Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 276: Are We All Traumatized? | Dr. Pat Ogden

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

It’s a human urge to return to normalcy after a cataclysmic event. But if we rush back to normalcy without taking a beat, without metabolizing what we’ve all been going through, that can create profound psychological issues. Dr. Pat Ogden is an expert in trauma and a pioneer in what’s called “somatic psychology” (which I will let her explain). In this interview we talk about whether we’re all traumatized by what we’ve been through in recent months; the impact of trauma on the brain and body; how to handle and heal from our trauma; and we also branch out into her fascinating views on productivity. There’s a lot here. Where to find Pat Ogden online: Website: https://sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org/ Book Mentioned: Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy by Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton, Clare Pain - https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Body-Sensorimotor-Psychotherapy-Interpersonal/dp/0393704572 We care deeply about supporting you in your meditation practice, and feel that providing you with high quality teachers is one of the best ways to do that. Customers of the Ten Percent Happier app say they stick around specifically for the range of teachers, and the deep wisdom they impart, to help them deepen their practice. For anyone new to the app, we've got a special discount just for you. If you're an existing subscriber, we thank you for your support. To claim your discount, visit tenpercent.com/august Other Resources Mentioned: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo - https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414 Kimberlé Crenshaw - https://aapf.org/kimberle-crenshaw Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome - https://www.joydegruy.com/post-traumatic-slave-syndrome Dr. Mark Epstein - http://markepsteinmd.com/ The Theory of Structural Dissociation - https://did-research.org/origin/structural_dissociation/ Naropa University - https://www.naropa.edu/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/pat-ogden-276 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast, Dan Harris. Before we get to the episode, we care really deeply about supporting you in your meditation practice and feel that providing you with high quality teachers is one of the best ways to do that. Customers of the 10% happier app say they stick around specifically for the range of teachers and the deep wisdom these teachers have to impart. For anybody new to the app, we've got a special discount for you.

And if you're an existing subscriber, we thank you for your support. So to go claim your discount, visit 10% dot com slash August. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash August. Hey guys, it is a human urge to return to normalcy after a cataclysmic event. But if we rush back to normal without taking a beat, without metabolizing what we've been through, that can create profound psychological issues. Dr. Pat Ogden is an expert in trauma and a pioneer in what's called somatic psychology. I'll let her explain what that means. In this interview, we talk about whether we've all been traumatized by what we've been through in recent months.

We talk about the impact of trauma on the brain and the body and how to handle and heal from our trauma. We also branch out into her fascinating views on productivity. So there's a lot here. So here we go, Dr. Pat Ogden. Nice to see you again. I just wanna point out to our listeners

that you're very graciously agreed to do this interview twice because the first time we recorded it was right before the Black Lives Matter protests really, really pierced the national consciousness and we wanted to make sure that we did an episode that included the awareness of what's been happening. So thanks for agreeing to come back on. Even though it will be the first time listeners have heard from you. Pleasure to be here. Let's start with hopefully useful definition, because trauma is a word that gets used quite a bit. But I'm not sure that I could actually define it. So how do you define trauma?

I define trauma in terms of the response in the body, in the physiology. Often trauma is defined by the event and granted, some events will be traumatizing for everybody. Like a rape, racialized violence, these are traumatizing for everybody, like a rape, racialized violence. These are traumatizing, police brutality, etc., etc. However, we all have our own ways of responding to these traumas. When we're threatened, trauma is perceived, threat to one's safety or one's life. And that will stimulate our nervous system of rousal.

So our rousal might shoot up very high rousal where muscles get tense or hurts that's bleeding faster. And that's to mobilize instinctive responses like fight or flight or cry for help. Like babies will scream and cry for somebody to help them. If that doesn't work, our high arousal will plummet to a very low arousal where we'll shut down. And people are familiar with this because it's talked about in the animal kingdom as feynd death, like possums feynd death, but that's an instinct of

response that we often have. So in light of the events that are happening currently with both the pandemic and the racialized trauma that were either directly involved with overseeing this on the news, we're hearing about it constantly. We have different responses to these traumas in our bodies. Those of us who have a history of trauma that's unresolved are much more likely to experience these events in a much stronger way. Because when our past trauma's unresolved, that extreme high arousal or extreme low arousal, doesn't get a chance to recalibrate and kind of settle into an optimal arousal sound.

