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Intergenerational trauma refers to the transmission of unresolved trauma and its psychological, emotional, or even physical effects from one generation to another. This phenomenon can manifest in various ways, impacting individuals' mental health, coping mechanisms, and relational patterns. The cycle of intergenerational trauma underscores the importance of acknowledging, understanding, and actively addressing inherited wounds to break free from its influence on future generations.
On today’s On Health episode I’m joined by the incredible Mariel Buque, PhD, author of Break the Cycle, who wants us all to learn to unravel the threads of family trauma, and becoming cycle breakers so we can heal the burdens of suffering carried forward by so many families across generations.
In this powerful episode we explore:
- What intergenerational trauma is and how it can affect our physiology, mental health, relationships, economics, and more.
- The profound connections between our individual experiences and the echoes of our ancestors' pain.
- Resilience and stress tolerance as essential tools for breaking the intergenerational trauma cycle.
- How to expand your window of resilience and respond to life's challenges with greater awareness and purpose.”
- How compassion becomes a powerful ally, fostering understanding and acceptance of our shared human struggles.”
- How mothers can be preemptive cycle breakers, initiating the healing journey even before conceiving.
- The landscape of family estrangement and tools for reconciliation before resorting to estrangement.
- Mariel's approach centers around the concept of an upward spiral, emphasizing small, consistent mindful actions for reshaping the nervous system.
- Resources for those seeking guidance, including Mariel's book, “Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.”
Join us in this episode's transformative conversation on health, healing, and well-being, as we become architects of a future unburdened by the weight of generational pain.
Please share the love by sending this to someone in your life who could benefit from the kinds of things we talk about in this space. Make sure to follow me on Instagram @dr.avivaromm to join the conversation.
You can follow Mariel on Instagram and visit her at drmarielbuque.com.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Vicktor Frankl
Aviva: Even before having my own little ones, I set out on a path that included exploring my own intergenerational inheritances: the good, the bad, and the ugly. What happened for me was when I was 15 years old, now a lot of you might think my path to midwifery got started because I loved moms and babies so much and babies are so cute and all those things, and that is true, but actually, I had been given the gift of an article that had been written in the 1970s by someone named Stanislav Grof. He was actually an early LSD psychotherapist who started to observe and explore the interconnectedness between traumatic birth, intergenerational traumas and our own psychology as we emerged into our adult lives, I was so determined not to perpetuate the various intergenerational inheritances, the traumatic parts.
I love the resilience from my own family legacy, but as I learned along the way, being aware of intergenerational trauma is just the tip of the iceberg because it can be so insidious that we don't even realize we're still living, not just from our own wounds, but from those that have been passed down literally genetically and cellularly, as well as through behaviors that may have been so normalized in our family or so normalized in our culture at large, that they're kind of like this inaudible background music to our lives and they create this kind of dance that we're doing without even realizing it. Or when we do realize it, we see ourselves sometimes stuck in patterns that we saw our mother in or our grandmother in, and sometimes we get stuck in these relationships or behaviors, or economic patterns and we just don't know what to do to break free.
I'm Dr. Aviva Romm and I'm here today with my remarkable guest who I'm so excited to chat with Dr. Bouquet, who has dedicated her work to breaking the trauma cycle and guiding others on their healing journey. A Columbia trained Afro Dominican psychologist and a trailblazer in mental health. Dr. Bouquet brings a wealth of expertise in understanding and transforming intergenerational trauma, and she does it with so much warmth and so much energy and so much beauty and grace that I know you're just going to fall in love with her too. As I have through her Instagram and now reading her book, which I was so grateful to find in my hands.
We're going to explore intergenerational trauma, the invisible wounds that can echo across generations, influencing not just our minds and bodies, but the very fabric of our families, friendships, and communities. It's a silent force that can be shaping our lives, affecting our emotional and mental well-being, economic circumstances, and the very essence of our relationships.
We'll also be exploring the tapestry of intergenerational healing as we discuss Dr. Mariel's book, Break the Cycle, a Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma in which she combines scientific research with ancient and indigenous healing practices, offering a true holistic therapeutic approach that is so often missing in modern mental health.
Her insights have earned her recognition as a mental health champion featured on major media outlets like the Today Show, Good Morning America, and ABC News. As women navigating the complexities of our culture, we carry not only these external expectations, but these deep-seated imprints of family history and trauma. And Dr. Mariel joins us today to share how we can become cycle breakers, turning intergenerational pain into intergenerational resilience and even abundance.
