Using the "parts" technique to support recovery

From Robin Shapiro's Trauma & Attachment Therapy Blog

"Is addiction a form of dissociation?"

"When addicts think of their drug or behavior of choice, they begin to enjoy their endogenous (internal) opiates. When they engage in their drug or behavior it gives them an even better high. The neural pathways to the repetitive addictive behavior become wide and strong, until they become ego states. When people in recovery talk about "my addict", they refer to this strong ego state. Integrate the ego state and help heal the addiction.

So how does this work? Have clients bring up the last time they were frantic to use, or the last time they did use. "Where do you feel that inside? What's the feeling? Float back to the first time you had that feeling. How old is that? What was happening then? Can you bring your adult back to that time/that kid?

What do you need to tell that child? You're with her. You can fly her up to the present time. She's with you all the time, now, and you're with her.

Can you tell her that now, as a competent adult, you can tolerate those enormous feelings? Can you show her how you have learned to soothe yourself without that drug/behavior? How's that kid doing now? (Do whatever it takes to calm her down.) And are you ready to hug her into you now and forever?"

There is usually a frantic little child and often an angry/protective teenage part. Sometimes there are several "parts" involved in different pieces of the addiction. It has worked on several clients."

Robin Shapiro

"Intimate relationship is the best source of resilience and growth and hope for the future."

Trauma & Attachment Therapy BLOG
Robin Shapiro's musing about trauma, attachment, and affect-based therapies,
and her book: Trauma Treatment Handbook: Protocols Across the Spectrum

Robin shares notes from UCLA conference speaker Daniel Siegel: A System's View of Disintegration & Integration

P.A.R.T.T.T.T
when fully
Present we can
Attune to the client or others and
Resonate with others and develop
Trust which is important because it activates the smart ventral vagus so the social engagement system turns on so that we can
Track what's going on in moment to moment experience which allows the
Truth to come out and creates
Transformation/healing.

We help clients become open systems: self-organized: chaotic moving toward complexity, flexibility and adaptable: energized and coherent.

Coherence comes from integration.

When not integrated we move toward rigidity (avoidance), chaos (flooding) or both. It's all about the mind regulating the energy and information flow.

Calming exercise: Put one hand on your heart, the other on your abdomen. Hold them there for a while. Try switching hands to see if you prefer one over the other. Most people do.

"There's a distinction between awareness and mental activity: Awareness is the infinite possibility of neural firings."

In trauma, mental activies get locked into rigidity and chaos and pull humans into limited possibility. With unresolved trauma, rigidity and chaos imprison the person's possibilities. Good therapy transforms the brain of the the client to totally shift their center of attention and stay present to the self and watch self and make sense of it. The labeling of the internal state downregulates the limbic system. The client knows that "this" is not "that". Integration is the capacity to sit with core awareness and sit with anything that comes in.

You can use mindfulness practice to help people distinguish between mental activity and true awareness. Ventral integration--being in touch with the bodily state: Track it and you transform. Supress it and it screws you up.

We are designed to be interdependent and interconnected. There's hope for we as humans to move from chaotic & rigid states to integration, kindness, and peace.