The One You Feed - James Gordon on Healing Trauma

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Dr. James Gordon is an American author and psychiatrist known for mind-body medicine. Dr. Gordon is internationally recognized for using self-awareness, self-care, and group support to heal population-wide psychological trauma. He is the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine as well as the director of Mind Body Studies and clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School at Georgetown University. In this episode, he and Eric discuss his book, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma.Click here to schedule a free 30-minute intro coaching call with Eric to see if working 1-on-1 with him is a fit for you to help you build habits that ground and support you in these times of uncertainty. But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Dr. James Gordon and I Discuss Healing Trauma and…His book, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After TraumaThe two common and dangerous misconceptions about psychological traumaThat trauma comes to everyone sooner or laterHow everyone can access the path to healing after traumaPost Traumatic TransformationThe antidote to the fight or flight responseWays to experience your own ability to shift feelings of anxiety to calmThe best time to start healing traumaHow to heal population-wide psychological traumaHis wartime work of healing traumaMind-body medicineTechniques and expressive meditation for healing traumaThe role of drawing in dealing with traumaThe wise guide technique for accessing wisdom and healing traumaDr. James Gordon Links:The Center for Mind Body MedicineTwitterInstagramFacebookSkillshare is an online learning community that helps you get better on your creative journey. They have thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Get 2 FREE months of premium membership at www.skillshare.com/feed If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. James Gordon on Healing Trauma, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Judith BlackstoneDr. Jon MillsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

They can not only cover the balance that trauma has disrupted, the physiological and psychological balance, they can also become more whole and healthier than they've ever been. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series.

Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. James Gordon, an American author and psychiatrist known for mind-body medicine. James Gordon, an American author and psychiatrist known for mind-body medicine. In 1991, he founded and is the director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine. At the Georgetown Medical School and Georgetown University, he is the director of mind-body studies and clinical professor in the departments of psychiatry and family medicine. Today, Dr. Gordon and Eric discuss his book,

The Transformation, Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma. Hi, Jim. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Nice to be here with you. I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book called The Transformation, Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma. And it is a remarkably good book about trauma, and I found so much hope in it. So I'm really looking forward to discussing it with you. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.

He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. You know, I've thought about it as soon as I knew I was going to be on the show. And Tatiana shared it with me.

And I started thinking. And I thought, well, I've heard it before. I've heard it as a Native American parable. I don't know if that's where it came from. So that was one. Yeah. No one knows. is that my response is, I have to relax, be present, and understand that both wolves are there inside me, and that I need to acknowledge and respect them both. And as I develop that

meditative mind, because I recognize those wolves in me, as I have over the years developed a meditative mind, I don't feel so beset by the ones that have to do with greed and anger and fear. And I can just see it and kind of accept it, and I don't feel so threatened by it. And the other wolf feels easier to embrace. And it's kind of like, I want to have something in my hand so that that wolf can feed from my hand. So that's the image that comes to me. And it feels like after a while, there just isn't so much of a fight.

Ah, I love that idea. Not so much of a fight. So I want to start off by talking about trauma in general, and then I want to kind of move into your method for dealing with trauma. And you say that there are two common and dangerous misconceptions about psychological trauma. Can you walk us through what those are? Sure. The one is that trauma only comes to those other people. It comes to those people who've been in the middle of wars or those people who've had the most catastrophic kinds of abusive early childhood or some major dramatic events. So that's the first misconception. major dramatic events. So that's the first misconception. And what I say is that trauma comes to everyone sooner or later. If it doesn't come early in life because of poverty or violence

or childhood illness or abuse or neglect, it is likely to come as we move into young adulthood and midlife as we experience major disappointments, loss of love in a relationship. I know I had trauma there with a loss of it. And it really throws you into the state of chaos and distress or major disappointment in your idea of who you're meant to be. And it's just not working out. Or a parent becomes very ill or dies. Or midlife work you've been doing is no longer fulfilling. That is traumatic. What am I going to do with myself? Or you get a divorce. I have yet to encounter a divorce that wasn't traumatic. And if it doesn't come then, it's going to come if we're fortunate enough to grow old as we deal with physical frailty, the loss of people whom we love, and our own inevitable

death. So I think it's really important that we understand that trauma is a part of all our lives and that it doesn't serve us to think it's apart from us, just something those other people experience. So that's number one. And all of the religious and spiritual traditions that I know of understand this. This is a part of human wisdom that we've turned our back on thinking that somehow we're immune from it. And we're not. Trauma is part of life. Second misconception is that if we have been traumatized, that we're going to be permanently crippled by that trauma. And that we're going to have to be in some kind of intensive therapy for the rest of our lives.

