On friday my therapist and I talked about which approach would work for doing "parts work" with this normal part of me called rescuer....

Do I want to do CBT where I keep track of my behavior and make changes in my behavior by noticing and changing my behavior accordingly, to change this behavior of my trying to rescue others when they don't need to be rescued,

do I want to go with inner child therapy where we would use pictures of myself as a child, imagining myself as those children I used to be and imagine rescuing myself, type of parts work that goes more in depth to discover what the underlying / root of my feeling like I need to rescue children, friends and family and sometimes strangers.

Do I want to do Expressive Art therapy where I would be doing a meditation exercise to focus my thoughts on my normal rescuing feelings and create something to represent that feeling.

or do I want to do something more structured like IFS that goes even deeper into these normal parts of self where I would be doing guided meditations, role playing talking as if I was this normal part of self, my therapist asking me special structured questions, and my asking myself structured questions that will during this role playing type of therapy find the answers inside myself and journaling about my sessions and this normal part of self and eventually roleplaying my rescuing the rescuer,

IFS terms don't put it in those exact words. but that's what it is.

you pick a trailhead (problem to work on)
locate the normal part of yourself that is the problem (IFS calls this the protectors, firefighters and exiles) parts are your normal emotions, or the imagined picture in your mind that you get when thinking about the problem.

then you make sure you are in whats called self (if you are not dissociated, you are instead calm, caring compassionate with yourself, you have courage and curiosity about yourself your life and the problem you want to work on its called being in self mode)

then you pretend that the problem/ normal part of self is a person and give it a name.

then you answer special quesitons while you are pretending to be this normal part.

you keep asking and answering questions finding the answers inside you until you have nothing else to find out about that problem/ normal part of self.

sometimes other normal problems, other normal emotions, and reasons for those problems comes up,. IFS calls this another trailhead and another part of self. when that happens you ask yourself if one part will step aside so that you can get to know the second part. in normal words it means are you ready to stop focusing on the first problem and emotion and move on to the next on. if not you keep gong with the first one, if so you start working on the second problem and emotion.

After you have found out all you need to know about this normal part of self you pretend you are having a conversation with this problem/ emotion as if they were a real person and imagine what it would be like to help that problem/ emotion to understand that everything is ok now. in IFS this is called unburdening and integrating this normal part of self.

(please keep in mind that this is not integration of DID alters in the terms that my treatment provider and I understanding and definitions of alters and parts are different from each other.)

IFS and inner child therapy approaches would not work in the structured way with my DID alters but Im thinking with the normal part of myself this may be the way to go about discovering why I have this urge and need to rescue those I know when they don't need any actual rescuing.

eiting to add...forgot to copy paste the last paragraph in reference to betty's post...

after betty had posted to me I took my reply to her to pm, but since then I have noticed I have some people upset over this number thing....

in short the numbers thing is a severity scales numbers, not the black and white 1, 2, 3, kind of numbers.

at some point in the severity scales it shows when a person is out of touch with reality or reality remains intact.

out of touch with reality means a person is in an altered state of mind 24/7 with no times when they are not in an altered state of mind.

think of it like functional "Aunt Ethel" (not a real name here) who may be able to take care of herself and her basic needs but who and what she is, is so disjointed that you know she's living in altered states of mind instead of all here, in the here and now.

At some point her out of touch with reality ends up getting her hospitalized over and over again, and maybe permanently in special mental health programs / facilities or long term state mental hospital until some of the alters have been integrated so that she is no longer living in altered states of mind 24/7.

a severity scales numbers thing not the black and white numbers 1, 2, 3,...of alters.

in every ones brain functions there is a limit to how many times a person can dissociate and still remain in touch with reality,

I think of that point as when I am under stress and that one thing that "breaks the camels back" I know what my brain can and cant handle. when I reach that point what happens I leave reality behind and day dream, distract myself or when I was not integrated dissociated and was in an altered state of mind. just like my consciousness has limitations my unconscious / dissociated side had its limitations too. thankfully I didn't dissociate to the point where I was in an altered state of mind full time (in other words out of touch with reality.)