Transcript: Episode 93
93. Ritual Abuse and Attachment (Guest: Susan Pease Banitt)
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
Today we’re very excited to welcome back Susan Pease Banitt, who we interviewed again to discuss her recent presentation at the ISST-D and a little bit more about attachment and ritual abuse. Susan Pease Banitt is a social worker, psychotherapist, and author, who specializes in the treatment of severe trauma and PTSD. She has worked in the field of mental health for more than four decades in diverse settings - inpatient, outpatient, and medical with adults and children, and trained in Harvard Medical Teaching Hospitals in Boston. She wrote the books, ‘The Trauma Toolkit: Healing PTSD from Inside Out’ and ‘Wisdom, Attachment, and Love in Trauma Therapy: Beyond Evidence Based Practice.’
For these she has won several awards, including the Alumni Media Award for written work by Simmons College School of Social Work and the Silver Novelist Award for Health and Healing. Susan speaks internationally on the psychological and holistic treatment of PTSD. She lives and has a private practice in Portland, Oregon.
***Interview Begins***
Interviewer: Bold Font
Interviewee: Standard Font
Welcome back, Susan Pease Banitt.
Thank you for coming back on the podcast again.
You’re welcome.
Just, you can share, if you want to share a little bit about what you’ve been up to with ISST-D, and did you present there? Is that right?
Yes. I did present. I actually presented two workshops there. I presented a talk on the role of attachment, rupture and repair in treating people who have been ritually abused and mind controlled. That was one talk that I gave. And the second talk that I gave was a lot later. It was about improvisational comedy [chuckles] for treating trauma survivors. And that was a ton of fun. And I presented that second workshop with Lisa Danylchuk, who’s on the board of ISST-D.
Oh, that sounds really fun.
Yeah, it was great. It was a great -- it was a nice contrast, because of course, treating DID and ritual abuse survivors is a really heavy topic, and a really important topic, but it’s also -- we can also still laugh and build our neural networks with creative expressions, such as comedy. So, they’re both important.
So what does that look like with comedy in therapy?
With comedy in therapy? Okay. Well, I have been doing improvisational comedy for about the last six years, and I also have been performing for about the last five years. And what I originally thought was I wanted to get lighter on my feet for presenting work, and also to have an outlet for performing. But what I didn’t realize was how the games themselves, in improvisational comedy, which is not stand up, and it’s not sketch, it’s not written, it’s all completely made up on the spot, and so there’s a lot of games that improvisers play to kind of develop the neural network skills necessary for performing on stage and being quick and being able to what we call “Yes, and…” going on on stage, because an argument on stage isn’t funny. [Laughs]
[Laughs]
It’s more funny if people go along with each other and don’t get narcissistically injured in that process.
Right.
So that’s funny, and what I realized is that I started using -- I thought Improvisational games would be good for my classes, which are based on my book ‘The Trauma Toolkit.’ I gave a seven or eight week class based on that book, and a lot of the people who come to that class -- everybody has PTSD and a lot of them have social anxiety. So, to break the ice and to get people looking at each other and relaxing, I thought I’ll do some comedy games, and it worked beautifully. And I still do it. I’ll still have sessions where we play some comedy games and kind of get people loosened up, because if you’re playing a game where you have to interact with each other, you have to look and then often people are laughing, and if they’re laughing, they’re breathing, and if they’re laughing and breathing, they’re relaxing. [Laughs] So, it’s turned out to be an awesome part of the class and intervention.
So that’s one use for it. The other is, for me, what I found is, which surprises me in a way, is that there’s actually nothing too dark to laugh about. There’s a saying in comedy that “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” Right?
Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls it the “sacred profane.”
The sacred profane. Exactly. And of course, I would never make fun of anybody or make them the butt of my joke, but when I can engage in the kind of irony or lightness or sarcasm about extreme abuse or the kind of weird, stupid things that happen when people are abusing each other, that are sometimes actually comical, and I’m able to engage at that level with the client, they feel really joined with. And it gives them, sort of a more reserving ego kind of stance towards what’s happened to them.
It sounds like it walks them right back up the ladder, in a polyvagal sense.
Yes. Yes, exactly, because it’s that social connection. Like humor, I think humor evolved, if it evolved -- I think humor might have been there right from the very beginning, because animals seem to have a sense of humor -- it’s a form of connection. Right?
So, going from the light to the dark, first of all, before we even get into anything about what you shared a little bit… What was that like to be sort of back talking about ritual abuse again with ISST-D?
