Ep 127 "How does Trauma affect those with Neurodivergent style nervous systems?" with Dr. Matt Zakresky

Ever wondered about the intersection of neurodiversity and trauma? Get ready to unravel these complexities with Dr. Matt Zekresky, a renowned psychologist and founder of the Neurodiversity Collective, who brings his wealth of expertise and personal experiences to the table. We steer the conversation towards understanding trauma through the lens of neurodivergent individuals, highlighting their unique challenges in medical and educational settings. Dr. Matt helps us understand that trauma is indeed a matter of perception, and underscores the need for greater empathy and advocacy for the neurodiverse community.

We then delve into the realm of resilience and trauma, debunking the myth of resilience being an all-or-nothing trait. With keen insights, we explore how the brain navigates trauma, creating narratives and sometimes even placing ourselves at the center of traumatic events. Here, we use the event of 9/11 as an example to highlight the brain's proclivity to perceive threats to body and autonomy as most impactful. We then shift gears to discuss the concept of building resilience, emphasizing its importance as an ongoing process, and the critical role a strong support system plays in this journey.

Overcoming adversity isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. We tackle this notion head-on as we discuss the unique challenges faced by individuals who have grown up amidst poverty, food scarcity, homelessness, and more. We highlight the importance of building a life narrative and creating space for the brain to process and heal. We also throw light on the unique challenges faced by neurodiverse individuals and echo the importance of embracing one's unique brain. We end the

The fibromyalgia starter pack  categorizes the episodes in a way that is more accessible for those new to fibromyalgia.

Self Reflection Podcast

Self-Reflection Podcast is based on real emotions and feelings. If you are like me,...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:50

Really excited to having Dr Matt Zekresky here. He goes by Dr Matt and he is a psychologist and is the founder of the Neurodiversity Collective. So glad to have you to the podcast and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 1:08

I mean, I'm lucky enough to do a lot of podcasts, but this is definitely the first one of these I've done. So when you reached out to me I said, oh, how cool is that I had to quickly rabbit hole and listen to as many of your episodes as I could. But you know, I feel like I'm relatively caught off.

Speaker 1: 1:26

All right. Well, there's a few episodes been going on for a couple of years, just past their two year anniversary, and so glad I do a lot of podcasts listening to myself to learn and expand and trying to help learn more about neurodiversity and the intersection with a lot of people with also some struggles. There's so many gifts that go along with it, but also some struggles and being misunderstood and many other aspects to that.

Speaker 2: 1:52

But yeah, absolutely. You know, and and I think you know when you think about the word, misunderstood, right, there's been this groundswell of information and advocacy around neurodivergence over the last 10 years. Right, I mean, there have been people who've been ringing these gongs for decades, but, you know, we've sort of hit that critical mass over the last decade and it really is lovely to see it coming. But there's a lot of people who are sort of playing catch up right now, saying, like these are terms and words and paradigms. I've got to get behind If I'm going to do my job as a medical doctor, as a psychologist, as a psychiatrist, as a teacher, as a coach, like, what do I need to know? So it really is an honor to be able to speak to more the medical side of these things, right, and you know, I know that psychology and medicine have at times crossed swords in their history, but I've always seen it that we're all on the same team, you know, and I genuinely cannot do my job without you. Right, I need someone to weigh in on the medical side and help with the internal pieces of it and I will do my part to inform what care and environments should look like for people with different brains.

Speaker 1: 3:09

Yeah, great. Can you give a little broader background on who you are and your training?

