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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.
Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you
Speaker 2: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. Okay.
Speaker 2:So today, I am sharing a recap of the sessions from the ISSCD annual conference for the sessions I did not get to see live but have now gone back and watched. You guys, there's so much good stuff. So Friday, while I was in ethics, the other session that was happening, one of them was PTSD and dissociation in the perinatal period. And so they're talking about trauma and dissociation with women who are pregnant and then give birth and right after their birth. They talked about how trauma can derail preparation to parent, how rates of PTSD in pregnancy are much higher in low resource settings.
Speaker 2:And she compared data from Ann Arbor to Detroit. And they said the biggest trigger during birth for post birth PTSD is not having an emergency during birth, but again, relational trauma, being disregarded, neglected, or betrayed. And then she talked about how trauma informed care is not enough. They need a continuum of perinatal services. Programs that include active screening, specific interventions for identifying ACEs or self reports like psychoeducation, peer support, and discussion of triggers.
Speaker 2:And then specialist treatment for distress or related services for reports like parenting classes or substance abuse classes, prescriptions, or mental health referrals. That was all good stuff. And then there was another one called assessing complex trauma and dissociation in youth with an intergenerational lens. And they define complex or developmental trauma as being multiple incidents of trauma, chronic or ongoing trauma, interpersonal trauma, the trauma beginning early, and talked about how these things lead to disorganized attachment. And that with children can look like a learning disability, dysregulation, perplexing behaviors, or even misdiagnosis for things like ADHD or even autism.
Speaker 2:Those children can be in what's called survival terror, literally thinking I'm going to die. I don't exist. I'm a failure. I'm unlovable because babies have to have a proximity to a caregiver. And if they are isolated from the caregiver, either because of trauma, because of misattunement, or because of parenting techniques that separate the child from the parent, all of that can leave their brain in survival terror as if the trauma is ongoing.
Speaker 2:So that was really interesting. And she talked about therapies for that and it was really helpful. On Saturday, there was a session with Stephen Gold, which is very similar to a recent training by him that I attended, but he called this one Employing Alternate States to alter states in trauma and dissociation. And what he talked about was how our brains operate in patterns of functional activity that form these large scale networks. And there's three that he talks about that he's identified.
Speaker 2:The salience network, which is about internal and external environment. So that includes the amygdala, like warning bells if something is wrong in the environment internally or externally. And then the central executive network, which includes working memory, attention, goal directed activity, problem solving, critical thinking. And that's all, like, the cortex. Right?
Speaker 2:And then the default mode network, which has to do with our self-concept, our self awareness, episodic memory, our connectedness to others, and creativity. So like the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. And then those two talked about that in-depth. But I went to that other training of theirs and already talked about it on the podcast. So the next one was about art therapy and EMDR, and that was by Tally Tripp and Elizabeth Davis.
Speaker 2:And they reminded people that art therapy is not just for artists or just for children. It's not coloring books or arts and crafts, and it's not about the skill. It's the focus on the active process, not the end product, and that there's no singular meaning for what things represent or what the art is trying to represent. And so you really have to discuss with the client what it means. They also talked about how EMDR with art adds a structure and involves exposure where they are facing and going through the memory, and it encourages free association so that more can come up, but in a safe way.
Speaker 2:And then one of the big things that they said was going back to betrayal trauma again, high betrayal trauma survivors are not able to engage with social support in a way that fosters emotional regulation, but art can. You guys, I think this is an issue that we have, like an actual thing, where when we need it or as it's designed, something like that, we are not able to engage with social support. Like if you asked us on a safety plan, who are your support people? We could write down some names. That's progress.
Speaker 2:And it counts, you guys. It counts that we know this person, this person, and this person are safe and that they are supportive of us in general. But to actually utilize them as a support system or even just a general social support, you guys, we don't do that very often. We are making progress. We have some efforts and we are trying, and some friends have been very patient with us as we practice, but it has not come naturally.
Speaker 2:And so I put a big star by that just because I feel like we need to come back to it and think about it some more. But then also EMDR and art can create order. It can contain what's happening from the past, from memory time. It creates a path through and invites expression of what you're feeling. It helps orient people.
Speaker 2:It uses the body somatically, and it reveals the window of tolerance. It can help develop the safe place or the calm place, and it can assist with resource development installation. So you just have to make sure that the parts of a system are in agreement, are ready to do that work, and have access to each other. That's so simple. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, if you can do all those things, why do you still need therapy? I'm just kidding. Okay. Then also, Willa and Edward presented on working with self harm, and they talked about how people who are dissociative, you guys, I don't even want to say this out loud because it stepped all over my toes. It talked about, they said that people with dissociative disorders go in circles of reactivity instead of a reparative learning opportunity.
