Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 824: Women Therapists on Healing with Susan Pease Banitt

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Episode 824: Women Therapists on Healing with Susan Pease Banitt · The Trauma Therapist

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  Trauma Therapist Podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right
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  now. Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma
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  Therapist Podcast and signing up today or welcome back to the Trauma Thepist podcast.
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  My name is Gamiferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible
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  selves, to be human, to be real, not just a clinician.
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  I'm a big believer in who we are is more important than what we know,
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  and this requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires
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  intention. Can learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma
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  Therapist Project dot com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get
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  started. So five four, three, two and one, our folks,
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  welcome back to the podcast. I am very excited at back. Susan PA's
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  Bannett. Susan welcome, Thank you. I'm really happy to be talking to
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  you again. Guy. Awesome, awesome. So Susan is celebrating her forty
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  ninth anniversary in the field of mental health, where she's been a leader integrating
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  spiritual modalities with traditional practice. Susan is the award winning author of This Trauma
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  tool Kit, Healing PTSD from the Inside Out and Wisdom, Attachment and Love
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  and Trauma Therapy Beyond Evidence Based Practice. Her newest book, Women Therapist on
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  Healing will be released in the fall of twenty twenty four from North Atlantic Books.
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  And we're gonna be talking a lot about that today. Welcome back,
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  Susan. Thank thank you so much. So before we get going, remind
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  our listeners where you're from originally and where you are currently. Where I'm from
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  originally meaning where I was born or yeah's oh, okay, come yes.
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  So I was a California girl. I was born in Palm Springs, but
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  lived in the Bay Area my whole childhood and the last from nine years old
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  till the time I left in Palo Alto. In the beginning of the dotcom
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  area era, everything was just being born and so there was a lot of
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  open mindedness and a lot of experimentation, and I really credit that for my
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  interest in alternative and healing therapies being accepted in that environment and malu and then
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  again when I went to the Harvard Teaching Hospitals. So it was a great
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  place to grow up. Then I moved to Boston for seventeen years, and
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  then I moved back to the West Coast. And I have been in the
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  Northwest for how old are my kids? I've been here for twenty eight years
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  in the Northwest. Where in the Northwest, I'm in Portland, Ore again.
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  Oh okay, you know him in bed? No, I didn't know
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  that. Yeah, we'll have to get together and a half years. Yeah,
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  awesome. So let's dive into this, this this new book, Woman
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  Therapist, Unhealing. How did this come about? Why did this come about?
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  Yeah, thanks for asking. Okay, So it was COVID and I
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  at the beginning of COVID I had become very sick. I was diagnosed with
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  a little brain tumor. I had an unusual sinus problem that required surgery I
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  got. I ended up getting COVID three times. I had viral man and
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  I meanitis like it was nuts. And I got really behind my cus.
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  So the following year, I was doing a big weekend long CU with a
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  major name in the trauma field who I won't name, but who's very good
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  in many ways. But what happened during that weekend is that this person kept
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  mentioning people they respected as trauma experts in the field and over, you know,
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  sixteen hours of workshops and with eight names being mentioned, the only only
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  female name that was mentioned was Francine Shapiro, and they kind of couldn't avoid
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  mentioning her. And I just something kind of broken me because I know so
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  many amazing women clinicians who are published to are experts, who are recognized as
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  experts. And I realized that in my history of listening to these guys talk,
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  and I mean all of them at the top, I never hear them
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  acknowledgeablemen unless they absolutely are forced to because they're talking about about like a specific
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  study or so. But in terms of who they admire and who they learned
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  from, they don't acknowledge us. And I was like, that's it.
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  I am going to call a bunch of my friends and say an email and
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  say want to write a book with me? And they all said yes.
