Dissociative identity disorder is when you no longer feel your body. You are out of your body, so to speak. This is usually due to trauma. You don't want to feel that pain.
You often see in severe cases that people flop out of their bodies and don't want to go back into them because it hurts too much. For example, in a car accident where people dissociate from the pain. People with this disorder avoid emotions and feeling their bodies. Part of the reason for this is that people with dissociative disorder are unable to properly express how their heart beats[1]. It is not that if you have these symptoms you are necessarily suffering from this disorder; people with other problems may also have similar symptoms. Therefore, always see a doctor if you want to name your problem.
Perhaps you've experienced it yourself during a very painful moment. That you were distracted, that you suddenly felt like I don't feel anything. That the body's self-protection mechanism turns on, because otherwise it's too intense.
For some people, this mechanism no longer works out. You then see at some point people start seeking help, getting therapy, getting that classification and getting medication.
Only why take medicine if you already don't feel your body?
It is better to resolve the trauma. Now that's not always easy, but a pill to better deal with not feeling well doesn't make sense either.
Case study: symbol to get back in the body
For example, I had someone in practice. What happened was interesting. She was telling her story. We hadn't gotten to the real problem yet, but she told what had happened with that not feeling the body.
Then she made a movement along her throat as if she were cutting her throat, as if there was something there. I'm used to watching things like that. The first time is an occurrence, the second time is a coincidence, and the third time is a pattern. If someone does that three times on something they say, I find that interesting.
So I say, "What's in there, because you've been doing this three times now."
She was not even aware of this. But she said, "It's like there's a steel plate separating my head from my body."
So I said, "Get that record out then."
Then she said, "Yeah you can't, it's stuck with those pop rivets."
So I mentally gave her a nail remover, I didn't know what such a thing was called, and asked what happened next.
"It's gone now, but it's ice now."
Ice is interesting also from a symbolic point of view. Water is emotion and frozen water is frozen emotion. So I was very curious to see what would happen.
So I said, "Here you have an axe, just chop a wak." So then she went about chopping a wak in her mind while in hypnosis. She doesn't know what's going to happen and neither do I. Then suddenly the release came. The tears literally came right out of her eyes, as if it was under tremendous pressure.
She was shocked by this, but she also couldn't push it away, it only lasted a moment. So I asked her what happened next.
"All dregs."
So I said, "Oh there comes the dredge barge. So all the dredging goes away."
Then I asked her again what happened.
"Grass, I feel the grass. Wow, I'm in my body."
All at once, she was back in her body. That session did last a little longer than what I describe here, but these were the big picture. This is what just one session can do and now she feels fine.
Trauma had also changed. You have two ways of looking at it.
- The trauma was the dredge. The dredge was the symbol for the trauma and we cleaned that up. Now we are in clean and nice fresh grass.
- Why this can work, too. It is, of course, much larger now. I only found this out after the fact. She is much bigger now, what she went through as a child was all very intense. By then she had already gone out of her body.
For many people with dissociative disorder, there is also a distinct difference between the younger self and the older self. For example, people with this disorder find it difficult to determine who they are and where they are in time and place. So it is normal for a younger version of yourself to cause you to not feel comfortable in your body[2].
Now that she is back in her body in her early 20s, she can put that behind her and just get on with living her life.
Because her body left everything behind, her body just grew up. That little self that was still with it, that was dissociated, so that person was mentally disconnected from the body. Now she is back in it, because the trauma is resolved and now she can live her life.
When you see how effective it is to work like this, that's super. We didn't go into the content at all, I only heard about it afterwards. We didn't dig into the past at all. It worked purely with symbols. That's the power of the unconscious, working with symbols and with emotions.
Emotions are linked to situations that have taken place. We can use emotions to bring out information from a situation. This is what we do with regression.
But so you can also look at what the symbol is. You then say, "It's like there's a ... sitting there." For example, "It's like there's a tube around my neck." If you then remove it, you can see what happens. An emotional release usually follows.
As to what put that quiver there, we can guess. You may know it too, but the fact is you are liberated when it is gone.
Painful memories don't necessarily
Working with symbols can be very liberating and has less impact on the client than if they have to remember things during therapy .
All of this has its value, of course, because reliving things that allow you to let go of them has the effect of doing a lot of therapy afterwards. You're going to think about it, you're going to give it another place, you're going to revisit it.
You have less of this with symbols because there is less content attached. This is an advantage because then you don't have to say much about that content.
Many people actually want to know, which is why I don't work very much with symbols, but some clients don't want to lose it. They find it much too difficult to tell their story and then working with symbols can be very effective.
Using symbols can also help people get a better sense of their lives, their daily problems and what direction they actually want to take with their lives. Leaving the dregs behind and helping in the right direction to be able to see the green grass is then the therapist's main task[3].
Also listen to this webinar:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/195236/1336183-symbolen-werken-vaak-beter-dan-de-inhoud
Symbols are not just for hypnotherapy
Symbols are not only found in hypnotherapy. They also appear in other therapies for treating trauma or even PTSD. For example, in visual art therapy[4]. Drawing or something similar about your trauma allows you to process it in a different way than viewing the moment itself every time.
The use of symbols is also encouraged to help reintegrate people with complex trauma. This can also be done in conjunction with cognitive therapies[5], such as hypnosis therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy.
Symbols in child hypnosis
For small problems, for example those that children have such as anxiety, the use of symbols is also very appropriate. Because children cannot yet look at their problem with an adult eye and they already live in a world of play and fantasy anyway, it is especially popular in child hypnosis to use symbols[6], and this is often more useful with children.
Hypnosis is thus incredibly interesting for larger and smaller problems, and the use of symbols can help when people actually don't want to retrieve a painful memory to resolve it. After all, there are several roads that lead to Rome.
Would you also like to use hypnosis to help yourself or others? Then come to a hypnosis playshop to master the basics of hypnosis.
Want to see how a hypnotherapy session goes and learn hypnosis with other people? Then come to a hypnosis seminar.
Want to get started on techniques right away, such as how to use symbols? Then enroll in one of the training courses of the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands. The trainings are given in Wormerveer, Zwolle and online.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00897/full
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S246874991730090X
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Judson_Davis_Phd/publication/338670636_Active_Imagination_in_Psychotherapy/links/5e22ca91299bf1e1faba0dba/Active-Imagination-in-Psychotherapy.pdf
[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J229v06n04_02
[5] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15299730903179083
[6] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00029157.2019.1609840
