00:00:00 Rosemary

If you’ve been listening to our podcast and are curious about the Compassionate Inquiry approach developed by Dr Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur, consider joining the professional training program. It’s open to all healing professionals, including naturopaths, physicians, bodyworkers, coaches and therapists. In addition to learning how to use compassion to support your clients in their most vulnerable moments, with greater empathy and authenticity, you’ll also deepen your own internal process. If you’re interested, look for the link in the show notes.

00:00:39 Anouk

We have a capacity to change our wiring and to reconnect new neural networks in our brain, but it can only be done when there is a lot of compassion and understanding and self love from the heart and those two very strong systems do work together. You cannot separate body-mind anymore.

00:01:13 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast. Stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate inquiry.

Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes and my guest today is Anouk Bindels, a Dutch psychologist, family and relationship therapist, author, and a trauma therapist who has completed the year long Compassionate Inquiry training. I understand that your work focuses on understanding the deeper roots of trauma and the protective patterns people develop in order to survive difficult experiences. You’re also the author of Wisdom of Trauma, an interestingly titled book considering Gabor is the star of the Wisdom of Trauma movie. And you’ve also developed the heart and brain healing process, which is an approach that brings together psychology, neuroscience and embodied awareness. Welcome Anouk.

00:02:19 Anouk

Yes, happy to be here. Thank you.

00:02:21 Rosemary

So, Anouk, I shared a little bit about you, when I read a little bit of your bio. Is there anything you’d like to share with listeners who might be wondering, who is Anouk Bindels?

00:02:33 Anouk

Yeah, of course I would love to share because when people ask me about my healing journey, I often smile because there’s not one single story. There are many stories woven together across a whole lifetime. I’m 65 now and of course professionally I’m a psychologist and a trauma therapist. For more than 40 years I’ve worked with people who suffer, so some of my deepest lessons I didn’t learn from the books. It was life itself, and trauma lives in us, in our body, in the nervous system, in the heart. And that happened to me as well.

00:03:13 Rosemary

Can you talk a little bit about that? I remember you saying when we first started, that your personal life has profoundly influenced your work.

00:03:20 Anouk

Yes, of course. I was brought up with loving parents, but in a very unsafe environment. I am a child who suffered medical trauma as an eight month old baby, I was infected with typhus. I was nearly dead when they brought me into the hospital. I was isolated for three months, in the hospital for a total five months. And in the first months of being isolated in the hospital, I was also fixated because as you can understand, an eight month old baby when it’s hospitalized, it’s always trying to resist, because that’s what the body does. And everyone who has a little child between the age of zero and one and a half knows that they can turn and twist, especially when you’re tubed. Infusions are there and like a catheter, a breathing tube and a nasal saunt, and infusions are there. The child will try to pull it out. That’s our primitive survival instinct. Right? But in order for me to keep all those tubes, they fixated me.

00:04:34 Rosemary

And what does that mean exactly? Because my heart’s been breaking for you as I’ve listened. Because what an 8 month old baby also needs, in addition to movement, is to be held. And I’m guessing you didn’t get any of that either. So fixated. Please tell me that I’m not familiar with that term.

00:04:51 Anouk

Fixation is that they take your arms and fix them to the bed like.

00:04:57 Rosemary

Like a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Oh my.

00:05:00 Anouk

Yeah. And of course, 65 years ago, they didn’t know anything about the attachment theory. My system had gone totally into survival and my neurological program and my nervous system were of course wired for survival and dissociation, because in order to survive, I think I dissociated already at that point in my life. And according to Gabor’s teachings, Peter Levine, Bessel, van der Kolk, that’s where we split off and that’s how we come to live a life in survival. And if I look at how I was wired as a child, I became the difficult child in our family.

00:05:44 Rosemary

How did that express itself? What did the difficult child do?

00:05:48 Anouk

Exactly, the difficult child is the child that resists, for example, in my case, resists touch. I would resist washing my hair. I would resist anything that had to do with touch on my body. 

00:06:02 Rosemary

Wow. I’m just having the picture of you there as an infant, restrained.

00:06:06 Anouk

Yes, exactly. And now we know, we call that medical trauma. And the results and the symptoms is a living heritage in our body and nervous system. And of course I was a very anxious child. I was for my parents a difficult child, and for my mom especially, because I rejected her. When they came after five months to pick me up from the hospital, I went and cried when she wanted to touch me and I went back to the nurses because they were the ones that were there all the time. And when finally my parents would come and enter again, I rejected both of them. That my mom really had a difficulty with that because I would turn away from her. And now we know, out of attachment therapy, we know this is happening to kids when they are left alone and isolated.

00:07:01 Rosemary

It reminds me of Gabor’s story that when he was returned to his mother, he wouldn’t look at her. He turned away. It’s so understandable. But my goodness, what a start. You said it led you to be a difficult child. You weren’t the only child of your parents, is that right?

00:07:16 Anouk

No, I was the fourth child.

