Transcript: Episode 265
265. Guest: Dr. Jamie Marich
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
Our guest today is Dr. Jamie Marich, who describes herself as a facilitator of transformative experiences, a clinical trauma specialist, expressive artist, writer, performer, short filmmaker, and recovery advocate. She unites all of these elements in her mission to inspire healing in others. She is a woman in long term recovery from an addictive disorder, and is living loudly and proudly as a woman with a dissociative disorder with the goal of smashing stigma about dissociation in the mental health field and in society at large. Jamie+ began her career as a humanitarian aid worker in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 2000 to 2003, primarily teaching English and music. Jamie travels internationally, teaching on topics related to trauma, EMDR therapy, expressive arts, mindfulness and yoga, while maintaining a private practice and online education operations in her home base of Warren, Ohio. Marich is the founder of the Institute for Creative Mindfulness and the developer of the Dancing Mindfulness approach to expressive arts therapy. She's the developer of Yoga for Clinicians.
Marich is the author of: EMDR Made Simple: 4 Approaches for Using EMDR with Every Client; Trauma and the 12 Steps: A Complete Guide for Recovery Enhancement; Creative Mindfulness; Trauma Made Simple: Competencies in Assessment, Treatment and Working with Survivors; Dancing Mindfulness: A Creative Path to Healing and Transformation; and Process not Perfection: Expressive Arts Solutions for Trauma Therapy. Marich co-authored EMDR Therapy and Mindfulness for Trauma-Focused Care along with colleague Dr. Stephen Dansiger in 2018. And their new book with Springer Publishing Healing Addiction with EMDR Therapy is the trauma focus guide due for release in the Fall of 2021. North Atlantic Books published a revised and expanded edition of Trauma and the 12 Steps in the summer of 2020. Marich’s own company, Creative Mindfulness Media, produced a daily meditation reader and workbook to accompany that Trauma and the 12 Steps project in the autumn of 2020.
The New York Times featured Marich’s writing and work on Dancing Mindfulness in 2017 and 2020. The Association of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Addiction Professionals and Their Allies awarded Jamie with their esteemed President's Award in 2015 for her work as an LGBT advocate. The EMDR International Association granted Jamie the 2019 Advocacy in EMDR Award for her using her public platform in media and in the addiction field to advance awareness about EMDR therapy and to reduce stigma around mental health. Marich also sits on the clinical work group of the prestigious Council of Scholars. Welcome Dr. Jamie Marich.
*Interview begins*
[Note: Interviewer in bold. Interviewee in standard font]
So Hi. I am Jamie. Professionally, I'm Dr. Jamie Marich. Although on a personal level, I definitely go by Jamie. I sometimes sign my name Jamie+, because although Jamie the adult is in the driver's seat talking to you today, we are we, and there's a system of us doing this interview. And we're all happy to be here.
How did you even get started on this? You've done so much. To start with, I saw you for the first time at Healing Together. And it was so well done, your presentation. And then you're dancing session that you did was an incredible powerful experience. I can't even tell you what that did for us. But let me back up a little bit and clarify for listeners that you are a professional who is out about your DID. And what has that been like for you? What part of that journey do you want to share?
Yeah, while I got into doing this healing work really through my own healing journey. So I guess I'll start there. And I'll lead it up to the question. Because it's been an evolution coming out. I had no idea I was going to end up working in the field of professional psychology, professional counseling when I started out in life. I'm actually an English teacher and a performer. Which is why I'm glad to hear that you resonated so much with dancing. Because it was through dance and the expressive arts when I was teaching English that I learned a lot about trauma and healing.
I worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 2000 to 2003. My family's from that part of the world. And there was a bad civil war there in the 90s. And I was mentored by a very wise American social worker who helped me to understand unhealed trauma not just in the kids I was working with, and helping me to understand why they resonated so much with dancing and singing and and the arts. She also helped me to start to understand my own healing journey, our own mind, our own system. And she validated my experiences with addiction. She validated my experiences with trauma, and was one of the first people I was truly free opening up to about my life story.
