[slow music]
[gentle instrumental music]
- If we can get back to our essence,
I think that's where we belong, that's home.
You've had all these experiences in life
and yet, there's one part of you
that was there the whole time.
That same essence, your same awareness,
your same consciousness has been with you this whole time
and it's with you now.
We're still struggling and stumbling.
Some people are dying in the process,
some people are sick unnecessarily
but eventually, we've gotta get there
and we can change the paradigm.
We can do it.
[calm instrumental music]
- Stress, it's a word we hear every day.
People are stressed out, work is stressful,
but what do we really know about stress?
Before we can figure that out, let's take a quick travel
back in time starting around 70,000 BC.
Hunter-gatherers had to be on high alert in order
to survive from other predators in their environment.
Even though this seems like an extremely long time ago,
we actually react to stress in the environment
just like these early people.
Let's fast forward to early in the 17th century
to see French philosopher Rene Descartes
who famously said, "I think, therefore I am."
He is also responsible for the idea of mind-body dualism
which some call the mind-body problem.
He theorized that if the mind was a thinking thing
and the body was a non-thinking thing,
that the mind could exist without the body
but the body could not exist without the mind,
which essentially declared them as separate.
This paved the way for many schools of thought
addressing this mind-body split.
Several decades later, we hear the word stress
used by English natural philosopher Robert Hooke
in engineering terms.
He was interested in how man-made structures such as bridges
could be made to withstand heavy loads without collapsing.
He created what he called the Law of Elasticity
which demonstrated how something like a spring
could withstand a certain amount of stress
before it reached a breaking point.
This machine-like analogy proved to be fertile ground
for future explanations of how humans experience stress.
His rival at the time, Sir Isaac Newton,
would soon introduce his three Laws of Motion
which would continue to point toward
a mechanistic view of the body.
He also held a grudge against Robert Hooke
and is responsible for why you've probably
never heard of him.
And now to jump ahead to the mid-1800s.
French physician Claude Bernard
introduced the idea that the internal environment
of living organisms must remain fairly constant
in response to changes in the external environment.
Based on this work, in the early 1900s,
American physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon
coined the term Homeostasis to describe this neutral,
stable state that needed to exist for the body to survive.
He also coined the term fight or flight,
but we'll get back to that later.
When it comes to our current understanding of stress,
the man responsible is Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist
Hans Selye, he is known for his work studying what he called
General Adaptation Syndrome.
He would later coin the term stress which is still used
to explain aspects of the stress response.
This response is directly responsible
for helping the body return to homeostasis.
Which brings us to today.
[calm instrumental music]
- Most people, when they think of stress,
they think it's like they're stressed out in their mind,
they're worrying about things,
they're obsessing about things.
The response part of the stress response
is your body's response to that stress.
So most of us walking around,
we don't put two and two together.
- When they layperson hears something like stress response,
they know that stress, they think that stress
is the cause of their problem.
But we teach them that stress is actually an aggravating
factor over whatever existing weakness they have.
'Cause we're all stressed all the time.
One of the things we wanna take a look at
is that people have physical stress,
biochemical/nutritional stress
and mental/emotional stress.
People think, when they think of stress,
it's whatever they're stressed out about at their job
or their career or their family
or whatever's going on in their life personally
but stress takes many different forms.
So our goal is to make sure that they know is that
all of these things are equally important,
your mind and your body are the same thing.
It's not some new age-y kind of statement.
If you alter your mind, it's gonna alter your body.
- If you can address a person's stress in their life,
I feel like that should be number one
because we know that mental stress will affect the body
in a physical way.
So many American's have gastro-intestinal issues,
they have stomach issues, their digestion's not great,
they bloat after they eat and yeah,
there's a good portion of that that's from food
but we also know that so much of our stress
goes right to our digestive tract.
And so I've found with many patients
as I'm addressing their food but more importantly,
it's also looking at what else is going on in their life.
And it's amazing how when they're able to digest more
of what's going on in their life
they're able to digest their food better
and everything else in the whole system starts clearing up.
- The person who has a heart attack today,
were they healthy yesterday?
Of course not, where they healthy last week or last month?
Most likely not.
But there was something that was going on
that led to that crisis, that heart attack.
The emotions work they same way, they accumulate,
they accumulate and then something goes wrong.
- When somebody's under a lot of stress,
at least emotional stress, a whole cascade of things
can be going on, from neck problems to low back problems
to stomach problems to anxiety to,
I've seen people go through cyclical infections
to you name it.
Stress causes almost every condition out there.
And if we can just take some of that emotional pressure
off their system, at least the chemistry of that emotion,
their body has a better chance to heal.
[calm instrumental music]
- When we're struck by a stressor on a day
that our system is already somewhat compromised,
it's just like, it's really like adding, you know,
one more little, teeny, tiny hair to the pile
and it just, everything just crumbles in that moment.
And we're very adaptable and we're very, you know,
our nervous systems are very intelligent.
And it figures out a way to kind of cope and get through
but what we often end up doing is
developing coping mechanisms that don't work
when we get a little bit older.
I often have patients come in and say,
"Oh, I'm sabotaging myself,
"I don't know why I'm doing this to myself."
And they are beating themselves up
because these patterns are coming into play
but what they don't realize is that
these patterns saved them as children.
These patterns are survival skills that have just
gone a little wonky.
- Where I find stress is a really big deal
for a lot of people are their own internal thoughts.
