Have you ever been having the time of your life, only to be pulled back into a traumatic memory by a single sound? Imagine sitting at a Thanksgiving dinner, surrounded by loved ones, when a scream triggers a past emergency call and plunges you into a whirlwind of panic and distress. This episode shares my personal story of how deeply ingrained trauma can resurface unexpectedly, even in the safest of environments. Join me as I recount that unforgettable day and the profound impact trauma triggers can have on one's emotional and physical well-being.
We'll take a closer look at how our brain responds to trauma, diving into the roles of the thinking cortex and the autonomic nervous system—the so-called reptilian brain. By examining the fight, flight, or freeze responses, I share insights from personal experiences and therapy, including neuromodulation techniques. Discover how these automatic reactions can hijack rational thought and leave us stuck in survival modes. This understanding will pave the way for identifying and addressing trauma triggers, offering tools to move beyond these heightened states.
Lastly, I'll take you through my journey of recovery, detailing techniques like therapy, mindfulness practices, and the immense value of support from loved ones. From the high-stakes courtroom drama that left me on edge to the family fallout that ensued, this episode underscores the importance of recognizing and processing emotional triggers. Listen in for an eye-opening conversation about the lasting effects of high-stress situations on mental health and relationships, and learn how to navigate the path to healing and better mental well-being.
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www.DoubleDownDuo.com
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Have you ever been having the time of your life, only to be pulled back into a traumatic memory by a single sound? Imagine sitting at a Thanksgiving dinner, surrounded by loved ones, when a scream triggers a past emergency call and plunges you into a whirlwind of panic and distress. This episode shares my personal story of how deeply ingrained trauma can resurface unexpectedly, even in the safest of environments. Join me as I recount that unforgettable day and the profound impact trauma triggers can have on one's emotional and physical well-being.
We'll take a closer look at how our brain responds to trauma, diving into the roles of the thinking cortex and the autonomic nervous system—the so-called reptilian brain. By examining the fight, flight, or freeze responses, I share insights from personal experiences and therapy, including neuromodulation techniques. Discover how these automatic reactions can hijack rational thought and leave us stuck in survival modes. This understanding will pave the way for identifying and addressing trauma triggers, offering tools to move beyond these heightened states.
Lastly, I'll take you through my journey of recovery, detailing techniques like therapy, mindfulness practices, and the immense value of support from loved ones. From the high-stakes courtroom drama that left me on edge to the family fallout that ensued, this episode underscores the importance of recognizing and processing emotional triggers. Listen in for an eye-opening conversation about the lasting effects of high-stress situations on mental health and relationships, and learn how to navigate the path to healing and better mental well-being.
www.StreamlineEventsLLC.com
www.DoubleDownDuo.com
@StreamlineSEE
@DDownDuo
Youtube-Instagram-Facebook
It's Thanksgiving Day 2022. Where were you on that day and who were you with? I'm guessing if, like me, you're with friends and family. It's a day you've been looking forward to. It's a day that you have a lot to be thankful for. It's a day where you come together with, maybe, friends you don't see all the time, but you get together on that special day to have a specially beautifully prepared meal. It's a day really like no other. There's a few holidays throughout the year where we come together with friends and family and if your house is anything like mine, your door and your table is always open to strangers, and if your house is anything like mine, your door and your table is always open to strangers.
Speaker 1:Thanksgiving 2022, we got invited over to some friend's house and they were going to throw a friends and family Thanksgiving Day. So that's exactly what we did. Everybody prepared their favorite dish to come together for friends and family and to share that. Everybody brought their kids and we get together and there's about 25 of us at this event and things are going good. I had one cocktail when I first got there. I'm not a big drinker, but this day I wanted to be social, so I had a glass in my hand and was sipping something kind of throughout the day. I am feeling good. Life is good. I'm happy. I'm happy to be there surrounded by my best people as we sit down for dinner.
Speaker 1:It's a long table. I'm going to paint this picture for you. The table is about 25 feet long. There's people on both sides. There might've been more than 25. There might've been 30 people there. There's seats on both sides of the table and everybody has a name place at the table. Everybody sits kind of where they're told to sit, which is great. But we're sitting with our immediate family. So I'm sitting at one end of the table almost to the very end, and it's strategic that I'm put there because the host knows my situation and wanted to put me somewhere where I wasn't surrounded by folks. So I think I'm the last seat on the right end of the table. The left end of the table is another group of friends who I'm not particularly close with, but we do hang out, socialize and are together on occasion. They're drinking a little bit more on that end and having a good time as well. They should be. It's Thanksgiving Day.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden I start to feel my anxiety go through the roof. My leg is starting to bounce. I'm uneasy in my seat. I feel like the walls are closing in around me. I stopped eating. I no longer have an appetite.
