Hi listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. Wherever you are in the A, I’m going to use the word beautiful inside and out. Guest with us, I have the one and only Bonnie Badenoch.
So we’re going to be talking today about non judgmental presence and Bonnie’s going to give us some insights into what she feels maybe is missing or maybe what we could be attending to a little bit more as clinicians. For those of you that don’t know Bonnie Badenoc, let me share a little bit about her. I want to read a little bit from her bio, but I’ll also share a little bit of my personal experience with Bonnie.
So Bonnie has been in the field for a while. She is a resource for us. She’s been a therapist, mentor, teacher, author 17 years, integrating the discoveries of relational neuroscience into the art of therapy.
In 2008, she co founded the nonprofit agency Nurturing the Heart with the brain in mind. Many of you may be familiar with many of Bonnie’s books. Being a BrainWise therapist, that’s how I first came across you, Bonnie, was that book landed in my hands then, going on and creating the brain, savvy Therapist workbook.And then my favorite book that you have created, the Heart of Trauma healing the Embodied Brain in the context of relationships. Bonnie does so much, but I want to highlight that for the last 30 years she has supported trauma survivors and those with significant attachment wounds to reshape their neural landscapes for a life of meaning so beautiful, resilience and warm relationships. Her conviction that wisdom about the relational brain can support healing experiences for people at every age led to the publications of all of these different books and everything that you are up to in the world.
Bonnie, thank you so much for being on this podcast with me. Well, thank you for inviting me, Lisa. I value your work also very deeply.
Thank you, Bonnie. So audience, just a little bit about how I know Bonnie. When I was first trying to wrap my brain around all this relational neuroscience stuff and what was going on in the brain, I reached out to you, Bonnie, I said, who can I speak with? And I reached out to you, Bonnie.
And you and I had some beautiful conversations and you helped me understand some pieces that were really integral to my own knowing and my own what I teach now. So I am forever grateful for you for being there when I was trying to wrap my brain around a lot of this relational neuroscience stuff. So thank you so much.
You’re welcome. Well, we’re always handing it yeah, we’re handing it on to others and we got it from others and so nice river going on there. Beautiful.
And you also wrote the Forward to the Aggression and Play Therapy book that I’m also so feel so honored that I was able to have your contribution to that. So. Thanks, Bonnie.
Very glad to do that. Yeah. So Bonnie, share a little bit more about you and what feels significant to share about your journey and why this work is so important to you.
Yeah, well, you know, I was a college prof for many years and I had a pretty significant trauma history and I had really no good therapy. And so in my late forty s, I actually had kind of fell apart after my dad passed away. And I was fortunate enough to be guided to a therapist who finally really helped me.
And I knew by about three years into that process, this is what I want to do. I don’t want to teach, just teach. And I still do a lot of teaching because I love doing that, but I just really wanted to help others have the experience that I was having, which is that even with deep profound trauma, it is possible to heal.
So I feel like I learned more about offering therapy from that person, from that therapist than I did any other way. I mean, school is school and it’s got its ups and downs. And right now I really think our field is significantly challenged in the way that we train therapists.
But I had the experience of someone who could be with me in the depths of my terror and in the depths of all of that and not turn away, not try to steer me away, but be present with me and allow the healing to unfold naturally. So that’s what got me into the field in the first place. And then we did found a nonprofit organization in California after that one, another person and I who were in the same program.
And as we did that, we only offered therapy to trauma survivors. And then two years after that, I started supervising. We took in interns also trained in this long term, deeply present kind of model of being there.
So I had some idea about it. But back in 2003, I heard Dan Siegel speak for the first time and literally the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was like, this is so important.
This puts a foundation underneath it to help us hold and understand what’s happening with people and why healing is possible. It was such a hopeful message, interpersonal neurobiology. And so some of the things that happen always make me laugh, like there’s something afoot in the universe.
So my grant writer called to ask when he was going to speak again and somehow got put through to him. And somehow I got invited to be in his study group in ways I would never have thought to ask or anything. So I got to be, if you will, with the horse’s mouth for five years, which was wonderful, and really put the interpersonal neurobiology world underneath me.
