Transforming Trauma host Sarah Buino and guest Giancarlo A. Simpson, MS, reconnect in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the nationwide protests against racial violence and systemic oppression, providing real-time context to their previously-recorded conversation about NARM’s ability to address complex trauma and support post-traumatic growth in communities of color.

Giancarlo shares with listeners that now is the time to look inward, to be vulnerable, to listen to others, to address our internal biases, and to actively work to be anti-racist. In their discussion both Giancarlo and Sarah provide resources on Anti-Racist learning, which are avaialble in this online guide.

Recounting stories from his work as a therapist, mentor, and teacher of teens and young adults, Giancarlo centers the discussion on the corrosive effects of complex trauma, specifically within the Black community. “The system in itself needs to shift in order for people to feel comfortable about who they are as individuals, because right now what the system itself is telling people, communicating to people, is that you are not good enough, and that in itself is reinforcing a lot of thinking, a lot of behavior that occurs in these environments and communities, and makes it very hard for us to get out of that, because we don’t have enough individuals telling us otherwise, or showing us otherwise.”  Giancarlo shares the ways he has begun using the NeuroAffective Relational Model, particularly in classrooms, to shift this implicit learning and the long-term effects of complex trauma, which includes the under-recognized impact of cultural, intergenerational, and racial trauma. 

Communities of color in America, particularly the African American communities that Giancarlo works in, are faced with a legacy of severe and ongoing complex trauma. From his work with children within these communities, Giancarlo shares, “A lot of these personal experiences in these kids’ lives have really conditioned them to feel uncomfortable opening up to people, and being open and honest with themselves at times.” Sarah and Giancarlo explore the trickle down effect of complex trauma and how it can show up in the classroom. They discuss the innovative ways Giancarlo is incorporating NARM in the classroom, creating safe spaces for BIPOC to experience vulnerability and regain their agency. 

Sarah and Giancarlo discuss how early and prolonged exposure to complex trauma leads individuals to develop survival strategies. While these survival strategies allow people to manage in the face of trauma, it comes at a significant cost. Giancarlo explains, “When we think about survival patterns, it’s basically anything that we do to maintain a sense of balance and homeostasis for ourselves.” Oftentimes, a person’s capacity for vulnerability can become eclipsed by their survival strategies. But vulnerability is a pathway to authenticity, and ultimately long-term health and success.  Giancarlo talks about the healing power in vulnerability, when kids can say, “I’m OK with opening up and acknowledging the things that have hurt me and that now are hurting others”. He supports youth in working through shame and guilt, recognizing that most of these kids have not received consistent connection from their environments, and have experienced adults in their lives who are not aware or even interested in what’s going on emotionally for the child.  Instead, these adults, the child’s teachers, parents, and other adults, focus on the child’s behaviors. In NARM, a person’s behaviors are viewed as their survival strategies developed in response to early trauma.  

As Giancarlo explores the role vulnerability can play in healing complex trauma, specifically with BIPOC, he demonstrates for his students what it looks like to be vulnerable, which gives space for their own vulnerability.  As Giancarlo shares, he focuses on helping children in “being authentic, finding out what that really even looks like for you right now, and finding out the things that are stopping you from being the best version of yourself.”

Sarah asks what post-traumatic growth looks like in places where the trauma never stops. Giancarlo reminds us that there are systems in place that enable these traumas to continue. He shares that his students of color are “navigating not only a tough environment, but also navigating through a culture and a system that has told you, over and over again, that you are either less than, or have to work twice as hard to get where others are.” Giancarlo identifies this as pressure a person puts on themselves just to feel like they are enough. He also speaks to the power of coming together to speak out against a system that consistently places one group of people above another. This power imbalance leads to identities around superiority and inferiority.  This can lead to those in the superiority position, which in the American culture is white Americans, to not recognize their implicit bias, and feel threatened when it is challenged.

This conversation leads to what is referred to as “white fragility”, which is the difficulty that many white people have in engaging in honest conversations about systemic racism. “What’s normal is comfortable for us… in order for us to change as a culture or as a society, or even as ourselves, we have to really be comfortable being uncomfortable.” 

