Exploring Intergenerational Trauma with Dr. Buque (The Mindful Space)

Hi, everyone. This is your host, Michelle, and you’re listening to The Mindful Podcast, the show that aims to break the stigma associated with mental health. Today we have Dr. Mariel Bouquet, a Columbia University trained psychologist, trauma expert, and soundbath meditation healer. We will discuss healing wounds of intergenerational trauma, holistic mental wellness, and the importance of spirituality in the therapeutic process. Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Mindful Podcast. Today we have beautiful dr. Bouquet. How are you today? Good. It’s so good to be with you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. Thank you for taking the time. Coming from New Jersey. Correct. Yeah. How is Florida treating you? Oh, I love Florida, so Florida always treats me so well. Yeah, sunny enough. Very sunny and just the right amount of humidity. Oh my God. I don’t think the same, but okay, we’re going to go with that. A little bit amount of humidity. Yeah, that’s what a New Jersey person would say for sure. 100%. Yeah. Perspective is key, right? Yes. So everybody that comes, I allow them to introduce themselves professionally and personally, so please go ahead and do so. Okay. Yeah. So for me, I think there’s a lot of merging of my personal and professional worlds because I do a lot of living by what I do. Mental health is kind of like my full life, but as a professional, I’m a psychologist and I’m a trauma expert and more so kind of on the personal end, I am someone that is from the Dominican Republic, and I arrived in the US. When I was five years old. So I’ve been here for a couple, you know, even when I was doing my first couple years of therapy, I was doing it in the Spanish and English language because it matters so much for me to just keep my language and my culture. So I’ve always been someone that’s been kind of tapping into both worlds and doing a lot of self care. And I’m always with family in some way or another. And I have a really energetic dog named Leo. Nice. I love that name. My dog’s name is Louie. Louie? Yes. Frenchie. I guess we’ll have a little anymore, but have a playdate at some point. I’m all for it. I love dog moms. All right, digging right into it. Our topic today is intergenerational trauma heavy, which is your specialty. Yeah, correct. How do you combine the spirituality and psychology into your practice? It actually is something that I do really, by way of just integrating practices that feel right for the person, but also that I know really work. So spirituality as a practice, I think it makes sense to really kind of understand why I even integrate it. Right. I do so because the way that we, as I see it, should approach mental health is very mind, body, spirit. And I oftentimes offer a breakdown because I think that people might think of the spiritual piece as something that’s more like religious based, when in reality, it kind of isn’t. The ways that we tend to emotionally hurt is multilayered. And it does incorporate those three elements of how we experience emotional pain in the mind. We experience pain by way of our thoughts just being intrusive thoughts or recurring thoughts or being stuck in a certain pattern of thinking. And we also experience emotions which are also frozen whenever we’re experiencing a lot of distress. And then in the body, the body also retains a lot of emotional energy. Yes. And our brains actually capture that energy. And our brains actually transform. Our brains change in reference to emotional distress. The same with our nervous system. We enter fight, flight, freezer, fawn, and that can be a place where we remain stuck for many years. And then the spiritual realm I really define as our connections to our higher power, our connections to ourselves, and our connections to everyone else in our lives. And when we feel disconnected, when we feel like we can’t ground ourselves, when we feel like we’re not in tune with everything outside of us, that is generally what I tend to define as like the disconnection that’s in the spiritual realm. And so when I’m doing work with people, I have to integrate that piece in order to really see and heal the whole person. Yes. So from what I’m hearing, spirituality is very important in the therapeutic process. How much? How so? I think it’s very important. I mean, I think there are people that are trying to really scientifically prove how important it is because you have to have a scientific thing, right. You can’t just not see it. Right. I mean, I think in the world that we live in, especially this Western world, we need tangible evidence that something actually works. It’s just the way that I think we have been socialized. And so anything that is seen as more like out there in the ether of the energetic world that doesn’t have anything that we can tangibly say like this is any research, any paid research by the government? No, but I get it. It makes sense. It’s just the type of, like you said, western western civilization. Yeah, but the Western world is catching up, though. It’s bite sized catching up, but it’s still doing so. And we do have a number of studies that are proving the ways in which, when we meditate or when we take mindful action or when we are actually connected to a spiritual practice, how that actually can diminish the impact that a lot of