Hey, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And I'm delighted to be talking to Christine Gibson, which is the formal name, isn't it, Christine? Because, actually, you're much better known as Christy Gibson, so you better tell us a little bit about that. So, first of all, hello.
Christy:Hi, there. It's nice to meet you. Russell. Yeah. I was Christy for the first 20 years of my life, and when I got into medical school, I thought, you know, that's not a serious enough name. And I had been named Christine at birth, so I thought, well, that's a more serious name for a doctor. So, when I moved Toronto here in Canada, to go to medical school, I changed my name to what was written on the birth certificate. So, I just thought it was a more serious way to show up. And then little did I know, three years ago now, I joined TikTok. And TikTok just borrows from your other social media. So, I had been Christy Gibson on Facebook, and that is what TikTok pulled across.
Christy:So I was Christy on TikTok, and I thought, no, that's okay, because I want to be more authentic and vulnerable and myself there, so I don't mind that name being used. And then, yeah, my TikTok blew up. I have 130,000 followers there now, so that's definitely the way more people know me. I don't know 130,000 people in real life. Well, maybe I do. I'd be interested to know if that's true or not.
Russell:Brilliant. It's amazing the way the modern world has changed access, reach, and our ability to influence people at very different levels. And that's fascinating.
Christy:Yeah.
Russell:Well, tell us a bit about what it is that you do, because, obviously, you've talked about the TikTok thing, but that's only a channel. But tell us all about your expertise.
Christy:Yeah, I mean, I am a true transdisciplinary, and were just chatting about that before we started recording. I have been inpatient family doctor. I've been an outpatient family doctor doing community-based work, and I have studied medical education. So, I created our residency program in health equity. I've created a number of non-profits. I do international work through a non-profit global family med foundation, and I've worked in Nepal, throughout East Africa and Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Laos. And more recently, I've become a trauma therapist. So, when I was working in community, I noticed that as a physician, I would tend to put out the same fire every week, and it leads to frustration on the part of the patient and burnout on the part of the doctor.
Christy:And when I was caught in the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015, I started researching PTSD and trauma because I had some physical residual symptoms that I was very curious about, and that led me to recognise how much complex trauma I was seeing in my clinical practice. And I had no resources to help them with that. So, I thought, well, I better be that myself. So, I just started studying everything I could about trauma treatment, and I became a trauma therapist. And that's what I do most of my work now. I work in adult addiction and refugee health, which is two practices I've been heavily involved in through health equity. And, yeah, the TikTok is about trauma and resilience, which has led me to you. And I wrote a book, the modern Trauma toolkit. So that would be the short version of my career.
Russell:Wow. It's amazing. And I love all the training you've had, some of which I have with you and some of which you have, which is different, but it looks like you're quite interested in the polyvagal side and Bessel van der Koch and all those sorts of people. I find all that trauma work quite fascinating, how trauma is held in the body as well as being a cognitive episode.
Christy:Yeah. Such an important point for the people that I work with in the refugee community. A lot of different cultures will somatise their trauma symptoms, and they won't come and describe the mental health aspects. They will describe the physical pain that is being experienced and perceived because of the trauma they've been through. And a lot of folks that I work with have such significant trauma that their amygdala’s are just hijacked by danger signals and their cognitive brains aren't accessible. So, if I were to do a cognitive therapy, and I'm trained in a number of those too, at least to start, they wouldn't really have access to their thinking brain to connect to it. So, I find somatic practices or body-based bottom up to be a really excellent door for the communities where I work.
Russell:Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I find traditional PTSD trauma treatment seems to all be about reliving the experience and almost flooding, but I don't find that works. I've never found that works as well as a technique. But I'm very excited by all this new stuff with DBT and the sort of trauma treatments, the body side of it, because actually it gives someone really something very practical to be able to do. To be able to do something rather than be overwhelmed by thoughts, by constantly revisiting, which is the sort of traditional sort of counselling approach, I suppose.
