349 - Trauma, Shame, and Post-Pandemic Recovery with Brian D. Mahan
Collective trauma
Brian D. Mahan is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner who has also extensively studied healing from developmental trauma and shame. Throughout this episode, Brian talks about the shame and trauma we are collectively experiencing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, symptoms of trauma that may be showing up that are specific to the pandemic, and some actionable tools to help us get through this difficult time.
We also crowdsourced some questions and prompts for Brian to answer from our Patreon group, including:
Generalized social anxiety exacerbated by not seeing people for a year and a half, as well as reluctance to get out and go on dates again.
Dealing with changes in relationships that were triggered by the pandemic.
How to deal with feelings that come up when a partner has the opposite inclination and is really enjoying getting out and dating again.
Overall loneliness caused by the pandemic and ramifications from possible choices made due to isolation (i.e. moving in together quickly, taking on new partners who require lots of emotional bandwidth, not wanting to leave a relationship out of fear of being alone, etc.).
Brian also goes through some actionable takeaways at the end of the episode, including a meditation exercise he recorded to help increase mindfulness and self-care.
Find more about Brian at his website, YouTube channel, or on Instagram and Facebook at @BrianDMahanSEP.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Emily: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're joined by therapist Brian D. Mahan. In 2003, Brian suffered seven to ten panic attacks a day following a catastrophic car wreck. After just three sessions with a somatic experiencing practitioner, he was symptom-free, and within weeks, he began training to become a practitioner himself. He's also studied extensively about healing developmental trauma and shame. He's a speaker, educator, and author with an international private practice. Today, we're going to discuss healing from trauma brought on by the pandemic, as well as what people can do in their relationships to better support each other through this challenging time.
Dedeker: Thank you so much for joining us, Brian. It's so good to have you on the show. I do feel like by having you on the show, it feels like I'm sharing this super-secret, wonderful treasure with all of our listeners. Just to help bring people in. Yes, so Brian was my first Somatic Experiencing therapist. I left a physically abusive relationship in 2017, spent a lot of time and talk therapy and the talk therapy was okay. It was very, very cognitive and it helped me understand a lot logically about what was going on with my PTSD. But when I left talk therapy, I still felt like everything from the neck down didn't get the message. I was still having really, really bad physical symptoms of PTSD.
The reason why I'm sharing this story is normally on the show when we encourage people to find a therapist or a practitioner, we really encourage people, "Yes, make sure you do your due diligence, find someone who's queer-friendly, who's polyamory friendly." I was so desperate, I did none of that. I literally after reading Peter Levine's book, In An Unspoken Voice. I was just like, I need to find someone who does this kind of work. I don't care who it is. It doesn't matter as long as they're close to me and they're available. I got very, very lucky that I ended up with Brian, who was not only wonderful practitioner, but also very queer-friendly, and polyamory friendly, as well. Kids, don't do what I do unless you're very, very lucky, like I was.
Brian: Don't try this at home.
Dedeker: Yes. I just have to say, Brian has taught me so much personally, about the way that trauma works, and about shame and the way those things interact. I also went on to join the Somatic Experiencing Training Program as well. Which has happened for a lot of Brian's clients. You said you're what? Up to like 16 clients now who've gone on to become peers?
Brian: 26.
Emily: Oh my God.
Brian: 26 clients, a couple of friends, but 26 clients and friends have become Somatic Experiencing practitioners over the last 17 years or so that I've been doing this. I think it's a great testament for the work itself.
Dedeker: Sometimes I feel nervous sharing that because I'm like," Oh, God, are people going to think it's like an MLM?"
Dedeker: "Is Brian earning all the from signing up 26 different people?"
Brian: All right. No, not at all. I mean, I don't receive anything from that except for just the gratitude, and the inspiration, and seeing the change in people's lives. I mean, that's how I got into the work. I got in it and it was so transformative for me, I was like, "I got to learn this." Then as I was learning it, I was like, "I got to share this," so to have that-- to witness that same thing in so many people over the years is just really tremendous. I think it speaks highly, and specifically about somatic experiencing and the efficacy.
I mean I would say 9 out of 10 clients that come to see me come with the story that they've tried everything. They've tried comprehensive therapies of all different kinds for decades, that they're sick and tired of telling their story over and over. That they have found that talk therapy, helpful to a degree, but then that just got to a place, like you were just saying, Dedeker, that it just wasn't getting, it just wasn't reaching, it wasn't really resolving what needs to get resolved. That's why we have to look at trauma through a different lens. Trauma is a physiological condition, not a psychological disorder, and so we have to work with it physiologically. To work with it psychologically or through talk therapy-- I hate to say it, because of my peers in the field, but the research that's come out recently as a result of all of the studies that have been done with the veterans, the research has come conclusive that talk therapy and psychiatry isn't helping, and it might actually even be harming, right?
When we can shift the focus, and we can look at trauma as what it is, originally, inherently a physiological wounding experience, when we can work with it physiologically, then things can change. One of the reasons why we know that trauma is physiological moreso than intellectual, cognitive, or psychological is that we can become traumatized, pre-verbal, pre-cognitive and pre-conceptual. If we can become traumatized before we can think and reason, then clearly there's another system at play. Cognition, and even explicit memory don't even come online until 18 to 24 months. If we can become traumatized before that, then what's at play? The system that's online, and that's our lower brain, and our autonomic nervous system, and so we have to work with that system. When we do work with that system, then healing and transformation is profound, palpable, and long-lasting.
Dedeker: Let's start with some basics. Brian, can you share with us how you define trauma, how your training and background defines trauma? I know we have a lot of listeners out there who are either vaguely or very specifically familiar with the term, there's a lot of different definitions, a lot different experiences out there, but how would you characterize it?
Brian: Well, in very simplistic terms, I think, it is simplistic but it also could be a little academic, but in very simplistic terms, when we face the threat of any kind, our bodies, our brain, our lower brain, specifically, our reptilian brain, assesses the threat. In the threat assessment, the lower brain governs the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is mobilized, brought online to deal with the inherent threat. There's an activation in the system. If that activation of the system is able to find it's own natural peak, unwind, discharge and the system could reorganize and return to homeostasis and to just basic baseline, then we consider that event stressful. If for any reason that process gets interrupted, we consider that event traumatic.
Emily: Just to rewind for a moment when you talk about the autonomous nervous system, that's like, breathing, heartbeat, hormones, that kind of stuff, right?
Brian: Exactly. Right. So there's the sympathetic system and the autonomic system. The sympathetic system is the charge, is the arousal which could be an emotion, like anger or fear. That's an activation in the nervous system. Then the autonomic nervous system helps manage that charge. We say the autonomic nervous system governs rest and digest. The sympathetic charge is the arousal, and then the parasympathetic system helps to manage that arousal, that help it to unwind and discharge and reorganize.
Emily: But sometimes it can't do that?
Brian: Sure, sometimes the charge is too much and it just pierces our bank of toleration. What happens in that situation is the parasympathetic system has to come in to manage it so that we don't blow our minds so that we don't blow out our system. When that charge is so intense, when that fear, when that rage, or that vulnerability, or sadness because that charge can also drop if we think of the activation that goes into high arousal, but we also have the nervous system collapse. The autonomic nervous system is what helps manage that. If the feeling is way too intense, and the parasympathetic system comes in to manage it, sometimes what happens is that it gets stuck there, so you've got all this arousal being contained and managed.
It creates what we call a freeze, where there's a flatness in the system. There's a lack of emotionality, there's a lack of affect, there's a lack of ability for arousal. There's people like how I lived for most of my life, I was in a state of dissociation and freeze for most of my life. I came off really cool. Aloof. I was mellow. I was the easygoing, nothing could ruffle me kind of guy because I was dead behind the eyes. I didn't have any life force because it was all suppressed. It was all held up in pain.
Dedeker: Yes. The way that I think about this, sometimes I'm going to lay this out and Brian, you can let me know if this is accurate or inaccurate. I think about the ways that our nervous system initially evolved to be, which is, I see the bear, I have that sympathetic nervous system activation, I run away from the bear. If it's a good day, I get away from the bear. Then I come home, I come back to my tribe of people, my arousal, slowly over time, as I realize I'm saying, if I'm with my people, it's okay, the bear is not going to get me then I can kind of slowly calm down. Then I have a good story to tell everybody else.
I've gone through that whole experience of activation. My activation saved me and then now I'm calm, which is a little bit different of how we often have to go about it in our daily lives now in our modern lives, where there's much more of that parasympathetic system needing to have to manage that activation. I'm really stressed out about the fact that I have a presentation at work and my sympathetic nervous system wants me to run away. I have the heartbeat and I have the sweats and I have the shakiness, but I can't run away because that's ridiculous, so I need to clamp it down and manage it and tamp it down.
That causes not just stress, but a little bit of a slight kind of constant push, pull, maybe even a little bit of a freeze to a certain extent. While I wouldn't necessarily categorize having to give a presentation while you're nervous as traumatic, but it seems like that's to me in my brain, that's a little bit of an example of how our nervous systems are kind of expected to manage in this day and age. Would you say that that's more or less track?
Brian: Yes, absolutely. If we take that back to the idea of, if your nervous system is able to go into its natural arousal to deal with the threat, whatever that threat is, and then when that threat passes, or that threat is resolved, and the nervous system is able to settle again, then it was just a stressful event, but if that process is unable to complete, then it creates a short circuit in the nervous system. Now we've got this short circuit, this place where the arousal was not able to be fully expressed and it's gotten stuck. Now we have this wound, and that wound, that wounding experience, we also form all kinds of beliefs around.
If you go into that meeting and you're stressed out, and your mind is racing, and your heart is racing, and you're sweating, and you can't speak clearly, and you’re stumbling on your words, and you can't collect your thoughts, and you really bomb that meeting, then there wasn't the ability for that resolution. You walk out of the room, and then here's another little topic here, but then the shame comes up, "Oh, my God, what have I done, I messed it all up, I’ll lose my job, failed," et cetera, et cetera. Then things really kind of spiral out of control again. That situation we then form a lot of beliefs around. We form beliefs around ourselves, around the other people, around the situation, location, all that kind of thing, and then those beliefs can run the show.
Then start to seek out and find similar kinds of situations in our daily lives to reinforce itself. That's where all of our patterns and habits and individuation can come from are from these wounding experiences that, you know, aren't resolved. We form all the beliefs and the beliefs are like seeking out those same situations in an effort to be able to bring that original wound back online so that we can heal it, but oftentimes, we don't do that. We just end up in this endless pattern of behavior throughout our lives.
Emily: That's really interesting. I'm interested to move on to a topic that I think many of our patrons and our listeners and all of us really are collectively going through right now, which is this pandemic that we're all in and have been in for the better part of almost two years now. I see so many people in real-time, having to deal with just a huge amount of trauma, I think, from the pandemic and this idea of not really ever knowing what's going to happen next. Where are we being jostled back and forth in terms of things opening up and shutting back down? I think of Dedeker who's been into it the longest, you had the longest shutdown in Melbourne. I think in the world.
Dedeker: In the world, yes. The longest shutdown in the world.
Emily: In the world. Exactly. I saw that recently and I was like, "Wow, Dedeker is literally living through that right now." Just, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on just this collective trauma that we're all going through, and how is it that we can move in a direction of going past this or healing ourselves from this collective trauma?
Brian: Sure. I think to kind of put a little bit more foundation on that of where the conversation just went, okay. If we want to just look at the basics of how the human-animal responds to threat. That's really what we're ultimately looking at in trauma, right? When there's a threat of any kind, and it doesn't matter if it's the loss of a job, or if it's a tiger chasing you, the body reacts and responds to threat in very simplistic ways. Your lower brain, your primal brain, your reptilian brain is there to protect you. It's without thought or reason or perspective. It's just pure animal behavior. It's survival strategy.
When facing threat of any kind, the first thing that we do, the best thing that we can do if facing threat of any kind is to freeze. First, become still and quiet and hide and get as small as possible because that conserves energy and increases the likelihood of survival because the threat may just pass on its own. The next best response, if the threat continues, is to flee. Run. Try to save your life, right? That is the least energy expenditure and lessens the risk because you might actually be able to get away.
The next response if you can't get away, is you got to turn around and fight. There's a different kind of mobilization there in the system of now I have to fight, and that is the highest risk and the greatest expenditure of energy. We have two other ways in which we’ve handled threat and one is to fawn. This is kind of like Stockholm syndrome, where the captor starts to befriend the person who has imprisoned them or who is torturing them.
Emily: The captive starts to develop sort of affection for their captor. Right?
Brian: Exactly, because you're trying to minimize the pain. If I can win them over, if they find me to be friendly or affectionate then maybe they won't inflict as much pain on me, or maybe they'll let me go, so there's that fawn. Then there's also feign, and that's when we pretend to die. That's like the possum or the Impala that pretends, that feigns to die because the predator needs the prey energy. Okay. I just wanted to put that as a foundation in really understanding the biology, physiology of the survival of the human-animal, facing threat of any kind.
Now we've got this pandemic. This is the first time in the history of mankind where we have been dealing with an inescapable attack from an invisible assailant where there's no safe place to hide and it's species-wide. Even though we may have had the pandemic of 1918, right, we didn't have the access and knowledge of it the way that we do now, right? We also have to understand there's this thing in threat and trauma called horror, right? Witnessing terrible things happening to other people, our lower brain doesn't have the ability to determine the difference between perception and reality. When we witness something happening horrible to someone else, our lower brain is interpreting it as if it's happening to us.
It's like when we're watching a movie, the reason we laugh and scream and cry, is because our lower brain doesn't know we're not in the movie, we're not in that situation. We're in the pandemic, we're in this terror, where even the people closest to us, our family, our friends, our lovers are potential threats now, because if they have to go out-- Remember the first days of the pandemic, when everybody was bunkered down and like, "Oh, my God, I can't leave the house." Then you would leave the house, and you were told to come in and take off all your clothes, and jump in the shower and sanitize everything, and people were wiping down all of the food that they were bringing through Trader Joe's.
It was like, there was nothing safe, there was no one safe, right? If someone breached the safety of your home, if one of your family members or your partner had to go out, they were coming back, potentially with the ability to kill you. This is a level of threat that we have never experienced as human beings. There was no safe place to hide, and no one could be our sense of safety. Then we're either having to deal with this in intrusion, or in solitude. Suddenly, these relational dynamics that used to have some breathing room no longer had breathing room.
Parents were discovering, wait a second, I have to care for this child 24/7. I have to feed her three meals a day, I have to entertain her, I have to educate her, I have to-- There was this sense of intrusion. Couples didn't have the buffer of being able to go away to work and then come back 8 or 10 hours later, it was 24/7 threat and overwhelm and all the relational dynamics. I mean, intrapersonal relational dynamics, meaning your own sense of relationship to yourself, and the interpersonal relationships of how you engage with other people. Everybody's stuff was coming up, all of your individual stuff was rising to the surface, all your relational dynamic stuff was coming to the surface. Then there was this other segment of the population like me, who was living alone. What is the worst punishment that we subject human beings to?
Emily: Solitude.
Dedeker: Yes, solitary confinement.
Brian: Solitary confinement. Right? If you messed up in tribe, we take you out of tribe, and we put you in jail into a different tribe and if you mess up in that tribe, we take you out of that tribe, and we put you in solitary confinement. This has been one of the most just regulating experiences that the human species has ever been through. Then there's this other level of shame, the loss of power, the loss of agency, the loss of freedom, the loss of ability to self-soothe, and self-regulate by means in which you're used to doing. There were so many things that were restricted that we just no longer had access to, to self-soothe and self-regulate.
Emily: It's so interesting hearing you talk about that idea of a threat that essentially everyone has become a potential threat. Even if we live with them if they ever leave the house, they come back as this potential threat. It's interesting hearing you say that because I've never had quite occurred to me like that, but I still feel that way about everybody.
Dedeker: I walk around people on my walk as opposed towards them or near them. I feel like everybody does that now. People are threatened.
Emily: Right, and everyone's potentially a threat, and even my friends, even people who I want to spend time with, there's still this part of me that's like, this person could be a threat to me and I'm just having to cope with that. Like you were saying before about or like, that occurs example of having all of this activation, stress response about doing a presentation, but being like, but I'm not going to run away from this because I need to do my job, I need to do this presentation and the same thing with like, "Well, I want to see my friends and my family and people I care about because I know that I'll feel better seeing them and it's it sucked, not seeing them," but at the same time feeling like I'm having to just tamp down this little bit of a level of fear or panic, or something that is kind of that I want to run away. I'm just reeling from that revelation, I guess that that's what's going on there.
