Dr. Cochran: Brain Waves, Breakthroughs and Unlocking the Secrets of the Mind

Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide?
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one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Mantur. Welcome
to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide.
Joining us today is doctor Cochrane. She's a renowned psychologist
with over three decades of experience in clinical practice and
mental health advocacy. Known for her compassionate approach and deep
expertise in cognitive behavioral therapy, she has helped countless individuals
navigate life's challenges with resilience and clarity. She brings a
unique blend of scientific insight and heartfelt wisdom to her
work making complex psychological concepts accessible to all. She has
a wealth of information for us, So before we dive
into our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted show
read after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on,
I'm excited, yes, me too. Great to have you on.
If you would give us a little background. What do
you do well?
I work with people and relationships, and I help them
get unstuck and I help them get away from fear
and avoidance and moving toward what they want.
Okay, can you expand on that? Can you give us
a little information on the types of people you work
with well?
I work with children and adults, I work with trauma.
I work with people who are neurodivergent. I work with
couples who are neurodivergent, and I help a lot with strategizing,
problem solving and giving options for basic and sometimes complex
psychosocial stressors.
When you work with someone this neurodivergent, what are some
of the issues you see that can arise and then
how do your problem solve it?
Well? Generally, the kinds of things I see are people
whose brains work differently than neurotypical people, and so when
they are stressed or they are faced with the problem,
Often they are a migdala, or the emotional part of
the brain takes over and they start responding from there.
So they'll get really angry, or they'll cry, or they'll
just kind of curl up in a b and you know,
stop and they don't know how to do something called
self regulation, where you learn to calm yourself and get
your prefhone cortex back online so that you can be
present in whatever is going on.
Well, that's pretty interesting. So what led you to do this?
Well, my undergraduate degree and my first master's degree are
both in special education, so I've been working with people
of all stripes for a very long time. I found
as I was doing that work that more and more
people were coming to me with questions and concerns. It
didn't really have to do with spelling or math or
any of that, you know, is how do I solve this,
How do I do with this? What do I do
with my child when they do this or that? What
does it really mean to have ADHD? What does autism
really look like? I'm scared for their future? How do
I plan for that? You know, those kinds of things,
And so that sent me off into the giggle weeds
of education, and I got degrees in social work, and
I did work with traditional ecopsychology and also transpersonal psychology.
When you was getting your master's and you was getting
all these degrees, was working with a doctor, was you teaching?
What was your journey to where you are now?
Well, of course, when you're training, you have to have supervision.
But once I was able to practice on my own,
then I do supervision for other people.
And I also help therapists.
Sometimes when they get stuck, because sometimes you're working with
a patient you're not quite sure which direction to go,
So I do that primarily. These days, I'm doing a
lot of coaching with folks. The reason why I like
to do coaching versus the clinical stuff is because I
can coach all over the world anywhere I want to.
As far as being a therapist per se, I still
bring all my skills with me. But you can't build
insurance outside of California, which is where I live.
Those are the rules in each state.
You can only practice in the state you're licensed in,
So I only do psychotherapy inside California, but outside and
around the world I do coaching and it's so much
fun and it's so rewarding.
I love it.
So give me the difference between the psychological part you
would do in California and then the difference of the
coaching you would do in any other state or any
place in the world.
There isn't any You just can't build insurance for it. Okay.
I bring all my experience and wisdom and everything with
me wherever I code, But you can't build an insurance
company because I'm not licensed in that state.
In other words, it's just private pay yes, correct, Okay, gotcha?
Can you give us an idea of what situations that
you might take on. This way, the listeners can get
a better idea of exactly what you do.
Well.
Coming back to the couple's thing, A lot of times
I will see a neurodivergent partner with a neurotypical partner,
and as you might guess, there's some miscommunication there, a
lot of uncertainty, and if there are children involved, that
gets even more complicated. So opening lines of communication, teaching,
self regulation, talking about problem solving, safe language, and how
to make sure that you're being consistent in what you're
doing versus being not so much.