It's often called the window of tolerance, where we can tolerate all the stimuli that were bombarded with without extremes of arousal. So it's hard sometimes for people to understand, and I had to learn this myself, that everybody responds to trauma differently. And some of us are traumatized by what's happening. Others of us feel it intensely, but we're able to bring our arousal within that window of tolerance. Okay, so I think now actually this is really helping me understand it. So trauma is something

that's, it's an event that activates our, this sort of reptilian folds of the brain, the amygdala, the fight or flight response. And you can experience trauma without being traumatized. That is correct. When you are traumatized, you're never fully recovering from the traumatic event and it's living on in your body. Yeah. Subconsciously often. That's correct. Yeah. And so, you know, some of the things that are really

challenging about this in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent killings of I might obribe, run a tailor and all the others, is that for BIPOC, Black Indigenous people of color, the trauma continues. It's ongoing. It's a white person, it doesn't continue for me. I don't have to worry about walking down the street and being stopped or brutalized by the police. For example, that's a really obvious example. I don't have to fear for my white children. So for BIPOC, it's never ending. And I think that's something that is really challenging to work with.

When we have an ongoing situation of systemic oppression where people are continually retraumatized. I want to dive pretty deeply into the impact of trauma on marginalized communities, because I know you're working intensively on this and writing a lot about it. But let's just stay on writing a lot about it. But let's just stay on a sort of general level for a second. Can you talk about how trauma operates in the brain? In the brain? Yes. And in the body. Okay. Yeah, because, I mean, the way I think of it is that, you know, we have this cortex that's our thinking brain and we can think things through, we can decide how

to act. But when trauma happens, that thinking brain shuts down. And it's in the service of survival. It shuts down so that our instincts can take over and react immediately to save our lives, to protect our safety. So in terms of the brain, that's a really adaptive function. And how that affects the body is that when the trauma is unresolved, our bodies are still prepared to respond to the trauma. So it might be harder to think clearly, especially when we're faced with repeated triggers,

because our brains and bodies were still prepared. You know, there's that old saying, it's better to mistake a stick for a snake, than a snake for a stick. So we're wired for survival and to interpret things immediately as threatening if we've had past experience with those threats. And that our brains and bodies are primed to react in that way. So when the amygdala fires,

you know, when the fear centers fire, when we're threatened, our instincts take over and our executive brain shuts down. And it's only after that even that we feel afraid, even the emotion, it this useful distinction between trauma, which can be an objective event and being traumatized, which is not metabolizing the event in a way that lets you get back to, quote unquote, normal. What's happening for us when we're living with trauma and it's continuously dogging us? Well, again, it depends. Oh, sorry, one second.

My son is bombing the Zoom, yes. Oh. You just want to see if you can come in here and talk to me No cats are in here. No, yeah, you should put some pants on by the way Okay, can you can you close the door for me? No that door that door that one when you leave Love you put some pants on okay He's five and he only comes in I'm telling you he only comes into this room my office When I'm doing a podcast he has like a sixth sense

He wants your undivided attention And he's wearing a great ensemble of sweatshirt and nothing else. It's so cute. It's pretty cute. Yes, it's pretty cute. So when we are traumatized, we have been unable, our brain has been unable to and metabolize the trauma. And so then we're kind of, it sounds to me if I'm here you correctly, kind of living out of whack, dysregulated, all the time or only when re-triggered. More when we're re-triggered. I mean, some people are in a chronic state of dysregulation. People with severe, severe histories of abuse, for example, from early childhood on. But most of us have triggers that will send our arousal to the extreme levels. And even when those triggers, they remind us of past threat. But they might not even have a relationship to current threat.

Like, you might tense when you see a police car or depending on your history, you might tense up and get frightened if you see a big dog, if you have a history of being hurt by dogs. Even when that dog is safe or when that policeman is kind and not acting on racial bias. Actually, since we're now in this area, I think it might be worth saying more about how trauma shows up. And we talked about this recently in a podcast I did with Resma Menacum who's written a lot about trauma for communities of color and for white people. But you've been looking, I know, at how trauma shows up

in marginalized communities. What more is worth saying on that, given what we've already discussed? Well, something that I've been thinking about more and more is about how trauma not only has to do with the oppressed, but also with the oppressors. So it's not just about the marginalized communities. It's also about the white people in our country

who have all the advantages. In a joy degree talks about this quite a bit. She wrote a book called Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She talks about the cognitive dissonance that oppressors form in order to justify treatment of people in order to maintain their own privilege or to exploit them. I mean, the worst case of that, of course, is slavery. And our history of slavery, we had 13 presidents who were slave owners and justified it by demeaning black people.

