In this conversation, Dr. Christine Gibson discusses her journey into trauma work and the importance of trauma-informed care in the medical field. She emphasizes the need for a paradigm shift in understanding the mind-body connection and the impact of trauma on physical and mental health. Dr. Gibson shares practical tools and techniques from her book, The Modern Trauma Toolkit, that can help individuals regulate their nervous systems and heal from trauma. She also highlights the importance of trauma-informed training for healthcare professionals and the need for greater awareness of trauma in society.

Takeaways

• Trauma is often the root cause of physical and mental health issues, and addressing trauma can lead to significant improvements in overall well-being.
• There is a need for a paradigm shift in the medical field to recognize the mind-body connection and the impact of trauma on health.
• Practical tools and techniques, such as EFT, havening, and tremoring, can help individuals regulate their nervous systems and heal from trauma.
• Trauma-informed training should be provided to healthcare professionals to ensure they can effectively support patients who have experienced trauma.
• Greater awareness of trauma and its effects is needed in society to create safer and more compassionate environments.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Christine Gibson and her book, The Modern Trauma Toolkit

02:12 Dr. Gibson's personal and professional journey into trauma work

04:06 The impact of trauma on physical and mental health

07:35 The translational gap in trauma research and education

10:13 The importance of psychosensory modalities in trauma healing

13:22 The need for trauma-informed care in the medical field

16:07 The motivation behind writing The Modern Trauma Toolkit

17:38 Favorite psychosensory tools and activities for trauma healing

20:05 The future of trauma work and the importance of spreading awareness

29:26 Dr. Gibson's hopes for the field of trauma in the next decade

34:16 Potential future books and projects

36:22 The importance of communication and psychological first aid

38:31 The power of spreading the word and creating change

Keywords: trauma, medical field, trauma-informed care, mind-body connection, physical health, mental health, tools, techniques, The Modern Trauma Toolkit, trauma-informed training, awareness

This is unedited.

Peta Stapleton (00:02.064)
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Fourth Wave in Therapy. And I am a little bit excited myself today to have with me Dr. Christine Gibson. Now, Christine's, I'm a bit of a fan girl in this moment because Christine's book came across my desk probably nearly a year ago now. And all details of course are below in the show notes. But Christine's book, The Modern Trauma Toolkit, piqued my interest.

Not only because she included one of my favorite modalities, of course, EFT, but lots and lots of other techniques and strategies, if you like, for someone to, you know, use themselves if they're going through that trauma journey. So Christine's full bio is included below, but just by way of introduction, Christine is a family physician, but has gone down in that trauma space. She is well known on TikTok as the TikTok Trauma Doc.

That link is below as well. But I do believe you might be transitioning over to YouTube. Heard that somewhere along the line. Christine, welcome to the podcast.

Christine Gibson (01:04.494)
it's so amazing to be here. I've been a fan of yours for a long time, too.

Peta Stapleton (01:09.744)
how exciting that we, it's lovely when we get to kind of swap these stories even off air, but you know, people that we admire out there doing the good work, if you like, in these spaces and then being able to connect and share, I think just, you know, it's seamless that we have all this internet and technology available to us. So thank you for sharing some wisdom today. If you're okay, I would like to start by asking, like, you're in the medical field.

So you're well and truly, you know, you made a decision somewhere along the line and listeners know that my youngest daughter wants to go the medical path. So she's a year away at present from finishing her formal education to then go into medicine. So you made that decision, but somewhere along the line, you know, it sounds like, and it could have been through patient stories or consultations, you made the decision to kind of go down this trauma path.

and not a traditional conventional one, I would say. How did that come about for you?

Christine Gibson (02:12.142)
Well, there's the personal story and there's the kind of more professional story. I'll start with that one. I have been running a global nonprofit for about 12 years now. And so I was working doing some academic consulting in Nepal in 2015 when the earthquakes hit. So as you would have read in the book, I did experience some post -traumatic symptoms and I was just so curious about it because I'd never experienced that before. And I met a psychiatrist in Singapore.

And he said, no, no, no, you're having a normal response to an abnormal situation, which we all know what that means. But I got really curious. And the more that I started researching about trauma, the more that I recognized because the other parallel thing I'd been doing was running a health equity residency. So I'd been running that from 2007, eight, I think, till about 2014. So I would have just finished being the program director for that residency. And in health equity spaces,

So many people have gone through trauma, whether that's structural violence that's imposed on racialized communities or immigrants and refugees, people who are living with like insecure housing and finances, and then lots of folks with developmental trauma, which can happen in any demographic. But the more that I studied it, the more that I was like, this is the root cause of everything I see, not just the psychological symptoms, but all the physical ones too. So.

