Episode 105: Recovering from Adverse Childhood Experiences with Dr. Bre Gentile
/Mental health is as important as our physical health. And as parents, we need every bit of help regarding this matter because parenting is never easy when we are mentally exhausted. Not to mention, our wonderful children have a real knack for showing us know where we have healing to do, right? And so, we are going to talk about mental health and trauma informed practices and how understanding our pasts can help make our parenting a little bit easier.
To help me in that conversation, I have invited Dr. Bre Gentile. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology at Gonzaga University and has gone on to receive two master's degrees, one from Golden Gate University in Counseling and the second from Palo Alto University in Clinical Psychology, where she also got her PhD. Dr. Gentile has spent over 10 years working to improve outcomes for children, teens, and their caregivers working through her research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress. Her work with mental health providers, communities, and families has allowed her to develop a keen insight into the challenges of supporting resilience through trauma-informed practices.
Here's a summary of what we discussed:
Trauma informed practices and what it is
Adverse childhood experiences and their effects
How to recover from adverse childhood experiences if you have some
How we can determine if our children are having the same experiences
Getting the right help for mental health
To get more resources, visit Dr. Gentile's website www.drgslab.com.
You may also check:
www.stresshealth.org
centerforyouthwellness.org
www.theconfessproject.com
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do; not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast. In this episode, we're going to be talking about mental health and trauma-informed practices and how having a trauma-informed lens as we approach parenting can be really helpful for ourselves, making parenting a little bit easier and in working with our kids and to help me with this conversation, I'm bringing in a clinical psychologist, her name is Dr. Bre Gentile, we'll call her Dr. G and she is the director of product design at the Center for Youth Wellness in an expert in adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress. So I'm so happy to have Dr. G on the show. DR G, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?
Dr. Bre: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So as you mentioned, I'm the product designer over at Center for Youth Wellness and I came to this place after being a bachelor's degree in psychology and continuing on to get my Masters and then my Ph.D. and myself as a psycho oncologist and then became super interested in mental health tank.
So I left the psychology world to do some tech work. I did some U.X hardware research with google and found myself really unfulfilled and ended up back into the nonprofit space where I'm at now with Center for Youth Wellness and really what I do there is I help our products and services become very trauma-informed and trauma conscious and we help families, communities, and providers such as pediatricians and other behavioral professionals with aces and toxic stress and resilience. So I'm really happy to be part of the conversation today.
Laura: I'm so glad that you're here. Okay, so can we just touch real quick on what you mean by trauma-informed practices like what does that mean to us?
Dr. Bre: So it really means making sure that you're thinking about not only the trauma or the toxic stress that your child has gone through, but also as a parent or a caregiver what you've gone through as well and bringing that to the conversation, whether it's with your teacher pediatrician, even your dentist.
I mean it's really interesting and you'll see as our conversation goes on, that toxic stress is really just a biological response. So it can come up in all different ways and all different places where you might not think that it would be important, but it actually is very important throughout your life span and throughout the different places that you show up.
So that's really what we mean by taking a trauma-informed lens is just remembering and acknowledging the stress and the events that you have gone through as a parent and also that your child may be going through as well.
Laura: I think that this piece of it is so important Dr. G especially as kids return to the classroom after this pandemic, I think it cannot be overstated that we have all kind of been through a collective trauma and having trauma-informed practices in the classroom is incredibly important. Don't you think?
Dr. Bre: it's a little discouraging at times when I hear conversations about getting back to the new normal and rushing into this new normal of getting back into the classroom and I just have to hope that, you know, our school counselors, our principals and our teachers are getting the training that they need to also acknowledge their own low level of trauma or toxic stress that they may have gone through, but also to look for signs in our kids and their students and how do they plan on addressing that and being proactive about it.
I think is going to be really important and not just waiting for some kid to show up in your office or for a behavioral outbursts to happen, but to really just outwardly address what just happened in this last year, year and a half or so, how that might be affecting them as kids and how it might be affecting their supportive adult as well. I think it's going to be really important.
