Kim Howard  00:00

Kim Howard, welcome to the Let’s Talk EMDR podcast brought to you by the EMDR International Association or EMDRIA. I am your host, Kim Howard. Let’s get started today. We’re speaking with EMDR certified therapist Susan Weissbach to discuss the role of EMDR therapy and generational trauma. Thank you, Susan, for being here today. We are so happy that you said yes.

 

Susan Weissbach  00:26

Well, thank you so much for having me, Kim, and I’m really happy to be here and to discuss generational trauma.

 

Kim Howard  00:34

Susan, can you tell us about your path to becoming an EMDR therapist?

 

Susan Weissbach  00:38

I’ve been working as a therapist. I had been working for over 25 years, and in the last actually, I think I had mentioned to you, I’m currently taking a little bit of a hiatus, because I’m working more on doing some writing, fictional writing, which we’ll get to but in the process of my work, I was definitely, you know, seeing more and more people that had experiences with trauma, both discrete traumas, say, like a car accident, and more developmental childhood trauma. And so I started training in EMDR, oh, gosh, easily eight or nine years ago. And actually, I’ll say, continue to be in a peer support group with somebody who is an EMDR trainer.

 

Kim Howard  01:26

The good story. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with us. So your new novel, “Clara’s Truth,” discusses many topics, but the overall theme is generational trauma. Can you please explain what generational trauma is?

 

Susan Weissbach  01:40

Yes. So, you know, some people hear about it as intergenerational trauma, or transgenerational trauma. It’s all the same under the same umbrella of generational trauma. And what that is, is when trauma gets passed down from one generation to another, and people started to look at this in a big way, as far as the Holocaust and second generation survivors of parents have who had survived the Holocaust, where, for example, the parent might be, you know, very hyper vigilant and hyper focused on being worried about the whereabouts of their child, much more than a parent who had not been through such a horrendous situation, and that hyper vigilance about, you know, worrying about where is one’s child, then could easily get passed along to that younger child particularly. And what I was going to say is, and as they become an adult and perhaps have a family themselves, they may carry along and behave in a way that their parent behaved to them, so that it has nothing to do with what their own experience was. They obviously are of an age where they didn’t go through the Holocaust, but that their parents did, and that got transferred to them and their parental behavioral style and nurturing style. So that I want to say like that’s an example, but there are so many where you can think about racism and how that impacts, you know, a whole group of people, and how also something like a parent at some point, becoming, you know, being a narcissist, and how that gets translated to their child. And with narcissism, often, a parent can treat one child as a scapegoat, neglect another child, and another one could be their golden child, or there can be a mixture, but those things get passed along and unchecked, and I should just unprocessed. I’d rather say unprocessed. That’s how that child as an adult, if they have their own children, is then going to or may very well treat their own children. So there are these ways of parenting for all of us that we just pass along from our own experience, unless we’ve processed them in therapy, typically in a way that we have much more understanding, as well as an emotional feel that can help us be different as parents and parent in a more healthy and nurturing manner.

 

Kim Howard  04:34

Yeah, absolutely. Two points to what you just talked about. One, I know that there are studies out there, and I’d be happy to find a couple and link them in the podcast description about how generational trauma can be passed down through pregnancy, you know, so the woman or the pregnant person, you know, if they’re if they go through a trauma that immediately impacts the the baby, and so that can be passed down. On without even people realizing that, yes, you know. And the second thing is, I mean, my own parents, you know, I look at how, you know, how they raised me and my four siblings and and both of my parents had trauma in their their family lives. And now, looking back as an older adult, I see, I’m like, Oh yeah, that explains some of their behaviors, you know. I mean, luckily with my dad, at least, you know, he was the son of a coal miner, there were seven siblings. My grandfather was a raging alcoholic and a mean, mean, mean drunk. And so that impacted my dad in a way that my dad also was an alcoholic, but the home life that we had was not the same. It was a better home life than my dad had growing up like he was able to to do sort of a 180 in terms of how he parented us while he was still fighting his own demons, until he stopped drinking completely and got sober in the mid 80s. And so you look at things like that that happened even in your own family, you know, if you don’t understand where your parents came from, you sort of really don’t understand why they do the things they do as parents, until you then get older maybe, and become the parent. And so there’s, there’s a lot of generational trauma out there. And nobody has to be in some kind of historic worldwide situation to experience that you can still have it with other life, things that happen to your parents or grandparents. And so it’s out there. And so the more we know, the board we educated, we can be, we can, we can combat that. So thank you for sharing that.

