time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning the cow palace sing a cappella sing is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis and history at new york university and the founding faculty director of the n y u prison education program he is the editor of climb and jacob's ladder the black freedom movements writings of jack o'dell and the author of black  a country race and the unfinished struggle for democracy and he is here to talk about his latest book race and america's long war the kilt thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thanks for having me mike so start out tell us what was your motivation in writing race in america's long war race in america's long war is a collection of essays that i had been writing over the last ten years or so so i think the first  one ended up as chapter three in the book which is which was written right after the abu ghraib torture scandal so i've been writing these essays really over over a period of ten years and i think what what prompted me to pull them together was the the trump election so right after trump was elected i wrote a piece that circulated around right after the election called trump in the present crisis and i reworked that a little bit and put it in the book so the book is really meant to be a kind of  a series of snapshots that at the period that we're living in the period that we've been living through the period characterized by permanent war by by a kind of increasing awareness about the sort of sit in across the essays in sort of thinking about the relationship between sort of internal transformations that relate to surveillance torture or criminal punishment and then the sort of ongoing continuation of how far back do you go with when the mutations began because it seemed like we were kind of designed from the very get go to pretty much be what we are today is just it was never acknowledge yeah i think that's a great that's a great point and i guess the sort of the book includes some things that i wrote a few years ago and revised and then it included some newer pieces which some of which were focused directly on the kind of current moment the current crisis but the book was also an opportunity actually to think over a much longer period so so you know you're exactly right i mean one of the things i sort of used for one of the ideas i used to frame the book is this idea that there's a relationship between an inner warren and outer war and the inner war is actually the war that really begins with the beginning of the united states with frontier expansion with chattel slavery and with two projects one focused on the frontier the others focused on the kind of internal security question that arises from the fact of of kind of mass racial slavery and these two processes really nation as a racial project and as a project that's essentially built upon the constraints surveillance elimination of of kind of potential enemies within and enemies without you know so it's a it's a it's a it's a project that's kind of riven with insecurity from the beginning by virtue of its expansionist nature by virtue of the fact that it's a project that is founded on a system that's as coercive and violent as ason slave meant and s o i'm really interested in kind of tracing back these longer histories not saying that the present there's a straight line to the present moment but trying to think of the kind of the kind of broken line that sort of  continues and and sort of resurfaces at various moments in our history and puts us in a situation where that kind of level of insecurity and sort of a racialized insecurity is sort of at the at the heart of what leads lead s american policy towards in the imagination that there are there are only violent solutions to what ails us and so how do you see that being implemented in our society and like both codify into our laws as well as into our societal d n a of what is acceptable to do to ourselves and others well it's a good terms in our war and outer war to the things that are quite sort of familiar to us our military and our police and maybe now it's today we would we would want to extend the concept of police to include an agency like ice you know which is sort of produced out of the kind of the kind of border policing right and then you think of sort of border policing kind of urban policing and  military power as existing on a kind of continuum right as institutions as practices and all of them have certain kinds of objects that they're focused on objects that tend to be you know  kind of bodies that are seen as threats to the body politic in a sense right under trump clearly immigrants have been framed this way and yesterday gave a speech to the n r a where he once again doubles down on this idea that basically immigrants are a criminal blackness itself is sort of sort of along along part of kind of the sort of the kind of other of american policing or the other of american police power again going back to the slave patrols but really becoming codified in the sort of of early twentieth century with the beginning of crime statistics with this sort of creation of a notion of black crime is something that is sort of irredeemable and needs to be kind of controlled and curtailed and that of course really comes to the fore after the civil war during and after the civil rights movement which is the period in which we see the rise of mass incarceration and then the third element the sort of military element which has been sort of about american expansion so it has a sort of sort of begins on the frontier begins in the indian wars but extends through the period of the development of american overseas