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How We Can Heal
A podcast to share deep conversations about How We Can Heal from life’s toughest circumstances.
How We Can Heal
Decolonizing Trauma Healing with Dr. Laura Brown
Season 5 of the How We Can Heal Podcast is sponsored by SimplePractice.
If you want to simplify the business side of your work, I highly recommend Simple Practice!
Right now they’re offering a special 7-day free trial with 70% off your first 4 months for How We Can Heal listeners.
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This episode is also sponsored by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD).
The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation is an international, non-profit, professional association organized to develop and promote comprehensive, clinically effective and empirically based resources and responses to trauma and dissociation and to address its relevance to other theoretical constructs.
Visit https://cfas.isst-d.org/ to access educational offerings for both professionals and non-professionals
To learn more and become a member, visit: https://www.isst-d.org/
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What if everything we've been taught about trauma and healing has been filtered through a colonial lens? Dr. Laura Brown —psychologist, author, and activist with over 40 years of groundbreaking work in feminist therapy—challenges us to reimagine healing outside the medical model that has dominated Western thinking.
Dr. Brown takes us on a profound journey from her early activism in the 1960s through her pioneering work in trauma psychology, weaving together personal narrative with radical theory. She articulates how medical systems have colonized healing processes that humans have practiced for millennia, turning natural responses to harm into "disorders" requiring professional intervention. "People have been healing from trauma since human beings became human beings," she reminds us, inviting practitioners to question the foundations of conventional approaches.
The conversation expands beyond clinical settings to examine how trauma and power operate in our broader society. Dr. Brown offers wisdom about maintaining our integrity and voice in challenging times, protecting our nervous systems from becoming hijacked by those who don't deserve access to our activation, and finding small yet meaningful ways to resist injustice daily. Her perspective on trauma work as inherently political challenges the false neutrality many clinicians adopt, while her vision of collaborative healing relationships dismantles hierarchies between "expert" and "patient."
All while navigating cancer recovery and a vocal disorder affecting her speech, Dr. Brown embodies the resilience she describes, finding joy in aikido, nature, friendship, and beauty. Her message inspires hope not through toxic positivity but through genuine engagement with both suffering and possibility. Whether you're a healing professional or someone on your own recovery journey, this episode will transform how you think about trauma, power, and our collective capacity for change.
Want to keep creating opportunities for healing together? Subscribe at howwecanheal.com to continue exploring how we can create more humble, culturally responsive approaches to trauma that honor every person's inherent power and wisdom.
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Lisa Danylchuk:Today I want to give a big shout out and extend a huge thank you to the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, the ISSTD, for sponsoring this episode. If you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me talk about ISSTD and the incredible researchers, clinicians and advocates I've met during my time as a member and a volunteer there. The ISSTD has been delving into the science and best practice of treating trauma and dissociation for over 40 years now, and they have a rich catalog of educational offerings for both professionals and non-professionals on their website that's cfasisst-dorg. If you're a mental health professional, I highly recommend you consider becoming a member of ISSTD. I'd love to see you during the live educational offerings and at the annual conference in Portland, oregon in March of 2026. Visit ISST-Dorg to learn more.
Lisa Danylchuk:If you love this podcast, I bet you would love the Yoga for Trauma online training program. This eight-week certification is for anyone who wants to learn how yoga philosophy and practice can help respond to the impact trauma has on our bodies and brains. When you join the program, you'll learn the theory and best practices for incorporating somatic skills into your healing work. Students often come into the program knowing that yoga can be helpful for stress management, but unsure about how to apply the practice to specific aspects of trauma recovery. This program breaks it all down and leaves you feeling clear about your choices as you support folks navigating post-traumatic stress, whether you're managing a program, working one-on-one with clients or leading therapeutic groups. Of course, the experience is good for you too. With eight modules and eight yoga classes, you'll get a taste of how it feels to practice yoga in a resource-building, trauma-responsive manner. Head on over to howwecanhealcom forward slash Y4T. That's the letter Y, the number four and the letter T to apply to join the program today. Mention the podcast in your application for a special bonus. One more time, nice and slow. The website is howwecanhealcom forward slash Y4T. If you're feeling called to join us, I would love to welcome you and support you through the program. Welcome back to the how we Can Heal podcast.
Lisa Danylchuk:Today's guest is someone whose work has shaped the very foundation of trauma-informed care, feminist therapy and culturally responsive healing. Dr Laura Brown is a psychologist, author and teacher who's been at the forefront of feminist and trauma psychology for more than four decades. She founded the Fremont Community Therapy Project, a low-fee training clinic in Seattle that served as a home for healing and growth for so many people over the years. She's also a past president of the Society for the Psychology of Women and the Trauma Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. Her writing helps us reimagine what therapy can be when it centers justice, intersectionality and care. Books like Subversive Dialogues, cultural Competence in Trauma Therapy and her latest Decolonizing Trauma Healing don't just add to the field, they expand it in essential ways. Dr Brown is also the recipient of countless awards, including the APA Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Public Service and the Carol Wood Sheriff Award for Feminist Scholarship and the Carol Wood Sheriff Award for Feminist Scholarship. Despite all of that recognition, what stands out most is her humility, her clarity and her unwavering commitment to survivors, especially to those whose voices have too often been ignored. Speaking of voices, dr Brown is coping with a condition called spasmatic dysphonia which impacts her vocal cords, so her voice will sound different than it did a few years ago.
Lisa Danylchuk:If you're familiar with her. If there are moments you, as a listener, need help understanding, check out the YouTube episode or visit howwecanhealcom backslash podcast to follow along with the full transcript. Today we're talking about what it means to decolonize, trauma healing, the evolution of feminist therapy and how we keep showing up and sharing our genuine, authentic voice with integrity and joy, even when the systems around us fall short or we're dealing with specific challenges. So excited to share this episode with you, please join me in welcoming Dr Laura Brown to the show. Join me in welcoming Dr Laura Brown to the show. Dr Laura Brown, welcome to the how we Can Heal podcast. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Oh, I'm very pleased to be here, lisa. Thank you for asking me. Yeah, there's so many questions I have for you. First of all, congratulations on your Lifetime Achievement Award from the ISSTD. That was such an honor to be there and to be able to celebrate you with other colleagues in Boston recently.
