Calm Clarity

Description

Author of the viral Medium piece, “Poor and Traumatized at Harvard,” Due Quach shares her Calm Clarity program to show readers how to deal with toxic stress and adversity.

We often don’t realize how much control we have over our thoughts, feelings, and actions–on some days, the most minor irritation can upset us, but on others, we are in our best form and can rise to challenges with grace. These fluctuations depend on the neural networks firing in our brains, and we have the power to consciously break hardwired thought patterns. Due Quach developed an intimate understanding of the brain during her personal journey of healing from post-traumatic stress disorder.
     According to Quach, people function in three primary emotional states: Brain 1.0, Brain 2.0, and Brain 3.0. In Brain 1.0, people act out of fear and self-preservation. Brain 2.0 involves instant gratification and chasing short-term rewards at the expense of long-term well-being. Brain 3.0 is a state of mind that Quach calls “Calm Clarity,” in which people’s actions are aligned with their core values. As Quach confronted PTSD and successfully weaned herself off medication, she learned how to activate, exercise, and strengthen Brain 3.0 like a muscle. In Calm Clarity, she draws on the latest scientific research and ancient spiritual traditions alike to show us how we too can take ownership of our thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to be our best selves.”Calm Clarity tells Due Quach’s story of transformation, weaving her rich life experience with in-depth scientific insights from across diverse fields. Due has created practical and accessible tools for readers to not just be inspired by her transformation, but to set off and experience their own profound changes as well.”  
—Sharon Salzberg, New York Times bestselling author of Real Love and Real Happiness

“Our world is in need of healing because there is so much pain and negativity being transmitted. Calm Clarity provides a powerful, practical, science-based approach to healing and transforming our pain and cultivating compassion to enable others to do so also. The compelling story of Due Quach’s personal modern-day metamorphosis from a skeptic into a mystic will touch the hearts and minds of seekers everywhere, and her ongoing efforts to bring these tools to low-income communities to end the transmission of toxic stress and trauma is inspiring.”
—Richard Rohr, bestselling author of Falling Upward

“Quach offers an extensive exploration of neuroscience and trauma resolution that led her from a struggling beginning with her impoverished Vietnamese family, to Harvard, a Wharton MBA, and business success. She delves into the importance of meditation, ancient wisdom teachings, and the latest scientific research in transforming ‘outer success’ into a deep inner peace and calm clarity. This is an extraordinary work by an extraordinary woman.”
—Allan Lokos, author of Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living

“Due’s rich personal narrative is interwoven with deep research into the way our brains work, offering lessons and tools that all of us should embrace for our own good and for the good of the world we live in.”
—Philip W. Lovejoy, Executive Director of the Harvard Alumni Association

“Calm Clarity is refreshingly readable, easily accessible, and understandable, a very valuable addition to contemporary books on transforming our minds and creating the foundation of a happy life.”
—Sylvia Boorstein, PhD, author of Happiness Is an Inside Job

“Imagine leading an organization where taking personal responsibility, having positive interpersonal relationships, performing at the highest level, and thinking creatively are commonplace. This is the future: Calm Clarity’s mixture of cognitive science, spirituality, and enlightened thinking are already transforming everything we know about life and work.”
—Howard Blumenthal, Visiting Scholar, The University of Pennsylvania

“Calm Clarity is an essential guide for the masses, to not only understand how the brain works in a simple but scientific way, but also to find a pathway to inner peace and a joyful life.”
—Tom Cronin, founder of The Stillness Project and producer of The Portal documentary film

“One of the best books I have ever read. Yes, this book is about rewiring your brain for greater wisdom and joy, but it also shares Due’s compelling story of resilience and grit, a very personal account of shifting from entanglement to enlightenment.”
—Rick Bellingham, EdD, CEO of iobility

“Calm Clarity captivates not only the mind, but also the heart, soul, and imagination. Due Quach skillfully interweaves scientific understanding with spiritual wisdom and grounds these important insights in everyday life by sharing how they enabled her inspiring personal journey of healing and transformation. This book can help anyone looking for effective tools to manage anxiety and their inner critic.”
—Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, coauthor of Wired to Create

“Calm Clarity is the powerful story of a woman’s journey from early chaos to a life of profound purpose. Combining the latest research on the brain with a skeptical dive into ancient spiritual wisdom, Due Quach develops an impressive program of ‘brain hacks.’ These tools can help all of us, especially those who have traumatic histories, to fashion a better life by thinking more clearly and more calmly.”
—Robert Kreider, former President and CEO of Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health

“Accessible yet deep, Calm Clarity helps readers achieve inner transformation, untangle emotional knots, and find clarity. This book is a revelatory and inspiring guide on the spiritual path that also helps people develop the leader inside them.”
—Patricio Barriga, CEO and President of Fagor America Inc.

