February 10, 2010
Posted in Dissociative Identity Disorder, DID Education, DID/MPD, therapy, Therapy Homework Ideas, Self Injury, Internal Communication, emotional pain, Domestic Violence tagged Dissociative Identity Disorder, Healing, Safety, Self Injury, multiple personality disorder, Trauma, emotional pain, Healing Process, Body Memories, therapy, Kathy Broady, Abuse, Self Harm, DID Therapy, Treatment for DID / MPD, SI, Scrapbooking, Creative Expression, Journaling, Therapy Process, Treatment Goals for DID, External Safety, Trauma Survivors, Flashbacks, Domestic Violence, AbuseConsultants.com, DID Survivors, Current-day Safety, DID Education, Goals for DID Therapy, Intense Feelings, Internal Safety, Art, Painting, Journaling Exercises, Self soothing, Blogging, Poetry, Play therapy, Scrapbooks, MPD, DID Therapy 101 at 3:41 pm by Kathy Broady
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Lots of trauma survivors with dissociative identity disorder are just starting their healing process. Other dissociative survivors are not new to their healing process, but they might realize that they haven’t yet covered all the basics.
DID therapy can feel huge, daunting, difficult, and overwhelming. There is so much to do and so many areas of work. For a broader overview of the many areas of DID healing, please refer to the article, “50 Treatment Issues for Dissociative Identity Disorder”.
For individuals building the foundation for their work with your dissociative system, here are some of the first things to do.
DID 101 involves:
1. Get to know your system. Build the courage to find and meet your insiders. Remember, they were formed and created to help you – even if it doesn’t feel like it, you are (or can be) on the same team. Who are your inside parts? What jobs do they have? What kinds of things are they able to do? It’s really ok for you to build positive relationships and actual friendships with your insiders. If this feels scary for you, explore those feelings. What makes it hard for you to get to know your insiders? What fears or resentments do you have? Understanding your resistance to these ideas is important.
2. Become more comfortable with your diagnosis. If you don’t understand what dissociative identity disorder (DID /MPD) is, be sure to speak more with your therapist or psychiatrist about what it means to be dissociative. There are lots of books, websites, blogs, articles, conferences, etc that can help to educate you about the basics about DID. Understanding DID will help take out some of the mystery and confusion for you.
3. Build a support system and capable treatment team. It is very helpful if you can surround yourself with a few other people that understand trauma dynamics, preferably at least one or two other people, besides your therapist and doctor that understand that you are working on healing from trauma. These support people don’t have to be experts in DID – if they are just willing to spend some time with you when you need a safe distraction from your healing work, that will be helpful. Please don’t lean on lay-support people for the heavy issues. Leave the complicated treatment issues for your therapist to work with – your support friends are not therapists, so be very careful about not pushing them too far or demanding too much of them.
4. Once you have recognized at least one or two other parts, work on building communication with these parts. Internal communication is one of the very most important factors in DID therapy, and the sooner you can interact cooperatively with your other parts, the better your healing progress will happen. Approximately twenty of the articles in the Discussing Dissociation blog reference tips for building internal communication. This link groups these articles together. Learning how to talk to your other parts is the most important factor in your healing.
5. Connecting with your internal landscape. What can you see inside? Can you see the other insiders? Do you have an internal safe place? Internal visualization work is an important skill as it builds a way to connect with your insiders. Even if you can’t see the others inside, there will likely be someone else who can. Maybe ask if that insider will draw a map of your system for you? The sooner you can see inside, the better. And of course, if you see insiders that are not in positive, healthy, clean living conditions, you and other helpers in your system will need to do something to help them.
6. Working on limiting or preventing self-destructive impulses and self-injurious behaviors. Learning how to address self-harm urges is particularly important for your stabilization and progression in therapy. You have already been hurt enough – adding more hurt may feel like it helps you to cope in the short-term, but using behaviors such as cutting or burning is not any more helpful than using a shot of whiskey or a hit of cocaine. Explore better ways to cope with your intense feelings, develop more grounding skills, build positive containment strategies, and methods to reconnect with the here-and-now. A grouping of articles about preventing self-injury can be found here.
7. Live in a safe place both inside and out. If you live in a violent environment, address this issue as quickly as you are able. If you are continuing to be abused or sexually assaulted in any way, your dissociative walls will stay strong, and your system will have greater trouble trusting you and your treatment team. Of course, when anyone is fearful of abusive repercussions, it is much harder to disclose the real issues. Dangerous environments can include everything from domestic violence, abusive parents, organized perpetrators, to internal system perpetrators and angry introjects. Building more and more current-day safety is vitally important for your overall healing process. If you aren’t safe, make this a priority in your therapy process. Building an internal safe place is also critically important. However, please remember that in order to build an internal safe place, you have to have a genuine belief that safety can happen, at least part of the time. Making an internal safe place for your insiders is much more difficult when you are still concerned about external safety.
