 Hello. I'd like to welcome and thank all of you for coming to our program today. It's co-sponsored by the New School for Analytical Psychology and the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness. We have a great turnout and we're just really pleased. My name is Kenneth Kimmel. I'm a co-founder and faculty of the New School. And today we're pleased to present Two-Eyed Seeing Indigenous Approaches to Healing Trauma with Dr. Luis Mel Matarona and Barbara Mangy. I'll be moderating the question-answer discussions today. And as your questions or comments come up in the one hour to 75-minute talk, please enter them in the chat box and we'll take them in the order received. So there'll be about a 15-minute break after the talk and then we'll do a question and answer after that. And we're going to ask you to mute yourselves during the talk and only unmute yourself when your question is up and we'll ask you to present your question to the presenters. Before I turn things over to editor of the Society for Anthropology of Consciousness, Nicole Torres, to introduce our guest speakers, I'd like to say a few words about the New School. The New School for Analytical Psychology was founded in Seattle in 2014 by four Jungian analysts. It came into being out of a response to what they perceived as a fundamentalism and hierarchical misuse of power in their former institute that compelled them to leave. This is common in many institutions, including psychoanalytic ones. The exclusion or appropriation of human differences, distinctiveness, and otherness. It is for that reason our school does not hold fast to a single theory or ideology. We value the principles of intellectual freedom and inclusion. Our faculty comprises psychoanalysts and psychotherapists from diverse schools of thought, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, artists, and at least one mystic at heart. As a co-founder of the New School, Ladsen Hinton writes in the acknowledgement to his new edited edition entitled Shame, Temporality, and Social Change, ominous transitions, quote, The core purpose of the New School is giving voice to a multidisciplinary analysis and critique of the basic concerns of our times. And for those of you new to our school, if you'd like to receive our announcements of future programs, please be sure to go on to the website to be placed on the mailing list. Thank you. Nicole. Hi, and thank you, Ken. And thank you all for attending and for being here with us. And we, the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, we're definitely glad to be co-sponsors of this event. To give you some background about the Society, we are a section of the American Anthropological Association, and we are also an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners who utilize cross-cultural, experimental, experiential, and theoretical approaches to studying consciousness as a fundamental component of the universe. And this includes indigenous as well as psychoanalytic perspectives, among many, many other things. And Andrew, if you're up to it, you can drop the website, our website into the chat box. If you are a clinician and you need CEUs, please follow the instructions that I sent in an email. You should have received that in your inbox about an hour ago. If you registered this morning, I will send you the email for CEUs later. So we are happy to welcome Dr. Louis Mel Madrona and Barbara Mengi as our guest today. Louis is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, and Coyote Wisdom, focusing on what Native culture has to offer the modern world. He has also written narrative medicine healing the mind through the power of story, the promise of narrative psychiatry, and his most recent book with Barbara Mengi, Remapping Your Mind, The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation Through Story. Dr. Mel Madrona graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed his residency in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He has been on the on the faculties of several medical schools, most recently as the associate professor of family medicine at the University of New England. Barbara Mengi is a licensed clinical social worker. She studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Toronto and received her master's degree in creative arts psychotherapy at Concordia University in Montreal. She has co-written also Remapping Your Mind with Dr. Mel Madrona and currently she is completing her master's of fine art and documentary film making at York University Toronto and is also working with Louis in Orono, Maine. She is a director of education for the Coyote Institute in Orono. So thank you for being here with us and we're honored to have you here and I will turn it over to you. Great, thank you. Yeah, I'm going to focus on two-eyed seeing and Barbara is going to bring in the trauma aspect of two-eyed seeing. So, and of course, this is a picture of Barbara at our favorite odds and ends store next to that castle that you can see on the left, which is in Najak, a place called Najak. And this is how to get a hold of us, or me at least. So, I want to thank Albert Marshall for bringing two-eyed seeing into the English speaking world. In Mi'kmaq, his language, it's Eptuopta Monk. And we sit on the original land of the Wabanaki people, the people of the dawn. And so we want to acknowledge the Wabanaki. And I want to thank New School and Nicole and the people I'm just meeting, Ken at all, and the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness for having me. And I thought we were, you guys were in California, but it sounds like you're in Seattle. I don't know where you are. But wherever you are, thanks to the indigenous people of that place. So my journey to two-eyed seeing, or what's also called explanatory pluralism, began at Stanford University School of Medicine. And it began really for me as a sudden shift of consciousness that happened in a lecture, given by the guy who discovered the metabolic syndrome. And he said to us that life was a relentless progression toward death, disease, and decay. And the job of the physician is to slow the rate of decline. And I thought, that's not what my great grandmother said. And so I was immediately confronted by two perspectives on healing and health and two perspectives on aging, because my grandmother and my great grandmother believed that they didn't believe that you had to be sick to die. And they didn't believe that being sick would kill you. They believed that the two were very separate. And their ideal was to die healthy so you could party with your relatives when you got to the other side. And so this notion of death, disease, and decay would not have sat well with them. And so after the lecture, I ran over to the Stanford Indian Center, which in those days was in the old firehouse. And I burst into the room. And who was at the desk but Henrietta blue eyes. And, and I ran up there and I said, Henrietta, I need an elder. And, and she produced one of those archaic devices that now belong in museums called a roller decks. And I went through it. And, and she said what tribe and I said Cherokee. And she, and she gave me two names. One in you kaya and one in Garberville. And I was spending time with elders by the next weekend in order to keep my indigenous eye open. So that the biomedical I would not force it closed. And so that, that was really my beginning of to buy it seeing. And also at Stanford, I got to go to my first, an EPI Haga, which an EPI, any means to breathe. And P means please the plural, third person plural. So any P or an EPI means they breathe. And Kaga is a ceremony. So it means they breathe ceremony or ceremony in which they breathe. And, and that breathing refers to the breath of life, which is the steam coming off the stones, when you go inside. And so my first in EPI Haga happened on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. A friend from medical school brought me home with him to his reserve. And who should I meet before I went in, but father stone. And I said, wow, I said, I didn't expect no Catholics here. Oh, yeah, he said, I go to all their ceremonies. And he showed me his collar and he said, and I bring my collar because you know if the police come and try to arrest them. I'll just announce that it's a proper Catholic ceremony. And in those days, of course, this was illegal. It was illegal to do an EPI Kaga because all Native American ceremonies were banned. And that had changed in Canada in 1960, but it did not change in the United States until 1978. So father stone was fun. And any confided to me said, you know, he said, I have to tell you he said I kind of like their stuff better than my stuff he said, but they're really nice to me they come to all my masses to you know he said I got it I even got an award from the Pope for having the most Indians in mass. So, so he was kind of a cool guy, but so that was too I'd seen, because father stone could see the world through his Catholic I, and he could see the world through the Shoshone Arabah Hawaii. And he could hold both of those visions at the same time. So, another story and Barbara may chime in on this story because she knows Becky well. So Becky is a friend of ours, and Becky's unfortunately was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And she was told that there was basically no hope for her go home and die. And so, instead of going home and dying she went home to Native American church. And Native American church is a complicated story that we don't have time to talk about, but briefly, it arose in the late 1890s. And it came from a Winnemucca guy if I'm remembering correctly, a Paiute in a Northern Cheyenne. And, and it, it's an amazing ceremony it's done in a teepee. And it's, it's designed so that if the police or the army show up that everything can be taken apart to look like it's a bunch of people sitting around cooking around a fire. The fact that it was illegal to do this ceremony. And here's, here's what the inside looks like. You can see the water drum. And you just pull the top off and it looks like a cooking pot. And you can see the these rattles are designed so that you can stir stuff with them at the other end. And it's really quite ingenious how they did that. And so anyway, I think it's been about 15 years and they still haven't found Becky's pancreatic cancer. It must be wandering around somewhere in South Dakota because, you know, nobody's been able to track it down. And it was, it was quite a process of healing. And the part of the deal was that she had to give something back. So she couldn't just be healed. She had to make an offering. And she had to continue to make that offering every day of her life, if she wanted to stay well. And the offering is, is, is her participation in healing and working with her own community. So she with her husband Dallas Dallas chief eagle, she opened the all nations healing center. And, and they, they, they regularly invite people to ceremony and take care of, take care of their community. So, so that was an example of one I'd seen, because the doctors couldn't see the doctors in Rapid City couldn't see that there was any other option for her. There was only death. That was all they could see. And luckily for all of us, that didn't happen. So, so the basic story is that indigenous people had been concerned with healing and with healing from trauma with, with emotional well being which I've been, which I've learned is a better translation than mental health. And so I'm trying to replace mental health on everything with emotional well being. And, and our problem, the problem that faced Albert Marshall, who started to I'd seen was that the dominant paradigm dismisses indigenous wisdom as unscientific, lacking in evidence. And of course, the dominant paradigm is positivistic, it's reductionistic and some other things that I bear, dare not say, in mixed company. So, Albert's point of view is that indigenous wisdom has something to offer the modern world and he wanted to bring that forth. And, and he wanted to say that indigenous knowledge is just as valid as any other knowledge. Of course, this is true for indigenous for Aboriginal indigenous people, but also for any marginalized people for LGBTQ individuals for immigrants for the homeless for voice hearers, you know that that everyone has wisdom, and their wisdom should not be dismissed. And that's the point of two I'd seen. So, up to optimum in me. And, and so, Albert believes that the dominant culture actually needs the wisdom of indigenous people for survival. That it's indigenous perspectives that humanize biomedical approaches, and that the two could could do well together could be better than one alone. And of interest is that for the meek Mac, seven generations is 840 years. For the law, it's only 120 years. We're a little behind the meek Mac. And, and, but the point is that we should leave the world a better place. We should always try and improve on things and here's Albert. And he's a little older than this now he's over 80 pushing 85 and going strong. So, Albert brings another concept to up to us. Another meek Mac concept, which is not to collect. And this is the, the idea that meek Mac idea that we are interdependent and interconnected with the natural and the spiritual world. These are key concepts in meek Mac, as well as Lakota, and I believe in most indigenous cultures, and the parallel in mainstream culture would be system science, of which ecology is one branch. And so to I'd seeing is about always looking for another way to look at things. And with the idea that the other way might be a better way. And so we have to be open to all perspectives. And it sounds like that's what you guys are doing at the new school is, is allowing multiple visions to coexist. And we may have that kind of diversity. We have tremendous possibilities for creativity. So, so we want to take the best of all worlds. And, you know, I have to say that that Western. Well, maybe we should say biomedicine because it exists in Asia as well and Africa. So biomedicine does some things really well. You know, if you're in a terrible car accident, they can patch you up. They're pretty good. And if you need a hip replacement, they're pretty good at that too. But there's some things that they're terrible at. And so there's some things that indigenous people are better at. And just a quick funny story about that. So, Barbara and I have a shared client. So when she came to see me three months ago, her, her hemoglobin A1C, which is a marker for severity of diabetes was 11.4, which is tremendously high. And so we all rallied around her and we said, Hey, you know what, you got diabetes. She's like, no, I don't. We're like, yes, you do. And, and so a whole team came together, you know, to help her change her lifestyle. So case managers were involved. Barbara got involved. And a nutritionist got involved. And in three months, she had it down to 8.4, which is an amazing drop. Now that the only medication she was taking was a little metformin. So three months ago, our pharmacist, our clinical pharmacist had just been nagging me like nobody's business to put her on like tons of medications. And I said, No, you know, a little metformin is all we're going to do and we're going to do lifestyle. And she's like, wow, wow, wow, wow. And so anyway, I sent her a note. And I said, look what lifestyle accomplished. And so she wrote me back and she said, isn't it amazing what metformin can do sometimes. And, and, and then she, she said, Now here's a whole bunch of other drugs that'll further lower the hemoglobin A1C. And I sent it around, I sent a response to some of my colleagues and I said, isn't it terrible where medicine has come. I mean, look at this, not even an acknowledgement of the tremendous lifestyle change that this woman made and the possibility that her exercising and changing her diet had some impact on her diabetes and not the metformin. And that's one I'd seen. And we want to do two I'd seen. And so part of this too is about creating ethical space within the relationship between indigenous people and mainstream cultures. And Albert and his wife, Merdina would say that we need to cultivate tribal consciousness. So, and of course, there's so many stories so many indigenous stories from so many cultures that privilege altruism over selfishness and collectivism over individualism. And we may need some of that these days. We, we may need to bring the human element back into science. So, indigenous knowledge then comes from consensus driven systematic observations of how things work with a by consensus driven, I mean that people sit around and talk about these things and figure out, you know, if the observations are valid or not. You're not just fly by the by the night, sort of, of suppositions. And two I'd seen says that indigenous explanations don't have to make sense to the dominant paradigm to be effective and practical to work. So our enemy is positivism. It's the idea that there's one cause, and the scientific method will will find it. And that explanations are mutually exclusive. So that a full explanation of an event precludes any other full explanation of that event. And to I'd seen says no way, Jose, there's, you know, there can be multiple full explanations. And you pick the one that works for the problem at hand in the context in which you find yourself. How biomedicine reductionism that the best theory is the micro theory. So microstructural theories are inherently better than macro theories. And, you know, the, the counter argument is that, no matter how much I know about neural circuitry of depression and the neurochemicals involved. Explain why relationship and talking together within that relationship makes people feel a whole lot better. And nor does it explain the beneficial effects of meditation, just because you know which brain circuits are involved. So reductionism isn't always the best possible solution. So explanatory pluralism, we can have multiple levels of explanation. We choose according to utility and aesthetics matching our explanation to our context. And we may need more than one explanation. So, so I wanted to just mention that there is some, some published articles that relate to this. I'm not going to really go into them. But I often talk to what's the word physicians also I'll just leave it at that. And they have to know that you have research. This is an example of a kind of study that's looking at bringing traditional cultural healing into substance abuse treatment. And so to I'd seen in this context means taking the best from both worlds. And in, in the work that Barbara and I do, it could mean medication assisted treatment with, you know, using suboxone to help someone to stay away from heroin. While at the same time, taking them to ceremony, doing talking circles, having them in beating groups, singing, praying, smudging, and, and all the rest. So to I'd seen, we can do more than just one thing. And this was a study I looked at at the effectiveness of using traditional cultural healing for chronic illness. And, and what I found was that everyone's just looking for what works. And people who have chronic illness don't actually care. What makes them better if they get better that for the most part, when they go for alternative or complimentary medicine or traditional cultural healing. It's because the simple approach, taking a pill, which sounds easy, didn't work. And so they're looking for something more. And so, to I'd seen three I'd seen for I'd seen many I'd seen. And, you know, I tell residents that I'm teaching that if allopathic medicine was so great complimentary and alternative medicine wouldn't exist. Because if there was a pill you could take that would solve all your woes, everyone would take it. And that would be the end of that, but apparently not. We also looked about, looked at how elders thought people should learn counseling, if they're going to work with indigenous people. And, and the essence was to I'd seen that they needed to be open to the traditional cultural ways, as well as whatever they were learning in their graduate program. And this was the study we did of bringing traditional cultural elders into working with domestic violence situations. And we found that when we brought in the elders, that we had much more success in, in eliminating domestic violence than when we just did the standard approach. So again, to I'd seen. And this was the