212. how to be more resilient feat. dr. glenn schiraldi

Feb 17

listen to this episode:

Today's guest is Glenn R. Schiraldi. He has served on the stress management faculties at the Pentagon, the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, and the University of Maryland, where he received the Outstanding Teaching Award. He is the author of various articles and books on human mental and physical health and the founder of Resilience Training International, which teaches practical, effective coping skills to build the strengths of resilience.

In this episode, we discuss:

+ How Dr. Schiraldi's military experiences led to him studying resilience

+ Effective ways to think about your mental health

+ The psychology of toxic stress & resilience

+ Coping skills for low & high stress situations

+ What ACE scores are & how they can impact your stress levels

+ How to ACTUALLY heal from ACEs

+ Finding specialists in trauma recovery

+ Trauma's impact on shame & self-esteem

+ Healing from shame & traumatic childhood memories

+ Self-doubt & why we all experience it

+ The secret to being truly resilient

+ so much more!

Mentioned In The Episode…

+ Resilience Training International

+ Dr. Schiraldi's books

+ Accelerated Resolution Therapy

+ Sidran Institute

SHOP GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS: https://amzn.to/3A69GOC

About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

Sadie: [00:00:00] Hello, hello, and welcome to She Persisted, the Gen Z mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton, a psychology student at the University of Pennsylvania. Let's get into it.

Glenn: Have you ever known somebody who is really sharp, bright? popular, and they don't like themselves, and you wonder why. but adverse childhood experiences explain a lot of that. Because shame gets imprinted in the right brain early on. And people can't get talked out of it often you gotta go deeper to the felt sense, and that's the beauty, I think, of what we're learning that, we can heal people, but not in traditional psychology, at least not initially.

Sadie: Hello, hello, you guys, and welcome back to She Persisted. I am really excited you're here today. We have a really interesting episode all about resilience. We've talked a little bit about ACE scores, and how we can boost our resilience with different ways that we think about things, and broaden and build theory, and all these different adjacent concepts, but I don't think we've ever done an [00:01:00] episode fully dedicated to what resilience is, why some of us are more or less resilient, and how we can boost our resilience for when we go through challenging periods in our lives.

So, I'm really, really excited for this conversation. It's one of my favorites that I've had in a while on the podcast, Today's guest is Glenn Aldi. He has served on the stress management faculties at the Pentagon, the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, and the University of Maryland, where he received the outstanding teaching award. He's the author of a number of articles in books on human, mental and physical health, and is the founder of the Resilience Training International, Which teaches practical, effective coping skills to build the strengths of resilience. We dive into a lot of different areas in this episode. We talk about his background in the military and how that led him to start studying resilience. We talk about the ways that you can think about your mental health.

to boost your resilience and come at it from that angle. We talk about the psychology of toxic stress and how that impacts our resilience. We talk about the [00:02:00] different coping skills that you want to use in low stress versus high stress situations because they're really different. We talk about ACE scores, which are a really fascinating concept and something that you should absolutely be aware of.

And we also talk about how that impacts our lifelong stress levels and how you can heal from adverse childhood experiences. We talk about finding specialists to work with, how trauma can impact our shame and self esteem, how to heal from that, self doubt, and what you should know about being truly resilient in your life.

So we really go everywhere in this conversation. It's a really, really fascinating listen, and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I do, And, as always, if you guys find this episode interesting, make sure to comment, share with a friend or family member, post about it on social media, leave a review.

It really, really helps the podcast, and I don't want to keep you too long. So with that, let's dive in.

Well thank you so much for joining me today on She Persisted. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast.

We've talked about ACE scores and resilience a couple times on the podcast, but we've never done a full episode talking [00:03:00] about What is resilience? What contributes to how resilient we are, especially as young adults and how we can improve that. So I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today and dive into that.

Glenn: It's great to be with you. And I'm so impressed with what you're doing with your life experience.

Sadie: Thank you. I so appreciate that. I would love to start with your background and research and how you decided to go into psychology. What piqued your interest as far as resilience and trauma? And obviously we're going to talk about a lot of different dimensions of that in different ways that shows up.

