Episode 37: Tian Dayton, PhD
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: What we experience as adult children of alcoholics is a post-traumatic stress reaction. In other words, pain from childhood is emerging in adulthood. Pain from childhood relationships is emerging and being played out in adult relationships.
Jessica Fowler: Welcome back to What Your Therapist Is Reading. I'm your host, Jessica Fowler. On today's episode, we are speaking with Dr. Tian Dayton about her book, The ACoA Trauma Syndrome, The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships. Dr. Tian Dayton is a senior fellow at the Meadows and is the author of 15 books, including Treating Adult Children of Relational Trauma, Adult Children of Alcoholics Workbook, and Emotional Sobriety.
Dr. Dayton is the former assistant professor of psychodrama at NYU. She is a fellow of the American Society of Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy, ASGPP, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, the Scholar's Award, the President's Award, and former Editor in Chief of the Journal of Psychodrama.
She is also the winner of the Marty Mann Award, the Mona Mansell Award, and the Ackerman Black Award. Dr. Dayton has been a guest expert on NBC, CNN, and ABC. MSNBC, Montel, Ricky Lake, John Walsh, and Geraldo.
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Welcome. I am so excited to have Dr. Tian Dayton on my show today. This is somebody who I have followed for a long time, so I'm very excited. Thank you so much for being on the show today.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Jessica Fowler: So, as we talked, I like to start the interview with asking this question. Can you share a memory of how reading has impacted you?
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: I have a couple of memories. One is from childhood. I adored the Pippi Longstocking books. And I remember discovering because I grew up with, you know, growing addiction in the family. And I remember discovering that if things were rocky in my family, if I read Pippi Longstocking, I felt better. So, I really learned the, uh, ability of reading and losing myself in really what was an imaginary world in giving me relief. And Pippi Longstocking is vibrant and creative and childlike and imaginative. So, it got that creative part of my mind going and that part of my mind has not stopped going. It's, it's a, it's where I live more, most happily in, in, and in relationships obviously in the world. But, um, but I always need to be creative in some way.
And another memory is when I was in college discovering the book by Roy Eugene Davis Time, Space, and Circumstance. And in the first line was within you is the perfect life waiting to be discovered. And I remember reading it and thinking, okay, I can do that. That sounds like a good idea. And I read the book, and it changed my life. And ever since then, I have believed in the power of a book to change a life.
Jessica Fowler: That gives me chills. And I think that's part of what this podcast is right? Here's a way to help change your life. That is beautiful. I love that it impacted you in that way. And so, with your book, what is your hope of how it impacts your readers?
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: That's a good question. I remember I had a college roommate who, um, she wrote a book when she was about four years old. And it was titled, How to Pull Up Your Knee Socks, because that was a struggle for her at that age. And she wrote a book so that other little children wouldn't have to struggle so hard to pull their knee socks up.
And I really thought of this book as that. I had to, um, really struggle. I mean, I, I had to learn it chip by chip by chip, how to recover from being an ACoA, how to even name it, how to feel it, how to know it out, what to do with it. And then I married an ACoA and discovered that we both needed to recover from that.
So, I think of this, if it's a subtitle, it's how to pull up your knee socks and how to get better from being an ACoA. You can pull up your own knee socks.
Jessica Fowler: And when we say ACoA, ACoA, we're saying adult children of alcoholics.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Yeah. And people call them ACoAs, adult children of addicts, adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. There are lots of monikers out there.
Jessica Fowler: And you have been in this field and doing this work basically since the beginning.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: I have.
Jessica Fowler: Right. Which is amazing. And I'll say that I've read your book, I don't know, 15 years ago, something like that, a long time. I worked in addiction for a long time and ran a family group and I actually had an ACoA group. It was probably to this day my favorite group to ever run and I used your book. all the time. So, I am very, very grateful for your work. It's impacted me personally. It's, I did not grow up as an ACoA, um, but we had stressors in our family that played out a little similarly, um, not exactly, but similar. And so it was the first time I read something that I was like, oh, this is what it can look like. And this is what I can do. So, I appreciate it very much.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: You know, a lot of, um, ACoAs or people who identify with these characteristics are what we call grandchildren of alcoholics or GCoAs, and they have alcoholism somewhere in the next two generations above them. Those dynamics are really difficult because being an ACoA is a traumatizing experience. Most people develop CPTSD or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which is relational trauma, but it is trauma, so that you have the, the trauma occurs in the context of your primary attachment relationships. When you're little and growing up and identifying with with the parent when you're just learning how to think and feel and so forth and naming feelings and talking about them.
