Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone and welcome. I’m Dr. Ruth Buczynski, a licensed psychologist in the state of Connecticut and the president of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, and I’m so glad you’re here tonight.

I’m going to be talking with one of my very favorite people. In our office, I refer to her as the other Ruth, so they know that I’m not referring to myself!

This is Dr. Ruth Lanius. She is a physician as well as a PhD. She’s a professor of psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, and she’s the co-editor of the Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease, and she has authored over 100 published papers.

Today, we’re going to talk about a variety of topics. We’re going to talk about a new model of dissociation
and what that means for treatment and for the people you work with. We’re going to talk about how neuroscience and psychology can give us a better understanding of trauma and what’s going on.

We’re going to talk particularly about the effects of early life trauma and the effects of PTSD on the brain and development in general.

I’m awfully excited. Let’s jump right in, so we don’t lose any time. I usually run out of time with many questions I still want to ask because Ruth is really up on so many areas – in fact she’s up on everything! So, welcome to our series, Ruth. It’s good to talk to you again.

Dr. Lanius: It’s great to be back, Ruth.

A Working Definition of Dissociation

Dr. Buczynski: Let’s talk about dissociation. There is a wide range of practitioners on this webinar tonight. There are a lot of psychotherapists and psychologists and social workers and marriage and family people, and they of course know exactly what you and I mean when we talk about dissociation. But in addition to that, there are lots of other folks who are also professionals.

They might be school nurses and physical therapists and occupational therapists – a range of people who may not be quite as familiar.

For their sake, can we have just a brief description and definition of dissociation, and then I’d like to get into what you’re now calling a 4-D model of dissociation. But first, what would you say dissociation is?

Dr. Lanius: Dissociation provides an escape where no actual escape is possible. It provides a mental
escape from intense experience, from intense emotions, and from intense memories.

It’s a very broad term and can refer to a number of things. For example, it can refer to dissociative flashback – reliving an experience and losing your connection with the present.

It can refer to dissociative amnesia – not remembering, for example, the torture you’ve experienced.

It can refer to depersonalization or out of body experiences – removing yourself from your body in order to dampen the emotional intensity of certain emotions that you may be experiencing.

Or it may be referring to fragmentation of the self – experiencing your self as having multiple selves.

It’s a definition that can refer to a lot of different experiences.

This leads me into the 4-D model that Paul Frewen and I have been working with. The 4-D model takes dissociation and understands it as an alteration in consciousness. We are co-authoring a book that’s being published by Norton later this year on this 4-D model.