Transcript: Episode 23
Guest: Dr. Warwick Middleton
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Hello, this is Dr. E. I need to introduce the following podcast a bit. I did another interview and I appreciate our guest spending time with us, but there’s several things that you need to know before you listen. The first is that he was outside during the interview and so you will hear some birds and some other outdoor sounds that are in no way at all meant to be triggering to anyone. But do be aware that you hear a bird, one particularly friendly one, throughout the interview. The second is that by the nature of this interview and who our guest is, there are several triggering topics included in the interview. Further, as part of the discussion, he does include several specific case studies that are both public and well known and very detailed in their graphic report. Because of this, there are different types of abuse mentioned. There are weapons mentioned. There are different types of confinement mentioned. Further, there are types of organizational and other ritual abuse scenarios and examples given, including abuse in church settings, Satanic ritual abuse, and other examples of organizational abuse. In addition, further discussion about abuse that is ongoing into adulthood is also discussed. As always, please make sure that your system is safe before listening to the podcast and grounded after listening to the podcast. Thank you for taking good care of yourself and being attentive to your own needs as you listen and after listening. Thank you.
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Hello, this is Dr. E. and today I’m interviewing Professor Warwick Middleton. Professor Middleton has had substantive ongoing involvement with research, writing, teaching, including workshops and seminar presentations, supervision, and conference convening. He has made substantial and ongoing contributions to the bereavement and trauma literatures and was with Dr. Jeremy Butler, author of the first published series in the Australian scientific literature detailing the abuse histories and clinical phenomenology of patients fulfilling diagnostic criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder.
He was the first researcher to publish systematic research into ongoing incestuous abuse during adulthood. He is a fellow and past president of the ISSTD, is a co-chair of the ISSTD Membership Committee and Vice-Chair of the ISSTD Scientific Committee. Professor Middleton Chairs The Cannan Institute. In 1996 he was a principal architect in establishing Australia’s first dedicated unit treating Dissociative Disorders - The Trauma and Dissociation unit in Belmont Hospital. He has authored many papers and book chapters and has been the co-editor of two books based on journal special issues. He holds professorial appointments at the University of Queensland, La Trobe University, The University of New England, and The University of Canterbury.
Interview begins
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Welcome Dr. Middleton.
I know that you were studying originally bereavement and getting your doctorate and through those cases first were introduced to trauma. Can you tell me how you got involved with treating trauma patients after that?
What I was seeing with severely abused patients is a spectrum of the broader trauma area and one becomes aware that in order to survive and in order for dissociation to work one has to somewhat dissociate the fact that one dissociates. And dissociation is a disruption in the normally integrated processes of identity consciousness, memory, motor control, and emotional response. It’s a way of shutting off channels of recording and in a way that protects a traumatized child in the longer term from having to deal with something that they’re incapable of dealing with. And that usually involves ongoing abuse by someone who was also the primary attachment object and caregiver. So, there’s this inbuilt contradiction that the person whom is likely your abuser is also the person to whom you rely for attachment and protection.
So, it’s nothing very unusual about the process of dissociation. It actually makes a whole lot of psychological sense to realize that of course, you know, somebody who doesn’t have a developed sense of identity when they’re trauma starts, that identity is going to be a part of the dissociative process. And where trauma starts early, before there is stable identity, then the compartmentalization of trauma, which is say in an adult, is a compartment between a traumatized and an un-traumatized part. And a child takes on the persona of different identity states, some of whom are daddy’s special little girl and some who know the extent of the abuse and only surface at times of the abuse and so compartmentalize memories of trauma.
I, early on, decided that the most productive way in which to further the establishment of the field in Australia was to do a detailed phenomenological study of a representative and substantial number of individuals who satisfied diagnostic criteria for DID and over a period of five years, I and a colleague Jeremy Butler, collected fine-grained data on the phenomenology in abuse histories of 62 individuals seen in Brisbane selected for no other reason than that I had legitimate clinical contact with these individuals. Off the series, I had contact with 57 and he had contact with five such individuals.
And the core findings of that study, which was published in 1998, so we’re getting back over two decades now, was that the abuse history and phenomenology of individuals who satisfied diagnostic criteria for DID in Brisbane, Australia was pretty well identical to the phenomenology in abuse histories of individuals in series had been described in North America.
