About our TDEA ('Trauma and Dissociation Education and Advocacy') Facebook community - Visit us - contribute!

By: Tom Cloyd - 6 min. read (Published: 2019; reviewed: 2023-05-24:1826 Pacific Time (USA))

The GeTI project has a presence on Facebook - a group focused on trustworthy information about the psychological trauma disorders and their management and treatment. (For easy reference, page sections below are numbered.)

Page contents…

• 1. Our community purpose ^
• 2. How to participate ^
• 3. What we are not, and what this means ^
• 4. If you have alters, dissociated parts, or a DID (dissociative identity disorder) diagnosis… ^

1. Our community purpose ^{^}

We are a community of diverse individuals with a common interest. Our purpose is discussion, education, and advocacy about evidence-based thinking about and management of the psychological trauma disorders.

2. How to participate ^{^}

Beyond reading posts, searching for topics, or clicking “Like” buttons, consider:

• Offering thoughtful critical comments to posts. Remember that “critical” is another word for “thoughtful”, and not just a synonym for “negative”!
• Relating a post that interests you to your personal experience.
• Posting substantive content that contributes value to the community discussion. This might be your own thoughts, your reaction to someone else’s thought you encountered elsewhere, or a question for the community. Questions can be especially useful, as they are invitations for people to move beyond being a reader and to become an active participant.

3. What we are not, and what this means ^{^}

3.1 This group is not a “link farm” or a bulletin board for anything and everything having to do with psychological trauma disorders. Our mission statement is clear: our focus is on discussion of evidence-based best practices for dealing with psychological trauma and the disorders that it can create.

If you do not know what evidence-based means, read the definition in our website glossary.

3.2 It is not appropriate to post text that merely seeks to draw site visitors elsewhere. Contribute to the community before you take from them. Please see “What can you do instead”, below, for more on this.

3.3 It is not appropriate for professional (or non-professional!)health care providers to solicit clients in our Facebook community. There are two reasons for this:

a) A mere service advertisement is off-topic for the community. It does not contribute to the ongoing discussion. It is about an individual’s business, not the welfare of the community.

b) Professional services in most industrialized countries are provided by licensed individuals, so that the quality of such services is reasonably protected, for the sake of both customers and the professions licensed. These licenses qualify one to practice and solicit clients in a local region, and not elsewhere. Our Facebook community is NOT local, but has participants from across the globe (see a breakdown here). Most are NOT in the region in which you are licensed, if you are a provider. It makes no sense to advertise to a group of people who for the most part are outside of your service area. Doing so merely contributes noise to the community.

What you can do instead: Contribute value to the community that does not require their having to leave to find it! You can then end your contribution with a link to your website or Facebook page, if you wish.

Your contribution could be your thoughts on an ongoing discussion, or your reactions to someone else’s post. It could also be an excerpt or summary of content you have written elsewhere.

Showing the value you have to offer is far more likely to attract attention to your work than an overt client or site-visitor solicitation.

3.4 We will not be promoting support groups or informational websites run by individuals without professional credentials. While some are excellently designed and run, too many are unfortunate sources of misinformation, rumor, and mere folklore. This is not helpful and in general will have the effect of slowing participants’ journey toward recovery and a fully healthy life.

A little historical perspective may help at this point: Prior to the emergence and validation of the “microbe theory” of infectious disease, infant and maternal mortality was a major reality in our society. The only recourse people had was folklore and religion - neither of which had much effect. The emergence of careful observational methods in the physical sciences eventually gave rise to reliable, verifiable knowledge about how to handle such matters. Infant and maternal mortality plunged drastically in the first part of the 20th century, as a result.

The same methods, applied to understanding human behavior, learning, and thinking, slowly yielded similarly striking results. Then, shortly after the end of World War II, clinical psychology as a major profession was launched by the US government in response to the large number of mentally damaged soldiers now trying to get on with their lives.

Folkloric knowledge - when it is actual knowledge at all - tends to be simplistic and not well specified. This makes it fairly easy to understand, but generally ineffectual. Scientifically-derived knowledge tends to be much more specific and focused, with the result that it’s considerably more powerful in its effect. Promoting such knowledge, and its application, is our central purpose here.

3.5 We are not primarily a social support group, although some highly helpful and supportive interactions and information exchanges do occur in our Facebook community. As stated in our name, our focus is on “Education and Advocacy”.

4. If you have alters, dissociated parts, or a DID (dissociative identity disorder) diagnosis… ^{^}

Your posts to the TDEA group can be helpful in several ways:

1. Telling about your experiences and challenges living with multiplicity can help others like you see that they are not alone in their struggle. It can be comforting to know that there are “others” out there in the real world. Too many with folks living with DID do not know this.

2. You can help people not dealing with your challenges to better understand your situation. Multiplicity is confusing to everyone, and most people’s actual knowledge about it is meager at best.

It may help you to consider this: we all have “parts”. Non-multiples simply don’t pay much attention to this fact because it usually doesn’t cause much of a problem for them. But in reality, parts get into conflicts with each other, whether or not one has DID. For example, one part of me can be eager to buy a new tool I see for sale, while another is fretting about the lack of money I have for other, more vital things. Do I go for immediate rewards (buy it!) or yield to a more thoughtful response (save your money for the important things!)?

As it turns out, non-multiples can come to see a lot of themselves in the lives of multiples - and guess what? - this is helpful!

A caution: A central problem in living with an active, inadequately integrated system of personality parts - which describes the situation with anyone who has DID - is that some parts “act out” - they are impulsive and behave inappropriately. In a normally integrated personality, parts communicate with each other and work to restrain certain parts from acting in ways that could hurt everyone. In DID, this often cannot happen because the personality parts are substantially isolated from each other and do NOT communicate.

This means that you may from time to time post things on the TDEA group that are not educational or related in some way to advocating for a better life for those affected by trauma. Your post will likely be removed. Consider this simply part of your learning appropriate social behavior.

 

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