Like Thomas Jefferson's would say, well, black people don't need as much sleep. So that would justify working slaves from, you know, more in dawn to dusk, as they said. And that's cognitive dissonance, because that does not fit with human values. In those days, you know, our country was founded by Christians and Christian values, but the exploitation and the Holocaust with the American Indians, so we could have a land, and then of course our history of slavery. That lives not only in those marginalized communities, but the trauma of those decisions made by our ancestors and

the perpetration by them lives in us as well as white people. And I've been thinking of this phrase, you know, we either face it or erase it. And we've erased our history. I didn't learn anything about the way women or African Americans or the Native Americans were treated in my schooling. I learned about this great country that was founded on freedom and justice for all and the pursuit of happiness, never realizing as a child that that was only meant for quite wealthy men. So I think we carry that dissonance in ourselves. And I think there's guilt and shame associated with that transgenerational transmission of trauma to us as white people as well as to other groups. And I think that we're at a real turning point. There's a country

I think that we're at a real turning point. There's a country to find out if we can actually face this history and really live what our Constitution says. I think it's very easy to assume that it's marginalized people only who are traumatized, or marginalized people only who carry the trauma. But I don't believe that's true. There's a lot of research with veterans now that's coming up around moral injury, where veterans

had to perform acts that went against their moral code. And I think as a country and as a white member of society, we collectively perform acts that go against our moral code as well. I mean, right now, I see it in the 2000s of children joined from their parents at the border and held in horrible, horrible conditions. So as citizens in healing trauma, I think we have to face that as a nation. It's just not at all a matter of something that affects marginalized communities. I want to talk a lot about the healing part of this, but just to reflect back what you just said about the impact on white people in this culture. You talked about how there was this systematized

dehumanization of black people to justify slavery. And you can see that showing up today in the disproportionate amount of violence directed at black people by the police, even through the studies of the lowered likelihood of black people getting pain meds from doctors, including black doctors. Exactly. So, it's still with us today, but this, while obviously wretched and worse for black people,

is not leaving the whites unscathed, because, as I've heard it argued, white people in order to survive in this system have had to cut themselves off from their emotions in key ways, because if we didn't, it would be intolerable. Yes, I think that's true. And in some ways, I think it's even more than cutting ourselves off from our emotions. We find ways to justify it. You know, you hear these comments, well, just they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. That's impossible. It's like running a race where you're miles behind

the people who have the advantage. We hear these comments in the way we've weaponized threat. I mean, it's starting to change now because I think it's coming to consciousness that a white person can't just call the cops anymore, hopefully, and say this black person is threatening me and have the police automatically believe the white person. I think with the awareness that's coming now, it's starting to shift, but I mean in the coming now, it's starting to shift. But I mean, in the trauma field, it's well known with any kind of crisis or disaster. The attention is usually short-lived. And I think our job now is to keep the attention focused

on the truth of our history and remedying this, really dealing with it. We're going to talk about trauma on a more general level as it pertains to the pandemic. But since we're on the subject of race, which I think is a really fruitful and important subject, let's stay here for a second. So what can be done from your perspective as a trauma specialist to, I believe,

use the word face it and deal with it, both for white people and for communities of color, given the situation we wrote. What are the modalities for dealing with this effectively? Well, I think in some ways we have to come up with new ways of dealing with this, with that Audrey Lorde, who's a black, I don't know if she's not living anywhere, she's a black activist and writer, she said, you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. So I think that's very relevant. We need to come up with novel and innovative ways of dealing with this. And I think for white people,

the first thing is to educate ourselves, to look at our history squarely, looking for the truth, and not to ask questions like, am I racist? But to start to ask questions like, and what ways am I racist? Because we are steeped in this white supremacy ideology, our country steeped in it. Actually, most of the world is steeped in it. So it's got to affect us implicitly, even really good progressive people, Robin D'Angelo, who wrote white fragility, which is a great book to read, a long-word joy degrees,

post-traumatic slave syndrome, those are two, they're not new books, but they're super relevant. She says that the first step was acknowledging that we are racist and challenge it, like challenge it, like start to notice the ways in which you are, start to notice in ways the ways that you just accept your privilege without thinking that others don't have it. So I think that's a really big element is the education. I mean, I feel like I can speak much better for white people because I'm a white person. And the things that I feel that I need to do, I feel like as a white person, I need to contribute.

I need to contribute to the Black Lives Matter movement. I need to contribute to reparation, even though that's not really something our country supports yet, because many ways to contribute. Like we gave the Japanese people that we interned in World War II. They got financial reparation for that. That was four years of internment. What about the hundreds of years of slavery and the legacy of that? How can we bring BIPOC up to the economic wealth that we share as white people? For example, these are questions that I ask myself.

I think it's important to engage in conversations to join groups on White privilege, to start interacting with mixed groups and start asking questions and listening and really hearing the responses. And to start to notice the racialized depiction in the news, I was struck by, this is still a while ago, but it goes on, like pictures from Hurricane Katrina, where there was a white person that had groceries and they were depicted as having gotten them at a store. There was a picture

of a black person with groceries and they were depicted as looting. These stereotypes are so pervasive. Yeah, my colleague at ABC News, Steve Lois and Somie, is one of the correspondents he did a piece for Nightline, along with my friend, Jasmine, who produced it. I think it was last year. And the story was about the fact that when young white women go missing, it becomes national news when young black women go missing, it becomes national news when young black women go missing, nobody talks about it.

