Felt-Safety Part 1

0:00TBRI. TBRI. Tabbaryi. TBRI. Deborahi. TBRI. TBRI. TBRI. Theova dem. TBRI. TBRI. Trust-based, relational intervention. TBRI is an attachment-based. Troll-mine formed intervention. That is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. TBRI uses empowering principles to increase physical needs, connecting principles for attachment needs and correcting principles to disarm fear-based behaviors. While TBRI is based on years of attachment, sensory processing, and neuroscience research, the heartbeat of TBRI is connection. Hello and welcome to the TBRI podcast you're listening to season 13 episode 4. On this show we talk all about trust-based relational intervention or TBRI. We talk about different elements of the model itself. And we also talk about how TBRI is applied in various systems of care and practice.

1:03I'm Emily Pickett, producer of the podcast, and today we are chatting with a returning podcast guest, TBRI mentor and longtime friend of the Care and Purpose Institute. Her name is Amy Able. Amy is the owner and a training specialist with Hope Light, an organization that equips school-based professionals with TBRI tools. On today's episode, our host Sarah Mercado and Amy are talking about felt safety. Amy shares how the concept of felt safety has been transformative in her home, in her own healing journey, and with the organizations she works with through Hope Light. As we often do with old friends, we started chatting before our officials start. So you'll hear about Amy's work with Hope Light at the top of the episode. And then we got ourselves organized and we moved into chatting all about felt safety. So much in fact, that this conversation is a two-parter. So be sure to join us back next week to hear part two. Thanks so much for listening and please enjoy this conversation with Amy Able. Here's a crazy fact.

2:05I was looking at our data, like our client data. And we are almost there. We're almost 50-50 school districts and community agencies at this point. Oh really? Yeah, we're close to that. It's in my, I put it in the bio, but I want to say we have 70, we've served 73 clients total. We're currently working with like half of those. The other half we've already completed our initiatives. But yeah, they are 50 percent. Our schools keep us longer because they're just really hard systems to move, you know. So I mean, I've been with one for seven years, but the other ones. Anyway, so it's very, it's not just schools anymore. What's the average length of time you consult with them? Oh, that's a good question. Well, not school like you could do like schools or. I would say is that what community organization? That's hard.

3:06I don't have a good answer for that. I would say it's rare that people only work with us for one phase. I would say they typically work with us for two or three phases minimum. But some of our groups like were on phase eight, you know. Yeah. And so they all do very, but. We have a phase a year. Yeah, about a year-ish or just shy of a year, sometimes depending on like just how the schedule works out. But like I trained my first hospital group in December. And I was, and it was like the psychologist, the psychiatrist, the therapist, social workers. They're like their crisis response team, like their whole behavioral health line. And I was like, well, these are these are my people because I'm a school psychologist, which is to me more. It's mental health, but pushing into schools. And it was so fun. They're going to be a really neat group to work with. I've already trained like all the schools in that, the four districts in that county.

4:09I've already worked and I'm currently still partnering with them. And then the community corrections department in that county. So now the hospitals on board. And I mean, it just keeps building in that county. That is so cool. And do they all work? Do they communicate with each other? Yes. They're all like heavily involved with one another. They do, they had like a huge event in September. It was like a mental health conversation is what they called it, but they had like the school districts came in. Community mental health, the hospital like facilitated it. I was their keynote speaker. And they had like, you know, 300 people from the from the community. Anybody could come and a lot of professionals and there were panels of like high school students. So they had kids from each of the four districts like share about their experience. It was so cool because the whole time the kids kept referring to, yeah, my teachers do this. Just like what Amy was talking about earlier about regulation. We do this in class. And it was so cool to just see them pull from what I had shared and to make those connections.

5:15Like this is our lived experience. These are the things that this is how we're being supported and what we're doing. So it was a cool event. It was like the only thing I think I've been nervous to do the last year. I'm really nervous leading up to it. Usually I feel pretty comfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I feel pretty safe to get this back up. Okay. In any more. So yeah. That's awesome. Well, Amy, let's look back up a little bit because we got into what Hopa Light is doing. But I got a little excited and thank goodness we keep the recording happening when we're chit chat and before we start recording. I want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do. Hopa Light, anything else you want to share? Sure. I'm Amy Able. I live in Central Indiana with my family, my husband. We have four sons, two of whom we adopted from China and kind of sparked this whole journey with TBRI back in 2016.

