00:00:00 Shawn

The trauma informed approach, while important, is still incomplete and it comes from my own sort of rooted experience in working with young people. All the young men had some form of trauma. I was trained in trauma informed approaches as well. 

Marcus stopped the group and I… because I was having them talk about the worst thing that happened to them every Thursday night at the Community College, where we met. And Marcus said “Doctor G, why do we always have to come here and talk about the worst thing that happened to us? I’m more than my trauma.” 

And when he said that it sparked a sort of… I became curious about the comment, because all the young men agreed with him. And they began to talk about their dreams, and what they hoped for, and it shifted the conversation. And so it was that experience that led me to go back into the research to try to understand some of the shortcomings of trauma-informed approaches. Not that it is… needs to be replaced. It’s incomplete. If the shifting from thinking about the medical model of trauma, thinking about the more holistic environmental ways in which trauma exists in young people’s lives, thinking about it from young people individually experiencing trauma, to thinking about it as collective, as well as its response. And then lastly, thinking about… trauma generally sees young people as broken right? “What happened to you?” And not the assets of young people and asking questions about, “What’s right with you?”

00:01:27 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast, stories of transformation and healing through compassionate inquiry. 

Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and I’d like to welcome author, professor and activist Dr. Shawn Ginwright. It’s such a pleasure to have you with us today.

00:01:57 Shawn
Glad to be here.

00:01:58 Rosemary
Yeah. Your full bio will be included in the show notes, so I’d like to start by sharing just a few key points. You’ve done groundbreaking work in trauma healing and the empowerment of African American youth. Your research has been instrumental in reshaping the discourse surrounding youth development, and you’re considered an innovator, provocateur, and thought leader in the field of education. So from what I shared, your innovation and thought leadership are obvious from the research I’ve done. But I’m curious about why you’re perceived as a provocateur.

00:02:34 Shawn
I don’t know. I think… I think some ideas that I put out into the world that are really grounded in people’s experience may be counter intuitive, may be counter to the ways in which people think about well-being and trauma in communities. So I think the provocateur is probably a result of some of the ideas departing from the mainstream, ideas about what’s really happening.

00:03:02 Rosemary
Yeah, so, a bit of a rebel, in other words.

00:03:05 Shawn
I don’t even know where that term came from, but I’ll take it. I’ll take the term provocateur.

00:03:10 Rosemary
OK, great. That’s very formal. And I’m wondering before we move on, what would you like to add to what I shared about you that, you know, may not be contained in your formal bio? What do you think is important?

00:03:22 Shawn
You know, I… thank you for asking that question, Rosemary. I am a father of two extraordinary young adult children, 26 and 24. I’m the husband of an extraordinary woman for 30 years. I’m a son of William and May Ginwright who are from the South in Florida, Jacksonville, Florida. So my family is… I am not anything without my family, and I think I’ll figure out how to make sure that’s on my bio too.

00:03:54 Rosemary
Yeah, that is really what’s important, isn’t it? 

Shawn:
Yeah. 

Rosemary:
OK, cool. Thank you. So, Shawn, you’re clearly passionate about empowering marginalized youth. I’m really curious, what sparked that passion?

00:04:09 Shawn
Well, I think…  I think a couple of things you when I was a kid, I think I always for some reason, you know, I always saw myself giving young people voice. I remember as a child kind of growing up in a household, where kids don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. So I think I’ve always had a sense that I wanted to create opportunities for young people to have voice in … and a say in their lives and in their schools. I think as they got older in college, I’ve told this story before. I was working with a student that was at a turning point in his life. He was, I think he was maybe 1516 years old. His name was Michael Barnett, and I was gonna take him on a college tour to my College at San Diego State, and he didn’t show up. But when I came back the next week to the school where I was working to ask where he… why he didn’t show up, his friends told me that he had gotten shot and killed over the weekend. And I think it was that moment where I decided, wow, at a moment where I thought I could have an influence on this young boy, this young man, he was gone. And so I think at that time I was really struggling with, ‘What am I going to do with my career, my life, to actually have an impact so this doesn’t happen again?’ So I think that was a significant influence on shaping my… my thinking about my work and my contribution.

00:05:37 Rosemary
Yeah, that must have been so shocking.

