A wise and more experienced colleague said to me once, “You can’t expect someone to just stop dissociating and do something else more beneficial for their wellbeing when they don’t feel safe enough to stop dissociating. They need to find safety first within that dissociated state to come out of it.” Essentially, somebody who relies on soothing and safety within a dissociated ego state has nowhere else to go-inside the mind/body or outside that is adequately safe or soothing enough to regulate the nervous system.

It was a great relationship with my mother. Sounds counter-intuitive, right? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve raised eyebrows with that provocative sounding statement in my psychotherapy office whilst sitting across from a new client.

Compassion and Codependency make strange bedfellows. Indeed they do. Truly this combination is a one-sided marriage, and the two together effectively maintain an insecure balance. If you are acquainted with a compassionate codependent, your mindful patience can go a long way toward holding space for them. Simple common sense tells us that compassion and codependency are a bad mix in intimate relationship, yet some continue to play out codependent relationships of this sort even when they know it hurts them.

Yesterday was a cloudless Summer day in Southern California, and I was done early with my clinical hours. COVID-19 hit and everything has been on shutdown since mid-March. It’s now mid-September, and I’ve been feeling the need for some sun to drink into my skin. I drove over to the local pool (that is now re-opened, yay!) and lay down on the warmed and water splotched, brown concrete deck. Immediately I was alerted to a distressed toddler in the pool who was, in fact, with a swim instructor protesting into a water safe swim lesson.

People are able to integrate their dissociated personalities that have been separate for a very long time behind an amnestic curtain. And true, it takes many years in psychotherapy with a skilled clinician for this process to complete itself thoroughly. This being stated, not all persons with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) will move forward after long-term treatment with a single, unified personality. That is their choice in the event that integration of solidified ego states (aka-alter personalities) does not ever spontaneously occur.

It’s been said that perspective is everything. But really how does a person get a perspective in the first place? It’s locked and loaded, hardwired actually. By the time we’re six years old, humans show an emerging capacity to think about things in relation to the self and the outside world. When an infant has a secure home atmosphere where caregiver(s) are attending sensitively *enough* to their needs, fostering playful moments, providing a sense of security, protection and helping them make sense of their daily experience-this all is optimal for healthy development. It sets the stage for self-reflection capacity, a balanced adult viewpoint toward childhood caregiver(s) and experiences, and positive adaptation to life. Great! Attachment research puts these persons at around 50% of the general population around the world.

With COVID-19 cases escalating, I see both obvious and subconsciously concealed similarity to threats and danger from past trauma; this all gets understandably triggered in a person’s complex PTSD. What can people who suffer from complex PTSD do to mitigate the sometimes sudden and intense triggering these days?

The human condition automatically (read: without conscious direction) processes and stores traumatic experience as it’s happening in a different part of the brain as compared to non-traumatic experience (van der Kolk & van der Hart, 2019).

Skilled therapeutic intervention is key to resolving trauma, and fortunately there is not just one method or modality to accomplish resolution of traumatic experiences! At the heart of mental/emotional trauma resolution is therapeutic memory reconsolidation as articulated by Bruce Ecker’s (2018) methodology literature review.