Christy:Yeah. And I think different people respond to different things. So generally, what I work with first is nervous system regulation. And I think that's why my work in terms of social media and writing has really become popular, is because as a family physician, I was able to share what's happening in the body and really help people what Deb Dana calls befriend their nervous system. And as they get to know the way their nervous system is stuck or hijacked, they have more agency over that. And once they're able to get into that window of tolerance, Dan Siegel's term, although someone this weekend just used window of flexibility, and I thought, oh, that's so much nicer.
Christy:So once they get into that window and they're actually feeling like they are using all parts of their brain again, that's when I think the cognitive therapies are more useful. And I totally agree with you about the significant exposure. I found that flooding sensation can be really damaging for patients, and it's just unnecessary. There are so many ways to process trauma where it's actually a nice experience for patients. I generally use tapping, which is one of my somatic techniques. I use a technique called matrix re imprinting using tapping. And then I use a more modern version of EMDR. So, the eye movement treatment that's been around for a couple of decades, there's a more modern version called accelerated resolution therapy, and it just feels like magic. So, patients aren't harmed with that therapeutic process, and it's very efficacious, which is amazing.
Russell:Is that the same as blast, or is that a different thing?
Christy:I believe it's different.
Russell:I think it's different. Yeah. I'll have to have a little read of that later. There are so many massive strides in the way that this has been looked at, and often I find that the traditional counselling approach is the one that's advocated for. And I found, actually, there's some quite interesting thoughts and new stuff around blue light trauma, which is actually about how you forget the triggers rather than dealing with the trauma. So actually, you never really experience a trauma anymore because you've forgotten the trigger. That is the gateway into it as well, which I thought was quite a clever approach as well. I don't know if you've come across those sorts of ideas.
Christy:I haven't, no. That's fascinating. It makes sense to me, though. One of the many training things I've done. I've just spent a lot of years gathering a large toolkit. So, Frank Corgan is a psychiatrist here in Canada, who's created a version of therapy called deep brain reorienting. And the premise is based on what's happening in our brainstem, and it's the orienting reflex. So, at the time of a traumatic event, whether it's relational or event trauma, we tend to be looking in a certain direction, which is the basis of brain spotting, and then we orient our neck in a certain direction. And so those audio and visual cues are kind of stored associations in the amygdala, but we also have that orienting reflex that can also access that traumatic pathway, and that's in the brain stem. So, this is all subconscious work.
Christy:That, to me, is so exciting because I really do feel that patients can't narrate the trauma pathway that's happening in their brain. And it's so much easier to access through those subconscious pathways once you know that they exist and the tools that actually work.
Russell:Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I think for too long we've just talked about it and estimated how people feel, and then we've wrung our hands and ummed and nod and summarised and such like, and that's all fine, but people want. They actually want relief, or they want some sort of closure. They want to be able to move on. And getting stuck in the. Because you find trauma loops, don't you, where people are constantly flicking in and out of this process, and they experience horrendous flashbacks, and of course, they sort of become overly sensitized to the whole process. And so, what you can find with people with traumas, everything sort of, almost everything sets them off, and they're caught in a sort of spiral, aren't they? Of helplessness?
Christy:Yeah, absolutely. I think helplessness, like that feeling of losing hope and a sense of shame are so pervasive and these are such hijacking experiences, and it's really hard to move forward until certain processes have happened in the nervous system. And then once that's happened, there are so many beautiful pathways being formulated. I just finished training in something called NARM, or the neuroeffective relational model, and it was such a beautiful, generative way to examine how the things that have happened to you are showing up in your present-day experiences and thoughts in such a non-shaming way. And it was so different than the cognitive behaviour therapy that I studied 20 years ago that I was told as the gold standard. It just feels so different, and patients love it. And you're not necessarily going through the trauma you're going through.
Russell:Well, how does the trauma show up now, which is really the issue.
Russell:And I guess for people who we sort of jumped into our conversation midway through, because, as always, I've got curious. But for those who don't understand or maybe have heard the word, but what is trauma? How would you describe it?
Christy:Yeah, I definitely agree with the more somatic practitioners who say that trauma is not an event that happens to you, it's your body's experience of that event. And so, it's the way that the nervous system primarily, but really, the whole mind body system, changes as a result of the event or numbers of experiences. When we talk about complex trauma, and I wish we had a better clinical definition of complex trauma, but they keep refusing to put it in the DSM, but it's really a lot of what I deal with. So, the complex trauma would be a person who's faced different kinds of traumas. Oftentimes both event trauma, like a physical harm to the body, as well as relational trauma that happens through those attachment patterns.