00:05:40 Shawn
Oh yeah, it changed me. Some things you can’t come back from.

00:05:43 Rosemary
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. Now, I first came across your work through the article you wrote in 2018 in Medium called The Future of Healing, shifting from trauma informed care to healing centred engagement and being a member of the Compassionate Inquiry community which is all about trauma informed… I was riveted as I read through it. You walked readers, including me, through the short history of, I guess you could say, coordinated responses mounted by researchers, policymakers, philanthropists, and practitioners, to really address the most pressing issues facing America’s youth at various times through history. I’m wondering if you could share some of that progression with our audience, because I found that quite fascinating.

00:06:34 Shawn

Yeah, Well, I think from, you know, I think I wrote about policymakers and stakeholders and youth in the youth space, from time to time, think about young people in waves. Right? 

And I think the first wave was shifting from – young people as problems to be solved – to thinking about them as assets for positive youth development. 

And they’re… more recently, the term trauma informed care as a response to the ways in which young people are exposed to acute experiences of trauma, has caught policymakers and practitioners attention because it did speak to the reality that young people experience in communities. 

Young people experience various forms of trauma and the trauma-informed approach, while important, is still incomplete, and I talk about its incompleteness and it comes from my own sort of rooted experience in working with young people. I was trained in trauma-informed approaches as well. And one night during a… I write right about this in the article, Marcus and… they all had all the young men had some form of trauma. And one of them, Marcus, stopped the group and I because I was having them talk about the worst thing that happened to them every Thursday night at the Community College where we met. And Marcus said, “Doctor G, why do we always have to come here and talk about the worst thing that happened to us? I’m more than my trauma.” And when he said that it sparked a sort of… I became curious about the comment because all the young men agreed with him. And they began to talk about their dreams, and what they hoped for, and it shifted the conversation. And so it was that experience that led me to go back into the research to try to understand some of the shortcomings of trauma-informed approaches. Not that it is… needs to be replaced. It’s necessary, but it’s incomplete. If the shifting from thinking about the medical model of trauma, from thinking about the more holistic environmental ways in which trauma exists in young people’s lives, thinking about it from individual people, young people individually experiencing trauma, to thinking about it as collective as well as its response. And then lastly, thinking about… trauma generally sees young people as broken, right? What happened to you and not the assets of young people and asking questions about, “What’s right with you?” And there are a number of ways that I try to depart from our conventional notions of trauma that are really rooted in the experience of young people.

00:09:04 Rosemary
Yeah, so it’s really reality based. But to those who like to go buy the book, hence The Provocateur, that makes sense.

00:09:12 Shawn
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:09:14 Rosemary
And it’s interesting because you really were leading the wave with… this is back in 2018 and now everybody’s on board. I’m thinking back to a conversation. We had a conversation with someone who had done a lot of youth work in the north of Ireland, and he shared a similar experience with a group of young men who came and gathered and they came from continually ongoingly traumatizing backgrounds. They were serving in a juvenile detention centre and this was part of the condition of their juvenile detention. They had to attend these groups and similar things came up. But it’s amazing that you were so far ahead of the curve. Now we’ve got Thomas Hubl educating the world about collective trauma. There’s a lot of talk about generational trauma. There’s so many different facets. And I’m curious, what did you see specifically, that limited the trauma informed care model? 

We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate inquiry community. Stay with us, we’ll be right back.

00:10:20 Kevin

If you’re a current Compassionate Inquiry professional, training program participant or graduate, you’re invited to CI’s Experiential Intensive Retreat in the North of Ireland from September the 8th to the 12th. Deepen your personal and community connections in the beautiful natural settings of Corrymeela, with beautiful views over the Irish Sea. Rest, reflect and partake in workshops, CI body- and nature-based practice sessions plus delightful evening community celebrations with home cooked meals, Irish music and dancing. Tap the link in the show notes to learn more.

Rosemary:
…what did you see specifically, that limited the trauma informed care model? 

00:11:02 Shawn
I think the thing that struck me most is the trauma-informed approach was largely about responses to symptoms from exposure to trauma. That is, how do we support young people and understand how they were harmed as a result of their current behavior, their anxiety, their anger issues, the string of behaviors. And so I think that the link between the experience and existing behaviors, while important, doesn’t capture the completeness of young people’s experience. That is, I could still experience trauma, and yet I could still dream about my future. I could still experience trauma, yet I still feel whole when I’m in community. I still experience trauma, yet I feel I could still think about and engage in prosocial activities. So the entirety of my trauma doesn’t define me. That’s the piece right there… and that we can… and then we could actually use the other assets as an important treatment response.

00:12:12 Rosemary
Yeah, because if I understand correctly, the existing trauma-informed approach was constraining…

Shawn:
Yeah,

Rosemary:
…people from having big dreams, from seeing themselves as more. It’s almost… it would almost have the same effect that having a medical diagnosis. It’s like you get taken over by the diagnosis and it cuts out all other possibilities.

00:12:35 Shawn
Yeah. And we know from research, you know, and Hope Theory and Snyder’s work, that the ability for young people to see themselves in a possible future, and not just young people, even adults, when you could see yourself in a possible future, that contributes to a sense of control and a sense of agency and a sense of optimism. So these are not just wishful thinking about dreaming, right? They’re based in both evidence and lived experience, the healing centred engagement, which I named intentionally, again, looking at phrases that build from trauma informed care. And I used the term engagement because care connotes a medical response that I’m treating this thing, this patient, where engagement means we have a relationship, right? And it is that relationship that can contribute to the well-being of young people.

00:13:30 Rosemary
Yeah. I’d like to share a quote from your article that I think really speaks to this, where you say, “A healing centred approach to addressing trauma requires a different question that moves beyond what happened to you to what’s right with you.” And I know Gabor Mate asks what happened to you often? So this is a really interesting shift. And the quote continues, “it views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than victims of traumatic events.” Yeah. And it’s interesting too, because if you put aside the medical and psychological models and go into the psycho-spiritual, there are huge benefits when you enter that realm of not being constrained in how we think.

00:14:15 Shawn
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and again, the medical models… people have always, they kind of read the article and they say ‘We’re not using trauma informed-approaches anymore. We’re going to shift to healing-centered. And I’m and, that’s fine. But the trauma-informed approaches, I’m not saying abandon them, even though the article says shifting from trauma-informed to healing-centred. What I’m really saying is that a more complete holistic approach will blend those two together, that we could build on trauma informed approaches and also use a healing centred approach which really focuses on cultivating the well-being of young people by seeing them as agents in their own sort of healing process. And the term healing, people actually don’t push me a lot on, right, because people just assume ‘we know what healing is.’ But healing, I think people think healing is the outcome and healing is not really the outcome. Healing, which is the restoration of well-being. Healing is the pathway to well-being, right? It is not the destination. The destination is to be holistically well, and healing is the path that we get there. And so it’s slightly different from treating or treatment of pathology, behavioral pathology. It’s assuming that we can actually build from the assets of young people.

00:15:34 Rosemary
Yeah, thank you for that. So with healing… your approach, so we’ve got trauma informed and healing-centred. It’s not either or, it’s yes, and…

00:15:47 Shawn
Absolute. Absolutely. And they can both coexist. They can both coexist with each other.

00:15:51 Rosemary
Yeah, that makes sense. I’d like to add just another quote. You also said,”Healing centred engagement is explicitly political rather than clinical.” I was intrigued by that. I wonder if you could say a bit more about it.

00:16:07 Shawn
Yeah. Again, I’m making – maybe this is Rosemary. One of those provocative distinctions, right? That most of the time when we think about treating or responding to some mental health issue or behavioral health issue, it’s largely seen through a medical lens, which is, we can address the pain with therapy, counseling, some form of treatment And the political essentially means two things. One, it means that we understand that that trauma is not accidental or trauma is not a sort of, it doesn’t just sort of like occur in happenstance, right? And we say this because we could look at the research and we understand that trauma and trauma exposure is more present in low income, disenfranchised, disinvested communities. So then understanding that, it means that we can think about trauma in a political way, that it doesn’t affect just individuals. You could actually study and understand and treat trauma at zip code levels or at census track levels or neighborhood levels, right? Because the exposure to that is still present. And then it’s also political because it says you have a right to be well, you know, you have a right for systems, and you have a right, that your well-being is a right that needs to be supported by the systems that young people are engaged in. And so both of those things together is what I mean by political.

