00:00:01 Rosemary
We’ve had an explosion of coaches, self help books. The Internet is full of advice. Do you think this abundance of information is keeping parents more in their heads and seeking outward input from experts, when they really just need to tune into their hearts?

00:00:21 Gordon
Oh my goodness. And sometimes the irony is so strong as you see parents Googling something. What am I supposed to do? And that creates the actual separation, and the child is disoriented trying to figure out what is wrong. And the more we look for the right thing to do, the less we do the right thing. The more we think the answer is in what we do, the less we realize the answer in who we are to our children. Whether it was apparent 5,000 years ago in the middle of a forest or a hunter gatherer tribe, we’re the same people we’re the same humans and the same things will have been true 10,000 years ago as they will be from 10,000 years hence. And that is when children, regardless of their parents’ education, history and so on, when children experience the conditions that are conducive to the spontaneous unfolding of potential, flourishing happens, they become who they were meant to be. And when we’re part of it, we become who we were meant to be as well.

00:01:27 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through compassionate inquiry. 

I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and this is the Gifts of Trauma podcast. And today I would like to welcome our esteemed guest, Doctor Gordon Neufeld. Welcome, Gordon to the show.

00:01:54 Gordon
And thank you, my pleasure to be here indeed.

00:01:57 Rosemary
Now you’re an authority on children, stress, trauma, and resilience, and your work as a clinical psychologist with children, youth, and those responsible for them, spans over 5 decades. I’d like to introduce you formally with a comment that Gabor made in a podcast you were both guests on last year, and I’ll read this quote. He said, “I move in a psychological and therapeutic world, and I can tell you without bias that Gordon’s understanding of child development is just deeper than anyone else’s on the planet, and I highly recommend his work. I’ll just finish by saying that my own work has been so deeply informed by Gordon’s that I can’t even imagine it without it. So this has been, at least for me, an essential partnership.”

00:02:42 Gordon
Well, Gabor is being very complimentary, and, as you can imagine, he was one of my best students ever.

00:02:50 Rosemary
Yeah, I can well imagine that. Now, is it accurate to say that you’re retired from your work as a psychologist?

00:02:58 Gordon
Hmmm. I retired from university teaching. I’ve retired from doing therapy in the trenches, so to speak, although I certainly mentor therapists. So I’m busier than ever. And I’ve just retired from some of the things that were quite preoccupying. And I have the privilege now of also being directly involved in the care of my 7th granddaughter. She’s just ah, two years of age now, so two days a week, this gives a wonderful opportunity to see all of these dynamics in in operation. It certainly keeps me young.

00:03:38 Rosemary
Absolutely, and it may inform your 5th edition of Hold On to Your Kids, your best selling book.

00:03:45 Gordon
Yes, I’m filled with stories now are every time I speak. That is true. I have all kinds of new illustrations and refreshed insights, that’s for sure.

00:03:56 Rosemary
Wonderful. You know, on the gifts of trauma, we’re really interested in hearing stories. We’re also interested in your wisdom and your teachings. So anytime you feel the urge to share a story, please do. And you are still working very actively as an international speaker. As I did my research for this podcast, I saw you on multiple podcasts. So you’re still out there very actively supporting Hold on to your kids.

00:04:20 Gordon
Yes, as speaking and in basically directing the Neufeld Institute, which has courses, over 40 courses that created for parents, teachers, professionals reaching out into about a dozen languages. And so it’s a full time job as well.

00:04:40 Rosemary
Yeah. And if I may, I was all over your website, the Neufeld institute, and I was impressed by the breadth of free resources that you offer, and also the breadth of very reasonably priced training courses. As you said, they’re for parents, they’re for professionals, and I will be linking it in the show notes. It’s an amazing resource for anybody listening who has ever been a parent, who has ever been a child. So I think that encompasses everyone

00:05:12 Gordon
Our mission is to get the message of relation, relationship and being out, so we try to make it as accessible as possible. It’s a nonprofit charity that I decided to organize, because I had retired from making a living, so to speak. And so I could devote myself to those things that I believed were very important for those involved with children in any way to be able to hear.

00:05:39 Rosemary
Beautiful. I love to hear that. So if it’s alright with you, I’d like to start this conversation in a personal way. As you said, your life’s work has been to help adults provide the conditions for children to flourish, and as you mentioned, you’re the grandfather of seven. You also have five children who are all helping produce those seven grandchildren. What led you into this line of work?

00:06:05 Gordon
I landed almost by accident, into it. I was headed for natural science, chemistry, physics, those things very much to take up the same profession as Gabor did as an MD. And then I realized what I really wanted to do and always had wanted to do is to make sense of things. And the ultimate is to make sense of ourselves. I didn’t know at that time that the secret was to make sense of a two or a three-year old. I had no idea. But I knew enough that I was on my way to get a PhD in developmental psychology, in clinical psychology. And along the way, I had my first two daughters and I realized that I did not, I did not get what was going on. And that really was the beginning. 

It was that challenge that I knew that my interaction with them must not be governed by prescriptions, reading books. The dance must evolve from deep within me and that meant that I needed to make sense of them, from inside out. And so that was my journey ever since, my quest ever since, to make sense of children from inside out. It’s an insight based approach in that when you’re trying to think of the right thing to do, you actually aren’t using your eyes to be able to understand your child from inside out. And so it’s paradoxical. It’s ironical, deeply ironical, that we’ve never had more books, we’ve never had more people telling us what to do, and we’ve never been so dumbed down. And the other thing that I realized, and it struck me, as I was trained as a behaviorist and then with my children, I realized that you must never put conduct before well-being. You must never put conduct before relationship. But it struck me that the context of raising children was invisible. Relationship was something that was invisible, and it was bottom up. And so with these understandings that, hence the title of the book, hold on to your kids, like something there that if you go out want to have influence with them, you need to be able to cultivate this relationship. So it started a wonderful journey of being able to understand a relational base, a drive for togetherness, but in the context of the ultimate developmental approach. The main idea there, I was a developmentalist, is that the unfolding of human potential is absolutely spontaneous if conditions are conducive. And the challenge is, for us, is not to pull and push at the maturity of our children, not to react against the results of immaturity, or things that have gone wrong. It was to provide these conditions, so that nature could have its way with our children. Those things informed the dance, the interaction from inside out. And then I realized as I began to understand more and more and began to put the pieces of developmental science together and attachment science together and neuroscience together that I wanted to share, to share what I saw with others.

00:09:26 Rosemary
I and many millions are very glad that you did. Now, was it your studies that made you get out of your head and look at what was going on? Was it something to do with how you yourself were raised? Like it’s an unusual… most people revert to raising their kids the way they were raised. Can you credit anything specifically for having you stop and look and say hang on, I’m doing this wrong?

00:09:53 Gordon
I don’t think so. I was very fortunate. I didn’t know how fortunate I was as a child to have been raised in a shame-free environment. I had no idea until I was a therapist that this was not, this was was not the norm. My own parents had been shamed incredibly and my mother was an incest victim and her family up until nine years of age. There was huge crippling, but they were the prime example of what I learned about, is that in putting… I was the first born. They knew enough that they didn’t have to have the right answers, they had to be my answer, be my answer to invitation, to exist in their presence, to love, to belong, to all of these things. And I think that sowed the seeds in me in which I’ve realized that in my own practice, as I was trying to help adults get better. And I realized that there was this huge impediment because we’re not meant to focus on ourselves. And I actually had a two year waitlist and I went away to Provence over 25 / 26 years ago now to completely rethink things. 

And I realized that, no, all of the true transformation that I had seen and the growth that I experienced, whether it’s in me, what had transformed me, was when I yearned to be the answer to what another human being needed. It was that yearning, not knowledge, not books, not PHD’s. It was that yearning to be that answer that grew me up, and that healed others. And so it was getting back into this arrangement of cascading care. Whereas we yearn to be the answer, not have the answers, to be the answer for another’s relational needs, for love, belonging, for sameness, for invitation to exist, to be seen from inside out. As we yearn, we stretch, we have our tears, we have the processes. So from that point on, I stopped treating adults and they would come and they would say even in terms of as an individual in our sessions, we will focus on somebody you deeply care about, preferably a child. And I will hopefully help you keep your eyes on that child, make sense of them, or your spouse and become the answer, to step up to be the answer. And you will find that something absolutely transformative happens within you. But that was huge for me and a huge kind of turning point,  pivotal point, .26 years ago, taking a year off to think something’s amiss here. Something’s not right. I’ve got to do this a bit differently. And and so it was when I talk about thriving children, often I entitle my presentations becoming the answer your children need. Because that is the issue. But the focus is on the children, not on how messed up I am, not on how crippled I’ve been. And I think my parents were a prime example of that. And I was very fortunate for it, because I did not inherit in the sense what you would think he would have from individuals who were very crippled by the circumstances in their own life and in their time.

00:13:19 Rosemary
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. It’s interesting. It seems that you talk a lot about the impact of the digital age on children. But 20 years ago on a different podcast, I interviewed the late Doctor Paul Pearsall, author of The Heart’s Code, and we were talking about at that time his newest book, which was titled The Last Self Help Book You’ll Ever Need.

