Breaking The Cycle Through Co-Regulation And Connection With Neil Hughes
Co-regulation is at the heart of today's conversation, and one that can shape the way we support our children in navigating the world. In this powerful episode, Katie Harward sits down with Neil Hughes for an eye-opening discussion on childhood trauma, neurodiversity, and the vital role of co-regulation in helping kids feel safe and understood. Neil shares his deeply personal story, offering insight into how recognizing and respecting a child's unique neurological needs can create a foundation of trust, autonomy, and healing. Get ready for a perspective-shifting discussion that will inspire a new, more empathetic approach to cultivating a generation that feels truly seen and supported!
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Breaking The Cycle Through Co-Regulation And Connection With Neil Hughes
In this episode, we are having a deeply important and powerful conversation with my dear friend Neil Hughes. Neil's journey is one of resilience, bravery, and healing. He's someone who has seen the darkest of days, having experienced unimaginable abuse as a child, abuse at the hands of someone he trusted, a close family friend.
Neil takes us through his story, sharing his personal experience as a neurodivergent child, how that vulnerability made him more susceptible to manipulation and harm, and the lifelong impact that trauma has had on him. It's an incredibly raw and real conversation, and one that is both difficult to read but so important to share.
In this episode, we also dive into an important discussion about how neurodivergent children are at a heightened risk for abuse and what we as parents, caregivers, and communities can do to protect them. Neil offers invaluable insight on the concept of co-regulation, how parents can better support and connect with their children to build the trust and safety that they need in their lives.
This is a deeply personal and emotional conversation, but it's also filled with hope and the power of sharing stories. I hope Neil's words resonate with you and that this episode sparks a wider conversation about how we can all do our part to protect the most vulnerable among us. Please join us as we talk with Neil Hughes. This one is not to be missed.
I'm so excited to speak with you, Neil. I am overjoyed by the relationship that you and I have. We do The Neuro Dope Podcast and talk about our neuro differences. I'm so excited to hear your story. You bring such a great perspective to anything about kids. You can teach people the warning signs to look for when your children, like something happens with your child. There are so many things that we don't know about as parents. We turn a blind eye until something happens. Due to your history, what you've been through, and your knowledge base, you can give us a lot of perspective on everything. I'm so excited to speak with you about this.
If you want to know how you and I became friends, it's all recorded on The Neuro Dope Podcast. You and I don't talk unless we're on a podcast.
That's true.
I'm very glad to be here.
Understanding Childhood Safety And Warning Signs
I did the introduction so people know a little bit about you, but why don't you tell us a little bit about your history and why it's so important to you to talk about kids' safety?
From what I understand, our purpose here is to provide tools. What I'm about to say is not tools. It's triggering. One of the things that we need as a tool is that we need to allow children to be triggered. This is my trauma brain. I have access to it. That's a tool, and I've had to learn it. I'd like to give this tool to those kids out there.
However old you are, you're still the same person you were when you were being sexually abused. It doesn't go into a dead file somewhere in your brain. We're not computers. I'm going to come out of it. I'm breathing deeply. I'm connecting with my body. I'm not afraid. If anything else happens, any other information you get, all the data that you’ve collected over the years, none of it makes sense if you don't look at the nervous system. Can you see my nervous system? Do you see the change in my affect?
Yeah, you're calming it down. Do you, on purpose, relate to that or touch on the soft spot that makes you cry and makes you feel that?
Everyday. Do you have a death? Have you lost a pet? If you can't go to your parents or your siblings, the worst of the worst losses, can you go there? Do you see what I'm saying? You're already embracing.
That's the thing that's so hard for me. You know because of my history. I'm so closed because if you talk to me about losing my dad, it's something that is hard for me, but if you talk to me about losing my sister, it's instant.
I can see it, and I'm okay with it. That's the tool.
The thing for you is you embrace it and you're like, “I need to feel this every single day.”
I don't shame it. When you started the introduction, you were like, “We're going to talk about this in your background.” It’s that co-regulation. If you turn away from a child who's dysregulated from sex abuse, they're not going to say, “This thing happened to me. I'm confused about it. I don't understand anything that happened, but it hurt. It hurt me in ways that I can't even explain, physically and emotionally, but it's worse than that.” They're not going to say that. They're going to say, “I don't want to eat.” You're going to say, “Eat your food,” and they're going to say, “I can't eat,” because their body is breaking apart.
I am so grateful that you can show this, be here with me, and be completely authentic because I know that it's hard and I know that there are so many things in your life.
That's the dinner table. What about school? What about dissociation? That is the technical term is of what I'm going in and out of.
Do you mind sharing with the viewers a little bit about your history so that they know what's triggering this trauma for you?
