 This is the OGM call for Thursday, April 11th, 2024. We alternate between topic-oriented calls and check-in calls. Last week was a check-in. This week we have a topic. And our topic starts with the situation in Gaza and kind of goes into trauma as experienced trauma as it influences trauma in general. And I'm curious actually how the topic might resonate for you all and if you have strong feelings about where we should go. And actually, Patty, if you'd like to jump in and say anything about expectations or desires for the call, please do so. Oh, thanks, Jerry. I don't know that I have any of either. Just happy that we're talking about it and looking forward to seeing what we take it. Thank you. Thanks. And lest we skirt around it, I think a piece of the origin of your message to us was also, hey, there seems to be a censorship or a gingerness or something, a chilling effect around support for Palestinians in this mess and what's up with that and how does that work? And I think that causes traumas and is bouncing around the room as well. So I'm interested in our perspectives on all those things. And just before the call, Gil shared a Friedman column, which ran yesterday or the day before about what the problem is and what the solutions might be. And he was pretty straightforward about what he recommended. So that was an interesting, perhaps starting point, but other alternative solutions for the situation or for trauma would be great to have. I have collected a bunch of trauma-informed blank categories, trauma-informed care. I will sort of look up and share what the different subcategories are. But that's been a thing now for, I think the better part of a decade, that awareness of trauma has been working its way into the population in general. And the redesign of systems, whether it's, I think policing also falls under this and others with some awareness of trauma and its effects, which I think is a good thing. And then every now and then I read about ways that we overstep and do strange things. Last thing I'll sort of add into this funny start to our conversation is in Portland, famously measure 110, legalized drugs three years ago, Portland failed, Oregon failed to put in place most of the support services that are required to make this actually work. But also in reading through and digging deeper into the issue, it turns out that Portland put in place a whole bunch of policies that made it very hands off for dealing with anybody who was on the street doing fentanyl or doing whatever. And you sort of couldn't do a thing, except sit and watch. And I think I'm exaggerating there, but there was this desire to avoid increasing the trauma by institutionalizing people who needed institutionalizing and doing other sorts of things that made it really hard to actually deal with the situation on the ground. And I think a lot of that was policies crisscrossing and in conflict around how to handle people in very difficult situations without increasing their trauma or difficulties. And again, I'm an amateur and an outsider looking in on the situation, but I was kind of surprised by the kinds of policies that appeared to be in place here in Oregon. So with that, I'll go to the people who are like to step into the conversation. So Gil and Mike, please. Just very briefly question on process. If we're going to focus on trauma and what you've just illustrated about how that can't be talked about in the abstract, right? It has to be tied to specifics. I'm concerned that if we start with talking about Gaza, we never get out of that and never get to the conversation about trauma more broadly. Just a question. Yeah, exactly. And I have a bit of a concern about that, but I'm not that concerned about it. And I don't want to shortchange the Gaza topic here. So can we sort of gingerly go in and at some point, if we've over Gazaed, we can sort of collectively raise our hands or just pop up and say, hey, can we go broader? Is that okay? And I'm happy to help steer that as well. But that was partly Gil why when I worded the invite, I said, let's not make this all entirely about the Gaza situation, but let's go broad. Any reaction from people to that? Or it seems like- Yes, no? Good? Yes. Sounds great. Thanks. Mike. I was going to ask a similar question and I do think it's helpful to kind of define the scope. When I first saw the topic, I thought my assumption was this was going to be more on personal trauma, individual stories. And I did want to share something that Lizzie told me. She was recently trained in how to use these anti-opioid drugs. And they do cause a major amount of trauma for the people who are injected with them. Although dying is much worse, but the shock of suddenly not being high and the physical reaction the body has to the drugs is in some ways maybe a good thing because after going through that, people probably are discouraged from going on opioids and shooting up or taking some of these illicit street drugs. According to her, it was described to her as sort of coming out of anesthesia in 90 seconds. You're just suddenly just ball and you're in pain and your brain is just completely discombobulated. But I just put that down as a marker about personal individual case study of trauma. I do think it would be more helpful to look at the impact of trauma broadly on societies and in order to avoid going 17 different ways on Gaza, I would propose that we start by looking at three or four case studies and the trauma that Iraq has been through, that Syria has been through and we just celebrate, not didn't celebrate, but we just mark the anniversary of the Rwanda genocides. And they're still struggling with the trauma that that caused. But I do think it would be helpful to kind of just not focus so narrowly on the one case study in front of us now and to compare and contrast. There's been a lot of comparing to what the US did in Mosul and in terms of the body count and the ratio of civilians to ISIS members who were killed. The big difference of course in Mosul was that all the civilians could get the hell out of there and the US military and its allies could fight ISIS in a less complicated battlefield. But I do worry, I particularly worry about Iraq. I mean, it's gone, first it was attacked by Iran, hundreds of thousands of people killed and then it went through two horrific wars because there was a madman in charge. And the madman caused trauma before he was attacked by outside forces. So I just, I've not seen many countries figure out how to deal with the kind of widespread trauma that these wars have generated. Rwanda being probably the one that's been most successful. South Africa, again, it wasn't a full-fledged war, but they've done truth and reconciliation. But all the psychiatrists I've read, they describe countries that are literally in a state of PTSD, not 5% of the population. It's so many people, just distrustful, paranoid, not sleeping well for years. And I think an important piece here, I'd like to add in as well as healing from trauma. And there's a lot of, that could it be its own call easily, but between Gabor Mate and Vandercort, Bessel Vandercock and a bunch of other people, there's just a whole lot of wisdom growing up. And I'll point out that Israel, Palestine is one of many, many cases and Rwanda and others of intergenerational trauma. And the kind of cold hard way of looking at that is that he said, she said story of these people's histories and conflicts over time and who has the upper hand of having suffered more or been displaced more, but then there's the psychological human side of it. It's all about how these things actually live and ruin lives through generations because of unaddressed crap that happened. And just yesterday I found myself in a conversation saying, why are people so shitty to each other so often? Why do we do this? It's just so often. Steward then costs. And feel free to take a beat before stepping into the conversation so we can pace ourselves going in. Can I just sit? Steward, you're muted. Judy, you have a question? Yeah. I'm trying to suggest that at some point we contemplate a sort of antithetical to the trauma thing in terms of all of the mechanisms of coping with trauma and the conditioning that people could be taught from childhood on how to respond to stress so that we're building a more positive society. Thank you. Yeah. Go ahead, Steward. So I've got a number of tidbits and I hope as a whole they make some degree of sense or maybe not. One of the things that I've been saying anytime I get the chance when I'm speaking publicly and in some ways it goes to your question, Jerry, about why can't we hope you nicer to each other slash why can't we all get along? We're living in a PTSD world. Period. End of story. Just read the papers every day. I mean, we are living in a PTSD world. I had the opportunity about three years ago. Many of you know him right was one of the founders of Society 2045. I stewarded a book of hers through the American Bar Association Publishing Process called Trauma-Informed Lawyering. And it kind of makes sense because very often when people see lawyers it's there in some kind of a traumatic situation so I learned a bunch about that. When my wife died I realized it was a traumatic event and so I read a lot