Natalie Gutierrez, author of The Pain We Carry, Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color, is a critical POC voice in a wellness space dominated by white trauma experts. Through her personal lens and professional lens as a Puerto Rican complex trauma therapist, Natalie explains how historical and cultural trauma is experienced by Black people, Indigenous people and People of Colour - and how cultural burdens and legacies inform our relationships and internal family systems. Natalie is remarkable and you can catch her among a line-up of powerful presenters at the upcoming Justice As Trauma conference, in Vancouver from April 3-5, 2024. Please visit https://www.myrnamccallum.co/justiceastrauma for details - and don’t forget to order her book, The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color.
Natalie Gutierrez, author of The Pain We Carry, Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color, is a critical POC voice in a wellness space dominated by white trauma experts. Through her personal lens and professional lens as a Puerto Rican complex trauma therapist, Natalie explains how historical and cultural trauma is experienced by Black people, Indigenous people and People of Colour - and how cultural burdens and legacies inform our relationships and internal family systems.
Natalie is remarkable and you can catch her among a line-up of powerful presenters at the upcoming Justice As Trauma conference, in Vancouver from April 3-5, 2024. Please visit https://www.myrnamccallum.co/justiceastrauma for details - and don’t forget to order her book, The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color.
HOST: I’m Myrna McCallum, Metis-Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of trauma-informed lawyering. As you know, I believe that law scholars and bar courses are missing a critical competency in their curriculum: trauma-informed lawyering. Becoming a trauma-informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs and biases. Call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy. Guide your practice in to avoid doing further harm to others. And ask that you commit to remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn’t know you needed before beginning your career.
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HOST: You’ve heard me talk many times on this podcast about carrying the burden of trauma. The big question for me is… how do we heal these traumas?
Let’s talk about complex PTSD and complex trauma. This refers to the way children face multiple, long-term interpersonal harms.
But we have to look even deeper. It's just not enough to think about our own direct traumatization.. we have to think about the traumatization of the people we come from.
For people of color, these traumas are not just individual: they are collective.
These are traumas that run through histories, cultures, institutions, and families. They go back generations, and continue to manifest in all sorts of ways. How do or how you react to things… is that your personality, or is that your trauma response? That’s the question we have to ask. How do we begin to peel back these layers of trauma?
That’s what we will learn from Natalie Gutierrez today, author and complex trauma therapist and healer.
This episode is special to me because for the past several years, I have been focusing largely on how to heal trauma; how to heal trauma inside of me; how to heal trauma within my family; how to heal trauma within my community; within this legal profession that we work. And it’s also really special to me because as Indigenous women living in a time where we are not valued and our bodies are not safe from harm; I had to ask Natalie the question: how do we achieve safety? And can we fully heal when we live in an environment that is constantly putting us into a threat response.
So, I just want to give you a content warning. We’re going to talk about missing and murdered Indigenous women; we’re going to be talking about the harms that we experience as children that result in complex trauma and complex PTSD. We’re going to talk about mental health issues and if you are not in the space to lean into this conversation, you might hold off on listening until you are in the space to hear this.
Let’s go ahead and listen to Natalie Gutierrez.
[00:00:00] Myrna McCallum: Hi there, Natalie Gutierrez.
[00:00:07] Natalie Gutierrez: Hi Myrna, thank you for having me.
[00:00:10] Myrna McCallum: I am so excited. Ever since I picked up your book, The Pain We Carry, Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color, I was like, oh my god, I need to talk to this woman. And for like so many reasons. So I'm so excited that you are here having this conversation with me.
[00:00:30] Natalie Gutierrez: I'm excited to have this conversation with you. And again, I just want to appreciate your support with the book.
[00:00:36] Myrna McCallum: Absolutely. I think I just told you off the record, I've put a course together for indigenous professionals and, I gifted them a copy of your book and it was like important for me to do that because one of the things that got me to find you, is, I was noticing on social media how every voice around wellness, self care, self love, overcoming trauma,were all white voices. They were either white blonde women like the Mel Robbins and the Gabby Bernsteins or it was the Bessel van der Kolk's, right?
