In this episode, Andrew and Barbara dive deep into trauma in high-conflict relationships: what it is, how it shows up in the body, and how it shapes the way we relate to others.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. Today we’re gonna dive deep into the topic of trauma. Trauma is such a hard thing to deal with.
Andrew Folkler: It’s, in a way it’s somewhat elusive and mystical. It’s deep embedded into our subconscious, and so where better else to start? One of the things we’re thinking of is we’re gonna try and really define what trauma is, just to give you a full picture. So Barbara, how would we go about describing what trauma is?
Barbara La Pointe: Well, trauma is so under-acknowledged in our society and so overlooked, but it is a common denominator among every human being. We are all going to experience trauma at some point. But essentially what trauma is, Andrew, is when our nervous system is just overwhelmed, and our nervous system might actually get stuck in a fight, flight, or freeze response.
Barbara La Pointe: So it’s like energy in our nervous system that gets stuck there. It gets stuck somewhere in our body, and it isn’t released, and it keeps us stuck in our trauma.
Andrew Folkler: Gotcha. And it can definitely have a huge lasting effect on the individual, and not only impact them in terms of ways that they view life, but also how they react on their day-to-day, just their day-to-day demeanor.
Andrew Folkler: And it’s interesting that you mention how trauma can be stuck in these little energy clusters within our body. How exactly does it get to that?
Barbara La Pointe: It’s not released. It’s that energy, that dynamic universal energy of trauma that flows through us gets stuck somewhere, typically in our muscles.
Barbara La Pointe: And that’s I guess used the word mystical earlier where people didn’t know how to treat trauma. But Dr. Peter Stephen Levine actually founded Somatic Experiencing and really addresses body-centered work where we can release trauma from our body.
Barbara La Pointe: And he actually says that when we release trauma, we’re able to restore goodness back into our lives.
Barbara La Pointe: And trauma is not talked about very often. There’s a lot of trauma going on in divorce. I call it divorce trauma. Intimate partner violence or abusive relationship trauma. COVID is actually a collective trauma that we’re all dealing with, at a time where we really need more intimate connection, we’re asked to socially and physically distance, and that is a collective trauma.
Andrew Folkler: Definitely is. And human beings are social creatures by nature. It’s the number one reason why as a species we’ve done so well is our ability to rely on each other. And I think that, kinda going along the lines of where you were talking about, trauma seems to impact that ability to rely on each other, and it creates this sense of distrust, and it creates this sense of needing to disconnect away from other people in fear of either more trauma or re-experiencing the existing trauma.
Andrew Folkler: And what are your thoughts on that?
Barbara La Pointe: I agree. If we don’t release our trauma, we stay stuck in our trauma, it’s gonna wreak havoc in our lives. But just maybe to back up and underscore that trauma is a loss of our sense of safety. So as someone who’s been traumatized, whether it’s divorce trauma or environmental or a rape, any kind of trauma.
Barbara La Pointe: Someone who has experienced a trauma is not going to feel safe in their world. So trauma can be a perceived threat or a real threat, but they’re not gonna feel safe in their container, in their body, in their lives. So that’s a very important piece of trauma is that loss of safety.
Barbara La Pointe: And our nervous system will not allow us to be in that calm state where we feel safe.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, definitely. And what it sounds like is that the person who experiences these horrible traumas, they’re caught in this state of survival mode. And it goes along the lines of where you were talking about with the freeze, flight, or fight mode where they’re just stuck, and they’re so afraid and so paranoid of what could happen to them in light of the trauma that they’re unable to see what is happening just all around them.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, because they’re stuck. Your body can actually get stuck in a freeze mode, in a freeze response, and your nervous system is just trying to keep you safe.
Barbara La Pointe: So I agree. Trauma also can occur after cumulative stressors or cumulative triggers over time, and we see that in divorce court, or in parental alienation or in abuse cases where you’re just under such cumulative stress for such a long time.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah. And it does compound, and as a result, multiple traumas might overlap with each other leading to many different either coping mechanisms or just different outbursts of behaviors that certain individuals have.
Andrew Folkler: And as a result, they’re completely oblivious to that their trauma is taking over, and their trauma is, in a way, behind the scenes guiding their actions because they’re afraid of re-experiencing something like that.
Barbara La Pointe: Absolutely. I guess we’re always trying to protect ourselves, so we might live out that trauma for years, or it might be system affecting us throughout the course of our life, as in the example of early childhood trauma.
Barbara La Pointe: We might not address that till we’re older. But it could have affected the whole course of our entire life if we haven’t worked through that.
