So, of course, he felt nervous in the morning before he had to head into school. Sure. Plus, the kid had dyslexia and ADHD, all of which was not diagnosed. So he's heading into a full day in a classroom where he physiologically, neurologically is incapable of doing what is going to be asked of him. And so his body, before entering that situation, sounds an alarm. Totally. And when the alarm sounds and the physiological changes happen, guess what physiological feeling he has? His stomach starts to rumble because as the physiology of the alarm changes and the chemistry in his digestive tract changes, he starts getting butterflies that feel like pterodactyls. And then all of a sudden, instead of just giving himself a hug and going, It's going to be okay. Today is going to be an okay day. I can face this. Instead of reassuring himself, he goes into his head and says, Oh, my God, my stomach. I think I'm going to puke. I can't go to school. Holy ho, da da da da. And he ramps himself. We were dealing with panic attacks with this kid where he would literally bang his head on the kitchen island, I don't want to go to school crying.

He would force himself to throw. He would get so worked up, he would actually throw up. I mean, it was horrible. And I now can see that all of the interventions that were being done with this kid with therapists, which were all about just change the channel upstairs. And then he would turn to them and say, But sometimes when I change the channel, it takes me to a channel I don't want to watch. So what if I change the channel of my thoughts and I get another bad thought. Like even he was reacting against it, but nobody taught us that what the kid needed was a hug, validation, reassurance in that moment physically to get the alarm to quiet.

Yeah, you nailed it. I think that's part of it is that, especially with kids, especially with children, it's so important that they feel you, that they feel seen, heard, and loved. Touch is such a valuable thing with kids. It's just so amazing. My wife, Cynthia, is a somatic trauma therapist. She deals mostly with people that have preverbal trauma before the age of seven years old, so they don't have a story about it.

Right? Wow. How do they know they have trauma before the age of seven?

Because they feel in their body. Because they feel alarmed every day, and they don't know why. Because they haven't encoded it to a point where they can... See, the amygdala never forgets. The amygdala encodes everything, birth trauma, everything. It encodes everything. But we don't have the retrieval mechanism to pull it back up. We think we have no childhood memories, which is a bit of a semantic thing because we do have childhood memories. We just can't retrieve them. That's the problem. There's a whole reason for that that I put on Instagram about how the hippocampus gets paralyzed. But I don't want to get too much into that. But basically, with Oakley, it's getting him into his body into a safe place. So you practice with him. This is what I do with... I know he's older now, but this is what I do with parents is I get put your hand on your child's heart, then put your other hand on their back about the same level as your front hand, and just sit there with them and just allow their nervous system to regulate and just allow them to feel it and create this safe place in your body.

Because this is the next place that I'd like to go with this little interview that we're doing, is finding a... People say, I don't want to go to my body. It's like, I understand that. So how can we do that? Well, we find a place in our body that's either safe. With me, it's my breath around my nose because I used to do a lot of meditation. Then what we do is we feel the alarm and then we go into this safe place and then we go back into the alarm.

Okay, so hold on. Let's walk through this. You just reached up. For those of you listening, we put uncut episodes of our podcast in long form up on our YouTube channel, YouTube. Com/mellrovins. You'll be able to watch him do this. But he just put his hands right like, if you wore a pair of glasses, you'd put your hands under where your glasses are along your cheeks. And so when you said the way that you could practice this, so here's a takeaway for how you could practice this. You just got what I would call the love sandwich, hands on the heart, hands on the back, and just hold somebody.

When.

They are having an alarm go off in their body until you can feel them slowly start to have the alarm turn off, and the clinical word being their nervous system starts to regulate again. They're in their body. They're in their safe space. But you also talked about the second tool where you locate a safe place in your body. And for you, it was right here alongside your nose. I was trying to think of another one other than the heart. There have been times where I've tucked my hands under my armpits. It's almost like a mini hug. Almost like, I don't know what it is. I suppose that it's like I could put my arms, I could give myself a hug thing. But so you could pick anywhere in your body, your stomach, for some people, like deep breathing. What are some other places that patients of yours have selected in the past?

Oh, it's all over. But basically, I get them, Where's a safe place in your body? And a lot of them will say, I don't feel safe. And I'll say, Well, where's a neutral place? It's like, Well, my right knee feels like there's no feeling in my right knee. It's like, okay, let's go into this pain of your heart from this recent breakup that you've gone through. Now let's go and just bring our attention into that right knee and then go back into this. I'm doing this quite a bit.

Faster than I normally. But when you say bring your attention to your right knee.

If.

I'm doing this exercise with you, does that mean that I've got my eyes closed and I'm mentally working my way down to my knee? Yeah. So you're mentally locating your attention at your knee. Okay, got it.

Yeah, because that feels either safe or neutral, right?

Yeah.

What we're doing is we're basically training your unconscious mind that this pain that you're feeling in your heart is not all of you, because what will happen is the amygdala has no sense of time. So when you get triggered, you will go back, you will turn into that 11-year-old. And then basically what we need to do is train your amygdala like, No, I'm not back there. I'm not 11 years old anymore. I'm actually my age that I am now. You go into that right knee that's neutral. Or if there's for me, I go into the sinuses, right? So when I get alarm, I wake up with alarm every day, right? But I don't give it that much credibility anymore. And then I go into this place in my sinuses.

Where it's like- Do you actually touch it or do you just feel it?

I touch it. Yeah, I touch it. And I can do it a little bit now. I might get a little zony when I do this, but basically... I'm trying to think. And what I do is I can locate the alarm in my solar plexus. I talk about this in the book.

Where are the solar plexus?

Oh, it's right where your ribs meet. Right where the bottom part of the sternum.

Oh, got you. Okay.

