Healing From Family Trauma (with Mariel Buqué)

Family Proclamations: Exploring Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality

Your family is...loving? Your family is...hurtful? Your family is...all this and more? If you feel overwhelmed when you think about your family, this episode will help you understand your anxiety and give you evidence-based tools to repair it.

Dr. Mariel Buqué is a leading specialist in trauma psychology. She says our physical and mental health challenges can be rooted in family trauma passed down through the generations—not just culturally, but even biologically.

We're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.

Transcript

MARIEL BUQUÉ: My family is loving and hurtful. My family is nurturing and invalidating. They have a mixture of characteristics—and I myself have also been a part of how this family has operated, perhaps in dysfunction, for a multitude of years.

BLAIR HODGES: How do you feel about the family—or families—that you were raised in? Dr. Mariel Buqué says a lot of our current physical and mental health can be better understood based on how we answer this question. Dr. Buqué is a leading specialist in trauma psychology. She says a lot of families go through cycles of dysfunction, and these cycles are passed on, generation to generation—not just culturally, but even biologically.

She says understanding our trauma can help explain why some of us are people pleasers. Or why some of us find ourselves in codependent relationships. Or why we avoid relationships. Why some of us avoid forging our own families, or why we forge unhealthy wounds.

Dr. Buqué has been helping to develop cutting edge therapy techniques to address trauma to help heal minds, bodies, and hearts. Today we're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.

As you listen to various episodes of Family Proclamations, I think chances are you're going to hear things that touch a raw nerve. I've definitely experienced that myself as a host. I hope this episode provides some ideas about how to address those feelings, and maybe become a cycle breaker yourself.

There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges and this is Family Proclamations.

A KEEPER OF THINGS (1:52)

BLAIR HODGES: Mariel Buqué, it’s great to have you on Family Proclamations.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes! We're talking about the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. And this is one of the newest books that we're going to be covering, this one actually comes out in January of 2024. So first, I just want to say congratulations on the new book!

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you, I'm excited for it to be out in the world and for people to be getting their hands on it, and hopefully doing a lot of good healing from it.

BLAIR HODGES: It must be an interesting time, because you've spent so much time with this book already. And now it's coming out. So by the time it gets in people's hands, you're sort of like, “okay, like, I've spent so much time with it,” how does it feel?

MARIEL BUQUÉ: I keep telling people that it feels almost like that moment when a person who is about nine months pregnant is ready to just birth their child and meet them and have them out in the world. But also, because I just don't want to hold it anymore. I want everyone else to have it.

BLAIR HODGES: I do too.

Let's start by talking about how you personally used to be a keeper of things. And maybe you still are resisting this impulse. You describe hanging on to stuff even when you don't need it anymore, and that you even experience some guilt or fear when you think about throwing something away rather than finding some use for it.

Talk about being a keeper. What are some of the strange things you've kept in the past where you've been like, “Ooh, should probably get rid of that, but I can't!”

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Oh, my goodness, I haven't gotten this question. And it's such a good one, I appreciate it very much.

So, you know, the actual through line especially in my maternal line, my grandmother, my mother, we've had this way of actually keeping things, first to preserve them for anybody else that might need them even if they're not functional items.

And secondly, because of this terrible, terrible guilt of being wasteful. And it comes from there being a lot of scarcity in their lives, my life growing up, and feeling like if we don't keep every little thing no matter what it is that there's a likely chance that we might just be left with nothing. So it was just this irrational fear that was so profoundly ingrained in me.

And you know, as far as keeping you know—there's so many things but one thing that I find to be particularly interesting that I've been able to keep and use to the last little bit for years and years and years is actually a white sage that I have. I've had it for about—I've been burning almost the same three bunches for like five years.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh wow.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Which in part, I say it's a good thing because there's a lot around that plant that, you know, we're kind of over-utilizing it in on the planet. But I felt like that was like a such a curious thing that I continued to do, even though I'm still working on not being so much of a keeper, that I am so carefully preserving every last bit of everything. Even to this day, I have little things that I do still.

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how it comes from sort of a scarcity mindset; you mentioned poverty or need in your family’s history and how that kind of gets passed down. That's why I wanted to start off with this personal example of yours, because your book talks about how some of the things we experienced in our lives are directly connected to what we've inherited. What came before us. Our ancestors, our direct relatives.

I want to ask about—was it a mug that you broke?

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: My heart went out to you, because I used to have this small little drinking glass that was my mother-in-law's, and I made fun of her for it. I said, “Who would ever need a glass of that size?” And she said, “It's perfect for juice at bedtime.” And she since passed away and I started using that glass and fell in love with it. And I would drink a little juice before bedtime. And one day I dropped it and broke it. And it was terrible. Because she's gone. And now my glass is gone.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: I share the sentiment! Like, it still kind of makes me a little bit tender to even reflect on the fact that I broke that mug. Now, my grandmother, she lived in this—one might call it almost like a hut. It wasn't even a proper home. It had no indoor plumbing, you know, it was just this set of sticks really in the Dominican Republic. And for her to actually find a way to make this mug reach my home in the US was just like, I could tell the profound sense of love she had for me, that she did so much to try and provide me with a gift. And yeah, I felt an immense amount of guilt.

I felt also like I could never see the cup again, like it just it was gone, right? And so there’s this yearning for that part of my journey and my connection to her, to have been there. So actually, you know, I'm in the process right now of actually—I’m in a ceramics class, I'm actually going to create my own cup that in essence emulates the one that she gave me.

BLAIR HODGES: I like that.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, it's a way that I can visibly still stay connected to that cup. But it did make me feel a deep sense of guilt. And guilt is that general kind of, let's say, more common emotion that we tend to experience in my family. We're very guilt driven. We're very guilt motivated. We're a guilt people. And we understand that about each other, too. So sometimes, you know, we utilize guilt almost to kind of get each other to do certain things. [laughs] Some subconscious, some not subconscious.

But guilt has been so prominent, and it left me with this deep sense of guilt that was really hard to shake off for a number of years.

DEFINING INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA (7:22)

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so we've talked about this physical object that you inherited, this beautiful mug that's now gone, and also a sort of temperament or an inclination toward guilt that you inherited. We're talking about inheritance here. Your book talks a lot about trauma as an inheritance—intergenerational trauma. Let's hear a definition of that. When you're talking about intergenerational trauma, what do you mean?

MARIEL BUQUÉ: What I mean by it is, intergenerational trauma is the only type of trauma that is actually handed down our family line. It actually is at the intersection of our biology and our psychology.

If we come from individuals who have actually endured adversity—chronic adversity, specifically—that has led to trauma symptoms, and that they didn't get a chance to actually resolve those symptoms and lived with the experience of trauma for a long-standing period of time, that it would have actually made its way into altering their genetic encoding, or their genetic markers or genetic expressions, as they call them in a scientific way. And that, upon conceiving us, both parents would have transferred over that genetic makeup that would have also included some emotional vulnerabilities or predispositions to stress and trauma.

And then in comes everything else that life throws at us once we're born, which is our psychology. And if we're born into that family that perhaps is still under some sort of distress or trauma, and we're not feeling like our home environment, the initial home environment we grow into, is safe, or feels nourishing, or helps us to develop enough of an emotional foundation of connection and a sense of trust—which are basic elements of our foundational makeup—then we're gonna start developing symptoms of unrest.

