This post talks about childhood sexual abuse and sexuality and it’s potentially triggering. Take care of your own well-being and stop reading when you notice signs of dissociation or flashbacks. It is hard to talk about sexual parts without offending anyone. I will share with you an integrative approach and I need you […]
DID
The difference between Ego States and dissociative parts
Ego State approaches are becoming more popular. People are reflecting on their own identity and notice that they actually aren’t one whole, they have ‘parts’. After the ‘Inner Child’ trend in the 80s we are experiencing a new trend where people talk about ‘their inner child’ or ‘their inner teenager’ in an Ego State context. […]
Hands technique for advanced DID SystemWork
A versatile yet simple technique for working with parts of a DID system uses our hands to represent different parts or groups of parts. All these exercises start with at least one part choosing a hand and imagining ‘going into’ that hand by moving their awareness there. In most of the advanced exercises 2 parts […]
Dealing with trance logic in dissociative disorders
Trance logic describes logical glitches that can exist when people get hypnotized and enter a trance state. In that state of mind we can accept statements as true even though they deeply contradict each other. We simply don’t notice that they can’t possibly be true at the same time. Nothing is questioned or reality-checked, it […]
Classification of Dissociative Parts using Action Systems
The attempt to describe dissociative parts of the personality most accurately led to the incorporation of the concept of action systems into the theory. Action systems are considered the most basic subsystems of our human behavior. Actions toward the survival of the species, energy management, attachment, caretaking and social interaction, exploration, play, reproduction and […]
Elements of Integration 2: Realization
Realization is an integrative mental action that needs more and a slightly different kind of energy than synthesis. We take our traumatic and dissociated experience out of the fog of ‘not knowing’ or only ‘kind of knowing’ and enter a felt sense of its reality. It means knowing with our knower that bad things happened […]
Elements of Integration 1: Synthesis
Ideas people have about integration are often vague. Some of these ideas are romantic, others scary but usually they include imagery that doesn’t tell us how integration is supposed to work and ends up being inaccurate. That is why we will look into the basic elements of integration and explain the meaning of synthesis, realization, […]
Review Of The Day (advanced DID SystemWork)
There is an exercise that helps us to find the small things we can change to improve our life for the whole system. It is inspired by an ancient meditation technique we learned long ago. You could call it a review of the day or an evening meditation. We sit down with those of the […]
The Good Enough Host
Being the host of a system is a difficult job. It is not difficult in the same way carrying the trauma memory is, but in its own way. Between managing daily life, the system, therapy and ourselves it is easy to feel inadequate and just never good enough. And it is true that we […]
Mapping for DID/OSDD systems
Mapping is an exercise that is introduced early in DID/OSDD therapy. The goal is to create an overview that shows the different parts of the system in relation to each other. At first the maps will not be complete. They grow, as awareness grows and there will be a certain amount of guessing until we […]
Befriending our nervous system
Most people who experience dysregulation and stress think of it as something bad; they are ashamed or want to make it go away. Befriending our sensations seems contra-intuitive.(If you are new to the language of stress responses you might want to start with the polyvagal ladder) When we reject our stressful experiences we reject […]
Working with categories of parts to solve complex dynamics
There are different ways one could categorize different parts within a dissociative system. None is them is inherently bad, they all describe part of the experience, but they are also all lacking, they can’t describe the whole experience. We think it is wise to know different ways to express things, so we can choose our […]