Dr. Laura Brown:Well, thank you. I still can't quite grasp that I got it, but Steve Gold keeps telling me you deserve it. You deserve it Practicing being deserving. So I'm practicing being deserving. It's a pretty amazing group of people to be in the company of.
Lisa Danylchuk:yeah definitely, and it was great just to be able to see everyone standing and celebrating you and just so grateful. I think a lot of the work you do that we'll talk about today is a long journey, right, it's like the arc of the moral universe quote comes to mind, where it's like oh yeah, long and it's arduous, and just like healing, it's not linear, and so I feel like you have been along for that ride in terms of cultural responsiveness and inclusion and gender inclusion for a very long time. So I'm curious for you and I want to get more history in a moment but just as you sit here today and see where we are in the world in terms of progress and challenges, how does that sit for you, given how much amazing humanitarian work you've done in the world of psychology?
Dr. Laura Brown:Well, I feel like I was really fortunate to come of age in a time when that was happening, and I am very worried about what's going on right now with the pushback that social justice is getting, not just in the larger world but in the mental health professions, it feels as if the current Western administration is trying to strip away half a century of work that we've done, and so, right now, resistance is really my daily question. And how, each day, do I do one small thing to resist? Which takes me back 50, almost 60 years now, to when I first got involved in social justice movements as an adolescent.
Lisa Danylchuk:What was that like? Can you tell us about when you first got involved?
Dr. Laura Brown:So it started with. There was this group called Students Struggle for Soviet Jewry and I don't know if you know, but in the Soviet Union Jews were systemically oppressed and discriminated against and for many years Soviet Jews tried to get out of the Soviet Union. And so there was an American Jewish student group, sssj, and it was active at my synagogue and when I was about 15 or so I got involved in it, went to demonstrations, got used to being in demonstrations and then in the summer of 68, I had just got back from my very first trip to Israel to Israel at the Democratic Convention in Chicago was happening on TV and I got to watch what was going on and I thought I have to do something. And I searched for and found a local SDS group of students for a democratic society, which wasn't quite as crazy then as it got in a few years. And I got involved in the anti-war movement in SDS and a group called Student Mobilization Committee and the War in Vietnam and from there got involved in challenging more conservative elements within the Jewish community, because there's a strong tradition of leftism in the Jewish community but it wasn't the primary voice.
Dr. Laura Brown:And so I got involved in a group when I was in college and went to one of their meetings, a national meeting in the winter of 1971 in Madison, wisconsin, that we were voting to support every liberation movement in the world and the six women in the group said what about women's liberation? And we were laughed at. And that was the end of my involvement for a very long time in transgender social justice movements, because I went back to Cleveland where I was finishing my undergraduate degree and joined a consciousness raising group and there she wrote I have been a feminist and a feminist activist ever since then, but we're talking about 54 years of me being involved with and identifying myself with, feminism, or, as we called it back then, the Women's Liberation Movement.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yes, yes, and I'm curious what language you resonate with the most today. Do you still like the original term?
Dr. Laura Brown:What I call myself is a decolonial, intersectional feminist. Okay, yeah, and because feminism is not about women, that became really clear by the middle of the 1980s that it's really a way of thinking about gender and power and eventually other intersectional identities, that the person who's doing the thinking it doesn't matter what their biology is. There are people with 2X chromosomes at a vulva who are anti-feminist, and there are people all along the biological, gender and chromosomal spectrum who are active feminists, and so the more that that became obvious to me over time, the less women's liberation was a beginning term, but it really isn't where anybody that I have been associated with for decades calls themselves anymore. Yeah.
Lisa Danylchuk:But there is an inclusion now of more gender, non-binary and sort of a span. You know, like you said, it's about power and it's about all these intersectional identities. So there's a lot of connection from a feminist psychotherapy standpoint. There's a lot of connection to other identities as well to other identities as well.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, and in fact, you know, there's still some feminist psychologists of my age cohort and I'm 72 now who don't support trans people, and what I say to them is look, we created a movement that said gender is a social construct. We opened that door. We challenged biological essentialism. What are we doing? What are you saying? Why are we neglecting what it is that we had to learn in the 1980s about gender as a social construct, just as race is a social construct, and so on and so on, and so there are still some people of my age cohort who are having that argument. But what I say is we open this door. Yeah, we should welcome everyone who has the courage to come through it. As a feminist, as a decolonial thinker, as someone trying to do liberatory work, yeah, I don't care how they identify themselves, what body they were born into. What's important is what are they doing in the world now? Mm, hmm.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, I'm curious how and when trauma theory wove into some of this work, right, because I'm aware of the historical arc of it and you're talking about. You know, before PTSD was even a diagnosis, you were doing this work, and then there's the movement for more awareness of it, and then I know you've written about okay, well, this is just the biology of how we respond to stress, so why are we calling it a disorder? Right, there's such a revolution there.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, I know. Well, you know what's interesting is, when I was in graduate school, I worked at what was called the Women's Center of Carbonell, illinois, and what we didn't realize is we were a de facto shelter for battered women. We found that out because we offered places for women and children to stay for free for a certain number of days. There were like four or five bedrooms in the house that the Women's Center was in and we would I was a volunteer there and we would have these men banging on the door.
Dr. Laura Brown:Well it turned out that these were women's league abusive relationships and we didn't have a word for it then women's league abusive relationships and we didn't have a word for it then. So I was working in a sort of a de facto battered women's shelter and then another graduate student came back from her internship and her internship at the University of Florida at Gainesville, working with the psychologist Jacqueline Liss-Resnick, who has gone on to become a friend and was actually the older sister of one of the people I was in grad school with. So my best friend came back from her internship and they had started a great crisis line in Gainesville. She said we need one here. We created one and I got back talking to the police chief in Carbondale, illinois, and Carbondale lives in Chicago. Carbondale is in the Bible Belt, okay, and it is very not progressive, and so I was seeing people who were survivors.
