Saturn Returns with Caggie - 7.7 Beyond instinct: Survival Mode and Intergenerational Trauma with Dr Mariel Buqué

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

This episode Caggie is joined by Dr Mariel Buqué for a thought provoking and evocative discussion on her holistic approach to healing the wounds of intergenerational trauma. Dr Buqué, world renowned intergenerational trauma expert, received her doctorate in counselling psychology from Columbia University and is the author of book, “Break the Cycle: A guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma ''. Dr Buqué and Caggie explore the complexities of intergenerational trauma, shedding light on her holistic framework in healing trauma that transcends generations and impacts many of us in various aspects of our lives; family, relationships and professional. They delve into discussions around the nervous system, survival mode (fight, flight, freeze and fawn), self sabotage in relationships and the tools you can utilise to diffuse your nervous system when it goes into overdrive. You can find Dr Buqué here on Instagram. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. Today I am joined by Dr. Marielle Bouquet. Dr. Marielle received her doctorate in counselling psychology from Columbia University, where she also trained in holistic mental health. She is a world-renowned intergenerational trauma expert and the author of the book Break the Cycle, a guide to healing intergenerational trauma. Her clinical framework is holistic and infuses ancient and indigenous healing practices into a modern comprehensive therapeutic approach. I wanted to get Dr. Marielle on the show because I followed her for some time on social media

and I love the content she puts out. I wanted to talk to her about intergenerational trauma and how that shows up and how we can actually do the work to heal it. In this episode we cover some of the ways that you can get the tools to handle things when they're showing up in the body, how to diffuse a situation when you feel activated and your nervous system is in overdrive. I found this conversation so useful and so calming. She has such a calming way and voice and it was just a really lovely conversation to have on a very difficult and complex subject but I found her tools and her way of approaching this really really handy so I hope you found it useful too. In this episode we cover emotional trauma, intergenerational trauma, how to form healthy relationships when you are healing from

trauma, toxic relationship cycles, mental health, family dynamics, and how this shows up in different aspects of your life, not just the personal ones, professional ones as well. Dr. Marielle Bouquet, welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a beautiful name that you have, especially your last name, like the way it's Bouquet, right? That's how it's pronounced. That's right. Yeah. I always tell people like a bouquet of flowers that helps them remember. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, welcome to the podcast. I'm super excited for this conversation. And for the audience that doesn't know, would you be able to do a little intro about who you are and the work that you do? Yes, absolutely. So I am a licensed psychologist and I specialize in the area of trauma and I'm an intergenerational trauma expert. So I focused from a very holistic

perspective on healing traumas that have a lot of layers and ancestral connections and have been in families for generations upon generations. So that's a big part of my work and a lot of what motivates me every single day to show up and do therapy work and healing work. And so that's, in a nutshell, a lot of what my professional world is. And how did you get into that space? Well, it's been a pretty long journey. However, a lot of what tended to motivate me at the beginning was really just seeing a lot of the pain that I was seeing in my communities. So I was volunteering while I was actually in my first career, which was advertising. And yeah, so I had a whole different life prior to therapy.

And when I was engaging in the process of volunteering, I started hearing a lot of these similar stories of pain that transcended generations. And in addition to that, I was also undergoing my own healing journey and trying to figure out what that really meant and what it looked like and how it factored into my family life. So the combination of those two things came together to then help me dive into this world of helping to heal in a multi-generational way. And then everything around my training, I eventually got my doctorate and wanted to study really kind of the ways in which people's life are sometimes even predetermined even before they're born and the ways in which they can shift the course of their family's pain into abundance and so I've eventually now 10 years 11 years later have found myself here yeah it's amazing because I think I'm sure you'll agree the the language

around this kind of thing has it's become more in people's vocabulary. So people are saying using the word like trigger and trauma. Do you think sometimes it's being overused or like people don't actually understand what it means? I do believe that when people start feeling like something feels relatable, they will take it and try to apply it to every aspect of their life that feels like that concept fits in order to then try and make sense of the experiences that didn't feel like they made sense before. And so I do believe that a lot of what we're seeing in terms of the potential overuse of trauma and triggers is people trying to understand what these things are and trying to apply it to their lives almost for the first time for many of us. And so what tends to happen is that eventually people become more concretely educated as to what a proper trauma is and a trauma response is and how triggers really manifest and what they look like and feel like in the mind and body.

