Thomas Hübl: Welcome again to the Collective Trauma Summit 2021. My name is Thomas Hübl, I’m the convener of the summit, and I have the great pleasure and honor to sit here with Diane Poole Heller. Welcome, Diane. I’m so excited that we made it again to have a good excuse for another conversation.
Diane Poole Heller: I love our conversations, so thank you so much for having me, and I’m excited to be with everybody that’s on this call.
Thomas: Yeah, me too. As I said before, I’m always mesmerized by your aliveness and creativity and by your esprit that you radiate, that’s always so enriching. I think it’s also a great sign, because you’re somebody that dedicated her life to the exploration of trauma, the healing of trauma, and how to spread that important work in the world. And it seems also that trauma integration generates post-traumatic learning growth, and also aliveness; like we become simply more alive, and that’s what I also see in you a lot, so that’s beautiful.
Since you’re very dedicated to your work, maybe you can share first a little bit, so what are the essentials—because you’re doing this already for a long time, so you’ve got a lot of experience—what are the essentials? If you were to condense the essentials of your experience in working with trauma, with attachment trauma, what’s the essence that, if you review your entire work-life and you boil it down to the most important concentrated liquid, what would that be?
Diane: Well, thank you. That’s a wonderful question. There’s a few gems that come to mind. One is learning to have a useful alignment with suffering. What I mean by that is, I think sometimes we fall into unnecessary suffering. Even when I was a kid, I was a weird kid. I would be watching my mother going through difficult things, and I would be looking at her and going, “Well, that’s unnecessary suffering.” She’s generating that in herself, her own way of worrying and repeating. I think you call it the after … something. She can’t let go of it. Then I was thinking, “Okay, well, this is necessarily suffering.” This is actually the wound, that’s where a lot of this is arising from.
One is like learning how to have a more curious, friendly relationship to suffering where we can observe it, be curious about it, lean into it, but not in a way that overwhelms us. Because you can go through overwhelming life events without being overwhelmed, and that’s why I really have to do a shout out to Peter Levine because he taught me the physiology of trauma and how to help the nervous system integrate as you go, and touching into deep wound and honoring that. But even before you do that, making sure there’s some grounding, centering, a certain observing ego might be there, presence, and resources that give you some resiliency or stability to touch into the really difficult material. That’s been incredibly valuable. I think that’s important work in general, but for trauma, I think it’s essential, because it’s easy to get caught in the spiral of it in a way that it sort of takes you down the drain or leads you to dissociation or fragmentation. It’s a way to really support integration.
The other gem that I really think is important, that I learned over the years … I’m going to paraphrase Gurdjieff right now, and I know he didn’t actually say what I’m going to say, but when I read him, this is what I get out of it. He said that one of the most important times to do deep spiritual work is when the world is in great turmoil.
Why would he say that? My interpretation of why he says that—and he did a lot of work during World War II, he was serving meals to people in Paris when it was Nazi occupied, and he didn’t leave. He could have left. He stayed there to try to help. Then we know his whole body of work, but I think trauma generates so much energy, it’s so intense, and it’s so severe, and usually happens quickly. Sometimes trauma can happen slowly, like having monoxide poisoning or something, but generally, it’s too much too soon, too fast. It generates so much energy.
Then it’s like, how do we interface with that energy in a way that we can do small pieces at a time? But that same energy that is bound in the trauma or fueling the dissociation or fueling the fragmentation is the same energy—if we harness it correctly—takes us right through the eye of the needle, as Peter would say, into this expansion of creativity, aliveness, like you mentioned, vitality, maturation, evolving consciousness, dimensions of spiritual experience. If we understand—not that we have to go look for trauma, we usually have enough that creeps into our life, I’m not suggesting we go find more—but when it finds us, there is a way to interface with that energy that actually, it’s like, I call it the hidden gift of trauma.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. There was one moment when you spoke about the resourcing and the slowing down, that through my body, I could really feel your transmission of that slowing down. There is, for you as a therapist, of course, a long trained capacity to provide a co-regulative space. I’m wondering how you see the embodiment of the capacity to work with trauma that has to go through our body. Because I can write a PhD on attachment trauma, but I can still be a very traumatized person, because the PhD won’t necessarily heal my trauma.
But the embodiment of the knowledge that I write in the PhD, that is important. Maybe you can speak a little bit to what I felt when you spoke about it. I could feel the transmission of your nervous system slowing down as you said it. I thought that that’s a very important component. At least to me, that’s a very important component in the work, and maybe you can expand a little on that.
Diane: At the very least, in your office, have your resources all over your walls, so when you’re working with someone, you can remind yourself of people you love or art that you love or something. When people interface with trauma, so often it robs us of our center. It robs us of our capacity to embody. It robs us of any grounding. As therapists, it takes some practice or some art. I’m a big advocate of us all doing our personal work. I mean, humans in general doing their personal work. But I think for therapists, it’s almost even more important because you’re getting activation, injections from a lot of other people’s lives on top of what you’re processing in your own incarnation.
Just to be compassionate towards yourself and make sure you have enough support; peer support, therapy support, partner support, whatever that is. But really learning how to keep your seat, as they say in Buddhism, while you’re listening to really terrifying stories, and that’s getting transmitted in the relational space. You’re probably permeable to a degree and your nervous system’s affected. And then how to drop into your feet. I think we ground through our feet and our seat—we’re usually seated when we’re doing therapy, not always.
But to really focus on that, because it doesn’t help if your client’s dissociating or flooding and you are dissociating with them. That’s not the therapeutic mutuality that we’re looking for. It’s kind of our job to really find a way to land in ourselves as we’re meeting in a dark place. I think that there’s no way to learn how to do that until you practice. I mean, I’ve been doing a spiritual practice formally since 1979, so I’m kind of a dinosaur in that. Many of us listening, I’m sure, have that because of the group that you attract, Thomas, in your own deep practice. That’s been invaluable to me.
