Splitting Model

of the psychological splits caused by trauma

The human psyche is healthy by nature.

It uses a special ability to survive trauma/overwhelming experiences. It separates itself from reality and creates a psychic life of its own.

During traumatic experiences, the psychological system as a whole can no longer function and can no longer regulate itself. The human psyche splits.

Splitting causes our health to disintegrate and our identity to change.

What previously functioned as a complex interaction in the human organism: perception, feeling, remembering, thinking, willing, acting, etc., is then no longer available as a unit, but unconnected, unconsciously next to and against each other. The IoPT assumes that a healthy core continues to exist.

Trauma-related splits in the psyche:

Healthy parts:

The psyche can continue to grasp reality, regulate and control itself with these parts. These parts continue to be interested in reality and …. „can persistently pursue the project of finding their way out of their own split“ F.R.

Traumatised parts:

These parts retain the unbearable trauma feelings such as pain, powerlessness, panic, anger, disgust, shame, guilt, fear of death and keep them encapsulated, separated. „Traumatised parts still live, feel, sense and think as they did in the original trauma situation. They remain at the developmental stage at the time of the traumatising event.“FR

Trauma survival strategies:

Work to ensure that trauma experiences are blanked out, suppressed, ignored, no longer remembered, not felt, not thought about. „They have to prevent the worst in a trauma situation, i.e. physical death and psychological dissolution…. They block the traumatised parts in their expression by breaking them down into their individual parts, de-emotionalising them, removing them from the ego and banishing them from consciousness. Continued functioning is ensured by putting those areas of the body that are particularly involved in the traumatic experience into a state of anaesthesia, reducing blood flow or leaving them in a state of tension and numbness. Feelings of trauma are packed away by the survival mechanisms in certain areas of the body and contained there.

The survival parts work hard to undo the entire traumatizing life experience for the consciousness of the affected person. They drag the traumatized body or parts of it through life like a heavy weight and so no alternative.“ „One very important aspect of psychological trauma survival strategies is that the healthy self disappears. It is compensated for by a substitute ego construct, which in the end even thinks it is the real ego.“ FR We are then no longer really present and the survival strategies keep us in check and away from our real feelings