An Okay Ending

 

Polyvore by grace2244

It’s been a wild emotional ride from 2011 when a suicide program unleashed to today. I’ve fully integrated. I thought I had integrated from 2003 until 2007; however, apparently I was integrated enough to have my career as a therapist. When my body fell apart (physical trauma) due to numerous surgeries, it’s likely why my integration fell apart somewhat easily. Possibly the level of depression was a factor as well.
 
Depression was a constant in my life and fear of being anywhere by myself, for the most part, was prevalent. I continued with my therapist of 15 years until early this year. I have an excellent new therapist who is very knowledgeable in treating DID and had more time to help me as my former therapist began reducing her hours and availability for retirement. At the time I changed trauma therapists, I also began to see a nearby male therapist once a week for every day life issues. Mostly he focused on trying to get me to face the anxiety I had and move beyond it…let it go. I couldn’t imagine letting it go. He kept at me though and, while I resisted consciously, it did impact me subconsciously.
 
Vision Quest. This is the short version of what happened to get me from male therapist nudging me about external fear to fully healing and no longer carrying the anxiety he so wanted me to put behind me. Through synchronicity of a friend visiting Sedona and my recalling it was a healing place because of the energy of the vortex winds, I made arrangements to be there for three full days of healing massage and ceremonies along with vortex visits and a helicopter tour of the ancient canyons.

Once I made the reservations, my Raven began to communicate with me through poetry…something I began to engage in earnestly since January and haiku in February. While direct communication with another part of myself had always been short term and/or difficult to maneuver, Raven’s narrative of what was to happen in Sedona was quite specific. By the time I left for Sedona, I knew exactly what was going to happen to me; I just didn’t know when or how. It was such a strong knowing, and I opened myself to whatever was going to happen to me once I arrived.

I do want to share that Raven (who knew all of the horror of my subconscious world and who had healed and existed with me) told me I could never fully heal as long as she were a part of me. It’s how my system had been built. After completely bringing down the system and healing all parts, full integration was not possible. Raven had found a way to bypass the way I had been “engineered”. She chose to take the form of a raven bird but wanted to leave my being at the “ancient canyon”. She said she would take all the darkness and “toxic waste” of my past with her but separate from that baggage so she would be free too. We would continue to be connected in an astral way. We are all stardust…along those lines.

How I experienced the release of the darkness and feeling her leave me were wonderful and emotional. It felt like freedom. I referred to that trip as my vision quest and believe that’s exactly what it was. I came home fully integrated and had what I call a shift in consciousness because that huge anxiety that followed me around like a cloud was gone. Not that I’m carefree…I’m reasonably cautious in my world as any person needs to be.

I have realized that Raven has spoken to me since the journey through my writing. The feeling coming through from her is happiness in much the way that my best friend and I have an inexplicable connection to each other. I no longer feel partsy and have been tested with regard to parts. Recently I was fully freaked out about having been attacked by bugs at the back of my knees and I remained me. That surely would have caused a switch before Sedona. My life after Sedona. That’s where I am.

What’s next? Two sessions after returning from my trip, I stopped my weekly local therapy. The end of June I stopped regular monthly sessions with my trauma therapist although she is available as needed. As mentioned in my last post, I have begun the evaluation process (brain mapping) to begin neurofeedback. Possibly five years ago I wouldn’t have gone near anything connected to my brain. However, research shows it can calm down the central nervous system and possible reduce overall and/or eliminate some of what is left over of my PTSD triggers.

I was fascinated after my initial brain mapping session to see that my brain wave patterns were far from normal. Most were double where they should be and those that had one normal number had an abnormal secondary number. It explained my inability to focus. Surprisingly, as thorough as I am about relaxing every day, the map showed I was above where “normal calm” is for most people. We will focus on that first.
Neurofeedback does for the brain what chiropractic does for the spine. It trains the mind to remain within a specific range by itself. It takes time to start to stay there on its own. I’m excited about it.

Prior to Sedona, I had started acupuncture after my new health insurance kicked in from my new marriage. The sessions aren’t covered but I’m offered a sufficient discount with my insurance to where it’s finally affordable. I just went from weekly to every other week and that has been helping body pain and depression.

Finally, because there had been such a shift in my being, with the help of my psychiatrist, I began to wean off my antidepressant. I will be antidepressant free in a few days. I wanted to be off for the neurofeedback to train my mind to be in a good place without medication interfering.

It’s difficult for me to write for too long which is why I haven’t been blogging. This will likely be my last entry for this blog but hope it stands to provide important information for others who realize they have DID and to provide hope for completely healing or at least have a fairly calm life at some point. Perhaps occasionally some important and relevant information will surface that I will post here.
 
An acceptable end. My first anniversary to my husband is in a few days. He has been with me since 2001 when I was still quite variable in personality and intensely healing while also beginning my graduate program for my counseling degree. He was with me when I was lying in a hospital bed on several occasions for several days in 2007 when I wasn’t sure I would be leaving alive. He proved “for better or worse” and with DID, PTSD, and severe depression before we ever said our vows. Peace at last. Those with DID usually experience minor to major issues with a spouse when it surfaces. I’m grateful to have him in my life and have the security of knowing he will be my “until death do us part” husband.

I wish healing for all on this journey from the insidious, intentionally created child with multiple personalities for life’s underworld fully into adulthood. More survivors are “out there” than you can possibly imagine. You are not alone. Thank you for taking this arduous healing journey with me. 

M is for Misophonia

I learned a new word today. I have no idea how prevalent it is with trauma survivors but am sharing it here because some of my triggers cross over from trauma. Am hoping writing of this doesn't trigger anyone, so just in case you are a survivor in early stages of healing, please use caution if you do proceed.

Since my teens, long before I knew I was a multiple or had experienced/was experiencing trauma, I was hypersensitive to gum cracking, eating noises, and things like clinking of silverware on a plate. I recall one time counting the number of times my mother said "um" while talking to me instead of hearing what she said. Flash forward from age 16 to 60 and take into account I just recently changed trauma therapists after being with one for 15 years. The new therapist told me of misophonia and suggested I google it because of the triggers I realized I still had after just having a tremendous emotional healing experience. Here is part of the definition I found from Wikipedia:

"People who have misophonia are most commonly annoyed, or even enraged, by such ordinary sounds as other people clipping their nails, brushing teeth, eating, breathing, sniffing, talking, sneezing, yawning, walking, chewing gum, laughing, snoring, whistling or coughing; certain consonants; or repetitive sounds.^[7] Some are also affected by visual stimuli, such as repetitive foot or body movements, fidgeting or any movement they might observe out of the corner of their eyes. Intense anxiety and avoidant behavior may develop, which can lead to decreased socialization."

You can also google and find a complete list. It's classified as a neurological disorder and apparently neurofeedback can help although I don't know to what extent at this point. I did read of one person where the sounds did not cause such an intense feeling after neurofeedback. Some think it's genetic. However, having been a multiple, I know my brain had to take circuitous routes for information to get from one place to another. Perhaps it routed right through where misophonia originates in the brain. Plus some trauma triggers might be mixed in with misophonia triggers but I'd have no way of knowing at this point.


Before knowing of this word just hours ago, I did/do have coping skills for it. The iPod was my gift from heaven since it was acceptable in many public places and could drown out most offensive sounds. Restaurants were places I was prone to run out of due to my fight or flight response. Others have a rage response to the sounds. When trapped with nowhere to hide from a triggering sound, such as a doctor's waiting room or airplane, I almost always have a pair of foam earplugs with me. They are inexpensive and work, but you may have to play around with the different sizes to find the ones that work for you.

There is a misophonia support group online which I just joined. What a relief not to feel alone. I had tried EMDR and another therapeutic technique called brain spotting which eliminated my one trigger for awhile but it gradually returned. I did that twice so now believe it is "hard wired" and only neurofeedback would work if anything is going to work.

If this is all that's left of my trauma, I'm a happy camper. But life would be so much more fulfilling if I found a way to reduce or eliminate the impact of misophonia. For some it can be socially debilitating. I'm hoping this post will help shed some light for others.

What Appears As One Trigger May Be Several

My inner world has been quiet lately giving me time to work in therapy on a list of remaining PTSD triggers. A big one for me is eating noises. It had often caused me to leave restaurants before the days of ipods and iphones. Actually I had started to use ear plugs before I had an ipod. Eating with others around was such an anxiety ridden experience.

As a child...even an adult child...eating with my family was a horror of father-made noises, especially slurping. We had dinner manners pounded into us but none applied to him. I recall my younger sister and I at high school age approaching my mother. It stopped for awhile amidst his evil looks at us but then returned.

Several times I had worked with EMDR in therapy to try to resolve this trigger. I was always led back to the horror of the initial trigger. Memories no one ever wants to discover but, to heal from it, they have to be visited, even if only briefly.

Not too long ago, a yogurt commercial on television had me screaming when someone sucked in entire container of yogurt at once. I learned to quickly mute it but also told my therapist how awful it was for me. That was the first time she used the technique of brain spotting with me. She was newly trained. It is simply my eyes following a moving pointer she held vertically in her hands and following her directions for focusing on certain feelings and eye movements. After that one session, I was able to completely tolerate the commercial and it translated to real people and their natural noises of eating with regard to slurping.

More recently, a Kit Kat commercial included a series of people biting into the crunchy bars with close ups of their mouths. Even looking away, it made my anxiety soar and my partner quickly learned to mute it. It came on several times every night about the same time. Because of my current internal quiet time, I was able to work on the crunching noise, again with brain spotting. My therapist expanded the healing to include watching people eat with the message that food was nourishing and enjoyable and I was hearing people enjoy their food. I returned home from the session telling Brian not to mute the commercial that night so we could see what happened. When it aired, we both stared at each other. I was okay. I was really fine. The next night I purposely looked up at the tv to see the people biting into the bar and that was okay too. I also noticed on a tv show that included a family dinner that I wasn't turning away. I was able to hear the conversation instead of fighting with the anxiety of the trigger.

Poor Brian has been eating as quietly as possible for a number of years and now I rarely notice when he has food. We are an informal, eat-in-the-living room couple. However, since resolving the slurping and the crunching, I still jump when his lips smack. This probably sounds bizarre but everything about eating apparently is a trigger. No wonder just working on "eating noises" didn't work.

I already asked my therapist if we could do smacking next while she sucks on a cough drop. lol. It will do the trick. I am/was also triggered by the clinking of silverware against dishes...as in stirring a drink or simply someone's fork hitting the dish while grabbing food. I haven't noticed that in awhile so perhaps it has resolved itself.

I thought it worthwhile to share this discovery since, if work on a generalized trigger is not working, perhaps breaking it down into smaller components will work.

Note: The link provided for brain spotting is a good overview that is not too technical. You can google it to find other references. The most important aspect is that your therapist is properly trained in the technique.

Mindfulness for Trauma

Yesterday I was fortunate to see an article posted on Facebook regarding mindfulness. What really caught my attention was the last sentence: "What makes life so frightening is that we let ourselves be carried away in the garbage of our whirling minds. We don't have to do that."

In my life as a therapist I had learned and taught mindfulness. I still practice it to some extent by listening to guided imagery to help my body relax to fall asleep. But I’d never seen mindfulness explained so succinctly. I now understand how to use it to get myself out of my head when it is circling with unpleasant memories, the aftermath of nightmares, or, most recently, a barrage of suicidal thoughts.

Without realizing I was practicing mindfulness, one morning after being discharged from the trauma center, I awoke from a horrid nightmare/memory. I can see in retrospect I engaged every one of my senses to keep me out of my head. I turned on my aromatherapy to have the aroma of fresh cotton and have a pleasant and different smell; I grabbed the rosary-like grounding beads I’d made at the Center to have a tactile distraction; I turned on my favorite music to provide soothing sound, and I placed a heated lavender spa pad over my eyes for soothing warmth. It took me nearly three hours to shake the nightmare but it worked.

I had forgotten about the full benefits of mindfulness and hadn’t thought about how it might be used to get me out of my head filled with suicidal images and only tended to make me tense and frightened. The other aspect of mindfulness that I apparently hadn’t grasped initially but hit me between the eyes yesterday was that I was keeping myself stuck by wanting to be the person I was in 2005…happy and healthy. My reality is my body has undergone surgeries and trauma in the past four years that likely will not allow it to be ever be quite the same. Mindfulness is being in the present…not the past or future.

For me, it meant accepting me and my body for where it is today and moving on from now. Wishing for a point in the past is fruitless, frustrating, and stressful. Wishing for me to be healed when I’m not is also not productive. But I can start from today and move in the direction of acknowledging where I am today in terms of mind and body pain to finding ways to move forward as well as handling the days with what is going on NOW.

This morning, in trying to focus on my breathing to get out of my head and the nightmares, I found myself back up in my head. This is why it Is called the practice of mindfulness. As the article states, it takes practice. When focusing on just my breath didn’t work, I turned on music and focused on listening to every word and musical instrument while keeping my hand(s) on the grounding beads. I also had heat on the areas of the body experiencing pain. It is now an hour later and I am up writing this blog post.

We trauma survivors get stuck in our heads a lot and many of us do suffer from chronic pain. Mindfulness is one coping tool. I also use Belleruth Naparstek’s guided imagery for depression, alleviating pain, and IBS. Her voice is so easy to listen to and, for me, she works. Sometimes curling up with a soft stuffie, crying, and listening to sad music is also being in the moment with my feelings. We don’t have to distract from them. Suicidality is one we definitely don’t want to “be in”, but experiencing unpleasant emotions is healthy when done safely. The key is being mindful of how we choose to experience our own pain.

Most in my group on Polyvore use art to get stuck images out of the head. Some might view that as focusing on the thoughts; however the focus is actually on the art: what elements to use to create the set, the colors, the effects, which images best represent the feeling. It is a healthy distraction and release at the same time.

Into the Wind by grace2244 (kinda here) on Polyvore.com

Having read the article yesterday and having an “aha” moment, I do feel unstuck from 2005 and have moved my mind to where I am right now with my concussion and body pain from the fall along with frequent suicidal thoughts. And I’m DID. lol. Could there possibly be more? Am sure those reading this do have more. Likely we all feel we are at our maximum tolerance level. Even more reason to find that which helps us cope and live our lives as best we can with what we have day by day. Is it okay to dream? Yes. It’s the wishing we were already there that gets us stuck in a place away from where we need to be…in the moment.