these mental health conditions have upon us. And it can even help us to feel a lot more emotionally healthy. Yes. So that would be called nowadays holistic. Yes, right. Holistic method therapy. Just like there’s been holistic medicine all over. What led you to pursue or what led you to focus on the more holistic side of actually, I feel like it kind of found me a little bit. I was actually really fortunate when I was still in my doctoral studies to actually be a Fellow of the United States Health Administration. And that fellowship was this kind of like guinea pig fellowship to try and see if placing a mental health clinician inside of clinics that had nothing to do with mental health would actually be an effective strategy to helping people to kind of bridge into the mental health world. Okay, so basically what the fellowship was, was like a program that actually allowed me to go into different clinics in the Columbia University Medical Center. So it’s a huge, huge organization and it’s like scattered all across New York, right? I can imagine. Yeah, it’s ginormous and it takes up a large portion of Upper Manhattan as well. And Upper Manhattan is very diverse as you might know. Right. All New York, I mean, all New York is very diverse, but Upper Manhattan has a very concentrated demographic of Latinx and black. You know, that is also the demographic that’s widely represented within the Columbia Medical Center as far as patients is concerned. And so they were creating this program to try and bring in what they called integrated mental health care. Meaning that I’ve heard that many times. Yeah, in a perfect world. Right, it would be lovely. But I think they were trying to see can it work? And basically, I would go into the Cardiology Clinic, the Neurology Clinic, the Gynecology Clinic, and many other clinics within the actual Columbia Medical Center. And I would give therapy. But the therapy would be from a holistic perspective, so it would have the Meditative practice and it would include ways in which I could work with a nutritionist to really combine our efforts. Yeah, it was an incredible program and it allowed me to really understand why holistic methodologies actually work. Why this is the way that we have to treat mental health from a holistic place and treat the whole human, not just little bits and pieces of them. Yes. Not just trying to pick at the brain and go the intellectual way, but have that connection with, like you mentioned, a higher power to be able to connect within ourselves. Right. So it was a great experience and that’s how it found you. Yeah, it was incredible. I mean, I think I got to learn from the community itself because I got to see real change happening and I was like, oh wow, humbly, I really have to take a step back and realize that this is the way that we help people. And I was trained from a very traditional psychodynamic Freudian perspective and with a little bit of feminist psychology kind of infused in there. I liked a little touch. I had to really pivot and shift from my perspective as a talk therapist to one that was holistic and integrated the ways that people needed to heal into the therapy itself rather than the ways that I felt comfortable with being a healer. Yeah. So then it became less about you, but more about them and how you can help them throughout different methods, not just the traditional therapy. Amazing. For those who might not know what intergenerational trauma is, do you mind explaining it? Yeah, absolutely. So intergenerational trauma is the type of trauma that flows through families from one generation to the next, and it’s the only type of trauma that is actually handed down. So intergenerational trauma happens to be at the intersection of what I call the biology of intergenerational trauma, which is like a lot of the genetics and the ways in which when a parent is traumatized, their genetics change, or they re express to say, I’m in a traumatized body, and that that gets handed down to their children. And then there’s the psychological piece, which is anything that happens once a person is born that can trigger a trauma response. So both of those have to be present for there to be intergenerational trauma. Okay, so what would be an example from a client that you’ve had or that you’ve seen? Yeah, I mean, the ways that we start off knowing, okay, intergenerational trauma may be in the mix here is usually when a person starts saying, well, I had a history of being completely berated by my mother, and I do the same to my child. And so we’re starting to see the thread, right, that there’s already behaviors that are trauma responses that are being held in multiple generations. And that’s usually where the conversation starts, where we start seeing, okay, this is not just a trauma of something that happened to you, but this is something that has been modeled. It’s something that’s in the genetic pool of your family. Let’s take a deeper dive and a deeper look into that. Are people usually aware when they come to you that this is happening? Or are you the one to tell them this is intergenerational trauma? Yeah, there’s a little bit of a mixed bag still. Right? Because I think intergenerational trauma is still not a common language that people are using around their healing or around just their understanding of what’s happening. It just doesn’t sound good either. And people have this