Dr. Laura Brown:But when I thought about it more, it goes back even further to the job I had between undergraduate and graduate school when I worked as a psych tech in a patient psychiatric hospital. And when you are the only psych tech, you're the lowest person on the food chain and so you get the difficult jobs. You get to work weekends and evenings and one Saturday afternoon I was asked to do intake with a woman who was being admitted by her psychiatrist and I sat. I got this like full body memory of sitting with her in her room as it got darker outside, with her telling me that what was happening is that her daughters had come to her to tell her that their grandfather, her father, was secretly abusing her and that this had happened to her and that her daughters coming to her had triggered her memories of what had happened to her. She was having a full-blown PTSD episode. Well, we were taught to write down everything the patient said to us, so I would like pages and pages of what she said to me.
Dr. Laura Brown:Monday morning I am called into the head nurse and told that I was never allowed to speak to that patient again, that this was a delusion, that I was fostering the delusion that this is 1972 or 73, but that's how it was then. You have to realize that there was no place for incest survivors to speak in 1972 or early 73. It was simply forbidden. And then I had a friend at graduate school and we were driving back from the APA convention in 1974. We had all piled into my old blimpster and we drove down Route 57 from Carbondale to New Orleans and on the way back she told me her incest story and her other incestually abused her until she was 16. Wow, and so I also was hearing incest stories, but I didn't have a unified framework to put any of this into. I was simply hearing about it. Yeah.
Dr. Laura Brown:And then I went off to the VA in Seattle for my internship, which is how I ended up here, and we're listening to veterans of many wars, including, most recently, people who were Vietnam veterans, because it was 1976. And I said, gee, these sound a lot like the battered women and rape victims. And we were told no, war is not a trauma. Wow.
Dr. Laura Brown:Because if you admitted that war was a trauma, you were challenging, well, really, the foundations of American imperialism. And so we had to say that these people were what you call character disorder, which is the same as a personality disorder, which is ironic given that the VA has become the center of drama research in the interim. But in 1976, it was forbidden. And you look at people like Chuck Bigley and Bessel von der Kolk, who were in Chuck's case he was a veteran, he was an Air Force pilot who became a psychologist, and people like him and Bessel who were working in veterans' facilities. And then Judith Lewis Herman, our great prophet, was also beginning to work with rape victims and innocent survivors of battered women. And they were all saying we see a commonality, we need to do something about this.
Dr. Laura Brown:Oh, I'm a little younger than those folks. I'm, like you know, a decade younger than they are, but they were people who pushed for the inclusion of the first version of PTSD into the DSM. I remember when I got it and I was like, oh my gosh, look at this, we finally have a diagnosis for it, which at the time seemed like a good thing. Yeah.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, well, a name. Right, we can call it something.
Dr. Laura Brown:We've got a name yeah, and people can read this and see themselves in it yeah. And I did not have a fully developed critique of what did it mean to pathologize people's distress. So at the time it was live. Remember I was sitting in my office, university of washington where I was on faculty for a couple of years, and getting very excited by the dsm.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, yeah so I was lucky to be the right age or the right time of the world to get in early on our study of trauma. And then I had the good fortune of so I worked on the alcoholism unit at the VA and my friends there all knew I was in private practice and they treated very few women because there weren't a lot of women veterans. They didn't have women's programs in the VA. I got a call from my friend who was a staff member of the unit saying we've got a patient here we want to refer to you when we discharge her. And that was the woman in the article that kind of made me visible as a trauma therapist. She used the pseudonym of Ruth.
Dr. Laura Brown:She had been a nurse in the military, in the Navy. She was in Vietnam. She came back traumatized and told that she couldn't possibly have trauma because she wasn't on the battlefield. Well, she was. I don't know if you know what happens when you're a young nurse taking badly burned military members off the medevac choppers and oh, by the way, your hospital is getting shelled every night. Yeah, yeah, she had PTSD, yeah, and I was so fortunate that she came to me and that she was willing to work with me and this is before EMDR, by the way so I got arthritic joints in this hand from her grabbing on to me while she was having flashbacks. Wow.
Dr. Laura Brown:Because she needed to be grounded or something or someone and I'm like, okay, grab away, because she used to be in my office having flashbacks. Yeah, and she and the people I worked with, but her in particular, really turned my corner in the direction of working with trauma.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, yeah, of seeing it, of having a name for it, of being able to be there with someone in the intensity of it, like there's something really validating at that point in time, right when we're like, oh okay, we're going from. You can never see this client. About the DSM, I'm thinking back to 2005, when people started talking about developmental trauma more formally and introducing complex trauma more frequently.
Dr. Laura Brown:It came before that, yeah, I mean it came In the 1990s because there was an ISTSS conference where Judy Herman and Bessel Lagerholt were kind of debating what to call it. And again, another eidetic memory of sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, which is where the conference was being held, with Judy and a couple of other feminist people talking about wanting to call it complex drama, which is not what Bessel wanted to call it. So we were talking about it in 1993 or 94. Yeah, and certainly Christy Courtois was talking about it in Healing, the Incest Room, which came out in 1986.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, so we've got a lot of people talking about it in the 1990s and we're getting incredible pushback. Um, some people in the drama field who still get the pushback. By the way, we're like, you know, that's not a trauma, because the person wasn't fill in the blank, having feeling, uh, so it wasn't 2005, it was a good decade before that. It's just that it finally began to reach the surface after a decade of people saying, excuse me, we have research. Yes, and then, excuse me, we've got neurological research. Yeah, and some people don't want to acknowledge it.
Lisa Danylchuk:And that phenomenon continues. I mean, I think even within ISSTD and other similar societies there's such a wealth and depth of knowledge that's commonplace and shared. Of course, there's debates about some things and others, but there's such a perspective and understanding about trauma and that takes a long time to go beyond. I remember I was working with youth in housing development in Watts in California and it was just around. Well, I said 2005 because Essel published something about developmental trauma and I remember being like read this, read this, read this like sharing it with the staff and sharing it because people would pathologize.
