Billions of people around the world are affected by trauma, and none of us are immune. Whether you’ve experienced trauma in childhood or adulthood, the impact can be pervasive and long lasting. And in today’s divisive, unsettled world, traumatic experiences seem to be lurking at every turn. This often creates feelings of overwhelm, powerlessness, and anxiety. Yet I’ve found that hope and healing are possible when you have the right tools.

To guide us on this journey, I’m joined by the amazing Dr. James Gordon, Harvard-educated psychiatrist, pioneer of mind-body medicine and integrative medicine, and Founder /CEO of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. Dr. Gordon is a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School and former chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush). He is the author of Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing and other important works.

Topics discussed include trauma, healing, connection, body-mind medicine, holistic medicine, integrative medicine, individual therapy, group therapy, population-wide trauma, political divisiveness, shamans, healers, physicians, and patient care.

Sensitive Episode:

Please note that this episode contains sensitive material; listener discretion is advised.

Emergency Assistance Details:

If you or someone you know needs immediate support, please call your emergency services. In the US, 24/7 help is available by calling “911,” “988” (Suicide and Crisis Hotline), or SAMSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

Online: https://mentalhealthhotline.org/ptsd-hotline/.

As applicable, additional resources may be provided in the show notes.

Non-Emergency Online Mental Health Information: https://www.nami.org/support-education/nami-helpline/

https://odphp.health.gov/myhealthfinder/healthy-living/mental-health-and-relationships

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: No expert is offering medical or psychological direction or advice; the content is purely informational in nature. Please consult your physician or healthcare provider before undertaking any new regimen or procedure.

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

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Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend 

Date Smart: Transform Your Relationships and Love Fearlessly

Aging Joyfully: A Woman’s Guide to Optimal Health, Relationships, and Fulfillment for Her 50s and Beyond

The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships

Imperfect Love Relationship & Oracle Card Deck by Dr. Carla Manly:

Etsy

Amazon

Connect with Dr. James Gordon:

Website: https://cmbm.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindbodymed

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MindBodyMed

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesgordonmd/, https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-center-for-mind-body-medicine/

Books by Dr. James Gordon:

Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing

Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression

Manifesto For A New Medicine: Your Guide To Healing Partnerships And The Wise Use Of Alternative Therapies

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Transforming Trauma and Anxiety with Mindfulness, Connection, and Love Featuring Dr. James Gordon

Transforming Trauma and Anxiety with Mindfulness, Connection, and Love

Billions of people around the world are affected by trauma and none of us is immune. Whether you’ve experienced trauma in childhood or adulthood, the impact can be pervasive and long-lasting. In today’s divisive, unsettled world, traumatic experiences seem to be lurking at every turn. This often creates feelings of overwhelm, powerlessness and anxiety. Yet I’ve found that hope and healing are possible when you have the right tools. To guide us on this journey, I’m joined by the amazing Dr. James Gordon, Harvard-educated Psychiatrist, pioneer of mind-body medicine and integrative medicine, and Founder and CEO of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine.

In this episode, we’ll focus on this real-life question. “I feel pretty dark about what’s going on in this crazy world. I have two teen kids and I’m scared for them and what they’ll face. My father was a mean alcoholic so the upside is I can be tough. I’m losing my grit and spirit. It’s like I’m worn out from too much negative news and sadness. Please talk about this because I want to have a better attitude for me and my kids.” That issue as the focus of this episode. Please note as this episode contains sensitive information, reader discretion is advised. If you want further information, please see the special links.

Introduction of Dr. Gordon and the Listener’s Trauma Question

I am honored to be joined by a tremendous special guest, Dr. James Gordon. Dr. Gordon is a Psychiatrist and Clinical Professor at Georgetown Medical School. He is also the former chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush. Dr. Gordon is the author of Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing. Welcome to the show, Dr. Gordon. It’s such an honor and a pleasure to have you with us.

Thank you and thank you for that lovely introduction.

I have a feeling it’s a substantial understatement of your qualifications but thanks again for joining us. Before we jump into the topic, could you tell our readers just a little bit about what makes you you?

