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In this week’s episode host Diana speaks with Dr. Benjamin Keyes, an expert in trauma and the developer of the Heart Model for healing. Dr. Keyes has over 40 years of experience and multiple accolades in the field. The discussion covers his unique faith-based approach to trauma therapy, including self-forgiveness and contemplative prayer techniques, the differences between Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and the critical role of divine presence in recovery. Dr. Keyes also shares about his work with Green Cross, an organization that provides mental health support during disasters, and plans for future research on the Heart Model’s effectiveness. Personal stories and professional insights offer listeners a deep understanding of trauma recovery and the hope and healing available to survivors.
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast
00:57 Welcome and Opening Remarks
02:33 Introducing Dr. Benjamin Keyes
03:13 Dr. Keyes’ Background and Credentials
09:49 Understanding Trauma and Disorders
13:39 The HEART Model Explained
21:23 Green Cross and Disaster Response
27:05 Success Stories and Real-Life Impact
34:12 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
37:38 Closing Remarks and Subscription Reminder
Buy Dr Keyes’ book on Amazon!
Website: www.greencross.org
email: bkeyes@divinemercy.edu
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Dr Benjamin Keyes
[00:00:00] Next on the Wounds of the Faithful Podcast.From a Christian standpoint, they may never forgive a perpetrator, but self forgiveness for healing is absolutely essential, and it opens them up to receiving God’s forgiveness.
God has forgiven us, but sometimes we have to dare to forgive God for not being who we wanted God to be.
Where was God in the midst of what I went through, right?
Right. And that, and I told them, I said when we do this, when we use this prayer technique, that’s the very first question I want you to ask him.
And I want you to sit expecting an answer.
And it’s amazing. God, in all the years I’ve been using this model, God has never not shown up and has never not answered.
Oh, that’s powerful.
[00:01:00] Welcome to the Wounds of the Faithful podcast, brought to you by DSW Ministries. Your host is singer, songwriter, speaker, and domestic violence advocate, Diana Winkler. She is passionate about helping survivors in the church heal from domestic violence and abuse and trauma. This podcast is not a substitute for professional counseling or qualified medical help.Now, here is Diana.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. So glad that you’re here with us. It is a pretty volatile environment out there in the world, isn’t it? I’m hoping that when you come to listen to the podcast that you get some encouragement and maybe, escape from what’s going on out there, learn some new things, meet some people.
And [00:02:00] I won’t go into any of the craziness out there, but please be kind to one another whatever is going on out there,
So I’m not getting specific here, but you all know what I’m talking about.
Just a friendly reminder to love one another, love your neighbor, love your family members.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Don’t forget Jesus words, even during these times. And that’s all I’m going to say about that. That was on my heart today.
We have an extraordinary guest coming on the show today. The podcast is no stranger to guests that talk about sex trafficking.
And we do have an expert on that subject today, Dr. Benjamin Keyes. And he has been doing this for 40 years. He reached out to be on the show and I’m so excited to [00:03:00] Here’s what he has to say, because he’s been doing this a long time, and he has a lot of credentials and awards, let me read to you some of his bio here, okay?
Dr. Benjamin Keyes holds seven board certifications and has worked in trauma for more than 40 years. His experience has encompassed hospital, residential treatment, and outpatient and field settings. Dr. Keyes has worked with the entire disassociative spectrum, including borderline personality disorders, post traumatic stress disorders, and a variety of disassociative disorders.
Dr. Keyes received the hope award service provider of the year regarding the heart models application to trafficked women and prostitution through restoration [00:04:00] ministries He has received multiple awards and certificates of appreciation for his work in trauma training worldwide.
As the executive director of Green Cross Academy of Traumatology and Divine Mercy’s Center for Trauma and Resiliency Studies in Sterling, Virginia, where he’s also a professor. Dr. Keyes has three other book publications, multiple journal articles, And over a thousand presentations regarding trauma globally.
