The healing process for dissociative trauma survivors is very long, involved and complex, and of course, the therapy process for the treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder is full of many potential blocks, complications, detours, messes, digressions, etc.
The article, 50 Treatment Issues for Dissociative Identity Disorder, lists out many of the steps involved in trauma therapy. How can dissociative trauma survivors not have some form of complication in their therapy process when there is that much to do?
While that list is comprehensive, it still only covers the surface steps. What tasks do you need to tackle next?
It takes years of time to work through all the issues and complications created from severe trauma and dissociative splitting, and while that length of time may feel discouraging in the beginning, let me assure you that progress truly is possible. You really can heal from your hurt and traumas and lead productive happy, healthy lives.
Therapy is somewhat like the progression through years of school. Therapy work builds upon itself through time to involve a lot of additional steps – the basics needing to be accomplished and mastered first.
If the basics are neglected or not learned well, then therapy will get stuck — and if someone goes to school and gets stuck in the fifth grade for three years, they are going to feel very frustrated, especially if the goal is to graduate from high school.
So what keeps a person stuck and unable to progress further in their healing? What blocks their therapy from moving forward?
Sometimes people get comfortable addressing only the surface layers of their trauma.
Sometimes they get too afraid to address the deeper layers of their system. Therapeutic resistance can be normal for various periods of time.
But will avoiding those areas of your healing bring you the peace of mind that you want?
What if you have been in therapy for years already and are still struggling desperately?
Blocks and stalemates in the therapy process usually lead to increased depression, ongoing anxiety, more self-injury, not to mention the added frustration and wasted time and resources.
While it is important to tackle the healing process at your own pace, it is also good to make significant treatment gains at every step of the way.
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What is missing in your therapy process?
What is interfering with your therapy process?
Where are you resistant to change?
Common reasons that people get stuck in their healing process:
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A fear of seeing the abuse – wanting to keep those dissociative walls in place
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A lack of resources, and financial constraints to being able to get sufficient help
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A refusal to accept that loving family members were also abusive monsters
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An adamant refusal to look at who the abusers were
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Anger – wanting a “safe target” to fight with instead of a therapist for assistance and guidance
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Being too busy testing everyone over and over instead of getting to the actual therapy work
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Clinging to denial, clinging to denial, clinging to denial
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Comfort Clingers – wanting to stay hurting, even on purpose, to get comforting responses from other people
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Creating distractions from therapy work
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Current-day abusers actively sabotaging the progress you are making in therapy
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Current-day control by external abusers reinforcing the fear of telling
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External life issues become too overwhelming, ie: kids, school, work, finances, etc.
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Fatigue, frustration, and just being tired of trauma issues being the center of your life
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Fear of learning more, of future consequences, of any number of things.
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Fear of other loved ones being hurt or abused if certain secrets are exposed
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Finger-pointing blame at others instead of being self-responsible for movement and changes
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Genuinely incompetent therapy or working with an uninformed therapist
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Interference of addictions – any form of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sex addition, etc
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Internal programming is running interference and not being removed or addressed
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Laziness – thinking that healing happens magically without having to put in the hard work required
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Not really and truly wanting to do the therapy work – simply going through the motions instead
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Outgrowing the therapeutic knowledge and assistance that your current therapist can offer
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Putting more effort into helping / rescuing others than addressing personal issues
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Refusal to speak with the others in your system
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Refusing to acknowledge, admit, or address your own negative behavior
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Sabotage – of self, of relationships, of therapy
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Self-injury, self-destructive behaviors, suicidal behavior
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The front host refusing to speak with the inside system
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The Ostrich Syndrome — denial or blindness to seeing the reality of the problem
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Threats of ongoing abuse if certain secrets are exposed
What is blocking your therapy and healing?
I wish you freedom, movement, and progress in your healing journey.
Warmly,
Kathy
Copyright © 2008-2018 Kathy Broady MSW and Discussing Dissociation
Well meaning therapists acting as surrogate parents when the problem is, one already does have actual parents, not good ones, but the point being that “corrective emotional experiences” as a primary approach is just fundamentally flawed and ultimately it just does derail the therapy.
The problem in the aftermath of course is that long exposure to such well meaning intentions just does make basically any other therapist inherently impossible to adapt to.
Dollswise,
Thanks for your post — I have to say, I don’t quite understand what you are saying. (sorry!)
Can you explain a little further?
Kathy
I understand what you are saying. Old therapist acted like mother or we saw her that way.Then when we terminated and we were upset she said I am not your mother! You have one. Lots of confusion as to what was going on. I told the new therapist you are not to touch us, you are not to tell us you love us.
Wow. I have a lot of work to do. I WANT to let go of fear, denial, and defensive walls, but it doesn’t seem like wanting to is enough for some parts of me. I need to convince everyone that this is going to be good for all of us. They don’t really believe it. I keep telling them, but they don’t fully trust me yet, I guess.