paper from the anthropology of consciousness that I did with a graduate student of mine, about looking at how indigenous or Aboriginal people think about mind and emotional well being. So, so how do we summarize all this. Well, that we are, we become what we are through our relationships. And that relationships are managed through stories. And that stories give us meaning and purpose. And this is a really marvelous little book by Joanne Archibald called indigenous story work. And, and she talks about she writes about how indigenous oral stories, nurture knowledge systems and our knowledge systems. And she writes about the seven principles of indigenous story work, which are respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism interrelatedness and synergy. So, these are cool ideas. So, indigenous knowledge about mental health. We learn to be who we are. We're not born that way. We're born into relationships that determine who we come through the stories that are told in the context where they're told, and the stories that we incorporate and enact. And another way of thinking about this is that the conclusion. At this point, the moral of a story could be called a belief. And this is where you can hook up indigenous knowledge with cognitive behavior therapy. So, stories lead to beliefs. And it's a lot easier to change a belief by changing a story than to, than to bat around the belief with a stick. So, so in, in Lakota world, we talk about the Naki, which is all those things that influence a person. And the concept is one of a swarm, like a swarm of bees, but a swarm of stories, stories that that have made us that will make us past present and future stories. Ancestral stories, cultural stories. All of the stories that shape and influence us surround us like a swarm. And each story contains a spark of the being who told that story. And so there's a spark, a little tiny piece of every being who told every story that's swarming around us. And it's, it's a concept of non local mind, mind outside the body. And it all happens in community. So, it all happens in a circular world and not a linear world. And there's a marvelous book by Donald Fixico, American Indian mind in a linear world. And he talks about this problem of, of circular thinking in a linear world. And, you know, how to struggle to connect those two worlds is hard. So, and elders of course are the knowledge carriers. And they are educated through an oral tradition. Everybody knows who they are within a community, though they don't actually have anything on their wall or hanging over their door that says who they are. So, so I want to talk a little bit about some elders that I have known and their contribution to two I'd seen. So, one of the most amazing human beings that I've ever met is Vern Harper, who has been, and he may still be the elder in residence for Cam H and Toronto, the Center for Addictions and Mental Health Hospital, which is the largest psychiatric hospital in Canada. And one of the most amazing experiences you can ever have in your life is to sit with Vern and, and allow him to listen to you. There's never been a deeper listening that I've ever experienced in my whole life. And what Vern does once a week, he goes to the worst part of town, and he sits with people, and he just listens to them. He doesn't try and change them. He doesn't preach at them. He doesn't do motivational interviewing. He doesn't do anything but listen. And, and he performs in the manner that Jacques Lacan recommended when he said that the greatest gift you can give someone is to listen without judgment or interpretation. And, of course, Vern said that, that if you if you really want to engage in healing, you have to cover the physical emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions. And a couple of other people's people. John Charles was an amazing man. He's crossed over now. But John Charles is another example of two I'd seen. And John was diagnosed with glioblastoma, multi-forming at age 60, which is a really terrible malignant brain tumor. And John went to the doctors in Saskatoon. And they told him he probably had about a month. There was nothing they could do for him. Now the interesting thing about John is that he was an Anglican priest, as well as being by birth creed. So John was in a quandary because no amount of Anglican ceremony or praying had helped him. And so people told him about a creed healer, traditional healer. And he went to see her and he started working with her and he did everything she said. And again, you know, he misplaced his brain tumor. And when I met him, it had been 15 years since his diagnosis. And he was going strong. And he told me that, you know, he was in a terrible dilemma because he'd spent a great part of his life studying the Anglican ways. And now he'd found healing through the cre way. And he didn't know what to think. And so one night he had a dream. And in his dream, he dreamed of Christ on the cross surrounded in the four directions by elders smoking their sacred pipes or chinupas. And in that moment of being in that dream, he realized that it was all one. It was just different symbol systems. And he could do both. And he didn't have to choose. And so from that time on, he did both. And he was comfortable being entirely in one or entirely in the other or blending them, whatever way you went. John would go that way. And that was amazing to I'd seen. And I used to take people to it for him to doctor on Sunday mornings. And he would hold clinic. And then afterwards we would do an epi kaga ceremony. And in this was on Sturgeon Lake First Nation. And after the ceremony, there was always Sturgeon to eat. Yum. Caught in the lake. Four directions. And there's, there's always different symbols for this concept of balance and harmony. So Barbara, whenever you want to jump in with to I'd seeing, as it relates to trauma with maybe threat power, meaning network. Yeah, I could do that. So I wanted to, to start by. Talking about what so our friend Renee, Rene link ladder, who's from rainy river. She's a rainy river Cree woman. And she is in charge of Aboriginal relationships at the center prediction and mental health in Toronto. And she has been working. She, she wrote a book decolonizing trauma work, which was, is a really wonderful intervention. And it coincides with a lot of the work that is being done on trauma and intergenerational trauma, which has, has been happening recently. And basically to be very brief and the our nervous systems develop when we're starting from when we're in the womb. And we are, are working to be able to correctly assess threat. And this takes place in a constellation of biology and bio psychosocial cultural and spiritual activities. So our mother's threat, our mother's anxiety level. The timing of anxiety and stress on a mother during the developmental process in utero. The, the ability of, of people to self regulate all contribute to the very beginnings of, of how our own threat detection system works. And our threat detection system is, is how we find out how to bond with other people, establish trust and move in the world in a way that we feel confident that our, that our actions can, can, can work. And so when we, if our mother is stressed, and she's very stressed at certain times during gestation. It actually affects the, the, the child's stress modifying system, which is the hypothalamus pituitary axis, and leaves the leaves the baby without the resources to manage stress biologically. And this is what is the under the substrat of what we call intergenerational trauma. It's this actual impact on a baby's nervous system from maternal stress because the mother has too much stress and it gets passed a placental barrier and affects the child. So, when, when that happens, we end up with a nervous system that can be under reactive or over reactive and basically doesn't, doesn't assess experiences for their amount of, of possible danger or threat in a way that that is useful, which in turn creates more stress. There's a wonderful new understanding through what we call polyvagal theory. There are great videos that explain polyvagal theory but basically it talks about how when our nervous when we feel safe. Our nervous system allows us to have experiences and come and go from people and make friends. And it has all sorts of modulating effects on our, our, our, our face can can change expression easily our voice can be dynamic. We can hear a full range of sounds, and we can, we can tolerate eye contact, and we can relate to others. When we feel threatened, those things start to shut down and we become a little bit less approachable. And when we experience trauma, which is when the nervous system is completely overwhelmed by the situation, then we go into, there's a couple of predictable states that we go into. And one of them is we dissociate substance uses looked at as a form of dissociation. We go, we cannot, we can't we literally can't hear voices in the human range. We lose the ability to change our facial expression, we shut down a bunch of bodily functions. And what can happen is, is basically our frontal cortex. Extracts itself from the situation and protects us, leaving behind our lizard brain which can react impulsively and, and, and, and violently in order to protect us in the, in the context of keeping us safe. And the reason I'm saying all this is because this stress reaction this this overwhelm stress reaction helps us to understand a whole lot of behaviors of people when they are facing stress and facing trauma as symptoms rather than as antisocial behaviors and things that are are just, you know, might come from from poor for socialization. So, Renee, Renee link ladder came up with a term in her book decolonizing trauma work, which is ethno stress. And she defines ethno stress as a reply to the lack of predictability and cultural strangeness of the wounds inflicted by the colonizers. It's a response pattern of hopelessness and powerlessness in embodies intergenerational trauma and those effects. And it instead of calling these symptoms and problems. They're, they're, they're the result of spiritual injury they cause soul sickness, wounding and ancestral hurt. And so that to me seems like a really reasonable definition of trauma and I will, I will add this to the list of slides so that we can continue with the weekend before going to be sharing the slide set we can, we can have that in there. And so, basically, there's a new paradigm for looking at trauma, which has been emerging actually as a result of work with Australian aboriginals. And it's, it's called power threat, the power threat, meaning framework, and the power threat, meaning framework is a paradigm shift in mental health. It kind of takes into account what we now know about how our nervous system reacts under stress. And it is a way of looking at the operation of power. The physical power embodied power, coercive power legal economic material ideological social personal power, the threat of the negative operation of power on the person, and the meaning produced by the social and cultural discourse. And in how we experienced that power what it means to us, and what ends up to be our threat, our threat induced responses to this power situation. And so, really what they're saying, and I, and this is, this is part of this indigenous perspective of trauma is that we cannot look at trauma as something resident in an individual in keeping with what Lewis has been talking about about community and illness arising in community and in that context, we have to look at, at, at, at, at trauma as a function of this ecological perspective of this power threat and meaning, in terms of, of, of how we are able to move in the world and the things are social culturally allowed to be done to us, and what that might mean. So it's really taking it out of this idea of an individual being, you know, resilient enough to overcome, and turning it into the idea of having a community impact on, on recovery as well, and engaging with community. A lot of the work that I do at the moment is I work for the Wabanaki Confederacy I work for the, for a center for people from the five tribes that are local and I work in the harm reduction program. Most of my work is trauma work, and working with people with substance issues. And, as, and substance in this model is looked at as, as, as a dissociative response as a way to get away from the discomfort of feelings and the discomfort of, of, of living in this, in this form of oppression. So it really raises some very good questions about how do we, how do we bring healing to people who are suffering in this way. And a lot of traditional mental health treatment tends to, you know, build strengths try to build the resources try to, you know, encourage resiliency. And we're really looking at, at trying to build a community, a kind of survival community that can, and looking at telling news stories telling stories of life experience being an urban Native American in this, in this population, and, and how much we can contribute through re identifying and really really looking at the story of trauma through a lens of respect. It's very easy to indict people with a, with a kind of moral failing for, for some of the things that are properly seen as symptoms for some of the things that are properly signs of soul distress, and are manifesting in, in ways and for what is properly manifesting as, as a kind of rage that, that can be easily and racially profiled as, as anti social, but is in fact coming from that very deep place of this ethno stress model. So, we're really looking at trauma treatment from a social justice perspective, and looking for ways to integrate, integrate our people into, into the community setting and also embracing, you know, to I'd seeing really matters here because, because of the foot into the culture's impact where you're, you're off in a, not, not in the homelands not on the reservation but they're part of the, of the downtown world and part of the culture from, from their homelands and so it's really how do people find a way to walk in both worlds and it's a really tricky negotiation and it seems completely understandable that people would be surprised by how the processes work. And it comes out in, in addiction, it comes out, especially in the context of children of how what's happening to the children that they're raising and trying to kind of really take care of that generation and take care of the, of the kids who are kind of, you know, caught in this, in this constellation of forces as well and teach them how to negotiate those things. So, that's, that's the piece that, that the, the interesting pieces of, of nervous system response to trauma is readily available on YouTube if you're interested and I can send out resources on this, this way of looking at it. Lewis, do you want to take it from here. Okay, I wanted you to tell one more story about the elder who told you that we're spirit beings come to walk in a physical world. Oh, yes. I was taught that we're spirit beings coming to walk in a physical world, and we choose the life that we're going to walk into when we, when we come to earth. And we, and we sometimes get halfway through that life that we've chosen. And we, we think what what on earth was I thinking this is ridiculous I have no idea what to do why didn't anybody tell me and we cry out for support from, from our community from our community of spirit beings. And one thing that's really beautiful about this is it's actually an idea that's echoed in the Bhagavad Gita, where a goddess comes to earth to walk in a human body and they say what's it like. And she says, Oh, my, my movements are so slow, because I have these feet and my, my thoughts are so slow because I have this brain. And I think it really speaks to that kind of ideological tension that we experienced between our wishes for ourselves and the obstacles that we face through just being human and being with other humans in a, in a human world, the human body and the human psyche are imperfect versions of wet wear. And they don't always, they don't always help us to address, address the things that happened to us or the way we'd like to respond. And I think, especially in a situation where there's been a lot of disempowerment through racially identifying people, a lot of people take responsibility in themselves for things that are properly attributed to circumstances. And I was once taught by a professor that we call this the fundamental attribution error. But it's very easy for people who have the, the, a rustic band of Malaseet, I think it's the whole or the Holton man of Malaseet. And their original tribal land, given to them by the town of Holton was the town dump. And that is where they were invited to set up their tents and people would walk by and throw garbage and be extremely offensive. So when you're coming from that kind of perception, working with the shame and, and the, that disempowerment is really important so that aspect of respecting somebody else's perspective and respecting a more spiritual value in healing becomes a question of survival for some people to find a story that has, has hope embedded in it, as opposed to, you know, economics or functionalism. We wanted to, so keeping with two I'd seeing, there's some research, scientific research that echoes indigenous beliefs. And one of our favorite studies is about speaker listener neuro coupling. And this shows how the same areas of the brain light up in a speaker, telling a story as light up in a listener hearing the story. And so it's evidence for auditory mirror neurons. And it, it results in a theory of empathy, which is that if I really listen carefully to you, I'm going to feel what you're feeling, because my brain is going to synchronize with your brain. And the brain, the areas in my brain will be activated just as they are in your brain, which gets back to the power of the deep listening, which appears to exist in almost every indigenous culture. So I'm also the idea that it's the social brain hypothesis. It's the idea that the environment changes the brain far more profoundly than the internal environment. So the social external environment is much more important for brain function than the internal chemical environment. And, you know, in psychiatry it explains why you give a drug, and it works for a year, year and a half. And then it stops working. Because if the outer world doesn't change, the brain adapts. And now it's the same as it was, but with the drug, which makes it really hard to take away the drug, which of course, the pharmaceutical companies love. And, and then you either have to increase the dose or change drugs or, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So, outside shapes inside, as opposed to inside shapes outside. And so we, we wanted to mention some examples of two wide seeing on this is a project on the Eskisoni First Nation, which is where Albert Marshall comes from. And this is near Sydney, Nova Scotia. And so they talk about making traditional cultural services equally available to youth as conventional mental health services. And so youth are given the choice between standard conventional mental health services or indigenous methods of improving wellbeing or any combination that they want to use. So, here's another study of two wide seeing. This is from my old stomping ground Saskatoon Saskatchewan. And it's about using elders to interpret research. So, talk about doing a meta analysis, or a scoping study, or a narrative review. So, these guys headed by Colleen Dell, bring the elders in to participate in that whole process of evaluating research. And, and then here's an example from Northeastern Ontario of blending Aboriginal and conventional methods to treat intergenerational trauma among people with substance abuse. So, so this is happening the point is this is happening around the world that people are being offered traditional cultural conventional biomedical, or whatever combination they choose to create. And where I come back to is the power of story. And so, within indigenous cultures. Story telling is a part. It's a crucial part of community and family life. And the stories hold the wisdom. The stories hold the knowledge. And if you want to understand a culture, listen to its stories. So, um, how, how do we intervene with storytelling? What is the storytelling intervention. And so, what we want to do is to identify people who can serve