So, going forward the next step was to establish an inpatient unit that attempted to address the particular issues of individuals with dissociative disorders and that was how I became involved in being the principal architect of the establishment of the Trauma and Dissociation unit at Belmont Hospital. And we celebrated with a conference in Brisbane back in 2017, the 20th anniversary of the establishment of that unit.
Over time, and it was apparent in the first published series, I became focused on the issue in my research and writing on those particular individuals with DID and they all had DID who had been subjected to ongoing incestuous abuse during adulthood. If I looked at the literature of even recent years, one could be forgiven for thinking that apart from the odd case study and anecdotal references that there was no systematic research whatsoever on the fate of a significant proportion of individuals with DID for whom the abuse essentially never ended. And one of the paradoxes of researching this field where one has to show due care and never go beyond the verifiable data, that the individuals in the spectrum are people who very much resemble the large group now of individuals who have been the subject of articles in the popular press about that same phenomena. And I probably somewhat paradoxically have Josef Fritzl to thank for stimulating past interest in the phenomena. So, as you’re aware, Josef Fritzl had sexually abused his daughter Elizabeth for 31 years and for 24 of that he had her imprisoned in a homemade dungeon under his residence in Austria.
Apart from the fact that he actually created a dungeon, the core elements of his abuse was very similar to multiple other reported cases and in 2013 I reported in the international literature an analysis of 51 such individuals or groups of individuals reported in the world press who had subjected children, usually daughters, to this sort of ongoing abuse. Obviously press reports tend to be somewhat sensationalized and usually fairly short so we don’t get the fine-grained collection of data that one sees in a systematic, scientific series.
But what it did, it allowed me to actually identity from unequivocal cases that were verified by court reports and police statements, a phenomena that one could then examine more closely in a series of clinical cases which I published again later that year, which was a series of ten such individuals seen in Brisbane who had essentially identical abuse histories to the sorts of people that were the subject of verified court reports. And if one looks way back to the published series in 1998 that I was involved in putting together, it was apparent back then that at least 1 in 8 patients with DID had this sort of history. They were victims of abuse that never ended. There used to be the assumption of course that something as bad incest was that intended to end with at least, if not before puberty at least with puberty where abusers and fathers, et cetera became worried about pregnancy and individuals became older and stronger and managed to leave the family environment or something happened that brought the abuse to an end. But, it’s very apparent that for a significant proportion, and I would say now having seen many, many more such cases that the 1 in 8 figure of people with DID that have this sort of background is if anything a tad on the conservative side.
So, if you look at published figures for the population incidence of DID in the adult population, the median of published series is somewhere in the 1.1% and if one was to assume, and congruent with my published research, that something in the order of 1 and 8 of these were subject to do ongoing incest into adulthood, we actually end up with the challenging figure that about 1 in 700 of the adult population have this sort of background where the abuse is ongoing. And of course among the groups that I have seen, one sees example where the abuse has literally by one or other family members and associated organized abusers, where sexual abuse has continued for half a century and that was also brought out in the published press reports. Where they were press reports documenting cases where ongoing incest had occured for over 40 years. And of course when it was originally published, Josef Fritzl’s case led people to wonder whether there was something unusual about Austria. You know, we had Adolf Hitler coming from Austria. We had Josef Fritzl coming from Austria and of course there were a couple of other high profile cases of severe abuse associated with Austria. And of course, very shortly, became apparent that every country where there’s a reasonable court system, that we have similar such cases and soon there were British Fritzl’s and Scottish Fritzl’s and American Fritzl’s and Australian Fritzl’s and so on and so forth.
In 2012 I published an updated series of such cases and as time’s gone on, one just sees the such cases in the popular literature continue to accumulate. And while some become the subject of books and where there is more detailed description of the dissociation, the brief press reports usually don’t have an opportunity to delve into any of the complexities of the dissociative conditions.
One of the things that I have found is that every single person that I’ve ever seen who has this sort of history has DID. It’s almost like if you’re going to survive and you haven’t suicided, you need to be severely dissociated in order to live with and somehow survive that sort of ongoing abuse.
What is the difference in the dynamic between the abuser and the child and the abuser and the adolescent or the abuser and the adult?
When one looks at abuse that continues into adulthood, one has usually a strong attachment, despite the fact that on one level parts of the individual are very aware that they’re being abused, they also, as we a species, mammalian species are strongly attached to our primary attachment figures and if the only attachment figures are abusers, then there’s a deep ambivalence about acting definitively against someone who is both your strongest attachment figure and also your principal abuser.
