Suzanne Kryder Interviews Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, researcher and author of the book
The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma

SK: Dr. van der Kolk, what is trauma?

BvdK: What is trauma? Trauma is having an experience that overwhelms your coping mechanisms and that disruption being in such a way that you shut down or get stuck in fight or flight.

SK: When you say, “shut down,” shut down what?

BvdK: You shut down various parts of your brain. You shut down your executive functioning. You shut down your capacity for seeing your future. There are many parts of your being and brain that can get very affected and it changes your perception of reality.

SK: There are different causes of trauma. Some are a one-time thing, but some are repetitive. Talk about a list of the different kinds of trauma.

BvdK: For me, it’s no so interesting. It’s really about an event or a series of events that just get the better of you and your whole system gets overwhelmed and you get paralyzed and stuck. It can be a chronic abusive situation, it can be a war, a rape or robbery, seeing your kids being hurt, it’s all nasty stuff. The stuff that people love to watch in movie theaters that I hate watching in movie theaters. They get off on it, but when it happens to them, it’s devastating. Life used to be tough enough. People didn’t need to watch movies. Plowing a field from end to end doesn’t leave enough energy to watch violent movies at night.

SK: Trauma has a lot of different symptoms. Tell us a few of those symptoms.

BvdK: Being traumatized means that you narrow down what you see and you tend to interpret a lot of things in terms of “I’m in danger”, “I’m going to get hurt”, “I’m going to collapse”, “I’m going to be helpless”. The internal experience is that you’re always on guard. You always feel unsafe and you think that you’re going to lose control basically in a variety of ways.

SK: How does it affect things like sleep and eating and sex?

BvdK: It affects your organism. Many people think that trauma is a memory of something bad that happened to you, but that’s not really trauma. Being traumatized means that your body continues to react as if you are in danger. The issue is really the brain gets changed the mind gets changed and you live in a different reality than the people around you.

SK: Dr. Van Der Kolk, in your book you write about specific techniques for healing trauma. What are some of those techniques?

BvdK: Again, it depends on where you are in your recovery or your progression into it.
One of the most interesting things is that we did was series of yoga studies funded by the National Institute of Health in which we found that engaging in a yoga practice seems to be more effective than any medication you can take. I can easily understand that.

Darwin already talked about it ages ago. Trauma is experienced in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations in your body. In order to feel better, you need to learn to befriend your body and to feel safe in your body. That’s why techniques like yoga may be very helpful to reestablishing a loving relationship to your body.

SK: Dr. Van Der Kolk, in your book The Body Keeps Score, you talk about some different modalities for healing like somatic experiencing, art, writing, dancing. What you’re saying is you just keep trying those until you find something?

BvdK: There are particular things that I talk about. The first thing I talk about is telling the truth. For many people, trauma has to do with secrets with things that you feel ashamed of having done, that you blame yourself for, that you cannot tell people, maybe being molested, and being able to tell the truth is terribly important.

That’s where therapy comes in, that’s where writing comes in, is to be able to find words for what happened to you and the effect that it has had on you. The celebration of the singular human capacity to put things into words and to identify things and have words for them is terribly important. Not to explain things, but just to describe and say, “This is how it is.” That is a very important cornerstone.

If there are memories that bother you, something like EMDR, it can be incredibly helpful to lay your memories to rest - particularly adult trauma. If things have been okay with you for most of your life and suddenly you’re in a car accident or somebody close to you gets killed or you’re being raped or shot or all the other horrible things we see, these single incidents are extremely well-treated with eye movements and desensitization. But for more people, trauma is not a single incident, but chronic exposure an environment that is toxic, dangerous, scary and neglectful.

SK: You mentioned EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization. Can you say a little bit more about that treatment and what happens?

BvdK: Well, in EMDR, you evoke what you saw, what you heard, what you felt, but you don’t talk about it. Then you set up certain rhythms in the brain. We just finished study on that in Canada.

You see, what you do in EMDR is active certain association areas of the brain and allow your brain to know that yes, this belongs to the past and doesn’t belong to the present any more. What actually comes inline is an area in the right temporal junction that is an area of your brain that gives you a sense of owning experiences. Eye movements can really help people to process the experience and say, “Yes, this happened to me, but it happened to me a long time ago and I own this experience now.”