idea of trauma that it’s like a big event, and they come to therapy, and then you have to be the one to tell them, no, this is still trauma. We’re still destigmatizing a lot of what trauma is. Exactly, and you’re right. I really see that. I see that people want to talk about stress more than they want to talk about trauma. But when we’re talking about chronic stress, we have to really look at the underpinnings of it. And in reality, there’s usually some sort of a triggering event, and that triggering event is a traumatic event. But we don’t really want to utilize those words because they’re labels. That not a lot of people want yeah, nobody wants to go to family reunion, say, hey, guys, I have intergenerational trauma from all of you. Yeah, this is your fault. I have to fix it. Right. It usually isn’t the best conversation to have, and especially during the holidays, because people get together with families during the holidays, and they’re like, well, I’m going to point out all the trauma responses that we have so we can fix them all. And it kind of just causes a little bit more of a rupture than people intend. So my therapist says that this is your fault, mom. So I don’t know what you’re going to do about this, but better pay for my therapist. That’s not a bad transaction. Well, I think it’s mind blowing that your body or your brain changes because of your past generations going through trauma. That’s called epigenetics. Correct. And there’s actually research didn’t they do a research with mice? Can you explain that to me a little bit more? I don’t want to say the wrong thing. Yeah. Epigenetics has been a field that has helped us a lot in the field of intergenerational trauma to understand the genetic component of why this type of trauma even exists. And for anybody not familiar, epigenetics is really the study of how our social environments actually impact our genetic expressions. So whatever happens to you in your life becomes especially if it produces a chronic response, like a chronic stress response, a chronic trauma response. It becomes the ways in which your body then reacts. And when your body reacts a certain way for an extended period of time, your genes start to change or express. I say change because I think that’s language that I feel like is more relatable, but basically it’s called expression, meaning that they turn on or they turn off, depending on whatever information they’re being fed by your body. Okay. Yeah. Again, mind blowing. Wow. And there’s so much around it. I know you mentioned a lot of the studies around mice and more recently, and especially the more groundbreaking studies that we’ve had is especially a study that was done around children of Holocaust survivors. And the ways that not only psychologically. They were kind of leading their lives like the elements of stress that they experienced and the commonalities among them and how significantly different they were from individuals that were of Jewish descent who did not come from a background of families that were in the Holocaust. Jinxed. So that distinction that some of these individuals had a specific temperament and certain personality characteristics and certain ways in which they embodied stress versus their non Holocaust survivor counterparts was something that was really mind blowing, and we were able to see now in humans right. The fact that there was this transmission of these trauma elements that were present now in us, and the more, like biological component of it, of the study itself was around the stress hormone cortisol. Okay, so individuals who were the descendants of Holocaust survivors actually had a decreased level of cortisol in their bloodstream, and it was so significantly low that they were able to see that this was really kind of what differentiated them from anybody who wasn’t part of that lineage. And that’s the most recent study with humans. There are several different, especially marginalized or targeted groups who have been people who have at least scientists have had greater interest in being able to understand their lineage and the ways in which intergenerational trauma has been a part of that. So it’s extending now beyond the initial group. But yeah, that was the more prominent area of study that we found. So there’s just more to be discovered. So much more. This is like one of the newer areas of mental health and newer areas of trauma. It’s not even in the actual DSM. Neither is complex trauma, neither is developmental trauma. They’re all fairly new. And fairly new means, like 30 to 50 years old as far as our understanding around them. So they don’t make it into these greater texts because we still need a lot of studies around them. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. But it’ll come, I’m sure. Yeah. We’re all talking about it. There’s a lot of advocacy around it, and the hope is that we will begin to recognize a lot of these other areas of trauma. For sure. It just reminds me verbal abuse or emotional abuse, it’s also not recognized. Yeah. But it’s talked about, and we all accept that it is there and just no, I find that to be just insane, but hopefully we’ll get those into the DSM Five. Yeah. I think we also got to think about who’s writing these books. Right. And I think that that’s a part of it, too. It’s a whole other podcast episode. Oh, my God. Or the group of people that are behind the scenes writing these greater clinical texts aren’t really recognizing the ways in which individuals from marginalized group or women are accosted a certain way and that that produces a certain kind. Of trauma that they’re not realizing that this is something that needs to be recognized as a clinical term or a clinical diagnostic definition, then we’re not really kind of going to get there. I’m hopeful, though. I’m glad you’re hopeful. We’ll see if in my lifetime and in your lifetime. But I think it takes a really long time for the medical world to really come around to these things. But we’ll see. Yeah, we’ll see. So going back to intergenerational trauma, what does that look like in a person symptoms? Or what do you look for when you’re trying to pinpoint that? It is that yeah, there are different types of symptoms. So there are the more mood based symptoms, like a shift in mood to irritability that tends to be really prominent to anger or angry outbursts. There’s also a change. A lot of the symptoms around the psychological symptoms tend to mirror a lot of trauma based symptoms. So there’s a change in appetite sometimes there’s a change in how a person is connecting to others. There’s a change in how a person is feeling around themselves, really their self concept. There’s changes that are more metabolic, like the ways that their bodies are being the ways that they’re experiencing their own bodies or sleep. I mean, there’s so many different variations of these symptoms. But really the more significant marker of intergenerational trauma is that whatever it is that we’re seeing that there were versions of that in previous generations, that if a person suffers from chronic headaches and that they’re also suffering from appetite suppression. And they’re constantly feeling sad and that they’re feeling disconnected from the people in their lives. And they have all these multitude of symptoms. And their mother was very much experiencing the same symptoms in her lifetime that now we’re looking at something that has that intergenerational tie. Okay, that makes sense. The main cause you would say is somebody in their family in their past went through a traumatic event. Is that the main cause of intergenerational trauma? So it is the major cause that distinguishes intergenerational trauma from other traumas because we have to have that component of it being handed down. So if a parent was chronically stressed or chronically traumatized, then they pass down genetically that emotional vulnerability to trauma to their child. And so when the child is experiencing the world, let’s say that they’re bullied in school, they’re likely going to experience that bullying incident with bigger emotions than a child that doesn’t have that predisposition to trauma and stress. Okay? They’re just going to have a bigger experience both in mind and body. And it’s going to be kind of like the breeding ground for trauma. So they can experience trauma by way of being bullied versus someone else who may just be like, you know what? They’ll brush it off, go about life and then just kind of exactly. And again, that’s a whole other podcast because people don’t understand sometimes how some kids are more prone to bullying or why does he take it. And it could totally be connected to the intergenerational trauma and nobody’s aware. Then you start talking to mom. Mom was also bullied. So that makes sense. Absolutely. What could be the long term effect of untreated intergenerational trauma? There’s quite a lot, right? I mean, the more obvious one is you risk the transmission to the future generations, right now your children and your children’s children can be impacted and the cycle continues. And that’s a really big that will be main one. Yeah, but there’s also like in your lifetime, there’s all the things that you have to suffer, right? You have to go about life always feeling heavy. Also have a propensity to actual physical disease because when we’re in chronic trauma, we’re more susceptible to cardiovascular disease, to our immunity being suppressed and actually having autoimmune conditions surface in our lives. There are some correlates with some cancers. I mean, we’re talking about now your life being completely shifted physically also because of the mental piece. Right. So there’s a lot that can happen if a person does not decide, okay, I’m going to break the cycle, and decides, well, this is the way that it’s been, I’m just going to stick it out this way. Yeah, but there’s consequences down the line. Exactly. And some people are not aware or they don’t know that our mind also affects our body, and then they start getting chronic pains or stomachaches and might be anxiety, might be stress. I think that’s very important for people to know. Yeah. When I was in that fellowship at the medical center, the actual screener that they had in place when every single person visited any of the respective clinics actually had a portion where they were asked about depression, they were asked about anxiety. And that allowed an opportunity for those clinicians, a gynecologist or cardiologist or anyone to say, hey, we saw that these things were coming up for you, and we have someone that you could talk to. And I would just kind of come into their session and it would be a warm handoff, and they would have an opportunity to actually get some of the education that we generally don’t get in