Episode 64: Illuminating Trauma: Feminist Perspectives from Susan Pease Banitt and other Women Healers

When Susan Pease Banitt stepped away from her psychotherapy practice, it wasn't just a career change—it was a moment of transition that illuminated the hidden complexities of psychological trauma.

 Join us as Susan, with her considerable insight into PTSD, dissociative disorders, and the dark corners of ritual abuse, shares her personal journey and the challenging reality that pushed her towards new horizons in healing. Her voice adds depth to our conversation on the multi-dimensional treatment of trauma and the intriguing concept of lightworkers and starseeds that defy traditional healing paradigms.

Our discussion ventures into the realm of reincarnation, a concept met with sceptics in Western cultures yet woven seamlessly into the fabric of Eastern and indigenous traditions. 

The episode features an introduction to a pivotal new book that gathers the wisdom of female therapists—a harmonious blend of voices seeking to redress the balance in a historically male-dominated field. This anthology not only serves as a celebration of women's resilience in trauma therapy but also as a rich tapestry of diverse healing modalities, with each page promising a step towards empowerment and understanding.

As we wrap up, the transformative power of Reiki emerges as a beacon of hope for those navigating the aftermath of trauma. 

We celebrate its ability to transcend dualities and its roots in the enlightened teachings of Usui Sensei. Moreover, we confront the troubling misdiagnosis of PTSD as a personality disorder, a misstep with profound implications for women in search of support. 

Our episode concludes by setting the stage for a series of enlightening dialogues with the book's contributors, and a partnership with The View Magazine that underscores our dedication to amplifying women's own voices in the journey towards mental health and justice.

Transcript

Madalena Alberto : 0:01

Welcome to the View Magazine's Rebel Justice podcast. This week we bring you Susan P Banitt, an award-winning author, psychotherapist and pioneer in the field of alternative therapies in psychological healing, with over 45 years of experience in mental health work with specialties in PTSD, dissociative disorders, asd and medical social work. Farah from the View spoke to Susan about her past work as a therapist and about her forthcoming book Women Therapists on Healing.

The View Host: 0:35

Please tell us a little bit about your background and how you became involved in trauma work. How did that extend to your work with the most traumatised people who have gone through ritual abuse by the government and other institutions?

Susan Pease Bannit : 0:47

Okay, sure. Well, I've been in this business of human services for a long time. I started as a teenager working with autistic kids and moved into summer work in college at a psychiatric hospital in California and then back into residential care through my 20s until I went to graduate school and then worked on oncology, which is where I feel like I started to really focus on trauma as a specialty and grief work, and then things just progressed from there. Once I started a private practice, word got out eventually that I was good at trauma and I started getting more and more traumatised people and at the end developed a specialty in ritual abuse, mind control, government secret programs, things that are very hard to treat and not well known about, with people who are quite dissociative and engineered to be dissociative actually. So I did that until last May.

Susan Pease Bannit : 1:53

What I found was that, even though I wanted to keep going, my body really couldn't, and the body there's a shelf life to every profession, right, you know. I think that doing heavy trauma work is sort of for therapists, the equivalent of digging ditches. It's so hard on your body and your nervous system to do it. So that was hard to give up. But then a lot of wonderful opportunities, including this book, came into view and this book is an anthology and so I got to work with a lot of my colleagues, which was tremendous fun. Actually, I didn't really appreciate how much I would enjoy cheerleading on my colleagues to write, so this is like a second life sort of, for me.

The View Host: 2:40

Can you also tell us a little bit about why you stopped doing trauma work?

Susan Pease Bannit : 2:44

So a lot of things started happening. Also, I was under a great deal of scrutiny and attack by certain parties that didn't want me talking about this. Work Turns out organized crime doesn't like it when you free their slaves who knew. So they came after me hard on many different levels. They tried to challenge my license in my state. They showed up at a conference in such numbers that we required police protection. They've come onto lives that I've done with people and disrupted with pornography and things like that, and they also if one is knowledgeable or believes in such things.

Susan Pease Bannit : 3:27

I believe I was subjected to some psychic and shamanic attacks as well. I have a pretty big team of people who support me in all the different realms that I need support, so that's been good. So I was diagnosed with a small brain tumor in 2020. I had viral meningitis.

