The gym is where we fail. The gym is where we try. The gym is the opportunity to try things, to suck at it, and to measure our growth and slowly get better at something.

Welcome to Therapy is my therapy, a podcast where licensed counselor Olivia and unlicensed client Tanya, you delve deep into real and raw conversations in order to demystify what really happens in that 50 minutes hour. Heads up. This podcast contains strong language and sensitive topics related to mental health.

On today's episode, we invited Aaron Hurley, brazilian black belt athlete, mental health advocate, and performance and mindset coach, onto this podcast to discuss two topics that are rarely talked about in brazilian jujitsu. That is, the stigma of crying in sports and the concept of being trauma informed as a coach or teammate. Her and licensed therapist Olivia also covered what gyms and coaches can do to foster a healthy training environment and much more. Frankly, I couldn't think of two people more well suited to talk about such a nuanced matter. Unfortunately, 15 minutes into recording, Erin's neighbor decided to fire up the lawnmower and as a result, the audio can sound a bit od at times due to Mai having to repair her recording because murdering someone through the Internet isn't possible yet. We have to live with lesson stellar audio, but the knowledge Erin drops is well worth it. Enjoy the episode.

So today we have a very special guest, Erin Hurley, and I've learned to pronounce her name just recently. You likely know of her through her jujitsu athletic career as she has a gajillion medals in all of the things and also through her mental health advocacy work in submit the stigma. She's also moved on to performance coaching and I don't feel like mansplaining her to herself, so I'm going to let her take it from here.

I'm a jiu jitsu black belt who competed a lot and realized that the mental aspect and emotional aspect were not being catered to. In terms of my training. It was a lot of just do the hard thing and reap the rewards and suck it up. And being an emotional female, it was different for me and so I learned to interpret my own actions and behaviors through the lens of the patriarchy, through what is traditional sport ethic of just doing the hard thing, especially in jiu jitsu with like a combat sport. And now I have a master's in sport and performance psychology, so I can now interpret those moments of my own career that are really meaningful to me and why I did the things I did and definitely would have benefited from having myself now, the knowledge that I know, but I get to help others move forward, and it really is awesome. And I think I found my, you know, I went from doing the thing to talking about the thing. Now I get to help people do the thing and not stress over it.

And that is the core of the reason why I wanted to invite her, or we wanted to invite her to this podcast, because Erin and I have had really great conversations about how the sport, as much as we love it, could really benefit from having an increase in awareness of emotional intelligence and an increase in, I guess, diversifying the way different athletes may respond to different situations. So, if I may, I could talk a little bit about my martial arts experiences, because I feel that they're pertinent and they mirror a lot of yours. Where I started Moitai when I was 14, and there was always an interesting experience when you're a 14 year old girl sparring with grown men and having grown men as your coaches. And my coach Glenn, he was very compassionate and very good with working with younger people. But there still was a disconnect or an awkwardness, let's say an awkwardness in how to navigate, essentially, for me, an athlete who cries, and that's how they blow off steam. For me, if Coach Glenn would come over to comfort me, that was embarrassing. And if the teammates just let me cry, also embarrassing. And if they mocked me, also embarrassing. From my perspective, in jiu jitsu, crying seems relegated to kind of Ron Swanson parameters, where it's only good for victories, funerals, very, very specific things. And while it's easy to blame the patriarchy, tm, I would like to use this podcast to discuss and explore this further. And, Olivia, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on this.

Yeah, absolutely. And I have an interesting perspective of it, too, from my side of things, because I grew up playing sports every season. I very much loved that competitive athletic space. But I also am a very highly sensitive person, and those two things did not mesh well, especially in elementary school, middle school, they're like coed teams. And so that was an experience of, okay, if you are crying or if you are doing anything sensitive, you're deemed as weak, oh, you're acting like a girl. That kind of mentality. And then when I went through school and was learning to become a therapist, I took a class on sport and exercise psychology, and I really enjoyed it. And I finally felt like, oh, I was right. It was not the best thing to just tell everyone to suck it up and bury your feelings, because there's no utility, then, in learning to regulate them. If we just bury everything, we're like cutting off that whole side, because then we can't use our intuition as much because we're shutting ourself off from all of our feelings. So I think that was something that I learned a lot through my professional journey of not just in athletics, but in everything. If you're feeling sensitive, that's usually you being intuitive. And if you're crying or if you're having another emotional experience while you're engaging in something else, that's just a cue that your body is looking for something. And it's so important to learn to tune into that rather than shut it down. And I'm sure you can talk about it a lot more, Erin, but I think just in general, there's this black and white thinking of, oh, you're crying and you're a mess and you can't focus, or you're totally shut down and you're just dialed in and great. And there's such a middle ground of learning how to use your emotions and regulate them in a healthy way. And also, you can still be tough, right? It doesn't mean that just because you're emotional that you're not also strong and capable.

