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What is “Dissociative Identity Disorder” and how does it relate to trauma?

Dissociative Identity Disorder (“DID”) is a mental health disorder in which an individual’s experience of self becomes fragmented, and “self-states” become split off or separated from consciousness. 

Dissociation takes many forms, such as depersonalization and derealization, and serves as a reaction to developmental trauma when an individual is faced with repeated betrayal such as abuse or neglect from those in a position of trust. This “biological paradox” gives rise to conflictual emotions and the drive of going both toward and away from the same attachment figure resulting in irresolvable fear and a fragmentation of the mind.

From the Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, such traumatic relational experiences disrupt the capacity for integration, moving individuals outside an array of context-specific windows of tolerance for a range of emotions, making them prone to chaos and rigidity, and isolating “self-states” in DID as separated fragments of a whole waiting for the healing process of integration to bring them back to an experience of wholeness. 

In this course, you will receive a never before seen interview with Dr. Dan Siegel’s former client who was diagnosed and healed with Dissociative Identity Disorder and has gone on to study psychology and practice psychotherapy for the last 20 years.

Whether you are a therapist or a clinician, you may have noticed that some mental health disorders receive a lot of attention, while others are rarely discussed in professional and academic environments. With lack of attention and formal training, conceptualization and treatment of less discussed mental disorders can become a challenge. This course brings you the rare opportunity to observe and learn from a real life client’s experience of Dissociative Identity Disorder (“DID”) as an illustration of the impact and treatment of disorganized attachment and dissociation.  

Why should you consider taking this course on Treating Disorganized Attachment and Dissociation?

Through the integrative experience of an attuned relationship between the therapist and client, deep processing of traumatic material is made possible through the presence, attunement, resonance, and trust within the therapeutic relationship. This relationship allows the client to integrate psychological material, creating coherence between self-states, and enabling an integrative individual to access a wide array of memories and emotions with widened windows of tolerance and more adaptive responses to challenge within the person as a whole. 

Although there are many different therapeutic techniques to address and treat trauma, IPNB’s focus on integration as the basis of well-being illuminates how DID is an outcome of the excessive isolation of different “self states” revealing excessive differentiation and impaired linkage. Through the treatment of the individual as a whole and the attunement to individual self-states, the clinician is able to understand and facilitate the linkage of the function of each individual dissociated facet of the person, processing the psychological material that is held in isolation within each separated state and then facilitating the integration—the linkage of differentiated states—of the individual as a whole person.

With so many different therapeutic orientations to work with trauma, what makes this approach useful for treating Dissociative Identity Disorder?