Laura: Oh yes. That acknowledgement of our role in the kind of the systemic nature of these interactions is so important. So kids don't exist in a vacuum. Neither do teachers or parents or doctors or therapists. We have the relationships with each other and those exists in the space between two people and so two people are both bringing their own experiences and background and trauma and stress responses to interactions and acknowledging that I think is so important.
So I'm so glad that we're having this conversation. This is what the balance parent is all about, is contextualizing the parenting experience where we are looking at the whole child, but also the system that the child is embedded in an understanding that, you know, what's going on for the child can be isolated from what's going on with the parent. Right?
Dr. Bre: Right. Absolutely. Yeah, this system is huge. That's a really important key factor that you mentioned.
Laura: Yeah, Okay, so let's talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences. I think most of my audience will have heard about these in looking back on their own childhood and thinking about if they've had trauma in their own lives, can we talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences? Or ACEs are where that term came from and what some of the things you know, that come up when parents are looking back at their own upbringing.
Dr. Bre: So, the 10 original adverse childhood experiences, there's been a couple of them that have been added on since the 10 original are really divided up into three different categories. So, you've got abuse neglect and household instability. So I'll go through each category because there's experiences within the category.
So within abuse, you have physical abuse, emotional abuse, and of course sexual abuse, and then within neglect, you have, again, physical neglect and emotional neglect and within household instability, which I think is one of the ones that is really not obvious but has tremendous effect on our health outcomes, which is mental illness, incarcerated, relative mother treated violently substance abuse and then divorce.
So, those are the original 10 adverse childhood experiences. I think there's been a couple of studies that have added things like deportation anything around immigration and then a couple of things have been thought about about adding bullying. And I think that's probably maybe interpersonal violence may be also be added on, but discrimination is also one of those that we're thinking about adding to.
Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And so the research on ACEs then, what does it say about folks who have had 12 or more of these experiences in their childhood as they came up?
Dr. Bre: Yeah. So, you know, the science of ACEs has been pretty much going on since the original study of Feleti, but it's really grown and so the science of it, it's just been decades of scientific investigation. It's showing that, you know, adversity that we experience as children, it can affect us into our adulthood. So the challenges that children face in school life and ultimately in their health, they're often the symptoms of ACEs and toxic stress.
So, you know, I don't want to go too far without giving some good news, which is that the earlier we can identify that a child spirit is experiencing ACEs and toxic stress the sooner the children and families can be connected to the services that they need to prevent and to heal effects. So, You know, the landmark adverse childhood experience study that I mentioned was in 1998. And the idea is that one, I think it's about one is okay, right.
One is something that we probably all have. But when you get up to four, Such as emotional abuse, emotional neglect, mental illness and substance abuse, that's when we start to look at the risks and the risk factors, you know, again from that study, the idea is that aces are incredibly common. In fact, I think it's something about 67% had at least one ace.
But There are also 13% of that had four or more aces. And so the more aces that you have, the higher risk, um for chronic diseases as an adult, so you can be experiencing these aces as a child and you won't see the effect until you're an adult where you're three times at risk for heart disease or lung cancer. So things like that, that you might not see until you're older? And there's also, which is probably the most shocking result to me is there's a 20-year difference in life expectancy for children that have cases that were left unattended. 20.
Laura: That's heavy. So I feel like parents are, who are receiving this information right now are in the spot where they're like, do I have these are these, is this part of what makes things hard for me? Is this contributing to things that might be difficult?
And then how do I know if these are experiences that my child is having? So what is a good starting point for parents who are just starting to think about, like, oh, the things that she mentioned, I have those in my past for the parent, what do we do? And then we'll talk about the kid out later.
Dr. Bre: That sounds great. So I think the idea is the question is really as a caregiver's an adult, you're asking? Okay, what can I do? Right. So yes, we have the power to help our children. Absolutely. But we also need to think about what about my aces? What about my aces? So the first thing is to know, acknowledging did I go through some of these hard times as a child?
A lot of times we just thought it was just, you know, our error or it was just how things were done and it was just how our mom was or how our dad was. But really when you think about it, was it really how it just was or was there some really hard times that you want to recall may be disciplined. For example, this is a really big one may be disciplined. What was excessively harsh at home.
