Dhru Purohit Show - How to Heal from Emotional Wounds and Break Intergenerational Trauma with Dr. Mariel Buque

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers and Cozy Earth.  Now more than ever, trauma is being discussed in mainstream discussions. We are learning that trauma can impact not only our minds but also our bodies, prevent us from taking action, and even lead us to a state of disease. But how do we assess and heal our generational and individual trauma and empower our minds and bodies to rise through our challenges?  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with professor, psychologist, and author Dr. Marial Buqué to discuss trauma and breaking the cycle of trauma. Dr. Buqué shares how we can become more aware of the trauma we have suffered and the patterns that we engage in as a result. She also shares the common misconceptions of trauma and discusses the importance of calming the nervous system before addressing unresolved trauma. Dr. Buqué describes practical tips she uses with her patients to implement a body-centric approach to self-care and healing.  Dr. Mariel Buqué is a Columbia trained trauma-informed psychologist, professor, author, and sound bath meditation healer. Her clinical work centers on healing wounds of intergenerational trauma, holistic mental wellness, and centering indigenous healing practices. Her newest book, Break The Cycle, will be released on January 2, 2024. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Marial Buqué dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): How our past trauma impacts our future goals (1:36 / 1:36) Dr. Buqué’s patient and the story of trauma and physical manifestation (3:42 / 3:42)  Misconceptions of generational trauma (6:11 / 6:11)  Individual trauma versus intergenerational trauma (10:15 / 7:00)  Behaviors in couples that are rooted in the past (22:52 /19:47) Our internal voice as a reflection of our past trauma (24:46 / 21:52) Nervous system calmness and awareness (31:40 / 28:34)  Shifting blame and getting stuck in our story (33:11 / 30:05) Compassion for not knowing better (35:25 / 32:00) How do we break the cycle and move forward (43:23 / 40:17)  Creating a routine to care for and heal our body (52:34 / 49:00) The role of food and its impact on how our body feels (1:02:19 / 59:14) The practice of writing and releasing our tension (1:04:03 / 1:00:57)  How personal challenges or trauma can lead to a superpower (1:09:35 / 1:05:12) Also mentioned in this episode: Break The Cycle For more on Dr. Buque, follow her on Instagram @dr.marielbuque, Twitter/X @drmarielbuque, YouTube, or through her website, https://www.drmarielbuque.com/. This holiday season, thrive with Magnesium Breakthrough. Just go to magbreakthrough.com/dhru and enter promo code dhru10 for 10% off any order. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRUP. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there is a persistent stressor that is relentless, ongoing, or incredibly acute, where we go is to the other side of our nervous system, which is our dorsal vagal response, which is an emotional shutdown or what we call like freeze or fawn. What we understand about that level of cortisol is that in that freeze or fawn response, when there is a chronic and persistent terror or experience of genocide or experience of something like a holocaust. that an individual that is existing in that persistent terror is likely in a chronic dorsal vagal response. Hi everyone, welcome to the Drup Road Show. This week's guest is Dr. Mariel Bouquet. Dr. Bucke is a Columbia University-trained trauma-informed psychologist, professor and sound bath meditation healer.

Her clinical work centers on healing wounds of intergenerational trauma, holistic mental wellness and centering indigenous healing practices. That's the topic for today's discussion. Dr. Bouquet has appeared as an expert on Good Morning America and today and all the lore and self and glamour and all the fun places that are out there. Her newest book, which is out now, is called Break the Cycle. That's the focus for today's conversation. Stay tuned for a fantastic episode with Dr. Bouquet. Dr. Bouquet, welcome to the podcast.

A pleasure to have you here. I want to jump right in. Can you help our audience understand how it is that our past, especially our unegenerated? examined past, sometimes filled with trauma, could sabotage or impact our future goals and dreams for our life. Oh, my goodness. This is such a great starting point. So there are so many ways in which this can happen to us. And primarily because whenever we experience trauma, there are ways in which we tend to suppress that trauma or not have a direct connection to it consciously. And many of the experiences that we have around trauma are situated in our subconscious. So then we show up to life,

let's say to a relationship, a new relationship that we have. And if the trauma that we suffered made us, in essence, like internalized the idea that we are not worthy of love, there is a likely chance that we might sabotage that relationship and actually do things that we typically wouldn't do, but that do coincide with that internalized idea, that we're not worthy of the love that's being presented to us. So in our relationships, there's a lot of ways in which we tend to, you know, bring in that trauma in a subconscious way. It can also happen in our health and in the ways in which we take care of our bodies and the ways in which we socialize ourselves around how precious our bodies are or how we don't get socialized around, like, how precious our bodies are.

And, you know, with the body, for many of us who are individuals who have that trauma history, there is a lot that we tend to internalize about not caring for ourselves globally, mind, body, and spirit. And as a result, we don't, we really, like, we don't attend to our bodies. We don't care for it in the ways that our bodies require, even just to sustain balance. So it can happen really in any area of life that trauma can resurface. but, you know, in relationships and in this experience of how we care for our bodies and our health, it's very prominent. You know, we were ch-chatting a little bit before we hit record, and I was asking you, is there a story of somebody that you've worked with that can connect the link between, you know, trauma that people have gone through in, especially their early childhood, and how they can show up as physical manifestations, illness, chronic disease, or just even, just general body aches, ailments. And you were talking about a young woman that you've worked with.

Could you share that story? Yeah, absolutely. I once had a client who she herself had had the experience of having a traumatic childhood, but that childhood was specifically traumatic because of the parentification that happened in her childhood. Like she was the eldest daughter in her home, and as a result, she had to take care of her younger siblings. And so she never really had an opportunity to just be a kid. And when we started working together, the work, of course, really mapped back the origins of her wounds and the childhood that she had been brought into and brought up on. And also the childhood that her parents and her grandparents had that had a similar flavor. But what I felt was like a really almost kind of like remarkable person.

part of her history was the fact that she had this idiopathic lung disease and she had all of a sudden this chronic lung condition and none of her doctors were able to identify like where did this come from like what happened here and when I started studying especially you know different ways in which we can holistically help heal traumas I started also coming upon some of the theories that are more situated in Eastern medicine that also locate sadness and grief in the lungs. And it made a lot of sense that with someone who had to grieve a childhood that she never had, a childhood that was in essence lost, that she would experience this experience of having idiopathic lung disease where there were no no mappings that we could identify

in her physical body that would have led to that disease, but we could map it back to the stress and strain that she had been experiencing in her body as a result of that loss that was never really processed. You know, there's more conversation about trauma than ever before, at least let's say on social media and kind of like the worlds that we're all hanging out in. And yet there's also still a lot of misconceptions about what trauma is, what generational trauma is, and what it means to actually truly break the cycle, which is the topic of your new book.

What do you feel are some of the top misconceptions that people have when it comes to this topic? One of the major misconceptions is the belief that trauma is an event and not our emotional experience in reference to that event. So we oftentimes think that, you know, one event can be traumatic when in reality an event can happen to multiple people and only certain people would actually internalize that event as traumatic. So it's the ways in which we internalize the experience itself and how we metabolize that experience emotionally. This episode is brought to you by Buy Optimizers. So this holiday season is coming up or we're in it, depending on when you're listening to this episode.

