Lessons - The Neuroscientist Who Cured His Daughter's Autoimmune Disease by Rewiring Her Brain | Dr. Don Wood - Creator of the TIPP Method

In this lessons episode, discover how addressing the root causes of trauma may differ from simply managing its symptoms. Understand how education and nervous system awareness can reshape responses to past experiences. Explore why unresolved trauma can compound over time and uncover how building resilience can create lasting emotional change. So... Talk about TIP. Talk about the actual program, how you deploy it, but also maybe contrast it to traditional therapy. Okay. I think that's interesting because I think a lot of people, the way they would solve for a lot of these experiences right now would be traditional therapy because I know that you condense a lot of this into a four-hour window. That's your ideal optimal experience. set up. Why is a four-hour window important? What do you do in that four-hour window versus therapy, which is an hour per week, I would assume. A week, per month, whatever. Yep. So let's walk through the actual program so people understand why it's structured the way it is. Because I know there's a lot of... thought behind the four hour. A lot of science. Why you got it? Yes. Yep. Let's go into it. So that was really what I did is I looked at it and I said, okay, if somebody comes in and they say to me, I have anxiety, I say, that's the symptom of the problem. Why not look at what caused this anxiety? There's a something that happened. There's a root cause to it. So if we get to the root cause, you won't have anxiety. Anxiety is just a symptom. But they treat the symptom in traditional, like, are we going to treat your anxiety by giving you anti-anxiety medications? So they're trying to chemically change the brain. And remember I talked about the trauma loop. So our minds are constantly to make it simple, doing Google searches all the time, pulling up files. What do we know about this experience? What the medication is doing is blocking the Google search. It's not fixing the problem. So the problem is still there, but you're sort of numbed out. And so, and then traditional talk therapy, which I'm not saying is bad, traditional talk therapy will want to say, well, what do you, how does it make you feel? What do you think about? Well, I think you keep reinforcing it. And then you're only in there for an hour. So if you're in there for an hour, chances are you're going to be in a high beta brainwave state because you're coming in to talk about, let's take a stream. They rehash all the memories. All the memories. So they're in high beta talking to their therapist about a high beta event. And so how much work are you going to get done if you're in the same state that you experience the event in? Not a lot, maybe a little bit. That's why traditional therapy takes a long time because you're sort of getting little pieces trying to get that done. What I do, and the reason I use four hours... is in the first two hours, it's almost what we're doing here. It's education and science. I tell you how I developed it. The first thing I say to everybody when they come in, there's nothing wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with your mind. Your mind is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, is protect you. It's dealing with some glitches and error messages. So think of the brain, the physical brain, as the computer. The mind is the software. If I drop the computer, the computer is going to get damaged. If I hit my brain, I'm going to get a concussion. I'm going to get it damaged. Software is prone to glitches and error messages. Of course. And you get a virus. Yeah. So what do we do when we have a glitch in software? We reboot the software. We recode the software. Right? We don't try to throw the software out or say we got bad software. All we have to do is reset it. So I always talk about if you, every time you hit the M key on your computer, your computer shut off. So if you took your computer to your computer therapist, your computer therapist would say, don't touch the M key. Stay away from words with M's in them. What's wrong with you? It's going to activate. They'll say trigger. I never use the word trigger. I say activate. Why not? I thought it sounded negative and violent. So when people come in and say, oh, this triggers me, and I'm saying, the first thing I think of is a gun and somebody firing. Yeah, I guess, yeah. And so what I say is try to remove the gun analogies from a mental health environment. Yeah, not a bad idea. I say it's activating your nervous system. Why would it activate it? Because it perceives a threat. So it's supposed to do that. That's why I say there's nothing wrong with you. If a lion shows up here, we're supposed to If we think about a lion, we're not supposed to be activated. Why would we get activated if we thought about a lion? Because we got attacked by a lion. And the mind starts looking at the resource, what do we know about lions? And then it starts to see the old information in real time. And that's the movie analogy I was talking about. Your mind thinks something's happening. So if your mind thought something was happening, doesn't it make sense it would activate? Of course. It has to. So there's nothing wrong with you, but they'll tell you anxiety, depression, panic attacks, oh, there's something wrong. You've got a mental health issue. No, your system is doing exactly what it's designed to do. It's reading old information. So the way that you structure the... And then you actually set up like... So I know the way that you help people and the way that you work with people, there's sort of two different formats. You have like a personal four-hour session, which is like the highest touch, but then you can also... do this in groups or online to a degree as well. So you've, you've developed systems for both, but obviously all based on the same fundamentals. It's exactly the same program. So if you come and see me one-on-one, I take you through the program, you know, people say, well, what's the difference between that and the digital version? Like just watching through the digital, like on your own. I said, it's a book and the movie. Yeah. If you read the book and then watched the movie, you'd go, ah, the book was a lot better because I got a lot more out of the book. But if you just watch the movie, the movie works. It takes you through the same thing. It's just not me telling you personally, but it's me doing the exact same thing, but just on video. Is there, is this something like this, this process, is this something that would be healthy to do periodically? You can refresh, but once we get the bulk of the