| Dr. Lowell Routley founded Heartland Initiative, Inc. (now dba Core Integrity, Inc.) as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in 2002. Thirty years after encountering his first trauma survivor and after interactions with literally hundreds of trauma survivors — his compassion toward these individuals with wounded minds has never wavered. Now, more than ever before, Dr. Routley remains committed to transforming lives impacted by trauma.
In 1972. While team-teaching about altered states of consciousness at the college level, Dr. Routley set up a biofeedback learning lab. It was in this lab that he remembers well his first contact with a trauma survivor: “She was doing the relaxation in the lab, on the machines, getting the feedback... As she was relaxing, she had this image of an arm – a hairy arm coming up to her face – and she panicked. We had a protocol when there were certain anxiety states that couldn't progress, they would talk to me or one of the other profs and we would help them through it.” (By this point in time, Routley had taken extensive training in biofeedback with a number of people who were the top people in the field; e.g., Tom Budzynski, Johann Stoyva.) So, as she's seeing this image, Routley suggests, "Why don't you relax through the image? You're here right now in this lab and I'm here with you. Just relax through the image and see what happens." She described the arm coming up and, as she relaxed, the arm passed – like it almost went right through her. Routley remembers her saying, “What just happened? I feel totally different.” Three months later, she would tell Routley of an incident when she was a teenager. Somebody had come up behind her and accosted her, but she had forgotten it. That had been the memory associated to the image of the arm. Routley: “So this just went back in my (mental) files because I didn't have a context for it as such. From 1974 on, in my private practice, I started hearing person after person telling of intrusive images of past hurts popping up at unusual times. And it wasn't just simply dysfunctional family stuff.”
The early 1980s. Fast forward a decade. One of the therapists Dr. Routley supervised at a counseling center came to him with a puzzling situation: The client had actually switched in the middle of an issue he was trying to help with saying, "I’m not Mary; my name is Jane." The therapist had said, "Well, okay, before you leave, you need to pay for the session." The client responded, "Didn't you hear me? My name is Jane. I didn't come here. I don't want to be here. I'm not going to pay you for something I don't want. It's her (Mary’s) session; she can pay for it." Dave: "Well, we need to schedule another appointment." Jane: "What don't you get? I didn't come to see you. I'm not going to schedule an appointment." The client stormed out of the office to return the next week at the schedule time as Mary. (He had encountered the first multiple personality*, whose one part blatantly denied being the other part.) When the therapist left the counseling practice two years later, Routley took the client on.
After additional encounters with more trauma survivors, he began reading about cults and other types of abuse and trauma; as he counseled more and more people, he more readily recognized when they were talking about emotional, physical or sexual abuse - things that were a part of family or neighborhood events - in contrast to involvement with cults and the occult. Routley: “I would then gently ask questions to find out exactly what they were referring to. A lot of them would come to report experiences from different contexts as an image flash or an unexplainable pain with no clear medical reason.”
As a result of supervising the therapist who worked with the initial client, Mary, - later identified to have a background of very complex trauma - he joined the International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSD) in the early 1980s and began his formal training in severe trauma. From then on, came more and more experience in terms of working on those issues with people. By 1987, he had set up the Iowa Study Group, a component society of ISSD, which he chaired from 1987 until 1994. Routley remembers that “during that period of time, we met with and trained anywhere from 10-20 therapists every month. We met at the University of Iowa with the support of Dr. Reme Cadoret, a faculty member from the University of Iowa Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Cadoret was in agreement with our study of dissociation.”
|