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  So I have this really nice diverse I have several BIPOD people, which is
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  black Indigenous people of color, several LGBTQ plus people and from all areas of
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  the country, and at least one from another country. So it's it's been
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  a delightful thing. It was quite a long process getting it done, and
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  was my first time doing in anthology. But one of the things I asked
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  was because women learn and process their trauma in sharing rather than question answer,
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  I asked my authors to reveal a little bit of their journey themselves in their
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  journey, and some authors wrote an entire chapter that was autobiographical, and some
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  like myself, put poignant parts of their journey on the page to illustrate the
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  things they were trying to tease. So was that a prerequisite for being a
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  part of this anthology? Yeah, I mean sort of. I mean I
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  requested it. I wasn't going to. I don't like being super forceful like
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  you have to. But I explained why. I explained what the project was
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  looking like. And the project was originally entitled Wild Geese because of the and
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  I write about that in the introduction, because of the cooperative nature of goose
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  leadership. Is it that one the person in the front tires, somebody else
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  takes their place, and it's functions on a basis of empathy. So I
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  thought that for women reading, if they could connect to these women's stories as
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  sort of part of the flock, you know, it would be really helpful
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  because we all have our own stories, all of us do. Yeah,
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  And I love that idea, and it's how we connect with people. You
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  know, there's a lot of there's a strong sense in this field to oftentimes
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  not share our own story because it may it in the way and boundaries and
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  this and that. But when we hear people talking about themselves and sharing their
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  stories, it creates this connection that we need for healing. And to hear
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  you talk about the genesis of this book. To me, I'm not surprised,
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  but it's so crazy. You know, there's so many of the people
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  at therapists are women. The majority of them are with him. That's what
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  I write about in the introduction is like, the majority of the consumers are
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  women, the majority of the therapists are women. Like and but why do
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  we always have the same four or five guys at the top telling us about
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  what we should be doing in our experience without acknowledging their women therapists And they
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  have inevitably seen over the years. They're people that they've leaned information from.
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  And it's I you know, I talk about the patriarchal structure and in my
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  chapter and Christine Forner, who I'm sure you've interviewed from ISSTV. Her whole
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  chapter is called How Feminisms Saved My Life, and she talks about this in
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  the field too. Of like, it's interesting how it's still kind of almost
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  blind to the field of trauma, the fact that women are voices are suppressed,
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  the fact that, you know, when you look at the trauma summits
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  out there and even the mental health summits out there, you do see those
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  four or five men that we all see that we all know, many of
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  whom are very well respected and for good reasons. But that kind of feels
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  like a holdover. It does to me feel like there is a movement,
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  a current that is replacing that in a sense with you know, with what
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  you're talking about here, aside from bringing women together. You mentioned anthology,
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  and that is what basically a collection of Yes is. Every chapter is written
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  by a different trauma expert in their field. Okay, it was this book
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  is The overarching theme is trauma. Yes. It's divided into three sections.
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  Trauma and Association is the first section. Intersectionality is the second section, and
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  medical I forget how we worded it, medical illness is the third section.
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  Because medical traumas often are not acknowledged or talked about, and yet everybody I've
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  seen with a trauma history has had profoundly traumatic interactions with the medical establishment.
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  So walk us through, Susan, if you get more specific about the different
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  elements of these chapters or sections of the books, give us a little juice
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  there, if you would. Okay, can you be a little more specific,
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  I'm wanting. Yeah, you said the first part was from association.
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  From association, Well did you choose one author for that? Actually, the
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  structure came after the topics came in, because I asked people to submit the
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  topics they wanted to write on, and then as I started reading the chapters,
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  I realized they fell into these like three basic camps, and so I
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  really wanted to highlight those so that people in the bookstart her browsing through could
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  be like, oh, Wow, there's a whole section on intersectionality and feminism
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  that really lights me up, and I want to read that, you know.
