Staying with Discomfort (Thomas Hübl): Part 2
Listen now (53 mins) | “Many of us needed to suppress anger. And what you feel in your throat is an intelligent mechanism to suppress the intensity because it threatened the belonging, most..."
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Spiritual teacher, Thomas Hübl, is back for the second part of a series we’ve decided to undertake. If you missed part one, I’d recommend giving it a listen—it ran last week—though there is no test! You can pick up with this episode and you won’t be lost. Thomas is one of my favorite thought partners because of his presence—he can build and hold an incredible amount of space, which I hope is perceptible to all of you who are tuning in from afar. I can feel it through the computer. In today’s episode, we went deeper into our conversation about finding “bad” feelings in our bodies, sitting with discomfort, and learning how to move these sensations up and out. We talked about our collective responsibility to build this capacity—particularly if we’re not deep and directly in suffering ourselves—and why these deposits of collective trauma stick around for so long. On this final point—the presence of dark and dense entities that you can sometimes sense or feel, particularly in highly traumatized parts of the globe—we’re going to devote an entire episode. So stay tuned for Part Three, coming later this fall.
MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:
Part One on Pulling the Thread: “Finding Shadow in the Body”
On Pulling the Thread: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”
On Pulling the Thread: “Processing Our Collective Past”
Thomas’s Podcast, Point of Relation
Attuned: Practicing Interdepence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World
Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds
Thomas Hübl’s Website
Follow Thomas on Instagram
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
THOMAS: So welcome to the point of relation. My name is Thomas Hubel and I'm very excited to be here again with Elise Loehnen. Elise, welcome.
ELISE: Thank you.
THOMAS: And we had such a lovely part one basically to the, we had a conversation recently and we decided to continue, which I'm looking forward to. And so basically first let's see how, how are you doing and what's important or interesting right now in your life that keeps you busy or keeps you internally engaged and then we'll dive deeper from there.
ELISE: yeah, I'm trying to remember exactly when that first conversation was, but I know we were in it as much as we are always in it collectively and it feels like, in some ways, the pulse of the planet has gone down while simultaneously continuously rising at certain points. And I feel like in the last almost year, my book has been out for a year. I've been with people post COVID in this past year of really trying to understand, and I know this is the focus of your work of where I begin and where I end and others begin and end and what part of this work is better managed collectively and what part is can only be managed safely collectively. When we understand that beginning and ending and I was sharing with you before we started what's my responsibility, right? And when am I taking over responsibility for other people and or does that diminish their own experience and or is that overwhelming? And I know you have thoughts on this but that's what I've been trying to find. The proper level of engagement.
THOMAS: that's interesting. Let's dive into this for a moment because I think that might be very interesting exploration from many people. When we say over responsibility or when we say the responsibility is the ability to respond to something like I'm able to respond to you, I'm able to respond to life circumstances to my family's needs too. So I'm able to respond. And what's the process of over responsibility?
ELISE: Mm. That's beautiful. And I think that I am talking about something that we use that word for, but that's something else, which is an over empowerment of myself in situations and taking ownership of experiences that finding that line, I guess, between proper engagement and over extension where I see this a lot in communities, particularly with women, although I think it's probably true for men to particularly men who are really balanced in their feminine, this deep intensity of caring. And I hear from women like how can we be letting any of this happen and I'm like, I'm not sure that we're letting this I'm not sure that the language or there was the relationship is necessarily appropriate. It's this line between feeling like you're creating your own experience and we're creating this world together and leaning too much into that. I'm maybe having trouble explaining it, but the balance between sort of compassion and empathy and engagement and recognizing the limits of ourselves. And letting things evolve and happen. It's almost like I think I relate to it as like a sense of over importance, in some ways, if that resonates for you, or it's my job or my responsibility to fix everything that's happening in the world. And be engaged and involved with everything happening in the world and maybe that's not my job. I don't know.
THOMAS: Yeah. The question is what it serves.
ELISE: Yeah, good question.
THOMAS: What's the difference? That's what I meant before. What's the difference between responsibility? I'm engaged in something. I have a relationship to whatever is happening, but the question is when it's over, what's actually the more than that.
ELISE: Yeah.
THOMAS: maybe when we look at what it serves and maybe also for everybody who's listening to us, maybe many of us know what you're just talking about. You know, that we have it over responsibility is an interesting process. What's the over bit or where am I when it's over in myself? What happens to my own inner experience when that happens?
ELISE: Yeah. I was chatting for pulling the thread with this woman, Sarah Bessie, who is post evangelical Christian who has been involved in deconstructing and reconstructing and in her last book, she talks about how she's deeply in the process, and I relate to this very much, of distinguishing between peacekeeping and peacemaking. And to me, that felt like a very profound distinction of not being able to tolerate presence of what's emerging and so wanting to suppress it. And you see this in families, of course, all the time, like the maintenance of a status quo and a fear of disruption, separation, whatever might be present and felt but not arising. And then the difference between that and like letting it come up for some higher value of peace. I also feel like that's when I'm, that's what's very hard to discern in our collective at this moment, when I think for so many of us, we can't tolerate understandably any of it. And so we're sort of projecting or flinging how bad this makes us feel and our inability to change it onto each other, and it's, of course, just making everything worse when I think we all actually want to make the same type of piece, maybe.
THOMAS: Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah. Saying it also like, isn't the discomfort that comes up in me with what happens out seemingly outside part of the peacemaking process. You know, because you said it beautifully, you said, can we feel the discomfort with what's happening in the world? And we begin to project that onto each other. Because I think our capacity to be with discomfort is often reduced, limited. We try to reject the tension, the discomfort, the friction, the inner, also sometimes not knowing what to do and then doing something as a compensation, but actually deeper down, we might be confused, overwhelmed, numb, activated. And I think it needs some capacity to be with that and not see that as non contribution, but actually as a contribution of a world that tries to detox something.
ELISE: Yeah. I resonate with that so deeply, Thomas, cause I can sense it in myself, in some ways it's the whole point of my book. When we have these feelings of discomfort, we call them bad deep shadow, whatever it is. When it starts to rise or emerge in us, we try to escape it as quickly as possible and get it out rather than eradicate. It's this instinct to eradicate rather than integrate. Don't know if, and you would probably know if we can actually develop sort of this internal washing machine or sump dump or whatever the metaphor is of discharging it, moving it, sending it into the ground, or I don't know what the right metaphor is, then does it increase our capacity to be with other people who are in this experience and in the collective where this is happening and then do we have a greater capacity to hold and move it without reaction and activation?
THOMAS: Yeah, that's what I deeply believe. I think that we are sitting in the legacy of the former generations that preceded us. And there's a lot of unresolved stuff. Like, we haven't been born into a very tidied up and clean space, if you were to see how many ghosts and how much stuff is in our living room. So I think the capacity that you're speaking of being with the discomfort, and I'm not talking about constantly trauma triggered, I mean, if many of us carry a lot of attachment trauma or trauma, so we need to take care of it and just being in a triggered state is not what I'm saying, but from a certain level of inner resourcing, I think we are in a detoxification process so that layers of individual ancestral and collective trauma, undigested material are coming up and I think especially when there are crisis, it's a sign that we anesthetized or through painkillers and entertainment and all kinds of distractions on it for a long time. So now the crisis is saying, stop, you can't ignore that very thing much longer. And I think that's also what's happening, for example with the climate crisis, so that stuff wants to detox itself for us to grow and mature, to be able to also solve the climate situation, we need a certain maturity. So yes, I believe very much what you just said, that we need to develop that capacity to be with discomfort, to be with tension. Like also, you know, polarization, I believe is always, if you have enough in a space to host the tension of the unseemingly unresolvable, then we are not polarizing because then polarization is tension. But if you reject that tension, we identify ourselves with one of the poles that's, that has less tension, but it's more unconscious because then we are enrolled in a, Oh, I'm part of this. So I'm part of that. I'm against this one and I'm othering that one. And so I'm in it. But if I have more space, so I can say, Oh, there is tension, I cannot reconcile that at the moment, but I'm willing to be with it. And I think it needs a certain level of maturity to do that.
