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