Ep 42 with dr. christy gibson.

Ailey Jolie (00:00)

⁓

The first question I have for you today is a bit different than the questions that I have asked past guests right at the start of our time together. But I would love to hear from you how you define trauma as a starting point for our time together today.

Christine Gibson (00:20)

⁓ I think of trauma as an internal process. when I went to medical school, when they say the word trauma, I think of somebody who is in a big accident or a natural disaster and their body is broken. so trauma always was the external event ⁓ until I started to learn more. So now I think of it as an internal event. Trauma is the thing

that your body does in response to this. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be something that happens outside your body because surgery can cause trauma. It's something that happens that your internal self responds to in a very specific way. So this helps me understand when I was caught in the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015, why some...

people that I'm still in touch with had PTSD symptoms and others didn't because we were all in the same event, but it didn't land in all of us the same way, same as a family. For some people, they can be exposed to a certain kind of relationship and end up with a complex trauma response that gets stuck. And other kids in the exact same family won't have the same one. They might have a different response. ⁓

and they might not have any response at all. So trauma is definitely affected by the landscape, which includes epigenetics, like what you inherit and what you're predisposed to. And that's a really different way of looking at it.

Ailey Jolie (02:03)

wanted to start with asking you that question because you wrote a book called Modern Trauma, which I recommend people pick up. But I loved the languaging modern trauma because in our world right now, there seems to be, I don't know if a competition of ideology or a flattening of ideology and trauma has become this very disputed terms, I would say in clinical spaces and a very like catch all phrase outside of.

Christine Gibson (02:22)

Bye.

Ailey Jolie (02:31)

spaces. And I would love to hear from you two things, these two questions in my ramble, like how do you define modern trauma? And then I would love to dive in with you around just the dispute happening in clinical spaces and the catch-all phrase and the nature of trauma outside of clinical spaces. But maybe we'll start with the definition of modern trauma.

Christine Gibson (02:53)

These are such important conversations for us to have because there is this backlash around ⁓ people overusing the word trauma. And I really don't think we are. I think we are living in a really traumatic time. And I don't think that's unique. mean, there've been many generations that have been through war. There have been many people coming from places of war. ⁓ But the way that we're exposed to human suffering is so unlike what

previous generations were exposed to because it's on our smartphones. It's you know, it's in our ear 24 seven if we're paying attention and so the way that the climate emergency hits feels so much more alive because it might be happening to us if we're somewhere like California or like most of Canada is on fire every summer now. ⁓ And we we don't just witness that we're exposed to it in so many different ways.

⁓ through social media, ⁓ through the ways that we communicate. So, you know, there's some people who are on some form of social media connection like Twitter, TikTok, like 24 seven. ⁓ Even like I'll be at the refugee clinic and my refugees from Iraq, from Sinjar are on Facebook 24 seven looking for videos.

about these horrific events and the refugee camps that remain. So that access to information is just really different. And I think modern trauma is an awareness of what is hurting us and just a greater exposure to it. ⁓ I did a TEDx talk last year and I was looking at information around the climate emergency because I was talking about climate psychology and

The Lancet had published a major study. ⁓ 10,000 youth between the ages of 16 and 25 were surveyed in 10 countries. So we're not just talking Europe and North America. We're talking like Philippines, a country in Africa. Like they really did a randomized survey of the world. And 76 % of those youth felt their future was frightening.

That's modern trauma to me. Like the kids are not all right. It's why I joined TikTok. Like people recognize that ⁓ these times are different.

Ailey Jolie (05:32)

I would love to maybe pull this a little bit apart a little bit more. One thing that I really love about the field of somatic embodiment is this understanding that the unconscious lives in our fashion and our body and our brain only takes in 0.0001 % of what's around us, our body takes in the rest. And so when we speak of modern trauma or

the access to witness human suffering. So I think we all felt it in a different way before, but now we can really access it and witness it. I would love to hear from you how you believe or perceive that impacts the relationship we have with our body. Because I do perceive that to be, is what we call it vicarious trauma, re-traumatization.

you know, some spaces will be like, that's taking extending too far. But it's like, the reality is that we are inundated with images of horrific pain all of the time. And that is unique.

