Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Dr. Chuck Benincasa (Part 1 of 3)

Transcript

Guest: Dr. Chuck Benincasa (Part 1 of 3) · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over:
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to long time listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
• 1:00
  Our guest today is Doctor. Charles Ben Encasa. Chuck is committed to advancing the field of psychology through advocacy, education, and trauma conscious practice. His work spans clinical, forensic, and consulting practice areas, as well as research and clinical training with an emphasis on complex trauma dissociation and dignity based anti colonial and culturally responsive practice. Chuck earned his Doctor of Psychology and Counseling Psychology degree from St.
• 1:32
  Mary's University of Minnesota and completed his postdoctoral fellowship on the Trauma Disorders Unit at Shepherd Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where he provided intensive psychotherapy to individuals with complex trauma histories and dissociative abilities. His specialty areas span traumatic stress, dissociation, interpersonal violence, institutional betrayal, coercive control, and identity based harm. He has held faculty appointments, teaching and supervising graduate students, co authored two chapters with emphasis on complex post traumatic and dissociative reactions as well as culturally responsive forensic evaluation for the Handbook of Psychological Injury and Law, is an associate editor for the Journal of Threat Assessment and Manager, a consulting editor and section head on dissociation for the Journal of Psychological Injury and Law, and an editorial board member for psychological trauma: theory, research, practice, and policy. Chuck has held various leadership roles and national organizations, including serving as the Convention Programming Chair and Awards Chair for APA Division fifty six Trauma Psychology, and he is currently an elected trustee for the board of Washington State Psychological Association. His advocacy efforts focus on equitable treatment of psychologists in the healthcare industry, improving training opportunities, and expanding access to care.
• 3:01
  He is dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices and dismantling oppressive systems within the field of psychology.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: The world.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: I'm pleasure to finally meet you.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: I'm so excited to talk to you today. I can't even handle it.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So my name is Chuck Benincasa. I am a psychologist in Washington state. I did most of my clinical training in the state of Minnesota. It's where I was born and raised and, in many ways, still have the heart of an upper Midwesterner.
• 3:53
  I would say most of my career has focused specifically on things having to do with complex trauma and dissociation, whether that's helping people access care, whether that's developing broader frameworks for clinical work. I also do forensic practice. And so how that shows up in in legal and criminal justice spheres. And I'm pretty passionate about training. I my dream is to train, you know, just a whole generation of new clinicians that take a dignity based approach to their work.
• 4:49
  And I yeah. I am one of those people that I like doing lots of different things. So you'll notice that I have all sorts of different kind of things that I do in my professional sphere because I don't think that advocacy happens in any one single place. And so I try to bring the perspective of the people that I have had the privilege of working with and interacting with to the spheres that don't often get that perspective represented.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: I am excited to talk to you today because we have these several parallels that do not actually intersect until this moment and I am excited about that. I know that I worked with Ben Israel on the hospitalization committee with ISSTD. My training for licensure was with a Buddhist union supervisor and I learned more about the liberation framework from Laura Brown and then now Doctor. Tema, the listeners have heard Doctor. Tema and her Homecoming book and that podcast we've referenced.
• 6:19
  And so there are these pieces that I feel like I've been sort of chasing to learn more and wanting to learn more and studying about and wanting to talk about more explicitly in the podcast, especially just from my own lived experience in a variety of ways and and politics and all the things happening in the world. And then I found you and got referred to you for the podcast that this is your jam. And I'm so excited. So excited. Where do you even wanna start?
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Well, I wanna start by acknowledging the gratitude that I have for you bringing up those different sources of knowledge and information because the I have a really particular way of of thinking about things and talking about things and understanding kind of who people are and how they got that way. But none of this is original to me. Right? I'm borrowing from so many robust traditions and and and scholars, and and it's really important for me to be able to communicate that even though how I talk it talk about it might be unique to me, that the due acknowledgment of where a lot of these ideas come from is one of the things that we often miss and really being intentional about crediting those sources. I appreciate you doing that even just in mentioning some of those names and some of those perspectives.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: I love that so much. A writer and as a person and as a, a researcher which maybe some people don't agree with for me but I feel like I have done that in my own way and as an indigenous person the wisdom credit to our elders is so so important, is so congruent with dignity concept in and of itself. And also for me, personally, I feel like it's part of how I determine safety. If I know what is coming from where, it helps me with safety. And I think that has always been on the podcast.