 

Susan Weissbach  06:37

Yes, absolutely. And the first part of what you were talking about, Kim, and you probably know this term do with epigenetics, yes, and some people view that as a little bit of a controversial topic, but there are many people that are believers. And I think that you know, when you look at many people’s experiences and lives. It kind of makes you understand, makes you a believer that you know it would make a lot of sense that for whatever reason, I’m going to say the mother, because the mother’s the one who carries the child right to term, the baby to term, for whatever reason the mother has, for example, tremendous anxiety and or depression that’s going to affect that mother’s nervous system tremendously. And how could that nervous system, that, say, over active nervous system, not affect that baby in utero? It’s like, How can it not? And we all have, each and every baby that you know comes up out, you know, into this universe has a different potential disposition and different genetics. So one child, if there are two children in that family, one child may be more affected, assuming the mother’s equally as nervous in having both when having both children, one may be more clingy to the parents and more overly attached and have more difficulty going out into the world and trusting in the world. One may be a little bit more easy around that, but they still likely have that trauma in different situations. Yeah, absolutely. And I think also what you said that that you know, and I was trying to make that point earlier too, that there doesn’t have to be World War, there doesn’t have to be something you know, for there to be true. There’s all kinds of trauma that gets passed along, certainly. And I discussed this in Clara’s truth, certainly abuse and neglect and abuse of different forms, sexual, physical, emotional, verbal and people are understanding more and more. Therapists are understanding more and more, and hopefully the public the detriment of neglect as well. So it’s not only overly doing something to a child that’s negative in terms of abuse, it’s also being under involved and neglectful, including not physically embracing that child, including ignoring that child, and maybe to the extent they’re a child that’s not even being provided basic needs. But you know, that’s more extreme. It doesn’t have to be that extreme.

 

Kim Howard  09:25

Yeah, exactly. We did a podcast with Dr Debbie Korn and her co author Michael Baldwin a couple of years ago, and we talked about Big T and little T trauma, which is talked about in the therapy world, especially the EMDR therapy world. And so anybody who’s listening out there who’s not a therapist, you understand what a big trauma would be. It would be a car accident, it would be a war, it would be a death, it would be some kind of assault, sexual assault, whatever. And then a little t could be bullying. It could be like you said earlier, you know, parents who ignored you, you know, I don’t know how they how their. This, classify which one is which. But don’t think that, if you grew up in a household where you think there might be some trauma, just because it wasn’t like it didn’t make the news, it’s still not traumatic to you. And then you want to make sure that you can heal from that. So please be aware that there’s, there’s both kinds out there.

 

