just one quick way of doing it.
Dawn Davenport 49:51
What thank you so much, Dr. Caroline leaf for talking with us today on building resilience in our kids. I truly appreciate your
Unknown Speaker 49:59
time, man. Patients thank you so much.
Dawn Davenport 50:02
Thank you Vista Del Mar for your long term support of both this podcast but even more important perhaps is your support for our mission at creating a family we really appreciate your support. With Vista Del Mar is a licensed nonprofit adoption agency with over 65 years of experience helping to create families they offer a home study only service as well as full service infant adoption, international home study and post adoption support. They also have a foster to adopt program. You can find them online at vista del mar.org/adoption.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai