May 8, 2020 • 21 mins
Dani and Bessel respond to questions from the audience about trauma, and how art—and writing in particular—can help people heal.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is the production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets Listeners. It's Danny again. I hope you found
the special bonus episode with Dr Bessel vander Kolk helpful, illuminating,
(00:21):
even soothing. It's so important to recognize that we're all
in this together and that it's hard, and that it's
okay to admit that it's hard. The more we tell
the truth of ourselves and our lives, the better off
will be when we're on the other side of this,
and we will be on the other side of this.
(00:41):
Here's the portion of the evening in which the audience
at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire asked questions. Oh,
and stay tuned for more great bonus content as we
work on the fourth season of Family Secrets, which will
launch in October. I can't wait, all right, I think
(01:05):
I'm going to open it up to some questions here
because we have a nice pile of them. Okay, we
are a group of almost twenty half siblings that just
found out within the past two years about each other.
Through twenty three. In me, it has been a most
positive experience for most How often do you hear positive stories?
(01:27):
I hear positive stories really quite often, UM, I also
fear hear painful, difficult stories. I think one of the
things that's so complex about this moment of time that
we're in where so many of these stories are pouring out,
is that there's no template. There are no rules, there's
(01:49):
no playbook, there's no one size fits all and um,
but I think what it has to do with a
lot is some combination of the n fable, like where
people are in their lives and whether they're kind of
open and able to incorporate a staggering new reality. I mean,
(02:10):
for those of you who have not had this experience,
imagine waking up one day and finding out that you
have twenty half siblings. It's a shocking, stunning thing, and
very often, UM, the initial response is, in my experience,
just anecdotally, very the initial response is to feel threatened
(02:30):
and what do you mean and overwhelmed, and there's a
I think a very human, primitive primal um a feeling
of like the other, the interloper, the stranger. I mean,
you know, see the Bible, it's full of that kind
of stuff. But then moving past that, when I'm seeing
(02:52):
is that more and more people are um inclined to
be kind to each other, because this is so clearly
of a kind of epidemic proportion, because of the sheer
numbers of DNA tests that are being taken and the
(03:12):
numbers of people who are making these discoveries. It's hundreds
of thousands of people a year. UM. And so I've
spoken a lot of bioethics programs around the country, and
one of the things that I've come to is like,
when people say, what do you think it boils down to,
it turns out that it's a it's an ethical term kindness.
Can we treat each other with kindness? And even if
(03:34):
this is, you know, not the story we wanted, it's
the story we got. And um, even if you know
people were promised anonymity, you know fifty sixty years ago,
forty years ago, science changed things, and what are we
going to do now? Um? You know with this new um,
(03:56):
you know this new information that we have. UM. But yes,
I mean I meant I have. But I have a friend,
a good friend who I've made in the last few years,
who discovered she was donor conceived, and she's discovered half siblings.
This is happening all the time, And UM, I think
it's utterly, utterly wonderful that UM, that that that you're
(04:18):
able to know each other and be with each other. I,
by the way, and this is probably a question that's
even in the pile. I am the only donor conceived
person I know who has discovered absolutely zero half siblings.
It's like I'm an outlier. I'm I was an only child.
Then I'm I'm only like whatever this thing is, I'm that.
(04:39):
But my reaction is, UM, that we should know, we
should learn from you guys, and that I hope you
can find a way of chronically what you're what you're doing,
and maybe set up a collective depository of your thoughts.
It might create some tensions between all of you, but
(05:00):
be very interesting to hear about the processes, like I
think the world would love to hear that. Um. Another
option thinking of is to get a singer songwriter like
where Gauthier, who herself is adopted and has quite a
story that who does songwriting with people, and she goes
with a groups of people in writes songs about that
(05:22):
connective experience and everybody chips in their own lyrics and
together to make a song about experience. But something that
serves that symbolizes and collect what this process is like
discovery and illuminates it because there is very very little
(05:43):
in the way of studies, surveys research about this world
because it was a secret world, so it couldn't be
studied because it wasn't known. And now there are so
many people who don't have a lot of guide posts.