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off. That's an amazing sale. Take advantage of it. You know, in the book, you talk about trauma and intergenerational trauma, and you talk about some studies that were done on people and survivors of those who were in the Holocaust. Can you chat about that? Yeah, absolutely. The most prominent things. studies that we had at least to begin with were studies that were conducted with individuals that were not the Holocaust survivors themselves, but actually their descendants. So children of Holocaust survivors. And what was found in those studies, and the studies were conducted actually in New York, I believe,

and they were conducted by Dr. Rachel Yehuda. And the studies were actually helping us to understand that the stress hormone cortisol was actually being represented a certain way in the bodies of individuals who were descendants of Holocaust survivors. And what was found was that their cortisol levels were actually much lower than individuals who had Jewish descendants, but not a direct descendants from the Holocaust. And what that was able to say to us was that being as though we actually knew that individuals that have these lower levels of cortisol have a higher propensity of actually having PTSD, that there was a likely chance that the individuals that were in this study also had

some element of PTSD. Now, they also studied, you know, some of their family dynamics and some of the ways in which they were actually internalizing emotional events, right? And that was later done in other studies. But initially, what we were finding was, okay, these cortisol levels are lower, that probably means a higher propensity to have PTSD or to be living in a body that is metabolizing PTSD. And this is something that is remarkable. And so those studies were then, in essence, replicated in different iterations with other populations that also suffered a severe and extreme collective trauma. So is it the right understanding that if you're, you know, ancestors in some sort of way, right? especially more immediate, right?

Your parents, your grandparents went through like an extremely, and I mean, you can't think of anything worse than the Holocaust, right? Extremely traumatizing, you know, event that your cortisol levels as a descendant of them, whether it's, you know, a daughter, a granddaughter, it's lower than what it should be. So you don't have the proper sort of flight. flight response because you typically hear that, you know, high cortisol levels and elevated cortisol levels throughout the day is a sign of, you know, having a major stress response. But I'm hearing you if I'm understanding correctly that these individuals actually had lower.

So it's almost like their response and their sort of ability to handle stress was already subdued. Is that how to look at it? Well, one way to look at it is by looking at the nervous system itself. So our nervous system is constructed in three parts, right? So we have what we call the fight or flight mechanism or the sympathetic nervous system response, which is basically whenever we sense that there's a threat in the environment, all of our senses go on alert and we go into fight or we go into flight.

If there is a persistent stressor that is relentless, ongoing, or incredible, incredibly acute, where we go is to the other side of our nervous system, which is our dorsal vagal response, which is an emotional shutdown or what we call like freeze or fawn. What we understand about that level of cortisol is that in that freeze or fawn response, when there is a chronic and persistent terror or experience of genocide or experience of something like a Holocaust, that an individual that is existing in that persistent terror is likely in a chronic dorsal vagal response and that the cortisol levels that they're experiencing are not no longer in fight or flight elevated cortisol. They're now in this dorsal vagal lower cortisol level. And so that's why, you know, and the other part of the

nervous system is the parasympathetic response or the ventral vagal response, which actually helps us to mobilize out of that initial fight or flight so that we don't enter dorsal vagal. But if we don't actually have that rest and recovery, that parasympathetic response, that, okay, everything is safe now, we can actually rest and release and relax, then we go into dorsal vagal. And so that's what is most likely the connection between the cortisol levels that we're seeing in individuals that have actually survived the Holocaust or individuals that have had a persistent kind of experience around trauma in their lives. So you're almost saying that they have this freeze response. They didn't choose it. They weren't in that sort of major traumatic event. But as they're born, they're sort of already prepared into a world where, I mean, if you look at the animal kingdom, why do animals have that freeze response?

Well, it's a safety mechanism. If the lion who catches, you know, the gazelle and the gazelle temporary plays dead, and there's videos of this on, you know, people can see. If the lion gets distracted for a second and thinks that the gazelle is either paralyzed or dead or whatever, all of a sudden in a moment, it can then escape. But it wouldn't have that opportunity if it didn't, you know, play dead. And so in a way, some individuals who have gone through extremely traumatic things, their descendants are in a way already, you know, to use layman's terms, like freezing up because of how stressful their ancestors' lives were. Yeah, and there's also, it is said that in part some of this inheritance that we have, this biological inheritance, is to actually prepare us for the very same stressors that our ancestors went through.

So if somebody in our family line had actually gone through a very extreme and adverse experience, then our bodies are already preparing us for that extreme and adverse experience by reformulating, right, like the epigenetic process of, like, turning our genes on or off in reference to what's happening in our environment. But a part of that is actually protective. Because we talk about it very often in the sense of, okay, this is something that creates trauma, or at least, like, makes it so that trauma is more evident and present in the body. But we oftentimes forget that it also is preparing us for those same stressors

that individuals, you know, had gone through in the past and that that also is a part of how we then get through the circumstances that present themselves to us in the present. So for the person who's listening who's thinking, you know, my heart goes out to everybody who went through the Holocaust, their descendants, everything's super horrific. My family lineage is that I don't think we've gone through that. You know, I don't know of any extreme acts of violence, genocide, other components that are there. Does this conversation still apply to me? Well, it's not a conversation that simply applies to individuals that come from a lineage of collective trauma

because some individuals have had trauma surface in their family line on an individual level. So if there is somebody that, you know, has a grandparent that, you know, perhaps underwent, like, really tough financial difficulties and had chronic stress for years at a time, and then developed, you know, trauma responses in reference to that. And the ways that they then organize themselves around their child, your mother, was out of trauma responses. And your mother also had, you know, let's say that she had a circumstance where she was in a relationship that was really unhealthy. And that was a part of her lived experience. And that relationship was indeed appraised as traumatic by her, right?

then we have already two generations that have suffered individual traumas, but that the traumas are still generational because they're two generations that have that experience. And if we think about how trauma is mapped in the body, trauma doesn't say, you know, you experienced a collective trauma versus an individual trauma. Our bodies just say, I feel unsafe. I don't feel well. And I need to protect myself. And so that is the actual biological message that's being transferred forward. And then our work is now, which is the topic of your book, is to break that cycle. Because there might be habits, behaviors, ways of interacting with ourselves, and then of course ways of interacting with the world that don't serve us.

Many people have what they would consider bad habits or they practice a lot of self-harm. even if that self-harm is just on a consistent basis speaking to themselves in a way that they would never speak to anyone, probably not even their own worst enemy. That's there. Are there an example, whether it's a patient, something in your life if you feel like you want to share about that, where we can sort of make the connection between what somebody's parent or grandparent in that example that you were sharing earlier led to. some sort of negative pattern or habit that express itself in someone's life because they weren't

aware of this connection. Is there an example, another example or story that you could pull from? Yeah, absolutely. You know, there is one of the clients that I also reflect within the book who lived in an intergenerational home, right? So multiple generations existing in one home. There's a grandparent. There was a mother and a nuns and my client and her siblings. And whenever there was an experience that any one individual in this home would actually have that felt adverse or stressful, they would actually come into the home and they would have some sort of an interaction that was explosive.

