My Process

last updated 2/10/97

I am not in a place where I can tell the story of my healing process in a systematic way, but I want to share something about it because it has been useful to me to have a sense of the wide variety of approaches that people use in their healing. Two things seem particularly important to me right now: letting the process follow its own course and a particular thing I discovered about the process--that it helps me to be intentional about letting the insiders out.

1. My therapist is a Jungian analyst (for Jung information see: C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, and Culture). Being a Jungian means that he is particularly interested in dreams and symbols and any kind of unconscious material, rather than focusing on issues of daily life. He is so Jungian, that the theory is almost invisible. Once, he told me (when he didn't want to answer a question I asked) that part of the approach he learned in his Jungian training was that he tries not to fit what I am doing into any theory in his mind, because if he does, he will unconsciously influence me in that direction. Instead, he tries to be with the process that is inside me, and to respond from his intuition.

I go to therapy for two hours once a week. The two hours are really necessary to have time to let stuff come up. I also drive 65 miles each way to see him, so it isn't practical to do that more than once a week. When I go into his office, we exchange a hug and he asks me something like how are things, and then he waits to see what I want to talk about. Sometimes I have surface issues I want to talk about first (and if it is something I want to check with him he will usually ask me some questions about it and maybe even state some issues he sees in it). Other times, there may be something that just happened that I want to tell him about, or paintings or new craft work to show him.

When that is done, I sit on the floor and go into trance and try to say whatever comes into my mind. Sometimes that becomes an alter who wants to talk about something specific, sometimes a series of different feelings come up, and sometimes it becomes a journey into the unconscious in the form of a drama (a waking dream).

I usually move around the room and act out some of what is going on inside me, and particularly in the earlier map, the alters had their own particular places in the room where they would go to talk (for awhile the closest I got to any of the little ones inside was to curl up under his desk). Usually he says nothing during the time I am in trance, letting me find my own path, though sometimes he will respond to one alter.

When I come out of the trance, we usually talk about our feelings, about what happened a little, but don't analyze it. It has gotten to the point where I almost always spend more than half the session in trance. Early in my work with this therapist, I tried to talk about my trance approach some, but he has said almost nothing about it as a technique or to guide the process. I learned trance mostly on my own years ago, though I had a therapist 10 years ago who thought he was hypnotizing me (he didn't need to).

2. This process is changing shape now, and I don't know where it will end up. I am aware, in the last few weeks, of the insiders being out and taking over more completely than they usually did before. And it made me thankful that I developed a better way of communicating with them (before, I was mostly saying words that popped up into my head) and that this stronger presence didn't happen until I was ready for it.

I think that was possible only because my therapist put no structure on the process at all. He said something last week about our unspoken agreement to watch the process unfold rather than try to guide it. If he had had any expectations, or told me anything about how he saw what was going on, or talked to the alters a lot, I would have been pushed forward into giving the alters more reality than I could have accepted, instead of letting them gradually unfold. I feel awfully lucky.

I have a good e-mail friend who has a therapist with the opposite approach, which seems to be what is right for my friend. The therapist is clearly guiding my friend through a process that the therapist has mapped out in her mind. First my friend worked on building a safe place in her mind and on overcoming denial. Then it was time to start on memories, and so memories started to come. Now they are working on building deeper levels of trust.

3. One of the surprises that came out of my process was that I have found that ones of the keys for me is to intentionally (purposefully) reach out to and include my alters. I was lucky enough to be in a listserv that included multiples, before I realized I was multiple myself. So right from the beginning, I knew I had to listen to and learn to love my insiders.

I made an effort to listen to them and do things for them even before I could hear them very clearly. Certainly, sometimes they came up and dominated my feelings when I didn't want them to, but particularly in therapy I was usually making an effort to let them talk. In the particular incident I'll describe below, I wanted the scared one to talk and I was trying to follow her impulses even if they weren't very loud. When I felt an impulse inside me to go under the desk, I would do it, even if the impulse wasn't very strong. Then I would say whatever words came into my head and gradually she would get her voice.

Let me tell you a particular story about what I call "being intentional," because sometimes the story is worth a lot more than the theory. I was at therapy and I had gone into trance and different things were coming out. I began to move into a scared part of myself who wanted to curl up under my therapist's desk before she would feel safe enough to talk. I started to move in that direction, but my therapist was sitting close enough to his desk, that he was blocking my way. He didn't figure out what I was trying to do in time to get out of my way. I said I was trying to go under the desk, but saying it out loud made me too embarrassed, and I couldn't do it. Instead I sat and hung my head and was stuck in feeling embarrassed and ashamed of the things I do to express the insiders. I finally said: "I feel too embarrassed to do it intentionally, I will have to do it unintentionally." And I guess I then gave up more control, and the process went on, including eventually my curling up under the desk. But I realized afterwards that I didn't have any memory of what I said when I was under the desk.

When I got embarrassed, I got struck in a place where I could no longer bear to choose to let her talk--to choose to follow those small impulses. So instead of me consciously acting out the impulses and saying the words that came up from her, I let go of control. And she took over, not in any threatening way, but because I wasn't able to believe that it was okay for her to talk, I couldn't hear what she said.

This was an important lesson for me because I had always worried about about how I mostly repeated words that I could hear in my head rather than switching more completely. I wondered if I was still repressing the insiders when I needed to let them out more; or, on bad days, I worried about whether the fact that I had so much control meant that I was just making it all up. When I discovered that I didn't remember what I had said after I let go of control, I realized that my choosing intentionally to let the insiders speak allowed me to hear them. Choosing to let them speak meant that I accepted their existence and therefore could bear to hear what they said.

In the last few weeks, I have moved away from just repeating words that come up in my head to a more complete kind of switching. It used to be that almost all the time everything was filtered through me (blue). Now the others act more autonomously, but blue is still there watching. I try to be intentional about it. If I feel pressure inside, I try to make space to figure out who wants to talk and let them write or do something that they want to do. I think if I waited until they forced a switch, I wouldn't remember. However, because I choose to switch, I am still present.

4. Sometimes reaching out to the insiders can really help. I recently had a nasty new bit of memory, and even though it was a small fragment, it overwhelmed me. But I was able to get in touch with the part that had the memory, even though I didn't know her before, and find positive things about her and nice things for her to do (a chorus of voices in my head said to go to the zoo, so after a minute's resistance, I decided to do so). At the zoo, she wanted to see the lions, and she decided she would take the name baby lion or little lion because she wanted to grow up to be strong and fierce and able to protect herself. The memory came up Friday night. By Sunday, her presence wasn't the presence of a child overwhelmed by something bad that happened to her, but a child who was excited about having been to the zoo.

I have sometimes said that what seemed to happen last fall with the adult parts was that they gradually gained ego strength and became more fully rounded people, but as that happened they also overlapped more. I visualize that what happened with this new little one is that she started out as narrow--just a memory fragment--and I found ways for her to get wider, so that she included happiness and playfulness, not just pain.

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