Transcription of Dr. Gregory Nevens for the show Taking Care of Teeth & Treating Trauma #281
Lisa Belisle: Last Fall it was my pleasure to work with a group of integrated practitioners who put on a symposium. One of these practitioners who was involved in the planning of the symposium and is affiliated with the group still is Dr. Gregory Nevens. Dr. Nevens is a health psychologist with long-term experience in integrated and integrative health care. He has spent most of his career embedded within, and working conjointly with family practices and some specialty medical practices. Nice to have you in today.
Gregory Nevens: Thank you. Nice to be here.
Lisa Belisle: You have a very long and interesting background as a health psychologist, but you’re kind of a… uou’re a health psychologist with lots of different interests and expertise.
Gregory Nevens: Yeah. My journey has, I actually started 35 years ago in an integrated medicine practice with three docs and three acupuncturists, massage therapists, polarity therapists, et cetera, which was an idea way, way before it’s time, and it’s really been the impetuous for much of my career since in terms of advocacy for integrated and integrative medicine. Integrated meaning health psychology or emotional issues as part of chronic pain and chronic illness presentation, and that experience was great working together, taking the tough cases and analyzing what kinds of intervention systems would be helpful for them, from what kind of discipline, and so that’s really been what I’ve been advocating for in larger systems, smaller systems of medical delivery systems since.
Now I find myself back in another integrative medicine center with a small group, doing what I was doing 35 years ago which is a nice full circle.
Lisa Belisle: You’re right in that 35 years ago the idea of integration really hadn’t taken off yet. I remember 20 years ago when I graduated from medical school, the idea of integration hadn’t taken off yet. We were still calling it alternative and complementary medicine.
Gregory Nevens: Right.
Lisa Belisle: What was it that caused you to become aware that this was an important thing to be involved in?
Gregory Nevens: I would say that I’m the kind of person that’s always thought outside the box. Of course, education as a health psychologist involves certain kinds of sciences and certain kinds of approaches. I started a practice, and especially in those early years, I became very interested not just in being supportive of the medical side in terms of just doing cognitive behavioral work for compliance and that kind of thing, but I started to see there were opportunities to actually effect medical symptoms through work with emotional problems. I started to have some patients for instance, a patient very early on who presented with chronic pain. She rated it a nine or a 10, and she was out of work. She was in the worker’s comp system. She was struggling with her previous employer.
It’s really obvious that the strongest emotion involved in her presentation was really intense anger. This was before I knew any of the kinds of more complex integrative techniques I know now, but just through helping her take that angry energy, and that’s how I see emotions, as an energy, take that inner angry energy, and use it for her own rehabilitation and functioning, rather than just sit there on the couch feeling the tension in her muscles. She was able to recover remarkably and get much more functional and even start talking about returning to work and that kind of thing.
That was a seminal case that kind of drove me to further research in terms, and many of the lectures I gave around the country 20 years ago were about not separating mind from body, recognizing that depression, anxiety, anger are part of the presentation of a chronic pain patient, and they’re inextricably intertwined. It’s only more recently that the neuroscience actually proves that that’s the case. The pain matrix, the new models of etiology of chronic pain and other chronic illnesses, now includes, through brain imaging, we see that the interior thing, that anterior cingulate gyrus that holds much of our emotional experience good and bad, and the insula, and the somatosensory cortex where the pain is actually experienced and the discriminatory aspects of pain interpretation occur.
Those three areas are stuck in this pain matrix, in this feedback loop. If you break that feedback loop in any stage, whether it’s the insula or the anterior cingulate gyrus or the somatosensory cortex, you get relief. In my experience, when you break it at the core emotional issue that’s stuck in the interior cingulate gyrus, sometimes it’s long term relief. It really gets better and stays better. It’s exciting stuff.
Lisa Belisle: I believe that when many people think about health psychology, they do think about the types of things you’ve described. Cognitive behavioral therapy for example. There’s a lot of talking involved, and it’s all about the words and the thoughts and the sharing of things which has its own validity. You’re actually talking about using techniques that will get in there without necessarily spending a lot of time talking about things.
Gregory Nevens: That’s true. As an integrative medicine person, somebody who is a CAM practitioner and I served on the board of the executives, the American Association of Integrative Medicine, have met lots of pioneers and innovators in all sorts of different intervention systems, but integrative intervention systems are based on energy. Western intervention systems tend to be based… medical intervention systems tend to be based on mass. How can we create a synthetic molecule to fit the mu receptors to block the pain impulses? Okay, how do we take an MRI or CAT scan and find where the legion is that we can fix?
It’s mass based, but I think what’s really exciting about our time and a lot of the innovations that are going on and a lot of the integration that’s going on, is that we’re now starting to see energy and mass at the same time as both valuable, and this has been a conundrum since the early quantum physics explorations, where it was confounding to Einstein and the others, how we could take light which is one of the energy intervention systems I use, we could take light and we could see that light was mass in terms of developing experiments which would show protons hitting a screen. We could also see light is energy. We couldn’t see both at the same time, or they couldn’t see both at the same time.
