Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Dr. Dan Siegel

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Guest: Dr. Dan Siegel · 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, fighting stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org. And there is a button for donations where you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. We so appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are all learning together.
• 0:38
  Thank you. Daniel J. Siegel, MD, is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child adolescent and adult psychiatry. He is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, founding co director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center, founding co investigator at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development, and executive director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational center devoted to promoting insight, compassion, and empathy in individuals, families, institutions, and communities. Doctor.
• 1:56
  Siegel's psychotherapy practice spans thirty years, and he has published extensively for the professional audience. He serves as the founding editor for the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, which includes over 70 textbooks. Doctor. Siegel's books include his five New York Times bestsellers, The Science and Practice of Presence, The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain Mind, A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, and two books with Tina Payne Brinson, The Whole Brain Child and No Drama Discipline. His other books include The Developing Mind, The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, MindSight, The Mindful Brain, The Parenting from the Inside Out, and the Yes Brain.
• 2:51
  He has been invited to lecture for the King of Thailand, Pope John Paul II, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Google University, and TEDx. For more information about his educational programs and In this interview, we talk about the process of DID and dissociation and how it works in the brain. Because Doctor. Siegel explains this using some specific terminology, we start out by asking him to define some of the words that he uses, such as integration. But it doesn't mean what you think it means.
• 3:39
  It's so much bigger and better than that and that's exactly why we needed to have him on the podcast. Welcome Doctor. Dan Siegel.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: My name is Dan Siegel and I'm a psychiatrist and I work as a therapist and also an educator in the field of mental health and education. And so that's that's what I do.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: I feel like that's a very humble introduction. You've done so much, and you've contributed so much. And, specifically, you have done this hand this I'll put it on the pod on the blog, but you've done this example of explaining how the brain works with the hand, and you have talked about interpersonal integration. And so even before we use that word, can you tell me what what you mean when you say integration?
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: Sure. Well, integration is a word that can be used to talk about how in life you can have aspects of whether it's your relationships or your body, including how the brain is structured, that are differentiated from each other or allowed to be different. That's what differentiation means is respecting differences, the way certain people or areas of your body, parts of your brain can be specialized or unique or different. That's all differentiation means. And then, while on the one hand you have differentiation, you also have the way you link those differentiated parts.
• 5:25
  So in a relationship that would be the way we would communicate with one another in a very compassionate, respectful way. And so that linkage or connecting or joining of the differentiated parts is what we mean by integration. And the important thing about integration defined in this very specific way is it's not the same as blending. It's not that you're trying to, you know, make like a smoothie or, you know, a homogenous all one kind of thing. You're just linking the differentiated parts, and in that linkage, you do not lose the differentiation.
• 6:16
  You don't lose the differences. So it's more like a fruit salad rather than a smoothie. And in this very important way, there's what's called synergy. There's an interaction of these differentiated parts where when they're connected with one another, they're actually creating something where the whole, the w h o l e, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So this is the synergy of the way we're defining integration, and there's a long line of reasoning that I talk about in a textbook I wrote called The Developing Mind, How Relationships in the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are that uses this concept of integration as a window into understanding what health is, health in a relationship or health in a body including its brain.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: When you are talking about that integration in that way though, you mean it in a more global sense than just internal experiences being separate, you mean also the body and also even relationally with other people.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the amazing thing about this field, which I'm privileged to work in with my colleagues called interpersonal neurobiology. What interpersonal neurobiology is, is, you know, we combine all the different sciences together and then, you know, look for common ground or what's called the consilient findings. And in doing this, what we're able to find is certain things that, you know, might not pop out at you otherwise. So in this case, integration we see not just in the head, you know, not just in your brain and your head, but throughout the whole body. And then it turns out that when you look at basically something called energy and information flow, this flow is not limited by the skull, nor is it limited by the skin.