He has other honors and distinctive organizations as well. Which I will put in the show notes for you. He definitely knows what he is talking about here. Now we mentioned the H. E. A. R. T. model. That stands for Healing Emotional Effective Responses to Trauma. We’re going to talk [00:05:00] about his. Meticulous, professionally oriented book, The Heart Model.
I think this is going to be a conversation that you will learn a lot. You will be encouraged and he gives hope for those that have been sex trafficked. And who have been abused and suffered. He has a different perspective on techniques on healing from those things. Thanks. Enjoy my conversation with Dr.
Benjamin Keyes.
Please. Welcome my guest today. Dr. Benjamin Keys. I’m so glad to have you with us today. Thanks for coming on the show.
I’m actually very glad to be here, so thank you.
Yeah I’m so honored to have someone with such credentials and experience on the show. I like to meet other advocates and join forces with those that do the same thing that I do.
[00:06:00] Now, nobody really grows up wanting to get into the ministry or line of work that we’re in, I’d love to hear how you got involved in helping sex traffic victims and abuse survivors.It started with reading two books back in the early 1990s by David Siemens, who was a missionary and it was Healing for Damaged Emotions and Healing of the Memories, and I saw a pattern in how he worked, and
I started playing around with the pattern over the years. I started building material to talk about it within that pattern. I finished off about the mid nineties by spending a weekend with him in Florida at his home and with his blessing I started developing the model for real as [00:07:00] a model that might work.
From a faith based standpoint I had a dissociative client. that I failed to diagnose properly. I thought she was PTSD, but there are a lot of things that didn’t fit.
After working with her for several months, I sent her to a colleague, who called me back about six weeks later, and she said, I hate you, I never want to speak to you again, and if you want anything to do with this case, you will call me tonight. So I heard a message when I called her, she said, do you remember in school when we were taught that if we saw a D.
I. D. Used to be multiple personality. If we saw a DID case, it would be once in our career. You just sent me hours, and if you want anything, you, if you want to know anything about this, you’ll meet me three months [00:08:00] from now for training in Alexandria, Virginia. I was in Florida at the time. I went to the conference.
And I’ve been involved with it ever since. This would have been like 1993.
Wow.
I’ve been, like I said, I’ve been involved with this ever since. And I was working in private practice, but when I went into academia, I met a person in D. C. that was working with trafficked women prostitutes on the street that were being arrested, and she asked me to do a workshop, a training, and this was 2006,
And I’ve been working with trafficked women in particular because of their diagnoses. Their diagnoses were dissociative disorder, PTSD, or borderline personality disorder. All the disorders that [00:09:00] have to do with trauma. And In fact, as I said to you earlier, the the model that developed, it’s now called the Hart model, developed out of the books and the relationship that I had with David Siemens, and What made sense to me as just good common sense as a in treatment, and what we did was we embraced the secular model, and then put a faith based overlay to it.
So it was well accepted in secular conferences to be teaching about a faith based model, because it didn’t conflict with the secular model. It was very compatible too, and that’s really how it developed and how I got into this.
Now we all have heard of PTSD, but can you explain to the audience that isn’t familiar with the other two disorders you mentioned?
Sure. [00:10:00] Borderline personality let me start with DID. DID, dissociative identity disorder, used to be known as multiple personality disorder. It was changed in 2000 because of research. We used to believe that they were separate personalities that grew up alongside of each other and had to sort of work things out to eventually have it all come together in what we call integration.
What we found was that it’s a single personality that is fragmented, and the pieces of that fragmentation are what grow up alongside of each other, hence the name change to be much more descriptive, dissociative identity, rather than multiple personality,
And it’s the same process there’s Usually a lot of amnesia between those parts.
They don’t know other parts in their own system, usually. And so the [00:11:00] process and how you wear down that amnesia is you get the parts talking to one another. And over time, they begin to work out their issues, they work out their programs. I often call it family therapy with one person, because it’s the same process.
You, you come alongside of each of those parts and join with them to help them to work out whatever is going on internally within their own system. And as you do that, it wears down those walls because the need for the separation disappears. Borderline personality disorder is very similar, but borderline comes from early childhood or adolescent traumas that are sexual in nature, are often, or physical in nature.
