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“It makes sense that the body’s reaction to the onslaught of perceived threats would have a detrimental effect on physical and mental well-being. Perceived threats trigger the exact same physiological response as actual threats, activating a fight, flight or freeze reaction. It’s the constant stimulating of these stress responses that can lock some people (and others, not) in a chronic state of stress, not the actual events that people experience. We all react differently—some more intensely than others.

Once you begin the process of regulating your nervous system, you’ll notice a gradual change in your physical and emotional well-being. You’ll feel increasingly safe, spacious, and resilient. You will have more capacity to metabolize stress, and to give and receive love—all without the constant presence of a false threat response. It may sound too good to be true, but time and again, I’ve seen people’s lives completely change when they learn to do this work.”

Rebecca A. Ward is a marriage and family therapist and author of The Paper Tiger Syndrome: How to Liberate Yourself from the Illusion of Fear.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “The body is the gateway to the Original Blueprint.”

This episode is sponsored by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM). 

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Rate and review the show at KevinMD.com/rate. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/follow. On today’s show we have Rebecca Ward. She is a marriage and family therapist. She’s the author of the book The Paper Tiger Syndrome: How to Liberate Yourself from the Illusion of Fear. There’s an excerpt from that book on KevinMD. Rebecca, welcome to the show.

Rebecca A. Ward: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your excerpt and book in a little bit, but first off, just briefly share your story and journey to where you are today.

Rebecca A. Ward: So I’ve had a lot of my own traumas, and I’ve gone through my own struggles with a lot of medical trauma, actually. I’ve lost my two boys. I had a third-trimester loss, and they were born alive but didn’t survive past the first day. That experience was life-changing, of course. And I had several bouts with cancer over the years following that, from what I believe is unprocessed grief that manifested in my body and turned into toxicity in the system. So lots of medical trauma.

I have been really close to the medical community for a long time and have a lot of folks in my own family who have worked in hospitals as nurses and physicians. So I deeply care about this community and know how much, you know, folks in this industry are impacted by trauma themselves. That secondary trauma that you’re all exposed to day in and day out is near and dear to my heart, and I’ve coached a lot of physicians as well in terms of, you know, regulating their own nervous system. So it’s a topic, and a community, that I’m deeply close to and care about.

Kevin Pho: Now, is there a typical case study, a story that you could share, of a clinician coming to you with secondary trauma, and what would you do in the office with them?

Rebecca A. Ward: Yes. I had a heart surgeon, actually, who came to me for a while. We did some coaching around his own trauma. The system in which he works is rather toxic. There’s a lot of trauma, again, in the system, people exposed to that, and when people are dysregulated in their nervous systems, they don’t behave at their best. You know, there’s a lot of high risk. Everybody in this community has, you know, the demands, the pressures to try to help their patients. Depending on what your role is, you actually are the one that is responsible for keeping someone alive, and he was one of those people. He’s a heart surgeon. That level of stress had a tremendous impact on his ability to function.

So we worked very closely with a lot of the tools and practices that are in the book about how to regulate his nervous system, so that when he was exposed to secondary trauma, he could more effectively respond. It was really critical to his role as a surgeon, because if you’re going into the OR and you’re dysregulated, there’s a higher chance of errors, of mistakes, in a system. When your own nervous system isn’t regulated, right, you don’t have access to your higher-order thinking. You’re in a nervous system that’s in constant communication with that amygdala, and it’s on high alert all the time, so that access to your higher-order thinking is compromised.

So that was really important, not just for himself and to lower his own stress levels. That stress response going on all the time in that environment is just wreaking havoc on all the medical staff that are exposed to that day in and day out. So that practice of regulating his nervous system was essential to his overall health, well-being, and his ability to function as a surgeon, and it changed everything for him. He would come to his sessions running through the hospital. He couldn’t wait to come see me and work on his regulation. He always felt better, and he took those tools and implemented them so that he could not only do that for himself, but he started teaching the people that he worked with how to do it. So it’s a practice that I think every medical professional needs to put in place, to regulate their own nervous system.

Kevin Pho: And you talk more about that in your book and in the article. Your KevinMD article is titled “The body is the gateway to the Original Blueprint.” Your book is titled The Paper Tiger Syndrome: How to Liberate Yourself from the Illusion of Fear. Now, for those of you who get a chance to read your excerpt on KevinMD, just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to share that particular one.

Rebecca A. Ward: Yeah. I talk about the Original Blueprint, and the Original Blueprint is what we get when we come into this world. This is my philosophy: We come into this world, we inhabit a body, and when we come in, we are the purest expression of our soul. We inhabit that body, and then over time, throughout childhood, throughout adulthood, all the stress and the experiences that we naturally have as human beings pull us further and further away from that pure self. And it’s very simple for us to understand that by just going inside and recognizing, “Somewhere along the line, some part of myself is lost,” right?

So it’s all, I believe, by design. That mechanism inside of that nervous system that is part of our primitive wiring, that fight, flight, and freeze, is still the main default for all humans. That innate need to survive, literally to survive, is designed to help us either function and, you know, regulate the nervous system to make the distinction between real and perceived threat, or it’s going to be dysregulated, so that what we call the paper tiger, which is a perceived threat, the illusion of fear, can run us constantly and take down the nervous system, draw down our internal resources, and cause stress on the system.

