It always amazes me when dissociative trauma survivors tell me that after they’ve met three or four of their inside alters (or maybe even a few more than that, but not many), that they think they’ve met everyone in their system. They think they are “done” meeting their insiders.
That never makes sense to me. Oh, I understand why the survivors would want to believe they have so few others inside, but that hope rarely matches with the actual amount of dissociative symptoms that they experience in their lives.
For example, if someone is still losing time, but they believe that have a good solid relationship with the parts that they know – then why are they losing time? Yes, it is possible that someone you know in your system can still block you out of awareness at certain times. Then again, if everyone you know in your system said they did not know what happened during a period of lost time, then it only makes sense to realize there are other parts of the system out and in charge during that missing time. If all of you are losing time, then there are more insiders yet to meet.
In my definition, meeting new insiders is a sign of progress. The survivor will not be creating new parts by meeting new parts – they are simply finding the parts that have been hiding from them all along behind strong dissociative walls. Any time you can reclaim more of the information that had been previously blocked from you via dissociation, you are making progress. Learning about your system and your history are always steps of progress.
So who should you look for or when will you know if there are more parts to meet?
All dissociative trauma survivors have their own unique system, of course. No one’s system is exactly like anyone else’s. There is no right or wrong for how big or how elaborate your system is. You would have split as many times as you had to, and you will have as many parts as you needed.
However, there are some common types of alters that exist in most DID survivors. This is a non-exhaustive list:
(Please note: alters may start off in these categories, but their roles can change.)
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1. Host parts – check to see who was the host at various times in your life. This role can change and be assigned from part to part to part through time.
2. Child parts – your dissociative splitting would have started prior to age 7, so you will definitely have at least one child part, however, most DID survivors have bunches of child parts.
3. Parts that are relatively happy and trauma-free. These parts do not remember any trauma whatsoever. They can be of any age, but they believe they had a completely safe and happy childhood / adult life. Some parts might believe there was childhood abuse, but they can be blocked from the awareness of abuse happening in the adult years.
4. Parts that are created to manage the outside world. These parts may be the ones that went to school, or go to work, or handle social situations. They are typically quite separate from the trauma-holders or those that hold intense emotions. These parts may not be aware of a lot of trauma, they may hold a lot of denial, and they have the job to look as normal as possible. They will help the person get through life by doing normal things.
5. Parts that don’t remember anything “good” happening. If there are parts that only remember good things, there will absolutely be parts that only remember painful, not-so-good things. They contain the information that the normal daytime “happy” parts were not allowed to know, experience, or remember.
6. Parts that know a lot of memory information. These are the parts that either experienced or witnessed the trauma, abuse, neglect, etc. Getting to know these parts will involve listening to stories about the trauma, body memories about the trauma, flashbacks of the trauma, etc. It is common for there to be numerous parts to handle various types of abuses by various perpetrators. For example, one part may have managed a specific kind of abuse by perpetrator A. Another part may have handled a different kind of abuse by perpetrator A. Another part may have handled the abuse by perpetrator B. Yet another part handled the abuse by perpetrator C. And so forth.
7. Parts that contain a specific emotion. Many people split off various emotions into certain parts to contain those intense overwhelming emotions. If you believe, for example, that you never feel anger, you will likely have other parts in your system that do contain those emotions for you. These parts often have names such as “the sad little girl”, or “the angry one”, or “the scared one”. Getting to know these parts will mean starting to accept and experience these emotions.
8. Parts that split off at particularly traumatic years of life. These parts could also be memory-holders, but during years when there was more stress in the external life, there will likely be more parts. Years of more extreme abuse can lead to more parts being created of a similar age simply because more selves were needed to manage the overwhelming abuse.
9. Parts that are loyal to the mother. All children love their mother, even abusive, neglectful mothers. However, this emotion might need to be contained within certain parts, especially in the case of abusive mothers. Some parts are created to agree with the mother’s abuse (defining it as anything but abuse), and others are created to be obedient to the mother, even if they are terrified or in pain.
10. Parts that are loyal to the father. Just as with the mother, the father may have a variety of parts that are loyal to him, his beliefs, his ways, etc. They may learn that it is safer to align with the perpetrator and to separate themselves from the child-survivor.
11. Parts that contain loyalty to the perpetrators. These parts are often rewarded by the abuser-perpetrators and are encouraged to view themselves as separate from the rest of the system. It will take a lot of work to bring their loyalty back to the person they were created from.
12. Introjects created from external people. System introjects are internalized parts of the system that act – think- feel – believe themselves to be a mirror image of the external person that they are replicating, except they often believe they are the actual person (and not the replication). They may adamantly believe that they are a different person from the survivor-self, complete with a different body from the survivor. These parts contain a lot of memories, factual information, emotional realities for how it was like to be near the outside person.
13. Parts that contain the programming / mind controlled messages. These parts are often created by design and on purpose by organized abusers. These parts are given specific learnings that function as “rules” to control the survivor’s overall behavior. They are often separate from the host parts, and quite hidden within the depths of the system. The other system parts will experience their influence, but have trouble recognizing them as specific alters.
14. Parts that hate the mother or father. Hating the parents may be a difficult dilemma to address, especially since there will be parts of the person that naturally love their parents. However, years of repeated abuse and neglect can create the need for parts to contain the hatred felt towards parents who would allow such atrocities to happen to their child.