00:17:38 Rosemary
Yeah, I appreciate you expanding on that. Right now, the timing is such that there is a screening of The Eternal Song by Science and Nonduality, which digs into Indigenous trauma around the world and what they have shared so far… because it’s a movie screening wrapped in a number of Zoom conversations with people who participated in the movie from various Indigenous communities around the world. And all of the elements that you just mentioned have been brought up in some way, either in the movie or in the conversations. So it’s very timely. And I’m wondering, could you share some stories or examples of the trauma informed approach as opposed to the healing centred approach? You know something that you’ve witnessed or experienced with the youth that you’ve worked with.

00:18:28 Shawn
There’s a few stories. The one that comes to mind most acutely is in that group of young men I was working with. They all had various forms of trauma exposure. And again, every Wednesday or Thursday, we would meet and we would talk about the worst thing. And then after Marcus said, “Why do we have to talk about the worst thing that happened to me?  I want to talk about my dreams, I want to open up a clothing store.” And they all start talking about, I wanna be.. I wanna open up my own jewelry store. And they all went, and it got to this one young man whose name was John, and John was high in the circle. He was like, he was just high, right? He came to the thing and he was, he had done some drugs. And so he was there and he was like, man, I don’t really want to, I don’t wanna open up no business, man. I just… what I really want to do, man. I really want to be a firefighter and I wanna have a family. And so everybody kind of laughed at John because he was like, oh, I mean, you can’t be a firefighter. You can’t be high. And… but we allowed for John to talk about his dreams. And after that we began to continue to talk about what they hoped for, what they dreamed for their life, but it didn’t really change much for John. 

After the group had ended, and I had given all the young men my phone number. So from time to time I would get a text message. And so about two years later, I hadn’t heard from John at all. And about two years later, I got a text message  when I was in a taxi, and it was from John. He said, Doctor G, how you doing? I said, I’m doing great, John, how are you doing? I haven’t heard from you in quite some time. And he said, I’m doing great. And then, you know, when the text messages go … it was doing that for a long time, I thought he was texting a lot, right. I was waiting, I was in a taxi, and the next thing that showed up on my phone was a picture of him in an Oakland firefighters uniform, holding his child with his wife. It was amazing. Yeah. And so I saw him actually not long after that, you know, the fire truck was right in front of the Starbucks not far from my home. And he said, Doctor G man, you know, I get emotional thinking about it. He said, man, are you still doing that group? Cause that stuff works. 

I love that story because it shows you how, even if it’s one light that can shift as a result of a possible future of a dream, right, that you create the pathways. Turns out that it wasn’t just a dream. It was that he got involved in a program that was focused on formerly incarcerated young men to become a paramedic. And so he went through that program. They gave him housing, they gave him food, they gave him… He got through that program. He studied, He was a paramedic for a while and then he was recruited by the Oakland Fire Department. So it was… it wasn’t just a function of good public policy as well a sense of agency coming together that created them.

00:21:21 Rosemary
Yeah, and he went for that dream because of that sense of agency. Yeah. Beautiful. That’s a wonderful testimonial really, to the work that you’ve done.

00:21:31 Shawn
Yeah, I love that story. I wish I could show listeners the picture of John.

00:21:35 Rosemary
Yeah.

00:21:36 Shawn
You have to see that later I guess.

00:21:38 Rosemary
Actually, if you could send it, I’d love to include it in the show notes. It would be lovely to share. Yeah. I wonder, given how you’ve been working in a very grassroots manner, have you identified any other blind spots in our approaches to supporting young people experiencing trauma?

