ASM178 Ask Hillary McBride (Week 2)

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get ready for a wisdom overload it's time for another episode of ask hillary mcbride [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i usually answer your questions about science faith and life but this week is part two of three with hillary mcbride the researcher and therapist who co-host the lyricist podcast with me as well as producing lots of work about mental health in the public sphere it's a great episode but watch out the conversation does get heavy so what do you say let's get it started well in case you missed last week's show i have great news for you it's not just me this week we are with the brilliant and talented hillary mcbride co-host of literature's podcast host of other people's problems researcher phd candidate therapist the amazing extraordinary hillary mcgrath hi everybody so happy to be with you again today and mike what a dream to get to spend this afternoon recording with you i'm having so much fun i get here confession okay i get achingly lonely recording ass science mic by myself which sounds weird because i never talk on the literature's podcast because there's people but what happens to me is it's like i'm either alone and can talk but i'm lonely or i'm with other people and i'm happy but i don't talk i mean yeah it's a real good time so thanks for actually yeah this will this will be fine for everybody here uh you do an exceptional job of of helping me find space in larger social settings or conversations and that means a lot to me it's something i notice and that i really appreciate um so you know not only thanks for spending the afternoon with me but thanks for helping me talk to people oh my gosh it is my one of my greatest joys to be friends with you mike so whatever's happening just feels effortless and delightful for me and i'm glad that it works for you and everyone enjoy that uh that warm moment um because uh what ask hillary and and is about is people sending in like mental health questions and we always talk about serious and weighty topics on ask science mike um you send in things you've never told people to me on the internet and i appreciate that trust um but even in a series on mental health we've got some questions in this episode that are especially vulnerable we're going to be talking about um issues about self-body image and weight we're going to be talking about sexual assault we're going to talk about addiction and we're going to talk about combat ptsd on this episode and i just want you to know that this is heavy stuff so if you're doing something where you could be triggered and that could make you physically unsafe if you're driving a car or operating machinery maybe consider listening to this podcast in a more quiet environment where your attention is not divided and i would also say that if those topics are things that are going to trigger you because of your past experiences just remember although i love that you listen to this podcast if you skip an episode for your mental health i love that even more and if you start listening i just want you to remember that you never have to keep listening to this podcast you can hit pause whenever you want i'm happy to wait for minutes or hours and i'm happy if you don't come back to this episode at all what i care most about is your mental health your feeling of safety so please consider taking care of yourself as you listen to this podcast episode and if taking care of yourself means not listening or pausing this episode at any moment please feel the freedom to do so um well said thank you oh and with that let's talk about our first question this week my question is about societal beauty standards i am someone who is considered attractive by society's standards and this has been a blessing and a curse i've been struggling with beauty standards and trying to buck them my whole life for example in high school i cut all my hair off in an attempt to prove my worth was not and how appealing i was to men but in college i went through a horrible low after i was sexually assaulted and in parentheses it says raped i had always been someone who saw my worth in my brain and my interests but after this incident i began to view myself as only a sexual object i suffered through bulimia and did unhealthy things like tanning to try to make myself appealing to men i look back on this behavior now and i cannot understand why i would respond in this way but my therapist says it is common when i began weightlifting in graduate school it was a breakthrough i had just gotten out of a bad relationship with someone who viewed me as simply a sexual object and did not respect me as i continued to lift i loved seeing my muscles and feeling my strength grow i soon found out from family and friends that they did not approve of my masculine body and that men would not find it attractive i tried not to care but i did that was five years ago i still lift and have an athletic body type i have recently made the decision to stop shaving my body hair i have the same feelings that i did with weight lifting sometimes it makes me feel empowered but other times i feel shame and believe that people are repulsed by me my question is will i ever be truly free from the shame of not conforming to beauty standards how can i stop caring and simply love my body well oh i'm so sorry that your precious body was hurt by somebody i'm so sorry and it's impossible for me as i'm hearing you read this question mike reading the question to not hear this person's power resilience how much work they've done i want to say to the person who wrote this i can see how you have worked so hard to take care of yourself how you have done so much to show up in your life and for yourself and i'm sorry that there's pain but wow there is a lot of strength and a lot of goodness and a lot of resilience in you wow and i just love the question right in light of this context how do we how do we love our bodies when people say they need to look a certain way or they've been hurt or violated by other people i think that it's pretty normal to feel attention when we are raised in society that tells