Episode 213: Dark Night of our Soul documentary roundtable – trauma, post traumatic growth, and film making with Jessica and Jeff Depatie and Rick and Dr Danielle Alexander

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[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson:

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, and on this podcast we talk all about things to help your fitness journey from body composition, muscle hypertrophy, training, performance, all done in a flexible format. And today we’ve got something that probably on first blush doesn’t sound like it’s too related, but I believe that it is.

[00:00:26] We’re talking with the producers and some of the people in the new documentaryDark Night of Our Soul, and it’s a conversation related to trauma, high stress. And can you facilitate something called Post-Traumatic Growth? We’ve probably heard of PTSD or PTS, but after a high stress period, could you facilitate a huge amount of growth after that?

[00:00:55] And just from my experience from working with people in fitness for, oh man, over a decade and a half now, a lot of times when people get stuck, need to look a little bit deeper and see what is actually going on. And part of this, the reason for having them on, not only are they good friends, I’m super biased to the work they do.

[00:01:18] I was one of the experts in the documentary, and they’re in the process of raising money to finish the production of it. They have a 30 minute trailer. Now you can see, we’ll post a link down below for a small donation. I don’t make any money off of the promotion or anything like that. All the money goes through a Kickstarter campaign that they’ll either get funding for the film at the end or they don’t.

[00:01:43] So with Kickstarter, it’s an all or nothing thing, and I would really love to see this get finished. Hopefully it might be picked up by somebody much bigger for distribution so more people can get access to it. But I wanted to have them on the podcast to give you some exposure to it, to talk through some of the concepts in it.

[00:02:00] And I’ve had the luxury of knowing all of them for quite some time now. I’ve done podcasts individually with Rick and Dr. Danielle also. We have Jess and Jeff on here also. I almost said Jessica. That’s kinda crazy. If you want more information for me, go to mike t nelson.com. There’ll be a way to get onto the newsletter.

[00:02:20] That’s where almost all my information goes out at this point. So go there and enjoy this conversation with I think the greatest number of people I’ve had on the podcast to date, talking about the new documentary, Dark Night of our Soul.

[00:02:39] [00:02:40] Dr Mike T Nelson: Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, and today we’ve got a very special episode. We’ve got four other people on the podcast, which I think in over 200 some episodes. This is a record and we’re gonna talk all about a new documentary film I talked about in the intro here, and some things related to trauma, stress, and yeah, I think it’ll be a super interesting discussion.

[00:03:09] And then most of you’re gonna be on audio, so some of you can watch the video if you want. So if you wanna start in, I guess it would be my upper left with Danielle and Rick, if you guys want to go around and introduce yourself and what you did related to the film and anything else you wanna say.

[00:03:27] Rick: Sure.

[00:03:27] Yeah. So my name is Rick Alexander. I’m the writer for the film. Also I work as an author, a speaker, a coach and also a former military member. And so a lot of the, a lot of the themes that we touch on, a lot of, I, I study these things. I also very much live these things. That’s what I’m getting at.

[00:03:44] Yeah, that’s it.

[00:03:46] Dr Dee: I’m Danielle Alexander. I am a former doctor of physical therapy. I’m getting my PhD in depth psychology. I’m also a somatic experiencing practitioner, so I work in the throes of. Renegotiating trauma every day. And in terms of this documentary, I was interviewed for the documentary and also because my husband wrote the documentary, there’s been a lot of behind the scenes conversations about the script that he was writing.

[00:04:17] So I was blessed to feel the energy behind the scenes. So yeah.

[00:04:22] Dr Mike T Nelson: And you guys are both in graduate school now too, correct? Yep. Yep.

[00:04:28] Rick: Studying. Yeah, so I’m studying, so I’m studying myth mythology through the lens of psychology. So asking the question of how do people make meaning out of their experiences and really looking at that question through an interdisciplinary approach, studying psychology, myth, cognitive science, and also looking at that question across cultures.

[00:04:47] And so comparing different religions and ways that humans typically make meaning of their experiences, which I think that if the dark doc, if the dark night of the soul night of our soul documentary is anything, it is a, an experiment in meaning making and making meaning out of these incredibly difficult experiences that we go through.

[00:05:06] So yeah, I’ll be heading into my dissertation phase in very soon at the end of the summer.

[00:05:11] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Same for you, Danielle.

[00:05:14] Dr Dee: So I am in a, I’m in the same school, different program depth psychology. Basically studying is the reality of unconscious. A reality that we should be talking about. Particularly for me, I am interested in the somatic, unconscious, how unconscious processes show up somatically.

[00:05:33] How if anyone has heard of the term archetypes, these patterns of reality, do they live at a body cellular level? So that’s where I like to nerd out.

[00:05:47] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome.

[00:05:47] Jessica: Jess. Hi Dr. Mike. So nice to be on your show.

[00:05:52] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yes. Thank you for those listening. Jess actually helped set up a lot of our marketing stuff that we still use now for the Flex Diet Search and the Flex Diet podcast.

[00:06:03] So huge thanks to her for all her help.

[00:06:05] Jessica: Oh, you’re welcome. And your marketing is still looking fantastic years later.

[00:06:08] Dr Mike T Nelson:. Thank you. That’s, wait, I just used the stuff you set up.

[00:06:12] Jessica: Nice. That’s probably why I like it. So my name is Jessica Depok and I am one of the producers of this documentary, dark Knight of Our Soul.

[00:06:21] I have a podcast and YouTube channel, also called Shadow Work Library. And my background, like Mike was talking about started in started in journalism and then I moved into marketing in the fitness realm. And as a lot of us understand about fitness, it’s a really natural progression into understanding more about why we are the way we are.

[00:06:41] We come across, we come to our edges physically and like energetically in terms of how much we can output. And then it’s oh wow, I’m capable of so much. So it was a really fun and easy transition to this kind of work where we’re now looking at a different kind of pressure, a different kind of stress, a different kind of tension, more around an emotional state.

[00:07:01] And we brought Doc Dr. Mike in to be one of the experts of this po of this documentary because there is so much rollover between our physiological state and our emotional state and like our psychological state. So yeah,

[00:07:16] Dr Mike T Nelson: that’s me. Awesome. Thank you, Jeff.

[00:07:21] Jeff: Hi, I’m Jeff. Hi. I’m with these Fools. I’m a high school dropout, and I do this thing where I just type in random numbers for Zoom meetings and I end up on places like this.

[00:07:30] Sweet.

[00:07:31] Dr Mike T Nelson: Welcome.

[00:07:32] Jeff: I just kidding. Yeah. I’m a former operator in the Special forces realm. A, I don’t even know what to call it. Diagnosed with P T S D and I went down the rabbit hole of post-traumatic growth, and it just opened up so many avenues for me eventually leading to producing the dark night of our soul where I produced it and I worked on the interviews, the concept the story arc, all these things I knew nothing about.

[00:07:59] And now I’m okay with, but just like Jess, Mike, it’s a real pleasure to be here.

[00:08:05] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, no, thank you all for being here. And there’s obviously many other people who are involved who are not here, but. I’ll start off with Jess. Like what? Why do this? Because obviously, and I’ll pose this question to all of you, but making the movie, which I know nothing about other than my experience with you guys, it’s a pain in the ass.

[00:08:26] I think it’s worse than writing a book. I don’t know, but it seems to be a lot more expensive too. But why go through all of the hassle since most of this, as far as I’m aware, is all self-produced, self-funded, nobody came to you and said, Hey, I’ve got this great Hollywood idea. Do this. Like it was something that you organically wanted to do and threw yourselves into doing it.

[00:08:47] Jessica: Okay, so there’s so many parts to this story I’m gonna tell we got time. One part that I, I have not told on a podcast yet. Ooh. Which was actually really an important part of all this and such a weird twist of fate. So the first part is that Jeff and I, when we first met in 2016, we found this through line around being interested in just like exploring the range of life, right?

[00:09:13] And as we explore that range and we got into a relationship, we found that another thing that we were really interested in is something called post-traumatic growth, which was just like a scientific name for something that we realized we had intuited more or less throughout our lives. Speaking for myself, I put myself in a lot of for lack of a better word, like dumb situations, very trial and error kind of life.

[00:09:38] I drank a lot. I, just did a lot of things. And also I realized that going through these situations on the other side, if I could find meaning from them, if I could find something that I learned from these things. I would learn something really valuable about myself. Now, this is on hindsight, like this is all happening behind the scenes, but as Jeff and I were talking more and more about how we can use this concept to bring it to the civilian world, given Jeff’s background and coming from the military where they obviously experience a lot of hardship, a lot of traumas what could be considered traumas and a lot of adversity and a lot of people on the other side of that also learn so much about themselves and gain a lot of wisdom along with oth a lot of other things.

[00:10:22] So that was like the seed of everything. So then we created a course that you helped us on an event called the Process. And this is where we took a lot of these concepts from the military world and integrated some modern science to it, some modern psychology, and also the work of Dr. Danielle and Rick around mythology and working like real meaning into a lot of these, a lot of these activities, more or less that we would put people through.

[00:10:48] And that was fantastic. One of the limit limiting factors, though, is that we never wanted to create a factory out of that experience. We wanted to only send three PE 30 people through it each year. For reasons you might imagine. We wanted to keep it really sacred and we didn’t wanna burn out, and we wanted to be there for every single one.

[00:11:06] So that’s a consideration, right? Like how do we bring something that we found so much value in to the masses? Okay, so here’s the second part of this story. I think it was 2020, the year 2020. We get a call from a friend. I won’t mention his name, but we all know him. And he’s Hey, Christopher Nolan’s guy is has reached out to me.

[00:11:28] They’re doing a remake of GI Joe and mark Wahlberg is going to be the lead character. And so we’re bringing together the, we’re bringing together the A team. People to train him people to help with nutrition and they brought, they wanted to bring in Jeff to help with military consulting.

