Dissociation: A Comprehensive Approach to Healing
Experiencing dissociation can often leave you feeling isolated and overwhelmed, making it difficult to connect with your emotions, your body, and the world around you. However, understanding dissociation is the very first step toward addressing its impact and reclaiming your life.
Mindful Way Counseling has providers who integrate dissociation-specific techniques into your care to help you achieve deep, lasting healing and reach your personal therapeutic goals.
Are you looking to:
Navigate the impact of complex trauma in a safe, supportive environment?
Find good clarity after receiving numerous diagnoses without much actual relief?
Break through plateaus in long-term therapy having not made or maintained progress?
Reconnect fully when you feel checked out from your physical and/or emotional self?
Make sense of your mind when you feel puzzled by your own internal experiences?
When these signs of higher dissociative abilities are properly addressed, many clients finally make the breakthrough progress that they have been unable to achieve or maintain in the past.
What exactly is Dissociation?
Dissociation is really just a skill or strategy the brain naturally develops to adapt to overwhelming life situations. It functions as an internal survival mechanism, helping individuals cope when stress becomes too heavy to bear.
Everyone dissociates to some degree, such as highway hypnosis or zoning out, while some people experience it more frequently or in more complex ways. Complex, developmental trauma or prolonged stress heavily contributes to these advanced dissociative abilities.
Who can benefit from Dissociation-Specific Interventions?
People with histories of complex or developmental trauma highly benefit from dissociation-specific support. Because dissociation changes how you process the world, these tailored interventions are typically used in conjunction with other types of therapy to provide well-rounded care.
While prolonged stress or early trauma plays a significant role in developing these capacities, clients with other presenting concerns can also experience higher levels of dissociation and benefit deeply from this type of support.
These interventions offer deep support for individuals managing:
Complex trauma & PTSD
Persistent depression & mood struggles
Severe or persistent anxiety
Panic disorders and agoraphobia
Obsessive- compulsive disorder
Integrating Dissociation-Specific Modalities Into Therapy
Various therapeutic modalities incorporate specific, targeted principles to help individuals navigate the complex impacts of trauma throughout their lifespan. Our therapists utilize advanced, neuro-developmental strategies to help you build a compassionate awareness of your internal experience, track your thoughts and feelings without judgment, and cultivate deep self-compassion.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) & Ego State Therapies: These modalities serve as the early foundations of dissociation practice. We utilize them to focus closely on how your internal experience tracks and responds, rather than only looking at external events in your life.
Imaginal Nurturing: Developed by April Steele, this approach helps us focus heavily on the specific elements of imaginal nurturing that actively develop deep healing, self-care, self-nurturance, and profound self-kindness. This model actively fosters a compassionate awareness and targeted focus on different parts of the self, while simultaneously building vital emotional skill development.
Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy (DNMS): Developed by Shirley Jean Schmidt, LPC, this multidimensional strategy merges ego-state therapy with strengths-based, client-centered, developmental psychology, and self-reparenting models. By utilizing your internal resources, it works to meet the unmet needs of wounded child parts, helping them get unstuck from the past. The strategic use of support, compassion, empathy, radical acceptance, and psychoeducation helps manage internal conflicts and promote deep healing.
Integrating these various therapeutic models allows us to completely tailor our approach to each client’s unique experiences and needs. This highly personalized treatment fosters a safe, secure space for you to explore your feelings, build emotional resilience, and learn sustainable, effective coping strategies for everyday life.
At Mindful Way Counseling, we believe that informed, compassionate care is vital for complex trauma and dissociation. Each of our highly trained providers brings a unique perspective and advanced skill set to address dissociation, ensuring your care aligns beautifully with your healing journey.
Our trauma and dissociation trained providers include:
- Franceska Moua, LICSW
- Molly Gurovitsch, LMFT
- Dr. Natalie Marr, PsyD, LP
- Andrea Patten, LICSW