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The Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast
Bringing all things health and wellness to Tampa Bay, FL from your very own family and obesity medicine physician, Dr. Kerry Reller, MD, MS. We will discuss general medical topics, weight management, and local spots and events focusing on health, wellness, and nutrition in an interview and solo-cast format. Published weekly.
The Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast
E147: Dr. Christine Gibson on Trauma Tools, Polyvagal Basics & Everyday Regulation at Home!
Welcome to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast with Dr. Kerry Reller! This week, I’m joined by Dr. Christine Gibson, a family physician and trauma therapist. We unpack how trauma responses are adaptive, not defective, and how to move from fight/flight or freeze back into your “window of tolerance.” Dr. Gibson explains polyvagal basics and teaches fast, body-based tools—breath work, gaze shifts, EFT/tapping, Havening, butterfly taps, guided imagery, and “afformations”—to calm the nervous system. We also connect stress regulation to blood pressure, asthma, GI health, fertility, immunity, pain, and sleep. Tune in for practical, 60-second skills you can use daily to feel safer, clearer, and more in control.
Christine Gibson, MD, is a trauma therapist and family physician with extensive training in mental health, medical education, and social change. Her work spans from individual trauma recovery to community resilience, and from local frontline care to international system-building in primary healthcare.
Christine holds a Doctorate in Transdisciplinary Studies and a Master’s in Medical Education. She is a Clinical Associate Professor in Family Medicine and Psychiatry and is a two-time TEDx speaker. She co-founded multiple organizations that integrate equity, healing, and innovation, including:
- Safer Spaces Training: Personalized training to equip professionals with the skills to build trauma-informed services and workplaces.
- The Belong Foundation: dedicated to serving the complex and interconnected needs of community.
- Global Familymed Foundation (GFF): Strengthening primary care systems in low-resource settings.
Christine weaves the power of story into all she does—whether speaking, writing, facilitating, or leading change.
00:00 Intro & guest welcome
01:35 Why a family doctor pivoted to trauma therapy
03:20 Trauma is adaptive: triggers, vigilance, and meaning
07:20 Fight/flight vs. freeze/dissociation (the “shutdown” state)
11:05 The framework: Noticing → Shifting → Reconnecting
13:20 Toolkit overview: EFT tapping, Havening, breath & gaze
17:49 Butterfly taps, guided imagery, and multi-sensory grounding
20:54 Neuroplasticity: rewiring stress pathways with practice
23:58 How regulation supports BP, asthma, GI, fertility, immunity
30:26 Where to start if you’re struggling: pick tools for your state
Connect with Dr. Gibson
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.christinegibson
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gibtrotterMD#139
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-gibson-md/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktoktraumadoc?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
Connect with Dr. Reller
Podcast website: https://gethealthytbpodcast.buzzsprou...
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerryrellermd/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClearwaterFamilyMedicine
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clearwaterfamilymedicine/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kerryrellermd
Clearwater Family Medicine and Allergy website: https://sites.google.com/view/clearwa...
Podcast: https://gethealthytbpodcast.buzzsprou...
Subscribe to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Pandora.
All right. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kerry Reller, and today we have Dr. Christine Gibson all the way from Canada joining us today. Thank you for being on the podcast.
Christine:It's a pleasure to be here, Kerry. Thanks for having me.
Kerry:Yeah. So why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Christine:Well, I am also a family doctor and I've done almost everything through my career. So I was a hospital medicine doc. I had a family practice in a low income community health center, and I actually ran our health equity residency at the time. And then for the past five years or so, I've really focused on trauma therapy. So I still do primary care at a refugee clinic, but I started focusing on trauma because once I started exploring it, I recognized that it was one of the most upstream or like the kind of an early point of intervention for a lot of the folks that I saw, and not just their mental health, but their physical health as well.
Kerry:So how did you make that kind of journey from family medicine into Trauma therapy?