Speaker 1:I'm scanning everybody in the room. I feel like I'm on the defensive and I don't understand why. To the point where Stacy's sitting next to me, she put her hand on my leg because she realized that something's going on. I've obviously changed in the last couple of minutes and things are getting worse In my mind, mind. My mind is racing. I'm upset. I have no reason to be. I want to get away from the people who are sitting around me. I want to keep that arm's distance. My auditory system narrows in focus.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden I'm tuning kind of the room out, except for the people that I'm immediately talking to, and I don't understand what's going on. And it's this way for a while. The lady sitting to my right asks me what's wrong. She can tell there's something wrong and I told her. I said, tina, I don't know what's wrong. Something's happening and I can't figure it out. I'm I'm not comfortable, I'm anxious. I explained all the things that I just told you and I said I don't understand what is going on and I sit there, I'm in a very uncomfortable spot, for about 15, 20 minutes, while the left end of the table is still having a really, really good time.
Speaker 1:I am anxious and upset and then I hear a gentleman at the other end of the table, in a very fun and playful way, let out a loud scream and it's almost a blood-curdling scream. But he's having a good time and at no fault of his. It immediately hit me what is going on? You see, he's been screaming for the better part of the last 30 minutes, about the time that my episode started. Well, when he screamed the second time, remember I said I was kind of tuning everything out, except for the people at my end of the table.
Speaker 1:That scream pierced through the silence like a gunshot in the night. It was loud, it echoed, reverberated in my head and I immediately recognized it. That's the same scream that I heard on a very particular call where a woman's daughter had died. Her child had hung herself a 12-year-old little girl. It was one of the worst calls of my career and there's a lot of healing and therapy in that call that I will talk about on another episode, without going into lots of detail about what occurred, but more the trauma response and how I got through that. But that's not for today. But that is the scream that I heard. It's the same blood curdling scream that I heard that mom scream that night when she realized her daughter was not going to survive the injuries.
Speaker 1:And my brain brought me right back to that call. That call where, at the time, I was numb. I had no feelings on that call I'll talk about numbness in a moment but the point is that scream triggered my brain, my autonomic nervous system, my reptilian part of my brain. Now, cognitively, I knew that I was in a safe environment. I knew that I was surrounded by friends and family and that nothing bad was going to happen to me. However, the scream that I heard subconsciously triggered an entire reaction within my brain Hormones got dumped, adrenaline got dumped, cortisol got dumped and, before you know it, I am a literally a nervous wreck sitting there. So once I identified what the trigger was, then I had to take a step back. Use well, we're going to talk about the brain, but use a different part of the brain to calm myself down. And ultimately, I ended up leaving Thanksgiving dinner early, because it's not something that I was able to work through and, honestly, I was embarrassed and I didn't want to bring everybody else down, so I decided to take myself out of the equation. Everybody else down, so I decided to take myself out of the equation.
Speaker 1:You see, there's two parts of the brain and I'm not a doctor, by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not a therapist. This is not therapy. I am simply telling you what I have learned about my situation, but you can relate it to yours, because it's a trauma response is what I want to talk about. So, whether you're a cop or whether you're a plumber, it doesn't matter to me or what walk of life you're in or anything else. It's the brain's response and how it affected me.
Speaker 1:Everything that I'm going to tell you today is stuff that directly affected me. I'm going to give you some examples of how that affected me. I'm going to give you some examples of how that affected me. I want you to know that, in full transparency, I am still being affected by all these symptoms I'm talking to you about are still bothering me. Today, I was feeling pretty good and something occurred, which I'll talk about in a moment and, honestly, it put me back to a place where I was worse than I was when I left the police department. We'll get to that.
Speaker 1:You see, there's two parts of the brain. There's the thinking part of the brain, or the cortex part of the brain. That is the part of the brain that you decide what kind of car you want, you decide what you're going to eat for dinner, what color you're going to paint your walls, and you think about what job you're going to work at and you research everything that you're going to buy online. That's the thinking cortex part of the brain. That's the part of the brain that you have to rationalize that I had to rationalize that I'm in a safe space. I'm in a friends and family environment. Nothing is going to hurt me. It's not the mom screaming, it's this guy at the end of the table, and I had to think my way through that.
Speaker 1:However, there's also the autonomic nervous system, or the reptilian part of the brain. Reptilian part of the brain. That reptilian part of the brain is not very smart, but it acts and responds a lot faster than the cortex or the thinking part of the brain. So what I mean by that is when that scream went out, there were two sets of signals that went to my brain. One went to the reptilian part of my brain. The other one went to the thinking part of my brain. Because the reptilian part of my brain is faster, it reacted. And what does a reaction from that part of the brain look like? And what does that part of the brain even do?
Speaker 1:While I've explained what the cortex, or the thinking part of the brain, does, the reptilian part is responsible for things that you can't control your heart rate, your heartbeat, your blood pressure, your digestion, your response to a threat, your sexual attraction. Those are the things that the reptilian part of the brain control. Those are the things that you have no choice as to what occurs. One of the authors that I was listening to on this topic explained if you want to get up and run across the parking lot or run across the street and you want to do it without elevating your heart rate, you can think about not elevating your heart rate all day, but when you get to the other side of the street after a sprint, your heart rate is going to be elevated. One of the things that I mentioned on the reptilian part of the brain is the response to threats, and that is exactly what occurred that day. The signal came in.