And then everything else happens in life. We can go into the school system and get bullied, we can get into a really bad relationship and all of a sudden, there's toxicity and cycles of abuse that are part of our journey. We can actually suffer from having a marginalized identity. And so all of these things play into our psychology. And when they're matched with an already vulnerable emotional state that is there since birth, and even before of birth, then we have the recipe for what we call intergenerational trauma.

BLAIR HODGES: And it might sound unbelievable to some people, to think that something that could happen to an ancestor of mine, a stressor or some traumatic event, could literally be passed down. So later on, I want to unpack that biological inheritance and how that works, what the science says about it, so people can really wrap their heads around it.

But before we do, let's talk about trauma in general. Your book introduces us to the fact that there are big “T” traumas, the big ones, and the little “t” traumas. Give us some examples of these and how they're different from each other.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes. We bucket trauma into those two categories, big T, little T, capital T, lowercase t, there's different ways of referencing to it. But the big T traumas tend to be the kinds of traumas that actually threaten our sense of safety. They make it so we believe we may not survive the moment. Those kinds of traumas can be like theft at gunpoint, maybe getting into a car accident. It could also be the types of traumas that really hit hard and are very profound, like childhood abuse and neglect. Things like that tend to be like the bigger T traumas.

Now, the small t traumas tend to be experiences that unnerve us and unravel us, but don't necessarily threaten our sense of safety. A traumatic experience that would be categorized under small t could be perhaps losing a job and then entering into financial difficulties. It's not that your life is being threatened or that there is a critical moment in your infancy where there's a profound disruption. But there is enough of a disruption in your life so as to say you're living under some element of trauma.

Now, the thing about big T and small t trauma is that there are times when people suffer a big T trauma, and they experience enough nourishment, enough support and love in their lives—whether it's from a caregiver or other family members, community members, people that just hug you and care for you through those moments, and those symptoms can actually dissolve. And we can have somebody that has an accumulated, layered number of different small t traumas happening throughout their life that go on and addressed, and the layering of those can actually accumulate into really intense trauma symptoms.

So on both ends, it's really about not just what happened, but also, how were you taken care of through it? And then also, were there other things that were also tossed into the trauma bucket that could have made life a little bit more difficult to bear.

YOUR ALLOSTATIC LOAD (12:23)

BLAIR HODGES: The big term you use for this is “allostatic load,” it's sort of like all the stuff that adds up over time. I've also heard of “weathering,” a weathering thing. And I've heard this in racial studies where they talked about all the microaggressions that people of color might experience just add up over time to increase the likelihood of heart disease or chronic stress.

So what you're talking about are traumas that affect our emotional state, but they also affect our body. Talk about how trauma has not just psychological and behavioral consequences, but also some physical consequences in the way our bodies try to deal with stress.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: The allostatic load that you reference is actually the wear and tear meter of the body. And you know, neurologically, where we are actually formatted as humans to go through stress and then resolve that stress and then come out of it. Our nervous system is actually structured to be able to go into a state of alert if it senses there's some elements of danger in our environment. And once the danger has passed, then our nervous system says, okay, we can rest, digest, and calm, and we feel at ease, we go into balance, we call it homeostasis.

However, if we're not able to acquire that sense of balance on an ongoing basis—meaning that, for example, as you mentioned, individuals that experience racial discrimination on an ongoing basis, there is a little chance to actually recover from the last emotional injury or the last racial injury. And so then they go into yet another battle, and yet another situation, and yet another, and their nervous system—which is connected to all of their organ systems, which is connected to their brain, you know, it's all a part of one uniform system starts wearing down. And what happens is that the organs that are connected also start wearing down.

One example that I think is fairly common to offer is that of gastrointestinal discomfort. So our nervous system has endings that land right at our gastro tract. And so whenever we're in a state of alert and we sense that there's danger, our nervous system is actually partially shutting down non-essential functions, which includes the function of actually digesting food. So our actual gastro tract is constricted, in part. And so when we think about, for example, individuals that complain of symptoms that mirror irritable bowel syndrome, and we start looking into their history, and we started looking into the things they battle on a day-to-day basis, there are some correlates. We start seeing the fact that these individuals are suffering stressors and traumas on an ongoing basis. And sometimes, when we start addressing the trauma factors themselves, the so-called IBS symptoms tend to dissolve.

Which means that one, we're actually diagnosing physical conditions that are tied to stress, right, we're not actually addressing the stress, which is the root. And in addition to that, it's all one body. So it's interconnected. And that happens with many other things like a lot of cardiac issues have been mapped back to stress and trauma. A lot of autoimmune conditions have been connected to trauma in very specific ways. And even some cancers have had trauma elements, they’re stress-derived as well.

And so when the body is worn down, the body breaks down its own capacity to actually fight off any physical threat, meaning any cancers or any other conditions like viruses, or anything that may inhabit the body and then leave room for chronic illness to take root.

BLAIR HODGES: During COVID, the irony there is, the stress could make someone more susceptible, and we have to consider the ways that the pandemic itself was a trauma that could make people more likely to have their immune systems compromised because of the stress that the pandemic itself caused.

When I think about it in terms of family systems—you talk about family abuses that happen, it could be emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. And those can actually affect the physical health of the people that are encountering them, and not just in getting hit and being hurt from that. But as you said, in the way your digestion works, in your heart health, and your nervous system in general is really getting rocked.

People that grew up in these unsteady or difficult home situations are going to pay the price throughout their life. It's not necessarily the case, right, that someone can just get out of that situation and then go on with their life as an adult. What you found in your practice is a lot of people who are carrying ghosts of their family life with them, they're still haunted by those ghosts

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Very, very long into their adult lives. And it's something that tends to hurt at a very profound level, but tends to impact so many aspects of a person's life. People's relationships get impacted by their childhood experiences that are adverse. Their work gets impacted. Many times, we tend to see that people struggle with attentional difficulties that are really not a biological difficulty, like ADHD proper, but that the person is in essence, dissociating with higher frequency and as a result, not able to attend even to their job duties in the ways that they would have they not been in a state of trauma.

The way that people parent is very much impacted by the trauma factors in their lives. It is even said that—although we cannot say that parents who are individuals that have suffered childhood abuse in the past are going to, in essence, abuse their children. But the studies do show that there is a higher risk of those very same parents perpetuating the very same traumas they suffered. So as far as data is concerned, we do have data to support that. We have to really make people conscious and aware of how their past is impacting their present person, so they don't replicate those trauma cycles forward.

BACK IN MY DAY (18:39)

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, I want to talk about traumas and triggers. You talk about how different things can trigger a trauma. So you might have an interaction with a boss at work that triggers something in how you're related to a parent or a caregiver or a teacher from your youth, that triggers things. And your book describes the resulting trauma responses. Things like having a short fuse when you're stressed out, behaving in self-destructive ways, maybe a propensity to become addicted to substances, being chronically pessimistic, being jumpy, self-blame, self-loathing, a lack of being able to generate emotional intimacy.

