Host Dr. James Flowers, Co-Host Robin French, and VIP Guest Dr. Judith Landau discuss Dr. Landau’s 40+ years in exploring how to facilitate resilience and healing for individuals, families and communities through collaborative care. Dr. Landau educates the audience on the hard work of the ARISE Network as well as all of her current/upcoming projects.
Guest Social Media Handles:
Facebook: Arise Network
Instagram: Arise-Network
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/1599313/admin/
LinkedIn Personal: Judith Landau
Twitter: Arise Network
Twitter Personal: @jlandauARISE JFHI
Social Media Handles: J. Flowers Health Institute Facebook, J. Flowers Health Institute Instagram, J. Flowers Health Institute Twitter, J. Flowers Health Institute LinkdIn
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Listen to the podcast here
Why Survival Depends On Family And Community Resilience With Dr. Judith Landau
Welcome to Understanding the Human Condition with your host, Dr. James Flowers. Dr. Landau, thank you for joining us. We’ve been looking forward to this.
Pleasure.
I’m going to read a little bio, and then we can get off with some good conversation. Dr. Landau, child, family, and community neuropsychiatrist and former professor of psychiatry and family medicine, has specialized in mental health, trauma, addiction, and co-occurring disorders for 40-plus years, exploring how to facilitate resilience and healing for individuals, families, and communities through collaborative care. She is the developer of evidence-based best practices, Transitional Family Therapy, TFT, the first integrative family systems model, Invitational Intervention, ARISE, Comprehensive Care, Link Community Resilience, and LIFE, Link Individual Empowerment, all based on TFT.
She has over 200 publications, has taught in over 100 countries, is a senior Fulbright scholar, and the recipient of numerous awards. She has also served as a consultant to the UN, the World Health Organization, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the CDC, SAMHSA, and several international governments. Welcome. That’s awesome. Very impressive.
That is amazing, just hearing that. I have the pleasure of calling Dr. Landau a dear friend and a dear colleague. We’ve worked together and traveled the world together, and I’m so excited to see you. I haven’t seen you in a year because of COVID. I think my first question, Dr. Landau, is, tell us about your experience over the year of being home during COVID. How are you? How’s Pam? We’ll start with that.
The ultimate irony was that I was consulting with World Health on how to deal with the impending crisis of COVID on the first and second of March, and I came home with their variant.
That is ironic.
First-hand experience. A couple of years ago, we had decided to close down our physical office and start working virtually to make sure our programming was all available virtually. We were very lucky to be ahead of the curve and have had a lot of fun honing things, but I miss friends, not being able to give you a hug, and meeting new friends like Robbin. I can’t hug you either. It’s been tough not seeing grandchildren in person, but I am deeply grateful for Zoom and other social media and connection tools that allow us to maintain relationships. Still, it’ll be wonderful when we can all travel again and be with people in person.
It will, absolutely. Thank goodness, I believe both you and Pam had your second vaccine. Is that right?
That is, and we both had COVID, and we both had our second vaccine. Our first trip will be to see the youngest granddaughter in Minnesota. We’ll be able to have Passover together, it’ll be the first holiday we can celebrate together in a year. Pam is skiing up a storm, doing her job on the mountain.
I think she’s out there. That’s amazing. And the rest of your family as well? Have they fared COVID fairly well?
Most of them have already had their vaccines, other than the little ones.
Inherent Resilience
Good. Wonderful. I know most of the audience, if not all of the audience, knows who you are. Robbin, that was an amazing bio, and a brief one because Dr. Landau’s done so much more. But something I loved was your TED Talk. Can you tell the audience a little bit about your TED Talk and the many different cultural communities you’re from and how that’s affected your own human condition?
Great. The TED Talk really grew out of a lot of my travels and experiences with different families and different cultures. I grew up, as many of you know, in South Africa, which is a multicultural society with eleven official languages and as many different religions and practices. During the times of apartheid, where things were very much like growing up in a war zone, I saw my first murder when I was five and was part of a family on the forefront of fighting apartheid. I think one of the things I’m proudest of is being in the Apartheid Museum for having been part of the struggle. It’s colored who I am.
One of the things that really impressed me, and has been a huge part of who I am and how I work, is the realization during those early years of trauma that it was our support from our social system that made everything worthwhile. I was the oldest of 34 non-blood siblings. We always knew, even when one of the parents was in prison for bad activities, or someone had escaped over the border, or parents were under a banning order, which meant they couldn’t have visitors, there were always other parents around to take care of us. There was this sense of shared mission and connection, that even when my father died when I was six, it was devastating, but I didn’t feel completely alone.
The other part of that was growing up as he developed the field of social and preventive medicine. We lived in many different cultural and ethnic communities. Learning to be a traditional African healer from the age of three, there was that sense of all the stories of the ancestors and something much larger than I was. When I went through part of medical school, even though I had thought I would spend my life as a traditional healer, I realized there was more to it. I struggled to balance healing with a very cut-and-dried cause-and-effect medical model, along with my conviction that our connection to the people we love and who support us is what makes us whole and healthy. Those were really the primary driving forces.
Our connection to the people we love and who support us is what makes us whole and healthy.
My early research was on attachment or connectedness, and on working cross-culturally, trying to find a way of connecting with people regardless of their beliefs or cultural norms. I tried desperately as a child to learn all eleven languages and to learn about all the different religions, from the Judeo-Christian to the Bushmen who worship a praying mantis, a little tiny stick creature, and the Erlant, which is the giant antelope. What I realized was that what all of us, as humans and as living creatures, have in common is that we’re all in transition. My research expanded into looking at how we can work across cultures using transition as a universal theme and how we access that inherent resilience that I believe, from my healing experiences, is in every living thing. Sorry, that was a very long answer.
I love that. I want to talk about your father and his influence on your life in a minute, but I want to ask you, do you speak Afrikaans?
What all of us as humans and as living creatures have in common is that we’re all inherently resilient.
Yes.
Can you say something in Afrikaans? Because I love the language.
Ek is baie bly om hier te wees.
What does that mean?
I’m very glad to be here.
Father’s Influence
Thank you so much. I love that language. It’s a beautiful language. I did want to just visit with you about your father and his influence on your life. He passed away when you were six years old, I know, but he had built a hospital, and you went back and visited that hospital as an adult, and they honored you, the community honored you. Can you talk about what that experience was like and the influence that your father had on your own life and becoming who you are today?
It’s always been a theme for me that we all knew he had died because of the political hardship. He had a massive heart attack. What he had started was his mission to reduce infant mortality and improve health and education. He had started community and health centers all across the country. Just prior to his death, he had been appointed as head of a new government federal department of social and preventive medicine. What it meant was that, as a little child, I lived in each of those communities and learned each of those languages and customs.
With his encouragement, I learned the strengths of each of them and also the importance of health and prevention being psychosocial, cultural, and ecological, because his teams were nurses, doctors, educators, agriculturalists, farmers, people who could really bring complete or holistic health to an area, and educating the women who believed firmly in the equality of all humans. That’s been a prevalent theme for me. When his team was disbanded, they went all over the world and started the prevention social medicine departments in other countries and cities. I think I had no intention of going to medical school. I was going to be a healer, and I was going to be an actress.
You did the healing part.
I still do the acting. I can’t be teaching lots of people without using some of their skills.
I love that. Robbin, I think you were going to ask a question.
Trauma Survivors
Not at all. You mentioned in your TED Talk that you felt like all of us are trauma survivors. In fact, there was one part in the presentation I was watching where you asked everyone who’s a trauma survivor to raise their hand, and only a couple of people did. Then you said that you really felt like all of us, because of our backgrounds, are trauma survivors. Can you expand on that and explain to the audience?
Yes, I think that takes us back to your original question that I wandered off on the little bunny trail tangentially. Traveling around the world and looking for resilience, what I realized was that we all have trauma and resilience stories. In the TEDx talk, the example I use is intergenerational migration or pioneers and refugees, but in fact, with all our families who are here in this world, we are survivor families. I started to look at the intergenerational stories going back 5 to 7 generations of families who were still struggling with addiction or had struggled with addiction in the past. What I discovered was that one could trace back to the first trauma, whether it was the loss of a lot of babies, a war, a natural disaster, or generations of suicide and depression.
All our families who are here in the world are survivor families.
What I found was that people who had not found a way of accessing their resilience and surviving got severely depressed, committed suicide, and were not survivors. That branch of the family stopped there. Whereas what I saw with those who had survived and continued to survive was that, by the third to fifth generation, the addiction or depression had almost completely stopped without any outside intervention. I started looking more carefully at what was going on in those families, and I realized that, across the passage of time, without any external intervention, grieving gets resolved in the natural course of generational growth.
That had me realize that we need to view addiction and overcoming depression, or getting treated for depression, as resilience rather than as a major problem or something to be ashamed or blamed for, because those were the survivors. They found a way of dealing with the overwhelming grief and loss. I chose immigration as the theme because, again, it’s a universal theme where, when we move, even if it’s locally, Holmes and Ray found that moving house was the highest on the individual stress scale. I looked at what it means when we move. What are the transitions involved? What are the tasks related to each transition? Where most of us, in an everyday situation, deal with three transitions at a time, at most three at a time, more than that throws us off track.
When I added up transitions and tasks for people who are migrating, and the more stressful the migration, like refugees and mass disasters, the more tasks, if we have three transitions, and each of them has 4 or 5 tasks, which is the average above what we normally do in a war zone or after a mass disaster, people have 12 to 15 transitions. Each of those has up to 30 or 40 additional tasks. That’s why, when we have three or more transitions, we start to get stressed, and somebody needs to find a way of accessing their neuropsychological survival by finding whether it’s a substance, listening to music, or playing with a pet.
It’s so interesting that we’re talking about this at this very moment. What was running through my mind, first of all, I was going to ask you to tell us if you use this theory and this research that you’ve done in your trainings at ARISE. Before I do that, I was going to say, the temperature in Houston in the winter is typically 50 degrees. Over the days, it was 5 or 6 degrees above zero.
I have two staff members in Texas. My assistant, Yoda, they have no electricity and water for five days.
My home had no power and no water for five days. The bathroom wall ceiling collapsed when the water started thawing. The garage apartment ceiling collapsed with water coming through the end of the floors. I’m okay. There are so many people, millions of people, or hundreds of thousands of people in Houston, that their homes and their pipes burst, and they have no water, and they have no electricity, very little access to food, that don’t have the resources or the resilience to really even understand what to do. What advice would you give families that are going through a recent natural disaster and trauma?
You’ve just highlighted the key pieces, which are that the reason we get stressed with major transitions is an imbalance between resources and stresses. I know that you have emotional resources, you have intellectual resources, you have friends and social connections, and you have a cell phone. I know that through this, you could maintain your connectedness to supports, and no matter how painful the experience was, you would survive because you know how to access those resources.
The reason we get stressed with major transitions is an imbalance between resources and spaces.
That’s right.
If we look at the majority of people going through a mass disaster, they don’t have any of those resources. They don’t have the people to support them, they don’t have the finances, and they don’t know how. One of the things that I looked at was how many people of the artificial or professional or ancillary support system does it take to replace one family member or close friend? It’s five. If we look at people in a situation like that who don’t have the supports, they have to rely on a huge amount of external support that isn’t easily accessible in a lot of places, particularly during a mass disaster. At the same time, back twenty years ago, the average American had three confidants, close friends that they would share things with. We’re down to 0 to 1.
Absolutely agree.
The social media moguls came together, and I happened to be working with a consultant who consulted to them at the time in a different situation. They had decided that within ten years, adolescents would connect more through social media than to their families. They made it in five years. We’re looking at a reduction of resources, which makes the stress even greater. My advice is to reach out to people you know, reach out to neighbors. We had an ice storm when I was teaching in Rochester, and we lost power for about two weeks.
The neighborhood organized so that the person who had a generator could go from house to house. Everybody took their food from their fridge and freezer to the one house that had a gas stove. The neighborhood became much closer. I think the only survival in a situation like that, where the situation isn’t going to get mended fast, is that connection to others and pooling resources.
ARISE Network
From this, already what we’re seeing in Houston and other parts of the country because of COVID, on top of this natural disaster that hit Houston, is stress levels going even higher. We’ve had so many natural disasters in Houston over the last couple of years. What does that do to the alcoholic, the drug addict, and the people in new recovery?
With your company, which I follow and have participated in and just idolize, and you’re a huge mentor of mine, talk to us a little bit about ARISE and how ARISE helps with interventions. How can people reach an ARISE-trained interventionist? Whether it’s Houston needing an intervention for someone that’s drinking or using substances, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, because ARISE is such a valuable resource in this world. It’s not just in the United States. You have ARISE-trained therapists in every country in the world.
Not quite, but one day. I think the easiest answer to that is that, first of all, ARISE doesn’t just deal with substance use disorder but with all the other behavioral issues. Also, our certified ARISE specialists are receiving a lot of calls about the elderly developing dementia. They don’t have resources at this time because anybody who’s already disadvantaged, whether it’s mentally, physically, socially, or economically, is going to be under much more stress. Our ARISE folks deal with all of those. The easiest way to access them, once people are either in training with us in the internship or certified, is through our website.
They all work independently. We don’t get a cut. It’s all individual relationships with professionals. That website is www.ARISE-network.com. It’s easy to find right on the homepage, with instructions there. The other thing I wanted to mention is that one of our other transitional family therapy protocols is linked community resilience. We often get called into communities after issues like this. We mobilize the whole community and make sure that they are in charge of whatever happens. They take credit for change. We’ve done many projects around the world where nobody knows we were ever there.
