Trauma, Resilience, and the Creative Mind

When you’ve lived through very severe trauma, you might develop the ability to separate one part of yourself from another so completely that they start to feel like separate people. When one part of you is in charge, others have so little access to it that when you switch parts, the second part might not remember anything about what that first part did or what happened to that part. Many people with DID or OSDD develop multiple such parts, or alters (though in OSDD your parts might be a little less separate and each part can probably remember what others do when they’re in charge). Each part has had an important job to carry out to help you survive in a chaotic and scary environment. If, in that original environment, the parts weren’t so separate, they might have had a hard time carrying out their respective survival tasks so efficiently, and protecting you from pain. It’s really a brilliant survival strategy!

The problem occurs when you’re no longer in the traumatic environment and no longer need these separations to survive. You might face all kinds of challenges, from losing time to feeling like you’re still in the past where the trauma is happening. So what’s to be done?

Therapy for DID/OSDD is a little different from other kinds of therapy. We still use the techniques I’ve talked about in my “How Therapy Works” page, but with the addition of a focus on the use of techniques to help access all of the parts of you and stay grounded and feeling as safe as possible.

So how do we start? Well, one of the first things we’ll do is help each of your parts get to know what your roles have been in the system and how you’ve helped the system survive. When you understand more about who you are and why you do things the way you do, it’s a lot easier to have conversations with each other about your differences! As you each get to understand your own roles better, we’ll also be working on helping you connect with each other. I’ll help you have conversations with each other and identify and work out conflicts, and we’ll work on developing better relationships throughout your system. Sometimes we do this just through talking and sometimes we might find that using additional techniques such as ones using visualization are helpful. One of the biggest reasons that there is so much separation between your parts is that you each have very different ideas about what is the best way of helping you survive, so if we can help you all start to see the merit in one another’s roles and tactics and even begin to collaborate, then the walls between you are going to get a lot less thick!

We’ll also develop some basic ways to help you feel grounded as we do this work together. We’ll identify a set of grounding skills that works for you. Because of your dissociative talent, we’ll likely use some visualization skills to help you stay centered and feel more safe and make positive use of your inner world to care for yourself. We also might do some somatic/body-oriented work (you might try out moving your body in a particular way, like finding a way to sit that feels safer or stronger, for example, guided by what feels comfortable to you), DBT skills, or other grounding techniques we can explore together to find what’s right for you.

Each system is different and we can explore together which combination of these techniques will be the best fit for you to help you feel safer and develop communication and cooperation between your parts!

DID and OSDD are challenging disorders to live with, but they also represent your tremendous capacity to survive and the enormous resilience and creativity of your psyche. I look forward to exploring this ability with you in our work.

“It’s no use going back to yesterday,
because I was a different person then.”
-Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll