How To Heal Genetic, Cultural, and Individual Trauma with Dr. James Gordon

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Trauma suppresses those genes that help us deal more effectively with stress and make us more vulnerable to future stress. That's what triggers are all about in a sense. We're reactivating on a biological level the trauma we've previously experienced.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Farmacy to the Nth power, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever experienced trauma in your life, small or big, whether it's the little traumas that happen to us as children or the big traumas that can happen to us through war or abuse, this is going to be an important conversation because it's with an extraordinary human being. a very close friend of mine, a Harvard trained psychiatrist and physician, Dr. James Gordon, who's just come back from two and a half weeks in Ukraine. He's the author of Transforming Trauma: the Path to Hope and Healing. He is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Center for Mind Body Medicine in Washington, DC. And he's recognized for using self-awareness, self-care, group support to heal population and individual trauma. He's a professor at Georgetown Medical School and was chairman under President Clinton and G.W. Bush of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. Welcome, James. Jim.

Thank you, Mark. It's always good to be with you.

Yeah, well, I'm just really excited for this conversation because we are living in a very traumatic time. And we recently had Gabby Matte on the podcast talking about both micro traumas that happened to us throughout our lives in childhood and macro traumas. And right now you are in a situation that is pretty fraught with macro trauma. You literally just came back from Ukraine, had bombs falling all around you. People you knew literally were killed from these bombs just a few feet away from you. And you've returned to America and it's important that you share your story and tell us about what happened. give people an insight into what's happening there on the ground, as well as your overall work around trauma. So you've written some of the worst traumas ever, or you've been to Kosovo and worked with war trauma, you've been in Haiti and the worst moments there in their history. I was there with you in 2010. You go to wherever the problems are, whether it's the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where suicides are rampant amongst children, or Katrina in New Orleans after the hurricane. And wherever there's problems, you show up to help heal not just individuals but populations. And you've created a model for doing it that's quite powerful. But I'd like you to maybe share about what you've witnessed recently and how the war is affecting the state of mental health in both children and adults and what you're doing there to mitigate some of these long-term effects of trauma that the Ukrainians are now experiencing.

Well, yeah. You know, I think as you're talking about sort of where I've been and what I've done, I think one of the functions, certainly for me, and I think for all of us as Physicians, is to be with people when they're going through the most difficult times. So this is whether those times are manifested in physical illness or psychological trauma. And so this is, this is work that I feel called to do and. that feels very much a part of my identity as a physician, as a psychiatrist. I think the important thing to understand about Ukraine, which is, well, one of the important things to understand is that everybody in the country is both mobilized to deal with the Russian invasion and committed, just about everybody is 100% committed to it. And just about everybody is seriously traumatized. When I talk with people there, they also have a wonderful sense of humor, which mitigates the trauma in some ways. They say, Nobody's normal here. Trauma's in our DNA. And it's true. It's a whole country that's under assault. And if you read what what Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, says. It's clear that he wants to exterminate the people and the country, and he has no regard for human life. And the actions in any part of the country, primarily in the eastern part of the country, demonstrate that. And people in Ukraine are very connected to one another. Everybody I met in the western part of Ukraine, a thousand up close to a thousand miles away from the east, they all have connections. My cousin's in Crimea. My friend I went to school with is in Donbas where the fighting is.

So.

Raging for so long, for eight years now, really, since last February. And so they feel all of the losses, the losses of life, the destruction of homes, the utter annihilation of cities, feels very personal to everybody. So everybody is deeply affected. I think for us to understand it, you know, I'm thinking, you know, you live in Western Massachusetts. So if Boston were wiped out, what would the repercussions of that be like for you? For me, you know, when I was in Kiev in the capital, there were bombs falling 500 yards away was the closest one. What if a bomb was falling 500 yards away from me here in DC? What would that feel like? And I think that gives a sense of the forces that are producing the trauma in the entire population. And what's happening now is that people all over Ukraine are waking up to the effects of psychological trauma. The focus for the first months of the war was very much on you know, we've got to win this fight. We've got to keep the Russians from invading Kiev. We've got to push them back. All still absolutely vitally important. But they're beginning to recognize in the schools and the hospitals and the clinics and the community-based organizations and in the military the effect of psychological trauma on everybody of every image.

