Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Health Chatter. Today's show is about a book, The House That Resilience Built. It's about trauma, childhood trauma. We have a wonderful guest with us, the author of the book, which I'll get to in just a moment. We'll introduce him. In the meantime, we've got a great crew. I'd love to introduce them all because they've been with us since day one.
Maddy Levine-Wolf, Aaron Collins, Deandra Howard, do our great background research for all our shows, give us something that we can talk about. And so that Barry and Clarence and I sound kind of smart, at least when we're talking with people. Also, Matthew Campbell is our production guru. He makes sure that Everything comes out to you, the listening audience, in perfect form.
Sheridan Nygaard does our marketing, and also she does our transcripts of all our shows. If you don't listen to our shows, you can read them on our website, which I'll get to in a second. Clarence Jones has been with me, and together we've been doing this for, well, we decided it's closing in on five years now, I guess. And so it's been wonderful being with you. And, Barry...
Dr. Barry Baines, our medical advisor, second to none.
Chapter 2: How does Tom Glazer's personal experience influence his work?
And he really provides some insights from a medical perspective. So thanks to everybody. Human Partnership, H-U-E-M-A-N. Doesn't matter what color skin you are. Human Partnership is our sponsor for these shows. You can check them out at humanpartnershipalliance.org. And check us out at healthchatterpodcast.com. You can, again, read all our shows.
If you have questions about the shows, you can put them on our website and we'll get back to you. So there you go. We have a great show today. Tom Glazer is with us and I met Tom about a month or so ago and found out that he has a great book that I've read and actually we've read. And I'll start out by saying to the audience here, get the book. It's really worth reading. It really is.
And it's really, really well-written and engaging. So I'll give it a 10 to start out with. Okay. So Tom is a master's level licensed psychologist with 40 years of experience in this arena. His journey from his own childhood trauma, which is he explains in the book. led him to writing the book, The House That Resilience Built.
He did a book prior to this, Full Heart Living, conversations with the happiest people I know. So there's a happiness component to his writing. And now also he's dealing with trauma, childhood trauma. So it's great having you, Tom. Thanks for being with us. And I underscore that you're a wonderful writer. Thank you, Stan. So as I was reading the book, these words kept coming into my head.
And it just kept going and going and going. And let me just reflect on some of those words. Okay. One, ruminate. You know, we all have a tendency to ruminate or how do we reflect? You know, instead of I find that ruminating is is harder on you than reflecting personally. Right. And then then, of course. So it's another our word resilience.
You know, how do we become more resilient as as we deal with these things? And then other words that kind of came to my mind were grief.
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Chapter 3: What are the Seven Building Blocks of Trauma Resilience?
Happiness, sadness, angst, wellness, which is near and dear to all our hearts on this show. So let's... Well, Sam, let me say something real quick.
Let me add one other word to that. Preventable. Yes. Okay.
Yes.
That's my word I want to add.
Yeah, absolutely. Preventable. So let's start out with... your story and how you got into this all together. And then we'll get into some of the health-related aspects of it all.
Sure. Yeah. Wow. Great words, by the way. And thank you for the kudos. Yeah, I got into the work sort of by accident, right? When I was in graduate school, the word trauma, I don't remember that word coming up, maybe it was, and I don't remember. The concept was that, I remember the concept of the hardest thing that ever happened to you.
I remember that coming up in graduate school, but you know, we learned really it was through the Vietnam War, right? That the research really came out and we learned that. So there are these, you know, really commonly understood,
causes of trauma like war and famine and dislocation sexual assault everybody understands that those are traumas but what we learned over the time is that other experiences particularly in childhood have the same effect on the nervous system and on the body and that's how we get into my story so I um From the outside, my childhood would have looked ideal to many people, right?
We were fairly well off, right? We never struggled for the basics. Educated, you know, we did some travel. All six of us loaded into the station wagon and went to Washington, D.C. or North Carolina to the coast in the summer. But behind closed doors, things weren't so perfect appearing. My mom had some pretty severe mental health issues and just raged, raged, raged at us.