Then also the work with Peter, so sensation focused and really feeling the shifts of the nervous system. Then with Steven Ford, just feeling that shifts between dorsal and ventral and all these ways of understanding these windows that help us move into co-regulatory capacity and embodiment. But those are really huge trauma resolution signals when you’re able to do that. Of course, there will be times somebody has a history too close to yours, or you’re tired or sick or something, and you just … It’s harder to get there, and then that’s just something we do our best when we can. I mean, nobody’s thinking about co-regulation all the time, so take the burden of that off your shoulders.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Sometimes—and I’m curious about your take on it—sometimes I describe healing as the restoration of the original movement and trauma being like a reduced movement, often we call it also frozen, or we call it shutdown, non-absence, whatever, and hyper-activated, but it’s a reduction of movement. I would like you to speak a little bit about the notion; because some people might think centered means in a place, or some people experience center as being immersed in a movement hat creates a centered stillness within the river. So, it’s actually a movement and not a location, and it can happen, as you said beautifully, through our body, but I tune in with sensations in my body that are flowing. That’s also where we resource ourselves. Can you speak a little bit about your experience with seeing the movement of your clients increase, open up parts of their lives, opening up, generating more movement? How can we look at movement in the sense of healing?
Diane: Well, in brief, I think of it as moving from passive to active. That can be defensive orienting or cues for connection. That can be actual behaviors or gestures, but it’s also opening to … It’s so interesting. I mean, it’s such a privilege to be in a space with someone when they’re exploring something difficult or whatever aspect of their life, because you’re in this kind of midwifery, however you say that, of they’re shifting from this constriction and frozenness perhaps, and maybe pain patterns and other symptoms, to this gradual relaxation and opening and finding the unfolding of what was able to unfold in the moment when the trauma possibly happened, because it was too intense or there wasn’t the presence of an empathetic other.
There wasn’t a person there that could hold the experience with them, or even share the emotion or talk to them about it, or be there in a supportive way. Really, therapists—and I think sometimes our partners, and friends and peers too, but therapists in particular—they’re really hopefully holding this space where what got stopped, like trauma stops time, but what got stopped can unstop, and that flow of movement through the experience can happen. And then when it hits something that’s, I call it an arousal spike, that’s too intense, then we might shift focus to a corrective experience or shift focus to something that then matches some of that arousal with something supportive and increases resiliency, and then the flow can start again.
And you’re kind of paying attention to flow the whole time, like when is it going? And then you don’t want to get in the way of it. You might even not want to say anything, you might even just keep your mouth shut during that time. Let this flow, just the clients’ inherent capacity to heal, to take over, whether that’s physically shifting or emotionally shifting or meanings shifting, or their presence shifting, consciousness shifting to a different state. It’s really quite beautiful. Sometimes we’re just looking for where’s, I think as a therapist, where’s the window that’s open right now, in this moment?
Sometimes I’m, like I said earlier, tenacious about that. It’s like, okay, is it the front porch? Is it the chimney? Is it the back porch? I just keep looking until I can find some way that the flow can start to happen, and then I do my best not to stomp on it, not to interfere with it or interrupt it, or get in the way of it in any way. Because sometimes you can talk at the wrong time and you feel you just stopped it. Right?
Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. It’s beautiful. Also, how you described the sensitivity to movement and that we recognize different patterns of movement in our clients—of course, in ourselves first, but also in our clients—through kind of a deep relational attunement. I want to ask you, since of course, attachment trauma is a big issue for many people, so maybe you can—and it’s a central part of your work—so maybe you can give us a short overview of why some people don’t know, maybe that co-regulative, loving environment that hosts them when they are going through something and then they end up in your clinic, but it means that the family system or the attachment relations really couldn’t provide that. What are different attachment styles and what helps us to correct in a way, as I said, in a corrective experience, what we are so used to, into something new?
Diane: One of the quick definitions of trauma is overwhelming helplessness, but another definition that I feel is really important, is broken connection. And that can be broken connection to self, broken connection to ground, broken connection to spiritual source, broken connection, definitely in relationships. When I touched into a deep awareness about that, I dove into attachment work, because I figured, if we’re going to heal broken connection, we need to go from, where does connection even start? In the womb, when we first become … Just at the beginning of that formation in our mother’s body, and then what happens as we’re born, and how does that relational template form?
I’m very grateful to all the people that have written and researched about attachment, because I feel like it has given a wonderful entry point into understanding how do we heal relationship that’s been broken, and what actually happens that’s helpful to support a return to secure attachment and attachment language? When we’ve had a difficult upbringing or difficult circumstances that our family faced—sometimes it’s not caregiving, sometimes you’re born in a war zone or it’s a medical trauma, there’s other things—but I’m going to focus, just for time, mostly on caregiving styles and what might cause certain attachment disruptions or adaptations away from secure attachment.
John Bowlby put out a long time ago that biologically we’re inherently designed for secure attachment, we’re currently designed for connection. We have pro-social brains. I mean, this is something that is in us whether we’re in touch with it or not. Basically, I see the job of healing as sort of excavating that original secure attachment and creating an environment therapeutically, and hopefully in life and relationships, where that can get highlighted and emphasized and recover into.
It’s not like a therapist has to make somebody have secure attachment. They have it, they just might have a lot of things piled on top of it that need to have a chance to heal. If you are a parent, many people listening are parents, we only know what we know when we know it. There’s always, sometimes when I talk about attachment, I go, “Oh my gosh, I did that or I did this.” You can repair with your kids anytime. Repair is possible right now, after you get off the call. We’re all learning how to have healthier connection.
