The Pain Factor
What is pain? Where does it come from? Is there anything we can do to control it, overcome it, even leverage it?
This podcast is a comprehensive exploration of physical, mental, and emotional pain. Through shared information, personal narratives, and professional insight, we aim to understand this complex reality.
We want to be clear: this is not a self-help podcast. It is about fostering accountability while maintaining a human approach to sensitive issues. Religion, mysticism and positive thinking are things we purposefully, and adamantly, distance ourselves from.
Before facing the challenge, we get to know it better. This is what this podcast is about.
Join us on this essential quest for understanding, empowerment, and ultimate freedom.
The Pain Factor
TPF #24: Brian Desroches - Why Your Brain Protects You from Change
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Brian Desroches, PhD, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, neuroscientist, and author of Living a Triggered Free Life.
In this eye-opening episode, Brian DesRoches reveals how your brain’s survival bias keeps you stuck in self-sabotage, anxiety, and old habits—and how, with specific techniques, you can harness neuroscience to create lasting change. You’ll discover how emotional memories—both past and “of the future”—shape your reactions and why triggers aren’t just random, but neural networks stored deep in your brain.
Purchase Brian's book here.
Learn more about Brian's work at www.briandesroches.com.
The Pain Factor is a Project Fourtress podcast.
Project Fourtress is a secular, humanist project, dedicated to find answers to the physical, mental and emotional pain people experience, as well as offer help to deal with these issues. To learn more about Project Fourtress, please visit fourtress.org.
Welcome to the fight. Welcome to the pain factor. On this episode of The Pain Factor.
SPEAKER_00For me, pain is an awareness of something that limits me from something that I want to do. And I either adjust to it, adapt to it, so I can continue to some degree. The receptors for social pain and physical pain are very close to each other in the brain itself. So sometimes physical pain can have a protective origin, can in fact be, quote, I'm going to use the word psychosomatic, but it's the way the brain manifests a protective mechanism in the body. A trigger happens when the brain does its assessment, data comes in, the brain assesses what is the degree of threat of what's happening around me or what I want to do. If it recognizes one of these memories or emotional learnings, oh, and it recognizes pain and suffering, it immediately activates the trigger, sets off the alarm for adaptive protection, which many times for adults becomes maladaptive. There's a couple things that sometimes I will tell myself or listen to.
SPEAKER_02He's the author of several influential books, including his newly published work, Living a Trigger Free Life, which introduces readers to the neuroscience of emotional learning and a powerful process for updating problems, generating emotional patterns. Brian Desrosch, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to the Pain Factor. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Gustavo. It's looking forward to this. Really good to be here. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Anything you want to add that I missed to uh to mention?
SPEAKER_00I think that was a very good uh description. Um I would add that I'm licensed as a marriage family therapist. That's my primary practice license. And I also do a lot of coaching with the dental profession. Um on communication and management and just dealing with difficult patients and that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_02So tell us a little bit about yourself before we dig in our conversation. We know that you uh have just published this book. Uh as an introduction to our talk, tell us a little bit about your work and your experience.
SPEAKER_00Boy, it's been I was a hospital administrator for a while, but by my mid late 20s, it was pretty clear to me in early third that that wasn't my calling. Uh the pain of realizing all this time and all this effort, and it just didn't touch, it just didn't touch me. So I quit all that, did a transition, and uh fortunately I got a master's degree in counseling in the process, um, not knowing that that was probably going to be much closer to what my destiny was rather than being a hospital administrator. I thoroughly enjoy what I do, particularly now where the possibility, as I say in the book, and as you alluded, talked about, of making enduring transformation. I've seen it in my own life. I've seen it in so many clients where the problems that people have that bring them to, you know, a coach, a psychotherapist, any any helping profession, those problems are for the most part protective mechanisms. In other words, they're not character flaws. You know, all of us, Gustavo, all of us have done, we we do something wrong and then we come down on ourselves. We self-deprecate, negative self-talk. It's even hard for people to believe that negative self-talk is actually a protective mechanism. Yeah, it's like, what do you mean? It's like, no, no, it's a protective mechanism.
SPEAKER_02It's counterintuitive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it is, exactly. And and I was with a group of men last Thursday night who they were had reviewed my book and I was talking with them. And it's a very, it's a very, it's a big, for me it was when I say a paradigm shift, to think that all the time that I have been seeking a solution or healing my behavior problems, my anxieties, my sarcasm at times, my withdrawal and avoidance, that all of those, they weren't problems. They're solutions to problems. And the new neuroscience is telling us that because of the brain's survival bias, it's a learning, a predicting, and adapting process with a survival bias. If it detects anything that is like anything I've learned in the past that is threatening, it will trigger anxiety over a period of time. That anxiety produces behaviors, protective behaviors. Lo and behold, pretty soon we're behaving in ways we push people away, we withdraw it, avoid, we we uh even depression can be a second, oftentimes is a protective mechanism. I've worked with many clients, and that was has been the case. Um that which happened, that awareness at a workshop occurred in 2015, it's just it just opened up my eyes to a whole different way uh of being and working with people. And um the science behind it called memory reconsolidation is very solid, very real.
SPEAKER_02We will get to that. That is very good, good, good. Um what is pain for you, Brian? And you can answer that from any perspective, yeah, personal perspective.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna differentiate two kinds of pain.
SPEAKER_02Perfect.
SPEAKER_00First, physical pain. I've started a new workout using rucking, which is carrying weights when you're walking. Uh-huh. Yes. And my my back is is sore right now. I have pain in my back. It's subtle, you know, to three and I'm one to ten scale. I know it's pain because it limits me. And my attention is partially focused on not exacerbating it, being careful of it, and it's limiting factors. One of the ways I don't know pain is it limits me. It's something that's happening. But the other kind of pain is social pain. Social pain is it can be physical, but it's sensations, emotions, you know, tightness in the chest, nausea in the stomach, uh, you know, stuck in the throat. We have words to describe the sensations of emotional pain. Gustavo, what's interesting is the receptors for social pain and physical pain are very close to each other in the brain itself. So sometimes physical pain, as you've noted in some of your and the people you've talked to and you've had on your show, can have a protective origin, can in fact be, quotes, I'm gonna use the word psychosomatic, but it's the way the brain manifests uh a protective mechanism in the body. So for me, pain is an awareness of something that limits me from something that I want to do. And I either adjust to it, adapt to it, like with my back, you know, I'm gonna stretch and do some things, maybe put some biofreeze on it or something, or wear a salon pods so I can adapt, so I can continue to some degree do and be active and that kind of thing, both in my life emotionally, but also physically.
SPEAKER_02So we can include there on the second kind, the emotional and the mental pain. You just mentioned memory reconsolidation, and that is so deep. But before we get there, uh, and to continue to what you were saying at the very beginning, I want to talk about first why our brain protects us from change. Um I know that we have things like self-sabotage. Yes. Um I know that you also mentioned in your website things like being a people pleaser and the self-criticism. And that last for me was like, how does that prevent me from change? Because if I am self-criticizing, that should mean that I am seeing or identifying something that is not right, and that realization is going to help me find a new solution. However, and again, this isn't this is counterintuitive, that's not exactly how that works. So explain to us, Brian, why do we do all that stuff? Why why our brain is so inclined to self-sabotage, to be a people pleaser, to avoid conflict, and to just uh use self-criticism as a tool to survive, may I say?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, let me differentiate. But because we have, like you and I are on a pretty sophisticated technology right now that our ancestors 20 years ago, 30 couldn't even imagine, can imagine 250,000 years ago, where the only way they could communicate was maybe with drums or banging things and making noises. But the one thing that we still share with our ancestors 250,000 years ago is our brain responds to somebody saying something that, or who do you think you are? Or if I sense, feel that something I'm going to do, and it's it's a feeling, that something I'm gonna do creates anxiety. It it it I boy, I wanna I wanna speak up at a business meeting. And I've I know I can contribute, and I decide to do that, but something stops me. At that moment in time, the brain is reading a threat if I do that. That's no different than our ancestors 250,000 years ago, going, our Stone Age people saying, Oh, there's a Saber II tanger coming. We gotta protect ourselves.
SPEAKER_02Let me certainly track. Let me ask you one question. Sure. Is the mere presence of change or possible change a threat to our brain?