I mean, they're turning to my book because it illuminates
or reflects to them their own internal experiences. But like
(06:03):
my son as a podcast called Love and Radio, and
he had an episode where two siblings discovered they have
a half sibling and they are excited about it, and
it turns out he was a psychopath who tries to
take advantage of them, and then they talk about it
more of the lammas that comes up with that, So
it's never complicated. It's really good to really see what
(06:27):
the variations on the steamer. So this one's for you. Bessel.
I would say, Um, I'm very concerned about the magnitude
of large t trauma being created e g. Immigration trauma
inflicted at the border and all that entails. Any suggestions
on how we can counteract that, you know, one reaction
(06:51):
I have about what's happening to the border is that.
Unfortunately it's the extreme, but it's likely that in your
own town or onetown across, kids are being based in
situations that are not all that much better. I think
what's happening in the border is a war crime and
(07:11):
people should be punished like war criminals for doing what
they're doing. We know exactly what happens to kids who
are being treated like that, and it's torture and these
kids will never recover from it, and it's horrendous and
it's unbelievable that is happening in our country. Knowing as
(07:31):
we know what we're doing, it's inexcuse him. We'll be
back in a moment with more family secrets. Here's an
(07:53):
interesting question as well with early childhood trauma. Can't association
and lead to repression of all the bad as a
child seeks to be perfect, only to shockingly resurface fifty
years later when we traumatized with dissociation reappearing as memories resurface.
(08:14):
If so candidate associations stopped, well, that's that's a classical situation.
You know. There's hinted that in your book. Also, we
all like to believe that we were raised in happy
families because we all believe we're responsible for the families
were raised in. So if our family is violent, we
(08:36):
didn't want to hide it from ourselves and from my
consciousness and certainly from other people. Know. I'm not going
to tell you what my family that that's crazy, because
on way you'll think badly about me. It's very important
for us to keep it happy face, and the association
was curious what you think about it? To some degree
(08:56):
is a good thing. Is the larger to survive, and
so uh very common that people just split off part
of it and say it's not happening. We've met many
people who were sexually abused who don't remember the abuse
from the night before, go to school, happy, go lucky,
go back. The same thing happens during the day. They
(09:19):
are completely different people, and they grow up, and at
some point something happens and the whole stuff starts shutting
back along the lines of would happened to you, but
much more, much worse even, and then you think you're
going crazy and all the stuff started flying flying back,
And I hope at that point you find somebody who
can hold you and to continue, which again you write
(09:43):
beautifully in your book, how beautifully your husband also really
was there for you, really extraordinary. At at that point,
we need somebody to help us and not to label
us and say you're crazy take drugs, which you will
almost certainly do when you've got a psychiatrist. But what
you can say, let's find a safe place for you
(10:04):
to be hold you calm yourself down. And unfortunately there's
not enough places like that that I can think that
people can go. And that's why you know, an your
conference this year, um, I'm going to really we have
a bunch of people who do have set up peer
support systems, and I think what we need more and
(10:27):
more is peer support systems of people who are there
for each other, like that group who just said we're
lunching people from the say who have siblings. I think
it's very important that we moved towards de professionalizing this
and not making it dependent on insurance companies are really
for people to make a commitment to helping each other.
(10:47):
You know where I learned that in China. I was
musically invited to spend a month in China and with
a group of people of professional women, about a thousand
professional women who have peer support systems. They get together
once a week and they get to weather once a month.
It's a larger group of people, and they have conferences
at meetings, and they have a mific system of just
(11:10):
people being there for each other and getting help to
be there for each other. So we're going to port
yet another thing from China. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. And this one's for me.
(11:32):
Should I read the other memoirs reverse order or start
at the beginning? That's funny. I was. I was afraid
with Inheritance that would that no one would ever read
any of my earlier memoirs now because I was wrong. Um,
but that's not that's not actually what's happening at all.
It's really interesting. I have no opinion about the order.
(11:53):
I think you could move backwards in time. Um. I
mean essentially from my first memoir, Slow Motion, all the
way through Inheritance. It's one body of work. I understand
that now there should be like a box set of them,
because it's it's you know, it's it's thirty two year
old Danny looking back at twenty three year old Danny,
and then it's you know, young mom Danny with her
(12:15):
spiritual existential crisis, and then it's you know, married Danny,
thinking about marriage and walking along another person over time. Um.
But in a way, what I was exploring was always
coming back to. I Mean, one of the things I
always say to my students is theme is just a
fancy literary term for obsession, and we don't choose what
(12:39):
obsesses us. And what obsessed me was understanding my dad.
I suppose, understanding my mom, but that became more diagnostic
than anything. I mean, understanding my dad in terms of
like what was his sorrow, what was his pain? What
made him him? Um? And it's there through all of
(13:00):
my books. My aunt Shirley, my father's younger sister, called
me when she had read Devotion, which I was afraid
she would find painful because there's a lot in there
about how I didn't feel like I belonged in my
family even then. And she said she was crying when
she called me, and she said, it's like a cottage
for your father. Umcottish meaning like a um, like a prayer. Uh,
(13:22):
it's it's a it's a it's an omad, it's an offering.
And all my work was in some way that UM.
So in a way I think reading them is just
it's kind of read reading a life, reading a life
in which something wasn't known that that was known later
that was being informed by There's a phrase that I
use that I mentioned to you, UM, a psychoanalytic phrase
(13:47):
that the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas used and has written about um,
the unthought known UM, which I kept thinking about while
I was reading The Body keeps the score. You know,
we we are driven in so many ways by what
we no but can't bring ourselves to think. When you
(14:08):
talk about, you know, the gut instinct, or the way
that the body keeps the score, the way the way
that the body reveals to us what we are, what
we can't reveal to ourselves if you allow it, if
you allow yourself to listen, if you allow yourself to
even be in a position to feel it. Yeah, okay,
(14:29):
But in terms of the box set, you know, after
after people see King Lear, they don't go like, okay,
I've seen Shakespeare, that's enough, and they went went back
to the same things over and over again. So I
think reading several boks might be useful. M How did
(14:51):
you I guess this probably could be for either of us,
how how did you overcome your own trauma in its
physical manifestations? How to is how did it manifest or
show up for you? So I can say a couple
of things about that, because writing about trauma's really hard.
Writing about physical sensation is like one of the banes
(15:12):
for writers. I mean, how many ways? Because can your
heart pound or your palms sweat, or you know your
stomach drop or you know your fingers tingle. There's like
it's too easy to enter the realm of you know,
cliche in some way. Um time, I mean in part time. Um,
(15:33):
I really was dizzy for a year. UM and I
stopped having a relationship with my own But I've I've
had a yoga practice. Since I stopped practicing yoga, I
would unroll my mat and the body that had been
on that matt no longer felt like the body that
(15:53):
was now. I mean it was the strangest feeling of
like I'm still the same person, but my understanding of
about myself is so alter it and um and so
I that drifted away from me and I'm still struggling
to get back to it. Um Meditation was tremendous for me.
I have an app called insight timer that some of
you may know. That is for me a very valuable
(16:16):
tool because it keeps me accountable I have I think
it's a hundred and seventy eight days today and I
don't want to break my streak. It gives you like
a little gives you a little gold star every time
you finish your it. Lets you know it's circles the
day of the week and you know, so even if
it's a day where you think, oh my god, I
just don't have time. Yeah. Um, so that that that
(16:38):
space that um. But more than anything else, I mean,
I'm curious what would you would what would you say? Uh?
As for me that the body's pieces very important. I'm
very much into the rear mammals and there's a lot
of stuff in my field about it used to so
mammals need to feel safe without mammals and the way
(17:01):
my Steven Fancive reports, she says, if you want to
know but mammals, to go to a pet store and
look at what poppies do. They chase each other, the
line top with each other. There's love on each other,
and so that part of us needs to come to life.
Very basic bodies that like be with other bodies, and
as long as that doesn't work, everything else it's difficult. Um.
(17:25):
In terms of specific things that I found for me
very helpful is visiting yourself back then and seeing what
that kid went through. And we tend to sort of
have contempt for ourselves as her kids and say, oh,
(17:49):
he was so weak, he didn't stand up for himself,
he wasn't tough enough. Um, she was so compliant or something,
and so you really have to get itself intred for
how you behave back then and really going there and
seeing what that kid went through, and if you had
(18:11):
known then or had been as big then as you
are now, you would not tolerated that. But at that point,
you're gonna this kid had no choice but to behave
like that, and to really the big thing that comes
up more and more is this issue issue of self compassion,
which I also see in your podcasts that have a
(18:32):
deep love for what that kid back there had to
go through and put up with. And it's not because
she was crazy or stupid. She was just trying to survive.
