UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is Dr. Peter Levine. Peter is the developer of Somatic Experiencing, a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma, which he’s developed over the past 50 years. Somatic Experiencing, called SE, is one of the most well-known and respected internationally approaches to healing trauma. Listen to these numbers. 50,000 practicing SE therapists worldwide in 44 countries and 70 trainers. Peter Levine holds not one, but two PhDs. Biophysics and psychology. He’s someone who brings together science and the psyche. He’s the recipient of four Lifetime Achievement Awards, the author of numerous books including, In an Unspoken Voice, Trauma and Memory, with Sounds True, a book, an audio series, and an online course on Healing Trauma, as well as an online learning program that’s focused on the relief of chronic pain. It’s called Body as Healer. And Peter is the author now at age 82 of a new book, An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey. Peter, welcome.
Peter Levine: Hey, Tami. Good seeing you. Good seeing you.
TS: And so great to celebrate the publication of your new autobiography.
PL: I never thought I’d get there, but I got there.
TS: Tell our listeners a little bit about the writing of An Autobiography of Trauma and what inspired you at this point in your life to release this book?
PL: Well, that is a question. This was never intended to be a book. You mentioned my age. So clearly, even if I’m healthy and vibrant, which I think I am, the time that I have left until the end of my life is much less than the time looking back to when I started my life. So I thought it was time that I did a personal excavation really looking at the events, positive and negative that have shaped my life. And in doing that, it brought up many, many different feelings and many other different thoughts and images and memories. And so again, the idea of this was just to make it as something like memory, dreams and reflections. So it’s a way of coming to peace with my life and seeing where my life has taken me now. So that was the idea I had. First of all, I wouldn’t have thought to publish it as a book because it was just too vulnerable, too tender, too personal. But then a friend of mine, she really encouraged me to write it as a book. Write it and publish it as a book. And I thought, no way, no way am I going to do that. She said, “Well, Peter, just think about it.” I could see that was also an emotional reaction. It was like, my God, are you kidding?
So anyhow, very often when I’ve lost my way or I don’t know what my next steps are, I’ll have a dream. And the dream in many cases is absolutely clear. In other cases, I have to sort out the mystery of it. And the dream I had when I was struggling with whether I would publish this as a book is as follows. I was standing in front of a large field and holding in my hands reams of paper. They were some kind of a manuscript because I could see they were typewritten. And I looked to the left and looked to the right, left, right. And again at best, I felt ambivalent. I didn’t know what my next step would be. And in that moment of indecision a breeze, a wind came from behind me and took all of these pages and blew them into the wind to go out into that meadow to land where they would land.
And when I woke up, I realized that I had made … Well, that my unconscious had made the decision, yes, I was going to go ahead. It was scary and it was. It was pretty scary again to reveal so many of these very personal and in some cases violent things that happened as a child, but also some of the really beautiful supporting experiences I’ve had in my life. So that was about three years ago. Then the next two years I’ve put it in a manuscript form to publish it and now it is out. I’ve been doing a few different interviews. And at first I thought, oh my God, now I have to do interviews. But they’ve been interesting. People maybe that I knew or people that I’m just getting to know. So it’s been for me somewhat of an adventure to put it out in the world and to see if I was okay with it.
The first time I gave a lecture about this to a large audience, the Evolution of Psychotherapy conferences, they usually have between five and 8,000 people attending. And so I’m in this room with thousands of people and I opened my mouth, but the words wouldn’t come. And so again, I felt really stuck. But then I remembered some of the things, colleagues, friends, other people have written about the book and about me, and I felt deeply supported by them. And it allowed me to speak that truth for the first time in public. And now I’ve done it a number of times and it’s become … I wouldn’t say it’s become easier, but it’s become safer. I guess this conference is about safety. It felt safe enough for me to take these next steps with the support I had from my friends, my colleagues at my side, and keeping my back. So again, it’s this support which was very important, which was in many ways quite missing as a child. But now I’m bringing together really as an adult.
TS: What a celebration in your life of your life to feel that love and support around you that you can draw on. Now, a couple of questions, Peter. Here you were writing this originally for yourself, and I know that there are a lot of people in the Sounds True audience very broadly who are interested in personal writing as a way to work through their own traumatic experience. And I wonder from having done this autobiographical writing, what your suggestions might be for all of us who want to tackle a project like this, not necessarily for publication, but to find our own coherent narrative in our life?
PL: Right. First of all, to be kind to yourself as much as you can and to start. The way I started, I didn’t have any order of chapters. I basically just put a paper in front of … Or a pad with lines on it, and I just started writing. I let my hand in a way do the writing. That’s what I would suggest. We all have our own stories and they’re important stories to tell, not just to others but to ourselves. And again, that was the way it started with me. Again, it was at first some very frightening experiences in my life, but also some ones where I felt even if it was relatively a single time that I felt cared for, that I felt in a way supported and loved. And that really gave me a foundation. It let me feel using the term again, safe enough to begin this excavation to begin writing this story. And then after a while, my friend who originally asked me or suggested I write this, she said, “Well, let’s do a chapter outline.” I was resisting because in a way, by making that outline, I was then committing myself to writing a book. And so I went through these different halts and starts and movements and so forth, and I really developed a deep compassion for myself.
