In his podcast about ‘Understanding Your Trauma & How to Heal Emotional Wounds to Start Moving On From Past Today,’ Jay Shetty, a super popular podcaster shares his experiences with genocide survivors and other Rwandans and describes his discovery that the country’s healing has a lot to do with its current leadership. Jay was in Rwanda last June with Ellen DeGeneres for the opening of her Gorillas conservation campus in Musanze. His comments below come from his conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté on trauma and healing; the transcript begins at 1:01:30
Jay Shetty: I recently went to Rwanda with Ellen DeGeneres in collaboration with a Gorilla sanctuary and conservation centre. We went there to trek with the gorillas, learn about them and Rwanda. I had never been to Rwanda before; I don’t know if I would have visited if it wasn’t for her. The biggest thing that I took away, obviously trekking with gorillas and being in nature with a form of life that has no interest in us, but we were fascinated by them, was an incredible experience and I’ll talk about that separately, but the reason I brought it up here is I also had time to go to the genocide memorial museum. It was fascinating for me to learn, it’s been around twenty (twenty-eight) years from what I remember, that a tenth of the population of the country, so approximately a million people, of ten million, died and were killed in the genocide.
And most of the people who live there today, it was their parents, their ancestors, that did this, just twenty (twenty-eight) years ago, it was not a long time at all. And I met some of the survivors, I sat with them in the museum, I talked to them, we talked to the locals, to the people who were helping us with our travel and arrangements in the hotels we stayed at, and it fascinated me that the people were so healed, there was such a genuine, sincere conversation that they have let go of this two-tribe culture, they’ve let go of the names, the identification, they are living by a principle they call ubuntu, ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.’ It was so special.
Dr. Gabor Maté: I’m curious to ask, did you delve into what allowed them to do that?
Jay: They said a lot of it came through the leadership, they said that that was how they were being led. It’s like what you were saying that we don’t have time to focus on these huge issues because we’re too busy wondering which player played in which position. They didn’t say it in that way, but that’s what they were saying, that their leadership encouraged us to think in this way and I couldn’t believe that in twenty (twenty-eight) years, when your parents have probably killed their parents, that you are standing next to each other not worrying about the lineage that this culture had. It was the Europeans who set up part of that anyway, but I just wanted to understand from you, what does it take to get to that level of healing because, you know people would say that it’s a 10 million population, to me that’s still a humongous win for the world. I was wondering if you’ve seen cultures, or even smaller groups, during war where you have seen that kind of healing before?
Dr. Gabor Maté: I don’t know about what happened in Rwanda; I’m really encouraged to hear what you describe here. I think at the very least of it, the suffering had to be fully acknowledged and heard. Then healing can take place. That has to happen which is why it’s so important to understand trauma, the suffering has to be acknowledged. In Rwanda, of course that tribal hatred didn’t just arise from nowhere, nor is it necessarily in the nature of those people to be like that. Part of it was the legacy of Colonialism, that quite deliberately set one group against another, which created struggle and hatred and violence.
You can listen the part where Jay Shetty and Dr. Gabor Maté discuss about Rwanda on the audio below:
To hear the full podcast, click here