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Tom McCarthy is a husband, father, author, speaker, entrepreneur, and investor who has owned businesses in the training, software, financial services, and restaurant industries. Tom’s clients in his training business include some of the worlds leading companies such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Salesforce, Wells Fargo, and MetLife. His latest book,... Read More
David Berceli, PhD, is an international author, presenter and trainer in the areas of trauma intervention, stress reduction, and resiliency & recovery training. He has lived and worked in war-torn countries and natural disaster zones around the world. He specializes in recovery with large populations. Dr. Berceli is also the... Read More
- Rewriting the current narrative: Body tremors are an overlooked and undervalued self-regulating mechanism of our nervous system.
- TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises): A genetically encoded method for directly hacking the nervous system.
- Post Traumatic Growth: The human body designed to experience, endure, survive and evolve through the traumatic recovery process.
Tom McCarthy
I am so excited for my next guest. This is really my first time meeting David. He was actually, came highly recommended from somebody. I really respect Dr. Eric Robbins, who’s a medical doctor and a healing practitioner and an energy healing practitioner. And Eric said, you got to get David on the Global Energy Healing Summit. So I’m so excited to have David here. David’s an international author, presenter and trainer in the areas of trauma prevention, stress reduction, and resiliency and recovery training. And we’re going to learn about some really amazing work that David does. He’s the creator of a revolutionary set of tension and trauma releasing exercises. And so pretty much anybody on the planet has experienced trauma and most people haven’t released it. So today we’re going to learn about some possibilities for getting it out of our body, getting it out of our minds so we can really live amazing lives rather than being trapped in trauma. So, David, I’m excited to have you here, David Berceli, PhD, PhD. Dr. David Berceli, PhD is our guest. David, welcome to the Global Energy Healing Summit.
David Berceli, PhD
Thank you so much Tom. I’m delighted to be invited onto it. So I hope you have a good time talking about this.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, you’ve been doing your work for a long time. You’ve helped so many people let’s start out just by talking about trauma. You know, what happens when people… What is trauma and what happens when the typical person experiences trauma?
David Berceli, PhD
Okay, when we talk about trauma, we’re talking about a large spectrum ’cause trauma could be a mild trauma. Like if you’re in a car accident, nobody’s injured, it’s just a bumper to bumper thing and you’re shaken up, but everything’s fine. But that still was a shock to the body and the shock to the mind, with the surprise, you weren’t anticipating it. So that would be a mild trauma. And then severe traumas would be, you know, a death of somebody in your life, that sort of thing, or you’re living in political violence, those types of things. So let’s look at it from a spectrum. And basically what happened is two things really engaged autonomically without our consciousness at all.
When we get threatened by something, even if it’s a surprise, the body’s only protective mechanism is just squeeze itself. So even if you start yelling at me, my body will start to squeeze as a protective device. And right then the brain starts to go from the ego, which is in the cortex controlling us into what we call autonomic responses or more primitive parts of the brain where my heart rate will go up, my blood pressure will go up. I might start to sweat in my palms and I’ll get anxious.
All of those are autonomic responses of the human body to protect us. There’s a threat, it’s going to engage everything it can to make sure we survive this threat. And that means increasing the blood flow. I don’t know if I’m going to have to have the fight or flight response. And so the body does this automatically, which is the beauty. This is actually how we survived traumatic events, which is really nice.
We don’t even think about it. We just automatically do these things. So trauma is something that shocks or surprises us and in some way appears to be a threat to me and my body activates all these instinctual mechanisms to guarantee I survive.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, and I love how you just simplified it because I’ve felt that squeezing before, right. That just, that tension, that squeezing not even in and what I would consider like highly traumatic environment. This is when I feel like overwhelmed with sometimes in front of my computer over COVID ’cause now I’m on all these and I’m just, I feel the squeeze, but I’ve never heard it described that way. That is so cool. And so what happens when the average person experiences trauma as they squeeze, but they don’t release it, right.
David Berceli, PhD
Right. That’s our problem. That’s where we’re stuck. And this is where TRE comes in these tension and trauma releasing exercises. I recognize that I also have a background in massage therapy and it’s one of the ways I work with the body. People would come into my office with their shoulders way up here, around their neck. And I’d say, “How you doing today?” “Oh, I’m just wonderful, I had a great relaxing day.” It becomes so chronic that we don’t even know we hold these tension patterns.
