TRANSCRIPT
One criticism that has been leveled against me many times over the years, 10-15 years, about my idea of how to heal from trauma is that my idea, my concepts that I’ve laid out, are too intellectual. They’re too mental. That I put too much emphasis on the mental part of healing, on the intellectual part. And the criticism is they say that actually healing from trauma really has to happen in the body because so much of the traumatic process, the product, the process of being traumatized, the traumatization process does happen physically within the body. And that any good process of healing from trauma has to take into account healing the body.
Somebody recently told me a story about this thing called somatic experiencing. They were saying they used it as an example. I haven’t read much about it ever. It always seemed to make sense to me. It seemed good. But what they said was they used zebras as an example. I don’t know who came up with this idea. Maybe it was the guy Peter Levine who talks about this, but I don’t know. I heard it secondhand. What my friend told me, she said it’s vital that we heal trauma in our bodies.
The example with zebras was there’s a herd of zebras. They’re going along through the African savannah, and they’re being chased by a pride of lions. The lions come really close and maybe even kill one or attack them and biting them and biting their haunches. You can see videos on YouTube about this. And what happens is, let’s say most of the herd or all of the herd escapes, and they run off, and they’re all freaked out from having been attacked by a pride of lions. They go off into a secretive hidden place where, when they escape, there’s no longer a danger of being attacked from the lions.
In this private, secretive place, the herd comes together, and they all begin shaking. They shake and they shake and they shake. They literally shake off the trauma of what they’ve gone through. They shake off the trauma of being attacked by lions, and they just shake it out of their bodies. And when all this shaking is done, and it’s done, they move on. And that’s how they become not traumatized. This was shared with me as a metaphor for healing from trauma.
I thought about it, and I put it in light of this criticism that’s been leveled at me that my ideas about healing trauma are too intellectual. And here is my reply: actually, from the very, very beginning, when I began writing publicly about healing from trauma, back when I put my website up in 2004, I considered the main component of healing from trauma to be grieving. And in my experience, grieving is a profoundly physical thing.
So when I heard about those zebras shaking, that sounds exactly like what I talk about when I talk about grieving. I’ve shared about it in other videos, but it’s happened to me many times in my life. And it’s happened to me a few times in the most extremely profound way that I have gone into a grieving state where I have cried and literally cried, shaking and moaning sometimes for hours. The most extreme time, I think I cried for three hours straight, shaking. I was lying on the bottom of a boat in the middle of a lake in the rain and just moaning. The sounds that came out of me reminded me of something from the Daodejing from Lao Tzu’s Daodejing, which he wrote, what is it, like a thousand or two thousand BC, where he pointed out how a baby can just cry for hours and hours and never lose the strength in its voice. Whereas when an adult cries or screams or yells, we will burn out our voice.
Well, when I did this deep grieving, this moaning wail that came out of me, I was like, I thought of love. So even then, I was like a baby that just could cry for hours, shaking and wailing. It was profoundly healing, and I knew it as it was going on. It was so amazing. And it’s happened to me other times. Never for three hours, but it’s happened to me for half an hour. It’s happened to me for an hour. It’s happened to me for a minute. It’s happened to me for thirty seconds.
I’ve noticed I’ve been in fights in my life. Even when I was a kid, often after I would get in a fight, I would cry afterwards. And why am I crying? Why am I shaking like this? It’s like I’m grieving. This was my prevent against becoming traumatized. But those two-hour grieving sessions, that two-hour grieving, three-hour grieving session that I had, this was grieving years of buried trauma from earlier in my life. I didn’t have the good fortune of being a zebra who could run off and hide after being attacked, let’s say, by my family or by someone in school or by a teacher, by my parents. I didn’t have that ability to go in my room and cry for hours and work it out in a group session. So I put it off for years. That’s why I think I needed so much time.
I don’t think the zebras had to shake for two hours, but for me, I had to do this. But what about the idea that it’s an intellectual process? My process? Oh, that criticism, you know, you talk about healing from trauma, and you make it so intellectual. For me, it’s actually a combination. It’s not just grieving because how do I get to the point of grieving? For me, it’s doing the whole intellectual process of a search, the mission, the discovery process to find out how do I feel intellectually? How do I listen to myself? Who am I? What are my dreams? Writing them down? What do they mean? Using this great thing we have as humans, this brain that’s so intellectually powerful, to turn it to the problem, to say intellectually what is the truth of what happened to me?
The brain actually is one way to know truth, and you really can make a lot of progress knowing truth just by using the brain. Now, the body feeling, that’s another way to know truth. These are different. But what I think as human beings, we have been endowed with many different qualities that allow us to figure out what truth is from different angles. And I say use every resource you have at your disposal to try to get to what the truth is, to get to this healing from trauma.
So for me, the intellectual process has been key to write down my family history, to write down all my memories, to figure out intellectually what is the relationship between my mother and me, my mother’s father and her. How does that metaphorically relate to her relationship to me? My mother’s relationship to her mother, my mother’s mother’s relationship to her mother, going back in because all these things are an intellectual process that are very useful for me to see patterns in my life, to see patterns of how I was raised. Also intellectually to look at how do I behave toward other people? What are the healthy sides of how I behave toward other people? What are the unhealthy sides of how I behave toward other people? What are the historical unhealthy behaviors in my life that I demonstrated in my relationship with others, often especially in relationship to people over whom I wielded some power?
The ways I misbehaved when I had power were incredible clues to how I had been treated. And all of this intellectual process was very, very useful for me to say, wait a second, what happened to me? Do I want to be around these people? Who do I need to get away from? Intellectually, what is toxic behavior? What are boundaries? To make sense of all these things. And then I could make decisions in my life, often in large part because of this intellectual discovery process that helped me get away from bad people, to figure out what healthy boundaries were. And as a result of that, often I connected with my body. When I got away from people who were really unhealthy, I found it much easier to grieve.
So for me, this grieving process, this shaking process, shaking off the trauma, literally shaking it out of my body, because really that’s what it felt like. And in hindsight, that’s actually what it has been. It really was connected.
To the intellectual process, if I hadn’t done that intellectual process, I wouldn’t have been able to grieve nearly as easily. The intellectual process was me part of peeling the onion, looking inside myself, peeling the layers back in myself, having the intellectual courage to really be honest with myself and say, “Who am I? What is the good and what is the bad?” Again, that working in tandem with feeling what was going on in my body and ultimately doing that, shaking it off to heal from it.
[Music]