is different. In that case, I try to describe a visual picture to go with what I am saying. Sometimes, I direct the patient over the telephone to draw some of the figures on a piece of paper. So far, many of those who are willing to do therapy over the telephone usually have a productive experience with therapy and are easy to work with. I ask them to read Chapter 3, downloaded from the internet (Flint, 2005), to see if they can teach the treatment process to themselves.
Here is an example of teaching the treatment process to a person in my office. I have included several examples of its application.
T: (That’s me.) So, would you like to have me teach you Process Healing?
P: (The patient.) Yep, I sure would.
T: I am going to try to get all aspects of your personality to join a Treatment Team. All members of the Treatment Team will want their trauma treated, their positive qualities and behaviors strengthened with positive emotions, to work on a consensual basis, and to join with the Main Personality. I usually start by giving you a visual description of what I am describing. Can I move a little closer to you so you can see my paper? (See Figure 2-2, next page.)
P: Yes.
T: Can you see my paper?
P: Yes.
T: Up here on the top, I am drawing our lifeline. This point here is conception and this is birth. Sometime after conception, our brain starts learning words and phrases. At birth, when our senses become active, the objects and actions that we see and hear are linked to the words. A language forms and continues to form throughout our whole life (a). I call it the subconscious (S). Does that make sense?
P: Yes.
T: Then shortly before birth, or at birth, our Main Personality (MP) starts forming and continues to the present (b). [I initially draw a straight line.] We start learning in utero and continue to learn all our lives. Learning means the formation of memories. The formation of memories for the Main Personality amass in what I call Memory III. [Draw an ellipse around the MP line in the figure at b.] Memories in Memory III are used to run our body and thoughts. Memory III contains dormant memories. Dormant memories are ready to be triggered into our experience by an emotion or some content of an active memory. For example, if I asked you this question, oops, the answer is not conscious yet because the question has not triggered the answer. So, you don’t know the answer, but if I ask, “Do you remember when you last rode a bicycle?” the question will trigger the dormant answer. The answer or memory awakened and popped into your Active Experience. Do you understand so far?
P: Yes.
T: Now, I am going to explain how our behavior and thoughts form. Here we have what I call the Active Experience (c). The Active Experience represents all the activity in the brain and body related to survival. It is where all our internal and external sensory experience, all our internal processes, and the Main Personality are active. It includes all the Content and Emotion Memories triggered into our experience that are used to form the next response. The creation of behavior is a recurrent process, which means that our last response is the basis for the next response. For example, suppose I am moving my hand to scratch my ear. My nose starts tickling. This new stimulation will result in changing the direction where my hand is going. My hand will scratch my nose.
Now, what is interesting about the Active Experience is there is a dissociation process (d) that causes the conscious and unconscious experience. It is the job of the dissociation process to simplify the content and emotions of our conscious activity so we can behave to get more satisfaction and less pain. There is also an association process (e). When memories in the subconscious trigger other memories, the association process allows the most fitting memories to be triggered. If it lets in memories too easily, then a pencil might look like a hot dog. The association process is like a metaphor manager and limits which memories can become active. Do you have any questions at this point?
P: No. [Of course, some people may not understand enough to ask a question.]
T: Now I am going to talk about how severe trauma causes amnesic parts. When we think about trauma (f), we know that we completely remember some traumas. For example, I fall off my bike, go to the hospital, and go home, I can tell everyone I know about my experience. However, when the trauma has extreme emotions and at the same time there are no learned memories to manage the situation, the brain mobilizes with memories triggered by the intense emotions. When the brain mobilizes, the activated memories, independent of the Main Personality, push the Main Personality (MP) out of our Active Experience, and an executive function organizes and creates survival behavior. Behavior is created from the start of the trauma to the end of the trauma. This behavior becomes associated with a new memory structure that becomes a trauma part. When the trauma ends (End), the Main Personality rushes in or rapidly becomes active and pushes the new trauma part (TP) out of the Active Experience to become dormant. Because the Main Personality rushes out and in so fast, there are few associations between the Main Personality and trauma part. This rapid departure and entry of the Main Personality causes the amnesia between parts. Does this explanation make sense to you?
P: It makes total sense. [Most patients say, “Yes,” regardless of whether they understand it.]
T: The Main Personality, at the top of Figure 2-2, now has these bumps on it. These represent amnesic parts and the upline represents amnesia. The problem with having amnesic parts is the emotions from the parts can be triggered into the Active Experience and distort the here-and-now conscious and unconscious experience. With this distortion in the Active Experience, the response created may not result in getting more satisfaction and might put the person at risk. Getting more satisfaction and having less pain is the main reason for treating and integrating parts. Healing is another word for treatment that will remove all the negative emotions from the memory of the part and replace them with neutral or positive emotions. Then the part can join with the Main Personality (i). Parts don’t die or lose information. The subconscious strengthens their positive skills with positive emotions.
They simply exchange information with the Main Personality. The part’s memory becomes exactly the same as the Main Personality’s memory. Now, the trauma part and Main Personality can run the body at the same time without conflict. They still have unique structures. The response creation process uses their combined knowledge and wisdom, as needed, to get more satisfaction and less pain. Any questions?
P: No.
T: I want to ask all your parts to join the Treatment Team (TT) (j). By joining the Treatment Team, you all will want treatment, want your positive skills strengthened, want to work in consensus, and join with the Main Personality. Then you will help make a treatment plan for each member, which will be approved by the agreement of all members. One hundred percent agreement is necessary to accept treatment plans. However, I expect that the treatment of big, intense pain will worry some parts. If you look at (h), I will explain how big pain is treated. The trauma part works with the subconscious, who is drawn under the Active Experience. The trauma part moves over to the Active Experience and puts a little pain into the Active Experience. Five units of pain is just a little of the trauma time (f). The members of the Treatment Team can adjust the rate of treatment until all members are comfortable with the rate of treatment. It can be 5, 3, 1, 0.5, or whatever the Treatment Team decides. On the other hand, if we treated five units of pain one treatment after the other, the trauma part would destabilize and flood emotions into the conscious experience. It is like a word on the tip of your tongue. The word has not flooded your experience so you think of words or associations to help it become conscious. We want to stop the flooding, so we rest after each treatment. Over here (ttttt), you can see the part becomes destabilized and we wait a few seconds (t) until the part has stabilized
