Excerpted from the May 2007 NESTTD Newsletter
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
As I write the President’s letter the March two-day conference with Ellert Nijunhaus has just occurred. The flurry of preperations by the Program and Membership Committee and Board have ended. Continuous flow of emails and nervous monitoring of an early Spring snow storm have ceased. Despite the conference being long over, Ellert’s presentation strongly remains with me.
From the outset Ellert presented trauma and dissociation as an experience not to be questioned or requiring evidence. He quickly went into describing a framework for understanding the neurological aspects of trauma and the impact on the development of the self. His research suggests that there is an instinctive, automated system in all of us that responds to stress and threat of danger. In the absence of safety, ability to defend and other resources we turn to other defenses: fight, flight, submit and freeze. Having to endure this, whether a single episode or ongoingly, has an impact on the development of many skills and abilities to engage fully in daily life.
Ellert presented his research measuring physiological response and neurological brain scans that indicate the impact of trauma and dissociation on these systems. These research results also revealed how dissociative responses are reflected in physiological and neurological findings. The depth and commitment in which Ellert discussed dissociation and trauma in his research was very profound. This came from taking his research the next step and applying it to clinical practice with dissociation and trauma. He left no doubt that trauma effects a person’s experience of themselves in the world. Ellert’s presentation seemed to be shouting out to the entire mental health community: What is more important than debating whether dissociative disorders exist is developing successfully treatment to heal a person’s pain and suffering.
Ellert conveyed adopting compassion for clients experiencing trauma and dissociation as well as helping our clients experience this for themselves. Compassion also needs to extend to ourselves for the work we do. I am often asked, as I’m sure you are, what clients I work with. When I tell them trauma and dissociation I often get the response: “How can you listen to all those stories!”. I like to respond that the therapy is not about hearing the details and stories. What is a challenge is to work with people who have very little sense of themselves and therefore the world being a very scary place live. It is important we hold compassion for ourselves for working with this experience of the world with our clients. We become opened up to an experience quite different than our own then need to reintegrate back into our own world. Having compassion for moving in and out of these different worlds is what is important to remember to do for ourselves.
Yours truly,
NESTTD President