Chitty Chats with Stacy

Stephanie Nueman
===

[00:00:00]

Welcome back. I'm so excited for today's guest. This is a unique little situation we're in today. So, most of, I'm Stacy York Nation. I'm a licensed clinical social worker. I am doing a YouTube series called Chitty Chats with the humans in my life, and every human I know adds value in some way.

Today's human adds value in so many ways. So I am honored today to interview Stephanie Newman. She's my little sister. She's not really my little sister. She's my younger sister, and we get that a lot. And there's a lot of reasons I'm interviewing her, but one of the main reasons is we have been embarking on this journey in a very parallel way.

Stephanie is a licensed clinical social worker as well, and I'm gonna let her introduce herself, [00:01:00] but I want my audience to really know about you, Steph, and the work you do, because you, as you say, are a world changer, you're changing lives every single day, and I think the work you do adds a lot of value, and you see a very specific population that I think is really important to talk to and talk about, and so, Tell us a little about you, Steph.

Absolutely. I don't know a little about myself, I know a lot about myself. So, if it becomes too much, just hit pause and go get a Slurpee and come back. So, I am Stephanie Are you ever too much? No, I've never been too much. I'm very aware of that and I really own that. So, I am Stacey's little big sister.

And yes, I have been following Stacey's footsteps for a long time, until they diverted, and then I really found my own calling. So, I used to be a police officer. I was in law enforcement for a little over 10 years. [00:02:00] I worked in a detention center as an officer for about a year and a half.

And then I worked on patrol for about six years, and then I was a patrol sergeant for three years. So, I that's an important piece of who I am, because it's really the reason why I now change lives. And I'm extremely confident that I change lives, because I've seen it, and I see it every day. So, yeah.

Do you want to know how I became a therapist? Yeah, I

think there's a piece to your story that I know you share with a lot of people about how you landed in this work. And I think it's really important because one of the reasons I love the work you do and one of the reasons I also am doing this work is you and I have been through a lot of hard stuff.

And there are components of our journey that really define who we are and how we landed where we landed. And I think that people have a lot of mental health stigma and they think that therapists have their shit together and you and I both

are crazy. We, you, [00:03:00] the

best therapists are the therapists who keep seeing their

therapists, right?

They're the ones who keep doing their

work and I just think that's so important. So feel free to share all the things. It's hard. It's hard to interview your sister because I can.

Blow this up. I can say so much. Right. So I would say when I started doing patrol, I was doing patrol in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

So it's the capital of Wyoming. It's a large city, came from small town. So it was pretty big city for me. I was doing patrol work and I was about eight weeks in and my FTO, my field training officer, and I were involved in a shooting. And I can remember there's parts of this that are important for later in my story, but I can remember I was driving us back to the department because after you're in a shooting, you shouldn't really do much.

And I called my husband, who at the time was a welder, and he was welding one of the top dorms of the college. He was like so high in the air. I was like, Hey, babe [00:04:00] I was just involved in a shooting. So I'll see you for dinner. Talk to you later. Bye. Um, Fast forward 20 years. That's not the way to handle that.

Just so you know, we're going to, we're going to talk a little bit about that, but so we went to the department and the chief said, Stephanie, you're going to go see a therapist. Like, no, I'm not. I sent him to be a cop. I don't need therapy. Are you kidding me? Hippy dippy

bullshit. We do not need

that. So granted, I was 24 and I actually knew more than anybody.

And I'm very well aware of that. The chief was like, you know what, you've been on for eight weeks. You're going to go see a therapist. So I was introduced to therapy very early in my career, so it became normal for me. I did a lot of work, I did primarily EMDR, which changed my life emotional desensitization and regulation, or eye movement desensitization and regulation.

And so, fast forward from there, two years, [00:05:00] and I was I had just finished crisis negotiation unit training, 40 hour training with the FBI. I was on duty, and they had a situation that they needed a negotiator. So they called me and I was a sergeant at the time. No, I wasn't. I was just still in patrol and I showed up on scene.

Now, most negotiations and the way they teach it in the training is all the negotiators are with their buddies and we're in what's called the knock and we have coffee and we have access to everybody and the bad guys like up in the apartment building barricaded, we're in a safe zone. We're good.

And we have coffee and water. We're good. So I arrived on scene and I found myself shortly later negotiating with a gentleman about 10 feet in front of me with a gun to his head. Yeah. And I thought,

wow. Not with your coffee, not with your buddies, not with No, I was alone. [00:06:00] I was pretty

alone. Yeah. So, the gentleman suicided and that sucks for him.