as storytelling superstars. And we want to enable them to tell their stories in a way that gets recorded and shares with other shared with other people who look and sound just like them. Now, there's a researcher who did this very study in South Carolina, among black people with uncontrolled hypertension. And he found that it was dramatically successful in reducing blood pressure. He's, he's recently repeated the study among rural people in northern Vietnam. Got the same results, different looking superstars storytelling superstars, but the same results on blood pressure. And so his point is that, you know, nurture your storytellers and use them to good advantage. So, um, also another indigenous principle, social engineering, work with the whole community if you want to change an individual. That external experience changes the brain more powerfully than anything you can imagine. And, and this, of course, in the mainstream culture comes from Hubble and weasel. And, and they did mean things to cats. Well, to kittens actually, which is why maybe his last name is weasel. Anyway, what they did was they sowed kittens eyes shut early, soon after they were born. And they found that the brain took over the visual cortex for other purposes. But the brain said, Oh, well, I don't need this. So I'm going to use it for something else. And that the typical visual connections just didn't happen. Because you need external stimulation in order for the connections to be formed in the brain. And it's certainly true with substance use. If you want to stop using substances, you need a community that doesn't use substances. If you we found this consistently in Saskatchewan, I worked in the far north. In on fly fly in reserves, they're called where you, you can't get out except by airplane. And so we found that if you send people down south by down south, we mean Saskatoon and Regina, not Florida. Anyway, if you send people down south for 28 day programs and they came back to the reserve. Nothing good came of it because they came right back into the context from which they left of people using drugs. And so it was much more effective to create a community in place to create a recovery community. Right there in stony rapids or uranium city, or black lake. And that worked much better for recovery from substance use, then sending people down south, and then shipping them back up to their communities. So the brain changes from outside. And another really important thing that every indigenous elder knows. And by the way, one of my favorite elders in South Dakota when I was telling him about quantum physics, you know, and I was just waxing poetic about all this stuff. He said, Well, isn't it nice that they're finally catching up with the Lakota. So anyway, audience effect. So if you're in a group of people having an experience, the degree of gene induction is dramatically greater than if you have the same experience by yourself. And that's true if you're a cockroach, a fish, a bird, a monkey, a gerbil or a human. It's been studied in all of these species. So, so being with others who are like you, and having an experience causes it to be incredibly more powerful in terms of gene expression, how it changes you how it causes epigenetic modifications in the genome. And, and of course it turns out these days that epigenetics is so much more important than conventional genetics. That there are very few conventional genetic diseases. Huntington's disease. One gene. Cystic fibrosis. One gene. Well actually several genes, but a small number. But most illnesses are affected by a whole bunch of genes. And not by their sequence, but by their shape. And so it turns out that experience changes the shape of our genes. And that is transmitted across generations, which is why intergenerational trauma is so powerful and so profound. Because you get the experience, you get the results of the trauma of your parents, without really knowing what the experiences were consciously. And that could make you feel a little crazy. And so, so, you know, elders knew this without having to do the science. We know that indigenous knowledge, but we've got the science now, and we know that being together for an experience of healing or trauma is much more powerful than being alone. So, social interactions are an incredible controller of brain function on in every species studied. So, getting to the end, because it's almost time for the break. So how do we restore balance when we see with two eyes. So, we would be more relational and less procedural. I've learned a new term for that, more relational and less transactional. We would tell more stories and see things as stories and make fewer diagnoses, use more verbs and fewer nouns. We would work from the bottom up from people up to doctors, instead of the top down from experts telling people what to do. We would be a more acknowledging of suffering, more capable of bearing witness to suffering, and less focused on treating symptoms and conditions. We would probably be more qualitative and we would probably do less randomized control trials. Most randomized control trials, by the way, show absolutely nothing. You know, it's a terrible return on investment. We would do more community based participatory research and less hierarchical imposition by experts, and we would be more aware of the politics of evidence based medicine, which privileges those in power. And disenfranchises those who are not in power. So, and just a quick story about someone that I saw for a console. So, one of the residents where I work had tried just every medication you can imagine for a young woman's headaches, migraine headaches. So, in desperation, he referred to me. And so I had a captive medical student. And so I made her do a life story interview to get this person's life story. And as we looked at the life story, it was just totally obvious that there was this incredible conflict between the obligations of motherhood and her wanting to pursue her career. And so that led to a series of conversations. And we didn't give her any different drugs. In fact, we told her they didn't work. Maybe you should stop taking them, which she did. And as we explored, like, how to negotiate this conflict of values between motherhood and career, her headaches disappeared. And we didn't, you know, give her any drugs. So there's an example of relational versus transactional. So I think probably that's the end of my exposition. Barbara, do you have any final words? No, I just that I think that that, you know, this is a really leads us to understand trauma is something that we all can contribute to the healing of from. Right. And, and we all have it. Some of us more of it than others. So we all know what it is. And it's our duty to help each other to negotiate it and to heal it and to resolve it. So that's my last word. So with that, I will say, I'm done. Thank you guys. Thank you for letting me talk. Thank you, Lewis and Barbara. Just beautiful presentations from both of you. So we have a number of questions and comments. And I just like to invite people if you have responses in the spirit of allowing for discourse. Communication back and forth at a deeper level. You know, might try jumping in, but just mute yourself again when you're no longer speaking. So the first question we have is from Mark. Hi, Mark. Hi. And why don't you go ahead and restate your question. My question really is where firstly, I want to thank Lewis and Barbara for their fabulous presentation. It was very well put together and much appreciated. And really, I think as I reflect upon your presentation is, it's really about how do we engage with the dominant bio medical culture. At his beginning talked about our problem, the genesis of the new school as a reaction to fundamentalism fundamentalism is based in fear. And I will, I have had many, many experiences over the decades with fear from the biomedical dominant culture when you show them something and something as simple as lifestyle changes that are aren't wacky at all. And your pharmacist just could not see that. And you put out a wonderful presentation as a good professor would, but it seems to me that this data driven evidence based approach doesn't engage the dominant medical culture. Well, can we bring a two eyed scene, both sides to bringing this in. I'll just briefly say that when I, I'm a medical doctor has been doing osteopathy for more than 30 years after my fellowship training. My three chairman, including one that was my resident at one point, did not want any training in this and my specialties in physical medicine. I had osteopathy. I know the New England school in Maine is an osteopathic school. The expansion of osteopathy has gone from the early 70s of seven campuses to more than 45 and yet only about 2% of those osteopathic students actually have a sense of what osteopathy is, which is another way of viewing things in a broader context in the narrow evidence base way. What do we engage when you have good data, but it doesn't shift anything. That's what I'm asking. Well, I don't, I don't have any better answer than you. I can say that we probably just have to keep talking and keep writing. And, you know, it was Max Plank who said, science changes one funeral at a time. So it may just take time. Maybe it won't happen at all. But I also think of Thomas Merton who said, you should always do the right thing, even if you're sure that it's not going to work. So we just keep talking. I was, I mean, talking about the pharmacist, I was just flabbergasted because I just thought, I mean, she knows me. Why did she think I sent her this thing that said, look what the lifestyle change did, you know, but she just didn't get it at all. So, I guess we just keep talking and writing and I mean, you know, the more we talk and write the more we influence students. And, and really students are the future. So, so we just have to keep doing what we're doing, I think. Thank you. Thank you. Next question is from Ryan. So, again, I like everyone I'm going to thank you for really wish my hand was faster at writing. Lots of wonderful information and good, good dialogue there. I can have a question. I am not a licensed psychologist. So I'm coming at it kind of as an outsider, but