One of the people who wrote an endorsement said he goes from … Oh, gosh. I’ll remember it. But anyhow, then I went from horror and terror to self-care and self-love. And it was a difficult journey and it wasn’t a linear journey. My friend Ian, another Canadian said that the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line. It takes arcs of infolding and unfolding and something opening to something else. And so I really followed that for the next year really. Yeah.
So that’s the basic story of it. It really is. It really is. Yeah. And now that it’s out … It was released two days ago, and I know obviously that there’s no going back. I can’t just say I changed my mind. That I obviously it’s not going to happen because it’s out there. And surprisingly, there was a relief in that. I felt a lot of gladness. Because one of the things I told my friend is that the only way I would consider doing this is if I knew that this could help other people with their own trauma tell their own stories. And I believe that. I firmly believe that, that we all have our stories and telling the stories if it’s only to ourselves, can be of value, an invaluable catalyst to growth and to coming to healing and wholeness.
TS: In the book, there’s a picture of you as a small child and you put it right at the front, and there’s a kindness of this is this very small precious child, me, Peter. And I’m curious, Peter, for those of us who have trouble being kind to ourselves often as a result of trauma that we’ve been through in our life, what have you discovered about how to do that? Because it seems like you really have developed that capacity?
PL: Well, I gentled into it to put that in the past tense, but also the current tense. Again, I think writing it for myself first gave me a little bit more freedom. And then when I decided to write it as a book, I did it in steps. I had my friend Laura really reflecting what she noticed, and she knew some things about me that I didn’t realize how important they were. So I revisited those. So the loving kindness is something that really happened gradually. And again, if we’ve been traumatized, that’s not a given. But if we can be patient to us, be patient, what’s in our heart, then gradually, I think without even realizing it, we will come to a greatest sense of goodness and compassion. At least that is the way for me. And it’s also the way with literally thousands of people that I’ve worked with over the 50 years as a therapist.
So it’s not something I believe, I just know it. I’ve observed it. I’ve observed it in myself. And again, I think once we start writing our stories that compassion can start to develop. And when it’s not there and we feel self-critical, then that’s okay to be okay with feeling self-critical and knowing that that also can change. You mentioned the picture of me. It’s where I realized … The last chapter is called Living My Dying Through the Eye of the Needle. And it’s about me coming to my mortality to begin to face death. And one of the things that came up in writing this chapter is the photograph that my mother took of me when I was probably about … Looks like I was about 18 months old and I see a certain joy. And before some of this trauma was how I was alive and curious and playful. I’ll show you that picture if it’s okay here. Yeah. And that’s my coming home. And again, that’s where a lot of that self-compassion comes from. That child, that innocent child. Sad that he had to suffer so much, but really connecting with him with deep love and caring.
TS: You share in the book Peter, different traumatic experiences that you had. And as I was reflecting, I put them into three categories that I thought might be worth talking about. And maybe you could share with us both the trauma you experienced and your healing journey through that specific type of trauma. You talk about something that I don’t think everyone’s familiar with, conception trauma. And I wonder if you can share a bit about that and also the healing journey involved for you with conception trauma.
PL: Well, maybe if I can come back to it. Let me take a little sideways turn. And I’ll remember you remind me to come back to that. I experienced … My family’s life was threatened by the mafia by a mobster named Johnny Dio. Johnny Dioguardi, Johnny Dio. And he was ruthless. He was one of the most murderous of all of these people. He was mentioned or featured in The Goodfellas and The Irishman. And basically he told my father that if my father testified against him … It’s a long story, how that happened to happen, but it was in complete innocence. I don’t to go into that. So in order to keep our silence … Again, he’d said that if he testified that he’d find the family, all of us face down in the East River. Basically, of course, that would be murdered.
And so this is something I’ve pieced together. It’s about a violent assault and a rape. But in Somatic Experiencing, we don’t go right into the trauma. We go around the trauma or peripherally in the trauma or find some earlier experiences that were life supporting, life positive. And so I was experiencing a lot of a number of different physical symptoms, and some images would flood into my consciousness sometimes when I was going to bed, laying in bed, going to sleep, and these images would come and I realized it was time for me to take a dose of my own medicine. So I asked one of my students … Wonderful woman. To be my guide and to work with me to see where this would go.