I love that it's the both. And like this duality of you can feel the emotions and still do the thing, or you could do the thing and have these strong emotions. So emotions can either get in the way of, or they can facilitate. And like you said, olivia is not shutting it down, but really taking advantage of that and being able to read them, identify them, recognize them, and then see how they work towards your goal. If they do work towards your goal, then even though they might be unpleasant, it's still helpful. And so it's determining kind of those emotions that are both helpful and unhelpful, pleasant and unpleasant. And a lot of emotions. People think that it's something you can control. And I had a workshop this last weekend where we talked about control. What can you control and what can't you control? Because in sports psychology, you only want to control the controllables locus of control. And so locus of control isn't actually like what you can control. It's deciding what you want to choose to focus on that you can influence the most. And influencing and controlling are two different things. So I can influence my opponent's game. If I have this offense, they're going to have to make a defense, but I can't orchestrate it. I can't choose what that defense is going to be. So I need to make sure that I focus on what I can control, which is myself. But I don't like the word control for emotions because emotions are mostly unconscious. They're our subjective experience. They are interpreted pretty fast, within milliseconds or seconds, and they will mobilize us to behave a certain way. And it's important for emotional intelligence and emotional regulation to be able to say, wait a second, instead of just reacting, I'm going to respond and I'm going to see if this is facilitative to what I'm trying to do. So if I feel like laughing and I'm at a funeral, I'm going to downgrade that emotion, hopefully. Whereas if I'm at amusement park and I have the ability to express myself and it's encouraged, right, like screaming on a roller coaster, then I'm going to upgrade my emotions in that sense. And so in sport, there's a constant volley of which emotion do I need, how much of it? How long do I need it to last? And so this idea of emotional suppression to say that emotions are not facilitative at all is a lie. There are very facilitative emotions, like being a little bit angry to say, I'm going to go and punch this person in the face at a Moitai fight, and I have to not care about their feelings for a second. I got to shut down my empathy a little bit. Also, there's aspects of emotional regulation, of regulating someone else's emotions, which is obviously a lot harder. But when you think about a toddler, for example, and a toddler is crying because they can't get what they want, and you reframe it for them and say, we have that at home, or what if we did it later rather than right now? And so essentially, we are teaching them how to regulate their emotions. And I've found that a lot of the things that I do with athletes, it works for toddlers because a lot of people don't have the tools. And when I was working with my mentor, I said, yeah, I like to take this approach where I'm the expert on sports psych, but the client is the expert on them. And she was like, that's a very loaded thing to say, because not everyone has the tools to understand their own emotions or to understand why they do the things they do, or they were never taught to look within and have those introspection tools. And so you can't really assume that someone is going to have those skills. And so that's why emotional regulation is so important as a skill because it takes practice. And obviously, it's not just for sports. It's for building relationships. It's for experiencing the world. It's for having a positive outlook. All of those mean just going off of Olivia's, not suppressing it because there's a point in having them is really huge.

Because of my upbringing, because of the way we're socialized to suppress, quote unquote, inconvenient emotions. I had the emotional range of an 80s male action star, straight up, emotionally constipated. I had occasional sadness and mostly just anger. And I, for a very long time, villainized my sensitivity in pretty much every facet until I realized that sensitivity is a good thing. You have to be sensitive to, say, the subtle shifts of weight of your opponent. You have to be sensitive enough to pick up how they're moving and what they favor. And if you don't have that, you're not going to be very good at pretty much anything you do, because I'm making this connection now. For me, one of the hallmarks of mastery is discernment. It's knowing what to use and when. And I'm of the belief that you can't have discernment without sensitivity. And that includes emotion and something I had read some time ago about how people tend to villainize sailor Moon for being a crybaby. So on. She's weak. She's useless. And while she starts that way, someone pointed out the fact that she's crying and she still gets shit done. She beats the bad guys, and she does it for her friends. She doesn't do it simply because she's full of rage and wants revenge. She does it for a cause she believes in. And over time, obviously, the competence builds confidence, but it's accepting the fact that you are where you are and you're experiencing what you're experiencing. Accepting that is how you improve. And it took a very long time for me to truly improve because I didn't accept it for most of my life.

Well, there's that article that I sent you, Tanya, about Adeline Gray, the Olympic wrestler who would cry in practice, and her coach would just walk away or get frustrated or look at her like, you can't do the thing. She wrote an article for Forbes that was about crying and how it's not necessarily a sign of weakness or that you're not cut out or that you're not ready or prepared or have the genetic predisposed traits to do the thing. And so she went to her therapist and she said, I keep crying because I get frustrated, and it's just this automatic response. Just the tears keep going. And her therapist was like, does it stop you from doing the wrestling, doing the training? She's like, well, no, let's just cry and do it at the same time, because then there's no problem. And she mentioned how men in her training, they would get frustrated and they would hit a wall or show actual aggression. And somehow this is interpreted as, yeah, look at him. He's really passionate. He's really into it. I'm not really sure, actually, what it interprets. Besides, okay, that sounds effective. Yeah, you're frustrated, and we can relate to that. And men who are angry, that's okay, but women who cry is not okay. And I think it's more of a reflection of the coach not knowing what to do. And what's funny is that if I were in the same situation, I would know what to do if someone was crying. I wouldn't know what to do if someone was punching the mat. And I think that says a lot about how I interpret emotions and how I see them now as facilitative or debilitative or maladaptive versus adaptive. And so she was able to learn that expression of emotions is different. Like you said, tawny, it's diversified. It's going to be different for every person. And so it's important to understand why we are responding and reacting the way that we are. When I was a blue belt, I was in the finals of world, and I had a really good run. I had five matches, and I was going against a girl that I'd already beat, but they had studied me and they knew that I pulled guard. And so it was kind of new around that time. If you both sat at the same time and one person came up, they got an advantage because it was promoting action and they didn't want people just sitting on their butts. So all she did was pull with me and come up, and I didn't do enough. I couldn't do enough to get her either swept or to get points or submit. And so she won. And I remember I immediately turned on my stomach and just started crying. And her whole team is like. And I'm just, like, dying inside because I felt like my dream was so close, but obviously it didn't come true. And so in that moment, I'm, like, having reality versus what I thought was going to happen in this dissonance. And so I remember I had a blog back then, or a zine. I called it pulling guard zine. And I made a meme where I took the photo of the girl after she had won and me just lying face down on the mat. And I wrote, is crying a sign of weakness? Because I truly didn't know. I didn't know this was just my normal response, and yet, I don't know. I felt embarrassed, like, my coach had no idea what to do at the time. He looked at my mom and was like, oh, my God, is she okay? Because he didn't know how to respond. And so my own feelings were expressed in a certain way that showed how dedicated I was, how passionate I was. Maybe it represented how much I truly believed in myself and to have the outcome not reflect that. And so that was probably one of the biggest moments of my entire jiu jitsu career where my emotions were like, well, I don't know if this is good or bad, and you end up having this one group that's like, yeah, you're too sensitive for this. You're never going to last. And then you have the other group that's like, that's amazing that you lay it all out there, that you proved that you cared so much, even though it was blue belt and no one cares. This is something that was so important to me. And so it's really interesting to see it as, is this a sign of weakness? And when would it be a sign of weakness?

