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Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Over:
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.
Speaker 2:Today, we're very excited to welcome back Susan Peace Bennett, who we interviewed again to discuss her recent presentation at the ISSTD and a little bit more about attachment and ritual abuse. Susan Peace Banette is a social worker, psychotherapist, and author who specializes in the treatment of severe trauma and PTSD. She has worked in the field of mental health for more than four decades in diverse settings, inpatient, outpatient, and medical with adults and children, and trained in Harvard Medical Teaching Hospitals in Boston. She wrote the books The Healing PTSD from the Inside Out and Wisdom Attachment and Love in Beyond Evidence Based Practice. For these, she has won several awards, including the Alumni Media Award for written work by Simmons College School of Social Work and the Silver Nautilus Award for Health and Healing.
Speaker 2:Susan speaks internationally on the psychological and holistic treatment of PTSD. She lives and has a private practice in Portland, Oregon. Welcome back, Susan Peace Bennett. Thank you for coming back on the podcast again. You're welcome.
Speaker 2:Just you can share if you want to share a little bit about, what you've been up to with ISSTD and you did you present there? Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yes, I did I actually presented two workshops there. I presented a talk on the role of attachment rupture and repair in treating people who've been ritually abused and mind controlled was one talk that I gave, and the second talk was a lot lighter. It was about improvisational comedy for treating trauma survivors, and that was a ton of fun. And I presented that second workshop with Lisa Danlchuk, who's on the board of ISSTD.
Speaker 2:Oh, that sounds really fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was great. It was a great, it was a nice contrast, because of course treating DID and ritual abuse survivors is a really heavy topic and a really important topic, but it's also, you know, we can all still laugh and rebuild our neural networks with creative expressions such as comedy, so they're both important.
Speaker 2:So what does that look like
Speaker 1:With comedy in therapy, okay. Well, I have been doing improvisational comedy for about the last six years, and I also have been performing for about the last five years, and what I originally thought was I wanted to get lighter on my feet for presenting work, and also just have an outlet for performing. But what I didn't realize was how the games themselves in improvisational comedy, which is not stand up and it's not sketch, it's not written, it's all completely made up on the spot. And so there's a lot of games that improvisers play to kind of develop the neural network skills necessary for performing on stage and being quick and able to, what we call yes and, what's going on on stage, because an argument on stage isn't funny. It's more funny if people go along with each other and don't get narcissistically injured in that process, right?
Speaker 1:So that's funny. What I realized is that I started using, I thought improvisational games would be good for my classes, which are based on my book, The Trauma Toolkit. I give a seven or eight week class based on that book, and a lot of the people who come to that class, like everybody has PTSD, and a lot of them have social anxiety. So to break the ice and to get people looking at each other and relaxing, I thought, I'll do some comedy games. And it worked beautifully, And I still do it.
Speaker 1:I'll still have sessions where we play some comedy games and kind of get people loosened up, because if you're playing a game where you have to interact with each other, you have to look, and then often people are laughing, and if they're laughing, they're breathing, and if they're laughing and breathing, they're relaxing. So it's turned out to be an awesome part of the class intervention, so that's one use for it. The other is that for me, what I found is, which surprises me in a way, is that there's actually nothing too dark to laugh about. There's a saying in comedy that tragedy plus time equals comedy, right? Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls it the sacred profane.
Speaker 1:The sacred profane, exactly. And of course, I would never make fun of anybody or make them the butt of my joke, but when I can engage in a kind of irony or lightness or sarcasm about extreme abuse or the kind of weird, stupid things that happen when people are abusing each other that are sometimes actually comical, and I'm able to engage at that level with my client, they feel really joined with, and it gives them sort of a more observing ego kind of stance towards what's happened to them.
Speaker 2:It sounds like it walks them right back up the ladder, in a polyvagal sense.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes, exactly, because it's that social connection. Like humor, I think humor evolved, if it evolved. I think the humor might have been there right from the very beginning, but, because animals seem to also have a sense of humor. It's a form of connection, Right?
Speaker 2:So going from the light to the dark, first of all, we even get into anything about what you shared a little bit, what was that like to be sort of back talking about ritual abuse again with ISSTD?
Speaker 1:Well, it was amazing because I have presented there, I wanna say this was my sixth time, I've kind of lost count, I think this is my sixth year that I presented with them, but they have never overtly called for the topic of ritual abuse and mind control to be addressed overtly in any conference I've been a part of before this one. And there was a big call that went out to our special interest group saying, The organization really wants presenters from our special interest group to present. And I was one of the people that submitted around that, because, you know, there's what I call in my book organic DID, and then what I've called, people call different things engineered DID, or DID that's produced in a systematic way by handlers so that they can manipulate people and enslave them. And a lot of children that are involved in sexual slavery are mind controlled in that way, in a very deliberate way. So it's a very tricky treatment, because part of that conditioning involves not only torture, but torture in the direction to oppose therapy.
Speaker 1:So a lot of survivors are conditioned against therapy, clinical language, clinical interventions, and you know, they're between a rock and a hard place in terms of wanting to get help, but also being conditioned against getting help, if that makes sense. It does. So, yeah. So ruptures in that setting can be very, like even small ruptures can be big devastations in treatment. And so I really wanted to address that, the importance of the alliance, and really monitoring one's work for ruptures, both big and small, and then knowing how to spot them, knowing how to repair them, and knowing how to address them in the context of being DID and, ritually abused and mind controlled.
Speaker 2:Wow. So let's break it down a little bit. We actually have not on this podcast gone there yet for lots of different reasons except for, a couple guests, both Colin Ross and Warwick Middleton both just went straight there. And so that was on there, but we've not responded to it at all yet. So can you give us, just for the listeners, of a description of what ritual abuse is or organized abuse or mind control, whatever phrasing you're used to using?
Speaker 2:How would you describe that or explain that?
Speaker 1:Okay, so all those terms mean something slightly different, and let's see if I can explain it clearly. I'm thinking about a Venn diagram. So you have one circle that's organized abuse, and then you have a circle that's ritual abuse, and then you have a circle that's mind control. Ritual abuse is any kind of, like ceremonial, I wanna say religious based, but sometimes that's not the purpose of it, but let's just, for the sake of what we're talking about now, say there's often a religious or ceremonial or ritual aspect to it, and it's getting abused in the context of that religion or ritual or ceremony group. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yes. And so church organizations, satanic organizations, intergenerational cult organizations can all fall into that. But there's also organizations like the Mafia and other organizations that do mind control type conditioning, and the military also does it in various countries in the world. So while church groups and kind of religiously oriented groups can be players, other big organizations can be players, so you can see there's an overlap between the ritual abuse world and the organizational world. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yes. Okay, and then if you think of the third circle as being like mind control, Then mind control can happen in many settings. Mind control can happen in families that aren't in any organization. They're just really good at controlling people's minds. They can happen in psychiatry settings, but mostly they happen in overall organized settings.
Speaker 1:And the reason I believe that ritual abuse and mind control are linked, from my research, and from my sister's research and other researchers, is that there, and I presented this, there's a timeline. So after World War II ended, the Office for Strategic Services was created, which was a forerunner to the CIA. And within that group, within the Office of Strategic Services, there were people that created another group, and I'm gonna see if I can like pull that up, And that group was called Scientific Intelligence. So that was in 1949, Doctor. Willard Mackle, and he was trying to resist Manchurian candidate technology from Russia, and he created this Department of Mind Control.
Speaker 1:In our government, this is documented, and actually my documentation for that piece of fact comes from the CIA's own website. I have a link to it. So the timeline is like, had, OSS was founded in 1942, so even prior to the end of the war. 1945, there was an Operation Paperclip that recruited Nazi scientists for their Manhattan Project and secret mind control programs in The United States. By 1949, it was the Office of Scientific Intelligence that was overseeing that.
Speaker 1:In 1952, that became Project Bluebird, which became MK Ultra, which is also known by the names of Artichoke, MK Naomi, MK Delta, and QK Hilltop, among others. And this went on as a not too big secret program, not too big of a secret secret program in the government. But eventually, more and more people started to find out about these things, and for a variety of reasons I won't go into here, it became, it started to become, Congress started to become aware of it, and there became an investigation in the Church Committee from 1975 to 1977. In 1973, though, Richard Helms ordered a lot of M. K.
Speaker 1:Ultraman's documents to be destroyed, which they were. We still have a lot of documents, though, and they can be found online. And there's more disclosures being made all the time. So at the end of the Church Committee, after these Freedom of Information Act disclosures, they ended MKULTRA officially. However, we have a lot of people, numbering probably in the hundreds, who claimed that MP Ultra continued, it just kind of went underground, and then it went into levels of security that not even the president maybe had access to.
Speaker 1:So these were highly, I hate to use this word scientific, because it's such an evil technology, but they were scientific. Like, these people were brilliant. They were accomplished in the Nazi death camps. They could do all experimentation they wanted to unfettered. They had a ton of information already by the end of World War II, and they continued their work in various institutions in The United States and Canada, and probably other places as well.