SK: So, eye movements do something to lay that memory to rest.

BvdK: It’s not only memory. Memories can be laid to rest fairly easily most of the time with EMDR, but what we’re working with right now is that one of the things that people suffer from after trauma which is they often blame themselves for the role they played in their own survival. They may accuse themselves of having played along with what happened or done things during the traumatic experience that they feel deeply ashamed about or they may have done things that they feel deeply ashamed about. The issue that keeps getting in the way is how much they hate themselves for what they have done or contributed to what happened. An important line there is that self-hatred and self-blame keeps getting in the way.

As the field evolves, people become more and more aware of how helpful mindfulness is and learning to be decent with yourself and notice yourself. As the field develops, people become aware that mindfulness is only useful if it is accompanied by self-compassion, by feeling loving towards yourself.

Then we find out that many traumatized people; incest victims, soldiers and other people actually hate themselves for what happened to them. Then the question becomes how can you put people in a state of feeling deep compassion for what they had experienced back then. That is a very difficult thing.

People used to use hypnosis for that to various effects, but right now, my colleagues and I are studying MDMA for that. “Ecstasy” can put you in a position that you can loving observe the pain inside of yourself without being freaked out by it. It’s not legal yet. We’re doing a trial for the FDA to get it legalized, collecting enough data to show that it actually works, but these are the sort of directions that we try to go into which is how to make it possible for people to deal with themselves so they can say, “It’s over. This happened to me. It was very painful, but it happened when I was 18 years old or 12 years old or whatever and today I’m 48 and I’m right here and I’m okay.”

The whole goal of treatment is very much to help people to become alive in the present and to have the past no longer have a strangle hold on them.

SK: The healing is so much about the past; saying it happened and letting go of the past and being in the present. That’s also mindfulness.

BvdK: Actually, the first definition of trauma was by a Frenchman named Pierre Janet in 1889. “Trauma is the illness of not being able to be in the present”. The treatment of trauma is really finding ways of helping people to be fully alive right now. We need to bring the parts of the brain online that have been damaged by trauma so that person can feel fully alive right now. That’s really the job of treatment.

SK: It is, yes.

BvdK: And sometimes you need to revisit the past in order to do that, but at the end, life is for living.

Suzanne Kryder Interviews Matthew Sanford, yoga teacher, speaker, and author of the book
Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence

SK: Matthew, in your book Waking, you describe how you came to yoga almost 15 years after you were paralyzed at 13 and you write this: “If I was going to live, I needed to live the mind-body relationship my life had dealt me.” That’s a huge insight, even for people with able bodies, but most people really hate pain, so I’m curious; how do you get a trauma survivor to explore their entire experience which may include pain?

MS: That’s a really good question. My yoga teacher helped me realize that instead of my body being the place that was scary, that in fact my yoga mat was the safe place and that in fact, even if it was triggering memories, that I could trust my body.
Our bodies are the only true witness to our entire lives. Minds go in and out of phase, but bodies don’t. You can reclaim your body without having to go through all your memories. I think that that’s something that people don’t fully realize. In order to be grounded, simply grounded in your body, put your feet flat on the floor and feel grounded. That doesn’t mean that you have to travel through all of your times and all of your memories. That’s an important distinction to pass onto people.

SK: Isn’t there sometimes pain in people’s bodies?

MS: Oh, for sure. This is part of what I do when I teach people with disabilities. There is a place that precedes pain and precedes all the difficulties of your life. This is something that takes a little bit of time and you almost need to be shown, but you do precede your life experiences. What has happened in our culture is that we’ve gotten so caught up on the outside, we’ve lost touch with what precedes.

Even people that have been born with cerebral palsy that I work with, there is a level, even when they’ve been born with their disability, having them find access to the level of them, the practical level of them that precedes their pain is a huge step towards healing.

SK: Matthew, I used to think that facelifts were really a waste of money and I’d have the thought that if the same amount of money was spent on therapy, they wouldn’t need to have a facelift. But then, in 2012, I had this brain bleed that affected walking, talking and I did the same thing, I tried to fix my body. Now I’m not saying you did the same thing, but you did write in your book Waking that you tried to overcome the paralysis in your body. The question is, isn’t it natural to want to heal the body?