So, disentangling oneself from that sort of abuse scenario. Yes, it happens and therapy is an important component of that. But when one does actually see individuals who they never reach escape velocity. Yes, they’re deeply traumatized and deeply shamed and the principle mechanisms by which abusers keep their victims in this sort of role is by use of shame, fear, and conditioning. Shame is that the child victim really wanted this or elicited it, that they’re really a slut or combined with no one will believe you and if you tell anyone, I will kill you or you will go to hell. And all mixed in at times with, you’re my special person and I love you and you’re my little princess. And what became apparent when getting that form of extreme abuse that in the series of people that I’ve seen, it’s very apparent that one or both of the parents, seemingly from what the victim could pick up had themselves, had been quite traumatized and in the published series that I mention of 10, at least half felt that their father or step father, had Dissociative Identity Disorder themselves and most were aware that their father had come from an abusive background. And with mothers, we saw not dissimilar pattern, where they also had an abuse history and a tendency to be dissociative themselves.
So when you're surrounded by generations of people who were traumatized and dissociative and where the abusive culture is so ingrained, it becomes a very challenging thing. There was a case that came to life in New South Wales, just in the last half decade or so, and that was a family known as The Colt Family, where literally there were documented four generations of this extended family where every generation was abused. When authorities finally moved sort on a sort of rural conclave [inaudible at 19:38] in the bush, they found ten children and of the ten, these are young children that needed to be put in care, of the ten, nine had parents who were related to each other. So, there were 9 of the 10 who were incestuously fathered children and they were the fourth generation of a family where the ancestors went back and back and back.
Now, one has to be extremely careful in making generalizations. One issue that every person has been traumatized is automatically an abuser, but it does point to a reality that when you’re dealing with the extreme end of the spectrum, that abusers tend to coerce or force their abused offspring to also abuse their own offspring and that it brings with it strong feelings of shame and a strong tendency to maintain silence. So even though you get egregious abusers, yes some will sort of finally take out that sort of aggravated violence to keep their abuser away, but it’s actually very rare that they’ll initiate court proceedings that would have their father jailed.
A rare exception was one in Northern New South Wales, which became court prominent a couple of years ago, where a father and a mother were both jailed and where two sisters gave evidence of severe sadistic abuse. And when you’re dealing with that spectrum, sadism, the use of weapons, knives, guns, death threats are commonplace. And when one looks into the families and one sees, and these are verified examples, where close family members and close associates seem to die by unnatural means, homicide, suicide at alarming rates. And while I said before that we’re looking at rough figures where DID incorporates ongoing incest during adulthood of 1 in 700, that could be an underestimate of the number affected because when one looks at the group that has survived, most of them have survived serious suicide attempts. Most of them have been seriously physically assaulted and carry scars and internal injuries from those sort of assaults. And a number of them had inducements to suicide by their abusers. So, it’s very apparent that quite a number on the spectrum are already dead so they’re never included in the figure. And of course that keeps the issue hidden that these people die by suicide or of unnatural causes and misadventure and no one is able to look at the overall picture and actually demonstrate all of the causal links.
The fact that society has large numbers of people who are in positions of authority and who abuse children or, and, or, who use their institution to cover up such abuse was really brought into graphic relief by the Australian Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which concluded light in 2017, which was the most comprehensive national inquiry into such abuse in history, and yet even then that inquiry focused on institutions, particularly churches. And of the churches that were represented among the victims most frequently was the Catholic Church. Of all the victims of institutional abuse, that gave evidence of that Australian Royal Commission, no less than 40% of them were victims of clergy abuse or other church officials within the Catholic Church. No faith group really remained unaffected and I might also add that when one looks at professional groups, one finds examples of prominent abusers who outwardly appear eminently respectable and persuasive and powerful, who nevertheless have abused people who are vulnerable, including those who were children. And that includes people in the mental health professions, people in sporting professions, people who are in the scouting movement, who run off and it just... et cetera.
You know the salient message of recent years is that abusers don’t usually declare themselves and they use positions of authority to cover their tracks or to intimidate their victims or to organize access to victim. And I guess one of the features of recent years as we have become a digitally internet connected community is we’ve just seen graphic examples of the way child abusers organize by the encrypted sites on the internet to swap at times, live video feeds of children being abused and we’ve seen multiple large encrypted rings of child abusers being uncovered in various [inaudible 25:47] probes one of which was the probe by the FBI in the playpen, which came to light in 2015.