But what is your background? How did you become interested in this area?

Glenn: I'll try to make this quick. I always say that my life experience perfectly prepared me for what I'm doing today. I grew up a little close knit community in New York, and there was enough chaos in my home that I can empathize with just about anybody or anything and never be surprised.

But I was surrounded by wonderful, extended family, terrific friends. wish [00:04:00] everybody could have friends like I had. A close community. We go back to our unions, people say, we always felt so safe in our school. And that's not, you know, what kids are seeing today. But, , so I went to the United States Military Academy and West Point, and it was during the Vietnam War.

And I saw friends coming back with post traumatic stress disorder. I had no idea how to, how to help. After my active duty five years, I stayed in the reserves. , and, , started teaching high school, because I liked young people, and coaching. And I saw, this is a factory town, and kids were struggling with broken homes, and drugs, and, suicide, and, and rape, and I had no idea how to help.

So I decided to go back to, , get my doctorate at the University of Maryland. They had a wonderful stress management program. And it was in public health actually, and so I was, I was free to focus on not just psychology but medicine and, nutrition and exercise physiology and complementary medicine.

I was [00:05:00] basically looking for anything that helped. And, I was invited to teach stress management at the Pentagon, where I discovered that you could really do a lot of good in little small group classes for functional people preventively, teaching them skills, principles and skills. And so at the university, I was on loan to the Pentagon for a couple of days a week, but at the university I started developing, , what I came to call resilience courses.

And every day it was here's a principle, here's a skill, let's practice it, go home and do it for two or three days. We'll come back and process how it worked. And, there were skills to prevent depression and anxiety and anger and build self esteem, which correlates with all of the previous three. And we found that everything changed, which is really good news.

That you can actually strengthen people by teaching skills, not just information. I don't find that really helps much when people are under pressure. And so that was really good to know. And so I started a love hate relationship with books [00:06:00] because people would come up after class or workshops and say, I'm depressed.

And I think that's related to stress. And where do I find a user friendly book? And I say, I don't know, let me look. And most of the time I couldn't find one. So I started writing books on depression, anxiety, anger, self esteem, , lately resilience and adverse childhood experiences, which kind of are important pieces of the puzzle, I think.

, And then I retired from the university so that I could devote more time to writing and Training high risk people. And so I work today with the foundation that works primarily with military cops and firefighters. My wife and I recently, , depleted four years of running an addiction recovery program, which addiction.

They're often driven by unresolved pain And so like you, I think I, I really love sharing what I wish I knew when I was 18 in hopes that people don't suffer necessarily because, you know, we, we know what, what helps, but sometimes it's hard to find that, especially when [00:07:00] you're in the throes of, of crisis.

Sadie: What do you think is that difference between information and skills? Because a lot of the time. It's like almost synonymous. It's just kind of how it's presented. Do you think that framing it as a skill suggests that people can actually implement it or that what they're experiencing is malleable? , do you have any thoughts there about why skills are so much more effective than just educating on what's happening?

Glenn: Well, it's like, like a sport. I always like in mental health to golfing or playing piano, you know, you can get a lecture on. beautiful music or beautiful basketball, but that doesn't make you good at it. You know, it's important to know big picture concept principles. And so I start with principles. You got to understand why you're doing a skill, but then it teaches a coping skill.

That's got to be practiced. And I think people think I just read a good book that that'll fix all my problems. Sometimes it does, but usually it doesn't.

Sadie: Yeah. Yeah. , I want to get into [00:08:00] how we define stress and resilience. And you talked about how that can present in a lot of different ways, whether it's depression or anxiety, addiction, PTSD.

How do you kind of explain stress and resilience as a psychological concept. Because we've heard these words before, but a lot of the times when we're either working on interventions or conducting research, the way that these things are defined is actually really different from how we use them in day to day language.

Glenn: Right. my whole thing has been take stuff out of the, the clinic and the academic works and make it so that people can understand it. , there are lots of definitions of stress and resilience, but, but the way I generally look at it, stress is anything that calls us to be challenged, to adapt. And some people say, well, a stressor is the cause, and the response is called stress, but people generally use those terms interchangeably.