And he was instrumental in the first book being published, which was about making it more accessible to therapists. And then after that, I began to get really interested in others whose viewpoints were really confirming what interpersonal neurobiology was saying. So people like Stephen Porges, people like Ian McGilchrist or Jacques Punk Sep or the Social Baseline Theory Boys or all of these other people began to come in and give all of us, I think, a way to hold and understand the depth of the truth, of the importance of the way we are with each other.
So that’s kind of how I got here, moved out of Southern California, finally into the woods in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s where the third book got written, which feels to me like much more of a synthesis of all these viewpoints. And again, nothing. I’m not a researcher, I’m not particularly an innovator, but I love to take things and synthesize them and see how they can support each other.
So that’s been my journey in working with so many people over the years and now doing mainly consultation. And I’ll be 80 this year. So now beginning to just wind down some and just feeling like it’s a time of life for a little more quiet, a little more introspection and things like that.
So that’s kind of where we find ourselves here together today. Beautiful. And I think that’s why this topic for our conversation just feels so I’m going to use the word like poignant for what’s happening in our times because you’ve really been able to see the field over many years and see where we’ve come, where we hung out for a bit, where we’ve arrived.
And I’ve heard you say over the last many years, you’ve spoken to how we’ve really swung, really left brain. And can we go into that conversation a little bit about what you’ve observed and then we can make our way back to right brain and this non judgmental presence? Yeah, I know. When I was in my getting my master’s as a marriage and family therapist, there was still more space, it seemed, for kind of a depth approach and one that rested on this kind of profound know.
Carl Rogers wasn’t so far away that we’d forgotten him, which we seem to have a lot now. But over the years, as we got as I think the whole world and our culture, our Western cultures anyway, have gotten more and more concretized into the left hemisphere, there has been this movement toward what are the protocols? What are the interventions? And what we call evidence based therapy and cognitive behavioral ways of dealing with people and helping people. And all of that has pulled us away from depth and pulled us as clinicians into the role of being the expert that knows how to fix people.
And what I’ve learned through interpersonal neurobiology as well as my own experience, but really foundational is that the wisdom of healing is in the client. It’s not in us. And when we try to come in as the expert and try to imagine, like, we see people through the lens of diagnosis, which puts everybody in a box, it’s like, oh, you have anxiety.
You go in this box, and I should do these things in order to help your anxiety be relieved. When we begin to do that, the individuality of the person gets washed away. And the sense of us being kind of in this together in a way that I can support you and you can show me what it is you need.
Nobody is just an anxiety disorder. We don’t treat disorders, really. We treat humans.
And humans are so variable. My person might come in anxious this week, kind of depressed the next week, feeling really good. The following week they’re going to be all over the place.
And so I want to follow them there, and I want to be with them where they are so that their wisdom can begin to show through. And our field is way far away from that. Not everybody.
Obviously, there are people that are really working to be to cultivate their own inner world, to provide safety and give people room to heal. But that isn’t most of the training. And some of the newest models that I’ve seen, I can’t even remember what the name of it is, but it was really frightening where you practice the same protocol over and over and over again until you can do it flawlessly.
Oh, gosh, it really scared me to read about that. It’s like, that’s not how we allow people the room to be able to grow and develop and also have these deeply human relationships. It’s so relieving to let go of being the expert, especially when we can’t really do it well.
And even that piece that you were just saying that it takes away the individual. And if we’re trying to practice getting something right or we’re following that protocol, people are so complex and they’re so nuanced that the person in front of us I don’t know, this is my experience disappears. I’m not working with a person.
I’m working with an agenda. Which is so different. Yeah, totally different.
If we come in with an agenda instead of following and listening to what our people have to say it doesn’t mean we don’t know how to offer things that might be EMDR, it might be somatic experiencing. We do a lot of sand tray with our group and art and things like that, but also this kind of deeper internal work. It doesn’t mean we don’t know about those things and don’t want to hold a space for them.
But when I offer them, I want to say to the person so I’m wondering, it seems like you’re kind of looking at the sand tray shelves. Are you feeling drawn that way? And then they can say yes or no to me it’s like, no, this thing just caught my eye. Or yeah, I really want to go there.
So it’s always this kind of dance where I will offer something tentatively and then ask, how is that for you? Does that feel right for you? And then we go from there. And so we’re constantly doing this following and responding dance which looks a lot like attachment work, right? I mean, that’s what we do with our babies. We hope as very best we can and we do it really well sometimes and not well other times, but we come back and repair.