These trauma responses are going to be familiar to a lot of listeners. And what I've heard, especially recently, is people complaining and saying, “Oh, all this talk about triggers and trauma is too much. People are just too fragile these days. We just need a tougher mindset. When I was growing up, we didn't have traumas and triggers, we didn't have to worry about it,” and so on and so forth. “You're all snowflakes,” whatever. And I’d just like to hear your response to that kind of criticism of, “Oh, even talking about this is just too weak, it shows fragility.”

MARIEL BUQUÉ: [laughs] Well, I have a lot of things I'd like to say that can help us to really understand that perspective, believe it or not. Because the thing about people—I'm gonna place the people that are saying things like that in older generations, right? Maybe like, we'll say boomers, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. [laughs] Glad you said it. I didn't have to. For all my Boomer listeners out there. It's all Mariel. Not me!

MARIEL BUQUÉ: [laughs] You know, just placing an example, for sure. But there is this idea that, well, you know, “I went through the same thing, I turned out just fine, you should be fine.”

And we have to also reroute to what the science is telling us. Science is telling us that, with each generation, we have an accumulation of an emotional burden that deposits itself into our minds and into our bodies. And that when it goes on unresolved, it just passes on, but it gets compounded. So when we're talking about people in other generations—and let's even say down to Gen Z, and even the generation that's coming after them, because I think a lot of the sensitivity talk is mostly geared towards them, we have to think about the fact that we—even the millennials and Gen X that have been parenting these children—a lot of us have been suffering, and have had a lot of traumas that we haven't resolved because they stemmed back generations. And also because we just didn't know, a lot of us didn't know and still don't know, that these traumas exist within us.

And as a result, the biggest risk with unresolved trauma is the risk of transmission. So when we're looking at these kids who are highly, highly anxious, some of them very, very depressed, they have their own global mental health crisis that's burgeoning at the youth level, and their suicide rates are ridiculously high, it's safe to say that the sensitivity they're experiencing isn't just coming from the fact that they all suffered a global pandemic. I mean, being a child in a pandemic, I can't imagine. But in addition to that, the fact that they actually have an accumulation of genetic material, of biological data that's in their own bodies that also produces that sensitivity.

I like to take it there, because we can rationalize back and forth with different generations about different perspectives. But when we start looking at the truth of how our bodies hold trauma, I think that gives us all an opportunity to hold greater compassion for one another, for the ways in which we're holding emotional pain.

BLAIR HODGES: This is the real value of your book, is that it's not focused on just the individual. I think a lot of pop therapy today can be really focused on the individual. Self-improvement, self-authenticity, finding your best self, being your best self. And it can even seem narcissistic at certain points, depending on the pop therapy that we're talking about.

But your book shows us that dealing with trauma and striving for self-improvement don't have to happen alone. And in fact, it's better to not think of them in isolation, because trauma is interpersonal and intergenerational.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes.

THE BIOLOGICAL TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA (22:57)

BLAIR HODGES: So as you said, it can be transmitted both biologically and socially. Let's now get more specific about that biological transmission. This is the part that I just didn't have a lot of knowledge on. And to learn about the actual science behind how trauma can get passed on really opened my eyes. Give us a sense of how that works.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: I'm gonna take us back, actually, to the moment in which our grandmothers were actually pregnant, and they were five months pregnant with a baby in their uterine wall that was a fetus that was developing. In that moment, as it were five months pregnant, the fetus, regardless of the sex, had actually developed precursor sex cells inside of the reproductive organs that would have eventually developed into being you. So at a specific moment in our lives at the very onset of our lives, when we developed into just one tiny, microscopic cell, we were living inside of our grandmother's womb, because we were three generations existing in one body—our grandmother, the fetus that was our parent, and then us inside of their reproductive organs.

And when we start looking at when we actually developed—because we believe that we developed in our parent’s womb, and we forget that there is a lot more biological data and even social data that we've been capturing from the environments around us well, before we were born, two generations prior, even, when our grandmothers were experiencing any kind of stressors, those stresses were actually filtering actual hormones like cortisol and other stress hormones into their bloodstream. And that was reaching the fetus inside of them, which was our parents, and eventually it would have landed onto us.

And so everybody in that one body, that intergenerational body, was experiencing that stressor, whatever it was, they were experiencing it. So when we start thinking about biologically, what is happening, what is transmitted, how are these things interconnected, it starts making a lot of sense.

And there's a lot more in the biology. I mean, I didn't get that technical in the book, because I thought it might overwhelm the reader. But there's also a lot of biological understanding from different points of expertise, different fields of study, that we understand that there's also some genetic material that's left behind in the grandmother when she gives birth. And then in the mother when she gives birth. So there's still genetic material that's tying each of these generations. So much is also implicated there in reference to what is happening intergenerationally, where there's this biological bond.

Now fast forward, to now. Let's say you're already born. And now you have a parent who maybe their way of coping through stress is to yell at you. They yell all kinds of things, right, in order to just release that stress tension. What happens to that—let's say you're three years old—to that three-year-old little nervous system that has to digest this yelling big human. That little nervous system starts internalizing that the world is not safe, and it starts defaulting into a threat response, into an overactive nervous system response.

Now, let's not forget, of course, that we're already talking about biological vulnerabilities and predispositions that are already manufactured inside of you. All they need is a trigger point, they need something to turn on that trauma response. And if you're living in a home where, we'll go back to abuse, perhaps you're being physically abused and psychologically abused, you're not feeling a sense of safety in the very place where safety is supposed to be formed and nourished. And so all of that is being factored into your nervous system as well.

So when we're talking about the biological elements, we're talking about some of those epigenetic markers that we talked about at the beginning. We're talking about also the ways in which we exist in these three bodies in that genetic material, but also biological material is being transferred into these three bodies. And then beyond that, we're also talking about our nervous system and the ways in which it's being formed and structured around a sense of lack of safety.

BLAIR HODGES: That's a helpful introduction. And as you said, you don't get too far into the weeds in the book, which I think is helpful. This is a book for a general audience. But you do let people know that there are research studies going on in cellular biology, psychiatry, psychology, neurology, neuropsychology, embryology, interpersonal neurobiology, psychoneuroimmunology—some of these I've never heard of before—developmental sciences, epigenetics. There are a whole bunch of different fields focusing in on this biological transmission.

I think people probably picked up on the fact that it's not isolated—to talk about nature versus nurture is to perhaps introduce kind of a false dichotomy. Like genes exist, DNA exists, inheritance exists, but they're also triggered by social things. And so the nurture and the nature—it's really tough to separate those things.

You also talk about how families develop their own intergenerational nervous system. When I thought about nervous systems, I just thought about my own nervous system, it's a part of my body. And you're talking about a nervous system that shared among people. And as soon as you described it, I could recognize this, this is where a family has to become so attuned to each other, for good or ill. So maybe you have a parent who's out of control, or really has anger management issues. The whole family has to have their nervous system attuned together to pick up on signals and to be prepared for things like that. Maybe spend a second talking about how that intergenerational nervous system gets built, and if you have an interesting example from a client or something like that, to give people a sense of what that looks like.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Absolutely. I think an example is a great place to land because that is a way that we can actually visualize something that can be so complex. For example, let's say that we have a child who is ten years old, they just got home from school, and their mother had a really, really hard day at work. So this child now asks where their food is, right, and maybe they use a certain tone and the mother just completely lashes out.