Christine Gibson (06:35)

Yeah. ⁓

I think that the realm of somatic psychology is like a newborn. So those of us who have an understanding of it have a completely different paradigm around the mind-body connection. And as a physician, this really spoke to me. It's one of the reasons why I focus on somatic healing in the Modern Trauma Toolkit. And it's what I find the most efficacious because you can't...

think or talk your way out of a traumatic response because it is stuck in the body. ⁓ So this is something that the pioneers like Bessel van der Coke and Gabor Mate helped us understand. And then since then, somatic practitioners have developed more and more novel ways of shifting that response. So I feel like that's very hopeful. I don't think it has to be stuck and that's why I think it's worth talking about. But ⁓ what gets stuck

is these associations in your amygdala. So when you have been through something that your mind has perceived as dangerous or traumatic, it wants to remind you about that so that you don't get stuck in it again. So it stores the associations, the context, the sensations that you have in your body and the emotions that happened at the time of the event are stored in the amygdala.

as triggers to remind you. So it's this protective and adaptive function of the body. And I think that's one of the most important things that help develop self-compassion and avoid shame is to remind people that this is there to protect you. This isn't something wrong with you, but it's happening to more and more of us and it's getting stuck. So when your amygdala are saying, hmm, something's dangerous and getting constantly triggered by these exposures that keep happening,

it gets us stuck in either fight and flight or an activated body response or freeze, which is an underactive body response. And we're seeing a lot of both of those in the world right now. One of those things that you see on social media is the people that are saying ⁓ like really awful things to each other. And they are stuck in fight and flight. Like they're angry, they're passionate, they are fearful and they're enacting it in those ways.

⁓ And then you see a lot of folks stuck in freeze, like they're the ones that aren't getting out of bed, they're doom scrolling and kind of dissociating in that way. So ⁓ these are adaptive coping responses, but they don't really let you do the thing that you want to do in response to these events.

Ailey Jolie (09:22)

How do you feel like the conversation of modern trauma can start to kind of push people or gently guide people out of the underactive or the overactive nervous system state?

Christine Gibson (09:38)

So I think our understanding of trauma right now has really shifted.

I think it's why there's this backlash on the so-called overuse of the term. If we think of trauma as something that is sending a message ⁓ as a reminder that either the world isn't safe, which is what generally happens after we're exposed to these external traumas, like the climate emergency, an ongoing pandemic that people are comfortable.

ignoring or even creating. Like with a lot of what's happening with ⁓ vaccines in the United States, you know, the measles outbreak could feel really scary to parents when they don't feel like they have the support of these structures and systems that have always been in place. ⁓ Climate change, these divisive politics, like these external things that we are exposed to

create this message that the world isn't safe. And then if you add developmental or childhood trauma where our attachment wasn't safe enough that we believe that there's something wrong with us. So I am not deserving, I'm not good enough, and you might have a core of shame. So I think there's many different kinds of traumatic exposure and people are sometimes getting

culmination of that. So one of the things that I didn't study in medical school because it just simply wasn't published yet was the adverse childhood experiences research. And one of the things that we're now more aware of just in those last 25 years is how that lack of psychological safety when we're growing up.

either through abuse or neglect or these events that happen in the family can lock in a belief about yourself and about the world that is so pervasive it colors everything else. And it creates not just mental health syndromes, which people will then classifying call all kinds of disease, but it also causes physical health and social health outcomes. So people are more likely to be

pregnant young, more likely to use substances ⁓ and more likely to die very early. So if you have a number of adverse childhood experiences, it means that your life expectancy is shorter. this is a public health marker. So I'm constantly telling folks like ⁓ through the ways that we can shift trauma out of the body now and

I'll call it de-potentiate the amygdala, but you're basically erasing and replacing those associations through processing work. This is not your story. So it really makes me sad that people will look up the ACE study if somebody texts their ACE score and they're like, my gosh, it's an eight out of 10 and they look up what the possible consequences are. It's not your story. If you're actually doing the work, if you're shifting these responses away from your amygdala,

it doesn't necessarily mean that you have this lower life expectancy and you're locked into all these mental health outcomes. But because the DSM or like the big Bible of psychiatry didn't talk about complex trauma, you have to try to stick people into like personality disorders when oftentimes it is a traumatic response that's stuck. ⁓ So I just don't think the field of medicine is really helping.