Susan Pease Bannit : 3:46

I had a condition called Silent Sinus Syndrome, where my sinus had collapsed and pulled my septum 45 degrees to the side and it had to be broken and reset and things done in my face, and this was all going on at the same time, so it was really intense, but it was really like the brain fog. I had COVID three times, so how much was circumstance and COVID and how much was the progression. But I believe that this really challenging work over a long period of time just kind of. I'm a fairly robust, buoyant person, but it did wear me down and I'm in my 60s so it seemed like it was time to do that and ever since I stopped seeing individual work, I feel like I've been able to catch my breath and catch up and start healing, which feels wonderful.

The View Host: 4:39

What do you think about the way that everyone is claiming to suffer from trauma in our present time? How do you define trauma?

Susan Pease Bannit : 4:47

I, like my friend Jamie Merich, his definition of trauma the best and she talks about the original etymology of that word, which I believe is Greek comes out means it means to be wounded, and psychological trauma is a physical, emotional and spiritual wound in the person. It's multi-dimensional. Which is why I wrote my first book to say you really can't heal severe psychological trauma with just one hour a week of talk therapy. At best you can kind of maintain you really need to address all these different dimensions of the being the emotional body, the physical body in terms of restoration, and the spiritual body.

Susan Pease Bannit : 5:42

Trauma is a very deep wound. People who haven't been traumatized don't really understand it. They think they do, they have an intellectual understanding I was actually thinking about this morning. I'm thinking this is the toxicity of our times is that people read things, have access to a lot of information, but it doesn't necessarily translate into knowledge or applicability. So people think they understand the concept of trauma but to really understand it you have to have studied it deeply and preferably, if you're going to treat people, then a survivor of it.

The View Host: 6:20

I love these terms you use, such as star cedars and light workers. Can you tell our listeners what you mean by these words?

Susan Pease Bannit : 6:27

Yeah, star seed. Maybe we should, for our audience, define light work and star seed. They are overlapping category. So I do past life regressions. That's one of the things that I do. I was trained by Dr Brian Weiss, who famously wrote the book Many Lives, many Masters. He's a psychiatrist, his wife is a social worker. I got CEUs actually to do this training.

Susan Pease Bannit : 6:51

So my foundational belief is that our mind can be in many conditions over many lifetimes, and some of those lifetimes don't always happen on this planet. That surprised me. The first past life regression I had I'm like I don't see bodies, I see colors, what's happening. So what I've discovered over a long period of time is that we can take many different kinds of bodies. I regressed somebody who worked at Walter Reed Army Hospital and she had been a planet, she'd been a celestial body, and I know that can sound really strange to people who haven't really had an induction into this world, but that's people's experience. And so these different civilizations around the universe are at different levels of evolution spiritually and there are many of us who've had lifetimes in sort of what you might say more evolved or higher dimensional realities that decided to come to Earth.

Susan Pease Bannit : 7:55

Earth is considered to be a very challenging environment and a school of sorts for people. So, you know, some of us have to develop compassion as we mature souls, and some of us already came on to the planet with our heart fully open and compassionate. And the light workers are the ones that have decided to be here. Whether they came from this part of the universe originally and evolved on Earth or they came from somewhere else, they're here to serve.

Susan Pease Bannit : 8:27

Most of us have an idea that this is a really important time in Earth's history, that we have some kind of mission that we signed on for. A lot of us remember what that mission is sooner or later, and we take up our posts and our assignments and carry on. The star seeds are the beings and I do consider myself one of them that aren't originally from this part of the universe and came in with some, maybe, sort of bonus knowledge that was in our unconscious mind when we incarnated here. I've been on this planet, as far as I can tell, since the time of Atlantis, but I regressed plenty of people who have been cavemen. I don't have any caveman lifetimes as far as I can see, so everybody is really different.

The View Host: 9:13

Why do you think there is so much resistance to accepting that we occupy other life forms in past lives? We're all just energy and we came from the stars, so why do people deny this idea, which is so beautiful?

Susan Pease Bannit : 9:25

Well, the thing is that I've traveled around the world and I've talked to lots of different kinds of people and that kind of idea is only strange to people who were raised in or descended from Northern European areas, because I believe of the Inquisition, which went on for nearly 400 years and that's like 25 generations, something like that right Of systematic torture and genocide of the people who held that knowledge. Everybody who's indigenous in North America traces their ancestry back to star people. That is a fact. I've spoken to many Indians. Some Indian Swamis have said I'm from the Pleiades originally.

