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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:Our guest today is Doris Doga, who is a psychotraumatologist and a creative child therapist and EMDR practitioner with over four decades of clinical experience in psychotherapy and child therapy. She began her professional journey as a psychiatric nurse and has since specialized in treating complex trauma across the lifespan, including children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. She founded the Trauma Center in Belgium and has maintained a private practice since 1990. Her primary clinical and research interests lie in the profound effects of early childhood and prenatal trauma on development, with a particular focus on the formation and treatment of dissociative reactions. She has pursued extensive post graduate training in gestalt therapy, group therapy, neurosequential model of therapeutics, transpersonal psychology, integrative child therapy, psychotraumatology, and AMDR.
Speaker 2:A recognized authority in the field of early childhood and attachment, she introduced the concept of unseen attachment trauma as published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior. Further elaborations on this groundbreaking concept can be found in her article, Seeing the Early Attachment Trauma and Its Impact on Child Development and Invisible Attachment Trauma. We welcome her to the podcast today. Good morning.
Speaker 1:Good afternoon, Emma. It's so early for you.
Speaker 2:I am so excited to talk to you today.
Speaker 1:Me too, Emma. Thank you for the invitation.
Speaker 2:Very kind of you to join us. The only thing on my end is that I do sometimes have a train for which I apologize.
Speaker 1:Because maybe, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you're here with us today. I got to meet you because you have joined us as faculty with ISSTD. That's how I got to meet you. And then right after that, you did a webinar that referenced some infanticidal attachment themes, which we had been talking about on the podcast, and it's such hard content, and what you presented was so helpful. And then after that, ISSTD had me as one of the experts for Ask the Experts.
Speaker 2:And so I got to see you again. And I'm so grateful you're coming today for a conversation just for listeners to orient to the sound of your voice. Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit? I have read your bio, but just so they can orient to the sound of your voice. Let us know a little bit about who you are and where you are in the world.
Speaker 1:Hello, everybody. I don't talk to who I don't know to whom I'm talking, but I suppose maybe it's all to people all around the world, which which would be great! So I am Dulis Doga, I am a Belgian psychotraumatologist and I am very interested and mostly dedicated my life to understand attachment dynamics and also to understand and learn more about trauma and the impact of trauma and also attachment trauma.
Speaker 2:We had an amazing conversation at the Ask the Expert just about attachment and ways to talk about it. What was that like for you having studied this the whole time and then I'm just Emma here, I'm sharing this, my thoughts and feelings about attachment. What was that like for you?
Speaker 1:You know, Emma, every opportunity I get to talk about detachment and you know join people and meet people who are interested in the same topic I'm already excited so I'm not thinking in terms of you know, I know more than you know, it's always so wonderful to exchange, you know, ideas, thoughts, experience you have so that we can build all together, know, to understand, as I said previously, to understand more about this huge important relationship between children and their parents and it's so underestimated and I really think till today that it's not enough to educate and it's not enough to take into account such important relationship and building which is on the basis of total development of a human being. So for me, you know, I had every opportunity for me as well to, you know, to share and to talk about it.
Speaker 2:Where did that journey begin for you? How did you first start learning about attachment yourself?
Speaker 1:I a little bit expected that question. So I'm a little bit prepared. No, am not, but I was thinking this morning, thinking about this podcast, that when I was a child I was so interested and kind of fascinated by people, especially about my own folks and about my own parents and the kind of little observator what are they doing, why are they doing what they are doing. So it's I think from the very very beginning that I was so fascinated about people and their interactions. I remember even as a child how I was thinking about maybe I was six or seven years old how I was thinking about certain interactions and how I was aware of how I was let's say compliant or being the very little child who was little girl who was so pretty and all those kinds of things.
Speaker 1:It was not so unconscious for me. And then later on of course when I began studying, I started as a psychiatric nurse because I was wasn't allowed from my home, from my parents to go to the university so I chose to become a psychiatric nurse but psychiatric because this was where I was very interested in. I was interested in the psyche. I was interested in the mind. I was interested always call it who you are.
Speaker 1:I was interested in. And then starting as a psychiatric nurse, worked ten years on the psychiatric ward. You know, there was nothing about trauma. They didn't ask themselves, are those people traumatized? I saw schizophrenics.
Speaker 1:Saw all kinds of people and I was wondering the whole time, who are they and where are they? Not only who are they, what happened to them, but where are they? Where are these authentic general human beings? I see pathology, I see behavior, but where is this child? This was a very, very, you know, part of my thinking when I was working as a psychiatric nurse.
Speaker 1:I didn't, I was very critic towards myself because I think I hadn't learned enough and I was not that good in talking to them or working to them or understanding them and it was the beginning of the journey where I did all those different long term trainings for better understanding and making a better understanding or educate myself to better understand this other person and what happens inside. So it's really a lifetime journey, I think from the beginning, already from the womb from my church that I have this kind of focus on I want to know who you are and what happened to you and I want to educate myself, also myself. I have done years of therapy and still am in therapy and I'm 66 to understand myself and what is on the basis and to create, you know, these possibilities to grow and to then become who I was meant to be. It's kind of goal, it's also what I believe in when I'm working as a psychotraumatologist and this is a very big drive. It's really a drive in my life to be like that and behave like that and be a psychotermatologist like that.
Speaker 2:Tell me about what you said about the way we are all humans connected and inter generationally so there's no one without trauma.
Speaker 1:Yes, this is also, I always beginning with that statement, we are all traumatized and why is this? We are yet for ages human beings and if we study history and if we look at all these ages and how we have been behaving towards children and how we act towards children and how we consider them as non human beings or as something little who can't feel or think. You know this dehumanizing and this is already going on for years and years and ages and ages. So as a child you become an adult and eventually you become a parent. So you have already this attachment trauma and so as parents become a parent with attachment trauma and this has been going on for all those years that we are human beings so all of us have this attachment trauma we are all traumatized.
Speaker 1:So this is a very deep belief that I have and I think it's good to have that belief. And the ways Emma that this unresolved in parents is past regeneration. Then we have to do another podcast to talk about that because it's on genetic level, it is on biological level, it is on cellular level and the need is physical and neurobiological levels. It's about how you have this unseen, unresolved patterns, what experience parents who have psychopathology, parents who have this anxiety, shame, so all these trauma consequences which are not healed, which are not transformed, these are also in the behavior of parents, is a way how the unresolved trauma is transmitted from one generation to another. And we also have over the years and over the ages, all the war, we have all this other kind of trauma of course, have these natural disasters so you can't if you look from this point of view then you can't make no other decision than say we are all traumatized we all have attachment trauma because our parents, grandparents, our ancestors were also traumatized without resolution, resolving that trauma.
Speaker 2:What happens then when we're raising the next generation and we're traumatized ourselves and the impact of that with attachment?
Speaker 1:I think that the very beginning is that we have to acknowledge that we are all traumatized and this is a big one because we deny it and this is the beginning. We have to educate at this point in history. We have to educate about trauma, about intergenerational trauma. We have to educate psychoeducation, neuroeducation to parents, to adolescents, all the range of ages that they have. We have to educate them how trauma is disguised and to learn to recognize trauma.
Speaker 1:Is the phase that we are in. We have to bring it to the surface on very different manners by education, by sensibilatizing, by doing podcasts, by you know also that bit by bit we become a little bit convinced and recognize that we have trauma and then to find the courage and be encouraged to work on this trauma and recognize in how parenting and all the behaviors and about us certain patterns that we pass it through pass it on to the next generation. So I think it's lot about this trauma informed care but on all the levels in care, in education, on a societal level, on a political level. I think we have to do a lot of sensibilizing, educating, so we have the very beginning the start of awareness, becoming conscious about it, recognize it, acknowledge it because there's a lot of resistance against this idea and this statement that we are all traumatized and that this intergenerational trauma there's a lot of resistance against that and it has this tremendous impact on of course our ability to develop with our children the same attachment relationships. If we don't as a parent and also this is also for the traumatologist and for all on the field if we don't open up and work towards our own trauma histories and resolve them as much as possible so we can see more clear and be in a more genuine position towards our children.
Speaker 1:Also learning parents how to attach. Attachment is relationship and we have this confusion that we think attachment and it's about raising a child and it's about care for a child but these are two different parenting tasks. Attachment is about building a relationship, a very specific relationship with the child and this demands a of to be fulfilled to come to a safe attachment, relationship. Love it. Also, we have to educate parents about that.
Speaker 2:I think it's so important what you're sharing, and I love the broadening of lived experience. I think it's really, really important in the lived experience community that we are not judging other people's lived experience or discounting other people's lived experience or assuming other people don't have lived experience for the very reasons you're talking about. Some people for different reasons are more public or not about what their own issues are, which is absolutely fine and valid. But it doesn't mean it's not there. We all have these different traumas that so many of the traumas even we share collectively in different ways and it impacts everything.
Speaker 2:And I also agree clinically and personally about doing our own work, whether we're talking about for our clients or whether we're talking about for our children, or whether we're talking about relationships or friendships, we cannot be any more present with them than we are willing to be with ourselves.
Speaker 1:This is really a big one. This is really a big one, but it's a difficult one. It's not that integrated. It's my opinion in the work built today, so integrated that we have the courage to work on ourselves. I really do believe that you can't change anything and that you can't build a good relationship if you are unable to look at your own issues because you are coloured by them, you can't see clearly, you are unable to see who the other person is.
Speaker 1:You are projecting, you maybe are identified with some things. I have done a workshop for the ESSTD a few years ago about peace and it is also one of my strong convictions that we have to heal the war inside first before we can even talk about becoming on a global scope towards peace because all those unresolved trauma, you know, we have perpetrators inside, we also have all those good things, the genuine authentic parts that live inside, but we also have this perpetrator part. We have haters, we have unresolved anger, They all play a role in how we interact with others and how we relate with others. It stays all so disguised on such an unconscious level that I believe that growing awareness is a very important step. And also what you said Emma, we have to make a shift towards not what is wrong with you, but what happened to you, what happened to you.
Speaker 1:And then the third one now also, what do you want? What do you want now? What do you want now to happen as a kind of empowerment? So I think this is a huge, huge shift we have to make through.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what brings us back to attachment. One of the things you and I have already talked about is even how the purpose of attachment and how the attachment strategies help us approach care or avoid harm, and acknowledging that I have these different parts of me that are there because of my experiences, rather than being ashamed that this is who I am or what is in me. That really, this is what I have experienced, and this is what I've internalized and how to tend to those moments and those wounds so that also what is inside me is healing. And that is what I have to offer. And when we, our listeners to the podcast, are survivors and also the clinicians who treat them, it's a pretty even mix.
Speaker 2:And you're right, all over the world. And what we have been talking about with these different pieces of attachment and realizing that it's not just, that's what happened to me, so here's who I am now. But that next step of acknowledging what happened so I can reclaim myself is what it feels like to me, and then be who I am meant to be and become more of myself instead of less of myself because of what others did a long time ago, even if that was because of their own stuff. So how do respond to that or move from that into some of this that we know about attachment?
Speaker 1:I think I was always someone who is I'm not such a good believer. What do I mean by that? When I go to education or all these things, I always ask myself what they are telling me. Is this right? Is this right for me?
Speaker 1:So I want to think out of the box. I think this is a very important one and considering attachment because I have this huge clinical experience, because I have worked a lot with a lot of clients and it was through this observation that I saw a distinction between what I have learned and what research shows and what all those kinds of measures show and percentages about so much and so much that it didn't match with what I observed in my therapy room. So I became very interested in why if someone came in my therapy room with so much trauma consequences but I couldn't see any trauma, obvious trauma in their life, know, or I couldn't find a fitting and matching trauma as we see them on the lists of big and little t trauma. So I was really open trying to understand what happened to you, what happened in your relationship with your parents because I can't see anything and you can't tell me anything. Of course not because you are traumatized and we have a lot of these coping strategies that we don't remember anymore to survive terror and horror.