of the work of Peter Levine who talks about trauma lives in the viscera it lives in the body. So I chose a therapist who also did body stuff. And after about a half a dozen sessions with this massage table sitting on the side I said, Dan, aren't we ever gonna do that? And he looked at me and he said, no, I'm too old for that. I don't do that anymore, which I thought was kind of funny. I read a piece in the media this morning, a journalist reporting from Kyve about how he longs for a decent night's sleep. And then he just, just as he's about to fall asleep, he hears the sirens and he hears the missiles and he hears the incoming Russian assault. I think about the great words of Gandhi, if we keep on living with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth we're gonna end up blind and toothless. And it's true. And just to touch on Israel Palestine right now this is just going to over the long term create more hostility, more animosity, more let's get back at them. That's my sense of the end result. This is not gonna end the heart. This is just gonna increase the heart. And the last thing that I wanna say is, and it's a word of caution I think whatever the particular trauma an individual sometimes goes through, one of the challenges is not to make that your primary identity because you can just perpetuate the trauma and you can also stay in it when it's long kind of overdue to step beyond it and to just let go of it. And that I think is all I wanna say right now. Thank you. Thank you. Boss please. Yeah, I was listening in yesterday to the German chancellor and to the debates in Germany because Germany should start accused of aiding and abetting Israeli's actions. And I thought that was a curve ball. And so, I was born in 1949 and I spent quite a few years in the investment. I started to become more aware and conscious of being conscious about the trauma that Germany had caused and dealing with parents that were completely traumatized, that generation never really got so what happened to them there. And then when you look back over my lifetime, it just doesn't stop. I mean, we are supposedly more enlightened and supposedly more advanced but we're really not. I mean, we have the same cruelty and passions and brutality that you can see 2000 years ago. There's nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed are the tools we have and we're using. And so, then next couple of days from now I'm gonna go visit my daughter in Nashville and she's of course deeply embedded in this Israeli Jewish community there. We have been strenuously avoiding any conversation about any of this but what kind of experience is this for? I mean, he asked and my son-in-law still has his brother, his uncle, his arm living in Israel. So what kind of thought world you see living in and how do you process all this stuff? So it's, I mean, it's just astonishingly hopeless almost, you know, how we seem to be incapable of preventing people of violence and wholeslessness to reach positions of power where they determine the direction of society. You can see it right now here in the U.S. I mean, imagine it's not Trump, it's the people around Trump who want to come into office and gain power and we would be in the same mess here. We could be getting into a really bad space that most Americans can't even process. And so I think there is something, I mean, we talked about the dawn of everything, right? So to look at humanity, our species in total, in totality and the conclusion you come to is that's just us. That's just our species and the only way we can change that is to package ourselves into a set of rules and norms and understanding where peace has a chance. You know, my big takeaway from when I was taking a deep dive into Christianity and religion is that the guiding message of the New Testament is that you have to love your neighbor and that you have to take care of your poor because the poor will always be with you and if you don't take care of them, now you're going to end up in a mess. So we have learned nothing. I mean, we are going through the same cycles round and round it goes. And now that we have a world that's so populated and we have weapons that are so powerful, it just gets worse. And then on top of it, we're dealing with all the environmental issues and everything that's around it. This is a crazy time. This could, I mean, think about the billions and billions of dollars and assets and technology and so on that gets wasted in wartime. I mean, our best and brightest minds are trying to figure out how to kill the other guy more efficiently instead of how can we restore our soil and preserve our waters, right? So, God, you just want to cry, you know. What a tiny positive note on this. The conversation is making me think of questions like how might we act to disarm trauma-causing agents and just sort of focus on the problems that matter together and I don't know the answer, but I'm really interested in behavior that can easily spread. Contagious behaviors that lead people to just stop the crap. And I think that's a combination of things, maybe more things than anybody can grasp or do at one time, but I'm really interested in positive solutions to this issue. Mike, then Patty, then Kevin. I'm gonna throw out a couple more case studies and some possible steps forward. Most of you know that my wife was a career foreign service and ended up serving as our ambassador to Cyprus, which is a particularly fascinating case study in post-trauma society. July 20th of this year will mark 50 years since the Turkish troops moved into Northern Cyprus and started expelling Greek-speaking Cypriots to the south end of the island. And in response, a lot of Turkish-speaking Cypriots fled the Southern side. And now we have a divided island in the UN patrolling a society that's on the surface functioning quite well, at least in the Greek Cypriot part. They're part of the EU. They're getting investment from all around the world. A lot of tourism, but if you scratch the surface, everybody has a parent or a grandparent who somehow was affected by this trauma. And thousands of people were killed. Some people are still unaccounted for. And what's interesting in Cyprus is while you will be told, well, I'm a refugee or I'm the child or the grandchild of a refugee, they don't really talk about the emotions that come with that or how they dealt with the emotions and they haven't dealt with the emotions. They haven't done what the Rwandans and the South Africans have tried to do. The good news is there are some efforts to help the Cypriots learn from what's gone on in Northern Ireland. There are some exchanges with youth groups that involves Palestinians and Israelis, young people, mostly high school and college students, coming together and talking about their emotions and how it feels to live in a society where everybody distrusts everybody. And I just think we could learn a lot from looking at places where the trauma has been in existence for decades and people mostly by waiting until the next generation comes along have defined a different relationship. Yesterday, my wife, after we went and saw the eclipse in Cleveland, we drove all the way across Pennsylvania and went to Wilmington, Delaware. And she had been invited to talk to students at the Biden Center for Policy and Public Administration. She explained how diplomacy works and she explained the tension in Cyprus and why they haven't been able to get past it, why they haven't been able to erase the green zone between the two communities. And it came down to fear. It came down to not being creative and bold enough to think about accepting the other. And it came down to the fact that the people around the table trying to figure out the future of Cyprus were all 50 and 60 year old men, women were not engaged. And most critically, as Kathleen said, there was nobody talking about what the young people thought. For the young people, it's not so immediate. They weren't traumatized. They inherited, or the trauma was sort of passed down to them. It wasn't something they experienced. And some of them have gone to school with people from the other community. A lot of the Turkish-speaking Cypriots, at least the rich ones, send their kids across the green zone to English-speaking schools in the southern part of Nicosia. But they weren't there. So you had all these people who were trying to define a better future for a united Cyprus. And they just held the animosity and the grudges. But they didn't, again, they didn't talk too publicly about their fears. They just, they've couched everything in terms of what's fair and how we get reparations. It was all kind of an economic analysis rather than an emotional psychological analysis. And again, I'm talking too much. And I think I've talked enough and I do apologize. I will have to sign off in about half an hour. Great comments. Thanks, Mike. There's a couple of people who have to drop off at the top of the hour. So thank you for being here for this part. Just a pause for a second. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, wrote to Germany for reparations from Bolivia where they ended up just before the war and got a little bit of repayment. But the reason I know some of the family history that my family never actually told me out loud is that finally years later, I received a stack of correspondence on onionskin paper of my grandfather telling the story over and over again to different bureaucrats in Germany who were busy processing things through official means. And one of the pages includes, as best he could remember, an inventory of the furniture they had to sell at nothing, no prices in Berlin in 39 to get out of town because he worked the bureaucracy to actually get out of town with proper permission. So I've got documents with swastika stamps on them that basically they're character witness documents. And there's one in particular that says you have 60 days to get out of dodge, basically. And then they left on two steamships. And I've been trying to figure out personally through a little bit of internal family systems and things like that, how that affects how things that happened then that weren't talked about affect me in my life. And I don't think I've actually cracked that code yet. Thanks, Mike, you still have your hand up. Patty, then Kevin, please. I could use a breath. Could I invite a bigger breath? Please. So a couple of things I'm tracking, maybe a bit of like a meta level of this conversation. I, we're tapping into question marks around how can we, not that we have to restructure anything, but how could society begin to accommodate and account for all of the cost of the unprocessed and unintegrated trauma that exists intergenerationally at the genetic level in our lived experience, what we inherited from grandparents who went through the Holocaust, right? I mean, I think that something that keeps coming up to me is that one of the core values at least of United States culture efficiency seems to continue to be at odds with healing and as long as efficiency is a high value, it's going to be really costly and challenging for larger systems to create the space or even create shared language to better understand what is truly needed at the community level to support folks who are on their own journey, whether they know it or not of healing. So that was a thought. I think for Jerry's question, why are we so mean to each other? I've been thinking a lot about the just, it might not sound like it would be a big deal, but I think it's an enormous problem, what we're modeled in the media and what we're modeled in TV shows around how to have hard conflict conversations. I was in a, I'm in an embodied social justice program right now and we were had a module yesterday and there's a huge rupture, huge rupture in this two hour module and we all had to kind of watch this facilitator handle this like very, very activated blowing up. And that question was passed around the space a lot and I think it occurred to me that like, we don't really, we're not really shown how to do it differently. We're not really shown how to take breaths, slow down conversations, ask questions. And I think this draws really well into this, just to offer some shared language for the group. At the, as I think as long as we can just continue to keep trying to like solve the problem of trauma without having really clear shared language around what is happening at the biological level, we're just gonna be running in circles, right? And so there's this, just to offer some shared language, there's this concept, I think it was Dan Siegel who created this back in the, I think it was the 90s. He calls it the window of tolerance and a lay person's way to understand this might be like our ability, our little window of regulation before we, if something we have some kind of outside stimulus that activates us and we get bumped out of our window of tolerance, we get reactive in the fight, flight or freeze or other dysregulated responses. And like within the window of tolerance, this is where all of the good things that humanity can, can. This is like the, like the juice of where we can connect. We can sleep well when we're in our window of tolerance when we're in consistent regulation. Like this is where the potential of humanity lies, but we also exist in a system that whether it's intentional or not is doing it a fantastic job of continuing to shrink windows of tolerance and push us out of our window of tolerance. And so I think a system we have to name, we would do well to name that the systems that we are a part of are culpable for continuing to take us further and further away from this potential and possibility we have of being regulated, connecting and actually having effective problem solving. And so I think that's important for that to be named. And I would like to think that this, the healing and the, the reparation we're looking for will happen at the level of systems, but I've seen nothing yet to suggest that that's what's gonna move the needle. At least we're up right now. And so I think personally having an experience where there's a different story around the story of trauma. I think there's someone else on the call here. We've had a really good conversation about this, about how trauma in and of itself and really having these trauma-informed practices, I'm also a trauma-informed practitioner. So this is, this is me speaking to my lineage of training, but there's, there's a deep issue here in that there's, I'll use their words, they call it a fetishization of the trauma, which can lead to us getting stuck in the pain, identifying with the pain, not really ready to release the pain. And in my lived experience, I have not yet seen an instance of someone being able to heal from victim consciousness. And so in my opinion, there has to be a paradigm shift or a collective shift where we have a different story about what hardship, the place that hardship has in our life. And as long as we continue to see our hardships from this place of like, oh, why is this happening to me? Like, I know, you know, and like from the victim orientation, that's gonna continue to be a barrier to individual and collective healing. And I feel complete. Let's take another pause. I think Patty, you just put many wonderful things into the conversation. One of the things you made me think of is that it appears that in many places around the world right now in producing trauma is being used as a political strategy, partly because it shuts down our window of tolerance and it makes us react in ways we don't really necessarily want to react. And so our ability to stay and keep that window of tolerance open or broaden it is in direct conflict with a bunch of people's efforts to shut us down and make us fear. There was an interesting article recently that said, hey, things aren't as bad as we think they are. Hey, look, and it pointed out a bunch of different stats about where most Americans agree on this. And it was, the article was particularly about whether the US is actually bitterly, terribly divided or not. And it said, look, we're actually not that divided. There's a bunch of people who want us to think that we're that divided and it's working. So I think that there's a conscious use of trauma as a political instrument that we need to be very aware of that runs counter to what I think we would like humans to be able to do more of by themselves and together. Well, thank you. Kevin. Yeah, thank you. And thank you, Patty. In my own, I'll take my hand down, healing, I've been worked with folks who have used the methods from the book, The Body Keep Score, which is a really interesting kind of groundbreaking research. They looked at Vietnam vets and saw where the trauma was embedded and how the nurse deposited things. But in my work in economic justice, there's a really interesting further take on that called my grandmother's hands. And it's racialized trauma. And what I've found is that the best folks working best in terms of they help entrepreneurs get better, better use an analysis of intergenerational trauma when they are seeing what are the barriers to that entrepreneur? Because there are voices in their heads from their grandfathers, their grandmothers, or the people who talk to their grandmothers to say, you shouldn't ask, you can't have, you can't own. And so you have to deal with that because there are all the other things that work against you as an entrepreneur. And so you have to deal with, they take intergenerational trauma as a material thing to work with. And I think that's, you can work around it. Now, another thing I'm seeing just in, I thought we agreed that we wouldn't be doing conversation in the chat. I'm gonna ignore the chat and be in this space. And I thought that was a norm. I sure believe that we should do it and not have conversations in chat that distract. I'm about to stop that. Kevin, the chat restriction is only during our check-in calls so that the check-in calls are more present and mindful. So we're on a topic. Okay, so we don't have to be present in this big issue. I get it. Okay, well, that's fine. Not what I'm trying to say, but we've made a choice. But it is what is happening. It is what is happening. We are distracted from this space by conversations in chat. Is that gonna be allowed in every OGM or is it not allowed in check-in? Most of the chat is footnotes. It's people adding. A bunch of the chat is not footnotes. It is conversation. I see people responding to each other. I just wanna know, is that a norm or not a norm? It's current norm for OGM in our regular conversations. Anybody who's been here for many of these calls is familiar with the rhythm and I don't think there's anything unusual happening in today's chat that hasn't happened for four years worth of OGM calls. Right, but I think we agreed a couple of weeks ago that chat was a distraction from the space we're in with each other. No, only for check-in calls, Kevin. We decided to make the calls different and to make the check-in call special by eliminating the chat because it was a distraction. We did not make the decision collectively that we're all never going to have chat again, which is a decision I would object to. I would suggest, I love this topic, by the way, that a meta topic. I don't know how long we should spend with it, but Kevin, I hear you and I kind of agree. I myself am not distracted by the chat. I did not even know there were conversations going on. I think I've made one or two replies, but it's in footnote mode. I have not been distracted by the chat. So I think the fact that there is conversation going on in the chat means that some people may be conversing in the chat and maybe they're distracted from the space, but I think there's a bunch of the rest of us who aren't. So I think maybe the thing to do is have it be a personal choice. If you find the chat distracting, just close it. Don't pay attention to it. And if you want to zone out from the room and get sucked into a different conversation, go for it. Okay, fine. I'm good with that too. Stuart. I just want to say I feel strongly about that issue. And I'm frankly really torn because I find the chat invaluable and I feel like my attention is being torn and I am struggling as hard as I can to do all of the above. And I feel like if I didn't have the chat or the ability to chat, my brain would be hurting in ways that would also interfere with my ability to be present. So I'm completely torn on the issue. I would note that footnotes, footnote kinds of things, thanks for that terminology, Mike, can go down on a personal notepad and at least bleed off some of the stress. I was like, oh my God, I have a thing to... I actually kind of would value an agreement not to do chat, at least on some calls, maybe not all of them. But a call like this where we're trying to pay group attention to a topic, it makes sense that the chat, even though I love chat at the right time, maybe it's not the right context for it. So to redo this call, maybe we could have slipped the switch. This is one where we could just close the chat and not do it. I really hear Doug and Kevin and want to honor that and it makes sense to me. Thank you. Let's say this issue is definitely not resolved and we can come back and figure out how we want to do going forward. Stuart, please. Yeah, so there is a cost of conflict that often doesn't surface as something that people measure and look at it all, but it's there. I certainly use it as motivation for people to stop and get to the other side. It's a piece of economic justifications. It was really interesting to me to hear Patty talking about being exposed to what I'll call for one of the better term, a deep conversations. So this motivated me to look at my bookshelf, difficult conversations, crucial conversations, crucial confrontations, crucial accountability, getting to yes, getting past no, getting together. And my book, Getting to Resolution, which was endorsed by Stephen Cuddy among others. I share that in the sense of what pops up in my mind is the great statement that Al Gore used to make about dealing with climate, that we know what to do, we don't have the political will to do it. And that's the edge, that's the rub, I think. You know, I spent about 15 years doing a lot of divorce mediation work with the models that I had developed. And I had people, couples that were getting divorced, talk about traumatic context, really healing the relationship because of a process that I put them through. And it was some of the most satisfying work I've ever done. It was the most amazing, soulful work. So I think that we know what to do if we could, and I always had this vision to magnify that. You know, to do that work with 25 couples in a room going through a divorce, that was the vision that I had. So we know what to do. It's just a question of we're not doing it. We're not doing it. And it's the key, I think, for moving into a future that's gonna be different from the past. It's got something to do with the educational system, i.e. I know in the 90s, there was tons of money spent on child education about dealing with conflict. But that was one of the first fundings that was gotten rid of. So, yeah. And each generation, as Patty just demonstrated, comes to understand, ah, there is a way to move forward. But we don't do it as a mass cultural because I think politicians need to be tough. I mean, that's what Netanyahu is doing right now. He's being a tough politician and he's creating chaos and trauma all around. Shimon, Gil, you just took your hand down, I think, by accident. No, okay, good. Shimon, then Patty. Shimon, you're not muted on Zoom, but we're not hearing you. Nope. Try unplugging your microphone, try putting in an earbud. As soon as we hear your voice, we'll pass you the voice. Go ahead, Patty, in the meantime. So, per pursuant share, something I've been thinking about recently and reflecting on is just really being present to how necessary connection is for human survival and thriving and how this just goes back a little bit to what I was sharing earlier. We still haven't been modeled healthy ways of connecting and so connecting is going to largely, that's a generalization, that's not true for everyone, of course. But for the most part, we haven't seen or been modeled how to relate healthily to one another, how to have realistic and I'll just leave it at realistic expectations of what relationship can and cannot provide us. And there still isn't a conversation I'm hearing called widely about the power of being able to meet our own emotional needs and not continuing to project them out to others while still being in connection with others and having and practicing interdependence. So there's an element there. So I think that so much harm is done and continues to be done relationally and trauma perpetuated relationally because those two pieces aren't yet being talked about or clear or we have shared language around, so that's one. And then two, something I think about often is just, I refer to it as a cycle of pain, right? I think I don't remember who was presencing it earlier, but there was, it might have been Gil suggesting that there's the post-traumatic stress response and then the post-traumatic growth response. And I think that the framework that we have to work within this is still not widely talked about. It's not dinnertime, how they say dinnertime talk, conversation, household, like household language. And I think that in my lived experience, what I continue to observe is the cycle of pain is if harm occurs, we either have the option or we don't know we have an option to process in a way that is like, let's say regenerative or at least neutral, or we don't process it, we kind of pack it away and save it for later. If we opt for the latter, it becomes something living in our body that we inevitably harm ourselves, right? Varying different degrees of harm that can occur at that level. We farm others, we ventilate that charge that unprocessed and held charge in the body onto other humans, we harm other humans, we perpetuate trauma in that way and we also harm the planet. We also harm other life we over consume. And so it's my belief that the greatest threat to life on this planet, both human and all of the life is unprocessed emotional garbage. We've been holding for generations and generations, don't have permission or language or frameworks to help us process and deal with that. And I can't help but I feel we're kind of at time right now, we're like all of that stuff that we've saved for later over generations to generations, it's just coming to a head now. It's not coming to a head now but the planet can't sustain it anymore. And so to finish, my belief is that our collective greatest threat is the weight of our unprocessed emotional pain. And again, I just, I can't help but feel like one of the most urgent needs in this space as we figure out how to navigate through this and forward together is having a different story around why it's happening and that it, how can we create a new narrative where we see this as an opportunity to grow and to heal and for each of us to have better and more fulfilled and happier, lives better relationships on the other side of it where it's something we're doing for ourselves but we're also doing it for the collective. I feel complete. Oh, Patty, who's we? Gil, can you remind me where I said we? You said we a lot. And I'm just remembering the Ken Homer question of which we, of we are you referring to when you say we, are you talking about humanity in general, everywhere? Where's older, younger, traumatized, not traumatized? I don't mean to hassle you about it but it's just using it very generally and I want to get a sense of how universally your statements feel