Thank you so much for joining me once again from the Lessons From the Playroom podcast. I have with us today another incredible guest, ms. Arielle Schwartz.
I’m going to say a couple things about her from her bio, but then I’m going to share with you how I know this wonderful individual. So, Arielle is a licensed clinical psychologist. She is a certified complex trauma professional.
You are a yoga teacher. You’ve got your private practice in Boulder, Colorado. You are very much an internationally sought out teacher.
You are very much a leading voice in the world of PTSD and complex trauma. You are the author of six books, some which have won some pretty amazing awards. Arielle, so congratulations.
So, listeners, you might recognize some of these titles, the Complex PTSD Workbook, therapeutic Yoga for Trauma, which I believe is your most recent one, correct? Yes, it sure is. And The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook, very much dedicated to helping individuals heal on this planet. You offer an integrative mind body approach to therapy.
You do EMDR work, you do somatic work, you do parts work. You obviously incorporate your yoga. And one of the things I loved the most about your bio is you said that you believe that the journey of trauma recovery is an awakening of the spiritual heart, which that’s just beautiful language.
Arielle, I am so incredibly blessed that you are joining me for this amazing opportunity for all of us to have a conversation about intergenerational trauma, which I think we need to be having more conversations about that. So, welcome to Lessons from the Playroom contest. Thank you.
And Lisa, it’s just great to be back with Know. You and I have known each other a long time and I really look forward to where this conversation takes us. Yeah.
So, listeners, as I mentioned, Arielle’s in Boulder, Colorado, which is where I am as well, and we’ve known each other for many years. We co taught some E Dr workshops back in the yeah, we come across each other from time to time and very much have enjoyed watching what you have been putting out into the world. Arielle, it’s a blessing to know you.
Likewise. Thank you. So, Arielle, bring us into a little bit about you and your love for this topic.
I know we’re going to talk about intergenerational trauma, but PTSD is part of that. So, trauma, why has this topic grabbed you so much? Yeah, I don’t know that I ever knew that that’s where I was going to land. But my own journey of becoming a psychotherapist was certainly one of healing my own trauma and recognizing the complex nature of that in myself.
Meaning that for me, it was certainly the result of accumulated, ongoing, repeated developmental experiences that shaped me to such a degree that I didn’t know it was trauma. Right. And that’s what brought me into this kind of real curiosity of what is cPTSD and how does this form? And sometimes there’s very obvious glaring events that also occur in that repeated nature, but sometimes it’s more subtle, and sometimes cPTSD is deeply linked to that intergenerational piece, which it was in my case because the experiences that I had growing up were passed on across multiple generations.
And so then it became something that we were all kind of swimming in. This was the ocean that we were swimming in, and none of us had quite put the word trauma on it. And it was through my own therapy, as well as through the journey of becoming a psychologist, that I started to really identify my own patterns.
Patterns of where dissociation showed up for me, patterns of where I had relational dynamics with other people that were kind of replaying certain elements of this. And through that, I just continued to be hungry to learn more and to understand more, and certainly as a body centered psychotherapist, to understand more about how the body carries this forward and can even participate in how this occurs across generations. Yeah.
Well, let’s even start there. So you’re painting a beautiful picture, and I love that you’re already introducing this idea that an individual can be embedded in trauma and not even recognize it as trauma. What an important thing for us to even consider as a possibility.
How would you describe intergenerational trauma? This is when the unresolved trauma of one generation gets passed on to the next generation, and it gets passed on through parenting styles, and it gets passed on through relational experiences and dynamics, but it also can get passed on through epigenetics. So what is happening within the I’ll go with the mother because of the pregnancy, but what’s happening particularly within the mother’s body and her stress system and how she’s processing cortisol and so forth has been shown to be passed on to the child. And so infants can sometimes be born with greater sensitivities, whether that’s through colic or through sensory sensitivities, and also lower birth weight.
They can be harder to soothe, and it’s relatively common. And so I think I just want to kind of immediately say, like, can we pull some of the shame off of this story right. That it’s a relatively common story, and sometimes it’s going across, and it certainly was the case for me, many, many generations.