00:07:18 Rosemary

Okay, so they had very different experiences with your siblings. But I’m wondering how that experience cascaded forward as you grew up, you know, as you became a teenager, as you became a young adult. How did it impact your life, your choices, your….

00:07:33 Anouk

Yeah, yeah. I experienced in this, profound losses and had challenges my whole life. And how I was wired. I was fearful all the time. So I would be the child in the classroom that you would not notice. I would be totally silent. I would be withdrawn, and I would be the one that would never speak out because I was fearful to show myself in public or in the classroom. I am bullied, also, very much as a young child, because due to my health challenges, I already, as a four or five year old, had very bad eyesight. So I got glasses, you know, had weight problems already as a young child, probably had lots of medication. And during my growing up, I had a lot of infections. I had a lot of health challenges. And in that, I also was difficult to deal with because I was not allowing anybody near me. And another big thing that happened during my first four years is that my mother got into a very bad accident. She was hospitalized for a long time herself. And I was finally brought to an aunt, which is a very sweet aunt. It was a sister of my mother. But what happened is that they couldn’t take care of me at a certain point anymore. And then I was sent into a children’s home when I was four years old. That was a period that I remember, very profound, that I was put on the bus with 40 other kids who were sent into that home because they thought that would be the best for a child like me. It was a children’s home where they would bring children with health challenges and problems in their family homes. But it was run by nuns, Catholic nuns, and the atmosphere was completely hostile. It was a very hostile environment. We were punished, we were beaten. And especially we were taken out of the bed where you would be peeing in your bed, you would be taken out and you would be standing in the hallway. Imagine a four year old standing in the hallway with the wet sheets and then the other children passing you.

00:09:59 Rosemary

So you were shamed, publicly shamed?

00:10:01 Anouk

I was shamed, yes. Yeah, we were publicly shamed, yeah.

00:10:04 Rosemary

And this on top of your early experience of being restricted, tied down, really, in the hospital, you talked about losses, the loss of your family, you were sent away, and I’m sure that ruptured relations with not only your parents, but your siblings and…

00:10:21 Anouk

But everybody.

00:10:22 Rosemary

Yeah. And there were health losses

00:10:25 Anouk

And that was the beginning of my life.

00:10:28 Rosemary

And what did that set you up for? Take us a little bit forward, if you will.

00:10:32 Anouk

A deep search. Because those experiences actually they brought me to a place where psychology alone was no longer enough. And if you put me forward in time, my childhood, when I came back from the children’s home, it was due to my parents and the way they were living. They were not understanding the psychology of a child very much. So I had to either fit in or you were fitting out, you understand? And so I felt my whole life in the family where I was a misfit. I remember when I was eight years old, I had luckily a dog and a little pony and I was with my animals. That is my saving thing, by the way, that I had animals and I was sitting with them and I was crying and I was asking my animals to send me back home. Where’s my home? I remember that very much. And then at that moment I also realized, okay, I have to search for my home. And that day I ran away, I went searching for my home. And then when I came back home, they knew there was something that they needed to do for me. And then from that moment onwards, things changed a bit. But that meant that I was going already at a young age to a psychiatrist, like being treated. And I still felt there’s something very wrong with me. But of course, I never fitted in anywhere. I was isolated. As what Gabor says about the trademarks of trauma is. Isolation is disconnection, is loss of self, loss of relationships. I was not able to maintain friendships. And during my puberty I was alone, I was isolated and I developed an eating disorder. I was bulimic and anorectic, and that I was ‘til I was 18. Something in my puberty brought me to this place where I wanted to investigate. So I was intelligent and my saving was that I was able to study and learn very well. And that was also valued. I became already very young, interested in the intersection between trauma and psychology and also human consciousness. But at that time I was too young to understand it and to put it all together. But I started studying psychology, there’s no question about that.

00:13:02 Rosemary

And there’s also no question what you said earlier, that actually I think I quoted this from your bio, that your work focuses on understanding the deeper roots of trauma and the protective patterns people develop to survive difficult experiences. There we have bulimia and anorexia. Now that you look back, was there a purpose for those two coping strategies showing up in your life?

00:13:25 Anouk

Yeah, absolutely. Because I couldn’t deal with feeling. I had the worst relationship with my body. I hated my body, I hated myself. And I didn’t know who I was. But being negative about who I was, feeling isolated, unloved, fearful. When I started studying psychology, something miraculous happened to me because there’s something that opened up and I met my savior, who is Jan Foudrenne and he’s a very famous Dutch psychiatrist. He wrote a book about trauma and how people build bunkers around them and defense mechanisms. And in that time he was the first psychiatrist that was speaking out about the anti psychiatry, the biomedical treatments. And he came to our college and started teaching. And I got so inspired by him that I decided to go into therapy with him. And that was where my healing journey started. For the first time in my life, I met someone that really listened.

00:14:40 Rosemary

Yeah, it’s so important. And I love that you use the term bunkers. A lot of times people talk about walls, walls of trauma, but a bunker I think captures it so much better.

