90% of People Don’t Realise They’re Doing This - Ella McCrystal

0:00Your cells remember everything.

0:02Ella McCrystal:Ella McCrystal is a psychotherapist, TEDx speaker, author, and the owner and director of the Northampton Clinic, one of the oldest multidisciplinary health clinics in the country. She didn't study trauma from the outside. She lived it. So it's not just a case of what's happening now. It's usually in a combination of what's been happening throughout your whole life, because largely that's unconscious. Brain-body system is 95%, and you haven't been able to unfreeze yourself from that moment. What is ADHD in its simplest form? My opinion is that ADHD and complex PTSD can appear to be almost exactly the same.

0:35The other day I had a lovely little girl. She said, if you could go back in time and meet Hitler as a baby, would you kill him? I wasn't expecting it. I said, well, no. And she said... I think we should start with a really simple question. What is trauma? Ella, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us. So we kick off the podcast the same way every single time. I'm going to hit you with a big open question. Not my life. Who are you and what problem do you solve? Well, I am Ella McChrystal. I am a psychotherapist, author and clinic director. So I guess the problem I solve is broadly emotional mental health, but more so specifically working with trauma.

1:18Lots of different types of trauma, whether that be acute or chronic, but also just everyday life, really. people that struggle with things that just might seem to them like it's no big deal but actually it's holding them back um i do some coaching as well so for people that want to be inspired or motivated we also as a clinic look at brain body stuff so it's not just about the brain it's about the body as well brain nervous system really important there's going to be so much to get into i can't wait for this um so people that maybe follow you for your um advice or they are in your clinic typically what symptoms will they be facing for it to be worth working with you it's funny most people would contact with a grief or anxiety or they will call it depression but actually at the root of it all and and also with the physical stuff as well not always sometimes it's an acute injury which you know people need to visit us for but um often it's a root cause of a build-up of emotional pain i always say this to people so forgive me for going deep already your cells remember everything so it's not just a case of what's happening now it's usually in a combination of what's been happening throughout your whole life every cell has a memory and if you think there's about 38 trillion cells that make up in fact it could be more because some of those are bacteria cells so we could say 70 trillion cells that make up who you are as a person all of those cells are constantly evolving and changing and then we've got the neuroplasticity aspect so most people present with grief loss but it's usually the the straw that broke the camel's back there's also things like abuse neglect all those things that seem obvious but when you start to trace back there's a whole load of things going on so there's a lot of tiktok therapists out there at the moment yeah i think we should start with a really simple question what is trauma trauma is how it manifests for the person so i think the problem is with the old model it would be something like a car accident or a military explosion that would lead to what we would consider to be trauma but i always think that we've got to take into account several different factors genetic predisposition so epigenetics we also need to take into account what the person's life story was leading up to what they consider their trauma to be because remember some people will come in and say i've had a really traumatic episode and to them it is traumatic whereas i might have heard something and this isn't to disrespect anybody i might have heard something an hour before that would be 10 times more traumatic than that but that person has dealt with it very very differently and some would say in a more resilient way so of course everything matters when you're talking about trauma it's not just the incident itself so it kind of doesn't really answer the question because it's different for everybody and if if somebody holds it in their body for example say at the point that a trauma happened to you you fainted and then there are unconscious triggers around you it could be a sound it could be a smell and you start to feel faint and then you pass out and that happens a few times then you start to feel out of control so actually it's something that's triggering the original wound and you haven't been able to unfreeze yourself from that moment does that make sense so the so the trauma is less about the event more about how i responded to the event yes and then how you continue to respond because largely that's unconscious brain body system is 95 so of course if you're holding all of these signals in the body waiting to protect yourself from it happening again but you're not aware of what those signals are and you haven't been able to locate where you're holding that in the body or why you might not um you might not think that your dizzy spells and your fainting is attached to the original trauma there's actually a a syndrome called pots which is basically where people have an issue with their heart and they pass out and sometimes when they pass out they lose control so they might wet themselves or even worse and they get diagnosed with POTS but very rarely do they look at why that started now often you find that people with POTS are neurodiverse or they've had traumas or both so actually when you go deeper deeper down you discover that there's so much going on underneath the surface and they haven't even realized they're holding that as a trauma but their body responds to it so I want to dig into this like the body and and how that can kind of manifest so when we think about trauma there are probably people that come to you and although they might not feel like it's down to that trauma yeah can you give us some examples of how else you've seen that manifest in the body over a period of decades for example i mean chronic pain is one of them so people you know if you heard of fibromyalgia so people with fibromyalgia usually especially women they usually have a whole history of traumas and it's usually childhood traumas so their body if you think about the way the body work so if you heard of the fascia so the fascia is like the spider's web if you like that holds everything together it goes through every part of your body through all of the organs the skin everything if as a child you're in a household that's violent or where there's even if it's just loud sounds and you become a sensitive child your body constantly holds on and constantly keeps the score there is actually a really good book called the body keeps the score for anyone that wants to listen to it or read it and so as the body adapts to the events to the situation you can get stuck in this holding tension through the fascia through the muscles through the joints not only that if you're let's say if you're in a heightened situation at the age of five which is before the development of the brain where the prefrontal cortex starts to happen that's the part that does executive function sorry and it does all the sort of logic analysis if that part isn't developed and you're going through lots of different situations, could be bullying at school, like I said, trauma in the house, the body starts to keep the score for you and it remembers everything.

