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Compassion in a T-Shirt
You Are Not Your Trauma: Healing with ACT and Compassion | Robyn Walser
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- [00:01]
A
Hi, I'm Dr. Stan Steindl. Welcome to Compassion in a T shirt. Today I'm delighted to be joined by someone whose work I have admired from afar for a very long time in the world of acceptance and commitment, therapy and trauma treatment. Dr. Robin Walzer is an extraordinary clinician, trainer and thinker. I've followed her writing, her teaching and her profound contributions to ACT from many years. So it's a real pleasure to finally meet her and have the chance to talk with her today. Robyn is a clinical psychologist, Director of TL Consultation Services, Assistant Clinical professor at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of Research at Bay Area Trauma Recovery Clinical Services. She's also on the staff of the national center for PTSD at the VA Palo Alto Healthcare System. Internationally recognised for her expertise in trauma, moral injury and values based work, she's co author of several influential ACT texts including Learning ACT and the Heart of act. Today we'll be discussing her powerful new book co authored with Dara Westrop, you Are not yout Trauma, as well as discussing the three stages of healing. They outline in the book the role of compassion in trauma work and some of her current work with women, including her upcoming program, Women Rising. Robyn brings such humanity, courage and wisdom to this work and I'm thrilled to share this conversation with you. And so I bring you Dr. Robin Walzer. Doctor Robin Walzer, welcome to Compassion in a T shirt.
- [01:43]
B
Ah, thank you for. Thank you for inviting me. Love the name.
- [01:47]
A
My pleasure. Great to see you and to meet you. The title of your new book with Dara Westrop, you Are not yout Trauma. I guess it almost feels like a wise, grounded message that a compassionate other might say to someone who's in kind of deep pain or maybe even words of kindness and encouragement that we might offer ourselves, I suppose. So was there a moment there or a client or an experience that really crystallized this idea for you that people are so much more than perhaps they're just, well, their worst. The worst things that have happened to them.
- [02:28]
B
Yeah. No. You know, both Darren and I are trained in acceptance and commitment therapy and we've both been working in the field of trauma for more than 60 years combined, like a long time and doing a lot of clinical work and the combination of like the clinical work and the ACT approach has really just solidified our understanding of you are a being that experiences, not a being that is the experience. And in act, it's the idea of selfless context and that you're a place where you hold and carry memories. You're not the Memories themselves. And we feel like this is such a, you know, you're so much bigger, so much broader than those memories. And so we know they have an impact. We want to validate the experience and what's happening for people, but we also want to help them come outside of that experience and recognize themselves, be consciously aware of themselves as more than those experiences. They were victimized. They don't have to kind of live in that space. So, so you are not. Your trauma seem to fit just perfectly for the kind of message that we're trying to deliver from this approach.
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A
It's so hard, isn't it? Because there does feel like a. It's, it's sort of difficult to resist the sort of, the tendency to identify really closely with our experiences, to feel like, you know, that does define us or, you know, that sort of thing. How do you feel, formulate that kind of very human tendency? Really?
- [04:13]
B
Well, there's a, there's a bit of a more technical explanation that has to do with things like the relational frame theory, which is a theory of human cognition and language. And part of what happens for us as human beings is we start to think and we get language on board and we're communicating and talking all the time, is that we lose contact with another way of knowing the world. So we know it with our mind, but we also know it through our experience. And you know, things like learning how to ride a bike or learning how to walk are not necessarily verbal things, especially learning how to walk, those are learning through experience. And so there's a, a sense of us that is experiential and not verbal. And that when we start to really get into having a full blown mind, we engage in so much verbal behavior that we lose contact with that other way of knowing the world. That things flow and move and that we're in motion, including thoughts, sensations and memories. And inside of that very mindy kind of language based place, we develop concepts of ourselves and they, we think they define us. They like, we kind of hang on to them and they can be very true and very real. Like you can say, yes, this happened to me. You know, you ask somebody something like, do you remember the 10th day after your 11th birthday? You know, what about all those days in between and all the stories that you have that were there and true too. And so we only have access to accurate but smaller part of our reality than we define ourselves by it. And so what we're saying is that the concepts that we hold about ourselves, although true, are not nearly enough to describe who we Are and as whole organisms, you know, moving through the world. And so I would. I would blame that kind of defining yourself on our over reliance on mind and our loss of contact with experience. That. That's one. That's one way to describe it anyway.
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A
And I suppose at a. In a very basic way it just helps us to try to make sense of ourselves really, doesn't it? And so as painful as it can be, at least it creates a little bit of structure or definition or something that we can hold on to. And. And because there is so many, many and varied things that have happened or could happen. And I suppose there's also an evolved tilt towards the painful things, the threatening things. And so we want to define ourselves, we want to create a structure, but we have a little tilt towards the threats and so on because we also want to protect ourselves with that as well, I suppose.
- [07:21]
B
Yeah, no, we want to stay safe. That completely makes sense to me. And so that kind of lean towards those events that happen to us that are scary or hard and you know, it makes sense that we want to be aware of those, pay attention to those, so we can avoid them hopefully in the future. Right. And stay safe. But sometimes they capture us and we get kind of stuck inside of our identities and we lose flexibility and adaptability and variability in the way we move through the world. A good example might be somebody who's professional, I'm going to say sports figure, let's say. Let's say they injure their knee and they really are, I really attached to their identity as a sports figure. And then they can't play anymore and their whole world gets sort of turned upside down. And we've seen this where they just sort of collapse into feeling like there's nothing they can do. See this in retirement. Sometimes where people retire, they've lost their identity, lost, I would say in quotation marks, their identity as a. Whatever profession they were in. And so there's many roles in our life and yes, they help us create a coherent story of ourselves. And that coherent story is. Provides structure and a sense of safety and kind of orderliness. Makes sense that we do it, but it just moves us away from, I guess, what you'd call psychological flexibility. The ability to shift when the world doesn't meet your coherent story.
- [09:13]
A
Yes, it's making me think just it sort of. It happens kind of all the time or throughout really. I mean, I now have children who are adults and so that has meant a rather difficult to sort of cope with shift in. In the role or identity as Father. And no longer.
- [09:38]
B
No longer are they.
- [09:39]
A
Quite as interested in hanging out with me. But also, nor are they always asking for, you know, sort of my advice or anything like that. And, and it shifts, you know, we're in an, in a new, very positive phase. But even in that day to day sort of a way, things are constantly changing and our identity is challenged and, and, and, and I suppose when there's trauma at play, you know, all of that is, is kind of, you know, even more, more painful. Really?
- [10:09]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. And you, you hear the, you know, folks who are really suffering behind trauma, you know, they're just trying to stay safe. They get kind of stuck inside of those places where they want to be safe and they're, they're maybe having freeze responses or they're having, you know, responses that are about run away, get out. Like all of those make sense. Like none of that is like a something wrong with them or a mystery. It's just that they're relating to themselves in ways that are where there's no longer the danger that was once there. And so they sort of get stuck in that space. And what we want to do is help them get freedom and from that painful space and see it as a part of their history, not the whole of who they are. And I mean we're doing other kinds of things too, like exposure, work and you know, helping people engage in things like growth and broadening in the book through values based living and orienting towards meaning and what's important to you. So you know, there's a lot of things that we're working on, but I'd say the you are not your trauma sort of. If you think of a diamond, like that's the focal point, the point on the bottom of the diamond that sort of supports all of the other things that we're, that we're doing.
- [11:29]
A
Yes, your beautiful book does or is divided into three stages really that you just kind of captured the safety and skills building planned exposure to the trauma and reconnection to the here and now through values. In stage one, you kind of emphasizing grounding safety, but also even there reconnecting with strengths and values before the trauma processing might begin. What does, Would you mind. Yeah, just sort of telling us a little bit about that first stage. What does it mean to, to build that foundation within oneself?
