The Paradoxes of Healing with Dr. Lissa Rankin

Rebecca Wong:

Today, I'm joined by Lissa Rankin, author of Sacred Medicine: A Doctor's Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing. Lissa is a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including Mind Over Medicine, is a physician speaker mystic, and the founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute and the nonprofit Heal at Last. Lissa has starred in two national public television specials. Her TEDx talks have been viewed over four million times.

Rebecca Wong:

retreat centers like Esalen,: 1440

Rebecca Wong:

So welcome back everybody. I'm here today with Lissa Rankin. Lissa is the author of a wonderful new book called Sacred Medicine, and I'm so happy to have you here with me, Lissa.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, it's a delight to be here. Thank you for having me.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. I have been really enjoying this new book of yours and I'm so excited it's coming out. We're living in such a time right now, right? And I think what your book is really calling us back to is the healing process in many ways, for the fragmentation that exists throughout our culture and throughout our bodies.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. There was a quote somewhere towards the middle-ish of your book that really called me in. And I wonder if we can even just center a conversation around this. You wrote, "We live in a disembodied culture because trauma causes us to leave our bodies. It is a defense mechanism and in extreme cases, a survival skill that can save you. Yet you can't heal the body without being in it." Can we talk about that? It's so rich and deep and everything.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I just want to like have an empathy side note also to say that when the body is really suffering, it's really hard to want to be in it, to be motivated to be in it. It's so much more tempting to maybe meditate your way out of it or dissociate out of it, or in whatever way we can, of course we want to have pain relief.

Rebecca Wong:

Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

And at the same time, certainly one of the main things that I discovered in this 10 year journey of researching and writing this book was that very thing, that we can't heal the body unless we're in it. And so many of the healing practices that I observed were the opposite. They were spiritual bypasses that gave people temporary relief because they were leaving the body, and the body was what was suffering. And so it totally makes sense to me. I came to call some of those practices energy transfusions. In other words, if somebody were to come to the emergency room and they were anemic on blood yep, the first thing we would do is tank them up.

Lissa Rankin:

You're going to need four units of packed red blood cells because you're anemic. And so many of the people that are chronically ill or especially those people with mystery illnesses who conventional medicine cannot figure out what to do, and they have been shuffled from one practitioner to the next and all through conventional medicine and been failed, and then they've gone through the alternative medicine world and nobody can cure them, and they've tried everything they know how to do, those people often wind up becoming incredibly depleted on life force.

Lissa Rankin:

And so those practices that might be dis embodying for example, but provide some temporary relief, can often at least tank people up a little bit. It's like, "Here's a couple units of packed red blood cells." But then it would be medical malpractice if somebody came in anemic into the emergency room and we gave them blood but we didn't work them up to find out why are you anemic in the first place? Where are you losing blood from or why did your bone marrow stop making it? And so that's the part that requires us to come back into the body and it's much more uncomfortable. It's easier to just leave the body and feel better.

Rebecca Wong:

It's so easy to leave the body. Dissociation in so many different ways is, gosh, I think what our culture is built on in a lot of ways. Buy something new or drink this thing or whatever. There's so many different ways that we practice some form or another of leaving our bodies on the regular.

Lissa Rankin:

by the time I quit my job in: 2007

Rebecca Wong:

Some kind of contact.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. And it was so startling for me to realize I had actually lost proprioception. I couldn't find my left elbow in space. And it made me realize how disembodied. I had become like a walking cerebrum, and most doctors are like that.

Rebecca Wong:

Most people are like that. There are so many people that come into my office and I'm working with them in a somatic way to try to discover what's happening inside relationally. And they have no idea what they're feeling. What I've really been drawn to lately is do you know the work of Bonnie Badenoch?

Lissa Rankin:

I do. I love her work.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

The Heart of Trauma.

Rebecca Wong:

The Heart of ... Right. And so one of the small little tidbits I picked out of the Heart of Trauma was when Bonnie was talking about how we show up as little ones when we're first born in the world and how we talk through language of moving babies and bodies and crying, and we're asking for what we want, we are aware of our needs. And over time, we're slowly shutting down our ability to know ourselves and to communicate that with others. And when those needs don't get tuned into and matched by somebody else, and I think those mismatches and the ways that we turn ourselves off over time contribute to us living in these disembodied bodies.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah, absolutely. And trauma locates in the body. I always like to have another empathy disclaimer when I say things like that, because if I don't, sometimes people misunderstand and think that I'm suggesting that people with somatic symptoms that I'm saying it's all in their head, and it's really not. It's really located in the body and the via the nervous system, via the disabling of the immune system, via chronic inflammation, through the microbiome, through all these other ways. But it really is locked in the body and can create so much suffering and of course, this is one of the things that they don't teach you in medical school. This was, I guess, the holy grail of this book for me was realizing that we know now that trauma causes disease, that's very clear. We have really good data that is no longer in any way woo.

Rebecca Wong:

Like ACEs data and stuff along those lines.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely. That's becoming more and more mainstream. Thank God we have people like Nadine Burke Harris, the California surgeon general giving her TED Med talk about adverse childhood experiences and adult onset disease, and the significant decrease in longevity of people with high ACE scores. But I really wanted to make a point in my book also to talk about what Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychiatrist calls the trauma of everyday life or developmental trauma, because there are a lot of people out there that have an ACE score of zero and a huge burden of developmental trauma. And so we have much less data around that because it just hasn't even been tracked, nobody's even screening for it in a medical interview.

Rebecca Wong:

Right. And I'm curious too then about epigenetics and inherited patterns, because our nervous systems learn in so many different ways, and that stress response cycle that we learn to inhabit in our bodies could also be epigenetic.

Lissa Rankin:

I've been seeing that in my clients a lot right now with what's going on with Russia and Ukraine. There's all this re reactivation, PTSD triggers around the Holocaust and around World War II and refugees, and these generational wounds that these clients maybe that are even young and weren't alive during any of this don't have any actual memory of this, but they're watching their parents and their grandparents go through their triggers and they're experiencing their own individual or independent triggers around experiences that are not part of this life for them, but still very significantly impact them. And absolutely, epigenetics is one of the ways that can be passed down and we know that scientifically as well.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. In the book, you talk about six steps to healing, you outline. And I think that it's really interesting for me to take a look at these because when I look at them, I think you described my work too. And so I'm thinking like this is healing in so many different realms. So believing that healing is possible, I think was your first one. Am I right about that?

