Balancing Life and Medicine

Finding Peace within Chaos: Overcoming PTSD and Anxiety

• Dr. DeWayne Baugus • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Have you ever felt like your emotions were taking control, making it hard to balance daily life? Join me, Dr. DeWayne Baugus, as I share my personal journey from the battlegrounds of combat to the battles within my mind. As a combat veteran, I've faced the deep-seated challenges of PTSD, anxiety, and depression head-on. Today, I reveal how therapeutic approaches like EMDR and cognitive processing therapies have been pivotal in my healing process and offer a lifeline to others struggling with emotional imbalances.

Transitioning from the structured life of the military to the unpredictable civilian world can be daunting. I discuss the emotional toll this shift can take, not just on veterans but on anyone experiencing a significant life change. Discover the crucial connection between our emotional health and physical well-being, and how unchecked emotions like fear and anger can wreak havoc on our bodies. Through my experiences and patient stories, we uncover the vital role of therapy and holistic approaches in maintaining emotional and physical balance.

Recognizing the need for help is often the hardest step. In this episode, I open up about my path to seeking support and how leaning on friends, family, and professionals has been instrumental in my recovery. This journey isn't just mine; it's a call to action for anyone grappling with emotional trauma. Learn how to identify the subtle signs of trauma and the importance of addressing these issues promptly to prevent them from diminishing your quality of life. Join me, Dr. DeWayne Baugus, as we navigate through the complexities of emotional well-being and discover the power of support systems in healing trauma.

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Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Welcome back to Balancing Life and Medicine. I'm Dr DeWayne Baugus. I'm an acupuncture physician, licensed in the state of Florida as a primary care physician. One of the things I'd like to discuss today is emotional imbalances, or emotional disorders. It's something that's very near and dear to me, as I'm a combat veteran. I have suffered for many years with PTSD, with anxiety and with major depressive disorder. In fact, that is what I am labeled per se through the VA system, so I am a combat vet. I have a history with emotional, so I am a combat vet. I have a history with emotional imbalances and disorders and, in fact, after many years of working with them and multiple medical systems when I say multiple Eastern medicine, western medicine and everything that I could find help in between. As far as therapies go EMDR, ert for dreams, cpd, cognitive processing therapies all kinds of different things that I've went through over the years I would like to discuss that.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

I would also like to discuss my journey of understanding when I had trauma. It was not something I was aware of when I was struggling with depression, which I didn't know what depression was, and when I realized that I was avoiding things. In other words, I had an anxiety and I was limiting my life and what I would do and what I wouldn't do, based out of previous trauma, and that's kind of an interesting journey that I've shared with many patients over the years, as well as how I've grown and understood how to overcome these imbalances, these traumas. We all have trauma, not just combat vets, first responders, just anybody who gets in their car every day and drives down the road, or anyone who's raised children. I'm sure that there's lots of trauma that we could all discuss and share together. Who's raised children? I'm sure that there's lots of trauma that we could all discuss and share together. But today, what I'd like to do is help you understand it, identify it and know that there are therapies out there that are getting better and better, and for you not to give up hope.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

There's those of us who have went down that road, and sometimes it's not a road, it's kind of a. It's a thorn patch, psychologically speaking, where we go to dark places and then we make our way back out of it, and I contribute all that to the grace of the Lord. But before I found that, that the Lord was there, ready and willing, with his hand out, waiting to help me, waiting to let me let him help me, I guess, is a better way of putting it. There was a lot of struggles. There was addiction. I used a lot of alcohol. I was never into drugs. I had previous trauma with other individuals that did drugs, so you could say my PTSD led to more PTSD and I didn't do the bad things that some people get into while they're trying to overcome or handle or disassociate with trauma.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