It's just so interesting that historically, men being angry by punching a wall or screaming or whatever after a loss is great and passionate, but a woman crying after a loss is viewed as this horrible, weak thing when literally both of them, you're experiencing the exact same emotion. You're both frustrated, you're both sad, you're both probably angry. Like you said, the expression of it is just coming across differently because, as we know, women and men are socialized differently of what emotions they're allowed to express. And it's so limiting for both, right? Because men only being allowed to be angry is just as hard as women only being allowed to be sad or to be viewed as weak. And it's so frustrating to see that happen because for you, in that experience especially, yeah, you had those big emotions about it because you cared that much about it, right? Like, the intensity of the emotion has to do with how much that moment was impacting you. If you're not upset about it, if you were just like, okay, well, that's fine. I'll just go on about my day. That seems to me like that would indicate more that, oh, you're probably not going to last much longer in this sport because you don't care when you lose.

I'll dry snitch on myself because I feel that the way people respond to emotions has to do with how you feel about them, how comfortable you are with those feelings. And it took me some time, but I realized there was an individual crying beside the mats. And I remember getting angry at them and muttering to myself that they should be doing this alone because no one wants to sit. And I'm like, oh, wait. This is probably not the healthiest attitude towards something as simple as a display of emotion. And I find it so fascinating because we all feel emotions. There's apparently a certain number of them, or if they can be reduced to a certain number of traits, and we shouldn't be confused by emotions. The only time I've ever been genuinely perplexed and unable to relate to an emotional response. When I was watching a video, I believe it was a mongolian wrestling, and the person lost, the athlete lost, and the coach and the athlete took off their clothes. And maybe there's something culturally I don't understand, but I suppose what I'm trying to impart is that we all understand generally the spectrum of human emotions. And, yeah, an athlete crying because they lost a match or because they won a match shouldn't startle you. It shouldn't be this alien experience that you have no idea how to respond to, how to interact with. And Erin, I would love to hear, or we would love to hear more about what actionable steps or what things can athletes, coaches, teammates do in order to improve their emotional intelligence.

So there's how to manage emotions, and then there's who makes the most out of their emotions. So you have emotional regulation, and then you have emotional intelligence. And those are two different but interrelated things. Depends on what research you read. Gross and Barrett are mostly emotional regulation, and Daniel Goldman would be the emotional intelligence guy that I kind of go to. And so when we have an emotion, it comes unconsciously, it's there. So it's our benefit and our, I guess you could say, responsibility to kind of recognize it. So that self awareness is that first thing consciousness raising, that's usually the first step in most different therapy modulations. And being able to actually have an ability to do so takes practice. It is a skill. So a lot of my clients, I'll use the feelings wheel. If you google it, it's out there. It's very easy to find. And it starts in the middle with sad, happy, surprised, angry, and then it branches out one more time with a little bit more of intricacy, like, sad might be lonely, or it could be feeling unmotivated, and then that branches off again. So there's three aspects of it. And at first, I thought this would be great for toddlers. And then I realized, no, this is great for everybody, including grown men who are so much like, I don't know. I'm either happy or I'm sad. They don't even know how to translate it and communicate it. And if you don't know how to communicate your emotions and how lacking you might feel in your relationships because of that and your conflict resolution, and also, if you can't even tell what you're feeling, then how do you choose a plan of action? How do you behave? And so that's the thing where you see anger come out, which is a lot of people not understanding it and feeling some type of frustration, but they don't actually know that it's frustration. So if they're just mad, what do you do when you're mad? Do you just have this outward aggression or you're mean or you're defensive? But if you sat there and went, oh, this is because I'm frustrated that I can't do this thing. Like, if I was a toddler and I'm trying to put the circle into the square hole, and it's not working, and I just keep smashing it until someone's like, actually, you're doing it wrong. Let me help you. So there's so many ways to kind of go, well, actually, this is what's really going on. And knowing this information and being able to identify it, I can go forth with some sort of plan of action, whether it deals with just myself or others. And so we have this ability to modify the trajectory of the emotion. So obviously, we label it which emotion is it? And then how intense. Because there's a scale, right? Like, let's say one to ten. Right now, I would feel I'm pretty content. One to ten. I'm about a seven. I'm totally fine. I have nowhere else I want to be. I've got my Tim's coffee. I'm great. But if I were to feel like I'm too content, like I'm a ten, I probably wouldn't be sitting upright, I wouldn't care. And then figuring out when it starts and how long it should last. So, for example, when someone goes into a fight, they cannot be content, they cannot be chill. They need to have a certain level of arousal required to do the thing and to deal with the arousal level of the opponent, which is likely going to be high as well. So when it starts, all right, well, I'm going to measure my arousal and how I want to feel leading up to, and then I'm going to regulate that throughout. So during the fight is one thing, in between rounds is another thing, and after and before are other things as well. So how long it lasts and then how do I express it? Expressing something is really important because you don't want to have anything that says, I'm not in the experience or I'm not experiencing things correctly. And so I think it's really important that we focus on how do I want this to look? Because at times, you do have to mask your emotions. Like I said, when you're in a funeral and you want to laugh at something, what happens if you laugh at something? You would be looked at as a monster, really, or that you're not doing the expected type of reaction. And so regulating your own emotions has this reward to it in terms of, well, maybe I can't change the trajectory entirely of my emotion. Like, I can't be sad, and all of a sudden be like, never mind, I'm totally fine. There's something that needs to be done, it needs to be processed. And so having a goal in terms of, we're going to talk about just, like, performance, right? So going into performance, it's like, well, what emotion do I want to feel? And then how do I get myself to feel those things?

And that's one of the things that.

The feelings wheel does and the eyes off individual zone of optimal functioning does.

I love the feelings wheel. I didn't have any relationship with my feelings. I had kind of sad and no idea what signs of my body feeling sad are or scared. And I liken most things to jiu jitsu or some sort of martial art is that it's fascinating that we avoid doing that because jiu jitsu is all about what you had just described. It's about understanding and being able to control and direct. Because for me, when I was listening to you talk about how people couldn't figure out if they were angry or they only had angry or sad and not a sophisticated vocabulary and toolkit is very much similar to, I'm in a street fight and there's a guy on top of me, and I don't know what to do. So I'm going to do what either comes instinctively, which is generally flail, or what I've been trained to do, which if you're a day zero white belt, which is nothing, and then you don't have what it takes to assess and to action in order to get to the situation or the state that you want the desired goal, which is to not have someone on top of you punching you in the face. So that would be my only add on to that. And I would like to move on to the main topic, not just crying, but about a topic that is generally overlooked at best and at worst maligned. So the intro would be a lot of people have accredited jiu jitsu to saving them, and that would include myself. It's improved my life beyond measure. I've met amazing people, but there's also a lot of opportunities for improvement within the culture of the sport. For me, one important thing I want to kick off is I'm not angry at the culture. I will point out or highlight issues because I care about it, not because I think it's inherently awful and everyone who does it are terrible people. I'm big on holding things I love and the people I love to a standard and being around people that live up to their own standards and live within their values as well. So with that in mind, I would like to talk about the importance, misconceptions, et cetera, of being trauma informed in jujitsu. Because I have seen and I have experienced trauma responses, lots of thousand yard stares and shaking and crying in locker rooms. I've done it more times than I can count and I've seen it. And I find that there's not a lot of conversations about it that really explore and develop actionable steps that are accessible or help people better understand why this should be a thing. And another caveat for the competitors out there. I know that it's important that you be self centered in a way, as in, it's about your career. You have to really focus on prioritizing just your goals and whatever it takes to reach them. And I get it. Roll with whoever you want and you do you. If you don't agree with the things that we discuss, I get it. So I would like to start off with, what does it mean to be trauma informed? And I have two people who are beyond qualified to speak on it.

Obviously, from my standpoint, I'm working to be trauma informed in everything I do with my clients. And I think it gets misconstrued a lot as, oh, everyone's so triggered by everything nowadays. You can't say anything, you can't do anything. We're making people weak by doing this, and it's important to know what it actually means. And so it's not saying, okay, we're going to create a space that actively avoids every single person's trigger and doesn't make anyone do anything hard. We're just going to baby people and coddle them and whatever. That's not it. Being trauma informed is creating a space that is brave, such that people are able to confront and work through things that might be triggering in a way that's conducive to actually healing, rather than creating a space that on one side is okay, no one's being challenged at all, or the other end of we're pushing you so hard that we're not acknowledging why this could be hard emotionally and that's going to make you shut down and you're never going to come back or you're not going to reach your full potential because like we talked about earlier, you're going to have to show up in the space and be totally bubbled up and shut off emotionally. So being trauma informed, for me, in session looks like being non judgmental, being really emotionally present on my end and really holding space for clients to be challenged in a caring way. Right. So I'm sure with sports there's more specifics of how to get into it, but for me it's if I'm meeting with a client in office, I'm going to show them around the space. Before we get started, I'm going to say, here's where the bathroom is, here's where you can get water. The door is never going to be locked. If you need to leave at any point, you can. Here's what my credentials are. So you know why you can trust that I'm qualified, right? Like going through things that really seem basic, but going through those logistical things so that they know that they're in a space that they have control over. So I'm assuming you could do very similar in a jujitsu gym of, hey, let me give you a tour of the space. Here are some people who have been training a long time who know the space well. If you need help during talk to them, or if you ever need to leave early, just go. No one's going to ask you questions. Making it so that people are feeling in control to an extent. So that when they're asked to do hard things, they feel like they're doing it with other people and that everyone's showing up and challenging themselves rather than it's like, no, there's this spotlight on you. You're new or you're weak and people are trying to hurt you and people are trying to put you down. That's not a space that anyone's going to want to come back to from my end. That's kind of what it looks like. And I imagine what it would look like in the space of trying to create an athletic gym or whatever that follows that kind of same mindset.

