hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forest Hansen if you're new to the show thanks for listening today and if you've listened before welcome back I'm joined today by a very special guest and expert on intergenerational trauma Dr Mariel bouquet Dr bouquet received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University and her work has been featured on major media Outlets like the Today Show and Good Morning America she's also the author of the new book break the cycle a guide to Healing intergenerational trauma and host of a podcast by the same name so Dr bouquet thanks for joining me today how are you doing thank you so much for having me I'm doing really well feeling grounded today how are you I'm doing good I mean I always like start these with a little bit of nervous energy I think like I just can't I just can't help it even after doing it for like 5 years so I always feel a little fired out of a cannon but like you were saying you have like a really wonderful soothing presence and just kind of how you are so I think that helped kind of take some of the tone out of me a little bit I'm glad to hear it so I've just been really looking forward to having this conversation with you and as maybe a way into talking about your work um a piece of your personal story is that you were born in the Dominican Republic then you moved to New Jersey when you were pretty young I think you were like 5 years old and from there you went on to get your doctoral training at an ivy league university Columbia University's Medical Center and I'm just wondering what um what Drew you to doing this work and like took your attention here you know I I when I had to really reflect on this like a few years ago I actually came upon the moment of self-introspection where I was like you know what I think that this work has always been with me in in some way or another I just never really had the language to say like I want to be a psychologist that helps people with X and and the reason why I say I I believe it's been with me is because there were moments in my life when I would actually see my family and also people in my extended Community even people who weren't related to me but I would see them in a state of suffering some sort of emotional suffering and I always felt like I'm going to do something about this I want to change this kind of like these like childhood savior fantasies of like trying to the adults around me that were visibly in pain and you know I eventually interestingly enough I actually um I had to have a major surgery when I was 23 and I was really nervous I was like oh my goodness a surgery like I just I was anxious Beyond you know capacity and someone actually suggested to me that I attend therapy and in that first therapy session my very first session first therapist uh the person said you feel really psychologically minded I think you'd make a great therapist you should probably consider it and he proceeded eded to actually coaching me through the process of getting into grad school um and eventually you know Landing where I am so the that when I like reflect back I think somehow this work found me because I didn't intentionally like grow up saying I want to be a psychologist and then you know proceeded onto that career I it wasn't it wasn't like that at all so I I'm grateful because I couldn't imagine doing anything else that is really great and one of the things that's really present in my dad's story and it's a story that he's told on the podcast in the past um is how he has this like vivid memory of being a pretty young person like sixish years old uh he grew up uh in a very rural community and just like standing outside of his house and looking at it and having just like a real awareness of the conflict and like the suffering that was inside of the house kind of like you were talking about just like that that awareness of the ways in which the adults in the room were suffering too and there was this desire that you had to like do something to alleviate that so that's like really present there for you also which I just thought was like really interesting and I I wonder about that maybe it's a question I'll ask some of the other psychologists that come on or something I really think that there's a through line for us I believe that some of us are we happen to be like tender Souls from the womb and we were just like people that absorbed our environments differently um and and and that really kind of eventually may have found our way into this line of work but at least in my generation and I'm sure Generations prior like high school environments no one ever told me hey psychology is a career by the way you can probably go that route and I think that it I it would have sat really well with me given just how temperamentally I'm constructed and built um but even when I was a kid my mom she tells me stories about how people would say wow you have you have a little one you have a toddler I would have never known like because I can't hear any crying any I was just so quiet and so profoundly attuned to just my environment just really taking it in I've always been that way and I still am do you think that that tendency that you had because we talked a lot on we talk a lot on the podcast about things like parentification or the ways in which a kid kind of steps in to fulfill different kinds of adult roles for their parents by maybe being extra quiet or extra sensitive or performing different kinds of tasks um at the same time there are aspects of like personality that we have that can just be very authentic to who we are like you're saying you know you just come out kind of a supporting generous giving person and I'm wondering what you think about like the balance of those two things in a healthy way well you know there is there is a balance and sometimes there isn't right sometimes it tilts in One Direction or the other I can say with certainty that for me I I I believe that that quiet temperament was praised and um was lauded by the people in my community but little did they know that I was a very anxious child I was actually absorbing a lot of what was happening yeah and it wasn't until I was an adult with now an understanding of what anxiety actually was that I said oh my goodness my entire childhood I was on fire I literally felt like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin and no one ever knew including myself if you don't mind me asking about it what was the the process that you went through to become more like aware of that part of you maybe to use some like ifs language here or that like aspect that needed a little bit of soothing um and what did you what did you do about it like what was your personal Journey with it because I think that that's like a very an experience a lot of people have gone through yeah you know the anxiety for me actually went into places where it I don't know how I managed to do this but I actually had panic attacks that went unnoticed so I you know because panic attacks the ways that we tend to think about them is like they're very visible someone can't breathe you really you know you notice it people come to their aid and I was a very silent uh person in my panic attack like I was like literally like not able to breathe not able to you know really kind of like be in my own body uh dissociating and things of that nature while also looking like I was okay uh and so it it I believe that that also was a function of my childhood like not putting extra loads on the people around me and just like really kind of swallowing my anxiety if you may I think that that triggering that happened when I had to get surgery and I had to be placed in such a deep level of vulnerability you know in the in the hands of a surgeon I think that that then made the anxiety and the Panic so palpable that I was like this just is not it cannot be the natural way that I'm supposed to live on Earth yeah and so it was like that you could not see it yeah totally yeah it because it you know it I would fidget I would sometimes kind of bite my cheeks when I was younger when I was a kid and so those things were the ways that I would soothe my body but I once I was an adult I was like it just I just know in my inner being that this is just not the natural way I am supposed to be every single day there must be a different way like I see people around me and I can't imagine that they would be feeling the way that I'm feeling inside and so it was like that higher Consciousness that came into play and my understanding of myself shifted and and and transformed as a result um now the journey itself has been you know I I've been in therapy ever since so I even did therapy when I could barely like almost couldn't afford it like it is the one thing that I don't skim on I'm on time to every session I'm present at every session I'm very intentional about the work and I have been for the past 15 years and a part of the reason why is because I I saw one that I needed the help and two the ways in which it was transforming not just how I was feeling but my relationships the people in my life were also benefiting from the work that I was able to do and be more present and mindful less irritable right because that was also part of the constellation of symptoms that were surfacing when I was