0:00 [Music] hello and welcome to the your parenting mojo podcast today we're here with a guest who is a luminary in his field of trauma psychology dr bessel van der kolk dr van der kulk has been at the forefront of translating emerging findings from neuroscience and attachment research to develop and study a range of treatments for traumatic stress in children and adults for decades now he began by

0:32 studying post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans and has gone on to study it and other adults as well as how trauma affects children he's studied treatments to help people improve their functioning in the world by looking beyond symptoms to understanding the causes of their behavior that's generating their problems and then not just shifting their cognitive understanding of the problems and the causes but also showing them how to change their physical experience of their lives dr vanderkulk's book the body keeps the

0:59 score is required reading for anyone who wants to begin understanding that trauma isn't just something we experience in our brains but something that lives in us if what you hear in today's interview resonates with you and you see how the trauma that you've experienced in your life is impacting your relationship with your children today i invite you to join my taming your triggers workshop which is open for registration from sunday august 1st through wednesday august 11th

1:24 it's a 10-week course where you learn the real sources of your triggered feelings which either lie in the kinds of big t traumatic experiences that we'll discuss here today or potentially in not having your needs seen and met by your parents you'll get all the support you need in our private non-facebook community and you can sign up to get an encounter buddy to bounce ideas off as you're learning them and to hold you gently accountable for doing the work when you

1:48 might otherwise just let it fall by the wayside because it's difficult or maybe even threatening to the stories that your overactive left brain has told you about your experiences for all these years you can go to your parentingmojo.com forward slash taming your triggers to learn more about the course and sign up i also wanted to mention that we had some technical challenges during this interview so you may notice a little bit of choppiness as we had to remove some

2:12 sections because they weren't understandable but even so there's such an incredible amount of value in what dr van der kolk was saying that i know you're going to get something useful out of it so here we go i was curious to hear your interview with krista tippett and on being which a number of people have recommended as a really stellar interview and you had talked about how people in other cultures have things like dancing and moving and

2:38 singing really integrated into their cultures and religions and i haven't been a church since i was a child but there was no there was no dancing there's no moving in the church of england and it also reminded me of resma manikam's book my grandmother's hands where he describes people who were enslaved using exactly these practices to continue their culture and heal their trauma yeah but we just kind of stuff it down and then it comes back to bite us later

3:03 and we find that we need the pills and that we need the the alcohol it feels like we need that um what's what happened in our culture do you think to make us sort of head down in that direction instead of these other practices that seem like they're much more beneficial well of course it depends a little on the culture that we live in like let's say you would live in berkeley california it would not be

3:26 unusual to go to your yoga studio but in other parts of the country uh you are a traitor to your religion if you have yoga very true yeah very much on your environment and among the people i hang out with uh having a yoga practice and meditation practice would be or even martial arts practice would be very common but that's a small segment of the population of course you know people like easy answers

3:58 and uh and that's through all over the world let me give an example um a few years ago there was this huge tsunami in in the indian ocean and a a group from my clinic went down to sri lanka to do first aid and they called me for the beach in sri lanka and said bessel they have everything here and they need to recover they are moving together they're singing together they're rituals

4:28 it's beautiful but down the street farsi pharmaceuticals has come with pills and the all these sri lankan people are lining up behind the fisa truck to get the pill to make the pain go away and i think that's always around the world an issue is what is a community strong enough to induce you to share your pain communally or do you go off drinking or drugging by yourself and i think that's you know

5:01 you see that all over the world in some ways but in other parts of the world the other things are more easily accessible yeah and i think it might have been in that on being episode or another uh interview that i heard from you where you were talking about how you uh helped out in puerto rico after the hurricane i think i think it was if i'm remembering that correctly yeah and that i that again people were sort

5:24 of uh taking charge of what needed to be done and and uh they had a sense of autonomy over the start of the repair work and then fema arrives and take and completely takes over the whole thing and and says that you're going to do it how we're going to do it and stop doing all these things you've been doing and it just seems as though we sort of impose these ways on other people a lot