And to really know, like, boy, if I had known
them what I know now, nobody would have gotten away
with UM and the other thing that you mentioned it
(18:54):
to complicate to explain is our the psycho drama I
learned from Albessa of re creating the real scene of
it happened back then and then creating in three dimensional
space and ideal seen where somebody says to you, if
I'd been your dad, I would have been a drinker.
(19:17):
You could have been proud of me. I would have
come home with my uniform as a policeman and you
will say, wow, my dad looks great. It wouldn't have
been needed to be afraid that I was going to
drink and beat you up lay one the night. And
so you you create three dimensionals structures as we call it,
where you create new realities. And it's astounding to me
(19:40):
how I've never brought somebody who tough people growing up,
people who say, oh it is not real. People always like,
oh my god, if that had happened, but it's three
years old, my whole life would have been different than
people really gets new reality instill this is out of them,
so they start living in a different map of themselves
(20:01):
that the map that has determined how they live. And
is that in part because it is being placed in
three dimensions? I think it's really dimension the critical thing.
And you have people around you who enact like if
I said you, if you said me, choose somebody over
there to be your mom, and I said, okay, well
(20:22):
you beat my mom and you said to me, where
would you like to mount your mom to be? Said
you should be right there, a little bit further back,
turn a little bit slump over. Yeah, and there's something
in your right brain that's a spatial brain, is not
logical and not time determined, that has an internal image
(20:45):
of who people are. And then you bring other people
and said, oh my god, that's but my internal world
looks like when I said, it's three dimensional space. And
then you can start moving it up. It's amazing. I'm
still started by it. Yeah, that's beautiful. I think we
are out of time and that's a beautiful place to
(21:07):
to end. Best all, I want to thank you so
much for this conversation and thank you all for coming.
So thank you. Go to come. For more podcasts for
(21:37):
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is the production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets Listeners. It's Danny again. I hope you found
the special bonus episode with Dr Bessel vander Kolk helpful, illuminating,
(00:21):
even soothing. It's so important to recognize that we're all
in this together and that it's hard, and that it's
okay to admit that it's hard. The more we tell
the truth of ourselves and our lives, the better off
will be when we're on the other side of this,
and we will be on the other side of this.
(00:41):
Here's the portion of the evening in which the audience
at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire asked questions. Oh,
and stay tuned for more great bonus content as we
work on the fourth season of Family Secrets, which will
launch in October. I can't wait, all right, I think
(01:05):
I'm going to open it up to some questions here
because we have a nice pile of them. Okay, we
are a group of almost twenty half siblings that just
found out within the past two years about each other.
Through twenty three. In me, it has been a most
positive experience for most How often do you hear positive stories?
(01:27):
I hear positive stories really quite often, UM, I also
fear hear painful, difficult stories. I think one of the
things that's so complex about this moment of time that
we're in where so many of these stories are pouring out,
is that there's no template. There are no rules, there's
(01:49):
no playbook, there's no one size fits all and um,
but I think what it has to do with a
lot is some combination of the n fable, like where
people are in their lives and whether they're kind of
open and able to incorporate a staggering new reality. I mean,
(02:10):
for those of you who have not had this experience,
imagine waking up one day and finding out that you
have twenty half siblings. It's a shocking, stunning thing, and
very often, UM, the initial response is, in my experience,
just anecdotally, very the initial response is to feel threatened
(02:30):
and what do you mean and overwhelmed, and there's a
I think a very human, primitive primal um a feeling
of like the other, the interloper, the stranger. I mean,
you know, see the Bible, it's full of that kind
of stuff. But then moving past that, when I'm seeing
(02:52):
is that more and more people are um inclined to
be kind to each other, because this is so clearly
of a kind of epidemic proportion, because of the sheer
numbers of DNA tests that are being taken and the
(03:12):
numbers of people who are making these discoveries. It's hundreds
of thousands of people a year. UM. And so I've
spoken a lot of bioethics programs around the country, and
one of the things that I've come to is like,
when people say, what do you think it boils down to,
it turns out that it's a it's an ethical term kindness.