• 8:36
  And so when the substance, the stuff that you're interested in, in this case energy and information flow that are the essence of mind is what we're talking about, then you see that that flow also happens, like right now between you, Emma, and me. So you have a body, I have a body, but what's connecting us in something you would call communication that establishes a relationship, It's also energy and information flow. And so this was the amazing thing and continues to be kind of the beautiful finding from interpersonal neurobiology, which is a simple statement: integration is health. And impaired integration, it turns out, leads you toward, if you think about a river where the central flow of this river is harmony and well-being, each bank outside of harmony and well-being categorize what happens to us when we're not integrated. And that's one bank of chaos, things out of control and overwhelming.
• 9:50
  The other bank is the bank of rigidity, and this is where things shut down and become very stagnant. So the central flow is full of vitality. It has five features that come from an integrated flow, which is it's flexible, that's F, it's adaptive, that's A, it's coherent, which means resilient over time, that's C, it's energized, that's E, and it's stable, that's S, and that spells the word faces if you just want to try to remember that.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: It is amazing to see the pattern. It turns out that every challenge to well-being, it can be seen as either chaos or rigidity. And when I noticed that for the first time in the early 1990s and late 1980s, I was so confused because I thought I was like, you know, just oversimplifying things, you know, maybe because I didn't like to be overwhelmed with all the details when I was in training or something, but, you know, when I went on a search to try to ask the question, is there a field of science that has identified chaos on the one hand and rigidity on the other as some, like, feature of something, I don't know. There was a field and it's a surprising field when you're talking about the mind, but it's the field of mathematics when it's studying what are called systems, in particular systems or collections of things, and when they have certain characteristics, they're called complex systems. And complex systems are actually quite simple.
• 11:27
  They're not complicated, they're actually quite elegant in their simplicity. And one of those things is that they regulate their own becoming in something called self organization. And that's where the idea of asking the question, well, if the mind might be that self organizing emergent is what it's called emergent property of energy and information flow, where is it happening? Well, it isn't just happening in your head, it happens throughout your whole skin encased body. But and this was hard for my colleagues in the field of neuroscience to accept, but back then, and now maybe it's still hard for them, you know, but the view here is that the mind is not limited to what goes on in your head.
• 12:15
  It's fully embodied, and it's fully relational. And this is coming from the proposal that mind is not unlike what we've been taught for two thousand five hundred years since the time of Hippocrates it's not a synonym for brain activity. Instead, it's a body relational aspect of energy and information flow, the proposal is, that is happening both within your skin and case body, including the brain, which is awesome, but the brain isn't the whole story by any means. It's also happening in the relational worlds that we live in, which means one on one relationships, family relationships, relationships in school, when you go to work, in an organization you work with, even relationships you have in our larger society, and even relationships or especially relationships we have with nature. So when we use the word relational, we don't just mean with people.
• 13:14
  And part of what's happening on our planet is people have become literally dissociated. That is disconnected, disassociated is where the word dissociation comes from. You know, they've been dissociated from nature. And so this morning, for example, you know, I was really needing to get out into nature, so I drove a little bit away into the hills and went for a long, long, long walk into the mountains. And, you know, the whole feeling in my body shifted from how it had been when I first woke up or how I was feeling last night.
• 13:53
  And, you know, when you get reconnected with nature, you know, with the hummingbirds and the lizards and the snakes that were there, watching out for the poison oak that was all around me, you know, and watching out for the mountain lions that, you know, are in the mountains where I am, you know, you realize you're just a part of a much larger whole and that joining gives you a deep sense of belonging, which in our culture, our contemporary culture, is so lacking in life. And certainly when someone's experienced developmental trauma, which is defined as abuse and neglect, it's an assault on integration. You don't feel like you belong, whether it's neglect where you're, you know, there's an absence of the positive connections that we need and there's too much differentiation in a way, not enough linkage, or abuse, whether it's emotional abuse, verbal abuse, you know, physical abuse or sexual abuse, there there's a huge impairment where there isn't enough differentiation, you're not being honored for you just being a kid. And there's, you know, in a sense excessive shoving into you of your caregiver, often the caregiver's own, you know, issues, if you just put them that way.
