Thomas Hübl: Welcome to the Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m very excited to be here again with Elise Loehnen. Elise, welcome.
Elise Loehnen: Thank you. Love being with you always.
Thomas: And I see your cats joining us and we had such a lovely part one basically today we had already a conversation recently and we decided to continue, which I’m looking forward to. And so, basically first let’s see how are you doing and what’s important or interesting right now in your life that keeps you busy or keeps you internally engaged, and then we’ll dive deeper from there.
Elise: Yeah. I’m trying to remember exactly when that first conversation was, but I know we were in it as much as we are always in it collectively. And it feels like in some ways the pulse of the planet has gone down while simultaneously rising at certain points. And I feel like in the last almost year, my book has been out for a year. I’ve been with people post COVID in this past year of really trying to understand. And I know this is the focus of your work, of where I begin and where I end and others begin and end and what part of this work is better managed collectively and what part can only be managed safely, collectively when we understand that beginning and ending.
And I was sharing with you before we started, what’s my responsibility and when am I taking over responsibility for other people and or does that diminish their own experience and or is that overwhelming? And I’m sure, I know you have thoughts on this, but that’s what I’ve been trying to find the proper level of engagement.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s interesting. Let’s dive into this for a moment because I think that might be very interesting exploration from many people. When we say over responsibility or when we say the responsibility is the ability to respond to something. Like I’m able to respond to you, I’m able to respond to life circumstances, to my family’s needs, so I’m able to respond and what’s the process of over responsibility?
Elise: That’s beautiful. And I think that I am talking about something that we use that word for, but that’s something else which is an over empowerment of myself in situations. And taking ownership of experiences that finding that line between proper engagement and overextension where I see this a lot in communities, particularly with women. Although I think it’s probably true for men too, particularly men who are really balanced in their feminine, this deep intensity of caring. And I hear from women, “How can we be letting any of this happen?” And I’m like, “I’m not sure that the language or that the relationship is necessarily appropriate.”
It’s this line between feeling like you’re creating your own experience and we’re creating this world together and leaning too much into that. I’m maybe having trouble explaining it, but the balance between compassion and empathy and engagement and recognizing the limits of ourselves and letting things evolve and happen. It’s almost this like, I think I relate to it as a sense of over importance in some ways if that resonates for you. Or it’s my job or my responsibility to fix everything that’s happening in the world and be engaged and involved with everything happening in the world. And maybe that’s not my job, I don’t know.
Thomas: Yeah, the question is what it serves?
Elise: Yeah. It’s a good question.
Thomas: That’s what I meant before, what’s the difference between responsibility? I’m engaged in something, I have a relationship to whatever is happening. But the question is when it’s over, what’s actually the more than that? Maybe when we look at what it serves, and maybe also for everybody who’s listening to us, maybe many of us know what you’re just talking about. That we have over responsibility is an interesting process. What’s the over bit or where am I when it’s over in myself? To my own inner experience when that happens?
Elise: Yeah. I was talking to this, I was chatting or pulling the thread with this woman, Sarah Bessie, who is a big voice and she’s post evangelical Christian who has been involved in deconstructing and reconstructing. In her last book, she talks about how she’s deeply in the process, and I relate to this very much of distinguishing between peacekeeping and peacemaking. And to me that felt like a very profound distinction of not being able to tolerate the presence of what’s emerging. And so, wanting to suppress it and you see this in families of course all the time, like the maintenance of a status quo and a fear of disruption, separation, whatever might be present and felt but not arising.
And then the difference between that and letting it come up for some higher value of peace. I also feel like that’s very hard to discern in our collective at this moment when I think for so many of us, we can’t tolerate understandably any of it. And so, we’re projecting or flinging how bad this makes us feel and our inability to change it onto each other. And it’s of course just making everything worse when I think we all actually want to make the same type of peace maybe.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Yeah, saying it also isn’t the discomfort that comes up in me with what happens out seemingly outside part of the peacemaking process? Because you said it beautiful, you said, we feel the discomfort with what’s happening in the world and we begin to project that onto each other. Because I think our capacity to be with discomfort is often reduced, limited. We try to reject the tension, the discomfort, the friction, the inner also sometimes not knowing what to do and then doing something as a compensation. But actually, deeper down we might be confused, overwhelmed, numb, activated. And I think it needs some capacity to be with that and not see that as a non-contribution, but actually as a contribution of a world that tries to detox something.
