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Recap: Dissociation 101 · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to long time listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
• 1:03
  This weekend we attended the ISSTD conference virtually which had been rescheduled from our trip to California three months ago. Because of the pandemic, it was held online for the first time, and I know so many people worked so hard to make that happen and it went really, really well. Overall, it was a wonderful experience. The presentations were incredible and I would again urge those of you who are able to do so to join or support the ISSTD in some way. No one has asked me to say that.
• 1:44
  I'm not advertising for them. I'm just saying that they really, really are doing amazing things. They are listening to the community. They are responding to research. They are doing so much.
• 1:58
  I can't even tell you. There's so much happening that is so, so good. And the more that I help and the more that I participate and the more that I join my own work groups or committees and have those experiences of getting to know my colleagues and the work that they are doing and participate in making the ISSTD better and relevant and on top of the incredible incredible efforts that people have done for years and years on their own with very little recognition or support. I am more and more blown away by these people and appreciate their support, their acceptance, their attunement to the people that they are serving through their work, people they are advocating for, and the many who, like me, are also survivors themselves. It was really just phenomenal and I am so grateful, so grateful for the hard work of the board and the office, the presenters, and I just I can't tell you.
• 3:19
  It was really marvelous. It was really marvelous. I think it was also for us the first time that we had a bit of a respite from the pandemic because the husband knew that we had this conference and the children knew we had this conference so even though we were stuck at home and not like away in a hotel visiting friends or having any kind of trip away for a break or respite from home life, it was still us in our hammock not being interrupted and getting to be in this world for a prolonged amount of time, which is maybe the first time that's happened since the pandemic began. And so in just so many ways, it was wonderful. As far as sensory experience, we had the laptop set up on a little folding table next to the hammock.
• 4:15
  We had the windows open. I brought my fruit and my salad up in the morning so that I almost didn't have to leave the room at all. And it really was it really was just marvelous and so relaxing while my brain was working so hard to understand everything that I was learning and processing. The very first day of the conference was an all day workshop is what we had signed up for and registered for with Christine Forner who was the president of ISSTD last year. She has been on the podcast and she's one of my favorite people on the planet.
• 4:58
  She has such presence and compassion and attunement with people, interviewing with her and hearing her story and feeling the expression of care and awareness and depth of understanding was so touching to me when we had the interview and so she is one of my favorites so I am biased in that way but the reason she's one of my favorites is because it is not just head knowledge which she has a vast amount of but her heart presence makes that congruent with what she's presenting. She opened with simply just defining dissociation, the same thing as we've talked about before, the very, very basics about how dissociation is simply like a failure to connect. Not a failure as in doing something wrong, but the memories, feelings, actions, thoughts, body, or identity, all of these pieces are not associated. That is why it's called dissociation because those things are not associated. When those things are not associated, it causes disruption and discontinuity.
• 6:23
  Mary and Kate from Australia, I think, who I would be delighted to have on the podcast. I need to contact her, but as an example of how much these people care, she was up in the middle of the night presenting because of the time difference and the conference being live. And so that was just fantastic. She went from defining dissociation to sort of the history and ideology of dissociation as we understand it and referenced the same book that we mentioned from the ISSTD training and talked about trauma and recovery about sort of some of the context of how we came to understand dissociation. One thing that she pointed out that was not in that book that I didn't know about or maybe I haven't gotten to it yet in the class, I don't know, but she clarified that part of, doctor Cornelia Wilbur, when she presented the cases about Sybil and it came out as a book, part of that is because they would not publish her clinical work because she was a woman because of the context of the times.
• 7:37
  And in those same time periods, ECT was still super popular, lobotomies got the Nobel Prize. Again, just understanding the context of history of why sometimes things played out the way that they did and why things were done the way that they were at the time. Understanding the historical context really, really makes a difference. And so I would really recommend this class or the trauma and recovery book or the classes that ISSTD offers to understand some of this context of where we got from, of how this unfolded through history, and why things have been as they are, and why it so matters that there is this political piece of advocating for our rights as survivors and for mental health treatment and why that is so so critical and any kind of speaking out that we can do in healthy and appropriate ways like the podcast for example which is such a small thing but helps people understand so that we can have the support that we need so that we can develop treatments that we need and why that matters so much. It's so so critical.