7:32But also there's a part of your brain called the amygdala, which is only there for pleasure and danger. If that is starting to dial up, so I need to be prepared for the next event, if that dials all the way up, then what happens is the brain is now more hypervigilant to potential danger, so you're likely to produce more cortisol more adrenaline which is very acidic for the system if there's too much acid there's inflammation if there's inflammation the body will try to protect you from that so you end up with pain chronic pain and so a lot of people that have chronic fatigue or chronic chronic pain have had these stressful events through their lives but because they're listening to what they think trauma is they don't understand that the chronic events and the complexity of those events have contributed to their own trauma.

8:21So I'll ask the stupid question and we'll see where we end up with it, but can a trauma be undone? Yes, because I'm sure you've heard of neuroplasticity. That's how the brain rewires and recalibrates. So I use a particular technique called EMDR, and I've actually created my own, which I'm coaching other therapists and practitioners in now, called the Neuroelectrics Method, which is essentially based on neuroplasticity but it looks at three different types of therapy EMDR being one of them which I'll explain hypnosis being another or at least the inroad to hypnosis which is the relaxation part and then we use some psychoanalysis not a lot but some of the the framework one of which is Freud's free association which is where you are guided by the client rather than forcing them into a framework so if you blend those methods together you can create lasting change and it doesn't take long at all in fact i've seen people that have been i'm going to say severely traumatized um sex trafficking that sort of thing where within a couple of sessions their whole brain has been able to recalibrate the information so i'll tell you how when you have an event let's say it was yesterday or it could have been 20 years ago the brain gets stuck in time it sort of gets frozen so there's two things to know here one is that as you recall a memory you recall it from the last time you remembered it not from the time that it happened and also it changes over time it's a bit like gossip but also you're remembering it from the perspective of the age you were or the event that you were in so you get frozen in that perspective but you also get frozen in time and like gossip it changes ever so slightly that means that your body either becomes numb to the event or it becomes hyper vigilant to the event so it's almost as though it either gets dumbed down or it gets so big that you can no longer even leave the house so with the mdr and with the neuroelectrics method what you do is you go back to the original event you use a certain protocol to desensitize to that by repeating it over and over again then you start to layer in suggestions so for me that's where it's slightly different for emdr with the neuroelectrics method with hypnotherapy we use suggestions so we start to use the imagination the reason for that is because we can use our imagination for good or for bad there's a part of the brain that doesn't know the difference so if we're going to tap into the imagination we may as well start layering in new parts but whilst they're in a deeply relaxed state whilst they're going back to the event and then what we do is we keep reprocessing reprocessing but we're also tapping into the body because remember i said earlier the body holds some of this information so if someone was fainting all the time or if someone was always having like a really bad ibs response or feeling sick i would use that as part of the session to reprogram the body as well so we use sensory details we take them back to the event and and again a bit nlp actually sometimes i don't know if you've used nlp it's often used in sales you can use nlp to sort of take them back to a time even without doing any other techniques and just change the shape in the body so if it feels sharp turn it into a circle i know it sounds really basic but when you're using all of these methods together you're teaching the body a different feeling whilst it's remembering the same event desensitizing reprocessing neuroplasticity shows us it's clinically proven thus far that if you can imagine something new you can create new neural pathways with those pathways they sort of become bridges over the old pathways so you don't forget what happened before but when the thought lands it lands on the new bridge it doesn't go to the old bridge anymore so it's a bit like going to the gym and training your body building muscle you can literally change the shape of the way you think in the same way you can change the shape of your body you just need the right guidance and the problem is therapy and coaching often is quite misleading and what it can actually achieve so you need somebody that is very specific in their approach to trauma and that same approach can be used like i said for coaching to motivate people because it's all up here it's how you rewire so if you don't believe in yourself we go back to the reason why we work that out and we create a new version future mapping so you can combine all these modalities but you've just got to be able to do it in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming for the client but also give them the space to talk because yes we can fix the problem for sure but people also don't feel heard and seen a lot especially if their traumas have been about not being heard and seen oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time.

13:15How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile and I reckon I've spoke to one person. No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time? No other better connection, right? Wow, Nooks.ai. eye how important then is is awareness like if a client comes to you and they're aware i suppose on the example that came to mind was my nana right she's had arthritis since she was maybe in her 40s yeah rheumatoid i don't know what it's like very and she'll feel it in certain moments in her life more and then when i talk to her about her own childhood she'll say things like you weren't really allowed to feel things properly and you had to suppress a lot of emotions and i think that's quite common of people from a certain generation but if i said to her those two things might be linked she'd say don't be so bloody stupid and tell me i was being soft so how much should someone be aware before they come to you i think it's key i think not even before i think it's actually as a coach or a therapist we have to make sure that we are educating on these things because you don't want to miss that sort of detail where someone has arthritis i would i would suspect although though I could be wrong that it's rheumatoid arthritis, which is a chronic inflammatory disorder.

