Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Martha Strauss, PhD

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Guest: Martha Strauss, PhD · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over:
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to longtime listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
• 1:00
  Today our guest is Martha Strauss, PhD. She's a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Antioch University New England Graduate school in New Hampshire. Doctor. Strauss is an international trainer on topics related to child, adolescent, and family development attachment, trauma, and therapy. She is the author of numerous articles and five books, including most recently Treating Trauma in Development, Attachment, and the Therapeutic Relationship.
• 1:31
  She lives in Vermont, where she also maintains a small private practice. Welcome, Doctor. Strauss.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: My name is Doctor. Martha Strauss. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I've been practicing for a long while. I live in Southern Vermont, and I teach at Antioch University New England in the clinical psychology program. And I've been interested in working with and doing research on and writing about trauma in kids and families for many years, particularly interested in adolescence and identity development and the traumatic impact on identity in the transition to adulthood.
• 2:21
  And I guess these days, thinking more about all of those things that I just said, but in the pandemic.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: How did you get involved in working with children and trauma or adolescents and trauma in the first place?
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: I was interested in working with children and have since actually I was about 12, a child myself. I was volunteering and I'm one of these strange people that sort of knew what I wanted to do from forever, which is interesting because my own children and most people I know have such a harder time figuring it out. I think that I've had to work hard to even become more understanding of that because it has felt almost like a calling. I don't mean that in some cosmic way, but just something that really motivated and excited me. I got into the out forensic world.
• 3:08
  So I was working with kids. I was in graduate school, and I started getting very interested in kids in the system, in the foster care system, in the juvenile justice system, in the school to prison pipeline, and noticing a subtle pattern emerging, not so subtle, that a lot of these kids shared a lot of early childhood adversity and got to have opportunities both in graduate school, my postdoc and my internship, working in that place where the kids in the court system meet up, highly contentious divorces, termination of criminal rights. And all of those elements ended up sort of moving me toward being interested in working with kids and families who are really contending with a lot of intergenerational and compounded historical trauma issues passed down and how to intervene effectively and thinking about that. Through working with children in the courts also. And then I guess raising kids of my own, that spurred it a little bit in my own wild adolescence.
• 4:17
  But I realized at some point in this professional trajectory that I really liked the challenge and being challenged and dissed by teenagers. There was something energizing about that and curiously interesting to me. Like, it wasn't hard or scary or they wouldn't talk to me. I didn't seem to be too upset by that. People, oh, that's that's an unusual skill set.
• 4:42
  So I think I got encouraged, because of seeming to be fearless. And it wasn't about fear so much. It's just curiosity and and engagement. And I'm 64, and I still feel that curiosity and engagement when I work with adolescents and and particularly adolescents who have really struggled to overcome a lot of tough stuff in the beginning. Abuse and neglect and parenting that was sub subpar from an early age.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: How do you explain historical trauma to parents or family or adolescent? How do you talk about that?
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: What a great question. It comes up because when I work with whole families and I I extend my great empathy to parents, particularly teenagers, at how hard it is to raise teenagers. And I talk about what the resources that we have to have and what we bring in to the mix when we're raising kids and how do you learn to do it? You learn based on what you were exposed to. And I do a pretty detailed as many generation genograms I can early on.
• 5:48
  And it's not always the case, but it's often the case that people have a lot of compounded generation to generation experiences with parenting challenges, mental illness in the family and substance abuse. And it's very hard to pass things on to your kids that you haven't learned to do and to be loving and nurturing if people have not historically extended that to you. And so I think I come at it through tremendous empathy for how hard it must be to provide something to your kids that you yourself haven't had. Very interested in this idea of co regulation. So I model it for families, too, that I see myself as the co regulator of these caregivers and parents so that they can become co regulators for their emotionally, behaviorally dysregulated teenagers.
• 6:45
  I point out something that all parents know, which is that if you have a kid who is really in distress and you get upset too, it doesn't make it better. It invariably escalates the situation. So to the extent that I can model and teach and support empathic attunement and not getting all reactive yourself and staying grounded and present with the families, I think that I help them have more self empathy and more confidence dealing with the emerging storm of their dysregulated teenagers.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: How do you see trauma impacting the identity of adolescents?
