Dr. Julia DiGangi’s Post

Many moons ago, I was a student at Georgetown. During my studies, I spent many late nights and early mornings at a bookstore called Kramers. This cozy cafe, tucked right in the middle of the D.C. bustle, was the perfect place to study, people watch, and dream about what my life could become. Tomorrow, I'm speaking to 350 leaders in the US government about what it takes to lead with emotional power. Tonight, I strolled around DC and stumbled into Kramer's. I intentionally don't pay much attention to where the book is stocked and where it's not. But tonight, I couldn't help myself. "Excuse me. Do you happen to have any copies of Energy Rising here?" "Yes, we do. Right this way." And there it was, perched on a shelf. A simple story that, more and more, feels like it holds the energy of a thousand lifetimes. 24-year-old me believed I had an uncommon story to tell about the energy of emotion.  And what a dream it's been to watch it rise. Mostly, what an absolute dream to connect with people who understand we don't wait for power. We become it. See you on the stage tomorrow, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) https://lnkd.in/gXedjs3Z #EnergyRising #speaker #HBR

Want to know the most powerful thing you can do when people have opinions that are wildly activating to you? Let them. Emotional power rises from the places that feel like pain. #EnergyRising #emotionalintelligence #HBR https://lnkd.in/gXedjs3Z 

For some of us who treat trauma and PTSD, today came as a disappointment. Healing from trauma is a deeply challenging process. Trauma, by its nature, is an all-encompassing thing. It wounds emotionally, physically, spiritually, cognitively and morally. To treat something as complex as trauma, many modalities of treatment are often necessary: talk therapy, exposure therapy, mindfulness, somatic practices. A single tracked approach to something as existential as trauma does not work. Many of us were very hopeful that today an FDA panel would give the green light to methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) as an adjunct to psychotherapy. It did not. The panel had various concerns about the quality of the MDMA research. There were some legitimate concerns about conduct and procedure in the studies. However, the statistical effect sizes were insane! This means the benefit that MDMA showed for PTSD was extremely powerful. Those of us in the field are paying close attention and we're watching what happens later this fall. For those of us who have given our lives to treating trauma, anxiety and PTSD, we are so hopeful that quality treatments make it safely to the people--and their families--who need it most. Stay tuned. #PTSD #PTSDAwarenessmonth #anxiety #psychedelics

Earlier in my career, I used to let people go on and on and on about their problems. I would have told you this was deeply empathetic. But rookies make mistakes. I confused rumination with redemption. Now, do not talk to me about any problem until you first tell me who you are prepared to be. The only answer to life's perpetual (and often devastating) uncertainty is identity. Who, when your external sources of stability fail, do you say you are? *************** Headed to DC to talk about Energy Rising, the brain, and leading through uncertainty. Washington or bust! https://lnkd.in/gXedjs3Z #leadership #EnergyRising #uncertainty

The answer to uncertainty is not certainty. As a neuropsychologist who studies the brain's relationship to anxiety, the best definition I can give you for anxiety is a disturbed relationship with certainty. The more obsessively you seek it, the more anxious you will feel. The answer to uncertainty is identity. Who, when the world is uncertain, do I say I am? *************** Looking forward to talking leadership, the brain and Energy Rising with the EPA. See you soon, D.C.! https://lnkd.in/gXedjs3Z #EnergyRising #Leadership #Speaking

Ask yourself what you want more than anything. Having asked this question to thousands of people at this point in my career, I'd venture to guess that your answer is just like everybody else's: Peace. But we find ourselves puzzled, insisting we just want peace yet feeling anything but. Here's the central problem: You have confused peace with order. And in this confusion, you likely engage in what I call 'The Overs.' You overanalyze and overthink; you overachieve and overschedule. Overdo and overconsume. If overfunctioning was the way, you would be there by now. The path to peace is not about constructing order but about defusing defensiveness. The world around you is filled with uncertainty and so your brain--until you retrain it--reacts with defensive hypervigilance: What if they say that?! What if she does that?! What if he thinks that?! What if this happens?! What you've been calling 'organization' is just disturbed vigilance. If you want peace, you must allow what you swear you cannot. "But what if they misunderstand me?" Allow. "But what if they reject me?" Allow. "But what if they humiliate me?" Allow. "But what if it breaks me?" Allow. Peace belongs, not to those of us who have deluded ourselves into thinking we have mastered Life, but to those of us powerful enough to submit to a Life that is already mastering us. https://lnkd.in/gXedjs3Z

