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 extremes that don’t feel like they can exist together. That is an illusion created by the dissociative barriers. Things calm down significantly when we manage to share more between parts because it resolves the polarization. But how do we get there?
Some psycho-education
It helps to learn a bit about parts, how they develop, why some parts turn out this way and others that way and how all of that used to support survival. We don’t have to embrace trauma memories just yet, only the fact that bad things happened when we grew up. Learning a bit about dissociative parts can give us a birds eye perspective that helps to see that we are not the only ones here and how it might all fit together. When we are overly identified with just the truth that we know for ourselves, we make it harder for us to see how the others are experiencing life. There is no need to go into deep research mode for this. A reliable resource to get a better grasp is all it needs. I would recommend the Youtube Channel of the CTAD clinic instead of random forums. Online spaces are mostly confusing to new people and even to older ones… Our goal is to learn why it makes sense to approach parts with empathy, compassion, and gentleness. They have been through a lot.
Something we might or might not expect is that not all parts love us. They have felt ignored, rejected, scared, angry or numb for years and we didn’t engage with them. They have good reason to be upset about that. Trust is built over time. Maybe eventually they will notice that taking care of daily life is a task that sucks as well. It is different from carrying trauma memory but it sucks in its own way and front parts didn’t just have an easy life most of the time. Noticing inner parts needs capacity and front parts might not have had any to spare while they worked on survival in the outside world. We all took different roles for survival. Knowledge helps to foster understanding.
Preparation
Before we commit to reaching out to inner parts, we need to learn symptom management skills. Otherwise the phobia of inner experiences knocks us out before we ever get to other parts. All parts will have to learn these regulation skills eventually, but we need a headstart to make inner work possible. Intense inner experiences will happen when we engage with other parts. Our job will be learning how to co-regulate dysregulated parts and that means we regulate ourselves first. We don’t need full stabilization but we do need some basics that work for us. In this case it is more important to feel capable than to feel completely safe. When we know we can master the unsafe bits, that will be safe again, right? We go in protected by skill.
We still need the small steps that we have used for other inner experiences. Going too fast or doing too much just creates overwhelm. That is still the enemy we are actually trying to avoid. That means that periods of connection are meant to be small and short when we just start out. We only do it for a couple of minutes a day but we do it regularly and predictably. When it starts to get too much, we step back and regulate ourselves. Then we try again next time. People often believe that everything will fall apart if they listen inside. If we do it slowly and carefully, it won’t.
Education can become a form of avoidance if we believe that we need to learn more and more and never actually engage. We don’t have to be specialists. We have to do the inner work.
There is no one way to connect with inner parts that works for everyone. I will give you a number of options, some of them are exercises and some of them happen more naturally in everyday life.
Different possible approaches
Gentle Mapping
Mapping is a way to explore what we are already aware of inside. We are not attempting to match parts to any roles or get a name for everyone. Parts might or might not come with very distinct and clear information. A gentle openness for what is inside might just give us impressions, emotional states, opinions, and we collect them over a longer period of time until a picture forms. No pressure, no need to dig deep or discover everything at once. Mapping is more a study of our inner experiences of parts than a DnD game with full character charts.
Journaling
There are different ways to use journaling. When we use it to explore inner parts, we might like a structured approach like allowing parts to finish sentence stems. We might also just write about our thoughts and feelings and then reread it to see if someone else took over for a moment and had something to say. Very bold people write questions at the top of a page and leave that lying open for other parts to answer. I never had that courage, it just felt too scary and out of control. But asking questions by writing them down is a good way to get answers, even if we just write down what happens in our mind in response to them. Parts don’t just communicate with words. There might be other reactions we can notice and write down for later reflection.
Signposting
I personally found it really useful to take some time every morning to talk myself and other parts through the day to explain what is going to happen, what is not going to happen and how they know it is happening now. They are invited to say what they need or want and I get a chance to plan for that as well. It helps everyone to be more oriented and it builds low-level trust over time without having to go deeper into the past or the explosive experiences held by parts. We connect over present-day information. The regular routine helps with trust and there is a regular invitation to contribute that might not get used early on but still has an effect. This is my prefered approach early on. Full article
Check-Ins
We take a fixed time every day (and maybe twice a day, morning and evening) to check in inside. I use a more substantial Roll Call for that. There is less focus on the outside world and more focus on how everyone is doing and what might be needed. Questions for a check-in can vary depending on the situation. When there is nothing to take care of it should only need a couple of minutes. Longer Meetings will feel extra scary and it might be a relief for some parts, not just the everyday-life part, when it is kept short. But the information we gain from a check-in helps us to adjust our actions to make the situation easier for other parts. The chance to meet their needs is immensely valuable for our relationship with them.