Giancarlo reframes the current nationwide protests against racial violence and systemic oppression as protests against needs not being met for Black Americans. Communities are coming together to communicate about environmental changes needed in response to centuries of oppression and violence. Instead of using old stereotypes like “angry black man” and “angry black woman”, which shut down expression of authentic experience and make people feel bad for feeling, it is time for our culture to listen to and respect people’s experiences. Giancarlo suggests that our culture needs to do better in understanding the root causes for why the anger is occurring, instead of just focusing on behaviors – the outbursts, outcries, protests, violence, etc.  All Americans need to listen to Black Americans, and not continue “minimizing the reasons why we feel the way we do, why we’re hurting, why we’re upset, what we’re lacking, the things we’re not receiving at the most basic human level.”  While this discussion can make some uncomfortable, it is essential for transforming trauma and leading to a more just, humane and healthy society for us all.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Right Of Passage Program

Lynn University

Family First Adolescent Services

Jane Elliot, PhD

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard To Talk To White People About Racism – by Robin J.DiAngelo

Decolonizing Therapy for Black Folk (event)

Geonograms

Dr. Laurence Heller, PhD

We’re grateful to have Claude Cayemitte back with us to reflect on the current events emerging from the demonstrations against ongoing systemic, cultural, racial, and complex trauma. Transforming Trauma host Sarah Buino and Claude dive into the macro and micro perspectives of the traumatic response to long-term suffering that the black community, and other communities of color, have been dealing with for centuries. Claude shares his perspective, “Having these specific conversations about racism is a gateway into people’s interpersonal relationship to trauma… I think that’s the difference with this reaction. People are connecting emotionally to themselves while connecting also to the experiences of people of color.”

Claude shares his thoughts on the importance of opening up a real dialogue around racial injustice and systemic oppression. “Even though it feels uncomfortable, that’s the opportunity for you to move to a different place, to respond differently, to grow. It’s like there’s so much opportunity in growth in talking about this topic, personally and professionally.” 

Claude addresses the objectification that is often overlooked in racial trauma. “When I do individual therapy, I’m not engaged in the political process, because when I enter the room, especially for me as a black man, that shows up… whether it’s explicitly said through the client or not. So I’m always sort of holding these dynamics in play and I can look for how they show up clinically… This is a reality because it’s part of your reality and my reality… Therapy is about talking about how you relate to reality.”

As a NARM therapist committed to addressing the relationship between these systemic social issues and complex trauma, Claude brings an important voice to the trauma-informed movement. In this episode, Claude invites us all into this specific conversation around racism and trauma. This important conversation can help us, as therapists and people who work with and care about individuals coming from communities that face these realities, identify the complexities of addressing trauma on multiple levels. And, the need to systemically address this now. “Anything that we can do to take one brick off this pyramid, this ugly monument of racism. If we can take one brick off at a time, whatever we can do to do that, I want to just acknowledge and at the same time, you know, it’s about damn time. I would say that with love, of course.”

In this episode of Transforming Trauma, Dr. Laurence Heller, the Creator of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), is joined by our host, Sarah to answer a very common question about the role spirituality plays in the healing of trauma. How can spirituality serve reconnection to oneself in the aftermath of complex and developmental trauma? What are the ways that religious and spiritual practice might support trauma healing?  What role does spirituality play in post-traumatic growth, and specifically in the NeuroAffective Relational Model for resolving Complex Trauma?

Sarah begins this exploration by asking Dr. Heller how he defines spirituality. He says that it is very hard to define, and that spirituality is more than just a cognitive understanding. He says it is “an embodied understanding that there’s something more to us than what we take to be our personal identity.” Dr. Heller says that he could not have just learned this through books or cognitive learning, and shares a glimpse into his experiences with many different spiritual practices over the years that helped him refine his own embodied understanding of spirituality. Dr. Heller recounts the “peak experiences” he experienced first-hand that came about through spiritual practice, as well as psychological work and even physical exercise. These peak experiences led Dr. Heller to moments of transcending his identity and experiencing a deep level of interconnectedness. In those moments, he realized that we’re never truly disconnected from our larger sense of connection.

Dr. Heller states that trauma ultimately does not create disconnection; it leads to the loss of awareness of connection, which feels to individuals like profound disconnection and disorientation. Dr. Heller shares his personal belief that “we can never truly be disconnected.”