And so it’s this human dance brought into the counseling room that I think is really what we all yearn for, really yearn to be met and heard and have been respected and valued for the wisdom that lives in us. Yeah. So where does non judgmental presence how do you think about that in the context of what you just shared? Well, yeah, I think again, boy, this really coming to Stephen Porges’s work.
Polyvagal theory has been such a revelation and I think I kind of got a rough idea of it many years ago. And then every time I go back and be with it, it gets more and more subtle and more and more informs how it is that we are invited to be together. So basically what polyvagal theory says to us is that what we’re all yearning for is connection.
Steve says connection is a biological imperative and connection happens in places where we feel safe. So safety is actually a state, the neuroception, which means our whole system underground outside our conscious awareness. If we have a neuroception of safety, our whole neurobiology orients itself to opening to receive people.
We go into what’s called the social engagement system and you hear words like window of tolerance. But a bunch of people around me have started saying window of receptivity which feels much more welcoming than the word tolerance. We don’t just tolerate people, we receive them.
Or another friend calls it window of welcome. And that happens when we have a neuroception of safety. So when I’m in that state, then I am not in judgment because when we go into that state, we’re in right hemisphere.
And the right hemisphere is not a judging place, it’s a relating place. The left does the judging, and we need to do that sometimes, and the right does the opening and the receiving. So this ventral aspect, the social engagement system, lateralizes to the right hemisphere, where we open to others and welcome them, and then they begin to resonate with that and begin to settle into enough safety to become vulnerable.
So the hallmark of this kind of receptivity is non judgmental presence without agenda. Like, I’m really interested in where you are and what’s happening for you right now, and I don’t need to put anything of mine within my human limits on that. Nobody does any of this perfectly.
We should say that from the very outset. But when we move in that direction and kind of open our heart and our minds with this warm curiosity of I will say often when people come in, what comes with you today so that we can settle in and they can spend some time kind of going, well, this, I think, is what’s most present here for me right now. And then I’m following that without any judgments.
A person could come in and say, I’m hating you today. Like, wow, tell me some more about that. What’s going on with that? And they wouldn’t say it in that tone of voice.
Of course, I’ve had more than one person come in and say, I’m so angry at you, I don’t know what to do, and it’s all your fault. So if that comes in, I think, again, being grounded in the neuroscience, I don’t have to take that so personally, but really, I can take it with interest and wonder what is happening right now? And I’m very happy to acknowledge if I’ve done something really dumb, like didn’t return a call or said something really thoughtless, I’m very glad people can share that with me, but I really want to be with what’s happening in that moment. And when that happens and they feel like every part of them, the angry parts, the sad parts, the joyous parts are welcome, something magical happens in the room that gives them access to their inner wisdom, that allows them to move toward healing as we dance together in this.
But it’s that lack of judgment. And of course, the minute you are doing diagnosis, assessment and all of that, it’s just filled with judgments. And it puts people off because we’re in sympathetic arousal at that point, trying to control something, and they feel it in their bodies, and then they pull back.
I’ve had so many people say, this is the first time I felt like I could ever be honest with a therapist. I have a question that’s emerging and I realize this question is asking you to bring some left brain language to not such a left or a right brain process. For someone that spends a lot of time left hemisphere who may not really even have a sense of what does it feel like to be in this place and hold non judgmental presence because they’re so used to looking at things through the lens of diagnosis or label? So if I were to ask you, what does it feel like as a clinician, what does it feel like to be in non judgmental presence with our client? Yeah, I think it’s a great question because we’ve all had experiences like this that we can draw on.
I don’t think there’s probably anybody alive that hasn’t had moments where they felt deeply listened to, whether it was by a teacher, if it couldn’t happen in the family or a friend or something. And to feel in our bodies what happens when we feel really received. So what I notice is that my muscles relax, my belly gets soft, my heart kind of expands and maybe feels warm.
My throat feels really tender and gentle. There’s not a lot of tension there. And one of the things I really notice is that everything softens around my eyes and I become kind of aware.
I can’t remember the man’s name, but he talks about being aware of what’s in the center of our attention, but also the background at the same time, where you’re kind of taking in the whole thing. And then what wells up in me if somebody gives me a space like that is this intense sense of gratitude. If someone can receive me like that, my whole being feels so grateful that someone can give me that space.