[00:01:16] Aside from Resmaa Menakem, like where are the people of color? And it seems like there's a whole whiteness to this wellness movement.
[00:01:28] So let me ask you, this is my first question. When you wrote the pain we carry healing from complex PTSD for people of color was part of the inspiration for doing that the fact that there wasn't like brown voices reflecting brown experiences in this wellness movement?
[00:01:47] Natalie Gutierrez: Initially, I have to say it was and it wasn't. When I was approached by my publisher, I was approached. they had asked me to write a book about complex trauma. So I initially thought, Oh, my gosh, I don't think there exists a book that talks about complex trauma written by someone from the global majority.
[00:02:05] Right. So I had sent them a table of contents and it, and it just had a whole bunch of stuff like thrown in the table of contents. It was just like a bunch of like, just everything that I kind of knew about complex trauma, weaving it all together and sending it to them. And then the acquisitions editor got back to me and said, Natalie, what is the book that you wanna write from your heart?
[00:02:26] And, and I feel like that's ancestor and spirit speaking through her, right? And so she said, what is the book that you wanna write from your heart, right? Like from a soul level, from your heart, what is the book that you want to write? And so I said, well, it is a book about complex trauma, but it's a book for people like me.
[00:02:49] It is a book for people of the global majority, for BIPOC. I want to talk about not only, you know, what I know about complex trauma, but I want to, I want to talk about what I know about complex trauma and how it relates to the unique lived experiences and struggles of the global majority, because complex trauma in the mental health field is known as, you know, relational trauma, right? It's known as typically, when you experience developmental trauma growing up, when you experience abuse, neglect, sexual trauma, abandonment, as a child.
[00:03:23] We grow up in these environments by, you know, with our caregivers, just harming us in many ways. And then we grow into adults that struggle in our relationships and struggle with our sense of self. And that is what complex trauma is, right? That absolutely, I agree with that.
[00:03:42] That is what it is. However, when it comes to folks of the global majority: How are we also weaving in the impact of larger systems on our sense of self. How are we weaving in the historical trauma and the remnants of that and all the ways that it's impacted our lineages and, and ourselves? How are we weaving that in?
[00:04:11] Because, you know, that book by Mark Wollen, It Didn't Start With Yvou. It certainly didn't. And it didn't start with abusive caregivers. This stemmed back from many, many generations. And so I really wanted us, like us as a therapist, us as in the mental health field, and really just the general population, all of us, to really begin to understand conflict trauma as not just our exposure to violence when we're growing up, but when we're thinking about relational trauma, it's also important that we're thinking about it systemically, that we're thinking about it in terms of: Well, if I'm struggling with my relationships, and I'm also naturally going to be struggling in or with belonging in my community, and what else is feeding into the trauma that I carry around relationships.
[00:05:07] Well, when we exist in systems that are oppressive, that are racist, that certainly creates ruptures in relationships, that creates a sense of not feeling safe in the world. That in fact creates a very dangerous world, right, creates a very toxic environment. So I really wanted us to think about complex trauma systemically, really intersectionally.
[00:05:38] And that then became like the drive of me writing this book.
[00:05:45] Myrna McCallum: That's pretty awesome. So let me ask, because I know there are going to be a lot of listeners, and a lot of indigenous people listening to this podcast who may not understand exactly what complex trauma is or complex PTSD, or how is that different from PTSD? How is that different from, like, just toxic stress that Gabor Maté talks a lot about? Or just regular trauma. How is it different?
[00:06:15] Natalie Gutierrez: Yeah, so my understanding of complex trauma is that it's what happens in our bodies when we are met with perceived threat response, right? And that's true for PTSD as well.
[00:06:28] However, PTSD is more or can be understood more connected to sensations: when you experience like something that you hear something that you smell, and you're triggered. It's really connected more to the semantics of sensations. But when it comes to complex trauma, there's also sensation, those triggers that are related to smell and sound and all of that, but now there's also emotional triggers.
[00:07:00] That's where it becomes different. PTSD is not really connected to emotional triggers. Like complex post traumatic stress is where, when we hear things about ourselves, like when our caregivers say, for example, like, you're too needy.