• Frozen in time, he patrols the perimeter of his suburban home, searching for the Vietcong • Like a strange souvenir, an empty plastic bag floating down a U.S. interstate paralyzes him. The dull asphalt has been replaced by images of roadside explosives and dismembered body parts. • A punch to the face leaves a chatty moviegoer covered with blood. Talking once the movie starts is a clear rule violation—and everyone knows: You follow the rules or you risk everyone getting killed. When they finally make it to me, it is only because their lives have become unmanageable. And so we begin treatment. I am a neuropsychologist. As an expert in the relationship between the brain, trauma and behavior, I have treated male veterans for many years. In my work, I make plenty of evidence-based plans to help them live more functional lives. But, at its deepest core, treatment is about bearing witness. Treatment is church. A holy confessional, it is a place where we take our shame and our rage and our inadequacies and we present them for another human to see. Treatment works in proportion to the amount of truth we tell. If the patient tells a little bit of truth, the patient gets a little bit better. If the patient tells a lot of truth, the patient gets a lot better. The reason this works is because the human spirit longs to be understood. Without feeling that there is at least one other person who understands us—who sees us in all our splendor and our shame—we cannot be well. In my work with these men, there were two central storylines. First, that war exacts casualties far greater than we meaningfully understand. Behind each broken man are streams of shattered spouses, children, families and communities. That the exciting, early chest-pounding glory of war is quickly extinguished by the crushing weight of something so ugly you can never really know it unless you actually know it. That moral injuries are far worse than broken bones and that ghosts are real. War, of course, comes home. The trauma of the father belongs not just to him but to his children and their children. The second story took me longer to hear. A wife cries softly in my office. “I will never be for him what they were to him.” The husband shifts. He is uncomfortable, but he agrees. From Vietnam to Iraq, man after man has spoken of his deep love of the other men with whom he served. As horrible as the war was, the bonds they had with these men were sacred and now, so many years later, deeply missed. They longed for each other. Is war the only environment where grown men are allowed to love each other freely and profoundly without accusation or insinuation of something unwanted? It is breathtakingly ironic that it might be in these collective, shattering acts of aggression that men are finally able to access the one thing we all came into this world wired for: Each other. [From my article in Chicago Tribune] #PTSD #memorialday #veterans #mentalhealth

In the world of couples, people don't really have new conversations.  They re-enact patterns. It's not a joke when we say the couple has the same fight for 50 years.  Sure, say something once. Say something twice. Say something three hundred times.  But at a certain point, wake up. When you're saying the *same* thing to your partner--making the same requests, giving the same demands, and expressing the same unmet needs--you're not having a conversation.    You're avoiding Grief, Confusion and Terror.  The thing you've wanted so much is not available here. Worse yet, you can't quite figure out why. And unless you are willing to have a relationship with Grief, Confusion, and Terror--to let them take you, ravage you, break the version of you that wasn't doing all that well anyway, you will waste a lifetime pretending like the absence of an answer isn't a perfectly clear one.    And so the power question is: What is the precise cost to your life force if you continue to have conversations you already know the answer to? #coaching #relationships #EnergyRising

So much changes when we realize the only work we are actually called to do is transform ourselves.  What a dream talking to leaders from around the globe about Energy Rising and the neuroscience of emotional power. Thank you, MiTek Lisa Tyree, Clare Brewka, and Erin Bachelier, SPHR, SHRM-SCP #EnergyRising

On of the most powerful ideas in leadership is the most counterintuitive. Your leadership is *strengthened* by your willingness to engage with your pain--with your fear of rejection, your terror about being humiliated, and your preoccupation with being misunderstood. Why? Because the #1 function of your brain is to keep you away from things that it thinks will harm you. If you don't work to understand the difference between danger and dislike in your own body, your leadership will never be about power. It will be about avoidance of the things you don't want to feel. ************** So excited to be on the road speaking about Energy Rising and the neuroscience of leading with emotional power. See you tomorrow, St Louis! https://lnkd.in/gXedjs3Z #EnergyRising #speaker #training