97: FiLiA Meets Louise Godbold

 Sally: So, it's Sally Jackson here, FiLiA Volunteer. And I'm really pleased to be joined today by Louise Godbold, from Echo over in Los Angeles. It's really great to speak to you Louise, hi. 

 Louise: Hello! They’re going to wonder though, why I've got an English accent if I'm from Los Angeles. I fled the rainy shores of England 30 years ago. Got a nice tan to speak for it. But yeah, I actually have spent more of my life in the US now than I did in Europe. Can you imagine? 

 Sally: It’s weird, isn't it, when you kind of get to those stages and you think, oh, “hang on a minute, I've been here longer than I was ever there,” yeah. 

 Louise: Although I still consider myself a Brit, but don't tell anybody.

 Sally: And I bet British people say you have an American accent, and Americans say that you have a British accent. 

 Louise: Well, actually, Americans say that I have an Australian or South African accent, but yes, pretty much. 

 Sally: So tell us a little bit about yourself, Louise. I know that you are Executive Director of Echo Training, which does a huge amount of work around supporting people who've experienced trauma.

 Can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved with that? 

 Louise: Can we have a three hour podcast? It was a circuitous route, but I was working in nonprofit world and I just applied for a job at Echo as a grant writer actually. And my son was 15 at the time, I'm a single Mum, and we were kind of headed on a collision course. And I was just trying to do my best parenting him the way I was parented, the only knew I only way I knew how to parent and it wasn't working.

 So this agency, Echo, was at that time purely around parenting, non-violent parenting, and it was great, all the things that I learned. Completely different paradigm to the way most of us are brought up. But most of us are brought up with, “do as you're told.”

 And there's nothing wrong with, you know, a bit of discipline, but sometimes you sacrifice the connection with your kid for the sake of having them comply with whatever it is you want them to do. And there's a way to set limits, but also maintain that connection with your kid. So this was all very new to me, new to my son as well. He thought an alien had come and snatched my body.

 But the problem was that all of these new skills I'd learned, I really wasn't able to implement them. Because if I got what we call ‘activated’, you know, some people call it ‘triggered’, if I got triggered, I would just go into this white hot rage and end up ranting at my son and, you know, all kinds of not good things following.

 And in 2010 when I joined the agency, there was an article in the New Yorker about adverse childhood experiences. And I read this information about this study that had been done back in 1995, I think, and what it was saying about the long-term impact of trauma on health, mental health, and social issues was staggering.

 But the thing that really caught my attention was the questionnaire that they'd used. The first question was, “did an adult in your household humiliate you, put you down, call you names,” you know, all of the things that had been part of the repertoire of parenting as far as I was concerned, and certainly in school. I mean, most of the way that you discipline in school is through humiliation.

 There's this really horrible thing that they do here in the Los Angeles Unified School District with elementary school children, that you have red, orange, and green zones. And if you are naughty, you have to go up to the front of the class and move yourself out of the green zone into the orange zone, or from the orange zone into the red zone. So what is that other than public humiliation?

 So that question was one of 10 questions, and for every question that you answered, “yes,” you've got a score of one. And then when you added up your ACEs score, they had the correlation of what that would mean later on in life, in terms of things that you wouldn't even think were connected, like heart disease; even when they factored in people who had genetic predisposition, and excluded them.

 Things like, you were more likely to be raped, which was surprising to me because I thought it was circumstantial, you know, you'd ended up in a place where you were trapped or whatever, and that was it. What happened was, I realised that there was so much more going on in my body and in my brain than I realised.

 And this liberation I had found by coming to America where everyone hangs out of their window and shouts abuse at each other, which wasn't the way I was brought up in 1960s England, that had been a liberation for a lot of anger that I had, but I didn't know that all of that anger coursing around your body is actually toxic.

 And all of that agitation, whether it's anxiety, anger, it’s fuelled by stress hormones that eventually do a number on your body and can actually change your brain architecture. So with this new knowledge, I was better able to actually implement the parenting that I wanted to implement, because I could tell when I was going into that survival response and calm myself down.

 And understanding that, no, it was not like lancing a boil, letting all that anger out. It was actually harming me and it was harming my son. That was the beginning of my journey, and just trying to understand trauma, because there's so much information out there now, about what happens to the body and brain, that wasn't included in the original ACEs study, but subsequently, there's so much neurobiology that just makes sense, to me, of the world, of people, of our society, of everything.

 So now my friends say that wherever I look, I find trauma. But it's true, it's true! 67% of us, according to this ACEs study, have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience, and they did that in San Diego, with white middle class college educated people who were coming in for their health checkups.

 So imagine what that looks like if you go and do that survey on Skid Row or in the prisons. And in fact, they did another version of that survey in Minneapolis. Wait, Philadelphia. Philadelphia. And that time they controlled for having a larger sample size of people of colour, and people living in impacted communities, where there was poverty and racism and community violence.

 And then they discovered there was actually 83% of the people had experienced some kind of childhood adversity, otherwise known as trauma. 

 Sally: Yeah, I think it's really interesting cause there’s a kind of common sense truth to this, in that it sort of stands to reason that if some awful things have happened to you as you've been growing up, then that's going to have an effect, and that effect may be immediate or it may take some time before that effect comes out and is shown.