Lissa Rankin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rebecca Wong:

Connecting and surrendering to your inner pilot light. Letting your innermost knowing guide your healing journey. So letting the wisdom, the guide within you, is that what you're talking about there?

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. Every religious tradition has a name for that. Psychologists call it something different. We can call it your divine self, your higher self, I call it your inner pilot light. In internal family systems, we call it Self with the capital S. You can call it Christ consciousness or Buddha nature or whatever, but I guess that second step, those six steps are from Mind Over Medicine, which this is really the sequel to. And I really think of that second step, which was the sixth step in the original version of Mind Over Medicine, which I've since revised, I think of that as the antidote to the people that are grasping their healing journey with both hands in such a clenched fist, attaching to, "I have to cure myself. I have to find my cure."

Lissa Rankin:

Of course people are so terrified that they're going to not find relief or that they're going to die, and that's legit. That is absolutely legitimate to have those feelings. But part of what I have found, especially where I live, I live in the Bay Area and this place is full of health nuts. And so sometimes, and I imagine you might have some of these people in your listening also, there are so many people that I come across who are doing everything, quote unquote right. They are eating their raw vegan diet, they're taking a hundred supplements, they're going to their yoga class, they're waking up and meditating every morning, they've been to the best doctors at the local university hospital, and they've also been to their acupuncturist and their naturopath and their guru and their energy healer-

Rebecca Wong:

All the things.

Lissa Rankin:

They don't have any bad habits and they're getting eight hours of sleep and they are some of the sickest people I've ever met. And so that second step, I think particularly is aimed at those people.

Rebecca Wong:

It sounds like it's really bringing us back to discernment though. It's really guiding us back to where's that wisdom lie inside of you?

Lissa Rankin:

Right. Well, and I give the example in the book, I start the book by telling the story of a traumatic injury that I had from a dog bite when I was mauled by a dog in the middle of doing this research. And my initial reaction to looking down at my inner thigh and seeing that I had a huge chunk of skin missing right over my femoral artery and it's bleeding and I think I might die. That initial terror, if we're in that terrified place, it's really hard to hear what I call the whole health intelligences, your mental intelligence of course, but also your somatic intelligence, your intuitive intelligence and your emotional intelligence. And especially when we're on a healing journey, it's so important to be able to tune into all of those intelligences and weave them together like you're an orchestra conductor.

Lissa Rankin:

It's like, "And now we will bring in the strings and now fade out the drums and bring in the cello." And I think that's a very, very difficult to do when we're stuck in the contracted, disembodied, terrified in IFS language, blended with parts place that we can't hear that guidance, but it's there. We all have that, it's built in. It's one of the beautiful gifts that's built into being human, and yet we lose touch with it. And when we leave our bodies, it makes it much harder, especially to access somatic intelligence, of course.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. I don't know that everybody that's listening knows what somatic intelligence is. I understand you, but I wonder if maybe for our listeners, we should just dive into that a little bit.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, almost everybody can relate to the idea of a gut feeling, and we might think that's the same thing as intuition. In my experience with myself, I'll just speak for my own direct experience, my intuition drops in almost like it comes from nowhere. It just drops in as a thought, except it has no emotional charge to it at all. It feels entirely neutral. And then I might have an emotional reaction to what my intuition guiding me to. That's very different for me than if I feel in my body, let's say a contraction in my solar plexus if I'm thinking about a particular decision that I'm trying to make. And that feels very different, that might feel like a no to me. Whereas if I feel this opening in my heart, blossoming in my chest like a butterfly, that might feel like a yes in my body. And different sensations and vibrations and feelings in my body are speaking to me all of the time and giving me information if I'm paying attention-

Rebecca Wong:

Right, if you're paying attention.

Lissa Rankin:

Which I'm often not. So that of course, is the real work of tuning into one's somatic intelligence is we must be in the body and paying attention in order to be able to interpret, and interpreting the body sensations is very, very difficult for trauma survivors because even if we do get sensations in the body, our minds may make up inaccurate stories. And I love some of your listeners probably know about Stephen Porges and polyvagal theory, and some of the other people who have interpreted polyvagal theory talk about how the state of our nervous systems can create our stories. And if we're in a fight or flight or freeze state of threat, then we might be having a sensation in the body that's legitimate, but we might make up a paranoid story about that sensation if we have not been able to treat the traumas that have maybe caused the nervous system dysregulation. So I find that in myself, at least, because of my own trauma history, interpreting those sensations is really the edgy part of somatic intelligence.

Rebecca Wong:

I have found that I need to really spend time getting to know the sensations in my body in a somatic way, just as a baseline. And the more that I do that and make it a really intentional practice, the more available that knowledge becomes to me at a later time.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely. It is a practice and it is not quick, and people don't like to hear that because of course everybody wants the quick fix. "How do I turn on all four whole health intelligences automatically overnight with a pill, if possible, please? And don't make me feel any pain in the process."

Rebecca Wong:

What strikes me about that though, is that I think as our birthright, we're born with a template for them to some extent, if they're nurtured. And the only way that they can really be nurtured from an early age is if the people raising us can nurture them. In other words, they have to be in touch with their own.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely.

Rebecca Wong:

Right, so whenever-

Lissa Rankin:

So few of us had those good enough parents that knew how to do that. Because as you said, these generational wounds get passed down. In my family, one of the significant impediments to embodiment was religion and that fundamentalism that makes the body a sinner or makes the body a sin.

Rebecca Wong:

How do you get in touch with the somatic intelligence then?

