Welcome to Sheeper Assisted. I'm your host Sadie Sutton, a 19
year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania. Sheeper Assisted is the teen
mental health podcast made for teenagers by a teen.
In each episode I'll bring you authentic, accessible and
relatable conversations about every aspect of mental Wellness
you can expect. Evidence based teen approved
resources, coping skills including lots of DBT insights
and education, and each piece of content you consume.
She Persisted offers you a safe space to feel validated and
understood in your struggle while encouraging you to take
ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.
So let's dive in. This week on She Persisted.
One of the things that is most critical in the work around
generational trauma is to 1st work on regulating the nervous
system. With that, you are creating an
emotional foundation of greater strength to be able to then do
some of the digging. Work into those past wounds in a
way where you don't feel like you're trying to crawl out of
your own skin because you feel so incredibly emotionally
overwhelmed. Hello, hello and welcome back to
She Persisted. I'm so excited you guys are here
today. It has been a crazy couple of
weeks, almost have grad school apps submitted, but things are
busy busy. Hence the adjusted release
schedule of She persisted. But we have a really exciting
conversation today that I know you guys are going to love and
learn so much from. We have Doctor Marielle Bouquet
on the podcast. She is a first generation Black
Dominican psychologist, a world renowned intergenerational
trauma expert. She's the author of Break the
Cycle and she is a Columbia professor.
We talked about so many things in this episode, but I really
wanted to make this episode like a foundational first stop shop.
Everything you need to know about what generational trauma
is, how that might apply to you, how you can support others
navigating generational trauma, and I really hope you would get
that. In this interview, we talked
about what generational trauma is, how it works, if it varies
by siblings, how being born with generational trauma can affect
you, ways to prevent it from negatively impact affecting you.
What it means to break the cycle.
Supporting others when they're navigating their own journeys,
navigating those intense emotions that can arise when you
are doing the work to break the cycle, how to lower stress and
boost emotional safety, and then also where to begin if you are
breaking trauma cycles. So really everything you need to
know to start your journey is in this episode.
And this was just such an incredible conversation.
So grateful to have had this conversation with Doctor Bouquet
and I hope you guys love this as much as I did.
We'll dive in. But as you guys know, if you
enjoy the episode, share with a friend or family member, tag me
that she persists to podcast all the things.
I hope you guys are having a good fall.
And with that, let's dive in. Thank you so much for coming on
Sheep Assisted. I'm so excited for this
conversation and to pick your brain about all things
intergenerational trauma. I think it's something that
young adults are starting to become aware of, but it's not
something that they fully understand.
So I'm really excited to get your insight and expertise in
this conversation. And I'm so excited to join you
in this conversation, especially, you know, in in
talking about the incoming generation and ways that we
could proactively learn about generational trauma.
So thank you for having me. Of course, to get things
started, I would love to hear a little bit about your background
and how you came to be an expert in generational trauma and work
in the mental health space. Yeah.
You know, working in the mental health space is actually
something that happened a little bit more by happenstance.
I was volunteering while I was still an ad executive in New
York for a couple years. And in that volunteer work, I
actually realized that being able to help folks from the
perspective of mental health was an option which I didn't
actually know prior to. And it was something that, you
know, it just became cemented in me of wanting to do.
But Fast forward into when I was then getting my clinical
training, a lot of the training and a lot of the clients that I
had the pleasure of working with was centralized around trauma
and centralized around generational trauma.
But we were actually not using that language because it's such
a new language within the field of mental health that we weren't
necessarily like really understanding that that's what
we were working with in the room.
We in essence, just thought, OK, there's this person that's been
depressed for decades, but not really realizing that there's a
root to that depression. There's something that's
happening that's feeding the depression and not allowing it
to subside. And so that's when I started
becoming really curious about what else is there that we're
not naming and we're not working through that.
That's going to be really essential to create sustainable
healing. For people that are not familiar
with generational trauma, can you explain to us how that
works, how far back it goes? And then we'll talk about
breaking that cycle. But how do you define
generational trauma? Yeah, generational trauma is the
only type of trauma that can actually be passed down the
family line, as far as we know. And it happens at the
intersection of our biology and our psychology, meaning that
within our biology, we can have a parent or two grandparents,
great grandparents and distant ancestors who have actually
suffered traumas within their own lifetimes.