8. Start building options for positive self-comfort, self-soothing activities. The therapy process can be so very painful and emotionally difficult. Having a variety of options to do that are comfortable, safe, gentle, soothing, and stabilizing is important. What can you do when you want to have a break from the hard work of therapy? What can you do when you need some quiet space to think – or to not think? When you are hurting, what can you do that will help you to feel better? Soothing your pain in ways that help your healing (vs. using self-destructive options) is an important skill to develop.
9. Create healthy options for expression of feeling and emotion – use art, music, journaling, collage, blogging, forum posting, sculpting, painting, poetry, play therapy, sand tray therapy, scrapbooking, etc. DID therapy involves processing a lot of flashbacks, violent images, intense feelings, overwhelming thoughts, body memories, body pain, etc. Building a repertoire of artistic avenues to describe your feelings and experiences will be very helpful. You might not always have words that you can use so it is important to find non-verbal ways to safely express what you feel.
10. Create your own personal space. In this space, let it be ok for your insiders to come out, to be themselves, to be out in the body, and to exist. Out in the world, and when you are around other people, most of your daily life will be about keeping your insiders tucked in and acting socially inappropriate. But somewhere in your private time, your insiders will need time to surface, to know that it is ok for them to come out. Having the freedom to switch without reprimand is important as each of your insiders will need to do some personalized healing work of their own.
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Not 11. Please note: I am specifically not including memory work or skills to do memory work in my top then list of DID 101 skills. The reason for this is that if you are just beginning DID therapy, it can be very destabilizing to focus on heavy-duty memory work. Yes, of course, doing trauma work is an important part of your overall healing process, but in the beginning of this journey, you need to build these basic skills before you begin to put a lot of energy into memory work. It is much safer and more stabilizing to have these foundational therapy skills in place before focusing on the trauma content of DID therapy.
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DID therapy is intense, long-term, exhausting, and difficult. But your healing is worth it. As you truly address the painful conflicts, unmet needs, and internal confusion caused by your years of trauma, abuse, and neglect, you will feel better within your own self.
I wish you the very best in your healing journey –
Warmly,
Kathy
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By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
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February 8, 2009
Posted in DID Education, DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Family Members of Trauma Survivors, Friends of Multiples, Online Therapy, Self Injury, Supportive Spouses, Therapy and Counseling, Therapy Homework Ideas tagged Trauma Survivor, Healing, Safety, Self Injury, dissociative, emotional pain, split personality, Social Anxiety, Isolation, therapy, Shame, Denial, Kathy Broady, Self Harm, Vulnerable, DID/MPD, Self-hatred, Multiplicity, Scrapbooking, Severe trauma, Dissociative Walls, Perpetrators, Alone, Treatment Goal for DID, Support Groups, DID Support Group, Therapeutic Support Group, Online Support Group, SurvivorForum, Yoga, Needlepoint, Bowling, Softball, AA Sponsor, Forums, DID Forum, Forum for Trauma Survivors, Dysfunctional Family, Guilt, Emotional Separation at 2:58 pm by Kathy Broady
Are you alone?
Oh, what a tough and painful topic this one is.
All too many dissociative survivors are alone. Alone with their pain. Alone with their memories. Alone within their system. Alone in relationships. Alone in a crowded room.
Far too many dissociative survivors feel painfully alone. Isolated. Alienated. Separated from others.
There are actually a few trauma survivors that genuinely prefer to be alone. I still ask — is this a result of their trauma? Would they have been such loners if they had not been so very deeply abused by so many different people? I suppose it’s hard to say. It’s not like they can undo the reality of what happened, so how can they take away the effects of the trauma to know what their personality would have been like otherwise? I still wonder. I have to believe it’s very likely that a great deal of their need for aloneness is a direct effect of severe trauma.
All too often, the being alone isn’t preferable, it’s just how it is. It’s hard not to feel alone if no one else understands what you are going through. Of course survivors are going to feel alone if they are carrying the burden – the knowledge and pain – of their abuse on their own. It’s hard to fathom that other people went through similar enough tortures. Is it possible that anyone else could really understand?