Well, it was amazing, because I have presented there. I want to say this was my sixth time. I’ve kind of lost count. I think this was my sixth year that I presented with them, but they have never overtly called for the topic of ritual abuse and mind control to be addressed overtly, in any conference I’ve been a part of before this one. And there was a big call that went out to our special interest group saying the organization really wants presenters from our special interest group to present. And I was one of the people that submitted around that, because you know, there’s what I call in my book “organic DID” and people call it different things - engineered DID or DID that’s produced in a systematic way by handlers so that they can manipulate people and enslave them. And a lot of children that are involved in sexual slavery are mind controlled that way - a very deliberate way.
So, it’s a very tricky treatment, because part of that conditioning involves not only torture, but torture in the direction to oppose therapy. So, a lot of survivors are conditioned against therapy, clinical language, clinical interventions, and they’re taught -- they’re between a rock and a hard place in terms of wanting to get help, but also being conditioned against getting help, if that makes sense.
It does.
So, yeah. So ruptures, in that setting, can really be very, even small ruptures, can be big devestations in treatment. And so I really wanted to address the importance of the alliance and really monitoring one’s work for ruptures, both big and small, and then knowing how to spot them, knowing how to repair them, and knowing how to address them in the context of being DID and ritually abused and mind control.
Wow. So let’s break it down a little bit. We actually have not, on this podcast, gone there yet, for lots of different reasons --
Sure.
-- Except for a couple guests, both Colin Ross and Warwick Middleton, both went straight there, and so that was on there, but we have not responded to it at all yet. So, can you give us, just for the listeners, sort of a description of what ritual abuse is or what organized abuse or mind control, whatever phrasing you’re used to using… how would you describe that or explain that?
Okay, so all those terms mean something slightly different, and let’s see if I can explain it clearly. I’m thinking about a Venn diagram. So you have one circle that’s organized abuse, and then you have a circle that’s ritual abuse, and then you have a circle that’s mind control. So, ritual abuse is any kind of ceremonial -- I want to say religious based, but sometimes that’s not the purpose of it -- but let’s just for the sake of what we’re talking about, say that there’s often a religious ceremonial or ritual aspect to it and it’s getting abused in the context of that religion or ritual or ceremony or group. Does that make sense?
Yes.
And so church organizations, satanic organizations, intergenerational cult organizations, can all fall into that. But there’s also organizations like the Mafia and other organizations that do mind control type conditioning, and the military also does it in various countries in the world. So while church groups and kinds of religiously oriented groups can be players, other big organizations can be players. So you can see there’s an overlap between the ritual abuse world and the organizational world. Does that make sense?
Yes.
Okay, and then if you think of the third circle as being mind control, then mind control can happen in many settings. Mind control can happen in families that aren’t in any organization. They’re just really good at controlling people’s minds. They can happen in psychiatry settings, but mostly they happen in overall organized settings. And the reason I believe that ritual abuse and mind control are linked, from my research and from my sister's research and other researchers, is that there -- I presented this -- there’s a timeline. So after World War II ended, the office for Strategic Services was created, which was a forerunner to the CIA. And within that group, within the office of Strategic Services, there were people that created another group. And I’m going to see if I can pull that up. And that group was called Scientific Intelligence.
So that was in 1949, Dr. Willard Mackal, and he was trying to resist maintaining candidate technology from Russia and he created this department of mind control. In our government, this is documented, and actually documentation for that piece of fact comes from the CIA’s own website. [Chuckles] I have a link to it. So the timeline is like you had OSS was founded in 1942, so even prior to the end of the war. Nineteen Forty-Five, there was an operation paperclip that recruited Nazi scientists for their Manhatten project and secret mind control programs in the United States. By 1949, it was the Office of Scientific Intelligence overseeing that. In 1952, that became Project BlueBird, it became MK Ultra, which is also known by the names of Artichoke, MKNaomi, MKDelta, and QK-Hilltop, among others.
And this went on as a not too big of a secret, secret program [chuckles] in the government. But eventually more and more people started to find out about these things and for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here, it started to become a -- congress started to become aware of it, and there became an investigation from the church committee from 1975 to 1977. In 1973 though, Richard Helms ordered a lot of MK Ultra’s documents to be destroyed, which they were. We still have a lot of documents though, and they can be found online. And there’s more disclosures being made all the time.
So at the end of the church committee, after these Freedom of Information Act Disclosures, they ended MK Ultra officially. However, we have a lot of people, numbering probably in the hundreds, who claim that MK Ultra continued, it just kind of went underground. And then went into levels of security that not even the president maybe had access to.
So these were highly -- I hate to use the word scientific, because it’s such an evil technology, but they were scientific. These people were brilliant. They were accomplished. In the Nazi deathcamps, they could do all of the experimentation they wanted to unfeathered. They had a ton of information already by the end of World War II, and they continued their work in various institutions in the United States and Canada and probably other places as well. And Colin Ross has actually written quite a bit about this too.
Yes.
Yeah. And he knows -- and it’s interesting, because there’s been a media blackout about this in the United States, even when the Canadian, a group in Canada successfully sued the American Government, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars for their mind control programs, mostly McGill, also other places. This was common knowledge in Canada, and no Americans that I talk to know about it at all. So they’ve been very successful in covering it up, because all abuse, it’s hard to hear about and people don’t really want to know about it. At some level, we don’t really want to hear these things, because they injure us, and they make us scared, and our mind doesn’t want to accept them as reality.
So, it’s sort of -- when people are like, “How could they hide this for so long?” It’s like, “Well a, they didn’t, and b, it’s kind of easy to hide something from somebody if they don’t want to know about it.”
Right.
Right. So yeah. So that’s kind of the history of that. What I think the interaction is is that a lot of my clients who have successfully escaped those groups and come out of a lot of their conditioning, programming, have done so through spiritual means. So, it struck me as a very smart, but evil idea, to close spiritual doors for people, which I think is one of the purposes of ritual abuse. That’s just my theory. I think that that is a way, if you can’t tolerate having any kind of spiritual connection, because it’s too triggering, then you’ve just closed a door for people, a backdoor for people to escape out of control and conditioning, and it’s smart. [Chuckles] It’s smart to do that.
That’s profound. That’s really profound.
Yeah. Yeah, and so I’ve had clients who’ve had, of course, Christian doors closed, because a lot of the abuse in the west was done in a Christian context, but have been able to find their way out through yogic technologies or Buddhism or Shamanism or other kind of spiritual technologies and ways of being.
When you talk about the form of programs being shut down, or going underground for some of those things, I know that’s not all of them, but governments or other ones… how common is it for those who were then disconnected from the formal experience of that to then grow up and repeat what they had learned, in sort of a learned behavior kind of way, even if it wasn’t associated with the actual program anymore, like to new generations of children? Do we know?
Yeah, it’s really hard to collect statistics on this when the official government position on this doesn’t exist. And the reason that that’s been the official position, of course, is because our own government has been involved in it. So, it’s a state secret basically. It’s a top secret -- so I actually have a colleague, who I won’t name, but she was talking to some friends of hers who were in the CIA and other organizations, and she said, “Well, I know this is going on and blah blah blah” and they looked at her and said, “That’s above your security clearance to discuss.” [Laughs] And she was like, “I’m not even in the government.” Right? So they couldn’t say anything about it, because they didn’t have permission to talk about it. It’s just those of us who are stuck stumbling on this, because our clients are disclosing it to us.
And also, people are disclosing a lot through autobiographies, and also now on YouTube. So, that’s an interesting… it’s an interesting turn of events. There’s a lot of disclosure happening, and some brave souls have put themselves out there and will continue to put themselves out there. But mostly, those people show up in therapies, with therapists who are willing to do this work, and then sort of quietly go about healing themselves. The ones -- It’s like anything else, right? It comes back to Freud. Whatever you have not remembered or acknowledged is destined to be acted out. And that’s a very easy way to control people.
But the other thing to remember is that when people are split and handled and tortured into compliance and conditioned -- a lot of people don’t like the word programmed, but some people do use the word programmed -- then it’s a whole different thing, because the getting out is extremely difficult, because of the conditioning, and the sophisticated level of conditioning, because they’ve been working at this for a long time. They’ve gotten really good at this. The people who create this problem have gotten exceedingly good at what they do, and we therapists are always trying to play catch up.
How does a therapist, besides joining the ISST-D, which we talked about last time you were one, how do they learn how to help with this?
Well, here’s the good news and the bad news [chuckles]. So, the good news -- I got -- there was a woman who wrote a book, I believe it’s called ‘Unshackled’... Kathleen Sullivan, if I’m remembering correctly. She and I corresponded years ago, because she had just finished social work school, and had extricated herself. And she was very reassuring to me. She said -- she was like, “Hey, my therapist didn’t have any special knowledge or skills in this area. But she was just a really good therapist.” [Laughs] And she said -- and she was like, “You know, I extricated myself with her help of just being a good enough therapist.” And she’s like, “If you’re good at what you do and you’re good at maintaining that good therapy relationship and connection with somebody, that’s already a lot. And you don’t have to have special deprogramming skills or anything like that.”
But some people choose to go on and try to get those skills under their belt to also appreciate what they’re up against. So --
That makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. Because if they’re both organic and engineered DID, it is different, and the treatment feels really different, and it’s much, much harder when it’s engineered, because they actually program roadblocks to healing, which is not true in the organic. There’s natural organic blocks to healing, but not things that have been conditioned in through torture to not remember and that kind of thing.
And to stop remembering. Right.
Yes.
Going back to your topic at ISST-D, when you presented, how do you connect the alliance and the relationship like you were just talking about, to helping people who have been through ritual abuse and dealing with connection and rupture and repair and all of that? How does it tie in?
Well, it ties in because most therapists, well all therapists, really have what I call “thresholds of belief” and no matter what level you’re at in this work, you’re going to have thresholds of belief, because we all have belief systems about reality. [Laughs] Right?
Yeah. [Chuckles]
And so right? And so somebody like me, my threshold of belief is quite high, because I’ve heard a lot, because I’ve worked on a child abuse hotline, because I heard stories the general population hadn’t heard, and I knew, or I thought I knew, what was possible. And also because I just grew up in California in the 1970’s. [Laughs]
[Laughs]
And you know, I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of realities. You know?
[Laughs]
[Laughs] So my mind is very open to alternative experiences of all kinds, but that is unusual. Most therapists didn’t grow up in the Bay Area in the 1970’s and most therapists have not worked on a hotline, where they’ve heard thousands and thousands of stories of abuse. And they haven’t yet processed maybe what is possible in the darkness of human nature. So this is what I say about thresholds of belief - they’re largely unconscious and unknown. We don’t even know we have those thresholds until we encounter them and hopefully bring them to supervision.
Those thresholds are culturally determined, because right, if you are in a Native American family, and you talk about talking to the thunder beings and bringing rain, that’s not a problem, but it’s a huge problem if you’re in a psychiatric hospital and you’re a white person in the United States. [Laughs] You know? Right?
[Laughs]
So these are culturally determined thresholds. Also consensual reality is a moving target. So when I first started in my career, nobody was talking about reincarnation, but now the polls are showing that 30 to 40% of the American public believe in reincarnation, which is a pretty big shift. Right? And some of that has to do with all of the yogic teaching that’s happened, and permission to talk about those things.
And these thresholds give rise to countertransference. So when you hit a threshold -- thresholds fall into three categories that I say, horror, reality, and spirituality, and of course those are all related -- but when you hit one of those thresholds, you’re going to have a countertransference reaction to your client. It’s going to hit you physically. If you hit a horror threshold, like you hear something that you just never heard of, never conceived of, didn’t think was even possible for humans to even do to each other, you’re going to hit that countertransference. And if you’re not ready to deal with that threshold issue, you’re going to respond inappropriately to your client. You’re going to freeze and dissociate, or you’re going to disbelieve your client overtly, or covertly, or you’re going to start crying, or something that’s really off putting to your client, where they can tell you’re out of control, and not able to be present for them. And this quickly torpedoes therapy.
So a lot of the clients that I get -- just if we just take horror as one threshold, just understanding that yes, you know, a group of people could be responsible for torturing a young child. I’m going to keep it -- that’s going to be triggering for some people, but I’m going to keep it as vague as possible. But yes, that actually happens and it can happen and it does happen. Then if you can digest that information as a clinician, then when your client discloses something like that to you, you can handle it, and you can be present, you can stay present, and not dissociate yourself, in that moment not judge them or not react in an inappropriate way.
But this is a really hard thing for most clinicians to do. A few months ago I had an EMDR therapist call me for a consult and basically dumped their client in my lap.
That is not the same as a consult.
No. No. No, it’s not at all. And I had said during the consult, I said, “Well, you’ve been seeing this person for X amount of years, I assume you’re going to do a fairly lengthy termination.” And then they didn’t. [Laughs] Then they didn’t. And it was incredibly damaging to this client, who this therapist was basically the first person they’d entrusted with this top secret information. But the therapist just -- they went so far into their reaction, they didn’t even seek out supervision. They didn’t seek out things that would have helped them navigate an appropriate either continuation of the therapy or an appropriate closure of the therapy. And it started to feel like they were going to, I assume, that the urgency came from a feeling of the therapist was going to lose their mind if they didn’t dump this client out quickly.
Wow.
And that’s not okay. That’s malpractice, you know, it’s malpractice. So we really need to gird our loins if you want to say. We need to prepare ourselves for what we might hear. And how things we might hear may be so far out of anything we ever expected to hear when we became therapists.
I’m just thinking of different stories that I’ve heard…similar to that. And there is -- it’s such a deep violation, and it’s such a betrayal…not just between the two people, but of the process.