And so what happened is the first images that came up was when I was four or five. I think it was four. But anyhow, it was my birthday. And in the middle of the night, my parents must have snuck into my bedroom and laid tracks for a model train underneath my bed around into the room and then back again underneath the bed, like in an oval. So when I woke, I saw and heard the train moving around the track, and I literally, Tami jumped out of her bed, went to the transformer … Because I knew enough about electricity even at that time. And turned the knob and made it go faster or slower and made the horn go too. And in that moment, I knew in my body … There’s a saying in Papua New Guinea that knowledge is useless unless it lives in the muscles, unless it lives in the body. And so in the session, I really felt that excitement, that feeling of being cared for and being in a way cherished and being loved, even though that was not my normal experience in my life.
But it really gave me this foundation to support to then begin to work with the rape. And the way it started … Again, working at the periphery because I don’t believe in having people relive their traumas over and over again does any good. There’s a method called prolonged exposure therapy where you have the person relive the trauma and relive the trauma and relive it. Supposedly it drains the swamp. I think it just drains our vital energy in many cases. But anyhow, when I would come home from school, I would have my milk and cookies, Pepperidge Farm cookies. And then I would run out downstairs and go across the road to a park that was called Reservoir Oval. It used to be a reservoir. So that was then. Now a park.
And I would go down through the bushes, and then there was a cinder running track below. Speaking of tracks, the train track and the running track. And I would run around. Now, this was a time when we all knew something was wrong, but my parents never talked about it, which was very difficult because we knew something serious was wrong. And I would even sometimes .. When the mafia lawyer would come, I would sneak out of my room and lay underneath a small table, a small telephone table and try to listen to what was going on. So again, it’s something I knew that there was wrong, but again, regrettably, it was never talked about. And we were never made to feel that we had the possibility of safety. We were just left with this …
So in the session, feeling that power in my legs as I run, I glide around the track. And again, that gives me another experience … counters the experience that happened in the rape. So one of these days, just like any other day after school, I climbed the fence and I was going down to the edge of the bushes and I looked and I saw this group of well mobsters, and they were smoking cigarettes, and they had these motorcycle hats on. And somehow I knew that something was seriously wrong. So I tried to skirt down through the bushes, but somebody overtook me and grabbed me and threw me to the ground. And there, I don’t need to go into the details. I was violently raped. And as I reflect, I think they wanted me to tell that to my parents to tell them what happened so that they would know how serious the mob was. Now, I never told them. I was too filled with shame. I never told it in a way to myself. I just put it away in a faraway compartment, not remembering it. But every day my body remembered it. When I would walk to school, I’d feel a constriction in my breath, my heartbeat would go high. I felt like something was really wrong.
I made sure not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. You know that one, don’t step on the crack, you’ll break your mother’s back. Well, these are typical rituals that we do when we’re traumatized to keep us away from actually encountering the trauma. So with her help I also realized that … Chiron is a Greek figure, an archetype figure, and it’s about the wounded healer. And I realized that I would be limited in my own capacity as a therapist unless I did my own healing. So that’s what brought me to ask my student to be with me, to sit with me.
And one of the things I write about trauma in An Unspoken Voice is trauma isn’t so much, it’s not just what happened to us, but it’s rather Tami, what we hold inside in the absence of that present empathetic other. And my student, my guide was that for me in that moment. So with her help, I was able to move through these different parts and then come back to the aliveness in my body and running again on the track, on the reservoir, Oval track. And then also, again, remembering the experience of the trains. So little by little I excavated this, and the more that I reflected on some of these things, other things would come into my awareness, into my consciousness. And so my friend, as I said, my friend Ian said that the shortest distance is not a straight line. It is rarely a straight line. But it’s circuitous. It comes and goes. And that’s the way it was for me. That’s the way it was.
TS: Just to make one point very clear. The importance of the train under your bed was there was some joy and vitality and passion in that and somehow being able to reference that in the somatic experience work, if you could explain that, Peter, for people who aren’t familiar with this notion of alternating between a resource like that and whatever the traumatic memory is.
PL: Yeah. Again, like the tribesmen from Papua New Guinea say that unless knowledge exists in the body, then it doesn’t exist. And this knowledge, I could have been told, well, it was wonderful, your parents put this train and you should be feeling good about that. It’s not anything like that at all. It’s something that’s felt, that excitement, that vitality. And that’s what would’ve been taken away from the assault and from the rape. So this gave me a counter experience before I really went into the memories of the rape to be able to hold that sense of self-care in my being and be able to work through that. But again, the key is not knowing about it, but feeling it, sensing it in the living, knowing body. The body is healer.
So it was really very much about having it as a felt experience, and that in some fundamental ways actually contradicted the feelings of overwhelm and helplessness and terror that I experienced. And again, I had to go through that little bit step by step, but not again, right into the core, but working around the periphery with sensations and different images that were coming up. You asked the right question. That was really why it was so important for me to have this experience. Not to just know that it happened, but to feel it and feel the excitement and the vitality, because that’s what I came back to. And again, that picture of me as the 18 months old, you see that vitality, you see that passion, you see that curiosity in his eyes, and that was absolutely essential for my healing. So in a way, it’s where I started and it’s where I finally ended my story.