Speaker 1:And Cullen Ross has actually written quite a bit about this, too. Yes. Yeah, and he knows, you know, and it's interesting because there's been a media blackout about this in The United States, even when the Canadian, a group in Canada successfully sued the American government and won hundreds of thousands of dollars for their mind control programs, mostly at McGill, but also other places. This was common knowledge in Canada, and no Americans that I talked to knew about it at all. So they've been very successful in covering it up, because like all abuse, it's hard to hear about, and people don't really want to know about it.
Speaker 1:At some level, we don't really wanna hear these things because they injure us, and they make us scared, and our mind doesn't want to accept them as reality. So it's sort of, when people are like, How could they hide this for so long? It's like, well A, they didn't, and B, it's kind of easy to hide something from somebody if they don't want to know about it. Right. Right?
Speaker 1:So, yeah. So that's kind of the history of that. What I think the interaction is, is that a lot of my clients who have successfully escaped those groups and come out of a lot of their conditioning and programming have done so through spiritual means. So it struck me as a very smart but evil idea to close spiritual doors for people, which I think is one of the purposes of ritual abuse. That's just my theory.
Speaker 1:I think that that is a way, if you can't tolerate having any kind of spiritual connection because it's too triggering, then you've just closed a backdoor for people to escape out of control and conditioning. And it's smart. It's smart to do that. That's profound.
Speaker 2:That's really profound.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And so I've had clients that had, of course, Christian doors closed, because some of their, a lot of the abuse in the West was done in a Christian context, but have been able to find their way out through yogic technologies or Buddhism or, Shamanism or other kind of spiritual technologies and ways of being.
Speaker 2:When you talk about the formal programs being shut down or going underground underground for some of those things. I know that's not all of them, but Mhmm. Government ones or other ones. How common is it for those who were then disconnected from the formal experience of that to then grow up and repeat what they had learned in sort of a learned behavior kind of way even if it wasn't associated with the actual program anymore? Like, to new generations of children?
Speaker 2:Do we know?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really hard to collect statistics on this when the official government position of this doesn't exist. And the reason that that's been the official position, of course, is that our own government has been involved in it. So it's a state secret, basically. It's a top secret. So I actually have a colleague who I won't name, but she was talking to some friends of hers who were in the CIA and other organizations, and she said, Well, I know this is going on, and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:And they looked at her and said, That's above your security clearance to discuss. And she was like, I'm not even in the government. Right, so they couldn't say anything about it because they have permission to talk about it. It's just those of us who are stumbling on this because our clients are disclosing it to us. And also, people are disclosing a lot through autobiographies, and also now on YouTube.
Speaker 1:So that's an interesting turn of events. There's a lot of disclosure happening, and some brave souls have put themselves out there and will continue to put themselves out there. But mostly, those people show up in therapies with therapists who are willing to do this work and then sort of quietly go about healing themselves. It's like anything else, right? You, comes back to Freud, whatever is not remembered or acknowledged is destined to be acted out.
Speaker 1:And that's a very easy way to control people. But the other thing to remember is that when people are split and handled and tortured into compliance and conditions, a lot of people don't like the word programs, but some people do use the word programs, then it's a whole different thing, because getting out is extremely difficult because of the conditioning, and the sophisticated level of conditioning. Because they've been working at this for a long time. They've gotten really good at this. The people who create this problem have gotten exceedingly good at what they do.
Speaker 1:And we therapists, I feel like we're always trying to play catch up.
Speaker 2:How does a therapist, besides joining ISSTD, which we talked about last time you were on, how do they learn how to help with this?
Speaker 1:Well, here's the good news and the bad news. So, the good news, and this is, I got, there was a woman who wrote a book, I believe it's called Unshackled, Kathleen Sullivan, if I'm remembering correctly. She and I corresponded years ago because she had just finished social work school and had extricated herself. And she was very reassuring to me. She said, she was like, Hey, my therapist didn't have any special knowledge or skills in this area, but she was just a really good therapist.
Speaker 1:And she said, you know, she's like, I extricated myself with her help of just being a good enough therapist. And she's like, If you're good at what you do, and you're good at maintaining that good therapy relationship and connection with somebody, that's already a lot. And you don't have to have special deprogramming skills or anything like that. But some people choose to go on and try to get those skills under their belt to also appreciate what they're up against.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because the therapy, because I treated both organic and engineered DID, and it is different, and the treatment feels really different, and it's much, much harder when it's engineered, because they actually program in roadblocks to healing, which is not true in the organic. You know, there's natural organic blocks to healing, but not things that have been conditioned in through torture to not remember, and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And to stop remembering, right? Yes. Going back to your topic at ISSTD when you presented, do you connect the alliance and the relationship like you were just talking about to helping, or people who have been through ritual abuse and, dealing with connection and rupture and repair and all of that? How does it tie in?