us to look a certain way but we also have an understanding that those expectations and stories about bodies aren't helpful and in fact that they're hurtful because we're social creatures we're so wired to notice and value what the tribe says matters even if it's hurtful for us so first i don't actually want you to beat yourself up for the inner conflict that you feel and and this might sound like it's strange at first here but i think it's okay if shame is there i don't think shame is good but i think that when we have been trained to feel shame it makes sense that it's there because we're just responding to what what is very natural given our context and the messages we've heard and what i don't want you to do is shame yourself for having the shame so in saying the shame is there and i think that's okay what i want for you to know is that the shame isn't the only dialogue in your head and it matters how we respond to it so here's an example of what i mean i have this history of having a crippling life-threatening body shame problem and at one point in my life the shame about my body was the only voice that i knew the only story i knew but as i was working through the issues that i was struggling with i started experiencing new ways of thinking about myself and i learned how to respond to shame so instead of there being a shame monologue in my head there was a dialogue between the new story and the shame and that to me felt like a moment of victory that it wasn't just the one story anymore that that was a proof that some healing had happened and if that's where you get that's beautiful that means that the shame isn't the only store anymore and it's not winning and i want to say as somebody who is really public about my history with an eating disorder and mental health issues and and also as being a therapist it's important for you know that i often have body shame thoughts and they pop up but i don't get freaked out about them they i don't dance with them anymore they pop up just like any other kind of spontaneous thought that seems strange that i don't really know how to place and so instead of indulging them and feeling shame about the shame i steer my attention away from them and just know that whenever we've practiced something a lot and have been praised for practicing it it's normal for our brain to hang on to that connection for a little while and it doesn't mean that you are broken or that that's the only story about you but interestingly the less we reinforce or join with these specific shame-based thoughts about our body the less cognitive and emotional real estate they take up and then what we find over time is that they show up less just in general but we can also learn how to respond to shame itself by seeing how it has a pattern of coming up in our life and making us feel small driving us to disconnect from others and ourselves and we need to know what the antidote is so when shame comes up we need to meet it with connection and compassion if we're with someone we trust sharing about how painful things are in the moment can be helpful now hear me though i'm not talking about saying what the shame is telling you and actually just talking poorly about our bodies but sharing the experience of feeling shame and the sadness we have about that second if nobody's around or no one that we trust or just because it's a good practice to be in we can meet ourselves with connection we can say and i'll say to you something that i have often said to myself or that i hear other people say hey honey i see you i know how hard you're working i know how painful it feels to have thoughts that come up that tell you to hate this body and i'm so sorry it's been so hard for so long and i'm here with you i'm never gonna leave you and even if the shame doesn't go away we can flood this experience of being together with so much love that sometimes it even drowns the shame out so when we have these moments of shame come up instead of further beating ourselves up we turn towards ourselves to acknowledge that it's a shame story and shift into telling the thing that we desperately need to hear whatever that is scholarship in the area of body preoccupation so this fixation on appearance can help us understand why it's so hard for us to move beyond stories about body shame and i got two main ideas i want to say about this one that thinking about thinking about our bodies can act like intrusive thoughts like the kind of thoughts that some people get when they're anxious or they have ocd and learning to treat them as disturbing thoughts that we can actually disregard and we don't need to engage with can be helpful for a lot of people just like that random thought that we get when we're in a business meeting that we choose to ignore because it's not helpful in the moment and we know it's unreasonable we can do that with other intrusive thoughts and although some of the intrusive thoughts that we have about our body have such a negative valence to them we can decide in that moment nope i don't i don't want to do that and i want to tell that story and over time it starts to prune that lane that um that line of thinking second body fix second body fixation and preoccupation and eating disorders can all be symptoms of restricted agency so there's a scholar in toronto who works her name is neva paran and her work has been really influential in shaping my ideas about the body and embodiment and her empirical research has shown that that we're more likely to experience body fixation and preoccupation and eating disorders when we experience feelings of powerlessness in our lives so when our agency has been restricted and what we can see is that there's actually a really strong link between eating disorders and body um kind of body shame practices and thoughts for people who have experienced sexualized violence that when the body has been violated it becomes a place that we realize is an object not as it it's actually an object but we learn to see it as an object for other people and sometimes an object for ourselves an object that we hate that makes us a liability that exposes us to violence or pain or criticism of other people and so