But, There is, [00:09:00] is good stress, and that is what, you know, it challenges you, but it's pleasant. Think of somebody in a flow state who's at the computer doing something they really like to do. Then there is tolerable stress, where stress arousal gets elevated. But it doesn't stay elevated. It can come back to normal before any damage is done.

What we're often talking about is, is what's called toxic stress, which is stress that is so severe and or chronic that it overwhelms our ability to cope. , to the point that there is damage, literally to our brains with, with excess stress hormones, , and that affects emotions, our ability to cope, our relationships.

, and so really it's a question of how prepared I am, to cope with what life is throwing at me. And so I think a good resilience course. has to be comprehensive enough that it'll equip you with skills for anything that the life will throw at you. So for example, when I work with cops, it isn't just skills [00:10:00] to be a good cop, it's skills to deal with what you see emotionally.

The way I define resilience is, just the inner strengths. Strengths of mind, strength of character that help us respond well to the bad stuff, to adversity. and these skills, these strengths are innate. , capable of being developed, , but specifically what they help us do is prevent stress related problems like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and so on.

, if we suffer those conditions, they tend to be less severe, and with resilience, we tend to rebound quicker. And then the other part of resilience, which is often left off, , beyond the ability to rebound and resist is to optimize mental health and performance. And so that goes beyond traditional psychology into, you know, being at your best, really.

We want to overcome suffering, but we also want to enjoy life and be good at what we're trying to do.

Sadie: I think it's really [00:11:00] interesting. We've gotten better at talking about a lot of mental health concepts. And I think, And I could be wrong because I wasn't in high school then but like 50 years ago I don't imagine that students were all day every day in high school being like I'm so stressed.

There's so much to do I'm burning out. I'm the workload is too much. And now that's a really common experience in high school and Justified response because you have AP classes and you're studying for the SAT and ACTs and college exams and the workloads are increased And we almost lose that other side of the equation, like you mentioned, which is that stress can be good.

It allows us to mentally and physically perform better. It allows us to respond to those challenges. And so the more we avoid these things, the more intense they become. And so this narrative that we hear a lot about burnout and stress and overwhelm. All being negative, there's both sides of that, which I think are an important part of the conversations that we're not just working to avoid all stress and minimize all potential stressors in our life.

, you mentioned different [00:12:00] skills for different levels of stress. Do you have some examples for people of like what a low stress coping skill would be versus a really high stress intervention?

Glenn: Yeah, so when I work with the high stress groups, I start out with the easy stuff so people can get to experience, Hey, this works.

Sadie: Yeah.

Glenn: For example, I do a five minute head stress reducer. And, you know, people say, well, I'm really busy. Can you give me something quick and make sure? So say, okay, just just sit comfortably in a meditative posture, which is kind of feet flat on the floor and, back well supported. And just start to notice what's going on in your body.

Because what we know from brain scans is if you can track what the body is doing, the brain starts to get into the resilience zone, which is, , where stress arousal is neither too high nor too low, but just right so that everything is, is online. So track what's going on in your body. what is your, , gluteal muscles feel like on this chair?

What it is if you like to be [00:13:00] supported, and then kind of just do a series of, , put your hands on your stomach and just let compassion fill on the in breath, your abdomen, do a similar thing with your heart, do a similar thing with the warmth of your hands around your eyes, and then a little massage, a little thumb massage, a little tapping, which is, , drawn from a trauma treatment, I integrate it.

Parts from, from our Eastern friends where we're just being in contact with your true happy nature, you know, get under your thoughts, erasing mind, and just for a moment, rest in. Your, core self, which you don't have to create, it's already there, it's already happy and wise and kind and, and, , , humorous and, you just gotta be aware of that.

It's, it's innate, that's part of those resilience, , qualities we have. So that, that would be like, kinda easy stuff for anybody, just abdominal breathing is easy stuff. But when I make, try to make it a skill, I'll give people log sheets. And I go home and do this, [00:14:00] say, five times a day. When you wake up, when you go to sleep, and then, initially, at low stress times, and as you get good at the skill, try it in a traffic light, or try it with, when somebody irritates you or cuts you off.

