224 How Thought Field Therapy & Yoga Supports First Responders: Interview With Robert Bray

Chris McDonald: Do you ever wonder how to help clients who experience high levels of chronic stress like first responders? Are you wanting to learn more tools to help clients find healing? In this episode, we'll unpack THODD field therapy and how it can transform the way you approach healing for those on the front lines.

Stay tuned to learn how these practices can help first responders manage anxiety, regulate their nervous system, and build resilience. You won't want to miss this one!

To Yoga in the Therapy Room, the nontraditional therapist guide to integrating yoga into your therapy practice. I'm Chris McDonald, licensed therapist and registered yoga teacher. This podcast is here to empower therapists like you with the knowledge and confidence to bring yoga into their practice safely and ethically.

So whether you're here to expand your skills, enhance your self care, or both, you're in the right place. Join me on this journey to help you You'll be one step closer to bringing yoga into your therapy room.

This is Yoga in the Therapy Room podcast, the non traditional therapist's guide to integrating yoga into your therapy practice. I'm Chris McDonald, your host, and I want to welcome you. In today's episode, we're taking a closer look at thought field therapy or TFT, and this offers a quick and powerful way to reduce anxiety and process stress and how this can be a great tool for helping first responders.

We also touch on how it can be integrated with parts work and how it can complement yoga practices. Joining us today is Robert Bray, Ph. D. He has worked in the field of traumatic stress recovery for over 40 years. Dr. Bray has extensive experience as a clinician helping in recovery from natural disasters, criminal acts, and domestic violence of all types.

Whether you're working directly with first responders or maybe you want to learn how some innovative techniques can help you or any client with trauma, this episode will help guide you through a crisis tapping protocol that you can use right away. Welcome to the Yoga in the Therapy Room podcast, Robert.

Robert Bray: Hi, I'm glad to be here. I'm actually quite excited to be here. I love any opportunity I get to share information and find out what other people are doing.

Chris McDonald: Yeah. Well, it's great to have you. So can you share with listeners how you first discovered yoga?

Robert Bray: Oh, oh, that, oh, actually it's, uh, it's one of the key things in my life.

So I was going to college now, this is about 50 years ago. I'm 73 and this was probably when I was 19 or so. So I was going to college and they offered some yoga classes and I thought, well, I've never done this before. So I tried it. Yeah. And next thing I know, I was going two or three times a week because I just found it was a place for me to relax, to recenter myself, uh, to gain a different perspective.

I'm a Midwest kind of guy. And, uh, so it's like When I started going to college, I was exposed to all kinds of things, and it was wonderful to hear people thinking and operating in a different way. Actually, it turned out to be one of the most important things that ever happened to me, because I was sitting around after class or laying around after class one night, and I was listening to the instructor talking to one of the other students about how you can control your blood pressure.

And I was fascinated. Now you have to understand I'm a Vietnam era guy. And while I'd grown up thinking that I was going into the military, cause my dad, World War II, uncles in Normandy, I mean, it was just in my family, I would be in the military or something. But by the time we got to Vietnam, uh, it. I had a different perspective on what was important in the world and what was right and what wasn't.

Anyway, my brother was already in Vietnam and I had decided, I'm not doing this. He came back, he said, it's not worth the trip. So anyway, listening to how you control your blood pressure using a very simple yoga technique, I was able to master that fairly quickly. And so when they took me for an induction physical, I was actually about to raise my hand and swear.

They kept me there for a week. Taking my blood pressure three times a day, checking my blood for drugs, because I was a very healthy guy, but I was able to convince them that my blood pressure was 200 over 120, and I really wasn't fit for military duty. Now, I'm babbling on about this story because It's how important it can be to learn these things about your body and about your mind.

And for me, it was critical because my life would have gone a completely different way had I gone, as my brother did, been inducted in the army. That's where I started in yoga. And I learned a lot about breath, about my body, about my mind that has been added on to by all the other things I do in my life.

So, yeah, that's a little bit about me.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, yeah, for sure. To learn that empowering. It sounds like, too, that we can lower our blood pressure, that we have this power over our bodies and through breath.

Robert Bray: Yes, you can lower it. I was that particular trick was to raise your blood pressure.

Chris McDonald: Right, right. And, um, '

Robert Bray: cause a low blood pressure would've, wouldn't have kept me out of it.

