Transcript: Episode 111
111. Guest: Christine Forner (ISSTD)
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Interviewer: Bold Font
Interviewee: Standard Font
Christine Forner has been in the healing profession in one form or another since the age of 16, where she worked on a crisis line for teens. Christine spent the first part of her career in the front lines, working at local sexual assualt centers, long-term therapeutic settings, and shelters for domestic violence survivors. Since 2011, Christine has worked in her own private practice, which specializes in complex trauma and dissociative disorders.
Christine has over 30 years of working with individuals with trauma, post traumatic stress disorders, traumatic dissociation, developmental trauma, and dissociative disorders, with specialized training in EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, psychotherapeutic meditation techniques, neurofeedback, and havening.
Christine is also the current clinical supervisor for Waypoint, a centre in Fort McMurry, Alberta that specializes in sexual assault and domestic violence. Christine teaches locally and at an international level on the issue of dissociation, complex trauma, and the intersection of dissociation and mindfulness. Christine is the current president for the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. Christine has also served on the board of the ISSTD since 2010, and was the ISSTD treasurer from 2011 to 2017.
She is the author of Dissociation, Mindfulness, and Creative Meditations: Trauma-Informed Practices to Facilitate Growth. As well as avidly working with those who hurt the most, Christine has dedicated her professional life to educating others on the logic, normality, and commonality of dissociation. The summation of her work is to educate practitioners about the vital importance of their presence, patience, and care with those who have been through the most severe and brutal injuries, so that they get treated with dignity and compassion.
The four qualities of presence, patience, dignity, and compassion apply to every aspect of the therapeutic process, and can result in profound inner-healing, something every human deserves to experience.
Welcome, Christine Forner.
Hello, my name is Christine Forner. I am a clinician up in Calgary up in Canada, but I’m also the current president of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.
Thank you for joining us.
You’re welcome.
How did you get started learning about trauma at all? Can you go all the way back to the beginning?
The beginning started when I was very young at 16. I started to work at a teen line, deciding what I wanted to do with my life, and it was a suicide -- it was a hotline for stressed out teens, but it ended up being quite a bit of suicide calls. And I think back to the calls that I was taking when I was 16 years old, and I was like, “Oh my goodness”, because there was some pretty intense calls at that age, but I also recognized that it didn’t really bother me like it bothered everybody else. I was able to get in and listen.
And then I went -- I got a diploma in social work, and started working at a sexual assault center in public education. So, I was doing -- I was going to different elementaries, junior highs, and high schools in my city, talking about sexual assualt prevention. And so that was when I really started getting exposed to the experiences of sexual assault. And I -- I didn’t do that on purpose. That was the only practicum that was left that was closely within the range of what I wanted to work with. I didn’t really want to work there, but I ended up working there.
And then I ended up working at a woman’s shelter, after getting my women's studies degree. And then after I had my children, I found it really difficult working in the shelter, and seeing all of the kids. I was having a hard time not being mama bear all the time. So then I applied for a job at a place where it was lower fees. There was no set time limit, or how long, or how many years a person could see, and it was for women. So basically, it was just the perfect setting for extremely traumatized people. I didn’t quite have the education, and I wouldn’t be able to get away with what I got away with today, but I was being supervised doing long-term therapy before I had my Masters.
And I think because I went in with the clients first, and I listened to what the clients were saying -- one of my very first cases was a dissociative disordered person -- someone with dissociated identities. And I didn’t really question whether it was right or wrong. I honored what she was saying, and I was listening to what she was saying. And I went to my supervisor and I just said I had this most fascinating experience, and she handed me Colin Ross’s book about multiple personality, and I read it like it was the most fascinating textbook. It was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever read in my life, and I was like, “Oh my god, this makes -- this is really an interesting thing that humans do.”
And so, right from the get go, from like 1998 onward, I had been looking at this and researching it, and most of what I came up with, I was self-taught. I went back to school, and when I went back to school, I started specializing in creative meditations for dissociative disorders. And I didn’t realize at the time how weird that was either.
[Laughs] Wow.
And so I’ve been seeing them ever since.
That’s amazing. And you have -- it’s such a story. And you have such an intuitive gift for women and survivors that has really developed as you developed.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey, because through all of that, as I started going back to school and wanting to learn to be more, I also started realizing that my life wasn’t doing so well. That’s when I started doing creative meditations, and I got a bit of relief, but it was really when I started doing -- getting trained in EMDR and getting trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and getting trained in this and getting trained in that, that I started realizing that I, myself, am a trauma survivor as well.
