James Gordon, M.D.: TRAUMA/Tools for Transforming Trauma
Dr. James Gordon is a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, former researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, and a clinical professor of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown Medical School. He’s also the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a prolific writer on trauma. This is because he’s spent the last several decades traveling the globe and healing population-wide psychological trauma. He and 130 international faculty have brought this program to populations as diverse as refugees from wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa; firefighters and U.S. military personnel and their families; student/parent/teacher school shooting survivors; and more.
I met Jim many years ago, and he’s become a constant resource for me in my own life and work, particularly because he packages so many of the exercises that work in global groups into his book Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing. We talk about some of those exercises today—soft belly breathing, shaking and dancing, drawing—along with why it’s so important to address and complete the trauma cycle in areas of crisis. This is the first part of a four-part series, and James does an excellent job of setting the stage.
Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM JAMES GORDON, M.D.:
Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing
The Center for Mind-Body Medicine
Follow Jim on Instagram
RELATED EPISODES:
Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”
Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”
Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”
Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”
Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Alright, so you've been alive for longer than I have, as we've just discussed. I know people won't believe that, but it's true. But you've seen a lot in the course of your life. Has your entire medical career been focused on cultural trauma and how it shows up in the body? I actually don't know or did you sort of take a turn into this? I know you've been doing it for decades and decades and decades.
JAMES GORDON: You know, that's where I've been primarily focused for the last 30 years. But I never quite thought of it as a career. Except in the sense of rearing down a road, or careening. I've just gone where my interest, my passion, my concern for myself and for the world around me has taken me and I've always been interested in understanding the meaning and experience that's challenging for people, for myself and also for other people. And that led me through being initially very interested in working with psychotic people and seeing what that experience could yield. And then creating communities where people could come together and share their experience and look at themselves and be looked at as human beings who are trying to find their way and discover themselves rather than as patients. So I've kind of always been challenging a conventional objectifying medical model and looking at things in a more experiential and if you will existential way looking at what's actually happening in the moment in people's lives from their perspective. And that's taken me through initially work with psychotic people and then wanting to understand how to work with biology in a way that was not reductionistic, how to work with giving people the tools to deal with the changes biologically, and then bringing it all back. After a while to the focus on trauma, and of course the focus on trauma, people are sort of in some ways surprised sometimes, but that's where modern psychiatry starts. It starts with Freud and Jeanet and Breuer in the late 19th century, looking at the effect of childhood trauma on adult symptoms, including physical symptoms like paralysis and repetitive behaviors, as well as psychological symptoms. So I feel like those are the roots of the particular tree that I'm growing. And also that it's been very much watered by the world of existentialism, and also the political world. That my interest in other people's experience and in seeing the world from their point of view is a significant part of why I became involved in the civil rights movement and the anti war movement in the 1960s. Sort of seeing the inequities and wanting to be part of that process of change. But somehow I'm not set out to do, this is what I'm going to do and this is the path I'm going to go on. It's much more like, okay, what do I need to know next? What's coming up for me personally? What's happening in the world around me? And for the last 30 years, as you say, the focus really has been on looking at both individual and population wide trauma and developing programs to help people move through and beyond those experiences.
ELISE: And I mean we're speaking at a point where maybe the temperature has come down a few notches, and it depends on the zone of the world that you're talking about . Having spent your whole life in some ways plugging these holes for people or sort of trying to hold or create this net in which we can hold, process, contain these experiences and start to integrate and move past them. Does it feel, as it feels to me, like not only is everything moving faster, but between social media and our ability to at a distance have our own traumatic response to what's happening on the ground, which is obviously incredibly traumatic. Does it feel like? Things are getting much worse or as someone who has had your feelers and antenna and been working all around the globe, Has it always been like this and we just didn't know?
JAMES: Well, I think, you're definitely onto something. First of all, time does seem to be moving faster for me. And I thought, well, is this because I'm older? And I've talked with a bunch of people who are much younger and they say, no, no, I feel it too. I feel it too. I have a 21 year old son and I was talking with him about it. He said, no, he said, dad, we talk every Saturday. He said, I felt like last Saturday was just yesterday because Life is moving very fast, and he's a student, and he's working. But yeah, I think things are moving much faster, and I also think that the divisions in the world and the level of conflict and unease is far greater than at any time in my life.
ELISE: Mmm.