• 15:12
  And so developmental trauma of abuse and neglect are, you know, important examples to name of impaired relational integration. And amazingly, if you had to summarize what the studies on what it does to your brain in your head, if you're a kid going through developmental trauma, is the work of Martin Teicher at McLean Hospital, Harvard University, you know, you would be correct in saying those examples of developmental trauma, abuse and neglect, which we're saying are extreme examples of impaired relational integration, the primary result of developmental trauma is impaired integration in the brain, and we need to say very quickly that there's lots of hope that you can use different interventions like psychotherapy or journal writing or mindfulness practices to actually create new integration in your brain as an adolescent or an adult, even if you've experienced a blockage in the growth of integration in your younger years. So because of neuroplasticity, there's a lot of reason to be very hopeful, but also very active at realizing that you may have chaos and rigidity in your life that are revealing impaired integration, not because of something you did, but because of something you experienced. And the good news is that you can guide yourself toward the helpful experiences that can grow the integration that may be leading to all sorts of chaos and rigidity in your life.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: This really pulls together so many pieces. It pulls together shame theory and it pulls together attunement and it pulls together polyvagal and it pulls together this whole context of why trauma is so traumatic and how it's so disruptive and disconnecting not in just internally but also from the world around us. But it also what you're saying is gives hope for healing. Like, this does not have to be a static state.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, and once we recognize, you know, first of all, what goes on, we need to try to prevent developmental trauma and other kind of adverse child experiences, you know, that are studied in the ACES studies, adverse childhood experiences study. But we also need to be very specific about if you are listening to this and you're an adolescent or an adult, it's unlikely a child would be listening. You know, that if you've experienced adversity, at the extreme it would be a developmental trauma of abuse and neglect, but other forms of adversity also likely are leading to some impaired integration. And the reason this is so important to name is that, you know, in this book I mentioned earlier, The Developing Mind, now going into its third edition, you know, I always when I revise that book, I have interns working with me.
• 18:25
  And this time I had 18 interns working with me, and, you know, the instructions I give the interns is simply this, I want you to find one study that demonstrates that what was in the prior edition is wrong. And they pause and they go, by thinking misspoke, mean show that it's right. I said, no, no, no. I want you to find just one study, just one study that goes against, for example, this one of the many proposals in the book, one is integration is health. And And just show me that study that goes against it, and then we'll revise it or we'll, you know, really look into that.
• 19:06
  So we spent a year going over thousands of studies. So when I make these simple statements for all of us to reflect on and, you know, see if it fits with your own life, they don't just come out of nowhere. I mean, they come from literally spending now it's twenty seven years, you know, working on a model of what the mind might be, what a healthy mind might be, what kinds of things impair the growth of a healthy mind, and then what you might do to then heal, you know. And so the simple amazingly supported statement is that integration is health. And so if you're an adolescent or adult listening to this, the great news is you can now say, where is there chaos in my life?
• 19:56
  Or where is there rigidity in my life? And then, you know, if you're someone who has experienced, let's say, developmental trauma, and I'm an attachment researcher, in our field we call that a disorganized attachment that you've had. And what we've shown in our field is that disorganized attachment is not the child's fault. It's when you've experienced terror under the care of a caregiver called an attachment figure. And that experience of terror creates a fragmenting experience for the child.
• 20:37
  It's not their fault, but this is a fragmentation because part of the brain in the head says, oh my god, I'm being terrified. I should get away from the source of terror. That deep structure, very, very old, probably 300,000,000 years old, says I'm going to protect this individual, this body, and have them flee. But then another part of the brain, which is newer, like 200,000,000 years old, it's the old mammalian part of the brain versus the old reptilian part, says, hey, you know, I'm being terrified. I'm a mammal.
• 21:15
  And what I do when I'm terrified is I go toward my attachment figure because they're there to protect me. And that's not true in a reptile, you know, like the snake I saw this morning, it was a young snake, you know, there was no adult snake running around protecting her. You know, she's on her own, and she hatches and that's it. She's gotta make her way, but that's not true with mammals. So this this higher meaning it's anatomically higher doesn't mean it's better, but it's higher in the brain when you stand up straight.