14:39And again, it often happens where there's been layers of stress. Now, if you don't pay attention to the emotion, and in those days you're absolutely right, you weren't allowed to, no one even used the word anxiety. No one would have used the word depression then. You would have certainly been maybe called nervous, perhaps put on Valium or Prozac, but you wouldn't have been looked at beyond that. was just shut it down with medication so that's what people did and you could argue that to some degree it worked but it didn't solve the problem the problem showed up in the body and the problem is and this is what i was saying before where you've got lots of cortisol and lots of adrenaline there's lots of acid and inflammation but not only that you only have to look at ancient eastern philosophies which now neuroscience is catching up with so let's look at traditional chinese medicine the way they look at the energy centers in the body they've been right for a really really long time but it's kind of been poo-pooed by medical science as it's not really what we look at but i've met a lot of doctors recently that are much more on board with that philosophy now and and equally like i said neuroscience is catching up so essentially um let me try and think of an example for for how this works you know when you hear some bad news just explain to me i'll go with you first explain to me where you would feel that in the body first maybe my chest or my back like i might tense up all around okay so if you're feeling it in your chest what sort feeling is it tightness like almost like there's a constriction yeah there's two reasons that would happen one is that as the brain perceives the threat the oxygen levels at the front of the brain the prefrontal cortex drop ever so slightly adrenaline and cortisol start to surge through now what happens is the heart is getting prepared to pump faster and the lungs are getting prepared to work harder to get the blood around your body now if there's a moment of freeze which is often what happens it feels like everything stops and tightens up and constricts just to prepare you for the next step emotional processing actually is often to do with the lower back where people tighten up and hold on so imagine if you did that every day because you weren't allowed to speak and you weren't allowed to experience your emotions over time that would feel awful in your body and actually your body would adapt and you would start to hold on in more ways if you look at something like rheumatoid arthritis or joint aches and pains it's often where somebody hasn't been able to express so they hold on so everything gets inflamed to protect them and that's why we've got to look at the whole system not just the event and that's why it's so hard to answer the question about trauma because it's so multifaceted are there any other common um i don't know oversimplify but if you've got stomach issues typically that's because of are there any links that you've spotted between the type of trauma and where it shows up in the body so again if it's very specific actually for someone that has IBS so they often want to run away from their problems because what happens in the fight flight response is digestive enzymes slow down really quickly basically so that you can evacuate your bowels so that you can run faster you've got no extra load so to speak to carry so you're as light as possible to run if you feel it below the belly button that's usually someone who wants to run above the belly button where it feels below the rib cage almost like a void and then it moves up into the chest that's often someone not always but often someone that wants to fight but then they find that they get constricted in the throat more often than not and that they suppress their so their energy is here and they might tense their jaw clench their jaw they might feel it again in the back it's almost like a frustration or an anger response rather than the flight response and the particular types of trauma could be you would say that you've had to fight back or you've had to be prepared to fight or the the solution to the problem was to run away so it does depend on the person how they responded it's not always just about the trauma it's about what they've learned from those around them or how they've had to cope so their body's adapted with that well when we think about where we are generationally at the moment obviously my mind starts thinking about social media have you thought or have you come across any new traumas or any new things that you're seeing in in younger people that are probably being discussed well we we were discussing off camera weren't we the charlie kirk thing so that happened just to answer your question i'll give you an example that happened and um it was the first night of the news and I had to check a message on Instagram, a business message, and I went on and as I opened it, I saw Charlie Kirk get shot in the neck.

19:42I mean, it was about 2 o 'clock in the morning and I was absolutely traumatised by that because that is not something I would ever seek out. I don't want to see it. I mean, God bless him, but I don't want to see it. It's not something that I... I felt traumatised from it. The problem is, is that kids are desensitised to that now. So that brings a trauma of its own. If you're desensitized, shut down to the emotion and the response of seeing someone being murdered because you're seeing too much of that, that becomes a numbness, a coldness. How do we exist as a society when people aren't responding to that in a way that's devastating?

20:20But then the other side of this is, and I know I've mentioned earlier, I'll give her a shout out just because I think she's really, really key in this movement. um dr charlotte armitage who i know you've seen her ted talk and she's been on my show we talk about how the dopamine receptors are hijacked they're getting this flood of dopamine now dopamine is reward and motivation if you're receiving from the age of two or three because of social media or these apps where you're just constantly scrolling and getting this hit of dopamine you're going to wear out those receptors it's going to be harder and harder to feel motivated and rewarded so that then becomes a trauma because we see that young people are seeking out more and more risk more and more hits it leads into pornography and and and then terrible situations around sexual experiences for young people so of course that those things lead on to traumas if you're let's say 15 and you've been exposed as a girl or a boy and you've been exposed to all sorts of violence, porn, things that your brain doesn't yet have the capacity to understand.

21:27For your relationships, you're going in with a really skewed idea of what connection and closeness looks like, which leads to isolation and loneliness later, which becomes a trauma, not only for them, but collectively as a society. So, yeah, I think social media is an awful, awful thing. I use it beautifully, and I don't see anything too awful apart from things occasionally like the Charlie Kirk thing. But generally speaking, kids, their algorithms are screwed. You know, the music that they listen to is violent. And I know some of it could be excused as poetry or art, but on the whole, it's not.

