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Many websites and blogs of “professional mental health care providers” use words and phrases that are misleading to the public – particularly to those seeking mental health care while distressed or otherwise vulnerable. Doing so attempts to fool people into believing that some sort of quackery is actually science-based.
Science-based means the theory and treatment that someone is selling has gone through rigorous procedures to ensure its validity and effectiveness and then it’s retested and retested and retested under strict guidelines and controls by many different researchers over a period of years.
Let’s educate ourselves and each other so we don’t fall prey to people who seek our trust through deceit and aim to make our wallets lighter. There are many types of psychotherapy on the market, find one that works for you, not one someone else thinks might work for you.
Here are some words and terms you will find that may be meaningless, yet sound scientific and credible:
neuro this OR neuro that – simply “biologically based”
clinical perspectives – is nothing more than someone’s opinion. The perspective is probably in a therapy room, rather than a laboratory where research is being conducted under stringent rules.
professional training – what does that mean? Is it PhD level training, or a weekend course to “certify” someone in hypnosis?
educational workshops – aren’t they all educational in some respect? Duh.
consultation services – that means you can talk with someone but is it the one you want to speak with or their proxy?
internationally known for – please, if that needs to be told to readers, then how internationally known can the person, or his or her work, be?
seasoned clinical staff – does that mean the staff of therapists are old? have experience? seasoned in what? garlic and olive oil? or are they educated and have passed rigorous testing at university level? Just because someone has years of experience does not necessarily mean anything. If they are selling crap therapy, years of doing so does not make them a proficient psychotherapist.
testable scientific predictions – most things are testable. Predictions? I think they mean you should trust them because, after all, it’s scientific.
new science – means buyer beware, the theory or therapy for sale is probably untested, unverified, and the results known only by the ones selling it.
under review in scientific journals – means absolutely nothing. It means a paper was submitted, that’s all. You too, can be under review in a scientific journal – tomorrow.
diagnosis & treatment of…: if that refers to an illness that doesn’t exist, what is that statement worth? If it refers to a theory regarding a psychiatric disorder, what is it worth if there are no verifiable results on its effectiveness? You may think, Ah, it won’t hurt to try it? Think again. At the very least, you lose money – probably hundreds of dollars, and precious time. Be skeptical.
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You will also find groups that call themselves Foundations or Institutes or Organizations. Sounds professional and legitimate, right? But does the title of the group have any meat to it? Or is it just a word used by someone for business and marketing purposes?
You will find references to publications and/or professional journals. Look closer, who is the publisher? Where was it published? Sometimes the publisher is the person writing the article, not a professional journal that would enable their colleagues to rebut and retest statements, theories, and claims that are made. Who published the book for sale on the website? A known publishing house, or was it self-published using the name of the group or one they made up for publishing purposes.
Check further into any person or group that interests you especially if you are are thinking about hiring them to help you with mental health issues. You may find that what they say is meaningless – but hey, I am the CEO and Founder of The Institute for Educational Baloney. Legitimate? OK, remove the baloney. Which is exactly my point.
Sounds Scientific? Doesn’t Make it Legitimate Psychotherapy by Jeanette Bartha is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Questioning Dissociative Identity Disorder, Multiple Personalities, and Plurals 
Jeanette Bartha
/ 05/16/2011@ Keith, you said, “Whoever knows how to drive will be able to do so, until another larger emotional trigger overrides.”
This is nothing more than manipulation – I think multiples should not be driving in the first place.
Keith: If you only talk to the “adult”, then you will see only a limited view of their experiences.
JB: I disagree. Why does someone have to “act out” or abreact the past? That is a myth of DID therapy. If the therapists incompetence of knowing how to deal with multiple clients is true, then those therapist need different jobs.
Keith: If a less thorough therapist is able to help resolve 10% of the issues or emotions in the one memory, expect to return more than 10 times to that memory before it becomes a non-issue.
JB: Another myth AKA job security for therapists.
Keith, I mean no disrespect. It is clear that you have bought into the MPD/DID theories so deeply I cannot respond at this point.
