Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 769: Interdependence & The Healing of Trauma with Thomas Hübl, PhD

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Episode 769: Interdependence & The Healing of Trauma with Thomas Hübl, PhD · The Trauma Therapist

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Right. Welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gamiferson.
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My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to be human,
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to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
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who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
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authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more
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about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com.
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That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. Here we go.
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So five or three, two and one, our folks, welcome back
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to the podcast. Very excited to have as my guest today, Doctor Thomas
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Thomas. Welcome, Thank you guy. I'm happy to be here with you.
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Thank you for the invitation. You're all welcome. So Thomas who Will,
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PhD is renowned teacher, author and international facilitator who works within the complexity
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of systems and cultural change, integrating the core insights to the great wisdom,
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traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Since the early two thousands,
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he has led large scale events and courses on the healing of collective trauma,
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with special focus on the shared history of Israelis and Germans and facilitated healing and
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dialogue around racism, depression, colonialism, and genocide. Thomas's the author of
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Attuned Practicing Interdependence to Heal our Trauma as well as our World and Healing Collective
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Trauma Process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds. He has served as an
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advisor in guest faculty for universities and organizations, and is currently a visiting scholar
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at the Weiss Institute at Harvard University. Thomas, welcome, Thank you so
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much. I'm happy and I'm curious we go go awesome. So before we
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could go in here, if you're weather listeners, where you're from originally and
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where you are currently? Yeah? Originally I grew up in Vienna, and
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I left Vienna I think when I was in my early twenties twenty twenty five,
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maybe mid twenties, and then I am living right now after I had
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having a station in Berlin for some time. I'm living now in Tel Aviv
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in Israel. Oh wow, okay, So I mean you just have this
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really rich and fascinating uh background. How did this start for you? How
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did you just born? And because you have this obviously is a passion what
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you're doing. How did this start? Yeah, it's true, it's it's
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it's totally a passion. Like I think there are a few stations on my
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in my life that kind of formed this passion. One is that I always,
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already as a child, had a kind of a deep connection to spirituality
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to go to the divine, but I didn't connect to the church context around
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us. I don't know. It always felt cold to me. It didn't
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feel where we live, not in general, but where I live. And
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so that's one thing. The second thing is when I was sixteen, I
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joined and the Red Cross and I became a paramedic and later a trainer for
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paramedics, and I for nine years did this volunteer as a volunteer pretty intensively
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besides my studies at that time, and I and I learned so much during
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that time about life, society, trauma. I don't know. Also serving,
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like I love, like this quality of serving our culture, like giving
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something and not only because we get something in return, but because we care.
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So I think that there is something in that time that really had a
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deep impact on me and taught me a lot about life. And at that
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time. I didn't know yet how to frame trauma and all this, But
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there are many things that in retrospect I think were very important at that time.
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And then when I was twenty six, I left all my studies and
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I became like I went to a on a four year meditation retreat. So
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I was sitting a lot of my time, and I was meditating, and
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I felt there's a different kinds of studying that happens in silence. That opened
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a lot of my inner world. And I think that's also where it tuned
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has its roots. That's where the collective attunement has its roots. That's were
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presencing and using our relational moments as a kind of ongoing meditation or contemplation.
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And then and then when I came out of this four years of being very
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much retreated, I got the invitations to run workshops, and my workshops grew
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pretty fast. And then I and then because my first workshops were in the
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German speaking mainly in Germany and the German speaking area Switzerland, Austria, Germany,
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and then in every workshop, this kind of collective dimension came. Every
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workshop that was longer than two three days, we ended or we came into
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like a collective trauma process. And so at the beginning that was pretty strong
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because it was really like suddenly fifty people in a room touched this collective layer
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of the Second World War, of the Holocaust, and it was pretty intense.
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But then I so I thought, okay, it's just that group.
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But then it happened again and again and again and like a similar process design
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again and again and again, and said, okay, life is showing me
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something. And then I began to study that deeper and so that formulated for
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me a deeper understanding of systemic trauma. And that's also what I wrote.