22:01It's very, very graphic. So I think we're moving into a time that's concerning and it's devastating. And if we were saying, OK, Ella, you're now in charge, everything runs through you. I guess what what is the what do you think the solution is well I don't know how you would police this but I don't think I mean bear in mind that the prefrontal cortex isn't developed I said this before it's executive function so it does analysis logic it does organization it does imagination all those really important things that's not fully developed until you're 25 so to give time reference to development the reptilian brain develops first it starts to develop in the womb the emotional center the limbic part of the brain called the mammalian brain that's usually developed by two or three years old that's where the the amygdala is that's the danger tracker but also the pleasure center the rest takes until you're 25 to develop so i don't think kids should be allowed on social media full stop i don't think they should have access i think it should be you know we're getting this government id they're going to use it for anything use it for social media and stop all young people going on it until 21 at least i genuinely think that's the only way that you'll ever stop the problem is the the problem is the problem started we've seen with the new laws around porn and access to porn for young people that they're just getting vpns you know it's not hard for them to do that so there needs to be so many things put in place to prevent what is happening now but also hugely and I always go back to this point community family education system which needs to be completely reformed connection we need to be around the kitchen table again you know arts and crafts people in their communities getting together spending time together getting if you can't stop it you've got to get away from it it comes down to the parents Charlotte and I Dr Charlotte Armitage and I discussed this on one of our episodes and she's talked about this broadly um you know if your child is on a phone and you are on a phone and you're not looking at each other where's the relational skills where's the interpersonal skills so it comes down to the home again parents need to put their own phones down get out into nature go for a walk spend time in water or by water learn new things read books but that takes a societal shift which is why it's so important for me to keep talking about these things because so many people will never go to therapy they don't know what therapy really is they think it's the old school tell me how you feel and nod away while someone tells their life story other people can't afford it um and and for that reason podcasts or books are these free educational resources we we all need to do it it's our duty if we've got the information to go out there and speak about these things and educate even if someone only takes five minutes of this and goes oh that's interesting I didn't know that then that's a step more than what they did before so that's a whistle stop tour of trauma yes um anxiety is another thing that comes up a lot yeah talk to us about anxiety its role where it gets problematic well anxiety is essentially a good thing if it's managed well so we need to feel anxious about some things otherwise we would constantly take risk and that would lead into all sorts of trouble both physically mentally emotionally financially everything so we have to have some the problem is is if you're sensitive or over sensitive for whatever reason you might have grown up around a parent that was very anxious you might have heard things that your brain just happens to have a very good imagination and you're using for the negatives rather than the positives because the brain is negatively wired.

25:50So for survival, we are wired negatively first, positively second. So if you are watching someone be anxious or your brain happens to be very imaginative and you go to the negatives, you're likely to feel scared of a lot of things. Now, a couple of things to bear in mind. One of the things I always ask people with generalized anxiety disorder that don't happen to have a sort of co-morbid experience of autism or ADHD one of the things I ask is how was your birth because a lot of the time they go oh no nothing bad's happened you've got no trauma to to think of they can't think of any reason why they'd be anxious and oftentimes not always when they were born something happened like the cord was wrapped around their neck so their first experience of life is near death or you know it might have been a cesarean where they were rushed out of the womb and something scary for that baby where it's been safe in the womb it's now out there in the world in a really scary environment and it's not getting that skin-to-skin contact so that can be a reason for anxiety but also children don't listen they watch so they will be scouring all the time and absorbing things all the time even if it's not the parents that are anxious or the siblings it could be their friends at school so they're learning all the time and they're soaking everything up so anxiety gets logged in the brain and the body system because of exposure all those early experiences then what we see is obviously genetic predispositions you often find a lot of anxiety with adhd and autism so there can be neurodiverse reasons and then of course what you have to do is you have to be able to explain why anxiety is there and not to be scared of feeling anxious because that's what often happens with anxiety someone hates the physical response to anxiety so they start to fear anxiety even if there's nothing to actually be scared of so they think well last time I went to the supermarket it was bright lights it felt overwhelming I felt anxious I had a panic attack perhaps I won't go to that supermarket now so they start to avoid and in the avoidance they're not building up the skills to overcome the very thing that they've become afraid of so with anxiety cbt nlp hypnotherapy they're brilliant tools to get into the subconscious again using the imagination for good rather than bad getting them to trust that they're okay i did loads of work with phobias at one point i try not to do it now because i did it so much that i can't bear to do it ever again but if i use spiders as an example how many people have a phobic response to spiders and you see their anxiety just explode they've usually watched someone else be scared or they're very sensitive to the innate fear of spiders that we all have and it's embedded in us because at one point all spiders would have been poisonous we would have all been in an area where they were poisonous so we remember it in the psyche in order to get over that i'd use hypnotherapy cbt and nlp and that's just where we start graded exposure therapy so i always start with like a charlotte's web type spider you know and make it an animated type spider either in their head or to look at on a piece of paper and you gradually build up their tolerance to the thing that they're afraid of so that same example applies to all anxiety stop avoiding it and start gradually exposing yourself to it really important because some people are all or nothing and they think well I can't do that but actually if you're with the right therapist or coach it's a very gentle process and you're naturally rewiring the brain slowly remember it's always about rewiring and reprogramming it's not just about talking and that's where a lot of therapy and coaching fails jealous greedy and terrible i'm talking about jack frimston because he's got a request view that i think is outrageous i'm gonna ask it and i'm only gonna ask it one time if you are listening and you are enjoying it please like and subscribe and make two little boys dreams come true that's just blowing my mind i feel like i want to listen to that again with a notepad do you know i was thinking about then we went away with a group of our friends, I've got two dogs, right?

