#172 Today I’m here with Dr. Don Wood. Don is the founder and CEO of Inspired Performance Institute, an institute that since 2015, has been helping people heal from limiting effects of trauma.

Our conversation today revolves mainly around the concept of trauma. We talk about how physical and emotional trauma can manifest as depression, anxiety, cancer, and or Crohn’s disease, among other illnesses. We also discuss ways through which we can heal and move past our traumas and remove painful emotional charge from the memories that plague us.

I highly recommend you give this episode a listen, even if you think you have no trauma to heal from, as sometimes trauma can go unnoticed.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like: Releasing Trauma From The Body & Soul | Petra Brzovic

Subscribe On:

          

---

About Don:  Dr. Don Wood is a founder and CEO at Inspired Performance Institute. He developed the Inspired Performance Institute after spending years researching how trauma affects our minds and our lives. Dr. Wood began to understand that events and experiences throughout our lifetime continue to play a role in how we experience life in the present. He also realized that there was a better way of treating the issue. “Teaching people to live with, manage and cope with the daily stress doesn’t fix the problem. The solution comes from understanding it’s source and providing a long-term permanent solution”.

►Audio Version:

 

Key points with time stamp:

• Healing from Mental and Physical Trauma| Dr. Don Wood (00:00)
• Reaching ultimate performance levels: Don’s work in his own words (00:30)
• What is neuroscience? (01:04)
• What is limiting you from reaching your potential performance? (01:39)
• Are trauma and autoimmune diseases connected? (02:52)
• Real-life examples for the influence of trauma on the body (04:59)
• Does healing begin instantly after trauma is removed? (07:54)
• The stress response and cancer (09:33)
• Mental manifestations of trauma (11:52)
• Identifying trauma (13:33)
• Can we be unaware of our traumas? (15:12)
• How far back can trauma go? (17:19)
• How Don reached his conclusions (18:53)
• The story of Sunny Jacobs (21:15)
• The attachment of emotions to memories (23:31)
• Does anger lie at the root of depression? (25:16)
• The effects of shifting trauma on our lives (27:13)
• Athletes and head trauma (29:53)
• The effects of hyperbaric oxygen chambers (33:05)
• Healing while asleep (34:34)
• Healing in group environments (36:47)
• The future of Don’s work (41:29)
• A low point in Don’s life that later became a blessing (42:00)
• The effects of our upbringings on our stress responses (43:53)
• Don’s morning routine (45:47)
• You Must be Out of Your Mind (46:39)
• Don’t be so hard on yourself (47:27)

Mentioned in this episode:

• Lisa Tamati
• Inspired Performance Institute
• ATP, an organic compound that provides energy to drive processes in your living cells
• Crohn’s disease
• Bruce Lipton
• Sunny Jacobs
• Marlo Thomas
• Susan Saran
• Kate Capshaw
• You Must be Out of Your Mind, 2020. Don’s book

Don’s Website:
www.inspiredperformanceinstitute.com
www.drwoodphd.com

 

About me:

My Instagram:
www.instagram.com/guyhlawrence/?hl=en

My website:
www.guylawrence.com.au
www.liveinflow.co

 

TRANSCRIPT

Guy 00:01
Don, welcome to the podcast.

Don 00:03
Nice to see you Guy.

Guy 00:05
It’s truly, truly wonderful having you on the show. Like we were talking our family, my dear friend, Lisa Tamati. alerted me to your work a few weeks ago. And as soon as I checked you out, I was like, This man’s amazing. So I really wanted to get you on the show. And I really appreciate you joining me today.

Don 00:25
Well, thank you for the invitation and lovely. So she’s an amazing human being.

Guy 00:30
He is he certainly is. And I asked everyone on the show, I just find myself doing this every every time, but it’s always a good conversation starter. And that is if we were at an intimate dinner party right now. And you sat next to a complete stranger. And they said, Hmm, what do you do? What would you say? She that’s

Don 00:49
a tough one. I generally say I’ve developed a cutting edge neuroscience program that works on helping people stay present, and then reach their ultimate performance levels.

Guy 01:04
Wow. What what would? The question has been? How would you describe neuroscience just for the layman out there that we hear the term a lot?

Don 01:13
Well, a lot of it is talking about the brain. And how the brain I always talk about the brain is the computer, the body’s that printer. And so if the computer’s not operating, right, sending error messages, it’s going to affect the way the body prints. So you can have all the toner paper everything in the printer. But if the computer’s not sending the right signals, it’s going to mess up the printer.

Guy 01:39
Yeah, got Yeah. And from that, and you talk about high performance and performance as well. I mean, your your, your whole thing is called inspired performance Institute, which is amazing. What is then denying us from that performance within the body, if if the if the printer and the brain are not communicating.