And so you had so many of the individuals in the very same home feeding into that. explosive interaction, right? One person would come out of their room, the grandmother, let's say, right, like, and would actually say, what's going on? And she would start crying, which in essence, like we would say, like, she's probably like in a fond response and she's, like, overwhelmed by the experience of people yelling. Then you would have the mother who would actually be yelling, you know, together with her sister. And they would be in that fight response. And then you would have the children, which were adult children at that time, in the home that would actually also be in that fond response and teary-eyed and wanting the discourse to stop. And so we have so many

individuals like orienting around the same event, around the same issue, all having some sort of a nervous system response to the event and creating almost a contagion effect of this trigger response, if you may. And so I tend to see that very often, like even in conversations that are had even with individuals just in one generation, like if there's a couple and they live together, and they themselves are bringing in their family histories and the ways that that contagion effect can actually surface in their respective family homes, but they're bringing that into the relationship because that's what's familiar, that's what they know, and that's how they know to orient around a trigger response or a nervous system response. And so there's

the likelihood that they're also bringing that in should it not be something that they're aware of and conscious of and can actually disrupt and and reorient around, right, in a way that feels healthier and feels like it's driven by compassion rather than driven by unaddressed emotion. Let's take the example of a couple. Is there a behavior that you would see in sort of communication or interacting between a couple

where you may not know exactly what happened in their past, but it's an indication to you that, hey, something in their past is driving this. Could you think of an example? Absolutely. like shame and blame is one aspect of what happens in couples that tends to have those roots in the past. And like if somebody's like, you know, like you didn't do what I asked you to do. And so like you're constantly messing up. Like if you didn't take out the trash, right, like there's

something that you always do. Like I can't stand it. And so there is a, the actual conversation is driven in the direction of blame, right? Rather than actually analyze. what is happening inside of that person's body, inside of that person's nervous system that is actually creating a trigger response in reference to this event of the trash not being taken out. Most of us don't actually learn to go deep in and to understand what's happening right now. Like, why am I feeling this potent set of emotions around this seemingly benign issue, right? and how can I then address the issue from the perspective of feeling more settled rather than feeling that trigger response. But that's one thing that, of course, like how many of us haven't been in a situation where someone doesn't do something in our homes and then we're like pointing the finger, right?

But that tends to be like something that's, you know, pretty common. No, that's super helpful. You know, I heard one time a speaker say, I can't remember their name, but they were saying we often speak to others, especially if we're living in unexamined life. we speak to others the way we were spoken to. So you can see if somebody is, you know, constantly in a place of blame, shaming, their partner, their kids, which is unfortunately a lot of the world,

the way that people interact today, it's a sort of violent communication, defensive communication. Chances are that's how they were talked to growing up. Yeah. And they just thought that that was normal. And in some cases, Some people actually feel that it is familiar to them.

So even if they know that it's not serving them in their relationships or serving themselves in the way they talk to themselves, it feels very familiar. And there's almost like a sick comfort in that. Can you talk about that? Absolutely, yeah. Even the ways that we talk to ourselves, as you alluded to earlier, is a part of that. The way that we talk to others, but also the way that we talk to ourselves,

those are internalized voices of the people that raised us, the people that were around us and had enough proximity to us to actually have some sort of an impact on how we speak to ourselves and others. Like if someone, you know, if growing up you had a parent that whenever you did your homework, they would say, like, you're so stupid, why can't you get that this multiplication is that, that, right? If that was the case, if you had a parent that, they themselves were not able to get out of their own trauma response and the ways that they engage with you had some sort of a violent nature. Those very words, that language, will likely be the language that you internally utilized against yourself whenever you're engaging in a project

and you miss the mark on a project in some way. So all of a sudden, that language, you're so stupid, why couldn't you like figure out that on this Excel sheet, you know, you had to sum up this entire column, right? Like all of a sudden, you are the aggressor of your own psyche, of your own emotion. You are the person that's actually causing yourself to be unwelled, which in part is why when I talk about breaking cycles, I talk about how we can disrupt that as well, but also bring consciousness to the fact that you're talking to yourself like that and that it's a reflection of what you're, you're talking about. you grew up hearing because very often we're just not conscious. We kind of go about life in a very autopilot kind of way. I think that the world is structured that way right now, although many of us are coming into an understanding of how we need to pay mindful attention to ourselves and to how we interact with the world. But we're not quite there yet, right? Like as a global whole. Still, we have

a lot of individuals that operate in this autopilot, speak to themselves and others in ways. that feel like the norm because it is indeed what they know and they haven't learned another way. But if we learn specifically how to talk to ourselves in a more gentle tone, it can also trickle into how we speak to others. It can trickle into how we speak to our children because often that language gets translated forward. And it can, you know, translate into also how we speak to any individual in our lives. Like anybody that we work with, whoever we supervise at work, right, like friends that we have, amorous relationships just everywhere. Everything is impacted by the work that we do when we disrupt that cycle. Yeah. And I think, you know, from having done a little bit of

work in this area myself, I think that the other thing that would add to what you shared is that often people look at that and they think, well, that's such a soft in a negative connotation. That's such a soft way to sort of be in the world. If you're like that, people are going to trample over you. If you're kind everywhere, if you're this, if you're that. And I want to remind everybody that this isn't, you know, just, not that this is a just, but it's not just about being gentle. It's also about being kind and direct.

It's about honoring your gut intuition and telling somebody, no. And it doesn't have to be in a mean way, right? Unless if the occasion calls for, you know, something for, you know, you have to be very stern. that doesn't have to be mean, but it's empowering, right? Yes, we want that ability to have that kindness. And we want that ability to have that candor of being direct and truthful. We're not talking about brutal honesty and hurting people's feelings on purpose. We're talking about conveying and being direct in business with our team members.

Hey, you know what? You mentioned that you were going to get this done yesterday. And I want to reach out and just see, like, is something going on because you didn't get the job done? versus, you know, what a lot of people do, you didn't get this done. You know, you're maybe not the right person for this role. I don't even know why I hired you in the first place. Okay, great. That's a great way to start a conversation when you started off that way.

You know, I'm putting that in air quotes for those that are not watching on video. So there's a power in stepping into understanding, in my opinion, how your old patterns don't service you because I often find that those who are very, hypercritical and unkind with others are that way with themselves. I don't know anybody that's super kind of themselves, but just hypercritical with everybody else. I've never met anybody in my 40 years. Maybe I'll meet somebody in my next 40 years, but I haven't met anybody yet. So there's a strength and then there's a power, and there's the gentleness and the softness,

and both of those two things go together. Yeah. And what I also find to be true within that is that the people that have that tenderness, because they've worked on it, right? We all have to work on it. Like, it's not something that, in essence, comes naturally to us. And again, we've been socialized against being kind to ourselves in it. Or we haven't been socialized in the direction of kindness, of self-kindness, right? But what I have realized is that the individuals that have that ability to take that mindful pause do lead lives that are filled with greater calm and peace. And if nothing else is,

a motivator or a driver in the direction of, like, leaning into that kindness, you know, like, sphere, then at the very least, like, if you want to experience greater ease, if you want to experience a more calmer version of yourself, that doesn't have to be, like, heightened to the stressors around you or to the experiences around you that then becomes stressful because you don't have that internal balance, like, operating on a more continuous basis, then allow that to be your motivator, that you do want greater peace in your life and that you do want to approach any instances in which somebody messes up at work from the place of, you know, in a way that coincides with your values because you've been able to be thoughtful about how you approach the situation

rather than from the place that is just responsive to the trigger that you feel in that moment. Is awareness step one in the process? And if it is, then where do we go from there? Absolutely it is. Awareness is step one, but I do in my work, because I do operate as a holistic practitioner. In my work, I do bring in the awareness piece, but prior to actually digging into the layers of our trauma, I actually help us to navigate how we can ground ourselves and find that process of ease and calm in our nervous system, which I think is really critical because,

if we dig into the trauma layers too soon, we will be the people that will be fleeing away from our traumas. We'll avoid. We won't go to the next therapy session. We won't, like, do the journaling practice. We won't engage in conversation about it. We'll just, like, toss it because it just feels too intolerable to the body to actually tolerate that trauma history. So, although awareness is essential to say, like, you know what, trauma has been present here. And I need to do something about that because I don't want to be the next bearer of that legacy of trauma. I want the cycle to end with me. That is the point of awareness at which we then start to settle the nervous system to prepare for the work ahead.