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, it becomes part of who we are. Right? I think that when I started out in grad school, people would be talking about healing from trauma or resolving trauma. We had a lot of curious language around early traumatic exposure and that it was supposed to be something that you could get over. I'm really curious and interested in how in adolescence we develop into much more complex beings.
• 7:56
  When we're 10 years old, the way we think about ourselves and who we are in the world tends to be more unitary. And something happens as the brain expands and changes in terms of the complexity and how. But we certainly all have complexity and parts. And I think about working with adolescent trauma from a little bit of that perspective, that people have traumatized parts, And they are more than that, of course, and that identity is woven into the way we take care of ourselves and each other and how parts of us are working to coordinate and adapt. And I usually try to do some kind of identity, you know, experiential identity exercises where we're talking about the parts of you.
• 8:52
  And when your part that is deeply mistrusting because she's been hurt shows up, how does she take care of you? What does she do? How how does she react? And so that people come to understand and embrace and feel compassion, self compassion for their complexity and not thinking of themselves as any one thing. We tend in our culture to have trauma be very defining.
• 9:19
  Like, oh, I'm a traumatized person. And I think that I like to say that I'm a person who experienced trauma and contending with it and dealing with it and working to resist the effects of trauma, the kind of memories that I have, the body memories that I have that take me over and don't allow me to get great joy and pleasure in my life now. So giving more regulated, wider platform and self awareness of identities.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: When you are talking with adolescents about the different parts of them, do you use terminology about dissociation, or how do you explain
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I do. I mean, it depends on, I mean, I'm not giving you a one size fits all answer to this, but I do talk about this idea, well, one idea is of symptoms as body memories. So that, and dissociation is a symptom. So that when they get overwhelmed, the part of them that dissociates, that's taking care of them, runs the show. And it's actually, I mean, there's a lot of problems obviously with dissociation, but it's a phenomenal adaptation to early traumatic exposure, right, that you can protect yourself from overwhelm by checking out.
• 10:45
  The problem is when you're checked out, you're not learning and being in relationship and relying on people to help take care of you. I mean, it's a pretty complicated response, but it's certainly very understandable. So yeah, I think the associated parts of us really need tender loving care because they're really working overtime to keep us from having unconscious awareness. Threat that we think is a threat, whether it really is or not. And whether it is or not, it doesn't matter in our bodies if we think it is.
• 11:18
  We go to those places of trauma. People go to those places, including real dissociation or variations on that. We're checking out a little bit or getting so activated that we're reacting all the time and just in constant motion and talking a lot and getting into fights and doing whatever our body is dictating to do, which is dissociative in a certain way also. But helping them understand that these are body memories when they get symptomatic, when they get anxious or panicky or rageful, and they don't know why maybe, because if you have early trauma from before that 18 old, there's no left tennis here on board to make a story about what happened. So their bodies are remembering stuff, right, like the Bessel van der Kolk.
• 12:06
  The body keeps the score. So even when they don't know why they're having this big reaction, Their body is giving them really important information, and so I'm always very interested in working with kind of the below the neck stuff that's happening and the emotionality, because I think it's tremendous information about what this kid did to survive. And I think it helps create a much more heroic narrative. Wow, look at this. Your body is reminding you that you did amazing things to survive here.
• 12:43
  And it's remembering stuff that you don't even have any conscious awareness. How could you happen when you were so little? And here you are to tell the tale. So you survived. It worked.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: I think it's significant because usually when people who know or have experienced trauma and dissociation at some level, so often when we talk about body memories we're talking about something that is specific to a specific memory, like a bruise, for example, kind of reappearing. And this really broadens that definition because we also sometimes talk about how flashbacks can be emotional, but you're talking about literally the body itself as a whole and neurologically containing that experience from even pre verbal, that it's not just the wound of a specific abuse incident, but of the trauma and relational trauma as well, which is huge with the research that's come out this year on relational trauma.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Right, and the thing about developmental trauma, attachment trauma, whatever, language complex childhood trauma, terminology people use for that, is that it is all relational trauma. I think that is what distinguishes developmental trauma, you know, from PTSD and from what our most useful nomenclature. You know, we were unable to get the developmental trauma disorder into the DSM for lots of, I think, not very good reasons. But one of the I mean, there are some features of this. One is that the abuse takes place in the central caretaking relationship, right?
