The essence of being a therapist is to be a compassionate guide. It is to guide patients through the healing process with insight tempered by kindness. For DID treatment, it requires a willingness to work as a guide rather than a director, to have deep reserves of empathy and patience, and to understand the power of active deep kindness. While an intensive course with a supervised apprenticeship is important, those qualities of empathy, patience and kindness are critically important. At the same time, the therapist needs to know how to protect him/herself from vicarious traumatization that can occur simply by virtue of genuinely working with survivors of early childhood trauma.

Such a therapist needs to understand that:

1) you have this condition of DID because of early childhood trauma;

2) your current symptomology is an adaptive survival response to years of trauma;

3) your adaptive survival response, when continuing as an ongoing hyper-vigilant state, creates problems of its own;

4) you need guidance and support to work with the diverse parts inside which cause conflicts and gently pursue solutions aiming at co-consciousness, cooperation, coordination and working as a team, like a sports team always aiming to achieve the common goal;

5) you likely have partial and/or total amnestic barriers between different parts inside which can be great obstacles in your daily functions, barriers which arose for reasons connected with surviving trauma, and that loosening those barriers requires protection from retraumatization; and

6) you need guidance and support to retrain or reset your body’s neurological and emotional responses.

This last point means learning to safely dial down the hyper-vigilance so as to be able navigate daily life and identify what in each present moment is safe and what is dangerous. In short, you need help to readjust to what is encountered in ordinary everyday non-traumatic environments with ordinary vigilance rather than hyper-vigilance; like looking both ways at the corner before crossing the street rather than repeatedly scanning the streets for hours while being paralyzed at the idea of crossing the street.

To be guided and supported in your DID healing journey, more than academic/scientific credentials, you need someone with genuine compassion, good will, patience and willingness to work as a guide. When those with DID say that empathy, compassion and patience are the pre-requisites to their committing to begin working with any particular therapist, that can become the basis for a grassroots shifting of the views of therapists on how to treat DID.