Christine:Well, I started to recognize it in myself first. One of the reasons why I mentioned my career path is because I had kind of learned to dissociate as a hospitalist. So I would work a hundred hours a week, night shifts and just ignore all of the signals my body was telling me. Whether that was like, Hey, you need sleep, or like, Hey, you're hungry to, wow, that was a really devastating outcome. You need to process that. So I learned through the apprenticeship model in medicine. To really not acknowledge the, the trauma I'd been through. But it wasn't until 2015 when I was in the earthquakes in Nepal. I'd been running a global health nonprofit for a few years at that point and was, I was there by accident. So I was working with a medical school that did incredible, like community engagement during their, their, their schooling and. I, I just got to witness firsthand how that connection to community affected that, their response. But in the meantime, me as a little human being was feeling really overwhelmed and I had a lot of physical symptoms in my body after being in those earthquakes. So I started to investigate like, what is trauma and how does it affect the humans? And I was still running the health equity residency at the time, or I was, I think I was just kind of extricating and recognizing that almost all the humans that I was encountering from that perspective, whether it was refugees or folks living low income or folks using substances, they had faced trauma that I didn't know how to address in primary care, and I just started doing the research.
Kerry:Yeah. I think, you know, living, even as a hospitalist, like, like you said, you are experiencing all these basically traumatic things that maybe you, you, like you said, apprenticeship, we learn to suppress those things. So you may be, you know, seeing death and dying in all these scary things. Even I think there's a lot of research and data on even family members, like witnessing, a family member getting CPR and things like that and how traumatic that can be. And that's something you're, you know, kind of exposed to probably more often than not. And the other thing is you mentioned that you, you know, recognize it within yourself, and I think a lot of people who, you know, start on a new journey and things are usually realizing, okay, there's something that they can do better, or something's going on with themselves, and that's how they become the best teachers as well. Right. The best learners and the best teachers. Right. So I, I'm not familiar with the earthquakes in Nepal, but that definitely sounds like a super scary incident to be in any, you know disaster. As you know, if we got listeners in Tampa, I'm, I know many people, including my family members, went through a lot of traumatic experiences with our hurricanes last year, so, and are still kind of dealing with that. So, I mean, how do you like approach someone, or how can you help with these, with these patients, or, you know, individuals.
Christine:The most important thing that I learned about my own responses was that they made sense. So I always think that in medicine we're too quick to pathologize something and say, oh, there's something wrong with this person, or this is a maladaptive response. But traumatic responses are natural ways that your brain tries to protect you from future danger. And so what happened with me with the earthquake is, you know, of a building is. Vibrating. So let's say a garage door opens in a building, and this was, this happened in my hotel in Singapore. I would just get this immediate sense of threat and that is a protective mechanism. So some of what we think of as triggers things that make you feel uncomfortable. Instead of thinking like, what's wrong with my brain that it's doing this? We have to think, well, what's right with my brain that's doing this? So a lot of it is bringing into conscious awareness, the stuff that your brain is already doing. So what it tends to do is to notice things that seem dangerous. But once you're in conscious awareness of that, you can more rationally approach whether or not it is a danger. And once we're aware hey, my body is in a fight and flight response. Well, what does that look like for me? Well, that's overactive. So my mind is racing and I can't sleep and my muscles feel tense. And you know, my, my leg is jittering. I mean, some of this could be related to anxiety or many other things, but once we've been through something traumatic, and that can be. An earthquake or a hurricane, but it can also be having been neglected as a kid or having been bullied or having you know, a racialized person who's always afraid of just walking down the street. There. There's so many different reasons that we can face trauma and I, I think that a lot of folks believe that we're kind of oversubscribing to when trauma happens. And I think we still haven't identified sufficiently how often it happens. And I, I mentioned fight and flight is one response, but another thing that we're not recognizing is that dissociation, that kind of cutting ourselves off from self and those internal messages. So that's what we call the freeze collapse. And lots of folks are stuck in that. It's like. You can't get out of bed. You can't stop doom scrolling. Lots of folks that I work with at the the addiction clinic this is what they're either trying to create with their substance of choice or they're trying to escape from it. So I think trauma really is ubiquitous. It's out there. A lot of folks are experiencing it, and they don't necessarily have the right name. And if you don't have the right name, then you don't really know what to do about it.
