As a child of an African immigrant married to a Jewish Holocaust survivor, it has been a survival of two streams of very oppressed people for Nkem Ndefo. Nkem shares that her whole life has been fertile soil for transgenerational trauma, survival and resilience. Nkem Ndefo is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. She is working with organizations and social service in healthcare and education around trauma. Nkem addresses what is important to do before you embark on the journey of healing trauma. Listen to Nkem’s enlightening interview to gain perspective on healing for different types of trauma.
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The following interview is from the series called While We Were Silent. In the wake of the events that fueled the #MeToo Movement, a lot of questions have been coming up. Why would someone stay silent about abuse and then speak up twenty years after the event happened? My experience is that silence is the norm, not the exception. I wanted to explore the why and help all of us, those who have experienced sexual trauma and abuse and those who have not, to understand why people do not speak up and what happens in them during the periods of silence. While We Were Silent is an interview series with experts in healing from the trauma of sexual abuse and each one of these experts was chosen because they themselves have experienced sexual trauma and they’ve walked the path of healing and now they’re helping others to heal.
These interviews tell their stories and they explore opportunities for healing. They also explore what is shifting in our mass consciousness as the culture and our humanity has an incredible opportunity to heal from this undercurrent that is present in our culture. That has allowed the prevalence of sexual abuse to exist for so very long. This is a conversation that is timely, it’s relevant, and it’s so important to our culture right now. I want to thank you for being here and for hanging in there with us and I do hope that you will receive value from these interviews.
Listen to the podcast here:
While We Were Silent: Accessing The Resilience Toolkit To Heal Trauma with Nkem Ndefo
Our guest is Nkem Ndefo. Welcome, Nkem.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for being here. I greatly appreciate your presence here and your wisdom that you’re going to be sharing with us. Nkem Ndefo, she has a Master’s in Nursing, a certified nurse midwife, and a registered nurse. She is the Founder of Lumos Transforms and the creator of The Resilience Toolkit. She is a skilled practitioner, a dynamic speaker, and a valued strategist. She is known for her unique ability to connect with people of all types by holding powerful healing spaces, weaving complex concepts into accessible narratives and creating synergistic and collaborative learning communities that nourish people’s innate capacity for healing, wellness, and connection. Nkem, can you start off by telling us about your story and what led you to do all these wonderful things that you’re doing in the world now?
In hindsight, I can see lots of little and big events in my life and my family history, just in my experience, that point me to, “How could I be doing anything other than what I’m doing? I was born to do this work.”Going forward, it wasn’t so clear. My experience as a child of an African immigrant, married to an Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe who left before the Holocaust that left in the Pogroms, it’s a survival of two streams of very oppressed people who meet in UC Berkeley in the ‘60s. There was some ripe, fertile soil for transgenerational trauma and survival and resilience and then my own experience of childhood sexual abuse at a very young age as a toddler, a six-year-old, but that went under the surface. We do what we do need to do to survive.
It was not in my consciousness until I had my own child and he turned six and then the stuff started to bubble up. I was already on the path of working with to relieve suffering in all different kinds of ways. From first wanting to be a teacher and then deciding I wanted to be a nurse midwife and then going specifically into holistic health and trauma work. All of those impulses were about how I relieve suffering in the most efficient way, in a way that helps people find their own strength inside of themselves. It’s why I chose to be a nurse midwife versus a doctor, the idea of being with women. All of those things led me to be doing the work that I’m doing now with the desire to empower people or help people find their own self-agency and to work in communities that are particularly marginalized and traumatized in the larger senses.
Can you tell us more about the work that you are doing with people?
I run an organization, Lumos Transforms. Our tagline is, “We’re incubating holistic transformation.” That looks different depending on who we’re working with. We’re based in the Los Angeles area and the bulk of our work is working with organizations in social service, in healthcare, and in education around trauma-informed, resilience-informed, training for staffs, and working with their clients. We work with some marginalized and vulnerable populations, people experiencing homelessness and chronic mental illness. We also provide direct services to people in the community throughout the LA area, though we do have little offshoots in New York and in Vancouver.
One of our services is called The Resilience Toolkit. This is helping people, and it dovetails nicely with your While We Were Silent Project. It’s a way to help people build internal resilience before they’re about to launch into trauma healing. It’s the capacity-building before the transformation. That’s the big focus, is the capacity-building before the transformation. When we’re talking about individuals who’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse, who’ve experienced sexual assault, that sometimes the rush to the healing part, there are some steps that we need to be resourced first before we can jump into the content. A good part of our work as an organization is helping communities and individuals and organizations to resource themselves in advance of transformation.
You are a TRE specialist also, right?