And then we have a better understanding and usability of these kinds of terms throughout society. Can you talk us through what those would be and what they might look like? Absolutely. Trauma is the experience that a person has of adopting coping mechanisms to deal with a circumstance that was far too stressful. mechanisms to deal with a circumstance that was far too stressful. Many times those traumas tend to actually be so stressful because they pose a threat to a person's livelihood, meaning that a person felt as though their life was in danger or that their full persona was in danger. There was some aspect of who they are that was feeling threatened pervasively at that time. There are also other types of traumas, which the one that I just mentioned, we tend to call big T traumas. The small T traumas or little T traumas are the ones that happen to us on a day-to-day basis that also impact us emotionally

and may tap out our own capacities to cope. And so we develop and adopt what we call coping strategies and sometimes even maladaptive coping strategies, meaning that those strategies don't really work in our favor, but they help us to survive. And the small T traumas don't necessarily threaten our livelihood, but they do cause us an immense amount of distress. So that's kind of the world of trauma. Really, when we're talking about trauma, we're not in essence talking about the event itself, but the actual response, the emotional response that people tend to have to an event. response, the emotional response that people tend to have to an event. Because like, as a great example of a trauma that, or an event that was experienced by the entire world was this recent pandemic. And there wasn't a single place in the world that wasn't impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, body to body,

person to person, people experienced the pandemic very differently. They internalized it differently. They coped with it differently. Some people were able to get past the moment, the years that we had to undergo this collective crisis, and they were able to come out pretty unscathed. Other people weren't so lucky and they developed trauma responses or fears and grief and all kinds of emotional experiences in relation to this pandemic. And so that trauma response, the fear, the grief, all of those tend to be the actual experience of trauma, not the event itself, not the pandemic itself, but how we metabolize trauma itself. That's really interesting. I've heard you speak about the pandemic as like a traumatic experience collectively. And I think whilst we were all

navigating it, we were all navigating it we were going through our own personal crisis whilst navigating a collective one and I know personally and my family would experience these feelings of like grief and sadness and loneliness whenever there was a big announcement made that was sort of you, you need to be inside for another however long. And so it was, yeah, it was a really interesting thing that we all had to navigate. Have you noticed that there have been long-term implications of people that perhaps didn't have the tools or had maladaptive coping strategies during that time and how that's kind of played out to today? and how that's kind of played out to today?

Absolutely. So there's going to be with every single, we'll bucket it under a natural disaster, right? Because of the biological components of the COVID-19 crisis. There are always variations in how people experience these kinds of natural disasters. There's cultural variations. Different identities get impacted differently. Different people personally, just based on their personal capacities for coping through something like this, get impacted differently. this get impacted differently. And also what we tend to see with any kind of collective crisis is that there tends to be a lag in how people recover. So just because the pandemic ended or we've gotten a hold of it in a better way than we did whilst we were in it, doesn't necessarily mean that everybody has fully recovered. And typically, the timeline that some of the organizations that tend to map out recovery

phases after natural disasters, the timeline that they have indicated that tends to be more along the lines of naturally what we tend to see is about 10 years. So 10 years post the event. So once we were able to indicate we are no longer in a state of collective crisis, there is a state of recovery and emotional recovery process that happens that lags for a period of that time with people, some people falling, you know, on the maybe one year mark versus others falling on the 10 year mark. And we also have to consider a lot of the nuances, like some people lost family members, some people lost community members, some people had no losses at all. They were simply a part of the pandemic and saw

the losses happening external of their own family unit or community. And so all of those variables are to be considered, but we definitely tend to see there being in about 10 year process for a recovery phase to really concretize. Does that mean that some people won't actually feel it for 10 years? won't actually feel it for 10 years? There is a latency phase that we tend to see where people almost have like this upsurge in emotions that feel good. And then they have latent grief, where their mind and body catches up to the fact that they've been through what they've been through. And that happens with all kinds of traumas, but we are able to very much map it when it comes to something like this, where people, we as humans, we want to recover. We want to surface from pain. And so the natural response is to bring ourselves out of that just naturally as best as we could.

