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I understand better. Did your therapist get the Coping with Trauma Related Dissociation book? That book is about finding stability in your life when you have dissociation, not about doing a deep dive into your parts. It's possible to get greater stability without stirring up the parts a lot...

What are you most scared of?

I have a journal where the different parts come out on different pages. It is a safe place to explore what they feel and think. Much of the journal is not writing, but pasted pictures or drawings, so it is a good place for the little ones. I found it useful to start with the parts that I am...

Yes. When it felt like I was going backwards as parts came up, my therapist said it was progress of letting out the stuff that had been crammed down so hard. As you get used to it, it's possible to communicate with your parts without them taking over. I agree with Sideways that parts coming...

Sometimes we fantasize about being a different person (for example, supposing I was rich, supposing I am younger and going out with someone I like), or we can experience feelings that have been repressed. My point is that that kind of fantasy or expression of feeling can be similar to the sense...

One concern of doing this work outside of therapy is that when a buried part comes up, I've had the experience of intense conflict and sadness. That can be tough to get through on my own. I agree with your desire to keep safe and not do any harm! For me, my parts often came up initially as a...

I think there is a continuum of what a part is. I do know that standard therapeutic guidance is to not encourage divisions where there is none. (That's different, though, from the case when there is conflict between parts that are separate but tangled in conflict together. That's me...

A critic of DID said clients don't have alters or parts, we just have areas of our thoughts that we are phobic to. Although I disagree about the judgement on DID, I understand the point. The most fundamental question about leaving parts behind is whether you still have access to the thoughts...

Here's my two cents as someone who has parts. My therapists, who did not foist a diagnosis on me, say that everyone has some degree of separation of the different sides of their personality. There are trauma theories that some type of personality separation ("structural dissociation") is at...

Harissa, sauteed onions, garlic, & mushrooms, white & lima beans, flat-leaf parsley, an egg poached on top, all served on brown rice. Then two oreo cookies for dessert!

Can you say why you are worried about people on the other forum finding out about your trauma? On this forum, there is a wide range of people. Some just read, some disclose deep trauma. You are welcome to be here as you choose. Congratulations on your sobriety, and welcome!

Homemade bran muffin, a leftover from a batch made by my daughter last night. We needed to switch recipes this year because we can no longer get bulk wheat bran under COVID restrictions.

About the extra stressor of doing online therapy, here's a thread on the experiences of a lot of people here at the beginning of COVID: Virtual/Video/Telehealth Sessions Regarding privacy, I would discuss with my provider: a. Is there ever any need to record sessions with your clients? b...

I would look at this differently. You are working really hard to keep yourself safe. The EMDR process can be very invasive and unsafe. It's natural to have resistance to EMDR for many of us. Did you and your therapist jump right in to trauma processing when you started EMDR? Or did you...

I found the same to be true--hearing others describe the same things I had experienced helped me feel less lonely.

I think it's critical to go slow and to have a therapist who listens to you, especially about what happened between sessions, and is not driven by a schedule of getting through a certain number of topics in a certain time frame. If the trauma narrative is too triggering, then there are still...

My therapist suggests doing this so the parts feel less alone. Today, my daughter was talking about teen girls obsessing over bands. I asked her what band I would obsess over if I was a teen girl, and she said Taylor Swift. So she knows something about my teen girl part. I imagine as she...

That sounds like a hard spell. I hope you are easy and gentle with yourself.

Most of my "journal" isn't writing. I find pictures on the internet and paste them in, or I make drawings and paste them in. But there are other things you can do. I got some modeling clay and made little figures. At the time, I thought I had four parts, but I ended up making seven clay...

I struggled finding the right therapeutic path. A few years ago, I found a wonderful CBT therapist who did great things for me. While working with her, I ran into: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Photocopy/153416NCJRS.pdf I had no idea what DID was back then, but I kept on circling things in...

I'm sorry things are rough. I am sure you will get through this! Sometimes it takes some back and forth to find the right path. I've had really rough sessions that I thought were disasters, but that later opened up new and wonderful paths.

Not running out of the room is definitely the first step! Remember that that part's anger probably reflects a lot of understandable fear, and she's doing great by not running away. It is a huge leap of faith when your brain yells "RUN, RUN, RUN" and you are willing to put that aside and trust...

That's my experience. I score really low on dissociation screening surveys and have a professional job, but Little Wendell has been around forever, and Mrs. W has seen me dissociate and forget experiences. Paradoxically, the more I am aware and communicating with the voices inside me, the...

I have this, too. In therapy, when we bring in a part for an extended conversation, it can be hard to switch back to my ANP to get back to work, etc., because the part enjoys being in the body. My two female parts experience a deep euphoria. It's funny--I read about trans people transitioning...

When I tried couples therapy a few years ago with Mrs. W, it didn't work well at all. The conversations would trigger me, and I didn't have the space to deal with that. What works better for me is to talk about my relationship with Mrs. W with my trauma therapist, and think of how I can...