Lisa Danylchuk:I felt like it, even though that still used developmental trauma disorder, with that word disorder included. It started to contextualize more, and I think that's the arc we've been on is more and more understanding biology, understanding neuroscience, understanding trauma responses and contextualizing, like going from what's wrong with you to what happened to you, to what's right with you, to what's right with your and its response and all of that. So I'm curious for you in that arc, how does the decolonizing weave in? Because I think that part of of that, like we're on a journey, hopefully, of that process. It's a messy one, but how do you see, actually let me ask you this how would you like to see it evolve from where we are?
Dr. Laura Brown:yeah, well how I'd like to see it evolve for us. Often, by us I mean people who work with suffering individuals who are trauma exposed and who are responding in various ways. They might be dissociating, they might be having nightmares of flashbacks, they might be numb, they might be having physical symptoms, might be having physical symptoms. I mean there's a lot of different things that happen in the interaction between trauma exposure and age of exposure and the neurology that the person brings to it and the social context. There's a lot of different ways that people manifest their suffering. I would like to see this all taken out of the medicalization system and I get it that many therapists, many people who work in our field, are dependent on insurance companies to pay for what they do, on Medicare and Medicaid to pay for what they do. I mean I was a Medicare provider not to see old people, but to see people with a history of complex childhood trauma and dissociation, because it was a way they could have access to what I had to offer you people I saw for 10, 20 years, and yet that system has corrupted us. It corrupts us, so I use the word colonization because it's a little bit like what happened when the European Christians came to North America, to the global south, and said your ways of thinking are wrong, your ways of being are wrong, your existential systems are wrong, your languages are wrong, you're not real, you don't exist. And here we are. You know, 400 years, 500 years later, that's happened to the work of doing healing.
Dr. Laura Brown:As I write about in my last book, people have been healing from trauma and healing with others from trauma since human beings became human beings, because we've been experiencing trauma since we became human beings. I mean that's why we've got nervous systems that are explicitly attuned to being able to respond first to attachment and then to trauma. I mean, we're built for this, we are neurologically built for this, and our private ancestors and relatives are as well. Well, we've been healing each other since forever and we've been struggling with trauma exposure since forever, struggling with trauma exposure since forever. And somewhere in the late 1800s it began to be turned into a medical problem and a professional problem. And then we have diagnostic manuals, and then we've got what I think of as the alphabet soup of treatments that people get trained to do and instead of saying, oh, wait, a, a minute, stop what, what did we know before? There was all this layer, layers of medicalization, which I think of as the colonizing of healing and the disordering of trauma response, instead of the cultures that create drama. Yeah.
Dr. Laura Brown:We've been colonized by that. We need those of us who work with people who have suffering souls of some kind, and so to decolonize is a really radical project, and I get it that what I'm asking for is probably not reasonable or feasible for most people, but I want people to think about it. Yeah.
Dr. Laura Brown:I'm very interested less in what people do with their work and more in how people think about what it is that they're up to. I think about myself as in collaboration with a suffering person, so that they heal and I heal, and we heal and the world heals. If I think about it that way when I'm doing EMDR, for example, if I'm thinking about it that way, then I'm going to be different in the room. Then if I'm thinking I am the therapist and I know everything and I have this thing that will fix you, and if it doesn't fix you, what's wrong with you? And you're the person with the disorder.
Dr. Laura Brown:How do we think about it? It's always interested me what I wrote about feminist therapy, now what I'm writing about decolonial work. But how do we approach this? And I think, in the current political climate in the United States and some other places in the world, thinking about it in this very radical way that challenges power differentials, that challenges who's in the authority, that challenges who made this stuff up. I think it becomes even more important right now because we're seeing our professional associations do pre-compliance, we're seeing them give in and bow down and that makes thinking in this colonial way particularly necessary. And I think, for people who have been exposed to trauma and are suffering from that exposure, we owe it to them to say you are not the problem. Realize, when we're working with someone, they're not the problem. They may think they're the problem, they're not sick.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, the society is very, very sick yeah, it makes me think of a quote. I think it was J. Krishnamaruti. It's very challenging, in summary, to be healthy in a system or society that's not.
Dr. Laura Brown:Well, I would say basically that it's impossible for any of us to be truly healthy in a culture that is continuously traumatizing us or people we care about. I don't know how many people you know who have stopped looking at the news since November 4th of last year or are compulsively doom-scrolling through the news, but people are feeling more terrified, more despairing than they have in a really long time, and I think in in that we see how the culture has been so dramatized by what's been happening, and that it's not just the people with the official diagnoses or the official designation. So, thinking about it in a radical way, I think it's becoming even more important, and by. One of the things I like to joke about is that the current administration released a list of words that had to be scrubbed from all the federal websites. Well, that's the titles of all of my books, going back to the very first book I ever co-edited in the early 1980s. And so scrub everything that people like me write about and think about and do. And no, we're not going to be scrubbed.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, absolutely not. So you're talking about power dynamics. You're talking about histories of really severe trauma across not just the US but other places in the world in terms of the impact of colonialism. I mean. They're big concepts and I think a lot of us in the trauma world some people focus more narrowly, but I think you start to see it and then the horizon broadens, right. You're like it's everywhere and it makes sense, and you're talking about power dynamics in particular. So I'm curious. You know Dr Jennifer Gomez, she's been on the podcast.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah.
Lisa Danylchuk:I know she's great. We talk about dream storming. So I'm like what would the dream storm be in terms of power and that we could start on either end of the spectrum with? What does the power look like in a healing partnership? What does the power look like in a healing partnership? What does the power look like in a country right or in how in anywhere in between, in terms of how we relate to each other? What's the dream storm for you of how power works and how we relate to each other?