Let's say that the mother's default nervous system response is to yell. She is constantly in fight mode. That's what we call it right? That's her default. And so she lashed out and displaced onto her child who was asking for food. What he did was actually run to his room crying, because his default nervous system response is to flee.

Now, we have a grandfather who also lives in the home. And he comes out of his room, and he says, “Please stop yelling at this kid, please just stop. Is there anything that I can do, just stop!” That's a fawn response. It's a way in which a person would do anything to make the pain go away. And so right here, we have this contagion effect of everyone being in a state of distress because of what happened to one individual and the ways in which they responded and displaced.

However, they are all having different kinds of ways of expressing that distress and that trauma response. They have different nervous system threat alarm states happening all at once, but they're feeding off of each other. And that's what I mean by the “intergenerational nervous system.” That being the psychological elements.

The biological is a lot of what we've already covered. There are ways in which we're interconnected and biologically hardwired with the people that we come from. However, once we are in separate bodies, there's ways that we continue to feed off of each other's nervous system responses. And we create this contagion effect within our homes of emotions that continue to run rampant. And that tends to happen a lot with families that have emotions that have not been taken care of, or that have a lot of chaos within the family themselves.

THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA TREE (31:38)

BLAIR HODGES: That's Dr. Mariel Buqué. She’s an Afro-Dominican psychologist who received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University, where she also trained as a fellow in holistic mental health. She's a world-renowned intergenerational trauma expert. We're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.

Mariel, as we've mentioned, and this can get pretty complicated, but you break it down simply with the idea of a tree. And this should be a pretty easy thing for people to latch on to, we already think of our family tree. But maybe break down, how you identify the pieces of the intergenerational trauma tree—the leaves, the branches, the trunk, the roots, and the soil.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: You know, what I found within my work and a lot of the therapies I've been trained in is that we have these beautiful, beautiful tools that are really helpful, including trauma trees. But they weren't necessarily filling in the full picture of what I was seeing in the therapy room when it came to intergenerational trauma, which is why I decided to move forward with developing a new version of a tree, the intergenerational trauma tree, that actually had all of these different elements you just noted within them. And they're very specific for a reason, because they're part of what we then utilize in order to help the person create a trajectory of healing and then integrate that into their healing process.

The leaves of the tree signify one family member, each leaf. And each of the leaves actually reflect not only what may have happened to that individual that could have been appraised as traumatic, but also any actual trauma symptoms, or trauma responses that burgeoned in that person as a result. And this also includes the possibility that some trauma symptoms may have been reflective of physical conditions or physical discomforts, like chronic migraines, for example.

And so we start making sure that we map out every individual that a person desires to be a part of their story, or for whom we have some sort of a record of, you know, of their lived experience. And we start mapping out the leaves of the tree. And this also includes any of our descendants, whether they are our children, grandchildren, anybody who is related to us. And for some people, it is chosen family, and people who we've just had some level of proximity to them. And even some sort of connection or child rearing.

The trunk of the tree signifies us. So it signifies the ways in which we've internalized the hurt. What has happened to us. Ways in which we have been unwell in our mind, meaning that perhaps our thoughts have been frozen in this idea that nobody can be trusted, right, and that's just the way our minds have been able to organize around trauma. And in our bodies—like perhaps we are that person that suffers that gastrointestinal discomfort that mirrors IBS. And in our spirit, and spirit usually is how connected we are to others, to ourselves, into the greater whole.

And so if we suffer a series of bad relationships, or if we have a really tough relationship with ourselves, that's something to consider also, and something we have to bring into the trunk of the tree to hold an understanding around it.

The interesting part about the trunk of the tree is that I also asked one question, which is, “How have any of the trauma responses reflected in this trauma tree impacted you?” So we can look at our parents and think, okay, well, you know, I had a parent that perhaps drank alcohol every night to numb their emotions, and that was their trauma response. And that impacted me and my sense of well-being, my self-esteem, right, and so we have to bring in that question to have an understanding. How is it that the people who were not able to break the cycle left room or opportunity for you to then experience trauma.

The root system of the tree is one in which, for me I believe what needed to be reflected there were all of the internalized beliefs that we've held about ourselves, that stem from what happened to us, that stem from whoever didn't actually disrupt the cycle. A lot of people that suffer trauma say the words, “I am broken.” So I thought that that would be an important piece of what needed to be added to the system so people can really see it and visualize it and see the intergenerational trauma tree that's reflected in the book, and really understand, okay, you know what? That that's actually an internalized belief, it's not an actual truth. And so there are ways in which we start internalizing these ideas about ourselves in the world that then become almost kind of immobile, they become frozen in us.

Beyond that, of course, is the soil system, which I think is always not attended to within any other trauma tree systems, but we have to think about the soil because it's such an integral part of the tree’s growth process. And in the soil system, we have everything that feeds specific beliefs into our homes, into our families, into our communities. And that's anything that even stems from, like, the idea that you can pick yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? It's a systemic idea that also feeds itself into our homes. Or the idea that we don't air our dirty laundry, or we don't tell family secrets. And that can actually lead individuals who could use help inside of a family unit, lead them to experience shame, and not seek out help, and then just perpetuate harm onto the people around them, which is usually their family members.

So the tree needed to be that comprehensive so that we can have a very global and well-rounded way of being able to look at what happened here through the generations. And then how can we take that information to then transition into how you can heal more profoundly, but in a more well-informed way.

YOUR SOIL SYSTEM (37:35)

BLAIR HODGES: For me, your intergenerational trauma tree system helps me kind of escape the temptation to blame and instead, to seek for more understanding. So for example, I might have a relationship with a parent and feel like, “Oh, this parent failed me in this or that way. And I can just put the blame on them, they let me down as a parent,” so I'm not attending to the soil. And I think, in this case, the soil a lot of times would be like cultural gender expectations for what a proper mother would be, or a proper father would be, and how those things hurt that parent, and how that soil affected that parent in the way they parented me.

But it's harder, and I think less common, to zoom out like that and think about the cultural impacts that are happening, the soil that's feeding that person. I think it's a lot easier to just say, “That person hurt me. That's the cause,” and sort of hold on to the resentment there, the pain there, without attending to the bigger things.

The other thing is, it's hard to imagine myself as really being able to affect the soil in any big way. So I feel like, for me maybe it's been easier to just blame individuals because I feel helpless when it comes to the context, when it comes to the soil, like I can't really do much about that. I'm interested in your thoughts about bringing attention to that soil just a little bit more, because I think this sets your approach apart from a lot of the therapeutic “pop-therapy” stuff I see like on TikTok or Instagram, it really doesn't often get into the soil, it's just more about like, “How to be your best self” or whatever.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: You know, if we don't get into the soil, we are just existing in a world that is going to continue to perpetuate trauma and feed it into our homes. And so that's why I found it to be an essential part of what we needed to address. What we needed to address as individuals who have suffered these traumas, but also as a global community, right, because we can't just like place it all on the people who have suffered.

But one thing I'd like to say about that, even before I get to the logistics about it, is that I have actually seen individuals who have been socialized for decades—one of those individuals actually is my father, who's 65, and who, a number of months ago had actually talked to me about the socialized gender norms that he was, in essence, taught to believe and taught to behave in reference to. And he almost felt like this “a-ha” moment just kind of came to him about the ways things could have been different, and how he can now enact a different set of behaviors as a result.