Speaker 2: 3:16

Yeah, so I'm Dr Matt Sokreski. Everybody calls me Dr Matt. I am a twice exceptional individual, so I was identified gifted in second grade and diagnosed with ADHD in high school. It explained a lot, so that was that was good. So this work is personal and professional for me. I graduated with my SID in 2016 and really with a focus on helping gifted and other neurodivergent kids. So a lot of my training in grad school, where we are placements around that population. I've been lucky enough to work in schools that support these kids and consult with schools and give talks all over the world. It's often the community that people don't know is out there and being neurodivergent can feel very isolating and feel very alone, right. So, like oftentimes, I feel like my job is more of a clearinghouse and say, hey, you're gifted in Iowa. Did you know that Iowa has one of the best state organizations for giftedness, as well as the Bell and Blank Center at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. And they stare at me like, wait what? I'm not the only one. I'm like, no, there's a lot of you actually Go Hawkeyes if you're, if you're in Iowa, so you know. And then we get into the psycho education and the therapy and the advocacy piece, but a lot of it's just like hey, welcome to the club. You know, we're happy to have you.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Awesome and you know, when you have a special history with yourself and then wanting to help and seeing a big need for so many different ways, like we talked about in the beginning, kind of misunderstood and there's so many different things to talk about. But one of the things that intersects with many people who struggle with chronic pain disorders are often a mismatch in environment and with a calibration of how their brain and nervous system works. And there are many people we're finding that who are on the neurodivergent spectrum who also struggle with these chronic centralized pain disorders we call fibromyalgia, migraines, ibs, a lot of those that overlap. And one of the topics that I'd like to ask you about is understanding trauma and that as it connects with people who have neurodivergent brain's, as it seems that often they are more likely to have gone through high stress trauma type situations. But so can you generally talk? Just what are the different types of trauma that somebody might have to go through?

Speaker 2: 5:57

So trauma is as wide of a concept as basically the human experience is, and the single most important differentiator when it comes to trauma is the perception of threat. So this is an example for my own life. So I was in New Zealand once and we were whitewater rafting and I got knocked out of the boat in front of the biggest rapid on the river, a class four rapid. I was underwater for more than two minutes and I remember distinctly thinking I'm going to die and you're wearing a life vest, right, but the current was so strong I could, my helmet was above the water, my so was. I'm going to die with what? Eight inches right away from air. It was sort of comical almost. And then I hit a rock and I bounced out of the water and swim like mad to my friend's boat Right, and I perceived that as very scary. But oh my gosh, I'm lucky to be alive and let's just move along with our lives Right, like that was the thing that happened. Then, on the spectrum of things that happened, that sucked Like not a good thing. And then, as we are leaving the river, one of the other people on our boat tour scraped her knuckles on a rock and she called her father, who called the attorney, and for the rest of our vacation, another six days, she would not shut up without scraping her fingers on that rock Right. The perception of that pain and the injury to self right is what drives the experience of trauma. And trauma is itself a discrete thing. Right, it can be something very concrete and acute, like I was in a car wreck. It can be something environmental, like a building collapse. It can be something perceived like I think my family's out of money, I think we're going to be poor. All of those things can feed into trauma. Where we move from trauma to something like PTSD is when the symptoms, the psychological aftershocks of that event don't resolve within six months. You might be in a terrible car wreck and have nightmares about it for a couple of weeks and then every so often you'll twinge in your shoulder. But a couple of months later things have more or less returned to normal In the trauma world. Every time you hear a car screech, your brain snaps you back to when you got t-boned by that semi on Route 6. Our brains are, for better or for worse, great at yanking us back to that thing, because it's a whole body experience when it comes to trauma.

Speaker 1: 9:08

For many people who have fibromyalgia as their diagnosis, it's often preceded by and I like using a clinical term high stress situation, because that can encompass a lot of different things and it allows all the different elements and it's also that perception. As you said, one's high stress situation may not be another. What's interesting is reading some of the literature in preparation for this is this measure of resiliency and I think there's psychological tests of that. I think many people who are listening and the people who, I hope, listen to this are people who are going or living with fibromyalgia, but also their loved ones and also the medical community, who doesn't have a lot of training on this but is looking to learn more. I think for those who are struggling with this, the idea of resiliency may come across as a double entendre that if you are not resilient, then you don't have a strength of fortitude in yourself, in your character, because we often attribute that as a positive thing. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker 2: 10:21

