Articles and Blogs

Are the words we’re using, to describe our own experience or to make sense of someone else’s, distracting from human suffering and a bid for connection and support? Or are they tools to be able to come alongside someone in their distress?

Sometimes life doesn't go to plan. In this article I relate the circumstances that led me back into therapy and how I'm rising again after being knocked (and literally falling) down.

Dissociative survivors talk about what is hardest for them in living with dissociative identity disorder.

Dissociative survivors face a range of challenges and here, in their own words, they describe the things they find hardest about life with dissociative identity disorder.

How do you go about getting a diagnosis for dissociative identity disorder? In this guest blog, one client describes her long struggle for treatment on the NHS and the path to the Clinic for Dissociative Survivors.

In suffering abuse in childhood, we often experienced pain. And that pain was reflected back in the eyes of our abusers as pleasure. We then take that template and expectation into our adult relationships. In this blog post, written based on a therapy session early on in my recovery journey, I explore this topic by drawing on my experiences of working through the shame of self-harm and how the inflicting of pain can in some circumstances be an attachment cry.

For a number of years, I was a foster carer, looking after many traumatised and abused children whose trauma, although unremembered and unspoken, was plain to see. In this post I describe the impact on me of hearing the cry of one particular baby, and how this acts as a metaphor for our own inner child.

Trauma focuses our brain on danger based on the ‘there-and-then’, and one of the hardest, but most helpful, things to do is to be able to just notice and be curious about our present experience in the ‘here-and-now’. In this blog post I talk about my experience of learning to do this.

I used to struggle to understand what phase III could possibly be about, because my life was so consumed with just surviving, and then so consumed with working through traumatic material to neutralise it, that I imagined that therapy would always be like that, and that once it was no longer happening, there would be no more need for therapy.

When I first started therapy in 2006, I didn’t know much about trauma and nothing about ‘the three phase approach’. My counsellor didn’t know much more. So although I’d like to say that we started by carefully doing the Phase 1 work of safety and stabilisation, the reality was a great deal messier than that.

‘If I could just get over it, I would,’ I say, and I’m trying not to sound irritated or hurt but I’m not quite sure what emotion my face is displaying and my throat is tight and my fists are clenched and really I’d rather not be here, and neither am I convinced that I’m a good enough actor to hide all of this.

‘Christmas is optional!’ I announce, loudly and excitedly and with an uncharacteristic degree of gusto, at the beginning of my session. We haven’t even sat down yet. Mostly sessions begin with a tense stand-off as I battle within myself to be present. The therapist’s eyes widen. I can tell she’s wondering if I’ve switched to another part ...

Enjoying life depends on being in the neurobiological 'green zone' of safety, mediated by the ventral vagus nerve. Joy and threat are mutually exclusive so it took me time to develop the skill of ever enjoying myself. This is the story of that journey.

Stigma is the double-whammy of life after trauma. Not only do we suffer abuse in childhood, perhaps resulting in a post traumatic or dissociative disorder in adulthood, but then we are stigmatised, shunned and shamed for it too. How can that be right?

Everybody has mental health. The question is how good it is, and how we manage it. We need strategies for managing our emotions and feelings. In this article I share my own.

‘It’s horrible being triggered.’ I nod. It’s an understatement. There are no words to describe it. The trigger comes and our bodies and brains surge with the aversiveness of survival: everything tells us to get away. This is dangerous! This is painful! This isn’t good! Get away, get away!