Partner’s have an important role in reframing their partner’s past and changing the distortions a young brain used to survive. Partner’s are often there when a Survivor is overwhelmed by their reactions. Only partner’s can provide the new context necessary to change the old, distorted views. This may seem like a daunting, self less, and unforgiving chore. It may be daunting, but it should also be a bit selfish and forgiveness is the point! It is important that you NOT be perfect. This is good since most of us aren’t. Perfection, or at least the belief that doing something better would have changed the outcome, is the enemy. Young brains are constantly trying to see everything in the world as the result of their behavior. It is the only thing they can control. So, when the world hurts to much to bear, the only solution is to be better. It is most important that you are compassionate. You aren’t there to solve their problems for them! Compassion is caring about how they feel. I have this theory that it isn’t the pain of what happened that leaves the horrible scars and overwhelming reactions. It’s that no one seemed to care. You care and they need desperately to know it. I can’t tell you how to use your grown up, adult mind to help them. That’s for the professionals and their special training. Analyzing and dissecting their memories probably won’t help, either. The emotions and thoughts that swirl around traumatic events don’t seem to work right with our grown up brain. It’s like having to load Windows 3.0 to run software programs from the early 90’s. Have you noticed how you can put a laptop to “sleep” and it only takes a few seconds for it to wake up. It is much faster than restarting the computer. That’s because it saved all the memories to a big file on the hard drive. Everything is stored and ready to relaunch just by reading in the file. Traumatic memories, alters, or whatever name you want to use are kind of like that. They are a snapshot of the important parts of your system just before it overloaded and had (in more computer jargon) a core dump. Except that the incredible human brain is thousands of computers all running at once. Those old programs from way back when are still running and sending out alerts. To work with them, you need to work in their environment, in that old operating system from their youth. This is particularly true (warning, more computer jargon) when they go into a kernel panic. (That is the Unix technical term for when the core operating system can’t make sense of the inputs. It’s lost its context and just gives up.)