How to Heal from Collective Trauma | with Thomas Hübl

Michael: Thomas, my friend, I've been very excited about having you on the show. Over the course of the years, you, by proxy, have been a mentor of mine in ways that have helped me not only in my own healing journey, but in coaching the thousands of people that I've had the privilege and honor of coaching through this traumatic healing journey. So first and foremost, I just want to say with gratitude, thank you for being here. You played a big role in my life. And also for you, I would love to know as we get into the conversation and look at the story and the journey of your experience, if you were to define your childhood in one word, what word would that be?

Thomas: I would say sensitive.

Michael: What does that mean?

Thomas: Yeah, I felt that as a boy, I was, I think a quality that helps me now, like I could turn into a blessing that I perceive a lot, that I feel a lot, that I can apply in my work with drama. Sometimes felt either a bit too much overloaded or that I felt very sensitive, but I wasn't always getting the responses to feel grounded and safe in it. So I think that's definitely one word I would choose, which changed over the years, obviously, but I always felt like I'm very perceptive and I needed sometimes to protect myself in certain situations.

Michael: Would you consider that to be empathetic or have that feeling of being an empath involved with that?

Thomas: Yeah, that was definitely I think looking back with what I know today about life, I would definitely say that's true, that I was very empathetic, but that I also had a high level of sensitivity around things. And sometimes it's, okay, I think it has been interpreted as don't be so sensitive, get over it, get done with it. And so, I think that was definitely part of my experience at that time.

Michael: Myself being a highly sensitive person, one of the things that I did growing up was I would stuff it down because all you hear is just like what you just mentioned, don't be sensitive, especially if you're a boy, man up, don't cry, whatever those things are. And over the years, I've put a lot of deep thought into this because I've been thinking to myself, If you really were to narrow down what trauma is, and this is interesting because I had the same conversation with Dr. Gabor Mate, Caroline Leaf, a few other experts like yourself. And what I've come to realize, and this is just my interpretation of it, is I feel like the impacts of the traumatic experiences of our past, it's not the cuts and the burns and the scars and that physical pain, but more so like the theft of identity. And in your journey being such a sensitive person, perceptive to reality and what's happening, having these empathic experiences, would you feel like it holds true that part of you was taken because you weren't able to leverage that?

Thomas: Yeah. Or certainly I became more introvert at that time. And then I, that was my way to, I don't know, stabilize myself or balance myself. And so like my participation in the world, that's definitely the part that got reduced through it. So, we could say it with other words was taken, but I think I pulled in at that time a bit to protect myself. And so that that didn't allow me to fully participate with my full aliveness in the social context.

Michael: What do you think children are protecting themselves from?

Thomas: Yeah. I think, given when I come back to what I know today is that I somehow feel that Every defense mechanism is a way to stabilize something in ourselves to tune down or turn down the volume of the overwhelm in order for us to be able to stay true to the next levels of development. Because If we are flooded or if our internal system gets too stressed out or too overloaded, it's like when you, when there's a lake and there's too much movement on the water surface and you look into the lake, you can't see yourself anymore, your reflection. But if it's karma, you see yourself. So, when the internal equilibrium or homeostasis gets too disturbed, we need to put defense mechanisms in place for us to stay true, to keep our autonomy and our authenticity intact inside. And of course the stronger is the traumatic impact and the earlier is the traumatic impact the more these defense mechanisms are reducing. Into a small radius. So they, they reduce the internal authenticity into a very small protected space, because that's what this young system needs to do. And often when we are grownups, we self-pathologize that process and say, I can't feel my body. I can't do this. I can't be decisive, I can't be open. But in fact, we could also say, I learned to pull out of my body. It's not that I cannot feel my body, I can also say I could shut down my body. And that's actually an intelligent action for somebody that is overwhelmed. So, a lot of time with our clients, I think we need to reframe the process so that we can come in touch with that process and see it actually as intelligent in that moment in that given ecosystem.

Michael: I want to dive into this a little bit deeper and delineate some of this into a way that I think could be really practical for people. One of the things that I appreciate about you is your expertise and your ability to break these very complex things down into something palatable. And so, where I want to start here is. Kind of looking at this from a definition standpoint. What is trauma?

Thomas: Yeah, trauma is the inner response to a strongly overwhelming situation. Because many people say that trauma is the situation, and I would say no. The classical view on trauma says the trauma is the response that happens in our bodies, nervous systems, whatever, in response to a strongly overwhelming situation. And what that is that I believe a process that is, And that's why we have a very intelligent that has been formed over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years in our nervous systems is able to deal with that strong overwhelm in multiple ways. And there are two main reasons. One is that every time there's a strongly adverse situation, there's a high level of escalated stress that leads to high fight flight or freeze mechanisms. And the second part is then the nervous system can shut down the overwhelm. So, there's something very noisy and suddenly you push the mute button. And when you shut down a part and compartmentalize the overwhelm. In a box and shut it down in the unconscious, you can survive better. You can still act, you can do something in that adverse moment that you couldn't do with all that noise. And but what happens is in the moment that's dissociated and shut down is like we have a window with a crack. So, from that moment on, when something just comes a little bit closer to touch that place, we get really triggered. And we see the world not anymore as a, as an interdependent whole, but we feel separate. And these are also the trauma symptoms. You have high escalation of stress, trigger hyperactivation, you have hypo, you feel numb, you feel distant, you feel disengaged and indifferent, and you feel separate. And then it's me and them, it's us and them. It's like the whole story of separation that is in a way the reenactment of the next cycle of trauma already is built into that. And so that's, let's say it's a bit more complex than what I can say in the short words, but that would be for me a description of the trauma response and maybe the symptoms that many of us can identify in ourselves that either we are very stressed or we've become distant and a bit checked out indifferent has nothing to do with me.

