Dr. Cochran: Brain Waves, Breakthroughs and Unlocking the Secrets of the Mind

Meantourne. Broadcasting from the heart of music city, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guest share their raw, powerful stories. Some will spark laughter, others will move you to tears.

These real life journeys inspire, connect and remind you that you're never alone.

We're igniting a global movement to empower everyone to make a lasting difference by fostering deep awareness, unwavering acceptance and profound understanding of autism and mental health. Toon in, be inspired and join us in transforming the world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Meantourne, welcome to Why Not Me Embracing Autism and Mental Health worldwide. Joining us today is Dr. Cochrane.

She's a renowned psychologist with over three decades of experience in clinical practice and mental health advocacy, known for her compassionate approach and deep expertise in cognitive behavior of therapy. She has helped countless individuals navigate life challenges with resilience and clarity. She brings a unique blend of scientific insight and heartfelt wisdom to her work, making

complex psychological concepts accessible to all.

She has a wealth of information for us, so before we dive into our episode, we'll be back

with an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on. I'm excited. Yes, me too. Great to have you on.

You would give us a little background. What do you do? Well, I work with people and relationships and I help them get unstuck and I help them get away from fear and avoidance and moving toward what they want. Okay, can you expand on that?

“Can you give us a little information on the types of people you work with?”

Well, I work with children and adults. I work with trauma. I work with people who are neurodevergent. I work with couples who are neurodevergent and I help a lot with strategizing problem solving and giving options for basic and sometimes complex psychosocial stressors.

When you work with someone in this neurodevergent, what are some of the issues you see that can arise and then how do you problem solve it? Well, generally the kinds of things I see are people who's brains work differently than your typical people and so when they are stressed or they are faced with the problem, often they're a migdala or the emotional part of the brain takes over and they start responding

from there. So they'll get really angry or they'll cry or they'll just kind of curl up and ball and stop and they don't know how to do something called self-regulation where you learn to calm yourself and get your pre-fone cortex back online so that you can be present in whatever it is going on.

“Well, that's pretty interesting, so what led you to do this?”

Well, my undergraduate degree in my first masters degree are both in special education.

So I've been working with people of all stripes for a very long time. I found as I was doing that work that more and more people were coming to me with questions and concerns, it didn't really have to do with spelling or math or any of that. You know, how do I solve this? How do I do with this?

What do I do with my child when they do this or that? What does it really mean? How does ADHD, what does autism really look like? I'm scared for their future. How do I plan for that? You know, those kinds of things. And so that sent me off into the Giggle Weeds of Education and I got degrees in social work

and I did work with traditional Egos Psychology and also transpersonal psychology. When you was getting a masters and you was getting all these degrees, was you working with a doctor, was you teaching, what was your journey to where you are now?

“Well, of course, when you're training, you have to have supervision.”

But once I was able to practice on my own, then I do supervision for other people and I also help therapists sometimes when they get stuck. Because sometimes you're working with a patient and you're not quite sure which direction to go. So I do that. Primarily these days, I'm doing a lot of coaching with folks.

The reason why I like to do coaching versus the clinical stuff is because I can coach all over the world anywhere I want to. As far as being a therapist per se, I still bring all my skills with me, but you can't build insurance outside of California, which is where I live. Those are the rules in each state you can only practice in this state your life's instant.

So I only do psychotherapy inside California, but outside and around the world, I do coaching. And it's so much fun and it's so rewarding. I love it. So give me the difference between the psychological part you were doing, California, and then the difference of the coaching you would do in any other state or any place in the world.

You just can't build insurance for it.

Okay. I bring all my experience and wisdom and everything with me wherever I code, but you can't build an insurance come because I'm not licensed in that state. In other words, it's just private pay. Yes, correct.

Okay, I'm gotcha.

“Can you give us an idea of what situations that you might take on?”

This way the listeners can get a better idea of exactly what you do? Well, coming back to the couple's thing, a lot of times I will see a neurodivergent partner with a neurotypical partner. And as you might guess, there's some miscommunication there, a lot of uncertainty. And if there are children involved, that gets even more complicated.

So opening lines of communication, teaching self-regulation, talking about problem solving, safe language, and how to make sure that you're being consistent in what you're doing versus being not so much. What are some of the more difficult situations that you've had? You're working with the people, you're working at a surface level, then you start digging

a little deeper and you find other issues that start popping up. How do you handle that? Carefully, I'll step on it, sir. Well, generally speaking, people will come to me with a specific concern. And as we're working through that concern, that's often as you say other things kind

of bubble up to the surface. But for example, someone might come to me and they're having problems in their relationship or they're having problems in their parenting. After a little bit of conversation, I found out that person had was sexual molested as a child or badly beaten or abused as a child.