So, whether you're seeking personal healing or aiming to create a more resilient legacy as a mother to your children, join us as we uncover the impact of intergenerational trauma and learn tangible therapeutic practices.
Together. let's transform our stories to relieve us of the weight that so many of us are carrying from the burdens of our past while we pass down strengths instead of more pain to our children and future generations. Mariel, welcome.
Mariel: Thank you, Dr. Aviva. It's so wonderful to be in connection with you in conversation with you. This is such a beautiful way to kick us off. It's so lovely to hear from you and how you got here into this conversation, so thank you for that.
Aviva: Thank you. Well, I wish I could say that all the work was like nirvana, but I once heard this expression, new level, new devil, and it's like as you unpeel one layer of the onion you find another or you find yourself in a new phase of your life and you're like, “Oh, I didn't realize that was there and still showing up.”
And I think you have had some of these moments in your own life and you shared moment from your clinical practice in the first part of your book that I think so many practitioners know and dread, and it's that moment when we're so deeply wanting to help the person who's sitting before us, whether on telemedicine or whether in person and that well runs dry, right? You have a moment of like, “Wait, I don't know what to do for this person”. And you had that moment, and that sounds like it shifted your entire focus into working on intergenerational trauma.
So, can you share that story?
Mariel: Oh yeah, absolutely. That moment was very pivotal in my journey as a clinician, and it also was a moment where I felt probably the most inept as a clinician. I was actually at Columbia Medical Center where I was doing my training at that moment, and I was actually talking with one of my clients and we were talking through the multiple layers of how women and her family had actually experienced domestic violence, and it was a moment in which we were sitting with her story, but also a lot of things clicked into place for me because these were also the stories that we were hearing. Literally in every therapy room inside of the clinic, every single person had some element of how these intergenerational legacies have been passed down, and we would actually have conversations inside of our clinic team meetings about, Hey, this is something that also happened to her mother and her father and the grandparent, and here I was with all of that in this therapy space with this one client wondering, what is my next clinical intervention going to look like?
I don't think I have anything else that I can offer that can actually extract the layers of pain that have existed inside of this woman's lineage that have now made their way into this therapy space with me and with her. What do I do next? It was just so debilitating as a clinician, and I vowed in that moment I must figure out what I need to do and what I need to do effectively to create tangible change for this person that's sitting in front of me, but also continuously for the individuals that I have a chance to work with.
Aviva: And what did you find?
Mariel: Oh, I uncovered a lot. I uncovered a good decade's worth of stuff. I uncovered that one a lot of what we were working with was trauma. That was the pivotal moment really in how I started to also just address the work. We as clinicians, we don't have a trauma course inside of our clinical training. We don't have some sort of an understanding inside of our neuroscience classes that help us to understand how neurons are impacted by traumatic stress and toxic stress. There is none of this available to us, so none of us are really kind of coming into these clinical spaces with that general orientation, and that was a lot of what I started to uncover. These experiences that people are having that aren't necessarily experiences that I'm being taught beyond just understanding the general post-traumatic stress disorder orientation through the DSM and knowing that perhaps just maybe somebody may show up with a constellation of symptoms that actually qualifies within that DSM diagnosis and then we apply the code and even that process is very limiting.
It doesn't help us to understand developmental trauma. It doesn't help us to understand racial trauma. It doesn't help us to understand intergenerational trauma. There is so much missing in that clinical picture. So, I just made it my business to really almost self-teach, but also procure a lot of different trainings in other areas, and I was indeed very fortunate. I will say to also a year later actually procure an integrated mental health fellowship, which now we call holistic mental health. That actually oriented me for three years around how to do this work. But initially it started with me saying, “You know what? This person has depression on their clinical chart for the last 15 years.” Depression is not what we're dealing with here. Multiple episode depression is being sustained by trauma, being at the root of what she has been suffering. That's where I started.
Aviva: When I was in my clinical practice for years. I was having women come to me for example, with autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, IBS, all kinds of conditions, and while I never want to impute a mental health origin to a physical symptom because I feel like there's the risk of that kind of falling into the historical phenomenon of women being told things are all in their heads, so it's like that's not what I'm saying, but as I was sitting with woman after woman after woman after woman and unpacking these chronic physical conditions that can be very impactful on someone's quality of life, I started remembering back to the 1990s when I read Robert Sapolsky's book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, because even in western medicine from the physical medical perspective, we don't also look at the origins of traumatic life experiences like people give a hat tip to adverse childhood event scores.
