negotiating sleep (SystemWork)

If you have DID all the rules of  Insomnia – basic sleep hygiene apply, you just might have to work harder to establish them.

There are several different reasons why sleep might be a problem for you.

Sometimes certain parts like to stay up at night. They consider it „their“ time. Find everyone who might enjoy some time out of bed at night, learn about their needs and find a way to meet them during the day. This might mean that you have to re-negotiate how you spend your days and maybe find ways to entertain Littles somewhere else in the system to give the adults a break.

Sometimes parts get hyper alert at night. They might be afraid of

• the dark
• the bed
• silence
• closing their eyes
• nightmares
• …

Learn about who is scared and how they might feel safer. For some Littles that means having a stuffy nearby. Show some compassion with young parts of yourself.

 Nobody else can see this. It might be ok to allow yourself to meet young needs.

Remember that you can use night lamps and white noise to reduce the fear of the dark and quiet.

Some parts might be triggered by things in your bedroom because in the past bad things happened in a place like that.

We would like to suggest a team meeting in your bedroom. Sit down, look around and discuss.

Let everyone share if there is something triggering or scary in the room.

Remove things if possible (and practical).

If they cannot be removed, maybe you can modify them to make them distinctly different from what you remember. You could paint them, add a colorful sticker, cover them etc.

If all that is impossible, play a little game of „same but different“. For this you can work with your parts to find everything about the item that is the same as the thing you remember. Then find all the differences. Then go back to what has been the same and find more differences in the details.

For example it might be that the bed is standing right next to the wall and because of the shape of the room you can’t change that. You might find that yes, it is a bed with 4 legs like the one you used to have and yes, it is also standing right next to the wall. But your bed today is made of wood, not a metal frame and there used to be a picture on that wall but now there is none.

Make sure that you find differences in all the similarities. Maybe you want to write them down so you can remind yourself of those.

Discuss your time of winding down and make a list of the activities that everyone would need for that. Include everyone in your evening ritual.

You might find it helpful to have what we call „pillow talk“ before sleep. That could be a time to check in with everyone, speak softly and reassure everyone that you are safe.

Some find it helpful to imagine tucking everyone into bed.

Some like to have everyone tell everyone goodnight.

Some find it especially helpful to have everyone go to their Safe Place during the night, so they can rest in a pleasant, personal and safe enviroment.

Maybe your mind is racing or you are ruminating.

• Use mindfulness. Listening works the best. Focus on all the sounds you hear, label them, then listen for more. Listen together.
• Use the safe/vault exercise for containment. Let everyone who is thinking too much join in this.
• Use guided imagery for calm and relaxation.

Maybe you struggle with nightmares.

If you wake up from a nightmare you need to make sure that you are oriented in time and space. This is the one exception where you should turn on the lights and make sure you wake up completely. Tell yourself and your parts what has just happened, that you had a nightmare. Look around and use your Skills for grounding. Distract yourself and the Littles from the content of the nightmare thoroughly.

Here is what we do to deal with nightmares It’s magic: chase away nightmares

It’s a little crazy but the most effective tool we have.

You might find it useful to create a sleep kit. That is a Skill kit especially for calming you all down during the night. Discuss what should go in there. Invest if needed. You can put this into a box that you keep in your bedroom. You might want to keep your list of differences in there as well.

If you are clueless about what is going wrong during your nights consider writing a sleep log for a while. Things we write down about every night:

• time we went to bed
• time we woke up
• difficulties we had during the night
• measure we took against those
• hours we slept
• dose of medication we took

This way you can keep track of your sleep. Difficulties that repeat several times can give you a hint what to work on. You can also keep track of the measures that did or did not help with the problem.

Sleep needs a collective effort. Please go through the list of sleep hygiene together. If there is something you cannot agree on, let your parts explain why they won’t help the system with this. Please note that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. This is not a game, it is important. You can find compromises for almost everything if you are open for that. But you need to work together.