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Chapter 4: How can individuals reclaim their stories after trauma?
And most parents know to make a repair very quickly. They'll say, I'm sorry, that was me. Here's what was going on. You're okay.
Okay.
And people can move on, generally speaking. So those repairs never happened in our childhood. There was no one witnessing it saying, you are not to blame. No one ever talked about it. And then starting in junior high, I was targeted. And to use the word bullying... It's just like would barely cover what I experienced.
I wish there were, and the closest I can come to, we don't have all the language, right? The closest I could come to it is like sexual abuse, verbal sexual abuse. So I was not, I was never physically harmed, but verbally, publicly humiliated repeatedly for appearing too effeminate. Right. And I was told publicly the sexual acts that I should be performing. Right. Crap like that. I mean, really?
I mean, just horrible. And I didn't learn in the home how to speak up for myself. I didn't know that I could have gone to someone. I just my shame on both sides. Both at home and at school, it was so huge. I just wanted to disappear. That's all I needed to do was to ignore it, to put my head down and keep going. So that is, in a nutshell, that's my own experience of trauma.
Do I typically tell my clients this? No. And what I believe happens is because I know trauma happens, personally so deeply, my clients sense in my reactions to them that I get it really deeply. I'm only now becoming public. I mean, I'm near the end of my career now. So now it's public, right? It's out there. People know. And I don't care anymore, right? Because I've worked through it myself.
I've gone to my own psychotherapy, decades of self-development work.
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Chapter 5: What role does therapy play in the journey from surviving to thriving?
And then I stumbled upon resilience along the way. So I just happened to have interests in physical fitness and nutrition. I've always been very relationship oriented. I've always been interested in things like mindfulness and meditation. I kind of just stumbled into all these things over time. And only much later did I realize, oh, I was practicing the things that helped me to be resilient.
Yeah.
So in a nutshell, that's my story. Hope?
You know, did you have a sense that how you were being treated was normal?
No.
when you were growing up? Is this the way kids are all treated?
Well, in the family, yes. You don't know, right? When you're a child, all we know is our own experience. And again, nobody in my family talked about it. ever to anyone. So how do you make a comparison? How do you learn? It wasn't until much later I learned that that's not normal to have a mom who rages at you and calls you names and tells you how awful you are and uses profanity. I had no idea.
I thought that was normal. The school stuff... No, there I knew that I was targeted. Most people I could see were not treated that way. So again, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame. Me, and I thought I was to blame. And again, in both cases, if I acted perfectly at home, and this is how I became... I think I probably came into the world with a perfectionist tendency anyhow.
And then it got magnified, right? If I'm perfect, maybe my mom won't explode. And at schools too, if I hold my books in the right way, if I talk with a deeper voice, right? If I do all these things, maybe people won't target me. It didn't help. None of those things. Well, maybe they did a little, but I still got targeted. I tried everything I could think of. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How do we differentiate between acute and chronic trauma?
Go ahead. Tom, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing that. I think one of the things that you said was that your father never knew Do you think he experienced it at a different level as a father?
He probably got it, but it didn't look the same way as it did for you, but it had the same kind of impact because it probably helped him or probably shaped him in how he dealt with the whole issue. I just want to ask that question.
so he didn't witness all of the events he witnessed some of the events and did did he so i believe it's a both end i believe he really did know actually And he had his own trauma as, and my mom had her own trauma, right? All this, we all come in to life with our own experiences and we do the best we can. And none of this is blaming.
My parents were wonderful, good people in many, many, many ways. Good, good people who I loved dearly, right? Come on, they're my parents. You only get your parent, right? They did many good things in the world. And in these ways, they really, really missed the boat. They really, really, really screwed up. So I think my dad actually did know on some level, but did not know.
He didn't have the fortune of being taught himself how to stand up to someone. He did not know. I have the privilege of having an education. I have the great privilege. Psychotherapy was available when I needed it. It was barely a thing when my parents needed it. The most they could do is get some Valium maybe, right?