Yeah. So incredible, Jim, to hear what you're sharing about, you know, being there with bombs dropping just a few hundred yards away. And I, you know, I think it's really, and you look at the history of the Ukrainians, and actually my family is, part of my family is from Ukraine, from Kiev way back when, you know, 100 years ago when they were traumatized from the pogroms and the shtetls and were beaten by the Russians and the Ukrainians that had to leave and flee to America. And then the Ukrainians were subject to Nazi occupation. into Stalinist terror. And I remember being in Kiev years ago, and I remember, you know, walking down this incredible boulevard with these beautiful chestnut trees. And it was the march that the Nazis took 100,000 Jews on to a trench outside town, and literally just lined them up at this place called Babayar and shot 100,000 Jews like nothing. and buried them alive, many of them still alive. And I remember the incredible gravity and power and pain and immensity of that feeling of being there in that spot and reimagining what that must have been like. And it's happening again. It's happening again. And it's generational trauma. So a lot of you kind of share a little bit from a physician's point of view, and a psychiatrist's point of view, what are the sort of the biological, psychological and social damage that trauma inflicts? And the reason I think this is important because, you know, I don't, you've been doing this work for decades. You've been doing this work for 50 years probably. And you were way ahead of the curve on the trauma story. But now the conversation about trauma is emerging. You know, there's conversations around psychedelic therapy we've had on the podcast. people are using ketamine therapy and psilocybin therapy and MDMA therapy to actually deal with some of these deep-seated traumatic experiences that people share. And, you know, trauma can be big or small, but it often registers in the same way, whether it's just neglect as a child or whether it's physical or sexual abuse or being in a war zone. And, and it seems like culturally, we're kind of now having this new conversation about trauma that we never really had before and allowing us to have permission to talk about it. In my own life, I never identified myself as being a trauma victim. But when I look at my childhood and my abusive stepfather, my neglectful father, and the challenges my mother had being a child growing up in a deaf family and sexual abuse that I experienced as a young boy, you know, I'm kind of like, whoa, this is explaining a lot about me. But, you know, so I bring this up not to talk about me, but to really talk about how this is so universal and how your work really looks at this. So take us back through the biological, psychological, and social phenomena of trauma. And then let's talk about some of your work and how you help people heal with that.

Sure. But, you know, Mark, as you're talking, my family, my grandfather came from Odessa. And I went to Odessa to celebrate my birthday on this day.

Yeah, yeah, your 81st birthday.

And when you talk about trauma, I think it is important to recognize trauma is a part of life. Everybody experiences trauma sooner or later. And that's really important. It's not something strange and different. And so the trauma that's come to us may have to do with what's happened to us in our early life or midlife, it can happen anytime, but also the effects of that trauma that happened to our grandparents or great-grandparents, whoever it was in the family in Ukraine, that's there. I could see it, I could see it in, I could see the behavioral aspects in my father a kind of, on the one hand wanting to please the people in the larger society the way Jews absolutely had to, otherwise they'd be annihilated when they were in Ukraine, and at the same time a rebellion against it. And I can feel some of those same impulses in myself. And it's really curious how things get transmitted from generation to generation. We know now that this is an actual, as you're suggesting, this is an actual biological phenomenon. The trauma causes changes in the chromosomes that are called epigenetic changes. Epi is a Greek word that means above. And these are changes that happen in molecules in the chromosomes that in turn affect the genes and affect how the genes express themselves. how they act in our bodies. And in a kind of simple way, trauma suppresses those genes that help us deal more effectively with stress and make us more vulnerable to future stress. So that's why that's what triggers are all about in a sense. We're being reactivating on a biological level the trauma we've previously experienced. And we know now from studies on animals and on Holocaust survivors that this trauma can be transmitted for three generations, from grandparents to parents to the children. And that these changes in these epigenetic changes go along with the behavioral, the psychological, the emotional changes. So I think this is really important for all of us because I don't know if you've had this experience. You wonder at times, well, why am I so affected by X, Y, or Z? And then as you begin to look at the sort of family history, it becomes a little bit clearer. Why do I act the way I do? I remember I was doing a group in one of our training programs, and there was a young woman from Mexico, and she was saying how ashamed she feels. But she said, I don't know why I feel ashamed. And I had no reason in my life. And then she began to reflect on the shame that her parents, who were native people, indigenous people, that they felt when they would go to the market and how they, the oppression of indigenous people was somehow transmitted to this young woman who was quite assimilated. So I think this helps explain some of the difficulties that any of us may be having in our life.

Yeah, it's really true. I think, you know, the history of our families is written in our genes. And, and that seems a little bit daunting because the question is that how do we undo that? But the beautiful thing about epigenetics and the epigenome is that while your genes can't be changed, your epigenome can, and it's influenced by so many things. And we can literally rewrite the story not only of our lives, but we can heal. generational trauma, right? So we talked about past lives and I don't know if that's true or not, but in a sense, our past lives and our ancestors' past lives are written in our genes. And those affect us and how we respond to our life, our nervous systems, our cortisol receptors, our immune system. And in very granular ways, we now understand this scientifically. And what we also understand is that you can actually rewrite the epigenome by certain practices, certain behaviors, certain molecules, maybe some of these psychedelics that are being now researched to do this. And we're seeing profound changes in people. So I think what I'd love you to talk about is how you actually came to this work and then how you use it and what the model is and how you then go from you know, one psychiatrist who has a good heart, who wants to help heal trauma to training 300,000 people in a country in a model of healing, like in a few months. It's pretty remarkable. And you've done this over and over again. I just astounded by it.

So it's, I think that the first thing to say is that the techniques that we use actually can reverse those epigenetic changes.

Yeah.