I think, and Dan Siegel, I was listening to him several times, but one particular time he was saying, really, connection is kind of the new frontier. We’ve done a lot of work on emotion, we’ve done a lot of work on trauma, we’ve done a lot of work on sensation, we’ve done a lot of work on all these different things. He said, but really, to really, really understand healthy connection is kind of a big deal. We think we should just know how to do that, but I find it’s an ever-evolving growth that can happen.
In a way, I’d like to be able to, I don’t know, throw papers out on attachment and see how to get back to secure attachment on the back of airplanes. I just think all of us need help with that. It’s so valuable for most of us, especially if we’re recovering from trauma because trauma basically breaks it. Then how do we find our way back? I can say a little bit about the different attachment styles now. First of all, it’s good to understand what is secure attachment? Because we tend to think of it as three meals a day and a roof over your head. My mom used to always say it to me, “You have a roof over your head. What are you complaining about?” I was like, well … It was kind of a violent household, so it could be a little safer.
First of all, I think the shortest definition for secure attachment is attunement and being really sensitive to another person and allow … Like you say, I’m feeling you feeling me, right? That ability to enter into that space where you’re in a contingent connection where, if you’re not already in sync, you’re aware that you’re trying and doing what you can to move into sync. You have to have an awareness that you’re out and you also have the awareness of, how do we help ourselves get back in? We can talk more about that.
But secure attachment has a lot to do with being present. I mean, whatever modality you’re using, presence is the most important thing in my opinion. It does require a certain amount of safety, and it doesn’t mean that you always have to be in the safe zone. It’s, if you have a safe haven or a secure base, it actually gives a person the foundation to go out in the world and take risks, to go out in the world and make their sole mission contribution. It’s like, you can then return to something that is supportive to you, and that’s really valuable for people to have, whether that’s a friend, a partner, family, or I think sometimes it’s a stranger, but just something where you have that platform. The things that are included in secure attachment would be, even how you use your voice, your modulated voice is one of the main ways that triggers the prefrontal cortex awareness of safety. If you speak in a very robotic—I can’t do it very well—but flat tone, that signals threat to your amygdala, and it will actually not help a healthy connection. So, you want to check your voice. Are you speaking in a modulated tone of voice?
Of course, in evolution, when women are stressed, they get really shrill. When men are stressed, they get low and boom—and that’s functional, because in the tribe or in the clan or in the caveman camp, or whatever, if somebody’s voice went either direction, it was like, “Oh, there’s a tiger.” There’s something we got to alert to, and it alerts the whole group to respond to threat. There’s a function in that, but if you’re having an argument with your loved one and your voice, if you’re a woman, goes shrill, or you’re a man, goes low and booming, you’re triggering the other person into threat and then they lose their connection, often, to the prefrontal cortex that cares about relationship. That’s actually the part of the brain that wants to work something out. You’re just into, I would need to survive this. I’m either going to run away from this person or I’m going to get in the fight, worse. It’s like Stephen Porges says, you can never win an argument. What he means by that is you’re not in the physiological space to work something out if you’re in conflict. You’re in a physiology that only cares about you surviving the next five minutes, and that’s fight, flight, freeze. It’s not going to take you to social engagement in prefrontal cortex.
Secure attachment is there. Safe affectionate touch, of course, skin to skin, if you’ve a little baby on a mother’s or daddy’s skin, and your little beam gleams are really important. Right now, I can look at you, Thomas, and I can shoot you a beam gleam, because it is true. I love you. You’re special to me, you’re an amazing human being. That is a very strong attachment signal. Just if you’re at a party with your partner and they’re across the room talking to people, they’re a group of people and you’re nearby, you can just shoot them a beam gleam.
You can shoot a beam gleam to your dog and notice how powerful it is. And it takes two seconds. It doesn’t take anything. But if we know these things, we can use them with more intention. I call these secure attachment skills that are really easy to implement, but people sometimes forget to do it. Playfulness and laughter really support secure attachment. Having more playtime and doing really fun activities with your kids and your partners and your friends is really important, so I give you a really important prescription to play more.
Then this ability that many of us therapists we’ve trained in, is to be present for whatever arises in the other person. This is something we need to do, even when we’re not in the office. Sometimes we feel like we did it so much all day long, when we get to our family, we forget. It’s really important that we remember this with our kids and our partners and our friends. Being able to relax in the relational field, that’s an element of secure attachment, that you can … You notice when people are working through trauma, they’re kind of internal, or they’re kind of … got this look. They’re deep into it, and even though they’re resourcing, I don’t think … But all of a sudden, there’ll be a point in the session, or maybe after a few sessions, where they just show up, all of a sudden they’re there. And they’re like, “Oh,” and you’re thinking, “Oh, hi,” for the first time. They’re really present. That’s the shift out of a trauma brain into the pro-social brain and the capacity for social engagement and presence that means … It’s a strong trauma resolution signal for that aspect of what they’re working on.
Coming and going, how do we get together after work at the end of the day? Now, a lot of us are in the same house because of the pandemic, but do you kind of, if you can, can you stop a bit and really acknowledge the other person? Maybe do a welcome home hug, and just stay in that hug belly to belly, body to body, till you feel the other person’s body regulate. Stan Tatkin calls this the welcome home hug. There’s YouTube on it, you can look it up.
Then if, like … say, Thomas, you had a headache, I might put my hand on the back of your head or wherever your headache was, and if I had a low back pain, you might put your hand on my low back, and then that’s a physical co-regulation just in that embrace. Americans sometimes hug like this. They do triangle hugs, and it really needs to be not a triangle hug. It needs to be this, more like a Namaste position for regulation. It enhances the regulation.
