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Dr. E speaks with Christine Forner, the current president of the ISSTD. Christine shares her own trauma journey to healing, and opens up about what that was like professionally. She explains her clinical perspective of trauma and dissociation and what healing looks like from her own perspective. She discusses her goals for her presidency, as well as upcoming ISSTD projects related to survivors and updated treatment guidelines. Domestic violence and trafficking and other “genres” of abuse are referenced, but nothing is disclosed or discussed in detail.
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. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, and there is a button for donations where you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. We so appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are all learning together. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Christine Forner has been in the healing profession in one form or another since the age of 16, where she worked on a crisis line for teens. Christine spent the first part of her career in the front lines working at local sexual assault centers, long term therapeutic settings, and shelters for domestic violence survivors. Since 2011, Christine has worked in her own private practice which specializes in complex trauma and dissociative disorders. Christine has over thirty years of working with individuals with trauma, post traumatic stress disorders, traumatic dissociation, developmental trauma, and dissociative disorders with specialized training in EMDR, sensory motor psychotherapy, psychotherapeutic meditation techniques, neurofeedback, and havening. Christine is also the current clinical supervisor for Waypoints, a center in Fort McCurie, Alberta that specializes in sexual assault and domestic violence.
Speaker 1:Christine teaches locally and at the international level on the issue of dissociation, complex trauma, and the intersection of dissociation and mindfulness Christine is the current president for the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation Christine has also served on the board of the ISSTD since 2010 and was the ISSTD treasurer from 2011 to 2017 She is the author of Dissociation, Mindfulness, and Creative Meditations: Trauma Informed practices to facilitate growth, as well as avidly working with those who have been hurt the most Christina's dedicated her professional life to educating others on the logic, normality, and commonality of dissociation The summation of her work is to educate practitioners about the vital importance of their presence, patience, and care with those who have been through the most severe and brutal injuries so that they get treated with dignity and compassion. The four qualities of presence, patience, dignity, and compassion applied to every aspect of the therapeutic process can result in profound inner healing, something every human deserves to experience. Welcome Christine Forner.
Speaker 2:Hello, my name is Christine Forner. I am a clinician up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, but I'm also the current president of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2:You're welcome.
Speaker 1:How did you get started learning about trauma at all? Can you go all the way back to the beginning?
Speaker 2:Oh, the beginning started when I was very young at 16. I started to work at a teen line deciding what I wanted to do with my life, and it was a sew it was a hotline for stressed out teens, but it ended up being quite a bit of suicide calls. And I think back to the calls that I was taking when I was 16 years old, and I was like, oh my goodness. Because there was some pretty intense calls at that age. But I also recognized that it didn't really bother me like it bothered everybody else.
Speaker 2:I was able to get in and and listen. And then I went I got a diploma in social work and started working at a sexual assault center in public education. So I was doing I was going to different elementaries, junior high, high schools in my city talking about sexual assault prevention. And so that was when I started really getting exposed to the experiences of sexual assault. And I I didn't do that on purpose.
Speaker 2:That was the only practicum that was left that was closely in the range of what I wanted to work with. I didn't really wanna work there. So but I ended up working there. And then I ended up working in a woman's shelter after getting my women's studies degree. And then after I had my children, I was I found it really difficult working in the shelter and seeing all the kids.
Speaker 2:I was having a hard time not being mama bear all the time. So then I applied for a job at a place where it was lower fees. There was no set time limit on how long or how like, for how many years a person could see, and it was for women. So basically, it was just the perfect setting for extremely traumatized people. I didn't quite have the education, and I wouldn't be able to get away with what I got away with today.
Speaker 2:But I was being supervised doing long term therapy before I had my master's. And I think because I went in with the clients first, and I listened to what the clients were saying. One of my very first cases was a dissociative disordered person, someone with dissociated identities. And I didn't really question whether it was right or wrong. I honored what she was saying, and I was listening to what she was saying.
Speaker 2:And I went to my supervisor, and I just said I had this most fascinating experience. And she handed me Colin Ross's book about multiple personality, and I read it like it was the most fascinating textbook. It was the most fascinating thing I've ever read in my life. And I was like, oh my god. This makes this is really an interesting thing that humans do.
Speaker 2:And so right from the get go from, like, 1998 onward, I had been looking at this and researching it. And most of what I I came up with, I was self taught. I went back to school. When I went back to school, I started specializing in creative meditations for dissociative disorders, and I didn't realize at the time how weird that was either. And so and I've been seeing I've been seeing them ever since.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. And you have it's such a story, and you have such an intuitive gift for women and survivors that have has really developed as you developed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's it's been an interesting journey because throughout all of that, as I started going back to school and wanting to learn to be more, I also started realizing that my life wasn't doing so well.