Wouldn't have

Chris McDonald: kept you . But we have that power to make changes in our bodies.

Robert Bray: Oh yes. Oh yes.

Chris McDonald: Yeah. I'm sorry.

Robert Bray: On and on there a bit, but that's, uh, no, no,

Chris McDonald: it's interesting. So what interested you in working with first responders?

Robert Bray: Oh, well, um, I've always been kind of a, how we would say it, a, a trauma junkie. I always liked to get beyond the yellow tape.

So I was a lifeguard in high school. And so I did that for a couple of seasons as I came out and went into college. I was a wildland firefighter. for a couple of seasons, and so it just was second nature for me to relate to people who were doing that kind of work. And so when I started learning how to be a therapist, that was my focus.

I thought, well, I can help these guys, even though I don't do it, I can help guys who are doing it. So I've been Specializing traumatic stress every ever since actually, when I first started doing this kind of work, I know I'm battling him, but it's like, I started doing crisis intervention as a volunteer on a drop in center, a hotline and back in those days.

You had a hand line, somebody called you and said, I'm feeling suicidal, or I took the wrong drugs, and I'm having a bad trip, or I don't know how to deal with the protests outside my door. You know, and so they trained us as 20 year olds how to relate to our peers and to help them through this. I learned how to do that, and I found I was really good at working with people in the moments of crisis.

And so I've been working in crisis ever since, and that means that I'm working in traumatic stress. Which means I'm dealing with people who have very difficult traumatic stress. So that's how I got started.

Chris McDonald: Can you share what Thought Field Therapy is?

Robert Bray: Oh yeah, yeah. Thought Field Therapy is a, well it's interesting because the definition, Thought Field Therapy is a way to alleviate overwhelming negative emotion by stimulating meridian treatment points in specific sequences.

If you are interested, there's over 200, uh, journal reviewed peer reviewed journal articles that have been written, um, and some of this includes, uh, probably close to 50 randomized, uh, controlled studies. There's been, uh, I think 5 meta analysis. done on this work, and it all points to that this is the best way to help people with traumatic stress.

Now, if you want that data, the easiest way to go there to get it is go to the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, ASAP. It's www. ASAP. org. Energypsych. org. And if you go there and you click on the research page, you'll find a fact sheet that gives you all of that right there. And it also contains a bibliography of, of hundreds of articles that have been written about it.

And so the, the data is there if you want it and it's very effective. And it's a way to help people calm their minds. Calm their bodies, be able to, as the way I think about it, then be able to engage the top of their brain so they can think again, so they can actually take in new data, that they can do an analysis, they can use reason, they can use ways to begin to understand it.

And to come up with a plan, they can do problem solving and come up with a plan that's going to actually be effective in helping them in whatever the situation is that's affecting them or their loved ones in that moment, and most importantly, then to be able to take action. So why is

Chris McDonald: that important to why does that matter for for them to be able to access the problem solving piece?

Robert Bray: Why is it hard for them? Well, because we all have to try and make our lives better, right? It's all about decisions. You know, my definition of therapy is change. And so if you wanna change, you're gonna have to change your behavior. You're gonna have to change your interactions. You're gonna have to change how you approach the world.

So, you know, sometimes when we're just talking about crisis, we're just trying to get back to our stabilization. We're just trying. Mm-hmm . Get back to homeostasis. But if we. Go beyond that and say, okay, so maybe I've learned something here in this crisis and now I want to change something in my life. Then you go into counseling, right?

You start to ask, how do we make those changes? What it looks like. And if you really hang in there with it, you go into something called what I call psychotherapy. Which is, uh, a depth changing of how you perceive the information, the world around you, and your immediate reactivity to it, um, and how you respond to it in a way.

Cause the brain's just a big device that helps us be able to take in data, figure out what's scary, and figure out what the best move is to survive. But sometimes that gets in our way of being able to think because if we're just reacting in a triggered way, we're not thinking we're just doing what we've learned.

Yeah,

Chris McDonald: exactly.

Robert Bray: So that's why it's important. If you've ever sat with anybody and tried to have a conversation with them about how you're going to be different or what you're going to change, and they're melting down into tears and they can't get beyond that. If you're interested, my, my quick and dirty way of.