My Depression Reality

Untitled by grace2244 (sorta quiet) on Polyvore.com

I was born depressed. Kids weren't seen as having depression in the 50s and 60s. But I had the "I wish I would die cuz I'm so tired" thought at least since high school. Some of this I've shared before but feel the need to write again now. As an adult, before I knew I had DID, I had tried numerous antidepressants, none of which I could tolerate. Post DID diagnosis I know my total was at least 20 antidepressants that weren't tolerable so I healed as far as grad school and into full-time therapist without antidepressants. I had been taking Klonipin to help me sleep for quite a few years and still am.

Early 2005 I came to realize how down I was when my friends kept asking if I was excited about my trip to Italy in May and realized I really wasn't. I wanted to be. Then in February I woke up one day in tears and couldn't stop crying. Emergency call to my therapist. I had to be able to work. I couldn't let depression stop me from my career. By then Cymbalta was on the market and made to address both depression and PTSD. It worked. The tears stopped the next day. By April I was genuinely happy and felt I no longer had the default "I want to die" message. Life was wonderful.

I'd been on only a very small dosage of Cymbalta that changed my life. And all was well until a year after all the pelvic surgeries and hospitalizations. My depression had increased beyond where I could function. Cymbalta was bumped to where it made a difference...30 mg to 120 mg (max dose). Was feeling better...not crying every day.

When my body issues had impacted so much of my being, I fell even further. Since then it has been a battle to find an adjunct happy pill. I was feeling better on Wellbutrin but developed a tremor from it. Am now working on another and it is just not making a difference.

I know all the coping skills for depression but I get to a "why bother" point and really just wish I'd magically die quietly overnight or magically no longer need a drug induced state of well being. This is long term effects of trauma. Every day of my life.

I had most of 2005 and 2006 as a happy person. Not just "not depressed" but at a level I never imagined because I'd never experienced it before. I want to be that person again for me and for BB. He doesn't deserve a lump for a partner. I have my sense of humor even when I'm depressed which is a sort of coping skill.

Recent efforts to be heard as an advocate in changing strategies to target pedophiles has also begun to feel futile. Do I still have a life if I'm not making a difference in the world? Not sure where that message comes from but it's been around for a long time too.

An expert on helping others with their depression and giving up on my own. There has to be a middle ground. Where's my Soylent Green peaceful death?

Day of the Dolphins

She speaks to dolphins - by grace2244 on Polyvore.com

I believe in a post on this or another blog I mentioned how I absolutely believed the dolphins in the 80s movie Day of the Dolphins were really talking. My then husband assured me it was sound effects only. Fastforward to the late 90s when memories of being part of government research and programs begin to surface. A little alter spoke to me while I was bathing one night. Sounding very calm and rather happy, she announced she was a mermaid and could speak to dolphins. That was also my first year of the internet. Searching dolphins and speech, I came upon tons of information about John C. Lilly, M.D.

I invite you to google him. Not all of his book titles are clear on the collage. He invented the isolation tank in the early 50s which is in my memories as a sensory deprivation device. Lilly also was involved with experimentation with ketamine and hallucinogens. He had affiliations with the CIA and naval/government research. Much of his research focused on understanding the mind of the dolphin and interspecies communication.

I have no proof I was in direct contact with John Lilly. What my alter told me has credence though. You can hear the dolphins saying one syllable words on one of the websites. By the way, ketamine is an anesthesia that was used to allow the child/victim to remain awake during the trauma with no ability to move. Lilly died in 2001. He was active with the government experiments in the 50s and 60s when I was in early programming years.

What's sad is I would love to consciously know how to communicate with dolphins. I wish I could have a non-traumatic experience.

Alters who speak other languages

The thought just occurred to me that possibly what others used to call "speaking in tongues" was DID with an alter speaking an actual foreign language. Anyway, I spoke of needing a German and Russian dictionary to fully understand some of my collages and internal clues. I would hear a word repeatedly in my head. Sometimes it would sound like an English word. If not, I'd check both dictionaries. It's possible one of me knows French, but that has never been confirmed. The first three years of my life were in Germany and I have no doubt I had German and/or Operation Paperclip "trainers". The words that came up were single words or a short phrase only. Something a young child could understand.

I've relayed this next bit of my history before but is worth repeating here. I was determined to enter the military. In 1972, I was successful in being accepted into the Air Force despite my lack of 1/2" height. Career choices were not made until about the fourth week of basic training. My recollection is auto mechanic, file clerk, or Russian interpreter. I'd been a secretary and wanted more adventure than a mechanic, so I chose the latter. I had no conscious knowledge of Russian. The first day of class we were given a language test to see our level of comprehension, if any. I scored an 85. The next closest score was in the 60s. Everyone stared at me. I was clueless. At the end of the course, I was told that, at the time, I spoke with the best Moscovian accent the school director had heard before by an American. Always got good grades in school so didn't think much of it.

Fast forward to the late 90s when memories began and I discovered a system of Russian alters. I still don't know when I actually learned the language in my dissociated world. I'm fairly positive I was in Russia for "space camp" when I was 11 turning 12 (end of 1964).

I'm confirming that other multiples who recall "knowing" another language without ever taking conscious lessons is not a far stretch at all. In my memories, FWIW, the U.S. was cooperating with Russia in 1964 even though the rest of the world believed there was a Cold War. My reality of history is very different from the written version.

If you are a survivor and see words in collages in a foreign language, don't dismiss them, especially if you see the language turn up over a period of time. Communication Arts is a good source on that topic because they have annual photography and illustration issues with submissions worldwide. Next post (if I remember to check here) will be about what you use as images. The collage "Project Mayhem" which appears two posts before this one has the words "everything matters". That is very true for our healing process.

Change can be good

Fusion is new territory for me so the blog is hopefully educational for many. After a month of continuous visual messages and collages that I don't understand all or part of any message, today was different in a good way. I began to receive direct messages. The internal voice or the answer "landing in my head". I'm wondering if acknowledging Easel as the lovely alter doing the collages was part of that change? Would like to share the answers from this morning.

On my art blog, I had a post revealing Easel from the time she was a young girl. The collages showed me she was a very little girl but I also know her abuse began as a baby. The post made to the art blog immediately preceding Easel was a collage I had of my effed up f*ther. He's sitting on a tiny little island painting on an EASEL! Look at that inner strategy! Also, the first three letters of Easel's name are his initials. Knock me over with a feather.

Speaking as a spectator of my own (Easel's) collages, I was blown away by Zen Space, also posted on the art blog. I connected no trauma to the image. My SO's first response was "stairway to heaven". This morning's message was quite profound. The collage is a perfect example of Stockholm syndrome--why captive children may not flee even if given an ideal opportunity. Here is the collage followed by the explanation.


Zen Space by grace2244

The woman appears oblivious to the stairway behind her. In fact she seems oblivious to the beautiful sky behind her. She is focused on the lovely blossoms. She has wings but they aren't large enough to fly. It's difficult to tell but the wings are torn just behind her back. They wouldn't work even if they were larger. She has no curiosity to explore the stairs. If the stairway is an indication of "going to heaven" or suicide, that is forbidden. Even though survivors of organized abuse are plagued with messages of suicide when healing begins, while we are "useful" to the underworld, running away or escaping is under threat of awful consequences. And suicide is under the dire consequences of several innocent or loved ones being killed.

It's easier to block out the rest of the world, to include beauty and escape routes, than to see what we can't have. Pretty picture--powerful message. Stay or suffer beyond comprehension. Don't even think about it. Am watching the special coverage building up to tomorrow's inauguration. It's all about change and excitement. Am pleased with the change in me today.