TS: Peter, at what age did you have come to consciousness that this rape experience occurred?
PL: Well, first of all, I was just experiencing these troubling sensations and feelings and momentary flashes of images. And I knew something was wrong. I’d already been working with many, many hundreds of people, and I knew something was starting to break through. So again, when you have symptoms, that’s really telling you that something needs to be addressed. And that’s when I realized that it was necessary for me to enlist help from a guide, one of my students to help me process this, to help guide me in this journey, which was difficult, but was doable. Sometimes people ask me, what’s the most important things to know about trauma? And I thought, well, there’s two things. One is that trauma is a fact of life. All of us have experienced … Because trauma means wound, means injury. We’ve all experienced injuries to our psyche, to our soul, to our bodies. But wounds heal. Given the right support, wounds heal.
If it’s a broken bone, putting the cast on helps it heal. It doesn’t make it heal, but it makes it possible for it to heal. So injuries can be healed, but given the right approach. So yes, trauma is a fact of life. That’s, I say the bad news. But the good news is that trauma doesn’t have to be a life sentence. That given the right tools, trauma doesn’t have to rule. And it’s important to have these tools and to have somebody in a way initiate you with the use of these tools.
TS: So Peter, in your case, the clarity of the actual event occurred, but one of your points is that you don’t have to know the specifics of what happened to you in order to engage in the healing of a trauma. Can you speak to that? Because I think for a lot of people, they don’t get clarity. Something happened when I was young, I’m not quite sure what it was.
PL: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not necessary to remember anything. The work that we do in Somatic Experiencing is based in the here and now. We sometimes reflect back to the there and then, but also look ahead to the here and now and the future. But what need to do is find the experiences where the body had become shut down to allow the body to come back into vitality. And that’s what it’s about. It’s not about remembering something, and especially not remembering every detail. After excavating that some details did come up, but I could just look at them and just let them go through. Let them just disappear. But again, yes, it’s not necessary. It’s not required. And sometimes it can even be contraindicated to just go to every little detail of what happened.
We only do something that’s going to be intrinsically healing for the person, not something that is unduly or unnecessarily distressing. Of course trauma is distressing, but again, if we know how to meet the trauma and are supported, then trauma can recede and we can go back to the birthright that we all have. And it is a birthright to that innocent, playful, curious, excited child. And so that was, again, at least as important and made it possible really to look at the trauma of the assault.
TS: Peter, I mentioned, and I brought in this maybe strange, sequenced, unsequenced way, wanting to understand more about conception trauma. And then it’s something that I don’t hear people talk about very often. But your story of this assault actually links to that. So I wonder if you can make that connection.
PL: Yes. I was just exactly going to do that. So thank you for bringing me on task. Some years ago, I was visiting my parents, and I mustered the courage to tell them, especially to tell my mother what had happened. And my mother stiffened, and she said, “Peter, that didn’t really happen. I don’t think that really happened. I think what you were picking up is that I was raped by your father to conceive me.” And that’s a whole story in there about their distorted sexuality and so forth. But I know both were true. Both was true that I did experience that assault and that rape, and that at the moment of conception, my mother’s belief that she had been raped by my father just impaled … It just shocked my nervous system. So it was there as a memory, but not as a memory memory, but as a procedural memory of how my body experienced that kind of … Well, in many ways, I felt that I wasn’t loved by my mother.
And I think that’s true, but it’s never completely true. We never have parents that are all bad or all good. It’s always a mixture of both. But it really also helped set me free because I had a better understanding of why it was that I sometimes felt like I was the unwanted child because I was unwanted, because I was conceived in rape. And that impulse, that impact got me, I believe … And working with, again, thousands of people was different, but somewhat similar experiences that we experience conception trauma, intrauterine trauma, birth trauma, and early trauma in infancy. We experience all of those. And we can’t get at them because they’re not conscious memories, but they are registered in the body as emotional and what are sometimes called procedural memories. Memories that our body has formed and that we can work those through. But we have to understand that it’s not a memory in the normal sense of, or I remember this, I remember that. It’s a much deeper body memory. I think it could be called the body memory. But in academic psychology sometimes called a procedural memory or things that our body has done in attempt to protect ourselves. But that in many cases it failed to do that. So we were overwhelmed.
So in a sense of completing what the body was trying to do then maybe decades, decades before, to allow it to come to completion in the here and now. One of the way I start one of my books, the first book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. I was working with this woman who had severe panic attacks. And when I started working with her … Well, she was sent to me by a psychiatrist friend, and he’d been treating her for these panic attacks using different kinds of medications, but nothing was really helping that much. So we thought if some of these relaxation exercises that I’d been developing might be helpful for her, because she had all kinds of physical symptoms as well, that at least it could help give her some of her life back. Because she couldn’t leave the house alone. Even with her husband holding her hand, she was still just completely terrified to go out in the world. And anyhow, when I started to work with her to find a relaxation, actually the opposite happened.