Yeah. With you asking that question, I'm like, “I can do that,” but let me get composed because I want the messaging to be clear. I've spent a lot of years singing to solve this problem, so I did voice training with Angie Lee in Draper, Utah, for years. That's where I learned this technique. You have to breathe to sing. I'm going to tell you a funny story to get out of that stress brain.
In a middle school in Draper, she has these recitals. When you take piano or singing lessons, you have to do a recital. There's this 40-year-old singing. It was a medley. It was Elvis Presley and another town song. I worked for months on it, and I could not get out of my stress brain. I dissociated on stage. The last person to sing before me was a twelve-year-old.
The kid was like, “I'm going to The Voice. I'm going to be a superstar,” and then I get up there and no one knows my story. Angie knows my story. She knew why I was up there. That was the scariest thing of my life. As I told you on the other podcast, I had to know what fear was as an adult. I learned that through having a recital at a middle school as a 40-year-old-something. I was 48. I bombed. It was so bad.
Did you sing? What happened?
The stress brain is a threat detection machine. When we talk more technically, it's the brain state. It's not the brain's content. It's the state of the brain. When the fear center's on, and that's what I go into when I'm dissociating, my visual goes way up, and then I lose my verbal center. My hearing is for input. It's hearing for threats. What I'm trying to do is return to that melody. I'm trying to return to the training that I did for months to sing that song. I can do it now, but ten minutes ago, I wouldn't even be able to breach the content of my mind.
As a child, I was being taken apart on purpose by a pedophile. That's what grooming is. It's dating with a toddler. You're like, “What is going on? I don't understand why you're putting your arm around my shoulder. I don't understand why everyone's gone. Why am I alone with you?” We all have a sex drive. We're all sexual beings, but we're not all wired the same way.
When you ask me about my background, the first thing we need to talk about is being autistic. I'm very neuro different. I'm 54 years old. It's taken me this long to understand what my needs are. My need is for a deep connection, and he took advantage of that. That has never changed. My type of being in the world is of deep connection.
As a child, I was like, “I'm not hungry, Mom.” She was like, “Go to your room.” I was like, “I don't want to be in my room.” She was like, “I don't know what to do with you. I'm going to send you to my best friend's house and let them take you.” What I've learned is that everyone in that house knew what was happening. It wasn't just one person.
That was a house where they had abused a lot of kids. It was a mill. I know that now as an adult. My background is one of being told, “Your feelings aren't real. You need to eat your dinner. What you're doing is wrong.” What I was doing was I was protecting myself. By getting into my body, I'd have to experience what was happening. It was a survival mechanism.
One way to know that a child is being abused is to look at their nervous system. Are they hungry? They should be hungry, but they got back from a friend's house and they're not hungry. You know for sure they've not eaten, so they're in a stress brain. Look at the nervous system. The worst part of this is I did come out. My whole childhood was that if I talk about what's happening at their house, he will come into my bedroom, slit my throat, and take care of whoever else he has to.
How old were you at this time?
I can't tell you. I've asked my mom, “When did they move into our neighborhood?” and she had a hard time even talking about it.
Does she know? She feels responsible for what happened.
It became public when I was fifteen, the night they called the cops and then I got put in a police car. The worst trauma of my childhood was when I finally broke the silence, which was a threat to my life, and then nothing happened. Not only did nothing happen, but the detective didn't believe me. He drove me to the house where it had happened. He took me back to the scenes.
I can’t tell you about my autistic brain and the holographic memories I have. He put me back into my childhood and said, “You're never going to get justice. We're going to go kick his ass.” When I refused, he called me gay. He said, “You're gay. That's your lover and you're having a fight.” I couldn't talk. I was threat detecting. I went into that thinking we were going to drive away from my neighborhood and we drove right into the heart of it. I was clamoring at the door, scraping, trying to get out, and he sped away.
The cop sped away?
He dysregulated me. He created such a problem. He's like, “This is not a gay kid. This is a psychotic kid.” He tried to calm me down, and he drove as fast as he could. Malik was standing in the window. He knew what I was doing. It was a cop car. It was an unmarked special victims unit car. I knew not only was the cop not going to protect me, but I was dead.
He spent two and a half hours interrogating me about the sex acts. When I couldn't speak, the last thing he told me was, “At least it could have been worse.” My whole life, I've been disabled. My whole life, I've been in treatment. When I tell my story, and I won't tell all the details here, and what happened to me, the workers were like, “Stop talking. I don't want to hear it.”
This is my message. The #MeToo Movement, the woman who started that was a camp counselor. She had a history of sex abuse, which meant she went into that state frequently throughout her life. She didn't have the tools to come out of it. A girl came in and said, “I don't want to go home. Our week is over. This is the last day. I'm not going home. You've got to protect me.” I don't know exactly what was said, but that's how I feel. Do you know the woman who started #MeToo? This is in her stories. You can read it if you want to look it up.
I don't know.
