January 4, 2009
Posted in Dissociative Identity Disorder, DID Education, DID/MPD, mental health, Internal Communication tagged Dissociative Identity Disorder, Healing, treatment, treatment for DID, dissociative, Support, Relationship, therapy, Fear, Hurt, Kathy Broady, Dissociative Disorder, Painful, Communication, Talking, Approach, Emotional, Friend, System, Dissociative Wall, DID/MPD, Insider, Listen, Stability, Hearing, Feeling, Strength, Kindness, Respect, Internal System, Child Part, Distance, Abused, Internal Communication, Friendly, Communicating, Alter, Inner People, Function, Hitler, Inferior, War, Value, Understand, Stranger, Encouraging, Argue, Emotionally, Speak, Communicate, Talk, Squabble, Hear, Preparation, Blocking, Blackness, Wall at 4:16 pm by Kathy Broady
I ended my last post with this paragraph:
Focus first on relationship building with your parts. Get to know them. Talk to them. Learn their names. Overcome your fears of who they are. Appreciate their strengths. Develop friendships with them. I guarantee that your overall stability will greatly improve as you are more connected with your internal system on a genuinely friendly, caring basis.
In my opinion, developing good internal communication is the core of the treatment work for Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you cannot or do not talk well with your other internal parts, you will not be able to complete your healing work effectively, thoroughly or sufficiently.
Imagine going to your place of employment and not being able to speak with any of your co-workers. How well would businesses work with that approach? Have you ever been to a big department store? Imagine if the employees couldn’t speak with each other for days-weeks-years at a time. That store as a whole would find it extremely difficult to manage busy days, or to handle simple, basic operations. It would crumble. Even if all the employees continued doing their own jobs perfectly — if they are not communicating with anyone else in the store, then the store as a whole would be less effective. It would likely go out of business sooner than later.
Dissociative systems cannot function without internal communication any better than large department stores can function without internal communication.
If you don’t talk to your inner people, and if your various insiders do not speak with each other, none of you are going to function as well as you could.
Also, if you run your system with an attitude similar to Hitler’s, that’s not going to work so well either. Approaching your insiders as inferiors or nuisances that you want to kill off, or dispose of, or get rid of in some way will not be helpful. As our real-life example has shown, this type of dictatorship and abuse leads to tragedies like genocide and world wars. Don’t go there with your internal world. Treat your inner people with kindness and respect.
I promise you that every single one of your insiders has value, importance, strengths, and significance. You might not understand who they are at this point in time. And when you don’t know the positive value held by each person inside, that’s a big clue that you have some therapy work to do.
Allowing your system to stay scattered, chaotic, disorganized, and messy will not help your stability or ability to function. Keeping with the store metaphor, who wants to shop in a cluttered, disorganized, messy store? Can you find anything? Does it take twice as long to find the things you need? And are some items just impossible to find without taking huge chunks of extra time?
Permanently blocking your internal system behind walls or curtains or an unexplored blackness is not helpful either. I realize that all DIDer’s have dissociative walls and barriers already — walls that could have easily been there for years. That is the nature of DID/MPD. It’s the initial point of having a dissociative disorder — surviving by using those same dissociative walls to separate yourself from yourself and from the situations and feelings that were too conflictual, too painful, too difficult, etc. In the here and now, the treatment goal is to gradually lower and remove those barriers between your system people, and certainly not to create more walls or to support more distance between everyone.
Internal communication is the key to doing this work.
Doing your system work — meeting each other, getting to know each other, will in itself create a greater sense of order and structure within. More of you will know who can do what, where the other parts are, and how they got there. It won’t feel so strange or unknown to you. Insiders can become friends with each other instead of being strangers separated from each other. Even though there are additional steps to take, start by encouraging everyone in your system to be willing to see, meet, and greet as many others as possible. You all need to know who you have in there.
My next post — Internal Communication, part 2 — will list specific ideas for how to develop communication within your system.
For today, in preparation to do this work, please think about the following:
- How willing are you to speak to your insiders?
- How willing are you to listen to your insiders?
- If you are afraid of some of your inside people, what are you willing to say to them?
- If some of your insiders have experienced a different life than you have, are you willing to listen to them?
- What will you do if someone says something you don’t want to hear?
- What will you do if your insiders squabble and argue with each other?