Susan Pease Bannit : 10:13

This is something all of those cultures acknowledge an energy, body. All of those cultures acknowledge many lifetimes. So that is a very colonial kind of perspective that we have, colonial and sort of set down originally by the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church, that you have this one life and Jesus is the one person. But most of the rest of the world actually doesn't subscribe to that, which surprises people sometimes when they say that. But we are in a minority who believe that.

The View Host: 10:47

Yeah, the new book is A Compilation of Views and Treatments by Female Therapists on Healing. How did this come about?

Susan Pease Bannit : 10:56

It came about. I was making up CEUs from having been so sick. Those are continuing education that I need for my license. I was behind, so I did a weekend workshop with a well-known trauma specialist, who I will not name, but one of the top six or seven that you might think of when you think about people talking about trauma in the world. And over the course of the weekend this man named several men that he admired and at one point he had to mention Francine Shapiro because he was talking about EMDR. It's like an eye movement therapy that helps process traumatic events. It's very effective for a lot of people, but he didn't mention her in a way that was like he looked up to her or he kind of had to. But he mentioned like seven or eight men oh, they're so wonderful and they've done this wonderful work and something inside of me just kind of snapped that's all I can describe.

Susan Pease Bannit : 11:53

It was like the last straw for me. I've been hearing this for like 30 years and from the same guys, and I was like I know these men have had female therapists. I know they've collaborated with women. I know they've had girlfriends who've given them information that they put in their books, because I'm connected to communities that they're connected to. So I just am like why, when almost all the consumers of trauma therapy are women and almost all the providers of trauma therapy are women, we just listening to men talk about drama when they have no idea about women's trauma Right Personally, on a personal basis? So that's what did it for me, and I thought I know I was counting on my fingers. I'm like sitting there after the workshop is like. I know a dozen women who are published, who are considered experts in their circles, who've been in the field as long or longer than some of these guys who are talking at the higher levels, who are brilliant, who are creative. I'm going to contact them. So I did. I contacted them and said do you guys want to write a book with me? And they all said yes. So that's how this book got launched and I really made an effort, because my second book was wisdom, attachment and love and trauma therapy and it has very good, a good rating, better than trauma toolkit.

Susan Pease Bannit : 13:12

I had one reviewer give it one star on Amazon and I read the comment and it was a trauma therapist who said you have zero things about intersectionality in this book, and so I'm giving this a one star. It was like after the Black Lives Matter movement had started was one. This person's review came in and I was like it's done a little bit. One star reviews sting a little bit. I was like they're not wrong, though Like I totally. I just didn't even think about it.

Susan Pease Bannit : 13:45

Honestly, I didn't think about intersectionality when I wrote that book, but I was thinking a lot about it at the time when that review came in. So I made sure that you know, half my authors in this book are either Black or Indigenous in origin or African-American. Some identify as Black and some as African-American. So I made sure that there was a lot of diversity. And I have also an author from Australia who's got some Maori, mixed Maori, and yeah, it's an incredible group of women and I let them pick their topics. I just said to them I want you to share a little bit of your personal journey, because young people need relatability and women tend to follow women who are more self-disclosing. I have, as a woman expert, found that people don't follow women who are just experts, usually unless they're selling a whole brand of training or something that they've created in that way. So that's how that book was born.

The View Host: 14:47

When did you start to put the book together?

Susan Pease Bannit : 14:50

I think it was 2021 when I attended that workshop. Yeah, because I'm on an odd number on my license, that's right. It was 2021. Right. So it took quite a long time to pull it together and, because of COVID, publishing got slow and a little strange to get in touch with people.

Susan Pease Bannit : 15:13

One of my authors, jamie Merridge, put me in touch with North Atlantic Books in Berkeley and we had initial meeting but then, like, many months went by before I heard anything again and then they were like, oh yeah, we do wanna work with this. It feels like this book has definitely had its own timing and my authors have had their own timing and I do feel like there is sort of a divine design in that, in the way that this is all playing out and the world, I think, being ready to hear something different than they've been hearing.

The View Host: 15:51

There are so many various modalities for healing trauma in your book, from yoga to EMDR. Can you tell us a bit about them?