Speaker 2:So for example, with self harm, most people with dissociative disorders are involved in self harm in some way. They have a high suicidality rate, but self harm does not always mean suicidality. But you have to take it seriously and be careful about safety planning because there is such a high rate of suicidality with dissociative disorders. And so that's really concerning. But they talked about how self harm, which is not the same as suicidality, can be a temporary fix or a setup of alters against other alters, or an attempt to get rid of big feelings, or an attempt to regulate big feelings, a way of getting out of a situation, a way of avoiding a situation, a reenactment of trauma, specific traumas, a way to keep the system closed instead of opening up to help, and even talked about how sometimes shutting down instead of reaching out to that social support, like they talked about in the session before this one, that that can be a kind of self harm, which I feel like we talked about in the earlier podcast about the conference.
Speaker 2:And then there's also a relief of congruence after self harm because the body and the internal experience are matching, that there's pain in both places, and that that actually provides some relief. So they talked about self harm as a communication, not suicidal intent. And they talked about an example of how to assess for self harm and how to work with that. And just for safety reasons, I don't wanna go into that in detail. But the things that were helpful in general, one thing to share was how to explain self injury in the context of DID and about how self injury is a way that some people use in trying to cope with or attain relief from intolerable feelings.
Speaker 2:And that helps the person understand the purpose of it, and it increases intrapsychic awareness. And then work towards focusing on choices in manageable increments and dignity of the client. So just for safety, that's all that I wanna talk about that one right now. And then another session that was fantastic was done by Doctor. Lou Himes, who spoke about trauma informed therapy with transgender adults.
Speaker 2:You guys, I loved that the ISSTD included this as one of their sessions, and Lou did a fantastic job. They presented very simply the different terms and different aspects of transgender and the queer community so that people who are brand new to trying to understand this can really catch up and have a comprehension of what is helpful and what is supportive and what is trauma informed or even really trauma responsive. So for example, they explained how cis means congruence. So someone who is cisgendered feels internally like they are the same gender as what they were assigned at birth. And the assigned at birth sex is known as MAB for male assigned at birth or FAB for female assigned at birth.
Speaker 2:And then there's also intersex, of course. But then they also explained the different aspects of gender and explained why we have to be careful when we talk about gender, because it can mean so many different things. So they talked about how gender identity is that internal felt sense of who I am and what gender I am if they're if I'm identifying as a gender. So, like, for example, for me, just to make things simple and neutral, for for us for us, the body is cisgendered female, meaning we were born as a girl baby, assigned as a girl at birth, and feel the same as we were assigned. Like, I feel like a girl.
Speaker 2:I was assigned as a girl. I'm a cisgendered female. Right? But that gender identity, that internal felt sense, for us, that's consistent. It's congruent.
Speaker 2:That's why it's called cisgender with what the assignment was at birth. Now John Mark has some incongruence there. Right? So his gender identity, like, he's thinking male. There's some others like that.
Speaker 2:But but we're not talking about multiplicity here. We wanna be really respectful of people in general, although this can also be an experience that overlaps with multiplicity or plurality, obviously. But then gender presentation or gender expression is how one expresses that identity. So for example, there are some cisgendered females who wear cute dresses and do their hair and their fingernails. What do you call that?
Speaker 2:Like, manicures and makeup and all of that. You guys, we don't do any of that. Like, we wear dress to church on Sundays, but here's what we have, and I am not kidding nor do I mean any disrespect. We have, like, five skirts that we got in Israel that are all the way, like, ankle length skirts, but they're super soft and comfortable and, like, a mess of shirts that match them. And so all we have to do is pull a skirt and pull a shirt, and we are dressed for Sundays within the context of the rules of our family, right, and our chosen faith tradition.
Speaker 2:And so it's for that. That is as complicated as it gets. You guys, we rarely I think there's two of us that I know of that even ever put on makeup, and we brush our hair every day. But, like, fixing it, I don't know. Maybe those same too, but we are just not presenting super, super female.
Speaker 2:So we kind of land closer to maybe the not exactly nonbinary. We're definitely on the feminine side, identify as female, but not, like, feminine. And there's all kinds of stories I could tell you about that. I don't know. Right now, this very moment, I'm wearing cargo shorts and a t shirt.
