741: What I Wish Everyone Knew About Breaking Intergenerational Trauma

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1:15So happy shopping. It's a courageous journey and one that sometimes is filled with a lot of grief because we have to not only lose the connections that we had to unhealthy patterns, we have to lose parts of ourselves that held on to those patterns. Hey, my name is Jenna Kutcher and And I am obsessed with all things business, marketing, numbers, and helping you to navigate both the messy and the magical seasons of this thing called life. I'm a small town mama who took a$300 camera, grew a successful photo biz, and now I work from home and run a seven figure online business. I teach you the tried and true secrets to building a career you adore.

1:53Shy away from the real talk? No way. Money, hardship, growth, loss, and marketing are all topics we discuss here. Think of this as your one-stop shop for happy hour with a gal pal mixed with business school. Pull up a seat, make sure you're cozy and get ready to be challenged and encouraged while you learn. This is the Gold Digger Podcast. Think about this. We all know that when a physical wound is left unhealed, it continues to cause pain and it can infect your whole body. But have you ever considered that when emotions or trauma is left unhealed, it can cause harm too? Like, have you ever thought about how wounds from unhealed emotions spread to other parts of our lives, potentially hurting our family, our friends, even our businesses.

2:35Eventually this hurt can injure an entire lineage, which is the reason why some of us become estranged from our families, why some of us become people pleasers, why some of us find ourselves in codependent relationships, and so on. Healing this intergenerational trauma requires a holistic approach that has been so far absent from the field of psychology that it is until now. Dr. Muriel Bouquet is a Columbia University-trained trauma-informed psychologist, professor, and sound bath meditation healer. She has appeared as an expert on Good Morning America, Today, and in magazines like Allure, Self, Glamour, and many other outlets.

3:14Today, we're discussing how we can start breaking cycles through tangible therapeutic practices and learn how to pass down strength instead of pain to future generations. This is such a powerful conversation, and I truly believe that the work that Dr. Bouquet is doing is extremely valuable for all people in all walks of life. Listen in today to get some tips, tricks, and tools to come back home to yourself. Dr. Muriel Bouquet, welcome to the Gold Digger Podcast. Your sales software shouldn't be a bummer. When you step inside your CRM, you should feel equipped to do your best work. Like you're sitting in the pilot seat with easy to use, powerful controls.

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4:31By automating steps across the sales pipeline, you can take back your time and spend it on more impactful tasks. Close more deals and get on track for your best Q1 yet. Learn about HubSpot Sales Hub at hubspot.com slash sales. That's hubspot.com slash sales. I am so excited about today's guest and I was just telling her, man, we should have had you on a few months ago, but I think there is no time better than today. So Dr. Muriel, welcome to the Gold Digger podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be just in conversation with you and to be talking about this because I tend to nerd out when we're talking about healing.

5:15You are in the right place. So you do incredible and deep work. Like when I think about your work, I just think deep. Talk to me about how you started studying intergenerational trauma and what that has looked like, because you've been doing this for a very long time. So how did you start it? What piqued your interest about it? You know, the actual moment when I was like, oh, something needs to shift in my work, in my research, in my practice, in everything. And even in my own like self-introspection and like self-discovery was when I was actually in what we call like clinic team meetings when I used to work in a hospital.

5:59And, you know, we would be having these conversations about some of our clients just to kind of like see like who has some ideas of what direction to take next and things like that. And the stories that we would tell about our clients all sounded the same. Like they were different people, right? Maybe from different countries, maybe different backgrounds, but the same stories kept coming up. And I kept thinking like, we're not naming what this is. Like, why is it that, you know, this woman has like these people pleasing qualities that are of such great disservice to her. But she also comes from a family line where perhaps like a parent of hers had those same qualities and they just, you know, modeled that to this client.

6:44And then a grandparent that also had those kinds of qualities, or maybe even did things that made their daughter, like, you know, people please. And so I'm like, you know what, like, I just feel like if we're going to be helping a person to release like all of these layers, why aren't we digging into the layers. So the work really started from there. It was like just this point of curiosity, really wanting for people to feel like true healing. Some of the people that I actually got so fortunate to work with, but they had been a part of that clinic. And I used to work at a Columbia Medical Center and in the psychiatry clinic, and they had been a part of the clinic for well over 20 years.

7:25Wow. And I kept thinking, why are we here still 20 years later? Like we're probably not getting to the root of what is continuing this process of depression and anxiety. And we're just kind of mislabeling what's happening. Maybe it's trauma that's at the root and it's trauma that's layered. And we need to get to the root to actually help this person to no longer be this perpetual client. I love that you went deeper because I feel like there are so many people who are like, this is just how it is. This is the way it's always been. and the people that I feel most drawn to are the people that keep asking, well, why, why, why, why?

8:06And I feel like you are one of those. You brought up the word trauma. Let's kind of break down generational trauma. Like what is that? How would you know if you have it? What are questions that listeners could be asking themselves as you and I navigate this conversation together? Yes. You know, intergenerational trauma is the only type of trauma that's actually passed down our family line. And it happens at the intersection of two modes of transmission. So it's by way of our psychology, which is basically like, you know, everything that tends to happen in our day-to-day lives and the ways in which maybe we may have been misattuned to a parent or the ways in which, you know, we probably got bullied in school, or maybe we were in a turbulent relationship that had like toxic elements to it.

8:52It's in all of that, but it's also in our genetics, in our biology. And that's where, you know, the distinctive mark of like intergenerational trauma from other types of traumas that maybe just happened to one person. What happens with intergenerational trauma is that if we have a parent that they themselves lived in a state of chronic trauma, meaning they were in a traumatized state, they never really had the tools or access to actually dissolve some of those traumas and trauma responses in their lives. And And so they just kind of lived out of survival mode for a long period of time. Their actual body starts to register, oh, we're in a traumatized body.

9:33We are in so like genes start to what we call like re-express. They start to register that this is the new normal. What happens at conception is that we actually pass down genes that have this messaging to our children. And so it becomes basically like an emotional vulnerability or maybe even predisposition to stress and trauma. And when we get all those other kind of psychological factors, if we have a parent that we can't really connect with, especially early on, and all those other things that happen, we can become the new legacy bearers of trauma. How do we break this cycle? I mean, you have a book called Break the Cycle.

10:13But, you know, one thing that's really interesting is so I recently started doing therapy and I don't know what took me so long, to be honest. And, you know, I think a lot of it is establishing, especially for people that have children, is like what cycles need to be broken and like what cycles can continue? What cycles are good? So when you're talking about this, it can kind of almost feel helpless of like, well, well, what if somebody passed something down to me? And like, it's not mine to carry. How do we break this? What are your thoughts around that? Well, you know, that's a part of a reason, perhaps even the most compelling reason one might say, like why I decided to write the book.

10:54Because I kept feeling like whenever we were talking about intergenerational trauma, we were talking about it as if it was a hard stop. And that's not the case. When we come from lineages where there's been pain, especially emotional pain that has been translated into the emotional pain that's been passed down by multiple family members, yes, it can make us more tender. We do have potentially a bit more work to do on the emotional end of our lives. But that also means that we have opportunity. We have a chance to actually do things both on the psychology and the biological end that can actually help us to break the cycle, which is why I integrate the modality that I do, which is holistic psychotherapy into the actual book and into my work, because I want us to experience full healing.

11:50I want us to be able to feel integrated as a whole and be able to feel like we have the tools to actually on a daily basis, break those cycles and disrupt and welcome in new legacies. What would you say if somebody's listening and they're like, how would I even know if I have trauma like passed down to me? Where would you begin with that? I always go back to the body. And the reason why I go to our bodies is because our bodies have this reservoir of memory. We have what we call body memory, which is situated primarily in our nervous system, but it is really in a lot of places in our bodies. and it is kind of what is also connected to triggers.

12:32Like if we smell, you know, maybe like a perfume that is familiar and was the same scent that we smelled like when, you know, right before we had, we got into a car accident and it just got cemented into our brains. Like that smell pairs with a tragic accident, right? And so like there is this retrieval that your body does that allows us to also like have an understanding of, okay, something happened. It didn't feel good. It made me feel like I needed to fight for my life. And we can utilize that body memory to almost kind of take ourselves not necessarily back to moments, but that we can have a better awareness of how our bodies are responding and then actually help our bodies to feel more at ease and more relaxed, which is why I always say like, let's go back to the body.

13:23Let's Try and understand what happened here. And many times when we start talking about people's childhoods or their parents' childhoods, and we start unearthing some of the layers, there is a little bit of a nonverbal shift that tends to happen, right? Where people start fidgeting a bit more. They look a little more uncomfortable. And so that's when we start digging into, okay, you know what? You don't look as comfortable as you did five minutes ago. Something's happening. Where do you feel it in your body? Usually people will say, oh, I feel some tension in my neck. My stomach's a little bit in, you know, tied up in knots.