The other confounding variable has a lot to do with I think one of the issues that we’re struggling with now in terms of how to do research with integrative medicine. That is in the act of looking at light as energy, you change what you see. What that really enters into is this whole notion of intention when you’re working with energy medicine. Okay. Whether it’s acupuncture, Ayurveda, or whatever.
I’m very optimistic that perhaps we’re entering into an age of consciousness where we can see both at the same time, and that’s happening systemically, especially through the grassroots movements that’s driving integrative medicine in this country. It’s the fact that 70% of patients who are going to their medical doctors are already doing something in terms of alternative medicine. It behooves the medical side to understand integrative medicine, know what it’s good for, what it’s not good for, contra indications even. You don’t want somebody who has a pulse that’s damp in acupuncture doing hot yoga. That’s a problem. Of course, the medical side would also say, and somebody that has a cardiological issue doesn’t want to do hot yoga at the same time, too. Having a general knowledge of all these intervention systems that are out there that people are using and can be very, very valuable. Western medicine is fantastic for, basically for emergency kinds of situations. Western medicine saved my life at least twice.
For the more chronic issues, again, we get into a much more complex etiology that involves people’s emotional backgrounds, and is in need of integration and involves energy. Energy that gets stuck in certain patterns in neural networks in the brain. Different approaches can impact those kind of stuck neural networks. The energy based ones make sense, because when we take a functional MRI or an MEG or a CAT scan, what we’re seeing, or PET scan, what we’re seeing is energy.
Energy can change those neural networks, I think, quicker than cognition in terms of.… The cognitive behavioral approaches can certainly help people learn how to manage their stress better, can deal with compliance issue, can affect depression and those kinds of things, but they don’t get right at those kinds of core emotional issues in the anterior cingulate gyrus in the background. They don’t impact those in an energetic kind of way. They can sometimes identify them, but if you’ve been in psychotherapy a long time, you know patients that have been in psychotherapy for 30, 40 years, they have all the insight in the world, but it’s not changing the behavior or the feelings or the medical issue that may have developed out of those long-term patterns of feelings and effects on the autonomic arousal system, especially, like in fibromyalgia.
Lisa Belisle: Let’s talk about fibromyalgia and pain. We think of pain as a very physical thing, and also fibromyalgia, which is a syndrome, it’s not really a diagnosis, but it’s a pain related set of symptoms that a person experiences, but there is a very interesting emotional and psychological interaction in those situations.
Gregory Nevens: Absolutely. What again, the pain matrix shows is that however the initial pain develops, you can get fibromyalgia patients during a car accident. They get mild facial pains in one area, but then it spreads throughout the body, and that’s what fibromyalgia is as opposed to myofascial pain problem. Fibromyalgia myofascial pain problems are caused by…. The way to identify fibromyalgia is, do you have 11 out of 18 pressure points that are active? Okay, so those actual trigger points are spasming so the inner muscle fiber bundles. They’re not involved with a peripheral nervous system that tells the muscles how to move to pick up a cup of coffee and bring it to your mouth, they’re involved with the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic, the parasympathetic nervous system.
What we know about those spasmings of those intrafusal muscle fiber bundles is that they have excess sympathetic energy in them, and they have excess norepinephrine in them, which is the stress hormone. One of the ways to…. The other issue is that I’ve never seen a fibromyalgia patient that didn’t have a significant part of their life where they were walking on egg shells. Their autonomic nervous system was on hyper alert all the time, and very often that goes all the way back to childhood, they had very difficult childhoods where they weren’t free to speak their truths. They weren’t heard. They were abused. They were neglected. They were abandoned, and those kinds of issues create emotional trauma, core neuronal networks in the anterior cingulate gyrus, over their lifespan, more and more situations bring them back to and remind them of that initial core trauma. Those branches and neural networks in the anterior cingulate gyrus grow and grow and grow, and chronic pain, the somatosensory cortex which involves sensations…. Sensation can also trigger memories, so there is a connection there, and that’s where it gets stuck in these chronic pain syndromes.
Most of the times when you see chronic pain patients, you’ll notice that not only do they have a consistent pain pattern, but they also have a consistent emotional presentation that they come in with, whether that’s anger, depression, helplessness, hopelessness, anxiety. That’s showing you where the core issue is, or what that pain matrix is involved in. With fibromyalgia, you can’t, multi chronic pain patients, you can’t separate the emotional piece from the pain experience piece. They’re inextricably intertwined. Again, if you can impact any area of that pain matrix, you’ll get relief. If you can take care of the original emotional trauma, that relief tends in my experience, tends to be long-term, it’s not just two to six days. I can use auricular therapy with somebody and get relief a majority of time, but it lasts two to six days. That’s not a solution. That can help with exacerbations so that they can remain more functional during that period of exacerbation, but it’s not taking care of the core problem.
Lisa Belisle: By auricular therapy you mean using acupuncture points on the ear.
