Tell me about your vision. I'd love to hear it. Yeah, you know, I had the vision quite a long time ago
And it really came out of my experience of being both a psychotherapist and also having been a client and done therapy myself
And I've been a psychotherapist now for well over 30 years and I worked with you know
A lot of trauma because there is a lot of trauma in people's lives. There's a lot of
emotional mental
physical sexual
Abuse that's actually more rampant than I think a lot of people know
and
What what occurred to me what like I had a couple of big ah-hahs that really informed my book and one of them was
that I had my own trauma as a child and
that's probably what got me into the field of psychotherapy to begin with and
I had such an up close and personal experience of how much pain that can cause and what there is to really recover from
To recover yourself to recover a connection to your true self and a sense of yourself
and your own, you know
Path and purpose in life that I think we all are born with
Whether we are allowed or have the opportunity to access our connection to that
And it just made me realize from my own work and from working with so many people that there are people all over the world
Who have no access to help who don't get rescued from the traumas that they're suffering
and who are symptomatic and
Who act out their symptomology on themselves and on the people around them not because they're bad people
But because you know if you're adversely affected by your human relations if you're hurt by other people
If you're assaulted if you're a victim of war and you don't get you know people around you die or you're the subject of discrimination or injustice
And you don't get any help or any rescue you're going to have symptoms. Just like if you're infected with a bacteria
you're going to have symptoms and
We live in a society that tends to blame our most symptomatic people
Rather than be really committed to helping them
So that was that was my first really big aha that I really wanted to talk about
The widespread effects of
untreated and unremitting trauma
That's really worldwide
It's not just in the United States
But it's certainly in the United States that many people are targeted for abuse and neglect and discrimination
And who aren't helped but as I said, they're blamed for their symptoms rather than seen as
They're having a normal response to an abnormal situation that they've been
Inadvertently put in and then the other big thing that really informed my book
And there's probably more but a second really big thing is that because I did so much
Family systems work because family systems really is a lot of what psychology looks at today
We don't look at people as individual islands like you were just born good or you were born bad or you're intrinsically flawed or you're a sinner
We don't look at people that way
We look at people as having been affected by the conditioning that they've received from the people around them
And that's particularly our families our family of origin
Sometimes it's the extended family or the the family of a community
And what I realized is that family systems operate on all levels
Large and small so it could be your own nuclear family and it could be the family system of a country
And when I looked at america through the lens of family systems dynamics
It was pretty much impossible
Not to see that some of the dynamics that are
Policy and law and practice are highly abusive and discriminatory towards certain segments of the population
And that disconnect between what we think of as a healthy family
Where everyone is taken care of where everyone is loved where everyone has a sense of belonging more or less given that we're imperfect human beings
And that those are not
Some of the principles of the family of america that I really wanted to talk about that like
Not from the point of view and this is this is really important for me
Not from the point of view of who to blame or who to hate or who to make wrong
But the point of view of how do we break the cycle of abuse in an unhealthy family?
And could we apply those principles?
to a nation or a corporation or a church or a school or a community but on all levels of society these
Were either operating on healthy or unhealthy family dynamics and some of them are highly
destructive and even murderous and how do we interrupt that cycle and again not to blame and shame
But to change
Interrupt that cycle and again not to blame and shame but to change