May 7, 2020 • 40 mins
In January, Dani hit the road for a series of live conversations with some of her favorite writers, artists, and thinkers. Her first stop: Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she sat down with renowned trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, for a discussion about how we move forward after traumatic events—a topic nobody could have predicted would apply to each and every one of us just a few months later.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets Listeners. It's Danny. I'm very excited to be
sharing a special bonus episode of Family Secrets with you all.
(00:21):
At the end of January. To celebrate the paperback publication
of my memoir Inheritance, I did a series of live
podcast events around the country and the first of these
was at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with
the renowned trauma expert and author of The Body Keeps
the Score, Dr Bessel vander Kolke. After all, when it
(00:42):
comes to family secrets, trauma is inevitably involved. But when
Bessel and I sat down for our conversation, we none
of us had any idea that we were about to
enter a time of collective trauma. This will be a
two part special bonus episode my conversation with Bessel today
(01:03):
and then we'll share the conversation with the audience in
Portsmouth tomorrow. Good evening, everyone, it's great to be here.
(01:23):
It's great to be here with Bessel. It's amazing to
see this turnout on a late January evening in Portsmouth,
UM or anywhere really, um in this gorgeous theater. So
I was I was thinking about I've been thinking for
a while about coming here and doing this special live
(01:43):
episode of UM of Family Secrets with Bessel as my guest.
And I was thinking about, I love full circle moments,
and this feels like one to me. About three winters ago,
um I reached out to Bessel. We have a mutual friend,
(02:04):
the yogi and yoga philosopher Stephen Cope, and um I
was in uh complicated state. I had recently made the
discovery about a huge family secret of my own after
casually doing a DNA test, recreationally doing a DNA DNA
(02:24):
test the way I think of it, and discovered in
pretty short order that my beloved dad who raised me
had not been my biological father, which was something that
had never entered my mind. And so I was in
this state of really almost a kind of relationship to
(02:45):
my own self, my my identity, my body, my face
in the mirror. UM that felt traumatizing, um and shocking.
And I was walking around really feeling the physical symptoms
of that, the dizziness, the lightheadedness, the floatiness, and UM.
(03:07):
So I reached out to Bessel and he very kindly
agreed to meet me and we spent an afternoon talking
by a fire on a winter day, and I couldn't
have imagined, as it's been true in my life so
many times, that it would just be three short years
later and I would have synthesized this um metabolized this
(03:28):
experience into a book, Inheritance, and that then I would
simultaneously create this podcast, which was a happy accident. Um
just really briefly, I wrote this book about my family secret,
about my being the family secret, and then all of
(03:48):
a sudden people started telling me their's. And the very
first time that that happened, it was a friend of mine,
the Buddhist mindfulness teacher, Sylvia Borstein, and she had just
read the manuscript of Inheritance, and it prompted her to
tell me a story of a family secret of hers.
And I was on the other end of the phone,
(04:08):
and I thought, I wish I was recording this. And
that is the entire way that this podcast was born.
But one of the things that I've noticed in now
to going on three seasons of the podcast as thirty.
This new season is launching next week. It will be
thirty guests that I've spoken to, which is not it's
not really a scientific sample. But I've noticed a few things,
(04:31):
and one of the things that I've noticed is that
every guest of mine, at some point or another, no
matter what their story is, does use the word trauma.
And I guess I wanted to begin by there's a
there's a line from The Body Keeps the Score which
I just reread, uh and re underlined and felt new
(04:54):
things about. I think The Body Keeps the Score is
a book that you can probably come back to multiple
times and life and read it differently and have different
um different moments in it and different concepts in it
that are underscored. But I figured that you wrote the
book probably in around and you wrote that we're over
(05:17):
ten years. Yeah, you didn't write it in but as
you were writing this um at this point you wrote,
we're on the verge of becoming a trauma conscious society.
So I guess I wanted to ask you what you
meant by that then, and how does that sit with
you now seven years later. Well, I think that's a
(05:40):
very tough question because believe in this sharply divided world,
and at the same time that I no hundreds of
people around the country who are doing amazing work. I
know people who have these yoga programs in the Baltimore
Into City schools. I know people who have Shakespeare the
(06:01):
Kansas City, Kansas prisons, and just amazing programs, singing with soldiers,
working with horses and people are easy. There's enormous layers
of consciousness and really getting it. And then our mainstream
society becomes more and more rooted in there's destructive capitalist
(06:22):
world of how can we make more money and destroy
about a little bit faster so that we can make
more money, which is just a stolishing including medicine itself.
Of course, psychiatry very much so, of living with a
crazy diagnostic system, giving people labels that don't make any sense,
that have no scientific validity. And at the same time
(06:46):
there's other group of people who don't get paid by insurance,
who you know, who are not part of the system.
Be the discovering a lot and they see the difference
becomes a larger and larger in a way UM and
I don't get it, it's very much, but you see,
so it becomes right now, So it becomes larger and larger.
And yet at the same time there's more and more
(07:08):
of an identification of UM and experience, a piece of history,
a parent and aspect of childhood, um as as being
identified as trauma. More and more, it seems, I mean,
your book has it came out three years ago, four
(07:32):
years ago, and there's a reason why your book is
occupied the top three spots of the New York Times
Paperback nonfiction bestseller list for an entire year. Um, people
in airports are thinking, I know what I'm gonna read.
I'm not gonna read Daniel Steele. I'm not going to
read Danny Shapiro. No. Also because it's the next book
(07:54):
you read. You know. So what what do you think
that that that hung is about. That's again, it's a
tricky question. I see it, and I see so I'm
so impressed that I live in a particular world. People
ask me all the time what was happening in the world.
I said, I don't know. I just know the people
(08:17):
I know and know the people who come to see me,
the people who I hang out with, the people who
want to share their work with me, and I meet
always enlightened, very thoughtful, very mindful people. At the same
thing to people I don't see like you on your
stories about I said, and I don't know how large
this is, you know, and so I don't know, but
(08:39):
I know that that there's many places, almost every place
that I go to. I meant, people who do amazing
things in terms of getting into your body, telling the truth,
speaking openly, trying to lead an authentic life. Interestingly, also
in Silicon Valley, which is the hubble of the world
(09:00):
in some ways, where there's all the money and all
these immature people doing amazing things and crazy things, and
yet people are also really searching for how do we
keep ourselves together, how do we pay attention to each other?
And so there's a very serious effort to understand how
we can make safe, safe and energizic places for each other.