00:13:40 Gordon
I love it, I love it.

00:13:41 Rosemary

Gets even better, it says the last self help book you’ll ever need. Repress your anger, think negatively, be a good blamer and throttle your inner child. Of course it was very tongue in cheek and one of the main themes of our conversation was his frustration with what he called the Gurutocracy. Now you know. In the 20 years since that conversation, we’ve had an explosion of coaches and self help books….

00:14:09 Gordon
Yes.

00:14:09 Rosemary
The Internet is full of advice, and I love what you said. You really shifted the paradigm. But do you think this abundance of information is keeping parents more in their heads house since seeking outward input from experts when they really just need to tune into their heart as you said?

00:14:30 Gordon
Oh my goodness. And sometimes the irony is so strong as you see parents Googling something. What am I supposed to do? And that creates the actual separation, and the child is disoriented trying to figure out what is wrong. And the more we look for the right thing to do, the less we do the right thing. The more we think the answer is in what we do, the less we realize the answer and who we are to our children. And so there, there’s something there that whether it was apparent 5000 years ago in the middle of a forest or a hunter gatherer tribe we’re the same people we’re the same humans and the same things will have been true 10,000 years ago as they will be from 10,000 years hence. And that is when children, regardless of their parents, education, history and so on, when children experience, I’ve isolated it to four experiences, when children experienced the conditions that are conducive to the spontaneous unfolding of potential, flourishing happens. They become who they were meant to be. And when we’re part of it, we become who we were meant to be, as well.

00:15:42 Rosemary
Gabor has spoken often about, he’s spoken often about Indigenous people and how their parenting style is perhaps the healthiest he’s ever seen, and I’m wondering if those criteria you just mentioned fit into the Indigenous way of raising their children.

00:15:58 Gordon
Yes, absolutely, but it’s encoded in ritual and in culture, and that’s where it’s meant to be because we’re not meant to be so self-conscious about these things. You, you don’t say to a child really would work a lot better for you and I if you gave me your heart. You can’t say that. You can’t say to a child, what you really need to have now is some sadness about the things that did not work. You’re stuck, you’re stuck in mad. You need to feel your sadness. It doesn’t work. Yes, Gabor can quote me and he does and says that Neufeldt says that we will only be saved through a sea of tears. Yes, I do say that and sadness plays a huge part. But you can’t say that to anybody directly. You can’t even say that to a client directly because our suffering is in our feelings and so it has to be hidden in, back into culture, into ritual. So yes. But even to use the word parenting or indigenous is wrong, because parenting is a word invented by the colonized people. It wasn’t there, it in any way. Grandparents carry the weight in almost all indigenous cultures. They carry the weight because they move slower, they have less to do, and their culture allows them to be able to find the dignity that is required in true eldership, to be able to be the answer to someone else. Our culture throws the grandparents under the bus, and wants them to contribute to the gross national domestic product, or whatever it is. So the Indigenous, you wouldn’t think of parenting an indigenous thing, you would think it is really providing those children. But did they know that? No, what they had the benefit of is a culture that evolves slowly In sync with nature, 10,000 years or more evolving In sync with nature so that nature and culture dance beautifully together. Whereas our major cultures that most of us are speaking from, are pariah cultures, that venerated society, big buildings, materialism and so on. You can’t get those things out of it. We do have to become conscious of it. That’s why I speak about it. But there is something, there’s a downside to it, just because in the first story we have in the judeo-christian tradition, there’s a downside to becoming conscious of some things, is that you become self-conscious and so on. So yes, we need to do this and hence my courses. But we weren’t meant to be that self-conscious about these things.

00:18:47 Rosemary
Yeah. And it would be wonderful if the global culture could take on some of the more indigenous practices and see the elders, more of the elders, as wisdom keepers.

00:18:57 Gordon
That’s the full circle we need to do. And before, in Canada we had our reconciliation movement where I, still a white male elder, could work with Indigenous groups and did a lot of that in this, the heads that would nod, it was more affirming. They would always say to me, this is the way it used to be, this is how it used to be. This is how we raised our children. Now we’re fortunate enough to have three Indigenous faculty in the Neufeld Institute, because now, it’s really appropriately so. I’m not I’m not the right colour to be carrying the message.

00:19:38 Rosemary
Understood. Many of the things we’ve touched on in this short time already. You’re clearly very aligned. Your and Gabor’s perspectives are very clearly aligned. And I’m wondering, how did you meet Gabor? How did your paths cross?

00:19:50 Gordon
I met Gabor, I think his wife, as I remember it, first of all came to some courses I was teaching at the University of British Columbia and I knew of Gabor. I knew of Gabor ‘cause he was three years ahead of me in university and he was the editor of the university newspaper. And he was a radical leftist at that time, quite, quite pro-Palestinian already, which caused a stir because he’s Jewish in a very tight Jewish community in Vancouver, being pro Palestinians. So I knew he had a lot of courage. This way. So I knew of him. I didn’t know of him, but he showed up in my parenting classes because his wife dragged him along and it was just like his eyes just opened up that he was finding what he was looking for. And he’s a writer, obviously. And he was starting to write up some of the stuff and I was very mad at him, as you can imagine, because they were my ideas and he did credit them. But I avoided writing like the plague. That’s why I took science, to avoid writing. And of course he was a natural writer. So our wives got us together and said come on guys, be friends. You need each other. Neufld’s developed this attachment based developmental approach, but he’s a slow writer. So we became very good friends after that. But our initial initial one is that he was a student of mine that was writing my stuff up and…

00:21:10 Rosemary
And then you ended up collaborating on hold on to your kids. How was that?

00:21:14 Gordon
Yes, that’s exactly it. I wrote the manuscript. The manuscript was at least twice as long as the book. And then his job was is… I would make sense to him, and then he would use his…. I always joked with him that in my crayon box only had 12 crayons, but he had the big 64 crayon colour box. My job was with my 12 crayons to make sense of him and then he would take all the he would take it from there, which was a beautiful relationship. That writing relationship could have gone on, but he had so much of his own. He wanted to get out there.

00:21:45 Rosemary
Yeah, I totally understand. Maybe you’ve written one book to his multiples, but all of the various editions of the book, it’s been reissued three times Now. And I wonder if you could speak to what inspired those revisions and the nature of what changed in the book through those…

00:22:05 Gordon
Well, the first, the first revision is not one that I supported or Gabor really supported it. It was a shift from the Canadian edition to the American edition to become a standard. And it went down two or three reading levels because they wanted to make it more accessible to those that did not love language. And so it really decimated Gabor’s beautiful writing and neither of us were happy about it. But New York was the gateway to the rest of the world. The book from there went into 35 languages or more than 35 languages now. The second edition was necessitated by the fact that the first writing that the book was published in 2004 and that was before Facebook, which was 2005. And so the second edition was necessitated by being able to link what was happening in our world, our preoccupation with digital screens and those, and evolving into social media, the information age, evolving into social media. And so two more chapters were added there, and then that set the stage, like you couldn’t really understand social media with understanding that peers had become to replace adults in their lives, which is what the book was about. So it was beautifully positioned to be able to explain the digital revolution, which in turn, an understanding that could understand the free fall in well-being that was happening with youth all the way around, became noticeable during the pandemic. It was happening before the pandemic. But actually parallels to peer orientation of which the preoccupation with social media is just simply a symptom, not the cause. The underlying cause is fear orientation. So hence the revisions, the two revisions. It’s since been released in hardback, again in hardcover, in both the States and in Canada I’m not sure about other places. But unfortunately that hard cover is not the original hardcover. If anybody wants to get that, you have to go on used books on the Internet. If you love Gabor’s writing, you can just immerse yourself into that with all the beauty of the language.

00:24:23 Rosemary
Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much. Now that it’s a natural segue that you’ve just set up, talking about Gabor writing about what he was experiencing in your parenting classes. Your work has no doubt inspired and influenced numerous books and you’ve endorsed 3 that are listed on your website, by writing forwards. And I wonder if we can just look at those for a minute. The first one is reclaiming our students, why children are more anxious, aggressive and shut down than ever and what we can do about it. And your daughter is a co-author on that. There’s Rest, Play, Grow, making Sense of preschoolers or anyone who acts like one. I love that title, and also Nourished: Connection, Food and Caring for our Kids and Everyone else We Love by Deborah McNamara. So is there anything you’d like to say about any of these books, or maybe other books you’re aware of that your work has inspired?

