The Atrómitos Way

#056: Understanding Stressors and the Nervous System [Rebroadcast]

• Atrómitos, LLC • Season 5 • Episode 56

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In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re rebroadcasting one of the most popular episodes of The Atrómitos Way Podcast. Back in May of 2024, we sat down with Sharon Stultz, a dedicated educator and mental health professional with over 30 years of experience, to discuss the science behind mental health and effective therapeutic interventions.

Key Takeaways

Trauma brain explained. How does continuous exposure to stress influence our neurological responses — and how do fight-flight-freeze mechanisms affect a child's capacity for learning and social interaction?

Practical stress reset tools. Effective therapy focuses first on lowering stress and building distress tolerance. Sharon outlined practical regulation strategies such as mapping daily stress patterns, expanding calm moments, walking, and even practicing genuine eye contact. 

Co-regulation and connection. Political, social, and economic pressures during the COVID pandemic amplified chronic stress, leaving kids dysregulated and their caregivers hypervigilant. Families can build safety through simple, predictable routines — shared meals, consistent activities, and reliable rhythms. 

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Narrator

Welcome to the Adromatus Way podcast, where we candidly discuss the everyday challenges facing health and human service providers, including government agencies, philanthropies, and advocates. In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we are rebroadcasting one of the most popular episodes of the Adromedus Way. Back in May of 2024, Sharon Stoltz, a dedicated educator and mental health professional with over 30 years of experience, explored the intricate links between stress, the nervous system, and their impact on learning and social interactions in children.

SPEAKER_03

So a kid that has sensory overwhelm can't really listen because they don't feel safe. And so they start disrupting because they they don't they can't do anything else is instantly called defiant. And I would I hope we get to the day in our society where we start to label those kids as not feeling safe.

SPEAKER_02

Welcome to the Adromedus Way podcast, where we have meaningful discussions on the challenges in healthcare and the solutions behind them. I'm your host, Liz Church. Each episode we dive into the complexities of our health and social system, gaining the experiences and insights of the guests that shape our lives and our communities. And we're back on our fourth installment of the mental health crisis amongst our youth. Today I'm speaking with Sharon Stoltz, a dedicated educator and mental health professional with over 30 years' experience in the field. Sharon's journey in education began with homeschooling her own four children, igniting her passion for teaching and learning. Her diverse career path has seen her manage a service learning volunteer program and credential evaluations at a local community college. She's also served as a Teach for America educator, teaching fourth grade and later specializing in elementary special education. Now, Sharon focuses on supporting narrow diverse children and youth and those struggling with severe literacy disfluencies. With my previous guests, we learned about what they're doing to solve the problems to better serve their adolescent communities. But with Sharon, we're going to first uncover the scientific underpinnings of mental health and the therapeutic interventions she's found effective. We'll cover the landscape of mental health, along with the trends and issues she's observed, but we'll dive in deeper how stress is a contributing factor to mental health and how the nervous system affects our interactions and how it influences adults and children's lives. Without further ado, let us begin with the current landscape of child mental health. Sharon, what insights have you gathered or observed in your work?

SPEAKER_03

I became a therapist in 2023. I'm doing an internship through a community mental health agency in Seattle. And what I'm seeing, I see a lot of neural diverse clients because I have a lot of experience from with them working in the education field. And I have young children, elementary, I work all the way up to college age. And so I have a nice cross-section of each of those age groups. And one of the things that we're really looking at is how do we factor in what COVID did to us? Because when I look at mental health and we really approach why there's so much instability right now from my training and just my experience, stress is the major contributing factor. And all these political, social, economic factors that came into play during COVID put a stress load on us that we didn't know how to measure or evaluate. And probably most of us were already operating at such a high stress load because that is how industrialized urban areas function. And we just get used to the noise. We get used to the busyness. We see the fragile people that struggle with that level of stress load. And there's the those are the ones that you know we're trip typically treating. But what COVID did to us is took all the people that were managing at the highest level, but not in dysregulation, but holding a tight rope all the time. Those tend to throw people that are living at a high stress level over the edge. And then they move into overwhelm and all the mental health issues really start to unfold. And so that's how I've seen things over the years, and it pushed too many people in that direction without the coping skills they needed.