[00:11:48] So long story short, we hop on a call with Christopher Nolan’s guy, this guy, I’m from England somewhere. Really fantastic accent. We talk with Dana from, who’s the president of Disney, this beautiful, lovely middle-aged woman in California. We talked to multiple other people and sometimes they were all even on the same call.

[00:12:08] And you can imagine Jeff and I were lit, like we’re huge Nolan fans. And so we’re like, oh my gosh, we are gonna be a part in making a movie. And if they’re looking for consulting, maybe we can work in some of these universal stories that we were like so passionate about. Like really create, help them create something that can show.

[00:12:27] Another side to the military, other than glorifying this, maybe there’s some real meaning making that we can help integrate into this. So we don’t, so lots of conversations. Then they like Peter off and we don’t hear from them for a few months. We’re like, what happened? So our friend then calls us a few months later, he’s Hey, remember that Nolan guy that you were talking to?

[00:12:49] So it turns out it’s a scam. It’s a person out of Indonesia that can change his voice into all these different, like he’s an actor and there’s some kind of scam involved. So basically our friend had brought in an X C I A agent to help with security and this guy had these weird spidey senses about what was happening.

[00:13:10] So he called his contact in Disney and they were like, no, do not continue to talk to these people. There’s like a whole Hollywood scam that’s been going on for years and we’re trying to find him. Which fun fact they did just arrest this person like, Like months

[00:13:22] Dr Mike T Nelson: ago oh, they did? Ok. Cause I heard the story from the guy you’re talking about who remained nameless, and it’s a crazy ass story to say the

[00:13:29] Jessica: least.

[00:13:30] It was so funny, like at the time we were like, oh my God, gross. And then just felt so stupid. Now, clearly we didn’t give them any money and we weren’t even sure how they were gonna try to get money out of us. But if you did wanna know what the story was, there actually is a podcast that was produced called The Hollywood Con Queen that’s really good, that talks about this whole thing, which is actually a really good podcast.

[00:13:52] But anyway, Jeff and I were like, all right, so we were really excited about this. This is God to have happened. This is just too weird to be a co coincidence. What if we actually did make a movie? We could do it. We make podcasts, we make content. We have a fantastic director that we work really closely with.

[00:14:10] We have so much B-roll from all of these events that we’ve done, and we’re really good friends with some of the. Greatest minds in this arena. Why not? So that was like, what happened?

[00:14:22] Dr Mike T Nelson: And then we made a movie. It was kinda a, eh, we’ll do it.

[00:14:28] Jessica: We might as well work with that energy and put it someplace.

[00:14:32] Jeff: Oh, that’s awesome.

[00:14:32] And you know what happened, Mike? It it empowered us, we started having conversations with these people that we thought were execs from these high levels, and we were like, Hey we could talk. I talk like you, like we, we felt oh yeah, we contributed. Cuz this person was a mastermind.

[00:14:48] This wasn’t a low level scammer. Oh, good. And it just, it empowered us to feel like, Hey, you know what? Let’s

[00:14:53] Dr Mike T Nelson: just do this. And I heard the details of that story too. Like it wasn’t like some person in their mom’s basement like making calls. It was like thought out, like too well thought out. And yeah,

[00:15:06] Jessica: there was an entire town in Indonesia that was like committed to this scam.

[00:15:10] They would bring actors over and every hotel they would stay in, they would be like, oh, we’re gonna reimburse you just pay on your own dime basically. And you have to get these visas and you have to get this thing to do work legally here. And so they had all these officers and people and drivers just God, it was so wild.

[00:15:25] But anyway, yeah, just a great twist of fate because it sent us on this path that, I don’t know if we would be doing this if it wasn’t for that. So thank you guy in Indonesia.

[00:15:34] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So you were saying Jeff, just the impetu to got the idea and thought, hey, we can do this.

[00:15:40] Jeff: The idea had been burning sooner.

[00:15:42] So backing up from that two years prior when we first launched the process production companies approached us and they were like, oh, we’d love to turn this into a show. And I don’t know if it was my hubris or my humility I was like, no, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to add noise. I don’t want to make a fake show.

[00:16:03] This is not what this is. This is sacred ground to me. Not only is my experience to get here very personal, but it was very sacred to me. And I was discounting it, but it, that kind of started the rumblings towards it. And then bam like I said, it just the, I like the word relativity of attributes where your nervous system, your brain, your body, your soul, like maybe your soul, I don’t know.

[00:16:26] They haven’t been there until it’s been there. And this was like, it was almo. It was, yeah. It was fake, but it created all the circumstances to feel like we were there and it. I guess that’s what visualization, that’s what practice, that’s what drills are. That’s why we practice things.

[00:16:41] And usually it works out pretty good. It doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as the real deal because we all laugh right now on this side. It’s been a total not nightmare, but very steep learning curve. Cuz like you said I don’t know what it’s like to write a book. I would imagine it’s difficult, but I can tell you now that trying to bring a passion project to life through the medium of film and do it well, it is crazy.

[00:17:06] It’s a crazy industry that doesn’t know it’s head from its tail. It doesn’t like it’s so with the times, it’s very it thrives on popular culture in the moment. There is no, this is the standard procedure for those who like a little bit of an algorithm to follow. It’s been interesting to say the least.

[00:17:24] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. How’d you get roped into this, Rick? Yeah,

[00:17:28] Rick: A lot of, am I doing it right? A lot of that, and it’s interesting because I have written a couple of books and actually I would be, I’d love to talk about the differences, but you know what’s interesting cuz Jess asked me something along the lines of this on her podcast of like, why trauma or something.

[00:17:42] And it really I’m starting to realize it. It’s a thing. It’s something that’s called me. It’s something that shows me. So when I was writing my second book this is just an interesting story. I really, getting out of the military wanted, I wanted to go on my own kind of heroes journey.

[00:17:56] I was going to be a writer and I wanted to figure it out. So that’s what I did. I went I went backpack to Australia and wrote a book by, I wrote part of one draft of a book. And it turns out it’s much more difficult and much more time consuming. Yeah interestingly is I put the manuscript down for a couple of months.

[00:18:14] There’s, that’s just how my process is. I write and then I I have to walk away and I have to do other things and come back to it. So when I came back to it the second time I was moving through a chapter where I was talking about veteran suicide. It was I was trying to make a point about the larger sort of paradigms we think within and maybe we should start asking questions if so many people are taking the exit ramp early, like maybe we should ask questions about the life and the world we’re building, why people want to leave.

[00:18:40] It was something along, I was, the chapter didn’t even make it in the book. The point is between the first and the second draft I had to update the number of veterans that had killed themselves by tens of thousands, including one of my good friends. Nice. Yeah. It, like I remember sitting in Starbucks.

[00:18:56] I just remember the moment of do editing going through the number I and I. Go back to the source to check the statistics. And I just have this moment of realizing these aren’t abstract concepts. That they can seem like abstract concepts when we talk about ’em, but people are struggling like this. It is a struggle to be here in some sense. And that I’ve just, I feel like I’ve been awakened to that fact over and over. And because it’s a struggle to be here.

[00:19:24] And because I tend to think divergently I feel like we should, if we have any rights at all, it is to be able to start having any kind of conversation we want about how difficult it is to be here and what it actually could look like. And as we start to, and this is one of my favorite things to do, is to play with ideas and to Contemplate deeply the things that I don’t understand or I can’t let go or stir my soul in some way.

[00:19:48] So over time, yeah, it’s come over and over. It’s come back. This thing has chosen me. And then it was cool to be at the beginning too, to watch them start making it. Cause I wasn’t part of the team at first. And just watching it from the periphery. And then I don’t remember if you asked me to be the writer or just assumed that I was, it felt like

[00:20:09] Dr Mike T Nelson: you guys can, you’re gonna do this.

[00:20:10] Rick: But what an experience, and the cool thing about it is, the director Zacharia Montgomery’s not here right now. But what we’re getting ready to do a show on actually the creative process behind the doc. Nice. Something. Yeah.

[00:20:23] Something I’ve been thinking about though is it’s interesting to see, we all create differently. We all make meaning differently. We all move through the life, move through life a little bit differently. And we have this thing in common that we want to ask this question. Is growth possible? Is deepening and connecting and becoming more human possible as a result of the things we’ve gone through that kind of unites us.

[00:20:43] But we have all of these other perspectives. Jeff, he’ll always start with, I didn’t finish high school and within 30 minutes he’ll be dropping. Philosophy and neuroscience on you in your head will hurt. You can’t keep up. Oh

[00:20:55] Jeff: yeah.

[00:20:56] Dr Mike T Nelson: That’s happened multiple times.

[00:20:57] Jeff: I’m like, I

[00:20:58] Rick: don’t know, I gotta go think about that for three years.

[00:21:00] Yeah. I feel we have this thing in common, but we also all have our own perspective. So to watch the creative process come together, With all of these different perspectives and now putting it out in the world and seeing, oh, we all, we give birth to creation in a much different, in, in all our own particular ways too.

[00:21:19] It’s been a really cool, yeah. Learning process. Being on this

[00:21:22] Dr Mike T Nelson: end of it, and I believe you guys did it technically backwards I don’t believe you, you started with an idea of, trauma, post-traumatic growth, which we’ll talk about, but you, my understanding is started doing the interviews first and then tried to piece it together after that.

[00:21:41] Is that correct? And I guess that is the non-traditional way of doing it. Yeah.

[00:21:46] Rick: I’ll let Jeff speak to it a bit, but there was definitely a, from my end, a letting the story unfold, be told the way that it wanted to be based on the real world interviews and conversations.

[00:21:56] Yeah.

[00:21:57] Jeff: With docs, especially nowadays, like you can approach it in inductively and deductively and lots of. Documentaries now, to lay out this is what it is, and then we’re gonna fill it in as we go. And we were like this is what we want to explore. Let’s open up the funnel wide and see where it goes.