Testing, assessing whether or not somebody has PTSD is the, it's simply, can you tell the story beginning to end with appropriate affect? So you pick something and you start to tell that story. Now, if you can tell that story in a way that's connected and you're fully present and you don't end up. Getting so overwhelmed by emotion that you have to put your fists through the wall or you have to storm out or you just melt down into a pile of tears and you have to stop.

If you can do that, then you probably don't have PTSD. You may have some shitty memories. You may have some difficult things in your life, but that's not post traumatic stress. And so when we're trying to heal that, we want to get the person to be able to be present, fully present in the moment. And, you know, if you do yoga, you have some sense of what that means.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, exactly, mindfulness practices.

Robert Bray: Oh yeah, and when you can't be fully present in the moment because you've been triggered into an event from the past, that makes you sense as though you're re experiencing that moment from the past, and not in this present moment where you're safe. But back in that moment where you're unsafe, you know, you're going to, your body's going to react.

Your mind's going to react in the same way. And when it does that, then, you know, change is not possible because you're just going to do what you've learned to do to survive. And if that means shutting your therapist off, so you don't deal with this stuff, that's what you do. But if you can help people, yeah, if you can help people calm, calm that down so that they can be present in the moment and it becomes a memory that, that we're dealing with, then you can start to talk about, well, how are we going to change things?

And where does it go? And so this is the beauty of TV because we all carry those. Things that we, we've all had trauma in our lives. I've had it. You've had it. And it's just, question is, when did it happen to us? How severe was it? And were we able to find our way out of it? Are we still trapped in it today?

And that's the beauty of TFT.

Chris McDonald: Yeah. So it sounds like it's, it is a body based practice.

Robert Bray: Oh yeah, it definitely is. You've never seen it. You've never done it, huh?

Chris McDonald: No. So tell us what, what, what would that look like in a session?

Robert Bray: So if

Chris McDonald: you're with a client.

Robert Bray: Oh, well, if you're willing, uh, let me give you a little taste of it.

Let me give you a little experience of it. Okay. So Chris, I'd ask you to think of an event in the past that when you pull that event up, you can feel the feeling in your body. Now you got one. You don't have to tell us. I mean, that's the beauty of this. Okay. So when you think of that event, um, what do you notice in your body?

Chris McDonald: Just like a tension across my chest, like to my shoulders. Yeah.

Robert Bray: And when you feel that, um, so let's just rate it zero to ten. How bad is it? Zero would be no tension, no upset here. Probably like a four. Ten is the worst you can imagine. I'm sorry, what is it? Four. Okay. So what I'd ask you to do is, as you're thinking about that, however you remember, visually or words or whatever, but what I'd ask you is tap the side of your hand.

So go ahead and give that a try. For people who can't see me, what I'm asking you to do is come down from the We're mostly

Chris McDonald: audio.

Robert Bray: Yeah, so come down from your pinky finger to the side of your hand right there. They used to call it the karate chop point, but I don't know if that's the right way to do it.

Yeah, and you're gonna tap there about a half dozen times. And then what you do is you take a couple of fingertips and go right under your nose on your upper lip. And you're going to tap there a half a dozen times. And if you tap firmly enough, you can feel it, but it's never about beating yourself up or hurting yourself.

Now, we're going to ask you to go up and tap between the center line of your face and one of your eyebrows, either side.

Chris McDonald: Here. Yeah,

Robert Bray: if you're into it, it's the, it's a bladder to, I think is the point people know that now go under your eye right on the orbital bone, the right eye, right under the bone, right under your eye and tap there again about a half a dozen times.

And now we're going to go under your arm, go down your ribs to about, with women we say where your bra runs across your ribs there, and just tap there. Now we're going to come to the collarbone point. The easiest way to find that is a couple of fingers in the notch in your throat there. And then come down an inch and over about an inch.

And you're going to find kind of a hollow spot where your first rib and your sternum and your breast bone, uh, or your collarbone come together. And you tap there. Now, tap on your index finger. Between your last knuckle and the bed of your nail, slightly towards the thumb, go to the end, uh, your index finger,

Chris McDonald: uh,

Robert Bray: between the last knuckle and the bed of the nail and slightly towards the thumb there.