00:21:57 Shawn
I think the biggest one that I have been writing about, and I have a new book. It’s not new anymore, but, The Four Pivots, Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, and the gap, I think in the field is the idea that we could treat and respond to trauma, or that we could actually create well-being, without actually being, well, ourselves. And I think it’s a mythology that, it’s again, as a medical model, you are the provider, this is the patient. But in a healing centred process, we also have to understand that our own well-being, our own sense of agency, our own sense of hope facilitates that, and others. And so the gap that I try to articulate in my work, and then also in the book, The Four Pivots, is that we have work to do as adults. We have work to do as providers, We have work to do as youth advocates. And that we can’t assume that we don’t need to achieve some levels or some practices of our own well-being. That we can actually be broken, we can actually be hurting, we can actually be traumatized, yet show up in powerful ways for young people. That’s mythology. So we have to close that gap and look at the sort of well-being of the youth development workforce, look at the well-being of the teaching workforce, and all the adult allies that actually support young people, and try to create those spaces and policies and practices that provide the holistic supports to adults. I think that’s a missing piece in the journal equation and one that I’ve been trying to advocate for.

00:23:44 Rosemary
Yeah, I appreciate that because it has come up in a couple of other interviews. Gabor Maté often speaks about how physicians… the physicians training is one of the most traumatizing experiences out there. And we did have an Irish GP on speaking about.. she stepped away from the medical world for, I think for a couple of years, two to four years. And when she went back, it was immediately apparent how dysregulated everyone in the medical model was, from the receptionists to the physicians to everyone up and down the scale. And yeah, we can talk about therapists as wounded healers. Well, you know, you’ve got to be, to a certain level, healed before you can really be effective in healing others. So thank you so much for making that point. What do you think it will take for that point to be accepted and for things to start shifting?

00:24:38 Shawn
Yeah. You know, I’m starting to see it shift. And I think this is why … I think when you raise the question to youth workers, or those that are working in the youth space, or education space, people already know that there’s something  that they already experience stress, they already experience anxiety that they already see the behavioral mental health issues with their colleagues, right? And so it’s not a huge argument that people have to accept because I think they’re already living it. Folks are already saying, man, I am stressed, right? I go through depression sometimes, you know, I don’t feel I have a sense of agency. I don’t have a sense of power, this sucks. So it’s not a huge argument that you have to make to people. I think it’s already there. So I think what I’ve seen, I’m seeing more advocacy for workforce well-being. I’m seeing people being more vocal about why it’s important. Certainly in the research it’s existed, but I’m starting to see more robust empirical evidence about efforts that support the well-being of adults and what that does for teachers for example, or teacher burnout and so on. So, I’m starting to see it, but it is not at the centre yet. The medical model I think still holds true, but I think people are beginning to question, and it’s not as concrete anymore. I think it’s becoming more malleable, in thinking about the relationship between the providers well-being and the well-being of young people. And we see things like sabbaticals, and I’ve seen a school district provide professional development for teachers to go learn a Wellness practice and bring it back to their school so that it creates a culture and a climate of well-being in the school. And not just like you go off and learn the new way to do some mathematical equation or how to teach history, but it’s about their own development, right? So I’m starting to see more organizations take that up as well as more systems, like school systems take that up as well. And then in my organization, Flourish Agenda, we have a healing centre and engagement certification that actually shows folks how to take the practice and drive that into their organization so that they can think about the support for their organization.

00:27:04 Rosemary
You’re… we’re on the same page. That was my next question. If you can tell us a little bit more about the training.

00:27:10 Shawn
Yeah, this is about maybe six or seven years ago we were receiving a lot of requests to go do training on healing-centred engagement, show us how to do it and there’s only so many ways I could be on. So we decided to create an opportunity where people can learn and do a deep dive on what human centred engagement is and how to do it and as well as be trained in a cohort about taking those practices and applying them into their organizations. And so our healing-centred engagement certification. We’ve trained probably over 2,000 adult allies throughout the country in the past five or six years. And we’ve seen, we’re beginning to see, we’re doing some research about what does that do? How does that translate to the well-being of the adults or of young people. It ultimately is like you still need to focus on the young people. And so we’re starting to see some evidence that young people are reporting having greater trust in the adults that they’re working with. They’re starting to seek more transformative and meaningful relationships. They’re starting to have greater sense of agency and voice and being able to talk and speak about what’s really happening. So all of these things are like, not at the core of academics that we say, but they are, and we know that they are the important prerequisites to academic performance, important prerequisites to academic success. And so we’re starting to see, while we’re not measuring grades, we’re measuring the prerequisites to actually improve academic performance.