And so they haven't been able to process that and finish that piece. And it's interfering with their world today. So the trick is in the work I do is help keeping people in the now. Because if you're in the past, you're often depressed. If you're in the future, you're often anxious.

But if you're in the moment, not only can life be beautiful thing, but you can solve problems and not have them become future issues. For someone that's been abused, that can be physical abuse, that can be mental abuse. Both are tough to deal with. How do you get them past that?

I mean, that's a tough situation to let go of. You're right. It can be for sure. And depending on how they've been treated with regard to that issue in the past can also complicate things.

So for example, if someone's tried to talk to a parent or a trusted other about what happened to them, they were told that they were a liar or that's stupid on making it up. Makes a lot harder to resolve it than if they were taken at their word. So there are a number of things that you can do.

“The biggest and most important part in dealing with trauma is to get control of your”

mixture and I talked about that a few minutes ago as a part of your brain that does emotion.

Now, here's what's interesting.

I love brains by the way, I'm a big brain girl and what's interesting about it is that the amygdala is very closely collocated with the hippocampus and the hippocampus does memory and learning. Now, if we think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, that's a good thing because we need to remember where the people eating animals are more importantly than where the

blueberries are. So our amygdala gets very much involved in our learning. The problem is that a lot of the things that happen to us, we will react as though there's this animal that's going to eat us when it's really only a blueberry problem. And that's when we get into difficulty.

The human brain you see has not evolved in about the last 10,000 years. So we've got 10,000 year old software, 21st century problems, what could possibly go wrong? Well, what? And you're seeing it all over the world right now. So it's learning how to control that amygdala and get the prefrontal cortex, which is

here at your forehead behind your eyes, activated again so that you can think about what you want to do versus a kind of knee jerk reflexive response, which is what you're feeling.

“And the thing I think I teach people the most and this is so, so important, feelings”

are not facts.

Let that sink in a second, feelings are not facts because you feel a certain way about

something. Does not mean it's true. You have to use a testing process and that's where your prefrontal cortex comes in. Okay. So if I have a perception that something is real, then in my mind, it's real.

Yes. How do you get a person past that, especially if it's not fact and they're just running wild with their own emotional thoughts? Okay. So there would be two ways I would need to look at that problem.

One is you may be having hallucinogenic or psychotic process. My first job is to figure out, okay, is everything running smoothly in your head. Are you oriented times three as we say in the trade? And if I determine that you are, then my next thing is to help you understand that you've got to slow the process down because what happens is you're immediately gets a firing so fast

that eventually it develop neural pathways that bypass your prefrontal cortex. So it never gets there. So you can't resolve the problem. So my job is to help you slow that down so that the prefrontal cortex can catch up with

And there are a number of different ways to do that. One of them is called cognitive behavioral therapy. There's the havening technique. There's EMDR. There's a ton of different ways to go about it.

But basically they all focus on being able to slow things down so that you can think your

way into or out of whatever situation you're in. Okay. So you just brought up psychotic events. So that would imply that you've worked with people that are in psychosis before. Of course.

So when someone's in a state of psychosis or in a signature where they don't even realize it is a problem, how do you approach that? It depends on how psychotic they are. I mean, if they're flooredly psychotic, sometimes all we can do is sedate them help them calm down and then help them get some medication for it.

If it's a more mild form of psychosis, maybe just a little bit of paranoia or something like that, I'll just say to them, well, here's an example.

“So gentlemen came to me, he said, I have a problem, I said, oh, what problem is that?”

He said, well, I have all these ghosts at my house. I need you to help me with the ghosts. And some people do have ghosts. I mean, I'm not going to say they're crazy because that's the first thing they say.

But then I'll say, okay, we'll tell you about the ghosts.

You said, well, they're on my front lawn. Ah, I see. I said, what do they look like? He said, well, they're kind of have I'm Victorian kind of clothes, you know? I said, oh, I said, so are there any in your closet?

He said, yes, and I said, how about coming out of your TV? Yes, how did you know? Have you seen them? I've tried to wake up my wife and show her the ghosts and she can't see them. So we're talking about a psychotic process.

You're not a haunting. So I said to him, you know what, sometimes your brain can go a little wrong. And when it goes a little wrong, it's a little bit like getting a short and an electrical wire and it makes your lamp like on and off. And sometimes, you know, when your lamp is flicking on and off, you can't see everything

clearly. So there's some medicine that I can help you get. We'll talk to your doctor and I can help you get and it'll help the electrical signal work better so that your lamp stays on all the time. And he said, really, you can do that.