Yeah, I definitely see the relation between the trauma informed therapy and trauma informed coaching, because we are asking people to look within and also to perform at a certain expectation, and expectations are really, that's a whole nother ballgame of, like, is it your expectation? Have you internalized someone else's expectations of you and whatnot? That it creates pressure, and sometimes it's just not even important. Pressure or not even substantial. And so when you said that, yeah, if you were in an environment where people are trying to hurt you immediately, I'm like, well, yeah, that's the point of jiu jitsu. That's the point of combat sports. How effective are we? How dangerous are our weapons? Are we choosing the right weapons at the right time? Immediately I'm like, yeah, that does sound triggering for someone who comes from maybe a background of abuse or a background of being told they're not good enough. And so you can have someone who comes from emotional abuse and psychological abuse of their dad telling them you're going to amount to nothing and treating them like their inherent worth is low, and then they move on to trying to prove themselves continuously. Or it could just be you had one teacher who, like, I don't know, bands. I was in bands, right? And he says, you're not trying hard enough, even though I was, and not being recognized for my efforts. So this can happen at such a small level or a huge level. And so what you said at the beginning of, like, we're not trying to coddle people, but at the same time, we're also not trying to make their situation worse. We're not trying to make them confront things that aren't necessary. We're not trying to make them feel less than. And in jiu jitsu gyms, the competitiveness can get in the way of that, and it's really hard to differentiate between. I'm being competitive and I'm taking this out of context, and I need to be better than you as a whole. Like, I'm comparing myself to you instead of just our skills or our knowledge or ability. And so you talked about psychological safety, and there's a framework for this that I love. It's something that I do want to incorporate to coaches, and it's very hard, actually to do so. But I think with the right tools, people can really start paying attention to psychological safety. Because the gym is where we fail. The gym is where we try. The gym is where we, or the academy or the dojo, whatever you want to call it, is the opportunity to try things, to suck at it, and to measure our growth and slowly get better at something and how we determine whether we're getting better. It should be internal rather than just external. But the competitive aspect makes it very hard, because if I'm like, yes, I passed Tanya's guard, and then the next day she passes my guard and I'm like, well, what does that mean? Who's better? But instead of thinking about her ability, I have to think about, well, what about my ability changed? So thinking of myself. But trauma informed as a whole, to me, comes from learning that past experiences will affect people's present and future, and how we interpret things and the level of arousal that we have and whether we assess the danger, the uncertainty, as high or low. So if you walk into a jiu jitsu gym and everybody's walking around with their shirt off and they all got abs, you might be like, well, I immediately don't fit in because I'm not a big guy with abs. Or you walk in and everybody's kicking each other's ass, and you really need to get in there and prove yourself that you're a good training partner in order for people to even talk to you. So these are all aspects that are very real. So the four aspects of psychological safety is inclusion safety. So as soon as you walk in that door, you hold value, not because you had to prove that you were a good training partner or that you have something to add or that you're going to be a good body or a champion or make the team look really good. It's, hey, you are a human being. We appreciate you being here. You are included no matter what. Basically that you have to screw it up. You would have to be a real big dick or, like, put someone else in danger in order to not have that inherent value. So walk in the door, hey, how are you? What can we do? And then there's learner safety, the ability to go in and make mistakes and to put effort forth and fail. And people are so afraid of the word fail because they think that it means giving up or a stopping point or the end all be all. But it's not like if I go to try a certain guard pass or a combo and it doesn't work, I have to accept that, think about what I could do differently, and work towards that. But if I had someone next to me going, you suck at that, I might have this fixed mindset about my ability and that have this thing like, oh, if I can't do it, then I can't do it. I'm lacking because I'm limited. But if you have someone that says, yeah, it looks not very good right now, but keep working on it and you'll get better. And, oh, look, that's much more tight this time. That's much more fluid this time. And then there's collaborator safety, which is the ability to say, hey, what about this? And not have someone in response say something like, what do you know? It's having that white belt mindset of saying, everybody has something to add. You can learn from anybody. And so collaborator safety is just the ability to say, like, let me add my two cent and have it be actually listened to and valued. And then challenger safety, which is the hardest one to be able to say, I don't like the way things are done here. Why don't you do it this way and not have the coach say, this is the way we do things, and have an open mind and say, oh, well, you can challenge that. And I think having all four of these really ensures that we have the ability to make people feel that they are okay in failing, challenging, being, existing. The great one to feel like, wow, me just being here, that's great that I add value to this room. And then, of course, just being able to add your two cent, being allowed.

To exist is an extra $50 charge to your membership.

Yeah. And I think what we were talking about earlier with discernment of, there are going to probably be jujitsu gyms and other athletic facilities, that the main focus there is on people who are doing it as their job, who are truly competing, because this is how they make their living. And so I think recognizing, too, there might be those spaces where if you say, hey, I really want to roll light because I'm just doing this as a hobby, or, I'm not trying to push that hard. I just enjoy this. I come here after work and they say, well, okay, that's fine, but a lot of the people rolling here need to be more challenged. So you might have a hard time finding a lot of people who are cool with that. Here are some other gyms in the area that might be better suited to you. Right. So recognizing that if there are people who are coming in and have different goals for training, that's okay. And being able to be open of whether or not it's a space that that's going to work. And the same way I do that in therapy of like, if there are clients who come to me and say, hey, this is the main thing I want to work on and I don't have experience with that, or it's something where they would really need more care or different levels of that, then it's not right for me to say, well, I want your money, so I'm going to just take you anyway. If you're in a space that you can't do that or you don't think you have the resources for athletes who are one or the other. Right? Like, if it's mostly a hobbyist gym, it might not be the most effective to have someone super competitive in doing it for work and vice versa. So I think taking that into account too, of like, yeah, if you can't accommodate every student, that makes sense. Just being open about it and rather than just viewing it as well, we should just take everyone's money, even if we can't really give them what they need. Oof.

To that. I come from gyms that are not just your local gym growing up in LA, and the first gym that I walked into was a gym from multiple time world champion teaching. So immediately everybody's vying for his attention. And it was a small group because he was just starting out as a teacher. But when I switched gyms and I've gone to two separate other gyms, they were huge. When I was training in New York, there was rumors that there was a thousand students.

Insane.

