293 Healing Series: Dr. Julie Lopez [The problem with labels]
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/293
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. This is a special episode in our healing series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves, so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.
Today I'm so pleased to welcome back Dr. Julie Lopez, author of Live Empowered. We are talking all about how labels. can be highly problematic for adoptees. We discuss how nonsensical the term reactive attachment disorder is, when in fact, most of us are just having perfectly normal reactions to an abnormal situation.
Dr. Julie is an expert [00:01:00] in implicit memory, and she continues to inspire us that change and growth is always possible always achievable and how we can access our pre verbal traumas. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.
Links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson. com. Let's listen in. I am so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Dr. Julie Lopez. Hi, Dr. Julie.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Hi, amazing goddess Haley, you're amazing. I love what you've done for our tribe of people who are so amazing, too.
Haley Radke: Thank you. This is
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: pro adopted people.
Haley Radke: Yes, we're both very pro adoptee. This is your fifth time on the podcast. Did you know that?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: oh my gosh, I [00:02:00] didn't. It's been a long time. We took a little break, but. Yes.
Haley Radke: It has been.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: I believe that.
Haley Radke: Yes. You are a therapist, an expert in all things implicit memory and neuroplasticity. You help us to shift out of our stuck modes, I think.
I think you're so excellent at that. But just as a refresher, can you just tell us a little snippet of your personal adoptee experience for people who might not know you yet?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: oh my gosh, like every adoptee story, I'm going to give a trigger warning right here because my basic story is 15 year old mom dating a 17 year old guy who date raped her.
She never talked to him after that day and found out a few months later she was pregnant with me and was one of the baby scoop era moms who was sent [00:03:00] away and she gave birth to me, changed her mind, said she wanted to keep me. She'd met this other really cool teen who was going to keep her baby, even though the Catholic church was telling them what sinners and terrible people they were.
And then her parents made her give me away. So that was very traumatic for her and she's amazing and incredible. She passed away right before the pandemic. That was hard. And then I basically got reunited with her when I was 23. I never really thought about it before then. And I think a big piece of that was now that I'm 54, I look back to my years up until I was that age and I think I was just really dissociated and really unaware of myself in a lot of ways. And I can talk more about that later, but reunion since that time. Maybe six years in reunion with my biological father's family. And honestly, that trauma story just pervaded my life in a lot of [00:04:00] ways. I never really wanted to know my biological father.
And I'm going to tell you something super obvious. It didn't dawn on me before that time of reunion that it's not just him. It's a whole family and I got connected to brothers and sisters and aunts and cousins and some people I don't really care for but some people are really amazing. Like families are complicated, but my in my little oversimplified adoptee mind it was just thinking yeah, biological father, but it's a whole web. It's really a big loss and a big journey, this complicated journey of finding our biological people. So that's my adoption story in a nutshell. There's a lot more ripples out into my life that's had impact on, but I don't know if I kept it short enough. It's always so hard to simplify it down to a really short story. Story, but that's it.
Haley Radke: I know. Can you take your decades and just compress them in two minutes? No problem.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: That was decades
Haley Radke: [00:05:00] Thank you.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: And what a mess of decades those are.
Haley Radke: Well, and you've been a practicing clinician for a number of years also and.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: That's very nice of you. A number of years like 30.
Haley Radke: Okay, decades. Yes, so I know you've worked with a lot of adopted people and continue to do but also you work with normals also. What do you call the kept?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: I don't know. I haven't really named them. My favorites are the adoptees, though. And you know why? Because it's really a hard experience to go through. And so anyone, no matter how they're functioning, and some of us are functioning super, externally high, right?
Because we have had to go through really hard stuff and have really good risk tolerance and tenacity and all those things. But Regardless of how cruel or kind life has been or how much we've [00:06:00] struggled, I see strength in every adopted person, every single one of us. The others, I don't know, I'm starting to learn as I go and go.