JAMES: And, I mean, you open the newspaper and there's the collective conflict in the world, the conflict between Hamas and Israel and Ukraine and Russia and what's going on in Haiti with the gangs taking over and civilians being trampled on. And then what's happening here in the United States, a mirror for that with the sort of incredible level of invective and you know, Trump and the MAGA people saying really terrible things that Even when there were significant disputes and certainly in the 60s when there was what were called then culture wars, there wasn't that level of antipathy and that sort of fixed level of sense of being victimized. People might shout when we were out in the demonstration, go back to Russia when you're demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, but they weren't saying we were infected and we were destroying the civilization and you know, the kind of language that's being used, which is the language of authoritarian regimes is being used in sort of common speech now.
And I think it's very unsettling. And you mentioned the pace of internet life. I'm not on TikTok. People send emails and there's a compulsion. You got to respond quickly to what's going on. And I know for kids, that same sort of antipathy that's there in public life is there on the internet, in the circles in which young people travel that they're constantly being judged in such harsh ways and the anonymity, I don't know if you found out, but to me, the anonymity is particularly ugly, that people will things that they would never say in person. Well, Donald Trump would say them in person, which is actually one of his virtues, is that he's saying in person, he's saying out loud what people are thinking. Now the downside of course is that so many people agree and they're bringing their own own fears and their own anger to the surface. But the anonymity on the you know, on the internet is really very painful. I don't know if your kids are experiencing that or you experience it, but you know, people say very nasty things.
ELISE: My kids are not are young and not interested in social media. Thank God. They're definitely interested in the internet, but yes, I certainly feel it and I see it and sort of the moral righteousness and it's happening on the far left as well as the far right, in that horseshoe effect where you're sort of like what is happening at these two extremes is certainly, I think, terrifying. It's a mirror on our own inability to be. to hold complex situations, to not reach for a binary, to not choose polarity, to not project, to recognize, it's really hard to know how you, what, how you would feel if this were actually your situation. And so what I see, which is concerning amongst people who I think are totally reasonable people is the way that we get hijacked and are suddenly feeding these conflicts rather than trying to hold space and our own bodies and stay calm and I don't want to say reasonable, but to be able to hold the complexity of this without shaming each other, projecting and only making this whole cycle feel more hot, more extreme, more, as you said, full of invective in a way that I think most of us, if we get our minds together again would be like, what am I doing here? Like, how am I possibly helping? It's wild. I will say that. And to see what captures people is really interesting too, because you don't see much about what's happening in Sudan. You don't see much about what's happening in Haiti, which you just mentioned, etc. So it's like where our attention is drawn is really interesting to me.
JAMES: Yeah, I've been working a fair amount with people from Congress ever since January 6, 2021, when there were so many people in Congress who were traumatized. And one of the things that I see and hear is how difficult it is for them to be authentic. How difficult it is for them not to fall into the kind of polarized traps of left as well as right with the predigested opinions coming out, and I think that the difficulty of getting in touch with what is actually going on inside us is compounded by the pressure to appear in a certain way and to appear in a way that is, you know, pleasing to whatever the base is that you're speaking of, the political base for people in Congress. But also in sort of ordinary life, people are tending to want to, I have to be part of this this particular party, this particular way of looking at things, and forgetting the kinds of things that you're talking about, forgetting the complexity, forgetting how we actually feel and substituting slogans for that. So I think that it's a real issue. Several years ago, I was in South Sudan and I was working with the leaders of the warring parties. They were literally killing each other in the countryside. But they were trying to form what they called very tentatively a pre transitional government. And I was meeting with some of those leaders and actually, something that I suggested, but that they were willing to do. And the secretary of agriculture, big, big guy, very tough, strong looking. He got up and he said at the beginning of the meeting, we cannot have outer peace unless we have inner peace. And I thought, oh my God, I wish somebody would get up in our Congress or in cabinet meetings and speak to that as well, that we've lost that sense of connection, that each one can feed the other.
ELISE: Yeah. And we've lost our connection. It's interesting sort of the way that we will then also cherry pick our history to make our point or claim our rightness. And instead of recognizing like, you mentioned Freud, we're all this compulsive repetition of old Patterns it's why wars never end right they might calm for generations and then they're back because somehow someone needs vengeance you know the perpetuation of trauma and we're seeing this obviously in the Middle East and it's terrifying to imagine the trauma of everyone in Gaza. Obviously, there's trauma in Israel, you're talking about a intensely, epigenetically, intergenerationally traumatized population.
JAMES: Mm hmm.