Mm.
So then you’re not just repairing a relationship with the client or the Parts or whatever, but with the process to get them to even reengage in the process itself with someone else.
Yes, and it can be, the disconnect, can also be, it can also be more subtle than that. For example, I had a client who came to my class. They’d read my book then they came to my class, and then and only then they felt safe enough to approach me about doing some therapy. And they had had a situation where they had actually had severe abuse, not as far as they knew by their parents, but by another party that was in the community. But the therapist was very psychoanalytic, and kept trying to get them to talk about their parents. [Laughs] And it was enraging. It was incredibly frustrating and enraging, like I have this other thing I need to tell you about…but oh let’s talk about your family of origin. Like no, I need to talk to you about this other thing, this horrible thing that happened to me in the community. Right?
That is the kind of rigidity and directiveness is not helpful and I don’t know that therapist, but one -- it could be that they were scared of the material the client was going to get into, and so unconsciously shifted it back to a more comfortable area. Or it could be they were so rigidly trained, but they could not kind of wrap their head around the need to do something different.
There was no flexibility there.
Right. Right. So, those kinds of ruptures -- like this client told me later, they were like, “I was never going to come back to therapy.” [Laughs] “I had two therapists. It was both terrible. And I was actually never going to come back to therapy until I read your book, and then I saw that you were actually here in my state, and then I came to your class and checked you out.” So, I mean, thank goodness this person was able to re engage, but what you’re saying is absolutely correct. It’s like it’s not just happening between two people. It’s happening between an entire helping profession and your patient. If you torpedo their ability to get help, because they feel betrayed, you’ve torpedoed their ability to maybe get help ever again from anybody. And that is just a huge, huge violation, and something we never ever want to do.
I was taught -- this was sort of drilled into me at Israel Hospital in Boston -- if you do nothing else, they told me, if you do nothing else, leave your patient open to more therapy experiences.
One of the reasons that we started the podcast was because of that rupture at a community level. Partly because everything went down in the 90’s, part of it was because of situations like this, all kinds of reasons, but there’s this whole rupture between clinicians and survivors and trying to bring that community back together a little bit, and bring some healing to that. And after we interviewed you, we probably get 10 or 15 emails a week just about that episode, and that someone has gone to get therapy after years of staying away from therapy, because of a rupture. They did not know that repair was possible.
Wow. Wow. Wow, that’s amazing.
Yeah, it’s a big, big thing. And now, it’s something the community is talking about. And when an issue comes up and someone’s like, “I tried to get therapy, but I went to the therapist I was assigned and this terrible thing happened”, people are like, “But you can fix that. Go somewhere else. Talk to someone else.” Or if it’s just actually an issue you can work out with that therapist. People are open to options differently than before in just a few months of this being a conversation.
Wow, I’m so happy to hear that. Wow. Thank you for sharing that with me. That gives me hope. [Laughs] That gives me hope, because you can be. One of my first questions with a new client is, you know, about previous therapy, and why are you here? What didn’t work before? And let’s talk about that, because rupture is such a common experience with people who found the therapy for their trauma didn’t work. And you know, that comes back to that idea of part of why that falls apart is that the trauma a, is a new field and b, it really is a specialty field. And I really have come to believe that the average bear, the average therapist bear is not equipped to handle intense trauma work. They’re just not prepared. And they need special skills. It’s a degree of difficulty that’s extremely high, and especially if you’re going to see more than one, you know.
So, because it requires a level of ongoing self-care in all dimensions, so mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and physically, to do this work. You have to be on your game about that, or you’re going to get eaten up by the work. So, it’s just like -- I’ve compared it in the past to my husband being an interventional cardiologist. He goes inside of people's hearts and opens up blood vessels and puts stents in in millimeters of space. You cannot expect an ordinary doctor to do anything like that. It’s very tricky, specialized work.
Right.
And so is trauma therapy. It’s very tricky, specialized work, and peoples’ lives hang in the balance also in the work.
Well, and if you go to someone who’s not prepared to handle that, then there’s something about knowing ahead of time if I don’t choose well, it’s just a sort of a matter of time until there’s another rupture. I’m setting myself up.
Right.
And so not talking about ruptures just because it’s painful leaves us closed off to the hope of repair if we talk about the pain of ruptures.
Correct.
And so sharing those stories and being more open about those stories a little bit. We’ve given, on the podcast, we’ve given three examples of ours. Our first therapist, we were 17 and actually still in danger and so were actually still, long story short, sent to our therapist for foster care basically. And she was like, “I can’t be the foster parent and the therapist.” And so we just didn’t have therapy anymore.
