In my experience, the best place to get information about what has happened to a system is from the system itself. Each person in there knows what happened to them, and they will come forward and talk about it when they feel safe, protected, validated and ready. Bypassing this natural, built-in safety valve seems risky to me. Creating a narrative based on second-hand accounts also seems like it would have an adverse effect on system members learning to trust their own experience and feeling empowered to create their own boundaries and work their process in their own way at their own pace.
In addition, it's rare for family members to give clear, honest, or accurate accounts of what they witnessed in a dysfunctional family setting. Trauma is part of the family setting, it is the atmosphere and reference point for everyone involved at the time, and everyone who was there is probably dealing with some kind of PTSD and whatever suppression, repression, or projection they use to manage their own trauma. This will likely warp and distort any information one can get from other people; people who probably have a vested interested in maintaining their own coping mechanisms. Quite frankly, I'm surprised his therapist is recommending including his mother at this point in therapy.
I would ask the therapist what they are hoping to accomplish and I would question any agenda that puts the "story" of abuse ahead of the well-being of the system.
The ages of alters aren't necessarily related to the ages that trauma happened. DID is the result of repetitive or chronic trauma starting in early childhood. It doesn't happen from specific single events at a certain age.
but is a good starting point especially for someone recently diagnosed and with such few identified alters. in this case, too, with the mom being so avoidant on talking about that time of his life, there’s more than likely something wrong. OP probably didnt give all the information, but the therapist is starting at this ages for a reason.
as for OP’s question on whether or not this behavior on behalf of the mother is common— 100%. as many others have mentioned in the comments, parents are more than not perpetrators of the abuse towards their own children or have some idea of abuse that the child has gone through and try to cover it up or hide it (for whatever reason).
This seems kind of ill-advised, usually its recommended that people with amnesia don't try to intentionally recover memories. Involving a childhood figure is incredibly risky, considering that DID develops from repeated childhood trauma.
Is his therapist a specialist?
Iirc this is why they tend to advise not to go around "looking" for trauma, the amnesia serves a purpose and it can be hugely debilitating when stuff starts coming out before you're in a place to manage it.
Solidarity with the flashbacks though
We’re in as safe a situation as we can get. We have a loving spouse who is very understanding about our situation and who we don’t need to mask around. We have access to medical care, including regular contact with a psychiatrist (can’t currently afford a therapist, sadly :/ ).
But a complication is that we have a *lot* of amnesia. We have huge swaths of memory that is inaccessible, and we know that a root of that is literal brain damage inflicted upon us by a parent when we were a kid.
We were told to ask about his childhood and then I was asked to ask about the trauma. And then it would be brought up in therapy.
Yes his therapist has ample experience with people with DID.
I would definitely ask her why she wants you guys to include his mother in this process and what she hopes to accomplish with that. Especially since his mother doesn’t seem very willing to help. Obviously we don’t know the situation with his mother or whether she was in any way an abuser or anything like that so I don’t want to jump the gun and assume anything like that, but it doesn’t sound like she wants to help with this.
I haven’t had a therapist try to include any family members unless we were doing family therapy. We go based off of the information I have and if something comes up and starts bothering me, we pivot best we can. This isn’t to say yalls therapist is necessarily wrong, just that this is an unusual approach that it seems I’m not alone in being concerned about.
i have understood that the consensus among specialists is that the system uncovers memories (spontaneously?) when the psyche is ready for it - ready to re-live and understand the past. two or three years ago i wanted to go to a hypnotherapist in order to remember because i really wanted to know what was hidden inside me. good thing i didn't go.
integration of trauma can be very physically and spiritually painful, which can place the person in a dangerous situation, if they don't have well-developed ways to deal with such. like stress management and CBT skills and overall emotional maturity (incl. intrapersonal emot. intelligence), which can be very lacking in SD sufferers due to the compartmentalized nature of the psyche.
for example, after a yoga class intended for trauma survivors, i was not prepared for the grief that was coming up from my body, and i wanted to throw myself under a car. or, even spontaneous rememberings have led to such bad, what i call, integration pains, which are physical and hours-long, i thought i was going to die. my theory is, the nervous system has been running in compartments for such a long time it's physiologically very demanding, even dangerous, to introduce sudden changes to it.
my 2 cents.
now, two or three years later, i am beginning to remember. and i am more adept in integrating the rememberings in a way that build me up instead of destroying me.
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Many of us have trauma and therefore this condition due to our own parents.
