ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the survivor's present-day immediate family. Sympathetic family members need support in dealing with dissociative relatives. It is very important to inform family members about how structural dissociation functions. This also includes information about how believable dissociated memories are, and how it is possible that memories that the patient was not aware of can still emerge. Dissociated and re-emerging memories are massive events that can tear apart a person's life. Dissociation means that as soon as a stimulus arrives, the victim's organism classifies it automatically as too overwhelming to be made accessible to be processed and stored in consciousness. In the dissociated world inner information units arise which contain certain traumatic experiences and the necessary reactions to them. These units are at first not capable of consciousness, which is why the first step in therapy has to be realization.