Often with dysfunctional families. Growing up with alcoholics that are often [00:12:00] too drunk to remember what they do to their kids in the next day. Those are the conditions for borderline and it’s something that happens. The antecedent is very early in childhood, having to do with the attachment to the caregiver.
They live very dysfunctional lives. And until recently, we really haven’t had very many techniques. But the last 10 to 15 years, I’m sorry, 20 years, we have had just an amazing amount of techniques that And borderlines can and I hate to use that as a label because it’s a coping mechanism.
They did the things they did in order to survive the trauma that they experienced. So that’s really the explanation of the two. But they’re so similar because the borderlines have separate parts as well, they just don’t have the amnesia between the parts. If you’ve worked with borderlines, you know that they [00:13:00] often have a part that is a a teenager that might be spoiled, or a teenager that wants their own way, or a small child that sometimes goes into a fetal position when things are overwhelming.
for listening. The difference is that the borderline knows that what goes on because they just can’t get back to their adult self, whereas DID has no idea because there’s too much separation.
Thanks for explaining that because I I had never really knew the difference between the two, and there’s definitely some nuance there.
I am very intrigued about What sets your work with the heart model when it comes to healing from trauma and something like sex trafficking? What is unique about the heart model?
I think what’s unique about the heart model is that it not only focuses on [00:14:00] self forgiveness. In other words, Working with the memory and getting to a place between the adult of now, or the older adolescent of now, and the younger part of ourselves.
Because of dysfunction, very often that younger part hates the adult hates the child, because very often the adult will blame the child. And yet, the child was trying to cope in a situation that was rendered powerless. They had to trust people in who are untrustworthy and cope with the sense of helplessness and hopelessness and, am I ever going to be okay?
The other thing it does is that it introduces the client to a very real living God that is willing to interact with us. And we do that by using a, um, it’s a [00:15:00] contemplative prayer technique by the Benedictine monks, and it’s a way of allowing yourself to be in God’s presence, however that you experience that, whether it’s in pictures, or it’s a feeling, or it’s a cognitive thought and letting God be God and you be you, and what that brings up are all the dysfunctional ways we have seen God.
We have our own personal distortions of our own reality, but we also have spiritual distortions. When I think about myself, my introduction to God was Charlton Heston.
Yeah, me too.
And at eight years old, when I saw that film The Ten Commandments, that was a God to be afraid of.
That fire going into the mountains scared the heck out of me.
Yeah.
And so I saw God as [00:16:00] a vengeful God. I saw God as a taskmaster, until I was introduced to Jesus in the New Testament and found that there’s a whole other side to God that I didn’t know.
Amen to that. I love that. So we
use this technique to bypass theology, to bypass denominationalism, to bypass polity.
In order to create the relationship, because it’s in the relationship that we either follow or don’t follow.
Yeah, most people are dealing with all the rules that were imposed on them, for quote unquote Christianity when it really is about the relationship with Jesus, as you say.
But I think that’s the major difference.
The rest of the model. embraces sort of the step by step secular model. The secular model basically has three phases, the introduction where [00:17:00] we deal with safety, we deal with confidentiality, we deal with all the stuff up front when you start therapy as well as It’s all the skills that you need to learn to be able to self regulate your feelings and emotions, so that you begin to identify when you’re anxious, when you’re depressed, and what to do to get yourself out of it.
So that’s the early stage. The middle stages are where all the therapy happens, or the majority of it, even some if not all of the integration. And The third phase is basically terminating from therapy and going back out on your own, whole and complete. And that’s the reality, is that people can heal from this.
It does not need to take 10, 15 years. People can heal from this. And this is sort of a, it’s a circular model meaning that you can be at any stage at any [00:18:00] point. It’s a circular model, but it covers what needs to be covered when you’re working with particularly sexual trauma healing.
And it does that in 10 steps not similar to AA.
Oh yeah. Thanks for pointing that out. Cause we’re all like, we had some listeners that definitely know what AA is or something similar is different.