Project Mayhem Resolved

Wow. Doing that collage with the cigarettes has had some immediate results. I was wondering why I couldn't stop it myself since I knew what was being done. Plus, I got the name of "collage person". I posted a series of her pictures on the art blog awhile ago. Her name is Easel. I know. Slap self on forehead. She goes with art. The little blond girl who has appeared in several collages who I thought was a young Janie was Easel. You can see from my many images of Easel that she is always with short blond hair and has those delicate facial features.

Even though it sounded silly as I was asking inside, I wondered if we just couldn't have a "no smoking" policy so I wouldn't be "burned" again. My always knowledgeable protector indicated by knowing the answer, it was now undone. He also noted how brave Easel had been to show me the answer.

This morning I started off with loud high pitched screams because of the blister. After speaking to my SO about my internal conversation, I realized that the pain didn't even evoke an eek. It's sore but on it's way to resolving already.

This is the part I couldn't make up if I wanted to. Early programming was in Germany and spoken in German. I've kept German and Russian dictionaries near me through my healing since realizing I had clues in those languages too. Easel goes with artist in English but "esel" in German means ass--which is the site of my pain. I don't know if it was a cigarette or something like a cigarette. But some kind of probe was used to burn me.

Fight Club goes with fires and a photo shoot prior to the release of Fight Club had Brad Pitt with fires and a bunny! It all goes together in a very complex puzzle in a way nothing else could go together. The proof will be if I ever have blisters again in "that" area of my body. With all the memories and truth coming out now, that would be a much welcome relief. I thought it was neat that collaging led directly the undoing of this previously unending painful problem. Yes, alters can be trained to do all kinds of things to the body. Typically that's reserved for very sophisticated programming, which, unfortunately, I had.

I'm very happy that Esel is now officially Easel and expressing herself beautifully. I guess that might sound conceited but I'm actually very proud of "her", who I know is making herself known as part of healed me. The United States of Tara is at 10 p.m. My hopes are way up for the series. Please watch if you have Showtime to gain an understanding of multiples. The show can go a long way toward erasing the horribly negative image we survivors have and continue to endure.

Project Mayhem

Some may recall the movie Fight Club. The storyline includes Brad Pitt as an alter of Edward Norton. From my perspective, the entire movie looked like the inside world of someone who was multiple. I'm not sure all main characters smoked, but both Brad Pitt and Helene Bonham Carter's characters were chain smokers. Brad, as Tyler, begins Project Mayhem to raise hell with the city government (as I recall). Why am I talking about Fight Club?

A recent post in Grace Uncensored spoke of the cigarette and/or cigar burns that occur as body memories and have never stopped throughout my healing. I recall having painful "sores" before memories. I just didn't tell anyone I had a problem I couldn't explain. My therapist and I agreed to work on undoing any residual programming in case the burns are the result of a kind of self-harm conditioning. That would mean an alter or alters are creating whatever chemical responses in my body are necessary to cause the painful blisters that always are in my genital area.

Last night I felt a blister begin in a very painful spot. I'm angry today that I haven't been able to stop this before now. With all the collages, I wondered what would happen if I just started putting pictures of cigarettes and cigars on a blank collage page. Not that anyone needs to understand the meaning of everything, but I was able to see the alter who is responsible for the burns or who has the answer to stop it. The burning of my very sensitive orifices began shortly after I was born, if not immediately after my birth. It may have been the first consistent trauma (painful sensation) to cause a split.

I couldn't get the answer by asking inside, but those with the answers in fused me were able to show me who was responsible for my distress and much more with art therapy. I'm still in awe of the synchronicity of finding Polyvore website so soon after the fusion but before the new brain connections began to overflow.

Clearly, you can see from the collage, it was not okay to be a girl.


Project Mayhem by grace2244

Rebirth Ceremony

This topic has the potential to be highly triggering. Please use your best judgment if you are in the early stages of healing from DID before reading further. I'm sharing this information because it may help make sense of partial memories or fears. My first insight into this ceremony was from the brochure provided by the Ritual Abuse Task Force (Los Angeles?) in the late 90s. One of my earlier collages depicted the ceremony exactly as outlined yet had made no sense to me looking at it. You can see it had no overt horror elements. I had believed from the images that it took place in Holland where my parents took me on a "special" trip without my sister. We lived in Germany at the time.


The words are blurred but become legible if you click on it to enlarge. The vultures are speaking about a dead carcass and the "ad" at the top right speaks about a sheep's uterus. The lower portion of the collage is blatantly classical music and time which goes with conditioning. All intentional horror has a specific purpose in organized pedophilia.

Recently I read another description of the ceremony from a therapist whose survivor clients had recalled greater details. Basically, the young child is placed inside the body of a large dead animal. Since I have always been tiny, I would not be surprised if the animal of choice for me was a sheep even though some believe only specific animals are used. A sheep is not one of them which is why I don't rely on one definition for anything in this underworld.

The child is sewn inside the carcass for a period of time for horrific isolation. In one of the descriptions I read, the purpose was to create an alter to be the loyal cult alter. However in both my earlier collages of Holland and the one I completed last night, I created alters to comply with sexual abuse. Did I say I was 3?! I have maybe five conscious snapshot moments of that trip. One was seeing the bunnies at the zoo. Another was the beautiful view of Kuchenhoff Gardens with rows of tulips as far as the eye could see. They were bands of color. Red tulips for acres, then yellow, and other colors followed.

Yesterday I found a pretty image of the gardens with windmills in the background that I thought I might use. When I began to collage, I went immediately to that image. What happened next I watched from the background as "collage person" went to work. The sea of red tulips became a blood bath. Alters covered in "tulips" emerged completely traumatized. A rabbit managed to get in there along with several who watched from above. When the collage was nearly done, I looked at it and was so repulsed by it but kept trying to add more horror elements which I kept deleting. Enough was enough. I got the message. It was horrific and unbearable.

I must have produced a cluster of alters both from the trauma and those that were meant to be produced. These new collages since my fusion match up to much sketchier collages from early healing. All I knew from that Holland trip was I was taken somewhere, sexual alters were created, and porn movies were made. Testing the new alters?

I'm not going to share the collage here. You can see it at my Polyvore page if you wish. I think it's too much to share openly. What I understand about yesterday's collage is the ones inside who remember have that horror of being enclosed in the carcass seared into the trauma memory. Yes, I was a very special child for my parents to have taken me on that trip for quality time.

The Key

Am at collage 54 in 25 days. My therapist saw them today. We both agreed it was best to allow the driven process to continue because of such information overload. It has to come out somehow and this is safe. The survivor collaging group is growing nicely and the power that comes from the art is just stunning. With permission of the artist, I'm sharing this recent work with you. It's such a powerful statement of ones inside feeling trapped.


key by meshells

"Key" is the perfect title.

How can we know the truth?

Much of this blog has been focused on how confusing memories are to piece together, the tricks used by perps regarding the surroundings, a double language and double binds used on us as children. So how is it that we can know for sure who was an abuser?