we get into this relationship of preoccupation and fixation and behavior that's all about getting agency back at the place where we experience the pain so sometimes when we go back and we do trauma processing about the experiences of violence our nervous system settle down a little bit and the structures that are engaged to help us create that sense of power and agency can loosen a little bit and it's easier to be with what is lastly it's hard to love our bodies if all we do is focus on the outside culture says so much about the outside everywhere we look there are images we're seeing pictures that reinforce that image is the most important thing about us but actually that's only just one part of our body the inside is part of our body too and that actually matters or let me say it another way we can also choose to learn to focus on and be with the lived experience of being a body when we shift our focus from how we look to what it feels like to be us it can change everything for example instead of looking at the mirror while lifting weights or while getting dressed or getting ready in the morning trying to notice what it feels like on the inside when you're lifting that weight feeling the heat in your muscle the power you feel as you move all of that iron around and that excited and exhilarated feeling that makes you love weight lifting that's in your body too that feeling of aliveness that's in your body so go look for that and shift some of the weight of how you think about your body off the appearance and on to the experience now i wrote a ton about this in my first book it was called mother's daughters and body image about the stories that we tell between us as women about bodies so if you're interested in reading more about my research on the topic of learning to love our bodies you can go check that out too and if you have any trouble finding it you'll be able to see it in the show notes on this episode on asksciencemike.com there'll be a link to both hillary's website and to her books amazing now before we go to the next question um i just want to share something with uh the person who asked this question for as long as i can remember the people who i find the most striking are men and women and gender non-conforming people who defy and reject the scripts around appearance and presentation um the fact that you are taking the great effort and energy to define yourself and your body on your terms is achingly and astoundingly beautiful to me and thank you not only for doing that for yourself but for help making a world that cannot so quickly and reflexively confine people into gender-based social scripts yeah thanks for saying that mike i get all emotional [Music] here's our next question i have battled my weight and the emotional issues since my mom put me on a diet when i was 12. although i have made progress through therapy and reading and i do love my body and i don't do congestive self-talk i am still overweight about 60 pounds now i just want to live better and be here for my children and grandchildren and not some societal standard of perfection after 52 years of this struggle i just want to be healthy i know all the things to do but i am not doing them how do i find the motivation to eat healthfully exercise appropriately quit using sugar as my drug of choice and make peace with food and eating yeah i i get really struck by the part of the question where this listener talks about being put on a diet at 12 and that makes me feel really angry and sad at the same time yeah that there was messages so early communicated about paying attention to size and number and i know that's a story for so many people unfortunately that that was something that parents did that they thought helped kids care about their bodies um instead i wish that so many of us were told you're good just as you are and let me teach you how to pay attention to the messages that your body gives you like hunger cues and fullness cues so you can experience your body as good in that way so i'm so sorry that was said but i really like this part in there where you were thinking about how you take care of others by taking care of yourself that those things are connected and that there's a desire to see that you matter and that you you want to be here and that you want to treat yourself well and and that's somehow that that actually benefits the people around you i heard that theme in there and i really like that so i want to suggest a few things that might be helpful for all sorts of listeners who were struggling with or curious about similar issues and three things are one paying attention to our emotions two the way we set goals and three mindful eating so first eating for a lot of us is actually an emotional regulation strategy and it's not a crime to enjoy what we eat and food and the goodness and how it feels it's actually part of how we evolved but sometimes we nudge what's happening neurochemically by eating foods when it might actually be better for us in that moment to sit with what we're feeling and learn how to be compassionate with ourselves in it for example we eat not because we're hungry but because we're sad or lonely or afraid or we're celebrating something and for so many of us food became a way to manage emotions by bumping them up when we wanted to or distracting ourselves from them or soothing ourselves to level level things out so when we learn how to do self-regulation or the set of skills required to notice what we're feeling and respond in ways appropriate to our context and our needs in that moment we don't need to use as many other things to act as a defense against the emotion or to help us process through it this will be extra important if you're trying to make changes around your diet because often when people do that especially if they've been using food as an emotional regulation strategy they notice that because of the changes more emotions come up and the old way of distracting from those emotions isn't there so it can create this intolerable amount of discomfort unless we have other strategies to take care of ourselves into stress second what kinds of goals we set and how we motivate ourselves towards