They beat themselves up.
They don't think they're good enough.
They feel like they have to be perfect.
And every time they fail at something,
they stress themselves out.
And those are the stressors which oftentimes
people don't think they're stressed about.
So ask yourself this, if every time you do something wrong,
do you beat yourself up?
If you do that, you're stressing yourself out.
So what we try and do is we help people recognize
those things so that they can deal with them
a little bit more effectively so that they don't
actually stress themselves out internally.
- Some people understand that there's something
called a fight or flight syndrome.
And in the fight or flight syndrome,
that's looking at a part of the nervous system
called the autonomic nervous system.
- The autonomic nervous system is
a science-y way of talking about the
part of the nervous system
that isn't the central nervous system.
So the central nervous system is the brain
and the nerves that connect down.
The autonomic nervous system has two major branches,
so to speak, sympathetic which we call fight or flight
and the parasympathetic which we could call
relaxation and restoration.
When we're in that latter mode,
the relaxation/restoration mode of our nervous system,
that's when healing occurs,
that's when the body rejuvenates itself.
When we're in the fight or flight mode,
we're actually getting ready to ward off
something threatening so
we need that but we can't be in it all the time
or it has negative health effects.
- You might be driving in traffic and someone
cuts in front of you, your life's not in danger
but your body gives the same response.
And that ties back into the stress response
because when you go into that fight or flight
state of being, your parasympathetic calming nervous system
is turned off, that also turns off all your healing
and resting and digesting portion of your body.
- And if we don't find ways of breaking
that fight or flight response then
the symptoms you see of too much stress,
poor digestion, can't sleep at night, make sense
because you have this activated sympathetic nervous system
that, that's what it's all about.
- So it's kinda like, you know,
if you have a Ferrari and you're going 140 miles per hour,
I mean, that's what it's built for.
But if it goes 140 miles per hour all day long,
24/7 and you never stop and you never get a chance
for it to be garaged and parked for it to rest,
that can be damaging to the car.
So that's much like our body as well
if it's constantly in fight or flight and stress mode
all the time then it can lead to early breakdown.
- We need to remember that stress is not up here.
It's whole body.
And that stress is a physiological phenomenon.
And I often will use, with patients, the example of,
okay, you know, stress is a physiological phenomenon
that is not necessarily in your control.
It's not about the rational response.
So it's kind of like when you're driving down the road,
okay, I look at my speedometer, my rational brain
is in front of me and it says, "Okay, I'm going 55."
And then all of the sudden you see sirens
in your rear-view mirror.
And what happens?
Patients always know, they say, "Oh, well, yeah,
"I grip the steering wheel, my heart starts to pound.
"Sometimes I sweat, my tummy gets butterflies."
And with that it's like exactly.
That is the physiology of stress
because your rational brain looks at your speedometer
and says, "Oh, I'm going 55."
But you still see those sirens and think
[gasping] I'm in trouble, it's a threat.
And it's a perceived threat, it's not necessarily real,
it's the emotional reality.
And then the police car goes right by you
and you go okay. [sighing]
But you still feel the physiological effects of stress.
The other part of that is that people
are so used to that nowadays that it's normal.
[calm instrumental music]
- Neuroscientist and pharmacologist, Dr. Candace Pert
made a breakthrough discovery in 1972
when she discovered the opiate receptor.
It was thought for any drug to work in your system,
it had to first bind to receptors in your cells.
But what made this discovery so exciting
was that it meant that the receptor must be used
for something created by the body,
not just for external things like drugs.
This led to the discovery of endorphins,
our body's very own morphine.
These discoveries led to what she called
the molecules of emotion.
That when you have an emotion,
it is the result of physical molecules
known as neuropeptides being released into your body
and attaching themselves to receptors
in every cell of your body, which means that emotions
are actually a physiological phenomenon,
not a mental construct as we had thought.
- Candace Pert, the famous researcher actually found
that there were neuro-transmitter receptors in our gut.
In fact, there's more neuro-transmitter receptors
in our gut than there are in our brain.
- She taught us that the mind is not just above the neck,
it's throughout the whole body.
And that's true, there's intelligence
in every cell of the body.
- Emotions, really, as it turns out, are physiological
phenomenon not necessarily psychological phenomenon.
So kind of how we say it is that
we use these words to explain how we feel,
that we're stressed, that is going on in my life,
to try and communicate to our conscious mind
what we're experiencing.
The reality is is that we all have these
what we would call conditioned responses.
- The concept of conditioning came from the observations
of Ivan Pavlov, he was a Russian Physiologist
who conducted the famous dog studies in the late 1800s.
While they weren't the most ethical of experiments,
at least we were able to learn from them.
Every time he would feed the dog,
he would ring a bell. [ringing]
After doing this several times, he simply rang the bell
without feeding the dog.
Even though there wasn't any food,
the dog still salivated as if food was coming.
This unconscious, physiological response
is the result of conditioning.
- Humans, we drool our whole life away, right?
We have these different metaphors that people use
like he really pushed my buttons,
she really knows how to pull my strings,
they did it to me, all of this kind of stuff
to really explain our experience of what's going on.
But it's really just a conditioned response, you know?
And what we like to leave everybody with knowing is that
how it works is what you don't express in life
you'll repress until it expresses as disease or dysfunction.
It's kinda like Woody Allen used to say,
"I never get angry, I just grow a tumor."
