September 9, 2009
Encouragement on a Difficult Day
Hello Everyone,
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To those of you that have been having a very difficult day today – please know that you can fight that.
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You don’t have to do anything dangerous.
You don’t have to hurt yourself.
You don’t have to do anything harmful to yourself.
You don’t have to go to places where you get hurt.
You don’t have to go to places where your insiders get hurt.
You don’t have to go to places where someone else wants you to hurt.
You don’t have to give yourself to something that is dark and harmful.
You don’t have to go where you get stripped naked.
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Find someone safe. There really are safe people out there.
Stay by them. Stay with them. Stay near them.
Learn about protecting yourself, and your insiders.
You can be safe from all that hurt, you really can.
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I wanted you to know that there are kind helping people that understand why you are having such a difficult time today.
You are not alone in your struggle today.
I’m not going to explain much out here on this public blog – I know that far too many of you will already know what I mean.
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But yes, you can get help and support and understanding…
From gentle people who will not strip you naked.
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You can be who you want to be.
You can be who you decide that you are.
You don’t have to be who they say that you are.
You can be who you say you are.
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———-
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
March 22, 2009
Child Parts – When They Hold Suicidal Power and Influence
We’ve had some very interesting discussions on the “What do you think about Suicide?” blog article. Thank you to everyone who writes and comments on this blog – your participation is valued and appreciated.
One of the topics that surfaced on that thread is the idea that trauma survivors with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID/MPD) may have child parts within their system that can be suicidal, and that the ability to control the suicidal behavior of these child parts seems overwhelmingly difficult, even for the adults of the dissociative system.
I’d like to write an official response to that.
Typically, one thinks of child parts as a permanently young child – an inside part that holds the trauma memories, feelings, rememberings, and experiences that happened when the body was of a young chronological age. These child parts act like children, think like children, reason like children. Their thinking is often very concrete and their grammar / spelling / speech is child-like as well.
So, how does a child part, who is likened after an actual child, have the ability to be suicidal when typically, children do not even understand what death is?
How can these child parts have the ability to act outside of the control of the adults in the system?
There is at least one possible answer for that.
For dissociative trauma survivors, their childhood was filled with abusive perpetrators. Some — not all — DID survivors have experienced an organized type of abuse by organized groups of perpetrators. These organized groups could have presented themselves as sex slavery groups, or cult groups, or governmental / mind control experimental groups. Any which way, the abuse was more than home-based, chaotic dysfunctional family-crisis abuse. With organized abuse, there would have been a goal, a purpose, and a long-term plan for ongoing and continued abuse and total control of the victim by the offenders.
Organized perpetrators very often purposefully split off child parts and attach suicidal programming to these children. Even while the children are at a very young age, these organized perpetrators demand complete control of the mind and behavior of the child. These perpetrators know they are committing horrendous crimes to their victims, and are invested in keeping the children silenced about these crimes. They instill these controls early in life, and then have every intention of keeping this level of control over the victim for as many years into adulthood as possible. Organized perpetrators actually want life-long control. They begin their domination during the victim’s childhood with the intention of being able to keep that child under their control for their entire life.
Using suicidal programming as a way to control and manipulate behavior is one of the most effective ways for abusers to protect their secrets. Perpetrators have a variety of horrific techniques that they use to accomplish this goal.
The result is that a child part can be cued or triggered into suicidal thinking, can have a suicidal plan, and could potentially follow the instructions planted in their brain with the same level of intensity as any other mind-controlled person. The child part does not have to understand what they are doing, nor do they have to understand what death is, nor do they have to understand the effects of their behavior. They just have to know what to do, step by step. These child parts have simply been taught clearly defined, specifically detailed behaviors to follow upon command, and they have been taught to follow those controls without thinking.
Perpetrators attach suicidal programming to young children not only at the earliest point of intervention, but also because it goes to their advantage that these child parts genuinely do not understand what death is. The children know what obedience is and the mind control trainers take advantage of that. Children cannot reason past the orders to understand that they are being told to do something that is harmful to them. They cannot grasp the concept of death enough to fear it the way an adult would, but they know what happens in they don’t obey, so the programming is attached to this level of thinking without any risk of interference by “fear of death”.