Yeah, I often think my number one job as a therapist is to create an environment that fosters resiliency and help turn up the volume on a person's internal resiliency. I see that you wear glasses. You wish you were wearing your glasses so you could find your glasses. Resiliency can be very similar. I need to have resiliency to build resiliency. How do I build resiliency if I'm not resilient? The fact of the matter is is that if you are standing and drawing breath, you are being resilient. You're just feeling like the resilience you have isn't enough to meet the challenges you're being sat with. It's like if you can swim but you can't swim in a big rip current, you might think you're a bad swimmer. No, just how many people on earth can swim through a strong rip current? What we need to do is reframe it not as an all or nothing thing. I mean the resilient or I'm not. I can have more resilience. I always want to build my resilience. I want more and more and more of it so I can meet these challenges, because life is never going to stop giving us challenges. They're not all traumatic, but they are all challenges.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Yeah, exactly, and I think that support system is really important in fostering that. I have a medical student doing rotations now, just first year and getting a chance to observe take a simple chief complaint history of present illness and just getting a chance to meet with a couple of patients. And you have one person and I asked who's a second visit with me, who has some neurodivergency as part of some of these coexisting chronic pain type issues, and I asked what is going on at home? I said I don't know you real well, but if you have a spouse or a long term boyfriend that doesn't have a substance use disorder, who has a consistency in how they treat you, and I just said, is that the case? And she laughed Well, of course it is. And I'm like well, yeah, of course, and we go into the next patient and that's not the case. And yet having that structure is often a challenge and that gets to be a really sticky situation. Going back to the trauma, I've heard of trauma being something that I don't want to say. Is you invited versus something that's random? Potentially the idea that and I might edit this out as you get this but the idea of a random act in war that just happens to happen on somebody randomly hit by a car, that you were not doing anything inappropriate, versus something that you may have had a partial contribution to.

Speaker 2: 13:24

And the role of the brain in this is so important and it's also incredibly subjective. It's going to sound like I'm talking on both sides of my mouth here, but let's say you find yourself in a situation where you sneak out of the house at night to go to a concert and while you're at the concert a fist fight breaks out and you watch somebody get sucked in the jaw and they collapse. That is a traumatic thing. You watch an assault occur and you find yourself replaying that over and over in your brain through this narrative. If I hadn't snuck out and gone to this concert, I wouldn't have been there, I wouldn't have seen this thing. And that is our brain telling the narrative. The really interesting thing about our brains is our brains seek to understand and our brains will actually center ourselves in stories to help us understand it, even if the story is not our story. So our brain would rather have a navigable narrative that makes sense to them, even if it's wrong. Then acknowledge that the universe is full of entropy. That random car wreck well, if I hadn't stopped and gotten ice cream, I would have been in the intersection at that time, but you wouldn't have been, or maybe you would have, I don't know, but this is what our brains do. I was a senior in high school during 9-11 and I'm from New Jersey, so, like my town, you can look up and see the Manhattan skyline from my town and talk. You know, traumatic event, right, not only locally, nationally, maybe globally traumatic, and I cannot tell you how many of my peers in high school were like it's my fault. My mom went to work in Manhattan today and it's like your mom has gone to work every day in Manhattan since you were three. Right, you're 18 now and like why would that be any different today? But this is what our brains do. Our brains are like I would rather be the main character and to understand something than try and make sense of the universe. Is this cold, unfeeling, random place? You might see this at home with your partner or partners. Right, like you come home, your partner's in a bad mood. You're like, hey, what's wrong? Nothing, like, oh, but something's wrong, nothing, I don't want to talk about it. And you start going what did I do? I clearly did something. I, what did I do? And you ask that your partner that enough till they're finally mad at you and your brain and someone goes, ah, this. I can handle this. I know what this one is and for all of us that are partnered, we're all like nodding vigorously at our at our headsets as we listen to this in the car. That doesn't make it true. Your partner could have had a bad day at work or stubbed their toe, or gotten a really sad phone call from their great aunt, or a million other things, right?