Susan Weissbach  10:16

All kinds, there’s all mutations, and yes, and then, you know, I think about situation I had read about where it was actually like a case study, where there was a couple that was in a car accident together, and the husband did not have a history beyond that trauma, a history of childhood trauma, whereas the wife did, so she went into freeze mode, and he was able to kind of thaw out much more quickly. And so I do want to make the point that when there is developmental and also known as complex trauma and relational trauma, particularly in a family, particularly with caregivers, particularly with those people who are related to the person. As far as being caregivers like parents that that trauma is much more complex, much deeper and much older, and so it’s much more ingrained, and it’s going to take much longer to work on that kind of trauma, and it’s going to affect the person in a much more pervasive manner in terms of potentially being able to trust other people, to be able to trust, you know, potentially a partner, even friends they may Like. In my book, Clara’s Truth, the main character is very accomplished, intellectually and academically. She is a PhD archeologist, and she teaches starting out at very high level university, but she’s very isolated and socially and not just from other people, but from herself. And if I could just take a moment to talk about what trauma does in terms of, and this is a, you know, a very simple explanation in terms of how memory is processed so nor what we think of as normal, memory is processed in our brains, in the neocortex of our brains, and also in the hippocampus, and it’s it’s processed as narrative memory, right and sequential memory, where as traumatic memory is not processed that way, and it’s processed more through our amygdala, which are is our emotional center, and it is not processed in a way, a sequential way of this came first, and then this came first, and then this came first. It’s processed emotionally. It’s processed, typically more in fragments, and it often gets cut off from regular memory, and kind of especially if it is extreme and can get frozen in time. And so there’s, you know, people hear about fight or flight and the idea of freeze, especially with Dr Peter Levine, who founded somatic experiencing, and which is much more about working, thinking about the body, and it can coordinate with EMDR as a therapy, but he really talks about and it came out more how in the animal kingdom, where they don’t have animals don’t have the neocortex, their bodies are able to shake off the trauma of being prey. Otherwise they would never survive, right? But because of our neocortex is, our neocortex is get in the way of being able to just know to shake it off. And so the trauma ends up frozen in our in our neural systems. I’m just going to go back to Clara. You know, some people think that this is a point I want to make, in general about people, when people have strong histories of generational trauma, and so that’s going to start from the time they are a child. They may get emotionally stuck at a certain age, and it could be an age where they started to be abused, or maybe a few years after they started to be abused, she was abused by a sexually abused by a family friend. She thought she was abandoned by her father. Her mother and grandfather neglected her. So by age 12 or so, she just emotionally is cut off. And so I’ve had readers say to me, especially on like Amazon and Goodreads, oh, well, it she seems like a YA character. Well, to me, the whole point of this book is about trauma and healing, and that if you’re traumatized and you don’t heal, that you’re so cut off from yourself that you know. You, you often don’t kind of launch into the world, and in both, not just academic, academically or professionally, but socially and emotionally. And you may be very shut off, and people may not really get what’s going on with you. And in particular, if you don’t understand your own trauma, either because it got passed down to you, or because you’re you’ve disconnected from it. Many people will know the term dissociated from it, which can happen quite easily, especially when if you were a younger child, when it happens, you may feel kind of crazy yourself, because your nervous system is very overactive, you can go into hyper arousal and the hyper vigilance, and then on the other side, you can be exhausted and shut down and go into hypo arousal. And what we want is to be in this window of tolerance that people who have not experienced trauma, or most people who have not experienced trauma generally live within.

 

Kim Howard  16:05

That’s a good explanation. Thank you. I mean, I I can only use one example of a little trauma. When my son was about two years old, we were in a car accident. My plane was delayed because of weather, and there had been an ice wintery mix, as they like to call it, in the DC area. And we were about a mile from the airport, and we were not driving fast. My husband is a good driver. He is a safe driver. He is a careful driver and cautious. We hit an ice patch, and we did a 360 and this old fashioned, old school Bronco, Ford Bronco, hit the back right end of our our car. Thank God it didn’t hit the side. I was in the I hadn’t seen my son in a week. I’d been on a business trip, and I was in the back seat with him, and he was in his car seat. But ever since that, that was back in 99 so that’s been a while. If I have to drive in the snow or ice, I get pretty white knuckled. And that’s a small, minor example. I mean, I will still drive if I have to, I will not go out to because I’m bored and I need to get out of the house because I’ve been snowed in for three days. I don’t do that if I have to go out because it’s an emergency, I will go out. But that’s a small example of how that impacted me in terms of driving and my nervous system. You just you can’t the tension just comes. It just comes on you, and your hands are on the steering wheel like, whoa. I’m gripping a little too tight here. I gotta relax, right? So that’s a small example. So if people have bigger trauma than that, and their nervous system is not regulated, then they aren’t. They’re gonna be suffering.

 

Susan Weissbach  17:39

Life is going to be hard, and they’re going to often feel like they’re in panic mode, that maybe they don’t want to even leave the house or divert from their usual routine, maybe having a very particular routine. And so if that were to happen, Kim to the point where generalize that you weren’t comfortable driving, you would probably go and seek help, like people seek help when it intervenes in their life in a way that is your their life is quite impacted, and they can’t do what they need to do, right? And so for you, it’s like, you know, thank goodness everything was okay. You’re you were okay, your son was okay, your husband was okay, and you got past it, but it still comes up at, you know, at these moments.

 

Kim Howard  18:26

Yeah, absolutely. What are the specific complexities or challenges when working with clients with generational trauma?

