Transcript: Episode 184
184. Cascade of Defense (Guest: Christine Forner)
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
We're so excited to welcome back Christine Forner, past president of ISSTD, and author of Dissociation, Mindfulness, and Creative Meditations: Trauma-Informed Practices to Facilitate Growth. Welcome, Christine Forner.
*Interview begins*
[Note: Interviewer in bold. Interviewee in standard font]
The conference, the virtual conference, was so good for several reasons. But some of the big ones were that all that neurobiology and those breakthroughs from her studies, which I'm moving to talk to her as well. But then also, the attachment research about relational trauma being as significant, if not more so. Yes! And they said it in three different times in three different sessions. So like, really, confirming each other almost before they knew. And then this that you're sharing about. I mean, it all matters. And they just, it was, I was blown away. I really was. And I know that I'm still newer. I'm still learning. But it was so so powerful. So yeah, if you want to jump in there with cascade of defenses, or active, inactive, wherever you want to go that's easier for starting that would be amazing to share.
Okay, I'll start with cascade model of defense, and I move for active and inactive and how it's, it's very different. And why most therapies, most training about therapy, most modalities of therapies are hurtful for dissociative disorders. Because they all expect us to reach these goals, and follow these goals, and make sure people do goals, and make sure people do these things. And that's action. And you're not going to get anywhere if you keep forcing a client into action when their body is in an inactive state. You're just going to make them dissociate further. And that's sort of the whole reason behind my book, the whole reason between my 15 years of research in mindfulness, is that everybody says mindfulness is amazing. Just like everybody says, EMDR is amazing. But no, not for everybody. For some people they can either clamp down further on nothing, or open up Pandora's box. Right. And it's just if we had more respect for the inactive defenses and more respect to what happens to traumatized people, then a lot, then, so much of the baloney that's going out there that is harmful wouldn't be there.
I saw it, as soon as you started talking about it. And I started comprehending what you were saying. I saw it and everything from my own experiences, to experiences with clients, to foster children, to, it just, it's like, it opened a window of everything. I could see clearly all of a sudden. And it addresses even some of the shame issues of why can I not do therapy correctly? Like what's wrong with me that I'm failing even therapy? Who fails therapy?
Yeah. And it's because of the therapeutic underpinnings. It has to do with, if you think about, you know, if you take a look at where were the people who were deciding what goes in the textbooks, where were they? Who were they? What were they doing? Right, when we go back even to Freud, the founding father, he changed his mind to appease the masses, not because it was true. And because the masses are so misogynistic, and so patriarchal, “yeah, yeah, yeah, women are crazy.” When no, indeed, we're actually telling truths and we've been telling truths for 1000s of years, hundreds of years. But in the 60s when we started looking at this, 70s when we started looking at this, where was our frame of reference? Who was in charge? Who was saying, “This is the cat's pajamas”? Well these are men who are under the man code, believing that logic rules all. And so if we know about it, and know about it, and know about it, well it makes sense, eventually.
You can't make sense of some of this stuff. It is in comprehensible to the human body to sexually objectify and/or harm a child. There's nothing in the human body that can comprehend or understand it. So if you're going to keep forcing comprehension when it's not going to be there, what's going to happen to the person who's trying to do what is best, trying to heal, who's trying to help themselves, when none of the systems or structures are designed to help them? It's just setting more people up for failure.
So how is the brain structured for it? Tell us just a very brief rundown. We have talked about it some on the podcast.
We basically have three major, like there's this, the triune brain that everybody's familiar with, right? Everybody's familiar with the lizard brain, which is your deep brain structures down to the brainstem. On top of that as limbic system. And on top of that is the prefrontal cortex. And then there's this other part called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is a little different than the prefrontal cortex. So those deep brain structures, so the lizard brain and the mammal brain, they are designed to only have an other involved in their life, especially when we go back to lizards, for only reproduction. Right, so there's got to be something inside a lizard brain that happens that differentiates and delineates another being, predator, or food. Because they don't think about others, they don't work with others, they don't depend on others, they don't rely on others. There's no neurobiology for them. So they are all about fight, flight, freeze, moments of reproduction. So they're pretty basic, autonomic. They are not experienced in words. It's not experienced in language. It is not experienced in knowing or comprehension or meaning-making. It's 100% sensory.
On top of that is the mammal brain, which has a little bit more evolution involve others. Right. So if you're dealing with like, cats versus dogs, for cats, when they reproduce, right, they need to be in heat to reproduce so that they see that other coming close as a structure of life, the taker away of life. Because for cats most of the time, that that if another being comes close, it's threatening. That's just the nature of being animals that are part of the food chain. But if you take a look at dogs, dogs are a much more pack animal. They have brain structures that are more full of affect, are full of emotion. Dogs feels shame, cats do not. So shame is intricately connected to being part of a group or a tribe. I don't know if you've ever seen those things where it shows the wolf's walking along in a row. And it has the alpha male, alpha female, and then the venerable ones in the middle, and then the stronger ones again at the back. For that whole pack, those positions feel safer. It's not about domination. It's not about power over. It is about, it is the best for the pack. And for the pack, it is best for a couple of people, a couple of animals, making a lot of the decisions. But for the rest of everybody, when those decisions are made, it makes them feel safer. And humans are much more like that than they are like cats.
So then that mammal brain, you have that affective circuitry, the emotional circuitry, that's designed to communicate the feelings inside—the sensations inside—to others. But the human brain, which is that prefrontal cortex, everything about that human brain is about belonging in a group, getting along in a group, managing not just a group of seven or 12 other individuals, but 15, 150, 250, to be able to manage not just ourselves, but to have other people as part of ourselves and us as part of them. That's quite an evolutionary achievement unlike any other mammal or reptile on the planet.
But for humans, the basic of what we are is reptile mammalian. So we are a part of the food chain. And so when we're part of the food chain, we really do function through our defense systems. Like lizards and a lot of animals spend a lot of time in that taking care of oneself. So for lizards, for example, most of what they do is sleep, reproduce, and move away from danger or move towards safety. That's about it.
With mammals, it's that plus that affect—that need to bond. And that bond lasts more than just when we're giving birth. That bond can last years as for, it does for, you know, pack animals or elephants. It's different for a little bit for cat. So if you were to take a cat baby away at eight weeks and bring it back a year later, that cats not going to recognize that it's its offspring. But it seems to be that way with dogs and elephants, that they can go away and come back. So their capacity for memory is a little bit different. But their affective circuitry is much more advanced.
Than you take a look at what a human's doing, and it's just off the charts different. So for us humans, when we are in our inactive, or when we're in our active and inactive defense systems, we are using lower brain structures. We're not using our thinking brain. If our thinking brain is unable to move into and attune to these active defensive brains, then thinking becomes part of how we avoid pain and suffering, not how we fix it. Right. So for us human, that fourth brain structure that I was talking about that isn't, a lot of people don't talk about it when they talk about window of tolerance, or they talk about other brain structures. A lot of people will say that, you know, we talk about when we move into our active defenses, the prefrontal cortex turns off a little or a lot. But when we go into the inactive defenses, the brain actually gets cut off. So it's still working. So that's why a lot of people with dissociative disorders still can think inside their heads where people who have anger can't.
But the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is a brain structure that is a very last brain structure to grow. And it usually starts really developing between 20 and 25. That's a brain structure that's designed to manage these lower brain structures, to speak their language or to understand their language. To sort of experience in third person, that sort of those mindful things that people talk about, that being objective to oneself, is really the job of this ventromedial prefrontal cortex that can go to a sensation, and understand and be able to interpret the meaning, the context, the situation, the request of the sensation.
So for example, when a little baby's born, it's born with nothing but sensory and affective information. So none of those front brain starts growing until it's three. So baby will have a sensation. It'll have no idea what it is. There's no language for that there's no meaning for it, no context. It's just pure autonomic sensation that gets communicated through an affect. So that affect is intended to go out. So for all humans we are not designed to feel things on our own. Feelings is a communication. Just like me talking. It's a form of helping someone else understand who I am, but also for me to be able to understand who they are.
So when effect goes out, it's expecting to meet a mindful brain. A brain that can sense it. A brain that can feel its affect. A brain that can interpret the context and meaning so that the need can be understood and met so the sensation goes back to normal. Just like hot, just like cold, right? If a child is sending out a message of, if the baby body starts to shiver, that baby body has no idea that it's cold. It's the parents that come and see that it's shaking, and if they’re a mindfully attuned parent, they're gonna go, “Oh, my God, baby, you're kind of cold. Here baby, let's wrap you up and keep you warm,” and over 100s of 1000s of interactions, by the time that that person's an adult, they will automatically know that that sensation is cold and they need to give themselves a sweater. But because it's so procedurally learned we don't spend time thinking about it. Because if we think about everything we do that, it takes up too much space. It, we would become unable to function in many ways.
When, um, so that ventromedial prefrontal cortex, we know is incredibly sensitive to stress. It's incredibly sensitive to our active and inactive defenses. So basically, if we start following this thing called a cascade model of defense, it does a really good job of describing the difference between active and inactive defenses.
So when a human being is, because we were part of the food chain for millions and millions and millions and millions of years, the prefrontal cortex is really new. We don't even know how new the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is. Nobody's even really done the science to even guess how that is. But the Homo sapien sapien seems to have arrived around 300 years ago, 300,000 years ago, sorry, 300,000 years ago. Before that we, there was a very, we were a bunch of other things. But the original sort of hominid thing that went from sort of a reptile or a sort of an ape like creature, or a great great ape, is this thing called an Authoripictus africanus, or otherwise known as Lucy. And that's about 4 million years old. So for 4 million years we've been humanoid, sort of, growing and developing and evolving. And as far as we know, the iteration of humanity, of the Homo sapien that's 300,000 years old, is not much different today than it is then. That we really haven't changed in a grand evolutionary way in 300,000 years. So our central nervous systems, our lower brain structures, our physiology, our basic neurobiology, is millions and millions and millions and millions of years old in the making. So this thought brain that we got going on, is very new.
These back brain structures are really super old. And they're basically developed when we're born. So when, if when we were out in the wild doing our hunting and gathering, and we first recognized that we might be being viewed by a predator, we go into a harder freeze. It's still an active defense. It's probably the best and safest defense. So it oftentimes if you're working with clients, or you yourself, you go totally, like the eyes get big and the body gets all rigid. That's somebody moving into a harder state of freeze. And Broca's area, which is in charge of language, goes offline. So we can't talk, right? And that makes sense when you're trying to become invisible.
If that doesn't work, if the predator sees us, then we tend to move into flee. Which is running, movement. You'll see clients with their feet just going for, for broke in a session. Or they're fidgety and they can't quite sit still. Right. They start getting more uncomfortable. That's likely a back brain structure starting to give off run signals, flee signals. And a lot of times their language meets that is like, “I just need to bolt. I don't want to get out of here. I just can't stand being in here. Like I just want to get out of my own skin.” That's a nerve response of wanting to run. But the human brain is stopping it from running because that, the ventromedial prefrontal—prefrontal cortex, not the ventral—but the prefrontal cortex is supposed to manage these lower brain structures. So it can actually have some influence, but not a huge amount depending on how loud this gets. If we are in this place of danger where the predator starts getting close and we run, there's other brain structures that start going. There's a there's a very specific choreography that our brain does when we run. So for example, we might hear things a little differently, we might see things a little differently, our peripherals might change. Other things might not be as important, but the branch that might kick us in the face, or poke us in the eye, is important. So we tend to be more aware of certain sensations, but not all of them.
If that tiger gets close, then we still move into another active defense—typically fight. A lot of people when they move into a fight, they're going to be in their jaws, they're going to be moving their hands a lot. You'll see a lot of people with dissociative disorders whose hands move like this. It's not because they're nervous, it's probably because it's a fight defense wanting to come out that can't. The body is very good at differentiating between what is the best thing to do in the worst case scenario. So if fighting seems to be the best thing to do in this situation, then the body will move into a fight. It feels like a defense, but insight goes away.
So for example, if somebody is in a fight mode they are protecting themselves, and they tend to saw things that are terrible and awful as they defend themselves, and feel justified. But that brain structure then goes, “What am I doing here? What am I creating that's difficult?” isn't online. So a lot of times when we're working with someone who's in a fight state, trying to find insight and logic and reasoning, don't, it's just not even worth it. Because that person doesn't know that they're the one feeling those. Tend to calm them down and help them, protect them, and move them under the line of fire of the flight. Sometimes helping them, get into a fist place and just letting them be angry without them having to defend themselves, sometimes can lower that. But we have these very specific things that our bodies do in these different defenses if things start getting worse.
For children in particular, right. So if a parent or they're out in the, you know, the plains of wherever, where we were hunting and gathering 50,000 years ago, and there was an attack of some sabertoothed tigers, because like 50,000 years ago there was like 26 different types of sabertoothed tigers. Apparently we were very good food. Human beings are very, very, very, like they're just candy to, I think to predators. Because when we are alone we are incredibly weak, we are incredibly slow, we don't have any other natural defenses, like we don't have the teeth, we don't have the claws. We are easy pickins when we are by ourselves. About something like 4 million years ago, we exchanged muscle strength and gut digestion for a bigger brain. The bigger brain is all about using other people to keep us safe. Everything about the ventral-, the prefrontal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is designed to be in and around people. Right. So we exchanged being fast for being with each other. This is why vulnerability is really super important and why as humans and shame is also in here too.
So in those the situation 25,000 or 50,000 years ago, if we were out hunting and gathering and we got attacked by a pride of saber toothed tigers, if there were little children around who, whose strength is not necessarily running or is not necessarily fighting, a child will use panic and cling on to the nearest adult. Because when we move into our defenses, our social engagement system goes offline. We start caring and worrying about other people. Empathy goes offline. Attunement goes offline. Consideration of other people's feelings go offline. All of those things that are human start going away. And we go more reptilian and mammal the more frightened we are.
And so in that active defense for children, panic is something that children use. So a lot of times if you have a client and a panic attack, if you give them a pillow to hold on to, it can eliminate some of that panic attack. Because that panic is reaching out for the nearest human being. And if you help them reach out to something, it can appease that that neurobiological desire or need or defense.
If those don't work, then we move into inactive defenses. The brain structure does something very different. It's the brakes to this gas. There has to be something, so this is very dorsal vagal and very sympathetic when we move into our active defenses. That's, that's a powerful bullet train. Dissociation is the brakes to that bullet train. And it can instantly stop. You can see people's whose heart rate goes from 130 to 40. You can see people who go from this place of moving to totally silent. And what happens is the thalamus gets involved. And the insula gets involved, natural opioids get involved, natural cannabinoids get involved. So they take this fight flight and they numb it and anesthetize it. Because at some point in time being active, or in it, like you're if you're fighting a tiger and you lose, and you end up in that tiger's mouth, everything that has to do with action, everything that has to do with movement, is now considered dangerous. In inactive defense we're in that tiger's mouth, playing dead, being dead, feeling dead, sensing dead, is all keeping you alive. And this is what the, one of the troubles with dissociative disorders is because everybody assumes that action and doing things and taking care of things and being being being in our culture is healthy. It's not for dissociative disorders. For dissociative disorders hiding, protecting, being enclosed, not having to do anything, aligning with that felt feeling of being not watched, not seen, not heard. That's what makes them safe. And when they can find that safety, then they can start moving to more active defenses.
But some of the inactive defenses are things like tonic immobility. Boom, I don't have any, like so tonic immobility can be considered even, even people will call it depression, when it's actually you're moving into a place of tonic immobility. You cannot move. You cannot get out of bed. Because moving and getting out of bed is seriously, feels made way more dangerous than the safety of the bed. In our world, if you tell anybody I can't get out of bed, boom, you're going to get mood stabilizers, you're going to get labeled as depression. When actually it could be a state of inactive defense where your body's just like “this is the safest place for me and I move I'm dead.”
And so the body, because dissociation is the strongest defense we have. It's our last line of defense because there's nothing else after. So in, when you are in an active state of defense and you move, that's going to give you relief. When you do something active, it's going to help. When you're an inactive defense, it's not. It's the opposite.
So shame is part of this. Shame really is, a lot of people think shame is the thoughts that we have. “I don't like myself. I hate myself. What is wrong with me?” But if you drop down to the feelings of shame, and you try to remove the meaning-making that we're trying to make when we're in a shame state, right. So every emotion is supposed to be assigned with meaning-making so that we know how to attend to and care for our needs. But if you're experiencing a sensation that goes with an effect, and that affect gets ignored, denied, hurt or shamed, you will do the same thing that's being done because we learn by our parents doing. So if we have an affect that goes out and is seeking attention, 1) the original need isn't going to be met, 2) you're now dealing with being alone.
And for human babies and for human children being alone is tantamount to death. Because if you think about things 50,000 years ago, babies wouldn't be crying 50,000 years ago. Infants wouldn't be running off all the time. Kids would have been watched over by a lot of people. Because children likely were the hub of the tribe, just like pups with a pack of animals are the hub of the tribe. So back 25- 30,000 years ago, human beings, infants would have been the highest priority, and mothers of those infants would have been the second highest priority. So everybody would be helping the moms so the mom could be with the baby. So we wouldn't have had shame because those babies would never, ever, ever be alone and not have their needs met. Because it would be, it would be too dangerous for the whole entire tribe to have a baby crying all the time, when there's lots of things that want to eat us. We got to think 300,000 years, and then millions of years in the making, having crying screaming children who don't hear or listen or follow instruction is not that's not a safe child. That's a child who's flipping in and out of their defenses. And their social engagement system isn't being addressed. Right.
So 50,000 years ago, if we had to move into a state of inactive defense, shame would be one of them. Because shame is our default setting for being alone. And it's highly highly highly coordinated with dissociation. It comes from the periaqueductal gray, which is a lower brain structure even than the amygdala. So the periaqueductal gray is still part of the brainstem, and it's part of our pain recepting system. That's where the opioids and cannabinoids get excreted from. So when we move into a state of dissociation, our bodies are swimming in heroin and pot, pretty much. And the thalamus is intentionally splitting information so that feeling doesn't get connected with knowing. Or sensing isn't connected with memory. It's all scattered on purpose because basically, the body wants you to play dead. And the further danger you go the more dead you're going to be.
So you move even into aligning with perpetrator or fawning. Fawning is highly dissociative. And that's where we befriend and use all of our attachment system to try and attach to that thing. So that thing won't eat us. But it, you can know in families that this becomes a defense. But fawning is as much as a defense as fighting and fleeing and anger.
And then our last one is complete submission. Where we're just flopping we don't have any agency inside whatsoever. And what happens with, with, if this happens to children in when they're young. We're only supposed to visit our defenses a handful of times in our life. And in those handful of times those, those times were reach our defenses, it's because our lives are in danger from something like tornadoes or tsunamis or wild animals or whatever. There's nothing inside the human body that is able to handle human to human harm, or human to human neglect. Nothing. We don't have a backup plan for it. We have lots of backup plans for tsunamis, or sudden death, or predation, even car accidents, all those kind of things. We have a natural way. But the first line of defense we have is human beings.
Remember how I said back in the day, if we were out, if I was out walking in the plains of wherever, 50,000 years ago, and nobody was around me, it's basically a popsicle stick to any predator. Yoohoo! And I would have been eaten immediately. But when you put us together, and we work together, like more of a hive mind or herd mind, we're indestructible because we are so smart. Because we can think of a million different ways, because we watch, because we observe, and that's that that mind.
And I think with us human beings, at some point in time something had to happen where we started hurting each other. And the side effect of hurting each other means that at some point in time to heal, you have to feel what you feel and know what you know. You have to be able to manage from this mindful place. These defenses. Because ordinary consciousness does not manage these lower structures, the mindful conscious does. And it's actually a distinct altered state of being that is different than ordinary consciousness. And for a lot of people if they're spending a lot of time in their defenses, this is altered as well. And so a lot of people confuse mindfulness, when you start going into it, as the altered. Right? When you drop into this, all sorts of safety is available to you. When you drop into these, no safety’s available to you. So, so when we're working with people with multiplicity or people who dissociate from the get go. Because kids, they don't run really well. Kids don't fight it all. Their bodies cannot defend themselves. So for infants and children, the inactive defenses are their preferred modes of defense.
So this is why we know that the more a child is hurt, the more dissociation is going to kick in. Because they don't have the defense's available to them. However, if you start to dissociate from the beginning before a sense of self has had a chance to grow. A self, sense of self is part of the human package. It's part of our hardware, just like language is part of the hardware. Just like the capacity to have imagination and spiritualities is part of our hardware. What language we speak is software. How we funnel our spirituality is software. What I mean by software is it's influenced by the culture, right. Not everybody will, like wherever, it depends on where you grow up, what language you will speak. But the capacity to speak is part of our hardware. And so for us humans, our defenses is part of our hardware. Our ventromedial prefrontal cortex is part of our hardware as well. But we need safety to grow this structure. We cannot grow this structure if this structure isn't supported and shown to us by other people. So at some point in time we started hurting each other. Nobody knew this. Ancient man had no idea. Because current man doesn't even get this as all that well. But for us, when you look at someone who's dissociating, they didn't understand that when you dissociate from a little, an identity needs to grow. But those identities need something to hold on to. So it tends to be the defenses. So we tend to split our senses of selves into these defenses that are still being separated by the thalamus, still being you know, swimming in natural opioids and cannabinoids in a system that is designed to not know and not feel.
And that's what makes it super tricky. Because most therapies insist that we feel insist that we already know. But we don't when we're dissociated. We can't. Because the knowing and the feeling is too overwhelming—there's not enough of a foundation of being able to. And so that's the whole goal when we're working with people with dissociative disorders, is trying to do safety, safety, safety, safety. So an original sense of self will grow. And it will, because it's supposed to. It’s hardware. It just means that that person needs more safety. So like, if we had, if we had more treatment centers, if we had more places for long term therapy, where it is all about the safety, then likely people with dissociative disorders would heal much quicker.
That's amazing.
Sorry, that was a big rant.
No, it was really good. And I think it's one of those pieces that offers a cognitive understanding in a way that we have only intuitively experienced until we find words for it. Which is such a reflection of what's actually happening. But then also gives hope for “we really can get better, and we can feel better, and there can be healing.” Not just, “we missed out on this because of what happened to us.”
Exactly. Right. Like and it's hard, because it's the thing that you, that all survivors of complex trauma, they're there because of lack of care. Because no mindful brain that are attending to, and intuiting, and attuning to, and feeling and sensing our infants’ physical, physiological, psychological, emotional, spiritual needs. Right? So, and because there's no backup plans inside of us to handle human harm or human absence, then we quickly move into our defense systems. But because we so desperately need to fit in, we split. There's one face that can handle the situation and another face that can hide the reality. It's the defensive itself. So a lot of times, people who are constantly dissociating can have these parts that in lieu of regulation, they switch.
And over time, it's teaching people how to see themselves from not necessarily third person, but because you guys can see yourselves in third person, but those third persons isn't the same third person that I'm speaking of. When we have that ventromedial prefrontal cortex up and running, you can actually see, feel and sense your parts, your experiences, from a sort of an embodied kind of place and tolerate it. It's just getting there is really hard. Getting there is means that you have to wake up and start to feel what you feel.
Dissociation is an amazing mechanism to keep you from dying. It doesn't give a rat's ass about being alive. Being alive is feeling. Being alive is knowing. Being alive is understanding. And most people do not want to feel this stuff. They do not want to comprehend this stuff. Nobody wants to know that this is their life. Because that goes against human. It's abhorrent. We're not supposed to hurt each other. We're not supposed to see each other as scary. We're not supposed to be afraid of our neighbors. We're not supposed to be terrified of our politicians. We're not supposed to be untrusting of that person next to us. And so if you have all of those things, it's because you've experienced those things.
But if that ventromedial prefrontal cortex isn't working, you're going to be running from your defenses. And your defenses are going to be putting words, meaning, and context, and label to their experiences. So if you're a little peanut who's feeling hunger, and you send the hunger signals and they don't get met, you now have abandonment on top of that. So not only, you're not going to know how to feed yourself the way you need to know how to feed yourself, but it's going to be overridden with the felt feeling of not being seen, not being heard. How do you put context and meaning to those sensations that are painful? Painful. Like, like, most people, when they are healing, at some point in time they sort of comprehend how bloody brutal and painful that is. That is a feeling that you, me, we all had as a child. It isn't an adult feeling that just shows up when we're 25, 35, 45 or 55 and we're healing. That's a feeling a baby had. And it makes sense why we split because we can. Because that's the the miracle of being a human being. That we will do anything to stay bonded. Because bonding is what keeps us alive and it prevents us from feeling vulnerable.
Back to the pack.
Yeah, to the pack. Not just to one person, but to many. To many, many, many. And we don't really live in that, especially Western culture, you know, this, the nuclearization, and the removal of the family and, and the eroding of, of even good daycare or, or care of children, or social structures. Everything in Western culture—Canada, United States, a lot of places—those safety systems of of, of basic income or basic safety or basic health care. Those are things that have been eroded for decades now. For like for 40, 50 years there really hasn't been like, since things got so expensive, it's really hard for both people to stay at home, or one person to stay at home. Right. So from the 70s, and stuff, people, women were able to go to work, but nobody was there taking care of the babies. Because there just wasn't the system set up. There was you know, the daycares in the mall, strip malls. And that kind of stuff. Because people just don't think that kids need people and kids need lots of people.
Well and when you try to do that, because of those circumstances, you have to trade one for another. Right. So we know how important attachment is with our children adopted from foster care. So one of us is always with them. We take turns working and all of that. But it means we sacrifice time together as a couple. It means you sacrifice individual time because our time off is our turn with the children. And it means we sacrifice things like food security, which is important.
Yes. And so what would it be like if you and, and your partner and the kids had financial security? If you had a home? Right? That you could pay for a home? Like, if the home, we didn't have to pay for housing? Yes, just had a home.
You know what's funny about that is you, we have our youngest daughter who's so sick, right? And to pay for, because we're in America, to pay for her health care we have to sell our house. Yeah. And we are in a house now that is safe and appropriate, but we rent it instead of owning it. And it's, in something like the pandemic I’m like, I don't know if we're going to be homeless in a month or two months, or if we'll be okay, I don't know.
And that's, you know, but there's lots of other ways that we do have to trade our houses for our babies. And it's not just America. In Canada, if you can't pay for your home, you've got to go work. Who cares about kids? You shouldn't have bad kids. This whole notion about conservativism and not having children is justifying patriarchy. It’s justifying misogyny. And I think 10, 20, of, when we look at when we started being violent towards each other, there's not a lot of evidence that we were violent towards each other until about 10 to 6000 years ago. It happens to be the same time that we did agriculture. Which makes me think or suspect that at some point in time, somebody went, “hey, I can get something for free by hurting you guys.” Or who knows what happened. But something happened where we started hurting each other. And when you have been hurt by another person, the thing you need the most is another person. The thing you're terrified of the most is the other person. Because when that person starts to give you care, when that person starts to give you tenderness, when that person starts, you-
Have you ever had a therapist or a person who's just so just dripping with maternal kindness, like “it's okay, you're cool.” It makes people horribly uncomfortable. It triggers the living daylights out of them because a lot of perpetrators use care as a setup to evoke vulnerability. Because there are perpetrators that feast off vulnerability to most likely numb themselves as a form of self, like really profound self-harm. Then I think there's perpetrators whose social engagement system hasn't turned on from utero. Their body wants them to be human, but in order to be human you have to feel yourself. You have to feel what other, what you've done, what you do, what you be, what you are. And if you have a lifetime of hurting other people, I think that's mind blowing. I think that's, that's, that's just, you know.
Most survivors that I work with have not really hurt other people, and they are struggling with the pain of what happened. Then you have some people who have hurt people, and the guilt, and the shame of that is just profoundly intense. And that requires a lot of patience, a lot of tenderness, a lot of care, a lot of going in and being able to take a feeling and take a sensation, and provide it, like figure out what it is and then give it what it needs. It’s the tricky thing to do.
Because we're so used to thinking. We're so used to being up in our heads and logicing, not emoting. Cause once again, somewhere along the lines misogyny took off. And it isn't just the hatred of women, it's a hatred of what mothers represent. It's the hatred of care. It's the hatred of life fostering, life enhancing, and you see it everywhere. Anything that has to do with caring for life is treated like crap. Anything that has to do with the destruction of life is given accolades. And that's the side effect of misogyny and patriarchy. And it's been going on for a long time now.
You said earlier that the defenses or, I want to say in your words, about when you talked about those splits. Having to use the defenses and attaching to the defenses. You even showed in the conference, like a map almost, you get, a different kind of mapping. But being able to identify different parts by the roles that they're serving through those defenses, or. Clarify that for me.
Yeah. So I often talk about baseline. Right? So what is baseline? baseline is when our nervous system is in a place of good. We've got enough food. We've got enough sleep. We've got enough exercise. We've got enough of curiosity. We've got enough of whatever. It would be like, you know, we're pretty copacetic. So the central nervous system doesn't really need to be active or engaged in any sort of way. We're baseline. And baseline for us humans is actually quite a content happy place. You can go through all of our senses, or all of our systems. And, and you can understand, like, when we're at baseline, our fascia, which is a sort of a second central nervous system on the outside, is pretty loose. Our muscles are loose. We can feel ourselves. We can think about ourselves. We can we can have plans. We can both be aware internally and externally. We're using all of our brain structures. Were compassionate to ourselves. We're compassionate to other people. We have this sort of capacity to be dually aware. And we're good. That's an adult baseline.
A child's baseline is when that body doesn't need anything. So for an infant for that, perhaps like, for example, they get cold, the body starts to get cold, it's moving away from baseline. The physiology is going to start sending signal saying “I'm not okay.” The affect is going to start sending signals saying “I'm not okay,” expecting somebody to come and help them and get them back to baseline. If that doesn't get answered straightaway and that baby starts getting too cold, then it'll go from not being okay—sort of breaching on the window of tolerance—to actually moving into its defense systems. So it's going to go from one brain structure to another. We're going to be in those defense systems because now the body's trying to stay alive, rather than trying to get back to baseline.
So when we're in our baseline, we are fully aware. However, if we move into our defenses, you can start noticing that there's choreography that each defense carries with it. So for example, when you're in a hard freeze, you're going to be looking out and you're not going to be comfortable with being looking in. Your awareness is all going to be outside of you, not really inside of you. You're going to, your muscles structures going to be tight, taut, it's going to be tense. Right tension normally means that an action is getting ready to spring into action. So it's not a loose floppy or chillax kind of thing. It's going to be very, very strong. If that is dissociated enough, if that person dissociates. And we don't really know why some people can do this and why people can't.
There's, there's sort of, I think, two ways to get multiplicity. One is that it happens that that that functional dissociation that the opioids and the cannabinoids and it's, the scattering of the thalamus and all that kind of stuff, happens from the get go, and then the personality system attaches to the defenses. The other one is there's there's a certain group of people who are, just can do this. We don't really know why that is but we do know that that is, and they do this, the catalyst is complex trauma, or the catalyst is life and death terror. It's something splits the system. And it's, it's the trauma. So we agree that all forms of dissociation come from trauma. Simone Reinders basically confirmed that with brain imaging. That there's no doubt that this comes from childhood trauma. It’s just some people are a little bit more, quote unquote, flamboyant, with their capacity to create a sense of self. And other people, it's a bit more concrete.
So, you can, if that person spends enough time in that flight state, it will develop a sense of self. If they spend enough time in a fight state, it will develop a sense of self. But these two are really, because you can't have fight and flee happen at the same time, there tends to be no cross pollination. So these parts really are defenses that grow a partial sense of self. Their, there's states of being that grow into traits that are still divided by the dissociative process. And it can get really complex and really elaborate depending on how long this has been going on and how good people are at this. And our goal is to help them get to that baseline. And you can only be in baseline when you're safe when those needs are met.
So a lot of times when I'm working with people who have these stronger senses of self. So if they have a flee state, right, I'll try and get that flee state to start getting closer to a self state of safety, right. So somebody in a flee state, they're going to have much more activation going on than in a freeze state. A fight state is going to have different, different ways of seeing the world. And you can tell the difference between a part that's wanting to fight and the part that's wanting to flee, because the fight part is really scrappy. But it's still under the umbrella of dissociation. It's still being disconnected by the dissociative process. Does that make sense?
It does, it does. It's just fascinating to actually be able to apply what's happening from a science perspective, and feel that congruent with the experience of it. And not just “why can't I just turn this off?” Or “maybe I am crazy.” Or, like, it answers all of those things of, I don't know. I just. When I saw it on paper, well your slide printed out, right? When I saw it on paper, which is, “okay, I understand” in a way that I could not understand and in a way that I can no longer argue with. Because it lays it out in a way to help me understand what happened, and to help me see it. And now I see it on all kinds of people, whether they have DID or not. Yes. I think this is what's happening. It's like all of a sudden, I understood the color blue. And now I see it everywhere. It's the same thing. One of those moments of, “Okay, this is a thing, and now I can see it,” I'm able to see it both in myself and others. And it has changed everything of how I interact with people.
Yeah, it's not nuttiness. It's not crazy. And, but we come from, you know, we come from psychoanalysis. We are everything that has to do with, you know, psychiatry, social work, all of these things are heavily influenced by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, I think, people who are still traditionally psychoanalysis, I think the strength of that is that relational dynamic that they develop. It's just, you know, the person who's chronically curious about who they are. And I think there's some really good psychoanalysis who are probably in a mindful state most of the time when they're asking me questions. But if we go back to like, some of the very misogynistic traditions of psychoanalysis of the 60s, where if you said that you were sexually abused, or you thought you were sexually abused and the psychoanalysis say, “Oh, yeah, well, Freud says that you're making that up,” right? That kind of philosophy of analyzing things. We like to analyze things because sensory and affective is so vilified. Feelings are vilified. Being sad is vilified. Being angry is vilified. The sensations that come from this, the need, the need we are as a species gets vilified. You will have people going, like lots of people will go into emergency wards right now saying, “I think I need extra attention” like this is a bad thing. We need lots of attention. Especially when we're frightened and alone. And somehow this has been vilified as being weak. No, it's not weak. It's part of the human package.
What's challenging is you try and get someone who is so up in their heads. And so disconnected from their heart and souls. You try to get that person to feel what they feel, they're going to not want to do that at all. They have no confidence in it. They have no capacity in it. They have no ability in it. And they will see that emotion is weakness. But you take someone who's done their work, someone who can go in and feel what they feel, and someone who is able to go into their worst moment and that was worst experiences, and be compassionate to themselves and hold onto themselves, and have enough distance to go “oh my god, you were just a poor little child. You had no idea. You were surging through this feeling of being hated.” How does a child make meaning of that? Well, “I'm hate-full.” It must be. Because children can't tell the difference between who they are and how they feel. Thus, those shame thoughts. But that feeling of pain is actually that that body going, “attach, attach, attach, attach, attach, attach. I’m not attached. Attach, attach, attach.” It's the, it's the cold, it's the sad, it's the mad, that comes when our needs aren't met when we're not at baseline.
So when I'm working with people, and they're getting mad, and sad and scared, I'm not looking at it and going, “let's get rid of that.” I'm like, “let's, let's visit that. Let's give those feelings dignity.” Because they have to be there for reason. Because feeling, which is an effect, and sensing, it's impossible for them to lie. Because they're too low on brain structures. They're not up here. They might have the wrong meaning. We might give them the wrong context. We might give them the wrong place. But the emotion itself cannot be wrong. And it cannot lie. Because they're too primitive. Just like dogs and cats can't lie. Dogs can be a little clever and like manipulate a little bit. Like I have one dog and her sister is eating a bone, she will fake her sister out and start barking outside. So the sister will go bark and then she'll go straight for the bone. That's intelligence. That's not manipulation. Right, where when we're being hurt by someone who is profoundly hurt—the narcissist, the antisocials, the psycho sadomasochistic psychopaths—which, there's not very many of the but they do a lot of damage. When we're being hurt by someone like that, that is a manipulation. That is a gaslight of what's happening in the present moment. That is, that's where lying comes in.
And lying is really quite high up in the brain structure. Like, most kids don't start lying until they're four or five because they don't know how to lie before that. So children cannot lie. What that children understands, the meaning and context can be muffled out. So if a mom and dad get hot and cold wrong, a child will get hot and cold wrong their whole life. Because it's the parents that put the words and the meaning in the context of the sensation. So every time that child gets cold, if the parents going to give it a popsicle, the child will do that their whole life. If they're hot, and they get a sweater, the child will do that the whole life. And it's not until they go out into the public that somebody goes, “What are you doing?” “I don't know, what am I doing?” It's, they won’t question because we don't know what we don't know.
And when we're traumatized we have the view of the perpetrator inside of us, not the view of the survivor. There's not a little voice saying yes, “your feelings are 100% correct here. This pain is appropriate.” We don't have that voice saying, “oh, that feeling of being unloved is actually true.” We can't understand that as a child. We can't comprehend it because there's nothing in there to do that. But as we get older, we learn to live with these things. We adjust these things. We fit in because social, being social is our highest order. And that's what makes a human a human.
So like I just it boggles my mind how people see people with multiplicity as nutty, or crazy, or wrong, or bad. They make perfect sense to me.
I think it's fascinating the connection of healing. And even, just to given more neutral example. The last time I spoke to you on the podcast, you were talking about ISSTD. And you were like, “get involved” and “join this” or “see where you can volunteer.” And I really tried and it was so scary. And it was terrifying. But I've met the most amazing people. Every single one of them has been very, very kind, and accepting and warm and responsive in ways that I didn't even know I needed. I've been able to, I mean, in small pretend ways, nothing like huge, but in small pretend ways have this feeling of competency again, and functioning again, and having something to contribute, again. Whether it's writing an article, or just doing attendance for the trainings, or whatever my job is, or my role is or where I'm helping. And it has made such a difference in both my personal life and my professional life. I even have opened up my private practice again for the first time in 10 years. And just all of this, like it's every single tiny little effort that to me felt like such a big deal, but was really just a small thing. Like attendance is not, is not a big deal. But every single thing was exponential and showed up in all kinds of other areas. And it has been fascinating to watch that I didn't even realize that those parts of me that I even was so very conscious of were being rejected and squashed down and held back because of that voice that, Yeah, I wasn't even aware was there.
Yeah. I find that the experience with the ISSTD for me personally and it chokes me up every time. I didn't really. I don't think we see ourselves clearly, especially if we come from complex trauma or especially if we have a lot of trauma in our lives. You can't see yourself clearly because there's no one there to see you clearly. We see what is saw. We, that's how we function as a species. We don't invent who we are. Who we are is from the outside coming in. Hopefully it meshes with who what's going on in the inside and that secure attachment. So somebody who's securely attached leaves their childhood matching. Their feelings, their thoughts, their sensations match, and they have confidence because they don't have to “What is going on right now? What is happening? What am I seeing? What am I not seeing?” When you go to the ISSTD you have a group of people who are outliers. Because they don't, they don't agree with what is being told. They don't, like, they don't, they don't, they have too many questions. They have too many wondering. Like, “That's not right.” And these are really beautiful, kind people. And I just so wish, because they really are decades ahead of the rest of the world. Like 40, 50 years ahead of the rest of the world.
There are people who are coming up with stuff right now that they think is brand new. And I'm like, “No, we've known this for 40 years.” And we've been sitting in this and it's still really weird territory for most mainstream people to come and look at because it is so different. And it's such a paradigm shift. But it rings so true to humanity.
And when you go there you get seen. And if people see you and you're like, “Oh my god, you see that in me? I kind of suspected that was there, but I haven't had a lot of people see that in me.” And then you have so many people see that in you and you bloom. And so it's like, it's just, it's remarkable what happens when you are cared for and you are treated with dignity and respect. We thrive. Which means we cannot be a violent creature. We cannot be someone a creature that is that is designed to be objectified sexually, especially in our early years. We can't be. Because it messes us up way too bad. We can't function like that. But when we are loved, when we are cared for. care, care, maternal care, and fostering life is the most powerful thing a human being can get. Hurts like a bugger when you first, when you haven't had any. And it's terrifying when you haven't had any because a lot of people been manipulating it. But when you get that care, and that care is consistent, boom! People grow. It's like flowers. It's beautiful.
Yeah, I don't know. It's just, multiplicity is my jam. It makes so much sense to me. And it kind of has made sense to me in the human condition too. Why we're in such a mess. And really, it's the answer of how to get out of the mess.
It's fascinating. There's so much to it. My husband now can talk about all his parts. He doesn't have DID at all. He's like, “this part wants this.” Like he's negotiating with himself all the time. Yeah. And I’m like, “how are you doing that? I need help with this practice that you’re, can I just want you why you do this?” And my kids do that they can hold for their first time, like, opposing things at the same time, and are finally getting some object relations that we were so worried they missed altogether and would not be able to catch up. Or they told us, “No, and there'll be reactive attachment forever because of this and this,” but it's changing. No. And it's fascinating.
Right? So, so, you know. I was having a conversation with somebody on Facebook, which really I don't do anymore, because it's just so frustrated. But they were saying, you know, there's no cure for PTSD. And I'm like, yeah, using what you're using, there's no cure. But if you use something else, there's cures. There's 100% cures. Right? Or, at least you can teach somebody to fun-, like to primary fundamentally regulate their central nervous system. Baseline is in there. Baseline is hardline, We have a standard of care inside of us. And that standard of care for all human beings is so chock full of dignity. Because if that standard of care isn't met, we get upset.
Using, and you don't, you know, everybody sort of expects to be treated with a huge amount of respect. We don't know how to treat a lot of other people with respect. We're not really taught, but everybody kind of expects to be treated with this standard of care, that I think, you know, has been taken away from us 1000s and 1000s of years ago. And we're just starting to figure it out, “oh, wait a minute. Maybe we're not the violent creature that we are.” And I think it's because the masses finally have a say with social media, believe it or not. I think you know, there is a good thing at a social media is that 85% of the world is starting to go, “Wait a minute, I just want to be in my house and take care of my kids and just have this beautiful little quiet protected safe life.” That's most people. And then you have about 10% of people who are really, really angry. And then you have 5% of the world that are really nasty. And those 5% of the world work differently than the people who are content. They don't fight the same they don't work the same. They don't have the same drive. And I think that's why a lot of the really nasty people get into positions of power. Because that's, that's what they're designed to do. And, you know, I think every war has been created by someone who's just as strange as certain leaders in this world, except now we see behind the curtain.
I've never met more people who understand what narcissism is in my life. Because there's a, there's a case example and we're going, “Ohhhh.” Right? And so we're able to look at these things and see these things and understand, “Oh. That really is…” Right? I imagine if you had, if you were sitting on Hitler's shoulder the whole time, you would have seen how nutty he was too, but he never showed that. Because he had propagandas you see them as this together, man and all his military might. But behind the doors, he would have been just so dysregulated and so inconsistent and so pathologically blind. And he would have been managed and handled by a lot of people, like a lot of other… people who are like that are too.
Thank you so much for talking to me today.
You're so very welcome. I am so happy to speak with you.
I'm really really grateful. I am. And, and it's so healing, just the conversation and being in that presence. Thank you for that.
You're very welcome. I, there's not enough I can do for this, this field and for people who have been hurt the most, discarded the most, and treated the worst. But they’re such amazing examples of what's possible with humans. And I wish they could see themselves clearly of how fundamentally amazing they are. And, and I think hopefully enough things are changing that it's going to start exponentially growing. And maybe times like this helps us reevaluate and go, “Wait a minute, we have our priorities all wrong. We need to take care of people.”
Thank you. Thank you.
You're very welcome.
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