Brian: It goes against how we're hard-wired as human beings. We are hard-wired for human engagement. From our first breath, there is an instinctual drive to remain in favor, to belong, because if we fall out of favor, we die. Human animals are the only animal that spends 25% of his life 100% dependent upon others, we have to engage socially, especially initially. We are hard-wired to have our needs and desires met from other people. If we aren't able to engage them, then we can be rejected, neglected, abandoned, shun, or cast out and we die. We don't have the ability to fend for ourselves.
This is an underlying, unconscious human drive. This is where shame comes into the picture too because shame is used to socialize children, to create, maintain, and protect tribe, to establish power, and maintain hierarchy. Again, shame is about the potential of the loss of the interpersonal bridge. If there's something wrong with me, I fall out of favor, I'm rejected.
Dedeker: Yes, I wanted to point that out because the flip side of it was also knowing that your friends and family also see you as a threat as well. It was just like the whole pandemic got you coming and going, right? If you're the one going out and taking the risk, and then having to deal with that shame of people not wanting to be around you or being like, "Actually, I don't think you can come over." Or, "Actually, I think you should go, just live in the upper half of the house for two weeks before we see each other." Also that shame of being the threat as well, while also being in the midst of all your friends and family being a threat to you. I'm going to be a heckler here and be a little contrarian and say okay, sure. Brian, yes, I get what you're saying the pandemic sucked, but once it goes back to normal and we can go back to connecting to other people, all this trauma will be fixed, right?
Brian: No, because this is a unique phenomenon. There is no user manual here. Re-entry is a whole different beast. Re-entry is having to really take a look at how am I spending my time and who am I going to spend it with? We've been in isolation for so long, we've had to take a look at our own stuff so deeply and in that process, many people have fallen off the radar. Many relationships have ended. There's a greater sense of lack of connectivity that's innate. Period, end of statement. It's like, who do I connect with? Who matters? What matters? What do I want? What do I not want? Who do I want to engage with? Who do I not want to engage with? What matters? What doesn't matter?
This is an existential crisis of how do I re-engage in the world? How do I socialize? Socialization pre-pandemic was really difficult for a lot of people. In and of itself, social anxiety, that sense of do I fit in? Do I belong? Is there something wrong with me? Am I like everyone else? Am I different? That's what shame is all about. It's anywhere there is a sense of difference, there's shame. That doesn't mean just one down. That could be one up. I was in the middle of the pandemic, and I had friends who were leaving corporate jobs or losing corporate jobs, and they were driving Uber. I was in the middle of pandemic and I was seeing 48 clients a week.
Dedeker: Your job really went up.
Dedeker: Same for me. I think most people in this field, people dealing with mental health, or trauma, or any kind of those helping professions, it was the same across the board with all of my colleagues and friends, as everyone was just booked to the ceiling, essentially.
Brian: Normal practice is 15 clients a week. I was seeing 48.
Dedeker: Goodness. Wow.
Emily: When did you sleep?
Brian: Well, what else did I have to do?
Emily: That's true. I suppose you're right.
Brian: I was living alone. It's like, "I'm going to watch Netflix, or I can help people."
Emily: What you were saying though, is that that shame can show up in either case, of, "I feel shame because I'm working a ton, and my friends can't work, and vice versa." It's like, "I'm not at work and other people can't.
Brian: Can I tell my friends, "Oh, my God, look at how much money I made this week." I couldn't do that because they were struggling. There was that shame that I felt like I needed to hide how the pandemic wasn't affecting me adversely. I'd been working on video for 15 years already. I didn't have to switch over to telehealth, I was one of the first people doing telehealth. It didn't affect me adversely, except the solitude. I've been social distancing for years as it was, I enjoy my solitude.
I lived in Los Angeles, and they say nobody walks in LA, but I only put 7,000 miles on my car in three years. I'm a homebody. Even that wasn't that big of a difference for me. There was so much difference between me and my friends, but the difference for me was, this wasn't adversely affecting me.
Emily: The shame can come up in that situation.
Brian: Except, I will say that the first three and a half weeks, I went into total solitude, total lockdown, because one of my best friends is 84 years old at the time, and she's on oxygen and OCPD, and all of that. I thought, "You know what, if anything goes down, I need to be able to make sure that I'm not going to kill her. If I need to go help her, I don't want to kill her." After three and a half weeks of complete 100% isolation, I called her up and I was like, "Hey, it's been three and a half weeks. I'm definitely in the free and clear, I can come over and I can see you."
She said, "You can't come over here. I don't want you here. You can catch it on the way here." Then I remember a couple of weeks later, one of my closest best friends who had also been in lockdown isolation came over, and we felt like we were being horrible and bad people because we're actually going to meet. I open up the door, and he hugged me and my knees went out from underneath me because I had not been touched in five and a half, six weeks.
Emily: Well, we have some specific questions from patrons and topics relating to all of the stuff that we just prefaced on the pandemic and all of that. We're going to continue on with that, but first, we're going to take a short break to talk about some of the ways that you can support our show and help bring it for free to all y'all out there. Brian, you gave us a lot of things to think about before the break.
I just wanted to discuss some of the things that our patrons had prompted us for when we were talking about the fact that we were going to do this episode with you and talk about trauma and shame and many things related to the pandemic. You talked about this a bit, but I wanted to touch again on social anxiety, and just how as we're easing potentially out of this pandemic, I do remember a brief window in June and July, where it really did feel like we were going out of this pandemic a bit and then we were sucked back in with the Delta variant.
There is general social anxiety that's been exacerbated by this lack of seeing people for a year and a half, two years, and a lot of our listeners having a reluctance to get back out there and go on dates or see friends again or rebuild their social circles. Can you talk about that and maybe some of the shame surrounding that? Then also, if you have any tips on how people can start getting back out there?
