In Episode 91, I interview Nathan Vanderpool. Nathan has a background in psychology, cultural and religious studies, and he did his PhD in sociology. He’s also a singer/songwriter and the author of the Social Arts Handbook.
Nathan recently led me in a process he calls Trauma Mapping, and it was a powerfully transformative experience. Afterwards, I tweeted:
I was just reborn. How’s your day going?
— Discomfortable (@discomfrtble) February 4, 2021
In this deep-dive interview, Nathan and I explore the ways in which our sensemaking can get scrambled, often contaminated by old experiences and limiting beliefs from our past. We talk about the way our brains create “reality packages” that essentially hijack the present moment and thrust us into a defensive stance even when there isn’t much of an actual threat present. We also explore how our prefrontal cortex (the rational brain) and limbic system (the emotional brain) can disagree with each other about what is really important to us.
In order to address these distortions in our sensemaking, Nathan’s Trauma Mapping practice takes inspiration from Dr. Douglas Tataryn’s Bio-Emotive Framework, new research into memory reconsolidation and Coherence Therapy, and the ancient wisdom of Mantra. This episode takes you through the steps of Trauma Mapping with my own experience as an example. We mapped a recent professional conflict I had back to some much deeper issues and then transformed those old associations into an empowering sense of being reborn. And then to top it all off—in a surprising twist—Nathan and I wrote a song about it!
You can connect with Nathan and learn more about him and his work at social-arts.org where you can also check out his Social Arts Handbook. You can follow Nathan on Twitter at @craythan.
Note: this interview was edited for clarity.
