Mindfulness and DID

We have recently run into people who believe from the bottom of their heart that mindfulness is harmful for DID.
I am aware that it is difficult and that at the beginning a lot of stuff can come to our awareness that is uncomfortable and difficult to manage. But I have always thought of that as very challenging but healing.
Because it does reduce the dissociation. And it does help with emotional regulation and systemwork and dealing with flashbacks and all that on the long run. it is just tough to learn and it needs a certain window of tolerance so we won't get overwhelmed. So I am aware that it needs to be introduced slowly and carefully.

I was wondering if anyone of you ever read in a decent textbook or scientific article that there is a true contra-indication for mindfulness with DID. I can't read every textbook out there...

And then what your personal experience with mindfulness is. do you use it for grounding? does it work? and is there a DID specific reason why it doesn't?

Asti&Mike

I've not got any books or evidence I've seen either for or against.

Our personal experience is that it is a waste of effort. Mostly because of how we are when people try to guide us through it.

So we will often be Z when people try to guide us through it. They will have identified that we suddenly stopped being emotional (i.e. we just switched to Z) and they are trying to stop us from dissociating our emotions away. It doesn't work she doesn't feel emotions properly no amount of mindfulness can help her deal with what she doesn't have and she feels it's a pointless waste of time.

The other times people have tried to guide us through mindfulness is because we are completely and utterly overwhelmed. We are struggling to have anyone stay present in the body. I will be shutting down and losing my awareness of the body and the environment and no one else will be stepping in. Its of limited success because my ability to understand what is happening is limited.

The closest I come to mindfulness is looking after the dogs. They need me to be present here and now and that h lps me to push out intrusions. Past T's have tried talking to us about the dogs to ground us but it doesn't, it might trigger a switch but it doesn't actually do what they seem to think it should be doing or what they think it is doing. And that was really frustrating because I was able to recognise that it was only mimicking the affect they were trying to cause and I didn't know about DID most of the time and didn't know how to explain to them that what they thought was happening wasn't. I hadn't mindfully done anything I had just somehow sidestepped and avoided things. But they didn't seem to understand and viewed it as successful mindfulness.

So we don't like mindfulness but that's because we don't really understand how to make it work the way it's supposed to. We aren't even sure we can because we are almost always dissociative to varying degrees. And we have never been able to openly talk about what we are experiencing to the T's we have had so they haven't really been able to help. Maybe with the current one we would be able to learn one day in the future. I at least see a possibility that such a future might happen now which is an improvement on experiences with past T's.

may I ask what kind of mindfulness exercise you were led to do? mindfulness is a huge word that can mean all kinds of things.

When we first started L3 was like Z, without emotion. She actually learned to feel emotions using mindfulness. it just took a while. And it was pretty discouraging for a long time.

I have heard that from others before, that they just get overwhelmed because it is too much at once. it sounds normal. almost like making me eat chili peppers. I never eat spicy, I have no tolerance for hot stuff. with chronic dissociation we often don't have a tolerance yet for being present.

A&M

I've never read or heard that mindfulness is contraindicated in DID, and I agree with you that it depends on the kind of mindfulness and the person's tolerance as to whether or not they can handle that particular exercise at that particular moment.

What I do is mindfulness meditation, with recorded guide. It's these:

http://marc.ucla.edu/mindful-meditations

And I usually do the "complete meditation instructions" because there is a lot of talking before the two silences, to remind me what I'm doing and why.

I started trying to do this daily about 3 1/2 years ago after I read that meditation actually changes the structure of the brain in a way that helps with emotional regulation, and even though I didn't know about the DID, I knew that it was very difficult for me to calm down after getting upset and that had made it very hard to cope with the stresses of therapy (as well as daily life!).

Before that I had gone to mindfulness retreats sometimes--6 hours of learning about mindfulness and practicing different kinds--mindful eating, walking meditations, etc. It was a nice break from the intensity and self-sacrifice of being home with 3 young children. I maybe went to 3 or 4 of those over the years. There was a calm accepting attitude among the people there, and a lot of reassurance about it being a learning process that could take a long time.

What I like about it is that it's about focusing on what's going on around me--really noticing and grounding, and then just coming back to the breath. Thoughts and emotions are just things to notice and observe rather than getting tangled up in them. The first time I started to cry while I was meditating and was able to just observe how it felt physically was kind of a breakthrough for me--I realized that I didn't have to just let the feeling take over and then be stuck in it.

So I guess it showed me that there could be a different way of dealing with feelings rather than dissociating away from them. I could survive a feeling, at least a small one, and then it would be over and I would still be sitting there, breathing.

Hi Asti & Mike,

V1 was doing mindfulness excercises from the website calm.com but we have trouble with them, like she'd quiet her thoughts and her head would just fill up with other parts' thoughts. I try it and I get bored with it.

Kind of hit or miss. It has helped in terms of grounding when we've been triggered or having a flashback or whatever, but overall our feelings are very mixed.

A while back Lumpy did a thread about it, I believe he's of the opinion it can be harmful or at least unhelpful?
dissociative-identity/topic206233.html

V2

So with the last T when I switched to Z she would mainly get her to focus on our environment and would ask questions about it to help us focus in it. Questions would be things like what colours or shapes can you see. Z found it boring and pointless and underestimating and generally didn't get the point.

Other times I meant that I was already to overwhelmed when she started. I remember sitting there and not understanding what she was saying like it was a different language she was talking or that it was a language I knew but suddenly couldn't make sense of. I have a vague idea that she would try different things to prompt a reply she wanted and would eventually end up talking about the dogs and I'd end up switching. Then she would talk about how important it is to practice mindfulness to improve my distress tolerance. But I never really understood how to do that.