SPEAKER_02

Without those coping skills, obviously that puts them at that detriment. But so we are over four years since the pandemic began. Would you say that there's been any improvement, some improvement, very little?

SPEAKER_03

I feel like there's a level of stability. You know, the shock factor got everybody in freeze mode. Because we had no control. We didn't know if there were going to be more waves and more insecurity. And then our, you know, inflation exploded. And so people are struggling financially. And we can't make our jobs pay us more. So we've got parents that have been trying to be educators, multiple, you know, running around doing door dashing in between other jobs, just trying to recoup and recover the lost physical ground, but also the mental insecurity that they experienced. And, you know, being able to grieve and move on and account for what happened, that's what creates a trauma response. And when the brain has a trauma response, it holds that experience outside of time because the hippocampus is knocked out when we're in the midst of a threat response that is overwhelming to us. And so that's where PTSD and all those trauma responses come from, is because the brain has decided that this experience is worth keeping present. And the hippocampus is the part of the brain that marks and places things in time. And so without that encoding on these events, it's not put in the past, it's kept present, and the nervous system remains hyper-vigilant around any stimulus or reminder that this oh no, this is happening again. We have to protect, we have to have lots of adrenaline in our system so we can be reactive and moving. And in the meantime, we're really avoidant and unable to process socially. And the way we heal is socially, and so that's the that's the messy thing that we're in is how traumatic was this event? And so the kids are passive bystanders in their family system. And so if mom and dad are still in distress and recovering or just stuck, that kid is going to remain dysregulated because their primary providers are not sending off cues of safety, but cues of hypervigilance. And to a child, that's that makes them unable to be grounded. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02

It does. It does. And that actually puts us into the right path for the next question I have for you. So you talked about freezing, you talked about our perceptions. I want to dive into because I found this really interesting when you and I were talking to talk about the exploration of the effects of stress on the nervous system. Can you explain how the continuous exposure to stress influences on our neurological responses? And in what ways do these responses, bite, flight, and freeze mechanisms, impact an individual's capacity for learning and social interaction?

SPEAKER_03

So you just totally prefaced my master's thesis.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I did that because I thought that was so interesting. And I was like, we got to talk about it. We got to do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

