Structuring treatment for dissociative children with the Sleeping Dogs method

Abstract

Even though there are several excellent treatment models for dissociative children, their treatment can be challenging. To reduce dissociative symptoms, it is necessary to process and overcome adverse experiences; however, their life experiences or circumstances can make children avoid access to traumatic memories and treatment gets stuck. The Sleeping Dogs method can be used to analyse the reasons why children are unwilling or unable to talk about their traumatic memories through 19 questions. Many of the barriers concern, for example, the child’s biological family, including the abuser, unsafety or decisions made by child protection services about contact or living arrangements. Sleeping Dogs describes interventions for all barriers. Based on the analysis, the clinician can select only those interventions that are needed to overcome the identified barriers and support trauma processing. This provides more focus to the treatment plan. When the child does not want to come to therapy, treatment comes to them by having caregivers, residential staff, foster care workers, child protection workers do Sleeping Dogs interventions with the child to try and engage him or her to eventually attend therapy sessions.