By Janina Fisher
In Trauma Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), one of our most important tasks is to help our clients increase their sense of empathy for their inner parts. Crucial to that endeavor is helping them to separate self from symptom, to differentiate their feelings from the feelings of their parts. How can we empathize with them if we mistake our feelings for their?
To that end, there is one word we want to encourage them to remove from their vocabulary.
When they use the word “I,” when they say, “I feel,” they intensify the felt connection to whatever they are experiencing.
“I’m down,” “I’m up.” Whatever feeling to which we connect “I,” we’re going to intensify the sense of it being real and true. And therefore it’s often very dangerous for clients to use the word “I.” If they say:
“I am suicidal.”
“I don’t want to live.”
“I don’t care if I lose my life, or my marriage, to my addiction,”
Saying “I” is going to increase their sense of connection and confidence in what they’re saying, intensify the belief that they want to die or drink or starve themselves.
It’s particularly important with high-risk clients for us to make sure that “I” is not the word they attach to their impulses.
If I say, “It’s raining, it’s gray today. I feel hopeless,” I can feel the sense of heaviness. If I say, “I feel so ashamed,” I feel more shame.
If I say, “A part of me is ashamed,” or “A part of me feels hopeless,” then something very different happens.
One of the things that is counterintuitive is that when we use parts language, it actually helps our clients to take responsibility for their actions. There is something about saying, “I tried to kill myself and I have to take responsibility for that,” that’s very, very difficult for many people to do. It’s much easier for them to say:
“My suicidal part got the best of me.”
“My alcoholic part got the best of me.”
“My self-harming part [or my anorexic part] got the best of me.”
Helping clients to avoid identifying with symptoms and feelings of their parts is an important element of “parts language”, a foundational technique we use with our TIST trauma therapy clients.
As we help clients notice distressing feelings and impulses as those of trauma-related parts, there is often a settling—as if the parts feel heard and can relax a bit now.
This post is an excerpt from Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) Certification with Janina Fisher Module 3: Suicidality, Self-Harm, Addictions and Eating Disorders Part 1 – Increasing Empathy and Building Internal Trust
Read more about using “The Pause” in the free therapist resource article Using “The Pause” in Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST).
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