those goals is everything if the goals are way too big or too demanding or require too much of a shift they aren't sustainable and we either feel defeated before we start or it takes so much energy to work towards the goal that at some point we just get tired and give up so instead of saying things like i'm going to completely cut out sugar some people find it helpful to say i'm going to do x before i eat sugar or i'm going to eat sugar during the day but not so much after dinner and over time slowly having the manageable and reasonable goals allows us to reflect or to engage in behavior that reflects more of where we want to be when we're setting a goal it's helpful to say what we are going to do and not just what we aren't going to do that's a little trick that helps some people out so instead of saying i'm not going to eat sugar we can say when i feel sad i'm going to try and do this or after dinner i want to do this and when we're in a pinch and it feels super hard to stick to our goals in those moments it can be really important to use kind self-talk using compassion and encouragement reminding ourselves of why we're doing something in the first place but not beating ourselves up just to make it through and lastly mindful eating mindful eating or intuitive eating is a great practice to get in for any of us like in these busy lives that we're leading it can be extremely counterintuitive to actually sit down and be present with food but it means eating when we're not distracted as a kind of meditation instead of eating in front of the tv or in the car we eat while sitting in a place that feels calm and without any distractions that means tasting our food sometimes people even pause between bites to savor what they're eating and then through all of this noticing the cues from our organs that tell us oh yeah i'm full it's really hard for us to notice when we're full when we're eating while we're distracted and we can have the tendency to eat because we're not paying attention not because we're actually hungry but i don't actually think that there's anything wrong with feeding ourselves and i struggle often with the term overweight because people can be a variety of weights and still be healthy and there's lots of new stuff that's coming out podcasts and magazines and books and articles all about healthy at any size and if the processes underneath are healthy like how we pay attention to our emotions and what's going actually going on in our bodies then sometimes we realize that the story around losing weight is actually a leftover story from when we were growing up so i want to remind you that we can be healthy at many many many sizes and that there are lots of things that we can do to be healthy including adding in things into our lives instead of just thinking about what we're going to restrict or what we're going to cut out but for people who are interested in this question and the answer to this question you might like books like the food and feelings workbook or any of janine roth's work so when food is love feeding the hungry heart women food and god and anything you can get your hands on about emotional regulation and self-compassion so that's where i'm gonna leave that is there anything you wanted to add mike just a lot of empathy for the questioner i uh probably have really similar body metrics to the person asking that question and uh i just so resonate with you saying you love your body i love my body too i i really do um and i know that a lot of my eating and exercise strategies aren't primed for physical longevity if that's something that i care about um and that you know i know that the a great project ahead of me is exploring my relationship with food um it's not just you gosh it's not just you uh food is such a consistent wellspring of joy in my life uh it's actually the primary lens through which i understand behavior loops around addiction and compulsion in other people when people talk about sexual addiction or pornography addiction or drug addiction i have a hard time empathizing or understanding until i think about a pepperoni pizza and i go oh okay i get it i literally can't walk by one um so i think this is like one of the great challenges of our time learning both to accept the body and cast off the shame around the variance in body types and body shapes and learn to have a healthy relationship with food and they're presented so often as oppositionally in our culture um but i honestly have had this hope that i've been afraid to say out loud that the work that i'm doing in therapy and the space i'm giving my feelings and learning to cope with them may in fact help me not run to the kitchen in response to conflict in my life or anxiety about my work that maybe i'll be able to sit with those on their own without having to run and ask my stomach for help um and it's hard it's just really really intensive work yeah um for me you know my mom didn't put me on a diet when i came home crying because other kids were mean to me or beat me up oh my mom would get me some cookies and a glass of milk it would be these little rituals of comfort where my mom would set down a plate of food and then she would kiss me on the head and say she loves me um so of course i go to this place of safety and refuge with food and as i read your question i was i was sad that we have uh similar challenges with food but your origin story broke my heart and parents if you're listening please if you trust me if you listen to me don't put your children on diets just don't do it don't ever put your child on a diet model healthy eating as a family together that's great but do not put a child on a diet um you have no idea the damage that can cause for years and years and years i have to put a trigger warning on this episode for myself that's right [Laughter] [Music] this question is for hillary my name is clark and i have quite a bit of addiction problems to help cope with my spiritual trauma and my verbally abusive father how does an abusive father affect my brain and self yeah i mean i'm i'm starting my answer and in the way that i have with so many of these i can hear the pain and i think your hypothesis is correct um