5:43 of the time as well yeah and of course american society has these inborn things about top down versus individualistic enterprises but you know you can say all kinds of things are inaccessible but america is still the land of innovation and somehow our culture is still of it's okay to start something new and start to to try out new things and you see things happen all the time and so there's this tension between but

6:13 we don't have a government that's really for us for the people but at least we still have a culture where there's a relative amount of possibility for people to develop alternative structures yeah so i'd love to sort of go back a little bit as it were into your history of working with people who have experienced trauma and i know that you were really struck by the early early animal research where uh researchers not including you were

6:42 giving painful electric shocks to dogs while they were trapped in cages and then they would open the cage doors and the dogs who had been shocked would just kind of sit there whimpering and i think this has obvious parallels to situations like domestic abuse where we might say well why doesn't the patient the person just leave but i'm also interested in the implications of this for people who are not in the thick of the trauma right now that it has happened to

7:06 them in the past something like you know divorce and bullying and things that happened in our childhood and that this has profoundly shifted the ways that we show up in our relationships with our children today and i think it's so tempting to just say well you're not in that hurtful situation anymore that you were in when you were a child why don't you just do it differently why why doesn't that work because you still are in that situation because we become

7:30 who we are on the basis of the experiences that we have had and the experiences that we have had in our brain mind predicts how things will be in the future so if your experience as a kid is that the people who aren't supposed to take care of you regularly humiliate you put you down make you feel terrible about yourself that becomes your map of the world and then later on you may meet somebody who puts you down and

7:59 humiliates you and you go like wow this person is a terrible person but i feel at home and you may feel more comfortable in its own bizarre way with that person who doesn't ask you things to you then somebody who's actually nice to you and so so these early experiences really set your expectations and set your reward system of your brain you know so that certain things become pleasurable

8:30 that for other people may not be pleasurable or they may feel terrible that for other people feel terrific and that's not a conscious decision because these things get laid down in the nether regions of your brain yeah and it i think it um has a lot of connections obviously to attachment theory and i've been digging into a lot of reading on that lately and how uh babies will even seek out attachment they'll they'll be motivated to connect with a parent

8:59 even if the parent is uh abusive towards the child so it's we're we're very communal creatures for me by far the most interesting course i took in college was about harlow and his monkeys and it turns out that now several of my closest friends were working for harlow at the same time that i was studying harlow and you know seeing how we as human beings really are

9:31 little monkeys with a gigantic frontal lobe and i always love to look at monkeys because they chase each other and they groom each other they fight and they do things very much like human beings do and what harlow found is that monkeys need to be attached and humans need to be attached there's not like an option you know covet is not like oh let's just be by ourselves for a year and not connect with other people no

10:02 that is who we are we are defined by our context defined by uh the people who know us the people who don't know us the people who recognize us to make us people makes you feel special that's who we are most of our brain is for social enterprise yeah so there's severe problems there when we can't do that and just for anyone who's listening who is not familiar with the harlow's experiment this is where uh he's

10:29 creating these monkeys made out of wire that i mean some of them would puff air at the baby every time the baby tried to hug up to it and some of them had spikes on some of them were just a terry cloth over the piece of wire and you see these pitiful pictures of babies and monkeys hugging yeah yeah rather than mothers who feed them which is really interesting so the touch thing actually just we're doing research right now on touch and

10:55 trauma feeling being touched being held is very much at the core of who we are yeah oh can you tell me some more about that what are you looking at in that research oh we're looking at um that a lot of traumatized people are terrified of touch and don't feel comfortable with touch or knee touch all the time or that don't get comfort from touch so there's a real altered relationship to your bodily systems and you know because we have been so

11:27 drugs or yaking in our field we haven't paid attention to that and for me it's interesting that there have been nobel prizes figuring out how vision works and how audition works and how smell works and somehow people left out touch and touch has been virtually not studied even though the first thing we do when we're distressed is to hold on to each other and often when something terrible happens you don't even have words