Gregory Nevens: Yep.
Lisa Belisle: When I went to visit your office, you were showing me the work that you do with applying energy to acupuncture points, and that’s one aspect of what you do, but you referred to light therapy. That’s another thing that you do which I found fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where somebody was exposing me to a bright light and I knew that there was going to be a direct impact on my brain waves.
Gregory Nevens: That’s a really complicated system that one of the people I admire mostas terms of an innovator in this whole field of integrating modern technology with ancient wisdom is a man named Steve Vasquez, and the system that he developed is very complex. It’s called emotional transformation therapy. What seems to happen, if I can explain this very, very briefly, one of the ways to impact that anterior cingulate gyrus I was talking about, is to activate different parts of the anterior cingulate gyrus. One of the ways of doing that is light as energy.
As we’ve evolved as human beings, okay, there were three things that started life. There was water, air, and light. It makes sense that the cells in our body communicate in vibration systems consistent with the different electromagnetic waveband lengths associated with color. If you take white light and break it apart you get all the colors.
Light goes everywhere in our brains very quickly, and we seem to use the different electromagnetic waveband lengths of light to organize different kinds of information to file it so that we can, as a survival of the species kind of mechanism. I don’t remember whether I showed you this or not when you came into my office, but one of the early things that I can do with people, is just use some goggles to allow a very small piece of white light hit their eye at different angles, while they’re looking straight forward. What happens is that there’s another place in the brain called the frontal eye fields. The frontal eye fields are responsible for smooth pursuit eye movement, where every time you walk into a new environment, you scan it. We all do. When I walked into this room I scanned it.
What we’re doing when we’re scanning is we’re using those frontal eye fields to go through all of the files in that anterior cingulate gyrus, and tell us how we should behave. If we’re going to walk in to some environments that say all this feels relaxing, I’ve been here before, I can let my hair down, I can be myself, there’s no problem. Walk into other environments saying, something doesn’t feel quite right here, I think I’ll sit in the back of my head and test it out until I know exactly how I want to react to this environment, and we’ll walk into other environment where we’ll pick up queues that tell us, uh-uh, I want out of here.
It’s a survival of the species mechanism, but as you activate, as most of our vision’s in dark, and you activate just one angle, one tiny piece of the optic nerve goes back to the occiput and all sorts of places in the brain, that activates only a tiny piece of the frontal eye fields, which are directly connected to that anterior cingulate gyrus, lights up a small piece of that anterior cingulate gyrus or neuronal network and that anterior cingulate gyrus. As you switch the angle, people feel different emotions at different angles, different autonomic arousal through the insulate different angles, and pain patients can feel their pain levels go up or down dependent upon that insula and emotional activation.
I’ve seen patients who have had patients, I mean had pain levels, they rated a 7 to 10 for 10 years, and they’re in those goggles, you find a really good, comforting, relaxing, wonderful neuronal network with all sorts of good memories in it, and their pain level goes down to a zero or a two. Even after years and years and years.
That’s a quick little introduction to a very complex system, and then we get into the color aspects, and sometimes you can expose people to the whole spectrum of color one nanometer at a time, and when you get to certain colors, their pain levels will spike up. When you get to other colors, especially the cool colors, it’ll activate the parasympathetic nervous system while the hot colors activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is what is the problem in most chronic pain problems. Their pain level can go down. If you can identify those specific nanometer waveband lengths where that pain level goes up, that’s probably where you’re going to find the emotional trauma that’s at the core of the pain matrix, and you can explore it with a variety of techniques, but including this angle that now you use with that specific color as opposed to the white light that you used in the goggles.
There’s another component which is neural feedback, which is strobe, because you can entrain brain lengths through exposing people to different strobe rates. The delta wave strobe rates will get at really kind of deep memory that’s pretty unconscious theta wave activity, will bring up a lot of memory. Alpha is more relaxing. Beta is where we are when we’re on our A game. We’re at work and we’re figuring out a problem and our brain is just going at it. When I’m working with people with cognitive deficits, I’ll often work on beta waves in terms of indigo, which is usually about cognition.
Then gamma wave activity also accesses important memories in this network, but also is where you can get peak spiritual experiences, peak creative experiences, so I often use that at the end of the program.
Lisa Belisle: I encourage people to learn more about the work that you’re doing, and we will give people information on our show notes page as to how to be in touch with you.
Gregory Nevens: That’d be great.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Gregory Nevens, who is a health psychologist with long term experience in integrated and integrative health care. I really appreciate all of the work that you’re doing, and I hope that people who are impacted by some of these very significant problems will take the time to learn more about your practice.
Gregory Nevens: Great.
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Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 281, Taking Care of Teeth, and Treating Trauma. Our guests have included Dr. Jon Ryder and Dr. Gregory Nevens. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week show, sign up for our E-newsletter, and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa, and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, I hope that you have enjoyed our Taking care of Teeth and Treating Trauma show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day, and you have a bountiful life.
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