United Front: Building Trust Course

Creating Safety & Safety Plans

We’ve come to ask “Are you safe?” before suggesting that folk do work on building trust. Imagine how shitty it is to turn to a headmate and say “It’s ok to calm down and trust me.” meanwhile you’re still in touch with unsafe people, living in instability, etc.

So, we can say please don’t lie to your headmates. You can do this work even while you’re not living in full safety. But you can’t build trust on lies. So please edit things that we say or suggest; they have to fit your reality. You need to trust yourself as an individual, tell yourself the truth.  Be trustworthy to yourself. Then others may build up respect for you and be able to trust you, even if your life is somewhat shaky or not ideal.

If you are under threat in the physical world, in your Here & Now, please let us know and work on a System Safety Plan (recommended, not required) before taking this course. It doesn’t need to be complete (it’s a living document and technically never finished anyway), but this is a plan for how to help yourselves if you start getting triggered, things y’all can try in order to calm down, come back fully to the Here & Now, and the danger signs in case y’all need more help and are getting worse instead of better. It becomes an anchor to help yourselves if y’all need it.

In addition, if you are out of control of your circumstances, that’s a danger sign and  something that you should address with your professional team if you have one. If not, consider services to help out such as peer services, mental health advocacy, etc.

Course Outline

We will work together through 6 sessions to help you build better trust in your internal community.

This course is based on the 6-episode “System Trust Issues” series of our podcast Many Minds on the Issue (starting with episode 009: Welcome to DID: We are not your enemy), this is specifically a group coaching to work with challenged plural & DID systems who are not getting along inside.

This is based on a “flipped classroom model” so you will read, listen to, or watch lectures and other materials on a topic, then come to the group at the end of that week to discuss the materials, how exercises went, ask questions, and have more discussion amongst the participants than we’d normally be able to have if I were spending most of our time lecturing.

Each week will have media experiences (which should be marked whether they’re optional, suggested or required), reading assignments, at least one exercise and a journal exercise. Y’all don’t have to do all the work, but you will get more out of the course if y’all do it.

Try to bring a willingness for both sides to come to the table, and try (yeah we know!) to leave your attitudes at the door. If that’s not possible, that’s OK.

Week 1: Recruits vs Rebels

We’ll cover the introductory material (We are not the enemy) and application process, as well as terminology used in United Front and this course, and an exercise and a discussion or journaling exercise (if y’all aren’t journaling type, y’all can discuss the topic instead of writing about it).

Week 2:  As Inside, So Outside

The law of commerce or synchronicity for plurals, and how we often take external role models and import them into our system, so why not use this talent to help with our system’s problems?

Week 3: Boundaries & Empathy

How to heal and repair system boundaries so it’s possible to be compassionate with headmates, rather than overrun by their panic issues.

Week 4: Panic Reactions

To understand rebels, lost and stuck folk, and what causes and creates undesirable behavior in a system, we’ll talk about panic issues and what types of trouble headmates who are still stuck in PTSD can cause systems.  They know not what they do.

Week 5: System Trust Issues: Compromising Trust & Building Trust

It takes 2 (or more) to tango. Now that we have a better idea of what’s going on internally, what drives misbehavior for lost & stuck folk, hopefully better boundaries between headmates, etc. we can look at our own individual behavior and figure out what we each do that affects trust. The behaviors that have a negative impact on trust, and the behaviors that have a positive impact on trust.

Week 6: Recruits, Rebels & Adventurers

Kinda a bonus this week, the assignments are around how to handle mistakes and problems that will likely happen from time to time, and we’ll talk about things that system rebels can do with their enormous talents in order to help the system.