Susan Pease Bannit : 15:58

Sure, let's start with yoga, because that was one of my bases. When I started doing yoga and going to an ashram I had no idea I would bring it into my work at that point, but I did start to bring it into my work pretty quickly and at that time I was living in Boston and the Boston Harvard teaching hospitals that I was working in were extremely open to these ways of thinking, and a lot of those doctors were going to the Kripalu Institute and the Omega Institute for their healing and rejuvenation. So that became a thing. Yoga is so unique in that it does address the multi-dimensionality of the human being in a very systematic way, which was what gave me the impetus to write Trauma Toolkit, and the chapters are actually laid out in the different dimensions, or they call them kochas or bodies. So you have a physical body, an energy body that's made of prana, a lower mental body and a higher mental body which is wisdom, and a bliss body, which some yoga teachers call the love body. But the idea is that in yoga that the inside of us is non-different than the divine. It's like the divine is an ocean and you take a cup and you dip the cup and the ocean it's the same ocean inside the cup as outside the cup. It just looks different because it's in a cup and the goal of yoga is to realize the self, to realize that the ocean inside is the same as the ocean outside and there's all kinds of ways that yoga has to do that, many different paths to do that within yoga itself.

Susan Pease Bannit : 17:38

What's amazing about that, and what I experienced myself, is that if people have a genuine spiritual experience, an experience of oneness that is curative, it changes people's perspectives completely.

Susan Pease Bannit : 17:53

That's why mushrooms and things like that in Niaowaska have become so popular, because they can give you those glimpses In yoga. By the time you're having those glimpses you're already starting to live in that place within yourself. So it's a more permanent condition than if you just take a drug to get there. But what's also great about yoga is that along the way the yogic practices are preparing your body and mind for the stillness and that connection and to be sort of have the wiring inside to handle the amount of voltage that's gonna come through when you tap into source. Otherwise people can get really sick or delusional or different things can happen. I often say that Eastern spirituality begins where Western psychotherapy ends, with a calm and focused mind right, but the beginning practices of yoga, like asanas and beginning meditations, are great for people with trauma because they help us give us tools to calm down the body and the mind and to gain a sense of control back over a feeling that's very out of control when you're in a traumatized state.

Susan Pease Bannit : 19:04

So that's yoga. Emdr I don't practice. I've never been called to it, but I have a lot of friends and my friend, jamie Merritt, who I mentioned earlier, is really well known for her work with EMDR and especially with dissociative people. She's got a lot to say about that topic, so if people are interested they could look her up. Her last name is M-A-R-I-C-H and she has written a chapter in this book. I was led to Reiki in a sort of strange way. I had patients demanding that I put my healing hands on them. Even though I'd never told them I had healing hands, they nailed me. One of them was a shaman. She had to do sessions with me for her master's degree and at the end she's like I'm not coming back to you until you start working with your hands.

Susan Pease Bannit : 19:54

I was like okay, I got to look into how I can do that. I was aware that I had some healing abilities, so I stepped into Reiki in 2014. I read books of colleagues that were using it and got a lot of training in it and that has been particularly helpful, especially for spiritual abuses, because the energy of Reiki, of holy fire Reiki in particular, is designed to counteract the effect of severe spiritual trauma and abuse, which was, by the end of my work, kind of the majority of my practice was people with very severe spiritual violations and violations of all kinds.

The View Host: 20:36

What are your views on Reiki and how it can heal trauma?

Susan Pease Bannit : 20:41

Reiki is a divine or if you don't believe in divinity, you could say, non-dual form of energy. So what do I mean by non-dual? What I mean is that most things in this 3D reality 3D, some say moving into 4 and 5D reality at this point there's good and there's bad, there's up and there's down, there's top and there's bottom, right, and everything has an opposite. When you get up into higher dimensional realities, that duality lessens and then goes away. So several teachers in India, for example Ramakrishna, mayor, baba, jesus, buddha they're considered non-dual teachers because they were operating at a very high level of awareness and realization and they could do no harm and would do no harm. The non-dual Reiki is, when you know, I was doing shamanic work before I did Reiki work because I have that ability.

Susan Pease Bannit : 21:42

Shaman practice can be used for harm. It's based in duality. So is witchcraft. You can use it for good or you can use it for evil. Reiki cannot be used for evil. It's impossible. Reiki has its own intelligence, its own purpose. It will not be used. The worst that can happen with Reiki is that it won't do what you ask it to do or the person won't receive it. It will not go where it's not wanted. If you're like I don't believe in that, I don't want that, don't come near me with your Reiki witchcraft stuff. It won't, it won't. You know, there's no negative side effects from Reiki and, like I said, it can't be used to harm.

