TedMed Talk: Fulfilling Trauma's Hidden Promise

In this TedMed Talk, I explore how the model of self-care, group support, and self-expression in words, drawings, and movement, that I teach in my Insight Timer course, has provided hope and healing to lonely, despairing people in some of the darkest most traumatized places on our planet. Watching it, you will know that even the most catastrophic forms of trauma can be your doorway to discovering who you really are.

Transcript

Driver when need return to places where respect has beenirmi in Shijaya,

A Gaza neighborhood that was bombed into rubble in the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas.

Around me are a circle of children,

Eight children,

Each one of whom lost a father in that war.

With them is Fatma,

A Palestinian teacher who's been leading one of our Center for Mind-Body Medicine groups with these children over the last month or so.

Also there is Jamil,

Psychologist who leads our program in Gaza.

I'm working with them in a group creating a circle which is the ancient way that people have come together for healing.

And we begin this group just as we begin all of our groups at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine,

The way we begin our trainings and even our staff meetings,

With slow,

Deep,

Soft-belly breathing to relax and bring us into this place.

And I invite you to breathe with me here and now,

To breathe with me and the children,

Breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth,

Relaxing into your seat.

Breathing deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth,

Letting your body relax.

When we breathe like this,

It helps to activate the vagus nerve.

Vagus means wandering in Latin,

And this big nerve wanders up from the abdomen through the chest back to the central nervous system,

To the brain.

It relaxes the body,

Relaxes our muscles.

When it's activated,

It slows our heart rate,

Lowers blood pressure.

It works on our brain,

On the amygdala,

A part of our emotional brain that's a center for fear and anger.

It quiets activity there.

It stimulates activity in the frontal cortex and parts of our brain that are responsible for judgment,

Self-awareness,

And compassion.

And one branch of the vagus nerve stimulates centers in the brain which make it easier for us to connect with,

To bond with other people.

So when we breathe,

As I hope you'll continue to breathe with me slowly and deeply like this,

We're quieting our body and our mind.

We're making ourselves more available to compassionate and healing connection with other people.

One of the children in the circle is a girl named Azar.

Her name means blossoms in Arabic.

She's nine years old.

She is showing me the drawings she did in the first of nine mind-body skills groups that she participated in.

The first drawing was really a combination of drawing yourself and drawing yourself with your biggest problem.

On one side of the drawing,

There is a building.

Stones are falling off it onto the ground.

Up above,

There are Israeli fighter planes.

They've been bombing the building,

Which is Azar's home.

At the base of the building,

Drenched in red and blood,

Is her father.

He's dead.

Nearby,

Two other bodies,

Also drenched in red.

Those are my uncles,

Azar says to me.

Not far away,

Another body.

That's my aunt.

Azar herself,

And she points herself out to me,

She's over in a corner.

She's this little tiny stick figure constricted with her face,

Sad mouth turned down.

That's me,

She says.

It's all there in the drawing,

Just as it is not only with children,

But with adults.

When we work with adults and they do the same drawings,

What often cannot come out in words comes out so powerfully,

So beautifully,

So directly in the drawings.

First drawing is painful.

The second one is excruciating.

This is the one of what's the solution to your biggest problem.

Now often these will be rather cheerful drawings.

A refugee family or someone who's in a refugee camp in another country will imagine a road going back home or a home that's been destroyed,

Rebuilt.

In Azar's case,

There is a rectangle that's grey and dark purple.

What is it?

That's my grave.

I'm lying in the grave in my shroud.

The Israelis have killed me.

There is nothing for me in this life.

I want to be with my father.

Azar did these drawings five months after the 2014 war ended.

At that point,

30,

40,

Maybe 50% of the children in Gaza could have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now trauma,

If not post-traumatic stress disorder,

Comes to all of us.

There's a famous study that you've heard a little bit about in some of the other talks on adverse childhood events.

