Ep 2 Book Club - 'What Happened To You'

The podcast episode discusses a book group as part of a human library that aims to explore and share information, connect with others, and create a community. The first book discussed was "What Happened to You" by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, which focuses on trauma, resilience, and healing. The book emphasizes the impact of traumatic experiences on the brain and offers strategies for managing trauma and supporting individuals. The review highlights the importance of understanding the impact of trauma and shifting from a focus on what is wrong with someone to what happened to them. It also emphasizes the significance of connection and community in healing trauma. The book group aims to connect people in the social sector and strengthen the social sector as a whole. Kia ora and welcome to the next episode of Belbert's Social Works Walk, a podcast for talking about all things social work-related, all things social, community, people, because that's what we're about, right? It is people that we are here to serve, to support, to help, to connect with, to create a community. In this episode, I'd like to talk to you about our book group. So every couple of months, we meet and we talk about a book, and the purpose of the book group is really as part of a human library that we explore and we share information and we connect with other people. So the human library is about bringing the heart back to the workforce, designed to create a community network that holds space for people to share, learn, and play. This podcast is part of our human library and so is our book group, where we can share knowledge, inspiring through connection. The human library is full of ideas and resources, found within pages and, of course, within each other. It is a space for connection, networking, and sharing of ideas, and our book club is a space for anyone who resonates with the co-author. It's a space where people can come and take what they need and leave what they don't. And our very first book club, we had just a couple of months ago, and the book was about what happened to you, conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing, a book by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, and it was a recording of a dialogue between Dr. Perry and Oprah Winfrey, who discussed trauma as a concept. The first few chapters of the book explain the impact of traumatic experiences on the brain over the formative years, and it goes on to talk about exactly what we can do around the resilience that people have in order to be able to manage trauma, and what we need to think about when we're working with people whose behaviour may be exhibiting the trauma that is within, and the questions that we can ask in order to be able to really be able to get to the source and be able to support them, help them, and enable them to move through that. And that's really just about understanding. So I'd like to start off by reading our book review that was written by Michaela Voth. She is our human library creator and coordinator of our book group. So this is Michaela's review on the book, and then I'm going to talk a little bit more about some specific parts of it. So our book group happened in June of this year, and as we know, we've had a pretty miserable start of the year, and that is, talking about the weather is exactly how this review starts. So, the month that's been has brought with it more dreaded rain for our region, and what feels like the start of a cold winter ahead. Although not good for already dampened spirits after the worst summer in history, the start of winter is encouraging of indoor hobbies, and nothing is more suited to a cold, rainy day than a cup of tea and a book. I managed to reread the entire What Happened to You Over the Space of a Weekend, literally not being able to put the book down. I've read this book once before, feeling inspired to pick up a copy after listening to a Brené Brown podcast, where Oprah was invited to share her book. At the time, I was just completing my Master's, and as much as I enjoyed the read, I couldn't quite relate to the book as much to social work practice, specifically, and more generally working with traumatised people, I'd not realised the content's use and power in working with anyone who had experienced trauma in their life. Rereading the book has really encouraged me to examine the way I interact with anyone across my professional and personal life. I hope that the read encourages you to reflect in a similar way. As the title suggests, What Happened to You is a book recording the dialogue between Dr. Perry and Oprah Winfrey who discussed trauma. I absolutely love the explanation of how traumatic events in the past still shape your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour in the present. The book recalls how the painful experiences in childhood hurt us, make us feel unvalued, unloved, and at times unsafe. These experiences work to help us make sense of the world around us. Often people fail to recognise the way in which these beliefs contribute to behaviour. In shifting this understanding, we come to realise that behaviours at 20, 30, or even 50 years old are at times a direct result of experiences that we have had in the first thousand days of our lives. This explanation of the true impact of trauma influences what we should instead be looking at, not what is wrong with someone, but what happened to them, the entire premise and perhaps the major takeaway of the book. In asking what has happened to a person, a secondary positive consequence is that the shame and blame is removed from an individual. The principles of strength-based practice are scattered from the start to the end of this book. Post-traumatic stress is a term we're all familiar with, but what about post-traumatic wisdom, a term Dr Perry refers to throughout the book? Are we working with ourselves and others in a way that truly celebrates and promotes this? Individuals who experience trauma are not deficient or broken, but in fact resilient, powerful. In envisioning trauma in such a way, we're not trying to take away from the pain the trauma would have caused, but more so advocate for the fact that the brain is malleable and flexible. Once people can move through the pain of an experience, there is wisdom to be found and a powerful story to be told. I resonate with the messaging around how important connection is to healing trauma. Connection is a basic human need. We are social