Elise: Yeah. No, I think that I resonate with that so deeply, Thomas. The way, because I can sense it in myself in some ways, it’s the whole point of my book. When we have these feelings of discomfort, we call them bad, deep shadow, whatever it is. When it starts to rise or emerge in us, we try to escape it as quickly as possible and get it out rather than eradicate. It’s this instinct to eradicate rather than integrate. And I don’t know if, and you would probably know if we can actually develop this internal washing machine or sump pump or whatever the metaphor is of discharging it, moving it, sending it into the ground.
Or I don’t know what the right metaphor is, then does it increase our capacity to be with other people who are in this experience and in the collective where this is happening? And then do we have a greater capacity to hold and move it without reaction and activation?
Thomas: Yeah, that’s what I deeply believe. I think that we are sitting in the legacy of the former generations that preceded us, and there’s a lot of unresolved stuff. Like we haven’t been born into a very tidied up and clean space if you were to see how many ghosts and how much stuff is in our living room. So, I think the capacity that you’re speaking of being with the discomfort, and I’m not talking about constantly trauma triggered. If people carry, if many of us carry a lot of whatever attachment trauma or traumas, so we need to take care of it. And just being in a triggered state is not what I’m saying.
But from a certain level of inner resourcing, I think we are in a detoxification process so that layers of individual, ancestral, and collective trauma, undigested material are coming up. And I think especially when there are crisis, it’s a sign that we anesthetized or through painkillers and entertainment and all kinds of distractions on it for a long time. So now, the crisis is saying stop, you can’t ignore that very thing much longer. And I think that’s also what’s happening, for example, with the climate crisis. So, that stuff wants to detox itself for us to grow and mature, to be able to also solve the climate situation, we need a certain maturity.
So yes, I believe very much what you just said, that we need to develop that capacity to be with discomfort, to be with tension. Also, polarization I believe is always if you have enough in a space to host the tension of the seemingly unresolvable, then we are not polarizing because then polarization is tension. But if we reject that tension, we identify ourselves with one of the poles that has less tension, but it’s more unconscious. Because then we are enrolled in a, oh, I’m part of this or I’m part of that. I’m against this one and I’m othering that one, and so I’m in it. But if I have more space so I can say, “Oh, there is tension. I cannot reconcile that at the moment, but I’m willing to be with it.” And I think it needs a certain level of maturity to do that.
Elise: And responsibility, interestingly. The ability to respond, I think for those of us who are less trauma triggered, who are less processing our own stuff independently, maybe from early life, that’s our responsibility, I think. Is to be able to stand in the center and hold that tension without polarization or pushing into a binary or othering each other. I think that’s absolutely right to transcend and include and hold without getting activated, which I think is probably really difficult for everyone, I think for women in particular.
Because I think everyone has assigned a lot of goodness to being, “on the right side of history.” That there’s this fear that if you aren’t, “on a side,” that you are abandoning some moral cause. But I think that the reality is, which is hard to see, is that the moral cause is somewhere in that transcending and including and holding for something that’s not this. What does this lead to? This just leads to eradication and exclusion, and I think we all recognize that is actually not what we want at all. Right?
Thomas: Right.
Elise: What’s the end result of polarization and otherization? One side gets destroyed?
Thomas: Exactly.
Elise: Yeah.
Thomas: Exactly. We want to clean always one part that feels uncomfortable to stay with the part we believe is more true, instead of holding a deep inner alignment to the values that we want to represent, but seeing the dichotomy or the polarization in the world already as a symptom of something deeper. Instead of that we are fighting with the symptom and say, “This is right, this is wrong.” Instead of, “Yes, I’m committed to the values of the right side of history,” but not to perpetuate the eradication of one side, the wrong side of history because the wrong side lives only in opposition to something else.
So, I think that’s, especially when we talk about conflict resolution or when we talk about holding a global space for conflicts, holding a global space for climate change, holding a global, some maturity, properties of maturity. Like a mature self and not just a separate self, a mature also collective self. And I think there we are really challenged that when you see it on social media, you look at social media and you see tons of fragmentation, polarization, like the extension of our conflicts in the world is displayed. And there I think we have a lot to learn, we have a lot to mature as humanity.
