Ria Baeck and J.D. Nasaw on trauma informed collaboration

Lisa: So Ria, JD, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.

J.D.: Thanks for having us.

Ria: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Lisa: Yeah, so I thought maybe to just open up the conversation we could start by talking about trauma and the fact that it’s kind of come more into the collective consciousness recently, even in sort of pop culture. I noticed in TV series and stuff like that. So I wonder if you could say something about trauma in the context of organizations and new ways of working. You know, what’s trauma got to do with it and what value can we get from having a trauma-informed lens with how we work with others?

J.D.: Oh man, big question to start! Well, you know, I think that trauma is kind of overdue as a place for us to be looking. Ria is coming with many decades of experience as a therapist and following in psychology just how the word trauma has been around but really not brought into mainstream consciousness until maybe the last 10 or 20 years.

It’s kind of like as each domino starts to fall where medicine and therapy continues to have unsolvable diagnoses or persistent wicked problems, it finally came to the front as “Hey, this is somewhere that we need to be looking.” And in particular, the incorporation of the body.

I think there’s also a narrative around mindfulness and meditation and around yoga kind of coming to the West—a realization that the body had something to do with all of this, even though there’s been this 500-year mind-body split. A lot of people trace it to Descartes, this Western proclamation that “I think therefore I am.” All of a sudden we started to look at the mind as separate from the body in a way that it had not really ever been before, that they were kind of inseparable.

I think, you know, one more piece of it is it’s not enough to have good intentions, it’s not enough to want something. I think a lot of us inside of a culture where we prioritize the mind and changing the mind, we started to realize, “Well, I want to change or I want to take different actions, I want to show up in a certain way,” and some people would call it self-sabotage, but we find that our body is doing something different than what we think we want.

Over years and years, it’s like, “Wow, I really want to quit doing this or start doing that. Why can’t I do it?” And it’s because there’s this whole history that lives in the body.

So inside of new ways of working, there are all of these new organizational systems that are awesome and based on complexity and living systems, which I think are such a great leap forward from maybe the destructive hierarchies or domination “power over” based systems that we’ve been inside of. And yet we can show up in our bodies in those new systems with these old embodied patterns.

Yes, our minds are thinking, “Oh, I want to share power with this group, I want to be in more participatory governance,” for example. But my body keeps showing up with this response where, “Oh, I don’t trust that person,” or I have certain judgments that are getting in the way of being able to collaborate, being able to make decisions together, being able to actually consent to something because there’s this deeper level.

Ria: Yeah, and also from the other side. I came to start thinking about trauma from collaboration because I noticed in a couple of, let’s say, new networks, new organizational formats, the people there’s a saying of “bring your whole self to work.” That’s nice, and let’s respect each other for what we bring and the diversity. But there’s also an angle there like, “Hey, a workplace is not a family,” although we want to be respectful and very humane with one another.

I saw dynamics happening from stories from Enspiral and Buurtzorg and others, and I’m like, “Hold on, hold on, there’s something to learn here.” There’s something to bring in because as nice as a team meeting might be in these new ways of working, they are not there to fulfill all your needs that haven’t been met since your childhood, to make it very bold.

So I was wondering, but then what are the practices? How do we meet each other as human beings and not have power over, but keep away from that every team meeting becomes a therapy session? Because that’s not the point, that’s not the purpose. But where is that line that we need to find together? There’s no book or, as we said last week, there’s no tattoo yet on how to do this.

It’s a new thing that we are opening, a new body of work that needs to be developed. It’s nice to see that many people are actually interested, especially people who are consultants or facilitators, or who start their own business and want to bring in another culture and start in a good way from scratch.

But what does that mean? Even, I think, like the ones who initiate, who have a certain more power, the source people of an organization—how do you do that and how do you make it participatory and still recognize that there’s a certain risk and deeper involvement from the ones who started it? I mean, there’s tons of questions that we need to look into and find, let’s say, find other practices, other ways of looking at it than we’re used to from the hierarchical structures that we know so well.

Lisa: Yes, I’m listening to you both. Like two things are coming up for me really clearly. One is like, you know, for people listening to this podcast who are maybe exploring or experimenting with new ways of working, and as you said, JD, maybe kind of meeting some internal resistance somehow that they’re sort of unable to locate—like something in me is not doing what I want to do. That there’s a possible source of that in the body and in our embodied responses, right? And that there’s a value in perhaps inquiring into that.

