Bell Hooks Podcst V 2
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Kathy on the couch, your podcast for everyday clinicians who sit with grief, trauma, and the hardest human experiences every day. You weren't meant to carry this alone, and this is a space for therapists who hold space for others and sometimes need a place to be held to. I am Kathy and I am your EMDR consultant, trainer, and theologist specializing in.
Methods of death, dying, and bereavement. I created this podcast to support those who do the deep work, especially trauma and grief therapists and EMDR clinicians needing a soft place to land who want real conversations, meaningful support in a community where the hard questions are finally welcome. We also are thrilled to share and announce are Kathy on the Couch Membership Community, which is your home for grief and trauma consultation professional growth.
It's by therapist, four therapists. Where you find a monthly consultation group, you'll find a monthly N-B-C-C-C-E training. [00:01:00] You'll get access to a course module and resource kits. We're so happy to have you in one place and you don't have to go looking for all those items in all the places. You can just come here so we hold space for those who hold it all.
That's our mission where we talk honestly about all clinical challenges in the business of being a healer through curriculum development. And training and breaking the silence to lead and thrive in the field without losing ourselves in the process. So if you're looking to join for deeper connection, I invite you to join our membership community to help you learn and grow.
Or if you're an EMDR therapist looking to be certified or a consultant, we have our program EMDR University. Remember to give us a five star reading wherever you get your podcast. Now let's get comfortable and let's head on over to the couch.
Welcome to Kathy on the couch, your podcast for everyday clinicians who sit with grief, trauma, and the hardest human experiences every day. You weren't meant to carry this alone, and this is a space [00:02:00] for therapists who hold space for others and sometimes need a place to be held to. I am Kathy and I am your EMDR consultant, trainer, and theologist specializing in.
Methods of death, dying, and bereavement. I created this podcast to support those who do the deep work, especially trauma and grief therapists and EMDR clinicians needing a soft place to land who want real conversations, meaningful support in a community where the hard questions are finally welcome. We also are thrilled to share and announce are Kathy on the Couch Membership Community, which is your home for grief and trauma consultation professional growth.
It's by therapist, four therapists. Where you find a monthly consultation group, you'll find a monthly N-B-C-C-C-E training. You'll get access to a course module and resource kits. We're so happy to have you in one place and you don't have to go looking for all those items in all the places. You can just come [00:03:00] here so we hold space for those who hold it all.
That's our mission where we talk honestly about all clinical challenges in the business of being a healer through curriculum development. And training and breaking the silence to lead and thrive in the field without losing ourselves in the process. So if you're looking to join for deeper connection, I invite you to join our membership community to help you learn and grow.
Welcome to our podcast Today. Every series has an episode that feels different than the others. Not more important, just different. And that's kind of where in writing it, we realized that the whole series was building this. That is this episode. the theorists we've looked at across this series, fre, Dewey, Vygotsky, Montessori, we're all in different ways making the same argument.
That genuine learning requires the whole person and that education, which asks learners to suppress their experience, their bodies, their histories, and their authority as knowers is not education. It's something else. So Bell Hooks said it more directly and more personally and more politically [00:04:00] than any of them.
And she said it from inside of an experience at Fre, Dewey, Vygotsky, and Montessori. All of them white. All of them operating from positions of institutional belonging were never required to name. And as we go into this, welcome to the Rewired 360 podcast. I'm Kathy Couch, LCSW, fellow, and Thanatology.
Your EMDR, consultant and trainer, and the founder of Rewire 360. This episode is episode five of our six part series, roots of the Revolution, why Pedagogical Theory belongs in Clinical Training Spaces. Last episode, we talked about the polyvagal theory debate. What scientific critique actually says, what Porges responded and what it means for clinical practice.
