Coping mechanisms for alters

My system and I are looking to strengthen ourselves with coping skills. My alters come to the front but I never loose consciousness. I currently know common coping skills for myself however my alters want to be armed with coping skills at their disposal. We are looking for skills that can be enacted internally or without my participation such as imagery. Please let us know what helps your system! I'd even like to hear of coping mechanisms that the host can carry out to help everyone! TIA

Hmm, this is quite an extensive question. Could you give an example of a situation in which it would be helpful for you for parts to have internal coping skills?
dis-sos.com has some imagery exercises that you could look into.
I also know there are some imagery exercises in the book "Coping with trauma-related dissociation".

I personally really like the book "The mind-body stress reset" for ideas of general body-focused coping skills that any part could engage in to connect to the body and calm the nervous system. The chapter about imagery in that book is my favourite. It involves wondering what imagery could make the situation a little more bearable: an imaginary support, an imaginary boundary, an imaginary time-adjustment, or an imaginary resolution. Works well for working with memories too, but I don't recommend doing that right away unless you have experience.

Hi,

dis-sos is a really good idea.

We have some playlists on our phone that we use when we're upset. We also have a playlist if the Littles are upset - they like storybooks. We also have things that we carry that remind us the bad times are OVER! Even if Host isn't around we can hold the special things and calm down.

Iain

I know many people find guided meditation helpful; we don't tend to like it personally but it can be helpful for some people in focusing on calming imagery.

One of our alters does meditation while exercising/doing yoga/etc, it can make internal imagery easier to focus on I think.

As far as entirely internal, having calming mantras or something external to focus on can help sometimes. For example, imagining light going from the top of the head to your feet can be easier than imaging an entirely new situation that's also comforting to you. We've also been finding internal dialogue to be a helpful mechanism in expressing our feelings to each other and making sure everyone is heard. I do know that can be difficult though; we've only recently started to be able to communicate and we were told we had DID for the first time in early 2020.

Any sort of physical explosion of emotion seems to be helpful as well, in whatever that means to you - jogging, talking it out, art, etc. Within healthy mediums we've found this to be useful.

These are just some mechanisms that tend to work for us, obviously everyone is going to vary but I hope maybe some of this is helpful

We second fireheart's recommendation of the Mind-Body Stress Reset book. The exercises are explained simply enough for littles to understand, and there's a lot of praise and support built in.

In general, when we start to feel overwhelmed, we'll focus on breathing and the five senses. With some flashbacks recently, we've been able to use imagery to imagine a different outcome, and that's been helpful.

Oooh I'll add this book to the ressources thread!

You'll find other ressources here bty Link in my signature.