that having abuse in our childhoods affects our brains and ourselves so i want to talk a little bit more about that but i'm so sorry and i'm so glad that you wrote in and and i hope that this helps a little bit you're asking such a good question truly because abuse during our developmental years has this massive impact on our brain development and how we see ourselves when you're young because we're mammals and we depend so much on caregivers and touch and closeness for our survival our relational experiences support the development of our brain structures and the patterns of relating to ourselves and others that govern how we move through the world so when those relationships or experiences are characterized by anything like fear or neglect pain or unsafety it shapes our brain both to get used to those things and to respond to them so we know that for people who experience abuse growing up especially in the home that when we look at their brains later in life that there are a few things that are different than people who have not been through abuse growing up so for a lot of people there's a decreased size in the hippocampus the structure i talked about in the previous episode that's really important for learning and memory we notice a decrease in the size and thickness of the band of tissue that connects both our hemispheres so something called the corpus callosum and the corpus callosum has a really important function for emotion and regulating impulses and arousal and helping with communication between the right and left hemispheres of our brain we also see a decreased size in the cerebellum which means that this can people some people can experience this as having impacted motor skills and coordination and notably a decrease in the volume of the prefrontal cortex which mike talks about lots and is implicated in behavior and balancing emotion and perception there can also be too much activity or over activation we might say in some a structure called the amygdala which is helpful for activating a fear anger response and helpful for keeping us safe in stressful and dangerous situations and we know that cortisol levels are higher or in some cases too low which has a lot of impacts on a person's system as well but abuse growing up also impacts our attachment patterns it can be scary to connect with people scary to be alone we can feel uncertain about who to trust and if people who are supposed to take care of us and say they love us are also going to hurt us think of the attachment pattern this is the analogy i use lots of my clinical work but think of the attachment pattern as the map that connects or the map of connection that gets built into our brain based on the experiences we've had with our caregivers and the people who are close to us then that map is this thing that we take through life it's so helpful to be afraid when we're in scary situations and the map develops to help us be afraid or perhaps in some situations feel like that's normal but it's not always great for us to trust people who are going to hurt us but when we're not with the hurtful people anymore or we're not in unsafe situations anymore it can make it really hard to feel at rest or connect with others also when we're young we don't have a theory of mind so when bad things happen as kids we often assume it's because of this i don't know if anyone who's listening has had this experience but i remember hearing a friend of mine in elementary school whose parents were getting divorced and this friend said to me it's all my fault it's all my fault it's not the kid's fault but because of the way that we approach the world and understand what's happening around us when we're children everything is oriented around our ego development and and who we are as an individual but when those bad things are happening at the hands of people who are supposed to protect us or tell us that they love us it can be really confusing for our developing brains and kids can walk away believing that the pain that they feel and all the things they've suffered through were their fault this kind of shame can be unbearable that together with the poor emotional regulation and no place to process the horrors of the abuse anything can come along that gives us relief or anything that does come along that gives us relief can be extremely appealing in fact almost impossible to walk away from we know from studies about addiction done with rodents that it's not the substance that's addictive it's the brain so if we have the right conditions in the brain and a substance comes along that helps our brain feel better perhaps feel the way that several other people's brains feel naturally then there is a drive in us to seek that out it can feel so nice to get relief when we have been feeling pain for so long so if there's one thing i could wish for you it would be that you would know that the abuse was not your fault that the trauma was not your fault and that the addiction does not make you bad it's actually a very natural conclusion and in fact probably in some ways how you've been able to survive but when you're ready to see that that's a way of surviving that might be causing more problems and it's solving it can be a good idea to start that brain change process and brains can change trauma therapy is extremely helpful for this as our relationships with people who are stable compassionate and attuned to us and i mentioned earlier that something called the hippocampus can be smaller in people who have trauma approximately about 12 smaller but after doing trauma therapy some studies have shown us that the hippocampus will actually grow back to normal size so when the trauma is processed our brain adapts life is not over you're not bad and it's never too late to start the healing journey i really want to say to you that you're loved just as you are right now if you could do anything for yourself you might start by being kind you've been through a lot you are going through a lot you live through a lot and you're here the trauma that happened is over it did happen but it's over and when you're ready there are people who are willing to help you do the work to build a life and a