 I think one of the things that we've had some issues with in the UK is ACEs being used almost as a predictor. So kind of, you know, it feels like limiting for children and young people in that what we've been saying to them, or what some of the professionals have been saying is, “well, if you've experienced this, this, and this, your ACE score is… then that means these things are going to you know, are more likely to happen.”

 And that's not how you are using it at all, is it? 

 Louise: Well, it's true, those things are more likely to happen - without intervention. And the intervention can be as simple as me realising, “oh, this is not good, what's happening here is I'm replicating the cycle of trauma in my family.” That's what I mean by intervention. Not a bunch of doctors standing around in white coats and clipboards.

 Sally: And presumably no two children or young people are the same. So just for arguments sake, two children, both of them have experienced domestic abuse.

 Dad’s been violent to Mum, and they've witnessed that. Perhaps Mum's managed to get free, but as a result of that, there's been poverty. And maybe to cope with the trauma that Mum's experienced, Mum’s been drinking a bit more than is healthy.

 So those circumstances being the same for two children, doesn't mean that those two children are going to have the same, not opportunities, but the trauma's going to have exactly the same effect on those two individual children.

 What other things are part and parcel of how that may affect a young person? 

 Louise: Well, we have to talk about resilience. So at Echo, we call all of our trainings ‘Trauma and Resilience’, because otherwise it's like the glass half full argument. And the thing that's tricky with resilience is, I don’t know about England, but over here, there was this movement at some point, maybe five years ago, talking about ‘grit’.

 You know that there were kids who had grit and they were going to make it through. And it really, really annoyed me, because kids from that kind of background that you're talking about, who've come to school and last night witnessed violence in their home, the fact that they're even in school, that's grit, as far as I'm concerned.

 The fact that they're even able to function is grit. So, resilience... There are some factors in personality, obviously, that make a difference, but a lot of it is environmental. One of the things that we know from the work of Dr. Bruce Perry, who's up there, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of trauma experts, the most protective factor for anybody, a child or adult, is a safe, stable, nurturing relationship.

 Relationships really help modify the impact of trauma. In fact, so much so that if a kid goes, for example, through a natural disaster. I'm thinking of Beirut right now, that wasn't exactly natural, but, you know, go through a disaster. If they have a safe, stable, nurturing relationship, it can buffer them from the impact of that trauma.

 That's how we are designed as human beings. We're designed to be cooperative and collaborative, and these relationships actually calm us down. They calm down the nervous system, which is… When you're talking about biology, what happens with trauma is, you get hyper-aroused. you go into a place of, driven by a stress hormones, you go into a place of anxiety, panic, rage et cetera.

 And if that goes on for too long, or if too terrified, it can go the opposite direction where you are numb, depressed, lethargic. And the extreme version of that is dissociative when you completely check out. So that's what's happening biologically, and all driven by the stress hormones, by that override freeze response that I also talked about.

 But the human relationships bring on the part of our nervous system that is our default, rest and digest and relax, called the parasympathetic nervous system. That's definitely majorly turned on by being in a safe relationship. 

 Even being in the same room with someone that you love will start to bring down your heart rate, will start to deepen your breath, will start to produce the oxytocin, the hormone which is all about love and connection and actually drives the parasympathetic nervous system, the ‘calm down’ part of our nervous system. So you cannot understate the importance of relationships.

 Well, but what do you do if you're like me and your boyfriend’s just chucked you, and you're living in Los Angeles, miles and miles away from your family, and it's a pandemic. So… 

 Sally: I mean, that's a huge issue, just thinking currently with the whole of Covid, and the various things that that's meant to people around perhaps losing their income, you know, loved ones being affected, either being ill and you are concerned about them, or those that have lost loved ones.

 And then that added dimension of the isolation really making it difficult because as you so rightly say, what we usually do in times of trauma is come together, isn't it? And within this pandemic, what's happened is we've all been separated. 

 Louise: Yeah, and it really depends on how safe relationships are for you, because for some people who've experienced trauma, where now relationships don't feel safe, actually the forced social isolation is not only just something they're used to, but something that works.

 And I met somebody on my walk in the park, and she was saying that her whole nervous system was so much more regulated with the six feet - what is it in England, two metre - two metre distance. Because she is somebody who does not like somebody being in her personal space.

 And for me, okay, full confession here, I'm not the most social person in the world. My family, if they listen to this, they're dying laughing right now, it’s definitely an understatement. But to me, connecting on the phone, or like this, I actually don't even like Zoom very much, it feels a bit intrusive, but virtual connections can be great because you get all the benefits of the connection, but then you get all the benefits of the control.

 Like you can say, “oh, sorry, I have another call, I got to go,” or whatever it is. So you end up in control, and that that can help make that relationship feel safe. You get what you need, but in a controlled way. 

So, I think for many of us who've experienced trauma, not only are we used to isolation, not only have we found ways around that, getting the connection we need in a way that feels safe for us. But there are very many different coping strategies that we've developed that people who haven't had to deal with these elevated levels of toxic stress in the past, they're lost. 

