How your past hurts you today
Bear Psychology Podcast
Relationships rule our inner world. Understanding how you feel and think about your relationships helps you become more accepting and then more peaceful. You can develop an appreciation for other people's perspectives and stop assigning blame on others. Dr. Jacqueline Heller’s book “Yesterday Never Sleeps: How Integrating Life's Current and Past Connections Improves Our Well-Being” draws upon decades of clinical experience to create a powerful and more positive inner narrative. Her unique combination of neuroscience, memoirs of her life as a child of Holocaust survivors, and patient...
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Dangerous People in Powerful places
Bear Psychology Podcast
Disconnected People in positions of power make the world more dangerous for everyone – Bear Psychology Radio hosted by Dr. Anna Baranowsky with guest Dr. Steve Taylor. Disconnected people have the tendency to gravitate toward power. When Disconnected people rule in positions of power societies trend toward patriarchal, hierarchical and warlike. In contrast, societies with connected leaders trend toward egalitarian, democracy and peace. Although most people have a deep need to be connected, life events/upbringing and trauma exposure can interfere in this profound human characteristic....
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Why your coping skills stop working
Bear Psychology Podcast
Experiencing stressful or traumatic experiences during childhood leads us to develop certain coping mechanisms to get us through. While these strategies might have helped us feel secure when younger, they often fail us in adulthood. Richard Brouillette’s book “Your Coping Skills Aren't Working: How to Break Free from the Habits that Once Helped You But Now Hold You Back” offers an evidence-based guide using multiple therapeutic modalities including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), schema therapy, and attachment theory to help readers leave behind unhelpful coping strategies that keep...
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Muslim Loving Peace and looking to a better future
Bear Psychology Podcast
Raheel Raza, a Muslim Canadian born in Pakistan, migrated to Canada in 1988, has a unique perspective on what is happening right now in the Israel-Hamas war and her reflections on misinformation and what Peace would take. She has visited Israel 13 times in the 16 years. In her National Post Article “I'm a Muslim and I love Israel. Here's why” published in February 2023, Raza details what she has learned about hate and antisemitism, it’s prevalence in Arab Muslim countries, her hope for Peace and the struggles of supporting Israel at this time. Listen to our conversation...
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Collective & Personal Trauma: one family’s graceful end-of-life story
Bear Psychology Podcast
What does it mean to lose someone so close to you that your world will never be the same? What if this happens when the whole world is locked down during a global Pandemic, a collective trauma? How do we navigate terrible loss with great compassion and love? Journalist Mitchell Consky has something important to share with us about this based on personal experience. During the worst of the COVID pandemic, Consky received distressing news. His father had been given less than two months to live after being diagnosed with a rare terminal cancer. In his book, “Home Safe: A...
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Childhood Emotional Neglect impacts your life today
Bear Psychology Podcast
After 20 years in practice, Dr. Jonice Webb noticed the painful struggle of people who grew up in homes where they were emotionally neglected. She identified this neglect as an "invisible factor" that continued to affect adults often leaving them feeling depleted and dissatisfied or what she described as “Running on Empty”. In Dr. Webb’s books “Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect” and “Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships” she shines a light on this invisible force of CEN. She discusses how to bring new tools, strategies and...
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Mind, Body and Yoga for Healing Trauma
Bear Psychology Podcast
Recovery from trauma is not simply about healing the mind but about healing the body as well. Often the approach when treating trauma is solely focused on the mental and emotional effects and fails to address the physiological imbalances that trauma leaves behind on our bodies. In Dr. Arielle Schwartz’s newest book “Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma Recovery: Applying the Principles of Polyvagal Theory for Self-Discovery, Embodied Healing, and Meaningful Change”, she guides the reader using yoga practices to help release the burdens of trauma and begin the journey of healing the...
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Healing from Emotional Eating
Bear Psychology Podcast
Every wonder why you make poor food choices? Have you ever tried a new diet just to end up miserable and eating even more than before? Kim Shapira will help us understand how to put an end to disordered eating habits and improving your health and happiness in the process. Shapira recognizes that unhealthy food habits can occur as a result of life stressors and old patterns of self-soothing. Her work focuses on getting back on track and using food for health. Kim Shapira, author of “This Is What You’re Really Hungry For”, teaches us how to develop a healthy relationship with our...