In effective trauma therapy, these controls can be removed safely, and the person — both the child parts and the adult parts — can reclaim their own power and control of their behavior. However, as long as the programmed responses are hidden secretly within the child part, the person is at risk for suicidal behavior.
If you are experiencing these kind of suicidal controls, please work with an experienced trauma therapist while addressing these issues. It is imperative that you handle suicidal programming with great caution, and do not assume that just any therapist can do this level of work.
Find a genuine trauma specialist to help you remove suicidal programming from your child parts.
Your safety matters. And yes, you can reclaim the control of your own life.
If you are considering individual therapy work to address these issues, please contact me through AbuseConsultants.com. Be very careful about exposing too much of this kind of personal information on a public blog site.
Your safety is important.
__________
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
March 21, 2009
30 Potential Blocks in the Therapy Process
The healing process for Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID/MPD) is very long, involved and complex. The article, 50 Treatment Issues for Dissociative Identity Disorder, lists out many of the steps involved in trauma therapy. While that list is comprehensive, it still only covers the surface steps. What tasks do you need to tackle next?
It takes years of time to work through all the issues and complications created from severe trauma and dissociative splitting, and while that length of time may feel discouraging in the beginning, let me assure you that progress truly is possible. You really can heal from your hurt and traumas and lead productive happy, healthy lives.
Therapy is somewhat like the progression through years of school. Therapy work builds upon itself through time to involve a lot of additional steps – the basics needing to be accomplished and mastered first. If the basics are neglected or not learned well, then therapy will get stuck — and if someone goes to school and gets stuck in the fifth grade for three years, they are going to feel very frustrated, especially if the goal is to graduate from high school.
So what keeps a person stuck and unable to progress further in their healing? What blocks their therapy from moving forward?
Sometimes people get comfortable addressing only the surface layers of their trauma. Sometimes they get too afraid to address the deeper layers of their system. Therapeutic resistance can be normal for various periods of time. But will avoiding those areas of your healing bring you the peace of mind that you want?
What if you have been in therapy for years already and are still struggling desperately? Blocks and stalemates in the therapy process usually lead to increased depression, ongoing anxiety, more self-injury, not to mention the added frustration and wasted time and resources. While it is important to tackle the healing process at your own pace, it is also good to make significant treatment gains at every step of the way.
What is missing in your therapy process?
What is interfering with your therapy process?
Where are you resistant to change?
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Here are some of the common reasons that people get stuck in their healing process:
- A fear of seeing the abuse – wanting to keep those dissociative walls in place
- A lack of resources, and financial constraints to being able to get sufficient help
- A refusal to accept that loving family members were also abusive monsters
- An adamant refusal to look at who the abusers were
- Anger – wanting a “safe target” to fight with instead of a therapist for assistance and guidance
- Being too busy testing everyone over and over instead of getting to the actual therapy work
- Clinging to denial, clinging to denial, clinging to denial
- Comfort Clingers – wanting to stay hurting, even on purpose, to get comforting responses from other people
- Creating distractions from therapy work
- Current-day abusers actively sabotaging the progress you are making in therapy
- Current-day control by external abusers reinforcing the fear of telling
- External life issues become too overwhelming, ie: kids, school, work, finances,
- Fatigue, frustration, and just being tired of trauma issues being the center of your life
- Fear of learning more, of future consequences, of any number of things.
- Fear of other loved ones being hurt or abused if certain secrets are exposed
- Finger-pointing blame at others instead of being self-responsible for movement and changes
- Genuinely incompetent therapy or working with an uninformed therapist
- Interference of addictions – any form of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sex addition, etc
- Internal programming is running interference and not being removed or addressed
- Laziness – thinking that healing happens magically without having to put in the hard work required
- Not really and truly wanting to do the therapy work – simply going through the motions instead
- Outgrowing the therapeutic knowledge and assistance that your current therapist can offer
- Putting more effort into helping / rescuing others than addressing personal issues
- Refusal to speak with the others in your system
- Refusing to acknowledge, admit, or address your own negative behavior
- Sabotage – of self, of relationships, of therapy
- Self-injury, self-destructive behaviors, suicidal behavior
- The front host refusing to speak with the inside system
- The Ostrich Syndrome — denial or blindness to seeing the reality of the problem
- Threats of ongoing abuse if certain secrets are exposed
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What is blocking your therapy and healing?