Don 02:02
There’s a couple things, what I say is, if we can’t stay present, then we’re not going to perform at our highest level. And that what interferes with that, from my experience has been unresolved trauma of trauma. And when we have unresolved trauma, it continues to loop and takes us out of staying present. And then the cells go into a cell danger response. And when they’re in that cell danger response, it compromises the immune system, the neurotransmitters, and actually the ATP in the cell. So when we clear up that trauma, then the inflammation comes down, the immune system and neurotransmitters come back online, and then the energy is released.

Guy 02:52
Wow, there’s a few things that you’ve triggered again. How much then is trauma? Do you feel from your experience? I mean, yeah, I’m assuming you’ve been doing this work a long time. They’re researching and looking into it. And I’d love to get into backstory in a moment. But I’m always fascinated between the relationship with trauma and the effects on the body, like you mentioned, the keyword of inflammation. And from my background, back in the health fitness days, and from my last podcast was talking about earlier, inflammation was a key thing that was coming up. But I didn’t even really hear about it talked much about trauma actually causing these parts within ourselves on the body.

Don 03:33
What what I’ve seen is a lot of the people that I deal with, who have autoimmune issues, it’s all connected back to trauma. And so what I saw was that the trauma is creating the inflammation. So for my daughter, and I know we’ll probably talk about this, but she had krones. And that’s an auto immune. And so what I believe was happening is the krones was actually a symptom of the trauma looping. Does that make sense?

Guy 04:07
Yeah, it does. It does. And then you think, why am I was fascinated as well within the body? is that if trauma is showing up as a symptom, say as Crohn’s? Do you think lifestyle factors and other things are also then creating a certain area of weakness that just happens to manifest in Crohn’s? Or do you think that the particular trauma is then related to particular body parts? I don’t know if that makes sense. I read about these things. It depends on

Don 04:39
the individual. So my wife develop hashimotos, which is a thyroid issue. I see people with IBS or kaleidos, all those kinds of things. It just depends on the individual, but it generally shows up in some sort of a disorder. Yeah. Wow.

Guy 04:59
What what led you to look at this, because you’re very passionate about it. I mean, you dedicated your life to it. You’ve you’ve helped so many people with it. And we can get into some of the people who have helped as well. But why former what like?

Don 05:14
Well, I’ve led this ideal childhood, I didn’t realize that everybody wasn’t living the life I had. I had amazing parents that never yell, never scream, they were very calm. And so what happened was, when I met my wife, I really we were only 18, I realized she was not living in my world, she had a very dysfunctional father. And so he created fear and terror in that household. So she was constantly living in fear. And even though she was high functioning, there was nothing I could do to stop the fear. Even when she came to live in my world, she was constantly looking for danger all the time, because that’s how she protected herself. Now, that was subconscious. She wasn’t really aware she was doing it. But I could say something like, No, I don’t like that. And she could tear up and start to cry. And then I would say, like, what’s wrong? And she said, Well, you’re getting upset with me? And I’d say, No, I’m not. What I didn’t understand at the time, was that she had learned to listen very, very carefully, carefully, to the way her father spoke, so she could hear when the danger was coming, coming. So because of that, she could hear the slightest little change in my voice, and then that would activate her nervous, nervous system. And so then she started to tear up. So I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I tried, I tried changing the way I said things. I even tried to change the tone of my voice. And yet, she would still get activated. And then when my daughter was 14, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s. Now, what we didn’t know at the time is that she had had some trauma when she was around six years old. She didn’t disclose it until she was 16. And so we looked for all kinds of resources to stop it, changing her diet, taking out gluten, dairy, all those different things they told us to do. And yet nothing was working. She had four resections done, where they had to go in and literally cut out pieces of her intestines, because they would die and they were atrophying. So that’s when my wife said to me, You need to find an answer to this. And that started me on my research, which then led me back to trauma. And I connected the trauma to her, my wife and other people. And that’s when I started researching trauma.

Guy 07:54
That’s incredible. And with your daughter’s case, once you started researching you were, I’m guessing then you were applying what your research to your daughter? And did you find the turnaround quite instantaneous, once you move the trauma, or is it a healing process that comes afterwards? It’s a bit of a process. So

Don 08:17
it’s hard to tell when it actually changed. But what we do know is that after she went through the program I developed, she hasn’t had a Crohn’s flare up. And she had a cyst formed on her ovary. And when they went into remove it, the doctor came in after the operation and said, I’m confused. Your chart says you have krones. But when I operate it, there’s no evidence of any krones. And she says, Well, no, I haven’t had any kind of a flare up. And he says, but you’re not on any medication for Crohn’s. And so she says, No, I’m not taking any medications. So he says, Well, I hate to tell you this, but you’ve never had Crohn’s. And so I explained to him that she’s had for resections done, and that when we resolve the trauma, the inflammation went down. And that’s the Crohn’s. And he said to me, that’s impossible. If that was true, you’d have a Nobel Peace Prize. I said, Then tell me what Crohn’s is. And he says Crohn’s is a lifelong, debilitating disease with no known cure. And I said I disagree. I believe Crohn’s is inflation implement inflammation.

