Dissociation Link Sarah K Reece

Volume 1, Issue 4

Ed. Sarah K Reece

New website! Big developments afoot! Dissociation Link now has a website, found at dissociationlink.blogspot.com.au

I (Sarah) have been very busy writing up the content and printable brochures.

Inside this issue:

Voices Vic Conference

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Welcome Pack

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25 March 2012

The impetus for a website came from a few directions, one was to create a better way to manage an increasingly large mailing list that must be accessible and confidential. Manually entering in all the addresses is untenable, and the possibly of accidentally sending emails with addresses visible was concerning. When your editor and mailing list manager has a dissociative condition, you need better systems than that!

The website has a feedburner set up that manages the mailing list automatically. Each person is emailed separately, so there is no risk of addresses being exposed to other people. What’s more, people can add or remove themselves from the mailing list independently using the ‘follow this blog’ option on the site, or the ‘unsubscribe from this blog’ option at the bottom of every email. The other great thing about having a website is that everyone now has access to back issues of the newsletter, contact details of those involved in Dissociation Link, and pages of useful information and resources that are updated regularly, such as our

Calendar of upcoming events. The website will hopefully help to gather relevant information online in one hub area, and make things a bit easier for people who have been having to mine through Sarah’s increasingly large personal blog for basic dissociation information. So far there are two brochures available from the site in PDF format; Managing Dissociation and Introducing DID. Please have a look and if you’d like to pass on any feedback, I’d love to hear from you. 

Grounding Tech- 3 niques

Groups update Bridges is continuing well, there are no expected dates it will be unable to run in the near future. Echoes has started in Melbourne, and as expected is off to a slow start as we have almost no existing networks there. Much work remains to be done! We are also trying to find ways to link in those in rural communities.

A step towards this is our current trial of a closed, hidden Facebook group for those who attend Echoes and Bridges. This is an opportunity for those who wish to connect and chat without having to give out their personal details to other group members. So far it’s been very appreciated!

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Dissociation Link

Voices Vic Conference Apologies for the lack of a newsletter in February, I (Sarah) was busy writing and then off delivering a couple of talks at the Voices Vic Conference!

“not all voice hearers find a multiplicity framework useful”

The conference was an incredible experience with some very powerful and insightful talks about the experience of voice hearing. (there’s more about these on my blog sarahkreece.blogspot.com.au) Fellow peer worker Jenny Benham co-delivered a talk about the development of the voice hearer’s group Sound Minds that we cofacilitate. I shared about the development of Bridges, our group here in SA for people who experience dissociation and/or multiplicity, and how we used the format and values of Sound Minds as a template. This generated a lot of interest, and has led to a

Welcome Pack We now have a free welcome pack! This was developed to give new Bridges attendees information and contacts but is available to anyone who would like one. It contains fact sheets, flyers, and suggestions of coping strategies as well as the details of the Dissociation Link website. Most of the information can also be viewed, downloaded, or printed directly from online, (see the Resources page at Dissociation Link) or if you phone or email your postal details to Ben, Cary or Sarah on (08) 8378 4100 or [email protected] we can send one out to you.

new relationship with the Dulwich Centre, who used to run a voice hearer’s group called Power to Our Journey’s back in the 1990’s. You can learn more about them at www.dulwichcentre.com.au My other talk was about the relationship between voice hearing and multiplicity. Not all people who experience multiplicity hear voices, and not all voice hearers find a multiplicity framework useful, but I have experienced and observed that sometimes there is a relationship between these two experiences. Some voice hearers find a multiplicity framework useful and appropriate to their situation. Because multiplicity is almost always talked about in terms of DID, most people have not considered what mild or moderate dissociation in identity might present as. Some people who

hear voices have DID, others do not experience amnesia or the degree of identity fragmentation captured in that diagnosis. At present these people are almost always treated as having an exclusively psychotic condition, but for some the idea of voices as parts is helpful. Dissociation and psychosis can present in similar ways, and can also co-exist so accurate diagnosis can be difficult. This talk was received very well with a lot of follow up from those who attended. The images and introduction to what dissociation is are now on the Dissociation Link website on the page “About Dissociation”. I hope to work more with the Voice Hearers Network, (intervoiceonline.org) and am also looking for an opportunity here in SA to give this talk soon.

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Grounding Techniques Are ways people manage all kinds of mental health issues. I've come across the idea of grounding and being grounded in all kinds of mental health literature, recovering from trauma, handling addictions, managing anxiety, and dealing with self harm issues. It's an idea that is especially appropriate for people struggling with dissociation of any kind. In this context, a grounding technique is anything you do that helps to reduce your dissociative symptoms. In my experience, anyone who's been dealing with dissociation for awhile has come up with a few strategies that help them to manage it. They might not always work, or be discrete enough to use in public, and sometimes they can be self-destructive, but if they reduce dissociation for us, we'll give them a go. It can be really useful to spend some time thinking about what you already use when your dissociation is bad.

