"Waking up"

Sometimes a single pedophile with knowledge of DID can create messages within alters for when the child begins to heal, whether in childhood or much later in adulthood. Those in the early stages of healing need to understand certain messages that might be dangerous.

Here is one of the unbelievability factors of this sophisticated abuse. An alter or even group of alters can hold messages that do not "trigger" or come to consciousness until a certain date or time or event. The big event is beginning to remember. Not only do many messages of fear of being killed come up, often very strong messages of self harm surface. Pedophiles do not want their victims remembering.

If the survivor lives beyond those initial self destruction messages, there may be "back up" messages. Aside from self-destruction, the perp, if still alive, will want to know their former (or possibly still current) victim has begun to remember. When healing becomes known, the survivor may feel overwhelmed with family trying to invalidate memories, malign any therapy, encouraging the adult child to move back home "to heal", etc. The danger in being around family if any family member comes up in abuse memories is to maintain distance until more of the life unremembered reveals itself. Trust your gut if you sense fear about being around anyone who has been in your life until further along in healing.

The complexity of this issue is difficult to address briefly. Suffice it to say, survivors have many obstacles to overcome just to be able to focus on healing from the abuse as opposed to preventing the self from responding to subconscious cues. Cues and triggers can come from inside as well as outside. However, it has been my experience that alters believe their job is to help the host. Somehow the perp will have convinced the alter that the job is helping. A quick example: One alter may hold a very strong message of suicide at the time of remembering. The "logic" would be that the suicide protects the host from even greater harm believed will be inflicted on the host for remembering. Most alters in the system of a person abused by a sophisticated pedophile will have a job. While it may feel differently in early healing, there are no bad alters--only alters with yucky jobs. All have the capacity to heal.

I do not believe all parts of a system are impacted. Some survivors have protectors who do not hold the trauma but know of the trauma and can indeed help from within. Some in the psychological community disagree that any alter can escape the impact of the trauma. I must take exception. My experience was several protectors who "knew/know everything" and were witnesses but not participants in the trauma. Other survivors have had this experience as well. I learned quickly to trust that knowledge to include guiding what I needed to remember and when. For me, that was the foundation of my waking up to my subconscious world. This is an area that is likely different for each individual.

Other kinds of messages need to be reviewed for the safety of survivors especially during early awareness and healing.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BRENORTON