What we learned soon was a trauma that started to emerge. And at that moment, I had the image of a tiger crouching and getting ready to jump out from the four wall of the therapy room, the consultation room. And so without quite knowing it at the time, I said, “Nancy, there’s a tiger crouching, springing. Run. Run. Climb those rocks and escape.” And I could see that it wasn’t helping, that her legs got even more frozen. And I said, “Nancy, let me take your hand. I’ll do this together with you. We’re going to run together.”
And I could see her legs started to move, like sewing machine … I call sewing machine legs. And then I could see her whole body was feeling the power of climbing these rocks, very similar in some ways to what I just described about myself having this new experience, this empowered experience. And then when she got to the top, she knew that she felt safe. And then she asked me if I wanted to know what she experienced, and I said, “Yes, please.” She said, “Well, at first I couldn’t run, but then I could feel my body climbing. And when I got on the top, I knew I was safe, that the tiger couldn’t get me there. And I looked down, I saw the tiger, and the image of the tiger changed to an image of me when I was four years old.” She was 24 when I did the session. When she was being held down by doctors and nurses and an ether mask was forced on her face for a tonsillectomy, and she was completely overwhelmed and terrified, and her body had been wanting to run to escape for 20 years, and she finally could do that. So again, it’s really the body doing what it needed to do then, but which it couldn’t do because it was overwhelming. That’s again, another basic principle of Somatic Experiencing.
TS: Now, the other trauma that you write about occurring in your own life has to do with inherited generational trauma. You mentioned that on your father’s side of the family, everyone but one cousin-
PL: One distant cousin.
TS: One distant cousin was murdered by the Nazis. And that this is also part of the trauma that you’ve had to work through as a person. And this is a question, I’m just curious what you think, Peter. Do you think that the inherited trauma is harder to resolve in some way than other types? That’s my experience, but I don’t know if I’m generalizing, and maybe it’s not important to generalize in that way.
PL: Well, I think it is more difficult because we can’t pinpoint it, but inherently I think it’s just as doable as other different kinds of trauma. But you have to have, of course, a different perspective on it. One of the other things that I write about in the book around this issue was there was a restaurant that I loved to go to, the Beggar’s Banquet on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. And I was working on my doctoral dissertation and starting to teach what was the beginning of Somatic Experiencing to a group of therapists. And I was really struggling of how to demonstrate and then to explain to them what I was doing, how I was doing, what I was doing. And so at the end of a long day, I would go to this restaurant and the waitresses there knew me by name. They were very kind. They would sit me down at my usual table and start me off with some warm soup, some warm vegetable soup. And along with some warm french bread, crispy on the outside, soft and moist on the inside. It’s like my worries just drifted away.
Well, one of these times when I’m sitting there, I see a shadow moving from my left side, and I look up, and it’s a old man with wild, wild hair and wearing a crumpled jacket that was about three, four times the right size for him. And he motioned to me, is it okay to sit down? And I nodded. And in this image … By the way, these images are sometimes called … Gosh. Images just come from the unconscious. It’s not like a hypnotic image or a dream image. It’s something that comes just from the unconscious speaking to the conscious mind.
So in a way, my rational mind knew, my scientist mind knew that this was just an image from the unconscious, that Einstein wasn’t actually there speaking to me. But the images seemed so real. But what was important is for a better part of a year, once or twice a week, I would go and eat there, and he would often show up, and I would ask him questions, and I would ask him questions about … He would ask me questions about my questions. So it’s like the Socratic Method of inquiry. And towards the end of the year, I had been working with some people, and some of these people had reported the smell of burning flesh, and a number of them were vegetarians so that didn’t make any sense. But then I had the idea, probably because of my own generational trauma issues, I asked them to talk to their parents and their grandparents if they were around and asked them about their life. Well, it turned out most of those had actually were in the Holocaust, experienced the Holocaust and would be smelling those smells from their prison.
And so anyhow, at that time, I asked Einstein … I told them about what I had been observing, and I asked him what he could tell me about that. So it’s like a dream within a dream. So he takes me then in this dream, within the dream to a small pond, and he has a yardstick, a meter stick and along the stick there are a number of small stones. And so we hold them above the pond and then just twist them, and the stones all fall together at the same time, and they make waves moving out into all directions, moving forward in time, moving sideways in time, moving backwards in time. And of course, this is something that Einstein knows about because this is about the space-time continuum. So anyhow, I asked him about that, about what happens in generational trauma. And where the waves would pass each other and continue forward intersecting and continuing forward, if they got stuck, if there was what he called a fixation then everything after that stuck place became distorted. And then I said, “Well, okay. That’s very helpful, but how would I work with that?” He said, “Peter, I’m sorry. I don’t have the answer to that, but I know that you do.”