Speaker 1: 16:21

trying to help understand what's going on. I think that idea of locus of control or natural tendency is to look inside and what our role is, but also that's often where it isn't in our control and having to look outward, and that's a especially when a trauma happens. That's a very challenging to navigate through. That. What types of trauma seem to have the biggest impact on people, if there is any information about that?

Speaker 2: 16:58

So the types of trauma that seem to have the greatest impact are twofold. The first is immediate threat of grievous injury or loss of autonomy, right. So if you were sexually assaulted, that is a grievous threat to body and autonomy, right. There's way too much sexual assault out there. That could be its own podcast, of course, but if that's something that happens to you and we know that many, many people have suffered sexual assault Not all of them develop trauma or PTSD as a result of it, but many do because of the intensity of that. The other thing that seems to lead to the most trauma is environmental, chronic trauma. What ends up happening, like chronic food insecurity, for instance, is a trauma right, and you can have a trauma response to that. My grandfather, when he was still alive, he lived through the Great Depression right, he was a child during that and he was a very psychologically sound person who also collected everything to the point where his house was almost a hoarder house. The man never played around a golf in his life and he owned over 100 sets of golf clubs because he grew up in several years of scarcity scarcity of food, scarcity of objects, scarcity. I found that you could isolate a singular event in there. That was capital T traumatic right, that there's something to be said about the longitudinal nature of a bad situation you can't get out of. And I think what you and I are seeing in our professions is the resultant traumatic effects of COVID. If you zoom out for a second right, we lived through a situation where on Friday it was a normal day. On Saturday the world was shut down by an invisible illness that we couldn't see and didn't understand and killed millions of Americans and millions of people worldwide. Talk about trauma. If it was a wolf in the neighborhood, you could see the wolf, you could fight the wolf. This is like do I touch things? Do I not touch things? Do I hug people? Do I put a mask on? How do I navigate this thing? And it's terrifying if you have, even for your own bodily self, but family. I have young children and my son was born during COVID. It's like how do I go to the grocery store and buy food for my family if I am risking bringing home a deadly pathogen that could kill my son? And we had to make those psychological choices every day with no run up. In many ways it's amazing society didn't collapse. But that's the resilience of the human spirit. I don't know how many people would describe themselves as handling COVID with resilience, but as an mental health professional I can say the vast majority of us did. That's amazing.

Speaker 1: 20:11

And what we're finding too for many people who were infected with the virus. Most don't have long term symptoms, but there are those that have that acute inflammatory response. The inflammation goes away, but there are persistent symptoms, similar like getting in a car accident your bones have healed, the muscle swelling is healed, yet you have persistent symptoms. What does the research say of the effect on the brain of these high stress trauma events?

Speaker 2: 20:46

So high stress, trauma events release a tremendous amount of cortisol in our bodies. Right, and too much cortisol over time is very toxic. It wears our systems down. The good news is that brain is plastic in the sense that it responds to repeated stressors and pain. But the brain will also respond to repeated safety and cure. We call this epigenetics, right, the body responds to its environment and the environment responds to the body. So if you're out there and you're like, yeah, I was a kid who grew up in poverty, food scarcity, I slept in my car multiple times. Sometimes I didn't know who I was coming home to. Those things potentially were traumatic for you, and you might be sitting there like so Dr Matt's telling me that like, oh great, this is my destiny. No, what happens to our brains and bodies are not destiny. It is a chapter in a book. We can't pretend it didn't happen and I think a lot of people get into trouble trying to pretend that they didn't get into that car accident or they didn't survive that sexual assault or they didn't worry all day if their uncle had made it out of 9-11. Those are things that have their part of our stories, but there's more book to be written and as you start to see that event in the broader context of a story, of a life narrative, you build more space and context around that event, which gives your brain somewhere else to anchor and reflect on that which is really it's. One of the most amazing things about our brains is that our brains will actively respond and change our bodies to situations of threat and to situations of peace. That's how we use that information to amplify the work that mental health professionals do.

