The Unseen Discussion Between Peter Levine & Bessel Van Der Kolk

Thank you both for being here, you are such Inspirations in the field and in the world. Thank you for all your incredible work and we’ll start with the foundational question from each of you is “how do each of you efine trauma now at this point in your career and and in your research?

 do you want to start M

BVDK: well trauma is a trauma, in Greek it means wound and it is horrendous experience, horrendous experience that’s really important that overwhelmed Your Capacity to cope basically. It’s not like nasty stuff unpleasant difficulties the weather being bad you’re having to dig your car out the snow it’s about really overwhelmingly horrible things.

PL: yeah you know I’m thinking one of the best definition that I’ve heard succinct definition is the one from Freud in the late 1900s and he said that trauma is a breach in the protective barrier against stimulations. Stimulation leading to feelings of overwhelming hopelessness. I think that’s really the key. The only thing that I would add is it’s a a breaching the protective barrier against over stimulation, leading to feelings of overwhelming helplessness. So I think he really nailed it. Unfortunately you know he went in a very different direction after that, but to me that really says it. You know and when I started working with people in the 60s one of the things that came up what times when these people felt overwhelmed, particularly that their autonomic nervous system couldn’t adapt, so they didn’t have bounceback, resilience and so a lot of my work with them was about bringing together a more resilient nervous system and a more resilient organism so okay

BVDK: yeah like me supplement you saying trauma is not an event that happened somewhere in the past that event is over and it’s gone. Trauma is the imprint that your reaction to that event leaves in you. And had much of my work and my colleague who’s staying with me right now Marty tyer andan has been how it’s about how trauma changes your brain changes how you experience the presence. and Trauma changes how you experience um all sorts of things and how you organize your reaction to, but for other people is neutral stimuli and you react to things as if the past is back.

PL:  yeah and I would also say one more thing. Of course trauma is something that goes on in the brain in the mind, but the way I came to trauma in the in the 60s was that when something happens you just look outside your door or something and you see somebody has been fallen off a bicycle and so you get a and then you look more carefully and they’re really seriously injured and you get Y and that’s the brain talking to the body talking to the autonomic nervous system and talking to the to the our basic instinctual functions. And  but it’s something that goes in in the body because when you saw that accident your guts twisted,  your breath got stuck you feel stuck so again what can we do with that how can we help people move through that and one of the things that I think is really important that also involved with you and our dear friends stepen… is that that the this two-way Communication channel is the V one of them the main one is the Vagas nerve but what was not so readily known is that the vagous nerve is 80% afer is 80% sensory so it’s getting information from our organs and sending it back up to the brain and this becomes a what I call a “positive feedback loop with negative consequences” and until we’re able to change that relationship with mind and body as you were saying Bessel we we’re we don’t have access  to our “Here and Now experience of Life”

Speaker: yeah I’m wondering if we could each take some time or each of you could take some time to you started it Peter but we can move a little further into it is, share how you each came to understand and recognize the importance of how the body shows up in trauma healing or in other words how the body keeps the score.

PL:  right right and that’s the wonderful title of bessel’s book um but the way I came to it is I was working I was very curious I was developing a series of mind body exercises. I talk a little bit in my autobiography and  when I would found that I could relax in a specific way, a significant or special sequence, of relaxing muscles in the jaw, the neck, the throat, the diaphragm, that their blood pressure would these are again working with a group of men who had high blood pressure that not all the time but often and the blood pressure would drop 5 -10 -15 even 20 degrees. And so I was realizing that something goes on with them and as I explored that further it was clear that many of these people had not only experienced trauma, but they had also experienced high levels of stress throughout periods of their childhood and even to some degree of their um of their adulthood. So kind of gave me the idea of a place to where to start a placeholder and I you know I went um from there and so that was again that was really what took me in this direction. Because when I work with these people a lot of images would come up from the past with very difficult emotions, so as I was able to guide them, then they were able to restore balance and then that’s when I realized “now this is not just about relaxing certain muscles it’s something much more deep deeper than that” and that was how I came to my work my interest.