00:14:52 Anouk

Thank you for that.

00:14:53 Rosemary

Yeah. So you’ve done a lot of training. Maybe we could take a moment to speak about that now. And you’ve been through the Compassionate Inquiry year long training twice. I’m wondering what attracted you to Compassionate Inquiry.

00:15:08 Anouk

When I met Gabor online, his words immediately touched something deep within me and he reminded me of my psychiatrist because I heard Gabor talking about trauma in a way that felt so deeply human. He was never asking what was wrong with people. He always is asking what had happened to them. And that simply shifted and changed everything for me. And I wanted to learn from him as well. I did that. I always went to the people where I could learn personally. For me, Compassionate Inquiry moved the whole conversation from pathology to compassion, and from judgment to understanding, from trying to fix, to listening and meeting this person alive and being trained by him and Sat Dharam, of course, because they developed this boat together was a great opportunity. And the first time that I started the training, it was so much that I decided, okay, I do this training merely for myself because it touched so many layers inside of me that I knew I cannot finish this and be a professional at the same time. Because this whole four year old, Gabor, touched upon very deeply in me. And when he asked the question in one of the practice sessions that we had, Anouk, what do you think that a four year old would start thinking about herself being put in a dust and sent away, not knowing where she was going, with nobody to hold a hand or imagine? That was the first time and that was in a psychedelic training with Kiyomi. And I was also in that time being trained to become a psychedelic facilitator in the Compassionate inquiry and psychedelics. And I could not continue as a professional. I could only continue as a person who needed to heal this burden myself. And that was the first encounter.

00:17:07 Rosemary

Did you have to step away from your practice as you were going through that?

00:17:10 Anouk

Yeah, yeah.

00:17:11 Rosemary

Wow.

00:17:12 Anouk

Yeah. I closed my practice for about three months at that time, because it invited me to look beneath my professional identity, beneath my competence, and also beneath the parts of myself, how do I say… that had learned to be strong and capable and always taking care of others. So because I have had many therapists, I became very skilled at helping others. And Compassionate Inquiry gently challenged me to bring the same curiosity toward my own inner world. And in this whole training with Kiyomi and Compassionate Inquiry, I discovered so many protective adaptations that had shaped my whole life. And actually my strength had become a survival strategy. Yeah. And I really had to close everything to go in that journey. And I stopped working, actually for six months. For the other months I was traveling, I went to search for more psychedelic research and retreats.

00:18:09 Rosemary

I think an adult would be terrified if they were put on a bus and taken somewhere they didn’t know where they were going. What a journey. And I think it’s really helpful for you to say that you had to step away. I was having a conversation with someone the other day who spoke about a lot of therapists not having done their own inner work. And I wonder if you could comment on that, like how you were supporting clients before you did this inner work, and how it’s different now.

00:18:38 Anouk

Yeah, it’s completely different. My professional identity has changed completely. And I actually, very frankly, I don’t need to hide anymore behind my psychology. I was so identified, like abos is, with the doctor. I was so identified with these psychologists and now I don’t need… I’m a professional. Yes, I know something about trauma. I’m trained as a psychologist and I’m a human being who has gone through human suffering and gone through a healing journey as well.

00:19:11 Rosemary

Absolutely. You talked about your pursuit of training in psychedelics, but you also run retreats.

00:19:20 Anouk

Yes, I do.

00:19:21 Rosemary

… that include psilocybin, medicine, medicine truffles, which of course in the Netherlands is completely legal. And a lot of people I know go there to experience or lead those. Can you share with us your journey with psychedelics, like from experiencing it and actually, I think there was a life changing beginning to this journey. I wonder if you could share that with us.

00:19:44 Anouk

Yeah, there is a life, really. I was widowed twice. My first husband, he died of cancer. Of course, this is all still part of that subconscious unconscious me, which also attracted a lot of suffering in my relationships. And there was a lot of trauma bonding going on as well. And I was firstly married to my husband and he died of cancer. I had just become 30 years old and that was what I call a premeditated death and a death where we could really close and we could really say goodbye in a loving way. I got married again one and a half years later. I met a very beautiful, loving man, but he was bipolar. He was traumatized himself. And I knew that when we went into the relationship. But he was a very beautiful man. We got married, we lived together for 18 years. We got beautiful kids together. We were raising our kids, we were working. He was a lawyer, I was a psychologist. We had a pretty good life. But indeed, underneath, his bipolarity was coming up now and then, and especially the depressed states. When we were 18 years together, he committed suicide. He decided from one day to the other to leave us. It was not announced. We had just made a big decision to move out of Amsterdam and go and move near the coast. We bought a beautiful house where we sought. I thought, oh, now we start our real life with the kids and, you know, near the beach, a beautiful place… Harlem. And ten days after we signed the contract, which of course for bipolar people is a big change. And big changes always brought some… after the high, brought some depression. And we had experienced that with getting the kids, with moving somewhere else, with making big decisions around work. Always there was a period that the bipolar depression would come in and I didn’t notice that he had stopped with his medication because he was on lithium because it had so many side effects. He decided to get off and didn’t inform us. He also didn’t inform his treating psychiatrist. So we bought this house probably, and I didn’t really notice it while he was manic, because everything was possible in that time, financially, you know, legally, and he was a lawyer. So I trusted him and we made that huge decision and on the 1st of June we signed the contract. And on the 10th of June, he went out of the house on a Sunday morning, just left us and went to Amsterdam, to a building and jumped off the building.