Speaker 1:One part went to the thinking, one part went to the animal instinct. Animal instinct brought me back to my unsafe space. I reacted, my body went into fight, flight or freeze mode and that is the response state that I was in. What is the fight, flight and freeze mode, you might ask? Well, we've all heard of fight and flight. So that is in the wild. An animal is approached by a bigger animal. They have a couple of choices they can fight the bigger animal, they can run from the bigger animal or they can freeze in place. Those are the choices that they have.
Speaker 1:Your brain, our brains, do the same thing when we're put into a situation where we feel we are unsafe, or it's a stressful situation, or there's something going on where our autonomic nervous system, our reptilian part of the brain, needs to take over without thinking about it, just like our heart rate. We're going to go into one of these stages and I think that it's important to understand that, while we get into a fight, flight or freeze state, we can come out of that. It may take time, it may take therapy, but we can come out of that, and the best way to come out of it is to first understand how we got there. In this case, I needed to understand where my threat came from and that I was in a safe place, use the tools in my toolbox and ultimately I was able to come out of that state. So what is fight, flight or freeze, and what happens when we get stuck there? You see, early on in my therapy sessions I went through a treatment called neuromodulation and without being a brain doctor and being super smart in this, I'll give you my point of view and what I learned about it.
Speaker 1:Your brain is constantly giving off brainwaves those brainwaves. During neuromodulation, there's a series of sensors put on your head. They read the brainwaves. First, there's a baseline that talks about what parts of your brain are functioning normally, what parts of your brain are not functioning normally and what does that look like In each part of your brain. It's responsible for different functions in this world or different functions in your world. So the first thing they want to do is see is your brain functioning properly? Is the pendulum swinging back and forth on a nice smooth axis point or pivot point, and is everything going right?
Speaker 1:In my situation, I found that things were not going correctly. Some parts of my brain weren't functioning hardly at all Some of the thinking parts, some of the reasoning parts, some of the memory recall parts. I found that in my situation, I was stuck in the fight, fight, freeze part of my brain, and that is due to a lot of stimulation and a lot of threatening situations. Now that threatening situations might be a direct threat to you For example, getting shot at, getting into a fight, having your life directly threatened Another thing that can do that is being surrounded by other people's lives who are threatened, or death situations or tragic situations. You see, trauma is not necessarily what occurs to you. It's your body's response to a situation that you've been involved in. So, in my case, I lived a life of 11 years of being involved in traumatic situations. Every day that I went to work, it was somebody else's worst day, and that is something that got my brain stuck in that fight, fight or freeze state.
Speaker 1:Now, what does it feel like to be in that state? Here's what it feels like. First, there's painful thoughts, painful thoughts being flashbacks, nightmares, depression, suicidal ideations, anger, hatred towards yourself, anger, hatred towards yourself. For me, and even at times right now, I still feel this way. Um, and in the last few months it's been more than not where I literally feel like inside is dark, dark and angry. And if I'm smiling on the outside, uh, you know it, it might. Sometimes you got to fake it till you make it. And I'm getting through that because I've done a lot of therapy. I was a lot worse three months ago than I am today, two months ago than I am today, but you still feel that darkness, that hatred inside, and it's not hatred towards anything or anybody, it's everything and everybody Intense emotions, anger, anxiety, heightened startle response.
Speaker 1:Heightened startle response is a huge one for me. I hate being startled and my startle response is to punch, it's to hit, it's to push away. I've hit coworkers because they've come up and startled me, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not startling me intentionally or not intentionally, but my response is to hit and push. And that's a really, really terrible place to be, where you feel like the world is always. You know there's always evil lurking right around the next corner.
Speaker 1:Next corner, irrationality, irritability and unreasonable responses to situations. I shouldn't lose my ever-loving mind if my kids don't put my screwdriver back, but sometimes I do, and for me I get angry, I get over-the-top angry, and I'll explain a situation that occurred to me recently where this was very, very evident. But those kids not putting my screwdrivers back. I lose my mind. I've yelled, I've screamed, I've been angry and upset and it's unreasonable. Well, it's because of the stress situation that I'm in. I'm stuck in that fight, flight or freeze, and today it's a screwdriver, tomorrow it's the magazine for my gun. Without the magazine for my gun, I might not live to fight that next fight, I might not live through the next encounter. So put my shit back when you get done with it, that way I know where it's at. That is the approach that I'm thinking. Chances are I'm not going to save my life or anybody else's with a screwdriver.
Speaker 1:You have body changes short, shallow breathing, weight gain, blood pressure increases, weight loss, panic attacks, digestive issues, upset, stomach ulcers. Those are all things that occur during the fight, flight or free state. Maybe some behavioral changes. Maybe you've experienced some of these things yourself. Behavioral changes, maybe avoidance of things related to the trauma.