SPEAKER_00It depends on what let's put it this way. First of all, when you want to change something, you don't have a pattern in your brain to do it. There's no pattern. And so because the brain is a patterning process, one of the ways to facilitate change is to practice, like Olympic athletes do, visualize, 80% is in the mind, visualizing, creating patterns. But the other thing, Gustavo, that's that's interesting about it is if the change I want to make involves a behavior or doing something that I learned when I was young would be painful. So the brain would learn it to be painful. Then the brain, I want to do this thing, and I have a story, my one of my first stories about myself, and the book is about that very thing. Is I want to stand up for myself and say, tell a tell this finance guy, hey, you gotta stop putting me down in meetings, doesn't cool, I don't like it. You know, the assertive message. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. And the reason I couldn't do it, I had the skills, kind of. But a reason I couldn't do it is I learned in my past, in the first seven, eight, nine years of my life, if I speak up, if I use my voice, I could be shamed, I could be ridiculed, I was in danger. My brain learned that. My brain, I didn't learn it. My brain learned it because of my experiences early in childhood. If I speak up, if I assert myself, then, and here's where the prediction comes in. So the brain is always doing a threat assessment. Always, always, always. So if it registers something I want to do or something happens out there, if it like with post-traumatic stress disorder, if it registers a previous experience, i.e. a memory, that what I want to do or what's happening is a threat to me, even though I'm 40, 50, 60 years old, there's no threat. But it feels like it, because that's what my emotional brain learned, then I will that will the brain will trigger anxiety. The anxiety will trigger a will activate a protective behavior. Self-sabotage is a classic example. Uh I've got so many clients I work with, and there's some examples even in the book where people will shoot themselves in the foot, so to speak, because if they're going to do what they want to do, the threat of what might happen to them, which is unconscious, by the way. It's unconscious. You just feel it. Bango, the brain will stop you in your tracks, you withdraw, you'll avoid, you'll get defensive, you get conflictual like that. Um, all those protective now, telling yourself, I'm no good at what I do, I'm incompetent. That way I never have to be visible, I never have to test my competence. And I've worked with one person who's remember saying very well, no, I I know I'm really dumb and stupid. And I am. And where did he learn that? He learned that very young because he was in a school. If he expressed himself, he would, he was a smart kid, very smart, but he would get bullied. Kids would laugh at him. So his brain learned it's better to be stupid than it is to feel the pain of being humiliated, shamed, and bullied. He didn't know that until we brought it to conscious awareness and could change what he learned 30, it was about 32, 33 years prior to when he saw me. So basically that's what we're always learning. We're always the brain is always associating this with this, with an emotional state, with behavior, or what's happening in the world. It's always doing that. It's called associative learning.
SPEAKER_02You also talk about triggers. Uh, it's part of your memory reconsolidation talks. My first question for that would be what triggers are, because and we discussed this on our our very first meeting. Today everyone is triggered. Everything is is triggering. People get triggered about everything all the time. Yeah. And the bad thing about bastardizing a word is that you steal the meaning of that word. Right. Right. You you you forget about context all the time. Yes, yes. And triggering used to be a different thing. And that is not the case anymore. So, what is a trigger?
SPEAKER_00Great question. I had the same challenge when I was writing the book. And that's why in the beginning I kind of go through how where did we get the word triggers? Where did it come from? You know, World War I, post-traumatic stress, which they didn't know back then, was you know, shell shock or, you know, soldier's heart. Um, what triggers are? Are they actually neural networks within the brain that have information? So there's positive and negatives. Let's talk about the negatives. Negative triggers that have information about experiences stored in that network, experiences that are involved with pain and suffering. When we're born, two years old, three, six, what whatever. And trigger, a trigger happens when the brain does its assessment, data comes in, the brain assesses what is the degree of threat of what's happening around me or what I want to do. If it recognizes one of these memories or emotional learnings, oh, and it recognizes pain and suffering, it immediately activates the trigger, sets off the alarm for adaptive protection, which many times for adults becomes maladaptive. Can those freeze be hidden for decades? Oh my gosh. Not only they're there for decades, they actually get reinforced. Let me tell you how they get reinforced, Gustavo. You've probably heard people, I certainly have, and I've done it myself, say, Well, what do you want? And they will say, I don't want to be upset. I don't want to get frustrated with my children. I don't want to be limited in my career. They will say what they don't want, not what they do want. When you say what you don't want, you're actually focusing on it. It's called the quantum xeno effect. When you are looking at the I don't want to be unhappy, I don't want to get nervous. You're actually focusing on the neural network that creates the nervousness right there. And you're strengthening the negatives as opposed to saying, I want to be open and responsive to people, even when they're upset or they criticize me. I want to be open and responsive. Very positive. So it moves in a different direction. That's then there's positive triggers too. I was going to ask you about that if there's I mean, I live just above Lake Washington, and I love taking walks along the lake. Because taking walks on the lake, I get to see spring. And the flo the cherry blossoms. And that's a very, very peaceful meditative memory for me. I can sit here and I can think about, and I can feel it. I can I can think about the cherry blossoms and walking the lake. And it puts me in a peaceful state. That's a positive trigger. I'm actually focusing on something, okay, you know, or the hug of a friend or a great meal with with a bunch of friends, and you play cards, and then you remember it later. It's like, oh yeah, I that's wonderful. I am worthy of enjoying life. We don't do that. We don't strengthen our positive triggers, we strengthen our negative ones. Unintentionally.