And I didn’t know until much later. So, at the first -- the first 20 years of my career, I didn’t really know that I had the extensive trauma that I had. Which is -- it sounds so strange, but it’s the power of dissociation.
That’s so powerful and so empowering for you to open up and share - just even that piece.
Thank you.
That was a challenge that I had as well, that I had worked professionally and then all the sudden, my world as I knew it sort of fell apart. And as a result of that, the defenses I had been using were no longer working. And everything just stopped. I closed my private practice. I -- someone would have thought that I was seriously depressed. I almost became just a shut it. But, it wasn’t about depression, it was about I recognize this as trauma, and I don’t know what to do with it, because this is me. This is not a person in my office.
Yeah. Mine was sort of the other -- it was just this tsunami. I was in a very psychologically abusive and domestic violent interpersonal marriage, that I didn’t know was as bad as it was. And because of the level of crisis that I was in most of the time, my thinking brain, my knowing brain -- not my thinking brain, my knowing self, was totally offline. Because what she knew, I didn’t have the capacity to comprehend. I wasn’t in a position where I was safe enough to fathom what was going on with me. So, it wasn’t until I started becoming more safer and much more aware of myself, and with that sensorimotor -- just going in and finding this and finding that and finding this and finding that -- and it was like, “Oh my god.” And I discovered afterwards, that I actually -- my ACE scores an 8. It’s really high and I didn’t know that --
Wow.
For years of my career.
Wow.
Mmhmm.
So, tell me, without being overly intrusive, tell me how you were able to do that through -- the sensorimotor process -- so, let me clarify, in case you don’t know. We recently had Pat Ogden on the podcast, so the listeners know about this, and my mind has been blown by this.
Yeah.
What was your process for you?
Well, it was when I started training with sensorimotor -- I was lucky enough that I was one of the last to really get a training by Pat. So, I know Pat quite well. And I started doing sensorimotor and it was just these questions of what’s happening inside? What do you notice inside? Questions that I had never asked or even thought about asking before in my life. And when you start to -- I think, I think because of the meditation practices that I was doing -- they’re very visual, they’re very action oriented -- so I will focus on -- when I do a meditation, I will focus on different colors coming in and breathing in different colors, or I’ll focus on doing guided imagery, where I go to a place -- like I’ll visit San Francisco and I’ll come back. So, I could have that felt feeling of having control and focusing, but it was all highly visual. It did make me feel quite a bit better, and now I know why that is. So, not all meditation needs to be mindfulness.
But, I was doing that and I think because I was going in and actually practicing mindfulness when I started doing Pat’s work, I was able to do what we were instructed on doing, of going in and of exploring the body very well. I just didn’t expect to find what I found.
Wow.
And it was in those inner-journeys that I started experiencing unfathomable pain, and I started to -- the pieces started coming together. The… what was happening was coming together. The experience of walking around, being terrified in my life, but not at work, was so weird, because this never happened at work. Because I was able to stay very mindful the whole time I was working. I was able to stay present with my clients. I don’t know how I did that, but it’s what happened. So, I didn’t find work stressful, and I didn’t find taking care of my kids stressful, because I was regulated in both places, and dysregulated everywhere else.
And so when I started to explore the dysregulation, that’s when I started to explore what was creating the dysregulation.
That’s a powerful thing. I think two things come to my mind. One is that when Pat Ogden was on the podcast, and she said something about your body being an ally -- I was like, “Wait just a minute.” Like, I haven’t even met my body yet. [Laughs]
Yeah.
Much less considered it as an ally.
And I -- and in exploring the field that I explore, which is mindfulness for dissociative disorders -- and I’m learning -- I have learned that they’re very rightl brain activities. And that when we’re dissociating, it is almost impossible, virtually impossible to become aware. And it’s learning how to bring in that awareness. It’s a skill. This isn’t something that just needs to be understood. This is actually like learning to swim, learning to tie your shoes, learning to regulate yourself, is a hard skill to learn, especially when most of you doesn’t want you to do what you need to do, to do that.
Right!
Is that convoluted enough?
Right, exactly.
But you start to understand as you move through these processes that these feelings that we have are simply forms of communication. That terror that I’m experiencing is a part of me sending out a message - something’s wrong. And it’s expecting something to come back. I just didn’t know what that was, and I had to learn what that was to be able to bring in the care that I needed in that moment, of that time. And you can’t do that until you know what the problem is.