I do healing work. And many of my clients come to me they do have various forms of traumas. Most of which, some of them, many of which are beyond my skills, so I certainly refer them out, but there are some things that are far less so. And one of the, when you were talking about storytelling, one of the major stories that I hear, particularly from my female clients has a lot to do with their being powerless, and then also hopeless. And so one of the, one of the techniques I was taught is to have the person tell their story up to the point where that strong emotional reaction would occur and then have them envision a different reaction and anchor that with colors, or sometimes people don't think in colors so they'll use something else. And that's had some effect and some benefits. You know, I don't know how that would work on something significant, but you know, most of the traumas that I deal with are not that significant. They're, they're more childhood, you know, I wanted to play outside and mommy wouldn't let me kind of a thing. But I am curious on the storytelling and, and how we can more effectively use that in just even the life coaching and spiritual coaching that I do. Well, it, it seems from the studies that I've had, it seems that stories are the most effective way to convey information in an emotional manner. And so there's studies of, of, there's a study from Arizona of Hispanic women talking about mammograms, and it turned out that that was like, usually successful in increasing the rate of mammograms, as opposed to scary posters about breast cancer. And so I think that we, we just, we negotiate our world through telling each other stories. And, and you're probably doing that when you do your work, you're telling small vignettes. And, and sometimes we tell long vignettes, but mostly we tell small vignettes. And all of these are about persuasion, right. They're about encouraging people to, to pursue a certain course of action. And, you know, advertising got here before us. So they've been writing about this for longer than we have, because, you know, they want to make, they want to persuade you to buy a Ford instead of a Chevy, or vice versa. So they've got to come up with a story that you'll incorporate that you'll absorb that tells you why a Ford is better than a Chevy. And they're spending a lot on figuring out that out. So, I don't know, did I come close to sort of addressing your point. Well, I guess when I'm. So I really don't ever tell my clients what they should or shouldn't do my job is really to just ask questions. I'll try to nail me down to what do you think and of course, most of the times I just turn those questions right back around because that's it's really not my life so I'm not going to tell them what they need to do and not do. But there are times that we will talk about some of the pros and cons. I'm thinking of one young woman that I shouldn't call her young I don't know how old she is. So one woman that I was working with. She she felt particularly I'm going to call it unempowered to pursue any dreams that she had even though she was very successful business person she has her own business and lots of clients, especially celebrity clients. But she feels like she can't do anything she's always afraid and her story talks about when she was a child and her mother and father having a very difficult marriage and of course her life being very troubled. Apparently she got kicked out of the house at age 16 so it was a little bit difficult. And obviously I'm not qualified to deal with any of those. Nonetheless, you know clients talking about it so I just asked a lot of questions. And I remember at one point asking her. If you could change that how would you change it. The story, you know where where would you intercede and of course she said what would never happen that's what if it never happened then you would have this. If you were to happen if you could go now as an adult back to your childhood and intercede what would you make happen instead. And she came up with a really nice story of you know well you know this would happen I tell myself that this is mom and dad it's not me and blah blah blah. And then she said, and then I asked her I don't know why but I asked her what color or colors felt right about that and she picked yellow and I can't remember the other couple of colors. And after that the next session we had which is you know again it's a coaching session she was telling me about how certain things have changed in her life. Not necessarily related to her work, but, and you know where she wanted to go but related to other people in her life. So I'm just trying to figure out how that might. I don't know if I want to do more of that or not but I'm just trying to understand how does that story telling fit with some of the research of things you've you've understood. Because there isn't a big community here it was just her and me and the phone. That's why I don't know she's young girl because we just do it over the phone that that zoom. Well, I think you gave her the opportunity to find a metaphor and she ran with it. And, and you probably can't know how that work. You know, because it has to do with her inner world or inner workings I mean her sort of maybe private is her invisible cognition processes. You know, but, but when you said, when you offered her the color, then she made something of it. And I think it's often the case that we tell someone a story, and they get more out of it than we thought they would, and different things out of it than we thought they would, because it's all about what they do with it, rather than what we meant for them to do with it. And so, you know, I think, well, yeah, that worked. So do it again, try some more. You know, that was kind of what I was trying to get out of this. Is that a good thing to do. I mean, you know, like I said, this is way outside of my area of expertise, but okay. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Hi. Again, like everyone is saying hello, just really savoring every word. And my question relates back to Barbara's comments about dissociation and addiction and I was just musing for a minute, considering that perhaps if a story is too painful. We can't speak it, we can't tell it, and we, maybe that's when dissociation happens and we use, but I just love to know more about that. Yeah. We have, there's a, there's a couple of things. I just put a paper in the chat, because I saw your question, and that's kind of the science version of it talking about what they call a lexithemia, which is this inability to connect with your emotions, because they're too difficult. So, you know, we, we, we experience distress, and because of whatever level of tolerance we have for stress is interfered with. So there's, there are people who can tolerate, cannot tolerate a Tika handle being turned the wrong way, and there are people who are fine if the world is collapsing around them and we all fit in somewhere along there on a continuum. And it depends on our history and our current state and traumas that occur afterwards and you know so it's biopsychosocial. So, when we have intolerable feelings, when we're not used to being able to sit with distress, we develop ways of wanting to get out of that feeling of discomfort, and, you know, being able to know that you have emotions. If you're, you know, it's such a wonderfully important part of mental health and really simple things like validation, you know, if somebody is, so we always say we validate the emotion not necessarily the behavior. So, you know, we don't, we don't validate you trying to run someone over with your truck, but we certainly validate the rage that you're feeling. And let's try to work on another way to, to express it. So that feeling of, of just, you know, squirrely feeling and, and sitting with that feeling that that of anywhere from, you know, kind of doom can be facilitated with alcohol, alcohol makes you briefly feel better. So it's a maladaptive response, but it helps you to get out of that feeling state. And there's a, in the paper that I sent, there's a really solid correlation between people with developmental trauma. So, there's a PTSD is, is the result of exposure to life threatening life taking or sexual abuse or physical abuse. And it's very specific if you're familiar with the diagnosis it's got a lot of detail in it about how you can attribute it. There's another kind of trauma that is, is called developmental trauma or complex trauma. And back in the day, we used to have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, which was this inability to connect with yourself, not having a strong feeling of yourself, needing to be externally sort of driven, but also this tremendous sense of mistrust and abandonment that led to kind of really crazy making sorry to use the word crazy but the, you know, survival behaviors that are extremely complicated because it's usually threat and coercion and and immediate, you know, immediate survival and it's all about trying to feel safe. And, you know, this feeling that it's life or death and if you don't punch your way into safety, you won't feel safe. So it's a really complicated thing. And the treatment for it used to be what they call dialectical behavioral therapy which is really because it's about distress tolerance emotion management, interpersonal effectiveness and mindfulness and it's really a program that says, slow down, bring your reactions down, learn to calm your nervous system, nurture yourself, and then begin to think about how to create allies in ways other than intimidating and threatening. And, you know, the prediction was it would take anywhere from two to four years to help somebody along this pathway and it was considered a personality disorder. And so, along comes Bessel van der Kolk, the trauma guy, and he starts looking at this and he goes isn't and also at the same time, the ACE study, the study that came up with the adverse childhood experience score. His name was, I've got the paper anyway that it was, it was actually looking at intractable obesity in a clinical population at Kaiser Permanente, there were. So he looked at 17,000 cases of intractable obesity and correlated them all to trauma and