She dysregulated. She did not have the skills to regulate. She got up without a word, walked out of that room, and doesn't know what happened to that girl.
That's what triggered her to start the #MeToo Movement.
She's created a thing that was to protect children, like your show, to give people the tool. Is it workplace safety? Is Weinstein the topic here? That has nothing to do with kids.
Not to laugh at the situation because I know that is heartbreaking in so many ways, but I understand what you're saying.
The reason I'm bringing it up is that when the #MeToo Movement started, I didn’t like social media. I got on and I told my story. Guess how many crickets I got because I was talking about male-on-male violence.
People don't want to hear that. Let me go back a little bit. There's always a good story or a reason why this has happened to you and why God placed this in your life. It's to further your mission, further our mission, and be able to teach people the warning signs. The issue I see with any kind of parenting is, “Let's not deal with the issues until it's in our court.” It's like, “I'm not going to deal with it. I'm not going to think about what could happen if this happened to my child until it happens.” That's the wrong way to think about it.
It's the same thing with social media, gaming devices, and all of these things. Everybody's putting these things in their homes. That's great. We need to teach these social skills. We need to have these kids be able to play these games with their friends. At the same time, when you know the statistics are 1 in every 5 children who are on those gaming devices or on social media are going to be approached by a groomer or a predator, you need to gear your child up to be ready to handle that. Don't wait until these things happen. Know the warning signs and talk to your children.
Body Autonomy And Co-Regulation: Understanding Nervous System Regulation
What's the name of that? There's a name for this. It's called Body Autonomy. I'm showing it to you. I don't need a trigger warning. There are very few things in the media that trigger my dysregulation when I can do it myself, remembering my own past. It’s the thing that people need so they become stable or regulated. There are other words for it. I'm talking about the nervous system.
Your kid doesn't need to have a history like mine to need to be co-regulated with their parents. If the parent cannot co-regulate with their child, they will go somewhere else to do it on platforms. Body autonomy is co-regulation. Body autonomy and co-regulation are the same words. Dysregulation is what predators do. Not just sexual predators, but any kind of aggression. Aggressive people hurt people, and it's on purpose. We see it in our politics. Your show is to give people tools. It's body autonomy through co-regulation.
Body autonomy is co-regulation. Dysregulation is what predators do, encompassing all kinds of aggression, not just sexual predation.
Can you go a little bit into co-regulation and what that means and what that would look like?
Yes. There are a few people in my life who have helped me understand my neurology. Bruce Perry talks about relational intelligence and co-regulation all the time. He is a scientist who can take a public school in any place in the world that has over 500 referrals to the principal's office and reduce it to 4 for the whole academic year. He can take an entire school system, not just one school, if they listen to him.
He has the three Rs. It's Regulate, Relate, and Resolve. Those three Rs are natural human tendencies of good parents talking to their kids. They come home from school and they're like, “I had this great day.” You're like, “Your body's not saying that. Why are you bracing up?” They're like, “This happened. I didn't get my homework done, and then I bombed a test.” The parent says, “I did that as a kid this one time.” They tell a story and then they're like, “What are we going to do about our homework?”
By that little three Rs where they go in there like, “First of all, you're not telling me the truth. That's fine. Let's breathe together. I've done that before. Tonight, we're going to do it differently,” that's how you prevent child abuse. Sometimes, kids will come home from a birthday party or a family event and they're like, “I didn't like hugging Uncle George.” Some parents will say, “That's your uncle, so you're going to hug him anyway.” We know the statistics. We know where the abuse happens.
It's familial.
It's an uncle, a husband, or a boyfriend. Body autonomy isn't just about homework. It's about, “You have a nervous system, child.” We're speaking to this child. We’re like, “I love you. You have a nervous system. I don't know your threats, but I believe you.” That's the #MeToo Movement. I love the #MeToo Movement because that's the skill it's teaching.
I've had that, too. That's the relate part. I know what that feels like to bomb a test. I also know what it feels like to be brutalized by the police. When we talk about this to our kids, the word autonomy is like autism. It's not about being by yourself. The first tool is to understand that people are being dissociated. They're being dysregulated.
It might fall into play with this. They say a lot of times that when your kid’s behavior is wrong and you're like, “Go to your room,” that's probably one of the worst things that you can do. If they're facing something, the best thing that you can do is be there with them and co-regulate with them. Correct?
Yes. That's what I'm saying. “Do you have dysregulation?” I'm showing you. I'm doing it on purpose. “Do you want to do it again?” No, I don't want to do it again. The rest of this conversation, I probably won't get dysregulated, but I did it on purpose. I have control over it. That's autonomy, the full palette of emotions or all the feelings all the time. In order to do that range of emotion, anyone tuning in to Katie, you will see this in our other podcast that I trust her. I'm not doing this in front of the world. I'm doing it with you on a call.