The other thing that was really important I want to point out about what you just said was about how it’s so common for survivors to be able to function very well in different areas of their life. And I think especially those of us who are in the field, there’s so much stigma that we advocate against, and then we advocate for people, but then when it’s on us, it’s a whole different thing for some reason. And to --
Yeah.
Recognize that this is actually -- that we can do that ourselves. We have to face that stigma ourselves, in a whole different way, about how we’ve internalized that ourself, and to recognize -- I mean, it’s one thing professionally, to say what are the limits or the supports that I need to be able to be safe and do my job well, and it’s another thing to say, “I’m actually really good at what I do, because I have this and this and this.” And being able to separate and regulate, even though it’s not so easy in other areas of life.
Mmhmm. It always -- I don’t know the science behind what I was doing. I suspect it has something to do with just the makeup that I am, of who I am -- I was able to stay focused and regulated with my clients and with my kids. I think -- Kathleen Kendall-Tuckett was one of our keynote speakers many years ago, and she talked about how nursing moms can feel regulated for the first time, and experience regulation for the first time, because of the neurochemistry that’s being produced by the mom, which is all about the transferring of the neurochemicals of neuronal regulation.
I think when I was nursing my children, I started to actually become regulated for the first time in my life. Because that was -- out of everything in my life -- the birth of my children was the biggest catalyst of change. I started recognizing that I did not -- that something was very wrong, and I think it’s because I started to feel so regulated around my children, and having this felt feeling inside of me, that came from the neurochemistry of when I was nursing. And I think that that feeling of mindfulness when I regulated, it’s not a difficult skill for me in particular, even though it might be a difficult skill for other people in particular. And I think that’s probably why I was able to do the job that I was able to do.
I found, for me, that it’s almost about the struggle is recognizing what it looks like.
Uh huh.
But once you start to notice, “Oh, that’s what that is” --
Yeah.
It gets easier to do, and then you can practice it more on your own. But everything, for a survivor, whether that’s regulating internally, whether that’s finding healthy relationships that aren’t acting out what you’ve already been through, or those kinds of things. Once you recognize it, then it’s easier to get more of it.
Absolutely. It’s like care, right? If you’re hungry, and you don’t know that you’re hungry, you’re going to try all sorts of things to try and get that need met. But once you sort of figure out, “Oh my gosh, this sandwich is making me feel better. I’m going to have more of this sandwich. Oh my goodness. This must be hunger.” And that’s kind of what it’s like for survivors… is you’ve got to start putting those pieces together, of what your own neurobiology, or your own biomechanics are requesting, or talking to you about. And you can’t get that from the mind. You can only get that through sensing and feeling and trusting the felt feelings that the sensations are bringing with them. And dissociation stops all of this from happening.
That’s so powerful. It’s so well-said and such a good image. How did that shift for you, as you were able to do that and continue to do your career?
Well, I think one, I did have that very strong meditation practice before I really started my healing journey. And the other one is just I couldn’t stop it. It was just coming. The -- as soon as I started opening the door through sensorimotor of my body awareness, it just became a very focal point of my being. What’s going on inside? What’s happening in my body? What does this feel like for me? And it’s being able to sort of put the puzzle back after it’s been broken, without a guide. And you just start to trust, “Okay this feels like this. This feels like that. This seems like this. This seems like that. I’m just going to sit with this and let that be.”
And it’s a -- I think it was -- it took time. It probably took me, in total, about ten years, maybe 13 years, to really reach a place where all of the affects of my childhood are manageable… are understandable. It’s not just my childhood, it was also the 20 plus years that I was involved in a domestic violent relationship. The more you learn to go in, the more you learn to put the right words, with the right meaning, with the right context of what you’re experiencing on the inside. The more you trust those sensations, even if they’re the most brutal sensations -- they’re there for a reason.
And the more that you trust them, the more the gaps fill in, of who you are. And then the natural processes start coming in. You’ll have a moment of absolute pride, which shatters all bits of shame. As a trauma survivor, that’s a very weird, loud feeling. That day is a good day.
It is. It’s almost like before those breakthroughs happen, when you have memories -- whether they’re body ones or emotion ones or actual understanding of what the memory is -- there’s always this big flooding. It’s so awful and it’s hard to manage and shut it down, but when you start to have that breakthrough, it’s like the good happens almost as fast, and almost as intensely.