[00:07:21] We hear that, and it hurts us, and it wounds us, right? And it activates our nervous systems. We go into either fight or flight or freeze response. So it's doing all of this stuff in our nervous system. And now, that phrase becomes a trigger, right? It activates this emotional wound within us. And now, fast forward, we grow up, in adulthood and let's say we find ourselves in a friendship and a relationship and that person says:
[00:07:50] you're so needy. You're, you're too much, right? That is going to bring us back. That's going to reopen those older wounds, that it's an emotional trigger. It's going to bring us back to that time that we were seven, eight years old, where our caregiver said that we were too much. So it really has connection to the past PTSD really doesn't have.
[00:08:14] And that's the distinction.
[00:08:17] Myrna McCallum: Okay. That's really helpful. I want to know now a little bit about, I mean, you haven't mentioned epigenetics, but in your book you talk about, intergenerational trauma, you talk about these like cultural burdens, cultural legacies, and earlier you said, you know, some of what we experienced, like it goes way back.
[00:08:39] So can you help us understand how exactly the lived experiences of those who have come before us may inform how we show up today in relationships?
[00:08:54] Natalie Gutierrez: Yeah, in so many ways, in so many ways.
[00:08:58] Well, when we think about historical trauma, things like enslavement, colonization, forced separation from land when your land is stolen, when you've experienced war or famine or genocide, civil war and just so many other traumas, it impacts the way that our genes are expressed in order to survive because we are wired to want to survive.
[00:09:26] And so those same changes. are passed down throughout the generations for our survival. And then there's the piece around attachment, and this is where that generational wounding comes in. When I think about my ancestors, right? My ancestors are a mix of folks that were colonizers and also folks that were colonized.
[00:09:52] I have [foreign word] ancestry, which were the original natives of Puerto Rico, and then I have African ancestry from when my ancestors that were African were enslaved and brought from Africa to Puerto Rico for labor. And then my other ancestors are the Spaniards, are the folks that colonized, right?
[00:10:16] And so I, myself, am a mix of all of it. That has created, in my lineage, impacts or remnants and of how I navigate the world, my sense of safety in the world and also some of my internalized privilege. And that that is some of the ways that those patterns are genetically expressed, but tying it back to attachment trauma:
[00:10:47] When I think of how my ancestors that had just lost their land were able to parent or not parent their children and how that has passed down throughout the generations. That's where we get those legacies, the legacy burdens. That's where we get that burdened energy, those legacies of, you know, pain and patterns being passed down.
[00:11:14] So, like my family growing up, you know, I was hit as a child. I was hit as a child. That is a pattern. That has been passed down throughout the generations. But where did we learn hitting? Where did our parents, caregivers, learn to hit their children in order for them to be obedient?
[00:11:36] Well, at some point, probably, my ancestors had to do that in order for their children to survive, not get in trouble, to be obedient, whatever had to happen back then, it's manifested in all these patterns behavioral patterns that have been passed down throughout the generations that have looked like so many things that have looked like not talking about trauma or not talking about pain that have looked like spiritually bypassing and just saying, you know, we're not going to talk about this and like, just turn it over to God and, you know, we're not going to just talk about this.
[00:12:10] That was in the past, whatever. Like, it looks like that. You know, it looks like, like I shared before, you know, hitting sometimes it's looked like addiction. It's looked like drinking, a lot of struggle with alcohol in my family, it has looked like so many things. But this wasn't and who my family was, this wasn't who our lineage, this wasn't like a part of our cultural norm.
[00:12:37] These are ways….I want to say almost survival tools, survival mechanisms and patterns that were learned that stem back from the remnants of the historical trauma. So it passed down through epigenetics, but also passed down through attachment trauma. And then also our exposure to today, to the present world of today, where, you know, we're navigating systemic racism, we are navigating systemic oppression, and what that does to folks of the global majority, right? To black folks, to indigenous folks, to Latine, to Asian…How it looks like today when there is anti indigeneity, anti blackness, when there is Asian hate, right?
[00:13:26] Like there's so much violence and erasure, attempted erasure and erasure of histories, right? Look at what's happening in Florida with DeSantis trying to get rid of critical race theory and give the seal of approval to revisionist histories being taught in school. Like there is just so, there is just so much.