• 9:01
  When you're feeling overwhelmed or hopeless about the systemic issues, understanding the context of why things have been, why they're in place, how it's happened, what people have done and are doing to fight against it really makes a difference. But so does your own active support in the process, including supporting ISSTD. And so I think we need to be careful as a community that we ourselves are not taking old stereotypes and holding it against them without being part of the solution. So if you want the ISSTD to do well, then what you need to do is get involved, and you need to support them financially, and you need to share the research that they put out, and you need to spread word about the resources they have including the trainings that they're doing. The trainings that they are doing right now, these online classes that start over and over and over again so that they can train more and more therapists appropriately are incredible.
• 10:13
  They are incredible. I'm in the classes now, and they are fantastic. And they're doing exactly what we've been asking them to do. They're already doing it. And so I really want that to be part of the narrative in the community as they support the efforts of the people who are in the trenches doing already exactly what we say we want them to do.
• 10:41
  They're already doing it. And so we we need to understand they're aware of things like the rights of trans survivors. They are aware of survivors with intelligence challenges and developmental delays. They are aware of comorbidity with things like autism. They are aware of issues about integration and how that gets misapplied by therapists who don't understand what it means or that a client has a right to their own voice and their own journey.
• 11:18
  They're aware of these things and they're teaching these things and they're doing it right and they're doing it well and again I just can't tell you how wonderful the conference was. And so as she talked through some of the myths of DID, it was helpful not only to understand where some of those arguments come from, again understanding the history of it and the origin of where those claims come from and why people say that, but also to better understand the actual research of what is true. So just clarifying things like that, yes, all memory is fallible, but recovered memory and continuous memories are equally accurate and more likely to be true than false. And that fifteen percent of people who have any kind of trauma report a period of time where they have no memory of it. Even just with normal PTSD or or things after like an accident for example.
• 12:24
  And people are more likely to report forgetting sexual abuse than any other type of trauma. Thirty twenty to thirty two percent of those people see there's a period of time where they forgot about it or somehow just dismissed it. And that's addressed separately in the trauma treatment and research about realizing what's happened to you. Kathy Steele talks about it. Christine Forner talked about it in this.
• 12:51
  That's like a whole different section. But understanding how it works makes a difference. And for clinical setting, it's not the therapist's job to decide about memories anyway. It's the client's job, the person's job, the survivor's job to be working through it in therapy. And so they present what they present and the therapist is present with the person while they're bringing up what's going on.
• 13:18
  And that's the process, it's the being present, not the judging of what is real or not real or true or not true. And so even with ourselves, I think it's more important that we are present with ourselves and respectful of ourselves and compassionate of ourselves rather than working hard to dismiss it or working hard to keep it at bay or working hard to explain it away or minimize it in some way. In this session, they also talked about how because of all these issues historically, DID has actually been researched extensively and the validity and reliability of the disorder has been held up to a higher standards than other disorders like schizophrenia and depression and so there's no clinical reason to think that it's not real or that it's not a thing. It could exist and the study of it, the validity of it, has been held to a higher standard than anything else because we have had to defend it so much for so long. There was also the reminder that the research shows that an event is traumatic if it is extremely upsetting and temporarily and even temporarily overwhelms the individual's internal resources.
• 14:55
  And so this is significant for several reasons. We talk about this when we do disaster training and war zone trainings for people in our other job in my other job. The definition of stress is that more is being asked of you than you're able to meet. And this level of stress, when something happens, for some people, they may have the resources internally externally to deal with it and other people may not. And when the system as a whole, and I don't mean system as a whole meaning different alters, I mean the system of the body as a whole, the memories and the brain and the amygdala and the neurobiology of how everything works together, all those pieces that need to be associated.
• 15:47
  When that process is overwhelmed so that it cannot be associated and cannot be responded to, that stress becomes trauma. And this is important because it goes back to we cannot compare experiences. What is trauma for me may not be trauma for you. What is trauma for you may not be trauma for me. We can make this a neutral example in that most days, us having six children is not really a big deal.