So that’s me resonating with their safety. But the safety I’m offering comes from my body. And we know when we’re in this social engagement system, our voice quality changes, the quality of our listening changes.
All of these things can be then offered to the other person whose system is geared to resonate with us and to feel the effect of how they’re being seen. Whereas if I’m trying to think of what protocol should I do next and how should I do that, my eyes will tighten up, my voice will change, my body will be tense, and that will also communicate to the other person that it’s not really safe here. Yeah.
So what words of wisdom do you have? So let’s take a moment where the clinician is they’re working at being with. And I even noticed that the word working implies that there’s some left hemisphere agenda even in the way that I just said that, because when you’re being with, you’re not working at it, you’re just being with. Let’s say that I’m being with, and then all of a sudden I get really activated and I notice that there’s a judgment, or I notice that there’s a tension, or I notice something has emerged in me.
What can a clinician do in those moments to return to a non judgmental presence? What would you advise? Well, I think the first thing we have to do is not judge ourselves as much as possible, but say I’m a human being. Welcome I don’t know who was touched inside. I come from a kind of intercommunity parts work sort of thing.
So that helps me, like, who inside just was touched. And I always say to that part kind of really quickly, I’ll be back later. Right now I need to be here.
And that often will soften it. Because anytime, just like if we’re acknowledging, say, angry part of our person that’s with us, if we do that same thing inside of ourselves, it’s really helpful for that part to just relax a little bit. But if we say we’ll be back later, we need to be back later.
It’s not a technique to get this part to shut up. It’s a way to acknowledge it and say, you have value. Whatever just happened inside me has value.
And then it’s wonderful if all of us have one or two people that we have that really hear us very much of the time and call that person to mind. That helps me get back. And the other thing that’s really effective for me, that may not work for anybody, we all have to play around and find out what works for us.
If I really ground my feet into the earth and feel my connection to the earth, even though I’m grounding it to the floor, but my awareness of the earth supporting me, that often helps me come back into that ventral social engagement space. And sometimes there’s absolutely nothing that’s going to bring me back. Going to just make our way through this session.
And if I’ve caused a disruption, I’m going to be owning it. And saying, speaking to, I often don’t need to do that. Maybe overtly right then, but sometimes I do.
And it’s clear to me that I’ve really lost the thread. And I’ll just say, something’s touched in me, too. I’m not that different from you in that way and all of that, but often we get through as best we can.
It’s nice to know, too. Where do we go once we’ve been touched that way? If I can’t be therapeutic, I’ll teach my natural mode. He’ll start talking about some left shifted kind of thing.
Really interesting, but it’s way off from the thread of where we were and that kind of thing. And I can notice that with people sometimes and say, I realize I just pulled this right away from where we were a few minutes ago. And I’m wondering, do we want to go back there? And I apologize.
I’m sorry. That was in me. I love this last point that you just made because it speaks to as clinicians, us knowing our inner communities as you talk about it, and knowing our own strategies and noticing our own parts that are up to certain things, all designed for very specific reasons and all worthy in their own right.
But to notice someone may just start asking a lot of questions that might be their way to teach someone else, it might be to get a little dissociative, someone else, it might be to go really quiet. I think that that’s such a key piece for clinicians to become curious about their own parts and what their patterns are. Yeah.
How have we learned to protect ourselves? I think that it’s really true that that kind of awareness, because the foundation for being able to offer this kind of really safe space, this kind of non judgmental presence, has everything to do with, I think, our first ethical obligation, which is constantly tending to our own inner world with support, not by ourselves. It doesn’t have to be more than one or two people who will reliably, just sit with us and listen to us because our work is hard. It’s the work of co suffering, and we need others to hear.
Like it was so hard to sit with this person today or even to hear. I felt like celebrating and dancing in the streets when my person told me this. Everything gets so much easier inside of us when we have a listener.
Like we want to listen again. This kind of constant attendance on our inner world, I think, is an ethical obligation because when we don’t do it is when we may act out with our people. Every single ethical violation I’ve ever had worked with with therapists, because we used to do a lot of work with therapists who had really broken boundaries in some significant ways in California, all of it sprang from implicit memory that hadn’t been dealt with, old traumas that came up and just simply took over the therapeutic process.
