Speaker 1: Welcome to the Trauma Therapists podcast. My name is Gamiferson.
Speaker 1: I interview incredible people who've dedicated their lives to helping
Speaker 1: those who've been impacted by trauma. A big thank you
Speaker 1: to our sponsors and our guests who are supporting this show.
Speaker 1: Five name two All rif folks, Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 1: Very excited to have us. My guest today, Doctor Eric Walterstorff, Eric, welcome,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, good to be here. Guy all right.
Speaker 1: Doctor Walterstorff is a psychotherapist and developer of the Trauma
Speaker 1: Integration Protocol, with more than three decades of experience studying trauma, recovery,
Speaker 1: memory systems, and group responsor threat He began training with
Speaker 1: Peter Levine in nineteen ninety three and it's also studied
Speaker 1: with Pat Ogden, Max Schupack, and Arnold Mindell. Later earning
Speaker 1: a doctorate focused on group traumatology. Eric created the Foundations
Speaker 1: and Transference Tip trainings and specializes in cultural psychosocial development,
Speaker 1: group trauma, and the collaborative capacity of societies responding to
Speaker 1: long term threats. He's a founder and leader of seventeen
Speaker 1: first working internationally across Europe, Asia, in the Middle East
Speaker 1: and Africa. Eric, welcome, before we get going show with
Speaker 1: the listeners, where you're from originally and where you are currently? Oh?
Speaker 2: Well, I grew up in El Paso, Texas. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: I'm and now I'm living in Boulder, Colorado.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, so let's start. How does all
Speaker 1: this start for you? Take us back?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I was at a midlife crisis or early
Speaker 2: or whatever. I had one of those crises.
Speaker 1: In my thirties crisis, that's right.
Speaker 2: And I'm doing a lot of personal growth. I'm studying
Speaker 2: ralfing and my my rolfing teacher for that particular training
Speaker 2: was Peter Melchior the Guild for Structural Integration. And Peter says,
Speaker 2: I think that you should meet with Peter Levine, And
Speaker 2: I was like, yes, sir, so I went off. I
Speaker 2: had I knew nothing, no background in psychology, no background
Speaker 2: in psychotherapy, no thought of it, no ambition for it.
Speaker 1: What were you doing for work at this time?
Speaker 2: I had been I had a liberal arts degree and
Speaker 2: I was teaching music, composing music, writing music. And then
Speaker 2: I said I need a change in my life. And
Speaker 2: I was getting rolfed at the time, and Wayne, my
Speaker 2: rolfer at the time, said and I said, what should
Speaker 2: I do? I said, in my ralfer lying on the table,
Speaker 2: and he said, let me see your hand, and he
Speaker 2: picks up my hand and he said, I think you'd
Speaker 2: be a good ralfer. And I was just so lost
Speaker 2: at this turning point in my life, I said, well,
Speaker 2: that sounds good. So then I started to train to
Speaker 2: be accepted into the ralfing school. And so I'm living
Speaker 2: on savings at this point, and so I'm training as
Speaker 2: a rolfer. And that's when my teacher, Peter Melechure suggests
Speaker 2: that I see Peter Leving.
Speaker 1: Wow, so you go see Peter Levine. What happens?
Speaker 2: Oh, it's so much fun. So I my first session.
Speaker 2: I love telling the story. My first session with Peter's
Speaker 2: I just get access to things that I wasn't aware
Speaker 2: of in my psyche and it's amazing to me. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, wow, our doors opened into a new world.
Speaker 2: And so at the end of the session, I say, wait.
Speaker 1: Wait, ever, you're going to do this detail? I need
Speaker 1: decent what what happens? What is what is he doing?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it was very you know Peter's you
Speaker 2: know specialty. He works with many more things. But his
Speaker 2: specialty is, you know, single event shock traumas and and
Speaker 2: and specifically how to access uh dissociative traumatic states that
Speaker 2: tend not to present, right, So his his beauty's and
Speaker 2: finding what's not there and then creating the conditions so
Speaker 2: these little tiny nibbles grow up into and kind of
Speaker 2: emerge from the psyche. So he was doing that with me,
Speaker 2: and I ended up having so many sessions with him,
Speaker 2: I can't pull it apart. In this session, but he
Speaker 2: had me do something as simple as, ah, do you
Speaker 2: feel that movement in your neck? Yes, well, before it happens,
Speaker 2: why don't you just sort of pay attention to what
Speaker 2: happens before it moves and see if you could just
Speaker 2: not move it? And then I and then who And
Speaker 2: then I've flooded with anxiety. A branch cracked outside and
Speaker 2: I thought it was a gunshot. It was in such
Speaker 2: an altered state, and so anyways, it was it was
Speaker 2: you know, it was. It was a It was a nice,
Speaker 2: juicy somatic experiencing session from the master of the masters
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 1: Right, So you worked for him.
Speaker 2: For well, you're right, I was hooked. So so he became
Speaker 2: my therapist and my teacher and my supervisor for the
Speaker 2: next three years.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And that sort of led me also into the studying
Speaker 2: Hakomi body work with Pat Ogden Wright me, which is
Speaker 2: sensorimotor psychotherapy now. And then I got more interested in
Speaker 2: group dynamics and transference and that took me to Arnie
Speaker 2: Mendeleen mock Schutbox World Work. Arnie was the developer of
Speaker 2: process Work. We lost Arnie last year and then that
Speaker 2: I got more and more excited about these group dynamics
Speaker 2: but in cultures, and that led me to going to
Speaker 2: my getting my PhD. And one of the people I
Speaker 2: committee was Jim Griggsby at Works of Memory Systems and
Speaker 2: I'm working with group transference and how things are transferred
Speaker 2: across generations mass traumas. But the key with that that
Speaker 2: affected psychotherapy was just transference, transference, transference and how when
Speaker 2: we're we can be triggered in fifty different ways and
Speaker 2: according to the trigger, our mind just pulls up a
Speaker 2: set of screens from the past and that's how we
Speaker 2: began to interpret the present.
Speaker 1: Okay, I want to get there, but just taking a
Speaker 1: step back when when you were working with uh Peter
Speaker 1: in those different kind of capacities. At what point did
Speaker 1: you say and how did this come about that you said,
Speaker 1: this is what I want to do, this is what
Speaker 1: I want to study.
Speaker 2: Well, to go back to my little little story there
Speaker 2: the first time, at the end of the session, I'm
Speaker 2: sitting there with Peter. He offers me a glass of
Speaker 2: water and he says, do you have any questions? And
Speaker 2: I said, this is this is this is amazing. How
Speaker 2: does this work? And he opens his mouth to answer,
Speaker 2: and I said, don't stop. I'm afraid it's magic. And
Speaker 2: if you tell me, it won't happened again. And he
Speaker 2: laughed and he said it's repeatable, it's not a problem.
Speaker 2: And so I just wanted to learn more. And so
Speaker 2: then I became one of sixteen people in the last
Speaker 2: thirty years to read his dissertation. And I guess the
Speaker 2: last fifty years now it's a bit of a slog
Speaker 2: And yeah, I went to classes with him, did trade
Speaker 2: scot sessions from him from people he had trained, became
Speaker 2: you know, a real protege.
Speaker 1: What talk to us a little about I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: assuming there was some rough patches with your personal exploration.
Speaker 1: It's things unfolded for.
Speaker 2: You yeah, I mean I came in with h with it.
Speaker 2: I came into the field with a lot of interest
Speaker 2: and excitement, and yeah, sure when I when I, when
Speaker 2: I impact my history more and more, I had it's
Speaker 2: kind of boring, but I a lot of high speed accidents,
Speaker 2: had a tonsilectomy when I was early when I when
Speaker 2: I was six, and my mind had kind of created
Speaker 2: a trauma structure around that. I was a bit in
Speaker 2: the oldest child, a bit in the caretaker role, so
Speaker 2: I would take that anxiety plus kind of compulsions to help,
Speaker 2: and that created kind of a particular mix for me.
Speaker 2: And when I began to realize it's it's funny because
Speaker 2: this is this is the main kind of theme of
Speaker 2: this UH transference counterference counter transference training, that this this
Speaker 2: our next one starts in October. My daughter was just
Speaker 2: a year old at the time, and I'm beginning to
Speaker 2: realize all of these kind of compulsions inside myself and
Speaker 2: then and what I thought was, I want to see
Speaker 2: if I can open faster than I shut my daughter down.
