9/22/21 - DSPP Monthly Meeting
7:30pm-9pm
1.5 CE Credits
Meeting Location: Zoom
Melissa Wallace, MD, PLLC
CV: http://www.gapdallas.com/about-gap-dallas/melissa-b-wallace-md-pllc
Dale C Godby, PhD, PLLC
CV: http://www.gapdallas.com/about-gap-dallas/dale-c-godby-phd-pllc
As we attempt to emerge from the trauma of the pandemic, we have the opportunity to reflect on how this trauma has impacted our sense of belonging: to DSPP, to our families, and to everything we love. Since we last met face-to-face, DSPP has witnessed the deaths of three of our past presidents, Pat Wood, Judith Samson, and Bill Gordon. In the shadow of these losses and the ongoing trauma of the global pandemic, we are presented with an opportunity to explore group attachment and what it means to belong. For our tenured members, DSPP has been a secure home from which we explore old and new ideas about the development and healing of the mind. Hopefully, our newer members will come to form secure attachments to the group and benefit from it in a similar fashion. Dale and Melissa represent these opposite poles-Melissa is relatively new to the group and Dale has been there from the start. It is our hope as presenters that representing the spectrum of membership in DSPP will aid in exploring the various experiences of belonging to the group.
All of us bring to the task of belonging unconscious social and cultural constraints. The ways in which we belong (or feel estranged) in our families, our schools, and our communities of faith make up part of our social unconscious and contribute to how we form attachments to an organization like DSPP. To what theory do we belong? What theory belongs to us? Or do we eschew theory in the service of being free? We all started out knowing nothing about theory. As we move from one theory to another, we are bit like immigrants, feeling awkward and wondering if we will ever be at home.
After some brief opening remarks, Melissa and Dale plan to invite the group into a conversation about the meaning of belonging in the context of DSPP as a professional home.
Learning Objectives-We plan to convene a conversation on the following:
1) Reflect on how the pandemic has impacted your relationship to organizations like DSPP.
2) Consider how your personal attachment style interacts with your organizational attachment style.
3) Think about how attachment to DSPP effects your work with patients.
Reading: Kinley, J.L. and Reyno, S. M. The price of needing to belong: Neurobiology of working through attachment trauma. Psychodynamic Psychiatry 47, 39-51.
Presenter Bios:
Dr. Wallace graduated from Brigham Young University in 2011, with a major in physiology and minor in Spanish. She received her MD from Baylor College of Medicine in 2015 and continued on to psychiatric residency at UT Southwestern. During her residency, she taught medical student courses on pop culture's relationship to psychiatry, chaired the residency's literature and psychiatry committee, and received the John F. Hickman Award for Outstanding Resident in Psychiatry. After completing residency in 2019, she joined the Group Analytic Practice of Dallas as an associate member, primarily treating adults with a focus on individual and group psychotherapy.
Dale was the 4 th president of DSPP and has remained active in many ways over the years. This past year he and Tina Mohammad presented a workshop at the Group Analytic Symposium in Barcelona on The Languages of Faith and the Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Social Pre-Conscious. Unfortunately, it was virtual. Dale co-hosted the International Virtual Reflective Citizens' Koinonia Workshop with Serbian colleagues. Tina and Dale along with help from Melissa Wallace and other members of the Group Analytic Practice Dallas convened a monthly Reflective Citizens' Conversation on Race for the year following George Floyd's murder. With colleagues from the American Group Psychotherapy Association, he did a webinar on Experiential Training Groups in Psychiatric Residency and Other Training Programs. In 2020 Dale was awarded the Outstanding Clinical Teaching Award by the Psychiatry Residents Organization.