That's right. They talked about case after case after case. That's right. It's quite compelling. I want to make a comment and then ask a question. The comment is just about, for some people, the invocation that you just did of Robin D'Angelo's work might be slightly triggering. I have not read the book, but there is quite a bit of controversy

around that book right now, so I don't have a point of view. I just want to point out that there is, I think, thoughtful controversy around that book, and so I just want to say that. The question is, all those things you listed in terms of why people dealing with the history of racism in this country,

does that mean that to do with your work as a trauma specialist or is that just sort of basic sort of mental hygiene, good citizenship for white people right now? Well, I think it's both. I think as a therapist, it's definitely part of my job to understand racialized trauma, no matter what my clientele population is, no matter if I want to be as spokesperson for social justice and for remitting the systemic oppression in our society, I feel like I need to live it, not just apply it if I have a black client or a Native American client or

an LGBTQ client. It has to be a part of the fabric of my life. So it's very much an element of my practice. And I think to confront racism, wherever we see it, is even with our clients, is really important. Like a colleague of mine was talked to me recently, this is in my new book, actually this example, about a white Iraq veteran who had committed some crimes

and was imprisoned, and he was with many black inmates. And he was talking about the black inmates and very, very, very, very derogatory terms. And we talked about how she could challenge that in a way that would not shame him for it, because he's got this systemic white supremacy attitude that is so much a part of our culture, but to help him to address it. And I think the thing that I have found most helpful is just to talk about my own experience,

to talk about how I learned about race, how I learned about Native Americans, how I didn't see color. And it's very interesting because I marched in the civil rights movements in the 60s and 70s. And at that time, we were at a different stage of development, and I worked in all black communities, and I taught at a first integrated school with white and black kids. And the message that we got was, don't see color, treat everybody equally, don't see color, because at that stage of development, all those years ago,

we didn't realize we were going from, you know, Jim Crow and segregation and all of that to don't see color, everybody's equal. And now we have made some progress. And that now we are acknowledging that the IPOC people have a different experience. And we do see color, and it's really important to see those differences. You brought up shame, which I think is useful. Not shame is not useful, bringing up the subject is useful. Shame, at least for me, as I experience shame,

feels like trauma. And that seems like a not so helpful cul-de-sac when it comes toward examining whiteness, white supremacy, racism, etc., etc., when you're a white person. So it's delicate work to get people who look like us to take a look at their own biases, etc., etc., without throwing people into an amygdala hijack. I think that's right. And I think talking about race is going to be triggering and people are going to go into these hijack.

But also the shame is why we've stayed away from it. Like, yeah, I was taught to be so proud of my country growing up post-World War II. Like, our country was the best and the richest, not realizing that the other rich because we had slaves and we have all this wealth because we stole land. who like our country was the best and the richest, not realizing that the other rich, because we had slaves and we have all this wealth because we stole land.

And I think facing the shame, the implicit shame will keep us from facing that. I think once we face it together and don't try to blame one another for it, because we're all learning together. And I think if we can have pride in our country's history, it's how we deal with this now and how we can face the truth of the history and remedy it. But I agree with you that shaming and blaming and race conversations does more harm than

good. But see, Dan, once we accept that we grew up in a racialized country with systemic oppression, once we accept that that's the truth, that that's normal, of course we have racial biases. Of course we do. I mean, just think of when you were little and you learned about race, just think of the examples on TV, think of how race was portrayed in the news media. Of course we have biases, we can't help it. And our brains are wired to categorize and we learned these categorizations very, very, very young. And once we accept that it's inevitable, I think it makes it a lot easier

to talk about. It's not just race, it's also anti-female too. Right. Yes. I think this is a refrain we keep coming back to on the show. The experts who come on the show keep coming back to this notion. And I think it is unbelievably useful to point out that you have racist thoughts, not because you're a racist, but because you're a human. And it was wired into us from an evolutionary standpoint to have these biases. And we have been swimming in this water

where messages have been sent to us. And of course those thoughts will come up as a consequence. Once you depersonalize it in that way, it becomes workable, tractable. I agree. I agree. Although I would, I probably would challenge that and I do feel like we live in a racist country. So I would say, yes, we are racist and we have to address that, but it doesn't mean that we're bad. I mean, we couldn't help it because that's, there's that saying the fish of the last to discover water.