“Calm Clarity is both inspiring and practical. Due Quach combines her incredible personal journey with a deep scientific exploration and practical tools to help people investigate their own paths. This book is for seekers, pragmatists and all those who are looking to live a deep, meaningful life.”
—Larry Schwartz, Founding Chair of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality

“Due Quach has given us an exceptional gift—she’s taken research on neuroscience and mindfulness and made it easy to understand. But more than that, she’s used this research to build a set of practices that will help you to optimize your nervous system and rise to the challenges you face. And she’s done this with a keen awareness of the social realities of our time. Highly recommended!”
—Paul Zelizer, founder of Awarepreneurs

“Quach has broken down complex neuroscience into an easily understandable three-stage framework, making it possible for anyone interested in personal fulfillment and joy to follow a simple path and attain success.”
—Krishna Pendyala, President of the Mindful Nation Foundation, Chief Empowerment Officer of ChoiceLadder Institute, and author of Beyond the Pig and the Ape

“Following Due on her journey is so inspiring that you can’t help but think about your own path and life’s purpose. Her fascinating insights into current brain science and ancient Buddhist teachings provide the foundation for her Calm Clarity program, which all of us can use to live happier, more fulfilling lives.”
—Robin White Owen, creative producer, MediaCombo, Inc.

“The book is a tour de force—really well written, clear, easy to follow, and inspiring.”
—Tom Tritton, former president of Haverford College and the Chemical Heritage FoundationDue Quach (pronounced “Zway Kwok”) is the founder and CEO of Calm Clarity, a social enterprise that uses science to help people master their mind and be their best self. A refugee from Vietnam and a graduate of Harvard College and the Wharton MBA program, Quach overcame the long-term effects of poverty and trauma by turning to neuroscience and meditation. After building a successful international business career in management consulting and private equity investments, Quach created the Calm Clarity Program, which is accessible to people of all backgrounds. She now leads Calm Clarity workshops in inner-city high schools, university lecture halls, and corporate executive board rooms alike. She is also the founding chair and executive director of the Collective Success Network, a nonprofit that supports low-income, first-generation college students in achieving their academic, personal, and professional aspirations. The Collective Success Network collaborates with the wider business community to create innovative approaches to foster socioeconomic diversity and inclusion. After living and traveling all around the world, Quach is once again a proud resident of Philadelphia, her hometown.1.

A Traumatic Start

Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.-Richard Rohr

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.-Helen Keller

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.-Rumi

Let’s face it. A lot of terrible things happen every single day to bring people into Brain 1.0. No one is immune from tragedy. We all live in a world that traumatizes us and makes us feel like victims of broken systems, vulnerable to exploitation by con artists, criminals, and crooked politicians. Our environments are full of temptations for drugs, alcohol, food, retail therapy, and other pleasures and thrills as a form of easy escape. At the same time, the world is also full of wonder, majesty, and inspiration that naturally bring people into Brain 3.0. In every corner of the Earth, people are working hard to improve life for their families and to make a difference in their communities.

The fact that the misery and the awesomeness of our planet are not evenly spread out has always been very hard for me to come to terms with. The more I learned about how unfair the distribution of resources can be and how unequal the access to opportunity can be, the more my sense of outrage grew. Seeing signs that the system is not only rigged against the poor and powerless but also set up to exploit them has always triggered my Inner Godzilla.

Being born on Earth is like a lottery. A small lucky proportion are born into loving families blessed with inner resources (like education, emotional intelligence, and resilience) and a degree of financial stability, where parents are generally able to shelter children from the harsh realities of this world for as long as possible, give them a safety net in case they fall, and then coach and equip them to prosper in their careers and to raise a family of their own. Loving, caring, “privileged” families like these naturally develop and pass on Brain 3.0 from generation to generation. But a lot of people aren’t lucky. The vast majority of people, like me, are born into families that cannot shield them from horrors. Too many parents are so traumatized that they get trapped in Brain 1.0 and can’t help transmitting their pain and suffering to their children just by role modeling what for them are normal behaviors and expectations.

As I dive deeper into Brain 1.0, please keep in mind that what I mean by Brain 1.0 is a pattern of neuronal network firing rather than a specific part of the brain. In the Brain 1.0 pattern, the amygdala, a part of the brain that is involved in reading emotions and looking for signs of danger and threat, is highly activated and puts the entire body into a state of “red alert” that scientists refer to as hypervigilance, a prolonged state of anxiously looking out for danger and threats and not being able to relax (a.k.a. freeze-fight-flight mode). Whenever the body is in this very strong state of stress, there is reduced blood flow to the frontal lobes that help us carry out higher-order mental processes; thus we have less “processing capacity.” This is why when we are afraid and anxious, it can be nearly impossible to think clearly, take in and process information, and make sound decisions.