And what I always like to say is, you know, if nobody decodes this for you, you just as a child, accept this as your reality. So, if you grow up accepting this very, uh, mood, swingy, chaotic, sober one time, uh, drunk the next moment or high on drugs, sober the next day with no memory of what they were like the day before.
The attachment issues are complex. And that's how we pass pain down, how we learn to be in relationship and how we learn to partner, how we learn to parent. So that is, um, what an ACoA brings into their parenting. It, we need treatment if we're ACoAs, otherwise we pass down, not just, you know, what we got, but the sense we made of what we got, which can be very complicated, distorted, um, reactive.
There's a lot of emotional dysregulation and overreaction and underreaction laced into it so that our parenting style is trauma, uh, informed in the negative sense. But we don't know it. And we might as parents as a theory parents think. Gosh, I'm not using anything. My kids are so lucky they're not growing up with an addict for a parent.
It doesn't mean they're not getting trauma engendering dynamics passed on to them. And the problem is they don't even have the addiction in the parent to point to. So, they just get the crazy making dynamics. And then GCoAs can feel even nuttier than ACoAs.
Jessica Fowler: And it's so common, too, that it's the grandparents right, too. It's like, you know, often, right, we know that it can happen to the parents, too. But that it's a generation removed, and you're right, we think, well, I, I'm not doing that, so it's not. You know, it's not what I grew up with, which, sure, is true, but there are all these dynamics that play into, and especially when you become a parent, that's such a shift, and so much stuff is being triggered and brought up, it, it needs, you know, it needs to be worked on. Right. That's how you break the cycle.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Yeah. It's it, and it needs a lot of work. We're not talking, we're talking about trauma resolution. We're not talking about reading a book or, I mean, as much as I hope my book helps people, I hope it opens a door to further help, getting further help because this stuff takes a long time to get over.
And often the ACOA parent in my observation thinks that they're so, take such good care of your kids because they're so clingy. They're so overbearing. They, they do everything for their children and that's out of balance too. Remember, trauma puts you out of balance. It's dysregulating, emotional dysregulation, so that if you bring that kind of dysregulation into your parenting, your child can be confused because they feel overwhelmed and they feel anxious. They pick up on all that from their but they're being told, I'm such a loving mother. I'm such a caring. I'm not like my parent, my drunk mother. I'm, I'm here for you, you know, so the child doesn't, um, get the balance that they need because the parent hasn't recovered from being an ACoA.
Jessica Fowler: And so, well, I guess I will kind of jump in there. You talk about in the book, you talk about. Um, psychodrama and some other methods for treatment of ACoAs. Can you share a little bit about that and even how you bring it up in the book?
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Sure. Um, I started doing psychodrama in my, you know, 40 years ago as an ACoA was my first exposure. And I could not believe the relief I experienced by role playing.
I remember setting up a psychodrama and we put my father who was the addict on a chair and I actually was very close to my father. But what they were saying is that he was, he was really had the power in the family, the addict has a lot of power. And I remember getting very angry at him in that role play.
In a way I really wouldn't have in real life because I, um, it's not that I didn't feel I could get angry at dad, but he, he was too episodic in my life after the age of 15 or so, and, and I loved him. I needed him. I needed him. And he was, he, he was sober a lot. He, and then he'd go on these binges, but it was so, uh, relieving to get that rage out of my system.