And there was enough classes, but the classes that I was in were so big and within that you'd have hobbyists and you'd have these high level competitors. So I was kind of like middle of the pack. And so I would get the good training and I would have the opportunity to train with hobbyists, but I would have these limits because I was seen as one of the main staples there. I was there training twice a day, every day, and I was kind of, I guess, expected to be almost like a Walmart greeter to say like, oh, you're new here, okay. But in my brain, I'm like, I'm a competitor. The only thing that I'm responsible for is to get good at Jiu jitsu. I'm not here to promote more student base. I'm not here to make other people feel comfortable. Of course I'm not there to make people feel uncomfortable. It's not that I said, what are you doing here? No, it was like, maybe I didn't introduce myself right away, or I didn't say, oh, my God, I love your hair. I don't know what people expect. I'm doing my thing. And so it was interesting to be in huge gyms where I didn't even get the attention, and yet I was dedicating my entire life to this sport. And so that would be monumental for jiu jitsu gyms to say, I can't meet your needs. You should go somewhere else. The only time I've ever seen that is when people graduate out, like maybe they're from Minnesota and they come to art of jiu jitsu in Orange county. That instructor might say, yes, definitely go there because you're going to have way more opportunities. And I don't have the ability to make you a world champion because I don't have enough competitors here. I don't have the, the. Maybe the coach has never competed before. They don't have the experience. So if your goals are different than what those needs that can be met at the existing gym, then, yeah, maybe you do need to go somewhere else, or maybe you need to go to a different gym sometimes and cross train, which is another whole thing. So, I mean, having that competence level of knowing your competence level is so interesting. And when we start talking about trauma informed, it's interesting for me as a performance consultant because I cannot work with people who are not mentally stable. I work in the performance. So if you're having issues with relationships and trait anxiety or depression or other things that are affecting other domains of your life, then it is my responsibility, my ethical duty to refer you to a therapist, to someone that can meet your needs. Because I'm not clinically trained or licensed, and that's on me. And yeah, it's true. I could say, well, let's just talk about it and hope that some venting is going to solve all the problems. Or just because I know act acceptance and commitment therapy, or I've studied some other counseling theories, it does not mean that I am equipped to do that. So it is within everything in me to make sure that I get that person help because they're the priority. Now, doing that in athletics is different because I can't always say, like, you need to go to this person or you need to go to that person. There might be limitations, but I think the aspect of competence in terms of trauma informed coaching is the ability to say, I'm not equipped. I'm going to go find skills and I'm going to figure out how I can help these people instead of just going suck it up or there's no crying in baseball too.

I feel that it is a mark of competence and confidence because it is that white belt mentality. Not every coach understands what being trauma informed is, but not every coach understood the Danaher system of leg locks, but they went and learned. So if you can understand that stuff, you can understand some fundamental principles of cultivating more emotional intelligence. I would never go so far to say people are utterly lacking. There's always room for adding more intelligence, especially in that regard, and I'm going through my notes. So being trauma informed, you two outlined why it's important, especially being able to respond to situations where someone might be having a PTSD flashback. They might not know what to do. And if you don't know what to do, and no one knows even remotely what to do or even who to call besides the Ghostbusters, you don't even know what steps to take. It can be disastrous for everyone. It can negatively impact your reputation as a gym if you do something that would not be advised by mental health professionals, and it can be damaging to that person who may never want to do jujitsu. I've spoken at length about how there are many times I've almost quit jujitsu, not because of any coaches, but just due to the trauma response I have when I roll with people who quote unquote just want to roll without actually attuning. So that's an aside. But it can be very limiting to the very people for whom jiu jitsu serves, because as all these grapplers post on their social media, Jujitsu saved their lives. So why would you not want people who have had their agency, have had their sense of safety taken away from them? Why would you not want to facilitate in whatever tiny way that you can? Why would you not want to help them take those steps into reclaiming that? And to further a point, I was listening to Professor Pedro Valente discuss about jujitsu history, and I had asked him a similar question about Elio Gracie's thoughts on women or vulnerable people learning jujitsu. And he had mentioned that in Elio Gracie's diary. He wrote at length about how strongly he feels that the smaller people, the more vulnerable people, should have skills in order to defend themselves. And this is with the adenom that I know. The Gracie family has a lot of less than stellar facts about them, unless they're complex, but in this case I really found that lovely. And I'm not sure where you'd like to go. I had some questions about why is there such resistance against encouraging an environment of trauma informed jiu jitsu practitioners? I know we've mentioned a fair bit of it. We can get into a bit more or. Yes, okay, I'm all for it.

Yeah, I think a lot of gyms.

Are hesitant to add trauma informed because it implies that they understand what trauma is and that they can deal with it. And people assume that trauma. Well, first of all, if you think of trauma, some people might think of it as like a trauma unit in an ER, and that's a scary place to be. I did my EMT training. I've done volunteer time in the ER, and there's a lot of uncertainty in terms of literally what you're going to get that comes through that door and whether you are prepared or not and also what your own emotions come up when you witness it. So mirror neurons are interesting. So my mentor was telling me that she was marking out all of the routine that one of her Olympic weightlifting clients was going to do at the world, and one of those was watching another competitor. And so she made sure to tell her, if that person is not doing well or if they're losing, walk away, don't watch. And it was interesting because when we see someone who's struggling, that mirror neuron, when you read someone's facial expressions, because they're so connected to emotion, you are likely to feel that same emotion, that essence of, like, let's put ourselves in other shoes, which is actually impossible to do, but you can think of, well, when I was in a raging fit of tears, this is how I felt. And so you can kind of relate and say, oh, well, that's a really hard place to be in. And most people don't understand how to react to something like that, and that's why they just don't want it in their gym. So instead of saying, come as you are, the psychological safety here, you can fail and you can try and you can actually release your emotions about it. They're more like, we just don't want to see that because we don't know what to do with it and it makes us uncomfortable. And that was what the Adeline gray situation with her coach was like. I don't know what to do with you when you're crying because they've equated maybe their trauma with crying was having a mom who emotionally relied on you and your emotions and based on their emotions and having it intertwined, or having someone who was angry all the time in your home and you had to walk on eggshells. So this trauma informed actually relates to everybody. Everybody has trauma. Everybody has past experiences where it's like, don't want to go back to that or don't want to feel that. And whether they've processed it or not, it can be very triggering for someone to see someone have a triggering reaction. So that's why I think that it's really not a thing that people want to say. So my nonprofit is submit the stigma. We have mental health conscious academy training, and it helps people understand how to approach someone non judgmentally, take them to a safe place, get them help if they need it, and how to recognize those signs and symptoms in people and how to approach them about it. Keyword approach. And not avoid. A lot of people are very like, I don't want to deal with that. I don't know how to deal with that. I'm not trained in that, and I don't care because this is not the place for it. When really, sport is the opportunity to test these things, like, where else are you going to go into a tournament and feel the things that you feel there? This place, this bullpen, this opportunity makes me want to shit my pants. It makes me want to run away, makes me want to avoid this because there's an opportunity for danger or humiliation or shame or loss, and I'm just not ready for that. So I think it's important that people recognize that trauma is going to be there no matter what. And you don't have to say, like, we have to deal with this pre trauma that you've had the past experiences, but you can help someone through it in the current present moment. And just being there for someone and saying, like, I understand, or I see you, I hear you, I understand. I value your opinion. I am validating your experience. That can actually create an opportunity for bonding. It can create more commitment, more confidence, and also it can make your gym known as, like a reputation as a place for being. Yeah, we'll take care of you. You can do the hard things and you can feel all your fields and we'll still be here for you and you can still train here.

