I am glad that some readers are finding my books helpful, and that some therapists are open-minded enough to read them. For patients and their significant others, my wish is that they will find hope for healing in the material. For therapists, my wish is that whatever they find helpful will prove of benefit to their own patients.
I recently received a request for more detail on the 5% rule I discussed with my patients. In Engaging Multiple Personalities Volume 1 page 31, I suggested to a patient that she could try to limit her experience of pain to 5% of the actual memory of pain. In that way, she could begin to relate to the pain while remaining in control and avoid being overwhelmed by it. 5% seemed to give the pain a boundary of tolerability, regardless of that boundary’s illusory nature. Further, if 5% was too much to handle, at that point she could decide to only take on 2%. Again, the idea was to create a vehicle through which she could begin to process her trauma on her own terms -rather than being uncontrollably swept away by the memories.
The notion of 5% is a way of pointing out that a difficult task can be divided into small bits, so that each part can be handled successfully without overwhelming the system. In concrete terms, if one has to climb a tall mountain, it might seem impossible at the beginning. By dividing it into 20 sections, each part is only 5% of the whole. That small part appears on its own to be manageable. The next 5 % will be likewise manageable too, and so on. When climbing Mount Everest, even the professional climbers acclimatize by spending time in a series of Base Camps that are each a bit higher in altitude than the prior camp before making the final ascent.
When it comes to pain, one has to use some imagination. I once treated a patient with severe snake phobia. I applied the 5% rule in this way. I suggested that she could imagine 5% of the fear to be like imagining a snake placed in a locked cage, in a locked room in a locked building, situated in the next city block over. The next step would be for her to imagine allowing the snake to be brought in the locked cage just outside the locked room, but still being kept in the locked building in the next city block. This amounted to her feeling a certain percentage of the fear of the snake without succumbing to panic. In this way, she was able to have some measure of control. Step by step she was able to regain control of her reactions to snakes.
The important suggestion is that one can use one’s imagination to break down into fractions whatever it is that one is frightened of. As in all behavioural therapy, the key point is generating that sense of control in the hands of the survivor. With control, one is no longer a helpless victim. Rather than being a victim of onslaught of debilitating memories, the patient (NOT the therapist) is then in charge of allowing whatever amount of the distress to come through for processing.
Even simply talking and planning such a technique with the patient in a secure milieu is in itself therapeutic. It is best to engage the patient to fully participate in the therapeutic procedure. The primary default response to a trauma is helplessness—a sense of loss of control. This approach gives the patient the tools to transforms the default response of helplessness into a powerful controlled processing response.