And so it’s our ethical obligation, and really the beauty of our work is that it calls us to our inner world, but we need the supportive people. That doesn’t always have to be a therapist, although that’s lovely, but it doesn’t have to be that. That allows us to keep working on opening and reopening and reopening this non judgmental, receptive space.
I think sometimes therapists think that the support has to be something that’s more akin to supervision. I go for support with my clients because I need supervision, and supervision looks like this. And I’m hearing you describe something so much different than clinical supervision and really more focused on who’s going to help you become more aware of your own self and your own parts and help hold that space for you.
I think that’s an important distinction for therapists to recognize that we need two kinds of support, our clinical support and our own inner holding. I don’t know if you would say it that way. I would, except I think you can do both in supervision, if only we would allow ourselves to.
Because there’s a kind of supervision, I think, called reflective supervision, which involves talking about your person, but then reflecting on what happens inside of me with this person. And that’s what I do, is I do a lot of consultation and that’s what it looks like. It’s a kind of a moving back and forth between the client and what’s happening in you.
And how might we understand what’s happening in the client and how might we be with what’s happening in you. I don’t think those two things need to be nearly as separate as we have caused them to be. Otherwise supervision gets really left shifted.
And I don’t think new interns then have the freedom to feel like they can talk about man this client. I just want to throw them out the window. They make me so uncomfortable.
I want to run away. They don’t feel like they can say that only if the supervisor is saying, I know that I’ve had those clients like running away. That sounds really familiar.
And if we as those of us who get to be in that wonderful role of supporting new clinicians, if we can be honest about what our experience not only has been, but is still, people will say, when will I get over this? I’ll say, Well, I’ve been doing it 30 years and I still go into judgment. I still occasionally may even dissociate a little bit. It all depends on what’s being touched inside of me.
And having the space to talk about that is what keeps me from just having to close myself off from my clients, go into my left hemisphere and start offering solutions that aren’t going to help anybody. I think this last piece is such a beautiful example of how the field has shifted because even supervision training right now is very protocol based in many ways. And there are very strict lines for not saying all supervision training about what’s ethical, what’s not ethical, what you can do, what you can’t do.
And for many trainings, it is separating out what would be more of what’s emerging in you versus, no, we need to just keep focusing on the client and for your stuff, you’re going to need to go do your own therapy. And what you’re saying is that they coexist always. It’s right there.
And I do think it’s possible to do this in a very conscious way. I know in supervision when I was supervising interns, I’d say, so what might this be touching in you? And the person could kind of sense and I’d say, do you feel comfortable bringing it here? Or is that something you want to take to your therapist? Because we can do it either way. We do that, but we get to feel and understand that we are all human beings.
It’s almost like it feels like often in clinical training, it’s like there’s this basket outside the door and you put all your attachment issues and all your implicit memories and everything else in that basket, come into the therapy room, be the expert, and then pick them up when you walk out the door. And it’s just not like that. We’re just human beings being with.
Each other. We have a certain expertise and knowledge we can offer, and that’s wonderful. But really the beauty of what comes into the room is all the inherent healing capacity that’s inside the people that come to us, no matter what their age, whether you’re working with a two year old or a 90 year old, they have all this capacity to move toward healing in them, if only the holding is there.
And also, again, the solidity, the sense of let me back up and say that in a different way. To me, the two pillars of non judgmental presence are, one, cultivating safety in ourselves. All the time working on that.
And the other piece, for me anyway, has been learning the relational neuroscience of a really steady, stable place to stand. So I understand how people get hurt and heal and the value of doing things the way that allows people the room to do that. But when somebody gets into big emotions or whatever it is with standing on that really stable platform of relational neuroscience, I feel like I can welcome whatever is there because I have an understanding, like Ian Mcgillcross calls it, the left hemisphere emissary.
That’s kind of telling me, oh, this person is here. So both of those things are really helpful. Yeah.
Bonnie, the way that you’re talking about non judgmental presence, how would you say it’s the same or different than Carl Jung’s unconditional positive regard? We’re not Carl Jung’s. I’m Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers, right.
I think that he’s the foundation. I mean, there’s this beautiful quote by him where he says, before I step into the room with anyone, I remember my humanity, that there’s nothing that anybody’s going to bring to me that I don’t know something about in my own personal experience. And that because of that, I can hold this space where I can see people and I can see myself in them and they can see themselves in me.