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Finally, then my PhD about is the into the individual, ancestral and collective
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trauma healing process. And yeah, and then in the last twenty years,
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then we expanded, and of course I did at the beginning a lot of
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work between the aspora to choose people from Israel, German or European people that
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were interested in healing the Holocaust wound. We had very deep moments there,
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very deep, very complex, but deep. And then we started to expand
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into the rest of the world. As you said before, looking at colonialism,
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racism, Chenel sides gender violence, climate change. When you were sixteen,
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you decide to be a medic and go with the Red Cross. That
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is amazing and kind of like, were you getting encouragement? I mean,
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that's young to do that, right, It's not like I'm just going to
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go downtown and take a course on you know, first date with someone encouraging
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you in this direction. Yeah. Yeah. My mother and my stepfather at
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the time, they were serving as a paramedic at the same station, and
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so in a way, it was already in my family and I kind of
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grew into it. But like I kind of medicine or from very young attracted
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me. So it was and I felt it also, but it's dead and
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it's also this kind of giving that like serving the society was something that I
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felt cold to do, and I did it. Look, I did it
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pretty intensively. I was still going to high school at that time, and
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and I it was a great school for me to learn about life. I
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mean I saw every work of life. I saw many people in tremendously difficult
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circumstances. So it trained me also to do what I do today. When
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you started doing the workshops, you said, this kind of collective experience of
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trauma started to emerge. When that happened initially, what was your how did
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you respond? What was your reaction, what was your your gut reaction.
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Did you feel, Okay, let's go with it, or I don't know
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what the hell's going on? How do I deal with this? What was
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going on? View? It was interesting because in a way I kind of
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intuitively knew what was happening, So I knew what school was going on.
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But because the process was very strong, so it was a very strong experience,
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so for me like that many people and people saw visions of the Second
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World War and of their ancestors, and it was it was pretty strong,
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but it we kind of held it really well. So it turned into a
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very positive experience over this week and people got a lot out of it.
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I mean a lot happened for you. There was a lot of transformation that
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happened. And I felt also how it affected me because I was born in
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Vienna. My parents, my grandparents lived through the Second World War and they
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weren't involved in the Holocaust obviously, but they were they were going through the
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whole process. So I carried some of it in myself and I felt that
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so I also needed to do some of the work obviously on myself. But
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then but when it happened again and again, then I felt, Okay,
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this is is something in there for me. And also in my meditation retreat
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time, like to be dialed in or tuned to the collective dimension of life
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was something that I was very interested in at that time too. And then
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I felt, so life's teaching me through this process, and then I paid
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attention, and then I think I uncovered a lot of the collective and it
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also spoke to me because I felt, Wow, there is actually not that
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much work out there, and also not so much literature, given how it's
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a global phenomenon. It affects any kind every society around the world. But
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the research and I don't know the amounts of publications and how much we are
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dealing with systemic trauma is pretty small compared to what the topic is. And
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I found, I mean, it's it's interesting, but we can talk more
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about that. So that's a bit of journey there. Yeah, what did
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you when you started to come up? What did what specifically did you do?
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How did you facilitate this such that there was a lot of healing and
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so forth. Yeah, at that time I already practiced with my groups like
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that, like how we hold our personal process within a collective space. So
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we from early on I had this intuition in my groups to practice individual atunement
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but also how the group holds a collective presence for everybody in the group.
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So then when that came up, we had already like a group space formed
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that was for to feel very safe. People already relaxed into the group space.
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That I think allowed the nervous system to detox some of that collective material,
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that kind of mutual safety, and then I was kind of the facilitation
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was more to make sure that we keep on track with the collective achievement and
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then have individual voices bring in more of the content. But whenever we touch
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this collective trauma field, when one person shares, there's a lot of resonance
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in the room of other people that because their ancestors went or maybe their parents
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or grandparents went through a similar experience. So it's strongly charged. It's much
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stronger than maybe other topics, and so that created a strong intensity. But
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somehow we managed to host that intensity and also slow down enough that it's not
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overwhelming, but that we could really process. We made we made more space,
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and like that, it slowly decreased the intensity and people felt a lot
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of inner shifts movements. How the trauma started to ground itself over time,
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and then we broke it down to smaller groups and digestion process and it I
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think it went on for three days. But then after the three days we
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were in a good place. I mean the intensity was mainly at the beginning,
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and then it took us like the whole process took three days to ground
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and integrate and to people when they left, they didn't feel like a heavy
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burden or something. They were very This was very interesting. And then we
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simply we developed like a process designed Over the time, I learned much more
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how to how to modulate the intensity of such a process and let it grow
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slow down and like there so then it became also is skill for me.