And after a few years of working with her and there, she sent me back to go to graduate school. Yet it was in graduate school, specifically in graduate internship, that my dissociative nature really got triggered to the point where I didn't know if I'd be able to survive in the field. I had two years in recovery from my chemical dependency issues, yet as often happens when the chemical addiction clears up, the dissociation that was there at the root really, really came out. And so I was formally diagnosed with DDNOS, it was still called that in 2004. And it ended up being-. [Pause] Just in-. Because I know a lot of people hear that and they think, “Oh, it's horrible. It’s a dissociative diagnosis.” It was very liberating to us because it finally gave us some explanatory model. Right? Some, some explanation as to why dissociation was such a driving force in our lives, and why it was natural for me to use singular “we” pronouns, and why I always just kind of live from this very fragmented place in the world. So because I got that properly diagnosed, because I got it properly treated with the combination of EMDR and expressive arts and yoga and meditation, I was able to survive as a professional in the field. I knew that I had to be a trauma-focused professional if I was if I was going to make it in the field, if I was going to thrive.
And the first time I dipped my toes into coming out was in 2011. I wrote a book called EMDR Made Simple. It was my first book. It was very much kind of written from the place of like a young voice in the field because I was still pretty young at the time. It tries to give like a fresh take on EMDR. And it just felt very organic for me in the book to say, “I have struggled with dissociative symptoms since I was a small child. I've struggled with suicidality since I was a small child, and it was actually getting my stuff diagnosed and treated that actually helped to lift a lot of the chronic suicidality and self-injury.” And that was the first time I really put it out there and it felt good. And then over the years, I would say I dipped my toes out even further. As I would give workshops in the field, I would kind of feel out the audience to know where I was safe to downright say “I have a dissociative disorder. I, I struggle with dissociation.” And a lot of professionals have come up to me at those workshops and say, “We cannot believe somebody, let alone a presenter is talking that candidly about it. Thank you. Thank you.” And so on one hand, it's not been much of a secret. Yet I did have my official coming out process in 2018. I wrote two articles at the time, one for more of the general community, and then a year later, I wrote one by invitation specifically for the EMDR community.
And it's a bit of a story how I got to that place. I, um, I was married to somebody who had threatened to use it against me. He knew that we are we and had this dissociative mind. And as our marriage really started to crumble, he, he knew it would be an easy way, especially if he showed a video of me in some kind of episode to, quote unquote, “discredit me.” Although it's hilarious as he did end up trying to discredit me with a video. And my own therapist and team said he actually ended up making himself look like like the problem in the video, so you really have nothing to worry about if it got out widely. Yet, when he did that, it's almost like he did me a favor because it was, in a way, my worst fear come true. Because I did not do well after the 2016 election. And between that and our marriage crumbling, I had a self-injury relapse, and it was bad. Yet it was good in a lot of ways, because it helped me to, to do a deeper level of work. So long story short, he, him doing that was like it brought my greatest fear to life and I survived it and nothing happened. Right. And I knew I can do this.
And something else was also going on in us at that point. Which was for several years prior to 2018, we've been sitting with wanting to put together some trainings specific to dissociation. Because I had trained on EMDR for many years at that point, I'm an EMDR trainer. I had trained on trauma for many years. I mean, always talked about dissociation and explored it in a very authentic way as part of those trainings. Yet, many of my colleagues would say, “Well, when are you going to do a specialty training on dissociation? When are you going to do specialty trainings on dissociation?” And I said, “I don't feel I can until I can be truly open about the wholeness of my relationship with dissociation and dissociative disorders.” And for many years it still felt unsafe to do that, even in a lot of trauma circles I hung out at. And I make no secret about this. Because I would go to a lot of workshops on dissociation, and even the presenters—many of the experts in the area—were still talking about dissociation and DID and dissociative disorders in a way that felt so removed from the material. And a lot of times we sense that “Man, it seems like they have a personal experience with this, but they're afraid to say anything.” [Laughter] And I knew that couldn't be us. And we had to get to a place where we were fully ready, critics be damned, to to be our authentic selves personally and professionally. And we've not regretted it for a moment.