Speaker 1: 22:38

So about six hours ago, my last patient of the day, who I've known for a while and I've discovered last week when I saw I did the cat queue questionnaire because I've been using that as a screener and that'd be another question asked how do I? So it's a tool with some suspicion because just I thought maybe could there be some evidence. So she scored pretty high on that. She's not getting the support some stress at home, rejection, sensitive dysphoria, some restless leg syndrome on top of that. But talking about this, her husband or partner said, yeah, I know, I've had that and had said that he didn't talk to anybody besides mom until he was three and a half and that he was different. A hypothetical patient out there who may be going through a story like this, who has gone through trauma, maybe has been through high stress in middle school, may have been the victim of successive sexual assaults or taken advantage of in many ways by people that some of it's been forgotten for obvious reasons in the brain, but now is still having these ongoing struggles and a patient might ask me is there any hope? How do I get through this? Maybe in a higher stress situation as well, meaning some economic insecurity, some social insecurity. Maybe their car is no longer working, having to take the bus, and the question has been asked to me well, how do I get through this? Is there any hope or am I doomed? This may be somebody who recognizes it. They have a neurodivergent brain on top of this. What would you if you got a chance to meet with somebody? How might you help them work through something like that?

Speaker 2: 24:31

Yeah, I think what we're looking at here is the depth of challenge. Mental health challenges are not just oh, I'm depressed. It manifests in relationships and self-esteem, and occupation, and education and transportation, and housing and food. If you're neurodivergent, the world is not built for you. The world is not built for people who are autistic or dyslexic or ADHD. Schools are not built for gifted kids. We built society to meet the most people and most people are neuro-typical. Most people have regular-ish brains and they can navigate within those basic parameters. Those of us who are in the neurodivergent community, what we see is that, because our brains are different, that all flows downhill, whereas like, oh gosh, johnny, you lost your job and your word, your car is going to be repossessed. Well, go just get another job. Johnny's like I've got significant sensory needs. I can't be on my feet for very long. I don't really get along with people terribly well. The job at the call center was perfect because I didn't have to talk to anybody in person and I had a nice comfortable chair. But I got laid off and now I'm not somebody who can go work at Burger King. That's not a thing I can do. Your divergences that will make you an absolute rock star at the right job or the right school or with the right partner. Unfortunately, those things are harder to find when you're neurodivergent, especially if you're operating from a deficit in knowledge. If you just think you're a little quirky and you don't know. You have an IQ of 145 and you're profoundly gifted and you're like why does the world not make sense? Well, knowledge is power. We've got to inform you about your brain, the pieces of that brain and how they manifest in the real world, so then we can work smarter to meet some of those environmental systemic needs. My favorite therapy is a big hug, a grilled cheese sandwich and $50,000. Unfortunately, I can never do that kind of therapy because I don't have $50,000, let alone $50,000 times all the people I see. But that would be the best therapy, right? $50,000 in the grilled cheese sandwich for everybody. That'd be great. So what we need to do is think outside the box, because there are things in life that are therapeutic that are not therapy. To bridge our professions again, apple Day keeps the doctor away. Apple doesn't make you magically healthy. It's not like the one Apple I ate in college and I was like that undoes all the fried food, just that singular Apple I ate that time, but it is emblematic of a commitment to healthier choices. So that's something that's therapeutic without being therapy. So things like exercising, moving your body, are therapeutic. It's not therapy, but listening to music, having a home cooked meal, comfort with another human that you can trust, animals those are all things that are therapeutic. And that's why in the UK they're piloting this program where medical and psychological professionals can prescribe music. They can prescribe pets because it's like, hey, you might not be somebody who can handle financially, psychologically, logistically, whatever to do eight months of intense psychotherapy, but you're damn right that you can go to the coffee shop that has the stray kittens in it and sit there and have a mocha and pet some cats, and that's going to release a lot of dopamine in your brain. You're taking care of yourself, you're being intentional about it, and that starts to rewire some of the bad stuff that happens from trauma. So often my work isn't. Here's how we're going to unpack this bad thing that happened to you. So often the thing is like what can you do right now to take care of yourself? And it's like, ah. Sometimes it's like people like, oh, I was going to make myself a cup of tea before therapy. I ran out of time and I'm like here's what you're going to do. You're going to make that cup of tea right now. I can wait two minutes. So I just sit there, I do my therapist fingers yeah, it's interesting, very good, Right. And then they have their tea and I'm like did that feel good? They're like it did, because that's the thing Doing a good thing for yourself with intention. You get extra credit for it in your brain, an extra dose of dopamine. That's a wonderful thing.

