Keynote address from Neufeld Institute Conference 2022 - Bouncing Back: Recovering from Stress and Trauma. Conference presenters included Gordon Neufeld, Tamara Strijack, Deborah MacNamara, and many Neufeld Institute faculty and facilitators. Topics varied but all 40+ sessions centred around how the roles of feelings, nature, and nurturance factor into recovery from stress and trauma.

NEW! As of July, 2023, conference recordings are available through our website (https://neufeldinstitute.org/resources/previous-conference-recordings/). Purchase single session recordings or packages of 6 sessions - suitable for parents, educators, and helping professionals.

I'm pleased, very pleased, to bring you the Anchor Keynote for this year's conference.

It's a privilege, it's certainly an honour and a responsibility to lay the conceptual foundations for the other presenters to build upon.

If I can do my job right, they'll be able to take it from there.

Now, the topic is huge, recovery, and recovery in the deepest emotional sense of the term.

When children are young and of course in fairy tales, Sometimes all it takes is a well-timed magic kiss to make things better.

There are so many hurts, there are so many wounds that need to be recovered from.

Now we've all become very familiar with stress lately.

Waiting for stress to be over isn't going to work because stress is ubiquitous.

It is part of life, sometimes easier to identify than at other times, but almost always there.

How do we live with it and not come undone?

Which is what the word stress actually means literally, and we'll get back to that.

Yes, we as humans are adaptive, but it is not automatic.

You often hear, oh, as humans we're very, very adaptive.

Some find their way much more than others do, many do not.

So what is the answer in turning stress into strength, which is my chosen title here, turning stress into strength?

And yes, for those of you who are wondering, The focus of this keynote and conference, as always, is the children in our care.

But what is true for children is also true for us grown-ups.

Now, unfortunately, truths often get buried along the years under layers of conceptualizations, of culture, and so it can be challenging to unravel all of that and uncover the essence, which is what I hope to be able to do with you today.

It is always easier to do when starting at the beginning with children, and so we'll continue that.

Now I'll also start at the beginning in another way, in making sense of the stress response itself.

It's been too long assumed that the stress response was some kind of primitive evolutionary response.

Often you hear it stated as a fight-flight response or indicative of the brain's resources being overwhelmed.

That's how it first came to us with Hans Selye, the idea of stress coming undone.

And so there is no, we start from the place that there's something wrong, rather than something right, we need to start with decoding the actual emotional intelligence in the human brain.

I don't mean any person's emotional intelligence here.

I mean, the emotional intelligence that is pre wrote pre programmed into every human brain.

And the more I understand it, the more I am awestruck at the brilliance of the human brain.

And We need to discover exactly what was lost in the stress response that needs to be recovered for healing to happen.

That is, to get our bounce back, so to speak.

So we'll start at looking at the wisdom of the stress response.

But as I mentioned, the stress response, the term itself, has the wrong connotations.

Hence, salier, borrowed to the term from engineering, the load on a bridge, that happens when the load is too big, the bridge collapses.

So it's meant to be associated with the fact that if the stress is too big, we come undone.

But the whole idea is that our resources are being overwhelmed, that it was too much for us.

And the more stress we have, the worse it is.

And so the idea of breakdown is essential, collapse is essential to this.

Now we need to start with a complete turnaround, and I mean a complete about-turn.

A realization and appreciation that our brains are actually trying to take care of us.

They are brilliantly, as I said, and I'll continue to use that word, brilliantly pre-programmed to do just that.

We should always approach nature with the idea that it has its reasons, even if those reasons are not particularly obvious to us.

Now most people know some of the pieces of the puzzle by now.

This has entered into the general literature.

I'm hoping I can put the puzzle pieces together for you in a way that makes sense.

Now, the reason I'm doing this and not getting on the how-tos is because everything actually stems from understanding the essence of the stress response, and not in a way that our resources are being overwhelmed, but in a way that our resources are being summoned for a task.