So these chronic tension patterns, like you said, just being on the internet and listening about the virus all over the planet and all the news we’re getting and people are squeezing and getting tighter and tighter. Well, the only way we basically have in our society is, oh, at the end of the day, I’ll drink a glass of wine. I’ll have a nice meal and I’ll relax. Well, that’s partly true, it does do that, but it doesn’t do it permanently. It’s only a temporary relaxation process, but that chronic tension will sneak back in again.
So what I realized that this was after I had lived in Africa and the middle east for several years. So I was living in situations of violence because I was working with the nonprofit organization and I was working with the people recovering or living through traumatic experience due to violence or war. And what I discovered is that when there was some very intense traumatic event that occurred like a bombing or shooting or something, I would find little children would tremor in terror. They would just shake in terror. And then when I looked around, I would see that kids who were around 11, 12, or 13, you could see their body wanted to tremor, but they were learning how to be an adult. And they were holding back the tremor. But then the adults didn’t tremor at all. And I was fascinated by this because I knew the children were showing me something that was more natural in the human body and that as we learn to grow up, we learn how to control or unfortunately suppress some of these natural mechanisms in the body. And by the time we’re adults, we don’t even do it anymore.
Now, so that tremoring was invaluable because then I studied it and realized mammals do this all the time. So that mammals in the wild who live under life or death threat every day, they could be eaten. I mean, but they don’t suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. And the reason they don’t is because after the gazelle escapes the lion or whatever, it goes to the watering hole and it tremors all over its body, much like we see a dog tremoring in a thunderstorm.
We know that tremor mechanism, we see it in life. But what we did was we unfortunately, we associated the tremor mechanism with the trauma or the stressor. And then the narrative we got was stop the tremoring and the narrative is wrong. The tremoring is the healthy part of the body, trying to get us out of that contracted state. So the body contracts up, which uses a lot of adrenaline to do that. So pulls the muscles tight when they get to a certain level, the body starts to tremor itself in order to reduce that contracted state.
So after every event of tension, as an example, our body would naturally tremor if we allowed it to do that. And we inhibited the tremor so much so that we’re frozen from it. So now the body has its autonomic response to protect, but we don’t give it the autonomic response to release the protection and then we get stuck.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, that is so cool. Because what you’ve said, what you’ve told me is that the body’s designed to experience trauma kind of go through it, release it. You’ve even got… All of our bodies are designed to do that. We’re just, we’ve inhibited the process. You’ve got a really cool video that we were talking about that I saw, I think it was from your website, but a bear being tranquilized.
This big, huge bear being tranquilized, which is really traumatic, like getting shot by darts and then paralyzed and people coming to study you and poke and prod. And when the bear wakes up, the video is astounding because it does, it doesn’t just like, live with this forever. It tremors, and then it just goes on about and day. It’s almost like it’s left it in the past. Versus most human beings have taken this traumatic experience and they live with it every single day because they haven’t been able to release it. Your work helps them to release it. Is that correct?
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah, this work is actually hacking the nervous system. It’s kind of funny, but it hacks the nervous system. So it can go directly into the nervous system. So we can circumvent the ego because the narrative we have, if I tremor in public, or if I was tremoring here on this talk with you, people would say, well, he’s weak, or he’s insecure about what he’s saying. He’s very vulnerable. He’s afraid of what he’s saying.
So we would associate this tremoring or my voice quivering with a negative narrative, but that’s not true. It’s actually positive. It’s the most valuable thing you could do. We should be saying, oh, look, he’s tremoring, that’s great. He’s releasing his stress, but we don’t do it. We have to rewrite the narrative of the tremor mechanism in the human body because it is the genetically encoded mechanism to actually undo the response of the contraction.
Tom McCarthy
Wow! That’s amazing. And you saw that in places where there was violence and all these things going on, you actually started to notice that that is so cool. Thank God. Thank God you picked up on that because that’s not the narrative that most people have with tremoring you’re right.
David Berceli, PhD
But think of this, Tom, we see that all the time in the United States. When I tell people, have you ever seen anybody shake because they were afraid? Everybody said, of course. But when I was living in Sudan, it was thrown in my face a million times by a million people. So finally, after a few years, I caught on to say, wait, maybe I should ask the question. We’re constantly tremoring. Nothing is going wrong with us. We’re surviving war and all this violence. How are we doing that? Because the tremoring, at least in our medical model is they would give you medication to stop it, which they do for veterans as an example.
