Janina Fisher’s Method for “Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors”

Posted on by Wendy E. Smith, MA, LMHC

For years I have been searching for the right method of trauma treatment for me and my clients with complex developmental trauma.  I am, therefore, very excited to have been learning of late, from Janina Fisher’s latest book and from an online course with her, about helping clients overcome the “internal self-alienation” that can result from such ongoing traumatic experiences as childhood neglect or abuse.

Fisher uses the Structural Dissociation model as the basis for her understanding of trauma symptoms.  This model theorizes that, when trauma occurs, the personality splits into a “going on with normal life” portion of the self and trauma-related parts of the personality which are formed as coping mechanisms to deal with overwhelming experiences.  These parts are: fight, flight, freeze, submit and attach.

Clients with traumatic symptoms blend with one part or another at different times and think that they are that part, rather than a larger self that contains all the parts.  Thus, they may be overcome with anger (fight) at one moment and just want to escape (flight) at another moment.  This internal chaos is very confusing and distressing for clients and can also be confusing to therapists!

Using wisdom gleaned from Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model and from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Fisher demonstrates how to help clients “unblend” from their parts by helping them see their parts via the light of mindfulness.  She then helps them get to know and befriend their parts so that the parts (which are stuck back in the age of childhood in which they were formed) can be brought up to date and get what they needed back then from the client’s adult self now.  In this way the personality gradually re-integrates and trauma symptoms subside.

I am particularly excited by this method of trauma treatment because it jibes well with the attachment basis and techniques of Emotion-Focused therapy which I have been using for years and because trauma can be healed without the pain and suffering of re-experiencing traumatic memories.

Book Recommendation for Childhood Trauma Survivors: Not the Price of Admission by Laura S. Brown, Ph.D.

Posted on by Wendy E. Smith, MA, LMHC

On a trip to New York and back, I recently read Laura Brown’s excellent book for survivors of childhood abuse and neglect (including emotional abuse and neglect):  Not the Price of Admission:  Healthy Relationships after Childhood Trauma.  Here is part of a review by Kathy Steele from the back cover of Brown’s book that I think captures the essence of this book well:

“Laura Brown… has given us a book that is delightfully authentic and readable, chock full of humor, honesty, compassion, and–most importantly–realistic hope. How can people who have been terribly hurt by their caretakers in childhood ever learn to trust and love again?  Dr. Brown explores this agonizing question with refreshing clarity, sharing stories that illustrate tough issues and realistic solutions.  She truly gets the impossible dilemma of desperately wanting emotional intimacy, yet being paralyzed by a belief that you are unlovable, and mired in the deep mistrust and  confusion that only profound betrayal can engender.  Dr. Brown offers realistic and compassionate pathways to (re)learn how to take the tough but essential risks of authentic connection with the right kind of people, so you no longer find you have to pay a price for love.”

In particular, Brown explains how to raise or lower the volume of one’s “cheater detectors”, depending on which way they have been miscalibrated as the result of adverse childhood experience, and how to determine which people are and are not trustworthy.  She also explores how to set new boundaries so as not to continue to pay a price for participation in relationships with reliable people who never wanted the survivor to pay such a price in the first place, and end (or not get involved in) relationships with people who are likely to re-traumatize the survivor.

Brown clearly articulates how the predicaments survivors find themselves in came to be and are not their faults, and also how to start taking responsibility for changing them.  Survivors are likely to find this book eye-opening, affirming, useful and empowering.

Using Lifespan Integration in My Therapeutic Practice

Posted on by Wendy E. Smith, MA, LMHC

In the last ten months I have been using a relatively new type of therapy–Lifespan Integration (c) developed by Peggy Pace–as part of my therapeutic practice. This kind of therapy is based on the latest brain research and on attachment theory.

One of the things Lifespan Integration is very useful for is helping people integrate all kinds of traumas into regular memory so that they no longer have the “here and now” quality that makes unprocessed traumatic experience so troubling for people. Recent traumas, such as a car accident, can often be neutralized in one hour-and-a-half session. Older, childhood traumas, especially if they represent a pattern that occurred over time (such as a pattern of abuse or neglect) may take multiple sessions to process. In either case, Lifespan Integration works gently without re-traumatizing.

Even in cases where clients do not come in with post-traumatic stress as a presenting issue, Lifespan Integration can be used effectively to help them clear current troubling life patterns (e.g., shame attacks) through following unconscious connections to the early life events that formed these patterns and then integrating those. Often times, as children, clients did not have an attentive adult present to help them understand troubling situations in their lives. By bringing the client’s current adult self back into the childhood scene to support the child, the childhood experience can be integrated with the knowledge and understanding of the (now) adult. To use the example of shame attacks, whereas other forms of therapy help the client to cope with painful bouts of shame when they arise, Lifespan Integration can result in the disappearance of this reaction all together.

In addition to using Lifespan Integration to treat trauma, I have found it effective, although much more slowly so, in integrating the “parts” of people who dissociate (become detached from present experience) and, in this way, are more fragmented than other people. We all have different parts to our personalities, but we do better when these parts are well-coordinated through co-consciousness and self-leadership. Dissociation can be caused by trauma and it can also exist in such conditions as Borderline Personality Disorder. As parts are integrated through Lifespan Integration, the client’s current life becomes less confusing and chaotic and more coherent and peaceful.

Finally, Lifespan Integration is very good for helping people who become overwhelmed by their feelings and find it difficult to self-sooth learn to regulate their emotions. People with poor emotional regulation were not well-soothed by attentive parenting as very young children and, therefore, never got the chance to learn this skill for themselves. Through Lifespan Integration, they can re-parent themselves and thereby become less dependent on other less adaptive strategies for coping with feelings, such as overeating or substance abuse.

In my practice, I think carefully about if and when to suggest Lifespan Integration sessions to a client, depending on timing and appropriateness, and I usually recommend interspersing Lifespan Integration sessions with “talk” sessions in a strategic fashion.