And I mentioned this even before we started that there are commonalities of experience, even in those people who weren't relinquished. And those include a lot of times people who've had other traumas in their lives that I've learned how to work through being dissociated, how to reclaim parts of themselves, how to leverage some of the pretty cool science of the nervous system and the human system and brain science, which I'm very into and love to share to be able to make changes, because I think one of the biggest things that I see in these private adoptee groups that I'm part of across the world is sometimes people have thrown in the towel and they just feel hopeless or they feel like this is it.
I've had a few rough draws of the cards and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm just this [00:07:00] label or I'm just this thing or I'm just broken and there's no use in trying anything new and that's really honestly what my life is about is that I have found through rigorous study a lot of in person practice and life experience that in fact, there are so many ways that we can have breakthroughs on a big scale breakthroughs on a small scale life changing interventions and experiences that can literally change the felt experience in the day to day.
And I am all about that. And for that reason, I am against labels. I am all about empowering people. I believe that every single one of us is sovereign. Every single nervous system is complex and has just as much magic as someone else's and that we can leverage a lot of really cool realities about this incredibly sophisticated Supercomputer that is our body and our [00:08:00] mind and our energetic receptors that we have in our system to do cool things. So if we're going to talk about that, which I'm sure we are, then I'm all in.
Haley Radke: Yes, absolutely. So you recently started a podcast called the Viva View and I was a guest on it. So we'll link to that so people can hear our discussion there too, but what I wanted to ask you about briefly before we go into the how to change things is we talked, you and I, about reactive attachment disorder and I told you what a skeptic I was of that diagnosis and how harmful it is. And can you talk a little bit more about your thoughts on that? And then also tell us more how, why you hate labeling, why you hate putting these things on us.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Okay. So here's a thing. And we, I think all of us adoptees can relate to this one way or another. I've experienced so many personal transformations [00:09:00] and personal changes in my own life.
And I think some of that comes just from being plopped into a family that isn't biologically related and figuring out, oh, how do I survive this thing? How do I find myself? How can I be myself? And it requires a lot of flexibility, right? And then, becoming awake to the reality of what it means to be biologically related to other people that aren't right in front of you, but to have had a childhood and a developmental trajectory with all these other people. It's really like I really do feel a lot of adoptive people. Adopted people are very Adaptive. And so when we throw on a label, any label and keep in mind, I have 30 years as a licensed practitioner and we use this horrible book called the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, and it gives all these labels and insurance requires it to reimburse.
So it's tied into finances and those [00:10:00] labels, in my opinion are damaging and so reactive attachment disorder is a label. And when you put that label on it can feel like, oh, this is just who I am. This is what I've got. I've got this diagnostic code and it means that I can't move and change. And that is literally not true.
I can't tell you the number of times I've had someone referred over to me or they've left a medical doctor or another practitioner who was labeling their behavior, not understanding why it might be normal. And that by understanding why it's normal, you can start to move into relation with that person.
Again, holding them as sovereign and understanding that their body is doing what it needs to do to adapt, to survive, to be okay, given whatever cards they were dealt. And then that you can move it because our systems are adaptable. And when you throw a label on, even [00:11:00] if it feels validating oh, finally I knew something was wrong with me.
Here's a label. I can be this label. It starts, it can be interpreted in such a way where someone then feels just stuck. That's, I can't get close to you because I have reactive attachment disorder. It's not true. And people get hopeless and hope losing hope is a very big struggle in the journey to making change.
So I wouldn't be saying this lightly. Change is absolutely possible. And oftentimes people get into these therapeutic ruts where they're just saying the same old things over and over experiencing the same stuff and not realizing that there are different techniques and tools that can make a drastic difference in the way that someone is perceiving danger and safety.
I could actually I want to say a little bit more about reactive attachment disorder because it's a label if you think about what happens for all adopted people, [00:12:00] because anyone who's adopted has to have been given away has to have circumstances where they were removed from their family.
Anytime someone has circumstances where they were removed from their family, there's some overlying massive stressor of, if not incredible, like trauma and disaster families killed in a car accident, some financial problems, some. societal shaming, some heartache and pain. There's usually, people don't just, if everything's fine and good and safe and well, people don't give their babies away.