Good. Now, under the collarbone again, and then under the, now go to the tiny finger between the last knuckle and the bed of the nail. Now, this is the crisis tapping pattern we use. It's one of the longest tapping patterns we use. And then come under the collarbone again. Now there's more, there's faster, there's easier ways, but Chris, I don't know you.

So I'm just doing the standard thing with you. Now go to the back of your hand between your ring finger and your pinky finger. And to those knuckles and then go down about a half an inch towards your wrists. So you're on your back of your hand and you're going to tap there while we do nine things fairly quickly.

Close your eyes for a moment. Okay. Open your eyes. With your eyes look down and to the left. With your eyes look down and to the right. Whirl your eyes in a big circle. Back the other way in a big circle. Keep tapping. I know this is the hardest part. Here's the weirdest part. Keep tapping and hum a couple of bars to any tune.

Now count out loud, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Three, four, and then hum

Chris McDonald: again.

Robert Bray: Then we're just going to repeat the tapping we did before that. So tap the side of your hand.

Chris McDonald: Okay.

Robert Bray: Under your nose. And then beginning of the eyebrow. Under the eye. Under the arm. Under the collarbone. Index finger. Under the collarbone. Tiny finger.

And then under the collarbone. Now, Chris, I'm going to ask you to think about it again. I don't know if you're, are you visual or? Yeah, I'm very visual, yes. Okay, well pull up the same picture you had before. Okay. And tell me what you notice now in your body.

Chris McDonald: Even though it was a very difficult, I mean, actually this was a car accident I had many years ago, and could picture it, and the worst part was seeing.

saw it coming at me, but I don't feel any of that tension. I mean, it's like, it's like an ease in the body. Like,

Robert Bray: and did the

Chris McDonald: picture change at all?

Robert Bray: Uh, intense in your face?

Chris McDonald: Yeah. It's not demanding

Robert Bray: those pictures. So that's what we've done is we've just helped change that traumatic event.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, so listeners got to try this.

Rewind if you need to go

Robert Bray: through

Chris McDonald: it.

Robert Bray: Well, yeah, you know what? And the thing is, is if it doesn't work for you, don't worry about it. Cause we got a bunch of other stuff, but it's going to work 80%, 90 percent of the time.

Chris McDonald: So what did you say? It was a crisis?

Robert Bray: It's the Crisis Tapping Pattern in Thought Field Therapy.

If you go to my website, rlbray at rlbray. com, and you click on the button, you'll find a button that says Try TFT. That will take you to a YouTube video. Scroll down, you'll see the video. I'll be doing just what I did with you right now.

Chris McDonald: Right. Very

Robert Bray: YouTube and search Robert L. Bray crisis tapping pattern.

It's all around us. So this is the particular brand of energy psychology that I do. From Dr. Callahan's work have been developed a number of other tapping sequences and ways of doing this. Callahan was the original guy who developed the protocols and I studied with him for years and I was his, uh, I was his lead trainer for many years.

When he and his wife couldn't go someplace, they'd send me. So I got to know Dr. Callahan and Joanne. I got to understand how this stuff works and very, um, I'm still learning. I should say that. Yeah,

Chris McDonald: exactly. I know lifelong learning isn't. There are,

Robert Bray: yeah, and there's still, there's still more to be learned from doing this stuff.

Chris McDonald: So I noticed that I just feel like that parasympathetic response. Can you talk about the parasympathetic nervous system?

Robert Bray: And what we have happens is as soon as you fire up in a crisis situation or a dangerous situation or the trauma that you described, it's going to, you're going to get a sympathetic response.

You're going to get the fight or flight reactivity going on. And the problem with that is once that becomes your habit of way of reacting to. Those triggers now for you, that trigger might be driving in your car. It might be a particular location. It might be a scene you see on TV, but whenever that trigger now happens, it says to the body going into that sympathetic response.

Now, even though intellectually in the top of your brain, you know, you're sitting on your couch, it still doesn't matter. Still there. Right. It's that learning that we have to disengage. Now, a reconsolidation therapy says, we used to think, well, once you have a memory, you can't change it. But now the data is very clear.

You can activate a memory. You can change the memory so it doesn't reformulate. Resolidify in the same way it was before. So what I would predict is the next time you bring up that picture, same picture, you're still going to feel relaxed because you're going to be able to know that you're in this moment and your body doesn't need to react.