And so for a significant amount of time after that, I started to developing a way to help people find where they were stuck. And again, it was clear that these things were not just things that were happening from the past going into the present, but there were things that when we would heal some of those fixations, it seemed as though that was actually helping our grandparents and our great-great-grandparents with their own healing. And I thought, again, this seemed like really improbable. But then it became my understanding that it was quite probable and that it was quite common. That it’s not just what happens to us in this life that impacts us negatively and positively, but it’s also what comes from our ancestors. And it’s not just trauma that’s passed on, but wisdom that’s also passed on. Not important life-saving wisdom that can be passed on.
The first time I got an example of this, this must have been … I think it was in 1989. There was a famous airplane crash. A flight was from Denver, Colorado to Chicago. It was a DC-10 and the rear engine exploded and broke off all of the hydraulic lines. So it was not possible to steer the plane. And so they tried to make a landing in this small airport, this regional airport in Sioux City. But the only way they could try to control it was by increasing the thrust on one engine and then on the other. And so it was very wobbly, and when the plane landed, it broke up into many pieces, and a number of the parts exploded in flames.
And the woman that I was working with call her Katie. Again, not taking her to the trauma, but taking to the first time when she felt that she survived, that she was safe, and that was the image of her in a cornfield with the sun on her back and seeing the stalks of the corn. By the way, there’s a wonderful movie by Peter Weir, Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez called Fearless. I really recommend it. He treats trauma very well. The director, Peter Weir really understood trauma. Actually, we met together and got together after he made the movie. So where am I? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyhow, then we come back to in the plane. So the part of the fuselage that she was in was upside down. So she gradually lifts her safety belt off and holds the belt and lets herself down to the what was the top, which is now the bottom. And it’s dark and there’s smoke, and it’s acrid, and she’s starting to cough, and she doesn’t know what to do.
Then all of a sudden, she hears the following words, Katie, go to the light, go to the light and escape. And she found this pinpoint of light, and she went closer and closer, and it became larger and larger. And then there was an opening there. There were twisted wires and everything, but she was able to survive. She got out and then made it to the cornfield. So what’s remarkable about this is both her father and her grandfather were in airplane crashes. One was another commercial flight and the other was a military flight. And both of them escaped by going to the light where there was this crack. And so that message from them, a life-saving message came through to the ancestors to her and saved her life. So again, it’s not just trauma that gets sent down to us, but it’s so many things.
I was doing a workshop at Esalen. I was working with this lovely two people. One was a person from the Crow Indian Nation, and the other was a Navajo woman. And in doing the session, all of a sudden, this voice of his grandfather came and it was a beautiful chant, a beautiful, beautiful chant. And he just moved everybody in the group, everybody in the room. We were just so deeply touched. So that was that great wisdom that again, was coming through. So yes, trauma does get passed on. And it’s not just in the epigenetic transmission. That is important. That is significant. But it’s something much deeper than that. And again, it’s not just the trauma, but it’s also sometimes of really life-affirming information that can also be passed on. So as I again worked with people that it was clear it is not just what happened to them in this life, but also what happened in lives past.
TS: Now, Peter, in your own biography, the healing of inherited trauma, intergenerational trauma, what was the breakthrough? Was there a specific like, oh, that’s when this really shifted?
PL: Yeah. Okay. I think I can get to that. It must’ve been in early 1950. The Red Cross had this program where they would try to find people who were in the Holocaust and reunite them with families. And there was this distant cousin, distant second cousin. He had been living in the forest for I think a year or two. He didn’t know the war was over, and he was just living on eating bark and berries. And then he was eventually found and brought to the Red Cross, and then the Red Cross reunited him with the family. And I remember coming together with him and the family. So all of the relatives. One, two, three, four, five of us we’re there. And I remember seeing on his arm, these numbers that were tattooed, and I was fascinated by that. And I think I asked the question and I was told, don’t ask that question basically.
And as I pieced together that he did escape. That it was amazing that he was able to escape. I think it was in Auschwitz where he was. And that he survived. And I realized that we all have these survival instincts in us. So I think I learned that in a way from … His name was Zelig. There was a Woody Allen movie called Zelig, actually. I think it’s the German translation of the name Jerry. But anyhow, by being together with him, I became friends with him. Not friends, but he was much older, of course. But he had a convertible car. He bought a car. That was one of the first things he did when he arrived in the New World. And I remember the car. The floorboards … It was a convertible, and I just loved the convertible. But the floorboards were broken in, so when you drive, we could see the road underneath.
And so I spent time with him getting to know him, and he dropped little hints to me about what had happened, but that was balanced by the feeling of being with him in the car, driving together, and again, looking down at the road. And unfortunately, I lost track of him. Well, actually what happened was, he had not been with a woman for decades, and so I think he married two or three different women and then had to escape because he was going to be tried for bigamy. So I lost him. But having the connection with him, I think helped me connect with those free memories.