Mm.
Like that’s what happened when we were really too young to know any of the other layers involved or what was going on or okay or not okay. But then we just didn’t have therapy. And then later, in graduate school, tried to get in therapy again, but it was a husband, wife team, and they thought that that was how to treat trauma, like with some kind of parenting thing. I don’t know what that was. But they ended up getting divorced and fighting through the session. [Laughs]
Oh my gosh. Oh, that’s awful.
Yes! Classic. And then as an adult, going back to therapy, trying to find specifically a trauma therapist, someone responded, “I’m a trauma therapist, so you go and you meet with them.” And this person had so much of their own stuff going on, they were physically hot because of this and this and this, so they wouldn’t shut the door to their office. So --
What?! They wouldn’t shut --
Yes, no! They wouldn’t shut the door to their office, so it was just open to the waiting room. So, we couldn’t speak, because we’re like, “This is hard enough already. We can’t speak if the door’s not physically shut.” [Laughs]
Oh my goodness.
And so, because we didn’t speak, she used the time to answer emails and call people back. And so we were just paying for that. And then ultimately, she decided that because we were good at presenting that she should present with us, and so again, you can’t -- you’re our therapist. That’s not how --
You can’t do that. No.
And so she set up this thing and so we stopped going to therapy, but then she got mad about that. So then we didn’t have a therapist again. [Laughs]
Wow, those are some pretty big violations of the therapeutic contract that you’re talking about.
Right?
Yeah.
And so these are different things we’ve -- those are the three examples from our life that we’ve shared on the podcast since talking to you, because people aren’t understanding repair, because they’re not understanding rupture.
Right.
And like you said, “It’s not always such a big thing.” Sometimes it’s something more subtle, or sometimes it’s so subtle, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. Like, “This is what I’m feeling. This is what’s going on. Oh, this is --” You know, whatever that disconnect is. And it can be worked out, but people don’t have language for it. And so that was something I so appreciated you sharing on the podcast, about rupture and repair.
Yeah, and that’s really good feedback for me too, because I’m going to be giving a talk on this at the Social Work Leadership and Education Conference in the fall. So I’m going to have a lot of administrators and professors there. And to kind of really -- and this is what I mean by coming back to relationship as the cornerstone of therapy, because without that relationship, you got nothing. It doesn’t matter what technique you’re using…if the room’s not safe, the client’s not even going to be in the room. [Laughs] They’re going to be somewhere else, and they won’t be grounded and present for healing, which is your first job as a therapist, is to create a safe container where people can start to become grounded and present in ways they may never have been before.
And all relationships have ruptures. I think I’m getting to know, you know, I’m talking to people about friendships and spousal relationships, relationship and repair isn’t really talked about. And you know, the good, old fashioned apology seems to have gone the way of, you know, I don’t know…
Right.
Advocates or something, I don’t know. [Laughs]
[Laughs]
People don’t [laughs]...people don’t -- as people have gotten less religious -- also like in the Catholic Church, you have confessions, which is now called reconciliation -- but it’s almost like a skill set that people never had in their family or no longer have. They don’t understand the need for it, and how -- like if we step on somebody’s foot and say -- like most of us, I think, if we accidentally stepped on somebody’s foot, we would just say “Oh, I’m sorry” or “Excuse me.” Right? But if we accidentally step on somebody’s feelings, it’s very rare for people to apologize. They’re like, “Well, I didn’t do it on purpose.” And I’m like, “It doesn’t matter. You still did it. You got to fix the rupture that just happened.” Right?
And in therapy too, we might do things by accident, not on purpose, or just that we’re not considerate enough or thoughtful enough of our client. In my first therapy, early on, I didn’t even know this would bother me, I came in one day and it just was obvious that the office, the waiting room, hadn’t been dusted and vacuumed in a long time. And it was really triggering for me, and I went and I mentioned it in therapy. The therapist didn’t apologize or say, “Oh…”, at least to my memory she didn’t. She might have, but what I did remember was that the next week I came back, it was spotless. So, I felt heard. I felt responded to. I felt like there was care and concern and effort to make a repair there, you know, even though it was a minor thing. It was a minor thing that nobody would put on their list of relationship rupture probably, but for me, for whatever reason, that was just really triggering.
Right.
And so it wasn’t -- if people get their ego in their way, and they’re like, “I didn’t do it on purpose” and “That patient needs to learn with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People are going to be messy”, that’s how some therapists would respond. That wouldn’t have been a helpful response for me. What was a helpful response was that they were like…they got it together and they cleaned their office. That was a response I needed to feel cared about at that time. You know?