So that's where I have my from growing up with my schizophrenia dad. I will go into that alarm. I will try and intentionally give it love and attention. And then I will go up into my sinus area that feels safe. And then I will go back into that place that feels uncomfortable. The thing is there's a theory that says when you experience a trauma as a child, part of you stays locked at that age for the rest of your life. Part of you, right?

What I'm trying to do - At times I feel like all of me.

Yeah, and it can be very overwhelming because it's unconscious, Mel. It's not something that we consciously feel. We actually get transported through the amygdala to that time and through the insula. The insula is like the place in our brain that translates the body into the mind and the mind into the body. It's like the way station. So I believe that we actually create this body memory. And I think the insula has something to do with this. And then we feel exactly the same way in our bodies now as we did when the trauma was occurring, which of course brings up all sorts of old memories, all sorts of old panic. And then we want to.

Make sense of that. It's the stories, all of it. You're right. I want to take another scenario. I have a really good friend that is in the middle of a massive venture capital pitch.

Okay.

And she is doing presentation after presentation to raise a ton of capital for this super cool thing she's launching. And she is a ball of knots. She has the alarm going off all the time, the stakes feel high. And I realize part of creative energy, part of being successful, part of the motivation that can drive somebody during a very successful time and the adrenaline that shoots through you, that's part of what happens when things are high stakes. How do these tools help you be more successful in those moments where you're at bat and this is a big game you're playing and that adrenaline rush and alarm in your body is going off all the time. How do you use these tools in those moments?

Well, you practice them first. There's a little thing that I talk to people about all the time. I said, Hey, Mel Robbins, December the first, I'm going to take you to the basketball court and I'm going to give you 10 foul shots. And if you make three of them, I'm going to give you $5 million. Now, would you start practicing foul shots the day before?

No.

No. You'd start shooting foul shots every day, right? So that's what I mean. It's like, okay, so what I would do with her, the short version is I'd probably find her alarm and work on that first. But what I would do with her is I would say, okay, where is this alarm in your body? I find it. Can you put your hand over it? Can you breathe into it? Can you do this? Can you practice this a number of times a day so that when you need it, when you're going into that boardroom, you can do a two-minute thing in the bathroom where you put your hand over your alarm, you breathe into it, you regulate your body, you relax your shoulders, you relax your jaw, close your eyes. You go into this place that you've practiced a number of times, and then you can come back out in a regulated state.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, from what's going on in your mind, why does this matter?

Well, because you want to be able to train yourself to regulate your own nervous system is basically what it comes down to. And people with anxiety didn't have a parent that regulated their own nervous system, so they have to do it themselves. And nobody's coming to save you. I think I see that with people all the time. No one's coming to save you. You have to do this for yourself. And therapists can help, doctors can help, whatever. But unless you do it for yourself, it's not coming from a place that's really going to dissipate that alarm. I see this with a lot of people. I think we have this unconscious belief when we have parents that didn't quite meet our needs that eventually that parent's going.

To come back- I keep waiting. -and look after us.

We don't do it for ourselves. We don't do self-care for ourselves because we assume that parent is going to come back. This is unconscious. This is all unconscious. We assume that parent is going to come back and take care of us. Why do we have to do it? I'm sure that's what we said to ourselves at the time, Why do I have to do this? That's a lot of it, is that you've got to start taking responsibility for your own body, your own alarm, and realize that it's up to you. It's that child in you that wants you back, it wants to connect with you. And if you are pushing it away all the time, that child is either going to shut down and you're going to go into depression or it's going to go into this fight-flight mode where you're always anxious. And with you, Melth, bringing it back to you, is that this is how you would outrun the anxiety. And every success that you would have would put a little anesthetic on that anxiety.

Well, part of the reason, too, is that you get a lot of positive attention when you're achieving. I started marrying achievement with worthiness and being safe and being connected. And so when I would be still, there was like achievement means that your worth is attached to something outside of you.

Totally.

And whenever I wasn't doing something or going after something or being really busy, I didn't feel worthy. The alarms were going off. One of the other things, I've got a couple of rapid fire things that I want to get in here because I'm addicted to your Instagram account. Number one, what is the difference between coping with your anxiety and healing it?

Okay. So coping with your anxiety is mostly a top-down thinking process. You learn thinking strategies that help you deal with it. This anxiety isn't real. I'm over exaggerating, whatever that is. Healing it is going back to that child that's in you, that alarmed child in you and giving them the ability to be seen, heard and loved by you, by adult you. Now, child you is going to resist that because child you has been ignored by adult you for a very long time. It takes a while before you start building that bridge back together again. So that's how you heal. You heal by finding that child in you. With you, it's the 11-year-old with that sleepover. It's like going back to her, talking to her, sitting beside her and saying, Look, that must have been really hard for you. It must have been awful for you. And then see what she says. She may not talk back to you for a month or two months or six months, but eventually she will. And then when you develop that bridge, that conduit to her, that's when you heal. And the analogy that I draw is that you're in a rowboat, there's a hole in the rowboat, and it's filling up with water.

Now, you can do cognitive therapies, and I have nothing against cognitive therapies. I think they're helpful. But it's basically like bailing water out of that boat. So what you really need to do is go underneath, patch the hole in the hall, which I believe is the old alarm, which is the old wounded version of you as a child. Find that child, show them that they are seen, heard, and loved by you, high five them in the mirror, whatever you need to do. Find that child and heal them. And then you heal at the root cause of it. You're not just bail and water by trying to change your thoughts. You're actually getting to the root cause of what's causing your anxiety, which is really a state of alarm.

Yeah, and the inability to understand it or to tolerate it or soothe it. Dr. Kennedy in the house, people. So let's go back to the basics. Anxiety 101.