Self-injury, Flashbacks And Flooding As Programmed Responses

1. Self-injury, Flashbacks And Flooding As Programmed Responses and  How To Deal With Them

3. Destabilizing Symptomsin All Trauma Survivors • Include traumatic intrusions such as flashbacks, nightmares, body memories, and emotional states of sadness, anxiety and despair • Self-harm and suicide attempts are often methods survivors use to try and reduce these unbearable intrusions

5. Common Mistake of Therapists Not recognizing that survivor’s flooding of feelings or flashbacks or suicide attempts or self-harm are deliberately created by inside parts doing their jobs

7. So therapists • Teach you grounding techniques • Try to teach you to self-soothe, take bubble baths, and cuddle your stuffies • Give you medication to stop the symptoms • And feel despair when it doesn’t work

9. It doesn’t work because Organized criminal groups • expend large amounts of resources on training children • expect to be able to use them for life.  • regard children and survivors as their property • And set up security programming in the personality system, so that • If a survivor or a therapist makes discoveries about the personality system or memories, the survivor is likely to destabilize

11. Jobs of Insiders • Many inside parts have specialized “jobs” in which they have been trained. • They get punished by others if they fail to do their jobs. • Some jobs are always to be done; other jobs are in response to events in the inner or outer world.

13. Trained child parts do their jobs: in fear of death or torture to themselves or others if they disobey. The very behaviors which represent destabilization with “regular” DIDs such as self-harm, suicide attempts, painful body memories, nightmares and flashbacks are triggered to occur if the survivor breaks the abusers’ rules.

15. The Abusers’ Basic Rules • Silence – don’t disclose about the abuse • Maintain a façade of normalcy, or of craziness if you’ve been discarded • Obedience to past and present abusers • Loyalty to past and present abusers • Isolation from outsiders

17. In the early stages of a survivor’s disobedient pursuit of recovery Inside parts who live in the past follow abusers’ instructions: • To release partial flashbacks or body memories • to harm the body • to make unsuccessful suicide attempts • to quit therapy • To disrupt therapy with frequent crises

19. Talk Inside to the child parts who are responsible for the symptom and ask them to turn it off. Those three little words, “Turn it off,” can have profound effects. Teach your therapist to say them.

21. Jeannie Riseman says: When I have a thought or urge that seems cult-related 1. I name and label it as soon as I become aware of it. 2. I refuse to act on it. 3. I let the issue go—I don't brood on it.

23. and thinks: • "Wow! They really did a number on me, didn't they? I wonder how they did it." • My mental attitude changed from fighting suicidal impulses, trying not to think those thoughts, to curiosity about the past.

25. Jeannie’s conversation with the trained part: • I praised its strength, intelligence, and sophistication. • I also spent some time telling that part that nothing bad would happen if we broke the rules now. • I explained that there was nobody around to enforce the old rules, and so they didn't really apply any more. They had stopped being rules. We were free!

27. More conversation with the part: • I started to talk past the system to the child I had been, and still am in some frozen part of my mind. • "There's nobody around who will hurt you. They hurt you back then, but now is real different. They aren't here anymore." • And for the very little parts, "Bad guys all gone bye-bye!"

29. Caution: • You can only do this if you are actually free, far away from your abusers. • You may need to check inside about this, and whether any part of you reports on your disclosures or remembering to your abusers.

31. Two little problems even if you’re safe: • Parts have bosses, and backups. • That little kid inside who turns on the flashback or feels he really has to cut your body may be controlled by someone else inside who tells him he has to do it, • Or punishes him internally (e.g. with pain from a memory) if he doesn’t do his job. • And his backup may take over his job. • Backups are easy to convince if the first kid was convinced.

33. Internal Bosses • Most important are the parts who keep other parts in line (bosses) by issuing threats and punishments to those who disobey. • These or their enforcers administer punishment for disobedience or disclosures through flashbacks or self-harm or ordering “programs” to be turned on.

35. The Hierarchy • In most mind-controlled or cult personality systems, parts are set up in a hierarchy. • To really change things, you need to work your way up to the top of the hierarchy and talk to those in charge. • Those parts, who rarely if ever come out in everyday life, need to be informed about how your circumstances have changed

37. So – deal with the hierarchy • If a child part considers stopping his job, he may hear a voice threatening him. • Talk to that voice. Even if it appears to be an internal copy of an abuser, or a fearsome demon. It is a part just like everyone else inside. • Ask its age. Make your conversation appropriate for that age group.

39. Other Jobs Assigned to Parts • Observing behaviour and thoughts and reporting disobedience to internal or external bosses • Memorizing and responding to triggers from the outside world. There are deliberately placed touch, sound or sight “triggers” or signals for accessing alters or giving instructions • Switch control – turning “programs” on and off by internal switches and buttons which have specific effects, like putting alters to sleep or making them suicidal or creating hallucinations • Spinning internally to distribute feelings or impulses through the system • Gatekeeping – holding in alters or memories • Recycling memories, keeping parts of them separate so that programs cannot be destroyed by memory reintegration

41. You can ask • Parts to stop doing their jobs if those jobs are now harmful • Parts to do jobs when they are helpful, e.g. put away memories • Those in charge of the system to give parts new jobs

43. Information about Internal Punishers • The part who cuts is often not the part in charge of cutting, when it’s a program. • Alters who harm the body often don’t feel pain or believe they aren’t part of the body. • Often alters whose job is to kill the body have been tricked into believing they are not part of the body. • You need to show them they are in the same body with the others. Draw on your hand, then ask them to come out and look at it.

45. Another Mistake of Therapists Helping one side of the personality system battle with the other side (fostering internal splitting instead of resolving internal conflicts) This makes things worse!

47. Slow down to Stabilize • Work your way up the system hierarchy by treating all parts with kindness. • Establish rapport with dominant insiders (those identified with the perpetrating group). • Show dominant insiders, and those continuing contact with perpetrators, how they were deceived. • Delay memory work until those in charge inside are ready to permit it.

49. Internal Cooperation Is the key to recovery. When your whole personality system works together, and those insiders in charge work for healing, you can make it all the way to full recovery.