6:18I became a practitioner that year and then I believe the next year in 2017 or 18, one of those two years I started mentoring for the KPICD and supporting help support the practitioner trainings. It was at that same time that I started a company called Hopa Light. Prior to that, I was a school psychologist. So I was mostly in charge of like special evaluations. I really wanted to advocate for the needs of vulnerable kids in schools. And that was a perfect career path. I had done that for 10 years. But after becoming a practitioner, I just felt like that it was truly the critical missing piece in our schools and that I had sat around so many tables. I was discussing children that were struggling and despite our best efforts continued to struggle and oftentimes escalate and need more support and more restrictive environments. So when we experienced TBRI as a family and saw how much it was supporting the needs of my children, not just my sons from China, but really the whole family unit.

7:26I just felt like me and I could go back and be a school psychologist to keep doing this and take this golden nugget, this treasure and put it in a cabinet. Or I could potentially start supporting others. So the KPICD was so generous and I'm so grateful that they gave me permission and support back in 2017 to start training. So we do a lot of training and consulting with Hopoli. I actually have a team now. I've been doing this work for eight years, almost nine. And I have a team of four wonderful women. They were actually there. They coincidentally, they were the first three people to ever hire me. So the first one. Yes. So the first was a building. She was an assistant principal when she hired me, but she became a principal. The second person to hire me was a director of special education. And the third person was function like an assistant superintendent.

8:28And they were the first three people to give me my first three jobs training and consulting and bringing TBRI into their schools. And my husband said, if this work continues to grow, what are you going to do? Who would you hire? I said, well, I would hire Ali, Jesse and Katie in a heartbeat, but they have these amazing jobs. There's no way they would that would never happen, but they would be the dream team. Well, God is pretty awesome because it was time went on. They won by 1, and they joined the Hopoli team and because of them and then also our assistant Pam, who does everything behind the scenes for us, and just really supports all four of us in such incredible ways. have been able to support over 70 organizations, school districts, community agencies, families, and implementing TBRI at a system level and creating system level change, which is not easy, and we provide a lot of consultation and implementation support along the way. So it is the joy of my life. It's such an honor and privilege to do this work and support so many people who's

9:34not just, we're not just empowering the professionals and the parents to support the needs of kids and teens and the adults they serve. I was doing consultation yesterday with adult corrections officers. I mean, I'm working with a lot of people who are helping adults at this point, but on top of that, it's like they themselves are experiencing healing. They are, I mean, I get email all the time of people saying, I know this might sound extreme, but truly your training TBRI has changed my life and it's just, it's amazing. I love it. Yeah, it's really cool. I've always said, from early on, like, I think I recognize it. Really TBRI is about changing adults, right? Like if we can bring some hope and healing to the adults, then that's going to carry over to the kids. But I think Dr. Purvis nailed it when she said, we can't take to the kids what we don't have. And I think that's, it's a really unbelievable, unbelievable byproduct of being able to show up to help kids is that the adults themselves get

10:36some healing. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I mean, I think we could just keep talking all day about that. But I did ask you here to really talk a lot about felt safety because I think that it's one of the the cornerstones of necessity, right? We lay TBRI right down on top of the three pillars of trauma wise care, which is felt safety connection and regulation. Obviously in TBRI, we're pretty well covered in connection as, you know, our foundational element. But when you think about felt safety, what does that mean to you? So Sarah, I cannot remember whose quote this is, but I heard it once and I've never forgotten it. Somebody once said that felt safety is the foundation of possibility. And I love that. And I believe that with my whole heart because not only is it what I