went like, Oh, Oh, and so then he invented this 10 measure scale. So that kind of thinking and also Bessel van der Kolk studies about about nervous system arousal and porges as studies about polyvagal theory, all started to paint this picture of what's happening is your nervous system is messed up it's stuck on high alert. And you're doing all kinds of things to get out of that feeling of anywhere from discomfort to flat out panic that you feel, because your world feels just completely unstable, and it's a really neat theory that sort of maps into attachment and how we learn how to attachment is really. How do we learn how to bond how do we learn how to create a bond with another human being creating trust and feeling safe enough to connect. Like I was saying before, when you're when you're in a traumatized state you actually lose the ability to connect to other people your face shuts down you can't even hear the human voice range. So, when we look at at, you know, ways of, of feeling better and that kind of trauma happens. As a result of chaotic childhood experiences, no nurturing abandonment. I have clients who tell me, yeah, when I was feeling upset as a child, at age five, my dad handed me a joint, you know, and, and, you know, when I was 11 years old, he gave me a glass of whiskey because, you know, we were, we were up to a different level. And that kind of thing creates this, it's an impossible puzzle because if you think about it you don't have a very developed brain, you're trying to figure out how to make your way safely in the world and you're being exposed to completely bonkers signals about what that might look like. And it's really just a question of what actually provides a safe space, you know, when you're when you're raising a child you're raising a nervous system, and how do you teach a child's nervous system, how to regulate themselves in the world and how to detect safety and that. So here on high alert the whole time because your life is chaotic your parents are chaotic you don't have boundaries you don't have anyone reflecting experience you don't have anyone to process events with me and you're just getting these really weird messages about what might work that and that and that don't turn out to work. So now you're, you can't trust your caregivers because the things they're suggesting are not working. You don't have enough frontal cortex to kind of make an assessment and decide what might work better, you know, do all that work. And so you, you, you develop defense mechanisms and mechanisms that are coping strategies that just take the pain off and take the edge off and so they're really looking at that and looking at the correlation of that to alcohol use and this this not a unable to feel your feelings because you know, being either from messages about that they're not appropriate or misunderstanding of what feelings are or just like the idea that they don't go anywhere anyway and and you know you can get you can get hurt if you have a feeling because you might get hit. So that kind of developmental trauma that happens at key periods, especially at important, you know, key, key moments is, is what's contributing to this complete dysregulation as you're older and you're reaching for, you know, something that makes you feel calmer and substances just really fill that bill. And our friend, we have a friend in Australia, he's, he's a nurse practitioner psychiatric nurse practitioner there. Last year or the year before he won psychiatric nurse practitioner of the year in Australia, and, and he has been looking at this power threat meaning framework, and he came up with the term dissociate and he, he has a very strong argument that psychosis is a form of dissociation it's just literally getting yourself into another world. And you know that's where the rich metaphors come in. So I think it's useful to, I mean, I, I work with people with substance use disorders and co occurring mental health issues. And I have not met anyone who doesn't have a co occurring mental health issue who has a powerful substance use disorder. And I haven't. And I think, looking at the kinds of things that trouble people like, you know, and I, I'm a bit basic I go. How is this person making friends. Who's their supporters, do they know how to talk to other people and I honestly find so often that making a connection is the hardest thing, and something that they're finding impossible to do. And they're giving off signals, they're agitated they're, you know, and they get, they get the reciprocity that that invites and so it's really difficult to be in their world. And then they have, you know, various maladaptive strategies so you know it really seems like, regardless of what the, you know, the chicken and egg of substance use or co occurring. It's really useful to think about this from a trauma perspective and say something shot this thing, this poor system, you know, all the hell and we need to slowly start to rebuild it so helping people know how to self calm, helping people engage in self care, helping people, even just, you know, teaching psycho education about what it is, what the trauma states look like and what, you know, the fact that you can't, you know, I had a couple in my office saying, he's not listening to me and we looked at what was going on and we're going like is it possible that he's triggered and it's a trauma response and he literally is shutting down those, you know, those mid range, you know, signals it's possible that he literally doesn't hear you know it doesn't. I'm not going to say you can use that as excuse with your partner all the time but there is a feature of that that's involved there so when we look at these things we can see that simple interventions like listening to somebody validating, helping them become more comfortable with the idea that they even have feelings and that they might be relevant and useful, you know, I like. I'm going to go back, Panksepp's idea. The, he's the one who wrote. What is it affective neuroscience and he talks about, you know, feelings as signals in our seeking system about how our strategies are working out towards goals so I often use that to get people to just kind of go to a non scary place. You're not seeing the idea of feelings you know you can have feelings and they're just signals don't worry about it it's it's like you know it's like a valve, and then we'll get to the other parts of them later. But you know it just is. So that's, that's the kind of alcohol and dissociation it's a it's a trauma response it's a way to say, I can't tolerate this state. And, you know, the luck of the draw is what what what substance you turn to. And, and, and we have a right we have a lot of, of meth in our population in our one in all populations a lot of methamphetamine. We use Suboxone in the clinic but there's also an extremely active trade in Xanax. So, because these are controlled and you can't get them prescribed anymore and you know, so. Yeah, that it so it just makes all kinds of sense to me but as I said I put the reference in the paper so that. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thank you. Well the chat box, those of you that are monitoring it it's really filling up so my apologies in advance if we can't get to everyone's questions or comments. So, Nicole, would you like to go? Yeah, sure. Yeah, and I, I really love this conversation I love the questions and Carly thanks for your question also because this is something that I talk about regularly with students and so forth and I wanted to just just ask a little bit about a lot of what you said made me reflect and it's constantly made me reflect on how we individualize problems in a very particular way that caused problems later for us within the context of community. So, for example, I was thinking about a client, my own time in community mental health and feeling compelled to leave community mental health because I felt like the problems were so individualized and they were so reduced to these pharmaceutical solutions or individualized problems that we are abdicating her responsibility to to actually care for other people. I guess my question, I get, well, I should go back and say, for example, you know, I, you know, as a clinical director or as a program manager, we're trained to really have very, very specific protocols in conventional community mental health that could be just mainstream addictions counseling, you need to go to inpatient therapy or just fix your problems or just be abstinent, you know, without really having the support of a healthy community so what kinds of alternatives that would you recommend for for something like inpatient or for something like very like that highly individualized approach to problems that are largely, you know, ecological, like socio ecological system. Yeah, well, I think it's it's it's a tremendous uphill swim upstream swim and because all of the payment structures are individual based and, you know, sort of community organizing certainly doesn't pay well. And so we're really fighting against the grain of the culture. And I, again, I, I don't know how to solve this, but I know things that can be done, like community talking circles. You know, community discussion groups. And we've, we've been doing some things and in the communities about opiate use disorder, and just getting people out to talk about it. You know, and we've gotten a really wide range of response, as you might imagine from, you know, people learn it from their parents, they're just doing what their parents and grandparents did to, you know, the moral weakness argument that, you know, they're doing it because of poor morals, or they're just weak to everything you can imagine. And what I've observed is that when people talk together, something changes. You know, and, and there's another another idea I've been exploring is the idea. I think art installations really help. And I've been reading some literature on. There was a project at Penn State. Where they, they three huge screens in a small dark cocoon room with 30 seats and your and speakers everywhere. And you're just immersed in this surround sound surround video about attitudes toward aging and attitudes toward old people. And they've their