You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dr. James Gordon is a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, former researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, and a clinical professor of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown Medical School. He’s also the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a prolific writer on trauma. This is because he’s spent the last several decades traveling the globe and healing population-wide psychological trauma. He and 130 international faculty have brought this program to populations as diverse as refugees from wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa; firefighters and U.S. military personnel and their families; student/parent/teacher school shooting survivors; and more.
I met Jim many years ago, and he’s become a constant resource for me in my own life and work, particularly because he packages so many of the exercises that work in global groups into his book Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing. We talk about some of those exercises today—soft belly breathing, shaking and dancing, drawing—along with why it’s so important to address and complete the trauma cycle in areas of crisis. This is the first part of a four-part series, and James does an excellent job of setting the stage.
MORE FROM JAMES GORDON, M.D.:
Follow Jim on Instagram
Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”
Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”
Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”
Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”
Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Alright, so you've been alive for longer than I have, as we've just discussed. I know people won't believe that, but it's true. But you've seen a lot in the course of your life. Has your entire medical career been focused on cultural trauma and how it shows up in the body? I actually don't know or did you sort of take a turn into this? I know you've been doing it for decades and decades and decades.