We've got this, we've got this down. We are used to this. We've found out the things that help calm us down, like that walk in the park I was telling you about. That's brilliant, because walking is bilateral stimulation, which means the two sides of your brain are functioning together. 

And one of the impacts of trauma on the brain is the corpus callosum, which is like a big piece of masking tape that goes down the middle of your brain holding the two sides together, well, that gets thinner, if you've experienced trauma. 

And so anything that you do that is using both sides of your body, and especially crossing over the midline. So you know, your left arm going to the right side of your body or vice versa. That's really helpful for strengthening the corpus callosum, but also the brainstem, which is the survival part of the brain.

 It's like the most primitive part of our brain, and it takes over when we are in positions of threat, or perceived threat, or just our brain has got used to being in a state of threat, that primitive part of the brain is the part of the brain that's formed in utero, and is continuing to be wired up until about the age of two. So it really responds to patterned repetitive input, like walking.

 It's patterned, it's repetitive, and it's very similar to a baby being rocked by their caregiver, and those things help calm down our survival brain. So anything we can do like that is really helpful. And probably, if you've lived with trauma for a long time, you've found those things that help you.

 Sally: It's interesting you should say that because, you know, sadly, trauma, or well, the people living with trauma, is probably a lot more common than most people initially think. So there are lots of people that we'll interact with in all sorts of different ways, that are living with a trauma, and will be coping with that, as you say, using coping strategies that they've developed.

 But I'm wondering, could you tell us a little bit: we often hear about flight or fight, I'm just wondering, you know, how might it manifest in people if they're experiencing trauma? And recognising, from what you've said already, this may be, you know, an immediate reaction to trauma, or it may be someone's experienced trauma some time ago.

 And then I really liked the expression that you used, about being activated rather than triggered. That seems a much better description of what's happening in your body when something comes up. 

 Louise: Yes, we do talk about activated, because when you talk about triggers, that gives all the power to the trigger.

 So, for example, you might find – oh, what am I going to talk about here, I don't want to get too self-exposing here... If you think of any kind of trigger, whatever your trigger is, if you spend your life trying to avoid that trigger, or other people, who are supporting you, spend their whole time trying to help you avoid that trigger, you really have no control over it. You're just playing a defensive game.

 If you think about it in terms of, “this is making my nervous system become activated,” in other words that the stress hormones are running around my body, or I've gone into that opposite extreme, I've completely checked out, it's so much better to be able to figure out how to get your nervous system regulated than to spend your entire life trying to rid yourself of triggers.

 So that's why we talk about being activated. But the survival brain thing is just fascinating to me because, if you think about it this way, and it's too bad we don't have visual, because if you think about the brain as being three parts - of course it's a very complicated organ, so I'm massively oversimplifying, but: if you think about the brain as being in three parts, you've got the primitive part I talked about, the survival brain.

 It's called the reptilian brain because it basically functions in the same way that a reptile does. So eat, sleep, poop, reproduction, regulating body temperature, all of those things, all of those really basic things are taken care of by that primitive brain.

 Then in the higher brain, we have the emotional centre of the brain, which is getting wired up kind of in elementary school age. That's why elementary school kids are all about their mummy, their daddy, their sister, their brother, their dog, their cat, their best friend, my teacher. It's all relational.

 And then the higher part of the brain, which we call the human part of the brain, although other animals have it too, is the neocortex. And that's the thinking brain, that's where we can do abstract things, like language. And then part of that neocortex, a very sophisticated part, is the prefrontal cortex, which is right behind your forehead. And that doesn't even really start getting wired up until you're 15. It can take as long as 30 or maybe 33, in my case, which is when I had my son, which is when I became a grownup very quickly.

 So you have those three parts of the brain, and when you are activated, meaning you actually are in danger, or something has reminded you and you think you're in danger again, or you're just living marinated in that sense of being in danger, the part of your brain that's in control is the survival brain. That makes sense, right?

 Because it actually is the quickest to respond. In primitive times, if you came face-to-face with a bear, you don't want to think about whether I can create a relationship with this bear with my emotional brain. You don't want to think with your abstract brain. “Oh, now I seem to remember about cosines and tangents, and I'm wondering if that angle there would be my best escape route…”

 So you need to react quickly, and you react from your survival brain. And that's where most of us live. And especially now during the pandemic. I mean, you've seen all those stories, I'm sure, from the US of people just losing it in stores when they're asked to put their mask on.

 Just people losing it generally, that person is in survival brain. Because being asked to put your mask on shouldn't really elicit that kind of a response. That person is responding as if you are pointing a gun at them, because for some reason they are so activated, their body is responding as if they are in immediate threat.

 And so they respond by fighting or running away or freezing. And then the other, the fourth potential survival response is, if you are too big, I can't fight you. I can't get away fast enough, cause you are faster than me or I'm trapped, so I can't do flight. There's a response that kicks in, which is freeze, which is like playing possum.

 And actually what happens is your body gets flooded with natural opiates, which means you are basically preparing yourself for pain. So in the terms of that predator animal, your body is very kindly preparing you to be eaten alive. 

I should have given a trigger warning, shouldn't I. Trigger warnings about bears and animal predators.