11:58 but just feeling somebody hope even better is bigger and stronger than you are to hold you said it will be okay it's very powerful and uh people with trauma tests have terrific difficulties taking in the comfort of touch living with it and i think that's a dimension that we need to pay much more attention to yeah yeah i agree and i think it's partly to do with the the body brain split that we enforce through various aspects of our culture

12:29 where culture yeah this is who we are yeah yeah we privilege everything that happens in the brain as rational and and better than anything else that's happening elsewhere in the body and yeah so i was um thinking then about uh some of the ways that people who maybe don't have access to therapy can do work on on some of the trauma that they've experienced and it seems as though touch could be a really important part of that is that right

12:53 oh yeah but the other thing is becoming increasingly clear to me is so i went to medical school in social psychiatry school and then you think that okay this is the avenue for mental health you meet social workers occupational therapists who find a slightly different avenue to mental health and then you realize after well that all of us just do a very small part of the overall thing maybe the director of your choir or maybe your

13:23 uh music teacher or maybe your physical fizz ad instructor or your your boxing coach may be as useful for you as a traumatized person as a therapist could be therapy it's just a small part of the whole large spectrum of issues that get affected by trauma yeah so so talking is uh can can be helpful but there are a whole lot of other things that are useful too you know and for a while i really sort of put

13:56 words because i always thought that everybody talked in great depth with their patients and then i started to do a lot of supervision particularly past year and i hear that a lot of people mistake advice giving and wrecking their fingers for therapy which is very different i have been fairly unimpressed with the art of really listening and be really helping people to find words for the internal

14:26 experience doesn't seem to be essential to the field as it was when i grew up so i'm so really going back into no people need to find words for themselves people need to know who they are they need to discover who they are and find words for the internal experience in the same way that when you have a baby a very important part of having that baby is to help that baby to talk and find words for things

14:53 outside of themselves and things inside of themselves you're traumatized you oftentimes have to have words for the inner experience and trying to say what it is say what's going on and make a verbal connection with your inner world is actually quite important yeah and you also look a lot at tools like mindfulness and yoga as well and you've done research on the effectiveness of those in helping people who are traumatized can you tell us about that

15:20 well the mindfulness research was really done by a very curious marriage of the dalai lama and tibetan buddhism with a bunch of uh neuroscientists who really met each other richie davidson and john cabezin and people like that and they sort of fell in love with each other and it set up this whole thing of the mind life institute where people really looked at what the inner experience feels like

15:50 it was very productive beautiful work was done and we got a much deeper understanding about what self is and the relationship to yourself is and how it's laid down in your brain and how disturbed it is by trauma but we also discovered that also we know that mindfulness is in order to have a mind you need to be mindful in order to be in control of yourself you need to actually know where your mind is and what your mind

16:18 wants etc etc but what we also discovered is if you're traumatized uh you have all these sensations in your body that can be extremely uncomfortable and for many times just people doing meditation is very scary to just allow the sensation in your body to come out they may be very disturbing and what is very striking about many times is people who i've known and still know

16:48 is that they love to turn on the television they love to blast music and they love to have a lot of activities anything to not have to experience that internal self and so meditation sounds so wonderful but in fact when you traumatize it's a very hard thing to do and yoga is easier because the yoga instead of focusing on on nothingness inside you focus on getting the back to touch your toe and to twitch yourself

17:18 with a particular angle you activate the same circuits but yeah you know you actually are able to focus more on your body and be less subject to all kind of unpleasant old stuff coming up and coming back to haunt you um yeah so it's almost like they work in parallel then that um that the the physical focus on the movement in the yoga may open up some space for the mindfulness as well that's right yeah um and i know that

17:46 uh in one of your papers you you cite a number of body-based practices like focusing and sensory awareness and feldenkrais and hakomi and there's so many of these body-based practices and and i wanted to quote what you said you said the nature and effects of these practices are not easily articulated and their meanings are not easily captured in the dominant intellectual categories which i think is your way of saying essentially what i found which is that there's essentially