And if that trauma had not found a point of resolution to to some
extent, to an extent that they were able to live in greater
peace than not, then it's likely that it could have shown up in
their genetic encoding in their gene expressions.
This is where we kind of like have an understanding of the
seals of epigenetics, which means that our social
environments can actually drive our genes to turn on or off
specific tags depending on what's happening to us.
And if all of that is happening right, then these gene
expressions transition, they change.
And upon conception, the next generation that inherits gene
messaging that is reflective of the pains of the past.
And now Fast forward to everything that happens after
we're born. This is where the psychology
part comes in. And if we're born into a home,
maybe where there's emotional chaos, it's rampant and
relentless. Or if we have a parent or two
who themselves are living in trauma and aren't really
attuning to us. Or if we have, you know, an
experience of bullying in school.
Or if we have a turbulent relationship that has toxic
elements. Or if we have a pandemic that we
had to struggle through and really suffered a number of
losses through it. All of this then factors into
our psychology and what now with this, you know, emotional
vulnerability that is biological.
It can get triggered into being a trauma response and then
making us now the new bearer of generational trauma.
For listeners that have siblings, is generational trauma
going to be consistent for each child or is it more dependent
on, like you said, that psychology, those subjective
experiences of what people go through?
What an excellent question. I really appreciate discussion.
And although we don't have really a ton of like sibling
studies, there's a lot of studies like in the field of
psychology, which I'm I'm sure you already know, that have twin
studies especially. And twin studies are used in
order to really kind of have an understanding of what transpired
that could have impacted one child versus the other.
But what you're saying is indeed true.
A person's circumstances and their own capabilities will
factor into how a person internalizes trauma versus not
because we can have one sibling that is in a really turbulent
and dysfunctional relationship that could upend their life and
the other sibling have a series of healthy relationships that
don't actually trigger that trauma response.
So it is contingent upon the person's social environment.
But what we do know is that biologically, it is likely that,
you know, two individuals coming from the same womb and the same
kind of genetic makeup could have a similar genetic or at
least like biological process. I'm curious what this looks like
if you are like, aware that you have a history of generational
trauma in your family. When we hear trauma, we often
think of PTSD, or we think of doing trauma work or unlearning
these belief systems. But if generational trauma is in
the picture, are people more likely to be depressed or
anxious? Does it show up in
relationships? Maybe it's emotional
sensitivity? What are you like, predisposed
for? I guess that would be the best
way to explain it if generational trauma is something
that's in the equation. You know what we look at
generational trauma. We're not only looking at those
biological vulnerabilities, which of course, you know, could
make us predisposed to a host of things.
But the the ones that we have, the more concrete research on is
the predisposition to PTSD. Which means that there is a
likelihood that the hormonal makeup that is in our bodies,
even upon birth, that that is already structured a certain way
to make it so that we may experience stress more potently
and therefore potentially have that transform into PTSD
symptoms in our lifetime. Now, when it comes to
generational trauma, there's also, like I mentioned, that
psychological aspect of it. So we're also looking at the
ways in which there's been potentially modeling within a
person's home where there may have been one or two or several
family members that have actually had, let's say,
codependent qualities. And those codependent qualities
were modeled. And because they were modeled,
especially at such a young age where we're ingesting socially,
you know, kind of how to be based on what we're seeing the
adults do and say in our environment, then it's a greater
likelihood that we'll have that, you know, PTSD symptomatology.
But coupled with that, we'll also have codependent qualities.
And the same goes for a host of other kinds of interpersonal
qualities that are also situated in, you know, relational trauma
especially. Before we get into breaking the
cycle and doing the work so that this pattern of generational
trauma doesn't continue, would love to know what your thoughts
are on. I guess preventative work would
be the question, Like if you aren't necessarily experiencing
similar patterns of codependency or you aren't seeing symptoms of
PTSD, but you're aware that there's a history of
generational trauma in your family.
Are there certain like resilience factors that can make
you less likely to experience these kind of, I guess, examples
of generational trauma in your own life, Things that you can
do, whether it's relationships or coping skills, belief
systems, things like that? Excellent question.
So one of the most important and effective mitigating factors
against trauma surfacing in our lives, especially when we're
still children, is to have at least one adult in our lives
that is persistently there, present and supportive.