Andrew Folkler: Easily. And that would be just one coping mechanism right there, like dissociation, where you can avoid remembering those hurtful memories and just progressing forward and losing touch with your emotional side and those memories and wanting to just do away with them altogether.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, absolutely agree. Yes, to speak to what you’re saying, there’s a point where we have to acknowledge our trauma or we might have to look at it, but we also have to process it and and do that body-centered or somatic experiencing is what it’s called, to allow it to become released out of our body.
Barbara La Pointe: And something that, yes, we can do it alone, but it’s so helpful to have a trauma-informed coach or a psychotherapist or a somatic psychotherapist to do that kind of work with someone is so much more strengthening.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, absolutely. So what is somatic coaching? For the average listener who’s never heard of that before, what would be somatic coaching or somatic therapy?
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah. Somatic psychotherapy or somatic experiencing is just body-centered psychotherapy where you’re noticing and listening to your body and allowing your body to speak its truth or allowing your body to voice the truth that it knows. Because the neat thing about our body is it never lies.
Barbara La Pointe: So the body never lies. So we have so many stories and narratives in our head that we run, but such a different story or truth comes out when we just check in with our bodies. And really honestly as a society, how often do we check in with our body and listen to our body? Most of us are pretty separated out from our body at times.
Barbara La Pointe: And trauma can take us right out of our body too, and toxic stress can take us right out of our body. So somatic experiencing does exactly the opposite. It brings us back into our body, but allows us to learn a new way of being, a way of being where we can feel safe.
Barbara La Pointe: Kind of changing those inner pictures and anchoring it in a new sense of being within our container.
Barbara La Pointe: Sometimes that takes practice, but I know after inherited family therapy work, once we anchor in a new feeling, let that feeling be safety or positive emotions, we ask clients to practice it, that feeling, that positive feeling six times a day.
Barbara La Pointe: Until it becomes rooted in the body.
Andrew Folkler: Okay. So I guess what kind of exercises would you go through to listen to the body?
Barbara La Pointe: Well, that’s such a good question, Andrew. Well, just checking in with the body. A mindfulness work is excellent for tuning in. So bringing the energy of mindfulness into your life to just tune into your body.
Barbara La Pointe: Grounding yourself, meditation is also a wonderful way to come back inside yourself. I could go through perhaps one or two simple exercises to calm yourself.
Andrew Folkler: I think that’d be a wonderful idea.
Barbara La Pointe: While dealing with trauma. I’ll just point out, it’s so great to be here with you in the present moment.
Barbara La Pointe: I’m at a studio called The Village Collective.
Barbara La Pointe: There’s a lot of healing work that goes on here. And I can tune in to my heart center, but since we’re talking about trauma, if you’re being affected negatively by trauma you can’t tune into the present moment. You’re always stuck back in that traumatic event.
Barbara La Pointe: And actually it doesn’t even have to be the event, it can just be your body’s response to that event. ‘Cause remember, it doesn’t even have to be a real threat, it could be a perceived threat. So if you can’t self-regulate and you can’t calm down, one thing that somatic experiencing teaches us to check in and just soothe the body is take your hand and put it under your left hand, under your right, just under your arm.
Barbara La Pointe: Okay. And your right hand on your arm like this, and then you just sort of squeeze your arm. And it’s been reported to be extremely soothing. I might tell someone to do this if they were coming out of court or after an assault or anything, when you just can’t calm down, you can do this, and it’s been reported to be very soothing.
Barbara La Pointe: And the second one, Andrew, is to just put your hand on your chest and your hand actually on your head. And just by putting your hand in these two places, it soothes your nervous system.
Andrew Folkler: That’s really interesting. Yeah, I can feel myself relaxing just right now.
Barbara La Pointe: Oh, me too. And just, yeah, so simple, right?
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, absolutely. And it really is the simplest things that can help us self-regulate and can help soothe ourselves, really. As somebody who periodically does meditation, I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring and say that meditation is often stereotyped to be an exercise where an individual is supposed to sit down, scrunch their eyebrows, and think of nothing, and that is very, very far from the truth.
Andrew Folkler: Rather, meditation is a exercise where you are able to slowly work yourself through your body and feel those different energies, like you were saying. And there’s a few different exercises you can do. Typically, beginner’s meditation would be a process of just focusing on your breathing. You would take a deep breath in, and then you’d breathe out. Then you’d breathe in.
Andrew Folkler: And you’d breathe out. And what you would do is you’re just focusing on breathing in. Focus on the breathing out. And it’s just this slow circle of energy going in and out. And once you focus on your breathing, you’re able to slowly quiet down your mind, and you can then start focusing your attention on anything that is of importance to you.