Speaker 2:Okay? So, like, get my burps out. Good to go. So that's about presentation or expression. Then gender roles have to do with how one performs gender and social relationships.
Speaker 2:And so, for example, the husband and I have, like, role reversal in a traditional sense. So except when he's away caring for his parents, normally, he cares for the kids in, like, the everyday stuff, like getting them to school, getting them a snack after school, doing those kinds of things. Right? And we work. He's a writer.
Speaker 2:He also works very hard. But as far as who has the daily job to bring in the consistent income and pay the bills, that's us. And he has changed as many diapers as we have when we fostered 87 kids, and he helps out with chores just as much as we do. He cooks just as often as we do. So like, we're pretty, both of us, pretty neutral on that.
Speaker 2:And then stereotypes, gender stereotypes have to do with social expectations or defiance of them, which is basically both of us in different ways. And then they also clarified about attraction, that there is a both a physical attraction and an emotional attraction. And so can so when we're talking about who people are attracted to, they may have an emotional attraction to one gender and a physical attraction to a different gender. And this was pretty interesting, but here's the thing, we're actually gonna have Doctor. Himes come on the podcast and they can share this themselves their own way and more directly.
Speaker 2:And so I think we'll just save that conversation for them because it was such good stuff and I really want them to be able to say it their own way. Then the Shepherd Pratt team did a presentation about long term inpatient treatment. Really, the one thing I wanna share from that is they talked about how any disengagement from the social system or relational ruptures always, for DID clients, always increase safety concerns. And that that's a consistent and researched pattern that people, clinicians, and supporters need to be aware of. And I think that I don't wanna talk about this right now because I don't think that I can right now.
Speaker 2:But I think that that is a lot of what happened to us over 2020 and why we regressed so much during that time and part of what was so difficult. So there's another star there for us to come back and talk about that. And then Sunday sessions that I finally have gotten to watch now, One of them was by Joy Silberg, who has been on the podcast. She is so delightful. I love her.
Speaker 2:But she spoke about a cohort of child victims of organized abuse, and these were she only works with children. So these families have children that were involved in several different she gave different examples, which I don't wanna specify right now, but several different publicly documented and corroborated cases of organized abuse, and that can mean different things. So I'm just gonna leave it at that. But she was contacted to be consultant on these different cases. They were international cases, and some of them or part of them involved exploitation materials, so what we used to call child pornography.
Speaker 2:And so she talked about a lot of these things. So this was kind of a triggering talk for us, and, there were some really important things to share, though. She reminded therapists to embody the opposite of dehumanization, objectification, sadism, and intoxication from power and control, and that that's what a healthy therapeutic relationship is like, the opposite of abuse. So in case you didn't know, if you have a therapeutic relationship that starts to feel violating in some way, that's a problem. And we talk about this in the book.
Speaker 2:There are several examples that we have been through that we share in the book. And, like trust yourself if you start to feel that or ask for help. She said that forty nine percent of survivors of online sexual abuse imagery report abuse in organized rings. When I was little, they didn't call themselves an organized ring. They called themselves a franchise.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if anybody needs to know that or if that happened to anyone else, but that's what they was called for us. I don't know if clinicians know that or not. Maybe I should tell somebody. Now I've told you. They she said fifty three percent describe multiple perpetrations, which was also true in our case, like, perpetrators and, like, more than one perpetrator, which was our experience, like a whole line of people.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, that's what it was, people literally at the door. 52% involved in organized abuse. And the most common components of this were punishment for attempts to exit the system. That also happened to us, forced violence against others, near death experiences, sensory deprivation, commercial sexual exploitation, pornography production, and extortion.
Speaker 2:So she talked about that, and then she also spent the rest of her presentation talking about the creating of automatic triggers, which in some context people would call programming. And then she talked in the closing part of her session about interrupting control from the inside and outside, which twenty years ago, we would call that deprogramming. Right? And so I don't really wanna talk about that more on the podcast right now, but she did an excellent job of it in an appropriate and generalized context. And I think that there has been some validation that we have felt, without going into more detail, with the broadening of the organized abuse topic, where that is including some trafficking and child sexual abuse exploitation materials, or whatever we're supposed to call them, child pornography.
Speaker 2:And that, like what we went through was part of that. And, so without it all minimizing or dismissing other kinds of organized abuse as well, which we could speak to in another context. I just want to appreciate that this is being addressed and spoken about and that children are being rescued and helped. We are grateful for that. Anna Gomez also spoke about children.