And there is research on, as, as you know, there's research on meditation, being able to reverse some of those changes, research on nutrition and research on movement and physical exercise, all of them, as well as connection with other people. I think those are all key elements. And our program makes the program at the Center for Mind Body Medicine makes use of all of those tools. We begin by bringing people into biological and psychological balance by teaching them slow, deep, soft belly breathing to as a kind of antidote to the fight or flight response. And then we also use active. And I did when I was in Ukraine this last time, working with people who'd been bombed out of their homes and tortured in the eastern part of Ukraine. I did, did a workshop for them. I got them up shaking and dancing, and they looked at me at first like, what what are you doing? What are you doing? Who is this guy? But they did it. And I said, well, how was it? You know, you tell me. And they said, well, I feel more energized. I feel a little like laughing. I haven't felt like laughing in four months, and I feel like laughing. And my body feels better. So the tools and techniques that we use at the Center for Mind Body Medicine, we teach about 15 self-care techniques and People who want to learn what we're doing can look at our website, cndm.org, or read the book of mine that you mentioned in the beginning, Transforming Trauma. Yeah. Describe all the techniques that we use, all the techniques we've used in all the places you mentioned, Israel, Gaza, Haiti, that we're now using in Ukraine. And I originally came up along with some colleagues, but basically I came up with this approach as a way of a kind of universal language, a kind of vocabulary and grammar of how our mind and body function and making use of the complete interpenetration of mind and body, making use of our understanding that our thoughts and feelings and how we relate to other people as well as what we eat and how we look at the world, that they affect every physiological as well as every psychological function. And so, you know, it's like teaching a new language to people. And I kind of put together from many different traditions, including modern medicine, but learning from the traditional Zulu healers and indigenous North American people and my teacher, who was a North Indian from India, a healer, putting all these techniques together. And initially, I saw this as a way of dealing with kind of as a way of dealing with almost any problem or issue that comes up because stress and dysfunction play such a major role in every physical and psychological condition. It became clear that this was indeed true back when I started the Center for Mind Body Medicine in 1991. And we began to train individual practitioners. Yeah. And then as I saw how well it was working in their practices and hospitals and clinics, I thought, well, let me see, let me go to some of the places in the world where the worst things have happened and let me see if it can be helpful.

Yeah.

So I started, it was a question. I had a feeling it could be helpful. And, you know, I sometimes go by myself, as I did to Ukraine, But I have a whole team of people. We have 160 faculty at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine on our mind-body program. And you've been part of our faculty as well, teaching nutrition. And we're a team. We're a group of people who've come together, what I think of and describe as a healing community and a community of healers. And so it's not, I'm going, I'm laying the foundation. I'm sort of making the connections. I'm doing the kind of the, the scouting and some of the pioneering work. But we're already bringing our team to, to do training. So we're doing the trainings online in Ukraine, and already 270 Ukrainian psychotherapists and Physicians have come through the first two days of our online training. And, and they're using the work. They're using the work in, within the military. They're using it in combat zones. They're using it in clinics and hospitals that in parts of the country that have not been heavily bombed. So it's already happening. And I think that the idea that I had, the sense of wanting to heal population-wide trauma, obviously also appeals to other people. That it's something that we want to be part of something larger than ourselves. That's part of who we are as human beings. And if I can offer people the opportunity to do that, a lot of people are responding.

Yeah, I think it's incredible what you've done, Jim. And I think, you know, I think as a physician trying to change how people eat, you know, it's, it's tough and it's kind of one by one or, you know, you, you know, we've created some models and groups like the Daniel plan, but the scalability of what you've done is, is pretty remarkable. And, and the place you've gone are, are also really unusual. You know, it reminds me of the sort of work of, of Desmond Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa with the, you know, white oppressors and the black oppressed.

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Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

And you've been to Gaza and worked with Israelis and Palestinians who are kind of a death fight almost, and bring them together in ways that help bridge the gap, create healing, understanding, connection. And as I think about your work, I think about the incredible divisiveness now in the world, the sort of acceleration of you know, social media that's driven us further and further apart because of the algorithms that amplify more divisive and inflammatory and hateful content. And I wonder, you know, as I kind of think about America, where we can bring this home and how we can begin to kind of connect in a way that, you know, brings people together, whether it's, you know, you're a vegan or you're a paleo eater or whether you're a Republican or Democrat or whether you're Christian or you're not. It just the amount of divisiveness that takes us away from the essential fact that we're human first and whatever else we are second, it just breaks my heart. And I think I would love to sort of hear your thoughts on how we begin to heal this crisis where now 54% of Republicans believe that our strong Republicans believe that we're going to have civil war within the next 10 years. I mean, that's just a terrifying idea to me that in 2022, we're talking about civil war again in this country.

It is terrifying. And we're doing some of this work in places like Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Broward County, Florida, done some in California, where members of the community who were interested in helping others in their community will come together with each other to learn what we have to teach. And they'll kind of reluctantly be sitting in the same room with people, for example, community organizers sitting in the same room with police who they're organizing against. And the cops are very suspicious of the community organizers, but they're interested in learning what we have to teach. and in the course of being in our trainings and sitting in a small group with other people who you have all these prejudices and ideas about, over a period of time, you begin to see the reality, the reality that's there behind the mask of the propaganda. I remember one time you mentioned Gaza, the first training we did in Gaza, There was a guy, when we do a training, we work in a large group, maybe train 200 people at a time, and then we'll have 20 small groups. So I was in a small, I was leading a small group, and I had some of the leaders in medicine and public health in the group. And a guy who was a nurse was in the group who didn't have very high status in the community. He's one of the angriest people I'd ever met. And he was just, you could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears all the time. And in about the fourth day of the group, he looked at the guy across from him, and I'll spare our watchers the profanity, but basically he said, I've always thought you were the worst kind of arrogant son of a, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I've seen you on television, I've seen you pontificating. But being in this group for four days, I see you're actually a human being. And he said, and that gives me the idea, that maybe some of the Israelis are human too.

