Transcript: Episode 48
48. Guest: Lynne Harris, LPC
Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about Dissociative Identity Disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma and dissociation, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, where there is a button for donations and you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. You can also support us on Patreon for early access to updates and what’s unfolding for us. Simply search for Emma Sunshaw on Patreon. We appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are also super excited to announce the release of our new online community - a safe place for listeners to connect about the podcast. It feels like any other social media platform where you can share, respond, join groups, and even attend events with us, including the new monthly meetups that start this month. Go to our web page at www.systemspeak.org to join the community. We're excited to see you there.
[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
Today I speak with Lynne Harris, who is a licensed professional counselor in the states of Georgia and Florida in private practice. She has worked in the mental health field since 2000 and in healthcare for over 15 years. Her postgraduate specialty training includes Advanced Trauma Training from the Institute for Psychotherapy Training and Education, Somatic Imagery, and Ego State Psychotherapy from the Center for Healing and Imagery, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, EMDR, Sensory-Motor Training and Training for the Treatment of Trauma and Sensory-Motor Training for the Treatment of Attachment and Development.
Her clinical experience includes a wide range of settings and populations. She has experience in working with young children, adolescents, and adults, families, and groups. Prior to private practice, she worked for 10 years as an outpatient family therapist and in an adolescent treatment facility and as an addiction counselor where she was involved in treatment at different levels of care - detox, day treatment, outpatient, and residential. She has extensive experience conducting assessments and leading group therapy.
Earlier in her career, she helped positions in psychiatric hospital and school settings. In addition to clinical work with clients, she enjoys doing clinical supervision. She’s provided supervision for interns seeking their graduate degrees and currently supervises graduate level master's candidates in the practicum work. Prior to becoming a therapist, she worked in healthcare management and earlier in international relations with a focus on former Soviet countries. She is also an artist.
Welcome Lynne Harris.
***Interview Begins***
Interviewer: Bold font
Interviewee: Standard font
I’m Lynne Harris, Im a licensed mental health professional counselor. I’m licensed in Florida. I’m also licensed in Virginia and Georgia and I am a specialist in treating complex trauma and dissociative disorders. I’m in a full time private practice. I have a practice in [inaudible], Florida and St. Mary’s, Georgia. So some days in one location, some days in the other.
And in addition to that, I have been doing some consulting work with Voices for Florida, which is a non-profit organization. They’re based in Tallahassee and they’ve been doing a lot of really innovative work in the mental health field. And in the past couple of years, they started an initiative to work with survivors of trafficking - so children and young adults up to the age of 24 who are being trafficked to help get them out of the trafficking relationships and to provide resources for them in whatever way they are willing to accept them. And that’s been really interesting. So what I’ve been doing for them is I help them with the trauma piece. So when you are working with obviously victims of trafficking, then you’re dealing with people with complex trauma and in addition to that, they employ survivor mentors. So their model is clinicians, survivor mentors, and a regional advocate all work together as a team. And the survivor mentors are all adults who have come through their own experience of being trafficked. And so I’ve been helping them put together how you support the survivor mentors and how you work with the children who are being trafficked - what you look for, how you work on the trauma piece when someone may not even ready for treatment, but you have to kind of be aware of that stuff. So that’s been sort of a sidebar thing I’ve been doing for the past two years.
And I also spend time professionally presenting at conferences and writing about basic things related to what I do. For example, I just did an article for Trauma Psychology News that will be forthcoming and it’s a case study with a client that I work with who has Dissociative Identity Disorder. So, I try to be really as active in the field as I can in those different ways.
That’s amazing and I didn’t realize that we had some of those layers in common or some common experiences. I’m licensed in Oklahoma and Kansas.
Wow.
And so that’s...it’s a very rural area, but because of where the cities lie really, just geographically, I have to be licensed in both states to be able to work. And so you’re the first person I’ve met who is also licensed in other states. I know there’s more out there, but you’re the first person I’ve talked to that has shared that experience.
Yeah. It’s kind of an interesting thing, you know? And then I still have some clients, like I do some telemedicine sessions and I still have some clients from Virginia. It’s more and more these days there’s that ability to have a broader reach and in terms of providing services, it’s not just all in person and people coming into an office. But then there’s that treatment piece stuff like as you know, about how you have to...each state has different requirements for licensure and all that. So…
Right. And different timelines for turning everything in [laughs] and renewal.
