This is an excellent journaling exercise that can be adapted to any topic at any time. The entirety of the exercise is to find a difficult or complicated topic. Ask yourself a question about that topic and then write out 100 responses to that question. For lots of people, one hundred sounds like a huge number for a writing exercise, but once you start thinking about the issue in smaller increments, you might be … [Read more...]
Using Collage as a Way of Communicating
Creating a collage is another way of allowing your internal system parts to tell more about themselves. Pictures can be a powerful way of communicating. And a collage - a collection of pictures - can tell a lifetime of stories. Most trauma survivors were repeatedly told by their abusers, "Do not tell". Violence, threats, abuse, and pain often accompanied these rules. How many times did you hear "don't say … [Read more...]
Creating Internal System Scrapbooks
A fun and creative way to increase system communication and overall system familiarity is to make a scrapbook displaying pages that describe each of the people in your system. Getting to know your system is an absolute essential part to your healing and recovery, but doing system work doesn't have to be drudgery. A system scrapbook can be a wonderful treasure and a priceless keepsake for many years to come. It can … [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...]
Developing Internal Communication – Starting with the Basics
There are a variety of ways to develop basic, effective skills in internal communication with your dissociative system. Most of these skills are very similar, even the same, as the communication skills used with real people in the everyday world. There is no fancy trick to learning to talk to your inside people. Everyone can do this. Remember, it's like talking to other people. Have you … [Read more...]