18:10 no academic research on any of these techniques beyond the mindfulness and the yoga and i i think okay so are you all the names of all three people who actually yes please do because i would love to to read all three papers [Laughter] so so how do we move forward with this i mean i know that academic research is important when you're looking at population level recommendations because we want to make sure we're spending our time and our money effectively

18:35 but if if we're an individual and we're looking to understand well could one of these practices help me is there a way that we can do that based on the three people who are doing research in this arena well you know we don't need to do music research and everything you know people live without research on what music is most pleasing or you know you don't necessarily need to go to academic route but clinical practices always are ahead of

19:06 academic investigations and so a really good condition knows much more than anybody in the laboratory does because it takes much longer for laboratories to catch up with clinical complexities and so like recently it was a confident harvard where they talked about very sick stuff the tama and i sat there and i said yeah i studied that back in 1989 it started back in 1991. and somehow it didn't move

19:37 rediscovering all the old stuff again and then the old probably discovery like i did is that this stuff is held in the body you need to work in the body but um once it goes to mainstream academia they need to rediscover all this old stuff again yeah um but how can we know that even the thing we're doing is safe i mean i know you've talked about rolfing and i didn't know what that was well they know is that our bodies get

20:07 configured along the lines of what's required for them so if you're a little kid and you need to be really tough you get a real tough body and you walk around like this tough creature and if you think that the only way i'm going to survive is by being compliant and never letting people know how angry i you see you get the configuration of a mouse um and you walk through the world like like please don't hit me don't hit me

20:35 and so these things get actually configured in your body and there's either evolve taught us and you know it was weird for me uh when i was a medical student but then later on you discover that's true and then what rolfing does it actually opens up these set patterns of your fascia and your muscles so you don't get trapped in a body that continues to live out the fear the terror et cetera in the past just very

21:02 solid good thinking okay all right so i wonder if we can go back to some of uh what you said earlier about uh your the idea of what the self is and how that's laid down in early childhood through things like attachment relationships and um i think that also connects with uh things that you would learn from dr elvin samrad you talked about in the book about how he uh wants us to connect to be honest

21:28 with ourselves and connect with the reality of our lives and i'm curious about your thoughts on that we have done some digging on that topic and talked with dr chris niebauer about his book no self no problem which is the basic premise is that there's kind of no reality that we can know that yes we can experience this moment but then our left brain is making up a story about what actually happened to fit within our broader understanding and our

21:52 existing memories and what we actually end up sort of encoding into our memory can have very very little basis in the thing that actually happened and so how can we fit those two ideas together this idea of i i have ideas about where i've come from where i've been and what that means for me right now and also that essentially our left brains are very overactive and and that we can't necessarily believe very much of what they tell us

22:16 i think it's all true we are meaning making creatures and you know what i'd like to say is that every tribe in the world probably has had an explanation of why the sun rises in the east assessed in the west and most explanations were wrong but if you and i agree on our meaning making system on whatever the moon goddess makes advice then we are good friends so it doesn't really matter whether it's reality the question

22:46 is whether we create the same meaning universe of course that's happening in america more and more where there's large spots of people who have no idea what the other person is talking about and that is that's really it's confronting us right now but but when you traumatize things are oftentimes so confusing and so scary and so unclear who is causing what that your head isn't a great model and

23:17 then finding a way of making meaning for yourself is enormously helpful and that's really what therapy is about is that let me see what happened to this kid and and then you get in this whole issue of self-blame and self-hatred i feel this must have happened to me because i was a bad person and people treated me like a bad person anyway so you get this very deep sense of being damaged good and being wrong but the but the very important way of

23:46 getting out of that is to really hear yourself say it and to find these words and find the words you have for yourself and go like wow oh that's how i think about myself i think myself myself as this piece of that's good for nothing oh that's why i kept going to that bar where people did terrible things to me because i really don't have a sense that i deserve anything better huh interesting i didn't know that about