So yes, awareness is essential. And it is, in essence, a step one or maybe a step zero, I would say. And then we get into the nervous system regulation practices first. Sometimes I notice that as awareness increases about trauma, individuals can also get stuck in trauma in the idea that they have not been able to progress further beyond the blame component that now I have awareness that somebody in my past my parents, grandparents, another group of people, whoever has caused this thing in my life and they're the problem, not me, and blame takes over. Have you ever noticed this?

Yeah, 100%. So there's been a number of people in my practice, but also generally, right, like we tend to want to assign blame and hope that that could be cathartic. And the reason why I believe many of us go in the direction of shifting blame rather than just doing, you know, more of the self-analysis and getting into more of the healing is because we want someone to hold some sort of accountability and, say, I hurt you, I hurt you deeply, or I didn't do enough of the work so as to not prevent you from feeling hurt. But if we can actually, like, zoom out to what has happened through the generations in terms of our understanding of generational trauma and generational healing, we only have just about a few decades in which we've actually introduced the word trauma and the concept of trauma into the clinical landscape. And even, like, any, other field of medicine that isn't necessarily in the psychiatry, psychology, like umbrella,

people are still and clinicians are still operating from a perspective of only looking at specific organs or specific areas of the body and not really assigning a theory of stress and trauma. And in addition to that, like if we were to just zoom out to what healing has looked like in the recent generations, like we haven't had the tools and techniques. We haven't had like a podcast like this. We haven't had like a book like Break the Cycle that has actually emphasized the ways that people can heal from traumas. So the generations past didn't actually have those tools to break the cycle. Some of them, yes, could have done perhaps a better job at managing their stress and maybe even their trauma symptoms so as to not cause harm. And so we're not

exempting individuals from having been able to do at least some of the work if they really understood that they were causing harm. But the reality is that many of the generations past just didn't have the tools available to them. I actually hold a lot of compassion for my parents who are in their late 60s because I wish that they had some of the access that I have to healing tools. I wish that they lived in an era when they were coming of age in which they were actually provided with techniques and tools and books and podcasts and worksheets and practitioners who are holistic who can really orient themselves around their full health and help them transition from those places of stuckness so that they wouldn't then pass on some of those legacies of pain

onto myself and my sister. I wish. But that is not the case because in part they simply didn't have access in the ways that I do. And I have to hold that with enough of the compassion. that they deserve for me to hold for them. Because in reality, yes, some of the cycles could have been broken perhaps a little better, but some of them, they just did not have the technique in order to do so. I think to build on that is that even when you have knowledge, and nobody knows this better than parents, you could feel like you're the most enlightened parent.

I'm not a parent. I want to be one day. But hearing from a lot of my friends who have parents, is that even when you feel like you have the tools and you've done a lot of work, there's still areas where you mess up. There's like that classic quote where people say like, look, you will do your best and you will still mess up. You know, you'll yell at somebody.

You'll do something. You'll cause some sort of pattern. Now, will it be an extreme situation that doesn't have this sort of protective layer of teaching your own kids, how to sort of self-soothe and, you know, even apologizing, right? Even apologizing is a huge part of saying, hey, listen, I messed up. I'm sorry. A lot of people never grew up in a household where they got an apology in some sort of way. and again, their parents were doing the best that they knew, right?

And their parents before them were doing the best they knew. So I guess even to add to that is that even when we do know, I feel like that compassion is so important first and foremost for not just others, but ourselves, because everyone truly is doing the best that they can with the level of awareness and consciousness that they have in that moment. Do you agree with that statement? Do you have a different twist on it? No, I actually wholeheartedly agree with it.

I believe that, you know, we can infuse the compassion element into the work that we do in generational healing, but also that we can look at individuals that came before us with more of that compassion and that we can include them in the process of breaking cycles. Like my oldest patient was 84 years old and attempting to break cycles. It is never too late. And it's never too early. And I want people to hold on to that truth because oftentimes we think, well, my kids are grown, right? Like maybe I'm in my 50s and my kids are already, you know, 18, 19 and they're off to college.

And so my influence has stopped. Like it's, you know, I've already done the damage, let's say, right? But there's always opportunity to actually reintegrate the lessons into the lives that we still have with the individuals that we love. So there's, I believe that at any stage of life, we have. have an opportunity to bring in that compassionate element, to have compassion for ourselves, for not knowing better, and to have compassion for the individuals that also didn't know better before us and the individuals that we may have impacted in the future generations. Yeah, it feels like that compassion allows us to hold sort of two things together. One is responsibility. There are genuine

times where somebody has conducted an act that is something that has to be addressed. Unfortunately, we know the stats with women and sexual abuse and any other kind of big T trauma that a lot of people have gone through in their lives. So it's one thing to have responsibility, which is different than blame, right? Like this individual, this situation might need to be kept accountable to what happened and has to be addressed. And it's another approach to, along with that, have the understanding, the understanding of, well, you know, when you look at a newborn baby, this baby isn't aggressive. It's not, you know, mean, a bully, a this, or that. People are largely a byproduct of the environment they grew up in. And many times when we

look at people that we completely disagree with in life or maybe even hate. in some extreme situations, we have to remember that, well, if I was them and I grew up in exactly that same situation with exactly those same circumstances, I had the same parents that they had, I was taught to hate another group, I was taught to do this, it doesn't make any of that right, but I probably would have ended up just like them because human beings are largely the same at their core. And so I think that it's beautiful to have that compassion because you can hold responsibility and you can also hold understanding.

And what I have actually seen in my work is that the individuals that are held to them have some accountability and say sorry can actually feel a sense of ease themselves also. Most often we think you're pressuring someone to have some accountability and say the words that you desire them to say to really apologize. And we believe that we're like frustrating that individual. I will caveat this with saying some individuals do not want to say, I'm sorry, and they do feel pressured and they will make that explicit that they don't want to say sorry or that they don't feel that they are to blame for whatever reason.