• 16:19
  We know the children, we know their routine, we know what helps, what doesn't, we know our own capacities and the limitations, we know what resources we have to help, whether that's with feeding them or when the husband can help and when he has to work and what our schedules are, all of these things that support the sick children. It's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of wonderful times, it's a lot of difficult times, but we can do it. So in that way, it may be stressful but it's not trauma. Someone else, if we just drove up to their house and they were not used to having six children and didn't know our six children and we just dropped them off and said, here, take care of our six children for two weeks, that would be traumatic for them. Right?
• 17:08
  And so I'm just using a neutral funny example and no we're not going to just drop off the children with strangers. But just using the example because what happens is people will say even people have even said that about the pandemic. Oh, my experience isn't as bad as yours because I only had to deal with it. You can't do that. It it's apples to oranges.
• 17:28
  You're comparing your process to someone else's content. This is what happens on social media. People compare someone else's content, a postcard of a moment in time to their own process or they will say because I only had relational trauma or only had emotional abuse or only had verbal abuse then it's not as bad as someone who had physical abuse or sexual abuse. It's not true. You can't compare that.
• 18:01
  While I appreciate the severity and the distress of physical or sexual abuse, those are terrible things. Terrible things. You can also honor it's like object relations, right? Holding both at the same time. You can also honor the difficulty of emotional or mental or verbal abuse in relational trauma.
• 18:29
  It can also be terrible and in fact they talked in this conference about how it's actually in some ways worse because it's harder to see, because it's invisible wounds, and it's harder to treat because people don't realize it counts as trauma. So that in itself is also traumatic. Do you see? So it's really important how we define trauma because it's about the powerlessness and about the impact on the person, not about what exactly happened. So even if you were talking about physical abuse for something and memories or not, it's not even about the memories.
• 19:10
  I mean, yes, it is. But also it's about not just that this happened, but that it's your mom who did it or your dad who did it or whoever your abuser was. That's as much of the trauma as the actual wound. And so Christine talked later in the conference about what's so important in therapy and in self care as a system is not just telling your story but addressing the wound. What can you do to provide care for that part of yourself who suffered in that way?
• 19:44
  Because as Mary and Kate shared, it goes back to the disorganized attachment and betrayal trauma and relational trauma that bind of turning towards the caregiver because of our mammal brains, right? Seeking proximity, seeking safety and comfort in our caregiver, but also having to get away from danger because of our reptile brains, the lower brain, except that it's our caregiver that is the danger and so we can't get away from them. And so it's this loop of needing to turn towards what should give us comfort except what should give us comfort is the one giving danger. And so the only way to get out of that loop, because there's no way for a child to solve that, the only way to get out of that loop is to dissociate from the loop itself. So we solve it by distancing from the pain so that we can remain with the caregiver because we have to survive.
• 20:46
  That was how Mary Anne Kate described it. And attachment matters because it's how we're organized in relation to other people and how we receive information about who we are in relation to other people. And it's how we survive as humans. So part of us becomes very people pleasing to keep that caregiver happy so that we can stay alive and part of us gets very good at getting away like the reptilian brain so that we avoid danger, so that we shut down from danger, so that we don't get into danger by trying to connect with someone, So we get good at building walls, we get good at running away, we get good at numbing out in all kinds of shapes and ways, which Christine Forner talked about more later, and it was so fascinating. I asked her to come on the podcast to talk about just that piece because I never heard it presented that way and it was incredible.
• 21:55
  So we'll talk about that in a minute. But attachment is everything. So for a child to survive, attachment is everything. And so we have to dissociate because it's the only way that our brains can literally permit us to do any bonding which is required for our survival. But it's so important that if you have emotional support, then how bad what you're going through is less traumatic because you have more of those internal and external resources to deal with the trauma of it.
• 22:41
  So yes, it's hard and terrible but it's not as traumatic because you have the emotional support to get through it. But when we have relational trauma and betrayal trauma and less emotional support, then even smaller things are more traumatic because we don't have the resources. So right when we're talking about stress and the definition being more is asked of us than we're able to handle and resiliency being having the internal and external resources to deal with those stressors. Trauma happens when our resources are taken away and that resources of a child is the caregiver. The resources of a child is attachment.