MS: I’m not saying don’t heal the body. In fact, I believe directly in helping the body and having the body heal. The big difference for me is that the original vision that I got for healing from the Western medical model was one of reversal, that true healing only meant a reversal of condition, which is just not true.

The other healing vision they handed to me was to overcome my disability. In my case, it was very practical to make my upper body really strong (because I’m paralyzed from the chest down) and learn to drag my paralyzed body through life. This overcoming story is one of the best human stories of resilience we have except it’s not a long-term strategy. You can’t overcome the only body you ever have. There’s a difference between trying to overcome your body and your experience as opposed to trying to heal it. Healing it is a level of letting your body, however it is, and all of the times in your life become part of the river that you are. That’s a different level of healing.

I’m never going to walk again. Yoga is not going to fix my body, but what can be true is that I can feel whole and vibrant through my whole body. For you too, whatever you went through, there is a level at which you do want to fix your body to some extent, maybe on the outside more, but there is a way to feel fully whole in the experience you have and I don’t think that’s just a psychological insight of acceptance. I think that’s a mind body realization.

SK: You also write about will. I’m curious, did your will get you to where you are today? You’re really well-recognized as a yoga teacher and a speaker.

MS: I am a very willful guy, believe me, that is the truth. Will is one of our strongest attributes as human beings. The question and the problem becomes when it’s your only mode of survival. For me, my will became my survival default setting and that can become violent and even destructive. Yes, life takes will. You’ve got to lean into your life for sure, but there is a way to balance and temper your will with realizations, for example, of non-violence and compassion. That doesn’t mean that you’re not supposed to use your will and try to change the world, it means how you move, how you interact. That can transform even while you’re being willful.

SK: If will is no longer the default setting, what is?

MS: What happened to me is when I was trying to overcome my paralysis and live the first 12 years of my life before I came to yoga was that when you act just with your will, you lose the beauty of living. I call it a survival tunnel. You end up in a tunnel where you’re just trying to get through the next day, trying to get through the next thing, you’re gritting your teeth, you’re not seeing, feeling, smelling, expanding and growing in the same way.

The will definitely is more of a mental energy. It’s something that we inflict on ourselves and on our lives. Part of it is being able to recognize and master your will, know when you need it, but also know how to balance it and temper it.

I think there’s a lot to us. There’s a lot of connection and unity in us that our will does not readily utilize. If someone thinks of only their will, that’s where the healing has to begin. The will helps them survive to a point. Without my will, I wouldn’t be here, but then the rest of healing starts to occur.

SK: You write in Waking about non-violence as more than a moral principle. Could you read that section?

MS: “There is still so much to realize. My experience tells me that the silence within us can be experienced energetically as a nourishing sap. When this happens, consciousness changes shape. For example, I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without also becoming more compassionate. A mental state like tolerance can deepen into a three-dimensional state of true patience. Non-violence can become more than a moral principle. It can become an integrated state of consciousness that includes the body. And of course, for good or for bad, the silence within us also contains the opportunity for choice.”

SK: Is unresolved trauma a cause of violence?

MS: I think so. I think that’s one way to describe it. I think when you are carrying energy that is not in the present, when you’re reacting to things that are not in front of you that are not actually what are happening, I think that that type of living, we are more protective and more angry when that happens.

An obvious example would be a veteran that has had a horrible experience in Afghanistan for example that is trying to be in the present. I’m thinking of one guy in particular I was working with. We were in a restaurant and someone dropped a fork. He just about clocked me and went down towards the floor because it was a sound he wasn’t expecting. He wasn’t reacting to what was in front of him. His body, his mind and his nervous system were in the past where the IED went off in the poppy field. He was reacting more violently to a threat that was no longer in the present.

I think that when you are reacting to invisible things trying to protect yourself, you often protect yourself through anger and violence.

SK: How do you help a person like that?

MS: This weekend I’m teaching a workshop on trauma and PTSD because it’s something I think a lot about. I think it’s important to help somebody realize where the present is and what it feels like. I believe that someone who is reacting to past trauma needs to find their body. They need to know that the body, rather than their enemy is the only true witness to their life, to their entire life. In fact, the body will do everything to move towards living always. It’s the mind that waivers.

Trying to help someone that has tough memories, I don’t think they have to go right into their memories. I think they have to be able to exercise past times in their life while feeling their body in the present.