And when we understand what that is, what is right with it, what is orderly about that, Now we begin to see what needs to be recovered, what needs to take place for us to be able to bounce back.

Now I'm going to look through 3 lenses, as I usually do.

The lenses of development, we're going to look at the stress response, the science of development, the lens of emotion, what we now understand about emotion.

There's a pivotal piece here that I'm going to share with you that is absolutely essential for understanding this, and of course the lens of attachment.

It's amazing what you see looking through those lenses.

The lenses start with the idea that there is order in the universe.

I think all science should be about order, not disorder.

It should assume order because that's what science was initially about, to discover what nature was up to.

And so if we take that attitude again, we're looking at, well, what is nature up to here?

Especially when you have a benign understanding of nature, that nature is there to take care of us.

So our brains are pre-programmed with that idea to take care of us.

Now looking through these 3 lenses, you get to see some special things.

Unfortunately, most of the literature is not informed by this.

These lenses were not available to earlier theorists.

Certainly, Walter Cannon, from whom we get the fight-flight response, and Sallye, from whom we get the stress reaction from, they certainly did not have these lenses to look through.

And so we stand in a special place to be able to do this, and hopefully I can put the picture together for you, rather, in a way that makes sense.

And we'll start with the science of attachment here.

I won't go back to this diagram, but we'll start here at the very beginning and a very important understanding.

Now, when Hans Sallier, first of all, brought out his stress construct, People were really excited because science had taken an empirical turn, everything needed to be quantified, it's something that we could measure, and the idea was is that each of these stressors, each of these stressors, and we finally got to measure them with the cortisone level through a saliva test and so on, we could tell what caused stress, at least at its beginning.

And the idea was, is the more of these stressors you had, the greater the quantity, of course, the more likely it would overwhelm our resources.

Basically, even though Hanselier quite quickly changed his tune about this, It never really got out there and the stress reaction was bad.

Now the assumption that Hanselier had was the threat was threat to survival.

And so when they talked about fear, they talked about fear of snakes, fear of, you know, death, fear of all kinds of things, but they talked about fears as, but it didn't add up.

You know, other than more primitive animals, it just really didn't add up.

You couldn't go from there to use this as a therapist and so on.

Then came the idea, especially after Hansellier, that stress itself was the enemy.

If stress means to come undone, it is the threat.

And so we went into all of this in the past decades of stress management, of handling stress, The whole thing of the stress industry is about management, self-help, handling stress, assuming that stress itself is a threat.

And so your doctor, you know, when you go visit them says, oh, you've got to reduce the stress in your life.

And of course, we scratch our heads and try to figure out how in the world do we do this?

How do we reduce stress and stress management?

And the irony, well, first of all, what wasn't known is that it was not about threats to survival at all and stress itself was not the enemy.

It took John Bowlby, often known as the father of attachment theory, in the 1950s to say, hey, wait a minute, you guys.

It's not survival that is the preeminent drive.

When something happens, when there is a fire, an atrocity, a quake, a bomb, the children, family members are yelling for each other.

That's the first thing that comes into mind, not survival.

And they will go through danger to get there.

So survival is the most important thing, then they would not go through danger.

If togetherness is the most important, you get the point.

So survival is our need, but togetherness is our point.

Because if togetherness is our preeminent need, then facing separation, anticipating it even, Facing separation is the greatest threat.

Now, when we unpack this, we realize, oh my goodness, that means that all of these things have a common denominator.

The stress involved, whether it be daycare, hospitalization, losing face, isolation, is in the separation faced from those attached to.

That is why bedtime is such a stressor for young children.

That is the essence of what makes death so stressful and how we can hardly look it in the eyes, is that we are facing the separation from all those things that we are attached to.

Well, this has huge implications, because this means that if we reduce the separation children face, we would automatically reduce the stress in their lives.

We've been going in the opposite direction.

This has implications for all of our care.

The elderly, the young, it has huge implications of how to reduce stress in the life, in our lives.

