Lessons I need to unlearn.

First lesson: I could shield myself from the horrors of what went on, on a daily basis, by believing they were not actually that bad. I was constantly taught this simple thing: "You are not strong; if you can survive something, it isn't bad." I survived, so it wasn't bad.

Second lesson: We still hear, so often, that abuse is done by "Abusers," capital A. They are evil, or sick, or somehow different from you or me. So if there are good aspects to the people who treated me badly, if they did things for their own reasons, then it wasn't Abusive, it was just, I don't know, "hard." The things were done by people I loved, and who loved me. So it wasn't abuse.

Third lesson: If someone else survived with different, apparently more "functional" coping skills, and if other people survived things that were "worse," then I should be able to make myself be more functional, or not feel so badly about the things that happened to me. If someone else lived through something worse, I am exaggerating if I speak honestly about how my experience affected me.

Fourth lesson: If something is done with good intentions, then any negative effects I carry from that action are due to my own "over-sensitivity." The same thing goes for statements that are called "jokes," or any other form of emotional abuse. It is "over-sensitive" to object to racist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive comments made to me, if the person making them is smiling as they speak.


I learned these lessons, among others, quite well. And I struggle constantly to acknowledge that, yes, what happened was more than just "a hard childhood." More than that, I really, really struggle to accept that I had a childhood that was "bad enough" to result in DID.

Nearly all of the things I have read about DID that make sense to me overall, also say that it's the result of "overwhelming" or "traumatic" childhood abuse. How could my childhood be "traumatic" if I lived through it? How could I forget something "traumatic"?

There is only so much trauma one mind can hold. Everything else has to go somewhere. People are lucky when they are able to process trauma as it occurs, able to speak of what happened to a listening ear. More often, and especially with children, no one is willing to hear. And so the trauma gets buried, until it can be dealt with. But the habit of burying emotions and experiences becomes ingrained, and continues long past the point where it is necessary.

I am no longer beaten for crying, but it is difficult to cry.

I am no longer beaten for asking for help, but the habit of self-sufficiency remains.

No one comes into my room at night any more, but I still sleep on guard.

These lessons were vital to my survival. If I had not learned them, I would not be here, writing. My family are not, and were not, evil, but they were not able to face their own demons. Should something extreme have happened to me, it would have been a tragedy, they would have been sorry, but it would have happened.

I have been in therapy pretty constantly since I reached adulthood. My adult parts are, on the whole, pretty healthy, normal people. They are the face I show to most of the world. But the lessons they learned, in adulthood, have a hard time passing through the barriers between parts.

I have been learning to accept that my younger parts really are whole people, separate from me. The fact that we live in the same body makes it very confusing, as much to me as to anyone else. And yet, it explains so much. It explains how the differences between parts are not just about mood states--each part feels the full range of emotion; each part has their own goals in life, which don't always correlate with my own (Mandy was saying just the other day that she wants to be a garbage man when she grows up, to ride on the back of the truck. Um, yeah. Sorry, kid. You're out of luck!)

It is difficult for me to accept that my "quirkiness" has an explanation that points to something more difficult than just being "moody." But the more I acknowledge it, the more I tell people who have known me for years what is happening, the more we all understand things that otherwise made no sense.

But it's a process, and while I started down this road more than ten years ago, I'm really only taking the first real steps now.