Yes. Exactly. It’s sort of a lot to juggle.
Do you have any clients that travel a long way to meet with you?
Well, yes. [Laughs] So I have had clients in...St. Mary’s, Georgia is a, just for the record, is a small, coastal town in southeast Georgia, so the furthest southeast part of Georgia, like right across from Florida. And a very rural area around it. So I have had people that have come from Savannah to meet with me there - it’s like an hour and a half each way. And then people who have come from more rural parts of Georgia to meet with me there. And then in Florida, I have people who come up every week from St. Augustine to [inaudible], which is close to Jacksonville. And I have people who come from Orlando to meet with me which is just three hours away. So people will...I have had some people who will travel distances for appointments.
Wow. The other thing that we have in common or that I was surprised that I actually didn’t know about was the trafficking piece. My husband and I were foster parents for many years and we had... our oldest daughter was trafficked here from Honduras and so we had some unique trauma issues with her. Or she had the trauma experiences, but working with her was uniquely different from other trauma I had experienced in before that. And we helped her get her green card and get established on her own and get her GED and all of those things, but those were functional pieces. The trauma pieces she had were so specific and so unique.
Yes. It is, isn’t it? It’s very unique. And so it sounds like there was a learning curve for you with that, with how you addressed it, with how you worked with her and things like that.
Right. It got me in the field I guess and where we live in Oklahoma and Kansas, there’s a pretty heavy route of trafficking. And so I’ve been able since then to get my own training and learn more about it, but that was my introduction to it.
So are a lot of the people you work with people who have been trafficked?
More and more.
Mmhmm..
More and more. The more people become aware of it and the more it’s exposed and the more people are able to ask for help, I’m getting more referrals for that for sure.
Yeah. It is kind of an amazing thing to me how it just feels to me like recently, maybe within the past six months to a year, there’s a lot more attention being paid to trafficking in the media and just in people’s sort of general awareness. A lot of times people have this idea that trafficking is something that’s just happening at the very fringes or only in other countries, but they’re not even realizing there’s so much of it in the United States. And I am surprised to hear that in Oklahoma and Kansas that that’s a route where people come through.
It’s a big thing here. And I also think there’s an aspect of sort of understanding how it’s defined and what counts as trafficking and not. It has its own stigma, I think. And as people become more educated they are able to identify cases differently and earlier and intervene differently than before. And so I think it’s making a difference. I hope. I hope it’s making a difference.
I know. I hope so too. And I think a lot of it is training people who tend to have contact with people, the first contact with people, who are being trafficked, like police officers or schools or hotel employees. There’s really a lot of need for education across all sectors so people can spot it and know what to do.
Right. Right. So you specialize in treating trauma and dissociation. Can you tell me how you explain dissociation to new clients who are just learning about it?
Yes, I can tell you. So what I explain to people is that dissociation is really a mental ability that everybody has and that everybody uses to some extent. So even there’s a spectrum of dissociation. So on the low end it’s things sort of like daydreaming the way like a kid would daydream during math class and sort of miss part of what the teacher was saying. And it progresses up through the way a professional might perform or let’s say when they step on stage, you have to kind of push out some information out of your conscious awareness so you can do what you need to do. Or like first responders use a form of dissociation when they roll up on the scene or like an accident for example. On up through post-traumatic stress...complex post-traumatic stress. And on the higher end dissociative disorders and dissociative identity disorder.
So what I explain to people is that what the spectrum indicates is of the frequency of how frequently someone is employing that mental ability to sort of check out or be present but not be present at the same time...the frequency and the intensity of it. Meaning that how much there’s almost like an amnesia aspect to it where you lose time or you can’t remember something. So, I usually explain to people how everybody employs the ability to dissociate, needing to physically be present, but mentally go away a little bit or a lot. And it’s really important to normalize it and understand that the way people wind up on the far end or the extreme end of the spectrum with dissociative disorders is because they had to use more of it and earlier in their life. So usually having it indicates if there was a lot of duress or stress in a child’s life, because all children employ it naturally. It’s pretty normative for children to use dissociation and usually around the point of adolescence, you start to use it less, because the part of our brain that can mitigate circumstances has developed more by around the age of let’s say 12.