To that in that way. And I think that's

Chris McDonald: that makes it much clearer to that. It's just because the memory becomes the memory. It's not in the present moment.

Robert Bray: Oh, yeah. And that's that's the hard thing is getting sometimes these things to be a memory. And the nice thing about memories are, it's like a picture on the shelf, right?

You can look at the picture if you want, you can take down, you can have feelings about when it happened. You have feelings about that. It did happen and all of that stuff. And then when you're done with it, you put it back on the shelf,

Chris McDonald: put it

Robert Bray: back on the shelf. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris McDonald: Yeah.

Robert Bray: And then go on with what you're up to.

Chris McDonald: So the memory, you said recount. You say that word? Consolidation. Consolidation. Sorry, my mouth isn't working. So I actually pictured like the car just like sliding past me.

Robert Bray: Uh huh. So it's like that. And in this moment, that's what happens. Yeah.

Chris McDonald: Yeah. So it's like a calmer. Okay. And

Robert Bray: that can't happen if you're locked into that stimulus.

Chris McDonald: Okay. The trauma response.

Robert Bray: And that automated response that you have. So now you can do that. That's powerful stuff. Oh, and if you, you know, it's the kind of stuff that then allows you to see if, uh, I've done lots of work with people who've been in, in all kinds of serious accidents. And the first thing you have to do is get them to realize, get the body to acknowledge, oh, it's not happening now.

Right. In this moment, I'm safe. Now, once you do that, then you can begin to work on those particular pieces that you have to about how do you, how do you manage to stay safe in the future? If it's as real, you know, it's the same thing you have with trust issues with people who have been, their trust has been violated by somebody they loved.

And it's like, so then how do you begin to learn to trust again? Well, you won't until you find a way to make that a memory. And then find another way to begin approach to trusting people, you know, and I, you know, I love to be able to people say, well, how do you trust somebody as well? You know, it's a, it's a process.

You trust people to the extent that they show you to be trustworthy. Well, how do you know how to trust were there? Well, give them a buck and see what they do with it. You know, it's like, don't give them your fortune and see what they do with it. See what they do with one show them who you are, see what they do with it.

Before you go into that deeper sense of this is what I'm sharing.

Chris McDonald: Are you a mental health therapist who feels like traditional talk therapy isn't enough? somatic approach? You're not alone. Many therapists feel the pull to offer something more, something that helps clients. Connect with their body, regulate their nervous system, and find healing beyond words.

That's why I created Yoga Basics Course for Therapists, an 8 week training designed to help you confidently integrate yoga into your clinical practice. And no prior yoga training is required. In this course, you'll learn how to use trauma informed yoga for nervous system regulation, ethical ways to introduce yoga into sessions safely, simple postures and breathwork techniques tailored for therapists.

org forward slash yoga basics today. I'm just wondering with a memory reconsolidation, I just wondered, how can listeners help their clients to be able to shift once they realize that this is just a memory? How can they shift it to a different, I guess, outcome in some way?

Robert Bray: Well, what will happen is, is that that happens automatically.

Okay. Yeah. Once somebody knows, Oh, that's a memory. That's a memory. I'm in this moment. Then they're going to, they're going to say, well, in this moment. In this moment, what do I want to do? If you're interested, I'm doing a workshop, if you really want TFT stuff, the basic algorithm for Thought Field Therapy, I'm doing it in, um, starting in, uh, March.

It's, uh, Two hours on a Tuesday for five weeks. So you get 10 hours and I can give you California continuing education for it if you want. But at the end of that, you'll know enough about TFT that you'll feel really comfortable using it yourself, your clients, your loved ones. the loved ones, the hard ones to do.

But, um,

Chris McDonald: yes,

Robert Bray: but if you, you know, that's starting again in March, if it, they may not hear of it, but I do it a couple of times a year. And then I do a four day training that I take it's live in person. And for four days, I teach you everything. Dr. Callahan taught me, and then I add the stuff that I've learned about what it is to be a good therapist.

And my specialty is traumatic stress. Um, but at the end of that four days, you will have all the tools, um, needed to call yourself an expert in energy psychology.

Chris McDonald: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of change can happen for clients too. Chris, if

Robert Bray: you want to come to the training, come to the training. It's in San Diego.