Kerry:I agree. And I like how you explained it to me it's like just even thinking about our innate human response like to pain or something. Right? You learn these are natural things and you know, you've learned to be scared of, you know, a hot stove or, you know, watch out for it, right? So recognizing that it's a natural response and that you're supposed to have these signs and symptoms, you know, that's okay. But then, you know, kind of like you said, processing it and dealing it with it in a, in the, I guess a more appropriate and healthy way is also kind of the goal too. You mentioned, you know, some people use the word microtrauma, I think. I don't know if you've ever heard that term. Maybe for these little things that accumulate over life, but they really can have a large impact on some people.
Christine:I've heard that and I've heard Big T and little T
Kerry:Yes, I've heard that too. Yeah.
Christine:Subjective. So like what one person would believe is gonna be small for another human isn't necessarily experienced that way. So all of these things are subjective and our pathways are very individualized. So, and it's interesting that you bring up pain because emotional pain and physical pain are actually processed in really similar ways. They travel up through the vagus nerve as these messages telling our brain what our body is up to, and then our brain perceives them. And once we've been through either emotional or physical pain, our brain tends to either amplify. Or kind of ignore and disconnect from those messages so, so much of. Either of those pain pathways is bringing the messaging into conscious awareness and then learning how to adjust your own volume dial. So from a pain perspective, I've been studying pain reprocessing therapy, which actually uses very similar modalities to what I do as a trauma therapist now. So, it it's all really interesting when you get into the neurobiology of it and try to figure out like, why is this happening and why is it adaptive and what do we already have the ability to do? But most of us aren't consciously aware that we can do it.
Kerry:Yeah, I, I, I like your explanation, obviously with the, you know, the vagus nerve and the way that we experience these things. Tell me more about this, the freeze collapse. I guess response That you see a lot.
Christine:It can kind of manifest as a couple of things. One is like the body-based way that it shows up. So the body just kind of goes into a shutdown. It will often get misdiagnosed as depression because it looks like apathy. It looks like a lack of motivation. It looks like a lack of doing things, but it's actually so much fear in the body that the body's like, okay, well if I just get really small and really still, maybe the problem will go away. And the thing to remember about all of these responses is that every single mammal has them. So from freeze. The fight and flight of the sympathetic nervous system to the freeze collapse of the parasympathetic, that's overwhelmed. Every single mammal has this, and so like, even though we're this complex human with these big brains that do lots of rational thinking, at the end of the day, we're mammals. And so when our body says like, Hey, could you just like shut down and maybe ignore this problem and let's hope it goes away. We are the A possum, we are the deer that's kind of like rolling over and hoping the bear ignores us. We have these built-in strategies that are reflexes. Like when our amygdala decides, hey, this organism is in danger, it actually creates a reflux response and it's not in conscious control. And so the first step in being able to mitigate it is bringing it into conscious awareness.
