my first reaction to your post is that this jumps out at me...


how do you do this, how do you control when and where your alters are allowed to come out. if you can control not letting them come out during therapy then do the opposite of not letting them out during therapy..

why arent you allowed to let them out during therapy...is it a therapy rule that you must use more appropriate tools then dissociating during therapy?

I know some people who are on treatment plans that involve the person not dissociating, using grounding and talking about their problems rather than dissociating and the alter come out to deal with the problems..

if this is the treatment plans you are on my suggestion is continue with what ever your treatment provider is telling you to do.

that said...

here in New York treatment providers work under the premise of do no harm. how that applies to therapy with a dissociative is that a treatment provider can not purposely trigger a client into switching into and out of their alters.

with DID switching into alters (dissociation) is where a person gets so uncomfortable, triggered, scared, cant handle whats going on, that their mind causing them to dissociate into an alter who can take care of what ever the person they are living in can not handle...

since your alters dont seem to come out during therapy then my guess is that the type of therapy you are doing isnt something you cant handle doing, so your alters dont come out to take care of anything during therapy. in other words you dont need their help during therapy. you are doing fine on your own. you're lucky. when I wasnt integrated many times my therapist and I talked about all kinds of triggering/traumatic things that i was not able to handle. the result was i would dissociate and an alter would take over to talk about and work on that triggering problem with my therapist.

thinking about this my next question is why would someone want to cause their self so much emotional or physical pain that they cant handle so that they dissociate on purpose in therapy..most people I know who are DID including me would rather not dissociate because of the problems that come from dissociating....foggy headed, not knowing what is happening when an alter is out, losing time, and other things that a person is left trying to "clean" up after an alter has been out.

another thing to think about ....I had an alter or more who's job it was to prevent others from knowing what was happening.. when I did dissociate those alters continued to do their jobs. when aware they prevented me from telling and when I was dissociate they prevented the other alters from telling. thats what their job, purpose reason for being was.

what my therapist and I did was found other ways around this issue.. I remained grounded and aware. if we came up to something that I was not supposed to talk about she and I used other non threatening words. instead of saying this person did this to me..we had a different word for what ever "this" was....my cousin laughed at my lips. instead of my cousin ....at my lips.

theres no need to trigger your self into dissociating just to get therapy work done.