In that study,

60% of adults,

Middle class adults,

Said they had suffered significant abuse or neglect as children.

But it's not just those of us who've suffered abuse and neglect.

All of us are going to deal with trauma sooner or later.

We're going to face life-threatening illness.

There's going to be a breakup of a love affair,

A divorce.

We're going to lose a job,

Have an economic catastrophe.

And whether or not those come to us,

There are the inevitabilities that every spiritual tradition understands of old age,

Illness,

And death that come,

Whether we want it or not.

And everybody is affected by trauma.

On my way over here,

I was in one of those little carts coming over here,

And the guy who was driving the cart asked me what I was talking about.

I told him I was talking about trauma.

He said,

Well,

You know,

My grandmother just died.

And he said,

And I can't sleep at night because I'm thinking about her.

I loved her so much,

And I feel like it's going to happen to me anytime soon.

So trauma comes to all of us.

Over the next eight weeks,

Azar is going to be learning techniques in her group.

She's going to be working with soft-belly breathing so she can sleep better,

So she can concentrate better,

So she can focus.

She's going to be using guided imagery,

And she's going to imagine a safe and comfortable place in Gaza,

A place,

A region that really is neither safe nor comfortable.

She's going to do active physical techniques,

Shaking and dancing and fast deep breathing to break up the patterns of tension that trauma brings and break up the body,

Which is anticipating yet another catastrophe.

Break up that frozen body that so many people have after trauma.

Trauma can be,

And this is what I've discovered over the last 50 years or so,

But I'm discovering it now.

It's what the ancient shamans always knew that trauma can also be,

As catastrophic as it is,

It's the doorway to our discovering who we really are.

That the wounded healer becomes the one who helps others.

That those wounds,

Those traumas we experience show us who we really are,

What's most important to us.

And they give us the gravity and the compassion so that we can also reach out to and help other people.

So I've learned that these mind-body skills,

Deep breathing,

Drawings,

Guided imagery,

Moving the body,

And many others,

Can all be the ways not only to relieve the symptoms of trauma,

But to discover who we really are.

And especially when they're done in a group that's supportive of us as we do them.

Now,

Over the years,

People have said to me,

Sometimes,

Questioning,

Why are you so involved with these mind-body techniques,

With this work that seems so far removed from what your Harvard medical school education was supposed to prepare you for?

They say it in a sort of angry way,

As if I'm committing some kind of betrayal.

Other people are more polite and more genuinely curious,

And they say,

When did you stop being a conventional psychiatrist?

And I said,

Well,

I never was a conventional psychiatrist.

And furthermore,

Conventional psychiatrist is an oxymoron.

It's a contradiction in terms.

Freud,

The father,

The founder,

Really,

Of modern psychiatry,

Was a rebel.

He was a troublemaker.

He was upending all the conventions of late 19th century Vienna.

He said that what happened to us as children shaped our minds and bodies for our whole lives,

That we could go inside in dreams,

In free association,

And recover memories that could be healing.

He said that sitting with another human being and sharing what was going on,

Bringing out what was inside,

Could bring us to this place of balance and equilibrium.

And I saw myself as a young medical student,

And even before that,

That I was a seeker.

I was a bit of a troublemaker,

Hard to believe,

I'm sure.

And I was looking to understand myself and to see if I could help myself,

And then also to see if in some small way,

Like Freud,

I could help other people understand themselves and thereby heal themselves.

Over the years,

There have been many people who have been guides for me in this work.

I want to mention just a couple of them.

When I was in medical school,

Robert Coles,

Who was a young psychiatrist at Harvard,

Threw me a psychotherapeutic lifeline.

He said,

Your troubles are real,

Some of them go back to early childhood,

Some of them are distortions that are happening now,

Some of them are more serious than others.

But he listened,

He was there for me,

He helped me gain perspective on myself,

Understand myself,

And he helped me laugh at myself.

He was not only a great help,

He was also a model,

An example.