Dr. Laura Brown:Well, I think that, first of all, we have to think about power really differently and in a more sophisticated way, and so we start with how we are powerful in relationship to ourselves. Yeah, and that doesn't mean the kind of power that the guy sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue some of the time has, that's a different kind of power. But I think that power with ourselves, which is what we bring into our work as healers. So how do I know what I think and know what I feel, and know where I stop and someone else begins, and then how do I know what's happening in my body so that I'm able to respond to it? Those are very powerful things that many of the people with whom you and I work don't have access to. You know. We sit with someone and say how are you feeling? They say I don't know.
Dr. Laura Brown:yeah, well, it turned out it was dangerous for them to know how they felt, because if they knew how they felt and they said it out loud, something really bad happened to them, yep.
Dr. Laura Brown:And so creating healing relationships in which, first of all, we acknowledge that there is a power imbalance and that our job as the healer is to reduce it yeah, imbalance and that our job as the healer is to reduce it, yeah, and to reduce it not by giving away our own power, but by inviting the people we're working with to notice how they're already powerful.
Dr. Laura Brown:As I said to people, I don't stay alive long enough to walk into my office. Yeah, that's pretty remarkable when you think about it in terms of some of the people with whom we work, who you know, people who were their caregivers, supposedly and I'm putting air quotes around them, you know, tried to kill them, trafficked them, raped them, starved them, did horrible things to them. How is it that they walked into our offices alive, yeah, and have them look at how they have been powerful in ways that they could not safely know? So we need to create collaborative relationships. So that's my dream for the healing work is that we say the disorder is not in the person, the disorder is in the larger structural and social forms of oppression. Yeah, those are the pathologies, those are what think and that we want to see this as a person striving toward health, striving towards power, even if some of the ways that they've done it haven't worked very well for them yet. Yeah.
Dr. Laura Brown:And one of our jobs is to reflect that back. It's like you tried something. Some of them worked, some of them stopped working, some of them never worked particularly well and you did something the three-year-old kid you were figured out, dissociating somehow. All that you got through the horror show, whoa. That's pretty impressive, don't you think? You teleported yourself out without a transporter beam that's pretty impressive, don't you think?
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, so having that collaborative perspective and realizing that what we bring are how to create the conditions in which people can heal yeah, we don't actually do anything in particular. I mean, and the way I look at it is, there's lots of things we do. Working with people have been traumatized, and some of them help some of the people some of the time, and some of them help no one some of the time. And being a true believer in any particular approach to working with people is kind of like any kind of fundamentalism. You kind of get into difficulties because you can't see past your own. This is the way the truth and the life. Well, actually, no, the way the truth and the life of healing is the relationship. Lots and lots of good research on that done by people like my friend John Norcross, like my friend Bruce Waphold. People have looked at the evidence-based psychotherapy relationship variables. So one of my visions is we get rid of all these medicalized terms and just own that we're healers, we're collaborating and that we're not untraumatized, that we are affected, if not by some kind of big trauma or by developmental trauma or by attachment trauma, living in a world where all you have to do is turn on the TV and there is trauma everywhere around us. I mean, as a Jew, I could tell you that the current deportation of kids who are American citizens just has my Hitler meter going off like crazy, Because you realize that Jews of Germany were citizens in Germany until Hitler declared them not. The Jews of the Netherlands were the citizens of the Netherlands until the Nazis occupied the Netherlands and declared them not, and in France and in Italy and so on and so on and so forth. And so when I see and hear people who are in a position to effectuate taking away people's freedom saying your citizenship doesn't matter, we're going to just wipe it out, that's traumatic to me.
Dr. Laura Brown:I don't know if you've heard Jamie Pritzker's talk in Vermont that he gave. You've got to listen to it. So Pritzker is the governor of Illinois. He gave a talk and he, like me, is the grandchild of Jews who fled what was then Russia and is now variously Poland, ukraine and Belarus. And we fled because we were in danger, and my grandparents and his grandparents came to the country just a little before and a little after World War I, before the first immigration quotas were imposed. There was no such thing as an undocumented immigrant before in it21, where the first quotas were imposed to keep out people like my grandparents. Wow, and he said this is relevant to him because this country is becoming what his grandparents fled here from.
Dr. Laura Brown:And that's what's going on for me. So it's not happening to me directly or to him directly, but indirectly, through intergenerational trauma, it's happening to us. And so, as healers, rather than say, oh, I'm fine, we talk to the people we work with or utilize them, in which someone else is doing their work, so that when somebody wants to die on a regular basis, instead of freaking out and calling law enforcement, we say, okay, you know, you can always kill yourself later, but let's talk about how you're going to be alive for the next 24 hours until we get in contact with each other again, next 24 hours until we get in contact with each other again, so creating collaborative, non-coercive relationships with people who are trauma exposed and I think, becoming aware of the fact that this really applies to the broad range of suffering people, that it's very easy for us to say, okay, this is about trauma, but what about psychosis?
Dr. Laura Brown:And what I want to say is we don't have a place in our culture for people who hear voices, including the disassociated people that you and I work with, who hear the voices of their equal states. We don't really have a place in our culture for people who hear voices and we use other cultures. Do the history of this culture? There's a saint, joan of Arc, who heard a lot of voices and because of that became a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. You know, there were places for people who heard voices and we don't have that in Western cultures anymore. And so how do we create spaces that are safe enough for those people, which requires an immense investment of time and money and energy and a change of paradigm.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, rob, this is a mental illness which was actually a move out of. These are crazy people we should like to. The mental illness was a step along the way, but to say this is stuff, this is a neurotype, this is a neurotype for which we don't really have good support in the cultures that we're around. Well, it's the same thing as how do we decolonize, thinking about people who are probably exposed or people who are dissociative, because you and I both know there's still people who say, oh, they know something against the social and ego states. It's like excuse me, sit in the room with someone sometimes when the five-year-old ego state shows up and says who are you? Which is, shall we say, very convincing yeah.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, I mean, I remember having a supervisor at a young age, before I was licensed, and I had a client who was sexually exploited, being trafficked, and met with her for maybe a period of about a year and then one session where she actually came into the clinic which was rare showed up speaking like a five, six year old Can we color? And I talked to my supervisor about it and I was like, okay, I'm seeing some dissociation, I'm seeing this in my supervisor. Oh, I don't know if that's I don't think that's dissociation. I was like, well, okay, supervisor, you tell me what you think that is. I'm pretty confident here.