What I read from your writing is tantamount to someone being brainwashed and then MPD theories replacing reason, knowledge and rational thinking. That is known as thought reform.
I fell for it, was coerced into believing I had multiple personalities once my ability to reason and think rationally was destroyed. Can happen to anyone given the right circumstances and timing. Thought reform came after the teaching about MPD.
Brainwashing and thought reform are easier to accomplish than people think. It can be, however, a lengthily process and requires the right setting.
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Keith
/ 05/15/2011I post here, because this comment as well as answering previous comments includes discussion about research, which is relevant to this post (feel free to move it if you like).
JB: I think that DID people make conscious decisions about their behavior all the time. For instance, if someone is acting as though they were a 5 year old, and then needed to go to work, wouldn’t they switch personalities so they could drive there? That’s a conscious choice.
K: You are talking about two different things here. What happens when everything is emotionally peaceful and calm, is different to what happens when things are emotionally stressed.
Switching normally occurs involuntarily, as a result of emotional triggers, large or small. If the person FEELS like it is time to drive, then the feeling will switch in the part that has “feeling like driving” memories and can drive. It usually feels like it is time to drive when the person is sitting in the drivers seat with the wheel in their hand. Whoever knows how to drive will be able to do so, until another larger emotional trigger overrides.
Parts that have not had their traumas resolved, are still vulnerable to feeling the past, and may still react as if the past is now and so may act instinctively and irrationally. Even if they do have time to “make a choice” intellectually they are likely to make that choice influenced by the feelings they remember overlaid with the present situation.
Once all trauma is resolved, genuine decisions can be made without being emotionally driven.
JB: What would happen if the treating individual/therapist talked to the DID person/client/patient/SO as an adult 100% of the time. Why can’t that happen? If the environment is loving, warm, safe and caring as multiples seem to put high on their list of priorities, why would they need to regress and decompensate?
K: No therapist should ever be directive to that level, it is not the therapists job to tell someone how they should feel, or to put limits on how anyone may express themselves. Therapy should not include ANY suggestion, or requirement to conform to the therapists preconceived ideas of what is normal or required behaviour.
If your therapist is this directive, find another one. The need for active interventions is minimal. I never have to suggest anything, healing is enabled by knowing what is important in the flow of reflection, and working through it.
The littles ARE the person. You have one house, which you can look at through different (emotional) windows. Some people are open plan houses, and some people have lots of small rooms with only a limited amount in view at any one time.
If you only talk to the “adult”, then you will see only a limited view of their experiences. As a therapist you will find many walls with no explanation, many very real emotions with no apparent origin, memories without matching emotions. Repressing the littles will result in the emotions surfacing in other ways, through flashbacks and nightmares. You can play wack-a-mole all you like, repressed issues will pop right back up somewhere else until they are fully resolved. In short talking to the adult only you will only get a small part of the story, and healing will never really take place.
The littles are not some inconvenience to the person to be disposed of or ignored, they ARE the person. By adulthood the adult can be reduced to a life of switching from one coping strategy to the next just to survive, a virtual shell of learned behaviours dictated by fear and carefully controlling routine and relationships. All the littles have between them the real creative, fun personality, albeit divided up.
If you choose to talk “only to the adult”, what guarantee is there that you are talking to the core-self, and not a part created just to cope with the situation of talking to you in the role of an adult? I have met a number of parts, created specifically to cope with the trauma of living in a mental health ward, having needs ignored, being forced to conform and behave as doctors require.
The chances are that one of the angrier more difficult littles will actually turn out to be the closest thing to being the core-self. The core-self may be trapped in an absent state because it has been traumatised to the extent that it is unable to return to the conscious mind without remembering pain. Once their trauma is resolved they can come back. The core-self now emerges from its enforced hiding to be the 9 year old person, ready to start growing up again, from where it left off before; there may be no adult to be seen. The so-called adults are really the fractures left over after the core-self has been traumatised, these parts carry on life from the point at which the fracture occurred, but they lack much of the formative self knowledge and self awareness that the core-self has.