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B
Well, so if you think about what happens in with folks who are really suffering behind a trauma response, so maybe they have a post trauma reaction or they've been diagnosed with post trauma traumatic stress or something like that is that their world sort of shrinks. They're avoiding anything that reminds them of the experience, anything that would trigger their physiological response. Like their world starts to get very small. And if I were to think about things like PTSD as a, as a, as a full on, like, what would describe it? It's an avoidance process, right? Like you're trying to stay safe by avoiding anything that reminds you of the trauma. And what we're doing in ACT is looking at the cost of avoidance and also how control of internal experience actually fails. Like most people are trying to stay safe and they don't want to feel anxious and fearful, so they hide, but they still feel anxious and fearful. Or they, they don't go places or they avoid trauma reminders and it's not working right. Like the, the fear is still there. And so what we're doing is working on decreasing the avoidance. But not just through, you know, go to the places that scare you. That's only a part of it. It's also opening up to yourself as an emotional being and allowing, allowing emotions to rise and fall, to come and go through acceptance of internal experience, not acceptance of the trauma. Acceptance of internal experience. What's called an act, diffusion, which is seeing and observing that you have a mind, not that you are your mind. When you're born, your mind wasn't there. You developed a mind through learning and that sense of you stretches forward in time and that you hold a mind, you're not a mind and you can create a more compassionate relationship with yourself. Understanding that this was learning that got me to some of these places, not just, you know, that I'm afraid or something like that there. I have a learning history here. And so use acceptance and diffusion and then present moment work, be here now and self as context. As I was describing earlier values and committed action to sort of help people move through that stage. One process of preparing to do the exposure work and exposing them to emotional things that might be painful but are not about the trauma. Learning how to be here in the moment through grounding, working on seeing mind rather than being mind. So it kind of has a quality of mindfulness processes to it. Living more with, with more awareness and consciousness and then moving into exposure to the trauma as a way to stop avoiding and meet and essentially learn how to inhibit the escape response. And when you do that, you also learn that these emotions are not dangerous, that your heart can beat fast and it's going to be okay, and that you're can feel a little sweaty and you can have a little bit of that kind of response and then if you just wait, is going to fall too. It's going to rise and fall. But people usually, as soon as they start to feel it, they run and they don't move through the experience in a way that they kind of begin to be aware that rises and falls. So we're doing that kind of work in stage one. This is based on Judith Herman's model of, you know, trauma treatment where you have three stages, safety and stabilization, then exposure, then reconnection. So we took that model, but we built act processes into that model.
- [16:14]
A
Yes, the first stage, really, I don't know, it just takes so much courage, doesn't it, for people to, to really do that? I mean, it, it's remarkable to even just sort of imagine what that would be like to begin to just feel able to approach some of those most difficult feelings and the most difficult thoughts and the images that are popping to mind and every fiber of their being would be wanting to avoid that and step away from that and not have to face it. And yet stage one is really about. It's kind of feeling grounded and calm, feeling the courage, but alongside that a sense of safety. Actually, could you unpack the safety word? How would you describe that as a kind of goal of stage one?
- [17:13]
B
Yeah. Well, so, you know, so many people are actually just feeling frightened when they come in. You know, post trauma. Their systems are turned up and they're hyper aroused, hypervigilant. There's lots of things happening inside of those spaces where you're having a long standing post trauma problem. There's, it's more complicated with complex trauma. You know, people are living inside of families or systems where trauma is ongoing. And then your learning history gets more complicated there and safety and trust are really risky. Like the people you're supposed to trust are not the people you can trust. For instance, if, let's say your family is the perpetrator of the, of the trauma. And so you have to do more work in those spaces to help sort of get a sense of groundedness that I can be with these experiences, painful emotions, sensations that are challenging, painful memories. And they're not going to destroy me. And they don't have to rule my life. They don't have to be my definer, the definer of me. And so, and so sometimes stage one takes longer. But really the goal here is to help people get connected to a core, a centered place, a sense of consciousness and self where safety is. Because there's no emotion that's dangerous. Right? It just says they're dangerous. Like, if you think about other animals. You and I were talking about dogs and cats when we start. Yeah. And, you know, if I think about my little Daisy, one of my dogs, being in a fearful position, right. Where let's say she's being attacked by another dog, that would. That would be. Her whole system