Yeah. Yeah, because you kind of learn to stop the shut down. You learn how to just go with the flow, and be the leaf on the wave, watching yourself as you go through this. And if you honor that pain and suffering, if you give your pain and suffering patience, presence, dignity, and compassion -- right, so when you start to cry and you start to heave -- having those words -- let’s give those feelings some dignity. Let’s give those feelings some compassion. Let’s honor them and they’re supposed to be there. Once you sort of start to realize that they’re your friend, it takes you to that reward really quite quickly. Like, within actually minutes, honestly. And then you become less afraid of yourself, and afraid of the world, because you’re like, “Okay, I can manage that. What else?” And you become fairly impervious.
I spent almost a year on the podcast not wanting to talk about my own professional world, because the fear felt so big, of --
Yeah.
Not just the coming out process, but the consequences, because what if they take my children away? What if I lose my license and can’t provide for my children? What if? What if? What if? And the fears were so big, and when it finally came time, and I thought, This is what I’ve learned, and at some point I have to just trust this. And I sent that email to the ISSTD and said, “This is who I am and what I’m doing.”
Yeah.
Every single response that I got back was positive.
Yeah. And isn’t it hypocritical of our profession to throw people away so quickly when you actually say, “I’m a survivor”, when almost everybody is?
Yes!
You know, why -- you know, we’re not dentists. If we don’t deal with what we’re doing with -- I used to feel like I was a dentist with bad teeth all the time -- that I --
Right? [Laughs]
-- have all these problems that I should know how to fix, but that is contrary to what we’re trying to teach people. It’s that we cannot do any of this stuff alone. That being by yourself is not a healthy way to be healing these kinds of injuries, that we need other people to help us see things that we can’t see. We need that compassion and that community and that care from others, in order to heal these wounds, because they’re relational in essence, right?
It -- yes! And if there’s anything I’ve learned in the last year, it’s that healing comes through connection.
Absolutely.
And since --
It’s that care.
And since that email and reading people’s responses, it has just snowballed into a whole different world, where everything’s just okay. There’s some hard things we need to do. There’s hard stuff to deal with. Everything’s fine. It’s just okay. And these --
Yeah.
Big fears that I’ve had that were all related to, “You can’t say this in your profession” -- it just went away. It’s not even there.
Yeah, and that’s wonderful. That’s -- it’s part of being human. We’re human. And what’s wrong with being human? Sometimes I’m so worried that we’re getting further, and we keep getting further and further and further away from relationships in the therapeutic setting, and we keep not honoring the slowness that is needed in therapy, and the time and patience that’s needed in these things to truly -- and I sort of mean this in a non -- I’m trying to lead that I have weight when I say this word, but there are cures, like absolute cures. I am not the same person I was five years ago, ten years ago. I’m certainly not the same person I was 20 years ago. But, I wouldn’t have changed anything, because I’ve been able to explore myself in a way that I don’t think you get to do unless you know that kind of pain.
Yes.
And the value that comes from having that kind of compassion for yourself just oozes out into your daily life, and it oozes into your practice, where you can look at your clients and say, “Listen. How you are, right now, is not a bad thing.” It’s getting rid of the shame of basic, normal, human, inescapable ways of being.
How did you get connected to the ISSTD in the beginning?
Oh, that’s dear, sweet Martin Dorahy, who did that. So, back in 2006 I think it was, I applied for the David Cole Scholarship, and I didn’t get it. But Martin wrote me a very nice rejection letter, and I think I wrote back going, “That’s really sad. I think you guys should reconsider” or something like that. Or they had made a tiny mistake, and I was trying to make them aware of the mistake. And he ended up -- and I think I was probably melting down, because you do when you’re in master’s school, studying dissociative disorders, and you’re all by yourself and everybody’s giving you grief for what you’re doing.
Right. [Laughs]
So, I connected with him, and he just sent me this lovely email that was like, “It’s okay. Hang in there. You’re doing a good job. We need more of this.” And I was like -- and I had never heard that kind of support and niceness from a colleague, from an academic, so I was like, “What is this?” So, I started -- I became a member, I think, in 2006. I started going to conferences in 2008. I was very quiet my first conference. I was just getting a lay of the land, and then I started going to town hall meetings and business meetings in 2009, and that’s when I noticed a major generation gap - like huge.
Yes.