Meaning, if I don't get my stuff out,
it stays in until it comes out as something ugly,
either a behavior or a health condition.
- Symptoms can show up in the form of like anxiety
or depression and in modern days I think people
are quick to try to take a pill.
And maybe the drug helps, it's not to say that medication
isn't good once in a while, but often it's just masking
or covering up a symptom.
And maybe it helps a person through a crisis,
so it can be good, but if we can get to
what is the underlying cause
that keeps getting re-triggered, lives can change.
[upbeat music]
- [Narrator] In Philadelphia, exciting new research
is being done at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health
at Jefferson University, one of the leaders in this field.
- One of the critical pieces of what we were doing
with our initial imaging study is to expose people to
the various traumas and stressors that have really created
a problem for the person.
So they actually listen to an audio file
of these very traumatic moments in their life
and in particular we were looking at cancer patients
who have struggled with cancer and usually have
very traumatic part of either the diagnosis
or the treatment that they just can't get rid of.
- All of these people physiologically reacted
to thinking about that stressful event.
Heart rate went up or galvanic skin response changed.
And so what we had were people who were
physiologically reactive and subjectively distressed
by this event and it's been going on for a long time.
- So what exactly was this study?
Dr. Monti and his team created it as
a randomized controlled trial.
All of the participants had a distressing
cancer-related memory that was associated
with symptoms of traumatic stress.
These symptoms had been intruding in their lives
for at least six months, and for many of the participants,
it had been years.
Each one of them made a script
explaining the traumatic events in their own words.
That script was then read back to them
while they were given a functional MRI
to measure the levels of distress they were experiencing.
Since this was a randomized controlled trial,
the participants had been split up into two groups,
one group received Neuro Emotional Technique, or NET,
and the others were assigned
to the Waitlist Control Condition.
The results of those who received NET
were dramatic, to say the least.
But before we can go any further, we have to head over
to Encinitas, California to meet Dr. Scott Walker.
[upbeat music]
- Some of my patients weren't getting well.
Some of 'em get well over time,
some of 'em wouldn't get well.
The people that didn't get results
had a look of tension in their eyes.
This is just something, I came from a town
of 500 people and I'm so happy I came from a a small town
because I can see people in different ways.
And the people that seemed to be burdened, I think,
were emotionally burdened.
And they were the ones that had less results.
And so I made up in my mind that
maybe they were having emotional trouble,
that's not a new thought,
people have been thinking that people,
emotional stress has effected the body for some time.
But I didn't know how to solve it.
- But as it turned out, Dr. Walker went to a seminar
where he met a chiropractor by the name of
Dr. Jennifer Lamonica.
He learned that she would give certain people an adjustment
and soon after, when they would think about work,
that their spine would be out of place
before they even left the office.
Hearing this reaffirmed his suspicion
that there had to be something else going on.
- The first patient on the next day that I was home,
she had gone to work and gotten in an automobile accident.
Now I'm still, my mind is not in my compassionate heart,
my mind is in my mind and I'm thinking,
maybe she had fear in this accident.
This is a chance I can work this hypothesis.
And I said, "Oh, you were in an accident."
I said, "Did you fear when you were in the accident?"
And she said, "Yes."
I said, "Oh!"
[chuckling]
I'm sure I didn't do that but that's the way I was thinking.
- One of Dr. Scott's mentors, Dr. George Goodheart,
correlated the primary muscles of the body with the
major meridians used in traditional Chinese medicine.
- So you have these meridians, they're kinda like channels
or what I like to describe them as like freeways systems.
So they run from different areas of the body,
from your head to your toe,
to your toes back to your trunk,
to your trunk to the face.
So they all travel across the body
and they go even through the deeper layers of the organs.
You know, the philosophy is that if there is a traffic jam
or a blockage in any of those meridians,
there's a disruption of the vital force of the body
which is the chi, or the blood.
- Even though traditional Chinese medicine
has been using meridians for thousands of years,
a recent discovery by Auburn University Professor
Vitaly Vodyanoy is bringing more scientific attention
to this system.
- I didn't know all the meridians and all the emotions,
but I knew fear and I knew kidneys.
I said, "What I want you to do is I want you to think about
"the fear that you had when you were in that accident."
And she said, "Oh, okay."
And so she did and I adjusted the sequences for
the kidney, which is T1, T5 and T8.
And then I said to her, I said, "How does that feel?"
I wanted to see if I could get rid of fear.
And she thought I meant how does her neck feel?
Well, of course, you know.
And she says, "Oh, how do I feel?"
She goes...
"Yeah, that feels better."
And then I was ashamed because
I wasn't thinking about her poor neck,
I was thinking about this idea that I had
and maybe I could get rid of the fear.
And so I said, "Oh, oh, okay."
[clears throat]
"And how does the fear feel now?"
She says, "Yeah, I don't feel any fear about it at all now."
I said, "Yes." [laughing]
Yes.
- Any symptom that we have,
really, could have a stress component.
And I think that's how we came to develop NET,
Dr. Scott figured out that, as a chiropractor,
he would help certain problems
and help spinal conditions or painful situations
but there were those certain cases that didn't
resolve all the way, so it could be a knee or a shoulder,
a TMJ or a backache or a stomachache or anything
and, what, 80% would get fixed
but what about those 20 that didn't?
- It's really a brilliant intervention.
