KEYNOTE SESSION: A HISTORY OF DID
IS DISSOCIATION ALWAYS MALADAPTIVE?
Depersonalization, Derealization, and Denial
Recruits, Rebels, & Adventurers
Worldwide Issues & Advocacy Panel
(S)RA and RA/MC Myths Debunked
In therapy over the last year, we have been working on building internal communication.
This week and next week we are in a special four-session group coaching class with Criss Itterman, who runs Liberated Life Coaching. We were shocked to hear in class that not only is it important to know your way around the internal world and how to find each other, but also that you can make changes to make your internal world a safer place. This was a big deal to us!
Our internal world was mostly made of places where we grew up, and so a great deal of it is unpleasant and unsafe and there are many (especially littles) still stuck in those places. Recently, however, our therapist helped us in one particular room by hanging Christmas lights for some safe and soft lighting for a little girl who was in the dark and alone. This was an amazing and profound experience, and very helpful, more than we knew was possible! So after this class, we wondered what else we could do?
Power to the Plurals also has a video (a whole series, actually) about creating internal safe spaces and invite the others inside to come there.
There are actually a whole LOT of systems of who have shared about inner worlds, either why they happen or what theirs are like or how to create small changes. CHECK OUT SOME OF THEM HERE!
But for us, we needed to do two things to at least get started.
First, we need a way to get the attention of the others, or call out to them in some way, if we are in danger or someone needs help or if the therapist is trying to talk to us. Our own internal landscape reflects the farm where we grew up, so we were trying to think about the how things worked already. One idea we had was that at the neighbor’s house, now our safe house inside, there was a big bell on the porch the lady used to ring to call her husband in from the pasture. What if we added the same bell? And maybe another in the pasture?
This was super exciting, even if it seems tiny, it really was a big deal to us.
But also, not everyone can hear the bell, and the Christmas lights the therapist added in the one room were so beneficial and warming and helpful that we wanted to do more of that. We thought of the movie A Quiet Place, which used Christmas lights strung up around a property that worked as a warning system. What if we put up Christmas lights all over inside, and when someone needed help the lights turned red? What if when the therapist was talking to us, the lights turned white and everyone knew to listen? That was our idea!
So we spent the week trying to do this, and are still just getting started.
But so far it’s working!