I mean the list of what domestic violence experience or adverse childhood events experience can cause is an enormous list of chronic headache, IBS, autoimmune disease, you name it, it's there and we know the physiology of it, but I don't feel like there's enough work that's been done on what we're calling depression, what we're calling anxiety, is that really the symptom of this underlying iceberg of trauma and how trauma and intergenerational trauma actually shapes our physiology. I don't see mental and physical health is different to me it's all like bidirectional, and I think you see that as well.
Mariel: Absolutely, and I believe that if we were to live in a society where the western medical model were also integrative, meaning that it would actually involve a mind body approach to all of the clinical ailments that we seek to help or cure, unfortunately that's not the case, right? As we know it, we have a very fractured system in which basically clinicians are taught to centralize their focus and even do entire residencies and internships on one specific organ or one specific elements of the body mostly, right?
Aviva: It's so powerful when I talk with a patient and explain for example, to a woman and maybe particularly a Black woman who is experiencing high blood pressure in pregnancy and she's doing everything, she's eating the right diet, she's exercising and she's like, “What am I doing wrong? How am I possibly now harming my baby? What are my increased risk factors for all these things?”
And when I say, “Here's the bigger picture. You're not doing anything wrong, but you have generations of inherited trauma that affect your physiology that can be causing this outside of you doing anything.” And I watch women's shoulders drop or the tears flood, because it’s the recognition of the inherited weight of what women carry, but also that sense of, oh, this depression isn't just because I'm not exercising or I'm not eating well or taking my probiotic or any of the things. It's like, no, this is actually bigger and also here are the things that you can start to do.
Do you find when you explain this bigger context, your patients are like, oh, okay,
Mariel: 100%. People feel seen and heard. And I think that a beautiful byproduct of that, albeit feeling heavy as well, is that people start gaining some sense of compassion for themselves and understanding that they are living with so many layers of pain can actually build compassion for the ways in which they show up in day-to-day life even like something, let's say that's the experience that a person might have around perhaps having some sort of attentional difficulties that are coming out in their workplace environment and they're very palpable there. They may be able to see that some of what they're struggling with has a dissociative quality, and individuals in their family perhaps looked very similarly in their workspaces as a result of their own unresolved trauma, and that allows them to not beat themselves up if they miss a detail because their attention was a bit off in the morning, or if they take a little bit longer on a task, perhaps they can hold themselves with greater compassion because they have an understanding of the layers that they're peeling through and the layers that they have to work through in order to get to a more steady place.
Aviva: One of the things that you talk about in your book is the literal embodiment of reenacted behaviors in our present lives that can be driven by intergenerational factors. And I know this very well, having grown up in a housing project with a single mom having stood in housing assistance and food assistance lines, even no matter how successful my life is, there are days I still toggle between this fear of like, but it could all be gone or I could be in poverty and I am aware of factors like my mom got pregnant with me really young, and that kind of interrupted. I mean, I'm sure there's a greater purpose, but it interrupted what she perceived as her path to college and a career, so I grew up with me frequently hearing her either overtly or indirectly kind of saying things like she should have, she could have, but she never did, never will. And I cycle through those thoughts even though the evidence of my current life doesn't suggest that.
In your book you talked about your grandmother in the Dominican Republic and the extreme poverty that she and your mother and you faced and how this has shown up in your life, and I'd love to hear how you recognize this and then how you have come to or do you continue to move from that place of fear and scarcity into a place of welcoming greater ease with prosperity or abundance or ‘having’ in your life?
Mariel: What I've grown to understand, and I love that I apply this work even to myself and to my family because it allows me an opportunity to really humanize the work and really see it from a first-person perspective. And what it has done for me has also allowed me to see that it is an ever-evolving process, that there are always going to be bumps, but the bumps may feel like little bumps rather than the ginormous mountains that we've had to overcome in the past. And that those bumps would reflect what day-to-day life kind of is. It has allowed me to understand that we are manufactured as humans to actually have stress in our lives. Granted, industrialization and the general capitalistic nature of the world as it stands right now does exacerbate how much the world demands of us in a way that is in part antithetical to our human progression or wellness. And there's a lot that can be unpacked there.