A big thing that secure attached people do, is they are comfortable with initiating or receiving repair if there’s been a misattunement, just how do we—it doesn’t matter who does it first—how do we apologize? How do we acknowledge, “Hey, I was really stressed in the morning and I was abrupt with you at breakfast. I just wanted to bring that up and let’s have a chat about that and let’s get ourselves back into a good space.” And receiving people’s repair attempts. Sometimes they don’t do it perfectly, but the intention is to repair. Be generous about it! Okay, they didn’t say it exactly perfectly, or you wanted flowers and they brought you chocolates, whatever, just allow repair to happen. That, in itself, John Gottman says, increases your chance for 85%. It increases your chances by 85% for sustainable well-being in your relationships. That’s a really big return on your investment. If you did that with your coffee money, you probably would put it all in the bank.
There also is an easy flow between connection and alone time. That, in our ideal scenario, would be some of the aspects of what secure attachment is, what we’re trying to get to when we are interfacing with our own pattern or our client’s pattern, where we may have adapted away from secure attachment, because things didn’t support it. When people adapt away, even as little babies, they’re trying to maximize any way they can be, or try to get connections from their caregiver that their caregiver is able to do. We have to adjust to the injuries of the caregiver. You can’t not do that, because you’re trying to survive and we have to connect. We’re dependent when we’re little babies, a lot, so we have to connect. If you understand that everybody’s adaptation is wired into survival, then it helps you have a more compassionate perspective. What I love about understanding this, is it’s so much easier to drop out blame. Blaming yourself for certain patterns or blaming your partner or your friend or your teacher, or whatever.
You just start to see, okay, that wound gets activated, and how can I behave in a way that might support a movement towards secure attachment. That’s why we emphasize secure attachment skills so much for ourselves, and also to empower other people.
Thomas:Wow, beautiful. What a download, like a concentrated download of secure attachment. Do you want to just say a few words about the adaptation out of secure attachment? So, what—
Diane: Yeah, so I’ll try to do that kind of briefly, but I’d like us to really have a firm understanding of secure because that’s what we’re trying to get back to. But one of the ways that we adapt away from it is called avoidant. It’s called avoidant in children, it’s called dismissive in adults, same pattern. It just means—in the Cliff’s Notes on this—it just means that a child was left alone too much, for whatever reason, that could be hospitalization, it could be, the parents were just not able to be present. They might have tended to be rejecting. They may have only shown up when they were tasking a child, like teaching them to read, or ride a bike, or build something, or do math. They were present, but they … So, they were present sort of for left brain activities, but they weren’t emotionally attuned.
A child’s queuing for connection, because babies do that naturally out of their own secure attachment, but they’re met with nobody’s home, which is terrifying to a kid, or they’re met with active rejection. They might even see hatred in the eyes coming back at them, or anger, or rejection, and the child can’t bond to that. A child will then sort of revert to their own bubble of isolation and they’ll try to do it themselves, which is not … They’re trying to adapt to the deficit of the caregiver, but we’re not designed to do it by ourselves, so it’s a painful place. It just feels like that’s the only thing you can do, is to become very self-sufficient, very intellectual. They tend to sort of disregard the past and only focus on the future. “Okay, that’s over, I’m not going back there.”
They tend to minimize their wounding until they start to feel, at some point in therapy or some point in life, when they start to feel the need to connect again. Everything in them screams, “Don’t do it! It’ll be too vulnerable, it’ll go to a bad place.” When somebody starts to want to connect out of avoidant attachment, you, as a therapist, or partner, or whatever, you need to be really available, not be writing in your chart. You have to be right there in the relational field to receive that so that they start to feel relational field as nourishing.
And then they start to feel like,”Oh, I can have a need. Other people can support me.” Because in the original dynamic, they feel like their needs were dismissed. They weren’t even acknowledged, or they may not know their own needs, or they only feel they can do their needs themselves. They can’t really ask for support. There’s all sorts of ways we interface with that to try to help a person experiment with coming out of that adaptation. Kind eyes is one of the things we do. Imagine looking out into the world, you can do this now as you’re listening, and looking and remembering someone who had kind eyes looking at you. Right now, I think of my grandmother. I can think of dogs. I can think of different looks on different relationships I’ve had. Just see if you can recognize kind eyes out in the world, and then just see—the second part of it is, if you can bring that into your awareness, like actually embody and receive the experience of kind eyes. Now, that’s a really quick description. I have it on YouTube, you can look at a longer one.
This sounds really benign, but some people that have done this—and this was true for me too in the beginning—it brings up so much pain, because what will come up is the wound of how people that were important to you looked at you with rejection or hatred or a negative state.
I’ve had people do this exercise and they’ve gone home and cried for two days because it brought up the opposite. Sometimes when you resource somebody to a corrective experience, it can excavate the wounds. If that is even happening for you, just be gentle with yourself and make sure you give yourself some time to process, or maybe pause and you come back to the talk later. Then eventually, the pain of how you were looked at and what you took in with your eyes resolves, and then you can be in your eyes and you can see other people’s, how they’re looking at you. It starts to move in a different direction.
That’s just one corrective experience for avoidant. The other adaptation is called ambivalent as a child, and preoccupied as an adult. That usually reflects a situation where parents were loving, they’re just not consistent. They were on again, off again. They could show up at some times, but they never were there long enough. You know how you see kids just melt like spaghetti on your body when they’re just safe and relaxed, they just sort of droop over their parents’ shoulders? That’s interrupted too much so that the actual, the contact creates anxiety instead of relaxation, because they’ve had too many experiences of melting into the relational field with a parent, and then the parent getting distracted or preoccupied with their own attachment history or whatever, they do something that breaks the contact.
