Memoirs of A Healer/Clinical Social Worker: Autobiography of Bruce Whealton

Chapter 46: Treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder - A Success Story

[Disclaimer: I have used aliases to protect the confidentiality and identity of clients or patients. No other names have been changed.]

I want to describe a success story in the treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder. As I mentioned previously, I got a call from two young women who saw the article in the newspaper that featured me. Their names were Patricia and Sadie. Patricia wasn't coming very often, unfortunately. So, little progress could be made.

With Sadie, I began to meet the other personalities. It was clear that her friends and her family knew that she had been aware of having different personalities for some time.

In addition to her psychological issues, she had liver damage due to a long history of drinking. It was sad because she was so young to have a problem that caused her so much physical pain and medical problems.

Sadie was very attractive, with a nice friendly smile, long blond hair, clear complexion. She was 34. She was about my height of five foot seven. What made her attractive was not just her figure but just how cordial, friendly and kind she was to be around.

She was lesbian and she had a girlfriend that came to meet me more than once. I am not saying this to make it seem okay for me to point out that I am noticing that she was attractive. While I didn't discuss details of my clients with Lynn due to confidentiality purposes, I did discuss these kinds of observations with Lynn without giving it a second thought as to whether I was saying anything inappropriate that would bother Lynn or that would be inappropriate for a therapist to notice.

As much as I would like to assume that every reader knows that I am not shallow or unprofessional, nor do I objectify women, there will be some readers who occasionally will raise their eyebrows about something I wrote. I would hope that you are getting to know me through this book and will understand these things. Yet, I still want to clarify to be sure to remove all ambiguity.

Anyway, Sadie and her girlfriend intended to get married. It would have to be a church ceremony and there were some progressive churches in the area near where she lived. Same-sex couples in North Carolina could not legally marry at the time.

I had gone to a church that was frequented by persons who are gay or lesbian. I liked the more open-minded approach that they had.

Anyway, the therapy sessions were very much oriented toward whatever concerned her at any point in time. Sometimes that would involve issues that were most bothersome to one or more alter personalities. This could include traumatic events from her past.

I used similar approaches to treating trauma as I had with other trauma survivors as I described previously in this book. I was helping them to process the memory and to move past the trauma.

I also drew upon the ideas from the inner child work I had first begun to learn about back when I was an intern several years earlier. I used other techniques but for the purposes of this story, I'm not going to describe everything.

I helped her to nurture, parent, and comfort the other parts of her, the other personalities. I helped with this during our sessions and described things she could do on her own. I knew and used several hypnotic scripts for this kind of nurturing or reparenting.

She began to smile and said how much happier she was. She invited me to her wedding and told me to invite Lynn. She seemed fine at the wedding with others knowing about her condition and that I was her therapist. I even offered to take photographs for her as I had been getting into photography.

I gladly gave her the photographs and negatives for her to use as she pleased.

She seemed happy and thrilled with the progress we had made. She said she wanted to stop or take a break from therapy because she said she was happy with the accomplishments we had made. Obviously, I respected her wishes and her subjective feelings about this – her judgment.

Neither she nor anyone else who I met had anything but positive things to say about me, the therapy, and the therapeutic relationship.

I would later learn that her impression of me and my therapy changed after she had left therapy with me as a satisfied client. I cannot know for certain why her mind changed but I have ideas.

Things didn't go this nicely with everyone that I was treating.