What are some of the more difficult situations that you've had.
You're working with the people, you working at a surface level.
Then you start digging a little deeper and you find
other issues that start popping up.
How do you handle that carefully? How's that for answer?
Well, generally speaking, people will come to me with a
specific concern, and as we're working through that concern, that's often,
as you say, other things kind of bubble up to
the surface. But for example, someone might come to me
and they're having problems in their relationship or they're having
problems in their parenting. After a little bit of conversation,
I found out that person was sexually molested as a
child or badly beaten, your abused as a child, and
so they haven't been able to process that and finish
that piece, and it's interfering with their world today. So
the trick is in the work I do is help
keeping people in the now, because if you're in the past,
you're often depressed. If you're in the future, you're often anxious.
But if you're in the moment, not only can life
be beautiful thing which you can solve problems and not
have them become future issues.
For someone that's been abused that can be physical abuse,
that can be mental abuse. Both are tough to deal with.
How do you get them past that? I mean, that's
a tough situation to let go of.
You're right, it can be, for sure, and depending on
how they've been treated with regard to that issue in
the past can also complicate things. So, for example, if
someone's tried to talk to a parent or trusted other
about what happened to them, they were told that they
were a liar or that's stupider than making it up.
Makes a lot harder to resolve it than if they
were taken at their word. So there are a number
of things that you can do. The biggest and most
important part in dealing with trauma is to get control
of your amgdala. And I talked about that a few
minutes ago. That's a part of your brain that does emotion.
Now here's what's interesting. I love brains, by the way,
I'm a big brain girl. And what's interesting about it
is that the amygdala is very closely co located with
the hippocampus, and the himpocampus does memory and learning. Now,
if we think about it from a evolutionary standpoint, that's
a good thing because we need to remember where the
people eating animals are more importantly than where the blueberries are.
So our amygdala gets very much involved in our learning.
The problem is that a lot of the things that
happen to us, we will react as though there's this
animal that's going to eat us, when it's really only
a blueberry problem. And that's when we get into difficulty.
The human brain, you see, has not evolved in about
the last ten thousand years, So we've got ten thousand
year old software twenty first century problems. What could possibly
go wrong, well a lot, and you're seeing it all
over the world right now. So it's learning how to
control that amygdala and get the prefone cortex, which is here.
It's your forehead behind your eyes activated again so that
you can think about what you want to do versus
a kind of knee jerk reflexive response, which is what
you're feeling. And the thing I think I teach people
the most, and this is so so important.
Feelings are not facts.
Let that sink in a second. Feelings are not facts.
Because you feel a certain way about something does not
mean it's true. You have to use the testing process,
and that's where your prephone cortex comes in.
Okay, So if I have a perception that something is real,
then in my mind it's real. Yes, How do you
get a person past that, especially if it's not fact
and they're just running wild with their own emotional thoughts?
Okay, So there would be two ways I would need
to look at that problem. One is you may be
having hallucinogenic war psychotic process. So my first job is
to figure out, okay, is everything running smoothly in your head?
Are you oriented times three? As we say in the trade,
And if I determine that.
You are, then my next thing is to help you
understand that you've got to slow the process down. Because
what happens is your amigala it gets the firing so
fast that eventually it developed neural pathways that by pass
your prephone cortex. It forgets there, so you can't resolve
the problem. So my job is to help you slow
that down so that the prefernal cortex can catch up
with what the amigdal has got going on. And there
are a number of different ways to do that. One
of them is called cognitive behavioral therapy. There's the Havening technique,
there's EMDR, there's a ton of different ways to go
about it, but basically they all focus on being able
to slow things down so that you can think your
way into or out of whatever situation you're in.
Okay, so you just brought up psychotic events, so that
would imply that you've worked with people that are in
psychosis before. Well, of course, so when someone's in a
state of psychosis or antisignosia where they don't even realize
there is a problem, how do you approach that.