Then the child starts to learn that, “Oh, good, I can have this yummy love,” but it’s a package deal, with the next thing that comes is abandonment or betrayal. Instead of relaxing into the love, loving connection, they then are just waiting for the next shoe to drop, and then that creates anxiety, and then they start … If they have a lot of ambivalent, they’ll tend to be angry and maybe be moving towards tantrums, or as an adult, just picking fights. If they have a little of it, they’ll sort of have this experience of chronic hopelessness and despair that relationships never work. Their fear of abandonment takes over, and then they’re constantly seeking reassurance. They’re constantly trying to stabilize the relationship, but in trying to do that, they very often push away the person they want to be the closest to, because they over demand and they tend to focus on the negative.
It’s like the signal cry as a baby, like pick me up, play with me, whatever, feed me, got stuck on on, and it’s wired into survival. That tends to lead people to flood words and they tend to keep demanding. It’s an extension of that in an adult relationship, and that’s just something, if a partner understands it, they know they can reassure the person, “Hey, you’re my man, or you’re my gal, I love you. I want you in my life.” And they can remember to make sure they stay tethered.
As people heal from the adaptations, more to secure attachment, they don’t need so much attention on these wounds because the wounds start to heal. It’s not like you have to reassure somebody forever, but if you do it when they really need it, then their attachment system relaxes because it’s on overdrive, and they can relax and trust you—gradually, over time.
Those are two of the adaptations. Let’s check in with you, Thomas. And then, if we want, we can talk about disorganized.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Maybe we add the disorganized attachment in a concentrated way, and then we can open up the lens a bit into the interdependence, to the ancestral wounds.
Diane: I’d love to do that. Disorganized can be disorganized tilted towards avoidant or disorganized tilted towards ambivalent. It just means that one parent or the situation was scary enough that you have the threat response triggered. The brain is over-focused, it’s kind of scanning for threat a lot, because your brain adjusts to your original environment. The threat response is on on and then the attachment system’s trying to function, but it keeps bumping up against threat, which tells you to fight, flight, or freeze.
There’s this sort of jerking of trying to connect, but then feeling terror like, “Oh, this is going to be bad.” That’s built on lived experience usually. Sometimes it’s the behavior of the parent. There was too much chaos or maybe there was addiction or there was anger or abuse, in the worst case, right? Sexual, emotional, physical abuse that will cause disorganized attachment, which just basically means your attachment systems are not working in a flowing way and it has a lot of roadblocks to it.
The other way it can happen is if you have a parent, which of course can happen over generations, that has unresolved trauma. Even if they’re not yelling, they’re not doing anything egregious, they just have this energy field of fear and terror from something that they experienced in their life, or maybe intergenerationally from their grandparents, then the child’s going to feel that, and it will be difficult to bond. The parent may not even be acting anything out that’s obvious, but it’s just unresolved, the effect of unresolved trauma. That’s one of the ways disorganized can happen, and that’s the most difficult one to work with sometimes, but you can work with it. I’d read a lot about that. Mainly, you really have to work with safety and just … You’re resolving trauma in a very direct way along with the attachment wounds.
Thomas: Right. Beautiful. Thank you so much. I think it’s a great overview, especially for everybody who’s listening right now where these terms are not clearly defined, or the meaning of it is not fully clear. We heard these terms. One question I have is, when we now look at the parents that are the environment for these various attachment styles, as you said now, in the last one, … they have their own trauma. The trauma of my parents, maybe—for example, my grandparents went through the Second World War, so their traumatization kind of got transferred to me, too. How do you look at the bigger map or the bigger picture or context? There’s the individual healing work, but then the individual healing work opens up into some sort of ancestral healing work. What’s your experience with that? How do you meet that as a therapist in your daily work or in your groups?
Diane: Well, one example I can give clinically is, once somebody has done some work and they’ve healed some, and they’ve had their own corrective experiences, and they’re starting to feel a little more access to secure attachment and maybe spiritual states, I often introduce what I call a role reversal exercise, where I have them … I say, you know your mom or you know your dad—I do one parent at a time—you know your mom really well. You grew up with these people or you had access to them in some way. I just want you to see them as a human being and to see if you can feel in them, what was one of their, or one or two of their core wounds. You probably felt it, whether they ever talked about it or not. As you’re noticing what their core wound is, let’s do a corrective experience for them.
I had one person that their mother always wanted to be a professional woman and she got married, and she ended up having like six kids, boom, boom, boom, boom. And she was always disappointed she never did her career. The client had this fantasy of her mother being able to be a professional woman and surrounding her with … Back in the …. I’m dating myself now, but remember Mary Tyler Moore was a single woman who had a big career, and these are American references, but they’re … Mary Tyler Moore, there were all these different single women that had these careers.
My client put her mother in a book club with all these expansive professional women, and of course, they could have kids if they wanted to, be married too, but just that she had the ability to go into this professional support. As she did that, in her mind, she saw her mother relax and be really happy and fulfilled. Then, as she was experiencing her mother as relaxed and really fulfilled, she started to get a feeling in her own body of what it would have felt like to have a happy, fulfilled, securely attached mom. Her mom had actually been suicidal, so it’s a big difference. And she started to be able to feel in her own body, “Oh, wow, if my mom had been in that space, I would have been able to be more of a kid. I wouldn’t have jumped into trying to be a therapist for my mom, but I could just have space to be a kid, and also I could be in this relational field where there’s a much more joy and nourishment and fulfillment,” and there’s all these examples.