story about yourself that is more reflective of who you are and less about the pain that you went through and how to get away from it this was a heavy episode yeah [Music] our next question is our last one for this week my dad was blown up by a bomb during active duty he lived at great cost let me just get that out there of course the science of brain injury is still in infancy and back then i doubt they even thought of it aside from bleeding i've been doing some reading about brain injury and addictive behaviors my dad is an opioid addict and also a gambling addict he also lies pretty much about everything no matter how inconsequential although he has wrecked our family time and again and in so many ways he continues these behaviors swearing that he doesn't abuse the drugs or gamble away the money or lie to any of us or verbally abuse my mom it has escalated severely in the last few years to the point where we're losing him he's there but he's not if you know what i mean i've tried to find some way to help him but it seems that everything says that there isn't help for anyone unless they want to be helped but i'm just not sure he really even does realize he has a problem i'm just curious if there are any things that we his family can do to help him or if we just need to try and get help to support ourselves instead grace tells me to try and understand that this may not be his fault and seek out scientific reasons but reality sees how he is hurting my mom my siblings his grandchildren and me and i'm angry and i don't feel totally in the wrong for that thanks for any insight or advice you could give i know it's a heavy topic yeah it is heavy and i hear all of the people in relationship with him and him and how much hurt there must be in so many ways so i'm so sorry that you're all going through this watching him feeling your own pain yeah i can feel the weight and the grief in myself just as i hear your question there are some strong empirical links between the following things trauma and addiction brain injury and addiction brain injury and lying or sometimes what we call confabulation often people with brain injuries are lying without knowing that they're lying and that's what we call confabulation as the theory goes our brain automatically fills in gaps in our memories and assumes things based on patterns or past experience without knowing that we're doing it but when memory storage is impaired both because of brain injury and trauma it can happen a lot more and with a lot of things he's got a lot going on right a lot of different clinical issues and based on what he's been through what you're describing actually all makes sense it doesn't take the pain away but it makes sense and i'm not his clinician or yours so i can't advise on what to do for him and if if i was with him i might have some more specific ideas about how you could work as a family it just sounds like there are a ton of issues going on and sometimes when that's the case we can get caught up in how all of the issues are playing out and it can be sometimes helpful to pick one thing this is the case this is you know applicable for anybody who has a lot of things happening in their life a lot of presenting concerns that sometimes we get overwhelmed by all of them and and we lose sight of the ability to to pick one thing and see what we can do to resource ourselves or reserve someone else around that so for example working on substance use or the trauma or the brain injury and in cases like this sometimes the easiest point of entry for people is to remind them that it's not their fault there's help for people who have injuries of lots of different kinds for whatever reason because of the stigma around addiction or lying or trauma that brain injury when we talk about it as an injury comes with less stigma and less of a sense of moral failure and can help people feel like yeah there's something there's something that they could do about it i mean my other concern is if he's at all being violent or if any committing crimes or having psychotic symptoms it's really important to keep yourself and him safe and in those situations it can sometimes be a good time to get appropriate emergency services or authorities or resources involved for some people who have trauma and brain injury as a result of combat there can be services in patient or outpatient that are appropriate just for them and for you what i would suggest is doing things to take care of yourself to set boundaries to be compassionate when communicating and to be patient when we're working with someone who has brain trauma in a variety of ways we sometimes have to say things over and over again like please don't speak to me that way dad and then again i've you know we've talked about this please don't speak to me that way again dad i'm reminding you please don't speak to me that way and sometimes communicating things with concern um and emotion and empathy can help but because there's so much anger sometimes when we are having a hard time with someone we approach it with all of that full force anger and the urgency for things to be different but he's not the dad he used to be and for anyone who who knows and loves someone who's had a brain injury or has trauma or is resistant to and that you know the person is resistant to getting help for whatever reason there is this extra grief that who we knew in the past and who we loved has gone and we can be angry at the person who's there in their place now sometimes reminding ourselves of the way the brain works when it's been hurt helps us access a little bit more patience and compassion that it's not your dad trying to hurt you but that doesn't take away the grief or the pain um i'm thinking about your mom in this and making sure that she has resources so that she can set boundaries or decide what feels appropriate for her and healthy and sustainable but i can give you information about the links between addiction and trauma and addiction and brain injury and all of that stuff but but this is a heart ache there is a heart ache here from pain that is both your own as your father can't be with you likely as you long him to be and you you're missing