Speaker 2:She spoke about an EMDR model to heal intergenerational trauma in children and adults. And she talked a lot about the parent child relationship and how there are mirror neurons, there's reflecting parental self narratives get internalized by the child, and how our sense of self is born and created within the dyadic affective dance so that the parent is not just the co regulator, but also the co organizer. And when parents get triggered, they can't care give, which leaves the child waiting to be parented. When parents collapse, like dissociation or shutting down, then they are not caregiving, and so kids do the parenting of their parents. And then when parents are trying but do not have support with their trauma, then even in the present, they're seeing through the lens of the past.
Speaker 2:So she just talked about how important it is for parents to have their own therapy, for therapy with children to include the parents, and then using EMDR, how retelling the generational story and calling out those patterns and reenactments help pull that story out into the open instead of being something that's being acted out through relation through the relationship or interactions over and over again. She also spent a lot of time talking about SandTree and about art and how those things show up in that as well. And then my very dear friend, I love her, Annie Goldsmith, presented with Deborah Cohen and spoke about when comfort food doesn't comfort, helping eating disorder patients feel safe in their bodies and their minds. And they talked about PTSD and the flooding symptoms systems and dissociative disorders with organized attachment, they said a third of girls worldwide have been abused and a fifth of boys have been abused. And so they said dissociation is relevant to uncontrolled eating because it serves to undermine the normal processes of self awareness and then not eating as well to escape and to avoid.
Speaker 2:And then with dissociative disorders, complexity is added because body image is a construct and it's dynamic and fluid and can change with internal feelings and external situations, all of which is impacted by dissociative disorders. Right? And then dear Annie, oh my goodness, listen to this line. It is such a powerful line. She said, adequate nutrition won't fix mental health, but inadequate nutrition will undermine it.
Speaker 2:And then I was so stinking proud of her. She's become like a scientist of scientists. She has got it figured out. She talked about the two branches of the vagus nerve, the parasympathetic, how it's not just one polyvagal nerve, which I know poly because of all the branches off to the organs. Right?
Speaker 2:But how the ventral vagal connects to things above the diaphragm and the dorsal vagal connects to things below the diaphragm. And so the ventral vagal, you see that with how the pupils open up or close or ears, salivary glands, the breathing, the heart rate, social engagement, and neurosyptivity and noticing safety. But here's what is so powerful, and she nailed it. When you are not feeling safe, the ventral vagal shuts down the digestive process so that it goes offline because the ventral vagal recruits the dorsal vagal as part of the defense system. Oh my goodness, you guys.
Speaker 2:So dysregulated nervous system does not support effective or normalized ingestion, digestion, and elimination. So let me talk about this for just a minute. Do you remember, do you remember when Annie Goldsmith came on the podcast and she talked about different things eating, and we had a great conversation. We shared some of our struggles. We shared some of the husband's struggles because that's very codependent of us.
Speaker 2:And it was just a lovely conversation. And we're like, well, this is what's hard and this is what's hard, but we don't have any disordered eating, right? Oh my goodness. Listen to what she said. Survivors may not have the cues to know when they are hungry or when they are full.
Speaker 2:You guys, that's totally us. Like, we could go all day and not eat at all and not even notice, but we don't try to not eat. And I don't know. I don't know. But then, like, everything she said on this list, it was just like, oh, that's another one.
Speaker 2:Because she also talked about difficulty chewing and swallowing, which you guys, we even put in our book. We talked about that. And then a strong gag reflex, you check, we have that. Delayed gastric emptying, pain, appetite dysregulation, early satiety, bloating, nausea, vomiting, bowel movement problems. And so it becomes a catch 22, she said, where we need to eat well for good mental health, but we need good mental health to be able to eat well.
Speaker 2:Like you guys, disordered eating or eating disorders, she's saying is not just like a bad attitude or there's something wrong with you. It's literally a trauma response in the nervous system, specifically the ventral vagal hijacking the dorsal vagal. Like, that is an example to me of getting that cognitive clarification to understand what's going on long enough to come up for air, get a breath out of the shaming cesspool of trauma, and give yourself some compassion to understand what's going on, why it's going on, and then it's actually a normal response to what you've been through. That's huge. So she talked about how there is a shift happening with registered dietitians and nutritionists and how they are learning more about trauma.