I can't put you up, but I can certainly give you the training. Because I think, uh, the work that you do in reaching out to people and trying to find more folks is important. And I, I would, uh, you know, I'd love to give this to you so you have it, uh, to take care of yourself and take care of them.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, exactly.

So I'm curious about the eyes because I use brain spotting with clients. So I know a lot about the integration, the, with the nervous system and the brain. So I know you said you, while I was tapping, you had me look left and right. Can you talk about that? Roll your eyes

Robert Bray: in a circle. A circle. Well, you have to understand, this stuff came out a long time ago, and what Dr.

Callahan thought when he developed what he called the Nine Gamut Series, what he found was, is that by moving your eyes, you're actually, and the same thing in brain spotting, they figured out later on, is you're locating the thought. in a different part of your brain, or you're activating a different part of your brain.

And while you're tapping now, what's different between brain spotting is you're tapping on that gamut spot, that spot on the back of your hand. So you're stimulating a meridian treatment point and adding power to focusing that part of your brain and being able to disengage this, I'm locked into one part of my brain.

So that's why, you know, hum, count, hum, well, it's. left, right, left on your brain. So it's different parts of the brain. Right, exactly, because you stimulate a different part when you hum than when you count. And so, the brain spotting stuff I think is very powerful, but this to me is better because it doesn't require you to do anything other than you think the thought, you remember it, you come into it, you rate the upset, we like to rate it on a 1 to 10, and we know what it means.

And then we start tapping. We don't ask you to do anything else, just we, then we go through the tapping sequence. And then when we're done, we see how that worked. And depending on how that goes, we might say, well, let's do it again. Or we might say, you know what? We need to do this first. We need to do that part first.

But the idea here is that we just jump right into it. And what I like better about this than the brain spotting is it's a lot less verbal. A lot less. You don't need to describe to me, and for a lot of people that's, that's a hard thing to do. It is.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, and I'm wondering, first responders, they see so much trauma that I'm sure it's, it's even more challenging, yeah.

Robert Bray: Well, not all of it counts as trauma.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, okay. I mean, if you're trained,

Robert Bray: you know, if you're trained to deal in blood and gore, and you're an EMT or hospital first responder, you know, that's not the trauma part.

Chris McDonald: No,

Robert Bray: no. The trauma part is when the thing you're doing doesn't work. The trauma part is when suddenly you thought you were going to be working on an adult and you're working on a child.

Child stuff is always the most difficult. Yeah, that's always so hard. But same thing, you know, as a firefighter, you go to a fire, The fire is not the trauma,

Chris McDonald: it's

Robert Bray: the events that happen while you're there and sometimes if you, uh, lose a team member or somebody gets hurt or it reminds you of something in your past about your earlier trauma, then it's problematic, but you know, not every soldier who goes to war.

Comes back traumatized, you know, because they're doing what they're trained to do. And that doesn't necessarily create a trauma in the body. I mean, I've worked with special forces guys. It was like, yeah, the trauma was never, you know, all the stuff that we thought it would be. It was like, Oh, that was the time that there was that woman who reminded you of your little sister.

And now we're dealing with a connection to the little sister stuff. But, see, this is the thing is, I was raised in a family where I knew men who had killed a lot of men in war. Because there were soldiers in World War II in Korea and in Vietnam. And that, in and of itself, is not necessarily the trauma. I mean, that's the job, but for some people, you know, you think about it, that's not the job I want.

You know, I, I liked being a lifeguard. I like doing it, being a wildland firefighter. I think it would have been harder for me with the moral injury that would, that accompanies,

Chris McDonald: um, you know,

Robert Bray: inflicting violence on other people.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, I can't

Robert Bray: imagine that. No, and, and thank God, you know. Yeah. This is, and this is why I'm glad I, I didn't have to live that way.

But, uh, I just want to be clear with you. Just because somebody says they've had an event.

Chris McDonald: Doesn't mean it's going to be

Robert Bray: trauma. It's, we got to be careful how we decide what other people's trauma is. I mean, I talk about the big T and the little T trauma. The big T trauma is like the car accident that you had.

It's life and death. You know, you're going to die in the next moment or not, and that's big T trauma. Little t trauma is the stuff that happens to us that is regular and consistent, and we don't, wouldn't necessarily think of it as life and death. But when I work with people and I'm working on childhood stuff, you think about a child, right?