Can we treat each other with kindness? And even if
(03:34):
this is, you know, not the story we wanted, it's
the story we got. And um, even if you know
people were promised anonymity, you know fifty sixty years ago,
forty years ago, science changed things, and what are we
going to do now? Um? You know with this new um,
(03:56):
you know this new information that we have. UM. But yes,
I mean I meant I have. But I have a friend,
a good friend who I've made in the last few years,
who discovered she was donor conceived, and she's discovered half siblings.
This is happening all the time, And UM, I think
it's utterly, utterly wonderful that UM, that that that you're
(04:18):
able to know each other and be with each other. I,
by the way, and this is probably a question that's
even in the pile. I am the only donor conceived
person I know who has discovered absolutely zero half siblings.
It's like I'm an outlier. I'm I was an only child.
Then I'm I'm only like whatever this thing is, I'm that.
(04:39):
But my reaction is, UM, that we should know, we
should learn from you guys, and that I hope you
can find a way of chronically what you're what you're doing,
and maybe set up a collective depository of your thoughts.
It might create some tensions between all of you, but
(05:00):
be very interesting to hear about the processes, like I
think the world would love to hear that. Um. Another
option thinking of is to get a singer songwriter like
where Gauthier, who herself is adopted and has quite a
story that who does songwriting with people, and she goes
with a groups of people in writes songs about that
(05:22):
connective experience and everybody chips in their own lyrics and
together to make a song about experience. But something that
serves that symbolizes and collect what this process is like
discovery and illuminates it because there is very very little
(05:43):
in the way of studies, surveys research about this world
because it was a secret world, so it couldn't be
studied because it wasn't known. And now there are so
many people who don't have a lot of guide posts.
I mean, they're turning to my book because it illuminates
or reflects to them their own internal experiences. But like
(06:03):
my son as a podcast called Love and Radio, and
he had an episode where two siblings discovered they have
a half sibling and they are excited about it, and
it turns out he was a psychopath who tries to
take advantage of them, and then they talk about it
more of the lammas that comes up with that, So
it's never complicated. It's really good to really see what
(06:27):
the variations on the steamer. So this one's for you. Bessel.
I would say, Um, I'm very concerned about the magnitude
of large t trauma being created e g. Immigration trauma
inflicted at the border and all that entails. Any suggestions
on how we can counteract that, you know, one reaction
(06:51):
I have about what's happening to the border is that.
Unfortunately it's the extreme, but it's likely that in your
own town or onetown across, kids are being based in
situations that are not all that much better. I think
what's happening in the border is a war crime and
(07:11):
people should be punished like war criminals for doing what
they're doing. We know exactly what happens to kids who
are being treated like that, and it's torture and these
kids will never recover from it, and it's horrendous and
it's unbelievable that is happening in our country. Knowing as
(07:31):
we know what we're doing, it's inexcuse him. We'll be
back in a moment with more family secrets. Here's an
(07:53):
interesting question as well with early childhood trauma. Can't association
and lead to repression of all the bad as a
child seeks to be perfect, only to shockingly resurface fifty
years later when we traumatized with dissociation reappearing as memories resurface.
(08:14):
If so candidate associations stopped, well, that's that's a classical situation.