And I even had a client, my oldest client was 84 years old. And I say these things, because I think that even when we are decades, and almost a lifetime, in these kinds of patterns that have been socialized and have been almost kind of invisiblized in our world, it is possible for us to actually still find a way to look at them. Or if someone else helps us look at them, because they have a different lens, and that we can still create even micro-changes around these things.

So in terms of going out into the world and actually doing the work to try and eradicate the parts of the systems we are a part of that actually perpetuate trauma is an essential part of what we need to do.

One example of this is when it comes to particularly childhood trauma, and the adverse childhood experiences that people tend to experience, we understand that we can put in place specific educational programs for parents, specific educational programming for children in their health classes, and in other places where children can access information, that can actually help them to understand not only how to cope differently, but also what actually constitutes as maybe even trauma if it's age appropriate. And I think these are places where—I know there are a number of different organizations that have a connection to the original “ACEs” study who are trying to do some of this work, and trying to educate the parent-child dyad, around how to have a connection that isn't rooted in trauma, but rooted in a healthier bond.

And, you know, we have to do that work too in order to cut trauma at the root, right? We also have to offer the education, we also have to put in place policies, and bills, and institutional practices, and actually protect people from being further victimized, so that we don't have this more systemic victimization but that all we're doing is helping people solve the emotional hurt in their heart without solving the root cause, which is the institutional dimension of it.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, it's sort of like your basement floods and you're putting fans down there to help all the water evaporate and clean it out, but then you're not addressing the fact that your foundation’s cracked, and water is just going to come right back in.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes.

ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES – 42:50

BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned the “ACEs” study. This is the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. And maybe we'll just spend another minute here on adverse childhood experiences and the idea of the inner child, that we all carry this inner child, we have an inner child, and you've developed a tool that people can assess what kinds of trauma they experienced as children, because sometimes we don't even remember the kind of things we experienced, but you want people to kind of tap into that.

So we've talked about addressing the soil and being socially involved, and looking at that. Now we're looking at more like what we're doing personally and looking inward to ourselves. Adverse childhood experiences are something you recommend we assess and sort of try to think through what those adverse childhood experiences might have been for us.

You've already mentioned one for my kids: COVID and the pandemic obviously was one of those. [And continues to be.]

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes. Adverse childhood experiences are, in essence, what the words say. It's having experiences in our childhood that create enough of an adverse scenario or environment that it leaves us with emotional remnants that typically carry on into our adult lives.

And the layer I wanted to add for the Intergenerational Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire that I added in the book are the layers of, not only what happened before us—because like I said before, we understand that there is a higher risk in families that have trauma for trauma to be passed on and to be perpetuated by parents and other people. But that we also needed to know the added element of what happened around you, like a pandemic, like perhaps a hurricane that devastated your community, right? Like all of these things that are very much a part of our lived experience, especially right now in history. Especially for the children right now.

I believe it was the World Health Organization that did a questionnaire with some children, and I believe it was fairly open-ended, just to gauge what is making children feel so hopeless these days, because hopelessness is a large part of what leads a person to actually not want to be alive anymore. And we're seeing a lot of that in children these days. And so many of the children actually answered with the fact that they felt like, in essence, their world was imploding. Because we have so many climate crises happening on a day-to-day basis. And it feels like the world they're being raised into is a world that isn't even probably going to be here. That's a real reality for a lot of them that they're confronted with. And we're not really kind of gauging that as the adults in the room, right? We're not realizing like, they're in a world where they don't believe they may make it to 30 or 40 years old and be healthy in this earth, right?

And so all of that is part of what we need to assess, to really get a good comprehensive analysis of what really is happening here that is producing adversity. So in comes this questionnaire that helps us answer some questions, but it is also a conversation starter. Because how would I know that, you know—of course, a pandemic, I think it is a little bit more of a given. But quite frankly, I wouldn't have thought about the environmental issues and that children would have already been capturing the fact that those environmental issues could blossom and lead to a destruction of earth and they wouldn't have a healthy planet to exist in. That's a real thing that perhaps some of us are have not been attuned to. So the questionnaire helps us answer a lot of questions. And it also helps us start conversations that need to be had.

PRACTICES FOR YOUR WINDOW OF STRESS TOLERANCE – 46:41

BLAIR HODGES: People can learn more about the questionnaire about adverse childhood experiences in the book, again, it's called Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. We're talking with Dr. Mariel Buqué.

This book gives us a lot of information about how traumatic experiences affect us biologically, how our families and family life can impact us throughout our lives. But it doesn't just give us that knowledge. You also wanted to equip people with things they can actually do in their lives to help them heal. And you do have a proviso at the opening of the book that says there's really no replacement for contacting a professional if you can, because that's sometimes necessary when you're working through intergenerational trauma. This book can be helpful to do that, but you also say, “Hey, if things get heavy, reach out to somebody.” I really liked that.

But the book has a ton of practical advice, exercises, ideas and things we can do to “broaden our window of stress tolerance.” That's a phrase that you use there. So maybe give us an example of a practice you've personally benefited from in learning to broaden that window of tolerance, being able to handle stress better, being able to heal from some of those past traumas.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, you know, a lot of the practices I include in my work in the book, and even in my personal life, have a layered element. And what I mean by that is I usually try to incorporate practices that really help the nervous system feel at ease and relaxed, but not just for the sake of feeling more relaxed in the moment. But for the sake of actually restructuring our neural networks, or forming new neural networks, that actually are formatting to a more relaxed body. So it's really essential for us to also think about what we do in response to trauma that can actually help us exist in a more resilient and resourced body moving forward.

I usually go to a lot of practices that feel accessible enough to most individuals. I try and gauge people's ability statuses, and most of these tend to be practices most people can do. And these are, of course, deep breathing—I think it’s been popularized enough, that we understand that taking breaths is helpful. But I like to pair deep breathing also with other exercises like progressive muscle relaxation, for example, which, for anyone that's not familiar, is a practice in which you tense specific muscle groups, usually with an inhale of a breath—which is how I organize it in my practice—and then you release the breath and release the muscle group. And then you move into the next muscle group. And you complete it usually wherever—typically like your toes, so you go from head to toe.

The reason why this is a practice I have incorporated into my practice is because we have so much trauma that's stored as tension inside of the body. And on any given day, we're walking around actually with all of this tension pent up and not being released. And when I usually have conversations with folks about this, they start noticing their bodies. And they're like, “You know what? Actually, yeah!” And everyone's always like, “Oh, my goodness, I just noticed this pain that I didn't even realize was there, this tension in my neck, and there's a bit of a sharp pain there.”

And well, that's curious, right, because that was there. But, you know, it took me to gain body awareness and body mindfulness in order to really understand I'm actually carrying some tension there. When we tense the muscles voluntarily, we actually almost kind of release that tension that's pent up there, and the muscles that have been constricted because of whatever threat we perceived, like, three hours ago, that can be released in relaxed.

BLAIR HODGES: It could be like clenching your jaw, or just feeling that's where I'll usually feel it, like, are my teeth together?