[00:22:16] And we tried to follow that as deeply as we could to not bias it. As humans, were all very capable of bias, and we wanted to bring this thing that we felt intuitively was a human story. And that’s where we branched out. We weren’t scared to get tangential with this. We weren’t going to put take anything off the table, but we knew going into it that, yeah.

[00:22:43] P t g, esky and Calhoun had already named that. Okay. Joseph Campbell had already worked out the Hero’s Journey, which looks very similar to posttraumatic growth. You can look at any one of the the philosophers in in the doc we call esky, refers to it as, Existentialists. But I think they’re just, philosophers doesn’t necessarily have to be existential.

[00:23:02] This has been part of our story, it’s part of our evolution. And how do you start to tell that story in, a manageable amount of time? Because we ended up, like you had mentioned, Mike, we started doing the interviews and we learned later on that most people don’t have terabytes of interviews.

[00:23:21] They don’t have 27 interviewees. They don’t, all these things we didn’t really know, because we just were like we’re just gonna go and we’re gonna let the winds of fate take us and we’re gonna use our best judgment when we can. And so b so backwards, yes. In lots of ways. We didn’t get funding, we’re upfront, we didn’t present a wire frame to a streamer and, all these methods that people actually use.

[00:23:42] But I think, I don’t think. I feel, and I know that it produced something that when most people watch, just even the short, now there’s this deep resonance with it. We’re not quite all the way to the finish line, but people are like, okay, I feel that. And I feel that because I’m a human, I understand intuitively story, I understand these things because they just might be intrinsically some of the most important things that we go through.

[00:24:10] And Rick alluded to this thing we call suffering, right? Semantics, we can call it all kinds of things, struggle, adversity, whatever you wanna call it. But the truth is everyone goes through it. I was just on a call the other day with someone super, one of those hyper successful like waffle, wall Street kind of fellas, winking the gun.

[00:24:28] You let me worry about that kind of guy. And by every metric he, he’s successful, and yet he struggles deeply because he’s not living out. His own myth. He’s not living himself out. He’s part of this thing that we can call it traumas and adversities that he didn’t properly resolve have led him into this dark place.

[00:24:48] And it’s like he’s so nervous to be judged in the boardroom and all around him and it’s hey man, I’ll let you in on a secret. We’re all doing that, we’re humans. We should probably do it together.

[00:25:02] Yeah. If I can,

[00:25:03] Dr Mike T Nelson: yeah, go

[00:25:03] Jessica: ahead. Now looking back at it, I hadn’t really thought about this before it, but we had a couple of categories that we knew we wanted to explore to start things off. We wanted to talk to Rick and Dr. Danielle around mythology and psychology. We wanted to talk to you about physiological rollover and how that plays into all of this.

[00:25:25] And then we also wanted an epigeneticist, and I think there was another thing there, maybe a sociologist. I think those were the. Like core things. And so we went about this just like you would have a curious conversation, like I’m gonna start talking to Mike. And he brings up something about, epigenetics and it’s oh, I should find an epigeneticist.

[00:25:48] And then we talk to the epigeneticist and they bring up something around like depth psychology and oh, I should meet a depth psychologist. And also he talked about music and martial arts. So let me find a couple of people that talk about those things or have lived experiences of that and lived experiences of post-traumatic growth.

[00:26:03] And it just spidered into this really cool like mind map of information. A lot of which we didn’t use, like Jeff had mentioned. But then Rick and Zacharia Montgomery had this crazy task of then creating a story from it. So the result. And I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but this is the best way for me to explain what this documentary is because it’s not like your typical documentary.

[00:26:33] It is a it, I think it views like a nature documentary, but instead of animals, it’s people. So now we’ve created this narrative, this, these points, and I think the points are, one, we all have trauma as Anderson Todd says, nobody gets outta the parking lot without putting dents in the car. Two, it’s fine.

[00:26:55] Like it’s fine. It happens to everybody. Like it’s okay, you don’t need to identify with it, but it’s a thing. Three, what do we do with that material, right? What, how do we find meaning from it? Is there meaning in it? What do we do with it? And then to conclude, is there a moral responsibility to, sorry, my cats are crying.

[00:27:16] Is there a moral responsibility to. To go on this adventure, go into your inner world. And so in finally putting that story arc together with the hell of Jeff, of course, who had mapped this out in his own crazy way, Jeff is like a beautiful mind when it comes to these things. I

[00:27:34] Dr Mike T Nelson: just imagine lots of whiteboards everywhere with lots of writing and arrows and Yeah,

[00:27:41] Rick: totally like that sand.

[00:27:43] Jessica: Yeah. He’s this is what I’ve been saying the whole time. We’re like, okay, we don’t speak binary. And yeah, it was so fun. Every week we’d meet up and Luke’s hair would just be longer and longer each week and his eyes will be redder and he’s losing skin color and losing his mind also.

[00:27:59] And at the end of it, he’s just I’m so happy with this finally, and for all of us to do this. I think this is off topic, but we put a lot of our. I’ll just speak for myself. I put a lot of my worth into this documentary, whether that was smart to do or not, and I just realized I was doing that.

[00:28:16] So it was a really emotional process to go through. Because as we’re diving into these depths and into these concepts, it would be irresponsible and I think impossible to not also have them show up in, in our own lives. So that was a really interesting aspect of this too, that, we dedicated ourselves to really heading base first into what post-traumatic growth is and our lives mimicked.

[00:28:41] Do you wanna learn the lesson of post-traumatic growth? Here’s some things that you’re gonna have to look at. Here’s some things you’re gonna have to learn from if you really wanna. Spread awareness. If you really wanna change the conversation, here’s like real life stuff that you’re gonna have to deal with.

[00:28:53] So we’re all different people on the other side of it. And so grateful for that. The journey’s not over by any means, but now we’re at a point where people can watch that 30 minute film, which will be a 90 minute feature, which if you’re listening right now, you can go to post-traumatic growth.film and donate.

[00:29:09] We’re asking for $15 or more. More will be better. But $15 is fine. And to watch that short film and the funds will be used to finish this bad boy.

[00:29:20] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And to me it feels more like an actual more air quotes true scientific process because you actually are, you wanna accumulate the data. You wanna figure out, what is stuff I don’t know about.

[00:29:32] I’ve got this kind of general idea where I don’t know, to me, like I don’t enjoy a lot of new documentaries, at least some of ’em are good. But the few that I’ve seen, A lot of ’em feel very formula, like you’ve got the kind of arc of it, and they just, they had their agenda, they had all their biases, and they went and found experts in air quotes just to plug in who already had those biases.

[00:29:55] And, eh, I don’t know. It didn’t, I, I feel like I got to the end of it and I was just like, oh, this was like one big infomercial for, whatever. Or this, at least watching this short, it felt much more like you guys were saying organic and like you’re you’re on this like sort of human journey with everyone else.

[00:30:13] It didn’t I wasn’t entirely sure where it was gonna go, which I thought was actually very nice and refreshing compared to what a lot of documentaries are now. I guess

[00:30:25] Jessica: I really appreciate that reflection on it because that was important to us in, to Rick in particular, Rick and Danielle in particular, because with the work that they do every day, It’s like we’re trying to define something that’s undefinable.

[00:30:38] Like defining the subconscious is a, it’s a jumbo shrimp moment. Like it just doesn’t make sense. But to consider to make this a contemplative process and to also make it digestible, because it can be complicated when we really dive into this. If you listen to John River’s full interview, which I’m starting to publish the full interviews on my YouTube channel, and just so people can see all of the stuff that we had to delete, that’s so good.

[00:31:04] The dude’s a mad man. Like his mind is so brilliant and to chop that up was really difficult. Like the, his style is so different. The way that he tells a story is so beautifully put together. But also to segment that out, sometimes it doesn’t make sense. Yeah, it was a really interesting process to do that.

[00:31:25] Actually, Mike, if I could ask you a question. Yeah. I wanna, because this is something that has been coming up cause a lot of coaches and fitness people that are interested in being the best versions of themselves. Like they’re really in this industry of helping somebody progress for performance, for life, for all the things to be healthier and all those things.

[00:31:48] How did you find that this topic is relevant to them? Cause I think that is the majority of your listener

[00:31:53] Dr Mike T Nelson: base. Yeah. The more I got into fit, so I got a typical fitness journey where you start and you’re like, oh, it’s all just nutrition. And then, oh, it’s exercise and this better plan and this plan.

[00:32:03] And then as you go along, you fast realize why the hell did I study? Exercise, physiology, metabolism? I should have been a damn psychologist, number one. And it has very little to do with nutrition and everything else. It, it does, but it doesn’t. And then you start going down the psychology, path, mindset.

[00:32:23] And I started doing some hands-on work on people. And then you realize that the analogy of the duck that’s paddling really hard underwater but looks calm on the top, that a lot of the people who I thought, oh, they don’t have any trauma in their life, they don’t have anything weird that’s happened to them.

[00:32:40] Look at this, they got everything going for ’em. Oh, it’s all great. And then, as you work with them, you realize, wow, like 80, 90 plus percent of people have something significant. If we wanna use trauma or whatever word we want, that’s many times subconscious. Like they, they don’t know that is what’s holding them back.

[00:33:01] And that to me was shocking. So I, I think if people are listening to this from the outside, that. It’s kinda like the little picture of the iceberg, right? You’re only seeing the very top portion of it. And there are other things that are probably holding them back from being able to consistently do the things like, yeah, they can white knuckle their way, through it.

[00:33:23] And so I think of it more now as healing the onion back and trying to make them more aware of what’s going on. And then there’s also a side where, how much of it do you want to make them conscious of if they don’t want to deal with it, right? Like I think one of the worst things you could probably do is make someone very conscious of something that they don’t want anything to deal with that was maybe unconscious before, right?