ELISE: And it's like, Looking at it, I don't know how it ends. We're trying to solve on the mental or the intellectual something that's so deeply felt. And I feel this myself as you know, my father's Jewish, my grandmother left Poland and my grandfather left Germany in the 30s. And I am not a descendant of Holocaust survivors. And I have my own trauma response to what's happening in the world. And then I have friends who are the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and their response is so amped. And I'm not suggesting that it's not legitimate, but we're not just talking about the Holocaust, we're talking about, obviously, here in America generations of people who are enslaved. If we all looked at our family trees, we would find in them moments when we were oppressed, and moments when we were oppressors, moments when we were victims, moments when we were the victimizers. Like, this is who we are, right? We've survived, and other people have died. Is that a horribly morbid thing? I think it's just the reality and yet we don't know how to hold it.
JAMES: You're, you're right. I don't know if all of our listeners know the word epigenetic, though, which you
ELISE: Oh.
JAMES: Epi is a Greek prefix that means above and epigenetic changes or changes in the chromosomes that affect how our genes operate in our bodies. And there have been studies that have been done that show that those changes not only can last a lifetime, but they can be transmitted for several generations. So the famous study that I'm sure you're thinking of is Rachel Yehuda's study of Holocaust survivors. Who, yes, of course, they transmit their own fears and their own concerns, interpersonally, socially to their children and their grandchildren if they see them. But the striking thing in yahuda study is that they were transmitted to children and grandchildren who never even knew those grandparents. So you're right. It is a fixed biological as well as a individual, familial and social force that's acting on people and getting them to be in that same place that their ancestors were in, even if they had not suffered the same trauma. And of course for people in Israel, one of the things that they said after last October 7th is that all the memories, all the collective memories, as well as the individual epigenetic and family memories of the Holocaust came up. And it felt like this is the first blow in the next holocaust is what they felt like. So it's very real and the approach, as you say, it's not simply a matter of working with people cognitively. You can't convince people not to have those feelings or not to react physically in the way that they are. So the approach that we have works with, among other things, physical approaches, as well as logical approaches, as well as. bringing people together in a community and also working with genograms, working with family trees to help people understand the complexity of the family tree and that what the influences are and that those influences are usually a lot more complex than we may think and that although there may be holocaust survivors in there, they're also people who have survived. They may be Holocaust survivors, but we have to emphasize both sides, both of those words. There's the terrible trauma, but there's also the incredible strength of those people that they were able to come through, and we need to call on both and we also need to go beyond, we need to go beyond that epigenetic legacy that we have, and it's possible, it is possible to those epigenetic changes, it is possible for people who have experienced the most severe trauma, not only to Let go of the symptoms of that trauma and let go of that chain that binds them to the past trauma, but also to become wiser, more compassionate, more thoughtful, more full human beings than they ever have been.
ELISE: Yeah. One of the things that I love about your work is that you move quite swiftly past the, like, let's rationalize and let's talk about, you know, post earthquake in Haiti why you're having this incredible somatic response or not, right? Because so many people are so dissociated or disconnected from their bodies that they don't even know where the experiences live. So one of the things that I love is that your organization is somewhat of a first responder in terms of getting in to work directly with groups who are traumatized, whether it's from school shootings, or in Ukraine, or in Gaza, or Israel, or wherever it may be. And that this toolkit is useful on the individual level too, because I think as we become a trauma informed society, which is great, I still think we're sort of stuck at this place of like talking about trauma, potentially wearing out the word, and most people don't know what to do. I don't know if you want to start with the group response, group work, or individual work, wherever you feel drawn, but can you talk a bit about your process and some tools?
JAMES: Sure. And, I think it's best to talk about the individual first, because we're talking to individuals right now, and you and I are individuals. My book, Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing, which you know well, and I've appreciated and been grateful for your appreciation of my book, provides that whole toolkit. And what I start with, In the book and in my approach to anybody and I have to remind myself of it as well, is that it is possible. It is possible to move through and beyond the trauma, to be transformed, to experience what psychologists now call post traumatic growth. So, I put that out there when I'm working with individuals. In my book, the first examples I give of people who were, had the most horrendous childhoods with all kinds of physical, sexual, psychological abuse, poverty, all kinds of things who have become amazing human beings. People who are friends, who are colleagues, who've been patients of mine. So I tell some of their stories because I want to say it is possible.
And then the way that I work with individuals, and we also bring this into work with groups and whole societies, is we start with some very simple physical techniques that are antidotes to the biological reactions to trauma that people have. Whether it's trauma that's happened in childhood or trauma that's happened during the war. I don't distinguish very much among those traumas. And we don't force people to talk about trauma, but we give them the tools that provide the antidote to the fight or flight response first which is what happens to us when there's a threat. It's built into all vertebrates. It's part of our biological wisdom. It was first described by Walter Cannon in 1926 in a book called The Wisdom of the Body. So, this is our wisdom. It's a life saving response. The heart rate goes up and big muscles get tense and digestion goes down and our pupils dilate so we can see the threat. We're ready to fight or to flee, and our genetic programming tells us which to do. Now it's, it's more complicated with human beings, because it's not just physical threats for us, it's psychological threats that cause the fight or flight response. So I teach slow, deep, soft belly breathing. Breathing slowly and deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth, with the belly soft and relaxed.