Like I said, the first part of the model is similar from the secular side to the overlay side has to do with the intro. All the things that I said in that first phase of treatment, but then getting into memory feelings come up when we think about memory, even good memories have sometimes very nostalgic feelings that you’re with it.
So working with whatever it is that they remember. Sometimes if the abuse was very young, they don’t remember things, but they feel things. And so you’ve got to work with those feelings and the [00:19:00] sensations in the body. in order to slowly get to resolve what’s there. Um, memory, feelings, dealing with that inner self.
It’s confrontation between that younger self and the older self. It’s almost a it’s a counseling technique of getting the two parts to talk to one another. but finding a way to get to a place of self forgiveness. From a Christian standpoint, they may never forgive a perpetrator, but self forgiveness for healing is absolutely essential, and it opens them up to receiving God’s forgiveness.
God has forgiven us, but sometimes we have to dare to forgive God for not being who we wanted God to be.
Where was God in the midst of what I went through, right?
Right. And that, and I told them, I said when we do this, when we use [00:20:00] this prayer technique, that’s the very first question I want you to ask him.
And I want you to sit. expecting an answer.
And it’s amazing. God, in all the years I’ve been using this model, God has never not shown up and has never not answered.
Oh, that’s powerful.
And yes, again, it’s in the relationship. God is not a God of rescue. has never been a god of rescue. God, and he tells us in the Bible, is a god of presence. I will be with you until the ends of the earth. And it’s being, it’s his presence with us. So he was there watching the abuse. He was there knowing it was happening.
And I think just breaking inside, and that’s my own projection of it, because that’s who God is. He’s caring, he’s loving, he’s a nurturing father, but he’s not going to get in the way of free [00:21:00] will, including the negative.
And that’s just his own structure, we don’t fully understand that, but that’s his own structure of it.
Difficult for a lot of people to grasp.
But I find that when they truly grasp that God was present with them, Very often, that makes a huge difference.
Definitely has for me.
And me.
Right. Now, you are a director for Green Cross. Can you tell us more about that? What does the Green Cross do?
Green Cross is an organization that stands in the gap during disaster. For instance, right now we’re tentatively on standby for the hurricane Helene that just hit in Florida and we’ve been, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, we’ve been to the Oso mudslide in Washington State, we’ve been to the California wildfires we go in where Everybody’s [00:22:00] evacuated.
We go in and serve as that mental health piece our survivors our volunteers go in and talk to people about their experience in order. We know that by getting people to talk about their experience, it lowers the likelihood that they will develop PTSD. we get them to do that. We also work with first responders to get them to take care of themselves so that they don’t develop what’s called compassion fatigue, which is vicarious trauma.
You hear the stories, you see the destruction. You’re affected by that. So you’ve got to do some things to lower your own stress. So we teach those skills, and we teach the the ability to do that. How do we do that? One simple technique, when we did this in Osub Washington, we papered all of the porta [00:23:00] potties with The techniques.
If you’re sitting on the toilet, you’re going to read whatever’s up on the wall. And that was the point. And in fact, even FEMA congratulated us on hitting everyone
because I work with trauma. PTSD is in that same trauma pile, if you will. You experience flashbacks soldiers in the field do this survivors of domestic violence do this survivors of sexual trauma do this It’s the way the body and the mind are coping with what happened to you. And the idea, of course, with treatment is to get that to slow down and eventually dissipate, and to be able to reintegrate your emotions and feelings back into a normal life.
Red Cross comes in and bandages people up and then you come in behind them and help them deal with the mental health part [00:24:00] of it. I didn’t know that any organizations existed that did that. I always thought it was very okay. You need medical care, obviously. And then we send you off and take care of the next one in line and clean up the destruction around.
But. That is so needed and we’re watching on the TV, of course, the flooding and I’ve got friends in those areas and family in those areas and I didn’t hear anything about taking care of their mental health part.
Yep. My parents home, unfortunately, was totally flooded.
Oh no, that’s terrible.
They live out on Clearwater Beach.
The storm surge was such that it just took over the entire beach was affected.