[00:33:52] I don’t know if you could force ’em to do it or not. That’s debatable, but you’re guiding them through. But at the end of the day, they have to decide if they’re going to go through the door or not. Like I’ve done some hands on work on people where I felt. Okay. If I push them in this one direction, they might be better, they might be worse, but I don’t think they’re ready to handle that.

[00:34:13] So it’s always this teamwork of, okay, here’s what I’m seeing. What do you think of this? Oh yeah, okay, this or that happen. Okay, do you wanna go forward and do the next step? And sometimes they’re like, no. I’m like, cool. Then you know we’re done. So it’s more like this journey.

[00:34:29] Not necessarily, I’m just telling you, yes, eat chicken breast and broccoli and yes we cover all of those things. But to me it was very surprising that it was more at the kind of a deeper rooted issue in pretty much everyone. Or initially I thought, oh, some people have it all figured out and everything works well for them.

[00:34:48] Kinda like you were saying about the Wall Street guy, Jeff, like the outward appearance I think is very, Easy to not necessarily fake, but to make everything look like it’s going well. When reality is there’s probably some unconscious things that they need to work on. It’s probably one of their biggest limiters.

[00:35:05] And then it, it’s happened multiple times where they address that they do the work and then Oh wow. Everything else all of a sudden just seems to flow a little bit better.

[00:35:14] Jessica: If I can just, I’m not gonna take over this podcast, I promise. No, you’re good. But I’m just gonna say one more thing. Rick has this really great analogy and Rick, I was hoping you could speak to this.

[00:35:23] Cause I’m, I can’t say it as well as you do, but that thing about New Year’s resolutions, the person that makes a resolution on the 31st and then hits the alarm on the first is like a different person. I think that’s so relevant in this conversation.

[00:35:37] Rick: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s building off of the idea that.

[00:35:40] Yeah. Let me start with subconscious. We use the word subconscious, like I’ve heard it, and now we just switch to unconscious. And I’m just, I’m always like very technically interested in what we’re saying. I, the subconscious, the word sub is obviously below, so it’s below the threshold of consciousness.

[00:35:54] But when we use subconscious, we tend to be like, oh, it’s my subconscious. And all of a sudden there’s, I, all of a sudden I have ownership over it. The truth is these things are unconscious, meaning you actually don’t know about them and you don’t know if you have ownership over them, and likely they have you more than you have them.

[00:36:09] And I think that’s a very first important sort of orientation move, like toward our difficulties and our struggles. The second orientation move that I think is important is that really starting to, in our language we tend to view ourselves as individuals. And so the eye, the, which I would call the ego, ego literally comes from the Latin eye.

[00:36:30] The, we tend to feel as though the ego, the I is the one that is doing all of these things. And if I have a problem, it must be because I need to do better. The truth is, I think actually that we are more like a subcommittee of different personalities and motivations and desires and that we want that there are different aspects of us that want different things at different times.

[00:36:50] And so the example I like to use is just to make it very clear for people, it’s like they, cuz I think everybody understands this, is that, the person that sets the alarm on December 31st to set a New Year’s resolution and the person that wakes up on January 1st at 5:00 AM and shuts it off, they want different things, right?

[00:37:09] Those, they’re both you and you could beat yourself up all day for it. But maybe you should understand the different, maybe we could do a better job of understanding the different parts of ourselves and the different aspects that come out at different times. Because I think a lot of times we.

[00:37:25] We feel stuck in life and we move toward physical movement to feel unstuck. I did it, did that with ultramarathon running for a very long time. It was, I felt very stuck, but I could do things, I could move, which give you a feeling of I’m accomplishing and I’m doing something. But then there’s, in the back, there’s this there is this feeling of stuckness and oldness and dryness that doesn’t, that like life is starting to lose its vitality.

[00:37:50] And if you’re stuck in something, it’s not that you might not need to do more. You might need to learn how to relate to your life in a different way, to completely to think in different ways and to move in different ways. And then a lot of times I think what happens when you do that is then you bring in the things like the physical movement and the running and these things and they’re more of a addition to your life rather than a survival strategy.

[00:38:15] Which is, I think they become for a lot of people, But yeah I just, I think it’s important, at least it’s been important for me to realize, these things that hold me back. I’m doing all I can. So the problem is legitimately unconscious. I don’t know about it. And so I have to get interested and I have to learn to think in new ways, and I need to talk to other people so they can reflect parts of myself back to me that I can’t really see.

[00:38:38] And through doing that, you start to build a more sort of whole idea about who you actually are, and you can participate in the drama that is your life in different ways. But you can’t change anything you’re not aware of. So I think unconscious is really hopeful language to start

[00:38:54] Dr Mike T Nelson: with.

[00:38:54] Yeah. What are your thoughts on that, Danielle? Oh, I have so many thoughts

[00:39:00] Dr Dee: on that.

[00:39:02] Dr Mike T Nelson: I know, that’s why I asked.

[00:39:05] Dr Dee: Just where this conversation is at. I think I wanna tie it back to something that’s inherent in the film is that humans exist within this rhythm of expansion and contraction. That was something that was fundamental to Rick’s script.

[00:39:19] That was something that we chatted about. It’s something that I operate my own methodology off of, and that’s just not on a biological level, that’s on a psychological level, that’s on a spiritual level, that there’s this rhythm that’s existing. And I have a slinky on my desk and I always show clients the rhythm.

[00:39:40] If you’re not on the video version of this, please go to the video version of this

[00:39:45] Rick: video version of this Mike.

[00:39:47] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. It’ll be on YouTube.

[00:39:48] Dr Dee: So we have slinky. And so the rhythm is expansion and contraction, and someone who is incoherence in their life in and outer is gonna flow through that really well.

[00:40:02] But when I’m working with someone who has experienced trauma, what happens is that state of coherence and that rhythm starts to get really disrupted. And so the rhythm either looks something like this where you’re in increased sympathetic experience. So it’s like the gas is on all the time, or it’s like this and the car is sought out.

[00:40:26] And usually someone who is like this collapsed, slinky, has a lot of this underneath of it. And so really what renegotiating trauma in my experiences is trying to take little pieces that are. Operating in whatever rhythm, whether that’s a rhythm of survival and taking little pieces and exposing consciousness to that so that we don’t lose consciousness in the unconscious, because that, I think is what you are talking about, is exposing people and they start to lose their sense of self in the affective flow of the unconscious.

[00:41:05] All those mysterious, scary things in the deeps that we don’t know about, they’re afraid that’s going to completely disorient fragment them. Sometimes that fragmentation’s necessary, but in my experience, it’s really important to have support containment on the back end of that so that there’s integration so that the consciousness can emerge out of the deeps.

[00:41:31] So for most people who have experienced trauma, in my opinion, most people toggle between the stuck, collapsed. Slinky and the super high slinky highly activated slinky that is their system, but they’re nowhere to be found. They have no idea who they are. They can’t relate to other people. They can’t sense a sense of aliveness.

[00:41:57] And so in my experience, in relationship to everything that, of what you guys have said, it’s how can we hold on to a little what’s called an alchemy? The scintilla the light in the dark while not avoiding that there’s darkness in this renegotiation process and find a new state of coherence so that it builds a new relationship between those things that we thought we knew and those things that we do not know.

[00:42:30] And hopefully. That gives people a greater capacity to go into higher activation states without getting stuck in them and without fragmenting and losing their sense of self in them. And so I feel like it is about learning to go with the rhythms. And if your rhythm is here, can you be aware of that and be conscious of that and meet yourself in that place so that the rhythm comes back to something a little bit more coherent.

[00:43:01] So it’s not saying that this is better, it’s just saying there’s a little bit more coherence when there’s a little bit more flow in the system. And yeah that’s what I have to say about it.

[00:43:15] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Thank you. Anything else anyone wants to add to that?

[00:43:20] Rick: Yeah, it’s, I hope, hopefully this doesn’t get too choppy cuz I actually, th this idea of rhythm has become really important and we’ve really look at that as you were saying we started with a question and then let the journey go where it needed to go and let the answers unfold organically.

[00:43:34] One of the things that keeps coming up is like, how is this different than the go harder go home culture? How is this different than the take the thing you’re going through now and make it positive and full speed ahead kind of thing that we hear a lot of, I think in the fitness industry and in the personal development industry,

[00:43:51] Dr Mike T Nelson: just have to hustle harder and all your problems go away.

[00:43:53] Rick: Yeah. Yeah. So if I could go back to that, that example of the dec, the December 31st January 1st person, most people get the, they wake up and they don’t wanna shut it off and they’ll use some sort of like self-hatred or shame to get that part of themselves that woke up and didn’t want to do it.

[00:44:11] And. Often we get success in that, right? I’ve got a lot of success in that in my lifetime. Now the and often cause it works at a sort of like low level. It works at a functional in society level. So you can function really well and hate yourself completely because what happens is, you become the tyrant to get that part of you in line.

[00:44:30] But unfortunately you’re both, so you’re now gonna start oscillating. Sometimes you’ll be the tyrant, but sometimes you’ll be the victim. And now you’ve got an inner war. And so you’ll be, there’ll be moments of trying to it will become more and more difficult to become the tyrant and to get all of the parts of you to march in the direction that the ego wants ’em to.

[00:44:49] And it just struck me as perhaps that could be relevant, I think especially to, to this audience because that mindset is so steeped in the fitness space. Interestingly enough. Can I say something

[00:45:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: like that? Yes. You don’t need to raise your hand. That’s okay.

[00:45:05] Jessica: They’ve clearly been in school for

[00:45:07] Dr Mike T Nelson: too long.

[00:45:07] Yes, I do the same thing. I’m like, Ooh, me. Oh.

[00:45:13] Dr Dee: I feel like it brings in a fundamental conversation about the terms that are used in the documentary post. Yes. Dark Knight of Our Soul. What are what? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about an inflation of the ego? Are we just bolstering the sense of self on accomplishment and progress and growth, or is there a relativization happening of that sense of self?