any of these medical institutions. Ers, you go for pain, they treat the pain, send you home. Yeah. There’s no healing involved. There’s no other possibilities like, here’s your drug, take it, go home. I had one person that I worked with early on in my career where this person had visited the Er almost like, ten times in one month, believing that they were suffering from a heart attack, when in reality it was a panic attack. I was going to say panic attack. Yeah. And this person had a family that was the entire family was filled with panic. The whole family. And they lived in a multigenerational home inside of the home. Every generation had some aspect of anxiety and represented in a certain way. And so when we were not able to see that if this person hadn’t had that handoff from the individuals, the physicians in the Er, who knew, hey, I think that mental health might be implicated ten times in a month. Yeah. I think maybe it’s time to explore other ways. Yeah. Just maybe. Right. Because our medical system isn’t set up to just say maybe there are other things happening, and to allow a person to have access to that information. I call that generational privilege. Just having access to psychological information in this generation psycho education is definitely a privilege. I agree completely. I mean, we don’t have it across the entire world in the same way, and even across this country in the same way. I think there’s a lot of people who still have limits to access, but there are a lot of people that have phones and a lot of people have social media. And even in social media there is an abundance of information around mental health. Now. Now there is, yeah. Everybody’s trying to be a mental health advocate, which is not a wrong thing. I think there’s definitely a lot of more information that’s good for people that are looking for answers that might not know what a panic attack is or what it feels like. So I think that’s great. Do you believe or in your opinion, do you think people that do the inner work and go through the healing process are cured from all the trauma? I don’t think that it’s really possible to cure all trauma, to be honest. I think that a stress response. A lot of it can be healthy. I mean, that’s just the way we’re manufactured as humans. But people can do a lot of the work to break cycles and not be in a trauma state. They may be in a stress state, but not in a trauma state. However, trauma is tricky, right? Because trauma doesn’t just come from or happen to a person. Sometimes trauma happens to a community. Sometimes we were in a pandemic. It happens to the world, right? So sometimes, really, a person needs to do the work themselves. Families need to do the work as families. Communities need to do the work as communities. And then society needs to stop implementing policies and doing things that can actually retraumatize us and keep us in trauma. So it’s kind of like a multilayer. We need like intervention at all levels. Again, another podcast. I’m going to have to bring you back at least four times by now. Now, what is the ultimate goal when you see a client that has intergenerational trauma? Really, the ultimate goal is to help them to feel more settled in their bodies because we have to remember that a large component of intergenerational trauma is the biological component. And so if we can get that person to restructure their bodies or minds or nervous system, that already is a better set up for themselves and for the generations to come to not inherit that emotional vulnerability to trauma. So that is always where I go. Like, I start with the nervous system, I end with the nervous system. I integrate a number of practices that can get a person settled in their own body so that they can experience safety in their body and then we can do all of the heady work of like, who did what and all of that. That’s where you do the psychotherapy. That’s where Freud comes. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about your but you know, it feels really unsafe for people to get into their childhood trauma when they’re in a body that’s on fire. Like, we first have to work on settling the body. Sure. They feel it when they go. They want to talk about it but then their body almost gets anxious. Yeah. And a lot of people talk about what I call like, the emotional hangover of a therapy session. Right. Like, you talk about all these things, oh my gosh. And then you open up and you’re so vulnerable and raw. And then, okay, your 45 minutes are up towards the end. Well, we have ten minutes to end therapy. Wait, I just did this. And you’re like, oh my God. Yeah, it always happens, but it makes sense because that’s when they start feeling comfortable. Yeah, but doing the work. Exactly. And that’s so welcome, and we really need that. Right? Because that means that you also feel safe with therapist and you feel safe in opening up. And it’s going to be really important to resettle the body once the session is done. So the last couple of minutes that I spend with someone is always going to be tailored towards, okay, we went through all of this. How’s your body? How are you feeling? Right? Like, where do you feel it? And then let’s transition into a practice, a meditative practice, soundbath meditation, whatever it is that I have at my disposal to be able to help them to feel more settled in their body. Okay, funny. You mentioned