You know. There's hinted that in your book. Also, we
all like to believe that we were raised in happy
families because we all believe we're responsible for the families
were raised in. So if our family is violent, we
(08:36):
didn't want to hide it from ourselves and from my
consciousness and certainly from other people. Know. I'm not going
to tell you what my family that that's crazy, because
on way you'll think badly about me. It's very important
for us to keep it happy face, and the association
was curious what you think about it? To some degree
(08:56):
is a good thing. Is the larger to survive, and
so uh very common that people just split off part
of it and say it's not happening. We've met many
people who were sexually abused who don't remember the abuse
from the night before, go to school, happy, go lucky,
go back. The same thing happens during the day. They
(09:19):
are completely different people, and they grow up, and at
some point something happens and the whole stuff starts shutting
back along the lines of would happened to you, but
much more, much worse even, and then you think you're
going crazy and all the stuff started flying flying back,
And I hope at that point you find somebody who
can hold you and to continue, which again you write
(09:43):
beautifully in your book, how beautifully your husband also really
was there for you, really extraordinary. At at that point,
we need somebody to help us and not to label
us and say you're crazy take drugs, which you will
almost certainly do when you've got a psychiatrist. But what
you can say, let's find a safe place for you
(10:04):
to be hold you calm yourself down. And unfortunately there's
not enough places like that that I can think that
people can go. And that's why you know, an your
conference this year, um, I'm going to really we have
a bunch of people who do have set up peer
support systems, and I think what we need more and
(10:27):
more is peer support systems of people who are there
for each other, like that group who just said we're
lunching people from the say who have siblings. I think
it's very important that we moved towards de professionalizing this
and not making it dependent on insurance companies are really
for people to make a commitment to helping each other.
(10:47):
You know where I learned that in China. I was
musically invited to spend a month in China and with
a group of people of professional women, about a thousand
professional women who have peer support systems. They get together
once a week and they get to weather once a month.
It's a larger group of people, and they have conferences
at meetings, and they have a mific system of just
(11:10):
people being there for each other and getting help to
be there for each other. So we're going to port
yet another thing from China. We'll be back in a
moment with more family secrets. And this one's for me.
(11:32):
Should I read the other memoirs reverse order or start
at the beginning? That's funny. I was. I was afraid
with Inheritance that would that no one would ever read
any of my earlier memoirs now because I was wrong. Um,
but that's not that's not actually what's happening at all.
It's really interesting. I have no opinion about the order.
(11:53):
I think you could move backwards in time. Um. I
mean essentially from my first memoir, Slow Motion, all the
way through Inheritance. It's one body of work. I understand
that now there should be like a box set of them,
because it's it's you know, it's it's thirty two year
old Danny looking back at twenty three year old Danny,
and then it's you know, young mom Danny with her
(12:15):
spiritual existential crisis, and then it's you know, married Danny,
thinking about marriage and walking along another person over time. Um.
But in a way, what I was exploring was always
coming back to. I Mean, one of the things I
always say to my students is theme is just a
fancy literary term for obsession, and we don't choose what
(12:39):
obsesses us. And what obsessed me was understanding my dad.
I suppose, understanding my mom, but that became more diagnostic
than anything. I mean, understanding my dad in terms of
like what was his sorrow, what was his pain? What
made him him? Um? And it's there through all of
(13:00):
my books. My aunt Shirley, my father's younger sister, called
me when she had read Devotion, which I was afraid
she would find painful because there's a lot in there
about how I didn't feel like I belonged in my
family even then. And she said she was crying when
she called me, and she said, it's like a cottage
for your father. Umcottish meaning like a um, like a prayer. Uh,
(13:22):
it's it's a it's a it's an omad, it's an offering.
And all my work was in some way that UM.
So in a way I think reading them is just
it's kind of read reading a life, reading a life
in which something wasn't known that that was known later
that was being informed by There's a phrase that I
use that I mentioned to you, UM, a psychoanalytic phrase
(13:47):
that the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas used and has written about um,
the unthought known UM, which I kept thinking about while
I was reading The Body keeps the score. You know,
we we are driven in so many ways by what
we no but can't bring ourselves to think. When you
(14:08):
talk about, you know, the gut instinct, or the way
that the body keeps the score, the way the way
that the body reveals to us what we are, what
we can't reveal to ourselves if you allow it, if
you allow yourself to listen, if you allow yourself to
even be in a position to feel it. Yeah, okay,
(14:29):
But in terms of the box set, you know, after
after people see King Lear, they don't go like, okay,
I've seen Shakespeare, that's enough, and they went went back
to the same things over and over again. So I
think reading several boks might be useful. M How did
(14:51):
you I guess this probably could be for either of us,
how how did you overcome your own trauma in its
physical manifestations? How to is how did it manifest or
show up for you? So I can say a couple
of things about that, because writing about trauma's really hard.