[00:45:38] We’re not just bolstering it on progress and growth at the cost of the human soul. I think we’re going into the depths and trying to relate to those things in which we do not know, and that type of growth looks a bit different. Than what most people in modern culture would assume is growth. And as a trauma practitioner, that’s really confusing because sometimes people feel worse before they feel quote unquote better.

[00:46:14] Does that mean that they’re going down the wrong path? I don’t know. That’s a conversation that we need to have with the soul, and so we’re, instead of dictating the directions and the movements that we’re making from all of these outer voices telling us what we should or should not do, or what is good or what is bad, or what is healthy, or what is wellness, actually consulting those deeper existential experiences that come up in these moments of confrontation.

[00:46:45] So

[00:46:46] Jessica: I think that’s important. Thank you. If I could add something to that. Yes. We, the majority of us here come from a fitness background. Mine was fitness marketing, but still in it, Danielle works out every day with three 30 in the morning, so like ungodly time. Rick is also a yoga instructor and Yes.

[00:47:04] What’s that? That it’s church. That’s

[00:47:07] Dr Dee: what time church starts.

[00:47:10] Jessica: We’re all very dedicated to our fitness and our movement. And so what we’re talking about here is so nuanced because it’s not that we’re saying forget about fitness because it’s just this vanity metric. It’s the intention behind it and understanding why you’re doing it.

[00:47:26] You can continue to do the same thing that you were doing. But like with Danielle’s example, if you don’t mind me sharing she was like a hardcore athlete her whole life, and it was performance based. Perhaps coming from a place of wanting external validation, I completely resonate with that.

[00:47:45] And she still works her ass off, but it comes from a place of now giving to herself. So from the outside it looks very similar, but internally it’s a completely different activity. And I was reading something the other day. I just pulled it up here. This is from the work of Will store who wrote selfie, how he became so self obsessed and what it’s doing to us.

[00:48:04] And in this chapter it talks about the perfectable self. So I just wanted to read this because it made me laugh, but also I was like, yeah, this super resonates. So he says the Ladi bib, he’s English. So basically the chubby part I keep beneath my shirt is not so much a body part as it is a psychological flaw that’s become material shame that I can touch my weight, tells a story of who I am.

[00:48:23] This person who likes to spend weekends sunk into the sofa, surrounded by pizza boxes, sticky, fingered, and burping, a grown man who might as well be wearing a nappy. My fatness, the outline of my body can make me feel as if I’m guilty of a moral trans transgression. This bizarre notion that personal, that physical appearance and moral worth are directly linked is so deeply sunk into my brain that I feel it to be true on an emotional level.

[00:48:48] And he goes on to say it’s so powerful this idea that by being physically fit, by being like beautiful from, in whatever standard we acknowledge in, in this performance realm makes you a better person. Like a good person is just inaccurate. We can see that from all these people that, that have been glorified in the fitness industry, that have a huge fall from Grace because they have this moment where they’re like, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

[00:49:14] And they spin off or whatever, or they don’t show up anymore because what they believe to be true just wasn’t anymore. And that’s what they built their entire audience off of. So I think like what we’re getting at here is being healthy is so important. And also if your clients or you are having a hard time showing up at the gym that says something, that means something, and taking some time off might be the thing.

[00:49:38] Pushing through might be the thing, but that’s where this film can be really helpful. It’s to understand some of the complexities that might be hovering underneath the surface that are pulling your strings that you’re not aware of. Yeah. If

[00:49:52] Jeff: I, yeah, I will go Jeff, add that comes into the semantics of the word trauma.

[00:49:57] So Jeff is just alluding to something that has been shaped into our dna. N a, shame is shaped into our D n A, it’s not just a childhood pattern that we adopt. There’s some things that are very biological and we just overlaid the term trauma for now, distortions and energetic shifts that potentially don’t serve your full expression of you.

[00:50:19] And that’s, Rick and Dee and Jess are both alluding to that. Those are those pressures that lie beyond your conscious mind that start to shape you and potentially not the best way. Cuz like you said, none of us are. We’re, you gotta move or you gotta, you’re not gonna do so well in this life.

[00:50:36] It’s nothing like that. It’s what is driving you to, to this performance level? Is it because you’re actually insecure? If you’re insecure, you better start looking at it, because if you’re operating from a place of insecurity, you’re actually going to, I’m gonna use the word hurt, the world around you, the people around you, the environment around you.

[00:50:55] And it’s a bit of a strong word, hurt, but you will misbalance it’s inevitable. If you work out of a place of inadequacy, a place of fear, a place of shame, a place of any of those lower vibrational forms, you will disrupt the world around you in potentially a negative way. I use the word potentially there just because I don’t release talk in OBEs.

[00:51:12] But I think you will. And that’s one of the things with the dark night of our soul is realizing that one, we’re a giant collective of. 8 billion, 8 billion miracles working together on this like little thing called earth that, maybe flying through space faster in the speed of light and all these things that we can’t really comprehend.

[00:51:37] But what we can do is we can actually turn, pivot, face ourselves and start to, yeah, it may get mucky before it gets better, but then you get this, oh, this is what real joy is. Oh, this is what I am, oh, this is these deeper levels of what really fulfills me. Watching Jess’s kitties playing the pots and stuff.

[00:51:55] But just to tie that into the word trauma because it, it’s a big word. It means a lot of things. And that was one of our battles with this was like, oh, this actually, if you stop eating properly, stop sleeping and stop moving, you’re going to start to show and manifest symptoms that may look like trauma.

[00:52:12] If you have childhood wounding from sexual assault, you’re gonna probably. Not always, but manifest potentially trauma patterns. Oh. We have these things called epigenetics, even before we get to d n A and it, oh, those look like trauma patterns. And then you have social patterns that are like, oh my God I interact with these people and we create these feedback loops.

[00:52:30] Oh, that looks like trauma too. So it’s a big word that it we’re trying to encompass. And as Rick said early on it’s really about the discussion of it. Because at the end of the day, Mike’s a unique snowflake and Jess is a unique snowflake, and I’m a unique snowflake. And that’s where it gets tricky, right?

[00:52:47] If we try to overlay the Venn diagram of, what do we do with this? It looks a little bit tricky. But it’s awesome because alls you have to really do is look at yourself and people already like to do that. So do it in a bit of a different way.

[00:53:02] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, no, I love that. And so one of my questions is what.

[00:53:06] We’re you can speak in general or personally if you want, have you found for tools that have been helpful to move you more towards post-traumatic growth?

[00:53:19] Jeff: I’m gonna, I’ll go first. Yeah. My voice is all warmed up. I’m gonna, I’m gonna defer to a mic special here.

[00:53:31] There’s a lot of things that disrupt our patterns. When we look at the psychology that was formed from childhood and all these things, and then when, if we look at it physiologically but if someone could really like, and this get to where they have really great sleep patterns, especially really good rem the body has this really cool function of sorting out a lot of its own stuff.

[00:53:51] It starts we talked about meaning making and finding value. It automatically starts doing that somehow. Not. As the perfect solution. But if there was something, because I think that’s one of the biggest issues around the globe, whether you look at 2.5 hungry bellies, 2.5 billion hungry bellies that can’t get into good sleep because they’re in a survival mode.

[00:54:12] Or if you look at someone who’s we’ll go back to the Wall Street guy and he’s just hyper-focused, or she’s hyper-focused on that kind of performance and probably not sleeping et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think that would be like one, and guess what, it’s pretty free if you learn how to do it.

[00:54:26] It doesn’t cost much. And it’s pretty great, right? So I would say there’s a lot of factors to lead to that one. And it is not the end by any means of yeah. The whole best thing about P T G to do it is sleep. But a quick example, if you go through a traumatic and acute traumatic event, if you get into REM sleep that night, you are 70%.

[00:54:49] More likely not to develop any stress disorder or stress symptoms. Just that one night. Yeah. And the next night if you get into rem, it reduces it again. And I would imagine third night, fourth night, it looks pretty similar. And that’s just getting into REM sleep, so yeah, I would say that as mine.

[00:55:05] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Thank you. And the studies on that are utterly fascinating. There’s a lot of whole bunch of unknowns there, but it’s crazy how something that’s, that quote unquote simple can have pretty profound effects. So thank you.

[00:55:20] Rick: I’ll go just because I can, I like the idea of a conversation, so let’s just keep opening this.

[00:55:26] Yeah. It’s interesting because I think a lot of times we want the tools and because we want it now is what really actually what we want. Yeah. And I think you

[00:55:34] Dr Mike T Nelson: want the quick solution, Rick. You don’t have the quick solution.

[00:55:37] Rick: Yeah. And I don’t that it’s As a, you all want the quick solution and you need to sort,

[00:55:42] Jeff: everybody

[00:55:42] Dr Mike T Nelson: does.

[00:55:42] I do

[00:55:44] Rick: I wanna know what’s wrong and I wanna know now which is gonna make everything I say after this more difficult to be with, which is that I find contemplation to be such an important tool a tool, a psycho technology, a way of contemplating a problem rather than solving a problem and jumping into solving it and trying to skip over it and jumping into meaning.

[00:56:06] And I use, I, I use the sleep example because one, I’ve struggled a lot with sleep and it’s interesting because in the military I would go three days without sleep after Yeah, three days. Like you’re a different human being and it is not for the better. And it’s so fast.

[00:56:23] So I, I’ve. I got all of the sleep studies and I did all of the sleep hygiene and I’m, but the, here we come with this un this idea of the unconscious. There’s something going on that I’m not aware of. I’m, yeah the habits helped a little bit but I struggled with it. It didn’t change anything, and working with a client, he’s going through very, something very similar, insomnia all of his life. And, I asked the question like, what’s going on? That consciousness doesn’t want to let go. Yeah. What does consciousness, what doesn’t it want to let go of that, that it can’t release, that it can’t move into that other realm of sleep right now?