However, there are some folks, like there's one client that I actually, like, reflect in my book who I did sessions with her and then concurrently, like, did sessions with her and her child. and I asked her to look in her child's eyes and ask me, what did she see? Well, tell me what she saw. And she was able to see the very same pain that she herself had suffered through. And it was a moment in which she was able to really further humanize her child, not inflict further harm upon her child, and also have compassion for herself for how much she suffered

because she was able to see little her in her child in that very moment. It was a beautiful moment in which so much of the layers that were just like living in this person that were then being reflected as like violent anger, then felt like they had almost kind of melted away. And so even in the person that was the one perpetuating harm, she was able to, by way of her own apology to her child, experience a sense of release. So it's not always that the people that were, you know, in essence, like trying to hold accountable will feel greater distress as a result of that accountability. Sometimes we just need to nudge them in the direction of saying I'm sorry and they themselves will feel a sense of relief as a result. So now that there's a sense of awareness and awareness is fleeting. There's moments we have it and there's moments we have to be reminded of it. And that's all part of the process of doing the work, right?

which is what we're all doing. But now there's at least some sense of awareness, which means you cannot really go back to seeing, to not seeing that exist. How do we move forward from there when it comes to breaking the cycle? What are the next steps that people should be thinking about that you talk about in your book?

Well, the next steps are going to be doing some of the digging of the layers. So it's going to be really essential to have an understanding of how has trauma manifested in this family line or how has it been present in my community in ways that have been disruptive to my sense of peace. And that's why in the work, after, of course, we do a lot of the regulatory work and a person has an understanding of how do I get my mind and my body right back to safety when it feels like I'm experiencing higher levels of discomfort and doing this digging work. Once we've already kind of like mastered a bit of that, we transition into doing diagrams. that are like a family tree, an intergenerational family tree specifically. Or I also map out what I call like the intergenerational adverse experiences,

not just the adverse experiences of one's childhood, but how is it that your mother also suffered a similar fate? Because what we know through the science and through, you know, our scientific inquiry is that parents that they themselves have had adversity, childhood adversity, specifically adversity that has been marked by abuse, run a greater chance or are at greater risk of perpetuating similar harm to their children. So we have to have an understanding of childhood adversity through the generations. And we also have to have an understanding of how we can zoom out and have a wider lens, a wider understanding of what

is happening around this person that is also contributing to the trauma that's present in their lives. Like, you know, we, to go back to your example of the perpetuation of sexual abuse, you know, upon multiple humans, right, women specifically, and the ways in which us as a society don't do a very good job at holding perpetrators accountable. And that that systemic issue that we have in place makes it so that trauma enters our homes with greater frequency because we're not doing the accountability work. And so from an intergenerational perspective, we have to look at, yes, what happened to you, right? The very popularized question that Oprah and Dr. Bruce Perry, you know, helped us to understand in their recent book, but also what happened before you

and also what happened around you. Oh, you suffered within a global crisis called a pandemic, right? Oh, you know, you also had this experience of being an individual that is a part of a community that experienced a collective trauma. And so we need to have an understanding of all those layers in order to have an understanding of what is everything that's really like bubbling inside of you that when you're going into work on any given morning and somebody is talking to you about the next project,

all of a sudden you lash out. And it's because you have all these layers of tension and pain and strain and trauma that are going with you into every, interaction that you're having in the workplace and your relationships. When you get home, you know, you have all those layers that you're carrying with you. And it's formulating the interactions that you have with your child when they're asking you, can I go out and play with my friends? And all of a sudden, you're screaming at them, right? And so when we start gathering the layers and start having an

understanding of how is trauma represented and what are the trauma responses that I tend to lean to towards, then we have a greater capacity to actually break those cycles. One of my favorite quotes is by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. And the quote is, you think you're so enlightened, go spend a weekend with your family. And what I love about this quote is that often when people are thinking about, well, you know, I'm not sure. Like what are my patterns? What are those things that are there? I think even the idea, especially if you're an adult and you don't live with your parents, like,

Think about like what is Thanksgiving like for you in some instances. Think about what it's like to go back. What are the buttons that you feel that your parents or family or other individuals can press? And immediately, you know, something comes up, right? Immediately, you know, some backhanded compliment makes you feel a particular way. And so all of a sudden brings up this like old, whether you realize it or not like childhood feelings, right? And it sounds like as you get clear about those things on a map, what happened to you, what happened to your parents, what happened to people around you, you can start to at least look at that

from a 30,000 foot lens and see it more as sort of a puzzle to kind of walk through rather than this sort of fiery storm of triggering events when you're in the thick of it. Yeah. And I actually welcome those experiences where we can do that zooming out, right? More often than not, because we don't want to touch the tender parts of ourselves, what we try to do is avoid any triggers or any experiences where we're family and family says like the one thing that we know is going to send us, right? I find that those are also experiences that are incredibly informative in our trauma healing process because we can actually look to the very circumstances, the language, even the nonverbal cure. that are around us in our family and even in our extended community that offers these triggers. And whenever we can really then start zooming into the trigger response,

we can map out a plan for how we then start the healing in reference to that trigger in reference to the things that actually make us feel so pervasively uncomfortable in our environments. So I like to, you know, even in the book, I mentioned that in part, what we're doing, is a data collection process, right? And I know that we can't be fully objective about it, but it is an opportunity for us to be like many scientists in our own world and actually collect all the information

that we need for the journey ahead to then if we know that, you know, when a certain individual is around us or when somebody says, you know, something in reference to, let's say, feminism, right? Like the feminism talk starts, you know, in the family table and you know that people are going to, you know, to direct the conversation in your direction and it's going to trigger you because you are, you know, you identify as a feminist and nobody else does, then that is an area that you can, you know, just start to explore in reference to how is your body taking in that experience?

How are you, how is your nervous system responding to when people bring that up? And how is it that you can, understanding that it is very likely that the individuals that around this table are not likely to change their perspective to match your own anytime in the future or at least in the near future, how can you then instead shift how you respond internally to the very same dynamic? That's such a great reminder. So many times, and this goes back to people getting stuck in blame, the focus on awareness on trauma when we don't do the work, which is what your book is about.

you're walking people literally through how you can do the work is you become obsessed on trying to change others and the surroundings around you rather than meeting reality where it is. And meeting reality where it is doesn't mean that we just accept the status quo. It means that, yes, we can work towards changing it, but that all of a sudden we cannot project our view of the world and beat people over the head with it and expect that they're going to walk away with this deep understanding. They got to go through their own journey. And I think that's a big part of what doing the work allows us to do is it says we're not

reacting to the world. We're choosing to act. Based on the circumstances right now, what's the best thing that I can do to move forward this personal issue, this global issue, whatever it might be versus trying to force people by brute force to immediately adopt our ideas to make the world a safer place, which is a beautiful thing. We'd all want that. but we cannot force that upon other people to see the world,

and nor would we want other people to force that upon us, right? This brings up the next question that I had for you, which is that now that you have this map that's there, and you're beginning to take steps in the right direction, how do we start to take care of the body? Because so many people think of trauma as being this thing that exist and the repercussions of it simply in our brain. But it's actually deeply embedded into our body.

And you write a lot about this. How can we start to take, heal, and create some sense of safety and security inside of the body? This is so important. And I'm so glad you're bringing it up. And in part, what I would love for all of us. to do is to adopt a lifestyle that is very, very body-centered, right? Rather than a reactionary response to the trauma that exists in the body, that we can do that and be proactive about how we prepare our bodies for the adversities that will come because that is life, right? Like at any given

moment, we're going to be experiencing some sort of stressful experience or some of us, you know, greater adversity than just a mild stress. but it is going to be really critical for us to also like do some of the programming of our bodies like to actually restructure the ways that our bodies are responding to our environments. And so whenever I'm working with folks and even the ways that I've adopted some of this generational healing in my own life and even how I've introduced it to my family members has been by way of inculcating body-centered practices into our day. as a daily practice and as a lifestyle.