And then what you’re saying, Ria, is also that, I think, a pitfall of experimenting with teal and self-management and things like this is to become unboundaried or to expect that we can suddenly—we’re all suddenly qualified and equipped for everyone to bring their whole self to work and for us to deal with very new and unfamiliar topics and complex themes and power differentials and all sorts of things in our workplaces, which is very ambitious and unreasonable.

So there’s also something about maybe we could talk about sort of like self and then others. So like, how can I as an individual start to become aware of my trauma responses? Or, you know, how can I take responsibility for my state more, become more aware of it? And then perhaps later on we can talk about how can we support others also to do the same, and how can we recognize trauma responses in others. But if we start first with self, maybe that’s a good place to start. What would your—what are you learning about practices that help with that?

Ria: I’m just reminded of actually last night with my partner, a very minor glitch, let’s say, in the communication. At first I was like, “Okay, I’m centered, I can listen, I can let it be.” And then we went to bed and some more sentences came, and suddenly I was like—I flipped. I was triggered and I could—I was moving away, and I was, of course, really conscious, aware of, “Okay, I’m triggered, something has hit me.”

It took me actually a long time to actually figure out in myself like why was I suddenly turning away and grabbing the covers and kind of—I noticed my body was like… And it took me a while to actually find out what was that point there exactly. And then when I found it, I was like, “Oh yeah, I can see how that links with other situations, and I can see how it links with my history and my childhood.” I was like, “Now I can go to sleep.”

Just as a little example. I mean, there’s tons of these in the work environment, especially when there is tension like timing or something needs to be ready, or things don’t work as we planned, or—so many of these little things can trigger us and kind of put us in a response where the body reads it as, “Oh, danger, not safe. Oh, there needs to be a defense.”

The first thing is just to become aware of, “Okay, I’m not in a listening, open, curiosity mode anymore, so something has happened.”

J.D.: Yeah, that’s just because it happened last night, it’s still so fresh.

I’m in awe of how our closest people, right—like my partner as well is the person that most triggers me in my trauma responses. So certainly, you know, looking close around you for who might be your practice partners, so to speak.

And really, the way to speak to your question about how do we develop that awareness is through practice. We’re always practicing something. So throughout our lives, we’re practicing these automatic behaviors that are at an unconscious level. We’ve—our bodies have practiced those responses for decades if we’re adults.

What I love about somatics is that somatics is not pathologizing. It doesn’t say that our trauma response or what we might call a “conditioned tendency” or a “survival shaping” is bad. It’s actually incredibly important that our bodies learned how to take care of our core needs—to keep us safe, to keep us in connection and belonging, to keep us in our dignity. These are really deep, fundamental human needs that our bodies learned as we were growing up in our context, deeply embedded in the context that we were in, how to take care of us.

So we really want to come with reverence and care for those responses when they come up, rather than wanting to fight them.

There are many ways of practicing. Really anything that is bringing your attention below the neck, as we would say. I don’t mean to either prioritize the body over the mind, but to say that they are intimately linked, that they’re part of the same thing.

So when we practice, like in my lineage of somatics, we use a practice called “centering” that comes from the Aikido tradition in Japan. It’s a practice of checking in and attending to these four dimensions of length, width, depth, and then what we would say is at our center, which is our purpose. So are we on our purpose? We can do this in a matter of a few breaths, or you can take 15 minutes to do this practice.

Also aesthetic meditation practice, if it’s a practice that you’re bringing your attention to the body, attending to the breath, attending to sensation—all of these through repetition. It’s really not one right practice, it’s how often you’re doing this practice. It’s how often you’re building the muscle of training your attention to be able to see what’s happening.

The language of trauma is sensation. It’s not something that we can address from the level of thought or cognition, but sensing and feeling how the tissues, how the muscles, how all of our different organs are organizing themselves in response to that perceived threat that Ria talked about.

Through that, through that survival shaping or response, that’s where we can start to learn the way that we return to center. For me, I have this response where it’s like a shell, it’s like a turtle with a shell, and it’s particularly in my width where when I get triggered, I’m just like—and my breath gets short and tight, my eyes get big and frozen, and it’s like I can’t say anything. So it’s really like this freeze response with a little bit of kind of dissociation where I come out of my feeling body and up into my head, which is a really common response for people socialized in the West where we prioritize our minds.

I come up into my head and I’m strategizing like, “What’s the right thing to say? What’s the right thing to do?” And that gets me in a lot of trouble. That response, when I’m not actually under threat, when I actually need to be able to collaborate with somebody like my partner or somebody in a work setting, like I’m consulting and a client has just triggered me—it’s not helpful in that moment to do that response.