Part two drops Thursday, so stay tuned. But today we come back to pedagogy, to the question of what it means to teach and learn as a whole human being through the lens of bell hooks in what she called engaged [00:05:00] pedagogy. So she was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Kentucky, in Hopkinsville, and she chose the pen name, bell Hooks stylized, and specifically lowercase as a deliberate political act, drawing attention away from any individual identity and towards the ideas she taught at Yale, Oberlin City College of New York and Berea College.
But she died in 2021 at. 69 and her most influential work in educational theory is teaching to Transgress, and that was published in 1994. A book I return to more often than anything. it's not a comfortable book. It's the kind of book that asks you to honestly look at what you're doing in a training room and why, and to hold the gap between what you believe about education and what your practice demonstrates.
Super awesome work. Hooks Drew Apollo re's critical pedagogy on Buddhist philosophy, feminist theory, and also her own experience [00:06:00] navigating the overwhelmingly white academic institutions of the late 20th century America, and what she added to the pedagogical conversation. What none of the other theorists in this series named with the same directness was the body, the physical, emotional, political reality of the whole person in the learning encounter.
And that's not as an afterthought, it's at the center. And she insisted that education, which asked students to leave themselves at the door is not an education. And she described that as institutional violence. And when we look at the whole person in the room, she introduced the term, Engage pedagogy to describe a mode of teaching that insists on the presence of the whole person, teacher and student alike.
And the educational encounter, which is what I've been studying and getting ready to talk about the relational field and my grief map work. And engaged pedagogy is distinguished from what she called merely progressive pedagogy by one essential feature. [00:07:00] And really it's going back to Maslow hierarchy of Needs, our own commitment to self-actualization.
And that's in her 1994 work and in her framework, a teacher who's not doing our own work, who hasn't examined our assumptions, confronted our biases, or engaged in our own growth. Cannot create the conditions for our genuine learning and our willingness to be changed by the encounter is not optional. If you've listened to my other work, you'll know that I cite the I.
only the Brave, where there's a specific change encounter with the female and the chief of the fire department. It's about, fire workers and firefighters and, super powerful story. But you'll know that I have one specific scene that I often refer to It's, in my blog specifically, if you wanna kind of get more details, but that moment where people are changed by each other is foundational to what I'm building and what I'm doing in the [00:08:00] work.
And it's the condition of possibility for engaged pedagogy. It's not fres banking model, it's this idea of engagement, this very soulful relational field experience. And this has an immediate resonance for myself. And a lot of trauma-informed clinical educators in regards to neuroscience and neuroception.
And the parallel to therapeutic principle that the clinician's own healing and my own self-awareness is foundational to, effective practice. And that's exact from her. And she was making the same argument about teaching that. That trauma theorists have long made about therapy, that you can't take someone further than you're willing to go yourself.
I love that. I love the idea of story, this idea of richness, this idea of doing our own work, and it's changed my life. It's changed the life of my patients, and it's been super powerful. A trainer who enters a room with productive uncertainty and genuine curiosity.
They're a less available one. I've been in rooms [00:09:00] with trainers where I've raised hands and I've been shunned. Other Consultees describe their own ableism as they were speaking in a training and called out by a trainer. Super not in line with this theory. And an educator who has an examined our own relationship to power to learning and the possibility of being changed.
Can't credibly teach others to do the same. And I'm building this in the developmental consultation framework that's. going to be aligned throughout our framework as we look at, workbooks seminars on this idea. if you're interested in more training on this, I will have my, developmental consultation framework.
Coming up in June it looks like. And so, you can visit that at rewired three sixty.cgo.com and you can hear more about this framework if you're interested in the teaching model of it. And it's been super fun to build. It's been so important. [00:10:00] In my work, in the work of clinicians, we're gonna talk about the role of consultation.
We're gonna talk about the role that it plays in this, relational encounter. And she's the sort of core of that. And her relational neuroscience of intersubjectivity offers a biological account of what she was describing. Phenomenologically. And I wanna spend some time here because I think it's one of the.
