Gay

I’ll speak to what you’re referring to, Bill. You know, typically as a psychologist or a therapist, we are listening to the person’s narrative. I think we all have an operating narrative, and we act into that narrative in life. So that’s part of what we’re talking about. It’s not just that we have a dysfunctional narrative. It’s not just the mentally ill. I don’t treat just the mentally ill. I treat people who have been impaired in multiple ways. But they all have a narrative about their experiences, and those experiences often involve some sort of trauma. And there’s an attached meaning to the trauma. How do they operate out of that meaning? And the operation of their life becomes dysfunctional, because of the assemblage of how they’ve dealt with trauma. We deal with trauma of an individual, with neural feedback and biofeedback.

I liken it to more of a spiritual sort of journey, or a Buddhist mentality of being here now. Really thinking about how you open up space and time so that you can take in tools that are given to you. We then integrate them moving forward as an individual. When we treat people, we are actually changing the way the brain behaves. So we’re changing behavior, we’re not changing their personal narrative. We’re not changing their past experience, we’re not changing their personality, but we are hopefully changing their future narrative. Because they start operating in life differently. Behaviorally, that means sleeping better, better appetite, better mood, less reactivity, fewer challenges in the world. This is about feeling less the effect of some trauma. So that when they’re out of the shock and awe, they’re able to manage their life differently. They’re now building a new norm, or a new narrative.

And I think it is in terms of a model. And what I do is a little extensive compared to what some neuro folks do, because I look at their physiology, their metabolic system, and their blood work. I try to put the pieces together to determine what’s interrupting what, leading to these dysregulations. Because it’s not just through blunt force trauma. A lot of times it’s emotional trauma, and then what emotional trauma can do to our physiology. So, it’s about shifting reality. And we’re all trying to shift our realities in a way that can marry medicine with what I would consider my camp of non-medicine (the non-allopathic camp). We can bridge this gap, so that when we’re treating people on behalf of wellness care, it really is about being well.