SPEAKER_02You talk about emotional memories. You have already described past memories or a little bit about the effect they have on us. But I remember that you mentioned. Something that was completely uh new to me and that I could not understand. I I remember telling you, you will need to really explain that to me and the audience. You talked about memories of the future. Yes. And I I also remembered that I said memories from the future, and you said no, memories of the future. So that's like sounds like a movie. It sounds like a it's a contradiction in terms in a way. Wow, well, yeah, yeah. And also, I remember that you said that, and it was also so new to me, uh, I I I was left uh speechless. You said that our brain cannot, and correct me if I'm wrong, please. Our brain cannot tell time, not regarding reading a watch or interpreting what a clock is showing. But you said, and I'm I am paraphrasing here, that when our brain relieves a traumatic, painful event, it cannot tell, it's not able to tell whether that was 10 years ago, a month ago, or if this is happening today. The brain experiences that feeling, that trauma, that pain. Right there. And so our body reacts to that quote unquote present feeling, even though reality is not aligning with that with the previous occurrence of that trauma. So memories of the future and our brain not being able to tell time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So let me clarify. So I I know it's a turtle time right now because my neocortex, my thinking brain knows how to read a watch or read the the time on my on my computer. My thinking brain knows it. My emotional brain does not know time. So the information that's stored in the emotional brain, so that's why we can have get all upset. And we for a moment go, now wait a minute, wait a minute. Where's this coming from? And we realize our thinking brain intervenes and realizes, wow, that no, I'm I'm okay right now. No, I'm okay. I'm gonna be fine. So there's the thinking brain that we have knows it. Now, when the emotional brain takes over, it does not know time. That's why post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, is so difficult. I, you know, for some vets, I've worked with some. I mean, just the a loud car in the street could trigger a trauma response, big trauma response. And at that point in time, for their body and brain, they are back at war. They're back in the field, they're back there. They're not, but to their body and brain, they are, as Biso Vandekurg says in his the the body keeps the score. And that score is scored, is stored in the state you were in when the event occurred, and when gets reactivated, unless the thinking brain gets activated, it does not know the difference. And so that's why it can feel true that I'm going to be rejected and shamed right now, even though that happened in grade three, and there's no threat right now. My brain doesn't know it, and it'll react.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So that is what triggers things like panic attacks or anxiety attacks when your body shuts down because it knows your brain knows that you're going to die.
SPEAKER_00There's something here that is so threatening. It can even be the existential threat of death for young children. They don't know if their mother or father ignores them. They don't, they just feel it. They just feel, oh my God. And that gets stored as information in the brain of the child, not consciously. Not consciously. It's not like, you know, mommy, I'm just learning right now that if I ask you for what I want and you tell me no and push me away, that means you don't love me. No, children don't know that. But that's what they're learning. That's what they're learning.
SPEAKER_02What is an example of a memory of the future?
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay. So there's two kinds. There's our planning memories. You know, I've so after I'm finished here, I'm already seeing what the future is. I have an idea for the rest of my day. I've got some writing to do, friends for dinner, and you know, planning. Those events haven't happened yet. Those are just plans. They're not really memories, because I'll forget them tomorrow and the next day. However, all of us create and really focus on future events. We create memories with our partner about life and what's going to happen. And gee, we're going to take this trip. And one of the biggest griefs that people have, for example, is if they lose a partner, say someone, their child or someone in their life passes, they're not mourning the past, they're mourning all the futures that will never be, that they've planned, that they've hoped for, that they've looked forward to. They've actually created memories, which are neural networks of a future event. And we do that. And that's really important because let's say I live in a neighborhood that's dangerous. Okay, so I know when I go out, I've already anticipating I need to be on an alert, on guard. And I'm already in that because I've lived into that future at that point in time. If I say, if what's going on in the globe, I will tell you, are really functions of emotional learning and negative memories of the future, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_02I learned some time ago a technique, I think it's what you mentioned before, visualizing, that was very useful to me because someone told me that what you have can visualize something as already happening, uh, your brain cannot tell the decision whether that happened or not. Similar to what we were talking about, the brain, the emotional brain-telling time. So, for instance, if I am training for a marathon and I want to uh reach a specific time, I constantly imagine myself running through the finish line and looking at the clock and seeing that time. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I am not scared about that. I know it's going to it's going to be something that is going to demand sacrifice and consistency and pain, and I am fine with all of that, but it's not something that my brain tells me, no. What are you thinking about? Do you have any idea about what you're you will be putting your body through? So is that pain doing that?