anxious and so a lot of those things um started you know becoming better but initially the work really looked a lot like the talk therapy proper it was just you know me telling the stories that lived in me that I never got a chance to tell but that weighed me down emotionally eventually it got into being a little bit more structured a lot of those like more CBT kind of um practices and then it transitioned you know when I started receiving my own training I I was trained in a fellowship and I in that process I was also oriented around meditation um taii you know like a lot of different practices and when I started layering that onto my own healing I really saw the change it it it just completely the the healing became exponential for me so you're you're describing a pattern here that you had that one could kind of connect the dots on and see how it might be somewhat environmental in nature you had some anxiety you had some concern with the the people and the things around you you mentioned not skimping on therapy which makes me suspect that you're a saver in other areas of your life you could see you know where these various things might come from and I'm wondering how this connects to your your broader area of expertise on intergenerational trauma and how you think about these Tendencies as being passed down in various kinds of ways you know the more that I actually dig into my family tree the more that I'm able to see that suffering was the status quo every single living day of my parents grandparents great-grandparents lives and when I think about my own childhood and the fact that I I don't recall ever feeling at ease and literally since the moments that I had consciousness of my own self that helps me to understand you know what this was something that was there even before I could verbalize a word right like it was present in me so it makes a lot of sense to even apply the lens of the work that I do to my own life which I have done and I do continuously um and that is the case for a lot of us a lot of people you know when they come to me and we start telling stories of preverbal or you know newly verbal experiences they start saying you know um I was told that I was hard to soothe I was always you know somebody that I'm a crier right like you know the tender Souls of the world and I always get very curious when people tell me that because that was language I used to use for myself and I'm like you know tender tender that that if you're just Tender by by Nature right let's talk about who else was tendering your life you know who else had that like propensity to feel big emotions and and when we start peeling the layers both in my own life and in the lives of my clients um there's always this through line of oh yeah you know my parents they suffered such and such I continue to unearth a lot of new stories in my own family just this week my sister and I had a conversation with my mother and we we were holding space for her you know my mother is uh cheerful and calm in how she expresses the story my sister is uh holding back tears because there such a sad story of my mother's childhood and I'm sitting there kind of self like self soothing you know by just like remaining calm and present for my mom and then also for my sister and and I'm looking at all of us and I'm like um you know these stories the story needed to be told my mother needed to say I didn't feel loved right like she needed to say that and that needed to feel itself into you know our our conversation but you know when I when I think about my mother coming from that kind of childhood it it makes a lot more sense to me why I I didn't feel settled and I felt like I needed a lot of love like a lot of it um I'm trailing a little bit in the conversation now but I I just think that you know sometimes when we have these conversations with our elders it allows us to also learn about ourselves well you're you're talking about like the different ways that we we pass a pattern down if that kind of makes sense like it takes a lot of different forms uh a lot of the time in the kind of classic Western psychology literature there's a focus on behavioral patterns right um You you watch your parents do things a certain kind of way so you just sort of mimic how they do things uh but you're talking about these other ways that this kind of transference happens like through the through the story of a community Through the tales that we tell about ourselves or the people around us or the kind of people that we are we could even get into like some epigenetic stuff around like gene expression and how the experiences that people back in our lineage particularly grandmothers um go through can impact Us in different kinds of ways and so there are all these these tools that are not um they're not fuzzy in nature they're like pretty well understood in terms of how this kind of thing can happen where it's not just about your parents did ex to you or around you and therefore you became why it's this sort of broader model that taking place that I think you're speaking to really effectively here yes and you know and I think that it's important for us to have that understanding I think that we have done Humanity a disservice in not being able to help Orient us as a global whole around the fact that the ways in which our genes are in essence manufactured starts two generations prior to us even being born and the fact that you know our grandmothers especially like are holding our parents at five months gestation with already the precursor cells that we would have already developed into and the fact that there are three bodies existing in one at a particular point in time taking in the same Sensations the same stressors right like the fact that all of that is also a part of the initial structuring of our genes is is a really important detail for us to know we know a lot more about how that process actually leads to physical health complications or disease and the genetic ties there we have not paid as much attention to the ways in which it happens from an emotional standpoint as well and some you know I even look at um some of the the children that are in our society now and some of the language that happens cross generationally where adults and especially grandparents are like they're so sensitive and if we really look at what the adults have gone through and the fact that a lot of those emotional wounds have gone unaddressed because we didn't have structures in society you know to say like oh mental health is a thing you can go to therapy and you you can like you know work on your wounds we didn't have those systems in place in the ways that we have for physical health and so you look at it from the lens of intergenerational strain that's passed down generations of course the next generation is going to be more tender of course they're going to be sensitive you know it makes a lot of sense from a biological standpoint even could you give just a couple of examples here of some of the Common forms or like common patterns that you see walk into the room when you're doing work with people yes absolutely when people are really coming to that point of understanding that okay yeah this seems like there's a generational tie in the suffering in my family um a lot of them will will have Reflections like oh you know a large part of my suffering comes from not receiving enough love from my caretakers they never said I love you I know they loved me they cared for me right but they never said I love you and I realized that they too suffered that same fate their parents never told them they just you know apparent took care of you and made sure that you survived and and that was it and so we we start seeing that there's layers that there's these ways in which the experiences that they are having and that they've had in their childhoods were experiences that were recycled the same goes for toxic relationship patterns or cycles of abuse um there may have been cycles of abuse that as an adult now a person may be recycling that they saw growing up and they they didn't know to disrupt those patterns because they were raised within them and they saw that as the norm the same goes with family secrets that tends to be a big one too and the family secrets that get passed on right because no one's willing to really bring them out of the closet and air the dirty laundry as we call it and and really excavate the wounds that have kept those secrets in a place of Shame and so shame gets translated forward through generations of families like people learn to keep secrets they don't keep secrets by default that's not actually kids they tell everything you know they have to be socialized to keep secrets and and that happens primarily in a family that's a great Insight I love that that you have to be socialized to keep secrets that's a great line yeah and and socialized to to also you know experience a lot of things that have those generational ties there's a lot of socialization which is why I always say you know intergenerational trauma is that type of trauma that is found at the intersection of our biology and our psychology uh because we we may you know have those like tender emotional remnants that are biologically based and and inscribed in us um but we also have a lot of the relational