sun, the bathing healing. That was going to be my next question. I know that’s one of your techniques. Can you guide us, explain a little bit what that entails? Yeah, absolutely. So I do sound bath meditations as a part of my general practice, educative practice and everything, but it really is sound medicine, let me say, is an ancient practice that is practiced across the world in a multitude of ways. And sound actually does create healing in many ways. So it’s not just in the way that I practice it, but the way that I practice it, is very specific and unique. And sound bath meditations, which is, I think, like a category under sound medicine, is a Tibetan practice that is actually also very ancient. It has been around for hundreds upon hundreds of years, and it utilizes certain frequencies to actually emit micro vibrations across the body to help the body feel more at ease. So the person feels an almost instantaneous relaxation, and it also helps in the long term for the person to feel at ease. So if we’re talking about settling the body, it makes sense to bring into the therapeutic practice something that can help them to feel more settled after they’ve opened up. And they’re shaky, and there’s so much that’s happening in their mind and their body, and they’ve gone through a downward spiral, an upward spiral, and they’ve come back. And so we’re bringing the person right back through the sound medicine and through sound healing to feel more at ease. I’ve actually done the sound healing once. I loved it. I felt so relaxed and healed. But the bathe part is what gets me. So are they like. In the water? No, that’s such a good question. Are they like in the bathtub? Actually, you know, what difference, I guess, or is it the same thing? It’s a great question. Recently, I actually did my very first water sound healing. I know it’s a thing. That’s why I was like, I just want to make sure. It’s incredible for anyone who can do something like that. I highly recommend it. It’s wonderful. But traditionally, sound bath meditation, it’s really the sound itself that bathes your entire body. And that’s what it means by bathing. It creates these micro vibrations that actually cover your body at the cellular level. It’s creating vibrations. And it’s almost like if you can think like if you’re kind of like shaking things a little bit and then allowing them to settle kind of like a snow globe, like you shake it up a little and then you let everything settle back in place and it creates kind of that impact on your cellular. I almost have this image of water and when you move something and it’s like the waves of the sound and then it just kind of calms down again. I don’t know why that just came up to my head. I mean, it makes a lot of sense because we’re actually made up of a lot of water, right. And so the ways that the vibrations emit well, the frequencies emit vibrations that actually shake up the water in our bodies and then help to settle it, and it settles from a place of ease. Rather than being kind of in all of those stress hormones and everything that’s constantly floating when we’re in trauma, I’m going to have to do one again. Feel like I need it. They’re so good. Now, what can we do for ourselves or what can we tell ourselves to start healing the intergenerational trauma? Well, the point of recognition is really important, right? Because for a lot of us, we still aren’t at a place where we’re like, yeah, that’s what I’m going through. So that’s of course going to be that’s the first step. Yeah, but if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re like, I feel like I might have that, is there anything you can tell yourself to just begin the process besides obviously seeking therapy? Yeah, with a therapist, it would be, I think, even better to go through the process of understanding how intergenerational trauma has been a part of your journey. But I have an upcoming book on this topic and I will be presenting a number of different practices that people can do on a daily basis, which I’m excited about because I think that gets at what people are able to do to get themselves out of this type of trauma. But if in this very day a person can start doing one thing, I think it’s really deciding how they’re going to settle their body, whether it’s going to be like meditation, if it’s going to be breathing if it’s going to be humming and rocking, which I love to do also with people. It’s all of those things that’s going to be key. And then step two is really kind of getting at that family history, which is where I recommend you start, like start asking questions. Yeah, well, how was Grandma? Or people that are maybe a little too shy about asking those questions or think that they’re going to ruffle some feathers and it’s not going to go well. They can just start thinking about, well, what have been my trauma responses? What have I experienced in my lifetime? Just me that feels like a trauma response or feels like a trigger response or feels like something that I do or I say whenever I feel unsettled and I feel like there’s a threat in front of me and then map it back. Well, how is this familiar? Where have I seen this exactly? Who did this at home when I was growing up? Who did this in my community? Because sometimes our communities have trauma responses that are very community centered and so starting to just build that understanding, I