That’s the worst thing to do because they’re inhibiting the autonomic response of the nervous system to restore relaxation again. And so when I was in the middle east and in Sudan, particularly I was living, I saw that a million times. And that’s what got me to pay attention to it because Tom, you can’t even do it here. If you’re gonna go on a rollercoaster ride as an example, this is artificial trauma. The people standing in line, they’ll start to tremor saying, oh my God, I’m so scared, I’m so scared. And they’re tremoring. Some people won’t tremor until they’re on the roller coaster ride and it flips over. And then the brain says, what the hell are you doing to me? You know, this is terrible.
Or some people tremor when they get off of it. All that is, was a adrenaline shot, artificially stimulated by something playful actually. But the body still responded as a threat. It contracted, and then it tremors its way out. And what do we do? We laugh at people. Oh, look, they’re tremoring. How funny? They’re afraid, you know, and we laugh about it ourselves as well, but it’s one of the healthiest mechanisms and one of the most autonomic mechanisms in the human body.
Tom McCarthy
Well, you’ve changed my mind already because I can now recognize patterns in me where my father was killed in Vietnam when I was three, I was there when my mother got the news. And I think for so many years, I just like didn’t allow myself to unstress, right. To unclench up. And, and I wish I would’ve known it. I mean, not at three, ’cause I wouldn’t have understood it. But even in later life, this is such a powerful technology that you’ve created.
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah, we have to reintroduce it and change the narrative, so it’s accepted by not only general society, but even our medical system where they actually encourage that or know that to happen. When I talked to… I teach a lot of medical professionals around the world and I’ll say, when do you see people tremor? Right after they come out of the anesthesia, it’s the nervous system trying to restimulate itself. If it was surgery then obviously, even though they were anesthetized the body picks that up as a life or death threat, potentially, women after birthing a child will often tremor in the recovery room. So we see it all the time. We just have not researched enough to understand its value.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, so tremoring ideally occurs naturally. What about people that have been clenched up and tightened up for so long where it it’s not occurring naturally you can retrain them to bring this mechanism back into their life?
David Berceli, PhD
Oh, it’s very easy because I don’t use the brain to do it. The brain is what’s inhibiting it. So that’s why I developed it through exercises. So there’s seven simple exercises and they do two things that are valuable to activate this tremor mechanism. They stretch the muscles a little bit and they apply a little bit of pressure. Same thing as if you were lifting a barbell and it was a little too heavy, you would see your muscles tremor like that. But when you let go of the barbell, it stops. Well, the way I designed the exercises is it slowly continues to increase the tremor mechanism.
The last one, when you’re laying on the floor, you’re actually in quite a passive state and the body already activated the tremor mechanism since the body knows its value and what it’s for it then starts to travel through the body itself. Even though you’re just laying in a passive position, you can see a lot of those videos on my YouTube channel, David Berceli, PhD, where people are just tremoring, just laying on the floor tremoring, but telling you, oh my God, this feels so pleasurable. It’s really weird and strange, but it feels good at the same time. Well, it’s weird and strange because the ego doesn’t understand it, but it feels pleasurable because the body’s loving it.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. And is when they’re tremoring past traumas from years or decades before are getting released? What’s what’s going on with it?
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah, it’s quite astonishing actually. But I have people tremoring even from when they were being birthed and they had the umbilical cord around their neck. So somehow the body records all of this in the tissue and it’s not time-related so that when they laid down in tremor, this is really good for soldiers. I did have a soldier tremor today release a trauma that happened a year ago in Afghanistan or Iraq, wherever they were. And they’re astonished, first of all, that they even brought the trauma home in their bodies. They’re completely unaware of that, but they can tremor right now in the present moment. And it will release something from the past, but because they’re doing it in the present moment in safety, it reduces that anxiety level because the body’s not afraid to release the trauma. It’s actually happy to do it, actually because all it’s really releasing is tightness in the tissue.
Tom McCarthy
Right. And when that’s released in the body, cause a lot of the trauma that’s created stress in the body also creates illnesses. When we release it now the body has a chance to heal, right?