It's simply not true. And in fact, I've been working with psychological trauma, my own and other people's for about 50 years, and working with whole populations that have been traumatized by war, climate-related disasters, climate-related disasters, the opioid epidemic, or historical trauma of Native people for 25 years now. And what I see is that people who can learn basic tools and techniques of self-awareness and self-care, the ones that I teach in the transformation, that they can not only cover the balance that trauma has disrupted, the physiological and psychological balance, they can also become more whole and healthier than they've ever been. That that possibility is there and that possibility is open to everyone. something that I began to see very early on when I was working with patients in hospital when I was a medical student and when a friend of mine, whom I write about in The Transformation, became

paraplegic after a car accident. Even though she remained paraplegic, she was able to deal with this trauma in an extraordinary way, and she became a great teacher as well as a great friend to me. So what I think is crucially important for us to understand is that we need to accept trauma as a part of our lives, become aware of it. And as we become aware of it, use a program that there are ways, there are programs, there are paths that take us through and beyond trauma. And that's why I wrote The Transformation, to provide a guidebook to that path through and beyond trauma, and that that path is open to just about everybody. Yeah, I think that's a beautiful and hopeful message. Is this another way of saying something

that I've been hearing more often over the last several years, which is post-traumatic growth? First, I'd say yes. And then I would say post-traumatic growth is a, you know, slightly stiff way that psychologists have of saying what indigenous people have known for millennia. Yeah. That this process of transformation, it's not just growth. I think growth is, now that it's interesting that you raised it, growth is selling it short. This is a process of transformation. We become different. It's not just that we grow, we become different people as we allow ourselves to move through and learn from the trauma that comes into our lives. Yeah, that's certainly been a key message of this show from the beginning to me is that we

often become great or better or use the word you want, not in spite of our problems or difficulties, but because of them. You say in the book that suffering is the soil in which wisdom and compassion grow. I think that difficulty, suffering, whatever words we want to use, is very fertile soil. What I so enjoyed about your book is that it gave a path through that, because that's one of the questions I ask guests a lot on the show, is what is the difference in people who are made stronger, better, wiser, more compassionate by difficulty versus the people who are broken or embittered by it? Well, I think it is a process. There are some people who are naturally more resilient.

There's no question about that. But I don't think that's the major variable. The first, I would say, is there is some openness to hope. There's some sense that it is possible, that we're having this discussion and we're talking about it both from our own experience and to communicate to other people, yes, it's possible. It's something that we've been through. And I think that people at least have to be open to that possibility. So that's the beginning. And that's why in the beginning of the transformation, I tell some stories about people who have experienced this. And then the next piece that's really important is that we need to

learn and have direct experience of techniques, of tools, of happenings in our lives that show us that this kind of change is possible. And so that's why the approach that I teach begins with very simple form of concentrative meditation, soft belly breathing. Breathing slowly and deeply in through the nose, out through the mouth, with the belly soft and relaxed. Because breathing that way, the way I teach it in the transformation, and the way I teach it in workshops and our training programs, may take 10 or 12 minutes in the beginning to do this technique. And as I teach it, I also teach the physiology. And what this does is it is an antidote to the fight or flight response, to the anxiety and the agitation and the hyper vigilance and the fear and the difficulty concentrating

and sleeping that we feel when we've been traumatized. And so when I teach this technique, and maybe we just for a minute or two, people can close their eyes unless they're driving in a car and breathe slowly and deeply with us in through the nose and out through the mouth, with our bellies soft and relaxed, focusing on the breath, on the word soft as we breathe in and belly as we breathe out, and on the feeling of relaxation in our bellies. And when we do this for five, ten minutes or so, we begin to notice a change. And keep on, if everyone just keep on breathing slowly and deeply as we do this, slowly and deeply as we do this.

