Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Dan Shaw, LCSW

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Guest: Dan Shaw, LCSW · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, finding stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma and dissociation, Please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, where there is a button for donations, and you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. You can also support us on Patreon for early access to updates and what's unfolding for us. Simply search for Emma Sunshine on Patreon. We appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Daniel Shaw, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, New York. Originally trained as an actor at Northwest University and with the renowned teacher, Yuta Hagen, in New York City, Shah later worked as a missionary for an Indian guru. His eventual recognition of cultic aspects of this organization led him to become an outspoken activist in support of individuals and families traumatically abused in cults. Simultaneous with leaving this group, Shah began his training in the mental health profession, becoming a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for Psychotherapies in New York. In addition to his numerous published journals, articles, and book chapters, Shaw's book, Relational Systems of Subjugation, was published in 02/2014 for the Relational Perspectives series by Rutledge.
• 2:03
  The book received the International Cultic Studies Association Award of the Margaret Thaler Singer Award for Advancing the Understanding of Coercive Persuasion and Undue Influence. Shaw's second book, Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery, Leaving the Prison of Shame and Fear, was published by Rutledge in 2021. Welcome, Dan Shaw. Hello.
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: Hi there, Emma.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the podcast. If you want to go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit, I have already recorded your bio, but that way they can get acquainted to the sound of your voice as we get started.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm Daniel Shaw, and I am a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. I'm the author of a couple of books. The first one called traumatic narcissism, relational systems of Subjugation, both and the other book also Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery. Both are published by Rutledge.
• 3:06
  I, also teach, psychotherapy students, candidates at psychoanalytic institutes, and supervised clinicians as well. And, I'm happy to be here today. Thanks so much for inviting me.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: I'm so excited to have you. We heard you at the ISSTD virtual conference, and you presented there. And I just wanna talk just just to even get this conversation started. Just talk about the name of your books. What how how are you describing traumatic narcissism?
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: Right. Well, traumatic narcissism is a concept that developed over the course of twenty or so years, and I began to think about it after leaving the religious cult that I had been very deeply committed to for more than thirteen years. Well, about thirteen years. So, of course, I didn't think of it as a cult as I was in it. Only as I only after leaving it did I come to view it as a cult.
• 4:18
  And, of course, I had to think about, well, what is a cult? What makes something a cult? What made me become part of a cult? And, really, when I want you know? So what is a a cult?
• 4:31
  Okay. There are a lot of definitions out there, and that's all I gotta understand. What made me participate in this group? I could figure that out. It wasn't a big mystery.
• 4:42
  It didn't take a brain scientist to figure that out. There are a lot of, things going on in my life that were challenging for me. So, this happened to come into my view, and I got caught up in it. But what really fascinated me was, how do I understand cult this cult leader I had known quite well for a decade or so. What's going on with that person, and what's going on with them in general?
• 5:11
  So the first effort that I made, where I began to talk about narcissism was an an essay called traumatic abuse and cults. And I was connecting, the narcissist cult leader and trauma at that time, But that was, published I wrote that in 1996. And then my book, traumatic narcissism, came out in 2014. So be that between that those times, I have been trying to identify the kind of narcissist this person that I had known was. And in the meantime, I had become a clinical psychotherapist, got graduated from a psychoanalytic training institute and had a private practice.
• 6:01
  And I was now talking to all kinds of people who were traumatized by highly narcissistic people. And I could see that was on a spectrum and that there were certain kinds of narcissists who seemed less traumatizing or less destructive than others. I could see narcissism not being a monolithic kind of thing. But I was trying to describe a particular kind of narcissism, and, ultimately, I I chose to call it traumatic narcissism. Basically, to put it in a nutshell, I have actually written two books along the the theme of this, so it's not a nutshell constant.
• 6:43
  But as put it as as accessibly as possible. I'm talking about a narcissistic person. I'm talking about what they do to the significant others in their life. I want them to capture those behaviors, and I wanted to capture what they were doing to others and describe the relational system as a system of subjugation. I I see them this kind of narcissist has to have people they can control and dominate and exploit.
