Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Volume 1, Issue 3
Sarah K Reece
23 January 2012
Ed. Sarah K Reece
Bridges updates
Bridges will be running uninterrupted for the next conceivable while. Sarah will be running around the countryside a little bit, but on days she cannot attend Cary, fellow peer worker and co-founder of Bridges will be stepping in alongside Ben. :) For those of you who may not have met Cary, she also has a dissociative disorder and co-facilitated Bridges through the first 6 months. Shes currently busy with her psychology honors thesis (on dissociation and eating disorders) but is still part of Bridges and the Dissociative Initiative, not to mention very friendly and approachable. We have discovered that there will likely be a couple of times where the conference room where Bridges has been meeting will be needed for a larger group bear with us! Well likely meet in the Training Room on those occasions, its a similar space, next to the conference room at Mifsa only smaller. The ladies on reception can direct you if you dont know where it is. If any staff direct you to the DID Group please feel welcome to kindly correct them that Bridges is the Dissociative Group! Not everyone has worked out how to pronounce dissociative. :) Thanks for bearing with us, the room swapping wont happen often. For those of you who cant, or would prefer not to make it to Bridges, Sarah keeps a blog at sarahkreece.blogspot.com Part of which is dedicated to articles about dissociation, trauma, mental health, and other topics discussed at Bridges. This is a free resource available to anyone, whether you attend Bridges but find it helps to have a memory jog about topics discussed or would like to learn more about the kinds of things that people who experience troubling dissociation are struggling with and ways we manage and recover.
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Dissociation Link
hope to inspire people to feel more comfortable and confident in navigating dissociative issues
Volume 1, Issue 3
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Volume 1, Issue 3
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The Fire Yesterday I woke with a fire in my chest. All the leaves of autumn burned. My thoughts were sharp and clear The night was sharp and clear I awoke From where I had been lost In dream-haze, in exhausted slumber. I reached out To the sound of bells that rang Through the city. I tasted the air and felt my mind inhabited I turned and looked with eyes that turned and looked with me. Like a vault opened to the light Like a moth from a cocoon I awoke The fire stirred me. And beneath the clarity like diamond-fire
Was the little tightness The knowledge that fatigue, like wolves Would return when the flame was ash. This respite from the haze that is my life Was brief. For a glorious moment I touched the night. I knew myself familiar. Stranger! I cried I had missed you Lost you Loved you And I know you will not stay.
However, triggers can make life very difficult. If, like me, you find that you are very reactive and struggling to manage many triggers, here are some starting points on ways to try and calm things down. One of the first options most of us try is to avoid. It's worth mentioning because it is a legitimate option! If the trigger is something easy to avoid, like a particular location you don't need to go near - for me, my old school, then avoid it! Easy. This option falls apart a bit if you have lots of triggers or triggers that are really common in your everyday life. Then
you end up not being able to get out of bed. But there's no prizes for stressing yourself out trying to make yourself cope with a bad trigger you don't need to confront. Desensitisation is another approach. This comes from treatments for anxiety and phobias. The idea is that you gradually build up your ability to cope with a trigger, until it gets to the point where it no longer affects you. For example, for awhile there the smell of rosemary was a trigger for me. It would immediately make me feel extremely nauseous. So, I used to occasionally put an oil blend containing a tiny amount of rosemary in an oil burner on days I was having a good time, friends over, feeling good. It would bother me a little bit but not much. Over time I increased the amount slowly, and kept linking the smell to good, fun experiences. Now, it doesn't bother me at all and own a rosemary plant I cook with all the time. This concept of association is what gives triggers their power to affect us - they have been associated with a strong feeling or memory. Sometimes you can in time break down that association and create a new one. I often cope by trying to overpower triggers. Smell is one of the most potent memory triggers for all of us, and I use my perfumes to help me cope with other triggers in my environment. I find the smell of strangers upsetting, so in situations like public transport I can become very distressed. If I am wearing
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As you can see, for some of us, when we go through major stresses, we don't ever quite get back to as chilled out as we used to be. Each episode leaves us more stressed and anxious and highly strung than the last. Our baseline - how we feel when nothing is actually happening to stress us out, gets so high that we feel permanently stressed out. When we're in this space, we are highly reactive. Nearly everything is a trigger. The idea is try and recover better from stressful
When we're getting good time cruising along in that green space, we're less reactive and will find triggers easier to manage. Something else to bear in mind if you're having troubles in this area, is that you may find taking some time to process your stuff can help. If, like me, you get through the day by burying a lot of what you're feeling and thinking this can come back to bite you. Sometimes triggers are the price you pay for using
suppression to cope. It can be like trying to hold a beach ball under water - at some point it will get away from you and come hurtling up! If you have grief or trauma to work through, making some space for that in your life can help to reduce your reactivity to triggers. This doesn't necessarily have to be intense, anguished and time consuming. It can be as simple as starting a journal where you write about some of those feelings, going to a counsellor to talk about grief, or putting up a photo in memory of someone you've lost. Sometimes very small things that signify to yourself that you are listening and paying attention to your own needs can make a big difference with how well you cope in other areas of your life. And lastly, for the multiples, if the big issue you're having is trying to prevent things that trigger alters, then you can try everything listed above - and it may indicate you have some system work to do. If you're functioning by suppressing everyone else in your system - some of them are going to fight you. And they can gang up on you, be very persistent and wear you down. Working to make some safe time and space for everyone to get a little of what they need - which sometimes is just to be acknowledged that they exist - can make a big difference in coping with triggers. If your team are working together instead of fighting each other, then things that trigger switches aren't such a big deal. How to try and do that is a topic for another day!