ELISE: responsibility, interestingly, the ability to respond. I think for those of us who are less trauma triggered, who are less processing our own stuff independently, maybe from early life. That's our responsibility, I think, is to be able to stand in the center and hold that tension without polarization or pushing into a binary or other in each other. I think that's absolutely right to transcend and include and hold. Without getting activated, which I think it's probably really difficult for everyone. I think for women in particular, because we've assigned so much goodness to, I think everyone has sort of assigned a lot of goodness to being quote unquote on the right side of history, that there's this fear that if you aren't. Quote unquote on a side, that you are abandoning some sort of moral cause. But I think that the reality is, which is hard to see, is that the moral cause is somewhere in that transcending and including and holding for something that's not this, right? What does this lead to? This just leads to eradication and exclusion. And I think we all recognize that is actually not what we want at all, right? What's the end result of polarization and otherization? Someone, one side gets destroyed?
THOMAS: Exactly.
ELISE: Yeah.
THOMAS: Exactly. Like we want to clean always one part that feels uncomfortable to stay with the part we believe is more true instead of holding like a deep inner alignment to the values that we want to represent, but seeing the dichotomy or the polarization in the world already as a symptom of something deeper. Instead of that, we are fighting with the symptom and say, this is right, this is wrong, instead of, yes, I'm committed to the values of the right side of history, but not to perpetuate the eradication of one side, the wrong side of history, because the wrong side lives only in opposition to something else. Especially when we talk about conflict resolution, or when we talk about holding a global space for conflict, holding a global space for climate change, like some maturity, properties of maturity, like a mature self, and not just a separate self, a mature, also collective self. And I think there we are really challenged at the moment. You see it on social media and look at social media and you see tons of fragmentation, polarization, like the extension of our conflicts in the world is displayed. And there, I think we have a lot to learn. We have a lot to mature as humanity to be able to resolve some of the things really substantially, and not just through patches on top of Inflamed wounds, because often what happens and you have a patches in and now we took care of it, but actually it's already growing to become the next cycle of a similar issue.
ELISE: You mentioned, The environment and that as another symptom expression and obviously, you know, even the definition of nature is it's defined as sort of everything that's not human, which is funny the way that we see ourselves is outside of nature. And is that also, not to take global warming sort of a spiritual level, but to take it to that, until we recognize that what that are micro process is the same as the macro process, I'm assuming we will never resolve this macro world until we resolve them the micro.
THOMAS: Yeah, exactly what you said. We say, okay, go through the forest, where is nature around me versus I am nature too. And that, that the interdependence, like the sense of I am an interdependent whole. I'm not a separate particle within the biosphere that's called human, but my body, I am nature too, same as the tree or same as the rabbit in the forest. And I think in that, even when we say people destroy, like humans destroy the planet, like where does the planet start or end and where do we start or end?
ELISE: Mm
THOMAS: like as we, as humans, you know, where is the human and where is the planet and what's in between. And I think examining what actually creates that perception is like looking at the root cause of many, many behaviors that are destructive in relationship to the biosphere, of course, of course, there is destructive behavior, but that's already a side effect of something much deeper that we often don't pay attention to, even in climate movements, the dualism between humans and planet humans and nature is in the language encoded. So there's some kind of unconscious agreement being transmitted when we speak like that. And I think exactly as you said, we need to resolve, we need to look at not what's wrong with it, because when we look at what's wrong with it, we already reject it. So we can never really become intimate with that separation. I think to become intimate with the what am I, what are we saying when we saying that, how does this live in me? When I don't pathologize it, when I say, Oh, I'm really curious about it, what actually creates that separation in my experience? Or is there that separation at all? Or is that something I downloaded from the large language model, where we source our language from, as human beings what actually happens there?