Speaker 1:Well, it ties in because most therapists, well, all therapists really have what I call thresholds of belief, and no matter what level you're at in this work, you're gonna have thresholds of belief, because we all have belief systems about reality, right? And so, right? So somebody like me, my threshold of belief is quite high, because I've heard a lot, because I worked on a child abuse hotline, because I heard stories that the general population hadn't heard, and I knew, or I thought I knew what was possible. And also because I just grew up in California in the 1970s, and I just, you know, I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of realities, you know? So my mind is very open to alternative experiences of all kinds, but that is unusual.
Speaker 1:Most therapists didn't grow up in the Bay Area in the 1970s, and most therapists have not worked on a hotline where they've heard thousands and thousands of stories of abuse, and they haven't yet maybe processed what is possible in the darkness of human nature. So this is what I say about thresholds of belief. They're largely unconscious and unknown. Like, we don't even know we have those thresholds until we encounter them, and hopefully bring them to supervision. Those thresholds are culturally determined, because, right, if you are in a Native American family and you talk about talking to the thunder beings and bringing rain, that's not a problem, but it's a huge problem you're in a psychiatric hospital and you're a white person in The United States, you know, right?
Speaker 1:So these are culturally determined thresholds. Also, consensual reality is a moving target. So when I first started in my career, nobody was talking about reincarnation, but now the polls are showing that 30 to 40% of the American public believe in reincarnation, which is a pretty big shift, right? And some of that has to do with all the yogic teaching that's happened, and permission to talk about those things. And if these thresholds give rise to countertransference.
Speaker 1:So when you hit a threshold in, and thresholds fall into three categories that I say horror, reality, and spirituality. And of course, those are all related. But when you hit one of those thresholds, you're gonna have a counter transference reaction to your client. Like, it's gonna hit you physically. If you hit a horror threshold, like you hear something that you just never heard of, never conceived of, didn't think was even possible for humans to do to each other, you're gonna hit that counter transference.
Speaker 1:And if you're not ready to deal with that threshold issue, you're going to respond inappropriately to your client. You're either gonna freeze and dissociate, or you're going to disbelieve your client overtly or covertly, or you're going to start crying, or something that's really off putting to your client, where they can tell you're out of control and not able to be present for them. And this quickly torpedoes therapy. So a lot of the clients that I get, if we just take horror as one threshold, just understanding that, yes, a group of people could be responsible for torturing a young child. I'm gonna keep it, that's gonna be triggering for some people, but I'm trying to keep it as vague as possible.
Speaker 1:But yes, that actually happens, and it can happen, and it does happen. Then if you can digest that information as a clinician, then when your client discloses something like that to you, you can handle it, and you can be present, you can stay present and not dissociate yourself in that moment, not judge them, or not react in an inappropriate way. But this is a really hard thing for most clinicians to do. You know, a few months ago I had an EMDR therapist call me for a consult, and then basically dumped their client in my lap. Is not the same as a consult.
Speaker 1:No, it's not at all. And I had said during the consult, they said, Well, you've been seeing this person for X amount of years, I assume you're gonna do a fairly lengthy termination, and then they didn't. Then they didn't. And it was incredibly damaging to this client, who this therapist was basically the first person they'd entrusted with this sort of top secret information. But the therapist just, they went so far into their reaction, they didn't even seek out supervision, They didn't seek out things that would have helped them navigate an appropriate either continuation of the therapy or an appropriate closure of the therapy.
Speaker 1:And it started to feel like they were going to, I assume, that the urgency came from a feeling of like, that the therapist was gonna kind of lose their mind if they didn't dump this client out quickly. Wow. And that's not okay. That's malpractice, you know, it's malpractice. So we really need to sort of gird our loins, as you wanna say.
Speaker 1:We need to prepare ourselves for what we might hear, and how things we might hear might be so far out of anything we ever expected to hear when we became therapists.