• 14:34
  The person who is tasked with caring for the child is dangerous, and the child's survival depends on this person meeting their most fundamental needs. It's an awful dilemma that kids have, right, to be in that bind. And the other piece of this is there is very, it's very unusual, but there is a single incident. It's multiple, it's cascading, it's compounding. That, it's all kinds of things happening.
• 15:04
  You know, you're neglected and then you're hungry, or you get into fights and then you get put in the special ed class and you don't have the access to the same kids, or you get put in the foster care system, or you have traumatic loss because somebody goes to jail or dies. I mean, these kids have a lot. There's no capital P like one trauma. It's traumatic life or it's a life of fairly chronic stress and adversity. And so it isn't an explicit memory.
• 15:36
  I mean, it can be, but most of the kids I work with who have longstanding trauma, they may have a couple bad memories. But that's very much tip of the iceberg, you know?
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: It really broadens our understanding of trauma and the body memories both. Like, it really changes things, that perspective.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It does. Because instead of feeling crazy, it makes the kids feel like, Oh, this makes perfect sense. Even symptoms that people think are really terrible, and they are terrible symptoms, things like self harm. I mean, within this framework, of course, the part of you that is trying to keep you okay is trying to figure out how to manage overwhelm and is coming up with strategies that I mean, I think a lot of these strategies, I feel it's about self harm and substance abuse, these are strategies that almost work.
• 16:35
  Mean, they don't fully work for obvious reasons, but they do almost work. And you got to honor that, that this is a child, I mean, a kid figuring out how to survive, unfathomably difficult lives. And they're coming up with strategies to quell a really, really hot, overactive, outdated, and overwhelmed nervous You gotta hand it to.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: It's so empowering to move from a place of, I'm crazy, I feel crazy, I don't understand what's going on, I don't know what's wrong with me, why can't I stop it, why can't I be normal to understanding this is how it works and this is my response neurologically or physically or in my body as an entity and these parts of me that there's a reason it's all happening and why it's happening and how it's happening because understanding that takes away so much of the shame of what's going on and what someone is experiencing and replaces it with hope.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. Alright. You got it. I have a I have a young woman I've been working with, over a very long period of time. She's in her mid twenties now, and I started seeing her when she was about 16 or so, with a pretty severe trauma history.
• 17:56
  And she's in her first pretty stable relationship with a young man who seems like a basically nice guy, which is the first time ever she's found herself not with an abusive addict. He's neither of those things, and it's kind of exciting to talk to her in that way. And she had this great rabid very recently. We were talking, and they had had a conflict. She tends to be a very hyper activated when she gets anxious, she freaks out still quite a bit.
• 18:26
  Mean, her body is is really pretty tightly wired in how she lives in the world in a pretty hyper vigilant place. But she has this amazing kind of pride and self awareness of it now. And I guess they had a they had some kind of dispute. And she just laid a wrap on him about, look. I'm wired this way now, and this is what I need.
• 18:48
  When I get like this, this is what I need from you in order to get better regulated. I mean, she has all the language and everything now. We've been working for years. But she's really moved from a real victim, overwhelmed, not able to be in school, to being able to hold down a job and in a steady relationship. I mean, it's quite a I mean, it's ten years long, nine years, ten years long in the make.
• 19:11
  So it just didn't happen overnight. But I was pretty freaking delighted to hear her tell the story of how she not only advocated for herself, but she did it from a pretty conscious and self aware place, you know, even as she was freaking out about whatever she was freaking out about.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: That's amazing.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's a beautiful story. For me it probably was a beautiful moment for me.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Tell me about your work with the pandemic and what you have seen with those you're helping in the adolescent response to the quarantine and everything else about what's going on?
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So, you know, as an old person who hasn't I mean, I have done some teletherapy over the years, but certainly not as a full time experience. I have a private practice. I give it eight hours of direct client care a week in addition to teaching and other stuff. So in March, like everyone else, I moved completely into the Zoom land.
• 20:16
  And I had a lot of trepidation about it because my work is this I use this, you know, developmental relational model in my work. And I feel so much that intersubjectivity, that the way I connect and then in the presence of these kids and offer them my fully regulated adult brain to calm their and cool their hot brain. I mean, I have all of what I think about is so profoundly interpersonal, intersubjective in the same space. I I live in Vermont, so I have this, like, pretty hooey way of thinking about this, but I have this beautiful office. I really think of it as a sacred space overlooking the Connecticut River.