Speaker 2: And I was such a caretaker that I couldn't say, oh,
Speaker 2: I need this right. I was like, m but I'll
Speaker 2: do this work for my daughter, and I was two
Speaker 2: or three years into the work before enough of those
Speaker 2: compensations kind of opened up and I was like, wow,
Speaker 2: I can really use some help for me. But the
Speaker 2: whole time, I knew that my compulsions were affecting all
Speaker 2: of my relationships and that really troubled me. So that's
Speaker 2: probably my entrance into the idea of countertransference, that yes,
Speaker 2: my clients are going to come in with their transferences,
Speaker 2: but whatever I bring, I'm affecting every single session with
Speaker 2: with every client, and I have more power in the relationship.
Speaker 2: So arguably the best way I could help my clients
Speaker 2: is by working on what drives my countertrends diference.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I was going to ask what was the
Speaker 1: impetus for this interest in transference and remind our audience
Speaker 1: what transference is, what is counter transference?
Speaker 2: So so transference, projection, projective identification, there's a whole class
Speaker 2: of terms that are that are related to this single phenomenon,
Speaker 2: which is that you know, we we don't actually see
Speaker 2: the person in front of us, we don't see the
Speaker 2: situation in front of us. There's there's too much data
Speaker 2: our brain couldn't process it. What we do is we
Speaker 2: take some cues and we bring up an approximation from
Speaker 2: our past, and then we say, this is my best guess,
Speaker 2: and so we take a guess. I say something, or
Speaker 2: I stand in a way, or I do something based
Speaker 2: on my best guess, and then I see how you
Speaker 2: or the environment responds, and then I adjust my thinking
Speaker 2: and adjusting just and gradually we move toward rapport and we
Speaker 2: get to know each other as individuals over time. But
Speaker 2: it begins with with you know, I see you initially,
Speaker 2: and I see your glasses, and I think, oh, who
Speaker 2: are the people in my life? And then and then
Speaker 2: I guess kind of at their personality, at their at
Speaker 2: their vibe, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to interact
Speaker 2: with guys if he has that personality and vibe.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't know enough about you to know that, but
Speaker 2: I run with that as a first guess. So that's
Speaker 2: my projection. And we're doing it in little ways like
Speaker 2: this all the time, and it's just how we That's
Speaker 2: how we first meet people as we get to know them,
Speaker 2: it's it's normal. But when we've had a lot of
Speaker 2: trauma or we've had sort of a mismatched childhood that
Speaker 2: doesn't match where we are. Maybe we're from a different culture,
Speaker 2: maybe we've had a lot of trauma, or maybe the
Speaker 2: life circumstances have changed and we've moved from one place
Speaker 2: to another. There could be any number of reasons, but
Speaker 2: our projections don't match. And of course in the case
Speaker 2: of long term relational traumas where we get the greatest
Speaker 2: distortions around that. And then I start to look at
Speaker 2: you and then are you a person who's safe or
Speaker 2: a person who's dangerous? Or can I even tell the difference?
Speaker 2: And then relating becomes very complicated. Trust becomes complicated, boundaries
Speaker 2: become difficult, and relationship becomes much more of a struggle
Speaker 2: rather than something that we can relax into and take
Speaker 2: pleasure into and explore the world.
Speaker 1: So your interest, is it fair to say, is the
Speaker 1: interaction between the transference and counter transference and what happens
Speaker 1: because of that? Now, what you described is a what
Speaker 1: a template paradigm? Is it safe to say that different
Speaker 1: people from different experiences, maybe with uh different levels of
Speaker 1: vulnerability and authenticity, experiences differently or operate differently. Oh? In
Speaker 1: other words, yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, oh yes, very much. Very much. So I'm
Speaker 2: thinking of your in your introduction when you say who
Speaker 2: we are is more important than what we know? Well,
Speaker 2: I think we need both. I think we need good
Speaker 2: tools in the field is growing and we're gaining tools.
Speaker 2: But I couldn't agree more that it's a prime importance
Speaker 2: when working with relationship and transference and counter transference. Who
Speaker 2: we are. And that's kind of what I mean by
Speaker 2: the term permission space. What what do we allow in
Speaker 2: an interaction? What subjects are off limits? Which ones will
Speaker 2: I just kind of ignore, steer you away from? Which
Speaker 2: ones do I want to draw you into? Which ones
Speaker 2: do I add in intensity or some emotional tone too?
Speaker 2: So I'm completely shaping you all the time, and you're
Speaker 2: shaping me the whole time. And to go back to
Speaker 2: your thing. When the client doesn't we call it transference
Speaker 2: from the therapist, doesn't, we call it counter transference.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 2: It's the same thing.
