Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast, the space where education
meets resilience. I'm Joey Weisler, and in each episode, we dive deep into the personal stories
of educators, students, leaders, and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities
of modern education. Whether you're just starting your teaching journey, or are a seasoned
professional looking for inspiration, we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout,
and build trauma-informed communities in our schools. Now, let's take a seat at the front of
the classroom and get started. Today we are honored to have Pamela Rosenblum as our guest.
Pamela is a seasoned trauma therapist with over 38 years of experience in psychoanalysis and trauma
informed care. She's also a dedicated advocate and facilitator at the Lewy Body Dementia Resource
Center, where she supports caregivers and raises awareness about this often misunderstood disease.
Her personal journey, particularly as a caregiver for her late husband, Paul, during his battle with
Lewy Body Dementia, has provided her with deep insights into trauma and its long-lasting effects.
In today's episode, Pamela will share her expertise on how trauma impacts both educators and
students, and how trauma-informed practices can make a meaningful difference within our classrooms.
So please join me in welcoming Pamela to our podcast. Pamela, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. Hi, Joey.
So Pamela, first, we know that you've been a trauma therapist for 38 years, and I wanted to
know if you can briefly share some of your experiences as a psychoanalyst and a caregiver
for somebody with Lewy Body Dementia. And first of all, what is Lewy Body Dementia? And what
should people in education settings know about how different types of diseases impact the students
that they may work with? Lewy Body Dementia is the second most common form of dementia after
Alzheimer's, but many people have not heard of it. It was the disease, sadly, that Robin Williams
had, but never got properly diagnosed. He didn't understand what was going on with him. It's
different than Alzheimer's in that it is often starts with things like inability to do your daily
tasks, but also involves hallucinations and delusions and isn't so much often memory as more
what appear to be psychiatric kind of symptoms. That's Lewy Body Dementia.
So we'll learn more in a bit as to how this disease has impacted your life and your family
members. But first, tell us more about the types of patients you've seen throughout your years of
practice. Well, I didn't work with children or teenagers, but I worked with human beings.
I worked with adult human beings. And I think what's really important, one of the points I
hope to make today is for people to get some understanding of what trauma actually is.
I think it's often misunderstood as an emotional condition and that if people just talk about their
emotions or tell you about the trauma, then it'll all go away. And that's not true. Often
talking about it, depending how talking about it is handled by the listener, can actually be
re-traumatizing and reinforcing patterns in the brain that were laid down by the trauma.
So it's important, I think, for people to understand where trauma lives and why people get it.
That's a fascinating response. And the reason why I'm so drawn to that is because a lot of the work
that I do in my own classroom is on almost like this version of talk therapy and writing therapy.
So what I'm hearing is that sometimes that can re-trigger a student. So for some English
professors like myself who try and trope their classrooms in ways that allow trauma to come out
on paper, how would you guide us? What are some of the strategies that you would tell us to do
and some things that we should avoid in our practice? Well, I think that's a really good
question and very hard to parse out. I mean, I think that there is a form of therapy called
narrative therapy. And I think you may be involved in that where people write out the story.
The point of trauma therapy is that you don't want to remove the experience from the person's life.
We can't do that. Bad things have happened to people, but we want the memory of it to be able
to go back into the part of our brain where we hold the narrative of our life so that we can
actually say, oh yes, that happened, not it's happening right now. So it might be worthwhile
to talk right now about where trauma lives and how understanding that can help you in the classroom.
Trauma is not in the event, but it's in the nervous system, how the nervous system responds
to the event. So you may have a classroom of 30 students. Each one is going to have their own
specific unique reaction to a situation. And it's informed by how resilient they were before the
event. So everyone has a different reaction. And trauma lives in the present moment. Trauma is the
nervous system basically believing on a certain level that the traumatic event or events aren't
over. And so it's already always vigilant, always ready to go. And I think this evolved from our
hunter gatherer brains. It's in a way you think of it, it's a sort of survival technique that if
you're out and a saber tooth tiger almost attacks you or attacks some members of your tribe,
then you're going to be on alert for that all the time. And the problem with trauma is it just
sits in our nervous system and we're ready as if it's going to happen again. So Pamela, one
disclaimer worth mentioning is that you are not a narrative therapist, but since we already mentioned
some distinctions between both talk and narrative therapies here, tell us some of your thoughts on
the behalf of our audiences here that may be doing work within writing-based classrooms.