I started thinking I needed a little bit of tools in my toolkit for trauma. And in about 2017, I started doing some research about the kinds of work that I could do as a primary care doctor. And the results that I got were so striking that I just thought, this is the most downstream that I can move in primary care, is to intervene at the point of trauma symptoms. And then so much else within primary care resolves itself. And that was kind of my professional journey.

Peta Stapleton (04:06.736)
I just want to pause there for a moment because I think that's such a valuable statement that so many of the symptoms that you might have been seeing in primary care had this at some root cause. Like how common is that known in the medical field?

Christine Gibson (04:25.07)
Not at all. I mean, I didn't. And I'm like, I'm pretty, I'm a lifelong learner. I have a master's. I just finished a doctorate this year. I love learning. I'd studied Ayurvedic counseling prior to that. There were so many things that I was interested in and learning, and this had crossed my path yet. So the main study that really helped me understand the depth of it was the one on adverse childhood experiences that came out the same year I graduated medicine 24 years ago. And,

That should have changed all of medical training in my opinion, because it demonstrated this exponential increase of all of the adverse childhood experiences. So things like abuse and neglect and situations that kids can go through. And they only selected 10 of them. There's so many more that can affect people. And then they showed this exponential increase of every single physical and mental and social health outcome that they investigated.

that should have been a game changer. And that's what I noticed in practice. So that would be primary prevention, which is intervening in the kids. Secondary prevention is intervening in the adults who already have that trauma response in their body. And I have two kind of theories around this, although it's not super well studied. One is that when your body is stuck in fight and flight in that sympathetic nervous system, you actively shut down your immunity. So your immunity needs you to be spending some time in parasympathetic state. And...

Some of us do that when we're sleeping, but if you're really stressed out, even during your sleep, you're still quite activated. So I think helping us retain that balance of parasympathetic tone and just being in a calm body sometimes, which is where EFT and these other psychosensory modalities are such a gift. And that's why I want to share it with like the world through social media and writing. The other thing that I think happens is,

people actually start to care about themselves again. So that self -compassion comes back. I had so many patients who didn't want to acknowledge that they had a body or who had so much deep shame that they didn't want to care for their own bodies. And once you work on trauma, these things resolve itself. I had one particular patient in my family practice whose hemoglobin A1C, which is a marker of diabetes management.

Christine Gibson (06:40.878)
it dropped almost to normal after being twice as high as it should be. So her A1c went from 14 to eight after just dealing with her trauma for the first time in 20 years. And these are the transformational things that I saw as a clinician that I thought, wow, I'm free in Canada in our healthcare system, because I'm a doctor. I should be doing more of this. And my gosh, spread the word to everyone else.

Peta Stapleton (07:06.832)
Absolutely. And I'm hoping the book goes a long way towards that and social media, of course, as well. And again, you know, those links are below because I want everyone to follow and share those videos that you've got available. Do you think, and I'm thinking as you're talking, you know, this translational gap that truly does exist, you know, it certainly exists in the psychological world where, you know, modalities or processes or protocols that are tested in research,

kind of definitely take a couple of decades to cross over into mainstream. Do you think that's what's happened with the ACE study as well? But you know, what started off as just an exploration of obesity, you know, I believe back and then of course uncovered, you know, 10 different areas that absolutely weren't just correlational, but causal to some of these, you know, long -term chronic health issues.

Do you think it's just because they're still sitting in that translational gap that it hasn't really caught up into the teaching level for, you know, junior, you know, straight out of students, straight out of school, coming in and going into medicine or fields like psychology?

Christine Gibson (08:16.27)
I think there's multifactorial reasons and I think that's certainly one of them. I think another one is the knowledge translation is just bucking up against a paradigm of this dichotomy between the mind and the body. And we can't really wrap our medical heads around just how interconnected it all is. That's why I love the somatic strategies is because it formally connects them in the therapy itself.

