Podcast Episodes

Thomas is joined by renowned trauma psychologist, bestselling author, and CEO of Break the Cycle, Dr. Mariel Buqué. They dive deep into intergenerational trauma, exploring how it’s handed down through family lines and how we can effectively heal it.

Dr. Buqué’s extensive work with trauma healing has shown the importance of healing in connection with others, especially when the traumas we’ve suffered were traumas that happened in relationship. As humans, we are interconnected, interdependent beings, and it’s healthy and natural for us to rely on each other. But trauma can make that difficult.

Thomas and Dr. Buqué share holistic and professional methods for sustainable healing, stressing the importance of combining individual efforts with community support. Tune in to learn how we can break the cycles that we were unwillingly born into, and move from despair to profound hope and healing.

Thomas offers insights on how we can generate and maintain hope, exploring hope as a skill and a practice rather than just a belief. He defines hope as the presence of agency—something that we can actively influence and co-create with each other.

Many who have suffered trauma find it difficult to maintain presence and tend to view this as a negative thing. But Thomas offers a different perspective. He explains that being pulled “out of the moment” is an intelligent function that helps us survive traumatic events.

Instead of fighting our feelings and pathologizing our lack of presence, we can actually achieve more groundedness and connection by integrating our wounds, allowing ourselves to feel our feelings, and observing our tendencies with compassion and creativity rather than judgment.

In an interconnected world, we each contribute to a brighter future by doing our inner work and sharing the wisdom that comes from it.

Thomas is joined by Dr. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatry professor and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, to explore the secrets to human happiness and thriving. They discuss the profound insights gained from the longest-running study on human happiness, revealing how relationships, stress regulation, and having a strong sense of purpose shape our health and longevity.

Dr. Waldinger shares the factors in our lives that we can adjust to have greater agency over our happiness, and the role of wealth and privilege in wellbeing. The conversation also explores the transformative power of meditation, specifically in the Zen Buddhist tradition, offering wisdom on impermanence and interconnectedness.

In this special bonus episode, Thomas examines the role of our ancestors in our lives and how lessons from the past can help us heal and evolve as humans.

Our ancestors have left us with many gifts, but have also burdened us with unintegrated trauma. By learning how to connect to our roots and integrate those fragmented pieces of the past, we can bring light, creativity, innovation, and resilience into our legacies. And by doing this work in combination with personal and collective healing, we can build a better world for future generations.

Thomas is joined by Margaret Wheatley, a writer, teacher, speaker, and organizational consultant whose work focuses on summoning and training leaders who can step up to guide us in building new systems based on shared values, instead of trying to reform the destructive and corrupted systems that currently threaten life on this planet.

Thomas and Margaret start from the ground up, exploring how collectives and cultures emerge and how they operate, incorporating wisdom from science and biology. They focus on how different cultures define, experience, and approach trauma, and what we can learn from them.

Drawing on her work in diverse international communities, Margaret believes that the human spirit can transcend its individual experience. Using support from community and lessons from spirituality, we can shake off the loneliness of trauma, unite to reclaim our spirits, and use whatever power and influence we possess for the good of all humans.

Welcome to the 100th episode of Point of Relation! We’re so excited to share this milestone with you and we’re incredibly grateful to all of our listeners for their continued support.

In this episode, Thomas explores the concept of relational presence, an essential component of healing personal and collective trauma and nurturing healthy and fulfilling relationships in our lives.

He shares the fundamentals of presence, why it’s such an important element of the way we communicate, and how we can learn to co-regulate and resonate with the people in our lives.

By learning and practicing these skills, we’re building our capacity to form safe, coherent spaces that serve as the primary tool for trauma integration. When we train to see our own filters and unconscious areas, we can create an environment that supports collective healing.