There may be mental struggles. There may be political str it just goes on and on. So there's some messages that are pretty common that people take in on an unconscious level. And one of the major ones is, I'm not safe. The people that are supposed to be there for me, even if they were killed in a car accident, it's like the world's not safe.
And what does our [00:13:00] body do? It's adaptive just to be okay in the world. As we look around consciously and subconsciously and we tag things very quickly tag. oh, if I touch the stove, it's going to burn. Don't do that. oh, if I talk to this person, they're dangerous. Don't do that. All these people, all those people, all this situation. And it keeps us safe. So if primary caregivers or the world in general has a message that when you get connected or feel vulnerable with someone, it's unsafe, then the most adaptive thing you can do is push people away or create a cocoon to keep yourself safe.
And this collection of normal and adaptive responses to what I would say is abnormal and traumatizing conditions when it gets a label makes the person themselves feel broken. And that's where the stuckness comes in and it goes against [00:14:00] everything I know and that I'm committed to in terms of facilitating change and breakthroughs and transformations.
Haley Radke: Thank you for going so in depth into that. It's so important. Actually, to prepare for this, I was listening to another podcast where an adoptive mom was interviewing someone who facilitates rehoming. And they were talking about reactive attachment disorder. And the person that runs this rehoming agency was talking about how all these children, they can be so manipulative.
She kept using the word manipulative. And I just had this gut just disgust reaction to hearing adults talk about children that way. Trying to stay safe, trying to like, survive? Is that what you mean?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Yes. Okay. I'm going to tell you something. That word was used on me [00:15:00] yesterday in a board meeting because I'm part of a couple boards and this group is so beautiful and I love them.
And the guy who used it is actually a really good friend of mine. And I happen to know he has a trauma history and he is so beloved. Because he's wicked charming and he's wicked charming because he grew up impoverished and he had a lot of trauma, right? And so he said something about because I'm really charming and I'm really well spoken and I've had to do that because I feel like I had to tap dance and juggle and at least in my little kid adolescent young adult self, I felt like my life depended on people liking me.
And that's why I had all these like problematic like perfectionistic problems and anxiety struggles and but I was like you know we could go into so many topics, but you know the whole theoretical model of the good adoptee and the bad adoptee. It's not that one is good or bad but one uses a collection of performance to feel safe like they're not going to be thrown away and bad uses a collection of [00:16:00] push away tactics burn down the house to see are you still there for me?
It's the same thing I just want to know am I safe and how can I manage safety? And he said to me, oh, I said something really brilliant. I'm going to be honest and he was like, there you are just trying to manipulate the situation and I was like, hey, it takes one to know one and I know you came by that honestly and so you can call it manipulation, but if you're super sensitive as a lot of adopted people are we're high empaths because it's a safety mechanism like very attuned to other people's emotional realities, then you hear a word like manipulation and it's like bad and negative and I would rather someone, again, that's what it means to hold people as sovereign.
Wow, you really accentuated the positive in this situation and encouraged a behavior that you want to have happen. And you did it so adeptly. It was smooth and beautiful. [00:17:00] Wow. You should really think about going into branding and marketing because those skills are excellent. Or why aren't you the Speaker of the House, because those kind of communication skills are well received, or you should think about a career in politics, because being able to do that is a skill, right?
As opposed to giving this negative kind of shaming, label on a skill set. Survival skills are awesome. And I love to use the analogy of a war veteran who has come back from the war and had friends who didn't, right? So really got that very deep messaging on a sensory level, sight, smell, sound, that if you don't act quickly and do extreme things you're not going to survive and here they are back in civilian life and their sensitivity rating is still very high and they hear a car backfire and they knock their three friends to the ground and they're like, dude, you crazy.
Something like that. No, you're [00:18:00] not crazy. You're just have an amazing. reaction time and incredible speed. And maybe what's happened is that your sensitivity to noise is still ramped up from the couple years that you were overseas in this war battlefield type of environment. And it's not that you're crazy. It's that you have an adjustment internally that can be adjusted so that you reacclimate to the reality of the level of safety and danger that you're in now. Cause right people get labeled with reactive attachment disorder because someone wants to attach to them and they consider themselves safe and they want someone who has a trauma history not to have the trauma history. They're like, oh, we want it to be the little bow that we signed up for and paid, $80,000 for, or whatever. We want it to be a blank slate. And so rather than look at maybe you're [00:19:00] not a blank slate, maybe you are an actual living, breathing human being with all the incredible resources that we have to adapt and survive our circumstances.