- How will you handle it if certain insiders hurt others within your system? What if they are hurting child parts? What if they attempt to hurt you?
- What if meeting the others folks inside means learning that you were more hurt and abused than you realized? How will you handle that?
- What are your thoughts and feelings about finding new insiders — ones that you didn’t realize you had?
- Do you know how to speak to child parts? How will your address them if you see that they are hurting emotionally or physically?
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You can do this. Your healing depends on your talking with your internal system.
__________
By:
Kathy Broady, LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
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December 31, 2008
Posted in DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, mental health, Self Injury, sexual abuse tagged Dissociative Identity Disorder, Trauma Survivor, sexual abuse, Safety, Self Injury, split, dissociative, Trauma, pain, Support, Comfort, Hurting, Kathy Broady, Self Harm, Emotional, Survivor, Friend, Danger, Dissociative Wall, DID/MPD, Feeling, Comforting, SI, Emotion, Numb, Split off, Numbness, Emotional Distance, Distance, Self Destruction, Urgency, Compulsion, harming, Journal, Write, Draw, Paint, Picture, Visualize, Soothe, Self-soothe, Exercise, Garden, Pet, Crying, Stress, Soothing, Sleep, Shut Down, Imagine, Music, Song, Guitar, Piano, Vacation, Herbal Tea, Blanket, Cry, Breathe, Feel at 6:17 am by Kathy Broady
Survivors of sexual abuse often struggle with self-injury (SI).
Survivors often use dissociative walls to contain and separate intense emotions from themselves. This allows them to stay numb, and to not feel. They can split off their unmanageable, uncomfortable, or conflicting feelings into other parts of themselves, as frequently seen in dissociative identity disorder (DID/MPD).
As those dissociative walls begin to crumble, allowing more emotions and feelings to emerge, survivors often want to maintain or regain that sense of numbness and emotional distance. They will use various forms of self-harm to re-create more distance from feelings.
However, purposeful self-injury and self-destruction creates a myriad of other complications. There are a number of reasons why trauma survivors hurt themselves, and hundreds of different ways to do it. I will discuss some of these topics in blogs to come.
For now, the following is a list of 25 ideas of activities to do when the urgency of self-harm is there. These ideas do not necessarily address the issues fueling the SI, but they can be a helpful distraction during an acute crisis point. If you complete a handful of these ideas when you start feeling compulsions to SI, you might find that you can work past the danger point and get yourself into a more stable place.
Remember — Safety First! (that includes safety from yourself as well)
When you are in the immediate danger of harming yourself, try at least five or six of the following ideas. However, do as many as you need to get past the urgency to self-harm.
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- Call a friend or two and talk to them about anything – the weather, politics, the news, old times, new recipes, etc. Distract yourself, and enjoy the company.
- Watch a movie or two, or three, or however many it takes till you get past the urge to SI. Promise yourself that you will watch movies until you feel safe again.
- Write about your feelings in your journal. Write a poem out about your feelings.
- Scrub the house from top to bottom. Distracting yourself with tedious tasks, paying close attention to details can give you a different focus for the energy you are feeling.
- Get out the hottest jar of salsa and add jalapeno pepper or red chili peppers, and dig in. It might burn your mouth or make your eyes water and your nose run to eat this, but it won’t scar or cause actual harm.
- Draw or paint on paper what you want to do to yourself. Draw or paint a second picture showing why you want to do this. Draw or paint a third picture showing how you wish you were feeling.
- Play with, pet, hold, or hug your pet. Find comfort and soothe yourself with the company of your dog and cat instead turning to pain or injury.
- Take a walk or exercise. The physical release of energy is helpful.
- Plant a small garden. Creating something nice, making something pretty to look at, and tending to something alive can put you into a different frame of mind.
- Take a bath or shower. Let the water soothe you and help release your stress. Talking out loud or crying in the shower helps get the pain out that is locked inside you. Let the stress rinse off and send it “down the drain” away from you.
- Draw on yourself with a red marker instead of cutting.
- Put a rubber band on your wrist and snap it when you think of hurting yourself.
- Hit a pillow over and over and over till you tire yourself out or the thoughts go away. Speak or cry while you are doing this, if you can.
- Listen to soothing music (or scream to angry music).
- Read your favorite book, or read a new book from your favorite author.
- Watch something really funny on TV – use comedy and laughter as a release.