What makes me me? I think a curiosity, an interest in listening to and getting to know other people and a willingness to change, to allow myself to see different sides of issues and of what’s happening around me and to meet the challenges that arise. I’ve been rereading for the I don’t know how many times the Odyssey and the Odyssey begins with the word polytropos, which means turning in many directions. That’s very much a part of who I aspired to be when I was 12 or 13 and first read the Odyssey, but it’s also who I still am 70 years later that I’m turning and I’m dealing with what’s coming up and doing my best to help my companions do the same.

I love that. It’s such a beautiful way of looking at life and I really appreciate the idea of polytropos, that flexibility, that resilience and that interest in moving with life, moving into life rather than as often happens getting stuck in one place, one mindset, one anything. I do have a question for you. I see various books behind you that you may have read. You have a glorious bookshelf. I would just love to eat all of those up. You have several books behind you that look like you’ve written more than the one that I was focusing on earlier. Do you mind sharing a bit about that?

Sure. Well, I’m a writer as well as a doctor. That’s been part of who I am since I was a kid. When things seem to me important and important enough to share with other people, one of the ways I do that is by writing about it. A couple of the books behind me aside from my most recent book, Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing, there’s a book about depression called Unstuck.

There’s another book that I wrote it’s now 30 years ago called Manifesto for a New Medicine. That’s a book about integrating the world’s healing traditions with modern scientific medicine and creating programs of integrative care. Those are three of the main books that I’ve written. I also wrote a book with my former wife about integrative cancer care because that’s one of the fields that I looked at and we organized conferences and trainings at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine on integrative cancer.

Years ago, I wrote a book called The Golden Guru about an Indian guru named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and I wrote about why people were flocking to him, very highly educated people, and also about the hazards of that kind of charismatic leader and that kind of ecstatic experience that could be corrupted and made into an authoritarian movement. Those are five of the books and then I’ve edited other books about integrative medicine and written a number of essays about my work with kids over the years when I was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health.

I write about what feels important to me and it’s a way of me both coming to terms with what I’m learning and also finding a way to share it with other people. Transforming Trauma, what I hope is really a guidebook for it’s been the way I’ve moved it’s a record of how I’ve moved from my own trauma and how I’ve taught thousands of people to work with many hundreds of thousands of people to help them deal with their trauma.

It’s a step-by-step guide to getting from this feeling that your audience communicated to you about being overwhelmed and not knowing what to do and feeling shut down and fearful, moving from that place to a place of greater ease and confidence and new discoveries. That’s what the most recent book is about. I’m writing now about how to deal with this present really extraordinarily challenging situation that all of us around the world find ourselves in.

Thank you. That is going to be a very good and much-needed book. I do have to say, as I’m listening to you, you’re making me hungry and not hungry for food, of course, but hungry to have you back on the show already to talk about Unstuck and to talk about the Manifesto for New Medicine. Both of those sound like topics that we could dive into for hours on end and your mind is so rich so I would just like to dive into it and eat up all the knowledge in there. That tells you probably more about me. Thank you. Those all look like.

Thank you, Dr. Gordon. Let’s pivot to the question, the idea of being able to heal trauma and you say that this is your method that has worked for you and that you use it. Could you tell us, before we dive into that, for people who don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re saying integrative medicine, what you mean, just so that they have a working definition and can understand and even for some people when they’re talking about mind-body medicine, they may think,

 “What are you talking about? There’s only medicine that I get at my healthcare providers.” Could you give us some definitions, please?

Defining Integrative Medicine and Mind-Body Medicine

Sure. Integrative medicine, it comes from the Latin word integer, whole. It’s the same, really, as the Greek word, which is holistic. What it means is a medicine that brings together all that might be beneficial in the world’s healing traditions together with modern Western medicine and that also says and also proclaims that it can be studied scientifically. Beyond that, it’s also a medicine that looks at whole people in their social and ecological, political, and spiritual environment. It’s both a wholeness and an integration of all these different traditions.