And whenever I present that idea to folks, people think, yet another thing that I have to add to my to-do list, right? Like, here goes another task. When in reality, there's so many opportunities that we have throughout our day to just be more body-centered. And of course, you know, breathwork has been incredibly popularized, I think, in modern day, you know, times. And so there is at least one tool that we have.

at our disposal that if you're living, then you're someone who has the breath as a tool, right? And so it is something that I like to gravitate towards simply because of its accessibility. We have the breath and the breath can offer us an opportunity to re-center and to nourish our nervous system and to get into that parasympathetic ventralvagal response that I mentioned earlier in order to actually experience more ease. However, a lot of the breath work that we have popularized in general society is around taking a breath or three breaths, when in reality our nervous system needs a lot more than three breaths in order to re-center and feel a sense of ease, typically about five minutes or so. And when I even present the idea of five minutes, people tend to say, especially mothers, which I get, you know, that have busy lifestyles and have so many things to juggle in their lives. in their day, they say, I don't have five minutes, right? But, you know, we got to think about the full

day that we have at our disposal. We have 1,440 minutes in a day. Five minutes of them really seem like a lot when you, you know, juxtapose it to 1,440. You got five minutes for TikTok. Yeah. You got five minutes to dooms scroll on Instagram. So dooms scroll and breathe, right? Like if that's what you, whatever it is that you can fit in, if you're waiting, for the kids to get out of, you know, their basketball practice or, you know, volleyball, like you're in the car for five minutes. That's an opportunity to breathe. At least give yourself 60 seconds if you can't give yourself the full five, right? Like when you're segueing to sleep and you're just there just with your thoughts thinking and trying to get to sleep, that's an

opportunity to breathe, right? The kids are already in bed. Give yourself that moment. Give yourself a nervous system reset in that moment. Meditation, of course, like, now we know through a number of scientific studies, like has a way in which it can restructure, like our cortical brain actually can be restructured, and we can develop new neural pathways that are connected to ease rather than to stress, right? The same with our nervous system. We can have a better default in our nervous system that isn't programmed to stress and to always be in that threat alert system response, but rather that it could be in that

parasympathetic response more often than not. or at least that we can feel more settled in our bodies whenever presented with a stressor. So a deep breath for a period of five minutes or more can be so incredibly helpful. And when you think of a lot of people that have been suffering for decades, like for you to deposit five minutes every day into helping your body to absorb stress less than it has in the previous four decades, why not do it? Right. So I always like to juxtapose it in that way because I think it offers us an opportunity to really see like, this actually is obtainable. We can actually do this work.

And the sustained effects of it are innumerable. Like I can't even like cover them all just in this one conversation. But it's very effective. You know, an author Byron Katie, she has this quote. She says, I call it the work because when you stop doing it, it stops working. And I think that what I'm hearing part of what you're saying is that this is a lifestyle practice. We can't just wake up in the morning, not drink water, pound a large latte filled with sugar and caffeine and whatever else, additives. You know, eat a muffin for breakfast, rush off.

Again, I'm not saying that everybody's circumstances are the same. People are living in all sorts of different situations, but we cannot ignore the body, sit all day, live a sedentary lifestyle. the average person in America is getting 4,000 or less steps a day, which is considered sedentary, anything less than I believe than 6,000 is considered sedentary. And then come back, veg out on the couch, looking at social media. If we ignore our body, our body will start to scream. And that scream will get louder and louder. And sometimes that scream can show up as full-blown depression, although depression is, you know, complicated.

but there's a big body component that we know that plays into it. Yeah. Inflammation. It can show up as anxiety. It can show up as panic attacks. It can show up all these things when those things are layered on top of the traumas that we've been through or that our family has been through. It's no wonder that we are in a mental health crisis that we're in right now.

So we cannot ignore the body. These components, as simple as they are, as you mentioned, five minutes even here and there. but they have to be brought into a routine into our life. Any thoughts on people creating a version of their routine without feeling that they're overwhelmed? Is there like a place that you tell your patience? Like literally like starting here, you mentioned the five minutes, right? Is it important to do in the morning? Do you recommend other stuff in the evening?

Like how do we conceptualize this to become a part of our life, this idea of taking care of ourselves. Well, I like to really look at a person's day to day and think about the ways in which healing can be integrated within. For example, you know, many of us listen to music, right? So music can be sang out loud or it can be hummed. And what we know about humming is that it also stimulates our ventral vaguely nerve, yet again, the parasympathetic response, and can actually have a really positive effect, not just in the moment, but also sustainably. It can actually help us to do that reprogramming of our bodies. So in those four to five minutes that you take to sing that song, why not hum it? And then you're actually enjoying the song in addition to also

helping your body to be better for the long term. So it's, you know, a practice that's already in your day. If you're, let's say, like listening to a song or the way to work, there's your opportunity, right? If you're singing a song, let's say, like, you know, in the evening while you're cooking, there's your opportunity. And even when it comes to, because what I hear a lot is, especially from parents, well, how do I ensure that my children are also leading lives that are marked by trauma and how do I help them to also absorb this more mindful state or engage in these kinds of practices? that can actually help them. Kids love to hum also. They also love to move their bodies, right? And so you can have

dance parties with kids and it allows some of that trauma tension or just the stress tension of their day, which can be very stressful. School's stressful, right? So their day can actually be released to, you know, doing some shakes at the end of the day. So in that moment, you having that dance party with your child is giving you both an added benefit And right in that moment, you actually are engaging in multi-generational healing. It's a beautiful moment in which something that seemingly doesn't seem like a health practice can be translated into such. And it actually has health benefits for both you and your child. I think it was Michael Pollan who said that our food has changed more in the last like 70 years

than it has in the last 10,000 years. Wow. And how does that play in the world? to what people are experiencing today, both with trauma and mental health, especially from a holistic perspective. Where does food matter? And do you talk about that at all? I do because we have to think about one of our other brains, which is our gut, right? The gut microbiome, which is a home for a lot of our neurotransmitters, actually even more than the neurotransmitters that are housed inside of our brain is a place where many of us are ingesting a lot of toxins.

And the toxins are, of course, in a lot of the additives that are in the food that we eat, particularly in the Western world. But it is also in the types of food that we eat, right? Like the foods that have, like, you know, that are deeply fried or, you know, aren't necessarily coming from Earth directly. And so when we're depositing a lot of that foreign substance into the body that the body then needs to make sense of at the gut level, and the gut is like chronically confused and, you know, creating like more of the bacteria that it needs to create to like release the toxins and it creates this like imbalance inside of the gut, you have to wonder if and not just wonder if, but we do know that, of course, that this is also. impacting our mood and the ways in which mood and mood disorders or mood components of our mental health are permeating throughout society. So when we're talking about really approaching the work

from a holistic place, we have to think about what are we putting into our body, what are we ingesting, and what is going into our gut specifically that is either creating balance or lack thereof? Any other therapeutics or other tools that you feel excited about or that you might use or fur out for the people that you work with who are working through this process of trauma and breaking the cycle? Yeah. Oh my goodness. There's so many. But one that I think is incredibly, incredibly powerful for folks is writing. And writing, we have to think about the very mechanism of writing out our sorrows. Whenever we are talking about our sorrows, like, for example,

to a therapist, we experience what we call like catharsis, right? There's a release of the tension that has been pent up when our emotions and our thoughts collide and we have all of this just swirling inside of us. When we're actually able to speak to it and put a name to it and like really exercise, like words that give actually meaning to our experiences, we experience catharsis. That is in the very antiquated kind of, let's call them, like, Freudian days, right? Like a lot of what therapy was understood to actually do to offer us that catharsis. Writing can do the very same for us.