It depends on how psychotic they are. I mean, if
they're floridly psychotic, sometimes all we can do is sedate them,
help them calm down, and then help them, you know,
get some medication for it. If it's a more mild
form of psychosis, maybe just a little bit of paranoia
or something like that, I'll just say to them, Well,
here's an example. The gentleman came to me. He said,
I have a problem. I said, oh, what problem is that?
He said, well, I have all these ghosts at my house.
I need you to help me with the ghosts. And
some people do have ghosts. I mean, I'm not going
to say they're crazy, because that's the first thing they say.
But then I'll say, okay, Well, tell me about the ghosts.
He said, well, they're on my front lawn. Ah, I see.
I said, what do they look like? He said, well,
they're kind of have on Victorian kind of clothes, you know.
I said, oh, I said, so are there any in
your closet? He said yes, And I said, how about
coming out of your TV?
Yes? How did you know? Have you seen them?
I've tried to wake up my wife friend show her
the ghosts, and she can't see them. So we're talking
about a psychotic process. You're not a haunting. So I
said to him, you know what, sometimes your brain can
go a little wrong. And when it goes a little wrong,
it's a little bit like getting a short and an
electrical wire, and it makes your lamp click on and off.
And sometimes, you know, when your lamp is flicking on
and off, you can't see everything clearly. So there's some
medicine that I can help you get. We'll talk to
your doctor and I can help you get and it
will help the electric signal work better. So the chill
lamp stays on all the time.
And he said, really you can do that.
I said, well, not alone, but yes, I can help
you do that, and within about three to four days,
the ghosts were gone and he's feeling better.
Yeah, that's a great story. Now, over the last year
or so, I've had a chance to speak with a
few different people about this. What about the ones that
are seeing demons? And unfortunately, in order to save that person,
they have to kill the demon. Unfortunately they kill the person.
Oh dear, how do you work with those people that
are seeing demons? They think that everything they are seeing
is real?
Of course, yes, yes, how do you.
Handle that and help that person that is so far
in on what they believe.
If they're that far in, then we probably need to
call nine one one and have them taken to the hospital.
That's good in theory. Unfortunately, some states, when it gets
to aot it comes down to if they are not
a threat to themselves or others, they have to let
them go.
Well, that's true. However, if a patient is at the
point where they're seeing demons, they're going to tell the
doctor about that maybe, and they're also going to tell
the doctor what they're going to do to the demons.
I have to kill them. I have to cook them
in an oven. I have to do this. I have
to do that.
Yeah, if they're seeing demons, they're going to tell that
story because it does feel normal to them. They don't
think there's anything to hide. Now, there are people who
are suicidal sometimes who will go in and lie and say, no,
I'm fine, everything's fine. My family's just overreacting, you know,
blah blah. So that can happen. But if you're floridly psychotic, yeah,
we're going to pick up on it in the yard.
Well, we would hope. So Unfortunately, I have heard a
lot of horror stories. Can you think of a situation
that you started out you kind of thought it was
really not going well at all. You didn't know if
you could help them because they just was not accepting
what you was telling them, and then finally you hit
that tipping point when things just started turning around and
all of a sudden you had a success story.
Yeah, a number of cases like that. I have to say,
you know, as we're talking about this, it's a great
honor to do what I do. People put a lot
of trust in me, faith in me. I consider it
a spiritual practice. It's my way of giving back to
the universe.
That's a really good way to look at it.
So as we talk about these things, it's important for
your listeners to understand that I don't take credit for
what happens. I always tell my patients, you know, you're
driving the bus.
I just have the map.
I can tell you what's going to happen if you
do this or do that, but you're the one ultimately,
you know who's going to make the decisions. So I've
had many many cases where someone came to me and
they thought I was crazy or I was giving bad advice.