Dr. Laura Brown:If you were there there, I don't think you'd be questioning this like it was cut and dry so that's my dream for what happens with us, and what that means is finding ways to pay the bills for all of us to do this work, so that we're not being required to give a disorder diagnosis, to not have to be medically necessary for us to do the work we do, which I think has really corrupted us in some ways. And you know, when I first was able to be licensed and take insurance, that was pretty great because most of the people I saw had more insurance than they did money, and so they could afford to see me and I could make a living. And we need to be able to be housed in a fedex phone, just like the people with whom we work. Yeah, that's the therapy vision, the big vision we're seeing actually at the streets of America now almost every day. So I watch Rachel Maddow devotedly, and every night of her show she does something incredibly hope-creating and she shows dozens of clips of demonstrations happening everywhere, all over the United States, in places you might not expect it. And that's what we're seeing, and that's what JB Pritzker called for in his speech at Vermont, which is people have got to rise up. We have to have a willingness to take the risk to rise up and speak truth to power repeatedly, not just one time, not just one time, not just two times, not for the first hundred days, and over and over and over and over again. I know a lot of therapists who are like, well, I'm not political, this has nothing to do with me, it's like bullshit. Excuse my French. Everything we do in the world of trauma is political, and if we don't own that, we do it a service to the people with whom we work and to ourselves.
Dr. Laura Brown:And so the big picture is that we've stopped. We who are trying to have a more just world, first of all stop fighting with each other, because we do that. We have the circular firing squad in the left, which I've seen for many, many years. We've got to stop fighting with each other. We've got to stop being sectarian about it. We've got to realize that our intersectional identities help us understand who we are, but they shouldn't be creating barriers between us, and that we've got to figure out how do we come together in coalition. You know, bernice Johnson, reagan, who was the founder of Sweet Honey and the Rock, the wonderful women's group, said once I went to a concert once where she said being in coalition is working with people with whom you don't agree about everything, but you agree on the social justice goal. And we need that right now.
Dr. Laura Brown:And I think, because times are so dire, we're beginning to get that, because a lot of us my age are looking around and saying, well, I read my history book and, gee, this looks a lot like Weimar, germany. Yeah, and we could stop this. We could do something. Okay, let's do something.
Dr. Laura Brown:And so my vision for the big picture for a more just world, which I think will not happen in my lifetime picture for a more just world, which I think will not happen in my lifetime Because, given my family genetics, if I make it another 20 years that'll be good, but it might happen in the lifetimes of the next generation or the generation after that and my family. I have a bunch of younger cousins who are very fecund, and so there's a lot of babies being born there, yeah, who are very fecund, and so there's a lot of babies being born there, yeah, but in that generation, if we just are willing to keep on being fearless and not give in to the trance of despair, yes, and it's easy to fall into that, it's easy to say there's nothing I could do, and so that takes me back to what is power. Yeah, power is the ability to call up a friend and say let's go to a demonstration together. I do have a friend who's a famous person, so I won't say the friend's name, but this friend has started dating recently and her first date was going to a protest. The person she was dating invited her to a protest. Okay, this is pretty cool, and this is a person who's already, you know, very involved in progressive stuff, has really changed our field as well and with their work.
Dr. Laura Brown:But all of us need to say what is the one small, powerful thing I could do every day to move the whole world closer to justice? I have a sign in my front yard that I bought right after the election that says resist, persist, repeat. Every time someone drives down my street and my street is a busy thoroughfare that goes from one part of town to another it doesn't matter who they are or where else in the Seattle area they came from they see that sign, and so that's a sort of a set of get active resistance, so that I put things on my social media every day about things you can do my side petitions I bother other people to get involved. Those are really big things. I mean it's not going to cause I don't think it's going to cause the federal government to show up at my door anytime soon, although, ironically, when I was in the anti-war movement back in the 70s, the FBI tapped our home phone because my brother and I were both city-wide organizers for the Student Mobilization Committee to end the war in Vietnam. And when there was a raid on the FBI files at some point and they got stolen by the War Resisters League and a friend of a family member was in WRL and found his file and our file and there was nothing. To me it was like homework that's what we were talking about on the phone homework or, you know, going to a rock and roll concert. But the point is, you know, they've been showing up at my literal door, on a figurative doorstep, since I was a kid.
Dr. Laura Brown:Um, so what? Yeah, well, I'm an old woman, which actually makes me more fearless. But everybody needs to figure out this is my call to all of us in our field that each of us needs to figure out what is the one all-powerful act of resistance to injustice that we can find every day, and not demonize the people who elected those folks, because the people who elected them are traumatized themselves and sociopaths take advantage of traumatized people, and we have just seen that in the latest election in the US is sociopaths taking advantage of traumatized people. And so, rather than saying, oh, I won't talk to a person who voted for that guy, it's like let me listen to their story, because their story has a trauma in it somewhere and they were taught that the way to deal with that trauma is to pass it on to somebody else. I mean, as we know, a lot of the people we work with had parents who were trauma survivors, only they hadn't worked it through on themselves.
Dr. Laura Brown:So having compassion, that's the other thing. The most powerful thing we can do is have compassion for everybody. The autocrats I have no compassion for they are enriching themselves at the expense of vulnerable human beings everywhere. But I have compassion for the people who are their followers, because most of them were just responding to their own drama in a particular way, and I think that's a difficult message for many of us who are in the social justice world to be able to do, because those people are not being very kind to some of us these days or to people we care about.
