Hey
@theshadowoftheliving, you know how carbonated soda kind of explodes when it's shaken when you remove the cap? Maybe that's where you are now, feeling panicing and confused, after opening a lid that has been closed a long time? At least I felt that way when I first talked to my therapist about all this. Just remember that the soda won't be exploding forever. It does calm down after a while! :)
I think understanding the theory of structural dissociation of the personality, like
@HollyBeans27 also mentioned, might be one of the best ways to understand DID and other complex trauma-related disorders. This article explains a lot of it, and from page 7 they write about signs and symptoms of structural dissociation, like manifestation of internal splitting (high funtioning at work, while not so functioning at other times), a number of previous treatments without much progress or clarity, somatic symptoms, sometimes acting younger than ones age, memory symptoms etc. etc. It's written as treatment guidelines for therapists, but can easily be read by anyone who wants a better understanding. The Haunted Self is also a good book about it.
http://www.janinafisher.com/pdfs/structural-dissociation.pdf
Some excerpts from the article that i think sums it up well.
For example, even when the client’s normal life is safe and stable and the adult self is competent and capable, trauma-related parts may interpret traumatic triggers as signs that they are in the same danger of being annihilated, humiliated, or abandoned as they were in childhood. Each responds to triggers with different animal defenses: the freeze part might become agoraphobic; the submissive part may retreat to her bed in shame, depression, and hopelessness; a hypervigilant fight part might push people away with irritability, mistrust, or guardedness.
Patterns of structural dissociation, less severe in Complex PTSD and most severe in the dissociative disorders, develop to defend the child’s psyche against overwhelming assault. Dissociative shifts and switches had to work automatically because children have to respond quickly in an unsafe world. If they hear a yell, feel a touch, see “the look” in an adult’s eyes, they have to be able to distance, to go away in the mind and body into a mental state in which they do not feel pain, not feel overwhelmed, perhaps do not even know what had happened. In the client’s current life, that involuntary system has become ineffective or even dangerous, but because the body is biased to “default” to survival responses under threat or apparent threat, it continues to be evoked by trauma-related triggers.
In the model of treatment described here, the focus is first on differentiating the parts so that dissociative displacement can be utilized as a therapeutic intervention, then next beginning to build internal communication, consensus and leadership, and finally, developing the ability to soothe and calm distress throughout the system of selves. Paradoxically, this very process is an integrative one: each time the patient makes a cognitive, imaginative or affective connection with a “part,” she is simultaneously reversing years of disconnection and increasing the degree to which she is internally integrated. As the ability to be a source of support, strength, and soothing for herself increases, the client can contemplate the work of processing traumatic memories secure in the knowledge that she knows how to use both displacement and self-compassion to titrate or soothe the intensity of the pain.
And also, I feel I mention this book in every thread about dissociation, but I do think it's a really good resource for DID/DDNOS:
Dead Link Removed
I started in a group therapy using this manual on tuesday, and it seems very good so far.
