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Addiction Medicine Made Easy | Fighting back against addiction
Understanding Trauma: How I Found Out that My Brain Stores Trauma on the Left Side
This podcast episode delves into the groundbreaking concept of dual brain psychology and its implications for understanding trauma and addiction. Dr. Fred Schiffer shares his insights on how different hemispheres of the brain process trauma and the methods developed to facilitate healing through dual brain dynamics.
• Explanation of split brain studies and their significance
• Distinction between the functions of each brain hemisphere
• Insights on how trauma resides in different sides of the brain
• Connection between cravings and brain hemisphere activity
• The cumulative effect of trauma and its relation to addiction
• Gender dynamics and patterns in trauma experiences
• Therapeutic approaches using hemispheric stimulation
• Call for clinicians and patients to explore dual brain psychology
To contact Dr. Grover: ammmadeeasy@fastmail.com
Welcome to the Addiction Medicine Made Easy podcast. Hey there, I'm Dr Casey Grover, an addiction medicine doctor based on California's Central Coast. For 14 years I worked in the emergency department seeing countless patients struggling with addiction. Now I'm on the other side of the fight, helping people rebuild their lives when drugs and alcohol take control. Thanks for tuning in. Let's get started. This episode is going to be on trauma and one particular psychological approach on how to understand how trauma affects the brain and how to treat trauma. My guest today is Dr Fred Schiffer, a psychiatrist affiliated with Harvard Medical School. His expertise is on dual brain psychology. He's the author of the book Goodbye Anxiety, depression, addiction and PTSD the Life-Changing Science of Dual Brain Psychology. My interview with Dr Schiffer is pretty science heavy so I will be adding in commentary to clarify here and there throughout the episode. We start our interview with Dr Schiffer talking about split brain studies.
Speaker 2:Split brain studies were studies that were done on people with intractable epilepsy and so there was a radical surgery done and their brain was split. So the brain looks like a walnut it's wrinkled and has two halves and a stem between the two. And the stem in people is called the corpus callosum and it's about actually this size and it fits in here and you can actually cut it. And if you cut it, you have a left brain and a right brain, and we've all heard of the left brain and the right brain, and the reason we've heard about it is because of the split brain studies, and the gist of the studies is that each hemisphere of the brain can support a different moment.
Speaker 2:Now, when you cut the corpus callosum, you actually have two different people and one side wanted to be a race car driver when he grew up and the other side wanted to be a draftsman. One woman wanted to wear a certain dress and was buttoning it and her other hand was unbuttoning. It didn't want to wear it. One guy wanted to smoke a cigarette and his other hand put out the cigarettes. In other words, it's not just that there's a left brain, but there's a left mind and there's a right mind and they're different and they have different aspirations and different personalities.
Speaker 2:And I did the last split brain study from the California series, which is the group that won the Nobel Prize Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize and he had died about two years before I went out there and I did it with Joseph Bogan, who was the neurosurgeon who performed the surgeries, and so what one discovered was that this operation created two minds, two autonomous minds with different dispositions and different ambitions and intentions, and I studied that in college and didn't really grasp it. And I think a lot of people read these studies and don't understand what the real significance is. And even today there are people who argue that there aren't two minds in split-brain people, and to me, obviously there are.
Speaker 1:A little summary from me. The brain has two sides, a left and a right. Sometimes they're referred to as hemispheres. What Dr Schiffer is saying is that each side acts differently, and normally the two sides of the brain are connected, but when the connection was cut as a surgery to treat epilepsy, the two sides were no longer in contact with each other, and so scientists could see each side acting independently. And that's what he's referencing when he talks about one side wanting to be a race car driver and the other side wanting to be a draftsman. He next goes on to describe some of the connections of the brain.
Speaker 1:Here's a summary to get you ready for this part and I oversimplified this a bit, so take what I say with a grain of salt. The left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body. With vision, it's a little more complicated the left brain controls the right side of vision and the right brain controls the left side of the vision. Each eye sees the entire image in front of it. So the left half of what each eye sees, called the left visual field, is controlled by the right brain, and the right half of what each eye sees is called the right visual field and that is controlled by the left brain. Again, there's a crossover Back to the interview. Dr Schiffer shares a study he did on this. Back to the interview.