[00:13:53] That is happening that we are holding that certainly stems from that historical trauma and those legacy burdens and that generational building past throughout the generations. Also, what is happening today, the cultural burdens of today. That is also negatively impacting us. And all of that together is creating that toxic stress that you're mentioning, right?
[00:14:20] And that has impacts on the perceived threat response that we have in our bodies that we don't even have to think about right because if our listeners right now are like, or if they just pause and see what's happening in their bodies, I'm sure they're going to feel tension somewhere. And that tension is a perceived threat response, that shallow breathing is a perceived threat response, because we are programmed conditioned to guard ourselves, protect ourselves, from the next thing you know that happens.
[00:14:54] So I know that was a mouthful, but just trying to weave it all together.
[00:14:59] Myrna McCallum: No, that's really, that's a really good way of summing all of that up. And I mean, I was just visualizing as you were speaking about just how unsafe I think a lot of black and brown bodies are in this world. And I'm curious about whether you think it's possible in this time for, Black, Indigenous, people of colour to achieve any kind of sense of safety within their bodies and or healing. You do that when you've inherited things and you're also being confronted by all of this hatred and violence and threat against your person, your family, your community, all of these things, like, can we heal?
[00:15:52] Can we ever feel safe? Can we achieve that in this lifetime?
[00:15:58] Natalie Gutierrez: I don't know. I want to believe I have a part of me that wants to believe that we can achieve it in this lifetime. I don't know that it's possible if we're not dismantling the systems that we are existing in. I certainly think that some healing will happen in this lifetime, but it requires us to really see how we've internalized the oppressor.
[00:16:24] how we are colluding with just the trauma that we've internalized and seeing how we can release all of that stuff. How can we begin to really lean into loving ourselves again and seeing ourselves again? Grieving. It requires us to grieve. It requires us to come together as a collective. Us, the global majority.
[00:16:47] You know, in the U. S., they refer to, folks of color as the minority and that word pisses me off because, if I never heard that word again, I would not be sad because how I hear that word is an intentional way to try to shrink us and, to try to, take away our power and try to minimize us because we are not the minority. We are the global majority, all of us together, black, indigenous, right, POCs, all of us together are the global majority. But white people have really conditioned and programmed this whole thing to have us believe that we are small, and that we're incapable. And so if we release all of those messages and if we are leaning into our power. If we are healing from the stuff that has happened to us, and if we are healing from the ways that we've also perpetuated some of these things, too. If we are being honest and having these conversations and grieving and crying and beginning to take a risk to be vulnerable with each other again and come together, I feel like that's this global majority can really begin to dismantle these systems and there is the healing. I don't believe that we can heal fully while still living within these systems that we live in. Just for me there's there's no way that's possible because at some point we could only go go so far if we are still living within these systems that are designed for us to stay small, we have to eradicate all of it for the fullest healing.
[00:18:35] Myrna McCallum: Yeah, that just sounds like a big task. I mean, I'm hearing a few things. You know, healing, requires community, like we've got to come together and we've got to be in relationship with each other.
[00:18:52] And I think in order to even do that, these have to be healthy relationships that we build with each other.
Natalie Gutierrez: Yeah.
Myrna McCallum:I know many, many people, myself included, who don't feel safe in relationships, and are prone to isolation because isolation feels safe, although it may feel safe, we know people don't necessarily heal in isolation and it can, that can cascade into its own other mental health decline:
[00:19:23]something people refer to as lateral violence. And I think this is when the oppressed become the oppressor. And you talked a little bit about that, and I hear about it in workplaces especially, but I also hear about it in community.
[00:19:39] And it's so tough to figure out how do you begin to heal those wounds when your own community, your own family, your own workplace circle is not a safe place and you know that there are many in those environments who just want to keep you small. So, it's like, how do you find community that like how do you find community where healthy relationships are upheld and respected?
