Status Updates From Trauma and Dissociation Inf...

Mad respect for this therapist. There's a section where she straight up says some of us will never heal fully, our lives are too chaotic, fragile, disabled. It's a tiny paragraph, but absolutely fucking affirming to those failed by this world. She ends with but we gotta keep trying anyway. It's both really grounded and sweet.

Really fucking glad this book pushes against the IFS dogma that there is a capable self in all of us just waiting to self-heal dysfunction. This simply isn't true for trauma victims, who have not been taught how to regulate arousal, self-soothe, process emotions, articulate attachment wounds, mentalise other minds. We all have the capacity to develop a self, but it's something mutually constructed through the other.

Heh, internal family systems sees personality disorders as parts in a dysfunctional whole. I like reclaiming terms like borderline and narcissist, but IFS's rejection of total pathology makes sense. I've always hated the introvert/extrovert binary, because my sociality is dependent on who I'm with and how I feel. It's much the same with personality disorders. The field primes certain parts to emerge.