And playpen was a site that allowed for the connection between child sex abusers online and the number of members of that site when it was published was in the order of 250,000 members. So, there are numerous examples of people from prominent positions right across from politicians to university professors to members of the FBI, the Justice Department, police, child protection agency workers, et cetera, et cetera. The message is that within all those groups, we’ve got prominent examples of people who have been using their position to have access or a cover for the abuse of children. So, one becomes appropriately cautious about taking things on face value.
I guess the prime example of this would be the ongoing series of abuse scandals involving the Catholic Church. Where country by country, we’ve seen dramatic and evolving evidence of the extent of abuse in prominent archdiocese that stretch back for 50 or more years in entire countries. Where it becomes apparent that the senior hierarchy of the church have covered up for pedophile abusers and moved them around from diocese to diocese and where there’s been destruction of evidence. And it’s sort of got to the point where we’ve seen now that fairly frequently in the process, it’s not like the old days where there’s some polite inquiry into the church, these days law enforcement arrive with search warrants and take away documents from the administration of prominent bishops. And when we look at places like the Netherlands, we find that the majority of the bishops in the entire country are incredibly involved in the coverup or knowledge of child sexual abuse that was not reported. We’ve seen these prominent examples in Holland, Germany, Ireland, The U.S., Australia, et cetera where we get the predictable expressions of regret and need for more openness and we’re now right for the first time in the history really, where the Catholic Church, in terms of the number of [inaudible 28:52] members who have been charged or are facing trial or have been convicted of serious crimes is unprecedented. And where a person who’s third in line in the power succession of the Pope has been committed to trial and this prominent Bishop in France...I should say Cardinal in France, is a cardinal there in the U.S. whose issues have prompted of seeing the Pope to repent and to resign. We’ve just not ever seen that sort of public attention to our institutions in the history of humanity really. The Church has been around 2,000 years and yes, we’ve been through the reformation 500 years ago but this is actually, if anything, more dramatic in terms of a way in which we run our institutions.
And I might add that within psychiatry, we have seen much more of a trend to put any allegations about sexual boundary violations or abuse prominently within the hands of police rather than or registration authorities rather than attempting any sort of in house inquiry. They’ve proven to be demonstrably unhelpful and usually embarrassing in terms of their results. So, that’s an overview of some of the issues.
How do we help people if it’s so pervasive and so extensive?
Well, I guess there are two major prompts to that. One is society itself benefits or encouraged to be open that the bravery of individuals who are able to finally tell their truth needs to be acknowledged and supported and at the same time we need to be aware that this sort of abuse has massive impact on the causation of mental illness and social problems such as alcoholism, drug abuse, sexually transmitted disease, not to mention smoking, heart disease, et cetera. In fact, the more traumatized one is the more types of trauma one has growing up, the more likely one is to develop mental illness or physical illness to have teenage pregnancy or to develop lung disease from smoking or cardio vascular disease from alcohol and drugs, et cetera.
So, none of these things...there’s not just a unilateral, unidirectional result from abuse. It filters through and from generation to generation as I’ve sort of mentioned. It can continually impact at the individual level obviously we need to be aware and health professionals need to be aware of trauma spectrum disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, somatization disorder, so called Borderline Personality Disorder, et cetera. In fact when we look at all of the literature that’s looked at the abuse histories of people that present to mental health centers or mental health outpatient departments, we find that approximately 2/3rds come with significant history of childhood physical and/or sexual abuse. And when we add in abuse and neglect, emotional abuse and neglect I should say, the figure comes up to around 80%. Now, that’s not to say that everybody that presents any way to a mental health facility has a condition caused by abuse, but nevertheless it’s undeniable that the more abuse one has the more likely it is that one is going to end up with major mental health issues and major physical issues. Yes, there are other factors that cause mental illness and just as there are other factors that cause physical illness.
I mean, one thing you asked about - what do we do? I think there’s something very valuable about the Australian Royal Commission. And as one is aware, there’ve been a number of Royal Commissions or similar commissions, national commissions, launched in various parts of the world, none of them have done anything like as well as the Australian World Commission. I see the British Commission into historical child abuse has largely been a lengthy and messy process that has yet to get any real traction and where they’ve been through multiple different commissioners.