Speaker 2:And so, for example, she gave the example that it is more important that you feel safe while you eat than about you must complete 100% of your meal. And so she talked about like, do you do? And there are things like with therapy, relational safety matters most, support interoceptive awareness, pair eating and safety, navigate medical safety with nervous system safety. You guys, this was huge stuff. And Annie, I am so proud of you.
Speaker 2:You guys, this is going to change the world in disordered eating. People need this compassion and this trauma responsive understanding to be able to build that therapeutic alliance instead of just being shamed for doing it wrong. It's not about doing it wrong. And again, you're doing it exactly right. Your brain is doing what your brain is supposed to do.
Speaker 2:So we as a culture can't shame people. And then she also talked about that even with larger bodies. She said larger bodies have trauma of either starving to make themselves smaller or enduring relational trauma because they're not small enough. And not to assume nutritional adequacy based on appearance and that body size is not a reliable indicator of health. And then she talked about Health at Every Size or HAES, H A E S, if you wanna look that up on social media, or if you're searching for a dietitian or a nutritionist, look for someone who knows about health at every size because that will make all the difference.
Speaker 2:Naomi gave a session about internal communication skill building in adults with DID. She opened by talking about how we had to compartmentalize to survive, and then talked about how parts develop with specialized survival functioning. And so, which I guess comes from Fisher, I think, right? And so daily living parts or everyday parts, A and P kinds of parts, that's very structural dissociation language. So, well, you heard my presentation.
Speaker 2:But those kinds of parts, going to school, socializing, developing skills, and that that's why it's a pattern that so many people who are plural or who have multiplicity or with dissociative identities have those types of alters, because that's what they do. And that's part of how we survive in the world is by continuing to function even when it feels like we can't. But then those EP parts, the emotional parts or the traumatized parts, she had this interesting chart. And I don't know if that also came from Fisher or that was her stuff and just the reference was from Fisher, but she corresponded fight, flight, freeze, collapse, and attach with different kinds of EP or traumatized parts. So like fight had to do with bodyguards waiting to defend, flight had to do with acting out or self protection or avoidance, Freeze had to do with sounding the alarms and tracking triggers and protecting from invasions as opposed to external protection.
Speaker 2:My goodness. I might I might I might leave that in there just so that Peter can, like, hit a fire hydrant on the way home from the grocery store. Excuse me. Bless me. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2:You're welcome, that was awesome. Nothing like a good sneeze. Okay, so collapse, she equated with compliant or nonthreatening avoids rocking the boat. But do you see how that positive performance and all of that goodness oozing out on the outside to keep the peace and make sure everyone else is okay is really shutting down internally? Like it's not just that you're caring for other people, it's that you're caring for other people instead of tending to yourself and because other people are not tending to you.
Speaker 2:So it's always a trauma red flag. It's not the same as just being kind. And then attach are those cries for help and looking for any kind of crumbs in the environment to help you live another day. And even just saying that out loud, I feel like all kinds of icky shame. So clearly that's an issue.
Speaker 2:I think it steps all over my toes because it's one I'm actively working on right now of not giving away pieces of myself because it was so traumatic last year in my efforts to do that when I tried making friends, and some of that went well, and some of that was a disaster, and the disaster was painful, you guys. It was more painful than that sneeze you just heard. Okay. Then she talked about how avoidance of memories, emotions, and sensations looks like one thing, but really serves a different purpose. So depression is avoiding rage and anger.
Speaker 2:Substance abuse is avoiding pain and emptiness. Self harm is bringing pain to avoid numbness. Flashbacks are trying to memorialize what's going on and avoid, and like that delayed processing. Rage is trying to avoid shame, and dissociation does all of that. To close things out, I just want to give a shout out to Michael Coy, because Michael Coy saw my presentation and asked how to make his PowerPoint have captions, and then he did it.
Speaker 2:And you guys, his presentation was just a day after mine. And for him to go in and take the time and learn how it works and set it up with captions just to be accessible was so meaningful. I mean, we're a fan of him anyway. We love him anyway. He is a good person.
Speaker 2:He is a safe person. He's on my team of safe people I have identified in ISSTD, and I so appreciate him, but that was so symbolic to me of just you guys, on PowerPoint, it's literally a checkbox. Like, you literally just click on one box, it adds a little checkmark, and then it does it. You don't have to do anything. And, of course, live captions are not accurate.
Speaker 2:They have weird spelling. Sometimes it's creepy. Sometimes it's funny. They mess things up because it's a computer. It's not the same as having, like, a transcript caption to something.