That's amazing. What, what was that like? That coming out professionally once you made that decision and you all really started sharing and waiting for the fallout? Did it come? Did it not come? What was that experience like for you?
Yeah, one of the first things I did-. I mean, I am so lucky, so blessed to be surrounded by some really awesome people in my life. Personally, professionally, and a lot of my professional network and close associates, they're also personal friends. And I ended up sharing that first article. It, I published it on my blog, and then it came out on The Mighty words, basically. I called it like Dealing with Dissociation Phobia: A Personal Imperfection, Professional Disclosure. And basically in that first article I said so much of our problem in the field with dissociation is that people are so afraid of it, and maybe this voice will help you. And and I shared the draft of that article with my core team of folks who work with me in EMDR training. And they all knew me as a pretty candid, vulnerable person. I, my dissociation was no secret to them. But I basically said, “How would you feel about being associated with me and this being out there?” And they all said, “Jamie, this is why we work with you, is that you're willing to be this, this vulnerable, and this candid, and invite people into hard conversations. So we have your back 100%.” And that was certainly very helpful when I had my therapist’s support in the process.
I'll tell you if I've had any fallout it's been all behind my back. If people aren't saying stuff for criticizing me. It's nothing that has been said to my face. Any support I've gotten has been remarkably overwhelming.
And then that later that year in 2018 I did what was perhaps the scariest thing in my life. And there's there's a small meeting of EMDR trainers that happens every year at the EMDRIA International Conference and I decided to come out to all of them at that meeting, including some people who I'd had some interesting relationships with over the years. And once more, if anything was said in a not nice way, it was not done to my face. Any, any support and encouragement I got was just so overwhelmingly positive. And I was glad to hear that people were open to hearing this professional voice, or this personal voice come through. Because a lot of them at that point knew me as an EMDR author. And I told them what-. Because many of them remembered how 10, 12 years previously, I was that figure at these conferences that, oh-. We tended to cause a little bit of hell, not liking what was said and asking difficult questions. And, and I don't think it was anything necessarily bad. But it was, the EMDR community at one point felt very unsafe to me. And I told them why. That it felt like you were talking about people like me and not really wanting to get to know us. And that was awesome to be able to share that in a circle with with people, some who were safe, some who are not so safe for us. And then the next year they invited me to do a full presentation, which was was more or less awesome. Again, there was there was a little bit of critical feedback in one of the questions, but I think we handled it well. And I, yeah, that that's that's, that's that's part of the answer to the question.
The other answer to the question is it warms my heart when other professionals have come forward either via emails or talking to me at conferences saying, “Me too.” And some are ready to be out about it, some have just dip their toes out about it. But I think it helps them to hear that not just another professional, but a professional who's so public is willing to say it.
It's a powerful experience. When we started the podcast that came about because we have cochlear implants, and are deaf, and don't have time to watch YouTube videos because we’ve got six outside children. And podcasts were something that we could listen to for listening therapy, instead of just calling this 800 number every day where we have to listen to some story that we've already heard 100 times. And so we sort of had this thing for a podcast that was helpful. But then also, we we started talking about it in speech. Like, we should do our own podcast, but what are we going to do a podcast about? And when we really started in therapy again and this came up, the husband was like, “So why don't you guys do a podcast about that?” And I was like, “No way. That's not happening.” But then it was like, it just sort of happened. So “Okay, we're gonna do this. Let's do this.” But we, I mean, there was no way to tell people about it. Like we just sort of put it out there. And we were blown away when it took off. And then that coming to a point where about a year later we came out to the ISSTD because we were seeing it referenced on the listserv, and said, “Okay, so just for transparency, FYI, we're the ones doing the podcast.” And that was so terrifying, coming out to them and saying, “Hey, this is our legal name. This is what's going on. We're getting doxed anyway, so we would rather just say it in our own words, and tell our own story.” And we received nothing but support, like you said, to our faces anyway, as far as we're aware.