[00:57:00] I didn’t ask that to get an answer, but it’s fascinating because it was just something we were opening the conversation. And this is really what I think is really helpful for post-traumatic growth is like reflective circular conversation about it and like trying to open it up and see it from different perspectives, ask new questions, don’t try to answer it like, Really be with this in a new way rather than the three steps to post-traumatic growth.

[00:57:24] And I can’t tell you, I think that question has opened up so much work for us over the last six months. A and so there wasn’t, he didn’t an, I don’t think he’s ever answered the question. I really don’t. But he gets new ideas and he gets new images and he gets new ways of relating to this problem rather than trying to solve it.

[00:57:44] And it turns out that like when consciousness can come at the problem from a new perspective and shine a light on what’s unconscious, sometimes what’s unconscious dissolves and the problem ceases the problem because you’ve become somebody different. And that problem was really based on the habits and the patterns of ways of thinking of who you used to be.

[00:58:05] Dr Dee: Can I dovetail. Cause I feel like it’s related. Yeah. Go. So another, it’s not a tool per se, it combines what Rick was talking about, but I’ve found that dreams are incredibly wise. Informers of the psyche and free, get ’em every night. Most people do. You just gotta pay attention and you gotta learn to develop discipline around creating a relationship with it and having a container.

[00:58:35] My own containers that have been able to work with my dreams, I work my, with my dreams a bit more sematically. So taking the images that are revealing themselves in the night and seeing where they land in my body. Seeing what the body has to say, see where there’s resistance in the body. And it’s interesting because what Rick was saying about once you start to create a relationship, sometimes that material dissolves.

[00:59:01] That’s interesting biologically too. So that’s why I really feel like this archetypal psychological content has its roots in the body. They’re not separate because when you start to titrate the energy out of the system by bringing it to consciousness slowly the system unwinds. It’s not as bound up.

[00:59:23] And so what you thought initially was the big scary monster is once you get to it slowly and titrate it, it’s maybe a little baby bunny, running from your entire life. Maybe that thing you’ve been running from was actually something incredibly joyous. But for me, I think dreams and taking dreams seriously, because the thing about dreams is you are not making them up.

[00:59:52] Who’s gifting them to you? I have no idea. I don’t know the answer to that. I have my own hypothesis and I’ve had my own conversations about it, but you, the ego, the I is not telling yourself I’m going to dream X, Y, Z, it’s coming to you. And so there’s something about what Rick was saying about this kind of spontaneous reciprocity of spontaneous dialogue.

[01:00:16] You can have that with others, but you can also have that with yourself. And I think that dreams open us up into the spontaneity and the spontaneous aspect of being, which is incredibly important to break us out of those rigid habitual patterns. So not really a tool,

[01:00:37] Dr Mike T Nelson: but I gave it. Oh, I like that. And a quick follow up question, then we’ll get to Jess.

[01:00:42] What would be a good starting point? Yes,

[01:00:46] Dr Dee: somatic experiencing too. I’m not just like shamelessly plugging

[01:00:50] Dr Mike T Nelson: this, no. Shameless plug all you want. I sponsor this show, so I don’t care. This is plug all you want Somatic

[01:00:58] Dr Dee: Experiencing. It’s now Somatic Experiencing International. I think that’s incredible that this way of trauma healing is expanding on a global level.

[01:01:08] I think that speaks to the need but it’s more bottom up processing of trauma. So I just wanted to offer that resource to people because there is a directory online that you can find a practitioner near you or practitioners that offer telehealth. So there is accessibility there.

[01:01:28] Dr Mike T Nelson: I love that.

[01:01:29] That’s great. And my quick follow up question is starting point for people listening of where they can work with their dreams because I’ve. Written some of mine down and when I look at ’em, I think I’m a psycho. Yeah. Which maybe I’m, I dunno. Maybe that is the takeaway. I dunno. Why do

[01:01:51] Dr Dee: you think it’s important to meet the parts of our psyche that are less empathetic than we are that we identify ourselves as?

[01:01:58] But another shameless plug, Rick?

[01:02:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yes. Go. I know it’s also what you do, so plug your service. Yeah.

[01:02:06] Dr Dee: No, I feel like certain Yi analysts work with dreams. You find this kind of niche pocket. I like somatic Dream ending, like really working with the dreams in the body. I know Rick has his own particular methodology of working dreams but that’s a fundamental piece of depth psychology.

[01:02:26] In general depth psychology, starting with Freud and then branching into, to youngi and psychology. That’s a key piece

[01:02:35] Rick: to

[01:02:35] Jeff: that. I could if I may, so Yeah, go ahead. Something I use with my dreams, I combine that with stream of consciousness journaling. And then what I look at is I look at the patterns that keep replaying themselves, like the things that I may complain about or the things that I’m like, I love this. And I watch how those two things start to line up. Cuz it’s almost like the body wants to div just information,

[01:02:57] Dr Mike T Nelson: yeah. It’s like trying to tell you something. Yeah.

[01:02:59] Jeff: It’s like you gotta cut, it tries to heal itself. It’s our psychology is built on a lot of these kinds of systems if it starts to repeat itself in the dreams, potentially, cause dreams can be pretty complicated but you’ll start to see some through lines and you’re like, oh yeah.

[01:03:13] I should probably dissolve this relationship, duh. Or I should probably add a little more of this thing that floats to my boat. It’s literally that’s I don’t wanna take away from the complexity of the dreams itself and the sub-messages that are in there by any means, but as a starting point it could be that simple.

[01:03:29] But again, most people don’t really get to stream of consciousness journaling in a, like it’s full expression. It’s ah, I’m gonna journal. And then they just had eggs this morning.

[01:03:39] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Pick up the milk at the store.

[01:03:42] Jeff: Yeah. It always turns into a

[01:03:43] Dr Mike T Nelson: grocery list. Yeah. That’s might always start as has.

[01:03:48] Rick: Yeah. It’s, you’re like asking the question when you have these re recurring dream motifs what is this psyche insisting on? What is insisting that you understand that you see the whole dream keeps fading, but this one image, this one thing keeps happening. What is the psyche insisting on?

[01:04:03] And now all of a sudden, when I ask that question, I’m now interested inwardly in a new way. And cuz to me that is the value of the dream. And there’s also the sense that young pioneer, Carl, young pioneers, this way of dream tending that views the dream as compensation.

[01:04:19] It’s pretty brilliant and it’s got all these different things and he gets to the end of his life and he is I never understood a single dream because it can’t be pinned down and it that’s, and so the rational mind has a huge stru. It’s obviously a production of the irrational, and so it can’t be pinned down. But in turning toward it and starting to imagine the dream forward and starting to put yourself back into the feeling and starting to ask questions like. What’s the psyche insisting on and starting to do, like when Jeff is stream of consciousness journaling, like that’s a way of just in, in meeting that imaginable production with his own imaginal ideas.

[01:04:56] And just seeing what comes out of that and seeing wow, the psyche is much smarter than I am actually. And it starts to reveal itself to me. And if it does that now I, again, I’ll get back to this point where I can participate in, in, in new ways in my life. But so I think it is a matter of yeah meeting meeting the dream and allowing it to do what it does, which is to present you with a completely different idea about your life.

[01:05:23] Awesome.

[01:05:23] Jeff: Would you say the psyche is smarter than me? I have this image that pops into my mind. Do you remember the original Jurassic Park where the hunter is like moving, like they’re hunting the raptors and the Raptor comes out and he’s Oh, clever girl. Every time that’s what happens to me.

[01:05:36] It’s oh yeah, you’re, you are so much smarter than me.

[01:05:41] Rick: Notice just in our language, right? We’ve already made a move that like maybe a lot of people in Western in a western context aren’t even that comfortable with, which is, there’s more to you than the eye psyche is. There’s some, there’s a whole, as I said, a whole drama going on.

[01:05:56] And it’s psyche has its own reality and a lot of times we don’t want to be anywhere near our dreams. I, and I noticed this with Dreamwork, sometimes you get into it, but you realize, oh, this thing is autonomous. There’s something much bigger than me going on that I’m not in control of. And that cha challenges our fundamental assumptions.

[01:06:14] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Your thoughts, Jess, on tools?

[01:06:18] Jessica: Yeah. For me it’s. It was more of a lack of doing something that was really helpful. A lack of distraction. Distraction is my go-to when I feel uncomfortable and I want closure and I don’t have it yet. Like I wanna figure something out and if I can’t find the answer, then I’m like on my phone or I’m on my emails, or I’ll work more or I’ll watch TV or I’ll go to the gym.

[01:06:40] And in removing that, it adds a lot of space. And that’s when I start thinking crazy stuff, and those crazy thoughts. Yeah, like it’s so I’m like, I’m a little worried about myself, what are these things that are coming up for me? And so that’s when contemplation comes into play, what Rick was talking about.

[01:06:57] In the West we have these stories that we love about heroes. These brave heroes that go on these wild adventures in the pursuit of like dangerous monsters and they bring back like these remarkable prizes. And I think a lot of us will relate to that. We love it, because.

[01:07:14] At least us in the West. Cuz I wanna talk about Asian cultures in a second here. This idea of being the hero of your own story, it’s like we almost can’t see ourselves as somebody other than the protagonist of our own story, right? And so since these these hero myths are so ingrained in like how we do life, when we come up on a point when we’re crazy slinkies, it can feel like we’re a failed hero story.

[01:07:37] I’m not a better person. I feel like crap right now and look at my life. How did I get here? Which Rick had mentioned in the show that we did, or something we had talked about. He’s usually that’s just what mood you’re in. But it feels so, can feel, so definite, can feel so finite And this is me.

[01:07:53] I am this like, failed version of my story and all I’m trying to do is be a better version of myself and change the world and all these things. And I think part of that where the hero myth fails us and the way that like we see it on the surface is that, Thing of happily ever after, right? There is a conclusion in all the movies that we like.