I love that. And I feel that most coaches want to foster something like that. And hopefully conversations like these give them impetus to go and explore and how to upskill themselves in regards to becoming trauma informed, because I can absolutely empathize with the, we don't know what to do and we don't want to touch this with a ten foot pole. And how one's own personal relationship with shame and trauma can just infuse how you interact. And one thing is, besides the avoidance, I found primarily with teammates or less experienced people rather than the leaders, is there's a rubber necking that kind of happens. And that, for me, was as frustrating because I might be having a moment or I might be having a trauma response, and 800 people swarm to you asking, are you okay? And I've learned throughout the years that isn't always the right thing to ask people. And for me personally, in my self taught way of doing it, is it is just to be chill. And being unofficially trauma informed allows me to pick up when someone is about to have a trauma response. For example, new Year's Eve fireworks are going off, and I saw in the other person, I recognize that terrified deer in the headlights look, and I didn't make a thing. I didn't make it. Are you okay? I didn't swarm them. I just went, hey, you want to go inside and talk? Let's just go chill. Don't make it a big deal, and just have a conversation. And eventually you could see in their body language that they settled and felt more in their bodies, and then you can go and resume whatever you were doing before. And there are all sorts of different techniques that are out there in terms of helping people ground themselves.

Yeah. And I think, like, what you were talking about, Erin. I think a lot of times coaches or whoever is running the gym, they get worried that they have to do more than they have to do. Right. It's like, well, I don't know what to do if someone's having a panic attack or crying or having a trauma response. Like, I'm not trained to do that. And so I think it helps to elucidate, like, yeah, we're not asking you to be their therapist. You don't have to sit there and do all these extra things and talk them through it and whatever. We're just asking for basic kindness and compassion of maybe having a quiet space in the gym that they can go to and having it be put in the policies and procedures of the gym so that people know what to do and can self regulate if something happens, of just saying, okay, maybe we have one person who's designated to, if they notice that, or if someone comes up to them, they can direct them to a quieter space to process, or whatever it may be, but having that known through the gym the same way they say, okay, keep your toenails short and wash your gee and do all these things, just having that be a part of it, and then if it is something where they require further help, having sports psychologists, coaches, therapists to refer them to and recognizing that that's all you have to do. It's really not that intensive of what's being asked and also for coaches and people to realize that it will impact performance positively. If it didn't, there wouldn't be a whole field dedicated to it. Right. We wouldn't see professional sports teams having dedicated psychologists to work with their athletes. It's beneficial to both sides, and I think that's something that can help make people more likely to view it as valuable.

Yeah. To just echo what OLivia had brilliantly said, it's not about taking more legal liability or legal responsibility on. It's just having, in military parlance, standard operating procedures as to what to do. ONce agaIn, in JuJitsu, you don't go when someone goes on top of you. A coach doesn't go, you're shit out of luck. I guess they will walk you through the process and if you have anything you want to add or other points.

Yeah.

I wanted to actually bring up a personal story of when I was a blue belt. I had a lot of anxiety and I didn't have it as diagnosed, and I didn't really understand how to deal with it as a whole. So I was walking into the gym with anxiety. It was a predisposition, it was trait anxiety. It was something that basically these people on the mat shouldn't have had to deal with. But I would go on the mat and it would be the beginning of the class. We would pick partners to drill, and if I didn't get someone that I felt comfortable with, because I'm like, I want feedBack. I want to feel like, yeah, I can ask this person, does this feel right? I want to feel comfortable. The person that I'm literally this close to physically. And if my main training partners were paired up together or I couldn't be in a group of three with them, I would shut down and my brain would tell me, nobody wants to train with you. They don't want you here. You're not here because people like you or want to train with you. You're just a body. So I would go up to my instructor and I would be on the verge of a panic attack because I had been ruminating over and over, like, they don't like you saying all these negative things to myself. My self talk is horrible, and I'd say, I gotta go. And he's like, where are you? Just. We just started. And I'd be like, I don't know. And I would just have to leave. And I'd go in the women's locker room and I would just cry, still believing those things. Even know Alex and Stacey were just partnering together because they just felt like doing that. It wasn't that they were trying to avoid me or trying to exclude me. It was just that that was the opportunity that they saw and they wanted to take that. And so how we interpret and appraise things is very important. And that ability to interject on those aspects of the emotions is identifying the emotion and then realizing, is this rooted in that grounding that you said, is this rooted in reality? And sometimes it's as easy as, do you really not want to train with me? Kind of just actually communicating and dispelling it and saying, okay, no, that's actually not the truth, and asking or having that self taught cue that says, I know that this is going to happen because this has happened before and I know the situation. I'm going to modify it by saying, no matter what happens, no matter who I train with, I'm going to make sure that I value my training and I get my training in, no matter who I'm partnered with, that championing just the training itself and then being able to not think in terms of interpreting others actions. And that goes into the emotional intelligence as well. And regardless of whether someone says you're a bad training partner, I like to play out what my worst case scenario is and what I would do. And if that were to actually happen, I'd be like, you're a dick, and that's it. And I'm just not going to train with you in the future. It makes it really simple instead of living in your mind in terms of the negative what ifs. And so when these negative things happen, it's so easy to ruminate and to be distracted. But if you have the wherewithal to say, okay, what is the emotion? Is this applicable? How can I prove or disprove whether this is appropriate based on whether I'm interpreting it as I'm not valued or I don't belong? All of these fears that we have that are rooted in emotions is really important to change your appraisal. So I didn't really mention the five things, but I really want to. Is situation selection. I'm going to avoid things that I know are going to bring me anxiety. I don't like going to parties at night. I don't like being around drunk people who are just loud. And I'm 34 years old. I don't want to do that. Situational modification. So let's say I do go to a kickback or I go to a place, but I can modify so that I don't go around, hang out with those people, or jiu jitsu, I can make sure that I roll with people that actually value me and that I want to roll with, not the 300 pound white belt who's probably going to hurt me. And then attentional deployment, noticing when I am ruminating or I am distracted sometimes you can say, let's just not think about that right now and think about this instead. So it's not necessarily a suppression, but it's a deployment of your focus. Let's focus on the positive right now. Let's not even think about the negative that can motivate you to move further through with this emotion attached. And then the cognitive changes, the appraisal, and really truly appraising whether this is a real emotion and this is facilitative to my goal, which my goal is to train and get good training. If I'm going to let this get in the way of my goal, or if I'm going to be able to say, let's think of it as this is a shitty feeling, but I'm going to accept it anyways, and knowing that it's not going to last, that it's temporary. And then at the end, response modulation. So response modulation could be where I talk to someone about my emotion and I just ask for support. What should I do?