empire the u s philippine war at the turn of the twentieth century and you know this is really a country that has been continuously some of these wars have been low intensity wars counterinsurgency wars wars that have been defined around a kind of a american product of within the hemisphere and after world war two these wars kind of kind of migrate around the world and of course we we see that the biggest conflagration happened in vietnam and vietnam is probably the moment in which american militarism is subjected to the most severe and exacting kind of criticism and we have a moment it seems to me where there's a possibility of actually rethinking what american military power is and how we want to be constrain it curtail it put it under some kind of some kind of serious oversight right subjected to citizen control to congressional control but none of that really comes to pass it so in all of these domains whether it's the the domain of sort of bordering the domain of policing or the domain of overseas warfare i think what we see is a kind of unleashing of a certain kind of discretionary parag if it invested in in the executive the figure of the sort of decision maker u naccountable to but but defined by the way in which this figure protects the polity from these kind of racialized threats and this is one of the reasons why is exceptionally hard to attain any kind of oversight over this kind of violence i mean at the local scale like in new york city and other cities i mean police have fought tooth and nail to prevent civilian oversight over police activity to to prevent certain kinds of accountability the police will have the idea that sort of notion that we're kind of we're kind of always being protected from a kind of a savage really that's about to kind of engulf us and trump really uses this language if you if you listen to him you know it's sort of it's sort of meant then to give the police a kind of a kind of carte blanche you know and i mean that's a kind of funny term when you think of what it means right a kind of a white card this sort of a sort of a flexibility to sort of to sort of enact enact to this sort of discretionary violence in the name of protecting the citizenry that imagines itself as being on the right side of that violence as against these various kinds of enemies who are who are constantly being conjured and sort of sort of sort of recreated within the american imaginary as as as one of them was one commentator who i follow who i think is really smart on this patrick blanch field says america is you know a nightmare factory you know there's a sort of way in which that that's the sort of generation of kind of kind of kind of both bogey men you know all around us and i think we're very susceptible to that and obviously we're living in a moment where we have having a kind of engine of that sort of thinking at that at the kind of at the kind of pinnacle of american power but but but it's a constant right it's sort of it's constantly resurfacing this sort of this sort of mode of of kind of thought and action  within our politics so that's that's a sort of a long answer i guess to the question that you asked and it's it appears to be a theme that happens in most police departments  addition to new york we are wrestling with the same thing here in seattle and had been under justice department review seattle police department has and currently in the city as in most other cities i mean we're dealing with issues of homelessness and  drug dependency and and things like that and there's a pushback from people saying that the police the police's hands are tied in there and it appears like they're still there because of the justice department and other issues they don't like that they currently are standing down a lot on doing their traditional role which sounds like it's actually being how this is happening in other cities across the country and it's not being reviewed in the big picture there i mean it's really staggering it's a very it's something that i'd start to probe in the book and i don't necessarily think that i i covered exhaustedly because it's not really a book about the police as an institution it's really a book about this continuum both a kind of historical continuum a sort of a longer a but also about the continuum between the sort of the you know the inner war and the outer war and these different sort of modalities of racial i stay violence so but but  we don't even know how many people are in jail in the united states you know i mean we have statistics about federal prisons we have statistics about state prisons but the thing about the police that is so kind of fascinating and disturbing is that  the jurisdictions are so localized and the parag gives are so extensive within those local jurisdictions that there's this kind it has a kind of capillary capillary power i mean this is the way for code just kind of asks us to rethink power but it's but it's a capillary power that's sort of predicated upon this ability to enact a kind of sovereign violence at the point of sort of contact so there's a way in which you know what's going on in america's jails what's going on in america's local precincts the kind of the kind of ordinary parag that is that police officers have in kind of the day to day you know this is something that we we don't have a lot of sort of again kind of broad oversight over or even understanding of in some cases you know and that's sort of by design right one of the earliest theorists of police power in the united states ernst freud was writing around the twente turn of the twentieth century calls policing a formless authority that needs to have an elasticities to address