[00:20:10] Natalie Gutierrez: You know, I think it happens over time. I think it's hard, everything that you're saying spot on because, you know, when we think about those wounds that we have had, that we've experienced, you know, by other people, a lot of it is also like you shared from our own community members, [00:20:32] right, from our own families. And so if we are hurt by our own families, if we are hurt by people that look like us, that is a total betrayal. That right there is that betrayal trauma. That right there is that relational trauma. That sense of betrayal is deep and those wounds are deep and I think it's going to take a lot of courage and probably some more heartbreak for us to find real community and people that we can trust because we are going to need to learn how to set boundaries.
[00:21:12] We are going to need to learn how to communicate what feels right and what feels wrong and speak for our needs, advocate for ourselves. And we're going to also need to learn how to navigate disappointment and how to tell the difference between when someone disappoints us and we can stick around and there could be repair and restorative justice, or if this person maybe has to go for a little bit from our lives so that we can continue to heal and they can on their own figure it out and continue to heal, right? It's gonna, I think, really require this kind of journey. And it's hard. It is really hard. And I think, I mean, you know, people have said like the healing journey can be lonely.
[00:22:03] Sometimes it certainly can because you're going to find people on the way as you're healing that are not maybe healing or maybe don't. I want to say. Don't want to heal, but I want to reframe. I want to reframe that by really saying that they're stuck and really fearful of healing because I don't know that there are people that don't want to heal.
[00:22:26] I think people are just afraid of what could happen if they heal and what they'll have to grieve, what they'll have to, you know, come to terms with when that healing happens. So these are the folks that stay stuck and we have to navigate that. And be ready to let people go.
[00:22:44] Myrna McCallum: Totally. I mean, I'm just feeling everything you're saying like, first, I want to thank you for essentially giving us a recipe of where we start. Boundaries. So important. And understanding, like, assessing what do we need to feel safe in relationships and holding people to that standard and understanding that sometimes you have to let people go and letting people go for a time doesn't necessarily mean you let them go forever or that you have to give up on them because you're right:
[00:23:13] people get stuck, Yes, they stay stuck for life and they die stuck and that's sad, but there are also others who stay stuck for a number of years and then go, I don't want to be this anymore, and the transformation comes and this is why, you know, believing in redemption, rehabilitation, recovery, return to self, like has to be a guiding light that we live by.
[00:23:40] And this is something I know I hold on to a lot because there have been people I have loved and still love who have been stuck and are stuck. And although I separate myself from those individuals, it's never a forever sort of thing. Like the door is always open, if ever they decide to be unstuck. I think that true healing or justice, requires allowing people to, to grow, to change, to transform instead of always holding them to who they were when, when they did that thing to you, when they were acting in this way. [00:24:28] Like people can change contrary to what social media likes to say, right?
[00:24:34] Natalie Gutierrez: Right. I believe that. I entirely believe that. I'm not the same person that I was several years ago. I continue to evolve. And I think I think that's true for all of us when we're choosing to because the folks that again are if they're stuck in fear, they're not really going to be evolving in that way. They're stuck. But for folks that are saying, I'm going to make this conscious decision to try to figure this out and heal and grow and and repair with people that have hurt, there really is a possibility to, I want to say for redemption, right? Like for, for healing. And I appreciate you even saying like the doors open, because that is really kind of where we want to be with. I'm not closing this door forever. when you are ready for repair and genuine like accountability and, and when you're ready to, really truly grow, I am here. But until then I won't be.
[00:25:39] Myrna McCallum: Yeah, it really is kind of for me. It's a come find me sort of invitation. I'll share something I don't think I've ever shared on the podcast before, but I told you off the record. I went to residential school because the last one closed in my home province of Saskatchewan in 1996.
[00:25:59] And so it's not uncommon to see younger people, right, who've had that experience. I have a younger brother who's four years younger. He also went to residential school. I ran away after a year, but I couldn't take him. I was only 11 and I ran away. And I was pretty well on my own after that, but I couldn't take like a seven year old.
[00:26:21] And so he ended up being in residential school for several years and he went to two different residential schools and they were known on the prairies to be the worst in terms of the horrific sexual abuse that was done to children in these schools, the physical violence. Like, you know, some of these schools were so bad, Natalie, that, you know, one had an electric chair that they used on children.
[00:26:48] Natalie Gutierrez: Oh my God.
