where to begin?

Hi Laura,

Today I had art therapy (in the next city, about 45 minutes away), and then went to a quilt group meeting for an hour (where I showed them 2 Waldorf dolls and they encouraged me to knit doll sweaters).

We really do appreciate you asking questions.
ok..... where to begin about our experience with DID.....

I always knew that there was a vast landscape inside of me, and I journaled with different names, but I figured that it was part of being creative and an artist..... giving names to the people inside. I thought I was just more in touch with what it is to be a multi-faceted human being.

Before therapy and the DID diagnosis, sometimes when I was alone in the house, I would go to bed and suck my thumb and self-soothe. One day after starting therapy, I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea, and thinking about what it feels like to be in that baby personality. All of a sudden I had a vivid image of a field, with more than 100 babies lying on the ground, and they were crying and sobbing. I had bad abdominal pain and fell on the floor. I was terrified that rather than switching to a self-soothing baby, that I would switch to a crying baby and get stuck there and end up psychiatrically hospitalized in that state. With the skills Sally had taught us, we were able to make a deal that we would bring the babies and and the pain and crying to therapy the next session, but contain things until then.
That was how I found out that there were more than 100 babies inside.
My mother had told me that I had colic as a baby, and that she hit me if I cried until I stopped crying. And that the doctor had told her to leave me in my crib, close the door to the room, and walk away. She didn't know how to hold a baby.
If I hadn't been able to dissociate as an infant, I wouldn't have been able to attach, and I would have died.

Because I was abused by my parents, grandparents, and strangers, from infancy, I have polyfragmented DID, which means I have more than 100 alters. And many memories are held by groups of alters.

We don't have a host personality. Who I am is all of us together.
Early in therapy, Sally was telling us that we needed to create a nursery school inside, so littles could learn things like taking turns. At the time we were shocked that she had identified enough littles to form a nursery school class.
Now we understand that the majority of our alters are under the age of 10.

Imagine a theatre, with a stage, and one person can be on that stage, but more often there is a small group of people. And there also are people in the wings, and backstage, and in other parts of the building, and in the village, and living in other areas of the countryside.
That's one way we explain our experience.
We usually have groups of people on the surface. And who is on the surface changes.
Usually there are some littles on the surface.
We don't always have names. Sometimes I/we know the name of who is on the surface.
I switch a lot. When I am stressed, I often start rapid switching.

We have a very strict rule that only grown-ups drive. When we were in our 20's, we kept getting dizzy and blacking out. We were mis-diagnosed with epilepsy, but actually it was dissociation. We made an absolute rule that we only drove with safe adult parts on the surface.
When we do intense trauma work in therapy, if we drove ourselves, we often sit in the waiting room for an hour or more to get re-organized in our mind so we can be safe to drive.

Medical appointments medical situations are a challenge for us to manage, because the head of the pedophile ring that our parents sold us to was a doctor, and there were medical aspects to our abuse. We used to black out a lot in medical or dental situations. Now we have a team who handle medical appointments. But also, our doctors and dentist know about the DID, so they know to take things slow and explain things, and if a little pops to the surface, they explain and reassure as if they are talking to a 3-d child.
I have to have general anesthesia for some medical tests and dental work because of our abuse history.

We have anniversary reactions to different times of the year. Good Friday and Easter are difficult times for us. They had thematic parties for every holiday.
When we see holiday decorations, the littles who hold memories from that time of the year pop to the surface.

There was a time, early in therapy, when Sally was getting really mad at the adults in our system for not supervising littles when they are on the surface. (You don't let a toddler wander around alone).

Some times we have experiences of an alter taking executive control of the body, and others are aware, but can't change the action.
Also we have experiences of hearing ourself say things that we have no idea where it is coming from. That is called "made speech" or "made action", a couple of the symptoms of DID.

Part of healing, and our therapy journey, has been gaining greater awareness and control. But we still lose time. One of the diagnostic criteria for DID is amnesia, or losing time, when some alters don't share co-consciousness.
For instance, if Amy doesn't share co-consciousness with Max, when Amy comes to the surface after Max, she has no memory of what went on while Max was on the surface.
All my life I have lost time. I have a very clear memory of "coming to" when I was four years old, and knowing that I had lost about two years.

Until I started therapy, I spent a lot of energy "faking it", hiding what I couldn't remember.
I felt guilty and hid losing time. I felt guilty about depression. I felt a tremendous relief when I learned where those symptoms and others were coming from.
I still have a lot of amnesia.
But for the last year or two, I haven't been finding myself in a part of town, with no memory of how I got there, or hiding under a bush in a park at 2 in the morning (having flashbacks of a terrified child, thinking that the abuse was still going on).
There was a year or so, early in therapy, during which I kept finding myself by a mountain lake (I still don't know what mountain lake), in the middle of the night. It got to the point where if I called Sally because I was in crisis in the middle of the night, and I wasn't by a body of water, she would say "good, you're not at a lake ."
We wrote a 2 page memoir piece about that experience. I wonder if you would like to read it?

We have grown-ups in our system. And winged ones. There are more than 100 winged ones. I don't know how many grown-ups.
There are more child alters because that is when the abuse happened.
Alters were created to hold the memories.
When child alters first come to the surface, they almost always "don't do time". Sally introduces herself, tells the child she is safe, and shows her a calendar, explaining how time has passed and the abusers are dead now.
There are so many times we have looked at a current calendar, and it looks like a piece of science fiction art. We think it is still1962 or another time of our childhood.

The ones of us who were created to do the daily life, and who needed to not-know and not-believe the abuse tend to be older children or adults.

When we recover memories, we get to know the ones-of-us who hold those memories.

Sometimes it feels like the further along in therapy I get, the younger I get. That is because the littles have to come to the surface to tell their stories, find out that it is safe now and that people care, and to heal.

Sally says that the littles were always on the surface a lot, but that now we are more aware of what is going on.

One of the major goals of therapy is improving communication and cooperation between different ones of us.

Oh my goodness,
I hope I haven't blown you away or tired you out by writing this much.

if you have any questions, we are happy to answer, but if this is more than enough, that is fine too.

thank you for asking.

We hope you are finding joy with your children and with dollmaking.

hugs,
—Carole