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  Okay, So the first part was the dissociation. Talk a little bit
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  about that. Why, how is that important to you? How did that
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  become important to you? That is an emerging that is a really emerging hot
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  topic in the field, and you probably I'm sure you've interviewed Jamie Merritch a
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  few times at this point. Jamie's one of my authors actually in that section,
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  and she and I have corresponded a lot, and I was part of
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  her book Dissociation Made Simple. And I've been a member of the International Society
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  for the Study of traumat and Dissociation for a number of years because I felt
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  like when I was supervising people and training people, dissociation was never really on
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  the curriculum for therapists. It was a big, ironically enough, light spot,
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  which is what dissociation is. Like. We were dissociating away from the
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  association right as a profession, and I wanted to interrupt that, and I
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  wanted to call people's attention. So I've been talking about dissociation for a really
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  long time, so is NAT And my chapter is called did that really Happen
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  to Me? And it's a workshop I've given about memory and what constitutes are
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  remembory and what is a recovered memory, because people have a lot of ideas
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  about that in the general public that actually aren't really true. For example,
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  it's like you're sitting there one day in therapy, and all of a sudden,
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  like this whole memory flashes into your head and it's like a Hollywood movie
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  almost, like really dramatic, And that happens occasionally, but more often what
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  I talk about is that the memory, instead of being stored a whole in
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  the brain, gets broken up into pieces and stored. So and there's three
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  And I do this in my workshops of like ask people to think about a
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  memory that you've had, and now think about the components of that memory,
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  and they always break down into three categories, which is the sensory input site,
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  hearing, taste, touch, smell. Right, there's the interception,
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  the emotional feeling of what's happening, so surprise, joy, shock, horror,
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  whatever's going on inside. And then the third part is the narrative,
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  the story of what happened, and what happens is the brain does this divide
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  and conquer. If you're under eight years old, the brain splits those memories
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  up into the components, up into different places. When they come together and
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  reassociate is when you have the whole you realize this thing really happened. But
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  what's really really common and not really talked about as much as I'd like it
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  to be. Is that most of clients with horrendous histories, they have what
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  I call memory fragments, and they've had them their whole life. And those
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  memory fragments can be like a visual snapshot. Sometimes it's just like a picture
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  they have in their mind that they don't they think of it as a daydream
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  or fantasy rather than as an actual memory. Or they have a persistent somatic
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  state that they can't shake, like feel like deep deep feelings of abandonment that
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  they don't know where it comes from and they don't know how to get rid
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  of it. That is a memory fragment for a lot of people. Or
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  in my case, and what I wrote about in my book was I had
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  a narrative fragment was I think this person molested me. And that was the
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  thought I'd been having for over at that point, let's see, is forty
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  two, So yeah, I've been having that thought for about twenty years at
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  that point, but no therapist had ever been able to help me with that.
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  And also trauma was such a new field that there wasn't kind of the
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  skill level back then that there is now. So in my case, my
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  narrative fragment when I said it, and my therapist I'd say that again,
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  and I said it again, and then it was a total body knowing that
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  that had happened. It was undeniable. It was like what I say,
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  is my mind surrendered its disbelief. Like in a second, it was clear
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  that something had happened. It took a long time for the full memory to
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  emerge, but the veracity of that was apparent at that point and then I
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  could start working with it. Intersectionality. Talk a little bit about that chapter.
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  What did you want to bring forth? Well, there's a lot of
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  kinds of traumas that people have that aren't really talked about that well in the
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  DSM or other places, and the trauma of racism and sexism are among those.
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  And in that section, my wonderful friend Javalam Hardy, who I've known
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  for years, we met on the nas W board. She's African American,
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  and she writes she joins up intergenerational African American trauma with Bowenian family therapy theory
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  in her chapter and how that really helped her see things in what she's trying
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  to bring to her community. And I was like, wow, that's amazing,
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  Like I've never seen those things put in the same place, you know.
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  And another friend of mine, Lianne Johnson, she's a I met her
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  through comedy sports. She's an improvisational actress and storyteller, but she also runs
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  the diversity part of the organ healthcare plan and she's so she considered her a
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  systems therapist, and she has her degree in organizational psychology. And she talks
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  about the trauma of her life and the racism and then how that's affected her
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  job, and how that racism has continued to follow her into her job and
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  over time. Those things are very traumatizing, and I think they're more traumatizing
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  than we actually have given them credit for. So yeah, in her chapter,
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  she talks about the first time she heard the N word, she was
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  ten years old, and it sent her into a full body panic and reaction.
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  Like that's intense, and it's not something that I here talked about in
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  trauma conferences. It's not something I see on assessments, right, So these
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  voices haven't been brought to the Ford. And then I have another friend,
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  Claudia and Vilakova from Chicago area, who I met her an Evolution of Psychotherapy
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  conference years ago, and subsequent to that she had a real breakthrough of consciousness
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  about herself, her sexual identity, and her indigenous identity. She had a
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  grandmother who was a Corndera from Mexico, and she fully has embraced the indigenous
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  aspects of her lineage and herself. And her titles called Landback, and it's
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  written in a very storytelling, circular style, which is a more indigenous way
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  of talking, and it's beautiful. And she and I have talked about several
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  times the trauma of losing your land, which is not something that a lot
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  of Americans dial into for various reasons. So that's very profound to me that
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  we don't really ever talk about those things in trauma therapy. You know,
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  it's interesting Susan, hearing you talk, you know, and putting together the
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  pieces of the book you're sharing so far, I'm getting the sense of there
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  seems to be like a healthy frush stration of why are we not listening?