But we are designed to actually go through stress, and so when a stressor is presented in my current life, I have an opportunity to reflect on several things. The fact that I can hold the stress differently, the fact that my family does the same, the fact that I have what I call a buyback of time, which is I have a two to three second frame of time that is that response time that has been increased, that expanded window of tolerance that I've been able to obtain for myself that allows me an opportunity to go from stimulus to response in a way that actually coincides with my values rather than is reflective of a trauma response. And so, all of that is a part of the journey, but it isn't a perfect healed journey because I think that that can leave us in a position of actually internalizing greater shame. Why am I not healed and allow us to really stew in the heavy for longer periods than is necessary. So the fact that I've integrated a lot of this into my own life and have also helped my family to do the same has been one of the greatest lessons also beyond the therapy room because it allows me to really kind of play with the information and with the technique in a way that I don't think would be accessible to me should I have perhaps internalized the idea that I have no work to do.
Aviva: I’d love to dig deeper into this expanding window of resilience or awareness or stress tolerance. I talk with my patients about this in a different framework, which is I work with a lot of women who are struggling with either anxiety responses sometimes, but also food cravings that are driving them to behaviors they don't want to do around eating or alcohol use, or the opposite can be inertia where they're talking themselves out of exercising and I'll say, “Okay, can you hold that space before you make a decision for five seconds? Just hold the space for five seconds and see what happens in those five seconds.” And often that gives enough of a gap for the impulse to shift. And it seems like we're talking about a similar thing and you're talking about the impulse of a trauma response, that energy rising up that reactivity, if I understand you correctly.
Mariel: Yes. And the reactivity sometimes when it comes up and perhaps I don't have that two to three second frame that I have been so conscious about obtaining, I have at least the capacity to then go back into repair, go back into compassion, and that also is a part of what's gained because for many of us individuals that are on the cycle breaking journey and have been really tussling with trauma, what tends to happen is that as we see ourselves through the journey, not continuously obtaining enough of that distress tolerance and perhaps settled-ness within ourselves, it makes it so that there's almost kind of like an opening for shame to take root and almost kind of make its home in our hearts, just stay there.
So, for me, it's been really, really important to also intersperse that element of self-compassion in there. And the beautiful thing about intergenerational healing is that it actually also at times, this isn't for everyone. It doesn't happen for everyone, and it isn't a requisite, but at times it also helps us to almost kind of build even just a microscopic sense of compassion for individuals that come from our family line that perhaps were there before us parents, grandparents and ancestors and individuals that have also had to suffer in the ways that mirror our suffering. And it helps us to understand, wow, when they were, albeit it didn't feel good, it felt awful, I didn't like it, and there could have been a different way when they yelled when I was a child, I get how that can be connected to a trauma response. I get how that might be almost fight- flight- freeze- or fawn, how that could kind of categorize as fight I get how their body felt because I feel it within my own body. Whenever you're exacerbated and you're pushed your own emotional limits. And so, it starts to build an element of compassion because we start gaining a greater window of understanding as well.
Aviva: And sometimes I think we can also even understand, okay, the yelling was not a helpful behavior and it did create this ripple downstream, but sometimes we can say, and also I see how from their lens they were trying to protect me, that was how they learned to protect me, or maybe that's all they knew because that's how they were raised or that was their trauma response. So, then I feel like I can look back and have more of a loving, understanding, compassionate lens for my mother, my grandmother, etc., through that lineage and yeah, hold it more softly for myself,
Mariel: Hold it more softly. I love that language. It's complex, right? Because even as we're holding it softly for ourselves and for others, sometimes there's a little bit of nuance in there and there's a little bit of a scattered emotions. There can also be grief associated with that process where for myself, for example, just to use myself as an example in this moment, but I think that sometimes I carry this desire that I could have done something even in my infancy in my childhood to absolve, for example, my parents from having to experience the pain that they've had to undergo. And that's in there with the compassion that's in there with the softness. There's also the grief and the ongoing trying to absolve myself from the guilt that wasn't mine to hold as a child. I couldn't actually save them from the world and from themselves.
It's just not possible as a child to hold onto that familial burden. But as an adult, there are times when even as I'm holding space for my parents when I feel like, oh gosh, that was brutal. I wish your childhood could have been different. I wish that somebody would've held you in greater tenderness so that you wouldn't have to suffer in this way. And I get it. I get why you were so stern, and I get some of the methods that you used in rearing me, but I just wish that somewhere along the lines, someone would've caused a disruption for you, not because also for me, of course, but because I wish you wouldn't have to hurt so much. That's where the compassion comes in.
