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Recap: 2023 ISSTD Annual Conference, Part 2 · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about Complex Trauma and Dissociation.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling. It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship.
• 0:45
  Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to. We're all different, and all of our stories matter.
• 1:09
  As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Log in. I had to look up my secret code. Okay. So it has been a week. I can't even it's been days and days, and so much has happened.
• 2:01
  So we have to just back way up. We recorded on the first day of the pre conference. That is the day okay. So that was Thursday. Friday was the second day of the preconference, and you went to Christine again.
• 2:23
  Dean Forner all day long talked about the patriarchy and misogyny and trauma. And some of that was similar to what you had seen the day before, but really expanded on those. And that's why we have go down rabbit holes. That's why we spin out of our control. That's why we're overthinking.
• 2:49
  That's why we're spinning circles in our head. That's why we get anxiety all because, so our thoughts are looking for our need, but no information about our needs is coming up. Right. So the dissociative barrier is literally between, like, I wish they could see us right now. Like, I'm pretending, you know, like, off with their head.
• 3:16
  Like, cut it out. Cut it out. Like, I'm waving my hands in front of my throat. That, like, the dissociative barrier is there put, like, blocking what my needs from my body. So now I'm like, my body, all the way my chest down to my toes.
• 3:36
  Like, my body has needs, but the needs are not making up to my head. Now my hand is on top of my head. Like, I have to this is because thoughts spin out of control. I literally have to walk myself My through hand now on top of my head. My thoughts are looking for my needs, hand back down on my body, on my belly, like, but my I don't know what the needs are because that barrier between them.
• 4:04
  So okay. So connect this to what we talked about before about how every need is a part every part is a need. That's the same thing. The thoughts and awareness are not connecting between parts because of that barrier. But as we meet needs and learn what those needs are, the barriers start to come down.
• 4:31
  She said when we feel shame, the need is for connection. Yes. I actually took a picture of this slide and so it is posted on the social media because we did the social media for ISSTD and that's a whole different thing to talk about because I know everyone is mad and I was getting hate mail and they did not know they were sending it to me and I know that, but I was trying to be transparent, I was trying to make an effort of this is what we're talking about. This is like I was trying in the tiny, tiny way I could, and I just kept pumping out everything I could from social media. But anyway Mhmm.
• 5:17
  Because of that, I got a picture of that slide and I think I posted it. So I think the citation is that. It had the picture of the mother and the baby and the brain lit up that I know I got a picture of that. So I think it's on social media. We could look it up.
• 5:34
  There's so many things I wanna come back to this on that, but I think that's too intense. Can't do it right now. We'll circle back to it. But for now, what else? That right.
• 5:46
  We already talk about podcasts. I can't remember to where know about orgasms. She was saying that something about regulating, like normal, healthy, not traumatized people feel that all the time. We don't have walking orgasms. No way.
• 6:09
  I want a walking orgasm. No, that's wild. Seriously, seriously. That attachment as a baseline, that people can just feel that all the time. Right, right.
• 6:21
  Not just capacity, but that, that is what is normal. When it doesn't actually meet the need if you feel it for a moment. The way it reminds me of when people, like, overeat on fake foods, like, obviously, snack food. But when you overeat and only eat foods that are not actually real food, then you consume more of it because the need in your body is nutrients. But you're not getting nutrients because you're eating fake food.
• 6:58
  So the more that you eat, the more that you want to eat because your body's like, yes, I need those nutrients and try and try and try and to get them. But what you're actually ingesting isn't actually nutrients, so you keep eating more and more and more. This is the same thing, whether it's addictions or or sexual acting out or hypersexuality or, all these different ways of thrill seeking, the trends for that, like all these different things, some of the intense trauma bonding that happens in groups if you're not careful about that, which is why we're kind of, have that structure around check ins on the community because that intensity gets mistaken as intimacy, which is not a bad thing because it is the natural thing, but that's not actually meeting the need for it. Oh, my heart. Okay.
• 7:58
  Okay. I also wanna just acknowledge, like, I can't not say this. We actually got to spend some special time with Christine Forner. She's just so kind and authentic and real. And I love her so much, and I appreciate just that we got to share in a variety of moments.