Lissa Rankin:

Right, absolutely. You don't, you disembody and memorize dogma.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah, that feels really resonant.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. So it is a practice. But I have a tendency to not want to oversimplify anything or suggest that things are easier than they are, but I also want to say, just to be encouraging to people, it's so worth it. The gifts of embodiment are absolutely worth the effort and discomfort of embodiment, especially in the ways in which they can show up in relationship. And I'm not ne I'm not even talking about like a sexual relationship, although that's obviously one of the side effects of embodiment is that people tend to have an improvement in their ability to experience pleasure in their sexuality.

Lissa Rankin:

But I'm even just talking about the reaction of my body to taking my dog to the beach and taking a walk on the beach and feeling that vibratory energy coursing through my body as I'm in nature and I'm watching my dog think she's a seal and just so joyous and being able to experience, not just visually with my eyes, the beauty of being out in nature, but to actually feel my body respond to the grounding, to my bare feet on the sand and the full embodied experience of what I did right before I got on this interview with you. And it, I think gives us so much more resilience and we're able to tolerate the potentially disembodying impact of things like watching the news right now.

Rebecca Wong:

Oh gosh. Yes, so much. It brings me to the point in your book where you were talking about pleasure practices as medicine for the body, because that's really what we've been talking about here. I think you mentioned that these pleasure practices, it could be anything, like dance or singing. All of these different things really bolster the way we live, bolster our enjoyment of the moment.

Lissa Rankin:

Yes, and those are the things that I put into part one of the book, which is really about energy transfusion practices, where we're bolstering the life force. And if you go into indigenous healing methods, so many of them involve those pleasure practices. There is dancing, there is singing, there is mythology, there's storytelling, there's hands on healing, there's community, there's love.

Rebecca Wong:

And a lot of somatic body work type practices.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely.

Rebecca Wong:

There's also a lot. I'm thinking the vu that we teach in somatic experiencing.

Lissa Rankin:

That's right. And none of those things were happening in my hospital. That was the opposite of what was happening in the hospital with our patients. And so I think that's really important because when we can transfuse the body and the mind and spirit, soul, the human with those practices, then we have more resourcing in order to be able to do the more difficult trauma healing work, which is hard. My best friend, Diane gave me a great metaphor and I've been making a lot of art around it lately, where she says that healing is ... we're like whales and we have to go down into the depths, down into the dark, down into the depths of our psyche and our consciousness and do this more difficult healing work. But then we also have to come back up to the surface and splash our tails around and get some oxygen and play with the other whales. I love watching the whales. I live right on the ocean and I love just watching them. They play for fun.

Rebecca Wong:

They play a lot. Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

Thy play for fun and then they do go back down. And so I know I have been triggered when I go to trauma healing workshops where they put you in back jacks and you're doing all trauma all day with no pleasure practices. And I'm like, I cannot handle that. I need to be in my body. I need to be dancing. I need to be singing. I need to be doing some yoga stretches. I need to be in connection with other people in a ritualized way. I need to do some art. I need to have ways to express myself so that the trauma can come out of me. But it's also, if we do the energy transfusions without the trauma healing, then it usually becomes more of a hedonistic or spiritual bypass. And as I said, that can be resourcing in the moment, but it does not typically make people what I call miracle prone, quite the opposite. It prevents people from doing that.

Rebecca Wong:

In many ways, one of the biggest pieces that I got from your work is the both and. That it's not this or that, it's pain relief and feeling your pain.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely. And I have a whole section in the book about what I call the paradoxes of healing. And if you look out there at what influencers for example are sharing about health and wellness and mind, body medicine and things like that, so many of them make the mistake of only expressing half of a paradox, and in a way, half of a paradox is 100% wrong. Because if we only take a half of ... I'll give you an example so people know what I'm talking about. You can heal yourself and you can't do it alone. Keep an open mind and don't be so open your brains fall out. Be clear in your intention to heal and surrender attachment to outcomes. Trust your intuition and follow the science and apply critical thinking.

Rebecca Wong:

Would you think that this is what we've been seeing so much lately, especially around COVID, the way that there's such a division?

Lissa Rankin:

the manuscript in September,: 2020

Lissa Rankin:

And I've always thought of myself as bridging the worlds of conventional medicine and spiritual healing and trauma healing and things like that, standing at the bridge. But what I realized is that there already had been a division between the pro conventional medicine, pro science, pro technology crowd, and the pro natural healing, anti conventional medicine, "We're going to heal ourselves," crowd. And I've always thought of them as warring camps in a way. And I was raised in one of those camps. My father was a very skeptical doctor, and anything in the realm of natural healing or spiritual healing was at best, quackery and at worst, the work of the devil, from my fundamentalist mother. And so I grew up in one of those camps, in the pro conventional medicine camp, but I never left that camp.

Lissa Rankin:

I just opened up to the other camp of, "Wow, there's cool stuff over here. We should include all of these in our medical treatment." But I hadn't realized until COVID that what maybe what made people tempted to rebel against something mainstream, like conventional medicine also maybe was a trauma symptom that made them rebel against anything mainstream, including public health guidelines and masks, vaccinations and things like that. So that was really a surprise to me. My own audience turned on me. So many people were like, "What are you doing? You're promoting vaccination? You're pro mask? You're pro social distancing and lockdown? I thought you wrote Mind Over Medicine." And so people acted like I had slapped them and it was so confusing to me.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah, I can imagine.

Lissa Rankin:

My clients and friends are frontline COVID doctors. They were out there on the front lines and I'm going, "Wait, if you think this is a hoax, you should not wear a mask and go to the emergency room right now." It was very, very confusing.

Rebecca Wong:

I can imagine how confusing that would be. It's like a form of gaslighting, in a way.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. And it's incredibly abusive gaslighting because people are-

Rebecca Wong:

[crosstalk: 00:31:10

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. And I certainly have my own judgements about people who were making money and building a platform off of COVID denialism. I certainly hope those people get held accountable in some way, because there is blood on their hands.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. I agree with you, and I'm also wondering, I'd love to hear your thoughts about long term COVID. I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a relationship therapist who lives in the Hudson Valley in New York, and Lyme tick borne illness is huge here. And there's something about those illnesses and long term COVID that I've just been noticing feel somewhat similar.