What happens is that the vagus nerve is activated and it is the antidote to the fight or flight response that trauma produces in us. So we quiet our bodies. Blood pressure goes down, heart rate goes down, big muscles in our bodies that are tensed in fight or flight begin to relax. We calm our minds. We decrease activity in the amygdala. That's A-M-Y-G-D-A-L-A.

It means almond in Greek. It means almond in Greek. It's an almond-shaped portion of our emotional brain responsible for fear and anger. And breathing slowly and deeply in through the nose and out through the mouth with the belly soft and relaxed quiets activity in the amygdala. Breathing this way enhances activity in the frontal part of our cerebral cortex, an area that is responsible for thoughtful decision making and focus, self-awareness and compassion. And one branch of the vagus nerve connects with other nerves that are responsible for facial expression and speech. So when we breathe slowly and deeply like this,

in through the nose and out through the mouth, with the belly soft and relaxed, we're quieting our body, calming our mind, providing an antidote to fight or flight. And we're mobilizing parts of our brain that help us to think more clearly and be more aware and more compassionate. And we're connecting with other nerves.

The vagus nerve is connecting with other nerves that make it easier to read other people's facial expressions, to tune into their speech, to connect with, to bond with them. And breathing slowly and deeply like this, in through the nose and out through the mouth, helps our whole body to relax. and we can feel this now with each exhalation, relaxing a little more. And if thoughts come, let them come and let them go. Gently bring your mind back to soft belly.

So we did that maybe for six minutes or so. What people notice afterwards, I don't know, did you notice any change from before till after, Eric? Sure, certainly more relaxed. Yeah, so people notice that. More relaxed shoulders. My shoulders always get a little relaxed a little bit. I feel more relaxed. I feel more present,

a little slowed down. Using this technique over the years, no matter where I'm working, whether it could be in a hospital auditorium, it could be in the middle of a war, 70, 80, 90% of people notice a difference. So first of all, there is a specific difference. Calmer is what you mentioned, which is really important. If you're anxious and you've been traumatized, feeling calmer is quite important. And also equally important is the fact that you and 80% of the people who are doing this, even if it's for the first time, are aware that they can make a difference in how they feel. And this is the beginning of healing trauma. Because when we're traumatized, we often feel helpless and hopeless. So right from the get-go, the idea is to give people a direct experience that they can make a difference in

how they feel. Now, there are some people who may not feel a difference. Maybe 10, 20% of people don't feel a difference this first time. Many of them will a second time. Some of them are just so anxious and agitated, they just can't even sit still, even for five or ten minutes. And for those people, it's important to do something physical first to release some of that tension, which also is a message to them that you can do something physical. You can move your body around. You can exercise. You can shake and dance. You can do

something that will release some of the tension that you have that capacity. And then most times people can sit and this slow, deep, soft, breathy breathing will bring them to that state of calm. But the idea from the beginning is to give people hope that change is possible and to give them a direct experience of change so they know it's not, I'm not preaching to them. It's not about belief. It's about experience. And also, there is science. There is science that shows that doing these techniques, breathing slowly and deeply for 10 minutes and doing that on a regular basis does indeed decrease anxiety, improve mood, help sleep, enable us to focus better, make us less fearful, that it really is an antidote to the symptoms of trauma. Hey, y'all.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we

can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to back up for a second and talk about some of the work you did. I think it was relatively early on in this trauma work in Kosovo and you talk about the science, right? That coming out of Kosovo, a tremendous war zone, you got one of the first randomized control trials published, which we're not. We're talking about these things that you have implemented in some of the most dire circumstances on earth. So tell us a little bit about some of that early Kosovo work. Sure. Thank you, Eric. I started the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in 1991. And from the beginning, we've been an educational organization. And we developed a