We can literally like just free write onto paper and allow the paper to just like keep all of those worries and all of those thoughts and release them from our minds in a way that can actually help us to go about life, not having to carry all of that. And of course there's like structured writing, right? Like, you know, journaling has been something that a lot of therapists have used in order to help us to really release a lot of the pain that, you know, that we feel as humans that we carry around. And so sometimes, you know, there will be like more structured assignments that we give. One of the ones that I give in my generational healing protocol and process is writing to an individual in our family life. that we wish to speak to and perhaps don't have access to anymore. Maybe it's a grandparent that passed away and we can just start the letter with, you know, naming them and then letting them know things that we wish we could have relayed.

And sometimes that offers a catharsis because many of us just have a lot of those pent-up emotions and thoughts that we wish that we could have relayed forward and we don't have any kind of avenue to do that. Well, we do have a pen and paper. And if we have that access to pen and paper and we have an opportunity, to at least release it onto paper and see where it guides us emotionally. You have this mantra that you've shared, and I'm paraphrasing here because I don't remember it exactly, but I believe it was, I honor my past, but I'm not beholden to it.

Is that accurate? Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's so important for us to actually be willing to go through the process of healing, understanding that we are also individuals that are creating. creating legacies. So whatever family actually was our foundational family and the family that we came from doesn't necessarily have to be the family that comes out of us, right? Like we have, we have an opportunity to recreate our family structure and embody generational abundance in the

now by creating it in the now and then translating that forward. So it's a beautiful opportunity that we have as cycle breakers to actually research. surface, like the strength and the wisdom and the love that also has been present in whatever ways inside of our family lines and even in our extended communities and then create abundance from that, like actually bring that into our lives on a daily basis, even if it's just a reminder. Like I come from strong and abundant people, people who have been resourceful and who have been deeply loving. That in and of itself can be such a powerful mantra to carry with us and to actually help us to build a better future for ourselves and our descendants.

What I love about that mantra is that there's the beautiful side of everything, even things that we perceive as negative. And when you really sit down with someone and you talk to them about their life, which is literally what you do for a living, there's also this recognition that this very, maybe tough or painful thing that they went through also led to some of these traits about them that are incredible, that they themselves love. And it's not that one balances out another.

It's just more the reality of the situation. This thing happened. We can't go back in time and change it. We can re-contextualize it. We can break the cycle and say, we're not going to pass us forward. We can break the cycle internally and say, I'm not going to internalize this trauma

and continue to keep it going on a day-to-day basis, almost like carmic energy, just stuck in our body. And then also this beauty that comes from, I'm so thankful for number one being alive. That like is a very unique thing as human beings to even be alive in the first place if we're breathing and we're alive today and we're safe.

You know, that's a huge privilege for us all. But the other component is that some of the deepest wounds that we had led to these incredible and beautiful drives, strengths, and passion that we have our lives. Is there something in your life that you think of, which were your own traumas that you went through, that are an example of that, that they led to this in a way, I don't want to say they led to it, but your adaptation and strength of overcoming them led to this superpower that you have today. Is there, is there anything in your life that's like that?

So many things, you know, however, particularly like, you know, an instance in grad school where I felt so incredibly challenged. Like, I just felt like this was just uncharted territory for anybody that is a part of my family. I'm a first generation in many respects. And so I felt so ill-equipped to be in an end. educational system at this level. And to bring in the perspectives that I bring in, even, you know, some of the holistic perspectives, which actually derives from even my own family and communities. And I felt very out of place. And like I almost could not survive the grad school experience at the very outset of it. So like literally first semester. And I remember going to my mother,

and telling her, you know, I don't think I can make it like this is just too much. Like I don't feel like I have, you know, the compass. I don't have navigational tools for how I can like actually work through, you know, a program that's so incredibly demanding at such a high level. And I remember her telling me, you know, you come from a lineage of strong people. Like you have a lot of power in you. Just use that and go back in there and like show them that you have that. power. And that reminder is something that I now, I carried into my grad school experience and it

really got me through and it reminded me of the strength and power that I had within me. So it was incredibly empowering for me to hear that. And I also carry it into all of the other experiences that I have. I'm a first time author that's very, very foreign, you know, to me. And I don't have a lot of people in my social circles that have this experience. And so again, uncharges. And so, again, uncharted territory, but now I have that strength and wisdom that I was able to carry over without feeling overburdened in the ways that I did when I was first in grad school. So, you know, it's something that just permeates my entire life now, that understanding that that's what I have within me, that I have, you know, people that have been very resourceful

are very, like, creative in their thinking. And that's the resource also. Like, I know how to do this. So let me get creative about how I approach this situation. And I feel like that is also just an innate inheritance that I have been able to actually carry on and helps me a lot in life. That's beautiful. You made me think of a story which would be my own sort of tradition and lineage. You know, a lot of Indians, South Asians that are fortunate enough to make it here to America. I wasn't born here. I was born in Nairobi, Kenya. And it was about 120 years ago that my great-grandfather left India.

And with the common British rule, a lot of Indians ended up in Africa. And they were building out the railroads and people were starting businesses and other things like that. And a lot of Indians and other immigrant families that are here, I don't want to say it's just unique to Indians. Any immigrant families that were able to leave their area, in some case, escape their area, come to the U.S., there are some themes that are there. And those themes are, you know, parents are huge on sort of education first, right? I don't know if you grew up in a family like that. No, but I am familiar with. Yes. Yes. So often that will show up, you know, a lot of Indians, South Asians, immigrants, they have a similar version, Chinese, you know,

whoever might be. When you're young, you know, you are basically told, you know, you're either a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a failure, right? It's like you can pick between those. So even another profession that could be a great profession, something that you could be interested in, you know, you have to be looking at those angles. And when I was thinking about this, because I always did really great in school,

but as I was getting towards college, I started feeling like, I don't know if I want to pursue any one of those paths. I was studying computer science, but that didn't really feel like the thing that I wanted to do. I had this entrepreneurial energy. And I can remember getting so many questions for my community, unless for my parents, they didn't pressure me as much,

but they would check in every so often and saying, okay, so which one of these paths are you going to pursue, right? Even in high school, people are asking you. And thinking like, wow, like, why can't I just have the freedom to exist and sort of choose? And when I was first starting a lot of this work to the best degree of the resources that I had, access to at the time, I started tracing back in my own way. I didn't have access to your material, but I started tracing back and thinking and asking questions like,

huh, why is there so much emphasis on these roles, like an engineer, like a doctor, like a lawyer, these high-paying professions that are sort of focused on this? And why is there so much diminishing of business, entrepreneurship, or other categories that people might want to pursue? And a lot of these communities, and definitely the community I came from, you had a lot of parents that literally had to have flee their country, and they couldn't even take the money that they had in the bank that they had. I have friends that grew up in, you know, their parents were in Uganda, and you had nationalization of businesses and literally an entire business that you had and your family built was taken back and now transferred back over to the state. You had people that were refugees or fleeing deep

oppression, like my wife's family is from Iran. And after the revolution, you know, it became an in hospitable place. If you were a woman or wanted democracy or freedoms or other things, so you literally had to flee. And in many of these cultures, the sense was no matter what they take from you, they can never take away your education. And that trauma response that so much of the world has gone through,

and then those folks that were lucky enough to make it to America and the great opportunities that were here, and yes, there are problems here, but literally people were coming here for the opportunities, it was a sense of, well, we'd never know what can happen. And we might have to leave this country. But the one thing they can never take away from you is your education. So that's why there was so much emphasis.