to you. Thank you. Yeah, that's important clarification. I appreciate you reflecting that. I think most of the time I tend to use that in this context, we just, as very much a generalization of the collective. So I don't think that it necessarily includes a single user group of any or cohort of any that you just suggested. It's just kind of the, I think it was you who said earlier is this the human condition? I think this is what we're talking about is an innate experience in the human experience but we just need a different way to outline. I just have one thing to that then. Please very briefly. It's class, I'm sorry to jump the line. I'm really struck as I reflect on this conversation about people who have lived through the same, what appears to be the same traumatic experience and come out very differently with a very different lived experience and orientation to what they went through. And that, to me, it's an invitation to look into that and understand what's going on there. I know Holocaust survivors who are shut down for their lives and never talk about it. And I know one who just died last month at 102 who lived in a, how to say this, with the pain still alive but his life also still alive. And so the range of human response to trauma is I think something worth you to look at also. Can I, can you hear me now? Yes, Jim, I was gonna go to you and I'm glad you were in with your phone now. So go for it. Well, I'm on my iPhone now where before I was on my laptop. First of all, it's nice to be back. I think last time I was connected with the group was on discussing Gaza and probably in October. I actually have quite a lot of experience academically, clinically, that's personally with trauma. I actually was just at the psychedelic conference in Denver where a lot of the conversation was about epigenetics and intergenerational trauma. I think when we talk about trauma, there are just so many different level of trauma. And for what Gil said, I'm glad that I waited or I couldn't speak before because of like the technical stuff, the area that really fascinates me is exactly what Gil spoke about. And actually one of my mentors in medical school in Israel was the person who came up with the theory called salutogenesis. I've mentioned that before, which tries to understand exactly that. Why do some people thrive? Because there is the concept now of post-traumatic flourishing and why do some people languish? And he came up with the idea which I totally agree with and actually developing the idea of a sense of coherence. If we have a sense of coherence, then it helps us really cope a lot better. It does not mean that it's something good. Ultra religious people have that. People with very strong ideology have it. One of the problems for people in liberal societies is they don't really have such a strong sense of coherence and I'm much more vulnerable not to respond well. My concern right now, and again, as I said, I mean, I've worked on so many different levels of trauma. My concern is how to avoid that to your point, Jerry, how to deal with it moving forward. My biggest fear, or one of my biggest fears is the impact that artificial intelligence is gonna have on society in general and certainly on the work environment. I've studied very deeply the issue of the opiate epidemic and I know people mentioned here like training and all that stuff. Most of the treatments for opiate dependence, however you wanna call it, really are not very helpful. My sense is we need to really deal with and I think someone mentioned that how do you deal with early in life? Not necessarily just giving people tools of how to cope better, but even before that, how to understand the biology, the environmental factors and also the social system, the capitalism and other systems that actually put us in a position where at some point we're probably gonna be very affected by changes. The opiate epidemic, yeah, there was the sappers, but much of it was because of what would happen with globalism, neoliberalism and essentially the demise of communities. And I think that there is an easy way of not looking at these kind of things by focusing on, well, it's because of the FDA or the DEA, but unless we really understand what gives people purpose and meaning and what happens when they lose it, I think we're gonna get into more and more difficulties. There are quite a lot of people in the AI field who are very concerned, not the existential threat of AIs, you know, turning us all into paper clips, but what's gonna happen when people lose their purpose because our purpose is so defined by war and efficiency like people mentioned, but what happens then, what's gonna happen then, which has happened throughout history is people look for purpose and meaning and oftentimes a strong leader like a Hitler, people like that come about and provide answers. My project right now is exactly dealing with not necessarily strong leaders, but really starting preconception, how to really understand and how to build a society that helps people flourish. And I think that's what we really need to think about is how to think from the beginning on, like preconception, looking at communities, things of that kind. One of the things that I'm very encouraged by is the whole Chad GPT. I know I sort of introduced or talked about it a lot probably a year ago. I even worked on the program, me and Chad GPT, to change the political dynamics in Israel. But recently there's a lot of amazing work done by people looking at how to co-write, how to co-think, how to co-do almost anything with three of the new models, GPT, Claude and also Gemini. And I think you as a group, we as a group, that would be really a great avenue to look at how to kind of co-create thinking in generative kind of problem solving. And I think we really have tools now that even a year ago we didn't have. And I think the urgency of understanding what happens to people when they lose purpose and meaning and the very likely trajectory we're headed in, I think makes it almost imperative to really look in that direction. I feel we need to take another beat, but I wanna ask you just for a moment, Pete tried to expand, Pete did a lovely job expanding on your notion of the sense of coherence in the chat, but could you talk a little bit more about coherence? And then I'd love to go quiet for another little bit. Well, you know, you have to, I mean, people talk about human nature. I mean, my sense, Jerry, is not that why do we have so much violence? My question is why do we have so little violence? Because, you know, essentially, we're programmed in the driving force and might kind of thinking about these things. And as a psychiatrist is Cain and Abel, you know? Cain for whatever reason, and we think it's, you know, jealousy or envy or frustration or betrayal killed his brother. And essentially the same nor circuitry that existed then still exists right now. We develop in societies, you know, mechanisms for culture, religion, education, language to dampen that. We were able to create the enlightenment where rational thinking, you know, comes into play and helps us overcome those urges, not even going into psychoanalytic theory in this regard. What's happening now globally is that people are getting coherence from tying themselves back to very fundamentalist religious beliefs, which sort of like throws away everything that's been accomplished over the last 200 years in Western civilization. So what is the sense of coherence? You know, our brains and we try to make sense of the world. You know, our anxiety is the difference between what we understand the world to be and what we experience in the world. Why do we experience trauma? We experience it because we go along, we expect things to be a certain way and then all of a sudden they're not. So how do we cope with that? Oftentimes it causes anxiety in my realm field. For some people they get catatonic, people get psychotic, people get, you know, there's a whole range. And again, it depends on what stage of life you're exposed to it. So a sense of coherence essentially is a really wonderful operating system that evolution has allowed us to do that we don't have to continuously reevaluate and re-establish our program of how we make sense of the world. That's why families play such an important role. That's why communities, religions, everything, it just like gives us a kind of a continuum and within that continuum, a certain broadband we're functioning within. What happens when you have a good sense of coherence, you've shot everything else out. So like in the Arab, Israeli or, you know, I prefer calling it like, well, Israeli Hamas or however one of you define it. I mean, those people on the Israeli side who are religious fundamentalists have an incredible sense of coherence. I mean, they have a whole well-organized, and we used to talk about that with people with psychosis. It's a well-organized psychotic structure. It makes sense for these people. It helps them function. If it means that they're gonna kill someone for maintaining that sense of coherence, that's a small price to pay. On the other side with Hamas, they have the same thing. The religious fundamentalism that they are engaged in ties into liberating all of Palestine and killing