30:11None of my other friends have got dogs. Jack actually doesn't care about dogs at all to even acknowledge them. So his little boy is so cool around the dogs, he doesn't care, but he doesn't have a dog in his own life. Whereas one of our other friends was bit by a dog when he was younger. So when my dogs come in, he's fine, but he looks a little bit cautious. And his new baby also starts to look a bit cautious. But at first she was cool, but it just made that make sense to me. So you mentioned around being born, what was your birth? yeah is there anything that happens in the womb so if you're an anxious mother or in an anxious household or even vice versa yeah that then the baby picks up on even before it's born yeah absolutely i've had a child's and i think i had a very um stressful first few months of the pregnancy and it wasn't because there was anything negative going on it was just that my hormones created this oh it was super protect i actually developed i say developed i realized how bad OCD was for me during my pregnancy it really took a terrible turn for the worst so when I talk about these things I understand them from the point of view of experiencing them as well so I was pregnant I started to develop a germ phobia and it was ridiculous so I knew I was pregnant within two weeks I could just feel the changes in my body super sensitive and I started to bleach all the surfaces in the house straight away now normally that comes at the end of the pregnancy where you start nesting i was doing that from the beginning but not only that if i left my house i lived on a busy town street at the time between two shops there was always litter on the road i'd go out walking the dog picking up all the litter and put it in a bag to the point where i complained to the council because there was no one ever picking up the litter and they sort of said well we are sending people but it's always clean because i was picking it up like i just made a rock my own back there but um it got to the point where when she was born she's nearly 18 now and swine flu was around at that point so this is pre-covid and it was quite it was quite scary and dangerous i was petrified of her catching something because i obviously didn't know that i was thinking this but i i obviously thought she was going to die so we stopped going out the only time we went out was to walk the dog i didn't leave the house it became agoraphobic i was petrified she was going to die so i tell you that because the amount of stress that that would have created as in cortisol which would have everything's linked so cortisol affects not only acid and inflammation but also your hormones so a female hormone changes in pregnancy anyway but the amount of stress would have impacted that so her development would have been in the sack if you like of stress which would have affected that her and um without saying too much she has had some anxiety issues she does have elements of OCD she does have elements of heightened fear responses and I'm not saying that's the only reason why because obviously my OCD was there anyway I just hadn't really noticed it the fire wasn't ignited if you like but I do believe that those things you'll see with many people in fact one of the reasons for ADHD and we know a lot more about that now is if there's a particularly stressful pregnancy or if the mother drinks alcohol during her pregnancy, that can affect the development of the brain and the fetus and therefore we see many more neurodiverse children as a result of it.