A child, in order to survive, has to have a relationship with a parent, a caregiver. And if that caregiver is saying to you, Oh, you don't feel that way. That's not what you think. See, I think one of the pieces of violence we do is we say to a child, oh no, you don't think that way in this family, this is how we think, or you don't feel that, you know, you stop the crying stuff.

You look like you feel that, but you don't feel it. Stop in our family. We don't feel that well, that's violence. Because people have a right to feel what they feel and give expression to it. They have a right to think what they think and give expression to it. They have a right to do as they please as long as they're not harming anyone else.

Exactly. But that, that kind of violence to children is what often I refer to as little t trauma. Because nobody, well, He didn't hit me. He didn't beat me to death. Well, okay, but he threatened your existence because as a child, you know that if you didn't please him, you weren't going to get the attention.

You weren't going to get the food. You weren't going to get the air. And so you start to respond to that as traumatic. And you start to learn how to be able to avoid it. I mean, one of the standard things we do in trauma is learn how to avoid, learn how to disassociate, learn how to pretend. Anyway, I sort of went down a different

Chris McDonald: road.

I think that makes sense though, yeah. to kind of look at the big T's versus little t's, but then the little t's add up and it's cumulative.

Robert Bray: Well, and the thing that I often find is that when I'm doing therapy with people, and that's part of what you get if you take a training from me, as you kind of get my perspective on this is I do a lot of inner child work.

So I may ask somebody to tell me about what it is that's bothering them, that's triggering, that's upsetting them. And in the midst of that, one, they're really. Aware of what the image is or what the memory is and what the sensation is, the body, if you simply ask the question, how old are you, how old were you the first time you ever remember having that feeling and they'll tell you and then they'll tell you, um, you say, what was going on at that point?

And now you're into the deeper parts of that. And that's the beauty of tapping, TFT, is then you have a way to alleviate that injury to that child. And then to help that inner child part. Trust the adult you are today.

Chris McDonald: So trust the adult you are today. That's why I wondered if this was integrative with other counseling theories like parts work.

Oh yeah, parts work

Robert Bray: a lot. Yeah, I mean I, you know, I had a class with Virginia Satir when I was in graduate school. Yeah, it was absolutely amazing. And what I know is what can be done with that, but I know when you add some tapping to it, how much faster all of that can be done. Right, for sure. You can get to it.

Chris McDonald: That makes a lot of sense. I wonder, too, for listeners, if some of this could be integrated with yoga in sessions, too.

Robert Bray: Well, what I, what I found is useful for people and people, yoga instructors who have taken this, is it's a way to very quickly come to that mindful place where you can be present. So when you think with your, uh, when you're, if you're an instructor and you say, okay, so I'd like you to all assume a position and I'd like you just to become present to what that's like for you in this moment, right?

And you know, damn well that they're thinking about picking the kids up or they're thinking about the last time they were in this position, they tweak their hip. So what you can say to them is. Uh, look, whatever you got going on right now that's keeping you from being fully present in this moment, just be aware of it, and now let's tap.

And you take them through a tapping sequence, much like what we did with you here. And then what they're gonna find is they can let go of All of that stuff and be in this moment or make the decision to get up and go get it done.

But it's better you do that than pretend that you're present for the class because you won't get. You won't get the power of what it's like to be fully present and to let different parts of your body come into connection.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, because it sounds like if the mind's somewhere else too, it's like bringing that back to that full body connection.

Robert Bray: Yeah, yeah. Or if you find, say you're doing yoga and you're trying to do a practice and you keep, your mind keeps going off to something else. Well, we say we'll let it go and come back. But why don't you stop for a moment and do some tapping. And see if you can't change what you're being pulled into. So those are places that you might find it to be useful.

Uh, I know people who've done yoga and learned TFT. It makes a whole lot easier for them.

Chris McDonald: If you have success stories that you can share, is there any you could share about using this with first responders?

Robert Bray: Oh, first responders. Well, I'm part, uh, for many years, uh, the International Critical Instance Stress Foundation, Jeff Mitchell and George Everly.