And I remember being on that scene and they took him out and I went up to clear the rifle. It was a bolt action rifle. And I grew up in shooting sports. We grew up in shooting sports. So we're very familiar with firearms. I remember looking at it and my brain said, it's a bolt action, open it and clear it.

And I couldn't do it and I handed it to my lieutenant and I said, I'm going to go home. I don't know how to do this. I need to leave. And I called my therapist because she was on speed dial. Granted I was normalized therapy. I said, Hey, I think I'm in shock. This is what just happened. And I need some help.

So. I didn't realize that I was the only person on duty that day that called their therapist. I thought everybody called their therapist, but nobody called their therapist except for me. So I went in to do [00:07:00] EMDR and I was describing to her. the situation. With EMDR, as Stacey, we identify our negative cognition.

Well, it was clearly my fault the dude killed himself because I what did negotiate good enough. And I said, there was a bar and a tree and a bad guy. And she's like, Stephanie, I'm just going to stop you. And have you heard this story before? No. Oh, interesting. Viewers, you get to watch myself.

I'm watching it in live action. Yeah. Yeah. So she said, Stephanie, I'm going to stop you. Two years ago when you were in here for your shooting, you described the same thing. Are you mixing memories? What's happening? So no, I can take you to both addresses here in town. I can show you the bar and the tree and the bad guy at my shooting and the bar and tree and bad guy at the suicide.

She's like, okay. So we started processing and I go back to a time where I'm a little girl, I'm about nine years old in my brain, [00:08:00] and my dad, who's an alcoholic and I guess could be perceived as a bad guy in my brain, backs out of the garage and runs over our dog and we bury him under a tree. Now I'm not exactly sure if that's how the memory went, but that's what my brain went to.

And I can remember being nine, wondering. Why our dog was dying or why our dog was hurt, and that was my fault. And I said to my therapist at the time, I'm 27 years old, I just saw somebody kill themselves. Why are we talking about my childhood? What does my childhood have to do with any of this? And she let me know, Stephanie, everything that your brain has done up until the time of right now, determines and affects how we feel and what we perceive.

So what you took in from this shooting and from this suicide was a bar and a tree and a bad guy. In both [00:09:00] situations you felt as though it was your fault. Clearly you attached to that feeling and those things because of this memory. when you're nine years old. So the light bulb came on I think at that time you had probably just graduated with your LCSW or finished that master's class or you're kind of at the beginning in your career, I think, I'm not sure, but I remember having the thought, well, my sister has a master's degree, we've always been competitive to a set, I've always been competitive with you, you've just really lived your life.

I can acknowledge that. And I remember thinking, well, I only have two bachelor's degrees. I should probably go for a master's. And so I found a program, a master's program, that I could do while I worked. And so I joined it and started and thought, I need to help cops. The other piece of this is about a couple months later, I'm on a call for service with a buddy.

I'm like, dude, you look like shit. What is happening? [00:10:00] And he's like, Stephanie, I haven't slept since that suicide. Have you? I'm like, You didn't call your therapist? What are you doing? Why would you not go to therapy? And he said, Stephanie, cops don't go to therapy. And it was another enlightening moment of what are you talking about?

I had to go to therapy. Well, for cops in Cheyenne to be involved in a shooting in 2006 was extremely rare. So no, cops don't go to therapy. People who are involved in shootings go to therapy. And that was a really harsh understanding for me that cops don't want to do their work. There's this huge stigma around going to therapy, showing a weakness.

So I embarked on a journey. I went to grad school, got my master's, I got licensed, I did an internship with the highway patrol I did my three years as a sergeant, eventually left the department and opened up my own practice here in Cheyenne to try to Change lives of [00:11:00] cops. Well, cops are assholes and don't want to do therapy, so I didn't have very many clients.

So I had to open it up to all first responders, the general public, and I realized that I have a niche for sitting with the hard stuff.

Yeah. So there's a few things in your story that I just want to talk to you about. This is a very unique experience that I'm having right here, right now. One is that I typically have a picture in my office.

I will send you a picture. You've probably never actually seen it. And it's not in this office cause I just closed my physical practice of a little girl and her dog. And I bought it because my first EMDR experience was processing that same memory when I died. And I think I'm going to get a little teary as I talk about this because I think that.