33:31And then there's other reasons why, but that's one of the thoughts around ADHD. Let's keep on with that, Ella. I think ADHD at the moment, obviously, it can be a buzzword and it's getting thrown around so, so much and there's so many different takes on it. if we look at it from the science standpoint and you're breaking it down there what what is adhd in its simplest form i mean obviously i'll just for those that don't know and i'm sure everybody knows it's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder used to be add and adhd they now call it all adhd it's just that you're more inattentive or you're more hyperactive or you're combined i am diagnosed of ADHD myself hence the amount that I talk and the speed that I talk but so not only do I know this from a lived experience I know this from a work experience as well so I'll tell you a few things about ADHD and it's a bit controversial I think they've got it wrong I'm not saying that all of it's wrong but I think the way that it's assessed now is purely on a set of criteria so it will use the dsm so the diagnostic criteria which i think is outdated and it will look at certain things like you have to have had it from a certain age you know there's got to be certain questionnaires that you answer then you assess for three hours it's a thorough test i'm not saying anything wrong with the practitioners or anything like that but my opinion is this we know that adhd and trauma complex ptsd can appear to be almost exactly the same my history to give reference to why i'm saying this and many other people I've worked with bear in mind I've done my job for 20 years I've seen thousands of people a lot of which now have a diagnosis of ADHD or suspected ADHD so I was sexually abused as a child by my dad so it's happening in the home he was sent to prison but then my mum chose to stay with him and brought him back into the home afterwards where he continued to be violent so I was growing up in a very hyper aggressive scary household I had to be hyper-tuned switched on the amygdala response which i mentioned earlier was all the way up to 10 but obviously the sort of second trauma was that my mum stayed with my dad so there was this uh rejection and neglect of my emotional needs so my brain is adapting in a scary sad emotionally taxing environment and there's all sort of everyone new in the area it was you know this was over 30 i'm 46 nearly 47 so going back many many years it was 30 odd years ago now social services didn't really get involved so there was a lot of um crazy stuff going on but it started in in in my before my prefrontal cortex was developing so obviously the way the trauma impacted the development of the prefrontal cortex has now given me the same framework as adhd and I've been diagnosed with it so I think if there's trauma in the the womb if there's trauma in those early formative years or even after you're likely to adapt in a way that that fits the ADHD model for example hyperactivity well I struggle with stillness because stillness to me is a threat so I want to keep moving and keep thinking and keep you know distracting from the things that are going on at home you know you're at school and you know you're not being able to sit still or concentrate but the night before you might have been going through something very traumatic at home so all of those things that look like adhd are also very very similar to complex ptsd you mentioned earlier the world we live in you know the social media we're seeing now children and i'm not knocking single parent families because i actually think some single parent families are probably better than the two parents staying together to be honest but the framework of the family system is broken down the framework of society is breaking down the framework of community is breaking down all of those things that keep us safe and balanced and able to concentrate and thrive the education system is not coping it's broken and that's something that's so important to the child growing up so of course when we look at adhd and we see i'm not saying that that people shouldn't be diagnosed i'm saying is the problem much bigger than just the dsm do we need to think outside of that there'd be lots of clinicians and practitioners that would go against that and say no it's very specific and we have to stick to it but if these two things mirror each other are we now seeing a lot of people with adhd diagnosis that are actually dealing with complex ptsd that are taking medication for adhd and it doesn't work because perhaps it's not exactly the same but we have to have a bit more of a robust um conversation around that so it sounds like the the symptoms could be the same so it'd be very very it's probably easier to put you in this bracket than that yeah do you know of anybody that's gone for an adhd diagnosis and been told they don't have adhd yes so in my clinic actually i have an adhd assessor and she assesses autism as well and i've sent countless people that way because people want to know so if they ask i mean i'm not always in agreement that they should go through that process one because if you go private which is a private clinic it's expensive two when you get the label it may not just be a quick case of taking medication we've still got to do the work like you've got to adjust to a world that doesn't want you to be adhd so or the child needs to adjust to the school system that certainly doesn't allow for adhd um so there's been a couple where the assessor has said actually ella i think this is a trauma that happened much much later in life she doesn't fit the framework but she has got a lot of the same symptoms and then somebody else that she so only two of them actually but somebody else that she felt didn't quite fit the criteria but was more of an avoidant personality disorder so there are times when but you see the reason i think that's a really good question is because lots of people are getting diagnosed and i do question whether all of them including myself but then a lot of people with adhd question even with a diagnosis if they have adhd so maybe that's a sign you've got adhd maybe just ignore everything i've said but you see it's so complex and so you have to have such a complex view with people unfortunately traditional therapies don't go that deep and i think if you knew you were going to go and see somebody and it would be really really complex it might put you off but truthfully to achieve anything in life it isn't a walk in the park you have to be prepared to do the work but what if the work is also fun what if you also build a great relationship with the therapist or the coach what if you feel safe and heard and seen what if yes you've got to do a little bit of work and yes you've got to look at things differently and yes you've got to reprogram your brain but it's a really great experience like going to the gym a lot of people don't want to go to the gym but they like the experience being part of that community of building those relationships of seeing the changes so it's a similar kind of deal if you ask me this is going to sound insensitive question i think but on no on adhd sometimes i've met people and we've had a few people in the business who i think you might just need to turn your phone off for a bit and just like not be as stimulated like there's like such a and you know how much screen time have you got i'm on nine hours a day or whatever you think is is that sometimes a thing that's sneaking i'm just so stimulated and food think about i don't know i mean sometimes i'm on a tube or a train or just walking you know the dogs and i see people they're drinking their energy drinks they've got a donut in the hand you know they've probably not had breakfast so their body's not getting the nutrients it needs they're on their phone like you say constantly i mean i was on my phone constantly today because i thought i was going to be late so i was constantly on the phone but generally if i'm on the train i take an opportunity because the wi-fi is rubbish just put it in my bag and look out the window but everyone around me and not only that but you know when everyone's seems to have forgotten their headphones so they're on the train and everyone's on loudspeaker i'm overstimulated i want to commit some sort of crime right now you know so i can only imagine that if you're doing that to yourself all the time noise food not getting enough sleep not moving your body not getting outside not seeing natural sunlight all of that is going to give you some symptoms of ADHD.

42:31So I think you're alluding to a little bit but it'd be great to hear kind of ideal routine and practices to not be overwhelmed or riddled with anxiety like what are you seeing as if you have these behaviors and habits you tend to feel a bit better? So for sure making sure that you've got a routine because I think the when when COVID happened the world changed didn't it that routine that we all were used to was just out of the window and people can now pick can choose their routine so I think you've got to get up at the same time every day try and be in a good sleep habit get up at the same day sorry sorry same time and go to sleep at the same time if you can where possible make sure that you've got your personal hygiene routine I know it sounds really simple but a lot of people don't look after personal hygiene so they don't feel good about themselves so that's really important then don't get on your phone straight away I'm launching a brand i told you earlier and one of the guys that that's heavily involved in that product um he used to turn me off because i wouldn't answer messages like first thing in the morning six o 'clock in the morning i'm like listen i've got several hours of stuff to do before i even look at my phone i will not pick my phone up because you're starting your brain on overstimulation so stay off your phone for as long as you possibly can unless you absolutely need to go on it if you can get outside even if you haven't got time for a walk put your head outside of your window and spend 10 minutes just paying attention just listening to the sound of the weather could be rain could be wind take a few deep breaths make sure you have something to eat even if it's something really really small just start off with that little bit of self-care i do think looking at your diet is really important if you're eating lots of sugary foods and lots of sort of processed foods your body isn't nourished so therefore your brain isn't nourished therefore you're craving more it's that dopamine thing again if you're going to eat lots of processed foods you're going to get the wrong type of response and then i think it's a case of setting time aside so every 50 minutes set your alarm to get up and walk around try to keep moving because if you're focused on a screen it's not natural i mean people forget that we are not made for the world we live in you need to move around you need to have conversations you need to look up you need to pay attention so they're very very basic things you can do but also make sure you see people i know that sounds absurd to say that but some people work from home and they don't see people all week that's not normal we're pack animals we're meant to spend time with other people and so it's just get out do something be be physically active in whichever way works for you i know some people are limited with physical activity but honestly i see people going and i've been guilty of this myself haven't got time i can't do it and then you see someone in a wheelchair you know on those ones that are um altered so they can go out and like race on the wheelchair you think well hang on this person's interested i don't know what you're talking about we could all make more of an effort i think we have to understand what our bodies were originally designed for we weren't meant to overeat we were meant to move our bodies we were meant to be outside in nature we were meant to pay attention to the way the universe works dark and light you know we weren't meant to be looking at screens we're meant to be looking at people all of those things help to reset the brain body system so 25 years ago therapy felt like something for rich people yeah we're now living in a world where i think for the better like therapy is a conversation like the friends and family and everyone's talking about it and it's like oh I've tried therapy and I've tried therapy it feels like we're now moving into an age where it's so accessible maybe too accessible so I'll give you a few examples of things I've dabbled in because I think especially our line of business and running a business and responsibilities I think it's always important to check in two things is better help and those kind of cheaper alternatives to here's somebody on the other side of the world now you can have a therapist on a a zoom screen that's one thing and then something I dabbled with earlier this year was an AI therapist and it was two different tones of voice and it would ask you challenging questions I guess when you think about where therapy is going as a therapist what do you spot as some of the dangers?