That's the best that they had back then. So I want to follow up with that too, because I think what you're saying is so powerful, okay? Because I think a lot of times kids, young people, when they go through those kinds of experiences, they blame it. Yes. Those parents.
And they just say like, you know, yes, you know, there's no forgiveness in that, but what you're saying is that, you know, sometimes you don't have the, the knowledge that, They do the very best that they can at times.
Exactly.
So here's the thing, though.
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Chapter 7: What practical tools can enhance resilience in everyday life?
Because I thought I was to blame. I thought I was screwed up. There's something wrong with me. Right. And when I came to realize, wait a minute, maybe this wasn't, maybe they were in the wrong. I've never been able to have my anger before. I had to have my anger first. I had to have my own rage about it before I could come to any kind of understanding or compassion for them.
And that's just a much later stage that comes from really being with people And having self-compassion, right? You can't force it. And I see too many people trying to come to forgiveness too soon before their nervous system is ready. You got to have the full feelings and know you are okay. And not just from yourself. I'm emphasizing self-compassion here. None of this happened yesterday.
in isolation this happened in in my own group therapy which i write about in the book it happened in psychotherapy with my psychotherapist it happened because i have friends who i can trust who i was able to talk about it and all these people said tom tom that wasn't your fault yeah right i got a consistent message over time again if we back up
If a child can get those kinds of messages really quickly, and what does that mean? Within a month. We now know it's within a month. There's actually a time period. It has to be really quite quick. Children need to be reassured. They need to know they're loved. If children get that, often a trauma response... does not develop over time.
If they're not met emotionally, and I was not, I was not reassured. I had some, plenty of, I had a lot of love. I did. I didn't have enough specific love and reassurance about what I was enduring. I didn't have enough protection. I didn't have somebody come in and say, their behavior is not okay. We're not going to allow this to happen to you. That's what I needed. I needed, nobody did that.
Right.
So I developed a trauma response. I developed false beliefs about myself. I developed false beliefs about the world. I've developed false beliefs about other people.
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of community in healing from trauma?
I thought I couldn't trust other people. Right, right. And it interrupted my relationships. Yeah, go ahead.
you know, we, we, you know, Clarence and, and, and Barry and myself, we come from public health and medical backgrounds and we're trained to look at things, um, perhaps simply in the sense of prevention, diagnosis and, and treatment. Okay. And, um,
One thing that struck me, at least, from reading the book is, wait a minute now, how can we get to the point where we can truly prevent these types of things from happening? So, Barry, I'd really like to pull you in here. I can only imagine that in your practice along the way, you dealt with patients with medical oriented issues, but also maybe these types of mental health issues as well.
Yeah. Well, I, you know, I think, I think the that medical model of prevention and then diagnosis and treatment. You know, it works for some things in very simplistic way. And quite honestly, to me, again, this is a personal opinion, it doesn't work that way. And I'll say it in the real world for a couple of reasons.
And, you know, I'm going to be hoping for some help from Tom on this as I lay this out a bit. But the thing is, one of the things that that's most unrecognized is the daily, not necessarily daily, but not necessarily daily, but significant trauma events that we experience. That is a part of life. I mean, you can't. You can't get through life without having ups and downs and having traumas.
And I think, Tom, what you point out, there is this time frame between when a person experiences a trauma that can be significant. And that's very individualized. Things that might... roll off my back, okay, or Clarence or, you know, Stan's back, you know, might affect someone else differently.
And something that really bothers, you know, me a lot, you know, Stan, you might say, you know, Barry, what do you, you know, what's the big deal? It happens to me every day and it's right now.
Yeah.
So the response is very individualized. The other piece of this to me is that the role of resilience is also is unrecognized as well, or is underestimated. However, you need a tool, but what I'm hearing, Tom, from you, and I'll confess, I didn't read your book yet. However, I did research on your book and I saw one of the interviews that you did about a month ago, I think it was on CBS,
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