You know, the waters we swim in, like you said, they have a racist context. And I think when right now we're in the process of discovering the water as a country, I hope. Yeah, I agree. I'm just so you said you would challenge that. What were you? I would know was there a disagreement between me and you because I didn't hear one. I would just challenge. I think you said maybe I misunderstood that it's not that we're racists that we just have bias. I think we are rac racist because of our conditioning. Oh, I don't think that's what I said, but if it is what I said, then...

I'm a story, probably. Well, no, it's possible that I misspoke. What I meant, I'll tell you what I meant, was that you're not a bad person because you've racist, though. That's right. You're just a human person. That is, I think that is absolutely accurate.

And I think once we can acknowledge that, then the conversations are easier. And we can't, I mean, this is one of the things that I found useful about the book on white fragility, was how as white people, we immediately go to shame and guilt. And we get defensive, or we get angry, or we collapse, and tears, and how we can't stay with the truth of it, because we take it so personally,

and we take it as a personal insult. So I think what you're saying, because we're human and we were steeped in this, we can't help it, but we can challenge it. Right, yes. It doesn't mean pointing out to a white person that you're not a bad person because you have racist thoughts, does not let you off the hook.

Doesn't mean you should just succumb to it and act them out? It means that you can then do the work. So, amen. Yeah. We've zoomed in on trauma as it pertains to race. I'm tempted to zoom out to trauma writ large unless you feel like there are more things you want to say on race. Well, I think I would want to say on race?

Well, I think I would want to just say, but this is for trauma at large too. So maybe it's a good segue. Like, I know you practice mindfulness and mindfulness is very important in my work as well. And I think remitting all of this starts with mindfulness. It starts with mindful awareness of when we're triggered, when we have racist thoughts, when our arousal starts to go out of that window of tolerance. If we can be aware of it, then we're not identifying with it and we can examine it. So for me, that mindful awareness is essential for the healing of everything. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Pat, I didn't write after this. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions.

What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, your honor, and what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like what is the meaning of life, I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes

more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. You mentioned the window of tolerance earlier in the episode, but it might be worth you saying a little bit more about what the window of tolerance is and then us re-envoking

mindfulness in terms of how we can use mindfulness to tell whether we're out of the window. Yeah. Well, I think Dan Siegel coined that term window of tolerance in 1999 in his book The Developing Mind. I had before that and working with trauma, I had drawn a graph with two parallel lines like this. And I called the area of your arousal between those lines kind of an optimal arousal zone. And if you're within that window, you can think clearly, you can respond thoughtfully, rather than reactively, you can respond adaptively rather than impulsively. But when we're triggered,

whether we're being challenged by, that we're racist or whether we're being threatened by police or whomever, or whether we're threatened by the pandemic, our arousal starts to exceed that window. And we either go up into hyper arousal and heart rate beating fast and anxiety and panic and oil drop down to collapse and immobility and feeling like you just can't do anything. And those two extremes of arousal, we can't think of respond thoughtfully because our brains aren't thinking, you know, not thinking that clearly. So, if we're not

aware, like, you know, arousal starts to go up and if we can be mindful and be aware of those signals, we can do something to regulate it more quickly. For me, because trauma is so body, it affects your body first and foremost, right? That for me is a body, psychotherapist, physical action. Like if I feel my brows are going up, therapist, physical action. Like if I feel my arousal going up, I can place my hands on my chest. And that often calms me. Or if I feel myself collapsing, I can lengthen my spine. I can do things with my body. I can contain myself with a self hug. I can feel my feet on the ground to be grounded so my rousals not all extreme. But the mindfulness comes in, if you don't notice that your arousal is going up, you can't regulate it. And then when it gets to a certain point, it's much harder to regulate. And then because your arousal is up, you're perceiving things as threatening or unsafe, because your arousal is going up.

So this sounds like the application of mindfulness, self-awareness, to when you've gone in and out of the window of tolerance, that just sounds to me, thus far at least, to the untrained ear, me, like the basic application of mindfulness to powerful emotions that we've talked about on the show many times. But I want you to correct me where I've inevitably gone wrong here, and also to help me clarify. So if I'm in a traumatic situation, I'm being assaulted, I've been a car crash, I'm covering a war and somebody shooting at me, I just got a note saying I have COVID, whatever.