There was a lot of senior members, scattering of students, and a scattering of -- like, I’m talking about four -- professionals that were sort of that mid-range, mid-career. There wasn’t any then. And I looked at the society and I was like, “This is dying. This is a dying society.” And so I kept asking what are they doing to bring in students and emerging professionals, and how are you guys making this place appealing? And they’re all like, shrug their shoulders, and they’re like “Mm. We’re not.” So then I started bugging Paul Dell, and I’m phoning him like every two months, and saying, “Can I help? Can I help? Can I help? “
They ended up giving me, and creating the students -- it was the student committee. Then we changed it to the student and emerging professional. And so 2010, I started doing small activities to start making it more appealing to the students. I started the student book giveaway, where the senior professionals donated books, and we gave them to the students, so that we could start their libraries. I started, sort of, social activities, where the students and emerging professionals could talk with the seniors. And that went down. That was very, very popular. It’s always been super popular. And then they asked me to be on the board. They asked me like three times, because I couldn’t quite comprehend that they were actually asking me to be part of the board. But yeah, they asked me to be part of the board, and then the following year, they asked me to be the treasurer. I didn’t know what they were thinking about that one either, but that one turned out just fine.
And my whole goal was to bring life back into the organization, to bring more social, bring more fun, bring more -- because I just found it was the most caring, most considerate, and most humane place, organization I’d ever been involved in. I went to a couple other conferences, and they were pretty cold. And the academics were given a lot of accolades, but if you didn’t have any, they didn’t even look at you. That didn’t happen with the ISSTD. I got welcomed with wide open arms. And I think it has to do not just with the organization itself, but the mission, and the vision statement of this organization is to help everybody. The most injured people are who we accept. And they are excluded from damn near everything - excuse my language. They are so excluded, and not in just like excluded or shamed, they are hurt, they are belittled, they are ignored, and we are a society that says, “That’s not okay. It’s not okay to treat people like this.” And we fight hard for those who don’t have a voice, and to me, that’s a work of the universe. That’s what’s going to make things better. And so I have a very passionate place in my heart for the organization.
That almost made me cry. You have done something that is a sacred work. And I know that you are passionate about it, but I don’t know if you know that, survivors and clinicians both, recognize the sacred work that you have done, that you are doing, and what a gift that is to so many. When I started the podcast, I didn’t know that anyone was going to listen to it, and now it’s in 60 countries. And I didn’t know that clinicians that are famous people out there doing big, important work, and giving fancy speeches, would ever want to talk to me, or be well to me.
In this work, they do.
Yes! And bringing those communities together and healing that gap between where people are and what people can do for them, is where healing is happening.
Yeah.
And you are absolutely a part of that, and I’m so grateful for you. And I wanted to tell you that.
Thank you. This organization -- it means a lot, both personally, but also globally. It’s -- I’m just in awe all of the time at how hard this community words at speaking those voices that never get spoken for. And risking their careers over and over and over again to write a wrong. Man, that’s powerful stuff. But it also is -- I started going to ISSTD and I was getting pretty isolated with my work and my ex husband. And I started coming to these conferences, and I think I got seen. And there were many people who saw me. And my best friends, still to this day, and will be for the rest of my life, I have found in this organization - like-minded people, people who are so cellularly and molecularly beautiful -- just who they are. They’re just kind people and good people and thoughtful people and funny people. And the heart and the passion that’s involved in this organization, I really wish people could take a model from us. Take us for a business model or a therapeutic model or an an organizational model, of how to work very hard for others in a way that is beneficial for the whole, rather than -- also for an individual, but also for the whole.
Man, if people knew what we know, the world would be a very different place.
It’s so true.
To me, that’s what’s sacred. To me, that’s what’s absolutely sacred -- is the power of the heart of the organization.
What are some of the things that the ISSTD is doing differently for survivors now than before - just as part of your shift and part of your focus. What are some of those things that have unfolded?
Well, you know, I would actually say that they’ve been consistent with survivors the whole way through. This is the organization that when they were attacked, they kept holding true. When we got attacked, we went back to the books. We went back to more research. We went back to go, “No, no, no, no, no. This is what we are seeing. This can’t be wrong. The tenacity that is always been this. There is a tenacious feeling in this world, in this field, of dissociation that I don’t quite experience anywhere else.” It’s this fierce faith that we have in a human being, and that -- like Pat’s work is so brilliant to me, because it is the body is the ally. The person -- you may -- they may look super nutty on the outside -- sorry to use cochlocleaism, but -- they may look really nutty on the outside, but this is the world that says, “Why? Why would a body do that? What is that body asking for? How can I help that body get what it needs and staying with it, so that you can help that human being learn about themselves, so that they can learn to care for themselves, as you are showing them care.”
That’s basically what this organization does. How it’s changed over the years is I think we’re getting a confidence. I think we’re starting to have enough evidence and enough proof and enough consistency behind us that -- I have many shoulders that I can stand on. Those people who came before me had less shoulders. And the people before them had less. So, I think we’re getting a more confidence of an organization, instead of saying, “Will you please like us?” How we used to do before. Yes, we are doing good. We’re now a lot more confident in saying, “Oh my goodness. You should see what we’re doing. You guys have a look over here.” So, I think we’re getting able to be able to handle the pressure and the questions and hold ourselves true with evidence and the research that we have behind us and the clinical proof of over and over and over again that this is an extraordinarily valid thing. If everybody kind of knew, it would -- and I kind of understand why the powers of [inaudible] don’t really like this. It’s because it turns everything on its head. Dissociation, when you understand and get the notion of it, it makes everything topsy turvy, and I think it really does threaten the status quo of what people think a human is.
Oh, yes.
It really does. It changes the paradigm that the paradigm is really struggling to comprehend.
So, they cannot accept dissociation fully as a thing, and how it works, and why it’s there, without also understanding people differently?
Yes.
And because they don’t want to change the rules and they don’t want to change insurance policy and we don’t want to -- all of these pieces.
I think so.
They reject all of it outright.
I think so. I think it’s just too much of a paradigm shift. [Sniffles]
What do clinicians who have not yet heard about the ISSTD, or taken advantage of joining them, what do they need to know?
You will always be wonderfully surprised. [Laughs] You will -- the more you start learning about dissociation, and the more you become involved with the ISSTD, the more you’ll realize that there’s a capacity for this world to be very different, and still do what you’re doing. To be -- it’s -- it can help you extend your practice. It can eliminate burnout. It helps you look at human beings, not like what is wrong with you, but what happened to you? Like, what is your body trying to communicate? And honestly, I know this sounds super corny, but I’m going to be corny. It helps you fall in love with people. And I know that sounds so strange. I work with -- I hear the worst of the worst, and I know today, sex trafficking was my first appointment, my second appointment was somebody who’s been through genocide, my third appointment is somebody else who was sexually assualted. My first -- my next appointment -- like, this is my day twenty -- like, you know, four days a week, I’m living through this kind of stuff, hearing this terrible, horrible, gut-wrenching thing that people do to each other.
And then you see a human being coming alive from them. You see a human being starting to gain understanding and insight and compassion for themselves. And they start to apply care to what their inners are experiencing. And that human being starts to grow and they are so brilliant at the end of it. And you understand, holy cow, we know so very little of our potential. And human beings are really remarkable. You know, that’s where you find this stuff, in this organization and in this agency and with these people.
I will include the link so that people can have that if they don’t already have it. Is there anything else of that piece, for clinicians, that you want to direct them to, or include?
Just become curious of the ISSTD and become curious about dissociation. It’s going to solve a lot of clinical problems for you once you really understand -- like, you can intuitively, organically comprehend what this body is doing in this state of freeze. And it’s very different than the stage fight/flight. It’s an inactive defense. It’s not an active defense. It’s the one that stops the active defense, so it works really quite differently. But, once you start to understand that, you can start to feel at one with your work, rather than fighting or getting lost or getting confused. So, I highly recommend just checking out everything we’ve got, because there’s so much stuff there.
What do survivors need to know, or what are they able to access with the ISSTD?
So, for survivors, because we are an organization that actually is focused on clinicians and helping clinicians, there’s lots of information. If you’re sort of curious… yourself in a clinical kind of way, there’s lots of you know, information that you can gain. We are trying -- we are in the process of trying to develop that part of ISSTD that is for survivors a little bit more. So, we’re starting to do some written material and that kind of stuff. I would say out of everything we do, probably that’s -- globally, in the world -- most books are written for clinicians. There’s not a lot of books that are actually written for survivors themselves. So, find a therapist on the ISSTD and start working out some books. Start working out some things to write. We need to hear from everybody. We need people’s stories to be common.
Well, and I think that that’s really important, what you said, because the more that all of us share, the more we can build that database, so to speak, and those resources.
Yeah.
I know that because we have such a global audience on the podcast, I get lots of emails about, “I checked the ISSTD website, and there is no one in my country.” And know --
Wow.