The guy I’m thinking about, we did a lot of yoga together and I tried to have him talk about some of the things that he was carrying, the memories he was carrying, but I was having him stay with me in the present and do yoga while we were talking about it so he can reclaim the present through his body because his body will always be present in every moment of his life. He reclaims the present through his body and realizes that the past can happen while his body is present.

SK: Does healing that trauma and coming into the present make a person more peaceful or more compassionate?

MS: There is physical trauma that you have, whatever that is, but then a lot of trauma affects the invisible part of the mind body relationship, the intangible part of what you are.

People coming back from Afghanistan, the soldiers, are being injured in an invisible part of their mind-body relationship. When you can’t bring that with you into the present, when you’re reacting against that, that tends to make you more aggressive. Not always. Sometimes it makes people shut down and withdraw.

I think that healing trauma and reclaiming the part of you that got ruptured, the silent, intangible part of you, and reclaiming it for yourself instead of thinking that the world can threaten it, in general, that has a very calming effect. Instead of protecting against what scares you, you actually can be more connected with invisible parts of yourself that allow you to be more connected to people.

People that are the most compassionate people often have sustained some of the hardest things in life and it’s because the trauma opens up a part of their mind-body relationship I believe that eventually transforms into compassion and non-violence.

SK: I heard somewhere that sometimes they don’t want to call it Post Traumatic Stress anymore, but rather moral wounding.

MS: I think that’s tough. You’re not going to motivate someone to be compassionate because that’s what they should do. I think compassion and non-violence are not fundamentally moral insights. They lead to moral actions. I believe that compassion and non-violence are total relationships to the world. They’re how you live in your body. They’re much deeper than actions you should do. When you’re more compassionate and more non-violent in relationship to the world, you’re more open, you’re more vulnerable, but vulnerability isn’t just vulnerability, openness is actually strength. We are stronger when we feel more, not when we feel less. This is a hard insight for a traumatized mind to realize, that by feeling more they become stronger.

That’s a realization that the mind can’t have only on its own. The mind needs the body to realize how good and how nourishing being open to the world is and that’s unfortunately one of the big consequences of trauma; a traumatized person stops receiving nourishment from the world in the same way.

SK: That is such a tricky thing to understand; the relationship between the mind and the body. You just said the mind needs the body. Say more about that relationship.

MS: Well, one of the things I like to say when I’m teaching yoga and training teachers is that your mind is your organ of disconnection. That’s what it’s supposed to do. That’s what allows you to judge and interact with the world. I’m separate from the cup of coffee that I’m about to drink, therefore I can drink it. Your mind functions by being less connected to the world and that’s its strength. For that exact reason, the mind is subject to become unmoored and ungrounded. It can get lost in its own circles and spirals. One of the things I like to say is that your body is the best home your mind will ever have. In order for your mind to function as well as it can, it needs the grounding and nourishment of the body.

Suzanne Kryder Interviews Dr. Josephine Chase, researcher / social worker dealing with historical trauma populations

JC: I’m Mandan/Hidatsa from the Fort Berthold Reservation on my father’s side and I’m Hunkpapa and Yanktonai from the Standing Rock Reservation on my mother’s side.

SK: I’ve heard some different terms. I’ve heard “historical trauma” and “intergenerational trauma.” Which term do you prefer?

JC: Well, actually, they’re two different terms. Historical trauma includes intergenerational trauma. Historical trauma is the cumulative, emotional and psychological wounding across generations and across one’s own lifespan as well; genocide, loss of language, removal from our homelands, the boarding schools. Intergenerational trauma really means the trauma that is experienced from one generation to the other.

When a person experiences trauma, they are capable of passing certain characteristics and behaviors onto the next generation if they do not heal their trauma. We have many American-Indian parents who attended boarding school and experienced trauma in border school and they were treated harshly, abused and neglected and that’s how they learned how to parent so to speak. That’s the parenting that they then passed onto the next generation.

SK: Is it okay for this interview if I call it historical trauma?

JC: That’s perfect.

SK: Tell us some other groups. You mentioned that native people experience this, what are some other groups that have experienced historical trauma?