So, growing up in Oklahoma City, I grew up the last of three children bigger family there ended up being five but very rough childhood and throughout that childhood I started to learn how to overcome anxiety by just stepping into things, almost becoming aggressive, and that's not a good thing. So, as a child being aggressive or being challenging, I wish that now teachers and parents would understand more about children when they're acting out aggressively, if they're being bullies or if they're completely passive, which that was a stage I went through as well, where I was being picked on all the time because I wasn't. I didn't feel like I was strong enough. I felt like the world was collapsing on me as a child. Years of frustration that I gave my parents instead of them being able to see what I was going through the trauma, the anxiety, all those things. I was acting out of an emotion and in fact a lot of us growing up acted out of emotions. We're not going to talk about the crazy teenage years. Those are acting out of hormones and emotion and it's just. It's crazy. That's for another segment.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

But when it comes to straight emotion and being locked in as a child, children get stuck in an emotion and a lot of times that's fight or flight and that looks like different things. I'm not trying to say that other titles and what we found in psychology. Children don't have those. Whether it's ADD, adhd there's so many different things that children go through and that we're learning that children go through. But when it's an emotion, I'd like to help you understand that and identify it. So when a child is acting out, it's not time to discipline. It's time to ask why out? It's not time to discipline. It's time to ask why it's time to dig in closer. It's time to figure out what is upsetting a child or what makes them do what they do, instead of just punishing fear-based to get them to do what you want them to do. Because if we say it like that, if someone's already in trauma and you create more trauma, then we're not really helping the situation as an adult for a child to get through that. We're adding layers onto it and unfortunately that's what happened in my childhood and I know a lot of us that were born in the 70s went through that. In fact, we always have these little social media memes where we survived right, and we did. But through that process I think it could have been better. I think I could have turned out maybe different if someone would have had a little bit higher emotional IQ, someone who can look at the situation and not respond to it but defuse it.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

So with that childhood I went into the military right out of high school. In fact, my confidence was so low and I was so traumatized from growing up in an environment that wasn't encouraging and uplifting to me. I turned down a basketball scholarship and I joined the army. And when I went in the army, of course my family was devastated. They didn't understand why. They wanted to know why I turned down a perfectly good scholarship to go in the army. That didn't make any sense. What they didn't realize is what I'd been going through and then I didn't have the confidence to go to college to. I didn't feel like I can make those grades. In fact, in high school I was a terrible student because I was never really there emotionally. If I got a C plus man, I was high-fiving people in the hallway. I mean I was that guy. But I was also an athlete and that was kind of a hint or it should have been a hint for all those that were around me when I was growing up. I excelled in sports because it was a good escape and it was the ability for me to go and be me within a different setting.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

But within my own life, when I had to sit down and concentrate, I was always in fight or flight. In other words, you don't really retain good information when you're always in survival mode. So I won't go too in depth on that. I do treat a lot of children in the clinic. I do counseling type acupuncture, where we're talking about problems as we're working through them, and I do work hand in hand with local therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Believe it or not, some of them are patients of mine. But they also refer patients into me because we find that there's good results with acupuncture If it can knock down cortisol levels and stress levels. There's little bleeps of normalcy in the mind and that fight or flight starts to start. It fades and in fact that's something that helped me, but I'll discuss that here in just a few moments.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Back to joining the army instead of going to college. When I went into the military, my traumatized childhood made the military seem like it was going to the park. To give you an idea, basic training was. It wasn't bad at all. I didn't understand why other soldiers that were new, just like I was. They were crying, they were breaking down, they wanted to go home and all these big men were yelling at us. And well, I was used to being yelled at and that was my comfort zone. So if you'd like to take notes, during this video, I'm giving you a little little hints here and there. If someone is used to being screamed and yelled at and they act perfectly calm with it, you may want to lean in a little bit closer and see what they're doing, see what's going on. That was something that was normal for me. So the military, the training, the physical training, the psychological training they were all very welcome to me. My body was already conditioned as an athlete to go through the physical part of it, but the psychological part was something that turned out being rough, and what I mean by that is being deployed.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Spending several years in the army, I'd seen different situations and been in different theaters what we call of the world, where you see things that you probably shouldn't see. You see things and do things that they don't quite mesh with civilian life, but that's what you do as a soldier and that's what you do in the military, and I can honestly say I was able to help a lot of people with my military service and that gives me good gratification and makes me feel positive about my service. But in turn, the psychological effects of it, along with my childhood, started creating, I would say, a big storm. So as a young adult, I never got to mature emotionally. I went straight in the military and was told how to mature emotionally, which was a fake structure.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