Most practically important things in this entire series, Alan Shores work on the right brain to right Brain communication demonstrates that any significant relational encounter, the implicit, the nonverbal communication between nervous systems is continuous and mutually influential. And the trainer's physiological state level of regulation, relationship to the material.
Openness or defensiveness is transmitted to participants, not through explicit communication, through our vocabulary and our prefrontal cortex, but through the entire [00:11:00] sensory process, the limbic system, the pacing, facial expression, and body language, and the quality of attention that we bring into the room.
That's just so important. That's not what's taught in the consultation model. we're taught to be ourselves and also learn from the recipient and let them guide us. And I haven't found that in the consultation practices that I've experienced. And this means a trainer who's anxious about our authority, defensive about a challenge, or disconnected from our own experience of the material.
We'll communicate these states. We can feel it, we can sense it, and their nervous systems of the participants are reading our nervous system and responding to it. And conversely, a trainer who is generally curious, open, willing to be moved, what they bring into the room is creating a co-regulatory field.
And what I've done here is I've bridged the power differential and the neurobiology. and created a framework which is super fun to build. and we want [00:12:00] to, highlight, Sino and Porges that talk about settling into ventral vagal engagement that supports, this learning process.
And she was saying the teachers. interiority is always present in the room. the sense of interoception interiority, and you can pretend neutrality. You can perform dispassionate expertise. You can read from the PowerPoint, you can talk in a monotone. You can even actually be. Engaging but still, maintain professional distance and our nervous systems contradict that.
The most sophisticated teaching tool any trainer has is our own nervous system, generally present, and one of hook's most politically pointed arguments in teaching to transgress is her insistence that the body's been systematically excluded from academic learning spaces, and the exclusion is not accidental.
It just really reminds me of Ariel Schwartz's. Somatic experiencing work and the body experience and [00:13:00] how does that land with our, work that we're doing and to discount, there's an actual body and brain in the room learning versus just concepts, you know, is. Something that we really need to address.
And Western education is treated the mind as a legitimate side of knowledge, and the body has a distraction minimized, ideally, during serious intellectual work. But what we say to that is. Be still sit quiet, not suppress your self-regulation, not perform, be, sit, be attuned. Excuse me, sit still, be attuned.
And she argued that this exclusion falls, unequally bodies are marked by race, gender, disability. Or normative embodiment are, they're more difficult to render, invisible, and, I think that they're also, disenfranchised in the rooms and their presence in the room is always being managed, read, responding to in ways that the unmarked body, [00:14:00] white male, nly able, does not experience.
And when we discuss this idea of ableism, it really resonates. And the injunction to leave the body at the door is not a neutral request. It's a request that some bodies can approximate, but others cannot. And from trauma informed and neuroscience perspective, it's also simply bad Pedagogy learning is this idea of embodiment.
This very, somatic experience. Memory consolidation involves those somatic markers. Our ability to encode to receive an emotional arousal is a biological prerequisite for attention and encoding, and the body's not peripheral to learning. and it's a substrate of it. We look at this in DI's work in 1994.
And so professional training spaces insist on stillness, silence, and the suppression that's not attuned When we treat movement fidgeting, eating sensory accommodation is disruptions rather than, learning, [00:15:00] rather to learning rather than its conditions of it. We're excluding the body in just the precise way that bell hooks identified.
the exclusion falls hardest on the bodies who regulate, whose regulations is more visible. So the concept most radically distinguishes her pedagogy from other progressive educational frameworks, and that's her insistent on the mutuality of the transformative encounter. I love the words, I love the Stephen Pinker, vocabulary pieces here.
Yeah. The teacher is not the facilitator who remains unchanged while students are transformed. I love that. I love that I'm changed by you. That you're changed by me. I just can't say it enough. but it requires us to have. A self that's sufficiently stable to be moved without also being destabilized. And that's the work that I proposing in the Grief Map work is this idea of, this relational context and this relational field in the work and where are we when we show up in those [00:16:00] spaces.