When he wasn't working with privileged Harvard kids like me,

He was working on the streets of New Orleans with the young black children who were braving enraged mobs to integrate the schools there.

About ten years later,

I had another guide who was very important.

His name was Sham Singhan,

And he described himself as a mad Indian.

He had shoulder length,

Black hair,

Yellow eyes,

He looked like a cat,

He moved like a cat.

He was an acupuncturist,

Herbalist,

Homeopath,

Osteopath,

Naturopath,

And meditation master.

And he taught me many things,

Opened many universes to me.

But one of the major things that he taught me were the fast,

Expressive meditations,

The ones with the body like shaking and dancing and whirling and jumping up and down and shouting,

That are part of the human legacy,

The oldest meditation techniques on the planet.

And when I would use them,

I would find myself walking more easily,

Appreciating every leaf,

Every ray of sunlight that fell,

Being more tender to other people.

I was moving into that state of relaxed moment to moment awareness that we call meditation.

Sham came to me while I was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health,

And my job,

The one that I created,

Was to study so-called alternative therapies or holistic or integrative medicine.

This is in the early 1970s.

And so I was looking at the same time I was experiencing these techniques,

I was looking at the remarkable science that was showing the power of meditation and movement and guided imagery and nutrition to alter every aspect of our physiology and our psychology.

And I decided at that point that I wanted to put together these techniques,

To put together techniques of self-care and group support and bring them out into the world.

In 1991,

I created,

Founded the Center for Mind,

Body,

Medicine,

A nonprofit in Washington,

D.

C.

And we began to work with people I was particularly interested in working with.

I gathered together a group of people.

We had no money,

No paid staff.

It was kind of like Tom Sawyer painting Aunt Polly's Fence.

We all came around because we were all passionately interested in how these approaches and techniques could help ourselves and how we could work with other people.

And we began with people with HIV and cancer and other life-threatening illnesses,

With inner city kids,

With my Georgetown medical students who were just about as stressed out as anybody I'd come across,

And also with the patients who were filling up my practice,

People who had been tortured by dictators or had family members killed in dictatorships and had come as refugees to the United States.

The approach worked.

We began to train others around the United States,

Professionals who were interested in learning this approach.

Within a couple of years,

I became interested in seeing if the same approach that was working so well in the United States could also be applicable in some of the more troubled places on the planet.

And we began to go to these places.

And first in Bosnia right after the Dayton Accords and then in Kosovo during the war,

Working with people who were bombed and burnt out of their homes.

And everywhere we went,

Bosnia,

Kosovo with New York City firefighters after 9-11,

In southern Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina,

In Haiti after the earthquake in 2010,

And with U.

S.

Military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Everywhere we were teaching people this method and teaching them how to use it with those they served,

Whether they were clinicians or educators or veterans who were peer counselors.

And the work began to grow and began to expand.

Our largest program is in Gaza,

Where we've trained about a thousand clinicians,

Educators,

Leaders of women's groups,

And religious leaders.

And they in turn have worked with 160,

000 children and adults using this exact same model,

Simple self-care techniques.

We've also begun to study over the last 10 years or so and published research on this,

Showing that this model,

Which can be enacted,

These groups that can be led,

Could be led by anybody in this room,

Have made major differences in people's lives.

The kids and adults who are in these groups sleep better,

They're less angry,

Less inclined to become suicide bombers,

Martyrs,

More compassionate toward others,

They feel more hopeful about the future,

They can focus in school,

They do better at work.

And 80% of those who begin these groups with post-traumatic stress disorder don't have it 10 or 11 weeks later.

So what about Azar?

In the last group of these nine mind-body groups,

She did another set of drawings.

In the first drawing,

Once again drawing yourself,

She's there in the middle of the page.

She's a big girl.

She's got a skirt,

A bright skirt on.

There's an arrow coming from her heart,

And it's piercing a heart she's drawn in the middle of the page.