But when a dissociative disorder is present in somebody it means not that there’s something wrong with them, but that they had a life circumstance that really required using a lot, a lot of the brain's natural ability to disconnect for quite some time and that it gets kind of codified in our brain. And when we become adolescents, instead of using other coping mechanisms, we continue to rely on dissociation so that it gets really automatic as even into adulthood. And that’s kind of generally how I describe it.
So you really normalize it for them.
Yes, because I really believe that it’s true that it’s something that everybody...that it’s not a thing...it’s not an illness. It’s not something...a lot of times people will say things to me like they don’t tell anybody about the fact that they dissociate. They might not be aware of it or they might know it, but they don’t talk about it, because they feel like it’s really weird or that it’s crazy. A lot of times people will say to me that I’m just crazy and I insist gently, but firmly, that they are not crazy. That it’s a learned thing to rely so heavily on dissociation. And then it gets wired in the brain so it becomes sort of like on autopilot. And it seems outside of our control, but it isn’t. And it might seem really weird, but it also is not that. So I really, really emphasize how it’s not at all crazy, that it’s actually this kind of amazing thing that our brain can do and clearly there was a need for a lot of dissociation, which is really never any child’s fault.
So I heard you speak in Florida.
Uh huh.
Can you explain what you said or just again in your own words, tell me, or explain about the difference between functional dissociation and maladaptive dissociation?
So functional dissociation is when, again, let me think of a good example. So if someone is a firefighter, right? And they are called to a scene where a house is on fire and they have to put the house out, you can’t….there’s so much sensory input. I mean, I’m not a firefighter and so I don’t really know this firsthand, but I think of it as…
Right. [Laughs]
There’s so much sensory input, right? There’s so much happening all around you. There’s a lot of sound. There’s a lot of visual stimulation. There’s a lot of urgency, like things are really...you have to be able to focus and be on it and do the things you’ve been trained to do and you have to do it quickly. And so you have to push out a lot of sensory information in order to do that, to get your brain to just focus and do the task that you need to do. So to me...or like an actor walking on the stage where you are doing a performance. You can’t take in all the, all the sensory information, looking out at all the faces, hearing the sounds in the audience. You have to really push a lot of information out of your conscious awareness so you can do what you need to do. So to me that’s what I mean when I say functional dissociation.
Okay.
And maladaptive dissociation is when, like I was saying before, some stimuli, some circumstance sets in motion that process of kind of like you just are not there anymore. Or you’re still maybe walking and talking and looking at someone or carrying on with whatever you’re doing. You’re not there. You’re using another part of yourself to manage the interaction and what makes it maladaptive is that it’s not completely...it’s not a life or death situation necessarily. It could be a much more subtle stimuli that sets that in motion.
And then the other part of it is that sometimes when...I mean, not sometimes...always when we’re not connected to our frontal cortex, that’s the part of our brain that, you know, rational thought and problem solving, sequencing...then we’re not really quite connected to that part of our brain which is always true when we’re dissociating a lot. It means that we’re...a lot of the things can happen. It makes someone very vulnerable. So that’s where a lot of negative consequences can come from if someone stays in their dissociative state a lot of the time. It also inhibits someone’s ability to just do day to day things. And it’s also what causes a lot of repeated trauma, because again, if it’s a situation where it requires that you act in some way or you’re self-protective in some way and your part of your brain that governs those kinds of decisions isn’t available to you, like really anything can happen. And a lot of times what happens is people have just repeated trauma after trauma if they’re not really present enough to take care of themselves, so to speak.
So in those cases the brain is literally not online to help.
Yes. The part of our brain that...well, lots of parts of our brain are not fully available to us when we’re really heavily dissociated. But the part that is kind of the inhibits impulses, the problem solving, more analytic, more rational thought part that governs all of that is not fully online and neither is the hippocampus which is the part that stores narrative memory. So that’s why [inaudible] and someone dissociates a lot. There’s little bits of maybe little bits of pieces of memory available, but not a whole narrative memory. Sometimes people have no memory available to them. It’s not that it’s not being recorded, because it gets recorded more on the body level, on an emotional level, but very often...maybe you find this is true like with the people you work with, that they will say, “I know this happened, but I don’t really remember any of it.” Or, “So and so told me that I did x, y, and z, but I don’t remember it.”
