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ISST President's Report for the Executive Board Term 2018 to 2020

During the period since the present Executive Board took office at the end of 2018, the ISST has continued to grow and it has continued to live up to the name “International” with active members and often dedicated schema therapy societies in a wide range of countries.  In August 2018 we had 1343 members.  The number now is 1824 with 60 countries represented.

ISST membership by country August 11th 2020

Country

Members

Country

Members

Country

Members

Albania

6

Hungary

22

Paraguay

2

Argentina

1

Iceland

1

Peru

8

Aruba

1

Iran

9

Poland

42

Australia

156

Ireland

37

Portugal

3

Austria

34

Israel

31

Romania

32

Belarus

2

Italy

54

Russian Fed.

37

Belgium

12

Japan

12

Saudi Arabia

1

Brazil

25

Korea (Republic)

1

Serbia

2

Bulgaria

5

Latvia

6

Singapore

6

Canada

15

Lebanon

1

Slovakia

3

China

1

Liechtenstein

5

South Africa

16

Czech Republic

7

Lithuania

9

Spain

3

Denmark

17

Luxembourg

7

Sweden

57

Egypt

1

Mexico

6

Switzerland

69

Estonia

7

Monaco

1

Thailand

2

Finland

20

Morocco

1

Turkey

24

France

13

Netherlands

267

Ukraine

12

Germany

310

New Zealand

6

United Kingdom

218

Greece

56

Nigeria

1

USA

101

Hong Kong

4

Norway

15

Uruguay

1

Total

1824


This international character is very enriching for our organization, and what I have learned, through living in a multicultural country myself and interacting with therapists from many different countries and cultures, is that, whatever are the cultural differences,  we are all indeed the same species homo sapiens, with the same brain structure, the same evolutionary programming and the same attachment system and needs.  When fundamental early needs are not met, there may be culturally learned ways of coping and culturally conditioned “idioms of distress” as Kleinman calls them, but these are all variations on what we call early maladaptive schemas.  When things go wrong in development, when a child is in intense distress because of unmet needs, the same kinds of adaptation and coping that damp the pain and create dysfunctional coping seem universal.

In my own Western European culture, a clear recognition of the attachment needs of children is fairly recent.  It has, of course, been growing since the late nineteenth century as there was more and more appreciation of the impact of trauma, particularly on children, and a growing recognition of the needs of a growing child at all stages of development. The scientific study of psychology has been able to clarify this, particularly with the rise of attachment theory some 70 years ago.

This understanding has had wide impact, although, even in Western Europe and North America, where this kind or research has been most prominent, there are still large sections of society that are relatively untouched. In many other cultures, there has been less impact so far.  But there is a growing impetus across the world, founded on this new understanding, that is penetrating ever more deeply into societies at large and into education and healthcare systems in particular. The ISST is a part of this growing world-wide project of bringing these new insights into all spheres of cultural, family and professional life.  It is an organization that is committed to fostering training of high quality in delivering schema therapy, an attachment-based psychotherapy founded on an understanding of how the damage done by early unmet needs can be corrected

ISST Events

Central to the work of the ISST is the promotion of activities that provide a forum for disseminating the latest concepts and practices within schema therapy, providing research updates, and giving members opportunities for networking and expanding their clinical skills. We do this through our conferences as well as other initiatives such as the Schema Therapy Bulletin and the webinar series - I would like to thank our Board Secretary Susan Simpson for heading up these latter initiatives  -  see her report for more details.  She was also very involved in organizing the ENLIGHT workshops in Edinburgh in May 2019.

Planning for events in 2020 was thrown into disarray due to the coronavirus pandemic and the INSPIRE conference in Copenhagen planned for May had to be postponed.  This was a disappointment for all of us, but particularly for our Vice President, Susanne Vind who had put in considerable work setting up the event in Copenhagen and had to put in further work to manage its postponement.  It also faced us with an enormous challenge both financially and practically.  We had made significant financial commitments in arranging the Copenhagen conference and there was a threat to the continued financial solvency of the ISST.  Fortunately, we were able to arrange refunds and postponements and encourage members who had  paid their conference fees to carry these over to 2021 when we hope that we may once again be able to hold a live conference – although as we all know, there is still considerable uncertainty about when there will be a return of the world as we knew it, and when we will be able to hold a fully live conference again. Our plans for an ENLIGHT workshop event in Melbourne in 2021 have already been put on hold and long-term planning will very much depend on how the ongoing threat of COVID-19 infection develops.

Thanks to some brilliant planning and hard work led by Travis Atkinson, our Media Coordinator, we were able to put together, at quite short notice, the online Virtual Summit that many of you attended. Attendance was free for those who had already paid for the Copenhagen INSPIRE conference, but we had 173 additional people signing up for the Summit and the total attendance was over 700.  Although the program involved only a single stream over the three days, and presentations were shorter than they would have been at the actual conference, it was a very exciting and stimulating event that showcased the depth and creativity of the contributions of many of our leading members and for which attendees gave very positive feedback.

We spent quite a lot of time at all our Board meetings discussing decisions that needed to be made as the organization of both these events unfolded, but apart from that, as President I played a limited role in their planning and implementation and I am very grateful to the Board members who put in large amounts of time in the organizing of these events as well as the many members who served on subcommittees that worked on the detailed planning.