And maybe our listeners, Even as I'm talking, I'm doing more of it myself, and I hope our listeners will do it too, just breathe slowly and deeply as Elise and I are talking, and relax and let your belly be soft and relaxed. So that's the antidote to fight or flight, and when people do this, 80 to 90 percent of people, whether they're sitting in my office with me, or we're in the middle of a war and there are bombs falling not that far away, 80 to 90 percent of people can feel a change. And that's crucial. We need to feel that we can do something about trauma. So we mobilize the vagus nerve in this case, which is the antidote to that sympathetic nervous system overdrive that causes fight or flight. Fight or flight can save your life, but it goes on for too long. It becomes a sort of a palette of symptoms of post traumatic stress, anxiety, irritation, difficulty, concentrating, difficulty sleeping. And then people have the experience of being able to make a change. I usually teach it in 10 minutes and teach the physiology. And that's what I do in transforming trauma and people notice a change. So it's not a matter of convincing. It's not cognitive. It's yes, I can explain the science, but people have the direct experience.
And then the second technique that I teach or that we teach in our programs is an active physical meditation, shaking and dancing. Which is the antidote to the freeze response because when the trauma we experience is overwhelming and inescapable, children who are being abused by their parents, that's in many ways the worst because the trauma is coming from the people who are supposed to take care of you. And you can't get away from them. Also, as an adult, if you're in a situation where you're beaten by people who are much bigger than you, or raped, or sexually abused, or even in a situation at work that feels overwhelming and inescapable. I need the job. I'm afraid to leave. I think you touch on these issues particularly that come up for people so often. Then we go into a freeze response. And again, it could be a life saving response. We shut down. We put out endorphins to numb ourselves. We withdraw psychologically. That can be a life saving response if you're living in an abusive family. It can be a life saving response if you're in the middle of combat and you're overwhelmed and you can't get away, whether you're a civilian or a combatant. But when it persists, It's really so detrimental because our bodies are shut down. We are afraid to connect with people. We shut ourselves off emotionally. I've worked a lot with people who've been tortured in political authoritarian dictatorships in various parts of the world. And they're so shut down. They're so fearful of connecting with anyone because the trauma has been so overwhelming. So physical movement, the shaking the body, helping the body to relax. Creating a situation in which emotions that have been suppressed because they feel so overwhelming can come up, and then giving people a moment or two just to observe what's happening and then putting on music that allows them to express themselves freely. So those are the beginning tools. The saying, you can go through and beyond the trauma. Post traumatic growth is possible. Then two experiences of the antidotes to the primary biological reactions that perpetuate trauma, and then ideally being able to work with people in a group.
One of the most important things is the sense of connection when people are traumatized, they are shut off from other people, even if cognitively we know everybody here has dealt with poverty or racism, or everybody here has been in a war zone. It still feels like they're alone . One of the things hopefully about books like yours and mine is we can convey a sense of being, that's one of the reasons I loved your book is that you convey a sense of I'm here. I'm a real person. So including those personal elements, I think is very important for people that they can say, Oh, okay, there's somebody who understands. And if they can be part of a group, when we work, you're asking about our work with with populations or indeed with individuals here in the United States. It's so valuable to be in a group where you can not only learn the techniques but also share your experience with other people. So we can talk more about work with populations but that's the basic idea because if you come into physiological and psychological balance than every other tool and technique, I teach about 20 more in transforming trauma, but any kind of psychotherapy or eye movement desensitization, which is a kind of trauma treatment or cognitive therapy or nature therapy, all of those will be far more effective if we're in a state of physiological balance and we're able to be a little bit more open to the possibility of change.
ELISE: Yeah, I mean, two thoughts, and for anyone who hasn't read Transforming Trauma, I write about some of the techniques that Jim uses. I wrote about one in the gluttony chapter and the way that a process for re attenuating your response to food and taste. Two things, one, you know, you mentioned the breath and that's our one immediate way, I mean, some people are capable of controlling their autonomic nervous system and in strange ways, but that far exceeds I'm thinking of sort of the Wim Hofs of the world who can spike a fever, like the yogis who can, like, increase their body heat until they burst into flames. But most of us can't control our autonomic nervous system outside of the breath, right? Of course, we naturally are going to, as long as our heart is beating, we're going to breathe, but it's our one primary tool for really controlling the body sensation. And then second, just thinking about these groups, too, and that group resonancing and I've interviewed, I don't know if you know Thomas Hubel, I've interviewed him a couple times as well over the years, and I love his work, it has a spiritual component, too, and you can understand it biologically, that we build these sort of heart fields, right? So if I am able to process my own anxiety or process my stress response and move it through my body and control my autonomic nervous system and do that soft belly breathing and stay grounded in some way, that in of itself is contagious, right? How contagious, as you're in these groups, are we to each other emotionally and psychically?