Guy 09:33
And showing up That’s incredible. We actually had cases of Crohn’s turn up in those 10 year with people with cancer had it and the same diagnosis is always the same from the medical stamp establishment incurable,

Don 09:45
like arable. And I believe cancer is the same thing. The cells go into a cell danger response. So they develop a hardened membrane. The purpose of that is to protect the integrity of the cell. So nothing gets into the cell, but nothing gets out of the cell. It’s a temporary pause until the danger passes. But if the trauma keeps the danger active, because the memory keeps activating it, then the danger stays active. And the cells never come out of the cell danger response. And they die. Then you go,

Guy 10:25
I am, you know, it’s funny to say that I had about Bruce Lipton on the show a couple of times. And he talks about the biological imperative, if I’m not mistaken, were with the drive to survive. And that exactly what you see, no matter what you do, if you’re in fight or flight, or you’re in that stress response, nothing’s getting in. So no matter how I’m guessing, no matter how you eat, how you exercise, how you meditate, or the work you’re doing, if your nervous system, your body is in that stress place, we can feel helpless from that.

Don 10:57
And when the body is under that stress, there’s very little maintenance getting done. Yeah, so that’s gonna get the cells into a very unhealthy disease state. Because the purpose is, when the danger is over, you escape from the lion, it’ll start doing maintenance. But the memory keeps the lion active. So never comes out of the cell danger response.

Guy 11:26
Yeah, it’s incredible. Isn’t that when you break it down like that? You know, it all makes sense? No, yeah.

Don 11:30
That’s what I hear all the time. The number one thing I hear is, this makes so much sense.

Guy 11:36
And it boggles my mind that well, saying that maybe not the medical establishment on look at this tree. Man. Everything’s about putting out fires, and maintaining.

Don 11:47
Yeah, everything is about living, managing and coping with it, not fixing it.

Guy 11:52
Yeah. And when you speak of trauma, Don, what kind of trauma? Are we looking at your emotional, physical? And how does that then manifest in different ways? Because you talk about your daughter having Crohn’s. But can it manifest in depression, anxiety, addiction, again, symptoms, but maybe not in a physical sense, but in a in how they’re acting out?

Don 12:19
Yeah. And I think a lot of that is coming from memory. Humans are the only animal that stores explicit memory, about events and experiences. We’ve stored everything we’ve ever experienced in our life in this memory system, in great detail, especially traumatic memory, it’s stored in high definition. So 95 95% of your mind, is survival based, operating fully in the present. So what happens when it activates a memory from five years ago? When is it think that it’s happening right now. So it creates a physiological response, an emotion, an emotion is a call for an action. So the purpose of fear is to escape a threat. The purpose of anger is to attack a threat. So if you think about something that happened to you five years ago, your minds calling for an action, if you feel an emotion. Now, that doesn’t make sense. It’s a glitch, an error message. That’s what we fix.

Guy 13:33
Got it? Got it. And I’m always fascinated, do we need to know, the trauma because our mental minds, our left side of the brain tends to hang on to a lot of things so we can give it meaning. And if we got something happening that’s manifesting out, like, like you say, In these cases, do we actually need to know what the trauma is? Or can we just remove whatever that glitch anyway,

Don 14:04
we can, all we need to do is find two or three different ones, that may not be one of the traumas you remember, once the mind starts the process of updating trauma, it does all of it. So it’s like an algorithm, an app that we’re installing, and it’ll go through and clear up pretty much everything.

Guy 14:25
That’s incredible. I think the mind

Don 14:27
and body are designed to heal. So if you had a broken leg and we reset your leg, we don’t have to think about it healing. everything just goes into place to start healing. Yes, designed to do that.

Guy 14:41
So you’re looking for this tipping point where you get to the root and then there’s momentum that kind of goes the other way and then the body goes into its healing phase.

Don 14:50
So when you go to sleep at night, your mind goes into a theta brainwave state, in theta, our mind processes everything that it learned In the day, so when I take you through the process, your mind then starts applying it. Even though we worked on two or three events, your mind then starts applying it to all those events.