TS: In addition, Peter, as you describe your own working with students of yours in Somatic Experiencing to help you work through various traumatic experiences in your life, you recount journeys that you took with psychedelics in some controlled experiments, and you are very clear about what the context is that supports trauma healing. I think that’s really important, but I also think it’s important. Obviously, you sought greater help than just Somatic Experiencing was providing. So I think that’s also interesting, and I wonder if you can talk about that.
PL: Things that had come up but come up in a less full way. I came of age to Berkeley in 1964, so that was all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. So obviously this is a time of a lot of experimentation in all of those different realms. But now as I’ve of age and have looked at clouds, like Judy Collins says in her song from Both Sides Now, I think it’s really important to take a measured understanding of the use of these catalysts, which can be extremely helpful. There are great promises, but there are also pitfalls. And I think it’s absolutely necessary that people are prepared first for it, that they do this exploration without this catalyst, without the substance, and that there’s follow up, especially follow up of embodying these experiences. Because seen people who do these psychedelics one after another, and they become more and more dissociated. So I think it’s absolutely essential to bring it down to the bodily experience and to work on it and to work on some of the issues that came up around attachment and things like that. So I think they definitely do not replace therapy. I can say that with certainty and that they can be used, but they really need to be used judiciously and by people who are skilled and by people who know how to prepare and to follow up.
So for example, MDMA has been used more or less for a simple PTSD from war trauma, and it’s been helpful for that. So what I suggested is that before they take the substance … Because you wear an eye mask to keep out the stimulus from the room and earphones to hear sounds like music sounds. So I suggested doing that without the substance and just have two people, two therapists, be with that person for some hours while they process what comes up for them. And then only after that then, if it’s appropriate to employ the psychedelic. But again, I think it’s really important that we’re careful and judicious about that.
I think there’s a section in the book where I write psychedelics promises and pitfalls, and I think there are both. And I think that people are starting to … I speak a lot about it, and I think some other people also do about how to use them and how not to abuse them. So they were important for me. And in the end chapter, and coming to my mortality, to my dying, I took one of the psychedelics that really takes you to the death experience, and it helped me really be much less afraid of dying of death. And again, there are different psychedelics for different purposes. So again, the person who is administering them needs to know what are the appropriate catalysts to use, what appropriate psychedelics to use with that particular person at that particular time. So it takes a lot of thoughtful preparation. I guess that would be the end of it, or … Yeah.
TS: Yeah. You write in Autobiography of Trauma, you write 15 hours of suggested therapeutic contact after a session to integrate and really look at everything that’s been brought up. You were very specific in your recommendation.
PL: I was just going to say I was about this, and I know that some of the people … I don’t know if it’s because of me, but some of the people are now starting to do that. That they’re doing more with preparation and more with follow up.
TS: Now you mentioned this final chapter, Living Your Dying and the experimentation you’re doing now with 5-MeO-DMT.
PL: Correct.
TS: And you write about it as the welded unity of Eros and death. That this is what you’re exploring. And I thought, this is really interesting. I have got to ask Peter about this. And when you talk about your fear, also lessening your fear of dying, I want to understand what is allowing that to occur?
PL: Okay. There’s a number of different aspects to that. First of all, in my sexual healing, I’ve been blessed, supported by some women who have come into my life as lovers. And in allowing myself to connect deeply emotionally, sensorially, I felt as though I was entering some a death. I don’t know if we’d call it ego death, but some a felt death. And then in the last chapter, I mentioned that I had eye surgery for both my eyes. It was miraculous. I was going blind with cataracts. And I see basically perfectly right now. If I’m in a restaurant with dark light to read the menu, I might need reading glasses, but that’s all I need. And if I sit on them and break them, it’s no problem. I just get another one for $5 at the drugstore.
So anyhow, I had the first eye operated on that was completely successful. And I remember looking with both eyes into the sky and realizing that blue wasn’t orange. That the sky was blue and not orange. So anyhow, the night before I was going for the second eye surgery, I had the following dream, and dreams are very important in my life. And in the dream, I’m going to this large room, and there’s a man at the entrance, and clearly he’s some kind of a teacher, a meditation teacher. And there’s a couple off to the right, and they’re in a bed together. I asked the teacher, “What were they doing?” He said, “They’re doing the death meditation.” I said, “Oh, that’s what I want to do. That’s what I want to do.” And so he looked at me, I think compassionately, and he said, “No.” And he pointed off to the left and he said, “That’s where the beginners are.”
And so it was for me a beginning, an initiation into the death experience. So the anesthesia that we used was Propofol, which is a very kind drug. And so I asked the, … Well, first of all, I didn’t want to use Versed because it can have some pretty adverse effects. And so first of all, they asked me, “Well, why do you want to use Propofol?” And I said, “Well, I had a bad experience with the other. And what I’d like you to do is before you …” Because they put a line in your vein, and then they’ll push the anesthesia in. So I said, “Please, to count from three backwards to zero and at zero then push the Propofol.” So I was able to prepare to make that transition into death.