While Dr. Heller did not explicitly build a spiritual approach to healing trauma, it is implicit in the model he created. Training in the NeuroAffective Relational Model does not involve any specific spiritual teaching or practice. What is supported is a process by which every individual learns how to better listen to themselves, to their own experiences, and from that place they get more connected to the deepest elements of self. This happens as a by-product of healing complex trauma. As people experience more secure connection to themselves, free from the psychobiological patterns of trauma, they develop a deeper sense of “Heartfulness”. 

Spirituality reconnects a person to their heart. Heartfulness is an important quality of the NARM approach, specifically the heartfulness of the therapist.  Dr. Heller reminds listeners that clients pick up on their therapist’s internal state — meaning clients also pick up on the spiritual foundation of their therapist. When a client senses a strong spiritual foundation of their therapist, the client often feels a stronger sense of safety. This can lead to the client feeling more capacity to be curious about their own experiences.

Sarah and Dr. Heller also discuss a spectrum of spiritual trauma, from those who’ve been abused by others exploiting spirituality for their own gain, to those who, as Sarah puts it, are “addicted to spirituality”. They talk about what is referred to as “spiritual bypass”, which is when spiritual beliefs or practices are used to disconnect, generally in the face of uncertainty, for example in minimizing emotions and pushing for forgiveness. This can happen for individuals without an embodied spiritual foundation. “Real spirituality just gives us additional resources to tolerate uncertainty and be in the moment and helps us to distinguish between our objective response vs what is subjective having to do with old survival mechanisms.”

Before this episode concludes, Sarah and Dr. Heller reflect together on the role spirituality is playing now in the midst of the global Coronavirus pandemic. Instead of using spirituality as a way to “make meaning of the situation”, Dr. Heller sees spirituality as providing the capacity to hold the possibility of not knowing what’s going on in the world, and finding acceptance and calm in the face of collective trauma. Embodied spirituality provides more resources for people to be in the moment, even in the face of ongoing threat.  When describing spirituality, Dr. Heller uses the word abiding, meaning being able to be with the not knowing. 

When we experience trauma, it exposes the cracks in our perceived identity. For people who are curious about exploring these cracks in their identity, oftentimes beautiful growth and even a stronger spiritual foundation can develop when faced with trauma. The concept of cracks in our identity reminds Sarah of Kintsugi, a Japanese artform where breaks or cracks in pottery are seen as a part of the object’s history and celebrated by filling them in with gold, and reminds Dr. Heller of Leonard Cohen’s line, “There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in”.

The global COVID-19 pandemic poses unprecedented challenges for us all. How are therapists supporting their clients in crisis? And what about the therapists themselves?  How can we stay emotionally healthy during this time?  In this episode, NARM faculty members Brad Kammer, Stefanie Klein and Marcia Black join Transforming Trauma host Sarah Buino to discuss grief and loss, relief and discomfort, agency and surrender, connection and disconnection, and opportunities for post-traumatic growth and transformation.  

Sarah asks Brad, Stefanie, and Marcia: What recurring themes have shown up for their clients? How have social distancing measures altered the client-therapist dynamic? What challenges are they noticing for themselves on a professional and personal level? Which self-care strategies have had the most impact on their wellbeing? How can NARM help during a time like this?

Through their discussion they find commonality around acknowledging and facing loss and grief, and the hopefulness and optimism they are finding for themselves and in their clients as we all move through the pandemic. “There’s something very transformational that I’m seeing,” says Stefanie. “And, as we know from working with developmental trauma and post-traumatic growth, transformation is not always very comfortable. So I am definitely seeing this fluctuation between relief and then discomfort. But, the theme that I see developing is a lot of transformation, people really asking themselves that question of ‘what’s it going to be like when I come out of here?’ and ‘what if I don’t want it to be the same way?’”

The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) focuses on how therapists relate to and hold space for their clients. Marcia talks about how she’s authentically showing up for her clients in new ways while staying connected to herself in session. She’s answered clients’ questions like “How are you?” in a whole new way, and takes time to check in with her clients with the understanding that we are all going through this together and nothing can be taken for granted. She notes that we are all finding new ways to be together and hold space for the pain in life, without it tearing us down. She reflects on the deepened care and intimacy she’s experienced with her clients over the past month.