• 8:19
  There were several things I don't wanna talk about on the podcast, but there were several different things, hard things, good things, fun things, exciting things, where we were just randomly in the place at the time to get, like, the synchronicity of the world brought us together in that way and that we got to share these different moments. And I just really, like, I will not forget Talking about attachment and healthy ways and positive, it just was so meaningful to me. And so I wanna hold space for that. For you, that was an all day thing. So when I look on the schedule, the other thing that was all day was they had a panel of psychoanalytic people that were, historical people.
• 9:06
  Klufft was there, and and Shelly Iskowitz, he's actually sweet. He's a very nice guy and a very generous guy. He is I'm interviewing him when we get home from the from this trip. His podcast interview is scheduled for the next week. So, they will actually get to hear from Shelly soon.
• 9:35
  I have no idea what his interview will be like. There's no telling, but they'll get to hear him. So I'm gonna just skip that one to hold on for that. And then Kevin Connors, is hilarious and adorable, that and Lynette Danielchuk did dissociation two zero one, which is like so just traditionally, if you don't know, every year at the preconference for ISSTD, Christine Forner does an amazing presentation. It's the one we talked in the last episode called Dissociation one zero one.
• 10:12
  And this presentation talks about what trauma and dissociation are, the cascade of of offenses, the cascade of defenses, and she has come on the podcast specifically to talk about just that piece. So you can look up that episode if you've not heard it, the cascade of defenses, talking about how trauma and dissociation work in the brain, and she spends all day talking about that. So we talked about that in the last episode. Lynette and Kevin are doing dissociation two zero one. And so what their session talked about were kind of still the basic things, but a little bit more advanced layers of, like, these are what, alters or parts or ego states are like, different common types, how to help them interact, how to help keep people keep safe with big feelings or self harm or suicidality, transference, countertransference, some of those kinds of things of just sort of safety and phase one, talking about the the phases of treatment.
• 11:25
  They also did a really good job. I wanna give a shout out to them. Lynette has been to my full day training about dissociation, plurality, all of that, And she's been really responsive and even adapted some things in her trainings. And so I wanna acknowledge that because I know there's such tense feelings right now, but she's an example of someone who's really learning and paying attention and being sensitive. She she even calls me Emma.
• 11:56
  She's one of the first ones that had that conversation with me and talked to me and calls me Emma from the beginning. I knew her a year ago. And so their presentation was really good with all of those things and very sensitive to that. There is nothing in their presentation that is like, you have to force integration, you have to do, like, it's not like that at all. It's actually really appropriate and very respectful and very listen to them, listen to what they need, what is it that's hurting, what does healing look like to them, and and they talk about those things very compassionately.
• 12:35
  So I appreciate that. And then Catherine Rubin. Let me tell you about Catherine Rubin. Catherine Rubin helped write a chapter for my clinical perspectives book. She's amazing.
• 12:49
  Love her. She was so brave to come. We were supposed to also have Katie Keach. Yeah. Right?
• 12:56
  So I don't at all want to step into Katie's space. I just wanna say that I do know her because we worked on the guidelines together, and so we've emailed a lot. We've worked together on different projects. Catherine and Katie Key should work together on this presentation, but I also want to just stay focused and respectful of her clinical work and the work she and Catherine put into this and just focus on that. And Catherine's presentation was called treating traumatized and dissociative neurodevelopmentally disabled clients.
• 13:33
  The times I got to drop in and peek in at this session, Catherine was doing fantastic. I got to spend a little time with Catherine. She did wonderfully. We're so proud of her, and it is huge contribution to the field. She is a breakthrough scientist doing research on neurodiversity and dissociation, which has never been done before.
• 14:00
  And she presented it so well. The feedback on her session was great. She just she nailed it. That's all I know to say about that. They also had EMDR going this whole time from preconference all the way through the end of the week.
• 14:17
  And so a shout out to Jennifer Madier and Michael Coy and Jill Hosey for continuing that and making sure that we have clinicians who are sensitive. Again, these are also people who have been to my trainings and who are receptive and respectful and responsive to learning to be sensitive in language and sensitive to experience and respectful and culturally appropriate. And I really appreciate the, effort that they are putting into helping clinicians who work with dissociative people or people with dissociation to be ethical and careful and supportive and aware of trauma and dissociation and how that impacts EMDR and how an EMDR impacts that. Does that make sense? Like, both ways.