I said, well, not alone, but yes, I can help you do that.

“And what's that about three to four days to go so we're gone and he's feeling better?”

Yeah, that's a great story. Now over the last year or so I've had a chance to speak with a few different people about this. About the ones that are seeing demons and unfortunately, in order to save that person, they have to kill the demon, unfortunately, they kill the person.

Oh, dear. How do you work with those people that are seeing demons? They think that everything they are seeing is real. Of course, yes, yes. How do you handle that and help that person that is so far in on what they believe?

If they're that far in, then we probably need to call 911 and have them take into the hospital. That's a good and theory. Unfortunately, some states when it gets to AOT, it comes down to if they are not a threat to themselves or others, they have to let them go.

Well that's true. However, if a patient is at the point where they're seeing demons, they're going to tell the doctor about that. Maybe. And they're also going to tell the doctor what they're going to do to the demons.

I have to kill them. I have to cook them in an oven. I have to do this. I have to do that. Yeah, if they're seeing demons, they're going to tell that story because it does feel normal

to them. They don't think there's anything to hide. Now there are people who are suicidal, sometimes who will go in and lie and say, "No, I'm fine. Everything's fine.

My family's just overreacting. You know, blah, blah." So that can happen. But if you're flooredly psychotic, yeah, we're going to pick up on it in the year. Well, we would hope so.

Unfortunately, I have heard a lot of horror stories. When you think of a situation that you started out, you kind of thought it was really not going well at all. You didn't know if you could help them because they just was not accepting what you was telling them.

And then finally, you hit that tipping point when things just started turning around and all of a sudden, you had a success story. Yes, a number of cases like that. I have to say, you know, as we're talking about this, it's a great honor to do what I do. People put a lot of trust in me, faith in me.

I consider it as spiritual practices, my way of giving back to the universe. That's a really good way to look at it.

“So as we talk about these things, it's important for you to listen to understand that”

I don't think credit for what happens.

I always tell my patients, you know, you're driving the bus.

I just have the map. I can tell you what's going to happen if you do this or do that, but you're the one ultimately, you know, who's going to make the decisions. So I've had many, many cases where someone came to me and they thought I was crazy or I was giving bad advice. Sometimes it was on a more severe level, like serious mental

health, sometimes it was more just couples counseling. As an example of that, a couple came to me one time and the wife was just crying and the husband was really angry and he said, you know, she doesn't want me anymore. She doesn't want me anymore. She doesn't want me anymore.

She's going to be close to me. You know, maybe we need to get a divorce and she was just crying so hard. She couldn't talk. So I taught that couple about something I call skilled difference. What that means is that when a man loves a woman and I'm talking for the moment about

heterosexual couples, but other kinds of couples take on the role of the more assertive

And so early in the relationship, they have certain ways of taking care of, we'll use him and her for the moment, her and maybe it was chocolate and flowers. And then in the 30s, kids came along, things changed dramatically and what she really needed was not chocolate and flowers, which she needed was time to talk, time to rest, time to take some of the emotional load of running the household off of her mind.

But he doesn't understand that. He's still back when they were dating, trying to give her those things and she's not happy and he's really hurt. So I said to the gentleman, I said, you know, I think right now what your wife needs is a couple of loads of laundry, a few meals a week, and some time to just sit and be quiet for a little

bit. He said, that's ridiculous.

He said, I'm never heard of such bad advice.

I can't believe I'm paid you for this. How's that going to have her make me sexy again and want to make love with me? I said, okay. No, I can only give advice. You don't have to take it.

So he stormed out. Oh, he was just madder in a wet hand. And by the time they got back, the following week, they were real smiling. I said, oh, well, what happened? He said, well, damn, this thing I did what you said and all of a sudden, she wants me again.

So I said, yeah, okay, so here's the key going forward.

“For skill difference, you have to be able to check with your partner and find out what”

they need now and how you can best provide that. And you'll be holding hands and close to one another until you leave this life. Yeah, that was a great resolution for sure. Now, let's bring it back to the autistic world. I have a person I interviewed about a year ago.

He was autistic. She was neurotypical. In my opinion, they had the very best way of looking at it. I'm curious on how your approach would be. They looked at it as two different people from two different countries.

Basically, they had to learn each other's ways of doing things. This worked really good for them. Now, what are some of the things that you've used to lesson that gap between the neurotypical and the neurodiverse and raising families? Well, I often talk about concentric circles.

So there's the neurotypical person on one side, the neurodivergent person on the other side, and they come together. And then there's this piece in the center where they overlap.