But to this day, some of the emails from professionals who emailed me back then before the podcast was cool, we saved and printed those emails and get them back out and read them sometimes because of the encouragement that it gave us of our perspective is valid. And not only valid, but critical actually. Like you were saying about not just talking about us, but listen to us talk about ourselves and what we have to offer, and how you can connect to us and our process, and help your people differently than just when you’re robots talking about us.
Yes. So, so resonant. So resonant. And yeah, I-. The whole idea of the robots talking about us, I think of concern I do have, and just in the field in general—even the trauma dissociation field, the EMDR field—which is one of the reasons why I knew I had to come out is yes, there can be a legitimate fear, especially in new professionals who don't know what dissociation is. Or they know, but they don't think they know what it is. Because we've all experienced it, right? There could be such a fear about not wanting to do more harm with dissociative systems. There could be such fear about dissociation because they don't understand it. And I mean, yes, there's my own story, but I remember the first DID client I ever shepherded through through therapy would always say, “People fear what they don't understand. People fear what they don't understand.” And I've kind of piggybacked on that to say, “Yeah, people fear what they don't understand. They also fear what they can't understand or they won't understand.”
And I guess I just thought by putting a more personal face to it, especially because I am established in a lot of circles, it might help with that process. Because I do commend the efforts of like the organizations we're talking about. I commend a lot of the technical work that has been done on legitimizing dissociation, and the scales and the measures and the treatment protocols. And I'm not saying that none of that is important. But I think we do ourselves a disservice as a field when we only focus on that. Because those are all very quantitative means of inquiry. Which the mainstream of our field tends to need in order to think anything is legitimate. Yet any dissociative, at least any clinically significant dissociative identity, dissociative disorder is a qualitative experience. It's nothing I could easily put numbers to. It's nothing I could easily explain in simple words. And then when I really bring my system into trying to help us explain it, yeah, it is, it is a qualitative experience. And I think in order for professionals to understand that, they ought to be open to sharing of lived experience, like we do, and looking at their own lived experience and where dissociation and healing has showed up in it. So while I think like, like, technical study in our field can be very important, one of my close collaborators will always say, “But, but the technical person, the robot's, not the one walking through the door.” It's, it's it's a system and a soul and, and a heart. I guess I have a great wish that my colleagues will start to see it that way and not be so afraid of going there.
What is your approach with the phenomenological model?
Yeah, so thank you. I'm trained as a phenomenologist. When I did my PhD research, I did a deep phenomenological inquiry. That is definitely my philosophic preferred philosophical method of inquiry. And it is this whole idea of the sharing of lived experience. And phenomenology, as defined by its founder or the founder of the movement, rejects the idea that the human experience can be quantified. Kind of rejects the mathematical principles on which a lot of science is built. And I just agree with that statement through and through. That I cannot, we cannot, quantify our experience. There are a lot of people who see the world in numbers, and explain the world in numbers and statistics, and I'm definitely not opposed to that because I'm very much pro science and believe we need that. Yet, when we're talking about a deep system here, it's it's something we could only really get out with words and body sensations and colors and themes. And so much of phenomenology is looking at the world through theme. What are the themes that are at play here?
And a common example I like to use on that as a teaching thing is many of us, whether we're in the field or not, have been spoon fed this idea of the quote unquote “stages of grief.” Denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who first researched that model of death and dying, which she later worked on as grief, she's always said it was never meant to be a stage model. Right. Those are, those are themes: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance and grief. And we can experience them all at once. We can experience one on one day, one on the next. That they're never meant to be some kind of linear stops in the process of grief. That, that the thematic thinking is realizing the interplay of them all. And I say that I, our field’s obsession with stages, and models, and turning things into neat quantifiable models turned it into a stage model when it was never intended to be that. So if people are struggling with like, what's phenomenology, what's theme? That is how I explain it with the reference that I think we can all kind of get behind. That those stages of grief are not stages in a linear sense. They are themes of lived experience that she learned about from from talking to folks
And I believe in my own dissociative healing journey, nothing has been linear about it. And I'm very grateful I've been able to work with two therapists in my journey who get that.