However, there are some things that get captured in the mind and body that we may not be attuned to. And they only come up when we mentioned triggers earlier, when we get triggered by our environment. And a trigger is the experience of remembrance. So when something in your environment sparks a memory or something internal within you sparks a memory. And what I mean by that is that in your environment, you can see something that feels familiar to the traumatic event you experienced. And that brings up the element of fear. And that's an external, sensory, sight-based trigger. There's the internal triggers, for example, feeling a sense of sadness because perhaps you lost a friend and you lost that friend because the relationship was no longer

working out. However, it brings up that sense of sadness that you felt and the grief that you felt while you were in the pandemic. And so now it brings you back into that triggered state of feeling sad and it becomes more pronounced because the actual sadness that you were experiencing within the pandemic had not been resolved and now it's being re-triggered. I want to kind of tie this into what we mentioned a second ago about the kind of big T trauma and little t trauma. Is it valid to say that if in your childhood experience you had a situation where you weren't necessarily actually abandoned but you felt like you might be or there was too much time on your own or you witnessed a lot of arguing, things like that, that when you are in your adult self, you may react disproportionately to a situation based off that initial traumatic experience. A lot of what the experience of trauma and trauma responses are is very individual and subjective, even when we have

collective traumas. So a person can experience a parent leaving for a period of three days because they had a business trip as a sense of abandonment. And that perceptive experience of abandonment can then be carried into adulthood. And there's so many things that can be a part of that. Perhaps like as a kid, you know, there was a school play that you were a part of. And by way of being a part of that school play, you were so proud, but that parent couldn't come because they had that business trip. And so as a result, you felt rejected, abandoned, unworthy, unloved. And all of those experiences, should they not be spoken about, processed, they can become internalized, especially if they happen on an ongoing basis. It can happen once, but if they happen on an ongoing basis and when we don't actually resolve the experiences that we have, especially early in life, they can become the general scripts or narratives that we then

internalize in our minds. And then we operate through life with that script, with that narrative and with that idea of the world and of people. And so anybody that we come in contact with now is a person that is likely to abandon, likely to reject, likely to hurt. And so that's in essence how it all comes to be. Yeah. And then it creates this, you know, you get attached to that story and then, you know, you can navigate through life as everything is a threat. And the sadness within that is that you will end up sabotaging something that is actually not a threat and potentially great because you are so programmed in that narrative. Absolutely. Fear is a very powerful emotion. And we as humans are trying our best every single day to absolve

ourselves from fear. And if you have a fear of abandonment, then you're going to enter into frantic efforts to not be abandoned in each and every circumstance where you feel like you're connected to someone, which is where self-sabotage comes in. If I abandon this person first, and if I destroy the relationship, then I don't have to suffer the consequence, the fear, the pain, the grief of being abandoned. Yeah. How does one work through that? Because of course, when we apply this to the context of a romantic partnership, they tend to be the ones that bring up a lot of this stuff and bring it to the surface. And I was listening to a podcast recently, can't remember whose it was, I'll try and remember and put it in in the links. But it was saying how there's a point at when you've been with someone

for a certain period of time, and things are coming up, and you're having to work through stuff. And you start sort of fantasizing that someone else wouldn't bring up this stuff in you that you would wouldn't feel triggered that they would just like you'd be in this perfect harmony together which I think is quite a relatable thing and I think we like this idea that you know there is someone out there that's completely perfect for us and won't make us address our wounds but that is also the beauty of relationship is that someone can act as a mirror for the parts of us that we cannot see. But at the same time, we don't have the tools. We don't, we never learned about this stuff at school. We're just kind of going into it blindly. So what is your, what are some of your like tips and your thoughts on this particular area?

thoughts on this particular area? Such a wonderful question. And I love that you posed it as the opportunity for a mirroring experience, because very often what we want to do is flee the state of discomfort rather than lean into it. However, as humans, we haven't really been taught how to sit with discomfort, how to sit with uncertainty, how to sit with our wounds. And so when we don't have the adequate and proper tools to be able to process the experiences that come up in these places of intimacy, then we're not going to be able to really get through the process of healing. However, if we lean into it and we gather the tools that we need, then we would be able to, in many ways, create healing within relationships. One really important thing to understand about relationships is that we, for the most part, we tend to experience brokenheartedness in relationships. So the mending also has to be

in relationships. Yes. So when we feel that sense of urgency to exit, usually that's the first telling point that something needs to be unearthed, understood. And this is not taking into consideration the fact that sometimes the sense of urgency can come from people feeling discomfort because a relationship can actually feel unsafe and unhealthy. a relationship can actually feel unsafe and unhealthy. I'm talking more so about the relationships that are healthy, but still kick up things in us because they, even a sense of safety can be triggering because it's just so unfamiliar for some folks. So a lot of what I tend to start people off with in terms of my process and helping them to gather the tools and understanding of how do we then approach this is first off by starting with education,

which is a large part of why I started engaging in the process of educating folks across the world through these like social media platforms. Because when we have that element of knowledge, we're able to catch ourselves. We're able to understand ourselves better. And we can recognize it. We can recognize it. We can identify it. And the bonus here is that we can actually build compassion for ourselves because a large part of what tends to happen after we sabotage is that we experience shame. And we don't really know what to do with all of that. Why did I do that? I should have just worked it through. Here I go again in my old patterns. And so we go into that downward spiral. However, when we're equipped with the

knowledge that we need in order to then heal within the relationship, then that's a very healthy first step in helping us to get through the process of from having the trauma responses to entering into a healthy state of relating to others. So first is definitely knowledge for sure. Yeah, that it also requires that both parties have a willingness and sort of the capacity to hold that space for each other and often you know in the heat of conflict we do quite quickly jump to the rightness versus wrongness perpetrator victim your truth and validates my truth your experience and validates my experience and you can get like stuck in this swirliness where you're just not coming you're not coming to a resolve or to a

kind of like harmonious place so as much as it's you know in theory I get it and it makes sense when people are that activated how do they come back down so that they can actually come back into sort of like a sacred union together and hold that space for each other? Yes, that's a wonderful question because it dives me right into the second aspect of what I would invite in as the work with individuals and with couples and with families, which is to actually enter a state of regulating everyone's nervous systems. So what's happening in those moments is that everybody's nervous system is preparing for fight, flight, freeze, or fall. They're preparing for warp. They're entering survival mode, and everyone is focused on

self-preservation. When you're focused on self-preservation, you're going to fend off the perceived threat. That threat could be your significant other, right? They're the person that's in front of you, they're the one that is misunderstanding you, yelling at you, all kinds of things. And so what's going to happen is that these two individuals are simply going to be playing into their survival mode. If you, as someone that understands that you can operate from that survival mode and that trauma state, can train your body to be more regulated, to experience more ease, to feel more grounded on a continuous basis, not just in the moments when it gets hard and when a fight is happening, but in every single

day of your life. As a practice. As a practice, as a way to restructure your nervous system, as a way to even invite in neuroplasticity so that the emotion centers in your brain can actually reconfigure in ways to help you absorb emotions in a more healthy way. Now we dive right back into science, right? This is actually something that can help. However, a lot of individuals don't necessarily go into that aspect of their healing. They just get very heady about the situation and they forget that an entire body is implicated in that process as well. And that in order for them to feel safe and willing and able to connect, they have to have a nervous system that has the capacity to tolerate the moment. And so a lot of what we do in the area of holistic practice or the way that

I like to orient people is through settling their nervous system so that they can then feel a greater capacity for, which is very much what happens, connection, clarity of mind, an ability to problem solve in a healthier way, an ability to really sit with their emotions and even know what emotions are coming up instead of feeling like they're in this heavy fog and they're really not understanding their own experience in that moment or the experience of the person in front of them. them. I want to go back to this, but can we just explain in case the audience doesn't know about the survival mechanisms of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, just in case people listening aren't familiar with those terms? Definitely. So a lot of what a trauma response is, is an internal experience of our nervous system being activated. And that activation is what we call a hyperactive or hypoactive activation, meaning that the nervous system is in a place where it is outside of the range of how it can actually experience stress in a healthy way. I'll explain that further. So fight is basically what we tend to see when a person feels like they're being threatened in some way and they start to argue or start to defend themselves in any way.

Flight is what we tend to see with individuals that lean more on avoidance or stepping away from the situation because they don't feel like they can tolerate and handle the conversation. and handle the conversation. Usually fight and flight are happening at a level where the stress, let's say it's from a level of like one to five out of 10. When the levels get a little bit deeper, meaning that there is higher levels of stress, we enter into the other side of the nervous system shutdown, which is freeze, meaning that we don't feel like we can actually interact. And so we basically like dissociate. We're not able to engage. There is no way to either flee or no way to fight. We just don't have the energy. And then fawn is a full system shutdown. It is when we literally cannot even be present. And all of those tend to happen whenever we feel like we need to find a way to survive the moment. But there are different ways

that people survive. Some people are stuck in that people survive some people are stuck in fight mode some people are stuck in flight mode it all depends on the person and their general default but at the heart of it is an inability to cope with the pervasive stress that is in front of a person and the experience of wanting to survive the moment for the sake of survival. Because when that does happen, you know, I also am thinking a lot about when alcohol is in the mix for people and then they just like cannot regulate, they cannot rationalize, they cannot see that something is being activated that's perhaps a historical thing and they go into one of those routes when if someone goes into fight or flight especially the fight I think that

you know because I'm just thinking from my own personal experience I tend to just go pretty much straight into the thewn or freeze. That's been always my coping strategy throughout my life. And I think within family, I remember when fights would happen, I would just go very quiet and absorb a lot of it and just want to make it okay. Even if it wasn't about me, I just want to make everything okay but I've noticed in my adult life I do the same thing but then I have this like residual anger that comes up later so it's not in the moment it's like the moment I'm like I want everything to be okay I want to fix it I want to fix it and then days later suddenly the anger or the rage or whatever I

wasn't able to express at the time comes to the surface. And it's, it's an interesting one. And I would love to know your kind of thoughts and opinions on that. Mm hmm. Well, a lot of us have a default mode. A lot of us are primarily fight, primarily flight, Primarily fight, primarily flight, freeze-fun. And so there is a way in which we tend to absorb environments and cope with the environments that we're in that connects to or is similar to a way in which a parent has coped or someone that is familiar to them or that they heavily identify with has coped. a mother that was stuck in fight mode, that if you over-identify with that mother, then you yourself in your own relationships now as an adult are also in fight mode. Or if your relationship with your mother was one in which she was constantly in fight mode, but in relation to you and you had to fall and collapse because that was the only recourse that

you had, you could not fight back an aggressor, right? Because you were entirely too vulnerable as a child, then that's the way that you're going to be later on. And so we tend to see these patterns that are either an over-identification with a parent or a response to a parent. And that tends to be the programmed way that people then engage in their survival mode into adulthood. So the primary thing for people to understand in that regard is what their default is, but what it looks like also, because these states can be very... They look different. states can be very... They look different. Exactly. They look different person to person.

They look different situation to situation. So you can have one person with fight mode as their default and their fight mode can be very different in a business sense than it is with an intimate partner. And it can be very easy to spot in spaces where you can be open and perhaps more inviting to your traditional fight mode, which is like yelling at your partner, but you're not really conscious of the ways in which you're in fight mode in your business environment. And it's a matter of bringing attunement and knowledge to the different ways in which fight mode shows up in your life so that you can then. That's so interesting. Yeah. Because people are constantly thinking, when they think about relationships, they think about, we automatically go to a significant other.

But we forget that we're in relationship with the world. We're in relationship to people in our communities. We're in relationship to people in in our communities we're in relationship to people in our work environment where I mean relationships are everywhere so we have to be attuned to the multiple ways in which these survival modes tend to come up and when we begin to be more aware of it and recognize it because even having this conversation I'm like oh my god yeah I'm like that in yeah I'm like that but what is the sort of steps to healing from that because it's such a like it is such a primal response like you say you're you're actually trying to keep yourself safe you're trying to self-preserve so what is the kind of tools for yeah not going into that shutdown mode or that fight mode or whatever

it might be. I like to identify how and when a person feels safe. Yeah. Because of course, the natural response for a person wanting to heal is to want to always identify what are the ways in which I experience lack of safety. But what about the safety? How can we replicate safety for you? What are the spaces that create safety for you? Who are the people that create safety for you? Even if they're people that are no longer in the living world, like maybe it's a grandparent that always provided you with a sense of comfort whenever your parents were arguing, let's say, right? And that was your safe zone. How can you reconnect to that person, maybe meditate on their presence or think about their words to you that felt like just a warm hug and all of those things that create a sense of safety, how can we then replicate that? And it can be, I think people think, you know, when we're

thinking about something like meditating on someone that brought us safety, it can almost feel like, is that really going to work? But in reality, people, when they connect to their source of safety in a very profound way, they're able to remember safety does exist within me. I just have to find it and replicate it time and again. And when they're in that space where they're like, I remember that. I remember that warm hug. I remember that in her arms, I felt like no one was going to hurt me. They can then, it's almost kind of like a reparenting process. They can then come into their adult selves and give themselves more of that. Reflect those words to themselves, maybe in the mirror, like say the exact words that were said as you were a child. Perhaps it's about providing yourself even with a hug, right? And just remembering what the hug felt like as a child that came from a source of safety. So it's replicating the experience of

safety time and again so that your nervous system can start defaulting to safety rather than defaulting to survival mode. And that is the most critical piece in any trauma-based work. It's working on the body, working on regulating the nervous system, working on expanding the nervous system's capacity to tolerate stress. And then a lot of the other things that are more heady, like understanding what your partner is saying, really translating that into words of love and like all of those things that are more like in the mind, we can internalize those things better because we have now a capacity to sit with it in a way that's different, in a way that is framed around safety. How many people do you think are actually operating on survival mode

just going about their day? A lot. So I believe the latest statistics that I saw, and I think statistics are, you know, they provide us some information, but not all. But it was like something like 68% of individuals will undergo a fairly traumatic experience in their lifetime. And so if we're talking about that amount of people. That's a lot of people. If you think about the number of people that inhabit Earth, it's a lot of people walking around trying to survive

and employing a survival mode in order to get by each and every day of their lives. So it's a lot of people. Yeah, it's quite a terrifying thought in a way that that becomes the sort of normal baseline of how we go about our lives. It is. And coming to your initial point about the perhaps overuse of trauma, trauma response and triggers, the way that I see it, I actually am really elated that this language is coming to the fore and that people are so willing to integrate that language into their lives because it opens up opportunity for us to have more healing and

less of the survival mode. And even if we think about it from a generational perspective, because we're in this generation trying to undo a lot of those trauma responses, there's a very likely chance that that 68% could be very different in the next generation, because we're doing the work now to actually undo a lot of that heavy experience of trauma in our generation can we talk about that of the generational trauma or the intergenerational trauma of how because you know i listened to a podcast that you'd done about how if a parent experiences something even when we're in the womb let's say from the moment of conception even we are already genetically getting that and it was a really fascinating piece on the sort of nurture and nature and I think we you know whilst the vocabulary and everything is here now I think

