Is There No Hope?
The urgent problem is usually uncontrolled flashbacks with personality switching and self-mutilation. It is frightening and you just know that your loved one (or your patient if you are the therapist) has to be locked up and restrained to gain control. If this has happened before you also know that it will be traumatizing for the patient, not to mention, yourself. It seems too late to find other options and if you have been down this road before you have lost hope that any options for decent, respectful care exist.

There Is Hope
Increasingly, knowledgeable and compassionate therapists who have learned how to provide precise treatment procedures to manage and cure dissociative disorders are offering decent outpatient treatment. Their method depends on an intensive marathon treatment approach in the hands of a team of highly trained professionals using art therapy, hypnosis, and video therapy. The treatment is one-to-one and does not use restraints or drugs.

A Scientifically Developed Intensive Trauma Therapy
The treatment is new although it has been in development for 15 years. It began as a new application of the oldest methods of treating trauma, dating from the 1800s in Paris, France, when Pierre Janet learned how to cure these conditions, then called hysteria. The new methods use modern neuroscientific knowledge and modern technology in applications that were developed at West Virginia University and a Veterans Administration hospital and finally completed in an independent Trauma Recovery Institute. The treatment became a brief intensive approach after the discovery of a safe method for rapid trauma processing that avoided emotional re-living of the trauma.

The Key Discovery
Pierre Janet and his followers applied their cure in a diligent and long-term manner taking care to stabilize their frightened patients and give them time to gradually gain and work through insight into their subconscious mind. The modern discovery shed light on the evolutionary survival strategies that emerge in a persons instinctual trauma response. This discovery revealed that certain reparative tasks could reconstruct the traumatic memory as an unthreatening fact of history now devoid of danger. The treatment process requires simply the completion of specific reparative tasks and does not require periods of working through. The treatment needs to be only as long as the time required for completing the tasks.

Marathon Treatment
Once therapists learned that trauma therapy could proceed without waiting for insight to percolate over time they tried to condense treatment procedures into a marathon approach. Instead of scheduling one hour a week for a year they scheduled the same number of hours, one after the other, in a two-week period (10 days with the week-end off). They found to their delight that patients not only tolerated the marathon treatment but found it to be more desirable than the conventional schedule. Measures of outcome at one week, three months, and six months showed an excellent result. The final outcome of the first 50 dissociative patients (DDNOS: 37, DID: 13) Showed 31% recovered, 53% improved, 12% unchanged, and 4% worse.

Where Is It Available?
Therapists are being trained to deliver intensive trauma therapy. Solo practitioners have located in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California but the team approach is still available only in Morgantown, West Virginia. The marathon approach is still not covered by any health insurance. Even so, he demand is increasing and it is likely that this treatment will be widely available in the near future.