Aviva: As we're talking, I'm realizing that you and I are speaking a language that we're familiar with, but to just back up a step and differentiate for listeners when we're talking about intergenerational trauma as a part of the whole picture of trauma, what do you mean when you're talking specifically about intergenerational trauma?
Mariel: Intergenerational trauma is actually unique in that it is the only trauma that's handed down our family line. So, it happens within multiple generations of family members rather than it being a singular experience in one generation, in one individual. And the ways in which this happens is at the intersection of our biology and our psychology. So, it's very nuanced and complex on both ends, both the biological and psychological ends. But from our biological perspective, what's happening mostly is that we are a part of families where if trauma has actually been the lived experience of any individual in our family, we're going to take a parent as an example, it is likely that if they had to live with trauma for a longstanding period of time, that their bodies would've actually registered that they were in trauma.
When our parents conceive us, we actually inherit genes from both parents, which we know, but within those genes, we're not just inheriting a lot of the things that we traditionally believe we're inheriting like phenotype and hair color eyes and things of that nature. We're also inheriting some of the ways in which their genes turned on or off. This is called gene expressions. Then, if their social environments were stressful and their genes in essence re-express as it's called in scientific language, if it re-express in order to adjust to their social environments, we would've also inherited some of those genetic markers. What that means from the perspective of like, okay, now I'm a person living in this world, what does that mean for me? Is that in essence it would've created some level of emotional vulnerability or tenderness that we tend to see really early on in life.
But we also have to, like I mentioned cross-section, that biology with our psychology, and whenever we're born now, we have so much that's happening in our lives, perhaps that parent is still living under trauma. As a result, we have a parent that perhaps could miss attuning to their child in the ways that the child needs miss social cues, that the child needs the parent and maybe not be able to be as present in building the emotional foundation that this very tender child might need.
And then in comes everything else in life, the child could go into the school system and experience bullying or go into their first teenage relationship, and that relationship is toxic or abusive. They can go out into the world and experience just a world where perhaps because of a marginalized identity, they experience some level of discrimination. And so, all of that just factors into the already tenderness that's present, making it so that now this person could possibly now experience their own trauma responses. And when we're talking about someone now experiencing their own trauma responses and coming from people that themselves were living with trauma, we call that intergenerational trauma.
Aviva: It would almost be beautiful if we could be born with a roadmap. Your grandparents went through this, your parents went through this. Culturally, you can expect this. And it's almost like if when we were young, somebody could say, “Oh, you’re left-handed, so here's how you turn your paper to be more comfortable in a right-handed world. Here's how you might want to think about your reactions, your responses, your preferences in the lens of knowing that we have some presets actually, that we have ways that we might react or respond.
What are some of the symptoms that somebody might have that might tell someone now that they are living with the impacts of intergenerational trauma?
Mariel: It's a very nuanced experience, as you mentioned, because it ties in not just the traditional ideas that we held about trauma, for example, that a person might have ongoing irritability or that that person might have metabolic disturbances like sleep difficulties, insomnia, hypersomnia, that they may have persistent sadness, that they may have difficulty with appetite, that the thing about intergenerational trauma is that it's all of these things, and it is also the fact that we may be overly reliant on other people to soothe our emotions because that's how we saw people in our family soothe. They relied on other people to step in and come to their aid when they felt like they had an emotional crisis. And we've adopted by way of the modeling that happens in families, we've adopted that very same way of actually soothing our emotions through other people, and I'm talking about codependency or codependent behaviors that get translated forward. It's also sometimes in people pleasing qualities that we tend to see people over appease others. A lot of what we tend to know about that over appeasing quality is that it is very highly correlated with what we now identify as being almost that fawn response.
Aviva: Exactly. I really have come to in working with women, try to reframe, “Oh, I'm a people pleaser to, okay, my survival mode is being activated right now. How can I recognize that and shift the lens? Because I think when we think of ourselves, oh, I'm a people pleaser, it's kind of like, oh, I'm a doormat or something, and it's not really what it is. You learned to fit into your community safely by being polite or being the one who says yes or being nice.
Similarly, with even fight behavior, okay, what's activated right now, there's something in my survival.. I'm not just an aggressive agitated person. What is getting activated that's making me feel like I need to fight right now? I don’t know if you look at things like that, to me, that's the lens I've kind of started to take when I'm looking at actual human behavior, my own included and also with my patients.