And in that heart she's written,

She said,

I'm learning English in school,

It says,

I love nature.

And the arrow goes through that heart.

It passes a flower with very well-defined petals,

And it's heading for this beautiful tree with green all over it.

In the second drawing,

Which is who she would like to be,

Azar points to herself and she says,

This is me.

I'm in my white coat.

I'm a doctor.

And I can see she's got a stethoscope.

She's got a stethoscope in her ears,

And the resonator of the stethoscope is on the chest of someone lying on the table in front of her.

She says,

I am a heart doctor,

And that's my patient.

Beautiful.

I can just feel so moved by that.

I say,

Well,

There are five people standing by the table.

I say,

Who are these,

Azar?

She says,

Those are my other patients.

They're waiting for me.

So what's amazing here is that not only what she's saying and what I'm seeing,

But that I also realize that the table on which the patient is lying for healing looks almost exactly like the grave in which Azar had buried herself in the first set of drawings.

So a receptacle for death has become an opportunity and a place for life to come back.

This doesn't mean Azar is not sad.

She tells me how much she misses her father,

And she shows me the purple socks that she's wearing that he gave her.

In the third drawing,

Which is how you're going to get from where you are now to where you want to be,

Azar is sitting at a desk with books all around her,

And she says to me,

Rather solemnly,

She said,

I am going to study very hard so I can get into medical school and become a heart doctor.

But here again,

There's a surprise.

The desk looks almost exactly like the examining table,

Although in a different color,

That looks like the grave in the first set of drawings.

So she has gone from being a despairing child seeking only death after her trauma,

From having her heart broken,

To being able to open her heart to others and to herself,

And reaching out out of her own pain and of her own woundedness to be able to heal others.

What I hope is that Azar will be able to continue this,

That like so many others whom I've seen,

And like myself as well,

Our traumas have opened us to our basic fundamental humanness and to the humanness of everyone around us.

And they have encouraged us,

Urged us,

And called us to reach out to others with the compassion that we have learned through our own suffering.

And my follow up is that a year later,

Azar is not only doing well in school,

She's teaching these mind,

Body skills to the other kids in her class.

What I would hope for all of us,

Myself included,

Is that we can always remember that it's possible to learn from whatever trauma life brings us.

That it is possible to use very simple skills of relaxation and meditation and movement and creativity,

All the things that we've been talking about,

That we can use those to help and heal ourselves.

And that we can connect with other people,

That we're all in this together,

Whether it's a small circle in Gaza of children who've lost their fathers or the circle of all of us who are here.

And that we can support each other and learn to have love and compassion for one another and for ourselves.

Thank you.

Reviews

You’re the best

Beautiful 💖♾️🪽Thank You 🕊️♾️☮️

What a wonderful talk. It’s amazing to hear the progress of the young girl & the shift as you describe in the imagery. Very inspiring & hopeful.

Powerful, so important in this world… thank you!🙏🏼❤️

Beautiful… it would be good to be given a list of the 7 self-care practices. Thank you for your work

Wonderful

Such a powerful and positive story how trauma does provide an opportunity to go within and heal the 💔 and then be able to share this compassionate 💝 with others. Inspirational story. 🙏

Thank you 💙🙏💙

Awesome, reinforces the direction I pursue in my practice as a therapist. Thank you.

Wow. Checking out CMBM. Thank you.

So grateful for this talk. My heart tears open hope. Thank you. Sending good wishes.

I was so moved and inspired in hope by this. Thank you.

Thank you so much for this informative and life changing talk. 🙏🙏🙏🙏

I would say this is an amazing insight to coming full circle, living through our experiences rather then in our experiences. Beautiful educational example! Thank you Dr. Gordon for your incredibly devotion to understanding trauma, humanity and teaching others how to thrive from their experiences.🙏🏻💗

Outstanding!!! Thank you for what you do and for sharing it with us 🌹

A wonderful and inspiring talk, thank you 🙏🏻💜