Kerry:Yeah. So what about, well, I guess what would be the second step? Like once you're, you know, I guess admitting it or whatever, like how do you move on from,
Christine:I call it noticing. So after noticing there's shifting. And so shifting is when you develop skills and strategies and a lot of people, like, I mean, I don't know if you were taught this in medical school. I probably graduated long before you do, but did, but I was taught CBT fixes everything. So that's cognitive behavior therapy where you examine your distorted perceptions and you rethink your way out of it. And what I keep trying to ex, you know, express when you're in. Traumatic situation or toxic stress, lots of distress. Your thinking brain actually goes offline. And so one of the reasons why you can't think your way out of a traumatic response is because your thinking brain is never a part of the response. It's your amygdala's like, learn your in danger. And it sends this reflex response down the chain of command. So one of the things that can happen. In that shifting is we learn, well, what does my nervous system look like when it's overactive? What does my nervous system look like when it's underactive? And then there are tools using the nervous system to shift back, and that's what I really focus on and what I love about being a physician in this. Space is that I understand the neurobiology of what's happening. So I can say to my patients like, Hey, look we're, we're noticing your nervous system and when you're overactivated, these are the skills that can work. And it can be as simple as using breath or gaze, like where you're looking to a little bit more complex. Like I use EFT tapping, which is self acupressure. It's an evidence-based way to reduce stress and affect chronic pain responses, and a lot of folks are like. That's kind of out there and it's not anymore. The, the science is backing up why it's working. So it's one of the reasons why I kind of blew up on social media as TikTok trauma doc. But I'll, I'll be doing a lot more on YouTube now that TikTok is in question. And I wrote the modern trauma toolkit is'cause I was like, wow, these are really easy things to learn and we could be teaching parents and teachers and anyone facing the public how to regulate their emotions and then everyone will be better off.
Kerry:Oh, absolutely. I think. I mean, clearly if we can all regulate our emotions and there would be no fights, I'm just thinking of like my kids. If we could just regulate their emotions, it would be great. But so tell us more. What is in the, the mono trauma toolkit that you mentioned? I mean, I'm assuming those things that you just said, but I'm sure there's more, and I would like for you to share.
Christine:Yeah, for sure. So the first half of it is kind of like a, a, a very simple explanation of what trauma is and why it happens, and not just kind of like in the individual body, in your nervous system, although I definitely focus on that. One important thing that I mentioned is called polyvagal theory, which is not something we learn in medical school, but clinically it's been the most helpful way for me to understand. The overactive and the underactive response to stress. And so once you have an understanding of how that works in your own nervous system, which is kind of the first half of the book, then the second half tells you how to shift. So I mentioned EFT, that's one of the chapters. I have another one called Havening Techniques, which is a way that a lot of folks kind of intuitively know that we can self-soothe. So. If you think about the ways that the human body responds to stress, we might hold another person's hand, or we might ring our hands. We might give a person a hug or put them on the shoulder, and then if we are tearful, we are wiping the tears away on the cheekbones and all of those places on the body, from the palms to the shoulders, to the face are places that if we just touch with a really soothing brush and I, when I say brush, I mean just across with your fingertips. That will create calming delta and theta waves in the brain. So they've done the studies on like individuals in a lab type setting, and they show that really simple brushing across the skin calms the nervous system. And so if we do that and we enhance it with something like guided imagery or using breath, if you're overactive, then you would focus on a longer exhale. If you're underactive, you would focus on a longer inhale. These are really simple things to learn and I, I teach them as a physician, and under a minute, a parent can teach a kid, like if you're feeling really overwhelmed, this is a way you can self-soothe and also recognize there's nothing wrong with you. Like your body is having a natural response to this perception of danger. Your body's telling you something's wrong. Here's the way that you can adjust that volume dial.
Kerry:Now, was that the heavenly technique? Is that what you were describing?
Christine:It is called Havening, so
Kerry:Sorry.
Christine:it's also just like a soothing touch. Yeah, no, I mean, we don't learn this stuff in med school.
Kerry:no. Yeah, I mean, you can learn so much from, you know, kids and how they like to be hugged and they like to kiss their booboos and things like that. I think it's, you can learn a lot from that and it definitely makes them feel better. So it's kind of something similar to that. And tell me, you said the theta and delta waves. What, what does that mean? So we can tell our listeners.
Christine:When our brain gets really, really stressed and we were to measure the energy level coming off our brain. So this is an EEG, so there's an ECG that measures the energy coming off the heart. There's an EEG measuring the energy coming off the brain, and when we're really stressed, the energy looks. Quick, it looks kind of irregular, jagged. Those are called gamma waves, and that that's a marker of stress and tension. And when we're really calm and chill, like if we're. On the couch watching Netflix when we're in a deep sleep, our brain C creates really slow, gentle rolling hills with those brainwaves, and those are the delta and the theta waves. So what we know about the Havening techniques in a lab setting is that if really, really gently brush across the shoulders or the face our brain naturally decreases the gamma waves and increases the delta and theta waves. So this is something your body already knows how to do. A lot of the somatic or body-based practices that I teach are things that your body naturally knows, but we really just haven't learned how to do it. So I'm just trying to get these skills into more and more people's hands.'cause lots of folks are stressed right now.
