Got Parts?: an Insider's Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder

Finally a book for survivors written by a survivor!
Got Parts? was written by a survivor of DID in association with her therapist and therapy group. This book is filled with successful coping techniques and strategies to enhance the day-to-day functioning of adult survivors of DID in relationships, work, parenting, self-confidence, and self-care. Got Parts will help you introduce yourself to your internal family and improve its communication, integration, and well-being. Although written to carefully avoid triggering, it delivers well-grounded guidelines for living that DID people need to do on the way to recovery. Coping strategies included help you with issues related to triggers, flashbacks, and body memories. Got Parts also includes a detailed list of outside resources you can draw on. This book is intended to be used in conjunction with a therapist and is not a substitute for therapy.

Once thought of as a rare and mysterious psychiatric curiosity, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is now understood to be a fairly common outcome of severe trauma in young children most typically extreme and repeated physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse, and often lack of attachment. Formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder, DID is a condition in which a person has two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of the person's consciousness and behavior. Symptoms can include depression, mood swings, panic or anxiety attacks, substance abuse, memory loss, propensity for trances, sleep and eating disorders, distrust, detachment, lack of self-care, and distress or impairment at work.

Acclaim for Got Parts from Therapists and Survivors

"Got Parts? is a very well conceived and useful tool, particularly for those treating DID from a more functional perspective." -- Peter A. Maves, Ph.D., ISSD Fellow

"Got Parts is great tool for working therapeutically with ones internal family." -- Patricia Sherman, LCSW

"I particularly liked the chapter which emphasises the importance of taking care of body, mind and spirit holistically." -- Kathryn Livingston, Chairperson, First Person Plural (UK)

"I strongly recommend this book as a easily read, straightforward and insightful recovery tool for my clients with DID." -- Ian Landry, MA MSW RSW, Nova Scotia, Canada

"I will require got parts for new clients, refer it to other therapists and have even recommended it for others." -- Karen Hutchins, MA LPC

"ATW's approach reflects that of Truddi Chase, a DID victim who prefers her alters live in a harmonious community." -- Metapsychology Online Review, Dec. 22, 2005

For more information please visit www.GotParts.org
From Loving Healing Press www.LovingHealing.com

About the Author
W, A. T.: - Just a note about the writer of this book... We live in a female body, 44 years of age, single, a college graduate, with no living children. We share our life and living space with a beloved cat. We are beginning to work part-time, after being unable to work for over a decade. We were diagnosed DID in March 1997, though we had been in therapy intermittently, un-diagnosed and misdiagnosed, for years. We survived physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse and torture for the first 30 years of life, and intermittently for the next 9 years. The length of time, severity, and the extreme nature of what was done to us resulted in the creation of a very (very) large and diverse System. Perpetrators included family members, neighbors, school-mates-as well as the fathers of two school-mates, strangers, persons in authority in churches and schools we attended, and persons in the medical and mental health communities. We are also a survivor of SRA, and organized mind control programming by several different groups of individuals. We self-mutilated for decades, attempted suicide several times, and ended up in a psych hospital once. We hated ourselves, we hated our life. We held no hope of anything ever changing, of the pain and horror and evil ever stopping. We didn't know life could be any different. We finally found our way to a remarkable therapist, skilled both in treating trauma, and in accurately diagnosing DID and knowing what it takes to manage this diagnosis and re-integrate. We do not believe we would be here today without his skill, courage, compassion and unflagging belief in us, and his commitment to fight for us as long as we fought for ourselves. Although we are not 100% in following what is in this book 100% of the time, we continue to work toward ever-higher levels of this, because the ideas contained in this book are what have saved us, and what gave us a real chance at a healthy, satisfying life. There is a lot of us in these pages. Our successes have been hard-won, and they have not come quickly... but they have come. Accepting the diagnosis, learning to accept each other inside and work together instead of trying to vex each other, learning through hard experience the critical importance of good self care, doing the wrenching work of remembering what was done to us and working through it-speaking our truth, feeling the feelings, doing the homework assignments... these are things that were incredibly, unbelievably difficult and time- and energy- consuming... difficult beyond what we believed we were capable of doing. Yet, standing where we are today, we say to you that it was worth it. And if sharing any of this helps you, it was worth it. -atw January 2005