Be prepared to look after the re-established core-self 9 year old in a supportive family or intentional community situation, otherwise it will soon be overwhelmed by normal life and people expecting it to be able to cope like an adult. If this happens this young finding-its-feet core-self will get re-taumatized very quickly, and you will be back to square one. Since providing supportive intentional family/communities for adults is not part of the standard therapeutic approach you can pretty much guarantee that the core-self will remain hidden and 9-ish for a long long time. Many therapists run a closed shop they don’t train friends and family how to help, and the official psychiatric services in the UK are so tight on confidentiality they do not tell friends or family anything at all as a matter of ridiculous policy. This leaves most to fend for themselves alone, which they cannot do at thay point.
Another complication is that the core-self is likely to have suffered a lot, and is likely to be very angry about it. Angry parts get labelled as bad, scary and unco-operative far too easily. Even within, the other parts conspire to control and repress the angry difficult parts, and therapists get warned off them. Re-establishing the core-self a major hurdle in healing.
JB: I’ve seen multiples treated like 5 years olds because that’s what they wanted & the therapist complied (and vise versa). Regressive behavior,however, is not necessarily what is the most appropriate psychotherapeutic intervention.
K: There is no appropriate alternative psychotherapeutic intervention, interventions are a bad thing. Having “experts” “intervene” all over the place is most likely to make things worse. Interventions cut across natural reflection and emotional processing. Regression is part of the natural pain processing and resolving process.
The reason I assume that you think that regression is not the best thing, is because you are unlikely to have seen in your experience anything getting fixed decisively. Years ago I invented my “Alton Towers special”, we would pull up at “the star” camp site in my Camper Van, spend 5 hours working through every phobia you can think of, and then in the morning head for Britain’s biggest and best theme park to try everything out!
It is precisely because the so called experts tend to stumble towards the results they do get, and do not demonstrate decisive results that there is so much guess work and pissing in the wind in this field. This is not the fault of the person regressing, but the fault of the therapist not knowing how to understand and help the flow of the emotional processing through to resolve the situation once and for all. Since the most frequent mistake therapists make is to set the agenda, or to jump in with an intervention, the most effective intervention in the circumstances would probably be to do nothing at all. If you do nothing at all, then if the situation and the people are safe, the braver littles will eventually come out and talk of their own accord. (Only to be accused of being a creation of therapy)
The real effectiveness comes when you have the correct model of how things get broken, and how they may be fixed. With this model you can observe the emotional processing as it happens and spot the important features, helping to ensure that the emotional processing that occurs does not get stuck and is totally thorough, covering all of the salient points. Most of the time you only need to look at the individual emotions in each memory once if you are thorough.
RB: And I question that it is in the best interest of the patient particularly because it seems to do little more than open the door to more and more personalities that creates the need for more and more therapy.
If a less thorough therapist is able to help resolve 10% of the issues or emotions in the one memory, expect to return more than 10 times to that memory before it becomes a non-issue. 10 sessions regressing into one memory may look like a bad thing which is going nowhere because the benefit will not come until session 10, the point at which the traumas in the memory are 100% resolved. Unless the therapy methods are able to deliver 100% resolution of ALL issues in the memory, then it is likely for things to go around in circles for a while which looks bad. In this situation the breakthrough will eventually come offline, outside of therapy in a reflective or creative cathartic moment free of the limitations of the therapy AND medication. If the home-life situation is non-supportive or too stressful then it will not come at all.
There is not a person on the planet who would not benefit from having 10 issues in their life completely resolved, however this is acheived. The causes of most mental health problems can be nailed down to less than 10 core issues, usually it is more like 2 or 3 big ones. So those who have mental health problems would need up to 20 sessions, 10 for normal issues and 10 for their specific condition. In rare circumstances the to-do list may reach 100, I say rare because personally I have seen severe OCD resolved in 2 sessions, and Paranoid Schizophrenia resolved in one 20 minute session. So when I state that for MPD/DID the amount of successful therapy needed may be 500-2000 successful sessions, I am not overstating the need that there will be for therapy. There are as many littes as there are littles. There is as much therapy needed as there are painful emotions to process, per little. It is probable that someone with 50 parts may need up to 50-100 times as much therapy as someone without parts.