According to the Sanctuary Institute, a pioneer in the area of trauma-informed care, “trauma is defined as an experience in which a person’s internal resources are not adequate to cope with external stressors.” In the Sanctuary Model developed by Sandra Bloom, the experience of trauma can fall along a wide continuum that includes discrete events as well as ongoing, cumulative, and less tangible experiences such as poverty, racism, discrimination, and neglect. The Sanctuary Model also reframes many of the behavioral symptoms related to trauma as the misapplication of maladaptive survival skills developed to cope with adverse experiences.

In psychiatry, for a person to receive a diagnosis of PTSD, the trauma needs to be related to a direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violation. However, I have found that many people carry painful emotional scars from circumstances that may not fit this hurdle of being life threatening. When we are young children, we are completely dependent on adults for our well-being. Therefore, not having attentive parents, caregivers, and teachers; not having a sense of belonging at home, at school, or in the community; not getting sufficient emotional nurturing; or generally not having the sense of safety and security needed for solid emotional development can be overwhelming and prompt us to turn to maladaptive coping strategies that can later get in the way of our well-being and ability to form healthy and nurturing relationships as adults. Therefore people sometimes use the terms “little-t trauma” or “micro trauma” to refer to distressing experiences that are not life threatening but still inflict psychological pain and suffering.

When we experience trauma or long-term exposure to very stressful conditions, our brains, minds, and lives get reorganized as if the trauma were still going on, such that the trauma contaminates every new encounter and event. The amygdala stays hyperactivated as a “default” state, and the functioning of the frontal lobes becomes disrupted and impaired. Since the left frontal lobe is involved in the experience of positive emotion, when Brain 1.0 disrupts its functioning long-term, we can easily get trapped in a chronic negative emotional state. Furthermore, any bodily sensations that remind people of the trauma easily become overwhelming, so they often adapt by subconsciously dissociating as a way to block, suppress, and numb the painful sensations and memories.

In The Body Keeps the Score, a groundbreaking book providing a scientific perspective on healing trauma, psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk explains that “traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” He further explains, “People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic-they develop a fear of fear itself.”

What’s even more sobering is that the negative impact of trauma is not confined to the person who experienced the trauma-it is transmitted across generations. Research has found that experiencing trauma can cause changes in gene expression that can be passed on to offspring. These changes result in an increased risk factor for developing post-traumatic stress disorder. I can testify from firsthand experience that children born to parents who are traumatized have a high likelihood of being exposed to trauma and of seeing traumatic experiences as normal. Unfortunately, the impact of trauma in childhood-what scientists refer to as “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs)-is even worse than in adults because it negatively affects the development of a child’s brain and body in ways that make him or her more vulnerable to chronic illnesses like asthma and diabetes, as well as depression, anxiety, and addiction as they grow up. Unless the cycle is broken, traumatized people often get locked into Brain 1.0 as a way of life, and then pass on this pattern of brain development and activation to the next generation.

While many people have heard of trauma, what many don’t realize is just how widespread trauma is, and how close to home it can be. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a study of a large sample of 17,337 people insured by Kaiser Permanente in the late 1990s asked participants whether as a child they had experienced any of of the following ACE indicators, such as “experiencing physical, sexual, or emotional abuse; experiencing physical or emotional neglect; witnessing domestic violence in the home; living with someone who abused substances, was mentally ill, or who was imprisoned/sentenced to serve time; and experiencing parental separation or divorce.” The findings revealed that approximately 64 percent, or two out of three people, had suffered at least one adverse childhood experience and that 12.5 percent, or one out of eight people, reported four or more ACEs.

Further, the data unequivocally showed that participants with higher ACE scores had higher rates of obesity, chronic disease, mental health problems, and addiction disorders. Experiencing at least four ACEs became recognized as the threshold for severe trauma because the risk of developing serious health issues and engaging in risky behaviors increases dramatically at that point. According to ACEStooHigh.com, for the group of people who experienced four or more ACEs (and yes, I fall into this category), the risk of developing chronic pulmonary lung disease increases by 390 percent, hepatitis by 240 percent, and depression by 460 percent, and the risk of committing suicide increases by 1,220 percent compared to people with an ACE score of zero. Furthermore, the site states, “people with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and seven times more likely to be alcoholic” and “people with an ACE score of 6 or higher are at risk of their life span being shortened by 20 years.” What researchers found most remarkable was that the participants in the study were relatively affluent and educated white-collar professionals who had health insurance. About 75 percent of the participants had either attended some college or earned a college or graduate degree and about 75 percent of the participants were Caucasian. No one expected that the ACE rates would be so high in this demographic group.