This is a description of ventral vagal flexibility. And that we can move within that system and engage fully with challenge, with arousal, with interpersonal complexity from a position of sufficient regulation that the encounter becomes enlivening rather than threatening.
That's from forges work. So the idea here is activation of our, parasympathetic nervous system. and we really need to be engaged and come from a place with that. A trainer that is, hyper activated, can't be genuinely curious about their participants' challenges. They can't neuro cept them. They can't see the relational field.
a trainer and dorsal shutdown can be genuinely present to the relations of the room. They can facilitate. But only from ventral vagal access is the mutual transformation that hooks describe possible. Okay, so when we're doing this, we're in ventral vagal. There's a version of professional training that performs transformation while protecting [00:17:00] the trainer from any genuine encounter with uncertainty.
Hooks would recognize that immediately the slides are polished, the objectives are measurable, the feedback are positive. Nothing in the room. The trainer is actually moved, and teaching transformation requires a self stable enough to be moved to be changed by the encounter.
And what she says and what Frere says and what Pinker says. And if you haven't heard of Steven Pinker, he's a cognitive psychologist that studies linguistics and dialogue. And super, engaging person, and it requires our nervous system to be genuinely present. So Hooks was, unusual among strong educational theorists in her willingness to use words in relation to teaching.
and she used the word arrows. She didn't mean it sexually, she meant it in the classical sense of. Life force energy of engagement, passionate investment in ideas and the humanity of the people in the room. Oh my gosh, I love, love, love that. And she argued [00:18:00] that the suppression of arrows in the academic setting, the enforced neutrality, the performance of dispassionate experience produces dead classrooms and classrooms in which nothing's at stake, nothing's alive, and nothing's genuinely encountered.
It's very structured. Very clinical and the antidotes, not theatrical enthusiasm. We don't need to go in there and perform. But we need to see our audience. We need to engage. We need to also be moved by the material, actually interested, actually willing to let that encounter matter for both of us and for trauma informed clinical educators.
This resonates with what Dan Hughes calls pace, playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy. And this is a relational quality that supports therapeutic and pedagogical growth. That's from Hughes work in 2006. And the quality of presence, hooks, describes, is not a technique, it's an orientation focused on breath, cultivated through our own [00:19:00] practice of breath, self-awareness, scanning, reflection, engagement.
And I wanna be honest about what this requires. I've been trying to do this myself, and it's easier to perform, sort of engagement. It's easier sometimes. Then to embody it. So just sitting, not feeling we have to have the answer. It's easier to learn a facilitation technique than doing the personal work that hooks is pointing towards.
And a lot of people don't know the cost, right? They don't know the cost that the presenter has had to go through to be up on that stage. I can say so from my own experience, and it's sitting with where we know the cost of what it took to get there, and we don't have to share it, but we have to know.
And the nervous system in our training rooms will know the difference. They always do. And I wanna close with the word about what Bell Hooks adds to the conversation we've been building. Freir gave us his political analysis, the banking model, and its [00:20:00] form of epistemic violence. Dewey gave us a neuroscientific and philosophical account.
the. Philosophy behind experiential based learning, and it's this embodied state dependent learning experience. Vygotsky gave us the framework, let learning happen as a frontier of their capacity. Guide them. Give them small pieces, with a relationship with the more skilled other Montessori.
Give us the design and principle. Prepare the environment, trust the learner, protect the conditions. But what hooks give us is this relational political accountability. She asks, whose body is welcome in this room? Who is allowed to be uncertain? Who has to perform competence to be taken seriously? Who can bring our full humanity history, rage, grief, joy, and have it treated as information rather than disruption.
They're not separate questions from pedagogical ones. They're the same one. And the answer we demonstrate every time we stand in the training room is the curriculum, not what we say about trauma informed practice, what we actually [00:21:00] do in the bodies and histories of the whole people who show up.