Dr. Laura Brown:So that's my bigger vision and I won't live to see it, but I'm not going to stop working toward it. So that you know if of I have a new baby I don't know how you calculate it he's the grandson of one of my first cousins. He was born a couple of months ago and I just saw a picture of him and our family whatsapp chat. And when that baby is my age, in another 72 years, first of all, we hopefully will have protected the climate and, second of all, maybe it will be a more just world, because I don't want to say, well, I won't be here, so it doesn't matter, I won't be here, but he'll be here and his first cousins will be here. And if my niece ever has a kid which she's working at, her kid will be here. And we have a responsibility to do what we can to stop this injustice, because injustice is traumatizing and injustice creates the world in which there's no post trauma.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, and you're tracking right across generations, things that have happened directly within your family, things that are very real, that have happened in the world. Signs, stirrings of this feels very familiar. Let's not have that happen again. How do we work with this? In the moment, it sounds like seeing people come together in coalitions where we can agree on some values or a shared goal and work together. It also sounds like having empathy for people we might not be able to really get into their mind or fully understand, but be able to be open and stay connected.
Lisa Danylchuk:The other thing that comes to mind as you're talking is a conversation I've seen a lot about in terms of small power, like just making what can you do today to take care of yourself, to move forward, and also to it's almost like a decolonize your emotional state, news day to day, like stay connected, stay somewhat informed without being completely dysregulated, because that can be a pattern too, where people become so dysregulated that it feels disempowering and so they lean out and then people who are in very specific positions of power can do whatever they're doing because people are so exhausted or despairing, right. So there's something here about, even when you're talking about in session what do I need. What's happening in my body, how am I aware, like that decolonizing and becoming empowered as a healer in collaboration with a client, like a lot of that sounds like it applies to these bigger picture things that you're talking about, these larger systemic dynamics. Where how can we reclaim our own space, our own bodies, our values, our vision and stay connected and and yes, I don't know if in heartened is a word, but we can stay in heartened and hold the longer term vision too of, okay, maybe it's my children, my grandchildren, my nieces, my nephews, the future of what does this look like? Playing forward? Because we alive now, and you and your family alive now, know the impacts of racism against Jews, of the Holocaust, of all of the harm that was done there.
Lisa Danylchuk:We understand now in the trauma field that harm done has specific impacts in our biology and in the way that we think and feel emotionally, in the way that we feel safe or unsafe socially. And so there's this, there's so much that you're integrating and transmitting through in your work. That feels like I just want to honor how much digestion to go and how much understanding yourself sitting with uncomfortable experiences that other people have had, that have happened in your lineage or in your life. I feel like there's so much digestion going from the harms done, being aware of the harms done, and that's hard in and of itself, right, just to be aware of the harms done and then start trying to alchemize, okay, well, where do we go with that? Like, what do we do with that?
Lisa Danylchuk:And you've given so many examples today, from the more specific micro in the moment to the more macro or long-term ways that we can navigate and ways that we can hopefully heal. I mean, I think when you again you broaden that horizon, you see trauma. You're like, oh shit, like this is everywhere. What do I do? Yeah, and it's always been. It's just now.
Lisa Danylchuk:We have some language and we have an evolving understanding of it and we have, hopefully, coalitions, right, professionals coming together and even for me, being someone who's been in the yoga world, it's like, okay, yoga world's gone through a whole lot of reckoning with abuses that have happened even within that, and finding, okay, here's this amazing long-term practice that has this lineage and has this sort of sacred quality, and then here's the exploitive stuff. We're going to let that go, but how are we continuing to show up, to use the tools? We have to stay connected to each other, to honor harms that have been done, without letting that sort of fractionate us even more right, like honor the pain, connect and find some way forward where there's space for each of us, where there's space for us to be human, where there's space for I mean I think of the word healing a lot of just being peace and connection and being able to live a life that, like in my idyllic mind, it's like it's happened before on this planet that we've lived in this way.
Dr. Laura Brown:But it also sometimes means being angrier. Yeah, sometimes, when we heal, we get angrier because we have more access to all of our feelings and you know, going along with what you're saying, what I say to people is do not let those sociopaths take control of your trauma response system, of your sympathetic nervous system, of your HPA axis. Yes, don't give it away to them. If you notice yourself getting highly activated, then do things to center yourself. I mean, I've been practicing aikidos for the last 22 years yes, when I was 15 and getting on the mat sometimes is what I need to do, and our sensei talks about the importance of this practice because it's a trauma healing practice in so many ways. And when I start to feel something stealing my sns, I'm like wait a minute, does this person deserve my sns? No, what do?
Lisa Danylchuk:I do to take it back. Yeah, they're knocking on the door, but you don't have to answer excuse me, no, this is my sns, this is my nervous system.
Dr. Laura Brown:I'm going to save it for what matters, or the moments of joy I get when I step outside my door and smell the lilacs.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yes, yes, so that you don't, they don't knock on the door If you knock. If they knock on the door and you let them in and then your whole sympathetic nervous system is doing that dance and you step out the door, you them in and then your whole sympathetic nervous system is doing that dance and you pop the door. You might not see or smell the lilacs, right, you might just be in this sort of grumbly cloudy brain space going to your car and when we can say nope, not answering that, no, your nervous system, your outreach here is not allowed in my system. We can maintain a sense of peace. We can also stay connected to how we feel about things, like you mentioned. Yeah, a hundred percent, it's. It's an adaptive emotion.
Lisa Danylchuk:If somebody crosses the line, it's natural to get angry, but we do also have power to set some of those lines Right. Exactly, not you, not now. This is my space, right, yeah, not now. This is my space, right, yeah, so beautiful. I mean I feel like we could talk for hours here. So many threads that are, I think, so important and healing in your work. So again, I want to just thank you for writing so many books. I mean, for me, writing books is hard. I've written three and I'm like I'm taking a break.