Christy:When we're young, it's a lot of what I see outside of the refugee clinic, and I just don't think we have a really good lock on that. But things are changing. I mean, trauma as a field in medicine and psychiatry is quite new, and I think the developments that are happening now are phenomenal. And that's really what I wanted to share through knowledge translation, every pathway that I can think of, I'm trying to get the news out. Hey, there's nothing wrong with you. Your mind body system is doing exactly what I was programmed to do. You don't have to be in this much distress.
Russell:Yeah, and I think that's right about the shame side of it. I'd not really thought enough about that. But do you think part of the problem is this term PTSD, and the fact that we actually talk about PTSD as being separate from trauma? What's your view? Is it like a driven diagram between the two words? Is it the same thing? How do you make the categorisation between the two terms?
Christy:Well, I mean, PTSD as a diagnosis entered the DSM in 1980, and it was really after the vets were returning from Vietnam. So, we knew through the studies with Freud and young that there was a lot of childhood sexual abuse that was quite pervasive. And of course, they backtracked because society wasn't ready for it. But this was not what we’re defining when it came to PTSD. We were really defining the experience of those Vietnam vets because they were the ones who brought the trauma experience to the forefront. And were finally able to understand what shell shock was all along, and I think because were defining it in a really particular way related to events that people went through. And of course, we know that people who join the army are more likely to have had significant exposure to adverse childhood experiences.
Christy:So it's not to say that they only had the trauma related to the events that they experienced, but that was really what the clinical definition was trying to highlight. And so, I think the way that we define PTSD leaves out a lot of the experiences of people who've had more relational trauma. Right. I think it's just not nuanced enough when it comes to the emotional experience and the interpersonal relationship experiences. And those get defined oftentimes as personality disorders. So, I personally feel like I don't give a lot of people DSM diagnoses and say you have anxiety and depression and a borderline personality and maybe a bit of ADHD until I've done some trauma work with them, because chances are if they have complex trauma, a lot of those symptoms will improve.
Russell:Yeah, we're going to get into the book in a second, because I'm sure. Well, we'll talk about the book. I was going to tell you why you wrote it, but probably easier to ask you, but I'm just wondering if there's a couple of simple techniques you can share for people who think to get some instant relief from sort of trauma. Maybe they've experienced it, because you can have trauma which isn't above the sort of radar to need a lot of psychotherapeutic work, but you can still be experiencing it because it's something that's happened to you, either relationship or relation, as you call it, or event. Is there something simple people can start to do?
Christy:Well? And there's collective trauma, too, like Thomas Huble is really bringing that to the forefront. So, we've all experienced collective trauma around the pandemic and the climate emergency. So, I really do think there's not a lot of people on the planet that aren't affected by a traumatic event, and it's just the degree that they're affected. So, if I were to choose two different techniques that are, there's about 40 different practices in my book. I'll mention maybe a body based one and a thinking braced one. So, a lot of what I teach in the book, there's a whole chapter on things like havening or tapping or tremoring, and I can't really explain that just using audio, but there are some aspects.
Russell:Great, isn't it?
Christy:Oh, I'm such a huge fan. Tension releasing exercises. And then there's videos on the QR code showing people how to do all of it. Something really simple is just like, what are the easy ways to get in touch with your vagus nerve? So, from polyvagal theory, we know that the vagus nerve is supposed to be sending signals up to our brain to say, hey, this is what your body is up to. And sometimes when you've been through traumatic experience, that vagus nerve is actually changing the way that your sympathetic tone or what is getting your heart beating and allowing you to move your body, the vagus nerve can intervene in that. So, one of the ways to regulate that nervous system is vagal nerve techniques. And my favourite one is just using your voice. So humming, singing, chanting. These are ancestral practices.