Speaker 1: So you were talk to us about this. This What
Speaker 1: is the course of training. What's it called?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it's called tip transference training. We start with
Speaker 2: five days in person and then there's five months where
Speaker 2: we have two hour meetings every couple of weeks. By
Speaker 2: zoom to support people and doing trades and getting you know,
Speaker 2: case menality, consultation and practice with each other over the
Speaker 2: next half year. And really in the training, there's three
Speaker 2: things we do in the training. We've got some really
Speaker 2: I think they're really fun exercises that can reveal to
Speaker 2: us our counter transference. And so we do these exercises
Speaker 2: where we're working with somebody, But then we say, what
Speaker 2: if this thing comes up, and then we notice how
Speaker 2: the therapist is triggered and we could be they could
Speaker 2: be triggered by relational dynamics, by a particular theme or subject,
Speaker 2: by a person's kind of attachment style, whatever it is,
Speaker 2: and we notice, how do we react to that. Do
Speaker 2: we have space where we're calm and we can flow
Speaker 2: with that, Or if you start acting one way, do
Speaker 2: I automatically start acting another way? That's coming from my
Speaker 2: unconscious and I don't even know it, and we're always
Speaker 2: doing that. It's not like we're going to get rid
Speaker 2: of it. But if we learn the boundaries of our
Speaker 2: permission space, then we sort of know what the what
Speaker 2: the boundaries of competence are for our unconscious.
Speaker 1: We yeah, say say that again, yeah soon space again okay.
Speaker 2: So permission space is when we're interacting what subjects, what
Speaker 2: things can be explored, What emotions, what movements, what what
Speaker 2: can happen in our relationship as we're working together.
Speaker 1: So talking from the therapist's perspective.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, So so okay, let's let's let's pretend I'm
Speaker 2: the therapist and you're the client, and you've got six
Speaker 2: things you would like to kind of work on, and
Speaker 2: they're connected to other things. You've got senses of other things,
Speaker 2: and you start to bring those subjects up, and you'll
Speaker 2: name five or ten things when we're sort of doing
Speaker 2: an exploratory kind of first conversations, and I'll respond to
Speaker 2: some of those, and I just kind of won't respond
Speaker 2: to other ones, and I'll be drawn to other ones.
Speaker 2: And that is kind of uh and to the extent
Speaker 2: that I have unconscious preferences around that, it is just
Speaker 2: setting the bounds of what we can do. May I
Speaker 2: give you a very dramatic example of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, please love it? Yeah, love it.
Speaker 2: A wonderful thing happened started to happen in the nineteen
Speaker 2: eighties in the United States. We had this explosion of
Speaker 2: people talking about domestic violence and child abuse, right, It
Speaker 2: wasn't we don't talk about that, which is kind of
Speaker 2: what it was up until the seventies, or we're going
Speaker 2: to work with it is you know, metaphor or dreams
Speaker 2: or you know, it's like no, no, we've got this problem.
Speaker 2: And so there was an embrace of look at all
Speaker 2: of these victims who haven't been seen. It's great, look
Speaker 2: at all these survivors who haven't been seen, and how
Speaker 2: do we empower those people and how can we help
Speaker 2: them as therapists? And so there we which is great,
Speaker 2: and it was a it's been a wonderful thing for
Speaker 2: the last thirty forty years where we've i would say,
Speaker 2: sort of increased the permission space right as a as
Speaker 2: a field where all of a sudden, actual domestic violence,
Speaker 2: actual child abuse is write more broadly in the society
Speaker 2: that things like this are yes, we can we there
Speaker 2: is space for us to work with us now in
Speaker 2: the field.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But in doing that, we threw away the lessons that
Speaker 2: we had learned in forty years of family therapy, which
Speaker 2: is that in systems you've got bystanders and perpetrators as
Speaker 2: well as victims and saviors. And so we're saying, we're
Speaker 2: going to work with two of the four and we're
Speaker 2: going to lock those other two roles out of the door.
Speaker 2: We're going to make this a safe space. This is
Speaker 2: my therapy space. Is for it to help for caretakers
Speaker 2: and to help you to be strong and for victims,
Speaker 2: to help the victims to heal and become strong and fluid.
Speaker 2: But but we're going to block out the bad. But
Speaker 2: of course when we have traumatic memories, we don't simply
Speaker 2: remember or the victim or the victim and the perpetrator,
Speaker 2: I mean the victim of the savior role. We're using
Speaker 2: empathy at the time of the trauma to try to
Speaker 2: imagine what is the perpetrator thinking or feeling right now,
Speaker 2: Because if I knew that I could predict their behavior,
Speaker 2: I could figure out maybe what to do. Why are
Speaker 2: these other people or this other person not helping, So
Speaker 2: what's happening? So we've got we've got you know, Johnny
Speaker 2: who's ten years old and he's in the kitchen. It's
Speaker 2: a repeated scene, and his father's drunk and his father's
Speaker 2: beating him. So what is he doing? It's not just
Speaker 2: that he's being a victim, and that's the memory. He
Speaker 2: is trying to imagine what his father is thinking. Is
Speaker 2: what is his father thinking? Why is his father doing this?
Speaker 2: Because if he knew this, maybe he could interrupt his
Speaker 2: father's behavior. He could just say or do the right thing.
Speaker 2: He knows mom is in the house. Why isn't mom
Speaker 2: coming in the room and stopping this? And he's trying
Speaker 2: to imagine. So he's using this theory of mind, this
Speaker 2: empathetic capacity, and it can be completely wrong. It could
Speaker 2: be that, you know, his mom has her headphones in,
Speaker 2: which she always does, and she doesn't hear, or it
Speaker 2: could be her mom's His mama is standing outside the door,
Speaker 2: just gnashing her teeth and wanting to go in, but
Speaker 2: doesn't dare because she's afraid. Who knows what it is.
Speaker 2: He's going to imagine something. He's going to imagine something,
Speaker 2: So his imagined inner states of the perpetrator and of
Speaker 2: the bystander exists as part of his memory. So we
Speaker 2: remember the scene of the crime. We don't remember our role.
Speaker 2: We remember the scene. So if we're doing therapy and
Speaker 2: the savior is allowed and the victims allowed, and we're
Speaker 2: going to work with that all the time, we've opened
Speaker 2: up this place in the psyche. We're doing all this healing,
Speaker 2: but we've got two roles of the bystander perpetrator, and
Speaker 2: they're not allowed in therapy. How and so our unconscious
Speaker 2: goes out and looks for it. Now, So think about
Speaker 2: how many, how many times in our life it's it's
Speaker 2: it's it's all through our field. Somebody has a better
Speaker 2: and better relationship with their therapist and they become ever
Speaker 2: more dissatisfied with their spouse. Well, it's because because in
Speaker 2: the permission space of therapy, there's no room for the bystander.
Speaker 2: There's no the person who does nothing. There's no room
Speaker 2: for the perpetrator, the person who's who's making the assault.
Speaker 2: And so the person's unconscious goes out and they try
Speaker 2: to recruit people like they've got people on a play.
Speaker 2: Who I need, somebody to play this I need, and
Speaker 2: who's number one on the list. Your spouse could be
Speaker 2: your kids, your parents, could be a sibling, and could
Speaker 2: be a frank, could be somebody at work. You know,
Speaker 2: spouse or romantic partner usually usually gets the gets the
Speaker 2: role though, and now this person's having a split experience.
Speaker 2: Therapy comes better and better, and their whole life gets
Speaker 2: worse and worse. Yeah, this should be horrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's.
Speaker 2: Pat Ogden said a wonderful thing to me when I
Speaker 2: was training with her, and she said, you don't judge
Speaker 2: the effectiveness of therapy by what happens in the session.
Speaker 2: You judge it by how the person's life changes outside
Speaker 2: of the session. Yeah, that's right. So and if we're so,
Speaker 2: what does that mean for our permission space? If our
Speaker 2: permission space means I'm good with saviors and victims, but
Speaker 2: not but but but not the bad stuff, that's that's
Speaker 2: that's not necessarily bad unless we pretend it's a full
Speaker 2: permission space. If we just say, you know, in my therapy,
Speaker 2: I work with victims. I help them get strong so
Speaker 2: they can become caretakers themselves and send them out into
Speaker 2: the world. It's really important to work with the bystanders
Speaker 2: and the perpetrators. But I don't do that. Well, that's great,
Speaker 2: nothing the matter with that. But to pretend that the
Speaker 2: permission space is full includes the whole event when it
Speaker 2: doesn't is really putting the unconscious of the client. There's
Speaker 2: ever more and more pressure on them to heal the
Speaker 2: whole piece. But they've got to find the bystanders and
Speaker 2: perpetrators outside. The other thing to do, of course, is
Speaker 2: to get comfortable holding the bystander role in the perpetrator
Speaker 2: role as a therapist, and to learn how to work
Speaker 2: with negative transference. Can we hold a container that is
Speaker 2: connected and coregulating and safe, in which the eye as
Speaker 2: the therapist can be the perpetrator. I can be the bystander,
Speaker 2: and I can accept those projections on me while staying
Speaker 2: in relationship and giving them a space for the client
Speaker 2: to begin to integrate those parts of their own psyche,
Speaker 2: which if they don't have a lot of support and
Speaker 2: a lot of permission, is they're not going to want
Speaker 2: to do it. I mean, like, why it's bad enough
Speaker 2: this happened to me, and now I have to integrate
Speaker 2: this role, to perpetrate it. The stuck inside my psyche,
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm being violated again. Well, but it's there,
Speaker 2: so to actually be free of it is to integrate it.
Speaker 1: So we've got this permission space, and isn't it Is
Speaker 1: it fair to say that the capacity, the fluidity, the
Speaker 1: strength of the permission space is determined by the therapists
Speaker 1: level of awareness, development, authenticity, vulnerability, willingness to the degree
Speaker 1: to which they've done the inner work. Yes, so how
Speaker 1: was to what degree? So you're working in this course,
Speaker 1: this program, how does that? How do you address that?
Speaker 2: Great? So there are very particular, very particular exercises. One is,
Speaker 2: we want to make sure that people have strong mindfulness skills.
Speaker 2: Not mindfulness while they're sitting by themselves in a post
Speaker 2: or zen retreat, but when they're an active relationship with
Speaker 2: somebody and being triggered. Are they tracking what's happening right
Speaker 2: now to my body, my emotions, what thoughts are arising?
Speaker 2: How do I feel? Can we run all that? It's
Speaker 2: like a lava lamp that's bubbling up inside of us.
Speaker 2: Can I stay in relationship with you while tracking what's
Speaker 2: bubbling up in my lava lamp?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So mindfulness that particular application of mindfulness. Then there's coregulation,
Speaker 2: which is much more than resourcing. It's can we allow
Speaker 2: our nervous systems to connect? Can we go into a
Speaker 2: dance and it's my dance fluid? If I'm a therapist
Speaker 2: and I always have to be the calming presence, what
Speaker 2: if the therapist, what if the client needs to have
Speaker 2: the experience of they're excited and in sympathetic activation, and
Speaker 2: what they kind of need to learn from their childhood
Speaker 2: is how to drag me out of a calm state
Speaker 2: or how to drag me to use to use the
Speaker 2: polyvagl language. Maybe there was a parents who were just
Speaker 2: just kind of really just sort of endoorsal vaguel and
Speaker 2: traumatized or collapsed, and the child grew up just trying
Speaker 2: to be excited and their parents were just ugh, kind
Speaker 2: of flat. Then can the therapists allow themselves to go
Speaker 2: into a dorsal bagel place within this larger container while
Speaker 2: coaching and encouraging the client and dragging the therapist up
Speaker 2: into a up into a sympathetic activation for example. So
Speaker 2: this coregulation. The next one is to take these very
Speaker 2: basic family roles from family therapy around the caretaker, identified
Speaker 2: patient and distancer and outcast and set up exercises where
Speaker 2: some stresses the person stressed. How do you respond to stress?
Speaker 2: I was raised as a caretaker. When there's stress, I
Speaker 2: moved toward the stress like a moth to the flame.
Speaker 2: My robot wants to go straight to the stress to help.
Speaker 2: Identified patients will say their stress, Yeah, I have stress too,
Speaker 2: let's do a stress dance, right. The distancer's like, I
Speaker 2: think we need some ice. I'm running to the grocery store, right,
Speaker 2: And the perpetrate is like, you people are pissing me off.
Speaker 2: You want to be stressed, I'll give you stressed. The
Speaker 2: outcast will, right. So what is our response to this
Speaker 2: and when we And this tends to not be dramatic,
Speaker 2: but it's pervasive and a low level. If I always
Speaker 2: need to be the caretaker in working with my clients,
Speaker 2: then I always need to be one up, and that's
Speaker 2: creating a dynamic with the client where they can't take
Speaker 2: care of me or they can't be free of my caretaking.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's subtle but very powerful. A much more obvious
Speaker 2: one is if I haven't worked through my relational my
Speaker 2: relational traumas, then I could just be triggered by things.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: My psyche is filled with hot spots and cold spots.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, boy, we don't deal with surgeries.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we focus on assaults, and so does that
Speaker 2: match what the client wants or needs? So we're shaping
Speaker 2: what's happening. So there's exercises around this. There's exercises around
Speaker 2: becoming more fluid with the family roles. There's how and
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter if you come in and you do.
