Click here to download the transcript.
Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors. Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Dr. Martha Lucas, today we are going to talk about amygdalizing, and I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for giving me the opportunity to share this information with you. You can also find information on LucasTeachings. com, my teaching website. So my practice is located in Denver, Colorado, but I love to teach.
Click here for the best Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance
Teaching all over and having opportunities like this to spread the word about how wonderful Chinese medicine is. So today’s topic is something that I have called amygdalizing. And so I’m going to talk to you about telling your patients to amygdalize. Now, the amygdala is a part of our brain. It’s involved in our stress response, and a friend of mine and I have been studying the amygdala for quite a while in terms of how it is related, especially to anxiety, but anxiety and depression in our patients.
Get a Quick Quote and See What You Can Save
Kathleen is one of my Pulse diagnosis students from years and years ago, and we’ve kept in touch all these years about how important the proper diagnosis is to help our patients find the cause or help us find the cause of their condition, because that’s what Chinese medicine is about, right?
It’s essentially a preventive medicine, so we want to see our patients to prevent. Conditions, in other words, keep them healthy. You all know the old story about the ancient medical doctors and how you went to see them all the time to stay healthy and you paid them, but if you turned up sick, they didn’t get paid because they’re supposed to keep you healthy.
Now, in our culture, we only we might go see our doctor once a year for our annual exam, but we usually only go when we’re sick. So it is an educational thing to get your patients to understand. You need to come see me. Let’s say they start with a symptom. Come see me. We get you quote unquote cured.
We get your symptoms to go away. We get you healthy again, and then see you in a month. That’s what I tell all my patients. I need to see you twice a week for a couple of weeks, and once a week, then every 10 days, and two weeks, and then see you in a month when you’re healthy. Because I’m getting them back to the time where I can prevent their conditions.
So I love to treat emotions. Emotions are, I, in my pulse diagnosis system, we can feel the emotions in the pulse. Like worry makes the earth, spleen, stomach, pulse go backward toward the kidneys. Part of the problem with that is, number one, it’s taking away from the kidney energy in a perverse way. And number two, it’s not connecting with the lung, large intestine, metal, and earth and metal are our immune system, right?
So people are going to show up with some sort of immune or skin or hair condition, along with their worry causing this to happen. Terms of anxiety and depression, we feel depression, chronic depression, current depression in the liver pulse, the liver gallbladder pulse. And then anxiety is felt mostly in the heart, but that combination of the liver and the heart.
So I have for years been telling my patients when I feel their anxiety to what I call amygdalize. Now, why choose the amygdala as the choice of organs for them to calm down? And remember, the master said that, and I remember this from the first week of Chinese medicine school, and I Really, honestly, at that time, I thought it was a little bit of a crazy thing to say.
I’m a research psychologist by training in the Western medicine, so to say, Oh, emotions cause all physical disease made me feel like, what? Are you kidding? But as I’m feeling people’s pulses, you can feel that back and forth movement, or the scattered of the heart pulse, is eventually causing a physical symptom.
And if you want to think about it, and when we talk about the amygdala, you will know, it’s a physical disease. The amygdala is a physical organ in our body. We’re feeling the person’s anxiety and or depression, and that’s physically in their body. We’ve managed to get this idea of anxiety and depression down to a physical problem.
Now, sure, we have bacteria, viruses, that sort of thing causes physical disease, but also your patient’s emotions getting stuck. Your patient’s emotions, like if the heart pulse is scattered, blood flow isn’t going to be very good, right? This is why our fertility patients need treatment on the heart because that blood flow is going to eventually go to the uterus.
And without that connection, people are not going to be able to get pregnant very easily. So we’re going to be talking about the physical brain and how we’re going to deal with that in Chinese medicine. But it all started with this idea about that. Emotions caused all physical disease. And now of course, I’m big on treating emotions.
I love to treat emotions. I think we all need to let our patients know that Chinese acupuncture, Chinese medicine doesn’t only treat fertility and pain. I think those are two of the big topics, but we also treat the person’s emotions and their spirit. So the amygdala is a little tiny part of your brain, but it has a big function.
