s found. This is unfortunate, because of all the severe mental disorders, DID has one the best prognoses. However, in order to successfully help the patient, the therapist must first gain his/her trust and willingness to assist in the treatment. An acceptance of the diagnosis is the first step, and it may be many months in coming.Once contact and trust are accomplished, the therapist must ...establish communication with all of the alter personalities in order to learn their names, origins, functions, problems, and relationships to the other personalities (Coons 6). The amount of time required to do this is dependent upon the degree of trust the patient places in the therapist. The host personality and his/her alter personalities must then be helped to begin coping with their traumatic experiences. Only after this has been done can the ...fusion of integration of the personalities... (Coons 6) begin.The treatment of DID is excruciatingly uncomfortable for the patient. The dissociated trauma and memory must be faced, experienced, metabolized, and integrated into the patients view of him/herself (Rainbow House pg. 5). As each alter exposes its trauma, it can ...yield its separateness and re-integrate (because that alter is no longer needed to contain undigested trauma) (Rainbow House 5).Recovery from DID and the childhood trauma which perpetuates it can take years. It involves a painful re-examination of ones past and a long ...process of mourning (Rainbow House 5). It is particularly difficult because the individual must come to terms with the fact that (in many cases) the beatings, sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of trauma that were suffered as small children, were perpetrated by the very people they depended on to love, care for and protect them.In a case cited by Ross, paternal sexual abuse was related by a child alter whom he was neither aware of nor attempting to contact. When the adult female host personality was b...