To be able to resolve some of the things really substantially and not just through patches on top of a inflamed wound. Because often what happens, and you have the patches here now we took care of it, but actually it’s already growing to become the next cycle of a similar issue.
Elise: Do you feel, you mentioned the environment and that as another symptom expression. And obviously even the definition of nature, it is defined as everything that’s not human, which is funny the way that we see ourselves as outside of nature. And is that also, not take the environmental, not to take global warming to a spiritual level, but to take it to that. Until we recognize that our micro process is the same as the macro process, I’m assuming we will never resolve this macro world until we resolve the micro.
Thomas: Yeah. Exactly what you said. We say, “Okay, go through the forest where is nature around me versus, I am nature too.” And that the interdependence, the sense of I’m an interdependent whole, I’m not a separate particle within the biosphere that’s called human, but my body, I’m nature too, same as the tree or same as the rabbit in the forest. And I think in that even when we say people destroy, humans destroy the planet, where does the planet start or end? And where do we start or end as we as humans? Where is the human and where is the planet and what’s in between?
And I think examining what actually creates that perception is looking at the root cause of many, many behaviors that are destructive in relationship to the biosphere of course. Of course, there is destructive behavior but that’s already a side effect of something much deeper that we often don’t pay attention to. Even in climate movements, the dualism between humans and planet, humans and nature is in the language encoded. So, there’s some kind of unconscious agreement being transmitted when we speak like that. And I think exactly as you said, we need to resolve, we need to look at not what’s wrong with it because when we look at what’s wrong with it, we already reject it.
So, we can never really become intimate with that separation. But I think to become intimate with the ah, what are we saying when we’re saying that? How does this live in me when I don’t pathologize it, when I say, “Oh, I’m really curious about that.” What actually creates that separation in my experience? Or is there that separation at all or is that something I downloaded from the large language model where we source our language from as human beings. What actually happens there? That would be great. I think that’s exactly what you’re pointing.
Elise: And when you think about this ongoing detoxification process on every level, is there a version? How do you see it? Do you see it as this, you mentioned the ghosts in our houses, our lineage? Is it as obviously that’s not concrete, but in some ways that is concrete where there are these energies, these entities, these puddles, pools, I don’t know what they are of unprocessed feeling? Is that creating images or metaphors or turning it into a physical spectrum? Is that not the right or does it just depend on how people perceive the world?
Thomas: No, definitely. It’s important that we look how does this live in our experience and not just take images in that don’t relate to our experience, that’s important. And as you said, yes, and I saw this in over 20 years of working on collective trauma layers, there are archeological layers of trauma. And trauma is disembodied experience that couldn’t be experienced because it was so overwhelming at the time that it happened. It doesn’t matter if it was a 100 years ago, 50 years ago, five years ago, a year ago, whatever couldn’t be experienced is like a disembodied ghost.
But we can say if there are lots of collective disembodied, ghost, if cultures go through wars or if there are dictatorships or if there are, I don’t know, is the holocaust or other genocides. So, there’s so much pain, where does that energy go? That energy is not being destroyed, it’s being disembodied, it becomes like a cloud. And so, I think we are living in a world where that cloud reduces our perception. So, we are so used to, it’s like the metaphor will be you drive your car and you’re so used that it’s foggy that you get a shock when suddenly it’s sunny. Because we are so used to driving a reduced visibility where you only see 50 meters. If that becomes normal, then an open relationship, an intimate planet, that the planet is not so distant and far away and then the different cultures, but that everything is actually here.
That we have access to all that data because the biosphere is a huge supercomputer, but it’s so fragmented that everything seems far and fragmented. We don’t understand each other, we can’t collaborate well with all the side effects of a reduced visibility. But actually, the detox is actually that energy wants to come back to heal itself. It’s not a disturbance, but we try to put painkillers on it and anesthetize it to not feel the discomfort. And like this, I think we block a lot of evolution or development.