It took me a while to remember what the first T used to do. She would have us focus on the body and try to get us relax it and release the tension in it bit by bit working through the whole body. That went badly the first time and we told her we didn't like it and ignored her every time after. We have a really poor relationship with the body we don't notice it's needs or what it's feeling a lot. We think it's because we get somatic flashbacks a lot and if we distance our awareness of the body we distance our awareness of them. So anyway the first time she tried it triggered a somatic flashback or made us aware of one we were already having I'm not sure and that upset us and we never cooperated with her after that. Also the idea of relaxing the body when we are hypervigilant seems dangerous to us.

But I think your right about the more we avoid things the more sensitive we become and mindfulness could be a way to improve our ability to tolerate things.

@ theGang: oh wow. that is a lot of experience with mindfulness! it sounds wonderful. We would like a retreat like that. we will look into that meditation later.

@ V2: I don't think that the idea of mindfulness meditation has to be to empty the mind. thats kind of impossible. its more observing what is going on in the mind from a distanced position. but yes, it can be kind of boring. And body-focussed mindfulness can feel triggering at first.

I am reading Lumpys post in pieces cause my attention span is a little low. what I can see is that they say that mindfulness is crap at interrupting dissociation. this is something that I agree with, if someone is in serious hypoarousal the brain isn't functioning properly. it isn't able to be aware. it needs some stronger skills to get people back to reality. it is why we consider it a skill for "yellow" and not for "red" on the arousal scale.

I think that this is what NyxX was eperiencing. that you were too dissociated already to get anything out of it. and learning a grounding skill while being really dissociated probably won't work either, learning is impossible when outside the window of tolerance.
Is Z like an observer part? they often have found an identity in the distant observer position that we are supposed to learn in mindfulness and therefore it kind of doesn't make sense to them at all, they don't need more of that. they would need more contact with emotions...


Lumpys post was a little confusing to me cause they quote van der Kolk. I checked "the body keeps the score" and mindfulness is mentioned a LOT, in a very positive way.
like in "this is why mindfulness practice, which strengthens the MPFC (brain part responsible for calming down) is a cornerstone of recovery from trauma"
so I guess it is really about it being a less helpful tool to stop dissociative states.
Van der Kolk is also sceptical of the top-down approach - to regulate everything with our mind - and speaks up for body work a lot. last I heard him he sounded a little bitter about the limitations of mind-approaches, but he emphazised that it needs both, mind and body approaches.

Lumpys post also showed that when we try to do mindfulness with a whole system we will have to face down trance logic really hard. which I consider a good thing...
all this is very interesting to me.

sorry guys, I am not even sure who I am anymore today. we are kind of mixing and mingling a lot...

Z is a bit of a mix. When we were kids we would be punished if we showed any indication of being upset or frightened. So she became our host for a lot of years. She doesn't feel so we can act and think clearly no matter what is happening to us. She is the only one of us who is good at decision making and she finds it satisfying to observe and plan. She can also turn me off and force the others out of the body or force a switch to her. She can also cut off the connection between the system and the body. She thinks of herself as a sentinel.

And I would definitely say for Z it seemed completely pointless at least to her and for the rest of us we were to far past where it might even help. To us it's something that seems like a really great idea but not something we've ever had work. Part of that I think is us, we had to little understanding about ourselves and we have to much resistance to telling the people trying to help. And another part is that the past T's seemed to treat it like this magical thing that fixes everything and failed to recognise that it wasn't and that we were just stuck in a repeating cycle.

I see. it is the job of the T to help you with that...

I have checked "coping with trauma related dissociation". they consider reflection the most fundamental tool for systemwork and mention that this needs to be done from a distanced perspective like it is learned in mindfulness.
the book also has a mindfulness exercise, but it is not like a body scan or something like that, it is leading people to be mindful while doing everyday actions like eating or washing the dishes. the goal is to practice being present.

"The haunted self" considers mindfulness the basic tool for presentification. So its kind of along the same lines, to learn to be present we need to be more mindful. it is the main tool of presentification, which is one of the huge challenges and lessons to master when we try to heal from DID.

finally I looked at "becoming yourself" to get a perspective if this is used at all for RA/MC systems. and the answer is that it is a blunt tool when it comes to programming. If flashbacks or unrest or whatever is caused my malicious/programmed parts mindfulness won't do a thing, except maybe help to endure it. it won't help with grounding. and sometimes parts are programmed to stop presentification. So I guess it might actually cause trouble for people with specific programming.
that said, mind control is not the regular DID experience.

yes, we kind of do have too much time and a spontaneous interest in this... probably avoiding something

birdsong87 wrote:I checked "the body keeps the score" and mindfulness is mentioned a LOT, in a very positive way.
like in "this is why mindfulness practice, which strengthens the MPFC (brain part responsible for calming down) is a cornerstone of recovery from trauma"

I absolutely believe this. I avoid things in a big way if I think they are going to "hurt too much" emotionally. And a big part of something hurting too much is that it keeps on going. I have felt much better able to manage my feelings (without dissociating) since starting a mindfulness meditation practice.

birdsong87 wrote:yes, we kind of do have too much time and a spontaneous interest in this... probably avoiding something

Seems like a productive type of avoidance.

Maybe some of you are worried about having read that mindfulness might be bad for you and need the reassurance that you've really been doing something good for yourselves.