Mariel: Yes. And it's such a beautiful way to reframe the human experience because we are tossing around in the general world a lot of these characteristics and qualities, and what that could do is that it internalizes the quality and separates it from the root cause. And so, people develop this way of seeing themselves rather than looking at the externalized factor of trauma and the fact that it's a factor that can also be transformed and worked through. I love that framing.
Aviva: One of the things that is showing up in so many families right now, and I feel like it's the root of such deep and profound shame, is intergenerational estrangement. And it can be parent to children, children to parents, parents to their parents affecting the grandchildren. And I will say we've had some of this show up in a couple of areas of our own family's life with this intergenerational phenomenon that seems very culturally driven because also, and I think this got really huge during Covid and since the acute time of Covid, there are so many internet and coaches who are actually saying, look, if it doesn't feel right, just cut the people off. And I do know that sometimes that is necessary for our safety, but I worry that it is reinforcing more trauma or freezing trauma in place. And I wonder, especially now with us being in the holiday times, how do you see this phenomenon of this estrangement and think about this idea of cutting people off versus working through the healing or when there's a time for each of those.
Mariel: Yeah, the cutting people off phenomenon. I've been observing together with you, and I have also noticed a burgeoning of that approach in a way that actually further promotes toxic aloneness and really feeds the loneliness epidemic that we're also facing. And it to me feels like estrangement is almost kind of like a last resort once we have exerted our efforts to actually unify and connect with the people that are a part of our line. And very often people engage in estrangement without first engaging in the tools to actually forge connection. And they may be over reliant on boundary setting without any kind of scaffolding and structuring around the boundary setting. It's unfortunate for several reasons because of that experience of disconnecting families in a very profound way, and we're meant to be communal people that are interdependent with the people around us. And of course, I understand that some families may have experiences that are beyond repair. So just to honor that, yes,
Aviva: Yes, absolutely.
Mariel: But there are some experiences that I have seen that do have opportunity for repair in my own practice, in my own life, and we just aren't filtering enough of the tools into individual's lives to be able to actually forge that connection in a way that feels sustainable and then also temper their expectations because we tell people go enforce boundaries, and we forget to help them through what that actually looks like in the long-term, what that looks like in their body as it's manifesting as stress, because they're actually having to almost work with a lot of resistance that they weren't prepared for.
And so all of that is a part of the journey that I don't think we're bringing more nuance to, which is an unfortunate disservice that we're doing to a lot of families because they're coming now into these spaces with their family members during holiday seasons in which they are suffering and struggling, whereas they could have just been offered some of the tools that could have helped to buffer the experiences that they're having
Aviva: As a physician who's also a midwife, I'm working with people who are planning to get pregnant, who are pregnant and who are new mothers all the time. Sometimes I think even when people have done so much of the work, it's when you become a mother that a whole new level of awareness of it rises up again because now you're having to call on aspects of yourself that are being challenged by constant fatigue, overwhelm, but also you may not have had the skills that you need because they weren't given to you to now take care of this little one. And your old responses run the risk of coming up, and that's natural too. Moms lose it with their kids, stuff happens. Part of this is also as conscious mothering has become more mainstream, more and more mothers are really scared about messing up their kids. I know I had this, I became a conscious mom a long time ago, really trying to raise my kids within this framework of awareness that I had early on from that Stanislav GR paper I read about passing on trauma, and it's a beautiful thing to be able to be aware of these things, but it's also a tremendous burden that can cause a lot of anxiety for mothers. Also, if we're still living from the trauma and not being aware of that, we can unwittingly pass on anxieties and trauma.
So how can you speak to mamas who are just trying to heal, trying to do their best, trying not to pass on the trauma and at the same time help relieve that burden of weight of that responsibility too.
Mariel: Well, I always say that being a cycle breaker parent is doubly hard, but you achieve double the reward as you go through the process because you not only see yourself in the process of feeling lighter, but you also see the reflection of the work that you're doing in your children. And that is something that instills kind of like a double layered pride in a lot of mamas.
I have a lot of moms, a lot of parents that come to me and say, I'm afraid that I may have passed on something to my child. How do I ensure that I didn't? And typically what's happening in that moment is that that parent is sitting in fear. And what I oftentimes like to almost kind of remind them of is the fact that you sitting in fear is actually going to be taking away from the time that you can be focusing on attuning to child to their needs, to your needs, to the ways in which the two of you can bond and connect. Instead, that worry is going to be what's present and what's really central in your relationship. It may be hindering from you actually doing something that can be harmful, but it's not going to forge deeper connections, which is I'm sure what a lot of moms would desire.
