I have long believed that trauma treatment must address the effects of the traumatic past, not its events. Being able to tolerate remembering a horrific experience is not as important a goal as feeling safe right here, right nowâor being able to reassure oneself that the racing of the heart is just a triggered response, not a sign of dangerâor being able to relate to shame, grief, and anger as the feeling memories of child selves too young to comfort themselves.
In my view, resolution of painful past events cannot truly be achieved without reclaiming the lost children and disowned parts of ourselves, extending to them a helping hand, welcoming them âhomeâ at long last, creating safety for them, and making them feel wanted, needed, and valued.
It took many decades of scientific research for the clinical world to accept that child abuse constituted an epidemic, not a rare occurrence, and that untreated post-traumatic stress resulted in tremendous social costs, not just individual suffering. Only in the last ten years have the concepts of implicit memory and bodily-driven responses to trauma become increasingly widespread (Ogden et al., 2006; Van der Kolk, 2014), but, even now, theoretical ideas about splitting, parts of the self, and dissociation are still controversial and often avoided.
We as a field have not yet accepted that compartmentalization is normal under stress and much more common than we generally recognize. In a parallel process, the mental health world has had a history of disowning the prevalence of child abuse, dissociation, and fragmentation of the personality, either by ignoring its manifestations or by invalidating it as âfactitiousâ or âmalingering.â
To be the âgood childâ in the psychiatric treatment world, therapists have been under pressure to âun-seeâ signs of dissociation, to diagnose voices as a psychotic symptom, and to treat fragmented clients âas ifâ they were whole integrated human beings.
To be an integrated human, as Dan Siegel (2010) insists, requires âdifferentiationâwith linkage,â that is, it necessitates the ability to make distinctions between different parts of the self, to name them as parts, but also to link them to other parts and to the whole of which they are a part.
Disowning parts of oneâs self and over-identifying with other parts does not facilitate integration and a sense of being whole, nor does it engender an internal sense of safety that could counteract the after-effects of an unsafe, unwelcoming hostile world.
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