But I think in medicine, we really don't, and we might through other systems. So we can look at the nervous system and see how it's all interconnected. We can now look at the microbiome and notice how the microbiome is playing an effect on brain and neurotransmitters and all these other factors. But we haven't put it together in this causal linkage, saying these traumas that we experience and not just during childhood, but people who have experienced

ableism at the hand of the medical system. That is such a huge problem, especially with long COVID really increasing exponentially in the community. There's so much medical gaslighting and harm that comes from people having undifferentiated symptoms or being in a female body in the system. And all of these racism, sexism, ageism, classism, all of these things that I address in the book is causing trauma. They play out in

in adults and communities. And we also have these collective traumas. I mentioned the pandemic, but the climate emergency, which has certainly hit Australia really hard. These collective traumas are in our tissues too. And I think the easiest thing that happens in modern times is we dissociate. We just pretend it's not happening. And for us to actually feel safe and stay in that window of tolerance where we can handle reality is the only chance we have of solving complex problems. So.

To me, this is the most important thing we could be doing at this moment.

Peta Stapleton (10:13.104)
And you've touched on so many important things there. I think one, acknowledging that the unconscious biases that perhaps people carry that they're certainly not aware of, but the interactions at that frontline in medical situations. When that might be the first, if you like, trauma that someone has, and COVID's a really good example of that with maybe everyone was kind of functioning quite well, but then...

COVID itself resulted in long COVID, but then the interactions within a medical situation or environment and encountering unconscious bias, whether that's about gender or race or something else, I think is so important because I myself supervise a bunch of doctoral students that are investigating these kinds of things, whether it's to do with, one of them has a passion and she's exploring.

you know, like endometriosis in young girls and how long that takes for diagnosis purely because of the interactions there that are occurring or judgments that are made, that kind of thing. But that stuff constitutes a trauma eventually if someone, because she's looking at two groups. One is women in their fifties that were probably misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. But then she's also looking at young teens that have already been diagnosed to kind of look at quality of life. And, you know,

that could be extended into other kind of areas and you just think that in itself creates such a traumatic response doesn't it for people that then they develop some sort of you know fear or judgment themselves about medical professionals and whether they can be helped.

Christine Gibson (11:55.566)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think medical professionals have been ill -equipped to manage our own uncertainty because we believe we can fix most things. And there's so many things that are undifferentiated and unknown, and we have to stay really open -minded. And I think that's where a lot of these other fourth wave of therapy comes in is, we've been told for so long in medical school,

that cognitive behavior therapy is the gold standard for literally everything. And it wasn't until I started studying trauma and recognizing that your prefrontal cortex that does the cognitive stuff isn't even online after trauma. And it doesn't, it's not something that's accessible to you. So I have so many patients who'll say they're in a brain fog, they have no memory and concentration. I'm like, of course you don't. Your amygdala is like the smoke detectors in your brain are taking up all of your energy.

and they're not even letting you connect to your thinking brain. How would CBT work? So I think we really need these giant paradigm shifts and the more of us that are vocal about it and researching it, the better. And so the medical establishment is doing the best it can. Like I really don't think anyone has an intention to create harm, but the paradigm is old and it needs shifted both in terms of the things that we don't know and also the things that are already here.

and we're kind of ignoring to our peril.

Peta Stapleton (13:22.032)
Yeah, absolutely. Which is a beautiful dovetail and segue into obviously the techniques that you outline in your book, The Modern Trauma Toolkit. I mean, I want to jump into some of those because the book is definitely written for people themselves that might be suffering so that they can pick it up as a handbook. But just a step back from that, what prompted you to write the book in the first place?

Christine Gibson (13:48.11)
There was a couple of things that prompted me to write the Modern Trauma Toolkit. One was just how much engagement I was getting on social media. So starting on TikTok, but I'm branching out to other socials now too. There's people who are desperate for this information and they might not be able to afford a therapist. They might not have somebody who's either financially or geographically accessible to them. And I thought, well, there's so many...

easy ways to get good information to people. If I'm a trusted professional in social media, let's just open that door. And that doorway kind of opened me to getting a platform to be able to sell a book. But ultimately, so many of my patients said to me, where can I read more about what you're sharing with me? Like I've never heard of polyvagal theory before. And I didn't really understand that ancestral trauma was something that I have to deal with. You know,

We know that our First Nations communities, and I think they call Aboriginal in Australia, they've been so harmed by this ongoing genocide and structural violence against the communities, and they don't even understand how that is passed on generation through generation. So these are the kinds of concepts that I think everybody should know, and we should have been taught in school both.

how is trauma happening to people, but also the solutions. And I really wanted my book to be solution -focused. So not just what it is that's happened to you, but what can you do about it. And my other really strong intention was to try to make the book as safe as I could psychologically, because a lot of the existing books are very academically oriented. They use big words, lots of jargon. And the thing that I love to do on socials is explain everything in a really easy way to understand it. And then I hired beta readers. So...