 So it's fascinating that our bodies and our brains are protecting us in this way. But if none of those options are possible, and I'm thinking now, for example, in domestic violence situations where if you freeze, you do flopsy bunny, or you just become rigid, or you check out completely, and that irritates your abuser, then you have one more option left, which is appease.

 Some people call it befriend cause they want to keep all the F's, you know, fight, flight, freeze, befriend, and some people say fawn, which I don't like because that's kind of obsequious, you know, if you're fawning. Appease just means you are making nice to stay alive. And that's where we see the trauma bonding coming in, because it's not just the survival brain making a split-second decision, which is actually kind of happening subconsciously.

 It's actually a biological response as well, because when they looked at teenage abused girls they discovered, to their great surprise, instead of having higher levels of stress hormone, which is what you would expect, they had higher levels of oxytocin, which is this tend-and-befriend hormone, which you produce when you're safe and you feel relaxed and you're with someone you love.

 So that didn't make any sense. But what we've discovered is that, particularly women, when we are under that kind of threat, so definitely in an interpersonal situation, we produce more oxytocin. So this trauma bonding, like the Stockholm Syndrome it’s sometimes called, it's not because that person's lost their mind or…

 You’re probably very well aware of the statistic that people return to their abusers seven times before leaving, in a domestic violence situation. It's not because that woman's thick. It's not because that victim is weak. It's because there's actually something chemically happening in their body that's produced hormonal bonding.

 Oxytocin is so strong that when we give birth, we are flooded with oxytocin so that we will bond with this screaming infant that's just suddenly been put into our lives and it's going to disrupt our lives considerably. We need a huge shot of that oxytocin. Likewise, when we are breastfeeding, likewise when you orgasm, it's to bond you.

 And so that's what's happened in those trauma bonding situations. 

 Sally: And of course that is reinforced as well by some of the things that society might tell us in situations like that around, you know, “what did you do to upset him, just try harder.” You know, all of those placatory things that helpful, in inverted commas, friends, relatives sometimes will say when someone's experiencing abuse, which just reinforces that whole message, doesn't it?

 Louise: Like, “oh, I should have known he was going to react like that, I shouldn't have caught him when he was tired.” I mean, it's the excuses we also make ourselves. But yes, probably reinforced by the messages we're getting from well-meaning loved ones and society generally.

 Sally: And it reminds me, a wonderful psychologist here in the UK, Dr Jessica Taylor, she recently come out with a book around why women are blamed for everything.

 Louise: Yes.

 Sally: And this really kind of plays to that, how, you know, something is happening, which as you say is, if you like, a kind of a biological response.

 But then society, in inverted commas, will look at blaming the woman for the way she reacts to that, rather than necessarily blaming the perpetrator for putting her in a situation where she, you know, that reaction occurred. 

 Louise: Because as you know, I'm also a Harvey Weinstein survivor, and I think that there was a lot of sympathy.

 The first time that he sexually assaulted me was in New York in the, at that time, Miramax offices. And he trapped me in a room, and I think people have a lot of sympathy for that. But then I had been given assurances that he was, you know, dreadfully sorry, it was complete aberration, blah, blah, blah. And so I met him again in Los Angeles.

 And I was told to meet him at his hotel suite, which, you know, people often hold meetings when they're from out of town, in the living room of their hotel suite. But I learned very quickly not to read comments on stories, because there was a lot of judgment about, “well, why does she go up to his hotel room,” and “why does she go back again if she already knew this guy,” you know, “would not behave himself.”

 So yeah, we do blame women. And you know, I was fortunate in that the second time I had someone waiting for me, a guy waiting for me. And I was able to extricate myself, but the shame that followed after that… So it's the internalised oppression that is the big problem, because I'm a pretty feisty person, I will stand up to anybody, but I can't stand up when myself is split against myself.

 When that shame has become internalised. And the other thing that occurred to me the other day was, when I was starting out in the film industry, I went on lots and lots of meetings. That's how you do it. You meet with tons and tons of people, until something sticks and you actually, you say, “I would really like your help and I'm trying to get started,” and you hope that they will give you some contacts, and maybe one of them will pan out.

 So it's not really like a job interview, but all of those people I met with, they all helped me and the one thing they said was, when I asked, you know, “thank you so much, how can I repay you?” They would say, “pay it forward.”

 So not only was Harvey exploiting people who were coming to him for help, not only was there harm that was done, a basic decent human being would've actually been helping those people. So yes, shame on him for being a perpetrator, but also shame on him for not being like those other people in the film industry who were helping people, young people starting out.

 Sally: And it, you know, again, it just makes me think that, you know, clearly the majority of people do approach relationships, be that in, you know, work life, personal life, and et cetera, in a benevolent and positive way. And so it's no wonder, you know, our experience is, you know, “I've been for this many meetings, it's been helpful.”

 And so you go for another meeting, knowing that this is the way that the world works, you know, within the film industry. So what becomes our norm suddenly becomes really abnormal because of his behaviour, not because of your actions, if that makes sense. 

 Louise: Well, there's another aspect here, and I don’t know why we started talking about Harvey Weinstein, I kind of made it an aim of mine never to have to talk about him again. 