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah, that’s a good point because when we release stress, we actually increase the immune system. ‘Cause the immune system is decreased, the tide of distress comes in our body. They work back and forth with each other. So if I can reduce the stress of people, their immune system automatically will improve. And this helps them with secondary or tertiary health problems that they might have.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, so when they learn this process of tremoring, which I’m excited to learn from you too, by the way. When they learn the process of tremoring. And I know you’ve got not just you, but you’ve got coaches and courses and trainings and things like that. Is it something that to work through the trauma that you’ve held on to, you go through several different sessions and then you learn how to use it the rest of your life. Like tremoring, how does it work?
David Berceli, PhD
Right, well, first of all, anybody could do it because we’re genetically encoded with it and you follow the seven exercises, which are free on the internet for people to follow. Know, there’s a number of things here. First of all, Tom, you and I have stress from everyday anxiety and stressors. That’s sort of family issues, whatever. So you could lay down on the floor and you could tremor at the end of the day for 15 minutes as an example, and actually decrease the tightness in your body, which lowers the excitement of the nervous system charge. And it helps a lot of people fall asleep. So that part you can do simply and easily. There’s nothing big about it. But if it was a major trauma where maybe relationship was impeded or somehow challenged, then you might need somebody with you. Simply what we call co-regulating help you feel secure and safe.
Sometimes people need somebody to witness them crying, witness that they were afraid. And so sometimes it needs an accompaniment, but the tremor mechanism itself doesn’t need anything. It could be activated alone by yourself. And then what happens over the years I’ve watched is people just keep going down layers inside their body because you have traumas or let’s say stressors from just this past year.
But then if you had a divorce or if you had a difficult issue with a child being birthed, or you were in a car accident, you’ve got all these historical traumas that many of which are still stuck in our bodies. And that’s how we dissociate from our bodies. We don’t even feel that they’re there anymore, but they’re very actively, still tightly holding our structure will only recognize them when they’re there when we start to have chronic pain. Say my back has been hurting me for three years now. Well, there’s a problem there because unless there’s something physically wrong, it shouldn’t be hurting for three years.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. That’s interesting. So you talk about chronic pain much of, or I guess there could be something physical. So people need to get that checked out. But a lot of times they can’t find anything physical.
David Berceli, PhD
Absolutely.
Tom McCarthy
And so it’s this holding on to things in our body, our bodies almost… It is like we think the brain is the whole nervous system, but really the nervous system is throughout the body.
David Berceli, PhD
Exactly. Right.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. Explained the polyvagal system, and how tremoring aligns with that.
David Berceli, PhD
Okay, so if you think of the polyvagal system in a simple sort of bell curve, okay. The polyvagal system says basically there are two vagus nerves and one is the ventral vagus nerve. It’s down here at the bottom of the bell curve. That’s the one we’re on now. We’re talking to each other, we feel safe, life is okay. Our breathing’s easy. Our body’s relaxed. Now, if you and I start to argue about something, we’ll start to go up that bell curve. So we’ll go through this, the part of it that’s called the sympathetic nervous system that has the fight or flight response. They go through that, but if it gets very, very serious and threatening, we’ll flip over, what’s called the dorsal vagus nerve. That’s the vagus nerve that protects us. That’s what causes the freeze, the numbness, mild dissociation, and that kicks in automatically so that I will have, because I can’t run or I can’t fight my way out of the response.
So if the fight or flight response doesn’t work, my body says, well, I know what I can do. I can stop feeling so little children as an example, if they’re living in a home in a home that’s dysfunctional, maybe with an alcoholic parent or something. And the parent gets really enraged and yelling and screaming. Even if they don’t hit the child, the child can’t run from the parent, can’t fight the parents. So what they’ll do is they’ll basically mildly dissociate. They’ll stop feeling. Eyes will get big and they’ll watch, but they won’t feel anything. And that accumulates over years.
So what the tremor mechanism does since it’s part of the nervous system, and it’s part of the parasympathetic nervous system, the one down here, the ventral vagus nerve that calms us down. If you’re up here at the bell curve, anywhere in your history, in your life, tremoring, we’ll start that to come down so that you’ll come back down into here. So that both of those nervous systems could be activated together. I could be calm and relaxed with you, but someplace inside of me that I’m completely unaware of I could be frozen or mildly dissociated from my feelings.