So coming into our series, capstone accessible teaching is ethical teaching power ableism, and learning in professional communities. It brings everything together, all of those frameworks, and that's a set of concrete design commitments for our trauma-informed continuing education. And I genuinely look forward to having that conversation.
And if today's episode was useful, share it. Pass it to a colleague who trains clinicians, a clinical supervisor or anyone who's ever stood at the front of the room and wondered. If what they were doing was actually serving the people in it. You can see my full post with the a PA references at the Rooted Practice Blog at Rewire 360.
And if you wanna keep this conversation going, Kathy, on the Couch Community is where I go deeper with trauma and grieve Clinicians monthly CE Live consultation in a professional community For clinicians doing this kind of thinking, the links in the show notes. I'm Kathy Couch. This is your Rewire 360 podcast.
Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. [00:22:00] Take care.
Or if you're an EMDR therapist looking to be certified or a consultant, we have our program EMDR University. Remember to give us a five star reading wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to our podcast Today. Every series has an episode that feels different than the others. Not more important, just different. And that's kind of where in writing it, we realized that the whole series was building this. That is this episode. the theorists we've looked at across this series, fre, Dewey, Vygotsky, Montessori, we're all in different ways making the same argument.
That genuine learning requires the whole person and that education, which asks learners to suppress their experience, their bodies, their histories, and their authority as knowers is not education. It's something else. So Bell Hooks said it more directly and more personally and more politically than any of them.
And she said it from inside of an experience at Fre, Dewey, Vygotsky, and Montessori. All of them white. [00:23:00] All of them operating from positions of institutional belonging were never required to name. And as we go into this, welcome to the Rewired 360 podcast. I'm Kathy Couch, LCSW, fellow, and Thanatology.
Your EMDR, consultant and trainer, and the founder of Rewire 360. This episode is episode five of our six part series, roots of the Revolution, why Pedagogical Theory belongs in Clinical Training Spaces. Last episode, we talked about the polyvagal theory debate. What scientific critique actually says, what Porges responded and what it means for clinical practice.
Part two drops Thursday, so stay tuned. But today we come back to pedagogy, to the question of what it means to teach and learn as a whole human being through the lens of bell hooks in what she called engaged pedagogy. So she was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Kentucky, in Hopkinsville, and she chose the [00:24:00] pen name, bell Hooks stylized, and specifically lowercase as a deliberate political act, drawing attention away from any individual identity and towards the ideas she taught at Yale, Oberlin City College of New York and Berea College.
But she died in 2021 at. 69 and her most influential work in educational theory is teaching to Transgress, and that was published in 1994. A book I return to more often than anything. it's not a comfortable book. It's the kind of book that asks you to honestly look at what you're doing in a training room and why, and to hold the gap between what you believe about education and what your practice demonstrates.
Hooks Drew Apollo re's critical pedagogy on Buddhist philosophy, feminist theory, and also her own experience navigating the overwhelmingly white academic institutions of the late 20th century America, and what she added to the pedagogical conversation. What none of the [00:25:00] other theorists in this series named with the same directness was the body, the physical, emotional, political reality of the whole person in the learning encounter.
And that's not as an afterthought, it's at the center. And she insisted that education, which asked students to leave themselves at the door is not an education. And she described that as institutional violence. And when we look at the whole person in the room, she introduced the term, Engage pedagogy to describe a mode of teaching that insists on the presence of the whole person, teacher and student alike.
And engaged pedagogy is distinguished from what she called merely progressive pedagogy by one essential feature. And really it's going back to Maslow hierarchy of Needs, our own commitment to self-actualization.