• 15:18
  Okay. So that's basically the end of the pre conference because that evening was just social stuff that we didn't do because it was all kinds of drinking. Because we are in Kentucky, and it is whiskey town, and so we did not do the tour of the whiskey. That is just seems like a bad idea. We did not go to that.
• 15:45
  So the actual conference started on Saturday. Bethany Brand opened the conference. I actually got to talk to her finally in person and be like, remember when we did the podcast and we had the technology glitch? She was so sweet about it, and we have the best conversation, and I feel so much better about that. I also have said openly on the podcast in the past that my concern about the TOP DD study had to do with it being manualized and that getting watered down as it gets passed on later or, the relational aspect.
• 16:28
  She actually addressed those concerns in her talk, and I feel much better about it now. The only thing I would love to look into more, like if we had all the research money in the world, is the difference between different kinds of therapists and also those who are in groups and those who are not, because they think that is really going to impact, like, think those are critical variables that are not getting noticed. Yeah. But the two concerns I had, I feel like got addressed. Like, I feel much better about it now.
• 17:06
  So I also know that there are some people in the community who are in this study, and they're really progressing well. The posters went up for the conference. I posted all the pictures of all the posters on social media. So those are up if people wanna check them out. We had a friend who did one.
• 17:25
  We're super proud of them, so we'll say that. Jill Hosey and Rosita Cortizo did who said she would come on the podcast. It was adorable, but she said yes. They did a session on prenatal trauma, dissociation and bonding, and called it cultivating growth with the calming womb model. I can't even talk about it more.
• 17:52
  Hurts deep, right? Like it goes right into the core of relational trauma, even without disclosing more of my story or any of yours or anyone else's like so many of us, like, goes right into core stuff that is just painful. But it's beautiful work that they're doing, and they are both some of the most gentle people I know. You, like, we would even try, like, let's go to dinner, we'll have a little date or whatever and the elevators would open and people would just be there or we would be sitting at a corner and people would just come or even tonight we made it all the way to the restaurant and we sat down and we saw Jill and Michael were like, yay. And so so like that was a big thing and and a lot of peopleing.
• 18:43
  We got to meet Anne and Lexi from Beauty After Bruises. We did. Oh my goodness. Okay. So it was a lot.
• 18:52
  So this is actually one thing I wanna point out that coming to the conference, whether it's ISSTD, if you're a clinician, and then the place for lived experience, of course, is healing together. And I know there's a lot of drama about that right now and and lived experience, but my understanding, and I'm only just speaking from my understanding for myself, but my understanding is not that ISSTD is trying to not make space for lived experienced clinicians. It's that they are respecting the space that we already have at Healing Together. The organizations work very closely together in different ways, and they're just trying to stay in their lane. That's my understanding.
• 19:42
  And I know that may not be popular and not everyone will agree, but that is what I understand as far as that piece. And I know that's just one tiny, tiny piece of everything else. But it it was fun to see beauty after bruises and and healing together was a sponsor of this conference. And one of the things that, like I was saying, one of the things that's really special, especially when you can come in person to a conference, whether it is ISSTD as a clinician or healing together as a person with lived experience, or in my dream world when we get to have some meetups with the community. Right?
• 20:28
  Like, keep trying. And there's something really, really special about being able to gather together, But it's also a super intense experience because you go to sessions and you learn things that are really, really good cognitive things, but also have both difficult triggers and also positive triggers like this session you were just talking about or some of the truth bombs Christine was throwing out like candy at a parade. Oh my goodness. But then also, when you're not in session, you're around all these people. And I don't mean just a crowd, but I mean people who are safe and good and kind and tending and responsive and having conversations.
• 21:20
  And the level of authenticity at these conferences is so powerful and so healing and so strengthening that it is also triggering and like a positive trigger, right? So it is a very intense and overwhelming in all the good ways kind of experience, whichever conference you're at or both conferences or your own conference or what like, there's something unique about that experience. I think that's part of what was hard with sort of the background of everything else was going on is that and I don't at all mean to invalidate anyone else's experience. I I have had some struggles at other conferences, and that doesn't make them bad, and it doesn't make them not helpful. But my experiences have been positive, and it has been very healing.
• 22:20
  And I am grateful for that. And I'm grateful that you had a positive experience, not because it's better than another conference or because of any reason other than I am just glad it was healing for you. She she helped me feel okay with just being in my space and being myself because I have been anxious for several years, and I've talked about this on the podcast, struggling to identify or navigate my own multiplicity, my own plurality. What does that look like? What do I agree with?
