E23: When an hour isn't enough

Listen to the episode here: E23: When an hour isn't enough - https://apple.co/4gSRTRv

 Hello, friend. I hope this podcast finds you doing well. This is kind of an extra bonus podcast. It's episode 23 but I typically don't release a podcast as frequently as I will be this month and it'll be kind of a one two, uh kind of pace uh with these where it's a focus on maybe more of an ADHD topic and then something that is more generally related to integrative mental health therapy.

And so this is episode 23 of integrative mental health therapy with Dr. Tiffany, and it is titled, When an hour is not enough. And so just a reminder, in my approach, I'm always talking about brain, body, mind. We've had a lot of questions about my nervous system rewiring intensive. And so I want to talk about this concept of intensives.

And this is for people who are not in my practice, who are seeking out therapy, but also people who are and are curious about just what this is and doing a deeper dive in nervous system support, what does that look like? And so that's the focus of today's podcast update. So when an hour is not enough, I have been trained in the mind part of my approach, my three-leg stool of treatment, since 2009. I've been trained as a therapist. I've been in private practice for a little over a decade now. Well, that's not true. Yeah, that's true. I have been in private practice for about more than a decade now. And so, I've been doing therapy, offering talk therapy, and working with people for a while.

And as... I added more to my toolkit and I wanted to more deeply work with people to heal and we needed to do all the things. An hour quickly became not enough and it just doesn't fit. It doesn't fit with the model of get a person in, talk to them for 50 minutes and then see them again the next week. I have all kinds of feelings about this model of care. 

So that, you know, partly this will be a rant about that. Okay. Part of the reason I stopped taking insurance is because it dictated that treatment must look a certain way. And if that didn't fit, then I needed to, you know, figure it out. I needed to see people like daily or something to try to make the model work. And it just didn't work. And so... 

That was part of why I stepped away from insurance. And then it's this other piece of like, if you're seeing me for my brain, body, mind approach, which everybody at this point in the practice is seeing me for holistic neuropsychotherapy, we've probably done functional medicine, you're probably utilizing supplementation, you have an idea of which diet you're supposed to follow for your particular brain.

I've talked to you about brain exercises because I did a brain health assessment on you. You're probably playing tennis or pickleball or some sort of ping pong racket sport because you know dancing, right? You know that these are the things that are gonna make your brain better. And then I would have even given you specific exercises for your particular brain. On top of that, you are probably doing some emotional freedom technique work. So like EFT tapping. the app and or you're doing vagus nerve stimulation, you are doing heart math, you are doing something that gets into the nervous system, works with the body, all these things. That is how I do therapy. I will talk a little bit about the safe and sound protocol in just a bit. So that's the hell of that. That does not fit into 50 minutes or an hour at all. Okay, it just doesn't. So then if it does, if we just focus on the mind part of my treatment, what I find is that the body brain aspect of things gets very lost in treatment and that's not okay. So let me just explain. I am rolling treatment back to this idea of what worked as a baby. And I know that's kind of like, what are you talking about? But seriously, neuroplasticity, occurs in children in an unbelievable way. Let's start with babies because we are working on the brain. We're moving, we're crawling, we're cruising, we're walking, we're doing all these things, we're getting all these sensory inputs. So you're growing this cerebellum, the brain stem, you're growing a brain. Ideally, if possible, I'm a purist, I'm a naturopath and a functional medicine practitioner.

So hopefully breastfeeding is happening with  you know, the best breast milk, gold standard breast milk possible. Like mom is like not stressed and she's eating a great diet. Now I didn't have any of these things, okay, right? But now we know better. And so hopefully mom is getting all the things that she needs and just, there's just gold. This milk is unbelievable, right? And so we're feeding this brain. And then mom and dad or whoever's in the household that loves this baby is just, just and just making the best facial expressions and we're just sending love and we're just snuggling. That is brain body mind. That is how you grow a brain. And as human beings, as adults, we get so far away from this process and like we don't move enough. Oh my gosh, there's just so much inactivity and then we're not getting enough sensory stimulation. and the diet's all off and everything is stressful and we're cut off from other people and there's not enough positive, just facial expressions and eye to eye engagement for the system, like it's missing so much. And so when people come to me, I'm taking it back to basics and I can't do my work most days in an hour. So what has been happening in my practice a lot, especially for...clients that come in office and we're doing like advanced interventions of using the laser and grounding pads and vagus stimulation is those appointments usually are taking 75 to 90 minutes. And so that's just to kind of get most things done. And often what clients are having to do on top of that is like a 30 to 45 minute check in monthly. 

Just to make sure, if not monthly, every six weeks, just to make sure the supplements and the diet haven't been lost, especially in my practice, because there's a lot of ADHD, there's Alzheimer's, there's executive function impairment. My clients forget or lose track or just are off task, and I'm being hired to be an externalized prefrontal cortex, so yes, there's a lot of engagement in my practice, and so as I have become more and more trained, and I have deeply fallen in love with IFS, which is internal family systems, which is a parts therapy, a type of deep resolution of old wounds in the system and also helping use IFS with chronic illness and all the different things, those sessions take much longer to unburden exiles and things like that.