Maybe one of your parents drink too much or verbally abused your struggled with a drug addiction. So those are the types of aces that can cause toxic stress and put people at higher risk for the heart disease and the depression like I mentioned, I think what it brings up to me is, you know, in California, we have screening for ACEs at the pediatric level, but you can also find the ace quiz or the ace scale That you could take on your own to find out. Did I have one of these or more of these? 10 aces.
And so I think just taking that and taking stock in that and I highly recommend doing it with a licensed professional because it can bring up a lot of different things and we don't know the idea is not to re traumatize you but to give you some awareness and to give you some grounding in that, you know, these weren't just people just being people or eras being errors. These were actually really hard times that you went through that affect you as an adult.
Laura: Yeah, I think that's so important. I think so many of us. I want to say that like yeah, things were heard. Yeah. There were things about my upbringing that I wish had been different. Yeah, parents were harsh with me. Yeah, it was bad at this point in time, but other people had it worse. And so what should I, you know, what am I complaining about?
But I think really taking a good look at your upbringing and how it's affecting you in ways you may not even realize that the health implications that you're talking about are wild. They're astounding. So okay, now let's say then you're ready to start looking at it.
You're ready to start working on some of the stress maybe that you, this trauma response that you've been in perhaps your whole life, you're starting to want to look at that. How can you find a provider, a therapist who is informed, who is trauma informed and who will help you work through some of those things? Do you have any suggestions on how to find the right mental health care provider?
Dr. Bre: Yeah. The first place I would always look at is wherever you're getting your psychology or mental health tip, it's whether it's like, Psychology today or another forum that you use to start there because you can filter your results by trauma or PTSD. So, I think that that's really important to actually find a professional that has worked with trauma or PTSD.
And even though if you're thinking, I don't have PTSD, like you said, it wasn't that bad. Those therapists are going to know how to work with trauma and how to work with toxic stress. It doesn't have to be on the continuum over here. With PTSD can be on the other side of the continuum, that's just traumatic events happening. So I really highly recommend getting somebody that's actually specialized in trauma.
Laura: Oh, I so agree. Dr. G, I was just talking with a person who's in my balancing you membership. She was trying to find a therapist and she's, you know, seeing several over the past years and they've all just been terrible fits and done more harm than good for her.
And so I was giving her some search terms further, like what psychology today profiles and gave it that exact hip and she found someone on her first try who's a great fit who is trauma informed and just even having that search term trauma informed or searching for people who specialize in trauma recovery.
It makes all the difference because folks who are trained in those things that they have specialized training you know to and they have expertise and often times I don't know if your experience in the clinical world. When I was a practicing therapist, I was a specialist with trauma survivors. And there was a reason why those folks came to me because I was good at working with them.
So usually the people who specialized in it, they have some kind of gift with it too, you know where they know that they're good at it. They found out that this is something that they feel really passionately about and want to do. They're invested in it and then you get better care providers to.
Dr. Bre: Yeah, absolutely agree. And I think actually going with the search term of trauma informed over the search term parenting or family, I think you're gonna find yourself getting much better results because parenting with aces is a whole different realm than just your normal parenting stress. Right? So I think it's really important to bypass that parenting or family search term and go straight for the trauma.
Laura: I agree so much. Okay, it's so important you and I know what all the letters in the names and all of those things mean after people's names, but I think it's so important to be very, very clear and help people find the right care provider for them.
Thank you for that. It's so important. Okay, so then what about if perhaps there are people who are listening and thinking about their own family that they have now, their family of creation, the children that they are raising right now. And they're realizing that some of what they've got going on is perhaps contributing to their children's dress too.
Perhaps like a pediatrician would have something pop up on that screen. What do parents do if they're realizing that their kids right now are experiencing or have experienced earlier in their childhood, one of these adverse experiences?
Dr. Bre: Yeah, so again, I think that the important part is to first take a moment to realize that you have the power to help kids lead longer and healthier lives. A lot of times we may feel like if we're holding all of this trauma and we're realizing, gosh, I could be more calm if I only had this response system in track or I could, you know, not just completely freeze and shut down if I had, you know, this system in check.