Links are provided in the sidebar to some of the best in the field regarding trauma memory and how it is stored differently. I've used examples before but, as a reminder, those who recall the assassination of John F. Kennedy know where they were at the moment they heard, the feelings of the moment. Some remember smells, others great detail of the location...a kind of surreal experience to recall. If you've ever been in an automobile accident, you might recall the event in slow motion, what song was playing on the radio. If it had been raining during the accident, it's possible rainy days still cause some distress to your driving experience. The most recent moment in our history that was traumatic for the nation was on 9/11. The trauma of knowing, seeing, hearing...for many, feeling loss of a loved one. All sensory experience is frozen in that moment or moments of trauma.

In spite of the trauma memory being locked in from several perspectives by different aged alters with intentional confusion and attempts at making us believe that what happened never happened, we remember. And, over the course of time, the abusers remain constant (in or out of costume) for some period of life. Some alters and/or protectors remember very clearly. It has been proven time and again through drawings and descriptions through journals of survivors that incidents were recalled with remarkable accuracy, locations were internally recorded with uncanny details, and faces and voices were remembered. What comes out as a survivor's story is for the survivor to heal. The objective is healing, not suing abuser(s). What we come to know with great clarity as names, locations, faces, and sometimes dates are conveyed to us by those inside who remembered with clear "mind" and stored the information for later release.

In my personal experience, names rarely surfaced, but faces did. In doing collages, I'd find myself cutting out pictures of people. Over time, I consciously noticed that many images looked like the same person and I'd make collages for that one person. At the time I wouldn't know if it was an outside person or an inside person...very strange concept to grasp, I would imagine, for anyone who has not had inside people. Most of my collages were done in the first two years of my healing. Also in those first two years, abusers in my world at the time I was a child became known to me through researching, in documentaries, in magazines. I knew because the images cut from magazines so starkly resembled the perp collage and something about the perp's history matched my own history. This process is, of course, not admissable in court, but is sufficient validation to heal. It doesn't matter what others believe. We know without a doubt when we receive internal and external validation simultaneously and have our drawings and/or collages and journals to back it up. It's usually accompanied by a hugely triggered response to matching the name with the person or vice-versa.

I guess it boils down to that the alters can use whatever skills they have "backwards" to help in the healing process. Amnesia is a strange state of mind. Those who suffer from or who have even healed from DID still don't know what it's like to have a mind that functions for someone who grew up in a loving family without trauma. We know it gets better at a certain point in healing. We can tell when there has a been a shift in the way our brains process information after healing takes place. That happened for me after any merger, blending, integration of parts. I have used a gearshift as a metaphor for how it feels when parts integrate. I used to drive stick shift. Have no other metaphor that seems to fit. While there is a sharing of consciousness after an integration that wasn't there before, there is not a smooth transition from one alter to the other. There is still a feeling of separateness but in a different way. Over time it becomes more of a smoother process and feeling of togetherness.

I've heard from other survivors and have read in authoritative psychology books by those who have never been dissociative that true integration means *I* will have ownership of the memories. My life before my current medical difficulties was good. I hear I was a good therapist. Yet I still feel as if I've been told my story by others inside and *know* enough to understand my fragmentation and healing process. It does not feel as if it happened to me. Maybe my *complete* healing is still down the road. Or maybe sometimes what the books say should happen, doesn't happen for all.

Regardless of our individual truths, we all simply want to feel in control of our lives again. To feel that we have our lives back internally and externally. Others can stand back and judge the content of memories or watch the person blossom and grow and heal from processing their trauma. The truth that we do know about the abusers and the locations, in spite of being sometimes 30 to 40 years after the fact, can be used, if others would hear, to find the places that continue their lacivious activities to this day...where no one has ever bothered to look...or locations that have been so protected by community leaders involved in the charade that the secrecy is assured.

We, the survivors, want to be heard. We want to help future generations from experiencing our pain of having been born into an incestuous family or similar circumstances. Collaborating the truths of survivors recalling the same locations can be the blueprint for planning a new strategy to stop the madness. Why is that so unreasonable...or unbelievable?

My wish and goal is for this change to come to our nation...for people of good hearts and minds to stand back and find what is truth...to ask questions of those who have been denying our truth for decades...to help the children stuck in that world and honor and help those who have survived.

Undoing a known trigger

One of my most intrusive PTSD symptoms is dropping something or almost dropping something. The trigger is feeling the loss of control in my hand as opposed to any value of the object. Yesterday I started working on undoing the very loud startle scream that ensues. I wasn't sure it would work in a controlled setting. But it worked enough.

My recent memory processing has involved three previously integrated alters who were connected to each other. One of the three had the dropping trigger. The therapist spoke through to the little. I was completely co-conscious but felt the little's control in my hand. We worked with small objects of different textures. I was supposed to just let the first object fall out of my hand but my fingers weren't about to let go. T held something in her hand while talking and suddenly let it fall. She heard the scream. lol. At least it was okay there.

I managed to let several things fall to the ground but felt my chest tighten up each time it hit. Every time the object fell, t would say "That's okay". The little spoke a few times and I just let her be out. I was exhausted at the end of the session.

When I returned home, it wasn't five minutes before I knocked something over. BB (my SO) quickly came over to pick it up. "It's okay," said the little. I swear she was practicing knocking things over. Within about ten minutes, she had told BB, "That's okay" in the same sweet little girl voice. For now, I would much rather have a little girl voice for a few seconds than the startle scream. Something good happened. And that was only within a few hours of working on the trigger.

Next trigger to work on (when the opportunity arises) will be the startle scream that comes when I'm a passenger in a car and the driver suddenly goes to hit the brakes. I don't even have to have my eyes open; I can be looking out the side window. Somehow I sense when the foot leaves the gas pedal to hit the brake. Heaven only knows where the PTSD came from. The feeling is "I'm going to die!" Often it is just BB slowing down to avoid something up ahead. The internal screen showed me a car sitting still with a screen in front of it (similar to how they made "moving car" scenes in old movies. Am guessing from that bit of information that either in a terror state and/or slightly drugged state, I thought we were moving and when the driver hit the brake, it looked like a truck or car was going to crash right into me. Guess it doesn't matter what happened. I can undo it. That will be a little tricky. Will need to go with BB to empty parking lot. Not sure who inside goes with that though.

More on EMDR

I'd like to respond to two comments made on my previous post regarding EMDR. Working with EMDR and DID requires additional steps than the typical protocol which can quickly resolve current or past distress. The example given in the comment was a child with a great fear of shots and surrounding triggers such as the smell of alcohol. EMDR can be used to reduce and/or eliminate anxiety for phobias, among other issues, quite effectively.

If the therapist does not have the proper training which first teaches grounding skills to the survivor and is certain sufficient grounding skills exist to attempt EMDR, and other symptoms are controllable, only then should EMDR be tried. What was described in the comment sounds like an untrained therapist. Being certified in EMDR is not sufficient. It would be good to ask if the therapist is specifically trained to use EMDR with dissociation...and possibly how many other clients with DID has the therapist worked with using EMDR and the outcome. Understanding that some therapists may overstate their skill, the best thing to do is to stop the EMDR if it feels uncomfortable. You know best what is right for you. I know it is very difficult for survivors to be assertive. But you must assertive about what is being done to you and your body. If you are uncomfortable, you have the right to say so. You also have the right to say you will try it and see what it is like for you.

My suggestion is, as long as you have faith in the person leading you through it, allow for a complete session which gets to a resolution or a calming place to stop for later work. You don't want to stop when you are feeling distressed because EMDR is like a wave you ride. It begins with intense emotions and/or images in a controlled environment and takes you to a place of calm. If it feels too overwhelming to continue, say "Stop". The therapist should ask you to do a grounding exercise to take you back to a good place before continuing.