Speaker 1:I couldn't go back to my city. I went back to my city a year later and could barely make it through town by the time I got. I had to go to the police department to return my police car and I had to drive through the city about five, six miles. By the time I got to my police department I was a complete emotional wreck. I was crying, I couldn't see the road. Uh, it was absolutely horrible because on every street corner I saw a call that I was on, I saw a murder that occurred or something that was a memory of that city.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wanted to avoid the city, isolation and insulation. Isolating yourself from others, insulating yourself inside your own world, your own cocoon, and just avoiding the world. Guilty as charged, inability or the no desire to keep, maintain or make relationships. You find yourself. I found myself tuning everybody out, even the ones closest to me. I don't have a lot of friends, but even the ones that I did have, I wanted nothing to do with Church, pushing church away, nothing to do. I want nothing to do with church and I'm still fighting that a little bit right now and it's partially PTSD-related or PTS-related. I'll drop the D. I don't think it's a disorder.
Speaker 1:You can come back from this Lack of trust in others and coping mechanisms. The coping mechanisms is something that is pretty common through law enforcement. I find a lot of my peers were drinkers, were some of my sergeant got arrested for stealing drugs out of the drug locker. There's things that occur for coping mechanisms, that occur for coping mechanisms, and all we're trying to do is find something that makes us feel good, something that will take us out of that free state or that constant need to fight state. Why are we there? Why are we in a position where we feel like we constantly need to fight? Now, from the outside perspective, looking in, the world is good. We're in a safe place, we're at Thanksgiving dinner, there's nothing here that's going to harm you. Just get over it.
Speaker 1:For the war veteran coming back which I'm not but for the war veteran coming back who goes to a fireworks display, a firework goes off and he hits the ground and crawls under a car, that's because his animal portion of the brain is thinking and acting faster than his cortex portion of the brain. It's not until he's under that car or she's under that car that they realize I'm at a 4th of July celebration, it's not a bomb and I am in a safe place. And they come back out. That's similar to what happened to me on Thanksgiving Day. So why is this occurring? Because there's parts in the brain that become hyper aroused and function more than others and there's parts of the brain that decrease function during these conditions. Now I'm going to get back to the neuromodulation in a moment, but I want to remind you I was stuck in fight, flight, freeze because of the trauma and the experiences that I had through my profession.
Speaker 1:There's a part of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is, in all sense, the warning system for the brain. It's the smoke alarm, it's the tsunami warning. It is the bad things are going to happen. You need to prepare yourself. When the amygdala triggers, it releases hormones through your body. Those hormones change the way you act, think, feel, your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up, your respirations go up, your body prepares for a fight.
Speaker 1:To trigger the amygdala when I was working was every single day. When I was working was every single day, every single day, not knowing what it was you were getting or knowing what you were getting and you were experiencing the threats of harm to yourself. Or you're witnessing tragic threats of harm to others or death. Or you're making traffic stops and you don't know if the next time you make a traffic stop and you walk up on that car, the person's going to shoot and kill you, or you're responding to a bank robbery which occur all the time, and in responding you're thinking 27 different ways how you're going to stay safe, keep everybody else safe and handle that call. Or maybe it's just directing traffic and your partner was recently killed in the line of duty directing traffic around an accident scene. All of those things fire that amygdala and cause that dump of hormones into the body and, as a result of that, your body is always on alert.
Speaker 1:Now, these are parts of the sympathetic nervous system. There's the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is somewhere that many of us live. It is everything that is speeding you up, keeping you going, alerting you to dangers, it is everything that stimulates your brain, your body, et cetera. So, in this world of being in a hypervigilant state, hyperarousal state, whether you, no matter what your job is or what your life is when you're in this or what your trauma is, when you're in this state, your brain is going a hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 1:Imagine animals in the forest trying to get to water, animals in the forest trying to get to water when those animals are foraging through the forest. The animals in this case are your circumstances. They're everything that you're involved in. For me it was my line of work, it was the tragedy every day. It was the death, it was the violence, it was the traffic stops, the traffic accidents. Am I going to be the next one on the Officer Down Memorial page?
Speaker 1:That was the stimulus. That is the animals. The animals are trying to get to water or they're trying to get through the day. In my case case when they take their way and they make their game trails across the forest or across your brain in a sympathetic world. They make those trails through the sympathetic nervous system side of your brain. In your nervous system those neural pathways get beaten down and that becomes the direct route to water for those animals. Now there's another side of your brain called the parasympathetic nervous system. Occasionally an animal will wander through that way to water. Occasionally your thoughts activities such as parasympathetic nervous system activities might be adult coloring. Sympathetic nervous system activities might be adult coloring, meditation, yoga, pottery, art, taking a nice walk, something that calms you down. Occasionally your deer will go through that to get to water and they beat down a couple of pathways or a couple of neural pathways or game trails, but it's not near as often as the well-beaten path through the sympathetic nervous system side of your brain. All they're trying to do is get to water and they take the path of least resistance.
Speaker 1:That is the reason why I got stuck in fight, flight and freeze, or or the freeze state, because my game trails were all through that one side of my brain. Every day was life and death, mine or somebody else's. Imagine every time you walk up to a copy machine to make a copy at work or you answer your cell phone. One of those times that phone might blow up and kill you. One of those times that copy machine, when you hit print, might actually just explode and kill you and everybody around you.