For many, it is just safer to be alone. If there’s no one there, there is no one there to cause the hurt, abuse, torment, torture…
And yet, for many, the actual experience of the abuse happened when they were purposefully separated away from their loved ones. The aloneness was part of the trauma experience itself. And the abusers controlled and insisted on this kind of aloneness staying in place so the abuse could continue undetected and uninterrupted. The parent that cared for them didn’t know and couldn’t be told because the abusers threatened to harm them if they ever found out. Or the siblings would be off playing in a different room, and they would be next if you didn’t cooperate.
Most abuser / perpetrators demand that their victims remain isolated and separate from all other people who could provide support and help. For example, no-talk rules and deprivation traumas are intended to keep survivors separated from others. Current-day isolation and alienation make survivors more vulnerable for ongoing abuse as well.
Alone back then.
And that carries over into being alone now.
Are you alone due to…
- Your level of unrelenting emotional pain?
- Your horrifying shame and overwhelming guilt feelings about the types of abuses you’ve experienced?
- The fear that other people would hate you if they really knew what had happened in your life?
- The utter embarrassment of being related to family members so deeply ingrained in dysfunction or organized crime and sexual perpetration?
- The self-hatred you feel after being forced to actively participate in degrading and humiliating abuse situations?
- The years and years of secrets that have created immense emotional walls in all your potential relationships?
- The purposeful emotional separation from others in your family that could have (or still might) genuinely care for you?
- The dissociative separation from others in your internal system?
- Your denial – which separates you from your own self and your own history and your own system?
- Not knowing anyone in your local neighborhood who has also suffered from severe trauma and abuse?
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And do you have to stay this alone?
There is good news. You really do not have to stay as alone as you have been in the past.
Working on that sense of isolation is important in your healing process. It is also important for your safety.
The less alone you are, the less susceptible you are getting your needs met in dangerous ways, with dangerous people. Survivors that are isolated with their pain are particularly vulnerable to predators of all kinds.
What can you do?
- Continue to read and participate online. In the current day, there are hundreds of web sites and blogs created by or for dissociative trauma survivors. You can know you are not alone because others are speaking out and telling their stories.
- Join safe online support forums. While there are many good forums, I recommend www.SurvivorForum. Be absolutely sure the forum you join is safe.
- Participate actively in getting to know your internal system – let your own insiders become a sense of social support for you.
- Join a local support group led by a competent therapist.
- Get deeply involved with your therapy and your healing process. The more you connect to yourself, the more you will be able to connect with others.
- Address your emotional pain, find healing for your shame, etc. The more healing you have, the less you will have to hide from other people.
- Challenge yourself on a regular basis to get more involved socially, even if that is very difficult for you. Explore your fears about it, and problem-solve with creative solutions for how to not let those fears keep you stuck in isolation.
- Join safe but fun social activities that have nothing to do with trauma topics – ie: exercise classes, yoga classes, needlepoint / stitching groups, softball leagues, bowling leagues, group music lessons, scrapbooking groups, etc.
- Start gradually, but slowly talk with your friends, your family members, your pastor, your AA sponsor, your real-life support people. Don’t overwhelm them with too much personal information at once, but bit by bit, begin to share more about who you are and what you’ve overcome in your life. Your story is worth telling!
- Write supportive comments to other survivors. The more you support others, the more kindness you will receive in return. You might have to be a friend in order to make a friend, so as you reach out to support other survivors, you can begin building that bond. Too many survivors look to others to support them without offering the same in return. Try turning that around and be a friendly source of support for others. They’ll remember that.
- If it is too frightening or frustrating to think of connecting with people at this point in time, start with getting a pet of your very own. Dogs, cats, bunnies, gerbils, even fish can be another source of life in your home and can make you feel less alone. Your pets will love the attention and interaction you give them, and as you build a bond with them, you will enjoy their companionship as well.
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What are you going to do to overcome your feelings of alienation and separation?
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How will you resolve your struggles of being alone?
__________
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
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January 11, 2009
Posted in DID Education, DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Internal Communication, mental health tagged AbuseConsultants, AbuseConsultants.com, Album, Amnesia, Amnesiac, Amnesiac Barrier, Amnesiac Wall, Cloth, Collage, Communicate, Communication, Crayon, Create, Creative, Creative Expression, Creativity, Decorate, Describe, Design, DID/MPD, Display, Dissociative Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Drawing, Expression, Fabric, Freedom, Freedom of Expression, Fulfillment, Fun, Healing, Homework, Insider, Internal System, Journal, Journal Exercise, Journaling Exercise, Kathy Broady, Keepsake, Memories, mental health, Multiplicity, Personal Fulfillment, Photo, Photo Album, Poem, Priceless, Recovery, Resistance, Ribbon, Rubber Stamp, Scrapbook, Scrapbooking, Self, Self Esteem, Self-Worth, Souvenir, Souvenir Album, Stencil, System, Therapeutic Exercise, Therapist, therapy, Therapy Homework, Trauma, Treasure, Treatment Goal, Writing at 3:38 pm by Kathy Broady
A fun and creative way to increase system communication and overall system familiarity is to make a scrapbook displaying pages that describe each of the people in your system. Getting to know your system is an absolute essential part to your healing and recovery, but doing system work doesn’t have to be drudgery. A system scrapbook can be a wonderful treasure and a priceless keepsake for many years to come. It can help create and solidify nice memories for you.
This exercise is similar to making any other personal scrapbook or souvenir album or photo album. You will need a scrapbook, or a notebook, or a binder full of paper. Have a wide variety of writing utensils available, ie: pens, pencils, crayons, markers. Allow for different colors to be used. If you want to get creative with your pages, you could also set out scissors, glue, glitter, strips of fabric or cloth, stencils, rubber stamps, yarn, buttons, dried flowers, photos, ribbons, pretty papers, etc.
Invite each and every one of your internal system parts to design their very own page or two or three about themselves.
The pages are to be created by each of your individual system people to introduce and describe themselves, their activities, their interests, their friends, their history, etc. They each can each decorate and design their pages however they so choose. Encourage your parts to creatively display as much information about themselves on their pages as they are comfortable. It’s also good to include drawings, or photos, or collage, or poems, or lists of information, or “Facts about Me”, etc. The sky is the limit with creative expression!
The purpose of this exercise is to assist your system in getting to know themselves and each other, to increase system communication, and to lower amnesiac barriers between the different parts. As everybody fills out their own personal pages, they are providing a good visual summary for the others in the system to get to know who they are, what they like, what they don’t like, who they know, etc.
There is a particular personal fulfillment in being able to creatively express who you are as an individual. The same principal applies to internal parts as well. Having this freedom of expression is a great way to encourage other levels of communication, and being recognized as an individual within a system is also an important emotional need. The self-worth of each of your internal parts can increase just by being recognized as a valuable part of your system.
Completing a personalized page will be a challenge for many insiders, as they often do not know what they like. It’s ok to let the pages be filled out gradually – there doesn’t have to be a time limit or a rush for completion. In fact, the longer you allow this exercise to continue, the better. Some of your insiders might have to look around in the outside world to find more things that they enjoy. Many of them won’t be used to the idea of “liking anything”. Having the freedom and encouragement to explore, and to pick and choose for themselves will be a very new – and possibly unsettling – but positive experience for many of your internal parts. The entire design side of this exercise could be a totally new experience for most of your parts.
Of course there will be those who are resistant to telling anything at all about themselves to anybody, even to other insiders. These parts do not need to be forced to participate. There will be plenty of other folks that find this exercise to be a fun and creative way to meet each other. Encourage as much of your system as possible to participate in making their own page, and remind everyone to keep looking through the other pages.
View the amount of participation and interest each insider shows as an emotional barometer. The amount and intensity of interest your parts show in completing their pages and looking through other pages will absolutely parallel how comfortable, interested, and willing they are to participate in overall system communication.
This project can be rather involved, and may take days, even weeks, to complete. That’s ok! Hopefully more and more insiders will get involved over time. And as you do ongoing work in your healing process, you will continue to meet new insiders. As those new parts surface, encourage them to add their pages to your scrapbook as soon as they are ready to do so.
Another value in this exercise comes in your working together as a team. Some of the older parts will probably have to help the younger ones. Who is comfortable being near the kids? Everyone will have to take turns. Who gets to go first? Some parts will have to share when they both want to include the same item on their page, and as a system, you’ll have opportunities to problem-solve the various dilemmas. If someone makes a mistake, who will comfort them or assist them? If someone breaks a crayon, will they get in trouble? If these parts see someone new in the scrapbook, will they try to communicate with that new person on the inside? The actual process of learning to work together as a group in creating such a valuable system book is invaluable.
Please do not show this book to anyone you do not completely trust as there is no need to set yourself up for uncomfortable situations with people who are not open to understanding dissociative disorders. This system treasure book is primarily intended for you to get to know you and all your other inside peoples. It is a good therapeutic exercise and I’m sure your therapist will be very interested in seeing it as well.
Get creative, and have fun!
__________
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
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