Speaker 2:That's when I started doing creative meditations and and I got a bit of relief, but it was really when I started doing getting trained in EMDR and getting trained in sensory motor psychotherapy and getting trained in this and getting trained in that, that I started realizing that I myself am am a trauma survivor as well. And I didn't know until much later. So when at the first, you know, first twenty years of my career, I didn't really know that I had the extent of trauma that I had, which is it sounds so strange, but that's the power of dissociation.
Speaker 1:That's so powerful and so empowering for you to open up and share just even that peace.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:That was a challenge that I had as well that I had worked professionally. And then all of a sudden, my world as I knew it sort of fell apart. And as a result of that, the defenses I had been using were no longer working and everything just stopped. I closed my private practice. I someone would have thought that I was seriously depressed.
Speaker 1:I almost became just a shut in But it wasn't about depression. It was about, I recognize this is trauma, and I don't know what to do with it because this is me. This is not a person in my office.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mine was sort of the other like, it it was just this it it was just a tsunami. I could I I was I was in a very psychologically abusive and domestic violent interpersonal marriage that I didn't know was as bad as it was. And because of the level of crisis that I was in most of the time, my thinking brain, my knowing brain, not my thinking brain, my knowing self was totally offline because what she knew, I didn't have the capacity to comprehend. I and I I wasn't in a position where I was safe enough to fathom what was going on with me.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't until I started becoming much more safer and much more aware of myself. And with that sensorimotor just going in and finding this and finding that and finding this and finding that, and it was like, oh my god. And I discovered afterwards that I'm actually like, my ACE score is an eight. It's really high, and I didn't know that Wow. For the first twenty years of my career.
Speaker 2:Wow. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So tell me without being overly intrusive. Tell me how you were able to do that through the sensory motor process. So let me clarify in case you don't know. We recently had Pat Ogden on the podcast. So the listeners know about this, and my mind has been blown by this.
Speaker 1:What was that process for you?
Speaker 2:Well, it was it was when I started training with SensorMotor, I was lucky enough that I was one of the last to really get a training by Pat. So I know I know Pat quite well. And I started doing sensory motor, and it was just these questions of what's happening inside? What do you notice inside? Questions that I had never asked or even thought about asking before in my life.
Speaker 2:And and when you start to I think I think I because of the meditation practices that I was doing, they're very visual. They're very action oriented. So I will focus on when I do a meditation, I'll focus on different colors coming in and breathing in different colors, or I'll focus on doing a guided imagery where I go to a a place like, I'll visit San Francisco, and then I'll come back. So I can have that felt feeling of of having control and focusing, but it was all highly visual. It did make me feel quite a bit better, and now I know why that is.
Speaker 2:So not all meditation has to be mindfulness. But I was doing that, and I think because I was going in and actually practicing mindfulness, when I started doing Pat's work, I was able to do what we were instructed on doing of of going in and exploring the body very well. I just didn't expect to find what I found. Wow. And it was in those inner journeys that I started experiencing unfathomable pain.
Speaker 2:And I started to the pieces started coming together. The the what was happening was coming together. The experience of of walking around being terrified in my life, but not at work. It was so weird because this never happened at work because I was able to stay very mindful the whole time I was working. I was able to stay present with my clients.
Speaker 2:I don't know how I did that, but it it's what happened. So I didn't find work stressful, and I didn't find taking care of my kids stressful because I was regulated in both places and dysregulated everywhere else. And so when I started to explore the dysregulation, that's when I started to explore what was creating the dysregulation.
Speaker 1:That's a powerful thing. I think two things come to my mind. One is that when Pat Ogden was on the podcast and she said something about your body being an ally, I was like, wait just a minute. Like, I hadn't even met my body yet. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Much less considered it as an ally.
Speaker 2:And and I and and then exploring the the field that I explore, which is mindfulness for dissociative disorders, and I'm learning like, I have learned that they're very rival brain activities, and that when we're dissociating, it is almost impossible, if virtually impossible, to become aware. And it's learning how to how to bring in that awareness. It's a skill. This isn't something that just needs to be understood. This is actually like learning to swim, learning to tie your shoes, learning to regulate yourself is a hard skill to learn, especially when most of you doesn't want you to do what you need to do to do that.
Speaker 2:Right. Is that convoluted enough?