[01:08:12] There is a conclusion. We know what happens, and then we go off into our cars and we’re happy and all that. We know what happens. In Eastern cultures, which are more I would say modeled after a Confucian sort of mindset with a lot of Asian stories, there is no happily ever after. There’s no closure.

[01:08:31] And that’s the pleasure of the story. It leaves you wondering what happened. And both of these cultures have their own problems. But I think that me being a Western person, and when I don’t have closure and I don’t have the answer and I go distract myself, then that is that’s really challenging for me.

[01:08:49] So then just sitting in this space, which has been my reality lately, like being alone, not going out because. Of this reason or that reason, just knowing that I’m having these crazy thoughts, quote crazy. I say that in just like they’re so helpful to really look at it and to look at it with without a sense of shame and just to consider this is a part of me right now, and to just sit with it.

[01:09:14] And I can’t add too much more than what Rick and Dia mentioned on that. But I just wanna echo that. Cultivating pauses, which is from the work of Richard Rudd, who’s also in the documentary. That’s been the number one thing that has helped me in my life. Just taking a moment.

[01:09:32] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. And then last question as we wrap up.

[01:09:36] What are your thoughts about intentionally adding periods or times or things of high stress to potentially facilitate post-traumatic growth? And obviously that’s kinda the idea of the process, but it could be. Exercise, it could be meeting with a counselor, it could be, psychedelics. There could be a lot of things.

[01:09:59] What are your thoughts about that? Turns out,

[01:10:04] Jeff: I don’t have any, just kidding. I can,

[01:10:07] Dr Mike T Nelson: I was like, Ooh, where was I for all this?

[01:10:11] Jeff: I think it’s the most you can be its own podcast. You wanna evolve, you wanna be a part of the evolution of our species. You wanna be a contributing member of society, you wanna contribute to your own story.

[01:10:23] Then you step outta your comfort zone. And sometimes that means going inwards and sometimes that means going outwards. It does. Sometimes that means taking care of a very maslovian physiological hierarchy. Sometimes that means tending to your relationship garden. It means a lot of things.

[01:10:39] And I think that if we like just break it down to stressing your nervous system, these things can cause stress. Even joyous moments. Pressure your nervous system. Like they drain you of your hormones. They tax you and then you like you go through your recovery and then you adapt and lo and behold, you actually can maybe learn to feel joy even more, these are, it’s not all about just like jumping in the mud, getting dirty and cold necessarily.

[01:11:02] It’s about being cold and hot. Mike? I saw that news. So I I abs I think you should. I, so compared to a lot of people, I’m very cavalier, and when Rick and Danielle talk about containers, I do not disagree with them 100%. Sorry, that was weirdly worded. I agree. Cause I think society should be the container, but I’m also the guy that’s gonna kick them out of the plane, into their own depths. And good luck because I think we all. Should do this. I and they all know me. They know I, I don’t literally do that, but I, there’s a dump truck going by. I believe in it deeply and it looks different. It’s just, figure out what your comfort zone is. Figure out how to step out of it. There’s so many amazing, helpful people that are having this actual discussion. It’s everywhere. It’s, it’s it’s in all forms and it’s all part of that same discussion.

[01:11:59] It’s just start where you are, use what you got, do what you can rinse and repeat. And I didn’t mention it earlier, you asked about the single greatest contributor to ptg. There is one factor that I have observed, and it may not, this isn’t the most Validated thing. It’s interacting with other people.

[01:12:18] It’s having a discussion with other people. No matter what the modality is, there’s this real power in that. And yeah, just what I’m getting at there is we used to do something called an aar, an after action report. We’d go through something stressful and then we would after action it we’d basically talk about it.

[01:12:34] What could we do better? What could we do worse? Obviously in those cases, better and worse were defined by someone else, which I don’t any agree with anymore. But, you feel it out for yourself and then you learn to do this. You douse it, you build your character more and more you build your stress to Lawrences more and more.

[01:12:50] And then more really importantly, you learn what actually isn’t good for you too. It has that, that other side of Jess was talking about distractions. Once we start, she’s actually talking about doing less to figure out what is more, cuz ah, nature is paradoxical anyways. Yeah.

[01:13:06] Dr Mike T Nelson: The addition by subtraction. I love that

[01:13:08] Jeff: kind of a, yeah.

[01:13:11] Dr Dee: Add on to that. Yes. Cause I also have a little bit of a qualm with certain type of containers that are working just to keep people in their habitual state of consciousness. Huge conversation on safety and creating safety and make sure it’s safe.

[01:13:35] And, I do wanna acknowledge at baseline that it’s a privilege to engage in your own renegotiation process, but it’s also a necessity I feel like, for the people who do have resources to do that. But it’s really important that you challenge your window of tolerance. And I think this kind of movement towards.

[01:13:57] Safety and containment. We’re confusing it with, don’t stress the system because I think we have a lot of practitioners that are actually afraid to be in the dark night with other people. Yes. They don’t know what the fuck to do. Are we allowed to curse

[01:14:12] Dr Mike T Nelson: on here? Yeah. You’re good. They don’t, I’m not offended, so we’re good.

[01:14:17] Check it with this, with the

[01:14:17] Jeff: sponsor.

[01:14:19] Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh he’s cool with it. You’re good

[01:14:22] Dr Dee: When the system collapses. That says more about you as a practitioner than it does about what you should or shouldn’t do. Oh yeah. I think it’s really important that we have people that know how to navigate those deep, dark recesses of collapse and disorganization and chaos.

[01:14:41] And it’s not saying that we’re throwing people in those, it’s saying that, okay. If you come in a habitual way, I don’t wanna sit there for two years and listen to that every single day.

[01:14:57] Dr Mike T Nelson: That

[01:14:59] Dr Dee: there’s something about that form of safety that feels more like stagnation and dissociation from the soul than anything else.

[01:15:11] And I feel like we really have to have a conversation about pressing against those edges. And I love the idea in somatic experiencing of titrating. So making it digestible if it’s not digestible, being able to angulate back into resource. So that’s where the containment piece is really important.

[01:15:34] So if you notice that somebody’s in collapse, perhaps it’s not taking them out of collapse. But holding enough strength and stability in the place with that person to like really be with them in collapse and let their psyche, soma, work it out and just let them know, I’m here with you. I’m here with you.

[01:15:57] That’s different than just saying, oh that’s not a safe place to explore. So I think it says something about this conversation about containment and safety and it’s nuance and it’s complex. But I don’t think safety’s always the quote unquote best thing for the system. I don’t wanna put a, like a gold star on that and say that’s it.

[01:16:17] Always. So yeah.

[01:16:20] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, semi related. I took a trauma course with Tom Myers and one of the best things I got out of the course was he’s probably the best thing you can do as someone who is not a psychologist is just be there with the person, be their witness, hold a safe space and just be a good neighbor.

[01:16:38] And you would see the person go through what, from the outside looked like absolutely crazy shit. But if you were that person there, kinda like what you were saying, making sure you’re solid, you’re good, it’s okay, you’re gonna guide them through. You’re not really trying to manipulate ’em or, relieve their experience or relieve the stress from them.

[01:16:57] You’re just providing them a way to process as they need to. I thought that was super useful because I know for myself there’s this almost sort of thing where you. You wanna try to fix it or sometimes remove the stressor from them. And a lot of times they don’t get to the resolution or they don’t complete the thing that they need to.

[01:17:19] And that can be looking from the outside in, that can look really scary and sometimes too

[01:17:26] Dr Dee: Yeah. Psychologically that’s called impingement. You’re on somebody else’s experience. And that can actually activate a ton of developmental disruption and lack of coherence. And so that also mythologically, that’s like you going in and stealing somebody’s hero’s journey, right?

[01:17:48] Blocking it or putting the doors on it and saying, the soul’s calling you there, but you’re not gonna go there because I’m uncomfortable with it. Yeah. That, that doesn’t seem

[01:17:57] Rick: appropriate. There’s also this sense of, like what you’re saying, Mike I wish I could remember who to say on this. I can’t.

[01:18:04] But I remember a psychotherapist saying something like, you ex, if you experience something fracturing and something traumatic and you never talk about it, and you don’t, you get trapped in what he called unreality. And it’s start to become more and more split and you retreat more into this, more, this unreality starts to take more of your life force.

[01:18:23] And there’s a massive value in being seen in our struggle without solving it. Like just it’s something that I think we, or maybe a deeply private culture, I think we overshare because of that, but but anyway, I think that there’s this sense that yeah, like what you’re saying, just to be able to, first of all, you have to be able to be with yourself in these difficult experiences or you’ll never be able to be with somebody else in them.

[01:18:47] Because you’re instantly gonna have that reflected back to you when they start to descend. But there’s also a lot of value in just being there and allowing them to be seen in their struggle. And the way that puts us back together is like almost inarticulable, but it’s, there’s something to it.

[01:19:03] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I think this reminds me of the first time we went to Costa Rica. There’s another guy who was down there and we’re all, we had done the combo and we’re waiting to do the ayahuasca that night. And he had been down there, I don’t know how many quite a few times, and we’re just, talking to him.

[01:19:18] I’m just asking him questions because I don’t know what the hell’s gonna happen. I’m oh, I don’t know. And similar to what you were saying, like he didn’t wanna share any of his past experience, which I get, okay, fine, whatever. But he hadn’t even told his wife about what it had gone on.

[01:19:32] He had told no one about anything. And I think he, this was like his sixth or seventh time there, and he didn’t get the answers he wanted. And so now he is gonna do Iboga for 24 hours and. I just got this perception of them I’m not a psychologist, but maybe you should talk to someone about this shit.

[01:19:50] Jeff: It’s hard to resolve reality just in your own head. It’s so yeah. Such a bewildering concept to I don’t know why we do that. It’s oh yeah, I got it. I could tell you about reality.