The community drives the healing, and all of the decisions are made based on their own inherent resilience. We use a lot of intergenerational approaches. In all of the protocols, we listen to intergenerational stories and look for intergenerational strengths. We always look for strengths rather than vulnerabilities. How are people accessing their capacity to heal, rather than looking through a pathological lens?
It’s such a service that’s needed, not only in Texas, but really all over the world with what we’ve gone through in 2020 and really continue to go through in 2021. I know it’s getting better. You and I have been vaccinated, and we’re trying to get that out as much as possible. You’re such a pioneer in your field and such an expert, and you bring so much to the world. I just thank you so much for what you do. Robbin, is there anything that you want to try to wrap up with here?
Let me just say that it’s not what I do, it’s what I’ve been gifted to do. I think that for all of us, if we’re able to act on our mission and maintain that spiritual connection, we can all do wonderful things.
I say, Dolly Parton turned down the state of Tennessee. They wanted to put a statue at the Capitol, but I say we put a statue of you in Colorado.
You can imagine how we feel about that. No, thank you. That statue needs to be for the people who’ve survived.
You’ve been a survivor as well, Robbin?
LINC Foundation
I was curious about your work in Appalachia. How did all that begin? Maybe touch on that a little bit.
Our foundation, LINC Foundation, that one is www.LINCFoundation.org. My passion has always been working with disadvantaged communities. We do a lot of that through the LINC Foundation. We also do scholarships for training, those kinds of things. Working in Appalachia has been a combination of people reaching out to us. We’ve done quite a bit of work in Appalachia through Hazelton, Baird, and Ford. One of the people there discovered our work and asked us to train people for several states in ARISE, ARISE Comprehensive Care with Invitational Intervention. We also have done some work in parts of Appalachia, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Alaska.
There’s Alaska because of the enormity of the challenges of climate change. Also, working with the International Resilience Center, we’re focusing on climate change prevention. The theme is the same, how do we access resilience in individuals, families, and communities so that they can design their own healing path? One of the things that I talked about a little bit in the TEDx talk, but it’s in a number of the publications which are on our websites, is that once people have found a way of surviving, they deal with trauma differently. Once they’re able to access resilience, the entire intergenerational family story changes. If we can work, for example, in Argentina, mobilizing communities, within two years, they had a 400% increase in young substance abusers going for treatment.
In Kosovo, they developed health, mental health, and substance abuse services that were decentralized. They have health houses in every region where nobody can come without a family member or friend. With people with schizophrenia, who normally really struggle to take medication and attend appointments, they have a 98% compliance rate.
That’s amazing.
It’s mobilizing the community to design their own pathway so that they own it. They’ve selected what they want to work on, how they’re going to do it, and what’s important to them, rather than what’s important to us.
That’s right. That’s amazing. The 98% success rate, help me understand what that’s related to one more time.
That was with people with schizophrenia taking their medication and attending appointments reliably, and 1% of the 2% that weren’t reliable were because of roadblocks after the war.
Just amazing. That’s fantastic.
It really wasn’t all we did. What we do is with all of these interventions, we provide a process to the family and the community. They bring the content and the goals and take credit for change. We work through family and community links and ARISE the link is the person who calls us. We don’t wait for our person of concern to hit bottom because bottom these days often means death.
That’s right.
We work with the family’s bottom, whoever calls us first, whether it’s a family member or a friend, we work with their bottom to mobilize the resources and get everybody healthy, not just one person. The family gets healthy with life. It’s about getting the group and their families healthy. With LINC, it’s about getting a community healthy.
Just amazing work.
Unfortunately, we have our two-minute warning. Is there anything, Dr. Landau, that we didn’t touch on that you’d like the audience to know about? You mentioned how to reach you through ARISE and LINC. Is there any other email or phone number that you want to share?
I’d have to look it up.
The best way to do it is you can certainly Google Judith Landau.
We’ll go to one of the websites. I’m so sorry.
There’s plenty of information out there if you put your name in, for sure. Dr. Flowers, if they want to reach you at the J. Flowers Health Institute, how do they reach you?
I think the best way, just like with Dr. Landau, is www.JFlowersHealth.com. Go to our website, and you can certainly look us up on there and reach us through our phone number or email us directly on there. Dr. Landau, what an amazing day for me, being in Los Angeles, you being in Colorado, and Robbin in Houston, but getting to spend a little bit of time with you certainly made my day better. Thank you for all the work that you do. I miss you tremendously because we normally see each other several times a year. I’ll be glad when we can do that again.
Me too. It was delightful being with both of you.
Thank you.
Next time in person.
For sure.
Stay healthy, stay safe.
You too.
Love to all of your family.
Thank you.
Bye, thank you.
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