The phobia of fusion is not specifically mentioned in the professional literature that talks about the classic phobias in DID treatment or it is mentioned as a phase 3 problem. I believe it is one way that the phobia of other parts and the phobia of traumatic memories shows up in our life. I will […]
therapy
The Phobia of dissociative Parts
Avoiding other parts is common in the early phase of DID treatment. They don’t feel like something we would want to engage with. We might only know them as voices that insult us, overwhelming needs that flood us or outbursts that don’t match our value system. It doesn’t help that structural dissociation often creates opposite […]
The Phobia of Inner Experiences
In DID treatment, there is the concept of different ‘phobias’ that need to be overcome for recovery. The phobia of the inner experience is at the core of the first phase of treatment, stabilization, and needs quite a lot of time to master. What are ‘inner experiences’? Sometimes these are also called mental actions […]
The phobia of attachment and attachment loss
Literature on DID lists a number of ‘phobias‘, patterns of fear and avoidance, that hinder us from getting better. We will take a look at them to see how we as patients can understand them and what might help us in dealing with them. The phobias we will look into here are attachment and attachment […]
In Defense of Precise Interventions
Therapists learn how to use therapy tools and Trauma Therapists learn how to use trauma therapy tools. Usually there is a structured approach to a problem and that makes it a whole lot easier to approach it at all. These tools and exercises just don’t hold up to real life. It is necessary to […]
Hidden Dynamics in Trauma Therapy
There are ways in which our own trauma injuries can interact with therapy tools or the personality of our therapist that may create difficult or harmful situations for us. Therapists don’t always expect it because non-traumatized patients don’t struggle with these patterns and they might not be aware that we do. We will look at […]
Personality in Motion
When trauma has become chronic and our stress responses become the mode of normal functioning in the world, we will notice an impact on our personality. The way we see ourselves and the world and how we act within the world are guided by defensive actions. We might develop patterns of behavior that are based […]
Recovering from bad therapy
With DID, it is not rare at all to experience bad therapy. There are a multitude of reasons why therapists fail us and not being properly trained is just the most common one. Returning to the tasks of therapy with someone else will be exponentially more difficult after we got hurt. When we first started […]
The Discovery of Free Will
There is a small exercise that I have been doing for many years now. It offers a true and free choice within a safe setting. These choices are different from double binds that we might have experienced as we grew up. They are choices between positive or neutral things and whatever a part chooses they […]
The Hours after Trauma Processing
The basic idea behind trauma processing is that trauma memories were stored but they weren’t integrated into our memory properly. They never became part of our life history and when they come up, it feels like they are happening now. Completely over-simplified, we can say that something about them didn’t settle right. When we process […]
Integrative Actions in Trauma Processing for DID
The concept behind trauma processing is usually to bring up the traumatic memory in a controlled setting, use an intervention to break up the fixed way in which it got stuck and then support the brain in re-organizing the memory in a new and more connected/integrated way. That is why you will find the term […]
Screen Technique in Trauma Therapy
For the Screen Technique, trauma patients are asked to imagine their memories like a movie on a screen. It is supposed to create some distance to the memory to avoid flooding. The memory is not happening right here right now, it is just on the screen. The pictures on the screen can then be changed […]
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