• 21:01
  The light comes in these big windows, and I have cozy old seating arrangements. It's just there's something about it. You go in there, and it's calming. And I can provide that as a holding environment. And so moving on to this virtual thing where people are and teenagers, they've got their gadgets and gizmos on, and there's so much distraction and really trying to settle down to it.
• 21:27
  I had a lot of trepidation. And I would say about eighty percent of my anxiety was ill founded. I'll stick to about twenty percent of it. But these are kids, these Gen Zs, who they're amphibious. They grew up not making that much of a distinction between the online life and the offline life as I do.
• 21:51
  And they're pretty comfortable with the platform. Yeah, with Zoom, with FaceTime, whatever. They're very relaxed about this in a way that I certainly was not. And there's been opportunities, I guess, that come out of it. I have one 16 year old girl, for example, who has a pretty troubled relationship with her dad, who's no longer physically abusive, but he's still pretty controlling and verbally intimidating at best.
• 22:22
  And, you know, we're working on this, and she's doing a great job setting limits with him. He's working on it too. And, we'll be talking in her house, and all of a sudden, she'll move into the chat function on, the Zoom and say, my dad's outside the door. I'm changing the subject. And so she chitchats with me for a minute, and then then she go then she chats.
• 22:45
  You know, coast is clear or whatever, and we go back to what we were talking about. And so that's been kind of interesting in terms of safety and privacy and those concerns that I had, and how to maneuver that and manage that, during, COVID, particularly with families where the kids, I couldn't really guarantee the safety of the young clients that I'm treating. And so that was a nice feature. And so there's tough parts to this just as you and I experienced at the beginning where I find myself working really hard to hear and see and understand, and there's, you know, voice delays and screen freezes and all those kinds of technological I'm going to have to hang up and try again. We're working so hard just to stay connected in a way that it's already hard with these kids in the same room.
• 23:43
  And so that has that sort of accounts for some of my frustration. But I have a pretty interesting, you know, collection of stories that I'm accumulating, that suggest, you know, maybe that if they can find a safe, stable place with a decent connection, which is a social justice issue, as you know, in rural America, and I'm in rural America too, that a lot of kids who need therapy don't have the bandwidth literally in their homes or the computer hookup that they need to be able to do this in a reliable and safe way. And that's a false other downside to this. But I would say, by and large, as we're moving into mid six months of doing this, I am finding it actually offering a lot more flexibility with busy kids who only have a little time in their schedules. We can sneak it right in there in a free block if they're not at school or even if they're doing sports or stuff like that.
• 24:52
  We can work around it because they're not having to drive a long time to get to my office. I'm also seeing the plus side of that, just in terms of the logistics of doing therapy with busy teenagers. Also, I have to invite them the night before. So my no show and, oh, whoops, I forgot, is it too late rate is extremely low since almost zero now. Basically zero.
• 25:16
  Because I just reminded I'm reminding them the night before by invitation.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: Tell me more about what you mentioned. You mentioned the developmental relational model. Can you tell me more about that?
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Can I put in a plug for my book, which talks all about it? I have a book called Treating Trauma in Adolescence that came out on Guildford Press a couple years ago, and it's based in this model, which is really a model that incorporates relational theory and developmental theory in some key ways. One is that I think that therapy, I'll just tell you a couple of them, not going to whole deep thing, but one, a couple of the key ideas are, one is that therapy is a two person system, it's a dyadic system. And when it works, we both change.
• 26:09
  And there's a lot of really interesting from the interpersonal neurobiology world, Dan Siegel and Alan Shore and those people, that our brains change as a result of effective therapy to our clients. When it goes well, they have an impact on us also. And with working with traumatized adolescents, they really need to know that they have an impact on you in order in real time and experiential time. And so that's a big piece of it. And it's not cognitive understanding.
• 26:45
  It's an emotion changing emotion. So when we're talking about regulation and love and attachment, we're really talking about the enterprise of being with another human being and trying to stay connected with them and repairing ruptures to reconnect when we're feeling like we're moving away and disconnecting. And so it's very affectively, experientially based in the actual relationship in the room. And the piece of it that's developmental, besides the fact that they're adolescents and they're changing at amazing rate, and so you have to hear the therapy, how much you're playing and talking, and how long you can take or spend on any given subject and what what the enterprise is is very, developmentally embedded. But also your adult presence matters.