So what you want to do is regulate that nervous system and reconnect back to that pure expression of your soul, the Original Blueprint. And essentially, your system, your nervous system, is designed to give you two options. You can either recognize everything as a saber-toothed tiger or recognize the distinction between what is a real threat and a paper tiger, a perceived threat.

So that’s what the article is about: understanding, first of all, how your nervous system functions, and underneath all of that is that vagus nerve that helps to regulate the nervous system, and those practices in the book that teach you how to do that. Once you get through all that, once you’re regulating that nervous system, your stress response goes down, the fear goes down, and you have more connection to that Original Blueprint, more contentment, more peace, more joy inside yourself, and you’re far more effective in your personal and professional life.

Kevin Pho: If you have a physician that you’re talking to and you want to regulate the nervous system, what exactly would you say or do? What kind of techniques would you teach that physician to do that?

Rebecca A. Ward: Yeah, great question. So usually it’s relatively easy, because most physicians understand their own anatomy, right? So I talk about the vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve is at the core of our nervous system. It’s what connects all of our major organs. It’s essentially the network of communications between your nervous system and your brain. And when that vagus nerve perceives a threat, it constricts all of your major vital organs and channels energy away from their ability to function and do their job, and channels it toward a perceived threat. And what that does is it compromises the immune system’s ability to fight off disease, increases your stress levels, and can put unnecessary stress on your organs.

And the practice of this breath work is what I call the voo breathing method. It’s not mine. I didn’t design that method. It’s a method that’s existed well before this book, developed by Dr. Peter Levine. That voo breathing method is the way you settle that vagus nerve, the way that you settle the nervous system. So it’s a very simple practice, but it is very important.

And over time, what happens is that that practice of the vagus nerve, the voo breathing method that vibrates that vagus nerve, if you repeat that over and over again, it changes your neural plasticity, your neural pathways, so that your new way of being is to be regulated, to be settled in your nervous system, and not responding to perceived threats. So I explain that to my physicians, and they notice almost an immediate difference, because their systems are so dysregulated that any reduction in that stress level from doing that practice, they noticed almost immediately.

Kevin Pho: So you said almost immediately. In general, how long does it take for your coaching methods and breathing techniques and other techniques to regulate the nervous system? How long does that take before it becomes effective?

Rebecca A. Ward: Yeah. So with any practice that you take, if you repeat a practice 300 times, and these are general numbers, of course, but if you repeat a practice like the voo breathing method 300 times, it’s in your muscle memory. So if you practice that voo breathing method 10 times a day for 30 days, it’s in your muscle memory. That’s not that long, right? So you do that at night for five minutes, and it’s in your muscle memory. If you repeat that same practice 10 times a day for 10 months, that’s 3,000 times. It’s not just in your muscle memory; it is your new way of being. It’s in your neurophysiology. So it’s like brushing your teeth at that point, and a lot of folks don’t even have to continue to repeat the practice after that.

I did that myself. These are all practices I’ve applied myself, so I don’t teach anything that hasn’t worked for me. And now, because I’m so practiced at the voo breathing method, I don’t have to practice it every day. I notice when my system is starting to dysregulate, and I’ll do a few of the voo breaths, and it changes everything. So it just becomes kind of your normal, you know, good self-care, a good way to regulate the inside of your body, right? We’re so focused on the external and how we look in our society, and we’re not paying enough attention to how this internal system is driving us. It’s running us. And, you know, to really focus in on that, I think, is the most important thing we can do.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Rebecca Ward. She’s a marriage and family therapist, and she’s the author of the book The Paper Tiger Syndrome: How to Liberate Yourself from the Illusion of Fear. Rebecca, what are some of the other main points that you want my clinician audience to come away with after reading your book?

Rebecca A. Ward: Well, I think that the main thing is to be aware of how your system is functioning. That awareness: A lot of people, not just physicians but most human beings, don’t really fully understand how our systems function. And to me, the most important thing is to start with somatic awareness, your body awareness, right? To understand how that nervous system functions and how it is running you.

But the other piece that I think everyone needs to understand is how important a support system is. You know, when I was going through my own medical traumas, the medical community and my own personal network were essential. You know, the way that the doctors treated me, the nurses treated me, it changed everything. It changed how I moved through all of that trauma, because that connection and that support was essential for me.

So just like a therapist, just like me, doctors, nurses, everybody in the medical community, we need our own support. You know, we don’t pay enough attention to the support we need, right? So I would say that I want people to walk away really normalizing the need for your own support, that we all need that. And I would say anyone who’s in any kind of helping profession should have their own support systems, a therapist or somebody, a coach, somebody to help support you. You know, most of what everybody does in helping professions is help other people, and there isn’t enough focus on who’s going to help me, you know, who’s going to be here to support me. So it’s just to normalize that, to accept that the help from other people is essential to not only your own well-being but the well-being of the people that you support, because you’re going to burn out if you don’t take care of yourself.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Rebecca A. Ward: Oh, how much I appreciate all of you, you know, all the hard work. Anybody who goes into this line of work is, you know, you’re all just so incredible. And if your patients don’t thank you enough, I thank you, because we need people like you who’ve got hearts and minds that are so dedicated and devoted. And I just am so grateful to the medical community in general for all the help that they’ve given me over the years. I’m forever grateful and appreciative. So thank you. That’s what I want to say.

Kevin Pho: Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Rebecca A. Ward: Thank you.