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_Sky said:
Many doctors call the same "thing" by different names? There are some doctors who don't accept the idea of an alter, and use ego state instead.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">This is not the case for my T. He is very clear on the difference between an ego state and an alter and accepts that they both exist. One main difference is that the alters can take a person over and the person has no memory of it. The person "loses time." My ego states are not like that. The ones that are younger versions of myself were created by me unconsciously in my childhood due to trauma. I have learned better to take care of them, through therapy. They never take me over. My T says everyone has ego states. Some are just more overt and less integrated than others. Like you could have an ego state that is very good at investing in the stock market. It is the collection of thoughts and feelings and skills and memories, organized around a theme, all bundled up in that ego state.

insidious, there have been some threads here on PC about ego states, and discussion of how they are different from alters. There are multiple understandings of that term, so talk can get confusing! I think of it as a continuum, and the alters are farther along the dissociation scale than the ego states. People with full-fledged alters are said to have DID. There is a type of therapy called ego state therapy, in which the therapist works with a person's ego states and tries to help them live together harmoniously, among other goals.

This is a definition of ego state that I like:

"(Paul) Federn believed that the personality was not simply a collections of perceptions, cognitions, and affects, but that these organized into clusters or patterns, which he called ego states. An ego state may be defined as an organized system of behavior and experience whose elements are bound together by some common principle. "

If you are interested in learning more about ego states, here is a reference to get your started:
http://www.clinicalsocialwork.com/overview.html

I felt very strange when I discovered this male protector ego state and I was afraid to tell my T, because I thought he would think I was going off the deep end. He knew about my little girls, but those seemed more normal, they were at least "me" and the same sex as me. To have an adult ego state of the opposite sex seemed highly aberrant to me, but I did share with my T, and he said it is very, very normal. He was very accepting of this and helped me work on it and not feel so abnormal.

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insidious wrote:
I finally emailed my T about what happened and he never really mentioned it.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">I would feel very rejected if I shared such an important thing with my T and he ignored it. I have heard that there is a certain school of psychotherapy that believes if the therapist just ignores a client's ego states and alters, they will just go away and cease to exist. How stupid is that. Maybe your T is one of those. I do not believe this approach to be helpful or healing. It is abandoning the client to work on her psyche all alone, whereas that's why the person is in therapy to start with. On the other hand, maybe your T ignored this just because it came in an email. Many Ts do not like to communicate about such important stuff by email and want the client to bring it up in session. If this is an important issue to you, can you bring it up in session?

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insidious wrote:
I kind of wonder if I should try to get him back, or if I even could. It seems like he could take over, but maybe Im wrong.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">I felt the same way about my male. But I didn't know how to contact him. I have discovered certain things that make him very angry and so I can trigger him somewhat by exposure to those things, but I think this is kind of mean. He never came back overtly to me and shared my brain again, but I know he is still there by my inappropriate reactions to certain things sometimes. It helps me handle those times because I just smile a little and say to myself, "oh, that's just my male," and I am more accepting of my feelings and reactions. When he was with me, it felt good to have someone so strong, and since I am going through some hard life events right now, I thought hey, maybe it would be really helpful if I did let him take over. I'm not sure if I could, but why not? I think my T sensed I was considering this and said to me in session, rather forcefully, "you have to stay in control." I trust my T very much so have not entertained that idea again.

Good luck, indidious. I hope you can learn to get along and work together with your male protector.