SPEAKER_00Is that a legit tool that we can recommend people to use? Oh, yeah, I think it's very important. In fact, I tell people that before you start doing any like new communication skills or um anything. And and we be engulfed to skiing to running a marathon, see I call it the SFT approach. See it, feel it, and think it. SFT, seal, feel, think. So when you see yourself doing it, and you feel yourself doing it, and you think yourself, I am going to complete this, I can do this, you're creating, you're creating a neural network in the brain. And that neural network is a what they call an engram. It's a schema of the future that hasn't been created yet, but you're focusing on it.
SPEAKER_02So something physically happens.
SPEAKER_00Yes, in the brain. Your brain. Oh, physically changes. Physically, yep, yep. I could ask you, if you did that for three or four weeks, just like with meditation, changes people's brains. If you did that focusing, seeing it, feeling it, thinking it on a daily basis, in one minute, I can really breathe into it and see it. After about a week or so, if I asked you to think about that and we had a we had you wired up, we'd see where that memory network is in your brain. We would see it fire just like that.
SPEAKER_02That's why it's that is a good memory of the future.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and what's important is that most of us aren't intentional, I would suggest. You know, I have chronic back pain and I've had it for decades because of a surgery. So if I focus on that as limiting me, I will amplify that as opposed to I see myself working out, exercising, I see myself being, I see myself playing golf, at the same time recognizing I have some limitations. I'm not gonna push it too far here. I'm not gonna hurt myself, but I am gonna do this up to the pain, up to the point where, you know, not a good idea. Um, but I'm not gonna let my pain limit me because of uh the threat it represents that I may re-injure myself. No, no. I I have to be cautious, careful, respectful, and strive at the same time.
SPEAKER_02It is a delicate balance, but it's definitely a tool that is really I I wouldn't say life-changing, but it has been extremely positive for me. Brian, what is the feeling of what will happen? Explain that to us.
SPEAKER_00Okay. That's a great question. And I called it that is because we feel the future. We feel it before it happens, because of the brain's predictive process. So I'm thinking right now about the dinner party we're gonna have tonight. And I have a smile in me. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to the meal, to the friends, the conversation. That's the feeling of what will happen in a positive way. Uh-huh. The brain, however, because of its survival bias, will typically, if not always, go to negative interpretations when it doesn't have information about something. Or I think about something. Let's say tonight one of the people coming over was somebody that that person I really butted heads, okay? And I think about that person coming over. I'm going to experience and feel we're already butting heads, even though we're not. It's eight hours away. But I'm already there in my memory based on my past experience when I think about it. And so I'm the feeling of what's going to happen when I'm with that individual. It's already happening. It's already happening inside of me. So the opportunity when that happens is because I'm already in threat mode. My sympathetic nervous system is aroused, I'm in fight or flight, my vagus has shut down. Uh I'm a little stressed, a little anxious. But when that happens, if I can identify the threat that this person represents to me, and introduce a what is called a prediction correction into that, I can change my brain. That's memory reconsolidation right there. Because I want to be friends with this, but in fact, I'm thinking about somebody right now that I had the debt with, and it's changed their my relationship with them and with them with me as a result, because if I had to really, what is the threat this person represents? They don't represent any threat. It's in the past that the threat was created.
SPEAKER_02You say that the uh quote unquote feeling voice uh warns us to not speak up, to shut up, avoid the conflict, and even uh pull away from intimacy. Yeah, yeah. Uh how do we overcome that? No, first, sorry. First, how do we detect that feeling?
SPEAKER_00I really appreciate, I really appreciate your switching from overcome because the overcome model has never worked and will not work. It's contrary to evolution in terms of brain development. We don't over we don't learn something by overcoming something. We learn it by integrating it. So the first step is the detection. How do I detect? Well, most of us, I certainly have, have learned to uh this is this can be this can be a painful far part of my life, this proprioceptive region. This is where the anxiety and the sadness and the grief and the anger and the well, the hurt and the shame and the noxious feelings all occur. The first step is to engage. Is there a pattern in my life where I am getting in my own way, where I want to do something, but a feeling, some sensation in my body, my gut, solar plexus, throat, chest, tight, is telling me no. The moment I want to do something that is reasonable and respectful and is part of my growth, part of my, gee, I really want to be able to get in a relationship and not get anxious when the person doesn't text me. Uh, because I texted them, they have to text me within an hour. If it's way out of hours, I can't do it. We get, I get triggered if it's too long. It's very common, very, very common in our culture now. So you don't get a text in a few minutes that's like, oh, what's going on?