Susan Pease Bannit : 22:22

So that really appealed to me a lot and it's very. It's a very calm, warm, soothing energy. But it's when I started it I thought, oh, this will be nice, this will be like this really sweet little energy. I'm like, oh no, reiki's really powerful. Like I've seen people have physical healings. I've seen people have white light experiences. I've seen people talk to their ancestors. I mean, I've seen a lot of things happen in very dramatic releases and memories, soul retrievals.

Susan Pease Bannit : 22:55

Reiki's powerful and it's great when people are so traumatized they can't talk, which sometimes, if people are, let's say, a 10 out of 10 on the ACEs study score, they've had every kind of trauma imaginable. They will often come to therapy and not be able to talk. They'll just start crying and they'll cry out the way they do the session. So I never knew what to do with those people. I tried to do some breathing exercises with them, but that didn't work out well. But Reiki worked great. It was like you don't have to talk. Why don't we just do a Reiki healing meditation today? And people were loving that. So after two or three sessions, I don't think I ever had to do more than three sessions with somebody of Reiki to get them in a space where they were able to start processing their trauma, which is amazing. So because it worked with the energy body too.

The View Host: 23:50

Am I right in thinking that Reiki originated in Japan?

Susan Pease Bannit : 23:54

It is actually universal. It's been with humanity throughout humanity's history, as has the Holy Fire energy. But Usui Sensei in Japan. He had gone up to the mountain to have a retreat and he wanted the experience of full enlightenment and Satori, which he received. On his way down from the mountain he stubbed his toe really badly and he just automatically reached down to rub it and then the injury was just healed like that. He was like well, what?

Susan Pease Bannit : 24:25

is this and the sort of a side effect, if you will, of his realization was that he had this healing energy running through him. In fact he was there for one of the great earthquakes of Japan and this story goes that he would be healing four people at once, one with a, two hands and two feet on different people, just channeling, blasting with Reiki energy toward them. So he trained an inner group in Japan, some of those trained other people and now Reiki is all over the world.

The View Host: 24:55

What do you think about the misdiagnosis of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, as personality disorder, which is basically the throwaway of the key diagnosis, particularly for women?

Susan Pease Bannit : 25:06

Right. Well, I mean, unfortunately, even PTSD for some therapist was a throwaway, the key, like I can't tell you how many clients or just people have contacted me and said my therapist said that I would learn how I have to learn how to manage my trauma for the rest of my life and my response to that was like, well, if that had been the answer for me, I wouldn't have wanted to stay on the planet because that was that was not a future I could envision for myself. Unfortunately, I worked with a shamanic healer who was also a therapist, who brought me completely out of my trauma with some work on my own. But you know, that's why I again wrote trauma tool, because, like, I wanted to pass on the things I learned from him, because I didn't want people to stay stuck in suffering. So, yes, I think there's a tremendous amount of misdiagnosis and you know in, if science ever stops growing, it's not science anymore, it's dogma, right? So science should always be evolving. We should be asking these questions.

Susan Pease Bannit : 26:13

I've come to believe that schizoaffective disorder is really not a thing. It's a thing that a lot of light workers have. It's a thing that people don't have trouble getting grounded onto the earth plane have. It can be treated well with energy medicine, for example. Somatiform disorder. I think it's an obsolete diagnosis because it talks about Disturbance in all these energy systems in the body that are mediated by the hypothalamic, pituitary, ogenal axis, and Often people with trauma have disturbances in all these physical areas of their body because of the HPA axis. So why is that still in the de-sam? It should not be. You know, bipolar disorder is often unregulated. Ptsd, borderline personality disorder can be as well.

Susan Pease Bannit : 27:01

I do think that there's also a high comorbidity between the cluster B personality disorders and trauma may be all the personality disorders. One of the people who one of the authors in my book is a woman named Robin Shapiro who has written brilliantly about Ego state therapy and she sees personality disorders as a different kind of its fragmentation Based in trauma, than people with DID have. So that there are these self states that sort of come out and take over the personality. They're unintegrated self states that were caused by trauma and once you can Integrate those self states and the trauma and memories that go with them, a lot of those symptoms Either get a lot better. In some cases they disappear completely. So yes, I think that a lot of therapist's understanding of trauma is very superficial and Same with personality disorders, and I don't believe in an uncurable anything. I just believe that we haven't yet found the key.