But through practice, I could learn to recognize that it’s happened and then realize, “Oh, I need to come out in my width, I need to soften and deepen my breath, let my eye band soften, and relax my jaw, soften.” So there are these kind of usual suspects that each of us can find to start to notice where we develop more choice for ourselves.

Lisa: Interesting. I think I have a similar response to you, JD. I definitely freeze, I withdraw, and I think for a long time I was quite judgmental of people who had sort of the opposite response—people who would sort of flare up or people who would flee, you know, who would leave a call and be like, “Nope, we’re not talking about this.” I would be judgmental of that.

I think you’re right—in the West, JD, was socialized—I think also as a woman, we’re socialized to be polite and cautious and sort of, you know, even-tempered. For a long time, I thought my response was good, but in my body, you know, I’m repressing a lot of things and I’m kind of self-criticizing a lot of things. Ignoring it does not make it go away, and I also learned that, you know, it has a cost on your health, on your well-being, and also on your connection with other people.

Ria: Because you break the connection when you’re in that…

If you look through the trauma or the trauma responses lens, and if you look at any—I did quite some projects in the European Commission, and if you just look at the work culture, there were, let’s say, weekly unit meetings with over 20 people. But basically they are either fighting—like arguments, strategy, “No, I think this, that kind of verbal…”

Very polite, very polite. Nobody would shout or anything. Or the fleeing, like, “Oh, I look at my phone, I do my emails, I’m not even engaged.” It looks like normal office habits, but it’s actually now I know more about trauma responses. There’s several of these in it because nobody will really find—I mean, physically in office, hardly anymore. But there’s so much subtlety in there.

If you start looking at it’s like, where can people just be themselves without that kind of response? Or even expected that you can argument and that you can fight with words, and kind of that kind of “war of ideas,” which I’m not good at at all, and I don’t like personally, but some people are really very good at it.

It’s really nice what you said—like you miss out on the connection because there’s another part of your brain that has seen some danger, and either you fight or you flee in whatever format. But the connection, the curiosity, and especially the innovation, the creativity is not there. That’s, I think, something to be really mindful of.

For new ideas, which we all want in our new organizations, or faced with all these complex, wicked problems in the world—like real innovation is only possible when we are engaged with one another in a very humane, social engagement way, and we look at each other and we can smile and all that.

I think it’s really important. That part is what makes it also important to be trauma-informed, to understand, “Hey, I’m not really present,” or “Hey, are you off a bit?” or “How can we bring you back?” or “What is needed?”

J.D.: Yeah, yeah. I think a big piece there is just that in addition to this mind-body split, there was also this individual-collective split that happened in our culture, where we started to really focus—again, in westernized cultures—around the individual as the important node, right? And we should be able to regulate ourselves is kind of the narrative that has come up.

To name that that’s really a huge source of stress and a huge source of trauma is when we are made to feel alone, made to feel isolated. That in addition to threats to safety, are threats to connection and belonging. Also trigger that same trauma response or can lead to a trauma staying in the tissues.

The way that we come back from that, it can’t only be us learning to regulate ourselves, which again, that’s kind of like the narrative, and I want to make sure that that’s not the message. Co-regulation, right, is what we talk about, and in a lot of polyvagal theory is social engagement is what brings us back—when we can regulate our bodies off of another body.

The soma, which really just refers to the body and its wholeness, the whole living body including the mind, including relationship—is learning off of and regulating off of the somas that are around us.

So in the context of work, when someone has that trauma response and then they become this pariah, or like, “Oh, we need to shut that down,” or “That person needs to go away and deal with their response themselves,” like, “We can’t be taken away from our work to deal with that.” That just sends that person even more deeply into that narrative of isolation versus, I think, what we’re looking at inside of trauma-informed collaboration is: what is appropriate? What is the boundary for work where we can offer that container of safety for people to regulate with other people without doing deep trauma healing work or without doing therapy?

So bringing someone back from a trauma response and then noticing, is that something that’s within our capacity to continue to hold? Or does this person need to seek support somewhere else also? Or maybe they do need to take a break, but not from a place of “You’re a problem, you need to fix it,” again, that “Okay, trauma responses are taking care of us, they’re deeply informed in our nervous systems to take care of us.”

Ria: And let me add to that, JD. I think even space to “Here’s where I’m at, feel free not to join me. Feel free to articulate that you think I’m an idiot,” using stronger words than that. Just this real letting people be what they want to be, even if it’s at odds with the vision and the dream.

Lisa: This idea of co-regulation and staying in connection has been really profound for me because I was brought up to solve things myself, to, you know, that I should, that I needed to figure things out on my own. It’s only really recently, like in the last year, that I’ve started sort of daring to share what’s going on with me. Everything inside me is saying, “That’s nothing to do with anyone else, no one cares, Lisa, that’s not work, that’s not relevant.”