Andrew Folkler: Maybe you need to calm your mind before a big speech in front of a whole bunch of people. You could calm your breathing. You could focus on your breathing in and out, in and out, calm your mind, and then prepare yourself mentally for that public speaking event. Maybe you’re trying to deal with something else where it’s a little bit where something’s scary, and you need to calm yourself down and kind of work up that bravery. Regardless, meditation’s an exercise that can help you self-regulate and achieve this tranquility within yourself.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, and I’m just watching you do that, how it’s really a process of slowing down.
Barbara La Pointe: And just your voice was so calming, and then gave me permission to calm down. And that really is what mindfulness psychotherapy is just... It’s all about slowing down. You kind of slow down to go fast. And I do that in coaching as well. We slow down to go faster.
Andrew Folkler: And I think that’s what trauma does, though, is it speeds up our life. It makes us live life almost like we’re in just fast-forward mode. We’re just constantly moving forward, constantly trying to just get through the day, just get through the hour, just get out of work, just to go to bed, just to go to sleep, just so that way you can wake up again.
Andrew Folkler: And you’re just going and going and going, and you’re just unable to pause and breathe. You can’t even be yourself because you’re just going and going, like this never-ending train, you know?
Barbara La Pointe: Sometimes I’ve actually even had it heard that it’s great to get to a more strengthened place before you begin psychotherapy.
Barbara La Pointe: More positive life-strengthening things you can do when faced with trauma recovery or trauma healing. The more of those things you can do, the faster you’ll gain, the faster you’ll recover, basically, and the easier it will be to let go of that trauma.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. Going back and trying to deal with these difficult memories or series of memories, it’s possible that you can, what would be the right word to put it?
Andrew Folkler: It’s possible that you can do too much at once, and then bury yourself to the pain, you know? And you get hurt too quickly, and as a result, you kind of go back... You just race back into your turtle shell. I’ve met a few people who have done something like this where they would talk about their trauma and they’re trying to work through it, but they did too much all at once.
Andrew Folkler: And as a result, they were overwhelmed, and it really scared them, and they got a little bit more on the hostile end just because they were so hurt from trying to recover that they went back into the turtle shell and were just out there with a stick ready to poke anyone who would get close to them.
Barbara La Pointe: Right. Yeah. Well, like you said, just bit by bit, because it’s actually an energy that you’re opening up to release that is significant, and you don’t wanna open it up too fast necessarily. Although, so it can be a process, but...
Andrew Folkler: Definitely can be.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah. I see what you’re saying. But, since so much of our podcasts are, of course, focused on divorce and the experiences that human beings have breaking up, divorcing, going to family court, all of these systems aren’t acknowledging the trauma that they’re creating.
Barbara La Pointe: And even back in our podcast with the amazing Ginger Gentile, she was just talking about all of the hurt families that are traumatized just from what they’ve gone through in terms of alienation and divorce. So we’re seeing so many families traumatized that need ways to deal with their trauma and to heal from their trauma, just from being part of a broken family unfortunately is traumatic in itself.
Barbara La Pointe: And this is unfortunately, and too, the system re-traumatizes us over and over again as we go back and back to this unloving system, as I like to call it.
Barbara La Pointe: So.
Andrew Folkler: And unfortunately, mental health is not something that’s spoken about either in schools or with the workplace, or even just in general from parent to child.
Andrew Folkler: And as a result, many people are just making it up as they go. They don’t know how to cope with these frustrations. And so you get these common sayings or conventional wisdoms that people have that really aren’t wisdoms. Things such as boys don’t cry, for example. It’s a very common one out there that is pushed onto young men, basically telling them that their emotions are to be neglected and invalidated.
Andrew Folkler: And while it’s understandable that crying may not directly solve the problem and that an individual should be able to work through their emotion and go straight to solving whatever problem is out there, the issue is if a child is taught to repress their emotion, then you’re actually doing the opposite.
Andrew Folkler: You’re teaching the child to bottle that up and, like you were saying before, where it can lead to things just building up and building up. Eventually there will be an outburst, and that outburst will likely not solve whatever problem was the cause of the emotional stress to begin with. The difficulty there is that there’s a shortsightedness in some of these conventional wisdoms that people put out there, in things like especially with the boys don’t cry analogy, for example.
Andrew Folkler: And as a result, we’re not dealing with the actual frustration or the actual emotional source, like you were mentioning. And in order to move forward, you have to be able to have the right, you could say, mental health techniques or the right strategies to slow down, pause for a moment, and address what is ailing the individual.
