April 8, 2012
Posted in DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, emotional pain, mental health, Prevention of Sexual Abuse, Trauma tagged Body Memories, DID / MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Easter, Easter 2012, Flashbacks, Happiness, Kathy Broady, making changes, new beginnings, pretty flowers, Spring, traumatic history, Traumatic Memories at 2:46 pm by Kathy Broady
Hello Everyone –
pretty flowers I found just walking around one spring day...
How are you?
I’ve had another few weeks of extremely limited internet time, but it is Easter weekend, and I wanted to come and say a quick hello to you all.
I am aware that this is a very difficult weekend for many of you…. “Happy Easter” is more of an oxymoron than a reality for all too many of you.
For those of you that relate to that, I want you to know that I am thinking of you, and remembering that you are having struggles. And flashbacks. And body memories. And fights against worlds full of darkness, experiencing that conflict from both inside and out.
Please remember: no matter what you’ve seen in your prior years of life, you don’t have to belong to or stay stuck in any of the dark worlds that you were shown or taken to by those who, at that time, had more power or authority than you. This includes those of you that have been more familiar with worlds of darkness, and have always believed that you belonged there, and only there.
Even if that has been true for years of time, that does not have to stay true.
You don’t have to stay connected to worlds of darkness. You can decide to do something different with your life. They didn’t (and won’t) tell you that you can do something different with your life, but you can. Even if they tell you that you can’t, that is not true. You actually can. Your life belongs to you, and only to you, and you can make decisions different from anything anyone else plans for you.
This time of year can be a time of new beginnings for you.
Easter, to me, is full of new beginnings. Here in the USA, it is Spring – a time for new blossoms, new buds, new leaves, new grass, and baby animals are everywhere.
I know that it takes a whole lot of courage to do completely different things with your life, but doing something new can be the beginning of freedom. It can be something beautiful, and it can be something of your own making. It can be hard to change your life, but it can be wonderful and very much worth the effort it takes.
Instead of feeling trapped and weighed down by darkness, your life can be something you are happy about. You can be genuinely content and happy with the places you are going in your life. You can feel proud and pleased with your life.
If you are willing to do what it takes to make such big changes. Change can be scary, but you can do it. I know you can. Believe in yourself, and know that you are worth the effort.
So I wish you all a Happy Easter today.
If it’s not a Happy Easter just yet, have hope that one day, you too can have a happy day.
Warmly,
Kathy
Copyright © 2008-2012 Kathy Broady and Discussing Dissociation
Like this:
Like Loading...
Permalink
December 9, 2008
Posted in DID Education, DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, mental health, sexual abuse, therapy, Therapy and Counseling, Trauma tagged Add new tag, Addiction, Amnesia, Anxiety, Bipolar, Body Image, Body Memories, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Depression, DID / MPD, dissociate, Dissociation, dissociative, dissociative disorders, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Emotional Abuse, Emotional Crisis, Emotional Healing, Exploitation, Grief, Healing, Hurting, Integration, Isolation, multiple personality disorder, pain, Physical Abuse, Pornography, Prostitution, Relationship, Ritual Abuse, sadistic, Safety, Self Esteem, Self Injury, sexual abuse, Sexually Abused, Social Anxiety, Social Skill, split personality, splitting, Stabilization, Suicidal, Suicidal Behavior, System Work, Therapeutic Process, Trauma Bond, Trauma Survivor, trauma therapist, traumatic history, treatment, treatment for DID, Violence at 7:06 pm by Kathy Broady
“How long will it take for me to feel better?”
As a clinical therapist, I hear that question frequently. It’s a reasonable question. I certainly understand that when someone is deeply hurting and struggling in their life, they want to feel better as quickly as possible.
However, the clinical treatment for someone with DID / MPD is long term. Some research has said that the treatment can be completed within two or three years, but in my clinical experience, that is far from the truth.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is a result of long-term, chronic, severe, sadistic child abuse. As children, these survivors witnessed and experienced a myriad of heinous crimes. They typically describe repeated consuming abuse by multiple perpetrators, and then were otherwise emotionally neglected, starving for comfort, consolation, or attention. They were left alone, even while very young, to process and contain their pain by themselves. For these children, the splitting process became their way of coping with emotional intensity, conflicts, huge distress, and intense pain that were otherwise far too difficult to manage on their own. They blocked off their pain, locked it away from themselves, and left it there. Sitting, waiting, piling up for years.
When you understand how much pain and abuse has occurred in order to create the dissociative splits in the first place, it is no wonder that the healing process is also so very long. All areas of dissociative survivors’ lives are touched and profoundly changed or affected by the abuse. It simply takes a very long time to address everything properly.
Some of the treatment issues are:
- Stabilization of the person – both internally and externally
- Managing and eliminating self-injury and self-harm issues
- Examining and obtaining current-day external safety from abuse
- Internal system safety
- Developing effective internal communication
- Calming internal noise and chaos
- Working specifically with child parts
- Working specifically with adult parts
- Working specifically with teenage parts
- Learning about the other system parts
- Working with internal perpetrator introjects
- Creating emotional separation from external perpetrators
- Working with triggers
- Correcting cognitive distortions
- Addressing gender confusion, male vs. female issues
- Processing emotions
- Body image issues
- Reducing time loss, memory loss, amnesia
- Time confusion, time distortion
- Trauma processing – memory work
- Body memories and kinesthetic issues
- Understanding re-enactments and trauma bonds
- Healing sexual abuse issues
- Healing physical abuse issues
- Healing emotional abuse issues
- Healing ritualized abuse issues
- Healing exploitation, pornography, prostitution, sex slavery issues
- Managing family, marital, parenting issues
- Addressing addictions
- Managing eating disorders
- Household management issues – improving daily functioning
- Relationship issues and teaching social skills
- Understanding the effects of trauma on the brain
- Improving self-independence and self-reliance
- Improving self esteem issues
- Leaving disability and regaining employment
- Depression and medication management
- Bipolar disorder and medication management
- Anxiety / Panic and medication management
- Post-traumatic stress issues (PTSD)
- Reducing phobias
- Social anxiety and social isolation
- Safely eliminating suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviors
- Homicidal ideation and anger management
- Exploring spiritual confusion
- Philosophical issues
- Detachment and separation issues
- Treating sleep disorders
- Treating medical complications and physical harm resulting from the abuse
- Reaching integration, blended states, or effective system team work
That’s a tremendous amount of work. And most of these issues surface again and again and again, requiring in-depth attention on a regular basis for years of time.
Emotional healing on such a wide scale just does not happen fast. Forcing the issues or pretending to be “done” sooner than realistically possible is not helpful.
Simply put, years of severe injuries will require years of intense healing.
It takes as long as it takes.
__________
by:
Kathy Broady, LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
Like this:
Like Loading...
Permalink
December 8, 2008
Posted in DID Education, DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, mental health, sexual abuse, therapy, Therapy and Counseling, Trauma tagged Child Abuse, Childhood Sexual Abuse, coping skill, Coping Strategies, DID / MPD, dissociate, dissociative, dissociative disorders, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Emotional Crisis, emotional pain, Healing, multiple personality disorder, pain, Safety, severe abuse, sexual abuse, Sexually Abused, split, split personality, splitting, Therapeutic Process, Trauma, Trauma Survivor, trauma therapist, traumatic history, treatment, treatment for DID at 12:32 pm by Kathy Broady
Do you feel like you can be very different people?
Do you have trouble remembering what happened through your week?
Do you have minimal memories of your childhood?
Do you feel a lot of conflict within yourself, and have unexplainable extremes in your behavior, thoughts, or attitudes?
Do you have conversations in your head, and do the voices in your head talk about you?
Read on…. This article is for you. And no, you are not crazy.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder (MPD) is an adaptive response to a very maladaptive environment. It develops in response to trauma severe enough that people can only handle the experience by mentally splitting themselves off from it. A common thought becomes, “that’s not happening to me – it’s happening to somebody else.” By forming other selves to handle traumatic situations, the person compartmentalizes the experiences and dissociates themselves from their occurrence. This allows the person to maintain a separated sense of self, safely secluded away from danger. even when their physical body is obviously forced to participate in intolerable activities.
The treatment for DID is based on reversing and repairing this splitting and separating. This amazing coping skill, once highly adaptive in traumatic situations and originally a life- and sanity-saving strategy, eventually causes great disturbances in a person’s life. Over the course of time, the depth of pain, the volume of emotionally laden memories and experiences, the constant conflict between too many opposing needs, the hidden loss of original self, and the chaos of having many separate selves all become too overwhelming to manage. The dissociative walls that once neatly separated these areas begin to crumble — complications, confusion, disarray ensues.
By this time, therapeutic treatment for dissociative disorders can be highly beneficial.
As these survivors gain safety from any ongoing abuse and any ongoing reason to dissociate, they can begin the process of healing and re-associating themselves with their parts. This occurs gradually, as they connect with the painful, emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual experiences that forced them to split and separate in the first place. Only as they re-learn about their traumatic history, meet the needs that went unmet at the time, find comfort for their pain, and develop a safe life without trauma, can they heal the emotional wounds that have been left unattended for so many years.
The dissociative treatment process is long and complex because of the depth of the issues involved. Typically for those with DID, the abuse occurred for years, with a wide variety of offenders, and a significant lack of comfort or assurance of safety. Pain, crisis and trauma became an “everyday normal reality” and no area of life was unaffected by such extreme trauma. Healing from this depth of injury takes time because there is so much healing to do.
If you are dissociative and you’ve carried your hidden pain within your hidden selves for too long, healing through the reconnection process is beautiful. It is not easy, but it is very much worth the effort.
__________
by:
Kathy Broady, LCSW
www.AbuseConsultants.com
www.SurvivorForum.com
Like this:
Like Loading...
Permalink
