In DID, there is a separation between parts who contain different emotions, memories, abilities and different levels of awareness for body sensations. It is very common that parts represent polar opposites. One has barely any emotion, the other has way too much of it. One remembers trauma and the other doesn’t. And maybe one can function in our job and others can’t because they lack the abilities.
We might not be able to access areas that don’t belong to ourselves within a separated system like that. Trying to learn how to have emotions when our whole system design is built on us not feeling them can be tedious and the results will be limited. Integrative strategies are more promising. They consider the system as a whole and understand that in some corner of the system we can find the knowledge or experience that we need. The task is to bridge the gap and create a temporary connection so we can access the information. We don’t need to learn what some of us already know. We need them to share it with us.
Difference between Communication and Sharing
Sharing goes beyond telling. We don’t just listen to another part as they explain their own experience to us. The experience crosses the dissociative barrier so we can feel it as our own. It loses the sense of ‘not-me’ by becoming our own experience. That can last for a moment when we share something but it can also leave a lasting memory of how things were experienced by others within us. Sharing is more advanced than telling and it needs inner connection and cooperation to work with it. It is also more intense than being co-conscious on a level where we are aware of the same things in the outside world and we have a stable line of communication. You should not try sharing by yourself. Do it within therapy. You will underestimate the intensity at first.
Steps
First, we need to identify the kind of information that we are lacking and who in the system is holding on to that information. Who can feel the pain that the doctor wants us to describe? Who carries the ability we need? Who knows how we are feeling about something? The content belongs to the system as a whole but it is stored with one or a few parts. Unless we have some level of communication and cooperation, sharing will not work.
Then we define how much we need them to share with us. There is no need to share all of their experience and knowledge. We limit it to the information that is needed to manage our situation or reach our goal. That way we avoid getting overwhelmed with other things. It can sometimes help to also explicitly exclude certain kinds of information from being shared now, like trauma memories.
Tools for sharing
Some systems have a good intuition and they can somehow ‘feel’ how they can push a block of information from the experience of one part into the experience of another part. Sharing like that becomes more natural the more permeable our dissociative barriers are and if we are already firmly co-conscious we can just follow our inner sense of how this is working.
For others, this is a lot harder and there are exercises and tricks we can use to support the inner exchange.
Imagery and items
We can imagine that the information is held inside an item that we push over and into the experience of the other part. We can try to hand it to them inside. Some prefer to work with actual items in the outside world. Then each part picks a hand for themselves and the item that symbolizes the information is moved from one to the other.
Hypnosis
When we work with a T who uses hypnosis they can guide us through a process where we meet the other part and then allow ourselves to overlap with them in just one area of experience, just the corner of them where the information is held ready for us. We don’t fully blend with them, we just blend one small and defined area of experience. Maybe the part can move the information to the tip of their finger and we touch and blend just there.
More symbolic connection
Nijenhuis suggests that each part can take over a hand and then each finger could hold a different aspect of experience. One for emotions, one for thoughts, one for memory or body sensation. It helps to get into a very mild trance state where we can feel the symbolic meaning of the fingers. To share, we touch the finger that holds the information that we seek. Here, too, the information can be moved to the tip of the finger so that we don’t share all the emotion but only the kind that is needed right now.
EMDR
For some systems, bilateral stimulation reduces dissociative barriers and makes it easier to share things. Using eye movement, binaural sounds, tapping or something similar might be enough to bridge the gap. This is very, very delicate business that could easily lead to overwhelm if you don’t know how you react to bilateral stimulation and you must not try this alone. I am rarely so strict but I am here. If you have no experience with EMDR it is dangerous to just try it for yourself.
There is also a sharing tool in advanced EMDR training for DID. Your T will tell you to draw little pictures of yourself and the thing you want shared, or sometimes yourself and the other part. Symbolic items could also serve as a focus. Then you are guided to move your eyes from one picture or item to the other to support integration of the two. You cannot use this for yourself until your EMDR T says you can.
When to share
During the stabilization phase you usually only need Sharing when communication alone is not enough. It is meant to support self-care eg. to help you feel hunger when it is time to eat and you can’t make yourself do it because you indeed don’t feel it and acting against one’s intuition like that never works long-term. It is necessary to feel something to be motivated to act. A similar situation could be the need to convince you that physical pain really needs treatment. As long as you are unaware of the intensity or quality and you just have the report of another part you might brush it off as not that important or bad. Knowledge that is needed to function in life can be made available without the need of an inconvenient switch. Just telling us how something works is not the same as having access to the procedural memory of the (practiced) movements needed.
Advanced
Later in therapy we will encounter situations where parts are separated into opposites that exclude each other’s experience. A classic example is an abuser-loyal part who has a different view of an abusive relative than a traumatized part. Their complex experience of memory, emotion, thoughts ect is different and it can be terribly difficult to believe that things really happened the way the other part is reporting them. The trauma part will struggle to believe that sometimes these people were actually acting nicely. And the loyal part will struggle to believe that these people could ever hurt them. By gently exchanging experiences in a titrated way we integrate the experiences with each other. Both were real, just not at the same time. These people are complex. They are not just nice relatives and they are not just abusers all the time. This kind of work firmly belongs into phase 2 and sometimes even phase 3 of our treatment. Unless there are major issues with compromised safety where a part has to understand that seeking contact with dangerous people is unsafe, it is too difficult to bother early on. Regulating ourselves through Sharing is tricky. It is not an easy tool to begin with and it is not necessary as long as communication is enough to reach a goal.
Sharing does become more natural over time as the system becomes more integrated. Eventually, the dissociative barriers aren’t as solid as they used to be and sharing can become as easy as asking a sibling to lend us a shirt. If we start there, we probably don’t have DID. To achieve functional multiplicity, it should become more normal and easier to do. Those who aim for fusion will learn to go one step further and experiment with blending more areas of ourselves with other parts.