Speaker 1:That constant state of awareness and hyper arousal is what I and others in my profession and many of you, no matter what profession you're in, experience to some level or the other Remember, my crap is no different than your crap. It's just my crap and your crap. There is no comparison here. So just because I'm talking about my experiences, you can relate this to your own life. So that amygdala is always going off. That is the equivalent to always being prepared for that copy machine to explode. Well, the amygdala doesn't stop going off when you leave work because those game trails are right through the sympathetic nervous system and that is the way your brain is conditioned.
Speaker 1:Remember, I started this by saying your brain changes. Your brain changes because that amygdala is always firing, even in circumstances where you are clearly safe. You're at home on the weekend, surrounded by friends and family that amygdala is still firing. You haven't gotten enough sleep to reset it. You haven't got away from work. You haven't gotten enough sleep to reset it. You haven't got away from work. You haven't separated yourself from your environment enough for that amygdala to not be firing and sending off that smoke alarm and your body's looking for the fire, but there is no fire.
Speaker 1:This is one of the reasons why I was irritable at home. I was irrational. My anger was high when my kids didn't put my screwdriver back. I wanted to beat them. That is the reasoning that I acted the way that I did and I made some of the choices that I made During the amygdala triggering and firing. You are getting, I was getting rushed with bunches of hormones that I didn't need because there was no fire to put out. I was literally getting flooded with a fire hose full of water in my brain, but there was no fire to put out, so all of the chemicals had to go somewhere, which kept me amped up all the time.
Speaker 1:Still, that way, to some extent, the thinking part of the brain gets turned down because the amygdala and the reptilian part of the brain is functioning so highly, so they're slowing in the thinking part of the brain, which makes it easy to get confused, harder to think and sometimes harder to process why things are happening. It was very obvious to my wife why I was having that episode on Thanksgiving. I couldn't think of it. When I finally had the epiphany to say, oh my gosh, this is what's going on, my wife was like, yeah, I know. And I felt dumb. Well, how did I not know? Well, I didn't know because the brainpower that I was using to process the threat took away from the brainpower for rational thinking, took away from the brain power for rational thinking. When we get into this sympathetic nervous system, deregulation of the nervous systems, things aren't regulated. It can lead to health issues. For me it did. It led to heart issues, weight gain, mental health issues, medication at times. All of this stuff was due to the sympathetic nervous system. I felt dark, depressed. Maybe some of this stuff is ringing true to you Darkness, depressed behavioral adaptations and when I talk about that, you immerse yourself in work.
Speaker 1:The only place I feel safe is in the work environment. I remember coming home from my last murder that I worked a cartel murder and I had three days off, two, three days off back to back. And while I was still answering my phone when I was at home, I felt so on edge. I just needed to be at the office, but I kept telling myself the thinking part nope, you need to be at home and relax and take some time off. You've been going hard. When I got back into office on Monday morning and stood in front of that whiteboard with a marker in my hand, ready to go back to work, I felt so peaceful and so much at home and that was an indicator to me that I had a problem. When I'm at home, I don't want to be there. I wanted to immerse myself in work where I was safe. Relationship failures I can't tell you where I was safe. Relationship failures. I can't tell you how many times my wife and I have had issues over the year and I always thought they were her problem and they never were. They were always mine. But I didn't recognize that at the time because I was fully immersed in my situation.
Speaker 1:So what do we do with all of this? Well, your brain can heal, so your brain can heal. That's why PTSD we should drop the D. It's not a disorder. Pts is something you can heal and recover from. You just simply have to work at it. All the things that you hear, think, feel, see throughout life are compartmentalized and stuffed away in little boxes inside your brain and your brain does not forget any sight, sound, smell, touch, word, anything, and you may think you forgot what happened to you when you were eight years old. However, start unpacking that box and you will smell the smells and see the sights that you saw when you were eight years old, that surrounded that traumatic experience. It takes work. It takes work to get on the other side, to drop that D out of PTSD and realize it's post-traumatic stress.
Speaker 1:Some of the things that have worked for me is therapy and neuromodulation EMDR, being mindful of my circumstances, almost daily meditation I say almost, because I try hard, but I'm not perfect and parasympathetic activities such as taking time off, reading a book, realizing that you're more important than anything work-related or stress-related. Let's get back to that neuromodulation. So that neuromodulation. Remember I told you I had to go in and get those brainwaves. They put the sensors on. They read my baseline. My pendulum was stuck.
Speaker 1:You go through a series of neuromodulation sessions where those sensors read your brainwaves as they come out of your head. They turn them into an audible tone and you hear those audible tones. They put earbuds in your ears and you hear the audible tones. The audible tones you hear are representative of the brainwaves coming out of your head in real time. It sounds like a bunch of voodoo witchcraft, I get it, but it works. So when you hear those tones come in through your ears, your brain effectively has to put them away and store them where they really go. So imagine the brain waves coming in and you got a little squirrel inside the brain. That is, taking them as they come in your ears and putting them into the right containers all throughout your brain and reorganizing them where they go in the portions of your brain. Well, what this does is it takes all that stuck energy and it re-associates it to everywhere else that it should be.