Brian: Sure. Well, first of all, I want to just say that we have to look at shame with a broader lens. First of all, we don't want to be without shame.
Emily: Interesting.
Brian: If we didn't have shame, we'd all be sociopaths, there'd be no rule of law. Shame helps us figure out what's right and wrong, good and bad, what we like and don't like, and what we want, don't want, what works for us and what doesn't work for us. It also helps us come together in tribes, because the human experience is all about the tribal experience, and shame is all about tribe. If we have healthy shame, then we're able to move about from tribe to tribe, in the recognition of, there are parts of me that this tribe resonates with, would engage with, that enables me to be a part of the tribe.
Tribes are formed around social structure, around certain kinds of ideas, around certain kinds of values or beliefs or behaviors. We're even looking at this tribal experience of the relational field and your audience of people who are looking at intimate relationships in a different way than society as a whole embraces. There can be some inherent shame in that alone. I am not wired or behaving in these traditional relational structures, but here's this tribe.
You guys have your patrons, you have your listeners, you have your followers, you have other people like you where you can feel safe and you can express yourself freely in that tribe. If you go to another tribe, you're not alone, let's say your family. You may not want to bring forward these parts of you in conversation with your grandparents.
Emily: I think we've all had a lot of familiarity with what to leave out in certain situations.
Brian: Healthy shame helps us figure out what parts of us we bring forward in one tribe and what parts we hold back. Then when we go to another tribe, we bring forward the parts that we held back in another tribe and maybe we hold back the parts that we brought forward in the other tribe. That's what healthy shame avails us, is the opportunity to move from tribe to tribe. It's not being inauthentic, it's being fully authentic. Shame is the loss of authenticity. Shame comes in the guise with the messages we get when we're children.
"That part of you, I don't ever want to see you again, that part of you doesn't belong, that part of you is wrong, that part of you is bad. How dare you talk to me like that?" We're getting all these messages that there are parts of us, ways that we think, ways that we behave that are unacceptable. We begin to dismember these parts of us, we hide them, we suppress them, we try to kill them off. In healing shame, we have to expand the container large enough to remember our dismembered parts, so that we can be all of who we are.
We can be fully authentic, we can hold all of that which might even be in the juxtaposition of opposites. Then in healthy shame, to be able to recognize it's okay for me to be all of who I am. There are certain groups where I can express certain parts of me, and what we're ultimately looking for is our family, where we can be fully who we are.
That doesn't mean that everyone in our family is going to embrace every single part of us and think every single part of us is just amazing, but they love us nonetheless, they accept us nonetheless. That's that whole idea of unconditional love, is that it's predicated on the idea that there are conditions that we love someone in spite of. Sorry, going off on a bit of a tangent. If we're looking at this idea of re-entry, we have to take a look at all of that. We have to really drop in and recognize, "Wait a second, how can I hold all of who I am?" because during COVID you got really clear with some parts of you that you had been suppressing, refusing, denying. Everybody's stuff rose to the surface during COVID. It's been a very introspective time for most people. Now we get to take all of that and we're looking at, "Okay, so I crossed the threshold of the front door. What am I going to do? How is this going to play out? Where are my tribes?" because tribes have been dismantled.
Dedeker: I'm wondering, in addition to things like feeling this social anxiety or this hesitancy toward reentry or confusion about reentry, are there other trauma symptoms that you've seen in the people that you work with that feel like they're very pandemic related? Like their other behaviors or other feelings? The reason why I'm asking is I want our listeners to have a sense of being able to recognize if there's something confusing that's coming up because I do think there is still a little bit of this collective assumption, "Okay, if we could just get back to normal, then everything's going to feel fine again. I'm going to go back to how I felt before again and it's all going to function the way it did before."
I guess I'm wondering if you can share what are some other specifically pandemic-related trauma symptoms that you've noticed that people may be feeling maybe for the sake of normalizing that for folks.
Brian: Well, yes. I think that there's an inherent, I don't know, my personal opinion, there's an inherent problem there and that's normalization. How can we normalize what's happened? How can we expect to go back to what we once thought was normal? Quite frankly, personally for most of my life I haven't aspired towards normalcy.
Emily: I imagine a lot of our audience can relate to that.
Dedeker: For sure.
Brian: I've always said normal is the setting of the washing machine. I don't aspire towards normal, but what this does give us is the opportunity to really take a look at how do we embrace all of who we are? How can we expand the container of who we are to be able to remember all of who we are? To be more cohesive, to be more fully aware and fully presentational? We are moving out of this isolation and so that means that we can move into clear and specific tribes. What I would say in the midst of all of this and coming out of pandemic, isolation, and the reentry of it all, is get really clear and specific about the tribes that you want to be a part of.
If you have to form them, form them. Figure out the ways to connect to those people who have the same energetic resonant feel, birds of a feather flock together. How do you find those communities? How do you form those communities?
Jase: Something that is related to this I think that has come up in some of our discussion groups, I know has come up a lot of us have shared this experience talking with people where someone might come in saying, "I'm having this struggle with my partner or my partners." It just feels like they're extra needy and I just can't provide everything they need. Or they just seem different or they're being unpredictable or variations on something like that. The thing that I brought up in one of these discussion groups recently was, what we're talking about today which is that we all--
I think so many of us don't acknowledge how significant the trauma is in ourselves or in our loved ones. I think that is in a way just like recognizing that there's something I don't want to say freeing, but there's something that helps give some perspective to those challenges. To be like it's not just that something's changed with you or them or your relationship. It has, but it's because the whole world has and there's been this trauma that everyone's experienced and we're all coping with it differently or it's presenting somewhat differently.