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, making fists, you can make a balled-up fist, you can squeeze yourself, like you're hugging yourself really hard, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I liked that one. I liked the song one too, where you find a quiet place that's comfortable for you and you can sing, and not just the sound, but literal vibrations of the singing can help your nervous system as well. It's a physiological response.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, there's actually, so we have this part of our nervous system that's called the ventral vagal nerve, which is the part of our nervous system that's most implicated in helping us to relax and release especially after being excited by a threat—

BLAIR HODGES: And by the way, this is very evolutionary, like this is rooted back when we were running away from like some predators trying to get us or something, and our body—This helped us survive, and now it's helping us get super stressed. [laughs]

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, because it's overestimating threat. It's actually seeing threat everywhere, because threat is no longer like that big tiger that was chasing us; threat is now we turn on the computer, you know, we read that first email, and it has a certain tone, and that's a threat, right? So it's like [laughs] it’s a very different life we’re leading and as a result, threats are kind of all around us. And then we also have ways to really kind of over-appraise a perceived threat.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, sorry about that sidetrack. But it's just fascinating.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, no, it's super important. And it actually drives me right back to my point where the ventral vagal nerve is actually a nerve we can voluntarily stimulate in order to increase the relaxation response inside of our bodies. And one of the ways in which we can do that in a very effective way is actually by humming. And if we take whatever favorite song we have, and we instead of singing it, we actually hum it, we even increase even more of that relaxation response, because we're creating even more vibrations inside of our bodies, but more specifically, within our ventral vagal nerve, which needs that stimulation, that vibration, in order to get triggered and work in our favor.

BLAIR HODGES: And you point out that some of these practices are ancient. Some of the things you're recommending are things that cultures and peoples have been doing for generations, we now have a scientific add-on, sort of understanding a little bit more, perhaps, of why biologically, these things are impacting us. But I also wanted to ask you about that relationship between ancient traditions, long-standing practices and science today.

The reason I asked that is because I want to know how people can discern between quackery versus real practices, right? So, “Do your own research” is a phrase that came up around the pandemic, which really meant like, “Don't get vaccinated” or “Don't believe in science at all.” [laughs] So I want to know how you have approached being educated in a university setting, but also honoring and incorporating ancestral or ancient or indigenous and otherwise practices, and negotiating that difference between sort of science quote, unquote, “Western science,” and tradition, and kind of how you navigate that relationship in ways that won't make people say, “Well, I'm never getting vaccinated, because if I hum to myself, I will, you know, I'm gonna get healed” or whatever.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, there's always nuance in everything, right? I always like to add that. But the way that I see Western modern science is—in part, I see it as a science that is so widely believed, versus, let's say, ancient healing practices. We can even take yoga as an example, right? An ancient healing practice that we are now integrating into our day-to-day lives by the millions, and are realizing even in actual scientific studies that are focused on the brain, we're realizing that yoga is actually helping us to reorganize our brains and grow our brains in regions that are actually health-promoting, and grow memory centers, and do all these things, right?

So in part I see the utility of Western science because people believe in it so much. So if we can utilize it to prove that the practices that have been here for thousands of years are actually effective, and we need to look in the brain, and we need to look at the body and the ways the body is organizing itself differently as a result of this practice, then let's utilize it. Let's let that help us buy into the idea of more holistic wellness, if that's what we need to do. So I see its utility. And then I also wish that we would be more willing to actually see how effective some of these practices can be without the use of medical science or scientific inquiry.

Now, one thing I always like to go back to is—I’m sure that, especially I believe that whenever I do it, or I instruct people to do it, it feels like a little bit out there, until I can actually contextualize it, which is the practice of rocking. Like swaying side to side and rocking, which actually stimulates that ventral vagal nerve and helps us to feel relaxed. When I incorporate that or tell people to do that in reference to their mental health, they're like, “What are we doing here?” But when we go back to, you know, when we were a baby or a toddler, and people were rocking us to sleep, we were going to sleep. Why? Because our nervous system was actually feeling more calm, at ease, relaxed, and we were able to segue into such a vulnerable state like sleep.

And that is the thing that I'm trying to bring us back to. I'm also trying to bring us back to the data that has been there since we were kids, that we actually had, but we lost it along the way, we forgot that we can actually rock ourselves and soothe ourselves. And we even see this in individuals that are on the Autism spectrum. So there are individuals who fall under the category of neurodivergence who actually utilize rocking, intuitively, to soothe themselves. And I think when we can see that people actually do this naturally, because they need that soothing element, or people do this instinctually, or intuitively, to soothe their children, we should be thinking about the fact that this actually has utility. And we should be thinking about truly incorporating it into our day to day lives.

And rocking, if we're in our office chair. And we feel like that last meeting was stressful, why not take like two minutes to just kind of rock and sway and like, you know, you can pretend you're listening to some music if you don't want to look weird to your colleagues, but it's really going to help you, so why not do it?

BLAIR HODGES: It just reminds me of so many things in your book, these ideas you offer. And I think my biggest obstacle to doing these types of things and incorporating them in my own life has just been impatience. I'm thinking about the end of the day when I'm trying to get my kids to bed and just like, “Go to sleep, why don't you go to sleep? I've read to you. I'm singing to you. I'm rubbing your back. I'm doing just about everything a parent could do. And I wish you were asleep and you're not. And now I'm getting frustrated. And you're asking about you want to write this letter to your friend at school the next day.

And I just don't take that time to just stop and breathe. And yet, you also point out that when we're elevated, it can take five or more minutes to come back from that. And I had this false idea that, “Oh, I just need to take like three deep breaths, and I'm right back in it.” But I think what I've realized in reading this book, is that I was actually doing this really short-term coping that was actually just bottling up what I was coping with and pushing it down and keeping it there. Then it would just eventually build up and up and up. So I was really personally impacted when you're talking about the patience that's needed sometimes, like five minutes at least, to cycle through a stress response when I thought I could do it in a couple of breaths.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Most of us think that, because we've been socialized around deep breathing in that way. I mean, I'm really grateful that deep breaths are even entering the conversation in modern-day society—

BLAIR HODGES: Sure, yeah.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: But we're not necessarily doing it to the extent that most of us need. And we have to also remember all of us suffered a pandemic, whether it impacted us greatly or not. We all suffered through a global crisis. So we all have some element of emotional remnants that we're still sorting through.

And so when we're talking about all of that, and we're also talking about living in bodies that are decades long—sometimes generations of remnants that are still captured there, we can't say that taking three deep breaths is actually going to help us to release the stress. Like we, you know, [laughs] we have to do a little bit more work than that.

But usually—especially with parents or people that are busy because their careers just tie them up, I usually get a little bit of resistance around the timing element, Like, who has five minutes? And I always like to reference the fact that, okay, you have one thousand four hundred and forty minutes in a day. If you take five of those minutes to actually regenerate your nervous system in the direction of health, and you do that for a period of a year, I think you're going to be in a slightly different situation emotionally than where you are now. Because what we know about body memory from even a neurological perspective, is that body memory takes an approximate three to four hundred repetitions of these nervous system regulatory practices to actually start defaulting to them. So we actually have so much power within us, within our inherent nature—in our breath, which is literally something that we all carry, that we can actually integrate into our day, and a year from now, bedtime might not feel as strenuous as it feels right now. [laughter]

FALSE FAMILY AND TRUE FAMILY – 1:00:46

BLAIR HODGES: That's right. All right. That's Dr. Mariel Buqué, and we're talking about the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.