curriculum early on that included maybe 15 different self-care techniques. We've already talked about a couple of them. In the transformation, I actually write about 25 different techniques. And we began to teach people here in the United States this curriculum, give them an experience of the techniques, also give them an experience of a small group in which people could come together to learn the techniques. And in the first few years after I started the center and we began to develop a faculty and a program and share it pretty widely in the United States, I saw that it was working well, working well in hospitals, clinics, community-based programs, schools, etc. I got interested in seeing if it could work in some of the more troubled places on the planet. So I went to Bosnia shortly after the war there ended. War ended, peace accords were signed in 96. And I worked with the leaders, the Christian and the Muslim community, leaders in health and public

health, and teaching them. A colleague and I went, we were teaching this model, and I could see that it was quite beneficial, but I could also see that four years of war had really taken an enormous toll on the whole population. Essentially, 200,000 people dead, tens of thousands of people, men as well as women, in rape camps. The whole country, the whole fabric of the civilization there was torn apart. So when the war began in Kosovo in 1998, I decided we have to start at the beginning. And this is a really important message, that the best time to start to deal with your trauma, with your stress, is now. Don't wait for some mythical future that may or may not ever come. And here during this coronavirus pandemic, the time to start

is very much now. So we went to Bosnia, I'm sorry, went from Bosnia to Kosovo in the middle of the war. And we began to work with people who were bombed and burned out of their homes, who were homeless, they were living in the fields. Hundreds of thousands of people were there, mostly children and women and older people. And we also began to work with the peacekeepers, the soldiers who were acting as peacekeepers, and to teach them these techniques. And then we were out of Bosnia during the NATO bombing, working with Kosovo refugees in Macedonia. And then as soon as the NATO troops came back in, we came back in with them. And we developed a program in Kosovo where we taught this whole curriculum of 15, 20 self-care

techniques, virtually all of them with a very good scientific base, all of them capable of making changes in our physiology and psychology. We trained over a period of years 600 people in Kosovo, including everyone who was working in the community mental health system. And this model of mind-body medicine that I write about in the transformation became one of the two pillars of the new mental health system in Kosovo. And we trained 600 people and we trained a local leadership team who were the leading young psychiatrists and psychologists. They're not so young anymore. This is 21 years ago that we were beginning. So, and then we began to study our, because it's really important to do scientific research on it. We began to study the effects of our work in a region of Kosovo that was really very badly hit.

It was a region in the south called Suareka, S-U-A-R-E-K, a Suareka region. And in that region, more than 80% of the homes were destroyed, and 20% of the kids in the high school lost one or both parents in the war. So major trauma in this region. And we had a group of teachers and a few other people who came from this region who came through our training. And the teachers were wonderful. They were so deeply committed to these kids. These are rural high school teachers. And so they learned our program of self-awareness, self-care and group support. They practiced on themselves. skills groups with the kids in this high school. There were a thousand kids in the high school. They led groups, one teacher working with 10 kids. And over the course of a year or two, they did 12-week long groups with every kid in the high school. We studied the work that they did.

The teachers did the work. They were supervised by our Kosovo leadership team, the psychiatrists and psychologists, but they were doing the work. And what we discovered is that 80% of the kids who entered those groups with diagnosable post-traumatic stress disorder no longer qualified for that diagnosis after 11 group sessions. And those gains held a three-month follow-up. We did the first ever randomized controlled trial of any intervention with war traumatized kids. Nobody had done the study, a randomized controlled trial, which is a gold standard of medical research and psychological research. Nobody had ever done this with any intervention, psychotherapy or

pharmacology or anything else. And this is an amazing finding, which we've replicated in the young children and adolescents, as well as adults in Kosovo and also in Gaza and work that we've done there. And what's remarkable, and this is important to people who are listening to us, is not only how good the results were, but that the groups were led by rural high school teachers with no background in psychology except one course in pedagogy. And so what this says is that anybody who wants to learn these tools and techniques can learn them and they can make a profound difference in their lives. That's what this tells to me. And that you can learn these on your own and it will be even better if you can, you know, do them with a friend or join one of our groups or do them with your