But there is another factor, which is danger cues. And I was sexually abused when I was a child, and part of what that did was really mess up my danger cues because it was a family member. And so suddenly somebody who you are supposed to trust did not protect me and in fact abused me.

 And that sets up some pretty wonky parameters in terms of what's dangerous and what isn't. And what I usually find myself doing is getting in situations that are a bit risky and I'm telling myself, “oh no, this is perfectly normal, no, this is fine, I can handle this.”

 And anybody who didn't have my history probably would've not even gone into that situation in the first place, because my sense is not that you don't, it's not like you're, “la, la, la, la,” and you have no sense whatsoever. It's that you are receiving messages that, “ooh, this is a bit weird,” but you're so used to talking yourself down.

 You're so used to this being your normal, that you're having this fight in your brain about - and actually that is literally what's happening, because the right-hand side of your brain is receiving the sensory input and the spatial input. Like, “ooh, this person's in my space,” or, “ooh, I'm in a room with a closed door, this is suddenly not feeling good.” Or whatever it is.

 And then the left-hand side of your brain, which is the part of your brain that is trying to make meaning, and is trying to go through its memory banks of, “how am I supposed to respond in this social situation?” That's what the left brain is trying to do.

 If your sense of what's normal in relationships and social situations has been formed by a history of abuse, then those memory banks are going to be serving up a very different interpretation of what's happening, to somebody who hasn't been through that.

 And so I distinctly remember being in that hotel room in Los Angeles, and distinctly remember one part of me was like, “oh heck, I got to get out of here.” And the other part of me was like, “well, I suppose he's right that friends give each other massages. That kind of makes sense.”

 And the worst thing is that the left brain - I don’t know if that's actually, frankly, I don’t know if that's naturally or because in our education system, we so favour the left brain - but it is dominant, and so it will actually suppress the information it's getting from the right brain.

 So I should have been out of that hotel room a lot faster than I actually was, if I had been listening to my right side of my brain. But the left side of the brain was still trying to make sense. And that's the interval in which the predator pounces.

 And I have talked to so many Weinstein survivors, and other survivors of sexual assault. I mean, I can't even tell you how many, because a lot of people come to me cause they want to understand about trauma resilience. I don't think I've actually spoken to anyone who does not have a history of childhood sexual abuse. I mean, I know the stats are one in three, but a hundred percent, there's something there, right?

 Because predators like Harvey, I am very sure that he was abused as a child, to become such a monster. I truly believe that he himself was abused. But it can send you both ways, right? It can make you determined that no one else is ever going to suffer that way, and we all become social workers, and executive directors of Echo, and volunteers with FiLiA, et cetera.

 Or it can turn you the other way that you are replicating the cycle of trauma and abuse. And so Harvey had a sixth sense, because of over the hundred people who've come forward, you've never heard a story of, “and then I kicked him in the balls.” You've never heard that story because he didn't select people who would respond that way.

 There was like this sixth sense he had about those that he could intimidate, and this is the sick cycle and dynamic and relationships that are all built around trauma. But going back to what I was saying earlier, our whole world is built on that dynamic. What the heck happened to us as a species?

 Because most of the time people are walking around angry, angry and self-medicating because of their anger, or numb and dissociative and checked out. We are going to see that more and more as this pandemic goes forward. The other morning I got woken up, like 5:30 in the morning, this guy shouting, swearing away.

 It was very scary, cause hearing that kind of anger is scary for me. But I was thinking this is so ubiquitous, this pain and this rage, and so many people are walking around with trauma. Massive overgeneralisation here, men tend to project it outwards in violence, women tend to project it inwards in self-harm or depression.

 We are all so messed up, and if we only understood what was going on, that this is something that was set up in our childhood, probably, although obviously you can have trauma later on in life.

 If we understood how to regulate our nervous systems, if we understood what those thought patterns were, where they were coming from, if we were able to respond to that other person understanding their trauma, if we were to look at our institutions that have institutionalised all of this trauma, and the way that we operate through punishment and rewards, which is all about control and power.

 If we were to understand all of that, I just think we could relieve so much pain, and we could really bring so much more compassion to our relationships and to our relationships with ourself as well.

 Sally: And I think as well, it strikes me, and you separated there the reactions of men and women. And I think as well, it's compounded by the fact that, you know, society is structured in a way that celebrates men for being stoic and strong and sorting things out. And, you know, if he hits you, you hit him harder, and celebrates women for being compassionate and caring and understanding and forgiving.

 So there's this, kind of, like, parameter around our individual life, a structure, which, you know, if we don't take down that patriarchal structure, then we're never going to be able to stop the stereotypical way in which we expect and excuse men's behaviour.

 And also for women, you know, it’s really interesting to me that, as you say, we're not talking about women that are going around shooting the place up, shouting all over the place. And generally you put a group of women together and you tend to get more understanding, more sisterhood, more cooperation, and, sort of, things of problem solving, and, “let's work out how we can do this.”

 And again, just, sort of, thinking about the Covid crisis, when we look at the female leaders and the male leaders and the different approaches they've had, there's something for me around, you know, and obviously as a feminist, just kind of recognising that if we follow these old-fashioned patriarchal structures and patriarchal ways of doing things, we're never going to get out of this.

