Dear ISSTD Community,
Although I hope the month since my last message has treated you kindly, I also know very well that may not be the case for many of us. The heightened stress and strain of daily life is real, and enduring. One of the antidotes to the isolation that this stress may foster for many of us is to connect and coalesce in service of a common cause or shared purpose.
I’ve mentioned before that ISSTD is my professional home. Because we are an international organization, most of the opportunities for connection are facilitated by videoconferencing technology. It’s wonderful when it is possible to have that kind of access. I’ve found myself wanting, more and more especially as of late, to squeeze in chats with friends I’ve made through ISSTD. It helps me feel a bit less alone (and maybe a bit saner) in what, over the past handful of years, has become a much more uniformly tumultuous world. We do difficult work. It can often feel much more difficult when we have no opportunity for distance from many of the same stressors playing upon our clients’ nervous systems. This year’s very successful Annual Conference, which I wrote about in my March letter, led me to think more about how good it feels to spend time in person rather than online. This, in turn, took me back to some realities of holding in-person conferences, which I discussed during the 2025 ISSTD Business Meeting this past February.
The challenges of sponsoring in-person conferences, and the Annual Conference in particular, have often taken center stage in Board-level discussions. I’ve been a regular conference attendee once or twice a year since 2013, when I felt like I could afford it. (Well, maybe more accurately, 2013 was the year I decided that my credit card would not melt if I incrementally paid off the cost of attending a conference here-and-there. Mind you, I do not come from economic privilege. My parents were working class. The only way I could afford grad school was through loans and grants. I learned it’s best to avoid taking anything for granted.) However, I never thought about the logistics of putting on a big conference until I was elected to the ISSTD Board, mostly because it wasn’t my responsibility to think about things like that. I just knew that attending either/both the EMDRIA and ISSTD annual conferences helped me be more aware of what was happening – new ideas, new research – and to ‘play’ with similarly passionate colleagues for a handful of days. (I love learning. Period. It’s fun for me. I find it to be even more fun when I’m not alone in the process.)
The systemic and financial limitations that accompany these bigger conferences seem without end. On the member side of the equation, we all work in a woefully under-resourced field (mental health), focusing on an area of research and treatment (complex trauma and dissociation) that historically has been, and often still is, denied or minimized. Denial and minimization often translate into lack of access to financial and other resources at every level. We all do the best we can with what’s available to us. And, of course, if we bring to bear comorbid factors like the impact of race, class, gender, international economies and exchange rates etc., it only brings the disparities into greater relief. ISSTD’s access to financial resources has mirrored this lack of access, as it is a largely member-funded and -led organization. We’ve run with two or three staff members and a small, dedicated volunteer pool for our entire 40-year existence. And it never feels like enough, whether we are talking about money, time, energy, focus, you name it. The reality is that ISSTD’s Annual Conferences historically are nearly always financial losses or at best ‘break even.’ But the priority has always been providing a refuge, once a year, for our members to come together in community.
Why point all this out? Well, I guess I want to emphasis that we are all ISSTD. The organization is an ecosystem. In a way, and this might sound strange, I kind of think of the Annual Conference as our organizational Great Barrier Reef. For it to survive into the future, we must all, together, consider creative ways, particularly in the face of global strife and economic uncertainty, to ensure that this critical part of our ecosystem does not become a shadow of its former self or, worse, perish. I’d love to say it’s not possible, but so many other organizations have cut back either the frequency or scope of their annual conferences over the past handful of years. And, we might like to think that livestreaming might be the answer, but… actually, it hasn’t been. Virtual attendance revenue during hybrid conferences (i.e., in-person and livestreamed) has not been commensurate with the expense.
Our members and friends will have a chance to be together again this coming October in Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand for a regional conference, which, really, is more like a second, smaller annual conference – maybe even more so with the uncertainties related to traveling to/from the US. You can learn more about this conference and register here. And then we will be together again next March in Portland, Oregon, USA, for our next Annual Conference.
Warmly yours,
Michael