Elise: Yeah. This healer or this spiritual healer I work with talks about it like as layer. She’s like, it’s almost like oil spills in different parts of the planet. The density like archon energy in certain areas, that’s palpable. And as you said, it’s unrealized shadow projection, it’s not evil in the way that we love to use that word. It is waiting to be filled with light and needs to be enlightened, it needs to be integrated, it cannot be eradicated. And that part of it is what we were going back to and I think we should talk about tools for that discomfort.
But how do you use your body or nature, your part of nature to integrate as much as you can without becoming overwhelmed or sticky? I don’t know, I don’t know what that process is. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Thomas: Yeah. I think one is we all have our individual challenges. You have challenges in your intimate relationship, you have challenges with your kids, you have challenges at work, you have challenges with certain parts of society. So, we all experience the unintegrated parts of ourselves through relationships with different parts of our life. So, one practice will be that I’m curious every time something is hard, difficult, challenging, whatever, that I have my own practice to look what actually is going on in myself. And I say this was difficult, something was difficult here. So, it was hard for me to experience my experience in relationship to whatever was difficult. And as long as I only project these outwards, there are circumstances obviously, but there’s also something here that experiences those.
And that I go deeper and instead of saying it’s difficult, I say, “It scared me.” Or in meeting I felt shamed or I felt ashamed or I felt I got angry and I didn’t say anything. And now I have this tension in my stomach or in my belly or in my throat. Anger came up, but I suppressed it. And if I don’t pathologize that, but I say, “Okay, I want to develop my intimacy within myself and learn from my own experience, so then I practiced this myself. And then I think we need also more collective containers like conversations or groups as you said before, where we dedicate time to say what’s actually the legacy of our society? It’s the legacy of our culture. What are these dark lakes, the unprocessed shadow lakes in our society?
And I think if we create safe spaces where we can have conversations and conversations puts us in touch with deeper feelings or with the experiences of our ancestors, the generations before us. So, then we expand our awareness, the radius of our awareness. And I think that’s courageous because then we are less and less bound to the repetition compulsion of those shadows. And we are more and more integrating those shadows as creativity, as agency, as clarity, as relational capacities, resonance and so on. I think that and I’m sure you and your work also have developed rituals or ways how to be together. And also, what you wrote in your book, how we work on patriarchy or patriarchal aftermath in all of us. I think that’s very much needed.
Elise: Yeah. I had this experience and of course it’s perfectly timed that we’re speaking today. I went to a retreat with this woman Carissa last week, and it was like an anger bubble burst in me on the first day where I was enraged. And it was a really interesting experience and I stayed that way for four days. And I knew it was important as it was happening, and it didn’t disturb the peace or my engagement with other people who are around me. It was just so alive in me, Thomas, in a way that I was like, “Wow, I don’t know that I’ve ever let myself actually experience anger.”
And I knew it was really important and I knew I didn’t want to turn it off and I didn’t want to stay there forever because I was waking up at 5:00 in the morning just being enraged. Again, there was no target, there was no, “trigger.” I was just like, “Oh, I’m supposed to be experiencing what this feels like. And then I did a session on the last day with this energy healer at Uta who lives in Germany, and I felt we were lying on the ground, we were in nature. And as she was putting hands on me, I could feel this intense resistance and then it was suddenly again a sump pump at an RV park where I just could feel she did three or four points where I could feel this intense tunneling into the earth.
And it was interesting too because I was like, “I don’t want to lose this. I don’t want to live like this as a steady state, but I need access to this. This is clearly important to me.” And I’ve seen a lot, I’ve worked with a lot of people, it was the most intense sort of reiki energy session I’ve ever had. But it felt like I was cleaning myself or replumbing myself. I don’t know what I was doing and I hope that I have more access to my anger because it felt like a sediment release. And I think women in particular, it’s like, we don’t know, my anger gets stuck at my throat chakra.
And I don’t know, it made me think too, I was like, “I wonder how many of us have a certain threshold or cut-off where we just can’t actually get into our bodies or experience our emotions in an embodied way.” And then how do you turn that on? I think I had that experience at least the beginning of it. But how do you get people back into their bodies? Because I can’t imagine I’m unusual.
Thomas: I know you said it beautifully and you said it also that anger is pent-up energy basically. And there are different kinds of anger, I think we discussed this once also, that there is the anger that is basically a rejection, it comes on top of existential fear. But then there is the anger that is an autonomy movement that wants to make more space to ground ourselves more in life and own more the inner land that we are standing on. And you said it with the different point like pipes into the ground.