When someone gives you a structure like the military does, it's easy to take it on. So, becoming that mindset, knowing what to wear every day, knowing how to polish your boots, knowing how to iron your uniforms, knowing how to be on time Ten minutes prior always military If you're not early, you're late. So all these things where to eat, what to eat all that stuff is provided. It's a structure. The military provides a really good structure, and then you learn the psychology of how to navigate the military, the egos, all the things that can go on.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

I'm going to pause it. We'll start over, I'm sorry. I think all the things that can go on yeah, all the things that can go on as far as the structure, the psychology, all the things you gain from the military, well, it eventually goes away because you have to get out of the military. So I'm going to fold back one more time not fully matured as a teenager and psychologically or emotionally imbalanced military. If you think you're going to get emotional balance when you go in the military, that's a good one. We can discuss that one off to the side. If you want to send us some emails, go to our website, mabelbrookacupuncturecom. We'll get into those conversations personally, one-on-one. But I hope you don't find balance in the military and think that that's going to be normal from now on, because you're going to find this recoil, this impact, when you get back into the civilian world.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

And that's where my story really starts to clear up in a bad way. When I became a civilian, I realized that my structure was gone in the military and, emotionally speaking, I came apart. Unfortunately, I had never been together. I had taken on all these other structures that were given to me, growing up in a household where everything was structured strictly, and then growing up in the military, everything was structured both physically, emotionally, all of it put together. All that now gone. I was pretty much out flapping in the world, and the world is a vicious place. You have to make your own way. You have to make your own food, you have to make your own, you put your own clothes on, you have to buy your clothes, you have to fit into society and you have to do it not just physically and visually, materialistically, but emotionally. And that's where I started to fail and I didn't understand why, in fact, I started to drink. I was covering up my emotions with alcohol because I didn't really care if I drank enough, enough.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

And we see that in society, a lot People are using drugs. They're using things to disassociate, whether it's staying home and playing video games, whether it's overeating with sugar, whether it's very, very bad diets. Vices is what we used to call them and we still call them that things that we're holding on to, that give us comfort, when in fact, we should be able to find our own comfort, and the other thing that we should be able to do is understand when we're being emotionally compromised, or how to find calmness or peace emotionally. Now I ran into that. I was in Sarasota, florida, and I was working four to five different jobs. That's how I covered was. I tried not to sleep. I was having night terrors.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

My PTSD from what I'd seen in the military, my anxiety, my depression of not fitting into the civilian world all these things were starting to really collapse on me. They had happened previously, but now I was having to deal with them. It was a perfect storm and unfortunately, that's where we start to see a lot of suicide rates. The military has extremely high suicide rates, but it's not just the military. They're focused on as a special group, but we find this happening throughout society. We find it with first responders, we find it with healthcare providers, we find it with individuals who submerge themselves into a career field or a certain habit and then they fade away, but you never really get to know who that person is, because that individual they don't know who they are either. So what I have found is a lot of therapy, a lot of work.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

A lot of different approaches in medicine combined to help me understand emotions, to essentially gain an emotional IQ, not just for myself but for my patients. When patients come in, many times they'll have something going on emotionally that's imbalanced, usually with a physical pain, a problem with diet, a problem with sleep, like insomnia. All those things have an emotional tie. They're rooted in something. Maybe that isn't settled in the mind, but I also find internal organ systems that are imbalanced. For example, we know that fear, long-term fear from trauma will affect kidney function. You can see this with how the body responds to long-term fear or long-term abuse. We can discuss all that more in detail. If you like, shoot an email at us and we'll do a video just based on fear and that emotion trauma. But there's also many other emotions that affect different organ systems and I'd like to cover a group of those today before we get detailed into one specifically, as mentioned, the kidneys, fear the liver, anger and depression those emotions affect the organs but those organs will also create those emotions.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