anyone who's in the way. So they have a very strong sense of coherence. Now, with sense of coherence, if you're into, I mean, I have the whole, you know, my work is built on creating paradigms that help us reach, you know, shift our way of looking at what we're going through. But a sense of coherence is built on your sense of manageability, whether you feel you're able to manage your environment, whether you're capable of it and whether people will respond to it. So it has three components. We're doing a project with a number of people on coherence in the workplace. Why do people so often have burnout in the workplace? So we're looking at using that model. But I think coherence, and again, back to Gil's point about why people function one way or another confronted with the same, seemingly the same trauma. I think this is a good explanatory model, the whole salutogenic model. Simon, thank you very much. Let's go into silence for a little bit. I'll bring us back on the floor. It's yours. Yeah, thank you, Simon. That was helpful. In many ways, this is really a watershed moment, isn't it? I mean, this is deep and impactful and it hits us pretty hard in our established world views and upholds a lot of things that we have come to believe. So I take my German culture background here. You know, Germany, after the war, was what I would call radically pacifist to the point of being radical about it. So the German military was a joke. I mean, I spent two years in the German military. It was ridiculous. And the Germans really thought that the world ought to be a rational place. And if you provide physical well-being in a place of economic security, then things will just fall in place. And then you come to the question, why does this Jewish action and reaction create such attention when there were, no, literally a dozen such cases around the world where people, a tribe got displaced. I mean, think of the Oriapo or Inchers and think about Sudan and other places. And it never really triggered this kind of emotional response on a global level. So what place do the Jewish people have in our psyche that makes this stand out and be so, so very different and observed? And then when you trill down, I mean, it's really, here you have one of the most sophisticated advanced tribes resort to medieval brutality and go back into a act of horrible violence and then you think that, wow, that's really, that's really, oh, we collective species are and we may not be able to get through it. So in Germany right now, that's a really big turning point. I mean, the Germans are going back to re-arming themselves. They're saying to hell with this deal, we have to be militarily strong. Japan is doing the same. So this whole experiment of liberal, of building a liberal free thinking society has failed. It doesn't work in this world that we are in. Well, it has failed, Jerry. I don't know what makes you think. I'm not sure it's totally failed. I mean, that's a blanket declaration. I think it's struggling. That's for sure. I don't know that it's failed, but I'm just an optimist that way. Yeah, but it has failed in the sense that it needs to be restructured to also convey strength. If you, the idea for Germany, for example, to not have a military that's worth anything and to be basically militarily, marshally defenseless doesn't work. You and liberal society has to be also combined with strength and the capacity to project strength in order to function. That's sort of where the German psyche has come to at this point. So that's why they're just pouring billions of dollars into the military right now. And there is really an emotional sense of we got to get back on track here because we are at risk. And so that's a turning point here, which I don't think we have quite processed yet. But it's also, I don't know. I mean, it's probably a sense of reality. If that's who we are as a species, then let's really deal with that and build a frame and hopefully AI may assist in pointing towards socials and physical realities that help us build a society that can actually prevail and bring leadership to the front that is actually leading us into a better place. Thank you, Klaus. Doug, I'm Doug C. I think one thing that's not being mentioned is economic trauma. And I think that's a good point. I think one thing that's not being mentioned is economic trauma. We all live on the edge of the trauma of losing our income, whether it's loss of jobs, collapse of a company, in government, that our agency doesn't get refunded. If you're rich and have a portfolio, there's the fear about the portfolio collapsing. I think that economic insecurity and it's not just insecurity like falling off of some simple thing. It's the loss of one's livelihood and the definition of who we are in society. And we're all there. I noticed, by the way, that I work hard to make my interventions here short. And I'm not sure if that's effective. Thanks, Sarge. Carl, is there any other places with Doug? Because I've been leaving, but sometimes we also have the thing where people have spoken three times before others get a chance to do things. But I posted a lot of things in the link in case I wasn't here to say, but I'd like to defer to after Doug. I think Carl just passed to you, Doug B, but I'm not sure. You're muted. Yeah, so I'd like to offer slightly different orientations and perspective picking up on Shimon's contributions. On a really fundamental level, feelings, Trump thoughts every time. And as living biological beings, feelings sort of determine response, the person having the feelings and their relationship to them on an identity level, self-awareness level, consciousness level directly factors into that thing about why given the same trauma to two different people come out of it completely different. And the reason for the difference for the person who goes through the most horrendous stuff and ends up paralyzed versus the person who goes through the exact same experience and comes out whole, intact, dusting themselves off and taking inventory of whatever they have left and going about maximizing their lives, their generative potential, their levels of connection and engagement all around them is actually rooted in where they center their source of orientation. So if that orientation, if they're, and you're gonna invoke a little elemental stuff, hopefully as little as possible, their sense of their own earth, their own grounding, their own knowing and awareness of who they are on a being level felt sense across all five bodies, the more that is internal and de facto, the more resilient and effective they are going to be in the face of whatever. Now, sort of zooming out, natural world, natural law says that everything's connected to everything, everything affects everything. It's an ongoing standing living principle of connection all the time, everywhere, always. Everything about our culture, Western civilization and the primacy of intellect of ideas and Shimona, I'm gonna reference your invocation of coherence is actually rooted not in a concept of connection, it's rooted in a concept of disconnection, discrimination, separating and sorting, itemizing, ontologically, parsing and breaking down. Science is rooted in proving something and fixing an idea and then validating that once fixed, it'll fix again and again and again until somebody else comes along and bumps it out of the saddle into a new thing to be fixed in place. What's psychotic at the root of that is that in the face of natural law, everything is constantly changing, everything is constantly in motion, nothing ever repeats. In fact, that fixation, that breaking things down, that parsing and separating, disconnect one thing from other things, one group of people from another group of people, intrinsically is seeking to fix things in place to not have anything in motion, to provide predictability, to provide repetition, to provide same, same, same, same, same. It is literally in 180 degree opposition to natural reality and law, it doesn't make sense, but that is the whole endeavor of every aspect of our current culture, civilization, education, productivity, everything. How to replicate, replicate, replicate, repeat, repeat, and the sense of earth, the sense of grounding and identity isn't rooted in the individual living being, it's rooted, it's transposed and externalized to downs, to things, to patterns, to systems, to science, to all of these things that are intellectual constructions because we can't. But the underlying fundamental result of that is disconnection, atomization and fragmentation and fixation in place. The goal and greatest aspiration is for something to never change. I can generate the same sales next quarter as I did this quarter, as I did two quarters back in five quarters and the tension of being a living being in fact connected to everything in the natural world embodying everything changing, everything being in motion, everything flowing as part of an energetic field up against that is driving everybody crazy, has us killing each other, has us doing insanely irrational things because it's irreconcilable. So coherence is still stuck in the mental, it's stuck in the intellectual, it's stuck in the abstract, it's stuck in the we are gonna construct our way out of