that understanding of that piece and that that can be passed down. So would it be valid to say that if you had, if your parent or something suffered from neglect, whatever, that you actually may have that in your body, even if it wasn't your experience? Absolutely. So what we're getting into is an epigenetic transmission of trauma, which is part of the intergenerational trauma experience. So part of it is some of that biological experience and a part of it is what I call like the psychological or psychosocial experience, which is everything that you experience after you're born. From the biological perspective, when a parent is in trauma, especially chronic trauma or ongoing trauma, their bodies start to register. I am in a traumatized body. And because my body is in trauma, it is constantly in survival mode. And a lot is happening in that body.

There are a lot of hormones that are being filtered through the body on an ongoing basis. There are a lot of ways in which vital organs and even the brain and nervous system are constantly operating to keep this person alive. And so all of that is being registered in almost a genetic sense. So epigenetics are basically the ways in which our genes either turn on or off in reference to our environment, to our social environment. So our genes are saying, I need to be in survival mode. I need to protect myself. I need to be in survival mode. I need to protect myself. color of our eyes or hair or skin color or texture of, you know, our hair, anything that is the phenotype or the, the, the things that get handed down the board, we know like, oh, that's

such and such as daughter, right? Like you can tell, right? Like also such and such as daughter inherited 98% of genetic material that has nothing to do with the way that she looks. It has to do with a lot of other variables, including these transmissions of how we internalize stress. What I call that is an emotional vulnerability to stress, meaning that if a parent was in a traumatized body, they then transmit an emotional vulnerability to stress to their child. And that child then enters the world with that emotional vulnerability and whatever they then experience in their own lifetime, then kicks up trauma responses or has the capacity to do so. Like let's say they get bullied in school or maybe even they get yelled

at a lot by this parent or they get aggressed upon by this parent, right? Like they get physically injured by them. All of these things are able to cause trauma to an already emotionally vulnerable child. And so the cycle of trauma continues thereafter. And what does one do to begin healing that? Because these traumas also have that biological component, a lot of how we have to heal has to be also in the body. So I take on a holistic approach to healing intergenerational trauma, meaning that I work with folks in the mind, body, and spirit realm. And what I mean by that is that, so in the mind, we work on understanding the different layers of trauma that have occurred in their family of origin. Within the body, we work a lot on the nervous system, but also on really helping that person to feel like there is a sense of safety inside of their bodies, because very often

people are born into bodies that feel unsafe, given that they have that vulnerability. And then in the spirit realm or dimension, how I conceptualize that is a disconnection to ourselves, to others, or to a higher power. So it would be important to help a person understand how they can ground themselves, how they can feel connected to other individuals, how they can reintegrate into their community in a healthy way, how they can have healthy relationships with their significant others, how they can have healthy relationships with family members, even family members that perhaps have undergone similar traumas because they themselves were in intergenerational bodies of trauma. And so a lot of the work has to be in all of those three dimensions. It's the prototypical psychotherapy, mind-based processing and practices that we tend to know is therapy, but it is also the somatics, which is the body. It is also the spirit-based practices, which help ground a person and bring them back into healthy relationships with others. So it's all of those things. In terms of the somatics, what are some of the practices that people can

do? Because I know I had an interview with someone on the podcast and it was really fascinating. She sort of explained how animals when they go through something traumatic they they shake and they actually just move out and apparently human beings do do that until it's kind of socialized out of them yeah and I I loved that because I was like we do store so much in our body and I think we all know when we feel activated it's like the whole nervous system is is suddenly going to this kind of shake mode. So what are the particular things that you practice for kind of processing that somatically? Yes, I love that you framed it from the perspective of shaking, because one of the more gentle shakes that we tend to experience when we're younger is that of rocking.