SPEAKER_02That's why we have those three dots letting us know that the other person is answering. Is is is answering.
SPEAKER_00And if we don't see all wait. No, we cannot wait. Now, what is that? That is an anxiety associated with an early emotional learning. In other words, it's bringing up memories from the past when we're ignored. I don't matter, I don't count, I'm insignificant. What I think doesn't matter, the the issue of significance, I don't belong. It can bring up all kinds of stuff in a fraction of a second because of the brain predicting. It's always predicting, whether conscious or unconscious. Using information to predict a threat, bango, based on something I learned, even though most of the things have nothing to do with today, it just feels like it.
SPEAKER_02And once we identify that detaching those feeling that uh how do we use that in a positive way?
SPEAKER_00In a positive way is a way that would then update, uh change that, kind of get it. I want to reduce, I want to be less affected, less held emotionally hostage by my reactions. So if I can detect something, I know for me, for example, if I start to feel the threat of shame, it's like my chest is being excavated. It's like just like this, a nauseous feeling. I know that. And when I feel that, oh, okay, so that learning, a threat is being activated. But I have to look then. What is the threat? And I actually recommend people actually do this is to really look at and write down what the threat is. Uh was with a gentleman, uh client the other day, and he said it took me 26 years to tell my mother I didn't want her to complain to me about my wife. 26 years to tell his mother. And in the meantime, it placed some stress on their marriage. So what is that? He wants to do it, but the the feeling says, who better not. What he discovered was if I express myself clearly to my mother and tell her what I just do that this does not work for me, then she will abandon me. She will leave me and I'll be all alone. Now, this is a 47-year-old man, and you know, hello. But that's what he learned as a kid. He recognized it, acknowledged it. First thing is you do is you put words on the thread if you can. The second thing you do is to then recognize wait a minute, what experiences have I had in my life that contradict what this thread is saying? Classic example for me, if I'm a user gustaffle, my wife is a great cook. She's like, ugh, I'm not. I'm a great cleaner-upper. And sometimes in the kitchen I will make mistakes, like I don't cut the potatoes right, or now I'm really learning how to check. Before I learned about this material, she would say to me, Hey, I want you to cut it this way, not this way. I would take that as a criticism. I felt like I wasn't good enough. And what I know from my childhood, if I'm not good enough, then I will be ashamed, I will be left out. Kind of reject it. That's what was happening for me. And it made no sense. My wife's not gonna leave me. She's not gonna leave me. But that's what it felt like. And I would then get pushed away, get a little sarcastic back, or I'd withdraw in a kind of a cold silence. When I discovered the threat and I shared it with her, and I realized, wait a minute, my wife loves me. And I as I when I feel that that grip coming, she says, then I remember that. No, no. My wife loves me, she's with me. I am introducing what is called a prediction correction. I'm telling the brain what you learned needs an update, it's wrong. And the brain will then literally, Gustavo, unlock, open up, unwire the neural network in the subcortical regions of the right hemisphere where that learning exists in the unconscious. Open it up and it stays open for five hours. Five hours. During that five hours, I can remember positive things, I can focus on, and then it closes back down with the new information. That's the difference between the you know therapy that is counteract and the therapy that engages, goes deeper for enduring transformation. That's the difference between those two.
SPEAKER_02The trick with that, as most things in life, is that that takes time.
SPEAKER_00It takes time, it takes awareness. Takes awareness.