think that that can be a really enlightening process for folks. But always while doing some really good meditative and nervous system settling work because it can kick up a lot for folks too. Some yoga, meditation, even a little bit of exercise, maybe just move the body. Move the body. It can even be light stretching, even that I mean, if you want to take it all the way. I love always saying like tai chi or emotional freedom technique like the tapping. Yeah, all of those are really essential practices when we’re trying to release trauma. So anything that can help welcome it in, why not just scream? It’s fine. Yeah, right. Scrab a pillow and scream. That’s what I do. Yeah. Well, I think you already answered this question, but what are some of the simple shifts that we can do in our everyday life that can lead us to true healing? Yeah, if not I feel like you already answered the question. Well, I think that when people think about healing, they get a little overwhelmed. They think, I got to do a lot. And in reality, it’s all the small things that you do in your day that can actually contribute to the healing itself. So I typically like to recommend that people start their day with healing because if you just think about doing it throughout the day or maybe at nighttime, you won’t get to it. You’re not going to get to it. It’s almost like wake up and exercise, but wake up and do healing exercise. Yeah, because what’s going to happen is that more often than not, people are going to deprioritize their healing and also you don’t see the effects right away. So people start saying, I’ll just leave that to whatever time. But if you start your day with just five minutes of doing whatever practice feels right to you, whether it’s meditation, if it’s a light stretch, if it’s yoga, if it’s humming to your favorite song. Most songs are five minutes. So when you hum, you actually initiate a relaxation response in your nervous system. So actually humming for five minutes your favorite song at the top of your day, that already is a healing practice that can help your body. Yeah, my son hums all the time. I didn’t think about that. That’s weird. Not tell him to be quiet, then stop humming, stop singing. That’s amazing. I mean, he intuitively knows what’s actually going to soothe him, and a lot of kids do, which is why sometimes we can just look at kids for the things that are going to be helpful to us as adults. If you think about it, like when you were humming Lullabies, let’s say, or like rocking your baby to sleep when he was a baby, right. All of those things were actually soothing practices that now we use as therapists to help soothe the nervous system, because what were babies doing when we were humming and rocking them to sleep? They were going to sleep because they felt so deeply relaxed. So if we do that for ourselves at the top of our day, we can enter our days from a completely different mindset and we can produce healing in the long term for ourselves. Now, I always like to preface this with saying, like, it takes an approximate 300 repetitions of these practices. A lot. It is a lot. But if you put almost every day and if you map it, it’s like less than a year. So in less than a year, if you can contribute to five minutes of healing in your day, then you’re actually going to see an impact at the end of the year. And it’s actually, I think, a really nice practice to integrate any day, but even at the top of the year to say, you know what? This year, five minutes of healing every day. Yeah. I think that’s amazing. I’m going to try to start that. Love that. Start my day very busy, like get up work, get your son up, just like moving. I just have to set up my alarm maybe five minutes before to breathe and meditate. Yeah, but I’m going to try to do that and then I’ll let you know in a year if it’s true or not. I’ll let everybody know. I can’t wait to hear it. I think you’re going to say, yeah, this really worked. I will let you know. I want to thank you for this conversation. It’s been amazing. I’m hoping that everybody listening got a little bit more information about this, right? And are able to implement some techniques and just be more self conscious and start asking yourself some questions, maybe your family, too. Is there any last recommendation, any last message you want to give our listeners? Yeah. I think regardless of what a person has been through, regardless of what you’ve been through, I think if you are ready to break the cycle of trauma in your life and in your family, today is as good a day as any. It’s always a good day to break the cycle. So it just starts with those five minutes. So I would just urge anybody that’s out there to just decide if they’re going to take that leap and to just start small and realize how big of an impact those small moments take in the long term. I agree. And then seek professional help. And then hopefully my book will be out in a couple of months. Buy her book. There’ll be so much more. I’m going to go buy it for sure. I’m sure I can use it a lot because we’re Hispanic. You get it. I’m sure. I have intergenerational trauma 100%. It’s in me, but amazing. All right, well, thank you for coming. Thank you. I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip in Florida. Yes. Love it. Thank you guys for listening. Tune in next week. As usual. Don’t forget to subscribe, like and comment. Thank you.