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly.
Speaker 2:But you start to understand as you move through these processes that these feelings that we have are simply forms of communication. That terror that I'm experiencing is a part of me sending out a message something's wrong, and it's expecting something come back. I just didn't know what that was, and I had to learn what that was to be able to be able to bring in the care that I needed in that moment of that time, and you can't do that until you know what the problem is.
Speaker 1:The other thing that was really important I wanna point out about what you just said was about how it's so common for survivors to be able to function very well in different areas of their life. And I think, especially those of us who are in the field, there's so much stigma that we advocate against and that we advocate for people. But then when it's on us, it's a whole different thing for some reason. And to recognize that this is actually that we can do that ourselves. We have to face that stigma ourselves in a whole different way about how we've internalized that ourself and to recognize I mean, it's one thing professionally to say what are the limits or supports that I need to be able to be safe and do my job well.
Speaker 1:And it's another thing to say, I'm actually really good at what I do because I have this and this and this. And being able to separate and regulate even though it's not so easy in other areas of the life.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. It and it it it always I I don't know the science behind what I was doing. I suspect it has something to do with just the makeup that I am of of who I am. I was able to stay focused and regulated with my clients and with my kids. I I think Kathleen Kendall Tackett was one of our keynote speakers many years ago, and she talked about how nursing moms can feel regulated for the first time and experience regulation for the first time because of the neurochemistry that's being produced by the mom, which is all about the transferring of the neurochemicals of neuronal regulation.
Speaker 2:I think when I was nursing my children, I started to actually become regulated for the first time in my life. Because that was out of everything in my life, the birth of my children was the biggest catalyst of change. I started recognizing that I did not that something was very wrong, and that and I think it's because I started to feel so regulated around my children and having this felt feeling inside of me that came from the narrow chemistry of when I was nursing. And I I think that that feeling of mindfulness when I'm regulated, it's not a difficult skill for me in particular, even though it might be a difficult skill for other people in particular. And that's probably why I was able to do the job that I was able to do.
Speaker 1:I found for me that it's almost about the struggle is recognizing what it looks like. But once you start to notice, oh, that's what that is, it gets easier to do, and then you can practice it more on your own. But everything for a survivor, whether that's regulating internally, whether that's finding healthy relationships that aren't acting out what you've already been through or those kinds of things. Once you recognize it, then it's easier to get more of it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's it's like care. Right? If you're hungry and you don't know that you're hungry, you're gonna try all sorts of things to try and get that need met. But once you sort of figure out, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:This sandwich is making me feel better. I'm gonna have more of this sandwich. Oh my goodness. This must be hunger. And that's kind of what it's like for survivors is you've gotta start putting those pieces together of what your own neurobiology or your own biomechanics are are requesting or just are talking to you about, and you can't get that from the mind.
Speaker 2:You can only get that through sensing and and feeling and trusting the felt feelings that the sensations are bringing with them. That's so And dissociation stops all of this from happening.
Speaker 1:That's so powerful. It's so well said and such a good image. How did how did that shift for you as you were able to do that and continue your career?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one, I did have that very strong meditation practice before I really started my healing journey. And the other one is I just couldn't stop it. It was just coming. The the the as soon as I started opening the door through through sensory motor of my body awareness, it just became a very focal point of my being. What's going on inside?
Speaker 2:What's happening in my body? What does this feel like for me? And it's being able to sort of put the puzzle back after it's been broken without a guide, and you just you start to trust. Okay. This feels like this.
Speaker 2:This feels like that. This seems like this. This seems like that. I'm just gonna sit with this and let this be. And and it's as it it I think it was it took time.
Speaker 2:It probably took me, in total, about ten years, maybe thirteen years to really reach a place where all of the effects of my childhood are manageable, are understandable. And it's not just my childhood. It was also the twenty plus years that I was involved in a domestic violent relationship. The more you learn to go in, the more you learn to put the right words with the right meaning, with the right context of what you're experiencing on the inside, the more you trust those sensations. Even if they're the most brutal sensations, they're there for a reason.
Speaker 2:And the more that you trust them, the more the gaps fill in of who you are. And then the natural processes start coming in, like, you'll have a moment of absolute pride, which shatters all bits of shame. Having it as a trauma survivor, that's a very weird, loud feeling. That day is a good day.