Susan Pease Bannit : 28:12

I, I worked with a narcissistic somebody, just diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, for 10 years. At the end of 10 years she was no longer Diagnosable as an access to disorder. She worked really hard, I worked really hard. There was a lot of trauma there also that came out during the course of that treatment. But you know, 10 years for healing from anything Sounds like a long time if you're young. But on this side of the fence 10 years is like ah, you know, if you do 10 years early in life you get to my age you've had like 40 years about anything you know. So like, do it 10 or 15 years to heal a personality disorder? It's probably worth it. I think we don't understand how the fracturing happens in personality disorders very well yet and how healing from trauma can heal those kinds of things in people also.

Susan Pease Bannit : 29:09

As a past life regression therapist, I have to say that I think that's what we call Personality disorders also might be traumas from lifetimes, let's say of abandonment. You know, just lifetime after lifetime after lifetime of abandonment. I had a client come in for a one-session cure once who she was preoccupied with thoughts that her children would be beheaded, and I said well, did you ever live in Saudi Arabia and see anything? She's like no, no, no. We grew up in the Midwest, like we're Americans. We've never seen anything like that. She's like I have no idea where this comes from, but she's like. It like disturbs my functioning. I can't function. I worry constantly when my children are away from me.

Susan Pease Bannit : 29:53

So we got into the past life regression, and she went right to it. It was like a real Game of Thrones thing. She was in a stone corridor. She heard her kids screaming in the courtyard. They were beheaded, she was stabbed. She died in a lot of trauma, with them dying, a lot of trauma, and once she remembered that it was like oh, okay, I feel better now. That's not. This doesn't belong to this time zone. I'm like no, that was then, this is now you can be. Yeah, move on. You know, and she did. It was totally. After that it was gone. That is not something that we yet accept as a Like the APA, the American Psychological Association does not integrate this kind of wisdom. Yet we need to, though, because, truth be told, most Americans are aware of these ideas and have explored them a lot themselves, as well as people in other countries.

The View Host: 30:48

So we live in a world where everyone claims to be traumatized and triggered. How do we deal with this in a way that's respectful and not minimizing of other mental health issues, such as triggering or depression or anxiety, when clearly it's not trauma?

Susan Pease Bannit : 31:04

Oh, that's a hard question with so many facets to look at. There's a lot of I call it vectors, like ways, things coming into that question that I'm gonna pick. I'll see if I can pick them off one by one. One answer is that I think a lot of people are Traumatized, and more traumatized than they realize, but they haven't realized it, so they use that word flippantly. Does that make sense? It's almost offensive. Say, well, I was triggered, like well, you might have actually been triggered, but if you were really in touch with being triggered, you would have handled it differently or you'd be in therapy or those things. So I do see it as this almost like Shell game is the word that comes to mind. But yeah, it's like a Kind of denial almost, and so when you are the person they're saying that to, it feels terrible because you. It doesn't feel sincere, it doesn't feel grounded, like oh, I'm triggered to, or like when people have a PTSD trigger, they're not functional. There that's pretty much. You know the the meaning of being triggered. And I think of, like years ago, people who are old enough to Remember Oliver north being interviewed about the Iran contra affair and during his interview in court there was a car that backfired and he hit the deck. He went, he went down to the floor. It's like just that's a trigger. Okay, that's actually a trigger, this that sounded like a shot to him. So he hit the floor. His body hit the floor.

Susan Pease Bannit : 32:49

People Also use it in a way to justify their anger and behaving badly by saying I was triggered, that's not, that's not the same thing. You, your anger, may have been triggered, but if your trauma is triggered, you know lots of things happen, but you usually don't get snarky. You know it's like you're gonna have a full Anxiety reaction in your body. Your heart's gonna pound, you're gonna breathe faster, you might have all the symptoms of classic anxiety attack. Or you might get extremely Dissociated and your thoughts stop and you get Super foggy brain and you can't really think your way into the next sentence. Or you might get really dizzy and swimming and feel like you're gonna fall down Because the trauma vortex has been activated, like Peter Levine talks about.

Susan Pease Bannit : 33:45

I've seen all these things in my clients. I've experienced all of them myself and none of them are like, like you said, something triggered me. So I'm gonna be mean to you, like that's not, that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about a trauma trigger. But again, I feel like the reason people don't understand that is because they don't really know what they don't know. They don't know how bad it actually is and can be. You know what it puts me in mind of? Have you seen any of these videos of men being wearing electrical shock devices to simulate period pain? Have you seen any of these?