Kerry:What are some other ones that you like use in a clinical setting? You said you could teach things in under one minute. Gimme some more examples.
Christine:Yeah, so, so I, I mentioned breath, like it's really easy to notice your own nervous system and then adjust your breath accordingly. Another really easy one is gaze. So there's a couple of ways you can use gaze. So if you're looking at something close to you, that's actually the parasympathetic nervous system and farther away is sympathetic. So we have two nervous systems that help us res respond to stress. And if one of them is overactivated, it can help to pendulate or move back and forth between them. And so all you have to do is to look at something close by and then look at something far away. And you just do this for a couple of breaths in each position, and then you're alternating your nervous system. Some of the therapeutic modalities that use your eye movements, they just move your eyes from side to side. That's something we call bilateral stimulation. So anything that crosses the midbrain is very regulating for our brain. Another one that I teach is a butterfly tap. So you're just taking the palms of your hands and you're tapping them on the opposite. Side of the upper chest. These are really simple strategies that I teach folks. I love guided imagery. I do something called interactive guided imagery where you just visit your happy place. So whether that's a beach or a mountain lake or you know, hiking in the forest, but you bring a multisensory awareness to that and you can do that every single day. So I'm walking my dog and I'm really noticing the texture. Tree and I try to bring all my senses into it. What am I smelling? What am I touching? What am I tasting? I mean, sometimes that works, but even just the smell of a flower or a tree that I might not have otherwise noticed, it brings you into a different state because the stress responses tend to have sensory pathways as well, especially when we're triggered, it will bring up all of the senses of the first time we were exposed to that trigger. And so what we wanna do is erase and replace those associations and the more that we can pay more attention to cues of safety, it actually trains our brain to pay less attention to the cues of danger And the way our brains are designed, it's kind of like a five to one ratio of paying attention to negative stimulus, and so we can practice training our brain to pay attention to more positive stimulus. One thing I learned on TikTok just this week was every single person that you see or you meet, pay attention to one thing that you like about them. Whether it's, you know, something about their appearance or their tone of voice or their expressions. What's one thing that you like or you enjoy paying attention to, and that's one of the things that can help us rewire the brain that is designed to pay attention to cues of danger. So these are practices that we can rewire our brain or use these neuroplasticity that every single human has the capacity to do. I mean, we can rewire in as little as a month with the right tools.
Kerry:Wow. Yeah, I mean, I think we are definitely hearing lots and lots more about neuroplasticity and the ability that our brain can do that, and I know I've talked to other awesome guests like you about it. And it's, it's really amazing what we can do. And it's fun that we've learned all this stuff in the last I don't know how many years, but it's exciting. So how, I mean, these skills can help with stress, burnout, the physical symptoms, right. Do you have any like rewarding I don't know, stories that you wanna share from anyone in particular?