And I think that anger is a very important emotion for grounding and if anger is very suppressed, so we feel uprooted. And when anger gets integrated, then we feel our body more. But then it becomes strength becomes more decisiveness, it becomes clarity, it becomes speaking things when they need to be said and not postponing them, it becomes more immediate relational regulation. And so that’s very powerful and as you said, many of us carry, we needed to suppress anger and what you feel in your throat is a way, is an intelligent mechanism to suppress the intensity because it threatened the belonging most probably in the original family.
And so, when we say, “Oh, it’s not that I cannot experience my anger, it was intelligent to suppress it at certain moments in my development or my life to not threaten the attachment relation or to not threaten the belonging.” And now we begin to get to know the intelligence and the more we re-own that, the more the expression will happen naturally. Because some people say, “I cannot express it,” which I think is the shadow version of, “Oh, I was able to suppress it when it was really needed. And at that time, it was really better for me to do that than to be angry when I got punished for being angry, when it didn’t fit into, I don’t know, my education system, my family system, my father got angry when I was angry and it was threatening.”
Whatever the story is or people that experienced violence at home to suppress the anger is vital. And so, I think that that reframing or depathologizing those defense mechanisms is important. But as you said, getting in touch and not, first of all, many people don’t think, “Oh, it will stay for the rest of my life like that,” which is the forward projection of the mind, but that’s not happening. But what happens is that I don’t need to shut it down immediately that you were in a group space, you had a safer environment where you could really be with it. And then it can find its way through your system and that’s very powerful description of-
Elise: It was so powerful. And to be present with people and going into town and ordering a coffee and feeling perfectly pleasant, not activated, nobody would’ve experienced me as perturbed and yet present also with this inner experience. And for me at least, this is the way that I felt it or express it to myself. It was an early violation as a child from a stranger, a man and a friend of a friend and feeling like I didn’t have the power to do that. No, stop, get away from me and feeling like I was smiling my way through it, waiting for someone to intervene on my behalf.
And I think that at some point that got stuck and I felt like in this moment, and we’ll see if I can hold this and really integrate it, I grew up. I felt like I grew up in the last five days and recognizing, “Oh, I can say no and I have a no.” And it is not a kindness to myself or anyone else to violate my own boundaries. I can say no and I don’t need to use my throat to higher mind it, justify it, explain that I need to actually bring my whole body online for a very clear no, no.
Thomas: And that feels so lovely.
Elise: Yeah.
Thomas: Like a very clear no is very trustworthy.
Elise: Yeah.
Thomas: Isn’t it?
Elise: Yes. And it’s very easy to understand and less confusing. And yet I think it has carried with it so much anxiety for me of I can’t just say no.
Thomas: Exactly.
Elise: Yeah. I don’t think I’m alone, I think a lot of women in particular, I identify obviously intensely with women, but I feel like we need a reason and that a selfish no is not okay. It must be triangulated or justified or I don’t know, but I hope I can keep it because I think as you were talking about that vitality presence and groundedness. And I think anyone who listens to my podcast, anyone who listens to your podcast has a sense of the amount of energy that they are running in their body. And how when there’s no groundedness, I feel like my body’s looking for mechanisms all the time to try to stay rooted in heaviness or something, I don’t know. But I think actually being able to ground feels essential.
Thomas: Absolutely, absolutely. And you’re also saying it because some people do say no, but they say no from their mind, but their body doesn’t say no. So, it then creates this double messaging to the environment. But when anger is integrated, because anger is the emotion that can create grounding and clarity. And it means that because often we contract and then we try to either hyper rationalize or find excuses or find reasons, as you said, all the defense mechanisms, but actually we are scared to say no. And when the power is palpable, then the emotion and the body and my mind together when they say no, it’s also much clearer in the space to understand.
Elise: Yeah. And don’t you think too that people say yes and their body is saying no, too?
Thomas: Exactly. That’s why it’s so confusing. That’s why I said at the beginning, a clear no is so trustworthy because once somebody says yes clearly or no, clearly, it’s trustworthy. Because if the person says it and the body means it makes sense. It’s not only a cognitive no, I understand you. No, but my body doesn’t get the message. I get your message, boom, and that is a clear boundary. A clear boundary is not a wall, a clear boundary is an energy transmission of a state.