 But perhaps by doing things differently and taking down that patriarchy, that's the opportunity that we have to be much more caring of each other much, more negotiation with each other, to help both men and women live in a world that's a safer place for all of them. 

 Louise: I agree. I agree a hundred percent with what you're saying. And I also think there's some nuances to what you just said, because first of all, biologically, as I explained… experience oxytocin at childbirth and breastfeeding. So there is that propensity for the tend-and-befriend.

 Not to say that men don't have oxytocin either, and they also have something called vasopressin, which has a similar impact, but there is a little bit of an edge, a biological edge, and of course men have got testosterone, which gives a bit of a biological edge. So, that is the slight nuance there.

 But as you say, the patriarchal model has completely polarised those things. Another thing though is, I've been working with Times Up, I very much respect the work that they're doing. However, I do have pause around one thing, cause I don't believe that… One of their ambitions is 50/50 by 2020 so that there's 50% of the jobs are held by women.

 And absolutely we should have women parity, gender parity, as well as racial parity. Only we can't just do that and expect everything to be better because yes, Harvey physically attacked me, but I would say that the greater harm that I experienced in the film industry was from women, from the emotional abuse of women.

 And what was happening in my mind is that those women were being what they thought a leader in the film industry should be. And they were getting that model from the men. So if men were harsh, they were harsher, if men were cold and callous, they were more cold and callous. But there was also the whole, “if you're a pretty young woman, you're my competition, so I'm going to beat you down.”

 It goes back to trauma because, you know, trauma is fear. And if we are in the fear-driven part of our brain, the survival brain, we are going to respond as if everybody's trying to kill us. And that is not going to create cooperation and collaboration, whether you are female or male.

 So there's a lot of unpicking that we have to do as well. Even things like competitiveness, that's held up as a goal. This is why we have sports days at school. I mean, it's, that's why we have prizes and cups. And I actually got the Marjorie Plum Physics prize when I was at school… to drop that in there.

 But really, unexamined, we are perpetuating that power-over paradigm, right? And so I think it goes deeper than just saying, “well, we need more women in positions of leadership.”

 We need to examine all of those norms that we've inherited, even subconsciously. And I had a real wakeup call around that as a nonprofit leader because I was leading in the way that I thought a leader should lead. And where were my models from? Well, from watching the people around me, my own bosses, and also TV.

 And I thought I had to be decisive and hard-nosed when having to make decisions. And it suited me in some ways because I'm very analytical, I'm very cranial, because that's how I cope with my trauma, is become more abstract in my thinking. I mean, also being British, god forbid, that we should actually look at our emotions. No, no, let's do Sudoku instead, but…

 So I had to learn, almost like an alien, I had to learn about the power of relationships, even in the workplace. And that you can pay people a lot of money, and you can inspire them with the vision. But unless you have relationships with those people, you are not going to have a harmonious workplace. You're not going to have great performing team. You are going to be miserable, they're going to be miserable, and it's going to become adversarial very fast.

 Because their model is that, “bosses exploit me, parents exploit me, authority figures exploit me.” And your model is, “they're going to try and get one over me.”

 So you’re working in this adversarial model, and you have to really peel back, and acknowledge how deep seated some of these values and attitudes are, and challenge yourself and challenge the assumptions and challenge those stories that you have in your head.

 I am not a poster child for that, cause I'm still learning, I'm definitely still learning, but I think that you teach what you most need to know. And so one of the things that we've been doing is putting out infographics, and really that's me just trying to figure things out.

 And the latest infographic that we've been working with is how to create power with organisations, and trying to make that more tangible, and trying to expose what some of those deep-seated thoughts and assumptions are that we really need to examine. Because like I said, otherwise, women have internalised that patriarchal model, which is really a fear-driven model.

 And you know what, I like men. I really like men. I don't think they're horrible. I don't think they're violent. I don't think they're unemotional, mean, whatever. I love my son. I loved my dad. I think they're caught up in this horrible power-over structure too. And that's what we need to dismantle, the power-over structure. 

 Sally: Absolutely. And I could talk to you for ages, it’s so interesting, Lou.

 I'm just thinking going forward then, in schools we need to be talking to young people, not just - I mean, I would say it goes without saying that we need to be doing a lot more around supporting children, young people, adults who've experienced trauma - but we also need to be using that knowledge to then think about how we can better deal with situations when they come up, so that we are hopefully not so traumatised by them.

 Does that make sense? It's not in a way to sort of say you could prevent horrible things from happening to you, but just being perhaps a bit more aware of yourself, and how your body might react because it really, you know, resonates with me what you were saying about how, you know, sometimes you can kind of know that something's going on in your body, but not be quite sure what it is that's going on.

 And perhaps if we could understand that better, we'd be able to listen and hear our bodies more effectively. 

 Louise: We are working in schools and we have an online course, ‘Trauma Informed Compassionate Classrooms,’ that's just about ready to go up online. And when we work in schools, we work first with the teachers.

 Because, you were talking about things going on in your body, we call that soft signs. Those are the warning signs before you go into a full-blown rant or check-out completely or any of the other possible reactions.

