Hey, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And today I have with me Jacqueline Heller, MD, who's from the States, sitting in front of me on the fabled zoom. And we're ready to record a session and get chatting and find out all about you, Jacqueline. So why don't you just say hi and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jacqueline:Well, hello. Good morning. Thank you for having me. I am here because I've recently written a book, but I'll tell you a little bit about the journey and why I wrote this book. I was grief stricken when my mother died about six years ago. And I had never written much. I mean, I've written articles and things, but I've never journaled. And we know being trained as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and having a scientific background, I knew that writing is very good for consolidating memory and for remembering experiences and for creating a narrative that's cogent, which is very important during lifetime. But I suddenly started writing, and I wrote a letter in response to something that came up after my mother died. And it was an email that troubled me. And so, I wrote a response in defence of my father.
Jacqueline:And I received an outpouring from several different nieces and nephews saying, this is amazing information. We didn't know any of this. And so, this personal experience of feeling like I gave them a gem, it was a gift. And one of them in particular said that she put pieces together of her narrative that made sense out of her life. It was like the final piece of a puzzle in this one sector of her life that really resonated with her. And she said, can you tell us more? Can you tell me more? And I've spoken with my nieces and nephews over the years about family history because I think it's very important. So, I continued writing this chapter about my father, which I titled the Unsung Hero. It became a chapter and then I just kept going from there.
Jacqueline:And I found the process of writing to be very cathartic and also very connected thing. The connected dots for me, as we know writing does, writing is a very good way to consolidate memory and to connect to other memories into past and to connect emotions to the visual memory and put words to it. And that was a very interesting process. So basically, the book came out of that. I just kept going and going. Then Covid came and I had ample opportunity to keep writing. But my background is I have a bachelor's in biology. I went to graduate school. I was in a PhD program. I got my master's in basic medical science. I did research in a neurosurgery lab and pathology lab, basically on antioxidants on steroids, which were first noted to be good for spinal cord injury.
Jacqueline:I was always interested in the nervous system. Then I went to medical school, and then I became a psychoanalyst, and I became a psychiatrist. I was in school till I was probably 35. And then I trained in an attachment theory-oriented facility that is called the Centre for Reflective Communities. Then it was the Centre for Reflective Parenting, and I got certified to be a parent counsellor, which was fun. And I brought some programs about reflective parenting to schools. And then I kind of retired a few years ago when I started writing the book. So that's kind of where I am. And so, I'm excited to share the book because people are responding to it very well and it's resonating. So, I'm here to kind of talk about how it can help people.
Russell:Right. Okay, well, hold your horses. That's very good. Thank you for that introduction. So, you give us lots to go at. So, let's unpack a few of those things, if I may. You talk about the power of writing, and you talked about why it works. But I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit more for people, because a lot of people talk about journaling and such like, so how does it work? You talked about the fact it does work, but how does it actually work?
Jacqueline:Well, I think it works because when you write, it forces you to think and it forces you to first. I mean, the most important thing to me is about self-reflection, which is a key to having good attachments and good relationships and to knowing other people is knowing yourself. I mean, I think Aristotle said the key to wisdom is self-knowledge. And we spend an awful lot of time looking outward and pointing the finger to other people. And that leaves us guessing and making up a lot of things about other people and projecting. Whereas when we go inside and we look into ourselves, we get out of the dark and we see what's going on.
Russell:So if I may just jump in for a second. So, it's always a terrible lag on these systems. So, people talk a lot about self-reflection, and they talk about in quite a vague way. So that's great. Having a psychoanalyst in our midst. What does that actually mean? What does it mean by going inside? What are they actually talking about?
Jacqueline:It's a great question because there's a lot of language out there that's very nonspecific, and no one knows what people are really talking about, but sounds good. So going inside means, for one, it's kind of a two-step process. I call it introspecting, which is a contraction of going introspection and then going in as an observer, as a participant observer, which means, first of all, the first thing we need to do is identify our emotions, which at the 10% of Americans are lexemic, they don't know how they feel at any given moment. You ask them, are you happy? I don't know. Are you sad? No idea. I don't know. I just feel weird. And they can't define their emotions, so that's problematic.
Jacqueline:So the first thing is to identify your emotion, because if you don't know how you feel, you can't know other people, you can't exercise good judgment. And unfortunately, too many people have knee jerk reactions. They have hair trigger reactions to things, and they react emotionally before they think. And so, this skill, which I think is probably the singular most important mind, body, brain thing we can do as far as a habit that we form, is very important. So, the first thing is to identify how you feel at any given moment in time, the emotions. And that means, and I call them Delta moments. I call them the little shifts in your day to day all day long, and eventually it becomes automatic. But you have to practice, like anything, you have to practice getting good at it.