Michael: What's so interesting about that is because it does become this autonomic response that becomes for many of us are emotional home. You see, high performers who are constantly on edge. And one of the things I used to say, having now been an entrepreneur for a very long time and going through my own healing journey, honestly, was I thrive in chaos and then Thomas, one day I was sitting back and I was like, that is the dumbest shit imaginable. Why would you want to thrive in the place of which you suffer the most? And for me, it's so much of the journey. Has been getting into this place of restoring homeostasis, but what's so fascinating about it. Is in my own personal journey, I'm now heading into 14 years of doing the work, like really intentionally showing up every day. And it is still like a day in, day out journey, and one of the things that I teach my clients all the time is, if you sign on the dotted line, where you're like, I'm going to Hill, this is a rest of your life game. And one of the things that I want to try to do is give people permission to accept that reality. And I'm wondering I think about acknowledgement around the experiences that we've had and looking at our life in the truth, not in the reality we wish existed, but in the truth of the reality that we're in. I find that to be the jump off point, that acknowledgement for creating change to going down the path. If I'm sitting here, I'm listening, I'm going through this. I'm like, I know some traumatic things have happened to me. Where do I begin my process? What does that look like? What is like the most practical thing I can do in this moment?

Thomas: First of all, I love the wider framing. I love that you demystify the healing process. And you say, this is a journey for the rest of our lives, we don't know. The question is how long is not relevant because how long actually says that it's hard for me here. That's why I want to project myself into the future of when it's good. When, in fact, all that grows is my, every time something heals, of course, my capacity to be in a world that is still traumatizing to a certain extent. It's not that suddenly all the world is going to be great because I'm healed. I will have a much higher capacity to be, stay related to that world, to find new solutions, to be innovative, to maybe create healing around myself. But it, it increases my capacity to be more grounded in the world and not more checked out, not more in a kind of a paradise seeking reality, but more grounded in dealing with the world that we have. And I think that's also where our efforts need to be. That's where our impact and purpose needs to come. And all the healing that I develop in myself is also how I become the remedy. That's the remedy that I become. So, post traumatic growth is also what I heal in myself will serve others. They can learn from my nervous system that it's possible. And that's amazing. So, thank you for. Because there are many, oh, self-help and you do it fast and it's fast and it's, no it's the process. It takes the time that it takes. And I think we need to be realistic about that. And that's also one thing we can do is we can say yes, because trauma, when we are on the trauma healing path, the reason why we get there most of the time is because we are suffering from something. And I think coming back to your question, one element is to see, okay, there are multiple great friends that we can gather around us that can help us on the journey. One is a learning practice and practices and techniques to self-regulate differently and to train our nervous system to change its inner state. So, there are many self-regulation techniques and ways to do that, that we can acquire, we can read books, we can do trainings, we can do that. The second thing is, and my breath is a very important aspect of regulating my nervous system. So I, there's something that is very close. There's a simple remedy that I can train and work within myself and my body, my embodiment. I can find the resources that help me like nature, music, friends, meditation, all kinds of things that helped me to resource myself. So, I can learn about that, but. I think it's very important to know that. A lot of trauma has been inflicted through inappropriate relationships, and that's why a lot of healing of trauma happens in appropriate relationships, in relationships that have an expertise to hold us. They go through with us through the bottlenecks of our development when it's really painful that somebody is there that we can trust, somebody that we feel safe with, or we develop the safety over time. And I think finding the right guides and maybe these are different guides at different times of our process that can help us to go through the journey. That's amazing. Also community. community and having a community where we can also what you create with your podcast to create or with your work you create a community and that community is an asset like it's we are together in this we are learning something collectively. We are developing collective competencies that are maybe not like very highly trained trauma therapists, but we learn something collectively and we can be with each other in certain moments. So, the individual, the relational, the collective, and also the spiritual. If the spiritual is not a bypass, then it can be a tremendous resource for our healing process. And so, these are a few elements that I can see, okay, how can I bring that more and more into my life? And I, and the important thing is we are not supposed to do it alone. We don't have to do it alone. It's not a lonely fight to heal myself. It's the more relational support we can allow back into our life, because often that's what's the most threatening. So, we, it's a step by step process, but the more support we can let in, that's also a sign that we can open up again and be more nourished. And so, I think these are just a few components to not make it too long.

Michael: No, that's beautiful. And I love the depth. And I think one of the interesting facets of everything that you just laid out is there's that component of fear that often keeps people from taking that first step, because there's such an identity shift that happens through the traumatic experience where now you start playing this game internally about shame, about guilt, about deservedness, about what you can or cannot have. And when I was very young, and obviously I share this publicly, I have a score of 10. My mother was a drug addict, alcoholic. She actually cut off my right index finger when I was four years old. My stepfather, super abusive. I was homeless. Most of my childhood started doing drugs when I was 12, got kicked out of high school. My three childhood best friends got murdered. The list goes on and on. And that's only what I talk about publicly, Thomas, by the way. When I was 25, I had made almost a million dollars in corporate America, but I was 350 pounds smoking two packs a day, drinking myself to sleep, high from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, cheating on my girlfriend, 50,000 in debt, and my car got repossessed. And the reason that I'm creating this context and frame here, even though I do a frequency is because I realized one thing, when I had this seemingly rock bottom moment at heading into 26 years old, I realized that my entire life. In that moment, the actions that I had been taking my actions were my responsibility, but the traumatic experiences that I had gone through were not. And what was interesting, it was almost like for the first time in my life, like a window opened and I could see something outside of the pain. And what was really fascinating about that moment is the first thing that I came to realize was that I had to go and find people to support me in this journey. Now, it took a long time to build that community around myself because I was so weary and so fearful of people. My superpower is the ability to read people. You put me in front of a human being within 10 seconds. I'll tell you everything that you need to know. And that's because I had to use that as a survival mechanism. And so when I went down the healing journey, what was really interesting is that my fear of being in connection, like we are right now, having this conversation was they're going to use this against me or they're just using me, or they're lying to me. Or whatever other rumination I could come up with. And it wasn't until a continuation of doing the work, showing up day in and day out, did I actually start to shift the narrative into, okay, wait a second. People inherently are good. But people inherently also are flawed. And what that did was give me permission to go deeper. So, the reason I'm creating that context is I want to ask you a very specific question in consideration of, okay, here you are, you laid out all the tools. You're the expert, you're the guy that people go to. Yet, I sit here, I listen, I hear, I understand everything that you say to me, but fear has me so stuck, I'm trapped in the narrative that I don't deserve the light. How do you navigate that world?