Dr. Laura Brown:For me it's easy. Don't ask me to strike a yoga pose, I can't do that. But ask me to write anything, and I just go away for a couple of weeks at a time to Hawaii, and I write. That's what I do. I just get up in the morning, I snorkel to be with the fishes and then I write, and I'm fortunate that way. I mean, some people can do what you do and some people can do what I do, and each of us has our particular talents. Yes, and I've been fortunate to be somebody for whom writing comes naturally, and particularly now in the last year, with this vocal disorder that has descended upon me, again being able to write has become especially precious.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yes, you can communicate in that way as well.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yes, oh, thank you for asking me to be on your podcast, Lisa. I really appreciate that.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, it's been so wonderful talking with you and hearing more from you, and I know listeners will agree. So what's next for you? Your book came out recently, decolonizing Trauma Healing. For those watching on video, you can see it on the shelf up above. Uh, laura, towards a humble, culturally responsive practice. So that's out and available. Is there anything else that's going?
Dr. Laura Brown:on I'd like to share. Oh, apa reached out to me and said so why don't you write the how-to book? Well, I'm working on how to be a decolonial, humble, culturally responsive healer. I have about half the book written and I'm going to finish it up this year. So that's the project. I am slowly, very, very, very slowly working on a third-degree black belt.
Dr. Laura Brown:Maybe, I don't know, I'm not in any particular rush. I'm halfway through the five years that they should be fully in remission from cancer. So I'm doing things to take care of myself and I'm so grateful for all the researchers at the fred hutch cancer center here in Seattle who saved my life. I'm looking for joy where I have it. I'm grateful that my treatment for my vocal disorder is moving ahead so I can have a speaking voice again, even though it doesn't sound like the one I used to have. But I have one which a year ago I didn't. When I first got the recurrence of this I didn't.
Dr. Laura Brown:But mostly I'm looking to keep on making good trouble, as the late great john lewis used to say. It's like make make good trouble, because you know, jews have 613 commandments. We do not have only 10, and one of them says that hebrews said x tiered off, but pursue justice. Well, I have been pursuing justice for a very long time and so honoring that commandment. I may not keep kosher, but I do pursue justice and continuing to find ways to do that. Whether it's where I shop or don't shop, how I spend my money, what I do with my time, all of those are about creating justice, in small ways and in big ways.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, but the next book is what's next, so it'll probably be out somewhere in 2026, unless I get sort of hung up on writing too many words again. A problem I have, and this is looking for joy in my life, because when you're 72, you know that you're more than halfway there. People in my family tend to live until they're mid to late 80s, so I would like to be around at least that long, and at that time I want to be. I want to honor the gifts that life has given me. Yes, by doing something with them, for myself, but for the world around me, in whatever way I can. That's what's next. That's what's always the next.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, I often close by asking people what brings them hope. But I'm curious what brings you joy?
Dr. Laura Brown:Aikido brings me joy, yeah. The people in my life bring me joy, my friends, the people I'm close to. Smelling the lilacs brings me joy, yes. Looking at the beautiful fabric I heard all around my home, which has been created by Indigenous women artists all over the planet, that I've been collecting since the early 70s, brings me joy. Beauty brings me joy, yeah. Dancing brings me joy, yes. Listening listening to earth, wind and fire, and dancing in the morning because of me joy. Yes. Looking out at the mountains that are west of me brings me joy.
Dr. Laura Brown:So nature, my aikido practice, my friends, that all brings me joy. And I nature, my Aikido practice, my friends, that all brings me joy. And I am fortunate. I'm incredibly fortunate. I have so much privilege and I don't feel guilty about that or ashamed of that. I am grateful for that because my grandparents went, you know, across the Atlantic in steerage. Grandparents went across the Atlantic in steerage. My parents worked their tails off to be able to go to college as the first American-born members of their families. My teachers gave me a wealth of wisdom and the ability to think critically. People worked hard to allow me to do what it is that I do, yes, and so to have gratitude every day that gives me joy.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, that intergenerational resilience. You're tracking right All of that, all of those investments in growth and joy and in right when you mentioned privilege, like being in a place where you feel safe enough to go and write and share big ideas and give your gifts, share your gifts with us, which I'm grateful for. I know a lot of listeners are grateful for too.
Dr. Laura Brown:So thank you for being here, thank you for inviting me, so I look forward to seeing you at the next.
Lisa Danylchuk:ISSD. Yes, we'll be on the West Coast.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yay, down the road for me, I don't have to be jet lagged to go to ISSTD Yay.
Lisa Danylchuk:Great. Yes, I look forward to seeing you there. And how can people connect with you?
Dr. Laura Brown:I've got a website, drlaurabrown. com, which you can put in your show notes and that's really. It's got my contact information there. That's really the best way to get a hold of me. People can email me. I'm not doing therapy anymore, so don't ask me about that. I don't have a lot of people to refer to anymore, because people are either full or half retired. What I am doing is consultation and supervision and teaching. I've got six groups in China right now where I get up and teach at four in the morning here in Seattle, which is really great, wow, because I'm an early bird. Yeah, so people can email me, but don't ask me to do therapy with you, please. But if you want consultation once or twice or a long time, I'm still going to be doing this for a while, because doing this work gives me joy. Yes.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, well, thank you again and I look forward to seeing you in Portland.
Dr. Laura Brown:Yeah, I'll see you next year here in the Northwest, all right.
Lisa Danylchuk:Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to go to how we can heal. com to sign up for email updates! You'll also find additional trainings, tons of helpful resources and the full transcript of each show. If you love the show, please leave us a review on Apple, spotify, audible or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe and keep sharing the shows you love the most with all your friends. Visit how we can healcom forward slash podcast to share your thoughts and ideas for the show. I love hearing from you.
Lisa Danylchuk:Before we wrap up for today, I want to be clear that this podcast isn't offering prescriptions. It's not advice, nor is it any kind of mental health treatment or diagnosis. Your decisions are in your hands and I encourage you to consult with any healthcare professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing. In addition, everyone's opinion here is their own. Guests share their thoughts, not that of the host or sponsors. I'd like to thank our guests today, everyone who helps support this podcast directly and indirectly. Alex, shout out to you for taking care of the babe and the fur babies while I record. Last but never least, I'd like to give a shout out to my big brother, mMatt, who passed away in 2002. He wrote this music and it makes my heart so happy to share it with you here. Thank you.