Integrative medicine is the combination of bringing together all the world’s healing traditions that may be helpful with modern Western medicine and doing it in a way that can be studied scientifically. Integrative medicine is also a medicine that pays attention to the whole person, to all aspects of us physiologically, biochemically, structurally, but also psychologically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. It sees people as a whole.

It is a corrective to the way we have tended in recent years to look at people in very isolating and isolated ways. With this increase of specialization, which of course has created some wonderful specialists. I was at the dentist and I can’t have to get implants from one person, one dentist and crowns from another dentist. If you go to your primary care physician, you get referred to the pulmonologist, the cardiologist or the orthopod.

Integrative medicine tries to put it all together. It’s not a question of abolishing the specialties, but of saying that even within every specialty, we have to understand the whole person and we have to address ourselves to all aspects of people’s lives. What it encourages in the people who are coming for help is to really experience themselves whole, to understand the psychological effects on our physiology. To understand how the world around us may affect what pain, syndromes we have and how we deal with the various psychological issues and the physiological issues that arise. It’s putting medicine back together.

In a sense, it’s a revival of the indigenous healing systems and the high classical systems like the Greek Hippocratic medicine, which is the ancestor of our Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine. All of those understood the interplay of the psychological, the physiological, the social, the spiritual and we’re beginning to rediscover that now. We’ve given it the name integrative medicine or holistic medicine. It’s really what medicine should be. That’s integrative medicine.

Mind-body medicine really means two basic things. First of all, it is a recognition that of the hard-wiring that actually exists. That every thought and feeling and sensation we have, every interaction with other people, the way we are in the world, can affect every organ and cell in our bodies and that conversely, what’s going on in our organs and our cells can affect how we think and feel and relate to the rest of the world. That’s the first piece about mind-body medicine.

The second is the understanding that we can enter into that continual conversation between our thoughts, feelings, sensations and our organs and cells in a way that is productive and therapeutic and beneficial to us. At the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and in my books and in my work over the last 50, 60 years, I’ve focused on how we can enter into that conversation.

What practical tools can we use to enhance our capacity for enjoying life, to improve our mood, decrease our anxiety, enhance our physiological functioning including our immunity and to decrease the pain that we may be having. It’s a whole therapeutic system as well as a declaration of what is actually true about how human beings are. That’s mind-body medicine.

Thank you and thank you for the very detailed and rich explanation. I have a funny little story to share about my personal experience of that. I truly believe in mind-body medicine, it makes so much sense. I believe in holistic healthcare, it absolutely makes so much sense. I know a lot of my clients, and me on a personal level, wish we had more of that holistic care that’s not fragmenting you into pieces and taking so much energy to get good wrap-around care that sees you as an individual.

My little story is I talk a lot about how stress impacts us on a physical level. How we do not do as well, our bodies don’t do as well. I was given a little gift of a blood glucose monitor and in fact, I have it on my arm right now and I was able to watch that my levels were very flat, doing just fine, regular food intake, and then I had what to me was a very stressful conversation with someone that I care about very deeply.

I was able to watch, after the fact, there was this intense rise and then plummet and it was exactly during that conversation and then back to normal levels fairly soon after. I was able to look at this and show other people and say, “Here’s an example.” This is what a simple singular is because my life tends to be very peaceful, really good. I create it so that it stays peaceful and but there it was in red spike, evidence of this glucose spike that comes. If that is just one little measurement of what’s going on in a human being, we can only imagine what all of the organs inside are doing, our muscles, our cells. What would happen to someone who lives under stress 8, 12, 18 hours a day? Thank you for that very rich background.

Yeah, you’re welcome, but also thank you for the example because what you’re bringing up is really important. People need to see just the way you did, to see for themselves this connection. Whether you’re using a device to see it or whether you’re just happening to notice that your heart rate is increasing when your boss starts yelling at you and you’re seeing the mind-body connection.

You can also see that you can bring yourself back into balance. The science is there that tells us that the variety of mind-body techniques that I teach in Transforming Trauma and that we use with people who are traumatized all over the world, the science says these techniques work. It’s our personal experience that really, just like yours, that comes home and says, “This is real. This is not only science, this is not only a nice idea, this is my reality.” That enables us to act on what we’ve discovered.