Speaker 1:Then I saw that there was a lot going on between parents and children which was not observable. It was not about sexual abuse or abuse or physical abuse or neglect but it was about how those parents and of course especially my interest goes into the relationship with the mother but how these parents and this mother how they behave towards the child if they really could see the child as a human being, part of who they were. If they ask themselves, who is that child? What was going in their mind? There was a huge interest in how available are those parents in their relationship with their children.
Speaker 1:We all looked for years about care. We give them food, we give them shelter, we let them educate, we play with them. We say okay we build an attachment but that is not attachment. Attachment is relationship. So I became huge interested in their stories and tried to reveal what was the interaction with your mother, was she gentle towards you, was she interested in you?
Speaker 1:Also, prenatal, were you once a child or was this previous? So I went up to all other levels in this relationship and I developed tender, unseen attachment trauma which is about the quality of this relationship with the child and this is something you can't see because it's about quality, it's about interaction and it's not in the list of abuse and emotional abuse or psychological abuse or ritual abuse. It's not in the list. It's about how this parent is in the relationship with the child, what is this quality and this has to do a lot of those qualities. And then I go a further when I dare to think about that mother's neck and therefore I say and I really emphasize how important it is as a clinician or as a psychodromatologist really to work on your own issues so that you can go on a very, very open way to look.
Speaker 1:So it was there to think about bad, good and bad mothers and then not what was described already about it, but about mothers who really are behaving towards their children that we can call it that it is a kind of monstrous. It has to do with debt, or it is literally that you don't want your child to lift and to bring that on the surface or under the surface, or it is that there are those debt teamed, a team in this, mother that, and it's, then it is about debt in the generations before or, war victims or their children. So all of a sudden I really want to clear this up and add to attachment style and it's a little bit of built on the work of Brett Carr on intangible attachment, but I get deeper and make it broader and broader and looked at the mothers in this relationship and divided them into the murdered mother and the murderous mother. Know it's all of them a distinction that I made because it's about how they act towards the child and so I think that was how I bit by bit dove deeper and deeper and deeper into attachment attachment relationships beyond and out of the box of what was already described.
Speaker 1:But it was really because I was in my therapy room the whole time encountering so deep, deep traumatized people without obvious.
Speaker 2:I just want to recap this really simply because if we are new to doing our own work, these are really difficult things to see clearly. What we are talking about is that the trauma that counts as trauma includes things like deprivation and includes things that are relational trauma, that it is not just the incidence of specific kinds of abuse that we see on the news. It doesn't have to be this kind of abuse or that kind of abuse, that relational trauma, which we also know from the fMRI studies, that the relational trauma has a greater impact neurologically, even than physical or sexual which we know are bad. We're not dismissing that. And also, then taking that into looking at the disorganized attachment category, for lack of better words, and understanding that disorganized attachment means we've had to use strategies to approach care because we weren't getting it and to avoid harm because that's what care looks like.
Speaker 2:So we were having to do both of those things. And then a subcategory of that being the infanticidal attachment where we have to agree with our caregiver for survival that we are invisible or should not have existed or don't exist or have lost siblings and have to replace that sibling. All these different kinds of things and dynamics, which leave us developing as children in the space of agreeing that we are not here or should not be here. So even if they are not, like we're using the word murder, and it's such a big word, but we're talking about the soul and spirit of the child where just completely squashed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you say because I remember that when I began with my webinar, I think that you wrote in the chat they call it soul murder and if I remember good. I also use these words of the murdered mother and the murderess mother because you can't exist, it's about existence. You have to go into non being and non existence to go in relationship with an antisidote and then tinnitus attachment, you have to go into non being and nonexistent. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To be seen, to be coming in communication and in contact, it's it's very paradoxically, but it is that huge paradox. You may not exist and you stop in your development on several levels, you stop with that existing and this is so important to understand because a lot of behavior which we have called pathology as death wishes, suicidal behavior, auto mutilation, all those things you really can understand it better if you look through the lens of how a child is trying to survive while not surviving.
Speaker 2:That, that in itself too explains so much when folks say, I didn't have this kind of abuse or that kind of abuse, so I don't understand why I'm so dissociative. But that paradox itself is trans induction. And when you're growing up with that as your contract with your caregiver, you have to stay in chance for that to be possible because it's not actually possible to not exist while existing.