• 21:47
  You know, this area says, oh, go to my attachment figure. Well, here's one brain where one set of circuits, the mammalian circuits say, I'm terrified, go to my attachment figure to protect me. The reptilian part says, hey. I'm being terrified. Get away from the source of terror.
• 22:05
  If the source of terror is the attachment figure, then this one brain with these two networks and this one body have no solution. It's called fear without solution. And so the fragmentation that arises, we believe, and we've shown this just in terms of research, it leads to dissociation. There may be other reasons people dissociate, so we're not ruling those out. But we know for sure, in several studies this has been shown, that disorganized attachment is one cause, and we hardly ever use that in the field of psychiatry.
• 22:50
  But I'm saying it with a ton of science behind it, it's the cause of dissociation. So once you realize that as an individual, you go, oh my gosh, of course I dissociated because my mind was fragmenting, because I had fear without solution, because I was terrified of my attachment figures, because one part of my brain said, oh, I'm terrified, get away. Another part of my brain said, oh, I'm terrified, go toward the same attachment figure. So of course, there's no organized strategy to adapt to that. And it all collapses.
• 23:28
  The strategy of survival collapses, and that's what dissociation is. It's the way in which that these two drives go toward and go away could not be resolved, and you have to fragment your mind. And the more, you know, intricate thing, you know, I used to when I was in training marvel at how the field of psychiatry just would not embrace this back in the 1980s, but dissociation is a very real process of the mind. Later, the field of attachment would prove it was caused, and at least one cause is from disorganized attachment. And then the issue is, what do you do with it?
• 24:11
  And that became my specialty of working with dissociation and really having the privilege of being in a relationship with someone who's survived developmental trauma and disorganized attachment and support them in finding more strategies now that they are out of that situation from back then.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you and have you on the podcast is because I think even just how you are defining these terms is so significant and changes the perspective of what it is we are talking about because I think when we are using words we don't understand it makes it even more complicated to figure out how to help or what's going on or why it's wrong. Understanding these terms and how global they are and how all of these pieces come together the attunement and the attachment and neglect and abuse and all of these things that are disconnecting and what causes dissociation because of what you are dissociating from and understanding not just the structure of Oh this is a dissociative disorder or this is whatever but understanding the process of what's actually happening and how healing brings connection because it changes that process, that's where it's so powerful.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Well, Emma, that's such a beautiful way to talk about it. Know, we start with, you know, it's kind of like a mindset, if you will, of saying everyone does the best they can, you know. And when you then look at the science of development and say, you know, these moments of being threatened by a caregiver when those disconnections and usually the attuned relationship that you're referring to are broken when they're not repaired because lots of people can experience terror from parents, but the parent then realizes they flipped their lid, you know, in terms of that hand model of the brain, they've stopped being integrated themselves, and then they go back, you know, two minutes later, two hours later, you know, I've seen people do it years later, but they go back and they say, you know something? I lost my mind.
• 26:36
  I was terrifying to you, and I just want to own up to that, and first of all, apologize, but also find out what was that like for you when I would be screaming and yelling or, you know, beating up your sibling or beating up your the other parent or whatever. There's a lot of terrifying things that can happen, not just straight out abuse. Certainly neglect is terrifying too. And those moments, you know, are number one, establishing the attunement that was ruptured. Hopefully it'll happen within a few minutes, not decades, you know, but whenever that repair can be made is important.
• 27:10
  But the second thing, in addition to attunement, is an incredible term that a colleague in the attachment world of mine named Peter Fonagy in in London that he has coined, and I think it's just so powerful. The the term is called epistemic trust. So what epistemic trust is is this. So in philosophy, there's two things that are foundational notions. One is something called ontology, which just means, like, how does something become what it becomes?
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: So people use the word like ontological, that's an ontological issue. You know, okay, well, how's this thing becoming itself? Fine, that's interesting. And that's kind of what we've been talking about. How does what's the ontology of dissociation, you know, and we're saying one set of research that's really, really thorough says that for at least one cause, and I want to reiterate that, that there may be other causes.