24:13 myself so words are still important and finding somebody who helps you to find words as cautiously as they can without inflicting too much of their own value system on you is quite important but our value systems come in there anyway it's important to be kind and generous not only with other people but with yourself it's important to be still it's important to empty out your mind stuff like that but but you asked me another question that i'd like to say

24:44 something and this how do we how do we change the culture my agenda these days more than anything else and i've considered myself a preacher man is to see if you can get a policy that in every classroom in america from k to 12 kids are being taught every week about the four hours reading about arithmetic and self-regulation that the kids are taught to experience themselves to feel themselves to have a language for themselves to have a language for

25:15 the internal experience to have a language for what happens in their brain a language happens to their bodies and that kids are being taught that when you become really nervous the way you breathe really will help you to calm yourself down when you feel really upset tapping certain acupressure points in your body may help you to be focused maybe when you get really upset and you run around the block and really expand a lot of energy

25:42 you may feel safer and so that all of us get taught that regulating yourself and owning yourself is a core part of existence that's that's worthy of one of the four core things that you learn as you grow up wouldn't that be amazing that's not the case yeah and and not just to teach it from the perspective of well you need to learn as soon as you said self-regulate my mind immediately went to well yes because that makes it easier for the

26:11 teachers to to sort of keep a classroom of 30 kids under control but what you're really talking about here is that this is a fundamental skill for throughout life and if we're just learning these skills in adulthood then you know imagine how our lives could have been different if we had understood uh from an early age what capacities we have ourselves to regulate ourselves that just because somebody says something that we find distressing doesn't mean that we have to

26:37 feel anger if we if we're we can choose a different response we can or to feel the anger and then to say and they have a choice about what to do with the other exactly yeah i think that's a very important thing that's the four r the r the fourth r is yes people will do things that will piss me off and so when i feel that impulse oh i feel impulse to plant my fist in

27:04 their face right now how interesting i think i'll probably not do that just i'll just check my cell phone or so you really build up an internal capacity to really notice your emotions know these sensations and take care of them yeah and not have them sort of run with you yeah and there's there's nothing like that in our culture right now at all anywhere is there yeah i mean that's why parents are here listening to this right now so that they can start to

27:32 do this where i can break the cycle and introduce these ideas to their children the young parents who i see in my surroundings which aren't all that many and not representative are extraordinarily good in doing these things with their kids how they find language for their feelings they talk with their kids the greatest predictor of adult function the two most important predictions of adult function that i know of has been scientifically studied is one

28:03 daily family meals where people talk to each other and do not look at screens and being involved in team sports where you learn to pass the ball to each other and to be part of a larger group of people these are very powerful predictors of good adult functioning actually yeah and so and i think that's something that's happened to our culture possibly i don't know how most people live but sitting down at the table and talking together

28:34 huh tell me pretty just how was your day what was it like oh someone so got mad at me what's like for you how can you do with it and to really talk about your experiences as a as a group of people who have something to say and learn to hear that whatever your opinion experiences is important to you and so find the language for yourself is is enormously important yeah and we're very clear about meal

29:02 times and that we sit together uh you know in some christian families people may sing by their meals probably very useful singing together is a beautiful thing for people to do or jewish families sing together i think secular families don't have a lot of songs to sing but see your songs or something yes in our house we read black lives matter or black history flash cards

29:33 and learn about that so you have talked a lot about how children who have grown up in abusive environments perceive almost any situation as a trigger and that that reminds them of the danger that they may have faced and and may even continue to face but we tend to apply these diagnostic labels like conduct disorder and adhd and opposition pardon me weak you know savvy i don't know about those labels no but we uh in society-wide

30:06 tend to do those things um and yeah dr gross green has said that oppositional divine disorder is code for this kid hates my guts um and so i i know that you have you have tried to uh have what you've called developmental trauma disorder listed in the diagnostic and statistical manual a few years ago and unfortunately it didn't happen i'm wondering if you can tell us a bit more about the kinds of trauma that uh lead to what you would have