I guess to bring that to a question, something that came up in a few of the questions that we got from our listeners was, how do you deal with when it feels like there's a mismatch there? When it's like my partner wants to try to cope with this by going super social and going out and doing all the things, and I'm still dealing with I'm scared of everyone, I don't want anyone around me, I don't want anyone to touch me or breathe on me or anything like that? I'm just curious if you found in your practice some things that have been effective for people in coping with those sorts of seeming incompatibilities.
Brian: Well, I hate to say it, but this is a time of redefining and that is a reality that we have to all hold onto. It may mean that relationships change. That's just the natural fallout from this experience. Ultimately, what you're really talking about, if I were to really drill down into it, is boundaries. The boundaries that we bring into our relationships and that's a cornerstone piece of all relationships. I can imagine it's an even more important dynamic when you are exploring relationships with multiple people while still maintaining certain types of relational connection with other people and it's all about boundaries.
That's really the ultimate question. Do you have fuzzy boundaries? Do you have no boundaries? Do you have healthy boundaries? Are you over-boundaried? How does all of that play out in the relational field? The relationship with yourself first and foremost, and then in the relational field with your partners. When boundaries are not acknowledged, or disrespected, or breached, it builds resentment. When it continues over and over and over resentment builds upon resentment, which builds into rage and contempt. To be able to put the attention and focus on how do we create healthy boundaries here and how do we protect those boundaries is paramount.
That really needs to be the conversation. We get lost in the details and circumstances and we have a tendency to focus on the "Well, you said," and "You did," and "What about the time when?" and all of that, but what we really need to do is recognize the details and circumstances are just circumstantial. What's really going on underneath it all.
Dedeker: I think you were talking earlier about so many people experiencing the pandemic through this lens of intrusion, particularly in relationships, of, "Oh, my God, suddenly I'm in extreme proximity with someone that I used to have some space with." Sometimes that was by choice. Sometimes that wasn't by choice. Sometimes it was purely overused to the buffer of going to work. I remember in that first month of the pandemic where people were like, "I guess we'll move in together because God knows how long we're going to have to shack up and so I don't want to go through not seeing you, so let's get married or let's move in even though we've only been dating for two months," or things like that.
There was just so much of that and it does feel like now there's-- I don't want to use the word reckoning, but it is a little bit of a reckoning of now having to figure out, "Where do I actually stand now? Where do those boundaries lie? How do I differentiate between myself and you now that I'm going back into the world and reconnecting?"
Brian: I think that the pandemic ultimately has been one of the most influential forces in our own introspection. It has forced us to take a look at ourselves and the world in a way in which we've never been compelled to before. When we stop and we really take a good hard look at ourselves, at our own world, our own life, when I put my head down on the pillow at night, I've got myself to reckon with. If we look at boundaries, we have to recognize that the energy that we use to set boundaries and protect them is called healthy aggression. It's the energy of self-preservation and self-care.
If we have healthy aggression, we have the ability to self persevere and to care for ourselves. Then we have the ability to set boundaries. This is what matters to me, this is what doesn't matter to me. These are my values, these are not my values. This is my north star, that's not my north star. If we're able to do all of that, then what are we able to do with that healthy aggression? It shows up as drive, dedication, discipline, chutzpah, get up and go, vim and vigor, vitality, vibrancy, inner-strength, empowerment, embodiment, self-confidence, and self-esteem.
If we can be in that place of self-confidence and self-esteem, that means that we have a really clear idea of who we are, what matters to us, what doesn't matter to us, what's good and bad, what's right and wrong, and it doesn't matter what other people think. That's what self-confidence and self-esteem is. I'm so comfortable in my own skin, whatever it is you think about me doesn't really have that much of an impact on me, because I'm good in my own skin. We have to take a look at when we're looking at boundaries, the layer underneath that is your relationship to anger, and that's another big piece in the relational dynamic of any two people, is what is your relationship to anger?
Dedeker: Brian, honestly, this could be a whole other episode.
Emily: On relationships to anger.
Dedeker: Yes.
Brian: Yes, absolutely.
Dedeker: That was definitely a foundational piece of the work that I did with Brian, was like reconnecting to anger and aggression and things like that. Yes, I think not a lot of people realize that anger often is, I think, if we look at it very positively, a really wonderful cue that's pointing out a place where maybe need to have some boundaries, or should have had some boundaries, or you had some boundaries but then they were steamrolled or pushed against in a particular way. I think that so many of us are so socialized out of feeling that that kind of anger is okay.
I will say even the first time that, Brian, you used that phrase with me "healthy aggression" is very, very confronting for me. I think especially even that term aggression really, really makes us nervous because no one wants to think that they're encouraging you to be aggressive to somebody. It is that sense of, there has to be something within you that's able to hold that boundary and push back without just being fucked.
Brian: That's why I call it self-care, self-preservation. If we look at anger as on the spectrum, because we live in a polarized universe, everything has a polarity. If we're looking at anger, we oftentimes think of anger in the context of harm of other, harm of self. Homicidal rage, suicidal ideation, that's the extreme expression of anger. If that's the extreme expression of anger, then the opposite is self-care, self-preservation, care of others, protection of others. If we can hold that positive polarity, that vital energy of self-care, self-preservation, care of others, protection of others, and we bring that into the context of our relationship with ourselves, and then consequently the relationship that we have with other people, then we're able to set really healthy boundaries out of care and love and kindness and support, right?
Dedeker: Yes.
Brian: Where oftentimes, those things aren't even talked about, those boundaries aren't even talked about, and that's where things get really wishy-washy in the relational field, and that's where the power struggles begin.