Speaker 1:It is. It's it's almost like before those breakthroughs happen when you have memories, whether they're body ones or emotion ones or actual understanding what the memory is, there's always this big flooding and it's so awful and it's hard to manage and shut it down. But when you start to have that breakthrough, it's like the good happens almost as fast and almost as intensely.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because because you kind of learn to stop the shutdown. You learn how to just go with the flow and be the leaf on the wave, watching yourself as you go through this. If you honor that pain and suffering, if you give your pain and suffering patience, presence, dignity, and compassion, right? So when you start to cry and you start to heave having those words, like, let's give those feelings some dignity.
Speaker 2:Let's give those feelings some compassion. Let's honor them, and they're supposed to be there. Once you start to sort of realize that they're your friend, they takes you to that reward really quite quickly, Like, within actually minutes, honestly. And then you become less afraid of yourself and afraid of the world because you're like, okay. I can manage that.
Speaker 2:What else? And and it just be you become fairly impervious.
Speaker 1:I spent almost a year on the podcast not wanting to talk about my own professional world because the fear felt so big of Yeah. Not just the coming out process, but the consequences because what if they take my children away? What if I lose my license and can't provide for my children? What if what if what if and the fears were so big. And when it finally came time and I thought, this is what I learned.
Speaker 1:And at some point, I have to just trust this. And I sent that email to the ISSTD and said, this is who I am and what I'm doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Every single response that I got back was positive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and it and and isn't it hypocritical of our profession to throw people away so quickly when they real when you when you actually say, I'm a survivor when almost everybody is.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Except, like, know, why you know, we we're not dentists. Like, if if we don't deal with what we're dealing with I used to feel like I was a dentist with bad teeth all the time, that that I had these problems that I should know how to fix. But that is contrary to what we're trying to teach people is that we cannot do any of this stuff alone, that that being by yourself is not a healthy way to be healing these kinds of injuries, that we need other people to help us see things that we can't see. We need that compassion and that community and that care from others in order to heal these wounds because they're relational in essence. Right?
Speaker 1:It yes. And if there's anything I've learned in the last year, it's that healing comes through connection.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And it's that care.
Speaker 1:Since that email and reading people's responses, it is just snowballed into a whole different world where everything's just okay. There's some hard things we need to do. There's hard stuff to deal with, but everything's fine. Like, it's just okay. And these big fears that I had that were all related to, you can't say this in your profession.
Speaker 1:It just went away. Like, it's not even there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's wonderful. That's it's it's part of being human. We're human. And what's wrong with being human?
Speaker 2:I like, I sometimes I'm so worried that we're getting further and we keep getting further and further and further away from relationships in a therapeutic setting. And we keep, you know, not honoring the slowness that is needed in therapy and the time and patience that's needed in these things to truly and I I I sort of mean this in a non I want like like, I'm trying to lead the I have weight when I say this world, but there are cures. Like, cures. I am not the same person I was five years ago, ten years ago. I'm certainly not the same person I was twenty years ago.
Speaker 2:But I wouldn't have changed anything because I've I've I've I've been able to explore myself in a way that I don't think you get to do unless you know that kind of pain. Yes. And the value that comes from having that kind of compassion for yourself just oozes out into your daily life and it oozes into your practice, where you can look at clients and say, listen, how you are right now is not a bad thing. I mean, it's it's it's getting rid of the shame of basic, normal, human, inescapable ways of being.
Speaker 1:How did you get connected to the ISTD in the beginning?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's dear sweet Martin Dorey did that. So back in 02/2006, I think it was, I I applied for the David Cole scholarship, and I didn't get it. But Martin wrote me a very nice rejection letter, and I think I wrote back going, that's really sad. I think you guys should reconsider or something like that. Or they had made a tiny mistake, and I was trying to make them aware of the mistake.
Speaker 2:And he ended up and I think I was probably melting down because you do when you're in master school, dissociative disorders, and you're all by yourself and everybody's giving you grief for what you're doing. Right. I so I connected with him and he just sent me this lovely email that was like, it's okay, hang in there, you're doing a good job, we need more of this. And I was like and I had never heard that kind of support and niceness from a colleague, from an academic. So I was like, what is this?
Speaker 2:So I started I became a member, I think, in 02/2006. I started going to conferences in 02/2008. I was very quiet. My first conference, I was just getting a lay of the land. And then I I started going to town hall meetings and business meetings in 02/2009, and that's when I noticed a major generation gap, like, huge.
Speaker 2:Yes. There was there was a lot of senior members, scattering of students, and a scattering of like, I'm talking about four professionals that were sort of that mid range, mid career. There wasn't any. There was then and I looked at the society, and I'm like, this thing is dying. This is a dying society.