15. Parts that are created along the lines of family dynamics. Some survivors will internalize their family into their own DID system. You might find internal replicas of the sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. The family dynamics will be played out in a variety of ways but will most obviously be noted in the way the survivor splits off their system.
16. Floaters and other parts that separated themselves from the body during times of trauma. These parts may have risen above the body, and from the out-of-body experience position, may have specific information to share with the survivor about the kinds of things that happened.
17. Internal self-helpers. These parts would have been created by the system themselves and not necessarily during a state of trauma. They are typically leaders of the system that are considered to be holders of wisdom, or gentle peace, or spiritual guidance. They are devoted to the survivor system as a whole and work towards maintaining safety, stabilization, balance, etc. They typically do very little with the outside world, and focus most all of their energies towards helping the system to survive.
18. Parts that are specifically parental figures to the outside children. It is not uncommon for a survivor to split off “parental parts” just to be focused on raising the outside children as well as possible. These parts very often work hard at being different from their own outside parents, and strive to be the best parent they can be.
19. Parts that were involved in abusing others. This is a very difficult area for survivors to reach, but it is more common than not. Especially for those people who have been abused by organized perpetrators (ie: cults, sex slavery groups, etc) there will be parts who were forced to have the perpetrator role and required to do things that harmed other people.
20. Parts that contain a specific skill or talent. Certain parts can be created to develop positive talents and abilities, often as a way to help manage or express or avoid the pain that is felt so deeply by the others in the system. Maybe one part is better at playing a musical instrument than anyone else. Maybe someone else learned how to write poetry. Or maybe someone was created to be an athlete and to run, jump, excel at sports, etc.
As you can see, there can be a large system just by having parts to fulfill the different roles that are often needed to get through the abuse. Some parts may have a variety of these jobs, overlapping from a variety of categories.
But don’t be surprised if you have a variety of parts in each of the categories listed above.
Practically every dissociative trauma survivor that I have ever spoke to has said to me at some point in time or another, that they have felt hated, truly hated. What’s worse, they didn’t feel hated by strangers — they felt hated by their loved ones. They felt hated by their mothers, their fathers, their siblings, their spouses, their children, their friends. They felt hatred from the very people they cared the most about.
What effect does feeling hated have on someone?
How does this experience change someone’s life?
It’s a natural human response to want to feel liked, loved, cherished, treasured. Children very much want to be the in the spotlight for their parents, the apples of their eyes. They each want to feel special, and to be treated like they are the most important person on earth. This is normal for children. It is part of a natural, normal, healthy development.
What happens if a child does not experience a positive sense of self in early childhood?
What happens if that child feels hated instead of loved?
What if the only time the child feels loved, accepted, appreciated, wanted is during times of sexual abuse?
What happens when abusive parents treat their children in such consistently abusive and neglectful ways that the children are left with feelings of self-hatred instead of self-love and self-acceptance?
What are some of the effects of being hated?
Inherent sense of badness and worthlessness
Long-term self-hatred and self-loathing
Loneliness and Isolation
Sadness, emotional pain, emotional scars
Self-injury, self-destruction, and suicidal behaviors
Children that are treated with hatred internalize that hatred. Children find it difficult, if not impossible, to blame their parents for their hateful behavior. Instead, children will blame themselves. Children decide it must be their own badness, their own poor behaviors, and their own inadequacies that forced their parents to not love them.
With each violent assault, abusive parents spoke hatred to their children. Even if the words “I hate you” were never said, it was understood clearly enough by the children. In order for their loved ones to purposefully cause so much hurt and harm to them, their parents must have hated them. It is not hard for children to figure out that people causing physical injuries and emotional wounds are acting in hateful ways. Children will feel that hatred to the very core of their being.
Children tend to internalize that hatred as if they deserved it. They decide that they must be bad, they must be worthless, they must “need to be punished”, they must “need to be abused” because of their badness. Children cannot blame their parents — so they blame themselves.
The more the children are treated with hatred, the more the children hate themselves.
They may learn to hate the parents / abusers eventually, but their first response was learning to hate and despise themselves. And the self-hatred isn’t something they just grow out of or leave behind the way they might leave the actual abuse. Self-hatred can continue to affect them for all the years of their life. It is a fundamental part of self-injury behaviors. Without intense self-hatred, survivors would not be nearly so prone to cutting, burning, overdosing, or any other number of self-destructive and suicidal behaviors. It’s not uncommon for trauma survivors to carve or burn “I hate myself” messages into their body, sometimes scarring it for life. I dare say, most survivors that commit suicide were able to do so because of their incredibly deep sense of self-hatred and self-loathing.
People that truly hate themselves don’t want to live with themselves.
It’s equally difficult for people that hate themselves to be in long-term positive relationships. Trauma survivors often find it easier to love someone else more than themselves, but part of being in a positive loving relationship is comfortably accepting the reciprocal love-caring-compassion-support from others. People that inherently hate themselves find it very difficult to believe that they could be loved / lovable. This belief will ultimately (and repeatedly) be noticeable. It will cause problems in those relationships, and it will absolutely undermine the strength of those relationships.
