Posted by serena11 on May 17, 2006, at 17:30:07
In reply to Re: DID no longer » serena11, posted by Pfinstegg on May 17, 2006, at 15:40:37
> That sounds so incredibly long and hard. But you obviously never gave up, and having a supportive husband is so helpful. I'm not familiar with the type of therapy you have had- theophrostic? Could you tel us a bit about it?
Theophostic ministry (TPM) is a weird name for a very successful form of healing. It is Christian based, but not exclusively for Christians. It was developed by Ed Smith (he has a webite), and my husband and I had gone through the basic training ourselves before I came to grips with my problem. My husband, a psychologist, had given up hope that I could be cured. He had investigated EMDR (I think that's what it is called) and my sister went through some of that successfully for a period of time. The premise of TPM is that there is a fundamental lie at the core of each trauma. Also, there is no healing without reliving the initial feelings, all of which had been shunted off into different parts of my mind. Over time, I acknowledged these "people" and their lives and pain, then just as quickly disowned and disavowed them as I struggled through the process of healing. Eventually I was able to see that this shattering of my soul was a gift that protected me from unendurable events and memories. I always knew that I had been severely abused; I had all these dreadful paths in my memory that went nowhere. They simply stopped abruptly and I had huge lapses of memory. The abuse I suffered was especially sadistic and destructive. My first suicide attempt was at age 4, if that is any indicator of how difficult my life was. So in TPM, we just prayed and would go to what seemed like a never-ending path in hell. I had to accept what I had long denied. I despaired of ever being healed, hated God with a passion, and seemingly went around in useless circles, becoming very suicidal. Prior to TPM, I had been in conventional counseling for much of my adult life. As I noted before, that kept me alive, primarily through kind therapists and medication, but I really never knew what was happening inside. Because I "saw" and "heard" other parts of myself and their memories, I was diagnosed as schizophrenic for most of the time. One brave therapist diagnosed me with MPD about 30 years ago, but I didn't know what that meant and having just left home, I was not able to come to grips with whatever that was. Being called psychotic was no fun, but until the 80's, that was the most common way of viewing me. Then I had more MPD diagnoses and did coventional (but very frequent) talk therapy to no avail. Again, I had such kind therapists and medication to help with anxiety and depression, so I stayed alive. NOW I am really living! It is truly amazing. But it took a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the people who worked with me. We usually had 4-6 hour sessions (and we all work fulltime). It was also excruciating for my husband to see all that had happened to me. Not for the faint of heart....
poster:serena11
thread:644880
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060517/msgs/645245.html