Letter from the President
Letter from the PresidentRhonda Sabo, PsyD
Excerpted from the December, 2005 NESTTD Newsletter
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
As I approach the end of my term as president of NESTTD, I would like to take stock of where we are as an organization and where we are as a field.
NESTTD is vibrant and growing. Membership has exceeded 200 for a few years now. The transition of our location from McLean to more spacious and comfortable quarters at Bentley College has been smooth and successful. Last spring, Bournewood Hospital generously offered to sponsor continuing medical education credits (CMEs) for NESTTD programs, a very important step in furthering our relationship with the medical community. We have increased the size of our board, begun the process of reviewing and revising our bylaws, added a section to our Web site for the posting of research projects, and embarked on new projects for educational outreach in our area. We have also invited Professional Books, a retailer of science and technical books in association with Amazon.com, to provide relevant reading materials for purchase at each of our meetings.
Slowly but surely, the field of trauma and dissociation continues its sometimes arduous journey into mainstream mental health studies. As a therapist who treats clients whose pathways to health can be long and difficult, I make it a point to mark milestones of achievement with them. Similarly, I think it behooves us to mark points of progress in our field. Looking about, I found that there is indeed such an occasion—the publication of Selected Topics in Ego State Therapy, an October 2005 special issue of the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. To my knowledge, this may be the first time that ego state therapy has been the subject of an article in this oft-cited journal. All seven sections of this issue are authored by our colleague and two-time workshop presenter at NESTTD, Claire Frederick, M.D.
Ego state therapy—as developed by John and Helen Watkins, based on the theoretical contributions of Paul Federn—is a creative form of hypnoanalysis that assumes the normal polyschism of the human psyche. Although the literature on ego state therapy has been slow to grow, pioneers in the modern field of dissociation such as Richard Kluft, George Fraser, Marlene Hunter and Moshe Torem readily embraced ego-state-therapy techniques and applied them to severe dissociative disorders. Many of us used ego state therapy for the first time with the DD population.
In the ’80s and ’90s, many New England clinicians traveled to ego-state-therapy workshops given by John and Helen Watkins at ISSD and other venues, or learned about the therapy from Dan Brown. More recently, we have witnessed a local upsurge in interest in Richard Schwartz’s internal family systems therapy, an ego-state–related therapy model. (IFS trainings in our area are ongoing.) Although the research data on these approaches is limited (therapies employing ego states are as difficult to operationalize as psychodynamic therapies!), trauma clinicians have reported impressive results when working with “parts” in clients without severe DDs. Indeed, in New England, we have been fortunate to be involved in the discussion of ego state therapies for so long and have used it with such a variety of populations that we sometimes forget this promising subject has been slow to move into mainstream professional and scientific literature.
And I don’t want to overlook mentioning a possible mini-milestone in the mediawatch department! This month the television program “60 Minutes” featured an interview with a DID client. Unlike previous subjects who have appeared on television, this individual did not “switch” on camera nor was he asked to. The interviewer also seemed less skeptical and more respectful of the DID diagnosis than interviewers have been in the past. Perhaps this is because the client was Robert B. Oxnam, a well-respected scholar in Asian studies. Dr. Oxnam has written an autobiographical account of his life with DID in a new book, A Fractured Mind: My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder. I have just read the first few pages of the book and am interested to see whether it presents a more realistic portrait than previous popular memoirs.
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Under the skilled leadership of Joan Atkinson, Ph.D., our bylaws committee has been hard at work reviewing the organizational functioning of NESTTD in order to better serve our members. That committee recommended we change the timing of our elections so that board members and officers begin their terms on July 1, consistent with our program and fiscal years. Pursuant to this suggestion, our next round of elections will be held at the May 2006 quarterly meeting. (Past NESTTD elections have been held in December with board members and officers starting their terms in January.)
To facilitate the adjustment, the bylaws committee also recommended that current board members and officers remain in their positions for an additional six months. We are pleased that most of the board members are able to stay on.
I want to say goodbye to two members who are leaving the board at this time. Anette Brink, M.D., brand-new to the board this year, has recently relocated to Arizona. We will really miss you, Anette, and hope that you will come to visit us soon. And I want to especially thank Suzanne Borstein, Ph.D., who is leaving her position as board secretary of NESTTD at the end of December. In addition to doing a great job as secretary, Suzanne has been an invaluable addition to board meetings: always knowledgeable, thoughtful, grounded and supportive. Thank you, Suzanne.
Finally, I am so pleased that this December our program will focus on the important subject of vicarious traumatization. VT is a very real and serious problem in the field of trauma and dissociation. Anyone who has remained in the field for many years knows people who, sadly, have left because of VT—and others whose work and personal lives have been affected. I thank the program committee for addressing this issue and for recruiting an authority on the subject, Dr. Laurie Anne Pearlman, to speak to us. I am very glad NESTTD is able to play a role in reducing the isolation of those who treat complex PTSD and severe dissociative conditions.
Yours truly,