• 7:18
  And in order to do that, they have to find a way to bring these people, these significant others, usually followers or intimates or adult children or children or partners or siblings, they they need to diminish people in order to maintain a sense of their own superiority. And in the worst cases, they need to basically enslave and subjugate people in order to reinforce a delusional sense of omnipotence. And, that's the dynamic I wanted to capture in this particular kind of narcissistic person who is a little different from, the description of the pathological narcissist, who's a person with a tremendous amount of grandiosity and also a tremendous amount of insecurity, and you can kind of, see them fluctuate between both. The traumatizing narcissist splits the difference. In other words, what I mean by that is that they take all the grandiosity, and they use their intimates and significant others to hold all the insecurity.
• 8:39
  And by maintaining that relationship of a dominating, subjugating one to an insecure, dependent one, they are constantly reinforcing this delusion upon impotence. So that's the kind of narcissism I'm talking about. And it turns out there are a lot of people who have experienced it, not just in cults, but that's always the kind of person leading a cult or a group that you, would view as a cult. It's also, partners. It's also, as I said, siblings.
• 9:18
  It's any authority figure that you might develop a relationship with can be that kind of person. So I hope that, wasn't too, complicated an explanation?
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: No. That that I I just wanna recap that for for our listeners who are not clinicians and and clarifying. Like, so you're saying that part of the volatility volatility really with with some narcissists is that tension between both and them vacillating between the power and the vulnerability. And and and, with the traumatic narcissist, what we see is is them taking almost an object relations kinda way, taking all the good and putting all the hard or the bad or the negative or the insecure on the victim, for lack of better words, just for clarifying.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: Yes. Yes. That's right. So really traumatizing narcissists are perpetrators. They're predatory, and they're parasitic.
• 10:24
  They're using other people to fill themselves and reinforce their delusion of total superiority, total entitlement. And in order to control these people, they're using and exploiting. They're preying upon, and they are parasitic too. In order to control them, they have to, induce within them states of, fear and so they are, their behavior is always, alternating between seduction. I'm sorry.
• 11:02
  The narcissist the traumatizing narcissist is is always behaving either seductively or intimidating or belittling or humiliating. And there's an alternating kind of rotation of those behaviors, seducing the other into feeling very, very special and very much very important, and then, bringing on the intimidation and the belittling and the humiliation. So this is not unfamiliar with people who work in the area of domestic violence. It's quite similar. But, most of the time, the traumatizing narcissist is, is actually avoiding, is very, very skillful at at avoiding the appearance of, any, malicious behavior.
• 11:59
  In fact, they're often very successful people. They often have lots of resources, wealth, power, control. And, so they don't look like, you know, the typical battering husband of a in a domestic violence situation, and yet their behavior is very similar.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: This is extra fascinating to me. Just for full disclosure, the this interview today where it's happening in real time, not when they hear it later, is happening in the in the ISSTD conference in which you spoke this last weekend, is happening literally between two weeks of four episodes where we share with a a roommate from the time, an experience we had with sort of some institutional trauma with a college that was a evangelical college and things that happened there and trying to get away and out of there. And it is fascinating when I heard you speak and then looked up your materials and and your books and got this that I thought, oh my goodness. Like, this played such a role in what happened there and the leaders that were there. And I had a a a teacher, an English teacher long ago who tried to say, like, no.
• 13:28
  This is a cult. And I'm like, well, no. That's not a cult because a cult is like this over here, those people. That's what a cult is. And now looking back on it and having this information and these other layers, it's so clear.
• 13:43
  And, my my own therapist said just this week, you know, you can't manipulate happy, healthy, well adjusted people. And so they have to destroy you as part of the control process. And and I wasn't understanding that until you said this piece about how different than other narcissists who are trying to balance, like, their own insecurities. They don't wanna acknowledge how how traumatizing narcissist put those pieces on you and just
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Almost like an x I mean, in this I know what splitting is clinically, but for people who are not clinicians, like, almost like an external dissociation. Like, it's not mine. It's over here.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: That's right. The, it's very, you know, I was speaking with a survivor of the Rajneesh cult, somebody who had been extremely close in to Rajneesh himself, somebody who had been severely abused from a young age and remained loyal to him for many years after he left the country and died and so and who only in the last few years began to realize the the extent of the abuse. And we were talking about how important it is for a traumatizing narcissist in a cult with, you know, which is a movement, that needs to have, followers and needs to, you know, be on a mission to save the world supposedly so that more and more followers will come and dedicate themselves to the mission. In a cult, the mission to save the world never happens, but the mission to enlarge the grandiosity and the delusional omnipotence of the leader is always what the cult is able to accomplish. The cult the cult followers are working day and night to, reinforce the leader's delusion of omnipotence.