__________
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
March 19, 2009
What do you think about Suicide?
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Suicide is a difficult topic.
All too many trauma survivors feel drawn to it.
Mental health professionals fight against it.
Insurance companies dismiss it.
Religions disagree about it.
The world out there doesn’t know how to interpret it. The world does not know how to talk about it. It’s controversial and complex. There are no simple answers.
Who’s to blame for it? The individual? The parents? The treating physicians? The perpetrators that caused the initial pain? The spouse or other family members?
And do we have to have someone to blame?
When you think about suicide, do you think that it is…
- A last resort?
- Abusive?
- Ambivalent?
- An avoidance?
- Comforting?
- Controlled?
- Depressing?
- Destructive?
- Devastating?
- Discouraging?
- Disrespectful?
- Good?
- Heartbreaking?
- Horrifying?
- Isolating?
- Lonely?
- Manipulative?
- Overwhelming?
- Painful?
- Peaceful?
- Punishing?
- Relieving?
- Reluctant?
- Right?
- Scary?
- Selfish?
- Someone’s right to choose?
- Stupid?
- Tragic?
- Upsetting?
- Wrong?
- An option?
- Never an option?
- A compulsion?
- Something outside of your control?
- Your destiny?
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If you have ever truly cared for someone who has committed suicide, your life will be forever changed.
I am convinced that one of the absolutely most painful and devastating traumatic heartbreaks is to have a loved one commit suicide. The surviving friends and family members are left with questions that will forever remain unanswered. Children whose parents commit suicide are forever scarred, and parents whose children commit suicide are forever in gut-wrenching pain.
If you are suicidal, please get help immediately.
Your life matters more than you realize.
There is hope for you.
There is help for you.
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———-
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
March 15, 2009
Addressing Depression in Trauma Disorders
It is no secret that trauma survivors get depressed, and depression is the most commonly known and experienced mental health disorder.
Typical depression symptoms include:
- Suicidal thoughts, recurring death thoughts, death wishes
- Suicidal behavior and suicide attempts
- Self destructive behavior, self injury, self harm
- Feelings of worthlessness, guilt, self hatred, or not deserving to live
- Loss of energy, fatigue, excessive sleeping
- Little or no interest or pleasure in anything or anybody
- Inability to think, or to concentrate, or to make decisions
- Significant but unintentional changes in weight loss or weight gain
- Significant but unintentional changes in appetite
- For children, not making normal and expected weight gains and physical growth
For trauma survivors, depression can have layered meanings beyond the typical medical symptoms.
Repeated patterned depressions can be very much related to a specific or recurring trauma, or to a significant loss. For dissociative survivors with DID/MPD, the information detailing the specific loss or trauma may be hidden away or blocked off by dissociative walls. Someone in your system might know why you are feeling depressed, and they might know what the loss is, but the host / front personalities might not have a clue.
Do you have a pattern of depression occurring at the same time of year each year?
Think back through all the years. Do you have any hints that tell you how far back this pattern goes? Do you repeatedly feel the need for hospitalization at the same time each year? Do you find yourself struggling more than usual at the same time each year? Do you find yourself having thoughts of suicide or self-injury more often at a specific time of year? Do you know how long this pattern of depression been happening?
If you have Dissociative Identity Disorder, be sure to check inside and to ask your various inside parts what they have noticed as well. Some of your insiders might have a different awareness of patterns and events than you do.
For repeated patterned depressions, it is important to find the original starting point of this depression pattern. Once you do, you will get more clues as to what it is about.
My general approach to repeated depressions that follow a pattern is to “assume” that there is a trauma-based reason for it. Unless you have a better explanation, in terms of a bipolar type depression pattern, or a seasonal depression pattern, then quite possibly it is a trauma-based pattern.
Look around inside, ask around inside, to see if there is anyone that knows the depressed time of year to be a particularly bad time for them. While you are talking with your system, be sure to pay attention to the following ideas:
- Who inside feels the depression the most?