Yeah, I’ve got friends that they have investment property on Sanibel Island in They had just cleaned up the mess and restored the last hurricane that came through [00:25:00] and then this happened again. So they’re, then it’s underwater again, of help over there.
It’s very tragic.
No, the beach area, Clearwater Beach is still, I understand, inaccessible, the the bridges. They’re not allowing anybody to cross the bridges. And they’ll evacuate you out, but they won’t let you back in. No. It’s still touch and go.
Yes, touch and go.
It’s just a broader area of trauma that I work in.
I’m the director of the Center for Trauma and Resiliency Studies. I do research. I will be doing more research in the trafficking area in the next couple of years, because I would like to be able to replicate the study that we did. We did a seven year study with trafficking survivors. That are in programs throughout the United States where we work with eight different programs.
We went in and [00:26:00] taught their folks the heart model and how to do the research. And we found that the model works quite well it lowers dissociation, all the five major symptoms of PTSD, depression, anxiety, but it also increased personal self esteem, how somebody saw themselves, and a significant rise in God image.
And, not bad for a study. And. We’d like to replicate it on an international basis. We’ve already enlisted two programs to work with that are willing to work with us. And if we can replicate it, our hope is that by replicating it, it will show its effectiveness. Enough so that it will become a best practice.
There is currently not a Christian best practice for working with [00:27:00] trauma. And there needs to be.
You’ve done this for 40 plus years. I’m sure you have a lot of stories of people that you have seen actually heal from sex trafficking and abuse. Do you have a story in mind of an individual, obviously you don’t say their name, but somebody that, that their life was really changed by the model that you practice?
Actually several stories come to mind, but the one that stands out is actually public. So I can talk about it.
Okay. Great.
Her name was Sandy. And when I met her she made a living doing hypnotherapy for smoking cessation and things like that. And she had been diagnosed dissociative identity.
And so we set out to find out just how many different splits, 250. It just fractured over and over again. I called friends that were experts and said, here’s what I got, how do [00:28:00] I work with this? And the answer was interesting, they said, you work with different parts in groups. Any of the other parts that want to join in, can. It was an interesting way of working, but it worked. And I worked with Sandy for about two years.
She had already had about five years of really good therapy before she came to me, except That everybody she worked with just kept opening her up and opening her up and not putting her back together again. That’s one of the things that I set out to do with her was to, let’s close some of this back up.
Let’s resolve it, let’s end it, and let’s close it. She really worked hard, and In two years, she had fully integrated and was functioning. She went back to school, completed a master’s in counseling, and a doctorate in clinical psychology. She moved out to California excuse [00:29:00] me, out to Colorado, bought property out there, traveled.
Internationally speaking about sexual trauma, her father used her for child pornography, starting at the age of nine until she was about 13, passed around to his friends, filmed, and put out in the tapes put out for sale all over the world.
She questioned all of it until she found out that her sister went through a lot of the same things.
But she passed away a couple of years ago and for me, it’s been a real loss. I used to see her at conferences. It’s one of those situations where she became a colleague and a friend. Long after she was a client but we always had a special connection because of her allowing me to be part of that journey with her and her healing. And the work that she did was
amazing.
My goodness, well hats off to [00:30:00] Sandy for doing the work.
There is a book I think you can still find it through Amazon. The title is E Pluribus Unum. It’s Sandy’s story along with a little bit of my clinical dialogue and the pictures that she drew showing me and telling me what was going on inside her.
Wow. And the
pictures tell the entire story.
That’s intriguing
wow. Oh, thanks for that story. That gives us hope that there, there is healing out there, even something that seems hopeless and so big and complex that there is definitely hope. I’m going to put my controversial hat on. Ask you if you’ve seen the Sound of Freedom and what your thoughts on it were.
I have seen the Sound of Freedom. I thought it didn’t go far enough.
Ah.
Yes, [00:31:00] it was. a gut punch but it doesn’t touch. I when you think about the these women, they are raped eight to 12 times a night over months, years. That’s a, that’s just all a massive amount of abuse. And then they have to deal with handlers, traffickers, pimps.