Maybe like the war veteran, your sensitivity scale is moved way up because extreme loss has been part of your history before you came here. And if we wash over for me, I was adopted at three months. I know younger people may have been adopted the day of their birth, whatever. But we still have all this scientific evidence about prenatal trauma about the well being of the mother and what gets transmitted in the womb.
And usually when someone is going to be giving up their baby, even if it's at their first day of birth, they're not having a relaxing pregnancy. Their stress hormones are part of this experience. I think what happens with any label is we're oversimplifying something that we really just don't wanna deal with being so [00:20:00] complicated. And when we do that, we're doing a disservice to the people's lives who are impacted.
Haley Radke: Yes. So well said. Thank you. I am gonna ask one more thing about labels and then we're gonna get to the how to and the
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Okay, cool.
Haley Radke: And the good stuff. This is one more upsetting thing that I didn't really know even was a term until this year. And it's this concept of blocked care. So as an adoptive parent or caregivers who are experiencing some kind of burnout or are maxed out in some way, or they're, they have a child who is doing the push back to all of their advances. They get labeled with, this is blocked care. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Am I explaining it right?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Totally. Yes. Okay. I'm being subjective on the podcast because that's what's happening. I don't like [00:21:00] it. I don't like any labels whatsoever. I think they do a person a disservice. So the label of blocked care is about reactive parenting. It's just the flip side of the same kind.
And it's basically saying, oh, label, you have blocked care. And again, what I think when you throw a label on it like that, it discourages. any more movement. But why is someone having what someone would call blocked care? They're burnt out of a situation, their own personal history of rejection or abandonment or failure or whatever those stories are that they hold within their nervous system are getting triggered.
So rather than actually work through what can be moved and adjusted, right? What because the dials like the example I gave with the war veteran, for someone who gets a label of blocked care, it means that their system has maxed out of a limit. They don't [00:22:00] have any more patience. They don't have any more resourcing.
They don't have, they've come to the end of what they know. So that parent, rather than giving them a label, I would want to give them empowering tools to be able to stay engaged, even in their distress and to be vulnerable about what's getting picked up for them, what's happening in their history that maybe needs some adjustment in order to stay in relation.
Because whether it's the adoptee or any child, because it's not just adoptees that get that label of reactive attachment or someone who's got a blocked care label, it just means that their system needs some love and support to be able to move and bend because it can. People can learn to be more resilient.
People can learn skills around how to engage. People [00:23:00] can learn how to be more vulnerable, right? And it can be like a perfect storm. You've got someone labeled with block care, someone labeled with reactive attachment, and there are ways to change that story. And that's just my fear with labels is it's oversimplifying something that's way more complicated and has a lot more to do this time with the nervous system of the parent.
Haley Radke: Right? So let's move into talking to adult adoptees. What would you say to someone who was diagnosed with rad as a child or was told, oh, you were really manipulative or had those attachment issues and has brought that identity with them into adulthood.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Okay, so you preface this by saying let's move into the how to. So the first thing is, it is so important to look at your environment. The first thing I would want to change is your [00:24:00] exposure to the people and how they're relating to you. So I would highly advocate being in relation with resources, groups, and supports that also see you as sovereign and that recognize that you have ability and capability to move and adjust.
And so that is like the first thing I would say. And what are those things look like? There's all these private Facebook groups, where people are treating you with respect, looking at your whole person, giving you compassion. For the ways that you've learned to adapt and adjust, and even celebrating your gifts and your strengths.
Because what I've noticed as a trauma expert is that everyone who's been through something really distressing actually develops a whole host of strengths and abilities. And so being around people that are accentuating those, because in those environments you to get to a neutral [00:25:00] space where your system itself and in an authentic way is gonna feel more open to the process of change. And actually, I know we're not meant to talk about this much or you weren't talking about this, but for 20 years now, I've been doing transformation retreats and I've been hired in to do transformation material with people. And the first step is preparation.
And a lot of that has to do with speaking to the cells of our body. Just like an athlete would stretch. And have certain types of nutrition in order to really perform if we're going to do make change in our identity and in the way that we're working in the world. And we really want that. We really want closer connections, or we want to work more in harmony with our nervous system around what it means to be vulnerable and to be really intimate with another person.
Whether that's a friend or a family member or a lover or a partner, [00:26:00] then it starts with preparing for that. And the labeling really messes up the preparation. It's like a swimmer who's about to have a race and someone's screaming you're a really terrible swimmer and you're not really supposed to be here and you are too short or too fat or too whatever.
Or, it's it's not the right preparation to really be making a change. So you have to really There's so much that goes into preparation, right? I was using an athlete, which is like stretching, nutrition, mindset, but even listening to this podcast, I would argue is a part of preparation. It's oh, I never heard of that.
Or I didn't even know that door could open or that there's possibility here. That's part of the preparation. Oh, I guess I am around an environment. Actually, I'm working with a therapist that labels me all the time and doesn't seem to understand at all where I might have come from, or I've never even heard about having this compassion for loss and grief and danger and all this kind of stuff.
It's really, I [00:27:00] can't overstate how important that is, that kind of preparation piece. And then the second thing I would say is that even the most dire of messaging that's encoded deep in our body can be changed. I have literally, I witnessed that with people and I would look for, and I know there's a lot of resources already out there, coaches, therapists, people who are already versed and adoptee centric in their work.
So they're not going to minimize or they're not going to even sometimes people, intentioned people don't even know they're minimizing because they're just not exposed to what the reality looks like for someone who's had the experience of relinquishment because it looks really good from the outside.
Like we really literally cannot change the things we cannot see. So if you're wandering [00:28:00] around and you're holding the story that relinquishment didn't have an impact on you or that your system didn't take in messages of whatever they took in, people are very different worthlessness, being broken, being unwanted, being unlovable, being defective, being all alone.
Deeper things. I've worked with so many people who don't think that with the frontal lobe of their brain. They're like intellectually, I don't even believe that. But my behavior show that there's a deeper part that does right. I know, partner, that you're safe and I see physical evidence that you love me and care for me.
But my body doesn't seem to adjust to that message because I do things that push you away or that indicate I don't trust you, right? These things can be moved, but it is very hard to move them if someone isn't aware of them, and I'm saying it that way specifically because I know a lot of my fellow adoptees feel like, gosh, I'm pretty sure I know [00:29:00] intellectually, theoretically, these things impacted me.
My transracial adoptee friends who were adopted from Korea, age two, don't remember because we don't have conscious memory till we're three and over. It's all an implicit memory. This unconscious memory I'm super into and wrote a book about blah, blah, blah. You don't have to know the person doesn't have to consciously know their story to work with an expert who can get to the mapping of what's in their implicit memory without words.
I know this is all like abstract concepts and move it. It's what I do with my intensives. I do these half day full day or two day intensives where we go in there, even to material that someone doesn't know. I've had people move the outcomes of material that came from their grandmother. I know this all sounds so crazy and people think it's crazy because afterwards they're like, what'd you do to me?
I didn't do anything. I just know how implicit memory works and I can pull the material out and change it. You don't have to [00:30:00] know what happened to you day to day in that orphanage. I don't know what happened in the first three months of my life. I don't but my body knows it my cells know it and an expert and implicit memory or this deep unconscious can move it. I have seen it many times and this is maybe in whole other podcasts Haley because I'm going off topic but it can impact the way we're experiencing our body physically.
I've seen people with diagnosed chronic pain type of conditions, chronic inflammation type of conditions have their symptoms abate because the trauma load in their body was moved and changed.