ELISE: And when you think about this ongoing detoxification process on every level. Is there a version? How do you see it? Do you see it as this, like you mentioned the ghosts in our houses, our lineage. Is it as, you know, obviously that's not concrete, but in some ways that is concrete, where there are these energies, these entities, these puddles, pools, I don't know what they are, of unprocessed feeling, or is creating images or metaphors, or turning it into sort of a physical spectrum, is that not the right what or is it just depend on how people perceive the world?
THOMAS: No, definitely it's important that we look, how does this live in our experience and not just take images in that don't relate to our experience. I mean, that's important. And I saw this in over 20 years of working on collective trauma layers, there are archaeological layers of trauma and trauma is disembodied experience, experience that couldn't be experienced because it was so overwhelming at the time that it happened, it doesn't matter if it was a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, five years ago, a year ago, like whatever couldn't be experienced is like a disembodied ghost.
ELISE: Yeah.
THOMAS: But we can say if there are lots of collective disembodied ghosts, if cultures go through wars, or if there are dictatorships, or the Holocaust or other genocides? So there's so much pain, where does that energy go? That energy is being destroyed. It's being disembodied. It becomes like a cloud. And so, I think we are living in a world where that cloud reduces our perception. It's like the metaphor would be, you drive your car and you're so used that it's foggy you get a shock when you, when suddenly it's sunny because we are so used to drive in a reduced visibility where you only see 50 meters. If that becomes normal, then an open relationship, an intimate planet that the planet is not so distant and far away. And then the different cultures, but that everything is actually here that we have access to all the data because the biosphere is a huge supercomputer, but it's so fragmented that everything seems far and fragmented. We don't understand each other. We can't collaborate well with all the side effects of a reduced visibility, but actually the detox is actually that energy wants to come back to heal itself. It's not a disturbance, but we try to put painkillers on it and anesthetize it to not feel the discomfort. And like this, I think we block a lot of evolution or development.
ELISE: Yeah, this spiritual healer. I work with talks about it, she's like, it's almost like oil spills and in different parts of the planet, the density Archon energy and in certain areas that's palpable. And as you said, it's just, it's unrealized shadow projection. It's not evil in the way that we love to use that word. It is waiting to be filled with light and needs to be enlightened. It needs to be integrated. It cannot be eradicated. And that part of it is what we were going back to. And I think we should talk about tools for that discomfort, but how do you bring, how do you use your body or nature or your part of nature to integrate as much as you can without becoming overwhelmed or sticky? I don't know what that process is. Can you talk about that a little bit?
THOMAS: Yeah, I think one is we all have our individual challenges. You have challenges in your intimate relationship. You have challenges with your kids. You have challenges at work. You have challenges with certain parts of society. So like we all experience the unintegrated parts of ourselves through relationships with different parts of our life. So one practice would be that I am curious every time something is hard, difficult, challenging, whatever, that I have my own practice to look what actually is going on in myself. And I say, this was difficult. Something was difficult here. So it was hard for me to experience my experience in relationship to whatever was difficult. And as long as I only project this outwards. I mean, there are circumstances, obviously, but there's also something here that experiences those and that I go deeper and say, yeah, that's scary. Instead of saying it's difficult, they say it scared me or in meeting I felt shamed or I felt ashamed or I felt I got angry and I didn't say anything. And now I have this tension in my stomach or in my belly or in my throat. And anger came up, but I suppressed it. And if I don't pathologize that, but I say, okay, I want to develop my intimacy within myself and learn from my own experience. So then I practiced this myself. And then I think we need also more collective containers: conversations or groups, as you said before, where we dedicate time to say what's actually the legacy of our society? It's the legacy of our culture. What are the These dark lakes, the unprocessed shadow lakes in our society? and I think if we create safe spaces where we can have conversations and conversations put us in touch with deeper feelings or with the experiences of our ancestors, the generations before us. So then we expand our awareness, the radius of our awareness. And I think that's courageous. Because then we are less and less bound to the repetition compulsion of those shadows and we are more and more integrating those shadows as creativity, as agency, as clarity, as relational capacities, resonance, and so on. And I'm sure you and your work also have developed rituals or ways how to be together, too, and also what you wrote in your book how we work on patriarchy or patriarchal aftermath in all of us.