Speaker 2:Dr Schiffer shares a study he did on this and I did the first study of a split brain patients of a psychological nature, and I put two words on each side of a screen so that only one hemisphere could see it and they were the same words in different orders and their 35 words and half were positive and half were negative and they rotated and it turned out that in this particular patient his right brain had a high opinion of himself. So some of the words were like honest and some were dishonest, some were happy, some were unhappy, and so they tended to be opposite, but positive or negative. And so they tended to be opposite, but positive or negative. And so this one person had a right brain, a mind in his right brain that felt good about himself. His mind and his left brain had a devalued feeling about himself and scored himself poorly.
Speaker 2:The other patient that we studied when we were setting up the equipment he told me that he had been bullied as a child and I said does that upset you? He said, of course not. It happened so many years ago. Now he's about 50 years old and the bullying was in high school, when he was in school, I'm not sure what grade. And so I injected a bunch of bully questions and, as he told me, we had them answered to pointing the pegs from none to extreme with each hand, and graduate students watched each hand, and so we got very accurate responses to the questions and to the bully questions. As he told me, his right hand signing for his speaking left brain was not upset by the bullies. He answered no or none for about 10 questions. It was the same question in different form but his left hand signing for his right brain and on all the other questions they were similar so they diverted and he was extremely upset at the 40 of his finger in his right brain by the bullies which happened 35 years ago or 40 years ago.
Speaker 1:A little clarification from me. The patient that Dr Schiffer is referring to had the connection between the two sides of his brain cut to address his epilepsy, and the left brain did not have a negative response to questions about bullying, but the right brain did have a negative response to the questions about bullying, so the two halves of his brain responded differently to the same set of questions. Back to the interview.
Speaker 2:Back to the interview, and so I think that this is what I expect, and I think that old trauma, like old soldiers, never die. But what I've discovered is trauma lives in one brain hemisphere, one brain mind. This I wasn't expecting. Or if I was expecting, I thought all the bad stuff would be in the right brain, and it turns out not to be the case. It's about 50-50, maybe a little more negativity in the right hemisphere, but it's close and you have to test a person individually to see the difference. And so, if I can indulge you, I'll give you our tests for hemisphere surveillance and we'll see if you have a difference between your hemispheres. About 20% of my patients don't feel a difference initially. Of my patients don't feel a difference initially, but usually by the end of their treatment they don't, and so you want to give it a try.
Speaker 1:Dr Schiffer's reference to testing for hemispheric valence refers to a test that figures out which side of the brain stores trauma. I do it with him, but before I did I had some questions. So you mentioned that when you cut the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, the corpus callosum, two minds emerge. Are they operating at the same time, and does one dominate over the other, and how can you tell?
Speaker 2:Well, you can tell, with the guy who wanted to smoke, so he would light up with one hand, I think his right hand, with his left brain, and I think his right brain didn't want him to smoke, so his left hand would put the cigarettes out. So that's an indication that there is a different intention and there were many different paradigms. One was a woman who was a split-brain patient and they showed a picture again to her left visual field and so it was only seen by her right brain. She started giggling and then they asked her why she was giggling, started giggling and then they asked her why she was giggling and she said I don't know. You've got a funny machine, doctor, which was a confabulation, got it and and she had no idea why she was laughing in her left brain but her right brain saw a playboy nude that Murray had presented to her left side and a Playboy nude in an experiment with a very distinguished Caltech professor, which felt to be very funny, or at least it induced a giggle. I can't attest to what she was actually experiencing, but she was laughing and we had an explanation for why she was laughing. She was shown in a Playboy nude and it was in a funny context, and so these are the kind of experiments that showed that there were two minds in these people.
Speaker 2:Now, later, I found a German scientist who was purporting to show movies to the lateral visual fields in intact people and get different emotional responses. I did not expect that and he never really developed it, but he published about three papers on it, developed it, but he published about three papers on it. And, and the side that was upset was a movie of people getting shock treatment I don't know whether without anesthesia or not and so it was upsetting movie and people were upset more on one side than the other, and so I I couldn't afford this. He had a million-dollar machine, and so I decided I could do the same thing by going like this Well, as I'm looking at my right lateral visual field, now I'm looking at my left lateral visual field, and I didn't feel any different.
