Traumatized people usually show behavior that is outside the norm in at least some areas of life. These coping behaviors often get stigmatized as mental illness and dysfunction. But once we understand how a child survives unsafe situations we realize that these behaviors are strictly logical. They can be understood and they make sense. They […]
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The Freeze Response and how to get out of it again
The freeze response is one of our natural, involuntary stress responses. It happens when the parasympathetic activation starts to overpower the sympathetic arousal. The sympathetic signs of high muscle tone are still visible as an underlying energy, but we moved down the polyvagal ladder into immobility. Imagine that the foot that carries your weight stepped […]
Book Review: Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors (J. Fisher)
Healing the fragemented selves of trauma survivors: overcoming internal self-alienation by Janina Fisher Written for: Therapist who treat trauma-related problems like cPTSD, BPD, eating disorders, addiction, chronic suicidality and self-harming behaviors or dissociative disorders, including simple cases of DID but mostly OSDD people who have any of these problems based on childhood trauma or […]
Working with categories of parts to solve complex dynamics
There are different ways one could categorize different parts within a dissociative system. None is them is inherently bad, they all describe part of the experience, but they are also all lacking, they can’t describe the whole experience. We think it is wise to know different ways to express things, so we can choose our […]
Denial and Doubt in Dissociative Disorders
Denial and self-doubt is such a common problem in dissociative disorders that some argue it should be part of the diagnostic criteria. The definitions of denial include the refusal to admit the truth or reality of something or a refusal to recognize or acknowledge; a disowning or disavowal Psychology has its own definition of denial […]
Discussing EMDR for the treatment of complex PTSD with structural dissociation
Now that we have looked at the standard protocol for EMDR and how it can be adapted for DID, we want to discuss the technique based on our own experience with it. As always, we are focusing on the treatment of complex trauma with structural dissociation. Some people don’t trust EMDR because it is […]
EMDR: The Progressive Approach for severe Trauma 2
It is not rare for DID or subforms to get diagnosed after an EMDR session went terribly, terribly wrong. Once we understand why the basic protocol for EMDR can stir up so much within a system that patients get overwhelmed, we will look at a different approach to EMDR that can make processing safer and […]
EMDR: The Progressive Approach for severe Trauma 1
When we look at the standard protocol for EMDR we soon realize that it is too difficult for a lot of people with a background of severe abuse. We need more stability to manage trauma work, yet we can’t gain that stability because of our severe trauma symptoms. It can feel like we need to […]
The Awareness Continuum for Trauma Therapy
With early childhood trauma we rarely get a chance to develop well in every aspect of our being, that includes mental processes. We usually struggle to separate inside and outside reality and to tell the difference between: our sensations and reality, what we perceive seems to be all there is our thoughts and reality, believing […]
FAQ: When will Flashbacks stop?
One of the most frequently asked questions we get is “When will flashbacks stop?“ So here is the answer, not intended to be exhaustive. Short-term For PTSD Trigger Flashbacks can only stop when we stop being triggered, which means that we need to remove ourselves from the trigger or the trigger from us. […]
Radical Openness in Trauma Therapy
Virtues come in opposing pairs that balance each other (see the v-square). Most of us are familiar with Radical Acceptance. The lesser known counter-part to that is Radical Openness. Radical acceptance is used to reduce suffering caused by rejecting things we can’t change. Radical Openness helps us to change, when we have accepted something that […]
The 8 Phases of EMDR
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It relies heavily on scripts, which makes it easy to research. A multitude of studies show that it works just as well as other easily researched approaches for trauma confrontation while being more gentle for both Ts and patients. Why exactly EMDR works is not fully explained. […]
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