The phobia of traumatic memory is the main phobia that we have to overcome in phase 2 of DID treatment. We have put in a tremendous amount of work, challenging our phobia of attachment and attachment loss, inner experiences, and dissociative parts before memory becomes a relevant topic in our therapy. It all builds up to this: overcoming what blocks our path to a more peaceful and self-directed life. Facing the memory is extremely scary for several good reasons.
Re-experiencing
We mainly know about our trauma memories because they happen to us in flashbacks. We re-experience trauma over an over again in uncontrolled ways when the memory is triggered. There might be several dimensions to our flashbacks and they might come with body sensations from the past or the full intensity of the terror we felt. It is important to know that we don’t have to re-experience memories on that level to process them. It is why we practice distancing techniques early on in therapy. We are meant to look at it from a distance to put together the pieces of the story and gain the certainty that it happened to us in the past and is not happening anymore. We don’t process memory until we can disrupt re-experiencing reliably because it isn’t the re-experiencing that we want. All parts need to know that. We can know about memories without flooding each other with them. There is no value in making other parts re-experience something with us. We might feel like this is necessary to be fully understood but it is just how we have been hurting each other and reinforcing the need for more dissociative barriers. If we want better results, we have to try a new way and in this case it is looking at all the pieces of the memory together from a distance without re-experiencing it. That removes the greatest terror from the process.
Stress responses
What we are left with is the stress response that will absolutely happen when we get close to a traumatic memory. It doesn’t feel safe because getting too close isn’t safe and stress responses can easily trigger re-experiencing and suck us in way too fast. That is why we learn how to use Orientation and Grounding and all our other regulation skills. We go in prepared. When we start to feel the stress response coming up too fast, we disengage with the memory and regulate ourselves. It is a very controlled process of moving close enough to put the pieces together and taking breaks to regulate ourselves so we don’t go in too deep. If we really master our regulation skills, the process will have highly stressful moments but it will never get out of hand and we can feel our agency in the situation. Our Ts are there to help with pacing but nobody knows better and faster when things start to slip than we do. We don’t have to wait for them to notice to catch ourselves. We can have a serious amount of control in our own process when we learn our trauma and regulation skills properly and don’t skip steps during stabilization.
Skill and Safety
We spend a substantial amount of time in our therapy looking for a felt sense of safety, for grounding and calm. We invest into these skills to counter our chronic stress responses and to make it possible to relax and improve sleep. We also build up other skills than just relaxation. They are meant to make it possible for us to act and move forward. We learn how to deal with our symptoms when they get bad, how to manage ourselves when we get triggered or experience a strong stress response. We become quite capable over time. The new tools we learn help us to master truly difficult situations without hiding in a space where nothing happens at all, a safe space. We learn to do both, withdraw into calm and stand up and manage chaos. Trauma processing is not safe in itself. Our skill makes it safe. We know exactly that we can manage this because we have practiced all that is necessary for it. Usually, when we try to calm ourselves we orient towards safety. When we face difficulty (processing trauma is just one example) we orient towards our competence. We’ve got this. And the second focus when facing truly difficult situations is always on the people around us who support us. That means we also orient towards our therapist. That is where the safety is in a challenging situation like trauma processing: Competence and Company. They are the reasons why we don’t have to be beside ourselves with terror.
Beyond exposure
To process trauma, we put together the pieces of the memory and differentiate it from our present. We get a more complete picture of ourselves. But it will also do something to our view of the abusers and to our view of the world and our place in it. It does not always feel like a relief because reality is more complex than that. We might realize that we have truly been a helpless victim. That people who should have protected us did not. That society at large didn’t intervene. And we might get a sense of how that influenced the way we developed over the years. These are intensely difficult realizations. They need integrative capacity for us to even hold them together in our mind and not lose them again to dissociation and amnesia. There will be grief. We build these strong inner connections between parts because we need to lean on each other when the realizations come through. The weight of it all can feel crushing and we need to be ready to catch the parts who get to feel it the most. Our therapists will be just as ready to help and support us but nothing is as close as when we can do it for each other. There is healing in staying with each other were the overwhelm used to separate us.
Trauma Integration
After many years, this is the part of the process that still scares me. It is not exposure or even re-experiencing. It is the silent but heavy weight of realization and personification that is only bearable because it also comes with presentification. All this happened, it happened to me because we all belong together and, thank the heavens, it is over. Knowing this in my soul will still change the way I see myself in the world. It is impossible to know how it will change me. I always hope that it will make me feel stronger, more powerful and more secure with who I am. I am still always scared that it will leave me crushed under the weight of what was done to me, and the world that allowed it. Trauma integration means feeling the brokenness that we used to dissociate for while. Usually, things settle after eventually and we are a bit more disillusioned and a lot more grounded. But there is a crossroad there every time. When things go badly they usually don’t leave us crushed and dead, although there is a risk of suicidality that comes with the first days of realization. If it goes really badly we can usually rely on our dissociation to eliminate the experience and push it back into amnesia and behind dissociative barriers. If it is too big to integrate it will be dissociated again. That is the quiet comfort of being highly dissociative. The big change does not happen in our therapy session. It happens during the integration process that takes place in the days and weeks following that session and it is a big challenge that is hard to prepare for. It feels different every time. What I do directly after processing and in the days after processing to help with the integration process.
Memory integration will be closely followed by structural integration. Sometimes it happens spontaneously. With DID, it is often a longer path of integration and we will face more challenges to our integrative capacity. Memory processing is not a goal in itself. It is what removes the things that block us from growing closer together. Our journey is far from over. But we have managed the scariest part of it when we have overcome the phobia of traumatic memories by resolving them.
A phobia of trauma processing
Some parts have good reasons to avoid trauma processing, not because they are scared of memories but because they are scared of the aftermath of processing. They might live in an inner world of re-experiencing with little knowledge of the outside world and frankly, often not even an interest in the outside world. The memory is all they know and it is their whole world. Pulling them into the present and helping them to realize that all this was abusive is not the kind of relief to them that it is to us. If they are attached to abusers, they might not want to know any of that. Processing comes with the loss of their world for them. Their picture of loved ones has to change when they realize that they also did unspeakable things to us. Those who hold love for them start to feel the broken attachment for themselves. Their sense of living in their childhood will be over when they realize that all of it is over. What a loss. They might have a phobia of processing that feels very different from the phobia of trauma memories as we know it. We cannot process a trauma memory until we agree that it should be processed. It cannot be done against the will of those who are scared of what will happen to them and their reality. There are more gentle steps we can take before we turn to processing. Working with abuser-attached parts
So much of our therapy builds up to these moments in time when we connect the fragments of memory and integrate them. When we are ready for it, there will be respect for the project ahead but also a sense of trust in our own abilities and our therapist. What happens after the session can be held with gentle kindness and the willingness to grieve. We might have to hold ourselves for a while until we find a place where we are ok. In DID, it is extremely important to stick to the phased treatment approach and take one step after the other. We cannot safely process memory without new trauma skills and inner connection. Once we find this stability inside, facing the memory does not have to be that scary anymore. Even if we do a lot of our recovery alone, we always work with a trauma therapist when it comes to memory processing because they add an element of safety and support to get us through. Together, we can do it.