Christine:I mean, one of the things that was the reason that I kind of journeyed from hospital to family practice to more trauma therapy is because I think it's such an upstream effect. So I mentioned that the folks I was working with in my family practice clinic, they had all of these benefits that wasn't just stress reduction or clearing away their PTSD symptoms. They were having effects in their diabetic management and their asthma in their blood pressure. So what I was starting to recognize and, and this makes sense because there was a research trial that came out in 1999 called the ACEs, or the Adverse Childhood Experiences Trial, and they recognize that for all of these developmental or things that happen to you as a kid you have these outcomes as an adult, like heart disease and cancer and early pregnancy and all of these social and physical and psychological outcomes. And what's amazing is when you start to work on stress and also those foundational beliefs that get laid down as a kid. And that's actual therapy. You modify those risk factors so you are improving your vascular tone. So for example, when your sympathetic nervous system is active all the time and your body is stuck in fight and flight, and you're just kind of constantly amped and ready for something bad to happen. Once you start to spend more time in that parasympathetic nervous system and your blood pressure improves, then all of the other things start falling into place where you might not have the same cardiac risk factors. So for me what was so rewarding is just watching everybody's health improve overall once they started to modify stress, and you know, when I was in medical school, it was kind of like nebulous, whether or not stress reduction helped with every other thing. But I can just say this firsthand i, I definitely experienced that with my family practice patients to the point that I was like, wow, I need to dedicate not just my career and my clinical individual work to this, but also spreading the word, writing the modern trauma toolkit, getting on socials and just trying to share with people wow, these are simple things that you can learn to lower your stress.
Kerry:So, so you mentioned asthma, like do you think that there's like an, in an, I guess a anti-inflammatory component of what could be going on with like reducing the stress from, like, how do you think that would be getting better, I guess, inflammation.
Christine:I mean, if you think about the kinds of things that help you modify your asthma, we take like a beta agonist, right? So you're influencing your sympathetic tone to catalyze an asthma response. So when I think about how many processes in our body are affected by that sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, almost anything can be modified once it's under your control. So parasympathetic is your gastrointestinal tract, your fertility, your immunity. And if you're in locked in sympathetic tone because you're stuck in fight and flight and your parasympathetic system isn't working, that means your GI. You're reproductive and your immune systems aren't working. So once you have better balance, then all of your systems do what they're supposed to do. So like we're supposed to have these immune systems that fight off cancers and autoimmune disease and infections, but if our sympathetic system is dominated, our parasympathetic system never gets a chance to do what it's supposed to.
Kerry:Mm. Yeah. Wow. I never really thought about it that way. It's really important, I mean, for everything that you're doing. So it's so good that you're, you know, getting out here and speaking even on the social media, right? Because we wanna have good people teaching us, not just influencers in general. So that's very important. What, you mentioned a lot about community and some of your previous work, like on, I guess these surfaces that you've been doing. How does community and social connection kind of play a role in this emotional regulation?
Christine:Such a good question, Carrie. When I focused on not just the individual aspects of trauma, but also kind of the systemic or collective responses, I never dreamed that like the kinds of things we were facing collectively would be so impactful in terms of our stress level, like. Political divisiveness, ongoing pandemics, the climate emergency, like there are just so many things that we're all facing as a human race, and one of the ways that we can heal is by more, connection And, and when I say connection, it doesn't necessarily mean connecting to others.'cause sometimes people are really nervous to do that. But can you connect to a pet? Can you connect to nature? Can you connect to music? Can you connect to self spirituality? Like there are so many ways that we can develop that sense of connectedness. Connecting to humans really works when we think about our values. And I think one of the things that it's become so divisive because we haven't focused on the shared values that literally every human has. We all believe in family. We believe in, a sense of connection to nature if we were able to focus more on those values. So this is something called acceptance and commitment therapy. This is more the cognitive stuff. So there's three phases to trauma. We talked about noticing, we talked about shifting, and the third phase is reconnecting. So reconnecting is like, well, who am I? As a human in the world now that I'm no longer driven by these stress reflexes because the reflexes are happening not under conscious control. And when I think about. You know, even just the way folks are really, really upset about masking and they're trying to ban masks, that's because masks have become a trigger of a time that was really scary and felt dangerous. So they're trying to say, let's ban cues of danger. Whereas, what if we were to say like. What if we got better at emotional regulation and we didn't have that cue anymore? So I, I was noticing we have these crazy wildfires in Canada that are still burning right now. I was in Toronto for my med school reunion a couple months ago, and the air quality was so bad that you could like literally see thick smoke ash in the air and the numbers hit like nine. So like off the charts in terms of dangerous air quality and I was the only person with a mask on in the street. And that's the dissociative response. Like when you can't actually acknowledge the cue of danger in front of you, which is ash falling out of the sky because the other cue of danger, people wearing a mask has a traumatic association for folks now. So we actually need to figure this out because the collective problems that we're facing are enormous. And if we have all of these traumatic associations and we can't actually acknowledge like these are the things we need to do to stop climate change from happening, and you know, you living in Florida, there can't be something more important for like the collective health of people, is just to make sure you guys can keep your cities safe.