• 8:29
  People who have listened since the beginning can follow the trail of what I've learned and where I've learned. And it's just such a concept of broadening the the concept of our our elders and the wisdom credit of where we learn things. Absolutely.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: I love that you mentioned the word safety because this is something that I talk a lot about with folks, particularly in the lens of how our construction of safety has been colonized and just sort of having a western view of safety of often when we use the word safety, we're thinking about the absence of danger, but the absence of danger is not the presence of safety. The presence of safety really comes from and these are how we understand the way that it's developed biologically and sort of in our evolutionary survival mechanism is safety is when bad things happen, we get through it together. And and a lot of times when, you know, traumatic experiences start to live in our nervous system, we start to understand safety as, you know, not being exposed to potentially dangerous situations, but that that sort of reinforces this idea that there is such thing as places that are absent of danger. And that's just not true, particularly when we think about how the construct of safety has been colonized within trauma work, clinical trauma work. A lot of times, there's sort of this idea of, like, oh, well, you know, we can't do trauma work until there's, you know, safety, and and we're often talking about that as the absence of danger.
• 10:11
  But what does that mean for people who the the source of their trauma is society itself. Like, you can't wait to, you know, help someone liberate their nervous systems, find their values for having some safety if if it is the society or the culture that is source of the trauma. And so I think that that's a really important place to kinda start and think about how we we approach trauma work, that safety is not a destination. Safety is an interconnection.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: Okay. I'm already crying, so thanks a lot for that. It brings so much context to even Now Time is Safe as a concept I learned so early in therapy and talked about on the podcast and in some ways was super grounding but also ultimately was devastating because now time was not safe at all. And having to find out what is safe enough, what does safety mean, and then it was almost ten years later before I learned the difference between trauma and deprivation. So for you to now say the absence of danger is not safety, safety includes nurture and connection and community and these things, it explains so much to me.
• 11:41
  And to see, oh, this is what is hard in life right now, as opposed to sort of gaslighting myself because my own treatment has been colonized in ways I didn't even know is happening. This is the most attuned moment of, yes, life is hard and here's why. And that is safety, is agreeing to understand that.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the ways that I started shifting my thinking about this, there was a segment on NPR that I was listening to that I wish I could remember the name of this particular cultural anthropologist, but there was a cultural anthropologist that was a guest on on NPR, and and she was talking about how as a cultural anthropologist, she often gets asked the question, you know, what is the first anthropological evidence of civilization? And and, you know, people will often think of things like, you know, Hammurabi's code or the Pyramids At Giza or sort of like these, you know, the the evidence of of, you know, building cities. And and she said, actually, the earliest anthropological evidence of civilization that we have is the earliest carbon dated femur that we can find that had been broken and subsequently healed. Yes.
• 13:05
  Because at that period of our evolution, as as, you know, human beings, a broken femur was death. Right? Like, like, the the level of of threats, the ability to protect oneself from threats, not something that is possible without that, you know, level of of mobility unless there are people around you that are protecting you from the danger until you have time to heal. That's the difference between the absence of danger is not the presence of safety, that the presence of safety is being interconnected and understanding how we balance both our reliance on others with our ability to contribute what we have to others in the web of of what community means in getting through things together. The the I also talk about that from perspective of of shame, which is something that anybody with any degree of complex trauma or early childhood trauma understands well.
• 14:11
  It's these these ways that we have experienced ourselves that create the stories of of of who we are. And, you know, in in my training in DBT, you know, you go through and you've got the different emotions and and you can think about, like, anger. Okay. Well, what what does anger communicate to us? How is anger a helpful emotion?
• 14:34
  Well, it communicates that, you know, there's an important goal that we had that was obstructed somehow or that, it's an acknowledgment that we were treated unfairly here. Okay. What about sadness? Well, sadness communicates that there is something really important to us that we lost access to or, you know, that that in all of these different emotions, there's ways of understanding that they serve, you know, a valid purpose in our in our understanding of the world. And then you get to shame, and it's like, okay.
• 15:08
  So what does shame you know, what does shame communicate to you? Well, shame communicates to me that I'm bad and I'm awful, and, I just well, you know, what am I doing? And it's like, okay. Wait. How how is that helpful?
• 15:23
  And struggled with this for so long. How is that helpful? And I'll often talk about the difference between guilt and shame. Right? Guilt is I made a mistake.