46:52Okay so better help is slightly different to AI although I still feel that it's a limited type of help however I will say it's a good starting point if you've never done anything before and you've got no idea of who you are why you are the way you are books services like better help are a great inroad and they could provide relief for the first part of your journey but i think if you've got more complex issues or you want to build a really good solid relationship i subscribe to the american way of doing things i don't think therapy is a six week 12 week 20 week process people often ask me at the beginning of the therapy how long do you think this is going to take and i'm like well i don't know i can't be honest with that answer because i don't know you yet but the longest standing client i have is 17 years could be nearly 18 but they don't come every week that would be insane um they come once every couple of months just for a check-in sometimes once every three to four months people drop off and they i don't see them for six months but a bit like the American style they keep you in their you know in their address book and then they come back and see you if life gets tough so that relationship's imperative um apps or services like better help get you through the first part but finding somebody that you really trust that really knows how to get into you as a person and reframe and reprogram is so important um AI I actually write reports after every session because I believe it's really important for my clients to see with transparency what I'm considering about them I do them little mini programs so I only see most of them once every two weeks or once a month they get their program and they can contact me in between it's not like don't contact me I'm not available they can contact me if they're stuck but I've also started saying to them look here's your report here's your program why don't you if you don't understand something copy paste put it into chat gpt and see what you can find out if you if you don't feel like i've quite hit the nail on the head use ai as a way of finding more information or read these books so if you're using them as bolt-ons and add-ons and you've got a point of reference like a therapist or a coach to ask questions to absolutely fill your boots i've been doing it for myself you know if there's something i'm stuck on and I'm feeling a bit low, I actually say in the style of Ella McChrystal, therapist, da-da-da-da-da, what would you advise?

