Thank you April Steele for responding in depth and thoughtfully to this question. I have a few brief comments:

Ms Steele has said, "the majority of clients are not highly dissociative, most of those who are can benefit a great deal from this approach, and if introjected perpetrators of highly dissociative clients intrude, ego state work is incorporated into the therapy at that point."

Of course the majority of clients are not highly dissociative. However, those few who are are the ones I am referring to whose intrapsychic structure can run afoul of the procedure. In your workshop, there was almost no mention of using ego state procedures with clients let alone dissociative clients. There was no question in the registration process for your workshop that would prequalify registrants as knowing how to use ego state methods, and no training in your workshop for how to use ego state therapy methods. So saying that ego state work should be incorporated if introjected perpetrators manifest is begging the question of how that's going to happen, and how practitioners are supposed to know that they should do that.

Unless you've considerably changed your training, ego state therapy was not a prominent part of the process. (Working only from the adult state to the child state does not ego therapy make).

Let me say clearly that April Steele's contribution is considerable, and that the Imaginal Nurturing method has many strengths and I've benefitted from learning it. However, and having used Ms Steele's method at some length as well as Landry Wildwind's and other resource development and ego strengthening methods for many years, I continue to find that working directly with introjects for complex/dissociative trauma cases is more beneficial than working from the adult ego state. People in my experience respond more viscerally and positively to a remediated introject than to a nurturing adult state.

Again, thank you to Ms Steele for her contributions and her comments here. April, please reply again if you wish. I enjoy the dialogue.

Warmly,
Sandra Paulsen PhD