Ailey Jolie (13:35)

You said something interesting that I would like to go back to because you've named it twice now, the environmental environment that we're all in, the climate crisis, which I don't think medicine also has a great job of acknowledging. But something as a psychologist that I often find challenging with my clients is anchoring in a felt sense of safety when our world is inherently.

unsafe in ways that the American dream is not true. We don't have complete control of our destiny and we can kind of go in that existential kind of place. But there is this type of reckoning that has to happen of even though the world is unsafe, can I still find safety inside myself? And I would love to hear from your perspective and your wisdom as a physician.

What is that process like? What are maybe some of the areas of the brain? You've named the amygdala, but I'm also thinking of our interceptive awareness and our prefrontal cortex and some of these other areas that maybe don't get spoken about as much when we think of creating safety in an inherently unsafe world. Because we're not in control of it. Never will be.

Christine Gibson (14:52)

Yeah,

no, it's such an important conversation. And I think it's one that ⁓ I'm developing an understanding of it. So this is kind of my snapshot in time around it. But let's start with interoceptive awareness. So ⁓ for many of us, all emotions are made as perceptions in the brain.

of signals that are coming up from the body. So this is really the role of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is meant to be afferent fibers. So 80 % of the vagus nerve signals are telling your brain what your body is up to. And that is part of the process of interoception, which is an awareness of those internal body messages. And what ends up happening when your amygdala has decided that those signals are dangerous or something within

external environment is dangerous. And so those interoceptive signals could be saying, hey, my heart rate is speeding up or do you notice that you're sweating? And it's telling your brain what your body is up to, but it's also telling your brain, this is what I'm experiencing with my senses. This is what I'm seeing and hearing and touching. And those signals are telling me through social media, through the smell in the air. So for like up until

I think Sunday, we had the strongest smell of like campfire smoke as soon as we step outside ⁓ where I live. And I know this was even true in Toronto, ⁓ which didn't usually get exposed to that. I was there the weekend before and the air was so thick that the air quality index was at like a plus 10. So it was beyond like the level that it's safe to be outdoors.

I would be seeing people cycling and rollerblading. What's happening is you are breathing ash and you have an interoceptive awareness of it, but what your amygdala has done instead of turning the volume up and saying, danger, danger, it's turned the volume down. You've actually disconnected from your sensory awareness. This is the two different responses. Your amygdala can amplify those signals

and scream at you, you're in danger, why aren't you doing something? And then you get really locked into fight and flight, or your amygdala can turn the volume down and be like, ⁓ it's fine, everything's fine. And then we end up ignoring the crisis. So both of those things are happening and part of it is when your amygdala is activated, it actually disconnects

the neural network towards the prefrontal cortex, which is where your brain does its thinking. So we can't really rationalize out of what the amygdala has decided you're going to do. We can't think our way out of it. And this will bring us back full circle to why I'm such a huge fan of somatic strategies. So how can we, A, change the input through the vagus nerve and lower the volume dial on the messages themselves? How can we change the

input from the vagus nerve and actually lower our heart rate through biofeedback and a lot of these neurofeedback type modalities. How can we change the input in terms of that perception in the brain of those pathways? And part of it is bringing the subconscious into conscious awareness. So one of the first steps in a lot of somatic practices is actually noticing

and grounding. So when you ask the question, how can we stay safe? Actually, this is funny. This is the title of my last TED Talk. How do we stay safe when the world is on fire? This is the crux of it. how can we find, ⁓ Meg Wheatley calls it an island of sanity. Other people talk about staying in the eye of the storm, but how can we find that space of safety within ourselves? And that's always accessible. So this is what I feel like.

so many of us are teaching, I mean, not just our clients or patients, but like children that were exposed to ⁓ people like teachers or doctors. mean, the people who, the firefighters of the world, the people who are constantly putting out these amygdala responses, ⁓ which I mean, is anyone dealing with the public right now or anyone in the middle of a protest march?

You're getting so much sensory input to your amygdala. How can you create your body as one of those islands of sanity? There's nothing more important right now.