Right. Not just the words too.
Not just the words, it was actions. So, if you’re saying, “I’m uncomfortable with your door being open”, not that the door should ever be open anyway. I can’t -- I mean, that’s just -- again, that falls to me in a level of malpractice. Just don’t have therapy with your door open - therapy 101.
[Laughs]
Like you create a safe container [laughs], you know, like that’s not a safe container. [Coughs] But I apologize. And I go into detail in the book about how to apologize, because a lot of people don’t even know how to apologize well. [Laughs] So because it’s just not a skill in our culture that we’re good. And as somewhat, at the risk of offending some listeners, as somewhat of an arrogant culture. So other cultures that I’ve been to, like India and China and other places, they’re actually really, really good at this. It might not be sincere [laughs], but they’re really good at it, if you know what I mean.
That’s funny. We are going to Africa tomorrow, actually. We -- our oldest daughter, one of the ten year olds, is African-American, and her biological mother told her her whole first five years, before we got her, before she came to us, told her that she was white. And when she was about five and a half, before her adoption was final, she looked at us one day in the middle of dinner and said, “Someone’s going to have to tell my mom that I’m not white.” [Laughs]
[Laughs] Aww.
Like she had finally figured it out, right, but as she’s grown up, because we are very European, very white skin, we’ve had to work really hard to teach her what her story is, because it was twisted from the beginning. It’s not just that she’s growing up with white parents, which is a whole different issue, but it was twisted from the beginning. And so we’re not just having to catch up, but undo some things.
Right.
And at the same time, it’s her story, it’s not our story. And so what we can do is expose her to things and take her to museums and teach her about music and dance and all these different things that are cultural pieces. But one thing that we did recently was do her DNA, and they were able, because so many people from her ancestors have done the DNA, they were able to track the tribe that she’s from in Africa.
Mm.
And we were able to contact them, and through different connections, we know people who are safe and good and real there and it’s an appropriate thing. And so we’re actually taking her this week to Africa. And the reason I’m telling you this is what you said about apologizing and reconciliation in different cultures and places in the world. They are having a full homecoming ceremony for her --
Oh wow.
-- With the king of that tribe.
Wow.
And they’re going to dance around her and they’re all going to wear their native clothes and there’s going to be fire. Like there’s this own, like a ritual in a good and positive way to welcome her home. And she’s very happy with us and we adore her and all of that is going okay as far as trying to build attachment and maintaining attachment and all of that, but this is a part of her story and an important part of her history. And all of the other children, we still have visits with their biological families when it’s safe to do so. But no one from her family has ever come once, and so we are so excited to be taking her to Africa, for her to see this, and to be encircled, literally, by her people.
That’s powerful. It’s almost like an ancestral soul retrieval.
Yes.
Like reconnecting that lineage for her. It’s going to be -- and ancestral work in Africa is really important. So that’s -- what a beautiful, what a beautiful thing to have happen. And that’s just another example, you know, you’re responding in a culturally competent way, but you’re also responding in a way where you set your, you know, cultural thresholds aside and say, “Yeah, there’s something kind of mysterious here that’s important, and we’re going to make this happen, even if we don’t completely understand it.”
Right.
I had a client from -- it was one of the only -- I’ve only seen two conversion disorder cases and this was one of them. And this woman was from Africa. When her mother had died, she wasn’t able to go back for the funeral, and there was a lot of very profound ceremonies that they do at that time, and it has to do with the Earth and it goes on for days and I asked her about that. And when I was asking her, “What do you need to do to feel okay?” She was like, “I need to go back. I need to go back to my tribe.” Which, I don’t know if that -- I only consulted with them for a couple of times, so I don’t know if she was able to do that. She was married to a white man, but she clearly had this piece that I think white people don’t have and don’t understand, because all of us who immigrated here got ruptured from our ancestors in some kind of way. Right? That’s why we’re here. [Laughs] You know?
Right.
And it’s different for those cultures. It’s different because they -- even though they’d been invaded and whatever, they still have these sort of unbroken ancestral ties and rituals that they still do, that are on the positive side. Right? And so I don’t want to give ritual a bad name either.
So ritual abuse is abuse of those things that are powerful. And rituals themselves are important and necessary for healing.
It’s a powerful thing, I think.
Mmhmm.
Wow.
A very powerful thing, yeah. What an interesting…yeah…it’s a beautiful thing.