Sometimes it was on a more severe level, like serious
mental health. Sometimes it was more just couples counseling. As
an example of that, a couple came to me one
time and the wife was just crying and the husband
was really angry, and he said, you know, she doesn't
want me anymore, she's going to make love anymore, she's
want to be close to me. You know, maybe we
need to get a divorce. And she was just crying
so hard she couldn't talk. So I taught that about
something I call skilled deference. What that means is that
when a man loves a woman. And I'm talking for
the moment about heterosexual couples, but other kinds of couples
take on the role of the more assertive person or
the more nurturing person. They want to take care of
their partner, and so early in the relationship they have
certain ways of taking care of will use him and
her for the moment her and maybe it was chocolates
and flowers. And then in the thirties kids came along,
things changed dramatically and what she really needed was not
chocolates and flowers. What she needed was time to talk,
time to rest, time to take some of the emotional
load of running the household off of her mind. But
he doesn't understand that he's still back when they were dating,
trying to give her those things, and she's not happy,
and he's really hurt. So I said to this gentleman,
I said, you know, I think right now what your
wife needs is a couple of loads of laundry, a
few meals a week, and some time to just sit
and be quiet for a little bit.
He said, that's ridiculous, he said, I've never heard of
such bad advice. I can't believe I'm paid you for this.
How is that going to have her make me sexy again?
And we want to make love with me.
I said, okay, well, you know I can only give advice,
you don't have to take it. So he stormed out,
Oh he was just mad in a wet hand. And
by the time they got back the following week, they
were really smiling. I said, oh, well, what happened? He said, well,
is damned this thing? I did what you said, and
all of a sudden she wants to me again. So
I said, yeah, okay. So here's the key going forward
for skilled difference. You have to be able to check
with you and your partner and find out what they
need now and how you can best provide that, and
you'll be holding hands and close to one another until
you leave this life.
Yeah, that was a great resolution for sure. Now let's
bring it back to the autistic world. I have a
person I interviewed about a year ago. He was autistic,
she was nurotypical. In my opinion, they had the very
best way of looking at it. I'm curious on how
your approach would be. They looked at it as two
different people from two different countries. Basically, they had to
learn each other's ways. So I'm doing things. This worked
really good for them. Now, what are some of the
things that you've used to lessen that gap between the
neurotypical and the neurodiverse and raising families.
Well, I often talk about concentric circles. So there's the
neurotypical person on one side, the neurodivergent person on the
other side, and they come together and then there's this
piece in the center where they overlap. And the trick
is that I'm really really out of it about life
is never going to look all the way neurotypical. Life
is never going to look all the way neurodivergent. What
you have to do is come up with a common nomenclature,
common language to be able to talk to each other,
to get your needs met and get things done in
the relationship. And it isn't going to look like what
either of you used to. It has to be an
amalgam of the two. And the work in the relationship
is to develop that language and ability to be flexible
and open and neuroplastic.
Sure, yeah, it has to evolve.
Yes, absolutely, Life is a process of becoming, but it's
not always such a becoming process.
Absolutely, Now when you're dealing with adults, I'm not going
to say that it's going to be better but hopefully
they can process things a little bit different because they
are a little older, live the life a little longer.
What do you do when you're dealing with teenagers? They
can be going through bullying and all the drama that
goes around them in school and life in general, because
things can just not be so good. A perfect but
unfortunate example is what happened here just a little while ago,
and an eleven year old girl that lives just ten
or fifteen minutes north of where I live committed suicide
and the bullies told her how to do it. Oh,
that is the extreme. Now, how do we get it
to the point where this can be under control and
doesn't happen again?
Well, honestly, the key is vigilance.
You have to pay attention to where your child is,
who they're talking to, what kinds of things they come
home from school with, what their attitude looks like about
going to school, how they feel when they come home.
And you've got to be hyper vigilant about their use
of the computer. You know, we have to have license
to drive a car, which is a very powerful machine
that can go quite fast and hurt people. Computers are
incredibly exponentially faster than that and can kill people too.
But we don't watch our kids.
We think, oh, well, you know you're eleven years old,
how much shruggler. You can get into a lot. You
can end up dead, you can end up kidnapped, you
can be groomed by a pedophile.
I mean all kinds of things. So vigilance is.