The emotional pain connected to feeling hated digs very deep within the core of the person. It is hard to battle on an intellectual level, and it penetrates into the deepest layers of the person’s being. The emotional wounding caused from feeling hatred is one of the most difficult traumas to heal. Layer upon layer of years of blame, guilt, shame make the self-hatred feel locked into place. It’s just soooo hard to feel differently.
But part of healing from trauma involves healing from that self-hatred. Survivors may not be able to change the behaviors and actions of their perpetrator parents or any other abusers that have acted criminally towards them, but survivors can learn to separate themselves from such hateful people. It will take working with all the parts of the internal system, but then again, remember that healing for all the inside parts is important.
Learn to separate who did what, and what belongs to whom. The person that committed the hateful acts is the creator of the hate. That negativity belongs to them. Hateful people can project their own feelings of hate onto anyone around them. As survivors become old enough to think through the emotional process of their abuse, they can begin to build emotional protection around those kinds of hateful attacks.
Let the hate belong to the ones that sent it. Don’t take it in, don’t claim it as yours, and don’t let it apply to yourself. Picture a strong emotional, spiritual shield around you, and let that protect you from the barbs of the haters. Hold tight to your own feelings of kindness, compassion, caring, gentleness, and know that your own ability to love and to connect are coming from a different place than hatred. Recognize that your ability to genuinely care for your loved ones is proof in itself that you are not to be hated or considered worthless. Your ability to feel genuine kindness, gentleness, patience, and compassion prove that you are a good person, completely different and separate from the haters.
The haters will always be haters. Unless they work on their own deep-seated self-hatred, they will always project hatred onto others.
But you don’t have to accept yourself as a rightful target of their hatred. You don’t have to be one of them. You don’t have to shove hatred in the face of everyone else, and you don’t have to internalize it within yourself. You can be different from that. Let the hatred belong to the ones that it came from. Give it back to the abusers and let them own it for themselves. Don’t contain that for them. You don’t have to accept their hatred as yours when it came from them.
Spend your time in life doing things that you enjoy and let you genuinely feel better about yourself. Connect with the people and animals that you care about, and build bigger boundaries and stronger separations from the people that treat you with hatred. Give positive time and pleasant experiences to the people around you, and let your own behaviors define who you are.
Be a good person, and let the very fact that you are choosing good, positive behaviors define to you that you are not that hated person you once felt you were.
If you want to be a good person, you can be. You are not who your haters say that you are. Let their nasty ways belong to them. You can be someone very different from them.
You can be as good of a person as you want to be. No one else gets to define you — the final word on who you are belong to you, and only you.
When you have dissociative identity disorder (DID/MPD), and you’re thinking as a multiple personality — thus having a multitude of different thoughts at once time — it can be very difficult to make decisions.
How do survivors with DID ever make up their minds?
How do survivors with DID decide whose opinion to follow?
How do survivors with DID ever decide what is best for them?
How do survivors with DID sort out having a dozen different opinions at once?
It is complicated to think like a multiple.
There are gaps of missing time, non-sequential pieces of information, jumbled feelings and emotions, snippets of conflicting facts, confusion, voices from the past, fears of more punishment, flashbacks, internal arguing, programmed thoughts, insistent introjects, personal insecurities, etc. The chaotic internal workings of a dissociative trauma survivor can make it very difficult to think clearly.
Non-dissociative “singletons” (people who do not have multiple personality disorder) can experience simultaneous mixed feelings, opposing thoughts and conflicting perspectives on specific situations as well. Singletons can write out extensive lists of “pros vs. cons” on any number of situations. Non-dissociative singletons do not experience just one thought or one feeling at a time either. They see the big conflicting picture all at once.
So what makes decision making even more difficult for survivors with DID?
All too often, dissociative trauma survivors functioned through the difficult times of their life by separating their thoughts and feelings into individual compartments and using dissociative, amnesiac walls to keep these compartments separated. Having mixed emotions and conflicting beliefs at the same time was often too much to manage in the middle of a traumatic event. Dissociative survivors learned to split the different feelings and the different perspectives into different parts of themselves, blocking one perspective away from the other. It is easier to separate and contain overwhelming conflicting emotions when the two opposing emotions did not have to directly collide with each other.
For example, all children love their parents. But if a young girl has a father who is sexually abusing her, and a mother that is either pretending not to see that or is helping the father to abuse her, then huge conflicting emotions are going to occur. The child will want to please her parents, even in this painful abusive situation. But in order to do that, the child will have to find ways to separate her experience of the parents she loves from the parents who are hurting her. Dissociating the conflicts into separate parts help this to happen.
The child can split off a part of herself that is willing to obey her father even to the point of acting like a passive or promiscuous young child that appears to want to be sexual with the father.
She can split off a part of her that feels the physical pain and injury of the assault.
She can split off a part of her that contains the intense betrayal by the mother.
She can split off a part that holds the emotional pain, deep wounding, and heartbreak of the assault.
She can split off a part that holds the anger and rage at having been assaulted by both of her parents.
She can split off a part that holds the fear of being violently assaulted by her parents again and again.
She can split off a part that is the happy little girl who goes to school the next day, blocking out all the pain, acting very connected to her parents, not showing any sign of having been through a horrendous assault the night before.