Yeah, right.

It's possible, but people have to be willing to come together. I've been working with some members of Congress since January 6th. And I say, and they happen to be all Democrats, and I say, can you get some of the Republicans to come into the group? And the people will say, we've tried, but it's not happening. So there has to be a reason for people to come together. One of the things that's so interesting about Ukraine and I just published this piece on lessons that Americans have to learn, is that people in Ukraine have come together across these divides, across religious divides, across cultural divides, economic divides, political divides, because the importance of saving their country is so much greater than the differences they have. We have to find some kind of common ground. some kind of common interest that will bring us together. And I don't know what it's going to be. I don't know whether it's going to be the welfare of children. I don't know whether it's going to be climate change. I don't know how I'm, you know, I, I heard the, the pessimism or the concern and what you were saying, and it may be that things are going to have to get worse before people are willing to step outside of the, this, these boxes that they live in and and come together with one another. But also, I think it's important to do exactly what we're doing here, is to be talking about the issue so that some of the people, I'm sure you have people who are tuning in who think that the revolution is going to come and that they have to recover America for whoever. But maybe something will touch them. So it's a real process and I think at the community level, It's easier because there are common interests in a community. Communities don't want people to be killing each other.

Yeah, I mean, the othering is really a problem. I mean, the othering of each other is really striking. And I have a friend, an African-American actor who told me an incredible story about how he was campaigning in Pennsylvania and between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He says it's more like the deep south. And he was in a mall, a shopping mall, and went to, you know, around and try to register people to vote, not asking them who to vote for. This was, I think, in 2008.

And he.

Went to this one gentleman and said, can you vote? He's like, register to vote. He's like, no. And then he came, you know, he came back a second time and he says, come on, why don't we register a vote? and he was like, no. And then he said, well, why don't we have lunch? My friend asked him, why don't we have lunch? And so he had lunch and he said, what do you care about? And he started talking about things that really, political stuff. He said, what do you really care about? His family, these issues, and he started really getting into what he really cared about. And then he took the pamphlets from McCain and Obama, and he ripped off the front and just put what their policy platforms were. He said, well, who do you feel more aligned with here? And it was Obama, right? And he was kind of shocked. And it turned out this guy, it was able to sort of change his thinking and then convince him, his family and his friends to actually vote for Obama, which was really kind of striking about sort of creating and humanizing each other. And I know a similar story of an of a black supremacist who, I mean, sorry, a white supremacist who was one of the leaders in the white supremacy movement and went to a college that was not white supremacist as college or a kind of, you know, primarily white college. And he was ostracized. And this one Jewish kid says, why don't you come over for Shabbat dinner? And he started making friends with them. And then they started having these conversations and they started to talk and it started to sort of share. their perspectives. And over the course of a year, by sharing information, research, this guy completely changed his view. And I think we all have the capacity to begin to create understanding instead of creating somebody as the other and the enemy and the bad person. When I was in medical school, I went to Russia as part of this program called Citizens Diplomacy. we tend to kind of vilify the other. And the idea of this group of medical students was to go to Russia at the Soviet Union at the time, and I'm that old, right? It was still the Soviet Union, and to go and meet with other medical students and become friends with them and develop relationships and to humanize the other and the enemy. And it was so profound. And a lot of that group actually was that I was involved with was involved in a lot of the activities that supported some of the underground work that was happening in the Soviet Union with people who were trying to change it. And they were involved in some of the uprisings. And so I think, you know, it taught me a lot about how we can begin to create bridges. And your work is really about creating those bridges and healing those beliefs and those attitudes, because it goes beyond just their individual trauma. It's really cultural trauma.

Yeah, exactly. And what, you know, I think what happens is as people, if people are willing to participate, in the kind of process that we offer them. They start opening up without us trying to tell them they should be more open or they should change their mind. Human beings, as you well know, have tremendous capacity for change, but we have to allow that to happen. We have to put ourselves in a position, whether it's through a conversation with somebody with whom we disagree, or by simply being willing to discover what is true. And that's kind of what your friend was suggesting to, you know, take a look. Take a look at what the positions are then. And I would suggest it's good to take a few deep breaths so you're not in fight or flight mode.

Yeah.