But I noticed time and time again, when I say something about what’s going on: “Oh, I have an interpretation that you think that that was a stupid question. And now, if I can’t—I have all this noise going on in my head and my heart’s beating really fast, and I just wanted to know that’s happening with me.” And then, you know, my colleagues just sort of listen and say, “Is there anything you need from me?” And often it’s not a drama, it’s just naming something.

I’m learning how rich that is for creating trust, for creating collaboration. It takes care of something for me, the group learns something. I think this is something really valuable.

I wonder if you could share some examples or some practices which—you know, as you said, we’re not talking about therapy in a group, but when you notice, like, what are some examples of trauma responses that we might see in a meeting, for example, in a group setting? And what are some possibilities of how we might engage with that, how we might try to co-regulate together, or see what’s within our capacity to work with?

Ria: For me, one example comes to mind. It was maybe not in a regular team meeting, but this is a team that goes on retreats, like every half year, like many of the new teams do. There was one person in the team that became like a scapegoat. Everybody was complaining, and like, really, everybody. I was invited into that retreat, although I was not a member of the team.

I was like, “Oh, this is not good.” Even, let’s say, the hierarchy or the initiator was like—everybody was looking at this person. What we did—it was a retreat after all, we had time—and I invited everybody to share like, “What are the patterns of your family that you bring to work? Like patterns of behavior that you know are not really helpful or collaborative, or not creative, but that you realize you bring and that you want to change.”

So everybody had shared their stories, which kind of took away from the one person who was the problem because everybody had something. It was a really deep, deep sharing. I don’t know, it was kind of magic because the so-called problem person, after he shared and after the circle concluded, he said, “I think I better move on and go away from this team.” It was all solved kind of instead of being like conflict that nobody wanted—the conflict, but it was all hidden and not in the open.

This is like maybe a dramatic example that came to mind, and it’s actually, I think, a good practice for everyone to know if you’re working together for a longer time. Like, what are the patterns that you realize you have, and that might limit the collaboration or the creativity? So it might be a practice.

J.D.: Yeah, and I think one of the catalysts, there’s something in that around circle practice, which Ria and I both come from—hosting and holding a lot of circles. I’m just thinking about the almost architecture of that circle—the way that if something is coming up, a circle can hold it where each of us are given a chance to speak, right? It’s not the other architecture where one person has this response come up and then everyone’s just pointing at that. It’s like this kind of uneven distribution of energy that is really difficult to kind of, again, regulate from.

There is something about just inviting around—inviting a question and inviting everyone to speak to it and instead of going back and forth, just speaking into the center is a really powerful practice that we use a lot.

I think in terms of responses in meetings, as you were asking, it’s really when are we contracted and when are we numb? So really looking for—has someone gone from, particularly in breath, do they feel subtle and connected to the ground? What’s happening in their eyes? There are sort of these places that you can look to see: is life moving? Is energy flowing? Is it this wave of feeling that’s natural—breathing in, breathing out?

When we’re in a trauma response, one of the first things that happens is we go into that contraction, and it affects the breath, it affects all of these different bands in our body that are there to help us—that they know how to help us. So we’re looking at contraction, we’re looking at numbness, we’re looking at constriction of energy.

There’s these three patterns that come up that we’ve kind of touched on already, but they’re really “moving against.” So you can feel if someone’s trauma response or survival shaping has them moving against something, and it often feels like they’re moving forward. There’s kind of this clenching—you might see it in the fists, you might see it in the eyes, the jaw.

So that response where it’s very animal—animals know how to do this too. So we can just sense—it’s that lion, it’s that bear, it’s that kind of “against” response to take care of things.

And then there’s an “away” response too, which is like—it might be leaning back a little bit, it might be not saying very much. Even if we’re not actually leaving the room, we can be here and still be in an “away” response of making ourselves smaller, trying not to be seen. You could just see that someone’s attention is not present in their eyes—like, “Oh, this person’s body is there, but they’re actually not.” And we can really read that from someone.

And then the third response that we haven’t really talked about as much is a “towards” response, which is actually also kind of vacating ourselves and our own needs in order to move towards that pressure—to take care of it. Which we see dogs do this, right? Like showing our jugular vein and showing “I’m not a threat. Let me help you, let me take care of you, let me soothe.” Or “fawn” is another word for it.

That’s another one that’s very particularly socialized female in our culture—“Oh, I can’t get away and I can’t fight,” so there’s also this third, very intelligent, very adaptive response that tries to subdue whatever that pressure is.