Speaker 1:No. Like, also in in in a clinical setting, it's a very it's a very difficult one to work with because they really feel as I don't exist. But you are with your client at that moment in this interaction, of course they exist, but it's a huge, huge difficult work and complex work to do, but it's really beautiful. It's a strange word, really beautiful that in the presence of the clinician or psychotheraumatologist, in the here and now in the presence of that, you can make the contact and begin to make this little step that they are alive because they are confessing or not.
Speaker 2:I think it's such a scary or frightening moment in therapy when you start to exist because it feels like you're breaking the contract. It feels like you're putting yourself in danger. And so starting to exist in therapy and starting to take up space in the world or starting to be in relationship, there was the experience of having like feeling myself come back online and it being so distressing and I attributed it to so many different things Oh I am sad because this person isn't here, or I'm sad because this situation changed.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:am scared because of this or that. But my big feelings, it turned out, were not about those things. My big feelings were, it was a threatening thing to take up space in the world.
Speaker 1:And it's not only about breaking the contract. It's because, of course, it's a contract with renewal and the model, let's say, but it's also that you have built so much of this survival mechanism that also in the brain and I think Courtois is talking about that how you also in the brain are making this connection to stay attached with your caregiver. For me, this is one of the main main themes to remember the whole time. When I'm giving my course, I think my participants, I annoy them with that the whole time because I say all those coping strategies is to preserve this attachment relationship. So becoming alive is not only about breaking the contract, it's about, oh my god, I'm going to lose my mother.
Speaker 1:Yes. I'm going to lose my mother. And this is annihilation anxiety. This is annihilation anxiety. The biggest fear is the fear to lose the mother.
Speaker 2:Annihilation anxiety, even also, because that's so hard to see directly gets projected into relationships, into interpersonal violence. I cannot exist because I will lose this person or I cannot take up space because I will lose this community. I cannot have my voice because I will
Speaker 1:Yeah. Biggest fear is to lose. The biggest fear is the fear to be abounded, in my opinion. In my opinion, this is the hardest part. All all always at the birth when your client they sell you are growing.
Speaker 1:And when you come into a relationship, this annihilation anxiety that really strikes you and that all kinds of things are coming up and you you are eager to leave the relationship. You are not allowed. It's not only that you're not allowed to live, you're not allowed to love, but you are, you know, you think when I become alive, I'm going to die. So this is the all all this is strange paradox the whole time, the whole time. And more I'm going to lose my mother and I can't live without my mother.
Speaker 1:I'm a child. I'm dependent. And when we are in, you know, beginning of of this very complex and long long term, maybe lifetime therapy and still in therapy, in the beginning, you are not going to take that risk. You're not going to take the risk in your head to lose your mother. Of course, you don't understand you didn't hatch your mother.
Speaker 1:She wasn't there. That's why you created annulation anxieties. But in your head, of course, you think, no, no. I'm going to lose my mother. So I'm, you know, I'm I'm going to stay dead and not allowing myself to develop, to love, to become a human being, to go into the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As
Speaker 2:you were sharing this, the train was coming, and it was, like, the alarm bells of what you were talking about. It was so emphatic of what you were describing, the alarm bells going off. And, but I just want to say how real this is, literally trying to stay alive. And also why we stay in relationships that are not safe or healthy for us. And why we cannot see clearly the impact of what we experienced in these situations with caregivers, even when it was not malicious, the impact, looking at the impact and how it is so difficult to see that clearly and also stay alive at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's, it's a very, very long way because it's a huge impact and very, as I said, contradictionary and the coping strategies and the things inside and it's so relationally. I always say relational trauma, interrelational trauma. I'm not the one who saying this is worse and worser but this has such an impact on the total development of a child and then you see you become an adult and you can behave and you choose the same partner who has those traumatic bonds and it's not that only because you are used to it and it's for you, familiar, but it's all that you have developed. You are at a certain point when you don't work on all these issues.