this, we're gonna rationally figure out our way out of this. And the truth of the matter is emotions trump thoughts, feelings trump thoughts. And fear is fear and safety is safety. And unless somebody can be provided with safety, there is no way for them to heal or change or feel into wholeness again. And the system last but not least, and I apologize for the length of this, but the system we're in is training everybody to seek their earth, their center of orientation, their grounding and things external to them because if I can provide that and sell you that I make money. Again, reflection of the same thing. And so the point made about why people turn to authoritarians because there's no means or safety for them to even begin to look in term for their sense of security, grounding and orientation. And I apologize for the length of that. And I also apologize for like having to flee immediately on the heels up. But I thank you all for being here and having this conversation. It's important. Thanks, Doug, a lot. Pearl, I think earlier you passed the mic to Doug but your hand is still upside. Don't want to offer you the floor if you'd like to step back in. Okay, yeah, thanks. Somebody come in to do some work. I'm not so I'm gonna let them in. Oh, there's so many. How many things with this? I did post quite a few links. I just wanted to kind of bring them to people's attention. That Rachel Yehuda, she had an interview with well that Chris type of the on being that talks about trauma and resilience across generations. Which there is also Peter Gables. His last, I guess, I think it was his final book was on the desire for mutual recognition. And that link is actually, he was editor at Tikkun. And that's, there's a lot of things there, obviously around the, I mean, that's the progressive end of the Jewish perspective. Type of thing that I, one of my key mentors has been Paul Costello. He's done a lot of work about the new story and it's all about storytelling. And he's actually brought, it's really in Palestinian, mostly college students over to DC to intern on the hill and other places and stuff. So he's got a lot of things. And Donna Hicks actually worked with Desmond Tutu and the whole idea of dignity. So how do we get dignity, trauma, resilience, story? It's all kind of part of the mix. So I guess that might, yeah, Doug B and I have obviously, we have a lot of interesting conversations and things. We really can't, we're just, we cannot comprehend, truly comprehend a open system. So we get into closed systems, but there's always adding, for everything you know, there's one thing you don't, and that doubles the number of that previous unknown thing has a relationship with everything you know. So I mean, that's the Pascal's triangle. It's like add one more component to your system and it doubles the number of relationships, two to the end. And then minus one, but people act like, oh, that's insignificant as n gets larger. So no, that one is the container for everything else and things. So just from that standpoint. So yeah, it's, and then like, well, the time sensitive thing too that I wanted to bring to people's attention is the brain 14 officially was released a couple of weeks ago and the primary developer there, Harlan Hugh, he's gonna actually be talking about it at 2 p.m. Eastern here, so I put a link for people to register if you're interested. Thanks, Carl. We're getting close to the end of our time for today, but Gil then Hank. We'll just take a moment. Thanks. So I was very affected by Doug B's rant and I'm sorry that he had to leave so I couldn't tell him that directly. But it was very profound for me in part because it put into words experiences that I've been sort of moving through and hadn't put into words in that way. So I felt a great appreciation for that. And the connection between the urge to fix in the sense of repair, make better, make okay and the urge to fix in the sense of lock it in place. It was a very powerful resonance for me. The urge to categorize in the face of natural law where everything is changing. And I've been thinking for some time about our, at least Western humans addiction to classification of this is this and not that. That is this and not that. There are boundaries, there's boxes, everything has a box to fit into. It even shows up in our conversation and our listening because often listening is listening for mapping what you say onto coherence that I already have, different than listening with a complete openness to what might emerge in the conversation. I've been working to train myself to at least notice that. Am I listening to say yes, I agree or disagree or am I listening to be provoking to something new? It's very challenging and very interesting what opens with that. Doug talked about where the boundaries are imposed. And I think of Nora Bateson's wonderful provocation of where does the deer and the meadow begin? And we're in a world that's not only in constant flux where the boundaries are always contextual and arbitrary and not discreet. We're due in this conversation are my thoughts, my thoughts are our thoughts. Where do they arise from? It's a very, it's a much messier universe than we seem to live in. And so the goal he spoke about a predictability, sorry words are difficult here. That's one way to orient in the world and another way is to orient in some kind of respect of the emergence in the face of utter contingency. We don't, this has probably always been true of the world but it feels very much so now that we don't know where things are going. We have no way of knowing. I'm a futurist who's given up prediction because it feels like a fool's errand at this point. And so how do we live in that kind? And how do we walk on the shifting sands? How do we manage ourselves in the face of what Flores would call utter contingency which is not necessarily a bad thing because there are moves open in every moment about how to respond. The one thing I disagreed with about what Doug said I was surprised that he said it toward the end he said fear is fear and safety is safety. Which seemed like exactly the kind of thing he was decrying at the start. And we know from the physiologists that and somebody will probably have the reference for this or tell me that I'm wrong on is it physiologically fear and excitement show up the same in the body? So is fear fear? Or is there possibilities of learned and conditioned responses where people can experience the same event and experience it as trauma or thrilling as damaging or enriching? So I've spoken. Thanks, Gail. I noticed we had Hank and Pete in the queue and we're sort of running out of time. I'd be very happy to hear Hank and Pete go ahead and then whoever wants to stay I think we might have a queue of three poems right into the room. And it'll just spill over and that's cool. So Hank, please. I'll try to be very brief. I'm not familiar with most of the references and therapies which have been talked about earlier in the call. I made notes of them and I'll try to look at them. The few that I know, such as EMDR and family constitutions, constellations are very effective with individuals and small groups. So let me just ask a very naive question. Are any of the therapies which have been talked about useable for larger communities, parliaments, for congresses, for cabinets, for people in so-called nations who have this memory of collective trauma in their consciousness and in their bodies? And if there are, are there some which won't have the danger of descending into a kind of brave new world model? That's what I wanted to ask. That's a great question Hank and probably could be the subject of an entire call. Anybody have a quick answer on society scale therapeutic interventions? I do, Joana Macy is the work that reconnects. I've experienced this in groups as large as 100 people. Several of the exercises can produce profound shifts in the space of about three hours and leave people with a sense of open possibility. Thanks, very interesting. Thanks, Ken. Pete? I'll try to be short and maybe I can turn my notes that what I was gonna say into an email. I really appreciate, especially hearing from Patty and Shimon, both of them really added to my understanding of the conversation and the subject. I wanted to kind of mention looking at instead of looking from the individual up looking at from the population level down the species level down. One of the things I got short changed by in my education and all of our educations at the time when I was learning stuff was that natural selection works on individuals. Especially for social animals like people there's a thing called group selection which I think is still not really believed in all the way but anyway, it makes sense to me that any individual in a species especially a social species is actually not really relevant to the survival of the species. It's how all the individuals work together. So it's really fascinating to me to think about trauma and we could have evolved so that trauma didn't ring through whole societies and multi-generations, right? We could have had that kind of thing. So then it makes me wonder why is trauma a evolutionarily selected generational trauma especially or civilizational trauma? Why is that evolutionarily