Guy 15:12
Wow. And from your experience, and I want to put this to the listener because trauma is an interesting word because it’s not it’s not attractive. And and I find an overused, but I found in my own even in the health and fitness industry and now doing what I do. People don’t like to admit, they got this, there’s something they’re like, quite often we can be in our mind and go well, I don’t have trauma, like I’ve had a, I’ve had a good life, like you said, growing up. But have you found that there has been trauma, you were just unaware, and it has been playing out in a way that you weren’t aware?

Don 15:48
Yes. And that can very easily happen. So people who are high functioning, like my wife, she didn’t realize that it was trauma that was affecting her. So and if you met her, you would never have seen it. I saw it because it was behind the scenes. And she was also very protective. So she didn’t want anybody to know about her childhood. And so she swore me to secrecy. And it wasn’t until she went through this program that she’s now open to share it. It took away all that shame and guilt and regret.

Guy 16:27
Yeah, beautiful. I know those those emotions as well as shame. They are the big things burdens that we carry. And it’s no wonder it shows up because we suppress them so much without lifestyle choices and don’t want to go there.

Don 16:42
So the whole idea is those emotions are calls for an action. So if your mind is calling for an action, about something that happened 10 years ago, that doesn’t make sense. So we have to update that. So if somebody is actually chasing you now, it makes sense to feel fear. But if you’re thinking about somebody who chased you 10 years ago, and you feel fear, that doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, mind seeing it in real time.

Guy 17:19
Absolutely. Sorry that they went off camera. But that’s that’s fine. So Don. What I’m intrigued as well, and then is sorry, be hitting your left, right and center with these quests. I know, it’s great. How far can the trauma go back?

Don 17:36
I believe it goes all the way back into birth. Wow, go that far back into the womb.

Guy 17:43
Yeah. And there’s no way we will have memories of that I’m assuming until we go there, those

Don 17:48
will probably I don’t know. Because most of the stuff I work on is things that most of the people can either remember, or we remember two or three, and the mind will clear others. Got it. But the great part about this, I don’t need to know what the trauma is. I’ve had people come to me who I know have had major, major trauma. And they never share one word of it. And at the same time, I can take them through this process and clear it. So it’s very, very safe. So you know, for example, if I’m working with a woman who’s been sexually assaulted, the last thing she wants to do is sit there and start talking about that in detail to a stranger. So I’m going to ask her for about a two to three minute highlight, recap. And they she can do it just visually, I have no idea what she’s saying. And during the process of those two or three minutes, I get the mind to update it and reset it.

Guy 18:53
Wow, how did you come to these conclusions with this work? You know, because it you know, and I’ve been in this game long enough to know to know that there’s there’s things that can feel mainstream and things that can feel fringe. But for me, I find everything when I get out to the mainstream and really start to dig and look, that’s where the gold lies. And it’s amazing what you’ve you’ve put together and now do and how you support people.

Don 19:22
I studied a lot of different modalities. And some of the things I thought were good, some of the things weren’t so good. And so I sort of took bits and pieces and then developed my own program from that and develop some of my own techniques. And as I started testing it and going out there with people, it was amazing the results. And now I do a four hour program. I don’t know anybody else who’s doing four hours. But the reason I do that is because I believe it takes about an hour and a half to two hours to get the mind into a restorative mindset. And then it’s just simple because the minds ready to update. It’s in a very alpha brainwave state, where that’s very, very peaceful and calm, but super focused. And then when we bring in the memory from two or three minutes, the minds able to update it fairly quickly.

Guy 20:26
Amazing. And what happens at the end of the four hours? So Are they aware of what’s happened?

Don 20:35
Oh, yeah. They’re participating throughout the whole thing. And so for example, I worked with Rebecca Gregory from the Boston Marathon bombing. She was three feet from the first first bomb, and she lost her left leg. So she’d been experiencing post traumatic stress for five years, have been tearing up my airs, nightmares every night. After we took it through the program, she had no more nightmares. And in fact, after we finished the technique, she could talk about it without shaking and crying. That fast.

Guy 21:15
That’s amazing. I was blown away by a story. I think I heard you speak about, I wonder if you could share it as well. And I think it was about a couple that were accidently accused of a shooting.

Don 21:29
Yeah. It’s her name is. Oh, my gosh, I’m in sunny, Sunny, Sunny Jacobs. And sunny and her husband. were driving to North Carolina. And somebody suggested that there was somebody who needed a ride. So they shared the ride. And during the trip, Sonny and her two children was sleeping in the backseat. And her husband was in the front seat with this guy driving. He got pulled over by the police and was wanted. So he shot and killed the police officer. And then what happened is, is when the police Then he took off in the car, the police finally disabled the car by shooting at the car. And then when they got out, they thought, okay, we’re safe. But they blamed all of them. And they actually all went to prison for murdering a police office. And so her husband was actually executed on death row. And two years later, Sonny was exonerated. Because they realized she didn’t do it. And so she ended up meeting another man who had also been accused of policing officer in Ireland, and they fell in love. And now she lives in Ireland with him. And she works with a lot of people who get exonerated. And then they come over and spend some time with her and she talks to them about it and counsels them on it. But she went through our program, and she said this is the only thing that stopped the looping of the trauma.

