My History with Ego State Therapy

Why this resource is helpful:

"I wrote this as a prologue to the Greek version of Easy Ego State Interventions and realized that it will make a good post:

I have been looking through the lenses of ego state therapies since 1981. During that year, my first out of graduate school, I took a course in Eric Berne"s Transactional Analysis and learned to identify the "Parent", "Child", and "Adult" parts of myself and my clients. It was useful to notice when I, and other people, were coming from our kid states, our introjected parent states, or our chosen, skilled, present-oriented part of self.

In the same year, I read and took classes in various hypnotic techniques, and learned my most used ego state intervention: "Go inside, and find that part of you that (1) having that feeling/ (2) having that belief and/or (3) can tell you when in your life that belief/feeling started."

My consultant, Thom Negri, gave our group the experience of finding our own inner children, and promising to care for and protect them. I"ve used this intervention with nearly every client, and learned new twists from April Steele and others, which I continue to use.

Before I learned EMDR, in 1993, ego state therapy was my best tool for healing trauma. I would direct clients to compare their present-day safe selves with their past stuck-in-danger selves, and to rescue the endangered younger selves. After I learned EMDR, I continued to interweave ego state interventions with the new therapy. I, and many others, found that the more dissociation a client had, the more necessary ego state interventions were for both preparation and interventions. With some unstable clients, straight-forward ego state interventions are still the treatment of choice."

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