I was asked to describe what EMDR was like for me. Let's see if I can give a description. Each survivor is going to process information differently, so please hear this as my personal experience only. I was initially afraid of EMDR "doing something to my brain". But after my experience with drumming, that was no longer an issue. I understood it was a good thing. Engaging both sides of the brain is a good thing under normal circumstances.

I will first describe a conscious trauma I had that was resolved during my EMDR training--because we practiced on each other. Not knowing whether anything I chose might lead to the DID trauma, I was rather cautious but made the trainer aware of my concerns just in case. I had taken my own EMDR buzzers (tactile stimulation) with me since I don't like the eye movements. The incident I chose was something that had happened when I was 12 years old. Recalling the incident brought up huge feelings of embarrassment and betrayal and shame. I had been in the girls room where several other girls had gathered. I did not know my skirt was tucked up inside my undies. No one told me. I entered the school library and had walked halfway through when the librarian came up and helped me get everything in order. We all have those kinds of things in our past. Even singletons ;-O

Part of the protocol is to identify the most distressing moment of the event and to focus on that moment. Initially the emotions welled up as tears and streamed down my face. Following the direction of the therapist, I refocused as suggested until, in bringing up that most distressing moment, I no longer felt any distress. And it has remained that way since that one "practice session" during training. That's how simple EMDR can be.

With DID, there needs to be a very specific behavior or trigger that the survivor wishes to understand or change. The entire system can't be the target or it will wreak havoc as described in the one reader's comment. I had all my grounding skills and trusted my therapist to handle whatever response I might have. Later in my healing, when processing yuck memories became "same old, same old", I was able to say that I had a memory brewing that was interfering with my life and wanted EMDR to get the answers and get it over with. A neat thing about EMDR is you can be as comfortable as you want. My typical therapy session is lounging on the sofa with several pillows behind me and a quilt on me. I can hold the buzzers in my hands under or on top of the quilt.

Sometimes I only had a physical sensation like an aching in my gut or a twitch that I knew went with an alter. Whatever was "active" in the therapy session is what I knew was to be the starting place. So I would focus on the aching in my gut and my therapist would start the buzzers which give a short buzz in one hand and then the other, alternately at a regular speed and intensity of my choosing. While the protocol is for the therapist to ask questions of what is happening, someone with dissociation can have messages or images come out of nowhere. I usually just started describing what I was seeing, hearing, feeling, sometimes smelling. Fear almost always was/is the first emotion to rise and my therapist always knows what to say to alleviate fear of current safety and reassure the alter(s) having the memory that it was okay now to yell or scream or talk or move the body to resist...to allow my body to do whatever was needed.

My suggestion to my clients and what I did for me was internally to watch on the screen in the projector room (see earlier post). Sometimes there were very quick flashes of some trauma while other times it was if I were watching a scene from a movie. Often I was coached to fastforward through the yuck. The resolution, for me, was when I would get to the needed detail of yuck that the alter was holding so s/he could heal. Or to the message (lie) that the alter was still holding onto as the belief so my therapist could guide me through undoing it. EMDR wears me out. It wore my clients out whether they were dissociative or not. Engaging both sides of the mind apparently is exhausting. I had no ill effects except that I felt like an airhead for several hours after the session and learned not to go shopping when the brain was on EMDR. There was no balance of logic to counter emotional spending. lol.

Emotions come up and can be intense but also process quickly. The effectiveness really lies with the training and experience of the therapist. I had a great role model before I went to my own training. I hope this answered the issues addressed in the comments. Great questions!

A world of clues

I mentioned "clue talk" in my last post. My experience with my inner wisdom synchronizing with my external world to prepare me for a memory is the awesome part of the healing journey. It's a lesson in how we can do things subconsciously while wide awake and have idea what we are doing. When the moment of realization sets in, it's an incredible scary but good thrill. An OMG OMG moment.

In my life before knowing of the amnesia, I surrounded myself with certain objects and art. Some items went through years of relocating. My writing was also something, in retrospect, that became a profound validation to my memories.

Something I know that has happened for others, especially with the internet, is, that in typing, you begin to use a certain word repeatedly. A few weeks ago I was using "arsenal". An arsenal of coping skills, an arsenal of tools. The memory that came up was when we lived at a military base which was called an arsenal. Just be mindful of when that happens. Another way a clue can eek out is that you consistently mistype a word. You know how to type it but it keeps coming out another way. That is likely another part of you wanting you to know something. The meaning at the time is not important. It's the noticing...awareness...that is key.

I shared in my last post about the secret meaning of bunnies. I have had rabbit or bunnies in some form throughout my life...as pets, statues, stuffed animals. One of my first memories was of a bunny meeting a tragic end, of course because of my fault...at the age of 3. I also received my "reminder object" bear when I was 3. hmmm. Oops, this is about helping you!

Some alters seemed to go with certain objects which later had meaning. My little who went with skeletons and bunnies had no sense of self and knew only pain. But recently bunnies re-entered my life, first as an image in one of my videos, then as an icon, then "spontaneously" having to buy a brown bunny. I actually went to my favorite Boyd's BEAR store to look for a bunny the other day. Boyd's does have bunnies but not the bunny I "needed". My favorite book has always been The Velveteen Rabbit, a story about a stuffed animal bunny who becomes real after he is loved by a human. Strong identification with finding all that abandonment and loneliness attached to a bunny. One symbol has had many meanings.

One of the creepiest clues I had was when another little went with hearts. I probably had five heart necklaces and dishes in the shape of hearts. I didn't realize how many hearts I did have around me until I met the little. The magnitude of the collection had been completely out of my awareness. The trauma memory that went with the little was her remembering she had to hold a heart in her hand but dropped it. Horrid things happened to her for not holding onto the heart. This was the beginning of my memories and wasn't believing what I was seeing or hearing from inside although it was well documented in the collages that came to life after her giving me the memory. It was about this stage that I was heavily researching abuse with ceremonies and rituals looking for answers.

Several days after the memory, I was walking from a store to my car thinking about the heart message. That had been so traumatic for me. It had to be some made up story. It was then I began feeling the car keys in the palm of my hand. I looked down and my key chain had a large red jelly-like heart from a pet store. I'd had it for so long it had become invisible to me. When I saw that heart sitting in my palm, I needed an airlift out of the parking lot. Honestly, it was that huge. It also explains my "dropping PTSD". If anything even feels like it is slipping out of my hand, a blood curdling startle scream emanates from me. It's one of my last really bad PTSD triggers. It doesn't matter what the object is...it could have no value whatsoever. The PTSD goes with the feeling that something is coming out of my grasp. That kind of trigger remaining so entrenched goes with something falling out of my hand.

Possibly that's my only validation for the memory, but having the traumatic reaction to seeing that red heart in my hand was validation enough for me that something happened with a heart. It could have been a prop heart for like a movie, but it was real to me at the age of the memory--likely age 5.

I've probably mentioned before, but opening yourself to being given clues from the outside world will help insiders give you information that will help you make sense of an upcoming memory or give you pieces to a memory that would not otherwise surface as easily. I've had clues come at me from billboards (an image or words appearing very large). I used to have someone inside download itunes while *I* was browsing that would show up on my playlist. Clues can come from songs. They can come from anywhere if you let them.