• 23:32
  The resources of a child are the emotional support. So when that is taken away, then what is hard that you're going through, it takes less of it for it to count as trauma. And so you can't ever tell yourself or someone else that was a little thing, it wasn't so bad. Because it's not about how little or big the thing was, it's about how little or much support you had to deal with the thing. Does that make sense?
• 24:02
  One of my favorite things from the whole conference was this quote from Christine Forner herself who said, and I'm going to quote because I want to get it right, often people assume that people with dissociative identity disorder have several personalities, But what it is actually like is that there are not too many personalities, but not enough of one personality. For them, they feel like it is several people or someone else who is in charge, but they also don't have an intuitive knowledge of what one sense of self should feel like. One sense of self feels very different than partial bits of a sense of self. Do you understand what she said? It's really big and I want to let it settle because she's not saying DID isn't real.
• 24:55
  She's not saying your alters aren't real. It's not that. It's saying when things don't get associated, we don't get to have the experience of being whole. And so there is no sense of oneself in a capital o, one, sense of self, capital s kind of self, because it's not associated. So we don't even understand what it is supposed to feel like for everybody else.
• 25:26
  So when you feel crazy, that's the incongruence. When you feel unwell, that's the incongruence. Other people can do things that you cannot do because they have a sense of self that we do not have yet. That we have not yet developed when we're not talking to each other, when we're not communicating with each other. This is why functional multiplicity and while healing and continuing in therapy is so so important and talking to each other and communicating and sharing experiences because the more you do that, the more you have a cohesive sense of self, meaning the experience of your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions and your everyday life being congruent and associated and connected.
• 26:20
  And this also answers the question that we talked about in the podcast several months ago about how it feels like we couldn't even do DID right because if we had, we would not have needed another alter for this and another alter for this and another alter for that. Because this is what she's talking about. This is exactly it right here. Each one of those was not enough of one, which is why we feel like not enough because it's not. Because we only got one piece.
• 26:56
  There's this piece of things, and she will talk about this in her defense chart, which I will I'm going to have her come and speak about, so you'll understand it more later. But it was really, really powerful for me to understand that the frustration and the exhaustion doesn't come because there's too many of us. The frustration and exhaustion comes because not any of us are just one. And that's not because we've done something wrong it's because we did not have the resources, the support, the caregiver, the resources that we needed to process and deal and understand what happened to us while it was happening at the time. But together and in therapy we can associate those things so that when this happens I know this is what I feel about it.
• 28:00
  And that's what's been so important for us in the pandemic. We are in a pandemic aware that this is an ongoing trauma for the entire world. I'm not saying I'm so special, I'm the only one who thinks this is hard. Everybody thinks it's hard. Well, most everybody.
• 28:15
  But what I am saying is, I can be aware that these are the thoughts I'm having about it, this is what I'm feeling about it, And being able to hold both of those things at once so that when I remember the pandemic, I can remember these were the things I experienced. These were the things I felt about it, And I don't have to split it off unconsciously because I'm using the resources I have, which are colleagues who are going through the same things I am at work, friends who are going through the same things I am with children, other families who are going through the same thing with having to homeschool. Right? Connecting these pieces requires and depends on having the internal resources, being able to tolerate the feelings, being able to communicate with each other about the feelings and to have the external resources, others who understand or others who can share in attunement. And I think that's why incongruence feels so dangerous during the pandemic because any threat of misattunement for us as someone with DID during an ongoing trauma, any threat of misattunement is also a threat of not being able to associate this experience in an integrative way with thoughts, feelings and memories together.
• 29:48
  So misattunement or dismissing of my experience, whether that's from myself or from someone else, becomes the dangerous caregiver. So it doesn't matter how well intentioned they are, it matters that you have disrupted my process of associating or integrating. I want to say associating because integrating so is charged But I mean associating the thoughts, feelings and memories of what I'm experiencing right now so that it can process like a normal memory with fewer trauma effects than memory time memories that were all divided up into thoughts here and feelings there and memories here because it didn't have the resources to do that. So I think that's one of the things that helped give us words for our pandemic experience, much less childhood, because she helped me understand why some things helped and some things didn't during the pandemic and why we responded as we did. And I think it's why it was interesting to watch the difference between people who have never really been through hard things and people who are like survivors who have been through a lot of hard things and how they dealt with the pandemic.