selected for? And I won't go into it now but I'll try to get it into an email. But when you think, so then group selection, super scale social structures I think is also interesting for me. A lot of the forces that we live in are inside these big monster things that are hundreds of thousands or millions or billions of people large over centuries. And so then those forces also compete in natural suction. Another one for me is that we've gone through I don't know a thousand years of warlike conquest oriented cultures literally removing more peaceful cultures from our gene pool. So we are the sons and daughters of the warriors and the conquerors. We're not the sons and daughters of the people who lost those battles to the conquerors. So when we say why are people mean and cruel to each other? It's like, well, that's what we've inherited from our wars, everybody else died. The people who weren't mean and cruel died. Why do people have very different reactions to trauma? This to me is a group selection thing, right? It makes sense that you'd want to have a variety of reactions to trauma and some of them are selected for some of them aren't but you actually want that variety as a means of testing different reactions. And so civilizational trauma and generational trauma it could be positive in the sense that it creates more success for the people who carry it, carry the genes to be able to transmit it. It can do things like trauma and then a reaction to it, good reaction to it, which may be, and by good there, I mean survival of the species, not good for any individual. It's actually really traumatic for individuals, right? But societies, cultures that do well might be more adaptable and more resilient to future traumas. They might get good at telling stories to meet future challenges. They might develop selective memories that sharpen different kinds of trauma so that they fight better or they win better or something like that. And I think also trauma is the dark side of cohesion and identity formation. So there's a kind of a cycle there where we get more cohesive as a social unit when we collect and experience trauma together, right? So just some thoughts. Thanks. Pete, thank you very much. And I'm glad we made room for these things. I wanna make a tiny note before we go to three poems and I just added trauma as an unfortunate asset to the chat, which is the note, something I wanna add to the comments before my little note. And that is people who have suffered loss sometimes figure out that that loss is actually a superpower for them and it allows them to connect to other people. It gives them empathy. It gives them credibility. It opens connections. And if they can share and be vulnerable about their trauma, that is an okay thing. And to get there, they have to get past the shame associated with trauma. And we've stigmatized trauma in so many ways that revealing your trauma is a bad thing and it's gonna be dangerous and it creates that moment of unsafety which actually makes sharing trauma a bigger act of vulnerability and sharing and connection. So I think that Patty's question in the chat about how my trauma would be a positive influence or a path to positive change I think flows along those kinds of ideas. The thing I wanna leave with everybody is I've loved this call. I love that you all are here. I want to know, do you wanna go back to this topic in two weeks? Do we wanna go to this topic for a couple of weeks running so we don't lose the momentum and skip our check-in routine? Do we want to do something different? Will we get tired of trauma? Will we exhaust ourselves on this and beat ourselves on the rock of trauma? But I think we've left a lot of really lovely paths in the conversation here. Open questions about society scale interventions about can trauma be helpful, et cetera. So I would love to talk about this either on the Mattermost channel, the Townsborough channel or on the OGM list. Please just put your feedback about this call in there. Gil, go ahead. Just a quick note. We've been talking about trauma but not only we've been talking about humans and change and social change and all the things that we always talk about through this particular lens everything we've talked about is applicable across our subject range. Agreed. So thank you. And with that, I will go to, we'll do Ken, me and Patty for coaching. And if you must leave, you must leave but thank you for being here. The floor is yours, Ken. So one thing I've noticed on this call is that we've talked about trauma in the abstract sense of those people over there. No one has spoken of personal trauma here today. And I'm gonna, well, okay. It hasn't been a very well-tapped vein but I'm gonna speak about that right now. This is a poem inspired by Sharon Olds and for Sharon, those of you who don't know Sharon Olds she sort of broke new ground by writing poems about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents. Buried among my childhood memories in a deep underground reservoir of pain, our events I'd rather forget but their persistence is such that the passing decades have failed to erase them. Here's one, my head and face are being held under the hot water faucet. My mother is roughly shoving a bar of dial soap into my four-year-old mouth. I'll never forget how its accurate taste made me gag. Why? I had innocently repeated a word I heard an adult uttered the day before. It was a harsh way for me to learn that adults are free to say things that children are forbidden to speak. Had I but known I would have kept my mouth shut. At that time the word's definition was, the word's definition was well beyond my ken. I caught holy hell for speaking that word. It was years before I learned its meaning. To this day I have absolutely zero recollection of what that word was. There was also a vast repository of slaps. A raft of rude insults to my tender flesh. How often did my sacred child's body end up cowering under the assaults that regularly rained down upon my head? My shoulders, my back, and of course my face. Most were delivered by hand, some with a hairbrush. I sometimes wonder what made her slap me so often. Was I such a horrid child? And why did I keep hearing her admonishment, stop your crying now, or I'll give you something to really cry about? That boggled my mind and terrified me. Wasn't the last slap reason enough? I hadn't been crying before it landed. Would hitting me again teach me lessons the previous slaps had failed to impart? What were her slaps supposed to teach? And since I seem to get slapped constantly for new and unknown reasons, how was I supposed to own at all? There were no rules. It was confusing as hell. I have questions about my mom's behavior, questions whose answer I'll never know. And I wonder why more than 60 years later, am I still trying to understand why are these old memories still so fresh? There was a woman I used to work with. One day she couldn't get something to work on her computer. When I sat down and tried it, everything was just fine. Surprised and chagrined, she slapped me hard on the top of my head. Before I knew it, I had risen over her. My fist clenched with rage. Darkly I thundered, don't ever hit me again. Do you understand me? Her eyes grew wide. I could see she was as shocked by my response to her slapping my head as I had been triggered by it. Why not? That was a question I didn't expect. Did I really need to explain to a woman 15 years my senior why hitting me in the head was inappropriate? Seriously. Looking back now, I'm sure my mother believed that hitting me so often was the right thing to do to help me grow. She'd been acting as she'd been taught. She has brought up in strict Lutheran and Germanic traditions. Traditions where punishment swiftly administered would prevent problems later on. Emotional costs, both immediate and deferred, held no place in her parental accounting system. To this day, I wonder, did all her punishment and all her slaps make me a better person? That's a difficult question for me to answer. I only know that the rod was not spared. So the child was spoiled in a different way. And thank you. That's really beautiful and moving. The poem I want to turn it into the room doesn't fit well after that. So I'm just going to share a link to it. Anybody can read it if you want to. And I'll ask for just another little moment of silence and then Patty, if you'd like to read your poem. Let's turn, thank you. I don't think I'd ever heard that poem. I know Sharon Olds, I don't know a bunch of her poems, but. That's my poem. Oh. I'm the person in that poem who was slapped and hit and. Thank you. Thank you all. I appreciate the silence on the whole thing. Patty, if you'd like. Thank you, Jerry. And Ken, thank you for bringing your heart and sharing your heart with us, new experience. I would also like to pass on my share. I will email it to Pete to be written into the plex. And if you'd like, you can read it there. Thank you. Thank you all. I'm happy to see we outlasted Gil's father, Notica. Thanks for everybody. Thank you, Ken. Thanks for holding the space, Jerry. See you next time. Thanks for creating the space. It was great. I didn't realize this shirt has Moiré effects on camera. Let's stop wearing it. Groovy. Take care. Thanks, bye.