Speaker 2:Years later I did, and I'd used to this, but at that time I didn't. But I went to the office that day and I tried it on my first patient. It was a Vietnam vet who was doing well with his PTSD and I asked him to try it and he looked out his right lateral visual field which would stimulate his left brain Because again, like the picture, it's a cross Right. And he got very upset and he said that picture behind you not the picture, but that plant behind you looks like the jungle. And he was very upset. I said really, I said quickly, I said look out the other side, and he smiled. He sat back and said no, it said quickly, I said look out the other side and he smiled, he sat back and said no, it's a nice looking plant and I knew I was in business.
Speaker 1:More commentary from me. This is really science heavy, but stay with me. So the experiments on people with split brains due to epilepsy surgery showed that each half of the brain had a mind of its own, and further research on people with intact brains demonstrate that showing people the same upsetting movie evoked more stress on one side of the brain than the other. So Dr Schiffer tried this with a war veteran with an intact brain. Again, there was no surgery here, just a regular intact brain.
Speaker 1:If you remember our discussion of brain anatomy, the left half of what each eye sees, called the left visual field, is controlled by the right brain and the right half of what each eye sees, called the right visual field, is controlled by the left brain. Remember, there's a crossover. So this veteran, just by covering one eye and half of the visual field of the other eye, was able to isolate each of his two visual fields the left visual field and then the right visual field and his description of what he saw when he looked at a plant out of each side of his vision, that is, each visual field separately was different, field separately was different, which meant that Dr Schiffer had discovered that trauma was stored differently in each half of the brain in people with intact brains, which brings us to the field that Dr Schiffer is an expert in dual brain psychology psychology, there is an idea that you can smish the two hemispheres together and make a whole person.
Speaker 2:I don't subscribe to that. I think that there are two people and they fight with each other or they can cooperate, and that you have to talk to them and you have to get them to get along and negotiate, and it's just like any relationship between two people.
Speaker 1:So that brings me to my next question was when people are connected as in. Their corpus callosum has not been cut by a surgeon which mind dominates? Has not been cut by a surgeon which mind dominates?
Speaker 2:Either one can dominate, and so some people have a negative hemisphere. It could be on the left side or the right side, and it dominates their whole life, and so they only know themselves to be an addict and a failure. And for the first time in my office they might experience themselves as successful. And then there are other people who only experience themselves as successful and might see themselves in a negative light out the other side. And then there are people who see themselves similarly on both sides, but most of my patients have I'd say, 80% have a difference between their sides.
Speaker 2:And how is that correlated with addiction? Very interestingly, you tell Okay, so if I have somebody comes to see me and they're drinking alcohol, I can do this lateral visual test and on one side they'll have very high cravings and they'll want to drink and I can have an auction. I can say I have a beer in my refrigerator, how much do you pay for it? And I get them off at $500. Refrigerator, how much will you pay for it? And I get them off at $500. And if I have them, look out the other side they won't pay me anything.
Speaker 2:And we did two studies on craving and they both got very strong results showing that if you stimulated the correct hemisphere you could diminish cravings significantly. And now we have an FCA study with funding from the National Institute for Drug Abuse that we're running and we should complete it in the fall, I should complete my section in May and it looks like we're getting very good results. This is with fentanyl addiction and what we're doing is we measure their visual field test and then we treat. We put a light that's an LED, on the positive hemisphere, over the positive hemisphere, and it has a very powerful effect. It's stronger than the visual thing. It does the same thing, but it's about two or three times stronger and we use that in our studies and it decreases cravings dramatically.
Speaker 1:Does it vary person to person as to which hemisphere is the addicted one?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Is there any explanation as to why?
Speaker 2:Not any good explanation Understood. It may have to do with development and it may have to do with the type of trauma. I think it probably has more to do with the development and I think that the healthy side kind of comes into being in late adolescence without the person really being aware of it. And so do you want to give this?
Speaker 1:a try, I'd love to. I take care of patients with addiction all day long, and most, if not all, of my patients have some sort of trauma history. And if they don't, I probably just haven't asked enough questions yet.