Thomas: First of all, I want to say that it really touches me to hear about your journey. And that I hear when you tell me all you just told me that I don't know, it deserves the right space to just see also what kind of enormous change you had in your life. And I think that what you just said, I believe, is already part of the answer. Because you just transmitted it to me. At least it touched me, like when you say, wow, I had that fear. I was paralyzed in it. I could see all the negative things in people and what can all go wrong. And that's clearly how we project our fears into the world. And you also said, I really did it to a certain degree. And of course, you're still working your way through, like all of us, but you just put something very enabling into the space, which is, your own past and also how you turned your trauma into becoming more and more of a remedy for other people. And so, I want to highlight that because I think that is partly also the answer that we can see and we can let ourselves be inspired by people that did it. And there are multiple examples in the world. When I interview people for our collective trauma summit, I have heard so many stories of people that had very difficult experiences and their trauma healing became their purpose, become the gift to the world and say, and I heard this now from you too. And I think that in itself is already part of the answer. Then the other part of the answer is I bring often an example that I think speaks a bit to how we deal with fear, let's say my daughter comes to me and says daddy, I'm scared. And. And I turn, I look at my daughter and say, don't be scared. There's nothing dangerous here. Everything's okay. So what did I just do? I devalued my daughter's fear. I said, don't be scared. But she tells me clearly I'm scared. And the other thing is she has a clear emotional request and I give her an intellectual answer. Oh, there is no danger in the house. The other version would be. Daddy, I'm scared. And I turn to her, I feel her, and I say to her, yes, I feel you're scared. Come to me. And in that moment, my body creates like a synchronization with her body and her nervous system. My emotional system receives her fear, my system feels her stress. So she can land in me, and she can begin to decompress the fear and distress, feel safer and safer, and then I ask her okay, what happened? Tell me what happened. And then I bring a rational viewpoint into the situation. And the reason why I'm saying this is that often many of us didn't have such a context. When we were scared, we felt either very alone, reinforced by others in the fear so we are naturally walking around with a lot of fear, and then we self-pathologize ourselves and we say, oh, I shouldn't be scared. And what I'm saying is, I think we need more contexts, like here, where we can say, whatever is happening in us is part of an intelligent process. Even if we experience a lot of adversity, what we meet today in us is the best way we try to be with it. It's the most intelligent version of us, in the given ecosystem. And if the ecosystem was very adverse, of course, this needed to be also more extreme. But I'm unravelling and you, when I listened to you, you learned to work with your own intelligence to open some of these things up again and integrate them. And so, when we are very afraid, I think, first of all, to acknowledge, yes, I am scared. When, and I run very big groups, when I ask, okay, who else is afraid? Hundreds of people raise their hand. and say, oh wow, we often think other people have it all together and only me, it's only me, that is hurt. And then you see, no, it's not true. We all, and the more authentic we are with our emotions, we can also dare to say it. And so if somebody feels very afraid and we do with ourselves what I just described with the child, say, yes, I'm scared, so come. And I say to my fear, come. And I create a bit of a holding space because that often takes the paralysis. The paralysis is me fighting the fear versus, yes, I'm scared and I'm still here. And I will look for some sort of support. I will open myself to see what's around. And I do one step at a time. Sometimes it's not, I won't have the solution for how it's going to be, but I will do the next step. And then I get a number of somebody here. I get, I read a book here. I do this and I begin a journey and every step will show me the next step, show me the next step. And like that, I will unfold my healing journey. And the more resources I develop in myself. And sometimes I need to find out what's good for me. Sometimes music is good for me. Nature is good for me. I don't know. Different activities are good for me doing sports and it helps me to make the next step. And like that, I think we unfold the path. And the same is one of the things.