- Do you see anyone inside who is showing the depression in the way that they are sitting, standing, laying, not communicating, not being “their usual self”, etc?
- When you look at your internal system, who is showing / feeling the biggest list of depression symptoms?
- If you can’t automatically see an internal someone who is depressed, take a broader look at your internal world. When you walk around your internal landscape, can you find-feel-sense the center of it?
- Is there a place inside where the depression feels the most intense vs. the generalized depression of everyone (similar to finding the eye of a hurricane).
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Other trauma-related questions you can ask your insiders include:
- Were there any significant losses that happened at this time of year?
- Who in your system has experienced these losses? (Do not assume that everyone in your system is aware of the same losses!)
- Did you or anyone inside lose a child /children, or a close friend, or a loved one at this time of year?
- Are your feelings of grief and loss repeatedly surfacing as a type of depression?
- Was anyone inside specifically traumatized or abused at this point in time each year?
- What happened? What do you know about that trauma?
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For dissociative trauma survivors, a significant period of depression can be a very important clue that there is an unresolved trauma waiting to be addressed. If you have the room in your life to explore its foundations, and to address how the trauma issues are related to that recurring depression, you will be able to interrupt and resolve the depression itself.
———–
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
January 3, 2009
Overcoming Instability Issues and Unsuccessful Memory Work
Kerro commented:
I have a question about stability. I accept that I need to be reliable, motivated, responsible and willing to delve into things I generally don’t want to delve into. As for stability – I can see how a stable client is easier to work with for a therapist. However, what if the beginning stages of therapy have resurfaced old issues or retraumatised the client to the extent that they are now “unstable”? How would this fit with your schema? And what should the therapist’s (and client’s) roles be in re-stabilising?
Typically trauma survivors, particularly those with Dissociative Identity Disorder and PTSD enter therapy because their life is already full of emotional complications, symptoms of depression, anxiety, self-injury, internal chaos, flashbacks, confusion, memory loss, time distortion, time loss, body numbing, nightmares, voices, etc. As a whole, people do not enter therapy because their life is already stable. They go to therapy because they have some awareness that they are starting to fall apart. There is something wrong, something very uncomfortable, and something very unmanageable about their life. They may not be able to define it, but they can feel it and see it in the way their life is unraveling.
And yes, Kerro, you are right. There are various stages of therapy that can be quite de-stabilizing, yet maintaining stabilization is a fundamental building block of therapy. Sometimes the path seems like two steps forward, one step back. And, yes, there are times when it feels more like one step forward, two steps back. It is a very fine balance. To do the healing work required for trauma survivors to gain overall life stability, these survivors have to address painful difficult issues that are potentially de-stabilizing.
So, not doing the work leaves people de-stabilized.
But doing the work also can cause people to be de-stabilized.
Some days, it feels like the line between the two is nonexistent.
Now what?!
Take it slowly, one step at a time. Look ahead, increase your self-awareness, try to maintain the stability that you have, and try to predict the areas of your stability are the shakiest and and prepare for them ahead of time. This is important.
What is stability?
Stability consists of a lot of different elements all at once. Some examples of stability are when survivors:
- Can manage intense emotions without using serious self-injury to cope.
- Can be challenged with something emotionally difficult without making it ”the end of the world” or some other dramatic crisis.
- Are willing to move forward by learning about new areas of life and using new coping skills, instead of self-destructing from the same old place and/or blaming others for their lack of progress.
- Do not consider suicide as a realistic problem-solving solution to difficult situations.
- Can manage feeling depressed, and even suicidal, but knowing they wouldn’t actually do anything lethal or harmful.
- Take their medication as prescribed, regularly and consistently.
- Eat regularly, without starving themselves or without bingeing repeatedly.
- Get a regular, sufficient amount of sleep, rest, and personal down time.
- Have a steady source of monthly income that meets their basic needs.
- Can incorporate painful trauma memory work into their lives without self-destructing or attacking others.
- Work cooperatively with their internal system without attacking each other from within.
- Maintain a safe and consistent distance from and/or can establish boundaries with people that repeatedly abuse them.
- Can keep their regular job/employment, even while working on therapy issues.
- Can use their dissociative skills to their advantage, instead of to their detriment.