Elise: Yes. Letting it come in, running it through your body, no or yes.
Thomas: Exactly. Or I don’t know, but if I don’t know, I don’t know. But a yes is a yes, and then no is a no. And then if that’s clear inside and without the anger being grounded as strength, like having roots like pillars in the ground, it doesn’t feel fully clear in the embodiment. And I think we are much more, as we said before, we are not separate from nature, we are much more in these primal instincts of nature, our bodies recognize that immediately. So, when somebody’s no, yes wavering, we feel that even if it’s unconscious, we get that. And when it’s clear, we also get the clarity.
So, I think for everybody who’s working on boundary issues or strength and anger and agency, I think that’s such an important work. And it’s often being has all kinds of judgments on it but I think what you experience is a great role modeling also for everybody who’s listening that it’s really important. And that groups, when they’re well led, because people send out a lot of information, then one person’s process activates other people’s processes and together the group’s growing. And then one person gets angry, the other person wakes up in the night and is suddenly feels a lot of rage, but something is cooking and if it’s facilitated well, we are growing together.
Elise: Yeah. And becoming more available, which is the paradox I think of what we’re saying, which is while a no feels like a clear boundary, the actual assertion or alignment of that yes and no makes you both more available to yourself. But conversely available to other people even if they might not enjoy your no. But it is a less, the whole point in some ways is taking down that armor or exterior wall in order to come back online.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. That’s how you said something very beautiful because when the no is grounded, it’s relational. I don’t need to protect myself from you because I’m scared and I say no, and I have a wall here. When the power is online, I can say no while I feel you. And that’s so much more available and that’s so much more active negotiation in life that is relational. And I think then also much less harm happens because the life is much more connected. And you said something very powerful, we are much more available and we are clearer at the same time. So, we save more energy for essential things and we don’t waste energy so much in all the side effects of unclarity.
Elise: You mentioned in terms of group leaders and skill and a group in which you can evolve, I guess rather than devolve. How can people know? Is it an in felt or intuitive? Assuming they cannot come and work with you, how can you tell that a group has integrity or is safe or is it not a question of safety?
Thomas: No, it is a question of safety, definitely. It’s like I think in the leadership of a group, what I would look for is congruency. If what I can feel or what’s being said is also something that I can feel if there’s a transmission of what’s being said. If it’s more intellectual concepts or if it’s embodied. And of course, when we are hurt ourselves, we can’t always discern that. That’s why we go to these groups because we have issues in recognizing that where we are wounded, not in general. Where I’m integrated, I can feel that, but where I’m wounded myself, I’m more vulnerable to not sensing that or not getting it immediately. So, that’s why I’m putting this as an important remark into the room.
But basically, I would look at, okay, do more and more people feel safe with each other? Is it a relational environment? Is it more top down or is it more relational and competence based? How is the hierarchy in the system? Because we don’t want to reproduce top-down power over leadership in groups. We want group leaders that are clear but relational. And so, I think it’s a question of safety but the other thing is when we are hurt or traumatized, and we experienced a lot of unsafe family system dynamics or so. When we go into a group, we won’t feel safe because we’ll project our disowned fear onto the context. So, that makes it more complex because it’s not going to be, “Oh, I come into a group and safe.”
No, even if the group is safe, it’ll bring up in me also at times, at least the fear that I needed to suppress in my own upbringing. So, then I will say, no, but this is not safe and this is not safe because we also have a vigilant, then we see small things that confirm in a way our experience of not feeling safe. It doesn’t mean that the group container is not safe. So, it is safe when it can hold what is not safe. When we can positively work with the fact that it’s not safe. For example, an unclear group facilitator would say, “Yeah, but I want you to trust me.” A more clear group facilitator will say that your mistrust is completely welcome.
That not trusting is not trust is not the remedy for not trusting, but consciously not trusting and finding a relationship to the necessity of mistrust. Because everybody who doesn’t trust has a good reason in the past. And so, we can only work with it when there is no should or when defense mechanism, that’s your resistance. No, if somebody is resisting something, it has a good reason. So, pathologizing, that doesn’t help. So, that’s why I think the more the trauma-informed understanding came into the self-development communities, we stopped some of the earlier encounter type. Sometimes power over dynamics that happen in groups to push people into experiences because we know that’s not helpful.