Speaker 1:You are all your coping strategies and you behave depending on what is happening in the outside. You behave in one or another coping strategy, so you can't see clear, you don't see the environment clear, you can't see it through all those different lenses of your coping strategies. You look through an internal working model where you believe I don't deserve any love and you can't see that maybe in your environment there is somebody who is genuinely in love with you and a good one. So all those things are difficult for me this is also on the basis of psychosis. I don't like the word psychosis.
Speaker 1:I don't use it but to compare it I think we have all those tremendous confusions about what is real and what isn't. If you have a mother who is telling you, you are so bad, you are the one who is going, you kill me, you kill me, you bit by bit that you are a murderer and that you are able to kill people. When you take that belief, it's so, you know, yeah, dissociated, let's say, dissociated from the reality, the real your own reality and the reality inside and the reality outside it's so difficult. I think this understands all those kind of things and as clinicians really and as psychotrometricians have the courage there to seek that even if it wasn't this incident, as you call it, ritual abuse, that in the relationship such bad things could have happened which has no name even which you can't see that this has this tremendous impact. I call it translation with your client.
Speaker 1:You have to translate and make a link with your mother saying such kind of things. This is killing you inside and it's making you believe that you are a killer, that you have the supernatural powers that only maybe by looking to someone you can kill them. This is not a reality, but of course it's not that simple, but bit by bit you know those two realities, the trauma reality and the, yeah, personal human reality on who you are. I think this is very important to work with.
Speaker 2:There was a movie, this is a silly thing, but it comes full circle for me on this. There was a movie, one of the hunger games movies actually, which of course so violent, but, there's a line where one of the people in the movie says, I can't change that. They're basically saying I can't change that. They're making us do this, but if I'm going out, I'm going out as myself. And the reason that line was so powerful for me was because recognizing myself in situations and relationships and even churches, organizations that were not safe or healthy for me and recognizing I am not going to survive this because to stay in this, I have to agree to not exist.
Speaker 2:If I leave this, everything in me tells me I will not survive leaving this. And also leaving this is the only thing that will bring me back to myself. And having to use that to get myself out, which ultimately, of course, sets me free from it. But that's not what it feels like in the beginning.
Speaker 1:I have this, you know, I call it survival belief. I remember as a child, I really believe that evil would not win over good. This was so strong in me till today. That belief also filled my search for Who am I? Also escalation, Who are you?
Speaker 1:I believe till today I think of forty years of work and field that I can prove that trauma can't destroy what we it the self my model and in my theory, it the authentic self. It doesn't matter. Trauma harm destroying. You are born with your potential to develop on all different levels: bodily, cognitive, emotionally, moral, bodily, relationally you are born with that potential and you are also born, we call it in our theory transcendence. The transcendence are universal undestructible powers and those are the attachment energy which I really believe is an inborn energy power which can't be destroyed by trauma, love, will, life and call it essence.
Speaker 1:It's an other name for the spiritual power. And with that in mind, Emma, I put all this together and said, you know, with this belief evil can't win over good and somewhere there, somewhere I am somewhere with my potential and with my transcendence. Of course, when I was a jot, I didn't project that. It took me years to name it. It's so important for me as a clinician and as a psychotheraumatologist to work with that belief and also to trauma work to integrate the whole trauma work together with empowerment.
Speaker 1:Empowerment is working with its developmental potentials, enhance them and make free, bring to the surface the energies. Because I believe they are still there, no matter what you have been going through and how much layers of coping strategies and different parts are living inside, they are still there. I think it's important that really as a dermatologist that are convinced of that and you can see that and you help the client to discover it, to explore it, to develop it. Besides working with the trauma parts and you know, try to heal the pain, but at the same time, it's balancing this both instances, I call it in the work, with attachment trauma.
Speaker 2:That is so lovely, so important and changes everything. I think my darkest moments in all of my own therapy were recognizing like those dark, dark, dark, deep moments of recognizing there was nothing I could do to undo what had happened between me and my mother or between me and my father. And that in my relationship since that were reenactments of that, that there was no way to win because it was set up so that I couldn't win, whether that was relationships or church or whatever that were, were not healthy for me, but in the same, like in the, that, that, like I thought I would drown. It felt like drowning. It was so dark and it was so awful and there was no air in that.