What I've discovered in the past seven, eight years was the work of Stephen Porgis and Polybagel Theory, which I had learned nothing about when I was working on my master's thesis around the stress response system. So one of the big learnings that I came away from in my first program on learning sciences was that the stress response system is the learning mechanism. So the stress response system is if we are feeling safe and connected and oriented in our life, we are going to be in what we call social engagement state, right? We're able to connect, we are able to engage in social relationships and be strengthened by them. We are creative, we think the best of people, we get humor, we find it engaging, we like to play in this state, we like to eat good quality food and have those social experiences. And these are all facilitated within the brain system. From one of the interventions that Stephen Ford just created was around strengthening the social engagement system with a passive pathway into the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve is what polyvagal theory is all about, and how the brain's unconscious monitoring of our environment 100% of the time without our permission. The second our brain detects threat, which can come through a smell, it can come through a TV program, it can come through a song, it can come through any endless stimulus in the environment. And the second our brain picks up on that, it'll start giving us adrenaline and cortisol to deal with the threat. But if the threat isn't real, which is what happens with trauma or when someone's scared, you might have a perceived threat and nothing's actually wrong. And that's kind of the place that we're stuck with COVID. We're not sure if something's wrong or not, you know, and what's going to tell us so there's all these unknowns. And your nervous system could be looking for different things than my nervous system. And so we're all these individual perceivers. And if my brain decides, like I hear a sound or I smell something, and I'm not okay, my attention without my permission is shifted to threat state. And now I'm listening to low tones in the background, and I'm I'm not really able to process what people are saying because I'm looking and scanning the horizon. You know, you watch your head go down. Anyone who who gets like a door slam, whatever, for a second, everybody's gonna pull their head down and take a look, you know, and make sure. And if if the brain goes, oh, I'm okay, and then we'll take a couple breaths and say, okay, let's go back and see if we can do what we're doing. That is the dynamic nature of the stress response system. And so, but what happens with people that get stuck in chronic stress is the middle ear muscles that that manage this threat detection and brain alter changes to get us more hyper-vigilant is managed by these little muscles in our middle ear and they lose tone just like any other muscle in our body. So if you broke your leg and you had to sit on your couch for six weeks while you healed, would you be able to get up and run across the room? No, you would have to go to or start exercising to rebuild the muscles, right? To be able to function the way your body is designed. So if someone goes through a long period of chronic stress, then those muscles will cease to be exercised and you will cease coming up and down and through your nervous system states fluidly, rapidly, because we're all supposed to be doing that all the time. We call this heart rate variability. And so we're supposed to be able, if we're healthy, say, you know, in a relatively safe environment, if you live in a war environment, think about the people over in our war states right now, right? Their nervous systems, they don't ever get to go to safety. They are hyper-vigilant constantly because they have to be. That's their survival is dependent on it. And so the conditions that they're in necessitate the state of their nervous system. But just like war heroes that come home from those places, their nervous systems are in distress and they come back to a sense of normalcy, and their nervous system cannot calm down because their brain has not encoded this stuff. And that's what trauma work is about for our soldiers and our war veterans, you know, that are coming back. And anybody that's gone through any significant environmental distress. So, you know, all these things are happening. We've got wildfires going on, we've got big storms happening, flooding, all those things impact the nervous system just like a war, you know. So we're not accounting in our society for this perpetual bombardment of major stressors and how they're affecting us and how do we come together as a people and a society, community, family, schools, right, institutions to bring safety back so we can get back to the business of what we were really trying to do to begin with.

SPEAKER_02

And do you think that's where this is this is twofold? You hear a lot of people arguing against, you know, back in my day, we didn't have a safe place, but these safe place spaces are made so that we can get back to this norm. And I think with the oh, unfortunately with stress, with a lot of people, when they don't have the understanding and experience with mental health, their perception is oh, you get over it. So like if a child is going through something that is traumatic, well, they'll just grow out of it, they'll get over it. From my conversations with you and other guests, children have a harder time to coping with these things than adults do.

SPEAKER_03

We have to learn to get out of these spaces. It's not hardwired and natural. We are not hardwired with the capacity for self-regulation or even co-regulation when we're born. We have to learn how to do it. And we have to have people around us to help us do it. Because I would argue with you that there's no such thing as self-regulation. It's co-regulation that we actually need. It's my connection with others, my capacity to connect with you, smile at you, have a meal with you. You know, what really grounds us and helps us feel safe is when we're not alone. And so we have to learn, like the kid does have to learn, but not alone. The teachers around, the parents around that child. We all need to learn how to get safety back in our midst, how to thrive. Some of my favorite work with Esther Perell is around thriving. It's not enough to just be alive and have our senses and cope and use our senses to hijack our nervous system through substances, through media, through all those things from the outside. Our nervous system is tired and exhausted and overwhelmed. And we'll we'll grab anything we can to keep us busy so we don't have to feel what's going on inside because we don't understand what's going on inside, right? And so we need to learn how to have connecting experiences because we we're not lizards, we're not reptiles. We are not designed to live in isolation. We share parts of our brain. The parts of our brain that run that dorsal vagal shutdown state is a part of our nervous system we share with reptiles. Though they're the animals that freeze when they're in trouble. They don't have a fight or flight system to use. So it's just a lot that's going on that we don't see ourselves from the animal kingdom perspective.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you gave those two examples. I was like, let me think of what other animals actually do that too. And deers, unfortunately, deer deer in the headlights kind of thing when they freeze.

