When a new client crosses my threshold, and I hear their concerns and burdens and goals, I wonder how this self system is structured, and how much affect tolerance there is, because the answer to that question determines whether our path is short or long, and whether and how to proceed with resourcing or EMDR or whatever else. The DES makes sense to administer early, because it gives us clues to that question. Its a screening device, not a diagnostic one, but its a good start. Waiting until when one wants to do EMDR makes no sense to me, because why wasn't one wondering at the time one was doing the original assessment? It is surely germaine to assessment and diagnosis.

Now, there are other means of assessing for dissociative disorders in interview or with other instruments, and experienced people can often pick it up in interview and know how to field it as they go along, and work with parts as needed. But that's another story for another day.

A very very common error many clinicians seem to make is to assume that they only need to think of dissociation if they observe switching. But florid switching is very rare indeed, a small percentage of serious dissociators. So I hear people say, "I've only had one or two DIDs" when they really mean florid dissociaters, but they don't know that's what they mean. They don't know about the many others they overlooked because they aren't florid and don't have tattoos on their foreheads saying, "highly dissociative." If the whole point of being dissociative is to keep secrets from the self and the world as a survival strategy, then no surprise the condition is secret often from self and therapist.

It seems to me that Kiesling, in referring to the basketball player, is using that phrase as a handle to pull forward an ego state, or you could say the neuronet holding the piece of state dependent learning that has the capacity to feel imperturbable. I don't object one bit to that use of a handle, because it pulls it forward handily one might say, and people get it. If it is ones own high school experience, it is typically quite accessible in a nonDID person. If it is the basketball player who lived across the street, one has to approach it more gradually, perhaps shadowing the player closely, until one can envision and have a felt sense of how it is to look through that imperturbable persons eyes.

To clarify and answer your other question, I was saying that there is no iatrogenic dissociation involved in observing another state of oneself, rather, it is a midpoint on a path. The points, if there were only a few, on that continuum of integration would be:

1) forgotten "disowned" (for example, I am perturbable and that's all I know about me in this moment and in the board room,

2) "object cathected" or "dawning" I remember now, there is a part of me from high school and he is imperturbable, I see that in his stance, his expression, (notice the third person, which evidence's object cathexis)

3) "merging" I am following the basketball player closely, so I can emulate his stance, his expression, and I can almost feel his imperturbability (this is still "I" and "he", but its almost "we" so first person experience of imperturbability is approaching (its becoming ego cathected we see by the approach of the first person pronoun), and

4) "ego cathected" or "owned" I feel my imperturbability, I am that basketball player (ego cathected, that is, there is ego energy (self energy) on that neuro net. It is now activated, no longer in archive.

So what might appear to be encouraging dissociation is actually encouraging an integrated self, increased neural linkages between neural nets. You might say we are greasing the wheels of conveyance to more readily access the highway of imperturbability (in this case) with those increased associative linkages. If we are increasing associative linkages, how can we possibility be creating dissociation? Only by reifying the basketball player, so he has his own dressing room and wardrobe and name, Wilt the Imperturbable, where both client and therapist are too much into the Otherness of the basketball player for its own sake, for the entertainment value, rather than as a means to an integrated self.


If the basketball player was the guy across the street and now one can wear imperturbability by borrowing the felt sense of him, well oh well. Its a resource.

I'm not sure what Roy Kiessling would say about it, but that's what I would say.