We either rock ourselves or we get rocked. And rocking, when you present it to an adult in this world right now, they say, I'm not going to rock. I'm not a baby. And they become so disconnected from the mechanism of rocking as a regulatory tool for their nervous system to feel greater ease. If we think back to the moments, if any of us were rocked to sleep when we could completely surrender and dive into the immersive world of dreaming. We can even dive into darkness by way of closing our eyes and not feel pervasive fear. eyes and not feel pervasive fear. When we can actually replicate that experience in our adult lives, it offers us an opportunity to reintegrate that very natural bodily expression of regulation back into ourselves, the ones that we lost, as you mentioned. So a lot of the work that I do does have rocking at the center. And I've found myself, even as I'm in spaces where I'm with

fellow clinicians, that I tend to be maybe one of very few people that integrate rocking into somatics, into body-based practices. Whenever I do breath work with people, I do breath work with rocking. I also do breath work with humming. So humming also activates the, what we call the relaxation or rest and restoration process inside of the nervous system that helps the nervous system to then feel greater ease and be less in survival mode. And that process can be ignited in a very profound way when we hum. So sometimes some of my recommendation to clients would be to actually hum a song in the morning because that's already five minutes of humming that they can integrate into their day, where they can actually activate the rest and restoration process inside of their nervous system. And they can enter their day in a more relaxed state than

they would have otherwise. So rocking, humming, and breath work are like my three go-tos every single day. And my three go-tos whenever I work with folks, I always recommend, let's start here, especially because they're fully accessible to most of us. Many of us have the capacity to do all three things, even in between a meeting, we can take five minutes and actually do a practice that involves rocking or humming or some deep breathing and it allows us to reset our day and reset our nervous system in that very moment because that actually ties in beautifully because i was going to ask you as a final question what would your advice be for people that go to work in a highly stressful environment so you know they might and they're there for the majority of the day and it's super high pressure and it just takes them up

again to that level but I guess you've just kind of answered it by that's like a beautiful practice if they can find those five or ten minutes just to kind of bring themselves back down. Yes. And typically people have to take some sort of a break, right? Because I think that what people believe that they have to do is that they have to carve out this exuberant amount of time to actually regulate. And they really don't. People have to typically eat, right? They have to use the restroom. Some people have to drive. Some people have to take a public transport. In any of these situations, you can deep breathe. In any of the situations you can rock, you can rock at your desk. You can hum the song that's playing on the radio while you're driving rather than singing the song. And you're already engaging in the practice of a nervous system restoration that's baked into your day.

And you don't have to feel like that's the thing that you have to check off the to-do list, but that instead is already a part of your day just naturally. Amazing. I love that. Thank you. Dr. Mariel, before we let you go, is there anything else you'd like to add for our listeners? And also it would be great if you could tell them where they can find you. Yes, absolutely. So a lot of the more intergenerational trauma healing practices that are holistically based will be reflected in my upcoming book, Break the Cycle, which is a healing guide for intergenerational trauma. And that will be out on pre-order in April and it will be out into the world in January. in April and it will be out into the world in January. And so I'm excited for people to get into a deeper dive of their healing through that body of work, which is very exciting to introduce to the world. And they can find me at drmaryelbouquet.com. And also I love your Instagram. I love your little tea sessions.

It's just like that dose where I'm like, she's just dropped her bomb and just disappeared off. A gentle bomb. A gentle, I mean, I do, when you had an interview and someone was saying how, you know, you've got just such a calming presence and voice and you really do. So it's a real pleasure to talk to you. And thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me again. If you enjoyed this episode and want to find out more from Dr. Marielle, you can find her on social media at Dr. Marielle Bouquet that's m-a-r-i-e-l and bouquet is spelled b-u-q-u-e. Thank you so much for listening I hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it useful if you did I would love it if you could share it with a friend

because this show has grown organically through word of mouth and I am so proud of you guys in the community that we have built here so thank you so much for all your support and remember as always you are not alone goodbye