Date: Thursday 12 February 2026
Time: 8pm CET, 2pm EST, 11am PST, 7pm GMT
Duration: 90 minutes
Tutor: Ellert Nijenhuis, Ph.D.
Can’t attend live? Ticket holders will receive access to the recording of the public masterclass for 7 days.

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THE ORDER IN DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS

Do you sometimes struggle to assess dissociative disorders? For example, you may find it hard to distinguish DID, bipolar mood disorder, and schizophrenia in actual practice. Have you ever felt stuck in getting dissociative parts to cooperate with one another? They can be so opposed. This may make you experience your task as a therapist impossible, overwhelming or emotionally draining.

In this Public Masterclass, Ellert Nijenhuis starts sharing what he learned while working with dissociative patients for over 40 years. His goal is to help you gain clarity and feel more confident in your therapeutic work with people with DID.

Topics:

1. The order in dissociative disorders 

2. The role of longings of dissociative parts

3. Patients’ difficulty to overcome contrary longings

This public masterclass is ideal for:

• Psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and other therapy practitioners

  Including clinicians working with complex trauma and dissociative disorders.

• Educational and psychosocial professionals
  Who support children, adolescents, or adults with complex trauma histories.

• Medical, psychology, and healthcare students
  With an interest in trauma, dissociation, and clinical practice. Sign up with your university’s email address and receive access to the second and third masterclass for free.

A personal message from Ellert:

“Like all living beings, we primarily long and strive to preserve our existence and to evolve. When we succeed, we feel joy. The more we lack the power to meet malign forces, the more we experience sorrow. 

To meet destructive worldly powers beyond our power to act (e.g., emotional neglect and rejection, abuse), we may divide ourselves in two or more subsystems as a substitute for integrative strivings we cannot reach. Each of these dissociative subsystems is a partly conscious agent longing and striving to satisfy some of our basic needs. A basic division is between the effort to live daily life—while keeping traumatic affects and memories at bay—and the longing and striving to survive what harms us.

I invite you to join my first Public Masterclass in which we’ll explore the role of longings of patients and, more specifically, the dissociative agents. What will become apparent is the order in dissociative disorder.”

About Ellert Nijenhuis

As a -now, retired-psychologist and psychotherapist, Ellert has diagnosed, treated and scientifically studied severely traumatised patients for over 40 years. He developed the Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-20) and his publications include the book Somatoform Dissociation and the trilogy The Trinity of Trauma: Ignorance, Fragility, and Control. With Onno van der Hart and Kathy Steele he co-authored the book The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization.

Nijenhuis has been one of the founders of the ESTD. The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation granted him several awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Since 2014, he specifically concentrates on sharing his experience and knowledge regarding the psychology, psychobiology, and treatment of chronic traumatisation and dissociation.