But you can just sit there and look at things with what the Zen Buddhists call beginner's mind. That's what we encourage in, in right at the beginning of our of our training at the beginning of our work with people. We say profound change is possible. Post-traumatic growth is possible. It is possible even after the worst trauma to become more old and healthy and more integrated and more committed and find more meaning and purpose than you ever had. And if you can come into balance psychologically, physiologically, you can find your way there. so I think, you know, we're offering one path. I think there are, there are many, many ways. And Desmond Tutu, who you mentioned, who's a, was a friend of mine, was on my board, my board of advisors. He always, one of the things that he did is he exuded this kind of enjoyment and respect of other people. So I think that's incumbent on all of us as we think about people with whom we disagree is how do, how can we connect with them? And you would see him, I would, you know, go out and have a meal with him. And he was just, you know, enjoying everybody who was, you know, was cleaning the floor, serving the food or the driver who brought him there. And that's a beautiful example. And, and I think that people sort of, oh, okay, that maybe that's possible inside me, that possibility of enjoyment and of enjoying other people and respecting other people. So we have to keep doing the work on ourselves. And we, I think this is very important that we have to, and this is part of what I was working, am working on with people in Congress, that yes, there are going to be disagreements, but we have to treat the other as human, even if the other's positions are white supremacist positions. They're still human beings and let's treat them not not that we have to agree with them, but we have to see their humanity and approach them that way.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, what I think is going on is this cultural trauma now that we're not even naming. And it's creating a lot of the suffering and pain we see and a lot of the mental illness. And we see mental illness just rise and rise, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and we haven't really historically talked about that as, from a causal point of view. You know, we're very good with psychiatry naming conditions. We have the DSM-5, which is the diagnostic and statistical manual that allows you to describe by symptoms exactly what type of mental illness you have and it's pages and pages of what type of anxiety and what type of depression, what time of this and that. And none of it talks about the root cause. And I think there are many, obviously many causes. environmental toxins, there's nutritional factors, there's your microbiome, but there's also the.

Story of.

Our lives and the story of our ancestors lives and the trauma that often underlies mental illness and addiction. And, you know, with the opioid addiction, it wasn't just because these drug companies were pushing these drugs, it's because there's underlying trauma in our culture that we haven't really named, haven't addressed, haven't really talked about, and that needs healing. And it's really taking us down as a society, as a nation, as a world leader, as an innovator, as a global competitor. And we see this happening. It means it's like a slow motion train wreck in America. We're kind of past the ascendancy and on the decline unless we really take stock of what's happening.

And.

I think the trauma conversation and the acknowledgement of us, in some ways, whether we have small or large traumas, what Gabor Maté calls micro or macro traumas, we all are victims of trauma at some level and figuring that out and naming it helps to kind of remove some of the stigma of mental illness and the stigma of kind of a lot of things that people are suffering with. So as a psychiatrist, as someone who works with trauma, as someone who's really deeply involved in this, how do we sort of bring this conversation to the surface and how do we start to embed this in our healthcare system, in our national conversations and our policies and our approach. Because it just, to me, it seems without doing that, we're just going to be kind of on this treadmill of mental illness and recapitulating all the suffering that we're constantly seeing.

Well, you know, I think that some of what you've said touches on what's necessary. First of all, we have to have the conversation and we have to understand, and I don't really think of myself as a victim. but we have to understand the trauma affects us all. It's part of being human. Like we're all, I suppose, a victim of death. Then that's going to come to us. Trauma is going to come to us. So we need to understand that and not see it as something that just happens to those other people who have, you know, been in a war or have had the most horrible parents. That's number one. And number two, we have to see that it is possible. to move through and beyond the trauma, that if we recognize it, we're willing to allow it to appear in our lives, in our imagination, to see its effects. We can deal with it and we can move through and beyond that. This is an ancient, an aboriginal understanding. We have to recover that. The medical model has in some ways, as you're suggesting, has fetishized trauma. It's made it, you know, and, and turned it into these diagnostic categories that are, you know, and, and I think that they, you know, sometimes that's helpful in trying to understand, you know, what do these symptoms mean? But in the long run, first of all, it, it defines something as medical that is part of the human condition, and then It seems to dictate that we need to fix that individual. Whereas in fact, what we need to do is to create the opportunity and the setting and the attitude that encourages people to understand and help themselves and to move that this is possible. And we need to look at it not so much as a medical problem, but as a public health problem. I mean, in the United States, we're so divided with each other, are we gonna give a diagnosis to everybody who's got on left or right or center, some kind of personality disorder? That's not the point.

No.

The point is that this is part of our, part of the way that we're living right now. One of the things that I'm doing in Ukraine and one of the reasons people, I think, are so welcoming, is I'm saying, let's drop the medical model. This is a universal problem. There are 45 million people in Ukraine. World Health Organization says 10 million people are going to have major depressive disorder. So many people are going to have post-traumatic stress disorder. Why not look at 45 million people who've gone through this incredibly allacious traumatic experience? and let's create opportunities and rituals for everybody to heal themselves and understand that it's possible. So it's coming out of a medical model which tends not only to be not particularly effective, but also very isolating. One of the things that's most important about healing trauma is having some sense of connection to other people and looking for some and finding some meaning and purpose. in our lives. And that doesn't come out of the medical model very easily, whereas it comes out of an educational and a public health model. So we have to shift the way we look at things and what we as physicians are offering.

