Diagnosing and Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Beginner’s Guide
DID (formerly multiple personality disorder) is frequently misdiagnosed, under-diagnosed and misunderstood, creating anxiety, counter-transferential issues and intense challenges for treating clinicians. Both beginning and advanced practitioners working with or interested in learning about the creative coping strategies of childhood trauma and the dissociative process will benefit tremendously from this workshop.
Using case scenarios, videotapes, clients’ artwork, and journal entries, we will process six main areas of treatment including: dissociation and other symptomatology; diagnosis; safety, containment and other relevant treatment issues; creative treatment modalities; fusion, integration and life beyond DID; and common pitfalls that most clinicians encounter during the work.
Practitioners will gain newfound understanding of the disorder, learning to re-frame and de-pathologize many of the common “symptoms” and presenting problems. They will learn creative strategies to enhance their efficacy with issues including: identifying and working with alters; switching and co-consciousness; handling abreactions and flashbacks; and re-grounding dissociative clients. In addition, participants will strengthen their ability to maintain appropriate boundaries, set limits, and avoid vicarious traumatization.
Learning Objectives:
- Define the dissociative process and how it evolves into DID for trauma survivors.
- Describe the most common emotional, cognitive and behavioral manifestations of DID.
- Diagnose DID by integrating subjective clinical red flags and objective standardized tests.
- Identify at least five creative treatment interventions including: containment; self-soothing strategies; mapping; and creating internal safe places.
- Identify at least five common pitfalls that therapists grapple with in their work with DID clients.
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