Lissa Rankin:

Well, that's a big question, and I'm sensitive to anybody who might be listening who might have long COVID or have chronic Lyme or chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia or other postviral syndromes, chronic pain syndromes, these mystery illnesses that are very difficult to treat and often baffle and befuddle.

Rebecca Wong:

And I wonder if that's just the similarity that you're naming right there. If that alone, the difficulty in managing it is what I'm feeling into.

Lissa Rankin:

Yes. It is the difficulty in managing it for, I can tell you for doctors having been one of them. Doctors don't like not being able to cure something. This is part of our trauma response. I work with doctors. I am a trauma healer for doctors. And I can tell you that I have yet to meet a doctor who was not overpowered in childhood in some way to the point that we decided at some point that never again were we going to be the least powerful a person in the room, and that the power to facilitate saving somebody's life is as powerful as you can get. What's more powerful than being able to save a life? But the flip side of that trauma symptom, and it's beautiful, it's beautiful because it motivates us to do so something really caring.

Lissa Rankin:

But the flip side of that is that if we can't save a life, we see it as a failure and we feel powerless and we feel helpless and we feel out of control, and that's scary to trauma survivors who become doctors. And what that means for the patient is that if the patient has an illness that we don't know how to treat, that all those inner children feelings that come up of feeling worthless and helpless and not good enough and-

Rebecca Wong:

Get evoked.

Lissa Rankin:

Powerless, and so we behave very badly with people who have illnesses we don't know how to treat. Instead of just saying, "I don't know how to help you. And that makes me feel awful, and I'm so sorry that you're suffering." Which would be much more compassionate, instead those people who have those mystery illnesses often wind up being additionally traumatized beyond the illness by how they are treated by the medical mainstream.

Lissa Rankin:

And that's why I think a lot of those people wind up going into the sacred medicine territory because they get treated better. They do get treated better usually, not always. And I wrote a whole section in my book about the shadow of sacred medicine and how harmful some healers can be. But I also so have witnessed people who conventional medicine has given up on being held with great delicacy, with great care, with great compassion by healers who say, "I believe you. I know how hard this is for you. I don't know if I can help you, but I'm willing to try. And either way, I want you to know you're not going to be alone." And in and of itself, that can be an answer-

Rebecca Wong:

That right there is healing. You're not going to be alone.

Lissa Rankin:

Right.

Rebecca Wong:

I'm here with you.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely.

Rebecca Wong:

Just from my own somatic training, that right there, that, "I am with you." That can calm down the nervous system.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely.

Rebecca Wong:

And once we start calming down the nervous system and the stress response cycle starts to have a little bit of resolution in there, that can shift some of what's happening in our bodies too. Some stress, if I'm getting this right, stress can cause more inflammation.

Lissa Rankin:

Yes. And chronic inflammation, we're getting more and more scientific data around how that is at the root of almost every illness. And we have of good data linking the trauma burden in the body to chronic inflammation. And that also disables the immune system and impacts the gut's ability to absorb nutrients and impacts the nervous system, and all of that is very multifactorial.

Rebecca Wong:

There's so many layers.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely. But with that disclaimer around long COVID, what I was going to say, and this is potentially triggering to some people, is that my theory, and this is not science, this has not been studied as far as I know. My theory is that people who develop long COVID probably have a greater trauma burden than people who got COVID and recovered with no squali. And I also have a theory that one of the reasons that black and indigenous communities for example, suffered much more greatly and died more frequently is because the collective trauma of racism and genocide and all of the traumas that those populations have been through, at least in the United States, makes the body much more vulnerable. The nervous system is more chronically dysregulated, there's more likely to be chronic inflammation. And so while we're all equally vulnerable to contracting the disease, if the nervous system is more chronically in a dorsal vagal freeze state in that level of threat or a sympathetic fight or flight stress response, and then we get COVID, then it's much more difficult for the body to recover completely.

Rebecca Wong:

Yes. And my listeners can't see that my head has been nodding. Yes, just a really big yes.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. And want to be really clear that I'm not saying it's all in your head. It is absolutely in the body.

Rebecca Wong:

On multiple levels too, right? The trauma's in the body, the disease is in the body. There's so many different pieces that yes, they are in your body and.

Lissa Rankin:

Yes. And I hope that people hear that not as overly triggering or disempowering in any way, but what I find hopeful about that is that trauma is treatable. We can treat trauma, and this is potentially really good news. And again, we don't have a lot of data yet. We have very clear data that trauma causes disease, we don't have really good data proving that treating trauma reverses disease, but we have a whole lot of anecdotes. Anecdotes are not science.

Rebecca Wong:

Are there any that you can share?

Lissa Rankin:

Oh gosh, yes. And there are many in the book about those sorts of things. So for example, I have a whole chapter in Sacred Medicine about Asha Clinton, who is the founder of Advanced Integrative Therapy, which is in the family of energy psychology, but with a lot of Jungian archetype work and deep roots of other types of psychotherapies. And she's also really an energy healer and a Sufi and Buddhist. She was a Buddhist for many years and then became a Sufi, and so there's a lot of spiritual healing in her work as well. It's very advanced and integrated. And she has been using Advanced Integrative Therapy, which is a trauma healing modality as primary treatment for cancer. Not as a substitute for treatment of cancer for those who want it, but for patients who have, for whatever reason, either been told that conventional cancer treatment will not cure them or people who have declined conventional cancer treatment, opting for hospice instead or something like that.

Lissa Rankin:

And so she has many anecdotes that are in the book of people who had a cancer diagnosis, for whatever reason, opted not to do conventional medical treatment, and were brave enough to do their very difficult shadow work. So this isn't just treating the traumas of how we were victimized, that's part of it, but AIT takes it deeper. It takes it specifically in the, she calls it the multi causal illness protocol, and it specifically is looking at the ways in which we have perpetrated trauma. And all of us have perpetrated trauma, none of us are-

Rebecca Wong:

This is such an important conversation.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. None of us are innocent from this. And that can be very, very difficult. I know for me, doing the trauma work around how I was a victim of trauma was very, very difficult, but sitting with the appropriate feelings of shame around how I have perpetrated trauma was almost intolerable for somebody who had a pretty high opinion of herself prior to trauma healing.