Can we regulate in those emergencies, is regulation even on the menu? I would say that it's even more important in those emergencies. And the reason is this, there are powerful emotions of anger and grief and sadness, etc. of really powerful emotions that show we can be mindful of. But the emotions connected with trauma are designed to mobilize these instinctive defenses. Think of the rage that a person might feel, say a black person, might feel rage being stopped by the police for no reason. And it is essential to regulate them because not your subcortical brain will

take over. And you could be in danger. You could be in danger. You could lose your life, as we've seen. Those are called in my field, they're called vehement emotions that really are based in the body and they need to be grounded and contained in not going to get any mileage out of expressing them because it will just escalate your feeling of thought. So in those emergency situations, if you want to think clearly, it's critical that you regulate yourself. I tell this to my nephews and nieces, we talk about this all the time, we have a black to learn these skills so you

don't react. It sounds simple in some way. I'm not saying it's easy, but simple in some way to, it's not complex to put your hand on your heart. I noticed you didn't mention taking a deep breath because breathing is, I mean, taking a deep breath, there's a lot of evidence that it can calm one down, but of course, the breath is implicated in both COVID and George Floyd.

So the breath is a loaded proposition at this moment. But these simple, and again, I'm not using that in the pejorative, but simple techniques of putting your hand on your heart, taking a deep breath, giving yourself a hug, grounding yourself in the sensations of your body as opposed to the stories of your mind. These really can work.

They really can work, but you're right. They're simple, but they're not easy. They're not easy for different reasons. Every person has to find what works for them. It's not a one-size-fits-all. And when you mention the breath, for example, if you're a traumatized person with a super tight diaphragm, trying to take a deep breath is just frustrating.

Or if you're a traumatized person who's in your past trauma, you went to that collapsed no energy state, trying to take a deep breath or taking deep breaths, constimulate that fey and death response rather than be nourishing and calming. So you've got to find the action that suits your body. The reason it works is because trauma, first and foremost, affects the body. And thinking your way out of it is just not as efficient. But in terms of the thoughts, this is also where mindfulness comes in. For it to work, you've got to let the thoughts go. And you've got to refocus all your mindful attention on whatever your body, your somatic resource is, with its hands on the heart,

hugging yourself, lengthening your spine, taking a breath, feeling your legs, pressing your feet into the fore, whatever works for you, you've got to focus your attention on that. Because see, if I place my hands on my heart, but I'm still thinking, I'm not safe, I'm not safe, this guy's after me, you know, it's not going to, so I have to let that thought go, focus on my hands on my heart, feel the touch, and let that semantic resource affect my nervous system. I taught at Naropa a Buddhist college for 25 maybe more years and we talked often about disciplining the mind I'm sure you've probably heard that expression that we want to discipline our minds to focus on what is going to help us at that time

so we're now living in, to put it mildly, to mulchewest times. We've got several mutually reinforcing dumpster fires going on with a pandemic, economic deep freeze, racial justice protests over manifestly awful racial injustice. We've got an election coming up on top of all that here in the United States. So it's a stressful time. Is there such a thing as a collective trauma and are we in one right now and then follow one question to that? If that's true, if this is a collective trauma, will some percentage of us be traumatized? I would say the answer to both of those questions are yes.

We are in a collective trauma that goes beyond the United States because of the pandemic. And some of us will be traumatized. These traumas, all that you mentioned, they're not isolated. I don't think of them as isolated because the pandemic, as we know, is affecting low socioeconomic groups, people of color, let's next much more strongly. I think what, there are three times is more likely to get COVID and twice is more likely to die. I think it's unparable with numbers,

but I think those are those statistics. So they're not isolated from each other. And as always, whenever there's a pandemic or a crisis like this, it's the marginalized communities who are much more strongly impacted. And the other element of this, I think, that we're faced with is that we to deal with this demands that we work together. And we have so much divisiveness right now in our country and to some degree in the

world, but especially in our country, there's so much divisiveness that it feels like we're not working together. I mean, some people say, oh, it's up to you if you want to wear a mask or not. Others are saying, we're a mask. It's not for yourself, you know, everybody else. So with that kind of lack of a strong leadership, we don't feel that it's handled. And it's not here in our country. And this was with any trauma, like if a child has a trauma, if they're raped by the neighbor or whatever,

they need their caregivers to hold them, keep them safe, get them the treatment, reassure them in that we'll really mitigate the PTSD. And we need that right now from the powers that be and we're not getting it, we're getting the opposite. And that's profoundly affecting us as a country, I feel. Most of us have very little power, if any, to impact what the powers that be are doing right now.

What can we do to protect ourselves and our loved ones from being traumatized? Obviously, this is a trauma that seems non-negotiable. Everybody's impacted some of us more than others, but nobody gets out of it with no impact, I don't think. Given that, I think we both seem to agree that it is a trauma. What can we do to protect ourselves from being traumatized?