Dedeker: Yes, and then on the opposite side of that you talked about being over-boundaried or hyper-boundaried. Which we've talked about a little bit on this show, is that I do think what I've seen happen with some people coming out of the pandemic is, again, maybe too much of an aggressive protecting of one's boundaries where it really is an active pushing away. Which I think also makes sense, considering the nature of the pandemic, where it was all about, literally, everyone and everything is a threat, and so of course, you would want to push away as well.
Brian: My best friend of 20-some years told me, "You can't come over here. You could kill me." After I took three and a half weeks preparing myself to make sure that I wouldn't kill her, she still said you can't come over here because you could kill me. This is a conversation that needs to be had that nobody knows needs to be had.
Emily: It sounds like you've said, sort of through all this, that this idea that I think many of us are trying to get back to like how things were, is simply not an attainable or realistic goal because we're constantly moving, evolving species, and we've moved in this direction of, we've had this huge experience together as a species and now our relationships and the way that we interact with one another are always going to be flavored by that experience that we have had. The idea that, yes, it's ever going to get back to where it was is probably not really going to happen, I guess.
Brian: Can I ask you a question?
Emily: Please.
Brian: Do you really want it to go back to where it was for you?
Emily: I've had a lot of internal debate about that because there was this beautiful, naivete in being able to relate to people and live life without that thing in the back of your head of, "Is this person going to be a threat to my health in some way?" I think about that, I mean, I work with a bunch of people who are not vaccinated, for instance, at a restaurant, and I can't do anything about it. The thing that I could do is quit my job, which at this point I am not willing to do. I think it is that question exactly of what you've just been speaking about, where are your internal boundaries?
Brian: Well, that spills over into STIs.
Emily: Sure. I mean, to a lot of things. Yes.
Brian: Right? I mean, it's like how do we know whether or not the person that we are being intimate with is aware of their own STI? Do they even know that they have an STI? All of the boundaries around that, condoms and no condoms, and this and that, whatever. I mean, again, this is giving us an opportunity, and that's what we really have to focus on, is the pandemic as an opportunity. It's giving us the agency to really take a look at what matters to us, and how we're going to enter into the world and engage again. We have the opportunity to elevate our experience now because so many of us were just bouncing around unconsciously hoping for the best. Now we actually have this framework that is insisting that we have greater respect for ourselves and other people. Let it elevate the experience. I'm finding life all that much more sweet now.
Emily: That's a really good point.
Brian: Right?
Emily: Yes.
Brian: A couple of weeks ago, here I am in Mexico, I had an odd thing happen one day, I had a gap between clients. We went to climb some pyramids and swam in some cenotes.
Emily: Goodness, how lovely.
Brian: I had a break in the middle of my day, and so I went and I climbed a pyramid, and I went swam in an underground cavern in pristine, pure water. That was such an exquisite experience. At another time of my life, if I had had that break in the day, I may have turned on Netflix, I may have sat in my backyard and done illicit things.
Brian: You know what I mean? Now, this has given me a different point of reference. My relationships have more meaning now. I'm giving them more attention, I'm giving them more precedence, I'm giving them more power because they matter. Whereas before, it was like you're trying to collect friends like you're trying to collect baseball cards.
Emily: Sure.
Dedeker: Yes.
Brian: Or collect lovers like sexual conquests. How many can I have in a day? Or, how many did I have this month? I've been there. Now it's, how do I elevate this experience? How do I really find the meaning, and the passion, and the connection, and the attunement in my relationships?
Dedeker: I'm going to take it home here. I'm sure we could talk about this for many, many, many more hours. I feel like we just scratched the surface of so many of these topics. I want to reflect back the actionable things for our listeners that maybe we can glean from this. Brian, you've talked a lot about, it seems like there's kind of this overarching theme of integration, really is what it sounds like, you're talking to me about, of this horrible, traumatic experience that led to such a shakeup in relationships, such as a shakeup in our sense of self, such a shakeup in figuring out what it is that we actually do need or not need to thrive.
t sounds like it's a combination of individually finding meaning in that, finding a way to integrate that experience as we go back into the world, having self-care, having boundaries, being clear on our boundaries, and as well as being very specific and mindful about who you do choose to reconnect to you, which communities you do choose to reenter into. Is there anything other than that stuff that I said, other actionable takeaways that you think that our listeners would benefit from?
Brian: Sure. I will share with your listeners a couple of mp3 files of a guided meditation that I created several years ago, called The Fives. Dedeker, I don't know whether or not that actually came up in there.
Dedeker: Oh, yes.
Brian: The Fives is a meditation that I branded several years ago. The idea is you take five post-it notes, and you write the number five on each one, and you hang it in five locations that you frequent on a daily basis, the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, laptop, car, whatever that might be. It's a visual reminder that at least once a day, to take five minutes to orient through all five senses. What the pandemic has done is has put us into a place of disconnection and dissociation, and oftentimes put us into a realm, into an environment that we didn't want to be.
There was a lot of dissociation, disconnection, distraction, trying to get out of, "I don't want to feel this, I don't want to look at this. I don't want to be in this space." What we need to do is we actually need to reconnect. We need to attune to, we need to associate with. Orienting to your environment through all five senses, meaning take one minute to really look around at the space that you're in. The colors, the shapes, the textures, the objects, especially the things that give you a sense of wellbeing, safety, calm, peace, pleasant memories.
Then listen to the sounds, every sound that you can hear. Really listen hard. Can you hear the sounds outside? Can you hear the cars going by? Can you hear the wind in the trees? Can you hear the hum of the refrigerator? Can you hear the sound of your dog snoring? Listen to the sounds, then smell the smells. Really bring all of your attention and awareness into what you can smell. The sense of smell is the most accurate and sensitive of all five senses. We can distinguish 10,000 different scents and each one can have multiple associations.