I work in refugee health and in addiction medicine and I have a lot of diverse patients and I just didn't want them harmed by me, a white woman in wellness. We have traditionally caused a lot of trauma. So I hired people who were women of color, one is trans and I just said, could we just write this book until it feels safe? And they helped me tremendously. So psychological safety, good information and a solution focus were kind of the intersection that I thought was missing and tried to do my best to fill that.

Peta Stapleton (16:07.568)
I can absolutely say I've read it from front to cover and you have absolutely achieved that. Probably what excited me the most because anytime I pick up a book myself, particularly in a clinical space, I'm looking for other techniques in it. Like literally if there's no techniques I'll probably put it down or I don't finish reading it. What is in this book are these practice sections. So it might be that here's a concept but then there's this let's practice.

And that's the part that I think makes it so different because even within the first chapter, you get to this element where you're like, there's something I can do. And maybe that's my acts of service love language. I'm like, I can do something. But there's great empowerment in that. I'm thinking for someone that's reading this for themselves or a therapist that might be working with a patient working through it to go, okay, here's something we can actually do. And I love that word you used before, which was psychosensory.

that you said these are connecting that mind and back into the body, helping that be quite a safe place to be. But activities that can be then implemented then and there, they can put the book down and go off and do it. You've got so many modalities that kind of are touched on in this book. And obviously if people wanted to train in them further, that's encouraged.

Are there any that are more of your favorite, your psychosensory tools or activities?

Christine Gibson (17:38.19)
so in the book, in the chapter on the somatic ways that we can shift our nervous system, there's a section. And so I have different chapters. So I had a whole chapter on havening techniques, a whole chapter on emotional freedom techniques, a chapter on tremoring, because to me, these are the things that people can learn safely on their own. And I just wanted to get it into as many hands as possible. So I was doing examples of little one minute videos on TikTok and

people were really engaging with it and saying, wow, this is helpful. And in my first few sessions with my patients, these are the tools that I teach them and say, this is the way to get back into the window of tolerance. This is the way to get into a calm body and dial that volume dial down to an amount of intensity that you can handle, whether it's pain in the physical body or emotional pain. And so I would say that,

like tremoring is a little bit hard to do because it requires like laying down in a yoga mat. I mean, I can do it on a wall sit now, but it's basically the way a dog or a horse would shake off their issues. I love it for end of the day to kind of relax the body, but they're really practical tools that you could do just by moving your hands underneath the table and, you know, doing hand tapping or hand havening, ducking into the bathroom for a minute at work.

Just a really quick reset are both Havening and Tapping. So Tapping I know you're really familiar with. One of the things that I did that I also think was unique is I had a colored illustration that's available on the QR code that everyone can download and print off for themselves. And there's also a 20 minute video for all of these techniques on the QR code in the book. So it's not, if you're not a visual learner in the way that you could read it and then practice on your own body, there's

there's the illustration and the video that will also help you. So I just, my goal was to have all teachers, all parents, all doctors, nurses, realtors, lawyers, literally everyone working with the public needs to know this stuff, how to regulate your nervous system. And then we can co -regulate and have safer conversations and, you know, tackle big complex challenges. This is, this is my goal is just to get these techniques into everyone's hands. Cause we literally all need them at this point.

Peta Stapleton (20:05.104)
Absolutely, and we're on a mission to share this stuff for you as well. So absolutely encourage everybody to, you know, visit that link and get a copy. And now we now teach brand new subjects in our master's degrees here where we recommend that book. So that book is absolutely because at a trauma level, yeah, as that educator, it's kind of like this is where we need to go. And the stabilization techniques can be.

can be done at home by people in between sessions as well. So we're on that journey with you, Christine. So your book is on our book list. So there you go. So excited.