ELISE: Yeah.
THOMAS: I think that's very, very much needed.
ELISE: Yeah, I had this experience and of course it's perfectly timed that we're speaking today. I went to a retreat with this woman, Carissa, last week and it was like a anger bubble burst in me on the first day where I was enraged and it was a really interesting experience and I stayed that way for four days and I knew it was important as it was happening and it didn't disturb the peace or my engagement with other people who are around me It was just so alive in me Thomas in a way that I was like, wow I don't know that I've ever let myself actually experience anger. And I knew it was really important and I knew I didn't want to turn it off and I didn't want to stay there forever because I was waking up at five in the morning just like being enraged, again, there was no target. There was no, quote unquote trigger., I was just like, Oh, I'm supposed to be experiencing what this feels like. And then I did a session on the last day with this energy healer who lives in Germany and we were lying on the ground. We were in nature. And as she was like putting hands on me, I could feel this intense resistance. And then it was like suddenly again, like a sump pump, like at an RV park where I could feel all she did like three or four points where I could feel this like intense tunneling into the earth. And it was interesting too, because I was like, I don't want to just, I don't want to lose this. I don't want to live like this as a steady state, but I need access to this. This is clearly important to me. And I've worked with a lot of people, it was the most intense sort of reiki energy session I've ever had, but it felt like I was cleaning myself, like replumbing myself. I don't know what I was doing but I hope that I have more access to my anger because it felt like a sediment release. And I think women in particular. It's like we don't know, my anger gets stuck at my throat chakra.
THOMAS: Mm-Hmm.
ELISE: And I don't know. It made me think too. I was like, I wonder how many of us have a certain threshold or cut off where we just can't actually get into our bodies or experience our emotions in an embodied way? And then how do you turn that on? I think I had that experience, at least the beginning of it. But how do you get people back into their bodies? Cause I can't imagine I'm unusual.
THOMAS: I know you said it beautifully and you said it also that anger. is pent up energy, basically. And there are different kinds of anger. I think we discussed this once or so, like that there is the anger that is basically a rejection of existential, like it comes on top of existential fear. But then there is the anger that is an autonomy movement that wants like to make more space to ground ourselves more in life and own the inner land that we are standing on, and you said it with a different point, pipes into the ground. And I think that anger is a very important emotion for grounding. And if anger is very suppressed, so we feel like uprooted. And and when anger gets integrated, then we feel our body more, but then it becomes strength, becomes more decisiveness. It becomes clarity. It becomes speaking things when they need to be said and not postponing them. Like it becomes more immediate relational regulation.
ELISE: Mm.
THOMAS: And so that's very powerful. And as you said, many of us needed to suppress anger. And what you feel in your throat is an intelligent mechanism to suppress the intensity because it threatened the belonging, most probably the original family. And so when we say, oh, it's not that I cannot experience my anger, it was intelligent to suppress it at certain moments in my development or my life, to not threaten the attachment relation or to not threaten the belonging. And now we begin to get to know the intelligence and the more we re own that, the more the expression will happen naturally because some people say I cannot express it, which I think is the shadow version of, oh, I was able to suppress it and it was really needed. And at that time, it was really better for me to do that than to be angry. When I got punished for being angry, when it didn't fit into, I don't know, my education system, my family system, my father got angry when I was angry and it was threatening. Whatever the story is, or people that experience violence at home, to suppress their anger is vital. And I think that that reframing or depathologizing those defense mechanisms is important, but as you said, like getting in touch and first of all, many people don't think, oh, it will stay for the rest of my life like that, which is the forward projection of the mind, but that's not happening. But what happens is that I don't need to shut it down immediately that you were in a group space, you had a safer environment where you could really be with it. And then it can find its way through your system. And that's very powerful.