The logging, I think it just increases focus, and when you look back over three or four days or a week, you go, I can see my ratings improved, I was getting better at it with practice. So for example, abdominal breathing, that's so simple and almost everybody has success with it. But if you're asked to track it, and then know that you're going to come back, say, to a group, a class, and report on how that go, then the people tend to fill it in and kind of reinforce their success.

And if they didn't have success, you talk about what would help to make it better. for trauma, you know, we build on those skills and, , all sorts of things that, that work sometimes in therapy, but a lot of things can be self managed, , and this is part of, kind of a theme of my life's work is I want to take [00:15:00] skills out of the clinic and give them to people to use on their own.

You know, a good therapist is worth his or her worth in gold, but, but I want to make sure people are. , self reliant and not just relying on a mental health professional too. And so many skills that can be used, , for example, a lot of people have heard of EMDR for trauma, eye movement, desensitization, reprocessing.

, but when people are having a bad day, , and maybe you can't get to the therapist, anybody can sit and go, okay, what am I feeling? What's going on in my body? , what emotionally am I feeling? What images and thoughts? And then just follow your own fingers back and forth 24 times. That's a self help strategy that, , you know, it's not a comprehensive trauma treatment, but it might get you through the next hour or the next day.

say, Just try to give people a whole tool bag of skills and they can pick what they need.

Sadie: Yeah. Yeah. And it's like you mentioned, like if information is sitting in the therapy office and talking about the [00:16:00] experience and the skills are going out into the real world and practicing them when you need it.

Both sides of that are really important to actually feel that difference in, in the techniques. , there are some things that can increase our stress and resilience throughout our whole lives, especially in childhood. I think people are becoming more familiar with ACE scores. I think most people listening probably got screened for ACEs when they went to the pediatrician's office and maybe throughout their whole life.

, but can you explain to us what ACE scores are, what adverse child experiences are, and then how it affects our stress and resilience throughout the rest of our life?

Glenn: Yeah, so this was One of my recent delights was, , in 1998, two medical doctors, Felidia and Anda, had access to 17, 000 records of people in an HMO, middle class, educated, fairly well off, they found that the more adverse childhood experiences you have, the more likely you are to suffer from, you name it, any psychological [00:17:00] problem, just about any medical problem, any functional problem on a graduated basis. So the higher your A score, the more prone you are to get ill or dysfunctional. , and so the 10 most common in that group, bear in mind that there's lots of others that are more, Appropriate for, say, minority groups or inner city groups, military people.

, but it was, it was any kind of abuse, mental, physical, emotional. physical or emotional neglect. Living in a home where there's, , loss of a parent from divorce or separation. , seeing domestic violence, seeing somebody mentally ill or suicidal on drugs or incarcerated. so typically, the more of those ACEs you get, , the more likely you are to have some kind of relatively serious problem, , especially once you get to around four or more, and when you get to six or more, people lose on average 20 years of life.

Now that is just mind blowing.

Sadie: Yeah.

Glenn: And that is about what [00:18:00] the average cop loses. , they die about 22 years younger than their peers, their civilian peers. So, , this has been called the most, , important unaddressed public health problem facing our nation today. , because even in California where a lot of this is being, , Pushed maybe 10 percent of people are really up to speed on aces, how to heal it, and how to not make your kids go through this again.

there's a lot of skills that are that are needed. I love the way that this is kind of graphically depicted. If you think of a fire with flames, and, and that's the aces, the bad stuff, including attachment disruptions, and then say 10 feet above is the smoke, and that's all the depression, PTSD, and autoimmune problems, obesity, and Precocious sex, premature pregnancy, and so on.

Felitti said, We do a disservice to treat the smoke without getting at the flames. In other words, at the trauma and [00:19:00] wounds from the childhood adversity. What's between the two is dysregulated stress. Stress that is either stuck on too high or too low. And that is what causes all these emotional, and even brain development changes.

And if you like, I always find it fascinating to talk about, how the brain develops after ACEs. It's very different than a kid who's securely attached and living in a secure home. But people suffer for decades sometimes, not realizing there are , treatments that are healing, , and so suffering is, is often unnecessary, , but it's usually not talk therapy for a lot of different reasons.