00:25:17 Gordon
These books, the preciousness of these books is that I got to have them as students for a number of years. So they were interns of mine, including my daughter, who said Dad can I study with you? Can you supervise me, mentor me as a therapist, and so on and so on. And so can I do this? And also taking all of the basic courses that I created. And then my daughter Tamara, became the Dean of the Neufeld Institute, like basically creating this. And Dr McNamara, Deborah’s book is… she moved from academia, simply because this material changed her life . Again, she’s one of my senior faculty. She interned with me. She actually moved from academia because of this material, to teach it. And her book on making sense of preschoolers or anyone who acts like one, is really the preschooler course that I created, that is written up. And it’s wonderful, because as she was able to use pictures, whereas my publisher, I’m a picture guy, right? I wanted slides, wanted illustrations. And I complained to Random House, largest English publisher of the world, royally when I said, come on, I need to put my pictures in there, Then I used this adage picture is worth 1000 words. And they responded and said precisely, that’s why we want you to use the words instead of pictures. 

00:26:43 Rosemary
As you would expect from a publisher, yes.

00:26:45 Gordon
Yes, as you would expect, so many of the diagrams were able to find their way into Dr McNamara’s book. And of course, in her book Nourished, she actually puts, brings back together, feeding and attachment, and it’s an incredible signature book. I think it will become classic and iconic, in that sense, because as science is great at teasing things apart, like relationship and sex, and it does it to study it, but it forgets to put them back together again. And this is what happened with food and relationship, is that it came apart. We started teaching children about food. They developed eating disorders. We realized our mistakes and had to back off of that because it’s only meant to be in the context of relationship, that we do. It’s meant to be a way of taking care of each other and it’s symbolic. So it’s a wonderful work that really took something right to the core. That relationship is a context in which we do life. Relationship is a context in which we give care. Relationship as a context in which we receive care. Nothing would be more important than to bring all of that to food. I thought she was going to be able to do this in three chapters. This from a far cry from that. It was a big project, but what a project.It is really a seminal work.

00:28:12 Rosemary
Yeah, I can’t wait to check those out. I have not dipped into them yet, but we had a a therapist on our podcast a few months ago, Rennet Wong Gates, and that’s one of the things she does in her practice. She brings her clients in and she feeds them. She says. Some of these people are very wealthy and they’re starving. She feeds them. She puts soft materials around her therapeutic rooms. She gives them all the comforts that for some reason when we become adults, we don’t do for ourselves, but we might very well do for our kids.

00:28:42 Gordon
Yes, yes. And my daughter’s book brings the construct of emotional playgrounds to the school to restore the idea of the role of play in the unfolding recovery prevention and how schools can bring that knowledge in without anybody really knowing what is happening. And to bring it back in to this. So that that’s her, her passion has been to bring that awareness into the educational system. 

00:29:14 Rosemary
That’s amazing. I’m curious, and you may not be able to answer this, but Doctor McNamara, you’ve said your work changed her life. Is it possible for you to share what she shared with you? How did her life transform as a result of your work?

00:29:27 Gordon
Her kids were just infants and toddlers and preschools, and she has quite a mind and just the same was trying to figure these things out and how in the world what is it that you do. So it was just basically provided her own marching orders for parenting, her own context. But again, it wasn’t prescriptive. It was providing her a way of seeing her children, from which a natural dance evolves. And I think this is what people find transformative. Initially, I had no “how to” chapters in the book. I had none. I didn’t want there to be – I wanted people to just simply look at their children differently and be able to see them differently and just be patient as a different dance evolved. But you know how publishers are. They said you gotta put”how to” material in there. So I had to oblige in that sense, or maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did oblige and if you want to figure out the difference in the voice, the “how to” stuff was mainly my voice because I did that later on to be able to satisfy the publisher.

00:30:38 Rosemary
Fair enough. Now you were mentioning your daughter’s book and play. You wrote an article that’s entitled Adding the Wisdom of Play to the Wisdom of Trauma. And I really love what you suggested, that we can play our way back to full feeling. Could you speak about that a little bit?

00:30:58 Gordon
Yes, most things you can see much easier in two year olds and three-year olds. They really do hold the keys to making sense, and for a developmentalist this way. I think it’s very difficult. Most theories and even today’s theories of therapy start with adults and then try to push them down to children. And when you look at young children and right now with Odessa, she had a couple of traumas lately. They, weren’t big traumas, but there were little traumas. She fell down the stairs and then she added another trauma, regarding her mother had to go on a business trip and these were traumas. Now when you watch what happens with her now, fortunately, she has  a whole retinue she brings with her wherever we go, there are at least four or five hand puppets. She also asked for the hand, and when you do the hand, you’re just one step removed and she has a hand and talks. So she has all kinds of indirect ways of doing this, because they never deal with things directly, and all her emotional work is done through her stuffies and play. 

But she begins to replay things. Her stuffies begin to cry, they begin to talk, she begins to replay things. And when you think of the word replay and you think of the word where you’re ready and where it’s safe. If therapy was, in its ideal of what it would be, it would obey the properties of play. It’s safe for all feelings to be there. It’s not for real. It is not work, it’s not outcome based. It’s ultimately engaging. And these are the properties. There is a beginning and an end, and replay is the essence of that. This happens all the time with little traumas, with big traumas, and I’ve seen this happen as a therapist. If I’m patient, I provide a safe place. There is a context for this, even with hardened criminals that I started working with this, if I could find the way of providing that place and provide play, like when you look at the what is happening with in prisons… what is therapeutic? Bringing in Shakespeare, bringing in play, forming a choir, all of these natural ways. What is about that? That’s play, That’s emotional playgrounds. That’s where our emotions play, where we feel them with hardened delinquents it’s where they find their sadness for the first time, and they’ve been dry-eyed for 20 years. It’s hardened, ones that have not had this. So you look everywhere, but it’s absolutely transparent with Odessa at 28 months of age, it’s all there. Now you think I am a seasoned therapist. I’m considered a parenting expert. What do I do? Very little. I just make a safe space for it to happen. That does the work. Am I a play therapist? No, as a play therapist you think still, has the idea that you have to know what’s going on. Now I’m thrilled because I can see what’s going on, but I wouldn’t have to know it for it to work. It works anyway. It’s spontaneous, play is the therapist. It doesn’t need anybody else, only someone to give it space. And so you see the unfolding and that’s my big question with trauma to understand what is traumatic, I think IS is fairly easy when you look through the lens of attachment. Togetherness is our greatest drive. The threats to togetherness are the greatest threat. That is the essence of trauma, but it gets convoluted when togetherness is the threat rather than the answer. And that is the issue of the kind of trauma that gets stuck, because togetherness becomes the enemy. You know, that’s where my mother experienced it, as the victim of incest, family incest. And so that to me, yes, there’s a message of, oh, my goodness, let’s save our children from this. Let’s save them from facing the threats to togetherness. And let’s make sure that togetherness is not the threat. But the question that’s always fascinated me is spontaneous recovery. Why do some children get better spontaneously, and others do not? And the answer to that is basically that they’ve experienced the therapy of play. And whether we know it or not, it’s spontaneous. But nature always yearns for full potential, for us to get better. Healing is part of us being human. It just requires conditions that are conducive, not a whole lot of knowledge, reading a whole lot of books. And so what is true of the 28 month old of Odessa is true of the 93 year old. That’s the beauty of it.

00:35:52 Rosemary
Now I heard you talk, and this is related, I think, about children having lost their sadness. Can you speak a little bit about what causes children to lose their sadness?

00:36:03 Gordon
We’re not of a feeling-friendly society. We’ve been throwing feelings under the bus for centuries, and almost all our pills inhibit feelings and so on. But nature itself sacrifices feelings. Our brain sacrifices feelings. Feelings are the last kind of evolutionary advance that we have as humans, thumbs and feelings, right? And so feelings are the last evolutionary advance. They’re a luxury that cannot be afforded when our brain is under duress. So when our brain is stressed, when it’s having a problem finding the togetherness it needs, and rests in the togetherness it requires, because it’s an organ that serves attachment, feelings are sacrificed. Now, that’s not a bad thing. Feelings are sacrificed routinely during the day. You don’t feel your bladder pressure, you don’t feel your sickness, your tiredness. Feelings are sacrificed until you get to a safe place. That safe place would be either in a relationship where you feel cared for, or in an emotional playground. 

When society provides those, when culture provides those things, then your feelings return. Ideally, they should return at the end of the day. That’s how they should ideally do, maybe at the most the end of the week. We live in a society that not only knows when their feelings disappear, because when they don’t feel, they don’t complain as much, they don’t suffer as much, they’re not in pain. So we’ve been mistakenly confusing well-being with the lack of feeling, the absolute opposite. 

So these feelings need to recover. So the brain routinely sacrifices, when under distress, but is counting on a culture that provides the conditions for feelings to return. And so there must be an end of the day. When that doesn’t happen, when there is no place for it and there’s many things that threaten it, in today’s world, children, adults are incredible trouble. So that that is the core issue on what happens spontaneously again for a 2 year old or three-year old, 2 year old or three-year old doesn’t talk about feelings, very rarely. Odessa can say I’m frustrated sometimes and says I’m mad and I love mommy and she shows her excitement. If you ask her what she feels, she never responds, then most clients would not either. The thing is that it’s all one step removed. Her stuffies, her babies, all of these feel, and that’s how it is, and that is how it is for a long time. And that’s why in therapy, you always have to come from the one step removed to be able to make it safe for these feelings to be there, and play, Shakespeare, music, all of these things, all one step removed are critical.