• 15:56
  They think their mission is to save the world usually or some such variant, but that's not what they're actually doing, and they don't realize that's not what they're doing until they leave. But, we were talking, this ex member and I, and, we were I was recalling my own extreme dissociation throughout throughout the time that I was around the guru I followed, and it was very similar to hers, except that I was able to call it dissociation. She was she was so confused about how did she know that, terrible things were being done to other people and terrible things were being done to her. How did how did she know it but not know it? And I was put and she because she kept saying, I didn't know.
• 16:51
  I didn't know. I didn't know while I was in it. Right? And what I said was, but now that you're out of it, notice that your brain registered every single thing that was wrong. So while you were in it, even though your brain was registering and recording these things, some other part of your bay brain was telling you, pay no attention to any of that and stay focused on the mission.
• 17:24
  So every person in in this kind of a relationship, whether it's a one on one relationship to a traumatizing narcissist or whether it's a cult or whether it's a nation, And I won't get I won't I'll try not to offend anybody, but whether it's a whole political party and a whole nation, you know, as it has been in his in the historical past. So it could be one on one or a couple or a group or a small group or a big group or a country is what I'm saying. You you're always being induced into an extremely dissociative state, And cult expert, Alexandra Stein, has done all of her work around cults, on, through the lens of attachment theory, and she's made it clear that a relationship to a traumatizing narcissist slash cult leader or or other is always one in which that person creates a situation for the follower of disorganized attachment, meaning that you are dissociate what happens with disorganized attachment for a child is that the child is seeking safety and proximity from a parent, but the parent is frightening and is the source of fear and is fearful herself or himself.
• 18:53
  So the child becomes disorganized. I'm I'm instinctively looking to you for safety, and I'm looking to you who is also the person who is frightening me. And that is so disorganizing for an infant that they are they are believed to become dissociative in order to be able just to not have to not have to know how conflicted they feel. It's exactly the same for a person in a relationship with a traumatizing narcissist. They are they must dissociate in order to maintain the relationship and not know what they know.
• 19:36
  In other words, not know that they are being abused. So I don't know if that relates to your experience in the evangelical college, but I certainly know many ex evangelicals who, think of themselves as having been abused in a cult.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: It it really does. And and I know also, you know, trying to be respectful like you said. I know this is not a political podcast, but I have talked in the podcast in the past about how recent politics impacted our family at different times because we have we have, children six children adopted from foster care, and and half of those are biracial kids. All six of them have disabilities, and one of them has a complex airway. So we were in quarantine for two full years until she could get vaccinated.
• 20:33
  And we've got because of the area in the country where we lived at the time, we got a lot of social pressure, a lot of mocking, and then some direct actual attacks because of the politics. And so Wow. In our experience of those, especially recent years, and and we just experienced sort of the worst of that. So not not judging anyone on their politics, but experienced the worst of when that like, what that was happening, like, what you were talking about as a nation. And, I watched this happen.
• 21:12
  I watched it happen for my kids. Like, someone told my son that he had cerebral palsy because we got him vaccinated. And I'm like, no. He already had cerebral palsy. It's not related at all.
• 21:23
  Like, all these different things. Yeah. And, I literally watched, like, the politics unfold in our nation and sort of the traumatizing aspect it was specifically for our family and our own personal experience. And
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: I I saw this, and I thought the people that I love and care about who who are of that political party or something, like, I'm baffled. Like, I don't understand how we got to this. Like, how does this represent them? Because this is that's not the people that I know at all. So how did we get there?
• 22:00
  And I literally did not understand this until last week, a fresh air episode on NPR, of all things. Like, an an author shared about his book and, like, literally walked through step by step. This happened, this happened, and then this happened. And I can put a link to that in the comments. It's unrelated to our discussion.
• 22:21
  But it it wasn't until I could cognitively sort through it that I could even understand how that had happened.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: Right. Well, here's an interesting fun fact. In the first year of the pandemic, I literally received three inquiries a day, seven days a week, on average, about people who were terrified that a relative of theirs had become obsessed with QAnon theories. Now let's be clear. QAnon theories are embraced by a very large number of people in the Republican Party, politicians in that party.