I just changed on a dime. And then I started to see other family patterns and there was some education involved. So that was my onboarding to psychodrama is, wow, this is incredible. I was studying to be a therapist. I thought now I'm going to do this kind of work forever. And you know, because ACoA always can't ask for help. I thought I need help. I need a lot of it. I know what I'll do. I'll become a therapist. I'll do it. You know? So that's how eventually I realized I got help from myself. Okay. So, psychodrama through the embodiment and the actual experience, which we can come back to why that's so good was incredible. As I matured as a therapist and did program development and training and all of this, I realized that, um, psychodrama was going all over the place in the hands of people who weren't fully trained.
And then I thought the solution is they need more training in psychodrama. And then I realized, Psychodrama was going over all over the place in the hands of people who knew a lot about psychodrama, so that the problem was to create a model that was trauma informed, and that keyed in on the issues of ACoAs, and that could be easily learned and incorporated into treatment centers.
So, it could not be heavy on psychodrama because people just couldn't get enough training for that. JL Moreno, the creator of psychodrama, created psychodrama sociometry and group psychotherapy. I leaned into sociometry, which is basically concretized group merit, uh, group dynamics. And I created something out of desperation called floor checks.
And if I may explain one, it will come clear. One of my trainees came in one day and there were the budgets were cut in New York state. He was given 35 people in his group and they wanted to, to him to do therapy with them, and I knew that it was impossible. However, Moreno has an adage in a group, each person becomes a therapeutic agent of the other.
And Maria Montessori, and I was a Montessori teacher in my twenties, had the concept of a prepared environment. So, I took those two concepts and thought, I'm going I will be, I will somehow create a model that will work for this wonderful man who wants to leave the field. And I just didn't want him to, he was such a good healer.
And he was a CASAC. He was a C, what we called then a CAC. So, he had a, not, you know, not the training of a, a master's level or PhD, but he had the heart for it and the talent for it and the experience of it. So, I have a whole bunch of respect for this kind of practitioner. I walked into group. Practically self-consciously carrying, you know, 16 pieces of paper with feelings on them, written on them.
And I just threw them around the floor and said, um, you know, let's try something, walk over to a feeling that you're experiencing right now. And, uh, share a couple of sentences of why you chose it. So, immediately I started to watch magic happening. People shared, first of all, they chose. This is the big, if there's a core concept to RT RS, RT RS is my model.
It is introducing the element of choice. And I will explain that further. They started to share about the feeling they were experiencing in the moment. Then I started to ask other questions, like walk over to a feeling you don't like when you experience it. So, you shut, you avoid it, you know, and everybody knew they just looked down and again, they were choosing.
I wasn't telling them what they were feeling. They were choosing. So, they walked over to that feeling you. And then I watched trauma resolution happened in real time, because once you identify the feelings you don't like feeling and start to share about them, and hear others in the group opening up, you sort of go, oh, wait a minute. It's not so terrible to feel that I think I could survive feeling that. And this is at the core of trauma, we shut down feelings. We, they freeze on the inside of us, and we never go there. So that means we never resolve them. We never let them see the light of day. We rationalize around them. We avoid connection where it brings up that feeling.
We avoid huge pieces of ourselves and our lives because we just can't sit with that feeling. So the feeling floor trick, thanks to this beautiful group. Change it again, change. It just, it launched this model in my mind. And then I found out I was hiding it from psychodramatists. I thought, I don't want them to know I'm being so prescriptive.
They started using it. I mean, it was working so well within a couple of months, it was around New York and people were loving using it. And I didn't tell anybody about it. This is trainees sharing with trainees. So, the next thing I tried, I thought if, if this works with feelings, what if I took the symptom lists?
I, I used to use Bessel Vander Kolk's, or I still do, symptoms. They're excellent. Of someone with PTSD, and I add some of my own that I see in my own clinical work. But, when I would put them into treatment centers, people got overwhelmed. And, and this is key, they thought they had them all. Right. People in treatment are very vulnerable and raw and they kind of go, oh, I identify with everything. And then pretty soon you look around and they're tipped over or shut down or, and they can't, uh, and then, you know, therapists get in trouble, hey, come on, who would, what are you feeling over there? What do you know? Therapists try to engage them with all these kinds of maneuvers that kind of don't always work. In fact, mostly don't work. So, I put symptoms around the floor. And I started saying things like, walk over to a symptom you experience that you struggle with. Again, they're choosing, right? So, they're waking up and they're walking and they're moving. They're waking up their limbic system where, which is where feelings are stored, which is where memory, sense memory is stored.