That again shows up a lot at work. I worked for a decade in hospitality in bars and restaurants, and there’s a deep “towards” response and also, I think, a co-dependence that shows up there of transcending our own healthy boundaries and entering into another person to try to understand and take care of their world—where we lose ourself and our needs. Over time, that can really cause problems.

Lisa: Wow, that third one—I haven’t heard that before, and it’s just like light bulb moment in my head.

I was gonna share with you both an instance of where I now I’m pretty sure I was in a trauma response, and maybe to get your input on what I could have done differently, or how we could see it through a trauma-informed lens.

It was a situation where a colleague and I decided to compassionately uninvite someone to a group call because of a mistake that we’d made inviting them to something that no longer made sense for the purpose of the call. And the person didn’t get the email that we sent because it was a bit last minute, and so they showed up in Zoom to this call, and we were like, “Uh oh, they didn’t get the email, we need to talk to them.”

So I went into a breakout room with this person and explained the situation and apologized because I could see that they had not got the message. They were, you know, surprised. I interpreted their feelings as you know, that they felt a bit rejected, a bit confused—like, “Why am I being excluded? Is there some agenda going on? What’s happening?”

I got taken over by this urge to take care of this person, and I became like panicked and desperate. This person wanted to leave. I think they kept saying, “You know, I’m fine, you don’t need to take care of me. I’m a bit disappointed, but I’m okay, I’m going to go now.” And I kept saying, “No, no, please let me let me explain. I can really see that you’re upset.” I tried to do—I was like, “Let me listen, let me mirror, let me do all of my tools in my toolbox.” I so wanted to take care of them, for them to be okay, and also, if I’m honest, I wanted them to know I’m not a bad person, I made a mistake, and I’m sorry—please don’t hate me.

So I went into this, you know, thing. I really was like possessed by this. And after they left, eventually I let them leave. I went back to this call, and of course I wasn’t present at all. I was trying to continue to facilitate, but my body was just like on fire. My heart’s racing, cortisol flowing through my veins, it was just like—oh my, it was like my ears were ringing, my face was hot. So I had very clear signals like, “Whoa, something happened there, what was that about?”

So what would your take on that be from a kind of trauma-informed lens, and what what could I—what could I have done differently in that situation?

Ria: Yeah, it always starts with, are you aware in the moment? Like, if you notice after the person said, “I’m fine,” for the second time or so, are you aware that, like, “Oh, something must be going on in me.”

But of course, that reflexivity—like being aware in the moment, that’s why we need to practice, because we are not trained to do that. Maybe you can do it afterwards, like now. Like, “Oh my God, I had all these signals in my body.” As you say, it was possessed—you were triggered into that’s what you need to do.

Any practice that brings you some more awareness on what’s happening in your body is a good practice. I mean, what JD said, but also there’s so many others—could be dancing, it could be walking every day—I mean, the list is endless to get more connected with how do you actually feel in your body, the subtle signals, “Am I still open?” “No, I’m not actually.” “I’m kind of…”

I had this at the beginning when I did my first psychotherapy sessions, and I was always leaning towards the client, like literally. And then I realized—“Ria, go back into your seat,” and 10 minutes later I would be back. So I had to train myself, practice again and again, like “I can listen and share and be compassionate and whatever while I lean against the chair” instead of always trying to help.

So that’s just one little example. When I say a lot is, when you know this afterwards, that you were not present, you can always say “sorry” afterwards. Like, “Sorry, I was somewhere else, I wasn’t with you.” So and you will notice that the time where you can notice that will become shorter and shorter as your practice.

I have clients who say, “Oh, one week later I realized that wasn’t…”

J.D.: Yeah, just one little response. I would just add into that—you already were mentioning some of those signals, right? Like the heat you could feel in your chest, right? So that’s that sensation that’s coming up and telling you that you’re gripped and that you’re in that response.

What I would say is we always want to really get deeply curious about what that’s taking care of. So I would put back to you, inside of these three core needs that we have around safety—so like emotional, relational, material, psychological, spiritual safety—belonging connection, right? Being with others. We’re pack animals, so we really deeply need to be with others and be belonged. And then dignity, which is our inherent worth, our inherent significance, making a contribution.

Is there one of those three that you think was the need that was at stake in that moment?

Lisa: Yeah, I think it was the belonging one. That’s often the one that drives me, I think, is that a deep fear of being rejected, being found out—you know, that sort of imposter syndrome, “Oh no, they’re gonna get that I’m a fraud,” or “I don’t belong,” or “I’m not good enough.” So I think I really—they wanted to make things right again with this person so that she wouldn’t reject me, so that we would—so I could still belong, so that she could belong. But mainly, I think that was the need I was trying to take care of.