• 23:08
  And I got I received calls from families and partners of people either who were democrats or republicans. There was both absolutely both were represented. And both of those people who, from those different parties, all of them who called me had become terrified about the complete loss and estrangement from a loved one who had been completely, obsessed with conspiracy theories, like, in, you know, in the QAnon family of theories. I have never, in thirty years of practice, being known not just as a psychoanalyst, but also as a cult expert. I have never received that volume of inquiries about anything ever.
• 23:59
  And it went on and on and on for quite a while. So and it's still going on. So we are seeing you know, it's hard to it's it's hard to, talk about conspiracy theories specifically as cults. They are cult like. They don't aren't structured as as, the way a traditional cult is.
• 24:22
  But, you know, this has this has become a severe, national problem. You know, Nancy Pelosi's husband was attacked by somebody who broke into their house and attacked him with a hammer just this morning. You know, these people, I'm sure we will soon learn once once we have the information, are motivated by political conspiracy theories. So we're in, you know, we're in we're in serious shape in this country about, how you become passionately committed to serving a a traumatizing narcissist and making that your mission, whether that's one to one in a a relationship, in a couple, which is often another type of work that I do, or whether it's in any kind of a group of any size.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: One of the biggest things for me in my own recovery has been learning that for me to be healthy and safe, that means the people I am with or the organizations I'm associated with, that I have a voice, that I have choices, that I have a framework that is more non binary, and I don't mean gender. I mean
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: Black and white or or the gray area or that there's a continuum in which I can exist with all of who I am as a whole person and have the freedom and safety to do so. And that is intense. That's wonderful.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: Yes. Well, that's that's I think that's a wonderful, criteria, you know, for what what it is to be part of a safe community. A safe community doesn't mean that you can't be challenged or you can't learn or grow or or have conflict, but it's safe to do those things in the kind of community you're describing. Right. Right.
• 26:31
  And And it's that kind of relationship is safe to be in. That's a that's a safe kind of relationship to be in, which is the opposite of what you're in when you are with a traumatizing narcissist.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. And and I like the point you bring up about conflict or differences that it does not conflict does not have to cause harm. Differences do not have to be hateful and ugly and mean.
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: We can be different people with different opinions without shaming what is the other. We don't have to do the othering to justify ourselves.
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: Exactly. Exactly. I know. It feels like nostalgic and a little bit sad when you talk about that because it feels as though we as a people are losing this, more and more. It's degraded in our discourse of what you're talking about, and, it's very sad.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: It it it is sad, and I think there's there's I think as much as I felt during those political years that were so rough, like, just as we witnessed through the lives of our children, that that felt like betrayal. Now now I feel when I think about it, it's sort of more of grief of Mhmm. I I I I've lived all over the world in different situations and for different work experiences, and there are always times, you know, not other other places in the world, many of them don't have nationalism in the way that's happening here right now. I know it's happened in history at different times, but but there were always, like, just these jokes of, oh, Americans this or, oh, Americans this. But this particular piece of my own lived experience history as an a a young adult and an adult now not so young in this country Yeah.
• 28:42
  Makes me like, I'm not proud. Like, this is not who I want to be. It is not congruent with who I choose to be of wanting people just to be safe and to be themselves and to, like, even masking for me was not political. I wore a mask because my daughter like, we had already worn a mask for five years because of her airway and because I care about my in laws. Like, it was an act of love.
• 29:13
  It had nothing to do with politics.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: I of course. Of course. I know we are we are at an inflection point in The United States Of America, and, it's it's quite a quite a stunning development for me, a baby boomer, who, protested the Vietnam War and kind of, thought that we'd settled, you know, civil rights and women's rights and and, voting rights. And it turns out none of it was settled at all. You know, for a long time, people who have wanted to dominate and control discourse and, and politics in this country who were in the minority of people.
• 30:04
  For a long time, that minority has been strategizing very successfully how to become more and more powerful to the point where we may see this minority group with their minority viewpoint actually, you know, erase all the gains that I thought had been made, you know, from from well, this is an interesting discussion. I hope it's it's, I hope it's relevant to your listeners. But, you know, after World War two, Americans felt that we were heroes because we had fought evil and we had conquered evil. And yet here in our own home, the the whole question of civil rights was waiting to explode, which it soon did not that long after World War two. And then came the youth movement and the women's movement and all the movements that said, let's be more human.