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  Why are we not hearing? Why are we not putting the pieces of the
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  puzzle together that we've had, but we're not listening, We're not hearing them.
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  You know, there's a sense of what are we doing? How come
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  we're not taking advantage of this, right, that's the sense I'm getting the
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  energy that's coming forth well, and I think that that the why I think
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  that's an easy question to answer is because if everybody at the top is a
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  white academic man, what do they know about this? It's not off their
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  lived experience, you know, right right? All right? So, and
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  then finally, the last part of the book, the last chapter, if
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  you will talk to us a little bit about that. I'm sorry say that
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  again. The last part of the book, the last Oh, yes,
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  intersectionality and yes. So my colleague and friend, Jade Barclay is in Australia
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  and she is mixed Maori and European. She's dealt with a lot of chronic
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  invisible illness. They call it things like Ellers dan Loews, syndrome, pots
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  and things that the Western medical establishment is not only not very good at helping
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  with, but also very disbelieving of, especially in years past. I think
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  we're slowly creeping up to awareness about those things. And she's an academic who's
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  done like really amazing work in this area and has networked with a lot of
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  people in her country around this and is bringing a lot of awareness to those
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  things. So she writes about that, and Lisa Daniel Chuck, past president
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  of is STD, just gave birth, as you know, probably a little
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  while ago, and she had she writes about kind of a wonder full experience
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  in the hospital and how necessary a caring holding environment emotionally is to a good
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  physical outcome, which I also think. I was a medical social worker,
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  so I know that that's true. In the Harvard Teaching Hospitals at that time
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  when I was working there in the early nineties, they were actually fairly aware
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  of that, and they were aware that the social worker could bring that modo,
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  if you will, to their units and to their clinics, and they
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  have a lot of social workers. And then my colleague, Aileen Avenni,
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  who also was very involved WITHSTD, and she was past chairperson of the Ritual
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  Abuse and Mind Control Special Interest Group, which I've been heavily a part of
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  in my career. And she started off in oncology like I did, and
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  eventually she started having these patients show up in her practice and miss again a
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  bunch of them with these backgrounds of what she called the cult abuse or ritual
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  abuse, and started diving into that and it's become a specialty of hers,
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  and she's one of my go to people when I get stumped. So she
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  writes a very interesting narrative where she brings you along from her beginnings as a
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  therapist, like how she discovered this world, what she did about it,
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  how she learned to work with it, and what it is, which,
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  to my knowledge, I have never seen aside from Allison Miller's book, which
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  is a little different. Her books are more like textbooks. This is kind
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  of a more personal narrative account of how she is a clinician, walked into
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  this world, how it affected her, and how she handled it. So
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  kind of in summary, what is your hope or the therapists out there who
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  are listening to this who are really intrigued by this, What is your hope
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  that they will get from this book that will take a well, I hope
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  that they feel seen, for one thing, because I feel like there's been
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  this stigma of therapists who say I have trauma, I have dissociation or id
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  ID or I'm honestly like it's still considered quite taboo in some circles to have
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  therapists be out like that. But like I say in the book, there
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  is no them there's only us, and we shouldn't be, as therapists,
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  excluded from the circle of healing and compassion because we're holding a certain boundary for
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  other people. And I want therapists to feel like not only educated by the
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  things in this book, but also nurtured by it. Awesome, awesome,
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  all right, Susan once again, books called Woman Therapists on Healing to be
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  released in the fall of twenty twenty four. That's still correct. Yeah,
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  I think we're looking at November release right now. Okay, okay. Awesome.
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  Well, so exciting talking to you, so inspiring. So you've got
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  so much energy. I mean, you can feel it. I love it.
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  Pleasure talking to you as all. Yeah, pleasure talking to you too.
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  I'll come back anytime, and anytime I'll be sending some of my authors
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  your way as well. Okay, take care, all right, thank you,
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  bye bye. Yeah,