Speaker 2:And so I kept asking, what are they doing to bring in students and emerging professionals? And how are you guys making this place appealing? And they're all, like, shrugged their shoulders, they're like, we're not. So then I started bugging Paul Dell, and I'm phoning him, like, every two months and saying, can I help? I help?
Speaker 2:Can I help? They they ended up giving me in creating the student it was the student committee. Then we changed it to the student and emerging professional. And so 02/2010, I started doing small activities to start making it more appealing to the students. I started the student book giveaway where the senior professionals donated books, and we gave them to the students so that we could start their libraries.
Speaker 2:I started sort of social activities where the students and emerging professionals could talk with the senior, and that went down. That was very, very popular. It's always been super popular. And then then they asked me to be on the board, and they asked me, like, three times because I couldn't quite comprehend that they were actually asking me to be part of the board. But, yeah, they asked me to be part of the board.
Speaker 2:And then the following year, they asked me to be the treasurer. I didn't know what they were thinking about that one either, but that one turned out just fine. And my whole goal was to bring life back into the organization, to bring more social, bring more fun, bring more because, like, I I just found it was the most caring, most considerate, and most human place like, like, a organization I've ever been involved with. I went to a couple of their conferences, and they were pretty cold. And the academics were given a lot of accolades, but if you didn't have any producing, they didn't even look at you.
Speaker 2:That didn't happen with the ISSTD. I got welcomed with wide open arms. And think it has to do with not just the organization itself, but the mission and the vision statement of this organization is to help everybody. The most injured people are who we accept, and they are excluded from damn near everything. Excuse my language.
Speaker 2:They are so excluded and not only just excluded, they are shamed, they are hurt, they are belittled, they are ignored. And we are a society that says that's not okay. It's not okay to treat people like this. And we fight hard for those who don't have a voice. And to me, that's that's a work of the universe.
Speaker 2:That's what's gonna make things better. And so I have a very passionate place in my heart for the organization.
Speaker 1:That almost made me cry. You have done something that is a sacred work. And I know that you are passionate about it, but I don't know if you know that survivors and clinicians both recognize the sacred work that you have done that you are doing, and what a gift that is to so many. When I started the podcast, I didn't know that anyone was going to listen to it. And now it's in 60 countries, and I didn't know that clinicians that are famous people out there doing big important work and giving fancy speeches would ever want to talk to me or be well to me.
Speaker 2:In this world, they do.
Speaker 1:Yes. And bringing those communities together and healing that gap between where people are and what people can do for them is where healing is happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you are absolutely a part of that, and I am so grateful for you, and I wanna tell you that.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. This organization, it's it means a lot both personally, but also globally. It's yeah. I just I'm I'm in awe all the time at how hard this community works at speaking those voices that never get spoken for and, like, risking their careers over and over and over again to right a wrong.
Speaker 2:Man, that's powerful stuff. But it also is I started going to ISSTD, and I was getting pretty isolated with my work and with my ex husband. And I started coming to these conferences, and I think I got seen. And there was many people who saw me. And my best friends still to this day and will be for the rest of my life, I have found in this organization.
Speaker 2:Like minded people, people who are so cellularly and molecularly beautiful just who they are. They're just kind people and good people and thoughtful people and funny people. And the the the heart and the passion that's involved in this organization, I really wish people could could take a model from us, take us as a business model or a therapeutic model of an organization model of how how to work very hard for others in a way that is beneficial for the whole rather than also just for an individual, but for the whole. Man, if people knew what we know, the world would be a very different place.
Speaker 1:It's so true.
Speaker 2:To me, that's what's sacred. To me, that's what's absolutely sacred is is the the power of the heart of this organization.
Speaker 1:What are some of the things that the ISSTD is doing differently for survivors now than before? Just as part of your shift and part of your focus, what are some of those things that have unfolded?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I would actually say that they've been very consistent with survivors the whole way through. This is the organization that when they were attacked, they kept holding true. When we got attacked, we went back to the books. We went back to do more research. We went back to go, no.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:This is what we are seeing. This can't be wrong. The tenacity that is that is always been us. There is a tenacious feeling in this world, in this field of dissociation that I don't quite experience anywhere else. It's it's this fierce faith that we have in a human being.
Speaker 2:And that like like, Pat's work is so brilliant to me because it is the body is the ally. That that the person may you may they may may look super nutty on the outside. Sorry to use colloquialism, but they may look really nutty on the inside. But this this is the world that says, why? Why would a body do that?