The more ways your alters can communicate with you, the more they are able to ameliorate the process of memory. It can be quick and trauma minimized. Or it can be long and agonizing, especially if you tend to fight knowing or hearing. For me, there has always been a reason to know. I think the only reason I really needed to get to my recent memory is that I was going to watch Dexter and that memory would have been triggered in an awful way.

Sixth sense is very much a part of people with DID. Through sensory deprivation and constantly being in a state of fear, all of our senses were heightened. It can work very much in your favor when it is time to heal. Protectors know what is coming up for you. I don't know how; they just do.

Embrace the knowledge your alters hold and the wisdom inside to present you with information as it is needed. Healing will go faster. You still have to rip the bandaid off, but it's a fast ouch. And that's far better than a long agonizingly slow pull.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, Split, Shatter

The mind/body has three main responses to danger: fight (resist), flight (run away), or freeze (stay still). For a child constantly in fear of being hurt or killed (because of threats) and whose body is being invaded, escaping the mind/body becomes the "flight". Maybe I should say "float".

Those with DID, learned to be out of the body for an alter to bear the abuse. Typically survivor memories include watching their body being hurt from the view of looking down from the ceiling. Because it is the intention for many pedophiles to create dissociative states (alters), the child is deliberately terrified into a state that the child or alter can no longer bear causing another split (or alter to be created).

For some events planned for the child, the abuse or terror is so horrendous as to cause several new alters to be created. I call this shattering. Sometimes a survivor will realize many alters are the same age which might have been caused by such an event. I likely had at least three such events in my life by age 16. Shattering can be from a series of events created around the child to ensure several or many new alters are created. One way to do this is to provide the child with an impossible choice. Faith from the Blooming Lotus blog describes having to make a choice between a sibling and a beloved pet--which one was to die. She then had to witness the killing of her pet. This is horrendous emotional torture.

In the memory coming up for me now, I have gotten previous messages. What I'm getting now is more of that story. It's not done processing yet but I'm fairly certain I had to choose between my life or my sister's life. Obviously they didn't kill my younger sister but they made me believe they did. This happened Halloween of 1956 or '57. My sister was only a year old. I was 4. I'm getting that I shattered then. Because these sophisticated pedophiles know how to create what they want the child to have as an internal world, they used this split to create another confusion that would cause me to constantly be in a state of cognitive dissonance throughout my life, thus helping to maintain the dissociation.

I've had this story before, but, for some reason, I need to know that this was the time and place when the official split was made inside me. The male/female split. Trigger caution from this point on. I want to make sure I get to tell this to the world because I think it goes with survivors from the 50s and 60s. I also believe it is still used for reasons explained below.

Of course I came into the world as a girl. I was born pretty much directly into perp hands. It is my belief that I was always treated as a boy in the dissociated world...from the time I was born. In my conscious world I was the good little girl. In the subconscious world, I was treated as a boy and punished for not conforming to responding as a boy. I have very confusing images and messages about boys and penises. I understand now that was to explain that not all boys had a penis and I was one of them (one of their lies that a child will believe). So I had one world where I was punished for being a girl and another world where I was ostracized if I didn't act as a proper little girl. That tends to wreak havoc on one's mind. It also explains why I changed my name legally twice to a feminized male name. (Changing names is a symptom of DID.)

Tyler (the little boy I write about in Believe the Children) had some of these messages. His perps had not been sucessful in causing him to dissociate, but they were successful in creating much confusion. His little sister was born after I began to work with him to heal from his abuse. At one point he told me that his little sister did not have a penis. I acknowledged that was true. Recalling my own memory, I asked him if he had seen little girls with penises. He said that he did. For me, that's proof this gender confusion is still part of the "tried and true" method of creating a split. I explained to his parents that he knew his sister had no penis but needed reassurance that all little girls did not have a penis. Had I not known of that kind of extreme emotional stress, I wouldn't have thought to ask him the question to find out if that was his belief.

The rule in inducing dissociation is everything to extremes. The child does not need to be physically or sexually abused for a dissociative split to happen. It is known that during a state of heightened fear, susceptibility to suggestions for alternate thinking is heightened. For me, the trauma of believing my sister had been killed because I had chosen my own life over hers was used to shatter my belief system that allowed me to believe I was a boy in that world. Wow, I think I just gave myself the final piece to my own memory puzzle by writing about this today.

The good news is that whatever they did can be undone and healed eventually. I had the first pieces to this memory in late 1997. For some reason it was time for this other chunk to fall into place. I am no longer shattered. The male/female split has healed. The internal confusion about gender was resolved a few years ago. I know survivors who have gotten stuck in the gender confusion. Maybe some reading this blog will not have to go through the craziness of the memories if they realize that it was a desired outcome.

The body remembers too

Body memories are weird, scary, freaky, fascinating and an important aspect of healing. While more and more therapists working with dissociation are aware of the need to work with body memories, most physicians, specialists, physical therapists...okay the whole medical community... are unaware and/or dismiss them. The good news is survivors know they exist. Two good resources to help survivors and therapists are The Body Remembers by Babette Rothschild and Trauma and the Body by Pat Ogden.

If you are not familiar with a body memory, it is when the body holds a piece or pieces of a trauma. Research has proven memory cells exist within the entirety of the body, not just the brain. However, as with all of recovery from DID, there is no simple explanation. What looks like a body memory may also be a fragmented self "living" in a specific area of the body. Or a fragmented self could be causing part of the body to move to convey a message or it could be a true body memory of trauma being released that's been stored since the original memory.

Body memories can be rather dramatic or as subtle as a twitch. The importance is on the survivor understanding that pain and/or movement might be re-enacted. And it is important for the therapist to understand this may happen to help the survivor release the trauma in a safe manner. I have read texts that encourage therapists not to allow body memories in the office. Ummm...it's not always a choice. Some therapists have the opinion that body memories are intentional drama by the survivor. As if survivors don't have enough to work through, they make things up?

Resolving a body issue can have truly dramatic impact. I had two long-term health/body issues resolve after working through a memory or experiencing a healing event. I'd had allergies since I was a teenager. Early in my memories, while in my mid-40s, I processed a memory having to do with feelings of suffocation as a very young child. I knew as soon as I processed that trauma that I would be free of those allergies in a few months when pollen season began. I was right. No hayfever since then. My nose was trying to expel the trauma through sneezing? It doesn't matter; allergies stopped.

I also had a sore lump on my left breast below my arm pit. It was monitored by mammograms since my late 30s. Before I turned 50, I came to know that a number of alters "lived" in the vicinity of my heart. I felt them integrate after processing a memory. It was actually painful as they passed through the heart muscle but a relief at the same time. The lump in my breast was gone at the time of my next mammogram and hasn't returned.

My question to the medical community is why they don't understand about the impact on the body of child abuse both physically and mentally. Or why don't they check for a history of known child abuse for their patients? And how many survivors are taking drugs for something that needs to be processed psychologically to resolve? I took allergy shots for over 20 years and they only ever seemed to make the allergies worse. This would be where the doctor would say "it's all in your head". If a survivor is aware of his or her DID-ness (?), that is a physical issue that could be targeted in therapy.

I do know this is difficult to grasp even for survivors. Many suffer from multiple physical conditions, many of which can be or must be relieved through medications or surgeries. For survivors going through the healing journey, just as you tune into your internal world, you can learn to tune into your body. Wonder "what else could this be" if your body develops something "out of the blue". Often I would have some strange body twitch or pain begin as I entered my therapy session. I came to know that was where to begin for that day.