• 31:06
  Let's be more humane. Let's let's let's be more tolerant and inclusive. Let's let's extend the same dignity to others that we would want for ourselves. And, you know, that's that's how I grew up, in a family that honored those kinds of values. So some people say, oh, then what how'd you end up in a authoritarian dictatorship of a cult throughout your old thirties?
• 31:35
  Well, it wasn't my family's fault. I can I can tell you that? And, you know, it wasn't how I was raised. There were, what I would say to people about being in a relationship with a traumatizing narcissist, whether it's a one on one or a cult or whatever it is, it's not your fault. You were probably like me, like I had was when I entered the group I was in.
• 32:06
  You were probably at a very vulnerable moment in your life as many of us are at various moments as I I'd say that as everybody is at one moment or another. A vulnerable moment where perhaps you're confused about what's next or you're just staring about what just happened or something like that. And when in a vulnerable moment of your life like that, you are unlucky enough to encounter, like, a predatory, exploitative, traumatizing narcissist, they might very well succeed in seducing you into believing that you have found finally the person who gets you, who really sees you, who really understands you, who's really strong and there for you, because that's how they present themselves. And then, it doesn't take long before you start to understand that what they're what they have managed to do is basically seduce you into agreeing that they can now control and exploit you. So, I really hope I I hope that point is clear that people who fall into these situations, you know, it's not because they had a a a a a bad childhood necessarily or that they had a certain kind of parent necessarily.
• 33:32
  It might be those things. But most of the time, it's basically that you were vulnerable, and you got unlucky. You met the wrong person right in the middle of your vulnerable time. And, I think that's the best way I can explain it.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: I think that that it's very relevant. It's relevant to the story we're talking on the podcast about in context of the college and how we had, basically been completely on our own and ran away from home, and this church sent us to the college. So that's exactly the same kind of scenario. And then it's also relevant because until we heal those vulnerabilities, like, this is why we have to stay in therapy. Right?
• 34:21
  Because until we heal those vulnerabilities, we continue to fall into these situations not because we're bad, not because we're trying to, but because we don't see what's happening because dissociation. And that's when we get those reenactments, which listeners know because we've talked about that with someone else on the podcast. And it happens to us again and again and again. And we can't be, like my therapist said, happy and healthy and well adjusted people until we do that work of healing.
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: I agree. I agree that, that, well, you know, it's the saying, I I I'm not gonna get the quote exactly right, but, you know, history that nobody pays attention to will repeat itself. You know, that's a that's a well known praise in the field of, history and historical studies, and it's true for us as well. Our you know, one of the things that I was so, happy and excited about as a as a, parent, as a as an expecting parent some years ago was to learn that if I could have a coherent narrative of my own developmental history, even though I might have had some insecure attachment, it would be pretty likely that my child would have secure attachment because I wouldn't have a dissociation way of understanding my own developmental history. I would have a coherent narrative.
• 36:04
  Right? And that research has been shown to be very, robust, that those findings. You know, so, yeah, It's to not it's not only to our own benefit to resolve those, issues and make sense of those our own history, but it's to the benefit of anybody we're with and and especially to the benefit of our children.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. Absolutely. And the other layer of this that I would highlight for our listeners is that when we're talking about traumatic narcissism, just by nature of the dynamic, that would fall in the category of relational trauma. And we have been talking on the podcast about how, like, Simone's research the last couple of years and and and about how we now know that relational trauma has a greater neurobiological impact even than other kinds of abuse. And this kind of abuse so often has several kinds of abuse, but it is relational in nature.
• 37:14
  And so it's a huge piece to to recognize, to call out, to to get away from, to get safe, and to heal.
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: Yes. And, you know, I've been thinking about I've been thinking about relational trauma since I started training as a psychoanalyst because I was in New York where the relational psychoanalytic school had developed. And I was also, not a Freudian, but I just knew that from the beginning. But I was very, very moved by the work of Ferenczi, who remained true to the idea of, trauma even after Freud had rejected it. And so, I always, I always was looking at, thinking about, and trying to understand and make sense of and help people with relational trauma.
• 38:12
  And, one of the things I've been thinking about relational trauma is that aside from all the kinds of ways in which people are, traumatized, you know, betrayal, abandonment, neglect, abuse, what I think might be the worst part of that kind of trauma is that nobody has been there to try to help. So bad things happen. Bad things happen, and they keep happening. And while they're happening, there is nobody who is helping. The teachers don't see it.
• 38:51
  The people in the community don't see it. Nobody sees it. So the person who's having to deal with this trauma is trying to be out in the world looking like a normal person and, you know, afraid to be discovered as somebody who is suffering abuse, neglect, abandonment, and what have you, privately. I'm thinking of children who may have to deal with this. And and when I work with people now whose relational trauma was very difficult for them growing up, and not always because they had monster parents.
• 39:33
  Often, they didn't have monster parents, but they had parents who had no clue as to what to look for, how to see them, and how to help them. And that that lack of help while you're experiencing bullying or sexual abuse or, anything like that, that lack of anybody seeing and being able to help, I think, is part of what makes the trauma so enduring.
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: I'm just sitting with that because that's so powerful. It it's it's a place I'm in personally and professionally right now with several several in my own work and then also in my own therapy of how these layers of, like, if you're trying to classify things. Like, when you're when you're trying to, feel safer about looking at hard things, then you start using labels and and compartmentalizing in other ways. Right? Because the dissociation is going down.
• 40:37
  So you're like, okay. This was physical abuse, and this was sexual abuse, and this was relational abuse or something. But this is that layer of that makes things complicated where there was also these layers of complicitness happening and neglect happening. And Yes. It's so much harder.
• 40:58
  Like, even things that you think, oh, this was just simple because even though it was hard and I'm was it okay. That's abuse. But even in those layers, there are there's this trauma that is so relational relational back to that.
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: Yes. Absolutely. And it's always complex. And everybody's story, even though there are always common threads to people who've been traumatized, developmentally, you know, in the in the developmental years from infancy to young adulthood or or even a little beyond, You know, we can we can see many common themes, but each person's story is very specific. And I think it's it's really important to work with a person who is able to help you tolerate looking at the specificity.
• 41:55
  You know? It's hard to, to talk about abuse enough. It's already hard enough. But if you if if you're working with a stabilization model where you are helped to always know you can be safe and grounded and, you know, that this is not a that the therapist is careful about retraumatization. You can be you can really I find that in my work that it takes a while before you know, often I know the headlines about the abuse and the trauma.
• 42:32
  I it's all very, like, you know, right there. But it's those specific ways in which a person felt alone, for each person, you know, that that come out only little by little. That's what I find. Because those might be the hardest parts of the trauma, the parts, of of how I think I'm gonna say that increasingly, I find aloneness and, the the extreme, unbearable aloneness that people who've, experienced relational trauma experience. I think that might be, in some ways, one of the most enduring and persistent problems they struggle with.
• 43:22
  And, finding ways of addressing that, are challenging.
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: It's it's a very deep piece of therapy when
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: It is.
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: When you get to those places of not just this and this and this happened, but that layer of that layer of I was alone in that or no one comforted after that or no one rescued from that or no one witnessed with me that.
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I'm I'm working with, someone who was horrifically abused by a religious leader, and her family, who were also quite abusive, basically pretty much trafficked her to this religious leader from the time she was 13 to 16 or 17. And horrific abuse. Horrific abuse.
• 44:13
  But and there's and there's, you know, family members who all all of whom have no interest in her story and always try to turn it against her. One sister, a younger sister, saw it all and believed it all and knew what it was when she saw it and is the one person in this woman's life who saw it and witnessed it and and was there for her. And as a result, this is a functional person, and I'm not saying she's not extremely damaged. And, and she is, and yet she is a very, very functional human being because one person in her world was able to really see it all and validate it and witness it and, you know, understand it. You know?
• 45:09
  So it makes a huge difference.
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: I think I think the other way it makes a difference is acknowledging those people whose traumas were not on the 05:00 news kind of trauma, not
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: Yes. Yes.
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: Newspaper, a lifetime movie, or dateline, and yet it still counts as trauma, and it was still valid trauma. And they've been feel not only alone in what they literally suffered a childhood all alone, but then also feel alone in healing because it's Yes. We say don't compare stories and don't compare traumas, but it's really hard not to do. And when it's harder like, relational wounds are invisible. You can't point to it and say this was the trauma.
• 45:58
  And so
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: And so so often, the traumatizers have been extremely successful in normalizing the traumatizing behavior. You know? What what are you so upset about? Oh, come on. You know?
• 46:15
  Get over it. I mean, in a million ways, abusers and traumatizers and our culture, to some extent, will normalize, abuse and trauma. So when people come to us, no. My family was fine. Everything was fine.
• 46:31
  I'm you know, it's just me. That's because abuse and trauma have been normalized, either by the individual perpetrators or even in our in our communities, to your point.
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: It's so it's so difficult. So so so when we talk about that level of intensity and that level of pain, then where does the recovery come in? Because that's your other book. Right? Like, what does recovery start looking like?
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, I come I come by my ideas about recovery from this, and bring parts, from my own experience. My experience in the cult I was in was extremely traumatizing, and I was very, very broken at the point of exit. And, I need a lot of help and support, and I'm very grateful to have had been able to find that from various people in various places, various ways. And, so one of the one of the ways that I, work with people who have these traumatizing situations is, well, let me let me put it this way. There's a great many factors that go into recovery.
• 47:54
  So I'll try to pull out one or two or three that I find particularly meaningful. I I often find it very useful to help people understand the psychology of their abuser, not because they're going to then be able to be compassionate or empathetic or forgiving. None of those things are relevant unless unless for whatever reason they are, but they are not generically relevant. Let me put it that way. What's relevant is if I can understand the the, the mechanisms and the and the and the origins of this abuser's behavior, I can free myself from the grip of it.
• 48:40
  I can I can I can look at it as their illness and their pathology and and their, you know, behavior? I I can see that it wasn't me that caused it. I can I can I can stop being obsessed with their abusive behavior of me because I'm because I'm not the one that, that caused it or that could've stopped it? This is so so really trying to help people know their abuser better, actually, I guess, is one way to put it, as as a means towards liberating themselves from being obsessed with their abuser, is one one of the pieces of recovery I find useful. And that's not so easy as it sounds a lot.
• 49:41
  And when I say people are obsessed with their abusers, for example, a cold, empty, dead, hateful mother who, an adult patient who's in their sixties and seventies cannot stop obsessing over why didn't she love me? Why didn't she love me? Why didn't she love me? You know, they're basically, I believe they get stuck because they feel like somehow they could have done something about it or it was their fault. And so that's why I I that's one aspect of the work that I do in recovery.
• 50:24
  You know, I see it as a process of helping a person liberate themselves from the from the control of the abuser and liberate themselves from what the abuser has, implanted within them. You know, the beliefs and the expectations that the abuser has led them to have, you know, the chronic complex PTSD symptoms, basically. I'm I'm looking to help a person release themselves from the grip of the abuser so that they can begin to discover and rediscover their own subjective reality, their own subjectivity. Who am I and who wasn't I and before I ever, you know, fell under the spell of this abuser, and who do I wanna be? You know?
• 51:21
  Reclaiming subjectivity is a big part of the work that I do. Abusers always are trying to, deactivate the victim's subjectivity to take either control it and take it over or just destroy it altogether so that the the abuse victim is left not knowing who they are. And, that's a big part of the recovery. You know, discovering me, my subjectivity, what not what they think of me or what they what I think they want of me, but who I am, what I feel, what I think, what I want. And, you know, they're they're even, even for people who have not been severely abused, but who have a very narcissistic parent who's been very controlling, Having a sense of your own subjectivity is a tremendous challenge.
• 52:26
  I had a I had a patient who was a wonderful guy, brilliant guy, Ivy League educated, you know, a a great athlete, great great, you know, well liked guy's guy. And when he went out on a date, I would because he was perennially, not with anybody, but he'd be dating a lot. And I'd say, well, did you like her? And he'd say, yeah. I think she liked me.
• 52:55
  And I mean, okay. Good. But did you like her? And he looked at me Like, I he didn't know what he didn't know English. And it was like, well, no.
• 53:05
  Yeah. No. I think she had a good time. His subjectivity had been so completely disabled by this extremely narcissistic parent he had. You know, it took a long time to help him recover his trust and faith in his own subjectivity.
• 53:25
  So I think that's a huge part of the recovery as well.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: So so even not just skill based, but literally critical to our healing is learning our own preferences, our own wants, our own needs, and daring to meet those needs and asking for those things and creating our lives in such a way that we are free to pursue those things.
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's an it's an emancipation from you know, and it's I was talking to somebody today that I work with who also had a quite a lot of abuse and neglect both, but it nevertheless has been able to become very successful and building a good, strong, healthy life that is worth living and, figuring all of these things out. And, as we we've been working for a while, and there's a lot of, a lot that she's gained.
• 54:32
  And we were reviewing some of these gains. And as we were talking about them, you know, more self reflection, more self regulation, more, internal coherence, more sense of, self affirmation and self validation, and and therefore, better relationships, with people. There's not this internal contempt that goes cuts both ways against herself and against others. So many things have changed for her. And as we were talking about it, I was just saying, I guess, you know, this is what it means to become an adult.
• 55:13
  Because as an adult, you are no longer, you you you have to take responsibility for your life and for and and in order to do that, you have to become able to understand yourself and regulate yourself. And, you know, these are the skills that are taken from people when they're traumatized and or that are not never, encouraged by people who are, you know, from and they have never been encouraged. People who have been traumatized have never had those skills taught or modeled or encouraged. Right? So, we were enjoying this sense of being a a liberated adult who can, you know, engage fully in her own life in a way that is, you know, something she fought for for years and years and, you know, kept struggling to have.
• 56:18
  So it's very gratifying when when people get better. It's the best part of my job, although I like every part of my job.
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. That's amazing because we we so often say on the podcast, we talk about how now time is safe, but the whole reason now time is safe or safe enough is because we are an adult with adult resources. But now this helps me understand almost like how now time has to be safe enough. In the same way, I can't be an adult with adult resources until I know what it means to be an adult.
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: Right. And and that that what how to define that, of course, is that there are many ways people can define that. But more and more for me, it's about being able to self reflect and self regulate and self reflect without, self condemnation and self punishment, but self reflect with self compassion. And, the ability to self reflect with self compassion allows for self regulation, and that sounds like a very, you know, simple little three steps to a better sense of self, but I think it's the hardest thing to accomplish for anybody, let alone people who've been traumatized. And, and it's pretty simple.
• 57:46
  And it's kind of, to be honest, it's kind of replaced my whole idea of what psychopathology, quote, unquote, is because rather than talk about self psychopathology, I like to talk about self alienation, which is Janina Fisher's term, and Janina Fisher is a tremendous, teacher for me. And, and how do I heal self validation through self reflection with self compassion and self regulation? These to me, those accomplishments, if you if you got that under your belt, you really grew up. You you came into yourself as a person, as a human being, as an adult. You know?
• 58:32
  It's quite an accomplishment.
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: I think that's so beautiful, and I love that you used words like liberating. That's that's exactly what we said listeners know, the piece by piece episode, the seasons episode. That's exactly what we said too, that feeling of I have found my way. Like, all of a sudden, it was like as cheesy as it sounds, it was like the sun breaking through the clouds of, like
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: This is not just life. This is my life, and I'm choosing for myself.
• 59:02
  Speaker 3: Yes. You know, I love, the woman I'm I'm blanking on her name right now, but the woman who, worked out, the whole dialectical behavior theory.
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: Marsha Linehan?
• 59:17
  Speaker 3: Marsha Linehan. Yeah. No. Her autobiography, I'm not an expert in that, although I've studied it a bit, and I appreciate a lot of it. I'm not I'm not a practitioner.
• 59:28
  I've studied a lot of things I don't fully practice. I've studied EMDR and sensory motor psychotherapy, and I try to absorb principles and concepts that are meaningful in the way that I work. It's but it's still not exactly. I don't also internal family systems. But, you know, I don't I don't call myself a practitioner of any of those.
• 59:51
  I'm a I'm a psychoanalytic trauma informed psychotherapist. Right? It's how I think of myself. But, you know, her her book is called A Life Worth Living. And the hope of her work and the hope of my work is that I can help people construct out of whatever the ruins they've come out of are that they can, construct a good, strong, healthy life that feels worth living.
• 1:00:23
  And And I just think that's a great little, rule of thumb for what therapeutic cure could look like.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: Thank you, Emma. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. It really has.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: Oh my goodness. I cannot even tell you. This is my new favorite episode, and I'm not just saying that. This is why I I want to just have conversations with people, and you were so authentic, and you were so courageous to just go there with me. And we went I had no idea we were gonna go those places, but it was so, so good.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much. You're doing a great job. It's a really excellent podcast, and this was a really nice interview. I felt, you know, you know, I felt you were, very present at but also very much inviting me to be as you know, to go where I felt it was good to go. Thank you so much.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 2: It was so good. I'm so grateful truly. Thank you.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: Alright. Take care. Be well.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: Bye.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org. If there's anything we've learned, it's that connection brings healing.
• 1:01:48
  We look forward to connecting with you.