JAMES: Well, that's really good question. Just the one thing, you're absolutely right, that we can control the breath. And when this research on meditation and soft belly breathing is technically a concentrated meditation, when it began, people were thinking, the researchers were thinking, only those Tibetan monks can do this or then only those people who meditated for hours a day for years can do that. And little by little, we've understood that just about anybody can use a technique like soft belly breathing to control their autonomic nervous system. So that's really, this is democratizing of these techniques that one once thought to be only the property of the adepts, the people who devoted their lives to it. Groups are so amazing. We haven't really studied as well as we should the sort of the harmonics of groups coming together and what's the electrophysiology you kind of refer to that, if there is some kind of resonance that happens. Even with people who begin the group totally scared of each other or angry because their skin color is this, or their political persuasion is this.
If you can get people, and our model of group is very simple in a way, and I've learned a great deal from indigenous people about this, is we come together, and we talk about it. In a circle, not too many people, maybe 10 people and somebody leading the group and everybody speaks in turn and when somebody else is speaking, you shut up, you listen, you relax, you pay attention to that person and it goes around in a circle and people speak in turn. We don't allow interruption. We don't interpret. We don't analyze. The leader doesn't interpret or analyze either. Everybody is in a group to discover what they need to discover for themselves. And at first, you know, it's a little bit jagged and nobody is sure who are these other people and is it okay for me to speak? Maybe one or two people are a little bit braver and they start speaking and In the beginning, they may share their experience of soft belly breathing or shaking and dancing. We do drawings to get people out of their conscious mind. There's a great deal more censorship that goes on with words than there is with drawings. Drawings are kind of thrown back on a kind of early childhood self and you just gotta put it out there.
I was working in Gaza, almost 20 years ago, we were doing a training there. And and this may be hard for people to leave given the current situation, but I had a group of about 10, most of them were leaders in healthcare in Gaza. It was the head of public health and there was a professor from the medical school and there were a whole bunch of people like that. And there was one guy who was a nurse. And he was an extraordinarily angry man, primarily angry at the Israelis, but he was angry all the time. And in the group, there was the guy who was head of public health on the third day of the group, the nurse said to him, you know, I'll spare our listeners the profanity, but you can, yeah, I thought you were, and you know, I thought you were so full of yourself, so arrogant, but I've been sitting here in a group, you know, Jim told us to shut up while other people are talking and just to relax. And I've listened to you and I've sort of got to know you a little. And actually, you're not so bad. And I realized how different my preconception was of you than my actual experience. I saw you on television, I heard you speak at conferences, but you're okay. And he said, and that led me to believe that maybe not all Israelis are bad either. This is such an interesting leap of faith that people can make in a group because they look at their preconceptions. In Haiti, working in Haiti, Protestant ministers and voodoo healers who were in our training in Haiti, because they're community leaders, both groups, each one thought the other was the devil.
ELISE: Yeah.
JAMES: they were looking for horns and tails, because that's what the story was. But when they got in a group together, I wouldn't say they became best friends, but at least they saw they were human, each one were human. The other thing I think is really important about groups is that we don't try to fix people. They're not patients, the people we work with, even though I may get paid by an insurance company, if they see me in private practice, I really think of the people who are in the group that they're learning, they're there to learn, and when they're with me individually, they're also learning about themselves and I may do certain things like acupuncture and I'm the teacher, but I'm also part of the experience and in our groups. The facilitator who's leading the groups shares their experience also. They share their experience of soft belly breathing, of shaking. They do the shaking and dancing. They share their drawings. So we break down some of those barriers. There's a woman who I actually write about in Transforming Trauma, who had one of those horrendous childhoods and went through every kind of therapy, including incest therapy, therapy for incest survivors, and all of which was somewhat helpful to her. But you see, when I was in one of your groups, it's the first time people were not trying to fix me. First time people were treating me as more than the sum of my symptoms. I wasn't simply an incest survivor. I was a whole person. I was a woman sitting here with other people. And I think you were starting to refer to this, we're biologically programmed to be in groups, but we are very individualistic and often very isolated society here in the United States.
