Bursting Out of Confinement
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In Heidelberg Zoo, Germany, a bear was confined in a small cage for years. Every day it would continually pace up and down as far as the cage would permit – twelve paces up and twelve paces back. Finally, the bear was released in a large new enclosure, but to everyone’s dismay, all it would do was walk back and forth, twelve paces up, twelve paces back.
Alters are like that. It’s not that an alter does not have the skills or memories or emotional ownership of certain events that a fellow alter has. It is simply that such alters are living in denial, or mistakenly think that they are more limited than they really are. They can access all the memories and skills of the full person but they believe themselves incapable of going beyond the narrow confines of who they think they are. They usually see themselves as having no existence before a certain age, nor beyond a certain age. They need to be freed from the confines that this self-image imposes on them.
As alters begin to heal, they will occasionally draw upon memories or skills outside of the age they imagine they are limited to. For example, an alter who thinks she is a child might display maturity or vocabulary or a skill that the person never had at that age. Or an alter might speak of an event that occurred before he was formed as if he personally experienced it.
This often happens so naturally that alters are unaware that they are doing it. They can be greatly helped if, when you notice it happening, you gently draw to their attention that what they are saying or doing indicates that they truly are the full person that you have been telling them they are.
Since alters exist in an attempt to protect other parts of the person from at least some of the trauma of deeply disturbing experiences, they retain the deepest emotional reaction to experiences. Not surprisingly, they also sometimes seek to protect the rest of the person by keeping unpleasant information to themselves.
Although these secrets seemed horrific when the alter formed, the host has since matured physically and probably spiritually, or circumstances may have greatly changed. For any of these reasons, the secrets are likely to be less upsetting to the host than the alter supposes. It is also not uncommon for an alter to be trying desperately to keep a secret without realizing that the host already knows about it.
Metaphorically speaking, it was as though artificial roadblocks had been set up in her host’s brain dividing the real person into several alters. Neural pathways from each alter to the thoughts, memories, viewpoints and so on of the rest of the person are all in place and full access can easily be established once each blockage is removed.
As an alter stops holding on to secrets and looks to God for healing, the blockage slowly dissolves, thus allowing the alter, simply by thinking, to access memories and skills that the alter hadn’t known he/she had. As this begins to happen, the alter becomes increasingly like the whole person, with just a slightly different perspective unique to that alter.
Once confidence is gained and an alter reveals his/her secrets to the rest of the person, a significant reason for the alter to exist as a separate entity vanishes. To unite with other alters the alter must also like those alters and (if the alters are older) not be afraid of growing up or losing his/her individuality.
The alter is then likely to merge with one or more other alters and the process continue until all the alters have integrated into one person with the full power of all the memories and skills and perspectives of each alter combined. The order in which merging takes place might surprise. For instance, a teenage alter might happen to have more in common with one in its thirties than one in its twenties and so the teenage alter could merge with the thirties alter, while the alter in its twenties temporarily continues to remain separate.
Moreover, it is often a case that opposites attract. Alters with a particular weakness will often team up with those who can compensate. A timid alter might team up with a courageous one; an alter lacking a particular intellectual skill might team up with one that has that skill, and so on.
I should point out, however, that it is not uncommon for an alter to remain silent for a while and for the host to misinterpret this silence as indicating that the alter has merged with another.
Next Part Helpful Points in Healing