Children need limits. They need boundaries. They need to be safe around their homework, not around their bodies, sexuality, and the way people will prey on them sexually in video games, which they will do. We need to have these small, neurologically built safety nets so that they come home and they come home with love. They hug and they're safe with you. When Uncle Whatever isn't safe with them, you guys are able to talk about it.
Two steps, dysregulation and then co-regulation. There is no self-regulation. That child is perfect. That child knows what they need, but we shame kids out of expressing. This is the third thing. The third thing is when you're traumatized, your first response is to talk about it. Did you know that? The first human response when traumatized is to go find a human and explain what happened.
The issue is the trust within parenting. That's all that it is.
The issue is that people protect the uncle, the husband, or the boyfriend. The issue is, “Shut up. We're not talking about that in public.” That's how you create these systems of abuse. It's built into the legal system. It's built into the way the laws have been written. What the #MeToo Movement was about was expanding safety, and it did go into the workplace. It's a safer place. Men are on edge. They'll complain about it. Women are markedly more employed in safer spaces because of #MeToo.
Empowering Women And Protecting Children: Overcoming Objectification
I've seen it myself. I have always been a proponent of women, strong women, and women who are at the top. That's my goal in life. That's where I've navigated towards. I feel like a lot of the time, I haven't been taken seriously because I'm a female. The opportunities that have been given to me are always questioned, or it's always, “This is why you have those opportunities.” It's never about my work ethic, the things that I can bring to the table, or my education.
The idea that a child is an object like a beautiful woman is an object is the same thing. Grooming happens to you because of what people see on the screen, like with kids. These are aggressive people who are objectifying and dehumanizing for their own needs. We need to protect children from that. That's why the first thing is to get them to understand what it feels like.
The reason the test is terrible or the reason the homework is terrible is because they're being valued and judged. The kid's like, “I'm so much more than a test, but this teacher doesn't like me.” That's usually what the problem is. It's a personal moral injury. When you come into the world with your looks, your career, and your history, and then you have kids, it's the having of the kids that changes you. We've talked about this on the podcast.
We've talked about that in Neuro Dope. I'm speaking of the #MeToo Movement in particular. I love what it has done for women. There needs to be another movement in particular. The reason why things happen to children is that they are vulnerable and they haven't been taught these things. Why I even mentioned my past is because it's taken me 30-plus years to understand the boundaries that I have, what can and cannot be done, and how I should be treated. For a child, they don't know that. They don't understand that.
That's why I'm bringing up that when I see you, I see you as a mother. I see you as someone looking for answers so that your kids don't go through the world being objectified.
Aggressive people objectify and dehumanize others for their own needs.
It's not that my parents did a bad job, but they didn't know. They didn't have the tools. That's the whole point of this show. Everybody needs these tools, but they don't know where to go. They don't know what to talk about. They don't know how to talk to their children. They don't know how to co-regulate. I didn't even know what co-regulation meant until our podcast with the Neuro Dope and understanding my neuro differences. I love what we're doing and I love that we're speaking and teaching parents, “This is what you need to foster the relationship with your child and make them feel safe.”
Can I point something out?
Yeah.
The second time I dysregulated or dissociated, you actively regulated with me. The first time, I was watching you the whole time. The second time, you did co-regulate with me. The third time, I'm emotional for a different reason. It’s from appreciation.
I love the relationship we’ve built. This is what it's all about. It’s the human connection.
The last step is peer support. Parallel. You cannot value your child as less than you for their grades or for them eating dinner or not eating dinner. They are peers. They are perfect. They know more about what they need than you'll ever know as a parent. Your parents did the best they could with an awful shame-based life.
You cannot value your child as less than you.
I'm trying to give you my academic paper. It's four parts. That's the last one. It’s parallel. Once you understand autonomy and that it's in community, those communities need to be parallel, not hierarchical. That's for everybody regardless of your neuro difference. If you can give a person safety and community, then they will have purpose. They will know what they want out of life. They will know if they're hungry or not.. If they're not safe and they don't have autonomy in the community, you can't get a kid to eat if they're not safe.
Protecting Neurodivergent Kids From Predators And Grooming
That made me think a little bit. We've talked a lot about neuro differences and how children who are neuro different are more threatened by predators and grooming. Can we go a little bit into that, and what to look for with that?
Yeah. I will talk about that in terms of neurological diversity. I've said this on the other podcast. I want to be clear. We're all the same hands. My neurology isn't different in its structure. We all have the same structures. We all have the same neurological needs. The problem I'm having, and I'll get detailed about this, is I have 10/20 vision. I need prescription glasses but I can't tolerate prescription glasses because I have extra anatomy. I have extra neurons.
I'm going to get detailed so you can see how neuro difference affects people. The connections between the cones and your retina and then the optic fiber are this highway of information, and there's no synapse. It's immediate. Our eyes are so important to us. When people lose their sight, for example, what happens to their hearing and their taste? When the brain isn't taking up so much of its energy with sight, if it's gone, then you get super hearing. You get people who can click and they can see the room.