The Australian Commission started with the Royal Commissioner and Assistant Commissioners and went through the entire 5 year process with the same team intact and very early on they made a central anchor-point of their missions work was respect for the dignity of abuse survivors. Survivors didn’t give evidence in a way where they were put on trial or they were cross examined. They were supported in large numbers in a very empathic and very sympathetic environment to be able to tell their story to someone in authority. And yes, there were public hearings which look in depth at a range of institutions which gave findings that could be generalized to multiple institutions so there was an indepth look at certain schools or certain sporting buddies or certain church groups or certain church policies, et cetera. And that were balanced by a whole lot of individuals, over 8,000 in fact, who gave individual testimony about their own sexual abuse within institutional settings that involved both abuse and the cover up of the abuse.
Now what became very apparent to the Royal Commissioners that a large proportion of those who gave evidence about being sexually abused by institutions or representatives of institutions were also abused by members of their family. And it’s very apparent that 90% plus child sexual abuse that happens in society doesn’t happen particularly within institutions, but within that other untouched organization, if you want to put it that way. You know, the family where 90% of child sexual abuse occurs within family groupings. And when you get to the extreme ends of DID, one finds almost universally, as I found in my published studies, is that when you get ongoing incest into adulthood, almost invariably the abuse within the family extends to incorporate some kind of organized abuse. Whether it be associated with a church. Whether it be a father’s work mates. Whether it be multi-generational family and orientation or whether it be some form of a cult. There seems to be a natural human tendency to organize, where there are ones that collect stamps, rides motorcycles or abuses children. And we see the hints when we have any internet connected society, you see graphic evidence of organizational abuse on scales hitherto unimaginable.
Organizational abuse - even using that term broadens the scope of different kinds of Ritual Abuse to include those other examples that you gave.
Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the term Ritual Abuse. I guess in the prime minister's public apology and his speech that came with it, our prime minister of the time last year, Scott Morrison, made reference to ritual occurring within abuse and undoubtedly ritual abuse incorporated in some childhood sexual and other abuse. And those sort of rituals that one encounters, one sees examples of things that involve religious symbols. I guess you get occasions where other symbols like Satanic symbols in a verified way have been incorporated into significant crimes. That is not to say that as yet that there is significant hard evidence of some sort of multi-generational Satanic worldwide organization that has babies and eats them, et cetera.
Those sorts of stories have circulated and have been circulating in various forms probably for hundreds of years, but sort of got to prominence again in the 80’s and hence when I was researching ongoing incest into adulthood I was very careful to not go beyond the data and that before I published systematic research onto individuals within the spectrum that I had assessed in detail, I published verified accounts and analysis of such individuals who had been widely reported in the world press. So, that gave a solid foundation to then being able to say, yes this form of severe abuse exists. It is widespread and what one sees clinically is very consistent with what is reported in the popular press and which appears in court reports and police statements.
That did not happen with allegations that appeared in the 1980s about alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse. There were counts of sort of cannibalism, you know babies being murdered in large numbers and et cetera. That’s not to say that at times, some disturbed individuals and there are disturbed individuals who have and it’s verified used some form of reference etc Satanic symbols just as they’ve used Christian symbols incorporated into their abuse. And I have patients that have been abused by priests where the abuse is fairly mainstream for this sort of spectrum, but where on occasions, there are some elements of Christian Ritual incorporated into the abuse.
So, one needs to keep an open mind, but one does not need one’s brain to fall out. And from very early on in the modern dissociative disorder slash complex trauma field, there have been many individuals who have cautioned about going beyond the verifiable data. We also need to not report things that do happen and which are provable and verifiable because we just choose not to look. I did find it interesting that it took so long, the systematic research into ongoing incestuous abuse during adulthood, to actually be published. Up until 2013, the only references to it in the literature were the odd anecdotal reference and the odd single case study. Sometimes as a autobiography or biographical book written by a journalist or with a journalist and that was the extent of it.
What has changed that’s made it more accessible or possible culturally or as a society to listen to these accounts or to confirm data and actually publish it so that it’s available to more people? What has changed?
