van der Kolk: It was stunning. South Africa was extremely violent on every level. The whole society was enraged. Everybody was after everybody. When I was there, people were getting killed all the time. So, how were they going to have a transition that would not result in a bloodbath? They very deliberately decided to make a transition to calm people’s rage down. Tutu was a master trauma therapist. I followed him and saw him at work, and he was stunning. He would come into a room with 40, 50, 60 people, and we would pray together, and we would sing together, and we would dance together. We got this sense of communal rhythm and pleasure and belonging and being in sync, and then somebody would start talking about their trauma. To talk about your trauma sometimes separates people because you are into your own misery and your overwhelming feeling of terror and rage. Tutu would just get people to that certain point, and he’d say, “Let’s get up. Let’s sing and dance.” He was a master at what we call in our work pendulation—getting people to move into safe places then into the dangerous places; getting that courage to go into deep and painful places by knowing that on the other hand there are feelings of safety and connection. I saw him do that well, and, of course, Mandela and Alex Borraine were like that too. When the transition happened, the urge to kill and take revenge was temporarily suspended because people felt loved and heard. They very deliberately wanted to make sure that the birth of South Africa was not a bloodbath as it was in India for example. They learned from India that if a nation gets born out of bloodbath, it will never recover. It was an astounding spiritual process founded on science and understanding how the brain and trauma works.

Melaragno: Now, when you said it was founded on science, did Bishop Tutu do some research? Or do you mean that his work just happened to line up with the scientific understanding?

van der Kolk: That’s how science works. People figure out how to do something and then afterwards our scientific studies clarify how it works. For example, the trauma therapy called EFT, which I call tapping, tapping acupressure points. Nobody knows yet how it works. There is also such a thing as chi. We empirical, Western medical people have no idea what these acupressure points actually are or what chi is. They may or may not exist. But I feel confident somebody will figure it out someday.

Melaragno: It goes back to that life force in the end, doesn’t it? There’s something in that about finding a way.

van der Kolk: We’re creatures, and creatures will do terrible things to each other and then need to find ways of surviving. Every culture finds ways to go on. I strongly suspect that most martial arts that developed in Japan were developed to help samurai to recover from their interminable wars. Studying martial arts makes perfect sense from a trauma point of view. I’m pretty sure that the tango in Argentina came out of those miserable sailors who had to risk being killed sailing to round Cape Horn coming together with the prostitutes. Somehow they said we have to make ourselves feel better. They started to dance the tango, and, to my mind, the tango sounds like a perfect way of helping to deal with deregulated bodies because you need to learn to pay attention to yourself and another. I think around the world people have discovered various things most of which does not really involve a lot of talking actually.

Melaragno: Yet here in the West we have a lot of talk therapy, don’t we?

van der Kolk: We yack and we drink. But talking is important. It is interesting to me because I taught in China, and I sometimes get Chinese students here. Their Qigong is wonderful, but they don’t talk. As long as you don’t talk, you can’t deal with your shame. The power of talking is that you can learn to tell the truth. Talking has a very important function, and it is not always present in all other cultures. Going within and finding words to express yourself is a very important part of healing from trauma. By finding words you can create symbols and connections, and you can communicate with other people who say, “Oh, that’s what it’s like for me also” or “Oh, it’s slightly different for me.” Words open up interpersonal communication. In most other cultures, words are more stylized, more prescribed. So, we [in the West] have definite things to offer.

Melaragno: Continuing that thought, you write in the book, “Trauma devastates the social engagement system and interferes with cooperation, nurturing and the ability to function as a productive member of the clan. People who feel safe in their bodies can begin to translate the memories that previously overwhelmed them into language.” And then you talk about story writing, “Telling the story is important, without stories memory becomes frozen and without memory you can not imagine how things can be different.” What can you suggest to caregivers in the field who are exposed to trauma? How can an aid worker best serve others and how can they care for themselves in the process?

van der Kolk: I think the most important thing in taking care of yourself is to stay in touch with the things and the people that you love. Also, it is important to talk about what you’re going through; what you’re worried about; what you see and what you notice. Be in touch with people and find words for despair and contempt and hatred because that’s the hard part of it. As we like to say, “All parts are welcome.” Fear, dejection, hope, strength, rage—they all have their place. And in serving others, just because a person is despondent does not mean that you have to “fix” them. All you need to do is to help them to access those parts that help them survive, and, as I talk about elaborately in my book, to discover what role their despondency, rage, and self-destructive parts play in their survival.

I oftentimes in a way wonder why people do what I call “trauma tourism.” Having gone to school on the south side of Chicago, which, to my mind, is still one of the worst places on Earth, I don’t really need to travel very far away from home to see an urgent need for trauma care. I just came back from visiting Europe and was in Japan and Australia earlier this year, and it seems like those societies are doing a much better job dealing with the seeds of trauma than we do in the US. And, so, I’m a little suspicious about US people going abroad to spread our gospel. I wish people would stay at home more and look at what’s going on right here. School systems in Japan, Korea, Australia, and Europe are more advanced, and parents are helped to stay home to raise their kids or to find highly subsidized care for them. It’s probably pretty heretical to urge US aid workers to stay home until we clean up south central Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, and rural Appalachia. I think maybe it’s best to start off being a change agent in your own community.

Melaragno: When you say “a change agent in your own community,” I think that maybe part of the alienation we experience in our culture is that we can live in a community and not know each other’s stories. You say that story or the ability to speak about our experience is very important, can you tell us a little bit more about that?

van der Kolk: Well, trauma is about not being able to tolerate feeling what you feel and knowing what you know. It’s about not being able to stand what you feel and what you know. We’re much better at seeing what’s wrong with other people, and we’re pretty blind to ourselves. Getting to know ourselves and seeing what we’re hiding from is really the beginning of change.

Melaragno: So, it’s about knowing our own story.

van der Kolk: Not so much “knowing our own story.” (Although, it’d be great if American kids learned in school that, under Jim Crow, Black people were treated pretty much like ISIS treats its underlings.). The most important issues are to know our reactions, be curious about our own blindness and uptightness, and get to know what triggers us and throws us off balance.

Melaragno: I had an interesting experience back in October at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in a seminar I did with Joan Borysenko. In a writing exercise, she said to take an experience or trauma in our lives and to turn in into a hero’s story with a beginning, middle, and end. She said that some of us might be in the middle of the darkest point of our story—in Dante’s terms, we might still be in the Inferno or the Purgatorio, nowhere near the Paradiso. She then said “[to] make the hero’s ending up because the brain doesn’t know the difference.” I’ve used this exercise a couple of times when I felt like I was in a no-win situation. By completing the story with a positive ending, my stress reduced and my perspective of the situation changed for the better. How do you feel about that—about the fact that the brain doesn’t know the difference? Somehow it’s not lying to oneself; it’s just seeing a possible future.

van der Kolk: Imagination is our greatest asset as human beings, and as long as you can imagine other realities, you are okay. If you are in jail and you can imagine learning to do new things and skills—if you can imagine Shakespeare playing in your mind as you’re locked up—you have alternative realities, and you’re not really a victim of the present. What’s so hard about trauma is that it tends to kill the imagination. In Chapter 18 of the book, I describe the psycho-dramatic structures that I use. People create situations in which others play real parents and ideal parents, and they have the experience of what it would’ve been like if, when they were 3 years old or 8 years old, something else would’ve happened and somebody would’ve been there for them. It is unspeakably profound. It is almost as if this three-dimensional alternative reality may be as powerful as the reality.