• 31:12
  And if I had a million billion dollars, that's what I would research because what's happened is people who have not been through hard things either were completely shut down by this because they don't know how to do hard things or they've completely dismissed that it was hard and isolated themselves from the people who are struggling with it and rejected them attachment wise relationally by this illusion that they were better than that. They were the toxic positivity, the this isn't hard, like denying that this was hard is a kind of dissociation. And so they don't even understand yet the damage that they've caused. And survivors who know how to do hard things, some of us were really just okay because we already know how to lock down, Some of us were okay because we already know how to dissociate. Some of us were okay because we already know how to just keep going even though it was a struggle.
• 32:18
  But we could keep going because we admitted it was a struggle and the other side of the pandemic will not be much different for us than during the pandemic because we have dealt with it as we've gone. Other people are going to have other crises and problems later because they didn't deal with it properly while it was happening. And it if it were not such a serious thing, it would be really, really funny because we have been doing what you've been telling us for years clinically to do and now we've done it well even though we look like the weird ones in the process. And the people who did not do what you've been telling us to do all this time think they're fine now but are going to be in crisis later. And it's fascinating to watch this.
• 33:08
  You can't cause a trauma or set up trauma, it's not ethical research. But this as an ongoing trauma has been fascinating to watch different kinds of people handle it in different ways. The conference this day went on through diagnosis issues and so talking about the different dissociative disorders and what those are like, how they're related to personality disorders or not, comparing it to schizophrenia which is a completely different thing, why so many survivors endure so many different therapists before they're diagnosed and so many different diagnoses before it's accurate and wait so long for actual treatment that's effective. All of these things we addressed in our plural positivity survey as well. Different experiences that we have shared in those ways and then in this conference they address the research of it.
• 34:05
  So in this particular session they talked about three forms of dissociation. One is normal dissociation like daydreaming and normal forgetting like why you're driving and you don't remember the last 10 miles. That whole highway hypnosis kind of thing. The second one is faculty dissociation which implies a disruption in the normal integration of psychological faculties or functioning of a given consciousness with a sense of self. So you have a sense of self but the separateness of what you're doing.
• 34:42
  So for example, the husband is the husband, but when he's writing a musical, he's not being a father. He is a father, but he's not doing the work of fathering and but he's also able to still be the same self. So he could be with the children and write a little song with them and put on a little musical because he still has access to all of those faculties. He still has access to all of those parts of himself and the functions that they perform. And then the third part is multiplicity which implies the presence of more than one center of consciousness more than oneself.
• 35:22
  The next part of this session was Christine Forner talking about the cascade model of defense and it was fascinating and amazing and I wish you could have seen her or heard her. I have invited her to be back on the podcast to talk about that piece, but it did clarify for me one big question that we get frequently from survivors that have not understood how to verbalize to either side. Either to the clinical community or to the survivor community. I understood intuitively, but I could not explain it. That now I think I can verbalize.
• 36:02
  In talking about the different models, so like Putnam has a model and the structural dissociation theory is another model and there's, like, more than 25 models actually even just documented last year. Right? And so we can't we have to be careful about assuming this model is what happens and this is the prevailing model right now. All systems are built this way. Because we don't actually know that.
• 36:31
  And that's not actually what's happening or or what the research is showing right now. It's important for survivors and clinicians to work with the model that works for them and the theory that works for them and that they are comfortable with. And everyone has the right to do that just like any other mental health illness as long as it's part of research and treatment and people are being safe and cared for. But one thing I understand specifically now is that I want to be careful because I don't want to be speaking for anyone and I'm not representing anyone. I'm not representing every single survivor.