SPEAKER_02Awareness. Let me sidetrack here for a bit. It's not related, related to what we are talking about. You five minutes ago, you were talking about feeling rejected or feeling that you don't belong, or feeling that you are going to be judged or not understood. Sometimes, isn't it good to feel that way and say, okay, okay, if I am rejected, okay if I know I don't belong. Maybe I need to do something about that and implement changes in my life. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. If I can say to myself, you know, I'm okay, not it's okay. You know, I've been rejected before by the time. Yes, yes, yes. I'm okay. You know, it's okay. I'm okay. And I, you know, I've been rejected by people. You know, I extend myself and they don't respond, or I get ignored. Yeah. But you know what? I didn't die. Nothing killed me. Nothing really bad happened at all. I'm still okay. But when we're in that negative state, we think that it can be terrifying. But remember it, wait a minute. I know I'm going to be okay. I've been through this before, and I was okay. Huh. And we can let ourselves feel it while we're feeling the negative. It's like Bluetooth. You have to feel the negative and bringing in the positive at the same time is the critical step in the neuroscience of enduring transformation. The brain has to recognize what it's predicting and what you're introducing to it that is a mismatch to the prediction. The brain will update itself. It has to do it because of its evolutionary survival bias. That's how it improves its chances of surviving by learning what's a threat and what's not. So we're we're kind of optimizing that in a way.
SPEAKER_02I am going to work on that prediction correction. That is interesting to say the least.
SPEAKER_00So throughout my day, if I feel myself like this, a little bigger, a little, unfortunately, they're getting a little smaller now, but feel myself triggered by something, even by what's going on in the world. Then I'll, okay, what's the threat to me? What is really the threat here? What is my brain predicting? And I will think, well, if something bad happens, let's say if there's a nuclear war, I'll probably be dead. Okay, well, I can't do much about that. And I know where I'm going anyway. So, okay. I don't want that. But if that's what I'm threatened about and it's affecting my life and causing, as it is for millions of people, the threat of alien of uh you know annihilation, that's gonna interfere with my life today. And it's it's just a different way of thinking. It's very self-referential in that way.
SPEAKER_02Brian, uh, what is your pain factor? And when I asked that, I asked that to all of my guests. Uh I'm just, I just mean, what challenges you still today? What brings pain to you? What hurts you or or takes over control? Some people have provided me with a number if they wanted to uh refer to a specific scale. Some other people just mentioned emotional challenges or mental challenges. So you can answer this any way you want. What is your pain factor? And what do you do about it?
SPEAKER_00Physically, first of all, physically, because of my back, I keep track of that. So daily stretches do a lot of things, and I'm more flexible than my kids are in their 30s, you know. So uh uh uh because I I really have to recognize the limitations that if I don't work with those limitations, the pain will increase. Limitations will increase. So that's the first so I pay attention to that. And then the other things physically that I don't, it's like, hmm, boy, I hurt my knee about a year ago and I still feel it. And it's because I I didn't honor the pain. I didn't honor the body's signal to me. Don't do another one of those presses. And I did anyway, and caused a torn ligament. Torn quantricep, as a matter of fact. So really started to pay attention to my own limits. Ego check, as we call it. Yeah, that's a great trip. Exactly. I tend to, Brian, look what you did. The two things right now, I I will be very honest with open with you, um, is my sense of powerlessness with what's going on in the world and in going on in the country. My own sense of powerlessness. Yes, I can do marches, done that, can do these things. And they're important to do, not to minimize them. But the the powerlessness against a you know an institutional control of our lives is is painful. I have to do a lot of yielding and trusting that there's something bigger and better happening. That's that's uh that powerlessness. And the other one is uh discerning my relationship with uh a higher power, God or cosmic consciousness, and trying to work through all the feelings based on what I learned about God when I was a kid, based on all that, working through the relationship that I want, that deeper relationship with, I'm gonna call it cosmic consciousness, which helps me then to deal with my powerlessness, powerlessness of what's happening. So, yeah, you know, there's the physical, I'm gonna call it the spiritual, and then there's the spiritual-emotional part, I would say.
SPEAKER_02Is there a difference for you between pain and suffering?
SPEAKER_00I'm learning that there is. I didn't know this before. I know Buddhists talk about that. You know, pain is a reality of being a human being, suffering is a choice, and so I'm still learning about that and watching the voices when I go into woe is me, or boy, this really sucks, or life, boy, life is treating me like you know. I want to pay attention to those language, to that language, because then I'm putting myself in a suffering mode. And it's not to say there's not suffering, but much of it is uh, I believe how we see and experience the pain of our human experience. Being human is painful. There's no way we're gonna escape it. Um the suffering I'm learning for myself is what I tell myself about my pain. What I tell myself.