would be alerted and on fire, and she would, you know, be doing things to get safe, either running or fighting and maybe even freezing. Although dogs don't tend to freeze. I suppose they can. Right. Either fight or run. And then once it's over, sort of, it's almost as if it didn't happen. If you watch dogs. And so, you know, they. They don't tend to cling to things the way they do it. Now, it's not that you can't get a dog in to learn helplessness. You can if you keep threatening them again and again and again. But it's more like complex trauma, right. Where there's another. Another series of learning experiences happening there. But me, I can step on my. Well, here's another example. Like, I can accidentally step on my dog's foot and she might yip. And I'm. I'll be like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You know, and do the stuff that I do when I accidentally do that. And then she's off and running and fine. And I'm like, guilty for 24 hours. And the next day I'm still like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Like, we as humans, kind of through language, hang on to things that have happened to us because we can reflect on the past and conceptualize the past. We. We conceptualize about the future. We kind of live in the future. And in those two places, things can seem scary. You've got the trauma and potential trauma. And other animals are, of course, aware of danger and they're alerted, but they're not doing what we're doing. I can give a little bit more of a maybe difficult example. Like, let's say a rabbit comes up out of a hole and a fox snacks snags it. Yeah. And the rabbit kicks into the fight response and then gets away. But imagine being snatched by. If you're the rabbit being snatched by that fox, it'd be pretty frightening. And the rabbit gets away. How long will the rabbit stay in the hole? Not very long. Like minutes, maybe even before it comes back up again. But something like that happens to a human being and they can get down in their hole and hunker in for really long periods of time. Like I've worked with World War II soldiers and Vietnam era soldiers, both of who've been struggling with trauma for years and, you know, 30, 40 years and, you know, staying stuck inside of spaces where they're waiting for the safety to arrive. I would add this, though. We don't invite people to show up to painful stuff for the sake of it. We're always attaching it to what kind of life do you want to live? We want to attach it to values and meaning. We don't want people to experience pain for pain's sake. But if walking through the pain in, in a, the structured way that we have in the book means you get to have meaning and values and engagement and, you know, a more vital and colorful life, would you be willing to do that? And so we want to link it to something that's about meaning instead of just about pain for pain sake. And even for symptom reduction, we're, we're not even that interested. And let's just eliminate your symptoms. It's like, let's build a life worth living. And so the work there is about moving towards, you know, you're only here this so for so long, and then you're, you're gone. Life is pretty short, right? And as someone who has children who are older now, you know, you might like, oh, yeah, that's right. It goes by pretty quickly.
- [23:18]
A
It does, yeah.
- [23:20]
B
And so, you know, when you get to the end, will you look back and say, yeah, I led a meaningful life, or you look back and say, I just tried to stay safe. And we want to kind of help people move into that space of meaning, even if it contains pain. But we also want to, I mean, we're, we're big fans of joy too. Right? So let's put that out there. Like, I like joy. It's a, it's certainly a big thing. We, and we now know that if you're trying to run from your pain or your anxiety or your fears and you're working really hard to suppress those emotional experiences, that as human beings, we're not very good at targeting a single experience and suppressing it, that if we want to turn it off, we got to turn it all off. And so if you're not willing to feel the more painful things, you also cut yourself off from joy. You turn it all off, you go numb. And you hear that with folks, trauma survivors all the time, that they're, they just feel numb. They don't feel joy either. And so we want to invite them back to feeling joy. But what that also Means is showing up to the pain of what's in the world as well. But all of it rises and falls, comes and goes. That's sort of a long, long explanation.
- [24:40]
A
Well, it's. To your question, it's really, it's beautiful listening to you talk about it. There's. We have this tendency to take the external and bring it internally in a way and then it kind of is maintained there even when perhaps the threat is gone. And it can have these consequences of more and more restriction through avoidance and so on. And it gets in the way of living our life or at least kind of can get in the way of our values and living a values directed life and a meaningful, a meaningful life. The thing that really did stand out for me as I was listening to you sort of go through those, those little steps, there was just your own steady, embodied kind of compassion as you're describing that. And I can imagine, you know, like as a therapist, that's a really important kind of aspect to it and important aspect to stage one, I guess as sort of a little technical curiosity. How did you create that in, in what is a book form or, or a sort of a self help book? You, you know, that, that kind of sense of a compassionate presence perhaps, you know, and, and help that, that being a big part of what encourages or creates courage in the room sometimes in therapy.