13:59There's something happening that's telling you, you know what? This era of my life, even though I had loving parents, I didn't feel all that safe. I didn't feel good in this. When, you know, my mother would scream because she had a really tough day at work. Actually, I wondered if she was okay. And that for my tiny little brain, my five-year-old brain was something that was really hard to comprehend and internalize and understand. And the way that I internalized that was that I believe that maybe I was the bad kid that was making her feel, you know, all kinds of ways rather than a more complex thinking, which is she had a bad day at work and she's displacing onto me.

14:40And so, you know, we can start digging into the layers and unpacking even wonderful experiences in our lives that maybe had an element that we hadn't really kind of touched on before, but has been buried deep within and sometimes can come up in inopportune times. And so I always like to go back to the body because it is a source of great wisdom and allows us to really have a better understanding of how things and events and people impact us. I love that and that is something that my therapist has been using a lot is we'll talk about something and then she'll say where do you feel it in your body and then she'll say what is your earliest memory it cannot even make sense of feeling that way and it is crazy how connected things can be or how you can source out these different memories or woundedness or different things and pull them into your periphery and just have them like have an awareness around it, which I think is really beautiful.

15:41So if somebody is listening and they can maybe kind of sink into their body right now, and maybe even just this conversation is bringing things up for them. How do you kind of work through that? Like, is it just stuck in your body forever? Do you get rid of it? How do you retrain your body? Like, where do you go from there? Oh, I love this question. You know, the point is to actually retrain our bodies to work in our favor and not against us. That's always the goal. And in part, right, it's about like looking at the moments when we're feeling discomfort and then pairing that with a relaxation response or a relaxation practice, right?

16:20So that we can actually feel the tension released from our bodies. And that's, you know, just one of the ways in which we can actually like integrate like, okay, health where health did not exist before. However, you know, for most of us, it's going to be like actually more critical for us to integrate holistic healing into our day-to-day lives in a more proactive way, because a lot of healing tends to be very reactionary. It's I'm hurt. I go get help for the hurt that I'm experiencing. What we noticed during especially the COVID-19 pandemic was that a lot of people were wounded and were hyper busy and not attuned to the wounding that was deep within.

17:08And then when they were confined to a home or to an empty space and they had to confront themselves, they were like, oh my goodness, I don't even know what to do with myself right now. And that opened up a can of worms for a lot of people and in comes a global mental health crisis, right? And so, you know, it's going to be really critical for us to also be proactive about our health in a holistic way, right? Like, you know, we have a ton of science around the benefits of meditation, not just for the sake of ease in your mind and body, but also the fact that your actual brain starts to form new neural connections.

17:49Like it actually starts to almost kind of like build upon itself in a healthy way. And very often what tends to happen when people experience trauma or when they experience something as debilitating and longstanding as depression, anxiety, right? Or longstanding stress is that they feel like they don't hold a lot of power in reference to their own mental health. But when you can see the little things that you're able to do on a daily basis, like five minutes of breath work or a five minute meditation, something that can start that rewiring process, it can really help empower you to say, you know what, I've got something that is tangible, accessible at all times, like the breath, that I can use to help me be better, not just now, but in the long term, because I'm building health-promoting neural networks, and I'm building a nervous system that is actually more regulated and can help me be a better mom, be more attuned, be more mindful, be a better partner because I have a more settled nervous system when my partner asked me something that would have actually rattled me on any other given day, right?

18:58Like I can be a better daughter because like I can listen to the things that my parents would have said that maybe would have been more triggering. But now I'm like, you know what? I can actually just let that roll off my shoulders because I'm sitting with the information differently. There's so many benefits, but I I really do feel like we hold a lot more power than we give ourselves credit. When we were young, we dreamed of castles and fairy tales. And as we grow up, those dreams might shift into building something real, like starting a business. You need a website, payment systems, a logo, and a way to reach customers.

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21:10And they have a truly incredible offer. Business owners can get free business internet advantage forever when you add four or more mobile lines. It's simple with no contracts and no added fees. Visit spectrum.com forward slash free for life to learn how you can get business internet free forever. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. I think this is so powerful. And I love to your emphasis on being proactive. One thing that I think is really interesting, and maybe some of my listeners can relate is that I'm someone with ADHD. I've told myself for years, like I'm just not someone who can meditate.

