Okay. So I was all kinds of optimistic and hopeful that the Showtime series, United States of Tara, would be a positive statement for Dissociative Identity Disorder. After all, Showtime interviewed Dr. Richard Kluft, an informed psychiatrist, one of the founding fathers of the treatment of DID/MPD. That was a good sign, wasn't it? Well. As a trauma therapist with 20+ years of clinical experience working with … [Read more...]
10 Life-Lessons I’ve Learned from Multiples, part 1
No, I'm not a multiple. I do not have multiple personalities. I do not have Dissociative Identity Disorder. But I know multiples very well. I am a trauma therapist who has worked almost exclusively with people with dissociative disorders. I met my first DID survivor 30 years ago. Since then, I have met more multiples than I can count, and I have spent hours and hours and hours each week -- and most … [Read more...]
10 Benefits of Being Multiple
Are there any benefits to being multiple? In the typical process of trauma therapy, your therapist and the dissociative trauma survivor will spend a great deal of time talking about how difficult it is to be multiple -- and it is difficult, no doubt about it. For the typical multiple, there were years and years of pain and horror and abuse requiring the need to split over and over into a number of … [Read more...]
Using the Internal Landscape to Increase Internal Communication
Trauma survivors with Dissociative Identity Disorder have an internal world – an internal landscape that is visible, tangible, and very real for the different internal parts. No one on the outside can see this internal world – it is within the mind of the DID person and it belongs totally and completely to them. Many times, this internal landscape is an internalized replica of what happened in the outside … [Read more...]
Working with Difficult and Destructive Alters
I'm going to take a slight detour in the internal communication series and write a little about working with difficult alters. It is crucial to work with these internal parts, no matter how challenging and hopeless things seem in the beginning. Your therapy and healing will never be resolved unless you approach the issues connected with these difficult insiders. And for that matter, the whole process of … [Read more...]