 So we can't ask the students to be doing that, to be noticing the soft signs, to be using their emotional regulation skills, if the teachers are not modelling that, because children learn through imitation and they will also learn by how they feel with that teacher. You know the Maya Angelou quote, “they won't remember what you said, they won't remember what you did, they just remember how you, how they made you feel.” I just completely butchered that, but you know what I mean.

 We do also teach about the brain and the nervous system and what is called, you know, the regulation zone or the resiliency zone, which is the zone you want to be in. You don't want to be bumped out, stuck on high, freaking out. You don't want to be bumped out, stuck on low, numb, depressed. You want to keep it in the middle.

 And then you want to expand your regulation zone, because people who’ve experienced trauma have a very small regulation zone. We get knocked out of our zone all the time. So you need to increase that.

 And that's what we're teaching the kids, but you have to start with the teachers. And the problem that we find, and this was before even the pandemic, teachers are so overwhelmed. Here in California there's something called Common Core, which was supposed to raise the standard of the schools, and it just means so much more work for the teachers.

 And they also get fed up because, “trauma informed schools, oh, another mandate. Well, we'll wait it out, you know, we'll give it a year, we'll wait it out, then it'll be something else.” And so they're so overwhelmed that, we start with self-care, and a lot of compassion and empathy, and a lot of reconnecting them to: why did they get into this profession in the first place? It wasn't to be a traffic cop in the in the classroom. It's because they really care about kids. And then we build on that.

 And then, as I said, we do the emotional regulation part, and we also do the knowledge part, which is understanding about the brain, and think ‘using tools’ as well, like classroom meetings, we could begin to create that power-with environment that I was talking about.

 So the teacher will have a classroom meeting, maybe at the beginning of school day, maybe after lunch, because stuff always goes down in the playground during lunch, and it helps children, students begin to be able to have that emotional literacy. And it also helps them understand they're part of a community and it also means they begin to help one another with regulation.

 Because especially children have a hard time with emotional regulation, we're supposed to be co-regulating. Goodness knows, as an adult, if I'm in the presence of somebody whose heart rate rate is nice and slow and steady, whose breathing is nice and slow and steady, and the amygdala, the fear centre of the brain is all regulated, I feel good being around that person. If I'm around someone who's antsy, worried, mad, it's coming off them in waves and it's going to affect me too.

 So we are all co regulators, but with little children, they don't have the higher parts of the brain. Part of that regulation is using your higher brain. And we talked about the prefrontal cortex, that's really important in emotional regulation. That doesn't even start to get wired up until about the age of 15.

 So we as parents, caregivers, teachers need to be the upper brains for the students. And when a child is born, they don't know how to self soothe. By the caregiver, rocking, feeding, singing, cooing, all of those things, that's how the child learns how to self soothe, from how the caregiver has been soothing them. And even, you know, early teens, kids are still needing us to help them self-soothe.

 And one other thing I'll just throw in, cause I know we're probably short of time, but as a parent, trying to do the non-violent parenting, trying to  understand that my son's behaviour was communication, and really trying to look at, “what is he trying to communicate to me,” rather than, “how dare he swear at me,” or whatever it was.

 Also, if you try this out, not to adopt that kind of sing song kind of voice, it's called the prosodic voice, and it works with small children like, “oh my little darling, what's going wrong? Oh my poor baby.” It works with little kids.

 But when my son was 15 and I was trying to do that, “I really understand that what you're trying to tell me from your behaviour is you’re…” 

 Sally: I can imagine how that went down. 

 Louise: One day I came home from work, and children learn by imitation, by modelling. I always used to ask him how his day was. So he asked me how my day was and I'm like, “oh,” and it had really been a bad day and I just said, “this happened and this happened.”

 And he looked at me and he said, “that sucks!” And then I realised, “ah, that's my key.” That's, when I'm trying to give him empathy, I'm not going to do the prosodic voice. This 15-year-old kid. I'm going to do the, “that sucks!” And it really worked.

 And I have to say, from that collision course that we were on when he was 15, he's now 25, it's so lovely. I mean, he is not a perfect child by any means. He's perfect for me. But he always tells me he loves me. He is always calls me when he has a problem, too much so sometimes, but the connection is there. The connection is there. 

 Sally: That connection, really importantly as well, is bringing young men up to be loving partners, loving fathers, good friends, you know, within their peer group. It enables them to be much better prepared for that adult life than, you know, shout it out or, you know, what are ever some of the cues that we've given young men before?

 Louise: Well, something very sad about that. I haven't really been able to have a lot of input into some of the more toxic things that my son has seen about what it is to be male. I think deep down the values have been communicated and I think that in the end, we all return to those values that we were given as children.

 But a lot of my son's idea of what it is to be male, he's had to pick up from the society around him cause he didn't have a father. He's never had a father. I live in the US. My brother, my father when he was still alive, they were all in England. He didn't have that.

 And of course a young teenage boy is going to reject anything I say about what it is to be male, cause what the hell would I know? You know? So I do see, it makes me very sad because, for example, attitudes around, “it’s okay for a boy to sleep around, but not for a girl.” I'm like, “what are you talking about? You're my son. How can you say such things?”