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And so we'll start talking about the book here. Before we do, I
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just want to take a break to thank our sponsors. We're talking with Thomas
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Cooble. We'll be back in one second. R Thomas. So the book
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is called Attuned practicing interdependence to heal our trauma and our world. What was
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the impetus for this book? How did this come about for you? It
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came about because what we just shared, like the whole collective work is going
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on. Now I do this maybe twenty plus years now. And then I
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wrote Healing Collective Trauma because I wanted to speak about systemic trauma, it's impacts
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and how it affects our societies individually collectively. And then after I wrote Healing
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Collective Trauma, thought, no, I need to write a book where I
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speak also more to the individual process, so and I and also to the
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skill building process of atulment, because that's a big thing that we do in
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our work all the time, and we train also the many therapists that train
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with us, or coaches or people that work with clients, because we refined
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is very much depending on the background, how to be precisely attuned to different
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trauma layers, different age layers, and so on. And so I thought,
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okay, now it's we need to bring the individual workforward to skill building
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on the relational level as a remedy. And then I wanted to also speak
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to this iac fluidity that trauma lives individually in US, ancestrally and collectively,
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and that they are not separate things, but that they are one continuous flow,
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and that we don't separate this as items, but as an a dependent
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continuum, same as we are ecosystemically interdependent all the time. And that that
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I think I thought was a good book and I wrote it in a way
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that it's also accessible for the broader public. And yeah, so that's and
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then it happened. How do you define a tunment. I think that our
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nervous systems are naturally wired to be social at the beginning of the cities,
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at the beginning of our life, we see it is also maybe in the
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later phases of our life, how much we are part of communities, holding
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spaces for society, Like there's something that like that our nervous systems naturally pick
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up a lot of information, social information, relational information, and a tuman
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is the capacity to bring that process more into our awareness and see how much
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data we exchange. When I feel you and I feel how you feel me
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while we speak, there's a lot of data flow between us. And then
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when we pay more attention and more consciously attention, so we can refine that
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skill that we have, become much more aware of the data that's flowing between
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us. So how our bodies pick up a lot of information. Our emotional
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systems, of course, our mental systems. Spiritually, there's spiritual atument,
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there's ancestral a tiumen, there's collective ativement. So there are different layers.
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I think different departments of our nervous system pick up different data. And I
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think often we are not being trained in our regular education system how to like
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to read the manual and see how amazing our nervous bodies are being is and
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so I think that process heightened. And maybe also we speak a lot about
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integrating because I can't feel you were my trauma re size, So I need
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to integrate that part of myself and then train it to be refined. So
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integration and training how they go together and hand in hand and support each other.
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And then yeah, and then it's a refined practice. And I think
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for everybody who works with clients like you know very well. So then the
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more we are ituned, the more information flows and that's accessible for us.
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Yeah, so that's our clients. That's really fascinating to me. Are so
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are you You're working with a lot of different therapists, you're training them in
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a sense, what do you feel is integral in order for therapists to understand
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or embody or learn to work with people who've been impacted by trauma, what's
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what's essential for them to Yeah. Yeah, First, I think the like
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a deep internal commitment that when we begin to hold space for our clients,
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we kind of sign like kind of a contract with the universe that we're gonna
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work on anything that comes up for us, like any difficult session, any
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interaction with our clients that is not clear to us. Every time I walk
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away and I feel triggered, I feel that some stuff stays in me and
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I work with it for a longer time. It's not that that's good or
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bad, not at all. It's just that I pay attention to it,
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and they use that material to refine my own my own being, because the
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more the more open my own nervous system is, the more I am in
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touch with yours. So I think that's a basic commitment that we have to
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give to say yes, when I do that job, I know I'm signing
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up that my whole life will be a refinement whenever it's needed. Sometimes a
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longer phases it's not needed, but whenever something comes up, I'm committed and
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I also engage like a system of introspection, peer to peer intervision, supervision.