BVDK:  yeah you know it’s this is really what brought Peter and me together. It seems so obvious that you see it right in front of your face, like you’re talking about something, something is happening and suddenly somebody becomes agitated and their voice changes and their breathing goes fast and  you know it doesn’t take a lot of observational power to see. What Abram cardner (?) was really the first person who described this issue back after the first world war ; said “it’s a physion neosis if your physiology believes the trauma” and that’s what you see right in front of, is that the body keeps score and then people say ”oh but the body doesn’t remember”.

 I never said body remembers that you experience trauma through heartbreaking at gut wrenching Sensations in your body ,which are generated by the alarm system in your brain that senses these messages to your body that you are in danger. And so the challenge with trauma is not so much, although it’s also useful to find words for what happens to you, but the big challenge is to change your physiology so that stuff that objectively is not particularly dangerous to you, it becomes no longer becomes a threat and your body no longer responds to minder stimuli as if you’re about to die.

PL: yep yep yep you know just thinking back about the the connecting link between body and body and mind the Vegas nerve.  Darwin I think  you know this also , that Darwin talked about this as the pneumogastric nerve that’s right go from the gut from the from the lungs and the gut and of course from the viscera and he realized that that nerve which is really totally amazing that this nerve was responsible for gut wrench and heartbreak.

BVDK:  exactly I mean how if you want to talk way before any of us knew very much about the brain Darwin nailed it.

PL:  yeah he nailed it and just I mean of course he’s our hero.  one of our heroes.

BVDK:  yeah and interesting Darwin had his own issues oh yes interesting his mother died when he was eight years old and he repressed the memory he had no response but he and his wife had quite a few children and whenever his wife would become ,would give birth another child Darwin would become sick for several months. Clearly post- traumatic reaction to the loss of his own mom.

PL: right yeah yeah typical one and he suffered for a lot of what we I talk about is syndromes yeah you know a lot of autonomic syndromes. combinations of of high arousal fight or flight and then also of shutdown so he had many many physical symptoms.

BVDK:  which shows again that you can be very traumatized and be brilliant at the same time

PL: yes yes it’s very important really important one, it’s a really important. Because you know it’s sort of like people who have had this early trauma like a friend of mine, really wonderful woman named Edith Eger, EDI  she last year I think has published a book called “The Choice”,  she was a holocaust Survivor and this woman is at a high high level of functioning. But when we visit her we try to find some little ways to work with some of what she experienced, but she you know she’s she’s famous, she’s compassionate, she’s incredible therapist. But on the other hand some people who have a similar background don’t, never can function and they get sick and may

BVDK:  but what we mentioned yesterday actually is that people are not unitary phenomenon, that we all have parts, so that person may be compassionate, warm and sweet most of the time, but if she gets triggered she may throw a temper tension. out of nowhere so what trauma really does to you is it activates certain systems while other systems emerge to compensate for it. and so people always live in a quite a varied internal reality from time to time depending on the circumstances.

 And so our work is is to and Peter is has been a major teacher for me in that regard, is to activate the memories or the experience of one body while keeping people safe  and that is I just have always loved working with you Peter in that regard, because you’re I of always love it when you see I see you do it it’s just beautiful how you very gently move people to the experience of danger and just very gently help them to experience it and to allow them to put an end to the experience, or to go come to some sort of completion.

PL:  yeah completion I think is really the operative here completion and relative safety finding some place where the person feels safe enough to begin to touch into these sensorial experiences

BVDK: and then our job as therapist is to be that container of safety that not to be brilliant or to say profound things, but to really just be a presence that makes it safe for people to go into very uh painful and dangerous situations.

PL:  yeah yeah you know sometimes I’m I’m sure they do but you people send the books, that would like an endorsement, so sometimes I’ll look and I thumb through the book and I notice that it’s a really really wonderful quote and that I was going to ask them if they could if I could use it, but then when I looked a little bit more closely, it was from one of my books in an unen yeah I know that’s it’s kind of weird and uh the quote is something like “trauma is not so much or not just what happened to us but rather what we hold inside in the absence of a present empathetic other” and I think that’s what another way of what you were just saying Bessel that we really have to be balanced in ourselves, grounded in ourselves, in the Here and Now with ourselves so that we can provide that container for our clients patients

BVDK: yeah excuse me but of course once you go into your trauma, you may lose touch with the empathetic other. Because you becomes the whole world’s dangerous and people may become really frightened of you even though you may have started off with the very best of intentions, when people get triggered, their whole world gets contaminated or get um gets determined by the trauma and so our job is to really keep people mindful enough and calm enough and connected enough so they can very gently and gingerly go into these very painful memories and experiences of the past.

