Achieving Co-Consciousness: Self-Acceptance-And-Love

On the first glance people may ask “What has co-consciousness to do with loving yourself and accepting all the different parts of you?” My answer to that is “Everything!”

If there is a part of you that you dislike, are afraid of, or even feel disgust for, you will stay away from that part ‘full stop’. If co-consciousness means to know to a large extend what other parts know, feel what they feel, and be able to act as they act, staying away from a part of you will increase the walls that divide you and prevent co-consciousness, not decrease them.

How Does Anger Become Pathological?

Anger becomes pathological when a person has over a long time mismanaged their anger. This starts in most cases already in childhood when children are raised within a family and/or society in which children's expression of affect and especially of anger is discouraged or even punished. These are families in which children are maybe see, but certainly not heard. These are families in which usually only parents are entitled to express anger and they often do so to punish or discipline their kids.

The Body Pays The Price

Leonie was very tired. Her shoulders have dropped and her head had fallen forward resting on her chest. Unable to muster the strength needed for balancing her head upright on her fatigued body, Leonie feels the floor opening and becoming a vortex inviting her into the never ending downwards spiral.  She hears a seductive whisper beckoning her to succumb, “Let go, let go. You have fought long enough. You can rest now!”

How To Build Trust

How can you go about building trust? When you don’t trust anybody at all, it might seem like an unachievable task. I want to look at building trust from a practical, pragmatic point in the hope that it might give you some hands-one ideas how to go about it. Trust will develop in any group or team when

•    The team is successful and reaches the goals they set themselves
The most important pointer for people in recovery is that they achieve progress. Without having a sense that things improve it will be difficult to keep being motivated. When everyone becomes aware that progress is achieved, they will not only trust the process, but also trust each other and the ‘team-leader’.

Trust and be Trusted

As some of you may know, I am in the process of putting all my material about DID and recovery into a book form, so that ideas explored in this blog, from my practice, and from research (my own and others) can be integrated to form a functional whole. As I was working on that project over the weekend, I started thinking about trust and the meaning of trust for Multiples.

Stripped of all it’s bells and frills, trusting another person means that we believe they will act according to the positive expectation we have of him or her. To some degree, trust seems always to be linked to making a leap of faith. And if people have been hurt, when they feel their reasonable expectation of care, respect, support, or appreciation has not been met, trust becomes more shake. In most cases it’ll take some time and some doing for trust to be re-establish.

Improving Internal Communication: The 6 Thinking Hats

Today I
am going be a bit technical. I would like to suggest a technique developed
by Edward De Bono in the 1980’s for communication with your system as you go
about negotiating decisions or look for solutions to problems.

De Bono
thought of six metaphorical hats a person can put on or take off, whereby each
of these hats represents a different way of thinking about a problem or
solution. Because of the different approach of each ‘hat’ to problem solving,
it increases the ease in which different parts of the self participate in the
exercise.

ME and My Parts

Today I want to talk about an interesting phenomenon: it’s “Me and My Parts”. Often I hear from a client: “My angry part is out of control, I can’t trust my xxx-part, I struggle with my teenage part”, or something similar. Others don’t want to know about ‘their’ parts because they get in the way of them working, studying, or socialising. Some people even want to get rid of their parts.

Somehow language limitations get in the way of capturing human reality. “ME” implies some sort of superiority or leadership whereas “my parts” imply somehow subordination or dependency. If we take the stereotype of “the ost” for example, who functions reasonably good in the here and now, has ittle or no memories and/or little or no feelings. Is that “ME”? Or is “ME” he parts (or alters) that are often younger than the body’s age, who have more historical memory and often hold the feelings?

Testing Therapists

Once a connection has been made, the therapist had to prove her trustworthiness. Making a connection with the therapist is a process that has to be repeated over and over again until such a time when the client is putting all her negative expectations aside and starts trusting the therapist. Only then is progress in therapy possible. DID clients go to some length to test their therapist. Putnam (1989) believes that it is with certainty that they will carry out various tests one way or the other.

Control as Obstacle to Therapy

When trust between DID client and therapist has not been established yet or has broken down, then clients reported that control techniques turned out to create a hindrance to recovery. These techniques impacted negatively on the therapeutic relationship, which is the cornerstone of successful therapy and recovery.

Control Through Changing Therapist

When therapy did not provide the DID client with good enough experiences, or when for example transferential issues were not satisfactorily resolved, some clients attempted to salvage control by terminating with their therapist and looking for another one.

The most striking feature of this first stage of therapy is that clients cannot exit this stage until they have been able to connect with a suitable therapist. It is this particular circumstance that puts great responsibility on therapists’ shoulders.