• 27:35
  So I I I became an adult at some point along the way in this work and determined that I really had to show up as a fully formed adult having done my own work Because these kids who are underparented or, I've had many kids have said to me, and at first it was daunting, but now I kind of, really try to step up to it, which is that I'm the only grown up in their lives. You know, I'm the only grown up that really talks to them in their whole lives. They haven't known any real grown ups. And so that's a role that I embody. And I say stuff like, I'm not gonna be you know, they're talking kids talking about going to a a party where bad stuff was likely to happen, you know?
• 28:19
  And I'll I'll say, look, I'm not gonna be at the party. I'm gonna love you just the same on Monday, but do you wanna know what I think? And I don't do this with adults. I do this with kids because I'm an adult, and this is a therapy with a kid. And so I really show up in this developmental relational model as a caring adult.
• 28:38
  Way, kids who are parented adequately have people to do that for them. And I think there is a adult slash parental role that this therapy requires. And they invariably say, yeah, I wanna know what you think. The reason they told you that they're going to this ridiculous keg party in the woods is because they wanna know what the impact of that is on you and, you know, that you're concerned for their my concern for their safety is paramount. And I get to tell them that.
• 29:08
  And I get to use my adult brain to say, you know, the last time you went to a party, this happened. And I'm concerned for you because I'm I don't wanna see you, you know, have to go through having to reconstitute yourself for weeks again after you get, exposed to, really traumatic and scary stuff and and get vulnerable and unsafe. We're working to help you take better care of yourself, and I'm worried about that. So that's another feature of the development erosion theory, that it's a therapy with an adult, between an adult and someone who's not an adult. And I get to use my fully fledged adult cortex to add emotional regulatory system to help them problem solve and become better regulated, because they can't do it for themselves.
• 29:59
  They need help. And so the last thing I'll say about this is that it's very much a co regulation theory, that the way we learn to self regulate is through co regulation. Babies who are crying get picked up a whole lot in early infancy and childhood, early childhood, and they learn how to what it feels like to be held and regulated from having it done literally for them. You're falling apart, you're crying, somebody picks you up and holds you. And over time, if you're lucky, you get to know what that feels like.
• 30:37
  So you know the difference between regulated states and dysregulated states, and I argue in this theory that our job as therapists with these kids is to be co regulators, that they need to learn what it feels like to be regulated. So if you send a kid to their room who doesn't know how to calm themselves down, crying themselves into exhaustion has no resemblance whatever to, you know, self regulation. In fact, it's a traumatic brain getting eventually resolved, and, they can't do it if they don't know what it feels like to be regulated. So that, young woman that I mentioned to you earlier, what she is able to say that her boyfriend is, I'm in a dysregulated state. This is what happens to me, and this is what I need to do in order to feel calmer.
• 31:28
  And I know what that feels like now too because I practice that. And she couldn't have done that when she was 16, 17, eight. Really, she couldn't have done that probably till she was 22 or 23 in our work together with any reliability at all. This is a really hot button kit, and it really took a long time. There were glimmers, but very small provocations could really send her back down the rabbit hole.
• 31:55
  So yeah, co regulation before self regulation, being an adult presence, emotion changing emotion in real experiential time. Those are some of the ideas.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: That's so critical, what you are saying about co regulation. There are so many people, even who are adults, who had relational trauma or developmental trauma and are not able to regulate themselves or don't know how to care or nurture themselves or meet their own needs because they've missed all those experiences of attunement and missed that caretaking and that caregiving. So even though their chronical age is older, that development is still missing, and they need that same kind of care.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. And I would argue that it's kind of a life pan, need that we have to have people there for us when we need them. And, you know, I'm a I'm an excellent self regulator. I have a million things I enjoy doing, and I haven't calmed myself down. I've, you know, worked at this for a lot of years.
• 33:00
  And when I am deeply distressed, I call my sister. You know? And there we all have thresholds where our self soothing strategies, even if we're good at it, get exceeded, and we we are wired to need other people. We evolved to get comfort from others. And, you know, I think this is at a Western American or patriarchal I don't know.