So I think he’s the foundation. And of course, he knew all of this intuitively long before there was any kind of neuroscience piece about it. I do think that, at least for me, understanding something neurobiologically about inner community and how we form our inner worlds and these pairs, we internalize others inside, I think that’s been helpful for me and something that he didn’t know.
But I can’t imagine that sitting with him wasn’t this remarkable healing experience just because you were being so fully received just as you were. I don’t even hardly hear him talked about in clinical training anymore. Really sad.
We’ve referenced in our community a couple of times in the conversation. I know this is a really important lens and understanding for you in your work and what you teach. Will you share a little bit about inner community for those that may not know what we’re talking know? We hear so much.
If you read a lot of the literature, you hear that you’re trying to find your true self. And somehow that never felt I couldn’t resonate with that. I didn’t know what that meant.
And then again, in studying with Dan Siegel early on and really getting the kind of the nitty gritty of the neurobiology, I begin to sense with his work and Marco Yacobony with mirror neurons and all of that with their work. And you bring those two together, and you begin to see that if I’m having like, I’m here and I’m having my experience of, you know, I’m having it in my body, something’s happening in my belly, my chest, my whole body, my nervous system, and at the same time, you’re having an experience. And through resonance circuitry, I’m internalizing you, and you’re internalizing me.
And so we have a third thing called the relationship that will live inside both of us a little differently. You’ll take me in, but I could go back later, and I could be with the felt sense of this relatedness because both of us are there, you aren’t gone. And you and I have had a relationship for a while.
So I had this lovely anticipation of seeing you today because inwardly I already have you in here. So we’re built out of these dyads and sometimes more if we had two or three other people with us, if we have a bigger circle. But we take these in, and they have a felt sense quality that either supports our sense of hope and goodness and all of that, or we do the same thing with people who’ve harmed us.
We have these dyads. So if someone’s terribly angry with me or is turning their back on me or whatever it might be, I’m having my experience, but I’m also internalizing their experience. And so that can be scary to think about, except that, let’s say I have a dad who turns his back all the time and never learns not to do that until after he dies doing that, I now have that dad inside.
And I can help that inner dad heal and resolve something I could never resolve with my father on the outside. And that, in fact, has been my history. Neither of my parents were in any way open to any kind of healing, and so there was no way I could resolve anything there.
But I’ve done years of work with my inner father and my inner mother and feel a great deal of settledness and peace and even a deep kind of love for them because I have such a felt sense of their own history, which lives inside this dyad and the sense of how they were both injured. Not just because I know it cognitively, but because I felt it in my body. And so I feel like I could meet them now and feel a lot of love for them, which was certainly not the case when I started therapy.
My mother was terrifying for me, and my father just could be really mean, and it was incestuous and all of this. He’s also a lot of fun and silly and had those dyads too, of my playful dad. But these other things, by being able to through what we internalize to go back and really sense what the harm was done to them that caused them to do these things is a remarkable degree of resolution inside.
And that’s why I love this work, doing this work. So to bring this into what we’ve been talking about. So here I am as the clinician, and I’m with my client.
My client says something or they do something, and up comes this internalized mom or this internalized dad. And I couldn’t have predicted it walking into the session that day, but here it comes because something’s been activated in my inner world. And I’m hearing you say there’s a piece here of acknowledging.
And then we come back to rather than ignoring, dismissing, shutting down, making that bad, punishing that part for just having emerged, am I hearing you correctly in the process? And then at the same time, how can we acknowledge and still be with our client, even though this part has just emerged? And sometimes I’m hearing you say that sometimes it’s really hard and there might be rupture because our protective patterns emerge in those moments, and we have a really human moment, and there might be rupture. And then we do repair if we need to do repair. And then we do repair if we need to do repair.
My hardest time with people to this day is when they’re in despair in a prolonged way. Not dorsal, but despair. Like, why live? I think my mother, my father, myself, probably my grandparents as well, had parts of themselves that, because of the magnitude of the abuse, lived a lot of days feeling like, why live? I would be so disappointed.
As a little kid, when I woke up in the morning and I was still alive, it was like another day. I don’t know if I can do this. And I feel certain that both my parents had that same experience.
So a session or two of that, I’m fine. But about the third session, I can feel myself start to crumble inside. And what it shows up, as in me, is maybe this person will never heal.
That’s how I know. I’ve learned to recognize that if I start to feel despair about my person getting well, because I usually feel like if I can heal, anybody can heal. So that kind of thing.
So when that starts to give way, I’ve learned to recognize that I’m touching, like, this family well of despair. And I need to go sit with my wife. I need to go sit with my closest people and speak about it and be held in that until I feel myself again becoming up and hold my dad and hold my mom inside.
In this kind of common experience of life being too painful to endure because I can deal with a whole lot of dysregulation. But despair about life in general maybe will remain for me for my whole life, a place that doesn’t fully heal. And that’s fine by me.
But at least because now I recognize it and I can understand that it’s connected to all of us. I can just acknowledge it while I’m with the person and we kind of live through this together. Occasionally I’ve had somebody say to me, I think you’re giving up on me in their next session.
And then I say to them, no, what I was doing was going into your despair with you, because it’s also common to me. And sometimes they’ll say, then you really understand it’s like I do in my bones. I understand.
So that seems to be the repair, is when we resonate so deeply with somebody and we need to share that with them because they’ve sensed something that is there that clearly needs to be addressed, is to be able for them to feel like there’s a kind of empathy of identification that has happened that can also be really meaningful. Nothing bad has happened. Something has happened, but nothing bad because it’s either an opportunity for repair or it’s an opportunity for this sense of like, oh, you really get it, which often our clients feel like nobody could possibly get.
So beautiful. Bonnie, I know I had the I said Carl Jung when I met Carl Rogers earlier, but now I actually have a Carl Jung piece coming, as you’re saying this, his quote that says something to the effect of learn all the theories, learn all the techniques, but when you’re with another human soul, just be another human soul. Exactly right.
That’s right. And it’s not easy in this culture. So we need each other.
Those of us that want to practice in this way really need each other because there’s so much pressure to not do it that way. From everything from the insurance company to supervision to the culture at large. Yeah.
Human soul to human soul. I love that. Yeah, right.
Carl Jung was trying to make his way into this conversation somehow. Bonnie, as we start to find a stopping point, the first thing is if our listeners want to hear more about your work or attend some of the different trainings that are offered, and I’ve mentioned you have your three books, will you say a little bit there? And then I do have a final question that I’d love to ask you. Sure.
Just go to our website, it’s Nurturingtheheart.org, and we are all on there know, there’s five of us that are involved in teaching at this point. And particularly, I guess I would mention Vanessa Timmons, this beautiful black woman who is teaching embodied liberation about doing.
She’s been doing antiracism work for 30 years and has been a student of interpersonal neurobiology for ten or 15 now. And she’s going to be doing these wonderful classes about a way to incorporate interpersonal neurobiology with our antiracism work. And Dan Keaty and Karen Welch are taking over teaching the main classes for Joe and I as we’re moving into we’re going to be teaching something called therapy, a spiritual practice, just four times a year as we’re kind of backing off.
We’re little old ladies now, so we’re backing up a little bit, but you can find all of that. And the books are on there, and there’s always poetry and all kinds of other things. So just go to the website and explore it and see what you find might interest you.
That’s wonderful. So the last question that I had for you, Bonnie, is for our listeners, and I know we have listeners that are just beginning their journey as clinicians, and we have seasoned clinicians. If you could say one thing to us, what would you want to say? I would want to support you in not being seduced by the culture and being able to remember what heart feeling led you into this work and then getting together with others and doing the relational neuroscience learning and also just the daily support day in and day out to stay with our people.
We can do it. It’s why we did this. Almost all of us came into this work because of that and then have been shunted off in a different direction, many of us, and we need each other.
So circles of support for remembering what it was in our hearts that called us to be with people. Amazing. Bonnie, this was a beautiful time with you.
Thank you so much for this conversation. Just genuinely appreciate you, appreciate your voice in this world very much. Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Lisa.
And your work is a blessing in this world, too, you know? Thanks, Mommy. So, listeners, wherever you are, I’m going to invite you to pause and take a breath. Let the wisdom of this conversation just land a little bit and remember, everyone, that you’re the most important toy in that playroom, so take care of yourself.
Let’s extend that out to go find your people that can hold you so that you can continue to do this amazing work of holding others until next time.