Right?

Because that can obviously alleviate the initial emotion and also help me in the future deal with it. Or some people are aggressive, or they rely on substance abuse or self harm. And so that's why it's so important to understand the behaviors that come from the emotions. And again, rooting it in that emotional goal of this is where I want to be, and how do I create that for myself? Well, these are all the different ways that I can modify that and make sure that I'm still acting within my values. And of course we talked about values, but we didn't actually say like, yes, go through your values. So that way when you have these situations, being able to say, no, I'm going to act in accord with this value, authenticity. So I'm not going to be ashamed that I don't brush my hair sometimes because I choose to not brush my hair, I just put it in a bun. That's me being authentic. And whether someone likes it or doesn't like it, it doesn't matter, because I value authenticity no matter what. I don't value fitting in with whoever I only want to fit in with. People that I want to fit in with. So just having those tools available and practicing them and recognizing them, it takes time. It is a skill. It is not something that you either have or don't have. It is something that you can work on. I think that's important for everyone to know.

Yeah. And I think you make a really good point there of tying everything together right, like that. There's also personal responsibility. It's not just, okay, I'm going to show up and try to do this hard combat sport and everyone is just going to cater to me and I don't have to work on any of my shit. That's exactly what you're saying is there are so many skills to develop when you walk into an athletic space. There are physical ones, obviously, but also that is giving you a safe space to hopefully safe space. Right. To work through some of that emotional stuff and create those skills. And if it's trauma you've been through in the past where you've had your agency taken away, you have now the opportunity to work through all these things, whether it's a performance, coach, therapist, both kind of thing, and grow from that. And so I think that's important to note, too, that it's not just that we're expecting the gym to do everything for you. It's that you're both showing up, bringing what you're able to offer and recognizing that you're more likely to get people to take that personal responsibility and to truly grow from it and have their performance grow from it. If you're providing them a space that is going to challenge them and also be overall safe as much as possible, considering the fact that the whole point is combat.

Agreed. I mean, the mats or the room itself doesn't turn someone into a jujitsu practitioner or an athlete. You have to go in and you have to work and you have to work hard. And thank you so much for bringing that up because that is a huge misconception or obstacle to being trauma informed, because I feel that both coach or other person may think that it is all on the gym and it's not, as Olivia had said about our therapy. And I imagine it's very similar to you, Erin. The individual has to do work. You're only there with them for an hour outside of duties. You can't grab their arm and make them do things and make them do the right movements and the right choices.

So, I mean, I think, Erin, you cover a lot of interesting stuff. And if there's anything that you have for listeners of resources, whether it's your own stuff to promote or just in general resources that you think would be helpful for people to have if they want to take what we talked about and learn more.

Yeah, I kind of mentioned Gross and Barrett doing the emotional regulation studies, or did. And then Daniel Goldman. And then there's also psychological safety. I think it's psychologicalsafety.com I have to check. But it's a lot of resource in terms of training on how to make a more inclusive and safe space for people to get the most out of what they're trying to do. And obviously, relationship wise, that's really important for team building. And even though in jujitsu we fight alone, we still train together. And I think it's important to have this goal of building everyone up, not tearing anyone down, kind of taking that strength and positive approach to coaching. And I do workshops as well. So if you wanted to check out my instagram at train your mind and my personal is Aaron Hurley, and check that out and book me for some workshops to come in and teach about emotional intelligence and teach about mental toughness and confidence. And I would love to also work with coaches. I have a couple clients that are coaches who look to say, okay, I want to foster this in my students, or I'm dealing with this. Okay, how do I do that? All right, here's the framework, here's what we're going to do. Here's a plan, here's your homework, and we quantify the data, and we figure out how we can improve whatever you're trying to improve. Also, Smith the stigma Instagram. We have our Smith Astigma and also smithastigma.org is where you can find information and resources on mental health within the jujitsu community.

Great. Thank you so much and thanks for coming on.

And that concludes this episode of therapy is my therapy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing to our podcast so you never miss an update. Once again, thanks for tuning in. The content discussed on this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not act as a replacement for therapy. Although we may share tools that have worked for us and talk about symptoms that we've experienced, it is not meant to be used for diagnostic purposes and does not constitute medical advice.