When therapy is successful, more and more therapy leads to more and more healing, and a better overall quality of life for the person. In my experience, those whom I have helped through this are now far more healed than I am. If they get upset about something, they can get that anxiety sorted to a point where it will not happen ever again in 20 minutes, whereas it would take me 6 months to even find the cause behind my problem, let alone fix it.
The biggest problem as far as quality of life goes, is that normal therapists don’t contribute to the holistic lifestyle/community as part of the therapeutic deal. So providing a good quality of life is not part of the therapist remit. Therapy can help with bad things which have happened, but the trauma due to neglect and the absence of good things can only be addressed through the real presence and restoration of good things.
One should not underestimate the amount of therapy and support that is needed for those with MPD, it may be several orders of magnitude more than for other conditions. You are looking at 10,000 or more damaged perceptions within the subconscious mind. Even working through them 10 at a time will take a few years.
When therapy is successful as in my experience, more and more therapy leads to more and more healing, and a better overall quality of life for the person. In my experience, those whom I have helped through this are now far more healed than I am. If they get upset about something, they can get that anxiety sorted to a point where it will not happen ever again in 20 minutes, whereas it would take me 6 months to even find the cause behind a single one of my problems, let alone fix it.
The biggest problem as far as quality of life goes, is that normal therapists don’t include the holistic lifestyle/community as part of the therapeutic deal. So providing a good quality of life is not part of the therapist remit, nor is it’s role included in health care studies.
Qualifications!
Who is qualified to say that it is not the best way forward? I was trained as an engineer, in my field you get qualified by actually doing the job successfully. Every time you drive over a bridge, or fly in an aircraft, you depend on that. In psychotherapy this is not the case.
I think that the issue of qualification needs a re-think, we need to re-discover the true definition of success, and then redefine qualifications based on the ability to achieve this success.
IMNHO ONLY someone who has supported a person through to full recovery from this condition can be qualified to make any comment at all AND this does not include myself yet!
In addition, for qualification, you would need to show that you have a model of understanding which explains what happened and why in specific detail. Scientifically the level of “explanatory power” if the underlying model needs to be very high. Broad based statistical studies on say the efficacy of drugs, ECT, EMDR, EFT etc, lack explanatory power, they are a mere overview. No one knows how most of these interventions actually work, if they really do, therefore it should all be considered dubious, until results go hand in hand with genuine understanding.
These are my three criteria for qualification: Firstly, an underlying understanding and model which successfully explains all the cause and effect relationships, in the original traumatic events, in the persons subsequent life, in the healing process, and after healing.
Secondly the ability to use this model, with a technical understanding of what exactly is broken, in order to fix it, as demonstrated through actual results.
Thirdly, results results results. In the UK the professionals do not even talk about recovery any more. Government papers on the future of mental health care and provision, talk only of coping better. How tragic.
JB: @Keith, without accountability we have the “MPD defense” – I didn’t do it – Samantha did. Even the courts don’t buy into that theory – most of the time.
K: Well they should.
JB: How can you make the abuser responsible for someone else’s behavior? That’s not OK.
K: Parents are responsible for their children’s behaviour, until they are old enough to take that responsibility for themselves.
People who are emotionally stuck in their development may have never reached that age of maturity. One doesn’t just become emotionally mature and capable of having responsibility because the physical body reaches a certain legal age.
You still need to distinguish between actions entered into consciously, or actions which are a result of emotional triggering.
JB: People have the choice of how to act – that includes multiples.
K: What is choice? Traditionally we think of choice as that made by the intellectual mind, as a result of rational thinking.
How much choice does someone have whether or not to have a panic attack? None!