Do you think it’s possible for someone to not have some level of intergenerational trauma in their story? Right. I think at this point on the planet, we are all carrying something. And I know for myself that part of my own healing motivation was becoming a parent and wanting to protect my children from elements that I felt like I was carrying inside of me.
And I think I’ve done a relatively good job. Does that mean that it’s perfect and that I stopped the river? No, right. They both came into the world with very highly sensitive systems and gratefully being someone in the field was able to secure occupational therapy and to work with that sensory sensitivity in them and to get them support too, because that’s kind of part of what we can do as well.
Yeah, I so relate to that, because that’s very true from my experience with Avery, also coming into this world with a very heightened sensitivities, many sensitivities in her system. And as you’re sharing that, there’s some acknowledgement that something’s going on and some access to resources, but that’s not true for everyone. Let’s take this now into the world of therapy.
So how do you begin to conceptualize how to use this information in the context of working with our clients? How do you wrap your mind around it? I think that part of it is really understanding our clients in that whole context, so that when we’re developing what we often refer to as a case conceptualization or that deep understanding of whether you’re working with a child, or whether it’s with an adult or in some cases the parent or the whole family system, that you are understanding them within that developmental context, within the social context, cultural context, and also in that generational context. So whether that’s using a genogram and looking at themes across generations, whether that’s kind of looking at attachment and parenting styles and understanding that across generations, it starts to light up where some of this may have come from. I want to actually give an example.
It’s a kind of potent one, and I’ll leave it in very generic terms to not reveal any identities. But this was at a time when I was doing a lot of play therapy in my practice, and just as a kind of knowing for our listeners, I had a play therapy practice for many years, primarily in child centered play therapy and filial play therapy. So I often would have the parent in the room.
And after my second child was born and kind of working with he has Dyslexia and some ADHD and these sensory sensitivities, and I stopped my child practice. I really needed my kid energy to be available for them and we’ll see what happens in the future. So it was a wise choice.
So this goes back some years now, but this young girl, I’m guessing eight years old or so, would come into the play therapy room with her mom and we’d all be sitting on the floor. And the mom would often bring in her own journal and just kind of needed that to ground her to write down what was coming up for her as she was sitting and being present to her daughter’s play because so much would be evoked. But one of these play themes that the child brings in a theme and it returns.
And it returns, right? One of these play themes was that she would create these farm scenes and all of these little child characters and animal characters and the water trough and the farm buildings and so forth. But what would happen is that the horse, which was affectionately called Nana, would always go and poop in the water trough. And then the children were trying to figure out, do I drink from this? Am I not drinking from this? And when I would have meetings with the mom after these sessions, she would talk about what was coming up for her because Nana, her relationship to her mother was very much what she feels like kind of this poison in the well.
And to watch her daughter know this and play it out, and to feel her own experiences of shame and guilt that she didn’t protect her daughter enough from the impact of this and how it’s impacted her and so on and so forth. But it just feels like a potent example of how sometimes also just watching those themes in play, we can start to see like, OOH, they know. Yeah.
I got very interested I’ll say one more piece around this. I got very interested in the role of transgenerational resilience in the process of both raising my own children and also working with other families. And this notion of transgenerational resilience was linked to children knowing more about their family histories.
Not so much that it was burdening them with the stories or feeling over responsible, but enough to locate their own reactions, their own wisdom. Another story is that a friend of mine has this lovely story about his grandson coming to him and saying, grandpa, why are you so angry? And he says, I’m not angry. And his grandson says, well, tell that to your face.
And in this lovely story he had to go, well, let me think about that. Maybe I am angry. But because children are so right brained.
They’re picking up on the emotions, whether they’re explicitly named or not. And so now imagine that we all go to Thanksgiving, which is right around the corner, right? And we’re with the larger family, and the child is picking up on the look on Aunt So and So or Grandpa or whoever it might be in the room, and they’re sensing what’s there. But if nobody talks about it, nobody tells the story, how does the child get validated in their own sense aid experience? Yes, very much so.
I love what you’re talking about of almost like a larger invitation for a child to know more of their story. We hear so often parents wanting to just protect their children from family stories. And yes, there are certain pieces more like the way that we share it versus the fact that we don’t share it.