11:36see in my work, but it's my lived experience. I think when people feel safe that anything is possible, that doors that were previously closed start to open the opportunities that in paths that never existed before start to become an option for people. I'm also becoming a somatic experiencing practitioner really for this reason. I think it blends so beautifully with TBRI in terms of it's completely focused there on nervous system level healing and what adversity and trauma has done to the nervous system. And so when I think about felt safety, that's a nervous system experience. We live in one of three states or a blend of the states, right? So we are either in safety, which means we're regulated. We're calm. We're not always calm, but calm can be accessible, more active states. It's like kind of whatever's necessary giving the context of what you're doing

12:39if you're at the grocery store, you're at the gym, but you're still like in that window of capacity. And you're feeling safe at that nervous system level. We can also be in that more mobilized state and be more active or immobilized state, which is inactive. And we can blend those states, right? We're again going to the gym, going to the grocery store, making dinner, you're kind of more blending that safe and mobilized state, or we could be like chilling, watching Netflix, hanging out with our family, going out to eat with friends, and you're more in that immobilized safe state. Unfortunately, we know that for people who've experienced chronic toxic stress, adversity, trauma, whatever kind of language you want to use there, that they are not in that safe state near as much because they're chronically getting activated into a threat response. So their systems are going extreme into mobilized fight flight, or going the opposite end, and they're going to extreme immobilized state, which is that free state, in order to adapt to those environments,

13:42and those circumstances, and the stress, or the trauma that they're experiencing. And so, for people who've experienced all of that, they just have less time in the nervous system state of safety, and so they don't feel safe. Yeah, so that's kind of what kind of comes to my for me. Yeah. Yeah, and I think about like just the idea that I can be calm in a scenario to the max that that scenario calls for. So like, when you say grocery store, that makes me want to flip my lid. That feels like there's too many noises, there's too many colors. I will inevitably always get this squeaky wheel on the cart. So I have moved to grocery delivery because it saves, it saves my nervous system. Let's just say it is literally a gift to my ability to experience calm. But when we think further about

14:51that whole idea of felt safety, and somebody just being able to settle in, why, or how do we, how do we get that? Like, what are our tools that we have to create felt safety, particularly? I mean, we all need it, no matter our histories, but most of us, if they're not listening to this podcast, because we're working with people with secure attachment and zero trauma, right? So like, when we think about the histories of those that we serve and maybe even our own, what are, what are some tools we can put in our toolbox to, to get felt safety? Sure. I have a lot of tools I'd love to chat about. Can I just back up a little bit? Because I think there's a story that is really impactful that I love to share. And I do think it, I don't think if you would have asked me 10, 15 years ago, do you feel safe? I think I would have said, don't sure I do. I think that this lack of felt safety is so oftentimes completely unconscious

15:58to us. I don't think it's within our awareness necessarily. And I do think that in order to use the tools, we have to be aware of the need that we have for it or the need of others. I think we miss it a lot. We look at people having certain behaviors and we think these are behavior issues when in actuality, the root cause, the need that's driving that behavior is the actual lack of felt safety that that person has. So I'll give you an example. When I was pretty early in my journey in therapy, after I was becoming a practitioner, I also started therapy. I was like, I've got some stuff. I work through it. This is not just my son coming home from China who's having struggles. He's activating all my stuff. And I thought I would just overcome it all. I thought I was fine till I did the dumb AI. I was like, I'm good. Oh wait. Maybe not. So something my therapist had told me at the time, one of the most powerful things she said was, it's not what happened to you

16:58that hurts, still harms you today. It's all the messages that are left behind from what happened. And obviously beyond the messages, we now know like also the impact on the nervous system, right in the brain. And so I want you to just write down all the messages from those events you experienced, what messages are kind of like the aftermath. And so I wrote them all down on a piece of paper. There were like 12 of them. And I gave her the paper at my next session and she read them all and she said, you know, when I look at all of this, it's basically the core message here that ties them all together is that you don't feel safe. And that hit me like a ton of rigs, Sarah. I was like, you know, again, I'm a psychology major. I'm a school psychologist. I'm in this world. And it's like, I missed it. And so I start, she said, what if you start, what if you rewrite that message? And instead of just feeling like, I'm not safe, what if the message is I wasn't safe then? But I'm safe now. And I love that so much. And I was, she said, so every time you feel that,