A psychotic part who has decided that it must kill the oppressor by any means possible, when triggered, is merely a very complex form of panic attack, it has no control whatsoever over its actions in the moment of emotional triggering. However what control there is, comes form other parts, if they are able to mitigate the situation. The presence of a psychotic part in the first place, indicates that someone is responsible for creating the circumstances which created it.
So here you have many people we can identify as being responsible. Firstly there is the person which caused the trauma to a child to the extent that a part is created in the first place. Secondly there are the responsible adults whose job it is to nurture a child and to help them to learn how to process emotions and to cope, the presence of psychotic compulsions in the part indicates that the part represents the child’s best efforts at coping on their own. Then you have the person who emotionally triggered the person to the extent that a switch occurs, and you also have every person, doctor, nurse, teacher and adult that has failed to notice any problem, and has failed to provide any kind of therapy to help then to cope.
With all of these people whose responsibility we can clearly identify, making the victim responsible, when clearly they cannot cope is pretty mean.
I was bitten recently, and so was my hat. The biter was a 1 year old little who behaves as a lion, she likes the name Nala. She took a strong objection to my hat, and me as the wearer of the hat. I can only imagine the circumstances which created this behaviour, and it would not surprise me in the slightest if the perpetrator wore a hat. Scolding or reprimanding this one year old little, when I was the one who gave her the safe space to express herself would be mean and wrong. Normally she would not trust anyone enough to be out in public, so the fact that she expressed herself through biting me was actually an indication of trust. Nursing my wounds, the instinctive reaction to scold would be very counter productive. I have to find a way for a one year old to understand, and when I do it, I will not be wearing a hat.
The adult is 17 and has never been to therapy, nor watched any films like Cybil.
JB: I understand that many blame the abuser for their situation and they may be right and perfectly within their right to do so. But, my question is: What does that do to help the injured person gain health?
K: Fortunately, no one’s healing depends upon their abuser; it does help if the abuse is not ongoing.
Blame is never helpful, the injured person will not gain any healing from blaming the other. They will get healing from getting answers to the question “why?”. Understanding and insight into the abusers character can be healing, and from that can flow sympathy and forgiveness, which is healing.
JB: Society cannot allow citizens to circumvent any ramification of their behavior. I can only imagine the chaos that could ensue. The MPD Defense would jam every court in the nation.
K: This is the way it is. Society had better start preventing people from getting this damaged in the first place. My most recent supportee, is 17 and has spent all her life in care, as a ward of the state authority. This means that all of her significant current problems are as a result of the so called “care” that “society” has provided. It doesn’t look like society is about to come up with the $1/2m that her therapy and ongoing support will cost, so at what point does anyone take the necessary responsibility?
Society is being very naive. Apparently it expects a great deal of people who have not been nurtured sufficiently, have not been taught how to cope with emotional situations, and have not been supported in growing up with stable non-abusive role models, but instead have been subjected to abuse by those who were supposed to be caring for them
Complaining that the courts will not be able to cope, is simply looking at the problem form the wrong end. Everyone is looking at problems in terms of symptoms, not causes.
<cite<JB: Your spider analogy is interesting. It would be a mean thing to put a spider in someones’ soup who is terrified of spiders. Then again, terror of spiders is not rational.
K: That was the point of the analogue, terror of spiders is not rational. No triggered behaviour is rational, no obsessive compulsive behaviour is rational, no paranoid delusional behaviour is rational, no panic attack is rational, no eating disorder is rational, no depression is rational, no emotionally stuck regressive behaviour which expresses itself through a child-little-part is rational.
This is all down to causes and effects in the “emotional mind”, not the intellectual mind. You are constantly attempting to approach this from the view point of a rational thinking person, rather than through the eyes of a frightened child.
JB quoted: Keith: You said: “Thinking logically is what Sam is doing. If his girls feel 3 then he trusts them, and relates to them as if they are 3. He can see it works, because he is there studying every slight nuance watching every clue all the time.”
JB replied: How does the DID individual differentiate between the nice and loving man and the husband/lover? That would be confusing to a 3 year old.