Michael: Yeah, no, absolutely. It is the same with shame. It's, I saw a horror movie when I was like, I don't know, 11 or 12. And it's Nightmare on Elm Street has Freddy Krueger in it. And there's a scene in the movie where this girl who's being chased by him in her dreams goes to sit with someone. They were like a spiritual healer. And they said to her, when you bring your nightmares to light, they lose power over you. And that's how I think about fear, shame, guilt, all of the things that we go through in the human experience when I was. In my teens, my twenties, one of the things that you learn is don't talk about it. This is for you. It stays in the family, all very dangerous language. And the more that I did that, the more my life was a disaster. And it was like, okay, what I came to reconcile with is if my life sucks really bad, which it did because of the things I was doing because of this unhealed nature that I was in, then maybe my life will suck less if I do the opposite of what I've been doing. And that's what ended up happening. And I was sitting in therapy one day. Here was the interesting part about this, Thomas. I would go to therapy, every week and pay this guy, just like you hundreds of dollars. And I would lie to him, right? Think about the disconnection, which is so common, right? It's so unbelievably common. The more people I talk to and what I realized is that truth, as they say, we'll set you free. Now, initially the truth was like snippets, like these very small pieces of data, right? And over time, as I gained trust. For both myself internally, like that reflection in the mirror, but also for the person and people I was sitting across every single week, the more that it opened. And even to this day, it is still opening. There are still things that are so dark. Like I'm still navigating how to bring that to light. But as I brought more and more to light, I started thinking about something and this is something actually that you said. I wrote this down because I think it's a really important part of this conversation of healing. When I noticed that there was something collective happening in my life, when I was surrounding myself by more people who could support me in this journey, I saw that my life got better. When I kept things quiet, and better to me means different. My life was just different than it was. When I kept things quiet and hidden for the first 29 years of my life sucked. But I was really deep in this thought of, wait a second, I feel this sense of freedom, the more that I share this. And people in the beginning, since a very immense space of fear about being emotional, which is at the core of why we're even human, right? You don't see emotions and other creatures like you do in us. And you said something that hit so home to me, and I want to go into this because I think it's unbelievably important in terms of the context of the sharing. And I don't mean sharing like crying on Instagram. I don't think that's the thing we should be doing right now. I mean sharing as in like really bringing truth to the forefront of the conversation. And you said, in a collectively hurt world, we privatize emotions. Talk me through that. What does that mean? What are the implications of that? And what do we need to be doing?

Thomas: Yeah, that's beautiful. It's again, you, through the fact that you can speak so elaborately about your story you are giving us an example of, you said it at the beginning, I didn't say anything, not even to the therapist. I kept it in because often we don't feel safe enough to say it. And just to say that if somebody says already, I'm scared, they need to be safe enough to say, I'm scared. If not, then I'm just mute. I'm not saying anything because I'm, I don't feel safe enough. So the question of safety, Like how we create spaces where we can feel safe enough with each other until we have that internal safety internalized. But as long as it's not internalized, we need an ecosystem that can help us to grow it. It's like a vitamin that we never got. So, if somebody grew up in adverse situations, that vitamin never made it inside. So, we can't have it. So, we need to actually find spaces or create, find conducive spaces to, to grow something that we didn't not that I cannot do it. That's why I often say that language is not the appropriate language. I cannot do it is not the right language is I didn't grow up in an ecosystem where I could freely develop those capacities because they were available to me. So, I needed to develop some defenses. And in a collectively traumatized world, we see the privatization of emotions that we pathologize emotions, that we hold them back, that we don't want to show it because we feel we can get hurt again, which also is true that we got hurt in the past. But it's not true that's going to happen in the future again and again. But the other side of privatizing emotions is that we need to ask each other, what we feel many people need to, okay, what are you feeling? What's your emotion? And that's, that can be a great intervention to ask somebody in a session what are you feeling? But not because we don't feel what the other person feels. because it induces an internal reflection process. But an open emotional system picks up on another emotional system, and an open body picks up on what's happening in the body of somebody else. So, we don't need to ask because we don't know, but in a collectively heard world, it looks like what's happening over there in that person, I have no idea. And that level of separation shows also how much we are looking through a window that has a broken glass, we, we don't feel anymore really connected as if you're like, the biosphere is one data network and we feel each other and as except as you said that some of us needed to develop such a hyper vigilance that we can feel people so much because we needed that. Then that function has been developed intensively because it's such a projection protection mechanism, but there are many people that when say okay but how do you feel other people, how does it work. And I think that we see that even the questions that we sometimes ask what's going on for you and we don't feel it is already a symptom of a traumatized world. That's not our natural state as human beings. We are so socially wired because we are living in social systems that are part of our protection, like of our safety for such a long time in human evolution. So, our nervous system is very social. And often when it's hurt it, it needed to shut down those capacities, but when they open up, it's, the life becomes so much more rich, also relationally, and emotions are the connective tissue. Emotions are what connects us, what gives color to the world, and what makes the world exciting.

Michael: One of the things that I'm pondering here in real time is if you go and you look back at the generations prior to us, I would argue that one of the biggest mistakes that was made is that we removed the human experience from the human experience, right? And so you have all of these people who become effectively robotic, right? You have industry, you have war, you have the creation of agriculture at these very high scale levels. Then you add in technology, then you lead to this place where we are today. And so obviously you can go down a litany of directions and looking at the mistakes we've made as dehumanizing the human experience in the past, but then now it has become pathological. Where what I'm seeing now, look, I'm 10 years into this, right? Coaching thousands of people. I certainly don't have the level of expertise as you do yet, but on a long enough timeline, I will. So, I'll make a different hypothesis with more information. But what I see today is everyone, Thomas is a narcissist, everyone is bipolar. Everyone is depressed. Everyone is anxious. Everyone is this. Everyone is that. And so, I'm curious. Where did we go wrong in the past? Where are we going wrong now? And what is the solution in creating a collective healing space that is done not for the sake of, here we are self-pathologizing, but actually for the sake of actually creating change?

