Integrating the Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation into Clinical Practice

This online course offers updated and expanded clinical application and differential diagnosis material based upon recent research, literature, and the presenters’ experience in consultation focused on the MID with hundreds of clinicians world-wide.

Many therapies focused on trauma resolution require screening and/or assessment for pathological dissociation as a prerequisite or preparatory step to accessing and activation of traumatic memory material. Since the development of EMDR in the early 1990s, a large body of research has shown that it is efficacious for PTSD. Clinicians and researchers have found positive treatment effects beyond PTSD for more complicated conditions. Unfortunately, clinicians soon discovered that EMDR seemed to move complex trauma patients into dysregulated states rather than towards the expected, adaptive resolution of targeted traumatic memories. Therapists new to EMDR gain a powerful tool, yet they are frequently caught unprepared to recognize dissociative features, conceptualize treatment in terms of dissociation, or modify treatment when dissociative symptoms pose a treatment challenge.

The Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation (MID) has become a valuable assessment tool for trauma-focused clinicians–and EMDR practitioners in particular–both to determine the presence of pathological dissociation and to develop more fine-grained interventions for preparation and successful trauma accessing/reprocessing. The MID is a 218-item, self-administered instrument with 168 dissociation items and 50 validity items developed by Paul F. Dell, PhD (2006, 2011). The MID reliably differentiates and offers a diagnostic impression for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.

Participants will be introduced to the MID in this ‘walk-through,’ during which they will learn to administer and score the MID; navigate the MID Analysis to enter data, interpret results, and conduct a follow-up interview; and begin to understand how the information offered up by the MID Report may influence treatment. Vignettes will assist clinicians to connect MID impressions with what clinicians may see (or have already seen) in client sessions. Case examples will be discussed, with particular attention paid to how certain clusters of dissociative symptoms could influence clinician’s decisions regarding the use of specific kinds of preparation and trauma accessing methods. Implications for stabilization and potential markers for readiness for trauma accessing, particularly in an EMDR therapy frame, but also more generally, will be offered.

MID documents are available without charge to mental health professionals and researchers at www.mid-assessment.com. Participants are highly encouraged to download and review the MID Analysis, MID (questions) and Interpretive Manual in preparation for this training.