K answers: Correct, it is a difficulty, really Sam should put the husband/lover role on hold until such a time as his wife is ready to handle it. He has unwittingly found himself in the role of parent, as part of his vow “in sickness and in health”. Other SO forums discuss this problem too. There are workarounds, but all are temporary stop-gaps, until everyone has grown up. Littles do struggle a lot with adult relationships and may be quite damaged by inappropriate disclosure or confusing (to them) situations. In our household, guys (visitors and lodgers) have to be clean shaven and dress modestly all the time. If they do not, then a little may will be triggered or internally distressed by it.
JB quoted K: “Therapies I use have shown nothing less than 100% success, beyond that it is only a matter of time, effort and emotional engagement.”
JB: Keith, with all respect, if that statement were true you would be a hero and your work would be all over every professional journal worldwide.
K: Thanks, yeah I can receive that compliment. This work is far more emotionally demanding than anyone can imagine. There are some problems with getting published:
Not everyone desires their therapy history to be public. I have only been working in a public forum for less than a year. Rome was not built in a day. When it takes 10 years 24/7 to help one person in your own home it is not exactly high profile. No-one academically inclined is going to be aware of anything in sufficient detail to be writing books and papers. They would have to be exceptional to be able to gain the levels of trust necessary for that level of disclosure. If you want one way to stop therapy in its tracks, start treating your friends as research subjects for your latest book. Lack of time and money is extremely limiting. I personally do not have access to these journals, I doubt that the Institute of Electrical Engineers would be interested. As a christian, I include spirituality as a key part of the holistic approach to improving quality of life. The research and therapy community has a strong secular bias, which presents a barrier. (I am not clergy, my degree is in Engineering, which twitter account did you find?)
I am currently collecting successful case study material in audio and video faster than I can humanly write it up. If you know of anyone who would be willing to act as a secretary able to write up 2-6 case studies a week, let me know. Some research does exist, but for more general emotional well being topics, not specifically related to DID/MPD. There is at least one PhD in progress based on researching the efficacy of some of the methods I use. Efficacy depends more on the facilitator.
Once trust levels are enabled and we have one successful session, I tend to see 100% success rates with that person from then on if they are female. Guys are a little bit more difficult overall. Obtaining that first successful session is more difficult with Guys. Also Girls are more likely to come back for more friendship and ongoing help, whereas guys just want one problem sorted and they are off.
JB: It seems like the second part of that statement is being used to account for any that were less than 100% successful. Would that be the fault of the patient? The incompetence of the therapist? Would it be because there wasn’t enough money for therapy?
K: I do not charge, I personally do not think it is ethical to charge for helping someone. Especially if the friendship and relationship is part of the necessary relationship. When was the last time you charged your friends for a heart to heart, it just doesn’t work. I would however accept independent sponsorship from a third party.
If it does not work it is usually the fault of the therapist or the process. In particular physical safety, and trust levels need to be high. If progress is not happening, you can always go for a coffee every week for 6 months and try again later when required trust levels have been reached. In the mean time being a real friend has therapeutic value too. Obviously some people don’t want to go there, to their hurting places, and will back off, this is due to attempting to move too fast, again it is really the fault of the therapist, not the client.
JB: Or could it be because they had extreme mood and hormonal changes that influenced their thinking and behavior that went undiagnosed because the treating therapist presumed the problem was MPD? Maybe the people being treated aren’t psychologically ill in the first place and felt better after talking to someone.There are way too many factors that influence the outcome of therapy and too many that cannot be controlled so I question your 100% success rate.
Firstly a therapist should not presume anything. MPD is a pattern of behaviour which emerges, it is not made, it is there all along.
My hundred percent success rate is not based on some finger in the air idea of whether they feel better, or whether they feel hormonal or not. You are correct that there are too many factors for you to know anything with that level of certainty with regard to general status.