Speaker 1: 29:16

Awesome. It sounds a little bit like nutrition advice, mentioning the apple. Often I'd say it's better to think about adding something than subtracting, and sometimes the locus of control being there are things that I have found that help turn down the intensity and I'm thinking this somebody who's going through that may be okay. One of the things that if you have a autistic style brain is well, I do have to do basic routines and I do better with that. Go to bed at a consistent time, have a wind down consistently, have that consistent daytime, have a healthy routine. Maybe it involves music or drawing, even if you can't afford the paints, maybe there's crayons, maybe there's simple methods that you can do. Maybe it's simple dancing a little bit. If you are into music, that can be in your own living room and maybe doing that together with somebody and having within whatever your means are. It's also that over time, this is not going to get better, which is a very frustrating problem because in medicine we're often many people are expecting that quick fix, miracle, pure medical model of helping somebody quickly get better. One of the questions I wanted to ask too is when we look at people who have neurodivergent style brains, nervous systems, etc. Are they more susceptible, in one sense, to sustained effects of traumas.

Speaker 2: 31:40

The research on this is very interesting because I also did my homework. Intelligence is a significantly protective factor vis-à-vis resilience factors for trauma. The more intelligent you are, that is somehow a protective factor. We can talk about some of the systemic stuff there, but it's a little bit too wishy-washy. But giftedness is more than just intelligence. It is a complete different neuro type. If we think about the parietal lobe on top of our head, our sensory center, the feedback that comes from that center goes through our entire body, through the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. If you are someone whose brain is more susceptible to taking in sensory input, that parietal lobe is hypercharged. It's going to do more stuff. Those neural connections from the parietal lobe to the rest of your brain, they're not local roads, guys, they're super highways. Those impulses are flying down into that sympathetic nervous system. You're having a big response to it. The bigger the response, the more likely it is to read as traumatic. I do this exercise when I give talks. We'll do a version of it now. I have here in my hand this invisible porcelain bowl. I'm holding it. Now, look, I have this metal fork in my other hand. Now, if you're not watching the video of this, I'm not holding a bowl, nor am I holding a fork, but I am painting a mental picture. Now I'm going to take my fork and put it inside the porcelain bowl and go squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak and I guarantee you many, many listeners, a lot of them, are cringing right now. They're like oh no, no, no, no, no. Not because anything is actually happening, but because our brains are perceiving that. Their brains are going right. When that thing happens, it hurts. I don't like that thing, I don't want it to happen. Your body is having a whole response to that. The seminal work on trauma is the body keeps the score because trauma is not just a brain thing, it's not just a heart thing, it's a whole body thing, which is why you have those images of veterans hearing a car backfire and doing a bowel roll behind a bench and creating an imaginary machine gun, because the event isn't just happening up here. Your brain is sending signals to your body like I'm in a life or death situation. Use the training, go back to when you were 19 and shipped out to Iwo Jima, right, like that's what you're going to do For all intents and purposes. For your brain's sake, you're back there on that island. You might be in small town, minnesota, but psychologically speaking you're back there on that island. When we treat trauma, we have to heal the body, not just the mind, right, that's what makes this work so challenging, because we're fighting an entire nervous system, not just a rogue circuit of brain that makes you say I don't like myself very much, which is its own very thorny problem, of course.