- [26:07]
B
Yeah, no, thank you for bringing that up. One of the things that Dara and I were really, my co author, Darren, I were really invested in communicating is that presence in the therapy room. Like in our work in the therapy room, we do want to bring compassion and we, when we wrote the book, we wanted that to come through in some way. So we were thinking about our clients when we were writing. We were talking with each other about what does it mean to stand in this very scary space and be with this kind of pain. Both from the perspective of the client, but from our perspective as well. I think that act has a very compassionate quality to it. If you think of being with pain and not shrinking away from somebody's painful experience as a therapist, then I too have to do some willingness. You know, I've heard stories that I would never share with another human being because they're so terrible about the kinds of traumas that people have suffered. And so to bear witness to that without pulling back or shrinking back in any way, I think is a compassionate stance. Like I'm here with you no matter what emotion, no matter what imagery, no matter what sensation you're experiencing. And I think like when you think about human beings as social animals and people who thrive in a kind of togetherness that if you and I are with each other and we've got each other's back, that's a much safer place. And if you're out wandering around by yourself. And so in combination with sort of presence and compassion with I will not abandon you no matter what, you get that sort of sense of. I know, I kind of think of it like as a deeply rooted tree or something like that. Right. Like it's got this quality of steadfastness in it that I think people can pick up on and detect or at least it sounds like you're hearing that in the book. And I'm, I'm, I'm hoping that clients or individuals or therapists who read it can feel it.
- [28:33]
A
Yes, it comes through in the voice of the writers and it does create that sort of feeling. And yeah, like you said, a sense that someone or somewhere in this process, they've got my back kind of a feeling. And I like the tree metaphor. I often think of it as a tree because a tree has a strong trunk and deep roots, but also soft leaves and little flowers, you know. And so it's kind of at both ends of the, the tender and the fierceness that can be there with compassion is, is sort of nicely depicted there. And of course stage two really is about compassion too and self compassion in a way. Because self compassion is often not necessarily doing what just sort of feels good in the moment, but doing what might be good for us or good for our health and well being and those sort of stuff and those sort of things. It takes a lot of wisdom and strength and courage to get there. But stage two is when people do start to turn towards those experiences that they perhaps have been avoiding for years. What's that like? Or how do people take that first step, tender step towards or from avoidance towards willingness as, as you said.
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B
Well, some of it begins at stage one. Right. Like we're having them, those difficult or other difficult experiences in stage one. So they have a sense of what it's going to be like. So it's not necessarily a surprise, although it still can be because it's challenging to dig deeply into a trauma memory. But I do think it has a quality of staying with self compassion, staying with self in this pain. And we hope we've established that by the time someone is moving into that exposure, the phase two part of the book. And if you think about compassion as staying with pain with pain and then the kind of added on piece of in the service of reducing suffering then now you've got a reason to, to stay with it. But we define suffering very specifically. The suffering isn't in the trauma itself. The trauma is painful indeed, it's unwanted, it's dangerous, it's all of those things. The suffering is in the avoidance of self following the trauma. I can't have this, I can't stand this. It's too much. There's something wrong with me. I'm damaged goods. I need to get rid of this. I need to hide, I need to run like you. The suffering is unfolding in that space, inside the avoidance space. And new learning kind of gets turned off and flexibility in life goes way down and there's really significant suffering inside of that. So our idea about being with in the service of suffering is about letting go of the idea that you have to be something else internally. History only goes in one direction. Right. We can't undo the trauma, can't go back in time and make it different. So it's on board and so how you relate to it becomes very important. And it. Will it be the consumer of you and the dictator of your life or will you compassionately hold it as something that happened to you, recognizing its pain, it's difficulty, the challenges it brought, but then hold it and move in a way that is about building and growth and stepping forward that no longer is your dictator. It's not denying it and it's not, you know, we want to validate the experience for sure. But stepping into that exposure is an invitation with self. Compassion is an invitation into a bigger life.
- [32:52]
A
Yes, it's sort of who's running the show in a way and you know, trying to, to step into that, that kind of part of ourselves or something that is able to have the strength and courage to actually approach the suffering. Which as you said, that's a really useful takeaway that the suffering is this avoidance and the cycle, the maintaining cycle, that that's what we've been really suffering with all this time. And so to alleviate or prevent that suffering we might be stepping out of avoidance. Does how do exposure based approaches fit in an act consistent way? Is, is there anything particular there in terms of how you framed the, the exposure itself?