ELISE: It was so powerful and to be present with people and like going into town and ordering a coffee and feeling perfectly pleasant, not activated. Nobody would have experienced me as perturbed and yet present also with my this inner experience. And for me, at least this is the way that I felt it or express it to myself, it was an early violation as a child from a stranger, a man and a friend of a friend and feeling like I didn't have the power to do that no, stop, get away from me and feeling like I was smiling my way through it, waiting for someone to intervene on my behalf. And I think that at some point that got stuck and I felt like in this moment and we'll see if I can hold this and really integrate it, I grew up. I felt like I grew up. in the last five days, and recognizing, oh, I can say no, and I have a no, and it is not a kindness to myself or anyone else to violate my own boundaries, I can say no, and I don't need to use my throat to higher mind it, justify it, explain that I need to actually bring my whole body online for a very clear no, no.
THOMAS: And that feels so lovely.
ELISE: Yeah, yeah.
THOMAS: Like a very clear no is very trustworthy, isn't it?
ELISE: yes. And it's very easy to understand. And less confusing
THOMAS: Right.
ELISE: and yet I think it has carried with it so much anxiety for me of I can't just say no. I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of women in particular. I mean, I identify obviously intensely with women, but feel like we need a reason and that a selfish no is not okay, it must be triangulated or justified or so I don't know, but hope I can keep it. Because I think as you were talking about that vitality, presence and groundedness. And I think anyone who listens to my podcast, anyone who listens to your podcast has a sense of the amount of energy that they are running in their body and how when there's no groundedness, I feel like my body is looking for mechanisms all the time to try to like stay rooted in heaviness or something. I don't know, but I think actually being able to ground feels essential.
THOMAS: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you're also saying it because some people do say no, but they say no from their mind, but their body doesn't say no. So it then creates this double messaging to the environment. But when anger is integrated, because anger is the emotion that can create grounding and clarity and it means that because often we contract and then we try to either hyper rationalize or find excuses or find reasons, as you said, all the defense mechanisms, but actually we are scared to say no. And when the power is palpable, the emotion and the body and my mind together, when they say no, it's also much clearer in the space.
ELISE: Yeah. And don't you think, too, that people say yes and their body is saying no, too?
THOMAS: Exactly. That's why it's so confusing. That's why I said at the beginning, a clear no, so trustworthy because once somebody says yes, clearly or no, clearly it's trustworthy because if the person says it and the body means it, you know?
ELISE: Mm hmm.
THOMAS: It's not only a cognitive, no, I understand you, no, but my body doesn't get the message, like I get your message, boom. And that is a clear boundary. A clear boundary is not a wall. A clear boundary is an energy transmission of a state.
ELISE: Yes. Of letting it come in, running it through your body, no or yes.
THOMAS: Exactly. Or I don't know, but if I don't know, I don't know. But a yes is a yes and a no is a no, you know, like, and then if that's clear inside and without the anger being grounded as strength, like having roots, pillars in the ground, it doesn't feel fully clear in the embodiment. And I think we are much more, as we said before, we are not separate from nature, we are much more kind of in this primal instincts of nature. Our bodies recognize that immediately. So when somebody is no or yes wavering, we feel that even if it's unconscious, get that. And when it's clear, we also get the clarity. So I think for everybody who is working on boundary issues or like strength and anger and agency, I think that's such an important work and it's often being kind of has all kinds of judgments on it. But I think what you experience is a great role modeling also for everybody who's listening, that it's really important. And that groups, when they are well led, because people send out a lot of information, then one person's process activates other people's processes, and together the group's growing. And then one person gets angry, the other person wakes up in the night, and he suddenly feels a lot of rage, but something is cooking. And if it's facilitated well, we are growing together.