Andrew Folkler: And then you’ll be ready to deal with whatever the problem is or solve whatever problem there is.
Barbara La Pointe: I like the way you said that, is we bottle it up. So we deny it, we suppress it, and we push it down. All these emotions that we actually need to process and let out. And so yeah, so this denial and the suppression and shoving it down shows up in our we store it in the very cells of our body. I love a little video I watched of Dr. Peter Levine, and I recommend everyone check out his website called traumahealing.org, where he’s just talking to a guy who had a very bad TMJ, and he was having a fight with his coworker, and he felt threatened that he was gonna lose his job, and in fact, he wanted to, just kill this guy.
Barbara La Pointe: But instead what he did was he just clenched down his jaw and to the point where he had awful TMJ, and so they just worked at releasing that from the muscles in his jaw. That’s something we could probably all relate to in ordinary life.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, absolutely. And it can manifest in many other ways as well.
Andrew Folkler: I remember there’s a book. The first psychology book I ever read was Choice Theory by Dr. William Glasser. And in that book, he was talking about how there were some people he was treating in his therapy where their autoimmune disease was exasperated as a result of some of these hidden traumas and frustrations that they had.
Andrew Folkler: And it wasn’t until they got that energy out of them, and it was like a poison that’s just welling up in them and just sitting there and just festering. And it wasn’t until he was able to work through those emotions with the patient and get it out of them that their symptoms reduced dramatically.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, absolutely believe there’s some emotional linkage to every physical or physical manifestation that we have. There’s an underlying emotional cause. So we see that all the time in inherited family trauma therapy, where someone’s coming in and they can’t sleep, or they have anxiety, or they just get migraines, and then once you start working it backwards, you can see exactly along the timeline what event that’s linked up to.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s why I think it’s such powerful work. Because if we don’t acknowledge it, our body’s happy to store it for us. Store it for us in the form of gout, store it for us in the form of TMJ, help us out to acknowledge our traumas by giving us migraines. Yeah. So so on and so forth, right?
Andrew Folkler: On it’s one of those unhelpful protection features that our body seems to have.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, and just interestingly enough too, you can take all the supplements that you want or all the remedies for that illness, whatever it might be, but if you’re not, some may argue, and I would be one of them, addressing the underlying emotional causes of those, then those supplements won’t have the effect that you want it to.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, there definitely is so much that we don’t know yet in terms of how the psyche impacts the body. And as we go along in this journey of understanding that, I think we are making waves of learning in terms of especially with depression and anxiety and trauma as well.
Andrew Folkler: It’s just we’re not quite there yet. We’re slowly getting there, but we’re not quite there to really know everything. Which is why it’s so important that we take what we have and we work through the traumas that we have, and we work through the pains that we have so that we’re not, like we mentioned in previous videos, we’re not passing that trauma down to any children we have or displacing it and putting it upon a unwilling person.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, that’s true. Our biological inheritance could be a trauma. And until we heal that trauma, it is going to keep following, living on in our lives or we pass it on to our children as generational trauma. But the great news is that although we all experience trauma, it doesn’t have to be a life sentence, and that’s something that Dr.
Barbara La Pointe: Peter Levine, kind of the grandfather of trauma research, is something that he always says and it’s so inspiring. He says, “Release trauma and restore goodness,” and that trauma doesn’t have to be a life sentence, which I love, love, love. I love him. I highly recommend him.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. And don’t get me wrong, to all the listeners out there, it is hard, working through trauma, working through all the symptoms of the trauma as well as that if there was a core event that is the source of it or a series of events, working through any of that is a huge challenge.
Andrew Folkler: It’s definitely not something that to balk at, but it is something that must be done. You have to, in a sense, as Jordan Peterson would put it, you have to get out there and slay the dragon. And it’s a really scary thing that is out there. Until you go out there, until you work through it, it’s going to continue to direct elements of your life.
Andrew Folkler: And like you were saying before, Barbara, it can direct your relationships, it can impact your marriage, it can impact your relationship with your children, it can impact your work life, it can impact the way you value yourself as an individual, and it can impact... So many little things in our lives that we just don’t quite realize are all compounding together to make the weakened state of ourselves because we’re just not conscious enough to see that we’re living life in survival mode.
Barbara La Pointe: And what it really impacts is our sense of safety and how can we walk on the planet if we’re disconnected from our sense of if we don’t feel safe? It’s so hard to really do anything. It really, that’s really what it is.