The lungs, we know, is affected by grief. We know intestinal problems can be the inability of letting something go, something that's hurt you in the past or something that is really personal to you that you've just held onto for years can create digestive disorders. The emotion of worry and overthinking affects our digestion, our stomach and our spleen. The spleen in Chinese medicine is actually the pancreas in Western medicine. So we see people that are caught up in worry and overthinking and that's a comfort they're looking for and usually they'll find it with sweet things like sugar and essentially it turns into a nation of diabetics.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

And we're seeing that going on today, where so many people are overwhelmed, they worry, they overthink and after COVID they don't even know what their future looks like anymore because everything is kind of busted up their foundation of what's going to happen tomorrow. Everything can change so fast. It's a type of trauma. So people started eating over COVID. The COVID wait is what I hear people say and what it is is. They got into bad habits, they worried, they were sitting around, they were stagnant, their mind was being compromised emotionally with fear and anxiety and their jobs. Everything changed. So the heart. The heart is directly affected by joy as well as sadness when we're hurt.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

How these organs respond to the emotions. It's also reversed. If you have an organ problem, you'll manifest those emotions. We're wired that way and a lot of people don't understand that their emotions are directly tied to their health. Not to mention a lot of them don't know their decisions are being made in an emotion, not in what they really want. If you ever had those individuals in your life, you say you want to go out to dinner and they're like, yeah, where do you want to go? I don't know where do you want to go. No, where do you want to go. They're afraid, they don't want to say something wrong. They're not actually making decisions based on what they want. Now you ask a kid what a kid wants and they'll tell you they want McDonald's. They know what they want because they haven't learned that fear, that trauma, isn't affecting their decision-making process or the thought process. So understanding where emotions are, where they go, how they affect the body, is something that I do in great detail. One of the first things I did when I finished medical school was I created a television show and that was in Sarasota, florida, and that was me trying to express, as a veteran.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

How do we identify emotions and emotional imbalances? How do we identify when we're stuck in the emotion of fear, stuck in worry? In other words, we worry day and night. If we're so worried, how are we present of our situation now, in the emotion of fear, stuck in worry, in other words, we worry day and night. If we're so worried, how are we present of our situation now? If we're worried about something, it's usually we're worried about the future.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Many times, that's the biggest lie we can tell ourselves. It's the biggest deceit is we're worried about something happening and that takes away our moment. Now we're worried about things that usually never happen, and that's sad because we I guess it would be better to say we have whole warehouses of data in our brain of all the things that can possibly go wrong, but we never open those filing cabinets because they never really go wrong into detail. We're worried about flying because the plane may crash, or the one that I had to use a lot to help family members understand how to identify trauma or emotion in another family member, because the family member maybe doesn't know what they're doing is someone has a car accident, so they get up every day and they leave their driveway.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

They go down the street. They always make a left at the stoplight and then they make a right at the next stoplight and then they're at work. Well, they leave their driveway. One day they go to the first intersection, they get t-boned. Their life changes in a split second. Someone doesn't stop at the light, or maybe they didn't see the light and their car is destroyed. They've got whiplash, there's pain associated with something that just turned the world upside down, and it's not like they seen it coming, it blindsided them. In other words, everything that has stable and has worked for years has been destroyed. Their pattern, their process is now broken. Now they'll recover, they'll get a new car, hopefully they got insurance and they've got all those fun things going on. But the physical repercussions can last a lifetime, the psychological ramifications even longer. But these individuals sometimes don't even know that they're acting out of trauma, that they're in survival mode, that they're in fight or flight.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