Absolutely and thank you for bringing it back home again. We can segue, if you don’t mind, from here into the issue about this individual, who it sounds as if she was likely experienced, she had an alcoholic father. It sounds like she had trauma in her childhood as a result of that and that she does see the upside, which is it made her “tough.” Now she’s feeling very bleak because there’s the external world that she’s facing for herself and her kiddos, that’s making her feel hopeless and lost.

It also sounds as if the trauma wasn’t addressed that maybe it’s doing what trauma tends to do when we’re really busy with life and raising kiddos the trauma can get submerged, it can go underground, but it’s still alive. Trauma likes to stay with us until we start working with it. What would you say about this particular piece?

What you just said is very true about the trauma staying submerged but then, when there is another high level of stress, the trauma comes up again. I think that’s what a lot of people are feeling right now. There’s so much divisiveness in our society, so much mean-spiritedness that it is bringing up those interactions from the past, those patterns from the past and also, I would add, those physical symptoms from the past that may have been, in abeyance, held in check, and they’re resurfacing now. I think the first thing would be to say to this person who I hope is reading that this is understandable. This is not a mystery and it’s not pathology. This is just the reemergence in part of what has not been addressed under this current stress.

The second thing that I would say is that what she has done is that she has, in the past, managed to move beyond, even if it’s not completely resolved, move beyond that trauma. That is possible again. The way I begin my most recent book, Transforming Trauma, is by telling stories of people with the most horrendous childhood trauma who have become extraordinary adults and who have used the method that I have taught them and also other things, to move through that trauma.

The second thing I would say is it is possible that even if you feel overwhelmed now and you’re very, as she describes, very worried about the future, it is possible to come to another place. The next thing I would say is it’s great that she’s recognizing what’s going on as opposed to perhaps doing what her father did, just drinking a lot to suppress it. It’s also great that she’s reaching out.

The Importance of Group Support in Healing Trauma

I think one of the terrible things about trauma is that we often feel so alone with it. It sounds like she feels alone but she has the capacity to reach out to you and I would encourage her to keep reaching out, to connect with other people. She will discover, first of all, that she’s not so alone and second of all, that sharing what she’s going on with other people provides a certain level of relief.

One of the most important things we’ve done at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine is we made small groups critical to the work and central to the work we do with psychological trauma. I think in our society, and again, this is the reductionist individualist nature of our society, we focus on individual approaches, individual therapy.

I would say for trauma, the foundational approach would be the small group approach that we’ve developed, where people can come together, they can share their experience with each other, they can learn techniques for self-care. Maybe in addition, it’s good for some people to have individual therapy. I certainly do individual therapy, I’ve been in individual therapy. What should be foundational is the coming together with a group.

Not insignificantly, that is the way our ancestors used to deal with trauma. The idea if you had a significant problem, that the official healer in your society, regardless of that was called a shaman or a wise woman or a witch doctor or a curandero, that person would bring together a group because it was understood that coming together with a group is intrinsic to the process of healing if there’s a significant problem.

Thank you so much for talking about this, because many people underestimate or are afraid of group therapy. I have definitely, as a human being, experienced group therapy as a woman, and as a clinician, I’ve run women’s support groups. I’ve run groups of families on juvenile probation, groups of young boys on juvenile probation, I’ve worked in domestic violence support groups.

Yes, maybe that first meeting is a bit scary, of course, but once you realize in a well-run group that you are contained, that you are safe, that you’re with people who get it. Their story may be slightly different or a lot different but those common themes of coming together for healing, of witnessing other people’s shifts and growth and being there, that’s community, the healing power of community.

As you say, in our bones, in our history, we know this. Our ancestors, on some level, would have met with these wise elders and as you say, the shamans or the medicine man or the wise woman, whatever it might be and we just have to find new ways of bringing this alive for each community so that people can readily access. Of course, care becomes more affordable because group therapy tends to be, if it’s there’s a fee at all, it tends to be much lower cost. You’re doing so much good in this highly synergistic way. Thank you for mentioning that.