SPEAKER_03

Well, we all are endowed with that brainstem that reacts that way, but it's an unmyelinated part of the brain. And so it's very slow to change if we get stuck there. And people that live in chronic shutdown, I can't do people, I can't do society, I, you know, our vets that are living on the streets, our homelessness epidemic, that is fueled by I can't do that, what you all do. They don't have the privilege of it anymore. They don't know how. And one of the most amazing things that I've personally experienced because I did come from a home where I where I wasn't safe. School was my safe place, other people's homes, other institutions. And so I've gone through this healing journey using Stephen Porkis's, you know, interventions and working with therapists that do ENDR and really heal trauma. That's what people don't know. You can heal and learn to get out of your trauma response. It's not something that you're saddled with for the rest of your life. And so that's the cool part is people need to know. I can learn to do this.

SPEAKER_02

I think it's also the healthy way of doing it, like you said, with the social interactions and having that sense of community and compassion. I think those are two keys. And that's that's an opinion side of me. I don't I can't speak to factually, but like what I envision of support systems, I feel like those are very important.

SPEAKER_03

Well, the truth is we don't have enough therapists in the world to get everybody mental health support. That's what happened during COVID. It's like every single therapist had so many people on their waiting list because people were buckling and they were so uncomfortable and just didn't know what to do. They got fine, I'm gonna go find a therapist. You know what? We didn't have enough therapists to help. And so this is a conversation I have with every single client that I work with. Our very first session is not what's wrong with you, because clearly you wouldn't have gone to the discomfort of sitting and you know, making an appointment and sitting in front of a stranger to what you might perceive be the most vulnerable you've ever been asked to be in your whole life. Um, but also a good therapist doesn't go there on a very, you know, first measure. This is a relationship that we have to build, and it's the relationship that heals. And so the very first thing I address, just because I know where we've been, I've done so much training and understanding to try and grow my skills as a teacher and as a therapist, and I recognize stress is it. So before we buckle into all those things that are going on in your mind that might make no sense to anyone, including yourself, let's work on your stress and see if we can get your stress down and see if your mind clears up because you're gonna get the right brain chemicals to think squarely if we get your stress is your stress response system down. And so, great thing I do is we evaluate, you know, what's your day like? And I'll take somebody through every hour of their day because they might feel I'm anxious all the time. And I'm like, I bet you're not anxious all the time. And so we like map out each hour of the day or each transition, like when you get up in the morning, are you feeling stressed? I've I've been dreaming about all the things that are stressing me out. I'm waking up and my heart's still pounding. I didn't get the best sleep, right? But if I sit down and eat a good breakfast, something that I like to eat, oh, I'm feeling calmer again, right? So having people map out periods in their day and going, when do I feel the calmest? Because that's helping your nervous system map to the reality that you are feeling better and you do have control over this up and down your nervous system is doing all day long. And it also gives you great tools to figure out what I can do more of? Why is that particular time in the day the time I feel less stressed? Let's increase that. There's studies that have been done that 15 minutes of walking improves someone's anxiety just as much as anxiety medication with no med with no side effects. The place to find and expand is the place in the day that feels the best. If you try and shove that into your morning routine and there's no space in your morning routine, and I can't even imagine changing my morning routine because I got to get up, get the kids, get out the door, make sure the dogs are fed, you know. The list goes on. There is no space in that time of the day. You need that adrenaline to get all those things done, right? And so that's not the best time of the day. So being, it could be in the middle of your lunchtime. It could be who knows where. But if you just start to expand the spaces where you figure I'm already down, finding the calmer time in the day and trying to expand it there is going to be much more successful at starting to create a new routine because the fundamentals of mental health are predictability. And so our brain is looking for routine and ritual that is predictable. And the more you can increase that routine and predictability, the more your stress response system is going to start to calm down and you're going to start to feel grounded.

SPEAKER_02

What about going out and smiling to at least 10 people? Genuine smiles.