PL:  yeah but in one small amount that at time I don’t really agree with the exposure therapy kinds of things have

BVDK: Rel live you and I are in the same worth like that is really your term Peter that now we all use had of pendulation oh yes and oftentimes people come in and finally they have a chance to talk and they start vomiting out that trauma and that doesn’t really do you any good it has to be integrated it has to become part of you and you have to do it very gently and very gingerly yeah

PL:  and that’s that’s vitally important and it’s precious we can offer that

 was that something you came to realize uh right away or was that over time that process of titrating into the the traumatic experience?

BVDK: there’s days that in one session you can do amazing things and in one session people can come to a completion and for other people it may take years before you can get it

PL: absolutely and I think that’s another one we have to be have some humility about is, yes sometimes you see really miraculous changes, yeah but times where people have been severely abused neglected in their early childhood, it that takes more work and it also takes along with working with the trauma, with also working with the relationship.

BVDK:  right and I say but but I learned actually from on Pi actually is that people become afraid of feelings themselves. People don’t want to feel because any sort of feeling is associated with danger and so it becomes a very careful process to help people to to begin to feel themselves and to begin as many people you traumatized you say how about if you take a deep breath and say “I don’t want to take a deep breath” that any sort of stirring up of your internal world is dangerous, they will be happy to tell you trauma stories, but actually to go inside and meeting yourself may be very terrifying yeah

PL: and like you said it’s about pendulation because when people let me Gra this first experience their Sensation, there’s a contraction and people are terrified as you just said with that contraction so they avoid in any way they can. So maybe their body first responded against threat and against bracing, but now the person is bracing against the very feelings that can help them to heal, so instead of uh uh dissociating or leaving this the just notice when they can be guided into a contraction yeah and then help them open to an expansion and then a contraction and then an expansion that’s my word I coined was “pendulation”

 Because it’s and what also is maybe not so well understood is that just going into expansion doesn’t do the trick. You have to be able to hold together those experiences of contraction and expansion if it’s just expansion you have what they call in the meditation circles , you know I know because I’ve taught there is that it’s a “bliss bypass “ you experience bliss but that’s all you want to acknowledge, that’s all you want to be with, but it doesn’t work that way.

BVDK:  so yesterday our paper that we we did a very large research project in psychedelics and we saw that psychedelics are very powerful on helping people to go into the capacity to feel these things much more deeply and we had half the people got Psychotherapy only, the other half got MDMA added to it and it was really stunning how much the MDMA help people to go into the spaces that they ordinarily wouldn’t go to.It was just published yesterday in plus one uh and it really was a stunning thing because we had never seen anything besides us who could help people with it and turns out psychedelic agents can really be very powerful in promoting that to people yeah

PL:  yeah yeah that’s such an important topic you know and one section in my autobiography book is is really to look at both the promises and potential pitfalls of psychedelics, how incredibly powerful they can be, but how people need to be prepared and followed up and I think that’s the key and the rich the research that you  and  what’s the name of that organization are doing, this research and I I think it will be said to be a revolutionary change.

BVDK:  yeah and you know that that is sort of the Hot Topic these days.  But is missing in that research is exactly your work, that when people go into that trauma on psychedelic they have very powerful sematic experiences and most people who do this work are not trained by you or other people who are very good in dealing with the body and they don’t know how to deal with the somatic responses. So it’s very to bring these two worlds together actually

PL: that’s right and it’s I like the way your hands come together like this vessel, bringing the two together, I think that’s where it’s happening

BVDK: at me you’ll see anything you know, he’ll he’ll just see it like it fit your ears I Noti how you ears

PL: observing for me that would take me back to when I was a young child and my ears the same size as they are right now, so people made fun of me and called me Dumbo. So when we were at the the evolution of psychotherapy conference, I realized I didn’t bring my night shirt, so we went to one of the the Disney Stores and there was a gum a dumbo t-shirt, so immediately Laura bought the t-shirt for me so could wear it and renegotiate my ear trauma.