And so I think the first thing is to just take a moment to realize that even though you went through these things and you're maybe parenting with your own aces, you still have the power to help your kids. So I think that the right kind of support like we talked about is really, really important in mitigating the impact of toxic stress.
But also I think that there's certain conversations that you can definitely have outside of your pediatric or outside of your licensed professional that you can have and most of those are going to be around what I call the seven domains of wellness. So we developed them at Center for Youth Wellness and those conversations are usually held within one of the domains which is the supportive relationship.
So if you find maybe one, maybe two, maybe it's six right? Supportive healthy relationships. Having the conversation about your own aces and your child's ACEs can really mitigate the effects and the impact of the toxic stress. So that's just one of the domains that I highly recommend taking a look at because that's one of the ones that you probably already have, you probably already have maybe at least one supportive relationship hopefully that you can use and utilize in that way.
Laura: Okay. Yeah. So tell me more about the seven domains of wellness. What are they and how can they support a family as they're moving through hard times.
Dr. Bre: Yeah, so the seven domains of wellness, our domains that we know mitigate the effects of toxic stress. And so the seven of them are supportive relationships, which I just mentioned, nutrition, sleep, exercise, mindfulness, mental health and nature. So I can go into each one of those really briefly that you can find a lot of this information on our website which is stresshealth.org.
So stresshealth.org. So supportive relationship like I said, is where we actually have a supportive relationship and it might not be your partner, it might be your best friend, it might be your child's mom, right? Or your child's friends, Mom, excuse me. So the idea is that we as parents can also use these domains of wellness and we can also encourage our children to use these domains of wellness.
So as the parent using supportive relationship, it's really seeking out that friend or that family member that you can have difficult conversations with and talk about stress for our kids that looks like them having a teacher or having hopefully maybe a parent, but we know, you know, as they get older, they may tend to not have those difficult conversations with you.
So a teacher, a coach, any of those will be a supportive relationship for your child and what that does is it allows them to have conversations that they don't have to hold and they can actually let that out so we can move on to nutrition.
Laura: Oh wait, hold on. I just wanted to highlight something. So when you were talking about the supportive relationships, I noticed that you were mentioning for relationships that your child would be having, that they would be with adults, but not with peers, and I think I wanted to just highlight the last thing there that you said is that they can have these kind of conversations where they don't have to hold it anymore.
I think that probably the reason why we're talking about relationships with adults, a child's relationship with an adult is so that I don't know that peers are not being burdened with heavy stuff. Is that kind of, am I on the right track?
Dr. Bre: Yeah, because the truth of the matter is, although we really want our children to have friends and be able to talk to their friends, their friends are not equipped to have a response to some of the stuff that may be going on. So while our friends are really great at normalizing what's going on and being like, oh, you know, Yeah, my dad does the same thing or my mom does the same thing, that's great.
But it doesn't have a great response because they're just not equipped to come and say that's a difficult situation. Why don't we talk about that a little bit deeper, Right? They don't have the active listening skills with reflective listening skills that adults do. So we do want them to have friends, but we also want there to be distinguished between a good friend and a supportive adult.
Laura: Good. I'm so glad that we kind of highlighted that a little bit more so there's a reason that there's a difference between these supportive relationships that you're mentioning here and paris Yes. Good. Okay.
Dr. Bre: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for making that distinguished to go ahead and move on to the nutrition then. And I always like to breakfast nutrition, but this is actually not necessarily about making sure you hit all of the food pyramid or you eat, you know, more vegetables really what nutrition is about when you're talking in terms of aces is actually something really simple like eating together as a family.
So, a consistent routine around being with safe and trusting adults during mealtime. It's a really important daily routine and it allows you to just set aside a specific time where you eat together, even the babies can eat together, but you're all around a family table and it doesn't have to be family, right? It doesn't, it can be mom, coach, grandma, auntie, it doesn't matter who's at the table, It's about the routine and about the coming together over a meal. That's really important with mitigating the toxic stress.