21:47And I believed that for so long, right? Like the thought to me of trying to be still and have no thoughts was so intimidating and impossible to understand. And until I recognize that it's not to not have thoughts, it's to have an awareness around your thoughts and to really just pay attention. I think that having an awareness really unlocks that next level of just being able to see when you're triggered or understand when you're feeling those feelings or come back to your body when you're feeling out of it. And so for anyone that's listening and they're like, yeah, good for you. I can't meditate.

22:25My brain's too busy. I've got too much. It's like, but can you bring just a different level of awareness? Would you agree with that? Or I could be totally off base here. No, you're like right on. And I, you know, even in my book, I say there are all of these different types of meditations. You can do a walking meditation, you can do yoga, you can do, you know, mindfulness coloring, right? Like all kinds. And, you know, I, I myself, I'm a therapist that's been meditating since 2007, right? However many years that is. And I started off with 60 seconds a day because that's all that my brain could actually hold at once.

23:01And I was all over the place. And I continue to the amount of meditation that I do that's a simple sitting meditation and just attending to the silence in the room is about 5 % of what I do maybe throughout the entire year. The rest of it, because my mind is a busy mind and I myself struggle with, you know, attentional difficulties of my own, I need movement. So for me, I have to engage with yoga, tai chi, and really incorporate, or even dance. I like dance with my dogs, like in my living room, you know, in between meetings sometimes just to really kind of get my body moving, but also releasing the tension while also being mindful that I'm doing only one thing right now.

23:47And that one thing is helping me to do all these health promoting things that I really need for the longevity of my wellbeing. Yeah. One thing you referenced, and I think that it should be something that while people are setting their goals and intentions for the new year, creating their vision board is nervous system regulation. Talk to me about that and why that is so important, especially for ambitious, driven humans who are likely entrepreneurs, overwhelmed, busy, high cortisol level inducing jobs. Why would nervous system regulation be something that we should be focusing on this year? Yes.

24:28I'm going to tell you right now, it is all the more important for individuals that are high functioning and that their attention is in high demand. And a part of the reason is, is because there are so many benefits to being able to have a nervous system that you feel like you have, maybe like you're befriending and you're more in control of. And I'd like to start us off just by briefly kind of just taking us through the nervous system. I think that can be helpful because there's like there's in essence three branches of it, right? We have our threat alert system, which is fight or flight. And it's telling us, oh, my goodness, there might be a threat and I must protect myself.

25:06So I have to fight this person who's like coming to me with whatever or I have to flee. I have to avoid them. Then there's a dorsal vagal response, which is our emotional shutdown response, which is saying, you know, this stressor has been here for forever. I don't feel like I can fight it. I'm going to freeze and dissociate or I'm going to fawn and people please and just do whatever it is that this person needs for me because I need the threat to go away. It's just overwhelming. And then we have this ventral vagal response, which is our parasympathetic nervous system, which is basically our calming, restoring, soothing part of our nervous system that says, you know what?

25:42The threat is gone. You're okay. You can relax. You can release. You can rest. we can go, of course, we're in essence like structured to go from the very first one, fight or flight, into that ventral vagal, okay, you can rest. We're not supposed to be going too far into dorsal vagal, oh my goodness, emotional shutdown. And so what we can do for ourselves with these practices that I mentioned, the ones you mentioned as well, is that we can sit in that ventral vagal response more often. And I think that the most beautiful thing that that can offer us, especially if we do this on a continuous basis and offer ourselves kind of a restructuring of our own biology is that it buys us time.

26:27And what I mean by that is that it buys us reaction time. So instead of there being like a microsecond between what someone says and what you respond that is driven by anxiety or, you know, just a response that's driven by some sort of an intense emotion, that's in essence, that's what a trigger is, right? You triggered me by what you said. I responded right away. Instead of that, we're buying two to three seconds of time. And that allows us to kind of like go into our minds and bring out our wisest self. We bring out our values and our response. We bring out how we want to actually connect with the person in front of us.

27:06There's so many benefits to those two to three seconds. They're so, this seems really minuscule, but it actually can be so life-changing. And when we're in these corporate meetings or high-powered meetings where we want to preserve the relationships that are there, we want to be able to make decisions that coincide not only with our highest selves and our core values, but also with the part of our minds that are structured to actually help us with higher level thinking, which is not going to be fully functional when we're in a survival mode, because that's the way that our body works. When we're in survival mode, part of our brains, part of our gut system, some of our organ systems actually mildly shut down to preserve energy.