I’m so delighted to be offering a taster workshop at this amazing conference in June.
Top of the bill is world trauma expert and best-selling author Dr Gabor Maté!
Sadly tickets for Saturday 15th June when he’s speaking are sold out.
However there are few £55 tickets left for Sunday 16th, which has a fascinating line up of speakers and embodied practice workshops.
“IFS gives us the tools traditional meditative paths often don’t. It’s the “how” of how to deal with the “monkey mind.” It’ a non-demonizing, non-pathologizing, non-bypassing path to radical Self love, healing, transformation, and compassion for all your many “parts.”
Great to hear another high-profile Doctor speaking up for Internal Family Systems…
Read Dr Lissa Rankin’s full blog here: https://lissarankin.com/internal-family-systems-ifs
I’m just back from a month in Guatemala, a mixture of traveling, training and facilitating workshops. I return with wonderful new tools to integrate into my practice, plus wonderful memories of a powerful and impactful trip – one that I will treasure for ever.
The trip included perhaps the most dramatic experience of my life: a huge (6.5) earthquake shaking our cliff-top studio for over a minute.
It happened right in the middle of a Constellation, at exactly the moment when a client contacted a part holding their long-repressed anger….
I also had the good fortune to witness my sister Rachael facilitating TRE workshops (in Spanish) with a Mayan women’s weaving co-operative. One even gamely did it in traditional dress!
Rachael said of the experience: “There was much laughter and a request for 
more. I’m so glad to have been able to give something valuable to strong but overworked and poor women. Also touched at their trust in a stranger with a strange thing to offer”.
She’s being modest – they loved it. There were a few tears, much curiosity and laughter, and amazement at how calm they felt afterwards, reporting how certain pains had eased or even disappeared.
I can only imagine what a challenge it must have been to deliver the workshop in a new language to a new culture – yet Rachael was simply warm and confident. I’m so proud of her, and look forward to working with her at my March retreat, where she will be again be assisting me in the Constellations, as well as offering a session of TRE. Join us!
This interesting blog post about sexual identity caught my eye:
https://qz.com/1230638/omnisexual-gynosexual-demisexual-whats-behind-the-surge-in-sexual-identities/
So I thought it would be interesting also to share this post on the issue of Sexual Identity and Sexual Trauma written byProf Franz Ruppert (creator of the IoPT Identity Constellations theory and method):
To call one’s sexuality “hetero”, “homo”, “gay”, “lesbian”, “trans”, “queer” etc. does not say anything about the quality, how I act my sexuality out – alone or with a partner.
Also naming it “normal”or “natural” is more an attempt to justify it for public opinion than to look at it in more depth.
What matters in my thinking is the question:
– whether we practice our sexuality from our healthy identity or
– whether our sexuality is traumatized or
– whether we are traumatizing others with our sexuality and
– whether our sexual trauma forces us to develop trauma-surviving strategies and attitudes of being a victim or a perpetrator.
Healthy sexuality is possible provided we have our healthy ‘I’ available for it, act out of our own free will, stay in a good contact with our perceptions and emotions, have realistic thoughts, have a good sense of our body, and do something that is joyful for us and our partner(s).
Being sexually traumatized, very often because of our trauma biography, means being overwhelmed by emotions like anxiety, disgust, pain, shame or guilt. Sexual trauma means our body is made into an object by another person, we are physically and psychologically hurt and we cannot stop it and defend ourselves.
Trauma surviving strategies from the victim’s side:
– turning the body into a collapsed or frozen state,
– making oneself emotionally numb,
– attempting to leave the body mentally,
– identifying with the perceptions and needs of the perpetrator,
– feeling disgust, shame and guilt,
– blaming oneself and feeling worthless,
– denying that this happens to oneself,
– suppressing memories about what happened.
From the perpetrator’s side we know surviving attitudes such as:
– “It is your duty and my right to have sex.”
– “It is a pleasure for you and not harmful.”
– “I love this child and the child loves me.”
– “You offered yourself and seduced me.”
– “Even if you say no, deep down you actually mean yes.”
– “I have paid you money for it.”
Sexuality acted out as a trauma surviving strategy:
– often involves alcohol and drugs,
– is meant as a compensation for loneliness,
– is based on illusions of love (“The perpetrator is the only person that loves me and cares for me.”),
– beliefs in myths about sexuality (e.g. “virginity”),
– provides only a short time relief,
– needs to be repeated obsessively,
– does not care if the body is wounded or infected by viruses, bacteria or fungi,
– does not care, if the sexual act leads to a unwanted pregnancy.
Therefore, if we are really interested in the quality of our sexuality, we can explore it with the Intention Method and we may find out how to live our sexuality consciously in a healthy way.
As psychotrauma is so wide spread in all societies, so the trauma of sexuality is also common. A consequence of sexual trauma is to repeat it again and again without realizing it. We may feel good even with the sexual retraumatizations because we do not know what it is to live from a healthy sexuality. Prostitution is seen as normal in a traumatized society. In such societies, it is not easy to find partners who deal with their sexuality in a healthy manner as well.
In traumatized societies sexuality is used as a weapon for competition, to devalue others and to make oneself be seen as the only one that is “good” and even “perfect”. Or the strategy is to hide within a traumatized collective that seems “normal”, where others are not and can be blamed and discriminated. For political purposes, persons that do not fit to the “normal” sexual standard in many countries are offered as “evil” and as scapegoats to project whatever fantasies you want on them, to stir hatred and justify violence.
I hope we all who like to work with IoPT, do not put extra fuel on the wide-spread fires of perpetrator-victim dynamics in our society that are acted out consciously and unconsciously in this field.
Franz Ruppert, 28.3.2018
Booking is now open for a 3-week Identity Constellations Closed Group in St Albans with a Focus on Parenting
There’s an amazing line-up of youth wellbeing professionals speaking – click on the timetable image here for details. Capacity is limited and the last event sold out, so book your tickets early.
A colleague recently sent me a link to this excellent blog post written by Jonathon Tomlinson, a practicing NHS GP in London. Its so good, I’m re-blogging it here.
The article is a worthwhile read, which traces his path to realisation that there had to be some reason why so many people were chronically ill, followed by a comprehensive summary of his understandings of trauma and its impacts.
“What is extraordinary, and to be frank, a betrayal of patients and clinicians on the part of those responsible for medical education is that we never talked about, much less seriously taught about the lasting effects of trauma. We were taught that diseases were due to the interaction of human biology and the environment, but human experiences were barely part of the picture.”
Read the whole article:-
One of the most haunting images from my time as a junior doctor working in Hackney in the mid-1990s was in an A&E (emergency) department while we tried to resuscitate a man in his 40s. In the corner of the room stood two young children – probably about the same age mine are now, 6-8 years old. They stood and stared in silence, watching us trying to save their dad. He was covered in blood and bile, his body yellow with jaundice, veins visible on his abdomen and torso from advanced, alcoholic liver disease. His wife was in another part of the department, so intoxicated she couldn’t stand, barely conscious and unaware of what was happening to her husband and children. The children were eerily impassive. The ambulance crew told us that when they arrived at their flat, they were trying to wake their dad while their mum lay unconscious…
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An Identity Constellations workshop may at first appear very similar to Family Constellations, with a client, facilitator and representatives working together in circle, moving and conversing as they feel into what is present. However there are many key differences in the two approaches.
Professor Franz Ruppert, who devised the IoPT*/Identity Constellations process, worked with Burt Hellinger for many years, and was originally a Family Constellations facilitator. As a Psychotherapist and Psychology Professor in Munich, he became aware that bonding and attachment traumas underpin all later relational issues, yet often remain hidden, and also have great potential for re-traumatisation.
Here’s an outline of the key differences between the approaches, as I understand them:
For deeper reading I highly recommend the books by Franz Ruppert (in particular Trauma, Fear & Love).
Vivian Broughton, who runs the UK’s IoPT training has also written a helpful introductory book, and her blog has many excellent articles. Her website also has a list of other practitioners offering this amazing work in the UK.
*Identity-Oriented PsychoTraumatology
A brief brush with group therapy in my 20s after a friend’s suicide was frankly horrible. It was uncomfortable enough to be expected to discuss my emotions with a group of total strangers, but then became traumatic when one of the group started attacking me verbally. The therapist did nothing.
This experience made me avoid therapeutic groups for years. So thank you to everyone who has said “I love the sound of your workshops but I couldn’t deal with my stuff in a group”.
You’ve let me know that I need to be very clear that being a Representative (ie taking part in others’ Constellations) is SAFE!
As a Representative, you participate, but you are NOT the centre of attention. In fact you can keep your own issues & process completely private if you want to.
Meanwhile loads of healing can and does happen inside you – alongside which you get to experience amazing insights and extraordinary levels of human empathy.
The evidence against repressing difficult emotions keeps on stacking up…
A fascinating piece on 25th April edition of Radio 4’s mental health magazine programme ‘All In The Mind’ about a new study that shows once more that simply writing about how you feel can speed up wound healing.
Although the effect has been known since James Pennebaker’s studies in the 1980’s, this is the first study to demonstrate that expressive writing after an injury can aid healing as much as doing it in advance of a wound.
You can listen or download it here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08n2wcz