Wow. So how does that play into seeing symptoms as strategies rather than pathologies? That was the other thing I heard you talk about in Florida.
Yeah, so the way I think about it is a way...dissociation is a way that we have to protect ourselves when whatever is going on is so overwhelming that we can’t process it in the moment, right? So when we can’t make sense of things in the moment, we can’t...it’s just either too frightening or it’s overwhelming in some way, but we still have to get through the moment. We still have to survive the moment somehow. So it’s a very protective strategy to be able to be able to just go offline for a little while and come back.
And it’s especially strategic for children, because when we’re children we’re physically smaller and we also don’t...our brain is not fully developed until I’m guessing, completely fully developed around 26 or 27. So if you’re like four, five, six, you’re working out of a brain that’s growing very quickly, but it’s not fully developed. So you have very much fewer resources intellectually than emotionally and physically you’re smaller. So what are the options there when there’s something that feels like life or death or is actually life or death or is [inaudible]. There’s not a lot of options.
So dissociation is a really helpful strategy, because it helps people survive things that they can’t make sense of, that they can’t function, and they just have to get through it. So I think it’s...you know...I tend to think of it as our [inaudible] moments and especially in children where you can’t...you know when you’re bigger and stronger, you can fight, you can flee, you can maybe assert yourself in other ways that you cannot when you’re physically small. And also there’s a big power differential, like from a child to an adult for example. The power is not on the child in those circumstances. And so again, dissociation is a strategy that allows anyone, children and adults, to kind of survive the moment when we don’t really have another way of doing that.
So even with children...well and you mentioned the frontal cortex. What is happening in the brain? I know I’ve read about the amygdala and all these pieces, but what is happening in the brain? How do you explain that during dissociation?
Well, that’s a really interesting question and there have been some studies done, a lot of studies done, and I...so there’s...we know there’s something that’s happening in the brain when someone’s actually dissociating. They’ve done a study where they do scans where they can see which parts of the brain are lit up and which parts of the brain are more dormant. And I should preface this by saying I am not a neuro-biologist or neuro-psychologist. I just am really interested in this stuff so I [laughs]...
[Chuckles]
I think about that all the time. I’m like what is actually happening in our brains when we’re dissociating? And so what I know and…
Right. Right.
...is that the frontal cortex is dimmer, like there’s less activity in the frontal cortex. There’s less activity in the hippocampus and the amygdala is very active. So the amygdala is the fire alarm part of our brain. It signals our nervous system very, very quickly when there’s a threat or danger present. So even if it’s perceived and it’s not actually anything frightening or dangerous happening, it can still fire. And what the amygdala does is it sets in motion the whole sympathetic nervous system cascading thing where signals are sent to the brain and throughout the body and chemical...neuro-chemicals get released to help us gear up first for fight or flight. And if we can’t fight or flee, then there can be a freeze response or a submit response in the body. And that means different neuro-chemicals get excreted. But also once the threat has passed, if our nervous system gears up for defense, and which is its function, then the threat or the perceived threat is over or it’s passed, then different neuro-chemicals get excreted in the brain to help the body slow back down again - slow the heart rate and breathing back down. Sometimes there’s a let down in the muscles, like a shaking that happens or a feeling in our gut, because all of that gets affected by the sympathetic nervous system doing its thing.
So the part of our brain that gets really active is our amygdala during an event where we feel like is a real or perceived threat. And then there’s this cascading effect in the body, the nervous system gearing up for defense. And then the other thing that happens is that sometimes when there is a lot of trauma, our body and nervous system gets acclimated to being dysregulated. So, in other words, the amygdala is always firing, right? And instead of just kind of turning on and off when we need it, it’s just kind of...it gets very sensitized. A lot of trauma throughout life causes...and I see this all the time where people have a very, very sensitized amygdala that signals either constantly is signalling danger, danger, danger. Or when it gets triggered, it’s just really hard to turn it off, right? So that is very taxing on one's body and can be really exhausting and it’s very unsettling. It’s just like if your body is always telling you danger, it’s very hard to rest. It’s very hard to feel calm. It’s very hard to think straight. So that’s a part...that whole amygdala and the whole effect it has over time is very profound in people with trauma and dissociation.