And speaking of intergenerational trauma, again, the book requires us to think a lot about our history. So for some folks, this book will require a lot of effort, especially if they have a lot of trauma and pain in their family history, because you're asking them to think about those family experiences.

And in the process, you introduce this idea of the “false family” and the “true family” that we have in our minds. This was a lightbulb moment for me. The false family could be the story we tell ourselves about who our family is. The false family can also be future oriented—it could be a hope that there's some way to fix whatever's wrong with our family. And that we can return to some nostalgic paradise of a past that maybe never even really existed. And then we're stuck with family dysfunction that's not going to solve itself. And that's hard.

And so a false family can be not only the story that's not true that we tell ourselves about our family, but it can also be future oriented as well. Talk about dealing with our ideas of our false family, and then what you talk about as our true family.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Our false family is those ideas we've held on to that truly don't hold any veracity for the most part, because they're ideas we've needed to hold on to in order to preserve our idea and our image of our own families.

BLAIR HODGES: Like quick give us like just a couple examples of what that would be. A person might think what about their family?

MARIEL BUQUÉ: A person might think that their family is loving, and still is not able to—let's say, like, an aunt can be loving, but does not have the capacity to hurt you. Actually, no. That very human aunt that you have has the capacity to injure you. They can say something about your body that could leave emotional marks, you know, for ages, right? Like, there's something that person can do, that actually puts them, almost kind of takes them off the pedestal, and makes it so that this person is now existing both as the aunt that is deeply loving to you, and the one that can be hurtful and damaging to your self-esteem.

And so it's like, you know, stuff like that—when I say that, I think any of us, probably our minds go into a multitude of ways in which different family members can and have been hurtful. And it is because we all have families like this. Our true families—

BLAIR HODGES: Because we're all human.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, we're all human. We're all flawed. We all err. We all say things that maybe come from a specific place, even if it's from a loving place, can be hurtful. We all cause emotional injury to others, because that's the human way. Now, when we're able to actually acknowledge that, what happens within us is that it actually creates a moment of grief that a lot of us are not prepared for. Because we've been denying that this family member or this family unit can actually have these deep hurtful characteristics within them. And as a result, it makes it so that we just delay the grief. But eventually we have to get to it.

When we start realizing that the toxic relationships we've been getting into are mirroring the relationships we saw growing up, or that there are certain words we tend to say to our children—words that have been socialized and ingrained in our brain from how we were raised, but we never realized, “Oh my goodness, that's really hurtful and kind of cruel,” right? When all of these things start coming to the fore and we have these “a-ha” moments, we have to face the inevitable grief. And it's either we are in grief but we're denying and pushing it down, or we are open to the grief and are facing it head on and are saying, “You know what? My family is loving and hurtful. My family is nurturing and invalidating,” right? Like they have a mixture of characteristics. “And I myself, have been a person that has perpetuated things on both ends, and have also been a part of how this family has operated perhaps in dysfunction for a multitude of years.”

So when we can actually step into an understanding of the true family we have in front of us, what I believe has been the biggest consequence of being able to enter that stage of grief and then just really feel the grief and come out on the other side, is that when we start having a lot of compassion for ourselves, for what we've had to go through, but also for the people that came before us, and the ways in which they've also been in their own suffering. It creates a lot of compassion. It doesn't happen for everyone. But it does create a lot of compassion for many people.

BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about how the outcomes could be different. It might be something where you can reconcile with the relationship in an incredible story. It might be that someone's dead, they're gone, you can't reconcile with them presently. So you offer practices people can do—write letters to the to the deceased, or meditate on them, or whatever.

Or it could be someone who's painful enough to where it wouldn't be safe to reconcile with the person. But you can still try to seek understanding and empathy toward that person, and try to heal in relation to them without having to necessarily come back together.

So you're not prescribing the exact outcome in this book. It seemed to me that you were more interested in the process of what we do with our emotions and our feelings and how we think about our relationship to our family.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, there are different ways in which we can have healthier connections to our emotions, and recognize that the families we come from are tied to hurtful emotions, and sometimes, wonderful emotions.

One of the ways in which I started coming upon even like the “writing to your ancestors” idea or exercise that I incorporate into my practice, you know, I myself started writing to my grandmother, who is now about five years deceased. But she never got to see a couple of the things I really wanted to show her—including even this book, right? So there were moments of grief, where I wanted to show her how her daughter had changed based on the work that we've been doing emotionally. I wanted to show her how I have changed in the things I've been able to achieve on behalf of her, my mother, my family. And I was just holding on to that, right? But when I started writing in my journal, I started instead just “Dear journal, Dear Mama.” And I just started writing, “Hey, this is what's happening. These are the emotions I'm holding on to, these are the things I'm seeing in our world. This is how I see mom now.”

Like, they were moments that I actually was able to experience a lot of catharsis and a deeper connection to her, especially when that mug broke and I no longer felt that connection was centered in this object, I still had an opportunity to write to her, and just kind of pour out my thoughts. And that felt so deeply nourishing to me. So I thought, you know, we all have that one person in our lives, there's someone in our family line that, when we think of them, we think of like warm teddy bears, they feel like the psychologically safe person, we can land on their shoulders, and we can just feel so much love. And so I want us to always carry that with us, because this healing journey can be really hard. So we need to lean on the places—even if the people are no longer with us, we need to lean on them in some way or another, in whatever ways we can create a connection, so that we can feel that sense of warmth, yet again, in this really, really tough journey that is the journey of cycle breaking.

BLAIR HODGES: That's beautiful. I want to give you the opportunity now to make a pitch to our listeners who might be thinking all along that all of this sounds wonderful. But as you said, some of your clients have said to you, “I'm a broken person. I just don't see a path forward for me. I've read books, I've talked to a therapist, I've done things, and I just don't know if there's a way out of this, Mariel.” You talk about cycle breakers, so this is a chance—as you do in the book—to talk directly to the listeners about their potential and what they could do as a cycle breaker.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Mmm. You know, cycle breakers are the most courageous people on this planet as I see it. I feel like we are the people that are taking on the arduous task—albeit, very rewarding at the end—but the very hard and courageous task of breaking cycles and sometimes being the first ones to do so in our families. And I can tell you not only from professional experience in having done this work for a multitude of years, but also from my own personal experiences and seeing different generations in my own family be able to have some elements of healing, that this work is possible. And that I am so sorry that we've done a disservice to you, anyone in the mental health field, by not incorporating a more holistic lens to your healing and the ways in which you can really heal the whole you and heal as a unit in your family, which I think is the ways in which healing can be sustained.

I do hope that this book can offer you that comprehensive roadmap that you've been missing in your process, and that it can reorient you towards healing in a way that perhaps you didn't think was possible, but I can assure you truly is.

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, I have one more question. And this is more personal. When you're asking us to tap into our ancestors and think about our past—not just to think about the stressors and strains and the trauma that they incurred, but also to think about them as inspirational examples that can help kind of push us forward. Coming from my own privileged background, that part of the book was harder for me. Because when I think about that history, I do think about colonization, I think about slavery and think about—and I don't even know the extent to which my own white family was connected to those things. But obviously, the world was such that they were. So when I think about the past, that is a little bit harder for me to feel that kind of, even pride, in that. I'm interested in your thoughts about that element.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Wow, that's super powerful and I appreciate you sharing that. And I can understand. I’d like to also help with almost kind of a reframe, because you don't just come from ancestors who were colonizers. There were people before them who didn't come to the Americas and engage in the atrocities that they did. There were people that were living their lives, you know, being every day humans, right, and going through their own adversities, and overcoming. And those were people that were also a part of your lineage, right, even though they were much more distant.