ELISE: yeah, and becoming more available which is sort of the paradox, I think, of what we're saying, which is while a no feels like a clear boundary, the actual assertion or alignment of that yes and no makes you both more available to yourself, but conversely available to other people, even if they might not enjoy your no. But the whole point, in some ways, it's like taking down that armor or exterior wall in order to come back online.
THOMAS: Exactly. Exactly. That's how you said something very beautiful, because when the no is grounded, it's relational. I don't need to protect myself from you because I'm scared and I say no and I have a wall here. When the power is online, I can say no while I feel you and that's so much more available and that's so much more active negotiation in life that is relational and I think then also much less harm happens because the life is much more connected. And you said something very powerful, it's, we are much more available and we are clearer at the same time. So we save more energy for essential things and we don't waste energy so much in all the side effects of unclarity.
ELISE: you mentioned, in terms of group leaders and skill and a group in which you can evolve, I guess, rather than devolve. How can people know? Is it an in felt or intuitive, assuming they cannot come and work with you? How can you tell that a group has integrity or is safe or is it not a question of safety?
THOMAS: No, it is a question of safety. Definitely. I think in the leadership of a group, what I would look for is congruency. If what I can feel what's being said is also something that I can feel if there's a transmission of it's more intellectual concepts or if it's like embodied. And of course, when we hurt ourselves, we can't always discern that. That's why we go to these groups, because we have issues in recognizing that where we are wounded, not in general, you know, like where I'm integrated, I can feel that, but where I'm wounded myself, I'm more vulnerable to not sensing that or not getting it immediately.
So that's why I'm putting this as an important remark also into the room, but basically I would look at, okay, do more and more people feel safe with each other? Is it a relational environment? Is it more top down or is it more relational and competence based? You know, how is the hierarchy in the system? Because we don't want to reproduce top down power over leadership in groups. We want to, we want group leaders that are clear, but relational. And so I think it's a question of safety, but the other thing is when we are hurt or traumatized and we experienced a lot of unsafe family system dynamics or, so when we go into a group, we won't feel safe.
ELISE: Hmm.
THOMAS: Because we'll project our disowned fear onto the context so that makes it more complex because it's not gonna be, oh, I come into a group and safe. No, even if the group is safe, it will bring up in me also at times, at least the fear that I needed to suppress in my own upbringing. So it will say no, but this is not safe. And this is not safe because we also have a vigilant and we see small things that confirm in a way our experience of not feeling safe doesn't mean that the group container is not safe. So it is safe when it can hold what is not safe.
ELISE: Hmm.
THOMAS: when we can positively work with the fact that it's not safe. Like, for example, an unclear group facilitator would say, yeah, but I want you to trust me. A more clear group facilitator will say that your mistrust is completely welcome. Like that trust is not the remedy for not trusting.
ELISE: Right. Yeah.
THOMAS: Consciously not trusting and finding a relationship to the necessity of mistrust, everybody who doesn't trust has a good reason, in the past. And so, We can only work with it when there is no should, when defense mechanism doesn't, that's your resistance. No, if somebody is resisting something, it has a good reason. So pathologizing that doesn't help. So that's why I think the more the trauma informed understanding came into the self development communities, we stopped some of the earlier like encounter type you know, sometimes power over dynamics that happened in groups to push people into experiences because we know that's not helpful. When your anger pops by itself, then your nervous system is ready, because it came up and then you feel you're sitting in intensity, but it's not that somebody came and tried to induce a lot of anger in you so that you feel something. And I think this kind of coaching or group spaces or so, this is how it has been done maybe some decades ago, but that's not anymore.
ELISE: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. I mean, yeah, my anger was like an independent process and an experiencing that I was having separate from the group. And you mentioned resistance too and in groups that I've been in, facilitators have essentially said, you might have resistance and you might feel really sleepy. You might feel upset. And yeah, like, just stand up, like move, just try to be present with yourself. Which is, I think it's always interesting to watch your own somatic relationship and to take it in as information, right?