psychological sociological patterns that are interspersed throughout our lives that also give way to these trauma patterns surfacing generation through generation so sometimes I'll talk to people about half the time maybe a little bit less than half the time who say something like wow I really knew that this system was dysfunctional while I was in it or wow I could really even as a kid I could just see that something was happening here that you know was was not quite it for for lack of a better way of putting it um but a lot of the time also it's just the water that we swim in and we're the fish that doesn't realize that it's in water and that that insight into those those patterns or that systems just isn't there what do you think helps people like develop that first step of insight that often gets them in the room to work with somebody like you interestingly enough a lot lot of the people that come to work with me are individuals who are now parents who are seeing their pain reflected in their children's eyes and they think oh my goodness I know that pain and I don't want to pass it down it's mostly cycle Breakers who are parents who are like or preemptive parents people who are like you know what I'm thinking about the parenting Journey I'm dating someone and you know they seem like a good match and now I'm thinking about you know in more future tense um now I'm wondering what are the aspects of my childhood that felt like I would want to pass on what's the Legacy there but also what are the parts of my childhood that I I really want to leave behind that I do not wish to pass on and and that's where a lot of the the the meat of the motivation comes from for most people well that's I mean really touching for starters and kind of connected to it like once somebody has that Insight um I've I've often just been like so surprised and pleasantly by the amount of insight that a person can have into their own psychology if you just like ask them about it right they'll tell you all about their patterns and their behavioral Tendencies and their you know my mom did this and my dad was that and here we are today and and yet for whatever reason that Insight doesn't always transition into the ability to actually do something about the issue whatever it is and I'm sure that you've seen that much more much more closely than I have in terms of your work with people uh what do you think again like it's kind of a turning point for people around taking that inside and turning it into some kind of actual action unfortunately for many folks it it's when they tend to hit rock bottom and I will say that there is the subset of individuals that have reached especially when I used to still work at the hospital have worked um with me having come through the doors of the hospital sometimes just you know in in dire condition and and then you know eventually when we start peeling back the layers we realize there's a lot more there um so for those individuals typically you know they see themselves really at the bottom and really don't know where else to go right because they've peaked and and they decide I'm you know I must follow a different path for other individuals more often than not they start to feel the tensions in their family unit very vividly when they start to recognize so they you know for example this is T the season right like people go into family gatherings and they they have now this like elevated Consciousness point of recognition and an understanding of how incredibly uncomfortable it is to sit across the table from from individuals that feel um not great to their soul right and So eventually like people start feeling like you know what I just this just cannot go on so there is a a um um a through line really kind of like with a lot of folks where they just see that things must change like there is a kind of like a breaking point if you may for lack of a better term that people reach um sometimes it's a Breaking Point in the fracturing of um really kind of like their their energy and and them feeling like you know they just cannot continue in that path that they've been walking because it they just cannot be any more unwell and sometimes it's uh the environments that they're now appraising and realizing they cannot function within those environments anymore and they need to change them most most notably family environments I thought that that was a wonderfully poignant but also diplomatic line you had a second ago there you know across from people who they feel just aren't great for their soul is like a really really beautiful way to thread that particular needle um but yeah I mean our family systems there's this wonderful line I think it's from Lori got La I heard said it our families are the ones who have known us the longest and therefore these are the systems that are the most resistant to change you have the most water that's under the bridge with these people and you know I can I can think of like my sister I've known my sister her whole life she's a couple years younger than I am I got a lot of water under the bridge with her and I still remember her when she was 12 and 13 and I've had to kind of update my understanding of her as time has gone on um but there's still a part of my memory that's tied to that younger piece so for people who are doing this work inside of that like family context it can often be really hard to to get a lot of like change energy going just because the system has become so entrenched and I'm wondering what you've seen about that yeah you know uh it is incredibly hard you're absolutely right I I don't understate that at all with this work which is why the work I always call courageous because we really have to step into courage on a daily basis and what I mean by courage is we have to kind of Step also into vulnerability which I see as courage um we have to help ourselves to really step into the places that still have deep wounding and that keep us in um a specific kind of dynamic with the folks in our lives and really almost kind of face them right I myself like I grew up with a sister who she and I actually didn't get along until she reached the age of 30 and I I was 27 and um you know it her parentification having to take care of me made it so that she felt like I was a burden to her and I was you know just loved my big sister but always felt rejected by her so there was a bit of a tension there now she's like my best friend but um but we had to do you know um some hard work we had to have honest conversations about the pain pain that was caused even as children right because of the ways that our family was structured and the things that needed to take place that placed burdens on us as children we needed to have those dialogues and they felt gunky muddy ugly messy they had little structure they were longstanding they weren't just one conversation tied in a bow and when we can actually express it this is the way that it looks I think that it can help free us a bit more from the fear that we hold around even having them more often than not people think okay you know um this conversation is going to look this way and they come to realize that it doesn't and there's a sense of disappointment there and then other emotions that also come alongside that and I think that that Al is a hindrance for us we need to have a clear understanding of how ugly these conversations can look they are not pretty they're not it's not that they're you know um they might be violent not that but that they just reflect pain at the other side of that there is opportunity for connection um sometimes there isn't and we have to acknowledge that too and and even in the book you know I mentioned um we have to grieve the parts of our family that are immobile are unchangeable are frozen the individuals or the characteristics and we have to in essence like almost kind of like attend a funeral of the people that we wish they could be and and we have to step into an understanding of who our true family is with all of their flaws all of their capacities to hurt us all of their um you know shortcomings and engage almost kind of like in a new relationship with the individuals that are truly in in front of us and none of that feels great at the beginning grief doesn't feel great and even grief that is in our minds that we have to construct right because we forget that there is a loss you're losing the individual that you held on to and you have to kind of like reconstruct a new relationship so all of that is very complex work and it is hard work um so I always like to you know always preface intergenerational work with the understanding that this is not easy and it is very likely to not look like a picturesque kind of conversation quite the opposite beautifully said um and it was also reflective of of certain aspects of my own experience like I mentioned I have a younger sister and we did not get along super well growing up um we were in Conflict most of the time uh there was definitely a layer that you were talking about in terms of me feeling like a little affronted by the existence of this other being that has come along to you know require all of these things that a young child requires and we had a pretty a very beautiful process but like a just like you're describing a fairly Rocky process in my early 20s um where we went through some of that repair work and one of the central moments of it and I think that she would be okay with me telling this story I I'll double check with her before we air this episode but um where she just kind of had a moment with me where she was just like why don't you love me you know essentially she was like why like what's going on like what's going on here dude why don't why don't you love me and that totally opened the door to a completely different relationship with this person but it required a moment of like real vulnerability and real like putting it on the table from her and I think we would have gotten somewhere functional and good without it but I think that it was that vulnerability and that like access to the interior that she had in that moment that allowed us to get to actually a really wonderful relationship that's like been developed over time but that's like a high bar of practice man like you got to be willing to go there in that way and that you know she was whatever whatever was happening in that moment for her it really came through and I'm wondering uh what are some of the I don't know if it's like the internal supports or maybe just like a moment of Grace or whatever it is that you think like helps people get through these hard conversations with each other wow that's so beautiful thank you for sharing that and um we have to honestly believe and be socialized to believe and to understand the truth which is that we can survive our own vulnerability most of us believe that if we open up that tenderness and expose it to folks that that's actually going to leave us in a place where um we're going to dip into the black hole of you know darkness and like then point of no return we just won't be able to really resurface from vulnerability that actually vulnerability has an opportunity I see it as an opportunity to really liberate ourselves from the deepest parts of our wounds and very often we're just not socialized to believe first of all that we can survive it and then secondly we are actually not socialized on how to survive it how do you get into a conversation that is vulnerable and then what do you do after how does your body takeen that experience a lot of people are sitting like stewing in anxiety while they're having conversations and not realizing that they have actual tools within them to help them through the process and even help them with the emotional remnants that are left behind when the conversation is finally complete and so the fact that we don't have awareness of the fact that we can survive and the fact that we don't have the tools that we can put in place to actually survive it with more grace I think those those two missing pieces are probably the bigger parts of why yeah yeah there's like a there's a fear of annihilation piece to to the whole thing a little bit I like I'm just speaking personally like there's something about going into it whether it's a difficult conversation with somebody or maybe more to the point of of the bigger topic we're exploring here around intergenerational trauma just like that exploration of the Interior like going into some of the rooms in your own house where you're like you know I I don't know if I want to walk into that room today because it's spooky in there um some friends of mine who have talked about uh not wanting to go to therapy because they feel like they're stable right now and they're concerned about what will pop up for them um that's a that's a big one that you hear and I really appreciate how you're focusing on tools and resources that can support us through that process as opposed to giving like a script to follow because a lot of the time when uh when people talk about this stuff they'll ask for okay well like how do I do that how do I have that conversation with that person and for starters I'm not a clinician but even if I were there are 10 million different situations that a person could be in like it's very hard to counsel somebody from afar about their specific situation but you can give them resources that might be able to help them through that experience or you know have that moment of insight where they see an opening like the way that my sister did in that moment where she was like there's an opening here and I don't know why I see it but I see it and I'm just going to fly through the opening and you know we'll see what happens on the other side of it um and so I would love to get kind of an ex I don't know if an example is quite the right way to put it but like uh a thought from you on like how this work actually works with people when you're doing it like what are some of the resources that you're giving them what are some of the tools that tend to help is there a process that this normally takes for people like what does this really look like yeah I love the question you know the the work itself is variable in length according to the person the layers right and also if people want to do a long-term process of like yeah integrating the lessons into their lives so that's a little bit more fluid however the actual structure of the work tends to feel fairly similar across the board and the I actually made sure that I was writing uh the book actually from the perspective of being someone who needed a book like this and what I would have wanted to digest and so int intentionally I like take people through what feels like a similar process to what I do in my actual work with clients and a lot of you know therapy is very open-ended right but some of the best models that I have seen for trauma based work have been structured around like phasic models phase one phase two phase three so although I didn't explicitly say that within the actual work that I do I do keep that in mind that we are working in phases the very first phase believe it or not is not digging into the layers of our family tree it's actually grounding ourselves it's settling the nervous system it's getting to a place where we actually do deep breathing by default it's getting to a place where we have lifestyle changes that actually integrate holistic practices within our lives in a very nuanced way and almost in a way that it doesn't need to feel like an added task but it is simply a way of living so I start there I start with really a full system approach with every single person and just like reorienting them around a different way of being so that they can befriend their bodies and they can actually have a body and a nervous system that isn't working against them and a body and a nervous system that is feeling like it's being nourished and cared for and being more regulated and more at ease so that when we start getting into phase two which is the digging work which is actually building out the intergenerational traumat Tre actually engaging in an intergenerational adverse childhood experiences assessment to get a sense of all of the different layers of wounding and like when we start Excavating those wounds it can feel really heavy so if we don't actually have a system in place ahead of time that actually helps a person to ground and sustainably so then we're we're actually going to be reopening wounds that can feel ret traumatizing so phase one will always be that grounding element phase two would would be of course the excavation and like really getting into the details of what happened here through the generations phase three is integration so it's really taking in a lot of the ways in which all of those wounds have then transpired into actual thoughts behaviors uh relationship Dynamics um ways to approach life work children like all of the different ways in which now those wounds are translating into the ways in which you've operated in life and actually getting an understanding of how to then start cutting them at the root we're cutting the behaviors we're doing things differently we're finding alternatives to how you can be and manage life that doesn't reflect the cycle keeping process that you were engaging in before even if it was subconscious but that act actually reflects how you're building a legacy that's different and moving forward in the direction of building health and abundance in your life I would if you're up for it I would love to essentially just like walk through each of these three phases a little bit um and because I'm sure people are listening and they're like sounds great I had how can I start doing this so I would love to start at the beginning like what are some of the um the resourcing tools sometimes people use that kind of language I don't know if you prefer you know resourcing or grounding or soothing or everybody's got their own word what are some of the ones that you tend to tend to come back to or or maybe that have been particularly helpful for you yeah both on a personal node and and also that I integrate into my practice has been the practice of sound bath meditations um and for anyone not familiar with what that is they are um Tibetan derived um practices that actually Infuse singing bowls that emit specific frequencies that actually um make it so that both on a mind and body level we actually experience greater calm and ease uh so it made sense you know for that to be a natural segue into you know some of that grounding kind of resourcing work uh in my practice I want to make it so that people are able to do the work on a continuous basis because I I get a lot of I'm a busy mom you know I'm a CFO and so when we can make these practices accessible there people are more likely to integrate them into their lifestyle so when I talk about like doing in Ence like kind of like homework I talk about doing breath work doing humming and doing rocking and breath work it's been popularized enough that I think a lot of us understand the ways in which you know the breath is is an actual powerful tool that we all have that can actually regenerate our bodies in in a multitude of ways but also help us to uh create new synaptic connections inside of our brains and nervous system that are structured towards health and structured towards ease and calm so there's that right and then there is humming which which if um for all of us we have like a part of our nervous system that actually helps us to relax and release there's a part of our nervous system that helps us to understand oh there's a threat coming once the threat passes the other part comes in and says we can relax go back to balance we're okay and so there are ways that we can actually stimulate that cranial nerve which is called the vental veal nerve and the the stimulation can be done through humming more specifically through humming in low tones but sometimes even like with kids I tend to just say like what's your favorite song and and we hum the song or I you know give them so so it's a way to really kind of integrate the practice into someone's day if somebody's driving to work and they listen to five songs on the way to work they can hum the songs instead of singing them and they're already baking it into their day and the third is is rocking which also has a vental vagal stimulation process that it initiates um and and I like to also you know like I rock and I sway from side to side Naturally by default now but you know for anybody who thinks that that might be something maybe like a little weird what I like to also reference to is hey think back to when you were a kid let's say a baby and just a toddler somebody was rocking you to sleep why did that work it worked because it helped to soothe you and it helped your nervous system to feel at ease and relaxed and it stimulated your vental vagal nerve There's an actual function there and it actually helps and it works even in our adult lives so if you can emulate that then you're already giving yourself that soothing experience that you're going to need so I do some practices in the therapeutic practice itself with clients but I also then help them to integrate practices into their day-to-day lives so that they can do it more often and that that forms the grounding resourcing kind of phase that that we tend to get into yeah so we actually had Steve pores on the podcast not too long ago and uh talked with him about some like similar related things he I think that he actually mentioned humming at one point as like a good way to get that kind of inner ear stimulation kind of just enter that enter that soothing state in the body um and I really appreciate how you're focusing here on finding a way in for a person that feels accessible to them that can be done in the course of their day that is maybe connected to things that were supportive of them when they were a younger person um because we're all carrying around that you know that younger part whether we mean that in a kind of technical ify way or if we meet it just in a more practical like we have those memories and you know I certainly still think of myself from time to time and kind of like forget that I'm in my mid-30s and still very much feel like I'm a young person and like big Spooky World and just having some authenticity about that I think can be really helpful for people absolutely I love the framing of that and I I share that with you being in my late 30s and you know um feeling like sometimes you kind of go into your younger self and not really realizing that that person has you know kind of made a a a pre like their present now you know on your behalf uh and and yeah you know I think that it's really critical for us to embrace these methods that have been interspersed into society in these ways that haven't been necessarily called out I had a parent that rocked me to sleep but I never really understood that that could actually be a way in which I can sell soup I can you know if I'm going from one meeting to the next and I have to walk from you know one part of the office building into into another There's an opportunity to hum There's an opportunity to do deep breathing there's a chance for integration of you know a practice that wouldn't have made it into my day to actually be a part of my day and my hope is that eventually we can get into being the type of society that can actually teach this to children so that children wouldn't have to be the adults in search of their ease and their calm and their peace and their relaxation in the ways that we so desperately are doing so right now I hope we're close to that maybe one day but I certainly hope we're close to that and I think that um I just I just remember my dad talking about working with kids a lot of his work was with children and families and how he used play as a tool he did a lot of play therapy um learning how to play different games how to regulate different emotions that come up in the course of of natural play you know frustration irritation the balance of wanting to win knowing you can't sometimes you know whatever it is like all of those like very very useful regulatory tools and sometimes I think that we just like don't give kids enough credit we tend to view them as these like I don't know unformed larvae or something like that sometimes this sort of like dismissive way where it's like oh yeah you're just yelling the grocery store because you're having a temper tantrum or something but it's like things happen do you know we have stimulus in response like something is happening that child is having an experience that's profoundly authentic to them in that moment and is frankly arising more often than not very understandably particularly if you think about our our broader like biological context um prior to the last 10,000 years or so the kinds of environments we were in the kinds of experiences we were having and how so much of life is like so foreign to that these days yeah yeah we're very disconnected and removed and you know we kind of have to find our way back to health um and so which is why you know because we are nowhere near in my opinion um nowhere near the place where we need to be as a society to actually say we don't need to search for health but I do appreciate the fact that we are open to the conversation and that conversations are being had on a global scale as well so you outlined your your phasic model earlier we've kind of gone through phase one here and then phase two you were talking about essentially opening the door to that that deeper material whether it be about a person's individual experiences or maybe it's more tied to to broader experiences that have happened in their family system and you mentioned a couple of things you mentioned um creating like a a family Trea of traumatic experiences of different kinds or just like what's happened to them uh my partner Elizabeth is a sematic therapist and I she did an exercise like this while she was in graduate school I forget was I keep on maybe you know the words for it I'm totally forgetting what it's called but it's basically like a tretry where you have all like the connections of different people and there's different notations for different kinds of uh challenges that they might have experiences or issues that they might have had um then you also mentioned uh Early Childhood experiences and adverse childhood experiences would you mind kind of walking through what that looks like or what some of the big tools are there I hope I'm not mistaken but I think she may have reference to a genogram which is you know kind yes yes yes yes yes that's the one you nailed it thank you thank you I was searching and it just wasn't there yes yes and you know um both counselors and genetic counselors are actually taught uh to construct genograms and I was actually one of my supervisors um within my own training was actually formally trained as a genetic counselor and then as a clinical psychologist after she was a few years uh into her career in genetic counseling and so it you know I I was able to like really get an in-depth understanding of that element of the work and that excavation process and so um it was just a very lucky experience that I happened to have which then I thought this also needs to be a part of the work of course because it it presents so much Rich data that we can utilize um so what I did is that you know I I couldn't necessarily find an intergenerational traumat Tre that actually reflected what I wanted us to understand and what I desired for us to understand in the context of the work is that there are people in our families that hold specific ific experiences the experiences themselves was a part um that some you know was scattered into some trees here and there Beyond those experiences those individuals had coping mechanisms sometimes called you know especially if they're not necessarily adaptive but maladaptive they have specific ways in which those coping mechanisms translated into trauma responses and so those trauma responses were also pieces that I desired to have inside of the intergenerational trauma tree because it is those circumstances that go on invisibilized in our families become the norm and then we don't actually like excavate them enough to understand oh I've adopted that myself so the other parts of the tree would have been the trunk of the tree and the trunk in essence signifies like who we are and what we've adopted you know have we adopted like perhaps a people pleasing capacities but in addition to that we've also adopted this chronic sense that our stomach is turning and maybe we've gotten a diagnosis that resembles irritable bowel syndrome but in reality a lot of what's happening is a lot of internal constriction of our gastrointestinal tract because we are in a constant state of emotional alarm right and so like it's really Excavating a lot of those layers so that we can get a better understanding of ourselves from this lens beyond that we have a root system and that root system is reflected of everything that is in essence like coming into the family tree like there are certain sayings that we have and internalized sayings like sometimes people internalize like the idea that they're broken and that tends to be like a recycled you know narrative so we need to include that into the root system and then there's also you know there's a whole entire soil system also beneath those roots that we need to understand as well and that soil system is everything that is kind of part of the microcosm that the family is a part of like it's all of society the institutions that we're part of context cultural context everything that's being fed into our homes subconsciously through the socialization process that is also feeding trauma into our lives and into our homes all of that needs to be a part of we what we have as an understanding if we want to do a lot of The Liberation work from those roots from that soil that is Barren soil it's you know it's just it's it isn't feeding life into our family and so I I I found that being able to then build a tree that had all of these different components added to it added greater Nuance to the understanding that people had about not only what transpired and everything that is in essence feeding the the ways that they're living their lives but it also allow them an opportunity to think about what Roots need to be cut do we need to change the soil and so it's from you know that point that we also you know kind of go into an excavation process of the person's adverse childhood experiences which what we know about adverse childhood experiences felt a little bit limiting to me and my clients and so what I did was that I I started adding pieces that that felt more PR into the work that I was doing average childhood experiences focuses only on our childhood but what we know through through a lot of studies is that parental um experiences of childhood adversity are actually a really big risk factor in parents actually producing the same wounds in their own children and so if we have that through line of an understanding that childhood Mal treatment especially can lead to Childhood Mal treatment it's going to be really important for us to understand what happened to them what made it so that they developed into being the kind of parent that then parented you this way and and and then beyond that you know average childhood experiences is also a place where I believe that we need to look at the social microcosm and the ways in which we are also beings of this world and the world is a world that can also feel traumatizing we all suffered a pandemic what about those experiences that may have left our families an economic depravity or you know um a community wounded and in what ways have those also factored into the wounds that have translated into our homes and so I I I get very comprehensive about these excavations and so you know when we when we're able to really tie all the pieces that we have right we don't need to have the entire story but whatever it is that we do have then we can move into that integration process with more data really at our disposal so some of those tools creating a genogram going through an adverse childhood experience checklist something like that they can kind of help somebody get enough space from whatever it is that they're talking about that it's not that it's impersonal the piece of paper that you're filling out or the practice that you're doing becomes almost a kind of buffer between you and what happened but there's just a little bit of room there but often as part of this process um when particularly when you're really getting into how you felt about it or what was really there for you in some kind of very personal way it can become a very emotional process you're really opening the door to a lot of material um including really re-evaluating how you think about yourself how you think about your family how you think about the experiences that you went through when you were a young person like there's some real reorganizing that's happening here and that can be extremely disruptive for people um and I'm wondering what you've just seen about that moment sometimes where like the lid pops and things come out in a new and different way and what what helps people through that and also helps them kind of reorganize after it well this is where being a trained therapist can be incredibly helpful for me in those moments right totally now I will preface this by saying the original Aces for example is is a form that most of us clinicians are trained to give to a person while they're still in the lobby for them to fill out and then give to us that's not how I work it's it I couldn't possibly have someone Excavating their wounds in a Lobby setting um and and suppressing their emotions about it so that's not you know and the the questions in the one that I've structured there's about 10 in the original mine has I think 35 we go through sessions upon sessions upon sessions of actually going through these questions sessions upon sessions of building the tree it doesn't just happen in you know one swoop one session it's a process where I'm diving into this with the person Leaf by Leaf root by root and we're really going through the process of how is this sitting with you how is it making you feel where do you feel it in your body can we do some Brea you know it's very paced in in a way that enhances healing and doesn't further injure well I think that's a very wise way to approach it uh that is not so well integrated into the kind of classic Western model that we have about these things where a lot of it really is about not just like the efficiency of it although I think that's some of it is about efficiency a lot of it's about what what leads to easy study design and like clean study design what can we what can we do in an 8-week clinical model um as you're much more familiar with than I am but uh that kind of stuff and it can really disconnect people from what actually supports somebody through that process in the way that you're describing yeah there's an economic undercurrent to that because in order to um have the field funded um by Health institutions and just kind of uh institutions that even drive Health institutions we have to prove that things work and and so people you know gravitate towards those structured short models that that they can actually test so that we can funnel you know some sort of funding into our field and it leaves so much behind um in addition to that you know we have models beyond the Western Medical model that has shown us for a millennia that they work and and we've discarded them many of us are coming back to them you'll hear a lot of clinicians now you know either doing yoga themselves or either recommending it right you know and you wouldn't hear of yoga inside of a therapeutic space it wouldn't be there wouldn't be an integration there would just be World apart but we Now understand yeah it we may not be able to now we of course now we have plenty of studies that actually do do some you know testing with yoga and medit ation and mindfulness and that's all beautiful but people have known that the yogic practices have had a a positive impact upon singular humans families and communities for a multitude of generations before Western medicine and Western science said hey let's test this I mean this is such an interesting part of the whole conversation right um like look at meditation as an example so meditation has been around for thousands of years in different forms and it's really you know only about the last 50 years since uh you know mbsr mindfulness based stress reduction like the early early early work that was done on it in the 70s and ' 80s and then it's really just like the last 203 years that it's become like a validated approach and even when my dad's my dad wrote a book called Buddha's brain um where he was integrating a lot of uh the more like Eastern tradition into a psychological model at the time that he wrote that book which was just like 20 years ago or something like that meditation was still viewed as this pretty like wooy pseudos spiritual not