I had another gentleman I did this exercise with. He was a twin and they also had like four or five kids.His mom was always really stressed out and his dad was always gruff. When he did it, he saw his mother in the kitchen cooking and singing while she was cooking, kind of dancing while she was cooking. Then he saw his father come in and hold his mother from behind in a really sweet way, kind of nuzzle her while she was cooking, and then they both started dancing. The same thing happened. He goes, “Oh my gosh, if that had happened, instead of all the violence and everything, I could have just been a kid, and I could have had these happy parents.” So, it’s healing on the ancestral level, but it’s also then embodied in a shift in the person. That’s just a mini example, like working with an individual, but then of course, there’s bigger ways to do this.
Thomas: Fantastic. It also shows how we carry in our body, how our body knows when internal channels of information are closed in that ancestral traumatization or what it means when they get reactivated and opened up. That’s beautiful. Because I think, if he expanded from parents to grandparents, maybe great-grandparents … but that’s a great exercise that you see in that, as through the body, not through the mind, but you describe it very much through the body, how an embodied experience can help us to feel much deeper. That’s beautiful. When we look at the ancestral stream, but we also, our ancestors went through collective woundings that many people at the time experienced, like the Second World War, or the Holocaust, or racism, or slavery.
Diane: Huge collective trauma. Yeah.
Thomas: Huge wounds. How does that show up in your work? Did you have some moments where that came up for you and how did you experience them?
Diane: Well, I think you and I have talked about this, but I had this experience, the most poignant one that comes to mind is, when I used to work in Germany a lot. I’d be there three or four times a year. And then I also worked in Israel and many different countries when I was … Back when you could travel, that was kind of my life, going from country to country, and I was younger also. But I’ve always had this really strong interest and sensitivity about World War II. I mean, even from the time I was young, and my family, my mom and my dad were in World War II, from the American side of things.
My mom worked for Western Union and was keeping communications going and also reporting to people when they had lost their sons and people in the war. My dad was in the war. But for some reason, I just was really focused on it. When I was in Germany, a couple of times this happened, we would come to find out that there were second generation Holocaust survivors in our training groups, and then one woman, her mother had passed away, and she went to go through all of her mom’s stuff to clear it out, and she found out—she didn’t know this at all—that her mother was very high up in the SS in the Nazi regime.
She was sort of horrified by that, but she brought that into the training. Then we found that there were some other people that had connections ancestrally as well. It just opened up this space. The training was safe enough. We emphasize safety a lot obviously with trauma and with attachment injury, that’s a really strong focus, and we had lots of wonderful assistants and facilitators there that could hold the group. But we found that people went into a very deep experience of holding both of those polarities of victim-perpetrator, but also what happened. We know all know the story of that.
But this healing, it’s just almost … I’ve had this happen in training, as I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, I don’t say this very often, but the sort of light that penetrates the darkness and almost the more … I’d really love your comment on this, because it seems like the more severe the trauma, the deeper the sacred space that opens up. I did a training in Israel, and when I got on the plane, it was when Bill Clinton had thought he had worked something out with Arafat, and they thought there was going to be this peace between Jerusalem and Palestine.
By the time I landed, everything had, you probably remember when this happened, everything had gotten really bad. There was terrorism all over the place and it was definitely a war zone. I did this trauma training in the middle of this war that was happening. I mean, people, they were passing out gas masks to the kids, and it was an unsafe time there, which I know has been happening relatively recently also, so this is relevant to today, but there was so much happening in the collective that I just kept just being present and working with resource and resilience and addressing trauma and naming it and being honest about it and having the group do the same thing.
We just went into this unbelievable sacred space. These are just two examples of what can happen internationally and with whatever the traumas are going on there. But there’s something, I think that we have such a powerful capacity to heal as human beings, and then we get a bunch of us together, I think it amplifies. You have not just my nervous system or not even just our nervous systems, but everybody’s nervous systems, and bigger than our nervous systems, our consciousness, that can hold these kinds of really, atrocity-driven experiences, and it starts to, like you said, move into flow, but in a bigger container, a bigger element of how that can happen.
I worked with somebody from the Indigenous First Nations in Canada, and we were talking, she had done my training. She’d done some trauma training. Lovely human being. She said, individual therapy doesn’t really fit for her Indigenous ancestry, but her parents were artists—and I know this is part of your summit—and they brought all the generations, everybody that was still living obviously, into a group and they went back and they reengaged them in like the birch bark building of canoes. It’s not a papoose. It’s called something else. I’m losing the term right now.
But they had them do all their original art together and they were speaking their original language, and she overheard—she knows the language—and she overheard two great-grandmothers saying to each other, “We’re still useful. We still know these things.” Getting together and in the large group and doing their tribes’ art and speaking in language and everything, just started to open up this space. It’s beautiful when we move into a larger orientation, a more … I love your book about this, obviously, and I love the fact that this is such a strong focus for you. I’m so grateful you’re doing what you do, and I have so much to learn from you about it, and the glimpses of the way to work with it for myself and when it’s happened, and been available. I really treasure those experiences.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s exactly … I resonate so much with what you said about your experience of light and the experience of the sacred space that opens up. I also had this in many groups with Germany, Israel, Jewish people, Holocaust survivors, and Nazi descendants. In the most intense encounter, there’s the most amazing presence. It’s unbelievable. It’s like, this is, and I think that’s exactly what you describe, I think there, in exactly that, is a crucial answer about … Because when we look at the tremendous amount of trauma in the world, and I look from a very tiny processor perspective of one single human being, it’s like it’s going to take forever until … And we are producing more trauma than we can heal with all our work on our clients.
But in a way, what you said, when many people come together, the intelligence of so many nervous systems creating coherence is amazingly powerful. Within that, I saw many times this kind of deep presence show up, and that has a much higher transformational capacity as this separate individual state sometimes. You know when we feel separate? Because in that sacred space that you described … and I love the language because it is sacred. You get the feeling of sacred, and healing is … Every time I see a real deep healing in a group, it’s always like a sacred moment. You can feel it. Like something is happening that is deeper than regular process work. They have regular process work, and then you have a moment of a real healing.