family, that that will contribute, but that the tools and techniques can work for anybody. Yeah. And I think that's what really stood out to me too, was that you were able to train ordinary, you know, good hearted people to do this work that was so effective? Because there is a idea out there that trauma is something that takes extreme specialization to be effective at all. And I find it interesting that your work is showing, well, not necessarily. I'm very glad you bring that up. I think you're the first person, I've had a lot of conversations, but you're the first person who's really focused on that so much and so clearly. I think it's absolutely crucial. And I think that we tend in the United States to sort of mystify all of our sort of therapeutic

work and to sort of act like, well, it's only these people or those people who can do this. What our experience has been, the criteria for doing this are really important because, as you said, it is people of good, basic intelligence who need to be trained to do this. It's people who are willing to work on themselves, to use these techniques on themselves continually. How can you teach other people to take care of themselves unless you're trying to do it and doing it for yourself? Also, people who are committed as they work with other people to get mentorship and supervision.

This is crucial. Our Kosovo leadership team, those psychiatrists and psychologists, work with the teachers on an ongoing basis for several years. When we do a training program, the people we train, whether it's here in the United States or overseas, we supervise them weekly for many, many months as they do this work. Not everybody can do it. It's not a matter of the degrees you have. It's a matter of whether you're willing to really take a look at yourself at each step of the process and be willing to admit where you're in trouble. The difficulties are not so much with other people's problems. The difficulties are with our own blind spots, our own anxiety. And also, it's not magic either.

People will sometimes say, well, does this work? Can I use this with people who are diagnosed schizophrenic? I say, well, if you're comfortable working with people who are diagnosed schizophrenic and you know how to do that, yes, but not if you're just walking in the room and you have no idea, you've never had never idea of walking with this population so we encourage people to really think through who is it right for you to work with so i'm just thinking right now popping into my mind is one of our faculty who used to be a new york city cop new york city policeman and he is doing work and in the beginning, after he came to our training and was certified by us, his first groups as he was coming through and being certified were with first responders and with military.

Those are the people he knows. Those are the people, and now that he's worked with them, now he's working with kids in the community, and he's doing all kinds of work. But the idea is there's a kind of intelligence to this, which has nothing, I would add once again, has nothing to do with degrees, but has to do with a native intelligence and a willingness to be self-critical and self-aware and to be open and humble enough to be able to have somebody else give you guidance as you do this work with other people. Yep. That's wonderful. So I'd like to move on to some more of the techniques. I think you said you taught 23 or 25 of them in the book. I'm not sure I caught quite that many, but I must've missed a couple, but I caught a lot. But the first one that you talked about,

you already led us through it. It's soft belly breathing. It's a form of concentration meditation that a lot of the listeners of the show are going to be familiar with some variation on that of following the breath. It might be slightly different. You've got breathing out through the mouth and some differences. Okay, fairly standard fare there that I would say most people who are listening to this show have experimented with to some degree. You talk about three categories of meditation. You talk about concentrative, which we just talked about. You talk about mindfulness meditation, another type of meditation that I would be willing to bet a lot of people listening are familiar with. But there's a third type of meditation that you talk a lot about. And this type of meditation, I would say is far less known.

I first saw an example of it for the first time, maybe four months ago. Well, it was before I came in contact with your book. But then when I came in contact with your book, I went, oh, that's what that is. And you call it shaking and dancing, but you refer to it in a category. The category would be expressive meditations. And you say that expressive meditations are some of the oldest meditations on our planet. So tell us a little bit about expressive meditation, this particular one, and why it's so useful for trauma. Sure. Thank you. Yeah, no, expressive meditations are, so far as we know, the oldest ones on the planet. I think when you look at the cave paintings in the south of France, which are 30, 35,000 years old, you see the humans dancing with the animals.