Yes, ljane, the therapy process takes a lot of time, a lot, and a lot, and a lot of time …. And different parts of your system will reach different goals at different times, lol… so continue to be gentle and kind and patient with yourself / selves, and give yourself and your insiders the space and time to move thru’ the steps….
Do you have any guesses for what is going on between you and your system that keeps them from trusting you??
And instead of “convincing” your insiders about certain things, do you have your own understanding of why they think like they do? Do you understand their reasoning / fears / concerns ? It’s a slightly different approach – and maybe, if you can understand what they are concerned about, maybe you could address those concerns for them.
???
Just a thought — thanks for your comment.
Kathy
I was reffering to my T’s, just venting.
hmm…im gonna think more on this. everyone is always telling me how luky i am to have been diagnosed at such a young age. how lucky i am to have a great trauma speacilist..etc. but i often feel inadequate and not ready for this..i want to get better..i want to heal but at the same time i feel like this process and sucking the life out of my already destroyed youth. i had no childhood..not really..and ive spent all of my teenage years and young adulthood in treatment. every second of my life is about did and truama and pain and the past. im glad and proud im getting help now..but i often feel like the therapy and heling process is taking just as much away from me as the abuse did. i dont really get to do anything fun. either im taking care of child parts or keeping teenage parts from killing us..or in class trying to graduate so that i will eventually have a future. its very overwhelming. and sometimes i just dont have anything left. i go to therapy and i dont talk and i pick fights or i test her to see if she’ll leave and i almost wish she would. no one said it would be easy but god dammit does it have to be so hard? im 23 and i feel like im 45.
_liv
liv,
I can totally relate. Sorry its so hard for you.
An intense fear of seeing the abuse has been something I have really been struggling with. I finally tackled a bit of that fear this week and for the first time in awhile, I no longer feel stuck. I actually wrote about it on my blog in the post “Exhaustion”… http://www.shatteredintoonepiece.blogspot.com
I just found your blog tonight and I have enjoyed reading along.
I am also stuck. I’ve been in for 6 years, with 5 T’s. I’m with a great PsyD now, but i don’t seem to know how to utilize the time. I have no personal memory of trauma, expecpt in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, and the alters writing or drawing in the non-dominant hand. How can I talk about something i have no recollection of – or that undermines and destablizes the system? I will take in that 50 things list of therapy options, but I am not even sure my T knows what to make of that. Maybe I underestimate her.
Kiyacat
Hi kiyacat,
Thanks for posting.
It sounds to me like you actually do have lots of ways to learn about the trauma you have been thru’ (via the flashbacks, nightmares, insiders), and maybe as you talk more to the insiders directly, you’ll feel more connected to the actual trauma. (Do you want that?? Sometimes it is ok to have a little distance from that….). I would guess, from what you are saying that your insiders are the ones that experienced the trauma directly, so for you to get more direct recall of it, you will need to get closer to your inside people. It sounds like you were dissociated away while your insiders were being hurt, so… start there. Connect with them, and then you’ll be able to get more directly connected to your abuse.
My second thought is…. working with 5 t’s in 6 yrs is very hard!!! By the time you / your insiders might build some level of trust with your t, it was time to get a new one (for whatever reason). 5 t’s in 6 yrs is a whole lot of change! It would be hard to get thru’ a lot of the depths of DID work with that many t changes.
I hope that this current t works out well for you, and I really hope that the list of 50 things will be helpful.
Good luck!
Kathy
I feel at a stuck place, so I went in search of why? I am having difficulty sharing my own personal issues. I have worked for so long with my inside parts (which I am truly grateful) but now I’m struggling. The list above was helpful for me to read through, and I can identify with:
*Fatigue, frustration, and just being tired of trauma issues being the center of your life
*Putting more effort into helping / rescuing others than addressing personal issues
I made my first attempt at it, and it went all kinds of wrong. I felt I wasn’t being heard. I have a great therapist, truly gifted, but it caught me off guard. It felt extremely vulnerable to share, in light of all the abuse/trauma my parts suffered. Now I don’t want to go back. It feels like I did something wrong, and I’m afraid. My T would be shocked to know this is how I’m feeling, but for some reason, I can’t go. Not sure why all the sudden I’m anxious about going; maybe I’m exhausted from the work it takes…
Thanks for posting this information.