The person as a whole sees the situation as a whole. But if a dissociative trauma survivor has separated the different feelings and perspectives and kept that information separated locked and blocked behind various dissociative walls, then the survivor is aware of only some of the information at any given point in time. She is not aware of the whole picture, because she has it dissociated parts of it away from herself.
Dissociative people are accustomed to separating the intense conflicting emotions and managing only one or two at a time. This might help in the short-run, but it does not help in the long-run.
So how do dissociative trauma survivors make good decisions if they are used to looking at situations from the constraints of one limited perspective at a time? What happens when they cannot see the situation as a whole? How can they make a good decision if they cannot put the entire picture together at the same time?
This is a common problem for survivors with DID. The part of them that sees and recognizes the dangers cannot always communicate with the happy naïve part who is determined to believe she is safe and unharmed. The ones that believe they are out of harm’s way (and who wouldn’t want to hold tight to that belief?) refuse to connect with the fear, anger, pain of the trauma (because who would want to feel that?!)
The problem is that by not seeing the whole picture at one time, dissociative trauma survivors find themselves tangled into a variety of dangerous situations. For example, they can bond to dangerous people without recognizing the danger. They see only as much as the current perspective allows them to see, and they don’t even realize that there is trouble looming in the near future. By dissociating the perceptions and experiences that might better recognize the danger, dissociative survivors can put themselves in high-risk situations over and over and over again.
Building the strength, the courage, and the willingness to talk to all the other internal parts in your system is key to getting past the dissociative walls and being able to make decisions from a more complete perspective. Face your difficult emotions, confront the truth of your trauma, listen to all of your inner selves, and recognize that other internal parts have valid information. No one can make a good decision based on partial information. Be willing to look at the whole picture.
As you learn to trust your internal parts to give you the rest of the story, you will be less vulnerable to people who aggressively or suggestively tell you what to think. The more you can trust yourself, the less vulnerable you are to people who would manipulate your thinking by maneuvering behind your dissociative walls. Predators and perpetrators will have less ammunition to use against you when you can trust your own selves. They will not be able to abuse you as much if you are aware that it is happening. The less you dissociate time and information, the more you can appropriately handle life’s current day conflicts.
If you truly know the whole story of what happens in your life, both in the past and in the present, then you are less vulnerable to feeling or thinking or believing something just because someone else more aggressive tells you that you do. You can learn to connect to and trust in your own thoughts or feelings or beliefs, and to make your own assessment of a situation based on that.
Pets are very important to trauma survivors for a variety of reasons:
A place to express love, affection, and tenderness
Many abuse survivors have difficulties with attachment issues due their extensive histories of trauma, abuse, and neglect. Because people were the perpetrators, trauma survivors frequently find it difficult and complicated to express caring and affection to other people. And yet, many survivors can still feel loving connections, and they have the desire to appropriately express that. Animals and pets feel safer for bonding than people, and because of that added safety, animals can become the positive target audience for the survivor’s feelings of love, affection, and tenderness. Sometimes it just feels good to be able to hug a cat!
An acceptable substitution for maternal instincts
Many trauma survivors do not have children, or are not with their children, or do not want to have children, or cannot have children, are not ready for children, etc. However, being away from children does not eliminate maternal feelings and maternal instincts (or paternal feelings and paternal instincts). Many survivors purposefully choose to have a variety of pets and animals as an appropriate substitution for children. Some survivors will purposefully get pets to learn how to nurture and care for others prior to having children. If you can’t manage taking care of animals, you won’t be able to tend properly to children.
An exercise companion
Trauma survivors, like any other group in the population, have difficulties getting proper exercise. Plus, having significantly increased levels of depression, fatigue, social anxiety, fears, phobias, obesity, body image issues, etc. can make it even more difficult for trauma survivors to exercise. Having a dog to walk or a horse to ride can make exercising less stressful, less scary, and much more fun.
Assistance with safety and security
Some pets can provide safety in the obvious ways, such as trained dogs helping to guard the home. For trauma survivors who frequently live in chronic fear of abusers, the assistance of a guard dog can be very comforting. In addition, animals can help to provide a sense of daily grounding from internal fears, dreams, flashbacks, etc. If the cats are still sleeping peacefully, the confused survivor can be more assured that the emotional disturbance was internal, not external. Feeling safe and secure is fundamentally important for trauma survivors, and pets can play a monumental role on this level.
Assistance with social situations
Social service dogs and horses are trained companions for social situations with anxious trauma survivors. These animals are excellent assistants, and have been found very helpful for many people. The service animal helps the survivor to have the confidence needed to venture out into the world and not be excessively housebound. Regular pets can serve that same function on a smaller scope, even if these uncertified pets are not qualified to go into stores, in public buildings, on planes, etc.
Being out in the world with a cute puppy provides:
an immediate distraction and interest for other people (putting the focus more on the puppy than the survivor)
a comfortable starting place for conversation (many people will ask about the puppy first)
a physical barrier between the survivor and other people, creating more physical distance and a greater sense of emotional safety (when the puppy stands or sits in front of the survivor)
a valid, less questioned excuse for the survivor to leave uncomfortable social situations (ie: stating the puppy needs to go outside now).