Speaker 1:During this time you may experience I experienced painful thoughts of the past memories. There were some mood swings that went with it. You couldn't really tell because I was already moody, but there were some mood swings that went with it. Then you take a small break from the sessions and then you come back. I believe you do another round and they do it, or they do a baseline, to see how kind of how things went and if everything got re-compartmentalized the way that it should. That was my neuromodulation. That was the first step to me headed in the right direction. Through that neuromodulation I was able to reprocess the stuck areas of my brain, reorganize them into their appropriate containers with inside my brain, and that kind of got me back headed in the right direction. It increased my sleep. I had insomnia prior to this. I was able to get sleep. I was less emotional, less reactional to stimulation. My kids could lose the screwdrivers and I didn't want to hunt them down and beat them. Uh. Nor did I get mad and yell and scream and throw a temper tantrum like a two-year old because my brain was functioning more regular than it did before. One of the things that I had to do for recovery was get out of my environment.
Speaker 1:If you're in an abusive relationship, expect the abuse to continue and the stress to continue until you remove yourself from that relationship, although in a, say, domestic violence relationship, oftentimes the victim finds solace and comfort in the abuser, and they do that because at least they know what they're going to get. Their self-worth is low, they don't have any value, they believe, and they know what they're going to get. They might get beaten, but then the abuser is going to have an I love you cycle and that I love you cycle is going to make them feel better and valued by somebody, even though they don't value themselves. And then the abuse cycle is going to come and this whole thing is going to repeat itself. They feel like they're stuck, like they're a cog in the wheel. Maybe you feel like you're stuck in your situation. It might be domestic violence, it might be work, it might be a toxic relationship with a friend or a family or a coworker. It might be your place of employment.
Speaker 1:It took a lot for me to realize that the world did not revolve because I existed in it. It took a lot for me to realize that I was nothing more than a cog in the wheel and if I were to remove myself from that situation, I would feel better, I would be happier and the world would continue to move without me. So how do you do this For me? I had to leave law enforcement. God made it very, very clear to me that he had another plan and that law enforcement was not going to be it. The doctors made it very clear that if I returned to law enforcement, I would likely die in my cubicle because of the stress and the effects that it had on me. If I didn't die in my cubicle, I could die by my own hands. That is not something that I was willing to accept, because I knew both of the possibilities might be true.
Speaker 1:I had to remove myself from that environment, remove myself from the people that reminded me of it, remove myself from the city. Maybe you have to get out of that relationship as well. Maybe the idea of checking him out of jail after he beat you up. Maybe this is the time to stop that. Maybe that toxic relationship you have at work where it's all take and no give. Maybe this is the time for you to say enough is enough and remove yourself from that.
Speaker 1:I had to co-regulate with happy people In my old world. Everybody was negative. They were overworked, underpaid, overstressed, too many murders. A 50-hour day wouldn't have been enough. Therefore, people were bitter and I was bitter because I was around them. I had to remove myself from that. Surround myself with happier people. Maybe this is the time for you to surround yourself with happier people. A different crowd, a different church, a different workplace, a different relationship, whatever that is co-regulate with people who you want to be like, that positive energy. If you're with them, you will reflect and mirror their behaviors, because that's just how we are as humans. We want to be like those around us. Rarely do we find an Eeyore in a crowd of happy people. Rarely do we find an Eeyore in a crowd of happy people.
Speaker 1:Put yourself in a safe environment. Remove yourself from the toxic environment that you might be in. I had to Be aware of lighting, smells, people that may trigger you and try to avoid those things. If you know you're triggered by dark environment because for me, I lived a lot of my life only being able to see what's at the end of a flashlight and for me sometimes that is a trigger, so I need to put myself, avoid those situations. Smells For the longest time, I couldn't smell smoke, smoldering plastic. It triggered a call that I was on and I had to avoid those types of circumstances, even to the point of avoiding fires, the smell of blood, the smell of blood still takes me back to a certain crime scene. If I nick my head shaving, I automatically get flashbacks and I had to avoid that. Be very, very careful around the situations. You have to put yourself into a sense of safety, security and a place of happiness.
Speaker 1:This is not rocket science, but sometimes that cortex portion of our brain is so slow Maybe even you listening today it is slowed down to the point where these things might seem like earth shattering. Exciting information for you Like holy crap, that's what I should do. I should get an adult coloring book and color because it makes me feel better, while if you were to ask your 13-year-old what makes them feel good, they might tell you right away I like coloring, it makes me feel good. But for us, being so much older and smarter, we can't even come up with that because of our stress level or maybe where we are in our brain. We need to identify anxiety. We need to identify anxiety, causes of anxiety and our environmental cues. Avoid them.
Speaker 1:And I tell you all of this not because it's anecdotal information and it's like yeah, dude, that's common sense. I totally get it. Well, it's common sense, but sometimes we feel like we can't. Sometimes we feel like we can't leave that relationship, we can't leave that job. We need the money, we need to pay the bills. We need this, we need that. You need to have faith that God has got a place for you other than wherever you are. At least, that's what's got me through it. This whole fight, flight and freeze was going pretty good for me. I was feeling well on the way of recovery and I'm going to leave you with this last story. You're never out of the woods. You always have to guard your heart, protect your mind and be cognizant of the world around you.