 

Susan Weissbach  18:33

Okay. So I would say, firstly, people, the clients themselves, need to understand, as well as the professionals, that because generational trauma goes very deep, that this is not going to be a quick therapy. You know, one thing that with EMDR that’s discussed in a kind of a general way is that you could get to trauma, a traumatic memory and experiences more easily and more quickly, and process them more quickly than through talk therapy. And when you’re talking about generational trauma again, you’re talking about developmental, usually developmental and complex trauma, that it’s going to take time because of just how ingrained in the nervous system it is. So I think that’s really important for both clients and therapists to know, I think also that it’s, you know, I think therapists know this. Clients don’t necessarily know this, that the client isn’t going to just come in and and start working on things. Even if you’re talking about a car accident, you need to take the therapist needs to take your history, they need to get a good history. In addition, you know, Francine Shapiro is the founder of and I know you know this, Kim is the founder. She’s, unfortunately, no longer with us as of about two years ago, but about 35 years ago, she founded EMDR, and since that. Time, you know, she’s she taught and worked with a number of different people, and one of her disciples, Laurel Parnell, because one of the things she added is, you know, thinking a lot about the importance of attachment and attachment theory, and in particular, and of course, Francine thought of that. But in particular, what she added was to think about, not just to think about to add resources before actually doing the EMDR or the bilateral stimulation. And you’re shaking, you’re nodding your head, so it sounds like you’ve, you’ve heard about this. And so in helping people, when I talk about resources, the idea is that you have, for example, a safe place you can think about and tap that in. So you’re in quotes installing that into your system. So a safe place, a nurturing figure. It could be more than one, a wise figure and a protective figure. And sometimes, in the process of EMDR, there are other figures that come up for the person that they didn’t name, and that that’s totally fine. The idea is that the client is not alone. Obviously, they have the therapist in the room, but they’re not alone in that moment. Because what happens in EMDR is there’s this dual awareness, where you have one you want to keep one foot in the present and one foot in the past. And it’s very, very important that people have that ability as well, to do have that dual awareness. Otherwise they can get very sucked into the past and it can feel emotionally very real. And you know what you hear about flashbacks? People may have a flashback that they feel like I was very real in somatic experiencing language you talk about that’s the vortex you get sucked into. And you want to go with a counter vortex. So you want to constantly be able to keep being able to bring people back into the present. And if you need to, you know, have the person. And I will. I’ve said to people, you know, hold up a hand, or just stop if you need to, if it feels too hard, or if I’m noticing, I’ll stop the process.

 

Kim Howard  22:09

Absolutely. It’s a delicate balance.

 

Susan Weissbach  22:11

Thank you. It’s a delicate balance, and you don’t want people to get flooded. That’s not helpful. So you don’t, you really want to prevent them from getting flooded with past memory, and so you may work with them on these resources for a while before you get further into the actual trauma. Also, sometimes people come in and they really are experiencing depression, and they may need to be on medication, an antidepressant, before they start EMDR.

 

Kim Howard  22:41

What successes have you seen using EMDR therapy for this population?

 

Susan Weissbach  22:44

I have seen some very, very nice successes, very good successes. Again, it takes time. So with EMDR, and people who have listened to this show before, and many maybe practicing professionals themselves, you start out with a target that is something disturbing to that person. And you also start out with, okay, so what is your feeling about that? And where do you feel it, in the body? And then a big piece is, what is the negative cognition? And it can be, I’m a bad person, right? And what you want to see happen is through the process of the EMDR. And it may not just be in one session. It may carry out. And then you also can have different targets at different times you want them to have. So the negative cognition is also known as the POV, and you want them to get to a point where they have what’s called a VOC, a strong cog, a strong positive cognition. The thing that I want to emphasize is that it’s not all about by any means, cognition. It’s about actually helping the person to have an emotional experience through the process of EMDR, where they go from feeling like an unlovable person to feeling like they can be lovable, and it may start out in a particular situation, but you ultimately want to generalize that feeling. And you know that work is, I mean, that’s therapeutic work. In any therapy you do, you don’t want to just have the person you know believe in their mind, or try to believe in their minds, that if they don’t think they’re, feel that they’re a good person, or if they think they are, that’s going to, that’s going to make a huge difference. No, they need to really feel it. And so a lot of times, emotion gets released, right? Tears can get released. You want to definitely end the session with them being having this dual awareness, being in the present, helping them to relax. It could be through guided imagery. Could be through relaxing their bodies. I want to also bring up just another point that in. Terms of the success that I have learned, and I have practiced that when you’re talking about transgenerational trauma, that if the person is willing to give supports to the resources to their parent, that that can be very useful also, because typically the parents, right, if we’re talking about there’s the client to the client’s parent and the the client’s grandparents, you know, the trauma got passed down, and so the parent and the grandparent had their own limitations themselves. And so if you can then go back and give resources to that parent or grandparent, then that parent or grandparents behavior could potentially have changed, and when the client or patient can experience that, that also can lead to an emotional shift.