I don't know how Dr. Walker put it together,
given that there was nothing like it at the time
and he just somehow put together these different concepts.
It makes sense in hindsight how he put them together
but it really required a special brain to do that.
- I knew I was onto something, I knew, this is good.
There is the placebo effect, you've gotta watch that.
I do not want to encourage the placebo effect,
I want to discourage the placebo effect.
So I made a pact with myself.
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
And I had this patient come in one day, she said,
"You did that emotional thing about this miscarried baby
"that I had, I feel so relieved,
"it was such a cloud over my head that I lost this baby."
And I said,
"Well," I was trying to write my notes
and she reached over and I don't know what kind of shirt
I had on but she grabbed me.
And she put her face in mine, "I said you helped me!"
[laughing] And there I was,
I couldn't write, I was nose-to-nose with her.
And she said very forcefully, she said,
"I said you helped me!"
And I thought, my God, what have I become?
[laughing sadly]
That I can't celebrate my patient's win?
That I can't celebrate her joy with her?
What's happened to me?
I said, I'm gonna leave the research
for the researchers, that's it.
[calm instrumental music]
- Later, with the help of fellow practitioners,
Dr. Scott created The ONE Research Foundation,
they have privately funded over 30 research studies to date
which brings us back to the present.
Meet one of the participants in this study,
Dr. Jim Buckley.
- And in 2014, I got a diagnosis
of non-Hodgkin's B-cell lymphoma.
And it really took me by surprise, I was shocked
that I had come down with something like this.
I mean, I'm a healthcare practitioner,
I'm not supposed to get sick.
But I did and...
I think I was spending so much time taking care
of everybody else that I kinda
let myself fall by the wayside.
Conventional cancer therapy was not anything
that I ever thought I would use just because I
had strong feelings that that was not the way to go
in terms of getting healthy again.
But as it turned out, the tumor that I had in my abdomen
was about as big as a football
and it was pushing on my kidney and my intestines
and it was really starting to cause me
an awful lot of trouble so I ended up
doing what I said I would never do
and getting chemotherapy.
And
during the process of that I found out that
The ONE Foundation was doing a research project on
the emotional effect of hearing that you have cancer
and I was in that boat now.
First they kinda questioned me about
what was the biggest impact of hearing that you had cancer?
How did that impact your life
and what was the hardest thing about it?
And I had to go down and list
what was the most difficult for me.
What came up was the hardest to leave my wife and daughters,
feeling like I hadn't finished the work
that I was here to do and felt as though
I was leaving them in the lurch
and felt a lot of responsibility
in terms of how I kinda had fallen down on my self care
and was, as a result, you know,
potentially could lose my life and closeness with them.
[somber music]
- One of the things that I heard over and over again
from participants in the study
was that these distressing memories and experiences
would intrude or impact on positive experiences
in the present day when they least expected it.
So they might be chopping lettuce in their kitchen
and be suddenly reminded or flooded with feelings of
how stressful it was to be sick
or what it was like to be retching over the garbage can
in their kitchen all those years ago.
So just being in the kitchen again
reminded them of that earlier stress.
- The passage of time wasn't making it go away.
By the way, that's kind of an old conception that
we found is incorrect, you know,
time really doesn't heal all wounds
because emotional wounds are in the part of the brain
where there is no sense of time.
- Sometimes things happen early in life
where we are in a dangerous situation
or something is perceived to be awful happening.
And the body is unable to extinguish that response
on an unconscious level.
Years later, we find out that that buried stress,
those buried feelings that have never gone away
are still being triggered in any situation
that looks the same, sounds the same,
smells the same, feels the same can trigger that
on an unconscious level and bring the feelings back
even though it's a different situation.
- So whatever happened to you at seven,
your subconscious still thinks it's happening right now.
And even as a practitioner, once I learned that,
it took me a long time to wrap my mind around that
but it's the truth.
- It's not gee, now it feels like I was then, it is then.
There is no linear time in that place
so it is exactly that moment that they're feeling
and it's replicated just as if it's happening right now.
- What we were able to observe in the brain
is where the distress was being registered in the brain
when they listened to a script of the traumatic event.
And that script has been going on for a long time.
Again, I emphasize that because
it isn't a matter of time healing this particular wound,
the time has been going by and going by and going by
and the period of time of the study was quite short.
- All of the participants in the study
who received NET were given treatment over several weeks
and some of them had their sessions all in one day.
The findings were then published
in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship.
- The main finding that we really had
was that these areas of the limbic system,
particularly the, what's called the parahippocampus,
which is very involved in our sort of traumatic memories
and emotional, our negative emotional responses,
this was an area that was far more active initially
and then after undergoing the NET program,
suddenly didn't really react very much.
- It just wasn't there anymore for most of those patients.
In fact, everybody had some response
where there was far less to no activation
of those areas in the limbic brain,
particularly the parahippocampal area
which is where distressing memories sit.
The activation was virtually gone.
- So there was a 50% increase in the neuron density
between the amygdala and the frontal lobe.
Now the frontal lobe is the front part of the brain
and that's responsible for long-term planning,
thinking, complex reasoning.
That's the part of the brain that says,
"Everything's gonna be okay, I shouldn't be stressed
"about this, this is nothing to worry about."
And my clients in and the participants in the study
will say all the time, "I say all the right things to myself
"but it just doesn't matter."
And that's exactly true because the message
isn't getting through to the emotional brain.