And that's in her 1994 work and in her framework, a teacher who's not doing our own work, who hasn't examined our assumptions, confronted our biases, or engaged in our own growth. [00:26:00] Cannot create the conditions for our genuine learning and our willingness to be changed by the encounter is not optional. If you've listened to my other work, you'll know that I cite the I.
only the Brave, where there's a specific change encounter with the female and the chief of the fire department. It's about, fire workers and firefighters and, super powerful story. But I have one specific scene that I often refer to It's, in my blog specifically, if you wanna kind of get more details, but that moment where people are changed by each other is foundational to what I'm building and what I'm doing in the work.
And it's the condition of possibility for engaged pedagogy. It's not fres banking model, it's this idea of engagement, this very soulful relational field experience. And this has an immediate resonance for myself. And a lot of trauma-informed clinical educators in regards to [00:27:00] neuroscience and neuroception.
And the parallel to therapeutic principle that the clinician's own healing and my own self-awareness is foundational to, effective practice. And she was making the same argument about teaching that. That trauma theorists have long made about therapy, that you can't take someone further than you're willing to go yourself.
I love that. I love the idea of story, this idea of richness, this idea of doing our own work, and it's changed my life. It's changed the life of my patients, and it's been super powerful. A trainer who enters a room with productive uncertainty and genuine curiosity.
They're a less available one. I've been in rooms with trainers where I've raised hands and I've been shunned. Other Consultees describe their own ableism as they were speaking in a training and called out by a trainer. Super not in line with this theory. And an educator who has an examined our own relationship to power to learning and the possibility of being changed.
Can't [00:28:00] credibly teach others to do the same. And I'm building this in the developmental consultation framework that's. going to be aligned throughout our framework as we look at, workbooks seminars on this idea. if you're interested in more training on this, I will have my, developmental consultation framework.
Coming up in June it looks like. And so, you can visit that at rewired three sixty.cgo.com and you can hear more about this framework if you're interested in the teaching model of it. And it's been super fun to build. It's been so important. In my work, in the work of clinicians, we're gonna talk about the role of consultation.
We're gonna talk about the role that it plays in this, relational encounter. And she's the sort of core of that. And her relational neuroscience of intersubjectivity offers a biological account of what she was describing. Phenomenologically. [00:29:00] And I wanna spend some time here because I think it's one of the.
Most practically important things in this entire series, Alan Shores work on the right brain to right Brain communication demonstrates that any significant relational encounter, the implicit, the nonverbal communication between nervous systems is continuous and mutually influential. And the trainer's physiological state
Openness or defensiveness is transmitted to participants, not through explicit communication, but through the entire sensory process, the limbic system, the pacing, facial expression, and body language, and the quality of attention that we bring into the room.
That's just so important. That's not what's taught in the consultation model. we're taught to be ourselves and also learn from the recipient and let them guide us. And I haven't found that in the consultation practices that I've experienced. And this means a trainer who's anxious about our authority, [00:30:00] defensive about a challenge, or disconnected from our own experience of the material.
We'll communicate these states. We can feel it, we can sense it, and their nervous systems of the participants are reading our nervous system and responding to it. And conversely, a trainer who is generally curious, open, willing to be moved, what they bring into the room is creating a co-regulatory field.
And what I've done here is I've bridged the power differential and the neurobiology. and created a framework which is super fun to build. and we want to, highlight, Sino and Porges that talk about settling into ventral vagal engagement that supports, this learning process.
And she was saying the teachers. interiority is always present in the room. the sense of interoception interiority, and you can pretend neutrality. You can perform dispassionate expertise. You can read from the PowerPoint, you can talk in a monotone. You can even actually be. [00:31:00] Engaging but still, maintain professional distance and our nervous systems contradict that.
The most sophisticated teaching tool any trainer has is our own nervous system, generally present, and the most sophisticated tool available to any trainer. And one of hook's most politically pointed arguments in teaching to transgress is her insistence that the body's been systematically excluded from academic learning spaces, and the exclusion is not accidental.
It just really reminds me of Ariel Schwartz's. Somatic experiencing work and the body experience and how does that land with our, work that we're doing and to discount, there's an actual body and brain in the room learning versus just concepts, is. Something that we really need to address.