And so, they can, that some of that starts to get triggered by what they see on the floor, but it's getting, it's what Fritz Perls, I think called a safe emergency. It's a, it's within a context of. So, you can kind of tolerate choosing that. Then you can share about it immediately. So, you don't have to sit with it. You can open it. And then lo and behold, everybody else shares about the one they're standing on in these little case studies, live in the room, in the real time case studies pop up all around the room. So, this is like gold for therapy. And then you can ask the next question, whatever you want to know. You can just say what, what, now if you want to go into family of origin work without saying we're going into family of origin work.
What feeling what symptom did your family of origin struggle with that you think you might still be, you know, working with, walk over that share something about that the normalization that goes around the room. And from there, if you want to introduce psychodrama. You're warmed up. Your focus the role play can be very simple.
It can include role reversal, doubling if you know how but it doesn't need doubling, and it can, the role play can be, you know, very short. You can also talk to a part of yourself, you know, I have people like IFS, psychodrama always allows you to talk to a part of yourself. So now I've got about a hundred or 200 floor checks for absolutely anything.
DBT, that you can adjust them to anything. Anxiety, that once you understand and unpack some of these symptoms, which are anxiety, depression, anger, things like that. You can start to break them down. So, then you do an anger floor check and all of these manifestations of anger that people don't understand, stonewalling rage, uh, criticism, negativity. People don't think they’re angry. They don't think about how they're expressing their anger. But other people are stuck holding it for them. So, this is very educational and it's healing. So, it's psychoeducational. Um, then you can do a depression floor check. How does your depression manifest? An anxiety floor check. Many manifestations of anxiety, you know. Prickly feelings, fear of insects, you know, you name it. You know, hypervigilance. And also, we're breaking down the elements of relational trauma into metabolizable bite sized parts, where the therapist them. I mean where the client themselves. is doing the choosing. It's their foot that is on the gas pedal. The therapist isn't reaching over and putting their foot on the gas pedal. So this builds autonomy, which builds resilience, which builds ingenuity, which builds, you know, an urge to reach out, an urge to choose. All of that is resilience building. All of that goes, uh, counter to trauma's collapse. And shut down. So, this, this little sweet model, it's simple to learn. Oh, does trauma resolution without ever having to say, we're going to work on your trauma now, because then all you're getting somebody to do is shut down all over again, or get all anxious or worry or try to get the right trauma or try to get the biggest trauma. None of which is trauma. I mean, none of which is necessary because trauma represents a disconnection within the self, shutdown parts, Parts they can't feel and a loss of ability to create, um, comfort and ease with others to trust. So, this changes that it's asking you to connect with yourself all over the place, your feelings, talk about them, to listen to others.
Another thing we need to learn and, uh, then to share and connect with others in in authentic ways. And that's trauma resolution from bottom up.
Jessica Fowler: Well, and it fits so well, what's already been established in addiction treatment within the group model right now, bringing in that body piece, right? Like the traumas, you know, the body keeps the scores we all know in doing it that way.
And you talk about that in the book, and you talk about psychodrama in the book, but you, you do it in a way that gives case examples. Right? Like this is what it can look like. And I see what you're saying with the book. The book is, I think the book is super helpful. It's very enlightening and it's a steppingstone to, okay, now how to resolve our trauma from it.
Can you share a little bit more of kind of because you organize the book in a way, um, with different sections. Can you share a little bit about what the readers are getting when they pick up the book?
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Well, I wrote that a while ago and I'm actually working on another one now to update the research and so on.
But what at the time I wrote a book called emotional sobriety, right? That's a really, uh, I think it's one of my most popular books. It talks about trauma. It talks about the goal is actually emotional sobriety. It's a Bill Wilson term, uh, that, that we want to restore emotional sobriety and balance. And the underpinning of that is of course, the trauma results in dysreg emotional dysregulation.