There's a lot of different answers to that. When we're traumatized, it's when our arousal stays outside of the window at those extremes for long periods of time and doesn't come back in. So I would say for our kids and each other, we can support each other in regulation. I mean, even with children, to make sure you've got a bouncy ball or something they can bounce on that they can have activity because that can be really regulating, you know, just to be sensitive to that a ralasol shouldn't stay outside of that window for too long, do something. it has a lot to do with the body, but it also has to do with reaching out, making connection, talking with others so long as the talk doesn't escalate. I mean many of us are so worried. We talk to our friends who are also worried and we just get more activated. If we can focus on, okay, we've talked about it, what can we do for ourselves? Let's have some chamomile tea over Zoom and pay attention to, you know, our friendship or whatever. Music art, all the things that are usually regulating. And then

the other thing, you said, yeah, there's not much impact. Most of us feel we don't have much impact. But any action we can take mitigates the effect of trauma, any action. This is kind of standard in the trauma field that if you can take any action in your behalf, it can be simple. Like I have a Black Lives Matter sign in my art. That's a simple action that does something, giving to underserved communities, volunteering, you know, taking some action, I think the young people responsibly, well, not just young people, but the people who are protesting responsibly, that's action. So action will mitigate the effects of the threat. So I think take action now.

Yes, so I mean, I hear a lot of really actionable advice in there from the empowering stance of generosity to the incredibly healing power of social connection, to motion, given that emotion shows up in our body and trauma in particular, which is the fight or flight system, which is sub-cortical. In other words, it's often out of our awareness and therefore showing up in our body in all sorts of stressful ways. So there's a lot right there. I worry that one thing that may be happening for some people right now is, and I'm going to use a phrase now from my friend Dr. Mark Epstein

who's a psychiatrist in New York City. Although I don't think he's in the city anymore, but he's a psychiatrist and author in New York who writes about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. And he uses this phrase, the rush to normal. And I wonder as we struggle to reopen now in the United States, whether there's some sort of psychological corollary for us as individuals where we just want to get back to some semblance of normal so quickly that we're not tending the wounds.

Right. Exactly. There is a whole theory in the trauma field. It's called the theory of structural dissociation where an individual trauma, after we've had trauma, like we get back from combat or we've suffered abuse or whatever. There's a part of us that just wants to get on with normal life. It's actually, let's get on with normal life, but then does the other part that's still holding the trauma Even when it's over and in this case in both the major traumas that we're experiencing the pandemic and the The racialized trauma. It's not even over

So there is an impulse to get back to normal. My hope is is that we will normal. My hope is is that we will look at all of this as an opportunity for a new normal, where we really do take care to support all of us. Getting back to normal for many is going to parties and then infecting other people, for example. So I mean, I think we're caught upon right now to develop much more of a social conscience, both with race and with the pandemic. It's not just about us as individuals, but we are so steeped in an individualistic culture, you see, as opposed to a collectivist culture, where in a collectivist culture, the needs of the group are paramount, which is one of the reasons that Vietnam didn't have the huge crisis with this pandemic. Pandemic is a much more of a collectivist culture. Our individualist culture is

to advance our own status and our own self rather than the collective and we're steeped in that too. And that individualist orientation right now is causing a lot of destruction on both those traumas. Johan Hari, who's an author who's been on the show a year or so ago, he's written a lot about depression and he acknowledges that depression can be hereditary and situational, but a lot of it he thinks is chalked up to, he chalks it up to what he calls junk values. So we have junk food, there's also junk values, which he says is this myth of individualism, which is leaving us cut off from people around us, and that's what makes us depressed.

I think I'm reproducing his thesis faithfully, go on if I fail, I apologize. But it also seems to me that it's tied up a lot in sort of a warped sense of masculinity, which venerates individualism and freedom and you know, I'm the cowboy, I'm the marble man, I'm gonna devote myself to death, whatever you tell me to do. And I'm not going to wear a mask. And so that's where I go with

everything you just said. I don't know if does any of that make sense to you? Well, I think it does, especially in terms of our country, there's an expression about that. We're a country of strong individuals, you know, and that individual, we can do what we want here. And all there is, that is a value of our country, isn't it? Rugged individualism.

Rugged individualism, that's what I was trying to think of. Yeah, we're good individualism, right. Yeah, I mean, that part of that is at the root of the, the American Holocaust with the Native Americans and also of slavery, which is going for what would benefit us, not what would benefit all. And I think we're seeing that in the anti-mascus and the people who don't think that race is a problem. The corrective or uncorrective in my mind is just to go back to your, I think, very useful

argument about the dis-utility of shame. I think a better way to handle this rather than wagging our fingers is to point out that the individual being a rugged individual is actually a less happy life often, because when you're tuned in to the people around you and having harmonious positive relationships, that is there's a ton of evidence to suggest a happier, more useful way to exist. And so to me, that seems like trauma reduction par excellence. Absolutely. And then can we extend that even further beyond the people around us, to people of different socioeconomic status, people different colors, etc. Can we take responsibility

for each other? You know, It makes me think of it. In the 70s, I have worked as a counselor at the Women's Prison in National Tennessee. And there was a theorist in criminology who thought that criminals should be the responsibility of their community. They should not be shut away because they were created in context in the community.