Yeah, I think that's really true. We are so focused on a medicalization of mental illness and of our psychological issues that it sort of prevents people from actually facing them and dealing with them, owning them. I think, One of the most important teachings that you have, and it's embedded in your work, is that we don't have to continue to live in the effects of the trauma that we've experienced throughout our lives. That we can actually change that. And that changing that is key not only to our psychological health, but also to our physical health. And I think I'd love you to sort of talk for a minute about the implications of of this trauma and how it manifests for people and how would they notice? Because I, I could tell you that I did not until really recently self-identify as someone who had any trauma in my life. But I realized as I began to look at, you know, the things that were challenges for me, at the relationship challenges, at life challenges, that were, you know, overworking or workaholism or whatever it was that I was struggling with, that, that, that it was, their Origins were actually quite deep. And, and, and I, and I really committed to working on these into healing them and to looking at it into shifting. So I'd love to kind of share, have you share how do this sort of manifest for people? How do they recognize it and how they begin to start to heal these things for themselves?

Sadly, or simply realistically, it usually comes just as you described it. Something is causing you pain right now. Trauma means Greek word that means wound. You're experiencing a wound in the present and you're wondering, what can I do about this? And the next question is, where did this come from? Why is this? But I. So I think that the first thing is to, is to pay attention to those areas of our lives that, that are causing us trouble, that are causing us, either causing us distress or sometimes causing other people distress and their they're shouting to us. Pay attention. And so what, what, what is going on? If I'm, if I'm being overbearing with, with other people, am I going to keep on arguing about whether or not it's their fault or my fault, or am I going to look at the fact that, well, now, maybe that came from something that was in my childhood, and maybe this is something that's working in me. and maybe I need to address it. So I think that's where we begin. And then the whole approach that I've adopted over all these years is really a meditative approach. And saying, by which I don't mean anything fancy or anything that has to do with a particular religion. I mean simply being aware moment to moment of what's happening. and paying attention to what I see. And as well as using techniques of meditation to bring me into physiological and psychological balance. And once I'm in, so we begin all of our meetings at the Center for Mind Body Medicine by meditating, by doing a few minutes of slow, deep, soft belly breathing. So we're not ready to shout at each other. Everybody's got to respect my opinion.

No.

Be quiet, relax, listen to other people as they're speaking. So if we put ourselves in that, that frame of mind, yeah, we're able to listen more openly and more sympathetically to the difficulties that we have instead of trying to pretend that it's not there. We're willing to allow those Pains, whether they're past pains or present pains, allow them to surface. And then as we're able to use the tools and techniques that I and others teach, the tools and techniques I teach in Transforming Trauma, we can use our imagination to say, okay, let's say I'm overbearing. What do I do about that? Well, I can use guided mental imagery. I can ask that part of my mind that knows the answer, the part that doesn't yet know the answer, can say, okay, and you can call it a wise guide. You go into a relaxed state and you allow a guide to appear to you. So say it's Desmond Tutu or an eagle or a flower, and then you have a dialogue and you say, okay, flower, you're there. What do I do about being so overbearing? And the flower says, well, what you have to do is open up, open your arms up a little more. and be a little more embracing of other people because these are people that you're talking. I just did that right now and it's good advice for me. I do get overbearing. I need to open up to the, to the people. Or maybe I do a drawing. We do a set of drawings. Draw yourself. Draw yourself with your biggest problem and draw yourself with your problem solved. And it is amazing what people come up with. And this would be the first time. the first time that I meet with them. We all have this capacity, but we've. We haven't been educated to use this capacity to either know ourselves or mobilize our intuition or unconscious. And we. It's there. It's there in all of us. And we just need to have a. Understand that there is the possibility of healing trauma. There's the possibility that we have the answers within ourselves. and then we need to learn techniques to use to access those answers.

And sometimes it's important to look at the beliefs and how we've developed our beliefs about how to be in the world. You know, I recently was reflecting on, you know, one of my behaviors that I struggle with most of my life, which is the trouble saying no and the sort of trouble with over pleasing people by not, you know, not wanting to set them. And, and I, I kind of know where this came from, but, you know, I think there's, there's, there's.

These sort.

Of fight or flight response, which people really are very aware of. And then there's the freeze response, which is another kind of playing possum, which many of us do. But I think there's, like, a fourth manifestation of trauma, which is the fight, flight, freeze and fawn response, which I've recently been reading about, and fawning is basically people pleasing. and not being able to say no, because the consequences of saying the truth, feel life threatening. For me, it did as a child, when my, my stepfather would be upset when I would say something that he didn't like, whether it was that I didn't take out the garbage or whatever it was that I didn't, you know, wash my hands after I went to the bathroom. I mean, he literally grabbed me. And when I was seven years old and I was I took a soup pan because we didn't have garbage disposals in the sinks back in the day. And my mom's like, flush the soup down the toilet. And I did. And it came out of the bathroom and he asked me if I washed my hands. And he went into a rage and he picked me up and he threw me against the wall, screamed at me. I was this tiny little boy. I was, I'm not, I'm 6'3 now, but I was like a little kid. I was really little. And it just, it just shook me right to my core and got wired into my nervous system in a way that that made it really clear to me it wasn't safe to tell the truth. It wasn't safe to disappoint people or to upset people. And I had to do whatever I could to prevent that. And, you know, I even see that still showing up, even though I've worked on it for years, I still see it showing up. So this is kind of these embedded patterns are so deep and they're so powerful that, you know, it takes a lot of work to work through them and the techniques of meditation, of journaling, of drawing, of breathing, maybe even things like group support and talking about these things in settings that sort of normalizes it and sort of makes it not so much that we're doing this all on our own. We all share this common experience of being human and having these traumatic experiences. And I don't even know if, there are other ways that are emerging around the psychedelic therapies and MDMA. I think all of this are tools that we can use to start to heal this embedded trauma and then create a more, you know, understanding and connected and, you know, more whole society, which we certainly are not in right now.