Is that actually impacting perception or limiting perception in some way then?
Like perception about?
Well, just in general, if it’s no longer an accurate filter, because it’s overworking or underworking, which I know simplifies it, but …
No, that’s a good way to put it. It’s yeah, it does, because it’s like you’re getting misinformation all the time. You know? So it increases things like feeling like you have to be hypervigilant even if there’s nothing happening, impulsivity. There’s a lot of suspicious thoughts and feelings of a lot of times it will just make people want to withdraw from any social interaction, because it’s just too much. It’s just too much to deal with all the time and if they can’t turn it off, it just...a lot of times people will choose to withdraw and become more isolated and, or the other thing that happens all the time with chronic nervous system dysregulation is substance abuse. So this is something that is very, very frequent and is the combination of trauma and substance use, because if we don’t feel like it’s in our control to regulate our body, then we’ll turn to chemical substances of some kind or another to help us do it.
That’s another complicating factor is if the perception is that either all people are dangerous versus this one person’s not safe for me to be around or I’m always feeling shut down, because our nervous system either speeds up or shuts down as a defense mode. And shutting down, I think I talked about this in Florida too, is equally in defense. So the shut down can be like feeling numb or disconnected or sort of zoned out, not really there, more passive, kind of can’t feel much or think straight. That’s where a lot of people live all the time, is down in there in the...and again, dissociation is a part of that. And so sometimes what happens is people use substances to help bring a little more stimulation into their nervous system or so that they can feel something instead of nothing, because that does not feel good.
So, does it affect people’s perception? Yes. It’s kind of like you move through the world with this anticipation that something is going to happen and in this constant state of readiness for something.
How do you approach treatment for that? Do you have a stage approach or phases or you just take one piece at a time that’s presented as it’s presented or?
It’s complicated, right? Because you’re dealing with many things on many different levels, all at once. But I do take a stage approach. And I follow what...so it will come to me. So there’s a stage approach in treatment where you have stages of trauma recovery and [inaudible].
Judith Herman in 1982, as far as I know, was the first person who really talked about the treatment in this way. Where you have to start with safety and stabilization. And safety and stabilization means both someone’s physical and emotional safety, so not be in an abusive situation, have housing, have adequate income, have some sense of support. But also safety in the body, because if what the person is used to is chronic, constant, kind of normalized of I’m in danger all the time, then the nervous system is sending that message all the time. It’s really hard to process anything or to do any real work in treatment.
So one of the first tasks in treatment, the way I approach it, is to teach some...first of all to do some education about why that is happening and to again, like I said earlier, not to pathologize the symptoms, right? The symptoms are telling a story, but it’s not pathology. It’s a normal body response to chronic stress. Like if you take any animal and you put them in the circumstance where there’s chronic stress, their body is going to adapt to that circumstance. So a lot of psychoeducation about that. A lot of normalizing and de-pathologizing the symptoms that are present. But then there has to be some actual ability. We have to build capacity and an ability to self-regulate that stuff. So that means building the ability to observe when someone is triggered or what their body is telling them, and not just observe it, but then have actual practical skills. And I tend to use ones that are both cognitive and somatically based. I find that you can’t just work on the cognitive, you have to have also a somatically based skillset to self-regulate.
That’s kind of the first stage in trauma recovery is establishing safety and stability and that means both in, you know...externally and internally. Like to be able to restore a sense of like, “Okay, I’m safe in this moment.” And it might be fleeting at first. It might just be moments of feeling that way, not a sustained sense of safety, but that’s what we work towards.
Stage two is actually processing some aspects of the trauma. I don’t ever find that it’s necessary to start from day one and say, “And then when I was one, and then when I…” Like you don’t have to...it’s not working through the narrative of what happened, although certainly sometimes people want to share the narrative of what happened. But not really necessary for recovery to go through the story. It’s really more important that I find that there are always a few really significant memories, whether it’s a narrative memory or it’s just a felt sense or little sliver of a memory that keeps popping up. Because there’s always the ones that are more intrusive than…
Right.