I am trained in TRE, I don’t currently practice TRE in that model for a number of reasons. I still use what’s called the therapeutic tremor, which exists in TRE, but it exists in many different modalities, some of them going back thousands of years.
Can you tell us a little bit about that tremor response? That’s interesting and powerful to understand that concept.
What we recognize is that all mammals have what’s called the therapeutic tremor, and this tremor is used in the body spontaneously to help downregulate or settle down a high charged experience. Not necessarily fully just trauma, it’s the high stress experience as well. You see it in two places. You see it as people, their charge is starting to rise. Their stress is starting to rise. They may start to tremble, and in a way, this is often seen as pathological. Something’s wrong with you. You’re weak, but it’s your body’s way to keep you from going into a freeze or shutdown state. It’s well known out in North American culture as choking. If athletes getting up to perform or someone’s getting up to speak and they freeze, they choked. That tremoring is to keep the body from doing that lockup.
On the other side of a trauma where there was a freeze response or a very high charge, that the body will tremor and shake to downregulate and reset the nervous system. This movement has been recognized across the world in many practices, whether they’re spiritual practices, whether they’re medical or healing systems or art, many cultures don’t separate art practices from healing practices like dance. In many cultures around the world, you see the recognition of the value of the therapeutic tremor, and it’s incorporated into these practices and rituals. In North America or Western Europe, it has been pathologized. The body has been pathologized in general. There’s a sense that it’s wrong, that it’s weak, it needs to be medicated, it needs to be shutdown. TRE is one way to connect to it. I have some problems with the idea of the release of TRE tension, the release exercise, because I don’t believe that all traumas can be released.
I saw a client who was in a car accident, a deliberate and intentional act of violence. That’s a shock trauma. That level of shock in the system isn’t released, but if we’re talking about childhood sexual abuse, most often, that occurred at the hands of a caregiver or some trusted adult. It may have occurred one time or over a long period of time, and two things that make that different. One, is it occurred when we were children, when our nervous system was still developing. It changes how the structure and the function of the nervous system, the hormone system, and the immune system is literally transformed through that experience. Second, this abuse happens in the context of a caregiving or relational aspect. It’s twisted into that relationship and often, if we’re dependent on that person for our basic survival needs, it’s even more complicated.
The idea of releasing a complex trauma that happened when our systems were developing or happened in the context of relationship, you can’t release your brain or your nervous system. It needs to be re-patterned and reshaped. I’ve found with TRE that people often wanted to think, “If I’m going to release, it’s going to be catharsis. I’m going to get this out.” For some people, if they’re not well-resourced then it’s really a complex trauma, that can be deeply destabilizing. They need to slow down and has resource people first using the tremor. You can use the tremor in different ways, but as a way to help settle your system and build capacity before dealing with the content.
Hence The Resiliency Toolkit that comes first. Thank you so much for giving that additional information. That’s very helpful for people to understand. This project called While We Were Silent, can you tell us in your experience with yourself, with others, and with the people that you work with, when someone has experienced a trauma, specially sexual trauma or a violation, why do they struggle with the silence? Why keep it silent? What is going on there?
There are all kinds of reasons and some of them are biological. A good number of them are cultural, others are interpersonal dynamics that happened in the context of culture. If I start on the largest piece, we live in North America as a patriarchy. If we’re talking about women in particular or people who identify as women, we are at the receiving end of that patriarchal oppression. Our voices don’t matter as much, our opinions don’t matter as much, our well-being does not matter as much, and we live in a culture where the law and practices and everything about the culture is devaluing to women identified people’s words and experiences. When we grow up in this zoo, we’re taught that we shouldn’t be angry. Women shouldn’t be angry. That’s unbecoming of a woman. We should be accommodating. There are all different kinds of cultural messages that are telling us to be quiet, to not rock the boat, telling us to accommodate other people’s needs. That our job is to serve. Our job is to take care of or tend to other people.
Men and women live in this patriarchy. We live in this. This conspires on all accounts for us to be quiet. Can we say what happens in a family dynamic? Everybody in that family was socialized in this culture. I don’t think North America has the stranglehold on patriarchy. Recognizing how many forces conspire to keep us quiet and for our voices to matter. Even if you were to buck the system and speak up, again it conspires that. How do we tear down your message? How do we discredit you as a person? How do we shame you back into your role that the culture who wants to hold women in? That is probably the larger reason that women are quiet.
Sometimes the rush to the healing part forgets that we need to be resourced first before we can jump into the content. Share on XTying it back to biology, mammals, we live together in connection. We take care of each other. If we were growing up as in hunter-gatherer situation where if we are exiled from the group, there are wild animals that will happily munch us for lunch and dinner. Being in the group, even if the group is not the best for us, it’s better than being dead. The idea of shame is we are saying you’re a bad person, you’re out of the group. That touches some very deep and primitive biology that our survival is dependent on being part of the group. It’s not that I just want to fit in, it’s a survival impulse. For me to speak up about abuse, I am bucking biology, I am bucking society, and I’m bucking culture. It’s beyond brave.
At a very deep level that putting your own survival at risk and your own safety at risk.
If we want to use the model of interpersonal violence, domestic violence, where many people who are experiencing that on the receiving end of that go into a free state to protect themselves. A freeze state is where the body shuts down in a way. We can literally freeze, like this idea that we can’t move at all, or in a more metaphorical way, where we feel stuck, powerless, hopeless, and there’s nothing we can do. We feel numb. We feel disconnected. That freeze state is probably a safer space for somebody to be in with act of violence going on because we know that when they start to speak up, when they start to fight back, if they start to leave, that is the more likely time that they’re going to be injured or possibly killed. It’s not that we made it up in our heads. There are so many forces that conspired to keep us quiet.
When someone does make that step or take that step to break through the silence and to make a change in their situation, what do you see is the greatest opportunity for healing? I want to help to paint the possibilities for healing.
The possibilities of healing are tremendous. There is something going on in the culture right now about what MeToo has definitely brought us. The possibilities of healing are endless. I just want to not pathologize people for staying quiet. When we talk about the gravity of what someone’s going up against, we’re acknowledging their bravery and we’re also not minimizing those people who for whatever their life circumstances are still quiet. It’s important. That might be the safest thing for them right now and we see you. We’re not judging you if you need to be quiet right now.
In terms of what is it that somebody taps within themselves, what is it that makes it okay for somebody to finally speak up? I don’t know when the tipping point happens and I don’t think it’s the same for person. The biggest opportunity is you get to reconnect to your whole self in power. One of our culture’s biggest lies is that women are powerful and it’s because the culture knows how powerful women are. We’re afraid of our voices and the ability to connect to not just our individual power, but our collective power, that that becomes liberated. The power is not to destroy; the power is to create something new. A new life, a new experience, a new culture, those are the possibilities of us speaking up.
This is on the individual level as well as on the collective level. What do you see as a possibility of what our future holds as we’re going through this movement? The biggest passion that I have around doing this particular event and getting these interviews and this information out to people is I want to piggyback on what you just said about that it might not be the time for someone to speak up, but know that we hear you and we see you.
It’s important to know that you’re not alone. What really lit a spark inside of me to do this project was to let people know what resources are available and what’s possible for our collective, for our world, as well as the individual. Finding that power and that wholeness inside of ourselves. What are insights from you about what the future will hold? At some point, enough people will come forward that there will be a tipping point on the mass culture. What do you see as the possibilities? What does the future hold for us then?
The immediate future is bumpy because what’s happening culturally is people are coming out of freeze. People that identify as women are coming out of freeze and when you come out freeze, you don’t immediately come into a subtle place. You come into fight-or-flight. This is very important to recognize. We’re going to see anger. We’re going to see a lot of intensity, and this is normal. It’s how we skillfully navigate through our anger and make sure that it is a productive anger, that it is a righteous and justice-seeking anger, that is not a small and punitive and rigid, because then we’re just recreating the structures that we came from.
Navigating this is like a cautionary tale. How do we navigate this into a settled place? What kind of healing resources do we use individually and collectively to settle into a social connected and relaxed and safe place from which beautiful generative creativity about what this is going to look like? What is this new culture going to look like where there is inclusivity, where there is acknowledgement, where there is flexibility, and all these beautiful qualities of connectiveness?
The organization has been doing work with pregnant and parenting teenagers, which no one does want to talk about that. Virtually, 100% of them have a history of childhood sexual abuse. Same thing also with people experiencing trafficking. People want to talk about the trafficking, but the antecedent, at least in North America, almost all of them is childhood sexual abuse. It’s harder to talk about when it’s closer. It’s easier to talk about what it’s over there. When we see and we work with folks who have these extreme experiences as they start to come out of those experiences, they’re mad.
Being able to hold the anger and understand the anger and witness the anger and not shut people down is so important. To connect to ourselves, our spirit, each other, and to our creativity is so important through this healing process that it can’t be just telling your story. Telling our story is not the same as healing. It’s a piece of it. Remember that we still all have to continue to do our collective healing work. As we get into communities that recognizes more the potential for what healing can look like, we’ll just expand. What we can imagine is based on our own limited vision at this point.
It does remain to be seen. The story is still unfolding. At the same time, as you say, it’s bumpy. We don’t really know how it’s going to unfold. It’s very much a mirror of what happens individually, that bumpy road that we travel on when we start that healing journey. It’s the same for the collective, because the collective body has that same path to travel. What would you tell someone, that one person who is here, who is still struggling in silence or perhaps embarking on that healing path, that healing journey and taking those steps? What would you say to that one person?
“I see you. I believe you. You’ve made it through. You are a survivor. The hardest part is already behind you and you don’t have to do this alone.”Those words are important for us, to even say to ourselves, “I see you,” because there are so many messages that are invalidating our experiences.
We don’t even want to hear them ourselves when they’re coming from inside so much of the time.
She was eighteen in New York City who was not arrested but put in a police car and raped by the police officers and how she would not be silenced. She stood up, she spoke up, and she got on social media. There were detractors, but her supporters rallied around her. There’s still a bumpy path of healing. That’s rough, but she’s not alone. That is one of the advantages of social media and that we can connect to each other across time and across space and really form some of those more collective and healing spaces. I also want to say healing is different for everybody. Part of healing is discovering what works for you. There’s a lot of, “You should do this, you should do that. Here’s the way.” That might have worked for somebody and know that there are many ways to get there and that you can form your own path. That literally is part of your healing, is because you begin to reconnect to one.
If someone says, “This is the way you heal, you use this,” and then a survivor reaches for it and it’s not feeling good in their body, the history is saying, “I can’t say this doesn’t feel good in my body. I can’t stop. It replicates the abuse.” One of the things that we have in The Resilience Toolkit is we encourage people to find what works for you. I’ll be working with a group of youth and a kid says, “That doesn’t feel good to me,” I give them a high five and they look. Where do we give children the permission to say, “I don’t like that. That doesn’t feel good in my body. Stop.” We want them to be able to say it, but we don’t give them the permission. Even in a lot of healing modalities, we don’t give people permission to say, “Stop. This doesn’t feel good. I don’t like this.” As a survivor, as you’re working through your healing, your ability to reclaim your voice about what works and doesn’t work for you is tremendously part of your journey.
Those words that you have to say when you said, “I believe you,” that went in so deep for me. For everyone, if that went in deep for you, back it up and play that again over and over again. Then as Nkem said, “Say it to yourself. Go look in the mirror and say these words to yourself,” because you so often we have so much fear or shame that we don’t even want to say the words to ourselves. That’s one of the steps, is coming to terms with ourselves. Thank you for that. This is a wonderful interview. I so greatly appreciate you taking the time and sharing your experience and your wisdom with us. Your words are very powerful. Can you tell people how to get in touch with you if they would like to reach out to you?
First, I just want to say thank you so much for doing this project, for highlighting and spotlighting the experience of survivors in silence as they start to speak and having spoken and the collective voice rising. I want to thank you for that and including me in this project. My own organization, Lumos Transforms, we’re on all social media platforms and our website is LumosTransforms.com. I can be found personally on Twitter. Just look my name, Nkem Ndefo. Reach out and let us share because we’re very interested as an organization, not just in the people we reach individually through our services, the organizations we reached, the communities, we’re interested in shaping dialogue and talking about issues and highlighting people’s experiences. We love having those kinds of conversations. Definitely reach out.
Your Resilience Toolkit, is that available online?
In Vancouver, New York, and the Los Angeles area, you can take it in person. It’s available online, and then if you have an organization, we’d sponsor your virtual trainings or travel and do that as well.
Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing. I want to thank everyone for being a part of this program. If you want to continue the conversation, join us in the Facebook group. It’s called While We Were Silent. You’ll see all of the links for Nkem’s information, for her website, and for our Facebook group accompanying this interview. Please join us. Continue the conversation, reach out. If you’ve been touched by Nkem’s words and the work that she’s doing, please reach out to her and to her organization at LumosTransforms.com. Please know that you are not alone. As Nkem said, “We see you. We hear you. We believe you.” Be true to your heart. Thank you.
Thank you.
About Nkem Ndefo
Nkem Ndefo, MSN (masters in nursing), CNM (certified nurse midwife), RN (registered nurse), is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. She is a skilled practitioner, dynamic speaker, and valued strategist.
She is known for her unique ability to connect with people of all types by holding powerful healing spaces, weaving complex concepts into accessible narratives, and creating synergistic and collaborative learning communities that nourish people’s innate capacity for healing, wellness, and connection.
Connect with Nkem and Lumos Transforms:
Web: www.lumostransforms.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/LumosTransforms
Twitter: www.twitter.com/LumosTransforms
Instagram: www.instagram.com/lumos_transforms
Important Links:
- While We Were Silent
- #MeToo MovementE
- The Resilience Toolkit
- Nkem Ndefo
- Lumos Transforms
- LumosTransforms.com
- While We Were Silent – Facebook