Ailey Jolie (19:49)

Are there things that come to your mind as you're speaking about like calming the amygdala or gaining an awareness of the amygdala and the felt sense of that? Some things that go through my mind is I know that there's like a lot of tech devices that stimulate the vagus nerve or like put sensory input through or humming or if you've done a Peter Levine training, he tells everyone to make the sound, voo. Are there any things like that that come to your mind that can maybe calm that amygdala or are

pull us a little bit more into presence when we start to either shut down or start to move really quickly in our mind.

Christine Gibson (20:26)

The answer is yes, because it's all of that. And what I think is really important is to develop that interoceptive awareness. Like what is the signal pathway for me? And then figuring out which is turning the volume dial down or sometimes up for my nervous system. So Deb Dana calls this befriending the nervous system, but part of it is like, how can I learn to notice what those signal pathways are for me?

my vagus nerve is sending dangerous signals, when my brain is perceiving them in an amplified way, what's that like for me? So, so much of this is that first phase of Judith Herman's work around trauma processing. She calls it establishing safety. So, I talk about noticing, shifting, and resourcing. So, the noticing is just like, what does that feel like for me? How can I get those early signals that my nervous system is overactive or underactive?

and just learning what those early signals are in your nervous system. And then shifting is any and all of what you're describing. And so that's why on the Modern Trauma Toolkit, the tagline is personalize your pathway to post-traumatic growth because it's not the same for all of us. So for some folks, it's gonna be creating a playlist and humming along to it. So you're extending your exhale, which is enhancing your parasympathetic or your calm nervous system tone.

For other people, it might be soothing self-touch. So a gentle brushing across the palm of the hand or the cheeks and the forehead. I had learned the heavening technique. So I have a whole chapter on that. And I was teaching that on TikTok for the first couple of years I was joining. I was just like, let's do a heavening practice. And I would just teach my TikTok followers, how do we calm the body down? And some people would be like, well, yeah, that didn't work for me.

great, let's try something else. And this is why we all need this toolkit. ⁓ Hence naming it the Modern Trauma Toolkit is because every toolkit is going to be different. And even for some people, like your toolkit might be different depending on that state of activation. So if you are really, really over-activated, you might not have access to guided imagery because your brain is just spiraling and you might have to focus on something just like ⁓ a grounding technique.

rocking your feet or trying to change your breath, something that's not going to require any thinking at all because your neocortex, the outer layer that thinks, isn't available to you in the least. And so part of that noticing is developing an awareness and knowing, okay, this is the strategy that I can use right now in this moment. ⁓ And it's never going to be perfect.

Ailey Jolie (22:56)

you

This is a larger question, but do you have any ideas or speculation as to why that kind of personalized approach or more nuanced approach has evaded the conversation? And my mind goes just to the reality that most of the big figures in somatics or trauma are white heterosexual men. We don't have a lot of anything else kind of out there speaking. There's a few that come to mind, but they definitely don't have.

the platform as those people. I also just think of capitalism and everyone likes a prescription. You know, I do X, Y, Z, I'll be fine, great, you know, keep moving forward. But I would love to hear from you around what it was like for you to write something that is really personalized and is really nuanced, what that process was like and how it was also received.

Christine Gibson (23:56)

Yeah.

Without naming names, I did create the book as a response to the conversation that had been having. And I want to acknowledge that I'm on the shoulders of these pioneers in trauma that did give a really good description of what trauma is. And I wanted to continue the conversation in a way that was really nurturing and embodying what that response should feel like. So my...

⁓ approach to it is what I would hope is a more embodied... ⁓

form of expression. So it's not just the words that I say in the book or on a TikTok. It's the intention and awareness of how all of it's landing semantically. So if I make a TikTok and I just notice my cadence slowed down as I'm developing an awareness, when I make a TikTok or when I listen to your voice, you have a very prosodic voice.

when I recorded my audio book for the Modern Trauma Toolkit. mean, A, funnest experience ever, but B, so much of my own awareness was if I can say these words with a melodic and soft and nourishing voice, they will land differently in your nervous system. So this is what I call an embodied awareness. And I don't think that the giants of trauma who are now 80 year old white men,

that sense of embodiment. They would say or write things that were very triggering without noticing how that could affect the people who are more likely to read it. And then they would offer a solution that was a one-stop. So if you do yoga, if you move your body in this way, if you can do sequencing, if you access the point of traumatic foundational belief,