Okay, so I would just say that the other two categories besides horror, I just wanted to touch on them, that are reality and spirituality. So it’s very hard for us to, I think, especially in this time where things have gotten so polarized and you’re all good or you’re all bad, or your belief sucks or your belief is the best or, right, so it’s making it a harder environment, I think, for therapists to navigate difference. And we still need to work really hard at staying open to thresholds, like knowing where our threshold is around beliefs.
You might be a solidly atheist therapist, who doesn’t believe in any God, any power, or anything like that, but your clients might be having mystical experiences right and left. That does not mean they’re psychotic. [Laughs] And I think clinicians know that, but things can, people get pushed to the edge sometimes. If a very analytic, scientific -- I don’t want to say scientific, because a lot of scientific people are open to mysticism -- but a very analytic, atheistic therapist is sitting with somebody who’s seeing their ancestors gather around in the office and say things to them, I think it’s going to be hard for that person not to see that as a hallucination. And we have to maintain our cultural competence by knowing that about ourselves, just knowing like yeah, I don’t know what that is, and I don’t think they’re psychotic, and I don’t know what it is, and I can be okay with my own discomfort about not knowing what this is. Right?
And the same with reality things. I think a lot of us are okay with visions. A lot of us are okay with a certain level of mysticism. A lot of us are getting more okay with realizing that there are these really dark groups, these organized groups that do bad things. But what if a client walks in and says, “I had an alien abduction experience” or “worked on a spaceship for twenty years” and then had their mind reset to this time and place? Most of us would be like, “Okay, you’re way over my threshold now.” [Laughs] That is like I cannot go there with you.
So, knowing where our thresholds are and still being able to hold a level of presence and listening and containment, even when our client has just gone way over our threshold. Because my own belief system is that the universe is a big place. The planet is a big place. [Laughs] You know? I don’t know everything there is to know about reality. I don’t think anybody, I don’t think any one person could possibly know everything there is to know about reality. And entering into a patient’s story is never a bad idea. It doesn’t mean you’re going to sign up -- you’re not going to -- I don’t know. It doesn’t mean you have to move that into your life in the real world. You don’t have to now believe in aliens or whatever, but you need to be able to enter into the patient's story in a believable way where they feel like you are with them, because that is their story. That is really their story.
And can we hold a space of not emotional neutrality, but genuine judgmental neutrality, of like, I’m neither for or against this story? This is my patient's story and I’m going to help enter into that reality with them and help them, and I’m going to be able to tolerate doing that. That, I think, is our real task. That is the task of working with these advanced cases, and that’s a very hard skill. That’s an advanced skill that we have to continually work at, I believe.
That makes sense.
Mmhmm.
I think it goes back to relationships being so important and about attunement and all of those things that it’s built on. It’s where healing happens, is in the connection.
And in the connection, if you think about small children and if your three year old comes back and says, “I saw a dinosaur playing with a monkey” [laughs], and you say, “No, you didn’t, dinosaurs don’t exist”, then what happens to your relationship in that moment?
Right.
It’s like wah wahh, [laughs] thumbs down. If you can join with that child in their imaginative world that is real to them, that has a sort of reality to them, then you keep that connection going. Right? So, it’s just a question of are we in service to the relationship? Are we in service to rupture, repair? Because to me, I’ve never seen anybody heal without a solid connection in their therapy.
So what does repair look like?
Um, well I wrote an entire chapter on that [laughs], actually.
[Laughs]
It looks like a lot of things. You have to notice that something’s amiss. You have to track it. You have to self examine yourself, in case you’re feeling defensive. You have to respond, and you have to repair. So, repairs can be like in my case with the dusty office, the repair was cleaning the office, taking me seriously. Sometimes the repair needs an apology. It always needs acknowledgement. It just always needs acknowledgement. Because often behind the rupture is a misunderstanding. Maybe your client -- maybe nothing happened. Maybe you were just sitting there thinking about what your client said, and in their mind, you were thinking something terrible about them. I had this autistic child who kept talking about my sneaky smile.
[Laughs]
And I was like, “My sneaky smile?” I just found this child charming, and then I realized, Oh, she’s autistic. She’s not processing my smile as friendly. She’s processing it as sneaky, because she can’t really feel it. And if I had gotten offended and pulled away from her story, that would have made the rupture even bigger. But instead I was like, “Oh, I’m sorry. Would it help if I keep my face more still?” And she’s like, “Yes.” So then I did. I worked really hard at not smiling, because that’s what she needed in order to process during our sessions. And she couldn’t understand what I was doing, because her brain wasn’t reading that correctly.
That’s a beautiful example. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
You’re welcome. [Laughs] You’re so welcome. I will come back any time.
I am so grateful. I really am.
That’s fantastic.
Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Emma. Thank you!
[Break]
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