Recently, I read the book Gewoon speciaal – kijken vanuit kindperspectief (‘Simply Special – looking from the child perspective’) by Bart Heeling, published as a hardcover and illustrated with drawings by Mariët van der Merwe. What started as stories on LinkedIn has become an easy-to-read and at the same time very wise book.
On his website we read: “It is my mission to give parents, teachers, directors, administrators (actually everyone involved in the development of children) insight into the function of behaviour. In doing so, I like to create awareness of how you yourself react to that behaviour.” You can read more about Bart’s work on his website and through that route, you can contact him for a lecture, workshop or training.

As a teacher in special education, Bart uses a very important and valuable principle: “These are children with a intense past or a sad present. (…) I have children in my class who are having a difficult time, instead of being difficult.”
That is a wonderful starting point and at the same time a challenge when it comes to interpreting and dealing with that behaviour. When we feel that other people are ‘being difficult’, it often says something about what we ourselves *find difficult*. What is it that the other person is showing that we find difficult to translate into the underlying meaning? What is triggered in ourselves by that behaviour? What pain, what unexpressed, unprocessed emotion is touched by it? Can we grow beyond that or, put differently… can we recognise our own inner child in the patterns of the child before us and can we see what was once difficult for ourselves, possibly see mirrored now?

Bart advocates looking from the child’s perspective and the book is a collection of short stories about his experiences with pupils, with which he illustrates aspects of the role of adults.
The chapters are divided by theme, such as ‘Our exemplary behaviour and feedback’, ‘Recognising the child’, ‘Recognising signal behaviour’ and ‘Dealing with disorders’, to name the themes of the first four chapters. Themes such as trauma-sensitive teaching, rethinking education and the connection between parents and school are also discussed.

Throughout, attention is paid to the influence of a disrupted stress regulation system, to the importance of coregulation, and to trauma as the source of difficult-to-manage behaviour or behaviour that is disruptive to the rest of the group. I was repeatedly moved to read how Bart tackles all kinds of situations and always keeps the underlying wound of the child in mind. For example, in the introduction to Chapter 6 he says that ‘it remains important to realise that much behaviour is a form of coping’ (page 89), or a survival strategy that a child has learned.

With it, the child can deal with what happens at home and what continues in other social environments. This is followed by a number of stories about how children themselves resolve arguments, based on intrinsic motivation, and about how an adult can use humour and an unexpected, funny reaction to take the sting out of a loaded situation.

Chapter 7, Trauma-sensitive teaching, is, in my opinion, the core of the book, because this is a theme that is essentially the foundation of all other subjects. The first book I read during my bachelor’s degree for ‘Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology’, was entitled Small Places, Large Issues – a title that aims to make it clear that discussing what happens in a small place, in a small setting, is very often illustrative of very large subjects. This is also the case in Bart Heeling’s book. The stories show a world of children’s experiences. In the way Bart takes his role in these micro-interactions, it becomes clear how much he has an eye and heart for the big themes that lie behind the comments, behaviors and facial expressions of the children in his care. These themes create stress that does not always find a convenient way out; anger from nearby adults certainly does not lead to a newfound sense of security. In my opinion, his answers to what happens show his deep awareness and his constant striving to be the rock in the surf for the child, the regulated adult. What a relief that is for a child who grows up with unrest and chaos, sadness and loneliness, and what an inspiration Bart offers for everyone who fulfills a task in the lives of young children.

In his book, Bart takes a clear position on certain principles:

• Anger should be left behind at all times.
• When you are angry, children do not learn to know their own boundaries, but yours.
• Resistance is an expression of the need for control, which is necessary for survival.
• Positive experiences feed the child’s confidence in you and themselves.
• Recognition and reframing of a strong reaction to a stimulus helps a child to put things into perspective and relax.

This is a small selection of the statements that are peppered throughout the book and which are essentially all a call to the adult to examine their own framework of beliefs. I suppose there is a real chance that this exercise will lead many adults to conclude that they themselves are also ‘simply special’ and have their own dragons and demons to fight. A well-regulated, stable (other) adult is probably helpful for them too. May a book like this contribute to us all using the opportunities that exist to be a source of emotional support for others, big or small. In doing so, we contribute on a very essential level and in a gentle, powerful, compassionate way to the social well-being for which the foundation is laid in childhood, every (school) day again!

What do we know about our ancestors? What do we really know about even our parents? Do we know what they went through during the early stages of their own lives? What emotions and inner beliefs played the leading role in how they met? What did they see in each other that led to our conception? Can we ‘attune’ to them, even if they are gone?

In many cases we know very little. We have an idea of ​​it, but we do not really know. We usually base our ideas about our parents on our experiences with them, on how they interacted with us and others, and on how they organised their lives. And even (or especially!) if we think: “I’m going to do that differently, because this approach doesn’t seem the best to me” or “I’m going to do that differently, because I’m furious about all the pain their approach has caused me”… precisely then there is a good chance that we will repeat patterns. With everything we recognise, or ignore and push away, we often forget that the experiences of our parents and other ancestors are stored in our cells and that whether we believe it or not, we are influenced by those experiences. These are tough, big, sometimes difficult to imagine realities that deserve careful discussion so that we gain more insight into how this works and how we can deal with it.

That is exactly what the book ‘Attuned’ does. Author Thomas Hübl is, in addition to being a writer, also a spiritual teacher and international facilitator of events where he focuses on intergenerational trauma healing and dialogue around oppression, colonialism and racism. He draws on the traditions of modern science, philosophy, theology and indigenous wisdom and rituals. This is a book that requires some prior knowledge for a good understanding, because it is sometimes complicated reading. At the same time, it reads almost like poetry and the meaning of what he writes is moving, comforting and enriching.
The basic premise is that everything and everyone is interconnected and that damaging practices in one place has energetic effects on all other places and organisms in the world:

The nervous system connects us to a complete record, a vast inner library containing all of one’s experiences across a lifetime. In fact, the human nervous system connects us to one another. Through transparent communication practices, we will learn to employ this evolutionary tool for deeper relational intelligence (p. 25, author’s italics).

That is a comprehensive idea. That idea also entails a comprehensive responsibility, because then you can no longer separate the damage you create over there from the situation over here, the pain in others from the pain in yourself – and the healing of the world from the healing you are willing to initiate within yourself.

Each of us has a chance to take part in this vital work, to bring our share of light and healing coherence to a struggling world. (…) By upholding our sacred responsibility to integrate trauma, we, in effect, remove our shares from the collective trauma field, lessoning the overall burden of suffering for others. This is not merely something some of us should do; it is work that all of us who are conscious and capable must do (p. 197, author’s italics).

As in many approaches to healing, Thomas’s work also has a strong emphasis on the importance of ‘embodiment’, awareness around personal experiences of sadness and pain and loneliness. You cannot ‘analyse’ the pain away; healing requires ‘presence’ – being present with your full attention and allowing the pain that is stored in your own cells and in the cells of loved ones, ancestors, acquaintances and distant strangers to penetrate into every fibre of your body. If you do not do this, there will be consequences:

Simply choosing not to know, feel, or reckon with the truth of who we once were is a decision to keep the truth hidden in darkness. (…) [B]y refusing to awaken to the consequence of the ancestor’s choices, we both suffer and perpetuate them. (…) When we carry unacknowledged familial or historical traumas, our ancestors are not in peace. As a result, our living nervous systems – and, therefore, our minds and bodies – cannot maintain a healthy state of flow (p.170, 171).

The result is ultimately illness and social malaise, as Thomas describes in various places in the book. It is therefore important to be aware of your own experiences with grief and loss, so that you can compassionately be conscious with what the other person is going through. This is often called ‘empathy’, but empathy is an exciting topic and requires personal development and awareness. A long quote:

How do I protect myself from taking on other people’s “stuff”? People everywhere seem to be looking for an answer to this puzzling question. In contemporary vernacular, the word empath is often seen as someone who struggles with what we might call “leaky emotional syndrome,” the problem of experiencing other people’s energies and confusing them with their own or simply feeling overwhelmed by others’ emotions. Some people may, in fact, have a higher de-gree of sensitivity, and they may suffer in this way. However, it’s usually not high sensitivity but a lack of groundedness and embodiment that causes the overwhelm – often rooted in attachment injuries. Healing the root trauma creates a more stable sense of embodiment, which allows a person to experience their high sensitivity as a gift rather than a curse. We might think of it like a tree with a very large crown of branches; it needs equally strong roots to stand (p. 91, author’s italics).

The book is an impressive combination of knowledge about physical, mental and spiritual processes. Thomas thus shows in a holistic manner how all these aspects of human existence are related. He sees three fundamental human rights in this context, namely ‘the right of being, the right of becoming (the unfolding of potential), and the right of belonging (the right to build healthy relational bonds and to experience oneself as part of a community)’’ (p. 19). Without respect for these ‘fundamental expressions of the soul’ (p. 19), mutual bonds and social systems, including families and governments, will collapse, according to Thomas.
When we develop the skills associated with ‘relational intelligence’, an interpersonal dynamic is created that stimulates growth:

To heal the past and create greater coherence in the present – ​​and, therefore, more availability to the future – three steps are essential: reflection, digestion, and integration. (…) When this process is allowed to happen, especially in the context of a supportive environment, we often experience positive changes or posttraumatic growth (p. 125,126, author’s italics).

It sometimes feels like an impossible task, with everything going on in the world, to maintain the feeling that you can make a difference, but Thomas has a positive view on this:

Only a small number of us – a critical mass, if you will – is required to engage before a new level of collective coherence becomes established in sympathetic resonance, ringing like a tuning fork across the field, inviting the entire world to join (p. 190 ).

“But the problem is way too big!”, you may shout, “and it is not about me at all, because it is about the planet, ecological problems and climate change. These issues must be solved!” Attention is also being paid to this:

Gus Speth, the American environmental lawyer and former US senior advisor on climate change, has said, “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, eco-system collapse, and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems, I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apa-thy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation” Speth is right, of course, but it’s important to note that the selfishness, greed, and apathy he mentions are , in truth, only symptoms of the larger problem, which is our unaddressed collective shadow and unhealed collective trauma. It is our willingness to awaken to, experience, and transform these root causes that create the cultural and spiritual transformation Speth prescribes (p. 189, author’s italics).

This is a book where reading once is not enough; this is a treasure chest to which you can return regularly to absorb what is said even more thoroughly and to integrate its wisdom even more deeply. I underlined a lot of things and put lots of comments and emojis in the margins so I can easily find back the valuable passages. It was wonderful to go through the chapters together with colleagues from the ‘book club’ within my Compassionate Inquiry-community and to share with each other what the text evoked. I highly recommend such a review of ‘Attuned,’ as well as much of the other work by Thomas Hübl that can easily be found on the web. Every year he also hosts the online ‘Collective Trauma Summit’ – also a source of valuable insights.