Guy 23:09
That’s incredible. I mean, what what she would have felt 17 years

Don 23:14
on death row. And they’ve done plays about her life. Susan Saran then Margo Thomas, Marlo Thomas, Kate Capshaw have all played her and these plays. Wow, great story.

Guy 23:31
And when they when somebody over go through your programming overcomes Why? Because I heard a great quote once. And that’s the memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. And is that what is kind of happening that you’re able to look back upon your I’m assuming you still have the memories? It’s not like they’re wiped from you.

Don 23:53
Right? Yeah. So what happens is, and this is why I explained so much about the science. The only reason you have an emotion is because your mind wants you to do something. When we update that memory, you just see the information. But your mind’s not calling for an action, because the action would be designed to protect you. But there’s nothing to be protected from. So it’s just information.

Guy 24:25
Hmm. Wow.

Don 24:26
Does that make sense?

Guy 24:28
Yeah, yeah, totally. Absolutely. So what about people with say, like, depression is a common one?

Don 24:35
That’s a really good question. What I say to people when they come in with depression, is I say, Can you tell me what you’re angry about? And most of them will say, Well, I’m not angry, I’m depressed. And I say right. Depression is the absence of an emotion. Your mind has been calling for an action over and over because you Didn’t take the action, your mind protects you and shuts down. Once we get to this source of what the anger was, and we resolve it, the depression lifts.

Guy 25:16
Amazing. There’s a protection. So if, if you know if somebody doesn’t express much emotion, and and keeps themselves closed off, and it could be labeled and depression, that’s normally something there’s normally a deep anger. Is that what you found that’s residing underneath or something that’s a trauma that’s happened, they’ve shut down and they disassociate from themselves?

Don 25:41
Yeah. Because the minds me saying, stop it from happening, do something about it. So say you took a child who was physically or emotionally abused. As they kept thinking about it, their mind would be saying, stand up for yourself, do something, say something. Now, if that’s going on for years and years, since you were a child, and you never did, because you couldn’t, the mind shuts down to protect you. And I always talk about when people say, I sabotage myself, I sabotage myself, I say that’s impossible. The brain cannot sabotage itself. It’s designed for survival. So it will do whatever can take to live, not die. And so if it can work around a problem, it’s seen as a potential pain. And it wants to avoid the pain. So say, for example, somebody had experienced maybe a father who was very successful. And yet he was an alcoholic. Or maybe he was abusive. And now this person starts to become successful. Their mind has associated the Father and that pain was success. And all of a sudden, now they what looks like sabotage, but it’s actually protection from running into the same pain. Right?

Guy 27:13
Yeah, that makes sense. So I’m guessing then especially because, you know, you’ve worked with all kinds of people to high achievers to people with trauma. Well, not say that thing that traumatic, big, traumatic experiences. So because we all have trauma, but when you shift that trauma Are you seeing then like, and I’m just gonna go slightly while we’re here, because I found myself as I’ve worked on myself, over the years, I find the way I’m being from a moment to moment basis, I just feel more peace with myself more, more joy, and I appreciate the moments more, and I’m not striving so much to fulfill an internal need. If that makes sense. Then, as I’ve come more from that place, my life has worked out more beautifully and randomly, in more ways than I could ever predict. Would you say that’s a fair comment in what you’re finding? If If there’s something shifted or moves, things start to open up for people? or what have you witnessed? Or how would you frame that?

Don 28:15
Yeah, that’s a great question. What I have experienced, is it people will say, things look brighter, the grass looks greener, the sky looks blower. And the way I explain it, is it if your mind is using energy, to fix things that don’t exist, you don’t have 100% of your energy available. When we free up all that energy, everything just seems to work easier. Everything looks brighter, feels lighter. And is because now you have more power, more energy. So also health improves. And I asked somebody based on what I’ve explained, and how your mind keeps using energy to fix something that doesn’t exist, how much do you lose? And people will say 60 7070. And I say, so imagine what happens when we free up that energy. Now your maintenance is going to get taken care of your health will improve, you’ll feel better, you’ve just got more power, for focus. And that’s why I called it a performance program. It’s not trauma therapy, because I start from the premise that there’s nothing wrong with anybody. There’s nothing wrong with anybody’s mind. everybody’s mind is being affected by events and experiences. And that stopping us from staying present