• 37:14
  I'm not representing ISSTD. I'm just talking about my own understanding. There has been the question for some time about those clinicians who push for integration and there has been the response from the community who say that we have the right to aim as a goal for functional multiplicity rather than pushing for integration. As we have researched this specific question over the last year what we have shared and what clinicians have said and what we have read about is really what matters most is that you stay in therapy and that is what is most helpful and most beneficial over time. There are several caveats to that including like my own circumstances right now where we have due to circumstances and moving we have lost a therapist and it's been very difficult to find another one And we have tried and tried and things keep going wrong and we keep trying anyway because we understand how important it is to be in therapy.
• 38:24
  But there are also places in the world where it's very hard to access therapy. There are rural places, there are government systems, there are payment issues, there are clinical expert access issues. All of these issues even before the pandemic happened make it difficult to find a good therapist and to work with a good therapist on an ongoing basis. And all of those challenges we're very well aware of. But in an ideal world, remaining in therapy whether you were wanting integration or whether you were wanting functional multiplicity either way that would be most important but what I have finally understood and have words for is that part of why in the past it's not been discussed directly is not because the ISSTD ever intended and again these are my words, I'm not speaking for the ISSTD, but they never intended to say integration was a requirement and what clinicians should support in an oppressive do it our way and we're going to force you kind of way.
• 39:47
  You guys, the people who may like, when you say ISSTD, you're talking about an entity. But the ISSTD is made up of people and some of them are also survivors. But because we have had to fight, again I'm not it's really careful because I don't want to speak for them. I don't have the right or the authority or the permission to speak for them. But because we have had to fight through the years and through the nineties and through the attacks of people and legal systems who say DID is not even a thing.
• 40:25
  Because of that, we have to be very very careful as a research and clinical and scientific organization that we are keeping our personal stories out of it. So those of you who say the ISSTD needs more survivor representation, that's not actually true. I understand why you're saying it, I understand what you're saying, but the truth is that you don't know. You're making an assumption about the people who serve the ISSTD so well. Because some of them are survivors.
• 41:02
  I'm not saying everyone are survivors and I'm not saying anyone specific other than myself, but I promise I'm not the only one. And even the many, many clinicians who themselves are not survivors, When we understand what trauma is and understand dissociation, they are survivors of other things, of relational traumas, of misattunement, of their own experiences of how hard childhood can be. And these are people generally who care very much for their clients in healthy and good and appropriate ways. And so when the guidelines came out originally, even involving my friend Peter, who you know some because he's been on the podcast several times because we love him and his family. And so when Peter and his colleagues developed those guidelines, the original guidelines, It was, as Peter himself described on the podcast, in response to insurance requirements, and it was in response to everything happening during those years that were so difficult.
• 42:09
  And it was in response to the very early stages of, for the first time, trying to describe what dissociation looked like, what treatment looked like and how that treatment might progress over time. It is not their fault that there are clinicians out in the world who took that and applied it in cruel and oppressive ways. It is not their fault that clinicians misused or abused those guidelines. It is not their fault that things like integration have been taken out of context and used in such horrible ways to shorten the length of treatment, to cut short the expression of different parts that still need work or still have things to be or who still want to be because they're meeting some need for the system. That's never anyone's intent from the ISSTD.
• 43:18
  Again, my words not theirs. And because of the context of the function of what the ISSTD is as the study of dissociation, the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, what I finally understand that I'm able to say into words is that they don't talk about multiplicity as a noun because they aren't focused on the identity. The identity is yours. You can be who you are. That's the noun.
• 43:56
  But they are the study of the process, which is the verb. And it's the study of the process that they have to defend against insurance companies and explain clinically and help teach new clinicians. And all the things that they're trying to do is the study of the process as a verb. But the noun of who the identity is, that's you. You decide that in therapy, in your real life, everyday outside of therapy, that's yours.
• 44:27
  You get to be you. No one's trying to take away you. And that being understood and understanding that who you are matters, they are also actively in the process already of working to update guidelines just because it's been so long since we did and because we've learned so much since we have. The general process, the verb, is very much the same even though we understand about it. So there are going to be lots of things that are the same because the process of dissociation, the verb, it has not really changed.
• 45:07
  Our understanding of it has improved, and our understanding of the process can be improved in the new guidelines, which they are in process of working on. And so in that way, they are very attuned to who you are in your noun identity. And that yes they hear you that we would like the guidelines to be updated and they are already working on it. That was already in discussion And so hearing that and understanding that, I hope that gives some context because it's not a big capital T them out there working against you trying to survive and be in therapy and learn about things. They are on your side.