Haley Radke: That's amazing. It sounds like a miracle, right? And I've heard people talk about these big things shifting for them when they've been using psychedelic assisted therapies. And you're not talking about that.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: No, [00:31:00] but I will say I do a lot of cross referring to psychedelic assisted therapies. Ketamine assisted therapy has been great for trauma, treatment resistant depression. Bessel van der Kolk, a lot of people love that book, The Body Keeps the Score. It really advocates the use of non talk based therapeutic approaches, which I'm all about and my mental health center is all about that.
Everyone there is only doing non talk based therapy because it's what's required to move what's in your implicit memory. And yes, mine doesn't use any chemicals, but it's very compatible with what happens with psychedelic assisted therapy. And to be honest, some people, and I believe this very strongly, we're all like little snowflakes. We're all different. And the way we come by healing is different. Like someone may love art therapy and someone else loves brain based therapy and someone else loves ketamine assisted therapy. And frankly, I didn't even finish my topic [00:32:00] because I have ADD. Like a lot of us trauma survivors and Bessel has been involved with a lot of research around the use of MDMA and he has called that one of the most supportive chemical assisted types of therapeutic interventions for trauma survivors.
So there's just really been a lot more research and a lot more positive outcomes for people that are all based on, in my opinion, the science of being able to move what's stored in our deeper unconscious in these unknown regions of our experience called the implicit memory.
Haley Radke: Okay, so I don't know if you can get into this or not. Can you like, explain what it looks like doing an intensive or like going into some of that implicit memory. Like we've talked on the show before about EMDR or brain spotting or neurofeedback and those kinds of somatic types of [00:33:00] therapies where you don't necessarily have to know what happened or you can get to that. Can you talk more about that? What you're talking about.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Yeah,
Haley Radke: it sounds really woo woo right. Yeah. So
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: I know it's so abstract. It's literally it is so not woo. It's all based in brain science and the way that your brain and your spinal cord communicate. So everything is encoded in our system very quickly.
And you can Google some of this stuff. You can look at infant studies around like infant and mother attachment. And you can see one of the classic studies where a mom just does a deadpan and doesn't smile anymore. And the baby starts getting really distressed because these cues are giving them information about their own well being and safety.
And if you think about a baby, if your primary caregiver isn't doing well, that's literally a life or death [00:34:00] situation. Never mind a baby who's had trauma. Oh my gosh, Haley, this is like a whole other podcast, but there's a couple of main ways that stuff gets stored in implicit memory. You can get it through epigenetics, actually cellular transmission from grandparents, parents to you.
So this is of course, like not in your conscious brain, especially if there's something that hasn't been talked about, same types of things can impact you based on. behavioral learning and modeling. Again, let's just talk about the war veteran. They never talk about the war with their children. They know they've been to war.
They're geared towards safety. They don't go out of the house. That gets modeled. No one ever says, I don't know, some terrible story, like some, like that person never shares a horrible story of losing their friend in the bunker or whatever. But they don't go out of the house and they're basically saying without words, the [00:35:00] world is an unsafe place.
And so the child is oh my gosh, the world's an unsafe place. I shouldn't go out of the house very much. I listened for sounds. Just because that's what we do. That's what we do. We learn how to adapt and survive and those codes are deep down and your question was like, what happens in the moment. So by the way, there is talk at the beginning because we figure out because your life is telling a story and so there's something that you want and you'll notice even if by external measure, you're super successful, you will want something to be different.
You're like, hey, yeah, I do want to be closer to my husband. I do want to be more confident about my ideas. I know intellectually they're really good, but I quiet down in the board meeting or in whatever. So we'll go in based on a present day goal. But once we target the way it's held in your body, which will be through how your body's experiencing something, we stop talking.
I like to leverage bilateral. [00:36:00] I use all of my tools, right? I was trained for many years to do EMDR brain spotting. I'm trained in neural feedback. I've done a lot of training on somatic interventions different types of inner weaves, expressive work. Integrative manual therapy. I could go on and on, but it's basically human system stuff.
So depending on what your body brings up, because we'll do sets using bilateral stimulation, I'm not talking, you're not talking. And I'll ask what are you getting now? Because your body without the talk, without the focused energy on the frontal lobe of your brain, you're going to start to be getting other data.