 

Kim Howard  25:57

Absolutely. Susan, are there any myths that you would like to bust about working with EMDR therapy and those who have suffered from generational trauma.

 

Susan Weissbach  26:05

Well again, you know, as I had said earlier, I think that, you know, it’s not a it’s not usually a quick fix, but I do think that it can be a very powerful technique, and I think that there are many therapists also that are trained in EMDR, who are also trained in other therapies, for example, like myself with somatic experiencing, and Francine Shapiro herself in her in her kind of Bible to talking about all of this, I’m just looking for My my Bible book, eye movement desensitization, repress and reprocessing, EMDR therapy in her got her third edition, you know, talks about the the importance of the patient or client noticing and the therapist helping them notice what’s in the body, so that it’s not a quick fix, that it can be A very meaningful and deep shift, and that it can also work in conjunction with other therapies.

 

Kim Howard  27:06

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve talked about this on the podcast. We’ve written about it a focal point blog, and within the pages of go with that magazine, and might be on the website too. I’m trying to think off the top of my head, but you know this EMDR therapy works really well with other therapeutic modalities. You know, when a client comes to you guys, you know new client, you guys have to basically start from scratch with everybody. Everybody’s sort of a custom approach, and you guys have to figure out, the therapist has to figure out what modality or combination of modalities is going to work to help heal that client. And when we talk about EMDR, I mean, there is a perception out there, in the public that EMDR is a quick fix. It is generally quicker than other forms of therapy. But it’s not like you’re going to come in and you get like, Okay, I got six or eight sessions. Can you cure me? It’s not gonna that. We need

 

Kim Howard  27:56

to set some expectations about, you know, especially quicker. It’s not talking about put a number on it, basically about

 

Susan Weissbach  28:04

generational trauma. Yeah. So absolutely. And Francine herself started out in treating Vietnam war vets and then eventually survivors of sexual abuse. And so, right? So it really you have to think a lot about the person’s history. And it’s really super important that the person have the ability to have this dual awareness, and to be able to work on that with to assess that, and to be able to, if necessary, work more on that with them, so that they don’t get sucked into the past memory and feel overwhelmed by it. And then, obviously, that’s counterproductive,

 

Kim Howard  28:42

absolutely, absolutely. I just think about my dad, who was a career army, served two tours in Vietnam, and when he came home from Vietnam, he this is before PTSD was even named, you know, and he had all these flashbacks, you know, for a good year to 18 months, my mother would say, you know, they usually happen at night, when he was sleeping, obviously during a dream state. But you want, when you’re processing anything in therapy, you want to, you know, talk a little bit about that, but you don’t want them to be so focused on it that they’re they get sucked into, like you said, the vortex of the, the negative memory. You just don’t want that to happen. You want them to be able to sort of recall it and talk a little bit about it, but not so that they’re focused on it so they can’t move forward. Because really the goal is to move forward. And we had another podcast guest when we did a podcast recently about how EMDR therapy can help with sleep issues. They put it in a really good way. I thought they said, you know, EMDR therapy is sort of like defragging your computer. And from anybody listening who’s under a certain age that you don’t know what defragging in a computer means, back in the day, we all used to have to do that, and all the little memory pieces of the computer would get out of order as you were using your computer, and then you had to run a program that would defrag it, so all those little pieces will go back in where they belong. Yeah. And so I thought that was a really good, I guess, analogy about how the brain works, and how those memories sort of get out of the wrong filing cabinet, and then EMDR therapy helps sort of put them back in the right place. Yes, and they become less intense. Of the negative memories become less intense over time, which is really the goal here.