You know, we, we train our young people today still, , and, and we'll talk to me about what you're thinking, about what you're feeling, but the problem is people are traumatized in the first 18 years of life, and particularly in the [00:20:00] first three years of life, trauma doesn't register in the verbal, logical left brain, it registers in the nonverbal right brain unconsciously.

A lot of this stuff is below the level of awareness. So when you're thinking calmly, you can say, well, I'm upset because X, Y, and Z. The right brain says, I don't know if I could put words to that. I just feel a felt sense. It's kind of my body. It's kind of emotional. And so you can't talk to what's , registering, lodging in the right brain, but you can come at it from a, , body based, in other words, reduce arousal in the body.

That reduces arousal in the survival brain, the emotional brain, and then ultimately that'll calm the left brain, cognitive brain, so that you can eventually talk about it. But you start with treatments that, that calm arousal, calm the body, and also deal with images, because that's what the right brain [00:21:00] does.

Just one more point about brain development. The first three years are critical. The left brain isn't even developed in the first three years, but the right brain is. And so a lot of people say, well, you're an adult now, just get over it. Well, what you're asking someone to get over is something they don't even recall.

It's the felt sense of dread or shame. , and sometimes it comes from bad environments like abuse, but sometimes it's just a fairly good family where the kid is just, , exposed to super high expectations that they think maybe I can't, , meet those expectations. , and so low self esteem and shame often gets imprinted.

Have you ever known somebody who is really sharp, bright? popular, and they don't like themselves, and you wonder why. but adverse childhood experiences explain a lot of that. Because shame gets imprinted in the right brain early [00:22:00] on. And people can't get talked out of it because it's not on the left brain.

You can reason out. I mean, cognitive therapy can help to a degree, but often you gotta go deeper to

Sadie: the

Glenn: felt sense, and that's Very different approach. You know, it's a body based, , imagery kind of approach, and that's the beauty, I think, of what we're learning from adverse childhood experiences, that, we can heal people, but not in traditional psychology, at least not initially.

Sadie: Mm hmm. What are your favorite techniques for addressing that felt sense, that more internal experience and response to stress? Is it a certain type of therapy? We mentioned breath work. Do you have any of these that work really well with your patients, , or that you've seen a lot of success with or that people find to be really effective and kind of decrease that feeling of Being out of control or not knowing how to navigate what they're experiencing.

Glenn: Yeah. So as a public health guy, my, my role is to educate people ideally [00:23:00] preventively, and then also to help steer them to the right kind of treatment. The treatments I've been most impressed with, people are pretty aware EMDR. And we know that eye movements, , calm the emotional centers of the brain.

And that's wonderful. The thing that I'm most impressed with, the treatment I'm most impressed with is what's called accelerated resolution therapy. Have you heard of this one?

Sadie: No.

Glenn: , I came across it when I was looking at what helps.

traumatized soldiers. And it was found that this worked even quicker than EMDR. Sometimes three sessions. So it uses eye movements, but it brilliantly adds, , many, many, different approaches, creative, innovative approaches. And so the way this works is you start with the body. Okay. , so you have this bad memory.

Let's notice where in your body you feel the emotions, and let's calm it with eye movements. And then [00:24:00] let's, , pull up the image itself and calm that with eye movements. And then let's erase and replace that image. reinforce that with eye movements. And then ultimately, let's imagine a future where you cross a bridge to a place where you're feeling happy and well adjusted, and you're leaving all your baggage on the other side of that bridge.

And let's reinforce that with eye movements. It is brilliant. Lainey was trained in the MDR, and she started adding all these innovative things to make it better, I think. And she was told you can't do that. You either have to stop doing it or don't call it EMDR. So she's called it EMDR. And I, I am just so impressed and, and the research is still fairly new, but impressive for the few years relatively that it's been around, but therapists getting trained in this and they're really [00:25:00] enthusiastic about it.

And I've had a number of people say, you know, where can I go? And I said, well, look on my website, acceleratedresolutiontherapy. com to find a therapist in your area. And , I've never had anybody come back and say, that didn't work, I hated it. Well, I will put that in

Sadie: the show notes for sure, so people can look in their city or state and find a clinician, , if they're looking for that approach.