Thomas: Yeah, you're speaking to something like when trauma becomes like a currency that's being used all over. So then it gets internalized as part of our defense mechanism and that doesn't necessarily create change. So it's good to be more trauma informed, but it's also good when we see how trauma is being used as a defense mechanism to growth. So you're pointing out something very important. And I don't know if he went somewhere wrong. I think there is a lot of, when you look at colonialism, when you look at 400 years of racism in the U.S., when you look at the Holocaust, when you look at gender violence, when you look at, I don't know, also a lot of domestic violence, wars, genocides. We are coming out of a global experience of repetitive, ongoing cycles of violence, oppressive power over hierarchies. So, there's so much woundedness in us and also intergenerationally transmitted that of course every generation added some stuff to that. But I think what the chance that we have now is. And not only the chance, I think given the technology we have available, given the urgency that we need to create a much faster global collaboration than we see right now, given climate change and other issues that we are facing. I think we need collective healing spaces because, first of all, we understand enough about trauma. We don't understand everything. And we're all learning like you, like me, like we're all learning through the work that we do. We learn a lot. I learn things every day and it's exciting. And then I come up with new things and then it's, I learn more and then it's a creative process all the time. And I'm sure you experienced this too. And I think many of the people that we talk to or do similar work experiences too, because the more you heal, things change, the world changes, and we find out more about the world that we changed into. So, it's a constantly creative process. And because trauma healing liberates so much energy, post traumatic learning is liberating, is integrating information into the perspective of the whole. So, we are constantly learning. And I call this also the innovation. From the unlearned past, that's the innovation that's frozen in the collective ice. And there's innovation that is new technology and stuff that comes in through inspiration, but there's innovation through trauma healing that liberates a lot of energy that we have available to do other things with it. And so when we look at the chances that I think we have, we know that trauma is subject to the repetition compulsion. I often say unconscious energy or information is destiny and conscious information has a choice. So, we can either decide to continue the way we go now, which means we repeat cycles of violence, cycles of trauma, cycles of organizational conflicts or difficulties or relational Difficulties, family difficulties, or we say, okay, let's intentionally with everything that we know, create collective healing spaces. That's the same. There was a time when hospitals didn't exist and there was a need and we developed those and now they seem normal. They're all over for people that need care and we need something for the collective trauma. Like every country has some kind of legacy. Like when we work on racism in the US we cannot continue like that, but in order to stop that cycle, we need spaces that are designed, but that are funded by the society because the society understands this is very important. This will affect our health care costs. This will affect all kinds of systems. If you really take care of that root cause instead of firefighting all the symptoms all the time that it creates and the pain that we keep creating. And that's the same in Rwanda after the genocide in Europe, after the second world war in like in, in Latin America, after the or in the aftermath of a very painful colonial history in Africa. So we, I think we know enough that we cannot with a good conscience. continue like that. We need to create spaces where we say, okay, these are well established, facilitated, professional spaces where we have collective healing spaces to in a much, on a, in a much faster way to integrate the collective trauma history. So we tend to this. Same as after COVID, how many spaces do you see in society where we really stop and say, listen, something big happens. We cannot just continue running. Let's stop for a moment and say what do we learn from this COVID? global pandemic. Why don't we create spaces to say, okay, let's exhale here for a moment. Let's regulate our nervous systems. Let's slow down before we run further. Let's see something happened to the globe. Something happened to tons of organizations with all the layoffs, all the shutdowns, all the economic crisis, all the people that lost their jobs. And all the people that lost relatives and lives and let's stop. But we don't do it. And I think that has a reason. And the reason is because the traumatic stress doesn't allow us to stop. And that needs a conscious regulation collectively. And I think if we learn to do that, we will stop reproducing the past and we will literally build a bigger future for the next generations. We will build more capacity to collaborate globally and not to pathologize all the others, whoever the others are. And I think that's a necessity. I think not stopping anymore is not responsible. As long as we don't know, we don't know, but now we know. So we can't not do it. And That's why I speak a lot about it needs an architecture in society. It's not anymore just a marginal issue that some groups and some people work in marginal spaces on this kind of things. This needs to be funded as a mainstream institution and we take care of our legacies so that we have a better future. And again, in the conversation, this is a shorter version of it's a very complex question.

Michael: Yeah, I think it's a necessity because in the, and you see these like small inklings of opportunity, call center lines chat supports, things of that nature. But if you're having, generally speaking, a mental health crisis, there's not really a place you walk into. Thank you. You break your leg, you go to the emergency room, they treat you. One of the things that I think is really important is having access to that. But here's, what's really interesting. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, okay. So if you break your arm, it's clear, it's visible. It's obviously broken. Anyone on the outside looking in knows that it's broken, right? If you are having something happen in your mental health, The most that we can do is trust that's true as an outside observer looking in, right? Obviously, there's sign symptoms. You can go down and check your DSM and things of that nature, right? But I think ultimately what it is we have to sit across from people and understand while they are in pain right now Here's the hard part. This is the juxtaposition There are people in pain who are in suffering who really need help, and there's people who are in pain and suffering, and I'm making a giant generalization, by the way, and I think that there's the other people who are in pain who their fear of coming through that pain will forever keep them in suffering, and I think one of the big breakdowns in the systems of mental health, especially here being in the States, is that the solution is often And one of the things that you said that really hit home for me was trauma doesn't get resolved by talking about it. And I think a huge element of this journey is most people, they fall into this space of constantly going to therapy, constantly going to coasting, constantly just having the conversation, reliving the experience. For me as a coach, one of my favorite things and what I encourage my clients to do is to never work with me again. That is ultimately the goal, like to get to the point where it's I don't need to work with that guy. I'm good. So if we're looking at this solution oriented idea to really healing collectively, knowing that for so many people, It is a symptoms based approach and not a root based approach. How in the world does trauma get resolved if it's not through talking about it?