Speaker 2:And I thought I'm not going to survive. And also the very next breath is the breath of recognizing that yes, no one is coming to save me. No one is coming to get me out of this. And also I have the power to liberate myself. And that changed everything.
Speaker 2:That is what set me free.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. This is so important that you, a certain point, can connect with because if you feel the power that you can set yourself free, it's one of these inherent powers, but we call this transcendence both worlds still live in you and are there and all their mighty power. And that it's so important that you can grab them. Also as a psychotromatologist, you can help your client to remember that there is more than what you have been going through.
Speaker 1:There is more than the trauma. There is developmental part, are also parts of you okay. There have been the development of uncertain stages being interrupted, but never destroyed. So in therapy, you can enhance the development on very different areas and also helping your client by looking with them when in their life could have seen this kind of felchlight of life energy or of love or attachment because they have been. Help them to recognize and acknowledge them that there is more than only this trauma but that's in you, the possibility is there to become you are meant to be.
Speaker 1:Think this is the most important thing to believe and to work with.
Speaker 2:I love this even in application for those with dissociative disorders, it becomes a mapping opportunity, not what is this name and what is that name and then let's live this name or that name. All of this as part of all of me and recognizing this developmental thing is happening and that developmental thing is happening. And that becomes part of the rescue mission, of being able to meet them where they're at, where I'm at, tend to them, tend to me, and then grow from there and recognizing, oh, even, even this mistake was my mistake as an adult or this, I did get myself in this mess or even learning to own those things, but also learning from them and recognizing the developmental experience that it was and moving on from that in healthier ways. And then I don't have to repeat them anymore.
Speaker 1:No. And also that also, they don't I think that a lot of trauma partners, I think this is a mistake, something in therapy with maybe dissociative disorder, they have to leave but you know they may not bother you that much and when you are able to see that all the inherent powers are also there and oil development potential is there, they can all live together and become a more coherent whole and help each other. It's not that they have to disappear, but they can't disappear, can't never disappear. As you said Emma, you can't, you know, is a big shock at a certain point in therapy that you understand what happened to you, you can never undo that. You can work with the consequences and and restore, make a restoration of yourself and build yourself up as who you are with that with that inside because it is part of your history.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Anything else you would want to share with survivors themselves?
Speaker 1:I, there's two things that I really hope that they could let in and the first thing is that we are all traumatized and that it is important for the clinicians and psychotramatologists and the psychologists and whoever is working with people who are traumatized that they have to work themselves to their own issues otherwise we are going to create unsafe attachment relationships in our therapies and really the last thing that I said that the self is undestructible the potential and inherent powers are still present. These guys, okay I am aware of that, they are still present and there are ways to connect them and transform them and let them help to maybe heal from trauma but that makes the pain or the suffering less so you can have a life that fits with what you want and who you are. I hope that those two things, yes, that they will remember it. Let it end in their hearts.
Speaker 2:Oh, we so often have memory time framed in the context of all the hard things that happen, but to think of all the good we were born with, that is part of who we are, that got interrupted and disrupted, that that can be reclaimed and grown,
Speaker 1:if
Speaker 2:it starts very, very tiny, because we were very, very tiny when we were born, To think that that can grow and heal along with us and become something more is so powerful and empowering. I love it. What else about clinicians? I want to respect your time. That last question.
Speaker 2:Anything else you want to be sure clinicians hear?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What I said, if you have the courage to, look inside your own soul and heart and ask yourself why you are doing this work and be honest with yourself try to support yourself because I think this is also a very important one to feel kind of circle where we can support each other in this and not doing it by yourself. I think that I have nothing more at this moment that I can think about that I want to share. I hope that my voice reached them.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for talking with us. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Thank you for inviting me for that. I'm grateful for that, Emma. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:I really am. You did lovely. Thank you so much, and I will see you in meetings.
Speaker 1:Okay. Bye bye. Have a nice weekend. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye. Thank
Speaker 3: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 3: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 3:Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.