Companionship, friendship, someone to talk to
Many trauma survivors live alone, or feel very alone even when they live amongst others. Most dissociative survivors have an extensive history of strained or unhealthy or abusive social relationships. Making and keeping friends is not easy, especially for survivors with issues such as borderline personality disorder and chronic self-injury issues. Having their own pet provides that special someone they can talk to, even if it is difficult to talk to people. Dogs and cats can be the very best friends, and their companionship is invaluable. They help survivors to not feel alone, and to not be alone. How can survivors feel alone when a puppy follows them all around the house, from room to room to room?
Entertainment and Humor
Laughter is the best medicine, and most pets provide a variety of humorous situations to lighten even the darkest of moods. Who can resist smiling and laughing at the antics of an energetic kitten rolling around tangled up in string or a puppy flopping around after a bouncy ball? Pets very much have their own personality – the more survivors enjoy the liveliness of their pets, the better. Smiles and spontaneous laughter adds to the quality of life for anyone.
Learning how to bond, connect, attach
Dissociative trauma survivors with severe abuse histories often find it extremely difficult to attach to other people. In survivors’ experiences, most people have been abusive, neglectful, or uninterested in them. Trauma makes it very hard to bond, and many DID survivors did not bond with anyone for years of their life. Or sometimes, the only bond felt is a damaging trauma bond with a perpetrator. Having a pet can be the first experience in positive unconditional bonding with a loved one. Experiencing affection and warm connection from a pet can have great meaning to an isolated, lonely trauma survivor.
Learning how to take care of someone outside of themselves
Some trauma survivors have experienced such damage from their abusive, neglectful childhood upbringing that they genuinely lack the skills in tending to others. Especially in homes where neglect was prominent, basic living skills would have been overlooked. Having a pet can be the first experience in learning how to tend to the needs of the self and others. Also, for survivors that are excessively self-involved and self-absorbed, having a pet can teach them to look beyond their own needs.
Provide a variety of medical benefits
Research has shown that pets have a positive impact on medical health, mental health, and reducing stress. Pets help to lower cholesterol and triglycerides, reduce blood pressure, increase life expectancy after heart attacks, reduce the need for prescription medications, reduce the number of medical appointments, etc. Pets can be trained to help with seizures, help with Parkinson’s Disease, diagnose cancer, and watch for low blood sugar. People with pets have improved health!
Help with depression and low self-esteem
Pets help to fight depression and low self-esteem. Pets help survivors to feel important and to be recognized as valuable, worthy people. Walking in the door to a pet that is really genuinely happy to see you makes for a corrective emotional experience for many trauma survivors who have felt ignored, unimportant, unnoticed, unworthy, etc.
Provide joy and happiness
Chronic emotional pain is intense for dissociative trauma survivors. Heartbreak, anguish, grief, profound sadness, and emptiness are frequent feelings. Pets can bring a sense of joy and happiness into the survivor’s life, helping to lift depression, and actually letting the survivors experience moments of joy and happiness.
To feel loved, accepted, cared for
All too many trauma survivors have grown up feeling unloved, unwanted, uncared for, unappreciated, etc. This leaves a hole in the heart that just doesn’t go away. Pets help survivors to have the emotional experience of being loved and unconditionally cared for. Pets don’t leave just because their survivors are down, depressed, messy, messing up, or dysfunctional. Pets stay loyal to their survivors, and continue to express long-term, loving devotion even through difficult times when people are not be willing to be there.
To feel understood
Pets can listen with their hearts. They can read the emotional state of their survivors with an uncanny ability. They know when their survivors are hurting, or angry, or afraid. Pets can respond in natural ways to these emotions, and provide a level of understanding that doesn’t require words. Pets can tell when dissociative trauma survivors switch from one part to the other. There are many reasons why they say “dogs are man’s best friend”.
Pets are wonderful.
I hope you enjoy yours as much as I enjoy mine.
Many people enter the therapy process with minimal awareness of their trauma history. When the trauma survivors are dissociative, they have the ability to block out an awareness of their trauma. They may know that their family had problems, or that their family was dysfunctional, etc, but they may believe they were never abused.
However, blocking out conscious awareness of trauma does not mean that the survivors have no effects of that trauma. Using denial and dissociative skills does not mean that the abuse did not happen. Denial means that the person simply is refusing to acknowledge or accept the fact that they were traumatized. They are pretending they were not hurt, when they were actually hurt very badly.
Even if the memories of abuse are hidden from the survivor’s awareness, blocked trauma / unresolved trauma creates very noticeable and obvious symptoms that can be easily seen in their every day lives.
People will enter therapy aware of some of the following symptoms, but they may not realize these complications are suggestive of unresolved trauma issues:
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1. Addictive behaviors – excessively turning to drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, gambling as a way to push difficult emotions and upsetting trauma content further away.
2. An inability to tolerate conflicts with others – having a fear of conflict, running from conflict, avoiding conflict, maintaining skewed perceptions of conflict
3. An inability to tolerate intense feelings, preferring to avoid feeling by any number of ways
4. An innate belief that they are bad, worthless, without value or importance
5. Black and white thinking, all or nothing thinking, even if this approach ends up harming themselves
6. Chronic and repeated suicidal thoughts and feelings
7. Disorganized attachment patterns – having a variety of short but intense relationships, refusing to have any relationships, dysfunctional relationships, frequent love/hate relationships
8. Dissociation, spacing out, losing time, missing time, feeling like you are two completely different people (or more than two)
18. Suicidal actions and behaviors, failed attempts to suicide
19. Taking the perpetrator role / angry aggressor in relationships
20. Unexplained but intense fears of people, places, things
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These same symptoms can be applied for survivors already working in therapy. Attending regular therapy does not mean the clients have resolved their trauma issues or that they are even working in that general direction. Many therapy clients will continue to deny, dissociate, and refuse to look at their trauma even if they are aware of their daily struggles.