 But toxic masculinity is a real thing. It's so important that young boys have good male role models. My son went to a French school, so when he started wearing cologne, I thought, “okay, good, it's working.” And I thought he'd end up this wonderful, you know, French intellectual.

 But sadly the toxic American macho culture, because he's being raised in the US has definitely given him some very strange ideas about what it is to be male. And it breaks my heart, to be honest. 

 Sally: And it’s so hard, isn't it, to bring up young men and to give them every chance to be the men that, you know, they can be, with, you know, all that's going on in society to influence them. And you are one mum, that's doing their very best.

 And I think at the same time we mustn't minimise the huge effect and benefit that mums have on their son's education. And I mean that in its widest sense. So you should be very proud, I think. 

 Louise: Well, his new thing is he wants to be a firefighter and that, you know, fits right in with the macho thing, but at least he's talking about saving people. So that's good. But he said he wants to do something meaningful and, what was the word he used? He wanted to do something honourable.

 Sally: Wow.

 Louise: And a friend of mine said, “well, so those values are there, Louise.” I just wish that he didn't have to do it at great personal risk, because I think in some ways he's still trying to prove himself or he's really yearning for that male camaraderie.

 But, you know, that's his history and that's what's formed him, just as much as my history has formed me, and we can take it and make something good a bit.

 Sally: I'm sure he's going to work it out, for sure. Before we go, Louise, can we just finish up talking a little bit, and we've talked about lots of things that affect how people might react to trauma. One of our central tenets is Sisterhood and Solidarity. And can we just talk a little bit about how we as sisters can support each other?

 If there's someone that you know that's experienced trauma, or someone within your peer group perhaps, that's acting differently to how, you know, you've been a bit confused by their reaction to something and you think it might be trauma, what can we do to support each other as woman?

 Louise: Talking about how to support someone who's experienced trauma, to make that quick and easy, I did create an infographic that's up on our website, about how to support someone.

 I think the most important thing is what you talked about, if someone's acting a little bit strange, and that's a really good thing, I'm glad you mentioned that, because we have all these terms like, “oh, that person's just being over-sensitive, or they're being over-reactive, or don't be so over-dramatic.” That was the one that was used for me.

 We have all these senses of someone behaving in a way that's disproportionate to what's actually going on. That's what we're saying when we're saying someone's being over- something or other, and that is a pretty good clue that you are seeing trauma, because trauma is the past intruding into the present.

 So if someone's having a massive reaction to something that you think is pretty minor, it's all of that history, all of that past, that's coming into that present moment. And so their reaction is being fueled by all of the anger, the sense of injustice, the grief, whatever it is, that was incurred at the time of the trauma and is now coming out in the present.

 So I think that's a great time to stop and be curious if someone is ‘over-reacting’, air quotes. And the other thing to remember is the person who's acting like a jerk is also probably someone who's experienced trauma. That doesn't mean that you put yourself in danger. That doesn't mean that anything they might do violent or other ways is acceptable.

 And yet again, behaviour is communication and trauma responses are an indication of someone's trauma history. I have a lot of patience when people call me up and they start ranting and raving, seems to be my lot in life.

 Because I know, especially for… I'll give you an example. A woman called me from a DV shelter and she was ranting and raving about something, and she was scared. She was about to be exited. She was about to lose her housing. And when I managed to calm her down, we were able to come up with some strategies and she thanked me afterwards.

 And if I had just taken offence, or I had done what that shelter director had done, which is punish her for her anger, we would never have gotten to a good conclusion, which was she was able to keep her housing.

 So be curious and learn about trauma responses. We have a trauma and resilience, kind of basic trauma and resilience course online that you can learn more, but be curious and remember, no one acts against their own best interests. So if they're doing something that's going to get them ostracised or put in jail, that's not against their best interests, there must be something else that's driving them, like the fact that they really think that they're in danger of being killed.

 You know, the people that run around that act like their hair is on fire, why do they do that? The people who pick fights, why do they do that? It’s so self-defeating. It's because they're trauma survivors and at some level, that is a solution to them.

 And at the most basic level, it's a survival. Keeping themselves alive is what you're seeing.

 Sally: As I said, Lou, it's so interesting and as you say, you know, the short time we have to chat is nowhere near enough to go into depth, but there's some great information on your website, as you've mentioned, the infographics, but also some of the online courses. Could people from the UK sign up to those? 

 Louise: Absolutely. We have the Parenting in English and Spanish. We do PayPal so people from all over the world can sign up. We have the Trauma and Resilience basic course, and we're going to soon have the Compassionate Classrooms one up there.

 We've also got videos, free videos on our website, because we do these one-day virtual trainings. But given the pandemic, and parents going out of their mind at home and frontline workers really needing help in dealing with toxic stress, we created 30-to-40-minute versions of those one day trainings, to do double duty so you can get help now as we call it. And it also means that you can see if you'd be interested in doing the longer training. 

 Sally: Oh, that's fabulous. Thank you so much. I hope people visit the website. I'm sure they will. And thanks for all the work you do for women and well, for everybody that that comes to you to help them deal with the trauma that they may have experienced. It's making such a difference. We really appreciate it. 

 Louise: Thank you Sally and thank you for your work as well. 

 Sally: You take care. 

 Louise: