Re:Safe Place/Addictions

Can you clarify? Honestly, I always felt the "viewing room" next to the conference room was the most important element -- because it allows parts to observe (or not), to engage (or not).

Being able to communicate and tolerate "parts" is essential. Having the option to not communicate seems to me just as vital.

I stopped DNMS work over a month ago. It has slowly occurred to me that my major problem with the protocol was it's emphasis on installing the many characteristics of the "resources". Schmidt also uses an analogy of a house... turning off and on lights in rooms... illuminating those characteristics that are desired and "turning off" those characteristics that are not desired.

The result of this was that, to accomplish the meditations/installations I had to walk quickly through the many "rooms" of my head, pulling out aspects of different parts but *only* those parts of parts that were deemed desirable. I left sessions flooded, as parts were prematurely coerced into proximity with one another (for instance, a patient part being told to blend with a protective part). Of course, undesirable characteristics, according to the meditations, got left in the "dark". (That image itself gives me chills.)

Good parts vs bad parts. The worst thing you can reinforce in a DIDer.

Anyway, the one thing most missing, from my perspective, was not the communication and container that a conference room provides, but the option of "not looking" that a viewing room provides. While I was told that "resources" were supposed to be a magnificent container, they in fact felt like a Frankenstein with a smiley face mask on. Pieces of me cut up and reassembled, to appear appropriate to my therapist.

(As the protocol asserts, everyone can remember ONE time of being patient or appropriately responsible or protective... thus proving the "neural network" exists... problem was, I had dozens of "parts" embodying those characteristics. To bring them "into a single sense of self" as the meditation reads, was a coerced and premature integration.)

My experience, I will repeat, is idiosyncratic. But the longer I am away from DNMS the more toxic it appears to me. After 13 months of crisis and continual contact with my old therapist, I finally feel grounded, have no outside session contact with my therapists, am doing EMDR, I am sleeping and I am happy. Except when I think about the past year and it's impact on my family and friends.

I return to my original question. What about that viewing room? What about "not looking"? What if parts don't want a "visual" rapproachment? Is that ok? What if a client doesn't want to wander from room to room pulling out memories or aspects of self?

Is is ok to just stay in that foyer and reinforce those structual beams? And keep the lights on... in all the rooms... in the meantime...?

Replies:

Re:Safe Place/Addictions, by Sandra Paulsen Inobe PhD, 08/28/03 Re:Safe Place/Addictions, by Sandra Paulsen Inobe PhD, 08/28/03 Re:Safe Place/Addictions, by lia, 08/28/03

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