SPEAKER_03

So again, more research has been done. The in the endorphins and the and the neurochemistry around smiling is has been highly documented. So if I smile at you and I and I do it genuinely, it's not a fake smile, you will not be able to help smiling back at me. And it it sends all these good feeling chemicals into our nervous system to help us feel safe and connect. And it is the hard wiring of our social system. And so if you're out on a walk and you're on your iPods, you got to meet or your AirPods in your ears, and you're cruising along listening to your songs, and you're not really looking at any human walking by or any dog walking by, you're missing out on the best medicine available. And it's free. So I would challenge anybody to next time you're out, even at this grocery store shopping, we're all around people all the time. And perhaps maybe we're around too many people, and that's overwhelming. And so we just pull inside because I'm busy. I got all this stuff on my mind. But choosing a time when you're out and about and with other humans or other animals, because other mammals can do the same thing for you. You find a cute lovey dog or a cute lovey cat, right? They can give you the same connection as humans can. So it's we're not restricted to our own species. If you notice that it makes you feel uncomfortable, it's a sign that you've lost trust.

SPEAKER_02

Ooh, that's interesting, putting it in that perspective.

SPEAKER_03

If you've lost trust in your, you know, for the your society and the people around you, you're not going to be looking into their face for connection. And so the shift and choosing to do it is actually choosing to come out of freeze. It's an experiment. How do I know if my nervous system is shut down? How do I know if I'm in freeze? And there's hallmark, and I'll read off a couple of the way you know you're stuck in freeze, because a lot of people have no idea that they're stuck here. So when you're stuck in this free state, you almost need to feel invisible. You feel stuck. You have this feeling like I have to take care of myself because nobody else is going to take care of me. Nobody really understands me. I need to be in control of the little bit I have left. For children, there's a label that's put on children when they're stuck in this state that they're manipulative and controlling. So our children feel controlling when they don't feel seen and they feel stuck here. Children go here quite easily because they're not agents of their life. They depend on adults to take care of them, feed them, clothe them, love them. And so if that any of that is intact in their life and they don't feel safe, they will be stuck here. And unfortunately, our school system and society tend to preference children that are here because they're quiet, they're submissive, they don't argue back, they've given up. We don't like the kids that are aggressive and active and tell you how they're feeling or show us how they're feeling. But what we really want are children that are socially engaged and playful and funny and kind and you know, empathetic, all these things that we want. Children require safety of the systems around them to be that kind of kid. And so we're often, you know, our schools are not good at looking and identifying these kids. But these kids are the ones that are at highest risk for suicide, highest risk for violence, coming back and shooting up schools, unfortunately. They're hiding and they're shut down. And if the insults to their life keep coming, they don't really have many re any resources to do anything else. But again, back to how we know ourselves stuck in this place. Because if a parent is stuck in this place, so is their child. Along with you don't want to be noticed, you feel alone, you're numb, you don't really feel pain anymore. You feel like you're on the outside looking in. You might be starving for love, but too afraid for the cost. And conversely, you might be starving for connection, but too afraid of the cost. You know what's going on inside your head, but you have almost no connection to what's going on inside your body. So it's a real disconnected. Some people find it impossible to speak, think, or plan, or organize, or make choices. So these are the cognitive deficits we see. Just can't get things organized. I used to be able to do that, but I can't do that anymore. It just feels so chaotic. And just focusing on surviving. Our memory doesn't work very well when we're in the state. We might leave our mind, our body, but want to play video games all the time or just obsess over things, not really being present inside ourselves because it's so uncomfortable. And our interactions in when we're in the state is we really can't do them. Eye contact is very hard. And so that's why I say this experiment could make some people feel really uncomfortable, and that's okay. Acknowledging it and noticing it means all right, maybe tomorrow I'll think of the two people that I feel the most safe with at work, and I'll choose to look at them. Pick who you choose who you look at and smile at, and just start to increase your dose of people connection every day. And that's how you become your own medication.