Training and Certification

Training and certification are also central aspects of the work of the ISST. At the 2018 GMA a proposal was approved to split the Executive Board portfolio of Training and Certification Coordinator into two.  For this term we had a separate Training Coordinator (Jeff Conway) and Certification Coordinator (Paul Kasyanik).  What I soon realized, if I had not known already, was that there was more than enough work for two, and both Jeff and Paul have shouldered a huge amount of work. All this was formerly dealt with by a single Training and Certification Coordinator, Joan Farrell and I pay tribute to the enormous workload she undertook during the previous Board terms.  You can read the details of developments in these important areas in the reports from Jeff and Paul to this GMA.  Here, though let me mention an important development:  we have split certification as supervisor and trainer into two steps.  In future members will apply for certification as a supervisor first, and later can apply to become certified as a trainer.  A second important decision was to allow training programs to be delivered online while we are impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.  This can be done while maintaining the quality of training, thanks to the breakout room facility provided by the Zoom online platform, and the same conditions with respect to attendance and numbers of attendees apply online as for live training. 

Another major challenge arises from the large differences in professional infrastructure for the practice of psychotherapy from country to country.  In some countries professional infrastructure is highly elaborated and in others it barely exists at all.  This presents a challenge for the ISST because our membership spans 60 countries.  It will be a huge task to establish for each country appropriate criteria for full membership of our organization, and therefore eligibility to train and apply for certification.

Addressing administrative bottlenecks

One of my concerns as President was understanding and working to improve various structural aspects of our Society. We have been growing fast and we need to expand our infrastructure to keep up!  Two years ago, I reported that, because of this expansion, we were experiencing a lot of bottlenecks because individuals were overloaded with too many responsibilities and tasks.  We have been taking steps to address this but have encountered unexpected obstacles. We appointed a professional office management organization, Volunt, to assist us, but their contribution proved disappointing.  They did not conduct an adequate needs analysis of just what infrastructure was required of an organization the size of the ISST with the range of different functions it is required to serve.  They did make recommendations about improving our web based membership records and related systems but the people they suggested to implement this were not competent and this led to many wasted months with little to show for it.

So many of these bottlenecks remain and many of you will have experienced frustration because of this. We are now reviewing the situation again with some urgency. We will be integrating our membership applications and records with the Wild Apricot platform which hosts our website and plan to have all applications for certification submitted online too.  In addition to this we need review our needs for office staff.  Angeles Hoffman has been working extremely hard in the ISST office in Bad Vilbel  - in fact she has had to work much too hard because the decision to go with Volunt turned out to be so unsatisfactory and much of the fallout from this landed on her desk. We have also established an Administration Advisory Committee to monitor and advise on office systems going forward on which our current Media Coordinator and Treasurer will serve.  This will ensure continuity going forward and that we do not lose the momentum we have established towards significant restructuring.

ISST Committees

There have also been some other changes to our committees including the establishment of an Environmental Awareness and Action Committee, on the initiative of our Secretary, Susan Simpson, and a Trainer Development Committee.  The Development Programs Committee has been renamed the International Developing Regions Committee. You can see the organogram detailing our current committee structure  at https://schematherapysociety.org/ISST-Committee-Structure as well as links to pages for all our committees.

Several of these committees have been active throughout the past two years and I would particularly like to mention the Ethics and Conflict Resolution Committee which has ably dealt with some sensitive cases and have now developed a formal complaints procedure which is just being finalized.  They are just finalizing a policy guideline on ethical aspects of dual or multiple relationships and I hope that the Board will be able to approve this very soon. At the request of the Executive Board they are also working on a code of conduct for members.  This will not of course replace the codes of conduct to which members are bound by their professional organizations but it will set a minimum standard we can appeal to especially for members in countries where there is limited professional infrastructure.

The revised Case Conceptualization form that we released in early 2018 is now being widely used and many people have told us that although it involves a lot of work to complete, it provides a valuable way of structuring the steps needed to develop a thorough case conceptualization.  Many of our members have contributed to translating the form and several related documents into other languages and now nearly 20 translations are available to members at https://schematherapysociety.org/Case-Conceptualization-Translations.  This is managed by a Case Conceptualization Form Translation Committee but at present I am the only member. I have received applications to translate the materials into several other languages and we know that there are some translations that have been done that have not yet been submitted to us and we would of course like to feature those there too.

Goodbye

I am not standing for election as President again.  I have found my two terms very stimulating and have enjoyed interacting with many of you and playing an active part in our wonderful society. I would particularly like to thank the members of the current Executive Board who all worked very hard for the Society in different ways and with whom I enjoyed working in a respectful and constructive manner.

To close, I repeat what I said at the end of my report in 2018:

 As President I have been mindful of a sentence in our Statutes that tells us that the Executive Board “understands itself as collegial executive team of the ISST e.V. and makes its decisions following thorough and consensus oriented discussions. In their internal and external communication and conflict resolution, the members of the Committee also strive to realize the principles and knowledge of schema therapy.”

I understand this as part of what we call Healthy Adult functioning. Often conflicts arise when we are triggered and our Healthy Adult gets put on the back burner.  In guiding the deliberations of the Executive Board, especially when we are dealing with conflicting perspectives, I have always tried to keep in mind these values:  mutual respect, seeking understanding and working towards consensus,  in a manner that is transparent and accountable. I won’t claim that I always succeed or that my own Healthy Adult does not at times get dislodged!  But those are the values I aspire to live by and implement, values explicitly referred to in our ISST statutes, which I encourage us all to strive to live by.

David Edwards                11th August, 2020

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