tremendously in credible not very mainstream kind of practice and that's just 20 years ago these days meditation is probably the single most recommended mental health practice that we have like period due to its broad accessibility anyone or not anyone but almost anyone can do it um and get some value out of it so it's just really like the Arc of history is really long here and we could all probably do with like a little bit more intellectual humility about all of this stuff but I would love to ask you here at the end if you don't mind about that third phase where you were talking about kind of really integrating this stuff into how we go out in the world and how we change practically um which I think is always just like such a beautiful part of the process and it's often also where where people have a lot of uncertainty they're like okay I've done this digging I've changed how I think about this stuff now what you know this is where the the work it's Nuance through and through right but it it develops even greater Nuance in this third phase and I think that you know one of the examples that feels perhaps like more tangible and prominent to like Express here like um I'm going to use mother and child and you know maybe we have a child that is uh asking their mother for a lollipop right and the mother has had a really tough day at work um truly truly hard and let's say that this mother like you know her traditional like way of like talking about herself would be like I come from a family of yellers we just yell so I yell at my child I I got yelled at and then you know the normalization of these kinds of behaviors and practices however in The Learning Journey of herself in the grounding excavation work that we've done she's been able to identify that in in reality a lot of her family members have been stuck in fight mode fight flight freezer F fight mode and in the nervous system response and that she herself adopted that very same mechanism of sorting through stressful circumstances and any mild stressor and especially if she's had a really big stressor like maybe a poor valuation at work which she is now sorting through and now she has a a trigger point her child asking for a lollipop up she she now has of course the defaulted nervous system state that she goes to which is to fight which is to yell at her child and say like anything that can be harmful that can be you know that can stay with this child for a long time sometimes cursing you know the works however through the work that we've done in the grounding process we've actually been able to gain back time and what I mean by that is that we've offered her at least a two to three second buffer between stimulus and response so we've offered her an opportunity to actually have those two seconds of understanding like how her body is turned taking in this request what the actual factors are in her day that could have led to to her feeling more tender and sensitive and that that sensitivity would turn into irritability and then displacement so those two to three seconds are gold because they offer her an opportunity to actually be reactive from the place of how she wants to leave a legacy for that child which is a legacy of feeling like they're seen heard loved and so in that moment she knows that what she was able to see growing up as far as a trauma response was the yelling we've done the excavation work that's what she's learned she understands that that's being replicated in her present day life however the integration process is buying us those two to three seconds and now she's able to exercise a different Behavior based on her learnings so now in integrating she would say would you be able to give me a few seconds to just think about it and if may not be the softest tone it may not be you know tender she may not hug her child she may not have the capacity to do any of these things right now but she did prohibit herself from actually moving forward in the direction of saying something injurious and she allowed herself a moment of respit and self-reflection and self-standing and gave herself a healthy separation between herself and her child's request so that she could settle so it that that's kind of how the integration process works and you know people will of course you know have moments where they backtrack we will process the backtracking let's talk about what happened take me through the moment right like that's where a lot of some of even the talk therapy comes into play and and we reintegrate what are some options that we have for those moments okay try those options next time right and so integration happens that's a really fantastic articulation of what this actually looks like in practice and and what I really really like about it is that it's small the stuff that matters is small it it's like it's one second here it's one moment there it's a little practical interaction that you didn't have exactly the way that you would have had it before and just speaking personally um and also maybe seeing this a little bit in other people like we can really look for the white light moment in our lives right where like the Seas part clouds lighten everything's just radically different all of a sudden but it normally doesn't really work that way it's the compounding of all of these little moments where we made like a slightly different choice and when you look back all of a sudden you're in a radically different place yes um and so I love that that's kind of what you're centering here and also just like a word that I don't think we've we've even really used during the conversation yet but there's a huge values piece to all of this like you were saying there you know what do you want to leave for that other person you know what are are your values that the person has and that the person has uncovered as part of this process they've really sat in this deep value of not wanting it to be the same for their descendants as it has been for them like that's a powerful organizing feeling right like that's very energizing in that way and so I wonder about that connection to values piece of the whole thing as like a a a guiding motor that can help get people through this process it's a really big piece you know it on the other side of Shame which is what tends to be reproduced and recycled when we keep the Cycles going that have been a part of our families for Generations we typically especially when we are cognizant of the fact that those Cycles can cause harm and injury or perpetuate you know um further behaviors that are unhealthy we experience shame many of us think you know and it's part of that root system what comes in is like I'm broken you know I can never change like all those things however on the other side of that when we actually buy back those two to three seconds what happens when at the end of the day it's time for bed we turn off the light and now we're in a point of reflection of what happened in our day Pride so on the other side of Shame is pride and it's pride in the fact that we acted from a place that aligns with the values that we hope to not only embody for ourselves but instill in our children and so all of that starts becoming what then creates not only a further motivation to continue those practices but if we think about okay behaviorism just a little right like you know positive reinforcement yeah totally and so you know what we know about positive reinforcement is that it increases Behavior desired Behavior so we are in essence like positively reinforcing ourselves with the emotion of Pride and then increasing you know our capacity or our um even our subconscious uh motivation to to actually do the very thing again well I feel like this is one of those things where we could just kind of keep on talking about it and it has just been so fantastic to talk to you today so Dr puket thanks so much for joining me for this thank you so much for having me it's been wonderful I love today's conversation with Dr Mariel bouquet who's the author of break the cycle a guide to Healing intergenerational trauma she had just a wonderful way of talking about these topics and something that I said to her after the uh after we stopped recording but we were still kind of interacting a little bit at the end was that she really brought together this fantastic ability to to tell a story and really weave a lot of material together in a way that felt organic and alive and very kind of relaxed and present in the room well also having such deep technical knowledge of this topic and so much personal experience working with people and unraveling her own story which is where we started uh with her personal history growing up in the Dominican Republic and then immigrating to New Jersey when she was I think 5 years old she talked a bit about some of the patterns in her own family having an older sister that she had some conflict with uh what was handed down through her mother her own tendency to be quiet and kind of very self-effacing and very oriented toward supporting the other members of the family in part because sure there were aspects of that that were her own soft supportive nature and there were aspects of that that made sense in the environment that she was in and we kind of conditioned into her by all of the things that were going on around her and later