• 28:13
  So we're not saying it's the only cause, but one for sure cause of dissociation is disorganized attachment which comes when parents are terrifying or other caregivers. A person who's supposed to be in a position of trust has now violated that trust and is now terrifying you. So that's one thing, and we can call that a rupture and attunement with capital R and capital A, huge rupture, you know, not just, oh my god, was on my cell phone and my kid wanted to show me a lizard they caught, you know, That's also not too many, but it's a different kind of thing. So the second thing is, besides ontology, how something becomes what it becomes, is something called epistemology, which is how do we come to know what we think we know? Or in other words, how do we know about the nature of reality?
• 29:06
  So that's that's epistemic trust means that in certain attachment experiences, the way you've learned about the nature of how things are, which is called reality, has been violated. So another way besides attunement that's been ruptured to see how these disorganized attachments impact us with dissociation is that, yes, attunement has been violated, and you can see where that would lead to fragmenting of the mind. Okay. So that's dissociation. That's important.
• 29:42
  Now an additional thing, this isn't to replace it, it's just to add another dimension to it, is the way you came to know about knowing, the way you came to know about the reality of things has been violated. So it's a violation in epistemic trust. So for example, if a kid is terrified of a parent and then, you know, half an hour later the child goes, you know, why were you screaming at me like that? Or why did you hit me? Or whatever they say, and the parent goes, I didn't do that.
• 30:16
  What are you talking about? You know, you were screaming at me and you're screaming that you hit me. I didn't hit you. You must be confused. I didn't do that.
• 30:26
  Oh, I'm sorry you're so confused about things. You know, so what you can see even in this few moments I'm doing, it makes me kind of feel terrible saying it. But you can see where a person in a position of creating epistemic trust, whether it's a, you know, a caregiver or a teacher or a religious figure that you're supposed to trust or a political figure you're supposed to trust, you know, when there is a violation of epistemic trust, is incredibly disturbing.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Disturbing then and somehow exponential. Because if your learning process is violated, then no wonder survivors feel like things don't get better because their filter is off. Not because something's that they've done something wrong, but because their information gathering process was violated. Like, that's such a good word the way you said that.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: Exactly. So their information gathering process has been violated because the epistemic trust that is the responsibility of the attachment figure has been violated.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: So it leaves the person at the time I I we'll get to the hope part, but it leaves the person at the time not only with that misattunement, but with no way to repair it because the learning process like, there's an ugh. That's why it feels so hopeless.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: It feels hopeless because guess what? Back then, it was hopeless, and that makes you helpless, which, of course, you know, when you add that to the shame thing, you probably talked about before, but part of the process of misattunement that leads to the experience of shame basically goes like this. You know, I'm not having a sense of connection with my caregiver. I kind of have a deep feeling of a longing for that. I feel like I have a right for that, but it's not happening.
• 32:29
  And so now there's a kind of a choice point, not that there's an actual choice, but I could either say, Oh, I'm fine, you know, but my caregiver is really screwed up and they have a problem, and that's why they're violating my epistemic trust. That's why they're not attuned to me. That's why they're doing these physical or sexual or emotional or verbal things to me. They're so violent. That's why they're neglecting me.
• 32:50
  Oh, no biggie. You know, I'll take care of myself because I'll do my deep breathing and I'll be fine. No, you're a little kid, and you depend on others to protect you. So to have that mind view, my parent or other caregiver is not trustworthy, would drive you insane. So instead of going to insanity, you go to shame.
• 33:14
  And in that shame, there's a nauseous feeling in the belly, kind of heaviness in the chest, and a turning away of eye gaze. And there's also, as you get a little older, a belief that the self, who you are, your deepest essence, is defective.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: And in that belief in your defective essence, you can actually solve the problem of how do I rely on parents that are not reliable? Because then you come up with an equation, well, my parents are reliable. The reason they're not tuning into me or the reason they're treating me this way is because I'm defective. I deserve to be treated this way. So it preserves the attachment figure as someone to be trusted.