Kerry:Yeah. Well that's a very interesting perspective on the masking situation. I mean, I, I guess when you say it like that, I'm like, oh, yeah, it is kind of like every time I see someone wearing a mask, I'm like, oh, geez. Like it is a little bit trauma provoking. And I mean, we use them in the office, which is fine, but I just, I can kinda see what you're saying. Either I'm like, oh gosh, I'm gonna get sick, or, you know, what's gonna happen next? So it is a little bit yeah trauma provoking. But is there anything else you'd like to share before I ask you where else you can find us or you losing my words?
Christine:No, I, I, I, I think the modern trauma toolkit is in, in all bookstores. Modern trauma.com is the website if you wanna find an easy way to, to get it. I did narrate the audio book. It's one of the other cues of safety is tone of voice, so a slow and melodic tone of voice, which a lot of female family docs are innately good at. It's really regulating for folks. So there's just so many things that we can do on a day-to-day basis. To, to do ourselves and then to teach others, especially the kids in our life. This is the right time for these messages. So I, yeah, I, I don't take clinical patients, like I don't see folks one-on-one, but I, I love to talk endlessly about how important stress management is.
Kerry:Okay. I wanted to ask this one question before we close because I, we mentioned it before, but for someone who feels like they're on the struggle bus, where's the best place to start?
Christine:I think the best place to start is to decide if your nervous system is overactive or underactive, and then learn a few simple tools that work for you. So we have to personalize the toolkit to help you get back into, it's called the window of tolerance, but some of it is nervous system awareness. So there's lots of folks teaching about stress reduction and I love to teach it from the perspective of the body. We've all got one.
Kerry:Yeah. Awesome. So I guess you were saying recognize it and then use something like the modern trauma tool to toolkit to find out what works for you, right?
Christine:Exactly. So whether it's like oh, I'll, I'll, I'll teach one last cognitive tool. So we've all heard of affirmations, like just saying. Good things happen to me. I'm a good person. Like just saying something that's really like kind when you're stressed out or when you've been through trauma, that can actually feel a little bit like gaslighting.'cause you don't necessarily believe the affirmation. So one of my most viral tiktoks was something called affirmations, and it's just putting a what if in front of it. What if I am a good person? What if good things could happen to me? What if things turn around and the more that you use the words, what if you're planting seeds of possibility? So traumatic responses shoot you in one direction. They say, get into fight and flight. Escape this danger. And what we're trying to do is to develop multiple pathways. So we just need to believe all things are possible. So practice information. So your, when your brain is like, what if. Worst case scenario happens, you counteract like, oh yeah, okay, let's acknowledge and prepare for that and let's also acknowledge these other eight possible outcomes. What if this is something that happens and we're just planting new seeds? So when I think of neuroplasticity, I think of it as like planting a new garden in the brain and then giving that new garden lots of attention. So plant some informations and give them lots of nourishment.
Kerry:I love that. I, I will have to check out that viral TikTok but I was gonna say it's this a little bit similar to like the ladder method, like where you are creating this affirmation, but then you don't really truly believe it. So you kind of bring it down to steps where you can believe a little bit more and more and more until it be kind of becomes something that you understand and believe in. Right.
Christine:Totally. That's exactly it.
Kerry:Cool. Well thank you so much for joining us today christine, I would, or Dr. Gibson, thank you so much and I will include everything that you had said in the show notes and everybody, please stay tuned for next week's episode.
Christine:Thank you so.
Kerry:Thank you.