Christy:There's been very few civilizations over the millennia that didn't have religious or cultural practices around chanting and singing. And there's a reason it vibrates our lung tissues, and then it goes against our lung pleura, the big sack around our lungs, right against our vagus nerve. And so that vibration is actually moving the nerve. And then with every long exhalation, we're invoking our parasympathetic nervous system. So, what I'll generally say to my patients is, could you make a music playlist of things that would be matching your overactive nervous system and your underactive nervous system? So, you've kind of got like an energetic playlist and a more mellow playlist, and then can you hum along or even sing along and just see how that changes your body? Those longer exhalations and that vibration against the vagus nerve can very quickly regulate the nervous system.
Christy:So that's a simple technique that I teach all my patients in one of the first couples of visits, which would be a body based one.
Russell:That's a brilliant exercise. And I've done something similar myself with both as a practitioner and also for myself, and I can attest to the efficacy of that. It's really quite useful. And I love the body-based ones, even the simple stuff like cold showers in the morning and that sort of idea. I think it's so simple, isn't it, to be able to get in touch with your body? Because I think we spend so much time talking about feelings without understanding that feelings are in your body that we don't spend enough time in the body actually experiencing a feeling, because we've sort of made it a cognitive process instead of a visceral process that we can actually really, truly experience. So, I love that you're going to give us maybe a cognitive one as well.
Christy:Yeah. And I love how you said visceral, although I can't relate to the cold showers. I want to, but I can splash cold water on my face or take an ICE pack against the back of my neck. There are other ways where you can experience that cold remodelling. So, the cognitive one that I was going to share was my TikTok. That kind of blew up the most, and it's a technique called affirmations. So, most people have heard of affirmations. That's the way that we might say, I deserve good things. Things will work out for me. But when you've been through trauma and you have shame locked in the body and you don't believe that the world is something you can trust and bad things have happened to you, affirmations can almost feel like you're gaslighting yourself.
Christy:So on TikTok, I introduced the concept of affirmations, and affirmations are absolutely amazing. It's basically tiptoeing towards an affirmation. So, it's an affirmation with the words what if in front of it. What if I deserve good things? What if something could better for me in the future? And you're kind of tiptoeing towards that really gently. And sometimes you might even say, what if I could imagine a time in the future that I might believe, insert affirmation? And I teach patients this as just a really gentle way to provide different possible pathways. So, the opposite of trauma isn't being happy all the time. The opposite of trauma is flexibility. And so affirmations help you really learn what flexibility could feel like. Yeah. Rather than being locked into those shame-based lack of trust responses that are so immediately available to us after trauma.
Russell:Wow. Well, I know we're getting towards the end of our conversation, so thank you for your time so far, but I really must talk about your book. So, have you got a few more minutes to spend with us?
Christy:Absolutely, yeah.
Russell:Brilliant. Okay, so you've written a book. So, first of all, tell us what it is and tell us who it's for.
Christy:Yeah, I mean, I wrote the book for my TikTok audience. So, these were generally young women around age 20 to 35. And so I had my beta readers that were all young women of colour. My book is a safe book about trauma, so that's what I think differentiates it. It's written in very accessible language, so written at a grade eight level, and all of the challenging concepts are in there, but it's written in very simple language. And my intention was to have nothing that would be triggering, and for it to really feel like, oh, this is me, this is explaining what's happening to me in a way that you wouldn't feel shame about it. So, I think in that way, I really did something different.
Christy:And it was the book that I wanted to be able to give my patients and say, this is something that you could read that would help you understand more, and with a real solution focus. So, solutions, both in terms of practical ideas that they can try, but also solutions at that systems level. Because trauma doesn't just happen individual relationships, it happens in systems. I mean, we face things like sexism and racism and all kinds of these structural problems. And I didn't want to say, well, trauma can be solved by you regulating your nervous system, because that's simply not the case. So, I also wanted to talk about social innovation and design change and policy work, and all of the other things that we can do once we have our thinking brain back, and that we can do in community.
Russell:Because what our ancestors knew was that there's community-based solutions to these problems. And in our hyper individualistic culture, that's really caused a lot of our harm, too.
Christy:I'd so agree. This idea of the old idea, there's the blue zone, which is not just diet, but the fact that people are packed quite closely together. There's an extended family, there's support, there's intergenerational exchange, there's socialisation, there's that ability to really have the idea of the collective. And it's something that we've. Human beings are sort of social animals, and we've gone from being a very social animal to being, as you say, completely driven by our own sort of selfish needs and desires. Selfish in the sense that they're our own. And it's sort of not healthy if you're not careful. And I think especially in America, you see this perhaps more. You're in Canada, I'm in the UK. So, we're allowed to sit back, know.
Russell:Point and pretend that we're better.
Christy:We don't need to pretend. No, but it's a point of this idea of reaching out, building communities, building friendships is so important. And the fact is you can be modern and have modern friendships online, as well as visceral friendships because they're touching people and next to them, because often some of the friendships you have are with family, and they're the least people, the worst people to have relationships with. But I think it's really important that we're getting this message of being interactive again as human beings. I think it's so important, yeah.
Christy:And as we're just recreating what life looks like after the acute pandemic, I think people are settling into new patterns, but there is a lot more fear and anxiety being expressed. And especially amongst the youth, they're very nervous about the world they're coming into. And I think the more that we all are skilled at regulating our own nervous systems, thereby co regulating with others. And the more practice we have in community, the better we'll get. I know I had to do a lot of work.
Christy:It's about building the resilience to face this and experience and learn from it. And I think there's a tendency to avoid, and therefore you lose out on the opportunity to gain the practice, as it were. And a lot of older communities still practice. So, I work a lot in Africa, and you'll still see people going in and putting themselves in a position of rigor or risk so they can learn from it and come back. And they're all old spiritual practices which are the same. And I wonder if we've wrapped ourselves up in a sort of slightly antiseptic, overly clean environment where we're dodging risk and living life through a sort of virtual reality, and actually it leaves us totally ill equipped to do with the real world, which still exists.
Christy:Yeah, it's such a good question. I think about that a lot. I think about how much this luxury and comfort hasn't let us be as resilient as even our immediate ancestors. My great grandparents were Ukrainians who came to Canada to settle the prairies where there was nothing. There were obviously indigenous people who were living here, but they were wanting to create farmland and the railroad was being extended. So, I think about what happened to our indigenous people, and I think about the resilience that you would have had to be a Ukrainian settler in 1903. And, yeah, I'm really curious. There's a lot of places that are at war now. Obviously, just invoking Ukraine makes me think about it.
Christy:And I do think that we have to build up not just resilience, but the ability for post traumatic growth, because resilience gets you back to your baseline. And I think our baseline is really quite harmful. Our baseline is allowing the dissociation that's contributing to the climate emergency. And the leaders that we have available to us are continuing to double down on the harmful things that society has created.
Russell:I suppose I see resilience as a more uplifting process where one is building capacity and innovation, one is experiencing events, and then you don't return to the baseline. It's that old idea bouncing forward. So because of the learning that you experience, you always emerge in a better place or a different place, or a place with even greater potential. And I do think that there's a sort of narrative around resilience, which is about weathering the storm and bouncing back and then being able to go back and work with a terrible boss who's going to make our lives a misery again. And you get stuck in this again, this sort of slightly, this sort of trauma through death by 1000 cuts. And I find in my own personal practice, very few people with severe anxiety or general anxiety disorders that don't have poor bosses at work.
Russell:And it is odd how those two things, you might have a relational attachment sort of issue, but there's always a management leadership aspect to this. It's quite peculiar how much poor management and poor leadership has led to the infantilisation of the workplace.
Christy:And the one thing we haven't talked about yet is we've just started up a consulting company, Safer spaces training programs, which is working on creating psychological safety in the workplace. So you're absolutely right. I mean, we have so much of our time spent in that environment. And I think that these concepts we're talking about around post traumatic growth and psychological safety and distress tolerance, they're very meaningful in that workplace situation. So we're also working on creating curriculum and onboarding processes so that people can standardize psychological safety in the work environment.
Russell:I just wish that term had been thought out. Oh, we need the next iteration of that term because it's about, for me, it's about how you get people to maximise their potential, not just to be safe. And I know the point of it is you could bring your best self because you are psychologically safe, but it's that thing about creating a defensive brand rather than something that's positive. And I think that's one of the problems with leaders and managers. They resist this idea because it seems like somehow, it's like the old days when we used to encourage managers to use an AAP or talk about stress, and they wouldn't do it because it was seen. If I acknowledge it, I must be weak.