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Cultivating Core Creativity
Bear Psychology Podcast
I know you are creative and innovative at your core. However, most of us just don’t know how to access the deep wealth of creativity that sits inside. Dr. Ronald Alexander’s book “Core Creativity: The Mindful Way to Unlock Your Creative Self” guides you through using mindfulness practices to train your mind so that it more easily opens the portal to core creativity: the unconscious mind. I am really excited about this show as it focuses on opening up to a powerful element of our true nature. Listen to our conversation with psychotherapist & author Dr. Ronald Alexander as...
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Healing the World through Human Connection
Bear Psychology Podcast
Disconnected people have the tendency to gravitate toward power. When Disconnected people rule in positions of power societies trend toward patriarchal, hierarchical and warlike. In contrast, societies with connected leaders trend toward egalitarian, democracy and peace. Although most people have a deep need to be connected, life events/upbringing and trauma exposure can interfere in this profound human characteristic. A person’s “goodness” and capacity for compassion often results from connection, whereas cruelty often originates from a feeling of being cut off from others....
info_outlineAhh, deep restorative sleep! What relief!
We all know how much better we feel after a good night's sleep. But what happens when we are woken up throughout the night by disturbing nightmares and unsettling dreams? Are we prepared with strategies for getting back to sleep or for addressing upsetting dream content when it surfaces? What about repetitive nightmares that keep coming back? How are we to deal with them? Well, today's show looks at sleep interventions, as well as dream and nightmare strategies.
I love this topic as it gives you the skills for looking closely at what surfaces through the dream content and what makes it so interesting and meaningful in your own healing journey.
Whether it is tigers chasing you or workplace incidents, repeating the content is often symbolic or representative of what needs addressing, rather than reflective of the actual problems in your life. For example, if in your life you are not getting along with a specific friend ... your dream content might show you in a boat floating away from shore into murky water and away from a house that represents your connections and safety.
You can see an array of animals growling on the shoreline as well as one cartoon character happily waving at you from one of the windows of the house. You don't need to live close to water or even in a house in order for the dream to have meaning for you or to relate to the argument you are having with your friend. Nothing needs to be an exact replica if you look at the content through the lens of "everything is an aspect of you".
In the example above, you are all elements. You are the murky water, the house you are leaving behind, you are the boat and the feelings you have being on the boat. You are all characters that you see. Given time and introspection, you can begin to notice how each element relates to you and your life themes and events.
Treatment for nightmares includes medications such as Prazosin, CBT therapy such as Image Rehearsal Therapy (or changing the ending) and dream journaling. Deep breathing, relaxation practices and embedding the positive rather than fighting to get to sleep.
Other approaches include:
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Sleep Hygiene
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Dream Journaling using a light pen
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Decoding Bad Dreams using Imagery Rehearsal Therapy
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Making Peace with your Sleep – do not fight to get back to sleep ... instead rest and breathe deeply
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Improve sleep with deep relaxation and embedding positive messages
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Using Guided Body Scan and Progressive Body Relaxation
We also recognize that having a trauma history makes a person much more susceptible to bad dreams/nightmares. This can be thematic such as dreams that reflect a certain type of experience (i.e., loss of an important person, violence against you or those you love, etc). These thematic nightmares do not necessarily present an exact replica of what occurred in your life but can have features representative of a type of loss or trauma that still needs attention or healing in your life.
Research indicates that trauma has been increasingly identified as a potential precursor to clinical insomnia (Sinha, 2016). Sleep quality disruption is one of many ways that trauma can have a significant and prolonged impact on health and well-being, and this is largely because of the ways in which trauma can sensitize the central nervous system to become more hyper-aroused. However, there are ways to mitigate this, improve sleep quality, and regulate the body's sleeping patterns again after trauma.
An excellent article by Havens et al. (2019) outlines this research, and has informed some of the exercise guidelines below.
Links & Resources:
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Sleep Hygiene: https://youtu.be/YvqeWcPwd2o?t=59
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Tame & Decode Bad Dreams: https://youtu.be/Oi72TXnkEy4?t=17
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Make Peace with Your Sleep: https://youtu.be/5HjzyLMsygM?t=38
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Improve sleep by relaxing deeply and embedding positive messages: https://youtu.be/ZQmfCEtzvEE
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Sleep relaxation (the Honest Guys): https://youtu.be/8TDcGYmEgyM
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Guided Body-Scan Meditation for Sleep: https://youtu.be/8TDcGYmEgyM
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Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT): https://www.verywellmind.com/imagery-rehearsal-therapy-2797304
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Reduce Nightmare Frequency with IRT: https://youtu.be/CLsmRs6RXYM