Guy 29:53
amazing. I’m keen to touch on as well if you don’t mind Don your son because I know he had a head injury. And that being a form of physical trauma, and I’m already curious to know what you discovered along with that, because I come from rugby background. I used to play rugby union long time ago and I haven’t played in over 20 years, but I still listen to rugby podcasts and head injuries and trauma is a big talking point in the game right now back home in the UK, and I’m from Wales, which is I don’t know if you know, but rugby is our religion. Oh, yeah. Yeah, hockey. Hockey, right. Yeah, yeah. So I’m curious to know, like, if this leads into that, or what you found out with your son, as well, if you wouldn’t mind sharing,

Don 30:41
he had three head injuries, one in elementary school, one in middle school, one in high school. And each one progressively, he started to see more signs of problems. And by the time he was in high school, they were trying to diagnose them as having major depression. And I said, No, I believe he has TBI, traumatic brain injury. But I could not get them to agree with me, they would not do the scans that I want to. I wanted to do a SPECT scan, so we could see blood flow. And so they just wanted to do an MRI. And they said the MRI looks fine. But it wasn’t the MRI I needed, I need either a functional MRI, or a SPECT scan to show the blood flow. Because that’s what I believe was happening, he wasn’t getting enough blood flow to certain parts of the brain, in particular to his frontal lobe, which is what you need for your executive functioning. So it would appear like depression. But it wasn’t depression, he just couldn’t get enough power to do what we do and take for granted. So he would just want to lie down and sleep. He didn’t want to do anything, he lost interest in everything. And of course he would, because he didn’t have the power to do what he was trying to do. That would be very, very disturbing. And so they just wanted to medicate them. And I said no. And so we eventually end up having to take them to a specialist who was able to do a SPECT scan for me, and also did a hyperbaric dive, and then added another spec scan. And we showed more blood flow starting to move. And so ever since we got him into hyperbaric oxygen therapy, he lit up because now he has enough power, enough oxygen to the parts of the brain that had been damaged from the head injuries. And I’m sure playing rugby and I played hockey, but I had six concussions that I know of, but I never had the problems he had. So why, who knows? The doctor harsh that we went to see, he just said you have a bigger reserve. He just didn’t have that same reserve. Yeah. Wow.

Guy 33:05
So you’re with the hyperbaric oxygen chambers? How many sessions Do you think it would take to start to see results because I know we’ve spoken about Lisa often on air. And when I heard her story with a mom, and then putting her through the hyperbaric just blew me away, like, you know, it’s

Don 33:29
so at least 20. And a 40 would be great. But the more you do, the better it is. And the problem we have with our son is he feels better. So we keep saying keep going. And he’s like, but I’m okay. He doesn’t want to do more. But I know he would continue to improve if we could get him to do more.

Guy 33:53
Wow. Wow. I’d like to try that. Like give myself a what would you say one a week?

Don 34:00
What do you want to do them close together? cumulative thing. So once it pushes in so much, and then can you got to push a little more than next time and next time. So it’ll start to move back. So you want to do them as close as possible. Possible. Gotcha.

Guy 34:17
Yeah. Okay. And have you put yourself through it through it?

Don 34:20
Oh, yeah. I’ve said, Yeah. But I didn’t have the problem that he had. But even if it helps everybody is one of the best kept secrets in medicine. And Lisa will tell you all about that. How it changed her mother’s life.

Guy 34:34
Yeah, well, we got a full podcast on it. If so people can scroll back, you know? Yeah, it’s just fascinating. So just loop it all the way back round. Somebody who’s had a four hour session with you. They’ve gone through there we’ve moved in and I know you speak about the theater cuz obviously sleep is so important anyway, with a lot of healing goes on. So we fall asleep and then we go on into that unconscious theater state while sleeping. And that’s when we’re auto correcting ourselves, while the

Don 35:06
mind is doing a lot of processing and fade out, right, go below four hertz, or cycles per second, you go into delta. And delta is where most of the maintenance gets done. Because that’s when it’s dreamless. Sleep. Yeah, mine is now just focused on maintenance. In theta, it’s processing what you’ve experienced. And that’s why I find people who have trauma, have trouble sleeping, because the minds continuing trying to process it. But it can’t process it, because it’s not happening. It’s just information.

Guy 35:43
Okay, and then do do we need then after the session and moving forward? Is it easy to slip back in that? Or have you found that it’s auto corrected, and all the other practices we need to enforce just to ensure the work we’ve just done is then supported like?

Don 36:03
Well, what we do have to the four hour session, is I give you 30 days of audios, right? Because humans have two memory systems. We have explicit memory, the details about events, no other animal has that just humans. And then we have procedural memory. And that’s associative. So we learn through Association and repetition. So we develop habits and behaviors. So we also want to start updating those old habits and behaviors. And we do that by listening to the audios. But it’s easier to do that now. Because you don’t have memory activating the nervous system. So now they make the changes we want.