I don’t know if you feel that way about it, but that’s how I tend to think about it. But the sense that kids already know, they already know. They’re already feeling it.
They’re already picking up on all those incongruencies, all those patterns. So how do we bring invitation to parents to talk about it? Do you have any ideas on that for clinicians? How would you invite parents and caregivers into more conversation about I do have ideas, and they’re research based ideas, which is kind of lovely, right? So the recommended narrative is this research came out of Duke and Five S. And you can look up their article called The Ties That Bind, and I believe it was a New York Times article that summarized some of their research.
But what they developed is this idea of this oscillating narrative. And the oscillating narrative basically offers to the child, your grandparents went through something really hard. They came to this country or your great grandparents or whatever, that however far we might go back, they had to flee their country.
This was why this was what was going on at the time in the world, right? And then when they came here, they were able to kind of resettle and organize. They developed the store, and they had a business, and this family business got passed on, and it grew, and these positive things happened. But then there was this loss.
They lost a child, and that was a really big loss for them. And they were grieving tremendously. And that impacted your father in this way, or your grandfather or however, wherever this goes.
And this was the pain of that, and this is how he coped with that loss. And so we go back and forth between. There were these hardships, and there were these ways in which we coped and there were these hardships, and there were these ways in which we coped.
And just like in the child’s own life, indeed, they’re going to have hardships and they’re going to have ways in which they get supported. They get to learn that they’re not alone in that, that it occurred across their family. It validates some of those stories, and it starts to even orient us to how do we cope with hardship.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s also bringing to mind, I would imagine, that a parent or caregiver that hadn’t created their own meaning and their own narrative, that might even be complicated, even just what you just shared. And then how that can potentially even the invitation can be another invitation for the parents or caregivers to look into their own history, to even be able to have the conversation with their child.
Would you say a little bit more about where I just went with that of now, the impact onto the yes, in a way, it goes back to the story that I started with, with the horse in the water. Is that that mother would actually need to bring her journal because her daughter’s process and a whole bunch of whole other variety of things that would come out in the play were triggering elements of her own childhood. And so she would write those down, and thankfully, she had her own therapist.
I knew that therapist, so they could work together on helping the mom develop more of that cohesive narrative, because as you’re saying, it’s that lack of cohesion that can actually be incredibly disorganizing for the child and leads things to be kind of reenacted rather than understood. So, yes, if we can help the parents develop more of that cohesive narrative, and sometimes we have parents who are willing to go on that journey, and sometimes we don’t. You know what this is reminding me of, Arielle, is when we support parents in writing out a narrative for, like, in an EMDR process.
So if we were to support a parent in writing out a narrative around something that was challenging so that they could then read the narrative or bring that narrative into the session, to be able to then help the child process through, but that there is a place for our support in that and to help the parent and caregiver have a narrative that isn’t overly polarized, that could then potentially just keep the system spinning and activation versus moving towards integration. That’s right. And we don’t want it polarized in either direction, not with the rosy colored glasses and not with all of the pain and trauma.
And so that when we can find that way that can hold the both. And that’s what will really help create the both, the validation, without feeling like the child then has to take care of their parent. I have a curiosity that I want to shift our conversation slightly.
So what about when this is what shows up within the clinician? So, like, for example, let’s say the clinician was observing the farm play that you were describing, and then all of a sudden, they became aware of something that triggered their own generational trauma or pattern in them. You’re just describing this layering, and this opens up a place to look here, and then this opens up a place of curiosity to look here, and then an invitation for the therapist to look inward. And how do you support clinicians when all of a sudden their own generational trauma is what’s showing up? Exactly.
First of all, I’m so glad that you asked that, because we’re all people first, right? We’re humans first. And many of us chose to become therapists because we have our own histories of either being forentified or those role reversals or experiencing trauma ourselves in certain ways. And so it’s not uncommon that working with our clients, whether it’s children or adults, will evoke countertransference.
And so I just think that when we can be committed to our own healing journey, whether that’s in therapy and also perhaps in supervision, where we can work with a moment that happened in therapy when we’re working with our clients and something gets evoked, and then we can bring that and have that be held and understood, and it becomes an opportunity. Right. I think of those as the gifts for us from our clients, that they help us grow, too.
Yeah, totally. I want to get a little bit deeper into some of the PTSD aspects of this, because this is one of the areas where you are such an expert and bring so much to the field. As we’re talking about this, we’re talking about trauma.
And you said that cPTSD is often a part of this. Some people may not be familiar with what the C is. So that’s the first question is what’s the C part of the PTSD? And then, what are some of the symptoms? Like, what are we looking for within our clients, or even between a parent and a child that can help us know that some of this is what’s going on.
Right. So C stands for complex. Complex PTSD is referring to it’s differentiating from the single incident.
It’s also differentiating from the presentation that often occurs with single incident PTSD. So very often when we think about post traumatic stress, we think along the hyper arousal continuum. So the re experiencing symptoms in which one might feel kind of keyed up in anxiety or feel panicky or the experience of that hyper vigilance and that high sensitivity, those high arousal symptoms, and then there may indeed be avoidance symptoms as a way to manage all of that.
But we’re kind of looking in that domain and with complex PTSD, we broaden out the types of symptoms that we tend to see. In addition to those three categories, we also tend to see that some of the emotional dysregulation is not always in the high arousal domain, but sometimes it’s feeling shut down, collapsed, helpless, powerlessness. Not to say that that can’t happen with single incident PTSD.
It’s just more prevalent with complex trauma, and that there’s this internalization of learned helplessness or a very pervasive loss of self efficacy no matter what I do. I can’t get my parents to stop hurting each other or yelling. I can’t get the domestic violence to stop, I can’t get them to stop drinking or I can’t get them to stop hurting me.
And then we tend to see more of the interpersonal or relationship challenges, whether that’s withdrawal or blaming or recapitulation of abuse patterns and that there’s this lack of cohesion. So it’s interesting how it ties back to that. But this loss of a cohesive self identity or impairments in that self identity we tend to see more themes around guilt and pervasive, shame and a sense of there’s something wrong with me.
Yeah. So when we’re looking at intergenerational trauma, I would imagine that this is one of the things that we might see in the parent child Dyad and I imagine it can look so many different ways. I imagine that one of the presentations that we might see is a parent that could be a bit more shut down has gone a little bit more into the dorsal side of things and then the implications of that from an attachment perspective or implications of that within the child’s nervous system and how that can also play out.
And I’m just throwing one example. I know it can look many different many different ways. I just want our listeners to just keep thinking about how can I think about this clinically and what can I be observing to help me get curious? So I don’t know if there’s any more pieces in there that you want to add in.
Yeah, I think in a way it doesn’t hurt to just kind of keep saying it a few different ways and it’s a lot of the same piece. But when a parent has that reduced capacity to be mindful about their own attachment style or their own upbringing or their own trauma, it can either lead them to be, as you’re saying, kind of shut down. In which there is more neglect, or they’re not attuned to the child’s inner world and states or they’re not as attuned to their impact on the child.
Or on the flip side, they might be more easily triggered because they’re not catching what’s triggering them and it can lead to more acting out or reactivity or even abuse. Yeah. And then again the implications for the child and then we see that clinically in the play therapy, in the play therapy space.
So I’m hearing a possibility here that sounds like this. When I’m with my client in my clinical space, whether the client is by themselves or maybe with a parent that’s in the room, not only am I holding curiosity about what might be going on for them present day or even in their more recent history. But I’m also then widening my lens to then say Anne, what’s also happening relationally with the parent.
And then I’m going even further in the widening of my lens to say what’s happening in the family system. And then even further to say, Anne, how our generational patterns and how our unresolved traumas generationally also really showing up right now in this moment in the playroom? And I’m holding a larger place of curiosity. Yes.
Zooming out, zooming out, zooming out, zooming out. I think that’s a great way of thinking about it. And the other piece to kind of feel into as a clinician is that our bodies are great feedback systems.
Right. So we’re getting feedback by how it feels for you to be in the room with the other, whether that’s the individual child or the parent child diet or the whole family. And sometimes when we’re working with things that have that very large collective theme or generational theme, it has a different feeling.