SPEAKER_02And it's uh also uh, may I say, a kind of a defense mechanism for some reason that you know much better than me. I have known people that seem to only have in their lives that pain. Their whole lives uh is anchor, is anchor, rooted down to that pain. And yeah, to me, most of the times, it's just suffering. You are you are choosing not to let go because through many, many years that pain has become your personality, even. And it's uh extremely hard to see people do that and feel like that and act accordingly, because you really feel uh like you were saying powerless, because there's nothing you can do as a there's a someone that is uh looking at them, if you are someone that you love, that you care about. Um that's hard, that's really hard. It is very hard and it's very painful because it is it is a realization they need to come. First of all, talk about detecting things, you have to detect that. Yeah, and once you detect that, you need to see, okay, what do I do with this? Um uh but suffering, I have learned too that at the end of the day, is it is a choice. And uh pain in pain is not. We have covered a lot of ground today. Uh, I am really, really happy that we have been able to do that. I will give you all the credit because you were able to summarize everything that is very complex in just a very short amount of time. And I really appreciate that and thank you for it. Thank you. But before we finish, um is there anything I have left outside, something that you would like to add or comment before we we finish our talk today?
SPEAKER_00There's there's the one message that if if I could say one message to people, it's the problems that we have as individuals that brings us to coaching and psychotherapy and the things we want to do to improve is not an overcoming the problem, it's understanding that under that problem there's a reason and the vast, once again, the vast majority of our problems and our symptoms are not character flaws. They're not, you know, something's wrong with me. They are protective mechanisms that the brain in its evolutionary wisdom has developed to keep us so that we're here tomorrow morning and we're breathing. And that if we can recognize that, that that much of that problem and symptom is caused by things we can change within our brain based on something we learned 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, even 70 years ago. Then we can actually change that, not only change it, but change our experience of life. The first step is to you know recognize I am doing the best I can with what I know. Secondly, I want to do better. What's in me that's in the way, what feeling, what threat. If I think about doing something and I get anxious, that's your brain telling you you learned something to inhibit your brand, your just your grandeur and your beauty and your creativity. You've learned some things that need to be updated. It's not that you are there's not there's something wrong with you. Not you thank you. Yes, you're not broken. You're not broken at all. It feels like it, but that isn't the case. It's the brain just doing what the brain does, which we now can optimize for enduring transformation.
SPEAKER_02I have been trying and working really hard in understanding that I am not broken. Um easier said than done. Yes, it is. I have been able to grasp the concept concept by talking to people like you. Thanks. Um I will get I will get there. Um, Brian, how do people learn more about your work? How how do they get your book? How do they follow you? Because we want all that information to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00I really, I really appreciate that. Um go to my website and uh um there's a lot of information there. Um the book is on Amazon and Goodreads, and you can get it at your local little bookstore uh kind of thing. Uh it's in digital imprint format. Um, there is an appendix that goes with it, uh, that's that's in the book, as it was the book would have been too thick otherwise. Uh but that's what definitely what people can do. Listen to this podcast again after you've they've played it, listen to it once. And you know, maybe even listen to it when they when we get stuck. You know, I know there's a couple things that sometimes I will tell myself or listen to that'll help me remember. I am not what I learned that I am, I am what I'm learning that I can be.
SPEAKER_02Can you repeat that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm not what I learned that I am. Inadequate, not enough, not competent, uh invisible, don't matter. I've I learned those things. Those are painful. They result in rejection and badness. I'm not what I learned that I am. I am what I'm learning I can be. It's a learning process, a learning process. And as a result, learning means to acquire knowledge. I want to acquire knowledge about myself and the world so I can change what I learned that's inhibiting me from being the bee, the living, the life, and my and my destiny, frankly. I think my destiny, I think that's where it is at.
SPEAKER_02Let's end on that beautiful note, Brian. Thank you so much for your time, for your expertise, for being so clear and sharp in your concepts. Thank you. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for everybody listening and watching. We will see you next time. Yes, when we continue to explore the pain factor. Ciao ciao.
SPEAKER_01The Pain Factory is a Project Fortress podcast.
SPEAKER_02Project Fortress is a secular humanist project dedicated to find answers to the physical, mental, and emotional pain people experience, as well as offer help to deal with these issues. To learn more about Project Fortress, please visit Fortress.org.
SPEAKER_01That is F-O-U-R-T-R-E-S-S.org.
SPEAKER_02I am Gustavo Varella. I'm not a licensed medical professional, nor am I a nutritionist or hold a degree in exercise or sports medicine. All of the advice given on this podcast is what I have learned from my own experiences and mistakes, navigating through depression, anxiety, and chronic physical pain. Project Fortress is not responsible for any actions that may occur as a result of your listening to and implementing the advice we provide. Use all of the information that we give at your own risk.