If you are experiencing a number of the symptoms listed above, ask yourself if you are truly ready to address your trauma issues, or if you find it more comfortable to continue living with these struggles.
Is it harder to face how you were abused and who abused you? Or is it harder to live a life full of depression, anxiety, thoughts of suicide, troubled relationships, extreme fears, physical pain, and addictions?
Running from your trauma history will not help you feel better. In the short-run, you might not have to face the issues, but the cost in the long-run of unresolved trauma weighs more heavily than you might suspect.
Trauma survivors know all about perpetrators. Dissociative trauma survivors know all about sadistic perpetrators. Dissociative trauma survivors with a background in ritual abuse, or mind control, or sex slavery organizations know all about truly evil perpetrators.
Those of us in the world who were not directly exposed to such darkness have a hard time grasping its depth. It seems surreal to us. Unfathomable. While many therapists may truly believe “in their heads” that abuse and evil exist in this world, having that head knowledge is still a far cry from truly knowing and experiencing yourself as the target of evil.
I’ve been working almost exclusively with dissociative trauma survivors for over 20 years, and I have listened to and believed what my clients have told me. I know the politically correct answer is to say that I can neither confirm nor deny the abuse of others, but let’s face it. Either trauma therapists believe their clients were genuinely abused or they need to get out of the field and go work somewhere else.
But do therapists really know what evil is? I dare to say, no, most do not.
They have head knowledge, but most mental health therapists have not experienced evil. They haven’t been the target of a predator. They haven’t had their soul ravaged or clawed into. They haven’t had their body destroyed or ripped apart. Of course, there are some wounded healers that have truly been able to rise above their own traumas and actually do have a genuine sense of how deeply evil can wound, but these are a rare find.
(But be careful, there are far too many wounded who should spend more time on their own healing before jumping into the helping profession. If you happen to find a therapist that truly has done their own healing, then you are very fortunate – that person will be able to help you. But please watch out for the professionals who are still mid-process. They can cause a lot more harm than they might mean to cause.)
Despite my sheltered upbringing, in the past few years, I have been getting a deeper grasp on how cold and evil people can be. I’ve had a closer look at the destructive handiwork of predators. Initially it took me off-guard, because I really believed in the goodness of people. I was raised to trust, to forgive, to love, and to see the best in others, and I do that easily.
So being targeted by the calculated coldness of predators has been quite an eye-opening experience. I still shake my head in surprise, completely amazed at how vicious people can be. The lies, the twists, the deception – the depths to which people will sink when they have no conscience to guide them – it’s totally mind boggling to someone raised by a family who truly believed in goodness.
How does someone protect themselves from blatant attacks by a predator trying to destroy them? When someone is trying to rip at your very core, how do you stay safe and solid within yourself?
First, know that they don’t know you. They know what they want you to be, but they don’t know who you truly are apart from them. As a result, they don’t speak the truth about you, or about anyone. They speak through the tools of their trade. They tells lies, they create deception, because these are the things they know. They know darkness, and they know cold, calculated, purposeful destruction of people. Yes, they purposefully work to destroy good people. But they are not you. And they are not me.
You don’t have to listen to them. You don’t have to believe them. You don’t have to be who or what they say you are. You don’t have to do what they say to do or think what they tell you to think. They are flat wrong in their words, their actions, and their motives. Learn who you truly are, apart from their lies and their manipulations and their tricks. Learn to think for yourself, neither in obedience to them nor in reaction to them, and that will help you to separate yourself from them.
And believe in your true self. Your life, your beliefs, your heart, and your soul belong to what you are willing to fight for and to what you stand for when there is nobody but you yourself telling you where to stand. You don’t have to give any of yourself away to the dark, cold emptiness of a predator. If you know and connect to your true self, that alone can be a protection against any predatory attack on your self. Knowing who you truly are is an armor against the lies and tricks intended to destroy you or hurt you by telling you who and what you are.
And learn how to compassionately love. Hold onto that gentle love you feel, and never let it go. Evil does not love. If you can genuinely love and care for others, you are not one of them. Stand solid in the knowledge of your own goodness, your spiritual faith, your strengths, and your ability to think and to feel and to love. Let that repel the evil away from you.
Separate yourself from them. Know who you are apart from them.
And stay far away from them. The best protection you can have is not to give them the opportunity to say or do anything to you. Protect yourself. If you know that somebody is a predator or a perpetrator, stay away from them.
Because you are not them. And they are not you.
You do not belong to them, no matter how much they come after you.
You do not belong to them, no matter what they did to you or what they said to you or what they made you do.
Stay true to yourself, and be who you are. Be who you truly are. And let the power of compassionate love overcome any darkness that tries to change you.
If you forget, remember the beauty and simplicity in an opening quote from the movie, “The Notebook”:
“I am no one special – just a common man, with common thoughts. I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me, and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect, I’ve succeeded as gloriously as anyone who has ever lived.
I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and for me, that is always good enough.“
The sudden death of Michael Jackson today has caught everyone by surprise.
Will he be more remembered as the King of Pop? Or will he be forever remembered as a suspected child molester?
Everyone will have strong views about it, I’m sure. I can’t even begin to imagine all the controversies that are going to be brought back to the surface.
The death of a famous celebrity icon affects so many people. Early unexpected deaths of the rich and famous create a public stir for months and years to come. Everyone talks about it. Even twitter was overloaded with the breaking news. Anyone that sang and danced along with some of his songs will feel the loss. Every choreographer will feel a sting and sadness. We’ll see new books, new articles, new blog posts. His face will be on magazine covers and newspaper headlines and in every version of media that we have.
In fact, it’s already on the news, online, in twitter, in chatrooms, on the radio, on television, in blogs – the news is everywhere! Everyone is talking about it, and everyone is asking everyone else if they have heard about it.
Even Farrah Fawcett’s death today will be overshadowed by the controversial Jackson’s death.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of people will feel the reverberations of the news. It’s like a social earthquake.
While maybe not as public or as clearly visible, the death of a perpetrator can wreak havoc on a survivor’s life, also for days and months and years to come. For trauma survivors with dissociative identity disorder, all the different parts within the internal system will feel the news with just as much shock.
Sometimes, abuse victims feel safer talking and telling about their trauma after their perpetrator dies. I don’t know if or how that will apply to the children near the Michael Jackson situation, but it is very common with other survivors of sexual abuse.
When survivors feel intimidated by, scared of, threatened by their perpetrators, it is not unusual for those survivors to keep the secrets of their abuse tucked inside them until after their perpetrators pass away.
Survivors may do this purposefully, or their dissociative walls may simply have been strong enough to hold all that information back even without the survivor’s awareness.
Survivors with DID systems will often feel all kinds of internal changes taking place with the death of a major perpetrator. There will be all kinds of internal movement, and shifting. There will be an internal earthquake.
How do survivors with dissociative identity disorder experience this earthquake?
A. Noticeable Decrease in Dissociation
Deaths of perpetrators can make dissociative walls crumble, emphasizing the point that those dissociative walls were there for safety and survival reasons in the first place.
When there is less likelihood of ongoing abuse, the need for dissociative walls is decreased significantly. When the walls come down, the now-unblocked information reconnects back to the parts that initially dissociated it away. Different parts of the system will be learning all kinds of new information, and experiencing new feelings.
B. Memories of abuse, incident after incident, can come crashing through. PTSD flashbacks and other PTSD symptoms will increase.
Why does this happen?
After the fear of dealing with their perpetrator in current day life subsides, and once the survivor feels safer, all kinds of memories can come flooding back. Child parts or even older parts with trauma memories will come to the surface, each wanting, hoping for, needing time to talk about what happened to them. The host of the system may feel overwhelmed by the sudden need of so many trauma-holding parts to have time to talk, and needing time to heal. The pain attached to these parts will be intense.
C. Increased Activity by Internal Introjects
Internal introjects may be kicked into greater action, feeling the need to replace the external perpetrator by taking a more vigorous role in the daily life of the dissociative survivor. Some internal introjects were taught and trained to respond when the external perpetrator was no longer visible. The internal perpetrator introject will try to carry on in the same manner, just to keep the status quo.
D. The Emergence of New Alter Personalities
New alters may finally feel brave enough to step forward and speak about their life story, including trauma memories. They may not have felt comfortable appearing until the perpetrator was dead and gone.
E. Increased Denial
While some parts may be happy and thrilled about the death of the perpetrator, other parts will fight that reality with all their being. These parts with an attachment to the perpetrator will need time to explore and process their feelings, and to explain why they were so connected to the perpetrators. Oftentimes, these are the parts that were treated kindly, and any abuse would have been framed in a more positive connotation. These parts simply will not want to accept or believe that the external perpetrator is dead. They will see the internal introject of the perpetrator and transfer much of their loyalty to this part.
F. Increased Pull for Self-Harm and Suicidal Activity
Many survivors will react to the death of a perpetrator with increased self-harm or suicidal activity. The self-harm could be a physical effort of shoving back all the memories and feelings, to regain control. It could also be an acting out of the trauma memories they are experiencing. Sometimes survivors feel pulled to commit suicide from the need to be with their dead perpetrator. When a survivor is experiencing these symptoms, it is imperative to work through the historical causes and beliefs that are supporting such extreme behaviors.
G. Emotional Relief
While experiencing safety from ongoing abuse of this perpetrator, the healthiest goal is for survivors to feel their sadness, their pain, their fear, their anger, etc. So many feelings get contained away, but once it becomes ok to feel, there is a big release when those feelings can surface. When survivors can truly allow themselves to address their fear, their anger, and grieve the loss of their perpetrator, they will be much further down the road in their emotional recovery.
All these internal events certainly cause emotional earthquakes in the lives of dissociative trauma survivors. All of these issues can be addressed effectively in therapy, and many of these issues can be avoided by preparing ahead of time.
If you haven’t worked on breaking the bonds with your perpetrators until after they die, you will have a harder time after their death. If you have worked on these issues ahead of time, the emotional earthquake won’t be as devastating.
What makes it difficult for trauma survivors with dissociative identity disorder to know the truth?
How easy is it to trick someone with DID with a lie?
When are survivors lying to themselves?
When does dissociation block out information to know the difference?
When does pain, especially emotional pain, become the deciding factor in what survivors believe, regardless of truth?
When does the viciousness of perpetrators demand and create particular beliefs and realities?
Is dissociation built on lying to yourself?
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I recently saw a situation where a DID survivor could not accept the truth. Despite the facts that pointed to the obvious, the dissociative survivor was determined to believe what her closest confidants had said. She trusted these loved ones completely, but these were the very people who were completely invested in hiding the secret from her. Accepting the truth would have been far too painful, and she fought that reality with all the strength and vigor that she had. She was angry. She threw out rationalizations. She projected blame onto others. She railed back through time, pulling out circumstantial evidence that could support her beliefs. She argued like a court room lawyer. She completely protected her position with every psychological defense available to her.
And she believed the lie.
Because to not believe the lie would have been utterly and completely devastating for her.
So she couldn’t let herself go there. Not even for a moment.
She absolutely, without question, had to deny the truth and hear only what she could stand to hear. She had to stay true to her preferred beliefs and rationalizations. She couldn’t risk losing everything by believing the conflicting information. The cost of believing the truth was too high. To believe the truth would have hurt too much, so it was necessary for her to completely refute the truth.
At first I wondered how this survivor could be so staunchly set in her beliefs, even in the face of clear and direct evidence of the contrary. I marveled at the intensity of her denial, and felt a deep sadness for her. I was amazed at how completely sold she was on the lie – she would have fought to the death to defend that as truth.
But then I understood.
Believing the truth would have been enormously painful for her.
She would have had to believe that her loved ones betrayed her – that they hurt her beyond comprehension.
How could she believe that?
It would have cost her too much. To accept the betrayal would have meant she was alone. It would have completely broken her heart. It would have meant her loved ones abused her. It would have meant that her trust and faith in them was shattered. It would have created an emotional pain so huge that her body would have felt seared to the core. It would have left her feeling broken on more levels than words can say.
She would have wanted to die before accepting that truth as a reality.
Yet the truth was so obvious that it seemed undeniable, so it was mind boggling to see the intensity of the denial that could prevent her from seeing the truth standing right before her eyes.
And then I realized I was seeing something stronger than denial.
I was seeing the beginning of a dissociative split.
Dissociation – complete dissociation – is an emotional protection strategy that totally and completely removes painful realities from the mind and body of the survivor.
When the pain of accepting a trauma is too huge, dissociative people split. They get rid of the excruciatingly painful information by dissociating it. They don’t accept it as happening to them, and they make it be gone.
They completely refute the truth even as it is happening to them, and they completely separate that painful reality from themselves, blocking it off, locking it away, keeping it as far from themselves as possible. Thick dissociative walls keep that horrendous information away from them. It protects them from feeling that unbearable pain.
If they don’t want to believe they were being sexually abused, or physically abused, or spiritually abused, or emotionally abused, or ritually abused, they use that same intensity to tell themselves it wasn’t happening to them. It doesn’t belong to them. It was happening to someone else – anyone else – just not to them.
They weren’t betrayed by their loved ones. They weren’t hurt and destroyed by their loved ones. That just didn’t happen. Not to them. And if it happened to somebody else, they didn’t want to know about it. Not now, not ever. That bad news had to be totally and completely separated from themselves. It had to belong to someone that was not them. It could NOT be happening to them.
And so they protect themselves from the heart-wrenching truth.
They need to believe the lie. They want to believe the lie. The lie feels better than the truth.
Believing the lie that “it didn’t happen” is the very foundation of dissociation.
As understandable as it may be, every time you split, you believed the lie that it wasn’t happening to you.
Ouch.
It still hurts. It hurts a lot.
And yet, finding the courage to face the truth in the present is as necessary for your healing as dissociating the truth away once was necessary for your survival.
I’m not quite sure how they work yet, so other than asking people to click their answers… I can’t really explain it yet. This will be new for me too!
However, I am very interested in knowing whether or not you all have found therapists to be effective in understanding dissociative disorders, and whether or not you have met any therapists that could appropriately treat dissociative identity disorder.
Part of my clinical work as a trauma therapist is to teach other therapists about how to work with DID / dissociative identity disorder. Your opinion matters to me in that it helps me to give appropriate feedback to other therapists. Your opinions can be included in my presentations to other therapists.
We have spoken about the importance of trauma specialists in other Discussing Dissociation blog posts. Please refer to that article for more detailed information about my own personal opinion on the topic.
Also, if you are interested in providing a more detailed opinion about therapists, AbuseConsultants.com has a survey titled “Do Therapists Actually Help?” Your responses there can be completely anonymous. To participate in this survey, please go to AbuseConsultants.com, enter the site, and then click on the Survey 2 icon near the top of the home page.
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Please feel free to add additional comments here in the blog as well, especially if you’d like to explain something further in response to the survey questions.
Thank you so much for your participation. I appreciate it!