social conditions so these kind of terms a sort of this sort of by design formless elastic discretionary this this this is sort of built into the design of how we think about policing in part because the idea really is that policing is not is is some kind of exists some kind of x kind of point of exception in relationship to democratic authority or the kind of consent we think we need or actually have in the over the way we're governed and it really sort of it's a sort of undemocratic kernel sort of within the sort of constitution of our of our social life and so here in some ways i think you know we also then have to be attentive to what policing is really for right i mean it's we are talking about this racialized continuum but i would i think that we would be remiss not to recognise that this is alternately about the preservation and defense of an order of unequal property you know i mean in some very basic way we're talking about the organization of of social relations under capitalist property relations  and what's what's what's kind of not exceptional about the united states but specific to the united states and sort of again kind of built into it's it's sort of design is a as you suggested  that capital is property relations in relationship to land and labor particularly in the origins of the united states are these intensely racialized processes there are processes that are about to dispossession of of the land of the people who are here already but who didn't understand their relationship to the land in terms of private property that is indigenous people and they were about the the the transformation into of human beings into commodities right so and  think of as well this is part of our past and we sort of we sort of mature and modernized and kind of left that behind and now we're in a kind of a modern capitalist society which is to some degree true but those processes sort of left there they're kind of imprint on the ways in which americans understand freedom and the ways in which americans understand the progressives of violence and force in the government of social relations in the ways in which the ways in which americans and understand the kind of conception  i mean i remember when the when the iraq war started you know it was like well you know we're just going to take the oil and the oil is going to pay for the war right i mean that was one of the kind of canards that was sort of trafficked around but by people who you know now we sort of imagine we're somehow the kind of the good republicans right the sane institutional republicans i mean those are the people that lead us into the sort of nastiness that we're in and trump repeats the same kind of the same kind of stuff right now of course this hasn't really come to pass because there's a lot of pushback and there's a lot of resistance around the world you can't just you can't just sort of eliminate people anymore in quite the same way people are are armed are there they're there are different kinds of norms the certainly have shifted some of the dispositions of power around the world but this this kind of conception that is sort of part of our national conception has a kind of stubborn consistency so where is where is the end point for all this this current system with the inner and outer war well i mean the thing is like and i think this is maybe a danger of some of the ways in which you know i'm talking about this i i think that we live in a moment where we are but tween kind of a kind of disavowal and a sort of like we have to look away from the circus right we just can't look at i was on the plane yesterday and the guy next to me is watching trump speech at the n r a and i had my head headphones on and i was listening to music and i could not look away you know eventually i just put it on and i watched it and it's like it's like you can't look away right we're sort of sort of pulled into the circus and then we we just want to look away from it and kind of think well if we just keep our heads down long enough this too will pass so that's a that's a sort of sort of one way to deal with it and another way to deal with it is is to sort of just sort of grow and deepen our sort of pessimism about the situation we are living under both the kind of the kind of way in which our our our political system seems hopelessly corrupted unable to correct itself i know a lot of people want to you know a lot of people so there's a sort of debate about whether our institutions will save us and or whether trump is the kind of hard being of some kind of some kind of  fascism some kind of you know absolutely fatal and fundamental mutation of our democracy such that we will no longer have it in the future i think we have to kind of resist that way of thinking you know i think we have to we have to not lapse into either fear mongering or pessimism no certainly not look away and imagine that this to a pass but obviously do the things that we have always done you know we need to organize we need to draw upon our our our our understanding of you know what obama used to like to call our better history you know and i give obama some credit for that although you know i would be very critical of obama for being somebody who in some ways  pacified us during the period in which he was president and there are lots of examples out there of people struggling for things that really matter you know whether it's the fifteen hour you know fifteen dollars an hour movement black lives matter immigrant rights and the sanctuary movement the struggle of for medicare for all the struggle to make college more affordable i think i would want to really add to that a struggle that i think has