Yeah, thank you also. Too few therapists are leading groups these days. When I was in my psychiatric training, it was an integral part of our training to be part of a group initially, to have that experience of being in a group of other psychiatric residents and then to be leading groups. Now, unfortunately, not so many therapists are leading groups anymore and I think that’s a terrible loss.

One of the things we do is we’ve trained 8,000 people around the world to lead groups using a model that draws on some of the lessons of the kinds of support groups that you described. A model in which people are making discoveries for themselves. We don’t analyze, we don’t interpret, everybody is there to help themselves and as they do that we learn lessons without anybody lecturing to us, we learn the lessons of other people’s experience, they share it with us. We discover and come to appreciate both the differences and the similarities.

It’s a wonderful experience that I hope that if there are therapists reading or actually people who want to learn how to lead these kinds of groups, we train people who are not therapists. One of the things that we’ve found that’s interesting that probably won’t surprise you too much is that people who are committed to learning this comprehensive approach to self-care on themselves in the context of a small group, who are committed to working with other people and are willing to have supervision from somebody with more experience, they’re able to do this work with groups at the same level as people like us with our fancy advanced degrees.

That’s how we’ve been able to work on a very large scale with hundreds of thousands of people. It’s because we’ve been able to train teachers and community organizers and people who are active in their church or their synagogue or their mosque who care about other people. We’ve been able to train youth to do this work and we’ve been able to train prisoners who want to find some reason to be alive and who want to stop being criminals.

We’ve been able to train them while they’re in prison to work with other prisoners using the same kind of model and getting supervision, of course, as they do it but they can do great work. I hope that the person who got in touch with you will be able to find some group. We have online groups at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine. We have a sliding scale. CMBM. People can look at our website and there are usually several online groups going at any given time.

Dr. Gordon, I wanted to add something so that if you’re reading and you’re curious about what this might look like for you to engage in a group or lead a group, my personal experience, which had nothing to do with the alphabet soup behind my name, up until COVID, I was leading weekly meditation at a woman’s drug and alcohol rehab center.

It had nothing to do with my work as a psychologist. It had everything to do with my ability to show up, lead guided meditation, talk about chakras, you know the energy points in along your spine and lead people into their visual and emotional world in a very calm and healing way. That isn’t something that you need a lot of training for and I would meet the women, still do in the community, and they come up and they say of everything we experienced individual therapy, this that, “I carry this with me. This has helped my life.”

We can see that if we have a skill or are interested in a skill, I have to say those weekly sessions were good for me, too. It got me into a different zone, it was really soothing and relaxing and uplifting to be with all of these women who had experienced significant trauma and to be part of their healing. It doesn’t mean you need credentials behind your name. I’m just reinforcing what Dr. Gordon said. It can be something that you get a lot or a little bit of training. In my case, that would not take too much training in what you’re talking about, Dr. Gordon. It would take sounds like very specific training but very deep and rich training. Did I get that right?

The Foundational Role of Self-Regulation (Breathing) in Trauma Work

Yes, I think that’s quite right. The other thing that I want to emphasize that you said is that when we lead a group or the beginning of our training, we begin with a meditation. We use slow, deep, soft belly breathing, just breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth with the belly soft and relaxed. This is the beginning and fundamental and foundational for mind-body medicine is to come into physiological and psychological balance.

That way, once you are accustomed to bringing yourself into that state for several minutes perhaps several times a day or longer if you’d like, then everything else becomes easier, whether it’s learning other self-care techniques and we teach sixteen self-care techniques or it’s psychotherapy or it’s any other kind of intervention. If you’re able to bring yourself into balance, you’re much more able to learn.

The fear and the anger goes down in the part of the emotional brain called the amygdala. Your ability to think clearly and be self-aware and connect with other people, functions of the frontal cortex of the brain get improved and it makes it easier to look at solutions, to look at alternatives, to use techniques like mental imagery or drawings to explore possibilities.

I think the person who got in touch with you, if she looks at this program and she can get it through my book Transforming Trauma or other ways perhaps but begins with bringing herself into balance she’ll have a sense. I’ve seen this literally thousands of times. If people can bring themselves into balance, they know that change is possible because they’ve experienced it. They feel a little calmer, a little more relaxed. The shoulders are not so tight. The room may be a little brighter.

That’s the beginning and then all the other techniques become so much easier to use. I think that’s a really important for the person who communicated with you, but it’s also important for everybody who’s reading to understand that you can do this, you can create this program for yourself. Ideally, it’s even better if you can do it in a group with others but you can begin on your own. Imagine yourself in a group or to reach out to other people, which is really important during this time.

We were talking earlier about time of COVID. One of the things that was crucially important for people there is to connect with other people and it couldn’t be always in person so it was often online. It’s just as important now for us to be able to connect with others. I know for me, I’ve found myself, when somebody comes to my mind a couple of times, I say, “I’m going to reach out to them. I’m going to write them an email. I’m going to call them on the phone.” It’s been so interesting doing that and these are sometimes people I haven’t seen in decades. “Yeah, it’s good to hear from you. I was thinking about you too.”

I think it’s beautiful how so often the psyche knows things that we don’t give it credit for knowing. In today’s world, we’re often told just to stay in that rational brain and what you’re talking about is allowing all parts of the being to come up, to be expressed, to feel. Some people think that’s gobble-de-gook. That we’re split into the mind and the body and we’re this machine but we aren’t. We are these truly beautiful, complex, intertwined beings and it’s so important for us.

As you’re saying, once you start working with your trauma and many people have experienced trauma throughout life or one big trauma, to be able to start creating that sense of safety and security in the self by allowing, as you’re saying, finding those moments where you can feel the stillness, the stillness of your breath, the softness in your body. You may not realize how tight your body is until you learn what the stillness feels like.

Many people stop there because it feels scary and it’s just unfamiliar, because if you’re always used to being tight and pent-up, relaxing can make you feel very vulnerable and it can feel very wonky. Once you become used to it, then as you’re saying, you’re able to call upon that and you’re having a stressful conversation or you’re having a difficult day, you’re able to just take a moment. Do some as you’re saying that nice belly breathing like a baby does. They’re not worried about keeping their abs tight or anything like that. They’re just breathing that big, beautiful belly breath and it is so calming to the body, the mind and the spirit.

Thank you for highlighting that as a true foundation of being able to do trauma work and a true reset in this. I agree with the audience member that for many people, it’s a very challenging time in our world on so many levels. It’s easy to go down that rabbit hole of bleakness or hopelessness. Being able to stay with yourself, do what you can do on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s picking up litter, caring for the environment, doing something in your community to advocate for good medicine, leading a group, whatever it might be, these things help us.

I’d like your opinion on this. These things help us not just with a sense of purpose but also allow us to feel that we are part of the solution. Every morning when I’m on my walk, I pick up trash, not for anyone else to see. There’s usually nobody out as early as I am, but it’s because it’s one way for me to give back to the earth, one way for me to care for the planet. One way for me to beautify the space where I’m so blessed to live.

If we do little things like that, it’s not making a huge impact around the world but I do the same thing when I’m traveling. No matter where I am, I’ll pick up bushels of trash. It doesn’t matter what other people are doing but it’s one of the ways that I can feel as though I’m making a difference. We don’t have to pick up trash but we can all find little ways like that that are meaningful that make us feel as though our lives matter and we can make a difference. What do you think about that?

Finding Meaning and Making a Contribution in a Difficult World

I think you’re absolutely right. I was just thinking I one of the places that I write is a cafe at a bookstore. I started talking with there’s a guy there who was reading a book that I knew well. I just went up and started talking with him. We’ve gotten to talk to each other again. What he does, he’s a body worker. It’s a practice called which you probably know called Feldenkrais, which very interesting work with the body.

He’s feeling something of what the audience member is feeling and everybody he know that if they want to come with him and take a three-hour walk on Saturdays in the park, they’re welcome to come with him. On that walk, he encourages people to talk to each other and he sometimes gives them little prompts and that’s his solution to dealing with this difficult time.

Mine is I bring together our staff when something happens. For example, the war that’s happening right now in Iran and I know that people are going to be upset not only the Iranian members of our team, our faculty members, but everybody’s going to be affected by it. I create a space and just say, “Come talk. Come and share what your feelings are if you have any responses or reactions or worries or concerns or anger or hope. Whatever it is, it’s all welcome.”

I think it’s really important for everyone to do whatever feels right to make a contribution. We often have a self-consciousness about it. We also think that’s for the experts. That’s for the person who’s the political organizer or that’s for the person who’s the doctor to do. No, I think all of us have this capacity to act. I love what you’re saying. I’m imagining myself watching you early in the morning, picking up the trash. It’s beautiful. It is a contribution. It’s a very positive thing.

I think the other thing is that we need to bring, which I imagine that you do, a kind of mindfulness to these activities. Not in a fancy way but just like, “This is what I’m doing and it feels good to pick this up and then wait and put it in a trash can when I get to the trash can.” Just to appreciate those little things that we do. It’s not only contributing to the environment, it’s not only giving us something that’s meaningful to do but it’s also changing the way we look at the whole world. If we can become mindful about one activity, we can also become mindful about other activities. It’s an education for us as well.

Mindfulness is a term that’s often misunderstood or overused. When we bring that mindfulness to life, we are to be mindful. We are naturally slowing down and really paying attention to in a thoughtful way. I really talk about the interplay of our feelings, our thoughts, our mindset, our energy, our action. When we slow it down and start paying attention to that interplay, we can intercept it at any level. If we find that our feelings are taking us to these dark thoughts and to this dark you know mindset or whatever, if we learn to pay attention to that, we can often just intervene and do something.

Not that we don’t want to pay attention to our feelings but we can channel them in ways that rather than keeping us stuck and making us go down a rabbit hole, actually create a better outcome for the whole being. Thank you for focusing on some of these really critical pieces that are easily within reach. We’re not talking about things where you have to have loads of money or resources to access this. These are pieces that you can use every day.

For the audience member who’s worried about her children, by her embracing some of these pieces that we’re talking about, she’s automatically giving her kids not only more mindful parenting and attunement but also hope and the idea that if we can get ahead of some of this, become immersed in some of this, the kids will not be left with a planet that is as hopeless as it might seem.

Honoring and Expressing Emotions for Healing

The other thing that I would add is that the emotions that she’s feeling that any of us are feeling, we need to just welcome and appreciate those emotions. No reason to suppress them. I would say it’s really important to express them. If you’re feeling frustrated, close your door, jump up and down, scream and shout, pound pillows, honor that emotion that’s coming up. I think what she will find, what I certainly find is if I’m able to do that, I’m freed from the prison that that emotion is imposed on me. I’m able to express it and I’m able to move on and that energy then becomes useful in positive ways that I can direct it.

If she’s sad if you’re feeling hopeless, cry. There’s nothing like a good cry to relieve the misery. The emotions have a wisdom to them and we need to honor that wisdom and create the space where we can experience those emotions as they arise in her. If you’re feeling good, honor that laughter and enjoy that too. All the emotions are innocent and they need to be honored.

Thank you. I so agree. I’ve seen it a lot even in psychological journals where they will talk and I’ve probably been guilty of it myself at least a few times in my career of calling some emotions good emotions and some bad. Some are healthy and unhealthy. I firmly believe that all of our emotions are good. It’s how we use them that can be healthy or not so healthy.

I don’t get angry very often but if I do and it’s big anger, I will take my anger for a walk. I’ll say, “We’re going out. We’re going to process this while we’re walking. We’re going to feel it, we’re going to let it move through the system.” It’s not about shoving the anger down or the sadness down. It is about allowing it to come up, allowing yourself to use it in healthy ways that aren’t destructive to self or others. Being with it, which is often what something like sadness needs, it just needs us to be with it to hear it.