And there are intensives that I have been trained in, an inner critic intensive that can span a couple of days to extended sessions, basically an extended sessions are three to three and a half hours. So those are two days of deep work around the inner critic or the perfectionist.  apart and taking a day to work with that perfectionist part up to two days. There are many of us who have been in this chronic illness model of treatment and just struggled with that part that is really deeply tied into feeling either gaslit by the medical community or misunderstood by others. And also have 0 this part that has illness or chronic illness because of trauma in the past or because of this, that, and the other, not speaking up, not being assertive, being a people pleaser. So there's a people pleasing intensive that is a day or two days, and then there's a chronic illness intensive that is absolutely two days. And this just allows us to have space and to deeply work with these parts that are having such a hard time and get some unburdening done, if we're lucky, across those two days, especially when it comes to chronic illness or it comes to people-pleasing. Sometimes with chronic illness, it's so deeply rooted and my client is older that we need a three-day intensive. And so... This is when an hour is not enough, when you're tired of being in therapy for years and you wanna have enough time to get beyond just bringing in whatever has occurred from one appointment to the next and to deeply unearth what is holding you kind of hostage, whether it's that inner critic, that people pleaser, that perfectionist, or the tangled web that is chronic illness, because chronic illness has so many parts.  Crohn's illness will often have trauma from the past.

It will have an inner critic who is kind of shitting constantly. It will have people pleasing that doesn't allow the person to properly take care of themselves. It can be a very complicated experience. And then there's the nervous system rewiring intensive, which is my big intensive. And it's one that... used to be hours, 14 to 15 hours. Last year, I was offering it a lot internally to clients who had sensory issues with their environment, digestive issues, autoimmune issues in the digestive tract. And then there were other clients who, like myself, had autoimmune disorders or Lyme disease, mycotoxin exposure where the nervous system had gotten stuck in fight, flight, freeze. And I was using this frequently. It was a safe and sound Intenso, so safe and sound protocol intensive. And what I realized is I needed a couple of different aspects to this and I needed more time. So I increased the duration of that safe and sound Protocol intensive to a nervous system rewiring intensive  and made it 20 hours and had, I started providing the option this year of people not just doing it in five days, which is what we used to do. And this was because people weren't feeling well sometimes at days three, four, but we had to push through because that's how it was set up and that's what we had scheduled for and all these things. And what I did is I started saying, you know, we can slow this down. we can extend the amount of time that we're together on any given day, but then we can slow down how many times we do that. And it has been unbelievable to make this a, instead of it a five day process, make it a four week process where my clients are seeing me intensively for three to three and a half hours every week for three weeks. And then the final week they see me.  for two sessions at three to three and a half hours each. And then there's like a follow-up like four to six weeks later. But then there's all this wraparound support in each session. So we're not just doing internal family systems in these three and a half hours. We're doing that safe and sound protocol. We're doing emotional freedom technique where we're tapping. We're doing brain spotting. We're doing all the things to... deeply provide an opportunity for neuroplasticity and change. And then some clients, if they wanted to, they will have support via some technology called Voxer where they're receiving daily brief coaching from me as well, if that's what's needed. And that is for people who, you know, I've done the Safe and Sound Protocol myself four times. \It's where there's a sensitivity to noise and a sensitivity to touch and a sensitivity to the environment and a big startle response. This is the big gun. This is my life has never been the same since I developed blind disease. This is mycotoxin illness has my brain on high alert. This process is what we bring in when somebody is like, I need you to hold me in this container for a month. as we deeply change my physiology.

So it's a resource heavy intervention. It's, you know, multiple sessions, multiple weeks. It's a higher price point. It's all the things and it's unbelievable. And it's based on Dr. Stephen Porch's process of safe and sound. And that through specifically tuned music, you can rewire the brain, you can rewire the nervous system. 1 and blended with internal family systems and parts work and doing all this, it has just been profound. So we've had a number of people ask about that particular intensive. There is, I will make sure in the show notes, there's a link to explain it on my website. I've just explained it here, but there's like a video and just like all of these different emails and so forth that will walk you through that process. And that's when an hour is not enough, right? So yes, sometimes clients need just kind of weekly accountability or biweekly accountability and support to get through their life. And then sometimes clients are tired of dealing with this deeper issue that is creating problems or they just don't wanna see me every week anymore. They don't wanna see me every other week and they might wanna come once a month or once.  every eight weeks and so some people have just been coming for an intensive to target different challenges once every two months or something like that. I just want to alert you and others, there are different ways to approach psychotherapy.

There are different ways to approach nervous system support. The nervous system rewiring intensive that I offer is very similar to something called DNRS that people are asked to do on their own for, drum roll please, six months, six months minimum up to a year. The Gupta program, same thing. And my clients don't have the attention span or energy to commit to something like that for an hour a day for six months to a year. We can do it in a month. And we can make dramatic change in the system.  in a month, right? And so the nervous system rewiring process is conducted once over the course of a month, every five to six months until the person feels stable. And it's amazing. So I want you to just think in outside of the box, go back to your therapist and say, hey, do you have extended appointments? Do you have intensives? I have an inner critic that is driving me crazy. I cannot.  make peace with my people pleaser part and and and advocate for yourself and the fact that sometimes you just need More I hope this was helpful. I hope you're enjoying the extra touch points at this time this month with the point with the um, Episodes and until well till next time goodness gracious. Be well