Mark Baxter

And those belief systems get kind of encoded in a way where you're not necessarily aware that they're kind of running you.

So when you perceive the world, you're kind of looking through these lenses that you're sometimes not aware that you're looking through.

So sometimes they might be called schemas or lenses.

Not only do they form belief systems like that, but they also affect the way that our body and our nervous system and our brain kind of interacts with people and the world and challenges that come up.

So if I just go back a step, there was a large study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and they tracked and followed about 17,000 people over many, many years.

It's a fascinating study because they're looking at the correlation of adverse childhood experiences and later struggles with mental health and physical health.

So adverse childhood experiences are things like, you know, did one or more parents have a mental health condition?

Was there someone that was coming in and out of jail?

Was there any drug or alcohol use in the family?

Was there neglect, emotional neglect?

Was there abuse, sexual assault, that kind of thing?

So, you know, things that are difficult for children to go through.

The fascinating thing about this long-term study is we'd expect to see, you know, mental health conditions being kind of directly kind of correlated with that which we saw, but it was the physical health conditions that surprised people.

Heart conditions, cancer, drug and alcohol use, economic situation,

So it was this range of kind of physical health issues and chronic health issues as well as the mental health issues.

And so what we're kind of finding is that what happens in childhood and more importantly, the support or lack of support around that sets us up for not only the way that relate to other people in ourself, but also the way our body works.

gets inflamed by chronic stress and how that inflammation starts to go on to create these chronic health conditions in a number of areas that we thought are just totally physically related.

So from a psychological perspective, we have this opportunity, I guess, to go back using different psychological methods and

Not only understanding what happened, but using different tools and techniques to kind of transform our relationship and kind of un-encode or change the patterns emotionally at a nervous system level and the belief system level as well.

So that's a lot of what we're doing, especially for people with disabilities.