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 […]
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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 […]
Pendulation in Trauma Therapy
Pendulation is an essential body work tool that can be useful in many areas of trauma treatment. It describes the inner motion of our attention and awareness, moving back and forth between a resource/resourceful place and something trauma-related/ a place that is low in resources. The goal is to dissolve states that are stuck, […]
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 […]
Analysis of dissociation for behavioral therapy
Behavioral therapy heavily relies on analyzing behavior to find out how to improve it. I often get asked if I can provide a worksheet for a behavior analysis for dissociation and the answer is No. Dissociation is not behavior. It is an involuntary stress response. Involuntary means that it is not conscious, by […]
The Clay Field – alternative treatment of developmental trauma
Work with The Clay Field is a mix of all kinds of therapy concepts. We can see elements of art therapy, Jungian symbolism, gestalt therapy and sensorimotor therapy. I like to think of it as a form of body work where the main body-focus is on the hands and on experiencing things with our hands […]
The Logic of Survival – Understanding Coping Behavior
Traumatized people usually show behavior that is outside the norm in at least some areas of life. These coping behaviors often get stigmatized as mental illness and dysfunction. But once we understand how a child survives unsafe situations we realize that these behaviors are strictly logical. They can be understood and they make sense. They […]
The Freeze Response and how to get out of it again
The freeze response is one of our natural, involuntary stress responses. It happens when the parasympathetic activation starts to overpower the sympathetic arousal. The sympathetic signs of high muscle tone are still visible as an underlying energy, but we moved down the polyvagal ladder into immobility. Imagine that the foot that carries your weight stepped […]
Book Review: Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors (J. Fisher)
Healing the fragemented selves of trauma survivors: overcoming internal self-alienation by Janina Fisher Written for: Therapist who treat trauma-related problems like cPTSD, BPD, eating disorders, addiction, chronic suicidality and self-harming behaviors or dissociative disorders, including simple cases of DID but mostly OSDD people who have any of these problems based on childhood trauma or […]
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 […]
Denial and Doubt in Dissociative Disorders
Denial and self-doubt is such a common problem in dissociative disorders that some argue it should be part of the diagnostic criteria. The definitions of denial include the refusal to admit the truth or reality of something or a refusal to recognize or acknowledge; a disowning or disavowal Psychology has its own definition of denial […]
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