There are many ways that people are addressing trauma these days. And when I say talking about
it can re-traumatize, it depends how it's being talked about. If a person talks about a trauma
and then gets completely upset and almost decompensates each time they talk about it,
that's not healthy. You have to see what is the effect of the writing about it in the classroom,
or I would imagine painting or writing a poem, anything that's going to help the person move
through it and move it to a different part of their brain, dancing. It's in the body,
it's not just in our thoughts or in our emotions, it's in our whole body. If I were with students
and asking them to write, I would first get them grounded in their bodies before they start writing,
feeling their feet on the floor, feeling near their bodies, and maybe ask them to write something
about what does your body feel like right now and what's happening in your body as you write your
story. So when it comes to like maybe yoga or meditation or some dancing, what would be some
good simple exercises that maybe teachers can use in the classroom before having students
communicate with them? Well, I think one of the really simplest things you can do to help anyone
in a situation is help them work with their breath. When people are activated, and that's a term we
would use if someone's in a trauma state, they're activated, their nervous system is sort of hot,
you know, ready to be triggered, you'll notice, and this is something teachers can become very
easily aware of. How are the students breathing? Do they seem to be breathing quickly and taking
short quick breaths? That's an activated system. When we breathe out longer than we breathe in,
so if I breathe in to the count of five and breathe out to the count of seven,
I'm prompting my parasympathetic nervous system, the part of my nervous system that can relax me.
That's called the rest and rejuvenate part of the nervous system. Because the trouble with trauma is
the body often in our modern world, we are in situations where as the animal we are,
we are triggered into a fight-flight situation, but we can't fight and we can't flee. Right.
And so we're stuck with amazing amounts of adrenaline, an unbelievable amount of adrenaline,
which we are then, we come back and we're told, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe, and people
are living with huge amounts of stimulation and adrenaline. In the wild, animals don't get
traumatized. Domesticated animals can be traumatized. But in the wild, if say a bunny
rabbit is being chased even by a house cat, okay, the bunny rabbit is triggered into fight. Well,
not fight because it's a bunny rabbit into flight. Right. It will run. It has a huge upsurge of
adrenaline. It will hop away. But even after the cat gives up, the bunny rabbit keeps hopping and
it hops and hops until all the adrenaline is out of its system. And in the kind of trauma we're
in, in the kind of trauma work I've done, we help people go to the event very slowly as they feel
into what's happening in their body, into their felt sense. And oftentimes we have them imagine
running. I've had people actually pound their feet up and down as if they're running and
actually get to move through the fight or flight response that they did not get to have.
A lot of the work that you've also done has been with adults as well. So let me turn the tables
here and let's talk about the teacher image who is now maybe dealing with all of this post-traumatic
stress. I myself, when I went back to teach in the Parkland schools for a semester after the tragedy
happened, I got terrible secondary trauma and I was having nightmares all the time based on what
my students were sharing with me. And this building that was actually shot up, I was one of the first
classes of students to actually go through it for all four years and for a while. And even to the
present, after the building has now been taken down in 2024, I still dream that I'm going to
my first period freshman geography class in ninth grade, but there's blood all over the floor and
there's blood stains on the seats. And I just sit there and learn in this bloodstained classroom
that no longer exists in real life. How would you guide teachers in secondary PTSD or secondary
post-traumatic stress from hearing the stories of those around them?
It's very difficult. I mean, I was going to ask you what are schools doing for teachers? I mean,
because I think there has to be real hands-on care for them, whether it is a weekly therapy group
for the teachers or actually taking money out of the budget and hiring trauma therapists to be,
to be not to wait till a teacher has a crisis, but to be there right now for them all the time,
available. The way you might have a school social worker down the hall that a child can go to and
talk to. Those teachers need that and they need to, they need somewhere to vent. They need somewhere
to, somewhere or somehow to learn some stress reduction techniques, but all the stress reduction
techniques in the world, that'll help them maybe get to sleep at night, but they need tremendous
support. Absolutely. These are powerful points because even beyond the mass violence, let's face
it, teachers are witnesses to the traumas and demons of their students every day and acting as
a caregiver for students who are in constant emotional and physical struggles absolutely can
take a toll on the educator's brain and body. Basil van der Kolk, who wrote-
Yes, the Brain and Body Keep the Score. Tell us about that.