 

Susan Weissbach  30:19

So, yes, you want to take the charge out of the intensity of the memory, and so the person isn’t not going to remember, right? So it’s not that their their mind is going to be blank. So the idea is that they will still know what happened to them and have that memory, but not have all that emotional charge connected to it to the point where it’s still in their present day life and gets in the way. Yeah,

 

Kim Howard  30:46

Absolutely. Susan, what would you like people outside of the EMDR community to know about EMDR therapy with this population?

 

Susan Weissbach  30:56

I would like them to to know about it to know why this population, that that’s population, exists, that it exists a lot more than people realize that, in particular, when you’re talking about children, that children grow up typically, not always in families with parents or with a parents. And a lot happens behind closed doors, and that they may go through their whole childhood and teenage life until they leave that house without ever having an adult another adult know what’s really happening, especially if things are, you know, abusive or very neglectful. And so how can you expect somebody who goes through that, or some variation of that, to be able to just function in life, and for people to have a sensitivity to the fact that we don’t know what other people’s stories are, and until we walk in in their shoes, that that’s really, really true, and to understand that there also that there are things for all of us to understand, that there are therapies and techniques and just relationships that can make huge differences in people’s lives.

 

Kim Howard  32:16

Absolutely. Thank you. How do you practice cultural humility as an EMDR therapist?

 

Susan Weissbach  32:22

Well, I would say for me, it doesn’t change being an EMDR therapist versus just, you know, wearing my hat as, say, a talk therapist, or if I’ve been focusing more on somatic therapy, which is to really listen to the other person, to let them know that you know if they feel that I don’t get something or the beginning, if they feel they need to share some information with me so that they’re educating me and I will understand better to do that and just to do my best to try to understand, as I was saying, you don’t really understand someone until You walk in their shoes. To really try to listen for where they’ve had to walk and what their experience has been, you know, and from my own knowledge of, you know, understanding all of that.

 

Kim Howard  33:12

Thank you. Do you have a favorite free EMDR related resource you would suggest other for the public or other EMDR therapists?

 

Susan Weissbach  33:20

So, I think EMDR is website is great, and in discussing EMDR, I also, you know, have a colleague who’s in my supervision group who just wrote a chapter. Her name is Noora Niskanen, and Nora is spelled N, O, O, R, A, okay, because it’s Swedish. And the book that just came out, it’s really for professionals, but it’s very interesting. It’s called Experiential Therapies for Treating Trauma, and her chapter is on EMDR, and I think she really excellently explains it and spells it out and makes it very easily understandable.

 

Kim Howard  34:00

Okay, yeah, that’s great. I will list that book in the podcast description as well. So terrific. Susan, if you weren’t an EMDR therapist, what would you be?

 

Susan Weissbach  34:10

Well, I currently, I think I know I told you, I’m taking a hiatus, and I’m I am working as an author. I’m working on my second book, my second novel.

 

Kim Howard  34:19

Congratulations. That’s awesome. Is it a follow up to the first one?

 

Susan Weissbach  34:23

It’s actually a prequel, because I could tell you that it was a part of the first book, and I kept being told that it was two different books. And so a few people have said, Wait, I want to know what happens next, but it’s a prequel. And I will just say that it has to do with the main character, art, Clara, who’s an archeologist, starts out in this prequel as an archeologist, really, because she’s trying to she’s digging for memory like excavating for artifacts. And I would like, through my fiction writing, to be able to really show characters. In this case, it’s this character that whose growth has been negatively impacted by their childhood experiences, and who are able to through their creativity, through new relationships, make a difference in terms of their healing. And I will, I just want to say that as a writer, what I can’t do as a therapist is create a whole new family for someone. And so that part is exciting, but I also see myself in the future going back to continuing with doing trauma therapy.

 

Kim Howard  35:32

Yeah, that’s awesome. Is there anything else you want to add?

 

Susan Weissbach  35:36

No, just you know, thank you so much for having me. It was real pleasure.

 

Kim Howard  35:40

We’re happy to have you. Thank you for being on the show. This has been the Let’s Talk EMDR podcast with our guest, Susan Weissbach. Visit www.emdria.org for more information about EMDR therapy, or to use our Find an EMDR Therapist Directory with more than 17,000 therapists available. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to this free podcast wherever you listen, thanks for being here today.