[00:26:49] Myrna McCallum: Like, the brutality that occurred was beyond anything, I'd ever heard until I served as an adjudicator and spent some years listening to survivors tell me their experiences.
[00:27:05] And every time I was shocked and every time I heard a horrible story, I would think it can't get worse than this. Like that is the most depraved, horrific thing I've ever heard. And then I go into another hearing and I'd be with another survivor and then I'd hear an even worse depraved, horrific story.
[00:27:24] So the level of traumatic experiences is so incredibly profound. And when my brother finally left that school, you know, he wasn't the sweet little chubby cheeks little boy that he was when he went in. He was violent and lost and addicted to drugs and alcohol. And so for several years, he was in and out of prison.
[00:27:59] He lived here in Vancouver on the Downtown Eastside, which is one of the poorest, most homeless, saddest neighborhoods in Canada. And for a number of years, I would always go down there, and I would go look for him, and I would find him. And then I'd pull him, like, literally out of, gutters full of rainwater and take him, clothe him, feed him, take him to restaurants, give him a hotel, hang out with him for a few days, and then he'd always return to the street.
[00:28:29] And every time we saw each other, it was always, he'd be like, [name], I promise, I want to get off the street. I want to get a job. I'm going to do, I'm going to rehab. I want to do this. And I would line everything up and I would give him a ton of cash.
[00:28:42] And it was like a cycle. And then my mom died. Our mom died in 2015, she was 59. And because I knew my brother was homeless, he had no ID, couldn't get on an airplane. As soon as I buried her, I grabbed his son who he'd never met, but I met at my mother's funeral. I said, we're going to go find your dad.
[00:29:07] And we drove to Vancouver and I found my brother and I introduced him to his son thinking that would compel him to want something else for his life. And I said, I'm taking you home. I lined up a treatment center. There's a bed waiting. I've got this. I'm taking you home. Like, let's go. And I saw something in his eyes that told me like, no, no.
[00:29:35] And I thought I was going to die in that moment. It was so heartbreaking. And I just looked at him and said, I will never come back here to look for you again. Because it kills me every time to find you here and then to leave you here and I will never come back, but I'm easy to find. And so then I left and, and never seen him since.
[00:30:01] So I don't know if he's dead or alive, but what I learned from that experience is that, I, I know that he has a lot of hurt and a lot of trauma, and he self medicates through dehumanizing himself, through not loving himself, through harming himself, and, if he's still alive, my hope is always, and my prayer is always that one day, he will choose to become unstuck, like, to borrow your words, and he will pull himself out of that dark place and choose a life that he deserves and when he does that, he will find me, that's always the hope, but, I know that there are so many people listening to this episode right now who have family members like that.
[00:30:51] I know I'm not the only one because residential school, and other acts of colonization, have devastated our families and have devastated our own spirits and compelled us to pick up alcohol or drugs or violence as coping behaviors and self harming practices. And I know right now that many are thinking, how do we get past all this pain, this pain that we carry?
[00:31:19] How do we get past it? And I know there's no easy answer. I definitely don't want to put all that on your shoulders, but I love how you started with you know boundaries and leaving the door open and understanding that people it's not that they choose not to heal It's that they are stuck and I want to maybe just segue now into asking a little bit about like the power of self compassion because you talk about it in your book.
[00:31:50] When we come from these environments where abuse has happened to us, like the depraved kind of abuses, shame tends to be, at least for me, has been a constant presence like a bad spirit following me around. You know, how do you overcome that and do you defeat it with self compassion? Does it take other things?
[00:32:12] Natalie Gutierrez: Shame. I feel like shame drives so much of our survival tools, of our coping mechanisms, and of our self sabotage and fear. Shame and fear. They're like cousins, siblings, maybe. I really believe that when we understand shame, that we understand:
[00:32:37] one, how it shows up in our bodies and what it says and how it speaks to us. I think it's important to really begin to understand shame. And this is where the self compassion comes in because we tend to feel the shame and then say, Oh, I hate that. I feel this way. I hate that I do this.
[00:33:00] I hate it. I hate it. I hate myself. I hate when I feel sad. I hate when I do it. And we tend to feel or be so mean to ourselves. And that actually strengthens the shame. The shame gets bigger, the more that we put ourselves down. And so, we really need to think about what the medicine is that helps to, I don't, I don't want to say, [00:33:25] eradicate shame, but really I want to say more of releasing shame, Because again, that's not who we are at our core. Shame is how we were made to feel by larger systems. And also again, by family, by family dynamics and all the generational wounding, all of it is burrowed in shame.
[00:33:47] And that's why so many of us don't talk about it because we carry so much shame. We don't talk about things and everything becomes a secret because there's shame. And so what if we did the very opposite? What if we began to talk about it? What if we began to grieve it, right? [00:34:04] Little by little, we do need to begin to face our grief. And then see what needs to happen so that we can mend the grief, [00:34:14] and begins to release the shame and that requires that self compassion, right? Even when if you've hurt people. It's not saying letting you off the hook if you've hurt people, but it's saying, of course, I did this thing. Of course, I said that thing. Of course, I was using these substances and I did this.
[00:34:33] Of course, I did this. Or of course I would feel depressed. Of course I would feel anxious when I'm navigating, school and it's super stressful. But of course I'm feeling depressed when I'm seeing the police kill people that look like me. Of course, I feel this way after my land has been stolen. Of course, I feel this way when I continue to see my people be dismissed, invisiblized.
[00:35:02] And then, getting clear again about what you've also maybe perpetuated right and how you've also internalized the oppressor and the messages that you've internalized about yourself and how that's impacted your own connection or disconnection from your sense of self and what needs to happen because there needs to be a lot of releasing and again a lot of grief work, a lot of tears, not all at the same time, but at our own pace.
[00:35:31] And can we offer that same compassion that so many of us are great at offering to other people, offering our friends. Can we offer that same compassion to ourselves? Can we offer ourselves that grace and begin to see ourselves for all of who we are, including what folks talk about, like their shadows, right?
[00:35:52] The parts that maybe, you know, are still carrying the wounds. That are still carrying those deep wounds that need healing. Can we see ourselves in our fullness and still say, I see me and I love me, or I'm learning to love me. And I'm going to release the shame that isn't mine, but that I've acquired and inherited from family and also from a system that has taught me that I should be ashamed of myself for existing.
[00:36:18] Myrna McCallum: That's huge. I mean, I think that's a great exercise. When I listen to you talk about grief and releasing, I think that's, that's a huge ask for someone like me, who is a very like, lock it down, Myrna. And I don't know why I do that. I'm sure I was like taught to do that.
[00:36:36] And so it's learning how to feel. And, I know when I listen to some people, not only is like learning how to feel a challenge, but even understanding. Like what do I feel and distinguishing like one emotion from another. I hear many people talk about like you're telling me I have to feel it to release it but I don't even know what the hell I'm feeling or I can't even access my own emotion and I'm not a therapist I'm a lawyer so I you know I don't know exactly how you how you navigate that but what I want to get into is this bit about safety, because whether you're grieving or releasing or feeling, I think that requires a safe space, if and when you ever come to that moment.
[00:37:23] Now, I want to ask…that here in Canada, there's this movement, the Search the Landfill Movement, because a couple Indigenous women who've been murdered are thought to be in a landfill. They were dumped in a landfill, is the belief, by this murderer, serial killer, maybe?
[00:37:39] And the provincial government of Manitoba has said, we're not going to go look for them, because it's going to cost too much, it's too risky. Even though there was an assessment done where somebody said, actually, you can do it, you can do it safely. They searched a landfill somewhere in Ontario for a white guy, like, who'd been murdered, and they searched for him, and they found his remains.
[00:38:02] These Indigenous women, there's three of them, potentially two landfills, won't go look for them. And, I have to say, as all of this was all over social media and more people were having conversations about how it sends a message. If you want to harm an Indigenous woman, all you got to do is leave her body in a landfill.
[00:38:22] No one will look for her. You get away with it. And the other is, That indigenous women are trash, right? Like that's the message that it all sends. And there's a heavy energy that goes with that.