Rebecca Wong:

When I teach relational living classes, one of the first questions I ask everybody that comes in is, "Who here has been hurt in relationships? Have you been hurt in a relationship?" Almost everybody says yes. And then I say, "Who here has hurt someone in a relationship." And again, almost everybody says, yes. So we have this knowledge that we can cause harm.

Lissa Rankin:

Yes.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. And I think that's really where you're going with this. It's that piece of it, it's harm on multiple levels.

Lissa Rankin:

Yes. We can cause harm and we can cause harm to ourselves also. So for example, I tell the story in Sacred Medicine about Avery, who was a physician client of mine, a young mother, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and sought conventional treatment for her breast cancer. Did not tell anybody. Her kids didn't know, her business partners didn't know, nobody knew that Avery was sick. And so she recovered from her first breast cancer and wound up with recurrent breast cancer. And this time, because she was a client of mine, we had Dick Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems, was coming to talk about internal family systems as medical treatment for people who are chronically or terminally ill.

Lissa Rankin:

And so Avery volunteered to do some of her internal family systems work around the cancer. And when we were making contact with parts in her that might be using the body to try to get her attention about something else, and I want to be clear, and Dick is very clear about this too. Not all symptoms are psycho-spiritual traumas trying to get our attention, but sometimes they are. And so in this case, there was a part that popped up in Avery that said, "Well, Avery throws herself under the bus. She throws her parts under the bus in service of everybody else. And look what happened when the cancer came last time, it was the only thing that caused Avery to pay any attention to herself."

Lissa Rankin:

And then the cancer got cured and then she went right back to throwing all of her parts under the bus in service of everybody else. And so the cancer was basically saying, "I have to be here. It's the only way Avery's ever going to take care of herself." And she was shocked. She said, "Oh my God, I totally do that."

Lissa Rankin:

And so part of her healing work, and she did also seek out conventional treatment, part of her healing work was to make agreements with her own parts, "I am no longer going to throw my own inner children under the bus in exchange for caring about everybody else to my own depletion." And so far, she's cancer free. I just spoke with her recently to make sure I was accurate in my follow up. And so in Avery's case, it was a lot of how she had harmed herself, and absolutely neglected herself and abused herself. Whereas-

Rebecca Wong:

And how many of us do that?

Lissa Rankin:

Oh my gosh, especially doctors.

Rebecca Wong:

And therapists and-

Lissa Rankin:

And therapists, and pretty much everybody in the healing professions, including sacred medicine practitioners. I went to see this one guru, he was a Hindu high priest and an indigenous Balinese shaman who did healing work, and you wait outside his house and he meditates in the morning and you come in. And when I went to sit with this Balinese healer, he started hacking up a lung. Blood's coming out of his mouth. And I'm going, "Maybe you should go see a healer. Maybe you need to see a doctor." And he was like, "Oh no, no, no." So I think that tendency to prioritize caring for others to our own self destruction is a very significant trauma symptom that arises in people who are drawn to all of the healing professions.

Rebecca Wong:

Very much agreed.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. Other people have the opposite. There are other people who prioritize their own needs and absolutely do not give a crap about anybody else, but that is not the wound of healers.

Rebecca Wong:

Right. No, the healers wound is different, and it's both a shadow and a light. So that makes me want to come back to this piece that you briefly mentioned and that you write about, about the shadow, about how you shine the light on the shadow.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. And this is why we need the energy transfusions, because shining the light on the ways in which we have been perpetrators of trauma for other people, especially when we start looking at, "Oh, I'm a mother." I already see that my child has these ... She's 16 now, I can identify these trauma symptoms. I know what caused them. I don't want her to have to wait until she's my age in order to get treatment for-

Rebecca Wong:

Figure it out. Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah, right. So it's very hard when we become aware of how we may have harmed our children, our loved ones, ourselves, and to be able to hold that with compassion, which is why I love internal family systems, because it's a big buzzword to talk about self love. But how do you love the parts of yourself that have ... I really thought about this at the beginning of the Me Too movement.

Lissa Rankin:

I had a lot of compassion for the women that were coming out saying, "Me too," but I also couldn't help feeling, what about if one in three women and one in five men has been sexually perpetrated, think about how many perpetrators. If we are sexual molesters, how do we love the parts of ourselves that have molested our children? That's boggling to me to think about. I have not molested my child, but the numbers demonstrate that are a whole lot of us that have. And how do we love the part of us that has molested our child? Or how do we love the part of us who has made our children narcissistic prey of ourselves? Or how do we love the parts of ourselves that break our New Year's resolutions every year?

Lissa Rankin:

These are not easy parts to love. And what I appreciate about internal family systems is that it gives us a way to look at those parts. In Avery's case, she was able to get to know the part of her that threw herself under the bus in exchange for everybody else, and to see that it was a very necessary survival strategy, given her childhood wounding, and the details of her story are all in there with her consent. And that absolutely saved her life at one point, but this protector part, this part that had developed in order to keep her safe in childhood had overstayed its need to be there. And so her, I don't even like to necessarily call it shadow work because some of our parts don't want to be called the shadow. They're like, "Wait, I was a light worker trying to save your life."

Rebecca Wong:

It's so true because so often those parts, I like to think of them as what's that saying? Adaptive then, maladaptive now. We needed those parts to survive.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely. And when we can get to know those parts and become intimate with those parts, we call them firefighters in IFS, and understand how they still think they're protect ... They usually think we're seven years old. They don't realize I'm 52. My parts, I have to remind them all the time. I am 52. I am a good mother. I have a 16 year old daughter of my own. I am not seven. And so I don't need that part to do that protective thing any more, I can do it better from the divine self in me.

Rebecca Wong:

That part gets to rest.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. And those parts, it can be very triggering sometimes when I talk about extending compassion to sociopathic parts in other people, or parts that are abusers in other people, because some of us get very contracted and self-righteous, and we need to punish those people. And I absolutely believe we need to hold people accountable for their criminal behaviors and their war crimes and all of that, but I also feel we're never going to have outer peace on the planet as long as we have inner wars going on with all of these parts at war inside of ourselves.

Rebecca Wong:

That's right.

Lissa Rankin:

hat do bad things, [crosstalk: 00:51:40

Rebecca Wong:

We have a really hard time with them.

Lissa Rankin:

We have a really hard time with them in ourselves, and we have a really hard time with those parts in other people. And so they don't get a lot of love, and yet they are part of our wholeness and the more we ignore them and avoid them, the more they come out sideways and make us sick. And so I find again, it can be triggering when I talk about this with people, but I hope people hear it as hopeful. I think it's incredibly exciting that Asha Clinton is working with people's perpetrating parts and their cancers are going away without conventional medical treatment. Like, what?

Rebecca Wong:

That's blowing my mind. My mind is blown. Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

What is that? And again, we don't have the science, so these are anecdotes, anecdotes are not medical science, but wow, that's exciting.

Rebecca Wong:

It's pretty darn exciting. I think it really speaks to how powerful a medicine compassion can be.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh my gosh. And I can say from ... I'm eight years into IFS in my own work, and I cannot tell you ... Again, I was making a plug for why embodiment work is worth doing, because it feels good once you can get past the uncomfortable part of it. And I would say loving the perpetrating parts in ourselves is the ultimate and I cannot speak highly enough about how worth it is, because what that also does is it makes me such a generous person with my loved ones when they have perpetrating parts that hurt me.

Rebecca Wong:

Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

And it doesn't mean I don't hold them accountable and set boundaries and communicate clearly about what's okay and not okay, and sometimes dial down the privileges if people cannot respect my boundaries and all of that, I do that also. But I am so much more generous and I have all these unconventional love stories now about connection and disconnection and rupture and repair and finding our sweet spot when I'm speaking up on behalf of my parts, but I'm also listening to my loved ones speak on behalf of their parts, and we're negotiating how to heal together.

Rebecca Wong:

Together, that's right.

Lissa Rankin:

And to me, it is so intimate. It is so loving. It is so co-regulating, which of course is calming to the nervous system and brings us into that more healing aspect of the ventral part of the vagus nerve, where we are-

Rebecca Wong:

That's exactly what I was just thinking about, we're in a more receptive place.

Lissa Rankin:

Yes.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

Receptive to other people, receptive to whatever your spiritual leaning might be receptive to nature and available for ... One of the prayers that one of the healers I worked with said, "Make me available for whatever healing is possible now." But can we be actually receptive to that? So healing is about receptivity. And so that's what Avery realized, she was not actually available to receive healing from anybody.

Rebecca Wong:

Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

She was offering it, but it was one way. And so, one of the exercises with my doctors when they come in for our Heal the Healer retreat is I say, "Okay, right now we are only going to practice breathing out. Because that's what we all do, we all give. So we are going to put air out." Now, how long can you do that without breathing air in?

Rebecca Wong:

At some point, you have to breathe it in again. Right.

Lissa Rankin:

And it's hilarious because of course, we don't last very long when we're only breathing out. And so we use the breath as a metaphor for sacred reciprocity, for giving and receiving in equal measure, which is at the core of many indigenous healing practices.

Rebecca Wong:

It's at the core of living moderately, of being balanced, of being able to take care of ourselves well and take care of others. All of it.

Lissa Rankin:

That's right. And as I said, some people are wounded in the opposite way. They only breathe in. They suck the life force out of other people and they-

Rebecca Wong:

And so then how long can you just breathe in for?

Lissa Rankin:

Exactly. You can't breathe in very long either. So these are not life generating ways of being. And this is my empathic parts coming in again. I always want to remind people, it's not your fault. It wasn't my fault that I was only giving out, breathing out and perpetrating on the sides because I was so depleted. It wasn't my fault. I was hurt that way and we can't do better until we know better, and until we get treatment.

Rebecca Wong:

One of the paradoxes you talked about, and maybe this is a really great place for us to land is it's not your fault and healing is your responsibility.

Lissa Rankin:

That's right. And it is something that we have some power over. Now, we're not in control of everything. We don't have the ultimate power. None of us are gods, in spite of the fact that we have God inside of us. We are not all powerful, but we're also not all helpless and powerless. There is that still point of balance, as you're saying, where we can be proactive about that which is within our power, and getting treatment for our trauma is one of those things that we do have some power over. And I also recognize, I have a huge social justice part that knows that trauma treatment is a luxury good in most countries. It is not covered by most insurances, at least the good trauma treatments are not covered by most insurances, and it is expensive. And so part of my social justice activism is that we have started a nonprofit called Heal at Last.

Lissa Rankin:

We're still building it, but if anybody wants to get on the mailing list for that at healhealatlast.org, we are looking to scale sacred medicine, to scale for anybody, based on a 12 step-like model where anybody can 12 step, it doesn't cost anything but a donation, if you can afford it, and if you can't afford it, you don't have to donate anything. And we're looking to scale this work in that way with peer-to-peer support and training group leaders to hold safe containers for group repealing work. So send us prayers because we've bitten off more than we can chew, and the demand is so great right now and the amount, the trauma burdens that people are carrying are so extreme and every trauma therapist I know is booked.

Rebecca Wong:

Oh, every trauma therapist I know is booked with a wait list. Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

And it's so triggering to me because it's so difficult to talk about this material to begin with. And when I do, people with chronic illness get buy-in and they say, "Okay, you've sold me on it. I am ready to do my work. Now, how do I do it?" And it's like, oh my God. There's nothing.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

So we are-

Rebecca Wong:

I'm so glad you're putting together this nonprofit.

Lissa Rankin:

We just got our first $100,000 grant and we're building the infrastructure right now, but we're not quite ready. So in the meantime, I have a program called Healing With the Muse where we have about 500 people that can't find therapists or doing in addition to their therapy where we're working with energy transfusion practices and trauma healing practices on Zoom right now.