Guy 36:47
Yeah, and, and a lot of these questions are quite selfish, because I’m just coming up from the listeners, well, what group environments because we hold retreats here in Australia, and I work with a therapist and and also as somebody that works with sound. And what we found over three or four days is that when you put people in a group, this synergy about house that is just, I talked about it on the show or on the science of the quantum field, whatever you want to label it, I don’t know. But there’s something magical that happens as well. Have you done this in group environments yourself and notice a difference I have, I started

Don 37:31
with a group of five, and then I went to 10. And then I did 40. And the biggest one I’ve done is 140. Oh, and you’re right, it’s a huge energy in that room. And what I do is they bring one person up, and I’ll do a session, like a quick like update for them. And when you watch somebody heal in a room, and all these people are seeing that, it’s amazing. And then I then show all of them, I take them through the same technique. So I show them a technique, demonstrate, and then take them all through it. But they got to watch the person literally transform in front of them. And it’s very powerful.

Guy 38:18
Wow, and that guy, because it gets me thinking, you know, because obviously, with something this work is so important, you know, and especially with a pandemic, and things that have been going on, you know, there’s a lot of people that need need support with this kind of stuff. And, and obviously, big groups to be able to take people through would be phenomenal.

Don 38:38
So I have an online as well an online program that people can go through, or we can do the groups, or they can do one on one with me. I mean, all of them work very well.

Guy 38:49
Yeah, amazing. And do you find that people need to be open and ready to do this

Don 38:57
always helps, because it makes my job easier. Yeah, I’ve had people come in saying, I’m very skeptical. I don’t really believe this is gonna help me. But I said, you don’t need to believe in science for science to work. I’m gonna take you through the process. Your brain does all the work. I’m just taking it through a process. And so you can believe whatever you want. But the brain understands the communication of the program. Yeah, so like I said, I had a guy come in who literally was just didn’t keep somebody else happy, who kept telling him he had crashed his plane with his nine year old daughter into a lake. And so he did not want to go through our program. He finally got convinced to comment he did it just to get the person to stop asking him and then after the session, He called this person up and said that was the single greatest life changing experience I’ve ever had. And he did not want to come.

Guy 40:04
There you go. Amazing. Yep. Do you ever? How does it make you feel that the impact you’re having on another person and the ripple effect that’s going on?

Don 40:14
Instagram all it really is to watch people and and see them change, see their lives change. You know, I worked with a lady who was in her 60s, got a home invasion was pistol whipped and was suffering with post traumatic stress. That therapist who sent her to me, she called me after the session to say that this lady came back into seer. And she said she was walking with a walker. And she came in to see the therapist and says, I have good news and bad news. And she says, Well, the good news is looks like you’re not walking with a walker. She goes, right, I don’t need my Walker, she goes, the bad news is you’re fired. I don’t need to come back. Because we healed her. And she would have been in therapy for years with that, teaching her to live and manage and cope with it. Now I’m not against therapy, where I think therapy is very beneficial is dealing with day to day life stresses, you know, a job a relationship, things like that. What is not very good at is trauma. Because it continues to reinforce the trauma. Yeah, by talking about it.

Guy 41:29
Do you think this will become conventional wisdom in helping people heal?

Don 41:36
I do. I think it’s just so cutting edge right now. And it goes against what they’ve all been trained. The advantage for me, I came into it not wanting to learn what they did to practice it. I wanted to learn it to get my degree. But I wanted to come up with something better. So I came in right from the start trying to say there’s got to be a better way.

Guy 42:00
Wow. Wow, there you go. I am now that’s amazing. It’s amazing. I’m just aware of the time on the show when I asked everyone set of questions to get to know a little bit better. And I will ask you this one, but I’m not sure what it would be because you had such an idyllic upbringing, which is sounds amazing. Has there been a low point in your life that as leader, when you look back upon it, it’s been a blessing?

Don 42:31
Yeah, because I’ve always been a business person. And so I’ve always looked for different ways to succeed in life. And I’ve had my my failures, I had a major lawsuit with a big international corporation that tried to rip me off and steal my idea. And it went to, you know, a three four year lawsuit. That was a low point in my life, because I’m a very positive person. And dealing with that lawsuit was constant negativity. And that was very hard for me to live with. Until we got to the point where my wife says, You got to drop this, you got to get out of this. It’s killing you. And it was. Yeah, but I think because as a child, I learned to regulate my nervous system, I was able to handle that better. I could separate the times when I needed to be involved with it. And then the times when I was away from it, but just being in it is what was very, very disturbing for me. Because my lawyers would take me through the process, you know, and practice depositions and all that kind of stuff, and just beat me up and say, This is what you got to be prepared for. And I found that very negative.