00:39:02 Rosemary
Yeah, thank you for explaining that so clearly. The picture I had in my mind is someone walking across a road. You’ve looked both ways. It’s clear. All of a sudden a pickup truck come speeding at you out of nowhere. You don’t stop to think how you’re feeling. You get a shot of adrenaline. You get out of the way.

00:39:18 Gordon
Exactly.

00:39:19 Rosemary
Should be constantly living in a state where you’re in that fight or flight or shut down…

00:39:26 Gordon
Yes, yes. Now in a 2 year old, that trauma that would have happened. Now, that was scary. That trauma that will happen will usually not show up for a couple of days and then begin to show up in a safe place and in play. If they’re behind screens, it’s not going to show up. If they don’t have that safe place that is held, if they’re facing more threats to togetherness, it’s not going to show up. And so you have very little things that can trip him into a place where they lose their feelings. And that’s the bottom line. 

The bottom line is if we lose our feelings routinely, for many good reasons, and for lots of bad reasons. The issue in life is we don’t always get our feelings back. That’s the issue in post traumatic stress disorder. The feelings didn’t come back. And that’s what differentiates a healthy 2 year old… And you say what interferes with the sadness, well that’s a very vulnerable feeling, before your can feel sad, you’ll have to feel the whole in togetherness, Before Odessa can have her tears about missing her mother, she has to be able to say I missed mommy. Missing is the ’hole’ in togetherness. If there’s a Canary feeling, it is missing. And this is ironic because missing goes missing. So now we’re sounding like alchemists, right? Missing goes missing. So that’s very ironic and nobody misses missing, and so nobody notices it. And so we have all of this, is that missing goes missing. But we have to feel the ‘hole’ in our togetherness before we can ever feel full. If the child cannot say I miss, they’ll never be satiated. If they’re satiated, they’ll become addicted to things that almost always work. And if they don’t feel the hole in their togetherness, they won’t feel the shape of the hole and that there’s nothing that could fill the hole, except that the one they miss. And that’s where sadness comes in. And so underneath, sadness is missing. And when you look at it from a kid’s point of view, from a three-year old, it becomes so obvious. So I work with disturbed young preschoolers, disturbed young adults, delinquent kids, it’s all the same. It’s all the same, all of our cues are in the second and third year of life. They’re all there. 

00:41:52 Rosemary
Yeah. Beautifully said. Thank you. Now, given what we’ve just talked about, people being shut down, not feeling their feelings, when you consider the current global polarization and other shifts that are emerging from world events, including the new US administration, how can parents best support their plugged in kids during these turbulent times? They’re dysregulating many adults. So say you’ve got teenagers and they’re looking at the news. They’re looking at all of this online misinformation? How can we help them navigate that?

00:42:26 Gordon
Again, you look at this polarization, you look at the world leaders and you’re looking, where are the tears? They’re losing their humanity. Clearly losing the vertical relationships of being taken care of by those that are meant to take care of them, or their ancestors. So they’re no longer taking care of their own children, They’ve fallen out of cascading care. And that they never speak about missing and feel the sadness and melancholy comes, they fill it with materialism, with all kinds of things, with acquisition, with this, with that, always making things better. That’s not what makes us better. What makes us better is to have that sadness about the things that we’re up against in our world. So what do we give them? We can say that no, screens aren’t good for you, but this is a symptom. It isn’t this we can try to make them aware of when we have preschooler bullies that are ruling us. That again is the ultimate answer. The ultimate answer has always been relationship where you can find rest in, that is cascading care and right from the ancient Greeks and the Aboriginals, its emotional playgrounds. It’s where emotions can… That’s the way nature takes care of emotions. It’s always take care of emotions. That’s where they’re safe to be expressed and safe to feel. It’s always been there. We’ve lost our way. Now, therapy can be an approximation to it, but it only is that way if it is done in the context of relationship, and you can give it those properties that true play has always had. And so those are our answers.

I was asked to… the Russian Ukraine War broke out the day I was supposed to have a professional development with Ukrainian teachers. I offered to cancel right there, and so on. They said well we need to hear this more than ever. Everything has changed in our world, and we no longer have the luxury of being able to educate our children about the world, but we’ve got to take care of their hearts. How do we do this?

I said, there’s two things you need to know about, It’s to preserve their relationships that they need to be able to find that place, and to introduce them to emotional playgrounds. And then I was asked again in terms of… By a program in Neufeld institute program with Ukrainian mothers who had fled across the border, and they were there traumatized mothers with their traumatized kids. What are the answers? The answers are the same. What are the answers and therapy? The answers are the same. And again, it becomes so important, so absolutely obvious. When does Odessa find rest? When is she in emotional health? You know, when she is an emotional health because she’s so playful. Oh my goodness, she’s playful. You begin to see this, the first indication. And when she’s at rest and takes her attachments for granted. This is what every child deserves. This is what every adult deserves. But it’s hard in adulthood to find that place. And sometimes we have to start with the giving, before we get to have the receiving. And it’s not the receiving. And that’s the tragedy is OK, if we haven’t received, we can still give. And if we are the answer to someone else in this, that will stretch us and transform us. As well.

00:45:46 Rosemary
Yeah, Thank you. And it all ties up beautifully with attachment, which you are a renowned expert on, how we attach as infants and young children, preschoolers. It’s so related to how we show up as adults.

00:46:05 Gordon
Yes. Attachment joins it to the theory, to the science, because you have to have a word through which you study. But it doesn’t join us to our intuition. We then have to change the language to more the language of caring, the language of love, the drive for togetherness, the construct of relationship. This joins us to our intuition. So we have to be very careful as experts that we don’t take the language of science, and make it seem like it’s different, than what it is. That they know that love does make the world go round. It always has made the world go round. It’s interesting that when Dr. Bowlby was trying to find a word for this, what are we going to name this? He wanted to name it the Bulby effect and it was in an argument with his wife who said no, John, you’re talking about love. And so it’s interesting that at the very roots of a classic attachment theory, which we think of it as the name, was this argument. What are we talking about here? What are we talking about? We’re talking about. I prefer the term the drive for togetherness. Because it’s something that we intuitively understand.

00:47:12 Rosemary
It’s much easier to understand than the whole attachment theory.

00:47:15 Gordon
Yes, it is.

00:47:16 Rosemary
The way that you described it. So thank you. I realize we’re coming towards the end of our time together. I watched your recent relationship matters presentation and you conclude by sharing 2 keys to raising children which are right relationships and soft hearts. I think you’ve said a lot about that. Is there anything you’d like to add?

00:47:36 Gordon
Well, the more years I put on. The more I’ve observed, the more I become convinced of this, is that it really has to do with soft hearts and right relationships. And by right relationships I mean embedded in cascading care. Where we give and where we stretch to become the answer to someone else, in the relational needs that they have. We’re meant to be depended upon this way, we’ve been throwing dependence under the bus with the construct of independence. We always have relational needs to the day we die. We can’t, we can’t meet them ourselves. These are met in relationship, and so yes, right relationship and soft hearts. I would just underscore, exclamation point, exclamation point. Yes, More true than ever

00:48:26 Rosemary
Very good. Thank you. Now my final question is really… if you could roll a pearl of wisdom out in front of all of the parents listening, some wisdom related to their ability to raise engaged, resilient, kind children? What’s the most important thing for them to know to be or do?

00:48:49 Gordon
That’s a good question, and I think the bottom line is something that always has been true. It really is stepping up. To be another’s answer. This is what makes marriage work to do this. We’ve lost our confidence. And we’ve handed our children over to experts when we are their best bet. And we don’t have to know what to do to know that they need to know they matter. They need to see the invitation to exist in our presence in our eyes and our demeanour. They need to know that relationship comes first and nothing will come in between. They need to know that we’ll hold on to them. We’ll hold on to them. And so I go to the title of the book, right? Hold on to your kids.

00:49:40 Rosemary

What a beautiful way to wrap up. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. I have all kinds of resources that you have created that I will be linking in the show notes. And so I encourage everybody who enjoyed this episode to scroll down on the show page, look into those resources. Definitely buy a copy of Hold On to Your Kids. I have it on Audible and Kindle and I’ve enjoyed very much digging into it. And now I can’t wait to get into those other books. That you’ve endorsed on your site. So thank you so much for being with us today.

00:50:12 Gordon
Oh my pleasure. Thanks again.

00:50:17 Rosemary
If you’ve been listening to our podcast and are curious about the transformative power of Compassionate Inquiry, you are invited to join us on Saturday, February 22nd for a six hour online experiential introduction to the Compassionate Inquiry approach and community. Whether you’re a healthcare professional, therapist, coach, or simply someone seeking trauma informed personal healing or professional growth, the CI Experience event invites you to witness live demonstrations, learn practical techniques, participate in reflective conversations, and connect with a supportive community of like minded individuals all in a single immersive day. This event will be recorded and as a participant. Will have lifetime access to the event recording and so much more. The CI experience takes place on February 22nd. To learn more and register, just follow the link in the show notes. 