And then, in addition to that, I think of colonialism and white supremacy as a systemic disease that has really infiltrated the minds, not only of the people it privileges, but also the people that oppresses. And there have been people on both sides that have also been revolutionaries, people that have fought for the rights and the humanity of others. And we have examples of that across the board.

Of course, we illuminate the examples of that, of the people that have marginalized identities and have overcome and have helped communities, right, but they also had a lot of white allies. And so even if those people aren't in your direct family lineage, meaning that there is a direct kind of bloodline there, they are still ancestors.

I consider Nina Simone, one of my ancestors, I'm Dominican, I'm a Black Dominican, I am not an African American, and Nina Simone is African American. There may have been no crossed paths in our family lines at all, right? Maybe like just dating five hundred years back. But I meditate on her music, I sing her music, I hum her music, she is soul to me. Nina Simone is my ancestor, right? And that is somebody that isn’t in my direct line, you know, genetic ties, and all the things we've been talking about, but who I hold dear in my heart. And so that, I hope, is enough to almost kind of reorient you, and there are people in your community that have also held on to that advocacy spirit, and have been the co-conspirators and co-liberators of our society that I would lean on them.

BLAIR HODGES: That's like a retroactive chosen family. [laughter] You know? That's cool. That’s helpful.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes, I love that, I love that. Yeah. Because, you know, I mean, you have to think about a person like yourself who is thinking in that way. There were people like you who were thinking in that way before you, right? Like who are those people? Right? And it's almost like when we think about them, and when we meditate on them, we're also kind of thanking them for also paving the way for us, because my life is a lot easier because of a Nina Simone, right? And we have so many examples within society of people that have been incredibly helpful in that way through the generations. And, you know, they probably deserve a little thank you from us, too.

REGRETS, CHALLENGES, AND SURPRISES – 1:15:22

BLAIR HODGES: I hope that gives people a sense of all the different levels you're addressing in your book, from the personal lives, to the ways we are connected, to our direct family that are still with us, people that have gone before us, going way back, not just our grandparents, great-grandparents, but people back through the generations. And then also to think about the future, because you say being a cycle breaker is a way to leave a generational legacy. To be the ancestor that we would have loved to have laying a path for us.

So the book covers all these levels. Again, it's called Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. It’s by Dr. Mariel Buqué, who joined us today she's an Afro-Dominican psychologist who received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University. And has also trained as a fellow there in holistic mental health.

Alright, Mariel. This is the last question. It's called “Regrets, Challenges and Surprises.” And this is the moment when you can talk about one, two, or all three of those. Something you might regret about the book—and since the book is just so new, maybe it just needs time to be like, “Oh, darn, I wish I could change that part of it.” But maybe something would come to mind. Or a challenge. What was the hardest part about putting the book together. Or something that surprised you in the course of writing it, something that changed you as a person in the course of doing this project.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Well. A regret? It still stays with me, even though I followed my editor’s suggestions to not be too heavy and too scientific about it. But I really wanted to add a lot more science to the book. I think it's already really filled and packed with it, but I had a lot more, so that that's a little bit of a point of regret. But I do want to nerd out in other areas of my writing, so I'll get to do that later on.

BLAIR HODGES: Nice.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Challenges. One of the biggest challenges was actually drafting chapter nine, “When Collective Trauma Enters Your Home,” and making that an accessible part of the work that we understand in intergenerational trauma. It’s the chapter that helps us understand how systemic injustices, how natural forces of earth, or how cultural norms that get handed down—how all of these are interspersed into the world we live in, and how they contribute to the traumas we experience.

It was really hard because it was a book in which I was trying to be incredibly inclusive, and wanted everyone to be able to see some version of themselves represented. And it was hard to pack that into one chapter.

BLAIR HODGES: That could have been a book, it could have been a whole book in and of itself.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: It could have been, yeah. And it almost was. That was a huge chapter, I had to chop it up. And I rewrote it, actually. So it was—

BLAIR HODGES: Oh wow. That’s a challenge! [laughter]

MARIEL BUQUÉ: That was for sure. Yeah, I scrapped the entire chapter and started over. So it was challenging, but I landed at a chapter that I'm really proud of.

And then was the third one?

BLAIR HODGES: The surprise.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Um—I didn't realize how much I cared about this work. There was one moment when I cried, because I was just so intentional about every word, I really wanted people to feel held in the book. And I remember the immense pressure I felt internally to ensure that I was holding the reader and carrying them through something that felt so heavy.

And you know, it's a little bit easier for me to do that as a therapist one on one. But when I'm carrying someone in the pages of a book, and almost kind of just handing them the words, there's so much more I feel like I have to think about. And that to me felt like, “Whoa,” that was very surprising.

BLAIR HODGES: Is that one of the reasons you've included the reflection questions? Because at the end of every chapter, you'll pause for a couple of questions. For example, “What was the most difficult part of reading this chapter? Where did you feel it in your body?” So you're having the reader check in with themselves about some of this.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Constantly. Because I understood—and I even interspersed a couple of different check ins inside of the chapter itself, because I wanted the reader to acknowledge the ways they're actually internalizing the information they're taking in. Because oftentimes, we just start tensing up and not realizing it, and I didn't want for us to hold more tension, but instead, start releasing it.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And if you're in the room with them, you could maybe see the fists, or you can see the posture change. And I certainly felt that. Reading the book to prepare for an interview was different than reading it as a workbook. I look forward to reading it in that way so I can get in that mindset. But I did see those times—You felt very present in the book. Your voice is there. Your presence is there. And I think those reflection questions and the check-ins you do throughout the chapters were really well placed.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you. Thank you so much. I also added sound bass to the book, which is very unique. But it is also a way in which I'm hoping people can feel more grounded. And the sound baths, I heard them the other day, they sound so, so good. Really the team did such a good job with them. And they were intentional because I wanted people to be able to have those moments where they could pause and just listen to five minutes of a sound bath and just find a way to feel more at ease and more calm, even beyond the prompts that are already in the book.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there's also an appendix with the lemongrass healing from your grandmother, I think, is that right?

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. You’ve got the family recipe. Now, my advanced review copy doesn't have the sound baths. I'm going to pick up the publication copy so I can check those out, because there are so many extras in the book, really practical things. I think your editor was onto something in the sense of, I love the science, but I sometimes can get lost in that a little bit. And I do need that more practical—like, just try this, or do this. And your book is chock full of ideas that way. It's great.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you for saying that. You know, I'm just starting to get feedback. People are just starting to get the book in their hands. So it's really wonderful to hear that.

BLAIR HODGES: Awesome. That's Dr. Mariel Buqué, and we talked about the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.

Mariel, this was a real treat. Thanks for joining us on Family Proclamations.

MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening, and there's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review and go to Apple Podcasts and let me know your thoughts. And please just take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

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NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.