active in the Active Experience. Now, before you have the question, you do not know the answer. The answer is still dormant. Here is the question: “Are you right-handed or left-handed?” Your response to the question became active and you thought of the answer. Dormant memories appear inactive and do not contribute to our behavior. But dormant memories are indeed active (potentially), ready to be triggered into the Active Experience as active memories. The Active Experience includes both conscious and unconscious active memories. Chapter 3 provides more details about memory activities in the conscious and unconscious.
Building rapport
By describing how the personality and subconscious came to be, one can usually set up early rapport with all parts of the personality, at least with those who are listening. Dormant parts will not hear unless they are triggered into the Active Experience. The goal is to get all parts on the Treatment Team so they want to receive treatment, to have their positive qualities strengthened with positive emotions, to join with the Main Personality and, later, to work together to develop a treatment plan for each part. I stress to all parts of the personality that the subconscious will not learn the treatment process until all parts join the Treatment Team and agree with teaching the subconscious the treatment process. All parts, even the frailest “baby parts,” must feel safe with the idea of internal treatment and agree with it. The next step in getting parts on the Treatment Team is to tell them the advantages of treatment and of joining with the Main Personality.
Reasons for getting treatment and becoming one
I attempt to motivate all parts to want treatment by giving the benefits for getting treatment and joining the Main Personality. Here are the advantages of getting treatment.
•The parts will have more satisfaction and less pain and the Main Personality will stop having intrusions or experiencing lost time.
•All parts will perform with full access to the entire memory of the personality.
•When the parts have identical memories, each part will experience running the body as one personality.
•This removes conflicts between parts, removes distractions, and makes all our skills available.
•The Main Personality will no longer hide important information and will be safer.
•I also point out that mono-personalities succeed far better in realizing their potential than people who have many amnesic or dissociative parts (Ross, 1996).
Reasons for not wanting to join the Treatment Team
While trying to get the parts to join the Treatment Team, you will usually have to resolve a few objections. A part may think that it will die or that it will lose some or all of its knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. It may be afraid that it will have too much pain during the treatment process that may damage the Main Personality or other parts. It may think that it will no longer be able to protect the Main Personality by causing emotion or behavioral intrusions. A part may think that it will not be able to run the body anymore or that the conscious memory of the trauma will further traumatize the Main Personality. It may think there will be more inner conflicts among parts or that the strong parts will not listen to wee baby parts. The next step is to help parts that have reasons for not wanting treatment. In Chapter 3, you will learn how to resolve these barriers.
The primary reasons for not wanting treatment
There are many reasons for not wanting treatment or for not wanting to join with the Main Personality. The rationale for removing these barriers will be presented in detail in Chapter 3. Except for pain, these objections are all beliefs held by the parts. One can bring about change in barriers by using the desire or need for more satisfaction or happiness and less pain as an incentive for agreeing to change and accepting the therapist’s explanations. Wanting more satisfaction and less pain is the primary incentive to get parts to communicate when they don’t want to talk to the therapist. I use this incentive to get parts to want treatment and to join with the Main Personality. It is interesting to note that the objective of getting more satisfaction and less pain is the apparent goal used by the Basic Neurostructure for assembling groups or collages of active memories to run the body.
Treating intense fear or pain
Treating pain can cause problems. After several years of being creative, with many ploys to safely treat massive pain associated with parts, I found a simple solution. This simple, easy treatment strategy works safely and, in most cases, painlessly, to treat the trauma memories of amnesic and dissociative parts as well as other trauma memories — even those with extreme pain. The subconscious orchestrates the treatment process and the trauma part cooperates by following directions. Treating extreme pain is done with a fixed rate of treatment. For example, if the Main Personality can just barely feel 100 units of pain, then the subconscious can treat five or fewer units of pain in each treatment. Then, the Main Personality would not feel any pain during the treatment. The subconscious can adjust the amount of pain treated (the treatment rate) in the treatment plan for each part until no parts on the Treatment Team are fearful. Planning treatment in this way both prevents the flooding of emotions by the trauma part being treated and the triggering and flooding of any other part into the Active Experience. All parts will be safe and usually feel no pain. However, one more precaution must be taken.
Since activating five units of pain destabilizes the trauma part, successive treatments could increasingly destabilize the part and cause flooding of emotions into the Active Experience. A destabilized trauma memory is like a word on the tip of your tongue — it’s ready to flood and become conscious. With a word on the tip of your tongue, you look for triggers to get the memory of the word to flood into your thoughts. With trauma memories, we look for ways to prevent the flooding. To prevent gradual destabilizing of trauma memories and eventual flooding, a planned rest period between each treatment allows the trauma part to relax or rest until it is stable before the next treatment. The rest period is adjustable and is in the treatment plan. This strategy using the treat-rest-treat-rest-treat-rest pattern effectively ensures the trauma part will not destabilize and flood emotions into the Active Experience during the treatment process.
Joining with the Main Personality
The treatment process gradually replaces all the painful emotional memories (connected with the trauma part) with neutral to positive emotions. After replacing the trauma pain and strengthening positive behaviors of the part with positive emotions, the treated part can join with the Main Personality. All memories appear to have unique neural structures to which memories associate or attach. Joining or integrating the trauma part and the Main Personality involves the parts exchanging memories with each other. In other words, the trauma part and Main Personality exchange memory associations until their neural structures have identical memories associated with them.
When the exchange of memories is complete, the Main Personality and the trauma part have identical memories and can both run the body with no conflict. The Main Personality and the trauma part continue to have their own unique neural structures. They each experience good and painful body sensations and emotions. They will experience less pain because, with their combined knowledge, they will be able to avoid pain more effectively. If someone was yelling at you and was about to hit you in the face, the combined knowledge of parts could lead you out of the situation and to avoid more intense pain. The structures will feel some negative emotions, but in most cases, the outside world causes the negative emotions, unless an active untreated part or a painful memory or behavior causes some pain. All parts would work together to get more satisfaction and to avoid pain. All joined parts will be in