- [33:41]
B
Yeah, it's a, it's a little bit more technical when you think about it. But when you. So exposure used to be more thoroughly about habituation. Right. Like the more you get present to something that's scary and you stay with it, like things sort of become less anxiety provoking, you know, if you're Afraid to step in the ocean. And you keep stepping in the ocean. You know, you can have your, your anxiety about it go down a bit. You might still feel a little afraid in dark waters or deep waters or something like that, but, but I think that'd be very natural, right? Like that's just a part of, you know, built in, really built in. So although habituation can occur, like you don't feel the anxiety anymore, this sort of response that you, that fear response becomes less and less the more you do the thing. And for those who might be listening, who are not sure what habituation is, it's just kind of that, like if you're afraid of something, the more time you spend with it, the less afraid you become, essentially. But some of the newer science shows that that fear can reemerge depending on the context and that if you don't keep exposing, over time, it can reemerge. And so, and there's some other research done that it looks at what's called inhibiting the escape response. And so essentially what they're saying, what you're doing in those exposure places is that you, you're staying with the fear and not, you're not running, you're not escaping from that. And, and what you learn there is that you can be with the emotional experience, no matter how high or low it is, it doesn't have to disappear, per se, because you now have learned that I can be with it and it's going to rise and fall and rise and fall again and rise and fall again. And so you can stay engaged in what you're doing if it's healthy for you. And it doesn't take away your. A real need to run. I mean, if you're, if a lion's after you, do what you need to do, right? But it does help you stay in your life and in your world in terms of I don't have to run. I can be with this. I can have compassion for myself. I can notice this as a learned response, a conditioned response. I can, and I can stay here in a very connected and present way rather than this my, my insides telling me to run and then I run. So the kind of newer model is that you're inhibiting the escape response. And when you learn that, then you can inhibit it anywhere, basically, if that makes.
- [36:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, I do notice that with my own fear of flying that it reemerges. And, and so it, it is, it is about, you know, just sort of, sort of building that skill of, of approaching, approaching and doing it. Because where it's taking me is, is also important to me too. Even though there are still these urges to escape or avoid. You've referred there to fear and fear that might sort of arise out of those traumatic experiences and so on. And it just popped to mind the sort of the self blame and shame side of those experiences too. Especially you mentioned complex trauma and that sort of thing. Where does the work around perhaps self blame come in? Is that a stage two aspect and is in the exposure processes too? Is there a different way in with, with those aspects of the experience?
- [37:39]
B
Necessarily if they're part of the experience, you want people to show up to those as well. You might in some stage one. I mean, certainly when they're doing the exposure work around the trauma, you, if you feel shame, you write that and you stay connected to it. Like you let yourself process the emotional experience. But part of what's happening there, and I find this pretty fascinating and I'm not sure without major changes in society that I know exactly how to fix this. Especially for clients who, let's say they were, you know, sexually abused as children and they're feeling ashamed of themselves or something like that. That's largely a social phenomenon. Like if you, like a young child won't report shame over being. A very young child won't report shame over being sexually abused. They can't, they don't know the words, they're not sure what it is. But you know, if you have shaking fingers at you and you've got messages in the world that are, women aren't to blame and what did you do to create that and what's wrong with you? Like you're taking that stuff on and then you're relating to yourself in the same way somebody else is relating or the world is relating to you. And so shame can evolve in that space. But it's almost like it's not your shame. It's a shame that is taught and, and sort of induced and evoked. And so that part, I, I really struggle with it, you know. That you would feel shame for being raped is interesting, right? You didn't seek it, you weren't wanting it, you weren't trying to have that happen to you. But because of the way society looks upon human sexuality and human understandings of this, you often get this idea that somehow you're to blame or there's something wrong with you because you didn't stop it or, you know, so we as a society have work to do that I think could help in this area. Now if you're, if you're talking about something like moral injury, then we want the shame to be there because, you know, moral injury often happens under conditions of trauma as well, where, except for you're the one perpetrating the trauma, we want you to feel shame. Right? Like imagine you perpetrated trauma, you have no shame. That's very hard to treat and do anything about. Like the shame is your ally in that place. And so the shame, like other emotions is when we want to approach, we want to be thoughtful about, is it your ally? Is it telling you don't want to do those kinds of things and that you're breaking your own values or is it a mixed up with social messages about, you know, you shouldn't have these experiences and that you did means that something is not okay with you.