And the trick is that I'm really, really adamant about life is never going to look

all the way neurotypical.

“Life is never going to look all the way neurodivergent.”

What you have to do is come up with a common, nomenclature, common language to be able to talk to each other, to get your needs met and get things done in the relationship. And it isn't going to look like what either of you use to it. It has to be an amalgam of the two. And the work in the relationship is to develop that language and ability to be flexible

and open and neuroplastic. Sure. Yeah. It has to evolve. Yes.

Absolutely. Life is a process of becoming, but it's not always such a becoming process. Absolutely. Now, when you're dealing with adults, I'm not going to say that it's going to be better, but hopefully they can process things a little bit different because they are a little

older, live the life a little longer. What do you do when you're dealing with teenagers? They can be going through bullying in all the drama that goes around them in school and life in general because thanks can just not be so good. Perfect.

But unfortunate example is what happened here just a little while ago and 11-year-old girl that lives just 10 or 15 minutes north of where I live committed suicide. In the bullies, told her how to do it. That is the extreme. Now, how do we get it to the point where this can be under control and doesn't happen

again? Well, honestly, the key is vigilance.

“You have to pay attention to where your child is, who they're talking to, what kinds”

of things they come home from school with, what their attitude looks like about going to school, how they feel when they come home. And you've got to be hyper-vigilant about their use of the computer.

You know, we have to have a license to drive a car, which is a very powerful machine that

can go quite fast and hurt people. Computers are incredibly exponentially faster than that and can kill people too. But we don't watch our kids. We think, oh well, you know, you're 11-year-old. How much should we can get into?

A lot. You can end up dead. You can end up kidnapped. You can be groomed by a pedophile. I mean, all kinds of things.

So vigilance is really what's key and having regular conversations with your children. And I don't mean things like when the child comes home and you say, how is school fine, what did you do? Same old stuff. That's a good conversation.

That's a reflective response. So a conversation was looked like, so how was school today? Fine. No. Okay.

Well, what was the best part today? Oh, what was the worst part today? When you got to that worst part, what was your plan? How did you handle it? Are you still feeling like you're not sure about that?

You see, that's a conversation. And that way, I'm digging into what's going on. If my kid is saying to me, so instead of saying, you should die, well, you can bet your

I'm going to be at the school like now.

That is not going to happen again. And it's not necessarily a question of vengeance, so to speak, it's more about no boundaries are called for here. And they have to be set. And my child has to be protected.

And that other child needs support and help in learning empathy, because they're stuck, right?

“So that's what I'm going to advocate for when I get to see the principle.”

Look, we have to work on both ends of this issue. That's all true, but sometimes the child is just very reclusive and goes into this shell and doesn't say anything. Do anyone, especially the parents, so how can you dig that out? Because sometimes you can dig and dig and dig, yet they just don't say anything.

It could be because they're ashamed of it. They're depressed because of it. That's the last thing they want to talk about is what they're ashamed of and depressed about. It's a totally different situation than what parents are used to dealing with. How do they handle that?

Well, that's where a therapist comes in, because there are things children won't tell their parents, but they will tell a therapist.

And that is a very powerful, sacred, safe space.

For example, I had a little girl who came to me. She had been adopted by this family and she kept running away. She was five and she kept running away and asking people, "Can I live at your house?" Nobody could figure out what was wrong. And it took a couple of sessions, but she finally told me what her adoptive daddy was

doing in her bottom. She was putting things in there and she liked it. And so she'd sneak out at night and try and find another house, because she bed adopted once, she thought maybe somebody else would let her be here a little girl. So needless to say, I got her out of that situation, lightning fast, but it wasn't something

that she would tell anybody else, but she would tell me because she knew and she could feel. This is the safe protective environment and that her needs and feelings were first. Yeah, that's great. She felt that way.

What do you think is very important that our listeners here, not only about what you do,

but what they need to do and how you can help them accomplish the mindset they need to move forward. Well, I think the thing that I want everyone to know more than anything else is, please, please, please, don't be afraid to ask for help. Sometimes parents feel like, "Oh, if I go to a therapist or something, I fail as a parent

or there's something I'm not doing right," absolutely not. The way that we learn our parenting skills for the most part comes from our family of Georgian, the family that we're born into isn't necessarily the family of marriage or the family that we're living with at the time and they don't have those answers.

“And that's why people like me go to school for a very, very, very long time and learn how to”

solve those problems and teach you how to do it. But not teach you with what's wrong with you. You don't know this is teach you with support and caring and the belief because a big part of my job is to believe in people. You'd be surprised or maybe you wouldn't, how many people don't feel believed in.