What are some of the things that aren't common in the DID experience?
Well, I think it could differ for different people. I mean, I think identity, obviously, is a huge one. [Laughter] What, what is identity meaning for many of us? Spiritual torture, spiritual trauma, spiritual angst. I don't want to speak for everybody's experience. But a lot of why my system developed was as a response to pretty pervasive religious trauma and spiritual trauma. I mean, struggling, struggling to feel alright in the world, I think is a huge theme. Working with this idea that is my brain broken beyond repair? Am I defective beyond repair? And I know that's a theme I danced with for many years, and I've eventually been able to transform it to a place where it's like, hey dissociation’s my superpower. The way my brain is built is very much my superpower. So I think that has certainly been a positive theme.
And I mean, obviously the the theme I think a lot of us dance with, and even this word as I say it, I realize it it may have some some trigger potential, is integration. Wholeness. And obviously, I take the approach that integration can mean different things for different people. I'm clearly never about forcing integration. I actually think that's not healthy for just about all of us. But I will say working wholeness. How can I, how have we gotten to a place of a working wholeness in our system? And that's something I know, I see driving me today. And so I think thematically, integration, wholeness, cooperation, cohesion, fusion, whatever you're calling it, for many of us, well, for just about all of us, at one time or another that's something we have to confront or deal with. We have to even come up with what term is going to work the best for us. And like many things, even that term can change over time. How we relate to that theme can change over time.
Tell me about the dancing, because that blew me away. I was-. It is one of two times in my entire life that I could recall actually feeling myself, as I experienced myself, inside my own body and yet also connected to others inside in a way I have never felt before. What did you do to my brain?
Ah, that makes me happy about connection to others inside. Well, I don't know what what we did to your brain. I mean, hopefully when we set up dancing mindfulness experiences we do so in a way that creates as much safety as possible, so that those who are coming to classes or experiences can take themselves on a journey and connect the dots in the body, in the system, that need to be connected.
So dance for me, and really all expressive arts, were truly my lifeline as a kid. I, my parents were, interestingly enough, both dancers and musicians themselves, which is how they met. The home ended up being pretty dysfunctional after a while. Yet it's definitely not a stretch to say because of dance, I'm alive. And more specifically, I took all kinds of dance classes when I was a kid. They were folk dancers, so I took Croatian folk dance, Slavic folk dance. Then I ended up taking ballet. I also figure skated. So I had a lot of different types of dance experience. Yet some of the most organic dance I tapped into was going to the basement at my parents house. I had like a toy room and a play room in our basement. And there was an old record player I had. I still remember was like a Mickey Mouse, Disney brand record player. And I would put on those records and I would just dance. And one of the earliest ways that we really survived was just creating these beautiful worlds inside our head, but our body helped us to do that through dance and through our imagination. And those those nights I spent in the basement just dancing to music from when I was a little little kid up to what I left my parents’ house, it was a pretty consistent practice. I I just, it gave my body an outlet to expel a lot of the pent up energy, but it also gave me an opportunity to create. And then I also took to writing when I was, especially in middle school, junior high. And playing music, listening to music.
So all of these art forms I really think gave me, gave us, a lifeline when things felt heavy. And I recently made this connection the other day that once I did start really working on myself, in my-. I got sober in my early 20s, and then really dove into trauma therapy deeply in our mid-20s. I think the reason I was willing, and we were all willing, to go there with emotions with body sensation is because the arts had primed us. The arts had given us tools for learning to be at least okay enough with emotion and express it.
