Articles and Blogs

The 'trauma traffic light’ represents three physiological states that the body can shift gear between, depending on levels of threat or security in the world: the green zone, the amber zone or the red zone. Join me as I explain this concept that I developed from Stephen Porges' polyvagal therory.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

What medications should be used in the treatment of dissociative identity disorder? This fact sheet takes guidance from the ISSTD’s Treatment Guidelines for DID.

How should dissociative identity disorder be treated? What do the guidelines say, and who produces them?

The way we respond to trauma is not a matter of choice – it is a biologically preprogrammed set of responses which happen in a predictable sequence. Here we look at the five ‘F’ responses to trauma.

For dissociative identity disorder (DID) to develop, there is usually chronic trauma in early childhood along with significant problems in the child-parent relationship.

Diagnosis of dissociative disorders is by no means straightforward, mainly due to a lack of training and knowledge. This article explains how diagnosis is made.

There are a number of diagnostic tools available for assessing dissociative disorders. This article lists the principle ones along with descriptions, purpose and methods used.

Dissociative disorders appear as diagnostic categorisations in both the American-based DSM-5 produced by the American Psychological Association (APA, 2013), and the other ‘diagnostic’ bible used more widely in Europe, the World Health Organisation’s ICD-10.

A brief guide to dissociative identity disorder, a post-traumatic condition, by me, Carolyn Spring.

Twenty helpful, and sometimes surprising, things that my therapists said to me.