Speaker 1:I am a year and a half past coming out of law enforcement feeling pretty good about it. I've avoided everything I've told you about. And then I get called back for a murder trial for a 44-year-old cold case murder where I was the lead detective. We expected the trial to be a five-day trial. I go to court Now. When I went to court, I worked this, obviously, years ago. I made the arrest and I believe in 2020, 2021, and it just went to trial in March of 24.
Speaker 1:When I worked the case, I contacted a lot of witnesses from 44 years ago who hadn't been contacted by the police in 44 or in 40 years at that time 42 years, whatever it was. I'm not good at math. I went to a small school in Alaska. I can't even have that many fingers to count, but I contacted those people for the first time, I built a relationship with them and ultimately their testimony is what allowed us to help forward this case and ultimately bring resolution to the victim's family. I'd never met them in person. Some of them lived in Tennessee, florida, texas, kansas but they were all going to be there for that trial.
Speaker 1:So, thinking that I was on top of the world, I went to the courtroom and in the hallways because I was banned from the room because I was going to be a testifier. I met all of these people. I got to talk to them a little bit about the case, but more so about their experiences in coming to this court session. Some of them were happy to be there. Some of them hated being there. They all were emotional in some way. They all cried. They all thought back to what they could have done, maybe should have done at the time that might have saved this girl's life that might have saved this girl's life. They were all dark, depressed and having some traumatic responses For me when I was a police officer.
Speaker 1:Earlier I talked about being numb, and being numb what I meant by that was when I stepped into these situations. I did not have any feelings. I could see the site, smell the smells, hear the screams, and it really meant nothing to me. It was just compartmentalized into that box and stored away into the brain somewhere. I had a job to get done. The victim lying there, while this sounds cold and callous, may have had no more value to me than the coffee cup I was drinking out of, because that victim laying there was a piece of evidence that was going to allow me to process it, potentially find clues to lead to the person responsible for this and hold them accountable. Lead to the person responsible for this and hold them accountable. So I couldn't sink my emotions into it, my human life value into it, my, you know, this could be my daughter laying there, 13 year old, laying there dead. I couldn't think those things because I needed to keep a clear mind in order to push the needle forward, to find the clues, find the evidence, ultimately investigate the case and hopefully find the person responsible for whatever the heinous acts were. If it wasn't a heinous act, there was a pretty good chance I wasn't dealing with it. So that's when I was a police officer.
Speaker 1:After 18 months of learning a lot of the stuff that I've told you today, I now have my nervous system back. I'm no longer stuck in fight, flight or freeze. I now have a well-balanced nervous system. I can feel emotion. I literally cry at American Idol. If the wind changes direction, I might start bawling, and you know and it's not pollen that's got in my eye. I am an emotional guy. Now, post-law enforcement, I'm completely different than I was, at least what I had adapted to. So, as I'm hearing these people's stories now, I'm a sponge sucking up their feelings and I'm like a feeling sponge and I'm a saturated, sucked up feeling sponge. And I'm like a feeling sponge and I'm a saturated, sucked up feeling sponge.
Speaker 1:Now I got to go to the courtroom. When I go to testify, I have the biggest piece of crap defense attorney that I've ever met, most unethical, absolutely absurd asshole that I've ever met, absolutely absurd asshole that I've ever met. Him and his son the defense team are in there completely undermining everything I say, calling me bringing up shit, that doesn't matter, that's not even about the case. Uh, calling me a liar, calling me unethical Every time I try to talk they talk over me. It is just an absolute fight in the courtroom. Total on this case.
Speaker 1:I believe I spent 19 hours on the stand the first day of the trial where I testified. I was gagged, meaning I couldn't talk to anybody about the case, including my attorneys. Well, the next time I testified was, I believe, two weeks later. So for two weeks I haven't been able to talk to anybody about the case. I had my ass torn apart by these defense attorneys. I defended myself, but I couldn't talk to anybody about the status of this ongoing case. That went on for two more weeks. Two weeks later, I find myself back in the courtroom in front of these same defense attorneys, and again, they're pathetic human beings. Ultimately, the next day, closing arguments and a guilty verdict, guilty of murder, times five, for a cold case that occurred in 1980 on the Mount Hood Community College campus. There was a moment of excitement and joy in that victory.
Speaker 1:However, during my six weeks of that trial five weeks of that trial all of the things I had explained to you today occurred to me. I was more in the dumps than I had ever been. I was in free state, I was hyper aroused, I had high anxiety, I was stressed, I had hormone dumps. I thought that maybe my family would be better off without me because of insurance money, because I was an asshole at home. All that occurs Now.
Speaker 1:We're going to fast forward a couple of days to Easter. It's Easter Sunday, we go to church that morning and I go to church. I'm in this hyper-aroused state. I'm getting no sleep. My amygdala is firing, the smoke alarm is going off. I can even smell smoke and there's no fire around. I go to church. I'm angry at the church. I'm angry with things that are going on. Some of that was me displacing my anger and frustration onto the church and others, but either way, I was not in a good place.
