Peter Maves – 2024 ISSTD President
As I look back on 2024, I find myself returning to where I started in January, speaking about our Strategic Plan and how much has been accomplished. ISSTD has 35 groups involving committees, special interest groups, and regional online communities, all staffed by volunteers who commit valuable time to ensure that ISSTD remains on the forefront of training and research in complex trauma and dissociation. We are in a stable and solid financial position, with membership up 2.5% year-over-year, with an 80% retention rate. Our Professional Training Program remains in high demand, and we continue to add new training components each year. With 1,763 members, we are nearly at our highest membership number in the last 10 years. And our membership is generous, sponsoring 33 new members who could not otherwise afford to join. We have initiated collaborations with the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation and the Division 56 of the American Psychological Society. Our virtual and regional conferences were well-received, our ongoing webinars and special events supported, and the annual conference is regaining attendance after the COVID years.
All our activities only take place because of the hard work and dedication of our volunteers, our Board of Directors, and our wonderful staff. Without them, ISSTD’s world would not turn. It has been a pleasure to work with Mary Pat, our CEO, Michael Salter, immediate Past President, Michael Coy, President-Elect, and our Board throughout 2024. I am hoping this Holiday Season brings you time to relax and enjoy the company of family and friends. I wish you the best and I do hope to see you in person at the Annual Conference in Boston in 2025.
D. Michael Coy – 2024 ISSTD President-Elect
In the passage from one year to the next, it seems customary to reflect upon the past and peer, sometimes with little foresight, into the future.
These are strange times, though. The past seems just as cloudy and uncertain as the future for many people in this world—on a global scale—owing to a variety of shifting political sands. Solid ground seems, at best, a rare, and at worst, a lost, commodity. To be sure, some of us have only enjoyed a sense of certainty, or of safety, because of privileges bestowed upon us by circumstance.
The reality is that many people have never enjoyed the luxury of a firm sense of who they are, or of what events brought them to this point in time, or of how to transcend a past that they did not invite. We, in this field of practice and research, know this well. We can see these symptoms manifest both intra- and inter-personally, even at the societal level. We spend our working lives (and, sometimes, our personal lives, as well) researching, studying, and partnering with clients and patients to deal with symptoms of the uninvited past. We advocate for larger-scale change, whether in the therapy space, in our writings, in community-based or academic settings.
I don’t want to oversimplify all of this too grossly. I know it’s not all doom and gloom. But when you’re in it, it sure as hell feels like it. And, this is one of the core reasons that I embrace ISSTD as my professional ‘home.’ It’s really hard to do the work we all do in isolation.
I was a casual, pay-my-dues member of ISSTD the first four years of my membership. Going to my first ISSTD Annual Conference in 2016… well, it kind of changed my life. I sincerely doubt I’d be writing this piece as ISSTD President-Elect had I not attended that conference in San Francisco. (And honestly, at that time, I nearly couldn’t afford either the cost of the conference or, being self-employed, the time off from work. It’s still a stretch.) But I haven’t missed an Annual Conference since.
Upon reflection—I cannot resist—the 2024 Annual Conference was the first since we returned to in-person conferences in 2022 that I felt re-captured the spirit of the pre-pandemic events. The upcoming 2025 Annual Conference in Boston is seeing REALLY strong registration, in line with what we saw for the 2019 Annual Conference in New York. There’s a Deep Brain Reorienting training happening alongside pre-conferences (alas, all 75 spots for the DBR training have been snapped up, and there’s a waitlist!), and we have exciting plenary speakers in the form of Thema Bryant, Judith Herman, and David Spiegel, and… the overall schedule is pretty amazing. I think this is going to be a very special conference, and I hope you’ll be able to join us.
Bookending 2025 will be our bi-annual Regional Conference ‘down under,’ in this case in Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand. This conference, just like our 2019 regional conference in Christchurch, will see regional culture woven in as an integral aspect of the proceedings. I expect it will give our Annual Conference a run for its money, and it’s going to be exciting to bring together our contingent from that part of the world in-person. Between and among these two ‘anchor’ events, ISSTD will provide all the offerings you’ve come to expect from our Society, via the Center for Advanced Studies. (To learn more about our programs in 2025, visit https://cfas.isst-d.org.)
I’ve found that, the deeper my volunteer involvement has become over the years, the more my investment and satisfaction have grown. I’ve seen and heard the same from other members of the Society. With that in mind, I want to encourage you to engage with the Society, whether as an active member of a Special Interest Group (SIG) or Regional Online Community (ROC), or as a contributor to discussion in the Member Forum, our Virtual Book Club, or even by submitting a proposal for a webinar, conference presentation, or a one-off article for ISSTD News.
It is my great honor to serve you as President in 2025 and walking alongside you as a fellow member of this worldwide community of students, clinical professionals, and researchers that is ISSTD. Always remember, it is you, and all of us together, that make this Society what it is… and what it will become.