And when I saw that all this pressure in society came from a lot of that standpoint, at least in the culture that I grew up in, I had a deep empathy and compassion for my parents and my grandparents who not only left India for Kenya, but then left Kenya. The day that I was born, there was a coup attempt in Kenya, 1982, August 1st. And my parents literally were, my mom had to give birth in the basement of a hospital. There was a war breaking out outside. The president fled the country. Like, that's a traumatic experience.

For her, she says she actually didn't even know what's going on. She thought there was fireworks going on inside. So I'm thankful that she didn't have access to social media. But when you see the world through that lens, that your parents had to not only leave, your grandparents had to leave India, then they left Kenya, then they're coming to a country that they don't know, then they're living in communities and places where there's not a lot of people that look like them. That's a very challenging experience to go through. So while I don't love the pressure, I can at least have compassion for where these individuals are

coming from and say that, okay, even if I'm choosing to go in a different direction, which I chose entrepreneurship, I dropped out of college, which was a very big decision. and tough decision in my family, I can at least have empathy for where they're coming from and say that, well, I am following in those footsteps of making sure that nobody can ever take away from me. You know, they always saw education as a paper and a degree that somebody signed off for.

I had a little bit more of an expanded version of education. And I could realize that I can't force my view upon them And it might take them time, but I have to at least have some empathy of where they were coming from. So that's a story that I wanted to share because that's my own version of a little bit of how that generational sort of traumas has led to what feels like when you're young and you're growing up in America and you just want to fit in. You want to go do something different.

It feels like pressure. But as you get older a little bit, you have empathy for how people got there in the first place. Yeah. Wow. That's beautiful how you were able to really kind of like go through. that wave of understanding. Like there were, you know, so many different places where insight was drawn by you, right?

But perhaps not, it wasn't a moment where you were like seeking out the insight, but you were just like capturing the insight of the moment. And for many of us that, especially, you know, I myself am an immigrant to the U.S., and the experience is very pressurized. It is, you know, an experience where we have to, because of the sacrifices that have been made, we feel the pressure to actually succeed in whatever way success looks, and many times it's through education. But in part, some of that is driven by being in survival mode and believing that the safety net is held in the education system, in the traditional structured education system.

And there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, right? There's a lot of truth to that. It is reinforced in society for sure. There's a lot of reinforcement around that idea. And so it makes it so that, of course, many of us lean in the direction of what feels safest. And we become very risk-aversive because we suffered so much risk in other areas of the world and where we come from. Right.

And so I love that you pivoted in the direction of compassion and leaving openness to when people, people can actually reach their level of understanding around your own path. And I think that that's, it's beautiful. So I'm grateful that you shared it. And also, it's a beautiful way in which we can also see how compassion can take root and be like that center for us in a family. Thank you. Thank you.

And I think one of the most beautiful thing that came out of it is that number one, I'm less reactionary, right? So if somebody says, why aren't you doing this or what are you doing now or shouldn't you go back to school or doing that, it's like, great. I understand they're coming from the place they're coming from. I would be coming from that same place if I grew up and had the same life experiences that they had. Yes. That's the compassion that we always want to bring to the other.

And having those conversations and dialogue with my dad to say that, hey, dad, I want to acknowledge here for a second. Like, that was probably so scary for you to leave Kenya or even be thinking about where you go. And one of the reasons that you got the opportunity to come to America besides the fact that we have, some family that was here, some of my dad's relatives, was it was quicker for us because you also had your MBA. And you got a job offer as soon as that you said that you wanted to leave. And a lot of your friends were not in that same boat and felt that they couldn't leave. And I understand how you feel that that education literally was a lifeline for you and your family.

And when you can share with people that you understand where they're coming from, at least that you feel that you understand parts of where they're coming from, I often find that that that takes off the defense that they have, that they feel that they have to prove something to you because you just don't get it. You're young, you're naive, you're this, you're that, whatever it might be. But when you can diffuse that a little bit by saying, here's at least some of what I'm understanding and seeing in you, and by the way, if I'm not seeing other aspects, like, please share with me. I want to see it. I want to see your perspective. It's just a whole different way of now how people are interacting with each other.

That is so beautiful. And it is very much a recipe for how I hope that we can approach older generations. I don't believe that they should be left behind. I believe that we should enter dialogue with them and have concrete conversations about how we see the world so that they have an eye into our world. And also have conversations about how we can hold compassion for them. Very often we think of breaking.

cycles as like being forward moving, right? Like we're breaking cycles on behalf of ourselves and individuals that come after us, our children, our grandchildren. And we forget that older generations need us to, in the very, you know, seemingly smallest ways that they also need us to have gentle conversations with them and to hold space for them and with them around all of the dynamics that they have had to undergo, whether it's, you know, underscored by a collective trauma or underscored by even some of the small T traumas, the milder stressors that still they carry with them, that we could have these conversations and we can help them to, you know, enter their older age with a little bit more ease or at the very least an understanding that someone sees them

and hears them and understands their journey. Beautifully said. As we wind down here, any final thoughts here or components that you think that you want to touch on on the topic of breaking the cycle? You know, the book is a roadmap and there's plenty inside of there that we hadn't get a chance to cover in an hour and a half interview. But anything else that you wanted to make sure that we hit before we concluded here. Yeah, you know, I'd like for all of us to internalize the idea of breaking cycles as a daily task, right? every single day we're presented with an opportunity to break the cycle. We just have to be willing to take it. And it's every day that we're presented with an opportunity to take those five minutes.

Every day that we're presented with an opportunity to not be the reactionary self that we have been. But instead, like, bring in that compassionate element, right? Like, it's every single day. And so breaking cycles is not this, like, monumental big thing that we do. And then all of a sudden, nothing else happens. it's in the day-to-day opportunities that we take, that we can actually shift the very lineage that we come from and create abundance in our lives.

So that's just one thing I wanted to leave us with. Incredible. How can people follow along on the journey and continue to be in touch with all this work and the way that you make it so practical? How should people keep in touch with you? So people can actually find me at Dr. Marielbouquet.com, and they can also find Break the Cycle, my book,

on my webpage and also wherever books are sold because it's a penguin book, so they, you know, scatter it across the world, so luckily me. And also on my webpage, you can find a lot of my social media handles. And I am at dr.a. mariel Bouquet, anywhere where you get your social fix. Amazing. Dr. Bouquet, we'll have the links for all those in the show notes. Please check out the book. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things.

Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health.

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