Speaker 2:What is that body asking for? How can I help that body get what it needs and staying with it so that you can help that human being learn about themselves so that they can learn to care for themselves as you are showing them care? That's that's basically the the the what this organization does. How it's changed over the years is I think we're getting a confidence. I think we're we're starting to have enough evidence and enough proof and enough consistency behind us that, like, I have many shoulders that I can stand on.
Speaker 2:Those people who came from Bornfi, they had less shoulders, and then the people before that had less. So I think we're getting a more confidence of an organization instead of saying, you know, will you please like us how we used to do before? Yes. We are doing good. We're now a lot more confident in saying, oh my goodness.
Speaker 2:You should see what we're doing. You guys have a look over here. So I think we're getting able to be able to handle the pressure and the questions and hold ourselves true with the evidence and the the research that we have behind us and the clinical proof of over and over and over again that this is an extraordinarily valid thing that if everybody kind of knew, it would it and I and I kind of understand why the powers that be don't really like this is because it turns everything on its head. Its dissociation, when you understand and and sort of get the notion of it, it makes everything top sy-turvy. And it it I think it really does threaten the status quo of what people think a human is.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:It really does. It it changes a paradigm that the paradigm is is really struggling to comprehend.
Speaker 1:So they cannot accept dissociation fully as a thing and how it works and why it's there without also understanding people differently. And Yes. Because they don't wanna change the rules and they don't want to change insurance policy and they don't wanna all of these pieces, they I think so. All of it outright.
Speaker 2:I think so. I think it's just too much of a paradigm shift.
Speaker 1:What do clinicians who have not yet heard about the ISSTD or taken advantage of joining them, what do they need to know?
Speaker 2:You will always be wonderfully surprised. It you will the more you start learning about dissociation and the more you you become involved with the ISSTD, the more you'll realize that there's there's a capacity for this world to be very different and still do what you're doing. To be it's it's it can help you extend your practice. It can eliminate burnout. It can it it helps you look at human beings, not like what is wrong with you, but what happened to you.
Speaker 2:Like, what is your body trying to communicate? And, honestly, I know this sounds super corny, but I'm gonna be corny. It helps you fall in love with people, and I know that sounds so strange. I work with like, I hear the worst of the worst, and I you know, today, sex trafficking was my first appointment. My second appointment was somebody who's been through genocide.
Speaker 2:My third appointment is somebody else who was sexually assaulted. My first my next appointment, like, this is my day, twenty like, you know, four days a week, I'm living through this kind of stuff, hearing this terrible, horrible, gut wrenching thing that people do to each other. And then you see a human being coming alive from that. You see a human being starting to gain understanding and insight and compassion for themselves, and they start to apply care to what their inners are experiencing. And that human being starts to grow, and they are so brilliant at the end of it, and you understand, holy cow, we know so very little of our potential.
Speaker 2:And human beings are really remarkable. You know, that's where you find this stuff in this organization and in this agency and with these people.
Speaker 1:I will include the link so that people can have that if they don't already have it. Is there anything else of that piece for clinicians that you want to direct them to or include?
Speaker 2:Just become curious of the ISSTD and become curious about dissociation. It's gonna solve a lot of clinical problems for you once you really understand like, you can intuitively, organically comprehend what this body is doing in this state of freeze. And it's very different than the state of fight flight. It's an inactive defense. It's not an active defense.
Speaker 2:It's the one that stops the active defenses. So it works really quite differently. But once you start to understand that, you'll you can you can start to feel at one with your work rather than fighting or getting lost or getting confused. So I highly recommend just checking out everything we've got because there's so much stuff there.
Speaker 1:What do survivors need to know, or what are they able to access with the ISSTD?
Speaker 2:So for survivors, because we are an organization that actually is focused on clinicians and helping clinicians, there's lots of information. If you're sort of curious yourself in a clinical kind of way, there's lots of, you know, there's information that you can gain. We are trying, we are in the process of trying to develop the that part of ISSTD that is for survivors a little bit more, so we're starting to do some written material and that kind of stuff. I would say out of everything we do, probably that's our that's a that globally in the in the world, most books are written for clinicians. There's not a lot of books that are actually written for survivors themselves.
Speaker 2:So, you know, find a therapist on the ISSTD and start working out some books, start working out things to write. We need to hear from everybody. We need people's stories to be common.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think that that's really important what you said because the more that all of us share, the more we can build that database, so to speak and those resources. I know that because we have such a global audience on the podcast, I get lots of emails about I checked the ISSTD website and there is no one in my country. And I know that that's that's a heartbreaking thing that we're still everyone is still trying to educate and spread the news and advocate for, but not necessarily something you can just fix with a button. You know? There's so much more involved in that, but it's so heartbreaking for them.