Speaker 1: 34:53

It sounds like people who have neurodivergent brains tend to have more susceptibility to stress and just how their brain is wired. When I think of in childhood and I often take part of the history as I find and I don't know what your experience has been with this that they're more likely to have been victims of being bullied in childhood. I know you do a lot of work with kids. Is that something that has any validity to that?

Speaker 2: 35:27

Oh, absolutely, like we said before, the world is not built for neurodivergent types, right. As much as America is an individualistic society where we celebrate individual greatness, it doesn't work that way in school, right, Standing out in something can be dangerous. It can be life-threatening. If you're the one kid and you have rainbow hair and you wear the pin you're going to, you are identifying yourself in a way that is awesome and brave and wonderful, but also can elicit significant bullying because the system is like you are not like us, right, and my kids that I work with, who are brilliant kids, sometimes smarter than their teachers, right, we'll hear stuff like from adults like well, if you're so smart, how come you can't? Right? Or I thought you were some sort of genius. If the kid gets something wrong, like because there is an ill fit, the environment, and this is why people develop the masking Right, the idea like I'm going to pass right to to go and I'm a neurodivergent adult, right, I was just at my kids school this evening and I did fine. Nobody would have guessed that I've 144 IQ and I have ADHD because I've gotten very good at pretending to be like them, right, but there's a cost to that and it's nice to actually come on this podcast and be my sort of authentic, all over the place neuro spicy self, because this is not masking, this is just like hey, this is Dr Matt. Right, so we need to have spaces where you can drop the neuro typical act and be neurodivergent. Right. And sometimes that's like the kids got to go to public school because we can't put them somewhere else, but they can go to the chess club at the library that meets at 330. And they go there and it's like, ah, you know, it's like at the end of the day, when you take your broth or your pie off, it's like, ah, yes, good, and like it's not unlike that. Right, so many kids I know who do the arts right there dancers, there's singers, their theater kids, they're like I look forward to that all day. The worst day at theater rehearsal is better than the best day in gym class. Right, because that's a place where they can be a typical. Right, and everybody needs a space to be themselves. Everybody needs a space to let their hair down. But the more hair you have to let down to further the metaphor, right, the more important those spaces become. So this is why you see a lot of neurodivergent people find online communities, do a lot of video games, do a lot of audiobooks and podcasts, because it those are spaces they can create, they become bespoke, right. I mean so many my kids are on discord because it's like this is a discord server for people who really like one piece but don't like the live-action remake. That's the discord we're in, right. This is the discord for people who are accepted to Yale but don't know how they got into Yale. That's a discord that exists, right, so you can hyper specialize, which is amazing because, you know, when we were kids, the internet was in its gestational period, right, we didn't have those sort of things. So, like the idea of Putting out a virtual flag and saying to all the other weirdos like here I am and they can go cool, there you are, right, it's. You know, I mean to make a very nerdy reference. You know it's like Lord of the Rings. Like the big ends are lit, gondor calls for aid, and if you got that reference, you might be neurodivergent, right. I mean, if you know what page in the original Tolkien that was on, you are definitely a gifted kid, right. Welcome to the club we meet on Tuesdays. It's gonna be great and that's the thing it's like, that's the power of community, because, you know, making that reference connects me to people and whether you listen to this podcast tomorrow or two years from now, you and I are having a moment that transcends time and space. Because it's like. This nerdy psychologist said this thing and I went oh, I love that thing. And now we're boom, we're bonded, and now we want more of that. We want more of those people, want more of those experiences, because psychologically it is about as healthy as you can get.

Speaker 1: 39:58

That's where we will end this week's episode. We will hear the second half of the interview with dr Matt next week. If you have any questions or comments, feedback, please reach out to me at dr Michael lens at gmailcom. Until next week go, team Fibro.