The irony is that school children are now taught stress management techniques while subjecting them to the very separation that is a source of stress itself.

I want to go back to the amazing, brilliant, as I said I would use that word again, emotional intelligence of the human brain.

When separation is sensed, facing separation, it mobilizes itself to get into action and boy does it ever.

And what it has to be able to move us is instinct and emotion.

Now, it turns out that there are 3 emotions.

We used to think that emotions, and now we go to the lens of emotion, that emotions were a leftover vestigial part of our animal nature, good for nothing.

As John Locke saw it in the 17th century, and the less emotional we were, the better.

Emotions were irrational and all of these things.

And now we've discovered that emotion has reason.

It is there for a purpose, and there is all of this pre-programmed brilliance, emotional intelligence in the brain.

And so it has 3 basic, what we call primal separation emotions that get triggered, all 3 at once actually.

It's throwing all kinds of solutions at the problem, hoping something will stick.

Maybe something will decrease the amount of separation faced.

Now this 1, there isn't even a name for yet, so I've named it separation trigger pursuit.

1 neuroscientist named it seeking, but that's not strong enough.

I wish we had something for the desperateness of this to close the gap.

You know, that thing, mommy, mommy, where are you?

When you hear it, you hear the desperateness in it to close the gap, close the gap, close the gap.

And of course this comes into all kinds of layers as we try to become more valued, more important, more special, and so on.

Always closing the gap, closing the gap when we face separation.

Now another 1, frustration, is simply the emotion that we have when something doesn't work.

The most important thing to work is togetherness.

So the most frustrating scenario for humans is facing separation.

What is the first thing we try to do when something doesn't work, make it work.

And so we have all kinds of problem solving energy.

Now you know people who need to solve every problem around.

That tells you that they're very very frustrated.

They have to effect change in themselves and others etc.

This energy can really characterize an individual, and it tells you something now, because you know that they're facing more separation than they can bear.

But this isn't the end, there's another 1 of alarm.

A huge part of our system is systematized, organized into alarm system.

That we often feel as anxiety or all of this anxiety, agitation, all of these things are riding on top of it.

And it is meant to move us to avoid facing separation.

They cycle back and forth, you'll find, because they're, again, these are solutions that are being thrown at the problem of separation.

You can imagine the children in Ukraine right now, the adults as well, they are thrown into this situation and they start cycling.

So you might see pursuit, pursuit, pursuit, and then all of a sudden full of frustration.

Now when it turns a bit foul, it turns into attacking energy.

It changes from problem-solving energy to attacking energy.

And then all kinds of alarm in it, elevated startle impulse, if it's acute alarm.

You see scattered attention, you see unable to concentrate, you see all the kinds of things that we'd associate with alarm.

We get obsessions, we get compulsions, and so on and so on.

We get in this, in a course, all kinds of desperate energy to win, to approve, and so on.

Now first of all, these are the workhorses of the emotional brain.

These and This is amazing, brilliant programming.

It is orchestrating the response, hoping something will stick here to reduce the separation being felt.

Now we go back to Walter Cannon 100 years ago in Harvard doing his work with animals, the animals that were available to him in the lab, and he got a piece of this.

What's amazing is that's about still where people are, 100 years later.

He saw the flight kinds of things, which of course there was no understanding of emotion, then emotion was still discounted.

So he didn't see the emotional infrastructure that, yes, that was fueled by alarm, but he got a piece of it.

The flight, he got a piece of it over here.

The fight, yes, it is true that that frustration quite quickly goes from problem solving to attacking energy.

And that part of it can be eruptions of fight, but there's many manifestations of attacking energy, irritability, self-attack, even suicidal ideation.

There's plenty of things there, but he got a piece of it, a corner of it.

And that part is actually the most significant part of all.

He put solitary animals together into a contained space in a do-or-die situation and then he carefully took notes about what happened.

As soon as you add it, other animals, other attachments, especially an attachment to what was the first thing they did?