SPEAKER_02

I went to the grocery store today. I made eye contact with one person. No, two people, two people. And I did smile. I did, I did do that. But one thing I noticed, I don't know if children will do this frequently, but I wear my sunglasses anywhere through prescription. They are. It gives me the ability to wear. I don't have to make eye contact with you, but I do I still smile. And it's my it's my safe zone. It's something that I noticed. Like it's like a stepping stone, kind of, or like, or it's a mask. It could be one of the two.

SPEAKER_03

Well, I would suggest that you choose to spin it in a positive light. The fact that you and I have had this discussion and that you are now more aware of a really minute behavior. What you're doing by putting your sunglasses on is denying yourself the smile of the other person because your eyes won't there if you're not that the the way our brains detect authentic smiles is through our eyes. So I put my glasses on and I smile. I have no eye detection to be able to tell if it's a real smile or not. So I'm not going to really want to come smile back at you. So a simple thing, like I'm gonna take my glasses off and I'm just gonna notice how my body feels when I choose do this and see. And however it feels is okay because no part of our nervous system is bad. This place of shutdown is an incredibly important survival skill. Think about somebody who's lost someone really close to them. I think the statistic is like 50 out of every 150, every out of 100,000 kids lost a primary care provider during COVID. We lost so, so many people. A normal part of the grieving process is going to this numb place because it's so overwhelming. We need it to survive. So it's a really important part of our nervous system. But living in this place is a place of not thriving, not feeling joy, not being able to giggle from your belly, right? You only do that when you're in a socially engaged space.

SPEAKER_02

And once you're in the threatened space, how long does it take to get out? I know every person is varies, but you know, once you're in, how would is it difficult coming back out and feeling like there's hope on the other side of the tunnel?

SPEAKER_03

Well, it it has to do with what we call building the capacity for distress tolerance because the three states that we're in, if you think of like social engagement being on one side of the spectrum, in the middle is fight, flight, and on the other side is shut down. You cannot go from shutdown to social engagement. You must be able to pass through the activation of what we call sympathetic to get to social engagement. And so, what keeps people shut down is when we start to cross over into sympathetic, we often experience very intense emotions as we're coming down. And so that's what therapy is for giving us the capacity to tolerate being activated. When I work with somebody with a lot of trauma and they're terrified of the physical energy of adrenaline in their body, because the brain says, oh no, it's happening again. Here comes the activation, here comes all the beliefs, fears, negative thoughts. And so those people don't even tolerate happiness well or excessive, you know, or a high level of positive sympathetic. Think about if you're out, if you're a soccer player and you're, you know, you got to go out and you're playing your game and you're winning, right? Your team's winning and you have all this energy. That is the the height of sympathetic, right? So much adrenaline, so much, you know, their heart's pounding, all of that. There's nothing bad about that. But that level of energy put in somebody with PTSD or complex trauma, their nervous system is going to be easily overwhelmed because they associate that level of activation with a negative event. And so we actually have to teach that nervous system to tolerate good sympathetic experiences, right? And learning is a sympathetic experience. I can't pay attention and learn something that I'm really interested in without my sympathetic system going, here's some adrenaline, here's this. You need to focus so you can get really intense. When we're in flow states and we're being super creative, that's a very sympathetic state. And so you have that's why people that are shut down have an absence of creativity, an absence of joy, an absence of passion, right? Because to have all those experiences, you have to be able to tolerate what our brain is going to give you, which is adrenaline and cortisol, to be able to do that. And so it's a learning experience. You must you have to be able to learn and make mistakes and try. And then, you know, we use a lot of visual imagery, sensory information to get ourselves grounded into safety rather than going back into shutdown again. And so when you get activated, I've already given you tons of resources. Like, let's imagine your favorite place. Where is your favorite place on the planet?

SPEAKER_02

My room.

SPEAKER_03

What's the ideal condition of your room?

SPEAKER_02

The blankets are freshly washed and dried, so they're really, really soft.

SPEAKER_03

Oh, can you smell the clean sheets? Yes. Yeah. What time of year is your favorite time in your bedroom?

SPEAKER_02

I would say autumn.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, window in your room, you can see the leaves outside.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and how they're changing colors.