(09:25):
My mind just went to the quote unquote wellness movement
as something that's kind of adjacent to this in a
way where I think we, meaning we who think about
these things are thinking about the body more and more
as the place that is the locus of where it
(09:48):
all gets expressed. I mean, there's a moment in your
book probably several where you talk about god instincts, right
or And I remember when I was reading that thinking,
I have never in my life had a got instinct
and followed it and regretted it, and I have had
got instincts and ignored them, and that that leads to
(10:11):
you know, walls and trouble. I think, but that the
idea that we're listening listening to our body is more Yes,
we are, you know, in certain circles at the same
time that we know the importance of the body and
being saved together. Our published school systems are abolishing um
(10:33):
recess our bodies, theater are abolishing sports and giving kids
tests to substitute for that. One of the Obama's worst
appointments are you, Duncan, who who just ramped a little
test gets wrote completely ignoring the natural thing that the
kidneys to do is to play at the horse about
and to feel your body RelA ship other bodies. And
(10:56):
so you have these layers that live side by side.
Um um. I don't know the prevalence of idolt. I
see a lot of good things happening, but I see
a lot of bad things happening at the same time.
Let me, for example, the dean of my medical school
UH called me and said, I've read your book, and
(11:19):
I think you can really help us because we have
a terrible problem with burnout more of our doctors, law
of suicide, people leaving people being horribly depressed. And can
you help us? I said, I'd love to h and
then she said, but you cannot change the system. I guess,
(11:42):
so where should I help you if you're unwilling to
actually look at the fact that you're only allowed to
see people for seven minutes and not from a long
term relationship with them, which is the well spring of
human wellness is long term relationships, as your books A
beautifully talks about. You know, we're basically law people who
like to belong to groups of people, and that's our essence.
(12:04):
And if you live in a completely alienated, uh corporate world,
all the connection get ignored and loyalty doesn't get rewarded
and you're not on the right track. Well, and of
course you're talking about the ground of childhood as as
where so many tracks get laid that once they're laid
(12:28):
are the question really is how we're able to or
whether we're able to adapt to act to have efficacy right. Um.
I think generally, if you have resources, you can find
all kinds of ways to really change yourself. You do it.
Change yourself is actually engage in things that dive actually
(12:51):
contradict what you were. You're holding your body. So when
you're stiffened up, taking tang or dancing lessons would be
very good. Be just justin tune with somebody else. I
talked a lot about singing. We know a lot about
the new ablehold. You're singing about us to the brain.
(13:12):
Singing together is marvelous thing. It really makes you feel
cheerful and the mystic and connected. But we don't sing anymore.
You can still go to singing camp or take a
workshops where we do sing. So when you say resources,
what do you what do you mean by resources? Like,
if you have the resources, you have resources? What what
(13:32):
are we? What are resources? You need money, you need
time off, you need to access, have access to stuff.
And maybe a little community like enforcement, maybe a rich
community in terms of resources. There are yoga classes, their
tychi classes, they're choirs, their places and double a A meetings.
(14:00):
These were people can come to and actually meet each
other and get to know each other. Maybe that's why
people moved to place like like it needs to be around,
it needs to be visible. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. We were talking backstage about
(14:24):
one of the patients that you write about in your
book who really didn't have the kindergarten teacher, who really
had a very very difficult childhood. I mean one would
say not a lot of resources right available to her,
who ended up more than okay, you know, with a
with a with a very fulfilled life. How does that happen? See,
(14:46):
nothing is linear, you know, it's like that leads to death,
and that leads to death. But you say she had
no resources, which of what I said, But I said
it was horribly abused by both of her parents. But
a mid music together at home. And I think something
like making music together and just letting it hang out
and getting into his people can be enormously powerful to
(15:08):
just to get things you cannot lie and play music
that there's truthmaking and and getting the stone fight and
get doing it to write mom and stuff like that.
That's interesting. Tomorrow night, I'm going to be in New
York City and my guest is this UH singer songwriter
named Alison Moore. And Allison was I mean, she's she's
(15:34):
the daughter of two Nashville country singers. Father was an alcoholic.
They made music together, all of them. The two sisters
and the father and the mother, and then when she
was fourteen, her father shot and killed her mother and
then turned his gun against himself and committed suicide. And
(15:54):
I've thought a lot about Allison in preparation for talking
to her and her sister Shelby Lynn, who are both beauty,
beutiful singer songwriters, and I think a big part of
what had to have saved them in some way was
was music and the memory of the music that they
made with their with their parents when they were all together. Yeah,
(16:15):
I would think that, like we talk backstage about our
lived just backgrounds, I bet that yon Kipper services still
move you deeply, even though you may not practices. I
still love back data start like that from my background
and it's it's it's the it's the ground of um.
You know. I was. I was telling you that I
(16:37):
wrote this memoir called Devotion, and one of the things
that I discovered after it was published, I was expecting
because I because I was raised observant in a very
strict home, I was always envious of people who were
brought up with nothing because I thought that they just
meant we got to choose, you know, uh, with no guilt.
(16:58):
You know, you could just pick from the Smorga's board
of religions. And what I was struck by and learned
just from people responding to me to the book was
that the people who were brought up with nothing were
actually the most lost and confused in their spiritual life,
(17:19):
and that growing up with anything gave people either something
to remember or something to to rail against. But it
was something formative, living up with rules and structures. And
when they call liturgies, it's very important, and we will
believe in literature. You get up and every Saturday you
(17:41):
do a particular thing, and every fortune July you do
another thing, and you know what to look for, a
certain regularity to life, and little predictability and a little
thing of At that time, we're really to go to
devote ourselves to something that we do together, which oledge
of course, do you make noises together, you move together?
(18:04):
And I think being vased in something like that is
very important. You talk a lot about um action as being,
and you're you're talking particularly about um the kinds of
capital t traumas you know, as I think of them,
(18:27):
UM where someone is trapped or someone is in a
burning car and can't save the people around them, or
someone is violently attacked and can't move, and the inability
to take action somehow embeds itself and makes UM recovery
(18:48):
or reprocessing more complex. Or it's a combination of two things,
so that basically, when you're exposed to something horrenda's you're
automatically meant to move or meant to do something. If
at that point you don't move or do something, the
horror wors to trigger your brain to move, actually go
(19:11):
in a different direction, take a different path, take a
path into collapse and helplessness. So when people started messing
with you, the normal thing is like get the hell
away from me and to move. UM. The thing that
happens to many people has when something scary it happens,
they collapse and come forth. So it's the opposite of
(19:33):
fight or flight. Yeah right, it's we need to collapse
that keeps people going. So it's actually just I um.
I said. There's a program called Impact used to be
called model mugging where you train women who I think
it happens to many people, particularly women who have been abused.
(19:54):
They bodies stand to be collapsed of I can't do
anything or anything I'm good for it. And they teach
them martial arts and to fight and to recreate the
most scary thing into lives and to take action where
they couldn't take action before. To my mind, a beautiful
(20:16):
program to help people to get out of that physical
sense of helplessness. And you don't become a tough broad instead,
he just becomes become a person who walks through the
world with self confidence. Well, there's so much. I mean,
I was very struck by the story that you tell
(20:39):
very early in the book about family friends of yours
and their little boy who were very close to the
towers on nine eleven UM. And it was his first
day of school, I think. And um, so he saw
a lot as many people didn't many children did. And
(21:01):
his parents had you know, you visited parents. Um, we're
processing what they were processing. But it was a very loving, um,
safe grounded family environment. And actually and I walked through
clean up side on September fift They knew the rescue worker,
(21:22):
so we we were in the sten stuff. We did
something we didn't just talk about home and and and
and the boy came as well. So he then draws
a he makes a drawing and it's a drawing of
the buildings, and the buildings are on fire, and there
are there are people jumping from the buildings, and then
(21:46):
there's something that you can't quite make out at the
bottom of the drawing, and it's a black circle. And
you asked him what was his name? Um, what's what's
the boy's name? No? No, no, yeah, no, what's the
what's what's the blacks circle? And he says, that's a trampoline.
Is so moving? That's a tramp and and what you
(22:06):
describe as the way that he found an adaptation that
his his mind was able to was able to imagine
alternatives very much. Can they talk about your book? You
find out it's this horrendous piece of news, that dirty devastation.
Next thing, you go online and find out who that relative. Maybe,
(22:31):
so you immediately get to keep gear and do something
instead of pretending like, okay, didn't happen. Let me just
keep that very fooled, like everything is normal. You immediately
goes into action, including lying your bed and contemplating what
what you were going to do. But your own story
is it is a remarkable story about resilience itself. And
(22:55):
you use what you do best, which is finding words,
And you wish, said everybody, because finding words is a
beautiful thing. I felt, I've never been more grateful to
that this is what I do. Um, although I also
think it's kind of a chicken and egg situation, like
is this what I do? Because this was always the
(23:15):
story that was lurking, It's impossible to really pry them apart.
There's some way in which this was always the story
that was lurking beneath all the other stories. I always
wrote about family secrets. All my novels were centered around
the corrosive power of secrets and families. And then I
started writing memoirs. No one was more surprised than me.
(23:36):
Why was I writing memoirs. I wasn't particularly interested in
my own life, but I was digging for something, and
I was using my life sort of as a laboratory
to try to make inquiries into things that I was interesting. Interesting,
m you could make it interesting. Not everybody can do that,
you know, well, I was like trying to always put
(24:01):
together what belongs with what It always felt like a puzzle.
And then the answer to the biggest puzzle of all,
you know, the line and inheritance, where I write I
always knew there was a secret when I didn't know
the secret was me. That's right, I think that. And
so we're just finishing up our work book for a book,
and we invite people to write all the time. And
(24:23):
also my organized way to just start writing. Take a glass,
start writing about the glass. See what comes up. By
free writing, sooner or later, piece of yourself start getting
revealed much better than if you and I talked to
each other, because if I talked to you, I meanly
worried about better, you will like what I'm saying. But
(24:44):
I think I'm smart. But if you write to yourself
that critic concurce teme because I'm just going to write
some nonsense. You can't do that because you have to
make a living, do it. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. When I teach Larger treats
(25:06):
a couple of times a year, there's an exercise that
I love giving the group and it's based on a
book that came out in the eighties by a writer
named Joe Brainerd. And the book is called I Remember,
which are two of the most evocative words when put
together in the English language. If you begin with the
words I remember, you will finish that sentence and then
(25:27):
drop down a line and then begin again. I remember
dropped down the line. And then it becomes associative. And
I sit from where I sit, and I look out
at a room full of people and they're all writing.
No one stops, and and then they discover things. And
then I have them go back to their rooms that
night and say, now right, I don't remember you don't
(25:50):
necessarily shared it with people. That's the important Say yes,
you're right for yourself and find words for your inner world.
That it's actually your book, also your in this piece
of truth, and you're basically dumbfounded, and you talk about
my quotation from trauma that trauma is a known verbal experience,
and then you start finding words to begin to borgainize
(26:12):
you relationship to yourself, which is beautiful. Well, I I
quote you in in the book, and it's actually from
the interview that you did with Christa Tippett Um that
I was driving along and it absolutely just you stopped
me in my tracks, which was, Um, it's the nature
of trauma that it doesn't allow a story to be told.
And I realized I realized something interesting about writing about trauma.
(26:34):
Because when I began Inheritance, I started writing right away.
I was writing on index cards. I was trying to
remember because my brain was kind of injured a little bit,
so words, I thought, thoughts that I wanted to retain.
I was afraid I wouldn't be able to bring them
back or remember. And then I started actually writing, and
(26:55):
I wrote about two hundred pages as I was researching
and doing and then I had to go way because
my last book was coming out and I was traveling,
So I left the pages, which were pages I was
feeling okay about. And when I came back and I
reread them, my heart just sank because they were no good.
They were they were recursive. They were an exercise in
(27:20):
writing from trauma if the nature of trauma is that
it doesn't allow a story to be told. I was
returning again and again to the same questions without new
insight or new additions to those questions, which is, I think,
what when we tell stories in a state of trauma,
that's kind of what we're doing. And I kept on this,
(27:43):
the question I kept returning to over and over again,
what did my mother know? What did my father know?
And it wasn't going anywhere, and I realized, I think
poets can write directly from trauma. I think they're the
only but the prose prose can't come directly from that place.
(28:05):
It needs a tiny, little, full crumb of distance. When
I finally started again, I realized that I wanted to
write from a place where I could go into the past,
where I could be in the present of the story,
and where I could also make these leaps into I
(28:25):
wanted to hold the present, the past, and the future
in in in my hands and be able to I
wanted to be a storyteller, and I wanted to shape
order out of the chaos of the story, which is
what I do. And one of the insights that I
had um in rereading The Body Keeps the Score was
that I think that that was my action that in order,
(28:49):
like starting to report, starting to research, starting to write.
I mean, I love the question when people say, how
soon did you know you were going to write a
book about this? Like five seconds? Because what else was
I going to do? It's how I how you do it,
It's how I do it, It's how I know any
new choreographer you would have bade it down side of it,
(29:10):
That's right, that's right. But I remember saying to my
therapist at the time, um, what if I were a
lawyer and I just had to go back to my
law firm and go back to work. And she said, well,
you probably would start drinking way too much an event
and eventually have a little mini breakdown and have to
(29:31):
take some time off. Um. But the stuffing it away,
the shelving at the compartmentalizing it, um, I imagine that
that's what a lot of people do for a while
until it doesn't work anymore. And to my Mike, does
a woman come to my thirty one annual Traumicas this year?
(29:54):
Her name is Anita Sawyer, who is a psychologist professor.
I met her, sat next to her in the Parliament Yale,
and she said, when I was a kid, I was
hospitalized for cutting myself, for eating glass, for it was
prereendous things, and they called the schizophrenic, he called me
bipolar order, they called me all these names. And then
(30:17):
but became very clear I was re enacting my sexual
trauma as a kid. And then slowly she found words
for herself and what it was, eaty touched by. She
didn't have any pretense that she was a writer. She
she got scholarships to go to writing retreats and maybe
she do classes with you, Beful, I know, and she
(30:37):
learned to write and tell her truth. And it's just stunning,
stunning thing that she was able to be deliberate, this
poor girl who was so abused from herself by finding
language for the experience for the girls just spectacular. And
when when I was jealous of because I didn't do
that when I brought my book, is that we need
(30:57):
to have more writing retreats. We have the knee, more
places where people can go and safely right about themselves,
because safely experience themselves and right now you need to
go to another house. In order to do that, they
have to insurance to pay for it. You know, let's
complete so true. You know we're in New England, so
this will make sense to a lot of you. But
(31:17):
so I teach once a year at Crapolo, and and
Cropola looks a little bit like a nuthouse when you're
driving up to it. And a mother and daughter who
came together once, maybe a year or two ago, and
they later told me that they're pulling up the driveway
and the daughter's said to the mother mom Am, I
going to rehab, but Old Jasmine Building is still a
(31:40):
bit kind of It restores my faith in humanity whenever
I lead one of those retreats, because people are coming
from everywhere and they're not necessarily writers. There are people
in there because they've published books and they want something
out of the weekend. That's that there are people in
there who are really just in this place of not
(32:01):
just they're in a place of self exploration and their
side by side. And I always tell them when they're
about to write something, you're you're not going to share this,
or you are going to share this. And there are
exercises I give them that they will share, and I
break them up into small groups and they go all
(32:22):
over the you know that main hall in Incropollo, and
as they're they're sharing their work. That's what restores my
faith in humanity because I walk around the room and
I see all of these people who have never met
each other before that day, and they are leaning forward
and they're listening, they're crying. There's such a there's such
(32:45):
a longing and a hunger for that kind of connection. See,
and that gets back to your early impressionive, is there
an increased all the sending of trauma. Is it or
is it worth? The critical issue is once believe in authority.
You know, um, do I go to somebody who knows
it all? Or m I do authority? But you're traumatized.
(33:09):
It's very hard to believe that you're the authority, but
you are. And so the critical thing that you probably
do in your workshops that I do in my workshops
is really the focus of control is inside of you
and to discover yourself, and nobody can do that for you.
You can create an the place where people can do it.
(33:32):
You can go to your down studio, your music study,
the writing studio, but the end you have to put
it out and you can't do it in your head.
I mean, that's the thing that I think of the
writing workshops that I've taught over many years, you know,
small academic writing workshops, and I think of them now
as a bunch of bubble heads around a table like
(33:54):
kind of disconnected from bodies. And I can no longer
when I teach, I can never teach without including meditation
in my teaching without I mean, I'm not a yoga teacher,
but I incorporate yoga or bringing a yoga teacher, because
that sense of stories being um caught or trapped in
(34:17):
the body. I mean, Stephen Cope writes so about that
a lot in yoga, in The Quest for the True Self,
or you know, anyone who has practiced yoga knows that
feeling of being in a certain pose like a hip opener,
and suddenly like we have such little access to our
histories in our inner lives. It means shocking to me
(34:39):
how little access we have. And I've come that's become
so clear to me since my discovery because I go back.
I recently had reason to go back and read my
early work to see I have a unique capacity to
see what I knew or didn't know. The year old
(35:00):
writing her first novel, did she know? She knew? It's there,
It's there on the page. It makes me just bow
down and say, yes, there is an unconscious and it's
alive and well and living in all of us. Because I,
through the path of all of my books, was somehow
tracing this um. I mean, in one of my books
(35:23):
a few years ago, way before before my discovery, I
wrote about snooping through my parents things, haunting my mother's closets.
You know, really yeah, I think I read about all
my books. Don't let me stay in your house. Um.
But but the the language that stopped me, stopped me
(35:46):
was what was I looking for a clue? A reason?
I wrote that I was looking for a reason. I
mean that just sort of astonishes me. Um. Can you
talk a little bit about some of what people can do,
you know, the tools that you write about, whether it's
(36:08):
M d R or it's that amazing theater therapy that
I found completely fascinating. I wanted to do it well,
Stephen Cope, we mentioned before, I thought this book, you're
going to true self as a true a true book
and learning to inhabit your body. It's terribly important. You know.
(36:30):
I've done all these different things. Um, but I think
what may be most most helpful for me is to
get rolled. ROL is the most intense body therapy there is.
I was born at the end of the second god Board.
Half of my birth co or died because of the
star fishing card. I barely made it and it was
(36:50):
just sickly little kid. I was had asthma and I
was a frozen little boy. And not until my body
was opened up out of its position did I begin
to be reflourish intellectually. Also, it's interesting and say something
needs to be opened up in your body. And I
think yoga martial arts may be very very helpful that
(37:13):
you just give you a sense of presence and agency
on a physical level. There's not not enough, not a
lot of it doesn't solve your problems, but I certainly
opous things up. UM. Have you talked about it in
the back e MDR was a great breakthrough to me.
UM in my training, I started with Fritz Burs before
(37:36):
did my residency, and I think we should explain to
people what I let let me do. Fritz Burs first,
Fritz Fritz Burs and the old weird guy in Nassal
we're no ar teaching. UM had people sit, talk to
each other, different parts of each other, moved from chail
to chair, called front part of themselves, do a lot
of acting. And I started my training at Harvard and
(38:00):
I was called in and said, if I hear you move,
if I ever hear you move your patients again, you're fired.
And I'll be sure you never get a job as
a trist because we don't move. We give drugs and
we talk to people. We don't move. I said, yes, sir,
so I didn't because we believe in authority, but you're
and so I didn't do anything. And then the MDR
(38:22):
a weird treatment where you move your fingers in front
of people's eyes. This is our thing, you know, I
no one of no we believesn't it. And I started
to do it, and people just and in these older
states of consciousness and their memories started to go like, yeah,
(38:43):
that happened to me, shaid that poor kid. But the
kid had to put up it back then. But it
sort of allowed your brain to put it into the
past and to associated to do things. And just this
past year, after twenty years of hustling for stealing from
other grounds, we define it to study how e MDR
(39:04):
works and to actually change the brain circuits that allow
you to observe yourself and to activate part of the
brain is largely to say this happened to be a
long time ago, but it's not happening right now. And
so these beauty eye movements change brain tracks. And almost
all my colleagues said, that's bizarre. I don't won't give
(39:26):
you any money to study about this. Bizarre movements do,
but joys are bizarre. Of once changed brain tracks in
a very profound way, probably more more powerful than any
drum that we know of. Um and sorry, and that's
true for everybody who's wives drama. You have to try
things out, and some of the things may be strange,
(39:47):
like checking or what people do in China to tai
chi everybody, it works. You actually recommended kickboxing in the
in the boat by boat and at the end of
the summer and seen it and it was struggling with
her if she don't getting anywhere, she did kickbooksing. So
as she comes into September and she marched into my office.
(40:10):
So what's happened to you? I said, less. It took
some kickboxing lessons and my husband and I gets a
little much better than able, just a less. For more
(40:40):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets Listeners. It's Danny. I'm very excited to be
sharing a special bonus episode of Family Secrets with you all.
(00:21):
At the end of January. To celebrate the paperback publication
of my memoir Inheritance, I did a series of live
podcast events around the country and the first of these
was at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with
the renowned trauma expert and author of The Body Keeps
the Score, Dr Bessel vander Kolke. After all, when it
(00:42):
comes to family secrets, trauma is inevitably involved. But when
Bessel and I sat down for our conversation, we none
of us had any idea that we were about to
enter a time of collective trauma. This will be a
two part special bonus episode my conversation with Bessel today
(01:03):
and then we'll share the conversation with the audience in
Portsmouth tomorrow. Good evening, everyone, it's great to be here.
(01:23):
It's great to be here with Bessel. It's amazing to
see this turnout on a late January evening in Portsmouth,
UM or anywhere really, um in this gorgeous theater. So
I was I was thinking about I've been thinking for
a while about coming here and doing this special live
(01:43):
episode of UM of Family Secrets with Bessel as my guest.
And I was thinking about, I love full circle moments,
and this feels like one to me. About three winters ago,
um I reached out to Bessel. We have a mutual friend,
(02:04):
the yogi and yoga philosopher Stephen Cope, and um I
was in uh complicated state. I had recently made the
discovery about a huge family secret of my own after
casually doing a DNA test, recreationally doing a DNA DNA
(02:24):
test the way I think of it, and discovered in
pretty short order that my beloved dad who raised me
had not been my biological father, which was something that
had never entered my mind. And so I was in
this state of really almost a kind of relationship to
(02:45):
my own self, my my identity, my body, my face
in the mirror. UM that felt traumatizing, um and shocking.
And I was walking around really feeling the physical symptoms
of that, the dizziness, the lightheadedness, the floatiness, and UM.
(03:07):
So I reached out to Bessel and he very kindly
agreed to meet me and we spent an afternoon talking
by a fire on a winter day, and I couldn't
have imagined, as it's been true in my life so
many times, that it would just be three short years
later and I would have synthesized this um metabolized this
(03:28):
experience into a book, Inheritance, and that then I would
simultaneously create this podcast, which was a happy accident. Um
just really briefly, I wrote this book about my family secret,
about my being the family secret, and then all of
(03:48):
a sudden people started telling me their's. And the very
first time that that happened, it was a friend of mine,
the Buddhist mindfulness teacher, Sylvia Borstein, and she had just
read the manuscript of Inheritance, and it prompted her to
tell me a story of a family secret of hers.
And I was on the other end of the phone,
(04:08):
and I thought, I wish I was recording this. And
that is the entire way that this podcast was born.
But one of the things that I've noticed in now
to going on three seasons of the podcast as thirty.
This new season is launching next week. It will be
thirty guests that I've spoken to, which is not it's
not really a scientific sample. But I've noticed a few things,
(04:31):
and one of the things that I've noticed is that
every guest of mine, at some point or another, no
matter what their story is, does use the word trauma.
And I guess I wanted to begin by there's a
there's a line from The Body Keeps the Score which
I just reread, uh and re underlined and felt new
(04:54):
things about. I think The Body Keeps the Score is
a book that you can probably come back to multiple
times and life and read it differently and have different
um different moments in it and different concepts in it
that are underscored. But I figured that you wrote the
book probably in around and you wrote that we're over
(05:17):
ten years. Yeah, you didn't write it in but as
you were writing this um at this point you wrote,
we're on the verge of becoming a trauma conscious society.
So I guess I wanted to ask you what you
meant by that then, and how does that sit with
you now seven years later. Well, I think that's a
(05:40):
very tough question because believe in this sharply divided world,
and at the same time that I no hundreds of
people around the country who are doing amazing work. I
know people who have these yoga programs in the Baltimore
Into City schools. I know people who have Shakespeare the
(06:01):
Kansas City, Kansas prisons, and just amazing programs, singing with soldiers,
working with horses and people are easy. There's enormous layers
of consciousness and really getting it. And then our mainstream
society becomes more and more rooted in there's destructive capitalist
(06:22):
world of how can we make more money and destroy
about a little bit faster so that we can make
more money, which is just a stolishing including medicine itself.
Of course, psychiatry very much so, of living with a
crazy diagnostic system, giving people labels that don't make any sense,
that have no scientific validity. And at the same time
(06:46):
there's other group of people who don't get paid by insurance,
who you know, who are not part of the system.
Be the discovering a lot and they see the difference
becomes a larger and larger in a way UM and
I don't get it, it's very much, but you see,
so it becomes right now, So it becomes larger and larger.
And yet at the same time there's more and more
(07:08):
of an identification of UM and experience, a piece of history,
a parent and aspect of childhood, um as as being
identified as trauma. More and more, it seems, I mean,
your book has it came out three years ago, four
(07:32):
years ago, and there's a reason why your book is
occupied the top three spots of the New York Times
Paperback nonfiction bestseller list for an entire year. Um, people
in airports are thinking, I know what I'm gonna read.
I'm not gonna read Daniel Steele. I'm not going to
read Danny Shapiro. No. Also because it's the next book
(07:54):
you read. You know. So what what do you think
that that that hung is about. That's again, it's a
tricky question. I see it, and I see so I'm
so impressed that I live in a particular world. People
ask me all the time what was happening in the world.
I said, I don't know. I just know the people
(08:17):
I know and know the people who come to see me,
the people who I hang out with, the people who
want to share their work with me, and I meet
always enlightened, very thoughtful, very mindful people. At the same
thing to people I don't see like you on your
stories about I said, and I don't know how large
this is, you know, and so I don't know, but
(08:39):
I know that that there's many places, almost every place
that I go to. I meant, people who do amazing
things in terms of getting into your body, telling the truth,
speaking openly, trying to lead an authentic life. Interestingly, also
in Silicon Valley, which is the hubble of the world
(09:00):
in some ways, where there's all the money and all
these immature people doing amazing things and crazy things, and
yet people are also really searching for how do we
keep ourselves together, how do we pay attention to each other?
And so there's a very serious effort to understand how
we can make safe, safe and energizic places for each other.
(09:25):
My mind just went to the quote unquote wellness movement
as something that's kind of adjacent to this in a
way where I think we, meaning we who think about
these things are thinking about the body more and more
as the place that is the locus of where it
(09:48):
all gets expressed. I mean, there's a moment in your
book probably several where you talk about god instincts, right
or And I remember when I was reading that thinking,
I have never in my life had a got instinct
and followed it and regretted it, and I have had
got instincts and ignored them, and that that leads to
(10:11):
you know, walls and trouble. I think, but that the
idea that we're listening listening to our body is more Yes,
we are, you know, in certain circles at the same
time that we know the importance of the body and
being saved together. Our published school systems are abolishing um
(10:33):
recess our bodies, theater are abolishing sports and giving kids
tests to substitute for that. One of the Obama's worst
appointments are you, Duncan, who who just ramped a little
test gets wrote completely ignoring the natural thing that the
kidneys to do is to play at the horse about
and to feel your body RelA ship other bodies. And
(10:56):
so you have these layers that live side by side.
Um um. I don't know the prevalence of idolt. I
see a lot of good things happening, but I see
a lot of bad things happening at the same time.
Let me, for example, the dean of my medical school
UH called me and said, I've read your book, and
(11:19):
I think you can really help us because we have
a terrible problem with burnout more of our doctors, law
of suicide, people leaving people being horribly depressed. And can
you help us? I said, I'd love to h and
then she said, but you cannot change the system. I guess,
(11:42):
so where should I help you if you're unwilling to
actually look at the fact that you're only allowed to
see people for seven minutes and not from a long
term relationship with them, which is the well spring of
human wellness is long term relationships, as your books A
beautifully talks about. You know, we're basically law people who
like to belong to groups of people, and that's our essence.
(12:04):
And if you live in a completely alienated, uh corporate world,
all the connection get ignored and loyalty doesn't get rewarded
and you're not on the right track. Well, and of
course you're talking about the ground of childhood as as
where so many tracks get laid that once they're laid
(12:28):
are the question really is how we're able to or
whether we're able to adapt to act to have efficacy right. Um.
I think generally, if you have resources, you can find
all kinds of ways to really change yourself. You do it.
Change yourself is actually engage in things that dive actually
(12:51):
contradict what you were. You're holding your body. So when
you're stiffened up, taking tang or dancing lessons would be
very good. Be just justin tune with somebody else. I
talked a lot about singing. We know a lot about
the new ablehold. You're singing about us to the brain.
(13:12):
Singing together is marvelous thing. It really makes you feel
cheerful and the mystic and connected. But we don't sing anymore.
You can still go to singing camp or take a
workshops where we do sing. So when you say resources,
what do you what do you mean by resources? Like,
if you have the resources, you have resources? What what
(13:32):
are we? What are resources? You need money, you need
time off, you need to access, have access to stuff.
And maybe a little community like enforcement, maybe a rich
community in terms of resources. There are yoga classes, their
tychi classes, they're choirs, their places and double a A meetings.
(14:00):
These were people can come to and actually meet each
other and get to know each other. Maybe that's why
people moved to place like like it needs to be around,
it needs to be visible. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. We were talking backstage about
(14:24):
one of the patients that you write about in your
book who really didn't have the kindergarten teacher, who really
had a very very difficult childhood. I mean one would
say not a lot of resources right available to her,
who ended up more than okay, you know, with a
with a with a very fulfilled life. How does that happen? See,
(14:46):
nothing is linear, you know, it's like that leads to death,
and that leads to death. But you say she had
no resources, which of what I said, But I said
it was horribly abused by both of her parents. But
a mid music together at home. And I think something
like making music together and just letting it hang out
and getting into his people can be enormously powerful to
(15:08):
just to get things you cannot lie and play music
that there's truthmaking and and getting the stone fight and
get doing it to write mom and stuff like that.
That's interesting. Tomorrow night, I'm going to be in New
York City and my guest is this UH singer songwriter
named Alison Moore. And Allison was I mean, she's she's
(15:34):
the daughter of two Nashville country singers. Father was an alcoholic.
They made music together, all of them. The two sisters
and the father and the mother, and then when she
was fourteen, her father shot and killed her mother and
then turned his gun against himself and committed suicide. And
(15:54):
I've thought a lot about Allison in preparation for talking
to her and her sister Shelby Lynn, who are both beauty,
beutiful singer songwriters, and I think a big part of
what had to have saved them in some way was
was music and the memory of the music that they
made with their with their parents when they were all together. Yeah,
(16:15):
I would think that, like we talk backstage about our
lived just backgrounds, I bet that yon Kipper services still
move you deeply, even though you may not practices. I
still love back data start like that from my background
and it's it's it's the it's the ground of um.
You know. I was. I was telling you that I
(16:37):
wrote this memoir called Devotion, and one of the things
that I discovered after it was published, I was expecting
because I because I was raised observant in a very
strict home, I was always envious of people who were
brought up with nothing because I thought that they just
meant we got to choose, you know, uh, with no guilt.
(16:58):
You know, you could just pick from the Smorga's board
of religions. And what I was struck by and learned
just from people responding to me to the book was
that the people who were brought up with nothing were
actually the most lost and confused in their spiritual life,
(17:19):
and that growing up with anything gave people either something
to remember or something to to rail against. But it
was something formative, living up with rules and structures. And
when they call liturgies, it's very important, and we will
believe in literature. You get up and every Saturday you
(17:41):
do a particular thing, and every fortune July you do
another thing, and you know what to look for, a
certain regularity to life, and little predictability and a little
thing of At that time, we're really to go to
devote ourselves to something that we do together, which oledge
of course, do you make noises together, you move together?
(18:04):
And I think being vased in something like that is
very important. You talk a lot about um action as being,
and you're you're talking particularly about um the kinds of
capital t traumas you know, as I think of them,
(18:27):
UM where someone is trapped or someone is in a
burning car and can't save the people around them, or
someone is violently attacked and can't move, and the inability
to take action somehow embeds itself and makes UM recovery
(18:48):
or reprocessing more complex. Or it's a combination of two things,
so that basically, when you're exposed to something horrenda's you're
automatically meant to move or meant to do something. If
at that point you don't move or do something, the
horror wors to trigger your brain to move, actually go
(19:11):
in a different direction, take a different path, take a
path into collapse and helplessness. So when people started messing
with you, the normal thing is like get the hell
away from me and to move. UM. The thing that
happens to many people has when something scary it happens,
they collapse and come forth. So it's the opposite of
(19:33):
fight or flight. Yeah right, it's we need to collapse
that keeps people going. So it's actually just I um.
I said. There's a program called Impact used to be
called model mugging where you train women who I think
it happens to many people, particularly women who have been abused.
(19:54):
They bodies stand to be collapsed of I can't do
anything or anything I'm good for it. And they teach
them martial arts and to fight and to recreate the
most scary thing into lives and to take action where
they couldn't take action before. To my mind, a beautiful
(20:16):
program to help people to get out of that physical
sense of helplessness. And you don't become a tough broad instead,
he just becomes become a person who walks through the
world with self confidence. Well, there's so much. I mean,
I was very struck by the story that you tell
(20:39):
very early in the book about family friends of yours
and their little boy who were very close to the
towers on nine eleven UM. And it was his first
day of school, I think. And um, so he saw
a lot as many people didn't many children did. And
(21:01):
his parents had you know, you visited parents. Um, we're
processing what they were processing. But it was a very loving, um,
safe grounded family environment. And actually and I walked through
clean up side on September fift They knew the rescue worker,
(21:22):
so we we were in the sten stuff. We did
something we didn't just talk about home and and and
and the boy came as well. So he then draws
a he makes a drawing and it's a drawing of
the buildings, and the buildings are on fire, and there
are there are people jumping from the buildings, and then
(21:46):
there's something that you can't quite make out at the
bottom of the drawing, and it's a black circle. And
you asked him what was his name? Um, what's what's
the boy's name? No? No, no, yeah, no, what's the
what's what's the blacks circle? And he says, that's a trampoline.
Is so moving? That's a tramp and and what you
(22:06):
describe as the way that he found an adaptation that
his his mind was able to was able to imagine
alternatives very much. Can they talk about your book? You
find out it's this horrendous piece of news, that dirty devastation.
Next thing, you go online and find out who that relative. Maybe,
(22:31):
so you immediately get to keep gear and do something
instead of pretending like, okay, didn't happen. Let me just
keep that very fooled, like everything is normal. You immediately
goes into action, including lying your bed and contemplating what
what you were going to do. But your own story
is it is a remarkable story about resilience itself. And
(22:55):
you use what you do best, which is finding words,
And you wish, said everybody, because finding words is a
beautiful thing. I felt, I've never been more grateful to
that this is what I do. Um, although I also
think it's kind of a chicken and egg situation, like
is this what I do? Because this was always the
(23:15):
story that was lurking, It's impossible to really pry them apart.
There's some way in which this was always the story
that was lurking beneath all the other stories. I always
wrote about family secrets. All my novels were centered around
the corrosive power of secrets and families. And then I
started writing memoirs. No one was more surprised than me.
(23:36):
Why was I writing memoirs. I wasn't particularly interested in
my own life, but I was digging for something, and
I was using my life sort of as a laboratory
to try to make inquiries into things that I was interesting. Interesting,
m you could make it interesting. Not everybody can do that,
you know, well, I was like trying to always put
(24:01):
together what belongs with what It always felt like a puzzle.
And then the answer to the biggest puzzle of all,
you know, the line and inheritance, where I write I
always knew there was a secret when I didn't know
the secret was me. That's right, I think that. And
so we're just finishing up our work book for a book,
and we invite people to write all the time. And
(24:23):
also my organized way to just start writing. Take a glass,
start writing about the glass. See what comes up. By
free writing, sooner or later, piece of yourself start getting
revealed much better than if you and I talked to
each other, because if I talked to you, I meanly
worried about better, you will like what I'm saying. But
(24:44):
I think I'm smart. But if you write to yourself
that critic concurce teme because I'm just going to write
some nonsense. You can't do that because you have to
make a living, do it. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. When I teach Larger treats
(25:06):
a couple of times a year, there's an exercise that
I love giving the group and it's based on a
book that came out in the eighties by a writer
named Joe Brainerd. And the book is called I Remember,
which are two of the most evocative words when put
together in the English language. If you begin with the
words I remember, you will finish that sentence and then
(25:27):
drop down a line and then begin again. I remember
dropped down the line. And then it becomes associative. And
I sit from where I sit, and I look out
at a room full of people and they're all writing.
No one stops, and and then they discover things. And
then I have them go back to their rooms that
night and say, now right, I don't remember you don't
(25:50):
necessarily shared it with people. That's the important Say yes,
you're right for yourself and find words for your inner world.
That it's actually your book, also your in this piece
of truth, and you're basically dumbfounded, and you talk about
my quotation from trauma that trauma is a known verbal experience,
and then you start finding words to begin to borgainize
(26:12):
you relationship to yourself, which is beautiful. Well, I I
quote you in in the book, and it's actually from
the interview that you did with Christa Tippett Um that
I was driving along and it absolutely just you stopped
me in my tracks, which was, Um, it's the nature
of trauma that it doesn't allow a story to be told.
And I realized I realized something interesting about writing about trauma.
(26:34):
Because when I began Inheritance, I started writing right away.
I was writing on index cards. I was trying to
remember because my brain was kind of injured a little bit,
so words, I thought, thoughts that I wanted to retain.
I was afraid I wouldn't be able to bring them
back or remember. And then I started actually writing, and
(26:55):
I wrote about two hundred pages as I was researching
and doing and then I had to go way because
my last book was coming out and I was traveling,
So I left the pages, which were pages I was
feeling okay about. And when I came back and I
reread them, my heart just sank because they were no good.
They were they were recursive. They were an exercise in
(27:20):
writing from trauma if the nature of trauma is that
it doesn't allow a story to be told. I was
returning again and again to the same questions without new
insight or new additions to those questions, which is, I think,
what when we tell stories in a state of trauma,
that's kind of what we're doing. And I kept on this,
(27:43):
the question I kept returning to over and over again,
what did my mother know? What did my father know?
And it wasn't going anywhere, and I realized, I think
poets can write directly from trauma. I think they're the
only but the prose prose can't come directly from that place.
(28:05):
It needs a tiny, little, full crumb of distance. When
I finally started again, I realized that I wanted to
write from a place where I could go into the past,
where I could be in the present of the story,
and where I could also make these leaps into I
(28:25):
wanted to hold the present, the past, and the future
in in in my hands and be able to I
wanted to be a storyteller, and I wanted to shape
order out of the chaos of the story, which is
what I do. And one of the insights that I
had um in rereading The Body Keeps the Score was
that I think that that was my action that in order,
(28:49):
like starting to report, starting to research, starting to write.
I mean, I love the question when people say, how
soon did you know you were going to write a
book about this? Like five seconds? Because what else was
I going to do? It's how I how you do it,
It's how I do it, It's how I know any
new choreographer you would have bade it down side of it,
(29:10):
That's right, that's right. But I remember saying to my
therapist at the time, um, what if I were a
lawyer and I just had to go back to my
law firm and go back to work. And she said, well,
you probably would start drinking way too much an event
and eventually have a little mini breakdown and have to
(29:31):
take some time off. Um. But the stuffing it away,
the shelving at the compartmentalizing it, um, I imagine that
that's what a lot of people do for a while
until it doesn't work anymore. And to my Mike, does
a woman come to my thirty one annual Traumicas this year?
(29:54):
Her name is Anita Sawyer, who is a psychologist professor.
I met her, sat next to her in the Parliament Yale,
and she said, when I was a kid, I was
hospitalized for cutting myself, for eating glass, for it was
prereendous things, and they called the schizophrenic, he called me
bipolar order, they called me all these names. And then
(30:17):
but became very clear I was re enacting my sexual
trauma as a kid. And then slowly she found words
for herself and what it was, eaty touched by. She
didn't have any pretense that she was a writer. She
she got scholarships to go to writing retreats and maybe
she do classes with you, Beful, I know, and she
(30:37):
learned to write and tell her truth. And it's just stunning,
stunning thing that she was able to be deliberate, this
poor girl who was so abused from herself by finding
language for the experience for the girls just spectacular. And
when when I was jealous of because I didn't do
that when I brought my book, is that we need
(30:57):
to have more writing retreats. We have the knee, more
places where people can go and safely right about themselves,
because safely experience themselves and right now you need to
go to another house. In order to do that, they
have to insurance to pay for it. You know, let's
complete so true. You know we're in New England, so
this will make sense to a lot of you. But
(31:17):
so I teach once a year at Crapolo, and and
Cropola looks a little bit like a nuthouse when you're
driving up to it. And a mother and daughter who
came together once, maybe a year or two ago, and
they later told me that they're pulling up the driveway
and the daughter's said to the mother mom Am, I
going to rehab, but Old Jasmine Building is still a
(31:40):
bit kind of It restores my faith in humanity whenever
I lead one of those retreats, because people are coming
from everywhere and they're not necessarily writers. There are people
in there because they've published books and they want something
out of the weekend. That's that there are people in
there who are really just in this place of not
(32:01):
just they're in a place of self exploration and their
side by side. And I always tell them when they're
about to write something, you're you're not going to share this,
or you are going to share this. And there are
exercises I give them that they will share, and I
break them up into small groups and they go all
(32:22):
over the you know that main hall in Incropollo, and
as they're they're sharing their work. That's what restores my
faith in humanity because I walk around the room and
I see all of these people who have never met
each other before that day, and they are leaning forward
and they're listening, they're crying. There's such a there's such
(32:45):
a longing and a hunger for that kind of connection. See,
and that gets back to your early impressionive, is there
an increased all the sending of trauma. Is it or
is it worth? The critical issue is once believe in authority.
You know, um, do I go to somebody who knows
it all? Or m I do authority? But you're traumatized.
(33:09):
It's very hard to believe that you're the authority, but
you are. And so the critical thing that you probably
do in your workshops that I do in my workshops
is really the focus of control is inside of you
and to discover yourself, and nobody can do that for you.
You can create an the place where people can do it.
(33:32):
You can go to your down studio, your music study,
the writing studio, but the end you have to put
it out and you can't do it in your head.
I mean, that's the thing that I think of the
writing workshops that I've taught over many years, you know,
small academic writing workshops, and I think of them now
as a bunch of bubble heads around a table like
(33:54):
kind of disconnected from bodies. And I can no longer
when I teach, I can never teach without including meditation
in my teaching without I mean, I'm not a yoga teacher,
but I incorporate yoga or bringing a yoga teacher, because
that sense of stories being um caught or trapped in
(34:17):
the body. I mean, Stephen Cope writes so about that
a lot in yoga, in The Quest for the True Self,
or you know, anyone who has practiced yoga knows that
feeling of being in a certain pose like a hip opener,
and suddenly like we have such little access to our
histories in our inner lives. It means shocking to me
(34:39):
how little access we have. And I've come that's become
so clear to me since my discovery because I go back.
I recently had reason to go back and read my
early work to see I have a unique capacity to
see what I knew or didn't know. The year old
(35:00):
writing her first novel, did she know? She knew? It's there,
It's there on the page. It makes me just bow
down and say, yes, there is an unconscious and it's
alive and well and living in all of us. Because I,
through the path of all of my books, was somehow
tracing this um. I mean, in one of my books
(35:23):
a few years ago, way before before my discovery, I
wrote about snooping through my parents things, haunting my mother's closets.
You know, really yeah, I think I read about all
my books. Don't let me stay in your house. Um.
But but the the language that stopped me, stopped me
(35:46):
was what was I looking for a clue? A reason?
I wrote that I was looking for a reason. I
mean that just sort of astonishes me. Um. Can you
talk a little bit about some of what people can do,
you know, the tools that you write about, whether it's
(36:08):
M d R or it's that amazing theater therapy that
I found completely fascinating. I wanted to do it well,
Stephen Cope, we mentioned before, I thought this book, you're
going to true self as a true a true book
and learning to inhabit your body. It's terribly important. You know.
(36:30):
I've done all these different things. Um, but I think
what may be most most helpful for me is to
get rolled. ROL is the most intense body therapy there is.
I was born at the end of the second god Board.
Half of my birth co or died because of the
star fishing card. I barely made it and it was
(36:50):
just sickly little kid. I was had asthma and I
was a frozen little boy. And not until my body
was opened up out of its position did I begin
to be reflourish intellectually. Also, it's interesting and say something
needs to be opened up in your body. And I
think yoga martial arts may be very very helpful that
(37:13):
you just give you a sense of presence and agency
on a physical level. There's not not enough, not a
lot of it doesn't solve your problems, but I certainly
opous things up. UM. Have you talked about it in
the back e MDR was a great breakthrough to me.
UM in my training, I started with Fritz Burs before
(37:36):
did my residency, and I think we should explain to
people what I let let me do. Fritz Burs first,
Fritz Fritz Burs and the old weird guy in Nassal
we're no ar teaching. UM had people sit, talk to
each other, different parts of each other, moved from chail
to chair, called front part of themselves, do a lot
of acting. And I started my training at Harvard and
(38:00):
I was called in and said, if I hear you move,
if I ever hear you move your patients again, you're fired.
And I'll be sure you never get a job as
a trist because we don't move. We give drugs and
we talk to people. We don't move. I said, yes, sir,
so I didn't because we believe in authority, but you're
and so I didn't do anything. And then the MDR
(38:22):
a weird treatment where you move your fingers in front
of people's eyes. This is our thing, you know, I
no one of no we believesn't it. And I started
to do it, and people just and in these older
states of consciousness and their memories started to go like, yeah,
(38:43):
that happened to me, shaid that poor kid. But the
kid had to put up it back then. But it
sort of allowed your brain to put it into the
past and to associated to do things. And just this
past year, after twenty years of hustling for stealing from
other grounds, we define it to study how e MDR
(39:04):
works and to actually change the brain circuits that allow
you to observe yourself and to activate part of the
brain is largely to say this happened to be a
long time ago, but it's not happening right now. And
so these beauty eye movements change brain tracks. And almost
all my colleagues said, that's bizarre. I don't won't give
(39:26):
you any money to study about this. Bizarre movements do,
but joys are bizarre. Of once changed brain tracks in
a very profound way, probably more more powerful than any
drum that we know of. Um and sorry, and that's
true for everybody who's wives drama. You have to try
things out, and some of the things may be strange,
(39:47):
like checking or what people do in China to tai
chi everybody, it works. You actually recommended kickboxing in the
in the boat by boat and at the end of
the summer and seen it and it was struggling with
her if she don't getting anywhere, she did kickbooksing. So
as she comes into September and she marched into my office.
(40:10):
So what's happened to you? I said, less. It took
some kickboxing lessons and my husband and I gets a
little much better than able, just a less. For more
(40:40):
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