- Play games online. Computer games can be monotonous, trancey-hypnotic, time-consuming, and calming.
- Work on web pages or any other big task that requires your attention.
- Sleep, just have to complete shut down. Let the time pass, and hopefully when you wake up, the intensity of the emotion will have subsided.
- For those with DID / MPD, go to the safe place you have created inside. Visualize nice things, comforting things, favorite things. Allow yourself to be surrounded by good things in life, even if it exists only in your internal world at that moment.
- Snuggle under your favorite blanket in a safe, private, secure place, and allow the feelings to surface. Cry, shake, feel, breathe. Let yourself experience and feel your feelings.
- Think of all the people who have ever had good, kind thoughts of you. Imagine each of them standing with you, holding hands and being with you. Allow them to offer comfort and support to you, even via your own thoughts. Write letters of appreciation to them.
- Play the guitar or piano and play out your feelings through the music. Write a song about your feelings. Sing out loud with your favorite CD’s. If you find a song that fits just right, play it over and over and over.
- Close your eyes and visualize yourself on vacation, far away from your stress. If you love the beach, for example, picture yourself walking at your favorite time of the day, barefoot along the shore, feeling the cool breeze across your face, listening to the waves coming and going, watching the sea gulls fly, picking up sea shells. Imagine yourself walking in the warm clear water, swimming with the dolphins, being totally safe.
- Eat a healthy snack (not too sugary), have a cup of herbal tea, or a glass of milk. Avoid caffeine. Nibble on saltine crackers. Challenge yourself to take 50 nibbles or more on each cracker
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Stay Safe!
__________
by:
Kathy Broady LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
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December 15, 2008
Posted in DID Education, DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Trauma tagged At Risk, Child Alter, Child Parts, Complacency, Control, Danger, Danger Signs, Dark, Deceive, DID / MPD, Discredit, dissociative, Dissociative Trauma Survivor, Education, Friend, High Risk, Internet Predator, Internet Safety, Kathy Broady, Manipulate, Naive, Needy, Online, Overly Trusting, Painful, Ploy, Predator, Predator's Ploys, Predator's Tricks, Prevention, Prevention Information, Protect, Protection, Rocking, RockingComplacency, Safety First, Survivor, Tips, Trauma, Trick, Tricks and Ploys, Trusting, Unsuspecting, Vulnerable at 11:44 pm by Kathy Broady
Hi Everyone,
I am busily working on some new posts in response to the excellent comments made by the readers here. You have been asking good questions and making thought-provoking points. I’m looking forward to responding to as many of these comments as I can. Thank you for your active participation – it is really exciting to see so many folks showing up around here already!!!
In the meantime, since all of you are frequently online, and clearly many of you are dissociative trauma survivors, I want to encourage you to read some very well written articles about internet safety and internet predators:
- Internet Predators: They Really Are Everywhere
- Internet Predators: One Way They Work
- Internet Predators and Child Alters: 10 Ideas to Keep Them Safe
These excellent articles are all available on Rocking Complacency, http://rockingcomplacency.wordpress.com. For that matter, this entire blog is good. If you are up to reading through the whole thing, I certainly recommend it!
The whole subject of internet predators is highly troubling and deeply disturbing. They work relentlessly to discredit the helpers, to prey on the vulnerable, to manipulate the gullible, to control the unsuspecting, and to deceive the needy while greedily feeding their own dark agendas. Dissociative trauma survivors are particularly at risk for getting used and hurt in these ways.
Solid prevention information / education can be enormously useful. It can help you prevent some serious harm, and can give you tips on how to better protect your system.
During my years of working with DIDer’s online, I have become aware of too many situations where naïve trusting DID survivors were led down the garden path by someone they trusted, only to find out, painfully too late, that their “friend” was an internet predator. It seems that warning people that are caught in the midst of this process falls on deaf ears – they get hooked and tangled in their predator’s web before they even realize it. They can’t see it happening, and all too often, they’ve been well-coached ahead of time on how to respond when an outsider catches wind of the dangers they are in.
By recommending the above-mentioned articles, my hopes are that many of you will become more aware of the danger signs ahead of time. If you recognize a predator’s tricks and ploys as they happen, you will have a greater chance of removing yourself and your system from their grasp, and staying safe.
Safety first!
__________
by:
Kathy Broady LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
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