Christine Gibson (20:41.55)
I'm so glad we hear that. Even though it wasn't for patients, I do recommend practitioners read it both so that they can recommend it to patients, but also because we don't know this stuff. Like I'm trying to go to conferences with other doctors, like lifestyle medicine, primary care, and to say, hey, did you know that these are ways you can manage toxic stress? Because we have so many patients that are stressed out, and if we can't figure out what to do for them, it causes vicarious trauma.

and it causes empathy fatigue. And then the practitioner kind of shuts down. And I think honestly, one of the reasons why so many doctors are retiring and everyone's feeling really burned out is because they don't have the right tools. So I do believe that the more that we feel competent and the more that we feel confident that we have the right skillset, the less chance we have of burnout. I feel awesome about my work. I love it. And I loved being a family doctor too, but this feels different.

Peta Stapleton (21:37.776)
Yeah, and we're not immune and I think that's the most important part that just because you're a registered professional, health professional in whatever field, we're not immune at that energetic level. You know, HeartMath Institute does its research even on that heart coherence and we kind of, you know, try and share that message too. It's kind of like you're not immune if you're sitting in someone's energy space and they've got, you know, major depression and the heaviness of that or they've got

chronic pain or, you know, they're disclosing their, you know, childhood traumatic history, that type of thing. We're not a mood as a human being sitting here. So yeah, I think, you know, it's even more important for us sitting in that chair of the helping profession to be regulating ourselves because people forget that the state that we're in affects the client as well or the patient sitting in front of us. Yeah.

Christine Gibson (22:33.614)
Yeah, absolutely. And parents and teachers and other people who are dealing with kids and anyone dealing with the public, it's kind of this opportunity to use the mirror neurons in our brain, which can see what other people are doing and co -regulate with each other in a whole new way. So one of the most exciting things for me is that I could just do something with my facial expression and my tone of voice.

and immediately become a safer space for somebody's nervous system. That is such an easy thing to be able to learn and do. And all of these techniques are just so enlightening and it just gives me hope. Because I think prior to having a deep understanding of all of this, I often would feel overwhelmed and kind of powerless. And now I know that there's more help that's available.

and I have more tools, I'm still learning either. Like I just, since I've published the book, I've studied brain spotting. I'm such a huge fan of brain spotting. So all of these things are the fourth wave of therapy stuff that has not got rigorous randomized control trials yet, but wow, case studies and qualitative evidence is astonishing. And the amount of movement that we're seeing, it's incredible. And,

Before we got on camera, we talked about accelerated resolution therapy. That was the first thing that I ever learned. And the evidence is still coming out about it. But right here in Calgary, if you're trying to be a psychotherapist, it's really hard to get hired if you don't have art training now, because it's become the local gold standard. And so patients are demanding it. They're wanting therapies that are more efficacious, less painful. Like, okay, there's lots of studies on prolonged exposure therapy, but how comfortable is that for a person? It's...

It's awful. So there's so many other ways to do it. And even within the tapping protocols, you can get somebody to be exposed to the traumatic associations and their triggers and stay in a calm body. How amazing is that?

Peta Stapleton (24:43.376)
Yeah, and look, there's a reason why there's high dropout rates in some of our gold standard therapies because they're really uncomfortable. I think, you know, that really is hitting the nail on the head there that it's uncomfortable to stay there and relive some of that without any strategy to give the body a different experience. I think that's to me, and I'm really curious about your opinion, to me, what's common amongst some of these fourth wave therapies.

when they're being used to process trauma and some incredibly intense trauma is that at the same time that perhaps, you know, processing is being done, the body is being given an experience that's the opposite. So whether we call that calm or neutral or whatever it might be, at the same time processing is done, whether it's, you know, through eye movements or through tapping or through touch or tremoring or something else, the body is given a different experience and

that is very hard for the brain to kind of hold. And I always say to my patients, and calm wins. So if the body was calm when you're processing all of thinking back or talking about what was back in the past, if the body's calm or staying in that window, it wins. But that's what changes the memory. Is that your kind of take on it? That's fairly simplistic, but I'm not going to go into memory reconsolidation, but it's kind of like, we've got two different things happening at the same time here.

Christine Gibson (26:10.894)
Kind of. I see it in the... So we're talking about neuroplasticity or how we rewire the brain that's been through a traumatic event. And one of the ways that I describe it to my patients is you're creating new pathways that are possible. So it's not to say that you could never feel danger again, because it's important to be able to notice when things are dangerous. But once your amygdala have been primed in that way, they learn to either suppress all the danger signals and you kind of land in this froze collapse response.

or it amplifies them and it amplifies the intensity, which can lead to a lot of chronic pain, emotional and physical. And so a lot of what we're trying to do is to modulate and get them in that right window. And so much of it is mental flexibility. So the way I explain it is your brain is heightened to be looking out for threatening dangerous events, both inside the body and in the external environment. And what you want to do is to give it the possibility that alternatives could happen. So,

I always say we're planting seeds of possibilities, but one of the techniques in the modern trauma toolkit is something called affirmations, which is a havening strategy. And we just use an affirmation with the word what if, and I think it's such a nice explanation for healing from trauma. What if you could imagine a future that is safe? What if different things could happen? What if you're actually safe right here, right now? And just even these new possibilities is how we rewire.