• 34:00
  And the same thing true as the epistemic trust violation is that you come to believe the insane view of reality that often parents of this sort are creating. And so the journey for healing that you're talking about, Emma, is a courageous journey. It's a journey to say, I really thought I was defective, and now I need to realize that that belief was actually protecting me from going insane. But that belief, I'm defective, is actually, as much as I accept the belief is there, it's inaccurate. Your belief kept me from going insane.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: And that's why starting therapy is so scary, because it feels like you're going to face that insanity if you let go of the Exactly.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: And so it scary, you know, and people diving in, you know, it's a courageous act. It's a it's a, you know, a sacred act, you know, of joining with someone in therapy as both the therapist and the client. And then, you know, you have the courage to unveil sometimes for the first time, you know, something I think I'm defective. And then your therapist can say, I hear your feeling, I hear your belief. And you need to understand that developmentally someone who's gone through what you went through will believe that in order to not go insane.
• 35:31
  You go to shame. And I understand why you have that, but it's an inaccurate belief. Now the next step is once the person wrestles with that is I see, well, if the belief that I'm defective is inaccurate, which it is, no child ever causes sexual abuse, physical abuse, any of those forms of abuse or neglect, even if they participated, which often happens for lots of developmental reasons, they didn't cause it
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: ever. Wow.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: And so, you know, giving up the belief I'm defective means, wow, there's something wrong with my caregiver, but I was holding on to a belief that they were fine. And now I come to realize they're not fine. So whatever feelings might have come up when you were one year old or two year old or three years old or four years old or five years old, to really feel there's something wrong with my caregiver is terrifying. So now you that's another part of the journey. You go through this grieving process that involves a terror of what the actual reality was.
• 36:42
  And so that's another step of the journey that can be really, really hard. And then, of course, with dissociation, you know, form of dissociation is, of course, not feeling the body. So that's something that can be terrifying because the body is a source of emotion. If you have emotion of terror, then if you can disconnect from your body, you can disconnect from your emotions. That's one form.
• 37:05
  The derealization where things don't seem helpful if the reality of your situation is so terrifying. Depersonalization can be helpful as a form of dissociation because then, you know, you can say, well, this isn't really me being abused. It's like somebody else. So that's you can see where that's, you survival based. And then, of course, the fragmentation of personality states beyond these, you know, depersonalization, disconnection from the body, derealization.
• 37:34
  There's also memory fragmentation, which can be useful in a disorganized attachment setting. But then at the extreme, you have these fragments of personality states, I call them self states or parts or aspects or facets, whatever word feels comfortable for you, you know, and now you have what used to be called multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder, which, you know, is a completely treatable condition. And I say treatable not that you ever become homogenous and just one person. We're all the multitude of aspects of ourself that always exist. But the key is the dissociative barriers to communicating across a younger part of yourself, an adolescent part of yourself, an adult part of yourself, a spiritual part of yourself, an intellectual part of yourself, a sexual part of yourself, an athletic part of yourself.
• 38:27
  I can go on and on and on. We all have these self states and the issue is not to make them the same because you lose integration then. The issue is to honor their differences but allow leakages, is open communication across states, which means open memory access, open emotions, open awareness. You know, in this book, Aware I wrote, you kind of can see this in one person named Teresa that I talk about as an example of someone who has dissociation and trauma, and what she goes through in opening up her awareness with this practice called the Wheel of Awareness. And you can see then what can happen with dissociation is this the center of the wheel, the hub, becomes this capacity to be aware of all the different what beforeward aspects of the rim that were not accessible to one another.
• 39:27
  And the part that was sexually hurt and the other part that was devoted to the stepfather that was hurting her and all these, you know, configurations that you may have experienced yourself or you could heard about, you know, now what you're doing is accessing this hub of the wheel, and then there's a deep dive into what the science of that is, is something we call the plane of possibility, where for many people, and this is a long, long story, but the short version is, you know, after doing this with about 10,000 people in workshops, it became clear that the hub of awareness versus what you're aware of is on the rim. This hub of just pure awareness looks like it correlates with this what's called a plane of possibility in this framework we have. And this plane of possibility is this optimal set of, you know, possibilities, potentialities that rest there. For some reason why we don't know, it looks like being aware and this open space of possibility go along with each other. And the other two things that seem to rest in this plane of possibility are the deep sense of uncertainty and then the experience of love.