Speaker 2:I'm just thinking of different stories that I've heard similar to that, and there's it's such a deep violation and it's such a betrayal not just between the two people but of the process. And so then you're not just repairing a relationship with the client or the parts or whatever, but with the process to get them to even reengage in the process itself with someone else.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it can be, the disconnect can also be, it can also be more subtle than that. For example, I had a client who came to my class, they'd read my book, then they came to my class, and then, and only then, they felt safe enough to approach me about doing some therapy. And they had had a situation where they had actually had severe abuse, not as far as they knew by their parents, but by another party that was in the community. But the therapist was very psychoanalytic and kept trying to get them to talk about their parents. And it was enraging.
Speaker 1:It was incredibly frustrating and enraging, like, I have this other thing I need to tell you about. Oh, but let's talk about your family of origin. Like, no, I need to talk to you about this other thing, this horrible thing that happened to me in the community, right? That kind of rigidity and directiveness is not helpful, and I don't know that therapist, but one, it could be that they were scared of the material the client was gonna get into, and sort of unconsciously shifted it back to a more comfortable area, or it could be they were just so rigidly trained that they could not kind of wrap their head around the need to do something different.
Speaker 2:There was no flexibility there.
Speaker 1:Right, right. So those kinds of ruptures, like this client told me later, they were like, I was never gonna come back to therapy. I had two therapists, were, it was all both terrible, and I was actually never gonna come back to therapy until I read your book. And then I saw that you were actually here in my state, and then I came to your class and checked you out. So, I mean, thank goodness this person was able to reengage, but what you're saying is absolutely correct.
Speaker 1:It's like, it's not just happening between two people. It's happening between an entire helping profession and your patient. If you torpedo their ability to get help because they feel betrayed, you've torpedoed their ability to maybe get help ever again from anybody. And that is just a huge, huge violation, and something we never ever wanna do. I was taught, this was sort of drilled into me at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, like, if you do nothing else, they told me, if you do nothing else, leave your patient open to more therapy experiences.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons that we started the podcast was because of that rupture at a community level. Of it because of the way everything went down in the ninety's, part of it because of situations like this, all kinds of reasons. But there's this whole rupture between clinicians and survivors and trying to bring that community back together a little bit and bring some healing to that. And after we interviewed you, we probably get 10 or 15 emails a week just about that episode and that someone has gone to get therapy after years of staying away from therapy because of a rupture, they did not know that repair was possible. Wow.
Speaker 1:Wow. Wow. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's a big big thing and now it's something like the community is talking about and when when an issue comes up and someone's like, tried to get therapy but I went to the therapist, I was assigned and this terrible thing happened, People are like, but you can fix that. Go somewhere else. Talk to someone else. Or if it's an actual just issue you can work out with that therapist.
Speaker 2:Like people are open to options differently than before in just a few months of this being a conversation.
Speaker 1:Wow, I'm so happy to hear that. Wow, thank you for sharing that with me. That gives me hope. That gives me hope. Because it can be.
Speaker 1:One of my first questions with a new client is about previous therapy, and why are you here, what didn't work before, and let's talk about that. Because rupture is such a common experience with people who found that their trauma, their therapy for their trauma didn't work. And that comes back to that idea that part of why that falls apart is that trauma, A, it's a new field, and B, it really is a specialty field. And I really have come to believe that the average bear, the average therapist bear, is not equipped to handle intense trauma work. They're just not prepared.
Speaker 1:And they need special skills. It's a degree of difficulty that's extremely high. And especially if you're gonna see more than one. Because it requires a level of ongoing self care at all dimensions, so mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, to do this work. You have to be on your game about that, or you're gonna get eaten up by the work.
Speaker 1:So it's just like, I've compared it in the past to my husband being an interventional cardiologist. He goes inside of people's hearts and opens up blood vessels and puts stents in, and it's millimeters of space. You cannot expect an ordinary doctor to do anything like that. It's very tricky, specialized work. Right.
Speaker 1:And so is trauma therapy. It's very tricky, specialized work, and people's lives hang in the balance also in this work.
Speaker 2:Well, if you go to someone who's not prepared to handle that, then you are, I mean there's something about knowing ahead of time if I don't choose well it's just a sort of a matter of time until there's another rupture. Like I'm setting myself up so not talking about ruptures just because it's painful leaves us closed off to the hope and repair if we talk about the pain of ruptures.
Speaker 1:Correct.
Speaker 2:And so sharing those stories and being more open about those stories a little bit. We've given on the podcast, we've given three examples of ours. Our first therapist, we were, 17 and actually still in danger. And so we're actually long story short sent to our therapist for foster care basically. And she was like, I can't be the foster parent and the therapist And so we just didn't have therapy anymore.