Speaker 2:So, yes, let's see what we can come up with Trauma is ubiquitous, and especially in addiction.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that addiction, like other things people do, is to reduce pain. 100% yeah, and opioids are very good at reducing pain. It's just that they have a lot of side effects.
Speaker 1:Well, and they also treat both physical and emotional pain.
Speaker 2:And treat it well, and it's good for depression too. And I think the idea that depression comes from bad chemicals or bad genes I think the idea that you know depression comes from bad chemicals or bad genes I think it misses the point that there's bad trauma that's causing the symptoms and that's why my book title has so many syndromes in it Anxiety, depression, addiction and PTSD because they all come out of trauma anxiety, depression, addiction and PTSD, because they all come out of trauma.
Speaker 1:Dr Schiffer now gets me ready to see which half of my brain stores my trauma.
Speaker 1:I have post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD, from my time practicing medicine in the emergency department, so this was very interesting for me.
Speaker 1:It's not very clear from the audio what I did during this exercise, so let me describe it. What I do is I use my two hands to block my vision in a particular way. I isolated the left visual field of my left eye by covering the middle portion of the vision of my left eye and covering the right eye completely. This isolated the left visual field, which is controlled by my right brain. I then isolated the right visual field out of my right eye by covering the middle portion of the vision of my right eye and then covering my left eye completely. So this isolated my right visual field, which is controlled by my left brain, and Dr Schiffer had me think about a difficult experience from the emergency department in both setups. And then he asked me what I felt to see which side my trauma is stored on. When we did this, I started by isolating the left lateral field of my left eye and then moved on to looking out of the right lateral field of my right eye. Here we go.
Speaker 2:And so so what I want you to do is maybe get your iPhone, or you can use your hands and cover one eye and the middle of the other eye Cover the medial side. So you're looking at the lateral visual field, all right?
Speaker 1:I'll set this up.
Speaker 2:And if you think of something, say somewhat upsetting.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to think about some of my ER experiences.
Speaker 2:Okay, and then see how much anxiety or whatever distress you want to label from zero to ten. So we have something to compare Somewhere between a zero and a one. Okay, now try the other side. So cover your left eye entirely and the middle of your right eye Got it, and think of the same thing.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I'll be honest. I took care of a young woman who hung herself. It's one of my more traumatic cases from the ER. I don't get much of anything when I'm looking at that lateral aspect of my left eye, and I feel it more when I look at the lateral aspect of my right eye.
Speaker 2:And can you give me a number Like a three or a four? Okay, so from zero to three or four, that sounds about right, okay, well, that's a lot, okay. So it's a four-point difference on a 10-point scale, and that means that the trauma is more in your left brain, and if I were to treat you with my light, I'd put the light over your right brain.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I quite understand all exactly what's happening, so let me get this straight. So when I look out the lateral aspect of my right eye, it triggers me more, so that links to my left brain as to the site of my trauma. And you put the light affecting my right brain correct. How does putting the light on the right brain help heal the trauma in the left brain?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, what it does is? It stimulates your healthy mind.
Speaker 1:Oh, that makes sense. Well, that was simple.
Speaker 2:For some people they might feel good for the first time with the light treatment and when they felt that they're hopeless and they're always going to be depressed, and they have an experience where they're not depressed and they feel good, and that's an interesting experience. One thing that I bring into my psychology is experience, and I think that experience whether it's a bad experience, like trauma, or a good experience, like having a positive experience it affects the brain and so what I try and do is get these two minds to cooperate and to work together, and I want the healthy mind to be a co-therapist with me and I want the healthy mind to be a co-therapist with me, and the aim of the therapy is to treat the trauma in the traumatized side.
Speaker 1:Me again. I am going to summarize this. Okay, so when I covered my eyes in a way that isolated the vision that goes to the right side of my brain, I didn't have any triggering or PTSD symptoms. But when I covered my eyes in a way that isolated the vision that goes to the left side of my brain, I did have some triggering, and so the trauma is therefore stored in the left side of my brain, and Dr Schiffer uses a special light in such cases to stimulate the side of the brain where trauma is not stored, to make the non-traumatized side of the brain more active. As we want the side of the brain without trauma to dominate, and since trauma is linked with addiction, having the side without trauma being more active helps to treat the addiction, we continue. What's the biggest point difference you get when people go from one visual field to the other?