I've heard about that.
This is what's fun about kids. They're fascinated by their bodies. You can start talking to them about, “Why aren't you hungry? I'm curious.” My differences of vision, I have them in my hearing. I have them with my coordination. They're hit or miss. If I'm dissociated or dysregulated, I have terrible coordination. If I'm regulated and safe, I have extra coordination.
In practice, I'm a Paralympic snowboarder. I trained at the National Ability Center, and then I had some concussions. It was short-lived from 2016 to 2018. I'm paralyzed. It's a longer story, but a lot of what this information I'm giving you is about your body's differences and children like me. I'mcross-dominantt. I'm extra vision. My hearing is an issue.
If you have a child that way, what happens is they're hard to deal with. They're overstimulated. We know what to do about that. We can give them weighted blankets. We can put on the dark shades. I probably should have been wearing glasses my whole life, not to correct my vision but to lower the visual inputs. The musician, Pharrell, talks about that. He has extra vision or supervision. It's not a superpower. It's different.
It's not Forever Plastics. It's not whatever. There are a lot of reasons we can talk about how the world is toxic to children, but developmental disabilities. Developmental differences create disabilities. I'm developmentally disabled from trauma. If I did this at work and I dissociated in a meeting, guess how long it is until they let me go because I'm crying in a meeting? I have extra emotions from extra sensory input, and I don't forget. If you look at my testing from as a nine-year-old, I don't forget.
You are a savant. That's for sure. For the readers and people who are going to tune in, how many books do you have? This is always wild to me. You’re like me, reading 24/7, but the difference between you and me is that you memorize these books.
Let's be clear. Our brains are cell phones. I don't memorize them, but I have access to them. A lot of times, the information is not completely accurate. I have a modeling brain. You know that I talk in long paragraphs and that I sometimes have to interrupt you because I can't not tell you what I'm thinking. It's usually on point but it takes a minute for everyone to catch up. That's been my whole life.
The topic is my backstory, but how does that relate to you as a parent or whoever's reading this? How did you grow up with your neuro differences? We're all different. That's diversity. If your child is struggling to eat, struggling to perform at school, struggling to say yes to things, and is defiant, what that child needs isn't quiet time alone in their room.
What they need is autonomy and community. They need parents to Regulate, Relate, and then Resolve to be a better, safe place so that it never happens again. Dr. Perry's schools go from over 500 referrals to the principal's office. In one of his examples, it went down to four for the whole year. What he did was he taught the teachers to Regulate, Relate, and Resolve.
I love that.
What I'm showing you is how dysregulated I can get and how you and I in public have created this professional relationship around these very important topics. Our first podcast is about how to be different as an adult in the world, especially at work. It's a professional development podcast and it's about what we can do as adults. What I feel like you're creating here is let’s apply that to kids. I'm so excited for what you're doing.
Turning ADHD From Struggle To Superpower
The reason why, too, is because it has taken me 30-plus years. This can relate to your children. People can understand how this works. As a kid, I never understood what was wrong with me, why I was this way, and why the relationships were hard. I always had a great time with friends, but the teachers didn't understand. My parents didn't understand.
For everybody out there, I'm extreme. ADHD. I always warn people. I'm like, “If you can see my eyes going different ways, that's how my brain processes.” At the beginning of every business meeting, I have to tell people, “If my eyes are looking over the way, it's not because I'm not paying attention. That's how my brain processes, relates, and can give back information.”
As a child, I didn't understand that. It took me so long to understand that that's my superpower. The reason why I have been able to do the things that I do is because of my neuro difference. I would love to help children and parents understand that it's not your kid acting out or your kid being all over the place or not being able to hone in and focus on things. Whichever way that they show their neuro difference is not something that should be shamed, but they should be told, “This is your superpower. Let's work together, navigate that, and teach you how to use it and utilize it.”
Every time you say superpower, I always have to say, “Not to objectify. Not to make you above humanity.” We're not Magneto.
It's my superpower, though.
It’s self-acceptance.
It's accepting it and being like, “This is something that doesn't hinder my progression.”
Fighting the shame-based.
It is shame-based. I've been shamed about it my whole entire life. I’m able to flip the script and be like, “This is what is unique to me and makes me evolve.”
It’s like, “See me. I'm not a bad student. I'm not a bad child.”
That brings me to what people do to children nowadays. They devalue. They're like, “You're different.” There are so many parents who are like, “My kids have ADHD. I put them on Ritalin and I do this and do that.”
The Role Of Power Dynamics In Abuse
Can we talk specifically about power dynamics?
Yeah, absolutely.