What have you come to? How are you going to deal with this people?

You know, it's just, it's a process of different things. You know, it's, it's. It's trying to deeply understand how it shows up and being able to witness it and notice it without judgment. It's around understanding my physiological response, how it feels in my body at the time when this happens to me. I mean, someone sends an email to me about wanting something from me or asking help and I'm just sort of overloaded, my schedule's full, and I get this stress response. because I don't want to disappoint them or upset them and say, no, I can't do this for you, or no, I can't have this meeting, or no, I can't do this call, or no, I, you know, it's like, and it's like, I manage it by trying to be more aware and to try to realize that this is something that is not serving me or the people in my life. It's not aligned with the values I have. And so I think it's definitely gotten way, way better So I think I still have more work to do, but I think I'm open to suggestions, Jeff. I know this is a podcast, but we can talk about it.

When it happens, try this shaking and dancing for a few minutes. And then do the thing with the wise guy, the thing I just did for myself, being overbearing, because I sometimes am. My staff tells me, you know, you're pushing us too hard. You know, you, Just because you do this, you want everyone... And the answer to me came just in that moment when I was talking, which is open my arms to them as human beings. Now the challenge is to remember that every time. I think in that few seconds, the insight that came to me is the vital one. What is more important than my wanting to get something done or achieve something, is to treat the other person as fully human. Yeah. And that's the. And so I think there may be little keys in there for you as well and for all of us as we look at this. And then we have to, you know, as we access what, what is, what is our. Call it whatever you want. Higher power, wise guide, imagination. What is it telling you to do? Do it for a moment. Now, what, when you, when you get this feeling. of wanting to please. What else? Get some advice from whoever comes to you as a guide.

It's a powerful exercise. I feel like, you know, the message is really clear. It's just that you're not serving yourself or them by doing that. And I can let go of that behavior and not have to do that anymore.

Yeah, so find out what it is. I might I might guess that it'd be great to get up when you feel that get up and not just shake and dance, but yell and scream, mother, get it out.

Yeah, no, I never had permission to be upset when I was a kid.

Never.

It was very clear. It's like, oh, coming together. Thanks, Jim. I'll send you the check for the site consult after.

Well, I think the thing, we can do these, this is, Part of it, you're not gonna hurt anyone. You're doing this for yourself, you're doing this, and we all have our issues and we all need to find a safe place where we can deal with them. And then it can change. And sometimes it takes a lot of time, but not always. Sometimes change happens very fast.

So what are you seeing in the Ukrainians, for example, or what did you see when you were working with the Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, where you just, these are really intractable, levels of stress and trauma, what were the outcomes you started to see with the groups you work with? Because it's clear you've developed these techniques that the people seem to be using them, but tell us about some of the stories of transformation that you've seen, whether it's there or even working with veterans and their PTSD.

I mean, you mentioned veterans, and I'll talk about Gaza in a moment. I was doing a workshop for a group of veterans. and we were talking about fight, flight, freeze response. And I got these guys, they happen to be all guys. No, no, not all guys. There are a few women and mostly guys. I got everybody up shaking and dancing. And I explained that the shaking and dancing will help to break up the freeze response, help to mount bodies that have shut down to protect themselves. And once we finished, we did it for about 10 minutes, this guy, big, tall, Maureen said, you know, I realize I've been frozen for 12 years. And since I was in Iraq, the image came to me as we were shaking and dancing that there were two little kids who were bleeding out. And I knew first aid. I knew, you know, I knew what I should do to put tourniquets on, but I froze and I couldn't do it. And in some ways, he said, I've been frozen ever since not being able to get close to other people. He said, now, he said, maybe now I can use this shaking and dancing as a tool to help me so that I can be unfrozen. Another story. I mean, that's just one meeting with this guy. I don't know, I have a follow-up. I do have a follow-up on little girl, and anyone who wants to can look at the CNBM website, and there's a CBS 60 Minutes film us. filmed me and filmed this little girl in Gaza a few years ago. And she was in a group.

With.