When your anger pops by itself, then your nervous system is ready because it came up, and then you feel you’re sitting in intensity. But it’s not that somebody came and tried to induce a lot of anger in you so that you feel something. And I think this kind of coaching or group spaces, so this is how it has been done maybe some decades ago, but that’s not anymore.
Elise: Yeah. I think that’s really helpful. Yeah, my anger was an independent process and an experiencing that I was having separate from the group. And you mentioned resistance too and in groups that I’ve been in, facilitators have essentially said, “Your resistance, you might have resistance and you might feel really sleepy. You might feel upset and just try to be present with your stand-up move, just try to be present with yourself.” Which is, I think it’s always interesting to watch your own somatic relationship and to take it in as information. Right?
Thomas: Totally. It’s beautiful what you’re saying because we had, for example, a great example recently in one of the last groups I led a strong collective trauma process around the Holocaust came up and about this phase of silence in Germany. And then one participant, and it was really to feel in the room you could feel a dead silence in the space. And the whole group was holding space for that but it came up in many people like this phase, the memory of that phase. And then one person spoke and he said, “Well, when I feel my body, it feels like there’s a huge hole in my body.”
And it’s not that he did 10 minutes before, he was pretty embodied, but then when that process comes up, it came up, you could see how much of the collective shadow is actually active. Because that part that he felt is always absent, not just when that process comes up. When that process comes up, we take the flashlight and we shine the light onto the absent part because then suddenly it makes sense. But I believe that these parts of our nervous systems are always absent, but because we never look at those collective dynamics in such a deep way, or we almost never in our society in daily life. We go to work, we go there, so we are not looking all the time at this shadow elements.
So, in regular life, it seems like we are embodied minus all the parts that we don’t feel that in Germany is specific for this, but it doesn’t matter which collective trauma it is around the world. I think our nervous systems are absent in certain parts and we don’t even know until we have such an experience that, “Oh, wow, actually in that part of myself, I don’t feel myself at all.”
Elise: 100%.
Thomas: So, that it’s not just in the group in that moment, that part is always there, but the consciousness is not there. And that’s why we don’t know that we are actually missing a part of our body awareness. And that also means if I’ll never have that experience, and then one time in my life I say, “Oh, why do I have certain health issues?” Yeah, because I don’t feel a part of my body. And it looks like in normal life I do, because I would say, “Oh, when I go to run, I do sports, it’s like I feel myself.” But I think certain parts we don’t feel simply, and that’s the collective unconscious that we all share.
Elise: Interesting. So, you think that those, because I have a dead zone in my body that I’m aware of and that I worked on last week. But you think that that’s collective and not specific to me?
Thomas: No, it can be anything. It can be individual from attachment trauma, but it can also be ancestral or collective. And often because in many ways we are much more developed in the individual in a work than I believe we are in the collective work. So, I think there are many more unfelt, empty absence spaces in billions of people. It’s like as if all the billions of nervous systems are a big jigsaw puzzle and there’s a drawing on all of us, and that drawing is sometimes absent. So, that’s why, that’s how we co-create the collective unconscious. It’s not existing somewhere outside where else it lives in us, but without us, without our web.
And so, when you carry that part in you, it might very well be that that’s a representation of some of the collective trauma of the US. And because it has never been seen in its context where it makes sense, it seems like, “Oh, a woman in the US notices that there is a part in the body that is absent.” And so, I think when we look globally, I think there are billions of nervous systems where information data is missing.
Elise: Yeah, I totally agree.
Thomas: Yeah.
Elise: I know we’re at time. We’ll reconvene regularly.
Thomas: I think we should reconvene. Every time we start, another thing emerges between us. It’s amazing
Elise: Someday let’s do something in person.
Thomas: Okay, let’s see. Let’s continue to do this. It’s very, very rich. I think we’re riffing off each other in such a beautiful way. Yeah.
Elise: Thank you, you’re amazing. Yes, and I feel everything that you say.
Thomas: It’s lovely. I’m deeply enjoying our conversations. It’s great, it’s very creative and conducive, it’s very beautiful. Thank you.