ELISE: No, certainly. It's really hard to hate or even dislike people when you're up close to them. I think the more time that you can spend with people, and I'm from Montana, it's a rural state that's generally more conservative, and I'm more liberal. But I have to say it does a lot for my idea of quote unquote tolerance, because I find that we agree on a 85 percent of things. I find it very hard to wholesale reject anyone I meet. It's much easier online, you know, when you're only seeing a fragment or you're seeing essentially like a projection. But I think the more that we can get together communally which we don't have many opportunities to do that, but it does, as you said, it also exposes yourself to yourself. And I'm sure we've all had the experience, whether we're joining a new job or we're in some sort of therapeutic group or we're at a audience participation event and you have this preconceived idea of someone and then they share and you are completely flipped. In ways that I think are really so beautiful. One question, because I think I benefit from all of the exercises in in your book and I've had experiences with MDMA. I write about that in the book as well, where I just had a major physical release, how important is it, and I do sort of a dance cardio class where I get, I find it to be very cathartic. I don't know necessarily what I'm releasing is not attached to any story or any event as far as I know, but in your experience, if we can sort of keep our vessels Clear. If we can learn how to use our bodies to process what's happening, do you find that that's just generally good energetic or emotional hygiene and that many of us are just sort of full, we're stuffed full of things that have happened to us and we've lost that connection and that ability? Is it enough to let the body resolve what's happened to us? Or does it have to be cognitive?
JAMES: I think the body can do a great deal of it. I know the body can do a great deal of it. One of the things that I sometimes do aside from the shaking and dancing, which is really recommend, you can look on the cmbm. org website and you can see me teaching shaking and dancing and, you know, listen to the music and do it with me. Indigenous people have known this, that periodically they have, and especially if there are traumatic events, they use this active, expressive meditation of one kind or another, drumming, and dancing, and jumping up and down, and shouting, and whatever, whirling shaking. Very, used in many places around the world. Periodically, we humans need to do this, and so I recommend it. I usually, when I work with people, I recommend one quiet meditation and one active expressive meditation. That this is a way of continually releasing that tension, and also, and not unimportantly, bringing up the emotions, as well, that we've stuffed down and as those emotions come up We may want to share those with somebody else.
I recommend initially certainly write them down in a journal keep a journal, bring them out into at least your world in that way. And then talking about them can be very helpful and integrating the experience that comes up From the shaking and dancing or other active expressive meditations into our whole world view and world experience. So it's cognitive, it's emotional, it's physical. I don't know, it's not always necessary, for sure. But it can be very helpful. You mentioned MDMA, one of the important things About using any of the psychedelics or MDMA is not strictly speaking psychedelic, but any of those mind manifesting substances, plants or or artificially created substances is that there be a time to integrate that experience. That you have a time after the experience and in many cases and for most people that you have somebody there Whom you can talk to about it and see how it fits into your life and I would say, to some degree that can be very important with expressive meditation not crucial. And I say I say people shake and dance I write it on a prescription pad every morning get up and shake and dance for 15 minutes and here's how you do it. And I say take some time afterwards write it down and I may not see them for weeks at a time So they're not necessarily thinking about it in between, but it's become a part of their life It's become a way of releasing what has been trapped in the body and making discoveries.
ELISE: Yeah, no, I think that's beautiful. Psychedelics is a whole nother topic. But as you said and I think that they're really promising and I'm a huge Rick Doblin fan for life. And yet the idea of people going into that experience alone and unassisted and or doing it too much does concern me, because it's heavy, it's big. I know that obviously you have your book and you have your center and how do you decide? I mean, this is a more practical question, but for anyone who's listening, who also either wants to sponsor some of your work or bring you in, how do you prioritize within your finite, I know you're a non profit, but within your finite resources, where you go, and I know that you're very focused, which I love on teaching the teachers or healing the healers within these local communities so that they can then take these toolkits and go work and spread it in their part of the world.