Writing about physical sensation is like one of the banes
(15:12):
for writers. I mean, how many ways? Because can your
heart pound or your palms sweat, or you know your
stomach drop or you know your fingers tingle. There's like
it's too easy to enter the realm of you know,
cliche in some way. Um time, I mean in part time. Um,
(15:33):
I really was dizzy for a year. UM and I
stopped having a relationship with my own But I've I've
had a yoga practice. Since I stopped practicing yoga, I
would unroll my mat and the body that had been
on that matt no longer felt like the body that
(15:53):
was now. I mean it was the strangest feeling of
like I'm still the same person, but my understanding of
about myself is so alter it and um and so
I that drifted away from me and I'm still struggling
to get back to it. Um Meditation was tremendous for me.
I have an app called insight timer that some of
you may know. That is for me a very valuable
(16:16):
tool because it keeps me accountable I have I think
it's a hundred and seventy eight days today and I
don't want to break my streak. It gives you like
a little gives you a little gold star every time
you finish your it. Lets you know it's circles the
day of the week and you know, so even if
it's a day where you think, oh my god, I
just don't have time. Yeah. Um, so that that that
(16:38):
space that um. But more than anything else, I mean,
I'm curious what would you would what would you say? Uh?
As for me that the body's pieces very important. I'm
very much into the rear mammals and there's a lot
of stuff in my field about it used to so
mammals need to feel safe without mammals and the way
(17:01):
my Steven Fancive reports, she says, if you want to
know but mammals, to go to a pet store and
look at what poppies do. They chase each other, the
line top with each other. There's love on each other,
and so that part of us needs to come to life.
Very basic bodies that like be with other bodies, and
as long as that doesn't work, everything else it's difficult. Um.
(17:25):
In terms of specific things that I found for me
very helpful is visiting yourself back then and seeing what
that kid went through. And we tend to sort of
have contempt for ourselves as her kids and say, oh,
(17:49):
he was so weak, he didn't stand up for himself,
he wasn't tough enough. Um, she was so compliant or something,
and so you really have to get itself intred for
how you behave back then and really going there and
seeing what that kid went through, and if you had
(18:11):
known then or had been as big then as you
are now, you would not tolerated that. But at that point,
you're gonna this kid had no choice but to behave
like that, and to really the big thing that comes
up more and more is this issue issue of self compassion,
which I also see in your podcasts that have a
(18:32):
deep love for what that kid back there had to
go through and put up with. And it's not because
she was crazy or stupid. She was just trying to survive.
And to really know, like, boy, if I had known
them what I know now, nobody would have gotten away
with UM and the other thing that you mentioned it
(18:54):
to complicate to explain is our the psycho drama I
learned from Albessa of re creating the real scene of
it happened back then and then creating in three dimensional
space and ideal seen where somebody says to you, if
I'd been your dad, I would have been a drinker.
(19:17):
You could have been proud of me. I would have
come home with my uniform as a policeman and you
will say, wow, my dad looks great. It wouldn't have
been needed to be afraid that I was going to
drink and beat you up lay one the night. And
so you you create three dimensionals structures as we call it,
where you create new realities. And it's astounding to me
(19:40):
how I've never brought somebody who tough people growing up,
people who say, oh it is not real. People always like,
oh my god, if that had happened, but it's three
years old, my whole life would have been different than
people really gets new reality instill this is out of them,
so they start living in a different map of themselves
(20:01):
that the map that has determined how they live. And
is that in part because it is being placed in
three dimensions? I think it's really dimension the critical thing.
And you have people around you who enact like if
I said you, if you said me, choose somebody over
there to be your mom, and I said, okay, well
(20:22):
you beat my mom and you said to me, where
would you like to mount your mom to be? Said
you should be right there, a little bit further back,
turn a little bit slump over. Yeah, and there's something
in your right brain that's a spatial brain, is not
logical and not time determined, that has an internal image
(20:45):
of who people are. And then you bring other people
and said, oh my god, that's but my internal world
looks like when I said, it's three dimensional space. And
then you can start moving it up. It's amazing. I'm
still started by it. Yeah, that's beautiful. I think we
are out of time and that's a beautiful place to
(21:07):
to end. Best all, I want to thank you so
much for this conversation and thank you all for coming.
So thank you. Go to come. For more podcasts for
(21:37):
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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