...others or that have more of an impact for some reason. And so in the second phase, the goal is to actually try to metabolize what happened and metabolize the trauma so it’s not...it can get kind of integrated into this is a part of my story. It doesn’t define me, but it’s part of my story and start to have a sense of separation from past and present where something can be remembered rather than relived. The reliving means that when we think about it, we have all the attended reactions emotionally, physiologically, as if it were happening now.
That is part of the intrusive symptoms with trauma. And so in phase two what we work towards is having the ability to let things lie down in the past more. Remember how I said the hippocampus is the part of the brain that puts the date and time stamp on things, but remember if we’re dissociating or if we’re in the middle of something that’s really overwhelming, the hippocampus starts to go offline, and so there’s not date or time stamp on a lot of these memories, or these experiences. So they show up as flashbacks. They’re like little slivers of a memory that work their way into the present and so rather than constantly living little bits of memory, what we want to do is identify that as in the past now. This is not happening now, even if sometimes it feels like it. And so working to process through what happened, but also the differentiation that that is something that is firmly in the past. That’s a really key part of the second stage.
And then the third stage is really kind of coming to terms with your post-traumatic self, figuring out who you are now, without having to be preoccupied all the time with all of the trauma. To sort of be able to make meaning for yourself and your life in the here and now, to have healthy intimacy, to decide what sorts of things are meaningful to you that you maybe want to pursue personally or professionally. So really more about making meaning for oneself in the present without everything being dictated by the old stuff, because it’s very, very preoccupying when there’s both a lot of dissociation happening and a lot of intrusive symptoms happening, and those people have both of those. It just takes up all one’s energy and your day is all about managing that stuff. And so if that stuff gets quieter and can lie down, then what? Then what do you want to spend your time on? How do you want to...what do you want to direct your energy towards? And so that’s stage three.
I know that you also talked about sensory motor. How do those skills redirect the attention to the body as a resource instead of the body being in the way of doing that work?
Yeah. So sensory motor psychotherapy is a body-oriented form of talk therapy. So it’s not hands-on, although I think some sensory motor therapists are sometimes incorporating touch into their work, but I do not. So it’s a form of talk therapy, but it’s where you're incorporating information all the time from what your body’s telling you. So the first obstacle there of course is that for a lot of trauma survivors, what was safe was for to never be in one’s body. So, it’s a tall order to try and start to talk to someone about and even notice anything, like what’s your breathing like right now. What sensation can you feel? Even that in the beginning is like not. We have to kind of work our way towards even being able to tolerate that.
What sensory motor says is we don’t want to just pay attention to thoughts or cognitions or try to draw inside analysis. That’s helpful, but we need to know all the information that’s coming from our bodies. So body movement, an impulsive instinct, an action, that tendency that is not...doesn’t...we can feel it, but it doesn’t get acted out. All those things are a part of sensory motor and incorporating that into the work.
So the way that our bodies can be a resource is [inaudible]. As a fairly simple example, remember how I was saying earlier that we’re overcoming that chronic dysregulation in the body? And so let’s say someone is chronically hyper-aroused in their nervous system. That means that there’s a lot of nervous system activity, a lot of arousal in the nervous system - so tension in the muscles, racing thoughts, heart race...like all of the autonomic nervous systems like breathing and heart rate are usually... heart rate’s usually elevated, breath may be more shallow. There’s sometimes just a feeling of pervasive restlessness.
So to work with that using the body as a resource is to focus on grounding and orienting. So grounding could be anything that helps you be more connected to your present moment, physical environment. So as an example, sometimes I’ll ask someone that I can see that they’re dissociating and having a hard time in the session is I’ll just work to bring their attention as much as I can back into the present moment. So listing things that they see around them in the room. I might say, “Tell me five green things you see in the room right now. Five sounds you hear right now. Five things you feel, not physically, but like tactically. What’s the texture of the couch you’re sitting on? Do you feel your toes in your shoes?” So using the connection to the physical environment as a way to reground and reorient into the present moment. Or even something really simple like turning one’s head to one side and noticing what you see on the right side and then turning your head to the left side and saying what you see on the left side.
Another example of using your body as a somatic resource is posture. So if someone tends to go more into a collapsed posture when they feel hypo-aroused, which is on the low end. You know, they shut down and kind of low energy, disconnected sort of state?