18:08I want you to say I wasn't safe then, but I'm safe now. Because my kids would leave the door unlocked after letting the dog out. And I'd start screaming at them. You can't leave the door unlocked. Somebody could break in or I'd be walking across the grocery store parking lot, which again, I do grocery pickup now too. But at the time it didn't exist. So I'm walking across the grocery store parking lot. And I'm terrified that someone's going to attack me and put me in their car. I had never experienced that type of trauma before. But I had so much threat, you know, detection. I was in that prepare say, always says, yeah, is this a threat? Is it not? When I waited tables in college, I remember like running to my car because I'd have like pockets of money from from tips. And so afraid that somebody would attack me in the parking lot. And here's one more anecdotal story. When I became a practitioner, I was so I had never stayed in a hotel by myself. Sarah, I was so scared that I put a my couch, I drug it in front of the doors to go to sleep at night. So talk about somebody who

19:12like did not have felt safety. So you can imagine, but I didn't have awareness. And once it came to my awareness, I felt it so vividly. And I just 12 times a day, I wasn't safe now, then but I'm safe now. I wasn't safe then. But over time, as I was doing my work, as I was implementing TBRI and my family, as I was processing through my unresolved stuff, I noticed I was saying it less and less. And maybe I only need to say it three times a week. And then maybe it was three times a month. And then it was once a month. And then once a quarter. And now I bet I say it to myself. Maybe once or twice a year, it's not the weird will happen. And I have to remind myself I wasn't safe then, but I'm safe now. And so because of that lived experience, I do feel really highly attuned to the people around me and noticing their own lack of safety, their own lack of felt safety. And then this is where the

20:14tools come in, right? Yeah. And I think like even, even just trusting once you know, then, then trusting your own intuition to be aware. I mean, I remember I was telling somebody the other day, I was like, when I see this behavior in another person, my body will warn me. Because I have an experience that tells me that's not safe. And before TBRI, before doing, you know, any of my own work, it was just like, you know, I was kind of running around not knowing the signals I was trying, my body was even trying to tell me because I don't know about you, but in my upbringing, like your body and your brain, like that was a total disconnect. We didn't talk about bodies unless it was shaming, right? Like we didn't talk about how our body would try to protect us and the signals and all of that. And now I'm like, uh, I'm not, I'm not entering that space. That ain't it because my body is literally telling me, but I think even Amy, you said

21:15this morning and it was an aha moment for me, I was telling you about some stress I'm experiencing. And I, you know, said I went to the gym and then I came home and low and behold like somebody's busted the water main. So I couldn't shower. But you literally said, good job going to the gym because now you want to sit and freeze. And I was like, oh my gosh, she's right. Like, like, I'm, I'm using my body to work that out. And I think that's the biggest thing of understanding when we see behavior, um, how much is it connected to felt safety? So, so let's drop in the, some tools of like, how do we create felt safety in the environments where we serve? And in our own lives, like I just said, like, if my body says, like, this is not a safe person for you to be around, then I don't, you know, I, I'd do my very best to disengage, um, yeah, because that's because I trust my body to tell me at this point. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the unfortunate

22:15fact is for so many people because their threat detection system has been activated so much, right? Now the amygdala and the autonomic nervous system are misperceiving threats. So sometimes things that are actually safe, right, are interpreted as threats. And so I go into fight flight freeze, but the more we can support felt safety and really create that environment, not only how we're setting up the spaces that we're bringing people into, whether it's our homes or our schools or our courtrooms, whatever it might be, our hospitals, we want those environments to feel safe, but we as people who are supporting those needs, delivering the services, parenting the children, we have to send cues of safety. That's a phrase that I pull from Marty Smith, who's incredible in this work as well. Um, she talked about cues of safety versus cues of danger. And I just believe so strongly that in every interaction that we have with people that we are either sending