beings who need people wrapped around us. This book provides a basic three-step model in working with people who have experienced trauma. It is best to, at first, achieve regulation of the nervous system. Next, strengthen relationships. And lastly, move into a space of reflection and cognition. If someone is not regulated, they are unable to connect with others. If someone does not have a strong community wrapped around them, they are unable to process effectively and move into that higher-level thinking space. I think we expect too much of others in this way. When we are working in a trauma-informed lens, we should be working under this three-step model in respecting the basic human needs of a person. The emphasis on relationships is not a foreign concept in Te Ao Māori, which the book pays homage to. How incredible that our country's indigenous knowledge is so profoundly shared on the international stage. The book respects whānau nā tanga as a fundamental value for Māori. I personally have been taught to understand whānau nā tanga as building relationships with others. Historically, for Māori, different generations lived all together in family groups, and isolation of an individual was a foreign concept. The ill and frail were not outcast, but brought closer, the community accepting them and protecting them. Colonisation in Aotearoa is to blame entirely for the fragmentation of community, although this is a rant for another day. Working in a way that is trauma-informed and focused on connection is nothing new for many indigenous cultures. This is but an ancient concept. We can look to our ancestors and our ancestral ways to teach us more about community and how to develop this more fully in our world today. The concept of the healing power of community is exactly what we as a collective are trying to achieve through Bellwood. We know, fundamentally, that in supporting the social sector, we need, as a society, to improve the way we flock together. In establishing our human library, we want people to connect over shared experiences in the social sector and share knowledge with one another. If we are rich in relational wealth, we are able, as practitioners, to offer a more powerful enriching service to the individuals, whanau and community that we serve. We will have better contacts within the social sector to call on and network with when we need assistance. This is powerful. Once we have established a community around us, we should only be working more to strengthen the entire community, the network around our plants, the whanau we serve, and strengthen the inclusivity of the community for vulnerable people. That was a book review written by Mikaela Voss, as I say, she is the creator, the brain, the imagination behind our book group, and she started with What Happened to You as our very first book, and it really did prompt some very interesting conversations. I think we use terminology such as trauma very loosely these days. Everybody thinks of things as being highly traumatic. We talk about being traumatized based on a conversation that we may have had over lunch, and yet actually what does it mean to really experience trauma? What is that that we're actually exploring? And what I really enjoyed personally about the book was the understanding that actually two people can have the exact same experience or go through the same experience, but come out of it with very different impacts, very different outcomes, long-lasting imprints of that experience. In the interview with Dr. Perry, when he's talking with Oprah Winfrey, they talk about, for example, children experiencing a fire, and the fact that actually depending on the resilience of the person going through that experience, the outcome, the long-lasting effect on them could be very, very different, and a lot of that is around how the brain was formulated in the first 1,000 days. Dr. Perry has done an awful lot of work around explaining neuroscience, brain development, the impact of the first 1,000 days, and there are a lot of good trainings out there that I would thoroughly recommend. The Brainwave Trust does some fantastic training around brain development, neuroscience. There's a wonderful TED talk by our lovely Dr. Johan Rorau who was very influential in our community about understanding neuroscience. And those first 1,000 days, those first sort of three years of a child's life, as they develop those connections, those understandings, the brain is incredibly receptive to those experiences, that actually the environment that a child is living in, the experiences that they're exposed to, has a massive impact. Another conversation for another day, perhaps, is our understanding around our adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, and the impact that we know that when we have these adverse childhood experiences, we are much more susceptible to ongoing health problems. We know that multiple adverse experiences result in increased likelihood of experiencing heart disease. It can increase our likelihood of experiencing cancer, as well as things like addictions, drug and alcohol misuse, and various other health-related issues based on the experiences that we had in childhood that were unhealthy for us. I think, if I recall correctly, there is a quote I saw in one of the Brainwave Trust trainings that says that a child who is raised in a home where there is violence, their brain is better suited for living in a war zone than living in a peaceful country such as Aotearoa, New Zealand. When we understand the fact that brains have been wired to expect certain things, when we live in a space and we grow up in a space where we're fearful, where our upbringing is turbulent, unpredictable, we don't know what mood our parents or our caregivers might be in, we don't know what the behaviours are, our attachments are not secure, then when we go to school or when we engage with other relationships in our lives, it's no wonder that those interactions come from a space of being guarded, of being reactive. When we know that we've got children who are raised in homes where there is physical abuse, when you walk past someone and you move suddenly, their instinct, their reaction, their expectation is for harm to occur, and so the behaviour starts to exhibit that. And so really this book talks about having an understanding around the experiences that have created that brain development, that neuroscience, the connectivity, the way in which we respond, our resilience levels to certain circumstances. Because