SPEAKER_03

See how I'm using the sensory, and I'm like, so if you get activated and you start to get a panic response of, oh no, I need to go, you know, your brain's going, we're going to shut down. Wait a minute, let me think about my room. Let me get some music on that really helps me feel safe. Let me go eat something that I love, and that will pull your nervous system to safety as opposed to shutdown. And the very first time you can do that, your brain will go, What was that? I want to do that again. Oh, dopamine just came into the play. And anything our brain marks with dopamine, we have to do it again because it felt good. Video games have hijacked our dopamine system. So those kids really, those adults and kids have a really hard time getting reward around these things that we need because their brain's been hijacked by the video game system. And so that's that's sort of an addiction, but addiction lives in shutdown.

SPEAKER_02

That's really interesting. I never thought about that. I'm a I'm a video game player, so like I didn't even think about that.

SPEAKER_03

And it's okay to use video games to distract yourself if you're starting to obsess over something, getting your mind off of it and doing something else. Vide games are great for that, right? There's not video games are not bad in exclusively in themselves. It's how we use them. And if we're using them to stay in shutdown mode, we're also depriving ourselves of the true gasoline of our life that we need, which is in safety. But this is what therapy is. I think people think therapy is lying on a couch and talking about the weird things you think about. And unfortunately, I don't engage people's thoughts when they're shut down or when they're sympathetic, even happy sympathetic, because you're not really in your brain. You're all in energized mode. And so if I want to talk to somebody and really process and heal, they have to be able to sit in safety with me so I can witness the difficulty and they can have their feelings and express their feelings. And if they get activated, we get out of there and we come back later. But it's but it's teaching the nervous system that you have the internal capacity to maintain your own well-being.

SPEAKER_02

I want to dive in a little bit into how you got yourself into this world. So you worked in special education for a number of years. What are some of the key needs of the education system regarding support for mental health?

SPEAKER_03

Well, I never expected becoming a teacher would necessitate me under using what I learned from my own mental health to stabilize my kids. I was, you know, I'd be sitting at a group table with a bunch of kids and a door would slam and every one of them would jump. And that's a threat response. And I, you know, I never expected that. And it made me be able to access what I'd learned about managing stress and do a whole lot more training around how we help these kids because I knew from my work on my master's thesis that chronic stress makes learning dysfunctional. And so, even the act of learning or the act of interest, if a kid has a really rough background, a really rough home life, asking them to engage in a learning task is actually asking them to visit dysregulation. And so we see all these behaviors to avoid learning because it requires stillness, it requires focus, it requires interest. And for somebody that's given up hope, even as a young person, you're asking them to visit a state that they don't want to be in anymore. The public school system was never designed for high needs individuals. It was designed to take an immigrant, all the immigrants flowing into our country during the Industrial Revolution, who didn't speak English and were very unique tradesmen to put all that away and please come into our factory system. So our public education system was never designed for people that had a lot of needs. And so we're actually asking a system to do something it was never designed for, because it takes a lot of money, training, and resources to be able to help high needs children. And most of the needs for that high needs child need to be dealt with within their community, within their family system. You know, the collective trauma that some of most of our BIPOC kids have come from. That's not a system that the school perpetuates it quite often, the marginalization. But if we want to heal and help those communities, it's not going to be done at school.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03