Body work is helpful even for those not holding onto trauma memories. I've had clients mention a recent headache or pain somewhere in the body. I'd ask, "If your knee could speak, what would it be saying to you right now?" The strangest answers would come out more like free association which always got to some issue right away. No one can tell you what anything in your body means except you. No one on the outside can translate. As much as survivors hate the phrase, "Ask inside," that is how you will know.

Under the category of possible too much info, I'm going to share a body memory I would not have believed could happen to anyone, let alone me. It was huge validation in an extraordinary way. I think I already spoke of a memory with ants. I also had memories with other creatures to include spiders. About a year after the memory surfaced about being enclosed with ants on me, I woke up with big red blotches all over my body. Since I lived pretty much isolated from the outside world, I knew it had to be a memory. And it itched to the point of pain. Always having my internal guide, I used the internet to research insect bites and found my welts identical to army ant bites. I hadn't made the connection that the ants in my collaged memory were "army ants", but on words taped to the collage it said "an army of ants".

A few weeks after that outbreak, a different type of bite covered my body. I have photos of this stuff but any naysayer would just say I did it intentionally, I'm sure. Like people would choose to have insects bite them all over. Anyway, the second round was fire ants. Very distinctive bite. And another couple weeks of constant itching and flare ups. Finally, I broke out in what appeared to be a bull's eye target. It goes with a spider. I think it's from a black widow which isn't poisonous. But a child can get sick from being bitten so many times. Shortly after I began to publish this blog, the ant bites surfaced just on my left leg, hip and lower back. Nothing on my right side. Leftover reminder of telling? Or possibly still fearful littles remembering what happened when we told at age 5. Definitely bizarre. Definitely validation. The body does remember.

It's my fault

All survivors with memories of the grade school and younger abuse who have gotten to meanings and messages behind the yuck, will likely get to the message "It was my fault" many times. It doesn't matter what happened in the world, apparently it was our fault. I was told this feeling I was to blame regardless of ability to have been at fault was a narcissistic wound. I don't like the word narcissistic, but it is a kind of self focus to an extreme. It's certainly not about liking oneself or wanting to draw attention to oneself. As children and into adulthood, trauma survivors are generally caught up in self loathing on at least a few levels.

I don't know how this feeling of being responsible for doom was instilled, but on 9/11/2001, I was healing and earning my counseling degree full time from home, which meant I slept in each morning. My husband called to ask if I had turned on television. I hadn't but did. I don't think I moved much that day. I was riveted to the news, stunned, scared, and believing somehow I must have caused the catastrophe to happen. Earlier in my healing, I researched news I'd missed because I had dissociated most newsworthy events from my life. At one point, I became panicked that I had caused the space capsule explosion that killed Virgil Grissom in 1967. The only thing that calmed me down was realizing that in January 1967 I was living in Iran. The family did not move back to the U.S. until late summer that year.

By the time I graduated, I had worked hard to heal that narcissistic wound. In fact, I used that as a guide for trauma clients who were constantly apologetic. I'd explain the narcissistic wound and start out with, "for instance, on 9/11, did you feel that somehow it was your fault?" I was stunned at how many said yes. So, in my experience, trauma that is sufficient to create DID, creates this feeling in survivors of somehow being the reason for all that is wrong with life. It's not a good feeling. I have a mental image of a cartoon character with that ever present dark cloud over his head.

When I say that it the sophisticated abuser's objective to destroy a child's psyche, I mean that from every conceivable angle. All survivors repeat after me: "It was not my fault! It was never my fault."

How it works (being aware of the dangers)

Several life shaking concepts surface in conjunctioin with memories leaking through. Being DID is one. Realizing you are DID because someone did horrible things to you for likely at least several years when you were very young is another whammy. My memories began with father abuse. The people in robes didn't come up until later and I knew it was my father and his friends...not demons, although one could argue they were. Then came memories for intentionally perpetrated harm for specific tasks.

Here's the cover within the cover. Memories of being in some kind of "ceremonial" group that are very similar to what was done to create the job(s) to be exploited are very similar. For example, one will be done to a child alter so that emotional hypertrauma shrouds another alter being trained to manipulate men through sexual ploy(s). In this scenario something like being raped by a "demon" might overshadow training for how to drug a "trick" and steal his money. Because it's all about the money. I want my share of whatever I earned. To pay for my years of therapy. To put in my retirement fund so I don't have to worry for having missed over five years of work healing from the harm. For the emotional harm and having my will zapped so decisions were never really my own.

You can see how there is an investment of time and training for each victim, initially in the form of a child with jobs that transition as the child ages into a teen and then into an adult. This explains the manpower to interfere with a healing adult. They try to ensure loyalty to the group along with terror of telling and terror of getting help because one person healing means a loss of money to the group.

What are likely to surface are messages to let someone specific know you are healing or to go to a specific location where someone knows how to reinstate the dissociation, delaying any chance of healing. I did not have the experience my two actively abused clients continue to have. If I was followed to therapy, I didn't see it or remember it, thank goodness. But I did have "I think I'll go away for the weekend and hole up in a hotel to pamper myself." Or, an overwhelming urge to call someone from my past to include a family member. This happens in one child, one pedophile situations as well, if the pedophile knew how to use dissociation.

The best tactic when healing begins is to have a safe person. Someone who can tell you if you are being logical. Don't respond to any "spontaneous" thoughts to take a trip, visit someone, call, email or write someone you don't typically contact. Try to not answer any phone calls. Let them go to the answering machine or voicemail first. Many times, cues for alters to act are given over the phone. Because adults usually have full time jobs, their dissociated "job" would have been done at night.

Remember the unbelievability factor. You go to bed. The phone rings. You might answer the phone but an unhealed dissociated alter could respond to the cue which could be words, a sound (like a tone), both, or something else entirely. All you will remember is having a good night's sleep. *You* will be back in bed before the alarm goes off and be clueless as to any other activity. That's how life has been unless you were able to somehow disconnect through other conscious life events. Regardless, those messages surface when you heal if they were ingrained into your psyche during the trauma years.

Hopefully a survivor will be in therapy and work through these urges to call or visit to help the alters with those jobs to heal. Once the alter heals and no longer responds, the survivor heals from that particular cue. Who knows how many are inside with different jobs and cues. That will be different for each survivor. Just know it can be undone. Being very aware of the thoughts that spontaneously come up and grow into nagging, overwhelming thoughts is helpful.

You may have a few slip ups and might, for instance, send email to people thinking that "so and so should know"; but no harm is done (aside from being freaked out when you realize what you've done). The harm comes when an email is returned with a highly triggering phrase that may not click as a the source of feeling exceptionally sick or being overwhelmed with a desire to vacation in Tahiti or whatever comes up. It's following through on delivering yourself to a person or location that is dangerous. They never came to drag me away. They counted on my ingrained messages to work. They counted on a cued adult alter to drive the body to them.

If in doubt, don't do it. Have someone trustworthy in your life do reality checks for you regarding trips or visits. Even conferences or seminars in your conscious life might be used as opportunities for dissociated jobs or, once healing begins, being drawn back into that world. Having someone accompany you to stay overnight to make sure you don't go wandering out after bedtime and to answer phone calls is strongly recommended. I guess that's as thorough as I can be for this format. Safety first.