Pick things up and smell it. Smell your t-shirt, smell your hair, smell your armpit, smell your breath, lick the back of your hands, smell your breath, it doesn't matter. Smell, connect to the environment. Smell the sofa cushion. Smell, connect, then taste. Notice the tip of the tongue, the back of the tongue, the left, the right, the top, the bottom, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, chemical metallic. Bring all of your attention and focus into the nuance of what you can taste. Roll your tongue around in your mouth and see what happens.
Then feel, and I mean, externally, your skin. Can you feel the headphones on your ears, the band across the top of your head, the weight of your clothing, the presence of your watch, the hair on your neck, your skin where it's exposed, your skin where it's covered, where your waistband is probably a little bit tighter than it used to be before COVID? Your feet on the ground, your butt in the chair, your back supported. Feel that because what you're doing is a number of things. One, you're giving the higher brain a different set of problems to solve.
In the pandemic, we've been spending the last year and a half looking at all the problems, anticipating what problems are going to be coming, catastrophizing the future, putting together five, six, seven contingency plans for everything that can go wrong. We've been lamenting the past, we've been hyper-focused on what our current problems are that need to get solved. This is one way to give your brain a break. It's a higher brain hack. Give it a different set of problems to solve. What can I see? What can I hear? What can I smell? What can I taste? What can I feel?
What that's doing is it's feeding the lower brain all the information it needs to know where you are in time and space. What's that doing, it's bringing you into the present moment. There's no other way to be present. There's no other way to be "in the moment" than to be fully oriented through all five senses. That's the biology and physiology of being present in the moment. People have been talking about it for decades. Nobody's talking about how to do it. If you're fully oriented through all five senses, you're present, you're in the moment, what is that going to do?
That's going to give you a sense of connection, of safety, of wholeness, of wellness, perhaps excitement, of pleasure. This is really important to be able to start to rewire the circuitry of the brain because we've been in hyper-vigilance. We've been in terror, we've been in horror, we've been in this state of threat 24/7 for a year and a half. If we can carve out five minutes a day, five times a day, then we can start rewiring the brain. We can start working with neuroplasticity to create new neural pathways to where we can get out of the threat response, and get into the present moment, get into our bodies, get into feeling safe and connected.
Emily: That sounds really lovely.
Brian: Then when you're with your partner, look at them, listen to them, smell them, taste them, feel them, be present with them. There's no other way to be present with them. Get out of your head, get into your body. Notice what happens in your body when you truly see them, when you truly hear them, when you smell them, when you taste them, feel them. What happens in your body?
Dedeker: Well, that just brought up so many feelings for me
Emily: That's so cool.
Dedeker: I know my own personal experience with the pandemic. Even after being a meditator for several years and really preaching the gospel of being present, there are parts of this that was just so aversive and so abhorrent that being present is the opposite of what you want.
Brian: Well, yes, because our body's generally is a shop of war.
Dedeker: Exactly. It is just like, "No, I don't want to." I used to journal pretty religiously before the pandemic and during the pandemic, I stopped and I wrote one journal entry that was like, "Yes, I'm not journaling because it sucks." I don't want to remember this.
Brian: That should have been in your burn journal. That's another tool of mine is what I call the burn journal. It's a way of having a safe place to express your anger.
Emily: Excellent.
Brian: That would be a perfect entry into the burn journal. I can hate this burn journal.
Brian: I have a burn journal. I've been so angry. I have to write in this burn journal.
Dedeker: Well, there's certainly much of that. There's a lot more burn journaling I would say than regular journaling over the course this pandemic.
Brian: Yes, absolutely. It was righteous anger. We lost our freedom, we lost our sense of self, we lost our ability to move around the world, we lost our ability to express ourselves the way that we wanted to.
Emily: Some of us loves people.
Jase: Well, Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to come on this episode and to share all this with everyone. Can you tell our listeners, where can they find more about you, if they're interested in either working with you or they just want some of the resources you've talked about? Where's a good place for them to find that and what can they look for?
Brian: Well, I'm highly googleable. If you google Brian Mahan, you'll find me everywhere. I've got a YouTube channel. I've got probably 30 videos there now. I've got 100 in queue, so those will start dripping out soon. I have a book that I'm completely revamping right now. Minimizing because I wrote this massive book about what is trauma? What is shame, and how do you work with it? What's traumatic experiencing? It was just like, "Oh, my God, it's way too much." I'm probably breaking it down into three or four books. One of those books, which is basically going to be like healing shame and trauma 101, hopefully, will be available on Kindle by February.
Then I'm also working on putting together a six-week course right now. It's a little twofold. One is for people who are in the therapeutic practice. It's the tools and skills, and resources that will help facilitate that healing journey. Even more importantly, it's for people to get the basics, the foundation in place before you even call a therapist. Then when you do find the right therapist, you'll be able to hit the floor writing on day one, because you'll already have the knowledge and foundation and skills, and tools in place. That's all in place as well. Yes, Instagram, you can follow me. It will start happening soon. I am so bad on social media.
Dedeker:
Brian: All of my social media is @Brian D. Mahan, SEP, and then my website is briandmahan.com, that's everything.
Dedeker: Or Yelp, which is how I found you first.
Emily: Oh, cool.
Jase: Right.
Emily: Brian, this has been amazing. I have had so many different epiphanies, I think all of us have throughout this episode, and just a lot to think about. I really hope that our listeners are excited by this and that it resonates with them, I'm sure that it will. For our bonus episode for Patreons, we're going to be continuing our chat with Brian, talking about a couple more things. If you want to check that out and become a Patreon, please do so at patreon.com/multiamory. Our question on Instagram this week is, how have y'all been coping with trauma caused by the pandemic? We're interested to hear about that. I might slip in a little something in there as well, answer my own question on Instagram this week.