Retrospring is shutting down on 1st March, 2025 Read more
Is host used in offical clinical contexts or therapitical settings? Is it a term that's recognized by professionals in a meaningful capacity?
I would say yes, lol
"The part of the self who is in executive control most of the time is generally called the host...The advantage of the term is that it is one word, and for this reason, using it is sometimes the best way to be clear.
I also frequently use other phrases, such as the usually presenting part, the part who appears most of the time, or the part in executive control most of the time, but when necessary, I use host.
Kluft (1984) has described the host as “the one who has executive control of the body the greatest percentage of the time during a given time."
This part of the person usually goes by the name that the patient goes by, the name used socially in the world.
This part is the one out front and actually often functions as a kind of shell, a front...the part in executive control most of the time is likely to be compliant, depressed, depleted, and masochistic. In many cases, though, this part may be energetic, idealizing, or cheery, while other parts hold grief, terror, rage, and depression. (Of course, these are not the only structured patterns; there are many variations and combinations.) What is constant is that the experience of the part or parts who function and interact in the world most of the time has been protectively separated from those of other encapsulated parts who hold powerful emotions such as rage and terror, as well as memories that would be too destabilizing for the func-tioning of the person if the host were conscious of them. Thus, the more depressed, depleted, and masochistic front parts have in their personality system other parts who hold, for example, rage, anger, terror, pain, and agency. The energetic front parts are likely to serve in a counteracting way to the dissociated very depressed and hopeless, and sometimes dead, parts.
Different parts can take over as host at different periods in a person’s life.
They may or may not have coconsciousness with the preceding usually pre-senting part. One of my patients described how she suddenly “came to” in class one day when she was about 8 years old, having forgotten everything she learned the previous year but feeling more in contact with her self of prior years. Another described how, as an adult, an alter different from the usual host acted as host for a period over 1 year."
Boon, Suzette, Kathy Steele, and Onno van der Hart. Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, p. 58-59
Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting
*italic text*
for italic text
**bold text**
for bold text
[link](https://example.com)
for link