Yeah... I really agree with this. At the moment in therapy we are doing a lot of "observing". We talk, we stumble across triggers, and we are "observing" our own responses. We are learning to observe when a protector steps in to protect one or another alter from something, and we observe that we don't have control over that. We observe switches, we observe triggers, we observe and we watch and we learn.
It seems for us that observing what happens helps us to see that the trauma responses really are ingrained and are not "put on" or pretend or just us being pathetic or useless or anything else. They just ARE.
And, they ARE because of WHAT WAS.
All interesting stuff to think about.