23:17them cues, you are safe, you are safe, you are safe, or we are sending them cues, you're in danger. And we have to be so careful, especially for those who have a more sensitized stress response, we have to lean into that sending cues of safety with that much more intentionality, because their threat detection system is not working like typically developing people. So the first strategy to go along with that, then I would say are the TBRI engagement strategies. Those are cons, if we are using those with fidelity and with consistency, we are going to create so much felt safety in this relationship. The person on the other end is going to, you know, see my warm eye contact. They're going to see me behavior matching them, getting down at their level, you know, sitting on the floor when they're on the floor, leaning on the desk, when they're on the desk, um, sitting at the table, if they're sitting at the table, I'm not going to stand up and ask my kids, hey, how's homework going? I'm going to sit down in a chair and say, hey, how's homework going? It's so much more connecting and sends them

24:21those cues of safety. Um, our playfulness, when we playfully interact with people, they can't be scared, especially for being playful in a way that's respectful. We're not, you know, being sarcastic, and we have to be attuned to them to make sure we don't cross lines, but just playfulness and silliness sends cues of safety. Um, the one I struggled with the most here when I was, um, starting this work was my voice quality. I grew up in a house of lots of yelling. I actually got one of my caregivers assured that says, I'm not yelling, I'm Italian. It was funny. It was funny when I bought that. Um, but it's also like, I was perpetuating that cycle with my children, which for my biological children, I'm sure they did not like being yelled at, but they also had enough nurture with me to know that I was a safe person. They had a more typically developing brain and nervous system, so yelling at them, it probably was uncomfortable and I didn't like it, but it wasn't scary, right?

25:23I didn't terrify them versus one of my sons that I adopted from China. I know that I was, I had to I know I was terrifying him. I know that I was. I didn't really make that connection at the time. Um, and so I have had to work very, very hard over the years to, um, and really at this point, it is rare. I still raise my voice at times, um, but it is so rare that it happens. It almost like takes me by surprise, but again, part of that, part of my ability as the adult to keep a more appropriate volume, my tone of voice, my cadence has to do with my felt safety, right? My, the more I feel safe as the adult, the more regulated, the wider the window of capacity that I have. So when my nervous system activates to this stress with my kid or with whatever's happening, right, I can activate and stay in my window. So I'm not yelling versus when my window was so small and I was

26:27in chronic survival, go, go, go, go, go, go all the time. It's very easy to get a little bit of activation and go right into yelling. Yeah. So we can't send cues of safety, again, back to Dr. Purvis and her wisdom. We can't take kids to a place. We can't take people to a place we've never been. Right. The safer we feel, the wider our window, the better we're going to be able to really deliver these engagement strategies, um, with fidelity and ways that create safety and relationship. Yeah, it's so good. And I think like, um, I know for me, like one of the, the entry point to TBRI was those empowering principles, um, because I was, um, I don't know if some might say I had a dismissive attachment style, uh, because I for sure did and sometimes do, um, but, uh, leaning on the idea of building a schedule to, to create so that so that the child doesn't have to, or the adult, right, they don't have to try to figure out what's coming next because they're going to tell the

27:28story if we don't, right? Like using rituals, using routines, like just keeping these strategies going, creating a safe environment where their body can calm, all of those things, being cognizant, I think like you've done so much work in schools, um, I've often told a story about, uh, when I was in the middle of my own mess and childhood being stuck right in the front and center of the classroom where I could not see one person other than the teacher and I was just terrified the whole time and it's like just being being thoughtful to like, how are we setting our classrooms up to create an environment of felt safety where we're not already activating a nervous system that has reason to be activated, even if we don't know it, right? Like, and, and, and given those kids of voice and trust, like, um, I was talking to a friend this morning who said her one of her kids teachers, like, they can pick their seat in the classroom and that's giving the kids trust to say, like,

28:30this is where my body feels safe within this room, um, and, but that sounds scary, right? Like, that sounds a little bit scary as the adult to say, like, just pick your seat, um, because that is, I think, as adults, that's a way we maintain control, but like, when we think about the idea of, of felt safety, I think we've got these really great tools built in the TBRI between our empowering principles and then our connecting principles, um, to, to give us some really solid tools to take off and, and try to build felt safety, um, and it's so, so, so important, and I think Amy, I don't, I'm curious to see how you feel about this because you work with a lot of leaders, but something I fully believe is if we're seeing a lot of behavior from the adults and our organizations, I think that is a huge indicator of a lack of felt safety within the organization and the leader, um, and so I think our, our leaders, I hope will really lean in

