As someone heavily prone to dissociation (I could probably be diagnosed with OSDD-1B if I were to go to a psychiatrist), I am interested in but skeptical of things like this. I have a very hard time holding my various contradictory emotionally-charged beliefs in my mind at the same time, because their accessibility to memory is dependent on which ego state I am in at the moment, and I often don’t even realize when I switch from one to another. (Other people sometimes do, of course, such as when I start arguing against an opinion I argued in favor of just a few minutes before.) Even when one version of me fully understands things like “I have people who care about me”, this does not stop my traumatized child-self from once again taking away the microphone when something bad happens and refusing to listen. That is… this method does not seem likely, to me, to actually have any permanent effects but only to be a temporary solution approximately along the same lines as telling oneself to shut up.
This makes me think of IFS, and how the symbolic unburdening ritual the standard IFS procedure includes only really does anything if you’ve managed to coordinate with your Protectors well enough for them not want to jump in the way / disrupt it, and if you’ve connected with and empathized with the Exile strongly enough for the symbolism to resonate for the exile, and for the exile themself to feel ready for and want the changes an unburdening would entail. Without all those pieces in place, it does end up falling flat and doing approximately nothing except maybe feeling nice for a brief period — because in essence you’re just doing some thing over here on the side in a way that isn’t actually interacting meaningfully with the parts it’s supposedly meant to heal.
Getting all of these pieces in place is actually quite hard and takes a lot of extended inner relationship-building and development of understanding, as far as I can tell. I’m still working on it myself, and have only had little bits and pieces of successful unburdening type results so far.
As someone heavily prone to dissociation (I could probably be diagnosed with OSDD-1B if I were to go to a psychiatrist), I am interested in but skeptical of things like this. I have a very hard time holding my various contradictory emotionally-charged beliefs in my mind at the same time, because their accessibility to memory is dependent on which ego state I am in at the moment, and I often don’t even realize when I switch from one to another. (Other people sometimes do, of course, such as when I start arguing against an opinion I argued in favor of just a few minutes before.) Even when one version of me fully understands things like “I have people who care about me”, this does not stop my traumatized child-self from once again taking away the microphone when something bad happens and refusing to listen. That is… this method does not seem likely, to me, to actually have any permanent effects but only to be a temporary solution approximately along the same lines as telling oneself to shut up.
This makes me think of IFS, and how the symbolic unburdening ritual the standard IFS procedure includes only really does anything if you’ve managed to coordinate with your Protectors well enough for them not want to jump in the way / disrupt it, and if you’ve connected with and empathized with the Exile strongly enough for the symbolism to resonate for the exile, and for the exile themself to feel ready for and want the changes an unburdening would entail.
Without all those pieces in place, it does end up falling flat and doing approximately nothing except maybe feeling nice for a brief period — because in essence you’re just doing some thing over here on the side in a way that isn’t actually interacting meaningfully with the parts it’s supposedly meant to heal.
Getting all of these pieces in place is actually quite hard and takes a lot of extended inner relationship-building and development of understanding, as far as I can tell. I’m still working on it myself, and have only had little bits and pieces of successful unburdening type results so far.