00:28:43 Rosemary
Wonderful. That’s amazing. It must be so fulfilling. And I’m curious at the same time, all this good work that you’ve been doing, what some people call the meta crisis, the chaos in the world around us, how do you see that impacting people’s ability to continue healing themselves in order to be those solid influences for the young people they support?

00:29:06 Shawn
Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I think what I am reflecting on is that dramatic change, people use the term unprecedented, right? I think that’s becoming the normal, right? That significant change comes more frequently and more powerfully than we have seen in quite some time. So the question then is, so how do we actually navigate that? I know this sounds like a plug, but the book The Four Pivots, it calls for really 4 pivots in how we think about and what we need to do in terms of our practice. Deep self reflection, right? Really cultivating transformative relationships in our work and in our personal lives. Having a sense of possibility, seeing into the future, a possible future. And then lastly, this pivot from hustle to flow to think that this… I call it an addiction to frenzy that we have. And then how do we begin to slow down, to have simpler lives, to pull back from the frenzy that’s endemic in American capitalist culture?

00:30:13 Rosemary
So pervasive. Yes, we had a guest on not too long ago, a couple months ago, who was a therapist and she was based in LA and the episode title was addicted to Speed and Hustle. Yeah. And she moved to New Mexico and she had to remove herself from that milieu in order to slow down. So It’s definitely baked into our culture. And I’m glad that you spoke about your most recent book. You’ve written five books and the Four Pivots was published in 2022. And it’s described as an activist road map to long term social justice. I love that. And I love the review that Brené Brown wrote. Reading this outrageous book feels like the beginning of a social and personal awakening. I can’t stop thinking about it. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what inspired the writing of this book.

00:31:07 Shawn
Yeah, almost all my career I’ve been spent advocating for change in our society as an activist, as a scholar activist and scholar practitioner. And I’m not sure we’re doing it right. My first experience with that came from a loss of a comrade here in Oakland, where we were doing youth work. He got sick and we were just, we were just grinding. He got sick and you’re like, man, hurry up and get better so you can come back to the community meeting. And then he couldn’t get back to the community meeting, went to the hospital, and we went to visit him and he never came back from the hospital.

00:31:45 Rosemary
Wow.

00:31:46 Shawn
Right, wow. Another friend of mine, we started a school here in Oakland. It was an amazing school and she was an amazing person that was just so dedicated to community. And she was hustling and raising the money and hustling, working with the kids. She got sick and she passed away. And so there’s this way that I had to pause and go, what is it that we’re doing to improve our communities? Is there another way to do this? I actually had my own breakdown. I write about it in the book where I was, I was running my organization, I was trying to complete my doctorate degree at UC Berkeley. I had a new child, so I had to support my kid and my wife. And we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to pay for rent, and all the things, then I had a breakdown. I’m like, there’s got to be another way. 

And so I wrote the book, really for me in some ways, right? What is it that I wanted to know? And so it was really trying to ask myself questions about where does it matter most in how we live our lives in the service of others. And my conclusion is that we could do everything in the world externally and still be bankrupt internally. And it is actually not beneficial to the outside work we do if we do it in a bankrupt way inside. And so again, trying to flip the script so to speak. What is it that we need to do internally? How do we need to be whole? How do we need to heal? How do we need to get ourselves, as Lauryn Hill says, “How you gonna win when you ain’t right within?” That was raised from Lauryn Hill’s work, right? So how do we make that shift and change so that we can actually win in the outside world? And so the book is really pushing… And I’m challenging folks in this book to question their own addictions to frenzy, their own relationships, their own sense of optimism. And it’s a practice. It’s not like… it’s not like I’ve done it. Like I know how to practice these pivots perfectly. No, I, you know, I struggle with frenzy as well. I struggle with blaming others and not doing self reflection first so that it’s a practice, not a perfect recipe.

00:34:11 Rosemary
Yeah, and it seems to all relate to that sense of agency. We, culturally, are very reinforced for going with speed, going with hustle, performing, overworking, overachieving. There’s that point to resist. We get rewarded for that. But I was interviewing Dr Gordon Neufeld in February, and one of the things that came up in our conversation is there’s so much information out there. There are so many experts, so much advice. At some point you’ve just got to throw away the books and trust your intuition, trust yourself, trust that sense of agency. So it sounds as if one of the things that you’ve discovered from losing really good people doing important work is that cultivating that sense of agency, that sense of self trust, that internal connection is one of the things that we’re going to be able to hold onto in this environment of relentless change, if I can put it that way.