Speaker 2:Like, that's what happened when we were really too young to know any of the other layers involved or what was going on or not okay or okay. But then we just didn't have therapy. And then later in graduate school, I tried to get in therapy again, but it was a husband wife team and they thought that that was how to treat trauma like with some kind of parenting thing. I don't know what that was. But they ended up getting divorced and like fighting through the session.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. So That's awful.
Speaker 2:Yes. Right. Classic. And then as an adult going back to therapy trying to find specifically a trauma therapist someone responded I'm a trauma therapist so you go and you meet with them and this person had so much of their own stuff going on. Like, they were physically hot because of this and this and this, so they wouldn't shut the door to their office.
Speaker 2:So, like, we couldn't stop talking. Shut? Yes. No. They wouldn't shut the door to their office.
Speaker 2:So it was just open to the waiting room. So we couldn't speak because we're like, this is hard enough already. We can't speak if the door is not physically shut. Like Oh
Speaker 1:my goodness.
Speaker 2:And so because we didn't speak she used the time to like answer emails and call people back and so we were just paying for that. And then ultimately she decided that because we were good at presenting that she should present with us and so again you can't, you're our therapist. That's not
Speaker 1:how it can play You can't do that,
Speaker 2:no. And so she set up this thing and so we stopped going to therapy, but then she got mad about that so then we didn't have a therapist again.
Speaker 1:Wow, those are some pretty, big violations of the therapeutic contract that you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Right? And so, but, and so these are different things we've, those are the three examples from our life that we've shared on the podcast since talking to you because people aren't understanding repair because they're not understanding rupture. Like you said, it's not always such a big thing. Sometimes it's something more subtle or sometimes it's sometimes it's so subtle it's just something that needs to be discussed. Like, this is what I'm feeling.
Speaker 2:This is what's going on. Oh this is, you know, whatever that disconnect is and it can be worked out but people don't have language for it and so that was something I so appreciated, you sharing on the podcast about rupture and repair.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good feedback for me too, because I'm gonna be giving a talk on this at the Social Work Leadership and Education Conference in the fall. So I'm gonna have a lot of administrators and professors there, and to kind of really, and this is what I mean about coming back to relationship as the cornerstone of therapy, Because without that relationship, you got nothing. It doesn't matter what technique you're using, if the room's not safe, the client's not even gonna be in the room. They're gonna be somewhere else, and they won't be grounded and present for healing, which is your first job as a therapist, is to create a safe container where people can start to become grounded and present in ways that they may never have been before. And all relationships have ruptured.
Speaker 1:I mean, think, as I'm getting you know, I'm talking to people about friendships and spousal relationships, I think that relationship rupture and repair isn't really talked about, and the good old fashioned apology seems to have gone the way of, you know, I don't know, abacus or something. People don't, like, you know, as people have gotten less religious, also like in the Catholic church, you have confession, which is now called reconciliation, but it's almost like a skill set that people never had in their family or no longer have. They don't understand the need for it, and how, like if we step on somebody's foot and say, like most of us, I think, if we accidentally stepped on somebody's foot would just say, Oh, I'm sorry, or Excuse me, right? That if we accidentally step on somebody's feelings, it's very rare for people to apologize. They're like, Well, I didn't do it on purpose.
Speaker 1:I'm like, Doesn't matter. You still did it. You gotta fix the rupture that just happened. And in therapy, too, we might do things by accident, not on purpose, or just that were not considerate enough or thoughtful enough of our client. Like, in my first therapy early on, I didn't even know this would bother me.
Speaker 1:I came in one day, and it just was obvious that the office, the waiting room hadn't been dusted and vacuumed in a long time. And it was really triggering for me. And I went and I mentioned it in therapy. The therapist didn't apologize or say, Oh, like or at least to my memory, she didn't. She might have.
Speaker 1:But what I did remember was that the next week I came back, it was spotless. So I felt heard, I felt responded to, I felt like there was care and concern and effort to make a repair there, you know?
Speaker 2:That's a
Speaker 1:good Even though it was a minor thing. It was a minor thing that nobody would put on their list of relationship rupture, probably. But for me, for whatever reason, that was just really triggering.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And so it wasn't, you know, if people get their ego in their way, they're like, Well, I didn't do it on purpose, and that patient needs to learn to live with blah blah blah, people are going be messy, that's how some therapists would respond. That wouldn't have been a helpful response for me. What was a helpful response is that they were like, They got it together and they cleaned their office. That was a response I needed to feel cared about in that setting, you know?
Speaker 2:Right, just the words, too.