Jacqueline:And if you have awareness of how you're feeling at any given moment, then you can reflect, then you can go up to your brain and your cortex, and you can think about how you feel. And that's how we get smarter, and that's how we develop connections to ourselves and to our past. If it's an important thing that happened to you, as far as an experience that was salient or traumatic, it'll come back. You don't have to live in the past and go digging into the past. It will find you.
Russell:So that's really interesting. It's fascinating that you illustrate the semantic degradation, isn't it? And the fact that terms mean increasing less and less. And then you're talking about feelings and emotions, and you're right. People can't feelings because they have no idea what they are, because they can't decide whether a feeling is a somatic experience or something that you've known, we talk about emotions, and there is really, unless you use the Ekman version, there's really no proper taxonomy of emotions. So, we find in the social sciences that we're sort of mangling terms backwards. And forwards. Let's just pick this apart for me. So, when we're talking about how do we feel? I mean, there's somatic things like happy, sorry. There’re somatic things like hot and cold and tired and energised.
Russell:And then they become more sophisticated feelings, like disappointed or pressured or, I don't know, guilty or shamed or whatever. Those things which I would argue are actually cognitive constructs rather than feelings. Are you trying to say, let's talk about how do I feel and start that self-examination? Are you saying, let me describe something and figure out for myself what that narrative produces in terms of reaction within me? Is that what you're.
Jacqueline:It's circular. I mean, it's a good cycle. It's bidirectional, and it's more like the Internet. It's more like hyperlinks. It's more like a web. Because once you start reflecting on something, you start making more connections and you start having more memory the more you do it. I mean, for me, it's automatic. And even the process of writing my story, which I thought was complete, developed new connections. And to this day, I still have new connections to things that I thought I finished writing two years ago. So, our life is an unfinished work. And if you chronicle it as you go along, it's constantly updating and modifying for the current context. So that's another story, though. That's about memory and how memory is stored and how memory is modified. The process fuels itself, and it creates a tremendous amount of the neuroplasticity.
Jacqueline:And the way the brain develops is kind of remarkable because our upper brain or our higher cortical functions, our executive function, is what we all kind of want to promote. We want to limit the amount of emotional, intense, raw motion coming out. We want to be able to focus and hold our emotion and manage it before we go ballistic or before we have rage attacks or whatever it might be. So, the amygdala is kind of the seed of raw motion in the limbic system, and that's kind of what we need to get a hold of. And that's why knowing how you feel before you open your mouth or before you react and then being able to think about that and what might it be?
Jacqueline:If I come home from a lunch date and I feel I have a lump in my throat or a pit in my stomach, whatever, pick your visceral response. And I think, why do I feel down? Why do I feel a little bit upset? Now? I would know right away why, but some people don't. And then they displace their bad feeling or their anger onto their child or to their spouse who doesn't deserve it because they didn't do anything. So, if I come home from lunch and I think, what was it? What did she say? And I realized she said my haircut was awful. But the good thing about a bad haircut is that will grow back. And it was kind of a backhanded compliment. You look great, but I'm not crazy about your hair. But it'll grow back.
Jacqueline:So that's kind of a small thing, but let's say it's something like that. Or let's say someone flip you barely cut someone off on the freeway or on the highway. You almost cut someone off. You start veering into their lane and they start flipping you off. They start screaming at you, and they even start a high-speed car chase. What if that has nothing to do with you? That's their stuff. So, these things are the important things that we need to learn to manage. And writing gives you the ability to stop and think. You're not in conversation with someone. There's no time pressure. And it also seems to be. It just seems to be a very good way to become reflective.
Russell:But it's interesting you say that because, of course, it doesn't work for everybody, and I don't think you're implying that, but there are a vast majority of people who don't like doing journaling, and often that's why they talk, because they have that perception or they want to visualize or storyboard or whatever it might be. It's about finding your own way to sort of pause and just examine things within yourself. I suppose that's the point. It doesn't really matter what it is sometimes evoked by music or whatever it is, but I know there are a lot of people out there who talk about journaling. And I think, again, the process of journaling sometimes gets in the way of self-reflection.
Jacqueline:That's a good point. Well, it's interesting because for me personally in my life, writing is a big deal because when I was a child, I had a diary when I was five. I still have it. It has about four entries in it. I couldn't do it. And I started to create a mental diary. And I kept a mental journal every day. I didn't know I was doing CBT on myself. I didn't know I was doing exposure therapy to trauma, but I was, and every night and I was lonely because my parents didn't come home till very late. And as I was falling asleep, I recited the day, mentally, I repeated the day.