It is the power of memory [00:12:00] and our emotional components that really draws me to EMDR. You do brain spotting. We'll talk about that in a minute, but. The fact that everything is so linked inside of us. And I'm sitting here with my little sister and I'm listening to parts of your story. I know, of course, but listening to the story about our dog dying and how that showed up in your EMDR and I've had a picture in my office and I bought the picture because it showed up in my EMDR and you and I've never talked about that.

Ever. And I'm sitting here and I'm like, holy buckets, right? Like how our memories are tied together in our life story is so critical to healing.

Very much so.

So I want to say that piece. The second piece is, I, you said something that was really important. You said cops don't want to do their work and this is something that comes up in my life all the time.

I'm in the military. I'm in the Wyoming Guard. I now refer a lot [00:13:00] of our clients to you. So you're, when I became a therapist in the military, you became a lot busier in private practice. Right. We have a lot of shared humans, but one of the things that We, you and I use the phrase their work, our work, the work all the time.

Tell me a little bit, like, what does that even mean? What does that mean to you when you say first responders need to do their work? Cops need to do

their work. What does that mean? Let me get you a whiteboard and I'll show you.

Oh, friends, I'm so glad you're sticking with us. This is such an interesting and unique experience we're all having right

now. Okay. So because when I do trainings, I really like to simplify this process. And even when I sit with clients, they ask the same question. What does that even mean? So I've really, I've come up with a way to look at it in a picture form, in terms of understanding what your work looks like.

And so if you think about our [00:14:00] frontal lobe, okay, and I'm an expert drawer, and inside of our frontal lobe is where we attach all of our thoughts or the things that have happened to us that we don't really get time to have an emotional process. It's the things that get stuck in your brain. So let's just say we've got our childhood, If there's anything that was hard in there, and then I'll put this into your focus in just a minute.

We've got money, we've got work, and then it starts to specify. We've got kids, family, we've got incidents at work. So what happens is we have a frontal lobe. You see that?

Okay, we might have to unblur for a second. So we have a frontal lobe

that ends up having a very minimal capacity of tolerance, is what I [00:15:00] call that area. So if you think of a spaghetti pot that's on the stove that's full of water, and you put spaghetti noodles into it and it's boiling, what happens? It explodes. That's irritability. That's anger. That's quick responses.

That's impulsive behaviors. It's all the things. That's

yelling at your kids when they do something that's for kids to do,

right? Absolutely. That's, lack of patience, lack of understanding. You're so overwhelmed by the new information because you have no room to process it. So when I say to clients, I need you to do your work.

It means I need you to dump your frontal lobe. So I need this line. To actually come down here and be aligned so you can get new information and you can actually focus and you can be present and you cannot be reactive and you can take a breath. And so doing your work means all the things that have happened to you up until this [00:16:00] moment that are stuck in your frontal lobe.

And for a lot of people, they may not even know they have things. I sit with a lot of clients that are like, I don't know what I need to work on. And I start asking questions and in a minute they're in tears and they're going, what are you doing to me? We're doing the work. Yeah.

So a lot of times the way, first of all, my audience is super savvy.

We're all neuroscience people. We love the brain. We love five, five, threes, block, bond. We love understanding emotional regulation, right? So we've, you. The reason this is an important conversation is because your group of humans that we're talking about is very different than my educators and my students and my mental health professionals.

Like, first responders see the underbelly of society, right? I always say you never call a first responder on a good day. You're always telling them on the worst day of their life, right? And so I really appreciate that part of the beauty of 1st responders. They show up and they're

professional [00:17:00] compartmentalizers.

Like, that's what makes them kick ass

people. We

need them to do that. And

I often say our brain is full of a filing cabinet of memories, right? And some of those memories are tucked away where they need to go. The dog dying that you and I have talked about, those are tucked away, right? The reason you and I can talk about that without falling apart is because we've done the work.

We've processed the emotional content that's come with that. So what I hear you saying is the work are all those files that are really flying out that don't have a space in them. You haven't looked at the emotional components of that, which emotions are hard. Ain't nobody want to feel them. Right?

I love that.

Well, and I think for first responders, they never get time to feel the emotion. So, they could go to a car accident with a fatality, call back in service, and immediately go help a little old lady [00:18:00] cross the road. They never get that minute to go, that really sucked, and that kid was the same age as my son, or anything like that.

And so, all of those free floating files just float even further. But they are professional problem solvers. They are social workers with a badge and a gun and they're just very good at not feeling the feels. Yeah.