These are the guys who originated the idea of critical instance stress debriefing. And, um, they, this, their organization is still going strong, you know, 25 years later, 30 years later. And so I was a trainer for this group. And so I would go and do their regional trainings and I would teach people this basic work that I'm offering in this next online training so that they would have it available to them.

And mostly with that group, what I did is focused on self care. You know, there's applications for using this with your patient if you're pre hospital or where you're trying to. Interrogate somebody and you need him to calm down so you can talk to him. Lots of stories. I mean, one pops out in my head. This young man came back to the training and he had just, he was struggling terribly because what happened was he went on a run and he, and it was a SIDS case.

And so he was trying to save this baby and he'd done this before and he was fine. But what happened is this is shortly after he had the birth of his first child. And so when he was there and he lost that child, he was so overwhelmed because he was so connected to his own kid that he really didn't know if he could go back to work.

We did some tapping to bring that down, to make it clear who was his, that wasn't his baby. And he had performed well, but that happens. I, I worked once with, uh, an EMT second day on the job. She arrived at a scene where a child had been hit by a redwood tree branch. And the child was unconscious, not breathing, and that was her second day on the job.

Now, the boy ended up, uh, eventually dying and donating his organs, but she was so overwhelmed that she couldn't do anything. And I tapped with her and I was able to help her get through. All of these feelings because she was sure she'd done something wrong. And by the way, that was that seven year old boy was, um, see how it touches me, um, was my god nephew.

Chris McDonald: Oh, I'm so sorry.

Robert Bray: Yeah. Um, but it's okay. Every time I think of him, I have these overwhelming feelings. And so many of them are so good that it's just like, Oh, okay. That's him. And. What I just told you about the story of doing this for this paramedic. I did it at his memorial service.

Chris McDonald: Oh, that's amazing.

Robert Bray: So I'm telling you, you can do this under any conditions.

You think I'm emotional now. Oh my God. It was just a complete wreck, but I was grateful. Yeah. I was grateful when Trey's mother. said to me, she was hugging this woman and she mouths to me, help her. And, um, she comes away and she's in a uniform, she's an EMT. And I thought, okay, give me a task. I love it. You know, you're like, yes, yes.

So you can use it with in all kinds of ways, all kinds of situations. And I tapped for myself for many times. If I weren't able to keep going right now, you'd see me tapping. Because I know in a matter of moments, I would calm that down again

Chris McDonald: and,

Robert Bray: um, I'd be fine.

Chris McDonald: It sounds like it's a great tool that you can teach clients and then they can use it for themselves to keep themselves regulated.

Robert Bray: Oh, yeah. No waiting to get hold of the doctor. You know, it's kind of, you know, here, here's the tapping pattern. Just take it home with you when you need it. Use it. Call me if it's not working, but you don't have to wait. You can take care of yourself.

Chris McDonald: So are there any other thoughts you wanted to share before we end this interview today?

Robert Bray: Well, other than, um, I encourage you, if you've not experienced it, I encourage you to go find my YouTube, find my website, rlbray. com. And we'll have that in the show

Chris McDonald: notes too.

Robert Bray: Okay, thank you. Uh, give it a shot. If you find it useful, come take the online training. Trust me, we don't role play in TFT trainings because we don't need to.

Because we know that if we ask Uh, people to treat one another with no disclosure required that you'll be fine. So that's how we practice is by working on ourselves and others.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for coming on the Yoga in the Therapy Room podcast, Robert. Okay.

Robert Bray: Well, I, I love it. Uh, if you have more questions, feel free to let me know if.

I'd love to come back and talk about it in some more depth once you've done some more tapping, because I can see you're going to be doing

Chris McDonald: some more. I need some more tapping. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you listeners for being with us today. And I hope you got a lot of important tools from this episode and be sure to tune in next Wednesday when another episode drops.

Are you ready to bring the transformative power of yoga into your therapy sessions with confidence and ease? I've got the resource just for you, Introducing Building Confidence and Confidence in Integrating Yoga into Therapy Sessions, a thoughtfully designed checklist to help you navigate best practices and feel empowered as you blend yoga and mental health therapy.

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Don't wait, start integrating yoga with therapy with confidence today. Go to hcpodcast. org forward slash build confidence. That's hcpodcast. org forward slash build confidence. And once again, this is Chris McDonald sending each one of you much light and love. Till next time, take care. Thanks for listening to today's episode.

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