BVDK:  humor is very important it is I find the people have some people you work with have been horrendously traumatized, but preserve their sense of irony and humor. And that makes it so much easier to work with people, who can also have a little bit of a capacity to laugh at themselves yeah

PL:  but again we we have to really make sure they don’t experience us as us that’s right it really has to be coming from there and usually it comes from these little moments of Joy that may come up you know and I think just building on those certainly is helping with their healing

are those tools that build the resilience to go into humor

BVDK:  is not a tool humor something that emerges you cannot teach people humor, it’s humor comes out of like Peter and I have a very longterm right intimate relationship and we can be funny with each other because we feel safe together.  And that can only happen when people feel really relaxed and can look at their internal contradictions and the on the one hand this and that but you cannot say let me teach you having a sense of humor, like doesn’t work right.

 PL: I think you made the point

yeah yeah going with that what are some of the the tools or the practices that you have found helpful to build that resilience to move into healing process?

PL:  well you know when people are able to guide to their positive internal experience,  which is really about autonomic resilience, I think that’s the key as much as anything else in building resistance. Resilience. Also you know um as as therapists we’re also counselors and we’ve often find out something that really has affected them in a positive resilient way. One of the things if you’re working with people with trauma, depression, anxiety, they really don’t see anything except that and so if you ask them “how is your day” basically they say “crappy” and well I then I think okay well is that the higher experience of the person.

So I developed an exercise I call it the um what do I call it the anyhow I’ll say what the practice is and then if I can remember the name I’ll give you the name oh “the conflict free experience” so that you you could go beyond the conflicts, so the idea is to think of a time so I’m talking to a client to think of a time in the last day the last 24 hours when you felt even the smallest amount less anxiety, depression, fear or you felt a little bit more like yourself, the self you would want to be, and the person will say “well no there wasn’t any any time” I but yes but I’m asking the question during that time was there was of course one time at least where it wasn’t just as horrible.

“ just oh yeah I can remember a friend called me a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time and it was really a nice contact” so that’s a re that’s a building res resilience then the next step I say okay well how about in the next two or the last two or three days another time a different time again when you felt a little bit less anxious, a little bit less despairing blah blah blah blah  and then the person might say something “oh yeah yeah yeah um you know uh I have a pet dog and we went out for a walk together and she was just jumping around and just clearly enjoy”

 okay as you can see that image, let’s just have you shift back and forth between that image and whatever you’re experiencing in your body and again that’s about also another aspect of building resilient. I think any therapy that doesn’t build resistance, is not going to be an effective therapy.

BVDK:  that’s not only true for the people we work with who trauma test, but therapists want to go after the trauma story, such a trauma story and but it stuck me is almost nobody who I supervised for the first time knows anything about what gives that person a sense of pleasure, no history of pleasure, no history of save people, no history of accomplishments, and that is again part of the pendulation piece, is to get also in touch with what gives you Joy, what gives you pleasure what has been around so then you can do the pendulation between the pain and the pleasure, but it’s very important to do a pleasure history and a joy history and a connection history.

PL: we call it a trauma resource inventory

BVDK: yes yeah and but even that is has to wear trauma, in it but maybe you should talk about Life Resource inventory

PL: yeah yeah well that’s sort of the idea yeah yeah

 I don’t feel like that’s often modeled so maybe we can even do that now with with you both sharing like what brings you Joy and what brings you pleasure

BVDK: ah different for different people,  me music is terribly important, I’m inviting my bikes to the hills here and walking through nature, gardening, talking with my friends, that’s usual stuff

PL: yeah you know just a little while ago in September I guess you and I and Steve pores were presenting together in Oxford

BVDK: at this in the in the sheldonian theater in Oxford which is not a minor little place

PL: okay and when I think about that yeah I think about the three of us sitting there together in the stage and I think that  well that really that joy that that brought. and and how much we are gifted by giving people of give these gifts. and and also I think what affects me also is there that expression called “Tikkun Olam”  it’s a Jewish expression and it means “to leave the world in a better place then you found it” and I think that also when I think about that relate to that brings me a great deal of satisfaction, that I know that I have done the best, that I have followed my truth. Sometimes difficult but that’s for me very …

BVDK: I can so many many experiences you and I had when we used to teach together of just a real deep sense of Joy, when we had moved the person from one place to the other and everybody feels great. like they feel great and we feel great about what we have been able to do, therapy can be a very joyful experience if you become a good therapist

yeah thank you for going into that pleasure and that joy. As you share it I I can feel the the Resonance of it the contagiousness of it and I I can really hear and feel my own body. the power of that as you speak of it in terms of resilience

BVDK:  yeah well no I think the word pleasure is not being used enough in our field life is really about finding what gives you pleasure gives you Joy and that’s an important Pursuit for us. In the constitution in America the pursuit of right fundamental right.