Speaker 1:And it's almost like there's a new gap that is just about technology because now we have people who can read those resources and who could hear things like the podcast and realize what's going on, but who can't yet get to help.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, there's there's small little things that that fundamentally, when you're working with trauma survivors, it is possible for a therapist to learn how to do this. This isn't it is it's it's challenging work. It's gut wrenching work. But if you follow your body, your body will take you to those places of reward as well afterwards.
Speaker 2:So it's it's inviting the therapist. If you have a therapist that you have a close relationship, that's the most important thing. That therapist can learn how to manage the symptoms and the skills that are required to help someone work through a dissociative disorder. So like, like it's, I would, as if I was in a place where there was no therapist, there is a therapist, and I would actually start going to therapists and say, would you be open into helping me with this? Here's information for you.
Speaker 2:There's there's supports here for you. Would you mind helping me through this?
Speaker 1:Advocating for yourself while they let
Speaker 2:those go. But that's kind of hard. And and I know because a lot of really traumatized people don't do well for advocating for themselves because they were taught and trained not to advocate for themselves. Right. But maybe put it as a seed.
Speaker 2:Right? Maybe put it as somewhere down the in the in the in the future that you could help like, you could introduce the ISSTD to your therapist, and then your therapist could learn how to help you.
Speaker 1:The other gap that is almost like what you talked about earlier about it being generational has to do with treatment guidelines and not because of ISSTD but because of time. So Yeah. I am friends with Peter Barrish who was involved with that originally and I appreciate him and his help and he's talked on the podcast before and he spoke about how one problem with just updating the treatment guidelines is that dissociation is still treated the same way. The problem with and and so that makes sense and I appreciated his perspective on understanding because I was getting these questions and I didn't know how to answer them. And so that helped a lot give me some perspective that even though this and this and this or the DSM five or ISD 11 or whatever, even though these things change, the treatment is still sort of the same process in a general way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think part of what the challenge is is the gap in time and how everything filters down. So there are people in places without good therapists or people Yeah. Who have a therapist who only has something from 1980. And so a new generation person is like, that's from forty years ago. Why are you treating me with something forty years ago?
Speaker 1:Even though there's so much more to that. And I know that, like, Bethany Brand is working on the top DD studies, and we're working so hard on research and all of these things are in the process of unfolding. But in the moment in the moment, the experience for the person is that they're with a therapist who has a piece of paper that Yeah. The therapist is using as not as a guideline but as almost like a policy statement that treatment treatment should end up looking like this and only this and treatment should Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's I think that's the influence of the world or the the cognitive behavioral therapy world that's very manualized. And and I think that is the the culture that we're in right now is you you need these results. We gotta get the results. And it's just this it's like we've taken capitalism and and used capitalism as as our guiding measurement of of health. And once again, we can't do that.
Speaker 2:That's why dissociation changes that paradigm because you cannot treat this quickly. There is nothing that can be done with a therapist in 10 sessions except for small connections that will have the deep rooted grounding that needs to happen in order to change. We have to be safe to change. And if we don't feel safe, change can't happen because the body doesn't have that scaffolding. It doesn't have what it needs to do what it needs to do to heal, to go to those vulnerable places and be be safe.
Speaker 2:So it it it's like, you know, it it it's so sad. There's no treatment place in Canada for someone with a dissociative disorder to go to. You have to have an addiction as well, but if you don't have an addiction, there's nowhere to go. And I think it's a lot like that in The States as well, and I think that's a lot like that. The Netherlands might be a little different.
Speaker 2:I think they have a different setup.
Speaker 1:Like In Netherlands, they're really struggling actually, which is fascinating. Are they? Because some of the best research is out of Yeah.
Speaker 2:What we need is treatment facilities that are designed around those treatment guidelines of respecting and honoring. But, you know, I think there we've learned an awful lot about mindfulness since those treatment guidelines have come out. And dissociation and mindfulness, they don't really work. I'm about the only as far as I know, I'm the only person who actually speaks about mindfulness and dissociation. And I do believe that that mindfulness is actually a very important part of this.
Speaker 2:The hard part is that mindfulness is such a a land mind field for people with dissociation. But if a person can start learning small little pieces of how to be mindful, that's when a lot of things can start changing inside. And if we were to add in a little bit more understanding of what mindfulness is and how to adapt it with a dissociative disorder, that might open some things up too.