I get spinning, boat rocking, and nausea sensations in therapy, experiences where I suddenly can’t hear anything my therapist is saying, I can’t remember a lot of my therapy, I lose a lot of time after therapy and get punished and shamed when I talk about things I’m not supposed to, I sometimes get to therapy and suddenly can’t remember anything about my life, A lot of information is blocked from my knowledge until I get home, I try to bring my home self which is more vulnerable to therapy, but I don’t have the choice and am not able to do that, so I go in an overly confident state where I seem a lot more together than I am and don’t talk about what’s really going on…. Oh! after therapy I throw up, sleep, and switch for hours often eventually going into a child state and watching kids movies and cuddling with my pets and stuffed animal for hours. A lot of things happen, protectors come out when other parts feel threatened, silencing happens where I literally cannot speak or make eye contact and can only slightly turn my head and eyes down and use a head nod for yes or no with a lot of willpower. Oh I get suicidal after therapy a lot if I talk about certain things or sometimes I don’t know why, it’s just random specific directions to kill myself out of nowhere. Uhhh the things in the blog post list seem mostly like choices, but mine are not choices. Has anyone had any success working through any of these things? With stopping the nausea & the throwing up and blocking of information while in sess? That’s really the worst part. I can handle the kill yourself shit, silencing, losing time, etc but I haaaattttte feeling sick and/or spinning. It’s literally the f’ing worst. Does anyone know how to stop being sick? I don’t know if I’m just triggered or I am being punished.
Hi Hayden,
Well, you have summarized my therapy sessions and after effects quite well here. Just add sudden urges to go to the bathroom and it is about right on target. Spent the whole weekend in bed three weeks ago with severe tummy craps and nausea. I knew that it was not the flu. Rushed out of the middle of session a week ago only to find myself coming back completely switched out or rather, missing the whole second half of the session having switched out in the bathroom.
The body is working out all of the memories from trauma. Body memories can be the most difficult for me to deal with. Just waves over me and then … BAM … I am caught up in them. Nausea is the worse for me too. My T has a waste paper basket beside my chair in case. I would be mortified if I ever had to use it. My T does not seem phased about the prospect.
When you get triggered it certainly is not a choice. When I asked my T why I kept switching out in therapy she said it was because we are always dealing with potentially triggering topics so it is natural that my body memories and switching are more acute.
And yes, I usually think that I am hearing what is going on in therapy to then not remember a thing about it the second I am back present. Things trickle back a bit between sessions but I never have a complete memory of what happened even when I think that I am fronting. Usually I have a “big sleep” afterward, often a headache some dizziness and nausea, problems hearing and seeing/focusing (both is session and afterward), really touchy/switchy and a whole lot of confusion about what went on. I also can sink into a deep depression, panic attacks and acting out (self-harm stuff). Often my T will tell me what went on the session before because I cannot remember (i.e., some memories come back between sessions only to disappear again). But, lost time and switching out do go hand-in-hand.
Grounding … I think that the secret is grounding in the here and now. All of the feelings that you describe are often attached with switching, flashbacks and body memories. So, the trick for me is to try and ground myself in the here and now and the symptoms go away. Not saying that it is easy or that they go away completely (especially depending on how emotionally draining a therapy session was and my general state of mind). Just saying that that is what I work towards doing.
I hope that this helps.
ME+WE
05/20/2018
I’m glad someone relates and is moving through it. Yeah, I remember very little of what happens in therapy and I literally don’t remember seeing my therapist for like 6 mos even though I know I was going there. Ughhhhh soo relatable.
Sounds scary for Hayden’s parts to spin. For us, spinning is hostile switch. For us, Forgetting at T is protectors wanting status quo. They would rather guarantee worst outcome—so that they are in control and not let down by hope’s failure or by getting tricked again—than try to improve.
We try negotiating before T: who wants to participate in healing activities with T today? If someone wants to talk, how will they pass messages? Hostile takeovers, as we call them, happen less. They still happen. Often, parts ring our hearing in one ear to get our attention in life. It is scary and now we call it ringing the doorbell to make it feel more cooperative.
Just trying to ask for manners and cooperation has improved spinning and nausea for us. We sit in T’s lobby after session until we can drive. We practice adapting.
Now, doorbell can be a sign of improvement over dizziness (vertigo).
Hope you can practice. Took us a year or less to improve this area. 5/20/18
This is really helpful, someone pretended to be fine at the end of therapy one day and then I got in a gnarly car accident. Smart to sit in the lobby.
I’ll try to do this. I don’t have a lot of co-conciousness, so I will def try.
Interesting that you are able to tell that spinning is a “hostile switch”……. gives me a direction to look…..not sure what my situation is……will have to check it out……sometimes the spinning is in a tight circle….sometimes a larger one…..I am recently aware that there are probable perpetrator introjects…..still figuring that one out……..
I am wondering if Hayden’s “boat rocking” is similar to my “waves”…….pulses that have definite patterns and directions to them…..sometimes concentrated in one area – such as just the trunk or just the head – other times from body side to side, or feet to head or vice versa…..almost as if it were like waves on a beach…..mainly noticeable at night – but then I am very busy during my days….so I may just not notice it so much……sure wish I could understand the source of it….maybe it is just “adrenaline surges” from getting through my day…..It doesn’t happen every night – but fairly often…..I don’t know…….does adrenaline affect the body like that????