I wanted to take a deeper dive into the ACoA dilemma because that's my dilemma, my husband's dilemma, my, which means it's my kid's dilemma and my grandkids. So, the connection I'm making for the reader there, because it was early in, I wrote it early in trauma, our understanding of trauma and mental illness is that what we experience as adult children of alcoholics is a post-traumatic stress reaction. In other words, pain from childhood is emerging in adulthood. Pain from childhood relationships is emerging and being played out in adult relationships. And that was the, I tried, you know, a bunch of different chapters to basically get that point across for people, because I didn't think it was, seen and understood sufficiently that what we're experiencing isn't about the relationships we have today.
That the overreaction we're having to our relational interactions in the present may becomes is fueled from the past, and that until we separate the past and the present, and unpack the source of our overreaction, we cannot hope to resolve the present-day interaction because it's too layered down, bogged down with the past.
And psychoddrama is a perfect vehicle. You can talk to, say you're talking to your husband. I mean, RTRS is designed to deal with this. So, but we're role play fits into that. The embodiment of role play role we embody into a role. So, if you are talking talk, so you're, the presenting problem may be is a fight. Say it's a I'm fighting with my husband. So, Tian, what do you want to say to your husband? Well, da, da, da, da, da, da, and the therapist or you know, is there any piece of that that might be, I don't even have to say that. See, that's so analytical and I'm getting out of the, I'm trying to reduce the need for pair, the, the therapist to interpret, because frankly, um, that's not what heals people experiences. And to be a good interpreter is brilliant. To be a bad interpreter is destructive. So, it's not everybody can really help their client unlock things with interpretation. So, Tian's talking to her husband as a therapist. My therapist is sensing there's a, I'm talking to my father or my mother and all the therapist needs to say then is, um, there's somebody who could play your father.
They get that somebody or use an empty chair or whatever. And that person can just stand behind my husband. And then there's a visual representation of separating the past from the present. I can talk to both. I can roll reverse with both. I can sort both out and then I can repair it. That is the repairing it of itself, but then I can, where would you like your father to be in relationship to you and your husband now choose someone to play you and show us that.
And you can also offer a, what we call second arm, a reformed auxiliary ego. Would you like to choose a, a reformed father who is more available to you now, or more who you would have liked to have and be then, would you like to show us what you would have liked to experience or what you would like to experience from now on?
So, there are many options that are very simple, but showing it's both showing it. Show us, don't tell us is what you do in psychodrama. And it's the power of embodiment and role reversal. Not talking about, but talking to, because that means all of the, all the feelings go, whoop, the role relationship with all of its demands suddenly becomes very real in the sacramental moment, in the role play moment, you really feel like you're talking to whoever you have designated. And it all comes out when you're talking about, there are just too many grids, barriers, concerns, rationalizations. It just gets all complicated.
Jessica Fowler: It's a different part of the brain, right? And we're looking to heal what's happening, right? If we're still just talking about it, that's not going to heal it. That's what we have learned from trauma therapy.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: I loved Bessel's description of the prefrontal cortex. Shutting down in times of terror. And, you know, it's terrifying to be a small child in a chaotic home. So, when that happens, your limbic system where you're processing your emotions and storing, picking up all the senses, you know, your eyes, ears, smells, everything about the home, limbic system and stored there. But the part of you that would make sense out of it. It shut down. So, you're just observing, you're feeling all these feelings and observing all these sense impressions, but you're not understanding what's happening in the moment. And that's how that gets stored in disparate fragments. So, then you end up feeling very fragmented.
Now, if after the fact you have a parent who will sit down with you and say, sweetheart, was that a scary moment? Let's talk about it. How are your feelings? How did da, da, then you can repair it. And then you become even more emotionally intelligent because some grown up mind that can think clearly is helping you repair it.
If that doesn't happen, and in alcoholic homes, let's face it, most alcoholics don't sit down with their kids and say, you know, tell me how I scared you last night. And a lot of spouses of alcoholics or addicts are trying to deny what just happened themselves. You know, where they just can't go there. It's too much.
They're overwhelmed. They're shutting down too because it's scaring them. So, there are two parents become unavailable to the child. So, the child feels lost and the person they'd go to for help and connection is now unavailable or both people. So then where they, they go to the TV, they go to the internet, they go to a next-door neighbor, that's these kids who get how many stories of the kid who went next door and was compromised or whatever.
Some kids are very lucky, and a loving neighbor or grandmother save them and they just see what's going on and they offer them a safe haven. And those safe havens are this, are the saving grace for those kids and who become adults. And those are the, they're the ones who can get out intact.
Jessica Fowler: Well, and so you talk a lot about that in the book. This is one of the things I really appreciate about this book is how you went into the trauma and the brain and what it looks like. And you give examples and you do talk about that, right? Who are the people who are the safe people who really helped? Some kids when they're younger, and I'll put a trigger warning that sometimes that doesn't happen and more trauma can happen and you talk about that in the book. And so,
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: More trauma happens either way, whether you've got a safe person or not a safe person, you just have the knowledge with a safe person that you have somewhere to go.
Jessica Fowler: Yes.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Which is everything.
Jessica Fowler: Yes. And so that is really important to understand and what I, you know, right. Cause it's, it's trauma, but giving a name to it. And I, I don't know that we do that so much in the field when somebody comes in and talks about their family history and addiction, but being able to say like, did you know that this has a name that this is, you know, this is ACoA. Like that's, that's really look at and heal that trauma, which I think is really important.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Well, I certainly grew up without that. I mean, the ACoA movement started when, um, I was you know, 30 or something like that, or in my late 20s, and my husband and I kind of looked at each other and went and figured out that we were indeed, there was no question we were ACoA’s we knew all that already, but that there were so many of us and there was actually we went to the first conference together for adult children of alcoholics with my mother. And it just changed everything. It opened a bunch of doors and once again I could, I saw that's where I want to be now. I need this, these rooms. And it was, I've been in that field ever since, you know, with Roxy Lerner and Sharon Wake Shutter Cruz and, you know, Robert Ackerman and Roxy, uh, Claudia Black, I'm just thinking of Jerry Mo, all. Gary Seidler, all, all these wonderful people, Jane Middleton Moz, filled with wonderful people.
Jessica Fowler: And all doing amazing work for this field.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Yep. All doing amazing work for this field and pioneering work.
Jessica Fowler: And so, anything else the readers should know about your book, kind of, we talk about your, you talk about the trauma in healing from it in different ways. You also talk about kind of taking care or no, not kind of, but talk about the importance of taking care of yourself. Anything else the readers should know about your book?
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: You know, I have an Amazon, a workbook called Adult Children of Alcoholics Workbook. And my idea there was to sort of create a landing pad for some of these feelings so that. As you and I've integrated this model into kind of a paper and pencil journey. So I would recommend that to anyone who's reading the ACoA trauma syndrome to get that workbook so that you can have a place to go with what's going to be brought up.
I would also humbly suggest that you check out a 12-step program. Um, in fact, I would like to put it as a warning label on the back of the book. Uh, you know, I cannot say enough good about 12- step programs. Uh, when I discovered them, the one that worked best for me in New York City was Al Anon was in the beginning of the ACoA movement so those were sort of disorganized at that time.
Some people like CoDA which is codependency anonymous some people like Al Alon and some like ACA groups, occasionally emotional support sobriety groups. Maybe you have a secondary addiction, a food addiction, uh, money problems that you can find, but there's, there's an An group for you somewhere. There's a, there's a 12-step group for you somewhere. Just Google any of them and you'll get more information. I would suggest that you look for that community so that as these feelings come up, you know that there's a meeting around the corner. And in 12-steps, people say, try six or try a meeting, meeting shop, see what's good in your area.
I found it's completely regional and don't stay where it doesn't feel right. Try another one, but you will find that room and you will find that community. And if you can just, as I say, get your souls in the room, which is the sole of your feet and the rest of your soul will follow, you will find healing in relationship to others, and it is pure lead. So, there's no bossiness that you have to resist and no feeling that you're different from everybody because you have so much like everybody there breaks the isolation. It does so much trauma healing just by sitting in the room. And if there's a lot of cross talk, they're not following the rules. People shouldn't be giving you advice. You just share your three minutes and you stop sharing and you listen to others share and that's how a good meeting should go.
Jessica Fowler: Well in it. I mean, I think that this area has done such a good job with setting up supports because we know that right from healing. We need community. We need people in our lives like that helps us heal And you know, 12-step programs are sort of the offshoots of the 12-step programs have done that they've done a good job where somebody can go and find people and not feel isolated and think that they're the only one. It's just, you know, I think sometimes you're right. It's about finding the meeting that works best for them. And that's okay too. Right. It's just like a therapist. Maybe your first therapist isn't, you know, the one for you. And so, you find a different therapist, the same thing with meetings. It's finding what's going to work for you, but knowing that that's a big part of healing that we can't stay isolated.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: You know, you need to, you need community to complete this loop because Moreno always said by the group, they were wounded by the group, they shall be healed. You need to risk going back into relationship. And to use these as steppingstones, 12-step communities, so that you can just learn to trust again in manageable, tiny itty bitty doses.
Jessica Fowler: Absolutely.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Make it slow.
Jessica Fowler: Well, this was such an honor for me. I am so honored to get to talk to you today. Where can our listeners connect with you?
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Okay. If you're a therapist and you want to get a certificate in RTRS, log on to RTRS-sociometrics.com. RTRS-sociometrics or TianDayton.com and look in the nav bar for RTRS sociometrics. And there's a contact form there on my website.
Jessica Fowler: Wonderful. Well, thank you. And I'll say you have, I think, what, 15 books or something. You have a wide range of books. So, there's lots of.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: I mentioned the ones that your listeners will. like, and I hope I have another one out in a year or so. Oh, and if you're a professional, RTRS Sociometrics has, has the books you'll need for doing this kind of work.
Jessica Fowler: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.
Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: Thank you for having me.
Jessica Fowler: Thank you for listening to this week's episode of What Your Therapist Is Reading. Make sure you head on over to the website or social media to find out about the latest giveaway. The information provided in this program is for educational and informational purposes only. Tian Dayton, Ph.D.: And although I'm a social worker licensed in the state of New York, this program is not intended to provide mental health treatment and does not constitute a patient therapist relationship.
About the author:
Dr. Tian Dayton is a senior fellow at The Meadows and Director of The New York Psychodrama Training Institute, author of fifteen books including , Neuropsychodrama in the Treatment of Relational Trauma, The ACoA Trauma Syndrome: How Childhood Trauma Impacts Adult Relationships, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance, Trauma and Addiction: Ending the Cycle of Pain Through Emotional Literacy, Heartwounds : The Impact of Unresolved Trauma and Grief on Relationships, , The Living Stage: A Step by Step Guide to Psychodrama and Experiential Therapy, The Magic of Forgiveness ….she is a Huffington Post blogger and creator of innerlook.com.
Films and Videos include: The Process: A 73 Minute award winning docudrama that uses Psychodrama to tell stories of Addicts and ACOAs Psychodrama and Trauma Resolution Training Tape, a compressive psychodrama training tape illustrating the effect of unresolved trauma on the personality and its resolution through psychodrama and sociometry available through tiandayton.com Tian Dayton has a masters in educational psychology and a PhD in clinical psychology and is a board certified trainer in psychodrama and a licensed Creative Arts Therapist. She is also a certified Montessori teacher. Dr. Dayton is the director of The New York Psychodrama Training Institute where she runs training groups in psychodrama, sociometry and experiential group therapy. She is a nationally renowned speaker, expert, and consultant in psychodrama, trauma and addiction and has served as their director of program development for eight years. Dr. Dayton was on the faculty at NYU for eight years teaching psychodrama. Dr. Dayton is a fellow of the American Society of Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy ASGPP, winner of their scholar’s award, the President’s award and editor in chief of the Journal of Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy and sits on the professional standards committee. She is also the winner of The Mona Mansell Award and The Ackermann Black Award. Dr. Dayton has been a guest expert on NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Montel, Rikki Lake, John Walsh, Geraldo. For further information log onto tiandayton.com