Christy:Oh, totally. One of our curriculum programs is a modern version of nonviolent communication. And it's the exact thing. Why would you call it nonviolent? Why would you want to be defined by the thing you don't want to be? So, yeah, we have safer communication strategies, and it's a more modern way of just learning how to talk to people, given that we all have experienced trauma at this point and it's a new world that we're finally acknowledging it. And, I mean, there's a backlash saying that we're talking too much about it. But thank goodness.
Russell:It's interesting you picked up on the one I hate is dealing with difficult people as if somehow people were difficult and rather than people doing difficult things. So ,we've got off the subject of the book, and, sorry, I'm finding it far too easy to talk to and far too fascinating. So, tell us the title of the book, because I think it's called modern trauma toolkit. Is that right?
Christy:Yeah, it's the Modern Trauma Toolkit. And it's looking at what is different about the way we experience psychological distress in modern times, but also our ancestral practices and ancestral traumas. And that's not something that people tend to talk about, because these sit in our subconscious, in our genetic code. But there are lots of ways to approach that, too. And then I say the word toolkit not because I think that there's a fix, that there's, like a destination and an endpoint, but that we could all have more resources available to us that we know are good for us and good to teach our children and our workmates. And so, building your capacity and your potential is around enhancing that toolkit that's individualised.
Russell:Brilliant. Well, I can't reckon. Well, I bought it, so that's good. So, you've got one extra sale, and I love the fact that you've got this. It's lovely when you get a really poor review. So, someone very grumpy who doesn't like the idea that you've talked about different things.
Christy:I know. That review made me laugh so hard, it was scattered. And I thought, oh, that's so interesting, because they don't like talking about systems level trauma or racism. But to me, if you write a book about trauma and you don't mention racism, you've really missed the boat.
Christy:And I wanted to talk about tricky things like psychedelic medicine, because again, I think a lot of practitioners avoid these tough conversations. And I just wanted to jump right in.
Russell:Yeah, good for you. And I also think it's fantastic when you see people giving you fives and ones, because I think it's good that the book is provocative enough to stimulate a lot of agreement or a lot of disagreement. It's the bland books, which get three stars all the time. I think they're the worst ones. I congratulate you on polarising.
Christy:Yeah. And there's also an audiobook. I'll just mention I worked really hard to create a prosodic and safe experience with my audiobook. It's read in a way that I think will be very nurturing to folks. And I think that was another differentiator is people don't always understand how important tone of voice and facial expression are when we're dealing with traumatic content. And that's, I think, another reason why I've been seen as a safe person on social media. And I'll just shout out my handle there. It's TikTok trauma doc. If people are on that, on TikTok.
Russell:Very good. And your website?
Christy:My personal website is christinegibson.net. That's where I take lots of speaking engagements, interviews, that kind of thing. And saferspacestraining.com is our workplace training and moderntrauma.com is the book. And there's lots of UK buying options. We actually are published through John Murray in the UK, so we have a UK publisher as well.
Russell:Oh, I'm sorry. I'm very old fashioned and I just use Amazon. Isn't it funny to say how we're old fashioned? Use Amazon rather than being all modern and going buying a real book.
Christy:I know times have changed. Yeah. So, on the banner at the top of my website, I'll have all the UK buying options, including UK Amazon.
Russell:Good to see Foyles on there. It's a fantastic bookshop. Well, it's been an absolute delight to spend time with you today, and apologies for running on, but I just found what you're saying absolutely fascinating. It's so important. And it's also important to hear a different voice talking about these issues, rather know yet another stereotypical male in a certain age. So, it's good to hear someone different with a different accent, a different way of thinking about this. So, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I really do appreciate it. And as Christy says, you can find in all sorts of different places her website and the book. Just remind everyone the title of the book before we go.
Christy:Yeah, the Modern Trauma Toolkit.
Russell:Fantastic. Thanks so much for spending time with us.
Christy:Oh, thank you, Russell.
Russell:You take care.