Need help creating a safe place for my little

Hi all,

We could really use some help/ideas/guidance on how to a create a safe place for our little before progressing with our trauma therapy. She's a toddler maybe 3 years old. She wears white glitter runners, has brown hair and rides a tricycle. We think she likes the color purple. She hasn't shown her whole face just about mid nose and above peeking around a corner at us. She's really cute, hasn't spoken and the only other part of her body we've seen have been the runners peddling the trike.

Thanks!

Hi caliwi81 ~ she sounds adorable!

Maybe you could create a special place for her to ride her tricycle? Like a park or playground... maybe even with other play equipment, too? That way she could run around sparkling all over the place, lol!

If you have a hard time "imagining" a place like that, I think it helps to either go to a real park or playground, and really concentrate on "memorizing it" for your inner safe place. Even a place from a scene in a movie you have watched, a youtube video (like central park) or a page from a book...
My Inner safe place got created when I was watching a Disney cartoon, so now all my Insiders live in Rapunzel's Tower in the Hidden Glen, LOL! I made sure to give them each their own bedroom, with a door that has little shuttered windows, so they can either hide, peek out, or come out if/when they decide to.

i wanted to bump this because i am interested in hearing others' ideas. i have one little and she is almost always silent, usually unseen. i think she's "not allowed" to talk or make needs known, and i feel bad about it but don't know what to do. occasionally i will feel a compulsion to buy a certain stuffed animal or toy and now that i'm aware of her, i usually do so for her. but i don't really know how else to make her feel safe and welcome.

well, to be honest, i dont have a lot of experience with toddlers.

for one girl we built a childrens bedroom, almost standard, with a safe bed, toys, things for entertainment. cozy and protected. this is what she needed.

with another girl we are travelling from safe place to safe place. she has this story she is telling to herself that has our daily struggles worked into it so that there are all kinds of safe places on her way. she has a castle, one underneath the water of a lake, a tree house, a ballon, a ship, an island....

whenever possible we let the kid build their own safe place, then help to make sure that it is really safe and doesnt contain any triggers.
i dont know if yours is old enough to understand the concept? a safe place doesnt have to be a room. i know a system that has a young part safely resting on the inside of a blossom.

one idea is to build a place and then put the part there.
another approach is to look at the part and build a safe place around them. we found that especially helpful with a possibly pre-verbal part in our system. we found her but it was impossible to move her, so we slowly started to make things more comfortable and safe around her.

sometimes parts create places that feel safe to them and they wouldnt feel safe or comfy to you. we had one who built a hole with naked concrete walls... it reflected where she was at and how she was coping and we didnt push her to make it nice and cozy. for some time she needed things to be bare and cool and hard to stay grounded. it doesnt matter if you like it, they have to like it.

and for some... they need to build their safe place and have you stay out of it. you might never know what it looks like. even just sharing would ruin the place.

i think thats about all we have to say about safe places
L & Asti

i wrote a whole story about my system
about how we build a safe place for the littles in general with all personal safe places within
but i lost it while uploading

there is one little who doesn't hear, see or speak
there is one bigger part who tries to connect with her bij emotions and feelings
there is still no way to bring her to the general safe place

what you wrote birdsong, L and Asti, i found it very helpfull, not to bring her here, but to build a safe place arround her, that is one to remember and worth trying

thank you

We have nearly ten littles. Most of them stay in the inner world, where there are a lot of kid friendly places and if they end up in a scary place our protectors and ISH are good at getting them away from there and to somewhere they can feel safe. We've got a city of tree houses, big libraries, huge zoos, castles, basically anything you can think of and it's probably in there. There are two who like fronting. They mostly come at on the weekends and play which kind of helps us all unwind from the week. We keep a lot of stuffed animals, coloring books, and toys for them in our bedroom that they can play with.

Since we're about to move out of the house to go to college and we want them to feel safe in our dorm room, we've been letting them help us pack. They each get to bring a stuffed animal, they're picking out our sheets, and we let them choose some decorations, stuff like that.

-The System

Thank you everyone for your help. My apologies for the late reply. My computer needed to go in for repair and I've just gotten it back. With your advice I think we'll try building our safe place around her. We've already started to journal what we think she'll like to have in her special place. I guess the hardest part is for me to accept that this type of diagnosis requires intangible solutions which is very different from most other types of problem solving we've had to do. Using our imagination is something really unfamiliar. Hope this makes sense.

OllieLuka wrote:We have nearly ten littles. Most of them stay in the inner world, where there are a lot of kid friendly places

We have 26 inside kids, including nine who are under the age of five. They almost always stay inside, where it's safe for them and they don't have to concern themselves with stressors on the outside. There is always at least one teen or older child, usually a sibling, around each of the little ones.

MDs

I think what everyone said here are great answers and suggestions for your post. Is it possible there are intuitive or "right-brained" alters who would be better or could help you create or enhance an inner world?

For others reading who might have a similar question but not be thinking of a safe place as strictly internal, we've had good results with setting up a room in our home as the play room. The other rooms have toys and stuffed animals in them and our littles have loved to spending time in the body playing, watching cartoons, and sleeping with stuffies or plush toys. Most of them like to go on walks, ideally in parks or similar quiet places.

I thought this worth mentioning since in our system safety is experienced more outside (in the body) and healing takes place better outside too. We never had much of an internal world, although we were able to create a pretty ornate inner world on demand, if needed. Maybe ours were disposable?

Sadly, and I do find it sad, our ability to create such a world seems to have shrunk as the overall dissociation has decreased. That said, we did feel it necessary to create a place, a big room with some furniture and toys, for younger alters not involved in a particular trauma to go during work in therapy.

Our non-DID sister once told me that in childhood she always felt safer outside the home rather than inside and I realized my system feels the same way. So the fact that our system feels more safe outside (in the body) than inside may be a reflection of that.

Johnny-Jack wrote:Sadly, and I do find it sad, our ability to create such a world seems to have shrunk as the overall dissociation has decreased.

Along those lines, while our innerworld is pretty much established, we can't retreat there as much as we could years ago, for similar reasons. There are times that we'd like to be able to hide there, but we're past the point where doing so would be helpful in the long run. The good part is that the specifics of the innerworld are no longer a mystery to us, and we can consider this knowledge a form of safety/grounding in itself.

MDs