- And we also know from this study
that every time a really distressing event
gets reactivated or there's a reminder of it,
that your nervous system reacts.
So when we looked at the biofeedback,
we know that the autonomic nervous system gets involved.
And when the autonomic nervous systems gets hyper activated,
that has a negative effect on health outcomes,
quality of life across the board,
creates too much inflammation in the system and so on.
- We talk about sort of the brain normalizing itself
and in many ways that is reflected
in what these scans looked at,
that instead of having this overreaction
in these limbic areas of the brain,
the brain basically said, "Okay, you know,
"it's just one of my memories now and it's not
"a traumatic memory, I don't have these
"horrible feelings that come up."
And it's reflected in what the brain looked like.
- I was even surprised that base-line mood,
base-line anxiety, all of those things changed.
Like when you think about it, the person's overall
quality of life was changed.
From three to five sessions of an intervention.
That's pretty dramatic.
- I can tell you that I felt
physically different after
receiving the treatment.
I had had a bunch of different treatments
during my attempts to treat the disease
but I really felt as though after that treatment,
I really took a turn towards healing
and it was physically evident.
That's just an example of how...
All the work that I'd been doing for all those years...
To help other people could actually
help me too.
It just, it reached me in another way that
it had never reached me before.
Like how impactful and how important this work is.
I know in my heart that this treatment really helped to
shift how I healed.
It just felt like I can heal this now
where before I didn't,
I may have thought that,
but I didn't feel that in my body.
You can have all the positive affirmations you want
and intend for different things to happen
and that's all cognitive, that's all your brain talking.
But this was distinctly different in that
it was in my gut that I felt different,
it wasn't just a thought,
it was I feel like I can heal this.
[calm instrumental music]
- There is an emotional component that happens
from being sick for long periods of time
or struggling with physical illness.
Or watching someone you love face a physical illness.
We're not floating heads, there is a combination
that happens where the mind and the body work together
and so when you have a physical illness,
there is emotional component.
And when you're facing emotional stress like depression
or anxiety, there's a physical component to it
and that both of those need to be treated.
- Sometimes people don't know and they need that tool of NET
that utilizes not just what's in the conscious brain
but what physiology is doing that actually helps us
to get at what's a little bit less than conscious.
- But because NET uses several unique components,
first being the muscle testing which allows the body
to become its own biofeedback instrument.
The body then guides the treatment
by using the muscle testing, it precisely and correctly
identifies what these periods of distress are.
- And what we're really doing with the muscle test
is we're posing a concept and then seeing if their body,
the patient's body, has a physiological response.
We're not measuring true and false,
we're only measuring the person's personal
reaction to it.
So it's kind of like, I over-simplified,
would be the amoeba moving toward a bit of food
or away from a bit of poison that's in the Petri dish.
And that's what we're measuring with the muscle test.
- The experience of NET is far different
than what somebody observing it can know.
[calm instrumental music]
- We're run so much by our subconscious,
at least 80%, probably 99.9%,
we're run by our subconscious minds.
And therefore we're kind of victim
to those subconscious minds.
- Because our subconscious mind is running
so much of the show, it can be difficult
to break out of our conditioning.
Dr. Scott explains that a Neuro Emotional Complex,
or NEC, is when an emotion gets stuck in the body.
- In the NEC, we're shedding the old perceptions,
we're shedding the feelings that went with them.
And usually the NEC, of course, has something
that is perceived by us to be non-survival oriented,
it's counter survival, that's the way we perceive it.
And so we're shedding that.
- So most of the time what happens is when people
come into my office, they've had this issue for so long
that they start to mistake the problem
that they're having as
it actually being them.
So instead of them having anxiety,
they feel anxious and then they start to attribute that
to them just being an anxious person,
it becomes part of their identity.
It's that feeling of hopelessness
that's so corrosive, I think.
And the idea
for people,
the idea that there's some hope out there
that they could actually get to the heart
of why this is actually happening
over and over again in their life
and even return to the place where it becomes something,
a condition that they have rather than who they are,
that's a great start, okay?
And then move on from there.
- People often ask me, "Well, that event doesn't seem
"like it was so traumatic or anything like that,
"so why did that come up?"
But I think that we are just so bombarded with
processed foods and sugar and,
you know, lack of sleep and the news
and everything that we're exposed to
that our brain gets overloaded,
our nervous system gets overloaded
with the emotions it's trying to process
so something that seems somewhat insignificant
may have hit us on a day that our system was weak
and it just didn't know what to do with it.
- When one person, years and years later,
is still suffering from the death of a parent.
And then another person, years and years later,
is suffering because they didn't get ice cream
at a birthday party, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
The person who lost a parent might've
actually adapted better than the kid
who didn't get ice cream at a birthday party.
- Emotions have no logic, they're just emotions.
If they were logical, we'd all figure our stuff out
and no one would ever have a health issue
or need to see a doctor or therapist for any reason
'cause we would just think about it, go huh,
and then we'd be fine.
Doesn't really work like that.
- The memory stores things, often inaccurately
as to what really happened, 'cause it's not about that.
And what it can do is it can put associated memories
together so that when you recount something
or retell a story, you had pieces that really
didn't even happen just by the way our memory stores stuff.
And it doesn't matter that it's logically correct
or that they're overly emotional or underly emotional.