All right. Yes. So he did an amazing study years ago. He actually had some Buddhist monks come
to him. I heard him speak at a conference years ago and the Buddhist, the Dalai Lama is really
interested in understanding what's going on in the brain when people meditate. These monks said to
him, do you want to study our brains? So he did functional brain scans on them and the part of the
brain that's lit up in these long-term meditators is a part of the brain, and sadly I'm not real up
on my parts of the brain, that is involved in being able to respond to things with equanimity,
being able to not be reactive. So then he scanned the brains of people with trauma and that part
of the brain doesn't light up at all. They're in a state of, they're triggered. So there's no
equanimity, there's just reaction, right? Just reaction.
Yeah. For our viewers, what does equanimity mean for them?
You hear the expression respond, don't react. We react instinctively. When we can respond,
it means we've taken our time to assess the situation and then respond, then decide what
to respond. It's a very different kind of being in the world, right? Than reacting,
constantly reacting. But when people are in a traumatized state, they're going to react.
What I love with our conversations, I were talking about Bessel van der Kolk, who was one of the
first trauma scholars that I became familiar with in my research as well. And The Body Keeps the
Score is one of the first, I would even go as far as say groundbreaking text in trauma memory,
where van der Kolk as a therapist is talking to survivors of, I believe the Vietnam War,
and he sits in front of them. And as they speak with him, he says, this veteran is not suffering
from pain, rather he's suffering from memories. And his text was one of the first times where we
actually took trauma out of the battlefield and put it in so many other aspects of our lives that
people deal with all the time. And as this conversation represents, that works to really
help validate and let us reason with ourselves versus trying to point at someone and saying,
your trauma is not valid because it wasn't rooted in X, Y, or Z. Van der Kolk overturned that to
make sure that people knew what they were experiencing and draw that out further for
them to find solutions. Exactly. I'll just give a very, very personal example, if I may. I took
care of my husband. He had Lewy body dementia for six years. And with that form of dementia,
you never know what symptoms the person's going to have almost from one hour to the next. I mean,
he could know me one hour and an hour later have no idea who I was or think there were two Pamela's,
where'd the other Pamela go? You're not my wife. And it was a constant shock to me. And I would
always have to quickly respond to it and take care of him. And so I never got to actually
process what I was feeling in the moment. I just had to jump in and take care of him. So after he
passed away two years ago, I thought, well, you know, I'm not a caregiver anymore. I can relax.
And I couldn't relax. I was living in this constant vigilance only now I was projecting
it into my future life. And so I've been doing trauma therapy for myself on reliving those
reliving those moments when I would walk in a room and my husband was not my husband anymore. You
know, he thought there were two of me and finally allowing myself to process and have the emotions
and have the feelings, but it's a body centered kind of awareness. I think that's a very key word
to use when we talk about a body centered awareness. So when it comes to students and
teachers in classrooms, you may have also experienced these types of events. What were
some skills or strategies that you can offer to allow them to have this body centered awareness,
especially when they're in the classroom, that could be more inviting of either narrative writing
or talk therapies. I would think just having a regular time in the classroom to pause. I mean,
there's so many demands on children now too. I mean, that we're all, we're all in our heads
all the time. We're all on our screens and in our heads all the time. We're not in our bodies.
And we're not another idea you may want to pursue is this idea of the open focused brain. We were
not, we did not evolve to be in this narrow focus all the time. And when we're focusing on our
screens, focusing on our schoolwork, focusing on things, we're in narrow focus. And in the
hunter gatherer brain, we were really only meant to be a narrow focus when we were hunting or
gathering. Otherwise we could be in what's called open focus. So a really calming thing to do for
the body is get students grounded, feel their feet on the floor, have them just look ahead of them.
And I can tell you how hard this is for some people to do until they understand it
and tune in. Like as I'm looking at you, Joey, now on the screen, that's my narrow focus.
But I can create open focus by simply tuning into my peripheral vision. I can see my left hand here
and my right hand here. And if you do this slowly, and you could do it with an entire classroom of
students, just asking them, you could take five minutes and ask them to just look ahead and
they'll think it's silly at first, but tune in to their peripheral vision. They will start to feel
their bodies relax. It's calming. You can try it when we get off this. It's subtle, but it's profound.
When it comes to finding ways to prevent burnout as a result of traumatic experiences, what advice
would you give for all different parties involved in education to avoid either student burnout or
teacher burnout and ways to try and use our pain to motivate us rather than hinder us?
Well, I think the first step is to do what we just talked about, even for the teachers, for the staff.
I mean, again, we keep talking about the teachers in the classroom, but there's the janitor,
there's the secretary in the principal's office. I could go on and on, right?