And the community needs to take responsibility for them. I was something. It's interesting. 20 something. And I really saw the value of that. And I think that's happening now. We need to take responsibility for those around us

who are at risk or suffering, who are not experiencing the benefits that we have. Last question I want to ask you before I let you go is in my briefing packet that Samuel Johns is the producer of this show provided me before we did this interview, there was a bunch of stuff on here that made a total sense to me in terms of discussion around trauma. And then there was one thing that stuck out to me because I couldn't connect it to trauma, but it's very interesting, which is productivity. Oh, why do you talk about productivity? What does it have to do with anything else we've discussed today? Well, two ways. There was, there was all this stuff circulating

about the pandemic that if you are not productive now, you don't have an excuse anymore because you have all the time in the world, you're at home, so you should learn that language, you should write that book. And I thought what a capitalistic notion that is that we always have to be productive. What about just being and being with this, with our loved ones?

And not worrying about having to produce the next thing. That's one part and then the others. I mean, look at what productivity... I mean, it gave us all this wealth on the backs of slaves. On the backs of these people that we abused and tortured and killed and stolen land from and so is that where productivity is Gonna get us. I mean, I think there's more to life than productivity, right? I can tell you that I don't know if it rises to the level of trauma, but my inner Obsession with productivity certainly makes my life

to mulch us. Well, it has mine too. But I mean, I also think we're steeped in that. I mean, I was taught, you've got to be the best. You want to be at the top of your class. You want to get straight A's. I came home with straight A's. My mom said, why didn't you get a pluses? You know, So it's always, you can always do better, you can always do better,

you can always do better. But what about being? I think it's that when we just get consumed with doing, we lose that sense of being and we lose the depth of feeling that goes with beingness. And I think we do need to take action, but we also need to be able to feel what's happening and not push it away and deal with the cognitive dissonance and deal with the history of this nation. So when we're fixated on productivity, we decrease the odds that we can handle our own trauma effectively and

increase the odds that cutting ourselves off in this way will lead to the traumatization of others. Well, basically, I would say yes. I think when we're focused on productivity, other people are just getting to be in the way of our productivity. It's like, you know, somebody wants having a hard time, they really need our attention. Oh, but I got to finish this book, you know, maybe in a, maybe tomorrow. So other people become more objects than people.

And when we extend that to people who aren't like us, people who are of different backgrounds and so forth, I think that's part of why we've gotten to where we are now. Or we can shoe our panceless five-year-old out of the room as I did earlier without a second thought because I'm trying to be productive on my podcast. Yeah, but you did that so beautifully. But you obviously tenderness and care. Well, I feel tenderness toward you for being willing to do this podcast twice, I really, really appreciate it.

And the final thing, just to give you an opportunity to we semi-facitiously refer to this part of the show as the plug zone. Could you just plug any and all Things you've written where we can find you on the interwebs, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Well my school has a website since remotor.org My work is called sensory motor psychotherapy So you can google that and find lots of articles and things. I've written

three books, one trauma in the body, another one called sensory motor psychotherapy interventions for trauma and attachment. That one might be helpful for some listeners because that book has a whole series of worksheets in it. And it's a really big book. Don't be daunted by the book, because the worksheets can be really helpful for trauma. And for listeners, you can write to the school and get a PDF of the worksheets, because they're impossible to zerox from the book.

So if you're right to the school, they'll give you a PDF. The third book that's coming out is about sensory neuropsychotherapy and context, but we're really looking at the really white supremacist history of psychology and how to address that as therapists and with her clients. Dr. Pat Hugden, thank you very much, really appreciate it. Thank you, Dan. I've enjoyed it.

Thanks, Pat. We want to thank and support as well all the teachers who are making a monumental effort to educate our children during this pandemic, many of whom are coping with massive uncertainty as the school year begins. So for free access to the app and hundreds of meditations and resources you can visit 10% .com slash care if you're a teacher if you work in education that's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash care. Finally I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to put the show together Samuel Johns as our senior producer Marissa Schneiderman is our producer our sound designers Matt Blinton and Agnieszescik of ultraviolet audio Maria

Whartell is our production coordinator We get a lot of insight and guidance from TPH colleagues, such as Jen Poient, Natobi Ben Rubin, Liz Levin. And finally, as always, big thank you to my guys at ABC News, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen. We'll see you all on Wednesday with a freshie. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

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