Question For All My Fellow Dissociators

[whiteraven]

I also wanted to comment generally that it was much more destabilizing for me when I was doing therapy that required memory recovery than when I was doing therapy that worked on functionality. I don't really know how most traditional therapists are doing it these days (because mine is definitely not traditional, thank goodness) but when I first started therapy, they just sort of jumped into working on memories. I think it would have been much, much more useful (and a lot safer for me/us) to establish trust within my system and with our therapist and work on building a strong communication system within the system. I suspect they didn't do this because there was the hope that quicker memory retrieval (with a minimum of communication and trust building) could lead to more rapid healing and integration. Just didn't work for us (or for many of the folks I knew going through the same process).

 

[Hope4Now]

@whiteraven, I couldn't agree more with the importance of going slowly. When I started in therapy a few years ago, I think my therapist thought he was going slowly, building trust, etc. I did too. And I was anxious to "get through" the therapy stuff and get on with my life. But when we tried doing some memory processing everything got pretty crazy. For a long while neither he nor I was quite aware of how layered up and polarized my system is, and neither of us had sorted out that I meet the criteria for DID. Back then, I was presenting as a formerly highly functional person with anxiety and chronic pain. Eventually we started taking things more and more slowly (much to some of my system's chagrin) and focusing on stabilization. As I've moved into doing some processing using EMDR, we are going at a snail's pace (It's called "fractionated abreaction--an approach developed by Kluft and another psych whose name I can't at the moment recall). And still it's really, really hard to stay stable. But even in my messed up way, I can see that I have gotten better at managing some of the upheaval.