Persistence of Ignorance About Trauma and Dissociation: Our Supervision Experiences

Abstract
Although complex trauma and dissociation are constructs that are increasingly well understood in some professional circles, the presenters' experience is that it remains common for each of us in our roles as supervisors and consultants to encounter experienced clinicians and forensic practitioners who are unprepared to assess, work clinically with, or simply be minimally competent with persons who present with these forms of psychological distress. It has been our experience that gross misunderstandings and harmful reactions on the part of clinicians who have been inadequately educated, despite many years of experience, include distortions such as

The failure to distinguish trauma, an event from traumatization, adverse reactions to traumatic events
The assumption that “trauma only exists among combat veterans”
A conviction that PTSD is quickly resolved by manualized treatment approaches, each of which can be mastered in a single workshop
The belief that the essence of effective therapy for trauma and dissociation is interventions and that the therapeutic relationship is secondary or completely irrelevant
Misconstruing that Complex PTSD as simply being severe PTSD
The myth that dissociation is exceedingly rare
Confounding dissociation generally with dissociative identity disorder
A failure to recognize that trauma and dissociation are inextricably linked to socio-political factors

The "Eek! There's a multiple in my office!" (or, alternately, "Wow! Fascinating! A multiple!) of earlier times remain distressingly common, particularly among mid-career and senior professionals, whose training was often tainted either by the absence of coverage of these topics or the false memory narrative which suppressed this material in training settings for several decades. This presentation will take the form of an interactive discussion between the presenters with illustrations of both clinical and forensic examples of practitioner ignorance. We will conclude with recommendations for how to better mainstream the insights and science of our field.