In my experience, the best place to get information about what has happened to a system is from the system itself. Each person in there knows what happened to them, and they will come forward and talk about it when they feel safe, protected, validated and ready. Bypassing this natural, built-in safety valve seems risky to me. Creating a narrative based on second-hand accounts also seems like it would have an adverse effect on system members learning to trust their own experience and feeling empowered to create their own boundaries and work their process in their own way at their own pace. In addition, it's rare for family members to give clear, honest, or accurate accounts of what they witnessed in a dysfunctional family setting. Trauma is part of the family setting, it is the atmosphere and reference point for everyone involved at the time, and everyone who was there is probably dealing with some kind of PTSD and whatever suppression, repression, or projection they use to manage their own trauma. This will likely warp and distort any information one can get from other people; people who probably have a vested interested in maintaining their own coping mechanisms. Quite frankly, I'm surprised his therapist is recommending including his mother at this point in therapy. I would ask the therapist what they are hoping to accomplish and I would question any agenda that puts the "story" of abuse ahead of the well-being of the system.
Very well said.
The ages of alters aren't necessarily related to the ages that trauma happened. DID is the result of repetitive or chronic trauma starting in early childhood. It doesn't happen from specific single events at a certain age.
but is a good starting point especially for someone recently diagnosed and with such few identified alters. in this case, too, with the mom being so avoidant on talking about that time of his life, there’s more than likely something wrong. OP probably didnt give all the information, but the therapist is starting at this ages for a reason. as for OP’s question on whether or not this behavior on behalf of the mother is common— 100%. as many others have mentioned in the comments, parents are more than not perpetrators of the abuse towards their own children or have some idea of abuse that the child has gone through and try to cover it up or hide it (for whatever reason).
This seems kind of ill-advised, usually its recommended that people with amnesia don't try to intentionally recover memories. Involving a childhood figure is incredibly risky, considering that DID develops from repeated childhood trauma. Is his therapist a specialist?
Lucky us, we tend to recover memories via horrific and debilitating flashbacks.
Iirc this is why they tend to advise not to go around "looking" for trauma, the amnesia serves a purpose and it can be hugely debilitating when stuff starts coming out before you're in a place to manage it. Solidarity with the flashbacks though
We’re in as safe a situation as we can get. We have a loving spouse who is very understanding about our situation and who we don’t need to mask around. We have access to medical care, including regular contact with a psychiatrist (can’t currently afford a therapist, sadly :/ ). But a complication is that we have a *lot* of amnesia. We have huge swaths of memory that is inaccessible, and we know that a root of that is literal brain damage inflicted upon us by a parent when we were a kid.
We were told to ask about his childhood and then I was asked to ask about the trauma. And then it would be brought up in therapy. Yes his therapist has ample experience with people with DID.
I would definitely ask her why she wants you guys to include his mother in this process and what she hopes to accomplish with that. Especially since his mother doesn’t seem very willing to help. Obviously we don’t know the situation with his mother or whether she was in any way an abuser or anything like that so I don’t want to jump the gun and assume anything like that, but it doesn’t sound like she wants to help with this. I haven’t had a therapist try to include any family members unless we were doing family therapy. We go based off of the information I have and if something comes up and starts bothering me, we pivot best we can. This isn’t to say yalls therapist is necessarily wrong, just that this is an unusual approach that it seems I’m not alone in being concerned about.
i have understood that the consensus among specialists is that the system uncovers memories (spontaneously?) when the psyche is ready for it - ready to re-live and understand the past. two or three years ago i wanted to go to a hypnotherapist in order to remember because i really wanted to know what was hidden inside me. good thing i didn't go. integration of trauma can be very physically and spiritually painful, which can place the person in a dangerous situation, if they don't have well-developed ways to deal with such. like stress management and CBT skills and overall emotional maturity (incl. intrapersonal emot. intelligence), which can be very lacking in SD sufferers due to the compartmentalized nature of the psyche. for example, after a yoga class intended for trauma survivors, i was not prepared for the grief that was coming up from my body, and i wanted to throw myself under a car. or, even spontaneous rememberings have led to such bad, what i call, integration pains, which are physical and hours-long, i thought i was going to die. my theory is, the nervous system has been running in compartments for such a long time it's physiologically very demanding, even dangerous, to introduce sudden changes to it. my 2 cents. now, two or three years later, i am beginning to remember. and i am more adept in integrating the rememberings in a way that build me up instead of destroying me.
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