PL:  it’s not just about anybody can have guns but

BVDK: yeah but guns come in or you need to keep your slaves under control I forgot yeah yeah yeah

I’m hoping uh you both could share some of stories or highlights in in the many years you’ve been working with people of stories of healing that have impacted you, or that still feel so present in resonant in your body even now

BVDK:  yesterday a person who saw me 40 years ago, who we did uh four sessions of newer feedback with and who got a real deep sense of  her preciousness. I mean it happens all the time, it happens in almost every psychedelic session we do, you know the sematic experiencing sessions that we have and that Peter is such a master at we just T the class and workshop at at kapalo for 150 people and when people come into their own calm themselves down and discover each other. it’s know the world is filled with wonderful things actually yeah

PL:  you know I’m often asked the question what do you do if the person that doesn’t have a sense of their body  and actually Bessel there was a young man in one of our workshops, our two day workshops, and so he followed me afterwards and wanted to do some therapy, but he he lived up in the Bay Area.  he’s a Works in in in Hightech ready and he clearly on the Spectrum  and so he would come to work with me, uh I think it was probably three days every year, and when we first started working he typed out questions he had for me on his computer, he was sending he wasn’t looking at me he was looking at his computer over to the side, and so um I would get on my computer and respond to him even though he was standing there sitting right there. So the second year was the same kind of thing and so but the third year, he opened the computer and closed the computer and looked at me, So again this was uh someone who didn’t have a sense of the body and needed to be met at their level. So I just want to show you every year I get postcard from him and here is oh ah that’s a lovely postcard isn’t that wonderful speak a thousand words it does and I have so much joy when I see that and appreciation for him and he always says something like “dear Peter hope you are well” but again if we find a way to meet people where they are, and not where we want them to be, that is also important.

BVDK:  but what you’re saying is so such a critical thing that if you cannot feel your body, you cannot feel yourself and you cannot feel pleasure. So a normative response to trauma, because it’s lived out as Darwin already said in heartbreaking gutwrench is to learn to shut off your emotions and your Sensations. Very useful thing to do when you’re overwhelmed by your feelings, but if that becomes your habitual way of being in the world um it pays off because you stop feeling pain, but you don’t feel pleasure either. because pleasure is also a Bly solation and you cannot select one over the other in order to feel your pleasure your and so opening up to of the bodily Sensations to yourself is very much at the core of trauma treatment. and if I have to give references to that I would say more than anybody else, Peter Levine taught me that, although some other people may say but I talk you that too 34:29

PL: yeah yeah you know there’s a kind of a, I don’t know if it’s Tibetan, but it’s some tool that are used in different techniques. I say techniques, approaches and that we can’t avoid pain, if we try to avoid pain that’s not going to work, but we can’t also grasp on to pleasure and to really that’s the midway according to the Buddha. You don’t grab on to pleasure, you don’t try to push away pain

BVDK: see and the critical issue here is the issue of time and so I like to show a videotape of a mom who doesn’t pay attention to her kid and then the kid can very distressed. you’ve seen that movie. and then the mom comes back and takes care of the distressed kid and it shows how this child gets an internal frame of the world of sometimes it can really feel crappy, but my mom will come and help me out. and many people who traumatized don’t have an internal sense of this can be over at some point and there are certain areas of the brain that have to do with timing that actually don’t work anymore. And so when you are feeling terrible it feels like this will last forever, as opposed to sometimes things are unpleasant, some sometimes things are painful. But will time will flow as through things and so a very important part of healing from trauma is to get that sense of time in your mind of now “I feel really crappy” and then I feel better” and to get a sense of all the things you can do that if you get really upset if I do my yoga poses, or I make contact with the person, or I go for bicycle ride, but I can help my body to calm myself down. So trauma is really about a sense of timelessness, that this will last forever, which all of us have had that experience. But also you do that very beautifully in your work that you demonstrate also yeah

PL:  yeah I think in a way this is what you were talking about the people that don’t get better after one or two sessions.

