0:00
This is Dr. Emma Goodall. We've only got 20 minutes to talk today. But I think that we'll be able to cover quite a lot. The reason I really wanted to invite Emma and I'll ask her to introduce herself, because she'll do a much better job than I would have. What she does is she's really she's a specialist. She's a researcher, she's an author, and she's an autistic woman of some kind at birth. And she actually before do you identify as a she,
2:08
I do my pronouns? Are
2:09
she her? Ms is she her, I mean, she her. And I just, for me, interoceptive awareness has been something that I've been learning about as a neurodiverse woman. And also with two, autistic and ADHD children. It's something most of the women that I work with, really struggle with, because a lot of the women that I work with around alcohol have at some point in their lives. You know, there's a lot of suppression that happens through the culture that we live in. Also, a lot of people who struggle with alcohol are often diagnosed or undiagnosed neurodiverse, or we've had trauma. And there's all sorts of reasons around that. And that's why I thought it was really because it's a piece of work for me that I'm it's a continuous journey of exploration that I'm on. But Emma has done amazing work in this area. And she can talk to us a little bit about what it is why it's so important, and how you can find her work and get more information about that. So Emma, over to you,
3:19
thank you so much. I'm actually useless at introducing myself. I mean, I'm autistic, and interoception has been one of my passions for probably about six or seven years now. So I, I was the only person in the office for about a week over Christmas New Year period. And I had been asked to review a book that was Kelly Marla's master's thesis made for laypeople. And I really was interested in the research within the book. And the book was very much from an OT perspective, it's not great if you're if you're an individual wanting to know about this, but I went away and I dug up all the research and what I found was the intersection had been first research in the 1970s by psychiatrist around PTSD and then there was a lot of work done after the Vietnam World War with PTSD veterans and and what has come out over over the kind of the intervening Gosh 50 years now, is that interoceptive awareness. So interoception is our awareness of our internal
4:38
body signals and accurate interpretation of this internal body signal. So interoceptive awareness is decreased when you have any mental health conditions. So when we improve our perceptual awareness, and if you are thinking of drug and alcohol use, they are mental health conditions. Your your reality is altered. And part of that reality is the internal reality. And so for those folks who are neurodivergent, as well, autistic and ADHD, my interoception is pretty bad. But I've been teaching it for about seven years now. So it's got a lot better. But what they found was that the symptomology of any mental health condition decreases when you improve your interoceptive awareness. So when you're more connected to internal body signals, what that means is that you're able to notice those internal body signals, and over time, interpret them more accurately. And often. This is the really interesting part is not just noticing them and interpreting them, you have to know what to do about them. And part of the thing is, if you if you've never noticed them, why would you know what to do? A key one we can think about is temperature. So I still have virtually no interoceptive awareness for temperature. So what that means is that I don't notice if I'm hot or cold until I'm extremely hot, or extremely cold, blue hands and feet, like an icicle. And when I'm teaching interception, I realized that when they would say to people, you know, you're sweating, that you're better you, you know, you're hot, you need to pay that off. But he just said to him, Are you hot? They'd say no, because they didn't feel hot, because they weren't getting that interested in the signal. No different. I need to know what are the things to do it, I noticed something. So you might notice that I'm what I need to take some clothes off and put the aircon on I put all wet, cold fan on the back of my neck. If I noticed that I'm cold, I need to put boots on or I need to put the heating on or I need to put a sweater on or I need to have a hot drink or I need to have a hot shower. So the thing is that if if you've had altered interoceptive awareness, this can be just because you were born with intergenerational format, because that actually impacts the interoceptive circuitry in your brain. Because when you experience trauma, whether it's intergenerational current, your brightness and amazing thing, and then that internal body signal awareness, because you don't want to feel the pain of trauma. So this protective mechanism, but it's kind of a crude one, so it doesn't do it just for that trauma, it does it overall for everything. So this is where we get people who end up with broken bones, and they're not aware that they've broken their bone or that they're extremely dehydrated, and then ending up with UTIs and kidney infections, because they're not reading internal body signals. So what I discovered also at the heart of nearly all dysregulated behaviors, so if you're somebody that cannot control your behaviors helpfully out of that, it's nearly always the lack of introspective awareness. It's not a purposeful thing that he gets out of bed, he goes, I'm gonna beat somebody up to their I'm gonna get up my spouse, or I'm going to be mean to my kid, or, you know, I'm going to forget to eat all day, but I'm gonna drink a lot. People get out of bed with the best intentions. Sorry
8:33
isn't it, it's just when you're saying that it just reading so true to everything that I'm experiencing in, in as in my life as a human being and in just so much of, you know, what we're finding is really helpful for people with alcohol, or people who are choosing to drink because, you know, they might have, they might have a big feeling, but aren't able to kind of identify what that feeling is or why they're disconnected from themselves. You know, there's, there's so much there. And I just think when you say that having interoceptive awareness can improve all mental health. Experience, answers, I think that's just really powerful.
9:21
And I think one of the interesting things is that uncomfortable feelings are not pleasant. There are two reasons to drink effectively to feel nothing. It's something in perception, it's going to be fairly easy journey for you. Because as you start to feel things, you can replace the need for alcohol with that feeling things naturally whereas if you're drinking to not feel anything interoceptive awareness, generally it's going to be a little bit harder. Because it still in the long run, going to Big really good. So is Google ready to learn a PDF, online and lots of different kinds of the South Australian education department. So I wrote that with my team, when I worked there, that is also been made into animations, because I read up on the student while being, again free for anybody to access without intersection and self regulation. So basically, in order to develop our interoceptive awareness, what we do is we need to do mindful body awareness exercises. This is noticing when you deliberately change your body somehow, if I just hold my hand here, my hands I just think about how that feels. And then I'll stretch it, this is my stretch, I have a very poor pathetic stretch, but you can see. Yeah, which is the difference between the relaxed and the stretch, so 30 seconds. And when you think about where did I notice that today's thing, sort of along the edge, so then we do, you always do an intersection activity twice. That second time, when it's relaxed, I'm going to make can I feel anything. If not, I'm going on with the level of thinking there until I feel something. Now I'm going to repeat the stretch. I'm going to wiggle that stretch until I feel my little thing, but I'm going to hold it in position, I'm going to really connect to feeling my loving, okay, and then just relax again. That's it. So any doing that second time, you're almost always notice it far more interesting. Now the trick is, if you have a body part that, you know, helps trauma for you. Don't do it with that body part of the body, just do it is safe for the path, they can do shoulder. You can do X, you can do speed, you can even temperature so you can put a pen in the freezer at home. And then codependence not in the freezer whole dependence in the freezer, screen all the difference in your hands. When we when we build up the interest to avoid this, what's really interesting need to explicitly learn to feel angry, seems that it just turns a second on, you can still get confused, you can still misinterpret one emotion for another one feeling for another part, what you can always do, whenever you're feeling uncomfortable with feelings, is just do an introductory activity that you like. So it can be a muscle temperature, it can be a breathing once you do one that you really like. And what it does is it neurologically calms you down. So the really interesting thing is that interested awareness is that it relies on the mindfulness part of the brain and the mindfulness only be activated when the parasympathetic is engaged. So when you are calm in doing the activity, if you do it for long enough for some people that two minutes 15 minutes, you will neurologically Calm down, that gets right back down, biologically calms you down, your heart is calm, your breathing system is calm, your muscular system is calm, itself is a tool that many of us came on neurodivergent or who had intergenerational trauma or struggling Is that is that not being that can dry dysregulated behaviors. That's exactly the strategy. One activity that you can do repeatedly. So mine was totally I would sit and come on to the top of my foot squishes into my shoe. And it's really quite uncomfortable but it really forces you to focus on how your chosen field and when you relax your foot outputs. And if you do that, what it does is it also distracts you from everything that's going on around you in your body part which is safe to do because you pick the activity or cut. Neurologically it's such a beautiful thing and I'm so excited when people talk about kids. For me this is the key to so much progress is healing. We know Vander Kolk talks about the body health that is releasing actual getting in touch with your body and
15:04
love it, this is perfect, I can see how helpful this is gonna be for people in my community. Absolutely amazing and Emma's the work that you've been doing, you've got, you've got some books, haven't you? Do you want
15:22
to kind of books on self regulation and insurance section. One is more around children. And then one is for adults. But that isn't it can be done by children as well. You can either ask your library to get purchase if you really want to spend money. But the ready to learn is free. Online, and also the Student Wellbeing hubs. Intersection and self regulation activities are also free. So I try to make as much as my work free as possible because everybody should have access to this. Software know that, you know, that journey that you're on is really difficult and easier than it can be made by other people. And also, to know that this does take time. So it takes about eight to 10 weeks for you to really notice a difference, are you able to express yourself and interact with the world. The key is once you start feeling better, don't stop doing. Because relational trauma, you can be triggered again and you will lose interest and build it into your routine. So for me when I'm driving to work, and that's when I do my, my interest active activities in my car time just to connect my body and be in a good space. And then if I'm being triggered, then I have some different interoception activities that I do, I very rarely do breathing. And breathing ones have the most research on them, the belly, where you breathe in very deeply and they come out. And then you breathe out very long about breath and you do three of those. And that's enough evidence to come down. However, I find that if I'm in that panic state or really dysregulated state, I can't do it breathing activity. To do dudes shoulder crunch. Sometimes because I hold a lot of stress. That's really uncomfortable. But if you start really noticing where you feel that just drop it down slowly, and you can actually feel the tension the and I think we get so used to be intense 100 ties with life. So I hope that this is useful. And obviously you don't need to burn up books. Just go out and get the free stuff. If you want to. It's all really easy to use. And if you have a family. All the activities are suitable for all ages. So feel free when you're having a family time in the morning before getting kids out to school. Stop for a minute decent intersection, calm the order made that morning routine so much better when you're coming home from school. Just as you're coming in, or if you're going somewhere else. So that you have that kind of time.
18:36
I'm so helpful because most of my clients have gotten a few a few don't. But most of my clients have got children. Most of them have got children who are sort of in their teens and often discovering their own neuro divergence as part of this, and again, you know, that triggering of you know, lots of different neurodivergent people in a household and highly sensitive and high sensory you know, that those kinds of tips are so helpful. You're welcome.
19:03
I'm really sorry that I have to carry this useful and please do all the free stuff online.
19:11
I will I'll put it in this post. Thank you so much, Emma for joining us. I really appreciate you. Appreciate all your work. Thank you so so much. You're welcome.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