It’s one of the major. are the major processing center for your emotions. It also links the brain with other brain activities like memories, learning, and our senses. So that’s why sometimes when people have a panic attack, they have all of their senses seem to be involved in that. But it’s main, going to be talking about is how it can cause disruptive feelings like anxiety and depression.
It’s inside your temporal lobe. As I said, it plays a key role in emotions and memory and learning and It’s actually a little structure, but it’s part of a bigger network called the limbic system. And we all remember that the limbic system has to do with emotions. It’s part of our, very important part of our survival, because without fear in the, what I call the old days, when we were, threatened by tigers at the door and dying in childbirth more and that sort of thing.
We had to have fear, like that idea that the hair stands up on end on your arms when we’re fearful or we are worried for our own survival. If you’ve ever almost been hit by a car, you will know that your hair stands on end because you, Your survival was threatened. So these parts of the brain, including the amygdala, what we call detect danger.
But now the danger isn’t a tiger at the door. The danger is we can’t pay our bills. We’re afraid we’re not going to pass an exam. Our business has declined. Maybe we’re having a little bit of a relationship problem. Those are now the issues that really aren’t what you would call survival. They’re not really, I’m going to die because I can’t pay this bill.
I can do other things about not being able to pay that bill. But the amygdala doesn’t know that. It, all it sees is it’s, Just processing the things that we are seeing and hearing, like literally look at the bill and the amygdala goes into that feeling of, oh my gosh, I’m going to die. So we get fear, we can get aggression.
As I said, it’s a part of learning through rewards and punishment. So again, we can cognitively train it to learn this is not a survival, death threat. And then with memory, and it also is a part of social communication, which is what amygdalizing is. When I tell my patients to amygdalize, it means that they need to just express the emotion they’re feeling, express the situation to someone.
In fact, they don’t even need to. They don’t even need feedback. It’s not I need to have a conversation with somebody about this. In fact, my friend and I do emails back and forth and we’ll say, I need to amygdalize in the subject line, which means to our friend, my friend and I, you don’t have to call me back.
You don’t have to even email back. I just am having this situation. I need to express it. I’m going to say it to you or leave a message, leave a phone message. Hey, this is an amygdalization thing. phone voicemail and just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what’s happening because we need to express that. And the masters were right about that.
I tell all my patients, your emotions are better in, sorry, your emotions are better out than in. They’re better expressed than held in. It’s the holding in that creates the stagnation and the weakness, the deficiencies or excess. Stagnation can be. either deficiency or excess, but it’s the holding in of the emotion that’s going to lead to some physical problem or anxiety and depression, which we consider emotional problems.
So they were right about that. Now, I always tell my patients, I’m not suggesting that we all become raging maniacs and road ragers. I’m just saying that you need to say it. You’ve had a bad day at work. Your boss has been a jerk. You just need to get in your car and do the, Oh my boss, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or you’re sad about something, I’m sad about this particular thing happening. And I always tell them if you’re sad and you can cry, or you’re crying with words processes things faster than just crying with your frontal lobe and your amygdala going on and on inside this loop, right?
That’s what worry does to the pulses, as I mentioned earlier. It’s a loop between earth and the kidneys back and forth. And that’s very dangerous to our health. So what the amygdala ization does, which that’s a phrase I’ve coined, amygdalize and amygdalization, is it helps your amygdala calm down.
It helps the neurons because what the amygdala is made of is neurons and they’re sending and relaying electrical and chemical signals throughout your brain and nervous system so that you see a threat, your bill, and then these neurons start to go through your whole brain, your whole nervous system. And It’s the protective cells for those nerves don’t recognize that this is not a threat to my life.
When we start to have anxiety disorders, PTSD, any mood disorder, panic disorder, these phobias, fearful things, these are all how These are all affected or started in the amygdala. So again, we need to be always thinking about getting that out for our mental health because your amygdala can get hijacked.