The audience member may be feeling some of these and especially if you grew up in an alcoholic household or other traumatic household. In trauma inducing environments, emotions are generally have to hold yourself together and be okay or fine. In adulthood, you might not know what to do with anything other than being okay or “fine,” neither are emotions.

Getting to know the importance of joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, all of those core emotions and honor them, that too is part of the healing of trauma, making friends with your emotions. As you so beautifully said, our emotions are wise and they’re innocent. Doctor, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours and I so appreciate your wisdom and your kindness and just the wealth of information you bring with you. Where can our readers find you?

They can find me in my book in Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing. They can find me at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, CMBM.org, the website. I’m teaching a lot of these techniques, demonstrating them on our website. People can just tune in to them and see what I’m teaching and practice the techniques for themselves or they can read about it in Transforming Trauma or other ways, perhaps. You can imagine me hanging out with you, too, if you’d like.

One of the exercises that I teach is a wise guide exercise. It’s allowing the imagination we were talking about earlier to emerge and imagining that I’m in a safe place and that a guide is coming to me and that guide embodies some wisdom. My guides may be insects or they’re animals or they’re figures from mythology or people I’ve known or sometimes people I haven’t known who’ve just come to my mind.

Maybe I’m your guide. Maybe you’ll see me as your guide. That’s fine as well. We’re here to serve each other and to be of use to each other. If you get interested because of this show or because of reading Transforming Trauma or looking at the website, if I come to you in your imagery, fantastic. It’s your version of me. We’re all here for each other. I work a lot with indigenous people and they say we’re all each other’s relations. I’ve learned that deeply from indigenous people, that we are all each other’s relations, we’re all connected to each other. Whatever way I can be of help, please, use me.

Thank you. I know we’re diving in a little more as we were closing up but I can’t help but jump into that piece that you said about you being the wise guide. Readers, if that doesn’t make sense to you, all you’re doing is, if you have a secure attachment style, you likely internalized parts of a very good father or a very good mother that felt good enough and healthy. You call upon them without even thinking about it in times of stress or need.

If you have an insecure attachment style, whatever type it is, you likely didn’t internalize a coherent, wise guide and so the privilege of being able to do this work is that you can choose a person, an image, an amalgamation. I remember when I was in Doctoral school, one of my professors was this amazing human being who was like this wise, old grandfather figure. I definitely internalized him and I still feel his presence as a wide guide.

It’s not a woo-woo thing as much as it is something that you are able to use as a resource. Dr. Gordon has just invited us to use his amazing energy and wisdom to internalize that part of what it might feel like to you in your imagination in your felt senses, to have a wise guide. If you can’t access your own wise guide or need support, he’s offered you this beautiful gift of being able to take that energy and put it inside of you and hold it close and dear as you might a parent who is very loving and kind and present. Thank you for that beautiful gift, Dr. Gordon. Thank you again. It’s been such an honor, a privilege, a joy, a feast. Thank you.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure for me as well to be with you.

Thank you. Readers, as always, I’m so grateful for your time, your energy and your presence. This is Imperfect Love.

Important Links

• Center for Mind-Body Medicine
• Dr. James Gordon on LinkedIn
• Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing
• Unstuck
• Manifesto for a New Medicine
• The Golden Guru
• The Center for Mind-Body Medicine on Facebook
• The Center for Mind-Body Medicine on Instagram
• The Center for Mind-Body Medicine on LinkedIn
• Non-Emergency Online Mental Health Information
• MyHealthFinder Mental Health and Relationships
• NIMH Traumatic Events and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• PTSD Hotline
• Dr. Carla Manly’s Website
• Dr. Carla Manly on Instagram
• Dr. Carla Manly on X
• Dr. Carla Manly on Facebook
• Dr. Carla Manly on LinkedIn
• Dr. Carla Manly on YouTube
• Dr. Carla Manly on TikTok

About Dr. James Gordon

Dr. Gordon, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, and a pioneer of mind-body medicine and integrative medicine, is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. He is a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School and was chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy (under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush). He is the author, most recently, of Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing.