Have you Heard of Other Personalised Introjects and What’s that got to do with Therapy?

Probably not. Other Personalised Introjects is a term coined by Professor Gordon Emmerson Ph.D. Resource Therapy is known as Advanced Ego State Therapy as a nod to its origins in Ego State Therapy.

Let me give you some background.

Ego State Therapy (EST) first introduced Introject as a theoretical construct. There’s a very different meaning of Introject in Resource Therapy (RT).

According to RT an Introject is simply an internalized impression of a person, animal, or object which is specific to a Resource State.

This is not a personality part, and Resource Therapists do not work to change Introjects as in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Imaginal Re-Scripting. In a workshop for CBT Imaginal Rescripting that I attended, therapists were encouraged to fight the Introject, gaol them, send them into outer space, and machine gun them down. I was disconcerted, as this seemed unnecessary and a waste of valuable therapeutic time and energy.

As RTer’s we believe introjects to hold no power, as they are memory fragments and illusory objects. RT clinicians seek to empower our Resources, our personality parts, for healing, by unmasking the control they have over their introjects.

For example, an adult part will have a different internal Introject of their elderly parent. Whereas a child part of us may hold unprocessed emotions like anxiety or rejection with regard to their parent, at the age they were when they were a child, in having that experience with their caregiver.

By now you may be asking what has got to do with Other Personalised Introjects. The key phrase is ‘Other Personalized’ Introjects (OPI’s).

In RT Introjects belong to Resources.

OPI’s they do not.

They are unusual personality phenomena that don’t usually feel like they belong at all.

In other modalities, they might be said to be spiritual attachments/ possession or past life experiences. Resource Therapy says Other Personalised Introjects are specialized client personality manifestations.

Many mental health professionals will have encountered clients with differing belief systems. Buddhist clients hold there are many lives and reincarnations.

Clinical Psychologist Edith Fiore reports in her foreword to Alan Sandersons book -“In what I thought were multiple personalities [now known as dissociative Identity Disorder, DID] turned out to be other people inhabiting my patients’ bodies, I learned techniques to help them leave, which resulted in instantaneous cures.” She goes on to say that although she did not believe in reincarnation or the possession of spirits, some of her patients did and others did not. The hypnotic technique she used assisted her patients dramatically for the better ( Sanderson, 2022).

Psychiatrist Alan Sanderson M.D’s research project on eye-movement desensitizing, before it became EMDR with Reprocessing), in phobias led him to be introduced, through Lance Trendall, to spirit attachment, as a cause of psychiatric disturbance (Sanderson, 2022).

Whatever your beliefs are, as therapists, we aren’t there to judge. We are here to help our clients. So we need a clinical method to effectively work with these personality manifestations.

Gordon Emmerson discovered this in his clinical work.

He noticed a client was having difficulty with their eyes. They were scrunching them and looked uncomfortable. He asked to speak to the part who was responsible for this sensation. He was mightily surprised to meet ‘Hank’. Especially as his client was a young woman. Gordon asked Hank if there was a problem with his eyes. Hank shot back with “Yeah I’m blind.” On speaking with Hank Gordon learned that he had lost his sight in a combat situation.

Gordon ascertained with was neither a part nor an introject. This was unique. This was the first OPI presentation he had encountered. Thinking on his feet, he ascertained that Hank was not where he was meant to be and devised a technique to help with this situation.

This is an advanced technique in Resource Therapy I call the OPI protocol. In our Clinical Resource Therapy training, we learn this on day 8.

Extremely interested to hear about your clinical experiences on this phenomenon. Personally, I have had the opportunity to use this protocol to good effect in our clinic. It takes me by surprise the ease and the results. It’s fantastic to have a method on hand.

References

Sanderson, A. ( 2022). Psychiatry and the Spirit World. Park Street Press. Rochester, Vermont.

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