[01:20:01] Rick: Yeah. And because a lot of people like, it’s called process philosophy, but a lot of people would say, because what you are is relationship.

[01:20:08] You are in relationship, you’re informed by what you’re in relationship to. And something, yeah. The psyche starts turning on itself when that stops being the case, I think. Yeah.

[01:20:20] Dr Mike T Nelson: Cool. Jess.

[01:20:24] Jessica: I did wanna add one thing. She was

[01:20:26] Dr Mike T Nelson: like

[01:20:26] Jessica: oh, I was thinking about my own

[01:20:28] Dr Mike T Nelson: experience. I just went down, I know the deer in the headlights of the Peterbilt there for a second.

[01:20:33] Jessica: John VivaKi had talked about this a bit in, and it didn’t make it into the full feature, but it’s in the full interview that there are there markers of personality that can contribute to post-traumatic growth?

[01:20:47] Is there a way that somebody can come into it already set up for success? And he said that there, there’s a little bit of an argument around introversion versus extroversion, which is what we’ve been talking about. For some people it’s easier to share. And for some people they’re way less comfortable sharing with others.

[01:21:03] But maybe their internal world is more alive and they have a better. Grasp on being alone with their material and not distracting. So there’s like a give and take with that. But he did say that there’s some markers of like success more or less around post-traumatic growth and openness.

[01:21:23] And so if we were to give a name to, I think what we’re talking about here around testing our edges and putting ourselves in situations that like hot and cold, right? This openness to different environments and openness to different conversations, that can be really helpful. Now, going too far on that spectrum is another thing that he talked about, which is finding way too much meaning in something, being too open, a healthy level of what’s on the other side of that spectrum neurosis or openness?

[01:21:51] And openness.

[01:21:52] Jeff: I think it’s just closed-mindedness, isn’t

[01:21:53] Dr Mike T Nelson: it? Okay. Yeah. Closed-minded can’t take in any new info.

[01:21:57] Rick: Yeah, like building discernment in that open, you’re talking

[01:22:01] Jessica: about Definitely, yeah. Having discernment, that’s a perfect word for it. Not everything is right, and so being a little bit more on that open scale can help for sure.

[01:22:13] And also recognizing that you have to use your own best judgment with all of this, like we’re, how many people are here, five people that are talking about our own experiences, our own realities, our own education, our own everything. And the only way that this can make sense is if you use your own best judgment around how this applies to your own life, or if it even applies.

[01:22:37] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Anything else to add on that topic? Great. Boom. I got the last word. Yes. Yes. Jess, tell us where they can help support the film. What can they do to help out? Because it’s, I haven’t seen the fully feature yet. I’m super excited to see it and just from being around you guys, all of you guys, and just the process and seeing the 30 minute I can’t think of a person who would not benefit from seeing it, even though, like Rick was saying, I don’t think it’s probably gonna answer all of their questions immediately, but I don’t think that’s the point.

[01:23:13] I think it’s looking at you asking your own questions and getting to a better solution over time. And at least if nothing else, provoking better conversations that, that you can have that lead to, better things overall, which I think is especially now desperately needed.

[01:23:31] Jessica: It is like the greatest journaling prompt that has ever existed.

[01:23:34] I think that’s what this film is like. After you watch it, you may have more questions and answers, but you’re gonna have somewhere to go. Like you’re gonna have some thoughts. So on the topic of testing our edges, I realize that I have a hard time asking for help. And like right now, we really do need help.

[01:23:50] We have a fairly small reach, we have, we’re humbled small business owners and we have a couple thousand people that have been in our circles for a while. But the success of this Kickstarter really is gonna require a lot more people, which is why you having us on your show has been so helpful and in any way that you guys can either donate and if that’s not possible for you, that’s totally fine.

[01:24:12] What actually might be more important is to share the trailer and to share the Kickstarter link because we are needing to raise it’s $90,000. To finish this and to get it onto streamers to find the right distributor and do that whole process, legal things and blah, blah, blah. And the campaign is running until July 5th, and if we don’t raise all of that, we get none of it.

[01:24:36] So it’s like a all or nothing game. We wanted to play this game because part of it is, it’s a psychological play on our part too. Like why think small? We can do Indigogo or some of these other things, but it was a challenge we wanted to accept that would push us to our edges as well. So you can find the link at post-traumatic growth.film and with that small donation you can watch the 30 minute short version of which will what will be the 90 minute feature.

[01:25:01] And we also have some really cool rewards there as well if you donate more. We have a veteran owned clothing company that is giving out shirts for donors, which are really beautiful. They’re. They say wired differently on them, which is really apt for this. And we have challenge coins as well that say dark night of our soul on them.

[01:25:18] And then, and a bunch of other things. Also, you got some foot

[01:25:20] Dr Mike T Nelson: nice high end gifts there too, like for people who really wanna step up. There’s some cool stuff there.

[01:25:25] Jessica: Oh, the shipping and handling is gonna be a nightmare if we get the amount of backers that we’re hoping we will, I think we’re doing for the next year.

[01:25:32] But yeah, it’s so worth it. Like we’re like, these are cool, so let’s just do it. Go against everything Kickstarter consultants tell you to do. And then also we’re looking for strategic partnerships as well. So if you are in an industry, you own a business or of anybody that would benefit from raising awareness around post-traumatic growth.

[01:25:50] So I think veteran organizations first responders, people in the psychedelic realm, psychologists, anybody that’s in the healing arts gym owners, anybody. There’s, we have opportunities and this will be a conversation if you wanna hop on a call with us about how we can, how this can be a win-win for us because we’re really planning to take this impact campaign once the film is finished, to tour the country, to tour Canada, the us hopefully go internationally cuz we have a lot of interest in spreading this word.

[01:26:20] And it can be a great sponsorship opportunity. Even if you’re a nonprofit. If we could just use your list to get the word out there. We can do it without money, there’s all kinds of options.

[01:26:30] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. And where can each one of you give your background and where they can find you individually?

[01:26:36] We’ll start in the upper left with Danielle and Rick. If you wanna

[01:26:40] Rick: support me as a rider, Go get the Kickstarter and watch this film.

[01:26:44] Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, thank you.

[01:26:46] Rick: But i, rick alexander.com has also a link to the Kickstarter, but a link to my other work as well, my books and all that.

[01:26:53] Dr Mike T Nelson: Great. Danielle

[01:26:55] Dr Dee: so I just switched my website cuz Rick and I had just got married like a month ago

[01:27:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: almost.

[01:27:00] Yes. Amazing wedding. Thank you for the invite. So it was

[01:27:05] Dr Dee: dr danielle mcginnis.com, but now it’s Dr. Danielle Alexander dot com. But if someone goes to either of those, they should be able to stumble upon my website and find all the info there and go the Kickstarter cause it’s really important.

[01:27:19] Dr Mike T Nelson: Great. Jeff?

[01:27:20] Jeff: You can probably head over to the special forces experience.com. Head down the rabbit hole there. It has some other programming in there and it’s just a pretty website and it’s filled with good info. Awesome.

[01:27:33] Dr Mike T Nelson: You go to the Kickstarter. Any personal stuff, Jess, and you give out the address once again for the film?

[01:27:39] Yeah.

[01:27:39] Jessica: You can find my stuff at my podcast, shadow work library, wherever you listen to podcasts or on YouTube. And you can also see some of the full interviews, which are so good on there. Zachary Montgomery edited them, so they’re really beautiful also. They’re not just, I dunno, podcast vision and yeah, post-traumatic growth out film is where you can find all the

[01:28:01] Dr Mike T Nelson: things.

[01:28:03] Yeah. And the interviews look really good. So a lot of times when people I think, hear interview, they’re like yeah, they’re in a studio somewhere, or they’re like in a cracker jack box and they’ve got questions. But like the scenery on the background, even in all of ’em is very different. But it just all looks like really good.

[01:28:19] Which I think is an interesting way to do an interview cuz you always think just audio only, but the visuals on a lot of ’em turned out really nice. Oh

[01:28:28] Jessica: yeah. And we’re gonna be uploading yours too, Mike. It was four hours long. Oh, thank you. So I need to sit down and save some bandwidth for that.

[01:28:35] It was amazing. It’s like a full on masterclass on human physiology and in the realm of post-traumatic growth, which was so fascinating. Awesome.

[01:28:43] Dr Mike T Nelson: Thank you. Yeah. I would highly encourage everyone to check out the film and thank you all for all of your time and coming on here. I really appreciate it.

[01:28:50] And thank you for all your contributions to the film. Thank you for having us. Yes, thank you.

[01:29:00] [01:29:01] Dr Mike T Nelson: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Huge thanks to Jessica, Jeff, Rick, and Dr.

[01:29:06] D for being on the podcast today. I really appreciate all the work they’ve done. For the film, there’ll be a link below where you can donate directly and see the 30 minute kind of smaller production of the film so far, which is great. There’ll be a panel discussion coming up. You can see details at the website there.

[01:29:29] But even after the panel check it out. I think you will really enjoy it. Our goal is to get this out to as many people as possible. And as you heard in the podcast this is something they have spent years on. It is entirely up to this point, self-funded. So they have been the only people paying for all of this, which is new small expense to say the least.

[01:29:52] And I think it has a potential to really help a lot of people. And of course I am biased because I was one of the experts in the film. But again, I don’t really make any money off of it. I just thought it’s a great film. I love what they’re doing. So please check it out. If you want more information for me, go to mike t nelson.com.

[01:30:11] Maybe they’ll hop onto the newsletter. That’s where I have almost all my content goes out. Thank you so much. Thank you so much in advance for supporting the film. If you’re not able to make a financial donation, totally understand. If you could share it around on social media so other people can see it and get exposure to it, and hopefully we can get the Kickstarter fully funded, which would be freaking amazing.

[01:30:34] Thank you so much for listening. Really appreciate it. I’ll talk to you next week.

[01:30:39]