- [40:54]
A
It's a, it's a big and wicked problem really, isn't it actually in terms of what you did. And it does feel a little bit overwhelming to think what to do, that there's, there's a kind of a, a built in aspect to it. I guess we are somewhat evolved to feel shame and guilt and so on. And actually when you said before stepping on Daisy's foot or something, you know, like you can feel guilty, you know, like, and so we, we do experience those self conscious emotions, but then certain people around us or relationships can start to instill that shameful feeling. And then society or the system, you know, just offers its little contribution as well or big contribution. And, and it's, it's a very, a very tricky aspect of it all. The, the third and final stage is you mentioned joy before and, and I guess one word that popped to mind was, was sort of flourishing, you know, trying to shift from surviving the trauma to building this life, I guess, guided by values. And so, so what's the stage three about in, in, in the book?
- [42:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, it's, I, it's such a, I mean, it's near and dear to my heart in terms of thinking about what's meaningful. And I've been, you know, highly influenced by Viktor Frankl and existentialism. Right. And these kinds of, that's also part of my background and training and resonates with me. And you know, how, how do we want to live becomes a really important question. Like let's say you have 80 years here and you spent 40 of it suffering behind PTSD. It's like, it feels like a tragedy in some way. Right? Like something's unfolding there. I give an, I use, I like to give the example of a Vietnam era veteran who really holds the value of love and connection inside of the family unit. But he goes to family events and he's like, hyper vigilant the whole time. He's disconnected from what's happening. And he would miss things like his little granddaughter, like tugging on his pant leg and smiling at him. Right. And if you're thinking about meaning in life, like, is it like scanning the environment or is it seeing that smile? And for him, it was about seeing that smile. And so we want to help people come into a space where they're connected to what's meaningful to them. I find this really fascinating to stand. Like, when you start talking to people about what's meaningful, what's truly meaningful. It's not like, you know, I've got money or I've got a big house or something like that. Quite often it's these little special moments, like your granddaughter smiling at you, or, you know, the dog jumping up and down when you come home each day, or the hummingbird in the backyard. Right. Like, there's these, but you. If you're not present for those because you're in avoidance mode, then you miss meaning. And so our work in this part of the book is to help people, like, step into their. Really clarify their values, really understand what's meaningful to them, and then in some way take actions on an ongoing basis that bring those values to life. So that when they do get at the end, they can look back and say, yeah, I did. I didn't live as a victim. I lived as a engaged, vital, alive, present person. And they get to define what that. They get to define what that looks like.
- [44:41]
A
Yes. The, the, the discrepancy from our values can sometimes be a, a part of the suffering itself, can't it? You know that there's sort of. On the one hand, we are. We might get stuck in, in the scanning or the hyper vigilance and not notice the granddaughter. But at the very same time, we know that it has happened too. And, and so we, we're not being quite that person that we would really like to be. But then that sometimes just means, okay, well, I don't want to think about that either. And it becomes again, a part of all of that. But then, yeah, being able to sort of identify, you know, like, what sort of person do I want to be, what sort of grandfather do I want to be, or all the other different aspects of my life, what are the values behind that? And then sort of, yeah, feeling a sense of thriving and flourishing and experiencing the world in a way that, where you can really connect with all of that.
- [45:38]
B
Connect to meaning and purpose.
- [45:39]
A
Connect to meaning and purpose. You've spent decades too, working with women and in a range of ways, but women veterans, I think, and survivors of violence, but also just women sort of. Yes. Shaped by systemic experiences and the challenges in amongst us, all of that. You have some Women Rising training coming up, I think that, that I saw on Instagram, so it must be. Must be real. And I, I suppose it's. It. It feels like it's. It's a sort of arising from your. Your work in. In trauma and with. With women who, who are survivors, but also is. Is broader as well. And, and so, yeah, I wondered if you. What's. What's been your work with women and what do you have planned next?