And when I awoke, I was feeling fine, I was feeling good. I was in the recovery room, and all these people were puking and they were all dissociated. Of course, I tried to do a little trauma first aid with them. But again, the idea was that if I could soften into this experience, then it could be a very positive experience. And you mentioned using the 5-MeO and that sometimes is called the God molecule, and you don’t always go to love and light because you can go into some pretty scary places. But if it’s done properly, you move through it.
There’s this incredible quote from this man named Alfred Romer. He was a physics professor in 1906. And he wrote basically that going to, the light is not where God is. Those can be by ways, those can be avoidances. But where God really is … And he wrote, is in the darkness because in the darkness itself, that’s where we find God. And I think that was one of the great teachings that I learned about experience was using that particular catalyst. And I only used it once or twice, and I might use it again, or I might not. Again, I continue to do bodywork and other attachment work to really make sure I’m getting the best that I can out of that experience and not just having it as an experience.
TS: Peter, at this point, when you find yourself feeling something anxious or caught in your head or worrying or anything like that, and you think, I’m not embodied right now, I don’t feel safe in my nervous system right now. What do you do?
PL: Well, I do a number of things. One of the things that I generally do, even if I’ve done some of the other things first is just lay down, lay in bed, and just follow the sensations. I guess a little bit, probably like with passive meditation. But particularly where I feel stuck in the body. And then an area where I feel really open in my body. And then I may shift back and forth with the open place and the constricted place, the expanded place and the constricted place and move back and forth. Also, I have device it’s like a trampoline, but it’s quite different. It’s called a Bellicon, and instead of springs, they use bungee cords all the way around. So it’s very soft. I use that when I’m working with people often. And most of the time when I wake up in the morning, I move, I stretch, I have some hot water with lemon, and I jump on my Bellicon.
And it’s not just jumping for exercise, but to really feel that lift in my whole body and letting the energy move through. So I do things like that, that are active, that are bodily oriented. Again, to move that stuck energy to move it through, and then to take myself, or even if I feel that I need some other guidance … Sometimes people ask me, well, do I ever do therapy on myself? And I say, “Yeah. All the time.” So sometimes attachment issues come up. So I do some work with this wonderful attachment therapist. I don’t see him often, but every once in a while I see him and work with him. And sometimes material has come up often about relationships and relationships that I’m in and where I might be stuck and where the two of us cohort to being stuck together. The aftermath lets me untangle. I mean, one of the good things about the MEO is that the most intense part only lasts about 15 to 20 minutes, but you still need some hours to integrate and to process. So having done that again, that’s really helped me open up to know that death is not the end, I guess you could say.
TS: Peter, here’s my final question for you. In reading An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey, I was impressed by how much healing you’ve done. And there’s not a place that you’ve reached some healed period. There’s not a sense that you’ve reached some … I don’t know. Promised land never to be touched.
PL: No way.
TS: It’s the sense that there’s an ongoing journey still happening in your life. And I noticed I felt a little disappointed about that, impressed by how much healing and like, oh, so this person who knows all of the best approaches has been immersed in this, even he still has more healing to do.
PL: When I wrote this book, the promise, the commitment I made to myself was that I would follow my truth wherever it took me. And I did that. And it took persistent and it took courage. Clearly, I am not the same person that I was 20 years ago. I’m a very, very different person. I’m not encumbered by trauma. Yes, sometimes things come up, sometimes I feel stuck. Sometimes it’s in a relationship, but usually I find a way to communicate that. Not all the time, but it took persistence. And it also takes courage. It takes courage to embark on this journey. And it’s a life’s journey. And it’s not just that we still have some trauma, but we are impelled to move forward with growth, to move towards wholeness. We have an instinct to heal and to become more wholer and whole. And so again, there’s not an end point to that, or at least I hope there’s not an end point to that
I see that as a process, an ongoing process. And if we do that with ourselves and another person does that with themselves, then we can bring together and really have a present here and now relationship because we’ve each done enough of our own work, and then we can meet each other and be there with each other for each other. So yeah. It’s not like a hundred percent of all my trauma is ever gone, but I can talk about it. I’ll occasionally get a twinge, but it passes readily. I’ve done some of these interviews. Sometimes sensations or feelings come up and I just take a moment I just say, just give me a moment for a breather. And I feel the sensations, I feel the feelings, and if there’s some image, I just maybe attend to that and then I’m fine, and then I’m ready to go on. So I think we get to the place where we’re not stuck with our traumas. Instead of they’re being sharp edges, like pieces of the wood with sharp edges, they’re honed, they’re softened, like they’re curved. So we just move and we touch the curvature and then move forward and then come to another curvature and brush against it, not get stuck on it. So we go from trauma to awakening and flow.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Peter Levine in celebration of his new book, An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code podcast to get Your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com sounds true.com Sounds True. Waking up the world.