[00:38:33] I'm going to say, I really feel like the message of the government in Manitoba is having like a heavy impact for women, Indigenous women across the land, and I know it's not just me.
[00:38:49] And it almost like sets me back and many other women like me back and it brings us out of this place of trying to achieve self regulation to being dysregulated, vibrating in this dysregulated state all the time.
[00:39:08] So my question is, and I'm asking this on behalf of all of the indigenous women listening to this right now: when we know that we are not safe, when we step out of our homes, and I know for many women, even being in your home is not safe, but when we know, like, going outside, being in public, going to our workplaces, whatever it may be, we are not safe there.
How do we achieve a sense, like, how do we create safety, even a tiny little modicum of safety in our lives? How do we generate it in ourselves when these external factors are actually saying you're not safe?
[00:39:51] Natalie Gutierrez: I think that it is going to be really, really difficult and that's the reality, that we can't bypass the truth. It is going to take work. It is going to take a lot. And I think when we're receiving so many signs that we don't matter, everything that you experience in your environment in your workplace, from the government, everywhere, that it's important to hold on to ourselves.
[00:40:29] It is important to hold on to our bodies, our spirit; it is important in these moments, and this, this takes so much effort and so much work, but it takes interrupting your threat response, even for a moment, even for a moment, a hundred times a day, stopping for a moment. And just breathing because understand the more that we are in a perceived threat response we're not breathing.
[00:40:55] Our heart is palpitating. We are also beginning to hurt our bodies. Because our bodies are not wired to stay in this constant state for very long. And so it's important in these moments that we are bringing it back to our breath, that we are co-regulating with each other or even by ourselves with the trees, that we are finding pockets of where we can feel like we can relax into a calmer body.
[00:41:22] Essentially, what I am saying is it comes down to harm reduction. This is about harm reduction until we can create those systems that can bring more safety to us. But when, when everywhere we turn, it is not safe for us. We have to go back within and create safety in our own bodies.
[00:42:03] Myrna McCallum: I love that. So when it comes to practice, like practicing that, what I'm hearing you say is we've got to seek out safety in our relationships.
[00:42:10] So all the more reason to build relationships with people we know we are safe with and cultivate those relationships. And also all the more reason to go out onto the land and go into the forest and sit by the water. Those offer pockets of safety as well and you're co regulating with the environment. Like there is a reason why a lot of people do healing programs in nature because it's it's almost like the trees are singing at least I feel right like the trees are singing to me They're holding me. They're relaxing me.
[00:42:47] They're telling me you're okay here and you can let go here and there's no shame here and there's no judgment here and we need to cultivate more of that.
[00:42:57] Natalie Gutierrez: Absolutely. Speaking and communing with the spirit of the trees, with the spirit of the ocean, right, with the spirit of the land and co regulating there.
[00:43:09] Myrna McCallum: I love that. I love that.
[00:43:11] I'm just, you know, feeling like why safety generating and creating these pockets of safety in your life is so necessary, especially in this time when the world and the systems and the white supremacy and all the oppression tells us we are not safe.
[00:43:28] Powerful. Anyway, Natalie, this book that you wrote is such a gift to all of us, black people, indigenous people, people of color, white allies who really want to try to understand it. It's such a gift and I just want to thank you so much for writing this.
[00:43:46] Natalie Gutierrez:Thank you. Thank you for receiving it, supporting it, amplifying it. Thank you so much. It's really an honor.
[00:43:55] Myrna McCallum: Thank you. And thanks for coming on to the podcast today. I hope to have you back.
Thanks to my guest Natalie Gutierrez. You can find her on Instagram @nataliegutierrezlmft. You should check out her book: The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color.
Natalie is also going to be speaking at an upcoming conference here in Vancouver, this April. The conference is called Justice as Trauma. We will put a link to the conference in the show notes. Or you can just go visit justiceastrauma.ca. April 3rd, to 5th. Natalie will be there delivering a keynote. We hope to see you there April 3rd to 5th.
Thank you for listening. Thanks for sharing this with people in your network, and for rating and reviewing the Trauma-Informed Lawyer Podcast on whatever podcast platform you happen to use. Thanks also to Cited Media for their production support.
This episode was recorded on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation.
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