This is your pathway. And for me, you can create a greater sense of agency or your ability to control the situation, which trauma takes away from you. If you can explore that personalized pathway, I'm going to learn this today and see how it lands. And today this is where I'm at and I'm developing an awareness of my own nervous system. And this allows me to,

create my own toolkit where I have, and I don't want to say control, but like I'm in dialogue with my own mind and body. And that's really different than something prescriptive. And I think the opposite of trauma isn't feeling good all the time or safe all the time. It's having flexibility. And so if you try to say, this is the one path, you've actually created something that's also inflexible. And for me, it's that

agency and ability to choose. So if you need to access fight and flight, you need to access fight and flight. Like I don't want to take away any pathways for you. I just want to open up new ones. And I think that that's really a different approach, but it takes away the shame because you understand that what your brain is already doing is adaptive and protective. So I want to remind you in a self-compassionate

This is where I like the IFS framing of those eight C's of the self. If you can develop that clear and compassionate and courageous approach to it, then you are more likely to avoid the shaming responses and to find pathways that are flexible. ⁓ And they might look different on a given day.

Ailey Jolie (28:18)

One thing that really stood out to me while you were speaking is you kind of mentioned the poetic aspect, which is something I'm so passionate about because the link between creativity and resilience and trauma is so well known. and even the healing from trauma process in air quotes is one that is going to inherently has to be creative.

and has to be unique and personalized because you are your own little being here with your own lived experiences and no one is exactly gonna know what happened and your nervous system is gonna adapt in all these ways. And so to be a practitioner in this space also means being willing to be creative and playful and experimental while in the hardest, heaviest stuff. And I would love to hear from you again.

Christine Gibson (28:49)

So.

Ailey Jolie (29:16)

why you feel like that part of the discourse hasn't made it in because when I did my master's certificate at Harvard in global mental health trauma recovery, we talked about play. We talked about creativity. It's like why I went and trained as a sex therapist, because I was like, what? Like I have no vitality skills in my toolbox and I'm not a very vital person. I must go. But even though was in like these little classrooms at Harvard,

It's not really in the discourse by kind of the big trauma figures in any significant way or in a way that my clients have actually received it. And I'm not the one doing that psycho education between the links. So I would love to hear a little bit more about that link because we've planted some seeds on it.

Christine Gibson (30:05)

love this conversation. I love your background around this. ⁓ I have a whole chapter around like creativity in the modern trauma toolkit because there's so many sensory ways that we can access it. So people have talked about narrative therapy where you use storytelling. When I think of this, it's ancient knowledge. There isn't a lineage of any culture in the world that doesn't use

storytelling and allegory and imagery and metaphor to share ⁓ wisdom and to share ways to respond in a good way. So I mean, I studied ancient ways of knowing like Ayurvedic practice and Qigong. ⁓ And so much of what I learned is that we've always moved the body. We've always sung together.

or chanted together. We have always been creative beings. We've always been storytellers. we, like ⁓ there's so many cultures around the world where a community will dance in a circle. These practices have existed because they heal trauma. There is something about a collective being where we can actually get like resonant heartbeats and nervous systems. We co-regulate.

in community. ⁓ And we've lost so many opportunities to do that because we are doom scrolling on our individual phones. So these ancient practices that have always been deeply healing in all of our lineages for so long have always involved creativity. And I think that to reconnect to and again personalizing your pathway, like I'm not going to say to everybody, ⁓ you have to do

this drawing of a river of life exercise and get an embodied understanding of the obstacles and the, ⁓ you know, the beauty that have been on your path, because not everyone's going to pick up some Sharpies or some crayons and go for that. But some might. ⁓ I do appreciate how Deb Dana like in her understanding of polyvagal theory, she has so many different practices and some of them do include ⁓

creative expression. I think creative expression allows us to heal in ways that aren't just using our rational brain. ⁓ One of the many random things I studied was social innovation. So it's like, how do we change systems ⁓ so that the systems aren't continuing to harm? And

So the course itself was super interesting. were living in Banff in the mountains. It was just joyful and the group was incredible. But one of the things that they said to us in the very first day is, would you play a one string guitar? And what the question was asking is, why do we keep pulling on the string of rationality and cognitive skills and ways of learning when we have all these other things available to us, which includes creativity? It includes

ancestral work and metaphor. It includes interacting with nature. So nature teaches us so many vital lessons, both through like the fractals of what's happening in the environment, but also our ability to reconnect to land and to water and to air, which is us. I mean, this is what makes up the human body and we are already so interconnected. And if we

acknowledge that connection we would not be doing to the earth what we're doing to her. ⁓ So like yeah I can't off the top of my head think of the six ways but one of them is definitely somatic and the lessons learned through and between bodies. So when I mentioned co-regulation what do we learn about the nervous systems around us and for some folks who've been exposed to tremendous amounts of trauma their awareness of that through

empathic abilities is so much more heightened and it's hard for them to be in the world because other folks are dysregulated, they're not okay and their body knows it. So part of the signals is like I don't want you to not be an empath but I don't want you to walk into the room and experience all the suffering that's there. So how do we adjust the flow of information so that you feel like you can handle it again? So that tends to be a somatic practice too but can it be done through

creativity. mean, this is why people are ⁓ really vibing with like ASMR or like these really soft and soothing sounds. And because they're like, yeah, that relaxes my nervous system. Like, I'm purring like a little kitten in here. Great, that that's working for you. So if this is the kind of thing that is relaxing your nervous system, let's lean in. ⁓ And yeah, for lots of folks. ⁓

Ailey Jolie (35:04)

you

Christine Gibson (35:17)

and you mentioned sexuality too. I just want to touch on Adrienne Marie Brown. Like I know she's not trained as a psychologist, but when I ⁓ have read her books about emergent ⁓ emergence or pleasure activism, like that to me is an important part of psychology. ⁓ How can we show up in a way where we can be playful and we are sharing food together?

or we are dancing together during the protest, during the ways that we are trying to change systems. ⁓ That can be joyful and pleasurable and it should be because otherwise the new system that we create is created through our fight and flight response. ⁓ So yeah, I think of that question as not just like, how do we show up as individual selves, but how do we change the systems?

to ways that are more generative.

Ailey Jolie (36:17)

Absolutely. There's one specific modality that I'm trained in and it's very prescriptive, very dogmatic. This is what you do. This is when you give the intervention around the eye contact and then you name the breath and then you name the shaking and it's like you have to do it exactly to the thing or else you don't pass. Except for it doesn't matter what's going on with the client.

And I've always found that just it didn't fit for me. So ultimately I pulled out of just finishing off my certification, but it's always stood out to me because it felt like, what am I actually teaching that nervous system or guiding that nervous system on the other side to experience? What I'm really leading them into is a deeper dogmatic embodied place, which is rigid in one way and kind of like that little guitar string. And I very much resonate with you saying like,

it's not only what the client then comes in with, it's in like what moves forward from there. Then it's like embodiment is known as this dogmatic thing that goes through the head in this really kind of precise way that doesn't have attunement or honoring of the inter-corporeal space between bodies and all of those pieces get missed out. I would love to circle us back to where we started, because there's some parallels between...

kind of the prescriptive semantics that I just named and some of the dialogue that's going on. I would love to hear from you just a little bit why you do or do not agree with some of the discourse around like what is trauma and like the fighting over that clinicians and physicians have. And then we'll talk a little bit about culture and everything being swept up into the trauma.

category and the pros and cons of that. But we'll start with clinicians first.

Christine Gibson (38:11)

interesting. have started to recognize because I think I've studied like probably 20 different modalities, mostly somatic around the healing of trauma and there's so many core components to them and they actually share these like really foundational steps but then they all claim that they are the only pathway. ⁓ So I'm kind of developing a protocol that is super inherently flexible.

Ailey Jolie (38:31)

I know.

Christine Gibson (38:38)

because that's what I think is the missing component from all the things that are well established is your ability to discern and decide. So it's not just saying this is the one pathway. It's almost like a choose your own adventure. So it can be playful and it can be really, really personalized and every single step of the way you're touching into that interoceptive awareness, well, what's happening for me?

Is this something that is helping my nervous system go in the direction that I prefer? Am I starting to shift these foundational beliefs using this modality today? Here's the other choice in your adventure. there are foundational parts of therapy that I think, especially for trauma processing, where you are changing those associations in the amygdala.

there's more than one pathway towards it. like you, like the very first modality I learned was accelerated resolution therapy. And it is literally a script. Like it's, I think it's 16 page script where you have to say the words. And I was just speaking at their international conference a couple of months ago and Lainey Rosenzweig actually went over my slide deck. She made me go over the presentation two or three times with her before she would approve it for her audience. And

I get it. Like if you've branded something and you've created something, you want it to be what it is. And also I believe that even though this modality is super effective and I mean, I can use it in the context of refugees. I can use it in the context of childhood developmental trauma. There is something to be said for flexibility and a personalization of that path.

So I was really lucky that I did the enhanced and advanced trainings because then they say to you, oh, you can actually adjust the protocol now. I was like, oh, phew, I want to do this thing with it and I'm not going to keep this component in. I can't use this verbiage because like, for example, she uses the word snapshot. And I was like,

If I'm a refugee, I don't know what that is, but if I say screenshot and you're just taking a photo with your phone, you're probably gonna understand what a screenshot is. So I'm just gonna change the language in a way that makes sense. And if I'm dealing with a refugee who's never owned a smartphone and never seen a YouTube video, then I'm going to use something very different. I'm gonna say, do you have a song in your culture where you talk about

something that is a part of a childhood ritual and I'll tap into something deeper or I might tap into food. This is a really common one. I worked with a group of Yazidi who all of the women were illiterate and enumerate so I couldn't ask them where they were at from a scale of zero to ten because they didn't understand numbers. So my concepts and all of these rigid protocols threw out the window.

⁓ But what they loved was watching wedding videos because it was their culture, dancing, ⁓ dressed in these beautiful, ornate ⁓ embroidered gowns, laughing together and sharing a meal. And these women had grown up in longhouses where all of them women would cook together. And so a wedding was representative of safety for them.

and I would actually do their trauma healing through the idea of a wedding video. Is that a protocol? Heck no, but that's what works for them. And so when I learned, what are you watching on Facebook? We are all watching wedding videos. Great. Let's tap into this sense of safety that that creates for you and why. And so we would lean into the embroidery. We would lean into these images of laughter. We would lean into the food.

And we would do so much description of their cultural foods that just changes that interoceptive awareness because all of a sudden they're tasting, the texture is in their mouth, the smells are in the room with them, and that is where safety came from. So, you know, that's just kind of an example of what a flexible pathway looks like, but ⁓ everyone has access to that. And we can tap into it through so many different

strings on the guitar.

Ailey Jolie (43:17)

Okay.

I bring us back. One of the things that I heard that kind of brings us into the conversation of trauma and like, how do we define it is this branding of things. And when we brand it and kind of put it in that category, we lose some of the flexibility and the creativity that you just spoke of because ultimately, at least in my experience, a lot of them times we are just saying the exact same thing in different words, but someone has a name on it. And so there's

Christine Gibson (43:49)

Yeah.

Ailey Jolie (43:49)

capitalist gain for it being this way and trauma being defined this way and not that way because then my protocol heals or treats that but it doesn't mine does it for this definition or languaging. I would also love to touch on what you see with trauma being more liberally used or more widely used in common culture if that's something that for you is

like you really support it because you feel like it's been underused or have you seen clients who've been harmed by that because that's a whole other dialogue that's happening right now.

Christine Gibson (44:30)

And it's interesting because it's part of this, I'll just say the word conservative backlash against woke culture. So they don't want the snowflakes who are willing to acknowledge and ascribe trauma as affecting our culture. ⁓ like even just a sign, even the word snowflake did something in my body when I said it out loud. ⁓ There's no truth to it. It's a person who is more

attuned to the field, like to what is happening in modern discourse. So ⁓ they, the people who are benefiting from systems of harm in ongoing colonial extractive culture and what is harming us as a living entity connected with the earth. So I don't want to say humanity, I want to say living systems.

The ones that are continuing to impose harm and benefiting individually from that harm don't want us to heal because we would heal the system. ⁓ It's not just the human body that is experiencing these harms. It is the greater field. It is the water. It is the air. It is the animals. It is us as an animal. Like when I break down how trauma is landing in our body, it's us as a mammal.

because that fight and flight response also exists in a bear and a horse and a dog. like we are just really complex mammals with more cognitive capacity and trauma happens in the same way in our body. So when I mentioned that soothing touch, that is something that I would do with my dog. When he is upset, I will pet him gently and talk to him in a soothing way.

And sometimes our little human bodies need something very similar. modern trauma, the backlash, I think, is the system that is causing trauma to the individual and the collective that is trying to hold on to the status quo that is harming in a greater and greater way because this inequity is worsening and the harm that it's imposing on those who are

And I'm going to use the word vulnerable knowing that these marginalized communities and identities are placed at risk. So like for me as a queer person, I have these intersectional identities where many of them are privileged because I'm a physician and an author and I have a platform. And yet there are some things that place me in a marginalized path too. Like I live in a really conservative province in Alberta where they are

⁓ attacking the rights of women and some of our legal rights around ⁓ agency over our body. And I am a physician who supports those pathways. For example, I'm involved in medically assisted death and these can place me in a vulnerable position too. So just an awareness that all of us are vulnerable because we're in these frail bodies that require water and air and physical safety and safe foods.

⁓ And collectively, we are so strong. And I think that's, I mean, you're in the United States, right? So, you're in the UK. Sorry. ⁓ I should have remembered that. But so interestingly, I was at this, ⁓ I'll connect this to the UK right now, because I was at a book reading from Robert McFarlane, and he just wrote a book called Is the River Alive?

Ailey Jolie (48:04)

in the UK.

you

Christine Gibson (48:23)

And

it's funny, I wanted to bring this up because this is really what it comes down to. He was visiting four different ⁓ continents, exploring rivers that are at risk and connecting the community that is fighting for the life of the river. So one of those communities was Cambridge, where he's from, but he was visiting Ecuador, Northern Canada and ⁓ India. And what he was noticing is that

the river isn't dead, it's a part of the system that is constantly renewing and emerging. And part of that is happening with community. And so one of his final messages is something that, like, I mean, I teared up when he said it. He said, despair is a privilege. ⁓ Hope is the dream that we all share. And so for the people who don't have fresh water,

they can't despair and just throw their arms up because their physical body needs that. And I think that's the same with trauma. Like we're recognizing that we need to create this island of sanity and this sense of embodied safety within ourselves, just like we need water. And so part of what I do in the world is I try to get ⁓ these skills and these possible pathways in front of as many people as possible. through TikTok,

Ailey Jolie (49:35)

Hmm.

Christine Gibson (49:48)

creating some online training programs. I mean, I've given away, I think about 500 copies of my book so far, because I'll give them to like Indigenous reserves. I just think the more of us that are having this conversation on as many continents as possible are spreading the word that hope is our collective dream. You're not alone in this, and we're all dreaming this together, and we're doing it in different ways. ⁓

like the reason I mentioned Americans is because they showed up in marches together. They moved their bodies. ⁓ So they, and they locked in steps. So they formed communities and they formed joyful communities. Their signs were funny. There was playfulness, there was music and they were marching. So this is a part of an enlivened practice that we can experience.

a new way of addressing modern trauma. So many communities around the world are dreaming what that looks like.

Ailey Jolie (50:55)

I think I'll leave it there for today with the message of hope and creating the dream. You've named a few ways that people can find you. You're on TikTok. You have a platform. You have a book. There's online courses coming up. Is there anything else in the next few months that the listener could get more of you by participating in?

Christine Gibson (51:18)

can't think of a lot that's public facing. ⁓ I love to speak so if people are wanting me to speak about collective trauma or climate or ⁓ any of these tools and I love to teach the tools to an audience of folks so that's one thing that I've kept quite open. ⁓ What I'm actually working on is fiction right now so I'm just working on a book that is describing the historical trauma that my Ukrainian ancestors went through.

And then it's actually Clifi or climate fiction where I've created a protagonist that's in the future and I'm creating a reality that I want. I ⁓ think I'll just leave with encouraging people to tap into their creative outlet, whether it's moving their body with Tai Chi, whether it's like a pleasure practice, like cooking or ways that we can be together that's just

bringing joy, you're nurturing your own sense of safety. So ⁓ whatever that looks like for you, lean in.