So I think part of it is allowing more options to be available. And so much of these techniques very concretely do that. They actually give you the option of what did happen in the past and the emotional and physical response to it, and then just allow you to have a different experience. So here's another option. You could experience this in a neutral body. Let's try that and see how that memory is experienced now. And I mean, that's obviously preferred. And once you've...

rewritten with the neutral body, then you now have these new associations and the amygdala is like, yeah, I guess I don't really have to hold on to those associations anymore. It's okay, right now you're safe and we're reminding the body that it doesn't have to be so hypervigilant because the danger, leaving the pain of the past in the past is really, I think, the best explanation. So yeah, long -winded way to say I totally agree with you.

Peta Stapleton (28:39.696)
It's so fabulous to have some other takes on that too though, because it is about what your client understands already and leading them where they're at in that explanation or using tools or drawing on big into teaching our students, let's draw it or make it with Play -Doh or whatever it is so that they get it, they remember, rather than just always using the same kind of thing. So I think the more we hear how we can say those things, the better, which I think is.

fantastic. Christine, if you were to kind of you know look into the future and do a bit of golden kind of bald gazing, what do you hope to see in your field you know within the next decade?

Christine Gibson (29:26.702)
Well, I am noticing a lot more medical doctors who are paying close attention to trauma and mental health. So I think part of just opening up virtual care, we can do a lot of it virtually so we can reach people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to find a practitioner. And there's just so much more that's available. So.

I am noticing a lot more interest. What I wish we did was trained all of the medical students and all of the nursing students and all of the psychology students. So everyone was trauma -informed and had just a foundational layer of skills in managing this because I think everyone expects that all of those practitioners are trauma -informed and they're simply not. I mean, I know I wasn't. I was a very compassionate person, but...

I didn't understand trauma responses that were right in front of me. Like if a person was angry and irritable, or if they were missing all their appointments, I would call them, you know, difficult or non -compliant without understanding that these were trauma responses. And that gives me a lot more to work with. So as much as it can be daunting to see these trauma responses play out in front of you.

It's also this opportunity and it gives me so much more hope. So I would love to continue to spread the word. And I've actually donated the book to a lot of low and middle income countries that are now using it as curriculum for primary care training. That's my goal. I just want more and more people to have this baseline understanding and disseminate this information far and wide. I think we're in for...

much bigger collective traumas coming because we haven't done enough to shift things like ecological disruption. And the more that we have people who are able to access their thinking brains and see the solutions more clearly, the more that we can regulate our emotions and not get stuck in fight and flight or freeze because we can see that playing out in leaders too. I mean, political leaders, I mean, you can watch an interview and just say,

Christine Gibson (31:36.622)
Wow, you're really stuck in sympathetic tone, aren't you?

Peta Stapleton (31:40.88)
We could literally make a whole video of that. Yes and I think you know being aware of that and having that lends ourselves you know but then ultimately you know we do come back to you know using the world as a mirror ourselves as well so that if we can walk our own talk and kind of go wow yeah maybe I had a reaction to that or...

I've been triggered by that that I read online or saw or whatever and what's going on for me there and that ripple effect that if we're regulating ourselves, which is one of the reasons I like tapping so much in session, it's because you're doing it at the same time that you're teaching a client. So you're like literally can see five or six clients and feel fantastic because you're like, I'm pretty regulated by the end of the day. Yeah. And lots of these modalities are like that. You're doing them at the same time as you're teaching it or using it with your clients. So you're, you're,

you're regulating all the time, which I think, you know, that's where that ripple effect is going to occur at that much bigger community and worldwide level. Yeah.