Speaker 1:Melanie, it's so hard to explain some of these experiences. Like we spoke about earlier about how the breakthrough can be so equally as good as the rest of it is hard before those times or how I spoke with Dan Siegel last week, and he talked about how anything that's integrative and not just talking about personalities integrating or combining, but the body and the mind and all of these pieces, how that is, like, he said, a fruit salad, not a smoothie. And when I talk to these people or interview these people or they talk on the podcast, they have such beautiful descriptions of understanding those pieces because they are connected with the people. And then that is such a different experience than a therapist who just has the piece of paper that's 40 pages and said it has to look like this.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Because it doesn't look like like, generally, with dissociation, not one person is going to look exactly the same, but there's general rules. Right? There's general you know, it it's asking these common sense questions when a person's in there of of in that moment to moment, what's happening in this? It know?
Speaker 2:Like, I have some clients who need something that it it doesn't even occur to me because I've never had that particular need. You can't put that in a manual. That's it's the same thing as parenting. You can't put parenting into a manual either because parenting is about the ebbs and flows of that child's inner body. And you can put general rules that you that child needs to be clothed and warm and fed, and all of those things are general rules.
Speaker 2:But that specific child might not like avocado, and another one might love avocado. We are unique individuals and the therapeutic setting has to reflect that because you're not treating the disorder. You're treating the human being who has disordered ways of being. And our job is to help figure out and and and figure out why they're doing that and what it would need so it doesn't have to do that.
Speaker 1:So Peter Barris told me that originally, they even came about the guidelines because of insurance companies and that being a requirement. And so what's happened is someone else outside of the relationship required that, and then now people are misapplying them. And what saying is it's not even about updating them so much as seeing beyond them.
Speaker 2:I think that there's a little bit they do need to be updated, and and I'm I'm attempting to that's one of the things that I'd like to accomplish with my presidency is get that started because they do need to be updated. The language needs to be updated. The some of the diversity needs to be updated and just making sure that we're not being overly privileged or or not inclusive enough. So that has to be updated as well as including some of these new notions that we didn't know really know about in 02/2011. Like, Pat Pat's bodywork stuff has changed things.
Speaker 2:Understanding the default mode network, that's brand new, and that is gonna open something really wide up, I do believe. There's other brain structures that we weren't really aware. We weren't aware back in 02/2011. I think I think that the the the senior people did. The people at the top of the pyramid knew, but now I think it's spreading down the pyramid of how fundamentally important relationships are, but what what constitutes a human relationship.
Speaker 2:And, like, I I'm not sure we knew the neurochemistry and the neurobiology of the betrayal of sexual assault in the same way we understand it now. And and it it they could it's sort of helping prove what everybody has been saying in the past. The neurobiology and the neurochemistry really gives us hard evidence that it is, like, the top relational injury that you can get besides neglect?
Speaker 1:So part of what's good about all of that is that because of technology today, that can sort of get disseminated more quickly as it unfolds. Both the gathering of information and the updating of guidelines and perspectives from ISSTD, that's all on the website.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So as people connect with the organization and utilize those trainings, then they are talking to the same people I'm talking to and and other people, and it gets out there instead of having these old stale things that are end up harming even though that's not what they were intended.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's exciting. You're doing so much.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. Well, it's I I didn't when I first started in this career, it found me. I did not find it. I've always felt super passionate because I think of how misunderstood and how brutal people are to those who have been hurt the most. But I I now know at the other side of this that a part of my passion was also me trying to figure out what was going on.
Speaker 2:I and I I never consciously thought I gotta figure out what was going on. I I intuitively knew like, I just intuitively was led here. And if if I can share any of these passions with the world of how remarkable we really are as a species, and if we're given the right conditions and if we're raised in the right environment, we are unstoppable in beautiful, positive, kind, connected ways. There's so much we could be doing with our ingenuity and our resources that makes, like it just it it it's mind blowing what's possible.
Speaker 1:That's exciting. That's so exciting. Thank you for talking to me.
Speaker 2:You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. Keep doing the good thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you so much. Is there anything that we left out that you want included?
Speaker 2:Oh, there's so many things you can talk about in so many different directions. Just if I was to give a little bit advice to students and emerging professionals, please come and talk to me. I am wide open to students and emerging professionals because of the energy excitement and the openness. I want to invite you to the ISSTD to help continue this society, to help grow this society, to help change the world for the better.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us with System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes, or follow along on our website, www.systemspeak.org. Thanks for listening.