Rebecca Wong:

I love it.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. That's our stop gap measuring. And it's by donation. It's pay what you can. So that's our attempt to try to meet the need because it guts me that I'm doing all this work to raise awareness about these issues and there's a huge shortage of adequately trained trauma therapists.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

And a huge problem around the democratization of health and health equity issues around the finances.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. I'm so on board with you there and I'm so happy to support getting the word out and helping folks find these resources that you're developing.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, thank you. And thank you for the work that you're doing as well. I know it's really important stuff and we need this more than ... We need to do this work on ourselves and each other for the survival of our species. It could not be more important. I can't think of anything more important right now.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. And if there's a shadow to the pandemic, it's how much it's helped us see how important this work is to do.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, absolutely. And the last chapter of the book, which again, I wrote it when I had to rewrite the book, I also rewrote the entire last chapter about collective trauma and how even the idea of, when I wrote Mind Over Medicine, I was thinking, "How can an individual self heal themself?"

Rebecca Wong:

Right. Not thinking collectively about what the whole container is bringing into the field.

Lissa Rankin:

Right. And one of our African American doctors in my program was like, "Oh my God, how do I help my African American patients when they are swimming in a sea of trauma."

Rebecca Wong:

Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

And the limit-

Rebecca Wong:

And ongoing trauma and escaping trauma-

Lissa Rankin:

Ongoing.

Rebecca Wong:

Trauma that it's not just like, "Okay, we're through it. Now you survived." It's still here.

Lissa Rankin:

No, it is still here every day. My sister is biracial. My sister's BIPOC, so we talk about this. And it she's like, "Every day. You don't understand sis, this is what I deal with every day. And every day I'm terrified my son is going to be stopped for a broken taillight, murdered or targeted for a hate crime because he lives in the south." Ow. So I think that's one of the shadows of the wellness world also is this exaggerated narcissism, the exaggerated focus on me, myself and healing myself without awareness of the traumatic sea in which we all swim.

Rebecca Wong:

Right. And I think it's so important to name this because that really is how we heal collectively is that we have to notice these parts because just like we were talking about before, the parts of us that have caused harm are equally important to help notice the collective healing.

Lissa Rankin:

Right. And that can be really difficult. I know particular types of childhood wounding make people trigger sensitive, like hair trigger sensitive to anything that feels like shame, because shame was weaponized and they were shamed for things that they were entirely innocent around. And so even the way we talk about anti-racism and things like that, I just was interviewed by Resmaa Menakem whose work I love.

Rebecca Wong:

I love Resmaa. Yep.

Lissa Rankin:

I love Resmaa's work. If any of the listeners don't know about My Grandmother's Hands and I just read his new book-

Rebecca Wong:

Oh, we had him on a few years ago.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, he's fantastic. I just read his new book, the Quaking of America, which comes out at the same time my book does. And Resmaa and I were talking about this and he was saying, "How's it going with doing anti-racism work with white male doctors?" I'm like, "It's not going well, because they're incredibly sensitive to anything that feels like," literally one of our doctors opened Layla Saad's book, Me and White Supremacy.

Rebecca Wong:

Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

Was reading like three sentences and said, "She's shaming me." And I said, "Okay, let's slow down. What if she is extending herself and doing you a huge favor by educating you about what you're doing that hurts people like her?" And he slammed the books shut. "No, she's shaming me." "Okay. So, let's slow down."

Rebecca Wong:

Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

And my sister's going, "We can't slow down. White people need to be able to tolerate this quicker. BIPOC people don't have the option to slow down." And I'm like, "Yes, that's true too."

Rebecca Wong:

You know what this is making me think of, is when I work relationally with couples, so I have two people in the room. And I use a lot of relational life therapy, Terry Real's model, which takes on power dynamics in a way that I don't see other methodologies taking on. And one of the ways it takes on power dynamics is it talks about both shame and grandiosity. And when we talk about shame, the power under position, often we're talking about like a power-over/power-under position, as opposed to what we try to help people get to, which is a shared power with. And when we're in the power under, it feels bad, it hurts, we want to get out of that place. But when we're in power over, when we're in the more grandiose place, it feels really good. It's hard to come down from there because it feels good. It's like trying to take the car keys away from someone who's drunk, but thinks that they can drive.

Lissa Rankin:

Right. I love that you're bringing this up because the whole last chapter of the book is about power over and power under dynamics and how as long as we're in that power game, it is a zero sum game. It is as zero sum as the Cold War. Even the winners are losing.

Rebecca Wong:

That's right.

Lissa Rankin:

And so, so much of the work that I'm doing, especially with Heal at Last, with the nonprofit work is about how do we change the game all together, such that we can share power and negotiate boundaries and communicate agreements together relationally in a co-regulating way where we can help each other repair our relational wounding in relationship, but in a way that in some way requires those of us who are maybe winners of the game, and I've been accused of being a traitor to my privilege. I am a winner. I won the game and I decided I didn't want it, in that I was at the top of the power hierarchy. I have every privilege other than being male. I am a white, highly educated medical doctor, cisgender, heterosexual, able bodied person who has a body size that looks normal.

Lissa Rankin:

All of those privileges, social class, all of those privileges. And yet the suffering that even at the top of the power hierarchy, the suffering of losing the intimacy of witnessing the people in the power under situation and just absolutely feeling crushed that I am in some way, part of that. But at the same time to be motivated by that, not to be paralyzed in a one down shame position, but to be motivated by what could happen if we are willing to make some sacrifices and learn how to share power and enjoy the intimacy of that. To me, that's why. Why would I give up my power? Why would I-

Rebecca Wong:

To share intimacy.

Lissa Rankin:

Yeah. Why would I sacrifice grandiosity when it feels so great? Man, I loved me some inflated grandiosity here. That felt great until it didn't.

Rebecca Wong:

Right.

Lissa Rankin:

And falling off that pedestal that we put ourselves on, or that other people put us on, and I really do have compassion for some of the people that I wrote about in the chapters about the shadow of sacred medicine. Man, I can tell you at given the position I am in that the culture wants me to abuse my power. They literally want to give their power away to me so that I am in a position where I am in a power over position, and I don't want to in power-

Rebecca Wong:

It makes people more comfortable when you're in the power over position than when you're in a shared power with position. People don't yet know what to do with that.

