"core" selves

For as long I have been a reluctant member of the DID client "community" there has been great emphasis on a core, healthy, pretraumatized self. There is am implicit assumption that we are each born with a single self which becomes degraded. I am aware of no evidence that this is the case. Everyone has selves and parts... in a sense, it's our inability to accept that which makes us DID.

The search for core splits, which I have witnessed beginning many times after an "integration", seems to meet some need to return to a "garden of eden". A desire to find the unharmed self, and the adherence to the intoxicating belief that if one just looks early enough... that pure self will be found.

Looking for unity, a "core" self, seems to me to be an evasion of the fact that conflict still exists within our new integrated "self"s. If only we remembered early enough, the logic seems to go, then we would be "really" healed... To me, this is just DIDer's, once again, in a therapeutically sanctioned way, trying to find the "perfect" ego state, the perfect part, which will make the world (and them) ok.

The world is not ok. That's what makes it ok. We are all fragmented. Therein lies our wholeness. Core splits are, as someone said, natural polarities. Part of the whole.

I know I am rambling... but in a discussion like this it is so easy for clients and therapists to discuss the same thing without actually doing so! I suspect here that the client has been talking about finding and/or healing a "core" self and the clinicians are talking about something else entirely... about programming and mirroring and development of "self" in a much larger sense.

I would appreciate comments on this... information overload or not!

Replies:

Re: in relation to EMDR...., by Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD, 12/26/02 Re: in relation to EMDR...., by Anonymous, 12/27/02 ...in relation to EMDR...., by Diane, 12/27/02

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