Facilitator: Lidy Evertsen

Working with dissociation and split off personality parts.

Body Psychotherapy with clients who learned to manage life by disconnecting memory systems.

 Two workshops of 2-days each, suitable for practitioners across all modalities

When trauma is too relentless to be normally processed and integrated into the psyche, to be blended into existing memory networks, separate memory-systems may spontaneously develop; multiple identities with, at times, extremely defined character traits and personalities, usually dissociated from each other in order that the sense of a normally functioning life can be maintained.

The experience of this personality-organisation is obviously extremely complex, and the transferential and counter-transferential therapeutic relationship inevitably reflects this, potentially becoming as chaotic and impossible to fathom as the hidden inner world of the client, were it not dissociated from awareness.

Over the course of two weekends Lidy will develop the understanding and recognition of a dissociative personality structure, explore how to help these clients to reconnect with split-off aspects of themselves in the development of a more consistent personality organisation, creating an overview of the dissociated parts and their organisation, relating these parts to age structure and and function for the total personality, connecting these parts to body areas, resourcing exercises, and providing supervision.

Important basic assumptions are:

• Every personality part has a function in the whole system.
• The therapist should not be in favour of nor dislike any personality part.
• The defensive systems should be honoured; as long as there is no alternative we shouldn’t touch the defence.
• All personality parts should be listened to carefully, as they carry specific information that the therapist and the principal in therapy acting personality part of the client often don’t have.

• Goal of the work is to connect parts well enough with each other in order to at least create an inner ‘working group’ that takes care of the wellbeing of the total personality.
• Dissociative identity is not so much a disorder as it is a creative way of preserving all inborn possibilities of the personality under harsh conditions.

From a background of theatre, Unitive Psychotherapy and Bodynamic Analysis Lidy developed a Body Psychotherapy way of working with clients living from a dissociative personality system. The Bodynamic system provides her with a rich and nuanced character structure model and the understanding of how to resource a structure verbally, energetically and physically. Besides Bodynamic Analysis has a discerned way of working with shock trauma.

By recognising each personality part as [part of] a character structure or a shock trauma function [survival, reflex system] it is possible to resource the different parts by means of physical actions, giving the right contact and finding the function of the different parts in the complete personality organisation. Then it will be possible to support contact between the parts and stimulate an atmosphere of negotiation inside of the system. Slowly more connections between the relevant memory systems will grow and provide the client with a more stable and safe ground on which further development can take place.

Venue: The Class Rooms

7-13 Melior Street
London
SE1 3QP

Lidy Evertsen is a Bodynamic certified practitioner and Shock trauma therapist, also trained in Unitive Psychotherapy. Originally a classical singer and voice trainer she taught acting classes for singers in the early eighties. Searching for how to support people bringing forward their own voice, she started to be trained as a body psychotherapist. Her theatre background and therapy training together have created a red thread in her work as a Body psychotherapist: dissociative identity. Lidy is also a Bodynamic trainer, running the part of the Bodynamic institute in Amsterdam,

Furthermore Lidy has been very active in the EABP. Currently she is the president of the EABP.