Glenn: Yeah, it's, it's very, very impressive. I've just seen things happen in one or two or three sessions that were, you know, could take weeks or months or years. Yeah. The other one I like is called Intensive Trauma Recovery. I was invited to, a trauma conference at the University of West Virginia.

And I talked about dissociation and how people can understand what that is as a part of trauma. And I started talking to the organizers, psychiatrist, and his spouse, who was a PhD art therapist. And they came up with this treatment that I thought this is [00:26:00] brilliant, I want to learn more about this, and so I trained with them.

And what it does is it divides a trauma, which typically is all blurred and all crazy, and the brain doesn't process it well and intrudes and so forth. But it gives the trauma memory structure by saying, here are the seven phases of the instinctual trauma response. Draw each one, and then talk to me, the therapist, about what's going on there.

And then watch as I, the therapist, post your Drawings on a whiteboard or a wall, and in a very kind, compassionate way, , tell your story. See, now you're eventually putting words to that, but art, sometimes I can't talk about what's going on inside, but I can express it with my hand. Yeah. Yes, it does. And so, in a safe way, you hear that your trauma memory has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

It's over. It's in the past. And [00:27:00] like ART, sometimes, that can be done very, very quickly and set all memory in a way that that lasts without retraumatizing people. So those are the two that I really, really like. And while we're talking about finding good treatments, Sidran, S I D R A N, if you send an email to them, they're in the Baltimore area, and give them your zip code, they'll say, okay, here are people who identify as a trauma specialist.

Sadie: Okay.

Glenn: Those skills are different than just traditional talk therapy.

Sadie: Yeah, yeah.

Glenn: Quality assurance, but at least you can get somebody who's, you know, attuned to trauma, so.

Sadie: Yeah,

I love that. And I think it's definitely helpful to know exactly what to search for, because especially if you're dipping your toe in the water, you haven't been in therapy before, it's not super intuitive that, oh, all therapists might not have these backgrounds or they might not specialize in this area.

It's not like you go to a general [00:28:00] practitioner and they're like, Oh, actually, you got to receive this specialist. Sometimes it can be a little bit more on the patient to kind of lead that process and advocate. So it's definitely a learning curve. Yeah.

Glenn: Yeah, and I think, to the uninitiated, we think all therapists are the same.

Well, they're not.

and you gotta be a really good consumer. And some people get discouraged because sometimes you find one that's not particularly skilled in, in trauma therapy. you know, so ask them. Interview them and say, here's my problem, I'm interested in treating it, what do you got?

Sadie: And,

Glenn: you know, find out, am I comfortable with that person? Do they have the experience to treat what I'm troubled by?

Sadie: Yeah. You mentioned that shame and self esteem can also be part of this equation. I'm curious. How that shows up. Is it something that people are thinking through like maybe they're like I'm not responding to stress in the way that my peers are or I feel like I should be having a different experience here and then shame and self esteem comes into play or is it more like an I don't know.

Something that [00:29:00] subconsciously gets correlated between the two. How does that relationship play out?

Glenn: Okay, so in our diagram here, here's the fire is a smoke. Here's, , dysregulated stress. Off to the side, I put shame and self dislike, which is basically low self esteem. It doesn't always happen this way, but let's say a child is unwanted, and that child gets messages, , from a caregiver, mom, dad, or a significant, adult figure.

Maybe it's words, but it's not so much the words, it's the feeling tone that a young child in the right brain will register. , so maybe it's a disgusted or angry look that the parent gives. The kid can't reason that out, but it gets ingrained in the brain. and so maybe 20 years later, as a accomplished adult, that now adult thinks, I don't feel like I deserve this.

I don't feel worthy. And it's not necessarily something they're consciously saying [00:30:00] aloud, although it might be. it's more like a, a felt sense, a sense of dread, a sense of I'm not good enough. And so cognitive therapy might help, but that's a left brained approach. And so, you know, you try to go at the shame and so, in a bottom up and imagery way.