J.D.: Yeah. In addition to having building that awareness like Ria was saying, there’s also this powerful move we can make of dignifying that response.

So when we recognize that it’s come up, maybe that’s the first step. The second piece here is really like, “Thank you for trying to take care of me.” So feeling that heat in your chest, feeling whatever else is coming up—once we can become aware of that, we can say, “Oh, my body is trying to take care of me in this moment. Thank you so much.”

There’s also practices we can do every day that help build that capacity to, to what we would say, blend with that response—to support it, to say, “Yes, thank you, I see you doing your work.” And over time, we can also learn to let that contraction soften and let it go, so that either when it comes up, it can more quickly release itself, or that it starts to learn that it doesn’t have to be the solution in that moment.

Those responses—we’re not trying to root them out and get rid of them forever, and the goal is not to never be triggered. That’s just not going to happen. These are part of us, right? Against, away, towards, all of these—fight, flight, freeze, appease, disassociate—they’re in our biology, so they’re never going to go away. But it’s how are we with them when they come up? And then really dignifying them, blending with them, and that opens up this possibility for a different choice.

So I wonder, given all of that, like in that moment, if you were able to or could say to that heat, that “towards” that’s taking care of connection and belonging, if you could have held that, dignified that—is there another choice that you would see in that moment?

Lisa: Thank you. First of all, both of you, this is wonderful. It’s like free coaching that I’m getting here!

I did try in the moment—I did try to say something to her about like, “I’m just noticing that I’m feeling this and I’m needing to…” But it was a bit half-hearted, and I think you’re… I think it stems from listening to you, actually, that I was not dignifying it. I was aware of it, but I was sort of judging it, you know, ashamed of it, “should not happen.”

Ria: Exactly, like sort of sharing it in a way of like, “Oh, this is embarrassing,” instead of honoring it and listening to it.

Lisa: So that’s really valuable, actually. I think that’s something I take away for sure.

Ria: Yeah, I had such a nice example. I was preparing with two ladies, and these ladies are really good friends and have done tons of whatever spiritual, emotional work. In the conversation, one of them got triggered by the other, and they said, “Yeah, but…”

And that—both of them, they really jumped in with, “Wow, this is interesting! What is this?” They were really like uncovering something and opening Pandora’s box, and they dove in head-on. Like, “Oh, maybe from my side is probably this,” and, “Yeah, from my side is that.” I was like, “My God, if we can ever come to such a place, all of us…” Just be curious about what happened here, what in me was contributing, and what in me was picking something up, and just uncovering.

They said after a couple of minutes, “Okay, we will figure it out later, let’s continue with our preparation.” But it was such a nice example. Later on they said, “Oh, we unpacked it, and there were layers of individual, personal, family, systemic.” I mean, if you unpack these things, you’ll learn so much.

But then, of course, you need to be out of that shame, like, “Oh, I’m not supposed to have this, or this is a professional environment, and I can be triggered. And like, come on, we just human beings just stumbling our way to some more consciousness together.” It was such a nice example of—they were immediately like, “Oh, let’s unpack this, this is interesting! What is this?”

Lisa: Really beautiful. I want to come back to something you said, JD, because it really struck me, because I think on the one hand, we can conjure up images of groups where there’s a conflict or there’s a trauma response. You know, one, yes, you described like one person is having a reaction and everyone’s focused attention on them.

But also, I hadn’t realized until I was listening to JD how what we’re kind of missing out on when we have this kind of meeting where people are contracted and numb, which I think, you know, through the paradigm of traditional ways of working, like formal hierarchies and so on, I think many people would look at that and think, “Oh, that’s a normal, functional meeting,” right? Like everyone’s being calm, but that contracted numbness—there’s so much aliveness missing. You know, people aren’t really in connection.

I think so many of our meetings can end up this way, and we can be completely blind to that because that is kind of how we’ve been conditioned, I guess, from school. We become much more separate and individual.

I’m curious to ask, like, you know, if I notice that climate, if I can see that people have sort of contracted or numb, what could I say? What might some invitations be, or how could I perhaps enroll the group in exploring something or talking about that? What would you suggest?

J.D.: Well, I think that it starts from certainly working on ourselves and our own shaping, right? So starting to do that work yourself, with probably the support of somebody in a somatic field or a somatic therapist, or any other kind of embodied work that helps you to do that.