And Western education is treated the mind as a legitimate side of knowledge, and the body has a distraction minimized, ideally, during serious intellectual work. [00:32:00] But what we say to that is. Be still sit quiet, not suppress your self-regulation, not perform, be, sit, be attuned. Excuse me, sit still, be attuned.
And she argued that this exclusion falls, unequally bodies are marked by race, gender, disability. Or normative embodiment are, they're more difficult to render, invisible, and, I think that they're also, disenfranchised in the rooms and their presence in the room is always being managed, read, responding to in ways that the unmarked body, white male, nly able, does not experience.
And when we discuss this idea of ableism, it really resonates. And the injunction to leave the body at the door is not a neutral request. It's a request that some bodies can approximate, but others cannot. And from trauma informed and neuroscience perspective, it's also simply bad Pedagogy learning is this idea of embodiment.
This [00:33:00] very, somatic experience. Memory consolidation involves those somatic markers. Our ability to encode to receive an emotional arousal is a biological prerequisite for attention and encoding, and the body's not peripheral to learning. and it's a substrate of it. We look at this in DI's work in 1994.
And so professional training spaces insist on stillness, silence, and the suppression that's not attuned When we treat movement fidgeting, eating sensory accommodation is disruptions rather than, learning, rather to learning rather than its conditions of it. We're excluding the body in just the precise way that bell hooks identified.
the exclusion falls hardest on the bodies who regulate, whose regulations is more visible. So the concept most radically distinguishes her pedagogy from other progressive educational frameworks, and that's her insistent on the mutuality of the transformative [00:34:00] encounter. I love the words, I love the Stephen Pinker, vocabulary pieces here.
Yeah. The teacher is not the facilitator who remains unchanged while students are transformed. I love that. I love that I'm changed by you. That you're changed by me. I just can't say it enough. but it requires us to have. A self that's sufficiently stable to be moved without also being destabilized. And that's the work that I proposing in the Grief Map work is this idea of, this relational context and this relational field in the work and where are we when we show up in those spaces.
This is a description of ventral vagal flexibility. And that we can move within that system and engage fully with challenge, with arousal, with interpersonal complexity from a position of sufficient regulation that the encounter becomes enlivening rather than threatening.
That's from forges work. So the idea here is activation of our, [00:35:00] parasympathetic nervous system. and we really need to be engaged and come from a place with that. A trainer that is, hyper activated, can't be genuinely curious about their participants' challenges. They can't neuro cept them. They can't see the relational field.
And a trainer and dorsal shutdown can be genuinely present to the relations of the room. They can facilitate. But only from ventral vagal access is the mutual transformation that hooks describe possible. Okay, so when we're doing this, we're in ventral vagal. There's a version of professional training that performs transformation while protecting the trainer from any genuine encounter with uncertainty.
She would recognize it immediately. Okay. Hooks would recognize that immediately the slides are polished, the objectives are measurable, the feedback are positive. Nothing in the room. The trainer is actually moved, and teaching transformation requires a self stable enough to be moved to be changed by the encounter.
And what she says and what Frere says [00:36:00] and what Pinker says. And if you haven't heard of Steven Pinker, he's a cognitive psychologist that studies linguistics and dialogue. and it requires our nervous system to be genuinely present. So Hooks was, unusual among strong educational theorists in her willingness to use word words in relation to teaching.
and she used the word arrows. She didn't mean it sexually, she meant it in the classical sense of. Life force energy of engagement, passionate investment in ideas and the humanity of the people in the room. And she argued that the suppression of arrows in the academic setting, the enforced neutrality, the performance of dispassionate experience produces dead classrooms and classrooms in which nothing's at stake, nothing's alive, and nothing's genuinely encountered.