And it’s almost like it’s a little bit more energetic, it’s a little bit more globalized rather than specific. And so if you’re kind of looking for what might be those markers that this is showing up in the room, you might even yourself feel like you’ve been kind of pulled into that river. Right.
I remember at some point realizing that when I worked with families, whatever that system was dancing around that wasn’t quite owned by the system, I would feel. Right. Just like when you’re with the individual.
Totally. Yeah. And that’s why I think our own ongoing supervision or consultation is so valuable, because it helps us catch what is it that’s now emerging inside of me.
Whether it’s my own feeling of like, somehow I can never get it right. Right. We know those ones.
Or my own feeling like I’m somehow now victimized by whether it’s the child or the parents. Right. We’ve been there too.
And so then we can go, what’s playing out here? And how is this related to the system and perhaps those larger systems? Yeah. I don’t know if you’re familiar. So in Synergy Play therapy, one of the concepts that we talk about is a concept called the offering.
And the idea of the offering is from this language, the system is going to offer us an opportunity to feel what it feels like to be part of the system. And that’s what I’m hearing you say, that when we are attuned, we can pick up on there’s a resonance that’s happening. There is an energetic something that’s emerging, and we can again hold that as a place of curiosity that maybe information about what’s going on inside of the system.
Right. And we as clinicians, in order to access that need, to allow ourselves to be touched by the other, to be moved, to be impacted, it’s much more of that right. Brain psychotherapy approach where we are not stoic and separate and distanced.
Yeah. I know we’re flowing here in our conversation, and I just had another place of curiosity that just peaked, but it takes us in a little bit of a different direction. I think it’s totally relevant.
So as we’re talking about our ability to feel and to be with, this is where I get curious about you and yoga and these practices that you do that you also teach therapists to do and also teach just anyone on the planet to do that’s struggling with their own trauma and PTSD. So can you weave some of that in for us? So as we’re being asked to sit with and hold some of this, which is really hard, what can we do as practice to allow us to be able to open up to more possibility in our own bodies and to hold more in the system? Yeah, there’s a lot embedded in that question. Two elements that stand out to me.
One is that we need energetic self care for ourselves as clinicians. We need to know how to clean the palate or clear the palate. We need to know how to even identify what is it that we’re carrying after a session or after a day full of sessions.
We need to know how to set ourselves up optimally prior to sessions. So for me, yoga fulfills a lot of that. But it doesn’t have to be yoga.
It can be any form of embodied mindfulness. And the process of being building your own embodied self awareness allows you then to be more likely to pick up on those cues as those resonance or those I can’t remember what the word was opportunities or gifts. Offerings.
Yes. Thank you. Yes.
Gifts in disguise. But if we’re disembodied, we’re going to be less likely to sense and feel. That when it occurs.
So for me, the embodiment practice that starts my day kind of sets that possibility that I can even walk before I go into a session. I can take a baseline. And this is one of those practices from Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma, where I refer to it as the five point check in.
What’s the quality of my mind? How am I thinking today? And to just kind of be present with that. What are the qualities of my emotions? What emotions am I experiencing today? What’s my baseline? What’s happening for me physically so that I have a sense of my body and space? And what am I carrying into the room? What am I aware of in my breath? How am I breathing today? And then what am I aware of energetically? Do I feel kind of relaxed and alert? Do I feel keyed up? Do I feel fatigued and shut down? So if I know my baseline and then I walk into a session, and then I can sense how I’m impacted on those five points of check in, and then very curious about why is that changing? What’s changing here? If you’ve ever had a session with someone that’s in a very dorsal vagal state, it can be sometimes like, whoa, I just got hit by a wall of fatigued. I can hardly stay awake.
It’s a. Very intense feeling that’s that energetic domain. And the other side of this kind of preparatory element of yoga is, can I have a practice that actually helps me get into optimal mind emotion? Right.
And I think of that as that ventral vagal piece. So if we look in the polyvagal lens, which is how my therapeutic yoga works, as it’s applying polyvagal theory, is, can I use the therapeutic yoga practice to actually fine tune my nervous system and body and mind to be in this optimal zone so that I’m really bringing ventral vagal into the room? Yeah. I’m imagining that these types of practices are also part of our own working through whatever trauma we’re also carrying in our own body as well.