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So to do that process, I'm embedding myself voluntarily in an environment that
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can that feedback can come to me and that I grow whenever there is something
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in my client interactions. The second thing is that I'm It's like I don't
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know any other discipline. If you become a great sports person, usually most
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of the people become good athletes when they train. So our training is a
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constant learning process. And as a I think, as a therapist, coach,
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whatever, it's not that we know, it's that we are committed to
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find out. And the more I'm committed to find out and learn together.
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Of course, we all bring skills and knowledge and we need a basic skill
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set for it. And then I'm a lifelong learner. And every client,
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every group, every situation also teaches me something. And that's why it doesn't
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get old for me. So I walk away every group that I give I
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learned something new. It's amazing and like it's always keeps it fresh and say
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oh wow, nuances like small things sometimes, but I feel it enlivens me
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and that's why it stays fresh for me. And I think that's an important
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ingredient that we are willing to learn, and of course it increases our competence
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and capacity, but it doesn't mean that that competence and capacity becomes kind of
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an identity or it becomes a standpoint. It stays a fluid relational product.
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And I think also that I refine my atutment capacity that I can track more
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and more fine roots of trauma experiences, conditioning what there were formable substance that
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our clients went through, that that internal residue of our development and the internal
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processes that need some kind of completion, that we can feel those and we
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are willing to also be in the these comfort sometimes that that means and be
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able to be in it consciously so that we can go with our clients to
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places where they first of all can easily go alone and where maybe many other
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people would turn away, so they turned towards And I think these are just
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a few call it is, but I think they compose a kind of an
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inner attitude to deeper and deeper explore life. And and sometimes in this collective
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trauma processes we had La Cit descendants and Holocaust survivors or they're there their next
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generation in one room, and and I think we can go there only when
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we're willing to feel the discomfort, feel the tension, feel the also the
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whole numbness and disconnected in the space and become a holding space for that,
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and that creates amazing, like magical and sacred moments of healing. Also,
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So these are a few, I mean, they're there for sure any more,
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and some ethical values and guidelines that we follow, and all of course
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anymore, what I think what excites me tell us about what you're saying,
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what I identify with strongly is use the word commitment. And I love that
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word within this context. What I think is interesting. You know you're not
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talking about you know, this modality or that modality or that trauma healing modality
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or that. Where do those come in? Yeah, they come in with
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with like for example, in our training programs, there are people they're coming
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from all kinds of different modalities, you know, from somebody experiencing and all
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kinds of other psychotherapeutic modalities. That that's what I meant before, we need
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a basic skill set and the basic modality that we feel grounded in the caldas
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when we started, and that formed our first steps. But then I think
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that the modality is that which gets us going, that which is the refinement
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runway, so to speak. But then it's more about how the modality allows
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me to become a musician that is more free to improvise, Like I think,
25:07
goodness it because you can't easily improvise if you can't play the piano well,
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so that it's harder to improvise. But if it's so in that that
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the modality created a certain kind of fluidity and flexibility in us, I think
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then the deepening happens through some of the things that I said before, and
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then maybe we see if the modality that we chose at the beginning is still
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the right one, or if you need to add some skills and some knowledge
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and some you know, practices that get us going further. That's for sure
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important. I want to say that I see this as very important, but
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I think it's it's also because we can also practice a modality and kind of
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stay on a similar level with a skill set and not progress into more and
26:03
more refinement. Whether the direct relational experience becomes like the source of the emergence
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of the process, and how we are more and more and more it tuned.
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I think that for me, creates the excellence of the modality, doesn't
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create the excellence, but it jump starts the process. But then it needs
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some kind of deep commitment to go to a certain level of depth and intensity.
