How does Tift work?
Complex trauma clients are most often hanging on by a thread, always recreating an inner and outer balance, living with a “Sisyphus syndrome”. Trauma disorganises time and flow, causing fragmentation, dysregulation, and dissociative states.
Resolution follows the client’s overall survival adaptations, i.e. the dysfunctional IWM (Inner Working Models) and their consequences over the lifetime, creating an uncluttered space for flow to emerge anew.
Tift offers structured analytical tools for evaluating the client’s survival structure, for undoing maladaptive survival patterns and archaic protectors, transgenerational imprints, as well as for integrating dissociated parts.
From stop and go to flow
Tift’s resolution process focusses on tracking and completing the interrupted, blocked and sometimes hidden movements to allow the emergence of flow within the client’s system.
Less is more or small inputs, big results
Tift works with small changes: gentle nudges can shift the system including its parts without alarming the tornado butterfly, always with the system as a whole in our heart and mind. A complex system cannot be pushed, as pushing is an aggression-transgression.
The empire counterattacks
When targeting a single "so-called harmful" aspect, to remove or reduce it, the system will react with a backlash, like with dieting and the yo-yo effect! Tift views every adaptation, whether it looks good or bad, as having been equally necessary.
The missed appointment
Tift reproduces the conditions of secure attachment, thus providing what has been missing in early life. The key element is a dynamic connection between therapist and client to overcome the initial "missed and missing appointment" of primary attachment.
The present holds the past
The integration process uses variable, client-specific "timeline" cycles. This time axis is like gossamer, light weight and light-footed, and serving as a rhythmical "back-ground music”, without excluding traumatic events or periods.
Moving through the labyrinth
The time axis is reminiscent of Ariadne's thread which enables the person to encounter its primary wound at the centre of the labyrinth and then come back, being harnessed by the connectedness to the therapist during the journey to where it all began.