And that how can we be aware that something has just come up, whether it is intergenerational or not? If we’re not connected in with our bodies and we’re not embodied in the moment, how would we even know? Like, going back to the very beginning, we can be in trauma and we don’t even know that we’re in trauma. Yes, exactly. And so now we can start to be curious about hi.
I noticed this theme. If I do that five point check in every day and then I can go, I notice that I have a tendency towards feeling kind of foggy in the morning. What is that about? Or at the end of the day, or whenever that might be.
And so now I might explore my brain fog from this experience of curiosity. What is that? What is that protecting me from? Where did that originate? When did I first start feeling that way? Or that’s the energetic domain. If we’re looking in the somatic or the physical domain, maybe it’s this kind of chronic tightening around my diaphragm and being curious about that holding.
Or in my hips or in my shoulders, right. These common spots. Or maybe it’s the tendency to hold my breath.
Well, when did I start holding my breath? Where is that? For me, in EMDR, we refer to this as a FloatBack process where we’re kind of following the symptom back to its origin. Yeah. Beautiful.
Arielle as we start to make our way towards a conclusion in our conversation, I just want to circle back around to we’ve touched on many different things, although they’re also interconnected. What would you love, clinicians to really understand about intergenerational trauma or any piece that we’ve talked about so far? I want you to really get this. I really want you to consider this.
What would you say? I think that maybe the big takeaway that I’d like around us, around this, is that the story doesn’t have to end here. Right. Like with any trauma story, we get to be an active participant in shaping what is the end of the story.
How do I get to kind of take the baton that was handed to me and what will I do with it? While it’s in my hands so that I can be even clearer and cleaner and more mindful about what it is that I’m passing on. And I love this idea that not only do we have what we can talk about as transgenerational trauma, but we also have intergenerational resilience and that we can be part of enhancing that resilience story. And I think that’s a lot of what we’re speaking about today yeah.
That there’s another opportunity there. Like you said, I love that the story doesn’t have to end here. The story gets to continue on.
Beautiful. Yeah. And I don’t think that we resolve that story simply by caring it for our family or ancestors.
There is a way in which, when we are willing to feel and resolve and heal, it is a gift that goes in both generational directions. Yes, that is a statement right there that I know in my own work has felt really relevant, that what work can I do that not only affects the generations to come, but also as a gift to the generations that have come before me. Recognizing that we’re all interconnected, I think that’s a beautiful, beautiful image and a beautiful thought that we are connected in both directions.
One of the authors that writes on this practice of cultivating transgenerational resilience, he describes the importance of developing generational empathy. And we can do this with our children as well, but we start with ourselves. This kind of idea of if you were to imagine that ancestor that went through a hard time, maybe contributed to trauma within your lineage, what were they going through? What was happening in the world at the time that they were on the planet? How do we kind of imagine walking a day in their shoes? And how does that then help us have more compassion for ourselves and more compassion for our children or the generations that come after us? So beautiful.
Well, since I know there’s listeners that are thinking, okay, well, I don’t want this conversation to end, where can I continue the conversation with Arielle? Where can they so, you know, maybe the first place that I’ll mention is go find the YouTube channel. I have a YouTube channel that has over 100 videos on it, some of which are kind of short trauma talks, and some of them are very long yoga classes, 90 minutes classes, and just peruse and enjoy. And it’s available, it’s available for you, it’s available for your clients.
And that’s Dr. Arielle Schwartz on YouTube. You can find lots of my writings in my books, in my blog, and that’s at Dr. Arielle schwartz.com and on Facebook at Dr. Arielle Schwartz.
So it’s pretty easy to find. Well, thank you once again for your time. It’s beautiful to connect with you in this conversation and truly thank you for you’re putting so much out into the world.
And it’s just been amazing to watch you. And it’s a privilege to know you. Thank you.
All right. So, listeners, thank you once again for tuning in and joining us. And I say this every single time, but take care of yourselves. You are the most important toy in that playroom, so tend to your hearts and be well.