And then your body becomes this invitation to others, so people can see, “Oh wow, Lisa is showing up with so much aliveness.” And again, it’s like at the level that’s below the thinking brain—we can just feel when someone is more contactable, more open for connection, flowing with more creativity. So it becomes something where people just feel, “Oh, I want that! I want to move towards that.”

I also heard you say, sort of like, “Well, what could we talk about?” And it’s like, yeah… [Laughter]

And that’s great, and also the way that we change is through practice. It’s like, what are we practicing? What is an embodied practice that we could be in together? I really feel that that’s a big leap in the culture that we’re in right now, like to invite people in a meeting to just breathe together.

There’s this practice from that I first found in Resmaa Menakem’s book, “My Grandmother’s Hands,” which is an amazing book, of just humming—of just making a tone together for two minutes, and then feeling what’s different in our bodies. I’m amazed that that would be such a radical offering to most work groups to be like, “Let’s hum together for two minutes.” Can you imagine? Can you just think of just what kind of revolt there would be in many groups if you tried to do that?

But that’s what’s needed. I really do think that we need to be in these embodied practices together where we’re feeling each other, and it’s building resilience. It’s collective practices of resilience, which are collective sound, movement, being in creativity together, being in nature together, animals, connection to spirit. These are core resilience-building relationships or activities that we have.

Even just naming spirit or spirituality in the workplace is taboo because we’ve said we need to completely cut that out of what’s rational, or that doesn’t have a place here—that’s too controversial. And that’s also erasing a big part of what it means to be human, is that there’s something more than us. All cultures around the world have always been connected to that, and it’s something that has been rooted out of the workplace.

Ria: What I notice many times—if I ever need to move, let’s say I notice that I’m shut down, and I said, “Sorry, I’m going to move, two minutes of doing some stretching,” even on Zoom, some people just join you. I mean, that doesn’t need to be, “Oh, let’s now all stand up and let’s do this.” But just naming your need. Most of the time, half of the group has the same need.

That’s where that boundary between individual and collective starts to fade if you really pay attention, because it’s not just my need I was voicing—it seems like others have the same need. So if you don’t speak it and you don’t do it, you also hold something back for maybe half of the group or more of the group. So that boundary is also being challenged from how we have learned it, like, “This is me and I need to take care of myself.” But if we do—if you start something, or maybe somebody else does it too, and somebody else starts to sing for a minute, and the whole atmosphere is different after three minutes.

So it’s kind of, as JD points out, it’s like moving through that perceived barrier of “That’s not professional” and “That’s not how we should do it.” But maybe it is the way of the future.

J.D.: I think just bringing mood as well, right? Even if you are—checking in and checking out in your in meetings is, I think, common practice now, but inviting, “What’s your mood as you arrive? What’s in your body? What are you feeling?” That can be—and then, “How are you leaving this meeting?” And making space for that to be a real answer, right?

So we don’t all show up and say—we’re not saying, “Good, I feel good,” like that’s not a mood. And we’re also not saying “tired” because we’re all tired in capitalism, but really, how are we doing? The more that we do that and develop a language for that and a space to be able to share that, it does bring us into our bodies. I think that that’s a powerful practice too.

The last thing that I’ll say too is—just because we haven’t really maybe pointed to it directly—yes, these new practices are needed, and the level of the team or the small group is kind of the site of change that I think we’re focusing on.

“Emergent Strategy” by Adrienne Marie Brown is just a wonderful way into looking at the fractal as the site of change. I’d really recommend that to people. We’re also existing inside of huge systems of institutions, of nation states, of global trade, and these forces of history that is present with us, that’s shaping us, and social norms that we’ve touched on of politeness, of this kind of sanitized culture that doesn’t want to name what’s difficult, or we’re supposed to focus on the deliverable and what’s measurable.

The individual is the most important thing. Those are very, very difficult to change. Those take a lot of time and just huge coalitions of people and movements to shift those things. I think we are in a moment right now—I mean, for me in the North American context, particularly around race, globally around class—that we want to be inside of that context and aware of that context.

So if we are addressing trauma, there are really good reasons why many people are not safe to feel their own aliveness inside of capitalism, inside of white supremacy, inside of patriarchy—that it’s not safe to fully feel ourselves. So that, again, is that reverence for the ways in which we’ve learned to take care of ourselves inside of these large systems that, as individuals, we can’t change them. We can only change them as large collective bodies.

Ria: I would add to that—I used to have some friends who then said, “Yeah, still nothing has changed, this wider system, this paradigm shift.” We need a way bigger timeframe than just the five years we tried in our team, or the 10 years we tried to be in circle practice or in dialogue. These are major dynamics that maybe we have to look over 200 years or who knows.