Speaker 1:The church is packed. I'm sitting there. There's 1,500 people in the church. 1,000 people, 1,500. The walls are closing in the church. A thousand people, 1,500. The walls are closing in. My anxiety is through the roof. I'm feeling anger and hate towards people in that building. I feel like that church is no longer my home. I want nothing to do with it. I love my family, but I can't stay there. I'm going to lose my mind. I'm literally having a breakdown. So I told my wife. I said I got to get out of here. So I step outside and we wait for church is over.
Speaker 1:After church we went over to some friend's house, had a Sunday brunch. Then we go home. We're having a nice meal plan that evening and I'm sitting on the couch. I'm still high anxiety. I'm still not the loving Aaron that I should be. I'm still in a state of um. I'm still in a triggered state. This all stems from my courtroom experience my six weeks. I have not reset from that. My amygdala is still kicking my ass. It's Easter Sunday night.
Speaker 1:My wife and I have a conversation about frozen potatoes and heating them up in the oven or on the smoker. My wife goes away. She comes back five minutes later and says hey, who got the potatoes out? And I'm like you did. She's like I didn't get them out. I'm like you did. I said we had this whole conversation. You took them out. You asked me where I'm going. She's like I didn't get them out. I'm like you did. I said we had this whole conversation. You took them out. You asked me where I'm going. She's like I didn't do that. Yeah, I didn't say that to you. Look, baby, we talked about this. No, we didn't talk about that.
Speaker 1:And I lost my mind. I have never in 26 years of marriage had a blow up like I did that day. I pushed, I threw things, I was swearing F this, f that at the top of my lungs. I told her she was effing crazy. I was completely out of line. I was irrational, I was unreasonable. We were talking about frozen potatoes, potatoes.
Speaker 1:She got mad and went to bed and I laid there on the couch and just cried for hours, wondering why I responded the way that I did. I knew a lot of the stuff that I've told you today and I've done research since because I wanted to understand it more. But big picture, remember I said the thinking part of your brain sometimes decreases. In this state I was in, I wasn't thinking clearly because my reptilian portion of the brain was taking over. It's faster to react than the thinking portion. All those chemicals don't just go out of your system when you pull the relief valve. They stay there and you process them. So I laid there for hours. I went up to bed, I tried to talk to her about it. We spoke, I was bawling, I felt like I was dying. I felt like my heart was going to stop. I literally felt like I was not going to wake up.
Speaker 1:The next day I went outside by the fire where my daughter was, who had witnessed all of this, and I sat by the fire. She asked me how things were going. She told me that mom loved me. She told me that she loved me and I'll bring my daughter on at some point. We have a very good relationship now, which is different than it was, and she asked me if she could pray for me. She came over and she sat on my lap and she prayed and I cried and when you're getting comforted by your 13-year-old daughter, wow, it's humbling. She prayed and told me that life was going to be okay and this was going to take a lot to get through and this was going to be hard, and everybody was behind me and they loved me and that they understood, and that was a pretty magical moment. So I continued to cry and then I went upstairs, got back in bed and woke up the next day and tried to make amends for that terrible situation that I put my family through on Easter Sunday. It was Easter Sunday turned to hell on earth for me. I'm not out of it. We're not out of it. We're in this together.
Speaker 1:If you're watching this, it may be on YouTube. If it is and I'm not looking at the camera, I apologize, but it's just another example of how a triggered state the reptilian autonomic nervous system took over. When I took this to my therapist, I explained and I took this to another therapy-like friend of mine, I explained and they both said the same thing. When I was yelling at my wife, the same thing. When I was yelling at my wife, it wasn't because of the potatoes, it's because I spent six weeks tied up in court and every time that piece of shit defense attorney would cut me off and call me a liar and I had to try to prove my worth and prove my value and prove my integrity and the integrity of my case and I couldn't because he kept cutting me off and I could never get a sentence out completely. When my wife I didn't say that. No, I didn't do that, we didn't do that, nope, I lost my mind Because, just like the scream at Thanksgiving, the amygdala fired. I found a parallel between my wife cutting me off and calling me not a liar, but it wasn't true what I was saying to the defense attorney and I lost my mind on my wife, like I wanted to do with the defense attorney. Once I understood it, it was easier to process and I wasn't such the monster that I thought I was.
Speaker 1:You can get through this, whatever you're in right now. Hopefully this has brought some kind of enlightenment to you or maybe shed a little bit of light on me. If you're one of my friends listening to this, I'm good. I'm always going to get better. God's got my back and there is uh. The more you know, the easier it is to process. If you're in a situation where any of this stuff rings true, please reach out to somebody, get help, learn about it. You're not alone. You don't want to be in a situation where you're wondering if you should even continue living, if the family would be better off with the insurance money, and have your daughter sitting out by the bonfire praying for you, telling you it's going to be okay. I have an amazing family, an amazing daughter, and I'm very, very thankful to have them. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode. Hopefully you guys learned something and we'll see you on the next one.