Ongoing Resources: free coupons to my 4 courses on Udemy.com
Pdf copy of my book Friends With Your Mind, How To Stop Torturing Yourself With Your Thoughts
“A fundamental goal of human development is the emergence of a self-sustaining, self-regulated human being who can live in concert with fellow human beings in a social context. Vital for this healthy development is a relationship with a parent who sees and understands the child’s feelings and can respond with attuned empathy to the child’s emotional cues.”
Dr Gabor Mate, When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
Children in non-attuned relationships may feel loved but do not experience feeling appreciated for who they really are. It happens easily when the parent is stressed or tuned out for any reason. This leads to only presenting our “acceptable” side. We repress the emotional responses our parents reject and learn to reject ourselves for even having such responses.
This is a fundamental reason emotional neglect is so damaging. It is the origin of not daring to be authentic. The root of denial and suppression. Of disconnection from ourselves and of course from others.
As adults, we now have the opportunity to attune with empathy to ourselves. Try this practice.
Class Resources
Empathetic Witness guided practice
Slides from class on Empathic Witness
Slides from class Blessings Presentation
Slides from class Timeline Inquiry: Agency, compassionate trauma lens, and self-sabotage.
Guided Inquiry Timeline Photos with Captions
Exploring Self-Identity Thank You For Arising
Signature Strengths: Inquire into one quality of strength and resilience from a parent or grandparent and one for ourselves and take an interesting leap into the quantum field of possibilities. Signature Strengths practice from class
Signature Strengths list Signature Strength Slides from Class
Please take this free test called VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths
https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/questionnaires/survey-character-strengths
Resilience and Strength in our family Inquiry Questions
Intergenerational Strengths Inquiry
Attuned Empathy: Slides from class
Compassion Inquiry Practice. With any inquiry, there is no expectation that we will feel a certain way. We are looking to see what is there.
Core Deficiency Beliefs: Holding the Opposites Inquiry
Letting Go of Core Deficiency Beliefs
Core Deficiency Beliefs and Alternate Explanations
Lingering Core Deficiency Beliefs
Resources Practices
Regulating our Nervous System
Relax your forehead and let go of worry 2 minute practice
Exhaling at least six seconds activates our relaxation response
Breathing practices like extended exhalation
Box Breathing for immediate reset – 4 seconds on exhale, hold, inhale, hold and repeat 5 to 10 times
Chant or sing. Use syllable Voooo.
Talk in longer sentences of at least six seconds
Tapping or Tracing on Catastrophic Thinking
Stay With and Mine Your Feelings
Tools to work with energy and sensations in our body
Grounding in your body – aware of feet on ground, hold your own hand, hand on heart, hug yourself, right hand under left arm then rub or pat your right arm with left hand
Shake the tree – stand up and shake your body around, let your hands and arms be loose
Throw the energy down into the earth – bring your hands above your head, hands in lightly clenched fists. Exhale and throw your arms down toward the earth, opening your hands and letting the energy fly out of your fingers and out of your body. Do at least 3 times.
What to do when you’re panicking or having trouble accessing your body
Kiloby Inquiries Resources:
Radical Recovery Summit: Interview with a mother and son connected with the Kiloby Center
In Need of Satsang Detox, Scott Kiloby. “Once I extracted some really valuable tools, I put all of that down and began investigating on my own. This made all the difference.
How Generational and Early Life Trauma Shape Our Lives, Scott Kiloby and others at Science and Nonduality
Psychology, Articles and Other Resources:
Coping with Childhood Trauma, Gabor Mate
“When you know a child is going through a traumatic experience, how can you help them come to terms with it in a healthy way? Keep in mind, trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you. What happens inside you is a constriction. So the question is, how do you keep that child from being constricted from their experience? How do you keep them from being limited by it? The trauma is that the child has to keep it in. The trauma is that there is nobody to listen to them. Nobody to validate their feelings. That’s why they shut down. That’s why they constrict. If they had someone to talk to, who heard and validated their feelings, they would not have been traumatized.
So the trauma itself is an adaptation, it’s a restriction, it’s a response to a lack of support. Which also means, that by the time the traumatic event happened, they were already traumatized. The traumatic event was not the primary trauma. The primary trauma was that the child was isolated in the world and couldn’t talk to anybody. But that happened before the traumatic event started. By the time that the event happened, the child already knew that they were alone, helpless, and without support. So they had to keep it in, push it down. The child needs someone to express their feelings to, and to have their feelings mirrored back to them. Then they won’t be traumatized. That’s the presence of what is called the ’empathetic witness’. The “empathetic witness” is Alice Miller’s phrase. It’s not necessarily somebody who can change the child’s situation, but somebody that can mirror, validate, and accept that child’s feelings and emotions. That’s how you protect people.” It’s never too late to become the empathetic witness for someone else’s or your own inner child.
Trauma Connection and Addiction, my 2017 interview with Dr Gabor Maté
When the Body Says No, Hidden Cost of Stress, Dr Gabor Maté
Dr Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté: Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Their Adult Children
How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations Dr Rachel Yehuda
Indigenous Canadian intergenerational trauma
My Grandmother’s Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem MSW LICSW SEP
Richard Schwartz Internal Family Systems: Exiles, Managers and Firefighters
Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness by Dr Rick Hanson. Section on grit, in which he speaks about agency. Here’s an excerpt
Adyashanti Allow Everything To Be As It Is. The egoic mind lives on resistance. Allow any moment to completely be, don’t try to solve the dilemma of being caught in it.
Dr Rick Hanson has a free 8 part series on neuroplasticity. The first interview is with Dr Richard Davidson who is a scientist who worked with the Dalai Lama. A lot of the research on meditation is from his lab. Sign up for the course here: http://live.soundstrue.com/compassionatebrain/
Paul Hedderman is a radical nondual teacher. He is actively engaged in AA and in helping people see and break through identification with the mind. Watch this fascinating interview here.
Stephen Porges is a medical researcher who developed the polyvagal theory. In this interview from the recent Sounds True Healing Trauma Summit, he talks in detail about how trauma works in the body.
Peter Levine on Healing Trauma through the Body
Empathetic Parenting – for inner and external children! Part of the reason I’m sharing is because many people who were/are imperfect parents can perhaps ease the guilt. What style do your parents use? What style do you use with your inner child? This fits right in with the Empathetic Witness practice we did. This is Dr John Medina on a Bulletproof Podcast (link in doc) on evidence based research for what John Gottman calls emotional coaching parenting. More from Dr Gottman there. We only need to be right 30% of the time! That gives us a lot of room to notice when we’re being unkind and to soften into “parenting ourselves” with emotional coaching and empathy.
Healthy Child Development: Dr Megan Gunnar talking about epigenetics, brain development and the effect of trauma. Serve and return: when babies have a successful bid (for attention), the brain develops these neural networks.
Healing FROM a Foundation of Wellbeing Dr Richard Miller interview
Integral Recovery, John Dupuy
Elizabeth Rosner on intergenerational trauma Survivor Cafe
How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations, Dr Rachel Yehuda interviewed by On Being
It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How To End the Cycle, Mark Wolynn
Melanie Tonia Evans Narcissistic Abuse
Dr Karyl McBride Will I Ever Be Good Enough?
Toko-Pa Turner Remember, Belonging Ourselves Home
Brandon Bayes Journey
Forgive Assholes: Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber
Dodging Energy Vampires, Dr Christine Northrup