I think they're doing an expressive meditation. Indigenous people understood that periodically, and particularly when there's a crisis in the community, and I've seen this and experienced it with indigenous people in many places, that you need to do something to release all the tension that's there. You need to clear out the minds that are so cluttered with fear and worry and anxiety and prejudice and anger, and you need to loosen up bodies that have gotten tight. So they use expressive meditations of many different kinds. So in addition to shaking and dancing, which I'll describe in a minute, there's fast, deep breathing, there's jumping up and down, there's shouting, there's whirling, there's pounding on the chest. There's laughing. All of these are expressive

meditations. Shaking and dancing. Shaking is used. Kalahari Bushman used shaking. They use shaking. Lada Han is an Indonesian meditation that's shaking. It's used many, many places. And the shaking is grounded in our biology. I mentioned fight or flight response earlier. When we've been traumatized, there are two basic biological responses that take us, that occur to us, that take place in our bodies. The first is fight or flight, because we react as if we're threatened by a predator, as if it's a life or death situation, even if the threat is an emotional threat. We still go into fight or flight and we get activated and anxious and agitated and fearful. Okay, soft belly breathing, other quiet meditations are a beautiful antidote to that. If we're in a situation that feels overwhelming and inescapable, we often go into a freeze response.

Again, this is built into our biology. It is a potentially life-saving response. So you see it in animals. You see it in the example I give in the transformation, which I used to see. I used to live in the country and I had several cats that were very successful mousers. And they would proudly bring back a mouse in their jaws. And the mouse would be kind of collapsed and just kind of hanging there. And if the mouse wasn't crushed to death by the cat's jaws,

the cat would often get bored. I don't know if you've seen this in gear cats. So the cat puts down the mouse, mousy shakes herself off, runs off to the mouse hole. She's been in a freeze response. Her body has collapsed. She probably isn't feeling pain. That's what happens in freeze response. And all she needs to do is shake herself off. She's back to normal. We humans often go into a freeze response when we're overwhelmed. This is what happens to kids who've been chronically abused. And you see these kids and you see people as adults who were abused as children. Often they're kind of stiff or they're kind of hunched over. They're not really emotionally responsive. You feel

something has shut down inside them. What's happened is they've numbed themselves. Same thing happens if as adults we're assaulted by people who are much bigger than we are. We can't get away. We can't fight. Or we're raped. I see it a lot in men and women who've been in combat, when they've been in situations where there's nothing they can do. They can't fight. They can't escape.

They go into a freeze response. Shaking the body helps free us from the freeze response. So you do that for five or six minutes. You stand up. Anyone can do it. You can read all about it and the transformation. You can look at me and other people doing it on our website, cmbn.org. Just put your feet shoulder width, start shaking from your feet up through your knees. And yeah, you're moving. I'm moving a little bit now. It breaks up that trauma frozen body. It also brings up emotions. Then pause for a couple of minutes and just be aware of your body and your breath and whatever emotions are coming up. And then it's really wonderful to be able to have some music

that you put on to move freely to that music. That's the shaking and dancing that we teach very, very early on. It is vitally important to working with psychological trauma. At the risk of sounding a little dogmatic, any trauma healing program that doesn't work with the body is seriously incomplete. And I think that this shaking and dancing, which is the first of a number of expressive meditations that I teach in the transformation and that we use in our work, this is the best place to begin. It's the easiest. Anybody can do it. You can do it if you're in a wheelchair. We do it, groups of women and amputees in wheelchairs. We've done it with people in hospital beds. Anybody, any age can do it. And you see the benefits. You see the benefits right away. You

know, it's not like you have to wait, you know, for 20 sessions of shaking and dancing. Almost everybody feels a little more relaxed, a little more energized, a little brighter. Maybe emotions have come up and you've had a release just from the first episode of shaking and dancing. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're

talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I hear, you know, techniques that focus on the body, I'm often

hearing about somatic practices, about feeling into the body, about body scan things, all those, which are wonderful. But this was the first thing I'd seen that really was energetic and expressive that felt like it was moving through. I mean, for me, exercise has always been one of the most important tools at my disposal. And I've often thought of it in a similar way to shaking and dancing in that it somehow gets something moving through me that previously wasn't. And so, like I said, I came across this technique. Somebody posted something, said, check this out. And I went and I looked, I was like, well, that is certainly unusual. And then I thought, you know what, I'm going to try it. And I was kind of like, wow, this is great. And I have done it several times since. It was just a YouTube video of it just said shaking. I was like, well, I don't know. I don't know what the heck that is, but I'll try it. And it's very, seemed very interesting. So when I read about in your book I was like all right now I know what that is yeah and you know we have all of us we live in a world where we don't do this kind of thing regularly