- [46:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, I, you know, when I look at the. I mean, I'll be quite honest, this has been an interest for me since I was very young. I grew up in a family where my father was quite violent and there was a domestic violence in the home. And I saw my mother and all of us, you know, suffering underneath his authoritarian rule of thumb. And so there's a personal interest in seeing, you know, actually witnessing, you know, my mother with a black eye and a split lip and just really feeling the wrongness of that. Right. And, and connecting to, you know, what is that about? And it's. It seems like it's mostly about control. I need to be in control in some way. And often it's about controlling their own feelings and, you know, or anger being the thing that they're, you know, using to guide their life in some way. And it's discouraging. I just recently looked at rates of violence against women to see if they're going down, and the answer to that is no. It's decreased by 0.2% in, like, the last 10 years. So it's like flat rates of violence are not going down at all. I was kind of hoping they were, because you think we're moving in a world that understands how violence harms society and individuals, but we're not. And so part of what I want to do is empower women to be able to stay safe and be independent, be in love if they want to be in love, but not to be in harm. And I think part of. I want to encourage women, but I also need to find a way, I think, to encourage those parts of society that are engaged in that kind of behavior to really take a look at the cost. The cost is not just to the person being violated. It's the cost to everybody. So violence against women harms society as a whole and suppression oppression harm society as a whole. Like you can see the long term impacts of it. It's financially impactful, it's psychologically impactful, it's emotionally impactful. It children who see violence grow up with, you know, a lot of distorted and ways of understanding the world. And so it just like if you look at societies where women have more equality, they do better by far than societies that, where women don't and women aren't us. So my interest is in finding ways to help women rise into more empowerment but not in such a way that they're going to suffer tremendously because there's backlash against it. And I think that's why we've seen violence not going down. You know, you may have heard of the incel communities and the, and the, you know, rise in authoritarian. Authoritarianism. If you look at authoritarianism across time, it almost always is damaging to women. Yeah. And so you know, I want people, I want women to be safe and with women being safe, your society is safer. Like it's healthy for everybody. And I'm not sure why that hasn't clicked yet and like why we're not in more enlightened in that space. So right now I'm thinking about how do I help women be more. Not have power, be empowered. And I'm saying that very deliberately to make choices and to move in the world in free ways that aren't about being in fear, being afraid of men. And you may have heard that if you, that would you rather run into a bear or a man on a trail in the woods? Have you heard this?
- [50:57]
A
I think I have heard it, yes.
- [50:59]
B
And women are saying I'd rather run into a bear.
- [51:02]
A
Bear.
- [51:03]
B
Yeah.
- [51:04]
A
Yeah.
- [51:05]
B
Hey, like what's it. I mean there's, there's no scientific research behind that or anything like that. But it is interesting to hear women say that grasshopper went into a bear.
- [51:14]
A
Yeah.
- [51:15]
B
And that tells me that like something's not working. It's not working and we as a society have some serious self examination to do.
- [51:29]
A
And, and part of it is the, the, the sort of important work that you're doing empowering women. And part of it is work with men too. You know, like how do we sort of help on, on that side of the dynamic because obviously that the statistic that's not changing is, is really involving also the behavior of men. So it's, it's a, there's, there's, there's definitely some work ahead for all of us.
- [51:59]
B
For all of us. I was thinking about, I know we're coming towards the end, but I was thinking about men in particular and the. And someone about the incel community. I'm planning to do some writing on it here shortly. And in that community, right. Like there's this sort of hatred of women that gets espoused and supported and propagated inside of these little incel communities. But also what's happening in there is that they encourage each other to commit suicide and, you know, to check out of this world where they're never going to have companionship. So it seems like they're never. So something really painful is going on there as well. And so it, it. It's a societal issue. And I tend, I'm right now working in the, in the. On the side of like, how do we empower women, but also how do we not focus on men having power, but men being empowered to be present in relationships in ways that are healthy and not damaging? And that is probably something that needs to be explored more.
- [53:16]
A
There's possibly trauma there too, I guess, in a way that's people responding to trauma or those sorts of things. Well, no, that's wonderful work, actually. Yes. Dr. Robin Walzer, thank you. Well, thank you for, for this wonderful book that, that really is very approachable and engaging and, and helpful, all of those things. And thanks for all the, the work that, that you do. I, I actually think I did hear Daisy snoring slightly in the background at one point, so it was lovely. It was nice to have a little sleeping, but yet compassionate presence in the background. Only very briefly at one point, but yes. And thank you for speaking with me on Compassion in a T shirt.
- [54:12]
B
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [54:14]
A
Great. Thanks very much.