Right.
So sometimes I ask someone to just, if it’s comfortable, I really have to know my person well, I wouldn’t just do this without knowing someone who could handle it, is I might ask them, first of all make sure they’re really present in the room, and then just bring a little more, a little bit to sit up a little bit more. You know what I mean? Just to bring a little bit of postural support, because when we engage our core muscles, when we sit up a little straighter, it changes the way we interact with our people and our physical space. And so sometimes that can really help someone feel more solid in themselves, in the moment.
So not just grounding, but also really being aware of the visceral experience in the moment as part of the grounding.
Exactly. Really using your senses but also your physical body. Like something simple like pressing your feet into the floor. Most of the time we’re not thinking about that. While I’m talking to you, I’m not really thinking about what my feet are doing, and if I shift my attention to my feet and I just ever so slightly press my feet into the floor, I can feel the solidity of the ground underneath my feet and become aware of my feet and my shoes. I can feel how the gravity is holding me down which is a really cool thing and how the earth is pressing back up against my feet when I press them down to the earth. And it might sound dumb, but when you do that there’s just more of this really visceral connection to my physical body in this space and time.
Thank you for explaining that.
You’re welcome. Yeah. So, sensory motor is probably the thing I use the most - the tool. That’s what I use the most when I’m working with complex trauma and dissociation. I know there’s never one thing in treatment. You have to have a lot of different tools in your toolbox I find.
So how about if I close out with a funny anecdote?
That would be lovely!
[Laughs]
[Laughs]
So I have someone I’ve been working with for a couple years and this is someone who is in their early forties, very severe history of trauma, has a child, and as a young adult has dissociative identity disorder, and is doing really, really well. She’s worked very, very hard in therapy and one of the things I just wanted to share with you is that we just came up one time with this funny catch phrase that we use.
There was one time...she has a regular routine on the weekends where she goes to Dunkin Donuts and picks up donuts for herself and her son and her partner. And her partner has this very special request and they’ve always honored it. And one time she went in to get the donuts on a usual Saturday and the person, for whatever reason, behind the counter said, “Nope, we are not. We can’t do that.” And she described to me how in that moment, her body went into this complete and utter sensation of terror. And she froze and she dissociated and it took a couple days to recover. And when we were talking about it, we were exploring kind of somatically what was the response. You know what was going...you know, before she could feel the sensation of terror in her body. She could feel that she was frozen. She knew that she was dissociating, but she couldn’t do anything about it.
And so we worked on starting from the sensation. We worked on grounding and coming back into the moment and then to explore the sensation of fear as just sensation, because she could at the same time feel it, but also use her present moment adult self to notice there’s not actually an emergency here. And I said, “Yeah, it’s just a donut.” And she laughed, and she said, “That’s right. It’s just a donut.” And so now, whenever there’s something we’re working on and she can feel that sort of nervous system response, and it’s a really intense one, that’s our way of differentiating that old learned response, defense and terror when it’s something that’s not life threatening. And so we laugh about it all the time and we apply it to all these different circumstances and she’ll be like, “Yeah, it’s not life or death. It’s just a donut.” And I’ll be like, “That’s right. It’s just a donut.” [Laughs]
That’s amazing!
[Laughs] Yeah. So we even thought about getting t-shirts made. So the idea was to put...I don’t know how we would do this, but put maybe, “Trauma Survivor” on the back and on the front it says, “It’s just a donut.”
That’s pretty funny.
[Laugh] I know.
It’s so true that feeling though when something finally clicks of that understanding and being able to finally hold both at once.
Yes, and that’s exactly right. That’s such a big moment to experience that.
That’s powerful. And I love that it came with donuts. That’s great.
I know! [Laughs]
[Laughs]
So I always picture for some reason, a donut with pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles.
Right. There you go. That’s pretty fancy.
[Laughs]
I love it. Well, thank you for talking to me today.
You are welcome, Emma. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today.
Sure, I appreciate it and I appreciate your time.
I really...this has been a great experience for me. So, thank you for inviting me.
I’m grateful! Thank you very much. I really do appreciate it.
[Break]
Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon. And join us for free in our new online community by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org. If there's anything we've learned in the last four years of this podcast, it's that connection brings healing. We look forward to connecting with you.