49:26So it's my own advice coming back to me, which is hilarious. They say no one ever listens to their own advice, but I think actually that's really good. I'll try that. So I think there is some value in it, but I just don't think like anything that you should go alone because a bit like social media, ChatGBT, who was it that said this to me the other day? it was a question about religion and they put in a question about christianity is christianity this this and this and chat chiebt goes yes it's blah blah blah blah blah and then it goes but could it be this oh yes it could absolutely be that so it basically gives you the answer in a positive framework without actually going into the complexity unless you challenge it so i think you've got to be careful how you use it but certainly use as a as a bolt-on not as the only form of therapy and I think for those that have got quite a lot of experience with coaching they've had coaches they've had therapists it's probably quite useful but again one of the things that I don't believe AI will ever replicate is intuition and with your therapist or your coach they should have a really keen intuition part of the experience that we've all got after 20 years especially if you've been in it for that long is you've just got a really keen intuition you understand human nature and human experience in a way that i don't think ai can it can it can replicate more than we even dare think about but i don't think it will ever replicate intuition it can't what are the things in in therapy that have changed maybe in the last five years and that you see are gonna change in the next five years well again it's the science part because i mean when i was training when I trained over 20 years ago now I actually went in through the sort of back door of medical hypnosis and I was working in the NHS I was supporting consultants and other people in a chest clinic and became interested in medical hypnosis because I saw a lot of anxiety around lung disorders and breathing disorders so that was my interest and then I retrained as a psychotherapist so i went in through hypnosis so i was always a bit more outside of the box in my thinking anyway but when i then did the psychotherapy part of the training it was very flat there wasn't much to it it was probably what a lot of people expect therapy to be i think the neuroscience has come on leaps and bounds thanks to the likes of joe dispenser dr joe dispenser and and gabor mate who have literally changed the framework of therapy i in my opinion they have come in with especially joe dispenser so much neuroscience you know looking at quantum mechanics and this sort of energy stuff the electromagnetic stuff which affects the brain and the body system and i use a lot of that in the neuroelectrics method um his work's phenomenal and then Gabor Mete on trauma you know these people have given us so much more richness to the therapeutic experience so if you're not moving with the times and the therapy isn't feeling like it's new age then I don't I don't really feel that it can be doing that much good because you can talk about something till you're blue in the face I mean my experience going into therapy was because I tried to access support when I was going through what I was going through and um back then i mean we use the term gaslighting a lot now but they did they gaslit me my gp happened to be the same gp as my dad i'd been self-harming as a maladaptive coping tool and he told me off told me i was wasting his time and then the counsellors back then i don't we didn't use the word trauma they just basically couldn't deal with me so i was thrown out essentially and it made me want to be the person I'd never had I didn't have a family a safe family unit I didn't have therapy I was living on my own at 16 so I always went into this with the idea of this can't just be somewhere where people go to talk if I'm not being effective with them then I'm not doing my job and if I'm not doing my job what is the point I never wanted anybody else to have that experience with me and I to this day I don't think anyone would ever say that they'd felt like I've just giving them the sort of a flat container where they could throw their feelings into again i'm not saying that's a bad place to start but i think it's really important to look beyond that and that's where any of the listeners that don't know of uh joe dispenza or gabor mate it's certainly worth having a look they're two key people and then the book the body keeps the score is phenomenal for understanding how stress trauma anxiety affects your body and what you can do about it were you able to have relationships again with the family that were i did so i left home at 16 and then i'd gotten into a situation financially that was very difficult as you can imagine but also i um i spoke about this quite a lot actually when you're sexually abused as a child your boundaries are terrible around sex because if your dad's sexually abusing you don't have normal boundaries you haven't learned them i'd i'd misread signals quite a lot i ended up being raped at 13 by a 20 year old and then again at 17 by two men in a park I wasn't switched on so I wasn't safe um I didn't have I guess what what I would like to think my daughter has which is conversations education people that care to keep you safe so I was drinking a lot I was in a mess and on and off I'd fall out with my parents and then you know make up with them again but I'm 47 like I said nearly um and then 10 years ago I completely cut them out my life because it was just toxic it wouldn't work it wasn't that and I have to say this because I don't want to sound bitter or twisted I know from working the way I work looking at people psychoanalytically understanding how the aggressor is usually um externalized in someone who hasn't been able to deal with their own pain and their own experience of abuse so they externalize the aggressor as a way of shutting out the guilt and shame that they're carrying for being a victim themselves so I don't fully blame anyone for what's happened and I don't feel sorry for myself for what's happened but my mum and dad's relationship they collude and I know why they collude because they're protecting each other because they're I would imagine unconsciously very deeply ashamed for what they've done so I was always hitting this narrative of Ella you're the problem um you're angry which I was rightly so um you're you're too much you know all of these sorts of things and so I just had to step back and go that's done and and I haven't spoke to for a long time it is sad and I do miss having a family but equally I've never been more successful since I cut them out I'm not saying that's for everybody because even those that have been and there's many many people that are abused within the home a lot of people can't do that and that's fine I get it and I would never advise anyone what to do in that situation but for me personally as an overall view of life if something is toxic and you feel bad when you're around it or those people you have to address whether it's time to reframe reprogram step back and take a wider view i had to become the witness of my own life rather than being the emotional part of it because the emotional charge that you experience whether it's anger sadness pain whatever that is and i mean physical pain because an emotional charge can turn into physical pain as we discussed if you can witness yourself and witness the situation zoom out try not to be reactive try to really think through what you would do if it was your own best friend or your daughter or your brother or your sister it gives you a little bit of an insight into whether it's healthy or not it's a very difficult decision to make but I'm glad I did and I don't feel sad that it happened to me either because I don't think I'd be doing what I do now and I love what I do now so without that and i keep telling this story but i'm going to tell you a little story the other day i had a lovely little girl she's 13 she asked me a really interesting question she said and i wasn't expecting it if you could go back in time and meet hitler as a baby would you kill him right so this is the end of a therapy session so i said well no and she said she would and i understood why she would because she's trying to prevent what happened next but actually there's something called the butterfly effect and if we intervene with things good or bad we could be making something worse because we're trying to control it or something great that could happen won't happen so when we interfere and when we wish something hadn't happened or when we think oh poor me i'm so unlucky you're missing out on all the greatness that comes as a result of that experience yes there's a lot of pain but that's the philosophy of life isn't it you know if you think about the Carl Jung thing he's a psychologist and philosopher shadow and light dark and light good and bad is anything ever good or bad really is it just what it is and you grow from it if you allow yourself so that's the kind of philosophy I take to my own life and I try and teach that to others as well because I think if you can do that and you can look at the butterfly effect and you can see the bigger picture zoom out and become the witness it all starts to make sense ella thank you so much for being so honest and open i i mean this genuinely we we do a lot of these this is this has been one of my conversations and i mean that because you have a beautiful way of articulating your points in such a um a lovely manner so thank you we always end the conversations the same way if there was one question that you would get the audience to ask themselves what would that question be this is going to sound too simple it's going to sound too simple but the question would be are you really happy i feel like we might need to do a follow-up episode with you based on that question alone if people want to find you or they want to work with you how can they go about that so you can go to www.ellamccrystal.com and i'm also my my most prominent social media is at Ellen McChrystal on Instagram Amazing, thank you so much Thank you