Abstract
At times in this last year of doing therapy, I have felt that I had finally learned how to do this work. To understand more, I set myself a task that I often give to patients:  “Make a 100-things list of what it is you are learning.”  On reviewing that list, I found that many items described work with what Van der Hart has called the Trauma Personality.  We often neglect this side of the trauma split in our tendency to identify with the Apparently Normal Personality, but it is the Trauma Personality that knows most about betrayal and survival.  In this last year, I have been applying techniques learned from treating more severe dissociative disorders to the task of valuing and integrating this self-aspect.  A second cluster of notes described efforts to recognize and repair the sense of time in these patients.  Trauma distorts time in many ways, not only through dissociative lost time but through the urgencies of fighting and fleeing trauma memories, through the time accelerations and slowdowns of mood swings and through generational reversals and intrusions into developmental time.  I found myself making timelines and genograms with patients.  However, it is the therapeutic framework itself that is our most effective tool here, providing a stability and predictability previously unknown in these patients’ lives.  The last cluster I identified in my list concerns early signs of recovery and how to recognize them.  Some patients in this phase of the work become avid students of self-care, researching and experimenting at length. Countertransference, though, provides the surest sign.  No longer do we feel ourselves switching from perpetrator to victim to the various rescuer roles that we once felt we had to inhabit:  nursemaid, witness, prophet, judge, wish-granting goddess, commanding general.  Finally, I find, I can just be me.  And I know then that it must be the same for the patient.

Potential to Distress: Yes