They don't feel like there's somebody who says, "Yeah, I know you can do this. I know it looks scary and hard, but I know you can do this." And that's a lot of what I do is to remind them, "Yes, you can. I'm going to give you a new skill that you can apply to the problem and you'll be able to resolve it in a new and more productive way."

Yeah, you just brought up a really good point. The fact that people do not believe that they can do things part of that is because of that green eyed monster that comes out, which is called jealousy. Sometimes people don't want to see people succeed. Many times is because they didn't have the courage to do it themselves so they don't want

them to do it. Right. So how do you work with a person that is unfortunately starting to believe what key or she is being told? How do you give them the confidence so that they'll get out there and try even if they fail

because many times when you fail, you learn and that gives you the opportunities to do it better and succeed.

“Well, the first rule to interrupt indoctrination, and that's what you're talking about, is”

to not allow the person or the child to be isolated in a group of people that continues to tell them they can't. That's step one and it's really important. The other thing is whether you're a child or you're an adult, I'm going to teach you how to call myself with one of the techniques that I talked about a little bit.

And then we're going to begin to implant new ideas so that you can make new neural pathways. You can actually reprogram your brain in about 28 days with something that I call Vitamin G, which is gratitude. Gratitude practice is so easy. All you have to do is start out your day and end your day, just running through the things

that you're grateful for. For example, I'm so happy and grateful that I get to do your podcast today. I'm so happy and grateful that I get to see my patients today. I'm so happy and grateful that I have four wonderful therapy dogs. I'm so happy and grateful that I live on a mountain with all kinds of trees and water around

me. Those would be some of the things that I would say, but I'm happy and grateful for. Okay. Now, you might say, well, that just sounds dumb. I mean, what do I do to take it and make?

Well, the difference that it makes is as you remind yourself of those positive things.

isn't going to work into a mindset of plenty and that I'm only limited by my imagination.

So what you begin to see as you move through the 28 days is, you'll notice, yeah, you know, this, this used to bother me a lot, but this bother me so much anymore. Or this used to really set me off and, you know, I didn't even notice it. You begin to become more sanguine and calm and your prefrontal cortex is now in control instead of your make.

Now, let me say this in the beginning, if you're feeling crummy, it can be hard to come up with things that are grateful for. And that's okay. It's normal. But just pick something.

“And gratefully, I have purple dinosaur socks or just anything you can think of, right?”

And you'll find this the days go along with the list gets longer and longer and you'll feel better and better and pretty soon. As I said, after about 28, 30 days, you'll notice, wow, my outlook's different. It works for depression. It works for anxiety.

It works with people who are dealing with neurodivergent issues, it works for everybody,

but it only works if you do it. I've got to take it vitamin G twice a day. Yeah. That's great and sound advice. Now, stop and think about this.

Someone this 25, 35, 45, it doesn't really matter. They've lived their life. Good about. They can be out there, working, feeling good about everything. And then all of a sudden boom, something just reminds them of something bad.

It triggers that switch that just takes away everything they've been working for that day to feel positive. How do you stop that switch from being flipped on? Do you tell them about it?

Look, this is likely to happen to you in the early days of what you're doing.

“You're likely, you know, everything is most people have heard of the learning curve, right?”

You go forward and then you go back a little bit. You go forward and you go back a little bit. That's normal. You're not failing. You're not bad.

You're not in successful. It just means that you're going through your learning process. If we talk about dedictions, for example, and someone has a lapse, a lapse is a teaching moment. It says, ah, okay, you weren't taking care of yourself that we need to take care.

Let's look at that. What do we miss? What do we need to do differently? If you're not about failure, it's about, okay, that was a learning tool. You can't have success without failure.

So preparing people for that and helping them understand is kind of like the ways of the ocean, right? It goes out. It comes in. It comes in.

That's just the nature of things. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree.

“Now, is there anything that we haven't touched upon that we need to?”

Well, that's a big question, isn't it? Oh. Let's see. No, actually, I think you've done a good job. I want to pivot back to, though, to remind folks that feelings are not facts.

And here's a way to break that down, slowing the process down as I talked about before it's very helpful. So get yourself a piece of paper and make three columns. Column one, you write down what it is, is bothering you. The worry thing, right?

Column two is, okay, what evidence do I have that is true? And column three is, what would I tell a person who came to me with this problem or concern? People give excellent advice, they just don't take it. Yeah, that's just so true.

Well, this has been great, great information, great conversation. I really appreciate your take on the time to join us today. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was fun. Yes, it was my pleasure.

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