-- that that’s a heartbreaking thing that we’re still -- that everyone is still trying to educate and spread the news and advocate for, but not necessarily something you can just fix with a button. You know? There’s so much more involved in that, but it’s so heartbreaking for them. And it’s almost like there’s a new gap that is just about technology, because now we have people who can read those resources, and who can hear things like the podcast, and realize what’s going on, but who can’t yet get to help.
Yeah. You know, there’s small little things that fundamentally, when you’re working with trauma survivors, it is possible for a therapist to learn how to do this. This isn’t -- it’s challenging work, it’s gut-wrenching work, but if you follow your body, your body will take you to those places of reward as well afterwards. So, it’s inviting the therapist. If you have a therapist that you have a close relationship -- that’s the most important thing. That therapist can learn how to manage the symptoms and the skills that are required to help someone work through a dissociative disorder. So, I would -- if I was in a place where there was no therapist, there is a therapist, and I would actually start going to the therapist, and say, “Would you be open to helping me with this? Here’s information for you. There’s supports here for you. Would you mind helping me through this?”
And advocating for yourself, while they learn --
Yeah, that’s kind of hard. And I know because it’s a lot of really traumatized people don’t do well with advocating for themselves, because they were taught and trained not to advocate for themselves. But, maybe put it as a seed. Right? Maybe put it as somewhere down in the future, that you could help -- you could introduce the ISSTD to the therapist, and the therapist could learn how to help you
The other gap that is almost like what you talked about earlier, about it being generational, has to do with treatment guidelines, and not because of ISSTD, but because of time.
Yeah.
So, I am friends with Peter Barach, who is involved with that originally, and I appreciate him and his help, and he’s talked on the podcast before, and he’s spoke about how one problem with just updating treatment guidelines is that dissociation is still treated the same way. The problem with -- and so that makes sense, and I appreciated his perspective on understanding, because I was getting all these questions, and I didn’t know how to answer them. And so that helped a lot -- give me some perspective that even though this and this and this, or the DSM IV, or the ISSTD-11, or whatever -- even though these things change, the treatment is still sort of the same process in a general way.
Yeah.
I think part of what the challenge is, is the gap in time and how everything filters down. So, there are people in places without good therapists or people --
Yeah.
-- who have a therapist who only has something from 1980.
Yeah.
And so a new generational person is like, “That’s from 40 years ago. Why are you treating me with something from 40 years ago?” Even though there’s so much more to that, and I know that -- like, Bethany Brand is working on the TOPDD Studies, and we’re working so hard on research, and all of these things are in the process of unfolding.
Yeah.
But in the moment…in the moment, the experience for the person is that they’re with a therapist who has a piece of paper.
Yeah.
That the therapist is using as -- not as a guideline, but almost as a policy statement. That --
Yeah.
It should end up looking like this and only this. And --
And I think that’s the influence of the CBT world, or the cognitive behavioral world that’s very manualized. And I think that is the culture that we’re in right now. You need these results. We got to get the results. It’s just this -- it’s like we’ve taken capitalism and used capitalism as our guiding measurement of health. And once again, we can’t do that. That’s why dissociation changes that paradigm, because you cannot treat this quickly. There is nothing that can be done with a therapist in ten sessions, except for small connections that will have the deep rooted grounding that needs to happen in order to change. We have to be safe to change, and if we don’t feel safe, change can’t happen, because the body doesn’t have that scaffolding. It doesn’t have what it needs to do what it needs to do to heal, to go to those vulnerable places and be safe.
So, it’s so sad. There’s no treatment place in Canada for someone with a dissociative disorder to go to. You have to have an addiction as well, but if you don’t have an addiction, there’s nowhere to go. And I think it’s a lot like that in the states as well, and I think it’s a lot like that -- the Netherlands might be a little different. I think they have a different setup. But --
In the Netherlands, they’re really struggling, actually, which is fascinating.
Are they?
Because some of the best research is out of there.
Yeah. What we need is treatment facilities that are designed around those treatment guidelines of respecting and honoring. But, I think we’ve learned an awful lot about mindfulness since those treatment guidelines have come out, and dissociation and mindfulness -- they don’t really work. As far as I know, I’m the only person who actually speaks about mindfulness and dissociation. And I do believe that mindfulness is actually a very important part of this. The tough part of this is that mindfulness is such a landmine field for people with dissociation.
But, if a person can start learning small little pieces of how to be mindful, that’s when a lot of things can start changing inside. And if we were to add in a little bit more understanding of what mindfulness is and how to adapt it with a dissociative disorder, that might open some things up too.