Hi, Deb. At night in bed, ours can be like a mix between electrical shock and falling.
Again, with increases in internal awareness (and we don’t have much), this sensation is on the decrease. 5/25/18
Wow. This is quite a list. I think I try to avoid the trauma stuff by acting out towards my therapist, trying to focus on others, trying to make therapy not about me and talking about other people, trying to even talk to my therapist like an old friend and listen to her problems. I also tend to take out my abandonment issues on her if she cancels, get very mean and manipulative at times, then apologize, etc. It is like we do EVERYTHING possible to get out of the trauma. Current stuff – marriage issues, health issues have also derailed us recently, and we are very STUCK in therapy. We often forget our coping skills that certain parts know, but younger teenage parts have NO IDEA what coping skills are make things hard at times. PTSD nightmares take over whole days that turn into a dissociative states and we are FORCED to deal with the overt trauma.
A DID diagnoses is scary to say the least, and the last year and a half have been harder than any other year. Sometimes we refuse to do homework, curse out the therapist, and just be plain awful. It’s like the introject wants her to leave. We sabatoge therapy on purpose; any rational person would run away. It’s like we test to see if she will leave; then she gets tired of “emotional abuse” and says she can’t see us, so we try to act better and apologize. She recently says she can’t see us anymore; and we are so tired of the “process” we threaten to just STOP ALL THERAPY. And we says SHE is the ABUSIVE one. She just cancels when she needs to but we hate any changes in the schedule.
I am not sure what we are saying except we don’t want to change therapists!! It is a nightmare to think about. We are a little to dependent on the therapist but we have made lots of progress in the last 1 1/2 years.
How do we go forward from blocked parts or introjects taking over? The protectors just GROWL up high walls. How do we work with them so they can feel safe to move aside?
Therapy is a long process. How do we keep from getting discouraged? How does the the therapist handle long therapy work? Trauma work is exhausting to both parties I believe.
DK,
I hear your frustration about the therapy process. And dealing with insiders that aren’t super helpful all the time. Maybe, just maybe, I have an idea that you may want to consider. Or it could be rubbish but either way, I’m trying to support you. 🙂
Is it possible that you as the host, need to be more honest and vulnerable? Let her know that you’re discouraged, don’t want to leave, that there are blocked parts and introjects taking over? If you’ve already done that, then your T would hopefully have some tools for you that would help. Tell her you want to continue to grow in your relationship with her, and that you want it to be a positive relationship. It sounds like you personally are not ready to leave. That maybe you’re just discouraged. Bring that up, and ask how she feels about doing long therapy work. Not that you’re responsible for her self-care, but maybe it can encourage you that you are doing okay.
Trauma work is difficult, it is hard. But there are many rewards and beautiful connections along the way. Believe in yourself (selves) that you can do this. There is hope that it will get better; I see it in your postings.
Hang in there. Sending lots of peace and wisdom your way.
MultipleMe
1/6/19
MultipleMe, thank you so much. Yes, there are so many good rewards. My therapist knows my main “issues” with her; she cancels a lot, sometimes she is not dependable. She lets herself work by her moods. I told her if I did everything by my moods I would never get anything done! Plus my moods vary all the time. She knows my concerns, and in a way, she is making me learn how to deal with normals “ups and downs”; she can’t be there for me all the time. I am not her only client. We meet for 3 hours a week so we are very very close in many ways. We do make each other upset sometimes but we do try to work through it.
I am very honest with her; and the truth is I am too hard on her in many ways. I tend to be perfectionistic and suffer with ocd type symptoms so I get a double whammy if she needs to change things up. She tends to by hyper flexible. So in many ways she is helping me; even if I get “mad” that she changes things up.
I am telling each insider that she is NOT the enemy, she is there to help me and being abusive to her won’t help things at all. I thanked her for not quitting on me, and asked that she reconsider and she has agreed.
We just learned mother died this weekend; so it is not a good time to transition after all. Def. will revisit this based on how things go.
Thank you
Hi DK,
I think that MultipleMe has offered some wise advice here. Open up and be honest with your T about what you are feeling and what is happening with you. Let her know that you are aware that you have not been an easy client to work with and that you are feeling the same about yourself. Let her know about your frustrations, blocks and insiders who are causing problems.
I would also have a frank discussion with your insiders as well. Tell them what you are thinking and feeling. Let them know that collectively you have to work together to build respect and healing with this T; that the T is not the enemy – memories of your abusers is; that they cannot heal if they are not willing to communicate in a reasonable fashion, etc. Lead with love and teach them with firm compassion.
I hear your struggles DK and want you to know that I am here to support you in any way that I can.
ME+WE
01/08/19
is it bad to keep some dissociative walls in place?
what if you still need some for protection?