who he used to be but also as you see him hurting other people and see him hurting himself so sometimes in situations like this one of the best things that we can do is get support and have places to process our own grief and anger a fear and sadness places where we can allow the things that naturally come up in situations like this to move through us so that we don't end up hurting ourselves as we shove those down in effort to cope and then develop some patterns in our life that don't help us be healthy so as much as i want to give you information or even tell you what to do i can't really do either of those things in a way that would help your heart heal because this is painful and tragic and um is so so so hard for everyone involved so i'm sorry and i hope that you can find places where you can take that anger and do your own healing i had made a little list on a sheet of paper i was like i can say some things hillary won't be able to say because i'm not a therapist and then you and then you said everything i was going to say okay almost in the same order it was amazing and then went further um so i'd like to maybe just shift the focus just for a second and talk from my own experience as someone with a brain injury now i was not blown up by a bomb during active duty i fell off a motorcycle and banged my head on the ground but i it did give me a double brain bleed uh and a complex concussion um and it and the recovery was brutal it took me two and a half years to figure out who the new me was and it took me a year to realize the old me was not returning and there was an incredible grief in that and so much that's happening in my life today is a result of that brain injury neither me nor any of you would have any idea that i have autism if i still had the cognitive resources i had before i fell on the ground i think perhaps some of the ways that my past traumas have shown up in my life are also as a result of losing some of that cognitive shock absorber i used to navigate the world before and what i want you to know is that in the days and weeks and months following my much more minor brain injury i was a real pain in the ass to be around i could be short tempered which i've never been i was very irritable i was constantly frustrated i got in brain fog all of all the time so easily and it made me feel like i wasn't a whole person now fortunately i have an obscenely rich social support system i am incredibly fortunate that way but one of the most valuable things that happened in my recovery process was my relationship with my wife because she was patient and supportive and helpful and would not allow me to treat her in certain ways so when i had this new habit of getting frustrated and snapping at her she let it happen a couple of times and then said you're not going to talk to me that way and it took that constant reminding for me to help become a new me and to find the patients i once had before brain injury it took the reminder of when my behavior was inappropriate because i was no longer able to tell when behaviors were inappropriate the damage to my brain was primarily in my left prefrontal cortex where behavior regulation is happening where executive function is happening where emotional regulation and integration not happen at least are it plays a major role in it my wife did a great thing by supporting me but also setting the boundaries of behavior that were acceptable in how i interacted with her make sure you take care of yourself make space for your anger make space for your feelings there was a a moment in your question that almost took my breath away are there things that we do for to help him or do we get help to support ourselves you cannot help him in my opinion unless you get the help to to be supportive yourself someone dealing with brain injury can be cognitively and emotionally exhausting because in so many ways we we don't have the capacity to regulate our impulses and our feelings that we once did and with my relatively minor brain injury it was a two to three year arc before i started feeling like a functional and whole person but i know other people who've had more severe brain injuries who are six years or 10 years or 15 years from the injury and still in dramatically reduced capacity and their lives and their social support and their relationships bear the mark of that i'm just so glad that you care enough about your father and yourself and your family to raise the question yeah and i just hope that you'd even focus first on getting the support for you i hear fatigue in your question i hear a need for rest and i i just want to say that in my completely unprofessional opinion that maybe loving your dad looks like having the courage to say i love you and i also need some space this week and do what you have to do to be healthy and to be whole [Music] okay next week hillary will be back with us one more time to answer your questions about mental health and uh emotional intelligence and healing and i'm really excited about it i hope you enjoyed this episode i hope that you found some healing in the answers to these questions even if they don't directly apply to you i hope that you hear an approach to openness to our feelings that i'm i'm just learning about myself as well i want to thank andrew golucky for his work in pre-production on ask science mike i want to thank greg nordin for producing and editing and basically doing absolutely everything that happens that makes this show sound good um greg has has been a a great partner and a faithful friend through this entire show of course greg uh also helps us out with the liturgies podcast and i'm telling y'all none of it would happen without him and i want to thank um let's say jeb bodiford for writing the ask science mike theme song i still love to hear it every week and i want to thank all of my patrons on patreon who helped me pay my rent and health insurance uh it's really vital so if ask science spike means something to you feel free to join them it's a dollar a month five dollars a month will make a huge difference in uh in my life and and how this show happens thanks for listening and i can't wait to talk with you again next week