JC: Well thank you for asking that because we talk about massively traumatized groups as well who have experienced genocide and some of the similar effects as American Indians and those would be the African-Americans who experienced the diaspora of slavery and Japanese Americans who experienced discrimination and internment camps. Also, Latinos who experienced massive discrimination trauma, displacement and Chinese-Americans.

I would just like to add that in 2001, my colleague Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and myself coordinated a conference that we called “A Dialogue Among Allies,” and that was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico where we brought together clinicians and trainers from these other massively traumatized groups and we talked about the effects of historical trauma and how it affects our populations and how to address it. We shared practice and intervention information.

SK: Dr. Chase, you’re a social worker and you’ve done decades of work on healing historical trauma. In fact, you’re part of developing an intervention called HTUG, Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief. What is that and what changes to you see in people as a result of that?

JC: The HTUG model was conceptualized by Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart who had been my colleague since the mid-1980s and we’ve worked together on this concept and this project to develop this healing curriculum. It integrates basically our traditional healing practices along with Western psychotherapy and we combine those two into a curriculum that has been show to be effective in helping our native people heal from the effects of the historical trauma, the depression that accompanies that, the sense of loss, the unresolved grief that perhaps our great-great grandparents experienced and were unable to heal from because our traditional spiritual practices were taken away.

We’ve utilized some of our ceremonies such as NEP or the sweat lodge, smudging, prayer, songs into psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral interventions that best fit our people and we’ve had a really fantastic response. I would say that people have reported that their depression has reduced, that they feel a sense of more hope, just a lessening of the symptoms of depression and trauma and that they feel hopeful for the future and learn new ways of thinking, new ways of handling situations and increased self-esteem.

Our intervention consists of four components. The first is confrontation with the past and that’s really confronting our history and looking at what happened to our people. In fact, it was genocide, it was approved by the government and the policies that were set were to remove our people. Each tribe has their individual experiences. By the tribe, we address that. We use writings or oral history and videos to elaborate the experience.

A second component of that is understanding the trauma, to know about the trauma symptoms, how it affects us mentally, spiritually, physically and emotionally and how that trauma was enacted on our specific community, our families and individually.

The third component is releasing our pain. We learn interventions, we conduct exercises such as, for example, the trauma graph which looks at the trauma that occurred in our life and then to use Western psychotherapy as well as our traditional healing practices to let that go. We have ceremonies for healing trauma and to return the person to a place of balance, we smudge to let go of the negativity. We use songs for calling forth courage and strength.

The we move onto the fourth component and that’s transcending the trauma because our intention has always been to restore our people to fully functioning, healthy, joyful people and not to be stuck in the trauma. Part of that is learning ways to heal for self-care, individually, personally, to develop a self-care plan and as they’re going through the intervention, they also begin practicing some of these healing methodologies.

They report back to us the effects that they’ve experienced of those interventions and then we look at how they’re going to take it home and implement it in their families and their communities.

SK: It’s so hard because it seems like many people who have experienced historical trauma have to live in two worlds. They live in the world that is the dominant culture and they live in a world where they have their own culture. I’m curious, as a social worker Dr. Chase, how you help people deal with those two worlds.

JC: Well, I like to emphasize that I believe because of that requirement that we are very intelligent, skilled, agile people so we’re able to do that and to focus on the strengths that we bring with us because of that and also the strength that we bring with us from our traditional culture and knowledge so that actually we are, in some ways, better prepared to deal with certain things because of the different requirements that it takes to speak two languages, to live in a collective community environment or to live in a rural reservation area, but also be able to go off to university and live in the Anglo world and succeed. We also believe that we have to try harder because of discrimination. Our intelligence is not always recognized. The quality of work is not always accepted. That’s a given, and I would venture to guess that that is the same for other people of color as well.

SK: What would you like to see non-natives do to help natives heal more?

JC: I would like them to be more accepting, to be more open minded and to be open to considering the fact that what happened to our people was in fact genocide and to be accountable and to take responsibility, but also to have conversations about it and talk about it. I’m not political, but our government has never acknowledged the wrongs that have been done to our people.

SK: And that would help healing you’re saying if the government said it was a mess and they made a mistake? Would that help people heal?

JC: Yes, it would validate our oral history, our perspective because we didn’t have a say in how this country was developed and what goes into education and what people learn about us. It’s just very stereotypical or denied and ignored.