So yeah, Dancing Mindfulness is on one hand, it's it's a system for teaching expressive arts—dance—that I developed in 2012. And I teach it in professional circles as part of expressive arts curriculum. And I teach it at conferences like you experienced it. And a lot of facilitators that I've trained will share it in their facilities. It really just is a system that that people of various professional backgrounds, either clinicians, we've trained a lot of educators as well, dance educators, so that they can use dance as a vehicle for teaching mindful awareness. They can use dance as a vehicle for helping people literally—and you've probably heard me say this during the interview a couple times now—dance with what's coming up in life instead of trying to push it away. So it's such a great joy for me. When I come to conferences like the one you met me at, I love nothing more than teaching a dance class there. Because I think about trauma conferences, especially. We talk so much now about trauma and the body, trauma and the body, trauma and the body. Yet too often we sit on our butts in conference rooms and watch PowerPoints or watch the computer screen. Let's actually invite our physical body into the process. And so that's what I try to do with Dancing Mindfulness at conferences.
I think it's a beautiful thing. The, the children that we have in our family are all adopted from foster care. And so besides my own trauma, we have a whole house full of trauma. And the husband writes musicals, actually. And so one of the things that he's done is he'll take songs that they're familiar with, when he hears them kind of repeating a little song and they're caught on a cool song for whatever, he'll take that song and change the lyrics to it to teach them something that we're working really hard on in our family, like how to feel big feelings or how to use your words or whatever, that they cannot get cognitively because of the trauma that's going on in their bodies and in their hearts. And with the songs, it will transform the learning process from something that's so difficult, and we're frustrated because they're not getting it and they're in distress because they're struggling, to something that is so simple and is just this behavior change that makes everyone's life so much better and more peaceful and their need-seeking and need-meeting more effective. And it's been a powerful thing.
The other thing that I noticed about the arts is that I spent probably my first two years of therapy for DID going to session and saying absolutely nothing. [Laughter] Like it was so hard we couldn't even talk when we were there. And I know everything like Broca's area, and all this kind of thing. Like I, I've learned the neuroscience of what's happening in my brain when that shutdown comes or the polyvagal theory and all of that. But what I did do during those two years was take journals that I had written for 15 or 20 years before that, and rewrite them as poems and as notebooks and trying to express things, trying to get it out in some form. And the other thing that happened with that is there are a few parts of of us inside that are painters, different styles, different kinds of paints, but drawing and sketching and painting and acrylics and watercolors and different things. And so, five years of therapy, which felt like nothing happened in session, filled up pages and pages and pages of writing of poems and of artwork. And so now when we released our memoir, and people are saying, “how did you write this story so vividly when you can't remember it?” That's how we did it. We accessed it through the arts, through right brain creativity pieces. So that if you asked me what is in the book, I honestly, most of it, I don't know. I know we agreed to it, but I don't actually remember. But I can say that it came through that process of, of being accessed through poems and and music and painting and drawing and sketching. And that's where the stories came from. That's how we were able to sort of get an outline of the content of our own timeline, even though we still need to do the work of processing it in therapy, and that like isn't finished. It's finally coming out and there's movement and there's expression. And somehow that came to a climax in your session with the dancing, and all kinds of stuff was going down inside. It was incredible.
[Deep breath] I'm just so moved by what you shared, because it's something I witness to happen in people. It's something I've witnessed happen in myself. And I just get very happy when I hear people share that kind of positive adaptive experience with it. Because, you know, the longer I've done this work, and I could say this both personally and professionally, I really think it's not our emotions, it's not our body sensations that causes the problems, it's everything we do to keep from feeling them. And often for good reason. Because one of the reasons we all learn to dissociate very young is that it was too painful to feel those feelings, especially at the age we were at. Yet, it's kind of like this idea of shaming that if you if you try to keep something away, if you try to deny who you are, if you try to deny who the we of us may be inside, I think it's just going to end up persisting. And of course we all do it at our own pace in our own time with our own process. Yet, I've just seen so many exciting things happen when we really involve our body into the process, and we really can embrace the body and in this case, together with the arts, as vehicles to let communication happen within our system. And that system can be the body mind soul complex, if you're keeping it very simple. It could be the kind of intricate systems that people like you and I have. Just so much power to be had when when you really, really asked the body what the body needs.
If we have listeners who are not regular listeners of the podcast, or have not yet listened to the Healing Together recap. If you go listen to that episode you will hear us talk about what happened in this session with Jamie with the dancing and what that experience was like. And I hope that you go back to reference that. I hope you look up your website. What's your website?
