Articles and Blogs

Is recovery possible? That’s the question that everyone is asking, even when they’re not asking it. After a breakdown, perhaps after years in the mental health system, do we have to simply accept that we’re broken and that we’ll always be broken, or is it possible to live a life where we’re back in control again, where we’re living as we want to live, where life has purpose and meaning?

I could cope with it no longer. Every part of me – eyelids, throat, bowels – everything was clenched tight in a ball of furious unbearability. This feeling – such a feeling! – loomed up over me like some prehistoric sea-monster, ready to snap me up and devour me, ready to pilfer my bones and pick apart my brain. This feeling was too much.

EMDR psychotherapy is an information processing therapy and uses an eight phase approach to address the experiential contributors of a wide range of pathologies. It attends to the past experiences that have set the groundwork for pathology, the current situations that trigger dysfunctional emotions, beliefs and sensations, and the positive experience needed to enhance future adaptive behaviours and mental health.

‘Child grooming’ refers to a series of actions deliberately undertaken in order to develop an emotional bond with a child in order to sexually abuse them. Grooming increases the availability of the victim for abuse whilst decreasing the likelihood of detection for the abuser.

Starting with her very first dissociative client, in this article sensorimotor psychotherapist Margaret Collingwood talks about her journey of working with clients with dissociative identity disorder and how she has learned to understand their parts in terms of their survival function.

When we have dissociative identity disorder, the problem is not always simply that we have dissociated parts of the personality. The problem more often is in the hatred we can feel for these disavowed parts: 'She is the hated child'. How do we heal the trauma of self-rejection and develop compassion for even the most traumatised and alienated parts of ourselves?

‘Dissociative parts of the personality’ grabbed the headlines, but my inability to set boundaries was the silent assassin destroying me from the inside… I said yes to everyone else, and no to myself. Other people mattered; I did not. And so, breakdown.

Understanding the dynamics around child sexual abuse, who the perpetrators are, how they achieve their ends, the impacts of abuse on us – all of this knowledge, this ‘psychoeducation’ has aided my recovery. And so these are ten of the many things that I have learned about child sexual abuse, some of the insights that have begun to heal my shame.

Duncan Craig is the founder of Survivors Manchester. In this powerful article he examines the impact of sexual abuse on men.

You don't need to be an expert to work with people who dissociate, but you do need to understand these fundamental issues. Here are ten steps.

After trauma our brains are sensitised to threat and our amygdala – our brain’s ‘smoke alarm’ – tends to react to burnt toast as if the house is on fire. In this article I show how to turn down the sensitivity of our smoke alarm – and overcome the impacts of trauma.

Denial and dissociation are two sides of the same coin. In employing dissociation, we are employing denial: “This isn’t happening” or “This isn’t happening to me.” We create alter personalities to whom it happened, so that it didn’t happen to me.

Once we understand dissociation as a logical response to overwhelming trauma, it stops being so dramatic and different, and the person suffering dissociation stops being ‘complex’ and ‘bizarre’ too. There is nothing bizarre about dissociative disorders—what is bizarre is how some people can be so badly mistreated that they end up with a dissociative disorder.

Sexual abuse is still a taboo subject. It is generally thought that between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4 girls experience sexual abuse before the age of consent. But despite this, we rarely read about the impact that might have on women experiencing pregnancy, birth and then parenthood. And it can have a huge effect on any or all of those aspects of life.

Men with dissociative identity disorder are in the minority, at least in terms of being diagnosed. This series of interviews explores the experience of dissociation and recovery from child sexual abuse from a male perspective, with stark honesty and vulnerability.

Someone who has dissociative identity disorder may have distinct, coherent identities that are able to assume control of their behaviour and thought. Read on to find out more about this poorly-understood phenomenon.