Also we talk about, you know, not having distractions, so avoiding screens and you know, phones, television, all that during mealtime, it's really tempting and we understand that if you ditch the distraction when you're just retelling the story to the kid that you matter, You matter, I'm here, I matter, I'm here, we're here together and that matters. So that's really important. I also think that it's super important about nutrition, specifically eating breakfast is really important. Obviously we, you know, we hear a lot of signs about that and of course the most colorful vegetables are always the most preferred ones.
But we know that you know, especially in San Francisco and the district that we serve, we know that getting fresh fruit and vegetables is not always possible. We serve Bayview, which is considered a food desert and so we understand that well it's nice to go to whole foods and get all the colorful vegetables you can get or go to a farmer's market and get fresh produce that is just not possible for everybody.
And we know for sure that in our black and brown communities, it's really difficult to have breakfast together because 11 parents are already out the door or we have parents who are working two different jobs and having dinner together isn't even a possibility. So one of the things I've always been thinking about is that the domains of wellness are really fixed right now for parents and families who have a general amount of resources, but how do we make those.
But for the lives of folks who are really low resource, maybe perhaps even living out of their car or you know, really suffering with homeless and food insecurity. So constantly thinking about that, but just want that to be shared that I'm well aware that it is not always a possibility to do these things.
Laura: Yes. Access and privilege are an incredibly important aspect of this conversation.
Dr. Bre: So sleep is our next one. And again, we know that you're supposed to have a certain amount of hours per sleep. And we know that largely our entire nation is not giving enough sleep. But the really important thing that I love to hone in on this because again, we know that there are folks and families who are sleeping 3, 4 to a room and getting good sleep and having a good mattress and all of this is just not possible. But if you can keep the bedtime and the wake up time consistent, that will help your brain and your body work better together. So it's not necessarily about getting the 8-12 hours of sleep for your teenager.
It's actually more important to say, you know, 10 o'clock is bedtime and 10 o'clock is wake up time no matter what, on the weekends, right? If it's a school night then maybe it's nine o'clock and You know, 7:00 or something. But as long as you have those consistent bedtimes and wake up times, it will help your body and your brain work better together.
The other thing that I know is really just kind of thrown at parents all the time, it's cutting back on screen time and we know it's really difficult. Sometimes it's our only time as a parent to just get, you know, a few minutes of social media time in or just something that really allows us to decompress. But the truth of the matter is it's just actually not decompressing us at all. It does the exact opposite.
So as much as you can model that for your kid, even if you end up using it right before you go to bed, if you can model it for your kid, you know, a couple of hours or maybe even like a half an hour is trying to start with before bedtime, they will see you doing that. And like I said, even if you end up going into your room and going right back on, that's fine. It's really just about modeling that that behavior is possible and then your children will know, okay, that's something possible. And I see mom and or dad or grandma grandpa doing it so I can do that. And then I think that the other one is that don't be afraid to seek support from a health care provider for your kids, right?
Like we're quick to do it as adults and saying like, I need help. I'm not sleeping while I have insomnia, but we don't want to do it for our kids. There's a lot of shaming and a lot of guilt that comes around parenting and sleep. I remember it from being a parent myself having an infant. It was like, oh, your kids not sleeping through the night yet.
Oh, you know, it's like I'm site, you know, so it's really okay to get help from a professional if you feel like your kid, especially if they're having frequent awakenings and it's not something that they will, you know, kind of go back to sleep, but it's, you know, frequent nightmares or night terrors or sleep walking. Any of that talk with your healthcare provider, there's really no shame in that.
Laura: Oh, I think that's so important. Especially with older kids. I think that we take such a behavioral approach to sleep with kids and that we think that it's when they're having trouble sleeping, that it's a choice that they are having rather as opposed to an indication that, you know, they might need support in some way to, you know, Yes.
Dr. Bre: That is such an important part to bring up because we do, we go, you know, from day one, we're reading sleep training books, right? It's something we can train them to do. But you know, we don't understand that there's a whole biological system. Yeah. Play behind all of this. And you know, more than likely our kids are not choosing to not go to bed.
Laura: Exactly. It was like adults. I'm in recovery from insomnia and people are like just sleep. Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, it's the same. Yeah, Exactly.