Harlow's monkeys, they went for each other.

Separation, trigger, pursuit, this is the most significant issue of all, this seeking thing.

So we made a huge mistake here, is that the wisdom of the stress response is, remember, togetherness is the answer.

So what is the first thing we're going to do?

This is the biggest thing, is togetherness needs to be reestablished somehow, and that is what it is about.

So if we were going to rewrite Walter Cannon, well, you know, he was...

He popularized it by getting alliteration going.

I've thought of a lot of things that start with F, if we're going to write it in the key of F, you know, for the alliteration.

A lot of things, flock, you know, like birds, flock together, follow, pursuit, yes.

Fawn, That's a new word that's entering the therapist literature, you know, to has about, this has a togetherness idea.

To fancy family, friends, fame, or fortune.

You know, to follow family, friends, fame, or fortune, and so on.

And if it devolves, because what happens here you see, is because he didn't have the animals with their attachments.

So if I followed it exactly, what I would come up with is it would devolve into over time, taking the person out of it, simply are fixes and fixations.

So there you have the stress response in the key of F.

All you have to know is the important pieces of it.

It's surprising it hasn't been done that way, but you have the important pieces of it there.

I actually think it's better understood in the key of A.

The key of A is a favorite of mine, by the way, so let's just try it in the key of A.

Well, we get to the essence of alarm over here, which of course is avoidance.

We get to the essence of foul frustration over here, which is attacking energy.

And we get to the essence of what this is about is attachment and we get to another issue they're all supposed to be answers not that they necessarily are and we get to yet another a so I'm helping you try to remember right triple a over here avoid attack attach and they're all meant to be answers and the answers are mediated through what?

And ends up to be the autonomic nervous system.

It is automatic, it's not under our control, It's how the brain is trying to take care of us.

And it has commissioned a particular part of the nervous system, the automatic part, the autonomic nervous system, and the sympathetic branch.

And you can now think if the brain is taking sympathy on us under stress, and it's trying to do good by us, get rid of this idea that there's something wrong.

No, the brain is trying to take care of us.

Now, this is only a part of the answer, though.

There are 2 parts to the autonomic nervous system, as many of you will have learned in school or you will know.

And the way you're supposed to conceive of it as being on a fulcrum, it's meant to swing it for homeostasis.

Sympathetic is usually associated with the aspect of work, making things work when under stress, all of these things that are applied when we've got work to do.

And the parasympathetic response is always associated with rest, recovery, getting our, basically the healing part, the rest part of this.

Now for homeostasis part, I had fun with this 1.

I'm going to drop in my executive neuron.

By this time, you all know it has dendrites, it has axons, there's a nucleus, and so on.

Now, an actual fact, there's a whole group of neurons in charge of this, but I couldn't get the whole group on the swing.

But you've got to get the idea of the swing here, and that freely swinging is what's important.

So this is the head neuron, and this needs to swing freely back and forth, and we're going to get them ready for work here.

First of all, we understand what the sympathetic nervous system is.

It's an emotional response through the sympathetic thing.

It throws 3 big emotions at the problem and hopes something will stick.

And when we look at most of the behavior, you know, they are derivatives of these 3 big emotions here.

Let's say we're all, we're in a relaxed place and all of a sudden we're facing separation.

Be back by she said she was going to pick me up and you're busy playing and you're realizing mommy isn't here.

Well, our executive neuron says, we've got to go to work, guys.

We'll pull him back a little bit so we can read this.

First of all, there's a bunch of pursuit, and this goes all the way, very complex, as complex as attachment is, the pursuit will be alarm and frustration.

All of this there, it shouldn't be a mystery to us anymore.

This is what is happening that is in this place.

But What if you're in a scenario where you're trapped or thwarted?

Somebody you love is taking advantage of you.

See all neufeldmedia transcripts on Youtube

Anchor Keynote: From Stress to Strength with Dr Gordon Neufeld