all too often, especially as we grow up and we start to work in the adult world or we have adult expectations on our behaviours, it is the behaviours that are seen and not in fact the understanding as to where those behaviours came from or why in fact we've developed those behaviours. And the older we get, the more challenging it is for society, for community, for the people around us, whether it's teachers or colleagues or co-workers, to understand that actually our behaviour is a result of our experience. It is not about saying, what's wrong with you? Or what's going on for you? Or what's your problem? It's saying, what happened to you? How do we understand what your experiences you've had that have shaped the way you see the world, that have shaped the way that your brain is wired, that means that these behaviours are exhibited almost in order to keep you safe. And so I think when we really understand trauma from that lens, when we understand that concept of resilience around being able to protect ourselves in a space where we are used to that adversity, then we understand a little bit more around saying, well, what happened to you? What is your why? Why are these behaviours here? Not just how do I respond to these behaviours? So some of the questions that we talked about in our book group, because we had these reflective prompts, what does trauma-informed care mean from your perspective? And I think it's really important to actually think about trauma-informed as a phrase. Like I said, we tend to use words a lot and we become a little bit desensitised to them. We become a little bit, they become a little bit sort of rote in terms of our understanding and everything nowadays says we're trauma-informed. But what does it actually mean to be informed by trauma? And what does it mean to actually understand and deliver in a way that really looks at the impact of trauma? We think about actually within our world, what understanding, what training, what exposure have we had? What conversations have we had that really look at the impact of trauma on the first thousand days in terms of our brain development? What actually is our understanding of knowing that one experience can have multiple different effects on every person who's had that experience? So while you have a group of children that have lived in the same home, or a group of people who've gone through the same experience, as I say, Dr. Perry and Oprah Winfrey talk about a school having a fire. Every child in that school who's gone through that fire, while it has been a traumatic experience and certainly very frightening, each of those children will actually internalise and embody and process that experience very differently based on their brain's capacity to process that information, based on their emotional capacity, their emotional resilience to understand what's happened to them. And as a result, the impact of that trauma, while it is shared trauma, the impact of that trauma on each individual person is indeed very different. And so when we say we're trauma-informed, what does that actually mean? How do we actually think that looks in terms of how we practice? How much time do we spend talking with the families that we work with around their understanding of trauma? Do we actually ask people, what happened to you? And do we have an understanding as to how they have interpreted those experiences? And how those experiences show up to them in their lives today? On YouTube, there are some fantastic interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Perry. They did a lot of, obviously, publicity around the book when it came out. There's some interviews with them on Dr. Oz. There's interviews with them on Brené Brown's podcast. There's a lot of information on YouTube. And it's really interesting to hear them talk about their own experiences and what that means for them in terms of the behaviours that still occur today. How we were raised, how we were parented, what happened in our upbringing still plays out for us as adults. Of course it does. And often we parent the way we were parented, and we still have things that have been bad experiences for us, and we still exhibit those behaviours. And most of us are able to attune in such a degree that actually we can still operate safely in our adult world without people really being too exposed around what are those kind of idiosyncrasies, what are those behaviours that are exhibiting as a result of some of our experiences. We operate within a kind of slightly normalised space. But for people who have had a considerate amount of trauma, and that trauma is indeed very personal to that person, what does that actually look like, and how does that show up, and how do we really work in a way that is trauma-informed? So I think that's a really interesting question for us all to think about. What does trauma-informed mean in terms of what we actually do around social work? What is our actual understanding of what it means to work in a trauma-informed way, and how can we continually improve our development and understanding around that? Another reflective question was, why is connection with others so important in the treatment of trauma? And again, I think that it's really critical because what Bruce Perry talks about is that we are social beings. What I love in simple terms is we do social work. We work socially. We work with people. We connect as people. People require community. We require connection. It is how we fundamentally establish identity. It is how we have a sense of belonging. It is a part of what feeds our purpose. It connects us in very simple yet powerful ways, that sense of connection. When we feel isolated, when we feel disenfranchised, when we feel disconnected, then that perpetuates a sense of trauma, of being not valued, of being not grounded in a sense of belonging. And that's a really unhealthy, unsafe, unwell place to be. And I think a big part of actually how do we enable people to be healthy is how are we healthy ourselves? As I've already said in this podcast, a big part of Bellbird was really around how do we connect ourselves, social workers, people interested in doing social work, social service, community work, youth work, teachers, health professionals. We all work in this space of service. How do we connect and support each other? How do we work as a community in order to be able to deliver effectively to Sharno, to our community? Quite often we are driven by organisations, we're driven by contracts, we're driven by a