JAMES: For many many years You I simply tended to go where I was called, and I don't mean somebody called me. Now that happens much more, but I felt after the war in Bosnia, I wanted to see what was going on, see if we could help, see if this method, back in 1997, this method that was working so well, this method that we teach at the Center for Mind Body Medicine, which I started in 91, I wanted to see, couldn't we work in some of the most troubled places on the planet? So that was coming out of me, something that I wanted to explore. And then what I discovered there, Was the time to work is not after four years of war and 250, 000 people dead and a whole society shattered. We could be useful. But so many of those patterns were fixed. So when the war in Kosovo started, I said, I want to be there. I want to go there while the war is going on and begin the work then. So back in the day, and then after Kosovo, it was okay, we ultimately did a nationwide program in Kosovo, trained 600 people, including all the leaders in psychiatry and psychology, and including a lot of people who are not in those fields, teachers and leaders of women's groups. That work goes on 25 years later and is still fundamental part of the community mental health system. So we're next. Well, at that point, an Israeli and Palestinian psychologist wrote to me, and they said essentially the same thing, which was quite interesting. They didn't know each other, but they said, we're very smart, we're very good therapists, we're good at working with individuals, and we're even pretty good with groups but we are so overwhelmed by what's going on with our children. Our children are fighting. They're not killing each other, but they're fighting in schools all the time. They're so violent. We read some stuff you wrote in the Washington Post. Would you come and train us? So that's now more and more. It's still a combination. People are reaching out. People in Lewiston, Maine, where they had a mass shooting recently, and so many kids and People were killed in Lewiston. And so the two of our faculty heard from somebody in Maine, do you think you might come? And they went up there and they began to work with that community and the community welcomed them.
And then the people who are leading the kind of community psychotherapy, if you will, or community, healing efforts, they all came through our training. We respond when people or want us to come and we'd like to work with whole communities. We worked after the shootings in Parkland, the superintendent of schools, we got in touch with him. We had a connection to him and he read about us and he said, come down. We need you. We need you at Marjory Stoneman Douglas where the shooting was. And then after a while, I said, and we need you in the whole school district, which happened to be 270, 000 kids. So people read about what we're doing. They get interested and we do our best to respond. We can't always respond to every need, but if a community is ready, if we can figure out and they want us to come in and we feel we can work on a significant scale and we can find the money or they can find the money for it, we'll be there.
One of the interesting programs that we're doing right now that since I last talked with you is with prisoners. We're not only working in the Indiana Prisons training the staff, the social workers, the psychologists, the corrections officers we're training the prisoners to do this work. And so I spent time in the prison and some of our other faculty, and the women and men we've trained are doing amazing work with other prisoners. And we're writing out, we're gonna be publishing research on it. I mean, it is really as good work as any psychiatrist or psychologist is going to do. So what I want to mention is for people who are interested in our work, if you want to learn what we do for yourself and to share with your community, sign up for our training.
We welcome people, you know, in the beginning, we were just pretty much just training health and mental health professionals. But what we discovered early on in Kosovo is that rural high school teachers could do the work, do this work, lead these groups, teach these self care techniques at a level as high as any psychiatrist and psychologist. And we published the first randomized controlled trial of any intervention with war traumatized children. This was in a region where 80 percent of the homes were pretty damaged or destroyed, 20 percent of the kids lost one or both parents. Major trauma. We trained the rural high school teachers there. They led 12 session groups for the high school kids, 82 percent of the kids who qualified for the diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder, anxious, depressed, agitated, couldn't sleep, nightmares, flashbacks, emotional withdrawal. All the symptoms. 82 percent of those kids no longer qualified after 12 sessions, and the gains held to three months follow up. First randomized controlled trial, gold standard of scientific research, medical research, of any intervention with war traumatized kids. So it was a landmark study published in a major psychiatric journal. But the other part that was also a landmark was that the people leading the groups were not people like me with my fancy degrees and, you know, all that education. They were rural high school teachers with no background in psychology except our training. And so we learned that we can train people who want not only to learn for themselves, because in order to teach other people self care, you have to learn on yourself, but who are willing to learn on themselves, who are committed to teaching other people and willing to have mentorship and supervision as they did it. We can train them to do this work at a very high level. And so we welcome people here in the United States and all over the world into our trainings if they want to do that, if they want to learn for themselves. And then in the advanced training if they want to learn how to help other people and use the same model with others.
ELISE: As throughout your career as you get more and more upstream, right, more engaged and as trauma is actively occurring, do you think it's just in time as we become more trauma informed as we get in some ways more simple in our healthcare, like in our self care as in moving, shaking, all of that? Are you optimistic that we can stop some of these cycles? I know, it's a hard question.
JAMES: I know we can break those cycles whether we want to or not Is another question. That's the hard part. We work on a large scale, in Gaza we've trained 1500 people who've worked with almost 300, 000 before the current conflict. Israel, we have a leadership team that has worked with 500 people who work with 50, 000 people. And so we can work at scale in Haiti. Our programs larger as well. The question is, are we willing to do what that agriculture minister in South Sudan said? Are we willing to look for inner peace? Are we willing to discover who we really are and to be fully ourselves with ourselves and with other people? If we are willing, yes, it can happen. And as you're suggesting. There are many forces against it. There is the polarization. There is the, you know, you have to be this, you put it so well, the pressures, for example, for thinness and and especially for women, but also to some degree for men that you know, you have to do this.