Seven other kids, all of whose fathers had been killed in the 2014 war between Hamas and Israel. All these kids had lost their fathers. And when she do grew in her first session of a nine session group, She drew herself with her biggest problem, which was her father was dead, her two uncles were dead, her aunt was dead, her home was destroyed, her school was destroyed, her neighborhood was leveled. And the solution to her problem, which is usually fairly positive in the drawings, for her it was to be in the grave with her father. Wow. She said, there's nothing for me in this life. The only thing to do that is a good thing to do is for me to be with my father in the grave. And, okay, she did the techniques that we teach in a group that was led not by me or you, not by a physician or a psychologist, but was led by a school teacher. And she was in nine sessions with these seven other kids. And at the end of the group, she did another set of drawings. and this time she drew herself instead of drawing herself as a little tiny figure off in the middle of this damage that had been done to the whole family and the whole neighborhood. She drew herself as a big girl with flowing curls and there was an arrow coming out of her chest and it came through a heart and in the heart was written, I love nature. And the arrow was headed for this beautiful tree with with blossoms in it. And when she drew where she was going to get, which was sort of the equivalent of the problem solved, instead of being in the grave with her father, she was standing up in a white coat with a stethoscope in her ears. And on a table in front of her, there was somebody lying down. And I said, what's going on? And people can see Scott Pelly saying, in 60 Minutes, what's going on? She said, well, I'm a doctor. I'm a heart doctor. And in Gaza, after this war, so many people's hearts have been hurt. And Scott Pelly and I both said, well, who are these other people who are standing by the table? And she said, oh, those are my other patients. They're waiting for me. So she went from being this girl who was ready to die, and this is six months after the war, to being, after nine sessions of self-discovery, and using these imaginative and expressive self-care techniques, she discovered for herself a way to move through and beyond the trauma. It wasn't that she stopped being sad. She told me how much she still missed her father and she was wearing purple socks that he'd given her. But she was grieving. She was no longer frozen and shut down by herself. Yeah. And I have a follow-up. few years later, she's now getting ready to go to medical school.

Amazing. She's going to be a doctor. That's crazy.

She's actually going to be an oncologist because people in Gaza have very high rates of cancer and some of her family members have had cancer. So she shifted. At nine years old, she wanted to be a heart doctor. Now she has a better sense. She wants. She wants to be an oncologist.

Incredible.

That's possible. That's possible for us, that kind of transformation.

That'S quite amazing, Jim. And your work is so amazing. And, you know, you're very humble and brave. And the work you're doing by going to these places where literally bombs are falling and violence is happening and your own life is at risk, is quite inspiring. And I remember the amount of trauma I experienced after I came back from Haiti and the nightmares I had and a degree of PTSD. And I can't imagine what you're feeling. you know, having just been there and seeing this and having been there multiple times over the last number of months that the war has been going on. So how are you taking care of yourself in all this?

Well, that's what we have to take care of. I mean, I'm a bit right now, I'm a bit run down from my line. I just got back a few days ago from Ukraine. And I have to take it a little bit easy right now. I have to practice what I preach.

Breathing and shaking and dancing.

And the other night I was talking with a friend and all of a sudden I was talking about some of what happened in Ukraine and I started crying. And I hadn't cried, tears had come to my eyes and interestingly, my eyes have gotten kind of an inflammation in and around my eyes. And I think that's, those are the unshed tears. And so part of my healing from the vicarious trauma. I was nodding. I mean, there were bombs falling, but they weren't real close to me, and I wasn't on the front lines. But it was mostly not so much the threat to me, but the overwhelming pain that people were experiencing. And now part of my healing is being willing to feel that pain and to cry and to let myself mourn for the losses that people have experienced there in Ukraine. So that's part of my self-healing. aside from, you know, getting more rest and eating in a healthy way and being with friends and hanging out with my son, there, we do have to take care of ourselves as well. And in fact, we can't, there's no way to help other people heal from their trauma if you're going to teach them how to understand and help themselves unless you're doing it yourself. So part of our work, the beginning of our work, when we're training people, We say, look, we know you're dealing with a traumatized population. We know people are suffering greatly. But deal with your own suffering, with your own trauma first. That's what we're going to teach you. Use these techniques for yourself, and then we'll teach you how to use them with other people. And so it always begins with us, which is where, you know, from the Bible, physician heal thyself. Yes, exactly.

Well, Jim, thank you so much for your work in the world, for what you do. for helping us understand that there's a way out of the suffering and the trauma that we've experienced and that there is a new foundation for healing that's possible by thinking about trauma in a different way, by learning different tools and practices that can help us heal both ourselves and each other. And I encourage people to check out Jim's work on the Center for Mind Body Medicine website, CMBM. .org, you can contribute there if you like, and they're inspired to help him with his work. It's really important work. I don't know anybody else who just runs into the fire. It's like, you know, when there's a burning building, he like runs inside. So it's always very inspiring. And check out Jim's book, Transforming Trauma. It's the Path to Hope and Healing. And it really provides a roadmap for people to start to begin to heal their own trauma and to heal our collective trauma. So thanks so much, Jim, for your work and for for what you do and for being an inspiration and a friend for me for many decades. And Godspeed.

Thank you, Mark. And we want to invite those who are watching us, if they want to become part of this work, we are a healing community. We want you to be part of our community. And thank you for all your contributions to our community as well.

Thanks, Jim. And if you've been inspired by this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. leave a comment. How have you experienced trauma? How have you helped heal your own trauma and those in your community? And we really love to hear that. And hopefully we'll see you next week on the doctor's Pharmacy. Dr. Hyman, thanks for tuning into the doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and.

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