All abuse, not only sexual, not human trafficking, and not at work and family, is mammalian. It's primate groups. It's humans. It's neurology. It's the power structure. They are maybe acting but not on purpose. These are preservation behaviors. Aggression is a preservation behavior. If people want to stop the crimes or we want to protect children from predators, then the thing that has to happen is that we have to start understanding the power dynamics that give those types of people power in the world. It's not hurt people that hurt people. It's aggressive people. Aggression pays. In this status-driven hierarchical world, if you're aggressive, you get rewards.
Hurt people don’t hurt people. Aggressive people do, and aggression is rewarded in our society.
It's so true.
Let's talk about that power structure and why I am saying peer support. Your children aren't less than. They're not property, but in our legal code, children are property. Women and children are property.
We treat children like they're our property.
If they misbehave, if they don't eat in public, that's when the shame starts happening. Shame is aggression. Shaming someone is more dangerous than putting a knife to their throat. These are ancient practices of controlling the crowd. This is not a new problem.
How do we work with our children with the power dynamics? Do you think it starts at home?
It starts in our neurology. It starts when we feel threatened, and then our eyes turn on. We are the most dangerous animal on the planet because we can calculate. Other people are prey. We can groom them, calculate, stalk, approach, and then kill. What's worse than that? What's worse than being the victim of a predator is being told that once you've become a victim of a predator, it makes you a predator. You're devalued for having that experience of being abused. It never ends. The victim-persecutor cycle never ends.
The way we stop generational trauma and the way we stop the crimes isn't through training people to act a certain way. It's through giving them the understanding of what power is, which is why it's so important to think about the differences as leverage. People leverage your differences to devalue you. If you go into it saying, “It's a superpower,” then they have something to attack. They’re like, “You don't remember all that because you said something that's inaccurate.” I don't have a superpower memory. I have a holographic memory. You don't have ADHD all the time. You have it when needed. It's a survival mechanism like my dissociation.
When you hear about someone who's been hurt and then you say, “They're going to do that. They're over sexualized,” there's nothing sexual about being a child in a sexual relationship. You don't have autonomy. You're not safe. It's not pleasurable. Your body responds in ways that are sexual, but it's so frustrating to your sexual development. This is why I'm on this show. We need interventions to change those power dynamics.
First, kids have the autonomy to say, “I'm not hugging my uncle anymore.” If that relationship has been turned into a sexual relationship, the child has the autonomy to say, “I can't do this. This doesn’t feel right,” to the uncle. If he doesn't have any of those tools, which was me as a child, when he ends up in a cop car, that child is driven away from the scene of the crime. That's it. Accept that people are aggressive. It's not because they were hurt. It's because they're rewarded.
This is why I like the #MeToo Movement. It’s about power. It’s about how the power structures are wrong. We're rewarding the wrong people. Since the beginning of that movement, how many of these people have lost power and left the country? Not even the ones that went to jail or hung themselves, but the ones that left the country. I'm thinking of martial artists. I'm thinking of actors, people that I didn't like in the first place because of my sense of predation. Like in Harry Potter, I’m like, “We sorted everyone into houses.”
How Parents Can Effectively Co-Regulate Children
One of my biggest takeaways from everything that you've been saying is about co-regulation. I want to step into that a little bit, too, about how it's important to know that when your kid is dealing with things, we can have an open conversation about talk therapy. Maybe you're seeing some differences with your kids.
You and I have talked specifically about how talk therapy has been beneficial for us in so many ways because you're regulating with another human. What would you say would be a great tool for parents to have when they're dealing with something with their child? What would be the best way to co-regulate your child, dependent and independent of a parent?
I always want to get more detailed because it's individual solutions for individuals. I gave you the four things that, when kids aren't eating, it's not about the food or their value. It's about what their nervous system is doing. If you see a kid that's dysregulated, can you co-regulate? If you can co-regulate, can you relate to them a time in your life when you were in their shoes and show empathy? Once you have that connection, can you create purpose? Can you resolve to make the world a brighter, better place the next day? That is called the anticipatory reward system. You're feeding your children hope or despair.
Authoritarian parenting drives behavior around rewards and punishment. It's a behaviorist model. It's proven. It does not engage the anticipatory reward system. The child is looking at the parent. The locus of control is outside the child for approval. That's the kind of kid that gets sexually abused because he is looking for approval, and they don't get it from their parents, teachers, or principals. They walk down the street and someone says, “Do you want some candy?” I'm using stereotypes.
What parents need to understand in my book is their own needs. Parents need to know their own differences, sensory needs, and their own unique history that has created this child into this world. They need self-awareness. They need to say to that child when they relate to them, not just, “I know what it's like to bomb a test.” It's like, “What was hard about the test? Give me more info. I'm curious.”
