Episode 72: Gaps In Trauma-Informed Care: Boundaries, Attachment and Generational Impact with Thomas Hübl

Listen to Episode 72 with Thomas Hübl →

When Individual Healing Isn't Enough

You've done years of your own trauma work and understand attachment theory well. You call yourself trauma-informed in your practice or relationships. But something's missing from your understanding that affects how deeply you can connect with others or hold space for their healing.

What if being truly trauma-informed requires understanding both your personal trauma and the collective trauma that shapes everyone's nervous system?

Why must you do your own trauma work while also understanding collective trauma's impact on attachment and relationships? Because you can't be genuinely trauma-informed without integrating both individual and collective perspectives.

Thomas Hübl joins me today as a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator whose work integrates wisdom traditions and mysticism with scientific discoveries. We discuss how to create the attuned, co-regulated relationships that are necessary for being truly trauma-informed in your work and life.

Understanding Personal and Collective Trauma

Why is it essential to do your own personal trauma work while simultaneously understanding how collective trauma affects everyone? You can't hold space authentically for others if you're carrying unresolved trauma patterns yourself. Your unhealed wounds will interfere with your capacity to stay present and regulated when others' trauma activates something in you.

Your early attachment patterns determine your emotional responses as an adult in ways that operate beneath conscious awareness. How you regulate under stress, how you connect in intimacy, and how you distance when overwhelmed all stem from those early attachment experiences. These patterns become your default operating system unless specifically addressed through healing work.

You don't just carry your own personal trauma but also hold patterns from generations before you that you never consciously experienced. Intergenerational and ancestral trauma passes through families and cultures affecting your nervous system capacity. This transmission happens through epigenetics, through parenting patterns, and through the collective fields that families and cultures carry.

Understanding the Biology of Trauma® reveals how ancestral trauma shapes your attachment capacity in the present. Patterns you didn't create personally but inherited through your family line affect how you attach to others. Understanding this removes shame because you recognize these patterns as inherited rather than created by your personal failings.

Creating Attunement and Co-Regulation

The impact of ancestral trauma on current attachment manifests in ways that feel personal but have roots extending back generations. Your difficulty with intimacy might reflect your grandmother's unresolved trauma. Your hypervigilance might carry forward from survival strategies your ancestors needed. Recognizing this broader context doesn't excuse your patterns but provides essential understanding for healing them.

Creating attuned relationships requires developing nervous system awareness beyond just noticing your own state. Reading signals in yourself and in others simultaneously allows genuine attunement. Co-regulation becomes possible when you can sense another person's nervous system state and adjust your own to support rather than escalate their activation.

Your nervous system regulates in connection with other nervous systems through biological processes called co-regulation. This is fundamental biology rather than just emotional connection or being nice to people. Being truly trauma-informed means understanding these biological mechanisms and working with them intentionally rather than accidentally.

Thomas shares specific strategies for staying regulated within relationships even when others are dysregulated. How to maintain your own regulation while staying connected to someone in distress. How to notice when you're starting to lose your grounded center and what to do in that moment. These practical skills distinguish trauma-informed practitioners from those who just intellectually understand trauma concepts.

From Distancing to Embodied Presence

Moving from distancing to full presence represents a significant shift for many people in healing work. Many practitioners and individuals use emotional distancing as protection from being overwhelmed by others' pain. Thomas explains how to move toward genuine presence and embodied connection without overwhelming yourself or taking on others' trauma as your own.

Being in relationship without losing yourself requires strong enough boundaries and sufficient nervous system capacity to feel your edges. You need to sense where you end and another person begins energetically. Without this somatic awareness, you either merge with others and lose yourself or distance so far that genuine connection becomes impossible.

Flow, stagnation, and embodiment connect directly to trauma's effects on your system. Trauma creates stagnation where energy and aliveness can't move freely through your body. Embodied practices that restore flow address this stagnation directly. This affects your capacity for secure attachment because attachment requires the ability to feel and respond to your body's signals about connection and disconnection.

Collective trauma's impact on individual healing means your personal healing happens within larger collective contexts that shape available options. Your personal trauma intersects with cultural and historical trauma from your ethnic background, your gender, your family's immigration history, or your community's experiences. Both individual and collective trauma need addressing for complete healing because you can't fully separate them.

Integrating Individual and Collective Perspectives

Thomas emphasizes that gaps in trauma-informed care often stem from focusing only on individual trauma without understanding collective trauma's role. Practitioners who work only with personal history miss how cultural trauma, ancestral patterns, and collective fields shape each person's nervous system capacity and attachment patterns.

The integration of personal trauma healing with collective trauma awareness creates more complete and effective trauma-informed practice. You work with your own patterns while understanding how those patterns connect to larger systems. You hold space for others' healing while recognizing how their individual trauma exists within collective contexts that shaped it.

Understanding intergenerational trauma patterns affecting your relationships empowers you to address what you inherited without taking all the blame personally. You can work to heal patterns that came through your family line while recognizing you didn't create them originally. This removes shame while still taking responsibility for healing what you carry now.

The Biology of Trauma® framework integrates well with Thomas's perspective on collective trauma because both recognize that trauma lives in bodies and nervous systems rather than just in thoughts and memories. When you work with both frameworks together, you address trauma at individual, relational, and collective levels simultaneously. This comprehensive approach creates deeper healing than working with any single level alone.

Creating truly attuned, co-regulated relationships requires ongoing work at multiple levels including healing your personal trauma and attachment wounds, understanding collective and ancestral trauma's impact, developing your nervous system regulation capacity, building skills for reading others' nervous system states, and practicing embodied presence rather than distancing.

This Episode Is For:

✓ Practitioners wanting to be truly trauma-informed beyond intellectual understanding 

✓ Anyone doing trauma work who needs to understand collective trauma's role 

✓ People curious about intergenerational trauma patterns affecting their relationships 

✓ Those recognizing limits in their current trauma-informed practice 

✓ Anyone interested in how personal and collective trauma intersect 

✓ Practitioners ready to deepen their capacity for attunement and co-regulation

What You'll Learn

Listen to understand why doing your own trauma work alongside understanding collective trauma is essential for creating attuned, co-regulated relationships. Discover how ancestral and intergenerational trauma shapes your attachment capacity now. Learn practical strategies for staying regulated while holding space for others and moving from distancing to genuine embodied presence.

Being truly trauma-informed requires integrating personal healing with collective trauma awareness.

Listen to Episode 72 with Thomas Hübl →

Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared reflects my clinical expertise and research, but every person's biology and healing journey is unique. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers before making changes to your treatment plan or starting new interventions. If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline immediately.

Join the Conversation

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. What resonated with you? What questions came up?

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