Thomas: Yeah, maybe we need to differentiate a bit between that, this, the story of my trauma. and my mental framing and my mental understanding of trauma is one thing. If I stay all the time in reproducing that, I will just trigger the symptoms of my trauma, but not much happens. Maybe I will be more reflected about it, and maybe this will also help a bit, but that's not gonna resolve something fundamentally or transform trauma. What transforms trauma is to learn that when I talk about my trauma, something significant happens somewhere in my embodiment. And so I need a process like a guidance to learn to liberate how trauma sits in my physical body, in my emotional experience, but also sits in different developmental stages in my nervous system. So in our training programs, we train with a lot of therapists to be able to attune precisely when something happens at age four, at age two, at age ten. So there is a file stored in the nervous system that holds a lot of energy at that level of development. And complex PTSD is a series of these files that created the big file. And so being able to Be really attuned. That's why I wrote the book attuned because attunement is a very powerful remedy, but it needs our nervous systems as coaches, facilitators, therapists, however we work to be very open and responsive. To be able to dial in with that precision with another person. And then we create mutual spaces that really liberate the information inside. And then the narrative of my trauma can come more and more to a rest. I have less need to talk about it because I learned to integrate the narrative. And then the narrative is an intellectual, emotional, physical, ancestral understanding, and something comes back into regulation. And that means that I'm less and less triggered in my trauma. And like that, I can see that I'm not afraid to go to the places where it happened, that when people, when I speak about it, I feel less and less charge in myself. So also the need to talk all the time about it seizes. And then I feel I'm more present. I'm more in the life that I'm living. And there are not so many things that remind me of that past, because the past somehow became presence. And I think that's an important part. And why I said this with the collective spaces, because if you have more collective spaces, you For some trauma, like complex PTSD, we need highly trained, experienced people that know how to work with trauma. But I believe we can develop some collective competence where we have collective holding spaces where we can listen to each other. We can attune to each other and we can create some sort of safety. And then the people that really need one on one treatment, they will get it there. But we as a society can also create holding spaces that can take care of some of it and that capacity will grow. And like that, the ecosystem will also be more and more conducive. And I'm fully with you, constantly talking about it doesn't help. And then to shut the symptoms down with medication. Sometimes medication of course is important because of the crisis that we are in, but then we need a process that helps us to integrate the root cause of it, otherwise we stay stuck. And I think we are doing something similar now that there is a lot of climate anxiety, there are collective, a lot of collective fears and depression and isolation coming up, which I think are also detox mechanisms, that we need to detox something collectively to grow. But if you pathologize the stuff that comes up and not, don't want to have it, so we keep it stuck. And there are competencies, I think, that we need to develop how to work with that. And as you know very well, that when we create safe spaces, Then the nervous system wants to detox material. It's the self healing mechanism of our biological systems. And then when that comes up, that creates more safety. So we are able to go deeper and release the deeper part. And you said this before in your own journey, you said, Oh, at the beginning, I didn't share anything. And then I shared more and then deeper things and I was able to rebuild deeper things. And if you trust that pacing, because you always need more safety to go a step deeper. So you described your own healing journey beautifully. And I think that's what we all go through.

Michael: Yeah. There's so much to unpack in that. And what that makes me think about is I, and again, this is all my personal view. I see. Being triggered as one of the most important things that happen in our journey. And the reason that I say that is we live in this very strange space of time where everyone is so against the idea of being triggered where we have overdone the safe space, where I think healing can't actually happen because the thing that needs to be healed, isn't presenting itself. We have effectively put ourselves in a bubble. A mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, emotional bubble. Where every single day, people are trying to find the way to make the world safer. Which again, we should be, let's be clear about this. I'm just creating content, like the world should be a safer place, but I don't think you get to a safer place by sweeping everything under the rug and pretending it's not a problem. And so I'm curious about your thoughts. I believe that triggers are necessary. I encourage it. Please show me the thing that I am missing that way. I can actually do something about it. And in the moment of human connection, generally you find this a space. Especially in intimate relationships where like in a moment of human connection, you go, Oh shit. But in that, Oh shit, that's the opportunity. But in order to transform the opportunity, that's where I believe you need the safe space, not the safety of avoidance or hiding or sweeping it under the rug, which is now our standard. What are your thoughts about that?

Thomas: Yeah, I'm absolutely with you. I think that's what I meant before when trauma gets encoded in our defense mechanism, then we try, instead of saying that scares me, I said, it's not safe. It's like that instead of being connected to the internal process, we try to over control the external process. And I think that's an important thing to be aware of. The other thing I would add is that for some people given their state of trauma, it's very important that they experience a very trauma sensitive space where it's safe enough for them to open up. As you said, we need those spaces. And then, But those spaces are supposed to create a resilience and a strength that we can meet the world more and more the way it is and regulate ourselves in relationships. Because trauma comes with a hyper regulation of the inner space. And healing shows itself that I can regulate myself more and more in the relationship. So I don't turn up my volume inside so much, but I am able to regulate myself here. And the more we can take the regulation back into the relation, we feel that we are living in a more and more healthy ecosystem, but we are More regulated within that ecosystem. And I think that's, that describes also a bit the path. And so at different stages, I think we need a different level of sensitivity. And for some people, they need a really safe space to just be able to open up. But then, we need to also create a society where we need to face certain things that are in the world that are happening right now and that need our engagement. And it's not going to be comfortable all the time. And that's why I see it very much like you from a certain level of resourcing. I think our triggers show us on the one hand, the edge of our evolution. So it shows us where we can grow. And I think if I create a positive relationship to my triggers, then I can learn the lesson that's in there. So that's beautiful. And I want to say one more thing that's because you mentioned like a mutual friend of ours, Gabor he, in his book, he described something very important. So, the myth of the normal And I'm very much along these lines that certain symptoms that show up in us. show up in us because we are living in an ecosystem that is not healthy. And so when you live in an ecosystem with toxicity, and then you show symptoms of toxicity, the toxicity in you has to show up. That's not the problem. There's also something in the ecosystem that we need to look at. So, isolating the issues in the person and not looking at how much poison did we put into the water. That we are swimming in makes only partly sense. They say, yes, of course there's something happening here, but let's also include at least the ecosystem, the society that we are part of, and the distortion of that society that we see, ah, certain if I'm living in my house all the time like that, and I come to you and I say, I have a neck pain, you would say, yes, I understand. If you live your life like this, so you need to look, why is your house, you pushing or pressing on you. And so the collective house is not a spacious house for all of us. It's not an open house. And that's why including when we talk about triggers, when we talk about inner symptoms, like seeing how we need to heal here, but then we need to also heal here for us to be really healthy is very important. So, an ecosystemic approach is a must, I believe.

