Show Description

Our latest guest on The MindHealth360 Show, Dr. Janina Fisher, one of the world’s leading experts on treating trauma, explains the revolution in trauma treatment since Bessel van der Kolk’s work, which showed that trauma is not in the event itself, but rather in the body’s reaction to that event, which is stored in the body, the nervous system and the lower brain regions. This explains why talk therapy and CBT, which engage the brain’s higher prefrontal cortex, so often fail to address the root causes of mental health issues and are blunt tools when it comes to successfully treating trauma. 

She explains that when we have an emotional reaction to an event or a person, we may actually be having a “feeling memory”, reacting to an implicit memory from a childhood trauma rather than to the actual person or event in the present. And this memory can trigger our nervous system’s animalistic response to an earlier threat – whether mammalian (fight/flight) or reptilian (freeze) in the present – dysregulating our nervous system and contributing to mental health symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and lack of focus.

Dr. Fisher developed the groundbreaking TIST (trauma informed stabilisation treatment) therapy to help heal trauma and teach trauma therapists around the world. Combining Dr. Dick Schwartz’ IFS parts work with mindfulness, clinical hypnosis, and sensorimotor psychotherapy, her approach has proven very successful in sustainably treating trauma. Here she shares some key insights to help us understand the effects of trauma and nervous system dysregulation on our bodies, minds and behaviour, and gives us some top tips for recovery.

Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist and a former instructor at Harvard Medical School. An international expert on the treatment of trauma, she is an Advisory Board member of the Trauma Research Foundation and the author of three books, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation (2017), Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: a Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021), and The Living Legacy Instructional Flip Chart (2022). She is best known for her work on integrating mindfulness-based interventions into trauma treatment, and she is also the creator of Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) therapy.

Learn about:

• Why talk therapy can be retraumatising and which therapies work best to address trauma
• Why we are born with a negativity bias and how this can exacerbate the impact of childhood trauma
• How we are born wired to dissociate, both as an adaptive response to trauma, but also to help us reach peak performance states
• Why being overwhelmed as a child by frightening parents can prevent the development of a strong sense of Self and self-esteem
• The two core fears in trauma: being abandoned, or being attacked and annihilated
• How to start healing by transforming how the body and mind remember what happened, since we cannot change the events themselves
• How meditation can dampen the activity of the amygdala and the reptilian brain and increase the activity of the prefrontal cortex, and how practising everyday mindfulness (with or without daily meditation) can help to recalibrate the nervous system
• Why it can be hard to focus on the positives for people who have been traumatised, and why feeling safe and relaxed can be a cue of danger
• Is it ADHD or trauma? Why a regulated nervous system is the bedrock of attention and focus (as well as happiness and calm), and the better regulated our nervous system, the better we can focus (and deal with depression and anxiety)
• How we can manipulate our behaviour to produce the biochemicals to get relief from uncomfortable states
• Why pathogens and toxins can prime us to be more susceptible to trauma, and how trauma primes us to be more susceptible to pathogens and toxins
• How we can develop a secure attachment if we’ve never had one; the concept of “earned secure attachment” and “internal attachment” and how they can be encouraged through daily practice