Transcription
[Music] Hi and welcome to another video from the Sea Clinic. My name is Dr. Mike Lloyd and I'm the clinic director.
In the video today, we're going to be answering a question that's been left with us around the pro aging process of alters within conditions such as other specified dissociative disorder and dissociative identity disorder. So to start with, I'm going to be answering this question about whether or not parts age or not. And this is often a very challenging challenging thing for be for people to be able to deal with, cope with, and understand within their own systems and for therapists to be able to understand in the people that they're working with.
There's not a huge amount written about this or research done on this clinically. So realistically, we have to get the information about this from the therapeutic, you know, uh, environment. So, a lot of the work I'm going to be talking about today is is my experience of working with people with these conditions by talking to them and understanding their systems and really learning what it means to have this stuff going on with inside them. And this is a really complicated and difficult process for people to have because it has many many different constructs knocking around it as about as about the process of aging or not aging.
Often we fall back to action systems and we try and think in terms of what is it that the parts are there to achieve in the first place. So where we do have aging, we have to understand where it's taking place. And where we don't have aging, we have to understand how it's taking place. And actually, I've just realized I've answered the question already because the question is, do alters age? And I suppose I've already just given away the fact that yes, they do. But obviously, I think of course they do. It doesn't mean that they have to, and it doesn't mean that they will. It just means that in certain circumstances, in certain systems, they do. This is what we see clinically. We have some people who parts at say six years old and they grow to seven and then maybe leap to nine and then suddenly they're 14 and suddenly they're 25 and others are six and then even when the body is 40, 50, 60 years old that part remains at six.
So if we think about why this might be happening because it certainly does happen it all comes down to the nature of the trauma and then the action systems that built around it. If you'd like to know more about action systems, there are other videos on the channel about this and I'll put links to those in the description so that you can quickly hop on and kind of like jen up a little bit about what action systems are all about. What we're talking about then is that specific parts are there for specific reasons and those reasons may be set and in concrete according to the nature of the trauma and the way that this system is designed to cope in the world and others may need to be more responsive.
So for example, if there is a part who was designed to look after the body, then it stands to reason that that part is going to grow and going to develop potentially along the side of the same sort of way that the body is. Because as the body changes through the natural growth process into early childhood, late childhood, puberty, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, older adulthood, the physical body changes. The needs and the way that that body is designed and works changes and that part may need to grow with it. So, it would make sense you don't really want a six-year-old part looking after a 55-year-old body. You want a 55-year-old part looking after the 55-year-old body. So, that part may age.
On the other hand, if the the body was designed to hold a piece of trauma and to look after it as a six-year-old and maintain it as a six-year-old, it's unlikely that that part is going to become a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old. The chances are they're going to remain at six. And this could be about attachment. This could be about the needs and the way that they operate within the outside world. The the essence of all of this then is of course yes parts can age and when they do we need to understand why that's taking place through careful analysis and assessment of all the information at hand. And if they're not aging we need to understand what that process might mean according to exactly the same criteria.
We should never assume that they should age and we should absolutely never pressure or force parts to age. It might be incredibly inconvenient to have parts aging or not aging. This just has to be lived with, coped with, and understood. It can change over time as therapy progresses if a person is in therapy through the process of stabilization, trauma exploration, and integration. It could be that those parts develop, grow, mature in different ways. And that's absolutely fine as long as we're not pressuring them to do that for the sake of, let's say, convenience.
It may be that parts really don't want us to know anything about what's going on and it's very difficult for hidden parts to be able to really have an understanding and the actual age that parts are may not always be available. We have to be careful about just steaming into systems and just asking about all of these details about how old you are and and all this kind of thing because it might not be information that's readily available. So it could be that a a a part that is that is manifesting in a certain age and will not budge from that age needs something to happen in order to do so. So really kind of just being very careful about how we approach this is absolutely and definitely the key to developing our understanding of how these are working within systems.
We also have to be clear that where parts are aging or not aging, it can cause conflict within the overall system. It can cause envy and guilt and resentment and all of these sort of things. This all has to be managed. And again, that's very much a therapy recommendation to work through all of those sort of things. It could be that the the whole system feels like a child part is holding them back or it could be that a child part is growing and that feels unfair to the parts that aren't. There's almost like, you know, there's an infinite series of calculations and difficulties and conflicts that can occur within this. But it can also be done very harmoniously and feel very sort of balanced, kind, and thoughtful within that whole process.
And it's also that within one system, a part um there may be parts that do age and then parts that don't. And it could be that some systems have all the parts that age and some systems have parts that none of the parts age. And it's all just a bit of a mixed bag. And again, individually in the clinical process, this is what we see. All we're trying to do is look at what's there and understand the nature of it. But it certainly can happen. So that absolutely does answer the question. And again for OSD and DID, it doesn't really make any difference because whether it's an internal or out external sort of um transition of parts and you know sort of light emergence of parts, it doesn't make any difference because it's all still about how the how the trauma is held in the first place.
So, I hope that's been a useful video. Um, it really just is about answering the question and giving a little bit of context and sort of building the understanding around why that might be the case. So, what we've essentially got is that parts can age, but it doesn't mean that they will. And for some people, their parts are not aging, and that's absolutely fine. And then we have to look at the consequences of either the aging process or there not being an aging process. And therapeutically we have to just allow all of this stuff to play out, develop the understanding, formulate why it might be happening and help the person and the system understand what's going on because that really alleviates a lot of the tension and stress and fear all around this process.
It's a very very common question. I'm really glad it got raised and I hope that I've done the I've hope they've done the question a decent bit of justice. So between now and the next video, please do leave any comments that you might have. Please look up the work on action systems. Uh do all the likes, subscribing, sharing, notifying, all that kind of stuff. Keep an eye on the website for our webinars, uh our training events, and further live Q&As that we'll be doing. And between now and all of that, as always, please do take great care.