I think we’ve reached a tipping point. If you look at the last hundred odd years at various times, a few individuals have tripped over and reported on the reasonably widespread nature of severe child abuse. In fact it even goes back further than that if one looks at some of the French pathologists who were seeing the results of severe child abuse. And French morgues back in the mid-1800’s, it was apparent that severe abuse occurs within society. And as we kind of know Freud was the first person to actually publish an account of the etiology of what was called hysteria being child sexual abuse occuring at an early age and usually involving a close family member. And within a very short period of time, from publicly proclaiming his theory about the etiology of hysteria, he was already by September 1897, reworking his theory and denying it. So that by 1905 he had renounced his so-called Seduction Theory and replaced it with a theory of fantasy and hysterical mendacity. So, we got back to sort of a scenario where women fantasizes and children can’t be relied upon to tell the truth and that people within the spectrum of hysteria or what would also encompass what became known as Borderline Personality Disorder, were prone to make wild and extravagant claims and were not to be believed. And the disempowering of women or the projection of women as lacking power, being unclean, being down the totem order in religious observance and in power structures, was well ingrained. And yes, over subsequent years, here and there, a single study by an individual did shine brightly a little light, but it did not capture. It was never captured as a widespread phenomena until the late 70’s feminism reached something of a critical point that coincided with the issues of returning Vietnam Veterans with post traumatic stress disorder.
But even then when incest became finally acknowledged as a widespread phenomena, there was a backlash. I might point out that when I started Psychiatry in 1980, the most prominently used, comprehensive textbook in Psychiatry was the comprehensive textbook of Kaplan and Sadock in a small section buried in the back of the book there was a page and a bit on incest which quieted another study more recent than 1955 on the prevalence and it came up with a result that on the quoted prevalence, there was something, incest was a vanishing rare phenomena where one women in about a million were subjected to incest. And within six years of that published epidemiologic studies indicated that child sexual abuse in some from was occurring in over a third of women and that something like 16% of the female population, adult population came with a history of some form of childhood incest. And of that 16, 4.5% involved either father or step father.
So, you know the order of magnitude from one in a million to a 160,000 per million as victims of incest gives some indication of just the extent of the non-focus and denial of society even in relatively recent times. And going back to that period, it was the period where I was just finished training in Psychiatry. And if incest was a vanishing rare, you can imagine how rare DID was, which was a condition that’s particularly associated with severe incest.
So do you think that trauma is being reported or disclosed more and so you’re saying that it’s often a kind of comorbidity thing or that it’s being misdiagnosed as other things?
Well, I think it’s being reported far, far more frequently now is what I was saying about the tipping point. While I said there was a backlash, that was sort of backlash that encompassed polarizations and professional disputes about the validity of recovered memories. And as you know, in about 1992, and organization called The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, formed by Pamela and Peter Freyd, with Ralph Underwager and their leader Wakefield in Philadelphia and it gained prominence by being a focal point for people accused of incestuously abusing children and it proclaimed that they were innocent. And I’m not saying that there weren’t significant numbers who haven’t been falsely accused. Just as there are people falsely accused of all sorts of crimes. But it also became apparent that this organization made a focus of essentially encouraging to sue therapists and to try outlaw therapy and to attack the foundations of the diagnosis of DID by putting forward some entity which has never been scientifically defined in terms of any operational criteria out of the false memory syndrome but it gained a lot of national and international press at the time and that organization sort of continued but became much less prominent over the last half decade. They now no longer publish a newsletter. They have a scientific advisor committee, but a large portion of the people named on their website are actually now deceased.
And in that induvating period we’ve seen this massive change in the way in which institutions are now seeing those that should normally be the vestians of moral authority and putting forth as the highest priority, the welfare of children, defy the fact that they’ve just horribly let down children decade after decade and covered their tracks or tried to. And we’ve seen so many examples in so many countries that it’s no longer credible that the fantasizing about abuse is an alternative to the reality that our mainstream churches and our family and so called nuclear family are major contributors to child sexual abuse and to the causation of complex trauma, including Dissociative Identity Disorder and that whole range of trauma-spectrum disorders and that includes as I’ve said, things like drug and alcohol addiction and abuse, sexual difficulty’s and disorders, sleeping disorders, eating disorders, proneness to depressive disorders, et cetera.
You were one of the first researches to really link the dissociative disorders to trauma and to research those trauma histories specifically and that you have been so careful to stay within the confines of the data itself and research and approaching it that way, so that it did get more traction and got a greater reception so that more people could learn about this. But, you’ve also really done a lot to advocate and empower survivors through the way that you present it.