waned in the in the period that we've been living through the struggle against american militarism these are all struggles that are very much also central to you know the american democratic tradition or american small d democratic history slave struggling for their liberation even as even if sometimes that was just flight indigenous people struggling to to retain dignity identity control over land a relationship to the land that's different from the kind of extractive possessive relationship that is that is for grounded in the kind of movement of settlers obviously the struggle of working people everywhere for for a living wage for safe working conditions for the possibility of reproducing community and family life in a way that sustainable these are all things that people want like we know that  we live in a very bad state and by bad state i don't mean it in a more just in a moral sense i mean it in the sense that a state that is actually not responsive to the deimos is not responsive to the needs desires and demands of people to be able to to live and sustain the life broadly speaking right and i think in that sense we're on the right side of history and we're also on the right side of a kind of what is rational in the world you know and i'm not a defender of sort of the application of rationality to every aspect of our our politics because clearly there's a lot of things that are that are crazy out there that are legitimately crazy that that we have to take account of and figure out how to deal with  i really do think that it's a funny moment in that sense and maybe this makes me a little bit sound a little bit naive but i'm actually quite optimistic in this period i think there's a great awakening going on certainly among younger people the people i encounter as a as a teacher as a professor they they see the world as a world that is that is deeply deeply damaged you know and they're very attuned to their own vulnerability and to the vulnerability of others and that can certainly lead them to to either to pessimism or despair or to kind of a narcissism of minor differences where you know everybody's sort of scrambling to sort of shore up their little place in the world and certainly we're encouraged to think that way you know that that's our only hope it's a kind of every person for themselves but on the other hand in a kind of countervailing way to that i really also see of these things and if there interconnections a much more systemic a vision of of how any qualities of property how ecological damage how histories of racial violence or histories of militarism are and of course sexism and patriarchy are our kind of interlocking interlinked problems you know and of course not everyone experiences them the same way  but but we have to actually begin to develop a kind of a band with an understanding where we approach them as a common problem you know from our different vantage points and i i see that you know i see that i think we don't yet have the institutional the organizational forms but i do think we're beginning to get the kind of ethical good sense that that can make that struggle one that is not so one sided or not not as one sided as it sometimes seems when we when we think all the wealth all the power all the arms are on the other side because they really don't have what we have which is they really don't have the people so do you think the fabric that is holding the current machine together then is is much more fragile than is being led on i think that's a really good way of putting it i think it's a really good with putting it i think i think we're in a we're in a you know one of those classic capitalist crises of over accumulation capital doesn't know where to go to get profitable investment that's why so much of it's on the on the sidelines as they like to say or off shore we need to think about how we appropriate or reappropriate that for for human need that's been an that's an old you know that's an old kind of kind of left him and i think obviously our governing order is tremendously fragile you know it lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most people i mean there are real dangers that come with that because you know it does it does potentially yield to a kind of a strong than politics to a politics that can manipulate fear and obviously that's something that we have to be very vigilant about and we're we're in the midst of it but i think i think we do still have the norms the sort of the deep norms and the deep sort of sense as people who are are our subjects in a democracy of our our right to choose our right to create the conditions under which were governed you know i think that is a that is something that we can really build on as the sort of the basis of kind of organizing people for a different kind of set of social social arrangements i've always thought that for all his shortfalls for all his limitations obama kind of grasped this you know and if you remember back to the period right before he was elected or in the run up to the election you know the sort of slogan of hope and change it now seems so kind of hokey and and disappointing but obama brought in the electorate you know and he and he also ran a campaign that inspired people to actually think another world is possible i mean many of us ended up most of us and up extremely disappointed by seeing that he was basically an institutional conservative in some of the worst ways but i think that what really scared the right not just the democratic aspiration that was in some ways behind him right and there's no reason why that can't be awakened again and i think because i think it's still very much there people are hungry for it they're starving yeah we're talking with kill powell sing here is author of the book race and america's long war and you were speaking today at elliott bay books one big reason is yeah i'll be speaking tonight i think it's at seven thirty  of a lot of fondness for this place all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us a spanking so much for having me it's been great talking to you time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning becca rebecca demo is founder and director of trauma integration programs with more than a decade as an ambulance paramedic twenty two years as a paramedic trainer and fifteen years of mental health counseling experience specializing in post traumatic stress and critical incident stress she is also the author of a new book nothing for nothing transformation through trauma and she's here to talk about that rebecca thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you it's great to be here thanks for inviting  me i want to acknowledge right off the bat about since rena be talking about trauma and i'm going to read a little bit from my book i want to acknowledge what's going on in our country right now and how this is these are tough times that we're in and there is a lot of trauma that people are experiencing due to uncertainty and as you know the u s bombed syria yesterday and that brings up a lot of things uncertainty for people and uncertainty is not the kind of thing that sort of fosters joy iness the kind of thing that seems to foster fear in as so that's saying all that just this is a time when we really need to even more than ever learn how to take care of ourselves and learn how to take care of one another so that we can be good activists and advocates for our world and so the work that i do with trauma integration programs is to  what i always say is to help people be well enough to do the job of caring for others so i work a lot with people in social service industry with medical professionals and with anyone that cares for other people so  i'm also an acupuncturist besides being a clinical counsellor and having a background in emergency medicine and i also so that informs obviously those things all inform the work that i do and also what informs the work that i do is my own trauma my childhood trauma growing up in a family where there was violence where there was abuse where there was sexual abuse i left home when i was thirteen and i lived on the streets in foster care for all of my teen years and i did what i could to survive out there so i brought with me on to the streets all of the childhood fears and the beliefs that i had formed  really early in life and that has impacted how i've related in in life and and also there my my healing has come that's why the book is called nothing's for nothing transformation through trauma because a lot of my healing has come not in spite of the trauma that i've experienced but because of it and so the title of the book comes from my mother and my mother she passed away ten years ago and i had a very difficult relationship with her because as a child growing up at age three my mom left chief fled for her life to get away from the violence from my my father and so i was left behind with my my older brother who is four years older and my father and that's where a lot of abuse happened in our home and i also had an older much older brother who was incarcerated so whenever he would get out of jail he would come in and kick the door down and come into our house and and it was very fearful talk about uncertainty that was growing up that way  my body we hold trauma in our bodies and so i've held a lot of my trauma in my body but through the work that i have become familiarized with the trauma integration work and that's what i call what i do it's to it's to use what's happened to us to help us learn what it is that we feel and so that's one of the first things to get in touch with is what am i feeling right now can i allow myself to feel what i feel and so this is not something that comes easily to many of us and it didn't come easily to me i it seemed like a big dark abyss allowing myself to feel was originally i remember when i started to allow myself to feel instead of avoiding the feelings many of the things that we do are to avoid feelings whether it's you know substance use whether it's acting out on other people whether it's you know expressing rage or hurting other people as marshall rosenberg author of nonviolent communication woods would wisely say that everything that we do is in service of our needs so if we're trying to avoid our feelings then we serve ourselves by whatever we are we act out and a lot of partial form of therapy yeah well definitely definitely it's been therapeutic definitely to write things down and relive them i mean when i sat down in front of the keyboard every day to allow myself to the have those feelings and memories come up because there's deep memories from my childhood that i express in the book i would get dizzy i would get nauseated i'd have to take breaks and i'd have to take care of myself and say ok in this moment you are safe in this moment everything is ok you're feeling what you feel but remember that that right now you're ok and so yeah i started to you what you bring forth will save you will heal you and if you do not bring forth what is within you what you do not bring forth can destroy you so i figured that bringing it forth was one of the best things that i could do was just continue my i mean my whole life is a journey of healing i think that's true for all of us have that we allow it to be and i'm still healing so so yes sitting down and making myself sit in front of the keyboard every day and write something as what i did for about a year and a half i kept a blog and you know this is a memoir it's a it's a healing journey for me but i want it to inspire other people to bring forth what is within them so i've written it as a resource for people there that healing childhood trauma that would like to heal family relationships a lot of that has happened for me a lot of that continues to happen and yeah the book is written in many small vignettes so they're like little flashes of memory there's about one hundred twenty nine i think counted little stories many of them are personal anecdotes from my history and many because i'm an acupuncturist and t c m practitioner is traditional chinese medicine there is many little east asian insights in there too i tend to see the world in terms of yin and yang and and and just see the wisdom that there is no absolute in union young or right and left or north and south or you know any of the things that bifurcate this country in particular republican and democrat for instance right and and then the other part of the book is that there is insight so i've i've tried to unfold some of the insights that have come through the difficulties i've  experienced and and i've written those down to and the book is divided into three different sections so the first section has to do with childhood early childhood stuff and then the second section is kind of the midpoint of life kind of my twenty's thirty's and forty's and then the last part is a lot to do with my mother so i i dedicated the book to my mom because she left i mentioned that she left our home when i was three years old and my my older brother michael was six at the time so she had to leave her two young kids behind which was very difficult for her you can imagine and she actually came and took us back at one point she sort of you know kidnapped us as my dad would say and anyways but he found us and took us back again so it was nine years still that i didn't see my mom through my childhood and that was that was very tough i formed a lot of beliefs around that if for no lot of beliefs around that well it's not safe to love anybody they're just going to leave you anyways you know there's something wrong with me i'm flawed and that's why she lacked so again you know that that's that's the value of allowing ourselves to feel and then checking out ok so i feel this and what are the beliefs and what are the belief systems even that i have that i've developed around all of those feelings and what am i actually projecting on the world i started to see how i projected on the world yeah i know you're just going to leave me anyway so there's no use you know use allowing myself to care or or feel and and yeah there's something wrong with me so what's what's the point anyways you know you're i'm i'm no good so and i started to see that the awareness changes everything you know and if it can be you know i like to try to hold things lightly you know rather than you know ok these are my beliefs so i'm not going to start you know beating myself for that they had well look how stupid and dumb you are to allow yourself to feel this way so instead i've chosen to try to hold those beliefs really in a in a light way and really kind of to observe those beliefs and to see how they can change over time to me it's like you know quantum physics has this wonderful truth of showing us that when there's an experiment going on just the observation of that experiment changes the outcome you know and when i when i saw that when i read that whenever it was years ago it really touched my heart that that is absolutely true and that's absolutely what's happening with me i only share what's really what i know what's really relevant to me that's what i that's what i share that's what i teach it's not about somebody else's stuff unless that is actually i've embodied that and it's really true for me so when you moved from ignoring or hiding or staying away from your feelings to examining them into were you in a safe space finally to do that is that a prerequisite to be able to successfully do that that's such a great question and thanks for saying that because i wanted to come back around to that that yes to feel what we feel there has to be some sort of foundation of safety right we have to feel in order to allow our defenses to drop enough to allow ourselves to feel there has to be some some little window of safety that we can kind of perch on and for me as a as a teen i had a social worker who cared about me and kind of stuck with me all through my teen years and so that was when i when i whenever i was around him and he looked at me i could see this is somebody who cares about me this is somebody it's not going to hurt me this somebody that believes in me and so that sort of allowed some things to kind of loosen and unfold and allow me to start to feel a little bit of safety so that i could just start to feel like my feet were on the ground so that did make a big difference and yet the foundation of safety allows us to feel and then then everything can unfold from there and when i when i work with social service providers is a very very tough job specially in a city like seattle where third in the nation for the number of homeless people and so you know there's there's all the trauma from being homeless there's a lot of times original trauma that made somebody vulnerable to becoming homeless and so folks that work with that population they're exposed to that trauma in a secondary way so we call it secondary trauma and and so you know people need support people need support for experiencing that on a day to day basis so that is also what i do is try to create at a safe form where people can you know express what what they feel about their jobs and then we can just start to work from there ok we've got the feelings now what are the beliefs around that and then once we get into the belief systems that we maybe are projecting on the world we can start to notice again when something loosens up a little bit when something might might change for us and and celebrate that a little bit one of the things that can happen when we start numbing ourselves to our feelings and that's a that's a common that's a very human response when we're feeling something very difficult is to go a little bit numb around that and unfortunately we can't just numb ourselves to what's painful and difficult we end up numbing ourselves but we numb ourselves to joy and the ability to celebrate and the ability to feel happy and light and all of those things so when we start to allow ourselves to feel a whole bunch of things can come up and and it can be a whole flood of emotions but being able to celebrate hey that thing that used to bother me really badly and trigger me so you know this that that thing that somebody would say or that thing that i would watch on t v hey that's not bothering me as much anymore oh i'm i don't feel bothered as intensely i don't feel bothered as often and that we can celebrate we can celebrate that because that healing and then when we start to see a little bit of healing in ourselves the wonderful thing can happen is we want more of that so we can begin to commit to say i'm going to keep on feeling and keep on noticing because there's this great reward of feeling more alive and feeling more happy and peaceful and more generous towards ourselves and is that something someone can pursue in isolation by themselves or do you really need help of others to do so i don't think we do anything in isolation you know unless you're living in a mountaintop on a cave and we live in a big society full of people so certainly taking time on our own certainly having our periods of silence is helpful to gain the insight to what's going on in my my thoughts my emotions and my body and then reaching out and expressing to other people is a big part of the healing and that's part of you know what's been healing for me is actually the expression of some of the things i've written in my book is is that the feedback that i've gotten from people all the the beautiful loving responses the acceptance the validation not that i needed all of those things or maybe not that i thought i needed all those things but being able to express things and then having others sort of reflect back  changes us from an isolated place to a place of connection and community with others and so that's that's a real beauty of a mention facebook because facebook's got a it's a crazy thing and there's a a lot of controversy around the privacy rights on facebook right now but one of the things about any kind of community forum whether it's online or whether it's in person is that people get a chance to express and  connect with others and see that they're not the only ones that feel something so i wanted to find out a little bit about since you dedicated the book to your mom she left here when she was three at some point there it's not like nine years down the road she tried to grab you yes bring you back yeah so talk more about that and did you ever you know resolve issues with your mom so yeah so mum did come and take my brother way but that's when we were both still really young so you know she left when i was three and then my dad got a court order restraining order to keep her from seeing us so she just became really desperate she she tried to visit a few times and then you know he was able to get a court order so she came and took us and across town when we were really young and then my dad found us and took us back and and so again i didn't see her until i was twelve years old and then i i wanted to seek her out and so i did find her it's actually the the first story in the book is called you in it so when i i talk about mom and maybe if there's time i can read that but yeah around all the beliefs that i had because mom left and i didn't see her all that time and i i carried resentment and pain and grief and loss with me my whole life and my relationship with mom was very tough and and i mean tough because i had a lot of  barriers to towards allowing her to be close to me and i think for a mom when first of all she had to leave her children and then when we were taken back from her and she couldn't see a seguin for all those years i think it really broke her and so something broken her and she wasn't able to be a loving mother to me even all you know from twelve on and you her you know until she had a stroke and  became immobilize she was paralyzed and i had to care for her and and i was the only one in the family that would visit her because everybody was completely fed up because she was kind of a kind of a tough horrible person i won't say the b i t c h word but yeah it was big time yeah she was really hard to be around and so for me this is the real core of the book is the that real painful dark place in me of those really early childhood beliefs that i formed that i wasn't good enough that there was something wrong with me that's why she left and that it wasn't safe to love anyone that was healed in our this is spoiler for the book  but in the last part of the book we healed that relationship together when mum passed away when she was to shy of her eightieth birthday and you know six months before she died i had waited my whole life for her to say i love you and she finally did