• 33:23
  I can explain it away. But our society has really given dependency a bad rap. And I think being able to ask for help when you need it is a developmental attainment. Dependency is good. It turns out the most successful, happy, what we call functional independent young adults are people that are effectively dependent.
• 33:44
  They have people that are there for them that will take care of them. They don't have the illusion that they could they have to do it all by themselves and that no one and hard that no one will be there. They know that they're lovable and, worthy of asking for help. I I think that that is a critical thing that many adults, I agree, that we don't we're terrible at this, asking for help when we need it. And being able finding people that we can depend on.
• 34:14
  And it's fundamental to development. I mean, it's certainly fundamental to infant development because their their survival depends on, you know, physical physical survival. But I I think that our psychic survival depends. There's evidence that suggests that emotional isolation and physical isolation, the brain doesn't distinguish between those. And I I it's probably even worse.
• 34:37
  If someone's physically there but not emotionally there for us, we feel devastated and abandoned. And the brain codes it as dangerous either way. It leads to fMRIs of this. If you need someone to be there for you that you can depend on and they're not there, it's devastating. It's a profound emotional wound.
• 34:56
  And if it happens a lot, we don't function well. We fall apart.
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: I think that that's significant, whether that is in relational trauma, whether it's developmental when someone is young, or whether it happens later, or even in situations with therapists who don't realize what they're doing and why therapy can go so wrong or be so damaging because that wound can be caused by a therapist who's not being present. And I'm I'm not talking about, you know, boundaries or or things like that. I mean, I'm talking about that actual non responsiveness.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Misattunement. And you're misattuned, and you're not getting how misattuned you are, you know, or you're just minimizing how bad it is. Like, you see you say something that doesn't work, and you see and sense in your body that it didn't land or it was hurtful even though it might not be your intent. And you see this little moment where they kind of turn away or look down or give up in some way and stop talking or whatever whatever the sign is that you blew it.
• 36:11
  And whether you work to repair that and notice it or not can be the difference in the whole world with this therapy that these kids who are primed for this disappointment. They're expecting you to treat them as they've been treated. They're expecting this relationship be screwed up just like other ones. And so the thing that's therapeutic is this corrective relational experience. They get a new kind of relationship that's different than the one they expect.
• 36:38
  So if you're a therapist who's disappointing and misattuned, just get in line. You're just another one of those people in his his life. They have lots of those people. And it it does have. I have an interesting I have an interesting recent experience which is very surprising to me.
• 36:56
  It ties in with the COVID question that you asked. Which is there is this experiment in psychology that was done years ago by Ed Tronick called the Still Face Experiment. A lot of people probably know about that.
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: But it shows how babies fall apart when their mothers are completely on their faces go completely still and and how awful that is. But they recont you know, they pull themselves back together once the mother's face and and responsiveness returns. And so I have had this experience with the, Zoom freezing up. And usually, of course, your face goes still in some god awful, expression, and, you know, one eye closed or whatever. But anyway, I have it worked out with all my clients that I will call you back if it freezes up and doesn't resolve.
• 37:50
  And so I did this, and I have taken to asking, what was that like for you? And I had this, young, maybe 19 years old, something like that, young, adult. And I said, what was that like for you? And my face froze up while you were talking. And she just burst into tears.
• 38:08
  And she said it was so awful. And I wasn't even gonna ask. I mean, so it was the first time I'd asked that. Now, I always ask. Because it's a therapist who's supposed to be there for you in the presence of you disappearing.
• 38:20
  Disappearing. And I don't know. Maybe it's sort of like the still face experiment for our time. What's happening with the freezing on the Zoom? But that was a very unexpected and moving moment that I had this young woman who I have a relationship with.
• 38:36
  I mean, I knew her in the before times. So it was easy to repair that. And it was but it was deep. My absence, she you know, therapy's supposed to be in the presence of this Zoom stuff and the app stuff. We have to keep reattuning.
• 38:50
  That's what I was saying earlier, working so much harder to stay connected because with these kids, the opportunities for misattunement are paramount. They're still legion. It's so easy to misattune to these kids, because they're primed to that. They're ducking and bobbing and weaving and stuff too a lot. They want to be seen.
• 39:09
  They don't want to be seen. And it's much harder to do this without the whole physical being in front of you, for me anyway. I don't know. Maybe other people have other other experiences with it.