• 45:56
  We are on the same team. And we have got to support each other because it's not the ISTD that needs to be called out. These people in the ISSTD, you all, if you trust me at all or have known me at all or have heard us at all or know who we are, let me tell you that these are humble and good people. Many most of them. And they are working hard at the heart of this organization.
• 46:27
  And the people at the heart of it, in the middle of this, have dealt with the same things you have. They have dealt with clinicians who are mean. They have dealt with clinicians who are nasty. They have dealt with clinicians who are not doing it well. They have dealt with clinicians who are not doing it right.
• 46:46
  They have dealt with clinicians who don't believe them. These people live and work in the same world that you are trying to get treatment. They know the things that you face, not because they are so over you and oppressing you and know so much more than you, but because they have to deal with the same people you have to deal with. So they know what's out there, the good and the bad and the ugly. So instead focusing on what is hard and what keeps us separate, whether that's internally or externally, we need to associate together and unite in support of each other.
• 47:30
  I know that's my own soapbox, but I felt it was really important and because I had the words to share, I wanted to explain. Because it's not a dismissing of the noun, it's the focusing on the process, the verb. Because doing that is how they support you, the noun. We're the nouns. You get to be you and I get to be me, and everyone's in favor of that.
• 47:53
  We can agree on that. And if you want to be represented because you're this kind or that kind of noun, if you want to be represented or understood or heard, then participate. Come to the meetings, help fund the research. Participate when they look for people to participate in the research. Do what you can as you are able to associate.
• 48:22
  I mean that with all of us, with each other. When I have a guest on the podcast, that's associating. When you listen to the podcast, that's associating. When you leave a comment on a friend or check on someone that you know is struggling, that's associating. When you're kind to a new alter that's come out to a friend and both the friend and the new alter are disoriented and you reach out to them with kind words, that's associating.
• 48:55
  When you support someone on a hard day because you know what it's like to have flashbacks or to struggle or to not know that you are loved and you remind someone that they matter, that they are loved. That's associating. When you show someone else how to bullet journal or how to track meds or how to keep a calendar that's associating. When we care and love and support for each other that is associating building our resources to be resilient as a community in the same way that we are learning to do that internally in therapy. Dissociation in this presentation by Mary Anne Kate and Christine Forner.
• 49:49
  There is a slide that was talking about the brain and neurobiology and it said that when we are dissociating we stop knowing and we stop feeling. So as we associate as a community we need to start knowing and we need to start feeling internally and externally. We've got to work together instead of against each other. We've got to listen to each other instead of shouting at each other or ignoring each other or dismissing each other. And we've got to remember that every part, every person, every person on the ISSTD board, every part of your system, every part of my system, we're human.
• 50:42
  We're just people. And we're learning, and we're feeling, and we're knowing. And the more we know and feel together the more we associate together the more resilient we will be. The end of Christine Forner's presentation was about the neurobiology of the brain and how dissociative processes work and it was fascinating and I loved her take on it and it was just fantastic. I want her to come talk about this.
• 51:17
  She's going to come talk to us about this. I hope it is helpful to you. I very much enjoyed it. So she will be on in another episode to talk about it. But basically she talked about the brain and how dissociation literally neurobiologically shuts down the hardware of our brain, and how healing happens when we upgrade the software of our brain through attachment.
• 51:48
  And attachment matters. Connection is everything. And that's where healing happens because that's association. So as connection increases, dissociation decreases. The challenge is that as dissociation decreases, our experience of feelings and memories increase.
• 52:14
  This is why sometimes we have disrupted connections or we struggle through the pandemic when we can't reach out to our friends, when we can't remember who is safe and who is not, even though cognitively somewhere in our brain that's very grounded. Because it's not actually that we've forgotten that so and so was a safe person. It's that as our experience of feelings and memories goes up because our dissociation is going down, our need for connection actually goes up as well. And that in itself is a trigger for people. It's why there's a backlash and this pendulum swing and political movements from one back to the other.