work done, unless there's new stuff coming up, chances are you wouldn't really need to do it. Plus, we've given you the tools, right, that you could continue to use. Is there, and even going forward, is there a way to, like, harden yourself so that you don't have some of these things imprint on you? Or is that a very difficult thing to do? Well, trauma's going to affect us no matter what. Yeah. But here's the advantage. If you have... old trauma, think of it, you're carrying around 150 pound backpack. Yeah. Right. And then somebody goes, here's another 10 pounds. That just can, can bring you to your knee. Yeah. But if you get the 150 pound backpack off you and another 10 pounds comes at you. You've got a lot more resilience now. You'll be able to probably work through it. That's the biggest problem. So many people come through and they have all of this childhood trauma, and then they get hit as an adult again, and then all of a sudden they're just taken down. People say, oh, I guess that event. I worked with a person from the Boston Marathon. I worked with a few of them, Boston Marathon bombing. And what she said to me, she goes, I thought I came in here because of the Boston Marathon bombing. She goes, that's obviously the big one. She goes, I'm in post-traumatic stress. I'm having terror nightmares. She says, my childhood trauma, I had no idea was that impactful on me. She goes, I got more out of the childhood trauma than I did out of the Boston Marathon bombing. trauma, right? It was more impactful for me. So the Boston Marathon is another 50 pounds just packed onto her 150 pounds that she'd been carrying, right? So once we got the 150 pounds off, right, it was easier to deal, well, not easier. I mean, it's going to be a lot simpler to deal with that 50 pound Boston Marathon. So she came in with a whole bunch of other trauma and then that one happens, right? then all of a sudden the system, it's an overwhelm. But even if you don't remember everything that happened to you, the way that you structured this, and like, I'm not well-versed in therapy, so I'm sure that traditional therapy tries to get into this as well, but the system that you've structured, it can pull out things that you weren't really conscious of. Yeah. Even aware of. So, to go back to the four hours, so the first two hours, I don't ask you a thing about trauma. I just educate you and say, here's how your brain works. Here's how the brain waves work, beta, alpha, theta, delta. Here's how the mind is going to process, right? So, you get all the science. And that's actually so helpful because what I hear constantly is it's like click, click. You're connecting all that. Now I'm getting it. Of course this would happen to me. How could it not happen to me? And so if people come in and they say, I have this and this and this, and I go, well, there's a reason why. I never had your life experience. If I had had your life experience, I'd be right where you are. I'm not specially unique, right? I just had a special unique childhood. that allowed me to do that. Then the next hour, we're going to get into some specific events. So I'm looking for basically three events. So I'll say, can you tell me about three different events that you had? But I'm looking for, if that event was made into a movie, I'm looking for the movie trailer. I want the minute, two-minute recap of it. And I don't need you to talk about it. I don't even need you to tell me about it. I can actually get your mind to clear it without knowing one word. And people say, I don't have to talk about it. So that's how when I do the groups, I could have 25 people in a room all going through their own personal trauma event and nobody's sharing it. The techniques I take them through does the clearing. Because they're discovering it in their own head. In their own head. They're seeing it. How does it help them for me to know that? It doesn't. No. There's only curiosity on my part because their mind is going to fix it. Right? I'm not fixing it. Their own system is fixing it. So if you came in with a broken leg and we reset your leg, how much credit should I get for that healing? I just reset it. You reset it, but the body did its own thing. Did its own thing. Yeah. It's the same thing with this. I don't take the credit. Your mind is going to do it. The reason it hasn't been able to do it is because you didn't understand why it was doing it. Once I educate you, you can see how this can work. It's so simple. You don't need to live and manage and cope with it. Fix it. So this all makes a lot of sense. There's probably a lot that's broken with the traditional... way of fixing things. Yeah. I feel like a lot of people are not going to like you that much. That's okay. Well, we get two camps. Some people that go, that's nonsense. You can't do it that fast. But we got the evidence, right? Well, that's actually how we connected because somebody's doing the studies. Yeah, we're going to publish the study. Yeah. Yeah. So I had, here's a good example. I had one lady, a therapist who saw the kind of work I was doing. She was referring, she referred me the ones that she knew would take her a long time. So she says, I've got a lady that you, I think you're going to be the only one that can help her. Can you, can she come and see you? Can you get it right? She had a 60s lady, had a home invasion, got pistol whipped, having panic attacks, can't even get out of her house. And she says, if we can get her to you, can you see her right away? So I said, OK. So she comes in. And as soon as she walks in the door, actually, it was my wife that was there that day. And she just breaks down crying. She's sobbing. And she's walking with a walker. And so she comes in, I take her through the whole program and it was like life changing for her. And so this was on a Tuesday. She goes back to see the therapist on her therapist on Friday. And her therapist calls me after the session, right? And so she says, I just saw her. And I said, she's doing pretty good, right? And she goes, oh, yeah. She's doing pretty good. She goes, I knew it would, right? She says, but when she came in to my office, she says, I have good news and bad news. And so the therapist, she goes, well, the good news is you're not walking with a walker. She goes, no, I don't need the walker. She goes, the bad news is you're fired. I'm coming back. And she says, but I was happy for her. But that should be the way that the health and wellness and medical system works. But it's not how the system works at all. But this therapist was thrilled. She was a true, caring person. And she knew that this was the fastest way to get her there. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.