00:22:38 Rosemary

I can’t even imagine your reaction. And as a psychologist, how did that land? Did you beat yourself up for not seeing it coming? It’s horrendous, but it must have added layers.

00:22:52 Anouk

It actually… what it did, it brought me back into the eight month old baby. And I was completely dissociated from that moment. I still remember the exact moment, like a film, that the two police people were standing at our door. What happened to my body? I remember leaving, you know, and they told me, can we come in? And I let them in and I said, did something happen to my husband? And they said, yeah, can we come in? And I noticed my heart racing, I noticed my throat going, closing. I noticed my mind already going into something very strange. And I noticed that my breath stopped. And from that moment I don’t know what happened except that I was looking at myself from a distance and functioning from a very distant position. And now I know, of course, that was dissociation and a very old program inside the nervous system, fully awake again.

00:23:57 Rosemary

Yes. I was thinking you might have been mentally sorting through. How could I have foreseen this? But you went to a whole different place.

00:24:05 Anouk

And your question came very later, much later. How could I not have seen this? But then the initial reaction was survival was like, dissociation was like… And I remember that immediately. I had a thought. How could he do this? How could he leave the kids alone? What’s this? And that kept me going for a long time, those beliefs.

00:24:31 Rosemary

Yeah. I think you said you had three kids, is that right?

00:24:35 Anouk

Yes, two biological kids with him and one foster kid with my first husband.

00:24:41 Rosemary

There were three children in the family and their father is gone. And you are operating in a very different way. You’re not really there.

00:24:51 Anouk

No.

00:24:52 Rosemary

You’re there, but not there.

00:24:54 Anouk

And my kids were 11 and 12. The youngest, the other one was already out of the house.

00:24:59 Rosemary

Very young children.

00:25:01 Anouk

Yes.

00:25:02 Rosemary

How did you get yourself out of the dissociation? How long did it last and how did it end?

00:25:07 Anouk

It lasted at least one year till my body said no. And I actually was going on survival. And six weeks after the funeral, Anouk was back to work, functioning as everything was normal. Like I had been training my whole life, continuing taking care of the kids, taking care of everybody, arranging all the things with the houses, because I was stuck with two houses. I was functioning on automatic pilot, but not taking care of myself, not taking care of my body. After a few months, I was so overstressed. And I know now that my cortisol levels went sky high, that I couldn’t function anymore. In my work, I started forgetting things, I started making huge mistakes. I went into a very strange relationship with a colleague. I had very strange fights with people. And I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep. I started drinking alcohol because I wanted to sleep a few hours. So I started to drink some more alcohol than I used to due to numb and to be able to sleep. And then nine months. Actually, it was nine months and from June till March, Good Friday, I ended up in the hospital with paralysis on both of my legs and myelitis in my nervous system, in my pelvic area, and my legs were thrown out fully. I was incontinent. I couldn’t hold my urine, I couldn’t hold my stool. And I ended up in the hospital. That was when actually my body had fully said no. And I was wheelchair bound for about six, seven months.

00:27:05 Rosemary

I know this is very sensitive, so if you’d rather not go here, if we can talk about the journey. You went so far in this direction, what you’ve just shared, what brought you back to being embodied, to being well, can you share that with us?

00:27:22 Anouk

Yeah, I can, actually. That nine months I was dissociated and completely not taking care of myself, but living on a very high stress level and coping with it the way I could cope. My eating disorder also came back. I started doing all these things that I used to do as a young woman to cope with all the overwhelming feelings. And actually I didn’t feel. I didn’t feel. ​​That was the whole thing. And when I was hospitalized and my kids came and they had found out what it was, that it was a myelitis, and that they could treat it with high doses of dexamethasone. And that there was a possibility that I could walk again and that there was a healing possible. I remember that my daughter and my son came with a little sheep, a little toy, and they put it in my bed. And my daughter looked at me. She was 11 years old. And actually that day that I got paralyzed and ended up in the hospital, we were about to celebrate her 12th birthday that same day. And she came to the hospital, and of course, they had to cancel the children’s party and everything. And with such tears in her eyes, she gave me that toy. And my son was standing next to her holding her hands. And I was looking at these two. As I’m telling this now, and I can cry again. And then she just said, mom, I don’t want to lose you also, and cried. And they both came and they cried, and I had to. I was holding them, and I was feeling them. I was really feeling them. And I was. For the first time in these nine months, I was really feeling something. And then I cracked. My heart cracked, and something cracked. And it was a crack where some light came in. And that was the beginning of the healing journey actually, it didn’t end there yet, but.