Speaker 1:Not just the words, it was action. So if you're like saying, I'm uncomfortable with your door being open, not that the door should ever be open anyway, I can't, I mean, that's just, again, that falls to me in the level of malpractice. Like, you don't have therapy with your door open. Like, therapy one hundred one. Like, you don't create a safe container, you know?
Speaker 1:Like, that's not a safe container. But you apologize, and I go into detail in the book about how to apologize, because a lot of people don't even know how to apologize well. Because it's just not a skill in our culture that we're good at. We're a somewhat, at the risk of offending some listeners, we're a somewhat arrogant culture. So other cultures that I've been to, like India and China and other places, they're actually really, really good at this.
Speaker 1:It might not be sincere, but they're really good at it, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:That's funny. We are going to Africa tomorrow, actually. We our oldest doctor, one of the 10 year olds is African American, and her biological mother told her her whole first five years before we got her, before she came to us, told her that she was white. And when she was about five and a half before her adoption was final, she looked at us one day in the middle of dinner and said, someone's gonna have to tell my mom that I'm not white. Like, she had finally figured it out.
Speaker 2:Right? But as she's grown up because because we are very European, very white skinned, we've had to work really hard to teach her what her story is because it was twisted from the beginning. It's not just that she is growing up with white parents, which is a whole different issue, but it it was twisted from the beginning. And so we're not just having to catch up, but also undo some things. And Right.
Speaker 2:At the same time, it's her story. It's not our story. And so what we can do is expose her to things and take her to museums and teach her about music and dance and all these different things that are cultural pieces. But one thing that we did recently was do her DNA. And they were able because so many people from her ancestors have done the DNA, they were able to track the tribe that she's from in Africa.
Speaker 2:And we were able to contact them. And through different connections, we know people who are safe and good and real there, and it's an appropriate thing. And so we're actually taking her this week to Africa. And the reason I'm telling you this is what you said about apologizing and reconciliation and different cultures and places in the world. They are having, like, a full homecoming ceremony for her Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:With the king of that tribe. Wow. And they're going to dance around her, and they they're all going to wear their native clothes and there's gonna be fire. Like this own like a ritual in a good and positive way to welcome her home. And she's very happy with us and we adore her and all of that is going okay as far as trying to build attachment and maintain attachment and all of that.
Speaker 2:But this is a part of her story and an important part of her history and all the other children, we still have visits with their biological families when it's safe to do so. But no one from her family has ever come once. And so we are so excited to be taking her to Africa for her to see this and to be encircled literally by her people.
Speaker 1:That's powerful. It's like almost like an ancestral soul retrieval.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Like reconnecting that lineage for her is gonna be, and ancestral work in Africa is really important. So that's, what a beautiful thing to have happen. And that's just another example of, you know, you're responding in a culturally competent way, but you're also responding in a way where you set your, you know, cultural thresholds aside and say, yeah, there's something kind of mysterious here that's important, and we're going to make this happen, even if we don't completely understand it. I had a client from, it was one of the only, I've only seen two conversion disorder cases, and this was one of them, and this woman was from Africa. And when her mother had died, she wasn't able to go back for the funeral, and there's a lot of very profound ceremonies that they do at that time, and that has to do with the earth, and it goes on for days.
Speaker 1:I asked her about that, and when I was asking her, What do you need to do to feel okay? She's like, I need to go back. I need to go back to my tribe, You know, which I don't know if that I only consulted with them for a couple times, so I don't know if they were able to do that. But she was married to a white man. But she clearly had this peace that I think white people don't have and don't understand, because all of us who immigrated here got ruptured from our ancestors in some kind of way.
Speaker 1:Right? That's why we're here, you And it's different for those cultures. It's different, because they have, even though they've been invaded and whatever, they still have these sort of unbroken ancestral ties and rituals that they still do, that are on the positive side. Right? And so I wanted, I don't want to give ritual a bad name either.
Speaker 1:So ritual abuse is abuse of those things that are powerful, and rituals themselves, I think, are important and necessary for healing.
Speaker 2:It's a powerful thing, I think. Mhmm. Wow.
Speaker 1:Very powerful thing. Yeah. Interesting. That's a beautiful thing. Okay, so I would just say that, you know, the other two categories besides horror, I just wanted to touch on them, that are reality and spirituality.