Michael: Yeah, I agree. And I think that comes with looking at first and foremost, the space that you're in. One of the things that I always encourage people is I'm like, leave your hometown, go into the world, find yourself, explore the opportunity because it is man, I used to be in my city. I grew up in and drive around and smell the smells or see the streets or see the people. And it was just like, Constant overwhelm. I'd go past that street. I'd remember that terrible thing that happened to me. And what I come to realize is I just had removed myself from that space long enough that I lost the sensitivity to it. And so now I can go back and visit my family and spend time with them. And it's a very different experience, but there's also the self-ecosystem. And we spend so much. Energy and effort. And I'm one who's very privy to this. We spend so much energy and effort numbing ourselves as a survival mechanism that it's autonomic to some extent where we don't even know what's happening. When you look at Folletti's work around the ACE survey and dealing with obesity, that study changed my life forever because I was morbidly obese at one point in my life. I didn't realize like my eating habits, my drinking habits, my drug habits, that was all tied. The outside world was so loud all the time where it was like, I just need it to fucking go away. And if I can make it go away, I can stabilize. But then what you don't realize is you're putting what your words are perfect toxins into the water, but you're effectively doing it to yourself. How do you, for me, I remember I had this very cut and dry moment, right? So I'm 26 years, almost 26. It's almost my birthday. Here I am. I'm 350 pounds. I'm laying in bed. It's a Saturday morning. I'm smoking a joint, eating chocolate cake and watching the CrossFit games on television. Like this really intense moment where I'm like, what the fuck is happening in my life right now? And I went in the bathroom and I looked at myself in the mirror. And I just had this moment, Thomas and for me, what I needed was this moment of internal war. My dialogue of trying to approach this through kindness was not going to work because it wasn't working. And I had just been like, Oh, tomorrow it's fine. It'll be okay. But I was like, no. And these were the words I was like, come on, motherfucker, change your life right now. And what happened is I was, as I was looking in the mirror, I had this flashback moment and I remembered being eight years old and the water company had come to our home and turned our water off. My mother was so addicted to prescription drugs that all of our funds went to her drug habit. So they turn off our water, our heat, our electricity, whatever that was. And I went into our backyard and I had this little blue bucket. I walked across the street to our neighbor's house and I turned on the hose on the side of their house and I stole water for the first time. Now, what happened is in that moment, and I didn't remember this as clear as day. I know people say that over time, memories change. This memory hasn't changed in 30 years. What I remember in that moment was saying to myself, when I'm a grownup, this won't be my life, a very intense thought for an eight-year-old. And so here I am at 26 and I'm looking at my life and I realized I'd been breaking the promise to myself. Because my life, while seemingly was okay, money and clothes and drugs and women and in a little bit of affluence, it was a disaster. My life was complete trash. And in that window, what I came to realize was that the problem in the ecosystem is that I'm the one who built the ecosystem, but I was also the one who was poisoning it every day. And there was this really interesting moment in that where I asked myself a question. And the question was, it's literally on my bathroom mirror. This moment says, what are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have? My answer, Thomas was no excuses, just results. What that meant. I didn't know what it would mean to fast forward to 14 years almost, but what it meant in the moment was I wasn't going to any longer be the cause of my own problems. I realized there are different levels to healing and everyone needs to go their path, but I do believe that for some people, just this moment of unbelievably nakedly radical honesty. Is the thing that will set them free. And so I'm curious, is there a space in this journey that you've seen? Cause you've worked with so many people. Is it necessary to adopt a mindset of I'm going to get this done way one, one way or another. Is that resilience? Is that grit? Is it something that you find in some people make sense and works? Does it always have to be kindness and sensitivity? What I'm getting to here is, are there actually multiple approaches to the healing journey?

Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you are describing one very powerfully right now. And that's obviously was your moment. And I would just add to your moment that I think everything That you did after that moment, all the healing that you experienced, I believe was part of giving you the strength in that moment. I truly believe that the future of our process has a rebound effect into the present as much as the past has a. As a, an influence. And so everything you learned in this 14 years actually was active in that moment to help you to make that step. And that's because we are living in a world where it seems like causality is going only one way, you kick the ball, it rolls, and then you kick it again, and it rolls again. But I think the ball actually rolls backward from the future as well. We are not fully alone. Even the future generations have an impact on now. So sometimes, because when we are in this, we are feeling we are just alone and to open ourselves to say, yes, I feel this wish. I need to change something in my life. And you said it powerfully. I think for many of us, it's a moment where we make a decision. However, that decision comes into our life is maybe something we can discuss, but there's a moment when we feel. Now it happens. Some hear it because they hear your podcast. Some have it because they are inspired otherwise. Some, the suffering is so strong that one day you wake up and you say it's enough. And however it is, but that moment is important and I think if we can create a society and a vibe in the ecosystem that de stigmatizes trauma and suffering and says it's something we all share, it's part of being a human being it's not that unique to one person, it's something, intensities but we all go through trauma and we create a more positive framing. I think it will make it easier and easier for other people to feel less ashamed about it to feel less afraid to reach out. So everybody like you going through this is you change something for your life. But you can see how many other lives you are affecting already. So everybody who makes that step also makes it for a much wider radius of the population, because we all will affect people, some of us more, some of us less. But so, what I want to say is everybody that makes that step makes it for themselves, but also for other people that they will affect. Through that. And you are a great example. I really honor very much how openly you speak about your journey and I think we can all learn from you and your transmission because that's very real. It's very grounded, and you speak to a lot of the stations that many people go through. on their journey. So yes, I think that decision is part of that one day we, there is like a moment and however, that moment is being created. I think that's something we can see where this strength comes from. And that's a lot, also either from our ancestors because life healed itself already many times in this thousands and thousands of years of being traumatized and healing and being traumatized and healing. And also the future that we literally have an effect. And I've seen many people that started the work and suddenly other family members started to be interested in that. And the family systems are changing. And as you said, one day you could come back to your hometown and you were less affected. Why? Because you healed some of your trauma. It didn't affect you anymore so much. And these are all very positive ecosystemic effects also.