Tom McCarthy
Interesting. Yeah.
David Berceli, PhD
It will take those, those components, those places inside of you, because it works anatomically. It will start to release those and relax them. The nervous system communicates to the brain. Then the whole thing starts to calm down. So it takes us from what’s called the dorsal vagal response down into the ventral vagal response, which is what Stephen Porges talks about, the Polyvagal Theory as a way of going back into a relaxed state after stressful or traumatic event.
Tom McCarthy
Very interesting. So you said that we can be calm and relaxed and yet part of my body might be wired or tensed up or frozen. That’s really interesting. We can feel calm and relaxed, but then you’d get some sensation or something’s not right in part of your body and tremoring can just even that out throughout.
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah, that’s exactly what it does. And it’s interesting. Even sports enthusiasts after they finished riding a bike, let’s say for five miles or whatever, where they use their legs a lot and they tightened their legs to do that endurance sort of run. And what’s really interesting if we don’t tell the body is over, it’ll stay in it’s contracted state. So you walk into the house, you sit down to have dinner and your legs are still like prepared for the bicycle ride. It doesn’t know that you got to do something that turns it off, you see. We know how to turn ourselves on and we don’t know how to turn ourselves off.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, we don’t know how to turn ourselves off around trauma, but we don’t know how to turn ourselves off just around daily life. You know, especially now when we’ve got our phones always there and we’re always just like feeding ourself more information and the body, honestly, I guess, we don’t know how to turn ourselves off anymore, especially children now.
David Berceli, PhD
We do not… But it’s not even promoted by our culture; be stronger, be better, be faster. Be the first one there, be on alert. The whole culture is about keep that phone on, make sure you’re the first one, trade your stocks at the right time. You know, make sure you’re ahead of the game. There’s no place in our culture that teaches all at the end of the day, turn everything off and just relax. So you can go back to yourself and be normal and enjoy living in your body. It doesn’t exist in our culture.
Tom McCarthy
I think many people are even aware of what it’s like to live in their body. I know that’s something I’ve had to constantly retrain myself on because we do get so caught up in, you know, they used to call it the rat race, but just like getting things done, being an achiever, you know, go, go, go, go, go. And this is really a great lesson for everyone listening. Not only those of you listening, but hopefully you’ll have your younger people in your life, whether it’s your children or your grandchildren, watch this interview. This is very, very powerful and not a message that’s being widely espoused or heard these days. What’s the consequence for not being able to turn yourself off and release the trauma or the stress?
David Berceli, PhD
Well, the biggest consequences are it’s social disruption even in the family, the family system, there’s more fighting or there’s more struggling or there’s more tension and not just between the parents ’cause as soon as that happens between the parents, the children feel it, no matter how much the parents try to hide it, but then you’ve got conflict as well in the structure, gastrointestinal problems, high blood pressure, a lot of illnesses that are really, it’s not an illness. It’s a secondary illness. And stress is the primary activator. ‘Cause stress is the number one killer in the world right now. Stress weakens the immune system. But then we have these secondary tertiary medical problems. So we get treated for those, but we’re still not being treated for the stress that is creating those.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
David Berceli, PhD
And so that’s our number one problem is stress.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, and chronic pain. I interviewed Dr. Alex Loyd who wrote “The Healing Codes” and he said, right at the very beginning, he said, the cause of all illness, disease is memories, memories, right? You know, memories that we’ve got energy in, which is what you’re talking about. Being able to release the energy from that memory that is being frozen with stuck in.
David Berceli, PhD
That’s perfect, Tom, this is really good. And this came from a Marine who was working with, he came back and he did TRE with me several times and his body literally repeated the motions that he had to go through an Iraqi to kick down doors and make sure there was no enemy behind the door, et cetera. But what happened was is when he was doing TRE and the tremor mechanism activated his foot and his leg came up as though he was going to kick down a door and he was stunned by that. The memory is not just in the brain. We don’t get it, the brain and body, although we separated them to understand them medically better, which is really good, but they don’t function separately. Actually the brain is the entire body. It isn’t just in the head. The nervous system connects these two so intricately, it’s impossible to have a memory that is not somewhere in the structure of the organism.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, and the vagus nerve is the wandering nerve that pretty much goes throughout too.