00:29:15 Rosemary

Oh, no, no. But that was the tipping point. That was the turn. Thank you. Oh, my goodness. That’s a wonderful story. I can see why it brought tears to your eyes. You healed from that, but there were more obstacles ahead of you, I understand.

00:29:31 Anouk

Yeah. Because it took me four years, really, Rosemary. It took me four years to come from this crack when I started feeling something, to become really fully embodied and feel everything that had happened to me. And actually what had happened when my husband committed suicide, and what I actually was feeling. I now am very grateful for that process because it brought me back and it has brought me a huge gift. But the journey didn’t end there, because what did they do? They treated me, of course, with huge doses of dexamethasone. And as you know, Gabor talks about them a lot, that when the stress system is already like, haywire, that when they start treating you with stress, of course, what happens to the immune system is it goes down, right? And my immune system, because I was treated with dexamethasone for two years. So from 2000 till 2000 was intense. And from 2009 till 2010, it was like pills. But before that, I had, like, an infusion where they gave it to me every time. And of course, after six, seven months, I could start to walk again. I could rehab and could walk again on crutches, but there was a vision of me walking again. And that was, of course, the best thing that could happen to me, that I could start taking care of my kids myself again. Because my mother came and a friend came and they moved in. And there was a lot of turmoil in my life at that time, who also taking care of the kids. And I couldn’t be a good mom for them at that time. So when I was treated with the dexamethasone, I got a lot of mucous membrane problems. And of course, I had already a damaged esophagus due to long years of damaging my esophagus, having reflux, having esophagitis. I had developed Barrett Syndrome in the mucous membrane in my esophagus. And exactly four years after I was diagnosed with esophagus cancer, you know, it was four years of going down with my health, but going slowly up with my mental and emotional state but my body was deteriorating. I knew when I started the cancer treatment, I knew there has to be something else. There has to be some more holistic approach to this, what is happening to me And a few people in my life who had gone down that road, I never listened to. I started listening to them. And then one gift after the other came on my part. I met the work of Joe Dispenza, I met the work of Kelly Turner. I met the work of Bruce Lipton. I met the work of many people who told me. And Gabor, of course, I read his book when the Body says no. And then I knew there’s a possibility for me, although they tell me this is a very bad voodoo curse, I knew what is a strong reason for me to live that for my kids. Thanks to all these beautiful teachers and pioneers in this field, which I really am so grateful that they showed up in my life. And that’s what I call the synchronicities. Because in the subconscious mind there’s a longing for healing. Then it will all come and show up. And that happened. That’s where I did my first psychedelic experience with trauma. And it opened up fully these childhood layers. And I was able to connect to it on such a different level as what Fadiman talks about in his book the Fadiman Protocols. What is ready to be shown is showing itself in that way. I could really look into my childhood from a fully different perspective. With not my default network active, my coping strategies didn’t work, and I fully became embodied. That’s what psychedelics did to me. They helped me open up a pathway for reconnection and being able to recondition my body to a complete new mind and mindset.

00:34:05 Rosemary

So they released you from the bunker and they helped you regain your health?

Anouk: Absolutely, yeah.

Because cortisol on top of… treating stress issues with cortisol, I’ve never heard a more eloquent story of why that doesn’t work. And it’s challenging though, because on one hand, it did work. You regained your ability to work Exactly. However, on the other hand, there was so much damage done.

00:34:30 Anouk

Yeah. And that’s the same with the cancer treatment. Yes, that is also a whole story again, which came on top of that. But that treatment and that would happen there, which gave me this full out of body experience. I was treated with chemo and in my second chemo, I was driving home myself and I already felt something strange happening, as if I was on cannabis or something, because the whole world seems to be getting slow and I was driving my car and I was like, what’s happening with me? And when I came home, I didn’t know, but my heart was really racing and at one point I was pushed out of my body, and it was said to me that my heart exploded and that they had to bring me back. And in that moment I was actually also again out of my body, because leaving my body was very easy for me. And that was again such an experience. But when I came back from that experience, I was discovering my body in a full new way, like I had with the paralysis. But with the paralysis it was not that profound and deep as I had with this, because when I opened my eyes and I somehow looked at my hand and was like, oh, where am I? And then I fully felt my body and from there, that was in 2011. January 2011. So what I told before about psychedelics, this is after this period when I started finding all these beautiful teachers. But before that I had this experience in 2011, which was quite something.

00:36:19 Rosemary

You’ve experienced such a journey with trauma and health and coping strategies, trauma responses, healing old wounds. And you’ve done so much training, you’ve done so much work on yourself. So there’s a depth of empathy and compassion that I’m sure you are bringing to your clients. I must say I’m intrigued by some of your clients’ feedback on your website. I saw that working with you was ‘pure magic,’ ‘an amazing experience’ and also ‘mind blowing’. So I’d love to get a sense of who you work with and what they bring to you and what happens when they work with you that would inspire them to share such words, such wonderful words.