Well, and it’s so hard to explain some of these experiences.
Yeah.
Like, we spoke about earlier, about how the breakthrough can be so equally as good as the rest of it is hard before those times, or how -- I spoke with Dan Siegel last week and he talked about how anything that’s integrative, and not just talking about personalities integrating or combingine, but the body and the mind and all these pieces -- how that is -- he said, like a fruit salad, not as smoothie. And when I talk to these people or interview these people or they talk on the podcast, they have such beautiful descriptions of understanding those pieces, because they are connected with the people.
Yeah.
And that is such a different experience than a therapist who just has the piece of paper that’s 40 pages that has to look like this.
Exactly, because it doesn’t look -- generally, with dissociation, not one person is going to look exactly the same, but there’s general rules. Right? There’s general -- it’s asking these common sense questions when a person’s in there, of in that moment to moment, what’s happening in this. You know? I have some clients who need something that it doesn’t even occur to me, because I’ve never had that particular need. You can’t put that in a manual.
That’s -- it’s the same thing as parenting. You can’t put parenting into a manual either, because parenting is about the ebbs and flows of that child’s inner body. And you can put general rules. That child needs to be clothed, and warm, and fed, and all of those things are general rules, but that specific child might not like avocado and another one might love avocado. We are unique individuals and the therapeutic setting has to reflect that, because you’re not treating a disorder. You’re treating the human being who has disordered ways of being. And our job is to help figure out why they’re doing that and what it would need so that it doesn't have to do that.
So, Peter Barach told me that originally, they even came about -- the guidelines -- because of insurance companies.
Yeah.
And that being a requirement. And so what’s happened is someone else outside the relationship required that, and then now people are misapplying them. And what you’re saying is not even about updating them, so much as seeing beyond them.
There’s a little bit of both. They do need to be updated and I’m attempting to. That’s one of the things I’d like to accomplish with my presidency -- is get that started, because they do need to be updated. The language needs to be updated. Some of the diversity needs to be updated and just making sure that we’re not being overly privileged or not inclusive enough. So, that has to be updated as well as including some of these new notions that we didn’t really know about in 2011. Like Pat’s bodywork stuff has changed things. Understanding the default mode network -- that’s brand new, and that’s going to open something really wide up, I do believe. There’s other brain structures that we weren’t really aware -- we weren’t really aware back in 2011.
I think the senior people did. The people at the top of the pyramid knew, but now I think it’s spreading down the pyramid, of how fundamentally important relationships are. But what constitutes a human relationship? Like, I’m not sure we knew the neurochemistry and the neurobiology of the betrayal of sexual assault in the same way we understand it now. And it’s sort of helping prove what everybody has been saying in the past. The neurobiology and the neurochemistry really gives us hard evidence that it is the top relational injury that you can get besides neglect.
So, part of what’s good about all that is that because of technology today, we can sort of get disseminated more quickly as it unfolds, both the gathering of information and the updating of guidelines and perspectives from ISSTD - that’s all on the website.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, as people connect with the organization and utilize those trainings, then they are talking to the same people I’m talking to, and other people, and it gets out there, instead of having these old stale things that end up harming, even though that’s not what they were intended.
Mmhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That’s exciting. You’re doing so much.
Oh, thank you. Well, I didn’t -- when I first started in this career, it found me. I did not find it. I’ve always felt super passionate, because I think of how misunderstood, and how brutal people are, to those who have been hurt the most. But, I now know at the other side of this, that a part of my passion is also me trying to figure out what was going on. I never consciously thought I had to figure out what was going on. I intuitively -- I just intuitively was led here. And if I can share any of these passions with the world, of how remarkable we are as a species, and if we’re given the right conditions, and if we’re raised in the right environment, we are unstoppable in beautiful, positive, kind, connective ways. There’s so much we could be doing with our ingenuity and our resources that makes -- it just -- it’s mind blowing, what’s possible.
That’s exciting. That’s so exciting.
Mmhmm.
Thank you for talking to me.
You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me. Keep doing the good thing.
Aw, thank you so much. Is there anything that we left out that you want included?
Oh, there’s so many things you could talk about, in so many different directions. Just, if I was to give a little bit of advice to students and emerging professionals, please come and talk to me. [Laughs] I am wide open to students and emerging professionals, because of the energy and the excitement and the openness. I want to invite you to the ISSTD to help continue this society, to help grow this society, to help change the world for the better.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
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