So, for example, I want to read, with your permission, a quote from a presentation I saw you give actually in 2011.
Right.
And here’s what you said that I have never forgotten and it just really blew my mind, but you said, “Far more is right with them than what’s wrong with them and what’s wrong with them was not caused by them.”
Yes, that’s right.
It’s a powerful statement. It’s a heavy statement and it’s really very straight forward and very simple and maybe even very obvious, but I think it’s a point that’s not often said out loud by researchers or by those who are discussing survivors as if they are not in the room. It was good. Just thank you for that. It was a powerful statement and I’ve shared it frequently.
Yeah, my colleague, Professor Jennifer Freyd, and I might add that Jennifer by way of interpretation, is the daughter of Peter and Pamela Freyd. Jennifer’s gone onto a distinguished career as an academic psychologist and is the longterm editor of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. Jennifer has written a lot about institutional betrayal and one of the points she makes about abusers is that the standard response from the abuser is to deny and loudly attack. And to switch the focus from the victim to the offender so that they become the victim and the victim is now portrayed as somebody who is attacking them and their the innocent victim of an attack. I probably don’t have to labor the point, but when one looks at that as a strategy, one sees the parallels within the political process in your country at the moment, where loud denial and loud attack sort of seem to dominate the airwaves on a daily basis.
I very much appreciate you talking to me today and I want to honor your time. So, I know our hour is almost up. Is there anything you want to add before we finish?
Absolutely. You very generously sort of attributed to me and how I roll in the field and it is true that I have been involved for many years in Australia in terms of the sort of things I sort of mentioned before, in terms of publishing, setting up a model of treatment in terms of contributing to and collaborating with a number of organizations and in trying to put together foundational research that provided a reference point for the emerging field in Australia.
But, I would very much emphasize that the modern dissociative field had its formation in more senior colleagues particularly and within that group I won’t try and list them all by name, but I should give prominent examples those who very early on were prominent in doing systematic research and in publishing in this area.
And they include Richard Kluft, who was the editor for a decade of the Journal of Dissociation, who’s a past president of our society and who has treated more people with DID than anyone in the history of the world. Fred Putnam and Colin Ross, both of whom published major textbooks on the diagnosis treatment of what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder in 1989 and of veritable large grouping of other colleagues who in those early years and subsequently contributed to the foundation of a field and that field is actually a strong field and it’s growing healthily. I look forward to being in the U.S. in March 2019 this year for the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation and your conference which will be in Times Square, New York. And it’s bringing researchers and presenters from all over the world. And it’s nice that I have so many colleagues within Australia who are a part of that organization and my colleague Martin Dorahy, who I’ve collaborated with more than anyone else. He succeeded me as a president of the International Society of the Study of Trauma and Dissociation and is a prominent presenter and has made a major focus of his research the issue of shame.
And I could talk a lot more about shame, but it’s a core component of why and how abusers have kept their victims silent.
I know a little bit of the shame from Patricia DeYoung’s work. What is your perspective on shame?
It’s one of those emotions that it’s not something attached to what you do, but is what is done to you and it’s a bit like having indelible path’s embedded in your skin. And it’s used very effectively by abusers who manipulate the natural, normal sexual responsiveness that everybody has and turns that into an instrument of projecting blame and shame onto the victim which they now in turn, at the one level ties the victim to them and at another level makes it incredibly difficult for that person to break free of that dynamic and to speak forcefully.
One of the people I think who speaks beautifully about shame is Marilyn Van Derbur who was the 1958 Miss America and who did recovery memories of her incestuous abuse that had been inaccessible and she was at the time obviously at the time, highly dissociative and who has gone on to a very effective career where she speaks a lot about confronting shame and being able to….Shame is someone elses problem. Once you get to be able to talk about what happened to you, someone else has a difficulty with it, it’s their problem, it’s not your problem. You are talking about something that somebody did to you who really wanted to keep you silent.
I did send a recording. That was just my take on the loss of innocence.
Well, thank you.
Okay. You take care, Emma.
Thank you!
[Professor Middleton’s poem song plays for approximately 5 minutes]
Thank you for joining us with System Speak - a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. You can listen to the Podcast on Spotify, Google Play and iTunes or follow along on our website - www.systemspeak.org. Thanks for listening.