One of the things that has been very interesting in my journey of being your big sister is watching how often both of us talk about topics like suicide, homicide, death, suicidal ideation, child abuse, sexual abuse.

And. And when you say sitting with the hard, it is hard in a way that other people don't sit with it. Is

that a fair? Very much so. I do I do some consulting work for people wanting to become certified in brain spotting. And so I sit with [00:19:00] therapists who are talking about, just situations with clients of, should I be brain spying?

Should I not be? And a lot of them are afraid. They're afraid to touch. that vulnerable piece of trauma because they're afraid of what's going to happen. They're afraid of what the client is going to respond like or unlock, or they'll say, what if I open Pandora's box? Dude, I have the key to Pandora's box and we're going to open it every time because they

need to.

And our clients need someone who can handle Pandora's, right? I often say to my client, I know you're similar to this, you're not going to tell me anything that's going to blow my mind. Like no one's here to talk about it being and being a first responder is

messy. Very much so. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about brain spotting.

So brain spotting has changed my world. EMDR changed my life. And I can, when I was in grad school, I was like, Stacey, if you're going to be a therapist, you need to be EMDR certified. Ah, the Gerton [00:20:00] of a little sister. That's what I do. And so when I was in grad school, Stacey and I actually went to EMDR trainings together and experienced those.

So when I got licensed, I did EMDR with everybody. Then I must have been bored, but for some reason I took a client down to Boulder for a treatment, which I'd never done ever before. And I'm sitting in the doctor's office with her, and the doctor's like, have you heard of brain spotting? Like, no, are you ridiculous?

It's EMDR or nothing. So, but I had the word in my head. I'd not heard of it. So, I take my client to the pharmacy in Boulder to get her prescription, and we walk in, and there is this little filing, like, bookshelf, very tiny, in a pharmacy full of other things, and the book Brainspotting's right there. I'm like, all right, I got it.

I buy the book and I read the book. I think this is interesting. So I go to the first class, the first training, and I go with all [00:21:00] my cop cynicism because I was still a cop. And I was like, and

your cop energy, I've had to like

turn that down. It was so intense. I was like, you show me this works.

Yeah. And within like three minutes I was bawling my eyes. I was like, okay, it works. Okay. Okay. So. We do brain spotting. Brain spotting is a similar modality used like EMDR where it utilizes bilateral music. Clients sit with headphones and they utilize bilateral music, which they can find on YouTube for free.

Type in bilateral. So when you utilize bilateral music in your earbuds, it stimulates left brain, right brain, which stimulates that frontal lobe. The other piece of brain spotting is when you think about a situation that was difficult or something that you're struggling with. you identify where it's at in your body.

So whether it's your chest or your stomach or your neck or your [00:22:00] back, and then if you're on zoom, you look at a pointer and you find a spot, a fixated spot for your eyes. that stimulates that piece in your body. And then you say, okay, just notice where your body and brain need to go. And it's literally a treasure map in your brain.

And it zigzags through all the things to get to the spot. And the client's body goes up and then it all releases and it dissolves. And clients will sit in my office and I will say, I don't need to know a lot of the story. So first responders love it because they don't have to talk. You can simply say, I was involved in an incident.

This is what happened. Okay. What do you notice in your body? Look at a stick. They'll say, Stephanie, you're doing voodoo. You're doing witchcraft. I don't know what just happened. I want more of it. How do you do it? Like, they're just blown away, right? By [00:23:00] the intensity. So, An hour of brain spotting or EMDR is like 10 hours of talk therapy.

It's effective, it's efficient, it's to the point, and it goes literally from point A to point B through all the things in your brain that I as a therapist don't know to go to because it doesn't make sense. to this topic, but your brain says it's all connected and then it lands and says, you know what?

You actually did the best you could. None of this is your fault. The guy was going to kill himself no matter what. Good job. And that's a relief. I can tell my clients, Hey, you did amazing, but they're going to say, Stephanie. No, I did it. You don't know me. If their brain says you did amazing, then that's pretty amazing.

Then that feels real to them.

Yeah, I love that. And there's a few things about that I want to say, 1st of all, [00:24:00] if people want to find brain spotting, they can Google it. They can look at it. There's clinicians all over that do

brain spotting.

And your practice is available, and you're full, and you have a waiting list, and you have other people that have a waiting list, and you kick ass.

