Our story

For four years, from 2014 to 2017, our community came together in person in Seattle. Each conference lasted four days. They were planned and run by members of our forum, most of whom had never done anything like it before, together with friends from the wider DID community. In 2018, we brought our conference to Anchorage, Alaska.

These conferences were never about making money for Ivory Garden. They were made for survivors. What we gained was something no money could buy: four days together, four years in a row.

We wanted everyone to be able to come, so we offered scholarships and hotel accommodations to those who needed them. Therapists earned continuing education credits (CEUs), and more than twenty vendors shared their work at tables offered at no cost.

In 2015, we held the conference to support research. All of its proceeds went directly to Dr. Bethany Brand’s TOP DD study, the largest international treatment outcome study of dissociative disorders.

Survivors and professionals sat side by side. Name tags showed only names, never titles or diagnoses, so everyone was simply a person, learning together. For many of us, it was the first time we met each other face to face, and the first time we got to learn directly from some of the most influential professionals in the field.

We never lacked for speakers. They gave their time freely, without being paid, and people still talk about those conferences today. They were truly memorable.

To protect everyone’s privacy, we kept photos to a minimum. The few we share here are of our speakers and organizers. The rest of the memories belong to the people who were there.