- So training experience is essential.
You're developing a therapeutic alliance.
We're trying not to do this with people who are psychotic,
schizophrenic, actively involved in drug use or withdrawal,
you know, very fragile, probably not a good idea.
You know, you wanna have a sense of how far to push people.
You don't wanna push people way beyond where they're going,
like with PRT,
if someone is learning how to walk without fear,
you don't wanna a marathon the first day.
It's too much for their brain.
Someone approaching emotion
is learning to approach emotions bit by bit,
and bits would be easier than trying to have them go
to this major thing.
And oftentimes we're choosing a situation which is smaller,
like we did today with you, a smaller situation,
rather than the first time
you're dealing with a major traumatic event in their life.
Not ready for that, most likely.
But there's a lot of times people feel uncomfortable.
"This seems risky."
It may be, "What if it makes things worse?
I'll feel overwhelmed.
I won't be able to think straight.
What if somebody gets mad at me?
I'm not sure I'm ready for what happens.
It's not socially appropriate.
I'm not allowed to do that."
These are things that therapists have said, not patients.
These are what therapists are fearful of.
And if we're afraid of dealing with emotions,
of course our patients,
our clients are gonna be afraid of emotions.
And so we want to demonstrate,
and that's why I use my own stories,
and you can as well demonstrate
that it's not dangerous to go to feelings.
We can handle it, we can tolerate it.
So PRT is making the pain and other symptoms not dangerous,
EAET is making emotions not dangerous.
So we're gonna do breakouts,
and there's gonna be these very simple cases
that will ask you to practise and role play this model.
The model is basically very simple.
You can't really go wrong
as long as you're helping people to access emotions.
If they go to hurt, then you can have compassion.
If they go to anger, then they can express the anger.
If they go to guilt, you can assess,
do they really deserve to be guilty?
"Is there something you really did wrong,
or is it more the feeling of guilt?"
And then you can go back to more compassion,
and then you can go to letting go,
and then maybe you can go to some amount of repair,
depending on the situation.
For me, the repair with the guy I was smashing his head
was realising he's an idiot
and he just kind of deserves my pity.
That was the repair.
It wasn't I'd become friends with him
and wanna hang out with him.
He's not worth it, he's an idiot,
but at least I was allowing myself to let go of anger
by actually having a pity for him,
allowing it to let go.
Other questions?
Yeah.
- Yeah, I just remembered from the other day
that, very specifically,
don't relive the awful emotions from the past.
So in what way is this different or...
- Yeah, yeah, I'm saying not to relive the situation,
but to change it,
and that's what we'll talk about this afternoon.
The situations so far that we're having to address
are situations in the present.
So you're going to the situation to feel the feelings
and to express the feeling.
But he, I didn't ask him to relive
and just, "Remember your brother beating you up
and hitting you."
I asked him to, "Imagine your brother being mean to you,
and your reaction now is yelling, screaming,
pushing, shoving, hitting."
It's changing this situation.
That's rescripting, that's memory reconsolidation.
I forgot to mention that.
I guess I skipped over that.
Here, you can't change the past, obviously,
but how do you know what your past is?
It's because of your memories of the past.
Are memories constantly changing?
Yes, memory never stays the same.
When we remember things, we're remembering little packets
of information in our brain,
and every time we remember it, we fill in the blanks.
In other words, the memory is changing
'cause we're filling in the blanks in some different way.
If you ever ask your siblings
what happened in your childhood,
they'll tell you one thing and you'll say something else.
You have different memories of what happened,
and who's right?
Probably neither of you're right
'cause the memories are changing.
And PTSD is remembering,
reliving over and over and over again the same memories,
but over time,
the memories can get worse and worse and worse.
Every time you relive them,
you're getting more and more tense, more and more upset,
more and more traumatised, and you get worse over time.
So if their memories are changing,
what we wanna do is find a way to go back in time
to change the memory,
to fix the situation in our imagination
because when we remember it
in an emotional way that's different,
we're implanting new memories,
we're implanting healthier memories, more powerful memories,
more realigning memories, which, in a sense,
is fixing the problem even though we know we can't change
what actually happened.
But the emotional memory then becomes one of realignment,
if that makes sense.
It's weird that you can do that, but it works.
So you're not reliving it,
you're going back in time to change it
rather than relive it the way it was,
and we'll see that this afternoon
when I show a video of somebody going back in time
to change a relationship,
and there's one tomorrow I can show you as well,
if you want.
So we're gonna have one hour.
It means you have pairs of two, you have the worksheets.
I think you have a couple different scenarios to use
to role play this.
So you have 60 minutes, so 30 minutes for one,
and then switch 30 minutes.
But if you want, if you feel comfortable
and if you feel comfortable with your partner,
you can use your own story, it's fine.
That works for me if it works for you,
but you don't have to.
It's totally up to you.
And so you're just kind of following the person,
but you're following where they're going,
and then you're guiding them to full expression of feelings,
and you know which feelings that you're looking for.
Hurt and sadness, anger or resentment,
any guilt, and compassion?
The beauty of this work is that
when you're play acting
about some fictional person or some theoretical person,
frequently when you touch something, you touch a feeling,
and when you touch a feeling,
it turns out the feeling that you're touching
is usually your own,
and that's great, that's perfect.
And like I said before, you may be talking about one thing,
but that feeling you're touching goes back
to some other things in your life,
and you can begin to recognise it, and see that,
and connect the dots, and understand yourself more,
and understand that emotions are healthy and normal,
and you can handle them and you can contain them,
but you can also feel free to express them
in safe and healthy ways.
Okay, go ahead.