Dr. Jay Wiles

And so, yeah, okay, well, there's this association that he's making, but we don't know like what the association is, why it's there.

And so as we kind of backpedaled and unpacked a little bit of things, because as you do in therapy, which I am a psychologist, so of course, like that's kind of part of what I do.

is that we realized that he was making just these really broad associations with hitting IEDs, kind of out when he would be in Humvees during his time over, and associating that with the car.

But that wasn't something that was cognitively manifesting.

It was really his physiology that would ramp up and send that signal directly to kind of to his brain.

And then he would get into this tunnel vision, highly sympathetic mode and not really kind of know what to do in that moment.

So it would be like, well, I'll just avoid.

I'll go inside.

I won't do like anything because that keeps me safe.

And that becomes obviously a really vicious cycle.

So he's experiencing kind of like all this flood of anxiety.

changes within the physiology that's sending the signal to the brain that this is a dangerous environment.

This dangerous environment is now connected with previous experiences.

So I experienced kind of all these nasty things that happened over in the Middle East.

And so now for I've created this

vicious physiological cycle.

And so this is where, like, yes, we want to leverage something like top-down cognitive processing or therapy with him.

And that's important.

But actually starting from the body up and helping him just learn how to regulate that physiological response was the best place to start.

Because trying to change the mind with the mind, I've heard Huberman talk a lot about this, and I really agree with Huberman on this.