This is the way all those pressures mitigate against this process of self discovery. So we have to become free. We have to be willing to take a chance. We have to be willing to look at what is actually going on inside ourselves, what is actually good for us, as opposed to simply what's prescribed by somebody else. So, do I think that's possible? Yes. Floyd, to go back to him, he said some very smart things. He once said that he thought the major contribution of psychoanalysis to the world would be pedagogy, the raising of children. I'm certainly, and I'm not boasting, but I am a better parent than my parents were. And I know you are as well, because we did learn those lessons. We are paying attention. So that's hopeful. And there is an openness now that so many people have to doing something different, to learning something new, to becoming more fully themselves. I think that's there, but there are all these countervailing forces as well.
So, the education of people, not just the education of children, the kind of education that you're doing, that I'm doing, is part of that process. And if people can be open to it. Now the tragedy, in one sense is a tragedy, that often people only become open when they've suffered horribly when that is both the tragedy of trauma, but also the promise. It's one thing to be trauma informed. It's another thing to inform our experience of trauma with some kind of courage and some kind of hopefulness for profound change. That's what's got to happen. If that can happen, then maybe out of all this contentiousness that is present in our 21st century United States, maybe something really good can happen, but we've got to pay attention, we've got to act on it, and take responsibility.
ELISE: Yeah. For me, the primary meditation in my life around this is like, am I ready to put the stick down? And it's hard. It's really hard because when you feel like you've been wronged or that you're a threat or you're somehow at risk, then you think you need that stick both to defend yourself and also to counter attack or to somehow even it out or get what's yours And it's very easy to Hold on to that stick really tight until you realize, like, I am spending a lot of energy holding this thing and what could happen if I could put it down. It's hard. It's a really hard practice. I can't say I'm masterful at it, but I think we can all start to do that in our daily lives. I'm gonna let this go. I don't know, from the micro to the macro.
JAMES: That's great. And I like what you say about putting the stick down and we have to do it all the time.
ELISE: Yeah. We really do.
JAMES: That is the meditation. I mean the Zen master comes around and hits you with the stick.
ELISE: Yeah.
JAMES: But that's so we can put it down.
ELISE: Yeah.
JAMES: Not need it anymore. Not either to be hit or to hit anybody else,
ELISE: Yeah. And to recognize that there is a difference between detachment or non action and not caring, or not moving toward the more just or more fair but that you don't need to be holding a stick while you pursue those goals. You don't need to be furious to be better to the planet. You know, I think so many of us are attached to this idea that it's only through that sort of stick wielding that we change the world, but it's not working for us.
JAMES: you know, and it's it's not working and one of the beautiful things about the civil rights movement, and I was never able to be totally vulnerable. I'm much more that way all these years later, and I learned. You learn the power. It's one of the reasons why somebody like John Lewis, Congressman John Lewis, Was such an important person because he embodied that willingness to put the stick down and to be courageous, truly courageous as opposed to being defended. Now there are times when you have to pick up the stick, but not so many.
ELISE: Not the first instinct. It's hard. It's hard. May we all grow to be that wise. Well, thank you for your work. And it was great to see you again. And I'm sure we'll be back on these mics down the road, hopefully not too soon.
So that is Jim Gordon, who has spent decades tending to this idea of repealing, and it is so powerful, I highly recommend his book. It’s full of practices which are excellent to integrate into whatever else you might be doing for yourself on the daily, even if you do them every once in awhile, just getting up and shaking out your body or really finding 5-10 minutes to let your belly relax. I know it’s hard, he writes about this in his book, this is particularly hard for women. We are so conditioned to hold our belly’s in, I don’t think it’s doing much for our autonomic nervous systems though—that level of self-discipline and self-control. And, I think about Jim a lot, because whenever something erupts on the planet, I know he is likely there, physically himself, and certainly his team and I’m thinking about him increasingly because we really seem to becoming into some sort of tipping point and I think we all recognize that we'll never, ever resolve this if we keep perpetuating the same cycles, and it’s hard to know how any of these cycles will ever end unless we can find the power to stop, to put the stick down, and to choose something different. And I know how hard that is, when we’re talking about Putin for example, but when elements seem entirely out of our direct control, but all we can do it start where we are and start with ourselves and that energy is contagious and I hope that there are studies to explore this, the idea of group resonance, but I’m convinced I’ve had enough experience with groups and have seen the impact not only on myself but on all of us to know it can certainly be powerful. It had influence, it has impact. Alright, thank you for listening. I’ll see you next time.