30:32 called a developmental trauma disorder in the dsm oh yeah the the definition of development trouble and sorry was that terrible things happen to you you get beaten up or molested or you witness violence in the context of an environment there where um with caregivers who are not dedicated to making you feel safe and so it's where the attachment system meets the trauma system

31:04 and so the worst thing that can happen to a person happens all the time is if your own parents are the source of your misery your own parents beat you up your own parents molest you then as a kid you have nowhere to go because we are wired to turn to our our parents to make us feel safe and so when that system gets disturbed you get developable trauma disorder or all this huge list of things in the

31:33 dsm um that all have no scientific validity opposition by the context or itself but these are all all the results of growing up unsafe and terrified and of course if you adopt kids that becomes more complicated because you may be a very thoughtful and non-traumatized person yourself who's quite tolerant and attuned to the needs of that kid but if you have been adopted you

32:06 the kid may have all kinds of things that are missing in terms of that capacity to take in your kindness and your warmth and you may feel very frustrated trying to do well by these kids and they don't really respond to you because once you get timed as a kid it becomes really difficult to reset and rewire their brain to really take in the milk of you the pleasure of the milk of human kindness okay and so i think that part of the

32:36 reason that you were trying to get this into the dsm was that there's a a link between being able to diagnose something effectively and being able to treat it effectively um so what kind of problems does it diagnosis that's why we don't like nonsense diagnosis like mind disorder because if you have something wrong with you i'm a doctor you know um and if i have a cough and i have blood coming out or something i want you to figure out what is wrong

33:03 with me and not give you the diagnosis that the insurance company will pay me for to give to you and in that regard mental health completely has sold its soul to a system that is determined by how much you get reimbursed by insurance companies rather than fighting out what does this particular person need yeah yeah it's it's very unfortunate uh for sure um and i'm wondering also the extent to which uh this comes into play for

33:34 children who maybe haven't been sort of horrifically traumatized but maybe they went through a pattern of of just having their needs were not met and i'm so i'm sort of thinking of dr alice miller's work where she talks about um children who were just kind of habitually didn't have needs met in childhood and and is it the case that that can sort of stack up over time and form a kind of trauma in children as well

34:04 it's i would say it forms a pattern of adaptation because you have this need to feel attached we really we're fundamentally unable to cut off all ties with everybody okay and so when you live in scary abusive surroundings you adjust yourself to try to live with whatever is going on even if it's at the expense of yourself and you can say oh my parents are

34:36 wonderful people they beat me up from time to time because i'm a rotten kid or i deserve it i'm really fundamentally evil and so it's okay to do this stuff for me or so people find ways of accommodating to this reality and it's very difficult for them to say no i'm not being honored i'm not being taken seriously this is not love and to go and to leave a situation very very

35:07 difficult for people to do yeah and essentially impossible for children right even even if they and may not even have the language to say my needs are not being met it's because the the parent is such an omniscient omnipotent person if the parent is not giving me what i need it must be my fault the problem must be in me you don't know what your needs are right you just know that you feel terrible and so when we're

35:31 thinking about uh sort of how we think about disease in a way you know mental health and disease you you talk about how the brain disease model really overlooks what you say are four fundamental truths and and i was super surprised in reading it of course i'm much less surprised now in in in talking with you that three of these four are related to connections with other people and the one that isn't is about regulating our own physiology and and

35:56 we've talked about that quite a lot in the podcast um but the other things paraphrasing are things that are while relationships destroy each other in people uh they also heal each other that language helps us to achieve this healing through a sense of common meaning and that we can change social conditions so that people can feel safe and fr and thrive and it seems to me as though it's not just the brain disease model that's flawed but it's the

36:19 problem it's this whole idea of you have a problem and you need to work on fixing it this flaw do you agree with that perspective well i i voted obviously i do no we are we are monkeys you know we are meant to be with other people our brain is to be with other people our language is to be communicating to other people that's who we are and so people can