So sometimes when I say that it almost kind of helps a mom almost say, you know what, yeah, that's a bit of wasted energy. I can understand how I may be concerned about that because I do desire the best for my child and better than what I even obtained for myself. But me hyper-focusing on the possibilities is actually not going to be as helpful. Me focusing on what I can do now can be more helpful, which for moms across the board, typically regardless of age range, as long as we're talking still about children, there's so much that you can do that can actually be healing both for yourself and your child.
There can be things that mamas can do when they're, as I call them, pre-emptive cycle breakers, because I adopted that language from one of my clients who was preparing herself for motherhood, had not yet conceived and was doing the cycle breaking process ahead of the game. But then the predominance of the clients that I've worked with have actually been moms that are already moms and have their babies and have multiple children, and they themselves were able to actually work through different ways in which they could engage their children in the healing journey and make it an intergenerational healing process rather than a process where they just work on themselves for their children, they're working on themselves with their children, and that's something that can be done with the energy that you would've used to actually worry.
Aviva: So it sounds like stepping out of the fear, stepping out of the anxiety, stepping out of freeze or fawn or flee, and looking at the ways those behaviors can show up in motherhood, we can become people pleasers to our children or fawning to our children or fight or flee or any freeze and being really present in the moment with how I can shift this right now
Mariel: And engaging in activities with children. When I used to work with families, I used to have family sessions, and in the family sessions we would actually do mindfulness activities that were specific to the family. I would gather some details from the families themselves about things that specifically the child loved, but maybe that the family loved doing together. And then I would tailor the intervention to actually fit the family. And that way there was something that felt familiar, felt grounding, but felt connecting.
One of the families that I worked, we would actually have dance parties inside the therapy room and that most therapists don't necessarily engage in practices like that, but there's so much that's actually happening from a relational place, from a neurological place, from a distressed tolerance perspective that actually is filtering into the therapy room through that intervention. And that can also create almost like a practice that the family can then do at home that can also be further promoting health across the generations. And so that moms can really get into, and I think that that's what I'm talking about, really shifting from, oh my goodness, what have I done, or could I have done? And that energy, which is valid, it's so valid, but transitioning from utilizing our emotional energy for that into utilizing it for actual action that can benefit both generations.
Aviva: I love that. And then always the reminder to come back to self-compassion and grace when you forget to do all that and you just lose your shit or whatever happens that moment. And as you said, there's the opportunity to get back to repair more quickly too.
Mariel: Yes, yes.
Aviva: Your book is full of practices, self-reflection exercises. I started to read it as preparing for the podcast and I was like, oh, no, I need to read this. This is work I need to do right now. I even did my pledge in my journal to be a cycle breaker. It feels like starting again with new tools. One of my favorite practices in the book is the three empty chairs, and I learned the empty chair practice when I was studying medicine and psychiatry. I love that frame of looking at the intergenerational part, your higher self. So the book is full of just such a wealth of tools that anyone who's working on any trauma, even if you don't think it's intergenerational, but you're just wanting to understand your own human responses better, and certainly anyone who is becoming a mom or is a mom, grandmothers who are listening, I highly encourage you to read this because as our daughters are approaching their own motherhood or coming in just in a world that's more trauma aware, us being aware and speaking the language and being able to listen and hold space is also part of that healing process.
You use a phrase in the book that I absolutely love, love. It just gave me chills when I read it, and this is the concept of creating an upward spiral. And you talk a lot about building nervous system resilience around this. Can we talk just briefly about this upward spiral?
Mariel: Yes. I think that of the most beautiful things that we have as part of the human condition is resilience and resilience that is multi-generational is passed down resilience that is really always there and can be built upon. Science is now telling us that we have an opportunity to also regenerate our nervous system and have our nervous system in essence work more in our favor based on the practices that we instill in our day-to-day life. So I always like to almost kind of nudge people in the direction of building a holistic lifestyle more than actually just throwing in a couple tasks throughout the week to do, just baking that into their life, into their children's lives, engaging in more mindful action even when they're making their coffee in the morning that perhaps you're really kind of like maybe smelling the coffee first and taking in the aroma and then looking at the drip of the coffee and really just small moments that I understand we don't always have, but if we can just start baking those in time and again into our lives, we can start building the resilience that we need in day-to-day life to help us to increase that window tolerance as we called it, like that pocket of time that we gain that response time that we gain, which is so helpful in building our internal pride.