David Berceli, PhD
That’s exactly right. And so that’s the nerve where we’re trying to play with, but I got to access that nerve without going through the brain because Tom, you know, as well as I do, I could say Tom, calm down, Tom, it’s okay. Relaxed Tom it’s okay. And your ego is saying, it’s not okay! it’s not okay! It’s not okay! And so I can’t get your nervous system to calm down if I have to go through the ego to get there.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. Yeah. The other part of the ego that probably gets people or haves them resist calming down is being strong, tough. I can handle it, right. You know, give me more. Probably more in males than females, although I’m sure females have that part too. And really having people become vulnerable enough to start to tremor again, right? Is one of the big issues?
David Berceli, PhD
Exactly, right. It’s interesting. When you say strong and tough and enduring the healthiest people are the ones who can complete the entire cycle. So if I can get revved up and be strong and powerful when I need to, but then make me come home and relax and be calm and integrate and have a good night’s sleep. I’m actually healthier than the person who’s just revved up and in charge all the time. They will weaken, they do weaken. That’s how we see, I mean, look at all our athletes by the age of 32 or 33, their bodies are completely worn out, they’re burned down.
They’ve been abused by their athletic performance and so dissociated from their structure by taking medications that numb their bodies so they don’t feel pain, but they actually burn out the body and what they need to do after every football game or whatever they play is to go home and figure out a way to completely relax the structure so that it lets go and then it can develop this endurance and this resiliency.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, the oldest player in the national football league, is an example of somebody that has figured this out, Tom Brady, right? Because he knows it’s not just about go, go, go. He has a whole regimen of releasing and lengthening muscles and not storing tension and trauma and he’s in his forties and he just won a super bowl. So I love it versus most are just run, run, run, go, go, go! And you said, you know, they’re 30 years old and they’re done or 32 years old and they’re done.
David Berceli, PhD
Yep, that’s very true. But we could see how we’re being trained socially to really numb ourselves from our body and push it as hard and as fast as we can, because we’ll be the winner. And that’s not fine-
Tom McCarthy
When you’re pushing the body like that you’re also pushing the mind, which is just as bad. Dr. John Sarno, who wrote “The Mindbody Prescription” was a medical doctor that worked a lot on pain. He even said, he said, The people that suffer the most are not the weak minded. It’s the ones that are just the strong minded that repress everything and hold everything in and never show any vulnerability. They’re the ones that have the pain and all these things that they struggle with just because they didn’t let it go. They didn’t have a process for getting it out of them once I experienced it.
David Berceli, PhD
Exactly right. Those determined mindedness people, I call them control freaks. All of us are a bit of a control freak in some ways, but what’s really interesting when they do TRE and the tremor mechanism activates, they’re absolutely stunned because now something’s letting go that they didn’t give permission to. And they go through this fight between their brain and their body. Their body’s doing something that their brain is not given permission to yet. And they’re saying, what’s happening? What do I do? Can I stop it? But it’s really kind of funny.
I like working with these control freaks, these tightly controlled people, because if they do it, maybe just two or three times, the pleasure stimulation that comes from the body of the muscles relaxing actually convinces the ego that this is good and it lets go automatically. So I don’t have to try to convince them. I let the body and ego dialogue with each other and the body convinces it because it starts to let go. And the ego starts to feel safe and says, wow, that’s pleasurable. I want more of that.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. I love that. So it’s actually a pleasurable experience to do this. I think some people have frozen so much for so long that they’re not even feeling any more the fact that, you know, new things are just kind of piling on top. They’ve… And for me, this is something I had to, I had to learn how to feel again. And I bought it, because I had gone so long being that tough guy and just like the one, I was like three years old when my dad had passed away and a two year old brother and a six month old brother. And you know, no one asked me to be the man of the house, but I became, you know, in my mind, the man of the house, the one that had to take care of my mom and look over my brothers and that type thing. So I had to relearn, like, what does it feel like to really feel in my body again? I think a lot of people have probably had that issue.
David Berceli, PhD
Everybody has that issue. We are not trained to feel even people who meditate or do yoga a lot or do all sorts of sports. They can move the structure of the organism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re feeling it. And I think you’re right. You said I had to learn how to feel again. Absolutely true. Because we are trained even in school, in class, sit, still be quiet. Don’t move around, stop fidgeting. We actually train them dissociate from your body and listen to the teacher. But don’t feel the excitement in your body of wanting to go out into the playground and run around. So we actually train ourselves to dissociate and numb ourselves from physical sensations because somehow we felt that they were wrong.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, and then we suffer from this training.