Speaker 2:But that's okay because it's still better than nothing, and it's fairly good. And so it's worth it. And the fact that he went in there and figured out how to do it, and then even, of course, because it's Michael Coy, made them super fancy and easy to read. I cannot tell you the difference between listening to a session and trying to watch, especially on Zoom, but trying to watch that tiny little box, I can't lip read that, those people are too small. And so I'm literally having to focus on the slides, listen, and try to see if I can put together what they're saying with the slides.
Speaker 2:And with my cochlear implants, I obviously can do that better than when I am deaf and don't have my cochlear implants. So obviously that helps. But so obviously like I can function, but the level of exhaustion because of how much work it is for my brain to try and understand that, I can't tell you. I can't tell you how hard it is. Like just after the podcast interviews, I always need a nap because it uses up all of my brain power trying to listen and understand.
Speaker 2:And I have that same thing on my computer. When I do the podcast interviews, I read captions as we go. So when Michael Koye started his presentation and captions showed up, you guys, it was that example of the nervous system and all that polyvagal stuff that we had talked about earlier. I felt a visceral relief. Like my shoulders went down, my breath came back to me, I felt lighter.
Speaker 2:Like I immediately could sense the difference of how much easier and how much less energy it took to understand what he was saying because the captions were there than the whole weekend of sessions without the captions. So I just wanna give a shout out to Michael Coy for putting up the captions. Thank you so much. It made all the difference. I don't even know if he listens to the podcast, but thank you to Michael Coy for that.
Speaker 2:He also said something significant that I wanted to point out, and I went to his webinar on this already, so I've already recorded a talking about this. And so I don't wanna recap the whole thing again, but he said, What can't be talked about must be acted out. But then he pointed out, it doesn't have to be mean or aggressive or bad. Like often when we talk about acting out, we assume it means naughty behavior because that's how pop culture has taken it with the whole like parenting culture and thinking they know so much, right? But it's not always a bad thing.
Speaker 2:It's simply a way of communication. And he said, A dissociative state's implicit attempt to grasp at validation from an attuned, compassionate adult in effort to heal old wounds. That's just so powerful. That's powerful. I thought it was beautiful.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing I wanted to share from that is that he reminded us that from ego state, which I appreciate, from ego state therapy, it reminds us that not everyone has traditional family settings or does not grow up with interjections that are all people. And so he talked about how parts of us are not patterned after people. It could be something else that's simply symbolic, like a dark cloud, for example. And then we also know in the plural community, that's where we get things like fictives and and other kinds of alters, nonhuman alters or whatever. It's the same thing.
Speaker 2:And so just for contextualizing and normalizing that that's not a new thing or a weird thing, it's actually always been a thing. And ego states has been pretty good about recognizing. I think that's Watkins and Watkins, right? And so I just wanted to, appreciate Michael for sharing that. So that was the last session that I had not yet watched, and these were the last bits of what I had to share.
Speaker 2:I hope that's helpful some. If you registered for the conference and already paid for a day or the weekend or the whole thing, whatever you were registered for, those videos are now online and available on the conference website. If you miss the conference and want to watch it, you can go through the ISSTD website to their CE program, and those sessions will be available for purchase there. And the links for all of that and everything will be emailed out by the office next week. So by the time you hear this, that information should be public and we can share it, they'll share it, it'll be out, and everyone can access what they wanna watch if they're interested in any of those.
Speaker 2:But we learned a lot. It was jam packed, but it was very different than previous conferences. And really for this particular intergenerational trauma conference, the World Congress of Intergenerational Trauma, I think they called it, it was very intentionally and very specifically broadened to include all these other aspects of where people are experiencing trauma, besides just the dyadic relationship of child abuse and DID, for example. And I really enjoyed it. I know we need to stay focused on what the ISSTD does with the study of trauma and dissociation, But I really appreciated that we got to hear from so many different perspectives from the transgender session to gender violence and violence against women and indigenous people, and there were people of color who shared and such diversity in so many ways.
Speaker 2:I just really, really appreciated all these different perspectives and feel like it was absolutely worth my time, and I loved it so much. So I hope sharing my notes was somewhat helpful and that you enjoyed Nerdtown this week. That is the best I can do with cooperating and collaborating and communicating. So I'm trying, but there you go, and I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
Speaker 1:We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too. That's what peer support is all about.
Speaker 1:Being human together. So yeah, sometimes
Speaker 2:we'll see you there.