The View Host: 34:22

No, thank God, no, but it's something that will never leave my mind now.

Susan Pease Bannit : 34:28

There's so great. Though the men cannot get to the level 10, the women cruise through it. They're like oh yeah, that happened last week, right, the men can't, they can't get, they can't get there. They're like most men are like I had no idea. They're like. Now there's like can you go to work? And they're like no, I couldn't go to work like this. Like women go to work like this all the time, right, so you don't know what you don't know. Right, and trauma is like that Okay that's really good.

The View Host: 34:59

Now I get, I'll have to watch one of those awful videos. Is there anything else that you want to add about the book? When is the book coming out?

Susan Pease Bannit : 35:09

At the end of November, right in time for Christmas. Yes, to what do I want to add? It has been a such an unexpected joy to write this book with people and to hear Stories that I've never heard before, like like one of the authors I know from comedy sports, from the improv world. She's African-American storyteller and comedian who also happens to run the the inclusion and diversity wing of the Oregon healthcare plan for the state of Oregon and she's brilliant and she's Funny. But I did not know her story of the first time she experienced racism and the physical effect it had on her as a child, where her heads would start shaking uncontrollably and her body would start shaking. And I think hearing those narratives and those stories are so impactful the lived experience of people and Also because this book is written by therapists Leanne, who I just mentioned, is a systems therapist in organizations.

Susan Pease Bannit : 36:17

Therapists, like people, don't know a lot about us because we're prohibited from talking about ourselves in our profession and we don't share our stories with our clients unless they're very, very well-curated stories, right, and I think that that leads to some Weird ideas about therapists and it can lead to therapist feeling excluded from the circle of healing. And I I really and Jamie Merich is working really hard on this. She's out as a person with multiple personalities and she writes and talks about this all the time and she's gotten a lot of negative pushback from other therapists like You're, you're supposed to be more healed, you're not supposed to talk about that, it's unprofessional and she's like that's, that is stigma. That is not okay. So she's giving a lot of therapists with dissociative disorders permission to start talking about who they really are and how they work, and I think this is important. We need to not be forced into pretending something. We need to be authentic and and have permission to be included in those conversations so that we, too, can heal.

The View Host: 37:38

So it's like a circle of healing. There's so much trauma and destruction in war, a damage and fighting and separation and silos and walking away and Abandonment and stuff in the world at the moment. I think this book I'm just so excited that it's coming out. I think it's really, really timely. You've created this beautiful banquet for these women and you know they've come and they've joined you and it's it's. It's going to be such an incredible Journey for all of us going through it to understand more about the process of the book and also understand a little bit more about these women's journeys.

The View Host: 38:16

So our plan is to talk to each of the authors over the next few months and Speak to them all a little bit about their journeys, why they got involved, how they got involved in trauma, and Each of these women will have a really interesting perspective on feminist therapy. It's sort of this incredible bouquet of hope and experience and Healing. So I think it's going to be a really interesting series. I hope people will Listen in. I know I'm really excited to host this, so I'm really happy that we've done this. I really look forward to talking to Some of the women, all of the women who've been. It been part of this. Thank you so much for being part of the view and part of our rebel justice podcast. It means a lot and look forward to hearing from you in this series also.

Susan Pease Bannit : 39:11

Thank you so much. I really appreciate being included and I love thinking of us as a bouquet, because there are some common flowers and there are some very rare flowers. There's stories we know about and there's stories we haven't heard yet, so it's going to be a wonderful journey.

Madalena Alberto : 39:28

And this concludes our podcast for today. Thank you so much to our special guest, susan peas bannett. We will be speaking to all 11 contributors of Susan's book women therapists on healing over the next six months, so be sure to tune in and listen to this important series on how women can claim back agency and power Around our own mental well-being. We are the rebel justice podcast brought to you by the view magazine, an independent media platform by and for women in the justice system. For more about the view, please check out our website at the view mag Org dot UK, and you will find us on X formerly Twitter at rebel justice, and on Facebook and Instagram as the view magazines and on LinkedIn as the view magazine. Please like and subscribe to the show and rely on your support, and please do leave us a nice review if you like what you heard and found it informative. Thank you, you.