Internal Understanding vs. External Belief

I am the first to admit the answers uncovered from my decades of amnesia have been unbelievable from the very beginning. It is most difficult to explain how answers come together from a massive cloud of amnesia that was a person's life and it is individual for each survivor. We don't make this stuff up. I believe I'm certainly not the first looking to prove what I'm remembering can't possibly be true. However, there comes a time when the level of unbelievability has a rhyme and reason to it. No one ever wanted anyone to believe what happened to us.

My most recent post still has me whirling and riddled with enormous emotions. I'm sure explaining this process of healing sounds possibly lacking in emotion to make sense of it as a cohesive narrative, but it is definitely not the case.

I know not all who read my blog believe my truth. Since much can't be validated in a court of law, it is my truth alone. However the enormity of survivors around the world with similar memories leads us to believe the same traumas seem to occur, just in different locations and by different people. Most of us do believe there is a manual, for lack of a better term, because what they do to create a dissociative child to become a skilled multitasked "slave" well into adulthood has been proven to work.

I don't ask for belief of my story per se to those who are not survivors. I know other survivors of this nightmare find solace and possibly some validation from the similar types of things they see in my history. But for those seeing this blog and writing it off as absurd, you are the people who allow such horrors to continue so widely and in plain sight. My purpose for this blog has always been to ask for an open mind so the next time you see or hear of something similar, your awareness grows.

It has taken me since 1997 to recover what I have and still there are tons of gaps in my life. I think only certain memories surface to give us some kind of timeline and meaning. Some memories have come up and processed on their own or in a single therapy session while others, like that in the last post, have been trying to come up for 15 years now. I'm sure it's not the last but possibly I'm getting close. The last post was not about memory as much as my history which can only come from an internal source of knowing. I suggest a resource in the post. None of it is easy to comprehend.

I thank my followers and especially those who support me. I'd like to share the huge anger that came from me as an aftermath to knowing of my possible origins. The Polyvore art was done after the writing.

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I hate that I had this life

I hate that what was done to me interferes with having a good present day life

I hate that amnesia affects me nearly every day in some regard

I hate the struggle of being me

I hate the strain that being me places on every other relationship in my life

I hate wrestling everyday between dreams for the future or dying so I can just stop this constant battle

I hate that I am back at square one with who I am

I am wrought with grief that I was likely a hidden child made through an agreement with the government and the man who called himself my father

I hate that I live every day in fear of my life 

I belong to no one. I relate to no one as family. I am alone. Aside from my current loving relationship, I feel I have no worth except to those I help online.

I hate this strong anger I am feeling while releasing these thoughts.

I hate that I hate my life and more than anything wish for a glimmer of who I truly am

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.

The puzzle of memory

Anyone with DID who has gotten to the point of processing memories will likely relate to this at least from some perspective. Since it happens differently for everyone, I can only explain my experience. While not all agree with "everything in its own time", I began my healing process already completely trusting my protectors. I've already spoken about my magazine image collages which was an obsessive task for months. I always had the answer in a collage or collages after I had a memory. The first couple years I had no therapist. I'd usually have flashbacks at night and would run downstairs to my "art room" and fly through the collages in my triggered state to find the collage that told the story. I would see the context of my flashbacks and words that accompanied them.

If I didn't have a collage, I would go to my uncollaged images and watch myself frantically put a collage together. In retrospect it was just amazing. Always the right images. And the process of having that activity helped to calm me down after having the flashback or memory. I view a memory as coming through more like a movie whereas flashbacks are very quick images coming at me just long enough to see what was happening. The other aspect to cutting out images from magazines is it is a safe "cutting". I didn't realize that diversion until I was a therapist. I was overwhelmed with the realization at how much I "cut". Thank goodness!

Even though I have collages for all memories I've had, I don't know all of their meaning. And sometimes I'd go for a year or longer before getting another piece of one memory. I first had the Halloween memory 11/1/97 (also my first anniversary memory). And now "the rest of the story" (or at least another major messsage) 11 years later.

I wrote a few posts ago of the key components of that memory. The big yuck came up at the therapist's office. My mind always continues to process for at least several days after such an internal event. I went back to my collages to see if I saw anything new in meaning and I did. Even now, I still gasp when I see validation of what came up mentally. The answer was always there but I was not allowed to know it until now. Additionally, the memory began to help me make sense of part of my internal dynamic.

I have witnessed for myself and others that, once a memory comes up, there will be a kind of internal validation that what came up was true. Even if we don't understand all the details, the major objective of what the perps did comes through. Now that I'm into "advanced memory processing", I can step back and know that whatever I saw could have been real, a staged "trick", or both. At the time a "death" happened, it was internalized as real by the littles. And that's the emotion that needs to heal. That awful terror.

I had a memory earlier in my work about witnessing some trauma with my little sister shortly after her birth. I do have some conscious memory of my mother being pregnant with her. My mother used to tell me I would constantly speak of my unborn sister as "my baby". The Halloween memory was similar in content with my little sister being only 11 months old. (Hmmm...notice how 11 has come up twice now?) In the memory that continued in therapy, after I believed my sister had just been killed, my adult female alter whom I dearly loved during her time out with me, was made to do something awful to what we believed was my sister's little body. The trauma of doing that is what caused my adult alter to shatter.

The adult alter had a name that logically appeared to be connected to my sister. I had often wondered, if that were the case, why was my baby sister internalized as an adult protector? She was also the only protector alter who was extremely wounded. The first little I came to know after amnesia leaked through was Chloe. Chloe was very attached to Leelee. Chloe was the first little to integrate. When she did, Leelee became unconsolable because she no longer had Chloe to care for. She asked if she could go inside to be with her. Leelee moved inside and I watched through images over the next year how Leelee healed to be a beautiful woman.

Leelee's images before her healing showed her as bald and naked. Always suffering. The messages I recently received were that Leelee WAS my baby sister (no hair, a baby, and traumatized). How did she become my "adult" protector? The answer I now understand is she protected me from death on the day she "died" instead of me. I had wanted consciously to hold and protect my little sister at age 3. This memory is from age 4. Organized pedophilia rules don't allow conscious bonding. They want their victims isolated even within family. Subconsciously we were pitted against each other explaining my terror for her and her aggressiveness in real life to both my older sister and me. But inside, we loved each other dearly and that continues.

I don't know if it was intentional that Leelee became an internal wounded protector. I'll never know those kinds of things. But Leelee's shattering was the base for a main split in my system.

Being able to put all that together is somehow comforting now. It is this deep understanding of something inside following a memory that becomes validation of your truth. Leelee had such a tortured voice and spoke with the alphabet. "A" is for ____, "B" is for ____. Usually the words in the blanks were those she heard from the abusers. She went with pictures of alphabets and blocks with letters on them. The image with this post is dedicated to Leelee.

You will find your own validation. It is not necessary to find outside validation. If that happens, great. Just know that your healing from a memory of horror is the proof. Remembering your own horror can resolve PTSD issues that arose with that event in your life. Most people hearing or viewing what we routinely see as memories would be traumatized by such images. It is counterintuitive that survivors would heal from remembering the horror. The rest of the world would likely be upset to see what we see as a memory in a horror movie. Because "no one would EVER do that to a child". Right? Yeah, right.