And that other data looks like sensations, thoughts, feelings. visualizations, like things will come up. It's almost using your periphery vision, but you're getting it internally because our bodies are holding all these things and our bodies want to move to what's more adaptive. So by setting the goals, having the objectives [00:37:00] at first, we're priming the pump to pull up anything related.
And it gets really wacky, really fast, which is why I like psychedelics also, although I don't use them within my intensives. Is that the mapping of our implicit memory isn't based on logic. So material might actually come up that's coming from your system, trying to unknot these knots that aren't serving you in the present day.
And if we're not acutely listening and paying attention and without the framework of understanding how it all might fit together, it's not going to make any sense, which is why the expert needs to be there. It's, the person is expert in their body, but like my role is pulling all the pieces together.
So to make it more concrete, here's an example. There was a woman I worked with and she really wanted to improve her relationship with her adult daughter. And she realized that [00:38:00] her daughter was estranged from her because there were things in their relationship that weren't working out well, but she wasn't really clear what was happening.
Of course she had a very traumatic childhood. She had actually been in the hospital for a couple of years to the point where she stopped growing because of some acute childhood stress. Your body really has to go through something, but she didn't know what it was. It wasn't in her conscious memory.
While we were doing these sets and I said, Hey, what's going on? She's I don't know my cousin. This isn't related. I don't. And I'm like no. Tell me everything because you just don't know. And her cousin had sent her a letter. And her cousin was really into her pretty aggressive religious group that she was a part of and a big part of their journey in their, this religious kind of order was proselytizing and converting people to their religion.
So [00:39:00] she said, I just remembered a letter that my cousin sent to me and it started out with all the things that were wrong with me and all the things that I needed to change to and all this different kind of stuff. And she's and I think it's really distracting from what's going on. And it took me a moment, but I was like, no, tell me more.
I want to understand this. And she was like I got, did you read the letter? Because it was like five pages long. She's I didn't even read it. I didn't even need to read it. It just made me feel bad. I wasn't open to her message at all. And she always does this to me. Guess what? I'm going to fast forward the story.
This is what she was doing to her daughter. She was so anxious about being value add as a parent, I think because of some of her childhood trauma and this like very severed and physically abusive relationship that she had with her parents that she wanted to be helpful. She wanted to be, but what she ended up being was really scared and critical.
And so her daughter was doing to her what she was doing to her [00:40:00] cousin. We got to that by her really reflecting on what would make her be more open to her cousin and me being willing to stay with the material that came up. So it's really a fascinating journey of association and this nonlinear connective map called adaptive information that's in our nervous system that we tap into that can come out with these nonverbal type of interventions.
Haley Radke: That is fascinating. That is wild.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: It's wild.
Haley Radke: And just say the next thing, like having these things brought up and being able to your body to reintegrate. How do I say this? You're not like learning the lesson in a verbal way. It's encoding in your body, right?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: It's encoded in your body. So for this person, A, she didn't know what happened to her as a child.
So she always felt just doomed I don't even understand. She felt powerless, [00:41:00] helpless, don't understand why these things are happening in my life. Didn't realize what she was contributing to it. That's number one. Number two, she was used to dismissing her body, even within our session, which was, a half day long.
She was dismissing messages that her body was giving her. And that was a memory. Sometimes it's physical. Sometimes it's a contraction. And we have all kinds of tools to interpret and rework the messaging. And that was important because it's not me telling her what to do or it's not like I'm even, I'm important, but I'm not important because I'm going to tell you what to do.
I'm important because I'm facilitating you figuring out what to do with yourself and your body wants that anyway. And so for her, it made all the difference because she'd had this light bulb and she could actually see her daughter better. And we did a whole bunch of other stuff.
Don't even think that was the whole thing. But what happened was the outcome was it was so much easier for her to make a behavioral change. [00:42:00] That's the problem with self help books. They're all appealing to your frontal lobe of your brain, an intellectual idea, and it might be helpful to learn and grow, but it's not going to change all the forces within your body that can make it feel a world away, like a person who's anorexic, right?
But you can't just tell them or show them the stats that. You're actually underweight if what they really feel is in danger, right? The statistics aren't going to have them be like, oh, I should eat my next meal. It doesn't work that way. And this cuts through all of that resistance, which is incredible.
And there's different ways to do it. That's a very, intensives work in tandem with someone who's doing coaching or doing therapeutic work with someone else. My intensives, I actually require that so that people can do the behavioral changes afterwards, but there are a lot of other different ways to facilitate breakthroughs and transformations.
And [00:43:00] we have them already, don't we? We have them all the time in our adoptee groups and in these awesome conferences and retreats where really profound things happening and I would argue if you're looking in hindsight, a lot of those most profound experiences happen when there's an intervention beyond words.
It's a relationship, it's something it's something you feel. It's an experience that you have.
Haley Radke: Yes, I love that. Thank you so much. Okay, as we wrap up, is there anything else you want to say to adoptees in particular who may be like, oh my gosh, that sounds really amazing. What's my next step? We talked about getting connected into groups and those kinds of things, finding a practitioner. What are your last thoughts that you want to leave us with?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Information is power. The more that you know, the more that you see, the more that you have guides and mentors, [00:44:00] coaches, therapists, whatever it may be an accountability partner programs that can support you. That's feel good to you where you feel like you're really seen and your strengths are maximized.
I am all about it. And I would say down with labels. One, one fun fact is that our Viva View podcast is very new, but we're going to change the name of it in January. We only do recordings once a month. What are you up to, Haley? Do you do them all the time?
Haley Radke: As I've just been on a break because I've been ill, I'm actually every other week right now because I'm working on a second show. So yeah.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Amazing. Yeah. So we're once a month, but we're going to change the title to You Make Sense. Because our really big thing is about all the riches of the human system and how you can learn to read them and adapt to them. And we just want to empower everyone about all the great data that you already have in what I like to call your inner sage.
And we all have one. So that's [00:45:00] the main thing is just the big message is you're awesome and you can do it. And there's a lot of support and resources out there and keep listening to Haley because she's amazing.
Haley Radke: Okay, so we're going to link to your podcast and whatever it's named when people are listening to this.
And folks should also check out your book Live Empowered because you talk a little more in depth about some of these things that we've talked about today about understanding implicit memory more and you have exercises in there and
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: I totally do.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Oh, you know what? I had something new come out. I have a journal. It's called Each New Hour and it actually is like a little guide that guides people through my five step transformation methodology. So that's out there too.
Haley Radke: Oh, cool. Another tool. Amazing.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: Another tool. Very low cost. tool.
Haley Radke: Where can we find all your things, Dr. Julie, and follow you to find out more about your [00:46:00] intensives and your books and all the good stuff?
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: I think the easiest place is drjulielopez. com. It links to all my things, including our mental health organization. We've got a few online groups that can be supportive to people and free resources. The Resilient Brain Project is all free and that links from there. It's a whole mental health repository.
So talk about empowering. There's a whole bunch of stuff on there to learn more about your amazing human system and actual tools and apps and things that can support your journeys all free. So those are the things I like to start with.
Haley Radke: Yes Thank you so much. I love talking with you.
Dr. Julie Lopez, PhD, LICSW: I love talking to you too, and I hope you keep feeling better and I'm excited to hear about your next show, too.
Haley Radke: Thank you.
Okay. We super hyped up Dr. Julie's intensives and we did it to such a degree that I think I'm going to [00:47:00] do one. And I'm going to be super candid, psychedelic assisted therapy. I know it's helped many people in our community. It has always made me really nervous. Like I'm a very straight laced person.
I don't know if it'll surprise you that I've never taken any kind of drugs of any kind besides, a glass of wine. So I'm really excited about doing some like deep work with no substances involved. And when we were talking about it in our conversation today, and we were talking about EMDR and stuff like, I was like, oh my gosh, I have done a lot of those things.
I'm like experienced in some of those things, but I've never done like a really a long period of some inner work. So I'm really excited about it. And I promised to report back in future months what this looks like. Keep your eye on this space ears on this space [00:48:00] and we will talk a little bit more about it in the future.
Okay. Thank you so much for listening and valuing adoptee voices and let's talk again soon.