sense of difference, and we can be in ourselves, in our practice, quite isolated. We can focus just internally. People talk about working in silos. We can have some professional bias and some professional judgements where we have social workers who don't communicate with health professionals, who, you know, where does education fit in all of this? But actually, we are a community and it is that sense of connection that really enables the treatment of trauma. Because if we feel connected, if we feel a sense of belonging, you know, we talked about those three things that Bruce Perry says are so important in the healing of trauma, obviously emotional regulation, but connection, being embedded in a sense of belonging. And so how do we create that for ourselves? If we, as practitioners, are well, then we're able to help others become well as well. Excuse me. Another reflective prompt, what do you think the term post-traumatic wisdom means? Because we talk about post-traumatic stress. We talk about the negative impact of trauma after we've experienced it, and certainly there are many people out there who live through and experience trauma to such a degree that they have PTSD as a result of it. But what are the opportunities of learning in terms of post-traumatic wisdom? What does that mean to us? What are our opportunities for growth, development, and understanding that really come from exploring what trauma is? Because it is by moving through it that we can heal it. I think in Michaela's book review, you know, she talks about the fact that if we can get to a space of actually a higher level of thinking, if we have a strong community that is wrapped around us that enables us to be able to think clearly, to have a higher level of processing, to move away from that instinctive, almost animal part of our brain, the brain that is storing our reflexes around fight and flight, the part of the brain that is working completely on how do I keep myself safe, how do I manage to eat, to have security, those basic functions that we need in order to exist, if we're able to move to a higher level of functioning within our brain processing, if we understand trauma from that higher effective functioning space, we get to a space where we're actually able to start healing. We get to a space where we're able to start to explore how do we understand, how do we process what has happened to us, and we build a different framework, a different understanding within our brain that enables those behaviours that come out that are protective, that are instinctive, that sometimes are in that very kind of base level response, and we can create new ways of understanding, new behaviours, a new response to those triggers of our trauma. And that is the space of being in wisdom, that is the space of understanding what has happened, how we exhibit, how we manifest the impact of what has happened, and how do we reframe that in a way where we can say that actually those behaviours no longer serve us and we can work differently. I think it's a very interesting concept to frame trauma in a way, as a teacher, that we can learn wisdom from it, rather than just seeing it as something that causes us stress and has that negativity, because ultimately, part of our job, the therapeutic side of social work, the ability to be able to enable people to process their thinking, their behaviours, their feelings, to be able to move to a space where we're able to make healthier choices, have healthier thoughts, do healthier things, then that therapeutic part of social work is really where the magic happens, right? That's where we change that generational trauma, that's where we change our outcomes and we don't perpetuate this cycle of harm that can happen when we have unresolved trauma that sits within us. So we think about how trauma impacts our nervous system, we literally carry it in our physiology, we literally carry it in our brains, in our body, in our muscle memory, we carry it with us, and trauma can be passed down, trauma can be carried intergenerationally, it can be passed down through your papa-papa, so how do we break that cycle, how do we shift that neurological understanding of our trauma to a space where we're able to process it effectively and therefore change the way in which we work? So I think these are some really interesting thoughts that this book has provoked and I really wanted to share it with you because that is the purpose of our book group, our book group is to be able to come together and explore ideas, like I say these are just my thinking, this is my contribution to the book group, this was the review written by Michaela and I would really encourage you to go out and read this book, What Happened To You, because it does really reshape our understanding of how do we understand trauma and how do we create resilience, and what I love about it as well is that it is a conversation, it is understanding each other, it is connecting, it's being able to talk about it, and so that's exactly what our book club was about, so thank you for listening to me talk about this book, we do have our next book club coming up quite soon and we're going to talk about the book Body Keeps the Score, and we're really excited about that book, that is a book that is a non-fiction book, again it's about trauma and its effects on the body and the mind. The author, who's a psychiatrist named Bessel van der Kolk, draws on research and case studies to show how trauma can cause dissociation, PTSD, other symptoms, and he proposes strategies for healing such as eye movement therapy, neurofeedback, mindfulness yoga, and play. And so we also have some other things that are going on in terms of Bell Bird where we're exploring the concept of play and being playful, and really I think it's about how do we change up how we work, what does it mean for social workers when we're working in this trauma-informed way, how do we actually engage in that in our practice, what are we doing in order to be able to really affect change and enable people to feel empowered, to feel enabled, to feel resourced, to be able to understand themselves better, in order to be able to maybe make some different choices in their life. So thank you so much for listening to me and being part of our book club, and I'd love to hear any thoughts and feedback, so feel free to send us some messages once you've read the book, and you can let us know what you thought of the book too, and we look forward to catching you with our next book. Ka kite. Ka kite.