Jacqueline:Like someone who's repeating an exercise or a piece of music they're going through in their head or an acrobatic routine, I repeated my day, and I started pruning the unimportant things that I consult, remembered, and remembered my life that way. And there were reasons for that go into my family. Trauma, my inherited trauma, which we can talk about if you're interested. So, for me, writing was kind of anathema. I just didn't do it. I couldn't do it. So, this was kind of a big deal for me, and I saw the value in it. But then again, I'm trained to make these associations.
Russell:Yeah, but you weren't trained when you were young.
Jacqueline:No, I wasn't trained.
Russell:So that's obviously a process you fell into or was your part in your natural style. And I think that's really interesting that you say that, because I do think this sort of pressure in this sort of modern world that we should be journaling, we should be that classic word in psychology, should or ought. And it's this idea that it works for somebody, therefore work for everybody. Everybody seems to want to write a book, but podcasting and visual diary management, or as you just say, just imagination or mental reflection is okay as well.
Jacqueline:It's very little imagination these days in the world.
Russell:And I agree with that because I think we've removed internal imagination, because we've replaced it with external stimulus, haven't we? And I wonder if we're losing a generation of people who have imagination and what that will do with the creative world around us.
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Well, we're losing a lot in this generation.
Russell:Yeah. Well, I always say it's tricky for people like me to complain about the last generation as someone who is responsible for bringing children up in it, so we can't really complain about them. So, you've written this book, and you talked about the process of it, and it seems to have emerged, and that's really quite unusual, because often books are constructed by thinking about, who is this you want to write a book for? But it sounds like your process has been much more interesting than the standard approach, which is almost generated by the marketing approach, which there's a book, a bunch of people out there that want to be my message, but it sounds like you just started writing and ended.
Jacqueline:Up with a book, which it was organic. It was a very organic process. It was something I started. My mother died at the end of 2017. I wrote the first draft in six months, but it took a few years to get someone to read it. And then I worked on it. But it was intrinsically gratifying. I wasn't looking for fame or fortune, and I'm not, but it was my process, and it was very helpful to me because as a psychoanalyst who's worked with a lot of people deeply, I know my own history the best. I know myself better than I can know anyone else, and I remember my life very well. And I see the merit to a lifelong narrative. I see the relaxing and calming. And that's why the subtitle to my book has to do with well-being.
Jacqueline:Because when you feel accomplished in your story and you have a self-story that's replicable, that's full body, that's dimensional, that's detailed, and that changes for context, it's very important because it gives you stability, it gives you foundation. It definitely promotes healthy attachments. These things have been looked at, and it improves your reflective function. Secondarily, good for your brain.
Russell:So who, in a sense, is going to benefit most from reading it? And what would that benefit be?
Jacqueline:Well, it's funny that you say that. It's a good question. And normally people can answer that very quickly and say, these are the ten things it does. But truthfully, one of my best friends asked me a few years ago, I love the book. I read it. But what's it about? Because it's about a lot of things. And I think I've been getting reviews where people say, this is a great parenting book. I'm giving it to all my friends who are new mothers or, this is a tremendous book on trauma. So different people are getting different things from it because it's kind of broad, sweeping. But the basic idea, if I had to sum it up, is that we don't know ourselves as well as we should or as well as we think we do.
Jacqueline:95% of our actions and behaviours and thoughts are unconsciously driven and we don't realize it, but all of our automatic functions, I mean, as far as look at the autonomic nervous system, the only thing we can control is our breath. So, you can control your breathing, and you can slow down and get your cortisol and your adrenaline and all of your fight and flight hormones to calm down, but it's only breathing that we can control and we don't think about, I'm getting up out of the chair and I need to put my left leg on the floor first and then my right. We thought about everything we did, how to put a spoon to your mouth. We'd be nuts. We'd be thinking about dumb things all day long that are automatic. But those are not the things I'm referring to.
Jacqueline:In some way I am, but I'm referring to the things that are hurts from the past, whether they're cumulative developmental injuries that create our personality or whether they're traumas. But basically, I'm talking about knowing our automatic mental constructs, the things, the patterns that are repetitive, that are ingrained, that we don't really have no awareness of. And we need to. We need to go plumb the depths and get closer to our unconscious. And there are methods to do that, as you know.
Russell:Yeah. It's always nice for people to have an idea of what they might be delving into. So, some people have written like a self-help book with lots of tools. Some people use it as a sort of an allegory or a metaphor, analogy. Some people have built their own story with their own lessons learned, right? Some people have a bunch of patient histories and sort of work those things through. So, some people have written something that's amusing. Some people have written something that's very tragic and self-referential. For those people who are sitting thinking, this sounds absolutely fascinating, but what am I going to expect when I start? What can I expect when you read the book?