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. 

Listen on Apple, Spotify, all podcast platforms. Rate, review and share it with your clients, colleagues and family. Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode. 

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

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Gordon & Rosemary – RAW File Transcript – Video Version

00:00:16 Rosemary
I’m Rosemary Davies Janes, and this is the Gifts of Trauma podcast. And today, I would like to welcome our esteemed guest, Doctor Gordon Neufeld. Welcome, Gordon to the show.

00:00:30 Gordon
Thank you. My pleasure to be here indeed.

00:00:32 Rosemary
Now you’re an authority on children, stress, trauma, and resilience, and your work as a clinical psychologist with children, youth, and those responsible for them spans over 5 decades. Um, I’d like to introduce you formally with a comment that Gabor made in a podcast you were both guests on last year. And I’ll, I’ll read this quote. He said I move in a psychological and therapeutic world. And I can tell you without bias that Gordon’s understanding of child development is just deeper than anyone else on the planet. And I highly recommend his work. I’ll just finish by saying that my own work has been so deeply informed by Gordon’s that I can’t even imagine it without it. So this has been, at least for me, an essential partnership, so.

00:01:21 Gordon
Well, Gabor is being very complimentary and, and, and as as you can imagine, he was one of my best students ever.

00:01:31 Rosemary
Yeah, I can well imagine that. Now, is it accurate to say that you’re retired from your work as a psychologist?

00:01:41 Gordon
While I’ve retired from university teaching, I’ve retired from doing therapy in the trenches, so to speak, although I certainly mentor therapist. So I’m, I’m busier than ever and I, I’ve, I’ve just retired from some of the things that were, that were quite preoccupying. And I have the privilege now of also being directly involved in the care of my 7th granddaughter. She’s just two years of age now. So two days a week. This gives a wonderful opportunity to see all of these dynamics in, in operation. It certainly keeps me young.

00:02:28 Rosemary
Absolutely, and it may inform your 5th edition of the of  Hold on to your kids, your best selling book.

00:02:35 Gordon
Yes, I’m filled with stories now every time I speak. That is true. I have all kinds of new illustrations and refreshed insights, that’s for sure.

00:02:46 Rosemary
Wonderful. Well, on the gifts of trauma, we’re really interested in hearing stories. We’re also interested in your wisdom and your teachings. So anytime you feel the urge to share a story, please do so. And you are still working very actively as an international speaker. As I did my research for this podcast, I saw you on multiple podcasts. So you’re still out there very actively supporting. Hold on to your kids.

00:03:11 Gordon
Yes, speaking and basically directing the Neufeld Institute, which has over 40 courses that I’ve created for parents, teachers, professionals in reaching out into about a dozen languages. And so it’s a full time job as well.

00:03:35 Rosemary
Yeah. And if I may, I was all over your website, the Neufeld Institute, and I was impressed by the breadth of free resources that you offer and also the breadth of very reasonably priced training courses. As you said, they’re for parents, they’re for professionals and I will be linking it in the show notes. It’s an amazing resource for anybody listening who has ever been a parent, who has ever been a child. So I think that encompasses everyone.

00:04:11 Gordon
Well, our mission is to get the message of relation, relationship and well-being out. And so we try to make it as accessible as possible. It’s a nonprofit charity that I decided to organize because, because I had retired from making a living, so to speak, uh, and so it could devote myself to those things that I believed were very, very important for those involved with children in any way to be able to hear.

00:04:43 Rosemary
Beautiful. I love to hear that. So if it’s alright with you, I’d like to start this conversation in a personal way. As you said, your life’s work has been to help adults provide the conditions for children to flourish. And as you mentioned, you’re the grandfather 7. You also have five children who are all helping produce those seven grandchildren. What led you into this line of work?

00:05:10 Gordon
I landed almost by accident into it.  I was headed for natural science, chemistry, physics, those things very much thinking I’d take up the same profession as Gabor did as an MD. And then I’ve realized what I really, really wanted to do and always had wanted to do is to make sense of things. And the ultimate is to make sense of ourselves. I didn’t know at that time that the secret was to make sense of a 2 or 3-year old. I had no idea, but I knew enough that I was on my way to get a PhD in developmental psychology, in clinical psychology. And along the way I had my first two daughters and I realized that I did not get what was going on. And that really was the beginning. It was that challenge that I knew that my interaction with them must not be governed by prescriptions, reading books. The dance must evolve from deep within me and that meant that I needed to make sense of them from inside out. And so that was my journey ever since, my quest ever since, to make a sense of children from inside out. It’s an insight based approach in that, in that when you’re trying to think of the right thing to do, you actually aren’t using your eyes to be able to understand your child from inside out. And so it’s paradoxical, It’s ironical, deeply ironical that… we’ve never had more books. We’ve never had more people telling us what to do and we’ve never been so dumbed down. 

And the other thing that I realized, and it struck me as I was trained as a behaviorist, which was, and, then with my children, I realized that you must never put conduct before, before well-being. You must never put conduct before relationship. But it struck me that the context for raising children was invisible, relationship was something that was invisible and it was bottom up. And so with these understandings that, hence the title of the book, hold onto your kids, like something there that if you, go out, want to have influence with them, you need to be able to cultivate this relationship. So it started a wonderful journey of being able to understand a relational base, a drive for togetherness, but in the context of the ultimate developmental approach. And the main idea there, I was a developmentalist, is that the unfolding of human potential is absolutely spontaneous if conditions are conducive. And so the challenge for us is not to pull and push at the maturity of our children, not to react against the results of immaturity or things that have gone wrong. It was to provide these conditions so that nature could have its way with our children. So those things informed the dance, the interaction from inside out. And then I realized as I began to understand more and more and began to put the pieces of developmental science together and attachment science together and neuroscience together, that I wanted to share what I saw with others.

00:09:01 Rosemary
Yeah, well, I and many millions are very glad that you did. Now, was it your studies that made you sort of get out of your head and look at what was going on? Was it something to do with how you yourself were raised? It’s unusual, most people revert to raising their kids the way they were raised. Can you credit anything specifically for having you stop and look and say, hang on, I’m doing this wrong?

00:09:35 Gordon
I don’t think so.  I was very fortunate. I didn’t know how fortunate I was as a child to have been raised in a shame free environment. I had no idea until I was a therapist that this was not the norm. My own parents had been shamed incredibly and my mother was an incest victim in her family up until nine years of age. That was huge, crippling, but they were the prime example of what I learned. I was the first born and and in putting, they knew enough that they didn’t have to have the right answers. They had to be my answer. my invitation to exist in their presence, to love, to belonging, to all of these things. And I think that sowed the seeds in me in which I realized that in my own practice. I was trying to help adults get better and I realized that there was this huge impediment because we’re not meant to focus on ourselves that way. I actually had a 2 year wait list and I went away to Provence, you know, over 25, 26 years ago now to completely rethink things. And I realized that, all of the true transformation that I had seen and the growth that I experienced, whether it’s in me, wouldn’t transform me, was when I yearned to be the answer to what another human being needed. It was that yearning, not knowledge, not books, not PHD’s. It was that yearning to be that answer that grew me up and that healed, healed others. 

And so it was getting back into this arrangement of cascading care. Whereas we yearn to be the answer, not to have the answers, to be the answer for another’s relational needs, for love, belonging, for sameness, for invitation to exist, to be seen from inside out as we learn to do something, then then we stretch, we have our tears, we have the processes. So from that point on, I stopped treating adults. They would come and I would say no, even as an individual. In our sessions, we will focus on somebody you deeply care about, preferably a child, and I will hopefully help you keep your eyes on that child to make sense of them or your spouse and become the answer, you know, step up to be the answer, and you will find that something absolutely transformative happens within you. That was huge for me, a huge turning point, pivotal point, 26 years ago. Taking a year off to think, ah, something’s amiss here, something’s awry. I’ve got to do this a bit differently, and so it was. And so when I talk about thriving children, often I entitle my presentations “becoming the answer your children need” because that is the issue. But the focus is on the children, not on how messed up I am, not on how crippled I’ve been. And, I think my parents were a prime example of that. And I was very fortunate in that because I did not inherit, in the sense what you would think you would have, from individuals. People are very crippled by the circumstances in their own life and in their time.

00:13:36 Rosemary
Thank you for sharing that. It’s interesting. It seems that you talk a lot about the impact of the digital age on children. But 20 years ago, on a different podcast, I interviewed the late Doctor Paul Pearsall, author of The Heart’s Code. We were talking about, at that time, his newest book, which was titled The Last Self Help Book You’ll Ever Need: Repress your anger, think negatively, be a good blamer and throttle your inner child. Of course, it was very, very tongue in cheek. And one of the main themes of our conversation was his frustration with what he called the gurutocracy. Now, you know, in the 20 years since that conversation, we’ve had an explosion of coaches and self help books. The Internet is full of advice and I love what you said. You really shifted the paradigm. But do you think this abundance of information is keeping parents more in their heads and seeking outward input from experts, when they really just need to tune into their hearts, as you said.