Guy 43:53
Yeah, thank you for sharing it. You know, it’s interesting that you just triggered another question. But when you talk about your upbringing, and you’re in this very safe environment, and and I guess your nervous system wasn’t on Red Alert all the time. And I have you found from your work then. So depending upon how we were brought up and raised culturally got with guardians or whatever it might be, that we tend to, or if we move the trauma, that we tend to handle situations that those pressure situations much better, because the way our nervous system is able to self regulate better, doesn’t have the glitches.

Don 44:31
That’s actually what the whole program is for. So now, when new things come at you, you then have the old stuff that is then aggravating the nervous system. So you’re able to handle what’s happening now. Without this old data coming in. Yeah. Which is exasperates it.

Guy 44:50
Yeah. And then Hence, we don’t have the triggers that like, those little things that we’d like Like you said, Why is my wife crying right now? You know, Just from the tone of my voice, or it could be anything that could be setting it off. And we’re not even aware.

Don 45:06
And like I said, As a child, I got bumped every once in a while, you know, somebody at school or a teacher saying something. But when I came home, my whole nervous system would get regulated because I was in a safe place. And so my nervous system was being trained to do that. So if I had that early in life, when I came later in life, I just knew how to do it. where a lot of people don’t have that training early in life. They’re living in a lot of trauma. And so then when they come into more trauma as an adult, it’s just cumulative. And then it really becomes a source of distress for them. Yeah,

Guy 45:47
yeah, no, fair enough. Do you would? Do you have a morning routine? Or do you have any practices are anything that you implement in your life to kind of give yourself a bit of a maintenance? Or do you find that once you’ve worked on yourself, you can just casually go about your life.

Don 46:06
I don’t have a particular routine. I do different things all the time. And so I like to first thing I get up in the morning, and I’ll generally check the computer, I’ll check my emails. I don’t do anything to too much. I like to read and, and then sort of get into my work. But once I start my work, I want to continue. So sometimes my wife will say, she’ll come and say, well, let’s go for a walk. And I’ll go, I’m already in. You had to get me before I started. Because I want to keep going.

Guy 46:39
Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. If you were to give the book to someone, what book do you think it would be?

Don 46:48
I think the first one was talks about the program and how I developed, you must be out of your mind. Yeah, it’s a great book, because it shares a lot of the program and stories. I think people get a lot out of that. The second chapter was called emotional concussions. And they develop that, because a lot of people said, I don’t have that big t trauma. But what they had was these bumps, you know, a mean teacher, I mean, Coach, you know, somebody who said something, and then that affected them. Those are emotional concussions. And so I coined that term emotional concussions and then wrote the book.

Guy 47:27
Yeah, beautiful. And last question I asked everyone on the show to leave is, with everything we’ve covered today, is there anything you’d like to leave the listeners to ponder on?

Don 47:39
Yeah, I think it’s what I say right? From the very first thing when somebody comes to see me, there’s nothing wrong with anybody. And there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with your mind. If I lived your life, exactly the way you live yours. I couldn’t have done things any differently than you’ve done. I just lead a different life. But that life gave me the tools to help you

Guy 48:04
perform. And if they want to find out more. where’s the best place to send them? I can put links in the show notes anyway.

Don 48:12
Yeah, so I think we have www dot get tip g t. Tip pp.com. And then I think we’re doing slash isn’t a guy or on the show? What are we doing?

Guy 48:27
I’m not sure.

Don 48:28
I’ve been told, but it shouldn’t be. It’s probably in the notes. But even if you go to get tip car.com that’s where you’ll find the information.

Guy 48:37
Yeah, beautiful. And we will link below anyway, that’s fine. And and yeah, I’ve no doubt people will come and check you out on it’s loads of pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for for sharing, and I truly find it all fascinating. and

Don 48:54
enjoyed it. You’re gonna have to come over there and do a big group session.

Guy 48:58
Yeah. Absolutely. Once the world opens up a bit. Have you been to Australia? I’ve never been I’d love to. It’s beautiful country. Yeah, I have no doubt, you know, won’t be much ice hockey. But they’ll certainly be safe and good weather for you.

Don 49:15
Especially you rugby players or like as hockey players tough.

Guy 49:21
Yeah, I did think it was tough. Once upon a time. I’m not so sure now. Yeah, but look, thank you for all you do. Thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom today. I really appreciate it.

Don 49:42
I enjoy that.

Guy 49:45
Everyone will get a lot out of it. Thank you, Don.

Don 49:49
All right. Thanks, Guy. Take care.