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ForwardLiving Legend Webinar - Lessons Learned in My Last Year as a Trauma Therapist
Abstract
At times in this last year of doing therapy, I have felt that I had finally learned how to do this work. To understand more, I set myself a task that I often give to patients: “Make a 100-things list of what it is you are learning.” On reviewing that list, I found that many items described work with what Van der Hart has called the Trauma Personality. We often neglect this side of the trauma split in our tendency to identify with the Apparently Normal Personality, but it is the Trauma Personality that knows most about betrayal and survival. In this last year, I have been applying techniques learned from treating more severe dissociative disorders to the task of valuing and integrating this self-aspect. A second cluster of notes described efforts to recognize and repair the sense of time in these patients. Trauma distorts time in many ways, not only through dissociative lost time but through the urgencies of fighting and fleeing trauma memories, through the time accelerations and slowdowns of mood swings and through generational reversals and intrusions into developmental time. I found myself making timelines and genograms with patients. However, it is the therapeutic framework itself that is our most effective tool here, providing a stability and predictability previously unknown in these patients’ lives. The last cluster I identified in my list concerns early signs of recovery and how to recognize them. Some patients in this phase of the work become avid students of self-care, researching and experimenting at length. Countertransference, though, provides the surest sign. No longer do we feel ourselves switching from perpetrator to victim to the various rescuer roles that we once felt we had to inhabit: nursemaid, witness, prophet, judge, wish-granting goddess, commanding general. Finally, I find, I can just be me. And I know then that it must be the same for the patient.
Potential to Distress: Yes
This presentation was originally presented as a live webinar in May 2024.
Target Audience
Intermediate
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this webinar, participants will be able to:
- List at least three characteristics of the Trauma Personality and three characteristics of the Apparently Normal Personality
- Connect at least four aspects of childhood trauma and later symptoms with damage and distortion to the sense of time
- Describe at least four technical interventions useful in patients recovering from childhood trauma
Presenter: Jean M, Goodwin, MD, MPH
Presenter Bio: Jean McClung Goodwin studied Physical Anthropology at Harvard/ Radcliffe and graduated summa cum laude. Her undergraduate thesis became a book, Human Birth at High Altitude. She graduated with an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1971 and with a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from UCLA in 1972. She did her first two years of psychiatric residency at Georgetown University Hospitals and finished her residency at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine where she stayed on as faculty directing the psychiatric residency. It was in Albuquerque in the late 1970’s that she began consulting to child protective services and discovered that children’s complaints about sexual abuse were assumed to be fantasies. Correcting this assumption led to three books, Sexual Abuse: Incest Victims and their Families; Rediscovering Childhood Trauma, and Splintered Reflections: Images of the Body in Trauma (with Reina Attias). She worked as a Professor of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin and at the University of Texas Medical Branch where she retains a clinical appointment. She is board certified in General Psychiatry, Forensic Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis. Since 1998, she has been in full time private practice in Galveston, Texas. She began psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and completed training at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute (now the Center for Psychoanalytic Training) in 1999 where she continued on faculty and is now a training and supervising analyst. Since 2005, she has taught the standard dissociation course through ISSTD, together with other members of the Houston-Galveston Trauma Consortium. She is a fellow of ISSTD and of the American Psychiatric Association. She has published over 100 articles and book chapters.
Available Credit
- 1.50 APAThe International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
- 1.50 ASWB ACEThe International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), #1744, is approved as an ACE provider to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 08/20/2024 – 08/20/2027. Social workers completing this course receive 1.50 continuing education credits.
- 1.50 ISSTD Certificate ProgramThis program is eligible for 1.50 credits in the ISSTD Certificate Program. No certificate of completion is generated for this type of credit.
Price
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