If we don’t recognize that this is not a danger to my life, then those emergency signals are just going to keep going and going and going and other parts of your brain are going to react you. to that. So you might have a startle reflex. As I said, you’re going to have anxiety or depression.
It’s an emotional hijack, if you will. So what the amygdala starts in your central nervous system is this process to protect yourself, protect your body, from a dangerous situation or from danger. So again, this helps in a dangerous situation, right? If a car is coming and your ears hear it and you’re on your bike and you’re, you suddenly get a fight or flight response, that’s going to save your life.
So it’s protecting your body from danger by putting you in fight or flight. But now, as I said earlier, The fight or flight isn’t survival. The fight or flight is worried about having a fight with our partner worrying about our business, having to pay some bills, something, our child is a little sick, but we turn it into a bigger worry.
Again, we need to. Nip that in the bud. So then that’s when I tell my patients to amygdalize. I say that’s not a life threatening thing, but your body feels like it’s life threatening. So you need to not neglect your mental health. You need to realize that your physical body is your mental health.
So again, talking to a friend, you don’t need feedback. So what I tell my patients is you don’t need to. Say to a friend, Oh, I need to talk this over with you. You just need to tell him, Hey, my practitioner told me to do this thing called amygdalizing, which means I’m just going to talk about the thing.
I’m just going to repeat the thing so I can get it out of my mind, get it out in a situation where I get my brain to realize, Oh, actually this is a bill. I can do something about that. I can call the company. I can make payments. I’m not going to die. And we can calm ourselves down by doing what the master said, which is getting the emotional, getting the emotion expressed right in a healthy way, not being over angry, not, it.
Not yelling at anyone, not hurting anyone. We just get the emotion out by expressing it to someone. Or like I said I call it talking crying is a great way to get it out and process it if you’re a crier. If you’re a crier and you say the words, I miss him, I’m in your frontal lobe. Let’s say it’s that you miss someone.
Your frontal lobe just gets in that loop. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. But if You can’t say that out loud when you’re crying. You can’t possibly say, I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. Like it goes on in your frontal lobe. You’ll start to process it.
I miss him because he’s going to a different school now, but Hey, there are airplanes, there are cars. I can still see him. He’s growing up, whatever it is that you’re trying to process. That little bit of grief, but you need to process it. I remember my mother died suddenly and so when I went to see my doctor for my annual exam, she said I was crying because I just reported that my mother died a couple months ago or whatever, and she said, Oh, do you need some antidepressants?
I said, No, I don’t need antidepressants. My mother just dropped dead. I need to cry. is what I need. You put me on antidepressants, it’s going to make me stop crying because that’s what they’re really good at. You can feel that in the pulses. You can feel the liver energy go up to the heart and stop when a person is on antidepressants.
We of course need that energy to get over, over to the spirit, right? Over to the heart to keep the heart blood flowing and the spirit flowing well. I know for that from Chinese medicine. Now, if I wasn’t a Chinese medicine practitioner, I wouldn’t have needed that. I wouldn’t have known that. And maybe I would have said, sure, let me have some antidepressants for a while.
But we all know as practitioners, we have to get that depressed energy flowing. Get that grief, get that shock going because otherwise my kidneys were going to suffer, right? And the last thing.
When you feel the emotions in the patient’s pulses, sometimes get them to amygdalize while your hands are on the pulses. And I’ve done it plenty of times the other way. I make a joke in my pulse diagnosis class about how, you know what, you want to feel somebody’s anger pulse in the liver, talk to them about their divorce.
It’s the opposite too. I can tell them, amygdalize, get, and old childhood trauma. They’re amygdalizing in front of me about that and you can feel their earth pulse Sink down deep because this is something they’ve had in their system for a long time about not being nurtured So at any rate I wanted to introduce you to this technique I call amygdalizing able to tell your patients to amygdalize and If you have any questions, you can contact me at LucasTeachings.
com or my private practice site is AcupunctureWoman. com and I’ll be happy to answer your questions. I love to help practitioners be better at our craft because I really, after more than 25 years, I really do believe that Chinese medicine rocks. Again, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity to speak with you and, as I said Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.