My 100% figure is based upon using the detailed model of how things work to understand what is broken, identifying a specific issue, and exactly in minute detail what is causing that issue and to be able to recognise specifically when it has been fixed. Once the causes have been identified, there can be a detailed before and after assessment to see if each of the causes has actually been resolved or not. For example, if we identify a phobia, and we tackle the reasons for that phobia, then when we are sure we have identified 100% of those reasons, and when we are sure they are all resolved we are almost at the point of claiming 100% success. If I am thorough and make steps to be certain that we actually looked at and processed 100% of the reasons for the phobia, then the phobia will be 100% healed. There is still the possibility that we missed something, so the 100% claim really only applies to those who return for a number of sessions over an extended period, in which case the opportunity to identify and tackle anything we originally missed will be available, together with longer term follow up.
For example, this week I helped a guy well on the way to overcoming OCD in one session. He turns lights on and off 6 times before leaving a room. There are two questions which need to be answered in order to heal him. Firstly the model explains this by telling us that our behaviours are driven by our emotions, so the first question is, “what emotion is driving this irrational behaviour?”. The second question is, where, how and why did his mind decide that switching lights on and off is the best way of responding to that emotion.
We found the emotion, traced it to its root causes, found other emotions, diverted off to look at anger and frustration, resolved those, came back to the original emotion and resolved the causes of that emotion so all related memories are peaceful. So now the actual source responsible for generating that emotion has gone, with 100% certainty, its not there any more. That emotion has gone completely, all emotional 10 measures are now 0. Everything tackled thus far is fixed with 100% certainty. I identified 7 broken things so far and 7 broken things have been fixed. Hence my strong claim.
If the OCD was to return, it would be due to other broken things that had not yet been looked at. So this does not mean that the OCD is totally fixed in one session because we have yet to check to see if there are any other different as yet unresolved emotions which might trigger the same response, and we have yet to tackle question 2, “why 6 times on and off”. However given that so much ground was covered in one session, it seems unlikely that 2 more sessions would not be enough to look for all other emotional drivers, and tackle question 2 fully, if relevant.
So given that the commitment to work through the OCD is there, to do at least 5 sessions, I expect, and typically find that after 5 sessions in which everything we look at in those sessions are resolved, overall the success rate will be 100% success on the overall OCD condition. OCD is only a label of a symptom, so is a fairly woolly classification, and is really useless in determining success measures. I define success measures in terms of specific causes identified and fixed, and painful emotions resolved to peace.
Keith, if, as you say, MPD is not real, what is there to cure? Because there is much to learn is not “proof” of anything more than hope. The cause and effect are Not clear. The assumption that sexual abuse = DID has not been proven by far. It it a belief, yes, but a fact? No.
I totally agree with you – people diagnosed with DID are doomed – to lose decades of their lives.
The cause an effect are extremely clear. No one as far as I know claims sexual abuse = DID. I can tell you that if you want to cause DID, belting a 2 year old to with an inch of his life with a belt with a buckle on the end will be definite, therefore I can categorically state that sexual abuse does not equal DID. However some sexual abuse can be as traumatic as the aforementioned belt. Overwhelming trauma produces DID, there is no dispute over this, the key is in the word “overwhelming”.
It is only muddied by people who insist on using models which do not work, and within which cause and effect is not clear at all. As a result we have a world full of practitioners and researchers whose thinking is not based upon clear ideas of cause and effect at all.
The diagnostic manual DSM IV is based on categorisation of symptoms, it does not present a clear model of cause and effect, its just an ever expanding catalogue of effects, in other words totally useless. You can safely ignore all the research contributions of people researching and treating effects only, ignoring causes. Then you can safely ignore those blinded by the medical model, if I feel depressed, my brain will produce less seratonin. The medical model gets the cause and effect around the wrong way. You can safely ignore most research done on broad statistics, because the devil as they say is in the details, and broad statistics blurs the details, and they rarely if ever have a large enough sampling. When I gave you broad statistics on my success rates you didn’t believe me. By the time you have discounted those whose interpretations are prejudiced by lunatics like Freud and Jung, there are not many left. Throw out anyone who relies on or uses hypnosis, and you are down to a mere handful.
I thank God I did an Engineering degree, in which I was taught to think clearly and apply rational problem solving skills.
regards
keith
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