Just first learning how to tune in to their bodies so that they can begin to trust what they need.
For some people, they may need to do yoga. For some people, they may need sometimes to have a good cry,
to be open to taking time, to paying attention to what you need. And if people say,
you need a break, take a break. So before I wrap up, I wanted to know if you could tell us a little
bit more about the Lewy Body Dementia Resource Center and how our listeners might be able to use
some of the tools that you've offered throughout our session here when it comes to maybe being a
caregiver in an educational context or just different ways that we've looked at for each other
within trauma settings and educational institutions. Sure. Well, first of all, the Lewy Body Resource
Center of New York City was started, I think, eight years ago by Norma Loeb, whose mother
suffered from Lewy Body Dementia. And the whole time she was caring for her mother for 18 years,
she basically had no support. She was on her own. And so she started this center by simply,
I think, first having caregiver support group once a month. We've grown into an organization
where we have multiple caregiver support groups now on Zoom. We actually have a support group
for people with Lewy Body Dementia who are still early enough in the disease to be able to come
together and talk to each other and face their fears about having this dementia. And that's on
Zoom. And we have a wonderful documentary that hopefully will get distributed widely when we
can get to it called Facing the Wind, which focuses on caregivers. And I would like to mention, as far
as somewhat answering your second question, if people are interested, we have a YouTube channel,
Lewy Body Dementia Resource Center. And we have a lot of very short clips of caregivers being
interviewed about the disease itself. But there's also a 45-minute workshop that I ran,
called Self-Care for Caregivers. And it's about dealing with stress and creating your own
self-care stress reduction practice, whatever that means. It could be just time away to go
do some drawing or playing the piano or the guitar and breathing techniques. And in that workshop on
YouTube, I teach quite a few breathing techniques, de-stressing techniques that people can learn.
Is that something that I can put in the link to our show notes, a link to that training?
Yes, you could. So I would recommend you, our website is LewyBodyResourceCenter.org.
And if you go to YouTube, it is just the Lewy Body Resource Center YouTube channel. And the
workshop is Self-Care for Caregivers. Perfect. And I'm on there with a lot of caregivers, but
the techniques are applicable to anyone as far as stress reduction goes. Absolutely. And especially
with our teachers in the classrooms, most of them are in that caregiver role or that
no differentist role. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what I think my heart
really goes out to them, because I think this is not what they trained for. And I think that's
right. They were willing, I mean, I would imagine a teacher went into this, yes, of course they're in
a local parentess role. Students are with them all day. But the level of possible trauma and even
trauma that's happening because out of the fear is just not right. Right. Yeah. Perfect. So what
could be for last question, for question, what could be one general takeaway that you would like
our listeners to remember for in today's conversation? Wow. I guess what pops in my
mind is to just, whether you're a teacher, a parent, a student, anyone, to realize that
each person is going to experience situations in life in their own unique way. Each person's nervous
system is very unique. So to not give, you know, you want to pay attention to those students who
are sort of saying my trauma is worse than your trauma, you know, they need to be heard. There's
a reason they're saying that. And they don't need to be shut down. They need to be heard.
They need to be heard and understood. But for the people around them to realize that
each person's trauma is their trauma. You know, is my trauma after caring for my husband for all
these years and I'm going through trauma therapy now, is that less than a war veteran? There's no,
you can't compare them. You know, so each, I think that's really important to realize. And so
each person's way of resolving it, they have, people have to be heard. They have to feel seen.
And even beyond the classroom that has suffered from mass violence, this is also any class that
has students of differentiating home lives where they just need someone to validate whatever
circumstance they deal with outside of that environment. Exactly. Exactly. Well, it has
been a pleasure speaking with Pamela today, who has provided strategies such as focusing on breath
work, grounding exercises, and understanding how trauma manifests not only in the brain,
but also within the body. Whether you're an educator, caregiver, or someone who is navigating
your own trauma, these tools can help you build a more supportive and empathetic environment.
Before we wrap up, we're reminded to check out the Lewy Body Dementia Resource Center
and their YouTube channel for valuable resources on self care for caregivers,
which we'll link in the show notes as well. And remember, trauma doesn't have to define you.
It's something we can work through with the right awareness and support. Thank you for joining us on
the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast. If today's episode inspired you or made
you think differently, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or review wherever you listen to
podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom Narratives podcast over Instagram and
Facebook. Remember, together we can transform our scars into stars in education, one conversation
at a time.