BVDK: that’s right

PL: that they have to keep having that experience with us over and over until it really then becomes embodied, becomes linked in the body.

BVDK:  and so and then it becomes really the cultivation of getting a sense of time of “oh now I feel bad and now I don’t feel bad” and “now I feel joyful” and then pain will come and “I’ll deal with the pain when it comes” and I think that’s really the big maturing issue that again in our psychedelic therapy was a very powerful thing that came online in people.

is it the the pendula process that can help reinstate time? is that what you’re saying?

BVDK: yeah the pendulation is really uh that people become aware of oh now I feel safe and now I feel pain now I remember something awful and then I remember something good. That have the mental flexibility that you going to get trapped in one state of mind, but you know that you are complex composite person who can feel depths of despair and hearts of joy, all at the same person and that’s all part of me yeah.

PL: absolutely

Speaker: I am something I appreciate so much of of both your work is that that reinstating of time, the reinstating of space, the reinstating of feelings in the body, this reinstating of this these primal elements of what it is to be alive

BVDK:  yeah and these will be primal elements that are not cognitive elements. You cannot say to people you should experience a sense of time. Uur job is to help people to experience that on a very deep level and to discover that themselves we canot discover that for people.

Speaker:  so I, as we have another 10 15 minutes I’d love to spend some time looking back at the history of your work both of you and and just ask you know, what has been your mission or your drive? what are what are you most proud of as as you’re looking back of Decades of incredible work?

BVDK:  well you know uh it’s always a progression. You know for me a very important moment came and anybody who’s heard me talk, hears me talk about it, is that at some point somebody showed me a video tape of a woman who was very distressed and very pained, who did EMDR, and after two sessions she said” it is over, the trauma is no longer there” and that little videotape inspired me to go like people have the birth right to be able to say “it is over” and so my quest has been very much like some method work for some people other method work some other people, but my job is to find what will help this person to say “it is over over” it’s over and that’s really uh the Quest for me is and that I’ve explored many different methods, that’s I’m not a guru, I don’t propose any particular particular method, say some people can say it’s all over after they do somatic experiencing, other people say it’s all over after EMDR, other people getting together through psychedelics. And so our job is really to find out what is it that you need or what you should explore for you to be able to say it is over.

PL:  good advice, good advice and it’s important that the therapist doesn’t say well this happened a long time ago, it isn’t it’s over. right I mean yeah but we just put in that caveat

BVDK:  yeah yeah yeah and then actually came up yesterday then people say “oh this person is treatment resistance” but you should say “oh I don’t know enough to help this person with the method that I’ve learned”

The tradition in medicine and psychology is to blame the patient if you fail. With them instead of saying “Oh My Method didn’t work, what do I need to learn to help this particular person to get better”

PL:  yeah yeah where’s our our shortcomings?

BVDK: yeah and you know I love to show people pictures of the web telescope and what the universe looked like 30 years ago. And 30 years ago we could see just a little bit of universe as technology evolves, we can see much more. in a bit and I think that is what happens in Psychology, we are in a process of learning stuff. You know 40 years ago nobody knew anything about the treatment of trauma and now we have discovered some things that are often helpful and I hope that in the next 50 years the field will be as fertile as it has been for the past 40 years and that people 50 years from now will laugh at us about how ignorant we were. And I hope that  but they of us and say they were living in the Dark Ages, you know.

Speaker:  yeah I love that Peter what about for you what’s been um sort of the driving force your mission and what you’re most proud of

PL: okay so over the past 50 years you know I’ve developed this approach called sematic experiencing the the living body , you know and I’ve taught in many places as we did at ASN but all around the world and I really at one time realized my gosh you know the archetype of Chiron the wounded healer and that that was really what was also driving me. So I decided to make an exploration, an excavation of my life kind of reflecting back and trying to find the pieces that connect together and and that still need to connect together ,so I did that and it was meant only to be a for my own work, my own healing work.