So even if we have that experience of that bully in
school, that there is someone that's there who we can have a
candid conversation with who can also show us that they can
protect us and help us. So it's really important to note
that because the relationship that we have with a safe person
can really be helpful in us not then obtaining symptomatology
for the long term. But there are also a number of
different things that we can be doing both as a society and as
individuals in order to help mitigate trauma or to at least
ensure that we're getting ahead of it.
First and foremost, really kind of as a society, I think it's
really critical that we start having very candid and
intentional conversations about how to talk about trauma in the
school system, in health Ed, in other aspects of, you know,
sometimes we're like in history lessons and we're not talking
about the trauma that has been suffered by the individuals that
were a part of that historical event.
And so things like that, that that I think can be incredibly
helpful in US obtaining the language prior to even ever
needing it is a part of that proactive, you know, kind of
like agenda that I think is really essential from the
perspective of, you know, an individual.
One of the things that we have not been taught to do is to have
body attunement since we're little and very often you see,
especially right now, I think us millennials are are definitely
in a place where we are enacting a lot of ways to actually help
us to absolve the pains of the past by tuning into our bodies
for the first time. Because we were never taught in
the education system with within our homes, no one's ever taught
us to have body awareness, body attunement and body regulation
practices within our day-to-day. And I think it's such a
disservice that you know it. I can't even call it a
disservice because quite frankly, somatic psychotherapy
and somatics in and of itself hasn't really made its way into
the Western world until really very recently.
But I think that what we can do with that information, with the
understanding that that can be a helpful set of practices that
can really help a person to gain like emotional resilience.
I think that we can have greater conversations about it to
intersperse it into our daily lives, make it more of a
lifestyle change that we could TuneIn with our bodies when
we're having a conversation and see how we're taking in that
conversation from an emotional perspective.
If we could do more of that, even in a proactive way, it can
be incredibly helpful in helping us to feel more settled within
our own emotional experiences. Yeah, so breaking the cycle, I
think this is one of the things that people are probably most
aware of because it's quite a hot topic on social media.
I was on TikTok yesterday. You've probably seen this before
where it's like you have the three glasses and it's
grandmother, mother, child, and then you're like pouring the
water and it's like this is you breaking the cycle.
Everyone is is talking about this, but I think there isn't as
much of A nuanced understanding of what this actually means and
what that that work looks like and what that impact looks like
for future generations. So for people that aren't
familiar, what does it mean to break the cycle?
And is that possible? Because we did talk about this
biological piece. Yeah.
You know, breaking the cycle means that you are going through
the number of patterns that are present not only in your family,
but many times in your community and even in the larger society
and deciding to actually take on the really, really arduous and
complicated task of no longer perpetuating those cycles
forward. And that can mean a host of
things, right? But cycle Breakers just know
that the status quo of how things have been can no longer
be maintained and things need to change.
So if that status quo is that, you know, hitting kids in the
home being just a cultural norm or, or even a family norm,
understanding for yourself that that is no longer a norm, that
will be persistent within your family line because you are
cutting the cord. You are breaking the cycle of
hitting children and, and sending them into, you know, a
psychological spiral. So it, it can look like that and
it can look like, you know, kind of in a, in a more community
based way. It can also look like maybe
educating community members on the fact that physical
retribution upon a child can actually have very long standing
effects. And it isn't, you know, helpful
or healing or even conducive of learning, which is usually what
people want for a child to change their behavior and learn
alternate behaviors. And their brain is, is not
actually comprehending that because their brain is in
survival mode. So, you know, there, there are
ways that we can kind of enact break the cycle protocol within
our own life from an interpersonal or family based
perspective by looking at the patterns that we wish to disrupt
within our families. But we can also extend that
forward into our communities. We can do like some of the
volunteer work that I did, right?
And like do psycho education to community members in community
members could even be your friends, right?
And just like sharing details with your friends, like, oh, I
read this book or I heard this podcast and it was really
informative as to, you know, the ways that I need to enact change
within my own life. Maybe this is something that's
applicable to your life and to your family.
Let's talk about it. And that's already community
work because you're extending the work forward.
So it's really important for us to consider those different
layers of how we can break cycles.
I'm really curious about how this looks when you have a close
relationship with your family, but you're also trying to do
this work. You've spoken to so many people
about this. You have, I'm sure, supported
many people through this process as well.