29:36and question themselves, like, what am I doing to create or not create felt safety? Yeah, right. I think our leaders have such an opportunity to utilize those engagement strategies that I talked about to send cues of safety to their staff. I think, like, you talked about the transition supports of making a schedule, reviewing the schedule, um, and again, I know you have a variety of listeners, so you, that applies to at home, giving people advanced notice, hey, this is coming up. Okay, so there are no surprises, this, and giving frequent reminders of that change or of what's coming, um, giving people something visual if they need it to really know, like, this is what's going to happen, um, in this meeting or in this, during this day, whatever it might be, uh, one of my children really needed that, he needed advanced notice, he startled very easily to, you know, to change, he didn't transition from A to B easily, and people could see, you might look at it and say, oh, he's throwing a fetties, you know, he's throwing a, having a tantrum, you're like, well, this is a kid who doesn't feel safe in his core, and when I

30:40change the plan suddenly or something happens, he wasn't expecting, his threat detection system is activating, and he's going into, um, that threat response, and he can't help that. I think there's so much of this in mindset where we look at people, and, and through this lens of you're doing it on purpose, and you could control it if you, if you tried, and what we need to remember is that it's called autonomic nervous system for a reason, because it's automatic. We actually don't have control. And so, um, you know, the transition supports the rituals, having a predictable practice that every, like, in every single, um, leadership call consultation session I have, I always ask a check-in question, because everybody knows that's what we're going to do. We're going to do a soft start, a slow start, we're going to connect. We're going to come into this moment because a lot of people are rushing, rushing, rushing, right? And it slows everything down, and it's something predictable

31:42and consistent, and so that feels really safe to people. Um, I think again, anything that's predictable and consistent sends cues, you're safe. Everything's okay. It's when something's different, it's when you walk in your house, and something is out of place, you're like, wait a minute, and you start preparing, like, assessing out, is this a threat, is it not a threat? But again, for people who have had more adversity, we just need to recognize their threat response system is just activating to such smaller things. You know, well, I just asked this, you know, my kid to, you know, do the dishes, I just asked this child to do this home, you know, this assignment in class, it's only three problems, and you're like, but you don't understand how sensitive their stress response systems are, and they've had to be, and thank goodness that they were, because these, that's how they've survived. Their systems adapted exactly how they needed to survive whatever they were experiencing in their lives. Yeah. I feel like one of the things I tried

32:44to listen to myself on early, and it actually still, like, let's be honest, I am still practicing TBRI, but one of the things I tried to listen to myself on was when I, when I heard myself saying, I just asked this, or I just did this, like, because I was trying to minimize my impact on the situation, but I would try to reframe that in my brain is like, I just went too fast. Like, I just needed to slow down. I just should have looked at the, the why behind the behavior, or I just like, because it helps me to think about like, those small inputs matter so much, and to, you know, the reality of what's happening behind the scenes. And so if I want to build felt safety, then I have to make all these plans and do these things proactively, because, because like you said, I'm literally trying to calm a nervous system that is designed to

33:46automatically keep all of us safe individually. And so if, if I'm the safe person in charge, then I have to bring the calm and not bring the ramping up stuff, because I was the same way. Like, everything, when my girls were little was a hurry, because like, the biggest thing is that I went, didn't want somebody in the community to think I was a bad mom, right? Like, and so we got to be on time. So hurry up, y'all, y'all, y'all, y'all, get your shoes on, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like all that. And I was so afraid of judgment. And now I'm like, judge away, my friends, because what's happening behind the scenes now is connecting, it's empowering, it's with respect to all of our bodies and what they're designed to do. I just think it's a different lens. It's a different lens to look through. It is. It's so different. The TBRI podcast is produced by the Karen Purvis Institute of Child Development at TCU. To learn more about TBRI and the resources

34:47mentioned in this episode, please visit child.tcu.edu slash podcast.