My website, if you're interested in the dance, go to dancingmindfulness.com, dancingmindfulness.com. The more general website I keep is traumamadesimple.com, which has a lot of movement resources, a lot of trauma material resources for free that you can access. And then you can always just go to my name dot com.
What else would you like to share while we still have you today? I know there's so many things, but I'm trying to stay focused.
Oh, I just want to share deep gratitude to you for doing this podcast. I add this to my resources list. And I share this with a lot of people that I train in dissociation. Because this is where it's at. This is where I think our field is really going to change, when professionals feel more comfortable having conversations like the conversation we just had. So I truly thank you for being a pioneer and doing this work.
I'm so excited. And we're going to prepare for DID Awareness Day being celebrated in a webinar by ISSTD for the first time. How do you feel about that?
I feel very excited about that because, I don't want to single out any organization, yet I will say all of the organizations that we're talking about, that we've talked about today, other professional therapy organizations have to have more events like the one you'll be doing. Just just so so critical. And I am grateful that EMDR associations have given me the chance to speak as I have. And I'm so grateful to Jamie Pollack and Healing Together for creating the conference that she's created to truly be a place where where therapists and clients can come together without that us versus them divide. It was still with the respect for for appropriate boundaries, of course. Yet I think so much of the problem in our fields are helping fields quote unquote, is that there is an us versus them divide. And I really believe one of the things that makes me a good therapist and a good teacher is that I've never stopped being a client. I've never stopped being somebody who's in the quest for healing myself. And I know I could get edgy when I hear other therapists really talk disparagingly about other clients, especially clients with dissociation. And very often I've called out some of my peers who do that, say, “Hey, you're talking about me, so.” And I get a lot of the “But Jamie, you're different.” And I'm like, “All I'm has really maybe maybe made me different as I've, I've accepted invitations to healing a little more quickly. But I'm really not that different.” And I live for a day when more of us will operate from that place.
It becomes a bit of a place of privilege with a great responsibility to advocate for those who cannot be in that position. And yet, we are really needing to advocate. Which becomes kind of exhausting sometimes of “Guys, listen to us, we already told you that,” or “Please don't say things like that,” or “Can we use this language instead,” and different things that in the context of everything last year with the pandemic and protest and politics, where that really came to the surface. This is an example of it as far as mental health or dissociation is specifically where we really really need to consider the hearts of the people that we are working with, the hearts of the people who have survived so much already, and not just the tradition of so and so has always said this, and so it's always going to be like this, and thinking that we know so much because of this. And instead create and add depth to that volume of literature, or a depth to that research that gives shape to being to treatment so that we are treating people and not just a diagnosis.
Very well said. I think that's why you and I have connected so much. And I think that's a good place to wrap up our conversation.
Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you want to share that we did not get to cover?
No. Just an open invitation for anybody to check out traumamadesimple.com and Dancing Mindfulness both. Trauma Made Simple, I've just really tried to cultivate that site as a place where, that's friendly to both clients, clinicians, all of the above, where you can access anything I've done that's available free of charge on that website. So please feel free to use it and pass it along.
You also mentioned EMDR, because you've done so much for that community. How could a clinician or a client either way find out more about EMDR?
Sure, well, my professional website is instituteforcreativemindfulness.com, that's the name of my company that trains in EMDR. We do a very dissociation focused EMDR training. We have a lot of dissociation focused consultation groups that clinicians can access. The general website as emdria.org EMDRIA.org, or you can learn about what other trainers are doing and in other parts of the world.
Thank you so much.
My great pleasure. And may this be the first of many great conversations we have together.
Oh my goodness. Thank you, truly. I am grateful truly for what you're doing, for your advocacy work besides all of your business work, and for your authenticity in in being you and sharing that with the world so vulnerably, and the courage and tenacity that it has taken to do so. I very much appreciate you.
Thank you so much, and good luck with the panel.
Oh my goodness, here we go.
You'll do great.
Okay, thank you.
Bye Emma, Bye.
Bye.
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