If the body's having a physiological reaction,
we can help connect the different piece parts
and let the body come to closure with that thing.
- When we do muscle testing we get the body's feedback
and we use that to help the body heal.
So logic and reason oftentimes are not involved
when we're doing NET, we're just finding out
where the body is stuck.
And sometimes there's no way that we would logically
ever figure it out unless we use muscle testing.
[calm instrumental music]
- Upon further analysis of the data,
the team at Jefferson noticed some very interesting changes
regarding the cerebellum.
This led to the publishing of their second paper in 2017.
- It's kind of traditionally been taught
that the cerebellum is primarily involved
in the coordination of our motor activity so when it comes
to emotions, it's not that relevant,
it's not really helping us with anything.
It's really just helping us to move our hands
and to move our legs and to do that in a coordinated fashion
but a growing number of research studies,
as we came to find as we started to look at it,
we started to see well, gee,
there's some interesting studies that show
that when the cerebellum is activated that has something
to do with the laying down of traumatic memories.
- According to a scientific paper published in 2015
titled "The Emotional Cerebellum", imaging experts revealed,
"The cerebellum is activated during mental recall
"of emotional personal episodes
"and during the learning of a conditioned
"or unconditioned association involving emotions."
- Even though the cerebellum is relatively small,
it's just kind of these little balls
in the back of the brain, it has five times
the number of neurons as the rest of the brain combined.
And then we started to realize, well,
you know, this is all starting to make some sense.
If this part of the brain normally is involved
in the coordination of motor function, maybe it's also
involved in the coordination of emotional function.
And if that's the case, then perhaps what we're seeing
is that as a result of going through the
Neuro Emotional Technique and the various elements
that are involved in it, that we are having
a direct impact on how that cerebellum
is able to regulate the emotional, or help in the regulation
of these emotional centers of the brain.
- This is one of the reasons to get up and go to work
as a medical researcher because
you don't get to see these kinds of results every day.
- But it also opens up the door even more
in terms of the field of cognitive neuroscience
and emotions and psychiatry and psychology
because it helps us to understand that the cerebellum
may be a very critical area of our brain
that is very much related to our emotional selves
and not just how our body moves
but how our body is moved emotionally.
- Even the people on my team who knew nothing about NET,
they're just analyzing, you know,
doing the quantitative analysis of the MRIs pre and post
are like, "What is this?
"What was this intervention, what's going on here?"
Everybody was just really
thrilled and so happy for the patients.
And of course, that's what it's really about.
- Even though the study was focused on people
with traumatic stress from cancer, the traumatic stress
of going to war is an equally important issue.
On his third deployment to Afghanistan,
United States Marine Corps Corporal
Rory Hamill sustained serious injuries.
- It was February 13th, 2011, it's almost seven years now.
Took the minesweeper off my point man's back
after he received some information
that there was an improvised explosive device
on a compound by our location.
And
we got about three quarters of the compound swept
and as I was nearing the end of my search,
I stepped on a little metallic pressure plate
which detonated homemade explosives five feet behind me
to the right and the explosion and the blast force
came from my right side,
sheared my right leg off instantly,
clipped the back of my left leg.
Flew 10 feet in the air,
hit the ground on the back of my head.
My Marines saved my life, they instantly rushed right in.
There could have been a secondary IED in there
but they didn't care.
They dragged me out of the blast zone,
worked on me, stopped the bleeding, stabilized me.
Unfortunately, on the helicopter to the shock trauma unit,
I flat lined for two minutes
and I was resuscitated, worked on
and began the long journey home.
Took about a week for me to get home
'cause they need to keep you stable when they put you
on a plane and I wasn't quite stable enough
but eventually I made it back to Washington, D.C.
where I began my rehab.
[somber music]
It's very common with amputees, we get phantom limb pain.
That's where your body is firing of synapses and trying
to remap, you know, where the nerves are and it realized
that there was a huge chunk of nerves missing.
But that can translate into phantom pain, phantom sensation.
And one of the things that we worked on at the office was
we tried using a mirror, it helped out a lot.
In a sense, it kind of tricked my brain.
I'm looking at this, I have my left leg
and I'm looking at it and in my brain it made sense
and it helped, you know,
with a combination of the actual treatment
it helped get a lot of that stress away from my body.
And the phantom pains and sensations became,
you know, very less frequent.
Obviously I still have challenges every single day.
It's very, very hard and over the past almost seven years
I have a gotten a lot mentally and physically stronger
but NET has been an integral part of that.
What I feel, what I've seen with NET is it's,
it really is a mind/body type of therapy.
And I can personally attest to normally, you know,
if you have a physical thing, go to a physical doctor.
You have a mental thing, you go to a mental doctor.
With NET, it hits both of those at the same time.
And I really, really feel that's why there was such a huge,
you know, wave of emotion released initially
and all the subsequent appointments afterwards.
The doctor didn't tell me that I was going to be cured
of my ailments or anything like that, it wasn't,
but he did tell me that it would help stabilize my body
and help me get back to a sense of normalcy
in my everyday life, which it did, hands down, immediately.
And it only got better with the next few sessions
and, you know, subsequently after.
It helped me a lot.
It helped me out of a dark place.
You know, that with the help of family and friends as well,
it's just, it was an amazing supplement to,
to my regimen, to everything that I needed.
[somber music]
- When the doctor's ego is there,
it reduces the capacity for healing in the patient.
