CREATING A SELF

Along the way we dealt with personal history which needed to be detraumatised so she could go beyond that but no effort was made at all on my part to find trauma. Since people's personal pain and incongruities often come to consciousness on their own in a supportive environment, there was no need to develop a special interest in all the grisly experiences Simone had as a child.
Some of these experiences included such things as trying to suicide at the age of eight, being tied up and beaten regularly with knives and sexual molestation.

I used standard trauma-reduction techniques here and basically did whatever worked to reduce pain and increase personal congruence.

Nor was any effort made to 'understand' the problem except that of constructing a viewpoint for her which helped her deal with the mess.
The only significant understanding I had or offered her was that her parents were scum and THEY were the crazy ones. In developing MPD she was acting like any normal, sane child in a situation where the parents spend their time beating, tormenting and torturing that child.

So HOW did we create this Self?
It was like starting with a blank slate and by continually asking her questions which elicited what she wanted out of life and what values she had, we found out what to put on this blank slate.
When she found some behaviour of herself she didn't like, asking what job that behaviour was doing for her, or what would she be doing if she didn't have that behaviour, we ended up with values and outcomes which were more functional.
All negative behaviour was thus reframed from a Functionalist viewpoint until a worthwhile outcome for the behaviour (what are you trying to achieve by this?) and the values congruent with that behaviour were reached.
The useful (increasing self-worth without reducing externally-oriented coping skills) feelings and values were incorporated without change.

At this early stage I didn't seek a sensory-based outcome (in the sense of what she would be doing in the external world when she had a Self) as we were primarily creating a self independent of context and behaviour.
For example after one session where she had told me of her mother tying her up and beating her with a carving knife I asked her 'how should parents treat their kid?'
This got the response that they should look after them and from there (a behavioural description) we got to 'they should care for them' (an emotional state).
Not too much to ask of parents you would think.
So the quality for Simone to include in her Self was that of caring.
Then came the part which made the experience of caring for a child 'stick' so that this was then a part of Simone's new Self.

Since I had no idea what her Self should be, her body was the guide to structuring the new experiences so that she could access the desired states and feelings easily.
Having elicited the feeling of care (which Simone felt in her head) I asked Simone to feel it on her skin, then the tissues just under the skin, then the muscles underneath and then in different parts of the body such as belly chest etc.
Mainly having her feel it in the torso of course kept it from just being anchored to body parts responsible for movement as she had a history of 'over-achieving' (moving away from pain) and I was concerned her old fear-based escapist patterns (which already used these parts of her body) might get in the way.
Ideally we have a Self whether we're moving or not.

One thing I made sure of was to refer to any sexual part of the body in the vaguest possible terms so that instead of vagina or cunt I used the word crutch.
This was to ensure that a male voice was not anchored to an intimate experience of her genitalia. She had had enough to deal with in coping with her father.
One study claimed that 70% of MPDs have been sexually abused, and although she would have to eventually deal with herself fully as a sexual being, either a lover or perhaps a female therapist would be more appropriate to associate with her sexual organs.
So crutch and chest were the only sexual terms that were used in reference to her sexual self-body awareness.

3,000 million years of evolution must have had some impact on the human psyche I figured, and with a bit of luck, her body would prove to be an appropriate metaphor for her Self.
I suspect that what made it work was her trust in me and her determination as she wasn't the type to merely desire something like this, and it was determination that got her through a decade's awareness of being crazy - and two decades of being crazy without knowing it.

Simone experienced her emotions feelings and values throughout her body and in an increasingly intimate progression. Skin, muscle, fat, bones and then the bone marrow.
As she arranged the feelings etc according to body structures they achieved a greater degree of stability continuity and balanced interaction with each other.
Instead of living in a chaotic emotional mind-space at the mercy of her inner turmoil and environmental pressures, Simone began to live more and more in contact with the external world which existed apart from her emotional state (rather than as a projection of it) and to feel more and more at peace with herself.

Interestingly, it was feeling the feelings in her bone marrow that took the longest for her to develop. This may have been due to there being no nerves in the marrow as the final layer of nerves is in the periosteum, the tissue surrounding the bone.
The significance of the metaphor here is that she was determining what would be in her 'Self' which was outside her awareness, just as neurologically the interior of our bones is outside neurological awareness.
This was a metaphor for her unconscious/automatic mind so she could start to assume her own existence.

And so it went, through the feelings that played the most important roles in her life and as usual they could be categorised as being incorporated into a love-power dichotomy.
Of course once Simone found she was having feelings which were incompatible with each other, it was easier for her to resolve this conflict/tension by moving her awareness to a higher order construct, a Self.
Before this she had managed conflicting emotions by parcelling them out to different personalities and so they never met.
By integrating them via a Self she then had easier access to both and used context and outcome as the criteria for dealing with them.

And within this growing construct (Self) the various beings that inhabited her faded in intensity and disappeared. From time to time some would return for more work to be done and then they too would disappear as she integrated the core issue (such as anger) into her Self.
Once their emotional needs were met they had no objection to becoming part of a richer, whole person instead of a very limited entity with a separate identity.
And it was they which gave Simone her richness as that whole person.

In a letter to me she said she was "...becoming new, complete, whole, happy, free, safe, secure and joyfully single."
And over the phone she said " I wonder what positive things I got from my mother..?"

When the client starts sorting spontaneously through her personal history for the positive then she has control over the experience and is well on the way to transcending it.
Mind you, we still haven't found any worthwhile contribution from her mother.

'You're not going to ask me to love her are you?'

The initial goal of creating a Self took less than 6 months but it took another 3 years for that Self to stabilise and maintain its integrity against the onslaughts of the inimical selves which had been created over her childhood.
Simone would see me every few weeks and I would repair the damage done by the other selves, strengthen her , teach her more skills for self-control and she would then 'try it on' until the next session when we would repeat the process, adjusting her mind each time to get closer to her goal.

The final (from my perspective) structures which gave her Self stability and strength and dominance weren't created until I first figured out how to do it.
And, once started, that process took 9 months. We were both learning as we went as there seems to be little useful information of just HOW to make this happen freely available.

This phase included Simone learning to feel comfortable without pain and fear as she wasn't used to it. In itself, the lack of pain made her anxious at first which triggered old emotional habits. She had to unlearn the habit component of the problem.

Then there were external world concerns such as how to handle herself in job interviews or how to deal with the head of the Department where she worked.
Through all this Simone progressed through her career path in the Public Service, a path which no other woman had achieved. She also received awards which enabled her to travel overseas and permission to use Departmental time to complete her PhD. Simone was not the type to run away from life and although these external pressures made the internal work more difficult for her at times, that was the path she chose, and she succeeded.