Brad describes the immense challenge of being faced with something like the coronavirus that you can’t personally do anything about. Instead of figuring out how to fix the problem – which in this case is currently unfixable – we instead can ask ourselves,“How do we stay as connected to ourselves as possible while we’re going through this?” Instead of falling into hopelessness and despair, Brad reflects on the power of our connections. While the obstacles we face are enormous, Brad is finding hope and inspiration in the ways people are coming together to support one another, form community, and give back to others. 

Brad, Stefanie and Marcia share a common bond, which is that they are passionate about their life’s work. They reflect on their role as therapists, teachers, supervisors and mentors, and leaders in the NARM community, in which they find great meaning and joy. While we are all facing a global trauma, they find hope in sharing with the world the NeuroAffective Relational Model, which is designed to support post-traumatic growth and transformation.

Our host Sarah Buino facilitates an extraordinary conversation between trauma visionaries Dr. Laurence Heller and Dr. Gabor Maté centered on complex trauma, its effects on human development, and their views on the future of trauma-informed care. 

At the core of both Dr. Heller’s and Dr. Maté’s thinking on trauma is the understanding that trauma is not what happens to someone, it is what happens within someone. When asked to define complex trauma, Dr. Heller says, “The word trauma itself is being thrown around a lot. I just want to emphasize that [early trauma leads to an] adaptation, a way that we distort our sense of self and the sense of other in adapting to developmental trauma that creates the difficulties that we experienced as human beings.” 

Dr. Maté says, “For me, the essence of trauma is the disconnection from the self.”  Complex trauma is characterized by its chronicity of disconnection. This disconnection to self and others can severely impact a person’s mental and physical health. As demonstrated in the current ACEs research (Adverse Childhood Experiences), unresolved early trauma leads to various psychological and physical disorders, relational difficulties and social challenges.

Both Dr. Heller and Dr. Maté address the profound effects of disconnection and misattunement that lead to complex trauma. The clinical models they have developed over the course of their careers – the NeuroAffective Relational Model (Heller) and Compassionate Inquiry (Maté) – both focus on how using aspects of the self, like compassion and agency, can support the healing of complex trauma.

Dr. Maté points out that when someone is traumatized they have a negative view of themselves, lack compassion for themselves, and often attack themselves. Dr. Heller reiterates that the dynamic of not having compassion for oneself, as expressed through shame, self-judgment and self-hatred, stems from the need to survive early childhood developmental and relational trauma. While there is an adaptive wisdom to the way children internalize shame, fear and self-rejection, this does not support healthy growth. Developing self-compassion is an antidote to unresolved trauma. And Dr. Maté believes there are two experiences of compassion that are at the core of the healing process: the first being the compassion that comes from the therapist for their client, and the second being the client’s own developing compassion for themself. 

Sarah mentions the challenges she has as a psychology professor in introducing her graduate students to the importance of their own inner world, and how they show up with their clients; or what is referred to as “countertransference” in psychology. Dr. Heller and Dr. Maté share the belief that in order to better support the healing of their patients’ complex trauma, therapists must be willing to explore their own unresolved trauma, and “do their own work”. This requires a process of self-inquiry and self-reflection. 

Due to the deeply relational process of working with complex trauma, therapists can’t just learn skills and protocols, they must learn a deeper engagement necessary for relational healing.  They describe that the training programs they have developed both have a strong focus on the healing process of the therapist in order to enhance the therapists’ capacity to facilitate a “corrective relational experience” for their clients.

Sarah, Dr. Heller, and Dr. Maté address the gap in the mental health and healthcare fields with understanding C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). This means that many therapists are working with clients without fully comprehending the complex psychobiological patterns that leads to such suffering for their clients. As Dr. Maté puts it, “If I could pass a law…if you don’t understand trauma, you’re not allowed to practice psychotherapy. You can coach people. You can be a friend to people. You can lend an empathetic ear to people. That’s all therapeutic. But, if you don’t understand trauma, there is no basis for you doing deep therapy with people.”

Both Dr. Heller and Dr. Maté share the intention of bringing their important work into the trauma-informed field, and to anyone suffering from unresolved trauma, so that we can address the unrelenting personal and social impacts of unresolved trauma. At the end of this lively discussion. Dr. Heller and Dr. Maté begin making plans for future collaboration.

SOURCES DISCUSSED:

Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship – Dr. Laurence Heller

Aaron T Beck, MD