in the conversation she talked about the kind of uh tree of trauma that we're all carrying around how there are the branches and The Roots and the soil that the tree grows in there are relationships with other people there are the behavioral patterns that we have have there's what happened to the people further up the family tree than us what happened to our parents and our grandparents and our ancestors going on from there and how those things very practically impact us how they really are lived by us in some way and how therefore we have to go through a deliberate process of changing those patterns if we want to break those cycles and throughout the conversation Mariel did a wonderful job moving back and forth between the the technical part of this whole thing and the more lived practical experiential part of it and I think that that probably I'm kind of putting words in her mouth here but I'm guessing that reflects the work that she does practically with clients how there's this uh pendulation to use the word from Peter LaVine back and forth from the more kind of cognitive aspects of our experience or the more process driven aspects of our experience to the underbelly of it and this is found in her phasic model where we start by phase one developing uh tools and practices that help ground us and soothe us and stabilize us so to put at a certain kind of way we can face Annihilation we can risk the dreaded experience we can have an interaction with somebody else where we're not sure how it's going to go or where it's going to land because a lot of that cycle breaking process comes down to being willing to step out of a heavily established pattern inside of your family of origin and that is a big risk that comes with a lot of lot of danger a lot of stress a lot of threat because our family systems are these incredibly powerful structures uh they've been around for a long time the people in them have known us for a long time and they are very resistant to change often and this means that it's very important for us to have resourcing tools that allow us to do this kind of work and to go into the sort of dark underbelly of our experience and that's phase two where we're going going through more of the unearthing process she talked about building a genogram or doing a uh a very fleshed out version of the adverse childhood experiences process that uh people will go through just kind of a form normally in a therapist waiting room where they're filling out this adverse childhood experience form that has a lot of really stressful stuff on it that can uh understandably activate somebody and she talked about going through that in a much more gentle process with her clients uh where she really built out this of experiences that could very understandably impact the way that somebody is or acts in the world and that then gets us to the third phase phase three which is about how do we integrate this understanding into the way that we actually are with other people and she used this really wonderful example of uh a parent with their child and giving the parent a lollipop or not you know the parents at the end of a long day the kid asks for a lollipop how do you respond are you in the old model that's maybe been handed down in some kind of of way where you respond abruptly or angrily because there's a story in your family that like we're shouty people we're just like that's what we do or do you have a moment where you have a little bit of space because you're able to identify the pattern you've developed some insight around it and in that moment in those one or two seconds that you've bought through all of the work that you've done which is just led to those one or two seconds you know in addition to probably a lot of other really wonderful benefits from you I want to underplay it here but I love how small this is it's just a few seconds but in those few seconds you can do so much you can make a different choice that maybe sets a different pattern going forward from here on because that's life right life is what happens to us while we're waiting for something else to happen life is what happens to us while we're waiting for the white light moment where the Seas part and the clouds a light in the sky right that's life those little little tiny moments that don't really feel like a lot you know while you're having them that little interaction with your kid doesn't really feel like a lot maybe in the moment but you have 10 of those moments a hundred of those moments a thousand of those moments through time and all of a sudden you look back and you are in such a radically different place than where you started I also want to take a moment here at the end talk about something that came up for just a minute uh during our conversation toward the end of it now Dr puket has been phenomenally trained in in the kind of classic Western psychological model you know she went to medical school at Columbia University and she uses a lot of tools from that tradition and she talks about a lot of them in the book but she also integrates a lot of holistic practices particularly in the book that haven't necessarily had a ton of formal research done on them for a variety of different reasons uh looking at sound baths actually before this conversation I went and I took a look at the research that was there for what it's worth it's actually quite positive uh I think that there are like four or five studies and of those five studies four of them have found like pretty positive results from doing that kind of thing but these are small scale studies they aren't like super deep or well built out and there's just not a huge body of research right now we don't normally share a lot of practices like that on the podcast uh because as you know if you've been listening for a while I'm a pretty scientific materialist sort of guy so it's just not usually my frame so I wanted to share kind of how I think about this and how my thinking on this has changed over time I used to be somebody where if there wasn't like a large scale scale study supporting a practice I just wasn't going to talk about it on the podcast but these days I've moved to a focus on what I think actually matters simple question does this help people feel better does it sooe them does it resource them do they find it useful and then really really important question does it have a lot of downsides does it have a lot of costs if it's low downside and low cost and it makes somebody feel better what the heck are we talking about here like why not do it the Arc of history is really long and the Western psychological tradition is only about 150 years old here the the roots of the word psychology itself literally translate to the study of the soul and psychology has long been looked down on by the hard Sciences as being like a little little unscientific a little up in their feelings a little woo to lack a better word if you read some of the early work on psychoanalysis that stuff was out there you know there is some wild stuff there in uh Freud and young and so on right and I I mean practices like meditation which we talk about all the time on the podcast and which is like these days arguably the single most commonly recommended mental health practice out there were viewed as totally Fringe 50 years ago like lacking a research basis not supported inside of our classic Western model not a serious practice and these days there's an incredibly robust body of research that supports meditation as a helpful intervention for everything from uh dealing with stress and stress reduction to chronic pain issues to managing anxiety to helping people just feel like they're getting a little bit more out of life and I'm kind of saying this like a little bit to myself here in all of this cuz I am that scientific e person and I will you know continue to be that way that'll continue to be 99% of what we talk about here on the show but I just think that there's a place for a little bit more intellectual humility and a little bit more openness to possibility about what could actually really help people so again my guest today was Dr Mariel bouquet she's the author of break the cycle a guide to Healing intergenerational trauma you can find her online at Dr Mariel bouquet.com you can also find her on Instagram under the same name she has a huge following on Instagram like a quarter million followers or something like that she's doing great work over there if you're uh if you're into the social media side of things and again I just love this conversation I thought it was totally fantastic I really appreciate her work um and I was glad that she was able to take the time to talk to me about it today if you'd like to support the podcast the best way to do that is by taking a moment to subscribe to it now maybe leave a rating and a positive review on the uh podcast platform of your choice if you're watching us on YouTube you could leave a comment down below maybe ask a question uh share something that you learned from the episode is there a future topic you would like us to explore related to this episode that would all be really helpful for me to know and the best way you can support the show is just by telling a friend about it if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find me on patreon it's [Music]