Too often we get an idea, a preconceived idea about
what's going on with the patient.
And how could we possibly do that?
Because we've only lived our own life.
We haven't lived that person's life.
We don't know what's going on with them at all.
And so, well known by the psychologist is
people project,
people project their loves and their hatreds.
- As a practitioner, you can't allow your stuff to interfere
and as humans, it's very easy for that to happen.
We even have seminars that they're designed
to address the practitioner's needs
so that we don't have those needs getting in the way
of the therapeutic relationship.
[upbeat music]
- [Narrator] There are numerous seminars every year
allowing practitioners to learn and improve their technique.
As of 2018, there are more than 10,000 practitioners
in over 30 countries.
[upbeat music]
[applauding]
- Whether they're small distressing events
that just aren't resolving themselves well
or the big, big ones, they all affect us.
And they affect our quality of life,
they affect how we're functioning, how we're feeling
and whether or not we're thriving in the world
the way we want to be.
- And where, 30 years ago, it was different thinking,
I think the whole face of healthcare is changing
and people are more open now
that what you think could affect how you heal.
What you eat, how you exercise,
meditation,
yoga, all that kind of stuff.
And NET's just a tool but I think it's a perfect time for it
because I think the consciousness of people in general
is real open that maybe I have something
to do with my health condition.
And if we can help unlock what was stuck in there
then all those other things they're doing as well
work better too.
- It pays it forward in so many different ways
because if one person can be less stressed
when they go home to their family,
when they, you know, go into work, when they are
on the phone as a customer service representative,
then all of the sudden we have a better world
cascading, cascading, cascading.
- This is a really good time in history to be there.
It was so wonderful in the very beginning
because we didn't know where we were going
or what we were doing or if it was gonna work
or if it wasn't gonna work but right now we feel
very confident that every single research study
that we done, every single condition
that we've thrown this as has been improved.
We haven't found anything that it hasn't improved.
We don't know where the limits are.
- It would be nice if it was a mechanistic world
and we just tightened a bolt here and there
and then it worked but that's not, we're way more than
a piece of machinery and I don't think we've begun
to touch on the energy of what runs the body
or even, dare I say, the spiritual piece.
- I never wanted it to go into a spiritual direction
but really, I don't know how you can stop it
when you start analyzing what's going on in this world.
- I think the other interesting piece about this is
healing, healing is so interesting to me in that
we put on these layers and layers and layers of protection
of things that happened to us.
And then a person will come in with a problem
and we'll start peeling off the layers
but what's totally interesting to me is the issue
won't come up until the body's ready to deal with it.
And I know, personally, I lost my mother
when I was six years old.
And, I'm sure, you know, I've had issues
and over the years we've done a bunch of NET
and would often go back to me being a six year old,
of course, which is when my mother died
and we would check the concept of my mother dying,
committing suicide,
and it wasn't there, for almost five years,
it would be something else.
It'd be that I had to go stay with my aunt
or that it was my father was so upset
or this or that.
And then, interestingly, five years into it,
on a Mother's Day, believe it or not,
I had an issue come up, goes back to age six
and this time I was ready to deal with the death
and suicide of my mother.
So I think that is so wonderful
and it gives a level
of safety to realize an issue's not gonna come up
until you're ready to deal with it.
- Probably the most interesting thing that happens,
that has happened for me as a practitioner is that,
person comes in, maybe for migraines
and you start doing NET on them for the migraines
and then they start to tell you the other things
that are getting better in their life,
their relationships are better,
they're happier, they're sleeping better.
And you didn't even take care of those things.
Which, again, just illustrates the amazing healing power
of the body if you give it a chance.
If you take some of these stress factors,
you reduce that load that the body is carrying,
the sky is the limit as to what it can heal.
- The one thing that we really are hoping people become
is to become more comfortable in their own skin
because if we're comfortable in our own skin,
things are a little bit less stressful in life.
We're able to handle things better,
we love ourself more.
And with that, there's nothing that money or anything else
can buy except that peace of mind with yourself.
- Imagine how the world could be
if we could actually become more aware of our stress
and its impact on not only our own body and ourselves
but those around us.
And be able to hold a space of acceptance
and allow each of us to reach our full potential
and be true, authentic selves.
- I wish that more people were aware of this work.
Because the miracles that we as practitioners get to see
every day... [sighing]
Are amazing and people don't even realize,
there's so many people out there in this world
that don't even realize it's a possibility.
- As a result, as a side effect, a wonderful side effect
from doing NET, I started to practice yoga
and meditation understanding and teaching
this idea that your mind
is very powerful and it can help you or harm you
and it's always your choice.
- I mean, I would probably be, I would probably be
an emotional wreck. [laughing]
If I never had NET, I would probably be a mess, honestly.
And I used to be, I used to be like,
my emotions would just go up and down
and a lot of that stuff also correlates with your diet.
So just learning about that stuff was a game changer for me.
But
it's helped so much in every way.
- Comments through your life are stored up in your body
and it's bringing that emotion out
and to attack that emotion, almost, and release it
and diffuse it from your body is,
it's the biggest freedom.
[calm instrumental music]
- We want people to prosper, we want them to be better,
we want them to be healed and we can change the paradigm.
We can do it.
I thought,
just 20 years ago, I thought that
those of us that believed in the power
that made the body, that's in the body can heal the body,
and that the body was natural healing
and that's what works and nobody was listening to us,
again, you know, what's new?