and and i finally felt it and i finally allowed it in so that he healing for both of us and being able to be with their her in her last moments  i think you know she was able to die in peace and i'm able to live in peace because of a feeling that old old wo and how about your father did you resolve things with him so my father died when i was in my twenty's so a lot was on resolved for me and you know that's another part in the book i talk about a lot because my father was abusive my father sexually abused my brother he didn't sexually abuse me that i remember but you know as the favorite and the one that wasn't being abused i suffered the collateral damage of survivor guilt and so things were done in my presence that should child should never have to see and hear so it was almost like i was invisible but i i don't think a lot of that was really in my conscious memory when my father passed away when i was in my early twenty's so he was loving and kind and there's lots of good memories i had with  him again i was with him when he passed away and still healing i'm still healing from my relationship with him but it wasn't nearly you you would think it would be fraught with a lot of  difficulty but not nearly as much as with my mom so i'm pretty good with my dad had a pretty good with he took care of us you know there was always food on the table  and i had a roof over my had when i grew up so those who some things that i that i had by your working through this trauma you have healed a lot of this pain and trauma that you've dealt with had you not worked through it and just ignored  it pretty much completely different person sitting in front right now right i guess so i have no way of knowing you know and and like i say you know i'm i'm the person i am not in spite of but because of what i've experienced that's the that's the beauty of you know where we're cracked is where the light gets in you know and and i'm cracked and the lights getting in and it's still coming in and yeah i i think that i think i'm doing ok i really do well and doing well enough to be able to share your story with others to help them do better as well and i think it's great that you in your work work with other people who are caregivers because i know personally from my mom had alzheimer's i was helping take care of her for years and and how that can s wear you down and you just get isolated doing it everybody you know like basically a you know who is your friend like abandons you because you're doing the selfish thing by taking care of someone else right here is it yeah yeah  it is it is it's a labor of love and and it's something that takes a lot of your time and attention and psychic energy and i know for me you know when mom had her massive stroke the doctors said oh you better say you goodbyes to her you know and i thought you know at that time i was so fed up with my many ways and and but she lived for three more years so i had three years have thrashing through things with her and just being exhausted and leaving the hospital every day in tears and you know seeing a counsellor and talking it through and and just and mum was angry too when she after she had her stroke she was debilitated paralyzed on one side and went from being somebody who could do anything they want super healthy lady to you know being bed ridden and she was pissed i mean i would go visit her she would yell and scream it was all my fault she would spit at me and call me names and and i would sit there and just take it and finally you know my counselor said to me you know you don't really have to take it you know you could register your hurt you could let her know that you know you could set some boundaries so this is this is a real gift from that i got to learn how to set really clear loving boundaries and so you know one day i walked in and she was behaving in her usual spiteful way and i just said mom i'm sorry i can't sit here and allow you to speak this way to me it really hurts my feelings i'm going to have to leave now and before i left i said i love you and that was a commitment i made myself yell scream you know has called me names i went out the door feeling very guilty and so i continued doing that for a couple more years after every time there would be a lot of mom just yelling and screaming and me at some point feeling like ok i'm going to register my my hurt i'm going to tell her that i'm going to leave her behavior doesn't change and then i'm going to leave i'm going to keep my promise and so i continue doing that until one day i came in to visit mom and she was all dressed up and looking her best and when i walked in the door she said hello dear i'm really sorry for speaking to you that way and she said and i love you so that was that was the last six months of our being together as we were able to sit across from each other and let all the pain go and to say i love you i love you and i you know being able to set my boundaries was huge not just for me but it was important for mom to see that oh yeah this is hurting her and i actually do love her and i'm able to express it so it's a beautiful way of healing and i'm really really grateful for that while since we are pretty much out of time that's a great place to have to just been talking with rebecca demmer oh she is author of the new book nothing's for nothing transformation through trauma and you have a website too that in addition to the book yeah you can check out your work sherri thank you he had trauma programs dot com and there you see the programs that i teach and these list of the clients and yeah thank you very well thanks for coming in and spending time with us this morning thank you i enjoyed it