SITTA
WHAT IS SITTA?
SITTA, Society for Integrative Treatment of Trauma and Abuse, is a non-profit organization formed to foster the integrative diagnosis and treatment of childhood abuse victims by providing support for training, treatment, and dissemination of information to patients, practitioners, and the general public.
Trauma has become a silent epidemic in our society and in the world at large. The personal devastation suffered by returning war veterans due to symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is just one kind of trauma eating away at the wellbeing of our society. The crippling consequences of childhood physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse are also taking a large and growing toll on persons from all walks of life at every socioeconomic level. The fallout from abuse can involve physical disabilities; anxiety disorders, including posttraumatic stress symptoms; chronic paralyzing depression; dissociative states such as multiple personality; impairment of sexual functioning; somatic symptoms of non-physical origin; alcoholism and substance abuse. Childhood abuse can also increase suicide risk and precipitate the early onset of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder in patients prone to these major mental illnesses.
Despite its high incidence, childhood abuse is frequently shrouded behind a curtain of shame and secrecy. When their stories are finally revealed, abuse survivors are often ignored, rejected or given cursory and inadequate treatment. Too few counselors, therapists, physicians, bodyworkers and healers understand how to detect the subtle signs of childhood abuse and respond most effectively to an abuse victim.
The impact of early abuse experiences on the developing child is complex and far-reaching, especially when the child has also suffered from neglect. Conventional therapies do a great deal to help, but definitive healing that can be maintained over time seems best accomplished if attention is paid to all six dimensions of human experience: the Physical, Psychological, Relational, Karmic, Energetic and Transcendent realms. Physicians and healers rarely have the wide perspective and necessary tools at their disposal to cover such a broad spectrum. Therefore, training opportunities, coordination between practitioners with different orientations, and communication networks need to be established to make the necessary resources available to patients, practitioners and the general public.
The first step in this process involves the completion, publication and promotion of Dr. Stephen Proskauer’s book, BIG HEART HEALING: A Multidimensional Approach to Trauma and Abuse. Next, SITTA will offer seminars and workshops to introduce the Six Dimensional Model of integrative healing to a wide range of interested health care practitioners.
The third project on the SITTA agenda will be the establishment of a training program to provide integrative healers with skills training to supplement what they already know. This program will need funding for scholarship tuitions and the establishment of a free treatment service, called the Haven Clinic, staffed by supervised trainees to provide help for abuse survivors who have no resources to cover the considerable cost of comprehensive treatment. Introduction of clinical research studies and establishment of an association of integrative healers are envisioned as fourth and fifth objectives for SITTA to address once the clinic is serving a sufficient number of patients and trainees to permit these steps to be implemented.
Dr. Proskauer’s book is now available on his website, www.karmashrink.com. Even in the two years during which the book was being written, several seminar series were given to a full enrollment of interested healers, giving an indication that this six dimensional model will be useful to a wide variety of practitioners. Now SITTA needs to meet the expenses associated with dissemination of the book and its message to generate public and professional interest and support to move forward with the SITTA agenda.
For more information, contact Stephen Proskauer MD by email: sproskauer@comcast.net.
An account has been established to accept tax deductible donations at the following address: SITTA, c/o Stephen Proskauer MD, 860 E. 4500 South, Suite 302, Salt Lake City, UT 84107. This project needs support to move forward. The health and wellbeing of many people will depend on awareness of and availability of integrative multidimensional healing.
Questions about SITTA:
Could you explain about the six dimensions? It is understandable that childhood abuse might affect a person’s psychology and relationships, and maybe brain and body too, but what do you mean about the Karmic, Energetic and Transcendent dimensions?
A big part of the book deals with topics related to this question. Only a taste of it can be given here. The Karmic dimension has to do with deep personal scripts we are living out, our prime directives, so to speak. There is clinical evidence that these karmic scripts are life lessons, like course objectives in college, chosen before we enter this lifetime and related to experiences in other lifetimes. Each life is a course designed by ourselves for the purposes of our growth. Some courses require us to pass through trauma to set up certain problems and opportunities needed to stimulate new learning. In this view, no one is entirely a victim in any situation.
We are always participating in creating our reality in some respect, even if it is only in how we choose to interpret the experience. Direct work with karmic scripts and their origins, detailed in Dr. Proskauer’s book, Karmic Therapy: Healing the Split Psyche, can be transformative for abuse survivors.
The Energetic dimension refers to the unseen parts of the self, sometimes called the layers of the aura and the chakra energy centers in and around the physical body. These delicate structures hold the patterns of the self that are replicated on a denser physical level in the body that we see with our eyes. These subtle manifestations of the self are damaged when children are abused. Energetic injury goes unseen but it adversely affects the health and wellbeing of abused children. Various forms of energy work and shamanic healing ceremonies can directly repair Energetic damage to decisive effect. Also, parts of the delicate soul energy can leave the body during traumatic experiences and return to the spirit world for safekeeping. Sometimes it takes a trained shamanic healer assisted by guides from the spirit world to recover and restore the lost soul parts in a soul retrieval ceremony. There are other ways to intervene energetically, but this much information gives at least some idea of what we are talking about and why it is important.
The Transcendent dimension refers to that mystical realm of experience where all is one and we experience no sense of separation from the universe or anything in it. We access this blissful state of no fear/no pain in deep meditation and glimpses are available through the Big Mind process devised by Zen Master Genpo Merzel Roshi. There are several different Transcendent perspectives and one of them is the voice of unconditional compassion and love for all beings, what Genpo Roshi calls Big Heart. Big Mind is just vast limitless space, utterly indifferent to what comes and goes within it, but Big Heart cares about suffering and wants to relieve this suffering out of pure compassionate love. Big Heart is the most powerful healing and harmonizing force that exists. Invoking and embodying Big Heart produces amazing progress within the context of integrative healing for those patients who are open to this approach. That’s why it’s so important to include the Transcendent dimension in our healing work with abuse survivors. The really tricky part is how to weave all the six dimensions of healing work together into a seamless whole, accessing each when it is needed. The clinical examples in Big Heart Healing demonstrate how that can be done and illustrate the underlying principles of multidimensional healing.
If multidimensional work is really required for true healing of abuse trauma, why don’t more practitioners know about it by now and how to do it?
This is a very good question. Unfortunately for us, our culture has an unbalanced idea of what is real and important in life. In scientific medicine, it has to be physically visible or at least measurable before anything is thought of as being real and worth considering as a cause of illness or a domain of potential healing. Clinical psychiatry is still considered by many doctors to be the ugly stepchild in medicine. Psychiatry is trying hard to be accepted as a legitimate medical specialty that has a pill to cure anything, but nobody is really fooled, because even the most rigorous scientist knows deep in his heart that there is no pill to cure what ails the soul.
If you want to be taken seriously in scientific medical circles, don’t even mention spiritual healing unless you have evidence from a so-called controlled clinical research study. It is not fashionable to think in Karmic, Energetic or Transcendent terms in our society, so we settle for incomplete and often ineffective healing efforts that ignore these dimensions. SITTA will work to correct the unbalanced state of healthcare in our culture, at least as related to childhood trauma, abuse and neglect.
Why give the name “Haven” to the SITTA clinic?
The term “haven” indicates a safe harbor, a place where ships can go after they have been damaged in a storm to be rebuilt and refitted so they can venture out again onto the open sea. It is like that for abuse survivors who need a stem-to-stern, keel-to-crow’s-nest overhaul before they can face the world in wholeness and fulfill their potential.