And I just thought, yeah, I'll just be one of the dinosaurs,
I'm gonna die off, but what I'm gonna do while I'm alive,
I'm gonna keep this principle
that natural healthcare works.
[calm instrumental music]
- [Narrator] So much of our cultural narrative
revolves around the stresses of life
and it can make us feel powerless.
Struggles with anxiety, depression and chronic
health problems are becoming more and more common.
Every one of us has been through
traumatic events in our life
and it's something that should bring us together more
instead of disconnecting us.
There are little to no treatment options
for people suffering from traumatic stress.
If you're not diagnosed with PTSD
or any other major traumatic condition,
it can seem confusing on how to get help.
These findings are about more than NET,
it's about helping our society to become more aware
of our emotions and how much they actually affect our life
and the people around us.
The mind and the body are intimately connected
and the more we can embrace that,
the more we can take control of our health
and ultimately take control of our lives.
[energetic music]
- Part of why brain imaging is so valuable
is that it shows the physiological basis of things
and we always sort of joke about how,
you know, you could parade 100 people
in front of a group of scientists
and they all say, "This made me feel a lot better."
But if you throw up one brain scan picture and you say,
well, this is what their brain looked like initially
and this is what their brain looked like afterwards,
they say, "Oh, okay, something happened.
"I get it, I understand it."
Because the subjective experiences that people describe,
you never really know and, of course,
in a very cynical world, every advertisement,
every group is trying to make their product,
their approach, their ideas sound great
so of course there's a million testimonials
and every testimonial always says this was great,
it changed my life, I feel fabulous.
So that's one thing but to have actual data
and to be able to do in a controlled trial,
a randomized controlled trial, and to be able
to sort of see what's happening
and then more specifically to show the physiological effect,
that shows that there's something else that's going on.
I mean, a person could say to me,
"I'm not having a response to it."
But you don't know exactly what they're feeling
on the inside and I'm not in the scanner with them
so they could still be in tears and just fighting it
back better and saying, "No, I feel fine."
But they wouldn't be able to change the brain that way.
- Even though it's obvious that,
you know, mind and body are one.
We used to talk about a mind/body connection
like, I don't know, maybe there was a rope
or a chain connecting them or something.
And, you know, there was even a debate about
whether or not there was a connection prior to that.
We now know that they're the flip side of the same coin,
that there is a physiology
and a biology to things that we experience mentally
and emotionally and this study elucidates that,
you know, beautifully between both papers
and the effects that a distressing event has
on the brain and the rest of physiology
including the autonomic nervous system
as well as subjective ways that people feel.
And that when that distressing event
gets neutralized to a large extent,
that all of those things change.
That the brain changes, that the rest of physiology changes,
that subjective feelings of stress and distress all change,
quality of life change.
So it's, mind and body in that regard are one.
- I think that this data is very important
in providing more knowledge about the mechanism
of action of the Neuro Emotional Technique.
It helps us to understand better what it's doing,
how it has an impact on different parts of the brain
and how it helps the person
to regulate their emotional responses.
Now, you know, there could be some other very interesting
aspects because the cerebellum is involved
in our body's movement and our motor function.
It appears that it also helps to regulate
our autonomic nervous system which was another part
of this study that showed that not only do we change
the way a person's brain is reacting to the emotional trauma
but we change the way the body reacts as well.
And the cerebellum, apparently, is able to regulate
the autonomic nervous system in terms of
regulating heart rate and blood pressure which were also
measures that we were looking at in this study.
And, again, what we were showing was
was that after the Neuro Emotional Technique,
people's heart rate responses to the traumatic stimuli
were much more normalized, they didn't have that kind of
over reactivity that we had seen
before going through the Neuro Emotional Technique.
So I think that this really opens up an ability
to understand more and more what the mechanism of action is
of the Neuro Emotional Technique.
It tells us a lot about what we may be able to learn
in terms of just traumatic memories and
strong negative emotions, how they play out in the brain,
what areas of the brain seem to be involved in them
and provides us a target for future studies.
- Initially I do not like the term alternative healthcare.
Bugs me, because this is not alternative healthcare,
in fact, this is almost more traditional
than any other type of healthcare that we have.
Because really, it's saying, okay,
you've got what it takes to heal,
let's unleash, let's unlock, let's help your body to heal.
- If we start looking at the body as mind as well,
it's not just the mind that's in your head,
it's also the mind that's down here in your gut
that is just as much at play
in terms of creating your health as the brain in your head.
- We look at the body as perfect the way it is
and if there is a symptom that's expressing,
it's because the body needs something,
it needs attention in that area.
- And emotions definitely are not logical,
they're not rational, emotions are non rational,
they're not irrational but they're non rational,
they just are what they are.
Most of the universe is non rational,
most of the universe is not working on a rational plane.
Most of the universe is just what it is.
Human beings, apparently, have been given reason
and we can work with our reason
to make life better for ourselves.
But we can't rely 100% on reason,
we have to understand that we're more than reason.
The body heals itself.
And NET kinda facilitates that and
kind of makes it
easier to do.
And it's just a process.
Through virtue of this process,
it allows that which heals to come forth
and get the healing done.
You know, they say, "Oh, you helped me so much."
And yeah, I tried to help you all right but
your body healed itself.
I just want to remind you of that.
So that we can get that consciousness going out there
and start making that part of the conversation.