so we have to get over a little bit of self-consciousness yeah seems silly weird whatever but once you do it as you say oh okay yeah let's hit a couple of other important techniques in your method with our remaining time. So I think I'd like to talk briefly about drawing because drawing is something that appears to be pretty fundamental in what you do. So maybe just talk us through the basic drawing technique that you prescribe. the basic drawing technique that you prescribe? The idea behind this is that there are things that are going on inside us that we don't often have easy access to and that we need to bring out that so many of us, there's so much that's bottled up inside us. So many of our emotions are shut down inside us. And also we don't have access ordinarily to our imagination. We don't live in a world where imagination is really valued in our educational system or as adults. You know, we have to take care of business. We have to get this done. We

have to think things through. But there's this whole vast realm of intuition and imagination that can just make our lives so much richer. So we use a number, and I teach in the transformation, a number of different techniques of self-expression and self-discovery. Drawings are one that I regularly use and that I teach early on in the transformation. And we begin with three drawings and no artistic talent required and nobody gets a grade on the drawings. A lot of us are inhibited. I remember feeling scared. Oh, I'll be like, teacher's not going to like this or somebody's going to make fun of it. This is just about letting what's inside come out. So you do a drawing. First drawing is draw yourself. And that helps you get a little bit over that self-consciousness and whatever comes, whether it's representational or blobs or stick figures, it's fine. Put that

aside. Just take about five minutes. Second drawing is draw yourself with your biggest problem. And this is very helpful because people often say, oh, I don't know what my problem is. Fine. Take a couple of deep breaths and then just let your hand do the work. See what comes out. Let whatever comes, come. So people draw their problems. And then the third drawing is draw yourself with your problem solved. And it comes. I mean, every once in a while, there's a blank page. But I've done this with literally thousands of people. And I would say 99% of people draw something on that page. So you look at it, you draw yourself. And the way to do this, if you're doing it yourself, is take a look. What did you draw? What do you see when you look at

yourself? Oh, I'm smiling, but it doesn't look like a real smile. It looks like I'm putting on a smile. Oh, I don't have any feet in my drawing. I wonder what that's about. So that's the draw yourself. Often they see things that they wouldn't expect. And in any case, it gives them a perspective on themselves. Sometimes it's very surprising. Sometimes it's, you know, I know I'm a mother of four kids. I'm a stay-at-home mom. The kids are yelling and screaming and there's a clock in the background. I'm a stay-at-home mom, the kids are yelling and screaming, and there's a clock in the background, I'm worried about money, there's a dollar, so okay, I expect that. Then the solution, the solution is often mind-blowing to the people. I mean, the solution that comes up for that mom may be, oh, and maybe now in this time when I'm locked in the same house or I'm closed in the same house with these four kids all day long, the solution may come, oh, what we need to do is go into the yard and look around and see if there are any little animals that we can see.

We need to get outside and we need, and she's drawing herself looking around at ants and squirrels and looking at the birds and looking at the... So that's the solution. And it's like, oh, and it comes as a real surprise. One of the interesting things about these drawings is it's not always what anyone would expect. So, for example, an example that I give in the book, because it always hit me, is a woman who had stage four ovarian cancer, seriously traumatized by the cancer. And she drew this huge red blob in her pelvis as her biggest problem. And fortunately, I was smart enough not to act like I knew what she'd drawn, even though

in my mind, I was thinking, of course, this is the ovarian cancer. I was smart enough at least to say to her, what's that? And she said, oh, that's my anger at my husband. It's not always what you think, not what she thought she would draw either. She thought when I asked her and I thought she would be drawing her ovarian cancer. No, it's her anger at her husband. And the solution that she drew was her and her husband sitting in chairs, shouting at each other and beginning to talk about the disagreements that they had. So the drawings are such a beautiful way of looking at what's going on inside us and then mobilizing our imagination and our intuition to give us the answer to what we should do about it.