But but then this um person I know is a publisher somehow he had heard about that and he said well why don’t you make it as a book and publish it as a book and I said “no it’s just for me it’s only for me”  and then I had the following dream and in the dream I’m standing facing a field and in my hand are are pages typewritten pages and it’s like in the dream I’m looking from left to right right to left just obviously I’m not knowing what to do and then behind me this wind comes and takes all of these pages and fills them sends them to the to the meadow and land where they may and that’s when I realized that I would be willing to try to write something that could help people heal.  And also could kind of be the backstory of how I developed my work and I received wonderful support from so many people. And  so anyhow the book is now at the publisher it’s called “an autobiography of trauma- a healing Journey” it’s available on Amazon.

And then I realized okay now I can let go I mean I was feeling terror. When I realized that this could be a book and and I’ve gone back and forth between terror and well leaving leaving this Legacy. And for people to build upon I think that was I really appreciated what you said about they will look back and just say good Lord these people were clueless or at least in some way I imagine they’ll give us some kind of credit. so anyhow writing that book and putting it out and and then actually the first time I actually talked to an audience and mentioning it was at the evolution conference and I stood up and you know there’s some thousands of people and I felt terror, I felt sheer terror. And one thing I’ve learned is not to try to deny it but just to kind of enlist the people and I said look I’m really scared about this and what’s made it possible is that the endorsements that several of the people I know and several friends have done and I felt their support. I felt their holding of me in this in this endeavor and in writing the autobiography. So and even when I talk about it now I get a little bit of a twist but it moves through it, moves through and and I think that I’m going to probably do a couple of other books one on spirituality and Trauma and then another one with a very close friend on healthy sexuality for adolescence, which of course is just a complete disaster. So I think writing books, walking on the beach, going to real places where I really feel like it’s I can swim and be and move and dance to really shift my life now to follow my heart to take me and lead me the next steps which wherever they are because I don’t really know

Speaker:  exactly where they’re going to be

BVDK: okay see I think it’s really important what Peter is saying about the wounded healer, you know, and that’s something that maybe not easy when you’re young and insecure to really see yourself as a laboratory animal, that we all have high pain and our hurt and as my friend be with BBD attachment researcher says “all research is research” and become therapist in order to heal ourselves or heal our mother. or something this is never neutral you devote your life to this because there’s something inside of you that you want to heal and and getting in touch with your own pain your own hurt uh is enormously important to become a good therapist and to really feel what you have put off with, what you have dealt with, and if you really get in touch with that you become much more respectful other for other people and other people’s solutions and when you hear how affected you have been by the own adversity, if you have experienced you go like and other people you other people s it’s like “that was much worse than what happened to me and I have no idea how I would have dealt with what you have gone through” and you start with position of great empathy and great respect, people have actually have survived what they have survived. It’s very important.

Speaker:  I’m wondering if we can land with just sharing uh something you’re excited about for the future Peter you started some and I just want to offer a little more space of like if there’s a, what’s next for you or something you’re excited for future projects or research that you can be excited?

PL:  I’m not the researcher

BVDK: or project no so we we finally published our our self experience in MDMA paper I think psychedelics are very exciting very worried about it. I think it’s last time it got screwed up and I’m not sure that it won’t get screwed up this time, but I think psychedelic hold enormous promise to really go very deep in into the sort of stuff that Peter more than anybody else has been exploring, your relationship to your body and I think there’s some real promise that I would be excited about exploring or helping people explore whether we can change very deep issues like autoimmune, diseases, fibromyalgia with learning how to work much deeper with body sensation and body awareness and we’re not there at this point and getting there yeah we’re get

PL: want to make sure we have time to mention the Boston trauma conference and also the the one that Scott and Melissa are putting on so maybe that’s what you say a little bit about that yearly conference

BVDK: I say this year we have our for the past 35 years and Peter has been our guest several times I’ve on a conference in Boston where we look learn from academic research basic research in the brain uh about what we really are learning in Laboratories and connected up with Innovative treatments. We have singers, songwriters, movement people, yoga people semantic experiencing people. But we also have  stuff on very basic neuroscience and it’s the place where we try to put together uh the brain uh the mind the body and spirituality and so our foundation is called the “trauma Research Foundation” traumaresearch.com and you can find a program there again, lot of somantic experiencing. But there’s really the integration about the huge amount of knowledge that we have these days about trauma that none of us can really contain so it’s a conference where people are really helped to see the whole complex spectrum of what how a trauma does to the mind and the Brain development and the evolution of healing yeah yeah