Healing From Family Trauma (with Mariel Buqué)

Your family is...loving? Your family is...hurtful? Your family is...all this and more? If you feel overwhelmed when you think about your family, this episode will help you understand your anxiety and give you evidence-based tools to repair it. 

Dr. Mariel Buqué is a leading specialist in trauma psychology. She says our physical and mental health challenges can be rooted in family trauma passed down through the generations—not just culturally, but even biologically. 

We're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.

 

Transcript

 

MARIEL BUQUÉ: My family is loving and hurtful. My family is nurturing and invalidating. They have a mixture of characteristics—and I myself have also been a part of how this family has operated, perhaps in dysfunction, for a multitude of years.

BLAIR HODGES: How do you feel about the family—or families—that you were raised in? Dr. Mariel Buqué says a lot of our current physical and mental health can be better understood based on how we answer this question. Dr. Buqué is a leading specialist in trauma psychology. She says a lot of families go through cycles of dysfunction, and these cycles are passed on, generation to generation—not just culturally, but even biologically.

She says understanding our trauma can help explain why some of us are people pleasers. Or why some of us find ourselves in codependent relationships. Or why we avoid relationships. Why some of us avoid forging our own families, or why we forge unhealthy wounds.

Dr. Buqué has been helping to develop cutting edge therapy techniques to address trauma to help heal minds, bodies, and hearts. Today we're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.

As you listen to various episodes of Family Proclamations, I think chances are you're going to hear things that touch a raw nerve. I've definitely experienced that myself as a host. I hope this episode provides some ideas about how to address those feelings, and maybe become a cycle breaker yourself.

There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges and this is Family Proclamations.

 

A KEEPER OF THINGS (1:52)

 

BLAIR HODGES: Mariel Buqué, it’s great to have you on Family Proclamations.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes! We're talking about the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. And this is one of the newest books that we're going to be covering, this one actually comes out in January of 2024. So first, I just want to say congratulations on the new book!

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you, I'm excited for it to be out in the world and for people to be getting their hands on it, and hopefully doing a lot of good healing from it.

BLAIR HODGES: It must be an interesting time, because you've spent so much time with this book already. And now it's coming out. So by the time it gets in people's hands, you're sort of like, “okay, like, I've spent so much time with it,” how does it feel?

MARIEL BUQUÉ: I keep telling people that it feels almost like that moment when a person who is about nine months pregnant is ready to just birth their child and meet them and have them out in the world. But also, because I just don't want to hold it anymore. I want everyone else to have it.

BLAIR HODGES: I do too.

Let's start by talking about how you personally used to be a keeper of things. And maybe you still are resisting this impulse. You describe hanging on to stuff even when you don't need it anymore, and that you even experience some guilt or fear when you think about throwing something away rather than finding some use for it.

Talk about being a keeper. What are some of the strange things you've kept in the past where you've been like, “Ooh, should probably get rid of that, but I can't!”

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Oh, my goodness, I haven't gotten this question. And it's such a good one, I appreciate it very much.

So, you know, the actual through line especially in my maternal line, my grandmother, my mother, we've had this way of actually keeping things, first to preserve them for anybody else that might need them even if they're not functional items.

And secondly, because of this terrible, terrible guilt of being wasteful. And it comes from there being a lot of scarcity in their lives, my life growing up, and feeling like if we don't keep every little thing no matter what it is that there's a likely chance that we might just be left with nothing. So it was just this irrational fear that was so profoundly ingrained in me.

And you know, as far as keeping you know—there's so many things but one thing that I find to be particularly interesting that I've been able to k