It's very structured. Very clinical and the antidotes, not theatrical enthusiasm. We don't need to go in there and perform. But we need to see our audience. We need to engage. We need to also be moved by the material, [00:37:00] actually interested, actually willing to let that encounter matter for both of us and for trauma informed clinical educators.
This resonates with what Dan Hughes calls pace, playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy. And this is a relational quality that supports therapeutic and pedagogical growth. That's from Hughes work in 2006. And the quality of presence, hooks, describes, is not a technique, it's an orientation focused on breath, cultivated through our own practice of breath, self-awareness, scanning, reflection, engagement.
And I wanna be honest about what this requires. I've been trying to do this myself, and it's easier to perform, sort of engagement. It's easier sometimes. Then to embody it. So just sitting, not feeling we have to have the answer. It's easier to learn a facilitation technique than doing the personal work that hooks is pointing towards.
And a lot of people don't know the cost, right? [00:38:00] They don't know the cost that the presenter has had to go through to be up on that stage. I can say so from my own experience, and it's sitting with where we know the cost of what it took to get there, and we don't have to share it, but we have to know.
And the nervous system in our training rooms will know the difference. They always do. And I wanna close with the word about what Bell Hooks adds to the conversation we've been building. Freir gave us his political analysis, the banking model, and its form of epistemic violence. Dewey gave us a neuroscientific and philosophical account.
the. Philosophy behind experiential based learning, and it's this embodied state dependent learning experience. Vygotsky gave us the framework, let learning happen as a frontier of their capacity. Guide them. Give them small pieces, with a relationship with the more skilled other Montessori.
Give us the design and principle. Prepare the environment, [00:39:00] trust the learner, protect the conditions. But what hooks give us is this relational political accountability. She asks, whose body is welcome in this room? Who is allowed to be uncertain? Who has to perform competence to be taken seriously? Who can bring our full humanity history, rage, grief, joy, and have it treated as information rather than disruption.
They're not separate questions from pedagogical ones. They're the same one. And the answer we demonstrate every time we stand in the training room is the curriculum, not what we say about trauma informed practice, what we actually do in the bodies and histories of the whole people who show up.
So coming into our series, capstone accessible teaching is ethical teaching power ableism, and learning in professional communities. It brings everything together, all of those frameworks, and that's a set of concrete design commitments for our trauma-informed continuing education. And I genuinely look forward to having that conversation.
And if today's episode was useful, share it. Pass it to a colleague who [00:40:00] trains clinicians, a clinical supervisor or anyone who's ever stood at the front of the room and wondered. If what they were doing was actually serving the people in it. You can see my full post with the a PA references at the Rooted Practice Blog at Rewire 360.
And if you wanna keep this conversation going, Kathy, on the Couch Community is where I go deeper with trauma and grieve Clinicians monthly CE Live consultation in a professional community For clinicians doing this kind of thinking, the links in the show notes. I'm Kathy Couch. This is your Rewire 360 podcast.
Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. Take care.
Thank you so much for joining us on another episode of Kathy on the Couch, the podcast for everyday clinicians. We hope today's conversation has inspired you. Spark new ideas and offered you practical tools you can bring into your own practice, whether you're just starting out in the mental health field.
Or you are a seasoned clinician. We're grateful to have you as part of our growing community, and Rewire 360 is here to companion you along your clinical career path [00:41:00] from the moment you begin your professional journey. We offer comprehensive support and resources that guide you at every stage. our curriculum is designed to fill the gaps often found in the marketplace, providing.
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And this information shared on this podcast reflects perspectives and experiences of our guest hosts. Is not intended to substitute for professional consultation, supervision, or individual guidance. If you have questions about how to apply any of the concepts, we encourage you to consult with your clinical supervisor, consultant, or licensing board.
As always, follow those research based protocols and best practices in your work. We're here to walk along beside you as you deepen your [00:42:00] clinical understanding and. Until next time, keep connecting, keep learning, and keep rewiring for success. Take care.