Speaker 1:So it's very hard for us to, I think, especially in this time where things have gotten so polarized, and you're all good, or you're all bad, or your belief sucks, or your belief is the best, right? And so it's making it a harder environment, I think, for therapists to navigate difference. And we still need to work really hard at staying open to threshold, like knowing where our threshold is around beliefs. You might be a solidly atheist therapist who doesn't believe in any god, any power, or anything like that, but your clients might be having mystical experiences right and left. That does not mean they're psychotic.
Speaker 1:And I think clinicians know that, but people can get pushed to the edge sometimes. Like if a very analytic, wouldn't say scientific, because a lot of scientific people are open to mysticism, but if a very analytic, atheistic therapist is sitting with somebody who's seeing the ancestors gather around in the office and say things to them, I think it's going be hard for that person not to see that as a hallucination. And we have to maintain our cultural competence by knowing that about ourselves. Just knowing, yeah, I don't know what that is, and I don't think they're psychotic, and I don't know what it is, and I can be okay with my own discomfort about not knowing what this is. And the same with reality things.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of us are okay with visions, a lot of us are okay with a certain level of mysticism, a lot of us are getting more okay with realizing that there are these really dark groups, these organized groups that do bad things. But what if a client walks in and says they had an alien abduction experience, or worked on a spaceship for twenty years, and then had their mind reset to this time and place? Like, most of us, I think, would be like, Woah, okay, you're way over my threshold now. Like that's just like, I cannot go there with you. So knowing where our thresholds are, and still being able to hold a level of presence and listening and containment, even when that client has just gone way over our threshold.
Speaker 1:Because my own belief system is that the universe is a big place. The planet is a big place. I don't know everything there is to know about reality. I don't think any one person could possibly know everything there is to know about reality. And entering into a patient's story is never a bad idea.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean you're gonna sign up, you know, you're gonna, like, I don't know. It doesn't mean you have to move that into your life in the real world, like you don't have to now believe in aliens or whatever, but you need to be able to enter into the patient's story in a believable way, where they feel like you are with them, because that is their story. That is really their story. And can we hold a space of not emotional neutrality, but genuine, judgmental neutrality of like, I'm neither for nor against the story. This is my patient's story, and I'm gonna help enter into that reality with them and help them, And I'm gonna be able to tolerate doing that.
Speaker 1:That, I think, is our real task. That is the task of working with these advanced cases. And that's a very hard skill. It's an advanced skill. It's something we have to continually work at, I believe.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. Mhmm. I think it goes back to relationships being so important, and about attunement, and all of those things that it's built on. It's where healing happens, is in the connection.
Speaker 1:And the connection, if you think about parenting small children, and if your three year old comes back and says, I saw a dinosaur playing with a monkey, and you say, No, you didn't. Dinosaurs don't exist. Like, you have what happens to your relationship with that child in that moment? It's like, thumbs down, right? If you can join with that child in their imaginative world that is real to them, has a certain kind of reality to them, then you keep that connection going, right?
Speaker 1:So it's just a question of, are we in service to the relationship? Are we in service to rupture repair? Because to me, I've never seen anybody heal without a solid connection in their therapy.
Speaker 2:So what does repair look like?
Speaker 1:Well, I wrote an entire chapter on that, actually. It looks like a lot of things. You have to notice that something's amiss, you have to track it, you have to self examine yourself in case you're feeling defensive, you have to respond, and you have to repair. So repairs can be like, you know, in my case with the dusty office, the repair was cleaning the office, taking me seriously. Sometimes the repair needs an apology.
Speaker 1:It always needs acknowledgment. It just always needs acknowledgment. Because often behind the rupture is a misunderstanding. Like maybe your client, maybe nothing happened. Maybe you were just sitting there thinking about what your client said, and in their mind, you were thinking something terrible about them.
Speaker 1:Like I had this autistic child, you kept talking about my sneaky smile.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 1:was like, My sneaky smile? I just found this child charming. And then I realized, Oh, she's autistic, she's not processing my smile as friendly. She's processing it as sneaky, because she doesn't really, she can't really feel it. And if I had, you know, gotten offended and pulled away from her story, that would have made the rupture even bigger.
Speaker 1:But instead, I was like, Oh, I'm sorry, would it help if I keep my face more still? And she's like, Yes. So then I did. I worked really hard at not smiling, because that's what she needed in order to process during our sessions, and she couldn't understand what I was doing, because her brain wasn't reading that correctly.
Speaker 2:That's a beautiful example. Oh, thank you. Thank you so You're welcome.
Speaker 1:You're so welcome. I will come back anytime.
Speaker 2:I am so grateful, I really am. Fantastic. Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, Emma. Thank you.
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.
Speaker 1:We'll
Speaker 2:see you there.