00:14:58 Gordon
Oh my goodness. And sometimes the irony is so strong, as you see parents Googling something. What am I supposed to do? And that creates the actual separation and the child is disoriented trying to figure out what is wrong. And, the more we look for the right thing to do, the less we do the right thing, the more we think the answer is in what we do, the less we realize the answer is in who we are to our children. And so there’s something there that whether it was apparent 5000 years ago in the middle of a hunter gatherer tribe, where the same people were the same humans and the same things will have been true 10,000 years ago as they will be 10,000 years hence. And that is not, not from here. It is when children, regardless of their parents, education, history and so on, experience and I’ve isolated it to four experiences. When children experience the conditions that are conducive to the spontaneous unfolding of potential, flourishing happens, they become who they were meant to be. And when we’re part of it, we become who we were meant to be as well.

00:16:21 Rosemary
Well, I’m curious, Gabor has spoken often about Indigenous people and how their parenting style is perhaps the healthiest he’s ever seen. And I’m wondering if those criteria you just mentioned fit into the Indigenous way of raising their children.

00:16:41 Gordon
Yes, absolutely, but it’s encoded in ritual and in culture and that’s where it’s meant to be because we’re not meant to be so self-conscious about these things. You don’t say to a child, “well really it would work a lot better for you and I if you gave me your heart.” You can’t say that. You can’t say to a child. What you really need to have now is some sadness about the things that did not work. You’re kind of stuck. You’re stuck in ‘mad.’ You need to feel your sadness… it doesn’t work. Yes, Gabor can quote me and he does and says that Neufeld says that we will only be saved through a sea of tears. Yes, I do say that and sadness plays a huge part. But you can’t say that to anybody directly. You can’t even say that to a client directly because our suffering is in our feelings and so it has to be hidden back in culture and in ritual. So yes. 

But even to use the word parenting for indigenous is wrong because parenting is a word invented by the colonized people. It wasn’t there in any way. Grandparents carry the weight in almost all indigenous cultures. They carry the weight because they move slower. They have less to do and their culture allows them to be able to find the dignity that is required in true eldership to be able to be the answer to someone else. Our culture throws the grandparents under the bus and wants them to contribute to the gross national domestic product or whatever it is. So the indigenous, you wouldn’t think of parenting as an indigenous thing, you would think it is really providing those children. But did they know that? No, what they had the benefit of is a culture that evolves slowly In sync with nature, about 10,000 years or more, evolving In sync with nature so that nature and culture dance beautifully together. Whereas our major cultures, that most of us are speaking from are pariah cultures that venerated society, big buildings, materialism and so on. You can’t get good parenting, you know, those things out of it. You know, we do have to become conscious of it. That’s why I speak about it. But there is something there’s a downside to it, just like is in the first story we have in the judeo-christian tradition. There’s a downside to becoming conscious of some things is that you become self-conscious, you know, and so on. So yes, we need to do this and hence my courses. But but that’s not We weren’t meant to be that self-conscious about these things.

00:19:43 Rosemary
And it would be wonderful of the global culture could take on some of the more indigenous practices and and see the elders, more of the elders as wisdom keepers as they do. Because that is, That is the role, that is.

00:19:57 Gordon
Definitely the full circle. We need, we need to do and, and before in Canada we had our reconciliation movement where I, still white, male elder, could work with indigenous groups and did a lot of that. In in this the not the heads that would nod, it was more affirming. They would always say to me, this is the way it used to be. This is how it used to be. This is how we raised our children. Now we’re fortunate enough to have three Indigenous faculty in the new Felt Institute because now it’s it really appropriately so. I I’m not the the the the I’m I’m not the right colour to be carrying the message.

00:20:51 Rosemary
Understood.. Well, many of the things we’ve touched on in this short time already, you’re clearly very aligned. You and Gabby’s perspectives are very clearly aligned. And I’m wondering, how did you meet Gavilar? How did your paths cross?

00:21:05 Gordon
Well, I met Gabor. I think his wife, as I remember it, first of all came to some courses I was teaching at University of British Columbia. I knew of Gabor  because he was three years ahead of me in university and he was the editor of the university newspaper and he was a radical leftist at that time, you know, quite, quite pro Palestinian already, which caused a stir because, you know, he’s Jewish in a very tight Jewish community in Vancouver, being pro Palestinians. So I do, I knew he had a lot of courage this way. So I knew of him. I didn’t know of him, but he showed up in my parenting classes because his wife dragged him along and it was just like his eyes just opened up, and that he was finding what he was looking for. And so he’s a writer, obviously, and he was starting to write up some of the stuff and I was very mad at him, as you can imagine, because they were my ideas and he did credit them. But I avoided writing like the plague. That’s why I took science to avoid writing. And of course he was a natural writer. So our wives got us together and said, come on you guys be friends. You need each other. You know, Neufeld’s developed this attachment based developmental approach, but he’s a slow writer. So that’s why we became very good friends after that, but initially, he was a student of mine who was writing my stuff up..

00:22:57 Rosemary
Yeah. And then you ended up collaborating on hold on to your kids. He worked with this writing of that. How was that?

00:23:04 Gordon
Was that well, that’s exactly it. I wrote the manuscript. The manuscript was at least twice as long as the book. And then his job was, it would make sense to him and then he would use his… You know, I always joked with him that in my crayon box only had 12 colored crayons but he had the big 64 crayon colour box, you know, so my job was with my 12 crayons, to make sense of him and then he would take it from there, which was a beautiful relationship and I wish that writing relationship could have gone on. But he had so much of his own, he wanted to get out there.

00:23:40 Rosemary
Yeah, I totally understand. And I wanted to talk you… you’ve written one book to his multiples, but all of the various editions of the book,  it’s been reissued three times now. Yes. I wonder if you could speak to what inspired those revisions and the nature of what changed in the book through those.

00:24:04 Gordon
The first revision is not one that I supported or Gabber really supported it. It was a shift from the the Canadian edition to the American edition to become a standard. And it went down two or three reading levels because they wanted to make it more accessible to those that did that did not love language. And so it it really decimated Gabbers beautiful writing and neither of us were happy about it. But New York was the gateway to the rest of the world. The book, excuse me, the book from there went into 35 languages or more than 35 languages. Now the second edition was necessitated by the fact that the the first writing that the book was published in 2004 and that was before Facebook, which was 2005. And so the second edition was necessitated by being able to link what was happening in our world, our preoccupation with digital screens and those and, and evolving into social media, the information age, evolving into social media. And so two more chapters were added there. And then that set the stage like he couldn’t really understand social media with understanding that peers had become to replace adults in their lives, which is what the book was about. So it was beautifully positioned to be able to explain the digital revolution, which in turn an understanding that could understand the the free fall in well-being that was happening with youth all the way around became noticeable during the pandemic. It was happening before the pandemic, but actually parallels appear orientation of which the the preoccupation with social media is just simply a symptom, not the cause. The underlying cause is peer orientation. So hence the three the, the revisions, the two revisions. It’s it’s since been released in hardback again in hardcover in both the States and and in Canada. I’m not sure if in other places, but unfortunately that hardcover does no, is not the original hardcover. If anybody wants to get that, it’s, you have to go on use books on the Internet. And if you love gabbers writing, you can just immerse yourself into that with all the beauty of the of the of the language.

00:26:45 Rosemary
Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much. Now it’s a natural segue that you’ve just set up, you know, talking about Gabor writing about the what he’s experiencing in your, in your parenting classes. Your work has no doubt inspired and influenced numerous books and you’ve endorsed 3 that are listed on your website by writing forwards. And I wonder if we can just look at those for a minute. The first one is reclaiming our students, why children are more anxious, aggressive and shut down than ever and what we can do about it. And your daughter is a co-author on that. There’s there’s rest, play, grow, making sense of preschoolers or anyone who acts like one love that title and also nourished connection, food and caring for our kids and everyone else We’d love by Deborah McNamara. So is there anything you’d like to say about any of these books, or maybe other books you’re aware of that your work has inspired?

00:27:42 Gordon
These books the, the, the preciousness of of these books is, is that is that I got to have them as students for a number of years. So they were interns of mine, including my daughter, who said that, you know, that can I study with you and you know, can you, can you supervise me, mentor me as a therapist and so on and so on. And so can I do this? And also taking all of the basic courses that I created. And then my daughter Tamara became to be the, the Dean of the Neufeld Institute, like basically creating this. So the and, and, and, and Doctor McNamara Deborah’s book is, is she moved from academia simply because this material changed her life. And so again, she, she’s one of my senior faculty. She interned with me. She actually moved from academia because of, of this material to teach it. And the, and her book on making sense of preschoolers or anyone who acts like 1 is, is really the preschooler force that that I created that is written up. And, and it’s wonderful because as she was able to use pictures, whereas my publisher, you know, I’m a picture guy, right? I wanted slides, I wanted illustrations and I plane to Random House, largest English publisher of the world royally. When I said come on, I need to put my pictures in there that I use this adage, you know a picture is worth 1000 words. They responded and said precisely. That’s why we want you to use the words instead of pictures. Where in the word business so.