But a family member may realize it real quick. Say, a family member joins that individual months after the accident that they just had. You know it's gone, it's in the past. They've went to PT, they've come to see me with acupuncture, we've worked through the musculoskeletal issues, and then a family member gets in the car with them because they're going to go out to dinner. And on the way to dinner it's that same pattern that they would take on their way to work, but they completely avoid the intersection where they had the accident. In fact they will block around it. Where they had the accident, in fact, they will block around it, they just avoid. They start avoiding that intersection. In fact they avoid everything at that intersection and they don't even know it.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Now that's when someone gets trapped but a family member starts to recognize or notice hey, why don't you just make a left and go straight? Why are you going around the block? You know, just taking the scenic route. You know I like it this way better. I don't know what it is, I just I don't like going there. What we start to notice is it's not just an intersection. Then the car that hit him was bright red.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Now their anxiety goes up whenever they see a bright red car while they're driving in traffic and all of a sudden they're focused on those bright red cars and they're all over the interstate. So they no longer want to take the interstate, they don't want to get on the highway. They start avoiding certain areas altogether. They avoid all traffic areas. They start going through neighborhoods, they start avoiding anything that can possibly make them feel uncomfortable, and that in itself would be a trauma, a long lasting trauma, and a trauma that gets worse. It snowballs. So with every passing month something closes in on their life. They keep their world keeps getting smaller and smaller, because they're avoiding and it's not always a conscious thought that they're doing this, it's something else. It's their fight or flight, it's their fear. It's that worry that starts to creep in and they start to limit themselves. And this is how we start to see people close up their world and they don't want to leave the house anymore after a while, because everything becomes a threat. That's just one example of what we would look for as a family member, maybe riding with them, or a family member that we've realized that they don't want to leave the house anymore. And that's where we have to dig in and we have to say hey, what's going on? Maybe you should get some therapy, maybe we should look deeper into this.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

It doesn't mean the individual's weak. It just means they're responding to trauma. That's a natural, healthy reaction. You stick your hand in fire and you get burned. You don't keep doing it. You learn to avoid that. You don't want to do that over and over. So whatever may cause us pain or trauma or change our world, sometimes we start avoiding and that is a big flag. It's a big indicator that you need to get into therapy. You need to talk to a therapist or a counselor. It's not a weakness to get into therapy, you need to talk to a therapist or a counselor. It's not a weakness, it's normal. It's normal for us to go talk to someone and ask for help.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

But a big job that I have here as far as working with patients is when they come in with trauma, going through it myself personally, I pick it up pretty quick. We have intake forms. We have a process when we do consultations where we start to figure that out and start to narrow things down. And many times I'll bring things to a patient's attention and they'll say, whoa, I never thought of that, I never knew I was doing that. And the other times is when they bring their significant other, their spouse, in and I'll point these things out and the spouse is going.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

That's true, you're living in fear, you're living in worry. You, and that's true, you're living in fear, you're living in worry, you're overwhelmed by something that no longer exists. How do we help you move past it? So, going over emotional disorders, imbalances, that's something that I have personally lived from my childhood to my early adulthood as well as a veteran and living in the civilian world Acupuncture and oriental medicine gave me a different perspective on it.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

I won't say that that alone was what helped me. It made a big difference in my life, but the combination of individuals who specialized in understanding where I was in my emotions and how to work me out of those situations. And there is one that stands out above all the rest and that's my faith in the Lord. When I finally couldn't handle it anymore, I cried out to the Lord. Because when my alcohol didn't work anymore, when my running didn't work anymore, with the multiple jobs, overworking, workaholics yes, you're looking at trauma, believe it or not. When people won't come home or they just got to stay with it, I mean money. Money shouldn't cost you your health. You shouldn't be working that hard. There's other things that you can do to live a peaceful life, but when we see people running, that's another identifier.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Those individuals in my past were really, really detrimental. They were other veterans that helped me, that stepped up, just going through that process, finding that moment that I needed to ask for help, to cry out to the Lord. Those were big changes, those were big steps as far as understanding. I needed help, which is that's needed. You need to know that there's a problem. Helping you identify that problem friends and family, therapists, counselors, myself, people like me and then what steps to take to move forward, to battle it, to start fighting back, to not give in to that ever-shrinking world that sometimes comes with our trauma in life.

Dr. DeWayne Baugus:

Well, if you have any questions about that, if you'd like to know more details about how our body is physically affected, how our mind, about how our body is physically affected, how our mind can be affected, how we hold on to things and how it can really limit our life, send us an email, shoot us something on our website, https://www. maplebrookacupuncturecom. Go to that website, check us out or contact us here by phone, and I'm always very ready and happy to help others struggling through emotional imbalances so you can have a better life. Well, I'm Dr DeWayne Baugus, with Balancing Life and Medicine, and I look forward to the next video. Take care, guys.

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