I think that the language of sacred describes this for me the best … and I once, for this summit, also talked to Otto Scharmer, and he described a similar experience also in Germany, in a group with a similar context as you described, and he had a similar experience, like this much bigger consciousness that suddenly was in the room, present. I believe that there, in that, there is the power of a much bigger collective healing is in that emanation of presence that arose, that you describe. I find it very powerful.
Diane: Well, that human beings have this capacity. We have this access to, I don’t know what we’d want to name that consciousness, but the sacred space. It’s so beyond, I don’t know. It’s there. Then I think you’ve been doing a concentrated study on how do we access that, and I feel like I’m dedicated to learning more about it, too. It’s absolutely possible, and it often comes in the darkest moments, the darkest times. There is this, I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book, An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum, but she talks about … She was a Jewish woman who was a journalist during World War II. She was a person that the Nazis put in charge of helping deport Jewish people to the camps.
She knew what that was about, but I guess they would have Jewish people do that so that it would be less upsetting or something, which is still horrible. She could go in and out of the camps, and she would go into the camps and she would see the suffering, the obvious suffering, but she would also see the suffering of the German soldiers. And she felt like she’d never say anything about that, because that would not be okay. But she also saw this light penetrating all of the suffering. For me, that’s been sort of a really powerful metaphor, even in processing my own trauma history.
When I can see the light coming through it, then I know, okay, I’m getting somewhere, and also when I’m teaching groups, when this presence arrives, it really … I know you must have an experience like this, but I just feel like when I’m in teaching mode, somehow, it’s not even me. I just feel like this download of something, presence that happens, and I’m so grateful for it. And it teaches me and the group at the same time and it holds the group. I can see it holding the group. Sometimes it looks like a really big presence, like 700 feet high, and other times it just … I feel it. I’m so grateful that we have this, because otherwise it would feel really hopeless.
Thomas: Right. I often say, every therapist or healer or medical professional in some sorts too are, in a way, agents of grace, the divine quality of grace, and what you describe is exactly that. That when we are deeply relational and when we really give ourselves, because we are going—you in your way and I in my way—but we are both going into very painful areas of life. When you go in there, it’s like there is this element of grace that’s in the deep relationality, like exposing oneself, as you said at the beginning, to very difficult trauma transmission, comes with the support.
You described that support in multiple moments now, in different words, but again and again. I think that’s a fantastic … That’s very important to remember, that giving oneself to feel and be really authentically engaged—I think many people in the healthcare system do that, that we really care—that triggers that power of grace. You had a beautiful description. I think many people that do that kind of work really from the heart, know moments like you spoke about, yeah, described.
Diane: That’s why it feels like such a privilege to be in those spaces with people.
Thomas: Exactly.
Diane: It’s beautiful, and of course, you’re also holding tremendous pain, so you’re honoring and being respectful of that. But at the same time, there is this co-emergent grace. I love it that you’re calling it grace, that really fits for me.
Thomas: How do you see, given all your experiences as trauma therapist, seeing so many clients, doing your teaching, traveling around the world, what are the main ingredients? Sometimes I speak about going from traumatizing cultures to trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive and trauma-integrating culture.
Diane: Oh, I love that.
Thomas: Or we look at, okay, what are the components of a collective healing movement, which honors the individual healing that needs to happen, but which also honors the interdependence of individual and collective as one whole? They’re not separate. The collective is not out there. I am also a part of the collective, so where is the collective? It’s all of it. It’s like individuals are expressions of the collective. What are the ingredients of individual and collective healing in your understanding at the moment? What do you think supports that healing movement?
Diane: I keep seeing an image of Indra’s net as we’re talking. Well, it’s one of the reasons, I guess, I love group work, and I work with groups on Zoom, but also when I do live things. I had a healer from Brazil attend one of my trainings, and he said, he goes, “How do you do this? Like in five minutes, there’s this safety. There’s this feeling of containment, and people are being really vulnerable immediately.” I don’t really know how that happens, but we have professional training, so a lot of times, they say, when they’re in other trainings, they guard what they say because of their profession. They don’t want their reputation to be damaged or whatever.
But that doesn’t happen for some reason. There’s something about allowing this level of permeability and vulnerability and honoring each person’s experience, but then addressing it as a group as well, like going from personal to universal, going personal to universal, normalizing, seeing the intelligence in how we’ve reacted to something. I spent, really, I spent two and a half years—I thought this exercise was going to take three months—to learn how to speak in a way that reframes things into empowerment and support and relational safety.
I thought, “Oh, I can learn,” because I had grown up with a lot of inner critic and critical environment and all that, and I thought, “Oh, this won’t be hard.” It took me about two and a half years of really focusing how to speak. I think I kind of recommend that practice—would probably take other people much shorter time—but because it helped, I think, create this space when we get together, whether it’s online or in person, for the right holding for these things to start to come up and start to be able to be metabolized.
I mean, I think so much of, with collective trauma or in individual trauma, it’s like learning how to excavate it from implicit memory, because we all could probably rattle off our country’s wounds. But how many people in the United States even talk about the Civil War? I mean, that was huge, but I mean, maybe in the South they talk about it more than my area. Even in Colorado, there’s all these reservations across the country, but you almost never see an Indigenous family together, like at a McDonald’s or in a restaurant. It’s just like becoming aware in a certain way. I think focusing on collective trauma is so helpful to bring our dissociated denial back into the front, but in a kind way, in a compassionate way, where people can speak their truth, and that may be harsh at times, but there’s this holding for it. All voices can be heard, and there’s enough compassion.