Are there challenges that arise when one individual is trying to
break a cycle? And I'm sure parents perceive it
as like you're saying I did something wrong or you're saying
that I've failed as a parent. I'm sure there's tension that
arises there, especially if maybe the child is really ready
to do the work. The parent isn't in the same
headspace. How do you recommend that people
navigate that? Yeah.
You know, this is one of the toughest parts of breaking
cycles. It's like having the difficult
conversations with people that we love, who we wish to maintain
a relationship with, but who we understand has also potentially
perpetuated harm, even if they weren't aware of the fact that
their own behaviors were harmful.
And one of the things that you just said is actually a guiding
post in those conversations, which is us being able to say
and acknowledge. I know you did the best you
could. I know that you had only a
limited amount of tools. And I had this vast Internet and
the podcast world and books and language and research studies
that are prominent right now in my generation.
And all of these hosts of tools and skills and therapy that
actually helped to reorient me around how to behave differently
in a way that isn't as harmful as it has been within our
family. And I think that what can also
be helpful is being able to, again, with that elements of
compassion, being able to say, I can tell that you suffered a lot
in your childhood too. I can tell that something
happened that was hurtful and harmful and not helpful.
And you know, my heart is open to listening.
And I think that that's the bridge, right?
Like these are the things that can actually create healthy
conversation, rather than the conversation feeling like it's
pointing fingers in any direction because that's just
going to erect walls and everybody's going to feel
invalidated, not supported, and not seen in the conversation.
Yeah. I think one thing that can be
challenging about this conversation that maybe people
are less excited about having these conversations on a
day-to-day basis. Obviously we still have a lot of
mental health stigma, so. We're not having these
conversations in line at Starbucks or whatever it is.
But I also think there's that element of we all have these
different families of origins and lived experiences.
And like you were saying, there can be that gap that needs to be
bridged between, OK, I didn't necessarily have that lived
experience, but I want to support you in doing this work
and I'd love to understand and I'd love to be there as a
support system. Do you have any advice for
people who are in that position where maybe they have a friend
or an extended family member or significant other who is going
through this work? They're trying to break
generational trauma, but this person maybe doesn't have the
family of origin with a similar experience, or they just can't
pull from their own experiences when validating and empathizing.
Yeah, I find that it can be incredibly helpful to create a
community, even if the community is a one person community and
meaning like another person with you that can actually hear you
out, understand your journey, potentially walk that journey
with you. I oftentimes speak to even the
ways that when I entered this work as a human, as a person, as
me, as Mariel rather than Doctor Mariel, helping others to walk
through this path when I was doing it myself, I decided to be
a cycle breaker, Co cycle breaker with my sister and with
my best friend. And separately, I would have
conversations with each of them about some elements of breaking
cycles, some way in which I was experiencing triggers from the
people around me that perhaps weren't ready to change and how
I could then find my way back to peace.
And I think that that was helpful to have that support
system. But the added bonus was that
because they were also breaking cycles, that I was also being
helpful to them. So it was very Co regulating in
a healthy, interdependent and not codependent way, while also
being very informative and in healthy and safe conversations
with people that I love and trust who were also willing to
go into that the spaces of vulnerability for themselves.
But even for me and with me to be able to break cycles together
together. I oftentimes tell people, if you
can find a Co healing partner, by all means, please, you know,
walk the path with them, share the resources with them.
If you're listening to podcasts, listen to them and and debrief
on them. If you're reading a book, read a
chapter at a time and then reconnect and and find your way
into the healing space with someone so that it doesn't feel
as lonely. Because loneliness can be very
traumatic. So we don't want to add trauma
to the trauma. We want to be able to create
places of safety, of emotional safety, in order for the trauma
to have a safe space to be felt. What do you do if those
challenging experiences or more traumatic experience, whether
it's loneliness or maybe there's conflict as you're navigating
this with family, any type of mental health work can bring up
lots of feelings and strong emotions.
What do you do and how do you recommend that people navigate
those intense feelings that arise throughout this process of
cycle breaking? Well, you know, it can be
helpful, of course, to have trained mental health
professional to work with. And I understand that's not
always a point of access for folks, especially right now with
the overburning of the system because the system wasn't
structured well beyond the pandemic to be able to support
as many folks as as need support right now.
But one of the things that is most critical in the work around
generational trauma. And I structured not only my own
therapy sessions, but also my book in this way is to 1st work
on regulating the nervous system, connecting to the body
in a way where you and your body are, you know, kind of in unison
in learning to default to safety more often than you default to
stress and trauma or trauma triggers.