Jacqueline:Well, I start off with basically explaining what triggers people, the kind of things that trigger people. And I start off with my. I mean, there's an introduction. I explain what the book is about. I explain my amalgam of my psychological construct, my kind of model of the mind. And I talk about these automatic mental constructs and these delta shifts and how we need to live in the present, not plumb, not go into the depths of our past. Family history is different, but I mean, as far as our own, like, why am I so upset? And what happened that year, what happened that day, that's fine, but that's if it comes to you organically, I wouldn't necessarily advise people to go look for those things because then it becomes artificial. And the idea is to just do some mindful meditation. So, I give exercise.
Jacqueline:I have a chapter on exercises, and I kind of mention them throughout the book. So, there are skills, there are ways you can learn to do this, as you know. So that's one aspect, basically, the first part of the book. It gives background to basic psychological principles. The unconscious mind, the conscious mind. What is consciousness? I talk about the patterns of behaviour that are repetitive, that come from our upbringing. I talk about parenting a little bit. I talk about the human, about. I have a chapter that's a crash course on psychology and psychotherapy. And I start with Freud, and I go all the way to the. So, the first five or six chapters, and I go into the neuroscience of things, neuroscience of attachment from infancy. That's about the first five or six chapters. I have a chapter on defence mechanisms and cognitive distortions.
Jacqueline:So by the time you get to chapter seven or eight, you kind of have a very good understanding of general principles. And my understanding is it's readable. And I use my own cases. I use tons of case material that's well camouflaged, and I have my own story. So, for example, chapter two is called Dana's invisible trigger. It's about a woman. It's about a day I went shopping with my grandson. I went to a high-end store, and it was a small boutique. And basically, the woman that was helping me called the police on me because she thought I had a gun. She saw something in my pocket, in my little slit pocket that looked like a gun. She called the police. Patrol cars came, and it was a long story. It's a whole chapter.
Jacqueline:But basically, she had suffered gun violence as a child, and she had a very low threshold for thinking someone was going to come after her or have a gun. And there I am, a grandmotherly, slight person with a child going into this. It made no sense. It was, like, completely irrational. There would be no way to profile me as someone that would have a gun. Not the profiling is acceptable snot, but it was really shocking. So, all of a sudden, I'm surrounded, and I came out to get some help in this store, because I was trying things on, and there was no one there. And I thought, that's crazy. They left the register unmanned. I better watch the store till they come back. Well, they didn't come back, but I left the store. After a half hour, I saw a commotion.
Jacqueline:I went back, and I see their police officers. Ma'am, were you in the fitting room about 45 minutes ago? I said, yes. What happened? And they said, are you carrying a firearm? And I said, no. They said, what's that in your pocket? And I reflexively, as we're talking about automatic behaviour, I reflexively put my hand in my pocket, and they took their gun. One of them took their gun out. The female came and frisked me, hands up. And I was passing out. I was freaking out. I said, what is going on here? And they said, one of the salespeople called 911 and said, there was someone with a gun. And I said, this is crazy. This woman is either ill, she's either unfortunately psychotic and having a delusion, or she's had some kind of terrible trauma and just really miscalculated.
Jacqueline:And that was the case. So, it ended. They didn't shoot me, obviously. I'm fine. There's some projective identification. You get the idea.
Russell:Yeah. No, it's fascinating. And it's interesting because I was having a look at the, because on your website, jacqueline heller.com, you actually have an example or not an example. You have an excerpt on your site, which is great because it gives a feel for the way that you write and such like. And I have to say, being on Amazon, you've got astonishing selection of five-star reviews on there. So, it's really clearly something. And I have to say I've just gone and bought it myself. So, I was listening what you were saying, but I was also buying the book at the same time.
Jacqueline:The endorsements were. I got great endorsements.
Russell:You really do.
Jacqueline:Very encouraging.
Russell:Well, look, let's just make sure that people can find it. Your website is jacquelineheller.com and the book is called yesterday never sleeps, and you can get hold of it on all the online plays, places and all the various bookshops in the galaxy. Do you have any sort of social media presence that you'd like people to.
Jacqueline:Be able to look at? I do, but chapter eight is called asocial media because I really don't like social media and I find it kind of unpalatable. So, you can find all that on the website, too? All the links. Yeah. I'm just not that into social media. I'm trying to do LinkedIn, but it's tough, very dull.
Russell:Anyway, let's not get interviews on social media because that's just us having a rant.
Jacqueline:Well, I have a lot of opinions about that, but that's for another day.
Russell:Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, it's been a jolly to talk to you, and it's been absolutely fascinating to hear your story. And please have a look in the show notes and look out for Jacqueline's website and book and links and such like. And thank you so much for spending time with us today. Jacqueline, it's been great.
Jacqueline:Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Russell:You take care.