Andrew Folkler: And so when it comes to transforming trauma into a point of healing, like we were saying before, there’s the somatic therapy that you can do.
Andrew Folkler: There’s meditation as well. There’s more than enough self-help books. Our podcast is a form of healing. If you are listening to this podcast, you are actively working through your trauma right now, and that is something to be proud about. Definitely take a moment and pat yourself on the back or share it with somebody who might need it as well.
Andrew Folkler: So there’s so much that you can do. You just have to slowly work through whatever is ailing you at the time and release those energies that are pent up within our body.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah. And I think you have to do it with a really strengthening partner, a psychotherapist or a trauma-informed coach or a somatic therapist.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s something I think you need to be guided through. And so how you should feel with a therapist or anyone that you’re working with is completely safe.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah. That’s one of the first fundamental things that needs to happen is that sense of safety and that sense of trust as well.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, and just we’re always talking in the context of broken families and divorce, and unfortunately, that’s not a place where you can look for help.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, I definitely think going to a psychotherapist and not doing it alone is a great way to call back all of those broken pieces back home, back home to your core.
Andrew Folkler: It’s definitely a scary thing considering that it’s a very long and hurtful journey. This is something that I went through as well, where I didn’t want to seek out help.
Andrew Folkler: I didn’t want to talk to any psychotherapist, and I spent years going through frustration after frustration and pent-up emotion. And there isn’t really an epiphany moment that comes. There’s no moment where you realize, “Oh, this was where everything went wrong,” and everything is clear, and now you’re enlightened.
Andrew Folkler: It doesn’t quite work that way. It’s a very long journey of pain and frustration, and it wasn’t until I started relying on people. It wasn’t until I started opening up to people and accepting the love and the support that they were trying to give me. That’s when the process started.
Andrew Folkler: That’s when the real healing started. Everything else, all these books, I could read all these books and I wouldn’t have the amount of healing as I would if I didn’t work with people, I didn’t heal with people. So it doesn’t matter how many books I’ve got behind me. What really matters are the people out there that are willing to support you and work with you.
Barbara La Pointe: We just wanted to really offer our audience a general and gentle and safe overview. But I know that we have some very talented and incredible psychotherapists and somatic therapists coming on to share even more tools and even more healing around trauma. But so that’s something we can look forward to.
Barbara La Pointe: But just, yeah, just like a welcoming, safe overview was our goal today and our wish for our viewers to be as well as freedom. I find when you heal trauma, you start feeling very free, because you open up so much space for other things. So it’s a worthwhile endeavor.
Andrew Folkler: It absolutely is.
Andrew Folkler: And with all these incredible guest speakers that we’ve got lined up, I think that we’re gonna really bring in an opportunity for people to learn these different strategies that you can hone in on the trauma that’s frustrating you, and give you the opportunity to heal, to grow, like you were saying, and just be the best you that you can be.
Barbara La Pointe: Exactly. And you can be that when you let go of whatever you’ve gone through and get support to let go of whatever you’ve gone through. But just to underscore that there is trauma in divorce, there’s trauma in family breakups. There’s trauma in parental alienation.
Barbara La Pointe: There’s trauma when you are breaking up with a narcissist or a high-conflict personality. All of those are trauma valid events, perceived or real. So we see so many families or women and men in a lot of pain, a lot of pain and crying out for healing, and that’s why I love working in divorce, and probably you too, is because there’s just so much pain of people who are reliving their trauma, being re-victimized by the system, and not healing.
Barbara La Pointe: And we wanna heal. We wanna heal as human beings.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. And it ripples out. When you help somebody else out, you’re able to not only make that individual’s life better, but you’re also able to help make their circle heal, you know? And they will go out there and help someone else out.
Andrew Folkler: And subsequently, you create this chain of healing, or this ripple of healing.
Barbara La Pointe: When we heal, then our children heal. This was really beautiful. Beautiful.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah. All righty. Well, guys, I think that’s all we’ve got for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be with us.
Andrew Folkler: And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel on YouTube or through our podcast through iTunes or Spotify. Don’t forget to use the downloadable document below to help you and your loved ones deal with these different challenges of trauma, high conflict. And if you’ve got any further questions, Barbara, what would be the best way to reach out to you?
Barbara La Pointe: Barbaralapointe.com, barbaralapointe@gmail.com.
Andrew Folkler: Right on. And if you need to reach out to me, feel free to reach me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, guys, thank you for taking the time to join us today at the Broken Families podcast, where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day, everyone.
Barbara La Pointe: Bye, Andrew.