And with that, with that season of learning how to regulate, you
are creating an emotional foundation of greater strength,
let's call it, right, emotional strength to be able to then do
some of the digging work into those past wounds in a way where
you don't feel like you, you're trying to crawl out of your own
skin because you feel so incredibly emotionally
overwhelmed. And so that is like step zero
really of doing generational trauma work is like really
understanding the ways and the mechanisms and the skills of how
to ground and then transitioning into the work.
But the beauty of then transitioning is that you now
have a mastery that's been obtained of the emotion
regulation skills. So that when you get into that
territory of my emotions are going, you know, into 789 of 10,
you have the skills that you'll need to regulate.
You mentioned defaulting into safety instead of stress.
I'm curious what that means to default into stress.
Is it mentally? Is it emotionally?
Is it like the way you're speaking to yourself?
And then what does that process look like of going to safety
rather than stress? Yeah, I think the default is
stress. What I mean by that is
defaulting to a nervous system state of alarm.
So going into, I know that there's expansions that are
happening even as we speak of like the different categories,
but fight, flight, freezer, fond, you know being like the
standing for. And if something happens that's
in front of us, for example, what we're going to use like a
benign example, benign enough, we lose our favorite pen.
This pen was gifted by someone that was, you know, very dear to
us and had our name on it. It was special pen.
Lost the pen. Lost it at the airport.
Can I get it? Of course it's going to bring up
a lot of emotions and even emotions that are very complex.
One might see it as a pen, but that pen carries an emotional
connection. That pen is also bringing up
loss and the the loss that's been, you know, present for us
for a very long time in reference to other things, loss
of people, loss of community, loss of, you know, not being in
our hometown and transitioning all the losses coming up, right?
And the trigger response is there and it's accumulating.
And that can be like the place where we tend to default to if
anything is lost. And let's say that the same
person really keeps a tight ship running on, you know,
controlling all the variables around their life in order to
never experience loss. So there's a lot that's
happening from the perspective of loss around this item.
And that's the place where, you know, we're defaulting to time
and again, what we're learning with the regulation work of
trauma is that we're learning then to process emotionally any
loss that happens around us, minimal or or big, but we're
processing it differently. So we're not going into full
emotional shutdown and emotional overwhelm.
Instead we may feel it may say, man, I'm really sad.
That sucks, but our body isn't like going into states of
dissociation, going into places where we feel a lack of safety
and we're really losing time and losing our connection to a
present world. So that's what I mean by going,
you know, into safety versus like that stress response, which
is more kind of like that nervous system response that
tends to overtake us. Yeah, you mentioned earlier that
we're in a really unique period of time because there's so many
resources, whether it's podcasts or books or research.
What are your recommendations for people that are beginning to
do this work and looking for more things they can consume but
not sure where to start? Yeah, I would first start with
learning more about yourself. I think it can be incredibly
helpful to do things that are. So it almost seems like it's
like 100 years back in time, but sitting outside for a moment
without our phones and just looking at trees and breathing
in fresh air. There's so much you can learn
about yourself in a moment where you sit in silence that is so
incredibly critical to your mental health that because we
are so over consumed with technology around us, we're,
we're not really allotting that time to, to really getting to
know ourselves in those moments. Someone could pass by and they
could have a Cologne that smells like the Cologne of a really
toxic ex, let's say, right? And your arms and your chest and
everything just starts tingling. And in that moment, you can have
a point of recognition of the fact that there is a trigger
that you can experience in reference to a smell.
But you wouldn't have otherwise like had that understanding if
you were, you know, hopping from 1 train to the next on your
phone. And you also had, you know,
music playing in your headphones.
And you're like moving. And there's so much happening.
You're not allowing yourself an opportunity to get to know
yourself in a way that is actually going to inform your
healing. Because later on in the healing
process, once we start doing the digging work, once we start
really reconciling some of those wounds, we're going to need that
data in order to understand what we need to work on.
Gotcha. I have really enjoyed this.
I think people are going to learn so much from this
conversation and I think there's just so much nuance.
But you explained it in a really digestible way, especially for
people that are beginning this journey.
If people want to continue to read your books and consume your
content, where can they do that? Well, they can find me at Doctor
marielbouquet.com and my clinical practice is break the
cycle of trauma.com. Incredible.
Thank you so much.