Although TraumaTime is long past, many survivors struggle to create a life that is safe, peaceful and meaningful. It is as if we are somehow jinxed. We start out with good intentions and end up with the opposite of what we wanted. Sometimes that’s because we don’t have the support or resources we need and change has to come through other people. And other times it is something that we create ourselves, though not consciously or intentionally. I don’t want anyone to feel ashamed or blamed. That defeats the purpose of the article. I want you to be informed that there are classic subconscious things we all do, more or less often. The only way to beat the dynamic is to recognize it when it happens, to understand the trauma pattern in it and to choose different actions. Then, instead of it being something that happens to us it turns into something that we understand and that we can influence. Please make sure to take a break if reading this article is triggering any shame in you. It is a rather uncomfortable topic.
Reenactments
Reenactments are situations where we repeat behaviors and dynamics from TraumaTime, sometimes with ourselves or inner parts and sometimes with other people. There are theories why humans do that. Some say we are trying to ‘finish’ the old scene to resolve it or to help us make sense of it so we can integrate it. The problem is that reenactments usually don’t lead to any resolution or integration, they are just repetitions. Other theories say that among many options, we will always choose the one that seems more familiar. Even if that equals trauma. Or that we only know relational tools from TraumaTime and they will inevitably recreate scenes that are like TraumaTime. It gets even more confusing with amnesia and DID because we might have no clue that what we are recreating is part of our history.
An illustration
My favorite way to understand reenactments in DID comes from Chefetz, who shared an anecdote of a man with a kind of amnesia that made him forget everything he experienced right away. It isn’t a scientific explanation but a very good illustration of the problem. In this medical example the patient gets a phone call. His aunt is in hospital and not doing well. After the conversation the patient forgets everything he just heard. But a few minutes later he asks if he can call his aunt. He has this urgent feeling that he should ask her how she is doing. The patient has no recollection but he still has an impulse to act. He doesn’t know why. If we think in terms of the BASK Model, he has no access to any knowledge, sensation or affect about the phone call. He doesn’t even remember his own behavior 3 minutes ago. All that is left is a response, an impulse to act.
In DID, we might split off most of our experience but we are left with an inner blueprint of a scene, a script of behavior and the urge to follow it. Like having to call our aunt. Only in our case the urges might be more serious and when we follow them, we end up in harmful situations that can often be retraumatizing. And for us, hindsight isn’t always 20/20 because the original scene was removed from awareness, so we don’t know what we are re-creating. When we look at it, it just looks bad but not necessarily familiar.
How to approach reenactments
The key to end this is to become aware of it. Sometimes we can connect with the parts inside who know exactly what this is about and they can help us to understand it. That way we learn about the blueprint and the script we were subconsciously following and we can notice it and make different choices in the future. When connection isn’t that good yet, we might at least be able to put together a map of our behavior to make guesses about the blueprint. We follow our own steps and pay attention to the story we are enacting. From there we can develop a plan on how to notice when we slipped into that pattern. The impulses of the inner script will tell us what we should be doing and if we act differently, that will make it feel bad and as if we are doing something wrong. Our task is to act differently anyway.
Different versions of reenactments
Some re-enactments will only involve us or our own parts. We can notice the pattern, the role we slip into, what triggered it, maybe phases we go through etc. Then we can find places where we could interrupt the script and change it to create a new story. Doing something very similar but not exactly the same as our impulse tells us to do can be helpful. We could also follow this impulse but do it at 1% intensity. Small changes could be enough to make a big difference. The earlier in the script we redirect our actions the safer we will be. Eventually, a reality-check that reminds us of today can be enough.
Sometimes we will try to re-enact something in a relationship but the other person notices that something feels weird and refuses to engage. That can be really frustrating and lead to conflict but it is also extremely helpful to get feedback. When someone points out that something is off we can step back and examine what is going on. It needs a bit of humility on our side to admit that our experience is stuck in time and needs to be examined. Getting the feedback that we are acting weird can cause a moment of shame before we manage to take responsibility for it. It’s ok. There is no judgement, this is what happens with trauma. We just need to figure out how to resolve it.
Things start to get truly messy when other people start to re-enact things with us. They are drawn into our script of how the story needs to evolve through something that is often called counter-transference, one of the dynamics that happen between people. Textbooks repeatedly say that it is especially strong with people with DID. When both sides get entangled like that, it needs a person who is trained in this to resolve it. We will sometimes see it happen in our relationship with our therapists. They are taught how to manage it and they should make use of supervision to figure things out too. If we manage to stay away from accusations or trying to tell who is right and who is wrong and instead use our curiosity, we can work together to find out what happened, how we got things mixed up and we can repair the relationship by grounding it again.
Reenactments are an area that can get messy. It is one of the truly tricky problems and there is no shame in not being able to fix it alone.
You can read a lot more triggering things about reenactments in Richard Chefetz’s ‘Intensive psychotherapy for persistent dissociative processes’ (a book about using psychoanalysis to treat DID, which is interesting but tbh not the fastest or most gentle way to heal)
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