Dissociative children and adolescents are governed by inner manufactured free floating anxiety.
Fear generating mechanisms guard against access to ‘the wisdom of the body’. This interferes with the possibility of reconstitution of experiencing and the processing of traumatic experiences. In this article a way of ‘Clearing a Space’ is introduced that can breach this functioning as ‘fixed machines’.
Treatments with body maps are presented to illustrate how the ‘I’ gets the opportunity to approach it’s dissociated functioning in a manageable way. The changed position of the ‘I’ diminishes the inner fragmentation while the automatism of continuous activation of the ‘fear-factory’ is interrupted. This restores the ability of the body to maintain a more integrated state of functioning when contact is being made with ‘worst spots’. This enlarges the possibilities of the ‘I’ to process traumatic experiences.
The tPeP (Journal Person-centered experiential Psychotherapy) is the scientific journal for Dutch and Flemish psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, that work from, or are interested in a client-centered perspective.
