Hey, welcome back everyone. Today I want to talk about the incredible Hulk and why I use the incredible Hulk metaphor for nearly all my patients with trauma. Because it's one of the best metaphors for understanding how trauma impacts the brain, how we think, how we feel, and how we react to different situations. And it also has some clues about how to actually help people recover from trauma. So everyone knows that the incredible Hulk is one of America's favorite superheroes. But did you know that he actually has a severe history of childhood abuse at the hands of his father? And so Bruce Banner always had this huge capacity for rage as a way to protect himself from perceived threat. But then when he got infected with gamma radiations, it turned his rage into one of the most powerful forces in the universe. And we all know that as he starts to get angry, his eyes turn green, his skin turns green, and he starts to grow muscles at an incredible rate. As his Hulk starts to come up, his capacity for intelligence goes way down. And as the Hulk is raging, there's this underlying sense of self-hatred because Banner hates turning into the Hulk. The rest of the world tries to stop the Hulk by sending the world's military against him, but every time you shoot the Hulk or threaten him, it just makes him absorb more gamma radiation and become stronger and stronger and probably less and less smart. And the only thing that can help the Hulk calm down is actually to just be done with his rage, destroy the threat, and then go jump to South America or some other beautiful place and take a nap for a day and a half, and then wake up and realize that you've tattered your clothes and you probably left a wake up destruction and you need to find your way back to civilization. Now there's a really important lesson about managing kids who Hulk out to. The thing that the world usually does whenever they see a child acting out and hulking out is that they threaten consequences to them. And this is exactly like shooting the Hulk with military weapons. I mean, the more you shoot at the Hulk, you just make him stronger and stronger and matter and matter. And this is what happens to all these kids who are raging out. Everyone sends them to timeouts or threatens consequences and takes away privileges and it just makes them escalate more and more. And then we end up classifying them as a problem as having rage and anger issues. But in fact, they just have this overreactive alarm system that operates just like the way that the Hulk does. And so you're going to ask, okay, then what do we do with the Hulk? Now the first thing you have to do is actually to never let the Hulk come out in the first place. And the way you do that is by strengthening Banner's capacity for self awareness to know what triggers him and to recognize when he's starting to get mad. Because when his eyes are green, maybe there's a little bit of capacity for controlling that reaction to become full blown Hulk. And you also try to help give Banner other skills for dealing with anger and aggression. But at the same time, Banner sometimes needs the Hulk because there are real threats out there. So you can't really hate the Hulk when he comes out. You just have to know when to use him. And then when the Hulk is out, there's really not much you can do. And even for traumatized people, as soon as the sympathetic nervous system is activated and the whole stress response is activated, it's going to take a good 45 minutes to an hour for the body to metabolize all of that adrenaline that's coursing through the body. This is why I like chill out spaces for schools. Just a place where kids can go and feel safe and try to calm themselves back down. Now the other thing you can do when Banner's eyes are green and he still has some capacity to think is to make him focus on what really matters most in this moment. And particularly if you make him focus on who matters most to you, who do you love, what do you care about most in this world, then sometimes it can help deescalate him down from turning into the Hulk completely. So I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. Thank you. Goodbye. Goodbye, David. And I hope you find your safe place, your refuge. Thank you.