Speaker 2:Four is very healthy. So I'd say, you know, maybe occasionally I've seen an eight, but I'd say four or five is is a healthy response healthy response, meaning that there's a significant trauma imprint upon that hemisphere of the brain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and even a one point difference is significant and and and. A two point difference you can really work with and and. If somebody's got a four-point difference, that's all I'm, and you know. Some people have a five or a six and it can vary, but if you have a big difference it usually stays that way.
Speaker 1:What is the significance of the size of the difference?
Speaker 2:What is the significance of the size of the difference? Well, it means that one side is very traumatized and the other not so much, and if you have a big difference, it's an advantage in treatment.
Speaker 1:Are you noticing more of a difference in people who have a singular traumatic event, like a near-death experience, people who are traumatized multiple times, like a victim of child abuse, or are you seeing it more in the so-called little T's, like people that were bullied for many years? They were never physically hurt, but the kind of constant negative emotional state led to PTSD?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what I feel about trauma is that it's a snowball. Oh yes, it could begin as maybe a mother saying oh, you're a loser and you're not going to mouth anything. And then the kid doesn't want to go to school because he doesn't have confidence, and then the teacher gets angry with him, and then his peers don't like him, and so he gets in with bad kids, and by the time he's a junior high, he's smoking dope, and by the time he's a teen, he's into some hard drugs, and so it's a cumulative trauma. And so it's a cumulative trauma. And so what I see mostly are what you're saying the small traumas that escalate.
Speaker 2:And then, when the person is using hard drugs, they forget the past and they forget how they got there and they're an addict. And then, if you're an addict, that's a trauma. Hi, I'm Fred, I'm an addict. And then, if you're an addict, that's a trauma. Hi, I'm Fred, I'm an addict, and that's really humiliating. And so that becomes a trauma, and it's not only not related to the snowball of trauma, but it's blamed on your genetics and your undiscovered brain chemistry that makes you an addict, and it's a disease and you can never recover from it. You can go into remission, but you never become normal, and I think that that's really harmful. And so I like to say I don't have any addicts in my practice.
Speaker 1:I was going to say I've never thought to think of the addiction in and of itself as traumatizing. I think I've maybe thought that a few times, but I was so focused on trying to understand the why. So it seems like to your point, a snowball is the perfect analogy. Smaller, minor emotional traumas lead to worse behavior, more traumas, ultimately addiction, more traumas, incarceration, major traumas, ultimately addiction, more traumas, incarceration, major traumas, and the cycle continues.
Speaker 2:Right. Wow, that's profound yeah.
Speaker 1:And true. Yes, oh my gosh, it really was not much on PTSD on my addiction medicine boards but gosh, in the last couple of weeks I've just been diving into this with my patients. Gosh, I have so many female victims of sexual assault. Oh, it just breaks my heart. I get super triggered and emotional when I'm taking care of them because some of them have just been so brutalized, and sometimes at even an early age. I have one patient who the sexual assault happened at such an early age she cannot remember at what age it started, only that there was an age at which it stopped to deal with.
Speaker 2:It's often easier to deal with a drunken father who's not sexually abusive than someone who's sexually abusive. It's a very complicated thing for a woman to deal with and very traumatic.
Speaker 1:I've noticed a couple of themes emerge from my female patients that talk about their sexual assault. One is many of them became promiscuous afterwards, which I was surprised by, but it makes perfect sense. They felt very out of control when they were assaulted and they wanted to be in control and not have it happen again, and many of them talked about being promiscuous afterwards. Talk to me about how the age at which the trauma starts affects the effect of trauma on their life and then your work in trying to heal from trauma.