I was like that as a kid. I need to know what you experienced. What I experienced was that I had a French class. I'd remember all the words and I could speak them to my mom, but when I went to school, I couldn't write them down. When they wanted me to talk, I couldn't talk. The kid's like, “That's what happened to me.” I'm like, “That's what I did because I trusted my mom, but I can't trust people at school.”
The kid's like, “This is normal?” You're like, “Yeah. You're valuable. We're parallel.” We need to understand the power dynamic between neurology and mammalian neurology in primate groups. Shaming a child is worse than putting a knife to their throat because the knife goes away, but your words don't. The knife stays at the throat the rest of their lives. Are those enough tools? I don't want to overwhelm the readers.
Your brain, how it works, and the things that I take from it every single time. While you're speaking, I'm always going back in my head and thinking how I can parent differently. I'm like, “What are the things that I can do differently?”
Parents support each other. Not autistic and not survivors of suicide, but parent support, sibling support, and student support. What's your trauma? I don't care about trauma-informed joy. What are you looking forward to as a student? What are you looking forward to as a parent? What are the stories that we can tell of success? Not the traumas, but success informed.
That's the shift. It's not hurt people. It's aggressive people. It's not healed or recovered people that stop hurting. It's calm people. The peace and light. It's a neurological state to be in community and be in a compassionate language. That's a model. That's a tool. What we're trying to do in the world is to share a light. You and I are on a mission. We don't have to repeat what happened, but we have to learn from it.
Also, help people see what we've been through and guide them to hopefully not make those same mistakes. You do hear, “Do as parents do or you do the exact opposite.” That's a beautiful thing.
You light up about your parents. You light up about being a parent.
Being a parent is my number one joy. That's why my mission is what it is. I always want to be a better parent. Why I make every single choice that I make is to make sure that my kids are in healthy, happy environments. If I can help anybody, that's what it's all about.
Building Connection And Healing Through Understanding
Let's be clear. You've used a couple of value terms. I'm always stripping shame out of stuff. Can I reframe that?
Yeah.
I forgot the first term, but help is sympathy. We need empathy. You love connecting parents to solutions. You're not helping them. They already know how to solve their problems, but they don't have the tools. You can provide tools and community. Helping is a dangerous term, like, “We're going to help this population.” Every child is at risk of being dysregulated.
We're all structurally the same, like a 5G network cell phone, but our models are different. It's not Apple or Android. The processors are different. The hardware is different. You're giving people the language to see how they operate on the network. We're not helping people. We're connecting the solutions. The light in me will shed light on the light in you. We can do that with children. We can do that with convicts.
There are no monsters. Aggression comes from the fear-based brain. If we're not daily trying to calm and self-regulate, that doesn't work. It's co-regulation. If we're always trying to self-regulate and control ourselves, and then we tell other people to control themselves and never offer our support, self-regulation doesn't exist. That's a lot. That's the tool.
I don't know where. I read something or watched it on some podcast. I say it and I use it all the time. I tell my son, “Let's control our emotions. Control your emotions.”
“Let's feel them.”
It should be switched. It's a new language.
This is why I started with this example. I haven't gone back there. I will not go back there. I did that for you to give you the opportunity to regulate with me. You can watch it. It happened about four times and you got better at regulating with me because I gave you permission. I said, “I'm going to keep doing this. We're going to do this on purpose.”
That's not a therapeutic environment. That doesn't happen in therapy. A therapist comes out of an appointment with a dysregulated patient, and they feel like they've failed as a therapist. Self-regulation and the psychological model of psychiatry and psychology, I don't believe in it. I believe in a post-materialist view that our physical bodies and the physical world are run by consciousness. At the end of the day, it's consciousness that comes into the body. Everything has consciousness. It's called post-materialism.
When you want to know where these ideas of mine come from with post-materialism, you also know that the brain is not a black box computer. It's a cell phone looking for a connection. That unlocks the whole reason why kids get abused. If they're looking for connection, and as a parent, you've stopped giving them what they need, they will go somewhere else for it.
You asked me why the neuro difference is so important to understand sexual violence with children. It's because kids are still sexual beings, but they don't understand the behaviors. They're easily preyed upon, especially those that have sensory needs. They need weighted blankets. They need pressure. They need a certain kind of touch.
I was the victim of sex abuse, but that guy was paying attention to me and learning what I needed, and then he took what he needed from me. That's why I have a hard time trusting people. I am a hurt person. I'm so conflict-avoidant. I'm so passive. I'm fawning in all of my responses and it has led to all these other disasters.
This is why I love your show. This is my last thought. It came out of the way I was raised from my parents telling me that what I was feeling wasn't real, it wasn't acceptable, and that what I needed was not my needs. When I was feeling scared, that was ridiculous. There's nothing to fear about my best friend's house. My mom said, “That's not real.”
The sad truth of that is that our parents were pain-avoidant. They knew that there were things that were hurting us as kids. The tension in the human brain is pain avoidance and truth. The truth is always painful. What I'm suggesting is that in order to see the truth of things, you have to relax. You can't see people as monsters. You can't dehumanize everyone in the system.
It's not kids that are being abused. It's humans who are dysregulated. We're all the same value. We're all eternal in this post-materialist world. I want to upgrade everyone's cell phone network to 5G, and I want their processors to get better. Modern science has proven that the brain is able to change. It is able to recover. It is able to regulate, but it does it in community.
Thank you so much. I love you. I'm so grateful for you to be in my life. You bring so much perspective to things and so much light. I always say that if I can help one person in any way, my life is worth it. You touch so many people. I want you to know that.
I'm going to keep talking even though it's over time. You said help again. It's dangerous.
I'm sorry. You don't help so many people.
I connect with the light and the truth. Helping is a responsibility that is beyond our abilities. To help someone means we have to know what their needs are before they even know what their needs are. It requires us to make stereotypes, place them in a bucket, and say, “This is what those families need from Sub for Santa.”
I want to talk about where that feeling comes from. What you're looking for is value. You're perfect. You're already valuable. You have everything you need to give those answers and those tools to the world by doing it yourself, for yourself. If you want change in the world, then you live that truth. The light in me sees the light in you. You've already done it. You've already done everything you've ever needed to do because you are consciousness. You are perfect.
The problem is getting self-awareness and co-regulation. The self doesn't need regulation. The body needs regulation. Humans are social animals. The law of humanity is that we are social creatures. Let's stop looking at ourselves. Let's stop being selfish. Let's stop being self-centered. Let's stop talking about self-regulation. None of that needs to happen. Let's reveal the self through deep connection and deep co-regulatory bonds. A moment of neurological safety can change a person's life. I don't want to correct you. I want to reframe it. I want to give you a better look.
A moment of neurological safety can change a person’s life.
I appreciate that. I'll keep that at the forefront of my mind.
It's recorded.
Let’s change that.
In the beginning was the word if you're Christian. Language skills that we have are lost in trauma. What a person takes from a human when they're abused or what a person is doing to a child when they’re abused is removing their voice neurologically. To let the eyes light up, we lose our verbal center, and we hear everything. Don't whisper around me. I'm such a traumatized body. If I hear whispering, I freeze up. My message to the world is that we need to understand ourselves neurologically. We need to understand what's happening neurologically. That deep connection and that sense of safety can provide purpose.
I wouldn't want to be anywhere else than connected to you in this messaging. The reason this is so important is that once you connect with people, you engage the anticipatory reward system. Your children, no matter what happened to them in the past, have something to look forward to. I look forward to our next podcast. I look forward to the next time we can talk. When I'm with you, there's no knife to my throat.
I love that. I feel the same exact way. It's true. When you are connecting with good people, and everybody's good but you know what I mean, when you have that heartfelt connection, I don't know what is released in the brain. I'm sure you could probably tell me, but I walk away and it changes my whole day.
It’s in the video How to Make Stress Your Friend by Kelly McGonigal. It's a TED Talk. It's one of the top ones. If you have stress, stress doesn't kill you. It's your belief about stress. Sex abuse doesn't shorten life. It's your belief about you being damaged. Hurt people hurt people. You end up hurting people because you believe that you're a hurt person. That's the danger of that phrase.
Freedom is found in the community. Freedom is body autonomy. It's not just about saying no but also having that "no" respected.
Kelly McGonigal, in her TED Talk How to Make Stress Your Friend, says that oxytocin released into the body during stress, if you believe that stress is good for you, it dilates the blood vessels, goes to the heart, and makes the heart stronger. If you believe that stress is bad, it does the opposite. It's consciousness. It doesn't matter how old our body is. What runs the body is consciousness. You honor that the light in me sees the light in you. That's where most humans spend their days, being connected. We're pain-avoidant because we don't like being dysregulated.
Understanding the truth of the world is dangerous, but the way it solve the danger is through authoritarian models that oppress and objectify the differences. We realize that only a few people are safe. If we could shift the power structure to give everyone neurological safety and then community, then the purpose would happen. That will happen in the family. It will happen at work, especially in our justice system.
I want people to understand that our laws, the way we govern children at school, and the way we govern them when they become victims of felony and sex abuse need to change. We're not done with the work. It's not difficult. I'm not talking about expensive solutions. I'm saying, “Drive me away from the scene of the crime. Give me safety.” The Statue of Liberty's promise is that it will be a country where we will take in those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Freedom is in community. Freedom is body autonomy. It's not just saying no. It's saying no and then having people respect you.
We've come far way and we're doing so many great things. I'm so grateful again to you. I love our mission. We will connect with a lot of people.
I can be here as much as you like. It's however you want to do it. You know what you need.
Important Links
The Fight Against Child Trafficking With James Haven
Randy's Mission To End Child Trafficking Globally