We are excited to conclude our 2022 Regional Conferences with an in-person Conference in Nashville, TN USA featuring Dr. Richard Loewenstein. This event will be an in-person event and will be recorded for those unable to attend in-person. We will not be offering a livestream option for this event. All in-person attendees will be required to submit proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test from within 72 hours of the start of the training to be admitted. Additional COVID-19 mitigation such as social distancing and masking will also be put in place. Our primary goal is to make sure that all attendees have a fun but safe conference experience. 

Abstract
This two-day workshop will review the core concepts that practitioners need to apprehend to successfully undertake the long-term psychotherapy of dissociative identity disorder (DID). The workshop begins with a discussion of discrete behavioral states theory (DBST), a transtheoretical and translational theory of human consciousness. Discrete behavioral states are so ubiquitous in normal and pathological human behavior as to be invisible. States can be understood as isomorphs, i.e., simultaneously at many levels of analysis, e.g., sleep states have been studied from cellular states to organismic states, and even shared social states of people sleeping together. Basic principles of DBST can be applied to, among many others, normal human development and attachment systems, altered states of consciousness, and as an organizing framework for many psychiatric disorders as fundamentally “state-change” disorders, e.g., bipolar and mood disorders, panic and anxiety disorders, substance-use and addictive disorders, trauma-and-stressor-related disorders, and dissociative disorders (DD), among others. 

The workshop continues with a review of the foundational importance of psychodynamic psychotherapy principles for DID treatment, as well as understanding hypnosis and hypnotizability. The workshop will discuss how our language about the mind is inherently metaphorical. In particular, the phenomenology of DID is often reified, mechanical and physicalistic, e.g., referring to DID self-states as “parts”, as if the mind were a machine. The presenter will review DID as a developmental posttraumatic disorder of self-integration, requiring the therapist to conceptualize DID in terms of self-states, self-state systems, and the “whole human being”. He will review data from studies of the overall personality organization of DID. The latter helps to provide a framework for DID treatment to maximize DID patients’ resilient capacities. He will review all self-states as posttraumatic adaptations, e.g., reframing “malevolent introject” self-states as paradoxical protectors and/or “underground freedom fighters”. Working in this framework with these self-states from the beginning of treatment does not make DID treatment of DID “easy” but helps navigate typical pitfalls of concretely reifying these states based on superficial labels, e.g., “persecutory”. In this regard, the presenter will also discuss type-D attachment, betrayal trauma, shame and affect theory, coercive control, and moral injury. Day one concludes with a review of the concepts of traumatic and mind-control transferences, negative therapeutic reaction, and posttraumatic and dissociative aspects of transference/countertransference in DID treatment. 

The second day will focus on clinical material. The presenter will discuss DID as a fundamentally logical disorder that can be decoded through application of the material from Day One. In addition, in the afternoon of Day Two, attendees are invited to “ask anything” by providing written questions about any topic of concern: clinical, theoretical, etc. 

Potential to Distress: Yes