Speaker 2:The trauma that I see in a suburban psychiatric practice is lifelong and began in a dysfunctional child, and it's what we call complex PTSD. Dysfunctional child and it's what we call complex PTSD. And my experience with a few combat veterans who have combat PTSD, which is clearly an adult trauma. They often have childhood trauma that comes out later, and I had a patient who was a veteran and later, much later, I learned that he was sexually abused by his stepfather as a child and that wasn't, you know, the only thing that was acknowledged through most of the treatment was combat, and so sometimes there's a connection between the two. I'm sure that there are people who are just traumatized, like yourself, in a traumatic situation as an adult, and I don't see that often. That's just not what comes to me. In other words, there are many problems that I don't treat just because it doesn't come my way.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:I can only see what's before me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I interviewed a couple of different people on my podcast about trauma. One was a firefighter who was trying to cope with being a firefighter and, after a back injury, got on opioids, and he talked about post-traumatic stress disorder in the firefighter industry. And that's a definite unmet need is mental health resources for our first responders. Thank you to anyone out there who's helping California with our wildfires today. And then I spoke with another man and he has a very interesting story. His name is Keeper Katrin Whitney.
Speaker 1:He's an author and he was sexually assaulted as a child by a babysitter and then his sisters were sexually assaulted by a family member and he felt a lot of guilt and shame after he learned that they were being assaulted and he had stood by as a brother not knowing and not helped. And we talked when I interviewed him about layers of trauma and it probably was more of the snowball thing, like you were saying, and it's a little bit in my mind. It was almost like he was talking about flavors of trauma and it's almost like picking the flavors out of wine, like, oh, there's a little bit of strawberry, ooh, there's a little bit of current, and we were talking about pulling out the nuances of the different traumas he had experienced. I'm curious if something like that comes up in your practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my feeling is that trauma is whatever hurts us Well said, and that can be being bullied. It can be a parent who's absent or degrading. Many parents are very hostile to their children, at least in my experience and then there's sexual molestations and there's just a lot of aggression, a lot of sibling rivalry and abuse and there's peer abuse. So the human being needs to learn how to be loving and compassionate and helpful, and that's what dual-brain psychology is about. It's about teaching the two minds, instead of fighting each other and trying to dominate each other, to learn how to get along and cooperate and support each other.
Speaker 1:It sounds like this is something that every human on planet Earth should be doing.
Speaker 2:I hope so. Yeah, I have my book back here and so I can reach it, so if I can give this a plug, I hope everybody goes out and buys it. It's on Amazon. I think it's an enjoyable read. It's got a lot of meat to it, but it's very digestible and I think it's a fun read.
Speaker 1:This is your book. Goodbye Anxiety, depression, addiction and PTSD. The Life-Changing Science of Dual Brain Psychology. That's the book we're talking about.
Speaker 2:That's right, I'll be buying it. That's right, I'll be buying it.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you and there's science in there too, but the science is presented in a way that is easy to understand and is interesting. Actually, we're talking about it in my practice. We were going to make a little free library. I don't know if you've seen those around your neighborhood where people just have a small, almost like a little mini house or a newspaper box where you put in books and anyone in the neighborhood can come by and donate a book or borrow a book. But we were going to make a small recovery library in our office where patients could borrow books, and this would be a beautiful addition to the to the library, right, yeah, so, and if I may ask, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the dual brain psychology idea. Just because I'm very left brained, I'm very analytical and right brained, being more creative. It's very fascinating to me that the trauma can go either direction. Do you see a difference in which direction the trauma goes in somebody who has a science degree versus who's an artist?
Speaker 2:Do you see a difference in which direction the trauma goes in somebody who has a science degree versus who's an artist? No, I think that there are two separate things. In other words, I think that there's something about the left brain being more logical and the right brain being more poetic, but it's also true that the left brain controls the right side of the body and it's true that the left brain has speech and the right brain doesn't have speech, so that they have certain differences in their properties and it turns out that the mind in the left brain or in the right brain might hold the trauma and the healthy side can be, you know, left or right, and the troubled side is neurotic and it is troubled and it's symptomatic and it's laden with anxiety and despair. And I don't see a connection between a poetic personality and a neurotic personality.
Speaker 1:You know, my patients talk all the time about their addict brain and I'm thinking that it really explains the fact that someone can be the nicest, most wonderful person, sober, and be very different, impulsive, aggressive, while using it.
Speaker 2:You can wake up on one side and by lunchtime you're on the other side, and also, just like two different people, there can be an external occurrence that stimulates one side or the other, and so you might be depressed in the morning, and then you get a call from a coworker that there's a problem and you got to pull yourself together and fix it and your depression goes away because you switched hemispheres.