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah, we suffer for the rest of our lives
Tom McCarthy
Where can people get access to the seven exercises and potentially going to workshop with you or getting a coach, we’re where can they find that?
David Berceli, PhD
Okay, so they can go to the website, which is traumaprevention.com. Now, that has all the lists of coaches all over the world. I think we’re about 67 countries or something. It has training programs. It has a lot of people who are giving free sessions since COVID happened. A lot of the TRE coaches got online and just said, all right, we’ll teach you for free. Every Friday, just get on and follow us through the process. And that’s really picked up very much. And we have it in many different languages as well. So traumaprevention.com is the website so they can get on there. And there’s a video there that they click on, which will take them to the YouTube channel with the seven exercises.
The other places to go to David Berceli, PhD, which is my YouTube channel and click on that. Because then you watch people from all over the world in many different languages. I just take them through tremoring session. Some of them live some of them over the internet and that you watch how they tremor. And then when they’re done, they sit up and they tell you, wow, it did this or did that. Or this was from this injury or that part of my history, my past. So it normalizes for people the tremoring mechanism and it also individualizes for people. You’re going to tremor according to your history and your story, which will be different from the way I tremor.
Tom McCarthy
Wow! I love the name of your website to trauma prevention, because a lot of people think trauma is the experience that you’re going to have experiences that are going to be unpleasant, but it doesn’t have to be traumatic, right? You can let it go like that bear. That was an experience that bear would not have chosen to be shot for darts and people prodding and poking and doing all this. But for him, it didn’t turn into a trauma because he shook it off and just went about his life.
David Berceli, PhD
Exactly, right. Now, what’s interesting about that is that I’ve discovered that the more that you learn this cycle of getting tight and tremoring it out and getting tight and tremoring it out, which we do daily, the body develops a resiliency. So that as soon as it starts to get tight, it knows, oh, I know how to get out of this. I know how to, I know how to let this go. And it becomes resilient in the entire cycle of going up towards the stress or trauma and releasing it right away so that we don’t hold on to it and we can reduce these post-trauma reactions.
Tom McCarthy
That’s awesome. Well, I hope everybody goes to David Berceli, PhD on YouTube and traumaprevention.com and learns this and see if it works for you and you have a very high success rate, I’m sure, with working with people?
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah. It’s extremely high. The only hesitation for anybody is, like I said, if they need somebody to accompany them, because the trauma they’re releasing like a woman who’s maybe sexually abused and she might need somebody to be safe to talk to about it. Other than that, it’s quite safe to do by yourself.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, I love it. So, it’s been so cool having you on David and getting a chance to meet you. And as I said, I want this experience. So I’m going to work with you and I’m gonna let more people know about your work. Any final thoughts, any last thing you would like people to kind of be thinking about as they leave this interview or any final words of wisdom that you have for us?
David Berceli, PhD
Yeah, two things I always try to remind people of. When we’re reducing stress, there is nothing wrong with doing it as a family. It shouldn’t just be the parents doing it with each other, or they identify one child who is stressed. The entire family system is stressed. And if we could learn to put it in our social family sort of structures, all of you could lay down on the floor and tremor together and laugh and play, you could watch each other. We can enjoy the process of releasing stress in our lives rather than taking it on as another task. Oh, I got to go release stress. Why not make it playful and fun and a family experience.
Tom McCarthy
I love that. And that would be just so healthy, particularly for the parents. I think the kids would especially if they start younger, it’s going to be easy. But, you know, I know being a dad and a mom like, you know, we have to, we can’t show vulnerability, we’ve got to be strong and fit and fearless. And being able to do that as a family, my kids are older now, 28 and 25.
That’d be interesting to do with a family now, but I wish we would have done it when they were much younger, because I would have been just so healthy for all of us to be able to do that through these years. So David, you are a gift. We really appreciate you being on today. Thank you so much. And I hope lots of people will come and check out your work and be able to see you and learn from your wisdom and learn these great exercises that you have.
David Berceli, PhD
Right, thanks a lot, Tom. I really appreciate having been invited. It was fun.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
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