Do you find mindfulness helpful? Do you look to spend some time with a friend? Do you find regular exercise helps keep you on track? Everyone is different and people react completely differently to grounding techniques. What is helpful for one person may not work for another, or may even make their dissociation worse! Learning more about yourself and what works for you can make a huge difference in being able to manage your condition and improve your quality of life. This can be a bit of a trial and error process, and at times frustrating especially if you're trying things other people find helpful that aren't working for you. So, putting some thought into what you already do that helps can give you a bit of a foundation to work from. Grounding techniques fall into one or more of a

by Sarah K number of categories, and these can make it easier to work out what approaches you tend to respond most to. Calming - you can find a lot of these techniques in literature about managing anxiety and recovering from trauma. Calming techniques are things like going on a gentle walk, listening to soothing music, doing breathing exercises or yoga, giving your cat a cuddle. Dissociation is often a reaction to feeling stressed and unsafe. Calming techniques work by settling you down so that your stress level goes down, and with it the degree of dissociation. Intense - some of the self help literature about managing self harm issues have some great suggestions about intense grounding techniques. Intense techniques include things like strong tastes, holding onto ice cubes or taking cold

showers, a hard workout at the gym, screaming into a pillow, listening to loud music. Intense techniques work by reaching through the dissociation to reconnect you to your body, feelings, and environment. Physical - some techniques are about affecting your physical body, a warm soothing bath, the texture of your dog's soft fur under your hand, grass on the soles of your feet, guitar strings under your fingers. They help to anchor you back in your body and connect you to the environment around you. They can be either calming or intense. Emotional - these techniques work on an emotional level, they can also be calming or intense. Hugging a stuffed toy that calms you, holding onto a bracelet that your grandma gave you, writing in a journal, watching a film that really moves you, painting your nightmares. Intellectual - these techniques engage your mind to access information that helps to orient you in the here and now. Examples are asking yourself and answering questions such as "Where am I right now? Who is here in this space with me? What year is it? What can I see, hear, feel, smell around me?" These can be really helpful if you are having trouble with flashbacks or that spacey kind of disorientation where you get confused about what's happening now and what are memories.

“people react differently to grounding techniques”

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Grounding Techniques Many grounding techniques work on more than one of these levels - like playing with your dog - it's physically and emotionally engaging, and if you run around the park and then collapse for a rest it's both intense and then calming. Sometimes it's these kind of techniques that affect us on many different levels that are the most powerful. There's nothing in my world quite as grounding as a lap full of kittens!

“There’s nothing in my world quite as grounding as a lap full of kittens!”

So, to give you some examples of what I find helpful, I rarely use intellectual grounding for myself. I do find it useful when waking up sometimes from long complex dreams where I can get disoriented about where reality left off and dreams began. Apart from that, it almost never appears in my repertoire. I've found that intense techniques are where I tend to gravitate. Some of the calming techniques, like breathing exercises, actually make my dissociation worse. Whereas I've used freezing cold showers to snap out of really bad dissociative episodes quite effectively. Creativity is also really critical for me, I keep journals and basically talk to myself in them. I use them to connect to my feelings and express thoughts and fears that otherwise just knot up inside me. This emotional connection with myself helps a lot to reduce my dissociation. It's basically a way of telling myself that I'm listening and I care - which is pretty important to make time to do when often you're getting through your day by ignoring,

denying, suppressing, and downplaying your symptoms and feelings. Some techniques are much easier to use in public than others, and it's a good idea to experiment until you find a bunch that are helpful. For example, I use strong tastes a lot. I'll often order a bitter flavoured drink, something carbonated, or a meal with a vinegar salad or salty olives. Obviously, it helps that I actually like most of these things! But the bitter drinks I didn't used to like much at all, I just found that the intense flavour helped keep me grounded. Now, they've grown on me. Another discrete one for me is wearing perfume. I get bothered by strange smells, and at times I hallucinate strange smells simply as a response to feeling really stressed. So, being able to lift my wrist to my face and smell something that is familiar and soothing can be really helpful. When sitting down, you can deliberately push your feet into the floor to feel the ground beneath them. When I'm wearing flats, I'll often slip them off under the table or desk, and rub my soles along the carpet, the sensation is grounding.

I mentioned self-destructive grounding techniques before - some of us discover by accident that pain can be very grounding, and if we're prone to dissociation, we may turn to self harm to try and manage it. Obviously, there are many other reasons people self harm, different needs and beliefs that can drive that behaviour. But, this can be one of them, and if it's that way for you, I'd suggest that you consider some other techniques and see if you can finding something not harmful that also works for you. Sometimes other intense, physical techniques can replace self harming as a way of grounding. As overwhelming and totally out of your control as it can feel to experience chronic severe dissociation, you can learn to manage it sufficiently to keep safe, feel alive, and get to do things you love. At the outset you may feel totally in the dark, nothing makes sense, your symptoms appear and subside without warning and you are always fighting just to be here. Take a breath. Accept what is going on, and start to investigate it. Knowledge is power, self awareness will give you the keys to better predict, manage and cope with dissociation. You will in time learn what triggers your dissociation, and what your key grounding techniques are that keep your feet on the ground. It may take time, but you will make sense of it and put together your own personal grounding kit, and that puts you back in the driver's seat. Good luck!