• 40:51
  So it becomes very important to say here is that love, uncertainty, interconnection, possibility, and awareness all are a part of this hub of the wheel, all are part of this plane of possibility. People who have experienced trauma may be desperately avoiding that uncertainty because uncertainty was so terrifying in childhood. So you're above that plane in what are called plateaus with only certain restricted peaks that can arise from a given plateau. This would explain dissociative identity disorder, explain dissociative states, explain all sorts of things. But when you look at the diagram in the book aware, you'll see that in fact part of the journey's challenge is that you can help people learn to embrace uncertainty instead of being terrified of it, which understandably they have been.
• 41:53
  But sadly, the terror of uncertainty keeps you from the spacious source of awareness where other options rest. And so the very adaptation to avoid uncertainty in trauma, whether it's abuse or neglect, then has kept you from the freedom that comes from this plane of possibility. So when you see what Teresa says or in a book I wrote called The Mindful Therapist or Mind Sight or all these different books, you know, I talk about dissociation and trauma and this disorganized attachment and ultimately in Aware what you'll see is that part of the journey is whether you're doing it in your own meditation practice, but usually for someone who's been traumatized, need a therapist to really help you through because this transition from avoiding uncertainty for good reason, and now with the support of your therapist moving into uncertainty leads you through that terror that you may initially have into the open space of interconnection, love, and awareness. And this is what's been so absolutely rewarding about staying with the science of the mind as an emergent property of energy because then we were given the opportunity to see that if you've experienced disorganized attachment, developmental trauma, all these challenges that can lead to dissociation, then understanding deeply how awareness, pure awareness, is actually being avoided gives you a guide to where you need to do your therapeutic healing.
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: Just amazing. I know that we talked a lot on the podcast recently about avoidance actually because it's brought up in the workbook for the Kathy Steele workbook. And I never thought about what was being avoided as being uncertainty because that covers all the layers of everything else and the terror to get there. So you've explained a huge piece that I didn't have words for and I appreciate that.
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: Oh, And that understanding, Emma, that you're talking about, about really, you know, sensing into not just in a logical way, which is helpful too but sensing into the empowerment that it gives you to say, I see. My fear of uncertainty was actually an attempt to protect myself. But actually the source of uncertainty now, now that I'm out of that abusive situation, is my own awareness that comes from this field of potential, this plane of possibility. And when I drop into that, even if it's initially just a brief glimpse, then what I begin to feel, what I sense into, is the incredible hopefulness. And so, you know, there was a youth that was talking about how challenging the world is these days and how he just wants to find a way to have hope.
• 45:09
  I believe deeply that hope arises from this plane of possibility, this hub of the wheel, and it's that sense of hopelessness when you're not able to tap into that deep resource inside of each of us that actually allows us, Emma, to know that, you know, your plane of possibility and my plane of possibility are the same. So we truly find connection, that linkage of our differentiated beings. We truly create integration through that plane of possibility. And when people have been living a life avoiding it, then what happens is you feel this kind of lack of belonging, this hopelessness, this helplessness, this feeling like, you know, I'm just alone in the world and even a connection to your own body cannot be there, our connection to other people or connection to nature. So what we want to do is, you know, guided with the support of a therapist, the wheel of awareness just as one example, gives you a way to access this plane of possibility, which in the metaphor of the wheel is the hub, and learn to live from that place.
• 46:18
  And the freedom and ease of well-being that's there is just incredibly rewarding to share with people as they are on their journey of growth.
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing with us.
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: My pleasure. It's an honor to be here with you, Emma.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: I'm so grateful. I really am. I appreciate it.
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: Keep up the great work.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us with System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes, or follow along on our website, www.systemspeak.org. Thanks for listening.