I always want to stretch people’s timeframe of that kind of evolution because otherwise it looks like, “Yeah, we still haven’t figured it out, and it’s probably not worth the thing.” But overall, consciousness is rising. Trauma was—even when I studied psychology, nobody told me about trauma. I had to do that training myself, and then I can see how, through my informed work, is slowly moving out of the therapy room and into society.

You have to see large dynamics to not get—I would say that—like, “Oh, nothing has happened” or “Nothing changes.”

Lisa: I think that’s really useful to keep in mind. This is—yeah, it’s very deeply ingrained in us.

I also think, you know, the things that both of you have just spoken about are also big factors in why people that I speak to who are experimenting with new ways of working in self-management and so on, why they find it so hard. I think often we misdiagnose—like, “Oh, that means that system doesn’t work, self-management doesn’t work, Teal doesn’t work.”

When I think it’s much more about—and Simon Mont put this really well in an article that he wrote about—that it’s more like when we start practicing new ways of working, and we sort of take away a lot of structures and processes and things that were as limiting as they were supporting, and when we take them away, it’s sort of like, “Whoa, there’s so many things now to kind of rebalance,” and we’re really not trained or practiced in how to deal with them.

I think it’s important to have both compassion and acknowledge our capacity. Like, yeah, this is going to be a learning process, and we need to practice this.

I think a key takeaway for me from this conversation is—I’m kind of amused by how often my questions to you have been through this filter of like thinking intellectually about it, right? “How do we talk about it? What do we think? How can we…?” And a key takeaway for me is like embodied practices, that this is really a learning edge for this movement, I think. There’s so much wisdom in our bodies in terms of why we sometimes are struggling to work together in ways that are more human, more decentralized, that would kind of—something our body’s trying to tell us something about why that’s difficult and how we might look at that in a different way, how we might practice in a different way.

So is there anything that you came to say that haven’t said, or any kind of final words of wisdom you’d like to share with listeners?

Ria: Maybe my small advice would be—get trauma-informed, understand at least the basics of the new science, let’s say the polyvagal theory and what’s related, because I won’t say that it needs to be—like everybody should know, because that’s the only point from where we can really change. You don’t need to dive deep, deep into it, but just what we call in the course, “becoming at ease with it.” Don’t feel ashamed when you feel like, “Oh, that was a trauma response from my side,” or “Oh, I see you’re a bit triggered.” Just that—can we just be at ease with it? I think that’s my advice.

J.D.: There’s so much I want to say. Let me try to… What do I really want to get in here?

I think in just connecting with the person that might be listening to this, that’s looking at new ways of organizing and looking at systems change, that it can be very scary and what we might say “disorganizing” when we start to get into our bodies. Not to come into it with an expectation of comfort—I think that’s another piece of the culture we’re a part of, is that we expect to remain comfortable.

So moving into that place where we’re stretching ourselves and feeling what is here, really looking and finding who is someone that can support us. We can’t change alone. So who is that person or group of people that can be in that longer journey of change with us, where we’re becoming embodied, we’re becoming trauma-informed, really holding that care for ourselves?

I think just the conditions that we’ve placed on acceptance for ourselves and within our groups—like you have to perform to be accepted, that our dignity is conditional—is a really deep narrative in the tissues. So the work that we can do to accept us for who we are—when those responses come up, to accept that—that can become grounding to then be able to feel our longings that are underneath that and to be guided by vision.

We can’t just be looking at what’s right in front of us, just reacting or responding to what’s right in front of us. There’s a fundamental capacity to envision a different way that comes from the body, that comes from—for many of us, it’s that belly center or that heart center where we can feel that there is something more, there is something we want to move towards.

That can be scary if we haven’t listened to that before, if we’ve been fully conditioned out of listening to our intuition or listening to our feelings. So finding your people, finding your people that can support you. Expecting that there won’t be comfort necessarily, that there’s going to be periods of discomfort—that’s the way it should be. And then on the other side, there is a much larger experience of aliveness that can resource us, that can resource other people to be drawn into and invited by that aliveness.

That’s the vision that I am holding, I would say, within this movement of new ways of working, is that we can support it to be fully embodied and not just at the level of systems.

Lisa: Wow, thank you so much. I’ve learned so much from you both, not just in this conversation, but I really consider you both mentors in this, and I think this is such a contribution in the work you’re doing to this movement and beyond. Yeah, I really recommend this trauma-informed collaboration course that you’re hosting, and just thank you so much for sharing what you’re learning with us and for coaching me and for being who you are.

Ria: Thank you.

J.D.: Thank you.