Michael: One of the things that I probably don't do a good enough job about elaborating on in my journey is self forgiveness. And so I'm curious, what role does forgiveness play in this journey, both for oneself, for the collective, for the people that hurt us is it necessary? Does it matter? It's a word that gets thrown around a lot. Is it a viable part of the healing journey to Offer forgiveness across the board.

Thomas: Yes. And I think I think we need to differentiate a bit. One more thing I wanted to say about your decision is. I heard also at that moment, you own something more, like there was an ownership, there's as if we can own trauma, and that takes us out to a certain extent of feeling victimized by our trauma, and we can own transgressions that we create a trauma, and we can, and by owning it, We are stepping into a healing process both ways. So saying, yes, this is part of my life and I'll do something about this. There's ownership. And I believe like on the way to forgiveness, there is ownership because like the whole story of the apple with the bite. is that nobody took responsibility. He blames her, she blames the snake, is the story of humanity. We need to own the things in our life for us to be able to create change. So the owning that I heard you do in that moment is a fundamental part of the forgiveness, of the development of forgiveness. And the second part is that I'm really willing to look to develop compassion for myself, that I develop a way of looking at myself, that shed some of the pathologizing of the self-criticism of the self-hatred, like all the things that I'm willing to really be able to explore. And I heard you over 14 years being it. On the journey to explore when I listen to you and being able to explore your inner world and what lives in there And yes, I think eventually, I think as long trauma binds a lot of energy, the more the trauma heals, it releases that energy more and more, and of course it happens for everybody differently, but it releases energy, that energy becomes maturation. That energy becomes grounding, that energy becomes participation, maybe also spiritual participation and it's, it liberates something so that I can include more of the world than I could include before. So I often say wisdom is the capacity to host more of the world in yourself. And that means that when we heal more when the energy releases more and more, so there's more and more presence. And that means that I can forgive myself for certain things more. It's not just an intellectual, I should forgive myself. When the energy gets released, it becomes. the release of the energy becomes the forgiveness. And also, intergenerationally or culturally, the more we heal, forgiveness, true forgiveness, is a natural result of the healing process. And until we feel, okay, there's something can come to a peace or arresting. And then I think the system is again open. And it's not that we are that the past defines us, but it's that the present moment is what we can experience and there's more freedom in the present moment. So I think it's a result because some people try to forgive, but their system is not ready to forgive. So they put, they actually create a strong pressure in themselves. I should forgive. But I often say, listen, let's work on the stuff that is stored. And once that's more open forgiving will become a natural part of the process.

Michael: I love that. That's very beautifully said. And. To me, I think this deeply like healing trauma is liberation and you use the word liberate and I don't think that word is used enough in the context of this conversation and I think you're completely spot on Thomas. My friend, this has been a beautiful conversation. I appreciate you greatly. I have pages and pages of notes here. Before I ask you my last question, can you please tell everyone where they can find you learn more about you and discover your teachings? so much.

Thomas: First of all, I want to say also that I really appreciate the space with you and I appreciate your honesty and transparency. It's really lovely, very lovely. So thank you for that. And and yeah, where we can find my work mainly on my website, Thomas, T H O M A S and Thomashublcom. Thomas Hubl. com is my website. And we run a summit every year, the collectivetraumasummit.com. It's a great place to find information about trauma and collective trauma. We have a nonprofit where we do a lot of international collective trauma work. The it's called the pocket project. org pocket project. org and my books, healing, collective trauma in the tunes. So yeah, there's, and there's a lot of information on the web YouTube.

Michael: Amazing. And guys go to thinkunbrokenpodcast.com. Look up Thomas's episode for that. And more in the show notes. My last question for you, my friend, what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Thomas: I actually think that unbrokenness is, or let's say like this, as we heal, we develop more and more capacity to host brokenness in ourselves and see that whatever we call broken is actually an intelligent attempt of life to deal with the adversity and the traumatic events that happen in people's lives. So I think we melt the idea of unbrokenness into a more and more compassionate relationship to the brokenness of our life. And whatever is the alchemy that arises of that, if that ever will mean to be unbroken or not, it loses a bit the importance because it becomes actually love. And so being able to love the world that we are in and that induces change and healing and transformation, I think is a beautiful result of our own healing process.

Michael: Could not agree more. And when I look back on my life and the moments in which I let my trauma be my narrative, I hated the world, and when I decided to take control of it, I learned to love the world. Brilliantly said. My friend, thank you so much for being here. Unbroken Nation, thank you for listening. Guys, please remember, when you share this with other people, you are helping them transform trauma to triumph, breakdowns to breakthroughs, and help them become the hero of their own story.

Until Next Time,

My Friends,

Be Unbroken.

I'll See You.