Some people can disconnect and some people can fragment, but there’s enough people that are present and there’s enough compassion available, enough love there, that this magic starts to happen. I don’t have it broken down into like step one, step two, but I just am so aware of the potential and so appreciative of who we really are as human beings. I mean, we’re way more than we think we are. We have access to unbelievable spiritual experiences and different states of consciousness. We can go into these deep dimensions of trauma, but we can also … My soul seems to want to understand the dark of the dark, as well as the light of the light.
I have a lot of friends that they don’t really, they sort of are not too interested in the dark. They’re just more wanting to do the spiritual dimensions, which I think is fabulous. But for me, something in me, my incarnation is about looking at the worst part of things, and then also, for some reason, I think it also opens the gates for me to have these, and other people, to have these shifts in consciousness that are helpful.
Thomas: Absolutely.
Diane: It’s a funny thing. I had a deal. I was in a spiritual school, like I mentioned, for 13 years. Then I hit my trauma history in a really, really major way. My spiritual school didn’t quite get trauma, because it wasn’t their focus. You can’t go to a cardiologist and expect dentistry, so I was kind of on my own. I couldn’t find anybody. I eventually found Peter Levine, but for years, I couldn’t find anybody that understood trauma the way I needed it to be understood for myself. I kind of made this deal with being. I said, “Look, I will go through anything. You can take me into psychosis. You can take me into anything, but just if I could ask to understand it as I come through it, if I could understand it, I would really appreciate that.” Because I figured, okay, I’ve been doing spiritual work for 13 years. It should be good for something, and it was for sure. I just started having these downloads. This is available to us and just I’m so grateful that I’ve had this career, and then I’ve been able to focus on this and learn, and I’m grateful that we have this access to the deep, sacred healing that we do.
Thomas: Beautiful, beautiful, Diane. Maybe, given the time, I see our hour is up, but it’s so interesting, and there’s such a richness in what you share with us. Given all your experience, and how you speak about your own personal experiences, it’s very accessible and it’s very alive. There’s one thing that I’m interested in your experience, because in a way, you shared it right now in describing your own personal experience, that after 13 years of practicing, you hit the deeper trauma layer.
I think that’s an important process for collective feeling., We are building a certain coherence, and that coherence has the power to, in a way, host the incoherence of the system, if it’s not overwhelmed. We are building coherence, but then, I think, and I’m sure you experience this over and over again, like with an individual practitioner, meditating, but it’s lovely. Then it looks like you’ve never meditated before, and then you have these phases where everything is disturbed. I often say, yeah, but it’s amazing because it shows that there’s enough coherence or enough safety that that coherence creates, that the nervous system can release another level of fragmentation.
Diane: Absolutely.
Thomas: For an inexperienced practitioner, or for an inexperienced society, this might look like a relapse. It might look like, oh, I’m back to square one. But for an experienced practitioner, that’s a natural cycle of detox and self-healing, and it brings up more stuff because that becomes the fertile ground of a deeper secure base. I’m curious what you say to that, how you relate to that and how you experience that in your own work.
Diane: I totally agree with you. I think as you develop and mature and evolve from practice and from healing, you’re also able to handle bigger pieces. So, it’s like you move from like a wound around will, or a wound around strength, or a wound around love, to working with the totality of your experience more and more. That can be, when you first start doing that, that can be quite overwhelming, but it’s actually a sign of capacity.
I remember when—we call this the [stupor?] work in my spiritual situation—but I remember when I was working on totality, you were also experiencing the wound on totality. It sometimes takes you to all of your suffering at once, like everything at the same time, where all of humanity’s suffering. It can take you to these pretty big chunks of experience.
Then, of course, as you can get support and stay with it, and all of that, you move into a very big spiritual experience as a result. But in the middle of how … I remember saying to my spiritual teacher, “I can’t believe I’m in this much darkness. I’m in this blind spot and it’s so huge. I’m impressed by how huge this darkness is. I’m impressed by that. I’m trying to be okay with it and observe it and be curious about it and all that, but it’s really impressive how it’s blocking out everything I feel like I’ve ever learned or any development I ever had. I just feel like, completely, it’s all gone.”
It is a challenging moment in your practice when those things happen, but that’s why it’s great to be around other people that have some experience that can say, hey, yeah, I get it, and this is probably what’s happening. Yeah.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. Beautiful. Diane, I would love to continue so much more. Is there anything for this conversation—because I’m sure we’re going to have many more—is there anything that you want to leave our listeners with, anything at the end that you think we didn’t speak about, or that seems important to you or any kind of concentrated summary?
Diane: I think what I hope people take away from this, and that I’m hoping to take away from it as well, and with you, it’s easy, is just there’s this sacred holding that’s, I think, ever-present. Then, of course, in our busyness and our ego structures and all that, we get a little disconnected from it. But one of the … That when we have had that experience over and over again, even when you’re not directly in it, you know that it’s there. That’s such a support and such a deep wisdom, that we can hold this wisdom till our clients experience it themselves, and sometimes we’re holding it before they’re able to feel it.
But as we’re feeling it and able to be in it, then it’s a big invitation in the relational field for them to enter into that space, too. I don’t talk about it until they experience it. I mean, I try to reflect that as they’re moving into that direction, but I’m so inspired and grateful that this is part of our human situation.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. That’s so beautiful. Diane, thank you. I entirely enjoyed our conversation. It was very alive, very rich, very informative, and I simply enjoy the transmission that you bring into the room. I can feel your lived experience and I can feel your passion for what you do, and that spreads like a very beautiful esprit, like a spirit around you, and the very resourcing transmission, so thank you for that, and thank you for everything you’re doing and all the people you are touching. I think it’s very precious.
Diane: Well, I’m soaking in your presence as well, and thank you so much for having this time to share.
Thomas: Thank you.