Shared activities
When we do something nice or mundane we can invite other parts to notice and do it with us. That way we are all facing a task together instead of having a head on confrontation. It can be easier to relate over taking care of a flower or a pet than making it about each other. But trust can grow in both directions over shared experiences. Examples for grounding activities
Responding
Sometimes we will feel that something is going on inside because there are inner experiences that feel like they are coming from someone else inside or because we notice that an unusual experience blended with our own or there is a new symptom we didn’t have a minute ago. These are moments we can use to check in inside and learn what is happening and why. Maybe we can take care of it through real life actions or imagined interventions inside. Imagining doing something for a part inside can feel just as real to them as doing it in real life would, sometimes more. But we will need our regulation skills here because we engage with a situation where there is already a noticeable need or unrest. These check-ins when we notice something will become a routine for us that becomes as normal as breathing over time. It is a natural way to notice our collective needs. It does come with the challenge of having to support a dysregulated part and might feel overwhelming without help from a therapist to learn how to do this.
Circular questions
We might use this ourselves but usually it will be our therapists who use this form of asking questions. It is a technique that is going to help us take different perspectives. Instead of asking us how we feel about a plan our T might ask us what we think a certain part will feel about it. They might even ask what we think that part A would think that part B is thinking about it. It helps with keeping each other’s mind in mind. If we guess wrong, parts might feel a greater motivation to correct us because it is hard to let others believe wrong things. It might draw out those who rarely feel the need to engage when it is framed as a game of who knows whom best.
Therapy
In some systems, the dissociation or the conflict between parts is so severe that it needs a mediator before we can make contact with parts. Perfect amnesia and inner barriers are not as common as people used to believe. The most common symptom reported in DID are intrusions from other parts. It would be an exception for a therapist to take on the role of mediator and they never do it for a long time. We have to learn how to connect for ourselves. But there is help, in case we just can’t get it started. It really really depends on the system what approach will be possible or useful. Reaching parts across strong dissociative barriers is the hardest part. Once we get it going, there are ways to find our way through.
But what about the trauma?
The trauma memory is the big elephant in the room that we are navigating around. It is not the right time to explore trauma memories in depth. Before we can do that, we need the ability to regulate ourselves together as a team without creating overwhelm. It can be hard for parts who know a lot of trauma to not share it, now that there is finally someone there who listens. It feels disappointing to realize that it is still not the right time and the right setting. Sharing too much now will not bring the relief these parts are hoping for. I believe it is wise to collect and contain. There is no way to avoid that trauma memory is triggered sometimes. Our strategy is to re-orient parts in the present reality, create a written record of what came up as one possible form of acknowledgement and then we use the containment option of our choice to store it safely until we can take a better look at it. We can take care of child parts without them sharing all the details right now. Without this overall strategy, the phobia of traumatic memories will sabotage every attempt to connect with inner parts. We follow the phased approach because we need proper stabilization before we can move into trauma work. We just get overwhelmed and retraumatized otherwise. As long as we keep memory contained, we can move in tiny steps to connect inside. Everyone has to understand that we can’t do more than acknowledge the pain right now and everything else needs more qualified help. Showing compassion can help parts to accept that but we might have to repeat this many times before parts manage to contain memory well enough. That is why we need the basic symptom management skills. Connecting with parts will not be smooth and they don’t understand, or trust, the plan immediately. They should know there is a plan to get them relief as soon as possible. But losing control wouldn’t serve anyone.
The phobic therapist
Sometimes, when therapists are out of their depth because they commited to something they don’t know enough about or when they are in the process of burning out or when they have blind spots or for whatever reason… sometimes our therapists are the ones who are phobic of exploring dissociative parts. They avoid it during session. They discourage talk about parts. They prefer working with the everyday part to improve everyday life. They might even come up with side quests themselves to fill the time. This can end in a couple of different ways for us. We keep pushing and parts might switch out until the therapist flees, quits therapy, and we will be left behind feeling deeply shamed and crushed and it will be hard to ever trust a T again. Maybe we play along and make sure to only talk about things that are comfortable for our T. We won’t get to do any actual meaningful work that way because that is locked within other parts and not our daily life. Maybe we teach ourselves, that is what I did in that situation, or maybe we can’t and we will get frustrated with the lack of progress. Maybe parts hide because they know they are not welcome, therapy is ended because there are no topics, everything is fine, and we will struggle to come out of hiding for a next therapist when it turns out it is not fine. The longer a therapist stays unaware of their own phobia of inner parts the worse the results will be for us. It is a treatment error. It is ok to need supervision. It is not ok to just accept their avoidance as the new treatment strategy. It is going to limit us and prevent us from healing. It is a patronizing presumption to think that only patients avoid inner parts. We just have much better reasons.
[This article is based on The haunted Self (Steele, Nijenhuis, van der Hart), Coping with trauma-related dissociation (Steele, Boon, van der Hart) and personal experience]