36:49 do miracles with each other you know particularly you're more open for that earlier in your life but if you just have the right kindergarten teacher you can get a sense of oh this is what it feels like when somebody pays attention to you or if you're lucky enough that if your first boyfriend your first girlfriend when you're 16 17 18 is a person who really thinks that you're wonderful with whom you have a great relationship then it can sort of undo a lot of

37:21 earlier damage also the opposite is true also and you can be a fairly well put together person and then later on you can live in an extremely hostile work environment and they can destroy a lot of these earlier patterns although the parents laid down earliest in your life are most powerful [Music] yeah and and so um i think that i was also drawn to an exercise in your book where you uh there were a couple of maria's who had anecdotes

37:53 described in your book and um one of them you guided uh through an exercise where people who were in a group with her did a role play where they took on the roles of people who had traumatized her so that she could experience a different outcome of an interaction that they were role-playing and and i read stacey haynes's book on somatic experiencing and i realized when she described a very similar anecdote that that's essentially what you were doing

38:18 and i was talking with a friend about this and she observed how amazing it would be if we could actually do this kind of healing work for each other out in the community instead of potentially needing so many therapists absolutely so my my group the trauma research foundation actually is starting again a whole peer support uh organization network basically because what i was struck by is that when we first started to talk about trauma uh and so the critical people in my mind

38:49 they were judy herman and me who were close friends and collaborators back then is that i was running veterans groups she was running incest survivors groups after that and then also in certain groups and what we saw is books like our bodies ourselves of women who really supported each other and this whole sexual abuse awareness movement came out of the feminist society as a peer thing and what we have also

39:20 seen among veterans for example is that peer support and peer counseling and etc is extremely powerful and probably more so than the professional help they can get but that peer stuff seems to have disappeared so through the time of research foundation we're very active right now in teaching people peer support we actually hooked up an organization in china of all places of 120 120 000 people which is very small by chinese standards

39:54 of people who do peer support with each other they read books together they uh do uh meditation together and they have a very complex structure of people really having a mattress and holding environment of peers whether with whom they can process their stuff not unlike what you see in 12-step programs also yeah you really don't have to pay an insurance company in order to get help yeah okay so so as we wrap up i'm just

40:24 wondering uh if a parent is listening to this and and they've experienced trauma in their lives and and they're seeing the effects of this come out in the ways that they're interacting with their children um what advice do you have for that parent to to try to work on interrupting that cycle well um i think i think therapy to work on your own stuff is terribly important maybe particularly therapy as you're having young kids and you can really observe yourself with

40:56 your kids and observe what it brings up inside of you and how you may be terrified your kid will grow up just like somebody who you know and what fears it evokes and what makes you feel comfortable and what makes you feel competent with your kid and to really get a lot of support none of us can raise kids by ourselves another thing that really has struck me is that i know a handful of people now

41:29 about 10 couples who have young kids and they're by and large not traumatized people and when they keep being impressed with it is how quickly they find other people companies to connect with and to help them with co-parenting and babysitting stuff and they form little pods of collaborative parenthood and i've seen this in many different places and what also struck you probably is if you've been traumatized yourself

42:00 you're probably less likely to easily establish a group like that around you of support and then you may need some extra help maybe from a professional to find another group of people with whom you can do this together but i think you know i know people who raise kids all by themselves i think that's an unbelievable challenge yes i agree yeah and i know people who do it and it's very very admirable

42:32 actually but by and large beneath supports yeah okay all right so uh so finding ways to get that support and uh in a variety of different ways it there's no one model it that works for everybody it's it's what it is that what you feel you need to be supported with that is the important part more than following any plan a prescription for the kind of support that you use beware of anybody who prescribes and says this is the answer

42:58 yes [Laughter] probably not awesome and don't forget that if you want to get all the support that you need to work through the process of understanding where your triggered feelings really come from and how to navigate them so that you can respond to your child effectively rather than going into usual fight flight freeze or fun mode where it feels like you don't know how to react you can sign up between sunday august 1st and wednesday august

43:25 11th i can't wait to work with you there