Because the school has a, you know, the school is a hopefully highly oiled machine that has to move and move and move and pivot massive amounts of children fluidly. So a kid that has sensory overwhelm can't really listen because they don't feel safe. And so they start disrupting because they they don't they can't do anything else, is instantly called defiant. And I would, I hope we get to the day in our society where we start to label those kids as not feeling safe. Because that when we when we label them as not feeling safe, we go, oh, well, what do you need to feel safer? And I instantly engage with that kid and ask them, what do you need? And one might go, it's too loud. One might say it's everything's moving. I don't know, you know, there's something going on in their body that's making them not feel safe, right? They might have come from a lesson, you know. I can't tell you how many of my clients have dyslexia. I've done extensive training in dyslexia. I didn't think a therapist needed to understand dyslexia. But I'm sitting here listening to these kids, and then I ask a few very direct questions. And also we're going, I think we have a kid that has a learning disability, and that's why you're getting all this behavior at school, you know. And as a special education teacher, I was frequently asked to write an IEP, which is the education plan for kids with learning disabilities, to write an IEP for behavior support. And I would come in and ask, How have we tested them for learning struggles? No, they just act horrible and we need them to stop behaving this way. I'm like, would you let me test them? Lo and behold, we have a highly dyslexic child on our hands. And the minute I start to approach them with who they are rather than who they can't be at school, the behaviors start to melt away. And I have a and then I have to build trust with this kid that I know how to help them. And I'm gonna stop the pushing and the forcing, and we're gonna start helping them with the learning, and then they stop feeling incompetent, and we don't have a child with behavior problems anymore. So our our school systems need more money, of course, more highly trained people, and what I realized being in that system, that that change isn't coming for decades, but I I am I needed to be about that work, and so I got into another master's program, did all the work to get my present licensing as a mental health provider, and now I work outside the school systems, frequently going to schools and supporting the teachers and the kids to get the system safer for that kid, and I can work with the whole system. So that's why I made the change because I realized that 90% of my work with my special ed kids was mental health work, and that if I could address those mental health needs, the learning became easy.

SPEAKER_02

Comes down to the learning aspect, like you said. It's not just get over it and tolerate what you feel, it's learning how to get past it.

SPEAKER_03

One of the funnest stories that I have is I was my granddaughter who was probably four or five years old, and I was learning a bunch of new techniques on calming and working with dyslexia. My family is highly dyslexic, and so I've seen them poor outcomes across my family. And so I was picking up on some of the cues before she got into school, and I'm like, I think we have another picture thinker on our hands. And so I taught her some of the tools for self-coming. And so within about a week after teaching her how to do this one, one day I was running around and she goes, Grandma, I think you need to take a breath. So this little five-year-old started coaching me on how to calm down because it made her uncomfortable for one, but it also empowered her with the tool, and she was so completely right. And so that's what I love. It's the system is that is what repairs, because again, she couldn't feel calm unless I was calm and she felt safe enough with me to tell me what she was picking up and she was like, You need to take a breath. And I'm like, You're right, let's do it. And that's what I see with children that trust me all the time. I always tell them if I feel edgy or tense or angry, you need to tell me because my nervous system, I might be having too much in my head. I may be doing too many adult things, but I can't be with you in this room and help you feel safe and learn if you don't sense that from me first. And so I I give kids permission all the time that if I feel not here with you, you have to tell me because I don't always know. And it's very empowering to them to be given that voice because they're better barometers at our mood than we are.

SPEAKER_02

That's opening doors to give the kids confidence to be able to say their feelings as they get older. I feel like a lot of generations with being told you don't say anything, you keep it all to yourself. It just builds up and it's you don't have you don't have those skills once you become a functioning adult. As we close today, what practical steps can parents, guardians, and loved ones take to improve mental health for their youth?

SPEAKER_03

I would say to sit prepare a meal, your favorite meal for your family, sit down at the table, and come up with five activities that you all love to do together. And take turns letting someone choose the activity that week from that list. So everybody in the family gets agency, everybody in the family gets voice, and we're starting to increase the level and capacity for safety in our home.

SPEAKER_02

The Adromatus Way is produced by me, Liz Church. Editorial assistance for this episode was by my fantastic team at Adromeda's. I would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to our guests who've shared their expertise, stories, and insights with us on the podcast. And finally, a big thank you to our listeners. Your support and engagement have meant the world to us at Adromatas. We're a boutique consulting firm with the imperative mission of creating healthier, more resilient, more equitable communities. I encourage you to connect with us. Let's continue these conversations and work together towards positive change. You can listen to all of our previous episodes on our website, Adromatus Consulting.com slash Adromatas Dash Way. That's A R T O M I T O S. We can also be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.