Sometimes therapy is like walking through a minefield. If you know you have to get through the minefield to survive, but there is the potential that you will set off one of the mines on your way through, you would tread very carefully. You would check everything you do, in smaller and more detailed increments. You would listen and watch for clues every single step of the way.
In the therapy process, once you start feeling a little too de-stabilized in a particular direction, back off and stop pushing that issue at the moment. Give it a break for an hour, a day, a week, a month — depending on the circumstance. Get to know yourself and what you can handle. Learn your own red flags for when you are starting to fall apart and getting too overwhelmed. Give yourself the space and the time to do your work. There’s no need to rush headlong into things that particularly de-stabilize you.
Remember, when healing from trauma, there are usually many, many different areas of healing. Remember the list of 50 different treatment issues for DID/MPD? If you are finding one area too difficult to deal with right now, simply put that issue on hold, and work on a different area. They ALL have to be done. They ALL have to be addressed. You can decide when something is genuinely too difficult, or too tangled, or too emotional, or too destabilizing for right now.
As a general rule of thumb, put internal communication work and system work as the first steps to focus on. If you cannot even speak to your insiders, you certainly will not be able to tolerate their intense emotional trauma memories.
In years gone by, the mental health profession used to promote abreactive memory work as valid and necessary. I absolutely, unequivocally disagree with that. Abreactions are often hypnotically induced, and they are basically inducing a flashback — putting the person back in time and directly into the intensity of the trauma. Most survivors find they do not even recall abreactive work, so as far as I am concerned, it is an absolute waste of time, and just leaves the person feeling more traumatized than healed.
If you cannot speak, in your normal voice, discussing your trauma memories from the safety of the here-and-now while still connected in the present, then don’t even try to address your memories. It is too soon.
In my opinion, memory work is NOT the core of the healing from dissociative disorders. I believe that developing the internal communication, internal cooperation between parts, and system teamwork is a much more important element, as well as being crucial to a person’s stability. Decreasing the dissociation and separation between the inside people has many facets to it. The trauma is only one area of separation between insiders. Build strong connections with each other first and then, much further down the road, address the memory / trauma issues, and you will likely find that the memory work is much less de-stabilizing than it once was.
Memory work has its role, and yes, survivors do have to process their trauma. Please know that you are not getting a “free pass” on not addressing that. BUT, it is not the first goal of treatment, and it is certainly not the main focus of the therapy.
In your outside life, when you first walk up to someone new, as you are first meeting them, do you say, “Hi. You don’t know who I am. I don’t know who you are. But I want to know your most painful memories. Tell me all your deepest, darkest secrets RIGHT NOW.”
Hello??? Of course you don’t approach people like that. SO, don’t approach your insiders that way either. Get to know them as people first. Find out who they are, what they are like. Build a relationship, a connection, and a rapport with them first.
In fact, building connections in your internal system, building that teamwork approach, improving communication, and etc. is the main and most effective stabilizing factor that I know. Once you truly can connect with your insiders, and you care for them and have relationships with them, you can hear their trauma through an entirely different perspective. You will have compassion for your inner people, and that will help you to heal. Jerking their memories out of them before you even have a relationship with them isn’t good for anyone.
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.
__________
by:
Kathy Broady LCSW
December 23, 2008
10 Qualities Therapists Recognize in Good Clients, part 2
Hello to all my Readers,
I hope this day finds you doing well.
The first part of this article certainly caused a little stir, and maybe raised a few eyebrows along the way. Please know, my intention in posting these blogs is not to offend anyone. If you have any questions or concerns about anything I’ve posted, please comment and let me know what you’re thinking! And here’s a big Thank You! to the folks who did comment to the “Part 1″ post. I appreciate that.
Let me try framing the context of this article. In previous blog posts, we’ve been discussing questions to ask a new therapist. This article is, in some ways, a follow-up to that idea, because these are the kinds of things a therapist is going to be thinking about / assessing in new clients as they arrive at their door. These are also the strengths that you want to emphasize when you are meeting a new therapist.
If you approach your therapy keeping these qualities in mind, you will honestly find that more therapists will stay interested in working with you for the long haul. That is not to say you have to be perfect. Who is???! It means, work on these things. Be mindful of them. Developing these strengths will make you a better person overall, and that is very much the goal of therapy.
These qualities, in my opinion, have nothing to do with mental illness. I have worked with some very disturbed people with huge issues, and yet, they possessed these qualities, and they made huge progess in their healing. I’ve also seen some folks who appeared to be rather high-functioning, and yet, they did not, or could not grasp some of these basic ideas.
I agree with the brave soul who commented that these qualities are an important part of everyday life. The more that survivors strive to incorporate these strengths into their approach to everything, the better. Your self esteem will improve, your self-dignity will be solid, and people around you will appreciate you more.
I don’t expect every trauma survivor to have a solid grasp on these qualities, but I do hope every trauma survivor strives to.
Intermingle these strengths into your life everywhere that you can. You’ll be glad you did!
And here is part 2 of the article, “10 Qualities Therapists Recognize in Good Clients”:
6. Honesty and Trustworthiness
- Are you willing to be honest with yourself?
- Are you willing to lie to your therapist, or hide information, or lie by omission?
- Do you gossip and tell lies behind people’s backs?
- Do you gossip about your therapist?
- Do you lie to your inside parts? Does anyone in your system try to trick or deceive the others in your system?
Therapeutic relationships are built on honesty and trust. Your therapist will need to know you possess these qualities as well.
7. Loyalty
- Will you treat your friends and family members with kindness and respect even if they have done things you do not like?
- Will you loyally protect your internal system from predators and perpetrators, putting the safety of your inside parts as a priority?
- Are you loyal to your therapeutic process and will you keep clear boundaries around the therapeutic process?
- Will you respect your therapist’s trust in you to the same degree that you expect your therapist to respect your trust in them?
- If you and your therapist experience a conflict, where do you look to resolve that? Do you expect to resolve the conflict within the context of therapy, or will you spread the conflict outside the therapeutic relationship and draw others into it?
Your therapist and support team can be your greatest allies in your healing journey. However, a deep level of mutual respect is expected and needed in order to progress in therapy. It is crucial that you thoroughly differentiate the “good guys” from the “bad guys”. Therapists understand the concepts of transference and projection, and they will work with you in those tender moments, but there will be limits to that. I can promise you, your helpers do not want to be thrown under the bus any more than anyone else.
8. Creativity
- Are you determined to do the same things over and over again?
- Are you open to trying new options?
- Can you think outside of the box instead of being boxed in?
- Do you help to problem-solve the various dilemmas that surface?
- Will you work on ways to reach even the most difficult of insiders? Even if this involves several failed attempts before you successfully connect with these parts?
We’ve all heard the saying, “the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again, expecting to get different results.” A huge part of the healing process is learning new things and doing different things.
9. Gratitude and Appreciation
- Do you appreciate what people do for you?
- Do you recognize when someone is doing something for you?
- Do you thank them for helping you?
- In relationships, do you overlook smaller imperfections in appreciation of bigger strengths?
- Do you thank others in your dissociative internal system for the ways they have helped you to survive through the years? Do you recognize their strengths and talents in the current day?
Gratitude and appreciation are key elements of any healthy relationship. Don’t take the goodness of others for granted. Be thankful for what you receive from others.
10. Safety
- Are you a safe person?
- Do you use threats of violence, or threats of harm to others, or threats of emotional blackmail, or threats of any kind to destroy or control other people or to get your own way?
- Do you threaten self-harm or suicide as a way to manipulate others or to get your own way?
- Are you willing to hurt yourself or someone else in order to get your way, including others in your internal system?
- How far is “too far” to go to get what you want or prove you are “right”? Do you think there is such a thing as “too far”?
Therapists will model safe behavior. If you are acting in ways that are unsafe for yourself or manipulative of those around you, your therapist will set boundaries with you — just as you should set boundaries with someone who is unsafe in your direction.
If you follow these guidelines, you will have a much better relationship with your therapist and others around you. If you are looking for a new therapist, remember that the more you can genuinely offer in the areas listed above, the more those therapists will view you as a client with potential — and the more positive potential you demonstrate in these areas of your life, the greater interest more therapists will have in working with you. It goes to your advantage, your healing, your self-respect, and the amount of respect others will feel toward you to learn these things.
All people, including trauma survivors with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID/MPD), can claim these strengths as their own. Work hard to be a “good person” in your therapy, and you’ll be amazed at how much difference this can make in your relationship with your therapist and with your system. Remember:
Maintain your stability the best you can.
Be dependable in what you do, and do what you say you will do.
Maintain your motivation and your willingness to work hard.
Be courageous, even when it is scary.
Stay clear and upfront about your personal responsibilities.
Be honest and trustworthy at all times.
Stay loyal to your helpers.
Be creative in the hard times.
Have gratitude and appreciation for the good things and good people.
And be a safe person. Be safe for yourself, and be safe for others.
You can do it. I’m just sure of it.
__________
by:
Kathy Broady LCSW
December 22, 2008
10 Qualities a Therapist Recognizes in a Good Client, part 1
Most clients quickly think of the many qualities they want in their therapists. However, are those clients also thinking about whether or not they are presenting themselves as the type of client someone would want to work with? As an experienced psychotherapist, I am proposing that there are many criteria for clients to consider about themselves as well as about their prospective therapists.
Many of the following issues pertain specifically to trauma survivors and those with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID/MPD).
Please consider the following concepts as important guidelines.
1. Stability
- Are you in a constant or repeated state of crisis?
- Are you looking for someone to rescue you immediately?
- Are you repeatedly in a suicidal or self-injurious panic?
- Do you make more than one emergency call every few months?
- Are you frequently in drunken states, or on the verge of over-dosing, or on the verge of self-injury or suicide?
Most therapists are not as interested in taking on heavily crisis-laden clients. The more stable you are, the more therapeutic options you will find.
2. Dependability
- Do you show up for every appointment?
- Do you cancel at the last minute?
- Do you pay for your sessions up-front and without issue, irritation, or complication?
- Do you do you keep your word, and follow through with the things you say you will do?
- Do you regularly pass important information between the leaders of your internal system, and not hide behind dissociative amnesia as an excuse?
The same as employers, babysitters, and doctors, therapists want to be able to count on you. They don’t want scheduling nightmares, and they don’t want to have to beg or fight for their pay. Remember, there are a lot of other people involved in each weekly schedule, so keep your time spot precious to you. Show your therapist that your therapy work matters to you.
3. Motivation and Willingness
- Are you willing to do what it takes to get through your healing process?
- Are you open to new ideas?
- Are you resistant to change? Do you react with irritation, anger, frustration, or refusals when you are expected or encouraged to change?
- Do you complete your homework each week?
- Do you bring new issues of needed work to the table? Are you presenting topics that need to be addressed? Or are you waiting for someone else to point the trouble spots out to you?
Coming to therapy typically means you are looking for some type of change in your life. If you are happy with the way things are, or you do not see any areas that need work, or you do not see any changes that you are willing to make, why are you going to therapy in the first place?
4. Courage
- Change and healing require taking new steps – both little steps and big steps. Can you do that? Will you do that?
- Are you too scared or too anxious or too depressed to try anything new?
- Are you willing to venture into difficult, complicated, painful areas of therapy work?
- Are you willing to look at painful memories when it’s therapeutically needed or recommended?
- Are you willing to look at the reality of toxic, abusive, or dangerous relationships, even those with your loved ones or family members?
Therapists can help you address your fears, your problems, and your issues, but only if you are willing to allow that to happen.
5. Personal Responsibility
- Are you willing to look at what you are doing to contribute to the problems you are experiencing?
- Are you willing to face your part of the problem, rather than focusing exclusively on blaming others?
- Are you genuinely open to hearing feedback about your issues?
- Do you retain the things you have learned from session to session, month after month? Will you be able to apply what you learn over time, or will you continue to use dysfunctional responses over and over?
- Even if you are dissociative, are your adult parts in charge of and responsible for your child parts? Are you able to maintain an adult presence when necessary?
The more responsibility you take for your own healing, your feelings, your behavior, etc, the further you will go in your healing process.
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(Please come back — the second half of this article will be posted tomorrow.)
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by:
Kathy Broady LCSW