00:37:05 Anouk

Yeah, it is exactly what they experienced, what I have experienced within the Compassionate Inquiry community, that you can stay with them, this presence, this abiding presence, to really see them, hear them, and for the first time in their life, maybe. And most of them do that, share their vulnerable, exiled thoughts. I do work in small groups and we do work with a team of psychologists and a psychiatrist who are all trained in trauma and know how to hold the space. And we work with psychedelics outside the clinical setting, but in a therapeutic set and setting. And that means that we have a full preparation and a full integration program. The psychedelic experience is not alone. It’s preparation, psychedelic retreat, it’s a four and a half day or a seven day retreat and it is a whole integration program afterwards. That exactly, that’s what I got. But in bits of pieces 

Rosemary You’ve put it all together. 

Anouk: Exactly.

00:38:19 Rosemary

And I love that it seems that it’s founded on as is Compassionate Inquiry, on the one piece that means so much, which is empathetic, abiding presence, being seen, being heard, being understood.

00:38:32 Anouk

Yes. Yeah. And knowing that there is a group of people that hear you and will support you, you’re not alone. And of course we create support systems, we create buddy system and we create the possibility that they can come to us in individual sessions as well. And that over the years now for me has changed fully into Compassionate Inquiry, in body work, breath work, and I do work in one on one psychedelic sessions as well.

00:39:08 J’aime

If you’re listening right now and wishing that this platform could be available for you to share with the world the unexpected ways that the Compassionate Inquiry approach is helping you bring more connection, healing and authenticity into your clients lives, we’ve got a really exciting offer for you, so stay with us.

00:39:27 Kevin

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00:40:10 Rosemary

I’m curious, do you have many people who come to you with psychosomatic challenges? Because those can be specifically frustrating because there’s no medical trauma. If you go to the doctor, they won’t find anything. And psychosomatic used to be a way of dismissing someone and saying it’s all in your mind. But these days, we know if something is psychosomatic, it can be trauma related. There is real pain in the body.

00:40:38 Anouk

Yeah. I don’t know if you have heard Dr. Schubenau recently with Dr. Gabor Maté.

00:40:42 Rosemary

I did not, no.

00:40:44 Anouk

Oh, he talks about mind body syndrome and we have a huge movement in the Netherlands who Has invited him a few times now to give training, and I was part of that training as well. We do work with it, and I do work with it. And I also do work with cancer patients. And I do work with a lot of, how do you call, body mind syndromes or psychosomatic symptoms. And I do also work with a lot of people that have been treated in the mental health industry, hospital industry, that were not treated very well or were medicalized or were relabeled as hopeless.

00:41:29 Rosemary

And possibly subjected to medical trauma in the process, yes.

00:41:32 Anouk

Exactly. So you can say that when patients come to me, I do hear a lot of times, I’m a difficult patient. I’m a complex trauma patient. You know Anouk I’m almost dying. I have cancer, you know, and all those words when you treat that with a different approach.

00:41:52 Rosemary

Yeah. And you started out as a difficult child. What a beautiful circle to close with your work.

00:41:57 Anouk

Yes, of course.

00:41:58 Rosemary

The difficult child understands what it is to be perceived as someone who’s difficult or complex or difficult to understand.

00:42:06 Anouk

Exactly. And it’s because there’s always trauma underneath.

00:42:11 Rosemary

Yes. Anouk, you have developed the heart and brain healing process. I would love to hear you say more about that. And perhaps what inspired its creation.

00:42:21 Anouk

What inspired its creation is when I was a student in 1986 finishing my psychology, I heard, when the brain is fixed, it will never change. And a decade ago, neuroscience discovered what we call this neuroplasticity. And now we know that the brain can change after childhood and isn’t fixed and wired to stay like it is. So when we start using neuroplasticity, so that’s the brain part of it, the neuroscience part of it. When we start using it and bringing consciousness and awareness into our thinking and feeling loops, which we create because we create a body which is signaling the brain. And the brain is predicting a future that once was true, but still is predicting the same future all over again and again. And we say, this is who I am. And that created for me, understanding neuroscience. So I studied with Bessel van der Kolk, I studied with the NICABM Institute, and I did neuroscience of change training. And that brought me onto the brain work, because already I was in the body because of my illnesses. I already had started looking into the embodied change and coaching and the Strozzi Institute, who works with the neuro embodiment. And I started training myself in that after I was cured, to get more and more. And then I saw, hey, but here I learned this. There I learned that. But nobody’s bringing it together. And that’s why my company is called Heart and Brain. Because it’s the heart and the brain, it’s the body and the brain that needs to be brought together because we have a capacity to change our wiring and to reconnect new neural networks in our brain. But it can only be done when there is a lot of compassion and understanding and self love from the heart. And those two very strong systems do work together. You cannot separate body, mind anymore.

00:44:52 Rosemary

It sounds fascinating. And,, are you booked very far in advance?

