Transcription
[Music] Hi and welcome to another video from the CATAC clinic. My name is Dr. Mark Lloyd and I'm the clinic director.
In the video, we're going to be looking at a question that was raised in the webinar that I did recently. So, apologies for those that weren't able to attend the webinar. It was really good. We had loads of people uh showing up. Um, loads of questions. um, just wasn't able to get through all of them. So, we thought it'd be useful to sort bring some of the questions that we didn't answer out of the webinar and into the YouTube channel where we can have a bit of a chat about it.
So, if you're interested in attending some of the webinars and you don't want to miss out on those, please do keep a lookout on the website and the community page on the YouTube channel where we'll be advertising all of the webinar dates for the autumn period for this coming year. So, hopefully we'll see lots and lots of you in those webinars. It was an awful lot of fun and um, it's yeah, definitely something that we're going to be repeating uh many times.
So the question was this: What have you found helpful working with OSDD with frequent blending of alters and difficulty identifying who is fronting? Which is a really interesting question because in a way we're not really looking at fronting as such with OSDD. We're much more looking at sort of who is sort of maybe more dominant within the system at any given time because generally speaking we have the sort of the main person who is fronting and or the sort of the main whoever you know is in control of the body the majority of times OSDD tends to sit more in the background but I absolutely understand where the question comes from because it is really difficult identifying who's who and who's knocking around within OSDD systems and by OSDD I mean other specified dissociative disorders which is very similar to dissociative identity disorder but tends to be much more covert and behind the scenes and is definitely more of an internal experience type condition and it is really hard being able to know.
So, we can be working clinically with somebody who's got OSDD and clearly an awful lot of stuff is going on during therapy and we're not really going to know who's who and the person who's up front may also not know who's kind of pushing and pulling around on the inside and definitely sort of like throwing influence into their system and you know sometimes causing difficulty but of you know also cause you know bringing help to the system. So we don't really get too worried about making those identifications. I think one of the things that I learned early on was to really not get too caught up as a clinician on exactly who is who, but be prepared to apologize if I don't get it right and always be willing to ask.
And I think actually the most helpful thing is to ask permission to know in advance. So not just to turn around and say right who am I talking to now or who is present at the moment because actually names are not something that can just be given out easily within a lot of systems. there's a lot of fear and anxiety and tension about handing names down. So, the most helpful thing that I found is simply to either not be too worried about who's there and just ask, but only ask if I've got permission.
So, I would lead by saying, I'm pretty much aware that someone else is around at the moment. I can tell that there's a lot of influence going on. There's a lot of chitchat going on within the system. Would it be okay for me to know who's who? If I then get an o a yes response to that and I'm able to locate a name and able to know who is who that's absolutely brilliant and I learn then put that in my memory and if I don't remember it on another day in another session then I can apologize for not knowing because often there's a lot of names and it's very difficult being able to identify the right one over time it always irons out.
So once I work with someone for maybe six months or 12 months or 18 months it's it's usually pretty clear who's around. You can sort of tell by the sort of the manner in which that person is behaving or altering their behaviors even with a lot of blending going on and it is a it is possible to be able to tell but mistakes can get made and again just to apologize if a mistake is made.
So I hope that that gives a a good answer to the question. It was a really lovely one. Unfortunately within the context of the webinar we weren't able to answer that question. Um, so I'm I'm really glad to have been able to come back to it and just sort of give a bit of an overview from a therapist perspective on how we work with that. And it's, as you can tell, it's quite a relaxed approach that we take with this. We don't get too tense. Don't get too anxious about knowing all the names. Often we don't know any names at all to start with. We learn as we go on. And as therapists then you have to be willing to make mistakes and not always get their names names right. try your best and if you don't get it, always apologize and say you'll try harder next time.
So, thanks ever so much for watching. Um, please do keep um questions coming because it's a great source of um inspiration I suppose for the YouTube channel to know exactly what sort of things people are interested in. And as I said at the outset, we will be doing more of these webinars in the autumn. So, do keep a lookout on our website and on the YouTube community page and we'll be letting people know exactly when those new webinars are going to be listed. So, thanks ever so much for watching this video. Like, do all the likes, sharing, subscribing, all the usual stuff. And in between now and the next video, please do take great care.