Really what's key, and having regular conversations with your children.
And I don't mean things like when the child comes
home and you say, how is school fine?
What did you do?
Same old stuff? That's not a conversation. That's a reflective response.
So a conversation would look like, so, how was school today?
Fine? Oh okay, Well what was the best part today?
Oh?
What was the worst part today? When you got to
that worst part? What was your plan? How did you
handle it? Are you still feeling like you're not sure
about that? You see?
That's a conversation, and that way, I'm digging into what's
going on. If my kid is saying to me so
and so said you should die, well you can bet
your buns I'm going to be at the school like now.
That is not going to happen again. And it's not
necessarily a question of vengeance, so to speak. It's more
about no boundaries are called for here, and they have
to be set, and my child has to be protected,
and that other child needs support and help in.
Learning empathy because they're stuck, right.
So that's what I'm going to advocate for when I
get to see the principle. Look, we have to work
on both ends of this issue.
That's all true. But sometimes the child is just very
reclusive and goes into the shell and doesn't say anything
to anyone, especially the parents. So how can you dig
that out? Because sometimes you can dig and dig and dig,
yet they just don't say anything. It could be because
they're ashamed of it. They're depressed because of it. That's
the last thing they want to talk about is what
they're ashamed of and depressed about. It's a totally different
situation than what parents are used to dealing with. How
do they handle that?
Well, that's where a therapist comes in, because you know,
there are things children won't tell their parents, but they
will tell a therapist, and that is a very powerful,
sacred safe space.
For example, I had a little girl who came to me.
She had been adopted by this family, and she kept
running away. She was five, and she kept running away
and asking people, you know, can I live at your house?
Nobody could figure out what was wrong, and it took
a couple of sessions, but she finally told me what
her adoptive daddy was doing in her bottom. He was
putting things in there and she'd like it. And so
she'd sneak out at night and try and find another
house because she'd been adopted once, she thought maybe.
Somebody else would let her be here a little girl.
So, needless to say, I got her out of that
situation lightning fast.
But it wasn't something that.
She would tell anybody else, but she would tell me
because she knew and she could feel this is a safe,
protective environment and that her needs and feelings were first.
Yeah, that's great, she felt that way. What do you
think is very important that our listeners here not only
about what you do, but what they need to do
and how you can help them accomplish the mindset they
need to move forward.
Well, I think the thing that I want everyone to
know more than anything else is please, please, please, don't.
Be afraid to ask for help.
Sometimes parents feel like, oh, if I go to a
therapist or something, I've failed as a parent, or you
know there's something I'm not doing right.
Absolutely not.
The way that we learn our parenting skills, for the
most part, comes from our family of origin. The family
that we're born into, isn't necessarily the family of marriage
or the family that we're living with at the time,
and they don't have those answers.
And that's why.
People like me go to school for a very, very
very long time and learn how to solve those problems
and teach you how to do it, but not teach
you with what's wrong with you don't know. This is
teach you with support and care and the belief because
a big part of my job is to believe in people.
You'd be surprised or maybe you wouldn't how many people
don't feel believed in. They don't feel like there's somebody
who says, yeah, I know you can do this. I
know it looks scary and hard, but I know you
can do this. And that's a lot of what I
do is to remind them, yes, you can, and I'm
going to give you a new skill that you can
apply to the problem and you'll be able to resolve
it in a new and more productive way.
Yeah, you just brought up a really good point, the
fact that people do not believe that they can do things.
Part of that is because of that green eyed monster
that comes out, which is called jealousy. Sometimes people don't
want to see people succeed. Many times it's because they
didn't have the courage to do it themselves, so they
don't want them to do it right. So, how do
you work with a person that is unfortunately starting to
believe what he or she is being told. How do
you give them the confidence so that they'll get out
there and try even if they fail, Because many times
when you fail, you learn and that gives you the
opportunities to do it better and succeed well.