00:44:55 Anouk

I am.

00:44:56 Rosemary

So people who reach out to you, there would be a few months wait, at least.

00:45:01 Anouk

Yeah, three months is minimum. But there’s always exceptions. And I cannot say what makes that. I say, okay, I open up, you know, because it’s sometimes it’s the urge or what I hear or feel. But in the meantime, I’m in a beautiful network. And of course we have beautiful trained Compassionate Inquiry therapists in the Netherlands as well. So I do refer a lot as well.

00:45:27 Rosemary

It’s just so inspiring. And what comes up for me, something that is touched on quite clearly in the Compassionate Inquiry training, is neuroception and how people with early trauma get their wiring backwards. They perceive, I think this is the example they share. In Compassionate Inquiry, we perceive unsafe situations as safe, and we perceive safe situations as unsafe, and that can get us into trouble. So I’m sure you address that in your approach.

00:45:58 Anouk

Absolutely, yeah. Because that’s of course what Stephen Porges has made very clear for us. Because neuroception is that what we perceive outside our conscious awareness, so outside what we can consciously perceive. And of course that’s all stuck in the body. Our body has become our brain, that’s for sure. And our body is informing the brain all the time. And the trauma is a body living in the here and now and reacting as if it’s happening again. And that’s why when the police people came in the door, my body went poop back in that old abandonment, being left being alone state, which it knew. And there’s no time in that. And that’s where with trauma there is a vortex in time, and it gets stuck in time. And what we need to do is we need to go back and address that, what was stuck. But therefore we need our conscious mind and we need to put the frontal lobe into action, because the frontal lobe is our crown on the evolution, where we can plan, where we can reflect and what Gabor also talks about, that we have the response flexibility. And of course trauma shuts down our response flexibility. We are not able to respond in a healthy way.

00:47:25 Rosemary

And I love your story because it happened just like that. There wasn’t a choice, it wasn’t conscious. It’s just you were present, you were gone.

00:47:36 Anouk

Exactly.

00:47:37 Rosemary

And I think a lot of people, we can tend to blame ourselves for situations like that where it’s not a choice we made, it’s something that was… It’s a response to an old trauma, as you said. And now I can also see why your clients use the words they did. It’s wonderful that you’ve put all this together in a program. You’ve done the research, you have the intellect and the experience to put this all together. And I could totally see why a client would just say ‘magic.’ It’s like magic because you know exactly where to go. So we were talking about, you’ve got a considerable wait list. You do refer clients to other therapists who are more readily available. But your heart and brain healing camps, those would seem to be an opportunity to work with you on a very deep level. So I wonder if you could just share with us, where would someone ideally be who chooses to participate in one of your retreats, in one of these heart and brain healing camps?

00:48:43 Anouk

They need to be stable. So if there’s a lot of dysregulation, I do work with them before. If they can easily dysregulate, we advise them not to take part in the heal camp yet, but to do the individual trajectory first. Because we need to be able to understand the theory behind the regulation and dysregulation, behind triggering, behind hyperarousal, hypoarousal, between the window of tolerance and all their coping mechanism. That’s what they have to understand. And of course they have to read my book. There is also, I do also have an online trauma course where there’s nine modules where they can start. But it’s not necessarily that they have to have resolved their trauma because we do work within this framework where there is a therapeutic setting with a lot of holding so we can hold them. And that’s why we also work with traumatized people when they have started to regulate themselves. And some still can get dysregulated, because we know how to hold that and we offer them that place.

00:49:51 Rosemary

It’s such a caring approach. There could be some part of them that really loves the idea of the retreat. But you take them in and you make sure you know through the pre-work that they’re actually ready. You do discern very carefully whether or not they are ready. And it’s so different to the type of psychedelic tourism that is growing around the world. It could do harm, if they weren’t ready, and you make sure that’s not a possibility.

00:50:18 Anouk

Because I’ve learned also the hard way that myself, you can understand that, because before I ended up with Gabor and the organization that was really holding people the way we do it now, I ended up also in some places which were not good, I can tell you that.

00:50:37 Rosemary

And you said reading your book Wisdom of Trauma was necessary before people attend. So talk to me about your book. What inspired it? What does it cover? It’s available in Dutch and German. Is it available in English as well?

00:50:53 Anouk

At the moment it’s going to be translated into English as well, and Spanish.

00:50:57 Rosemary

Wonderful.

00:50:58 Anouk

I will let everybody know when it’s in English. We are in the middle of it right now, so I’m really happy.

00:51:05 Rosemary

Beautiful. So tell us about it.