Speaker 1:Is that why people like me get addicted to work? Because when they're working, the better part of the brain is functioning and allows them to leave the bad behaviors behind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could be, and then maybe the vacations are uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:I get horribly uncomfortable on vacation. How did you know Me again? And yes, if you're wondering, I just outed my own work addiction, which helps me stay calm and focus, and that was very enlightening for me. It explains why my anxiety can paradoxically flare while I am on vacation. In the next section, dr Schiffer talks about how to access the side of the brain without trauma to calm someone down. In other words, when a person is anxious or triggered, they can cover their vision in a way that only the side of the brain that does not hold the trauma can see and is therefore active. And he's actually rigged up a special set of glasses to allow people to do this. There's a picture of these glasses on the cover of his book. Here we go. Do you have any patients that can actually almost choose which side? Are they that able to control their brain?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what you can do is you can go like this and switch it. So if you're really upset and this is your good side you go like this.
Speaker 1:So you use your visual fields.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow. And then you can talk to it. Once you kind of get the gist of this, you can say now listen, harry, I know you're really upset in there, but we're not in Vietnam anymore. I'm going to protect you. And so you can actually talk to it.
Speaker 2:And sometimes I'll talk to the patient's troubled side. I'll say listen, harold, I need you to cooperate now. Now get in the back. Get in the back and stop causing all this chaos. And the interesting thing is the patient says you know, I feel better, john and I have sunglasses that can stimulate one side or the other and you can wear them, wow. And so in the session I have the person. They'll say should I put on the negative side or the positive side? And I'll say well, let's sort the negative side first, and then I'll have a conversation with them about. So how are you feeling? And very anxious, you know. And what do you feel that that's about? What's it remind you of? We often go back to the past. Don't remind me of my mother screaming at me You're a loser and a bum and you'll never amount to anything. The pain still resonates from that.
Speaker 1:Let me just get this straight. You are using different sides of the visual field to be able to provide different therapy to each side of the brain. Did I get that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, there is one method. It's called further biomodulation. It's an intense LED that we put on the forehead, that we have patents for and we also talk and we have an ambition to get the sides to cooperate with each other.
Speaker 1:Now do you do specific trauma work with the patients where you go to the original trauma and talk about it and re-expose them to it in a therapeutic way as a part of your methodology? It and re-expose them to it in a therapeutic way as a part of your methodology.
Speaker 2:I would say I do more, just what would be called traditional dynamic psychotherapy. Okay, and so I think it's important to make a connection to the early origins of the trauma, and when a person can align their present feeling with their past feeling, there's an aha moment that is very cathartic and healing. And the other piece to healing is grieving and bearing and being able to not run from the panic, not run from the trauma, but to be able to say you know, I can bear this now, and that really changes the dynamic of it. So I don't have a five-step program in treating trauma. It's more in the relationship and in the relationship between the two parts of them. So it's a caring, empathic therapy.
Speaker 1:Well said. Well, I have to say. This hour has flown by. I have learned a ton and can't wait to read your book. Any last thoughts on dual brain, psychology, trauma and addiction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for some reason, clinicians have a hard time putting their hands up and looking at one side of the other, as you were brave enough to do, and it's very hard for clinicians to learn something new. So I hope, if there are any clinicians listening, that they give this a try, and if there are any patients who want to try something new, read the book. You'll enjoy it, whether you subscribe to the theory or not. You know that's for you to decide, but you'll enjoy and it'll be thought provoking and, I hope, helpful.
Speaker 1:Your theory and your approach make perfect sense to me. I look forward to learning more about it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Before we wrap up, a huge thank you to the Montage Health Foundation for backing my mission to create fun, engaging education on addiction, and a shout out to the nonprofit Central Coast Overdose Prevention for teaming up with me on this podcast. Our partnership helps me get the word out about how to treat addiction and prevent overdoses To those healthcare providers out there treating patients with addiction. You're doing life-saving work and thank you for what you do For everyone else tuning in. Thank you for taking the time to learn about addiction. It's a fight we cannot win without awareness and action. There's still so much we can do to improve how addiction is treated. Together we can make it happen. Thanks for listening and remember treating addiction saves lives.