So the mom is going out in the yard with the kids and the woman with ovarian cancer. And what came out of it is she said, you know, I've got to talk with my husband and I think we have to get into therapy. That's what we need to do. We need some help as a couple. So this is just one of many ways of really mobilizing our imagination or intuition to help us. Wonderful. And then another technique that uses our imagination, and we'll use this as the last thing to take us out, is the wise guide. commons in indigenous societies would often go into the realm that they might call it the realm of the imagination, they might call it the spirit realm, whatever it was, and they would consult with some kind of guide that would help them help people who are going through a difficult time. Well, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, brought this practice into modern

psychiatry about 100 years ago. And I learned it from Ruth Carter Stapleton, who was Jimmy Carter's sister, who was Protestant minister. But here, I'm not thinking I'm consulting the spirit world. I may be, for all I know but the way I think about it is I'm consulting my imagination, my intuition, my unconscious. I'm a psychiatrist, so I think about the unconscious. And what I do and what I teach other people to do, and you don't have to be a psychiatrist to do this, one of the virtues of this is that anybody can do this technique. We're democratizing shamanic and psychiatric practice. We're saying that anyone, if you can relax, and I go through the whole script in the Transformation, if you can relax and imagine you're in a safe place and allow a figure to appear to you. Could be a person, could be someone you know,

an ancestor, a child, a figure from scripture, or a book, or a myth, or an animal, or something from nature. And then you can have in your imagination a dialogue with this wise guy, this representative of your unconscious, of your intuition, of your imagination, and ask questions about anything that seems of importance to you and wait for answers from this guide. And the guide will give you answers. May or may not happen the first time. The first time you may just say, oh, I felt comfortable and it felt nice to be there. And maybe I'm not sure I saw anyone,

but I saw a beautiful landscape. But if not the first time, then the second or third time, something or someone is likely to appear and that dialogue will unfold. And I consult my wise guide regularly and it's sometimes it's many different guides. I mean sometimes it's a butterfly, sometimes it's a dragonfly, sometimes it's a squirrel, sometimes it's a wise old man or a kindly old woman or whoever it is. And I ask the questions and I get answers and I get answers about decisions that are coming up that I have to make. And so often, almost always, the answers that I'm getting have a ring of truth. And I push the guide.

You know, the guide says something and I'm not sure about it. I said, well, what do you mean? Or why are you saying that? Are you sure about that? And the guide goes back and forth with me. Sometimes I have to confess that I grew up in New York City. And sometimes the guides resemble the waiters in delicatessens on the Lower East Side of New York City who are incredibly sarcastic and tough and putting me, you know, putting me back on my heels. But they're giving me good information.

And they're making me laugh some of the times. And I'm learning. And I've been doing this now for 40 years. And it's been enormously helpful. And I recommend to people that they use this technique and they practice with it and start wherever you want. Start with something small. Where should I go for dinner tonight? Or, you know, who should I call on the phone now that I'm here and more or less secluded in my home? Or should I go out now or shouldn't I go out now? Those kinds of questions, ask the questions that seem relevant to you and see what you come up with. And I would say the vast majority of people who have experimented with this, and I'm talking many, many thousands of people, have found this to be

extremely useful. So it's another way. And I think the other thing that is important to say, I know we have to come to a close, is that there are all these different techniques and all these different ways of mobilizing our imagination, of calming our body and energizing us and helping us move through our emotions, and that each person will find different ways that are most appropriate to her or to him. All of us are different, and all of us are going to want to use the different techniques that I teach and combine them in different ways. And that's great. That's the idea. That's why I'm teaching so many techniques, so that people can find the ones that work best for them and put them together in a way that's uniquely effective for

them. I love that idea, way that's uniquely effective for them. I love that idea because I think it's so true. Not everything works for everyone in the same way, and it's just important to experiment and choose what works for you. So thank you so much, Jim, for coming on. I really enjoyed the book. I thought it was very well done, a really great summary of some really important work, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. Thank you very much, Eric. It's a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits.

It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth.

If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to a therapy for black girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

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