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: Well, and I think that in that kind of experience, this story you told with Zoom freezing up or or other experiences where the therapist who is the helper or the the safe person, when they disappear or freeze up like in your Zoom example, it's not just a new wound, which it is, but it also, for so many of these people, is a trigger of still faces from the past, so to speak.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think for this kid, you know, this young woman, that's so much true, and you can work with it. I mean, it does bring up all of these missed opportunities for miscommunication and loss and abandonment and rejection and disappointment.
• 40:06
  You know, we're working them in real time via the technology for sure also. You're right. It's it felt different. It didn't just feel like a random, oh, shoot. You Some kids are like, oh, yeah, well, it doesn't matter.
• 40:17
  It's just technology. But I think for someone who is trying as hard as some of these kids, and this young woman for sure is trying to be in a relationship that is supportive and she needs me right now. She's isolated. You know, the unbelief in the middle of nowhere when she's supposed to be at college in an urban setting and, you know, moving on with her life, here she is. So she really looks forward to therapy.
• 40:47
  And so for me to disappear on her like that is very much a compounding wound, which is, of course, the last thing I want to be is compounding in her wounds, but that's what we're dealing with.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: So when there are moments like that, what are ways you talked about how important repair is. What are some of the ways that repair can happen? What does repair look like after a rupture?
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean well, I mean, are you I guess I'm there's a technology pandemic piece of this that's a compounding thing, so I'm not sure. When I when I don't, I mean, I'm really working in a very moment to moment way, right? Like, I'm trying to figure out what's happening in this moment to moment way. So if I say something that's ridiculous or idiotic or doesn't land, and I see, a kid pull away or recoil or shut down, I, it's really important to address it immediately or as soon as you get it. This is a rupture that just happened and to the extent that therapy is about repairing ruptures and relationships, learning how to fix stuff when it's broken that these kids come into relationships very bad experiences with you know, ruptures and look, most of us have never had anybody when we were kids apologize to us.
• 42:17
  Adults didn't do that at least when I was coming up and so it's can be very powerful to apologize. I'm really sorry I missed it. I can see how this was just completely the wrong thing to say or to ask. I overstepped and I would love to try to fix this with you and try again and hear more about what that was like for you and I'm going listen you know, that sort of thing. So, to repair the rupture, to notice it, to acknowledge it, to name it, to ask what it was like and to apologize.
• 42:55
  These are, we gotta do this because how do you learn how to live in this world if you can't fix it when you have a disagreement with somebody or they're misattuned? I mean, they it's inevitable. I mean, I you know, where no one is in tune perfectly attuned all the time. Zero. And I don't think it's helpful to be perfectly attuned anyway.
• 43:16
  I think that the growth comes in how you fix it when you when you miss it.
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: That's beautiful. Beautiful. Was there anything else that we did not get to talk about that you wanted to cover?
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I guess the only sort of parting thing that I'm thinking about right now has to do with the way I mean, I heard an expression, which I kinda like, which was around the pandemic, which is that we're all in the same ocean, but we're in different boat. And thinking about my work with trauma and families in this context right now, in my relatively significantly more privileged boat than a lot of people, I have a job and a safe place to live, to start, and people who are safe. And, you know, it's working well here. Vermont is the best place to be in the country right now, today.
• 44:13
  It won't stay that way probably, but anyway, for the pandemic. So I feel very blessed and lucky. And so I'm very curious about other people's experiences and how the pandemic is showing up. But I'm also aware for us as therapists, we're in it too. And to acknowledge to ourselves, to each other, to our clients that one of the reasons that life feels really hard right now for a lot of people is, you know, because it is and that we're all living in this shared and we need to continually be checking in with ourselves and our own overwhelm and working with that because it's sometimes it's hard to be a therapist and to be hearing stories of overwhelm when we're also in the same ocean and trying to stay afloat.
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: Such a gift to give ourselves the same kind of attunement we're trying to offer others, just recognizing that it really is hard right now.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And the boundary management, when you're home all the time, it gets a little bit harder too. Mean, people say they want an appointment, you're like, Well, I'm home. Guess I It's harder to set the limits and the boundaries when people are suffering the way they are right now, and we've got to. We're finite ourselves.
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for talking to us.
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: Thank you. Good luck.
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemsspeak.com.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: We'll
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: see you there.