00:29:29 Rosemary
As you would expect from a publisher, Yes.

00:29:33 Gordon
Yes, as you would expect, So many of the diagrams were able to find their way into Doctor McNamara’s book. And of course, in her book Nurtured, she actually puts, brings back together feeding and and attachment. And it’s an incredible signature book. I, I think it will become classic and iconic in in that sense, because as science is great at teasing things apart like relationship and sex, and it does it because to study it, but it forgets to put them back together again. And, and, and this is what happened with food and relationship is that it came apart. We started teaching children about food. They developed eating disorders. We realize our mistakes and had to back off of that because it’s only meant to be in the context of relationship that we do. It’s meant to be a way of taking care of each other and it’s symbolic. So it’s, it’s, it’s a wonderful work that really took it, you know, something right to the core that relationship is a context in which we do life. Relationship is a context in which we we give care. Relationship as a context in which we receive care and nothing would be more important than to bring all of that to food. I thought she was going to be able to do this in three chapters. It was it was a far cry from that. It was a big project, but what a project and it’s amazing I that work is it is really a seminal work.

00:31:23 Rosemary
Yeah, I can’t wait to check those out. I have not dipped into them yet, but we had a a therapist on our podcast a few months ago ran at Wang Gates. And that’s one of the things she does in her practice. She brings her clients in and she feeds them. She says, you know, some of these people are very wealthy and they’re starving. She feeds them. She puts soft materials around her, her therapeutic rooms. She she gives them all comforts that for some reason when we become adults, we don’t do for ourselves, but we might very well do for our kids. So that’s.

00:31:56 Gordon
Yes, yes. And my daughter’s book, me my daughter’s book brings the construct of, of emotional playgrounds to the school to restore the idea of the role of play in the unfolding recovery prevention and how schools can bring that knowledge in without anybody really knowing what is happening in, you know, to bring it back in to do this. So that’s, that’s her, that’s really her, her passion has been to to bring that awareness into the educational system. That’s.

00:32:38 Rosemary
Amazing. I’m curious and you may not be able to answer this, but Doctor McNamara, you said your work changed her life. Is it possible for you to share what she shared with you? How did her life transform as a result of your work?

00:32:56 Gordon
Well, her kids were just, infants and toddlers and preschoolers, right? And she has quite a mind and just the same was trying to figure these things out, and how in the world, what is it that you do? And so it just basically provided her own marching orders for parenting, her own context. But again, it wasn’t prescriptive. It was providing her a way of seeing her children from which a natural dance evolves. I think this is what people find transformative. Initially, I had no ‘how to’ chapters in the book. I had none. I didn’t want them. I wanted people to just simply look at their children differently and be able to see them differently and just be patient as a different dance evolved. But you know how publishers are. They said you’ve got to put ‘how to’ material in there. Myself, I had to oblige in that sense, or maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did. I did oblige. And if you want to figure out the difference in the voice, the how to stuff was mainly my voice because I did that later on to be able to satisfy the publisher.

00:34:26 Rosemary
Fair enough, fair enough. Now you were mentioning your daughter’s book and play. You wrote an article that’s titled Adding the Wisdom of Play to the Wisdom of Trauma, and I, I really love what you suggested, that we can play our way back to full feeling. Could you speak about that a little bit?

00:34:47 Gordon
Yes, well, most things you can see much easier in, in, in 2 year olds and three-year olds. They really do hold a keys to to making sense. And this is I’m a thorough developmentalist this way. I think it’s very difficult. Most theories and even today’s theories of therapy start with adults and then try to push them down to children. And when you look at young children and right now with Odessa, she had a couple of traumas lately. There were they weren’t big traumas, but there they were there were little trauma. She fell down the stairs and in her and and she had another trauma regarding her mother had to go on a business trip and in so these were traumas. Now it when you, when you watch what happens with her. Now, fortunately she has a, a whole retinue she brings with her wherever we go, there are at least four or five finger or hand puppets. She also ask for the hand and when you do the hand, you’re just one step removed and she has a hand and talks. So she has all kinds of indirect ways of doing this because they they never deal with things directly and all her emotional work is done through her stuffies and play. But she begins to replay things. Her stuffies begin to cry, they begin to talk, she begins to replay things. And when you think of the word replay and you think of the word where you’re ready and where it’s safe. Like if therapy was in its ideal of what it would be, it would obey the properties of play. You’re it’s, it’s safe for all feelings to be there. It’s not for real, it is not work, it’s not outcome based. It’s ultimately engaging. And these are the properties. There is a beginning and an end and replay is the essence of that. This happens all the time with little traumas, with big traumas. And I’ve seen this happen as a therapist. If I’m patient, I provide a safe place. There is a context for this, even with hardened criminals that I started working with this, if I could find the way of providing that place and provide play. Like when you look at what is happening with imprisons, you know what is therapeutic? Bringing in Shakespeare’s, bringing in plays, forming a choir, all of these natural ways. What what is about that? That’s play. That’s the emotional playgrounds. That’s where our emotions play, where we feel them with hardened delinquents, it’s where they find their sadness for the first time and they’ve been dried eyed for 20-30, you know, or for 20 years in hardens, ones that have not had this. So you look everywhere, but it’s absolutely transparent with Odessa at at 28 months of age. I it’s it’s all there now you think I am a seasoned therapist. I considered a parenting expert. What do I do? Very little. I just make a safe space for it to happen. Yeah. It it it does the work well. Am I a play therapist? No play therapist, you think, still has the idea that you have to know what’s going on. Now I’m thrilled because I can see what’s going on, but I wouldn’t have to know it for it to work. It works anyway. Yeah, it’s spontaneous. Play is the therapist. It doesn’t need anybody else to be, only someone to give it space. And so you see the unfolding. And that’s my big question with trauma. Oh, wasn’t it to understand what is traumatic. I think is is fairly easy when you look through the lens of attachment, what togetherness is our greatest drive. So the threats to togetherness are the greatest threat. That is the essence of trauma, but it gets convoluted when togetherness is the threat rather than the answer. And that is the issue of the kind of trauma that gets stuck because togetherness becomes the enemy. You know, that’s where my mother experienced it in the, in the victim of incest and family incest. And so that is, that is, that is so that to me, yes, there’s a message of, Oh my goodness, let’s save our children from this. Let’s save them from facing the threats to togetherness. And let’s make sure that togetherness is not the threat. But the question that’s always fascinated me is, is spontaneous recovery. Why do some children get better spontaneously and others do not? And the answer to that is, is, is basically that they’ve experienced the therapy of play. And whether you we know it or not, it’s spontaneous. But nature always yearns. For full potential for us to get better. Healing is part of us being human. It just requires conditions that are conducive. Not a whole knowledge, not a not a whole lot of knowledge, not reading a whole lot of books. And and So what is true of the 28 month old of Odessa is true of the 93 year old, and that’s the beauty of it.

00:40:25 Rosemary
Now I I heard you talk and this is related, I think, about children having lost their sadness. Can you speak a little bit about what causes children to lose their sadness?

00:40:37 Gordon
Well it but we’re not a feeling friendly society. We’ve been throwing feelings under the bus for centuries, and almost all her pills inhibit feelings and so on. But nature itself sacrifices feelings. It it sacrifice our brains sacrifices feelings. Feelings are the last kind of of evolutionary advance that we have as humans. You know, thumbs and feelings, right? They. And so feelings are the last evolutionary advance. They’re a luxury that cannot be afforded when our brain is under duress. So when our brain is stressed, when it’s having a problem finding the togetherness it needs and rests in the togetherness it requires, when because it’s an organ that serves attachment, feelings are sacrificed. Now that’s not a bad thing. Feelings are sacrificed routinely. You know, during the day, you don’t feel your bladder pressure, you don’t feel your sickness, your tiredness. Feelings are sacrificed until you you get to a safe place. That safe place would be either in a relationship where you feel cared for or in in an emotional playground. When society provides those, culture provides those. I’ve been not. Society said in an ever provides those. When culture provides those things, then your feelings return. Ideally they should return at the end of the day. That’s how they should ideally to maybe at the most the end of the week. We live in a society that not only knows when their feelings disappear, because when they don’t feel, they don’t complain as much. They’re not, as you know, they don’t suffer as much, they’re not in pain. So we’ve been mistakenly confusing well-being with the lack of feeling, the absolute opposite. So these feelings need to recover. So the brain routinely sacrifices when under distress on, but is counting on a culture that provides the conditions or feelings to return. And so there must be an end of the day when that doesn’t happen, when there is no place for it. And there’s many things that threaten it. In today’s world, children, adults are in incredible trouble. And so that is the core issue on what happens spontaneously again, for a 2 year old or a three-year old, well, 2 year old or three-year old doesn’t talk about feelings. Very rarely. Odessa can say I’m frustrated sometimes and says I’m mad and I love mommy and you know, she shows her excitement. If you ask her what she feels, she never reply. You know, responds then most most clients would not either. The thing is, is that it’s all one step removed. Her, her, her stuffies, her babies, all of these feel and, and that’s, that’s how it is. And, and that is how it is for a long time. And that’s why in therapy, you always have to come from the one step removed to be able to make it safe for these feelings to be there and play Shakespeare, music, all of these things, all one step removed are are critical.