And so in the workbook that I fairly recently completed, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery Workbook, the idea that I try to convey is Trauma, by definition, is overwhelming. It overwhelms our ability to cope. And so it's good. There's no shame in asking for a coach. , you know, a world class athlete generally has, , a coach.

There's no shame. you know, we take specialized military equipment and, and take it offline and give it maintenance and service. And sometimes we need that too. and so if you can find a good trauma therapist, It's a great idea, but the problem is a lot of people will never get the treatment that would help them for a variety of reasons, cost or stigma, [00:31:00] or I don't know where to go, or I tried it once and I don't think anything's going to work because they don't realize all the different options.

And so in the workbook, I lay out like an eight step skill based plan to heal from trauma and for some people they can do that. , on their own, self managed. , others will maybe use it as an adjunct to working with a therapist. And sometimes therapists will get into the workbook and say, Oh, let's work on this skill today together.

And, and see how it goes. , but there are skills to regulate dysregulated stress, to regulate strong distressing emotions, which maintain that stress arousal. There are brain. keys, there are 9 or 10 keys that help the brain prepare to rewire so that these old memories are not continually driving your adult show, , we can strengthen and stabilize the nervous system through imagery, imagery that, , simulates what [00:32:00] an ideal attachment relationship would look like.

, and again, that's not logic so much, it's Just imagine yourself as a, as a young child. Being, loved and, and cared for and enjoyed by that ideal caregiver, whether it's mom or dad or both. What would that feel like? What would it, what would it feel like to hear that soothing tone or to see the smile or loving gaze in the eyes?

Anything's possible in imagery. Imagery can be very, very powerful. at that point then you're, you're ready to go after the trauma memory. and rework the image. There's some float back strategies where you'll, you'll take a upset in the present and go, why did I so overreact? And trace that back to the earliest memory where you had similar feelings of shame or being insulted or criticized and, , settle that core memory as well.

After you've done that, there's often remnants of shame lurking. in the recesses of her mind. And so there's [00:33:00] some imagery skills to rework shame programming that's imprinted in the brain. And at that point, you're then ready to do what I call transition skills, because life is about more than just overcoming suffering, you know, what kind of skills will lead to a happier, more satisfying life?

And that gets into, , pleasant activities. It gets into forgiving. It gets into, developing character traits that I feel good about when I look in the mirror. That's something that psychology books don't often talk about. But there's research that shows that people feel less traumatic stress symptoms When they feel good about who they are inside, their character, even not just, in America, but in Europe and in Buddhist countries, like, people who adhere to the five tenets of Buddhism, which I can remember them all, no intoxicants, no sexual abuse.

or misconduct, no lying, cheating, or stealing. , less [00:34:00] depression, less stress. So character, I think, is really important and often is overlooked. , sometimes people are damaged morally by the way they're treated, but then sometimes as we get older, We make decisions that we don't feel good about, and so part of resilience is learning how to rebound and be kind and look ahead because no one is irredeemable, no one is unchangeable.

So there's a lot of hope, but it's one of those things we don't really talk about too often.

Sadie: I'm curious, and this is totally just a theoretical, I'm not sure that there's an actual study, , or an actual measure of this, but do you think that most of us have some ineffective relationship between, like, those childhood experiences and how we relate to stress?

Maybe you don't have any score, maybe you don't have the four to six that have that huge impact on your outcomes, but do you think generally, I think everyone to some degree could be more effective with that [00:35:00] relationship to stress and then how we respond internally.

Glenn: Yeah, so I had the privilege of getting to know a lot of students over the decades I was at the university we had little small discussion classes, and we were talking about this a little before you'd be surprised how many people who on the outside look all put together great.

But I think just being mortal, you know, we have, we question ourselves, we don't feel good enough. It's just a question of degree. One of my friends has got emotional problems, just to question to what degree, you know, the skills are the skills and they help anybody in any, any state of emotional development.

You know, it's just a question sometimes how much help do we need with developing those skills. Some people can learn it on their own and they're basically doing pretty well, but you know, you can tweak a little things here and there. Other people, that's when it's good to have a therapist because understandably, you know, you've been through a lot of hard stuff and somebody kind of walk you through the healing [00:36:00] process would be really useful.