researchers found that people change their attitudes toward old people. As a result of sitting in this art installation. They didn't change their attitudes about aging everyone still thought that sucked. But, but they started to feel differently about older people. And I think maybe more art. We forget about art and art installations and, and, and sort of communication through art, you know, using art to engage people. And I think that that I that what I like about art too is that it, it shared experience of being around art. You know, it's, it's a good, it's a good way to have a meaningful conversation. And I wanted to just add that in our community. I think that conventional treatment, a lot of people who have substance use involvement are also involved in the justice system and boy is that ever an individualizing place. You can't count the Indian gang that is in the prison system here, but you know, it's not really, it's not really a collective way of, of, of approaching the world although I, I like to argue for trauma and foreign prisons. But what I'm seeing, which is really interesting is some of our people who are in the harm reduction program are, are, are reaching out to their cousins. And, you know, there's this little network forming. We had very few sober supports, we had very few there's, there's, it's a longer story but we, there were very few robust sober supports for people or mutual support communities, but I'm seeing this little thread. So, I think that I think what Lewis said, talking just people talking to each other, get somewhere, it takes people somewhere and in a way they used to say that inpatient wasn't ideal anyway because it takes you out of community to get fixed and then you're plunked back in with all the same social struggles that you had before. So in a way, somehow, you know, finding ways to, to form bonds in the community for mutual support might be stronger than, you know, going away to the farm where everybody wants to go around here because it's, you know, a farm they got horses. And it's nice place to go recover but you know, then you come back. So, that's my two cents. Sorry, go ahead. Thank you. Lisa, music to your ears. The art. You're up. Lisa. Yeah. Are you there? Yeah, sorry. Sorry. Art, visit to my ears for sure. I had a many things, but I'm going to be really specific. My question was about healing communities, like the ones you've you've spoken of that are in Southeast Alaska for the Southeast Alaska native communities up there. So we can speak a bit to that, but we'll refer you to people in Alaska. You know, I don't even need to take up some really cool questions that people are asking. Well, I, I think they're relevant. What's exciting in Alaska is the cultural revitalization that's happening. And we go to Kodiak when we can when COVID lets us And the elite people there have are just going through this incredible rediscovery of their cultural practices and implementing them in summer camps in for kids and adults in ceremonies and music. And I, I just, they tell us that the, on the mainland, there's groups that were more had less European contact and are more intact. They tell us that the Russians were nicer than the Americans. And that that they had to go, I think it was to Finland to see some of their amazing cultural artifacts that had been removed and put in the museum over there. But they're doing all this and our, our, our, our main contact is a professor in the School of Nursing, University of Alaska at Anchorage School of Nursing, Margaret Draskovich, although she just got married. So it's Margaret met a now, but we'll, if you email us separately, we'll connect you and Margaret, and you, and she knows all these people in Southeast Alaska. And you'll know each other, as you might imagine, and, and they can tell you so much more than we can. Oh, thank you so much. Rolf. Yeah, I'm here. Yeah, nice to, nice to be here. You know, I missed the first part. So, but the discussion that's been going on has been really rewarding. I work in Norway with mainly, not mainly only with refugees. So it's not like indigenous peoples, like probably you are, but still people who belong to different ethnic minorities in their, you know, home country and there are some parallels. So my question was that if you have any, not quick fixes, I realized that's not very realistic. But for groups of people who have been subjected to, you know, intergenerational trauma, you know, this has been passed on from one generation to the next. And then this individual has suffered quite a lot of new personal individual trauma. And anyone who would like to kind of talk about any good ideas in how this, well, I wrote rehab in my question, but maybe that's not the right word, but just to add on the question, you know, my experience, I'm a physiotherapist. So, you know, the gateway is the body, but I realize maybe 75, 85% of my work is now conversation and listening. So I realize how powerful that can be. But anyone in this panel would would, you know, take this further, I would be, I would appreciate it very much. I'm trying to remember the place where I read this paper, but I read a paper about Syrian refuge working using art, using an art probe, making art together with Syrian women, traumatized women, Syrian refugees. And, and it was wildly helpful. And if you, if you email me, it'll give me the time to look up where I, where I filed that paper away, because it was terribly inspiring. And done with virtually no money, as you might imagine, in a refugee camp. Yeah. Yeah. Was it the embroidery one. No, but that's another one. That's another one. There seems to be more than just one. So, I think, I think art, you know, there was a study, there was a community project, community art project in London, in Brixton, South London, which is a notoriously tricky area and there were two rival groups, I think it was, was either Hindus and Sikhs or I can't imagine what the two divergent groups were and they got, they, they invited, they did a thing about fabric, they got people to bring in fabric that meant something to them and talk about the fabric, and it turned into this amazing project where they created fabric sculptures, they made a sort of mosaic of fabrics are in different groups and people brought in denim and traditional fabrics and it turned into this wonderful conversation about history and belonging and being an immigrant. So I think there's some, some incredible value in, in, in people doing art together. Yeah. Well, I can add something to that because I notice psychologists, originally from Columbia, who's working in the US for a while and I was back in Columbia working with reconciliation process between ex-guerrillas, military people, etc. His name is Hector Aristisaba, and he uses theater, the theater of the oppressed or you know, different theater techniques. And we tried some of those things for a group of refugees in Bergen Norway from the DRC. And you know, the idea is to, to show something from their own culture, like dance, song, or anything. So we made a, or they made in without, with us as directors like three small pieces of theater. You know, happening like during two or three hours, just showing some of the resources that this group has. So, of course, you know, this being able to use art in any way, I think it's also very, very powerful. And also, I think it's, there's something really important about getting the people themselves who need and want the services together to talk about what they could use, what would help them the most, and what they would want to do. You know, that sort of participatory development of interventions that, that in which those who will receive the interventions participate in their design, their conceptualization and their design. And, and I think that's why it's a mistake to design programs and I, you know, isolated from the people who will use them, that they need to be part of the design process. And that could involve art too. Yeah. Okay, thanks. It was nice to hear your comments. I'm looking at my clock and it's, we're right at the, just about at 1215. Shall we stop at this point or take one more question or shall we just leave it here. Just more, I'm certainly, I know I'm speaking for myself, but I may be sharing for the rest of us, we'd love to have both of you come back again for perhaps a longer venue. Sure, we'd love to. Yeah. Maybe even maybe someday in person. What, what was that word again. In person, remember that word, you know, remember we got to share a meal together. Yeah, although I do, I do want to say that I am thankful to zoom, because I have connected with so many more people from so many far flung places. Since COVID started than I ever did before. And I hope we keep connecting. Because it's, because it's, it's a democratizing agent in that we don't have to have travel funds to connect with each other. And so, so I want to thank zoom. Maybe, maybe I ought to thank the COVID virus, you know, for doing something for us as well as bad to us, not, you know, like it told me, you know, viruses are good and bad. But it would be fun to be with you guys in person. So, I want to, on behalf of the new school and the, and Nicole's group, I want to thank you all for participating we do have probably about a half dozen people who are international that have called in. And they've been part of this event as well so we have an international following today so and I think that's a testament to what the two of you have to offer and keep up the good work. And thank you. Thank you for inviting us. Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much. I have one more reminder. Again, thanks. Thank you, the list and Barbara, and thanks. Thanks everyone for actually attending. I just want to remind if you're reminded for those of you who are in Washington state return your evaluations to me for your CE use also even if you don't need to use we want to hear your feedback so absolutely send us your feedback on the presentation. And if you want to be added to the mailing list of the new school or for the society for anthropology of consciousness send me an email to and I'll forward that information to the necessary parties. So that's my stick and thank you so much.