Lissa Rankin:

No, they really don't. And I can tell you having been a medical doctor, when I was in the delivery room and the shit's hitting the fan and the mother is dying and the baby is dying and there is a room full of experts in the room. If I do not look 100% certain that I know exactly what to do, if I'm not barking out orders, then the room is terrified. So if I were to say, "Hey, everybody else in the room, what shall we do together to handle this crisis?" I'd get fired.

Rebecca Wong:

You know what it's bringing me back to? You would get fired probably in that position. And what I'm thinking about is so much of this comes back to our dysregulated systems, the disconnection that we have from our systems. Because if we all had more agency around feeling more just connected within ourselves, it wouldn't be such a big deal that you're in a shared power with position. It's a big deal when my system is dysregulated, and I'm looking to you saying, "Tell me what to do."

Lissa Rankin:

That's so absolutely true. And I've had years of conversation with a woman who is a transpersonal psychologist, has a PhD in psychology. And she was the right hand woman for a guru for 17 years, a very powerful guru. And she, and many other people in the community left the spiritual community, because they wanted to share power with the guru and the guru wouldn't let them. There was no room, there was only room for one guru in that community, even though some of the students had outgrown him or had developed beyond him and felt that they had something to contribute. And so she was in the one down to the guru, and I was saying, "Well, I'm the one on the stage, and I am trying to get off the stage and get other people to come up and share the stage with me, And they don't want to."

Lissa Rankin:

They're looking at me like, "What? You want me to come up on stage and teach the Songa?" And I'm saying, please, please, please. And that is my model for Heal at Last, I am literally looking to actualize, ideally in its utopian version, it would ultimately become a leaderless group. But in the beginning we are planning on training trained trauma therapists to be able to make sure that we protect the safety. But imagine if the group itself becomes the leader, and if the practices and boundaries that are put in place and the sacred medicine practices that are holding the container could allow the container itself to be the guru or the healer. Now you're getting into my visionary part-

Rebecca Wong:

I'm going to keep going there with you, and it also just has a texture of it to me that reminds me of Earth Seed. I don't know if you're familiar with Octavia Butler's work?

Lissa Rankin:

I love her work.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. So it's just bringing me to that visionary place, and I'm loving that. And I would love to help you out in any way that I can, so please just-

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, thank you so much.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah.

Lissa Rankin:

Thank you so much. And I want to repeat, because I think this is so important that why is it worth doing this? Because the reward is intimacy.

Rebecca Wong:

The reward is intimacy, that's right.

Lissa Rankin:

The reward is intimacy, and it's so heartwarming, it's so touching. There's so much love on the other side of this journey, and we can't guarantee what will happen to the body when we do that. But anecdotally, I can say that at least some of the time, that infusion of intimacy, when we're willing to ... the phrase I use all is letting love win. When love wins instead of pride, when love wins instead of righteousness, when love wins instead of grandiosity, when intimacy is the reward, then this is medicine. This is medicine for the nervous system, which is then medicine for the body. And I really do believe it has the potential to reverse some medical illness.

Rebecca Wong:

Oh, so beautiful. And I think one last comment, because I keep trying to wrap us up, but then we keep going to such delicious places. It's so lovely.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, thank you.

Rebecca Wong:

The thing that I'm thinking about as you say this is intimacy. We don't really know intimacy from a power over power under place. We can't.

Lissa Rankin:

No.

Rebecca Wong:

So most people who don't understand that that's the reward it's because maybe we haven't really experienced what that feels like yet.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely. And people who are traumatized in certain ways, intimacy can feel like the enemy and intimacy is paradoxically both the thing people crave and the most terrifying thing.

Rebecca Wong:

And the thing they'll avoid. Yes.

Lissa Rankin:

Especially people, I talk about the NARM model in sacred medicine, and particularly people who don't get that early pre-verbal connection with the biological mother need met. And that can be through no fault of the mother. It can be because the baby's born premature and is in an incubator or because of adoption or the mother dies or any number of traumatic situations that can disconnect the baby from the healthy intimacy of the mother in a non enmeshing way, that people who don't get that need met have a significantly greater risk of chronic illness, and they also are much more likely to be attracted to spiritual communities and spiritual practices that are spiritual bypassing and embodiment bypassing practices because they never fully embody.

Lissa Rankin:

It's never safe enough to fully embody as an infant, even, as a neonate, as a fetus. And so that is a more difficult to treat wound, but it is treatable. It's just, it requires a much more gentleness than some of the other trauma healing methods that can really be too much for that particular population of high risk individuals who are really at much greater risk of difficult to treat medical illnesses and mental illnesses as well.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. Oh yeah. Lissa, it has been such an amazing gift and a pleasure to have you join me here.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, thank you. It's so relaxing to my nervous system to be talking to somebody that I don't have to fight. I'm so exhausted from the protectors in me that have been activists on social media, trying to just fight the ignorance and misinformation and spiritual bypassing and all of that. So thank you for being so easy.

Rebecca Wong:

Oh, I'm so glad that this was a respite for you. And I hope that everybody goes out and either pre-orders or orders a copy of Sacred Medicine, because it is such a gift to the world. Thank you so much for writing it.

Lissa Rankin:

Oh, thank you for helping me spread the word. And to everybody who's listening, my empathic parts are feeling the people on the other side of this conversation and recognizing that it can have a really big impact. And sometimes if there's not somebody there to it's someone when they're having that impact, I just want to remind everybody to give yourself the hug or go ask somebody that is safe to give you a hug. It can be hard to have this conversation, and I want to make sure everybody feels regulated.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah. And that's beautiful reminder, even just that we can all just put our arms around ourselves, hold our shoulders and give a little squeeze.

Lissa Rankin:

Absolutely

Rebecca Wong:

Such beautiful space to end. Thank you again for joining us.

Lissa Rankin:

Thank you.

Rebecca Wong:

Yeah.