Dr. Bre: So that brings us to exercise and again, you know, we have so much around exercise that I hardly touch on exercise because there's just so much pressure already for adults to be active, you know, five times a week, 30 minutes minimum and then there's already so much pressure on our kids to be even more active than they already are. But I think the combination of the pressure on the two people on the adult and the child, it ends up just being like let's just throw that out the window, let's not even talk about that.
Laura: Instead of using the word exercise, I've started using the term joyful movement and that feels so much better to me .
Dr. Bre: I love that. I really love that idea. I think that that's great because then you get out and you're like ok this is you know, even if you're just going for a walk it's joyful, even if you're outside blowing bubbles like you don't have to be you know, exercising heart pounding, sweat dripping type of activity.
Laura: A dance party in your kitchen is lovely.
Dr. Bre: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's one of the things that I actually recommend a lot is doing a freeze dance. So you know dancing in your kitchen or in your front room and then you turn off the music and whoever freezes last loses that round. So I think it's really fun to do, especially if you have young children they get a really big kick out of you know adults not being able to stop on time.
Laura: I co signed that my kids love those.
Dr. Bre: totally, I love it too. So I don't want to touch too much on exercise other than the fact that we do know that daily physical activity or or joyful movement can counteract some of the key impacts of aces. So you know it's it's reducing of the stress hormone that's all that we care about is just lowering that cortisol level so that they're not stressed and then it helps strengthen their immune system.
So just thinking about, you know, a little bit of movement, joyful activities doesn't have to be outside. It can really just be jumping up and down or you know just something really that you wouldn't even think about as being exercised. So I don't like to harp too much on that one. We get enough of that as parents.
Laura: Yes, for sure.
Dr. Bre: So that brings me to mindfulness and again, you know mindfulness can be this like meditation practice and like no it's really really not about that. It's really about self regulation and that can be for adults and kids. So what I like to do is start with the adult because it's really difficult to explain this, tweak it and I know there are apps that do wonderful jobs at it and we're getting so much better at bringing this down to the child.
But for adults, if you can do this then you'll see that your child will actually mimic you even if they're older. I have a nine year old who's starting to mimic me when I do some of these self regulatory activities. I don't think it's just for kids who are still, you know, two eyes peering at you all the time. But what I like to do is if you're facing a challenging situation or you're really stressed out, just stop, stop for a moment and just ask yourself what am I feeling right now? It can be the worst feeling ever. And it doesn't even matter, don't judge yourself, don't lighten it down. You know, you're not publishing this on facebook or anywhere else.
Just ask yourself what am I feeling right now and then take a breath and then you just ask yourself again? Okay? My breathing too fast right now. Am I holding my breath? Can I even take a deep breath right now and then just observe? Right, so, okay, what else am I feeling in my body? What are my thoughts right now? And then by the time you get to the observation place you're like, okay, all right then you can kind of move forward right? And like, am I, am I okay with what happens next if I decide to yell at my kids?
Am I okay with that? Am I okay with grounding my kids? Am I okay with turning off the video games? Am I okay with leaving the house and going for a walk? So you just kind of ask yourself and decide what way you want to respond? So I think that that's a really cool way, you know? So again, you just stop you, ask yourself what you're feeling right now you talk to yourself about your breath, asking yourself if you're holding your breath, it's too fast. Can you even take a deep breath, ask what else you're feeling in your body or your thoughts and then ask yourself if you're okay with how you plan to proceed, am I okay with it?
Laura: I love that. And I think I really love the reframe two of mindfulness, simply a self regulation. I think that people get so freaked out by the term mindfulness and they think they are going to have to change into some other being, you know, but really what it is is just learning how to have healthy emotional regulation.
Dr. Bre: Yeah, absolutely, you can do this with your kid without having the like, you know, kind of calm app or headspace app script in your head and I think the biggest way to do it is really just changing that question usually like what's wrong, right or what's going on. But if you ask, how are you feeling? It kind of gets you as a parent in this mode and then it gets the kids to start thinking like I'm feeling really frustrated, you know?
And then that just opens up a dialog to just like, okay, I hear you, you know, So I think if we just ask that without giving too many things to parents because God knows we have so much already, but just to ask change that question instead of asking your child next time, what's wrong or what's going on, ask them, how are you feeling? And I think it will open up a totally different dialogue.
Laura: I love that too. Or even like asking out loud, how am I feeling? Take the pressure off the kid to some for some of the parents who listen, they have really explosive kiddos, kids who are have a really hard time even talking about their emotions. So even just a tense moment saying like, okay, let's slow down. I'm just going to take a second to check in with myself and model that overtly okay, how am I feeling right now?
I'm feeling really overwhelmed or I'm feeling really frustrated, I'm feeling really concerned that we're not going to get to the bus on time or I'm feeling really concerned because I'm making dinner and it's burning. But I also want to help my kiddo with homework, even narrating it out loud for yourself can be helpful too.
Dr. Bre: So I have two more domains for you, but the next one is mental health which we've already touched on, so that's just really brief of like, you know, getting to the right professionals, there's really, I know that there's still a lot again, especially in our black and brown communities here in San Francisco accessibility is an issue and there's all sorts of other trusting issues going on.
So to not think about mental health in the same sense as a four walls couch kind of area, right, so there's this really great thing that we're doing in Bayview which is training barbers to have difficult conversations so that you as a male who don't typically open up this, you can go get your haircut and you can sit there and you can talk about what's going on and your barber is now trauma informed so
Laura: Oh my gosh, that's alright saying it's amazing.
Dr. Bre: Yeah, the project is fantastic, I love what they're doing.
Laura: What is the name of that project? I have, you have to know more.
Dr. Bre: Totally, the project is called The Confess Project and I will connect you offline with the founder of it, he's amazing, they're actually coming on Wednesday to train our barbers here in San Francisco to have those difficult conversations, so thinking about the different places, you know, it might be a beauty salon, it might be the nail salon, it really you don't have to seek out this space in the traditional way that you're thinking about it, especially if you're in a black and brown body and especially if you're suffering with accessibility barriers.
Laura: So one of my best friends is a hair stylist and she has been talking with me about how her community is so overwhelmed with the pandemic stress that's coming in her doors and they're so unprepared, this is a great project. Fantastic! So I highly recommend checking them out indefinitely.
Dr. Bre: Happy to connect you guys. It's a really fantastic way to think about mental health.
Laura: Oh yes, I will. And it will link for everybody who's listening and is looking for amazing organization to support. I will be putting the link in the show notes too.
Dr. Bre: So our last domain is nature. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I need to be one of nature. It's really about getting outside as much as you possibly can, but we know that some neighborhoods aren't safe. Sometimes it's actually not possible to get outside for whatever reason. So even just looking at pictures of nature or listening to nature sounds, we'll do the same effect as lowering your cortisol levels.
So you know if your friend is out there going on to Costa Rica excursion, tell him or her to send some pictures. I have encouraged a lot of our teachers to put up a screen saver of a nature during class breaks. So it's just again just to start thinking about nature and what it might feel like and hear the sounds and smell the smells and all of that. It really just slows your body down and lowers your cortisol level. So it increases our resilience and we feel more refreshed as well. So it's a win win.Laura: Yes. Yeah. You know I have found that guided nature meditations where you visualize during a meditation where you visualize nature can also be quite effective at getting you some of the same effects of like nature bathing when you don't have access to it. Love it. Thank you so much Dr. G for this conversation, Understanding how stress and the accumulation of stress over the course of a lifetime can really impact us. And then the things that we can do to help ameliorate that stress are really helpful.
Dr. Bre: You're so welcome. Thank you for having me.
Laura: Absolutely. And so I want to make sure that people know where to find you. I know you have a website too. So we've talked about the Center for Youth Wellness, but what about your website? Drop it. I'll put it in the show notes, but sometimes people like to hear it out loud.
Dr. Bre: Yeah. Yeah. So my website to my personal work is called drgslab.com. So D R G S lab dot com, You can find out more about me there. And the work I'm doing outside of my center for youth on this work.
Laura: Well, you're doing amazing work and I feel so grateful to have had you on the show. Thank you so much.
Dr. Bre: Thank you. It's been great.
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Alright, that's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this!