I couldn’t help wondering as I looked at the data: what would the ACE scores look like in the area where I grew up? Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to know. After I returned to Philadelphia, I learned that a group of institutions had already created a task force to conduct the Philadelphia Urban ACE Study. The findings were published at the end of 2013, just as I was getting ready to conduct the first pilot test for the Calm Clarity Program with public high school students in Philadelphia. In this study, the researchers added five new indicators to include traumatic experiences that are common among an urban population but were not included in the original CDC study: experiencing racism, witnessing violence, living in an unsafe neighborhood, living in foster care, and experiencing bullying. The findings showed that 83 percent, or eight out of ten people, reported at least one ACE using the updated indicators (using only the original ACE indicators, the number would be approximately 70 percent, a little bit higher than the Kaiser Permanente study) and that 37 percent, or nearly four out of ten people, had four or more ACEs using the updated indicators (using the original indicators, that number would be approximately 22 percent, almost double the rate in the Kaiser Permanente study).

The report also included a map showing the percentage of the population with four or more ACEs by zip code, which confirmed what I suspected all along: the area of Philadelphia where I grew up and currently live is in the top bracket, with 45 percent or more of the population having a score of four or more ACEs. These revelations from the ACE studies made me ask a few questions: For people in communities experiencing these rates of trauma, wouldn’t they need to have such a strong Brain 1.0 to sense and navigate the many dangers in the surrounding environment that Brain 1.0 could become their default state? Knowing these numbers are so high, is it even possible to help people in these situations shift into Brain 3.0? If yes, then how? Then it occurred to me that the primary place where I could find answers to these questions was in my own life story. How did I come out of Brain 1.0?

For me, growing up in an environment that put people in Brain 1.0 was like fighting a steep uphill battle on my own, both in the external world and inside my head. The biggest danger was always the loss of hope-which nearly died whenever my inner demons got the upper hand. Yet by somehow managing to emerge from this gauntlet of adversity in one piece, I’ve come to embrace my experiences as serving a purpose: resistance training for the soul. For me, overcoming adversity opened a path to enlightenment, which I now think of simply as the ability to shine light into darkness. Early on, there were many moments in which I let darkness disempower me, but I eventually found a way to transform these experiences into wisdom, compassion, and understanding. What happened as I conquered my inner demons was that my emotional and mental immune system got so much stronger and I developed the ability to acknowledge and do something about the ills of our world without getting infected by them. As terrible as trauma is, my life shows that it can be a vehicle for transformation.

Born into Generations of Displacement

For me, being a refugee means having a family tree with a lot of holes and gaps that can’t be filled in. It’s generally very hard for children to make sense of war, but it was much harder for me to do so growing up because I knew that if the Vietnam War had not happened, my family probably wouldn’t have ended up as refugees in the United States, in a country where we had far more opportunities but no roots. Over the years, as I tried to trace my roots, I discovered that I couldn’t find any that went very deep. What I learned from piecing together the stories my parents and relatives had shared and placing them into the greater backdrop of world history was that several generations of my family were displaced by a series of wars over the past century. My ancestors didn’t get to settle down for long before they had to migrate again.

Assembling a clearer picture of my family’s history has enabled me to connect mental health issues, such as anxiety, various forms of addiction, and abusive controlling behavior, which have run in my family for at least four generations, to undiagnosed and untreated trauma. Learning how war, violence, and displacement contributed to a family culture where being in Brain 1.0 was normal has enabled me to be more compassionate and forgiving toward my parents, other relatives, and myself for the amount of trauma and suffering we have yet to heal. I hope that sharing about my family’s past will encourage more people to examine and compassionately attend to the deep psychological wounds that their own family may be nursing.US

Additional information

Dimensions	1.0000 × 6.0000 × 9.0000 in
Imprint	TarcherPerigee
ISBN-13	09780143130970
ISBN-10	0143130978
Author	Due Quach
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BUS107000, SEL024000
Subjects	neurology, self care, science books, exercise, gratitude, motivational books, positive thinking, money, clarity, executive functioning, PTSD, consciousness, consultant, stress management, thoughts, business books, mindful living, mindfulness books, overachiever, brain science, consulting, mind hacking, happiness, mental health, BUS107000, business, self help, mindfulness, stress, anxiety, meditation, science, SEL024000, self improvement, motivation, research, resilience, Emotions, Fear, harvard, confidence, feelings, Brain, neuroscience