Sadie: Yeah. 100%.

Glenn: There is a study that, many countries around the world, 99 percent of people have regrets.

Sadie: Wow.

Glenn: And I think the 1 percent are probably sociopaths. They didn't understand

Sadie: the question.

Glenn: Who doesn't ever make mistakes, you know? So part of the experience I think is being compassionate, having self esteem that says, that was a mistake, I don't feel good about it, but it doesn't make me worthless or irredeemable.

Sadie: Yeah.

Glenn: Makes me human.

Sadie: Yeah. Very related. If you could like, wave a magic wand and young adults could have one skill or one way they thought about things with regard to emotional resilience or how they navigate stress. Maybe it's a preventative measure. Maybe it's something they learn in school. What would that be?

Glenn: What I love to do when I'm training groups like federal employees in nation's capital is ask them, , [00:37:00] what do you think resilience is? And what would you expect to take from our two days together or four days together? some, some of the best definition of resilience came not from academics or theorists, but from people in the trenches.

And one nurse at a, large, , children's hospital said, I think resilience is the capacity to absorb stress and maintain yourself.

Sadie: Now to

Glenn: me, that speaks to a feeling of worth, a feeling inside of being quietly glad to be who you are, that is independent of externals. So much of our culture says you have no worth unless you're bold and beautiful and rich and accomplished, , and have a nice car and a great job.

Those are nice sometimes. But it's not the good feeling you get when you look in the mirror, and so I think, I think there are a series of self esteem skills that I've, you [00:38:00] know, I started teaching in my courses, and then wrote it up in a workbook, the self esteem workbook. And the way that came about is, , I studied under the leading self esteem researcher, Morris Rosenberg.

In 1980, I said, Dr. Rosenberg, , you've spent your whole life documenting how low self esteem causes problems in people. What do you do if someone doesn't have it? You know what he said? He said, I don't know. And so Well, that's no good, so I'm going to make a course up and, and I plumbed the literature and I boiled it down to skills that could be practiced, and we found you can actually improve self esteem with skills practice, , skills that are related to a sense of unconditional worth as a, as a human, not market worth, not social worth, but , inner human worth, unconditional love, , and the process of growing.

and I think, We learn a lot [00:39:00] from our friends in the East, all of that done with compassion, because it's difficult to do everything right, but we can try, and as long as, you know, I love John Wooden, the old Hall of Fame basketball coach, success isn't the scoreboard, success is the satisfaction and peace of mind of knowing that you've done your best.

Sometimes the other team's better, some problems we can't solve, but we can feel good if we know. We give it the old college try, and so a lot of self esteem is just kindness, not that we soften on our expectations. It's healthy to have good expectations, but to pursue them with kindness, with love, and never with, Punishment.

I think that sometimes as parents we make a mistake, you know, if I just browbeat my kids, do good, do good, do good, everything will work out good. I think it's more important to teach kids to enjoy doing your best and accept the outcome.

Sadie: Well, if people want [00:40:00] to get your workbooks that you mentioned or follow along with your work, where are they able to do that?

Glenn: , if you just go to Amazon and search the books under my name, Glenn Chiraldi, , Or you can go to my website, , ResilienceFirst. com, but the books are generally easy to find. That's where I usually get all my books from Amazon. Yes,

Sadie: amazing. Well, I will put all of those in the show notes. And thank you so much for this conversation.

I know it's going to help so, so, so many people.

Glenn: You're very welcome. And thank you for what you're doing too.

Sadie: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of She Persisted. If you enjoyed, make sure to share with a friend or family member, it really helps out the podcast. And if you haven't already, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also make sure to follow along at atshepersistedpodcast on both Instagram and TikTok, and check out all the bonus resources, content, and information on my website, shepersistedpodcast.

com. Thanks for supporting, keep persisting, and I'll see you next [00:41:00] week.

© 2020 She Persisted LLC. This podcast is copyrighted subject matter owned by She Persisted LLC and She Persisted LLC reserves all rights in and to the podcast. Any use without She Persisted LLC’s express prior written consent is prohibited.