00:44:01 Rosemary
Yeah, thank you for explaining that so clearly. The picture I had in my mind is, you know, someone’s walking across the road, You’ve you’ve looked both ways. It’s clear. All of a sudden a pickup truck came speeding at you out of anywhere. You don’t stop to think how you’re feeling. You get a shot of adrenaline. You get out of the way, but should be constantly living in a state where you’re in that fight or flight or shut down. It’s it’s.

00:44:27 Gordon
Yeah, in in a 2 year old, that trauma that would have happened. No, that was scary. That trauma that will happened will usually not show up for a couple of days and then begin to show up in a safe place and in play. If they’re behind screens, it’s not going to show up. If they don’t have that safe place that is held, if they’re facing more threats to togetherness, it’s not going to show up. And so you have very little things that can trip him into a place where they lose their feelings. And that’s the bottom line. The bottom line is we lose our feelings routinely for many good reasons and for lots of bad reasons. We lose our the issue in life is we don’t always get our feelings back. That’s the issue in post traumatic stress disorder. The feelings didn’t come back. And that’s what differentiates a healthy 2 year old. And, and so you say, well, when interferes with the sadness, Well, that’s a very vulnerable feeling. Before you can feel sad, you’ll have to feel the whole in togetherness. And so before Odessa can have her tears about missing her mother, she has to be able to say I missed Mummy. Missing is the whole into togetherness. That is the. That is, if there’s a Canary feeling it is missing, it is. And this is ironic because missing goes missing. So now we’re sounding like alchemists. Yeah, right. Missing goes missing. So that’s very ironic. And nobody misses missing. And so nobody notices it. And so we have all of this is that Missy goes missing, but before we feel the hole in Arctic, we have to feel the hole in our togethers before we can ever feel full. So if the child cannot say I miss, they’ll never be satiated. They’re satiated dull. They’ll they’ll become addicted to things that almost always work. And if they don’t feel the whole in their togetherness, they won’t feel the shape of the hole and that there’s nothing that could fill the hole. You don’t except that the one they miss. And so that’s where sadness comes in. And and so underneath sadness is missing. And when you look at it from a kids, kids point of view from a three-year old, it becomes so obvious. So I worked with disturbed young preschoolers, disturbed young adults, delinquent kids, and began It’s all the same. It’s all the same. All of our cues are in, in, you know, the second and third year of life. They’re all there.

00:47:08 Rosemary
Yeah, beautifully said. Thank you. Now given what we just talked about, people being shut down, not feeling their feelings when you consider the current global public, sorry, let me say that again. The current global polarization and other shifts that are emerging from world events, including the new US administration, how can parents best support their plugged in kids during these turbulent times? They’re, they’re dysregulation, many adults. So say you’ve got teenagers and they’re they’re looking at the news, they’re looking at all of this online misinformation. How can we help them navigate that?

00:47:50 Gordon
Well, again, you, you look at this polarization, you look at the world leaders and you’re you’re looking, where are the tiers? They’re losing their humanity. They’re using losing the vertical relationships of being taken care of by those that have that, that are meant to take care of them or their ancestors are. So they’re no longer taking care of their own children. They’ve fallen out of cascading care and they they, they never speak about missing and feel the sadness and melancholy comes that they fill it with materialism, with all kinds of things, with acquisition, with this, with that, always making things better. That’s not what makes us better. What makes us better is to have that sadness about the things that we’re up against in our world. So what do what do we give them? Well, we can say that no, screens aren’t good for you, but this this, this is a symptom. It isn’t this we can try to make them aware of when we have preschooler bullies that are that are ruling us that again, is is is not the ultimate answer. The ultimate answer is always been too. You know, has been relationship where you can find rest in that is cascading care and right from the ancient Greeks and and the aboriginals, it’s it’s emotional playgrounds, it’s where emotions can that’s the way nature takes care of emotions. It’s always take care of emotions. That’s where they’re safe to be expressed and safe to feel. It’s always been there. We’ve lost our way. Now, therapy can be an approximation to it, but it only is that way if it is done in the context of relationship and you can give it that, you know, those properties that true play has always had. And so those are answers I was asked to The Russian Ukraine war broke out the day of. I was supposed to have a professional development with Ukrainian teachers and the, and I, I, I offered to cancel right there and, you know, and so on. They said, no, no, no, we need to hear this more than ever. Everything has changed in our world and we no longer have the luxury of being able to educate our children about the world, but we got to take care of their hearts. How do we do this? And I said, well, there’s two things you need to know about is to preserve their relationships, that they need to be able to find that place and to introduce them to emotional playgrounds. And then I was asked no again in terms of by a program and who felt institute and program with Ukrainian mothers who had fled across the border and they were there traumatized mothers with their traumatized kids. What are the answers? The answers are the same. What are the answers and therapy? The answers are the same, and again, it becomes so important, so, so absolutely obvious. When does Odessa find rest? When is she an emotional health? And you know, when she is emotional, how health because she’s so playful. Oh my goodness, she’s playful. You begin to see this the first indication. And when she’s at rest and takes her attachments for granted, This is what every child deserves. This is what every adult deserves. But his heart an adulthood to find that place. And sometimes we have to start with the giving before we get to have the receiving, you know, and it’s not the receiving. And that’s the tragedy is OK, if we haven’t received, we can still give. And if we are the answer to someone else in this that will stretch doesn’t transform us as well.

00:51:33 Rosemary
Yeah, thank you. And it all ties up beautifully with attachment, which you are a renowned expert on. You know, how we attach as infants and young children, preschoolers. It’s it’s so related to how we show up as adults.

00:51:51 Gordon
Yes. Well, attachment joins it to the theory, to the science, because you have to have a word through which you study. But it doesn’t join us to our intuition. We then have to change the language to more the language of caring, the language of love, the drive for togetherness, the construct of relationship. This joins us to our intuition. So we have to be very careful as experts that we don’t take the language of science and make it seem like it’s different than what it is. That they know that the love does make the world go round. It always has made the world go round. And it’s interesting that when when when a doctor Bowlby had was trying to find a word for this, you know, when this this word, what are we going to name this? He wanted to name it the Bobby effect. And it was in an argument with his wife who said no, John, you’re talking about love, you know, And so it’s it’s interesting that it very roots of a classic attachment theory, which we think of it, you know, the name was this argument. What are we talking about here? We talk about what we’re talking about. I prefer the term the dry for togetherness because it’s something that we intuitively understand.

00:53:09 Rosemary
It’s much easier to understand than the whole attachment theory the way you described it. So thank you. Now I realize we’re coming towards the end of our time together. I watched your recent relationship matters presentation and you conclude by sharing 2 keys to raising children which are right relationships and soft hearts. I think you said a lot about that. Is there anything you’d like to add?

00:53:34 Gordon
Well, it the more years I put on, uh, the more of it observed, the more I’m, I become convinced of this is that it really has to do with soft hearts and right relationships. And by right relationships, I mean embedded in cascading care where we give and we where where we stretch to become the answer to someone else in the relational needs that they have were meant were meant to invite others to depend upon us. This way we’ve been throwing dependents under the bus with the construct of independence. We always have relational needs to the day we die. We can’t we can’t meet them ourselves. These are met in relationship. And so yes, right relationship and and soft hearts. I would just_!! More true than ever.

00:54:28 Rosemary
Very good. Thank you. Now my final question is really if, if you could roll a Pearl of wisdom out in front of all of the parents listening some wisdom related to their ability to raise engaged, resilient, kind children, what’s the most important thing for them to know to be or do?

00:54:57 Gordon
Well, that’s a good question. And, and I think the bottom line is something that always has been true. It really is stepping up to be another’s answer. This is what makes marriage work. To do this, we’ve lost our confidence and we’ve handed our children over to experts. And when we are their best bet and we don’t, we don’t have to know what to do to know that they need to know they matter. They need to know that there’s nothing wrong with them. They need to see the invitation to exist in our presence and our eyes and our demeanor. They need to know that relationship comes first and nothing will come in between. They need to know that we’ll hold on to them. We’ll hold on to them. And so I go to the title of the book, Right? Hold on to your kids.

00:55:58 Rosemary
Yeah, thank you so much. What a beautiful way to wrap up. Doctor Neufeld, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. I’m, I have all kinds of resources that you have created that I will be linking in the show notes. And so I encourage everybody who enjoyed this episode to Scroll down on the show page, look into those resources. Definitely buy a copy of Hold On to Your Kids, have it on Audible and Kindle. And I’ve enjoyed very much digging into it. And now I can’t wait to get into those other books that you’ve endorsed on your site. So thank you so much for being with us today.00:56:35 Gordon
My pleasure and thanks again for inviting me.