Speaker 2: You know, whatever form of exposure therapy you want, there's
Speaker 2: lots of good ones. And whatever kind of work you're doing,
Speaker 2: it's going to add something to be able to work
Speaker 2: with the transference dimension of it, because that shows up
Speaker 2: regardless of the kind of work that we do. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna pause because I kind of kind of got lost
Speaker 2: in my own thought.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, Eric, this sounds really fascinating to me, and
Speaker 1: not only fascinating and amazing, but so necessary in the
Speaker 1: work of the therapist. When you started just taking and
Speaker 1: doing an aside here, sidebar, when this became interesting to
Speaker 1: you were fascinating to you. What started to come up
Speaker 1: for you? Did you find yourself needing to do more
Speaker 1: X Y or Z. I'm curious about that.
Speaker 2: Sure, I guess. I guess maybe the two main themes
Speaker 2: that came up besides working well three things. The first
Speaker 2: thing is when I began to understand this more, I
Speaker 2: had to go back to my whole trauma history where
Speaker 2: I had been the victim. And then I went through
Speaker 2: the entire trauma history again and looked for ones in
Speaker 2: which I played the role of the savior. Then I
Speaker 2: went through and did a whole nother trauma history of
Speaker 2: when I was the bystander and I didn't do anything.
Speaker 2: Those were really unpleasant, And then I went through and
Speaker 2: I had to begin this with a colleague who was
Speaker 2: very good with this, with Raven Welves, who works out
Speaker 2: in a why It's very good work, and we agreed
Speaker 2: that we would work with ways that we had been perpetrators,
Speaker 2: because there felt like there was so little permission space
Speaker 2: in the field. Who can I even talk about this
Speaker 2: with before I'm going to be seen as like a
Speaker 2: bad person. And so Raven and I created a permission
Speaker 2: space between the two of us where we could share
Speaker 2: when we were the perpetrator and find a way to
Speaker 2: connect with another human being and then begin to integrate
Speaker 2: those So one process is I had to go through
Speaker 2: the other post traumatic roles. So that was that was
Speaker 2: very big for me. That was the first thing. The
Speaker 2: second thing was again this compulsive low level whenever stressed
Speaker 2: going into the caretaker role, I wouldn't want to feel
Speaker 2: my own anxiety with somebody else, so I would disconnect
Speaker 2: from it, and I had to learn how to feel
Speaker 2: my own anxiety and how can I use that in
Speaker 2: the service of the client as well as in my life.
Speaker 2: Of course, I had to learn how to distance when
Speaker 2: anxiety or distress was coming up. I had to learn
Speaker 2: how to move away from that without kind of being
Speaker 2: overwhelmed with both guilt and a feeling of loss of control.
Speaker 2: I had to make friends with the part of myself
Speaker 2: that would want to attack, would want to hurt a
Speaker 2: client or another person. And I had you know, Okay,
Speaker 2: there is this part in me, and I need to
Speaker 2: get comfortable with this so I could be fluid with
Speaker 2: those That was a big part of the work. The
Speaker 2: other part of the work that began with the work
Speaker 2: with Ernie Madel in the in the late nineties and
Speaker 2: with mox the World work was working with social issues,
Speaker 2: and so you know, we would do all of these
Speaker 2: group processes and here I am, you know, tall, white,
Speaker 2: heterosexual male, educated and confident, and it was just like
Speaker 2: it was like I was a lightning rod in these
Speaker 2: processes and you so had I had to I had
Speaker 2: to learn both. I had to learn to to kind
Speaker 2: of say, you know, we're all born the way that
Speaker 2: we're born. What do we do with how we're born,
Speaker 2: and I know I'm in a movement in society that
Speaker 2: began very strongly in the eighties and led into the
Speaker 2: nineties it hasn't stopped now, in which you know, white
Speaker 2: males are a cancer on the human race. And I
Speaker 2: was in such a place with that after I sort
Speaker 2: of entered into that that feminist literature in the late
Speaker 2: eighties and by the time and I was just kind of, well,
Speaker 2: I don't know what I can do with myself. I
Speaker 2: guess I'll just kind of try to face myself and
Speaker 2: be of service. And then I started doing this work
Speaker 2: with with with Mocks and Arnie around earned and unearned privileges.
Speaker 2: And we tend to be very very sophisticated and sensitive
Speaker 2: around our earned privileges. If we didn't have money and
Speaker 2: we built a company and we made money, we tend
Speaker 2: to be really kind of sophisticated around money and what
Speaker 2: it means not to have it, what it means to
Speaker 2: have it. But if we were just raised with money,
Speaker 2: there's a giant blank spot of wait. Wait, there's a
Speaker 2: there's a basic anxiety or a drive or a drive
Speaker 2: to work there that that has to be dealt with
Speaker 2: people by who are on the labor side of the equation,
Speaker 2: who were you know, middle class or lower middle class
Speaker 2: or poor? And so the unearned privilege. So I'm stepping
Speaker 2: in these places and I'm saying, well, what have I earned?
Speaker 2: Because I'm I'm I'm It's very easy to project on
Speaker 2: me for the things that were unearned. So the challenge
Speaker 2: is to come to terms with and appreciate and own
Speaker 2: and love the parts of us that are unearned privilege
Speaker 2: and then put them to use for other people. So
Speaker 2: this was years of work, and again primarily through the
Speaker 2: process work and the world work to say, you know,
Speaker 2: like pipe I am who I am? And what am
Speaker 2: I going to do with this? What is the vector
Speaker 2: of my life? Not the starting point? So that came
Speaker 2: out of the transference counter transference. It fed into that
Speaker 2: because I could have such naivete as a therapist with
Speaker 2: my counter transference, because I would presume that everybody across
Speaker 2: from me had the same privileges as myself, and boy
Speaker 2: was that a problem.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So that's a different way that the counter transference would
Speaker 2: show up.
Speaker 1: As we kind of wind down here, Eric, who would
Speaker 1: you say this course is for, this program is.
Speaker 2: For, Well, it's at the intersection of trauma, somatic work,
Speaker 2: and transference coming coming out of the psycho psychoanalytic, psychodynamic tradition.
Speaker 2: So it's really for people who are as practitioners who
Speaker 2: do one or two of those things and they're curious
Speaker 2: about the third. Maybe maybe they're a sematic therapist who
Speaker 2: does a lot of work with trauma and they're really
Speaker 2: curious about about transference. But maybe they're coming out of
Speaker 2: the psychoanalytic up field and they want somebody who has
Speaker 2: a bridge to that and who understands that, and they
Speaker 2: want to they want to learn more about working with
Speaker 2: the body and trauma. So it's really where those three interact.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't matter if you've worked with trauma again
Speaker 2: which of the many different competing modalities there are right now,
Speaker 2: because we're in a time of variation and experimentation. So
Speaker 2: but but but there's a real gap around the transference
Speaker 2: work if you're not in the the the psycho the psychodynamic,
Speaker 2: psychoanalytic condissions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would agree. I mean when you started talking
Speaker 1: and shared what you wanted to share on this podcast,
Speaker 1: I it was very intriguing to me and and exciting
Speaker 1: to me because not only do I think this uh
Speaker 1: topic isn't talked about that much, just as you said,
Speaker 1: but it is. So it's it just feels to me
Speaker 1: to be the work and the excitement of the therapy process.
Speaker 1: I love it. Yeah, so I'm really excited about It's
Speaker 1: just sincerely, I'm really excited about this topic and looking
Speaker 1: forward to getting this out there. So how do people
Speaker 1: learn more about you and this program?
Speaker 2: Go to Trauma Integration Protocol. It's a lot of letters.
Speaker 2: That's what we call it TIP Trauma Integration Protocol dot com.
Speaker 2: And we're building a community and we offer trainings in
Speaker 2: both a way to work with single event traumas and
Speaker 2: I've got a book there that has that has protocols,
Speaker 2: but then the TIP transference training and there's a description
Speaker 2: of that training. And we've also of course got a
Speaker 2: got a got a YouTube channel and if you have
Speaker 2: any questions or anything, we've got email addresses on there.
Speaker 2: Just reach out to be happy to have a conversation
Speaker 2: with anybody, a series of conversations.
Speaker 1: Okay, we'll have all that linked up here at the
Speaker 1: show notes page at the Trauma Therapist Podcast dot com. Eric, Awesome,
Speaker 1: I love it. I really love to have you back.
Speaker 1: But I really appreciate and love what you're doing. Thank
Speaker 1: you to being here.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Guy, all right, thank you