00:51:07 Anouk

The book is divided in four dimensions. It’s a dimension of knowing your own psychology. And the second dimension is to understand the intelligence of the body. The third dimension is to know, where do I come from? What was my external environment? How did it shape me? What were my belief systems? How did what happened to me create the way I started thinking and feeling, acting, choosing and experiencing myself? Like you now know my story, then you know that from that childhood onwards I was always drawn to trauma, to lust, to severe things. But that was not out of conscious choice always. It was a lot out of subconscious programming and coming and seeing and using consciousness as an instrument of being able to get a meta vision about how I think, how I feel impacts the choices I make, how the choices I make influence what is my experience, and then see what thinking and feeling loop created that… was not taught in Western psychology. Right. We don’t get taught to use consciousness as a means of entering the subconscious mind. We learn to work with the ego, we learn to enact the ego, we learn to dissect the ego. But we don’t get taught. Hey, if you bring consciousness into yourself and develop a metacognition and bring that body of yours together with self knowledge and embodied knowledge, that will create a full new landscape. That is taught in Eastern psychology. Yeah. So these are the first three dimensions of my book. And since I mentioned Eastern psychology, the fourth dimension in my book is the spiritual, the energy medicine. Because we are more than just this body. We are not just bones and flesh and blood and tissue. We are energetic beings. And our nervous system communicates with your… Our nervous systems are communicating together and that’s energy. When we live, we have energy available to us. And now, of course, knowing what quantum psychology, quantum science and neuroscience has taught us, we know that we are more than just a body. We have a lot of consciousness available for us. And that’s the fourth dimension that I added to my work, which is actually the spiritual realm.

00:54:04 Rosemary

Yeah, I did notice there are many meditations that you offer on your website. I had a feeling there was a big spiritual component to your work. So for anyone listening, your website is shared in the show notes. If you want to experience one of Anouk’s meditations, there are a number to choose from.

00:54:24 Anouk

That’s what I promised myself when I would be better. I created this vision that I would be on that journey. And knowing that would be the inspiration for many people to come. And now for the past years, so many people are going on this journey and it’s so beautiful. I love that we are becoming better humans. You know what inspired me so much in my work is the book that Gabor wrote a few years ago, the Myth of Normal. He says that we have started to find normal what is abnormal. And this toxicity that we experience in being vulnerable, sharing our exiled path, that needs to be talked about, that we need to take that out of isolation and find it normal to talk about it. And that’s something that was so important for me. And from that moment, I really became so inspired to even more talk and go out there. Yeah.

00:55:27 Rosemary

And I’m very glad we have you here today sharing these words because you are so vibrant and so alive and so not what you could have been. Someone who’s gone through your journey, you are yourself an inspiration.

00:55:44 Anouk

Oh, thank you. I’m glad you touched me now also.

00:55:48 Rosemary

Yeah, me too. Anouk, I’m curious. After everything, the losses, the cancer, the coping strategies, the trauma, the near death experience, what has trauma given you that you would not take back? What gifts would never be rejected?

00:56:09 Anouk

Looking back, what I see is that my healing journey has never been about becoming someone else. It has all been about coming home to myself. The losses, the illnesses, the grief, the spiritual searching, all the professional trainings has all pointed me always towards the same direction. Coming home towards myself, towards greater compassion, towards greater authenticity. To me, healing is not becoming a better version of myself, but maybe becoming about more fully who I am or who we are as human beings. It’s so important. But I’m amazed about how people not understand it yet. It needs messengers and that’s what we are, of course, as Compassionate Inquiry people. We understand this. This community has given me so much like homecoming also.

00:57:05 Rosemary

Also, you wouldn’t believe how many times that phrase comes up in the podcast when we interview people. Coming home to myself, it’s a very strong theme. It’s exactly what you described, Anouk, that you offer In your treatments, especially the retreats, was it inspired at all by the Compassionate Inquiry community?

00:57:25 Anouk

Absolutely, because my whole training started when I did the psychedelic work with Kiyomi. It was a training with Gabor and psychedelics. And that’s where I really got so inspired in 2018, 2019.

00:57:41 Rosemary

The community is very unique. And I’m wondering how many other people who go through the Compassionate inquiry training, because there’s, I think, over 4,000 now around the world who have completed it. They fall in love with the community and they take this away and they replicate it. So I’m wondering if you have a few words of wisdom to leave with our listeners. It could be an insight, a quote, a poem, something that you turn to that regulates you, steadies you.

00:58:09 Anouk

Yeah. In my book, in the whole book, there’s all the poems from Rumi. The one from Rumi that I love a lot is the one with the crack and the light, which I shared. That little crack of light when I saw my children there, that opened up the whole window for healing. And when you allow that little crack to open up and allow a bit of light to come in, light will always shine brighter and brighter. And one other thing is radical hope. When I went through my cancer journey, I read the book from Kelly Turner, and she’s a doctor who has investigated many cancer cases. She wrote a book, Radical Hope and Radical Remission. And that is possible. We can have radical remission in many health conditions and we can have radical remission in many mental and emotional illnesses.

00:59:06 Rosemary

Thank you for sharing that. I will add to the show notes. Anouk Bindels. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Gifts of Trauma podcast. Thank you for being with us today and being so generous in your sharing. It’s been a delight to have you.

00:59:22 Anouk

Thank you. It was a delight to be here and thank you for inviting me.

00:59:29 Rosemary

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.