ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a survivor's story, which illustrates important mistakes made by her first therapist in her journey towards recovery. LisaBri's experience with Linda reflects two important mistakes that are easy for survivors, as well as their therapists, to make. The first one is a lack of boundaries. The second mistake is that many survivors and their therapists or helpers focus on helping one side of the personality system and battling with the other side. The persecutor/protector parts are actually lonely because they are internally isolated (because all the other parts are afraid of them), and they long to be accepted into the internal and external community, so just talking and listening to them make a great deal of difference. The most effective approach with persecutor/protector parts is to engage them as your allies in healing. In most mind-controlled personality systems, the parts are arranged hierarchically.