But, Brainspotting is huge. The second thing is, it, you're touching on. Things that I think are really important. So much of our memory is just undigested. It's unprocessed. And I can tell people, if you just keep pushing it down, it's going to flare up in some way. And when you say like you get from point A to point B, and there's all this zigzaggy stuff, the zigzaggy stuff is messy and painful, but it's also easy to get through.

Is that a fair thing to say?

Totally fair. And clients will say, I'm scared. I don't want to do it. And I'll say, okay, cool. If you've been carrying this around for the last 20 years, just keep carrying it for another week. Or, we can acknowledge it for 40 minutes, 10 minutes, 2 minutes, and we can be done with it.[00:25:00]

And when I put it in that perspective, a lot of them will say, okay, let's do it. It's already haunting you, so get out of it. Let's do it. So, I know you

work a lot with first responders. You work with military members, police officers, EMT, firefighters, that population. Is this something that just normal people can do

too?

Oh my god, yes. It's, I apply it to everybody. So I actually have lay people who come and see me also. Lay? Lay people. A lay amazing people. And I brain spot everything. The people close to me in my world get sick of me saying you should brain spot that. It's I had a gentleman today that was like, you know what Steph?

I haven't been working on my car and that's crummy. Hey, let's brain spot it. Let's brain spot the crumminess. And he left with motivated, ready to go. It's brain spotting is you, anybody who's alive should brain spot because we all have our stuff. Whether our stuff is big or small, we all have it.

And it's those thinkings and those thought [00:26:00] processes that really stop us from moving forward. I love this

brain spotting like your religion.

It is. It is so much.

Okay. So how can people find you? Like, in addition to being a kick ass therapist and a person who meets one on one with humans, what else do you provide?

What else do you bring into this world? And how do people find you?

So, I have a website. It's called leaftraumabehind. com. Why wouldn't it be? And I do various types of trainings. I do a two day brain spotting first responders and military course. I'm actually doing that this weekend, which is, you're not airing this till later, so that doesn't matter.

But then one is coming up in October 27th and 28th. I'm I do one hour briefing trainings. for to fill HR credits or anything that companies or departments need in terms of what is the brain of a first responder or a healthcare [00:27:00] provider. So I've had a lot of businesses and agencies and entities reach out, especially in the healthcare world.

Why does our brain not function? Why do we have all these behaviors? What's happening? So I do a lot of brain training. I am currently developing a protocol for brain spot your weight off. And so it's a weight loss protocol. And so if you think about it in terms of for people to be healthy, they need to eat right and they need to exercise.

The third component of that is they need to think about eating right and exercising. And so that's where the BrainSpotting, the weight off comes in of really allowing your brain to let go of all the barriers that keep you from having the healthy body that you want. And so that training, it should be coming out in the fall.

I have three people who are doing case studies with me. They're letting me video their journey, and I'm really excited about that. So you can look for [00:28:00] that. I also do mental health first aid trainings, and so I'm a certified trainer in that, and that is like the CPR for people. It's going across the nation right now, and it's the Mental Health Council that is putting those on.

So if anybody needs mental health for first aid trainings done, I'm your person for that. Love it. So yeah.

Very cool. So I have one last question. As your Unfolding your story, you're talking about sitting in the ick with people, you're talking about the hard. All the things you do, what, how do you enjoy your life?

Like, isn't it just fucking heavy?

No, it's not. I only work three days a week because, I need Wednesday to take off because that's my middle of the week Saturday. And then I power through Thursday and then I have a three day weekend. So I have very much done brain spotting a lot on my own to get through that to realize if I don't take care of me, I can't take care of my people.

[00:29:00] And so I do a lot of self care. I have two dogs in the room with me, as do you, which is interesting. I bring my dogs to work. They love my clients. My clients love them. I spend a lot of time outside. I love being outside and just getting recharged. And I turn my phone off. I just think that's really

important for people to know that the work you do in your office also applies to you.

And we talk all the time about modeling. I say you should never see a therapist who doesn't have their own therapist, who's not doing their own work. Those pieces are so important. So I'm really thankful we got to have this talk today for so many reasons. Any words of wisdom you want to leave with

these humans?

No I think whoever's watching this, if you're struggling, find a brain spot therapist. They'll change your life. You don't have to struggle. It's super easy. It's hard in the moment, but it's easy when you leave. And by all means, reach out. Love it. I

love you Steph. I'm so glad we did this [00:30:00] today.

Thank you for joining us.

Well, thanks for scheduling me in.

We do what we can around here. All right, friends. Talk to you soon. Bye.