• 15:29
  Shame is I am a mistake. And in that in thinking through that that NPR episode and that, you know, the the broken femur then then is healed, shame is actually the emotion that protects us from banishment.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Because it is within the threat of banishment, the threat of being exiled from our communities that is the most dangerous thing to our nervous systems and how we've developed in an evolutionary sense. And you see that in how sort of shame plays out in our childhoods and in our lives that if you're, you know, doing something as a kid that gets you belittled or that gets you punished, You we develop internally, but, you know, our brains in inhibiting our behavior, that part of our brain does not grow or really doesn't start to come online until, like, much later in in childhood and early adolescence. And so for younger kids, shame is an inhibitory process that keeps us from engaging in the behaviors that we've learned experientially threaten our membership in in our in our community or in our family of origin or in our peer groups. And and a lot of times, that that inner critic or that inner voice or that, like, we it develops to to keep us from from doing those things. And a and a liberation perspective is we didn't ask for the contexts that belittled our behavior or that judged our behavior or that termed what would have otherwise been developmentally, you know, appropriate understandable and and and healthy behaviors into things that made us bad.
• 17:32
  And we take into adulthood those rules that we've been given about what we're allowed to do, who we're supposed to be, who we're not supposed supposed to be. And all of it has become connected to our sense of survival in a way that it's not just, you know, if I do these things, things, then people are gonna judge me. It's if I do these things, my actual safety is is at threat. And how do we how do we liberate ourselves from the rules we didn't ask for about who we're supposed to be and and find find ways of claiming what is original to us and what would have continued to be true if the bad things hadn't happened.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: We have talked on the podcast about how attachment styles, our attachment strategies, like talk about colonization, right? Or even weaponization of what is just natural development of children and then being shamed for doing it wrong when children cannot do it wrong. They are approaching care and avoiding harm. And I talk in one of my books about the social contract of childhood where all families have rules, every family's rules may be different, but we have what gets us care and what keeps us out of harm's way, right? Which is what you're talking about.
• 19:04
  And, also, I never had until this moment put together that there was an escape from that, and that's what the liberation is.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Yes. I I love that, and and I have a line that sometimes gets I get I get people pretty upset with me for what I'm about to say, but one of my lines that I often use is that it is impossible for children to be manipulative. Yes. And the reason that I say that is because children are not independently capable of meeting their own needs. And if a need is not being met, a child is going to find creative and adaptive ways to approach that need meeting that from the outside we call manipulative.
• 19:53
  But when you consider that within the context of power in a relationship, it's just creative need meeting. And and to anytime we're framing a child's behavior as manipulation, we're essentially acknowledging we don't know how to meet that need. Yeah. Because if we did, the child wouldn't have needed to, you know, develop those creative strategies for getting that need met in the first place. And when we when we take that into adulthood, my my perspective is that all behavior all behavior is an attempt at meeting a need of some kind at its core.
• 20:38
  And behaviors that are adaptive, it when we're younger at getting those needs met get reinforced, and those end up becoming strategies that end up becoming conditioned. And even though the the context might change throughout the course of our lives, that doesn't mean that the implicit learning changes. And we end up finding ourselves in situations later in life where what we have learned is effective is also creating distance from how we would otherwise choose to show up if we were in a place of our values and not in a place of I cannot count on my needs being seen and and acknowledged and met. And so my nervous system and and the behaviors that have developed as a result take the lead, and my values have to take a backseat. And so the other aspect of that sort of dignity based paradigm is asking ourselves, if I were able to show up in this situation in a way that was perfectly consistent with my values, what would that look like?
• 21:53
  And that the pathology is not the the ways that we've had to adapt our behavior. The pathology is the barriers that exist in our environment that don't allow us access to those values. And sometimes they're the barriers that exist internally that don't allow us access to those values because of what we have learned about what is safe and what is not safe.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: Yes. What drove this home for me after encountering Doctor. Tema and all that is Doctor. Tema was realizing I had learned about betrayal trauma and how I had to maintain attachment. So that whether that included dissociating, whether that meant pretending I didn't exist or agreeing with whatever social contracts from when I was little, I had to maintain attachment.
• 22:45
  And what I did not connect until Doctor. Tema is the piece that I could betrayal trauma myself from not living consistent with who I am or my values or what it like and and so understanding why that happens growing up, but that my healing as an adult in liberating myself is woah, a sacred pause, as she says. I said, woah, she says sacred pause. And pausing to say, who am I? What is it that I need?
• 23:28
  And how do I act accordingly rather than fulfilling these contracts from everybody else that I never asked for in the first place?
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I I am really struck often by that question of who am I. When I work with anybody, I have two primary overarching goals. The first one is helping people have an understanding of who they are, what's original to them, what's important to them, what, you know, what what their values are. And then the second is, as much as possible, having the freedom to to be that me in the world.
• 24:22
  This This gets really complicated when, first of all, I have only ever been able to be the me that I needed to be to survive. And so when we think about, like, identity and and and who am I, identity is a privilege or, like, identity exploration is is often a privilege of those whose identity don't pose a threat to their safety and their belonging. And for a lot of folks that I have only ever been able to be or been allowed to be or had has it has only ever been safe to be the me that I need to be to survive. Bringing people to that who am I question is sometimes almost inaccessible to even think of. And then on top of that, when you think about identity from a parts perspective and and how different parts of ourselves, even at times, may be at conflict, but also still represent true and wise aspects of who we are.
• 25:43
  You bring those two things together, and and identity work becomes a really important part of the of the therapeutic process because it is it is not for a lot of people a reclaiming. It is a claiming. And I'm gonna use this line from from doctor Tema from her her plenary speech at ISSTD earlier this year. Some people never got to know themselves before the trauma. Yes.
• 26:14
  So how do you reclaim the you that you didn't even get to know because you've only ever been allowed to be the you that you needed to be to survive?
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: Yes. To me, that is another death of hope moment. The death of hope from Laura Brown about that my childhood can never be different than what has already happened but also the implication that my adulthood will never be what it could have been and this is a piece of that for me of when we don't get to be before all the things happen and then live in a world where all this is happening, you are sharing that and we literally had like warplanes flying overhead to go out across the ocean. And what is even happening that we're having a conversation about liberation and safety? And that is the context in regardless of your politics, that is the context in which we're in in this moment.
• 27:13
  And so who am I in that? Who am I in safety? And not just not knowing who I was before trauma happened, but not knowing I can become differently than only in safety.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Mhmm. Well, allow me to make an attempt at the revival of hope. And I think one of the things you said is really important of, like, that acknowledgment that my my life will never be able to be what it what it could have been. I would say that that there is a a feeling in that that what it could have been is what we would have wanted it to be. And and for me, reclaiming hope is also about reclaiming the agency to say, I get I get to decide what I what I want it to be, and then it's a question of how do I make that accessible.
• 28:19
  And and and how do I not discard the the the the learning and the knowledge and the understanding that I have now as a result of what I've been through that I wouldn't have had if those things hadn't happened. Not from a everything happens for a reason perspective because I don't think that we can say that, you know, the horrific things that people experience were meant to happen so they can learn to be humble. Like, no. But those things affect us in ways that are not inherently bad just because trauma is their source. And in in our quest to learn about ourselves and in our quest to come home to ourselves as doctor Tamer would would say, that includes the the ways that our experience have helped us understand what's important to us that we in the ways that we wouldn't have otherwise had access if if we weren't confronted with the things that have happened to us.
• 29:39
  And that's one of the reasons. So this is this this next thought is is primarily directed at at clinicians. But a lot of times when we're thinking about the clinical work that we do, we have there's a there's an inherent bias that, like, we're teaching our clients things that that help in in one way or another rather than helping our clients see what's already original to them. And one of the most common things that I try to do when I'm having a conversation with somebody is be thinking about and when possible reflecting back to them, what does what I'm hearing them say? Tell me about what's important to them and what makes sense about what they're saying.
• 30:53
  Because we all have things that are original to us. The things that are most important to us, if they if the if it meant potential danger or potential, you know, removed access from safety, those things, you know, often become inaccessible, but they're still there. And I'm going to posit that distress is not possible without an underlying value being hijacked because we don't get distressed by things happening the way our values want them to. And as we're as we're talking to people about the distress that they experience, how does even that distress tell us about what's important to them? And I can, you know, give different clinical examples or examples from conversations that I've had with people about what this looks like, but we tend to be so focused on the distress and the problem that the person ends up finding themselves in another scenario in which they are the observer of the environment interacting with their problem rather than actually seeing and acknowledging and dignifying who they are, what's important to them, and the wisdom of them.
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: That feels so heavy in the air because I feel like when we don't do that, that that is its own kind of interpersonal violence right there in therapy.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Yep. And the ways that we are trained as clinicians in just sort of the, you know, generic treatment as usual trainings that we get from our graduate programs are so colonized and so westernized and so allegedly universal that we don't realize that when we show up in those ways in our clinical relationships often without even intending to, we are replicating abuse dynamics.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: That's just heavy. I'm just letting it hang there. That's just heavy I think I think we've talked about that in on the podcast before in different ways where therapy trauma really is the worst Like it is my union Buddhist supervisor back in the day used to say the only thing worse than a bad mother is a bad therapist. Because it is that re traumatizing and not just re traumatizing, but repeating the abuse dynamics. So that's fresh trauma too.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: And and look. It's not to say that therapists are abusive when they're talking about problems. Right? Like, problems are real. Problems impact people.
• 33:59
  And and depending on where people are at, sometimes really tangible solutions for addressing and and and, you know, trying to resolve those problems is one of the most helpful things that we can do in therapy. And is that happening because we're attuned to the person, or is that happening because we're really good at chasing problems? It's you know, you talked earlier about attachment strategies. Attachment is so important, and and I a 100% acknowledge that. I found in my work that I've been way less about attachment and way more about attunement.
• 34:36
  Because attunement, which comes before attachment, sets the foundation and the framework for the perception of whether or not this caregiver is going to be safe and reliable in meeting the needs. The the Harvard Center for the Developing Child has some really great videos to kinda help people understand attunement and what it is and the serve and return. And when you think about the the the brain development at at that really, really young age, it ends up creating a foundation for the implicit way that we understand meaning and relationship for the rest of our childhood. And a lot of times as therapists, when we are invalidating without intending to be, we are that's one of the dynamics that we're replicating is the misattunement.
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: Yes. I had not thought about it developmentally, and that makes so much sense. Of course attunement happens first. We can't know what attachment strategy to use either for approaching care or avoiding harm if we are not attuning or misattuning and discerning what's working and what isn't.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: Exactly right. Wow. And you know when you think about the role too of a of a two minute history and sort of need making need meeting dynamics like we talked about earlier of, like, the creative ways about around which we go about meeting needs. That ends up becoming so important because what for for folks who had, you know, not super well attuned parents and even parents that are doing the best that they can and are doing things that are reasonable for other children, that doesn't mean that it's well attuned to what is needed for individual child. They end up often really struggling with that feeling of, like, needs are only valid when the other person understands or or or anticipates the need without me having to say anything.
• 36:45
  That's an attunement. Because when we're, you know, little tiny babies, we can't meet our own needs. We're completely and utterly helpless. And if our caregiver is is not attuned to our needs, those needs continue to go on unmet. And because we can't communicate those needs ourselves, we need our caregiver through their attunement to anticipate our needs, to see what our need is in order to meet it.
• 37:18
  And and, know, for adults, that's like, well, if I tell this person that I really want them to, you know, plant something special for my birthday. Like, if I tell them that and then they do it, it doesn't mean anything anymore because it wasn't their idea to begin with. I look at when people are not forced to do something but choose to do it anyways. That's an even greater expression of love than doing something because they feel obligated. But a lot of times that feeling of, like, my need being met because I invited it isn't valid or doesn't mean anything because they were supposed to come up with it themselves.
• 37:56
  That's an attunement one. Wow.
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: I'm putting these pieces together and realizing that if there's attunement and need meeting is happening then there's no need to approach care or avoid harm because it's not happening.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and the the developmental process working the way that it's supposed to is that you you incrementally and gradually become more autonomous in seeking out your needs because you're getting a better understanding of what they are, and you're having the experiential opportunity to know, like, no. You know what? I thought that was maybe my need, but it's actually kind of this thing over here. And, obviously, when we're talking about, you know, kids that are in you know, that are infants or maybe toddlers, this is not a cognitive process because kids at that age don't have, you know, cognitive frameworks for the world.
• 38:50
  But that there's also a lot of times an overlap to that with with later therapy processes of where's you know, I often find myself in the conversation either with clients or with other therapists that, like, okay. The goal of therapy is for you to be completely independent in your need meeting, and that is what we're going for or something along the lines of, you know, the the outside world can't meet your needs. You have to be able to meet them yourself. And for a lot of people, it's like I've spent my whole freaking life being the only one meeting my needs. Why would that be the therapeutic goal?
• 39:36
  And and it's like that that is what I would say more of a colonized version of of things that we know to be true in certain ways, but that we're still making that a hyper individualistic thing. You know, I don't need to be the own like like, perfectly responsible for making sure that all of my needs are met as as a therapeutic outcome. Like, that we have community. We have interdependence. We have, you know, the ability to no person can meet every single one of their needs.
• 40:19
  It's just not the way that we're that we're wired. And I frame it from the perspective of the goal isn't about I need to be able to meet every single one of my needs. The goal is if I only know how to get my needs met in this particular way, that's actually disempowering because anytime that we have less access to choice, we have fewer options.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: And the more options that we have, the more choice we have and the less likely we are to be at at risk of being under the control or at the whim of of someone someone else who has figured out how to meet our needs and is and whether intentionally or not, sort of holding that over us as a way to exploit us to their benefit. Woah. And I feel like those are two really different things. Right? It's not hyperindependent need meeting.
• 41:20
  It's there are so many ways when we are actually connected to community that we can navigate the needs that we have that don't put us at risk of that kind of exploitation.
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: This conversation will be continued on the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing. One of the ways we practice this is in community together.
• 42:10
  The link for the community is in the show notes. We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too.
• 42:38
  That's what peer support is all about. Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.