• 22:56
  What do I don't? And I have just not felt accepted or like a sense of belonging, even though I have friends who do identify with plural, who are good and kind and wonderful people. It does not have to be a binary of they're the good ones and I'm the bad one, or I'm the good one and they're the bad ones. I don't mean that at all. I just have not been able to find my space in a way that felt comfortable, but I have found it here and it has been okay with me.
• 23:28
  And I know that's not true for everybody, but I even talked to Katie Keach about this because they're gonna announce in the morning that I'm the plenary speaker for next year. And I told, I asked Katie about this. I said, what do you think about this? How do you feel about this? Because they asked me and I was agreeing to that right before all of this happened.
• 23:50
  And so I told Katie, just being transparent with her, they have just asked me to be plenary. And she was saying, but if that, if you are, if she's saying there's no reason you shouldn't, there's no reason you shouldn't just go forward with that and be you in the spaces where you can be you and do what good you can. So one of the things we talked about, even when I was doing the social media for ISSTD this week, it was, I am going to be as transparent as I can with these talks. I'm gonna put out what is being said and let it speak for itself. And I don't have to be one way or the other.
• 24:29
  This is just what is being said. This is what we are talking about. And I want to find the good in the world and put that out. I want to put good out into the world. I'm gonna be very human and make mistakes.
• 24:43
  I'm gonna have, what did Michael Coy say, a learning arc. I'm gonna have a learning curve, a learning arc, and I have no idea what I'll say next year, but I have a year to figure that out. And if they are going to be in a position to be willing to hear me, then I'm going to speak. And I appreciate both Katie and Laura Brown for helping me sort of navigate that while all this other stuff was sort of happening around us. It felt again how many times in my life do I say this?
• 25:17
  Like an Oklahoma tornado where the storm is just swirling around me. And here I am just in the center of the storm in my little world, a weird place of privilege that I didn't ask for and don't have in any other area of my life of, like, okay. I have a space. I will use my voice. I don't even know what we're gonna say next on the podcast.
• 25:41
  Okay. So what is next? The next one was reconceptualizing personality disorders as interpersonal reactions to childhood. I think I did not get to go to that one. If there were quotes I pulled from that, they're on the social media.
• 26:06
  Okay. That morning was also Paul Dell. Paul Dell, you need to know, helped write the brick with John O'Neill. The brick is like the classic giantess biggest book about dissociation clinical book. And John O'Neil came on the podcast and talked about it.
• 26:29
  So you can look up that episode if you wanna hear more about their work historically. I also talk about their work a lot in my presentations because it is John O'Neill and Paul Dell who have the who have stayed with the multiplicity model of dissociation, meaning it really is multiple personalities, which is different from the divisibility model of structural dissociation, which is parts of one personality. And I think it's a huge difference and really, really important. So I was actually very interested in what he had to say because I was just surprised to hear him speaking because that is his contribution. Like, it is fantastic, fabulous.
• 27:29
  They also just had a new edition of their book come out, and so I thought he was gonna be talking about that. But no, that is not what he was talking about. He kinda blew up the world with saying that hypnosis is just a concept. Not that it's not real, not that it's not valid, but that it's just really a concept that and he is very what is called phenomenological, meaning based on experience rather than theory or cause or explaining why or how. So he's saying he's very, very conceptual anyway, and he was saying that hypnosis is just a concept, a construct, and that we use that construct to explain what children can do naturally.
• 28:28
  And he was saying that eighty five percent of people in the world are not very hypnotizable, and fifteen percent of people in the world are highly hypnotizable. So he was saying that without hypnotizability, you can't actually dissociate because dissociation comes from and is part of out of the construct of hypnosis, even if it's self hypnosis. And so basically, he was saying trauma happens to everybody. Everybody has lived experience. Some people have trauma, but don't dissociate because they don't have capacity or he was using the word talent, which is kind of a strange word, but it's an older school word the way he was meaning it.
• 29:20
  Don't have capacity to dissociate. The other fifteen percent of people may have the same trauma but also have the capacity to dissociate and so may dissociate more or in more specific ways, which really also comes back to what it made me think of is how there's not that much difference really conceptually or as a construct between and DID. The amnesia, where is the barrier? It's not always in memory. And so that kind of plays into there.
• 29:59
  So, basically, that's that is a very short version of what he had to share. But he was saying, just like the talk is entitled, if you don't have hypnotizability, you don't have a dissociative disorder because you you don't have that capacity to dissociate. Other people can dissociate even without trauma, which gets tricksy in how you're saying it because at the same time, they have found the actual biomarkers for DID as a traumagenic disorder. But that doesn't mean someone doesn't grow up with capacity to dissociate and, practice that or train themselves to be able to do it more. And lots of people do that online with self hypnosis.
• 30:51
  So that's all he meant. He didn't mean anyone was invalid. He was actually, if anything, validating them more. Well and I think that's the bridge that's possible if we take further what he said. So maybe that's part of what I can say next year, but with the research and refining it.
• 31:08
  I talked to him about it tonight, actually. I spoke with him after the ISSTD business meeting and talked with him a little bit and then talked to him earlier. So I'll follow-up on that and see what comes of it. So I think that was everything in the morning. After lunch, there was a session, called the chameleon of child abuse.
• 31:35
  Will you see it if you don't know what to look for? And that was really interesting, especially in the online conversation about lived experience, because she was showing different ways to listen and hear better without our own biases in the way and without making assumptions. So examples like how to use art, how to use stories, how to use things. And she was focused specifically on children, but how to help what needs to come out come out without getting in the way of it, letting it be their experience and their expression. So that was really good.
• 32:26
  Developmental couple therapy for complex trauma. I think that's amazing they're doing that. I did not get to a 10 because I was like, I I I don't know how to I I don't even know where to start with that. Yeah. I cannot right now.
• 32:45
  There was exploring unthought knowns and integrating ego state therapy and EMDR. Michael Coy did that one, and I'm not even gonna talk about it today except you can add anything you wanna add because I have talked about it on the podcast before. I've seen this presentation. He's developed it and fine tuned it since then, but we have talked about it on the podcast already. Did you have anything to add from that one?
• 33:12
  The other thing that happened in the afternoon was they had a panel of past presidents, and they sort of talked about some of their stories from when they were president of ISSTD and some of the hard things, some of the good things. I don't even know where to begin on sharing all of that, but I think it's fascinating history, and it was fun to meet all those people, the ones we hadn't met yet. It is late. Is there anything else you wanna add on this one before we stop? I don't think I have anything else to add on those days.
• 33:57
  I think by the end of this day what was that? Saturday? By the end of Saturday, we were both exhausted. We had done Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nonstop all day long. I was literally running to different sessions, literally running through the building, trying to pull quotes and to share with people what was being said and to get that out on social media.
• 34:22
  And we are both handling all the internal stuff and external stuff that's happening in the background from sessions, from peopleing, trying to find lunches. There were, like, some kind of kids volleyball tournament here. So the hallways were packed, and that was kind of where we're stimulating. The we couldn't get to the pool because they had taken that over. Like, it was kind of a lot where I also felt like both because of time and energy and circumstances with all of that, it also kind of sucked away some of our coping skills.
• 35:07
  And so it was just intent, but it was okay. You feel better on the other side. We've got one more day to go. One more day. And then we fly home with three children.
• 35:18
  Are you sad? Are you happy? Or it just is. I don't know how I'm feeling. I am feeling sad for conference to be over because I really enjoyed it, and it's been good to see people.
• 35:32
  But also, I'm glad it's almost over because I'm exhausted and overstimulated and overpeopled. I am excited to see my children. I am also overwhelmed to try to be working this job with those hours while parenting by myself. And it also feels a little weird. I'll just be honest.
• 35:58
  It feels a little weird that just randomly by circumstance for this season that the kids are kinda split in half. Yeah. That feels weird. Yeah. It's just what they need and what they prefer.
• 36:15
  Have school stuff that they're really enjoying and then some camps, so they don't wanna come till in the middle of summer. Just needs that stability. So I won't get him until school is out, but could not wait any longer and wanted to come. And so and not like in a spoiled way, like they needed to be with me way. So they're coming, and then it's already been there.
• 36:37
  And so I'll have three kids at home. And I guess they'll hear some of that unfold because after the ISSTD episodes, the podcast jumps back in time again before it before it catches up. Okay. So we have one more day of this and two more days to share on the podcast. Okay.
• 37:00
  Good night. 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,
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: and healing brings hope.