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And also often say, but every quality that we go through with the
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client that we never had before, it's a certain kind of remedy to our
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own self. So the next time some clients come with the same quality,
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we're actually transmitting already a process that we went through by ourselves. And the
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more of those we we internalized in our own capacity. It's not even just
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the meeting with the client that works. It's the presence that we are sitting
27:11
in and as that has already an effect without even seeing the client, and
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that quality of when when we see very experienced therapists or coaches. So there
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is a kind of presence that has matured over the time, and I think
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that presence does a lot of the work. It's a it has a it
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has a very strong impact, and it's not just what we do, it's
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also what we become through that through our journey, you know, in decades
27:45
doing this work. Yeah, that to me, that's that that's what it's
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all about. That's so exciting. And and this commitment, what is what
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is behind that commitment? What is required of that commitment? How do you
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define that commitment? I think in the deepest place, it's like it's love.
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I think it's not a commitment that serves only our career. It's not
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a commitment any any kind of willful pushing myself to the edge of my capacity.
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I mean, there's maybe a lot of strength and agency and impact of
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course comes with that commitment. But either either there is a deeper spiritual dimension
28:34
to that commitment that I'm committed to serve a bigger context in life. And
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of course when we start off and we are more junior, so of course
28:45
there are other motivations part of it, and that's that's very human and natural.
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But I think the more we mature and we become wiser, that deeper
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love and also the curiosity, because what it feels like a repetition. I
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would already ask a question when somebody feels, oh, I'm doing this and
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kind of it's the same I'm swimming in the same word, then I think
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we need to ask ourselves questions about the path and not because it's good of
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it. But something is not refining itself anymore. That's why it gets a
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bit old. Like when something gets old, it's good to look and just
29:32
make a space to listen maybe what's happening. But I think if we constantly
29:37
learn something, it never gets old. It constantly refines itself. The path
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refines itself. And maybe sometimes we get stuck in a certain way of doing
29:45
things, and our own evolution is actually one thing to go forward. But
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we don't let go because I don't know, because of the income, because
29:53
of the status that we got. But actually our energy wants to go somewhere
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new, wants to go to a different place, and if we don't allow
30:03
that, then it gets a bit of a stagnant feeling. But if we
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continuously follow that in a calling to go to new places, I think we
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feel much more inspired by what we do. It never feels old, and
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it's it's it feels like our soul is all the time singing, and the
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outcome is like generosity. The outcome is like serving, The outcome is loving.
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And sometimes I say, I use a metaphor, it's like sometimes we
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are when we come into the deeper trauma zones that our clients went through.
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I often say we ourselves and our clients sometimes need that when in the bottleneck
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of the trauma, when it really feels more difficult. It's like as if
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a metaphor, like a hand comes through the wall and reaches out to take
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your hand and take you through a wall that looked like a real wall,
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but then you find out it's actually non you know, it's it's like a
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hand. And that moment I think is so important, and that we are
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in a shared space when it feels very isolated, lonely separate, and when
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that hand comes, I think that's a sacred moment. And maybe every one
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of us had such an experience with somebody at a certain time that helped us,
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and I think being somebody that can extend that hand is a deeply beautiful
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process. Thomas, there's obviously so much to talk about. It if like,
31:45
I could talk to you for so long as we kind of wind down
31:48
here. Uh, what's the best way for people to get in contact with
31:52
you? Yeah, it's obviously. My main website is Thomas Hubbell who Will
31:59
is a h U E B L dot com, Thomas people dot com.
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We have a great summit every year. It's a Collective Trauma Summit dot com.
32:07
It's many, many great speakers and a great the interdiscipline, a conversation
32:14
around collective trauma and collective healing. And it's also our ng o. We
32:20
are running a lot of programs through an ng o. It's called Pocket Project
32:24
dot org. And I think through these resources everything else can be found.
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And yes, thank you so much. It's lovely and maybe we will continue
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this in another forum somewhere, but I think there's a lovely resonance here between
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us. Yeah, I agree. I'd love love to have you back later,
32:45
later, time again. The book is called a Tune Practicing Interdependence to
32:50
heal our trauma and our world. Thomas, thank you so much, pleasure
32:54
and honor having you on here. You're amazing so much. Thank you so
33:00
much. You got it was crazy. Enjoyed it very much