Self-Alienation, Fragmentation & Re-writing Our Stories

How Trauma can Split our "Personality" & How to Recognize the True Self from Parts

Introduction

I recently had fruitful discussions with coach & therapist

Lilian Sjøberg

of

The HOPE shortcut

, about how different parts of us may arise in trauma healing, and come into conflict in stressful episodes, due to the triggering of body memories, and how working directly with the different parts in therapy can be helpful.

Off the back of this discussion, I decided to try to re-read a book on this topic, “Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation” by Janina Fisher.

The last time I tried to read it, I had to give up quickly, because at the stage I was at at that time, I found even thinking about conflicting parts quite triggering, and it would leave me even more dissociated/feeling splintered. However, after the conversations with Lilian, I guessed I had now come far enough that I could now face this topic.

Indeed, this time around I found the book very interesting and helpful. In particular, although written for other therapists, an explicit aim of the book is to educate and provide enough tools for those of us suffering due to trauma, in order to become our own therapists, to work on and re-parent ourselves.

Convergence of Two Approaches

I was interested to see a lot of independent convergence of what is laid out in the book, with the approach that Lilian has developed for her own style of coaching/therapy, that I have found so helpful.

In particular, the main thrust of both approaches is in going back and re-rewriting our memories and stories. From the book:

“Modern views on memory emphasize its unstable nature: that is, the brain seems to be organized to update and rewrite past experiences, integrating them with prior and subsequent events. Instead of focusing on developing a trauma narrative, clients are instead advised to rewrite their “self-defeating” stories and create a healing story that allows them to make meaning of what happened.”

“… [the] goal of treatment is to find a way in which people can acknowledge the reality of what has happened without having to re-experience the trauma all over again. For this to occur, merely uncovering memories is not enough: they need to be modified and transformed, i.e., placed in their proper context and reconstructed into neutral or meaningful narratives… thus, in therapy, memory paradoxically becomes an act of creation, rather than the static recording of events …”

Also, in both cases the emphasis is that traumatic memories don’t [just] get written in the brain as narratives like scenes from a movie, but [mostly] get stored bodily and viscerally [and especially in the fascia] as feelings, sensations, and motor/movement/postural patterns. Indeed, both approaches explicitly use the term “body memories”.

“... traumatic events come to be encoded as implicit emotional and physical states, rather than being encoded in the form of chronological narrative. “

“... attention to the role of implicit memory in trauma treatment. In order to recognize, understand, and help clients work with their trauma-related parts, the therapist must help clients understand their responses to triggering so that they can accurately identify triggered, implicitly remembered feelings, beliefs, and survival responses.”

They also agree trauma survival instincts are triggered in the present based on past experiences.

“...trauma-related parts, activated by normal life stimuli, driven by implicit trauma responses, experience the sense of threat [in the present] and automatically engage instinctive responses: fight, flight, cry for help, freeze or feign death...”

Both also emphasize that educating folks about this stuff is a big part of the therapy itself.

“The beginning stages of the therapy involve the therapist’s attuned building of a collaboration based on what the client needs, not just on what he or she wants. To create a new story about whom he or she is in the aftermath of the painful and traumatic events requires learning new habits of observation and discovery: the “op-ed” stories clients have been writing about themselves have been biased, not in their favor. They need help in acquiring the skills of mindful observation of both positive and negative feelings and sensations without interpretation or judgment.”

“For trauma treatment to be effective, no matter what methods we employ, survivors have to be able to integrate past and present. Concretely, this step requires education: about what traumatic memory is and is not, about triggers and triggering stimuli, about learning to accurately label triggered states (“this is a feeling memory”—“a body memory”), and cultivating the ability to trust that triggered states “tell the story” of the past without the necessity to either recall or avoid recalling specific incidents. When the therapist can also help clients connect implicit memory states to young parts of the self, it is easier to address them as a record of old dangers instead of signs of current threat.”

“Without an understanding of post-traumatic implicit memory or structural dissociation, not knowing they have been triggered by some cue reminiscent of the past, they interpret fear, shame, and anger as signs of imminent danger or deep-seated inadequacy. It can be a relief to discover that their stuckness, resistance, chronic depression, fear of change, entrenched fear and self-hatred, crisis and conflict, even suicidality all can be communications from parts who fear for their lives, unaware that the dangers they are bracing against are now in the past.”

Focus on Parts

However, the book focuses more squarely on a “parts” based methodology, akin to other parts orientated modalities such as Internal Family Systems. The hypothesis is that when we encounter potentially traumatic events, especially in childhood, it can be adaptive at the time to split off the traumatized parts of us.

“... a survival-oriented adaptive response... facilitating a... split that supports the disowning of “not me” or trauma-related parts and the ability to function without awareness of having been traumatized. The splitting also supports development of parts driven by animal defenses that serve the cause of survival in the face of danger.”

The more traumas we encounter and the more severe the traumas, the more splits and more siloed the splits become, resulting in multiple personality disorders in the extreme case.

“By the time the trauma survivor appears at our doorstep, the neurobiological and psychological effects of a dysregulated autonomic nervous system, disorganized attachment patterns, and structurally dissociated parts will have become a set of well-entrenched, familiar, habitual responses. He or she will be unconsciously driven by post-traumatic implicit procedural learning activated by trauma-related triggers. The symptoms and triggered reactions now will be so familiar and automatic that, subjectively, they feel like “just who I am.” Although apparently unrelated to the past, these “just who I am” responses are the conveyors of a narrative that cannot be fully remembered or put into words, a history held by different parts of the personality with different perspectives, triggers, and survival responses.”

“Our first priority in treatment must be to challenge this subjective perception that their symptoms are indicative of current danger or proof of their defectiveness or ‘just who they are.’ Therapists need to counteract the habitually triggered danger signals and trauma responses by calling attention to these reactions as communications from parts.”

Parts as Animal Survival Instincts

Interestingly in the book, somewhat different to other parts based modalities, the various types of parts which can get split off from the self due to trauma, are identified with one of the animal stress instincts/survival responses [fight, flight, freeze, fawn…].

“The submit part would be likely to write a shame-based, hopeless story of victimization; the cry for help part a story of how no one came or cared; the fight part would communicate that it’s better to die than to continue to be used and abused. Only the going on with normal life with its access to the wider perspective of the prefrontal cortex has the ability to conceptualize at a higher level, to make meaning out of the apparently paradoxical feelings, beliefs, and instinctual reactions of the whole system."

Problems occur when these parts come into conflict or hijack the system, or blend with the true Self.

The “going on with normal life” part proposed in the book is what is called the Self in Internal Family Systems. The author suggests to begin doing parts work by finding just one of the 8 C's of the Self [compassion, curiosity, clarity, creativity, calm, confidence, courage, and connectedness, especially starting with curiosity, with which to approach the parts, because some of them can be triggering of the parts at first.

“To help facilitate getting her prefrontal cortex back online, I next provide some psychoeducation by reinterpreting… difficulties as dysregulation: ‘No one can think clearly or manage intense feelings when the nervous system is in a state of traumatic activation—it’s too overwhelming. So, let’s go very slowly and stay curious. I’m going to ask you to pause and just notice what your body is doing right now.’”

As explored above, an important aspect of trauma healing is self-education and on-boarding self-care tools, and Lilian has created a number of resources for this very purpose. I recommend to begin by taking the Biological Stress Test to determine which of the animal instincts may be dominating, then take Lilian’s flagship HOPE-shortcut online course to address issues.