00:35:09 Shawn
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I’m at the really early stages of a new book about uncertainty, about the power of uncertainty and who we become when we lean into uncertainty, and who we won’t become should we only have certainty in our lives. And so I think you’re exactly right, that that agency to know that whatever comes, that I may not know what to do, but I have a belief that I’ll get through it, and that once I’m on the other side, that actually is a good thing. So anyway, more to come on that, but…

00:35:47 Rosemary
Oh, I can’t wait. That sounds exciting. And it’s interesting too, because there are certain people, as I mentioned, this Indigenous movie that’s newly published. One other thing that was quite remarkable is that people with these deep rooted traditions, even though they’ve been through unimaginable trauma, they do have their teachings, their approaches. A lot of them have lost their languages, but they do have, they have a core that they can come back to. So for those of us living very much in the modern world, lacking that core, it sounds like that’s something we need to build for ourselves.

00:36:22 Shawn
Yeah. And you know what, I think particularly in communities of colour, we may have gotten far from that, but those cultural practices still exist with black church. How we think about going to cookouts, right? That sense of community, there are elements that I think we don’t think about as critical to our well-being. And so I think that they don’t always have to be manufactured, they’re already present, but to name and lift them up as cultural practices that actually facilitate well-being, I think are really important.

00:36:52 Rosemary
I agree 100%. Now, I wonder, is there anything that you’d like to speak about that I haven’t asked about that you think our listeners in the Compassionate Inquiry community and beyond would benefit from hearing?

00:37:05 Shawn
No, you had some really good questions. I think the only thing I would say is that we don’t get through this journey of life without challenges and difficulties. That’s what it comes with and that hopefully some of my work around what it takes to heal… Actually, that’s the name of a book by Prentis Hemphill you should go and get it go. It’s a good book. What It Takes to Heal – Is that our healing journey is a journey that we all should be on, that we all need to have sustained and deep wells of well-being.

00:37:35 Rosemary
Sounds like we need to become good jugglers too. So for those of us raising children, we have to prioritize our children’s wellness. We’ve got to take care of ourselves. We have to adapt our practices. We have to adapt to change.

00:37:46 Shawn
That’s life

00:37:48 Rosemary
It’s the adventure of life and it’s ever changing. So thank you very much for that. And I will put that book you referenced in the show notes for everybody. So I’d like to invite you to close out our time together by sharing a few words our listeners can reflect on or contemplate that relate to your vision of the future of… and I’m not going to say healing, because we’ve discussed that, the future of human wholeness.

00:38:15 Shawn
Yeah, I’m gonna actually borrow from a colleague that I think is light years ahead of a lot of us. He’s an extraordinary thinker. His name is Reverend Benjamin McBride, and I talk about him in my book. But he says that oftentimes when things happen, we ask ourselves the wrong first question. And that wrong first question is, what should I do or what should we do? And he says that’s the first wrong question. But the first right question is who should we become or who should I become? And he says that because oftentimes we can’t achieve the outcome that should be in the current versions of ourselves, that we have to transform so that we could see something that doesn’t even exist. But the current version of ourselves is largely about the reduction of misery, right? I want to end violence, I want to end trauma, I want to end whatever. But the cultivation and the creation of the new thing is harder to get at in this old version of ourselves. So his question is like, who should I become in this moment? And I think that’s a provocative and challenging way that we should be seeing challenges in this world.

00:39:37 Rosemary
Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much. And it takes us out of the sometimes very internal focus we can get into when we think about our healing, and you know, what we have to do . It expands the picture. Thank you so much for that. Dr Shawn Ginwright, thank you so much for being with us today on the Gifts of Trauma podcast. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you and hear your perspectives and your visions for the future.

00:40:04 Shawn
Rosemary’s it’s been a pleasure and hopefully folks will take something beneficial and improve their sense of well-being.

00:40:12 Rosemary
Thank you so much. 

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