The first rule to interrupt indoctrination, and that's what you're
talking about, is to not allow the person or the
child to be isolated in a group of people that
continues to tell them they can't. That's step one end
is really important. The other thing is whether you're a
child or you're an adult. I'm going to teach you
how to call them yourself with one of the techniques
that I talked about a little bit ago, and then
we're going to begin to implant new ideas so that
you can make new neural pathways. You can actually reprogram
your brain in about twenty eight days with something that
I call vitamin G, which is gratitude. Gratitude practice is
so easy. All you have to do is start out
your day and end your day just running through the
things that you're grateful for.
For example, I'm.
So happy and grateful that I get to do your
podcast today. I'm so happy and grateful that I get
see my patience today.
I'm so happy and.
Grateful that I have four wonderful therapies. I'm so happy
and grateful that I live in a mountain with all
kinds of trees and water around me. Those would be
some of the things that I would say that I'm
happy and grateful for. Okay, now you might say, well
that just sounds dumb. I mean whatever is going to make. Well,
the difference that it makes is as you remind yourself
of those positive things, it shifts you from a mindset
of paucity, which is there's not enough and it probably
isn't going to work, into a mindset of plenty and
that I'm only limited by my imagination. So what you
begin to see As you move through the twenty eight
days is you'll notice, yeah, you know this used to
bother me a lot, but doesn't bother me so much anymore.
Or this used to really set me off, and yeah,
I didn't even notice it. You begin to become more
sanguine and palm and your prefrone cortex is now in
control instead of your migdala. Now let me say this
in the beginning, if you're feeling crummy, it can be
hard to come up with things are grateful for, and
that's okay, it's normal.
But just pick something. I'm so happy and grateful.
I have purple dinosaur socks or just anything you can
think right, and you'll find as the days go along
that the list gets longer and longer, and you'll feel
better and better, and pretty soon, as I said, after
about twenty eight thirty days, you'll notice, Wow, my outlooks different.
It works for depression, it works for anxiety, it works
with people who are dealing with neurodiversion issues. It works
for everybody. But it only works if you do it.
To take vitamin G twice a day.
Yeah, that's great and sound advice. Now stop and think
about this. Someone this twenty five, thirty five, forty five.
It doesn't really matter. They've lived their life good to bad.
They can be out there working, feeling good about everything,
and then all of a sudden, boom, something just reminds
them of something bad. It triggers that switch that just
takes away everything that they've been working for that day
to feel positive. How do you stop that switch from
being flipped on?
You tell them about it. Look, this is likely to
happen to you in the early days of what you're doing.
You're likely you know everything is Most people have heard
of the learning curve. Right, you go forward and then
you go back a little bit, You go forward, and
you go back to the little that's normal. You're not failing,
you're not bad, you're not unsuccessful. It just means that
you're going through your learning process. If we talk about addictions,
for example, and someone has a lapse, a lapse is
a teaching moment. It says, ah, okay, you weren't taking
care of yourself, that we need to take care. Let's
look at that. What do we miss, what do we
need to do differently? So it's not about failure, it's
about okay, that was a learning tool. You can't have
success without failure. So preparing people for that, helping them
understand is kind of like the ways of the ocean, Right,
it goes out, it comes in, goes out comes in.
That's just the nature of things.
Yeah, absolutely, I totally agree. Now, is there anything that
we haven't touched upon that we need to?
Well that's a big question, isn't it. Uh, let's see.
No, Actually, I think you've I think you've done a
good job. I want to pivot back to though your mind, folks,
that feelings are not facts, and here's a way to
break that down, slowing the process down. As I talked
about before, it's very helpful. So get yourself a piece
of paper and make three columns. Column one, you write
down what it is is bothering you, the worry thing right.
Column two is okay, what evidence do I have.
That that is true?
And column three is what would I tell a person
who came to me with this problem or concern. Most
people give excellent advice, they just don't take it.
Yeah, that's just so true. Well, this has been great,
great information, great conversation. I really appreciate your taking the
time to join us today.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
It was fun, Yes, it was my pleasure. Thanks again.
Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to
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