THOMAS: Totally. It's beautiful what you're saying, because a great example recently in one of the last groups I led, a strong collective trauma process around the Holocaust came up, and about this phase of silence in Germany. And then one participant, and it was really to feel in the room, like you could feel like a dead silence in the space. And then, and the whole group was, like, holding space for that, but it came up in many people, like this phase, the memory of that phase. And then one person spoke, and he said, Well, when I feel my body, it feels like there's a huge hole in my body. And it's not that he did 10 minutes before he was pretty embodied. But then when that process came up, you could see how much of the collective Shadow is actually active because that part that he felt is always absent, not just when that process comes up and that process comes up, we take the flashlight and we shine the light on to the absent part, because then suddenly it makes sense. But I believe that these parts of our nervous systems are always absent but because we never look at those collective dynamics in such a deep way, and almost never in our society in daily life, we go to work, we go there. So we're not looking all the time at this shadow elements. So in regular life, it seems like we're embodied minus all the parts that we don't feel.
ELISE: Yes.
THOMAS: In Germany is specific for this, but it doesn't matter which collective trauma it is around the world. I think our nervous systems are absent in certain parts, and we don't even know until we have such an experience that, oh, wow, actually in that part of myself, I don't feel myself at all. So that it's not just in the group in that moment. It's that part is always there, but the consciousness is not there. And that's why we don't know that we actually missing a part of our body awareness. And that also means if I'll never have that experience and then one time in my life, I say, Oh, why do I have said certain health issues? Yeah, because I don't feel a part of my body.
ELISE: Yeah.
THOMAS: And it looks like in normal life I do. Because I would say, Oh, when I go to run, I do sports, it's like, I feel myself. But I think certain parts we don't feel simply. And that's the collective unconscious that we all share.
ELISE: Interesting. So you think that those, cause I have a dead zone in my body with that I'm aware of and that I worked on last week, but you think that that's collective and not specific to me?
THOMAS: No, it can be anything. It can be individual from attachment, trauma, but it can also be ancestral or collective. And often, because in many ways, we are much more developed in the individual in the work. And then I believe we are in the collective work. So I think there are many more unfilled, empty, absent spaces in billions of people. It's like as if all the billions of nervous systems are like a big jigsaw puzzle. And there's a drawing on all of us and that drawing is sometimes absent. So that's why, that's how we co create the collective unconscious. It's not existing somewhere outside or else. It lives in us, but without us, like without our awareness. And so when you carry that part in you, it might very well be that that's a representation of some of the collective trauma of the U. S. And because It has never been seen in its context where it makes sense. It seems like, oh, a woman in the U. S. notices that there is a part in the body that is absent. And so I think when we look globally, I think there is a, there are billions, billions of nervous systems where information data is missing.
ELISE: Yeah, I totally agree. I know we're at time. Let's we'll reconvene regularly.
THOMAS: I think we should reconvene. Every time we start we like another thing emerges between us. It's amazing.
ELISE: Thank you. you're the amazing. And I feel everything that you say.
Thomas is the real deal. He has an incredible presence. I know he posts these videos somewhere, I believe on YouTube—someday, I’ll get with the program and do that as well—but, I highly recommend paying attention to him. I would love to go to one of his live events or groups. He has written two books, both beautiful: Attuned and Healing Collective Trauma. Honestly, I feel like we need him. We need people like him sitting in these zones of conflict and holding space, holding that tension between the binaries and polarity and helping us be with our extreme discomfort, our pain, our fear, so that we can develop the capacity to process that, not fling it out of us, not eradicate it, but to hold it, which is obviously significant work and I haven’t always had that capacity. Anyways, I hope you enjoy this two-part series that unexpectedly came together, but felt important to share it with you. I will see you next time.