It helps us build better health and wellness for ourselves and also for the people around us. In essence, the upward spiral is just, it's created through the day-to-day activities that we engage in that help us to also build a nervous system that is working in our favor rather than against us.
Aviva: We can literally reset our cortisol, our adrenaline, rewire what's firing together, and it can happen with consistent little, tiny practices. It doesn't have to be sitting on a meditation mat for an hour. It can be these little mindful moments, and I really love that There's actually a saying, and I can't remember if it's Viktor Frankl who said it, but between action and reaction there is that space and learning to become more aware of that space for me right now has become a profound practice. What is that space between what's activating me and where I go with it? And it's really been transformative.
Marie: It's such a gift that we can give ourselves, and it's a gift that we can also model to the children in our lives where they actually can see us pause for those two seconds, be reflective and even engage in a process where we're bringing them into that reflection. We can say in those two seconds, I want to say that differently. That's two seconds. And from there, we can not only engage in whatever behaviors or words or language that we use that actually coincides with us building a better legacy, we also get to model that to them.
Aviva: Do you have advice for families who are trying to find a therapist who's not just trauma-informed, but who works with families to heal the impacts of intergenerational trauma? My guess is you may end up creating the department for this because I know it's not there, and your book is such an incredible gift for people who can't or don't have the resources. I know mental health is so literally out of pocket in this country right now. But what thoughts do you have?
Marie: Yeah, it's part of the reason why I made this book an actual guide to healing because I wanted individuals who themselves identify as cycle breakers to be able to utilize the healing tools and for it to be accessible to all, but also as a way for clinicians and healers to also learn from the practices within to then integrate into their own practice so that they wouldn't have to be like the clinician that I was that many years ago where I was stuck in session. And so, my hope is that clinicians will also pick up this book and integrate it into their practice.
But there are a scattered few individuals that are out there that I've seen sometimes on social media that do have open practices and do work from an intergenerational perspective. And I think that they can be found and sometimes doing a Google search, I think people can be found. There are very, very few right now, so I just want to forewarn people and also let people know that sometimes there are people that work with somatic healing that can be a really great resource as well, and very often do have some element of intergenerational healing work that's interspersed in their own practice as well.
Aviva: One of the resources that I often use with my patients who are around the country or people who ask me is also Psychology Today, because you can search it by your zip code, you can put in, I want a female therapist, I want someone who does somatic work, somebody who does EMDR, all the different things. Intergenerational trauma is not in there, but trauma focused healing is. Do you feel like that's a good resource as well?
Mariel: I have to apologize on behalf of the psychological world that we're just not in a place where we can literally say, you can go here directly and you'll find something. It's just such a disservice.
Aviva): I'm apologizing on behalf of the medical world for that all the time. I feel like I jokingly say it's like I'm giving out instructions for building an IKEA bookshelf, but then people have to go find the wood at one hardware store, then the allen wrench went somewhere else, or maybe they can't even get it. It's really hard, but hopefully in a few years we won't have to say that anymore.
Mariel: I really hope so.
Aviva: Yeah.
I have one question that I love to ask each of my guests, and that is if you could tell your younger self anything, what age would she be and what would you tell her?
Mariel: She would be eight years old, and I would tell her, you belong and have a powerful voice that you're going to use one day. So just believe in that.
Aviva: Everyone here is Dr. Mariel's book. For those folks who are listening and not looking, it's Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma, and Mariel, for the folks who are not going to go look at the show notes where we will have all of your details, can you tell everyone the best places to find you?
Mariel): Yes, absolutely. It would be @drmarielbuque.com, and I'm also on LinkedIn where I spend a lot more of my time, and my book is also listed on there, and it can be found anywhere books are sold.
Aviva: Thank you so much for this beautiful conversation and just bringing your beautiful self to the world in the way you are. I appreciate you so deeply.
Mariel: Thank you.
Aviva: Yes, you are so welcome, and I look forward to further conversations and seeing these intergenerational healing curricula and departments that are so needed on so many levels. So, thank you again, and thank you everyone for joining us. I know you've been inspired and moved and have many little takeaways, and there are so many more takeaways in Mariel's book and beautiful exercises and practices and moments of self-compassion. So, get the book, hang out with her more, and thank you for joining me.
Mariel: Thank you so much for having me.