The street clients that beat them up or bruise them or hurt them on top of everything else, very often they turn to drugs because it’s available or alcohol to cope
and it just numbs them. It allows them to function and stay alive until this horror they live in is over. I didn’t see that in that movie. And that’s why I say it didn’t go far enough.
I would agree with you on that. And a lot of the [00:32:00] girls in my healing groups with Mending the Soul, they’ve been trafficked by their own families.
They weren’t trafficked by, another foreign country or somebody kidnapping them and taking them somewhere. It was their mother passed them around to all the male relatives or, the deacon at the church decided to traffic them. And so I think they left out that part that a lot of times it’s the boyfriend that’s grooming or sexual abuse at home and they run away and somebody scoops them up to use them.
As in some of other countries and various countries in Africa.
It’s the parents that give the daughter away, but it’s because they’ve been coerced and enticed with a good job, money sent home. They’re dirt poor, so it means money [00:33:00] to, in their mind anyway, money’s going to come back, I can feed my other kids, she’ll get a good education, a good job, and, be able to eventually come back successful.
So it’s benevolent. It’s a little selfish in that, they’re not able, they don’t have the capacity because of their poverty and these traffickers prey on that. We’ll be sending teams over to Kenya next summer to do just that, is to warn pastors, and to warn the churches, here, and talk about, here’s the pattern, if you see this going on, stop it.
And recognize a kid that’s being trafficked. Those signs are really important. Airlines are starting to catch on, finally.
As are truckers. There’s a huge trucking organization that’s centered around stopping prostitution and trafficking at truck stops [00:34:00] or anything to do with the business.
Because it brings the business down and it just makes it difficult.
Yeah. We come from a family of truckers, actually, and they would agree with that. And
we talked about a lot of stuff today. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about already that you wanted our audience to know about?
I’ll hold up the book so you can see it.
Yes. Oh, wow. Look at that. Art
model. It’s available through Amazon. And I think Barnes and Noble but definitely through Amazon, you can find it under my name.
Now, do you accept patients? I,
I do. Although I’m at the point where I’m keeping my practice very small. That’s because my duties and speaking engagements and everything else are keeping me busy. But I have a handful of clients, about eight [00:35:00] right now, that I see on a regular basis. I, when somebody Does leave the practice.
I will usually fill that slot, but I don’t have a huge practice anymore. I used to see 40, 42 people a week. I don’t do that anymore. Because I teach full time and administrate the center at the divine mercy university in Sterling, Virginia is where I am.
Yeah. Yeah. There’s only so many hours in the day, right?
That’s very true.
You probably have people that you could refer that could take on a few new clients.
We train a lot of them at the center and those that really take to the heart model and begin, Working with it do really well, and yes, we do refer to them.
Excellent.
How can the folks get in touch with you and learn more about what we talked about today, the heart [00:36:00] model and Green Cross? You have a website?
Yeah Basically it’s www.green dot ORG. My email address is b keys, KEYE S@divinemercy.edu. Not a website. It, it will be eventually, but it’s not currently. The book came out last October but I have not been able to do anything with it because I unfortunately had a round of cancer over the last year.
Oh goodness.
I’m now on the other side of I’m cancer free at the moment.
And really just returned to work about four weeks ago. So
congratulations on coming out on the other side.
We’re just cranking up the marketing effort on the book and things are picking up quickly.
Oh, good. I’m glad that you’re back out sharing your [00:37:00] expertise and your knowledge and experience.
I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today and learned some new things and I’m glad to touch base with people that are out there making a difference. Thanks so much for being on the show today, Dr. Keyes.
Thank you so much. And I would love to come back sometime.
So if you get something controversial down the road and want to ask questions, I’m more than happy to talk to you about it.
Absolutely. You’re welcome. Anytime on the show. God bless you.
Thank you for listening to the Wounds of the Faithful podcast. If this episode has been helpful to you, please hit the subscribe button and tell a friend. You can connect with us at DSWMinistries. org, where you’ll find our blog along with our Facebook, Twitter, and our YouTube channel links. [00:38:00] Hope to see you next week!