• 53:05
  It's why we have a solid time of being very connected and being very stable and thinking we're making progress, and then everything feels like it falls apart. It's why we finally get connected and then suddenly are struggling because we feel disconnected and push those connections away and everything gets worse than it was except not because we're more aware than we were before because this cycle is repeating where as we increase connection while we're learning to heal, right? This is what brings healing is increasing connection. So I'm going to say it one more time, healing comes through connection but it's a very delicate thing because as we increase connection dissociation goes down, which is good and healing and gives us a greater sense of oneself. I don't mean without everybody or that we're losing pieces.
• 54:07
  I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about greater access to thoughts and feelings and memories. I'm talking about greater presence in the now time. I'm talking about greater presence and knowing what's happening around us, what's happening to us, what our preferences are, what we choose, what we like, what we don't like. All of these things that make us who we are regardless of which parts are involved.
• 54:36
  As dissociation goes down that happens more and as our experience of feelings and memories go up our need for connection goes up. And this is maybe for many of us the most terrifying part of therapy. As healing happens, as we learn to connect, our awareness increases and we actually need that connection more. If you stop and think about it, it makes a lot of sense. We say that, we don't need anyone, we don't need anything, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine because we are dissociated, because it is hard.
• 55:27
  Increasing connection heals and comforts and soothes and provides care for what is hard. But it also brings awareness to it. And that's what's so scary. And because it brings awareness to it, our need for connection increases so that we become more dependent on that care. I don't mean in an unhealthy dependent, I mean in a good healthy normal what should be happening even with friends or a spouse or with children, the need for connection increases.
• 56:04
  And so it becomes more terrifying because the more you learn to trust it the more you need it because the more aware you are of what needs comforting and what needs care. And that is a big risk to trust a friend or a therapist or a spouse to believe that they will still be there when it already feels like you need them too much when it already feels like when you start out thinking that you need too much simply because you exist. It is a terrifying thing to get better at existing and need even more. And this is the very slow dance through therapy and real life with friends and with safe chosen family because you are risking greater and greater vulnerability and greater and greater authenticity the more that you connect because the result of connection is increased awareness and increased healing which draws attention to that which needs healing. That's what dissociation going down is.
• 57:32
  This is why therapy sometimes so often really feels worse before it feels better because it's hard what we're doing to face what we have put away and it's hard what we're doing to feel what we have avoided. But associating with internal and external resources and connections that bring healing and support us through healing also has the same effect on the connection itself. Meaning the more we associate the stronger we become. The more we connect the stronger that connection becomes. So yes, it's terrifying because you're needing more.
• 58:23
  Really, you already needed that. You're just more aware that you need it. But also, the more that you're aware that you need it and the more you're increasing the connection, the stronger that connection becomes so it really can bear the weight of it. When both people in the relationship, whether that's the therapist and the client or whether that's you and a friend or whether that's you and chosen family the more that you are both doing this in healthy and good and positive ways with all the boundaries that create safety that you need, whatever that looks like for you and whichever relationship you're thinking of, the more that you do that, the more that you put into it, the stronger it becomes so that it actually is enough because you were enough all along. Someone sent us a book of poems called All Along You Were Blooming by Morgan Harper Nichols, and I want to read one of them.
• 59:41
  I am not sure who has made you feel insignificant, but I can assure you, no matter how you have been made to feel, your voice deserves to be heard. Your words are meant to be felt, and the life that comes out of you is unique to you and no one else. And when the words do finally come, and you find the courage to open up, your story will not be too much. You were meant to give your all, and you were also meant to be loved. You were meant to have meaningful connection beyond what you feel you are worthy of.
• 1:00:23
  Never let anyone who cannot bear your pain make you feel you are unbearable. Not everyone is capable of walking with you, but that does not mean you are not worthy of belonging. I promise you, there will be other people. There will be other people who are willing to take the time for you and not because they pity you but because they believe in the kind of love that is true. The kind of love that is not envious.
• 1:00:54
  The kind of love that is not proud. I know you have been let down, but please don't give up on true love now. It is kind and it is real, no matter how you have been made to feel. Don't give up on love. Love has not given up on you.
• 1:01:31
  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. We'll see you there.