Christine Gibson (32:45.262)
I totally agree. And it's one of the reasons I think why I've probably subconsciously made sure that I do havening and tapping in my early sessions is because during the course of the day, I'll have at least a couple of patients that I'm seeing where I'm doing these modalities and I'm helping my own nervous system recover from the other events that I'm not necessarily witnessing a lot of. I don't do as much narrative in my practice, although sometimes people do need to tell their story. I do a lot.

that is nonverbal processing. But it can still hurt to know of how much people have suffered. And I feel that doing these techniques for myself, I feel so much better. And people will say to me, like, if I'm, I was at the refugee clinic yesterday and some of my friends have said, I don't know how you do it. Like you're doing the hardest work in our clinic. And I think I'm really not. I feel great at the end of the day. And I can see the progress that people are making. So it's.

It's hopeful, it's self -healing, it's really interconnected because I can see the mind and body systems healing each other. To me, it's a new paradigm that both psychology and medicine desperately needed.

Peta Stapleton (34:06.544)
Yeah absolutely and my very last question which is purely selfish because I love a good book, is there another book coming?

Christine Gibson (34:16.782)
I can't promise, but I'm working with my agent to develop two pitches. The ones that I have in my mind right now are related to trauma and pain and also trauma and addiction, because it's all really similar pathways and I don't think people have made those links yet and a lot of the same modalities work. The other thing that I'm spending a lot of time right now is in the climate space. So I'll be giving a TED talk, which I think will be out by the time this airs.

It's called How to Stay Safe When the World is on Fire. And I'll be linking the climate emergency to a collective dissociation with a solution focus. So I really, I think that the more we talk about the system level challenges as well as what's happening in the individual body, the more we can put the lens of trauma on it and say, well, okay, now that I understand how the trauma has impacted and now I know what to do. So that's the conversation that I really want to start happening. So.

I'm hopeful that there will be more books. I've also written a book on fiction. Like I started writing fiction, literary fiction actually, decades ago, which is why I was so ready to write this book because I'd been writing my whole life. So that might be something I'd jump back into. I just, I don't really know, because I just finished my doctorate and I have to kind of take a breath. The other thing I am doing is we created a company called Safer Spaces Training Programs and we are...

working on safer communication strategies. So a more modern version of nonviolent communication. We do workshops on psychological safety at work and also psychological first aid. So what do you do when somebody is having a panic attack? This is something that's happening in public more and more often. And, you know, the general public doesn't know what to do, but there are answers. So this is the kind of information that I'm trying to spread through multiple different ways, whether it's books, the company.

social media, yeah, and I also love doing keynote talks. So if somebody in Australia wants to have me speak at their event, I will be there to heartbeat.

Peta Stapleton (36:22.864)
We will make that happen, I promise. And I'll make sure all those links are below in the show notes, including the TED Talk, if that's out. That is fantastic. I love the title of that, How to Stay Calm When the World's on Fire. And absolutely communication and psychological first aid. Yeah, it's something we're passionate about as well here in Australia. So anywhere that anyone can spread these messages or reach out to Christine to explore, particularly if someone's listening in from Canada or close by.

and wants to engage the company for that kind of work, absolutely encourage it. Christina, it's been an absolute pleasure purely from a selfish point of view that I've really been looking forward to having a chat to you and perhaps at some point connecting in real life, real time and being able to maybe collaborate down the track as well.

Christine Gibson (37:12.558)
I would be over the moon about that. I've been admiring all of your work and research and just knowing that that's what it's going to take for the paradigm to shift. Like what you're doing is so essential. So like I know I'm spreading the word about it, but you're doing the work because what people need is the evidence. So I'm super grateful to you too.

Peta Stapleton (37:32.016)
thank you, Christine. Thank you. We do have those moments in the middle of the night where we're like, I've got to pick a different, easier road. But look, really, when we come back to it, we're like, no, no, this is, this is, this is okay. This is all right. And you're absolutely right from us in the EFT world, you know, it is just a paradigm shift and that's okay. Change, I heard a quote, change takes courage. And you know, that's sometimes you just need a couple of people along the way to kind of go, yep.

I'm okay to be courageous here and make some changes and it will happen. It will absolutely happen. So, Christine, thank you so much for your time. I encourage everybody to absolutely get their hands on that book, but follow you on all those and share, share the word as well. The more groundswell I think that is created, the more we do get those changes at the top, it kind of, you know, echelons of not only government policy, but groundswell and clinical evidence, clinical practice evidence.

absolutely is not to be underestimated. That has, you know, changed the world as well, not just academic research. So the more people out there talking about it, I think the better.

Christine Gibson (38:42.99)
Absolutely. Thank you so much.